The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  Source: Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665).

  Early Blood Transfusion

  The belief that imbibing blood from another person can restore youth and vigour is very ancient, and there were many early attempts to put it into practice. In 1492 Pope Innocent VIII, when weak and in a coma, was given the blood of three young men, all of whom died. How the blood was administered is not known: probably by mouth.

  After Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood (see p. 17) the possibility of transferring blood directly from the arteries of the donor to the veins of the recipient through a tube was investigated both in France and in England. On 14 November 1666 the minutes of the Royal Society record that:

  The experiment of transfusing the blood of one dog into another was made before the Society by Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe, upon a little mastiff and a spaniel, with very good success, the former bleeding to death, and the latter receiving the blood of the other, and emitting so much of his own as to make him capable of receiving the other.

  Samuel Pepys, a member of the Society, missed this experiment, but heard about it, and followed the fortunes of the surviving dog, reporting in his diary on 28 November that it was still ‘in perfect good health’. The experiment had been masterminded by Robert Boyle, who explored the possible psychological effects of transfusion in a series of questions to the Society – whether a fierce dog could be tamed by receiving blood from a cowardly dog; whether a transfused dog would recognize its master, etc.

  The first English blood transfusion into a human being took place on 23 November 1667. The Royal Society tried to procure ‘some mad person in the hospital of Bedlam’ for the purpose, but the Keeper of Bedlam declined, so the choice fell on Arthur Coga, a ‘very freakish and extravagant’ Bachelor of Divinity from Cambridge who, being ‘indigent’, was persuaded by a fee of one guinea to volunteer. The Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, recorded the result in a letter to Boyle.

  On Thursday next, God willing, a report will be made of the good success of the first trial of transfusion practised on a man, which was by order of the Society, and the approbation of a number of physicians, performed on Saturday last in Arundel House, in the presence of many spectators, among whom were Mr Howard and both his sons, the bishop of Salisbury, four or five physicians, some parliament men, etc., by the management and operation of Dr Lower and Dr King, the latter of whom performed the chief part with great dexterity, and with so much ease to the patient, that he made not the least complaint, nor so much as any grimace during the whole time of the operation; in which the blood of a young sheep, to the quantity of about eight or nine ounces by conjecture, was transmitted into the great vein of the right arm, after the man had let out some six or seven ounces of his own blood. All which was done by the method of Dr King’s, which I published in Num. 20 of the Transactions, without any change at all of it, save only in the shape of one of the silver pipes, for more conveniency. Having let out, before the transfusion, into a porringer, so much of the sheep’s blood, as would run out in about a minute (which amounted to twelve ounces) to direct us as to the quantity to be transfused into the man, he, when he saw that florid arterial blood in the porringer, was so well pleased with it, that he took some of it upon a knife, and tasted it, and finding it of a good relish, he went the more couragiously to its transmission into his veins, taking a cup or two of sack before, and a glass of wormwood wine and a pipe of tobacco after the operation, which no more disordered him, both by his own confession, and by appearance to all bystanders, than it did any of those that were in the room with him. The pipe being taken out of the man, the blood of the sheep ran a very free stream, to assure the spectators of an uninterrupted course of blood.

  The patient found himself very well upon it, his pulse better than before, and so his appetite. His sleep good, his body as soluble as usual, it being observed, that the same day of his operation he had three or four stools, as he used to have before. This morning our president (who by very pressing business could not be present in Arundel House) and I sent to see him pretty early, and found him a bed, very well, as he assured us, and more composed, as his host affirmed, than he had been before.

  Coga wrote an account of his operation in Latin, and read it to the Society. Pepys, who was present, concluded that he was ‘cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably and very well’. A second transfusion, this time of 14 ounces of sheep’s blood, was given to Coga on 12 December 1667. Once more, he survived apparently unharmed. However, a patient of the French pioneer of blood transfusion Jean Denis, who taught medicine at Montpellier, died following a transfusion in 1668, and this put a stop to transfusion into humans until the discovery of blood-group antigens and antibodies in 1900 made the practice safer. Blood transfusion was first practised on a large scale in the First World War.

