by John Carey
Which came first? There is some evidence that for Pasteur it was fear of the mob. His ideas about bacteria appeared pretty much fully formed in his first writings (1857) on the process of fermentation. In trying to explain how grapes turned into wine, and similar processes, he predicted the existence of living microbes, all apparently identical, yet autonomous, and which competed among each other in an attempt to grow on their target medium until they had fully taken it over. It turned out to be a good guess, but when he made it there was little evidence to back this or indeed any other detailed idea. Pasteur’s other descriptions of bacteria, again generally before there was clear evidence to demonstrate it, also matched the view that extreme conservatives took of society. One was that the infection had to be stopped early (think of putting people who even might be revolutionaries in prison); another was that apparently weak individual organisms could cause the demise of large, complex bodies, i.e., that outside bugs could cause inside infection.
To us such views are standard, but at the time medical tradition thought otherwise. We have to imagine the scientific world before the germ theory of disease. When bacteria were found in wounds or sick people it was really thought of as an unimportant by-product of the true disease, which came somehow mysteriously from within and had to run its course. This is why doctors were so upset when Pasteur and others suggested that by not washing their hands between touching diseased corpses and touching healthy or somewhat healthy patients, they might be spreading disease. To the doctors this was preposterous. How could minute organisms cause disease in creatures so much larger? All authorities brought up in the old tradition concurred. Queen Victoria’s medical advisors saw no need to clean up the no doubt typhoid-full cesspools near the water sources at Balmoral, from which she and the unfortunate Albert were encouraged to drink. Even Florence Nightingale never believed in ‘infection’, and was always against what in later life she called the ‘germ-fetish’.
It was mere common sense – but for Pasteur it was a common sense which he saw, he felt, must be mistaken. An investigator with the standard medical view in mind, let alone one with a brain swept clean of all pre-hypotheses, could never have developed the whole concept of infecting microbes from the small evidence with which Pasteur began. But someone disposed to push forth this idea of small swarming things always ready to destroy order and take over; someone primed to find it anywhere he looked: he would be the one more likely to come up with the germ theory of disease.
Such similarities between social and scientific views have long been common – what better place to get fresh ideas than to just look around you? – and were especially so in the nineteenth century, when so many fields were being set up for the first time. When German professors discovered the approach of several million sperm to the human egg, which only one successfully penetrated, they described it as following the morally sound marriage patterns of the time. On one side there was a passive, waiting egg; on the other a crowd of rushing, eager sperm suitors, of which only the luckiest and strongest one would make it all the way into her affection – just as the professors might hope would happen to their own no doubt properly brought-up daughters.
From the pure evidence they had to work with this is almost all unjustified interpolation. The microscopes of the time could barely get any detail on the egg and its fine movements, and only produced a series of isolated, blurry images. From those static images one could just as well imagine the female with her egg being not passive but taking a more Boadicean approach to her men. This indeed is the standard view today: video microscope images and better in vivo techniques show that the sperm don’t head towards the eggs, but rush around randomly in all directions; it’s the woman’s body that directs them in, sometimes helped by an actively slurping cervix. Once drawn closer the sperm are dragged over the final approach by chemical trails the egg sprays out to energize and pull in a particular one. But this for the proper professors, if not their eager-to-boogie daughters, is not what they would have liked to see.
Maxwell’s development of the kinetic theory of gases also seems to have come from his sharing in a standard view of society at the time. It was hard to tell what each individual in the great nation of England under Victoria was going to do, but somehow you could be sure that the end result of all those millions fussing, scurrying, slipping and interacting would be to man the navy, rule over the colonies, maintain a large coal industry, and do all those other things England was known for. This strangely cohesive power of the multitude, even though you could never tell what all the individuals in it were doing, was being described in detail by the new science of Social Statistics, and it was by explicit acknowledgement to it that Maxwell worked out his theory of gases where the scurrying molecules also were described only by overall statistics, and not individual biographies.
