The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Chemistry needed to find its own Newton, who would uncover the laws that governed the processes of change. The accumulation of knowledge through experiment and observation was the way forward. "Experiment is the Thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth," Joseph Black assured his classes.24 Smithson learned early on that the best contribution he could make to increase knowledge, and in turn to better the condition of mankind, was to amass facts. Virtually all his publications exemplify this urge—they are narratives describing species and making them identifiable by broadcasting the typical reactions a substance made under certain replicable conditions. "If molybdate of soda or potash, or, I apprehend, any other molybdate, is heated in a drop of sulphuric acid," he explained in one paper, "the mixture becomes of a most beautiful blue colour, either immediately, or on cooling."25 Smithson's papers, obscure and obsolete today, were some of the many incremental, essential building blocks that helped bring chemistry into the modern age.

  For some 150 years chemistry's practices had remained fairly constant—a standard repertoire of experiments and techniques, using the furnaces, crucibles, and retorts that had long been in service. But now, in the decades prior to Smithson's matriculation, a series of discoveries had rocked the foundations of the science as it had long stood. Pneumatic chemistry, the study of different "airs" or gases, opened up an entirely new field of inquiry, bringing with it major changes in laboratory practice. British scientists had unmasked the ancient Aristotelian element of air, revealing it to be not elemental at all but rather a multiplicity of airs, each with different chemical properties. Joseph Black in Scotland discovered fixed air (carbon dioxide), a vapor which extinguished a piece of burning paper put in it "as effectively as if it had been dipped in water."26 Joseph Priestley, in the laboratory of his patron Lord Shelburne, identified and described numerous airs, including nitrous air (nitric oxide), marine acid air (hydrochloric acid), alkaline air (ammonia), phlogisticated air (nitrogen), and dephlogisticated air (oxygen). And Henry Cavendish in London investigated inflammable air (hydrogen), given off by metals dissolving in acids, finding it to be highly explosive and much less dense than common air.27

  Pneumatic chemistry was structured around the concept of phlogiston. The German professor Georg Ernst Stahl had coined the theory at the beginning of the eighteenth century to explain the process of combustion. Phlogiston (from the Greek word meaning "to burn') was posited as the invisible substance inside all flammable bodies, like a spirit present in the heat or light released by burning bodies, and by metals in the process of calcination. When a candle burning in a closed vessel was extinguished after a time, it was understood that combustion had stopped because the air inside the bell jar had become completely saturated with phlogiston. Conversely, oxygen, when Priestley discovered it in 1774, enabled a candle to burn more brightly, and a little mouse enclosed in it to live twice as long as in common air, and thus Priestley decided that the air must be utterly void of phlogiston—so he called it dephlogisticated air.

  Air, so difficult to capture, weigh, or analyze, had for the most part eluded chemists in the past. Priestley and Cavendish pioneered a number of new techniques for the collection and manipulation of gases. They developed new instruments as well; Priestley's nitrous air test led to the design of the eudiometer, used to analyze the purity of the air, and soon inspectors all over Europe were assessing the quality of the air at resorts and in cities and other spaces. His "Directions for impregnating water with fixed air" (a paper dedicated to the Duke of Northumberland) promoted the making of artificial soda water, bringing the supposed medicinal benefits previously available only at spas to a much wider audience.28

  Chemistry, with these discoveries, began to move into the realm of the acceptable as an object of study. The natural philosophy lecturers who had already been traversing the country for much of the century, exhibiting the awe-inspiring secrets of the universe to genteel society, added chemistry experiments to their repertoires. And the inventions these discoveries soon engendered, the hot-air balloon most notably, captivated the public and greatly enhanced the allure of chemistry.

