Electric Universe

by David Bodanis

  On changing conceptions of time, two classics to enjoy are David Landes’s Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), which takes a sprightly historical approach, and Ernst Cassirer’s An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), rooted in Kantian philosophy, which takes a more discursive line. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963) excels on the religious views behind our shift to intense factory-controlled clock time; Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955) concentrates more on the universal principles of how societies shape time. David Paul Nickle’s Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) shows, most plausibly, how the frantic haste that the telegraph encouraged led to the destabilizing diplomacy so catastrophic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (New York: Walker; London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998) is the ideal narrative essay on telegraph technology and its consequences.

  BELL AND EDISON

  The best way to understand Bell as a person is through Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone, by Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson (New York: Abrams, 1997). It’s loaded with photographs from all stages of his life and has long extracts from the love letters as well as good explanations of the basic science. Laszlo Solymar’s Getting the Message: A History of Communications (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999) puts the science in the full context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century communication technologies; Signals: The Science of Telecommunications, by John Pierce and Noll Michael (New York: Scientific American Library, 1990) neatly brings in information theory as well.

  Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel with Bernard S. Finn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987) illuminates every question one can possibly imagine about the origin of the electric bulb. For a racily readable account of Edison’s life, I’d start with Matthew Josephson’s Edison (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1959), while Neil Baldwin’s Edison: Inventing the Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) takes a more thematic approach. For the shenanigans Edison was involved in when he finally met entrepreneurs as determined as he was, try Jill Jonnes’s well-written Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003).

  For broader trends, Thomas P. Hughes’s American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989) is very good, as is Arnulf Grübler’s Technology and Global Change (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which has enough charts to make any technological determinist happy; the edited volume by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx’s Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) is a useful counterweight. On electric streetcars, amusement parks, and popular culture generally, see David Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). The collective volume Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870–1950, edited by Colin Chant (London: Routledge, in association with the Open University, 1989) gives a European perspective to go with it. For the delays in taking up the new technology of electrification at the start of the twentieth century, Paul David’s writings give a good comparison with the difficulties in getting computer investments to fundamentally change working practices at the end of the same exhausting century. See the discussions in New Frontiers in the Economics of Innovation: Essays in Honor of Paul David (Cambridge, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005).

  J. J. Thomson’s life is sensitively recounted by his son in J. J. Thomson and the Cavendish Laboratory, by George Paget Thomson (London: Nelson, 1964), which shows this quiet, seemingly bumbling man ever so thoroughly transforming the modern world; see also Thomson’s own autobiography, Recollections and Reflections (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1936). What exactly J. J. Thomson discovered in 1897 is an intriguing question, for he couldn’t see electrons and was only able to record data on the ratio between electric charge and the mass of “something” in his cathode-ray tubes—a ratio that Walter Kaufmann in Germany had already measured, and with even greater accuracy. Per F. Dahl’s Flash of the Cathode Rays: A History of J. J. Thomson’s Electron (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1997) is an exciting, narrative-driven account of J. J. Thomson’s success; for the general issues of what constitutes discovery, try the essays in Histories of the Electron: The Birth of Microphysics, edited by Jed. Z. Buchwald and Andrew Warwick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Steven Weinberg’s The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990) is a clearly written synthesis of greater scientific power, and an excellent way to understand Thomson’s views, as well as recapping the relation between static and dynamic charges in electromagnetic theory today.

  FARADAY

  After researching Faraday’s life and works for a previous book, I’d thought I had little more to discover, but then I came across James Hamilton’s Faraday: The Life (London: HarperCollins, 2002) and, boy, did I learn what humility means. Hamilton is superb. He’s another art historian, who brings a richness to understanding Faraday’s life that most historians of science have missed. We see the tactility in Faraday’s hours of quietly winding electrical wire, as well as the significance of touch and smell and the years of deep religious thought, and how it all led to his great discoveries.

  Of the earlier accounts, L. Pearce Williams’s Michael Faraday (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965) is very good; so too is Geoffrey Cantor’s Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Scientist: A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Russell Stannard’s interviews with leading scientists, Science and Wonders: Conversations About Science and Belief (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996) is a strong start to the general topic of religion and science.

