Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Electricity became the rage in Europe, and then in America, after Ewald Georg von Kleist, in 1745, tried to pass a current (not that it was called that then) into a bottle through a nail. Accidentally touching the nail while holding the bottle, he received a shock. Soon everyone wanted the experience, with even the king of France arranging for a whole brigade of guards to jump as one by giving them shocks from batteries of jars. It was this idea which Benjamin Franklin took up, far away in Philadelphia. It was Franklin who realised that electricity in a body tends to settle at its natural level, when it is undetectable. If some were added, it became positively charged, and repelled objects, whereas if it lost some it was negatively charged, and attracted objects. This tendency to attract, Franklin also realised, was the source of sparks and shocks and, even more impressive, he realised that this was, essentially, what lightning was, a colossal spark. He demonstrated this by his famous experiment with a kite, showing that lightning was indeed electricity, and inventing the lightning conductor in the process.34

  In 1795 Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), professor of physics at Pavia, showed that electricity could be produced by putting two different pieces of metal together, with a liquid or damp cloth between them, thus creating the first electrical current battery. But these batteries were very expensive to produce and it was only when Humphry Davy, in 1802, isolated the new metals sodium and potassium, at the Royal Institution in London, that electricity began to be the subject of serious experimentation. Eighteen years later, in 1820, Hans Christian Oersted in Copenhagen discovered that an electric current could deflect a compass needle and the final link was made between electricity and magnetism.35

  More important even than the discovery of electricity, in the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of chemistry. This discipline, it will be recalled from Chapter 23, had not really featured in the scientific revolution but now it came into its own. One reason it was held back was the enduring fascination with alchemy and the passion for finding ways to make gold. This is not so surprising as it may seem now. Paracelsus’ 1597 book, Alchemia, is the first good book on chemistry. Despite being absorbed in alchemy, Paracelsus recognised that coal-mining caused lung-disease and that opium deadened pain. However, only when chemistry became a rational science could it advance. The main area of interest, at least to begin with, was the phenomenon of combustion. What, actually, happened when materials burned in the air? Everyone could see that such materials disappeared in flame and smoke, to leave only ash. On the other hand, many substances didn’t burn easily, though if they were left in the air they did change–for example, metals rusted. What was going on? What exactly was air?

  One answer came from Johan Joachim Becher (1635–1682) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734), who argued that combustibles contained a substance, phlogiston, which they lost on burning. (The name phlogiston was taken from the principle of phlox, or flame.) On this theory, substances which contained a lot of phlogiston burned well, whereas those that didn’t were ‘dephlogisticated’. Though there was something inherently implausible about phlogiston (for example, it had been known since the seventeenth century that metals, when heated, gained weight), there were enough ‘imponderable fluids’ about at that time–magnetism, heat, electricity itself–to make the theory acceptable to many. But the concern with combustion was not merely academic: gases (chaoses) were of great practical concern to miners, for example, who ran the risk of treacherous fire-damps and ‘inflammable airs’.36 And it was this attention to gases that eventually provided the way forward, because hitherto, in experiments on combustion, just the weight of the ore had been measured. This, as J. D. Bernal puts it, made it impossible to ‘balance the books’ of chemistry. But when gases were taken into account, this led immediately to Mikhail Lomonosov’s principle of the conservation of matter, established as fundamental by Antoine Lavoisier in 1785. The man who showed this more convincingly than anyone else was Joseph Black, a Scottish doctor, who weighed the amount of gas lost by such carbonates as magnesia and limestone when heated, and found that the lost gas could be reabsorbed in water, with an identical gain in weight.37

  Black was followed by Joseph Priestley, who had the idea that air was more complex than it seemed. He experimented with as many gases as he could find, or manufacture himself, and one of them, which he made by heating red oxide of mercury, he called at first ‘dephlogisticated air’, because things burned better in it. After isolating the gas in 1774, Priestley went on to show, by experiment, that ‘dephlogisticated air’, or oxygen as we now call it, was used up, both in burning and in breathing. Priestley well realised the importance of what he was discovering for he went on to demonstrate that, in sunlight, green plants produce oxygen from the fixed air–carbon dioxide–that they absorbed. Thus was born the idea of the carbon cycle–from the atmosphere (another new idea of the time), through plants and animals and back to the atmosphere.38

  Priestley was the experimentalist but Lavoisier was the synthesiser and systematiser. Like his English counterpart, the Frenchman was first and foremost a physicist. (In the early days of chemistry most of the great figures weren’t chemists, who were too bogged down by alchemy and phlogiston.) Lavoisier appreciated that the discovery of oxygen, le principe oxygène, transformed chemistry, in effect turning the phlogiston theory on its head. It was Lavoisier who created modern chemistry by his realisation that he could now build on the work of Aristotle and Boyle, to create a much expanded, systematic, discipline. He realised that water was hydrogen and oxygen, that air contained nitrogen as well as oxygen and, perhaps most important of all, that chemical compounds were largely made up of three types: oxygen and a non-metal, which were acids; oxygen and metals, which were bases; and the combination of acids and bases, which were salts.39 In doing this, Lavoisier introduced the terminology for compounds that we still use–potassium carbonate, lead acetate, and so on. This brought chemistry to a systematic level that put it at last on a par with physics. ‘Instead of being a set of recipes which had to be memorised, chemistry was now laid out as a system that could be understood.’40

