The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  FitzRoy’s initial reservations about nose shape, however, were outweighed by the fact that the young amateur naturalist had also studied divinity. FitzRoy was deeply religious and a fervent believer in the literal truth of the biblical account of Creation. Darwin, FitzRoy thought, would be useful in helping him find data that would reveal God’s work. Seldom in history has an appointment misfired so spectacularly.

  FitzRoy had another motive for wanting to go back to South America. On his previous trip to Tierra del Fuego, straying some way beyond his Admiralty brief, he had ‘kidnapped’ four natives and taken them back to England. His plan was to introduce them to the “benefit of our habits and language”, before returning them to Tierra del Fuego as missionaries. FitzRoy pursued his mad scheme with evangelical zeal. Of the four Fuegians, one died of a smallpox vaccination; two males – York Minster, aged twenty-seven, and Jemmy Button, fourteen – and Fuegia Basket, a twelve-year-old girl, were sent to school in Walthamstow where they were taught English, arithmetic and “the basic truths of Christianity”.

  FitzRoy’s great social experiment was cut short when York Minster was caught raping Fuegia Basket. Using his powerful family connections, FitzRoy hurriedly persuaded the Admiralty to let him return his Fuegians to their native land, along with a few items he thought necessary to recreate a piece of England on the wild coast of South America, including chamber pots, tea trays, crockery, beaver hats and white linen.

  The Beagle was a ten-gun brig of the type known in the Royal Navy as a “coffin” because they tended to capsize in heavy weather. Fortunately, FitzRoy was a brilliant navigator. Despite negotiating some of the most dangerous waters of the world, surviving storms, earthquakes and disease, and encounters with hostile natives, the aristocratic young sea captain returned home with his ship and most of its crew intact.

  Darwin, meanwhile, suffered dreadfully from seasickness, but this was the least of his problems. He quickly discovered that the man he had to share his meals with three times a day in a tiny cabin had a short fuse and was highly opinionated. The two men had lively exchanges of views, later described by Darwin as quarrels “bordering on insanity”. FitzRoy also suffered from bouts of deep depression. At one point, he stopped eating and shut himself away for several weeks. He eventually emerged, thin and haggard, and offered his resignation. He told the crew he feared he was going to go the same way as his uncle and his predecessor, Captain Stokes. At this point, it seemed that the voyage would have to be cut short.

  Luckily for science, FitzRoy’s loyal second-in-command, Lieutenant Wickham, was able to talk his captain round and continue the mission by crossing the Pacific and returning to England at the conclusion of the circumnavigation they had set out to achieve.

  FitzRoy was both very odd and completely unknowable. In spite of their differences, he had been won over by Darwin’s easy charm and they became friends and remained in contact subsequently for many years. Darwin was most surprised therefore, shortly after they got back, at the news that FitzRoy was about to marry a woman to whom he had been engaged for several years. Weirdly, FitzRoy had never once spoken a word about his engagement, or his intended bride, Mary, throughout the five-year voyage.

  The Beagle voyage, of course, turned out to be the defining experience of Darwin’s life, providing him with the evidence for his book On the Origin of Species that would forever change our view of the world and our place in it. But following the Beagle’s return, it was the ship’s captain, not Darwin, who won the initial plaudits. Robert FitzRoy wrote up his account of this voyage, including masses of detailed weather observations, and was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society.

  There was also a change in career direction. FitzRoy entered Parliament, serving for two years as Tory MP for Durham. His unpredictable temper got the better of him and almost resulted in a duel with another Tory candidate – in the end, they settled for a fist fight in The Mall.

  In 1843, FitzRoy’s life took another unexpected turn when he accepted the position of Governor of New Zealand. His time as governor was an unhappy one; his rigid discipline and unbending sense of religious duty made him deeply unpopular, especially when he upset the apple cart with his principled defence of the local Maori against unscrupulous immigrant settlers. The Colonial Office swiftly recalled him less than two years later without offering him the customary knighthood.

  He returned to his naval duties as captain of the frigate HMS Arrogant, but a morbid depression, one of many, forced him into retirement in 1850. And there he would have remained, snubbed by the Establishment and forgotten, if the Admiralty had not turned to him for help in 1854.

  There had been systematic attempts to understand weather patterns ever since the Crimean War, when the British had suffered disastrous losses during a storm at Balaclava Bay. The urgent need for a system for predicting storms at sea was tragically underlined when the passenger ship Royal Charter was destroyed by a violent gale off the coast of Anglesey with the loss of 450 lives.

  The Admiralty sent for FitzRoy and asked him to investigate the effect of the weather on the British fleet. He immediately set about making weather maps on which he plotted wind, barometric pressure and temperature using symbols to denote clouds, rain and snow. He made the first use of conical storm symbols – the standard gale warning still in use today.

