by Lee Sandlin
Redfield was a man who perpetually kept his own counsel; he rarely unburdened himself to either friends or family. But encouraged by Olmsted, he began talking for the first time about the Great September Gale. He had spent years looking for evidence about the gale and other severe Atlantic storms—in newspaper stories, explorers’ accounts, and ship logs. All of them confirmed his suspicion. There was only one way of explaining the damage the gale had left behind. There hadn’t been two identical storms passing each other in opposite directions. The gale had been a gigantic whirlwind, spinning around a moving center like a top.
Olmsted was stunned. He had no idea if Redfield was right, but the audacity of it took his breath away. He told Redfield that he had to publish it at once. Redfield immediately demurred. He wasn’t a philosopher; he was an amateur, a practical man of business who dabbled in natural philosophy. He would have no idea how to write up such a thing, and anyway he would have no standing among the real authorities on the subject. Olmsted brushed all these objections aside. It was true that science was becoming a professional field (perhaps most clearly marked by the increasing use of the word “science” instead of “natural philosophy”). But major contributions were still being made by the amateurs and the self-taught. After all, one of the most respected natural philosophers in America was Joseph Henry of Princeton University, who hadn’t spent a day attending college.
By the time the steamboat arrived at New Haven, Olmsted had won Redfield over. The two men arranged a deal: Redfield would write out his ideas, and Olmsted would vet them and send them on to the American Journal of Science. It was the beginning of a professional association and friendship that would last for the rest of their lives. Redfield wrote out his theories of the Great September Gale; he followed it by many more papers about Atlantic storms, about steamboat design, and about the fossil record of New Jersey. By the time of the New Brunswick tornado, he was already gathering a reputation for his unusual ideas.
This had not turned out to be a blessing for him. Most of the reputation was negative, due to the hostile reviews his papers had received from one particular critic—James Espy. Espy was scornful of the notion that any of the very large Atlantic storms, the ones generally known as hurricanes (in those days a vague catchall term, like “tornado” or “windstorm”), displayed signs of circular rotation around a moving center. Where would the energy come from to power and sustain this gigantic whirlwind? The storm, Espy wrote, “would soon be destroyed by its outward motion, unless some mighty cause exists, of which we have no knowledge, to generate new motion in the air.”
Redfield presented himself as a humble amateur who had no stake in higher theoretical questions. As his son John remembered: “My father would never permit his views to be called a theory; he used to say, Theory had he none, his work was simply to record and map out the facts that had been observed, to show not how storms were produced, but what storms are. If these recorded observations could not be reconciled to the theories of others, so much the worse for the theories.”
But that said, he was outraged and hurt by Espy’s criticisms, and he wrote letter after letter to the scientific journals disputing them. He also began mocking Espy’s theory of steam power, which he said was self-evidently nonsensical, and he soon grew so belligerent that he refused to acknowledge some of his own gross errors in basic science (he didn’t appear to grasp, for instance, how the moon’s gravity affected the tides); the most he would concede was that he had been “too aggressive” in putting forward his unconventional views.
Espy was taken aback at the vehemence of Redfield’s response and immediately wrote him a private conciliatory letter. He invited Redfield to come to Philadelphia and take part in a club he’d recently started at the institute, which he called the Franklin Kite Club. It was intended as a tribute to Benjamin Franklin, but Espy had his own serious purpose as well: he was fitting thermometers and barometers to his kites and guiding them into the convection columns beneath the clouds in order to track how their temperature and pressure fell off with altitude. (This calculation is now called the saturated adiabatic lapse rate and is an essential part of modern meteorology.) But Espy didn’t stress this lofty goal. The drift of his letter was more relaxed: join me, maybe we can settle our differences, at least we can indulge ourselves in the sheer pleasure of playing hooky by spending a sunny spring afternoon doing nothing more momentous than flying kites.
Redfield immediately wrote back to decline the invitation. He considered it unforgivably frivolous. He wanted nothing to do with Espy and even less to do with his theories. This was why, when he learned that Espy was in New Brunswick studying the tornado, he took care to stay as far away as possible.
Besides, he wanted to accumulate evidence to prove his own notion about the tornado—that it was a whirlwind like the hurricane. His son John would remember that July as a long solitary trudge through a succession of hot sunlit afternoons. Redfield wasn’t much interested in inspecting the damage track that cut through the town; most of the wreckage had been carted off already. He was focused instead on the downed trees in the woodlands. He brought along a compass and chain to measure the width of the storm track, and he had surveyor’s charts that he used to note the position and direction of each tree. The surface whirlwind pattern was perfectly obvious to him. Nor did he see any evidence at all of a rising column of air, as Espy believed. But he had no intention of engaging in any more debates about that. This was all just for his private satisfaction. He managed to collect his evidence and get out of New Brunswick without once running into Espy, and he would go on avoiding him for years.
