The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Davy’s surprising sharpness in such a ‘priority’ controversy was noticed by Faraday, but writing to Abbott he loyally dismissed it as patriotism rather than ambition: ‘Sir H has not been idle in experimental chemistry … his example did great things in urging the Parisian chemists to exertion … He first showed that [iodine] was a simple body. He combined it with chlorine and hydrogen, and latterly with oxygen, and thus has added three acids of a new species to the science … It confirms all Sir H’s former opinions and statements, and shows the inaccuracy of the labours of the French chemists on the same subject.’60

  In early spring 1814 Davy’s party travelled south to the Pyrenees, examining extinct volcanoes on the way, and making a leisurely cultural detour to visit Avignon, the Pont du Gard, Nîmes and Montpellier, with its strong tradition of Vitalist thought. Here Davy was an honoured guest of the ancient university for a month, continued his experiments on iodine, and wrote a number of descriptive poems about the South: the foaming rivers of Vaucluse, the shifting lights on Mont Canigou in the Pyrenees, the classic ‘Mediterranean Pine’ at Montpellier, and the ghosts of the Roman engineers at the massive stone aqueduct of the Pont du Gard.

  Work of a mighty people, of a race

  Whose monuments, with those of Nature, last.

  The Roman mind in all its projects grasped

  Eternal Empire, looked to no decay,

  And worked for generations yet unborn,

  Hence was its power so lasting.61 ♣

  The party then doubled back along the coast, through what would soon become the English ‘Riviera’, and slipped over the Alps into Italy for the summer and autumn. Taking an open boat from Genoa, they were nearly swamped in a violent squall off Lerici: just eight years later Shelley would drown there. Faraday noted mischievously that Lady Davy fell blessedly silent as she gazed at the waves. In Milan they interviewed the ageing Volta, and discussed the expanding mystery of electricity: ‘his view rather limited’, thought Davy, ‘but marking great ingenuity’.

  In Florence, while the guest of the Grand Duke, Davy performed an impressive carbon-based experiment which proved that the most apparently precious of objects — the diamond — could also be the product of nature’s simplest processes. With the Duke’s permission, he commandeered the huge solar magnifying lens at the Florentine Cabinet of Natural History, and subjected an uncut diamond to intense and continuous heat. The diamond eventually burst into flame, leaving a fine crust of black carbon, thereby proving, against all the commonsense evidence, that the clear, hard, glittering crystal was really little more than a lump of coal. Both were varieties of carbon, laid down by nature over millennia.

  In was perhaps reflections on this kind of mystery that led Davy to write a long, self-questioning passage in his journal about the limits of contemporary scientific research. Significantly, he picked out three leading disciplines — astronomy, chemistry, and geology. This entry of March 1814 is surrounded by sketches of birds diving into water.

  Our artificial Science has relation to the forms of Nature; but yet that which is most important in Nature — Life — is above our Science. The Astronomer vainly asserts the perfection of his Science because he is capable of determining the motions of 7 planets and 22 satellites; but comets & meteors which even move in our system are above his reach, & even this solar system is a speck in the immensity of space & suns and worlds are beyond our reach.

  Our Science [chemistry] refers to the globe only, & in this there is an endless field for investigation: the interior is unknown; the causes of Volcanoes. We have just learnt some truths with respect to the surface: but there is an immensity beneath us. — Geology in every sense of the word is a superficial science.62

  This expressed in private, perhaps as a result of conversations with young Faraday, a scepticism about scientific knowledge that was very different from the confident assertions of Davy’s Chemical Philosophy. But it also prophesied the very developments being pioneered by Herschel in sidereal astronomy, and by Hutton in deep-time geology.