  He also began what he called (and what everyone still calls) the weather forecast. Before FitzRoy the weather had only ever been presented retrospectively. The Times, for example, would print a report of how the weather had been across Great Britain for the period of 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. the previous day. Thanks to FitzRoy’s weather maps, on 1 August 1861 Times readers could actually read what the weather was going to do over the next two days. Queen Victoria soon got into the habit of consulting FitzRoy as to when she should make the short boat trip across the Solent to her residence on the Isle of Wight.

  In FitzRoy’s mind, however, storm clouds were gathering. His new wife Mary was an even more uncompromisingly devout Christian than he was and marriage had marked a radicalization of his own religious beliefs. He had continued to visit his old friend Darwin at his home, Down House, but all that changed in 1859 with the publication of On the Origin of Species. FitzRoy, the ardent creationist, became a rabid opponent of Darwin and wrote letters to The Times explaining that giant animals such as the Mastodon had not survived the biblical flood because they were too big to get into Noah’s Ark. He was convinced that Charles Darwin was going to hell.

  Seven months after the publication of Darwin’s book, science and religion finally went head-to-head on Saturday, 30 June 1860 when Darwin’s theory was debated at a famous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford. Darwin didn’t join in the debate, leaving the fighting to his more combative friends Joseph Hooker and T. H. Huxley, dubbed “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his staunch defence of the theory, in much the same way as Richard Dawkins is dubbed “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by some today.

  More than a thousand people crowded into the chamber to hear stinging attacks from both sides. According to reports, in the ensuing commotion Lady Brewster fainted and had to be carried out. Meanwhile, Robert FitzRoy, who was attending the meeting to present his own paper on weather patterns, walked around the hall brandishing a huge copy of the Bible above his head, shouting, “The truth is in here!” He was shouted down and escorted from the building.

  To the end of his days, FitzRoy blamed himself for allowing Darwin to be his personal guest aboard the Beagle and consequently for the blasphemy of evolutionary theory. His misery was compounded by the fact that the world was also unappreciative of his pioneering work in meteorology. Almost as soon as his first weather forecasts appeared, people began complaining that they were wrong. He faced pressure on all sides, not only from people who were angry with inaccurate reports, but those simply irritated that he was predicting bad weather at all – in particular, fishing fleet owners who were upset about losing business when thei
r fishermen refused to head out to sea in the wake of an unfavourable FitzRoy prediction.

  There was also criticism from an unexpected quarter – for many of his fellow scientists, the very idea of weather prediction was flawed. FitzRoy and his forecasts, which were notoriously imprecise,13 had “undermined the processes of legitimate scientific work”. Scientists, they complained, should stick to the establishment of certainties, not risk their reputation on unknowable outcomes. Even FitzRoy’s successor at the Meteorological Office went out of his way to promise “facts, not prophecies”, much to the relief of his fellow meteorologists.

  There was also much public mockery. Cartoons published in Punch poked fun at the uselessness of official weather reporting with a series of badly drawn synoptic charts populated by a flurry of made-up symbols. Even The Times, which ran his forecasts, took to printing disclaimers, effectively disowning their author. “During the last week, Nature seems to have taken special pleasure in confounding the conjectures of science.” The piece continued that this was not the fault of the laws of nature, but that “accurate interpretation is the real deficiency”. There were even questions asked in Parliament.

  A perfectionist and workaholic, the thin-skinned FitzRoy took the criticisms personally. Whether it was his apparent failure as a weatherman that cost him his life, or torment over his decision to take Darwin on board the Beagle, we will never know for sure. On the morning of 30 April 1865, the world’s first weatherman got up early without waking his wife, kissed his daughter, then locked himself in his dressing room and slashed his throat with a razor.

  The ultimate irony was that FitzRoy had only taken Charles Darwin on board in the first place as a companion to prevent him from killing himself. When he heard about FitzRoy’s death, his counterpart – the Dutch meteorologist Christoph Buys Ballot – warned gravely, “We must remember that anyone who has to forecast the weather, if he does it earnestly and conscientiously, is in great danger of going off his head through nervous excitement.”

  The Nearly Man of Computing

  The West Country mathematician Charles Babbage is recognized today by a handful of people in the know as one of the major figures in the development of one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements. But his ideas were mocked and derided in his own lifetime and he was largely forgotten for a long time after his death.

  The story of the computer is littered with false starts. It is generally reckoned to have begun in the early 1600s with a German, William Shickard. He created a machine he called a “calculating clock” to help his friend, the great astronomer Johannes Keppler, predict the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the planets. Unfortunately, we have no idea if the machine worked or not; Shickard’s machine and his blueprints were completely destroyed when French soldiers set fire to his house during the Thirty Years War, so instead of going down in history as the man responsible for the most important technological step forward since the horse-drawn plough, Shickard is remembered as a minor expert in Hebrew grammar.

  Coincidentally, 1623 – the year Shickard is thought to have invented his calculating clock – also saw the birth of the man responsible for the next significant advance in digital computing, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. He was the son of a royal tax collector. According to legend, Pascal wanted to help his father with his book-keeping so he devised a machine that could add and subtract figures up to eight digits. It had a complex series of wheels connected to rods with toothed cogs and gears and was beset with technical problems, stretching seventeenth-century technology to the limit. Pascal went on to build more than fifty versions of his machine, a few of which still survive today in full working order.

