The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  The papers were highly analytical works, spurred by research that others had done, which Smithson felt the need to question or to better. The zeolite paper, which was notable also for coining the term "silicates," originated with a sample the French crystallographer René-Just Haüy had sent—an indication, too, that Haüy and Smithson had managed to renew their correspondence, despite the war. The work on ulmin began soon after Smithson read an account of the substance in Thomas Thomson's new System of Chemistry, which described it as possessing "qualities totally peculiar and extraordinary." His friend the Berlin chemist Martin Klaproth, whose sample had also come from William Thomson, had been the first to analyze and name it; Smithson's investigations might well have been motivated by a robust sense of competition, to see if his results differed from Klaproth's. And in his third paper, the analysis of a "saline substance" from Vesuvius called vitriolated tartar [potassium sulfate], Smithson discovered "no less than nine distinct species of matters, and a more rigorous investigation, than I was willing to bestow on it, would probably add to their number."22

  The papers, with their many references to recent journal articles, reflect Smithson's keen desire to remain current on the latest developments, and to continue to contribute to the scientific community. But in many places that we might have expected to find him active in London, there is no trace of him. He never joined the Geological Society, despite being friends with a number of prominent members and clearly keeping up with their publications.23 The Geological Society had its roots in the mineralogical chemistry community; many of its members had been active in the Askesian Society and the Mineralogical Society, groups that Smithson, had he been in London, probably would have taken part in. Something seems to have been pulling Smithson away, detaching him from the social fabric of this community.

  There are no letters from these years revealing any of the issues that might have been preoccupying him, but there are small indications of problems. After he returned to London, Smithson severed his long-standing ties with his bankers Hoare's, opening up a new account with Drummonds. Hoare's had been his bankers since his university days, and they had also served his mother and her extended family, as well as the Duke of Northumberland in his last decades. They had presumably been involved, too, in the efforts to secure Smithson's release from prison. Perhaps Smithson had become disgruntled with their performance during that time. The reason for the rupture will remain a mystery, but it must have been something quite significant.24

  He no longer took many guests to the Royal Society. He occasionally brought his brother or his cousin Georgiana Keate Henderson's husband, and a few times he invited an as yet unidentified "Mr. Cox."25 He sponsored no new members. Few foreign scientists were paying visits to the capital, on account of the war. The celebrated Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, though, was one who came to town in 1812; he was a frequent guest of Smithson's friends Humphry Davy, Smithson Tennant, and Alexander Marcet, but Smithson does not appear to have met him during this visit. Smithson no longer appeared in the Dinner Book lists at Holland House, nor did he form a part of the King of Hearts—the informal conversation club of which Lord Holland and Smithson Tennant were members, along with a number of other men Smithson knew. And Smithson was most especially absent from the valuation of his close friend Charles Greville's mineral collection—a collection to which Smithson had contributed and knew intimately.26

  Greville had died in May 1809, while Smithson was still away, and for a year his villa at Paddington Green had been shuttered and closed, its furniture, pictures, books, and wine all inventoried. For a week in the spring of 1810 a group of eminent scientists entered the gloomy, abandoned house at the direction of the House of Commons to assess Greville's extensive mineral collection. Most of the men appointed—Charles Hatchett, Esq., the chair of the group; the Comte de Bournon, the French émigré mineralogist Greville had supported during the Revolution; Richard Chenevix; Humphry Davy; Robert Ferguson; William Hyde Wollaston; and Dr. Babbington—were acquaintances of Smithson. And Smithson was soon serving with a number of them on the Royal Institution's new Chemistry, Mineralogy and Geology Committee, which was chaired by Davy. This group, admittedly, could have been formed while Smithson was still away on the Continent. Its evaluation was carried out after he had returned, though, and Smithson was notably missing from this clique.