  They visited Rome, where Davy was enchanted by the Coliseum by moonlight, and Naples, where they climbed a sinister and smoking Vesuvius. In Venice they gingerly sampled the gondolas. All these places would eventually reappear, strangely transformed, in Davy’s last book, Consolations in Travel. During the summer heat they pushed back over the Alps into Switzerland, Bavaria and the Austrian mountains, where Davy found remote, fast-flowing rivers for trout- and salmon-fishing, to which he vowed to return. His most favoured region, in the Balkan peninsula, rejoiced in the magical name of Illyria. All the time Davy and Faraday were working on chemical experiments: iodine, chlorine, dyes, gases, and the electricity produced by the ‘torpedo’ or conger eel. Was the eel nature’s voltaic battery, and did it hold a clue to Vitalism? — a question which would come to haunt Davy.

  In autumn 1814 they travelled slowly south again into Italy, planning to winter in Rome. Riding through Florence in October, they heard of some strange natural gases escaping from rock formations in the Apennines at Pietra Mala, near Lucca. They rode over to investigate just as the autumn storms (later to be celebrated by Shelley in ‘Ode to the West Wind’) broke. Faraday wrote an exuberant account of this field expedition, undertaken for several hours in the pouring rain, while Lady Davy sat back patiently in the carriage. Davy forgot about everything when they discovered that the mysterious gas could be stirred up from mud with a stick, and could be ignited even in the heavy rain, burning beautifully with a ‘very pale’ blue flame, like methylated spirits or ‘the flame of spirits of wine’.

  They stood in the downpour, gazing at the weird blue pool of fire shimmering at their feet. Faraday watched Davy’s quick investigative mind observing, eliminating, racing ahead: an unusually cool flame (not like burning oxygen); almost no smell (unlike hydrogen); not at all like volcanic gas (as everyone assumed it was); possibly not from a local source, but percolating from ‘a great distance’ beneath the earth; possibly therefore ‘originating from a mine of fossil charcoal’. And then the careful inductive caveat ‘but everything is conjecture & it still remains a source of investigation’.63

  They succeeded in bottling it, and took it to Florence, where they were again the guests of the Grand Duke. After dining with the Duke (much to Lady Davy’s satisfaction), Davy precipitately left the table and commandeered the Duke’s laboratories. Here he succeeded in identifying the gas as fire-damp (or methane), very similar to the gas that endangered British coalmines — a prophetic discovery. The investigation was a model of the three-part inductive method he had expounded in Elements of Chemical Philosophy: observation, experiment, analogy.

  Davy’s notebooks for this period also suggest a new pattern of philosophical speculation, almost approaching German Naturphilosophie. Some of his observations would have been recognised by Coleridge: ‘The aspirations for immortality are movements of the mind similar to those which a bird makes with its wings before they are furnished with feathers.’64 Others were more closely tied to his laboratory work. On the subject of scientific ‘analogy’, for instance, he wondered if there was a wider principle at work. ‘Probably there is an analogy in all existence: the divided tail of the fish is linked in a long succession of like objects with the biped man. In the planetary system it is probable man will be found connected with a higher intellectual nature; and it is possible that the monad, or soul, is constantly undergoing a series of progressions.’65

  Davy would later come back to the question of man’s progressing towards extraterrestrial intelligences in the future. He reflected too on the past: on the way it was continuously redrawn by a partial present. ‘Our histories of past events are somewhat like the wrecks upon the sea-beach: things are often thrown up because they happen to be light, or because they have been entangled in sea-weed: i.e. facts are preserved which suit the temper or party of a particular historian.’66

  Throughout, Faraday continued his series of long letters to his friend Benjamin Abbott in L
ondon, extolling the ‘glorious opportunities’ of the trip. ‘The constant presence of Sir HD is a mine of inexhaustible knowledge.’ Yet after a lively account of his adventures with ‘Sir H’, including climbing Vesuvius in the dark and gathering coal gas in the rain, he began to admit that the months of travelling with Lady Davy were less than happy. In January 1815 he wrote: ‘I should have but little to complain of were I travelling with Sir Humphry alone, or were Lady Davy like him, but her temper makes it often times go wrong with me, with herself & with Sir H. She is haughty & proud to an excessive degree and delights in making her inferiors feel her power.’ It is not known what Jane herself made of the young Faraday, a tongue-tied companion, hating the foreign food, uninterested in politics or architecture and still unable to speak French or Italian (though learning). He admitted himself that he was gauche and needed to become ‘more acquainted with the manners of the world’, and learn to ‘laugh at her whims’. But perhaps it did not occur to him that Lady Davy might be jealous of his relationship with her husband.67

