All this put in his mind the possibility of a visit to the scenes of his youth, which Hutton thought would give him much pleasure. He first toyed with the idea around 1815–16, but events within his family quashed the plan; he returned to it in 1822 with the idea of seeing the new premises of the Lit and Phil. At the suggestion of another northern friend, the local politician William Armstrong, he planned to make the trip that summer, taking the steam boat that now connected London and Tynemouth; he still remembered with nothing like pleasure the carriage journeys of younger days.
His London friends were most alarmed, and persuaded themselves, perhaps rightly, that the exertion would be mortal for the octogenarian. They persuaded Hutton, too, and he, sadly, abandoned his plan to look once more on the land where he had grown up and learned his trade.
There was necessarily something elegiac about some of these activities, and it’s clear that Hutton, increasingly retired and at times at least feeling increasingly infirm, believed that the more public acts of his life were over for good.
But into his life now fell an unexpected change; one old battle was at last played to its unlikely conclusion. Dr Charles Hutton and Sir Joseph Banks were now old men. Each had his supporters; each side was capable of landing some shrewd blows on the other, in public and in private. Banks’s empire had grown, and as well as his career as a successful colonial administrator he stood at the head of a learned world that now took in the Royal Observatory, the Society of Antiquaries, the Linnean Society, the Horticultural Society, the British Museum and the Royal Institution. He sat on boards, he exerted influence, he dispensed patronage. At the Royal Society his focus had been on keeping the peace, unwilling as he was to see another outbreak of opposition to his rule, but his hand was a firm one and his agenda in no doubt.
Sir Joseph Banks.
On the other hand, around Hutton and his friends a generation of mathematicians had reached intellectual maturity nourished on tales about the Dissensions of 1784 and the persecution of mathematicians ever since; for them it was axiomatic that Banks and his empire represented unreasoning prejudice against them, their profession(s), their subject and their intellectual seriousness. The group as a whole nursed every grievance and every slight, real or imagined. Olinthus Gregory, in particular, spent effort that might have been better devoted to other matters collecting folklorish examples of wrongs done to his community by Banks and his minions, instances of the President’s ‘petty but inextinguishable malignity’. The astronomer William Herschel, for one, thought Gregory rather too coarse in his strictures and behaviour towards Banks and his party. Banks had vexed and opposed Maskelyne at the Board of Longitude and the Greenwich Observatory, and on his death in 1811 had organised his replacement as Astronomer Royal by the more pliable John Pond as well as the dispersal of his library (Maskelyne had offered it to government for the use of his successor, but Banks talked them out of accepting). In 1812 Banks had organised criticism of the Trigonometrical Survey of Great Britain (led by practitioners recommmended by Hutton) and the eventual exclusion of reports on the survey from the Philosophical Transactions. In 1818 Banks remodelled the Board of Longitude with the aim of diluting opposition to him from the mathematical professors of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1820 he opposed the formation of an Astronomical Society – led by a group of mathematicians and mathematical practitioners, and thought by some to be a deliberate manifestation of resistance to the Royal Society – and pressured some of its early members and supporters to withdraw. And so on, and so on. The Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, the Royal Institution, the Geological Society: all, it was said, had suffered from Banks’s machinations.
The passage of time has placed some of these accusations beyond proof or disproof, and it seems certain that Gregory and his friends had, on occasion, a tendency to exaggerate. Hutton himself had indulged in some merely scurrilous criticism of the Royal Society and its programme in his Dictionary (‘torturing the unseen and unknown phlogistic particles … hunting after cockle-shells, caterpillars, and butterflies’). Yet they may have had a point. The kinds of intellectual merit and usefulness cherished by the mathematicians of London and England were conspicuously not enough to secure election to the Royal Society or publication in the Philosophical Transactions under Joseph Banks. Some tried and were excluded – mathematician Patrick Kelly and journalist William Nicholson were both blackballed – others never even made the attempt: stockbroker and astronomer Francis Baily wrote to Gregory that election would be ‘but an ambiguous honour’ and did not seek it. Meanwhile Olinthus Gregory, John Bonnycastle, Charles Wildbore, Samuel Vince, William Mudge and Francis Baily all saw their papers rejected from the Transactions.
