Authors: Bill Bryson
When news broke that the Heckingham House of Industry had been equipped with high pointed rods but nevertheless caught fire, one of Franklin’s closest allies told him the Ordnance Board and the King were involved because ‘these events have a tendency to discredit conductors’.
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In ways familiar from more recent episodes of public science, such as the fracas surrounding food safety and BSE, the MMR vaccine, or the environmental effects of genetically modified crops, matters of concern seem to demand sure-fire judgments from trusted experts. So authorities called on the Royal Society for unequivocal decision. It is familiar, too, with sensational reports and rival experts in question, that public debate seems very wayward.
In these respects the Heckingham catastrophe was neither unprecedented nor straightforward. For two decades before 1781 the Society faced many episodes when across southern England houses, churches, powder magazines and other buildings guarded by rods had been struck or damaged by lightning. The Board of Ordnance, the clergy of St Paul’s Cathedral and the monarch all demanded certainty. The Fellows developed
a kind of electrical fieldwork, involving visits to the stricken buildings, interviews with workmen, excavation of the rods’ connections and collection of melted metal despatched to the Society. They trusted gentry ‘well known to many in the Royal Society’.
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The Fellows treated these events as so many ‘great electrical experiments’ then argued that such real-world experiments reinforced Franklin’s story about high points.
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But there were characteristic troubles of interpreting these experiments. If the protection had failed this might be because these rods were wrongly set up, so electrical orthodoxy was safe. But it might be because the orthodoxy was wrong and all such rods fundamentally unsafe. To solve this puzzle, Fellows had to appeal to some prior sense that they alone were masters of the facts.
Yet in the rough and tumble of society gossip and political crisis this trust was hard to win. The Society wasn’t on message. Franklin’s notions of high pointed rods and silent atmospheric discharge were backed by prestigious Fellows such as Watson, Nairne and Cavendish. But there were vocal critics inside the Society. The newspapers gleefully reported the schism. Opposition was led by the fashionable painter and theatre manager Benjamin Wilson, veteran Royal Society Fellow and pugnacious enemy of Franklin’s philosophy and politics, especially of ‘the magical point’.
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Wilson’s coterie had good connections. He was employed both by the Board of Ordnance and by the King, and won support from one of the Royal Society’s Copley medallists, the able chemist Edward Delaval, from senior military officers, noble courtiers and foreign academicians. Wilson’s experiments convinced many others that high pointed conductors were dangerous, for they would invite a lightning stroke and never safely disarm electrical atmospheres. The modern Prometheus was wrong. ‘Sharp points are put there only to invite an enemy which otherwise might not have troubled us.’
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Better, so Wilson urged, to build lower blunted rods much closer to threatened roofs and walls. In the midst of these histrionics the Fellows inevitably became the target of vicious satire. There were fraught votes within the Society about whether Wilson’s protests should be aired. One of his friends denounced the ‘factious illiterati’ of the Royal Society.
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According to an aged earl, ‘The Royal Society may if it pleases decide in favour of the pointed conductors, but its decisions cannot oblige me and I hope will not induce any of my friends to adopt them.’
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The Society’s system of experiment and trust was in trouble. Wilson and Delaval staged their own site visits after spectacular strikes to get different stories from those obtained by Nairne and Watson. Matters got serious in
May 1777. The gunpowder stores run by the Ordnance Board down the Thames at Purfleet were hit by lightning. Rods installed there on the recommendation of a Royal Society committee five years earlier seemed to have failed. In the midst of the American War, British military supplies at Purfleet were no longer safe. Wilson exploited the disaster brilliantly. Supporter of metal points and transatlantic rebels, Franklin was put in the wrong electrically and politically, ‘as bad a man as he is a philosopher’.
