The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  In 1834, Georg Scheutz, a printer and the editor of a technical journal in Stockholm, read Lardner’s article in the Edinburgh Review describing Babbage’s Difference Engine. He began to try to design a Difference Engine of his own, using models made of wood, pasteboard, and wire. Three years later his son, Edvard, a student at the Royal Technological Institute, joined him and they began to build the machine. In 1837 they applied to the Swedish government for financial assistance, and were turned down. But they continued working, and by 1840 the machine was able to calculate series with terms of five figures, with one order of difference. By April 1842 the machine could calculate series with two and three orders of difference. The next year they completed a printing mechanism, and the machine was inspected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Although it reported favorably on the machine, it was left to languish at the academy for seven years.

  In 1851 the Scheutzes finally received funding from the government: 10,000 rix dollars, estimated to be about £560—with the severe condition that they must return the money if the machine was not successfully completed by the end of 1853. It was completed on time, and the Scheutzes were fêted by the king. The following year the two traveled with the machine to England and France; they were granted a British patent for the machine, and it was exhibited at the 1854 Great Exhibition in Paris, where it received a gold medal. Benjamin Gould, head of the Dudley Observatory in New York, persuaded a wealthy merchant to purchase the machine for his observatory for £1,000. Before the machine left England, a copy was made, under the supervision of the Scheutzes, by Donkin and Co. (the firm that had adjudicated the dispute between Babbage and Clement in 1829), and was purchased by the British government, for use at the registrar general’s office at Somerset House.70

  Given Babbage’s personality, one would expect that he would have been bitter that others had succeeded where he had failed, and worried about the inevitable comparison: Babbage, with the £17,000 granted by the British government and the aid of the most talented engineers of the age, had been unable to accomplish what two Swedish technicians had managed to do, by themselves, with a mere £560. Babbage, however, rose to the occasion gallantly. In a speech to the Royal Society in 1855, he praised the Scheutzes, at the same time chastising the British government for the fact that “the country of Berzelius should thus have anticipated them in giving effect to an invention which requires for its perfection the tools of nations more highly advanced in mechanical science.”71 Babbage even set his son Henry to work preparing a presentation on the machine for the British Association meeting in Glasgow in September.72 The Scheutzes were so relieved about Babbage’s generosity that when a table of logarithms calculated by their Difference Engine was published, the dedication hailed Babbage as “one of the benefactors of mankind.”73 (All did not go well for the Scheutzes: the machine turned out to be inaccurate, lacking the security devices Babbage had designed, and they both died bankrupt. The British copy of their machine is on display at the Science Museum in London.)

  Babbage’s support of the Scheutzes may not have been completely devoid of self-interest; Isambard Kingdom Brunel had convinced him that the public’s curiosity about the Scheutz Difference Engine would reawaken a desire for Babbage’s Analytical Engine.74 Babbage began to work, patiently designing parts that could be built and eventually put together to construct a finished, working machine. When his work stopped abruptly for a time, he was chastised by one of his friends, the Countess Teleki, for having committed a kind of “moral murder, and an injury to the whole human race!”75 Babbage replied testily that her conclusion “rests entirely on the hypothesis that I care for the ‘whole human race.’ ”76 Nevertheless, he did go back to work on the machine, work he continued, on and off, until his death.

  In August 1869, aged seventy-eight, Babbage attended the British Association meeting for the last time. He brought drawings and parts of the Analytical Engine with him to Exeter, hoping for something like the reception in Turin so long ago, when eager engineers and men of science crowded into his room to hear him lecture on his new invention. Babbage reported forlornly afterwards that he had sat with the drawings hung up all around his sitting room, and “The only Members of the Association who called to see those drawings were two American gentlemen.”77

  By this point, Babbage had given up attempting to construct the machine; now he was just tinkering with the designs, trying to simplify the mechanism. Countess Teleki had earlier accused him of “making the better the enemy of the good,” which had been a problem in Babbage’s earlier periods.78 Now, however, that was not the issue. Babbage’s incredible powers were fading. One friend sadly recounted that “he had lost the faculty of arranging his ideas, and of recalling them at will.”79 Babbage’s brother-in-law Edward Ryan reported to Herschel that Babbage’s memory was so bad he could not remember the founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society.80 A visitor during this period described his “large and rambling” house, with its rooms all “crammed with books, papers, and apparatus in apparent confusion.”81

  Babbage’s difficulties in concentrating led him to believe that his work was being sabotaged by street musicians, especially “organ grinders,” men who went from house to house making music and hoping for some coins in return. These men—many of them immigrants from Italy—would travel through neighborhoods holding large barrel organs. From time to time they would stop and support the organ by a hinged wooden leg. A strap around the neck would balance the instrument, leaving one hand free to turn the crank and the other to steady the organ. The organs were often out of tune, and the cranks were turned with little attention paid to the proper beat of the music. A tin cup on top of the organ or in the hand of a companion (usually a young boy, or a small trained monkey) was used to solicit payments for the performance. Many Londoners believed these street performers to be engaged in a kind of extortion, exacting payment for the promise to stop the noise and move on—a situation recognizable to inhabitants of certain urban centers today.

