The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In order to study the double stars, Herschel needed to master his father’s technique of star-sweeping. The technique is based on the fact that, at night, the stars appear to drift from east to west, making a full circuit in twenty-four hours. This is due to the spinning of the earth on its axis in the course of a day. By keeping the telescope trained on one part of the sky, all the objects at a certain declination (or latitude on the celestial sphere) are carried successively into the field of vision as the stars drift east to west. The poet Keats was not far wrong when he immortalized the elder Herschel’s discovery of Uranus: “then felt I like some watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken.”27 The stars’ positions and movements could be noted and measured with the use of a micrometer attached to a powerful telescope. It was exhausting, painstaking observational work.28

  But Herschel did not give up his laboratory work. He could be found at night viewing the light of the stars through the telescope, and during the day decomposing the light of the sun into its colored rays using prisms and crystals. He was now fully engaged in a scientific life.

  BABBAGE’S ROAD TO his own scientific life was a more circuitous one, owing in part to his prickly nature. Like Herschel, Babbage had been expected to finish his university career as senior wrangler. That is not what transpired, however. The year prior to sitting for the Tripos, an undergraduate had to perform an “Act.” This relic of ancient times presorted students into classes for the examination. Each year the moderators of the Tripos received a list of students aspiring to honors the next year. The moderators sent notes to those students informing them that they would be “keeping an act” on a given date in several weeks’ time. Each student would reply with three slips of paper indicating the propositions for which he planned to argue. The moderator would choose three other candidates to argue against these propositions, and the two sides debated—all in Latin, usually pretty poor Latin, at that. As Whewell later described the scene to his old schoolmaster, “The Latin would make every classical hair on your head stand on end.”29 The moderator adjudicated the disputations and at the end decided where each student would be placed in the initial classification for the Tripos. The moderator had the power to fail a candidate on the spot for inability in Latin, general ignorance, or inappropriateness; he would signal this failure by proclaiming “descendas,” Latin for “you will go down.”

  For reasons no one can explain to this day, Babbage provocatively chose to defend the heretical statement “God is a material agent.” Had he written that to his moderator, he would have been barred even from performing the Act. Babbage climbed the stairs to the speaker’s boxed-in podium, where all expected him to argue for another, less controversial proposition. Instead he dropped his bombshell. The moderator, the Reverend Joseph Jephson, was stunned. A fellow student described what happened once Babbage uttered his proposition: “Jephson’s Piety received such a violent shock that ‘Descendas’ thundered from his lips.… All Peterhouse was in an uproar, when the direful news came that their crack man had got a descendas.” 30 Herschel, exasperated, told a mutual friend that Babbage “richly deserved his punishment.… Upon my soul it is a pity the man is so intemperate. He is like a hot poker, which you may play with till you burn your fingers unless you take a devilish deal of care.”31 Instead of taking top honors, Babbage ended up “gulphing it”—gaining an ordinary, non-honors degree without examination. Peterhouse was left once again without a senior wrangler. Babbage remained at Cambridge until the summer of 1814, and then returned to his family’s home.

  He wrote to Herschel in August with some startling news. “I am married and have quarreled with my father,” Babbage informed his friend. “He has no rational reason whatever; he has not one objection to my wife in any respect. But he hates the abstract idea of marriage and is uncommonly fond of money.” Herschel was shocked. “ ‘I am married and have quarreled with my father’—Good God Babbage—how is it possible for a man to calmly sit down and pen those two sentences—add a few more which look like self-justification—and pass off to functional equations?” He also wondered at Babbage’s neglecting to mention his wife’s name in his letter: “You have not informed who the lady is? I presume it can be no secret.” Babbage responded with a longer letter outlining the faults of his father, who was a “tyrant” in the family, “tormenting himself and all connected with him.” He had a “temper which is the most horrible that can be conceived.”32 Babbage did also finally divulge the name of his new wife to his best friend.