  Faraday’s key idea was that of a “field.” The ideal way to understand it is to spend a summer going through an introductory textbook on calculus, or even just some vector algebra, which would allow the pleasure which is volume 2 of Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1963; much reprinted) to be accessible. It’s hard to look at the world in the same way after that, but as it’s also hard to find the free time for the necessary mathematical preparation, an excellent alternative is Einstein’s own charming and nontechnical explanation, in parts 2 and 3 of his The Evolution of Physics, from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, cowritten with Leopold Infeld (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966; original edition 1938). The section where Einstein shows the reality of the field by explaining why sparks form when we quickly tug a plug from its socket is especially good. (Chapters 2 and 14 in volume 1 of Feynman’s Lectures also give a nontechnical flavor of the field approach.)

  It’s tempting to project back to Faraday’s time what we now know of fields, but that would miss the difficulty with which Faraday groped forward to his final achievement. The stages are well explored in P. M. Harman’s Energy, Force and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and also in Nancy Neressian’s brief yet sharp article “Faraday’s Field Concept,” in Faraday Rediscovered, edited by David Gooding and Frank A. J. L. James (London: Macmillan, 1985; New York: American Institute of Physics, 1989). Alice Jenkins’s essay “Spatial Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Science: Faraday and Tyndall,” in Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge, edited by Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 181–92, does perhaps the finest job of all at suggesting how visions of three-dimensional landscape entered i
nto Faraday’s views, as he moved from imagining instantaneous lines of force to a view of undulating waves traveling at finite speed.

  ATLANTIC CABLE, WILLIAM THOMSON AND

  JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

  Charles Bright, the imaginative chief engineer aboard the cable ships, was somewhat less imaginative when it came to naming his own son: he called him Charles Bright. It was the younger Charles who wrote The Story of the Atlantic Cable (London: George Newnes Ltd., 1903), and his years of hearing his father’s stories make it a great account of the venture; it also has a long transcript from the London Times correspondent who was aboard the Agamemnon when the HUGE waves of the 1858 storm hit. Bright junior’s companion volume, The Life Story of Sir Charles Tilston Bright (London, Constable & Co., 1908), is much longer, and contains such detail as the way British sailors would relax while taking samples of the mid-Atlantic seafloor: a crate of beer would go down with the line, at least part of the way, and then be towed up nicely chilled.

  Bright tried to be polite about Whitehouse, the electrician who nearly destroyed the venture, but if you’re near a good library and can get the official British inquest, Report of the Joint Committee on the Construction of Submarine Telegraph Cables (British Parliamentary Papers 1860, LXII), you’re in for a treat, as the spectacle of seeing Victorian barristers letting rip is as impressive in our day as it must have been in theirs. Of recent portrayals, The Atlantic Cable, by Bern Dibner (New York: Blaisdell, 1964), and A Thread Across the Ocean, by John Steele Gordon (New York: Walker & Co., 2002), both capture the tone well.

  My favorite biography of William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) is that by his friend Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson: Baron Kelvin of Largs (London: Macmillan, 1910; two volumes). A great deal more analysis, though perhaps less warmth of understanding, is in Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin, by Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Crosbie Smith’s later The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1998) does better at getting into the mindset of the time. The way Thomson went beyond Faraday in exploring what was happening inside the cable is the topic of Bruce Hunt’s most useful article “Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy and the Rise of Field Theory,” History of Technology 13, (1991), edited by Graham Hollister-Short and Frank A. J. L. James.

  It’s a shame that the structure of this book grants Maxwell only a brief mention, and I heartily recommend that readers look further into this cautious, brilliant, word-swirling man. Two good biographies are James Clerk Maxwell: Physicist and Natural Philosopher, by C. S. F. Everitt (New York: Scribners, 1976), and The Demon in the Aether: The Story of James Clerk Maxwell (Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing; with Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1983). For Maxwell’s key step in using the measured ratio between electrostatic and electromagnetic units to show that light itself is an electromagnetic wave, Simon Schaffer’s article “Accurate Measurement Is an English Science” in The Values of Precision, edited by M. Norton Wise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), is a typically lucid introduction.

