The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  The Director now looked rather quizzically at my loose bundle of lecture notes. I wondered if the memory of Coleridge’s notorious prolixity had never been quite erased from the Institute’s collective consciousness. He added reassuringly that in his experience most of his distinguished scientific lecturers had contrived to be saying their very last sentence at exactly the moment when the atomic clock went off. It was all rather elegant: Talk — Buzz — Stop — Applause. And of course there would be applause. With that, the Director stepped briskly forward and threw open the large double doors, to reveal the steep tiers of bench seats, crowded with expectant faces, and the growing silence of an atomic clock, noiselessly ticking away …

  Indeed, there is a particular problem with finding endings in science. Where do these science stories really finish? Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open. So it is with this book. The great period of Victorian science is about to begin. The new stories are passed into the hands of Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Charles Darwin …and the world of modern science begins to rush towards us.

  But science is now also continually reshaping its history retrospectively. It is starting to look back and rediscover its beginnings, its earlier traditions and triumphs; but also its debates, its uncertainties and its errors. No general science history would now be considered complete without a sense of the science achieved centuries ago by the Greeks, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Babylonians. It is no coincidence that the last few years have seen the foundation, in numerous universities across Europe, Australia and America, of newly conceived ‘Departments of the History and Philosophy of Science’. The earliest pioneering ones began at Cambridge (UK), and Berkeley (California), with others quickly following at Paris X (Nanterre), Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Indiana, Caltech and Budapest (1994). Similarly, it seems to me impossible to understand fully the contemporary debates about the environment, or climate change, or genetic engineering, or alternative medicine, or extraterrestrial life, or the nature of consciousness, or even the existence of God, without knowing how these arose from the hopes and anxieties of the Romantic generation.

  But perhaps most important, right now, is a changing appreciation of how scientists themselves fit into society as a whole, and the nature of the particular creativity they bring to it. We need to consider how they are increasingly vital to any culture of progressive knowledge, to the education of young people (and the not so young), and to our understanding of the planet and its future. For this, I believe science needs to be presented and explored in a new way. We need not only a new history of science, but a more enlarged and imaginative biographical writing about individual scientists. (I make some suggestions in the Bibliography that follows, under the heading ‘The Bigger Picture’.) Here the perennially cited difficulties with the ‘two cultures’, and specifically with mathematics, can no longer be accepted as a valid limitation.♣ We need to understand how science is actually made; how scientists themselves think and feel and speculate. We need to explore what makes scientists creative, as well as poets or painters, or musicians. That is how this book began.

  The old, rigid debates and boundaries — science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics — are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe. And that is how this book might possibly end.

  ♣ My account may be found in The Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Vol. 69, 1998.

  ♣ I am encouraged to see that my old teacher and early mentor Professor George Steiner, starting from an entirely different premise, has recently come to a similar conclusion: ‘Hence my conviction that even advanced mathematical concepts can be made imaginatively compelling and demonstrable when they are presented historically … It is via these great voyages and adventures of the human mind, so often charged with personal rivalries, passions and frustrations — the Argosy founders, or gets trapped in the ice of the insoluble — that we non-mathematicians can look into a sovereign and decisive realm …Locate this quest …and you will have flung open doors on “seas of thought” deeper, more richly stocked than any on the globe.’ See ‘School Terms’, in My Unwritten Books (2008). The imagery behind this splendid passage comes, of course, from Romanticism: Wordsworth on Newton from The Prelude, and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of 1825, The Sea of Ice, in which the explorer’s tiny, gallant ship is foundering amidst enormous polar ice-floes — but, hope against hope, may yet survive.

  Cast List

  (Shorter entries imply that more material can be found in the chapter indicated)

  JOHN ABERNETHY, 1764-1831. Physician and surgeon at Bart’s Hospital, London, he became President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Coleridge was one of his many patients. (See Chapter 7)

  MARK AKENSIDE, 1721-70. Poet, whose major work The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) set out the traditional eighteenth-century view of the cosmos, including the idea that the universe was approximately 6,000 years old, and that the stars were spread overhead in a ‘concave’ dome or heavenly temple (see for example Book I, lines 196-206).

