The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Perhaps hollow-earth theory was not completely mad, given that Halley lived in an age when even the most educated minds were still getting to grips with the nature of the universe. It was entirely sensible to speculate about what might lie beneath our feet. Altogether odder, however, was the theory put forward by Sir William Herschel, one of the most distinguished astronomers of all time.

  Born Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel in Germany in 1738, he was actually a professional musician and an obsessive amateur astronomer. The word “obsessive” barely does his hobby justice. Nothing could keep Herschel from his telescope, not even when it was so cold his ink froze. His energy was inexhaustible; working regular shifts of sixteen hours, rubbing his hands and face with raw onion to keep himself awake, he completed four detailed surveys of the northern sky and catalogued 2,500 nebulae, more or less inventing stellar astronomy along the way. He still found time to discover infrared radiation, make more than 400 mirrors and sell over sixty complete telescopes to other astronomers. He also discovered the first new planet in recorded history. In the tradition of royal brown-nosing, he wanted to name it Georgium Sidius in honour of his patron King George III. You can imagine his face when he found out it was actually going to be called Uranus. Herschel refused to call it anything other than Georgium Sidius for the rest of his life.

  Unfortunately, Herschel didn’t confine himself to the collection and publication of vast quantities of observational data and the manufacture of sundry astronomical requisites – he also liked to theorize. Herschel knew that the surface of the Sun was hot – too hot to support life – but he also believed that beneath the Sun’s surface lay a more temperate land where intelligent beings lived. These beings, Herschel revealed, lived in a society very much like our own. He found at least a couple of scientists who agreed with him, including the famous French physicist Dominique Arago. As recently as 1952, the German Godfried Buren reprised Herchel’s argument, hypothesizing that inside our hollow Sun lurked a cool region with a lush vegetation. Buren was so pleased with himself that he offered a huge cash prize to anyone who could disprove his theory. When the German astronomical society did precisely that, Buren refused to pay up, until they took him to court and won.

  Another unorthodox theory in Herschel’s day concerned the planet Venus. As the features of Venus are permanently obscured by dense cloud, for many years it was assumed that it rained a lot – a bit like Manchester only nearer the Sun. Another puzzling feature of Venus is that, like the Moon, it is sometimes observed as a crescent, but with the dark area slightly illuminated. The German Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, professor of astronomy at Munich University, found the cause of this phenomenon. It was not, as most people now believe, the result of refraction in the planet’s atmosphere; it was due to the Venusian custom of setting the forests ablaze to celebrate the succession of their new emperor. Gruithuisen went on to argue energetically in favour of advanced life on the Moon and on the insides of various hollow planets and wrote various papers on the subject including “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings” in which he claimed that he had seen roads, cities and a star-shaped temple on the Moon. Still, he got to have a small lunar crater named after him.

  Gruithuisen was not alone in being sympathetic to the idea of civilized races on our near neighbours in the solar system. Christian Huygens, the Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist who beat Robert Hooke to patenting the first balance-spring clock, speculated that the planet Jupiter was blessed with large supplies of hemp. How did he know this? The clues lay in Jupiter’s moons. According to a fashionable theory of the day, the Earth’s Moon was provided by God as a navigational guide for seafarers. As Jupiter had four moons, it followed that the planet had four times as many sailors. And where there were lots of sailors, Huygens reasoned, there were lots of boats. Lots of boats implied lots of sails and ropes to work the sails. And rope required loads of hemp . . . QED.

  More recently, the twentieth-century American astronomer Perceval Lowell, who endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, studied Mars for fifteen years, mapping the “canals” he could see on the surface. His books Mars and the Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life, now serious embarrassments for Lowell’s heirs, were hugely influential on astronomers and scientists alike, including Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi, who both claimed they had received radio signals from Martians.