  Both Thomson and Maxwell succeeded by knowing when to construct heuristic physical models, and when to let those models go. For Thomson’s bold, simplifying use of Fourier’s heat equations in his analysis of the Atlantic cable, see “Mathematics and Physical Reality in William Thomson’s Electromagnetic Theory,” by Ole Knudsen, in Wranglers and Physicists, edited by P. M. Harman (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1985); for Maxwell’s intricate construct of spinning gears and idler wheels to help clarify his final 1860s vision (and the edge it gave him over more primly abstract French researchers), start with The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light, by David Park (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chapter 9, and then consider Daniel Siegel’s Innovation in Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). After that, Maxwell’s own quirkily profound essays become accessible; they’re conveniently available in anthologies such as Physical Thought: An Anthology, edited by Shmuel Sambursky (London: Hutchinson, 1974).

  HERTZ

  The diary entries I used in the Hertz chapter are just a portion of what’s available in the compelling Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries, arranged by Johanna Hertz; second enlarged edition prepared by Mathilde Hertz and Charles Susskind; with a biographical introduction by Max von Laue (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977). Hertz’s main scientific papers were collected shortly after his death, and the second edition has an interesting preface by William Thomson; see Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity Through Space by Heinrich Hertz (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900). Sir Oliver Lodge’s Talks About Wireless (London: Cassel and Company Ltd., 1925) is a set of vivid reminiscences by someone close to all the main protagonists in radio’s early days. The science of what Hertz was doing is covered alongside Maxwell’s work in every introductory university text. The Sciences: An Integrated Approach, by James Trefil and Robert M. Hazen (New York: John Wiley, 1998), is an easy start, much more fluently written than the norm; Bryan Silver’s The Ascent of Science (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), takes a more literary approach, dense in historical byways.

  RADAR

  Watson Watt’s own account of his adventures in radar is, as might be expected, very rambling and very compelling; it’s The Pulse of Radar (New York: Dial, 1959). R. V. Jones’s remembrance of the intelligence wars takes a crisp, modestly ironic tone throughout: The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978). For biographies of other main characters, C. P. Snow’s Science and Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) is an excellent start; on Tizard and Lindemann, though, read Solly Zuckerman’s From Apes to Warlords (London: Hamilton, 1978) as a partial corrective alongside Snow’s work; also, see Tizard, by Ronald Clark (London: Methuen, 1965). After the official government history The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, by Charles Kingsley Webster and Noble Frankland (London: HMSO, 1961; four volumes) came out, Snow revised his 1961 lectures, producing Appendix to Science and Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); the back-and-forth makes the arguments, so soon after World War II, come alive once more.

  Robert Hanbury Brown’s Boffin: A Personal Story of the Early Days of Radar, Radio Astronomy and Quantum Optics (Bristol, England: Hilger, 1991) is an unusually well-written memoir, showing the early days of designing the Chain Home system, including the maneuvers needed to protect highly imperfect early equipment against the over-diligent eyes of London inspectors. Jack Nissen’s Winning the Radar War, co-written with A. W. Cockerill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), is what one young Cockney experienced when swept into Watson Watt’s development teams, where speed was more important than social class—and Britons from East End teenagers to Home County generals found long discussions within these teams liberating in a way they’d never imagined before.

  For detailed topics, George Reid Millar’s The Bruneval Raid (London: Bodley Head, 1974) is good on the paratroop operation, while The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Bomber Forces Against a German City in 1943 (London: Allen Lane, 1980) is still the best detailed account of the Hamburg raid. As overall introductions to the military campaign, Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (London: Granta Books, 2001) is powerful—I took my staccato initial description of Harris in the main text from him—but to balance it, do consider Max Hastings’s Bomber Command (London: Joseph, 1979, and later editions), which is more conservative, yet equally well researched and nuanced. As an example of the author’s psychological insight, he observes that “Although [Harris] sometimes damaged his own cause by his appalling exaggerations, he understood one prime principle of bureaucratic manoeuvre: that by agreeing to a course of action loudly and often enough in public, it is possible in reality to do something entir
ely different.” The BBC radio drama Bomber by Len Deighton (BBC Audiobooks, ISBN 0563552662, produced by Jonathan Ruffle) gives a gripping firsthand feel. Robert Buderi’s The Invention That Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) is the ideal single-volume account of radar through the whole twentieth century, from the forgotten German engineer who patented a shipboard system in 1904 to the latest research in radio astronomy. He also gives space to the fundamental contributions of MIT’s Rad Lab, which began to dominate radar development soon after the Chain Home system’s great success in 1940. The way one wealthy individual helped jump-start that powerful laboratory is the topic of Jennet Conant’s biography of Alfred Loomis, in Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).