This sort of explanation sounds good, but it could become too deterministic. Should not every French conservative of the time who was aware of the problems of fermentation and disease have struck his head and said, ‘Quelle bêtise! Of course the problem must be due to multitudes of blindly swarming bacteria! What else would make sense of my political phenomenology and analogical thinking?’ In the Hollywood version, some of the big words judiciously dropped, that’s no doubt how it would be. But as we know, such mass discovery did not occur: most French brows remained unslapped. Why Pasteur happened to be especially sensitive to this aspect of political society and worked it into his answers to the problem of disease, is a matter for the psychologist or biographer to answer. Our question now rather is: why did so many people at the time – so many of our own great-grandparents – go along with him? For the bacterial concept was not one of those scientific ideas, such as quantum mechanics, which ordinary people have a difficult time taking up. Rather it was like momentum, or computers: quickly accepted by all.
The first thing to note in an explanation is that, for humans, thinking by analogy is almost inescapable. Everything that works at one level we’re keen to try to see in another one. I remember as a kid, when first learning about the solar system model of the atom, immediately wondering if our solar system was an atom in a larger being. Perhaps the gentle reader remembers the same.
Even easier is to compare what we see with our actual physical body. That, after all, is what we have to spend our lives immersed in. Children who draw the windows of houses to look like eyes so that the whole family home becomes like a larger body are doing just this. It is a very old technique, and was given wide spread in our culture through the notion of the Body of Christ. For long centuries that body was not just an analogy to society, but in the corpus mysticum was actually identified with the whole body of Christian society.
When we do compare the world to a body, we end up having to take into account that our own physical body is limited, both in prowess and, especially, in the fact that it will in time come to an end. Religion provides one consolation for this, but whenever men have strayed from religion there has been a need to find another consolation. Frequently this has meant finding something in the outside world to identify with that would provide that missing but so desired escape from mortality. In the late sixteenth century, legal and administrative documents began to note that the king had a natural body, which was certain to decay, but that the political body he was identified with was oh so very much better than that material one. Even in that early period those identifications with the Body Politic seem to be phrased wistfully, as if realizing it was only a second best.
In Pasteur’s era the problem was becoming especially severe. Life was increasingly under rational control, so each loss of life seemed more objectionable, wrong. There also seems to have been a decrease in genuine popular belief in religion. The conjunction meant that there was an especially strong interest in altered forms of the body that had any sort of immortality to offer. One of these was patriotism, a continuation of that Kingly identification with the whole mass of living creatures in a political unit. But another, not a consolation
but still a terrible fascination, was that mass of small creatures, that whole distorted society in miniature, which yet also happened to be immortal: the bacteria. Organisms known to science before that – cows, humans, daffodils – were not immortal. These were. The first journalists and royalty who peered through the microscopes in Pasteur’s or Koch’s laboratory to see the bacteria consistently reported this fascination.
Along with these factors of individual psychology, there were changes in the whole society to make Pasteur’s concept so readily picked up in this particular era. The increased life expectancy meant that population was growing, a lot. Also there was a great amount of internal migration, from one country to another, and from the land to the city. There were perhaps 100 million more people in Europe in 1900 than in 1870. Strange things happened. In 1830 a swampy settlement by one of the American Great Lakes had a population of under 100. By 1890 it was the city of Chicago, with a population of one million.
There were not enough accepted institutions to handle all these new bodies. Guilds were gone, upper and middle society seemed closed, and so enormous numbers were left in between: working, or joining trade unions, or just being – always in those great numbers, always milling and jumbling and getting in the way of the established citizens and of each other. One would not need to have been M. Pasteur to be attuned to swarming masses with that going on.
Source: David Bodanis, Web of Words: The Ideas Behind Politics, London, Macmillan, 1988.
God and Molecules
The Scot James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) has been ranked with Newton and Einstein as a scientific innovator. He was the first to produce a unified theory of electricity and magnetism, showing that these two phenomena always coexist, and he formulated the concept of electromagnetic waves (of which heat, light, radio waves and X-rays are all examples). Following Maxwell’s lead, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–94) produced electromagnetic waves in the laboratory, and was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves.
Cultured, widely-read and humorous (he once wrote an analysis of George Eliot’s Middlemarch claiming that it was in fact a solar myth) Maxwell was also a Christian, as this excerpt from his Discourse on Molecules (1873) indicates.
In the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone, stars so distant from each other that no material thing can ever have passed from one to another; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time.
Each molecule therefore throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the double royal cubit of the temple of Karnac.
No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.
None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to any of the causes which we call natural.
