The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Davy moved back into his mentor Tonkin’s house (just across the street from Borlase’s pharmacy) and was given the run of the attic rooms, one of which he turned into a combined painting studio and laboratory. Tonkin, as generous as ever, supplied him with painting materials, chemicals and some elementary laboratory equipment. In the evenings Davy was given French lessons by one of his mother’s lodgers. Officially this was an emigrant priest, Monsieur Dugast. But he may also have been seeing the young refugee from La Vendée, who was known as Nancy.9

  Davy later told his brother John that this was ‘a dangerous period of my life’, and, in a wonderful periphrasis, that he had ‘yielded to the allurements of occasional dissipation.’10 Certainly there were rumours of an entanglement, some heartbreak and many sonnets — none of which has survived, possibly because they were in French. There was also the Prospectus for a slim volume: it would contain ‘eight Odes’, four ‘Cornish Scenes’, and one long romantic verse tale to be called ‘The Irish Lady’.

  In this ballad, with skilful displacement, Davy invented a beautiful Irish girl who had fled from Ireland (rather than La Vendée) at the time of the seventeenth-century Protestant persecutions, but was shipwrecked on a rock off Land’s End. Though she was drowned, Cornish fishermen occasionally glimpsed her during storms, sitting half-naked on her rock with a rose in her mouth, luring them to destruction.11 This poem may well refer to Mlle Nancy. But it also belongs to a popular myth or Celtic legend, persistent all along the sea coast of Devon and Cornwall, of the beautiful, fatal woman from over the sea who lures young men to madness or death. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, constructed on Brittany materials, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, based on local Lyme Regis legend, also belong to this tradition. In Davy’s case the Lady is also alluring him away from science, and this becomes significant in his later life. However, lighter influences show in another long, equally wistful piece, ‘Unfinished Poem on Mount’s Bay’, which plaintively describes Davy’s beloved spaniel, Chloe.

  French was certainly the language of love, and suitable for sonnets. But it was also, and just as alluringly, the language of Enlightenment science: the language of Laplace, Lamarck and Cuvier; the language of the Encyclopédie and the Biographie Universelle; the language of the Académie des Sciences, the only scientific body which rivalled the Royal Society in London. Above all it was the language of the greatest chemist of the age, Antoine Lavoisier.

  The moment he left school, Davy began to read voraciously. He found he had access to a number of libraries: both Tonkin and Borlase gave him the run of their private collections, a notable privilege for a teenager, and there was the Penzance subscription library. He was also introduced to the son of a wealthy local savant, with the promising name of Davies Giddy. Giddy had studied at Oxford University, and was now living at Marazion, the village by the sea opposite St Michael’s Mount. He had a large scientific library, and on his one afternoon off a week Davy would walk along the shore to borrow books and discuss them avidly.

  His reading exploded: classical authors including Homer, Lucretius, Aristotle; English poets including Milton and James Thomson; and French science writers, especially Buffon, Cuvier and Lavoisier. He plunged into William Enfield’s recently published two-volume History of Philosophy (1791), which was in effect a history of European science to date. He later observed wryly of this time: ‘The first step towards the attainment of real discovery was the humiliating confession of ignorance.’12

  It is evident that the death of his father, and all the subsequent emotional upheavals, profoundly shook the sixteen-year-old Davy, and started an intellectual ferment that never left him. Besides writing poetry, he also started his first diary, set himself reading lists and work timetables, and began a series of essays on religion versus materialism. During 1796 he wrote an essay ‘On Mathematics’, and another ‘On Consciousness’, which gleefully explored the implications of materialism. He described the body as ‘a fine tuned Machine’, and wrote a syllogistic proof that the ‘soul’ could not exist, since it was said to be eternal and ‘unchangeable’, while every known part of the human body, including the brain, was temporary and changed perpetually. ‘QED the soul does not exist.’13

  The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties’. Children were not magically endowed with intelligence and souls at birth. On the contrary: ‘A Child is not superior in Intellectual power to a common earthworm. It can scarcely move at will. It has not even that active instinctive capacity for Self-Preservation.’ Such speculations gave Davy a sense of growing excitement and freedom. He wrote two supreme declarations of faith on page 61 of his working notebook. The first was: ‘Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.’ The second was: ‘The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.’14

  When he played billiards with Tonkin, Davy tried to extrapolate the Newtonian laws of motion from the concussion of the balls. He read James Thomson’s great poem The Seasons, and imitated it in his own poem about energy in nature, ‘The Tempest’. A long poem of self-dedication, ‘The Sons of Genius’, went through innumerable drafts, that can be dated anywhere between 1795 and 1799, when it was first published.

  To scan the laws of Nature, to explore The tranquil reign of mild Philosophy: Or on Newtonian wings to soar Through the bright regions of the starry sky!

  From these pursuits the Sons of Genius scan The end of their Creation, hence they know The fair, sublime, immortal hopes of Man, From whence alone undying pleasures flow.