  The assessment of Greville's mineral cabinet was very much of the Establishment and for the nation. As Greville's brother Robert said, Greville had been keen to see the collection go to the British Museum, and thus be "secured, to the advantage of the British Nation. & perpetuating the Memory of the Person, by whom this Collection had been so industriously, & scientifically made [emphasis Robert Greville's]." The committee stated in their report that the collection, numbering some twenty thousand specimens, scientifically arranged, had been "selected with very great Judgement, both as to their utility & beauty." In the end, the men concluded, "they considered the Entire Collection to be equal in most & in many part superior to any other similar Collection which any of these Gentlemen have had opportunity for viewing in this & other Countries." They valued it at more than £13,000. Parliament promptly allocated the money, and Greville's minerals were purchased for the benefit of the nation.27 The British Museum, long disparaged for its inadequate mineral cabinet, finally owned a collection worthy of the country.

  Greville's cabinet consisted of many large, spectacular specimens, eminently suited to a national collection. Smithson might well have believed his own collection was of great importance, too, for different reasons, geared as it was for scientific research rather than show. He had annotated his finds, attaching little pieces of paper to each specimen, and he had also prepared a written catalogue, where each specimen was numbered and described. As a book he owned on building a useful mineral collection explained, "All specimens must be numbered and strictly described in a register. Every mineral collection without such a register is like a body without a soul."28 What did Smithson imagine was the future of such a collection as he was building? Was he thinking about the disposition of his own life's work, imagining what place might best benefit from his labors?

  Although there is little beyond his published laboratory work that remains from these years, it is evident that Smithson was still expanding his circle of scientific acquaintances and reaching out to cultivate the next generation of scientists, an activity he pursued later in Paris with tremendous energy. He met the young Irish geologist William Fitton, who had come to London in 1809 to study medicine.29 And he became friends with Sir Alexander Johnston, a neighbor in St. James's who had recently returned from a stint abroad as the Chief Justice of Ceylon, and had a number of interesting mineral specimens for Smithson's cabinet.30 Smithson also spent time with Edward Howard, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk and author of a landmark paper on the chemical analysis of meteorites. Howard was best friends with the chemists Wollaston and Smithson Tennant, men Smithson was presumably seeing regularly in London.31

  Smithson, like Tennant and Wollaston, was still pursuing microchemistry. He still believed that his work was leading him towards a serious contribution, something of real potential. And he felt that his way of working, on "a very diminished scale of experiment," was "highly to the advantage" of chemistry and mineralogy.32 There were some, however, who couldn't see the point of such work; Coleridge dismissed it as "empirical compilation," and wondered how his scientific friends could imagine that the solution to nature's secrets would be found by accumulating "a cumulus, a Rubbish Hill, of Descriptions of the appearances which this bit of mineral and that, and of another only to the ten thousandth presents or may be by fire, & chemical tests—be made to assume." Coleridge sought instead a unity of science and the spiritual. His was a philosophical hunger that could perhaps have been sated more readily by the spectacle of Davy's colossal battery at the Royal Institution, which Davy was using to explore a new theory of the affinity of matter.

  Davy's work also lay at
the heart of the rivalry with the French. Davy with his battery, Thenard and Gay-Lussac with theirs on the other coast, were, it was said, like Wellington and Napoleon, generals squaring off. After the French had awarded Davy their highest honor for his electrical discoveries, Napoleon had underwritten the cost of the French one to compete. No such governmental support was forthcoming in Britain, and so Davy raised money amongst his genteel audiences, telling them that the voltaic battery was "an alarm-bell to experimenters in every part of Europe."33

  Gentlemen scientists—men with wealth at their command—began to work on obtaining their own batteries. J. G. Children, for example, built one for his well-equipped laboratory in Tunbridge Wells, a place where Davy came occasionally to work. The Quaker chemists at Plough Court set one up as well. But the Royal Institution's battery was to be larger than all of these, capable of experiments beyond those that had previously been conceived. Smithson, with his wealth, certainly could have been one of the gentlemen patrons like Children underwriting the latest technology. He continued to work instead in an older tradition, grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of science as a civic enterprise, with simple equipment accessible to all.

