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1. Home
2. When Physics Became King 9780226542003
WHEN PHYSICS BECAME KING 9780226542003
As recently as two hundred years ago, physics as we know it today did not exist.
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* Author / Uploaded
* Iwan Rhys Morus
CITATION PREVIEW
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When Physics Became King
WHEN PHYSICS BECAME KING
Iwan Rhys Morus
The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London
Iwan Rhys Morus is a lecturer in the Department of History and Welsh History at
the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and coauthor of Making Modern Science: A
Historical Survey, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press,
Ltd., London c 2005 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved.
Published 2005 Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
06 05 ISBN: 0-226-54201-7 ISBN: 0-226-54202-5
12345
(cloth) (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morus, Iwan Rhys, 1964– When
physics became king / Iwan Rhys Morus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical
references and index. ISBN 0-226-54201-7 (alk. paper) – ISBN 0-226-54202-5 (pbk.
: alk.paper) 1. Physics–Europe–History–19th century. I. Title. QC9.E89M67 2005
530 .094–dc22
2004015207
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
To the memory of my darling wife, Bridgheen, who made it all worthwhile.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments
xi
1
Queen of the Sciences 1
2
A Revolutionary Science 22
3
The Romance of Nature 54
4
The Science of Showmanship 87
5
The Science of Work 123
6
Mysterious Fluids and Forces 156
7
Mapping the Heavens 192
8
Places of Precision 226
9
Imperial Physics 261 Bibliographic Essay 287 Index 297
vii
Illustrations
1.1
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin 2
1.2
Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (1620) 8
1.3
A visit to the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences by the king 10
2.1
Babbage’s Analytical Engine 38
2.2
A Cambridge examination 40
2.3
The Berlin Physics Institute 51
3.1
Electrical experiments from Aldini 66
3.2
Artist’s impression of Oersted’s 1820 experiment 68
3.3
The frontispiece of Noad’s Lectures on Electricity (1844) 74
3.4
A page from Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) 82
3.5
Possible mechanical structure for the electromagnetic ether 83
4.1
Galvani’s experiments on animal electricity 90
4.2
Voltaic piles 92
4.3
Faraday’s demonstration apparatus 93
4.4
Faraday lecturing at the Royal Institution 95
4.5
Sturgeon’s electromagnetic table-top apparatus 100
4.6
Henry’s giant electromagnet 101
4.7
The ballet Electra (1849) 112
4.8
The Electrical Building (1893) 118
4.9
Tesla’s high-frequency, high-potential induction coils 119
5.1
Watt’s steam engine 124
ix
x
Illustrations
5.2
Joule’s paddle wheel experiments 135
5.3
Thomson’s teaching laboratory 137
5.4
The title page of Thomson and Tait, Treatise on Natural Philosophy 139
5.5
The end of the world and the heat death of the Universe 141
6.1
Gassiot’s experiments with discharge tubes 157
6.2
The debate between scientific and practical electricians in 1888 168
6.3
Hertz’s apparatus to demonstrate electromagnetic waves 171
6.4
A ghost 180
6.5
An X-ray photograph of hands 183
6.6
X rays for medical diagnosis 185
6.7
The Curies’ shed laboratory 189
7.1
The Orion nebula as pictured by Herschel 203
7.2
Lord Rosse’s telescope 207
7.3
Astronomers testing their equipment in preparation for observing the Transit of
Venus 214
7.4
The canals of Mars 223
8.1
Faraday in the basement laboratory of the Royal Institution 231
8.2
The Cavendish Laboratory 238
8.3
Students at the Cavendish Laboratory 239
8.4
The Cavendish’s laboratory assistants 242
8.5
The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt 248
8.6
Apparatus for measuring the ohm 257
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making. It is an attempt to provide an
engaging and accessible cultural history of nineteenth-century physics that
brings together the significant developments in our understanding of that field
and its cultural connections over the last few decades. I have enjoyed writing
it immensely and, while doing so, have managed to surprise myself both by how
much and by how little I know about the subject that is meant to be my main area
of historical expertise. As will become readily apparent, much of what I have
written here is heavily dependent on other historians. I am deeply indebted to
them and hope that they do not feel after reading this book that I have taken
too many liberties with their writings. The list of debts could go on for ever,
but I would like to mention in particular Will Ashworth, David Cahan, Michael
Crowe, Robert Fox, Graeme Gooday, Bruce Hunt, Richard Noakes, Simon Schaffer,
Crosbie Smith, Andy Warwick, and Norton Wise as individuals to whose work I am
especially indebted in particular parts of the following pages. Any errors of
fact and interpretation are, of course, entirely my own. More generally, I have
learned a great deal over the years in conversations with friends and colleagues
about the history of science. I would like to thank them all, especially my
former teachers and fellow students at the Department of History and Philosophy
of Science at the University of Cambridge, but in xi
xii
Acknowledgments
particular Rob Iliffe and Andy Warwick, with whom I was lucky enough to be a
contemporary while all kinds of exciting new developments were taking place in
the history of science, as well as Simon Schaffer, the source for so many of
those developments. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the School of
Anthropological Studies at Queen’s University Belfast for all their support over
the years. The late Susan Abrams at the University of Chicago Press was a
constant source of enthusiasm and encouragement. I will always be grateful for
her faith in me. Christie Henry at the press continued the enthusiasm and
encouragement through some very difficult times. I would also like to thank my
copyeditor Michael Koplow for his diligence and hard work. Finally, I thank my
late wife Bridgheen, who was always there for me.
1 Queen of the Sciences
At the entrance to Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, across Queen’s University’s main
campus from my office, stands a statue of the physicist William Thomson, Lord
Kelvin (figure 1.1). Born in Belfast—where his father taught mathematics at the
Academical Institution—in 1824, Thomson’s career as a man of science spanned the
nineteenth century that forms the focus for this book. The statue is worth a
closer look. As he gazes out towards University Road, Thomson holds an open book
in his hands. The pages are inscribed with illustrations of his vortex model of
the atom—the foundation to one of Thomson’s many claims to a place in the
physicists’ hall of fame. He is leaning backwards slightly against a short
pillar that turns out to be a magnetic compass on its stand—a key patented
invention of his that played a vital role in the late nineteenth-century
shipping industry that powered the economies of both his native Belfast and his
adopted city of Glasgow. The combination of civic pride, philosophical insight,
and industrial prowess represented by this statue says a great deal about
nineteenth-century physics and what it came to stand for. It shows what mattered
about physics in late nineteenth-century culture. This book follows the story of
physics throughout that century, showing how a science that barely existed in
1800 came to be regarded a hundred years later as the ultimate key to unlocking
nature’s secrets.
1
2
One
1.1 The statue of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, that stands at the entrance to
the Botanic Gardens in Belfast. The book that Kelvin is holding in his hand
contains diagrams of his vortex model of the atom. He is leaning against his
patented magnetic compass.
So why does the history of physics matter? One way of answering the question is
simply to point to the central role physics and physicists have played and
continue to play in our culture throughout the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first. One area at least where we still seem to be largely in agreement
with our late Victorian predecessors is on the issue of physics’ preeminence. We
take it for granted that physicists are
Queen of the Sciences
3
the best people to find out about the nature of the universe, and we look to
their laboratories to keep producing the innovations that power our economies
and satisfy our ever-increasing appetites for more. We look to them as well for
solutions to the looming environmental catastrophe that two centuries of
industrial expansion seems set to deliver. On the whole, but with increasing
uncertainty, we still trust physics and physicists. In many ways, the
iconography of Kelvin’s statue still rings true today. Great physicists are a
source of national pride—living embodiments of a country’s genius. The number of
Nobel laureates in physics is still cited as an index of a country’s
international reputation. We admire physicists for their insights into the
workings of nature. We gasp at the seemingly endless parade of wonders emanating
from their laboratories as we look forward to Star Trek–style warp drives and
transportation pads. In other ways, however, the status of physics is less clear
than it was only a few decades ago. Arguably at least, molecular biology in the
form of the Human Genome Project and its offshoots has replaced it in the public
eye as the most visible scientific generator of excitement and progress. As a
historian, I am convinced that the first step towards understanding the central
role that physics continues to play in twenty-first-century culture—and the ways
in which that role is increasingly under threat—is to understand how that role
came about in the first place. Peculiar as it might seem from the modern
perspective of people accustomed to turning to physics (and to science and
technology more generally) as a source of authority and of answers, it was not
always like this. Two hundred years ago there was no discipline called physics,
nor was there anybody who called themselves a physicist. For most of the century
described in this book even, very few practitioners would have described what
they did as physics and even fewer would have described themselves as
physicists. Ironically enough, Lord Kelvin is one who would have rejected the
labels out of hand. The practice of natural philosophy and the natural
philosophers who practiced it had very different cultural roles from the ones
their descendants play today. There was nothing inevitable about physics’ rise
to prominence either. Making physics into the dominant discipline it is today
took a great deal of work and effort. It was not just a matter of producing
theories that appeared more and more successful at accounting for nature. It was
a matter of persuading others that these theories really were true, that physics
really was the best way of finding out about how the laws of nature operated. In
other words, making physics into the preeminent scientific discipline needed
real cultural engagement on the part of its practitioners.
4
One
This is why the history of physics that I offer here is an unashamedly cultural
history. Again, this might at first appear a little strange. It is central to
the view of science—and of physics as the preeminent science— that we hold in
our culture that science and culture do not mix. In many ways one of the reasons
we think we trust physics so much is because it appears to be free of that
cultural taint. Physics simply tells it the way it is. Its results have nothing
to do with its practitioners or the kinds of institutions they work in or their
cultural status. Even the most superficial history of science tells us that this
view is wrong, however. Physicists have always engaged with their culture, as
did natural philosophers before them. Indeed, as this history of physics will
show, without this kind of engagement there simply would not be any such thing
as physics today. Making physics work needed more than great experiments and new
insights into the workings of nature. At the very least those great experiments
needed laboratories where they could be carried out. That meant persuading
others to provide the resources needed to build those laboratories. Similarly,
great insights into the workings of nature are of very little use unless others
can be persuaded that they are worth listening to. This means that physicists in
the past had to establish their own authority and their own claims to people’s
trust at just the same time as they went about establishing their science. The
long standing perception of an unbridgeable chasm between science and ‘culture’
is another good reason for insisting that a properly cultural history of physics
is essential. Physics is often portrayed—even by some of its greatest
promoters—as some kind of alien force. The wildeyed, disheveled physicist (think
Albert Einstein on a bad hair day) is a familiar icon. The image is useful to
physicists, serving as it does to underline their otherworldliness, the arcane
nature of their practices, and their disconnectedness from mundane affairs. The
image is just as useful to physics’ detractors and for much the same reasons.
That physics is difficult, abstruse, and obsessed by detail seems a good enough
reason for relegating it and its practitioners to the margins of modern culture.
Ignoring physics like this, however, means ignoring one of the most influential
aspects of our culture. Regardless of cozy assumptions by some physicists and
their detractors alike that physics has nothing to do with culture, there are in
fact very few aspects of our daily lives that are untouched by what physicists
do. Understanding this means appreciating that physics is a part of, not apart
from, our culture. A cultural history of physics can also help us to move away
from the prevailing view of science as the product of individual great men. When
Queen of the Sciences
5
we think of physics’ past we typically view it in terms of a succession of
individual scientific heroes, each building on the achievements of their
predecessor. Most people, including most physicists, probably think of the
history of physics (when they think about it at all) in this way. We think of
Newton, or Faraday, or Einstein as individuals possessed of some ineffable
insight into nature’s workings that belongs to them alone. This is what we mean
when we describe people like them as geniuses. The picture of physics that
emerges from cultural history, however, is very different. Physics from this
perspective is a collective enterprise. To understand the way nature works
requires collaborative action as much as individual thought. Physics as we know
it today is a product of the mass mobilization of material and social resources
on an unprecedented scale. To make physics what it is, physicists in the past
had to do more than sit in their studies and think. They had to find ways of
mobilizing those resources and carving out a cultural niche for themselves and
their new discipline. To understand how they did this, we need a cultural
history. The history of science has changed dramatically over the last quarter
century. Historians of science up until the 1960s saw their discipline as a
handmaiden to philosophy. Philosophers analyzed the scientific method, and
historians looked to the past to find examples of the method in action. The
history of science was the history of progress. It recorded the gradual
accumulation of scientific facts and theoretical insights that led inevitably to
our modern understanding of the universe. A new generation of historians
borrowed a term from political history to castigate this tradition as “Whig
history”—it was the equivalent for science of liberal historians regarding the
past in terms of the inevitable rise of liberal democracy and suffered from the
same problems in that it judged the actions, achievements, and failings of the
past through modern eyes rather than trying to understand them on their own
terms. Historians of science in general and of physics in particular now tend to
focus their attention on what might be called the microhistory of science
instead. They look at particular controversies, the work of particular
laboratories or institutions, the consolidation of particular theories. The
result is a far richer and more nuanced understanding of physics and how it
works than we had before. Old-style history of science did, however, have one
virtue. It had a “big picture.” The history of physics as the history of
progress could be painted with a broad brush on a large canvas. Historians of
physics now are quite rightly suspicious of such big pictures. We know very well
6
One
that science is far too messy and human an affair for overeasy generalization.
The problem with this is that it leaves us as historians without a broader
perspective. The history of physics written as the history of progress from
ignorance to enlightenment did at least provide its authors and their readers
with a convenient narrative framework from which to hang their portraits. This
is something that a cultural history of physics should be able to provide as
well, however. It has the potential to develop new overarching themes that can
play a role in reversing the current fragmentation of the historical picture.
Looking, for example, at the different ways in which physicists have in the past
tried to establish their authority as the ultimate arbiters on questions about
the natural world and the ways in which this might be related to the kind of
knowledge they produced does not commit us to any particular view concerning
progress or the scientific method. It does, however, give us a new common thread
running through our histories. This particular history of physics starts around
1800. In many ways the choice of starting point is arbitrary. The period covered
by the book is a reflection of the period about which I think I have something
sensible and interesting to say. It is not, however, entirely arbitrary, and the
reasons why it is not so provide another indication of the advantages of looking
at physics through the lens of culture. Historians are largely agreed that
events taking place in the last quarter or so of the eighteenth and around the
beginning of the nineteenth century were truly revolutionary in their impact.
The American and French Revolutions shattered the old social order. The
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe convulsed society. The gathering
pace of the Industrial Revolution had major implications for national and
international economies and the organization of labor and trade. As the
nineteenth century moved on, democracy gradually became less of a dirty word as
newly powerful social groups sought to match their rising economic power with
equivalent political clout. Some historians of science have labeled this period
as the Second Scientific Revolution, with consequences as momentous as those of
the first, seventeenth-century one. With appropriate qualifications I agree with
them. Physics in anything resembling the modern sense was born out of the
cultural cauldron of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe and
America. It is no accident that the word physicist—in English at least—was first
coined in the 1830s. The word was not invented earlier for the simple reason
that the kind of person it was intended to describe did not exist more than a
few years previously. The equivalent French
Queen of the Sciences
7
and German words (physicien and Physiker respectively), while having a longer
pedigree, underwent a similar redefinition during this period too. The kinds of
institutions that typify modern physics—the laboratories, university training
regimes, and research institutions—have their origins in the nineteenth century.
It was during the nineteenth century that physicists forged for themselves the
authoritative position as the ultimate legitimate spokespersons for nature that
they still to a large degree enjoy today. It was during the nineteenth century
that the intimate link between physics and industrial and technological progress
that we now recognize was first forged as well. None of this is to suggest that
there are not clear continuities between nineteenth-century physics and what
went before. As we shall see over the next few pages, nineteenthcentury
physicists had concerns about the laws of nature, about the best ways of
investigating them, and about the position of men of science in society that
they certainly shared with their natural philosophical predecessors of the
eighteenth, seventeenth, and earlier centuries. All I want to argue here is that
the discontinuities were in the end rather more important. The Worlds of Natural
Philosophy What can we say then about these continuities and discontinuities?
Natural philosophers during the first Scientific Revolution certainly regarded
themselves as having brought about a profound and important rupture from the
past. They were placing the search for knowledge on a new footing, looking at
nature instead of consulting the ancient authorities. Natural philosophers such
as Galileo wrote in the vernacular rather than in dusty Latin and poked fun at
the staid and unimaginative Schoolmen. He found new audiences for his writings
in the urbane courts of Italian city-states like Florence and Venice. New
societies devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge, such as the Accademia del
Cimento in Florence, the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences in Paris, and the Royal
Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, likewise looked to the
courts for patronage. Their members saw themselves as far removed from the
traditional image of the reclusive Scholar. On the contrary, they were
civic-minded gentlemen, committed to making their knowledge both useful and
accessible. Universities were largely deemed irrelevant to the making of the New
Science. Increasingly, it was outside the cloisters in royal or princely courts
and aristocratic households that gentlemanly natural philosophers hoped to make
their mark and cultivate patronage.
