The Age of Wonder (74 page)

Sir Humphry Davy’s Will included endowments for a Davy Medal to be administered by the Royal Society; and for the maintenance of Penzance Grammar School, which celebrates a Davy Holiday to this day. The remainder of his estate was left to Jane, except for a bequest of ‘£100 or 1,000 florins’ for Josephine Dettela, daughter of the innkeeper of Laibach, Illyria, Austria. In March 1829, a few weeks before he died, Davy added a codicil leaving Pappina a further £50. Lady Davy was made the sole executor of this Will, a duty she carried out faithfully. Despite the urgings of Walter Scott, she never published her own memoirs, which might have described what it was really like to live with a man of science-who knew he was a genius.

^♣
It might be too much to consider this as Shelley’s tribute to Herschel and his faithful, orbiting assistant Caroline. But it can be said that the view Shelley imagines of the ‘green and azure sphere’ seen from the moon is exactly that enshrined in the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph of December 1968 (see page 161).

^♣
Curiously, vague feelings against Lady Davy have always remained in the collective folk memory of Penzance, probably because she never deigned to visit this remote Cornish seaside town during her lifetime. I was told on several occasions that the large stone statue erected to Davy, dominating Market Jew Street, showed his frock-coat with a missing button ‘because Lady Davy was a bad wife and would never sew it back on’.

^♣
The lively ambiguity of this relationship continues in modern research laboratories, where the line between assistant and collaborator remains easily blurred. A protocol has emerged in the joint signing of scientific papers for journals such as
Nature
; and in many British universities it is obligatory for a Director of Studies to allow his postgraduate assistants to co-sign research studies. But there are still many anomalies. It is currently the view that Edwin Hubble owed a great deal more to his assistant Milton Humason, a genius with stellar photography, than was originally recognised in his historic papers on red-shift. The examples of William Lawrence with Abernethy, Gay-Lussac with Berthollet, and most of all perhaps, Caroline Herschel with her brother, are even more subtle and complicated.

^♣
The foundation of the Natural History Museum, in South Kensington, was achieved in 1881, and the Science Museum in 1885. The New British Library on Euston Road, opened in 1996, took over the King’s Library, which now forms the central architectural feature of the building, as a huge and dramatic glass bookcase, rising six storeys high through the central core of the building. Curiously, the New British Library fulfils much of Davy’s original vision, containing both science and humanities reading rooms, as well as rare books, maps and manuscripts, and two art galleries with changing displays. Near the main staircase is a bronze bust of Faraday; but none of Davy. In the courtyard is Eduardo Paolozzi’s gigantic statue of Newton (1995), an iron man seated on a plinth, leaning forward to take the measure of the world with his dividers. The image wonderfully combines several contradictory versions of science: a noble Enlightenment Newton, reminiscent of Rodin’s
The Thinker
; a satanic, calculating, anti-Romantic Newton, based on William Blake’s engraving of 1797; and finally, more than a hint of Dr Frankenstein’s outcast Creature of 1818.

^♣
‘Eventually we must sing of greater things.’ The book had run to nine editions by 1883. The French edition, edited by the great Parisian science writer Camille Flammarion, supplied a long and dramatically expressive title:
Les derniers Jours d’un Philosophe. Entretiens sur la Nature, les Sciences, les Métamorhphoses de la Terre et du Ciel, l’Humanité, l’Ame, et la Vie eternelle.
That certainly covered it.

^♣
What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this-that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind…that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton…Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if indeed it be made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense-the image of the Creator-there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system’ (23 March 1801,
Letters,
Vol. 2, p.709). This saying of Coleridge’s has a peculiar power to outrage men of science, even modern ones. In November 2000 there was a special day-long seminar organised at the Royal Society by the then President Sir Aaron Klug, on the subject of ‘The Idea of Creativity in the Sciences and the Humanities’. Among its twenty distinguished participants were Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Carl Djerassi, George Steiner, Lisa Jardine and Ian McEwan. This citation from Coleridge proved more contentious than any other single proposition, and eventually goaded an eminent scientist (none of the above) to cry out in exasperation: ‘That is complete and utter
balls…
We don’t have to put up with such rubbish.’ Equilibrium was restored when it was pointed out that the idea of computing the contents of ‘500 souls’ was possibly Coleridge’s idea of a mathematical joke.

10
Young Scientists

1

By the end of the 1820s British science had lost its three international stars, the three scientific knights whose names had been renowned throughout Europe. The deaths of Joseph Banks in 1820, William Herschel in 1822, and finally of Humphry Davy in 1829, marked the passing of an age. The idea that they had between them created a distinctively British science was itself part of Banks’s great bequest to the nation. But with these departures its future seemed uncertain, and its reputation undefended. Who among the younger generation would take British science forward? And who would fund it? It was a time of great uncertainty.
The Times
helpfully announced that an age of scientific giants had passed away.
¹

The questions became more insistent. Was the Royal Society fulfilling its role? Was British science itself in decline, compared to France and Germany? Did science have a recognised social and moral role in society? Ever since the Vitalism debate, such questions were no longer limited to a small circle of experts and academics. Public concern about the role of science in society was now widespread. The thirty-four-year-old Thomas Carlyle, newly arrived in Edinburgh and freshly bearded for the fight, was just beginning to make his name as a polemical essayist and an aggressive social commentator. His first influential tract,
Signs of the Times,
dominated almost an entire issue of the
Edinburgh Review
in spring 1829. Here Carlyle announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery’.