  Theirs is the glory of a lasting Name, The meed of Genius, and her living fire! Theirs is the Laurel of eternal flame, And theirs the sweetness of the Muses’ lyre.15

  2

  In 1797 Davy quite suddenly became fascinated by chemistry. The subject, closely linked to radical ideas about the nature of material reality, was going through its own revolution. At this time it was becoming the Romantic science par excellence. The last of the old alchemy was being replaced by true experiments, accurate measuring and weighing, and a new understanding of the fundamental processes of combustion, respiration and chemical bonding.

  It was into this exciting new world that Davy was drawn. He could read both the English and the French accounts, which he found were often in contention, and this brought him an added sense of drama and immediacy. His English text was William Nicholson’s Dictionary of Chemistry (1795), a full, solid explanatory work which laid out the current state of the science, how it had emerged from alchemy, and what the future challenges and theories were. His French text was Antoine Lavoisier’s short, elegant and epoch-making Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, originally published in 1789. This developed new theories of ‘oxygen’ and ‘caloric’, a new table of elements, and proposed a whole new system of ‘chemical nomenclature’. Both books came from Davy’s mentor John Tonkin’s library.

  Davy saw that the time of alchemists was over, and a great new and revolutionary age of chemical experiment was opening. With intense excitement, he scrawled in his Penzance notebook a ringing declaration of intellectual freedom, which he would later include in his first published essay. ‘Chemistry, which arose from the ruins of alchemy, to be bound with the fetters of phlogiston, has been liberated, and adorned with a beautiful philosophic theory. The numerous discoveries of Priestley, Black, Lavoisier, and other European philosophers in this branch of science, afford splendid proofs of the increasing energies of the human mind.’16

  The traditional notion of the ‘four elements’ as the fundamental and unchanging building blocks of the material world, which went back to the Greeks and Aristotle, was being overturned. Earth, Air, Fire and Water were not what they seemed. To start with, it had been suspected since 1780 that the most basic of all elements — common water — was actually a subtle composition. It was finally ‘decomposed’, and shown to be an elastic c
ompound of hydrogen and oxygen (H2O), in a classic public experiment by Lavoisier in his laboratory at the Paris Arsenal on 28 February 1785.17 This was later repeated, in an electrical experiment by William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle reported in Nicholson’s Journal in 1800. It would not be lost on Davy that this simple but spectacular result was achieved through the use of the newly invented voltaic battery.

  Fire, long supposed by Joseph Priestley and others to depend on a single mysterious and volatile substance known as ‘phlogiston’, had again been analysed quite differently by Lavoisier. He proposed that fire was the rapid combination of carbon with oxygen, a process known as combustion, by which things actually grew heavier than before, not lighter. Despite all appearances, escaping ‘phlogiston’ (still championed by Priestley) did not exist. Nonetheless, Lavoisier still thought that heat itself was a substance, which he now proposed to call ‘caloric’.

  As for supposedly common air, the new science of pneumatics was to show analogous things. In reality air was an elastic mixture of oxygen and nitrogen (‘azote’, in Lavoisier’s nomenclature), with traces of several other gases. In animal respiration it was utterly changed: oxygen was extracted by the lungs and passed into the bloodstream, while carbon dioxide was exhaled. Both Priestley and Lavoisier agreed on that.

  Exactly the reverse happened with plants: vegetation ‘restored air corrupted by combustion or respiration’. Plants absorbed carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and returned oxygen to the economy of nature. This was demonstrated not by Lavoisier, but by Priestley, in another classic series of experiments, using air pumps and vacuum flasks, published in his Experiments on Different Kinds of Air (1774-77).18

  These findings had inspired both the painter Joseph Wright of Derby and the young poet Anna Barbauld, who often visited Priestley’s laboratory in Bowood House, Wiltshire. Yet the global significance of this crucial equilibrium between plant and animal life was not yet apparent.♣

  Finally, with the ‘element’ of earth, it was suspected in a similar way that alkaline substances found in the common earth, such as potash and soda, hid compound secrets, if a way could be found to unlock them.

  For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry grate, And tremble at the approaching morn Which brings impending fate …

  The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let Nature’s commoners enjoy The common gifts of Heaven.

  The well-taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.

  ‘The Mouse’s Petition to Dr Priestley, Found in the Trap where he had been Confined all Night’ (1773).

  The disappearance of the traditional world of the ‘four elements’ was revolutionary. It was as radical in the world of chemistry as Copernicus’s proof that the earth was not the centre of the solar system; or (some said) as Robespierre’s claim that the people, not the king, embodied sovereignty. Moreover, it was counter-intuitive: it went against common sense and common appearances. Surely water and air were primary, simple elements? Not at all: chemical experiment and scientific instruments could prove that they were not what they seemed to human senses — just as Newton, with his optical experiments with the prism, had shown that white sunlight was not what it seemed to the human eye, but a composite rainbow or spectrum of coloured light. Goethe had mused on the counter-intuitive nature of science: ‘When we try to recognise the idea inherent in a phenomenon we are confused by the fact that it frequently — even normally — contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea which was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day [that the sun rises] … The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses in this way.’19

  It was characteristic of young Davy that he saw chemistry primarily as an expression of growing mental power, of creative hope. Yet he also relished the precise technical challenge it now presented. The first task lay in the decomposing or analysing of chemical substances into their true compounds, and precisely weighing, measuring and recording the process. Some twelve primary ‘elements’ were now established — beginning with hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen — and many more were expected. These would later form the basis of the Periodic Table, first suggested by John Dalton as a ‘Table of 20 Elements’ in 1808 (and organised by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869, using the card game of patience as a model).