8
One
1.2 The frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (1620) showing a ship
setting out between the Pillars of Hercules onto the boundless sea of knowledge.
The Latin motto reads “Many will pass through and knowledge will be increased.”
Queen of the Sciences
9
In many ways Francis Bacon had provided the blueprint for these new natural
philosophical institutions with his utopian vision of Solomon’s House (figure
1.2). Bacon visualized the search for new knowledge as a systematic and
thoroughly organized process, based on the procedures of English common law with
which, as a prominent Elizabethan courtier, he was intimately familiar. Central
to this vision was the view that natural philosophy was something with which the
state should concern itself. Bacon wanted the new philosophy to be at the
service of the “commonwealth.” At a time of widespread religious and political
upheaval in England and in Europe more generally he argued that the production
of knowledge had to be the preserve of those best fitted to put it to the proper
use. The founders of both the Royal Society of London (established in 1660) and
the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences in Paris (established in 1666) certainly had
Bacon in mind. They were to be seats of responsible and collaborative learning,
far removed from the disputatious and unworldly universities. They were to be
governed by rules and protocols to maintain proper decorum in speech and action.
The members of the French acad´emie were to be salaried servants of the state
(figure 1.3), though its English counterpart never achieved as much by way of
state or royal patronage despite its best efforts. Even the English Crown,
however, was perfectly willing to pay for natural philosophy when it suited its
interests. When Charles II established the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in
1675 he had more reasons for doing so than a desire to further abstract
knowledge of the heavens. Astronomy was widely regarded as the key to better
navigation, and better navigation as the key to maritime supremacy. Knowing the
night skies in detail could help England’s navy know exactly where they were at
sea. This was the motivation behind the establishment of a large financial award
for solving the problem of longitude as well. Throughout the eighteenth century
this was the Holy Grail of observational astronomy. To further the quest for
useful astronomical knowledge the English Admiralty funded expeditions to
observe eclipses and other rare celestial phenomena such as the Transit of Venus
in 1761 and again in 1769 as part of the voyages of Captain Cook. The French
government similarly financed expeditions like this, including one famous
expedition to Lapland in 1736 to make measurements leading to more accurate
calculations of the shape of the Earth. Natural philosophy was regarded as a
tool that could be used to expand and defend the power of the state. Natural
philosophers were increasingly keen to find other patrons as well. In
eighteenth-century Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Philadelphia
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One
1.3 An imaginary visit to the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences by its patron, Louis
XIV, the king of France. The scene makes explicit the intimate connections
between the new scientific institution and the French monarch.
natural philosophers mingled with wheeler-dealer entrepreneurs in coffeehouses
as they tried to market their science. They offered steam engines to pump water
from flooded mines, or schemes of improving agricultural methods or of building
canals. Natural philosophy could be made useful and lucrative. Popular lecturers
in coffeehouses and polite salons offered spectacular demonstrations of their
ability to control the powers of nature as part of their sales patter.
Electricians such as the Dutchman Martinus van Marum or the Englishman William
Cuthbertson could build machines that seemed to mimic lightning and also offer
schemes that might protect vulnerable buildings from fires caused by lightning
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strikes. The American Benjamin Franklin had more than just philosophical fame in
mind with his invention of the lightning rod. Philosophical showmen were part of
the entrepreneurial culture of eighteenth-century Europe and America. Their
improvement schemes fitted in well with the prevailing expansionist ethos.
Enlightenment commentators saw the rational knowledge that natural philosophy
offered as the solution to humankind’s miseries and as a way of remodeling
society. Natural philosophy was becoming an institution—a part of a common
public civic culture. The audience for natural philosophy was increasingly drawn
from the rising urban middle class. These were the men (and women) who flocked
to public lectures for entertainment and edification. In England, many in the
provincial middle classes came from Dissenting backgrounds— outside the Anglican
Church and therefore excluded from access to political power. They turned to
natural philosophy as a channel for their cultural aspirations. It could be a
way of justifying their claims to political power as well. Members of the Lunar
Society such as the radical Joseph Priestley, the manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood,
and the physician Erasmus Darwin reckoned that their natural philosophy provided
a model for the reform of society. By the end of the eighteenth century,
literary and philosophical societies were spreading the taste for science to the
aspiring provincial middle classes. Natural philosophy was seen as a model for
overturning the social order in France as well. Friend and foe alike regarded
new natural powers like galvanism or oxygen as revolutionary spirits. Back in
England the identification was so complete that Joseph Priestley fled to newly
independent America after his Birmingham laboratory was looted and burned by a
monarchist mob. Such leaders of the fledgling United States as Benjamin Franklin
and Thomas Jefferson agreed with his view of natural philosophy as the model for
an enlightened social order. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, natural philosophers accommodated themselves to constantly changing
social and political circumstances. Just as they worked to fashion new ways of
understanding the natural world, they had to work to find a place for themselves
in society as well. Knowledge could very easily be seen as a dangerous thing.
The role of natural philosophy in sustaining (and subverting) the existing
political and religious order was under constant scrutiny. Seventeenth-century
natural philosophers had to find ways of distinguishing themselves and the
knowledge they offered from dangerous religious enthusiasts. Likewise, their
eighteenth-century descendants
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had to guard themselves from accusations of stagecraft and charlatanism from
their conservative critics, particularly as natural philosophy and political
radicalism came to be more closely associated. Natural philosophers had
constantly to reinvent themselves and their science in order to try to find
secure social niches for themselves and their practices. Philosophical arguments
about the nature of knowledge, the best way of investigating the natural world,
and the kind of people best fitted to carry out such investigations merged
easily with straightforwardly political discussions of the nature of political
power and its distribution throughout society. Charting a safe route through
these waters demanded constant circumspection. Mathematics was one route that
seemed to its supporters to offer a sure means of establishing their knowledge
of nature on a secure basis. Mathematics had the virtue that its procedures
seemed to guarantee certainty in its conclusions. So long as the axioms from
which the mathematician proceeded to theorize were certain, then the conclusions
he arrived at were certain as well. Galileo, who started out as a professor of
mathematics, sought to elevate mathematics (and himself) to the high status of
philosophy and bring the solidity of its arguments to bear on questions about
nature. The problem he faced was that to his critics mathematics seemed to deal
only with trivial things like numbers and quantities, rather than delving into
the real essence of things as a true natural philosophy should. Even the
illustrious Isaac Newton and his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) were criticized for failing to
account properly for the true causes of the phenomena. Newton’s Principia was
nevertheless widely celebrated as epitomizing the way forwards for natural
philosophy and its author hailed as the model man of science. Very few of even
its most ardent supporters either among his contemporaries or their later
eighteenth-century audience could actually follow the details of its
mathematical arguments, however, let alone reproduce them. Mathematics was a
science for the elite few, not the common crowd. Experiment was another
candidate that natural philosophers looked to as a way of placing the New
Science on a more secure footing. They would put nature to the test and wrest
its secrets from it. The proper foundation of knowledge according to this view
was detailed and disciplined observation. By looking in detail at the operations
of nature, by carrying out experiments that systematically set out to
investigate its phenomena under different circumstances, natural philosophers
hoped to be able to arrive at fundamental laws. Crucially, experiment was
conceived as a
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collaborative activity. This was one reason mid-seventeenth-century natural
philosophical investigators were so keen to combine in scientific societies like
the Royal Society. Groups of like-minded natural philosophers could meet to
discuss their experimental findings, share their results, and combine their
knowledge. Experimental philosophy was meant to be open to the participation of
all open-minded gentlemen inclined towards curiosity who were prepared to
investigate diligently and with due skepticism and diffidence. Its critics, of
course, pointed out that it was no such thing. In practice, it was only the
Royal Society’s own fellowship that had access to its experimental results.
Outspoken opponents of the experimental method like the irascible English
philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, never became fellows of the Royal Society.
Experimental philosophy depended in particular on the trustworthiness of its
practitioners. Audiences had to be convinced of their veracity— that they were
accurately relating the details of things that they had really seen and
experienced. This is one reason why codes of civility and gentlemanly behavior
were held to be crucial to natural philosophy. Gentlemen’s words could be
trusted (or so it was commonly held) and natural philosophers sought to buy into
that privileged status by insisting that practitioners should be gentlemen too.
Women, tradesmen, and artisans were disbarred by default from the company of
natural philosophers. Their word could not be trusted. Behind the scenes, of
course, artisans did a great deal of the actual work of natural philosophy. It
was Robert Boyle’s servants, not himself, who worked his air-pumps. Their
testimony was not deemed to be required when describing the results of the
experiments, however. The word of aristocrats and eminent fellows of the Royal
Society was more trustworthy. Crossing the boundary from being a servant to
being a natural philosopher in one’s own right was difficult, as Robert Hooke,
Boyle’s assistant who became curator of experiments at the Royal Society, found
throughout his precarious career. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (and as we shall see, throughout the nineteenth century as well)
natural philosophers had to find ways of convincing sometimes skeptical
audiences that they could indeed be trusted as spokespersons for nature. Critics
could occasionally be scathing of natural philosophers’ pretensions to
knowledge. Jonathan Swift lambasted scientific societies’ aspirations
mercilessly in Gulliver’s Travels. On Gulliver’s third voyage he found himself
visiting the flying island of Laputa. The island’s inhabitants were so
distracted by questions of natural philosophy that they were accompanied
everywhere they went by a servant whose task it was
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to hit them about the ears with a balloon whenever they were spoken to. Without
that reminder they would be too much lost in speculation to notice. He then
visited the city of Lagado, which boasted a scientific academy whose members
were continually producing useless inventions. Rather than speaking to each
other, members of the Academy carried objects around with them instead of using
words. This was the antithesis of the image that the civic-minded fellows of the
Royal Society or the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences wanted to convey about
natural philosophy and their pursuit of it. Conservative critics regarded
natural philosophers with suspicion as possible subverters of the social order.
They saw little difference between a public lecture or experimental
demonstration of the latest electrical or magnetic wonder and the trickery of
theatrical performance. Natural philosophers claiming superior knowledge of the
operations of nature could be dismissed as mere hucksters out to gull the public
or seduce them into revolution. The politics of natural philosophy was certainly
high on its critics’ agenda. The same could be said of its promoters as well.
Seventeenthand eighteenth-century natural philosophers were acutely aware of the
politics of knowledge. They knew that what was known about nature and who
produced the knowledge had important political consequences. This was one reason
why the Royal Society’s gentlemen or the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences’
state-salaried savants were so anxious to keep the production of knowledge under
their own careful eyes. They needed to be sure that only the suitably qualified
were recognized as true men of science. Everyone agreed that the organization of
knowledge had political resonances. This was because the social order of things
was widely held to mirror the natural order. Looking at the way in which nature
was ordered and the laws that governed the operations of nature was a way of
finding out about the proper order of society as well. Natural philosophy could
therefore either provide a powerful and decisive endorsement of the status quo
or produce a recipe for political subversion. Conservative supporters of the
ancien r´egime could get distinctly twitchy when radical natural philosophers
turned to nature as a way of exposing the deficiencies of the prevailing
political order of things. Clockwork was an increasingly common metaphor for the
operations of the Universe. All the parts of a clock worked in harmony to
produce the final motion. This was how some natural philosophers visualized the
workings of the Universe too. All the parts were in harmony and worked in unison
to produce the movements of the Earth and the planets. This had the major
advantage of implying the existence of a celestial
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clockmaker as well. If the Universe were a piece of complex mechanism like a
clock, then it must have had a Creator too. The French natural philosopher Ren´e
Descartes was one of those who took the analogy furthest, suggesting that even
the human body should be regarded as a piece of clockwork mechanism acting
automatically, though he stipulated that the governing soul was separate from
the body. One reason that the clockwork metaphor worked well was that it seemed
to provide a good account of the workings of society too. Just like the natural
Universe, the social world could be regarded as a complex clockwork mechanism.
As long as everyone knew their proper place in society, everything worked
smoothly. It was only when something went wrong with the mechanism—when unruly
subjects forgot their proper place in the natural order of things—that social
order broke down. The new heliocentric view of the Universe produced by
Copernicus fitted in neatly with this world picture. According to this account,
the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the Universe; all the planets
including the Earth revolved around it. The new picture was just as conducive to
the clockwork metaphor as the old Earth-centered view, in which the Sun and the
other planets revolved around the Earth. It was easily translated into social
terms as well. The Sun was the king around which his subjects—the
planets—revolved in harmony. It was an ideal metaphor for a time of increasing
royal absolutism throughout Europe. Isaac Newton’s view of the Universe differed
subtly from the clockwork model, however. He argued that God was always immanent
and present in nature, continually sustaining the operations of natural laws.
This was in opposition to the views of Descartes or the German philosopher
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued that a perfect God would have created a
perfect mechanism that needed no sustaining. This too had implications for the
social order. On the one hand, God’s immanence in the world served to support
the prevailing social order. At the same time it was an antidote to monarchical
absolutism, suggesting that the monarch as much as anyone else be subject to the
dictates and limitations of law. There were other ways of reading the social
implications of Newton’s theories, however—and these became increasingly popular
as the eighteenth century moved on. As far as radical Enlightenment philosophers
were concerned, Newton had provided a blueprint for radically reforming the
social order. They read Newton as endorsing a natural order that operated by
means of a system of divinely ordained checks and balances. The English
experimental natural philosopher Joseph Priestley argued that the different
powers of nature such as electricity, heat, and magnetism
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acted to sustain a natural economy. In particular, he suggested that
phlogiston—the active power of fire—circulated constantly throughout the natural
economy maintaining its balance. For Priestley and others like him, making this
natural economy visible was an indictment of the corrupt and despotic English
government that failed to live up to the standards of the natural economy. This
was the same kind of political ethos as lay behind publications like Thomas
Paine’s revolutionary Rights of Man. The situation was similar in France, where
radical political philosophers used natural philosophy to attack the notion of
absolute monarchy. When Julien Offrey de la Mettrie argued that humans were no
more than soulless machines operating according to the laws of mechanics, he was
also arguing against the Church—one of the strongest bulwarks of the French
monarchy. By the end of the eighteenth century, much natural philosophy had a
dangerous reputation. For many of its critics it stood accused of being
implicated in the political convulsions that swept through Europe during the
final decades of the century. In England, espousing natural philosophy—certainly
natural philosophy of the kind advocated by men such as Joseph Priestley—was
easily seen as tantamount to expressing support for the French Revolution and
the Terror that followed. Many radical natural philosophers had indeed been
supporters of the revolution, though many also revised their support in the
light of subsequent events. Many of the new revolutionary French regime’s
leaders and ardent supporters were fans or active practitioners of natural
philosophy as well. They would have agreed with the critics that their science
was indeed implicated in the revolution. Natural philosophy in France, as we
shall see, flourished under the revolutionary regime and the Napoleonic rule
that followed it. English natural philosophers, on the other hand, were obliged
to behave with considerably more circumspection. The destruction of Priestley’s
laboratory by the mob was a graphic reminder of the perils of experimentation.
Some scientific societies even found themselves banned under new Anti-Sedition
Laws prohibiting public meetings. Events at the end of the eighteenth century
showed clearly just how powerful, but at the same time just how easily
marginalized, natural philosophy could be. The Birth of Physics As we shall see,
many of these concerns with natural philosophy’s social place, the identity and
status of its practitioners, and the relationship
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between the natural and social orders, that had worried men of science from the
First Scientific Revolution, still mattered a great deal to their
nineteenth-century counterparts. The ways in which those concerns might be
expressed and resolved could be very different, however. Looking at the ways in
which they tried to resolve these issues will be the major concern of this book.
