The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Whewell was one of the main forces pressing the British Association to give grants to its members. The funds of the association “ought to get spent, and not saved, and with good management we may get money’s worth out of it,” he pointed out pragmatically.112 For instance, after the Glasgow meeting in 1840, Murchison told Whewell that “we netted £2600 here … and have employed a very large part of it in grants for scientific research.”113 In the first few years of the association, grants were given for studying the tides (much of that money went to Whewell), for comparing iron produced by the hot-air and cold-air blast furnaces, for research on the contours of ships, for a chemical analysis of the atmosphere, for studying fossil fish, and for analyzing the raw data from large series of astronomical observations.114 The British Association transformed science in England and, arguably, in the world.

  THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION was not universally loved. In 1832 the Times (which had ignored the 1831 York meeting altogether) called the new society “useless and childish.”115 The organizers were criticized for the amount of socializing that went on at the meetings. By 1835 an anonymous critic was calling the meetings “extensive humbugs,” noting that “with the aid of concerts and balls, beautiful women, sound claret and strong whiskey, the sages [make] out remarkably well.”116

  Others could not help but be amazed at the quantity of eating and drinking that went on during the gatherings. For their part, the philosophers had set themselves up for criticisms on this count: in a letter to Lord Milton right before the York meeting, Harcourt ventured to end with the reminder that “philosophers are very fond of venison,” asking whether Milton could supply some for the meeting from his estate.117 After the Liverpool meeting in 1837, a slightly dazed Sedgwick wrote to the wife of Charles Lyell that “mountains of venison and oceans of turtle” were on hand to feed the hungry savants. “Were ever philosophers so fed before?” Sedgwick mused. “Twenty-hundred-weight of turtle were sent to fructify in the hungry stomachs of the sons of science!”118 It would not be long before the society found itself ridiculed for the display of gastronomical science at each of the meetings. The editor of the Quarterly Review attacked the “gastropatetic turtle-philia” of the Association.119

  Even Brewster would later refer to the British Association as a “huge and unwieldy monster. The philosophical Frankenstein, which we have called into existence.”120 But once summoned up, the British Association—and the changes it would herald in science—was unstoppable.

  7

  MAPPING THE WORLD

  “LAST NIGHT A BRISK SQUALL, AND THE ‘PHOSPHERIC SEA’ IN HIGH perfection running a train out behind the ship for several ship’s lengths. It is an assemblage of shining individuals which when seen on the surface are like stars, when turned down deep under water and mixed with air, look nebulous.… Altogether this is one of the most magnificent sights I ever saw.” So wrote Herschel in his diary on the evening of December 6, 1833, from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He and his family were on their way to the Cape Colony at the foot of Africa, where they would spend four happy years.

  Herschel’s scientific objective in his sojourn at the Cape Colony was to map the stars of the southern hemisphere, matching his father’s earlier charting of the northern stars. The famous astronomer Edmond Halley—who discovered that the comet now bearing his name reappears every seventy-five years or so—had plotted the locations of 341 southern hemisphere stars he observed from the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic Ocean in 1676. More recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille had gone to the Cape of Good Hope and observed almost ten thousand southern stars. But more work still needed to be done.

  Herschel was also propelled southward by the desire to escape the intrigues and backbiting, the scheming and gossiping, that had plagued him in London and Slough. While his friend Babbage seemed to thrive on such a diet, Herschel could not abide it. The loss of the presidency of the Royal Society, and his unwillingness to play a leading role in the new British Association, caused him to withdraw from active participation in the scientific politics of the day. He wished nothing more than to stay at his telescope, making his observations and calculations, conducting chemical and optical experiments on the side. But it was getting increasingly difficult to remain detached from the scientific establishment while living in England.

  He had first mentioned his desire to travel to the Cape Colony in January of 1831, mere months after losing the Royal Society presidency.1 But Herschel did not start seriously planning the trip until after his mother’s death. During her lifetime Herschel knew that she would be strongly opposed to any voyage that would keep him from her for a long period; even in 1827, when he had thought of traveling to Tenerife to study the volcanoes there, he told Whewell to keep quiet about it; as Whewell reported to Jones, “I was told … he did not wish these plans to be talked of, as his lady mother will most likely set her face against them.”2 (In the end, Herschel did not go to Tenerife.) On January 4, 1832, Mary Herschel died, at the age of eighty-three. In February her son, just about to turn forty, began to make preparations for the long voyage.

