The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  The idyll of these days of scientific camaraderie was shattered a few months later, when Smithson Tennant, en route back to England in February, was thrown from his horse near Boulogne. He died almost immediately. His loss must have been especially devastating for Smithson, who had passed so much time with Tennant in those last months of his life. In Paris they had worked together; the purpose of Smithson's 1819 publication "On Native Hydrous Aluminate of Lead, or Plumb Gomme" was to assert Tennant's posthumous priority over the analysis in the face of a publication by Berzelius.16 And they had played together, both being lifelong bachelors with a love of gambling. They spent one of Tennant's last nights gambling in Paris, in fact, and the news that Tennant had beaten Smithson—to the tune of £100—had quickly made the rounds among their friends. Blagden, still with Berthollet out at Arcueil, was disgusted; he wrote in his diary, "Tennant & Smithson at gaming house: former won latter lost. … Told B[ertholle]t what I had heard of Tennant, added that I knew him to be a man of property but could answer for no one who went to a gaming house."17

  Immediately following the "catastrophe" of Tennant's death, as one of Smithson's friends described it, "came that of the resurrection of Bonaparte, the tiger who broke his chains to come torment mankind."18 The news of Napoleon's escape from Elba struck terror in the hearts of the royalist bourgeoisie and frightened many in the scientific community as well. Berthollet especially felt himself to be in grave danger. He owed his phenomenal wealth to Napoleon's patronage, the fruit of a relationship built in Egypt. In publishing the first memoirs of the Société d'Arcueil he had virtually dedicated the work of the group to Napoleon. At the time of the allies' entry into Paris in 1814, however, Berthollet as a member of the Senate had been forced to sign a document deposing the Emperor. Napoleon, reflecting on these events towards the end of his life, in the purgatory of exile on St. Helena, "was often heard to exclaim—'What Berthollet! … on whom I thought I could rely with such confidence!'"19

  Napoleon's landing in France, on March 1, 1815, and his uncontested march up to Paris, which he entered triumphant twenty days later, sent the English racing for home. The road to Calais became "one immense length of cavalcade." Every horse, donkey, and mule was pressed into service; there was "not a horse to be had" in Paris, Lady Dalrymple Hamilton wrote in her diary.20 It would have been natural for Smithson to have returned to England at this time, as a frightened Blagden and hundreds of others did. Everyone was haunted by images of a repeat of the random imprisonment of all English citizens, the march to Verdun that had followed the renewal of hostilities in 1803. Smithson was elected once more in June 1815 to the Royal Institution's Committee of Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy, which suggests that he might have been in London at this time.21 His bank ledgers at Drummonds, however, do not yield any indication of his living locally. They are filled only with charges for letters of credit. The biggest outlays in the months prior to Napoleon's resurgence are to the French banker and bon vivant, Jacques é, husband of the glamorous hostess, Madame é—which raises the interesting possibility that Smithson enjoyed the company of one of the most celebrated salons of Paris.22

  The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, marked the end of the Hundred Days and diminished once and forever Napoleon's hold on the imagination of Europe. The fallen emperor returned to Paris, where he attempted to arrange passage to the United States. Such a sanctuary was not to be, however, and at length he gave himself up to the British Navy. For Smithson, who saw the imprint of his ancestry writ in the world around him, it must have seemed inevitable that the ship that carried Napoleon off to his permanent jail on the remote island of St. Helena was called the Northumberland.

  Whether Smithson returned to London during the Hundred Days or not, he soon settled himself completely in Paris, where he remained virtually until the end of his life. There were probably many reasons why Smithson chose France as his permanent home. It was much easier on this side of the Channel to live lavishly on less money. Paris and Boulogne were in fact havens for English gentlemen like Smithson's friend George Mills, who were having difficulty affording their lifestyles in England. Mills, who called on Smithson in Paris, was so profligate he was even accused of having become a Member of Parliament solely in order to avoid going to jail (MPs were not subject to imprisonment for debt).23 Sir Charles Blagden, too, chose to settle mostly in Paris, for much the same reason. One English friend wrote to him: "You judge most wisely in my opinion to prefer being where you are [Paris], & if you invest 7 or £8000 in French securities you may there enjoy the income of it& find that quite enough for a Philosopher. … were I younger& in better health I would not have a shilling in this country nor stay in it a fortnight. The best plan would be to have one's property in America which seems very flourishing, & to live, not there, but in almost any part of Europe except England …"24

  And Smithson, always the outsider, probably took easily to the role of foreigner. Davies Gilbert (né Giddy), seeing him late in life, after years on the Continent, observed that Smithson had "manners and habits more foreign than English."25 What family he had left was also here, as his brother Henry Louis Dickenson had chosen to settle in Paris, with Mary Ann and their child, Smithson's nephew, eventually ending up in a place near the site of the old Temple on rue Chariot.26