The pages that follow are thematic rather than strictly chronological. That is
to say, the story does not start straightforwardly in 1800 and follow a simple
time line through to the end of the century. Instead, each chapter will focus on
a particular theme in the nineteenth-century history of physics and follow it
through the century. In no way is what follows intended to be a comprehensive
account of nineteenth-century developments in physics. Such an account would
clearly be impossible—it would certainly be so in a book of this size. Instead,
I have chosen to focus on a number of episodes and developments that seem to me
to capture something important about general trends and particular issues that
turned out to be crucial in the development of what we now recognize as the
modern scientific discipline of physics. The story starts in chapter 2 with the
rise of mathematical physics in revolutionary France at the beginning of the
century and the emergence there of new analytical styles of reasoning about
nature. The chapter then follows efforts to develop new institutions and new
ways of training mathematical physicists in England and the German states to
midcentury and beyond. Chapter 3 looks at various efforts during the century to
explore the unity of nature, starting with the Romantic movement at the
beginning of the century and culminating in the development of ether physics at
its end. Chapters 4 and 5 then focus on the crucial sciences of electricity and
heat. We look at how developments in electricity emerged from concerns with
showmanship and utility and how the new science of heat responded to the problem
of maximizing the efficiency of steam engines in industrial Britain. In chapter
6 we return to electricity, looking at the ways in which it proliferated into a
whole range of new forces and powers during the second half of the century,
providing ammunition both for and against the increasingly dominant physics of
energy and the ether. Chapter 7 looks at developments in astronomy, the
consolidation of observational astronomy, and the importation of laboratory
science into the study of the heavens. Finally, in chapter 8, we look at the
rise of the laboratory and the development of precision measurement as the
hallmark of experimental physics before concluding in chapter 9 with a brief
survey of physics and its institutions on the eve of the Great War. The story
finishes with the First World War for two reasons. In
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the first place, the war brought the role of the new science of physics in
international conflict to prominence for the first time. Physicists and their
institutions in both Britain and Germany were involved in the war effort to an
unprecedented degree. By the beginning of the twentieth century most of the
institutions we identify with physics—the research institutes, university
laboratories, and training regimes—were in place. The war made their
relationship to the state explicit. At the same time, the decade of the Great
War also saw the development of Einstein’s theories of special and general
relativity along with the beginnings of quantum mechanics. Within very few years
the grand consolidation of physics that had emerged around the ether at the end
of the nineteenth century, and which many physicists regarded as the end of
physics, was in tatters. Ironically, the very aspect of physicists’ culture
about which they felt most secure proved fallible, while the institutional
structures that still seemed very fragile to many of them survived and
prospered. If the social convulsions at the nineteenth century’s beginning seem
a good place to start the story of physics’ emergence then, the equally socially
tumultuous second decade of the twentieth century seems a good place to draw
breath and look back at what emerged. There are some very clear themes running
through all the chapters that follow. The first thing that should be clear is
that the main business of physics—the thorough investigation of nature and the
effort to understand nature’s workings as the outcome of universal physical
laws—was crucially dependent on a range of cultural and material resources. As I
started this introduction by suggesting, physics does not and cannot take place
in a vacuum. In order to be able to successfully investigate the laws of nature,
investigators need to be able to get their hands on the right tools for the job.
To do physics they need laboratories, they need training in the complexities of
mathematical analysis, they need instruments and people with the skills to make
those instruments. They also need to share a culture with people who are willing
to give them access to these things. One of the threads holding the following
narrative together is, therefore, the attempt to find out what kinds of
resources nineteenth-century practitioners needed to put together the view of
the physical world that they did and how they went about getting those
resources. In particular, the book investigates the cultural and material
resources that went into constructing the ether. To many physicists by the end
of the nineteenth century—probably to most British physicists—the ether was
physics. They might not yet have gained a full understanding of the ether’s
physical properties, but they were as certain of its existence as they
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were of the existence of the Sun and the planets. They were certainly as sure it
existed as modern physicists are of the existence of quarks and neutrinos. So
what made them so sure? How did they know that the ether was really there and
not just some figment of their imaginations or convenient theoretical construct?
In other words, what made their view of the Universe so stable? My answer is
that they knew because they could make instruments that could measure its
properties, they could manipulate its properties to send information down wires
or through space. They also knew because the ether was made up of the same kinds
of things, acting in the same kinds of ways, as the visible world around them.
It was familiar and made sense in the context of late Victorian industrial
culture. In more ways than in a literal sense, late Victorian physicists made
the ether from bits of the world around them. In that sense, despite its
solidity, it was very much a contingent product of its times. Another thread
running through the book is the importance of institution building in
establishing physics as a discipline. Carving out institutional spaces for the
new discipline of physics was itself a major cultural accomplishment. There was
nothing self-evident at the beginning of the nineteenth century about the idea
that universities would become major centers of research into the nature of the
physical world, for example. On the contrary, most holders of university
sinecures, in England and the German states certainly, would have regarded such
a transformation as inimical to their institutions’ primary business of teaching
established knowledge. Universities were centers of pedagogy, not of the
production of new knowledge. In any case, natural philosophy was very far from
being the coveted discipline that physics became. It was very much the poor
relation in terms of the distribution of university resources and status at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the institutional laboratory—now
the sine qua non of physics research—barely existed in anything like its modern
form at the beginning of our period. Neither was there anything like the
rigorous training regimes in laboratory-based experimentation and theoretical
mathematical analysis that modern physicists undergo as a matter of course.
Without these institutional structures there would be no physics as we now
recognize it. Again, these were contingent outcomes of determined efforts by
nineteenth-century protagonists to carve out institutional spaces for
themselves. Contingency is just as important a lesson to learn for the emergence
of physics’ institutions as it is for the emergence of physics itself. The
institutional history of nineteenth-century physics (and of science more
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One
generally) is usually cast as the story of professionalization. Physicists and
other scientists during the nineteenth century strove to become professionals—to
establish the kinds of institutions that are taken to constitute a profession.
There is a great deal to be said for this account. It has the virtue, for
example, of making clear the links between developments in the history of
science and developments elsewhere in nineteenth-century culture. The problem,
however, is that it puts the cart before the horse. Physicists, or at least a
large number of people who described themselves as such, were certainly
professionals by the end of the century in a way that they were not at its
beginnings—they were paid to do physics, for example. Some urge towards becoming
professional was not what made them do what they did, however. It would be more
accurate to say that the modern sense of what it means to be a professional
scientist was the outcome of their activities. The institutions they built and
the ways in which they built them came to define for us what kinds of
institutions a discipline like physics should have. Finally, there is a strong
sense in which the physicists whose activities I describe in these pages were in
the process of making themselves. To establish themselves as the kinds of people
who investigated the natural world they had to establish particular sorts of
relationship between themselves and their subject matter, their audiences, and
the state. What should the relationship between a physicist and the nature they
investigate be? What should be the relationship between the physicist and the
audience for their researches (and who, for that matter should that audience
be)? What should be the role and responsibility of the physicist with regard to
the wider community and to the state? None of these questions had clear-cut
answers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is a moot point whether
we have any clearer answers to them now, but trying to find ways of addressing
these questions was nevertheless central to the process of making physics both
as a discipline and as a reliable way of investigating the physical world. In
many ways it boiled down to the question of trust. Physicists had to be the kind
of people whom others would trust as reliable witnesses to the way the world
really was. They had to persuade their various constituencies that their way of
doing it really was the best way. As I have just indicated, this is a problem
that modern physicists need to address as well. They, however, have an advantage
over their nineteenth-century predecessors in that they have well-worn
institutional paths to follow. Indeed, in many ways that is just what the kinds
of institutions whose emergence this book charts are for—they help define
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who is and who is not a competent and trustworthy practitioner. In the absence
of strong and well-supported institutions that defined for practitioners and
their audiences what it meant to be a physicist—what kind of training was
required and how a competent practitioner should act—individuals had to make
their own careers. They had to find ways of defining themselves and what they
did in relation to their audiences in such a way as to convince them that they
could indeed be trusted to speak for nature. People such as Michael Faraday or
Lord Kelvin in Britain, Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany, and Pierre-Simon
Laplace in France fashioned themselves in such a way as to become acceptable
spokespersons for nature to their respective constituencies. In the absence of
anything like a clearly laid-out career path they had to carve one out for
themselves. By so doing they helped to define what being a physicist meant. I
hope that this book will provide at least some indication of just how important
the history of physics is as a part of understanding the historical development
of our own modern industrial and consumer culture. Physics is not, after all,
some peculiar esoteric practice out on the fringes of society. It plays a
central role in sustaining the way we live today. Thus it is crucial that we try
to understand how physics and its institutions operate. Understanding its
history is a vital tool in making sense of the present state of physics. History
provides us with a salutary reminder of the contingency both of our modern
understanding of the physical world and of the institutions where that
understanding is forged. We are reminded that there is nothing self-evident or
inevitable about the way things are now. Looking at history also provides us
with a stark reminder that physics is—irrevocably—a part of culture and a part
therefore of our cultural heritage. It is not some alien way of going on. On the
contrary, it is part of who we are, informed by and informing the past and
present cultures that formed all of us.
2 A Revolutionary Science
When the Parisian crowds stormed the Bastille fortress and prison on 14 July
1789, they set in motion a train of events that revolutionized European
political culture. To many contemporary commentators and observers of the French
Revolution, it seemed that the growing disenchantment with the absolutist regime
of Louis XVI had been fostered in part by a particular kind of philosophy.
French philosophes condemning the iniquities of the ancien r´egime drew
parallels between the organization of society and the organization of nature.
Like many other Enlightenment thinkers, they took it for granted that science,
or natural philosophy, could be used as a tool to understand society as well as
nature. They argued that the laws of nature showed how unjust and unnatural the
government of France really was. It also seemed, to some at least, that the
French Revolution provided an opportunity to galvanize science as well as
society. The new French Republic was a tabula rasa on which the reformers could
write what they liked. They could refound society on philosophical principles,
making sure this time around that the organization of society really did mirror
the organization of nature. Refounding the social and intellectual structures of
science itself was to be part of this process. In many ways, therefore, the
storming of the Bastille led to a revolution in science as well. To many in this
new generation of radical French natural philosophers, mathematics seemed to
provide the key to 22
A Revolutionary Science
23
understanding nature. This was nothing new in itself, of course. Greek
philosophers such as Pythagoras had argued that nature could be comprehended
mathematically. Far more recently, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes, among others,
had shown just what could be achieved by approaching nature through the language
of mathematics. The hero of the mathematical worldview—in France as much as in
his native England—was, however, Sir Isaac Newton. To French philosophers such
as Condillac, Diderot, and Voltaire, Newton’s Principia set the standard for the
mathematical understanding of nature. Many late eighteenth-century natural
philosophers—seeing themselves as following in Newton’s footsteps— placed
increasing emphasis on accurate measurement, on numbers, and on the development
of powerful new mathematical analytical tools with which to manipulate their
findings about nature. In revolutionary France, in particular, this new emphasis
on the mathematical and the quantitative in natural philosophy was held up as a
prerequisite for finishing Newton’s task and producing a complete and final
picture of an ordered and rational clockwork universe. Newton’s French followers
set aside Newton’s vision of a universe in which God was continually present and
refashioned his work as the epitome of Enlightenment rationalism. Following the
revolution, French scientific institutions were overturned, as ancient
institutions as well as heads toppled to the ground. The royalist Acad´emie
Royale des Sciences was abolished and replaced with an Institut Nationale in
1795. At about the same time, new edu´ ´ cational establishments such as the
Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale were set up to train new cadres of
revolutionary savants. Particularly following Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’´etat
of 1799, senior natural philosophers at the institute held positions of
increasing political power. Napoleon was a keen advocate of, and enthusiast for,
the physical sciences. The physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace, along with his close
ally the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, held a firm grip on the reins of
scientific power in France. Laplace, seeing himself as a committed Newtonian,
wanted to complete what he regarded as Newton’s grand project of reducing the
universe to clockwork. French mathematicians such as Joseph-Louis Lagrange were
producing powerful new mathematical techniques and applying them to
understanding nature. Major strides forward across the board of rational
mechanics were being made by the likes of Jean-Charles Borda, R´en´e-Just Hauy,
and Laplace himself. Laplace promoted his allies and his prot´eg´es to positions
of influence. His M´ecanique Celeste was a manifesto of Newtonian science and an
exemplar of how scientific progress should take place.
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Radical young mathematicians in England such as Charles Babbage and John
Herschel looked enviously on at the great strides achieved in revolutionary and
Napoleonic France. Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, they regarded
their alma mater as a reactionary backwater— in both political and scientific
terms. Cambridge’s mathematicians were not only fervent Newtonians, but still
wedded to Newton’s way of doing mathematics as well. They had no time for the
revolutionary gibberish being produced across the Channel. It was atheistic,
materialistic, and (of course) French. Babbage, Herschel, and their cohorts
vowed, however, to change all that and introduce analysis to Cambridge and to
England. Cambridge professors and fellows devoted themselves to educating the
sons of the gentry, preparing them to govern the burgeoning empire. They were
taught mathematics because its rigors were held to be good training for the
mind. Babbage and Herschel concurred with that at least. They wanted to make
mathematical analysis into the foundation of a whole new understanding of the
way the mind worked and how science could progress. They looked for links with
business and commerce, moreover. The new science of analysis would lead to a
proper understanding and organization of political economy as well. By
midcentury, Cambridge’s mathematical reputation had been transformed. The
university was probably the premier European institution in terms of
mathematical training. Undergraduates underwent rigorous preparation in the
latest mathematical techniques and their applications to physics before
undergoing a grueling examination at the end of their student careers.
Mathematics was still held to be a study calculated to breed gentlemen fit to
govern an empire—a high ranking in Cambridge’s mathematical league table could
guarantee a successful career. Increasingly, however, ambitious young natural
philosophers looked to the Cambridge mathematical Tripos (as it was called) as
well, to provide them with a thorough grounding in the latest mathematics and
its applications. Competition for the highest honor—the senior wranglership—was
fierce. The university developed a unique culture of mathematics training
designed to carry students through the rigors of the Tripos. Sporting prowess
was encouraged as a means of relaxing the mind while turning the body into a fit
receptacle. Two giants of nineteenth-century British physics—Maxwell and
Kelvin—were products of the Cambridge system, as were a host of others. By the
end of the century, Cambridge mathematical physics in many ways epitomized
British science. The German lands were developing their own culture of
mathematical physics during the nineteenth century as well. The
mid-nineteenth-century
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25
generation of German natural philosophers reacted strongly against what they
perceived to be the metaphysical excesses of early nineteenthcentury Romantic
Naturphilosophie—as we shall see in more detail in subsequent chapters. Natural
philosophy played an increasingly central role in German education as the
century progressed. New research institutions were established with the express
aim of placing German scientists at the forefront of natural philosophy. In many
ways, theoretical physics as now recognized had its origins in these
nineteenth-century German institutions. Physicists such as Rudolf Clausius in
Zurich, Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna, Bernhard Riemann in Gottingen, and Carl ¨
Neumann in Leipzig prided themselves on the abstractedness of their theoretical
practice. Theory was a valid exercise in its own right. Where British natural
philosophers worried about the material foundations of the terms and concepts
deployed in their theories, German theoretical physicists by and large had no
such concerns. What mattered was the integrity of the theory and its capacity to
explain and predict the phenomena. Physics in the nineteenth century was
developing into strong and robust forms of practice, each with its own styles
and traditions of research and institutional bases. As the century went on,
success in physics increasingly came to be recognized as a marker of national
status as well. Great men of science started to be recognized as national heroes
as much as statesmen and soldiers. Laplace in France, Kelvin in Britain, and
Helmholtz in Germany were national figures. Physics was becoming a way of
fashioning oneself upon the national (and international) stage. In many ways the
story of nineteenth-century physics is the story of the struggles of its
practitioners to carve out a distinctive cultural niche for themselves and their
way of doing things. For much of the nineteenth century there was no clear-cut,
straightforwardly defined way of “doing” physics. There was no career pattern
that the budding physicist might follow from school to university to research
institution. Nineteenthcentury physicists had to fashion themselves. They had to
make up their careers as they went along. The French Revolution French
scientific institutions in the late eighteenth century were unmistakably part of
the ancien r´egime. The country’s premier scientific institution, the Acad´emie
Royale des Sciences in Paris, was the creature of royal patronage. There was
nothing surprising therefore in the revolutionary
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Two
Committee of Public Safety’s decision to suppress the Acad´emie, along with
other royalist institutions, including the universities. It was perceived as
privileged, aristocratic, and elitist and opposed therefore to the ideals of the
Revolution. When it was replaced a few years later in 1795 by the first class of
the Institut Nationale, that new establishment was regarded as having a crucial
role to play in furthering the Revolution and France’s interests. Men of science
were being mobilized for the war effort and came to play increasingly important
roles in the Republic’s affairs. This trend continued after Napoleon’s takeover
of the state. This forging of a new relationship between scientific institutions
and the state provided the opportunity for some influential natural philosophers
to implement their own particular visions of physical science. Pierre-Simon
Laplace in particular took advantage of this chance to implement his grand
Newtonian vision of a comprehensive physical theory that would lay bare the
clockwork mechanism of the universe. Physical astronomy, for Laplace, was the
exemplar science. It was implicit in his view of science that all natural
phenomena could be accounted for in just the same way that Newton had accounted
for the movement of heavenly bodies. Just as the force of gravity dictated the
movements of the stars and planets and of bodies on the Earth’s surface, so
could similar forces acting in the same way explain other kinds of movement. “By
means of these assumptions,” he asserted, “the phenomena of expansion, heat, and
vibrational motion in gases are explained in terms of attractive and repulsive
forces which act only over insensible distances . . . All terrestrial phenomena
depend on forces of these kinds, just as celestial phenomena depend on universal
gravitation. It seems to me that the study of these forces should now be the
chief goal of mathematical philosophy.”1 Laplace’s monumental Trait´e de
M´ecanique C´eleste, in which these words appeared, was published in five
volumes between 1799 and 1825. It contained a comprehensive manifesto of
Laplace’s vision of the end of natural philosophy in a unified Newtonian theory
of everything. All of physical science could be reduced to the study of the
force interactions between particles. The active powers of electricity,
magnetism, heat, light, and so forth were to be understood as imponderable
fluids made up of discrete particles interacting with each other in just the
same way as the planets interacted with the Sun. 1
P.-S. Laplace, Trait´e de M´ecanique C´eleste (Paris, 1799–1825), 5: 99, trans.
in R. Fox, “The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics,” 89.