  A more recent controversial addition to the debate about extra-terrestrial beings was contributed by an argumentative Yorkshireman called Fred Hoyle. It was he who coined the expression “big bang” to describe the theory that the universe was created by a huge explosion.11 Hoyle was a world-renowned astronomer and one of the most important cosmologists of the twentieth century. He made major contributions to several branches of astrophysics, including the origin of the solar system, the evolution of stars, the origin of cosmic rays, the mystery of dust in interstellar space, the formation of the Milky Way, radio sources, pulsars and quasars. Unfortunately, as his obituary in the journal Nature pointed out, he also “put his name to much rubbish”.

  Hoyle was never far from controversy. During a radio broadcast in the early 1950s, at a time when Australia was dominating England at cricket, listeners were puzzled to hear Hoyle remark that somewhere in the Milky Way there was a cricket team who could beat the Australians. He also raised a few hackles when he claimed, without any evidence, that the famous Archaeopteryx fossil in the Natural History Museum was a fake and had been created by pressing bird feathers into a tub of cement. Palaeontologists were outraged by Hoyle’s claim; even less impressed were the museum staff who had to spend days fielding phone calls from the world’s press.

  In his later years, Hoyle’s reputation was further eclipsed when he said that life on Earth evolved from microbes falling from cometary tails about four billion years ago. According to Hoyle, the AIDS virus arrived from space in the mid-1970s and was originally passed to humans from rainwater via cuts on their feet. Hoyle went on claim that humans had evolved protruding noses with downward pointing nostrils to stop alien pandemic from falling into them from the sky.

  The Man Who Discovered the N-Ray

  The French professor René Blondlot, head of the physics department at the University of Nancy and member the Academy of Sciences, was one of the most brilliant scientists of the early 1900s. He discovered that electricity moved through a wire at almost the speed of light and devised experiments to examine polarization and velocity of radio waves and X-rays.

  It was X-rays that really excited Blondlot. Wilhelm Rontgen had discovered them in 1895, but no one knew much about them, let alone had any inkling of what the long-term effects of exposure to them might be. Radiation was touted as a cure-all for every imaginable disease – you could buy radioactive toothpaste for whiter teeth and better digestion, radioactive face creams to lighten the skin and radium-laced chocolate bars. A brisk trade in radioactive patent medicines thrived well into the 1930s. One of the most popular preparations, radium water, promoted in the USA as a general tonic and known as “liquid sunshine”, was responsible for the deaths of several thousand people.

  Scientists were not even quite sure what X-rays were. Were they a stream of particles, like gamma rays, or did they travel in waves, like light and radio? In 1903, Blondlot was determined to find out. He fired X-rays through a cathode tube into a charged electrical field and placed a detector near the path of the X-rays. If the electrical field polarized them, deflecting their path and sending them through the detector, causing a spark across a gap to grow brighter, this would prove that they were waves, not particles. They did, exactly as Blondlot had predicted. In doing so, he had correctly proved that X-rays are waves.

  It was just then that Blondlot stumbled across a strange phenomenon. He noticed that radiation leaking from the apparatus also seemed to make the spark grow brighter. It couldn’t be the X-rays; it had to be something else. On further investigation, he found that
this radiation caused a screen coated with calcium sulphide to glow. He suddenly realized that he had discovered a new form of radiation. He called them N-rays, after his home town of Nancy.

  Blondlot filled his university laboratory with a vast array of testing apparatus and he and assistants spent the next twelve months setting up experiments. Before long, Blondlot was detecting N-rays everywhere. Not only that – they had amazing potential; they had an ability to intensify flames and sparks, so they offered the prospect of enhanced vision in dim lighting.

  He found that the Sun emits N-rays – although not many on a cloudy day. Various other types of light source also gave out N-rays, including electric lamps, but not Bunsen burners. Ordinary objects warmed in sunlight also gave out N-rays. He wrote: “Pebbles picked up at about 4pm, in a yard where they had been exposed to the Sun, spontaneously emitted N-rays; bringing them near a small mass of phosphorescent sulphide was sufficient to increase its luminosity. Fragments of calcareous stone, brick etc., picked up in the same yard, produced analogous results.”