  Then, much more needed to be discovered about the three processes of transformation as defined by Priestley and Lavoisier: combustion, respiration, oxidation. Finally, chemistry needed to be applied to the human condition itself: the workings of the human body and mind, medicine, the cure of diseases, and what Davy called ‘the laws of organic existence’. Together, these would provide the key to life on earth itself. The whole field was wide open to a new generation, and the time for a truly great chemist to emerge was ripe. No one was more aware of this than Joseph Banks at the Royal Society.

  Years later, in his Geological Lectures of 1811, Davy would nonetheless praise the contribution of early alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, and particularly the first woman chemist, the legendary Hypatia of Alexandria, who worked in the fourth century, ‘a single bright star in a night of clouds and obscurity’, as he called her with a characteristic flourish. He would return to this theme, one that also fascinated Mary Shelley, in his last book, Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher (published posthumously in 1830).20

  Antoine Lavoisier had been the leading chemist in Europe. Elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1768 at the early age of twenty-five, he had established at the Arsenal in Paris the finest chemical laboratory of its time. Earning vast sums from his official post at the royal tax-collecting agency, the Fermiers-Général, Lavoisier poured his wealth into scientific research. His laboratory was equipped with the most sophisticated and expensive instruments available, such as the precision pair of scales made by Nicholas Fortin and said to be worth 600 livres. He also had a beautiful and highly intelligent wife, Marie-Anne Paulze, whom he trained up as a full-time scientific colleague.

  Only thirteen when she married Lavoisier, Marie-Anne learned English and translated all the scientific papers by Priestley and Cavendish as soon as they appeared. She also acted as Lavoisier’s laboratory assistant, wrote up his scientific journals, and drew all the illustrations for his Traité. Lavoisier’s execution by order of the Revolutionary Convention in 1794 (he was accused of embezzling tax funds) was a disaster for French science. It also nearly overtook Marie-Anne: her beloved father was guillotined on the same day as Lavoisier, the next man to climb the scaffold (in the present Place de la Concorde) after his gifted son-in-law.21

  Lavoisier had written an influential seven-page Preface to his Traité Élémentaire, defining his scientific method. This declaration seized young Davy’s imagination. Writing with great simplicity and clarity, Lavoisier championed the idea of precise experiment, close observation and accurate measurement. Above all, the man of science was humble and observant before nature. ‘When we begin the study of any science, we are in the situation, respecting that science, similar to that of children … We ought to form no idea but what is a necessary consequence, and immediate effect, of an experiment or observation … We should proceed from the known facts to the unknown.’22

  Lavoisier was not of course the first to champion scientific observation and precision.♣ He criticised Descartes’ speculative theories, and quoted the philosopher Condillac — ‘instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen to imagine them’ — who in turn quoted Bacon and the early members of the Royal Society in London: Newton, Halley, Hooke. Lavoisier was a great anglophile. He praised Bacon’s philosophy of discovery, and set out the aims and ideals of experimental science as a great Romantic adventure of the mind. Davy never lost this vision, and it remained with him until the very last of his writings, set down in an essay to be called ‘The Chemical Philosopher’.23

  No
w for the first time there are accounts of Davy’s own experiments, as recalled by his brother John: ‘His apparatus consisted chiefly of phials, wine-glasses, teacups, tobacco pipes, and earthen crucibles; and his materials were chiefly the mineral acids and alkalis in common use in medicine. He began his experimental trials in his bedroom in Mr Tonkin’s house.’24 On the cover of one notebook Davy carefully drew in ink an olive wreath encircling the flame of a lamp: the bays of poetry surrounding the light of science. Characteristically he headed another notebook ‘Newton and Davy’.

  For a dizzy moment he believed he had disproved one of Lavoisier’s basic claims, the existence of heat as a separate element called ‘caloric’. By rubbing together two large lumps of ice in a vacuum, Davy produced heat by simple friction (motion), which steadily melted the ice, though no ‘caloric’ element had been separately introduced, and nothing had been allowed to escape. He thereby believed he had demonstrated that ‘caloric’ could not be a chemical entity in itself, and that the most famous French chemist must have been wrong. In fact the heating effect of friction had already been demonstrated by Count Rumford in Munich (by boring metal cannons), and Davy had partly misunderstood Lavoisier’s terminology. Nevertheless, hugely excited, he began to compose a series of scientific papers, part experimental and part speculative, which he entitled ‘Essays on Heat and Light’.

  In summer 1797 a new lodger came to stay with Grace Davy, arranged through the ever-solicitous Tonkin. Gregory Watt was the prodigal son of the great Scottish engineer James Watt. At twenty-five he was the youngest member of the Lunar Society, brilliantly clever but physically frail — probably consumptive — and emotionally unstable.25 He had graduated in geological sciences from Glasgow University, and had been sent to Cornwall to convalesce from what was termed a ‘nervous illness’.