  In the summer of 1811, while vacationing with his family in Teignmouth, Babbage had met and started courting Georgiana Whitmore, a sweet young woman with golden brown hair from a prominent family of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire. Babbage’s list of expenses for that summer includes several entries for costs associated with attending balls; he most probably met Georgiana at one of these. Perhaps he was introduced to her by his friend Edward Ryan, who was courting (and later married) Georgiana’s sister. The two became engaged in 1812, though none of Babbage’s friends, not even Herschel, knew of this. Babbage kept the secret for two full years. (Babbage later explained to Herschel that he had thought the news would be “uninteresting” to him!)33

  On the evening of July 24, 1814, Babbage took a chaise to Teignmouth with his college tutor, who had taken holy orders. The tutor married the young couple the next morning.34 Babbage knew the marriage was against his father’s wishes, but went ahead anyway. Benjamin Babbage was furious. He objected to his son marrying before being established in any profession; although Benjamin was wealthy, and as the only son Charles would be expected to inherit that wealth, the elder Babbage did not believe that young men should marry without enough of a personal income to support their families. As punishment, Benjamin Babbage limited Charles and Georgiana to the £300 Charles had received as his allowance while at Cambridge. They had an additional £150 from Georgiana’s family, making £450 a year, a very respectable upper-middle-class income. But Charles no longer wished to be dependent upon his father, so he began to seek some employment.

  The Church was out, Babbage told Herschel, because it would not pay enough (no mention here of God’s materiality!). Babbage applied for a number of professorships, but was always rejected, even with letters of recommendation from the likes of Sir William Herschel; Joseph Pond, the Astronomer Royal; Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society; George Peacock, by now a well-known mathematician; and the even more illustrious French mathematicians Biot, Lacroix, and Laplace. He briefly considered employment in a mining company, a common career choice for chemists, whose knowledge of soil, minerals, and gases was put to good use by mine owners in building and maintaining their subterranean quarries. Humphry Davy, the most famous British chemist of the day, was at this very time inventing his “Davy safety lamp” for miners, based on the principle that a flame enclosed inside a mesh of a certain fineness could not ignite the flammable gases often found in mines, such as methane.

  Babbage’s financial situation appeared to be looking up when he was offered the position of director of a new life insurance company, with an income of £2,500 a year. Babbage threw himself into the project, poring over actuarial statistics and computing a new set of mathematical tables relating premiums to life expectancy. But for reasons that remain murky, the venture was aborted the day before the new company was set to open its doors. Later, Babbage would have his revenge, by publishing a book intended as a guide for those who were considering purchasing life insurance, warning of the contractual small print and the concealed penalties and disadvantages; it was an early example of consumer protection, aimed against the very type of company that had so deeply disappointed Babbage.35 It also gave Babbage practical experience with constructing the types of mathematical tables he would decide could best be calculated by a new kind of machine, a machine he would soon invent.

  Not long after their marriage, Charles and Georgiana began to dream of moving closer to London. Babbage wanted to live near Herschel,
but was dissuaded from living in Slough by hearing from Herschel of the pretentious social life associated with nearby Windsor Palace. In September of 1815 the young couple and their infant son, Benjamin Herschel Babbage (always called Herschel), moved instead to central London, to a terraced house at 5 Devonshire Street, off Portland Place. Some years later, Herschel would join them when he took a house down the street.

  It was a time of great change and great optimism in London. By the summer of 1815 the long war against France had finally ended, and Britain was at peace, with energy and resources to spend on its own growth and modernization. London seemed to many to be the center of the universe, with its banking houses, the Royal Exchange, new docks built by the East and West India Companies, and culture: publishers, literary salons, art galleries, theaters, and concert halls all within the confines of the city.36 John Rennie, who had planned the enormous canal in Lancashire, was constructing the Waterloo and Southwark bridges. Regent Street—named after “Prinny,” the Prince Regent, who ruled England from 1811 to 1820 as regent during his father King George III’s final bout of madness—was being constructed, and would soon be one of the most luxurious shopping thoroughfares in the world. John Nash had been commissioned by the Prince Regent to design Regent’s Park and its environs of curved terraced houses, and to turn Buckingham House into a proper palace.