  Another letter in late February threw slightly different light on the situation. Much of the difficulty arose from the fact that Sir H had refused to employ a valet throughout the trip, ‘being accustomed from early years to do for himself’. Lady Davy had taken advantage of this (although she had her own maid). She liked to ‘show her authority’, and was ‘extremely earnest in mortifying’ Faraday with humiliating requests. Perhaps Jane might have described this more as ‘teasing’ the extremely earnest Faraday. However, after occasional confrontations and even ‘quarrels’ with her (which Faraday felt he consistently won) she now behaved ‘in a milder manner’.68 By the end of the trip they seem to have rubbed along reasonably well, and Faraday had given up a secret threat (made to Abbott) to abandon chemistry altogether, ‘and return to my old Profession of Bookseller’. Davy seemed largely unaware of these domestic difficulties, trying to ‘remain neuter’, as Faraday put it in a curious phrase. Perhaps this was not a good sign for the future.

  In March 1815, news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba cut short a Grand Tour that had already lasted for seventeen months. Davy had originally planned to take his party as far as Greece and Turkey, but perhaps it was a relief to hurry home. On 23 April 1815 he was back in London, making sure that Faraday (now twenty-three) was promoted to a permanent post as Assistant to the Laboratory at the Royal Institution on £75 per annum, and encouraging him to start giving his own chemical lectures at the City Philosophical Society. He also urged him to publish his first scientific papers. All this marked a distinct advance under Davy’s patronage. Davy himself was appointed Vice-President of the Institution, which gave him access to the laboratory, and allowed him to continue acting as Faraday’s unofficial tutor.

  But as he established one protégé, he lost another. Davy’s beloved brother John, now twenty-five, had decided to give up medical research and join the army as a military doctor. He would be stationed abroad, largely in the Mediterranean, for the next twenty years. Davy would spend much time trying to entice him back so they could work together again, but would only achieve this under dismaying circumstances. John had been Davy’s closest confidant, and his link with Penzance and his happy past. Now that was increasingly lost.

  With Jane, Davy bought a beautiful new house at 23 Lower Grosvenor Street, in the heart of Mayfair, and began dining regularly with Banks and other members of the Royal Society. The couple were much in demand socially. A visiting American scholar from Cambridge, Massachusetts, breakfasted with Davy at Lower Grosvenor Street in June, just after they had moved in. George Ticknor knew of the Bakerian Lectures, and Davy received him in his most expansive mood.

  London 8 June 1815. I breakfasted this morning with Sir Humphry Davy, of whom we have all heard so much in America. He is now about thirty-three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five and twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity, talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience and keeps him in constant motion. He has just returned from Italy and delights to talk of it.

  This almost aggressive youthfulness and animation (in fact Davy was thirty-six) was not at all what Ticknor had expected from the distinguished chemist, let alone his fascination with Italian art and culture. ‘It seemed singular that his taste in this should be so acute, when his professional eminence is in a province so different and so remote.’

  But perhaps George Ticknor was a rather earnest academic, for there are signs that Davy began to tease him over the teacups. ‘I was much more surprised when I found that the first Chemist of his time was a professed angler; and that he thinks, if he were obliged to renounce fishing or philosophy, that he would find the struggle of his choice pretty severe.’ Jane avoided this interview altogether, tactfully sending a message down that she was ‘unwell’. When Ticknor did eventually catch up with her, he was impressed by her dark good looks, and what he called ‘the choice and variety of her phraseology’.69

  In a thoughtful mood Davy wrote a new kind of metaphysical poem, ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth. It reflects on the human condition, and suggests that since nothing is ever destroyed in the physical universe, only transformed (the First Law of Thermodynamics), then man himself must be immortal in some spiritual sense. It also returns in a new way to Davy’s early Cornish beliefs about starlight as the source of all energy in the universe:

  Nothing is lost; the ethereal fire,

  Which from the farthest star descends,

  Through the immensity of space

  Its course by worlds attracted bends,

  To reach the earth; the eternal laws

  Preserve one glorious wise design;

  Order amidst confusion flows

  And all the system is divine.