  Herschel wrote letters to the widow of his school friend Fearon Fallows, who, at the time of his death, had been the head of the Royal Observatory at the Cape, and to Margaret’s brother, Duncan Stewart, who had gone to the Cape as a colonial functionary sometime earlier. They informed Herschel about the climate, what provisions the family should bring with them, and where he was most likely to find comfortable accommodations.3 Babbage found information for him about houses near the Cape.4 Thomas Maclear, who would soon be taking up the position as new head of the observatory, suggested that the Herschels leave their youngest child, William, still an infant, in England, fearing he would not survive the long voyage or a protracted stay in Africa.5 John and Margaret did not even consider being separated from their child: indeed, while at the Cape, Margaret would bear three more babies, and Herschel would remain convinced until his last days that the time the children spent there was the healthiest and most wholesome in their lives.

  His friends were not surprised by his decision to go, but mourned the loss of his company. Jones told Whewell in February that Herschel was coming to visit him for a few days. “His wife writes word that he has something to talk to me about—I earnestly hope it may not be his scheme of expatriation which I can neither relish nor find fault with.”6 Whewell told another friend that “I cannot look at so long an absence of a man whom I admire and love so much, without dear regret.”7

  Herschel began to make a new primary mirror for his twenty-foot reflector, which he intended to transport with him to the Cape. He traveled to Hanover, for what he imagined would be his last visit to his aunt Caroline, and was charmed to see that, even at eighty-two years old, she was quite “fresh and funny at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.”8 He wrapped up the work he was doing on the nebulae, turning in the last proof sheets of his paper on the “little mists” the night before he left London.

  The Duke of Sussex, who had prevailed over Herschel in the election for president of the Royal Society, offered financial assistance for the expedition, perhaps hoping to smooth over the tension remaining between the two rivals. The British Admiralty proposed free passage on a navy ship. Herschel refused both generous offers, telling his friend John Lubbock that he wished to be beholden to no one. As always, Herschel saw himself as an independent agent, a scientist (to use Whewell’s new word) not by profession but by avocation, free to observe or not observe, calculate or not calculate, as he saw fit. And as he had argued against Babbage and Whewell at their breakfast meetings in Cambridge, he believed that men of science should support their own activities, at least if they had the resources to do so.9 At £500 for the round-trip fare, the cost of the expedition was considerable even before the family arrived at the Cape Colony. (The fare was expensive compared to other ships—Maclear, who was traveling to Africa to ta
ke up his new post, wanted to travel with the Herschels, but had to choose a less expensive vessel.)10

  In late October 1833, Whewell took the coach to London for one last visit with Herschel and Margaret, who were supervising the loading of their luggage—including the numerous crates holding the disassembled telescope—onto the Mountstuart Elphinstone, a ship of 611 tons, “a very respectable structure to a landsman’s eye,” according to Whewell.11 On the tenth of November, Herschel and his family left for Plymouth, where, three days later, they embarked on the ship, which had taken on baggage and supplies in London before traveling through the English Channel to its departure port. The Herschel party was made up of Herschel and his wife, their two daughters and ten-month-old son, Mrs. Nanson the baby nurse, and two manservants, including John Stone, the mechanic who would supervise the work of reassembling the telescope and aid Herschel in his nightly sweeps of the sky. Herschel had arranged for three stern cabins on the “larboard” side (left looking from stern to bow, what would later be known as the port side), the most comfortable accommodations on the ship, and one below, for the two men. Jones was there to see them off, with a small party of others who gathered in John and Margaret’s cabin to bid them a bon voyage.12 The ship set sail on November 13. Their voyage would last nine weeks and two days.

