by John Carey
The first public demonstration of electric light took place soon afterwards, on 31 December, 1879. As the New York Herald reported:
Edison’s laboratory was tonight thrown open to the general public for the inspection of his electric light. Extra trains were run from east and west, and notwithstanding the stormy weather, hundreds of persons availed themselves of the privilege. The laboratory was brilliantly illuminated with twenty-five electric lamps, the office and counting room with eight, and twenty others were distributed in the street leading to the depot and in some of the adjoining houses. The entire system was explained in detail by Edison and his assistants, and the light was subjected to a variety of tests. Among others the inventor placed one of the electric lamps in a large glass jar filled with water and turned on the current, the little horseshoe filament when this submerged burned with the same bright steady illumination as it did in the air, the water not having the slightest effect upon it. The lamp was kept thus under water for four hours. Another test was turning the electric current on and off on one of the lamps with great rapidity and as many times as it was calculated the light would be turned on and off in actual household illuminations in a period of thirty years, and no perceptible variation either in the brilliancy, steadiness or durability of the lamp occurred.
Three years later the Pearl Street Central Power Station was completed in New York – the first of the world’s great cities to be electrically lit. The coming of electric light was widely seen as banishing the fear and superstition that darkness had bred. The German historian Emil Ludwig proclaimed:
When Edison, the father of the American Nation, the greatest living benefactor of mankind, snatched up the spark of Prometheus in his little pear-shaped glass bulb, it meant that fire had been discovered for the second time, that mankind had been delivered again from the curse of night.
The same point is made, though less poetically, in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) when the new heir to Baskerville Hall arrives from North America and remarks, on viewing his spooky ancestral home:
It’s enough to scare any man. I’ll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months, and you won’t know it again with a thousand-candlepower Swan and Edison right here in front of the hall door.
Source: Francis Jehl (1860–1941), Menlo Park Reminiscences, Volume One, published by the Edison Institute, Dearborn, Michigan, 1937.
Bird’s Custard: The True Story
This touching piece of social history is by Nicholas Kurti, FRS, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Oxford.
It is widely believed that Bird’s custard is one of the earliest examples of ‘convenience foods’ or of regrettable substitutes designed purely to reduce the cost and the time of preparation of a dish. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the invention of Bird’s custard is a shining example of alleviating a deprivation caused by cruel nature.
Alfred Bird, whose father taught astronomy at Eton, was born in 1811 in Birmingham and in 1837 established himself as an analytical and retail pharmaceutical chemist there. When he married Elizabeth Lavinia Ragg he faced a challenge which was to influence his career. His young wife suffered from a digestive disorder which prevented her from eating anything prepared with eggs or with yeast. But Elizabeth Lavinia was apparently yearning for custard to go with her favourite fruit pies so Alfred Bird started experimenting in his shop. The result was the custard powder bearing his name and based on cornflour, which when mixed with milk produced, after heating, a sauce reminiscent in appearance, taste and consistency of a genuine egg-and-milk custard sauce.
The young wife was overjoyed and this substitute custard became the normal accompaniment to puddings at the Birds’ dinner table, though, when they entertained, genuine custard sauce was offered to their guests. Then came an occasion when, whether by accident or by design, ‘Bird’s custard’ was served and Alfred must have been gratified to hear his guests declare that it was the best custard they had ever tasted!
This then was the beginning of the firm Alfred Bird and Sons Ltd of Birmingham which for 120 years remained a family business, first under the chairmanship of the founder, then of his son, Sir Alfred Bird Bt and then of his grandson Sir Robert Bird Bt. While the firm’s main product remained custard powder Alfred Bird’s other invention to circumvent his wife’s digestive troubles, namely baking powder, was also manufactured and was used during the Crimean war so that British troops could be given fresh, palatable bread.
Alfred Bird was a Fellow of the Chemical Society and, a few months after his death on 2 December 1878, a brief obituary was published in the Journal of the Chemical Society, Vol. 35, p. 206, 1879. It described at some length Bird’s interest in physics and meteorology, thus: ‘He constructed a beautiful set of harmonized glass bowls extending over 5 octaves which he used to play with much skill’; and ‘in 1859 he constructed a water barometer with which he was fond of observing and showing to others the minute oscillations of the atmospheric pressure’. But of Bird’s Custard Powder – not a word!
Source: But the Crackling Was Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Nicholas and Giana Kurti, Adam Hilger, Bristol, IOP Publishing, 1988.