  The study of gases also led John Dalton (1766–1844), a Quaker and schoolteacher in Manchester, England, to his atomic theory. He had a particular interest in the elasticity of fluids and it was he who realised that, under different pressures, and incorporating the principle of the conservation of matter, gases of the same weight must be differently configured. The creation of new gases, and the studies of their weights, led him to a new nomenclature that we still use–for example, N2O, NO, and NO2. This systematic study made him realise that elements and compounds were made up of atoms, arranged on ‘Newtonian principles of attraction and electrical principles of repulsion’.41 His observation of certain other chemical reactions, notably precipitation, when, say, two clear liquids, on being put together, immediately produce a solid, or a major change in colour, also convinced him that a basic entity, the atom, was being reconfigured. His reasoning was soon supported by the new science of crystallography, in which it was shown that the angles between the faces of a crystal were always the same for any particular substance and that related substances had similarly-shaped crystals. Christiaan Huygens, the seventeenth-century Dutch physicist, realised this must mean that the crystal was built of identical molecules piled up together ‘like shot’.42 Finally, on this score, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday showed that passing an electric current through salts separated out the metals, such as sodium, potassium and calcium and that, at base, all elements could be classified into metals and non-metals, with metals being positively charged and non-metals negatively charged. Faraday further demonstrated that the rate of transport of atoms in solution was related to the weights of the substances, which eventually led to the idea that there are ‘atoms’ of electricity, what we now call electrons. But they were not identified until 1897, by J. J. Thomson.

  Besides his interest in the organisation of the elements, Lavoisier carried out a series of expe
riments which showed that a person’s body behaved in an analogous way to fire, burning the materials in food and liberating the resulting energy as heat. The behaviour of materials after heating (some melt or vaporise, others burn, char or coagulate) led to the division between inorganic and organic chemistry, which was fully explored by German scientists in the nineteenth century.43

  It is important to say that many of the inventions which created the industrial revolution were not made by traditional scientists, the kind who frequented the Royal Society, for example. The central preoccupation of the Royal Society had always been mathematics, regarded in a post-Newton world as the queen of the sciences. In such an abstract atmosphere, the practical inventor was not always regarded as a ‘proper’ scientist.44 But in marked contrast there arose in the factory towns a series of ‘dissenting academies’, described as such because they originated as schools to educate Nonconformist ministers–Quakers, Baptists, Methodists–who were not allowed into the regular universities. But these academies soon broadened both their aim and their intake. The three most famous of the dissenting academies were the Manchester Philosophical Society, the Warrington Academy and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, though other academies were prominent in towns like Daventry and Hackney. The career of Joseph Priestley offers a good example of the way the academies worked. Starting at Warrington Academy, shortly after it opened, Priestley was at first a teacher of English and other languages–in fact, at Warrington he founded possibly the first courses ever given on English literature and modern history. But while at Warrington he attended several of the lectures of his colleagues, and in this way was introduced to the new sciences of electricity and chemistry.45

  Almost certainly the most influential scientific academy of the eighteenth century was the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Its members (known agreeably as ‘lunatics’) met informally to begin with, in the homes of different friends. Formal meetings began around1775. The group was led by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon. Meetings petered out in 1791 after a riot at Priestley’s house (see below).46 The kernel of the society, at least in its early days, was composed of James Watt and Matthew Boulton. Watt, as we have seen, had developed his famous steam engine in Scotland, but found that craftsmanship north of the border was not up to scratch and joined forces with Boulton, whose Birmingham workshops operated to a much higher standard.47 But Watt and Boulton were by no means the only stars of the Lunar Society. Josiah Wedgwood was another: he founded the Wedgwood potteries, and modelled his ceramics on ancient Greek vases discovered in the Etruscan countryside in Italy (he named his works Etruria). Typical of his time, Wedgwood drove himself hard to obtain the highest standards of workmanship in his factories. Among other things, he invented the pyrometer (though he insisted on calling it a thermometer), to measure high temperatures, which helped him make the fundamental discovery that at high temperatures all materials glow in the same way–that colour measures temperature no matter what the material is. In time this would help give rise to quantum theory.48 Other members of the Lunar Society included William Murdoch, who invented the gaslight (first used in Boulton’s Soho works in Birmingham) and Richard Edgeworth, one of the inventors of the telegraph.49

  Joseph Priestley did not arrive in Birmingham until 1780 but when he did he immediately established himself as the leading mind.50 He also became a Unitarian minister. Unitarians were sometimes accused of atheism or deism and as a result were regarded as among the boldest thinkers of their time (Coleridge was a Unitarian).51 Priestley was certainly bold enough in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), in which he may well have been the first to argue that the happiness of the greatest number is the standard by which government should be judged.52 Priestley’s brother-in-law John Wilkinson was also a member of the Lunar Society. His brother had been at the Warrington Academy, which is how his sister met and married Priestley, while he was a teacher there. Wilkinson’s father was an ironmaster and John too became brilliantly adept in the use of the metal. Abraham Darby and he designed and erected the famous bridge of iron at Ironbridge, opened in 1779. Wilkinson constructed the first cast-iron boat and sailed it under the bridge.53 He died in 1805 and, true to his principles, was buried in an iron coffin.

