Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  As a child Jenner himself had been immunised against smallpox by variolation, and although it had successfully kept him from contracting the full-blown disease, it had had a debilitating effect on his health, a state that he suffered right through adulthood. This was no doubt a spur to his experimentation with immunisation. From his apprenticeship in rural Gloucestershire, he had also been well aware of the snippet of country wisdom that decreed that dairymaids did not catch smallpox. It was believed that this was because they routinely caught cowpox from the cows with which they were so often in close proximity. Cowpox is a disease that is relatively harmless to both cows and humans. In the latter, it merely results in a few unsightly pus-filled spots and a short-lived malaise.

  However, it was not until 1796 that Jenner hit upon the idea of testing out this bit of folklore to see if there was anything in it. He got his chance when a patient named Sarah Nelmes came to see him. Nelmes was a dairymaid who was worried that some spots (or ‘pocks’) on her hand might be an early symptom of smallpox. Jenner was able to assure her that it was nothing worse than cowpox (which she had picked up from a cow called Blossom). He then embarked on the sort of experiment that would have medical ethics committees today reaching for their defibrillators. First, he extracted some of the pus from Sarah Nelmes’ hand. Then he looked around for someone who had never suffered from smallpox. An eight-year-old by the name of James Phipps – the son of Jenner’s gardener – was chosen as a guinea pig.

  He made a few light cuts in the boy’s arm and introduced some of the pus collected from Sarah Nelmes’ hand. Phipps duly contracted cowpox, recovering from it after a week or so. The truly horrifying element of Jenner’s experiment was yet to come. He variolated his young subject – exposing him to a small dose of smallpox. He could not be sure of the consequences of such a move after a patient had been infected with cowpox from another person (rather than from a cow, as dairymaids caught it). Thankfully for all concerned, the boy did not take ill and die. In fact he did not take ill at all. Jenner was excited – it appeared that the cowpox had made the boy immune to smallpox. The following year, he submitted his work to the Royal Society but was told that he would need to find more evidence to back his claims.

  In 1798, after two years of research during which he had successfully repeated his experiment with a score of other children, including his own baby son, Jenner published a book detailing his findings. Clearly with an eye on the bestseller lists, he gave it the snappy title An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae; a Disease Discovered in some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cow Pox.

  In recognition of Jenner’s work, his method eventually became known as ‘vaccination’, a borrowing of the word vacca – meaning ‘cow’ – from Latin. However, the immediate response to his research was far from overwhelming. Indeed, from some quarters it was downright hostile. The anti-vaccination campaigns of our own times – which have been found to be complicit in the resurgence in Britain of childhood diseases such as measles and mumps – are by no means unprecedented. Back in the early 1800s, Jenner’s newfangled vaccinations were challenged by those who were, quite understandably, queasy about a disease that came from cows being introduced into their own bloodstream. Others cited what might be viewed as somewhat confused religious reasons for opposing the procedure. The argument went that humans were God’s greatest creation, and that cows were not on the same plane, and so it was not right that material that had its genesis in the latter be allowed to taint the former, even if the effects were supposedly beneficial. This line of reasoning didn’t explain why it was still apparently morally acceptable for humans to insert much greater quantities of these ‘lower creations’ into their bodies by drinking the secretions of cows and eating virtually every part of them. (Ironically, Jenner was himself a devout Christian.) When cowpox vaccination was eventually made compulsory by law, protests were organised by those who wanted to retain the freedom not to be immunised.

  There were many other reasons why Jenner’s book did not start off an immediate revolution in the treatment of smallpox. There was opposition from variolators whose very livelihoods were threatened by his innovation. Furthermore, cross-infection in cowpox doses was sometimes caused by the very people who administered them, since they also came into contact with smallpox sufferers or were treating patients by variolation as well. This could result in people coming down with smallpox immediately after receiving the cowpox vaccine, with the natural lack of confidence in the new practice which that caused.

  Jenner valiantly persisted, repeatedly putting forward the case for smallpox vaccination. He worked out more efficient ways of taking pus from the pocks of cowpox sufferers and drying it out so that he could send it off around the world to aid the worldwide struggle against smallpox.

  Jenner died of a stroke in 1823, and so never witnessed the immense strides that his methods would take in battling smallpox. It wasn’t until 1840 that Parliament outlawed variolation and it would be another 13 years before The Vaccination Act made cowpox vaccination compulsory for every newborn. This act of Parliament was arguably the first official step taken towards the socialisation of medicine in Britain that would ultimately have its apotheosis in the National Health Service. Furthermore, Jenner’s discovery of vaccines has provided the foundations on which modern immunology is built.

  It took an institution with the global reach of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to secure Jenner’s ultimate triumph. A campaign was launched in 1967 with the aim of eradicating smallpox entirely. It was a huge task, given that an estimated 15 million people came down with the disease every year and even the most remote communities were not immune to its grasp. Vaccination programmes were set up in every corner of the planet. It took 12 years but eventually the WHO was able to announce on 26 October 1979 that smallpox had been vanquished.

