The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  More ambitiously, the Great Exhibition was meant to highlight the natural theology and Baconian philosophy that the prince had learned from his reading of the works of Herschel, Whewell, and others. He encapsulated this philosophy in the speech he gave announcing the upcoming exhibition: “Man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs His creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer nature to his use—himself a divine instrument.”48

  Part of man’s purpose on this earth was to use his divinely given reason to understand God’s Book of Nature; he was also to use this knowledge to “conquer nature,” to provide practical benefit for mankind through science, manufacturing, and the arts. The Great Exhibition would give mankind the opportunity to see how far it had come in fulfilling God’s (and Bacon’s) mandate.

  The Great Exhibition took place in Joseph Paxton’s huge Crystal Palace, a greenhouse-type structure made of iron frames holding over 900,000 square feet of glass panes. Paxton had designed the building in just ten days, with the help of the structural engineer Charles Fox. The chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the son of Babbage’s friend Marc Isambard Brunel, was on the committee that oversaw the construction. The building was three times the length of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at 1,848 feet long by 454 feet wide, and tall enough to enclose a group of beloved great elms in its Hyde Park location. Once designed, it went up quickly, taking less than eight months to build the iron frame and then delicately maneuver the nearly 300,000 panes of glass into place.49 As Babbage, full of admiration for the structure and its speed of construction, crowed, the structure “arose as if by magic.”50 The satirical magazine Punch designated it derogatorily “the Crystal Palace,” and the name stuck.51

  In many ways the building was a sign of its times. The Industrial Revolution had enabled the cost-efficient manufacturing of cast-iron girders, columns, and sash bars that were interchangeable and so could be produced on a large scale. And Ricardo’s principle of free trade had recently led to the removal of an excise tax on glass, which allowed a huge, mostly glass structure to be constructed without crippling tax duties.52

  It was the first time such a huge iron and glass building was constructed. Critics warned that so much glass would be prone to crack and break during a storm, such as the tremendous hailstorm in the summer of 1846, which had shattered windows throughout London, including at Buckingham Palace.53 Others worried that the building would collapse under the weight of the spectators. Experiments were run during the construction phase: one of the galleries was installed a few feet above ground level, and the workmen were instructed to jump up and down, but nothing happened. Then a detachment of soldiers was paraded over it; still, nothing happened. Finally, numerous boxes containing thirty-six loose sixty-eight-pound cannonballs were rolled around the floor and still the building stood firm. Two days before the opening of the exhibition, another ferocious hailstorm struck. Not a single pane of glass was broken.54

  The Great Exhibition hosted more than seventeen thousand exhibitors, showcasing more than 100,000 objects, divided into five classes: raw materials, machinery, manufactures, fine arts, and the always intriguing “miscellaneous.”55 Over the five months of the event, more people gathered together than were ever found in one place in London. Six million visitors were recorded, more than one third of the whole population of Britain. Many arrived by railway, often taking their first train ride. Thomas Cook, who had started organizing train tours throughout England in 1841, planned special excursions to the Hyde Park site of the Great Exhibition that were extremely successful; of the six million visitors, 150,000 had arrived on a Cook tour.56

  Tickets to the exhibition were not inexpensive, at least not for the working poor who came to see it in droves. The first two days the charge was a hefty £1, thereafter five shillings a day until the May 24 (Queen Victoria’s birthday), after which laborers were admitted at one shilling (still a day’s wages for some of them). A season’s ticket could be had for three guineas. The profits of the exhibition and the eventual sale of the Crystal Palace came to £200,000. Intent on using the Great Exhibition funds to continue the education of the British public, Prince Albert purchased the eighty-acre Kensington Gore estate, on which he built a precinct of culture: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the British Museum. This zone became known as “Albertropolis.”57

  Across London, souvenirs galore were available memorializing the exhibition: papier-mâché blotters, letter openers, and cigar boxes emblazoned with the image of the Crystal Palace; handkerchiefs printed with caricatures of the main participants, especially Prince Albert; there were even gloves with maps printed on them so that non-English-speaking visitors could have their route to the Crystal Palace traced out for them in the palms of their hands.58

  Visitors would enter the central axis of the Crystal Palace, called the “nave,” as in a church. Walking through it, the crowd passed the huge crystal fountain, made by Osler of Birmingham. Twenty-seven feet high, with four tons of pale pink glass faceted and carved, the fountain jetted water high into the air. It was hot inside the Crystal Palace—it was a greenhouse, after all—for it was a particularly warm summer. Visitors could quench their thirst with tea, lemonade, mineral water, ices, or the free water fountain. But they could not buy alcohol—the commissioners had decided that selling it would not be prudent, given the large numbers of working poor who were expected to visit the exhibition.59