  As ever, we should not make too much of the Lunar Society’s ‘outsider’ status. Priestley did lecture before the Royal Society, and won its prestigious Copley Medal. The group had (intellectual) links with James Hutton in Edinburgh, whose work on the history of the earth is considered in Chapter 31; Wedgwood was close to Sir William Hamilton, whose collection of ancient vases would eventually adorn the British Museum, and stimulated the idea for the graceful Wedgwood pottery; several ‘lunatics’ corresponded with Henry Cavendish, whose interest in science would encourage his descendants to found in his honour the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (see the Conclusion); their activities were painted by Joseph Wright of Derby and George Stubbs. But between them the Lunar Society had many firsts to its credit: its members did much to promote the acceptance of machines in modern life, they were among the first to appreciate the notion of marketing, and advertising, and even shopping. These achievements also included: an understanding of photosynthesis, and its importance in life; an understanding of the atmosphere (achieved partly by their intrepid ascents in balloons); they made the first systematic attempts to understand and predict weather patterns; they developed modern mints for the printing of coins and improved the presses that would make mass newspapers practicable; their members conceived the idea of children’s books as a way to inculcate the young into the mysteries and possibilities of science. They were early campaigners for the abolition of slavery. In Jenny Uglow’s words: ‘They were pioneers of the turnpikes and canals and of the new factory system. They were the group who brought efficient steam power to the nation…All of them…applied their belief in experiment and their optimism about progress to personal life, and to the national life of politics and reform…They knew that knowledge was provisional, but they also understood that it brought power, and believed that this power should belong to us all.’54

  But let Robert Schofield, who made an earlier study of the Lunar Society, sum up its achievements and its significance. ‘Polite society, by state and custom established, might still be concerned with land and title, they might still spend their time disputing in an unrepresentative Parliament, discussing literature and the arts in London coffee shops, and drinking and gambling at White’s [a gentleman’s club]; but the world they knew was a shadow. Another society, in which position was determined by an ungenteel success, was creating a different world more to its liking. The French war and political representation delayed the formal substitution of new for old, but it was the new society that provided power to win the war…The Lunar Society represents this “other society”, pushing for place. If it was only qualitatively different from other provincial groups, then these deserve more searching study, for in the Lunar Society are to be found the seeds of nineteenth-century England.’55

  In 1791 there was an attack on the Birmingham home of Joseph Priestley because it was believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that he was attending a dinner ‘to celebrate the fall of the Bastille’. This was not the first of such attacks–it was part of an organised movement against people who were understood to sympathise with the aims of the French Revolution. In this case, Priestley’s home was ransacked and set ablaze. Although the rumours abated, Priestley had had enough: he left Birmingham and decamped to the United States. This was a dramatic move and revealing: at that time, and whatever their views on the French Revolution, many of the Nonconformist scientists and innovators just then were very sympathetic with the aims of the American variety. One reason for this was America’s successful realisation of the aims of the Enlightenment, discussed in the next chapter. Another was the more practical and pressing fact that the new manufacturing towns, such as Birmingham or Manchester, which had been mere villages until the industri
al revolution, were as a consequence under-represented in Parliament.56

  Religious dissent and political dissent were different aspects of the same phenomenon. Men like Priestley and Wedgwood favoured free trade, a view which went diametrically against that of the landed aristocracy, who wanted above all to preserve the high price of grain grown on their estates. This turned into a significant difference. The German sociologist Max Weber was the first to advance the theory that the rise of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, was a crucial factor in the modern industrial economy. Others had made not dissimilar observations before but Weber was the first to come up with a coherent account of why the difference should exist and why the Protestants had the effect that they did. He argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination produced in believers a perennial anxiety about whether or not they would be saved, and this worry could only be kept under control if believers followed the kind of life that they thought would lead to salvation. This, Weber said, led them to adopt a life of ‘in-this-world asceticism’, where the only worthwhile activities were prayer and work. ‘The good Calvinist was thrifty, diligent, austere.’ In time, said Weber, this way of life became generalised. Even people who were not believers in salvation still lived–and worked–like Calvinists because they thought it was the right thing to do.57

  The Protestant ethic, as it came to be called, did more than instill diligence, thrift and austerity–it gave us the view that something is real only if it can be perceived, described and, yes, measured by anyone so long as they have the right instruments. In the Protestant mind, in Weber’s sense, a fundamental distinction grew up between two types of knowledge. On the one hand, there was the highly personal religious or spiritual experience and, on the other, scientific and technological progress that was cumulative and could be shared by anyone.58 This distinction is still very much with us.59