The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  87 Quoted in Swade, The Difference Engine, p. 216.

  88 Anonymous, “The Late Charles Babbage, Esq.”

  89 “Charles Babbage,” in Nature 5 (1871–72): 28–29, quoted in Collier, The Little Engines That Could’ve, p. 11.

  EPILOGUE: A NEW HORIZON

  1 On Miss Bowlby, see Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years, p. 149n.

  2 Anonymous, “Notes,” p. 463.

  3 See Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” p. 76.

  4 Anonymous, “News: Professor Tyndall and the Scientific Movement,” p. 218.

  5 Tyndall, Address.

  6 Quoted in Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 20.

  7 Maxwell, “Experiments on Colour as Perceived by the Eye,” p. 287.

  8 See letters from Maxwell to R. B. Lichfield, June 6, 1855, and July 4, 1856, in Campbell and Garnett, eds., The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, pp. 215, 261.

  9 Quoted in Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell, p. 108.

  10 See Siegal, Innovation in Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory, p. 43. (However, Siegal incorrectly characterizes both Herschel and Whewell as proposing a non-Baconian, non-inductive scientific method.)

  11 Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.”

  12 See Longair, “James Clerk Maxwell, Scotland’s Greatest Physicist.”

  13 Maxwell, “Whewell’s Writings and Correspondence,” p. 206.

  14 Whewell to Jones, August 4, 1821, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 43. For a lovely discussion of the image of the romantic man of science in the generation prior to the Philosophical Breakfast Club, see Holmes, The Age of Wonder.

  15 Herschel to Whewell, October 17, 1826, copy in RS: HS 20.240. Here Herschel is paraphrasing a comment made by Isaac Newton at the end of his life.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ARCHIVES

  Whewell Collection, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (WP)

  John Herschel Papers, Royal Society of London (RS: HS)

  Charles Babbage Collection, British Library (BL)

  Isaac Todhunter Papers, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge

  John Herschel Papers, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge

  Herschel Manuscripts, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (TXU)

  Herschel’s Experimental Notebooks, Science Museum, London, MS 478.

  WEB RESOURCES

  The Darwin Correspondence Project, director Jim Secord, online at www.darwinproject.ac.uk.

  The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, project editor Larry J. Schaaf, online at www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.

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