  According to the Jenner Institute, an organisation dedicated to developing innovative vaccines, there are now only two samples of the smallpox virus left in the world, held in laboratories in Siberia and the US and kept under the tightest of security.

  Jenner has been fêted all around the globe for his work, both in his lifetime and in the centuries since. Honours and gifts rained down on him from world leaders, including the empress of Russia and Napoléon Bonaparte. Remarkably, as a token of his esteem, Bonaparte released two British non-combatant prisoners of war when Jenner wrote to him requesting such a favour in 1805. Statues of the Gloucestershire doctor have sprung up in cities in all parts of the world, and his former home in Berkeley now hosts a small museum dedicated to his life and work.

  Smallpox is the one and only infectious disease ever to have been eradicated by the actions of humans. Captain Cook’s loss has very much been humankind’s gain. However, it didn’t mean that Jenner gave up his natural history research altogether – in fact he was made a fellow of the Royal Society on account of his ornithological work. Cuckoos famously trick other birds into hatching and rearing their offspring, but it was Jenner who was the first to record the fact that a newborn cuckoo, even when still blind, will push any eggs and fledglings out of the nest. By doing so, it secures the full attention of its foster parents and has no rivals for the food they bring to the nest.

  Jenner also noticed that the cuckoo is born with a dip in its back that gives it the means to scoop up eggs and chicks. This adaptation disappears by the time the cuckoo is 12 days old. Naturalists were sceptical of Jenner’s findings (which, if nothing else, should have prepared him for the reception of his research on vaccinations) until an artist called Jemima Blackburn witnessed the phenomenon herself. When Charles Darwin saw her illustration and description of the newborn cuckoo, it compelled him to make amendments to his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species.

  There’s a certain delight to be taken from noting that the man whose breakthrough hinged on his taking of a voyage was influenced by the work of a man whose defining moment de
pended on him not taking one.

  An English metallurgist aims to improve the rifle

  It was Sir Isaac Newton who, in a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke, modestly stated, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Pleasingly, even that expression itself was not Newton’s own – he was paraphrasing a saying coined by the 12th-century cleric Bernard of Chartres.

  In the scientific world, there can have been very few discoveries that did not rely on the work of men and women who had gone before. In the case of metallurgist Harry Brearley, those shoulders belonged to scientists from France, Germany and his native England. However, in a twist on the usual story of one scientist painstakingly building on the work of others, Brearley found himself standing on those giants’ shoulders quite by accident. Furthermore – and most unusually for the metaphor – he wasn’t alone on the shoulders. In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of World War I there was a plethora of other metallurgists jostling for position with him. They came from Germany, the United States, Poland and (possibly) Sweden, and with one exception (the Swede, whose very existence is questionable), they were all endeavouring to invent the one thing that Harry Brearley came upon by accident. It’s true indeed that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

  Brearley was born in a small and cramped house in Sheffield, South Yorkshire in 1871, the eighth of nine children. He joined the city’s Brown Firth Laboratories, becoming its lead researcher in 1908. Four years later, the company was commissioned by a small arms manufacturer to find a solution to a common problem among gunmakers: the erosion of the metal in their weapons. Rifles are so called because of the spiral grooves or ‘rifling’ on the inside of their barrels. These spin the bullets as they leave the weapon, thus aiding their aerodynamic stability and accuracy. When they are worn away, the rifle loses its effectiveness. If Brearley could come up with a way of slowing down this process, rifles would have a longer life and their owners would be able to kill more sentient beings.

  Brearley set to work in his attempts to produce a metal that would withstand the high-speed chafing it received every time a bullet sped along a barrel. It would not be easy. He experimented with metal alloys, adding varying amounts of chromium and carbon to iron to see what would happen. By August 1913, when fortune finally smiled on him, he had racked up a host of failures.

  The romantics among us would like to believe that Brearley’s discovery – which, it must be said, did not actually help him with the problem he was working on – came about entirely as the myth portrays it. This avers that he was passing a pile of chunks of metal he had discarded as rejects when he happened to notice that one of his previous efforts stood out from the rest. Whilst the vast majority had rusted at the normal rate, this particular one sparkled up at him because it had barely rusted at all. He picked it up and in his hands he knew he had something special: the world’s first ever piece of stainless steel.

  According to the British Stainless Steel Association, an organisation one would be foolish to gainsay on the topic of its favourite metal alloy, more credibility should be given to other, less thrilling accounts of the discovery. These versions claim:

  It was necessary for Brearley to etch his steels with nitric acid and examine them under a microscope in order to analyse their potential resistance to chemical attack. Brearley found that his new steel resisted these chemical attacks and proceeded to test the sample with other agents, including lemon juice and vinegar. Brearley was astounded to find that his alloys were still highly resistant, and immediately recognised the potential for his steel within the cutlery industry.