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27
Entrenched in a situation of ever increasing power and prestige within the
Napoleonic French state, Laplace was in an ideal position to put his project
into practice. He gathered a constellation of committed disciples around
himself, all of them convinced like him that the holy grail of physics was to
reduce everything to the interaction of particles in space. Laplace and his
friend and fellow Bonapartist Claude-Louis Berthollet both owned country
properties at Arcueil, a few miles south of Paris. There from 1801 onwards they
organized the Soci´et´e d’Arcueil, an informal society of their friends and
prot´eg´es similarly committed to the project. They met there weekly to discuss
their mutual interests in science and to plot their activities within the first
class of the institute. The society provided Laplace and Berthollet with a
secure base and a support structure from which they could engineer the elevation
of their prot´eg´es into key positions within the powerful first class of the
Institut Nationale ´ and into influential teaching positions within the Ecole
Polytechnique and elsewhere. French scientific institutions as reorganized under
Napoleon were structured in a strict and centralized hierarchy. At the top of
the pyramid were the prestigious members of the first class of the Institut
Nationale. Membership in the institute was by election, and holders were
salaried servants of the state. Members wielded a considerable power of
patronage as well. Their say-so could be instrumental in determining the
appointment of a budding young scientist to a salaried position teaching at one
of the Parisian e´ coles or at a provincial university. Through his powers of
patronage, Laplace was in a position to further the careers of his ´ prot´eg´es;
Jean Baptiste Biot and Etienne Louis Malus, students at the ´ Ecole
Polytechnique, were promoted to positions of power and influence by Laplace. One
function of the institute was the organization of prestigious prize competitions
for significant new work in physics. Laplace was in a position to help ensure
that prizes were awarded in areas of research in which his disciples were
active. Thus, in 1807, for example, the first class of the institute proposed as
a subject for the prize in mathematics a study of the phenomena of double
refraction. Malus duly won the prize of 3,000 francs in 1808 with a theoretical
extension of Laplace’s own work on refraction in the M´ecanique C´eleste. One of
the exemplars of how to do Laplacian science was Laplace’s own theory of
capillary action. Trying to explain the tendency of a liquid in contact with a
solid surface (such as the inside of a tube) to creep up that surface to some
extent was a standard problem for eighteenth-century
28
Two
natural philosophers. It was axiomatic in Laplace’s approach that such capillary
action was the result of short range forces acting between the particles of
liquid and the particles of solid. The issue was what form the law governing
those forces should take. Some argued that it must be an inverse square law such
as Newton had identified for gravitational force. Others argued that the inverse
square law could be modified for intermolecular distances. Laplace succeeded in
sidestepping the dispute with an elegant mathematical demonstration showing that
the precise form of the law was unimportant for its solution. Compared with
previous efforts to solve the problem, Laplace’s offering was lengthy and
comprehensive. Along with his treatment of refraction, again based on the
assumption that the phenomena were to be understood as the result of short-range
interactions between particles—of light and solid matter in this case—this work
not only supplied his allies and prot´eg´es with concrete examples of what a
comprehensive theory should look like and how it ought to be constructed, but
also provided them with a wealth of experimental work to confirm and expand
Laplace’s own hypotheses. ´ Etienne Malus’s work during the 1800s on the
reflection and refraction of light beams fitted neatly into this picture. As a
good Laplacian and faithful disciple it was axiomatic to Malus that light was
made up of particles rather than waves. This was a moot point for
eighteenthcentury natural philosophers. The illustrious Newton was ambivalent on
the matter, while the eminent Dutchman Christiaan Huygens had produced solid
results with a wave theory. According to the particle theory, or corpuscular
theory, light consisted of a stream of particles emanating from the illuminated
body and striking the eye of the observer. The theory was highly successful. By
applying the laws of Newtonian mechanics to the light particles it was possible
to explain a range of optical phenomena like reflection and refraction.
Proponents of the wave theory, on the other hand, argued that light was the
result of undulations in a universal, cosmos-filling immaterial medium.
Vibrations in the illuminated body were transmitted like waves through this
universal medium—or ether— to impinge on the observer’s vision. Huygens applied
the wave theory to provide rival explanations to those of the corpuscularians.
He also succeeded in explaining the curious phenomenon whereby objects viewed
through crystals of Iceland spar appeared double—a phenomenon known as double
refraction. Malus succeeded, however, in reproducing Huygens’s results and his
explanation of double refraction using a corpuscular theory of light. He also
made a major discovery. He found that light was polarized by
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29
reflection. In other words, light reflected from a surface appeared to be
asymmetric—it acted differently along different directions. Polarization could
be demonstrated by looking at light through particular kinds of crystals. If the
crystal was held one way, the light source was visible. If the crystal was
rotated by a right angle, the light source disappeared. This was a major triumph
for the corpuscular theory of light. It seemed incompatible with the wave theory
but easily explicable by assuming that the individual particles of light rotated
around axes that were at an angle to their direction of motion. Malus’s triumph
was to reduce the various phenomena of reflection, refraction, and polarization
to a single mathematical law, built around the assumption of asymmetric
particles of light: “If we consider in the translation of the light molecules
their motion around their three principal axes, a, b, c, the quantity of
molecules whose b or c axes become perpendicular to the direction of the
repulsive forces will always be proportional to the square of the sine of the
angle these lines will have to describe about the a-axis in order to take up
this new direction.”2 It was a classic piece of Laplacian science. Laplace’s
success and that of his vision of a complete Newtonian philosophy of nature were
closely tied to the fortunes of the Napoleonic state. While the empire
flourished, so did Laplace. When the empire collapsed, however, so did the
Laplacian empire of natural philosophy. Following Napoleon’s fall at the Battle
of Waterloo in 1815, Laplace lost a great deal of the political power he had
wielded so effectively for the past fifteen years. Laplace’s position under the
restored Bourbon monarchy was by no means as secure as it had been before. His
powers of patronage were increasingly curtailed along with his power to prevent
political and scientific opponents from having their voices heard. In the years
following the Restoration, therefore, an increasing number of Young Turks from a
new generation set themselves up in explicit opposition to the Laplacian camp.
Some of these rebels, such as Pierre Dulong and Franc¸ ois Arago, were defectors
from the Laplacian camp—both had been members of the Soci´et´e d’Arcueil and had
benefited from its patronage. Others, such as Joseph Fourier and Augustin
Fresnel, were provincials who had had little previous contact with Laplace and
Parisian scientific circles. Fourier, the oldest member of the burgeoning
anti-Laplacian alliance, was a former army officer who had served under Napoleon
in the disastrous Egyptian campaign. Fresnel was a known royalist sympathizer, a
graduate of the ´ E. L. Malus, “Th´eorie de la Double Refraction,” M´emoires
Savants Etrangers, 1811, 2: 496, trans. in E. Frankel, “Corpuscular Optics and
the Wave Theory of Light,” 147. 2
30
Two
´ ´ Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Ponts et Chausses who had spent most
of his career in the provinces as a civil engineer. Fourier had first come to
Parisian scientific attention with a mammoth treatise on the distribution of
heat in solid bodies, read out before the first class of the Institut Nationale
in December 1807. Completely bypassing the standard Laplacian route of deriving
his equations by treating the phenomena as the result of force interactions
between particles of heat (the caloric theory of heat), Fourier developed his
own way of approaching the problem, cultivating a whole new mathematical
technology along the way. In his presentation, Fourier was determinedly agnostic
concerning the physical nature of heat, preferring to focus on a more abstractly
mathematical formulation of the problem. A few years later he successfully
submitted a revised version of his treatise for one of the first class’s prize
competitions, judged by a panel including Laplace himself as well as Lagrange,
Legendre, Malus, and Hauy—all good Laplacians. Despite that achievement,
publication of his work was blocked and his prize-winning contribution did not
appear in full until 1823, long after Laplace’s fall from grace and when Fourier
himself was already permanent secretary of a revived Acad´emie Royale des
Sciences. In the meantime, an extended abstract of his work was published by the
sympathetic anti-Laplacian, Arago, in the Annales de Chimie et Physique of 1816.
More trouble came to the Laplacians from the field of optical theory, so
recently hailed as the site of some of their greatest triumphs in the form of
Laplace’s work on refraction and Malus’s discovery of polarization. This work
had been extended by both Jean Baptiste Biot and Franc¸ ois Arago in classic
Laplacian fashion. Before long, however, the two experimenters fell out in a
public and acrimonious priority dispute in which Arago accused Biot of
appropriating his discoveries for himself. Disenchanted with the Laplacians,
Arago was more than happy to place his considerable influence at the disposal of
Augustin Fresnel when the young outsider tried to interest Parisian savants in
his own rival wave theory of the phenomena of diffraction—the breaking up of a
beam of light into a series of light and dark bands when it passes through a
narrow slit or past the edge of a body. Fresnel explained diffraction by
supposing that dark bands were caused by the coincidence of peaks and troughs in
waves of light canceling each other out at particular points along the wave
front while light bands were the result of two peaks reinforcing each other.
Having arrived in Paris in the summer of 1815, Fresnel was soon in contact with
Arago, who took him under his wing and pointed him in the direction of the
Englishman Thomas Young’s studies on the
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31
wave theory of light. Arago undertook, moreover, to act as reporter for
Fresnel’s first presentation before the first class of the institute later that
year. As well as submitting a highly complimentary report, Arago also had
Fresnel’s memoir published in his Annales de Chimie et Physique and succeeded in
finding him a permanent position in Paris so that he could continue his
researches. The turncoat Arago was turning the Laplacian patronage network
against itself. The Laplacians threw down the gauntlet. In 1817 a commission of
the academy, packed with Laplacians, called for a prize competition on the
subject of diffraction. Their hope was to repeat the triumph of 1808, when Malus
had carried off the laurels with his corpuscularian study of refraction. There
was even a staunch Laplacian, Claude Pouillet, one of Biot’s students, working
on the problem. The terms in which the competition was posed made it clear that
the commission expected a corpuscularian victor. The commission, however,
underestimated Fresnel, who responded with a revised treatise, ironing out
problems in his original presentation and producing new mathematical laws for
deriving the phenomena of diffraction. The commission, despite its
corpuscularian bent, had little choice but to award him the accolade. A few
years later, even Biot, a committed proponent of the corpuscularian theory, was
admitting that “the principle of interference is, up to now, the only one with
which one can explain the particularities of diffraction, and in that this
phenomenon is favourable to the undulatory system.” He still maintained though
that there was something unsatisfactory about the solution: “one feels that it
offers rather a representation of the phenomena than a rigorous mechanical
theory.”3 In due course he hoped that it would be replaced by a suitably
materialist, that is to say corpuscularian, theory. Biot was to be disappointed.
One by one the citadels of Laplacian physics fell before the interlopers. By the
1820s, both the caloric theory of heat and the Laplacian two-fluid theories of
electricity and magnetism were under fierce attack as well. In mechanics,
orthodox Laplacian “physical mechanics” was being replaced by the “analytical
mechanics” practiced by Fourier and his prot´eg´es such as Claude Navier and
Sophie Germain. Laplace’s ally Simeon-D´enis Poisson deplored the new style and
hankered for the days when mathematicians would “re-examine the leading problems
of mechanics from this point of view, which is at once 3
J. B. Biot, Pr´ecis de Physique, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1824), 2: 472–73, trans. in E.
Frankel, “Corpuscular Optics and the Wave Theory of Light,” 162.
32
Two
physical and consonant with nature.”4 Abstract analysis was all very well, but
what was really needed was a mathematics that stayed in touch with material
reality. As the Laplacian generation either grew older or fell out of political
favor under the restored monarchy, their positions in the seats of power were
usurped by their political and scientific opponents. Arago, Amp`ere (another
anti-Laplacian), and Fourier were already members of the reconstituted Acad´emie
Royale des Sciences. Fresnel was elected in 1823. A year earlier, in 1822,
Fourier had scored a decisive victory by trouncing Biot in the election for one
of the permanent secretaryships. The loss of political power and the loss of
scientific credibility appeared to go hand in hand. Laplace had presided over a
remarkably productive two decades of science in France. His brand of
revolutionary science had brought about a transformation in the
eighteenth-century Newtonian synthesis. As far as his adherents were concerned,
his magisterial M´ecanique C´eleste provided the blueprint for a thoroughgoing
Newtonian overhaul of physics. It showed as well how successful mathematics
could be as a tool with which to comprehensively interrogate nature. This new,
sweeping, and powerful science went hand in hand with the revolutionary reform
of France. Its uncompromising materialism fitted in well with the guiding
philosophy of the newly dominant elite. The Revolution and its Bonapartist
aftermath gave Laplace the political clout to put his vision into practice as
well. Laplace had the power to hire and fire. He could put into positions of
influence those who shared his commitment to a materialist reading of
Newtonianism. The shake-up of French scientific institutions after the
Revolution and under Napoleon’s dispensation allowed for scientific careers for
the talented in a way that few had previously been able to aspire to. To envious
eyes beyond the boundaries of the Empire, French science could easily appear as
an ideal to be fondly emulated. The Analytics English science at the turn of the
century—at least in its upper echelons— was very much an aristocratic affair. A
smattering of natural philosophy was part of the cultural repertoire of leisured
gentility. Practicing natural philosophers were often either gentlemen
themselves, with the time and 4 ´ ´ S. D. Poisson, “M´emoire sur l’Equilibre et
le Mouvement des Corps Elastique,” M´emoires de l’Acad´emie des Sciences, 1829,
8: 361, trans. in R. Fox, “The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics,” 118.
A Revolutionary Science
33
resources to devote themselves to science, or men beholden to such gentlemen for
patronage. English men of science and fellows of the Royal Society prided
themselves on their scientific heritage. They were after all the inheritors of
the great Sir Isaac Newton’s mantle. The president of the Royal Society in
1800—Sir Joseph Banks, who had made his name as a botanist on Captain Cook’s
voyages of exploration in the South Seas—had already been at the helm for more
than twenty years and was to remain there for another twenty. As his reign
lengthened, more and more of the younger generation of natural philosophers
became restive—particularly those interested in the mathematical sciences of
which Banks (reputedly at least) disapproved. They regarded English science as
becoming ever more backward and reactionary, losing touch with the developments
taking place in Continental Europe. They abhorred Banks and his patronage
networks and wanted science to be a meritocracy instead. They wanted to forge
links between science and commerce rather than kowtow to lords and ladies of
leisure. Early nineteenth-century Cambridge remained a bastion of academic and
aristocratic privilege. Its students were largely drawn from the ranks of the
landed gentry and the university’s purpose was to provide the finishing touches
to their education, to prepare them for service to church or state. Mathematics
was perceived as having a central role to play in achieving this end. It
provided an unparalleled means of training the mind. A student who could follow
the complexities of Euclid’s geometry or Newton’s fluxions (as Newton’s style of
calculus was called) was judged to be capable of following a course of reasoning
in other walks of life as well, be it the law, politics, or theology.
Cambridge’s mathematical professors and scholars had little time for new
developments. The university was a citadel of learning, not of research. They
preferred to follow tried and tested methods rather than dabbling with dubious
(and foreign) innovations. As befitted its status as nurturer of the nation’s
future elite, the university, particularly during the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars, was politically and theologically conservative as well.
