Copyright © 2011 by Laura J. Snyder
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Snyder, Laura J.
The philosophical breakfast club: four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world / Laura Snyder. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Scientists—Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century.
2. Science—Philosophy. 3. Scientists—Great Britain—Biography.
I. Title.
Q141.S5635 2010
509.2′241—dc22 2010025790
eISBN: 978-0-307-71617-0
Title page art: from A History of the University of Cambridge by William Combe (London: for Rudolph Ackermann, 1815)
Jacket design by Evan Gaffney
Jacket photographs: background image: Elizabeth Whiting & Associates; portraits of Whewell, Herschel, Babbage: Mary Evans Picture Library
v3.1
For Leo,
a natural philosopher
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE: INVENTING THE SCIENTIST
1. WATERWORKS
2. PHILOSOPHICAL BREAKFASTS
3. EXPERIMENTAL LIVES
4. MECHANICAL TOYS
5. DISMAL SCIENCE
6. THE GREAT BATTLE
7. MAPPING THE WORLD
Photo Insert
8. A DIVINE PROGRAMMER
9. SCIENCES OF SHADOW AND LIGHT
10. ANGELS AND FAIRIES
11. NEW WORLDS
12. NATURE DECODED
13. ENDINGS
EPILOGUE: A NEW HORIZON
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
About the Author
PROLOGUE
INVENTING THE SCIENTIST
How much has happened in these 50 years—a period more remarkable than any, I will continue to say, in the annals of mankind. I am not thinking of the rise and fall of Empires, the change of dynasties, the establishment of governments. I am thinking of those revolutions of science which have had much more effect than any political causes, which have changed the position and prospects of mankind more than all the conquests and the codes, and all the legislators that ever lived.
—BENJAMIN DISRAELI, 18731
ON JUNE 24, 1833, THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT of Science convened its third meeting. Eight hundred fifty-two paid-up members of the fledgling society had traveled to Cambridge from throughout England, from Scotland and Ireland, and even from the Continent and America, to attend. At the first General Meeting the members—and many of their wives and daughters—crowded into the grand and imposing Senate House of the university. The atmosphere was charged with barely suppressed excitement and anticipation as the audience watched one of the speakers take his place on the stage before them. It was William Whewell—a tall, robust man in his late thirties, renowned for the brawn of his muscles and the brilliance of his mind. At Cambridge he was a star: outspoken fellow of Trinity College, recently resigned as Professor of Mineralogy, the author of a number of physics textbooks and a new, provocative work on the relation between science and religion. In less than a decade he would surprise no one by being appointed Master of Trinity, the most powerful position at the university; some would say the most powerful position in the entire academic world. Whewell was one of the guiding lights in the formation of the British Association, and he was the proud host of the Cambridge meeting.2
Whewell spoke in a strong, self-assured voice, redolent with the peculiar vowels of his native Lancashire accent. He praised the assembled group. He discussed the current state of the sciences, singling out astronomy as the “Queen of the Sciences.” He remarked on the nature of science, noting the importance of both “facts and theory” in its formation: both the skills of the keen observer and those of the rational reasoner were combined in the successful practitioner of science. He spoke of a former member of Trinity College, Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century scientific reformer, connecting the goals of the British Association with those of his illustrious predecessor. It was a masterful performance, just as the organizers had expected in inviting Whewell to open the meeting. After respectful applause—not only for Whewell, but for their own good sense and good taste in coming together as they had—the audience grew silent.3
As the applause died down, one man rose imperiously. It was, the other members realized with some surprise, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the celebrated Romantic poet. Decades earlier, Coleridge had written a tract on scientific method. Although for the last thirty years he had rarely left his home in Highgate, near Hampstead, he had felt obliged to make the long journey back to his alma mater for the British Association meeting. It would be the last of such trips; he died within the year. His intervention in the meeting would have far-reaching consequences for those who practice science, even to the present day.
These practitioners were, at the time, known as “men of science” (they were rarely women in those days), “savants” (using the French word for a man of great learning), or—beckoning back to the close-knit relation between science and philosophy that had existed since ancient times—“natural philosophers.” Coleridge remarked acidly that the members of the association should no longer refer to themselves as natural philosophers. Men digging in fossil pits, or performing experiments with electrical apparatus, hardly fit the definition; they were not, as he might have said, “armchair philosophers” pondering the mysteries of the universe, but practical men, with dirty hands at that. Indeed, Coleridge persisted, as a “real metaphysician,” he forbade them the use of this honorific.