  But, above all, Paris was a place where the stigma of illegitimacy did not loom over Smithson. Here he was simply an alluring figure, "a distinguished foreigner, of great wealth," as his friend Arago recalled. Styling himself a "Seigneur Anglais," he lived with more than one servant, moving often from one large furnished apartment to the next, much as he had in London in years past.27 And immediately upon his arrival in freshly monarchical Paris, he added an aristocratic "de" to his name, becoming "Monsieur de Smithson."28

  This pompous inflation of his name, and with it the ironic transformation into patrician elegance of a name that in England telegraphed illegitimacy, belies the fact that Paris completely freed him of the gnawing knowledge that he was not heir to anything. The emotional needs that haunted Smithson in England appear to have plagued him still in France. In the books he bought during these years he invariably, poignantly, marked the margins whenever the Northumberlands were mentioned. He fined the passages of Louis Dutens' book that mentioned the extravagance of his father's expenditures, and in a guidebook description of Waterloo—"the spot on which the battle was lost, and won, that has given peace to the world"—Smithson noted the hotel the Duke of Wellington had used as his headquarters; it was from here, the text explained, that the great general had "sent his important despatches to England by Major Percy [Smithson's half-brother]."29

  Smithson commissioned at least two portraits of himself at this time, motivated perhaps by feelings of mortality. In 1816, while on a trip to Aix-la-Chapelle, he had himself painted by the miniaturist Henri Johns. This half-length portrait, in which he gazes penetratingly at the viewer, may well be one that he gave to Margaret Marriott, the mother of his half-sisters Dorothy and Philadelphia Percy.30 A year later he commissioned Pierre Joseph Tiolier, who had just retired as Engraver General of France, to make a bust medallion. It shows him in profile, and on the reverse he attached a little tag which read, "My likeness."31

  By the time Smithson left for France he had apparently decided on the Royal Society as the future repository for much of his fortune. He intended his money to be devoted to "the publication of scientific memoirs and researches." As scientific research was not yet the object of extensive philanthropy, Smithson was probably confident that posterity would laud his generosity and good sense. His name would be repeated through the ages, embossed perhaps on the front of publications, gratefully acknowledged at the presentation of network. He would be linked to exciting future discoveries, his name identified forever with the support of science and the quest for knowledge. The Royal Society, as the oldest and most reputable establishment in England dedicated to fostering the promotion of science, and one that had early recognized Smithson's
talents, was a natural beneficiary of his largesse.

  Smithson's relationship with the Royal Society, however, seems to have come to an abrupt and stormy end. The dispute apparently occurred, according to the physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, in the late 1810s when Smithson "became offended with the [Royal Society] Council for having stricken out some sentences from a communication which he presented."32 The famed Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz's telling of this conflict—the only other account of the incident—differed slightly. He said that "Smithson had already made his will and left his fortune to the Royal Society of London, when certain scientific papers were offered to that body for publication. They were refused; upon which he changed his will and made his bequest to the United States."33 The details of the controversy are lost to posterity, unfortunately, as no trace of the episode remains in the Royal Society archives. The Smithsonian learned of the story first through Wheatstone, around 1870; Agassiz's reminiscences were published much later, in Science in 1919. If Wheatstone's reflections are the more accurate, then the conflict might well have erupted over Smithson's last publication with the Royal Society, "A Few Facts relative to the Colouring Matters of Some Vegetables," which was published in 1817.

  "A Few Facts" is a minor paper indeed to have elicited such a calamitous rupture, and Smithson essentially admitted as much. In the opening paragraph he explained that he was presenting the work not because he had conducted new research or because he was interested in investigating the topic further; on the contrary, he said, "I have now no idea of pursuing the subject." He made the contribution because he wanted to be useful. He thought that some of the observations he had recorded were worth distributing for the use of others: "In destroying lately the memorandums of the experiments which had been made, a few scattered facts were met with which seemed deserving of being preserved." The paper described Smithson's investigations into the natural coloring of a variety of organic matter, including red cabbage, mulberries, and violets, many of which acted as indicators for pH levels. "Is the colouring matter of turnsol a compound, analogous to ulmin, of a vegetable principle and potash? Its low combustibility gives some sanction to this idea," Smithson asked, in an observation typical of the paper. Perhaps some "few scattered facts" like these were censored by the Royal Society Council prior to publication, causing Smithson to take offense.

  There are other indications, even from the scant archival material that remains from these late years, of how acutely sensitive Smithson was to the handling of his message and reputation. He was often driven by a desire for retribution, a patterning impressed upon him perhaps by his mother's besieged perspective on the world; "the man who feels," he had written years earlier, "does not sit down easy under the sense of being wronged and nor my family, or myself, have been inured by habit to the sensation." When he had first arrived in Paris, the Journal de Physique had just published a French edition of his paper on ulmin. Smithson was unhappy with the translation, however—enough so that he acted as his own translator for the French edition of his zeolite paper, which followed in August. He submitted a lengthy list of the errata he had found in the ulmin piece, which was published in a subsequent issue. But he quickly found fault with that, too. In his own personal copy of the printed corrections, Smithson scribbled further revisions to the published list of errata—amendments, of course, that no one would ever have seen.34 The effort is typical of the intensity Smithson brought to his experimental practice, the constant checking and testing of his work. But it seems also an indicator of how very easily slighted he was, and his defensiveness appears only to have grown stronger as he aged. "There may be persons who, measuring the importance of the subject by the magnitude of the objects, will cast a supercilious look on this discussion," he stated testily towards the end of one of his publications; "but the particle and the planet are subject to the same laws; and what is learned upon one will be known of the other."35