Students had to swear their allegiance to the thirty-nine articles of the Church
of England before graduation; heresy both in politics and in theology was firmly
stamped down. For a new breed of student in early nineteenth-century Cambridge,
however, this state of affairs was deeply unsatisfactory. Men such as Charles
Babbage and John Herschel admired French science and politics and were deeply
contemptuous of what they regarded as the culpable ignorance and reactionariness
of the Cambridge dons. Babbage was the
34
Two
son of a wealthy banker. Herschel, of course, was the son of the celebrated
Hanoverian emigr´e, the musician and astronomer William Herschel, discoverer of
Uranus. Both had republican sympathies. Babbage was acquainted with Napoleon’s
exiled younger brother, Lucien. Herschel had visited Paris with his father and
been introduced to Napoleon himself. In letters to Babbage he addressed him as
“citizen” in the French fashion and after Waterloo expressed disquiet to his
friends as to his future as a “poor snivelling democratic dog”5 in a world
dominated by triumphalist aristocrats. Along with others such as George Peacock,
Alexander d’Arblay, and Edward Ffrench Bromhead, they mixed their enthusiasm for
revolutionary politics with a taste for revolutionary mathematics. Disdaining
the Newtonian bias so prevalent in Cambridge, they immersed themselves instead
in the latest products of French analysis. In their politics and their
intellectual allegiances they stood for everything that stalwarts of the
Cambridge regime such as Isaac Milner, the redoubtable president of Queens’
College, found abhorrent. The outcome of their backroom conspiracies was the
foundation of the Analytical Society in 1811, committed to introduce French
mathematics into the University of Cambridge. The society was started almost as
a joke—a joke at the expense of the university’s conservative
politicotheological wranglings. A dispute was raging over the foundation of a
Bible Society. While some argued that the Bible should be circulated along with
the Book of Common Prayer to guard against heretical misinterpretations of the
word of God, others were adamant that the Bible should be distributed alone. It
was a dispute as to the extent the poor could be trusted to read God’s word
unsupervised. In the midst of this furor, Babbage in his rooms at Trinity
College drew up plans for an alternative society. It was to be established to
support the publication of the French mathematician Silvestre Franc¸ ois
Lacroix’s Differential and Integral Calculus in English, a work, according to
Babbage’s broadside, already “so perfect that any commentary was unnecessary.”6
The lampoon did have a serious intent, however. Babbage and his cohorts—all
highflying mathematicians aiming at high honors in the mathematical Tripos—were
disgusted by the state of affairs at Cambridge. They wanted to revolutionize the
Tripos and bring it, as they saw it, up to date. 5 J. Herschel to J. Whittaker,
7 July 1815, quoted in H. Becher, “Radicals, Whigs, and Conservatives,” 411. 6
C. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1884; reprint, London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1991), 20.
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35
The society’s aim was to support “the Principles of pure D’ism in opposition to
the Dot-age of the University.”7 The slogan was a barbed in-joke and a pun. The
new French analytical calculus employed the now conventional notation dx/dy. The
university’s favored approach was that of Newtonian fluxions, which would
express the same concept as ˙ At the same time, the radical theological
principles of deism (denying x. Revelation and the Trinity) were being opposed
to the university’s muddleheaded dotage. Babbage and Herschel were the new
society’s leading lights, both committed to the new system. They consumed French
mathematics voraciously and produced their own contributions prodigiously,
published in their own in-house journal, the Memoirs of the Analytical Society.
Both, along with Peacock, had eyes on a Cambridge fellowship. Babbage flunked,
however. Having moved to Peterhouse from Trinity so that he might have a chance
of a fellowship without taking holy orders, he fell afoul of the university’s
religious ordinances and thus was unable to aim for honors. He got an ordinary
degree without examination and lost his chance of a college career. Herschel
graduated senior wrangler at St. Johns in 1813, gaining a college fellowship.
Peacock came second and gained a fellowship at Trinity, accepting ordination
along the way. Within a few years, George Peacock was appointed one of the
university’s examiners and took advantage of his position to start introducing
the new, infidel “d-istic” notation into the Cambridge examination papers. The
analytics’ logic was simple—if the new mathematics were in the examination
papers, then Cambridge’s private tutors, who undertook the bulk of teaching,
pragmatists to a man, would start teaching it to their students. Its
introduction in 1817 was highly controversial to say the least. Looking back,
Peacock suggested that only the success of students from St. John’s at the
examination (the master of St. John’s was vicechancellor of the university that
year) prevented him from being hauled in front of the university courts for his
temerity. The opposition had some real intellectual concerns about the new
mathematics. As George Peacock’s opponent Daniel Peacock (no relation) put it,
“Academical education should be strictly confined to subjects of real utility,
and so far as the lucubrations of the French analysts have no immediate bearing
on philosophy, they are as unfit subjects of academical examination, as the
Aristotelian jargon of the old schools.”8 The complaint was that French 7
Ibid., 21. D. Peacock, A Comparative View of the Principles of the Fluxional and
Differential Calculus (Cambridge, 1819), 85. 8
36
Two
analysis lost its grip on reality. Powerful it might be, but its symbols did not
refer to anything in the real world. Its techniques simply provided a shortcut
through a problem without providing the kind of intuitive, if plodding,
understanding that an undergraduate needed if he were to have his mind trained
for empire. For Herschel and Babbage, however, there was more to analysis than a
debate about the appropriate mathematical symbols, or the proper education of
Cambridge undergraduates, or even mathematics itself. Analysis was part and
parcel of a grand project of intellectual, economic, and cultural reform that
they hoped would turn British society on its head. They agreed with the
Cambridge dons that mathematics was preeminently a way of training and
organizing the mind. They differed, however, in their methods and in what they
wanted the mind trained for. These were representatives of the new urban
industrial middle class. They saw Britain’s future in industrial expansion and
the thoroughgoing application of political economy. The key to the success of
analytical algebra as they saw it was its efficiency. It was a problem-solving
technology that could produce answers quickly and without wasting resources.
That was why it was good mental training. It exemplified efficiency. More than
that—it mirrored the workings of an ideal mind as well. It was a way of
economizing mental labor. As such it could be used to recognize what the most
efficient way of proceeding in other enterprises might be too. It could provide
the key, for example, to the most profitable way of deploying resources in order
to maximize factory production. Following his enforced departure from Cambridge,
Babbage switched his field of operations to the metropolis. There, his
enthusiasm for finding ways of maximizing the efficiency of mental labor in the
same way that the division of labor was increasingly being deployed to maximize
the efficiency of manual labor earned him a receptive audience. London’s bankers
and industrialists were as keen as he was to find ways to improve their balance
sheets. Babbage’s circle in London included men such as the stockbroker Francis
Baily and the actuary Benjamin Gompertz. Both were enthusiastic mathematicians
and astronomers, convinced, like Babbage, that their science could and should be
prosecuted like their business— and vice versa. Efficiency was the name of the
game in both cases, and efficiency was best achieved by due attention to, and
proper application of, the laws of nature and the operations of the mind.
Babbage, Baily, and Gompertz, as well as Herschel, were instrumental in
establishing the Astronomical Society in 1820 as an alternative power center to
Sir Joseph Banks’s corrupt (as they saw it) domination of the Royal Society.
A Revolutionary Science
37
Following Banks’s death in office in 1820 and throughout Sir Humphry Davy’s
precarious presidency of the Royal Society during the 1820s, radicals,
spearheaded by Babbage and his Astronomical Society cohorts, battled with the
conservatives for control of the Royal Society and its near monopoly of
governmental patronage for science. The battle culminated in John Herschel’s
unsuccessful stand against the duke of Sussex (the king’s younger brother) for
the Royal Society’s presidency in 1830. This was a battle about efficiency and
the proper division of labor in science. The problem with the Banksian regime
and its successor, in Babbage’s and his friends’ minds at least, was that it
interfered with the proper and transparent workings of the scientific community.
It depended on backroom backhanders instead of meritocracy. The superiority of
algebraic analysis over geometrical reasoning lay in its efficiency and
transparency as well. Babbage argued that “[t]he power which we possess by the
aid of symbols of compressing into a small compass the several steps of a chain
of reasoning, whilst it contributes greatly to abridge the time which our
enquiries would otherwise occupy, in difficult cases influences the accuracy of
our conclusions: for from the distance which is sometimes interposed [in
geometrical reasoning] between the beginning and the end of a chain of
reasoning, although the separate parts are sufficiently clear, the whole is
often obscure. This observation furnishes another ground for the preference of
algebraic over geometrical reasoning.”9 Not only was analysis more efficient, it
was less prone to error than geometry—it was easier to scrutinize. That kind of
oversight, according to Babbage, was the key to good science and the key to good
management in both industry and science. Babbage’s ultimate solution to the
problem of how to guarantee efficiency, transparency, and accuracy in reasoning
was the same as his solution to the same problem in political economy: replace
humans with machinery. Babbage was a firm exponent of the division of labor in
factory management and equally enthusiastic for mechanization as the ultimate
realization of the principle. His primary concern throughout the 1820s and
beyond was to work on his projected calculating and analytical engines and to
persuade a sometimes reluctant government to finance the project. The
calculating engine would replace the human drudge work of calculating
mathematical tables to be used (for example) in actuarial work and in astronomy.
The analytical engine would go further—it 9
C. Babbage, “On the Influence of Signs in Mathematical Reasoning,” M.
Campbell-Kelly (ed.), The Works of Charles Babbage (London: Pickering & Chatto,
1989), 1: 376.
38
Two
2.1 Plans for Charles Babbage’s ambitious Analytical Engine, showing details of
its inner mechanism. Babbage argued that by finding a way of mechanically
reproducing the mental attributes of memory and foresight he could build an
intelligent machine that could be used to replace monotonous mathematical labor.
would replace the human capacity to reason as well (figure 2.1). “Memory and
foresight,” according to Babbage, were the foundations of human intelligence,
and he had found a way of embodying them in a machine. Memory was achieved by
the “principle of successive carriages.” Foresight was more difficult. Babbage
recalled triumphantly that “[i]t cost me much thought, but the principle was
arrived at in a short time. As soon as that was attained, the next step was to
teach the mechanism which could foresee to act upon that foresight. This was not
so difficult: certain mechanical means were soon devised which, although very
far from simple, were yet sufficient to demonstrate the possibility of
constructing such machinery.”10 His analytical engine was to be the final
realization of the analytics’ dream of industrializing the operations of the
human mind and the scientific community along the same lines as the
industrialization of the economy. 10
C. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1884; reprint, London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1991), 46.
A Revolutionary Science
39
Herschel’s failure to defeat the duke of Sussex in the 1830 election for the
presidency of the Royal Society, along with his own continuing difficulties in
acquiring government financial support for his calculating engines, lay behind
Babbage’s publication in 1830 of his controversial Reflections on the Decline of
Science in England. The book was a passionate broadside against the corruption,
mismanagement, and nepotism of English science in general and of the Royal
Society in particular. The Royal Society needed a complete overhaul so that it
could be recognized as the legitimate overseer of the division of scientific
labor between the growing number of specialist scientific societies (like the
Astronomical Society) and the proper allocation of government resources.
Babbage’s model for future reform was unambiguous. He had his eye on the power
and prestige of the Acad´emie des Sciences across the Channel. Its officers were
salaried servants of the state and had the financial and political clout to push
science forward. Babbage saw this centralized, Bonapartist monolith as an
antidote to corruption and the epitome of efficient management. Others, even
among his fellow reformers, disagreed of course, pointing out that the academy
was even more prone than the Royal Society to corruption and backroom power
broking. It seemed obvious to Babbage, however, that the importation of French
science and French scientific structures should go hand in hand. Babbage’s,
Herschel’s, and the rest of the analytics’ apparently local battle to introduce
French analysis into Cambridge’s moribund mathematical culture and the fierce
opposition their efforts encountered were symptomatic of broader battles within
the world of English science. Young Turks such as Babbage and his cronies wanted
to turn English science upside down and remake it in their own image. New
methods of mathematical analysis, bizarre as it may seem to modern readers, were
a way of trying to achieve this. These men saw analysis as encapsulating a new
and more efficient way of thinking that could be applied outside the narrow
confines of the university and its hidebound curriculum, just as it could be
used to drag that curriculum and its guardians screaming and kicking into the
new century. Cambridge was not a bad place to start the battle, since its
professors presided over the education of a large portion of the country’s
future ruling elite. Efficiency and meritocracy were the buzzwords of an
increasingly confident new industrial class that was just embarking on its own
campaign for political power to match its growing economic clout. The analytics
and their analysis were in the vanguard of that campaign.
40
Two
Cambridge Culture By the end of the nineteenth century, the University of
Cambridge was internationally recognized as a powerhouse of mathematical
physics. Its former students could be found staffing new universities in
Britain, throughout the Empire, and beyond. The place had become a veritable
factory production line of mathematical physicists. This clearly was a huge
change from the state of affairs that so depressed the Analytical Society in the
1810s. Indeed, their drive to reform the Cambridge Tripos was partially
responsible for the transformation of the university’s international reputation.
There was more to it than that, however. The examination regime and the regime
of mathematical training developed in Cambridge during the first half of the
nineteenth century were quite explicitly designed to churn out mathematically
adept individuals in large numbers (figure 2.2). The aim was not to produce
mathematicians or mathematical physicists as such. Mathematics was taken to be a
means of inculcating a rigorous education of the mind just as it had been
earlier in the century. Cambridge products were meant to be fit to govern an
expanding Empire that required their services in ever increasing numbers.
2.2 A Cambridge examination taking place in the Great Hall of Trinity College
around 1840. Regimented and closely invigilated examinations like these are
common nowadays but were a relative innovation at the time.
A Revolutionary Science
41
A candidate who was successful in the Tripos was taken to have demonstrated
precisely those virtues of self-discipline, mental rigor, and iron determination
that were assumed necessary to be capable of such service. By midcentury, the
Cambridge system of examination that Babbage, Herschel, and friends had
considered so inadequate had undergone a major overhaul. In fact, the process
had been under way for some time when they were undergraduates. From the late
eighteenth century onwards, the emphasis in assessing students’ ability
gradually shifted from oral to written examination. Mathematics—the only subject
to be examined formally and through which a student could attain honors—became
increasingly important as a topic of study. Honors students were divided into
three classes: wranglers, senior optime, and junior optime. Within these
divisions, the examiners developed ever finer means of discrimination aimed at
individually ranking each candidate for honors in the Tripos. Graduating as
senior wrangler (first in the list of wranglers) or indeed as second or third
wrangler was considered a major achievement. The analytics’ efforts to introduce
new mathematical styles and techniques into the syllabus had a major effect on
the system. Increasingly, examiners developed finer means of grading questions
so as to discriminate between different levels of ability. William Whewell, the
polymathic master of Trinity College, played a major role during the 1830s and
1840s in reforming and rationalizing the Tripos system. As the examination
system became ever more rigorous and taxing, submitting oneself as a candidate
for honors meant being prepared to undergo a grueling and arduous regime of
training. The key to success in this punishing process was the acquisition of a
well-established and successful personal tutor—or “coach,” as they were
popularly known. As the examination process became more demanding and punishing,
the role of the university’s own professors in the pedagogical process became
less significant. After all, every student had easy access to their lectures.
What was needed to gain an edge was a personal tutor with a proven track record
of producing high wranglers. Coaches worked with their own chosen “teams” of
students, inculcating tried and tested ways of approaching problems speedily and
reliably. The teams worked their way through example after example of problems,
internalizing the best ways of getting through the examination successfully,
answering as many questions correctly in as short a time as possible. The best
students aiming at the top few places in the lists needed to demonstrate
considerable flair, ingenuity, and originality to attain the high honors they
hoped for. This could be achieved only if they had the mathematical techniques
required to solve the examination questions at their fingertips. Coaches
42
Two
attracted considerable personal reputations. The best of them could pick and
choose the best potential candidates as they arrived at Cambridge, having been
tipped off by grammar and public school headmasters of the likely prospects. The
king of these wrangler makers was William Hopkins, a graduate of Peterhouse with
a string of outstanding high wranglers to his name, including William Thomson,
Peter Guthrie Tait, and James Clerk Maxwell. As one of his former students,
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and an enthusiast for eugenics,
recalled, Hopkins worked hard not only to drill his team in the finer points of
examination technique but to imbue them with an enthusiastic and competitive
team spirit as well. “Hopkins, to use a Cantab expression,” enthused Galton to
his father, “is a regular brick; tells funny stories connected with different
problems and is in no way Donnish; he rattles on at a splendid pace and makes
mathematics anything but a dry subject by entering thoroughly into its
metaphysics. I never enjoyed anything so much before.”11 Hopkins’s impressive
track record was testimony to the efficacy of his methods. It also helped
guarantee him a steady source of talented pupils that would sustain his
reputation and his income. Hopkins charged his students £100 or more per annum
for his services and reckoned to pocket between £700 and £800 a year in
fees—more than enough to ensure a comfortable living. There was far more to the
coaching process than the avuncular bonhomie that Galton enjoyed, however. An
American student, Charles Bristed, studying at Cambridge in the 1840s,
emphasized that “a man must be healthy as well as strong—‘in condition’
altogether to stand the work. For in the eight hours a-day which form the
ordinary amount of a reading man’s study, he gets through as much work as a
German does in twelve; and nothing that [American] students go through can
compare with the fatigue of a Cambridge examination.”12 Success required
constant practice and application. “You can never know too much about the
solutions to del2 V = 0”13 enthused one coach to his pupils. This was the kind
of knowledge and skill that a good coach could instill in his students that
could not be acquired elsewhere. The coaches knew the shortcuts and the tricks
of the trade that could give candidates a crucial edge. Their 11 K. Pearson,
Life, Letters and Labours of Galton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1914), 163, quoted in A. Warwick, “Exercising the Student Body,” 296. 12 C.