  British technological might was visible everywhere: Talbot’s photographic process; the electric telegraph system, entire railway engines and rolling stock; the eight-cylinder printing press used by the Times; calico-printing machines run by one man and a boy, which produced four-color prints in the same time it used to take two hundred men; the first prototype of a facsimile machine. Nasmyth’s steam hammer was there, as was a Bramah lock. First made in 1784, Joseph Bramah’s locks were the first commercially produced cylinder locks to offer good security against picking. For fifty years the company had a “challenge lock” in their shop window, offering two hundred guineas to the first person to open it without a key. A. C. Hobbs, an American locksmith, claimed the prize at the Great Exhibition, a feat that took fifty hours spread over sixteen days.

  The Americans sent a McCormick reaping machine and Samuel Colt’s “revolving gun,” with its interchangeable parts, as well as a sewing machine, an artificial leg, a bed that could be carried in a suitcase, and a coffin designed to enable a funeral to be postponed until distant relatives could arrive.60 Queen Victoria was said to be most taken by a bed that ejected its occupant at a set time in the morning, thus rousing even the most determined late-sleeper.61

  Charlotte Brontë, who had published her novel Shirley two years earlier (and the more popular Jane Eyre two years before that), described one of her five visits to the Great Exhibition:

  Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth—as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect.62

  Punch, originally so dismissive of the whole enterprise, now raved that it was “the greatest and most cheerful, the brightest and most splendid show that eyes h
ad ever looked on since the creation of the world.”63

  BABBAGE, HERSCHEL, Jones, and Whewell were drawn to the Crystal Palace, as they inevitably would be. Jones’s work on the Tithe Commission had finished up, and he was back in Haileybury full time. At age sixty-one, suffering from numerous maladies, Jones was too ill during the summer of 1851 to make it back to London for the Great Exhibition until the end of its run; indeed, in August Herschel wrote his wife (prematurely, as it turned out) that Jones’s death was expected imminently. Yet on the day of the closing ceremony on October 15, Jones was visiting Herschel in his rented rooms in Harley Street, and the two men attended together. (Herschel told Margaret that night that she should not regret missing the event, as it was “very stupid.”)64

  Whewell went to the Crystal Palace several times; Cordelia went once with their niece Kate Marshall. At the close of the exhibition, Whewell was asked personally by Prince Albert to deliver a lecture drawing out the “lessons to be learned of philosophy and science” from the event, as Whewell put it in a letter to his sister Ann.65 (Whewell thought highly of the prince’s interest in science—and his reliance on Whewell as a scientific expert—but found the prince to be “handsome and somewhat inanimate” in person.)66 Using a metaphor inspired by the photographic images and equipment that had been among the displays, Whewell described the total contents of the Crystal Palace as resembling an ideal picture made by a photographer who had somehow brought within his field of view the whole “surface of the globe, with all its workshops and markets,” its technology and its arts. The whole history of civilization could be seen at a glance; in this sense, Whewell gushed, the Great Exhibition obliterated space and time—turning its visitors into travelers across lands and ages in a blink of an eye.

  One lesson to be learned by comparing different stages of civilization, Whewell argued, was that in less advanced countries, “the arts are mainly exercised to gratify the tastes of the few; with us, to satisfy the wants of the many.… There, Art labors for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less.” The wondrous workshops of France, with their exquisite tapestries and delicate porcelains, served kings and aristocrats, not the everyday needs of the people, while the British manufacturing concerns made popular goods at popular prices, to be enjoyed by those at all levels of society. With Bacon in mind, as always, Whewell implied that since knowledge is power, societies must put that knowledge to work for the good of all, not just for those more privileged few.

  In this lecture, which was later published in England and then reprinted around the world, Whewell used his term “scientist,” once again juxtaposing it to “artist,” noting that the Great Exhibition was a grand gathering of “artists and scientists,” as well as of art and science.67 Up to this point, the term had still not become widely used; even Babbage, in his pamphlet on the Great Exhibition, deplored the fact that “science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognized even as a class. Our language itself contains no single term by which their occupation can be expressed.”68 Babbage’s dismissal of Whewell’s term may have been motivated by his continued enmity toward Whewell, even almost twenty years since the publication of Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. But he was not the only one who disparaged the name “scientist.” Whewell had used the term in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. In the margin of his copy of the book, Sedgwick jotted “better die of want than bestialize our tongues by such barbarisms!”69 (The term was considered “barbaric” by some linguistic purists because it was a Greek-Latin hybrid.)70 It would still be decades more before Whewell’s term became so commonly employed that we are shocked to discover it did not exist at all before 1833.

