The First Scientific American
Page 43
First, we should introduce him to Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt, a stupendously talented Prussian naturalist, nearly equaled Franklin as an iconic natural philosopher and public figure—he was the only person remotely capable of doing so. He made contributions to most of the sciences. And in the tradition of fur-capped explorer-naturalists, Humboldt combined his research with travels, particularly in the Andes. He collected temperature readings for the South Atlantic current that now bears his name, as Franklin had done with the Gulf Stream. He composed some of the first natural histories of entire sections of South America and effortlessly mastered revolutions in thought as they exploded around him. At the height of his fame, he placed a newspaper advertisement asking admirers please not to write—he was drowning in letters. Franklin would have sympathized.30
At times, Humboldt did lend his talents to the state, but for the most part, he and his brother, Wilhelm, divided the territory: Alexander studied nature and stayed out of politics, and Wilhelm did the reverse. Had he met Humboldt, Franklin would have seen that science was becoming specialized. Its practitioners no longer seemed qualified to contribute to other realms, as Franklin himself had done.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the practice of science required more and more specialized education, moving still further from the knowledge of ordinary working people. And by the early twentieth century, scientific research came to require unprecedented funding, increasingly from government sources. Scientists no longer contributed to politics (unless their expertise and political needs coincided exactly) and became instead the beneficiaries of political institutions.
In the United States, however, those institutions gave little to scientists. From the 1790s until the early twentieth century, the only educational establishments that received federal support were the military academies, starting with West Point. That was where a man had to go to study the latest in science and mathematics. Otherwise, until World War II, the United States would remain a backwater, particularly in the areas of physical science in which Franklin had made his name but that now required instruments much more expensive than those he had used. In contrast, natural history and the fields that would become the life sciences remained less specialized and less expensive. These were subjects that Americans could address.
This was the case for hydrography, where our resurrected Franklin would have met many of his own friends and relatives. Two of these were his younger contemporaries. Thomas Truxton (or Truxtun), the captain who had carried Franklin home in 1785, and Jonathan Williams Jr., Franklin’s grandnephew, both published analyses of oceans and navigation that included material on the Gulf Stream. In his 1794 piece, Truxton wrote as a naval captain and emphasized the value of Franklin’s work to navy men. He had been “attentive,” he claimed, to temperature variation in water and air, “as recommended by that great philosopher, the late Dr Franklin.”31
In contrast, Williams used his Thermometrical Navigation to distinguish between men of learning and ordinary tars. He had made his own claim to learning when he published parts of his essay in the third volume of the APS Transactions (1790). Men of rank and with titles litter Williams’s narrative: “Captain Ellis,” “Doctor Franklin,” “Don Cipriano Vimercati,” “Captain William Billings,” “Sir George Staunton.” None of Franklin’s old sea captains or intelligent whalemen make appearances. Williams, like his granduncle, believed that navigators could use the thermometer to detect dangerously shallow water, which tended to be colder. But this belief differentiated learned men from mere sailors. Because the latter tested sea temperature “with the hand” rather than instruments, “they think [it] merely a matter of curiosity.” So much for the human hand as a sensitive instrument of science.32
As Williams (and Franklin) had predicted, technical instruments began to dominate hydrography. Armed with new devices, such as chronometers and improved thermometers, investigators sought larger patterns in ocean circulation and offered explanations. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, hypothesized in 1798 that if there was thermal variation at the sea’s surface, the same must occur below; cold water must sink as warm water spread above it. The cold water would also be denser, meaning it would contain more salt. Humboldt presented a similar theory of circulation. The idea of a general oceanic circulation would not, however, be widely accepted until well into the twentieth century. In the meantime, hydrographers continued to trace surface currents, as Humboldt did in the South Atlantic.33
Scientists and even travelers collected a variety of data on the world’s oceans. The accumulation of information occurred, in large part, because ocean travel was becoming more common. European empires spread; naval and commercial shipping expanded; steam power (and then fossil fuel) made ocean travel faster; and ocean cruises, which more than once had nearly killed Franklin, actually became enjoyable. Ships’ logs, diaries, letters, and data sets abounded. Collating all this new marine information was a formidable task. Franklin might have been pleased that a great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, did some notable collecting and collating. He might also have been surprised that Bache was the gentlemanly nemesis of a self-made naval hydrographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury.34