  ALEXANDER AUBERT, 1730-1805. FRS. Wealthy and independent-minded British astronomer living at Deptford, London, who set up a fine private observatory at Highbury House, Highbury Fields. Friend and supporter of William and Caroline Herschel, especially in the 1780s, when their early findings were criticised by members of the Royal Society. In 1788 he presented them with a beautiful Shelton long case astronomical clock, with brass compensated pendulum (private archive, John Herschel-Shorland, Norfolk).

  CHARLES BABBAGE, 1791-1871. FRS 1816. Brilliant young mathematician, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, close friend of Herschel’s son and Caroline’s nephew John Herschel. Irascible and outspoken critic of the Royal Society under the ageing Banks and the ailing Davy, supporter of the fledgling BAAS, and inventor of various Difference Engines (mechanical computers). (See Chapter 10)

  SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1743-1820. President of the Royal Society. (See Chapter 1 and passim)

  ANNA BARBAULD, 1743-1825. Poet, educationalist and bluestocking, she was greatly interested by scientific ideas. She was a close friend of Joseph Priestley, witnessed many of his early experiments, and wrote a poem in the voice of one of his laboratory mice. Her epic poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ (1812) predicted a crisis of Empire and intellectual life in Britain enveloped in ‘Gothic night’, and the rise of American power. A formidable editor, she produced a fifty-volume edition of contemporary British novelists. (See Chapter 6)

  FRANCIS BEAUFORT, 1774-1857. Sailor, hydrographer and inventor of the Beaufort wind scale, one to twelve (hurricane). He wrote some interesting accounts of the ‘after-death’ experiences of drowning sailors.

  ANNA BEDDOES, 1773-1824. Volatile younger half-sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, wife of the physician Thomas Beddoes, and possibly Humphry Davy’s lover at the Pneumatic Institute, Bristol, 1799-1801. Shortly afterwards she had an affair with Beddoes’s friend Davies Giddy in London, though she returned to nurse her husband when he was dying of heart failure. Anna had four children: Anna (1801), Thomas (1803), Henry (1805) and Mary (1808). Neither of these first two may have been legitimate. Davies Giddy acted as their legal guardian after Beddoes’s premature death. Anna’s son Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) became a poet and political activist, the author of several macabre poetic dramas including The Last Man (1823) and Death’s Jest Book (1850), lived exiled in Germany, and committed suicide in Switzerland. Anna herself went to live abroad, moving restlessly to Belgium, then France, then Italy, and finally dying in Florence, aged fifty. (See Chapter 6)

  THOMAS BEDDOES, 1760-1808. Physician, chemist, philanthropist
and political radical. Davy’s mentor at Bristol, and close friend of the leading members of the Lunar Society in the Midlands. His experimental use of drugs and gases, and the antics of his wife Anna, undermined his public reputation. With the collapse of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute as an experimental centre, he transformed it into the philanthropic Preventative Medical Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor. He had an early concept of a free national health service, providing particular help for women with children. A heroic but marginalised figure, he was never supported by Banks at the Royal Society. (See Chapter 6)

  CLAUDE BERTHOLLET, 1748-1822. FRS 1789. Leading French chemist, friend of Lavoisier’s, head of the scientific expedition — including balloon section – that accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in 1789. Later an admirer of Davy’s, and friend of Banks’s confidant Blagden. His glamorous pupil and protégé was Joseph Gay-Lussac.

  JACOB BERZELIUS, 1779-1848. Outstanding Swedish chemist, Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Stockholm 1807. His pioneering work in electrochemistry included the first accurate table of atomic weights, establishing twenty-eight elements (1828), and giving them their internationally accepted ‘initial letter’ symbols, as H20. Warmly congratulated Davy on the Bakerian Lectures and the safety lamp, but from 1815 was increasingly challenging his dominance. Married late, aged fifty-six, when his best scientific work was done, to a woman thirty-two years his junior.

