The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In the Plurality of Worlds, Whewell referred to Owen’s work and his claim that seemingly useless organs were the by-products of a “general plan,” or “archetypes” of the Creation.117 Just as the presence of seemingly useless male nipples was no evidence against God’s intelligent design, so too, Whewell now argued, the existence of unpopulated planets was no evidence against it. The planets and stars were “brought into being by vast and general laws”—laws particularly aimed at creating earth as a seat of life, but that also resulted in the lifeless stars and planets. As Whewell put it rather picturesquely, “The planets and the stars are the lumps which have flown from the potter’s wheel of the Great Worker.”118

  Whewell argued further that the existence of intelligent life on only one planet was not a “waste,” because man is a creation worthy of the whole universe. Not man as he is, surely, but man as he may be—with all of his moral and intellectual potential unfolded into actuality. “The elevation of millions of intellectual, moral, religious, spiritual creatures, to a destiny so prepared, consummated, and developed, is no unworthy occupation of all the capacities of space, time, and matter.”119

  Whewell elaborated on this point in his final chapter of the Plurality book, which contained his speculations on the future history of man on earth. Here he suggested that the search for life on other worlds might blind us to the importance of working to make life better for those beings here on earth. He called for a “universal and perpetual peace” on earth, in which the full capabilities of men and women could be nurtured by moral and intellectual education. While finishing the book he wrote to his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, admitting, “I believe, notwithstanding all the deeds of violence which we have seen committed, that a ‘project of perpetual peace’ is by no means a mere dream, if it be based on received International Law.”120 A few years earlier, Whewell had translated a classic work by Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist who laid the foundations for international law based on a theory of natural law. At the end of his life, Whewell would bequeath £100,000 for the first professorship in International Law and scholarships for eight students in the subject. The “Whewell Professorship in International Law,” established for the purpose of devising “such measures as may tend to … extinguish war between nations,” still exists at Cambridge today.121

  Unfortunately, few people paid attention to the political program Whewell was endorsing. Instead, he was mocked; his argument for the special nature of man, and his worth as the sole end of Creation, invited the famous sneer that his book tried to prove that “through all infinity, there was nothing as great as the Master of Trinity.”122

  JONES WAS worrying more about the future of a man than the future of mankind. Just as the Tithe Commission’s work had finished, there were rumors that the Haileybury College was going to be shut down, and in that case Jones would be without any income whatever. Jones and his wife had not saved any of the money he had earned during the flush years of holding both positions—as always, Jones’s motto seems to have been carpe diem—and his fears about the future began to exacerbate Jones’s health problems. “Nemalgia,” severe nerve pain, especially of his face, was found to be caused by a tumor. One of his eyes needed to be surgically removed; Jones told Herschel after the procedure that he did not miss it as much as he had thought he would.123 Whewell and Herschel started lobbying their influential government friends to wrangle a pension from the government for Jones as a reward for his work on the Tithe Commission; Lord Monteagle, in particular, promised to do something for Jones. Finally, at Christmas 1854, the East India Company granted Jones a yearly pension of £400. Jones did not enjoy the fruits of this effort on his behalf, however; he died soon afterwards, on Friday, January 26, 1855, at the age of sixty-four.

  Herschel, still hard at work at the mint, was so ill and exhausted that he could not make the trip to Haileybury to visit his friend while he was dying.124 Two days before Jones’s death, Herschel had written to his daughter Caroline that he felt completely “broken down.”125 But he did rouse himself enough to join Whewell in attending the funeral, which took place in Amwell Village, two miles from the Haileybury College.126 The first of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had gone to his grave, breaking a circle of fellowship that had existed for nearly half a century. As a memorial to his departed friend, Whewell took on the task of editing a collection of his still unpublished lectures and essays, his “Literary Remains.” In his heartfelt preface to the work, Whewell recalled the qualities that endeared Jones to so many: “an extraordinary share of wit, fluency, good spirits and good humor.”127 Speaking of his later life, Whewell could not resist noting that “his personal appearance, in youth bright and vigorous, afterwards retained its vigor in a more massive form”; but one that did little to diminish his “intellectual gladiatorship.”128 Jones’s “inductive nature,” Whewell reminisced poignantly, “was nourished by the sympathy of some of the companions of his college days. The Novum Organum was one of their favorite subjects of discussion.”129 To the last, Jones would be remembered for being one of the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

  Whewell was not to be spared more suffering. In December of that year, Cordelia, who was only fifty-two years old, died. Theirs had been a happy marriage. Jane Carlyle would later recall Cordelia’s obvious adoration of her “Harmonious Blacksmith,”130 and this adoration was mutual: Whewell had once told Jones that he read poetry to Cordelia every night (“which at any rate prevents it from putting me to sleep,” he sheepishly admitted).131 Their marriage went down in history as a famously good one; it was even cited as an example of “happiness in wedded life” in a book called The Art of Home-Making in City and Country, published at the end of the century.132