  You could also store N-rays in salt water. This meant that the entire planet, which is mostly covered in salt water, was in effect a giant N-ray battery, storing the Sun’s N-rays and radiating them back. In theory.

  N-rays also had some very curious properties. A prismshaped piece of aluminium could bend N-rays, just as a glass prism bent visible light. They seemed to emit from just about everything, except green wood and certain treated metals; or, for reasons unknown, bricks wrapped in black paper. Another puzzling thing was that loud noises appeared to make N-rays go away.

  But the most curious thing about N-rays was this: the effects of N-rays were not immediately obvious to the human eye. To see the effects of N-rays, on a phosphorescent screen for example, required a certain amount of practice. You had to sit in a darkened room for at least half an hour beforehand to acclimatize your pupils. Then – here was the really important bit – you had to look slightly away from the screen and view it with peripheral vision. Even then, Blondlot warned, not everyone would be able to see the effects. Some scientists, Blondlot explained, were naturally equipped with better N-ray vision than others.

  Blondlot announced his discovery to the world on 23 March 1903 in the Academy of Sciences newsletter and it provoked worldwide interest. This was all highly frustrating for the likes of elderly distinguished scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who apparently was not equipped with N-ray perception. In fact, quite a few scientists struggled to replicate Blondlot’s experiments. No matter how many darkened rooms they sat and squinted in they just couldn’t catch a glimpse of his N-rays. Even then, they kept an open mind. No one was prepared to suggest openly that someone as eminent as Monsieur Blondlot might have made a mistake.

  But a lot of scientists as it turned out did have the requisite N-ray vision (most of them French) and, before long, the science journals were being filled with the results of N-ray experiments. In 1904, the French physics professor Augustin Charpentier revealed that the human body emits N-rays – or, at least, some body parts do, especially the biceps and the brain. His results were confirmed by the esteemed medical journal The Lancet, who wrote in 1904, “There would no longer appear to be any doubt that N-rays are given off by active muscles and nerves.”

  Meanwhile, Blondlot was busy investigating the effects of N-rays on the human body, using himself as a guinea pig. One day he sat in a completely blacked-out laboratory waiting for his eyes to acclimatize. It was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, let alone the clock on the lab wall opposite. After exposing his eyes to a chunk of N-radioactive material, he realized that he could not only clearly see the clock, he could even tell the time from it. This was truly amazing.

  When Blondlot published his results, other scientists rushed to copy the experiment. Not only did exposure to N-rays improve eyesight, it sharpened the other senses as well. Professor Charpentier bombarded the heads of some dogs with N-rays and found that it improved their hearing and sense of smell.

  In France, any doubts that may have lingered about N-rays were dispelled when Blondlot was awarded the prestigious Lecomte Prize with a purse of 50,000 francs for his discoveries. He was now officially France’s greatest living physicist. All that was left for him to win was the Nobel Prize for Physics. Surely, it was only a matter of time.

  Across the Channel, the reaction to news of Blondlot’s award was decidedly mixed. To date, not a single British scientist had been able to replicate his results. Perhaps it was time to settle the matter once and for all. The British Association for the Advancement of Science arranged for a sceptical US physicist Robert W. Wood to visit Blondlot in his lab for a private demonstration.

  Blondlot was very happy to go along with it. His lab was hundreds of miles from Paris and he didn’t get many visitors; he was always keen to show his N-ray results. Wood didn’t speak much French so he and Blondlot conversed in German. But he knew just enough French to make out the odd confidential exchange between Blondlot and his assistant. Blondlot immediately set up a test by painting some luminescent circles on a card. Then he turned the lab lights down, and with the circles faintly glowing in the dark, he “bombarded” the card with N-rays.