  XAVIER BICHAT, 1771-1802. French physician and anatomist, worked at the celebrated Hôtel Dieu hospital in Paris, and led a brief life of great intensity and self-sacrifice, inspired by French Revolutionary ideology. Developed analysis of human tissue types, histology, and materialist theory of life. His influential textbook On Life and Death was posthumously translated into English in 1816, and fed the Vitalism controversy in Britain.

  CHARLES BLAGDEN, 1748-1820. FRS 1772. Physician, bureaucrat, francophile and outstanding scientific gossip. He trained as a naval surgeon, and for some years worked as scientific assistant to Henry Cavendish. Under Banks he became the influential Secretary to the Royal Society from 1784 to 1797. Despite occasional rows, he remained the great supporter and personal confidant of Banks until his death in Paris, a few weeks before Banks’s own. To some degree his friendship replaced Solander’s for Banks.

  JEAN-PIERRE BLANCHARD, 1753-1809. French inventor and aeronaut who first crossed the Channel in a balloon, and founded a ballooning school in Vauxhall, London. (See Chapter 3)

  JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH, 1752-1840. FRS 1793. Influential German anatomist based at the University of Göttingen, who founded the science of anthropology and the pseudo-science of craniology, and developed an early classification of racial types. His famous collection of skulls was known as ‘Dr B’s Golgotha’. Friend of Banks, and famous lecturer at Göttingen heard by students from all over Europe, including Coleridge, William Lawrence and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

  JOHANN ELERT BODE, 1747-1826. German astronomer and Director of the Berlin Observatory. Designed the most authoritative Celestial Atlas (1804), which finally superseded John Flamsteed’s of 1729. (See Chapter 2)

  LOUIS-ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE, 1729-1811. French naval commander and explorer, circumnavigated the globe and landed on Tahiti a year before James Cook. (See Chapter 1)

  DAVID BREWSTER, 1781-1868. Scottish physicist and campaigning science journalist. An early promoter of the BAAS with John Herschel. His researches included work on polarised light and lighthouse lenses, and he invented the kaleidoscope. He wrote an influential first biography of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), eventually expanded through several editions (1860). (See Chapter 10)

  COMTE DE BUFFON (GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC), 1707-88. French geologist and naturalist who developed early theories of the earth’s rapid, catastrophic changes through flood (supported by Neptunists) and volcanic action (Plutonists). He was director of the Jardin du Roi, the modern Jardin des Plantes, Paris, and wrote a forty-four-volume Natural History (1804). His studies of mountains and glaciers were referred to by Shelley in his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ (1816).

  FANNY BURNEY, MADAME D’ARBLAY, 1752-1840. Novelist, journal writer, friend of the Herschels through her father Charles Burney (FRS 1802), the musicologist. Fascinated but sceptical about scientific advances, she praised Caroline Herschel’s comet-finding work, and wrote to Banks wondering why women could not be Fellows of the Royal Society. Survived radical breast surgery without anaesthetic (Paris, September 1811), and wrote a long, courageous account of the experience. (See Chapter 7)

  GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1788-1824. Poet with a lively but sceptical interest in science and voyages. Looked through Herschel’s telescope, and met Davy both in London and in Italy. His poem ‘Darkness’ (1816) reflects current cosmological speculation, and several passages of Don Juan (1818-21) comment on scientific research and the vanity of ‘progress’. (See Chapter 9)

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834. Poet, critic, essayist and philosopher. Closely involved with Davy’s early scientific work in Bristol and London, 1799-1804. Later wrote about the history and philosophy of Romantic science in his newspaper The Friend (1809-19) and his Philosophic Lectures (1819), and became involved in the Vitalism debate, writing his Theory of Life (1816-19) to discuss the issues. Attended and spoke at the historic third meeting of the BAAS at Cambridge in 1833, at which the term ‘natural philosopher’ was first replaced by the word ‘scientist’. (See Chapters 6 and 10)

  WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800. Poet who suffered from disabling depression all his life, but whose lively letters and long, rambling poem The Task give a vivid response to the scientific advances of the day, especially Banks’s voyage and the balloonists. (See Chapter 1)

  BARON GEORGES CUVIER, 1769-1832. FRS 1806. The leading French zoologist and comparative anatomist of his day, he taught at the Museum of Natural History, Paris. He disagreed with Lamarck, rejecting the concept of evolution, and proposing a theory of biological development through global catastrophe. He published twenty-two volumes on ichthyology (fishes).