Birth Control: The Diaphragm
Birth control is not new. The methods used by the ancient Greeks – abstinence, abortion, withdrawal and extended breastfeeding – remained the commonest forms of fertility-limitation until the arrival of the oral contraceptive and the IUD in the 1960s. Condoms (made of linen, animal bladders, or fine skins) were in use from the late sixteenth century. But since they were regarded mainly as a safeguard against venereal disease (and were available in brothels in several European capitals by the end of the eighteenth century), they remained disreputable.
Public defence of birth control is first found in late-eighteenth century France. In the early nineteenth century it drew strongly on the theories of Malthus (see p. 54). It was not, at first, linked with women’s rights but with restriction of the irresponsible fertility of the poor. The introduction of a relatively reliable ‘scientific’ female contraceptive may have helped to change this emphasis during the later nineteenth century. By 1918 Marie Stopes was arguing, in her bestseller Married Love, that the wife had as much right to sexual pleasure as her husband, and she opened the first English birth control clinic in London’s Holloway Road in March 1921.
This extract is from Angus McLaren’s History of Contraception (1990).
The invention of the diaphragm did represent a significant innovation in fertility control. Nineteenth-century doctors popularized the use of pessaries to correct prolapsed uteruses; it was a short step to employ them as a barrier method of birth control. Such a device was presumably what Dr Edward B. Foote meant when referring to an Indian-rubber ‘womb veil’. The German physician W. P. J. Mensinga provided a clearer account of his diaphragm in 1882; a soft rubber shield which the woman inserted into the vagina to block entry to the uterus. Mensinga’s explicit intent was to protect unhealthy women from undesired pregnancies. The diaphragm was, when accompanied by douching, an effective female contraceptive; unfortunately its expense and the fact that it had to be fitted by a physician long restricted its use to a middle-class clientele.
Commercial houses began at the turn of the century to develop acidic powders and jellies to block and kill sperm. Easier to use was the soluble quinine pessary or suppository developed by the Rendell company in England in the 1880s and popularized by Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt. Similar home-made products which countered conception with both a barrier and a spermicide were soon being made from cocoa butter or glycerine by innovative housewives across Europe and North America.
Diaphragms and pessaries to be fully effective had to be followed by douching. Douching after intercourse with a vaginal syringe to destroy ‘the fecundating property of the sperm by chemical agents’ was recommended by the Massachusetts doctor Charles Knowlton in his Fruits of Philosophy, published in 1832. Knowlton
was prosecuted for obscenity, but his douching advice was repeated by others, such as Frederick Hollick in 1850 in his Marriage Guide. Simple cold water was suggested by some; Knowlton stressed the need to add a restringent or acidic agent such as alum, various sulphates or vinegar. Douches, like diaphragms, were regarded as providing a woman with contraceptive independence. By mid-century they were readily available in pharmacies and drug stores and sold via respectable mail-order catalogues, purportedly for purposes of hygiene. They were, for this reason, promoted by the German Health Insurance Programme and provided free to members of local Funds. Douching did entail expenses and required both a privacy and a water supply that was not available to many working-class couples. Perhaps this was just as well, since simply douching after intercourse was in fact less effective than coitus interruptus.
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, contraceptives and abortifacients were advertised in newspapers and magazines, sold in barber shops, rubber good stores and pharmacies, and brought to villages by itinerant pedlars and to working-class neighbourhoods by door-to-door hucksters. Irish doctors were astonished at the display by London chemists of ‘antigestatory appliances’ and ‘orchitological literature’.
Source: Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Headless Sex: The Praying Mantis
Several early naturalists observed instances of a female praying mantis eating the male during copulation. L. O. Howard sent the following account to the American magazine Science in 1886.
A few days since, I brought a male of Mantis carolina to a friend who had been keeping a solitary female as a pet. Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavored to escape. In a few minutes the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his left front tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur. Next she gnawed out his left eye. At this the male seemed to realize his proximity to one of the opposite sex, and began to make vain endeavors to mate. The female next ate up his right front leg, and then entirely decapitated him, devouring his head and gnawing into his thorax. Not until she had eaten all of his thorax except about three millimetres, did she stop to rest. All this while the male had continued his vain attempts to obtain entrance at the valvules, and he now succeeded, as she voluntarily spread the parts open, and union took place. She remained quiet for four hours, and the remnant of the male gave occasional signs of life by a movement of one of his remaining tarsi for three hours. The next morning she had entirely rid herself of her spouse, and nothing but his wings remained.