Bristed, Five Years in an English University (New York, 1852), 1: 331, quoted in
Warwick, “Exercising the Student Body,” 295. 13 Quoted in A. Warwick, Masters of
Theory, chapter 5.
A Revolutionary Science
43
aim was to drum such techniques into their disciples’ heads by constant
repetition and exercise. A good candidate was expected to be able to read a
question, recognize the techniques required for its solution, and apply them
successfully while barely thinking about the matter. Unsurprisingly perhaps,
such an arduous and in many ways unprecedented regime of mental training had its
failures. The road to Tripos stardom was littered with casualties. Even
candidates who excelled at the Tripos recorded their dismay at the mental and
physical strain they had been subjected to. Leslie Ellis, senior wrangler in
1840, recorded in his journal his “bitter dislike of Cambridge and my own
repugnance to the wrangler making process.”14 Cambridge had developed its own
solution to the problem of mental breakdown during the course of Tripos
preparation, however. As they exercised their minds, Tripos candidates were
encouraged to exercise their bodies as well. From the 1810s onwards, as the
analytical revolution gathered pace and grinding application became more and
more a prerequisite of Tripos success, hard physical exercise as an adjunct and
antidote to rigorous study became commonplace. Cambridge was developing a
culture of “work hard, play hard”; solitary activities were discouraged to
prevent undue introspection. Students entered into sporting activity with as
much self-discipline and rigor as they applied to their mathematical studies.
Sport at Cambridge was not just the preserve of the idle aristocratics who had
no interest in submitting themselves to the rigors of the Tripos examination. It
was part and parcel of the university’s mathematical culture. Much of the
university’s culture by the late nineteenth century was built around the
mathematics Tripos. The most successful candidates, who filled the highest
positions in the rankings, were lionized not only within Cambridge but
nationally as well. Their images and their histories would appear in the popular
press. Their future careers would be assured. The awarding of degrees was hedged
in by ritual. The results of the Tripos examination each year were publicly read
out at the university’s Senate House in strict order of ranking. Colleges vied
with each other for the honor of the highest number of wranglerships. The senior
wrangler each year would be carried from the Senate House on the shoulders of
his peers and paraded around the city streets. Failure was accorded its ritual
as well. The candidate achieving the lowest result each year was awarded the
wooden spoon. The “spoon,” fashioned, ironically enough, from a boating oar,
would be lowered from the Senate House’s galleries down to 14
Quoted in A. Warwick, “Exercising the Student Body,” 298.
44
Two
the unfortunate recipient below. Success in the Tripos was a guarantee of entry
into the country’s cultural elite. Comparatively few high wranglers became
professional mathematicians or men of science—that, after all, was not really
what the Tripos was about. Those that did however, were sure of a head start.
Relatively few eminent British men of physical science during the second half of
the nineteenth century had not passed through the Cambridge Tripos. William
Thomson and James Clerk Maxwell are only the most eminent examples. They were
joined by Peter Guthrie Tait, George Gabriel Stokes, George Bidell Airy, Lord
Rayleigh, Joseph Larmor, and J. J. Thomson among others. These men and others
like them contributed to constructing a distinctive style of mathematical
physics in the second half of the century. It was a style that owed a great deal
to their original training in the mathematics Tripos. Despite the analytics’
revolution during the 1810s and 1820s and the consequent introduction of French
and Continental methods of analysis, the Cambridge system still maintained a
strong commitment to the traditional concern with “mixed mathematics.” Examiners
(and coaches) encouraged students to work on mathematical problems with a strong
physical component. Mathematics was expected to describe and solve problems in
the real world. Challenging questions in the Tripos examination often formed the
basis for ambitious students’ future research. The late nineteenth-century
articulation of mathematical theories of the electromagnetic ether, for example,
was very much a product of this Cantabrigian approach. Even much of the early
twentiethcentury British response to Einstein’s newfangled theories of
relativity was firmly grounded in this tradition of mathematical research.
Cambridge’s mathematical culture during this halcyon period was, like the
university’s culture more generally, avowedly masculine. Mathematics was
unambiguously men’s business. As women were grudgingly admitted into the
university’s lecture theaters during the second half of the century, they were
even more grudgingly admitted into the coaches’ teams without participation in
which they had no hope of achieving honors. Even when women were allowed to
participate in the Tripos from the 1870s onwards, they were excluded from the
public ranking system for several years. It caused a major scandal in 1890 when
Phillipa Fawcett from Newnham College actually beat that year’s senior wrangler.
Not only did women’s success bruise male egos and undermine the cultural kudos
attached to mathematical preeminence, it also severely challenged views of the
relationship between mathematicians’ bodies and their minds. Athleticism
mattered to Cambridge wranglers because it was held that a
A Revolutionary Science
45
balance was needed between energies devoted to mental and those devoted to
physical exertion. Such a balance was impossible in women’s bodies since their
physical energies were meant to be overwhelmingly directed towards maintaining
their reproductive organs. They were thus judged incapable in principle of the
rigorous mental work required for Tripos success. Cambridge mathematical physics
itself, in the form of the doctrine of the conservation of energy, underpinned
this model of bodily economic management. By the end of the century, the
Cambridge mathematics Tripos was under attack from reformers once again. Women
were showing themselves quite capable of playing the game; this did nothing to
help those who defended the Tripos as the preeminent means of sorting out the
men from the boys. New centers of excellence in research and training were
emerging as well, challenging Cambridge’s claim to provide the best. Even within
the university, the mathematics Tripos’s position as the route to success in the
physical sciences was being challenged by the natural sciences Tripos and the
increasingly important role of the Cavendish Laboratory as a center of research.
The popularity of German models of theoretical physics could be seen as a potent
threat and a challenge to the hegemony of Cantabrigian mathematical physics in
the “mixed mathematics” tradition. For much of the century however, Cambridge
was acknowledged as one of Europe’s most prolific producers of physical
scientists. Shared experiences as fodder for Cambridge’s wrangler mills and
common ground in shared techniques and practices produced a highly cohesive and
productive scientific elite that dominated physics for a large part of the
second half of the century. The Reign of Theory German natural philosophy and
its institutions underwent their own reformation during the nineteenth century.
The German lands at the beginning of the century were a patchwork of states,
each with its own local university. By the end of the century, a unified Germany
was one of the most powerful countries in Europe, its economy threatening to
overtake that of Great Britain. Germany had universities to match its political
and economic clout as well. In the sciences particularly, German universities
increasingly looked world-beating. The new state placed great emphasis on
scientific and technical education for its citizens, not only seeing science and
technology as the foundations of its burgeoning economic power, but seeing
scientific prestige as reflecting glory on the country that
46
Two
had produced it. Internationally recognized German men of science such as
Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois Reymond were people to be reckoned with
on the cultural and political scene as well. Their views mattered. Just as
radical young natural philosophers in England at the beginning of the century
cast envious eyes over the Channel at French scientific institutions, those
calling for a new dispensation for British science and its institutions at the
end of the century pointed to Germany as their model. Germany was a country that
recognized the increasingly important role of science in its struggle for
economic supremacy. British failure to emulate its institutions would be a
recipe for British industrial decline. As in England (and in France for that
matter), universities in the early nineteenth-century German states had as their
aim the education of the country’s professional and ruling elite. German states
usually had at least one university for this purpose—those that could afford
them had more. As institutions they were designed to provide their privileged
students with the kind of education that would mold them into future leaders of
society. They would produce lawyers, medical men, teachers, and clerics.
Typically, each university was divided into four faculties—law, medicine,
theology, and philosophy. The first three of these provided particular
professional training. Philosophy included the humanities, mathematics, and
natural philosophy. Philosophy in particular was seen as providing for students
at university level the opportunity to develop Bildung that was a major purpose
of education. Bildung was in many ways the German equivalent of the English
ideal of a liberal education—a training of the mind that was meant to produce
depth and discrimination. At many German universities, this was achieved through
immersion in a classical education (as it was at Oxford). Reformers argued,
however, that another route to Bildung existed that did not involve the
recapitulation of ancient knowledge. It could be achieved through science and
mathematics. Natural philosophy’s status within philosophy faculties at the
beginning of the century—and hence within German universities as a whole— was
low. It was not considered as essential training for a profession such as
medicine, theology, or the law. Neither was it regarded as an important
component in the development of Bildung. Natural philosophy teaching took place
as part of a general education curriculum that was not dissimilar to what
students at schools and Gymnasien might experience. In no sense was a capacity
for research considered a prerequisite for a university professorship in natural
philosophy. The function of universities in general was pedagogy rather than the
production of new knowledge.
A Revolutionary Science
47
When Carl Friedrich Gauss was asked by the University of Gottingen ¨ about his
opinions concerning the filling of their vacant professorship of physics in
1831, he emphasized that the successful candidate’s main obligation would be to
deliver accessible lectures to a mixed audience who would only want to acquire a
general knowledge of the subject. The candidate would also be a member of the
Gottingen Society of Sci¨ ences and would therefore be expected to be proficient
in mathematics and capable of producing work that could be published in the
society’s Transactions. Even for an eminent man of science such as Gauss,
however, this was a secondary consideration. If anything, Gauss argued that a
first-class mathematician would be unsuitable as he would be incapable of
appealing to a broader audience through his lectures. By the later 1830s and
1840s, however, the pedagogical status of natural philosophy teaching was
changing. As early as 1824, for example, the curator of the University of
Heidelberg proposed to the state of Baden’s interior ministry that a
“mathematical seminarium” should be established at the university. It was to be
modeled on the increasingly popular and successful seminars in philology that
were being credited with improving German classical education. Other
universities followed suit. By the late 1820s, the University of Halle had a
“physical seminar” in place, and when Wilhelm Weber, a student at Halle, was
appointed to the professorship at Gottingen, he brought the model with him. The
seminar model pro¨ vided more intensive training, primarily aimed at improving
the quality of schoolteachers. As Moritz Stern, extraordinary professor of
mathematics at Gottingen argued in 1849, “The philological seminars came into
being ¨ in an intellectual epoch . . . in which the knowledge of antiquity was
seen as the almost exclusive foundation of all scientific knowledge. But the
louder the so-called realistic direction demands its right, the greater the need
becomes for all educated people to understand the foundations on which rest the
mechanical and physical discoveries and inventions that affect our conditions so
mightily, and the more it also becomes necessary that future teachers of
mathematics and physics be offered an academic institute that has their further
training as its special purpose.”15 Gradually, it came to be understood that
some grounding in physical research might form a part of that “further
training.” The foundation of the Berlin Physical Society in 1845 was an augury
of things to come. Research increasingly came to be regarded by German natural
philosophers as a potential route to prestige and career. The Annalen der Physik
15
Quoted in C. Jungnickel and R. McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery of Nature, 1:
79.
48
Two
devoted more and more of its pages to the productions of native men of science
rather than to translations of works from foreign journals. Founded in 1790, the
Annalen was by the 1840s the premier German journal of physical science. Its
editor since 1824, Johann Christian Poggendorff, had the power to make or break
a scientific career. Increasingly, research publication, and publication in the
Annalen in particular, came to be regarded as a prerequisite for any hopeful
candidate for a university professorship. Research was coming to be regarded as
a value in its own right. Such a cultural sea change had a clear impact on the
status of physics research in Germany. Researchers were no longer enthusiastic
individuals or wealthy dilettantes with the leisure to indulge in experimental
or mathematical tinkering. They were hardheaded professionals with all the
prestige of state-salaried university professors. Research was turning into a
career and increasingly prestigious German physics professors could demand ever
more from their academies in terms of resources and facilities as rival
institutions battled for their services. Carl Friedrich Gauss was one of the
towering figures in this transformation of German physics. As professor of
higher mathematics and of astronomy at the University of Gottingen he had been
instrumental ¨ in securing an institutional niche for research there during the
1830s. His increasing reputation as a mathematician and astronomer— particularly
his international collaborations in astronomy and geomagnetic
observations—raised the profile of research throughout the German lands. Gauss
also established his own style of mathematical investigation in physics,
particularly electromagnetism, that served as a crucial resource for the next
generation. Bernhard Riemann had studied mathematics under Gauss during the
1840s, attracting his patronage along with that of Weber. Gauss encouraged his
mathematical researches and his efforts to establish mathematical connections
between previously disparate areas of physical inquiry. Riemann’s work on
electrodynamics in turn inspired another young German mathematician, Carl
Neumann. Neumann’s work in electrodynamics, along with that of Gauss, Riemann,
and Weber, had a profound impact in establishing a crucial German theoretical
presence in discussions of electromagnetism during the second half of the
century. Electromagnetism—the science of the telegraph cables so crucial to
imperial expansion—was, as we shall see, in many ways at the core of
nineteenth-century physics. Poggendorff continued editing the Annalen until his
death in 1877. By this time his name had become synonymous with the flagship
journal of German physics. Following his departure from the scene, the Berlin
A Revolutionary Science
49
Physical Society took the journal under its auspices, with Gustav Wiedemann as
editor, advised by Hermann von Helmholtz on theoretical matters. A clear
division of labor was emerging between the experimenter and the theoretician.
The discipline of theoretical physics—a distinctively German institution in its
origins—was taking off. German theoretical contributions to the Annalen were
increasingly autonomous, contributors referred more and more to the theoretical
contributions of fellow Germans as opposed to work from France or Britain. This
is not to suggest that such work was ignored. Work by Faraday and Maxwell in
particular was heavily drawn upon. It does show, however, the development of a
distinctively German culture of theoretical physics with its own concerns and
direction. The institutional structure of German science increasingly encouraged
research. Directors of new physics institutes in particular had the time and
resources to devote themselves to new theoretical investigations. Rather than
being an adjunct to teaching, research by the 1860s or 1870s was regarded as
being an end in itself. Institutes, their directors, and their students were
state supported since their research contributed to the cultural prestige of the
state itself. From the 1870s in particular, extraordinary professorships of
theoretical physics were established at a number of German universities. They
were typically set up as junior positions in conjunction with the already
established ordinary professorship of physics. The aim as a rule was to provide
an additional source of teaching that would free the holder of the senior
appointment to carry out research. The additional result, however, was to
institutionalize the notion that theoretical physics was a separate discipline.
Most of these new extraordinary professorships were founded in Prussia. A good
example of the way they worked is provided, however, by the circumstances at the
University of Strassburg, newly under German administration in the early 1870s,
following German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The first ordinary
professor of physics and director of the physics institute there was August
Kundt. He soon hired his former student and collaborator Emil Warburg as
extraordinary professor of theoretical physics in 1872. While there, Warburg
taught theoretical physics as well as collaborating with Kundt on an
investigation of the kinetic theory of gases based on Kundt’s development of a
new method of measuring the velocity of sound. Warburg’s responsibility was to
conduct the theoretical part of the investigation. Increasingly, the theoretical
physicist was the specialist, aiming his teaching at those planning a career in
physics, while the experimental physicist lectured to more general audiences.
50
Two
German models for the organization of teaching and research within universities
increasingly prevailed in German-speaking regions outside the reunifying state.
In Austria, for example, the appointment of Ludwig Boltzmann as ordinary
professor of mathematical physics at Graz in 1869 was a signal of a move towards
a German system. Boltzmann was rapidly making a reputation for himself as a
theoretical physicist doing groundbreaking work in the kinetic theory of
gases—as a “passionate molecular physicist.”16 He did not stay long in Graz on
his first appointment. By 1873 he was in Vienna as ordinary professor of
mathematics. During his absence, however, Graz founded an institute of physics
and in 1876 Boltzmann returned as director of the new institute with a brief to
develop his “far reaching theoretical ideas through the circle of his
students.”17 The Graz Institute was to be as much a research as a teaching
school. Boltzmann took his proselytizing duties there seriously, diligently
supervising student research dissertations as well as continuing with his own
work. He was in the process of founding a research school in theoretical
physics. Students took Boltzmann’s investigations as the starting point for
their own efforts, keeping themselves abreast of the latest breakthroughs in
theoretical work. Theoretical physics was increasingly regarded as an autonomous
activity. It was an independent way of looking at the world rather than an
adjunct to experimentation. Woldemar Voigt’s appointment as director of the
Gottingen Mathematical Physics Institute was a recognition that ¨ such
appointments needed to be given to a proper theoretical physicist who could
direct theoretically inclined research students in their endeavors rather than
simply provide a supplement to experimental teaching. Voigt had been a student
of the aging Franz Neumann at the University of Konigsberg and had inherited his
old master’s lectures there before ¨ moving on to Gottingen in 1883. He regarded
himself as a theoretical ¨ physicist by training and inclination and aimed to
make the Gottingen ¨ institute into a center of theoretical excellence.
