Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  This is all very disgusting, but no one reading Smollett at the time would have believed that London food was really so bad. He exaggerates for the sake of comedy. What was so startling for Accum’s earliest readers was the discovery that many of the adulterations that people had assumed to be comic distortions were actually true. The editor of the Literary Gazette commented, while reviewing Accum’s Treatise:

  One has laughed at the whimsical description of the cheats in Humphrey Clinker but it is too serious for a joke to see that in almost everything which we eat or drink, we are condemned to swallow swindling, if not poison—that all the items of metropolitan, and many of country consumption, are deteriorated, deprived of nutritious properties, or rendered obnoxious to humanity, by the vile arts and merciless sophistications of their sellers.10

  Accum’s genius was to make readers see that “swallowing swindling” really was “too serious for a joke.” That he managed this was due in part to the times in which he lived—times when the possibilities for adulterating food multiplied as science and industry grew—and in part to his own outstanding talents as a publicist. Accum was the perfect commentator on this new rash of skulduggery, since he was a man whose passion was the science and industry of modern Britain, who nevertheless saw that science and industry could be used to do damaging things to food. The story of this book is largely the battle between the science of deception and the science of detection. Accum’s Treatise represents the beginning of this struggle.

  Portrait of the chemist Friedrich Christian (Frederick) Accum (1769–1838), who first opened the eyes of the British public to the extent of food adulteration. An engraving from the European Magazine (1820) at the height of Accum’s fame.

  The Glorious Career of Frederick Accum

  London in Accum’s lifetime was a city where outsiders could forge their way to the top very quickly, if they had enough bravado and talent. In this centre of commerce and relative tolerance, Accum was one of many Germans who made their way to prominence. There had been a German Lutheran church in the East End since 1762 and a German school attached to it. Accum counted among his London friends the German publisher and inventor Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834), famous for his lithographic prints. But he was by no means part of a Germanic clique. Accum had a knack for making contacts in every walk of British life: lawyers, scientists, politicians, aristocrats, men of letters; and charladies, as we shall see.

  Bad food was not the first public cause Accum took up. A man with limitless reserves of energy, charisma, and a swaggering belief that he could make himself the master of every branch of chemistry and turn it to profit, he had already secured a place in history by overcoming public prejudice against gas lighting. It was largely thanks to Accum that by 1815 the streets of Westminster were lit by gas lamps rather than, as previously, by lanterns. Yet this was not all. Accum was also famous as a chemical lecturer and teacher, as a purveyor of chemical equipment, as a royal apothecary, as a popularizer of the ideas of Lavoisier, and as a writer on every subject from analytical mineralogy and crystallography to vanilla pods. “In the whole history of chemistry,” wrote C. A. Browne in 1925, “there is no one who has attempted to discharge so many different roles as Accum.”11 Most historians no longer believe in the notion of a single “industrial revolution”; but if we might still speak of such a thing, Accum was the industrial revolution in microcosm, a man in whom knowledge and trade, enlightenment and profit, plus a fierce pride in the riches and power of Great Britain, coalesced in one single, handsome, restless figure.

  His gas lighting triumph shows how Accum’s talents combined to achieve spectacular results. Gas lighting had first been demonstrated in Paris in 1786 by the French innovator Philippe Lebon, but Lebon’s “thermolampes” had not been put to practical use. They certainly hadn’t made it to London, whose streets and houses were still lit mostly by whale oil, tallow, or beeswax. Then, in the winter of 1803–4, a German based in England called F. A. Winsor (another Friedrich like Accum who had anglicized his name to Frederick) gave a series of spectacular demonstrations on the benefits of gas lighting at the old Lyceum theatre on the Strand.12 One witness described how the large theatre was “most brilliantly illuminated by inflammable air,” with tubes of gas fixed round the ceiling, the boxes, and the stage, supplied from a reservoir below. Soon after, Winsor obtained a patent for his method of gas lighting and tried to set up a company for lighting the buildings and streets of London.

  Ornate gas lights from Accum’s Practical Treatise on Gas-Light (1815).