5
The Philosophy of Storms
There was a story about James Espy and his youth on the Kentucky frontier—that he hadn’t learned to read or write until he’d almost turned eighteen. He’d only been inspired to learn when a friend took him to hear the celebrated politician Henry Clay. Clay was just at the beginning of his long career then, but he was already making a huge impression as an orator; Espy heard him at a large outdoor gathering, where he stood on a makeshift platform and held the crowd spellbound with his electrifying, impassioned praise of Federalism, of American identity, and of the necessity of holding the nation aloof from foreign wars. He spoke for an hour in a grand booming voice that surged and lulled and thundered again like the ocean. Afterward, descending from the platform, he was immediately mobbed by admirers. Espy pushed his way through to the inner circle but then found himself too tongue-tied to speak. One of Espy’s friends yelled out to Clay, “He wants to be like you, even though he can’t read.” Clay immediately plucked up one of his advertising posters from the platform, pointed to the big letter A in “CLAY,” and said to Espy, “You see that, boy? That’s an A. You’ve only got twenty-five more letters to go.” Espy was so inspired that he set out to learn to read at once. A year later, he was admitted to college.
Espy’s family didn’t much like this story. One of his nieces described it in her memoirs as a scurrilous lie invented by Espy’s enemies. But that’s unlikely. Espy did make a lot of enemies, but this wasn’t the sort of rumor that would have hurt him. Illiteracy was common on the early frontier, and there was no social stigma attached to it then (that came later, after the Civil War); besides, if he really had taught himself to read so quickly, it would have only made his admission to college that much more impressive. The most likely source for the story, true or not, was Espy himself. It goes along well with his lifelong sense that he was destined to accomplish great things—and also with something he was less comfortable acknowledging: that his inspiration was always basically oratorical.
Transylvania Academy, in the wilds of western Kentucky, was despite its remote location one of the best colleges in America. It had been founded as part of a widespread movement of teachers and educators who, fired up by the values of the Revolution, had come out like missionaries to spread learning to the frontier. Espy gained a solid education in mathematics up through calculus and a goo
d grounding in both Greek and Latin. He was always a strong student. “He shows an ardent desire for knowledge,” his older brother wrote of him in those years, “and promises to be both intelligent and useful.” But he also had something wayward and theatrical about him. He organized a debating society on campus that earnestly discussed the issues of the day—the rapid spread of statehood, for instance, or the American attacks on the Barbary States of Africa. But he also invented for it a secret hand signal; whenever one of the debaters flashed the signal, everybody had to switch sides and keep on arguing with exactly the same passion, just to see how long it took the audience to catch on.
After graduating, he went east and became a schoolmaster at a small academy in Pennsylvania. He lived in Bedford—a small and decorous town, where the people boasted about their close family ties to the Founding Fathers. Espy didn’t have those kinds of connections, but he was personable, self-confident, eloquent, and strikingly handsome; he met and courted a highborn local girl named Margaret Pollard and charmed not only her but her whole aloof family. After he and Margaret were married in 1809, he took her family name and signed himself James Pollard Espy.
Margaret was tall, slim, graceful, and well educated; she was at least as smart as he was, as he always admitted, and knew much more about literature and art than he had ever bothered to learn. But she was also in chronically poor health—so much so that the family considered her unmarriageable—and after she and Espy were married, she remained a lifelong invalid. But she proved to be a devoted and endlessly supportive spouse. “Having no children to occupy her care,” one friend wrote, “and being of high mental endowment and of enthusiastic temperament, she found a never-failing source of interest and gratification in watching the development of Mr. Espy’s scientific ideas.” She remained steadfast even after Espy’s ideas led him to give up his secure position with the academy and begin his fitful and ill-paid career with the Franklin Institute.
The institute was a curious establishment. It was one of several public-spirited organizations known as mechanics’ institutes that sprang up in the early Republic and were intended for the education of the working poor. The institute’s full name was the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, and it was open to mechanics, craftsmen, and artisans. For a nominal membership fee they could hear lectures and attend classes. They could also make use of the libraries, which had large collections of both classic literature and the latest scientific and technical books. There was also a public museum, which staged exhibitions of practical crafts. These exhibitions tended to be loud, exuberant, and delightful shows, where steam engines thundered, lumbering metal arms clacked, and big electrical toys sizzled and banged and flashed. Its blend of gaudy entertainment and educational uplift would be the model for P. T. Barnum’s notoriously raucous American Museum and for the great World’s Fairs later in the nineteenth century (as well as for institutions like Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry today).
The institute proved to be a congenial home for Espy. He made friends there—in particular, Alexander Bache, who volunteered there apart from his duties as professor of natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Bache was brilliant, intellectually open-minded, and easygoing. He was also one of the best-connected men in America and the great-grandson of none other than Benjamin Franklin. He and Espy got on well; his essential amiableness was a good contrast to Espy, who was characteristically boastful and extravagant. “Mr. Espy,” Bache later remembered, “was eminently social in his mental habits, full of bonhomie and of enthusiasm, easily kindling into a glow.” This made him a good fit for the institute: that was where, Bache wrote, “Mr. Espy found the mental stimulus that he needed, and the criticism which he courted, the best aids and checks on his observations, speculations, and experiments.”