All this had the happy, unintended side effect of creating a sense of shared identity among British mathematicians that might otherwise never have existed, doing indirectly what the ‘secession’ had failed to do and creating a stable group with a definite sense of belonging. In particular, although Banks evidently found Cambridge-based mathematicians like Edward Waring easier to tolerate than members of the London circle of practitioners and educators, bridges began to be built between those two worlds. Leybourn, of the Royal Military College, joined with the Cambridge reformers in his enthusiasm for French mathematical methods; Cambridge man Charles Babbage held testimonials from both Charles Hutton and James Ivory of the Royal Military College. Hutton corresponded, during the composition of the Dictionary, with Waring himself.
By the late 1810s, then, it seemed that antagonism between Sir Joseph Banks’s learned world and that of the mathematicians was simply a settled feature of British intellectual life. But in June 1820, Banks died. Hutton, by six years the older man, was unexpectedly the last left standing, indeed one of the very last of the main players from 1784 still alive, and to many there seemed an opportunity to put right, in one way or another, the relationship between mathematics and science, between mathematicians and the Royal Society.
Responses were swift to come. One journalist wrote, under the cover of an obituary of Banks, a swingeing attack on the mathematical party that had opposed him in 1784 and its intellectual heirs. The Dissensions themselves were now more a matter of history than of memory – and rather garbled history at that – but there could be no mistaking the target of such paragraphs as these:
The whole attainment of the mass of mathematicians consists in trivialities long discovered, useless, or beyond their skill to use, and totally inferior in the required mental vigour, in public service, and in improvement of the understanding to every other intellectual acquisition; – infinite degrees below the genius essential to oratory, poetry, or painting.
… Of a thousand mathematicians, not the human cube root has ever been, or will be, more than the depository of the dusty problems, that the bookmakers of the art, the Simpsons, and Huttons, and Bonnycastles, have transmitted to them.
Nor indeed could a remark like the following be left unanswered:
How Dr. Hutton, whose life, till he was mature, was spent in keeping a village school in Westmorland, could have sustained the office [of foreign secretary] without numberless offences against the habits of good society, it is difficult to conjecture; and his merits, as a mathematician, were commonplace.
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage;
And even the saying ran, that he could gauge.
The inevitable reply appeared anonymously, savaging Banks’s character and conduct as president in terms that would have been scarcely feasible when he was alive and were much less than decent now he was dead. No one seems to have doubted that it was the work of the mathematicians’ usual spokesman Olinthus Gregory, although the article relied heavily on information that could only have come from Charles Hutton. It’s possible to read it as Hutton’s own last word in the affair, perhaps even with some use of text from the pamphlet he supposedly wrote and suppressed back in the 1780s. Banks was ‘notoriously fond of farming, fond of grazing, fond of gardening’; he had writ
ten nothing but a ‘little Essay on blight, and perhaps a diminutive disquisition or two on the manufactory of gooseberry-wine’; he ‘evinced an absolute ignorance of several of the most interesting and useful sciences’. Malevolent, obstructive, bigoted, ‘a good hater’. Bitter and ill advised all this was. But with Banks dead Hutton was indeed in a position to laugh last.
There was no further direct reply, and the attention of the Royal Society itself turned to the finding of a new president. Banks’s own preference had been for William Wollaston, a shy man who had left medical practice for laboratory work in chemistry. Babbage, Herschel and George Peacock were keen on him, and they recruited various others to the cause, including Hutton. But Wollaston withdrew his candidacy, and attention turned to various others. Hutton received another canvassing visit, this time from one Humphry Davy.