  But there was widespread resistance to the idea of burning gas for light. Ordinary people feared the stench and that gas would escape and poison them. British seamen opposed gas lighting, fearing that the decline in demand for whale oil would put them out of a job. Perhaps most significantly, many distinguished scientists also cast doubt on whether gas illumination could ever be safe, including Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the electrochemical genius who later invented the miner’s safety lamp. It didn’t help that Winsor was himself no scientist, but a self-aggrandizing buffoon. In 1807, he gave his proposed company the ridiculous title of the New Patriotic Imperial and National Light and Heat Company and boasted that annual profits would amount to £229 million (around £15 billion in today’s money, using the retail price index, the most modest index of calculation)—a transparently self-serving and counterproductive attempt to garner investors.13

  It was here that Accum stepped in. An accredited and well-connected scientist, he had a much better sense of what it would take to make gas lighting a going concern. Like Winsor, he scented the profit that could be made from gas, but went about it in a much more effective manner. He brushed up an earlier interest in the chemistry of gas, spending months experimenting with gas stoves, measuring gas flames against tallow flames, and distilling sticky coal tar with the consistency of treacle. He then presented himself before Parliament as an expert witness on the safety of Winsor’s method of gas lighting. In 1809, Accum assured the House of Commons that, based on his extensive experiments, there was “no smell” in gas at the time of combustion, if it was properly done and “no danger” of the gas bursting the pipe; gas illumination, he insisted, was not just as safe as tallow light, it was greatly superior to it. Compared to the constant dangers of fires caused by guttering candles in enclosed spaces, gaslight was cleaner and more dependable, contained in its glass dome.14 It was the right light for a modern society. In 1810, Parliament passed a bill permitting the incorporation of Winsor’s company; the name of Frederick Accum, “practical chymist,” appeared on the first board of directors. In 1813, Westminster bridge was lit by gas, and by 1815 thirty miles of gas main had been laid in London.

  Accum was now in demand throughout England as a coal-gas expert. In 1815, he published his Practical Treatise on Gas-Light, the first work in any language on the subject, beautifully illustrated with pictures of gas chandeliers and lamps, published by Accum’s great friend, Rudolph Ackermann. In this work, one can see Accum’s passionate belief in industrial progress. Accum pleads with his readers to ignore the “common clamour” that rises up against all “improvements in machinery,” whether the steam engine, new spinning and threshing machines, or gaslight. “It ought never to be forgotten,” he wrote, “that it is to manufactories carried on by machinery, and abridgment of labour, that this country is indebted for her riches, independence, and prominent station among the nations of the world.”15 Well he might believe in progress and in Britannia, given his own personal progression from German obscurity to British fame and wealth.

  Accum’s career was one of dramatic upward mobility, from humble origins in Westphalia to a glittering and lucrative position as part of the scientific establishment of London. The sixth of seven children, he was born in Buckeburg on 29 March 1769—the birth year of both Napoleon and Wellington, as well as the great scientist Cuvier, and the year that “James Watt patented his steam engine and Arkwright his spinning frame.”16 But nothing suggested that
Accum’s birth would lead to similar greatness. Only two of his siblings reached maturity, a sister, Wilhelmina, and a brother, Phillip; the other four died, two of smallpox. Accum’s father was a soapmaker, a converted Jew, born Herz Marcus, who at the age of twenty-eight changed his name to Christian Accum, probably for reasons of love; soon afterwards, he married Accum’s mother, Judith Suzanne Marthe Bert la Motte, a devout Huguenot. Christian died when Accum was only three, so it was his mother, Judith, who brought him up. Not much is known of Accum’s childhood, except that he attended the local gymnasium, where he would have studied Homer and Herodotus, Cicero and Tacitus, but no science. His inclination towards chemistry seems to have been nurtured more by familial influences. Watching his father, and later his older brother Phillip, making soap must have been one influence, as all Accum scholars have noted.17 The process of saponification is a very immediate form of chemistry. Young Accum must have known his acid from his alkali, must have seen the magic of how potash could turn crude hog’s lard into soap. Yet he did not choose to follow his brother into the family business. What Accum scholars don’t say is that his love of chemistry was undoubtedly encouraged also by watching his mother cook.