  But Davy's ability to attract support for large-scale electro-chemical work marked the crumbling of the old Enlightenment way of science. There were, finally, limitations on the contributions that an individual with small, typically portable, instruments could make. In the promise of Davy's battery was foretold the end of an era, and the beginning of modern, institutionalized, large-scale laboratory-based science.

  ELEVEN

  Paris: Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 1814-1825

  Some years since in Paris I made the acquaintance of a distinguished foreigner, of great wealth, but in wretched health, whose life, save a few hours given to repose, was regularly divided between the most interesting scientific researches and gambling. It was a source of great regret to me that this learned experimentalist should devote the half of so valuable a life to a course so little in harmony with an intellect whose wonderful powers called forth the admiration of the world around him.

  —çs Arago, speaking of Smithson, 18361

  AT THE END of March 1814 the allies marched into Paris. News of Napoleon's subsequent abdication soon reached London, and three euphoric nights of illuminations followed. At Carlton House, home of the Prince Regent, sparkling lights looped around the columns in front and along the roof and cornice lines. Drunken shouts of joy and hoarse huzzas joined the ruckus of drums, trumpets, bells, and pistol shots to fill the skies above Pall Mall. Days later a frail Louis XVIII, who had been waiting out the war in Buckinghamshire, arrived in the metropolis, the first King of France to enter the city in some four hundred years. Tens of thousands, many wearing the Bourbon white cockade and a sprig of laurel, thronged the roads as far as a mile outside London to catch a glimpse of him. They perched in trees, lined walls and roofs, and crowded every window along the procession route.2

  Smithson, in a manner that cannot have endeared him to his old friend, promptly called in the bet he had wagered with Lord Holland over a decade earlier: one guinea on one hundred that the Bourbons would be restored to the throne. Before the peace was even officially signed on May 30, Smithson had pocketed his winnings and was back in Paris.3 Once more he formed part of an enormous wave of English tourists eager to soak up French culture. "Where are the French?" one traveler wrote home to his wife. "Nowhere. All is English; English carriages fill the streets, no other genteel equipages are to be seen. At the playboxes all are English. At the hotels, restaurateurs—in short, everywhere—John Bull stalks incorporate."4

  Smithson was undoubtedly swept up in the social gaiety, attending salons and parties, touring the Louvre with all its looted works of art, and gambling in the city's glittering gaming houses. The streets overflowed with the glint of swords and the colors of all the Allied armies. High-ranking officials and nobility from all across Europe had arrived for the festivities marking the restoration of the monarchy. That winter, it was said, there were more balls than had ever before been held. The world was waking as if from a dream, Galignani's Messenger, an English paper in Paris proclaimed; France had "hurled from his throne the tyrant, who, vampyre-like drained her of her best blood … and the native princes of the French nation are recalled to the throne of their ancestors." The stage to which they returned had changed dramatically. Paris was littered with marble monuments to Napoleon's aspirations for an imperial capital—triumphal arches, new bridges over the Seine, the arcaded rue de Rivoli, and classical temples such as the one for the Bourse. The new regime immediately set to dislodging the symbols of its predecessor. The statue of Napoleon atop the Colonne de la Grande Armée was toppled; the golden quadriga stolen from Venice pulled down from the Arc du Carrousel; the "N"s on the buildings, marks of Napoleon's dynastic aspirations, lifted off; and in the carpets and tapestries of the palaces the bees and eagles—his emblems—were embroidered over with the royalist fleur-de-lys.5

  Smithson probably watched this activity with wry amusement, having predicted as much, a full decade earlier:

  To reinstate former institutions is the mode by which nations endevour [sic] to return to former times, to recall former happiness, and avert those further evils with w[hic]h innovation is still pregnant. Such was the conduct of the English in the time of Cromwell, such will be that of the French in the time of Buonaparte. The Bourbons will reascend the throne of France, amidst the acclamations, the sincere and harty [sic] acclamations of the whole nation.6

