Exuberance: The Passion for Life (31 page)

Joy is essential to this. The pleasures of play, which attend and abet learning in young children, must perpetuate if they are to continue to reward inquisitiveness as children grow older. Thoreau wrote of his boyhood: “
My life was extacy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses—I can remember that I was all alive.… This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such extacies begotten of the breezes. I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, —I said to others, —‘There comes into my mind or soul such an indescribable, infinite all absorbing, divine heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation & expansion—and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself—I speak as a witness on the stand and tell what I have perceived.’ ” Responsiveness to the natural world gives rise to knowledge; it begets curiosity and exploration.

Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens. In
The Education of Henry Adams
, Adams writes that to a New England boy “
Summer was drunken.” Each of his senses, he says, was assaulted and charged. Smell was the strongest, the unforgettable scents of “
hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes.” And then came taste. The children, said Adams,
“
knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a spelling-book.” Smell and taste, touch and sight, are, of course, the ancient mammalian paths of learning: a whack of paws, a pungent scent, a shriek: all teach fast and enduringly. Adams writes that even sixty years out of childhood he could revive on his tongue the memory of his spelling book, “
the taste of A-B, AB,” and with ease and a kind of sweet ferocity could recall the colors taught him by the summer days. A peony and a sense of blue, he recollected late in life, would always be for him the sea near Quincy and “
the cumuli in a June afternoon sky.” The happiest hours of his education were, he said, “
passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading … and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole [I] learned most then.” Like most, he learned best under the spell of nature.

Science, like the arts, is rooted in the desire to understand and then create; society requires that this desire be transferred to succeeding generations. It is teachers who convey it, especially exuberant ones. Exuberance is a dispositional thread in the lives of great teachers and scientists, and most of them, in turn, kindle enthusiasm and curiosity in their students. Great scientists who are also extraordinary teachers—Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Richard Feynman, for example—give us a glimpse into how a passionate temperament and a love of discovery fire up enthusiasm in those they teach. (It goes both ways, of course. “
The justification for a university,” said Alfred North Whitehead, “is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.” The enthusiastic young act upon those by whom they are taught.)
Not all brilliant scientists are spellbinding teachers, of course. Newton famously was not. When he lectured, a Cambridge contemporary declared, “
so few went to hear Him, & fewer y
^t
understood him, y
^t
oftimes he did in a manner, for want of Hearers, read to y
^e
Walls.” Newton was temperamentally unsuited to be a great teacher. He was by nature solitary and wary of others, and whatever passion he had for his work he never directly transmitted to the students who might have been inspired by it.

But Newton’s ideas, of course, were a different matter. One hundred years later, even poets were caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by his discoveries. Lord Byron, whose personality was the opposite of Newton’s in nearly every particular, was fascinated by the observations of Newton and other scientists: “
When Newton saw an apple fall,” Byron wrote marvelously in
Don Juan
,

(It is a pity Byron never taught, for the same vivacity and wit that Newton lacked Byron had in glut.)

Byron and his fellow poets were not alone in being swept up in the nineteenth century’s excitement at scientific discovery. In Europe and America the public paid rapt attention to the remarkable progress of scientists as they began to unravel the workings of the natural world. Scientific knowledge was widely disseminated by popular writers and journalists, and the impact of science on
daily life was readily apparent from advances in agriculture, technology, and medicine. Interest in science was further galvanized by public talks on scientific topics.

Indisputably, the dynamic lectures given by Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, which had been established in 1799 to encourage the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the general public, were among the most influential and widely attended in history. Davy’s enthusiastic teaching had a lasting and profound impact on scientists and nonscientists alike. He was, says one biographer, “a star”; when he lectured “
buckles flew, stays popped.” Those who knew Davy personally were struck by his vivacity and unstoppable enthusiasm. He “
talks rapidly, though with great precision,” said one observer, “and is so much interested in conversation that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience and keeps him in constant motion.” Robert Southey concurred, noting, “
I have never witnessed such indefatigable activity in any other man.” He was, remarked more than one acquaintance, a flurry of ideas. Michael Faraday, who began his scientific career as Davy’s laboratory assistant, said that Davy’s temperament was passionate and restless; so, too, was his mind, which, according to the president of the Royal Institution, was “
naturally ardent and speculative.”

Davy’s restless liveliness, a catalyst to his scientific imagination and integral to his gifts as a teacher, had its drawbacks: he was often irritable and impatient and difficult to satisfy. An acquaintance, later his biographer, remarked that fly fishing, perhaps not surprisingly, was ill-suited to Davy’s disposition: “
The temperament of Davy was far too mercurial: the fish never seized the fly with sufficient avidity to fulfill his expectations, or to support that degree of excitement which was essential to his happiness.”

Davy’s scientific achievements were as fundamental as they were diverse. He showed that by using electricity, chemical compounds could be decomposed into their constituent parts, and he
isolated, for the first time, the elements sodium, calcium, barium, potassium, and magnesium. He also demonstrated, despite entrenched scientific opinion to the contrary, that iodine and chlorine were elements; he described in detail the physiological effects of many gases (including, as we have seen, nitrous oxide), wrote influential scientific texts, and invented a widely used safety lamp for miners. (Davy refused to take out a patent on the lamp because, he said, the sole object of his invention was to “serve the cause of humanity.” His public-spiritedness is this regard is not unlike that of Benjamin Franklin, who chose not to patent the lightning rod or the Franklin stove, and of the Stevensons in Scotland, who declined to patent their inventions in lighthouse technology.)