  “The inhabitants of Westphalia,” he later recalled, “are a hardy and robust people, capable of enduring the greatest fatigues, [who] live on a coarse brown rye bread.”18 He probably meant pumpernickel, a Westphalian speciality famous even then outside Germany, whose strange dense texture was said to owe a lot to the characteristics of the local grain.19 Accum himself came to prefer a slightly lighter wholemeal sour dough bread; but some of his tastes remained distinctively Westphalian. Long after he had settled in London and left Westphalia behind, Accum continued to extol the excellence of Westphalian ham, that smoky dried delicacy flavoured with juniper whose reputation then exceeded that of the hams of Bayonne and Parma. The nineteenth-century German food writer Rumohr called Westphalian ham one of those products that is “unique, incomparable, unrivalled.”20 A contemporary English cookery book said that “it cannot . . . be denied that the Westphalian hams, made from wild boar, have a richness and flavour which cannot be completely imparted to the flesh of the finest and fattest hogs.”21 Often, though, the hams were made from hogs and not boar. Accum wrote that “families [in Westphalia] that kill one or more hogs a year . . . have a closet in the garret, joining the chimney, made tight, to retain smoke, in which they hang their hams and bacon to dry; and out of the effect of the fire, they may be gradually dried by the wood smoke, and not the heat.” This is surely autobiography as well as description. The Accum family would have needed to kill hogs for their lard for soap; delicious ham must have been a side effect.

  As well as feeding him well, Accum’s mother seems to have been the one who secured him his entrée to London life. Judith Accum was acquainted with the Brande family, who, thanks to the Hanoverian connection, were apothecaries to King George III of England. After leaving school, Accum took an apprenticeship at the Brande family pharmacy in Hanover. At this time, writes one historian of science, “the pharmacist’s shop was virtually the only place to gain a practical knowledge of chemistry.”22 Young Accum must have done his job well, because in 1793, at age twenty-four, he was transferred to the London branch, in Arlington Street, just off Piccadilly and round the corner from St James’s Palace. From here, he flung himself with great enthusiasm into the blossoming world of British science. He attended lectures at the School of Anatomy in Windmill Street, where he was taken under the wing of the physician Anthony Carlisle, who introduced him to other scientists, including William Nicholson, the founder of the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, where Accum published his early articles on the adulteration of drugs and on the scientific properties of vanilla pods. Little by little, he made a name for himself. Just seven years after his arrival in London, Accum was setting up his own business in Old Compton Street, Soho, as a supplier of chemical apparatus. This is where he lived for the remainder of his time in England—the twenty years until the publication of the Treatise on Adulterations.

  Accum’s public life was very different from the narrow laboratory existence of today’s academic chemist. He campaigned; he performed; he advertised; he showed off; he shared his joy of curious experiments involving Bunsen burners with the general public. He combined a fine mind with a popular touch. His aim, he wrote, was to mingle “chemical science with rational amusement.”23 He was said to have great personal charm, a fact confirmed by the warm defences of him issued by friends following the scandal that finally ruined his career in England. There are several illustrations of Accum giving public chemistry demonstrations at the Surrey Institution, where he had become professor of chemistry. A rapt audience looks on from gallery and stalls; society ladies lean forward eagerly over the balcony to get a better look. Were it not for Accum’s Regency attire—with his Byronic dark hair, beetle brow, full lips and Romantic collar—he could almost be a modern celebrity chef doing a cookery show. He is pouring some substance from a great height into another substance, with a flourish.

  Accum giving a public lecture at the Surrey Institute, Blackfriars Road, London, ca. 1810, by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson.