  Chemistry's rising status in late eighteenth-century England derived most especially from a growing appreciation of its role in transforming modern life. As the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution spread over the country, men became increasingly aware of the power to be commanded through the harnessing of the natural world. Martin Wall, angling to make his case that chemistry was an appropriate subject for Oxford's gentlemen of fortune, focused especially on the utility of the science. Chemistry, he told his students, was intimately connected with "all those arts, which have a most material influence in human life." He touted the invention of gunpowder, and the application of mercury in curing venereal disease. He noted chemistry's contributions to the arts of dyeing, tanning, painting, and even bread-making; he called forth the improvements seen in making glass, porcelain, enamel, and cement—and explained how these improvements had led to advances in instrument making and optics and further scientific discoveries. He galloped through the worlds of agriculture and medicine, enumerating the advances that chemistry had brought to these fields. He even credited chemistry with the spread of civilization that followed the birth of the printing press, by stressing chemistry's role in the improvement of printing techniques. He exhorted his students to devote their attention to this branch of knowledge, which he reminded them was indirectly responsible for some of the most singular events in history. All the work naturalists were currently engaged in seemed to be leading society to a moment in the near future where it could be possible to claim that the Moderns were finally surpassing the Ancients. "I cannot conclude," he finished, "without congratulating you on the advantages, which we of this age enjoy."29

  The pursuit of science, and chemistry in particular, duly became something of a craze during Smithson's tenure at Oxford. From a state of near dereliction in the years preceding Smithson's matriculation, the study of chemistry became by the late 1780s the most popular subject at Oxford. Martin Wall had fourteen or fifteen students enrolled in his first course in 1781; in 1788 the new chemistry reader, Thomas Beddoes, could boast that his chemistry course had drawn "the largest class that has ever been seen at Oxford, at least within the memory of man, in any department of knowledge."30 One student wrote to his father, "If you ask how I relish this new science [chemistry],—perhaps I have been too much attached to it. It has engrossed so much time, that I have hardly been able to spare an hour for anything else."31 The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was just one of many who went through a phase of being obsessed by chemistry while at university; one contemporary recalled that "his hands, his clothes, his books and his furniture were stained and corroded by mineral acids. More than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomenon of combustion … It seemed but too probable that in the rash ardour of experiment he would some day set the College on fire or that he would poison himself …"32

  Parents were not pleased with their sons' enthusiasm for the subject. Chemistry to them was a siren, luring their sons away from the trammeled routes to gentlemanhood—the trajectories to Parliament, to callings in divinity or law, to managing the family estate, to all those destinations for which the boys embarked when they first went up to Oxford. Mrs. Harris wrote to her son James, the future diplomat Lord Malmesbury, at Christ Church: "You are desired not to attend the anatomical lectures this year, as your father has no idea of bringing you up as a surgeon."33 Charles Hatchett's father was said to have offered him £3,000 and a place in Parliament in an attempt to get him to abandon chemistry.34 "It [chemistry] is new," another son tried to reassure his father, "and, like other new things, has prejudice to contend with."35

  For the most part, in the end, however, parents had little to worry about; the men at Oxford talking science did so in a superficial, fashionable way. The school was primarily, as the Victorian-era professor Henry Acland later reflected, for the "recreation of amateurs."36 Smithson, neverthele
ss, was already very serious about the subject. His pursuit of science appears to have been rigorous and profound, unlike the dilettantish enthusiasms of many of his Oxford contemporaries. Though still in his teens he seems to have readily surpassed what Oxford had to offer. According to Davies Giddy, Smithson, "an undergraduate, had the reputation of excelling all other resident members of the University in the knowledge of chemistry."37 The curiously precise wording of this praise—"resident members of the University"—could be construed as encompassing the professor Martin Wall as well, suggesting that Smithson the student had already eclipsed his master. (Smithson was made a Fellow of the Royal Society a year before Wall, and, notably, did not step forward to be one of Wall's sponsors when Wall was nominated.)38

  Smithson pursued his scientific investigations to such a degree that he soon developed an expertise in an arena hardly being taught yet at Oxford: mineralogy. As early as 1784, when Smithson was still just nineteen, his proficiency in mineralogy was declared to be "already much beyond what I have been able to attain to" by the person preparing the university's first course in the subject.39