On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel [English astronomer 1792–1871] has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.
Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop, – not that Science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing back the history of matter, Science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and, on the other, that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural …
Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built – the foundation-stones of the material universe – remain unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as they were created – perfect in number and measure and weight; and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.
Source: Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell. With a Selection from his Correspondence and Occasional Writings and a Sketch of his Contributions to Science, London, Macmillan, 1882.
Inventing Electric Light
In 1876 the American technological genius and rags-to-riches folk hero Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) set up the world’s first industrial research laboratory in the remote hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey. During the six years he and his team worked there he secured patents for scores of inventions, including the phonograph, the telephone (an improvement on Alexander Graham Bell’s invention), the electric pen (a stencil duplicator), and the electric light bulb. Incandescent electric light had been the despair of inventors for fifty years, and, as one of the Menlo Park assistants Francis Jehl recalls, Edison spent fourteen months searching for a suitable filament.
The hunt was a long, tedious one. Many materials which at first seemed promising fell down under later tests and had to be laid aside. Every experiment was recorded methodically in the notebooks. In many there was simply the name of the fiber and after it the initials ‘T. A.,’ meaning ‘Try Again.’
Literally hundreds of experiments were made on different sorts of fiber; for the master seemed determined to exhaust them all. Threads of cotton, flax, jute silks, cords, manila hemp and even hard woods were tried.
Some of the fibers being worked at the moment were piled conveniently on top of the chest; and today you may see them still in the same spot. Others were stored in jars along the shelves. An examination of the labels on the jars as they stand today on the shelves along the east wall of the restored laboratory will give an idea of what an infinite variety were examined.
Chinese and Italian raw silk both boiled out and otherwise treated were among those used. Others included horsehair, fish line, teak, spruce, boxwood, vulcanized rubber, cork, celluloid, grass fibres from everywhere, linen twine, tar paper, wrapping paper, cardboard, tissue paper, parchment, holly wood, absorbent cotton, rattan, California redwood, raw jute fiber, corn silk, and New Zealand flax.
The most interesting material of all that we used in our researches after a successful filament was the hair from the luxurious beards of some of the men about the laboratory. There was the great ‘derby,’ in which we had a contest between filaments made from the beards of [John] Kruesi and J. U. Mackenzie, to see which would last the longer in a lamp. Bets were placed with much gusto by the supporters of the two men, and many arguments held over the rival merits of their beards.
Kruesi, you know, was a cool mountaineer from Switzerland possessed of a bushy black beard. Mackenzie was the station master at Mt. Clemens, Michigan, who had taught telegraphy to the chief in the early days after the young Edison had saved the life of Mackenzie’s small son Jimmy. His beard, or rather, his burnsides, were stiff and bristling.
As I now recall, he won the contest, though some claimed that an unfair advantage was given him; that less current was used on the filament made from his beard
than on that from Kruesi’s. Be that as it may, both burned out with considerable rapidity.
At last, on 21 October, 1879, Edison made a bulb that did not burn out. Its filament was of carbonized cotton sewing thread, and Edison and Jehl sat up all night watching it shine. The first commercial bulb, which followed swiftly, had a horseshoe filament of carbonized paper. The New York Herald reporter Marshall Fox, who visited the laboratory, explained how the filament was prepared in an article published on 21 December, 1879:
Edison’s electric light, incredible as it may appear, is produced from a little piece of paper – a tiny strip of paper that a breath would blow away. Through this little strip of paper is passed an electric current, and the result is a bright, beautiful light, like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn.
‘But paper instantly burns, even under the trifling heat of a tallow candle!’ exclaims the sceptic, ‘and how, then, can it withstand the fierce heat of an electric current.’ Very true, but Edison makes the little piece of paper more infusible than platinum, more durable than granite. And this involves no complicated process. The paper is merely baked in an oven until all its elements have passed away except its carbon framework. The latter is then placed in a glass globe connected with the wires leading to the electricity producing machine, and the air exhausted from the globe. Then the apparatus is ready to give out a light that produces no deleterious gases, no smoke, no offensive odors – a light without flame, without danger, requiring no matches to ignite, giving out but little heat, vitiating no air, and free from all flickering; a light that is a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp. And this light, the inventor claims, can be produced cheaper than that from the cheapest oil.