The commissioners were told instead that they must accept all maps that they were given in cases of voluntary commutation, even if these were known to be inaccurate. For the contested cases, more-accurate maps would be drawn up, but these need not be full cadastral survey maps. The commissioners decided that even if they had to accept second-rate maps, they would affix their official seal only to the first-rate, cadastral survey maps. In the end, 11,800 tithe maps were drawn up and given to the Tithe Commission; only 2,300 of these were sealed. Those tithe maps drawn to the cadastral scale covered as much as ten square meters for large parish districts. Had all of England and Wales been mapped this way, the outcome would have measured 6.5 acres. It would not be until one hundred years later that England would map itself in as much detail as Jones and Dawson had wanted.117 Nevertheless, the nearly twelve thousand tithe maps that were drawn up constituted the first systematic mapping of England and Wales.
The commutation of the tithes was viewed as one of the most successful public enterprises in the nineteenth century. For such a sweeping reform—resulting in payments of over £4 million in tithes a year by the 1850s—it was accomplished within a remarkably short period, and with remarkably little complaint by those paying or receiving the tithes. The success of the endeavor was generally acknowledged to be due to the “energy, promptness and clearness of view” of Jones, who had finally found something he could do both well and with ease.118 The time he spent on the Tithe Commission would be the happiest time of Jones’s life since leaving Cambridge so many years before.
STARS, SEA, and land were mapped by the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club. When they began these projects, large swaths of nature were unknown and uncharted; when they finished, more of the world was mapped and understood. Before their work, maps of the stars of the southern hemisphere, the tides of the ocean, and England and Wales themselves were like the maps we associate with earlier eras, maps with large, empty zones filled with fanciful monsters representing unexplored continents: “Here there be dragons!” Herschel, Whewell, and Jones captured parts of nature that had previously been unexplored, like the continents of centuries before; they filled in wide gaps in the knowledge of the world.
In doing so, they literally illustrated their shared Baconian belief that knowledge is power. By mapping these realms, Herschel, Whewell, and Jones brought new parts of nature under man’s control. More specifically, they brought portions of the natural world under the control of the British crown. The ships of the British Empire could now more safely sail the world’s seas, even in the southern hemisphere, aiding exploration, trade, and naval defenses. And the ruler of Britain—first King William IV, then the young Queen Victoria—could glance at a set of maps and understand clearly, for the first time, the extent of the land under his or her domain. The Philosophical Breakfast Club had accomplished part of what they had planned at their meetings in Cambridge: “to leave the map of knowledge,” as Jones had put it, “a little in advance of where we found [it].”119
Lithograph of William Whewell by Eden Upton Eddis, after a portrait by William Drummond, published in 1835. (illustration credit 1.1)
Engraving by R. C. Roffe of Charles Babbage as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge. Issued as the frontispiece to Mechanics Magazine XVIII, Oct. 1832–Jan. 1833. (illustration credit 1.2)
Engraving of John Herschel, 1830s, by William Ward, from a portrait by H. W. Pickersgill. (illustration credit 1.3)
Richard Jones; frontispiece of Literary Remains of Richard Jones. This is the only known image of Jones. (illustration credit 1.4)
Carte-de-visite photograph of William Whewell by J. Rylands, 1860s. (illustration credit 1.5)
Carte-de-visite photograph of Charles Babbage, taken during a studio sitting for the Fourth International Statistical Congress of 1860 in London. (illustration credit 1.6)
Photograph of John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron c.1870, taken soon before Herschel’s death. (illustration credit 1.7)
Difference Engine Number 1 demonstration model built by Joseph Clement and Charles Babbage in 1832. This is the machine used by Babbage to demonstrate his view of miracles at his soirees. The model is two and a half feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep—about one-seventh of the intended size of the full Difference Engine. It could calculate functions with up to two orders of difference, and results up to six digits long. The crank handle is on the top of the engine rather than on the side, as it would have been in the full-sized machine. (illustration credit 1.8)
Design drawing of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1840, showing the Mill (equivalent to the central processor in a modern computer) on the left side around the large central circle, and the Store (equivalent to the memory of a computer) on the right side. The numbers would be kept in the Store and then moved by a system of horizontal racks or toothed bars to the Mill, where the numerical operations would have been carried out, after which the results would be moved back to the Store. (illustration credit 1.9)