  The courtiers and literati persistently ridiculed the Society’s experiments, headed by Charles II who ‘mightily laughed’ (Pepys relates) to hear that the scientists were ‘spending time only in weighing of air’. (Boyle’s epoch-making experiments on the pressure and volume of gases seem to be what excited the royal mirth on this occasion.) Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso, first performed in 1676, presents Sir Nicholas Gimcrack boasting of his exploits in blood transfusion:

  I assure you I have transfus’d into a human vein 64 ounces, avoirdupois weight, from one sheep. The eminent sheep died under the operation, but the recipient madman is still alive. He suffer’d some disorder at first, the sheep’s blood being heterogeneous, but in a short time it became homogeneous with his own … The patient from being maniacal or raging mad became wholly ovine or sheepish: he bleated perpetually and chew’d the cud; he had wool growing on him in great quantities; and a Northamptonshire sheep’s tail did soon emerge or arise from his anus or human fundament.

  Sources: From Pepys’s Diary and the Proceedings of the Royal Society via Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Pepys’s Diary and the New Science, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1965.

  Little Animals in Water

  Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) was the first human being to see living protozoa and bacteria. The son of a basket-maker in Delft, Holland, he received little education, but became a prosperous linen-draper. His friends included the painter Jan Vermeer. Drapers used magnifying glasses to inspect cloth, and van Leeuwenhoek took to grinding his own lenses from glass globules, and constructing microscopes. With these he observed protozoa and bacteria in fresh water, in the bile of various animals, in the human mouth, and in his own excrement. He nearly blinded himself watching the explosion of gunpowder under a microscope. His descriptions, communicated to the Royal Society in London in a series of 190 letters spanning 50 years, are so precise that modern bacteriologists can identify with certainty many of the micro-organisms he saw. In this extract from a letter dated 7 September 1674, he announces his first sighting of ‘little animals’ in water.

  About two hours distant from this Town there lies an inland lake, called the Berkelse Mere, whose bottom in many places is very marshy, or boggy. Its water is in winter very clear, but at the beginning or in the middle of summer it becomes whitish, and there are then little green clouds floating through it; which, according to the saying of the country folk dwelling thereabout, is caused by the dew, which happens to fall at that time, and which they call honey-dew. This water is abounding in fish, which is very good and savoury. Passing just lately over this lake, at a time when the wind blew pretty hard, and seeing the water as above described, I took up a little of it in a glass phial; and examining this water next day, I found floating therein divers earthy particles, and some green streaks, spirally wound serpent-wise, and orderly arranged [identified as the common green alga Spirogyra: the earliest recorded observation of this organism], after the manner of the copper or tin worms, which distillers use to cool their liquors as they distil over. The whole circumference of each of these streaks was about the thickness of a hair of one’s head. Other partic
les had but the beginning of the foresaid streak; but all consisted of very small green globules joined together: and there were very many small green globules as well. Among these there were, besides, very many little animalcules, whereof some were roundish, while others, a bit bigger, consisted of an oval. On these last I saw two little legs near the head, and two little fins at the hindmost end of the body. Others were somewhat longer than an oval, and these were very slow a-moving, and few in number. These animalcules had divers colours, some being whitish and transparent; others with green and very glittering little scales; others again were green in the middle, and before and behind white; others yet were ashen grey. And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see: and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.

  Source: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’, ed. trans. and introduced by Clifford Dobell, New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1958.

  An Apple and Colours

  Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), ‘one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect’ (in the words of his biographer, Richard S. Westfall), was born into an entirely undistinguished, semi-literate sheep-farming family in rural Lincolnshire. His youthful encounter with an apple is the best known of all scientific stories, and, surprisingly, seems to be true. Dr William Stukeley, who knew Newton well in his old age, records:

  On 15 April 1726 I paid a visit to Sir Isaac at his lodgings in Orbels Buildings in Kensington, dined with him, and spent the whole day with him, alone …

  After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me he was just in the same situation as when, formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself? Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter: and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth’s centre, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly, or towards the centre. If matter thus draws matter, it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple. That there is a power, like that we here call gravity, which extends itself through the universe.