Carlyle made the problematic role of the man of modern science a central issue. He attacked the dehumanising effects of utilitarianism, statistics and the ‘science of mechanics’, and opposed the world of the laboratory to those of art, poetry and religion. Though he did not name the Royal Society or the Royal Institution, he came very close to it. ‘No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple: but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively “interrogates Nature”-who, however, shows no haste to answer.’
²
Four years later, warming to his theme, Carlyle would announce definitively: ‘The Progress of Science…is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration.’
^3
♣

In the Royal Society’s presidential election of 1829, John Herschel became the natural candidate of the young scientists, despite his own deep personal misgivings. At thirty-seven he was recognised as a polymath at the height of his powers. He had been Secretary of the Society for five years, and had published over a hundred papers on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology. He was known to be developing a philosophy of ‘pure inductive science’, heralded as the true heir to Baconian thought. Moreover, he was wealthy and settled. In March 1829 he had heeded his aunt Caroline’s advice and married a very beautiful and gifted Scottish girl, Margaret Brodie Stewart. Above all, he was the son of his father, Sir William.

But Herschel soon found himself drawn into a public debate about the personalities and administration of science, quite unlike anything his father had experienced. The unworldly Michael Faraday could not be persuaded to stand. The mercurial Charles Babbage was regarded as unreliable and unsuitable. Both Wollaston and Thomas Young were dead, while the aristocratic candidate was the charming but ineffective Duke of Sussex, brother to King George IV, who knew nothing about science at all-although this was considered by some more traditional Fellows to be an overwhelming advantage.

After a good deal of gentlemanly infighting, during which Herschel threatened to withdraw his candidature, the Duke of Sussex was elected in 1830 by a very narrow majority: 119 votes to 111. Babbage, checking his statistics, noted with disgust that less than 33 per cent of the membership had voted. This unsatisfactory result led to a breakaway movement by a handful of young scientists around Herschel. They began to think of circumventing the Royal Society entirely, and appealing to a wholly different constituency: the ‘amateur’ men (and women) of science who belonged to the provincial scientific or ‘philosophical’ societies and institutions outside London. As if too soothe Herschel, he was promptly knighted, on a recommendation that many thought came from the Duke of Sussex, anxious to placate his rival. If so, it did not have the desired effect.

Between 1829 and 1831 a series of publications by John Herschel, his friend Charles Babbage and the Scottish science writer David Brewster (who had done fine research work on polarised light) pursued the emotive theme of the supposed ‘decline of Science in Britain’. The debate was taken up by the leading journals, rapidly moved beyond the Royal Society, and became one about national culture and the role of the man of science in society. It was no coincidence that all this took place at the same time as the national self-questioning reflected in the violent political debates surrounding the Great Reform Bill.

2

The first salvo was fired by Charles Babbage, when he released a slim but carefully targeted volume, provocatively entitled
Reflections on the Decline of Science in England,
in the spring of 1830. Two years previously Babbage had been appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Newton’s old chair, and he had considerable influence. It was known that his lectures on astronomy at the Royal Institution in 1817 had won the approval of Sir William Herschel, and that his research work had been supported by Sir Humphry Davy. He was wealthy, and had a large house in London at Dorset Square. Here he was working on his famous ‘Difference Engine No. 1’, a prototype computer which would require 25,000 brass cogs to function. After expending over £17,000 (a colossal sum) of his own money on it, he was understandably keen on the notion of government funding for such projects. This gave added energy, or bias, to his attack.

Babbage’s prototype computer later became one of the legends of Victorian science, and a parable about the failure of government research funding. At the point when he ran out of money in 1832, Babbage had succeeded in constructing one self-contained section of his Difference Engine No. 1, employing 2,000 brass components, which still exists and works impeccably as an automatic calculator. A more sophisticated ‘Analytical Engine’ using a punched-card input and mechanical ‘store’ on 50,000 brass cogs, the genuine equivalent of a modern computer’s RAM ‘memory’, was designed but never constructed. No one knows if this would have worked. However, Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed in the 1840s to use 4,000 brass cogs, was actually constructed by the Science Museum in 1991, and with some minor alterations works to this day, capable of calculating to thirty-one places of decimals-an impressive power. It weighs three tons and cost £300,000-considerably cheaper, in relative terms, than the original.
^4
♣

Babbage’s outspoken book was a polemical exposé of weak British scientific institutions and casual attitudes to research. He compared these with the culture of scientific research fostered by the great Continental Academies of Science, in Paris and Berlin. Though ‘eminently distinguished for mechanical and manufacturing ingenuity’, Britain was shamefully ‘below other nations’ in pure sciences. While he referred respectfully to the achievements of both Sir Humphry Davy and Sir William Herschel, Babbage implied that times had changed radically.

