By the 1920s, the ‘Rutherford-Bohr’ atom was widely accepted as the orthodoxy in physics and chemistry.  Of course, Rutherford and Bohr themselves, their students and co-workers and a growing international community of researchers continued to explore and refine the model through their experimental and theoretical work in atomic physics and radioactivity.  Much of this work was controversial – for example the long-running controversy between Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna over nuclear disintegration experiments, or philosophically-oriented debates about causality and complementarity. But no-one challenged the legitimacy of the Rutherford-Bohr model itself: indeed the emerging field of nuclear physics was predicated on it.

In 1933, however, a young English engineer produced an inverted ‘alternative’ to the Rutherford-Bohr atom in which a light nucleus was surrounded by orbiting heavy particles – a ‘flywheel’ model of the atom.  He claimed that this alternative model offered significantly better insights into atomic behaviour and the bulk properties of matter, and successfully sought the attention of industrialists and the media as well as academics for his work.  Amid heated controversy, claims of biased refereeing and stormy resignations, leading Cavendish physicists and their industrial contacts took the view that “the sooner this thing is killed the better.”  And kill it they did.

This paper explores the optimistic birth, chequered career and tragic early death of the ‘alternative atom.’  Its reception and fate – how it was killed – tell us a great deal about the nuclear physics community in the 1930s. Through the justifications they were forced to give for the orthodoxy, the episode also reveals much about what this community found valuable and useful about the Rutherford-Bohr atom.  The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of the ‘alternative atom’ story for nuclear historiography.