ABSTRACT
In early March of 1932, a play opened at the Globe Theatre in London’s West End. Wings over Europe, by the poet Robert Nicholes and the actorproducer Maurice Browne, was remarkably prescient with respect to certain scientific developments under way just then, only an hour by train north of London. In Bombay, the year 1932 began with Mohandas K Gandhi’s arrest on the eve of his new civil disobedience campaign, and the Congress was promptly outlawed by the British India government. Physicists in Berkeley, in Pasadena, and in Washington, DC, had also been hard at work on the same problem since 1928—the year, when Wings over Europe made its debut in New York. Describing the work of J. D. Cockcroft and E. Walton, under way since 1928, he cautiously added that their results ‘may open up a wide line of research in transmutation generally.’