  Chemistry, then at the height of its fashion, suddenly seemed relevant to all aspects of daily life. As one journalist wrote in 1820, chemistry was “intimately connected with that enthusiasm and laudable desire for exploring the productions of nature, which characterize the age in which we live . . . chemistry within our own times has become a central science.”24 Accum himself was seen as the “pet chemist” of London.25 Chemistry governed the twin passions of

  Some chemical instruments from Accum’s Explanatory Dictionary of chemical apparatus (1824). Accum sold this kind of equipment—at a nice profit—from his premises on Old Compton Street.

  Regency England, for industry and hygiene. Chemical advance powered the industrial revolution, but it was also chemistry that cleaned up the mess the factories left behind: the stinking air, rank water, and overflowing sewers. In the works of Accum, there is a fervent belief in the capacity of chemistry to make life better.

  Most of his countless projects combined enlightenment and commerce. He believed in scientific truth but did not mind making money out of it. He was “obliging and kind-hearted” but also arrogant and reckless.26 From 1800 onwards, he took on private pupils, for a fee of 160 guineas a year, a very considerable sum in those days (equivalent to around £11,000 in today’s money); many of his early students went on to become distinguished scientists in the United States—Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale, Professor William Peck of Harvard, Professor James Freeman Dana of Dartmouth. Accum was one of the first scientists to pioneer the notion of the chemistry chest, a forerunner of the child’s chemistry set, although his were designed for “Philosophical gentlemen.” In his book Chemical Amusement (1817), he wrote up instructions for “amusing” chemistry experiments that could be safely done at home. These sound marvellous, the kind of mad-scientist experiments you long to do at school but are rarely allowed to: “To melt a coin in a nut-shell”; “A fountain of fire”; “To produce an emerald green flame”; “To render bodies luminous in the dark”; “To make indelible ink for marking linen.” At the back of the book is a catalogue for the apparatus and instruments needed to do the experiments, all of which can be bought—conveniently—from Accum’s own shop: test tubes, hydrometers, prisms, mortars, moveable universal furnaces ranging in price from £6 16 s. to £8 8 s., as well as whole chemistry sets. He was constantly coming up with new chemical devices and materials to sell to the public. “As a manufacturer of new and improved chemical apparatus, Accum’s name was for many years almost a household word . . . Accum’s gasometer and pneumatic trough were in demand for fifty years.”27 If anyone should question whether science was best served by so close an alliance with trade, Accum would say, not a little pompously, that he who manufactures “an article of use to the sciences, which could not before be purchased, is a benefa
ctor to the public.”28

  Sometimes, though, his eye for easy money took over to an extent that even Accum, for all his self-regard, might have found hard to dress up as philanthropy. One of his friends found Accum in his laboratory one day, in a state of “high glee” at a bargain he had made with Mr. Pitt, the prime minister. Pitt had come in to order a large shipment of chemical apparatus to go to Pondicherry in India. Accum was chuckling because he had played Pitt for a fool, by taking “this opportunity to sweep my garrets of all my old apparatus and odds and ends that had been accumulating for years” and to sell these oddments at an exorbitant price to the British government.29 Interestingly, this puerile little trick did not seem morally wrong to Accum, even though he raged against the duplicity of shopkeepers; but then, he saw nothing wrong in making fun of the high and mighty, while the thought of deceiving some poor worker who only wanted to feed his family revolted him.

  The Chemistry of Adulteration

  Accum’s world of fun, flames, and commerce was a long way from that of the Royal Academy and the other pillars of British science. Yet to a remarkable extent, Accum had managed to crack this milieu too. He may never have achieved the gravitas of a Sir Humphrey Davy, but he was a fellow of the Linnaean Society and a member of the Royal Academies of both Britain and Ireland. In 1803, he published a System of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry, introducing the new concepts of Lavoisier to an English audience. Accum was fortunate to have been born at a thrilling time for chemistry. As one historian of science writes, “In the space of about twenty years commencing in 1770, the science of chemistry experienced a change more complete and more fundamental than any that had occurred before or has occurred since.”30 This period saw the emergence of many of the great names in chemistry—Galvani and his twitching frog’s leg, Scheele, Cavendish, Priestley, Bergman, Klaproth—but none was so great as Antoine Lavoisier, Accum’s hero, who was beheaded during the French Revolution.