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In summer 1777 Wilson set up a vast show to demonstrate the fallacies of his enemies. With royal funds and Ordnance Board gunpowder, he took over the Pantheon, a gorgeous Oxford Street dance hall, and installed a model of the Purfleet arsenal under a huge artificial charged cloud. The theatrical Wilson aimed to prove the dangers of elevated and pointed conductors. Many Londoners, including the royal family, watched the model’s spectacular sparks. Nairne and other Fellows tried to heckle Wilson and designed their own models of lightning and gunpowder to show the errors of his ways. Wilson’s confidants grumbled about Franklin’s ‘junto’, especially ‘setting Nairne to put you in the wrong’. Franklin’s allies launched a politically venomous attack on royal policy and the Pantheon displays: ‘those butchers sent by our infamous Ministry to exterminate the Americans are no more courageous in their hellish profession than our daring philosopher B. Wilson has been in his drum tricks’.
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For many months these tricks were satirised mercilessly in the press.
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The King reportedly ordered pointed rods replaced by lower blunt ones at Ordnance buildings and royal palaces. Some even said the fight forced the resignation of the Royal Society’s President: the Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences certainly thought this is what happened, and the
resignation was soon followed by Joseph Banks’ assumption of the presidency.
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This ghastly history explains the high tension around the Heckingham story a couple of years later and the pointed political interest in its details. The Royal Society had bad form in its management of lightning strikes where pointed conductors had failed. As soon as he heard from Norfolk, Wilson again mobilised his extensive networks to make the most of the fact. He ‘began to apprehend there might be an intention to smother the matter and keep it secret from the public’.
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If the high and pointed rods had been badly set up, the Royal Society’s view would be safe. If, however, they’d been competently designed, that view would be in trouble. If the rods were plunged deep enough into damp soil or their bases covered in flood-water, the official view would have expected them to work: their failure would count as a challenge to Royal Society doctrine. So Wilson gathered stories about floods and the rods’ grounding. Royal Society envoys sent to Heckingham would seek to show the rods were not well set up and that this explained their failure. It didn’t help that the Society’s delegates were Banks’ right-hand man the suave physician Charles Blagden and Edward Nairne, Wilson’s old enemy. Wilson sent Banks details of Nairne’s ‘troublesome manner’ at the Pantheon show and support for Franklin’s doctrine. The President boldly answered that Nairne’s ‘veracity is preferred by the public and the Royal Society in general’.
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So the Fellows’ Norfolk fieldwork was initially difficult. Blagden and Nairne did their homework by re-reading reports from Purfleet and recent electrical textbooks. They needed to show the Heckingham lightning rods were badly set up. Mr Bobbitt had allegedly been at fault by letting them reach only a few inches below ground where they led into a drain ‘without being in contact with anything but air’.
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A broken rusty iron pole whose lower end was in contact with nothing but air wasn’t really a lightning rod at all. The strike hit the lead on the stable roof simply because ‘the lightning picked out the best and nearest conductors to the moist earth’.
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The Fellows seized on any story that the drains were dry even during the storm. Blagden and Nairne got the House workmen to put back everything as they recalled it was just before the strike. Three different lightning paths might explain why the rods had not taken the strike, so the Fellows accepted the story of spectacular fireballs, even if the source was a dubious female inmate. Then they toured county gentry for evidence that the electrical defence of the House of Industry was inadequate and their theory of lightning conductors safe. Wilson did the opposite. He contacted Norfolk friends for signs the rods were in a good state, drenched with drain water and well maintained. ‘Have you been able to learn from anyone of good judgment how high the black cloud was at the time it hung over the House? And whether any of the flashes of lightning were seen to make towards the pointed conductor?’
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Wilson got Gamble to build a model of the House like the one of Purfleet, then showed it to the King and the Ordnance Board. He reckoned it showed the high pointed lightning rods had failed. If so, Royal Society doctrine had failed too.
The metropolitan outcome of the Heckingham inquiry was managed by Nairne, Blagden and Banks. The report they sent the Ordnance Board in February 1782 showed the imperfections of the Norfolk lightning rods and strengths of the received theory of their behaviour. It was publicised by the Society and copies sent to foreign papers.
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With the status of the Fellows and the select group they interviewed, they could secure agreement in the capital. Back in Norfolk things were less sure. In the 1780s ‘there was more mind afloat in Norwich than is usually found outside the literary circles of the metropolis’.