  Whatever the details of the conflict with the Royal Society, the break appears to have had a galvanizing effect on Smithson. The Royal Society's publication organ, the Philosophical Transactions, had served as Smithson's primary publishing venue for all his life. Now he looked elsewhere for an outlet. And while he had typically published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions every few years, after this slight Smithson began publishing with a vengeance. These years in Paris, which lasted now practically until the end of his life, were a fury of productivity, despite his declining health. Seventeen of his twenty-seven known published papers were written in this time, a period of only six years. In 1819, his analysis of a native sulphuret of lead and antimony, for example, was followed three days later by his paper, "On native hydrous aluminate of lead, or plomb gomme." Likewise, "On the Detection of very Minute Quantities of Arsenic and Mercury," and "Some improvements of lamps," both debuted in August 1822. The following year, 1823, saw six of Smithson's papers reach publication—from "A means of discrimination between the sulphates of barium and strontium" to "An improved method of making coffee."

  And though he wrote them in Paris, he continued to focus on English journals as the organ for his writing, as if driven by a desire to prove his worthiness, to show his English colleagues that they had misjudged and undervalued him. When in 1823 he identified chloride of potassium, "a new species in mineralogy," in the veins of "a red ferruginous mass … which was said to have been thrown out of Vesuvius during a late eruption," he decided to donate the type specimen to the British Museum. In 1823 he was still thinking of the British Muséum as the repository he wished to augment, the place of record for his finds and discoveries.36

  In these last years, however, Smithson's health caused him endless trouble, and it was primarily gambling that eased his physical sufferings. Smithson had a liking for "Rouge et Noir," and needed "the excitement of the game."37 Risk had probably been an important part of chemistry's allure for him, the exhilaration of discovery in the laboratory heightened by the danger of explosion, the thrill of specimen-hunting in the field by the perils of an unknown cave or crumbling cliff-face. Now in his old age, Smithson seems to have found that rush primarily in gambling; it was, he said, the one thing that kept his mind off his feeble state. But by the 1820s Smithson's gambling was spiraling out of control. "I keep such very late hours," he wrote to Berzelius, apologizing for not having seen his friend in such a long time, "& generally rise so late that I have indeed no day left."38 His friend Arago despaired to see so talented a mind wasted. He watched as Smithson, whose wins and losses frequently canceled each other out, began to believe that he could beat the bank "largely through a run of luck." Arago decided to stage a kind of intervention. To Arago, the "analytical formulas of probabilities offer[ed] a radical means, the only one perhaps of dissipating this illusion." And so he proposed to Smithson "to determine in advance, in my study, the amount, not merely of the loss of a day, nor that of a week, but of each quarter. The calculation was found so regularly to agree with the corresponding diminution of the bank-notes in [Smithson's] pocketbook that a doubt could no longer be entertained."39 Chastened by this presentation of scientifically gained evidence, Smithson curtailed his gambling. He could not, as he confessed to Arago, give up the game of chance completely—it was too effective a palliative—but he could set limits on how much of his fortune he was going to commit to the green-baize tables.

  The social nature of scientific interaction in Paris, as evidenced by Arago's playful intercession, also seems to have bolstered Smithson in his last years, when he was frequently debilitated by his illnesses. In the winter months he kept a small portable bed made up in the room he occupied during the day.40 Colleagues dropped by for breakfast, and he invited them, too, to join him "for a very plain dinner." Some came seeking encouragement from Smithson; "I work incessantly trying to verify my first observations," the young chemist Antoine-César Becquerel explained in a note he left at Smithson's door. Others left seeds of inspiration. "M. Ampére, a few days ago, accidentally in conversation, mentioned a fact to
me which much excited my attention," Smithson related in the introduction to his paper "On Some Capillary Metallic Tin."41

  And still others, like the Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted, came to observe Smithson's laboratory work. Oersted was in Paris for several months in the winter of 1823, where he was received as a celebrity, having a few years earlier discovered electromagnetism; his research had sparked a flurry of investigations into electrodynamics, inquiries that led ultimately to the technologies behind the radio, the generator, and much else. "Among my new acquaintances is the English Chemist Smithson," he wrote home to his wife. "Recently, I spent 3 hours with him in order to understand his method of experimenting with very small amounts. The tools he uses cost hardly a Daler [two Danish crowns]. Some of them are so small that children would regard them as toys, but he uses them with the greatest skill. He often yields the constituents of amounts so small you can scarcely believe, amounts that often do not weigh Ho gram."42 Smithson took tremendous pleasure in "the great beauty of deriving knowledge from so diminutive a source." Already by 1819 he boasted that his experiments were being carried out on "particles little more than visible."43