  Babbage, living in the center of London not far from Hyde Park, went to the Crystal Palace frequently, often escorting Ada Lovelace or the Duke of Wellington, both of whom would die the following year. (Lovelace died at age thirty-six, in terrible agony, of uterine cancer, denied morphine at the end by her mother, who felt that Lovelace could better expiate her moral sins through intense suffering.) On one occasion, the popular duke was mobbed by his adoring public, and he had to be removed by the police for his own protection.71 Babbage was in his element here at the Crystal Palace, relishing its display of manufactured goods, calling the exhibition an “industrial feast”72—though he thought that the commissioners should have stuck to their original plan of marking prices on the exhibitions. This would have allowed visitors to gain a just estimate of the commercial value of the different displays. Additionally, as Babbage pointed out, it would have served a profitable purpose: some visitors might have liked to purchase a shawl or a dress or some other useful and beautiful souvenir of their visit.73

  But Babbage could not hide his bitterness over the fact that the model of his Difference Engine—“the greatest intellectual triumph of [the] century,” as he put it—had not been chosen for display, and that he had not even been invited as one of the commissioners choosing and judging the exhibits.74 After the exhibition closed, Babbage would write yet another ill-tempered book in which he would rant and rave about his exclusion from the Great Exhibition, and about the sorry state of British science. “Great nations,” he lectured his readers, “are often governed by very small people.” Babbage realized that he would be called “a cantankerous fellow” for writing the book, but at this point in his life, at sixty-one years old, he seemed to relish the role.75 Darwin suspected that Babbage’s bark was worse than his bite, but most people by now accepted Babbage’s mis-anthropy.76 Later Babbage would discover that his name had been put forth as a possible Chief Industrial Commissioner, but that someone in the government had squelched it, reasonably noting that Babbage was “so utterly hostile” to those in power that he would be unlikely to work well with them, something that would be necessary in bringing off such an extravagant festival.77

  Herschel had been tapped as one of the commissioners, and so he was forced to be at the exhibition nearly every day. As a member of the Commission on Scientific Instruments, Herschel met with representatives from all over the world to discuss science and technology, answered piles of letters and inquiries, and judged contests in his category. This was a hardship for Herschel—he would have been happy for Babbage to serve in his place—particularly since most of his time was taken up by his work for the Royal Mint, where he had been appointed master at the end of 1850.

  On his fifty-fifth birthday, March 7, 1847, Herschel had finally put the finishing touches on his massive book Cape Observations, after ten years of labor. His aunt Caroline had lived just long enough to see this culmination of her nephew’s lifework in astronomy (she died ten months later, at the age of ninety-seven). Herschel was finally a “free man,” as Sedgwick joked to him.78 He felt free, but old—he was tired, often ill, and suffering from frequent migraines, many of which were preceded by hemiopsy, or half-blindness, where half of the visual field is covered in darkness or dark lines. Herschel realized that his most productive years as an original scientific researcher were behind him, and began to think that he should take on some kind of public service, as a way to use his time profitably.

  Herschel had asked Jones, at that time still hard at work at the Tithe Commission, whether he knew of any appropriate position. Jones at first demurred, saying that “I had rather see you in your grave!” than be enmeshed in the politics and machinations of an official government post. Jones made one exception: “The only thing fit for you is Mastership of the Mint.”79 The more he thought about it, the more Jones liked the idea of his friend in the position formerly held by his great predecessor, Isaac Newton. Using his contacts in the government, Jones managed to get Herschel appointed to the post, telling Whewell, “It is really a glorious thing for many reasons.”80 Babbage later enviously admitted that he had hoped for the position himself.81

  At first Herschel was gratified by the appointment. Soon, however, he began to rue the day he had accepted it. Newton had spent his tenure at the mint catching and prosecuting counterfeiter
s.82 Later the Master of the Mint became a political office, held by a member of the Cabinet with influence on the financial policies of the government. However, an act of Parliament right before Herschel took up the post changed it to a more administrative position.83 Instead of spending the bulk of his time arguing for particular economic and monetary policies—such as his idea of changing British currency to the decimal system, proposing to replace the pound sterling with a “100-millet” coin called a “Rose” or a “Rupee”84—Herschel found himself in charge of a massive restructuring of the workforce of the mint, one that was not only time-consuming and energy-draining, but was bound to make him unpopular with the workers, many of whom lost privileges such as the right to use the mint’s printing equipment for private contract work after hours. During this period there was such a high demand for silver and gold that the mint was having trouble coining enough, and Herschel was forced to put the workers on twelve-hour shifts, another hugely unpopular measure. Rather than being in the position of an “elder statesman” of the government, Herschel found himself besieged by tedious administrative and personnel negotiations. It was just about the most stressful occupation one could imagine for someone with Herschel’s sensitive and “over-excitable” tendencies.85