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The Fellows’ informants were gentlemen with their own views of electricity and lightning. None lined up in an orderly fashion behind Nairne and Blagden. The Heckingham governor Samuel Cooper insisted his House’s rods were well earthed, ‘nothing wonderful or even extraordinary’ had happened, and complained to Banks that ‘some of those who spend their time chiefly in making of experiment are too apt to treat those who do not with a dogmatism bordering upon contempt, would the latter venture to deduce by the legitimate principles of logic a plain and obvious conclusion from the experiments of the former’.
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While Cooper questioned London experimenters’ authority, Gamble had his own story of how electricity worked. Along with his model of the House, he made a diagram of lightning discharge. He insisted against Nairne that the rods were perfectly grounded, ‘these pointed rods were the cause of the stroke’s taking place in their vicinity’, and couldn’t accept the Fellows’ notion that the House was struck because the rods were surrounded by insulators. ‘For God’s sake, what should it be connected with so proper to keep the effect of the storm from entering the House!’
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According to Mr Gamble, the Society’s story simply didn’t make sense.
Even the Society’s best Norwich allies, Morgan and Brook, broke ranks. Brook had major experimental interests in electricity. He’d been the informant who’d insisted there’d been little rain before the strike and that the rods were not grounded at all. He designed his own electric models of thunderstorms and an ingenious electrometer that helped determine the atmospheric charge. He and Morgan showed Blagden and Nairne their own electrical experiments and the lightning rods atop Norwich Cathedral that Wilson designed.
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Brook joked with Nairne about whether Norwich soil had special electric properties. But Brook rejected the Society’s account, insisting that electrical fluid moved always from the soil towards the clouds. Unlike those of the Royal Society his instruments ‘speak so as to be understood universally’.
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Morgan was more radical about London doctrine. The Unitarian minister admired Franklin’s politics and experiments and aided the Society’s Heckingham fieldwork. Supporter both of the American and French revolutions, Morgan preached the cause of Promethean liberty: ‘In all ages the thunder of heaven has contributed more powerfully to promote the cause of imposture and tyranny. By the science of electricity, however, the future possibility may be exterminated of renewing these frauds. It has enabled the most common artificer to avert every danger attending a thunder-storm. It teaches the vulgar mind to smile at a thousand religious ceremonies.’
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But like his friend Brook, Morgan doubted Franklin’s explanation of this enlightened practice. ‘By guarding your house you make it of all objects that which is the most likely to become the circuit of a cloud.’ Franklin was wrong to imagine that pointed rods could silently and safely discharge the electrical atmosphere in the skies.
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Such views became common. The instrument maker George Adams had no doubts that pointed rods were ineffective and unsafe. ‘It is evident’, Heckingham’s events showed, ‘that the effect of conductors in general is too inconsiderable either to
lessen fear
or
animate hope.
’
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Soon Franklin’s electrical atmospheres and the Heckingham workhouse would both be under fierce attack. Galvanism and electrodynamics preoccupied experimenters on life and matter. The workhouse was burnt to the ground by Norfolk protesters against the poor laws.
Promethean science claimed it was grounded in experiences available to all, yet it proved hard to organise experiences so all agreed about these
principles. Only certain places and people could be trusted. Even close allies could waver from Royal Society orthodoxy. The problem was evident in 1780s Norfolk. At the same time as the Heckingham controversy, a lawsuit began about the security of north Norfolk harbours. Leading engineers and Royal Society Fellows were witnesses. This case led to a crucial legal decision on the status of the scientific expert: ‘In matters of science’, the Lord Chief Justice declared, ‘the reasoning of men of science can only be answered by men of science.’
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The problem was to determine who counted as ‘men of science’, so how to establish riskily Promethean science. The Titan’s theft of fire and subsequent vicious punishment stands for the rights of free inquiry and its penalties. In her brilliant commentary on the French Revolution, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1794 about the Prometheus story ‘on which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition’. Rather, she argued, ‘we shall find that men will insensibly render each other happier as they grow wiser’.
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Within a generation, her daughter Mary Shelley composed one of the most important accounts of scientific ambition and its fearful consequences.
Frankenstein’s
subtitle was
The Modern Prometheus.