  The directors at Brown Firth Laboratories were less impressed, especially when the knife blades Brearley made out of his new wonder material simply rusted like any other steel. Thankfully, help was not far away. One of Brearley’s friends from his school days, Ernest Stuart, had turned out to be a particularly fine cutler and was a manager at R.F. Mosley’s Portland Works in Sheffield. In no time at all Stuart had honed the process by which Brearley’s new metal was hardened and ‘stainless steel’ came into being. (Brearley had actually coined the term ‘rustless steel’ but Stuart’s name for it was the one that prevailed.)

  Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon and its discovery dates back to about 200 bc. Stainless steel, by contrast, is a metal that combines iron with at least 10.5 per cent chromium and a very small amount of carbon. This allows the chromium to form an oxidised coating over the surface of the metal, which is what keeps it both rust- and stain-free. Nowadays, silicon manganese is also added, while nickel, molybdenum and other elements may find themselves included in the mix as well.

  It’s astonishing to consider the number of scientists who came so close to pulling off deliberately what Brearley did accidentally. Nearly a hundred years beforehand there were several metallurgists struggling with the problem of devising an iron that wouldn’t rust, but they either didn’t use enough chromium or added too much carbon or both. By 1875, a French scientist called Brustlein worked out that, to make a good stainless steel, it was imperative that the carbon content be kept to a minimal level. Two decades later, a German scientist called Hans Goldschmidt developed a process that made that possible. Frenchman Leon Guillet did actually invent a number of alloys which, today, would be considered stainless steel, but he somehow managed to overlook the fact that they were stainless and rustless. Just two years before Brearley’s happy accident, two Germans called Monnartz and Borchers noted that there were benefits to having a steel that included at least 10.5 per cent chromium in it. There were many other scientists besides these who had the holy grail of a rustless, stainless steel almost in their grasp and yet failed in their quest to attain it.

  That hasn’t stopped a range of other people from asserting that they got there before Brearley. The most intriguing of these comes from the German Krupp Iron Works, which maintains that the iron-chrome-nickel hull it made for a yacht in 1908 was in reality the first stainless steel. Unfortunately, the claim cannot be verified because the vessel in question, The Half Moon, sank off the coast of Florida. Like a marine-disaster version of Schrödinger’s cat, until the yacht is located, its hull exists in two states: pristine and corroded.

  The invention of stainless steel handed Sheffield many more decades of prosperity as it churned out countless items of cutlery. It saved the people of Britain from constantly having to polish their steel knives and forks to keep them from rusting. Where its use was adopted in lieu of silver by the upper echelons of society, it also saved their staff from the unending and onerous task of polishing the cutlery in order to maintain its lustre.

  Although economic winds (presumably wafted by the vaunted ‘unseen hand of the market’) have blown out nearly all the furnaces that once gave Sheffield its nickname of the Steel City, there is still plenty of stainless steel being manufactured around the globe: over 40 million tonnes are produced per annum, a figure that has been rising steadily in recent years. The alloy is by no means limited to domestic use either. Stainless steel has been employed to create Newcastle’s iconic concert hall The Sage, as well as the Thames Barrier in London, and The Kelpies, a pair of 100-ft tall stainless steel-clad horse-heads – claimed to be the world’s largest equine sculptures – created by Andy Scott for the Scottish town of Falkirk.

  Perhaps most fittingly, given the urban myth that surrounds its invention, stainless steel plays its own part in another urban myth. It’s a widely held belief that the shiny silver-coloured finial on the roof of the Chrysler Building in New York is made of hubcaps. That’s not the case – it’s just good old stainless steel.

  As for a metal that was less susceptible to erosion when used in gun barrels – Brearley never did get around to discovering that.

  A chemist standing by his hearth fumbles with a stick

  The ability to control fire is one of the features that separates humankind from the rest of our fellow life forms on the planet, along with a desire to mask
our own body odour, and a tendency to misspell ‘broccoli’.

  Although a very primitive pinewood match impregnated with sulphur was possibly in use as far back as the sixth century in China, and would have been on sale when Marco Polo visited in the 1270s, being able to carry around an effective means of producing an instant fire was something of a holy grail for chemists working in Europe. It had taken until the 17th century for them to work out that a mixture of phosphorous and sulphur produced a good fire-starter. The problem with starting one’s fire with this compound came in containing it so that you did not set fire to yourself or anything in the vicinity.

  Various chemical fire-starters were produced in the early decades of the 19th century. These involved the user embarking on procedures such as dipping sulphur-tipped matches into phosphorous; smashing tiny bulbs of sulphuric acid in order to start a reaction with a phosphorous-headed stick; or other similar courses of action. Aside from being manifestly dangerous, they were also expensive.

  Remarkably, it wasn’t until 1826 – when the Industrial Revolution was already into its eighth decade, that the problem was solved, and only then because of an accident. The man who had it was John Walker, a chemist from Stockton-on-Tees, a town that was rocketing to fame at the time as one of the termini of the world’s first public railway line. The mishap occurred when he was mixing up a potion of chlorate of potash, antimony sulphide, starch and gum.