The hall erupted in a tumultuous din, as the assembled group took offense at Coleridge’s sharp insult. Then Whewell rose once again, and quieted the crowd. He courteously agreed with the “distinguished gentleman” that a satisfactory term with which to describe the members of the association was wanting. If “philosophers” is taken to be “too wide and lofty a term,” then, Whewell suggested, “by analogy with artist, we may form scientist.”4
That the coining of this term occurred when, where, and by whom it did was no accident; rather, it was the culmination of twenty years of work by four remarkable men, Whewell and three of his friends. It was also, in some ways, merely the beginning of their labors, for the term, thus launched, was not to be widely used for decades more.5
THE FOUR HAD met at Cambridge, at the very site of this creation of the “scientist.” Two decades earlier, as students, Whewell and his friends Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones had come together to discuss the themes that Whewell touched upon in his 1833 address. The importance of Francis Bacon, the need to carry out the reforms he had foreseen two centuries before, the role for both observation and reasoning in science: all of this had been the fodder for “Philosophical Breakfasts” fondly recalled by the four in later years.
At these Sunday morning meetings, the four students had cast their young, critical eyes over science as it was currently practiced, and found it wanting. They saw an area of inquiry perceived as the private pursuit of wealthy men, unsupported and unheralded by the public. No one was paid to conduct scientific research; the universities barely supported the experiments of their chemistry professors; students could not even receive degrees in the nat
ural sciences at Cambridge and Oxford; no honors, no peerages or monetary rewards, were offered for scientific innovation. Within science itself, its practitioners rarely met, and never debated publicly about their work; even at the Royal Society of London, that bastion of natural philosophy since the time of Isaac Newton, scientific papers were read, but never discussed or opposed. Indeed, its members were often not even men of science, but antiquarians, literary figures, or noblemen who wished to associate with the philosophers.
Moreover, there was no agreed-upon “scientific method,” no one process of discovering theories that was sanctioned above any other. Worse, there was a disquieting trend toward a kind of scientific reasoning the four men thought was not only sterile, leading to no new knowledge, but outright dangerous in its consequences. And while science had long been employed in the service of the state, of kings and governments, it was not generally accepted that science should be used to improve the lives of common men and women. It was to these friends as if the old medieval system of alchemy, with its secret methods and its mysteries, its discoveries hidden by codes and ciphers, its riches reserved for its practitioners, still held knowledge of the physical world in its grip. It was no surprise, they felt, that science was stagnating.
The four men devoted their lives to transforming science. And to an amazing extent, they succeeded. After their labors, science—and scientists—began to look much as they do today.
AT THE START of the 1800s, the man of science was likely to be a country parson collecting beetles in his spare hours, or a wealthy gentleman performing experiments in his own privately funded laboratory, or a factotum of a wealthy patron; by the end of the century he was a “scientist”—a member of a professional class of (still mostly) men pursuing a common activity within a certain institutional framework: professional associations open only to practicing members; research grants; university and laboratory training for younger practitioners. When Coleridge, the most famous poet of the day, wrote his tract on scientific method in 1817 it was not considered an oddity; by 1833, the time of the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it was already remarkable, and in the years that followed it was almost inconceivable. A wall was slowly being constructed between art and science, a wall that still stands today.
When the Philosophical Breakfast Club first began to meet, men of science and the public hardly ever explicitly argued about what kind of scientific method should be used; by the end of it, this topic was often discussed—and hotly debated. Men of science were forced to reflect on their method, not just proceed haphazardly. Before, Francis Bacon’s method of “induction” was sometimes referred to, but rarely understood; afterwards, a sophisticated form of Bacon’s inductive method had been developed and popularized, one that continues to guide the work of scientists today. And while earlier research was most likely done for the sake of personal glory, or for that of king and empire, or for the furthering of “pure knowledge,” by the end of the nineteenth century the scientist was seen as responsible in some way to the public. More than ever before, it was assumed that the methods of natural science could be—and should be—used to understand and solve the problems facing society. This ideal—though it has had a checkered history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—remains at the heart of much modern scientific work, and is part of the public’s conception of science, even if scientists themselves do not always view it as their driving force.
Each of the men who brought about this revolution was brilliant, fascinating, and accomplished, and possessed of the optimism of the age. William Whewell (pronounced “Who-ell”) was plucked from obscure beginnings as the son of a carpenter, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men of science in the Victorian era. Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first computer, spent most of his life attempting to build it, but died thwarted and bitter, even though the British government had put at his disposal funds equal to the cost of two warships in those days. John Herschel was the son of the German astronomer William Herschel; he came to outshine his father as the age’s most renowned stargazer, as well as one of the inventors of photography and an accomplished mathematician, chemist, and botanist. Richard Jones—a bon vivant, and linchpin of the group’s discussions of science—helped raise an infant science, political economy (as economics was then called), to respectability.