Espy’s other close friend was Robert Hare—also a volunteer at the institute and like Bache a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was teaching not from necessity but from love: he happened to be an enormously wealthy man, the scion of the Republic’s most famous brewing family; Hare’s American Porter was a brand known all throughout New England. But when Hare was young, he had decided to leave the family business; he’d taken a medical degree, but his real love was chemistry and what would now be called electrical engineering. He had invented the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, an electrical device that allowed metalwork to be done at extremely high temperatures. He had also invented the galvanic deflagrator, a complex array of metal plates that formed a powerful voltaic battery (it was strong enough to ignite charcoal). Conclusively and several times over, he had refuted Benjamin Franklin’s old fear that electricity would prove to have no practical value.
Hare was a choleric and ferociously contentious man, known for shouting down anybody who disagreed with him. But he found a strong opponent in Espy, who was almost impossible to defeat in an argument. Espy had the exasperating knack of appearing at all times to be amused rather than enraged by opposition; he conveyed a sense that he simply couldn’t believe he was being disagreed with. “His views were positive and his conclusions absolute,” Alexander Bache later wrote, “and so was the expression of them. He was not prone to examine and re-examine premises and conclusions, but considered what had once been passed up by his judgment as finally settled.”
But the three friends still managed to work together, sometimes harmoniously, on several scientific projects the institute was conducting. In the late 1820s and early 1830s they collaborated on a project to discover the causes of steamboat explosions. They found the mathematics extremely difficult to work out and resorted instead to practical experimentation: they set out arrays of boilers in a deserted quarry and tried all the different ways they could think of to get them to blow up. Later, after they got a federal grant, they bought a corner plot on the outskirts of Philadelphia and commissioned a house to be built there according to their peculiar specifications: it had a bricked furnace with an observation window of thick glass; inside it they would set their custom-designed boilers of brass and iron and rig them to explode. The whole neighborhood was jarred by the bangs and crashes and explosions within the mysterious little corner building—like a life-size version of Ben Franklin’s old Thunder House.
Espy often came home with pieces he’d salvaged from the exploded boilers. He had turned the enclosed backyard of his and Margaret’s house in Bedford into his own private open-air experimental laboratory. He was attempting to construct what he called a nepheloscope (nephele is “cloud” in ancient Greek)—a device that would create clouds and mist in a glass chamber. The yard was jammed with copper vessels, piping, ceramic vases, tubs of water, and a battalion of thermometers and barometers that allowed Espy to calculate and record minute variations in the dew point. The whitewashed back fence was covered over with Espy’s scribbles; he used it to keep track of his results. His niece remembered that the fence was “so covered with figures and calculations that not a spot remained for another sum or column.”
The New Brunswick tornado turned out to be the making of Espy as a public figure. Soon after his visit to the disaster zone in 1835, he started including descriptions of what he’d seen in New Brunswick in his lectures on the theory of steam power. He noticed an immediate jump in the attentiveness of his audience, and soon, as he devoted more time to the subject of tornadoes and how they demonstrated his theory, he noticed a jump in the size of the audiences as well. He continued to give his lectures for free at the institute, but he branched out to another and more lucrative form of speaking engagement—the new American lyceums.
The lyceums were the major cultural movement of the era. They had grown out of the mechanics’ institutes like the Franklin: they were places where ordinary citizens could learn about and argue through the issues of the day. In the 1830s, there were lyceums in cities and small towns all over America—in old wooden meeting houses and in great stone-pillared downtown buildings, in barns and in open field
s. There were celebrated and well-compensated speakers who traveled the lyceum circuit full-time, lecturing on their pet subjects, and there were regular open debates when anyone could speak out on whatever controversial subject was then raging. The flimsy and precarious economy of the country was always a hot topic, particularly after the latest bank crashes and the catastrophic panics in the financial markets. The morality of slavery and the treatment of the Native Americans were widely and bitterly debated. But passions could run furiously hot on almost any topic—American stage actors versus the British, for instance, an issue so controversial that it caused a riot in New York City in 1849, during which twenty-five people were killed.
Everyone was welcome to attend a lyceum. Even unescorted women were admitted, which in the early years was almost unprecedented. Lyceums printed up special admission tickets for women that had a space labeled “Introduced by _____,” to be filled in with a male name—any name would do. (Later, this whole charade was dropped, and women not only attended freely but took part in the public debates; several women became famous as lyceum speakers.)
The lyceum movement was a lifesaver for Espy. He began lecturing at Philadelphia lyceums in 1837 and within a year was traveling to lyceums all over the country. “He took the bold resolution,” his friend Bache wrote, “though past middle age, to throw himself into a new career, laying aside all ordinary employments, and devoting himself to the diffusion of the knowledge which he had collected and increased, by lecturing in the towns, villages, and cities of the United States.”