  Babbage lashed out, yelling at the offenders from his window, prosecuting the organ grinders in the courts, and finally publishing a pamphlet on “Street Nuisances,” which he reprinted in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. Retaliatory mobs began to follow him about, sometimes one hundred people at a time, shouting and banging on tin drums and blowing horns; dead cats were left on his doorstep, windows were broken, threats on his life were made.82 Children from the local schools would shout out his name “coupled with offensive adjuncts” whenever they passed the windows of his house.83

  Although he has been mocked or pitied by biographers for this obsession, Babbage was not alone in considering the organ grinders a public nuisance; Charles Dickens wrote to a friend that he could not write for more than half an hour without being driven to distraction by organ grinders. The brewer Michael Thomas Bass (grandson of the founder of Bass Ale), a member of Parliament, was moved to introduce a parliamentary act, the “Act for the Better Regulation of Street Music in the Metropolis,” which would give policemen the right to arrest any street performer who did not leave a neighborhood when requested by a homeowner. Bass published a book arguing for the act, including supportive letters from academics, literary, artistic, and scientific men, lawyers, and others who worked from home and were disturbed by the street musicians. Dickens contributed a letter bemoaning the “brazen performers on brazen instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, clashers of cymbals, worriers of fiddles, and bellowers of ballads.” The letter was cosigned by Alfred Tennyson, John Everett Millais, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle (who had spent £170 constructing a soundproof study in his London home), and twenty-four other prominent writers, artists, and architects.84

  Babbage’s difficulties with the organ grinders are given pride of place in Bass’s pamphlet: Bass reprinted numerous clippings from newspapers dealing with cases in which Babbage had brought a summons against a street performer, and Babbage’s name is mentioned in many of th
e included editorials on the topic. One editorial chastised the public to remember that “the services of Mr. Babbage are employed by the Government in calculations of the highest importance; these calculations require the strictest accuracy; and calm and quiet are absolutely necessary for their development.”85 Babbage was so publicly associated with the proposed act that after it passed, in July 1864, De Morgan wrote to Herschel, “Babbage’s Act has passed, and he is a public benefactor. A grinder went away from my house at the first word.”86

  Once Herschel died, Babbage followed quickly, within five months, on October 18, 1871. His son Henry was at his bedside. Babbage’s final hours were plagued by the organ grinders, as well as a “man inciting boys to make a row with an old tin pail,” as Henry later recalled. “It’s a long time coming,” Babbage muttered to his son. At last, the end came, just two months shy of his eightieth birthday.87

  As befitted his liberal politics and unconventional religious views, Babbage was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, the first public burial ground—open to both Anglicans and Dissenters—in England. Others waited for him there: his friends the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Arctic explorer Sir John Ross, the chemist Robert Brown, and the Duke of Somerset; as well as some old adversaries, including the Duke of Sussex and Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, Ada’s mother, who had argued with Babbage at the end of her daughter’s life. His son Henry, recently back from India, his friend and brother-in-law Edward Ryan, and only a handful of others attended the funeral. The Duchess of Somerset’s carriage was the only one that followed the solemn procession to the cemetery. At Babbage’s request, his brain had been removed and given to the Royal College of Surgeons. Half resides today at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the other half at the Science Museum in Kensington.

  His obituary in the Times lauded Babbage as “one of the most active and original of original thinkers.”88 Yet none of his obituary writers could restrain themselves from mentioning the gaping disparity between his great abilities and his great failures. “He nobly upheld the character of a discoverer and inventor,” one praised him. “His very failures arose from no want of industry or ability, but from excess of resolution that his aims should be at the very highest.”89 The last member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club had died, fifty-nine years after their momentous breakfasts began.

  EPILOGUE

  A NEW HORIZON

  BY THE END OF THEIR LIVES, THE MEMBERS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL Breakfast Club had seen the plans of their student days come to fruition. They had succeeded—even beyond their most optimistic dreams—in setting science on a completely different course. By doing so, they helped shape the modern world, in which science plays a starring role. The former image of the natural philosopher—an amateur, often a clergyman, collecting fossils or performing experiments in his spare hours—had been utterly transformed into that of the scientist: a professional who had been trained at the university and graduated with a degree in science, who belonged to scientific organizations and read scientific journals, and who could apply for grants to support his work. And soon he could even be a she, as women, having gotten their feet in the door of the British Association, made further inroads into the scientific profession. The British Association began admitting women as full members, starting with a Miss Bowlby of Cheltenham, in 1853, and eventually the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other nations began to do so as well.1 This new professional could hope for a paid position as a professor of a scientific field at the universities, or as a researcher in one of the new laboratories, such as the Cavendish, which had begun construction at Cambridge in the year of the death of the last members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