  JOHN DALTON, 1766-1844. Chemist, meteorologist and early theorist of atomic weights, producing a pioneering Table of 20 Elements in 1808, and laws on the thermal expansion of gases. A shy, retiring personality closely associated with his home town, Manchester, and reluctant to join the Royal Society in London. Herschel and Babbage thought he was shamefully neglected, but 40,000 people attended his funeral in Manchester.

  ERASMUS DARWIN, 1731-1802. FRS 1761. Physician, poet, polymath and inventor. Moving spirit of the Lunar Society at Birmingham, which met each month on the night of the full moon (in theory so they could walk home safely). A close friend of James Watt and Matthew Boulton, he described much. of the new science of the day in his long and remarkable poem The Botanic Garden (1791). Its extensive and highly informative prose notes on cosmology, geology, meteorology, chemistry and physics — a didactic method later used by Southey and Shelley — provide an encyclopaedic account of the state of science at the turn of the eighteenth century.

  HUMPHRY DAVY, 1778-1829. President of the Royal Society 1820-27. (See Chapters 6, 8 and 9)

  MICHAEL FARADAY, 1791-1867. Chemist and physicist of genius, inventor of the electric motor, dynamo and transformer. Director of the Royal Institution, London, for over thirty years. He was Davy’s great protégé, and unlike his patron one of the most popular figures in British science. (See Chapters 8, 9 and 10)

  BARTHÉLEMY FAUJAS DE SAINT-FOND, 1741-1819. French geologist and traveller, a specialist in volcanoes. He was a great anglophile, and in his Travels in England and Scotland in Examining the Arts and Sciences (1799) he gave a vivid account of interviewing Herschel and Caroline at work. He also wrote with enthusiasm about ballooning.

  JOHANN GEORG FORSTER, 1754-94. German botanist and travel writer. With his father he joined Cook’s second Pacific expedition (the one that brought back Omai), and he subsequently published a vivid and somewhat scurrilous account of it in English, A Voyage Round the World (1777). He was appointed Professor of Natural
History at Kassel, and corresponded frequently with Banks. His father Johann Rheinhold Forster, who had published a more sober Observations during a Voyage Round the World (1778), outlived him.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1706-90. FRS 1756. Physicist and statesman, he was American Ambassador to France 1776-85, and proved an invaluable source of information about French science for Banks, notably on mesmerism and ballooning 1783-84. He specialised in work on the properties of electricity: the static charge, the lightning surge and the lightning conductor. (See Chapters 3 and 7)

  LUIGI GALVANI, 1737-98. Italian physician, Professor of Anatomy at Bologna University. His dramatic claim to have discovered reanimation or ‘animal electricity’, when dead specimen frogs were fixed with metal pins, was disproved in a celebrated paper sent to the Royal Society by Volta in 1792. Nevertheless the term ‘galvanism’ remained loosely applied to a wide range of electrical phenomena, including the ‘galvanometer’ used to detect electrical currents from 1820.

  JOSEPH GAY-LUSSAC, 1778-1850. Outstanding French analytic chemist, the pupil of Berthollet, and Davy’s great rival in Paris when working on pneumatics, the expansion of gases and the properties of boron and iodine. A glamorous figure, famed for his high-altitude balloon ascent in 1804 (to 7,000 metres) and his marriage to a beautiful seventeen-year-old shopgirl whom he saw reading a chemistry book between serving customers. (See Chapter 8)