  Minerals had long been a subject of gentlemanly fascination. For centuries they had been prominently displayed in the cabinets of curiosities of kings and courtiers, as objects of beauty and symbols of wealth. Up until the 1780s these aesthetic interests had dominated efforts to systematize the world of minerals. Mineralogy had been organized as part of natural history, with a classification system much as Linnaeus had recently accomplished for the plant and animal kingdoms, based primarily on visible, external characteristics such as hardness, color, luster, and beauty. But the mineral world, with its wild profusion of types, presented a vastly more complicated organizational challenge. The drive to create a system to order the mineral produce of the world was an Enlightenment undertaking that guided Smithson's entire career; and it was a project that remained an unresolved challenge throughout his lifetime. He and his contemporaries recognized that only with an effective classification system could the full potential utility of the mineral riches of the earth—for mining, medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing—be exploited.

  By the mid-eighteenth century scientists had begun to lay out the path for a new understanding of stones, one based in chemistry. Chemical mineralogy made its first real advances in the German states and in Scandinavia, where the rulers—eager to exploit the natural wealth of their dominions—had established Europe's first mining academies. Sweden, in particular, had pioneered the art of mineralogical chemistry. Its academy featured a well-equipped laboratory and sent its students all over Europe to study the latest mining developments. Its chemists had developed a system of classification, which grouped substances into six "principles" or basic forms of matter: salts, earths, metals, inflammables, airs, and water; stones were considered earths, and divided into varying numbers of "primary earths," such as vitrescible, calcareous, argillaceous, and chalky. This system was adopted by the renowned lecturers in the medical school at Edinburgh, and made its way in turn via the Scottish-trained Martin Wall to Oxford.40

  Smithson was profoundly influenced by this school of thought, and Swedish mineralogists like Torbern Bergman and Axel Cronstedt became his heroes. Smithson extensively annotated his English translations of Cronstedt's System of Mineralogy (both those of 1770 and 1788). He subscribed wholeheartedly to Cronstedt's belief that the laboratory was but a microcosm of the forces in nature. "Mineral bodies being, in fact, native chemical preparations, perfectly analogous to those of the laboratory of art," Smithson argued in one of his papers, "it is only by chemical means, that their species can be ascertained with any degree of certainty." In 1811 he still referred to Cronstedt as "the greatest mineralogist who has yet appeared."41

  Cronstedt's most important contribution to the laboratory was the blowpipe, an old assayer's tool that he refined for analytical work. The blowpipe, when placed in the flame of a candle or lamp, could direct an intense jet of heat onto a mineral sample the size of a few grains, mimicking in miniature—and with considerably more control—the effects of a large furnace. Simple and compact, it could be packed into a small carrying case, making on-site analysis during mineralogical fieldwork possible. But it was also a tool that demanded incredible technical skills. In order to maintain a steady, high flame, it was necessary to breathe in through the nose while blowing out through the mouth, something the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius likened to "that which a man experiences when he endeavours at the same to turn his right arm and his right leg in opposite directions."42 One also needed to develop a familiarity with a wide range of diagnostic results, to know how substances reacted to the flame. Calcareous spar (calcite) expanded and broke apart violently when heated; arsenic yielded a garlic smell; zeolites frothed and foamed; and flours like phosphorus emitted a light in the dark. Smithson became very expert at the blowpipe. His prowess was such that later in life well-known scientists came to observe his technique, and he also contributed a number of improvements to the instrument.43