  The farther he traveled from England, the more Herschel felt the frustrations of England melting away. Like a young boy, he joyously tossed message-filled bottles overboard in the hope that they would find their way to some shore. He kept a scientific journal, avidly recording the temperature of the sea water; his pulse rates; experiments on the melting point of “cocoa-nut oil”; his determination of lunar distances; the detailed, minute-by-minute description of a lunar eclipse; and hourly meteorological readings. When the crew caught a strange fish, Herschel happily reported that he “got the eyes,” which he then dissected, sketching the optic nerves. He fished up some of the phosphorescent sea creatures whose glowing trail behind the ship reminded Herschel of the nighttime sky; he wrote up observations of their structure, noting, “They do not sting the fingers but when applied to the lips, irritate, like nettles.”13

  The family celebrated the start of 1834 on board; at the top of the page in Herschel’s journal entry for New Year’s Day, Margaret lovingly scrawled, “A Happy New Year to dear Jack.” By this time, however, everyone on ship, even Herschel, was anxious to reach land. The nurse, Mrs. Nanson, was ill in bed, one of the children was “fretful,” and “Baby [William] teething & Mamma has contracted a habit of beating me at chess.—Begin to be tired of keeping a Meteorological Register & wish for sight of land.”14 Finally, on the fifteenth of January, at dawn, the captain awakened Herschel to show him a magnificent sight: “The whole range of the Mountains of the Cape from Table Bay to the Cape of Good Hope was distinctly seen, as a thin, blue, but clearly defined vapour.”15 The next day the ship dropped anchor, and the passengers prepared to disembark onto small boats that would take them to the Old Jetty, the man-made strip protecting the shore from the punishing treatment of the tides. It would take fifteen boats to convey the crates of scientific instruments brought by the Herschels, a process that was carried out over a period of several days.16

  When the passengers disembarked, feeling a bit unsteady on solid ground after so long at sea, they were overwhelmed by the sight and sounds of a military parade. “The streets were lined with the military,” the Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette reported, “colors were everywhere flying, and the Artillery fired a salute.… [T]he whole population of Cape Town had turned out in the streets or were at the windows or tops of Houses.” They were celebrating the arrival of the new governor of Cape Town, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, who had traveled on the Mountstuart Elphinstone with the Herschels.17 To the Herschels, the pomp and ceremony seemed to presage a successful stay.

  The family found themselves in what John Herschel would call “a sort of earthly Paradise,” filled with 250 species of birds, numerous kinds of antelope, lizards, snakes, tortoises, insects, mongoose, baboons, otter, deer, and zebra, and over 1,100 species of indigenous plants (maybe too much like Paradise, Herschel mused, when he had to chase a poisonous snake out of the children’s nursery).18 Cape Town, thirty-nine miles to the north of the Cape of Good Hope, was originally a resupply camp for the ships of the Dutch East India Company. Among sailors it was known as the “Tavern of the Seas,” because they would stop there to take on fresh provisions during the long journey around Africa. The British, who had occupied the area around the Cape intermittently, were granted the colony in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, and it would remain a British colony until it was incorporated into the independent Union of South Africa in 1910. In 1820 the British government had established an observatory there, but it was not yet very well equipped. Herschel’s private observatory would best the royal one both in equipment and personnel.

  John and Margaret rented a spacious Dutch farmhouse about six miles southeast of Cape Town, situated at the foot of Table Mountain, a sandstone monolith soaring 3,550 feet above sea level, topped by the tablelike summit that gives the mountain its name. The house, called Feldhausen, was surrounded by large orchards and a grove of oak and fir trees as well as a profusion of native flowering plants. Herschel confided to his diary that it is “really one of the most magnificent sites for a home I ever saw; with every combination of wood, mountain and water which can give a charm to the landscape scenery.”19

  As soon as the baggage had been transported to the house, Herschel and Stone began setting up the new observatory. Herschel had brought the twenty-foot reflecting telescope, and three interchangeable mirrors for it: one made by his father, one made by father and son together, and one by the son on his own soon before departing. At this time mirrors were made not of metal-coated glass, as they are today, but of “speculum metal,” a white metal alloy of copper and tin with a pinch of arsenic. This metal was very prone to tarnish, and needed frequent repolishing, an operation that altered the shape of the mirror slightly, so that it needed to be refigured each time. When one mirror became imperfect, Herschel would be able to replace it with one of the others, while he worked laboriously on repolishing and refiguring the tarnished one.20 This happened frequently, about every six days—the mirror was besieged not only by the salty sea air, but also by extreme temperature changes; the weather varied from cold and windy nights during which the astronomer’s fingers would become stiff with cold, to days so hot that Herschel could cook a mutton chop and potatoes in the sun and eat them.21 Stone oversaw the construction of a giant framework mounted on movable rollers, from which the telescope was suspended by ropes. A movable platform gave the observer access to the eyepiece from a variety of positions.22