It is their story that I shall tell, a story that is at the same time a tale of the age in which they lived and which they helped to shape.
And what an age it was! In no previous fifty-year period had so much been accomplished, as Disraeli recognized at the end of it. Perhaps the only period as remarkable has been the past fifty years, in which we have seen routine space exploration, the digital computer age, the Internet, the decoding of the human genome, and so many other developments. From the 1820s to the 1870s—from when the men set out in earnest to change science, until their deaths—a dazzling array of scientific achievements burst onto the scene. The period saw the invention of photography, the computer, modern electrical devices, the steam locomotive, and the railway system. It hosted the rise of statistical science, the social sciences, the science of the tides, mathematical economics, and modern “theories of everything” in physics.
During this half-century there were reforms of the welfare system, the postal system, the monetary system, the tax system, and factory manufacturing. Nations—emerging from wars that had spread over Europe—began to cooperate on scientific projects. A planet was unexpectedly discovered; it was only the second new planet to be discovered since antiquity. Debates erupted about the presence of life on other planets. The skies of the southern hemisphere and the tides all over the world were mapped for the first time. A publicly funded expedition was sent to Antarctica to study terrestrial magnetism. New and sometimes troubling questions about the relation of science and religion were raised, questions that gained a fevered urgency when Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the accepted view of man and his position in the world.
In this age of great movement and change, of inventions and discoveries and speculations about distant and future worlds, the four friends plotted together ways to reform the scientist and his role in society. They hatched their plans at their Cambridge Sunday philosophical breakfasts, and pursued them as a team for the rest of their lives. After graduating, the men visited each other, traveled together throughout Britain and on the Continent, conducted joint experiments, compiled observations and information for each other, and together lobbied the government and scientific societies on behalf of shared intellectual interests as well as their individual financial interests. They read and commented upon each other’s manuscripts throughout their lives—so much so that it is often difficult to untangle the cords of influence, and determine who first thought of a particular idea. They introduced each other’s books to a broader public by writing reviews of them in the magazines of the day.
Their family lives were intertwined as well: they attended and officiated at each other’s weddings, named children after each other, served as godfathers to each other’s sons and daughters, sent their children on visits to the others, helped each other’s sons get settled at the university and find positions, and, finally, mourned together as, one by one, the members of the club died. Throughout it all, they corresponded: over the half-century of their friendship, thousands of letters were written, passed around, and discussed. They did not agree with each other on all the details, or on all the strategies, and sometimes argued bitterly. But reforming science was their shared project, and they pursued it with youthful passion from the time they met until their deaths.
Alone, none of these men could have accomplished so much. The friends goaded each other into making their discoveries, and cooperated in their efforts to transform the scientific world. They encouraged the others when circumstances began to make it seem impossible that they would ever succeed. And they shared their triumphs with each other, even when they were scattered over the globe
, in long and at times passionate letters.
As both Herschel and Whewell would remark in their writings on science, the scientific process is inevitably a social one. Discoveries are not made in a vacuum, but in the midst of whirling currents of politics, rivalry, competition, cooperation, and the hunger for knowledge and power. And the scientist does not work in isolation. Geniuses there may be, but even these require the interplay of other creative minds in order to discover, create, invent, innovate. The accomplishments of the Philosophical Breakfast Club marvelously illustrate the truth of its members’ views. Through the interaction of Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell, and the men and women around them, modern science was made.
Remarkably, then, these four men managed to bring into being their brash, optimistic, youthful dreams. But this very success carried with it an almost tragic irony: their own efforts would serve to make them obsolete. By carving out a particular role for the “scientist,” the four men left no room for those like themselves (which explains, indeed, why similarly inclined men of science were reluctant to take up the title “scientist”). They were not like the narrowly specialized scientists now filling up the section meetings at the British Association and other scientific societies, who know geology or astronomy but not both; not like the laboratory technicians conducting one kind of experiment, day after day; not like the teachers training a new generation of scientists how to construct an optical apparatus. They were widely and classically trained, readers of Latin and Greek, French and German, whose interests ranged over all the natural and social sciences and most of the arts as well, who wrote poetry and broke codes and translated Plato and studied architecture, who pursued optics simply because, as Herschel said, “Light was my first love,” who conducted the experiments that struck their fancy, based on the chemicals and equipment they happened to have on hand, who measured mountains and barometric pressure while on holiday in the Alps and observed the economic situation of the poor wherever their peripatetic wanderings took them. Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell are a strange breed: the last of the natural philosophers, who engendered, as it were with their dying breath, a new species, the scientist.
The Philosophical Breakfast Club Page 1