Four Leaves: photogenic drawing negative, 9.7 by 12.2 cm, by John Herschel, 1839. On the back Herschel indicated that the negative was water fixed, probably using melted snow, which was purer than the water from his pump. Since silver nitrate is water soluble and the hyposulphite of soda was expensive, Herschel experimented with using water to wash out the unexposed silver nitrate, stopping the action of light on the image. (illustration credit 1.10)
William Whewell’s map of cotidal lines for the North Sea, the result of twenty days of simultaneous observations made at nearly seven hundred tidal stations in nine countries under Whewell’s direction in June 1835. With the help of human computers—Thomas Bywater, Thomas Bunt, and Daniel Ries—Whewell took more than forty thousand data points for high tide and turned them into a map in which curved lines connect places experiencing high tides at the same time. (illustration credit 1.11)
First-class tithe map of the hamlets of Ingol and Cottam in the Parish of Preston, Lancashire County, 1838. This map was considered “first class” by Richard Jones and the other two tithe commissioners and given their official seal because it was drawn with the precision and the large scale they had hoped that the government would require for all tithe maps. Only 2,300 out of the nearly 12,000 tithe maps were considered first-class maps and sealed by the commissioners. The Lancaster Canal runs through the area mapped. (illustration credit 1.12)
8
A DIVINE PROGRAMMER
ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1837, CHARLES DARWIN DELIVERED A talk at a meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline that night with news of his success, happily reporting that two of the original founders of the society, Whewell and Sedgwick, had taken an active part in the discussion afterwards.1 Whewell, then president of the Geological Society, was so impressed that, less than two weeks later, he invited Darwin to serve as the organization’s secretary.2 The paper described one of Darwin’s discoveries during his recent voyage on the HMS Beagle: fused sand tubes found near the Rio Plata in South America. These tubes, formed when lightning struck loose sand, were useful, Darwin believed, in discovering how lightning enters the ground during an electrical storm. As he pointed out in his Voyage of the Beagle, published the following year, this area of South America was extremely subject to “electric phenomena.” In 1793, nearby Buenos Aires experienced lightning strikes at thirty-seven locations during a single storm, in which nineteen people were killed.3
Although he was enjoying his visit to Cambridge, where he had taken his degree six years earlier, Darwin informed his sister that Charles Lyell was insisting he hurry on up to London. He “wants me to be up on Saturday for a party at Mr. Babbage,” Darwin halfheartedly complained. “Lyell says Babbage’s parties are the best in the way of literary people in London—and that there is a good mixture of pretty women!”4
Lyell was right on both counts. The most sought-after invitations during the London social season in the 1830s were to the Saturday evening soirées hosted by
Babbage and his beloved teenaged daughter, Georgiana. This was a brief bright spot in Babbage’s life; like the happiness of his early married life, this moment, too, was interrupted by tragedy. Georgiana would die in September 1834, at the age of only seventeen. That fall and winter, London was struck by an epidemic of scarlatina (also known as “scarlet fever”), which strikes mainly young adults under age twenty-two. Before antibiotics, this infection of the streptococcus bacteria, which also causes “strep throat,” could be quite dangerous; nearly one thousand were killed by it in 1834–35. At the first signs of illness, Georgiana was whisked to her aunt and uncle’s house in Worcester, the same place where her mother had died seven years earlier.5 Georgiana—Babbage’s only daughter, and one of only four living children at that point—was soon dead as well. In a letter from the Cape, Herschel commiserated with his friend on the “calamity.” It was, Herschel groaned, “the first occurrence which has reminded me horrifically of our distance from home.” Had he been in London, Herschel felt, he could at least have eased Babbage’s pain a bit by helping to “distract his thoughts.”6
Instead, Babbage distracted himself by slowly resuming his entertaining, on an even grander scale. Several times a month, between two and three hundred men and women would gather at Babbage’s house on Dorset Street. In swallowtail jackets for the men and full-skirted ball gowns of brocade, organdy, or damask for the women, the elite of London’s society would join with scientists, literary eminences, bishops, bankers, politicians, industrialists, actors, authors, artists, and civil dignitaries from England and abroad for an evening of dancing, drinking, eating, gossiping, and demonstrations of the latest in science, literature, philosophy, and art.