Extracting the necessary finances from the Prussian government for his purposes
was not, however, an easy task. They had to be reminded that even minor German
universities like Bonn and Kiel outspent the Gottingen physics budget ¨ before
they relaxed the purse strings. Voigt made a name for himself as a writer of
textbooks as well, trying to forge a wider audience for the 16 17
Quoted ibid., 2: 61. Quoted ibid., 2: 67.
A Revolutionary Science
51
2.3 The Berlin Physics Institute in about 1877. Prestigious new physics
institutes such as this were increasingly important institutional features of
German academic science.
new discipline of theoretical physics. His Kompendium der Theoretischen Physik,
published in two volumes in 1895 and 1896, was a concerted and unprecedented
effort to provide a unified view of the new field. By the final decade of the
nineteenth century, the new discipline of theoretical physics was well
established in German universities. Gustav Kirchhoff, at Berlin since 1875 as a
member of the Prussian Academy, focused his attention more and more on
theoretical physics. Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin both as a director of the
Berlin Physics Institute and later as the president of the
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt from 1888 directed his teaching and his
research increasingly towards theoretical matters (figure 2.3). After
Kirchhoff’s death in 1887, Boltzmann was headhunted from Graz to replace him,
but declined at the last minute, going instead to a professorship in theoretical
physics in Munich, fearing apparently that the Prussians would prove too dour
for his taste. Even in the 1890s the position offered to Boltzmann there as an
ordinary professor in the new subject was nearly unprecedented. He had the
independence of being the director of a state-funded institute with freedom to
organize things as he wished. His power was increased when the Austrian
government tried to entice him back to Vienna in 1893. The Bavarians responded
with an improved salary and the appointment of an assistant. Boltzmann abandoned
Munich, however, in 1894 for the professorship in theoretical physics at Vienna
and a salary that at 6,000 florins was the
52
Two
highest then paid to an Austrian university professor. It had become a question
of national honor that Austria should retain the services of this peripatetic
but preeminent theoretical physicist. This international wrangling over
Boltzmann is a good indication of the way that theoretical physics had
established itself in German-speaking countries by the end of the nineteenth
century. It was a startling achievement considering that the discipline had
barely existed less than half a century previously. Half a century later,
philosophers of science such as Karl Popper would take it for granted that grand
speculation and theorizing was the be-all and end-all of physics, with the
experimenter relegated to bottle-washing duties. Theoretically concerned
physicists had engineered a spectacular cultural coup by carving out
institutional niches for themselves where none had existed before. From being
ill-regarded placemen in turn-of-the-century philosophy faculties,
physicists—and the new breed of theoretical physicists in particular—had been
successful in establishing their discipline at the core of German academic life.
The key figures in German theoretical physics—men such as Boltzmann and
Helmholtz—were internationally recognized celebrities, not just within their
specialist communities but on the broader cultural stage as well. They were
recognized as making crucial contributions not just to physics, but to the newly
confident and increasingly powerful Germany as well. They helped forged
Germany’s reputation as a scientific, industrial, and therefore modern state.
Conclusion Natural philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century looked
to many like a potentially revolutionary science. To others it merely looked
dangerous. Early nineteenth-century men of science had inherited from the
Enlightenment a sense of the ways in which natural philosophy could be used to
change the world, to overturn the social order and establish new institutions in
its place. For the radicals among them, this sounded like a wonderful idea. To
their opponents it was a prospect to be regarded with horror. Depending on one’s
perspective, natural philosophy could either subvert the proper order of society
or reveal in nature what that proper order should be. For those who wanted to
put this science to good use, however, the clear conclusion was that scientific
institutions needed revolutionizing as well. To make their science matter, they
had to find ways of changing these institutions. They had to find ways of
changing what it meant to be a man of science. As this chapter shows,
A Revolutionary Science
53
different natural philosophers in different countries and locations had a
variety of views as to how their practices and their institutions might be
transformed. This is not a narrative of continuous and progressive development
to a self-evident end. The state of physics by the end of the nineteenth century
was profoundly changed from what it had been at its beginning. At the beginning
of the century, natural philosophy was the vocation of a dedicated but tiny
band. By the end of the century, new institutions across Europe and America were
producing professional physicists in ever increasing numbers. There was no such
word as “physicist” in the English vocabulary at the beginning of the century.
It was coined by William Whewell to describe what appeared to him to be a new
kind of natural philosopher— just as he coined the word “scientist” at about the
same time to describe a new breed of practitioner. Its gradual acceptance by the
end of the century as the term to describe a particular kind of professional man
of science studying nature in a particular fashion was a sign that this new way
of doing things had found a secure cultural place for itself. Physicists—and
mathematical or theoretical physicists in particular—had managed to secure a
vital cultural role for themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what the natural
world was like.
3 The Romance of Nature
The worlds of natural philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century were
changing rapidly. As we have seen already, many observers regarded natural
philosophy as having been (and still being) deeply implicated in the political
convulsions that were still sweeping Europe. It seemed to many commentators on
both sides of the political fence that the French Revolution and its aftermath
were, to at least some degree, the results of Enlightenment philosophies
challenging traditional ideas about nature and society. Those political
convulsions themselves were responsible for major changes in the institutional
structures of European natural philosophy as well. New institutions proliferated
and campaigns gathered pace across Europe to reform the moribund structures of
ancien r´egime science. In many ways the social role both of natural philosophy
and of its practitioners was up for grabs in such a volatile situation. Not only
the institutional context, but the content of science was being quite literally
re-formed in the wake of the transformations surrounding the French Revolution.
New notions concerning what science should be about—what kind of nature natural
philosophers should be searching for—went hand in hand with new visions of what
kind of person the natural philosopher should be and how his role in society
should be understood and appreciated. Fashioning nature and fashioning the
natural philosopher were part of the same process. 54
The Romance of Nature
55
One response to the changing contours of natural philosophy and the natural
philosophical community was the cultural movement now known as Romanticism.
Particularly in the German lands a new generation of natural philosophers tried
to identify natural philosophy with the search for a transcendental unity in
nature. Reacting against what some of them, at least, perceived as an
impoverished Enlightenment insistence on focusing on appearances, Romantic
philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and
Friedrich Schelling in the German lands and Humphry Davy in England argued for
the importance of looking beneath the phenomena in an effort to capture the real
underlying unity of nature. Increasingly as well, the search for such unity was
held to be the province of a particular kind of individual. Natural philosophy
required genius. Only a genius—an inspired individual with access to unique
reserves of imagination and intuition—could peer beneath the fractured surface
of appearances at the transcendental reality beneath. This novel cult of genius
was not unique to natural philosophy. In many ways it was a defining feature of
Romanticism across culture in the early nineteenth century. In the arts,
literature, and music, as well as natural philosophy, being a genius was very
much in vogue. Laboratories across Europe appeared to be providing more and more
grist for the mills of those philosophers intent on discovering unity.
Experimenters were finding more and more ways of apparently transforming one
kind of natural force into another. The voltaic pile, according to the
proponents of the chemical theory at least, seemed to turn chemical forces into
electricity. The novel technology of photography seemed to provide a way of
using light to produce chemical reactions. Following Hans Christian Oersted’s
experiments in 1820, it seemed to many that there was some intimate link between
electricity and magnetism as well. The most visible technology for turning one
kind of force into another was increasingly ubiquitous during the early
nineteenth century; the steam engine, according to some natural philosophers,
was simply a machine for producing mechanical force from heat. Far from being a
transcendental unity, Nature was increasingly seen by some natural philosophers
as a laboratory for manipulating and transforming the forces. Conversely, what
nature did naturally, the experimenter could now perform in his laboratory. New
links could be found in all of this between the natural and the political
economy. The way nature’s forces were organized provided a powerful model for
the way in which human economies should be organized as well.
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Three
Laboratory practice revolved more and more about the task of finding new ways of
making one kind of force produce another. Such practices could also be used as
the foundation of new philosophies of nature—as well as new kinds of politics. A
number of natural philosophers before midcentury made efforts to base new
systems on the experimenter’s ability to transform one kind of force into
another. New vocabularies were adopted to express these views concerning the
unity of nature. William Robert Grove argued for the correlation of physical
forces. Michael Faraday argued for the mutual conversion of forces. James
Prescott Joule suggested that force was conserved from one transformation to
another. Force was the primary focus in these discussions. Many natural
philosophers, particularly in Britain, argued that force should be the
fundamental concept of physical science. In their view everyone had an intuitive
understanding of what force meant as a result of their own everyday interactions
with the world around them—they were continually aware of exerting force, or of
having force exerted on them. They argued that this provided a good way of
making sure that natural philosophy stayed grounded in the real world of
everyday experience. The grand philosophical schemes constructed around the
mutual relations of the various forces of nature had another implication too. To
claim that the forces of nature were all linked together was to argue as well
for the primacy of a natural philosophy that could explain that linkage. In
other words, it was a way of reasserting the continued superiority of a general
natural philosophy (and a generalist natural philosopher) in the face of what
many natural philosophers regarded as a worrying trend towards disciplinary
fragmentation and specialization. By the 1850s and 1860s, however, a new
candidate had emerged supreme as the focus at which the physical sciences were
united. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the new
science of energy. According to this new science, energy, not force, was the
fundamental concept of physics. William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait’s
Treatise on Natural Philosophy of 1867 was a quite self-conscious effort to
replace Newton’s Principia as the foundational text of a new kind of natural
philosophy. James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism, culminating in his
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism of 1873, was a prime exemplar of the new
science’s versatility. His powerful synthesis of electricity and magnetism
showed how energy could be the new unifying principle of natural philosophy.
There was nothing transcendental, however, about this science of energy. Energy,
according to this new world picture, was embodied in the ether—a substance that
filled all space and
The Romance of Nature
57
operated according to the principles of mechanics, just like a factory engine.
Understanding the mechanics of the ether was the holy grail of physics for late
nineteenth-century experimenters such as Oliver Lodge. There was a close link
throughout the nineteenth century between the ways in which physics as a
discipline was organized and the ways in which physics organized the world. For
early nineteenth-century Romantic philosophers, natural philosophy required a
particular kind of individual. Apprehending nature’s hidden unities required
someone with the innate capacity to look beneath the surface of events and see
what others could not. Midcentury experimental natural philosophers such as
William Robert Grove suggested that the natural philosopher needed to be someone
educated to look beyond the limitations of particular disciplinary
preoccupations and see the wider picture of the correlation of forces. By the
end of the century, proponents of energy physics argued that only those like
them, deeply trained in the complexities of mathematical physics, could see the
world as it really was. It needed their grasp to comprehend the subtle workings
of the ether. Their understanding of that subtle and universal medium gave them
the ability to police the sciences—to adjudicate what was and what was not an
acceptable way of looking at the world. Romantic Science To modern eyes, the
conjunction of science—particularly physics—with Romanticism seems somehow
peculiar, or at least surprising. Romanticism evokes images of wild-eyed poets,
drugs, and Gothic castles. Physics is taken to be a far more sober affair. That
apparent disjunction, however, is very much a product of subsequent history. The
Romantic movement, in its origins, was deeply concerned with the problems of
constructing a new philosophy of nature and as such quite straightforwardly took
the understanding of the physical world as part of its project. In many ways,
Romanticism was a response to what its proponents regarded as Enlightenment
excesses—an increasing distance from nature that came along with civilization
and an increasingly mechanized world picture. In their art, their literature,
their poetry, and their science, the Romantics sought to find ways of bridging
the gap they saw emerging between modern society and modern individuals and a
true understanding of their natural selves and the natural world. What was
needed, they argued, was an intuitive understanding of things that transcended
mere phenomena and got to the true meaning and unity of nature and man’s place
in it.
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Three
It was a central tenet of Romantic philosophy that nature should be apprehended
as a coherent and meaningful whole, rather than as an aggregation of disparate
and fragmented phenomena. Romantic philosophers were quite often deeply
contemptuous of the Enlightenment tendency towards understanding nature by
breaking it down into its constituent parts. The Enlightenment metaphor of the
Universe as a clock or a machine whose operations could be understood by taking
it apart was the subject for irony, if not of outright mockery. The Romantics
instead thought of the Universe as something organic. Like a living thing, the
Universe was best approached and appreciated by seeing it as a connected,
animated unity. Rather than being taken as separate objects of study, the
various phenomena and powers of nature were to be understood as different
manifestations of a single underlying and all-embracing cause. The aim of
natural philosophy from this perspective was synthesis rather than analysis.
Unlike Newton, who insisted that he would not “feign hypotheses” but build his
theories on the phenomena, Romantic philosophers insisted that by imaginatively
feigning hypotheses they could approach an understanding of a more meaningful
reality beneath the surface appearance of things. The Romantics celebrated a new
kind of human being who possessed this capacity to look beneath the surface of
things for their true meaning— the genius. A genius, as the term was
increasingly used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was
possessed of unique capabilities which placed him (and it was invariably a
“him”) outside conventional limitations. Genius was an innate, rather than a
learned, capacity. A man was born with the powers of genius. Quite often the
language of possession was used quite literally as well. Genius was an active
power that took over a particular individual rather than being something that
was under that person’s control. There was a strong sense in which it was held
that there was a kind of symbiosis between the individual’s genius and the
natural world that genius allowed him to comprehend. In the fragmented world of
early nineteenth-century natural philosophy, this cult of genius played a
crucial role in providing a new kind of social place for the man of science.
Natural philosophy was represented as a deeply individualistic process in which
imagination and inspiration took precedence over collective effort in forging
scientific progress. The monumental German playwright and poet, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, established many of the parameters of Romanticism in literature,
architecture, and the arts, as well as in natural philosophy. Goethe considered
his contributions to optics and the science of colors as among his
The Romance of Nature
59
most important works: “I make no claims at all to what I have achieved as a
poet. Fine poets were my contemporaries, even finer ones lived before me, and
there will be others after me. But that I alone in my century know what is right
in the difficult science of colour, for that I give myself some credit, and thus
I have a consciousness of superiority to many.”1 Goethe saw his work as a direct
attack on Newton’s then triumphant theory of optics. In Zur Farbenlehre in 1810
he declared that as soon as he saw Newton’s “celebrated phaenomena of colours”
for himself by looking through a prism, “I immediately said to myself, as if by
instinct, that the Newtonian teaching is false.”2 Newton’s theory, he argued,
was a house of cards built on partial and inconclusive experiments. Newtonians
were accused of ignoring observations that contravened their hero’s doctrines.
At Weimar and in nearby Jena, Goethe built up and participated in a circle of
similarly minded philosophers and poets committed to creating an alternative
worldview that could be used to challenge, among other things, the Newtonian,
mechanistic hegemony in natural philosophy. The philosopher F. W. J. Schelling
arrived in Jena as professor of philosophy in 1798, three years after Prussia
had been forced into a peace treaty with revolutionary France; he concurred with
Goethe that more was required of natural philosophy than a partial examination
of the phenomena. As tutor to a brace of young Saxon aristocrats at the
University of Leipzig, Schelling had already published his Ideen zu einer
Philosophie der Natur, in which he argued forcefully for the necessity of
establishing physics on a firm a priori foundation. According to this ambitious
master plan for a new Naturphilosophie, all of physics was to be deduced from
first principles. He elaborated this radical new worldview in 1798 with his Von
der Weltseele, in which he articulated his grand vision of nature as a living
organism. The task of the Naturphilosoph was to try to understand the soul of
this cosmic being. The end of physics was to be the full comprehension of
nature’s latent and hidden spirituality, which would, in turn, become a mirror
for the further exploration of man’s own spiritual nature. Like Goethe,
Schelling was adamant that this higher physics was to be understood quite
explicitly as a counter to the sterile mechanics of Newtonianism. He set his
vision of the world soul in direct opposition to the world clock that he
regarded as encapsulating Newtonianism. Where 1
Quoted in Sepper, “Goethe, Colour, and the Science of Seeing,” in A. Cunningham
and N. Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences, 189. 2 Quoted ibid., 190.