Bache attended West Point, where he gained the best education in science and mathematics then to be had in the United States. In 1843, he became second superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey, which undertook a fifteen-year study of the Gulf Stream. This analysis of thermal variation was a clear descendant of Franklin’s pioneering work. Bache enjoyed his pedigree. He was fond of quoting Poor Richard, admonishing one of his assistants that “a man who was good at making excuses was good for little else.” One of Bache’s admirers observed a “striking parallel between the great Philosopher and Statesman, Benjamin Franklin, and his illustrious descendant Alexander Dallas Bache.”35
While Bache collected data with instruments, his rival, Maury, studied ordinary ships’ logs. With these, Maury tracked patterns of winds and currents, publishing his results as guides to navigation. One of these guides was sold with a packet of blank forms, enlisting navigators in an ongoing project to which they submitted further information. Maury also tried his hand at hydrographic theories in The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), in which he memorably described the Gulf Stream as “a river in the ocean.” In addition, he paid careful attention to the configurations of the seabed and created the first bathymetric chart of the North Atlantic. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Maury with the first printed use (in 1859) of the word oceanography.36
But it was navigators, not scientists, who most valued Maury’s work. Notably, Bache snubbed him. Maury’s charts of wind and currents were respected but not his theories of circulation. The contempt he suffered from better-educated men of science reflected the growing fissure between scientists and amateurs. (The split existed in Franklin’s own family: the Philadelphia Baches studied the sea, whereas the Nantucket Folgers continued to be seafarers. In 1808, it had been Mayhew Folger who, commanding the Topaz in search of seals, discovered the famous Bounty mutineers hiding on Pitcairn Island in the Pacific.) From the Victorian era onward, hydrographers would steadily adopt instruments and gather data. Each development made it more difficult for nonspecialists to make a contribution.37
It was even more difficult in other areas of natural history. Americans continued to produce descriptive work, to gather specimens and data, and to write narrative accounts of the natural world—these activities came together in the fabled Merriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806. But in Europe, universities and learned societies that had government support and connections provided a superior environment for naturalists, whose claims were getting bigger and bolder.38
So it was wealthy, Cambridge-educated Charles Darwin, with the support of the Royal Navy in the form of HMS Beagle, who radically redefined humanity’s place within nature. In his work in paleontology, geology, and natural history and particularly with his ideas of extinction and evolution, Darwin
attacked many ideas Franklin (and others) had held dear. Darwin presented evidence that species changed or even went extinct. He argued that these processes had happened frequently and were ongoing. And he insisted that changes in species had eventually given rise to humans, who were descended from animal ancestors.
Many people shrank from these conclusions (many still do), and Franklin, had he lived to meet Darwin, might have been similarly chagrined. Franklin knew Darwin’s grandfather—Erasmus Darwin had been a Birmingham Lunar Society friend. And Franklin met Charles’s father, Robert Waring Darwin, who visited him in Paris. But Franklin rejected the idea of the annihilation of species that the later Darwin would be famous for. He believed that material things, created by a divine power, could only be destroyed by that power. In 1767, Franklin had seen what turned out to be fossilized mastodon tusks and teeth. But he thought they were evidence that the animals had found one region uninhabitable and had moved on. And he had long believed in the argument from design, which Darwin firmly rejected. Darwin’s evolution either showed the lack of a divine creator or revealed a malevolent deity who extinguished as much as he created.39
Would Franklin have been appalled or flattered to learn that he in fact had a place in evolution’s intellectual genealogy? Darwin had formed his idea of the struggle for existence after reading Thomas Malthus’s work in political arithmetic. Malthus argued that populations of plants and animals (including humans) would increase until they ran out of the means of subsistence. Subsequent survival depended on a struggle for access to subsistence. Malthus cited Franklin’s own political arithmetic to make this point: in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” the American had said that plants and animals could breed until they ran out of ground. Franklin had not moved on to Malthus’s gloomy conclusion, but British America’s burgeoning inhabitants were for Malthus the first evidence of the phenomenon that would later convince Darwin that nature truly was red in tooth and claw.40
It is a sign of the complexity of both the theory of evolution and Franklin’s mind that it is impossible to say what his reaction to Darwin might have been. At the very least, the evolutionist Victorian would have given him pause. Franklin would probably have been dismayed to learn that after Darwin, religion and science were pitted as adversaries. Following his youthful and brief flirtation with libertinism, Franklin had always sought to reconcile the two forms of belief.
Contemporary work in physical science might have been less dismaying to Franklin. Indeed, he would have recognized many of its premises, which remained Newtonian. Nineteenth-century scientists still accepted that elementary particles, forces, subtle fluids, and even the aether were useful concepts for their work. Had Franklin turned up in their laboratories, physical scientists might have begun their conversation with him with a polite acknowledgment of the law of the conservation of charge. Franklin had never used that phrase, but it did reflect his idea that electricity had two quantities, positive and negative, and that it occurred when both these charges were present.