  Throughout his life, Pascal suffered from ill health and took to wearing stockings soaked in brandy to keep his feet warm; curiously, this does not appear to have harmed his reputation as a philanderer. At the age of thirty-one, however, he was involved in a near-fatal coach crash, and underwent a cathartic religious experience, which caused him to suddenly renounce sex. He spent the last years of his life a sexually frustrated religious zealot, trying to prove the mathematical certainty of God’s existence.

  In 1673, the great German scientist Gottfried Leibniz saw one of Pascal’s amazing machines in Paris and decided to have a go at building one himself, possibly just to annoy his rival Isaac Newton. Leibniz’s prototype version was much more sophisticated than Pascal’s. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, even calculate square roots. When he showed it to the Royal Society in London, however, his fellow scientists greeted it with stony-faced indifference, so Leibniz gave up on his project and wrote a fifteen-volume history of the royal House of Hanover instead.

  The next big advance in computing came in the early nineteenth century from an unlikely source – a technician in the French weaving industry, Joseph Marie Jacquard, who made an innovative loom that could be programmed to weave a pattern by using punched cards. Jacquard’s idea provoked a riot and redundant loom workers stormed the factory and destroyed his machines, but his card-punching method survived. More importantly, one of the key elements of computing, the idea of programming, had now been invented. It would take an English mathematical genius, however, to work out what to do with it.

  Charles Babbage (1791–1871) was born in the early years of the Industrial Revolution to a wealthy banker from Devon. He was a sickly child and was mostly tutored at home. He dazzled at mathematics at an early age and, in 1810, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he ran rings around his maths tutors, although he still managed to leave without a first-class honours degree after a fallout with the university authorities. This pattern of clashing with the Establishment would haunt him later in life. After leaving Cambridge, he wrote a couple of major papers on functional equations and, in 1816, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

  Babbage dabbled in half a dozen sciences and published widely on a range of topics from chess and deciphering weather patterns to tree rings, railway tunnels and stomach pumps. He was also a prolific inventor; he was the brains behind black box recorders for railways, railway cowcatchers and skeleton keys. There were countless other Babbage inventions that never made it off the drawing board, including a seismograph for detecting earthquakes, an altimeter for measuring height above sea level, a flat-bottomed boat that would aquaplane on water, a system of tin tubes for long distance telephony (he calculated it would take seventeen minutes for words spoken in London to reach Liverpool) and a system for sending messages enclosed in small cylinders along wires suspended from church steeples. He also invented a pair of shoes for walking on water, but when he tried out his miracle footwear on – or more accurately, in – the River Dart in Devon, he almost drowned and only just about made it back to the riverbank.

  Above all else, Babbage was obsessed with facts, data and statistics. He thought that every scrap of information he came across, no matter how trivial, was worth storing because “the preservation of any fact might ultimately be useful”. Babbage wanted to quantify everything from the heartbeat of a pig (to be listed in his “Table of Constants of the Class Mammalia”) to the breath of a calf. He took daily records of food consumed by zoo animals and the “proportion of sexes amongst our poultry”. He suggested tables to calibrate the amount of wood (elm or oak) a man could saw in ten hours, or how much an ox or camel could plough or mow in a day. He once walked around a factory counting the number of broken windowpanes he saw then wrote a study called a “Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows”. Using his powers of deduction, Babbage concluded that fourteen were broken by “drunken men, women or boys”. He hoped the table might induce others to furnish more extensive collections of similar and related facts.

  In “Conjectures on the Conditions of the Surface of the Moon”, we find him describing experiments on lunar cooking – “very respectable stew of meat and vegetables in blackened boxes (with window glass) buried in
the earth”. He once had himself lowered into Mt Vesuvius so he could closely observe volcanic activity. On another occasion, he allowed himself to be baked in an oven at 265ºF for “five or six minutes without any great discomfort”, meanwhile taking notes on his pulse and the quantity of his perspiration.

  Babbage had spent years studying death rates, and was very irritated when he read these lines from Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Vision of Sin”: “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.” Babbage took exception to the verse because it implied that the population of the world was stable, when in fact it was increasing. He wrote to Tennyson with a suggestion:

  Sir,

  In your otherwise beautiful poem “The Vision of Sin” there is a verse which reads – “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.” It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – “Every moment dies a man, Every moment 11/16 is born.” The actual figure is so long I cannot get it on to a line, but I believe the figure 11/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

  I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage

  Another of his odder enterprises was working out the statistical probability of the biblical miracles. He calculated that the chances of a man rising from the dead were 1 in 1012 – a figure he arrived at by dividing the estimated total number of people who had ever lived by the number of witnessed accounts of someone being brought back from the dead – i.e. one. Even the more broadminded within the scientific community came to regard him as a crank.