Babbage’s parties brought together levels of society usually socially segregated. Female members of the titled aristocracy played whist with the wives of experimenters and fossil hunters, while on the dance floor the attractive young daughters of noblemen whirled with the unmarried scientists. Lyell told Herschel that “[Babbage] has done good, and acquired influence for science by his parties, and the manner in which he has firmly and successfully asserted the rank in society due to science.”7
The evenings were always a success. Even the dour, mostly deaf social reformer and writer (and onetime flame of Darwin’s brother Erasmus) Harriet Martineau said, of Babbage, that “all were eager to go to his glorious soirees.”8 Darwin would later ask Babbage if he could bring his sister to one of the evenings, so that “she may see the World.”9
At one party alone, on May 26, 1838, a bedazzled guest reported that the ensemble included Henry Hallam, the famous English historian and father of the doomed “A.H.H.” of Tennyson’s In Memoriam; the Reverend Henry Hart Milman, another historian and Rector of St. Margaret’s in London, son of the former physician to King George III (who came with his “pretty wife”); the bishops of Hereford and Norwich; Herschel “and his beautiful wife” (just eleven days after returning from Africa); Sedgwick; Mary Somerville, the Scottish science writer and polymath, whose clear and clever popularized translation of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste had both amazed and instructed the mathematical astronomers in England; Nassau Senior, the political economist and member of the Poor Law Commission that had formulated the New Poor Law of 1834; Sir Francis Chantrey, one of the most important sculptors of the day; and not one but two lady novelists: the Scottish Jane Porter, tall and lovely, who had written what is considered the first historical novel, her Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803); and the Irish Lady Morgan, said to have been less than four feet tall. (Lady Morgan’s 1835 book The Princess, which painted an idealized portrait of the education of women, was probably the inspiration for Tennyson’s later poem by that name, which poked fun at women who believed they were “undevelopt men,” concluding, against the more inflammatory rhetoric of Morgan, that “the woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”10 In Tennyson’s poem, “Princess Ida” is six feet tall, a likely parody of Lady Morgan’s small size.) At another memorable gathering, Alexis de Tocqueville met fellow liberal political thinker Camillo Benso, the Conte di Cavour, who would become a key figure in the unification of Italy, serving as its first prime minister in 1861.11
To provide sustenance for the long night ahead, a table would be laid with punch, cordials, wine, and Madeira; tarts; fruits both fresh and dried; nuts, cakes, cookies, and finger sandwiches. The grandest repasts would include oysters, salads, croquettes, cold salmon, and various fowls. There would always be ices to refresh the ladies; although off-the-shoulder dresses with very short sleeves had come into style, the ladies were still warm in their corsets, long, deeply flounced skirts, and gloves that reached to just below the elbow.12
Between sets of dancing, there were usually some amusements of a literary, artistic, or scientific bent. An author might read from his new work. The ladies might put together a tableau vivant, in which they would re-create a famous painting on stage, complete with costumes and scenery. An electrical researcher might demonstrate electromagnetic induction, by waving a magnetic loop over a battery pile and causing a sputtering electrical current. An astronomer might set up a small telescope on the front lawn and show guests the Milky Way, sparking discussion of whether the nebulous cloud was really nothing more than millions of distant stars, or a gaseous “ether” pervading the universe. At some of these parties, art and science came together, as when Babbage displayed examples of his friend William Henry Fox Talbot’s early photographs on a chiffonier in the hallway. And there was the “Silver Lady,” the mechanical dancer from Babbage’s youth, recently bought on auction, dressed in clothes made by Babbage himself—down to the silver spangle affixed to each of her little shoes—and crowned with a lock of his daughter’s auburn hair.13
But by far the most eagerly anticipated of Babbage’s entertainments at his soirées were the demonstrations of his Difference Engine. In 1832 Babbage had instructed Clement to put together a small working model of the engine in order to convince the skeptical that his larger invention would work. This demonstration model was two and a half feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep, about one seventh of the whole intended machine, with a crank handle on top rather than on the side, as it would have been in the full-sized Difference Engine. (It can be seen today at the Science Museum in London, and still calculates flawlessly.) Made of bronze and steel, the engine has three columns, each with six figure wheels; it can calculate equations with up to two orders of difference, and results up to six digits long.