  London was the largest city in the world. Its population had grown from 750,000 in 1760 to almost 1.5 million in 1815. People poured into the city from all over the country, hoping to better their lives. Yet this enormous city was still dependent on hand-pumped water. There was no police force or sewer system, and there were few social services. There were no government controls on the factories that had been built, which poured their chemical runoff into the Thames, the river that provided drinking water for the population, and puffed their chemical-laden smoke into the air, causing the thick and yellowish fog that became known as the “London peculiar.” Human waste was tossed into the Thames, periodically causing outbreaks of deadly cholera. The word slum entered the language as the Prince Regent began demolishing the clutter of poverty-stricken small streets and ramshackle hovels in order to construct the broad road from Carleton House to Regent’s Park.37 From the East End slums to the West End—home of aristocratic wealth—the city ran the gamut from astounding poverty to inconceivable wealth, from the families who worked together as “bone pickers,” going through piles of garbage to salvage whatever could be sold secondhand to tanners, rag sellers, and ironsmiths, to those that spent their lives separated, children with nursemaids and governesses, men in their clubs and shooting in their country estates, women making visits in their fine carriages. It could be a cruel existence, or it could be the most exciting place to live in the world, depending on one’s financial and social situation.

  Charles and Georgiana relished their lives there. Georgiana focused her energies on their firstborn son and the seven other children who followed, while Charles spent his days writing his mathematical articles, visiting Herschel, conducting experiments, and attending scientific meetings and demonstrations. In 1816 Babbage was made a fellow of the Royal Society, joining his friend Herschel in that august body.

  WHEWELL AND JONES still labored away at Cambridge. In 1814 Whewell won the prestigious Chancellor’s medal for poetry with his 340-line epic telling of the legend of Boadicea, the queen of the Brittonic-Iceni tribe who had led an uprising against the occupying Roman forces in 60 CE. Whewell proudly told his father that “there is not a single prize in the gift of the University which I should prefer to it.”38 However, in some quarters the prize for poetry rang warning bells that Whewell was not concentrating as single-mindedly as he should have been on his mathematical studies for the Tripos.39 He was distracted as well by the Cambridge “fever” of early 1815—probably typhoid fever, which periodically broke out there owing to the crowded housing and to the open sewers running through the town. The River Cam was at that time sluggish and polluted, and there were open ditches in parts of Cambridge into which human and animal waste was routinely dumped.40 Whewell told his father and aunt not to worry, as “only” six or seven students had died of the fever since Christmas, but nevertheless in April the colleges closed down and the students were forced to go elsewhere for a few weeks. Rather than returning home to study, Whewell took his first trip to London, where he enjoyed the sights.

  Over the summer of 1815, when Whewell should have been preparing intensively for the Tripos the next winter, he described to his old schoolmaster George Morland the rather more enjoyable activities of his reading party: “shooting swallows, bathing by half dozens, sailing to Chesterton, dancing at country fairs, playing billiards, turning beakers into musical glasses, making rockets, riding out in bodies, and performing a thousand other indescribable and incomprehensible operations.”41 Herschel had also neglected studying the summer before his Tripos; indeed, he had been even worse than Whewell. Herschel admitted to Whittaker at the time that “I am throwing away time with a prodigality truly abominable.… I make it a point of conscience to get drunk every day.” Herschel was so drunk when he visited Stonehenge that he was forced to acknowledge that he “saw not a single stone.—May his Satanic Majesty fetch me quickly if I know whether it is made of stone or cheese.”42