  Smithson evidently undertook a profound self-education while at Oxford—going well beyond the mineralogy that was covered in Wall's chemistry lectures. He must have read widely, probably conducted extensive fieldwork, and experimented at length in the laboratory. His library includes a 1775 book entitled A Method of Making Useful Mineral Collections, and he had most likely already begun to build his own mineral collection by this time. In order to familiarize himself with as many varieties as possible he probably also studied all the mineral cabinets he could access. On the top floor of the Muséum in the old Ashmolean building lay the moldering collection of rarities and curiosities donated by the Museum's founder Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century astrologer and alchemist. The room was crowded with skeletons and skins and muskets and model ships, along with the thigh bone of the Hertfordshire Giant, a crocodile in brandy, and a depiction of the crucifixion minutely carved on a fruit stone. In one corner sat a large old wooden cabinet, where Smithson perhaps passed hours poring over the specimens inside. It was full of precious stones, fossils, and crystals, augmented in 1758 with William Borlase's collection of crystals, minerals, and metallic bodies from Cornwall.44

  In addition to his studies, Smithson drew about him all the people he could find who were similarly passionate about chemical mineralogy. The friendships that Smithson cultivated at Oxford, the ones that he maintained in the years after university, were founded upon a kind of cult of Cronstedt. Smithson's friend Christopher Pegge, for example, came from a long line of distinguished antiquaries. His love of mineralogy and his devotion to a career in science represented a profound shift in the natural order of things. He should by all rights have passed through the crucible of old Oxford and left as a member of the clergy, to pick up the torch carried already for generations by his illustrious family line. As he wrote to Mark Noble, a Birmingham-based antiquary and author of a book on Oliver Cromwell: "Had not my attentions been twin'd to different studies from those of my Ancestors I might I dare say have heard of my friend [Noble] before this by his productions but I must confess myself rather an admirer of a Bergman & Cronstedst [sic] than of a Camden [antiquary William Camden, author of the popular Britannia].'" 45 Pegge elected to practice medicine, but posterity deemed him a second-rate talent, and he is remembered now mostly for some amusing doggerel (Pegge, "like Death, that scythe-armed mower, will speedily make you a peg or two lower") and for pompously donning, at the tender age of twenty-five, the ancient costume of the physician—the full-bottomed wig, large turned-up cocked hat, and gold-headed cane.46 His enthusiasms nevertheless mark him as a member, with Smithson, of this distinct breed of English Enlightenment gentleman: citizens of a new republic of science, dedicated to the cause of "improvement."

  First among Smithson's friends at Oxford was William Thomson, the one who delivered the introductory mineralogy lectures at the university. About four or five years older than Smithson, Thomson was originally from Worcester, the son of a physician who
had studied in Leiden. He received his MA from Oxford in 1783, studied for a year at Edinburgh under the great chemist Joseph Black, and was back at Oxford, appointed Dr. Lee's Lecturer in Anatomy at Christ Church, in 1785. He had numerous contacts in the medical and scientific establishment; he was also an active member or founder member of several specialized philosophical societies, such as the Natural History Society in Edinburgh, the Society for Promoting Natural History in London (to which he sponsored Smithson), and the Linnean Society. Thomson and Smithson stayed in touch all the rest of their lives, even after a scandal caused Thomson to leave England in 1790 for good. They were best friends forging ahead together, and Thomson was absolutely critical to Smithson's early success.47

  Among Smithson's other philosophically minded friends were Davies Giddy (later Gilbert), who eventually went on to become president of the Royal Society; George Shaw, an MA from Magdalen who was teaching several courses of botany at the university and later became assistant to the curator of the natural history collections at the British Museum; and William Austin, a physician at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary some ten years older than Smithson who became a professor of chemistry in 1785.48 Two men not known to be Smithson's friends but who must have been acquaintances in the tiny world of science at Oxford were James Sadler and Thomas Beddoes. Sadler worked as an assistant in the chemical laboratory, but he is best known as the first English aeronaut; his balloon flights were major public theatre, drawing thousands of spectators. Beddoes, who later fathered the Romantic poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, studied medicine and became a Reader in Chemistry at Oxford. His ardent embrace of the French Revolution, however, ultimately forced his departure from the university in 1792. He went on to Bristol and established the Pneumatic Institution, which was dedicated to applying the latest scientific research in gases to the treatment of disease and became famed for launching the career of Humphry Davy.49