A small man with a piercing glance and an engaging manner, the chemist and inventor was forty-two: barely half Hutton’s age. His personal trajectory had some intriguing overlaps with the elderly mathematician’s. The son of a Penzance woodcarver, he had worked for years on gases, following up the efforts of Priestley. He won the Copley Medal not for exalted pure research but for improvements in the smelly and nasty business of tanning. Most famously, he had been asked in 1815 to use his expertise in the chemistry of gases to do something about the problem of explosions in coal mines. He had travelled to Newcastle, met colliery viewers and visited collieries. There he had found that what the miners called ‘firedamp’ was methane; he invented a lamp that didn’t ignite it, by enclosing the lamp in a mesh the flame was unable to cross. By 1816 Davy’s safety lamp was in use in the North-East.
For all that, Banks had been in effect Davy’s patron, and he was acceptable – and more than that – to at least some of the old guard at the Royal Society. The chance seemed good that he would secure the election. During his visit to Hutton he praised mathematics; said he was studying the subject himself with a view to understanding the behaviour of elastic fluids. He was a good talker, a famed high-level populariser. Tolerant of specialisms and in favour, cautiously, of modernising the Society, his advent seemed to bode well for the mathematical party and indeed for the reintegration of British science more generally. Hutton was convinced, and agreed to support Davy for president.
Others did so too, in large enough numbers to make the contest an easy one. On 30 November 1820 Sir Humphry Davy, Bart., became the twenty-second president of the Royal Society.
The next week Davy gave a discourse on the state of British science, paying particular attention to relations between the Royal Society and other scientific societies: especially the Astronomical Society. In the course of this he praised mathematics highly: ‘the [highest] efforts of human intelligence’; ‘abundant in the promise of new applications’; ‘that sublime science which is as it were the animating principle of all the other sciences’.
He brought members of the Astronomical Society under his wing, supported reform of the Nautical Almanac, sought to extend scientific activity at the Board of Longitude. Babbage, Baily, Herschel, James Ivory and James South, astronomers and mathematicians all, were brought onto Council. Herschel was awarded the Copley Medal in 1821 for his astronomical work, and Davy took the opportunity to praise mathematics again in his speech on the occasion: ‘There is certainly no branch of Science so calculated to awaken our admiration as the sublime or transcendental Geometry’; Herschel’s work must be gratifying ‘whether the importance of the subject be considered, or the glory that has been derived by the Society from the labours amongst those of its Members who have cultivated the higher branches of the Mathematics’. Hutton could almost have written it himself. Mathematicians who had hitherto resisted came into fellowship of the society: Francis Baily, Benjamin Gompertz, Thomas Leybourn, Peter Barlow, Samuel Christie; Hutton himself signed the nominations for James Andrew, principal of the East India Company’s college, and for George Rennie, engineer.
Newly confident, Hutton reopened the matter of the density of the earth one last time. Davy in his inaugural speech as president had specifically mentioned ‘the grand question of universal gravitation’, alluding to the work of Cavendish but unfortunately not to that of Hutton. Hutton was still convinced Cavendish’s torsion balance result was wrong, and persuaded himself that the calculations involved were incorrect, suggesting that an assistant entrusted with them must have made mistakes. He reportedly asked a number of his friends to repeat the calculations, but on their refusal he determined to do it himself. Another prompt to action was an article in the French journal the Connaissance des tems that once again omitted mention of Hutton in connection with the subject. Hutton corresponded with the editor, the great mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace, in a pair of open letters, and was eventually rewarded with a full acknowledgement in the Connaissance in 1820. Meanwhile, he recalculated Cavendish’s result and submitted it to the Royal Society: his first paper sent there in thirty-seven years. It was read in April 1821 and published in the Philosophical Transactions later that year.