Davy’s response to his scientific discoveries was unconstrained exuberance. When he first isolated potassium and saw the “
minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash and take fire as they entered the atmosphere,” Davy’s cousin reports, he “could not contain his joy—he actually bounded about the room in ecstatic delight … some little time was required for him to compose himself sufficiently to continue the experiment.” Discoveries, declared Davy, “
are like blessings of heaven, permanent and universal … by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come.”

Such excitability, together with Davy’s literary sensibilities and scientific accomplishments, were enough to attract the fascination not only of Byron, who engaged in animated dinner conversations with him about volcanoes and gases, but also of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, who consulted Davy’s
Elements of Chemical Philosophy
as she wrote
Frankenstein
.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also captivated by Davy and declared that he had “never met so extraordinary a young man.” Had he turned his mind to it, said Coleridge, Davy would have been the “greatest poet of his age.” Almost everyone recognized Davy as one of the preeminent teachers
of his time; the Church of England, impressed by his passion and sense of theater in the lecture hall, implored him to become a preacher.

Davy was, in fact, all the things he was said to be—preacher, teacher, poet, and scientist—but nowhere more impressive than when he lectured to the public about chemistry. His talks at the Royal Institution were a sensation. The lecture theater, which held a thousand people, was nearly always packed by the time he arrived. Carriages blocked the streets nearby, and the crowds were so great in Albemarle Street that, in order to accommodate traffic, it had to be converted into a one-way thoroughfare, the first ever in London.

A London tanner who attended the talks gives a sense of the excitement they generated: “
The sensation created by his first course of Lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained, is … scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent, —the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical, blue-stockings, and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded—eagerly crowded the lecture room.” Davy infected the audience with his passion for science. He was a natural storyteller, as he had been even when very young: “
I was seized with the desire to narrate,” Davy wrote about his childhood. “I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all of my originality.” Certainly passion fueled his curiosity and his enthusiastic talks on science. His lectures were punctuated by his own surges of enthusiasm as well as by the dramatic explosions of gases that he created in order to demonstrate principles of chemistry and electricity.

Humphry Davy, like his apprentice Michael Faraday and, a century and a half later, Richard Feynman, stoked enthusiasm in his listeners and was in turn stoked by theirs. And, also like Faraday and Feynman, Davy was an impassioned teacher because he was
indefatigably curious and excitable. His zest for learning ignited those who heard him speak. He transferred to his audience his love of the natural world and his profound appreciation for its enchantments. He gave his first lectures at the Royal Institution when he was twenty-three, and he spoke then, as later, about the beauty of natural law: “
The appearances of the greater number of natural objects are originally delightful to us, and they become more so when the laws by which they are governed are known,” he said. “The study of nature, therefore, in her various operations must be always more or less connected with the love of the beautiful and sublime.” Davy was by birth an enthusiast, who loved science, knew its beauties, and conveyed without check his enthusiasm to those he taught.

One of those ignited by Davy’s exuberant lecturing was Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, who had taught himself science by reading books on chemistry and physics. He attended Davy’s lecture series at the Royal Institution when he was scarcely twenty and took such lucid, fastidious notes, nearly four hundred pages of them, that when he sent them to Davy and asked for a position as his assistant, Davy took him on. During the decades to follow Faraday did the work that established him as one of the greatest scientists in history (Einstein said that there were four physical scientists who towered above all others: Galileo, Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell). He was the first to conceptualize magnetic fields and the first to discover the laws of electromagnetic conduction and rotation, as well as the laws of electrolysis. Faraday, in short, gave the world its fundamental understanding of electricity.

But Faraday was also a great teacher. Like Davy, he believed passionately that the ways and findings of science should be communicated to the public and that preparation for public lectures should be rigorous. He wrote a “Manual for the Lecturer,” which presented in painstaking detail the desired physical layout of lecture
halls—their ventilation systems, entryways, and exits, and the arrangement of the experimental apparatus to be used in teaching demonstrations. Lecturers, he believed, owed it to their audiences to be not only prepared but also stimulating. “
A lecturer should exert his utmost effort to gain completely the mind and attention of his audience,” he wrote. “A flame should be lighted at the commencement and kept alive with unrelenting splendour to the end.”

Faraday’s first talk at the Royal Institution was widely acclaimed as brilliant. Later he would come to be known as a supreme showman, the “Prince of Lecturers” in Victorian England. Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens were among the thousands who flocked to hear him, and the painter J.M.W. Turner consulted him about the chemistry of pigments. He founded the Christmas Lectures for Juveniles, a prestigious series which continues to this day, broadcast by the BBC. He gave his first Christmas lecture in 1827, and his last in 1860, with such titles as “The Chemistry of Coal,” “Water and Its Elements,” and “Atmospheric Air and Its Gases.” The talks were wildly popular, and none more so than his most famous lecture, “On the Chemical History of a Candle,” which was first delivered to an audience of young people in 1849. There were “
bangs, flashes, soap bubbles filled with hydrogen floating upwards, and other spectacular effects” and, in a demonstration not unlike the drama to be provided by Richard Feynman during the twentieth-century NASA
Challenger
hearings, Faraday “
placed two vessels made of half-inch-thick iron, and filled with water, in a freezing solution, then went on lecturing until the vessels exploded.”