  It was a reluctance to embrace this professionalization that had caused many natural philosophers to reject the title “scientist.” For some time, many scientific men still felt, like Coleridge, that the amateur status of “natural philosophers” endowed their endeavors with greater nobility, and more independence; even Herschel, alone of the Philosophical Breakfast Club members, inclined toward this view for most of his life. The new magazine Nature used the new name right from its first year of publication, in 1869, hoping it would catch on. In one of its first issues a writer praised “the persevering efforts of scientists.”2 Yet the name was not commonly employed in Britain until early in the twentieth century. It was accepted sooner in America, which was always more open to new things. Indeed, the term became closely associated with American scientists, and by 1874 its English roots were forgotten, the president of the Philological Society in England referring to “scientist” as “an American barbarous trisyllable.”3 But the professionalization of the scientist happened, even against the wishes of some of the practitioners of the profession. In 1887, Nature grandly announced that scientists had finally realized that “they too are members of a great profession.”4

  The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club did not just transform the man of science into a professional scientist. They also transformed the activity of science itself. From Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell’s conviction that science required perfect accuracy in calculation, a perfection that could only be achieved by a new machine created at staggering cost, we can see the roots of modern-day science’s obsession with measurement, counting, and precision. To aid in attaining such precision, new technologies were added to the scientific toolkit, many of them invented or inspired by these men themselves: new instruments for making accurate observations, such as photometers, anemometers, tide predictors, photoheliographs; a new technology for accurately capturing and communicating observations, photography; and updated mathematical techniques for computing results out of large groups of observations, including the Continental calculus, analytical mathematics, and statistics.

  From the Philosophical Breakfast Club’s shared belief that “truth cannot conflict with truth,” the modern view that scientific truth need not be held hostage to religion was derived. In 1874 John Tyndall, Faraday’s successor at the Royal Institution, went even further than Herschel and Whewell would have liked, drawing a clear line of separation between the two realms; in a speech he delivered to the British Association meeting in Belfast praising Darwin’s work, Tyndall concluded that “religious sentiment” should not be permitted even to “intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command.”5

  During the lives of the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, they saw the scientist’s very subject itself shift slightly: it was still the natural world, of course, but with an eye to making practical improvements in the lives of the people, following Bacon’s exhortation that “knowledge is power,” that this power should be used for “the relief of man’s estate.” It was no longer only the manufacturers and industrialists who concerned themselves with making useful objects; the scientist, too, began to believe that he or she must also aim research toward the public good, even if the immediate practical value of a particular scientific investigation was not always apparent. And scientists, and those interested in what scientists do, began to concern themselves with describing and defining proper scientific method; this method was very often seen as the evidence-based, inductive method of Bacon, and not something like Ricardo’s purely hypothetical, deductive method in economics. A whole discipline studying the methods scientists have used in the past, and are using today, as well as the discoveries made with those methods—the history and philosophy of science—can be said to have emerged as a robust subject of study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.

  The scientist now looked for international cooperation in large-scale research projects, even as international competition sometimes sped up the pace of progress. He or she studied science at the university, worked in laboratories, joined scientific associations, read and published articles in scientific journals, and could make a living doing it. By the time Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell had died, the
“scientist,” and science itself, were very much configured along the lines they had drawn at their philosophical breakfasts at Cambridge.

  JAMES CLERK MAXWELL, born the same year as the British Association, in 1831, epitomized this new professional “scientist.” After studying at the University of Edinburgh, Maxwell arrived at Cambridge in 1850 with a letter of introduction to Whewell from Forbes, who told the Master of Trinity that the young man “is not a little uncouth in manners, but withal one of the most original young men I have ever met with.”6 He graduated from Trinity as second wrangler, and tied for first in the Smith’s Prize competition. Maxwell received a fellowship from Trinity, but soon left when he was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College, London, returning to Cambridge in 1871 as the first Cavendish Professor of Physics, where he oversaw the construction of a new facility for conducting scientific experiments: the Cavendish Laboratory. Maxwell was trained in mathematics and physics at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and spent the rest of his life employed as a scientist, earning a living by conducting scientific research, managing a laboratory, and teaching the next generation of young scientists.

  Maxwell played an active role in the scientific professional organizations. A paper on “Oval Curves” that he wrote at age fourteen was the first of many presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh—it had to be read by Forbes, as Maxwell was deemed too young for the podium. Immediately after graduating from Cambridge, in 1855, he presented his groundbreaking paper “Faraday’s Lines of Force” to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He was a member of the British Association, serving as its president in 1870. Maxwell also became a fellow of the Royal Society of London, which awarded him its Rumford Medal for his work showing that any given color sensation may be produced by combinations of rays taken from three parts of the spectrum, that is, from three so-called primary colors; and for experiments that seemed to confirm the hypothesis that color blindness was due to the viewer’s insensitivity to one of the three primary colors.