The female was apparently full-fed when the male was placed with her, and had always been plentifully supplied with food.
The extraordinary vitality of the species which permits a fragment of the male to perform the act of impregnation is necessary on account of the rapacity of the female, and it seems to be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner.
In the Biological Bulletin for October 1935, a later researcher, K. D. Roeder, demonstrated that removal of the male praying mantis’s head actually improved its sexual performance. This, he showed, was because the subesophageal ganglion (near the head) normally inhibits the copulatory movement of the abdomen. Once the subesophageal ganglion has been removed, by decapitating the insect, it will copulate with almost anything.
In his experiment, Roeder beheaded eighteen male mantises. Decapitation, he reported, is followed by a preliminary stage of shock, lasting for about ten minutes, after which the insects begin vigorous copulatory movements:
If they encounter any rounded object, such as a pencil or the observer’s finger, it is immediately grasped by the forelegs, while the other legs steady the body. Violent attempts are made to copulate with the object.
Decapitating females, Roeder found, does not have such dramatic results, though it does cause some muscular activity in the abdomen:
A decapitated female will readily accept a male, decapitated or otherwise, and actual copula results sooner than when both insects are intact. The pair remain together for about four hours.
Roeder illustrated his article with a photograph of a headless male mantis copulating with a headless female.
Sources: Science, New York: The Science Co., 1886. The Biological Bulletin, October 1935, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, printed and issued by Lancaster Press Inc., Prince and Lemon Sts, Lancaster, Pa.
The World as Sculpture
William James (1842–1910), elder brother of the novelist Henry James, was a pioneer psychologist, and founder of the first US psychological laboratory. In his Principles of Psychology (1890) he coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ (later used to describe the technique of writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) to characterize the chaotic flow of human mental activity. As a philosopher, he was one of the founders of Pragmatism, inventing the term ‘neutral monism’ for the theory that the ultimate constituents of reality are individual momentary experiences. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) he suggests that the substance of reality (or ‘all-form’) may never get totally collected, and that ‘a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is as acceptable as the all-form’. This extract from the Principles, positing the innumerable possible worlds consequent on such a view, anticipates the multiple worlds of quantum theory (see p. 278).
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish or crab!
Source: William James, The Principles of Psychology, London, Macmillan, 1890.
The Discovery of X-Rays
On the evening of Friday 8 November 1895, the Professor of Physics at the University of Würzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845–1923) was working late in his laboratory, after everyone else had gone home. He was preparing to carry out some experiments with an induction coil connected to the electrodes of a partially evacuated glass tube.
It had been known since 1858 that when electricity was discharged through the air or other gases in such tubes, the glass became phosphorescent. The ‘cathode rays’ causing this had been fancifully described by Sir William Crookes in 1878 as ‘a stream of molecules in flight’. It was also known that if the tube had a thin metal-foil ‘window’ in it, the cathode rays would penetrate this and cause fluorescence a few centimetres beyond the tube. Roentgen thought cathode rays might be detectable outside the tube even when there was no metal-foil window. As a first step in investigating this he covered the entire tube in black cardboard, and drew the curtains to darken the room. To test that his cardboard shield would not let light through, he then turned on the high-voltage coil and passed a current through the tube.
What happened next is described by Roentgen’s student Charles Nootnangle of Minneapolis, who had it from Roentgen himself a few days later:
By chance he happened to note that a little piece of paper lying on his work table was sparkling as though a single ray of bright sunshine had fallen upon it lying in the darkness. At first he thought it was merely the
reflection from the electric spark, but the reflection was too bright to allow that explanation. Finally he picked up the piece of paper and, examining it, found that the reflected light was given by a letter A which had been written on the paper with a platinocyanide [fluorescent] solution.
It was at once clear to Roentgen that the piece of chemically-treated paper could not have been made to fluoresce by cathode rays, since it was several feet away from the tube. Some other rays must be responsible – rays that were able to pass through the cardboard shield round the tube, and travel invisibly through the air. Since he had no idea what these rays were, Roentgen called them X-rays, and he began experimenting to see what other substances they would pass through. On 28 December 1895 he presented his ‘Preliminary Communication’, entitled On a new Kind of Rays, to the President of the Würzburg Physical and Medical Society.