  But Herschel was not adversely affected by his summer slothfulness, while Whewell was. When the week of the Tripos exams arrived, in January 1816, Whewell warned his father and his aunt that they should not expect him to come out on top as senior wrangler. Then he dove into the exams. (Jones was not a candidate for honors, so he avoided the ordeal.) The Tripos always began on the first Monday after Plough Monday (which is the first Monday after Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, January 6). In Whewell’s year, at 7:00 a.m. on January 15, the candidates assembled for a hearty breakfast in the Combination Rooms of their respective colleges—a room that was generally reserved for the fellows; it was where they came together, or combined, to take their port after dinner. The students then marched to the Senate House, headed by the college tutors, arriving a little before eight. The classes, presorted by the Acts of the year before, sat together at different tables: first and second classes, third and fourth, fifth and sixth. Whewell, as all knew, was in the first class; from here the first and second wranglers would undoubtedly emerge. The men were examined on mathematics for one hour, followed by a short break. The examining continued again from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m., from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m., and from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Exhausted, the men tramped to a solemn dinner. More testing followed. At 6:00 p.m., all classes took tea with the senior moderator, after which they were examined again until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.

  Whewell found himself unable to keep up with the incredibly fast pace of the writing. He complained later to his father that “I would only write twelve sheets in two hours, while others wrote twenty!”43 Tuesday and Wednesday were even more intensive, with examining going on from eight in the morning until night, with only a few short breaks. Thursday was the “easy” day, with questions on Moral Philosophy, Logic, and Paley’s Evidences of Christianity. On Friday at 8:00 a.m. the men were reclassified based on the results thus far. Generally, by this point, the senior wrangler would be listed alone, at the top of the list. To much astonishment, Whewell was bracketed in a dead heat with another man, Edward Jacob, of Caius (Jones’s college). Jones was friendly with the Jacob family—Edward’s father was a noted political economist—but Whewell did not know his competitor well.

  The exams continued until five that afternoon. The students stumbled back to their rooms to have tea and to sleep or, for many, to begin drinking their college ale, while the moderators rushed to theirs to grade furiously. By midnight the senior wrangler and second wrangler were announced: Jacob first, then Whewell. Celebration broke out, especially at Caius and Trinity, as the two top finishers were “chaired all around the college,” and hailed as heroes. Whewell could not fully enjoy the festivities; he had not brought his college the senior wranglership, and fel
t the disappointment fervently.

  After a long night of drinking and celebrating, all the students dragged themselves to the Senate House by eight on Saturday morning to see the full list of results.44 Whewell generously told everyone that Jacob deserved his top spot; “he is a very pleasant as well as a clever man, and I had as soon be beaten by him as by anyone else.”45 Edward Jacob later went to the bar, and had much success there, but for much of his life his reputation rested on having outstripped so formidable a competitor at Cambridge.46

  At ten o’clock on Saturday, the official ceremony began. The senior moderator made a speech in Latin, while the vice-chancellor, arrayed in his crimson-ermined gown, sat in the chair of office. The junior proctor delivered a list of the honors students to the vice-chancellor. Before a gallery crowded with other students, families, and townsmen with their wives and daughters, who loved the spectacle, each student was certified as having kept the proper number of terms and as being a member of the Church of England (no non-Anglicans could receive degrees from Cambridge or Oxford at that time). Then the hooding began. Each man’s bed-maker stood ready behind her charge to put a white furred hood over his undergraduate gown. The senior wrangler was presented to the vice-chancellor first, with the words “Dignissime domine, pro-Cancellarie et tota Universitas, praesento vobis hunc juvenem, quem scio, tam moribus quam doctrina, esse idoneum ad respondendum quaestionis, idque tibi fide mea praesto totique Academiae.” (Most worthy Vice-Chancellor and the whole university, I present to you this young man, whom I know to be ready, both in character and learning, to proceed to the degree; and for this I pledge my faith to you and the whole university.)47 The audience burst into frenzied applause. Next, all the students of Caius College receiving honors were presented. After the senior wrangler’s college was presented, the other colleges followed. Each man knelt before the vice-chancellor and swore an oath, after which the vice-chancellor would take his hands and admit him to a degree—all in Latin.48 No one in Whewell’s family was present; he would paint the picture for them afterwards, in letters sent after the ceremony.