  Herschel had also conveyed to the Cape the seven-foot equatorial refractor he and South had used for their double-star measurements. Attached to this telescope were the graduated circles and micrometers useful for the precise measurement of the distances between double stars. As these instruments needed to be shielded from the elements, the seven-foot refractor was not left out in the open with the other telescope, but was housed in a newly built private observatory with a sliding roof that opened and closed as needed. The twenty-foot reflector was already in use by February 22, but the smaller refracting telescope was not ready until May.23

  When Herschel first gazed into the eyepiece of the twenty-foot reflector, he was shocked to discover that, as he complained to his aunt Caroline, “in spite of the clearness of the sky the stars are ill-defined and tremulous.”24 It seemed that the atmosphere was not conducive to making the planned observations. For a time Herschel secretly feared that his whole expedition was doomed. But he was soon pleased to report that he had had “a perfect Astronomical Night.—I hereby retract all I have said in disparagement of the Cape Atmosphere.—Such tranquility and definition of stars equals anything I have ever had in England.”25 He later described another night’s sweep as “the Sublime of Astronomy—… an epoch in my Astronomical
life.”26 He would find that the observing conditions were best during the winter season, from May to October, especially right after the heavy rainstorms common during that period.27

  Once they were settled in, Margaret and John began a routine that would last for the entire duration of their time at the Cape Colony. John spent his nights sweeping the sky, with the assistance of Stone. They did the sweeps just as they had in England: the twenty-foot telescope would remain pointed at the same direction in the sky, being moved (by Stone) up and down slightly, only enough to “sweep” three degrees of width in the sky (remember, the celestial sphere is divided into 360 degrees, like a solid sphere). Small bells were attached so that they would ring when the telescope reached the upper and lower limits of its sweep, alerting Stone to stop moving the telescope. Lateral motion came from the revolution of the heavens over the course of the night, which would bring new stars, clusters, and nebulae into view of the telescope. When they were finished for the night, usually around four o’clock in the morning, Herschel and Stone would retire to their beds. After sleeping late in the morning, Herschel passed much of the day with Margaret, riding, taking walks, visiting their neighbors, making detailed meteorological observations, measuring the sun’s radiation by exposing water to the sun and then measuring its temperature with a sensitive thermometer (a device he called an “actinometer”), and engaging in their new hobby, botanizing.

  Herschel began to collect bulbs of the exotic and colorful flowers that grew indigenously at the Cape. One expedition to seek new bulbs with the whole family included his infant son Alexander, only six weeks old at the time. He kept diary entries on the growing and flowering of bulbs he planted on the Feldhausen property, recording whenever he decided to “make a gardening day of it.”28 He sent bulbs to his friends in England, including William Henry Fox Talbot.29 And he exchanged letters, samples, and descriptions of flowering plants with William Henry Harvey, a botanist who was also Colonial Treasurer of Cape Town. Harvey would later name a specimen of the orchid genus Satyrium after Lady Herschel.30 Another botanist, John Lindley, would name a group of ground orchids with blue flowers and narrow leaves Herschelias, referring to John Herschel not as the famous astronomer but as “the successful collector of Cape orchids.”31 Herschel proudly showed off his garden to all visitors, including Charles Darwin, who had eagerly anticipated his meeting with “the great Man” when the HMS Beagle docked at the port of the Cape in 1838, on the way back to England from the Galápagos Islands.32 (Darwin would enthuse in his diary after his visit that becoming acquainted with Herschel “was the most memorable event which, for a long period, I have had the good fortune to enjoy.”)33 When he returned to England, Herschel brought back with him crates of specimens, some of which he planted in Slough, and others of which he donated to the Royal Horticultural Society.