Physical scientists still focused on heat and electricity as central properties of inorganic matter. But nineteenth-century experimenters also investigated magnetism. They examined the interplay of electricity and magnetism, assuming that the forces had a constitutive role in matter itself. In the parallel field of thermodynamics, scientists studied the nature and significance of heat, and they began to define energy as a central property of matter. Experimenters explained that light and other forms of radiation created waves in the aether. By the middle to late part of the century, they used new ideas—subatomic matter, chemical structure, and radiation (especially X rays)—to challenge the older concepts of particles and forces. But they did so mostly to elaborate on what was still a fundamentally Newtonian view of the world. Scientists continued to believe they could measure, in absolute terms, material properties and connections, as when they defined the mass of different particles and the speeds of their motion.41
Franklin might have recognized aspects of these experiments, but he would have been confused by others. The study of electromagnetism required ever more elaborate equipment and would eventually demand a rigorous command of mathematics. The classic experiments in physics were done in Europe. At best, learned societies and universities in the United States could repeat the experiments, if they could afford the necessary apparatus. Had he visited laboratories abroad, Franklin could have admired their thrumming electromagnetic apparatuses. But even the politest of laboratory hosts would eventually have had to show Franklin some equations that the colonial electrician could not possibly have understood.
When it came to electricity, nineteenth-century Americans distinguished themselves with its practical applications. New devices stored and released electricity in a finely controlled manner. Most notably, technicians sent pulses of electricity through metal wires or cables, creating the telegraph. In fact, the invention of the telegraph united two of Franklin’s favored fields, electricity and hydrography.
It all came together in the Atlantic Ocean. In 1842, Samuel Morse first submerged a cable in New York harbor to demonstrate electrical communication through the sea. A grand, transnational project to lay an Atlantic cable commenced. (Matthew Maury’s investigation of the Atlantic seabed was, in part, meant to help lay that cable.) In 1856, a coin struck to commemorate the unveiling of a Franklin statue in Boston featured Morse along with a bust of Franklin. “SCIENCE UNITED THEM,” the coin proclaimed, along with Morse’s own Shakespearean claim, “I’LL PUT A GIRDLE AROUND THE EARTH IN FORTY MINUTES,” a Puckish defiance of distance Franklin would indeed have admired. Two years later, the completed cable carried the first official telegraphic message—Queen Victoria sent greetings to President John Buchanan. In his reply, Buchanan stated his wish that the cable be “forever neutral even should hostilities arise.” The director of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in England added: “Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication.” Although the cable failed a short time later, it was replaced, and others were laid under other seas. Nations—and the republic of letters—had a new and much faster means of communication. 42
Subsequent developments in physics kept those telegraph wires humming. Above all, many new discoveries challenged the Newtonian view of nature that Franklin had taken for granted. By the end of the nineteenth century, experimenters in quantum physics were stating that particles of matter did not have absolute mass. The masses instead changed, depending on where the particles were positioned or were moving, in relation to other material entities.
What quantum mechanics did for matter, relativity did for time. In 1905, Albert Einstein put forward his special theory of relativity. He proposed that there was no single, unified temporal flow but only moments of time that existed relative to each other. Einstein assumed that the speed of light was constant but that no other motion (or the time it took) was. He thus scuttled the idea of an aether. Newton had cheated, Einstein believed, by positing an absolute frame of reference that was not actually there; light did not need a medium to move through space. Einstein also suggested that mass and energy could be understood in relation to each other: E = mc2. In his famous 1905 equation, he expressed the relation between mass and energy mathematically. The equation summarized his hypothesis that the energy (E) needed to accelerate a mass (m) to the speed of light (c) would be infinite (an amount of energy divisible by the speed of light squared).43
Taken together, quantum mechanics and relativity demolished the Newtonian view of the cosmos. The new view of nature was relational, not absolute. Matter could be destroyed—that was how energy was created. Franklin would have found these ideas unfamiliar, if not deeply unsettling. He had believed himself to be observing and explaining forms of matter and their effects on each other. He would never have thought that the particulate configuration of matter and its movement (measured over time) could be a matter of relative position, either of the particles or of the person who observed them. Nor did Franklin think that m
atter itself could be annihilated—instead, he believed it changed form without ever ceasing to exist.
In a world without universally true physical form, can anything be certain? Einstein did not believe that nature necessarily lacked absolutes—he simply concluded that that was the way humans experienced it. Quantum mechanics alarmed even him. He rejected the conclusion that there was no real pattern in physical reality. “God does not play dice with the Universe,” Einstein would begin to proclaim. (Franklin would have agreed with that.) Universal patterns might still exist in the natural world, but they were beyond the human ability to perceive, let alone reason about them. Other scientists were not as sure as Einstein that this might be true. And in the popular imagination, the new physics seemed like a philosophy of radical uncertainty.44
The popular view matched the era, unfortunately. With World War I, the global depression that followed, the reconfiguration of European empires, and the rise of political extremism, the center no longer held. Meanwhile, scientists were dismantling long-standing assumptions about nature’s unity and stability. Yet the scientific ideas were arresting. Einstein became a muse to a variety of artists and writers; his theory of relativity was widely reported, though not always accurately.45