  Cordelia’s death, especially coming so soon after the loss of Jones, struck a hard blow for Whewell. He was so bereft that he asked Sedgwick, with him at Cambridge, to write the Herschels with the news for him. Life was now, Whewell admitted, “emptied of all its value.”133 Cordelia had been the moral example Whewell sought when he married her; he told her sister Susan that “we shared our thoughts from hour to hour, and if I did anything good and right and wise it was because I had her goodness and rightmindedness and wisdom to prompt and direct me.”134

  Cordelia was laid to rest on Christmas Eve. Immediately after the morning chapel service, her coffin was carried into the chapel of Trinity, and the funeral service read. She was buried in the College cemetery. Her will left £10,000 to Trinity, to be used as her husband saw fit.135 Whewell turned to poetry for comfort, as he had so many times in his life. He composed a series of elegiacs, a classical form of funereal verse famously employed by Ovid in the seventh century BCE. In lines describing his leaving the gravesite after the funeral, Whewell wrote, “And with leaden feet to our home, to our life, we return us; / Home that no longer is home, life that no longer is life.”

  Within a few weeks Whewell had to return to his official functions as vice-chancellor of the university. In his highly emotional state, he feared the reaction of the undergraduates, who were prone to hoot and jeer at Whewell whenever he served in that capacity. The students were inclined to ridicule anyone serving as vice-chancellor—they were often ill-mannered in those days—but they particularly liked to bother Whewell, whom they saw as an ultra-authoritarian, requiring undergraduates to stand in his presence at the teas and other social events given by the master, and enforcing college rules against owning dogs and walking on the lawns. However, the students had an underlying affection for Whewell, and an appreciation of his suffering. On January 25, exactly one year after Jones’s death, when Whewell attended the Senate House for the conferring of degrees, the undergraduates “with instinctive good taste received him with profound silence, and then suddenly burst into enthusiastic cheering.” Whewell was overcome by this expression of sympathy, and he began to weep.136

  12

  NATURE DECODED

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF JULY, DURING A PARTICULARLY COLD AND sunless summer.
1 Babbage was spending most of his time in his candlelit study, poring over a letter written in cipher. Slowly the letter’s content began to emerge, like a message written in invisible ink gradually revealing its secrets when held in front of a fire. But having deciphered the missive, Babbage was still at a loss to explain it. “I have been informed by the lunacy man here,” it began, “that my letters are in my father’s solicitor’s hands and I am hurt and indignant at this further proof of the watin [wanton] way in which you act towards mio [me].…” It continued in a more peculiar, and threatening, manner:

  I will now enter into no arrangement unless your whole government is upset[,] unless Palmers[ton] Graham Russell and Aberdeen are all kicked out summarily.… I will enter into no arrangement unless every one of those not only are walked out of office but all who are members of the house of commons cease to be so, and unless all cease to appear in public life at all—if ever you ask one of them to your table or house on any occasion I will cease to be anything to you—.… I again repeat to you I will be nothing to you unless I always give a negative free voice on all cabinet appointment and all house hold appointments!2

  Babbage had been asked by a barrister, Mr. A. W. Kinglake, who was working for the father of the letter writer, to decipher a stack of correspondence, which would be used as evidence in a court case involving the young man; the father hoped that the jury would recognize his son’s insanity, which had already been accepted by “18 medical gentlemen.”3

  The case was notable enough that Charles Dickens covered it for the magazine Household Narrative of Current Events. A Commission of Lunacy was convened in July 1854 at St. Clement’s Inn for the purpose of inquiring into the state of mind of Captain Jonathan Childe, son of Mr. William Lacon Childe, of Kinlet Hall, Staffordshire. The young man had been detained in various lunatic asylums since manifesting the signs of insanity in 1838, when he was in the Twelfth Royal Lancers, a cavalry regiment of the British army. At that time he was “seized with a delusion that the Queen had an affection for him; after her marriage he persisted in asserting that she loved him only—the marriage with Prince Albert was a ‘sham.’ ” The belief that one was going to marry the queen was a common enough delusion that it was mentioned in a textbook of the time outlining the “hints of insanity.”4 Childe had come to the notice of the authorities after he began to “stalk” the queen, in the sense of the term first used by William Makepeace Thackeray around this time: sitting opposite her box at the opera, following her around in the parks, and sending her anonymous letters.5

  This lunacy commission had been instigated by the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, an advocacy group hoping to show that Captain Childe had been improperly confined. Their case was hindered, however, by the evidence entered into the court showing that, since being detained, the young man had spent much of his time writing letters in cipher, which, as Dickens delicately put it, “have been ascertained to be declarations of his continued love for the Queen.”6 (In fact, not only were they slightly threatening, but they were crude and pornographic as well.) Captain Childe’s father thanked Babbage for deciphering the letters and also for giving evidence at the hearing; as the solicitor of the family later told Babbage, their case was greatly strengthened by the illustriousness of his name, as well as “the clear and learned explanation which you gave of the principles by which you had arrived at the certainty of the discovery of the key to the cipher.”7 An editorial in the Times lauded Babbage for his brilliance in breaking the cipher in the Childe case.8

  THERE WAS MUCH talk in the newspapers in those days about ciphers. Certainly the topic was not a new one. Codes and ciphers have been used for thousands of years by kings, queens, and generals trying to keep their communications secret. Even men of science have resorted, at times, to ciphers, as a way of temporarily hiding their discoveries while ensuring themselves credit for their priority later on.

  Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, codes and ciphers are not, strictly speaking, the same. In a code, a word or phrase is replaced with a different word, phrase, or number or symbol. So, for instance, a general might receive the message “Go home,” which he knows is a previously agreed-upon code phrase for “Attack the enemy fortress.” A cipher works by replacing letters rather than words or phrases. One cipher might require replacing every letter with the letter that comes after it: a becomes b, b becomes c, and so forth. In this cipher the “plain text,” or the original phrase, “attack the enemy fortress,” would be translated into the “cipher text” “buubdl uif fofnz gpsusftt.” Another kind of cipher is the transposition cipher, in which plain text is encrypted by moving small pieces of the message around. A simple form of this is the anagram, in which the letters of a plain text are scrambled and need to be reassembled in proper order for the message to be understood. In 1610, Galileo sent an anagram to Kepler: “smaismanilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras.” Kepler, who was working on charting the movements of Mars, believed that Galileo had observed two moons of the planet, as he unscrambled the anagram to make this message in Latin: “salue umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.” (“Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars.”) The message, however, really conveyed Galileo’s observation of the rings of Saturn, which he did not recognize as rings, but believed to be bulges on either side of the planet: “Altissimum planetum tergeminum observavi”—“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form.”9

  In Bacon’s time, diplomats routinely sent messages in cipher; learning the art of encryption was part of the training of future statesmen. Bacon himself was well versed in the art; his brother Anthony, known to be a British spy working in France, often passed letters to Francis, sometimes in cipher, and many believe that Francis too worked as a secret agent at times, sending his own encrypted messages.10 In his work De Augmentis, the Latin translation of a longer version of his Advancement of Learning, Bacon wrote on the importance of ciphers, and invented one of his own, in which each letter of the plain text is replaced by some combination of five a’s and b’s. Bacon’s interest in ciphers would later spawn an entire industry of conspiracy theorists convinced that Bacon was the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, and that he had “encrypted” those works with his secret story as the illegitimate son and heir of Queen Elizabeth I, only nominally the “Virgin Queen.”11

  In the late 1830s, public interest in ciphers was revitalized by a new invention: the electric telegraph, which transmitted electric signals over wires, enabling speedy long-distance communication for the first time. In 1837, Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone—who, like Babbage, was obsessed with ciphers and codes—joined with another physicist, William Cooke, to invent the first electric telegraph in Great Britain. Their system built upon the discovery of the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted that electric current in a wire generates a magnetic field that can deflect a compass needle. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph used this principle, as well as the later invention of the electromagnet, to send signals through a wire resulting in motions of one or more needles that could be translated into alphabetical symbols, spelling out the message. By the early 1840s the Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph had been installed at numerous stations of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway.

  At around the same time, in the United States, Samuel Morse was developing his own system of electric telegraphy, in which a series of short and long elements, known as dots and dashes, were used as a substitute alphabet; these dots and dashes could be transmitted over wires via electrical impulses. Eventually the Morse telegraph would take over in Europe, even in England, where it displaced the Cooke-Wheatstone model.

  Morse code was not a cipher, in the sense that it did not encrypt a message that was safe from being understood by others. Rather, it was an alternative alphabet, one made up of dots and dashes. To send a message by telegraph required giving it to the telegraph operator, who would read it and translate it into the Morse alphabet. The message’s meaning would be clear to the operator se
nding it, as well as to the operator on the receiving end, and to anyone who happened to intercept the message who could read Morse code. This was worrisome to people sending secret business communications or very personal information. A newspaper article of the time on telegraphy lamented “the violation of all secrecy” felt by those who sent telegrams, and called for the development of a “simple yet secure cipher” that would enable coded messages to be sent and received, but not understood by the operators.12 People began to experiment with constructing ciphers that could be used for this purpose. Wheatstone would go on to invent a cipher that became known as “Playfair’s cipher,” because his friend Lyon Playfair lobbied loudly for its adoption by the War Office.13

  Interest in cryptology extended even to everyday life. Young lovers, forbidden to express their affections publicly, and often even prohibited from meeting, were afraid to send letters that could be intercepted by their parents. Instead, they corresponded by placing encrypted messages in the personal columns of newspapers, called “agony columns.” Babbage, Wheatstone, and Playfair liked to get together and scan the columns, trying to decipher the contents, which were often risqué. One time, Wheatstone deciphered a message from a young man, studying at Oxford, begging his young lover to run off with him to Gretna Green, the village just over the border of Scotland famous for hosting the “runaway marriages” of parties under twenty-one years old without parental consent (which was required in England). Wheatstone playfully placed his own message in the next day’s column, written in the same cipher, counseling the couple against taking this rash and irrevocable step. The next edition of the paper contained a message from the young lady, this time unencrypted: “Dear Charlie, write no more. Our cipher is discovered!”14 The three men had a good chuckle, and Babbage saved the clippings for his growing collection of newspaper ciphers.