Hutton was eighty-three, and the paper was an error of judgement. Its fairly obvious purpose was to draw attention, again, to Hutton’s own role in the Schiehallion work and to bring renewed attention to the value for the density of the earth which resulted from it: now fudged up to ‘very near five’ times that of water by the use of Playfair’s measurements of the densities of different rock strata found on the mountain. Hutton identified a number of ‘errors’ in Cavendish’s work, but several of them were simple misreadings of the details of his paper: he took the large balls Cavendish used to be ten inches wide rather than twelve, and failed to notice an obvious printing error. By these means he was able to persuade himself – if not perhaps anyone else – that Cavendish’s experiments, properly interpreted, yielded a value for the density of the earth of 5.31 times that of water, rather closer to that from the Schiehallion work than the value Cavendish himself had calculated.
If the paper added nothing to Hutton’s reputation, that reputation still stood very high indeed. A journalist suggested that ‘perhaps no name can be mentioned, either ancient or modern, that has so successfully promoted those branches of Mathematical Knowledge, most conducive to the practical purposes of Life, as Doctor Hutton’. And the changes at the Royal Society had made it easier for friends and colleagues to express their admiration without fear for the consequences (it was said that in Banks’s day at least one man’s patronage had been withdrawn when it emerged that he had dedicated a book to Hutton).
In autumn 1821 a group of Hutton’s associates met to devise a plan to honour their old friend. The core group included Gregory (of course), Francis Baily of the Astronomical Society (and now the Royal Society too), ‘cousin’ Catherine Hutton and others. They agreed to commission a bust of Hutton, to be paid for by subscription. The subscribers would pay one pound each – the amount was deliberately set fairly low to enable more people to contribute – and the noted Irish sculptor Sebastian Gahagan would do the work. They issued a prospectus and placed announcements in the newspapers, and they found themselves somewhat overwhelmed by the response. Subscriptions poured in from over 120 individuals and institutions, and the list began to read like a litany of the notable mathematicians and natural philosophers of the country, together with a large number of friends and former students of Hutton, all eager to express their gratitude and admiration: James Watt, Charles Babbage, Charles Burney, Benjamin Hobhouse, Thomas Leybourn, John Rennie. The president of the Newcastle Lit and Phil subscribed, as did the Lit and Phil itself, and the Mayor and Corporation of Newcastle. So did institutions ranging from the famous Spitalfields Mathematical Society to the East India Company. Individual subscribers came from the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, the Bengal Artillery and the Bombay Observatory, from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and all around England. So much money was left over after paying the sculptor that the committee had a commemorative medal struck as well and presented to each subscriber. It showed Hutton
in profile, with emblems of his two great scientific achievements: a balance to weigh the world, and a cannon suspended from a pendulum.
There was no real secrecy about the scheme, not least because Hutton read the newspapers like anyone else. Some of the subscribers, in fact, wrote directly to him rather than to the committee. He also had to sit for the bust.
Gahagan did his work well. There was anxiety among the subscribers that Hutton’s character should be accurately caught, and the sculptor obliged with a portrait of the great mathematician in somewhat idealised old age. Vast forehead; not a wrinkle in sight. A rather determined mouth and the hint of a classical robe rather than contemporary dress (imagination could supply a laurel wreath if one was needed). Most thought the likeness very faithful, although there was some comment that it looked a bit gloomy: ‘grave’ was the word used. Hutton himself thought gravity a part of his character, and liked it.
On 21 September 1822 the committee waited on Hutton at Bedford Row to present him with his bust. It was an emotional occasion, the committee repeating phrases about their admiration and devotion to Hutton, their gratitude for his virtues, his talents and his long labours. Hutton himself, in a prepared response, spoke of ‘an honour far beyond what I could have aspired to’. The Great Northern coalfield was likely in his mind, as well as the long years enduring Banks’s disgust and disapprobation at the Royal Society.
The bust took up its station on a corner table in Bedford Row. Subscribers had been invited, at an extra cost of two guineas, to purchase casts of it for what the prospectus described – a little alarmingly – as ‘veneration’ at home; many did so.
Gunpowder and Geometry Page 21