  If matter cannot be destroyed,

  Then living mind can never die;

  If e’en creative when alloy’d,

  How sure is immortality!70

  Intriguingly, the first stanza appears to anticipate Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915), in which light is ‘bent’ by gravity; and then Eddington’s observations of a solar eclipse in 1919, when he recorded starlight actually being bent by the sun. But apparent anticipations of this kind can be deceptive in science, often hiding a more significant contemporary meaning. Here Davy was really expressing a more traditional belief: the sudden confidence that ‘eternal laws’ govern the universe in a benign and ordered way. In fact this view was largely at odds with the scepticism of his private journals. Instead, it proposes that nothing in the world is lost, or wasted or destroyed. There is ‘one glorious wise design’ throughout the universe, and ultimately ‘all the system is divine’; a belief somewhere between Romantic pantheism and the old Enlightenment deism.

  In truth Davy was never ‘sure’ of individual immortality, which he constantly questions in his laboratory notebooks. Nor was the idea of man’s being ‘creative’ normally any kind of guarantee of it, especially when ‘alloy’d’ in flesh. What is striking about this poem is its sudden tone of Evangelical self-confidence and its unusually hymn-like form. It could have been written by John Wesley or Isaac Watts, though Davy carefully avoids the words ‘God’ or ‘soul’. It is quite unlike his more private speculative poems, and seems like a deliberate performance. Perhaps he wanted to settle down theologically, as well as socially. But science would never quite allow him to do either.

  4

  In July 1815 Davy took Jane on another fishing holiday in the Highlands, perhaps in an attempt to revive the happy memories of their honeymoon. But in early August, while at Melrose in the Yarrow valley, they were interrupted by a series of increasingly urgent letters from Dr Robert Gray of the Coal Mines Safety Committee, begging for his assistance. The situation in the mines was becoming critical (another fifty-seven men had died at Success colliery, Newbottles, in June), and ‘of all men of science’ in England, Sir Humphry w
as the one who could best bring ‘his extensive stores of chemical knowledge to a practical bearing’.

  Replying on 18 August, Davy immediately proposed to visit Walls End colliery outside Newcastle, so he could observe the problem of lethal fire-damp on the spot. He determined to apply his pure scientific method: observation, experiment, analogy. He cancelled a visit to Banks at his country house in Lincolnshire, and sent Jane back to London. ‘Travelling as a bachelor’, he rode down to Walls End, and on 24 August had a long discussion with John Buddle, the Chief Mining Engineer.71

  Buddle (1773-1843) was a hard and experienced Yorkshireman, a Unitarian and a teetotaller. Neither a miner himself, nor a proprietor, he stood between capital and labour, proud of his professional independence as ‘viewer’ or engineer. He said that he had once been chaired in triumph by the miners, and another time burnt in effigy. In fact he was dedicated to them. He never married, never drank, lived with his sister, and played the cello in the evenings. In his way, he was a man not unlike Tom Poole. But initially he had grave suspicions of ‘Sir Humphry’, the man of science from the South.

  Davy was immediately put on his mettle. He knew that the Royal Institution was committed to helping science serve British industry, and this was an important part of Banks’s conception of humane progress: the appliance of science. But at Walls End he saw a peculiarly personal challenge, requiring all his experience and skill. In his youth he had explored Cornish tin mines with his lost friend Gregory Watt, and he had a feeling for mining communities and their intense local loyalties. He had never lacked physical courage in his experiments, and had been confidently handling dangerous gases since the Bristol days. He had already had a first encounter with fire-damp in the Apennines with Faraday. Above all, here was a chance for Davy to fulfil his greatest ambition: to show that a man of science could serve humanity — and be a genius.