  And thus by degrees he began to apply this property of gravitation to the motion of the earth and of the heavenly bodies, to consider their distances, their magnitudes and their periodical revolutions; to find out that this property, conjointly with a progressive motion impressed on them at the beginning, perfectly solved their circular courses; kept the planets from falling upon one another, or dropping all together into one centre; and thus he unfolded the universe. This was the birth of those amazing discoveries, whereby he built philosophy on a solid foundation, to the astonishment of all Europe.

  Asked at an earlier stage in his life how he had discovered the law of universal gravitation, Newton had replied ‘By thinking on it continually’ – a remark that supplements, but does not contradict, Stukeley’s apple story.

  Newton’s law, set out in the Principia (1687), states that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that varies according to its mass and to the inverse square of the distance between them. This remained the accepted explanation of gravity until it was superseded by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1915 (see p. 267, below).

  Newton’s other great scientific work was the Optics, not published till 1704, but based on experiments he made as a young man at Cambridge to discover the nature of light:

  In a very dark chamber, at a round hole, about one third part of an inch broad, made in the shut [shutter] of a window, I placed a glass prism, whereby the beam of the sun’s light, which came in at that hole, might be refracted upwards towards the opposite wall of the chamber, and there form a coloured image of the sun …

  So began Newton’s account of his experiments with prisms, which led him to the discovery that ordinary white light is really a mixture of rays of every variety of colour. He found, too, that the ray of each colour bends at a certain definite angle on passing through the prism – red being the least bendable, followed by ‘orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, deep violet’. The richness of his response to colour is evident in his experimental accounts, as here where he is explaining that a ray of a single (or ‘homogeneal’) colour, shining upon objects, makes them all appear of that colour:

  All white, grey, red, yellow, green, blue, violet bodies, as paper, ashes, red lead, orpiment, indigo bice [dark blue], gold, silver, copper, grass, blue flowers, violets, bubbles of water tinged with various colours, peacock’s feathers, the tincture of lignum nephriticum [a wood imported from Spain, the blue infusions of which were used for kidney-disease], and suchlike, in red homogeneal light appeared totally red, in blue light totally blue, in green light totally green, and so of other colours. In the homogeneal light of any colour they all appeared totally of that same colour, with this only difference, that some of them reflected that light more strongly, others more faintly. I never yet found any body, which by reflecting homogeneal light could sensibly change its colour.

  From all which it is manifest that if the sun’s light consisted of but one sort of rays, there would be but one colour in the whole world.

  Newton’s friend Edmond Halley (observer of ‘Halley’s Comet’) had engaged in underwater operations off the Sussex coast in a diving bell, and conversation with him enables Newton to draw imaginative conclusions about underwater colours:

  Mr Halley, … in diving deep into the sea in a diving vessel, found in a clear sunshine day that, when he was sunk many fathoms deep into the water, the upper part of his hand, on which the sun shone directly through the water and through a small glass window in the vessel, appeared of a red colour, like that of a damask rose, and the water below and the under part of his hand, illuminated by light reflected from the water below, looked green. For thence it may be gathered that the sea-water reflects back the violet and blue-making rays most easily, and lets the red-making rays pass most freely and copiously to great depths. For thereby the sun’s direct light at all great depths, by reason of the predominating red-making rays, must appear red.

  Newton’s theory that white light was not pure but a medley of different colours met with strong opposition. It seemed counter to common sense, which had long associated whiteness with purity and simplicity. Poets, however responded to the new colour-theory excitedly. The influence of the Optics flooded eighteenth-century poetry with colour. Alexander Pope’s ‘sylphs’ – fairy creatures who flit around a young lady’s dressing-table in his poem The Rape of the Lock – show clear evidence of Newton’s prismatic discoveries:

  Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,

  Their fluid bodies half-dissolved in light.

  Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,

  Thin glittering textures of the filmy dew;

  Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies,

  Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes,

  While every beam new transient colours flings,

  Colours that change whene’er they wave their wings

  Later, however, in reaction against eighteenth-century Enlightenment values, the Romantic poets condemned Newton for banishing mystery from the universe, and reducing everything to fact and reason. ‘Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death,’ proclaimed William Blake. John Keats agreed that Newton had ‘destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours’ – an opinion he versifie
d in Lamia:

  There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;

  We know her woof, her texture; she is given