He instanced the lack of government funding for research, the fact that there had so far been no honours for distinguished scientists such as Faraday and the meteorologist Beaufort, and the lack of recognition for the chemical work of John Dalton and Wollaston. He criticised the weakness of science teaching in the universities (apart, evidently, from his own field, mathematics) and the failure of the Royal Society to fund large scientific projects, or promote the public understanding of science in Britain. Despite its ringing motto,
Nullius in Verba,
the Society fostered no generally agreed philosophy of science.

Babbage’s attack on the Royal Society became increasingly contemptuous. Where, he asked, were the British equivalents of Berzelius (Sweden), Humboldt (Germany), Oersted (Denmark) or Cuvier (France)?
⁵
He claimed that the Society’s members were lazy, elitist, ignorant and largely dedicated to club dinners. In a devastating early use of statistical analysis, he showed that only 10 per cent of the 700 members had published two or more scientific papers.
⁶
He also jeered that British scientific societies were so easy for an amateur to join, that for the expenditure of precisely ‘ten pounds, nine shillings and nine pence ha’penny’ he had calculated that anyone could obtain ‘a comet’s trail of upwards 40 letters’ as initials after his name-like FRS, for example.
⁷

Babbage described the present Royal Society with a simile drawn pointedly from Herschel’s work. It was utterly devoid of ‘bright stars’, and ‘only visible to distant nations, as a faint Nebula in the obscure horizon of English science’.
⁸
He also urged a critical attitude to ‘publication of experimental data’, and the necessity for peer-reviewing-not, up till then, considered quite fair play. As a further provocation, he gleefully introduced such ungentlemanly terms as
‘hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking results’,
which he claimed should be applied very strenuously.
⁹

Babbage concluded the book with a suggestive comparison between the contrasted scientific styles of Wollaston and Davy. The first had been a meticulous, patient scientist, utterly without worldly ambition, and modest and private in his profession. He was primarily interested in getting precise results that avoided all possibility of bias or error. The second was a restless scientific enquirer, rapid and ambitious in all his work, superb at popularising and explaining his projects, driven by the desire to pursue and establish the truth,
and to be the first to do so at whatever cost.
Wollaston, he concluded, was a pure, saint-like man of science, while Davy was also a publicist and visionary: ‘Wollaston could never have been a poet; Davy might have been a great one.’ In the future, Babbage seemed to imply, British science would need both types.
¹⁰

He added, for good measure, a section describing John Herschel at work in his laboratory at Slough, analysing ‘the dark lines seen in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer’.
^♣
Babbage perhaps intended a sort of parable of science for the new generation. His story went as follows. When Babbage first peered carefully at the shimmering solar image projected through Herschel’s prism, he could not see these dark Fraunhofer lines, though he knew they were there. Herschel then commented to him: ‘An object is frequently not seen, from
not knowing how to see
it, rather than from any deficit in the organ of vision…I will instruct you how to see them.’
¹¹
After some time spent re-examining and refocusing the image, Babbage could see them perfectly. The point was that science must always be more than the simple observation of phenomena or data. It was simultaneously a subjective training in observational skills, self-criticism and interpretation: a complete education. This was of course precisely what William Herschel had said forty years before, about learning to see with a telescope.

To add a final sting in the tail, Babbage slipped in an Appendix enthusiastically praising the 1828 conference of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had attended. It had great scientists-like its President Humboldt, who had delivered an address praising Goethe-and great visions of the future. It would next meet in Vienna in 1831. He now proposed a new ‘Union of Scientific Societies’ in Britain, to follow this admirable German model, with annual meetings in cities outside London. By all means the Royal Society could send participants, if it should so bestir itself. But who else would rally to the cause? Babbage’s subversive tract was the first manifesto for what in 1831 would become the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
¹²

Michael Faraday would not be drawn into this whirlpool of controversy. Instead he encouraged a Dutch chemist, Gerard Möll, to write a gentle reply and reproof to Babbage, ‘By A Foreigner’. Möll observed that ‘the English have quite enough of their natural and foreign political enemies, without waging a civil-scientific war between themselves…The Barons of the French Institute will be highly amused…A neutral foreigner cannot help seeing with regret Englishmen scoff and rail at things which ought to have been looked upon as the pride of their country.’
¹³

John Herschel was not to be deterred by this appeal to his patriotic and gentlemanly instincts. He followed his friend with a quite different and much subtler line of attack. He decided to put forward a progressive view of British science, and hold out the possibilities of a golden future.

3

Herschel’s quietly phrased but immensely authoritative book
A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
was published as the first volume in a popular series,
Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia.
Despite its anodyne title, deliberately chosen to offset Babbage’s style of provocation, this became a hugely popular work which would run into many new editions throughout the early Victorian period.