  Smithson's reconnection with Paris was not exactly like that enjoyed by most other English visitors. His reacquaintance with the city was above all a reunion with the community of scientists from whom he had been separated by the wars. While the majority simply marveled at the splendor of the gas lamps that illuminated the Passage des Panoramas in 1816, for example, the first gas lighting of a public place in Paris, Smithson was interested in the mechanics of the system and was a friend of the Englishman who had arranged it.7 Paris lay at the center of scientific discourse, and every significant figure passed through the city at some point. Smithson's circle in Paris was large, and it included many of the most important people. Some of them, like Berthollet, Haüy, and Cuvier, he had known already twenty years or more.

  Chemistry in Paris was flourishing, and the scientific community enjoyed a thriving day-to-day existence. "I am living entirely among 'soda' and 'potash'—between [Louis Jacques] Thenard and [Joseph Louis] Gay-Lussac," wrote the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt after settling in Paris in 1808. "'Ammonia,' M. Berthollet, comes to see us occasionally; and then we all think ourselves to be hydrogenated."8 Jöns Jakob Berzelius exclaimed upon his arrival to the city in 1818, "The amount of work in chemistry that is done in Paris is completely incredible. I believe that there are here more than 100 laboratories devoted to research."9 The center of much of the activity was the Société d'Arcueil, which had been set up by Berthollet and the physicist Simon Laplace at their neighboring villas in the countryside outside Paris in the first years of the century. Berthollet and Laplace provided critical laboratory space, a place to share ideas and "cook muck" together, as Berzelius described it. The Société d'Arcueil provided France its first opportunity for something like a shared research program to arise. They founded their own journal and vetted each other's papers, which were then often delivered at the weekly Monday seances in town at the Institut. The members of the society were mostly brilliant young "polytecniciens," men who had trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and would go on to play a tremendous role in French science throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Smithson, perhaps through introductions forged in the pastoral Arcueil, became friends with many in this next generation—the physicist and chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, the astronomer François Arago, the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Biot, and the chemist Pierre-Louis Dulong in particular.10

  At least one account of Smithson's presence at a gathering of the Société d'Arcueil ex
ists, a visit in the autumn of 1814, recorded by Sir Charles Blagden, who was then staying with Berthollet. Smithson arrived in Arcueil accompanied by the sloppy, genial Smithson Tennant, who was in France on a brief tour, having just completed teaching his first course of mineralogy at Cambridge (Tennant's idea of packing for a trip was to dump the contents of his dresser drawers into his tablecloth).11 Many of the society's regulars were in attendance, including Laplace, Gay-Lussac, Arago, Dulong, and Humboldt, who was in the midst of preparing the account of his epic journey to South America for publication.12

  Although Blagden did not describe the specific conversation of that evening, beyond mentioning how much Humboldt "talked away as usual," his diary is filled with the ideas that were percolating at the time—topics that likely reflected the conversation in the circles in which Smithson moved. Blagden was immersed in the recently published folio volumes of Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt, in which Berthollet had played such a leading role; the archeological discoveries documented in these volumes fueled the Egyptomania that dominated the decorative arts and architecture of the early nineteenth century. Entering Berthollet's study was in fact like taking a fantasy trip to Egypt. The walls were painted with scenes of the ruins at Thebes and Dendera, and the furniture was all Egyptian in style, including a desk specially built for the folios in the shape of a temple.13 Another topic of fascination was the Hottentot Venus, who was then being displayed at the Jardin des Plantes; the discussion of her physiognomy, though, because it was held in mixed company, was all "kept within the bounds of decency."14 There was talk, too, of Britain's torching of the U.S. capital city of Washington, which was being trumpeted as a great vindication and triumph in the English papers; the men of science, in contrast, frowned upon it. "Told of capture of Washington by English, blowing up the Capitol, & proceeding to Baltimore," Blagden recorded. "We all agreed that Baltimore [was] a proper subject of attack [because of its port] but better have left Washington alone: it w[oul]d rather incite the people against us."15