Frederick Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, ( CHAR-wel; 5 April 1886 – 3 July 1957) was a British physicist who was prime scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in World War II. He was involved in the development of radar and infra-red guidance systems. He was sceptical of the first reports of the enemy's V-weapons programme. He pressed the case for the strategic area bombing of cities.
His abiding influence on Churchill stemmed from close personal friendship as a member of the latter's country-house set. In Churchill's second government, he was given a seat in the cabinet and later created Viscount Cherwell of Oxford.
Early life, family and personality
Frederick Alexander Lindemann was born on 5 April 1886 as the second of three sons of Adolph Friedrich Lindemann, who had emigrated to the United Kingdom circa 1871 and became naturalised. Frederick was born in Baden-Baden in Germany, where his American mother Olga Noble, the widow of a wealthy banker, was taking "the cure".
After schooling in Scotland and Darmstadt, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied under Walther Nernst. He carried out research in physics at the Sorbonne that confirmed theories, first put forward by Albert Einstein, on specific heats at very low temperatures. For this and other scientific work, Lindemann was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920.
In 1911 he was invited to the Solvay Conference on "Radiation and the Quanta", where he was the youngest attendee.
He was known to friends as "the Prof" in reference to his position at the University of Oxford, and as "Baron Berlin" to his many detractors because of his German accent and haughty aristocratic manner.
Lindemann believed that a small circle of the intelligent and aristocratic should run the world, to enable a peaceful, stable society "led by supermen and served by helots." Some sources incorrectly claim that he was Jewish, but Frederick Smith's official biography makes clear he was not.
Lindemann supported eugenics, held the working class, homosexuals and black people in contempt and supported sterilisation of the mentally incompetent. He believed – Mukerjee concludes, referring to Lindemann's lecture on Eugenics – that Science could yield a race of humans blessed with 'the mental make-up of the worker bee' ... At the lower end of the race and class spectrum, one could remove the ability to suffer or to feel ambition ... Instead of subscribing to what he called 'the fetish of equality', Lindemann recommended that human differences should be accepted and indeed enhanced by means of science. It was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for 'the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity.'
First World War and the University of Oxford
At the outbreak of the First World War, Lindemann was playing tennis in Germany and had to leave in haste to avoid internment. In 1915 he joined the staff of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. He developed a mathematical theory of aircraft spin recovery and later learned to fly so that he could test his ideas himself. Prior to Lindemann's work, a spinning aircraft was almost invariably irrecoverable and the result to the pilot fatal.
In 1919, Lindemann was appointed professor of experimental philosophy (physics) at the University of Oxford and director of the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Henry Tizard, who had been a colleague in Berlin. Also in 1919, he was one of the first to suggest that an electrically neutral wind of positively charged protons and electrons is emitted from the Sun. He may have been unaware that Kristian Birkeland had speculated three years earlier that the solar wind might be a mixture of positively and negatively charged particles. At the same time he worked on the theory of specific heats and on temperature inversion in the stratosphere, and began to bring the two scientific disciplines together. In the field of chemical kinetics, he proposed the Lindemann mechanism in 1921 for unimolecular chemical reactions, and showed that the first step is one of bimolecular activation.
Around this time, Clementine Churchill – the wife of Winston, at that time a government minister – partnered with Lindemann for a charity tennis match. Although the two men had very different lifestyles, they both excelled at a sport: Churchill's was polo. Lindemann's ability to explain scientific issues concisely, and his excellent flying skills, probably impressed Churchill, who had given up trying to earn a pilot's licence because of Clementine's grave concerns. They became close friends and remained so for 35 years, with Lindemann visiting Chartwell more than 100 times from 1925 to 1939. Lindemann opposed the General Strike of 1926, and mobilised the reluctant staff of the Clarendon to produce copies of Churchill's anti-strike newspaper, the British Gazette. Lindemann was also alarmed and fearful of political developments in Germany.
In the 1930s, Lindemann advised Winston Churchill when the latter was out of Government (the Wilderness Years) and leading a campaign for rearmament. He appointed to the Clarendon one of Churchill's social set, the young Welshman Derek Jackson. This brilliant young physicist, the son of Sir Charles Jackson, transferred from the Nobel prize-winning labs at Cambridge and worked on Lindemann's top-secret nuclear energy projects.
Lindemann moved in rich circles at Biddesden, the Earl of Iveagh's home, hosted with painter Augustus John and literary luminaries Lytton Strachey, John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, the Carringtons and the Mitfords, the Sitwells and the Huxley families. One frequently intoxicated visitor was a wayward Randolph Churchill.
In 1932, Lindemann joined Winston to complete a road trip throughout Europe and they were dismayed at what they saw. Churchill later said, "A terrible process is astir. Germany is arming." Lindemann was prevailed upon to release Jackson in 1940 to join the RAF; Jackson flew in the Battle of Britain and won a DFC. Lindemann also assisted the new Prime Minister in the rescue of a number of German Jewish physicists, primarily at the University of Göttingen, who immigrated to Britain; they assisted the vital war work developing at the Clarendon Laboratory, including the Manhattan Project.
Churchill got Lindemann onto the "Committee for the Study of Aerial Defence" which under Sir Henry Tizard was putting its resources behind the development of radar. Lindemann's presence was disruptive, insisting instead that his own ideas of aerial mines and infra-red beams be given priority over radar. To resolve the situation, the committee dissolved itself to reform as a new body without him. He stayed in close contact with the Jacksons at Rignell Farm, who enriched a poor wartime diet with dairy products they brought into Oxford themselves.
When Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Lindemann as the British government's leading scientific adviser, with David Bensusan-Butt as his private secretary. Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war, and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser. He would hold this office again for the first two years of Churchill's 1951 peacetime administration.