At the end of 1832 Babbage fitted to the machine a “feedback mechanism” that physically connected two of the gear wheels.14 Babbage soon used this device to entertain his guests in a most amazing way.
Before the guests arrived, we can imagine, Babbage would set up the machine to calculate a function, such as that which counts the natural numbers from 1 to 100.15 The results column would be set to zero, the first order of difference column would be set to 1, and the second order of difference set to zero. However, the first order of difference column would be connected to the second digit wheel of the results column, so that when the results column read 99, and was turning to 100, the first order of difference column would be turned as well, changing the function being calculated.16 Instead of adding one to the results column on each crank of the handle, the Difference Engine would begin to add two.
During one of the breaks in the dancing, Babbage would invite his guests to join him in the drawing room, filled with its gleaming wood sideboards and finely upholstered settees, and rows of chairs arranged for the purpose of this demonstration. The Difference Engine was at the front of the room on a walnut stand. The fashionably dressed men and women would seat themselves before it in excited expectation.
Babbage would begin with a brief discussion of the workings of the engine, noting that it could calculate any polynomial function set into the machine, and would do so automatically with the turn of the crank handle. He would invite the ladies in the front of the room to note the figure wheels in the results c
olumn—they were all turned to zero, the ladies assented. Then Babbage would begin to crank the handle. As he cranked, he continued to speak, pointing out the results: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. He spoke of the need for his Difference Engine, the great errors that lurked in all printed tables, as he continued to crank the handle: 20, 21, 22, 23. He noted the number of parts needed for creating the machine, the incredibly refined techniques of precision manufacturing required to make so many identical pieces: 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. He described the trials and tribulations of seeking funding from the government for his invention: 58, 59, 60, 61, 62. And he intimated quite clearly that his engine would change the world: 81, 82, 83, 84, 85.
Babbage pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and mopped his sweating brow, continuing to turn the handle. He directed the ladies in the front row to pay close attention to the figure wheels. He nodded to one pretty young woman and asked her to read the numbers as they continued to appear: 91, 92, 93, 94, 95. Babbage raised his voice slightly and asked for everyone’s complete attention, as the young woman continued to count off the results: 96, 97, 98, 99, 100. Babbage stared portentously at the crowd, his sharp face and hooded eyes giving him the look of a tortoise, and turned the handle one more time: 102. The lady reading the numbers could scarcely believe it, and the rest of the crowd murmured, craning their heads to get a closer look. And the next number: 104. And the next, 106.
Babbage finally stopped turning the handle, and looked up at the silent crowd. What you just witnessed seemed almost miraculous, did it not? he asked them. It seemed like the machine would just keep counting by one for an eternity. And yet this was not what occurred. The machine suddenly changed its course and began to calculate by a new rule.
The Philosophical Breakfast Club Page 25