  “Did you see the change in luminosity?” enquired Blondlot.

  “No,” replied Wood.

  Wood suggested another test. Sitting in the dark lab, he took a lead screen and passed it in and out of the path of the N-rays, while Blondlot reported fluctuations in the luminosity. Blondlot got it wrong every time. He even called out fluctuations when Wood did not move the screen. Wood asked for another test.

  This time, the key was Blondlot’s aluminium prism. One of the curious properties of N-rays, you will remember, was that an aluminium prism could bend N-rays, just as a glass prism bent visible light. As Wood looked on, Blondlot used the prism to record a series of N-ray wavelengths. Of course, as Wood couldn’t see the wavelength lines himself, he had to take Blondlot’s word for it.

  So he asked Blondlot to repeat the measurements. Only this time, Wood took advantage of the dark and quietly removed the prism. In spite of this, Blondlot and his assistant still “saw” the N-ray measurements. Wood quietly replaced the prism.

  Wood had seen enough and was ready to call it a night, but Blondlot’s assistant smelled a rat. He suspected, correctly, that Wood had removed the prism. The assistant called for one more test. The lights were turned down again. This time, Wood made a move towards the prism and pretended to remove it, but left the apparatus intact. The assistant, thinking that he had outwitted Wood, reported to Blondlot in German, “I see nothing . . . there is no spectrum. I think the American has removed it.”

  The evidence was overwhelming and damning. Wood’s report destroyed Blondlot, and N-rays vanished from the realms of science just as quickly as they had appeared.12 Poor, humiliated Blondlot continued to work as a university professor in Nancy until his early retirement in 1910, enduring whispers among colleagues that he had lost his mind.

  He continued to “see” his phantom rays until his death in 1930, refusing to admit that it had all been in his head. N-rays did not go down in history as a hoax; instead, they were a cautionary tale of how deluded researchers can see whatever they want to see. A real life emperor’s new clothes story.

  Least Successful Weatherman

  Robert FitzRoy couldn’t have had a better start in life. Born into the English aristocracy, he had impressive bloodlines on both sides of the family. He was a direct descendant of King Charles II and his grandfather, the third Duke of Grafton, was a prime minister; his uncle was foreign secretary. He was a brilliant student and, at the age of fourteen, graduated with distinction from the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth. By 1824, at the age of nineteen he was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy having passed the examination with “full numbers” (100 per cent), a result never before achieved.

  An early test of his impressive seamanship took place during one of his very first postings on HMS
Beagle, under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes, who was charting the South American coastline. While off Tierra del Fuego, Stokes shot himself in the head while suffering from depression. It took twelve days for him to die. FitzRoy steered the ship back to Rio, where he assumed full-time command of the Beagle at the age of twenty-three. By now FitzRoy was widely regarded as the most brilliant seaman of his generation.

  Three years later, he and his survey ship Beagle were assigned to carry out a three-year survey of coastal South America. Having had already spent a couple of years on a similar survey with the unfortunate Captain Stokes, FitzRoy was very wary of the loneliness that such a command could bring. He was also uncomfortably aware that there was a history of depression and suicide in his own family. His uncle Lord Castlereagh slit his throat when FitzRoy was fifteen, leaving a lasting impression on the boy. The solution, FitzRoy decided, was to take with him some “gentleman company”, someone who could share the captain’s table and engage him in intellectual discourse. The young naturalist Charles Darwin fitted the bill. Only four years apart in age (Darwin was twenty-two, FitzRoy twenty-six), both had a yearning for adventure and an interest in “natural philosophy”.

  At their first meeting, however, FitzRoy had doubts, on account of Darwin’s nose. FitzRoy’s studies of physiognomy told him that “people with a broad, squat nose like his don’t have the character”. Not that Darwin was particularly qualified either for a journey halfway round the world; the longest field trip he had been on up until then was three weeks spent in North Wales collecting insects.