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Three
Newton had studied the phenomena of nature as separate cogs and wheels in some
grand universal clockwork mechanism, Schelling wanted to see them as mutually
interacting members of one single and unified cosmic organism. The key to
unlocking the secrets of this world soul was the idea of polarity, or opposites.
The heartbeat of the cosmic organism was maintained by the constant interplay
and interaction of opposing forces— just like positive and negative electrical
forces and the attractive and repulsive powers of magnetism. It was from this
grand hypothesis that the rest of physics was to be worked out. In opposition to
Newton and his grand dictum of hypotheses non fingo—“I do not feign hypotheses”—
Schelling insisted that not only was hypothesis permissible, but that it was an
essential and integral part of physics. The phenomena of nature were to be
understood through his grand hypothesis of polarity—not the other way round. The
latest philosophical discoveries were marshaled by Schelling to provide a litany
of confirmations and examples of polarity’s cosmic role. Other Romantic thinkers
congregated around Jena in about 1800 concurred with many of Schelling’s claims
concerning the need for a new natural philosophy. Friedrich Schlegel was keen to
found his own philosophical system, boasting to a friend that “notebooks on
physics I have already, therefore, I think I will soon have a system of physics
as well.”3 Schlegel was anxious to bring about a reintegration of science and
the literary arts, advising a student that “if you want to penetrate into the
very core of physics, have yourself initiated into the mysteries of poetry.”4
The poet and mining engineer Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis) was
also a keen student of natural philosophy, aiming to produce a “scientific
bible”5 that would enumerate and transcend the sum of human knowledge. Another
member of the Jena circle, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, was regarded by his
interlocutors there as being well on the way to producing the Romantic science
they yearned for. Novalis remarked of his friend that “Ritter is indeed
searching for the genuine world-soul of nature.”6 A keen follower of Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie, Ritter regarded his task as being to discover the secrets of
the All-Thier (All-Animal) of the universe. To this end he embarked on an
ambitious experimental program to elucidate the notion of polarity in nature. 3
Quoted in W. Wetzels, “Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism,” 48.
Quoted ibid., 50. 5 Quoted ibid. 6 Quoted ibid., 53. 4
The Romance of Nature
61
Ritter, born in Silesia in 1776, had been apprenticed to an apothecary before
enrolling as a student of natural philosophy at the University of Jena in 1796.
Enthused by Luigi Galvani’s and Alessandro Volta’s new discoveries in animal
electricity as well as by Schelling’s claim that electricity was the principle
of life in nature, he set out to systematically map the ubiquity of electrical
phenomena throughout the natural world. His early work focused on examining the
workings of galvanism on organic matter and its relationship to the phenomena
and processes of life. He speculated that, at least in principle, electricity
might even be used to raise the dead. This, however, was only the first link in
a cosmic chain that led back to the fundamental unity of all things: “Where is
the sun, where is the atom that would not be part of, that would not belong to
this organic universe, not living in any time, containing any time?—Where then
is the difference between the parts of an animal, of a plant, of a metal, and of
a stone?—Are they not all members of the cosmic-animal, of Nature?”7 For many of
his Romantic contemporaries in and around Jena and elsewhere, Ritter’s
experiments were putting the empirical flesh on the bones of Schelling’s
speculative Naturphilosophie. One avid English reader of these exciting new
German speculations in natural philosophy was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge immersed himself in writings on natural philosophy while living in the
West Country following his departure from Cambridge. As early as 1796 he was
planning to visit the German lands in search of philosophical inspiration; after
considering Jena he eventually matriculated at the University of Gottingen in
1799. Naturphilosophie was central to his efforts during ¨ the early years of
the nineteenth century to develop a coherent system of thought. Like the
Romantic philosophers at Jena, he was convinced that mind was active in nature
and that nature itself was an animate, organic whole. In a draft of his seminal
Biographia Literaria of 1815, he argued that there was a correspondence between
the powers of mind and those of nature: “Our Business then is to construct a
priori, as in Geometry, intuitively from the progressive Schemes that must
necessarily result from such a Power with such Forces, till we arrive at Human
Intelligence, and prospectively at whatever excellence of the same power can by
human Intelligence be schematized.”8 Nature could, in other words, provide the
grounds for the powers of human intelligence that could then be used to 7
Quoted in W. Wetzels, “Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic Physics in Germany,” in
A. Cunningham and N. Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences, 203. 8 Quoted
in T. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, 119.
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Three
reflect back on the powers of nature themselves. There was, he argued, a kind of
symbiosis between nature and the human mind. It was this symbiosis that made
human understanding of nature possible in the first place. Like the Germans, he
condemned English science for its mechanistic sterility, contrasted to what he
regarded as the dynamism of the new German school. Coleridge’s close friend
Humphry Davy was another English advocate of Romantic science. Davy, who like
Ritter had started his career as an apothecary’s apprentice before joining the
radical chemist Thomas Beddoes at his famous (or infamous) Pneumatic Institute
in Bristol, also like his German contemporary founded his early reputation on
the exciting new science of galvanism. Closely associated with the poets Robert
Southey and William Wordsworth as well as Coleridge, during his sojourn in the
West Country, Davy dabbled in poetry himself while engaged in his chemical and
electrical experiments. Like the German Romantics, Davy was simultaneously
obsessed with the powers of nature and the powers of human genius (of which he
regarded himself as being a preeminent example). The discovery of nature was
taken to be a means to self-discovery in Davy’s scheme of things—sometimes quite
literally so. In early experiments on the newly discovered gas nitrous oxide,
Davy experimented with breathing the new air as a means of investigating his own
mind and wrote rapturous poetry of the resulting experiences. After leaving the
Pneumatic Institute to take up a post lecturing at the new Royal Institution in
London, Davy seemed, at least to some of his erstwhile collaborators, to have
abandoned his radical and Romantic roots for the carrot of metropolitan success.
His experimental researches throughout the 1800s and 1810s, however, continued
to focus on uncovering the active powers of nature and establishing their
fundamental unity. For Davy, the various powers of chemical affinity,
electricity, heat, and light were all to be regarded as different manifestations
of one underlying and all-embracing active principle. The natural philosopher’s
task, as he saw it, was to make these different powers available for mankind’s
material benefit as well as their spiritual uplifting. The philosopher’s genius
that led to an intuitive understanding of nature also conferred power over it:
“By means of this science man has employed almost all the substances in nature
either for the satisfaction of his wants or the gratification of his luxuries.
Not content with what is found upon the surface of the earth, he has penetrated
into her bosom, and has even searched the bottom of the ocean for the purpose of
allaying the restlessness of his
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63
desires, or of extending and increasing his power.”9 This utilitarian twist on
Romantic philosophy was particularly apposite to his position at the
Benthamite-inspired Royal Institution and later in the 1820s as president of a
reforming Royal Society. Romantic science in the early nineteenth century was a
loose collection of practices and ideas rather than a coherent school or system.
Even Romantics like Novalis, for example, could be scornful of some aspects of
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, dismissing it as little more than the “boasting of
a fanciful mind.”10 In some respects, maybe, a philosophy that placed so much
emphasis on the role of individual inspiration in the discovery of nature was
not aimed in any case at producing a collective research program. Future
generations of natural philosophers, particularly in the German lands, were
scathing in their condemnation of the metaphysical excesses of their
predecessors. Romanticism provided, however, some practical and intellectual
tools for self-fashioning and disciplinary fashioning in the opening decades of
the nineteenth century. In the face of massive social and intellectual upheaval
at the turn of the century it helped construct a new vision of nature as a
unified, organic whole, which in turn provided a resource both for constructing
new scientific disciplines—including physics—and for constructing a new image of
the natural philosopher and his place in society. The World’s Laboratory New
laboratories sprang up all over Europe during the first few decades of the
nineteenth century. As we shall see, these early nineteenth-century laboratories
differed from their predecessors in kind as well as number. They were starting
to be regarded as spaces for research in their own right rather than merely as
adjuncts to the lecture theater. Experiment increasingly looked like the key to
unlocking nature’s secrets and putting them to the service of humankind.
Furthermore, what more and more experimenters in these new laboratories seemed
intent on doing was finding ways of turning one kind of force into another. To
Romantic natural philosophers, these proliferating instances of the apparent
conversion of one kind of force to another seemed to be powerful confirmatory
evidence 9
Quoted in Lawrence, “The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism,” in
A. Cunningham & N. Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences, 221. 10 Quoted
in W. Wetzels, “Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism,” 49.
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Three
of the underlying unity of all the forces of nature. They were mutually
convertible because they were all simply different manifestations of the one
underlying power. More pragmatically perhaps, others saw economic potential in
this ability to turn one force into another. Laboratory experiments might prove
to be the means of delivering inexhaustible new sources of exploitable power.
Not only the powers of wind and water (or humans and animals) might be made to
do useful work, but the forces of chemistry, electricity, heat, and light might
all be made available. There was an underlying metaphysics behind this kind of
economic interest as well, however. By the end of the eighteenth century many
natural philosophers agreed that nature had its own economy and that the
political economy mirrored (or at least ought to mirror) the natural one.
Putting the resources of the one at the disposal of the other seemed
appropriate. Some argued that the natural economy was designed to be placed at
the disposal of humanity in any case. The geologist James Hutton argued in his
Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy of 1792 that nature
should be regarded as a self-regenerating system of active powers with the Sun
as the source of regenerative power. Adam Walker in his System of Familiar
Philosophy of 1799 maintained that light, fire, and electricity were simply
different manifestations of a single principle of repulsion and that nature’s
economy was maintained as a perpetual balance between this principle of
repulsion and the attractive principle of gravitation. The radical natural
philosopher and political writer Joseph Priestley regarded phlogiston—the active
principle of combustion—as underlying all of nature’s economy. Humphry Davy in
his Essay on Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light (1799) asserted that
electricity, light, and chemical action were different manifestations of the
same thing. The flamboyant American e´ migr´e and Royalist, Benjamin Thompson,
ennobled as Count Rumford by the elector of Bavaria, was a keen advocate of the
utility of the experimental sciences. As such he was to play a crucial role in
promoting utilitarian scientific enterprises at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. He was a key figure in the establishment of the Royal Institution in
London in 1799, having helped convince a group of reforming landowners of the
prospects for putting chemistry and natural philosophy to work in improving
agriculture. Rumford was a staunch opponent of the caloric theory of heat—the
notion that heat was an imponderable fluid. He carried out experiments on cannon
boring, showing how friction produced heat. He argued that the amount of heat
produced during the process was indefinite and suggested therefore that heat
could not be a fluid but was instead the result of particles
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65
in motion. Humphry Davy, professor of chemistry at Rumford’s Royal Institution
within a few years of its foundation, was similarly an opponent of the caloric
theory, then popular in Revolutionary France. Its last great advocate there had
been Lavoisier, whose wife Rumford had married following her former husband’s
death at the guillotine. Like Rumford, Davy carried out some confirmatory
experiments, in this case on the melting of ice due to friction. By showing that
blocks of ice rubbed together melted, Davy suggested that the heat produced by
the process was the result of friction and that heat was simply a kind of
motion. As we shall see in considerably more detail in a later chapter, heat and
its relationship to motion was a matter of particular concern to early
nineteenth-century experimenters. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing,
the steam engine in particular was taken to be the preeminent example of a
device that turned one kind of force—heat—into another— motion. It also seemed
to be a machine designed to make the power tied up in the “vast storehouse of
nature” available to humankind. The young Mancunian brewer’s son, James Prescott
Joule, in the 1840s devoted considerable experimental effort to improving the
efficiency of steam engines. That was what underlay his efforts to
experimentally determine what he called the “mechanical equivalent of heat.” He
had already made a name for himself carrying out experiments assessing the
efficiency of electromagnetic engines. His famous paddle wheel experiment was a
way of showing that motion and heat were literally interchangeable and of
providing the data that allowed him to calculate the exact rate of exchange.
Many of the early nineteenth century’s laboratory conversion processes were
offshoots of the voltaic battery—the dramatic new technology that was the
culmination of Alessandro Volta’s dispute with Luigi Galvani concerning the
origins of animal electricity. Ironically, however, Volta himself did not
consider the voltaic battery a conversion device. He regarded the source of
electricity in the battery as the simple contact of the metals. Only for his
opponents who like Davy held that the electricity was produced from chemical
affinity, or Galvani himself, who held that electricity was identical with the
nervous force of the body, was the battery the instrument of the conversion of
one kind of force or power into another. Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini used
the battery to spectacular effect to confirm his uncle’s claims concerning
animal electricity. Experimenting on the bodies of dead animals and of executed
felons, he could show how electricity seemingly reproduced the appearance of
life in otherwise inanimate corpses (figure 3.1). The Royal Humane Society in
England speculated that Aldini’s experiments might prove to
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3.1 Electrical experiments on recently executed criminals from Giovanni Aldini,
Treatise on Galvanism (1803).
be the key to restoring life to the prematurely dead. The Scottish chemist
Andrew Ure made similar claims when he carried out electrical experiments on an
executed murderer in Glasgow in 1818. The body, human and animal, was
increasingly a focus for experimentation on relationships among the powers and
forces of nature. Ritter, coming as he did from a Romantic perspective that
regarded the entire Universe as a single connected organism, was deeply involved
in experimental work on the relationship between electricity in particular and
the nervous powers responsible for animating animal and human bodies. His Das
elektrische System der K¨orper, published in 1805, was an ambitious effort to
construct a cosmic electrical system in which electricity was held up as the
basic organizing principle of all animate and inanimate matter. To this end
Ritter experimented copiously on the actions of electricity on the body, its
effects on the growth of plants, and so forth. Much of his work was dismissed as
fanciful by contemporaries and successors anxious to dissociate themselves from
the Naturphilosophie that informed his experimental researches. A few decades
later the Italian natural philosopher Carlo Matteucci embarked on his own
experimental program to
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67
investigate the electrical properties of living tissue and the question of the
relationship between electricity and the nervous force. He produced a long
series of papers through the 1840s, translated into English and published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, on experimental efforts to
measure electrical currents in the body. Hans Christian Oersted, a friend of
Ritter’s and like him an admirer of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, carried out
experimental work aimed at finding links among the different powers of nature as
well. Oersted was particularly fascinated by the possibility of establishing a
relationship between electricity and magnetism. It seemed to many experimenters
that there must be such a connection, if only because of the many analogies they
perceived between electricity and magnetism. In 1820 Oersted, by now professor
of physics at the University of Copenhagen, succeeded in finding the long
sought-for link. He found that when a magnetized needle was suspended near a
copper wire carrying a flow of electricity from a voltaic battery, the needle
deflected (figure 3.2). Oersted interpreted his findings in terms of an
“electric conflict” surrounding the wire and interacting with the needle’s
magnetism. He argued that heat and light should be regarded as the result of
such electric conflicts as well. Oersted’s work was enthusiastically reproduced
at the Royal Institution in London, where the young Michael Faraday succeeded in
making an electric wire rotate around a magnet. A decade later he succeeded in
producing electricity from magnetism as well. To those looking for unity in
nature, it appeared that more and more links in the chain were being forged all
the time. Another link was forged in Berlin. Thomas Johann Seebeck, an
independently wealthy experimental enthusiast and devotee of Goethe’s theory of
colors, had been fascinated by the possibility of finding connections between
heat and light since 1806. He was particularly interested in the relationship
between heat and the colors of the solar spectrum. Inspired by Oersted’s
discovery, he set out on an experimental examination of the connections between
electricity, magnetism, and heat. His aim was to produce magnetic phenomena by
heat. Instead, he found a way of producing electricity from heat. He found that
if he constructed a circuit partly of copper and partly of bismuth and heated
one of the junctions where the two metals joined, a current was registered by a
magnetized needle suspended nearby. William Sturgeon in England used Seebeck’s
discovery to good effect, showing how a spherical cage made of the wire of the
two metals could be made to rotate about a central magnet when the junctions
were heated. This was the solution to why the Earth
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3.2 A nineteenth-century artist’s impression of Hans Christian Oersted’s 1820
observation that a magnetized needle held near a wire carrying a current of
electricity was deflected.
rotated on its axis, according to Sturgeon, a self-taught natural philosopher
and former artilleryman based in Woolwich near London and the inventor of the
electromagnet. The currents produced by the Sun’s heat made the Earth rotate
about the central magnetic core—as well as producing spectacular electrical
storms in the tropics. A dozen years later, in 1834, the Frenchman Jean Charles
Peltier added another link, showing
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that electricity could absorb heat as well, reversing Seebeck’s experiment and
using electricity to produce cold. Heat and light were also coming to be
regarded by some investigators as different manifestations of the same thing.
The astronomer William Herschel, internationally fˆeted for his discovery of the
planet Uranus, had carried out experiments on the temperature of the solar
spectrum in the 1790s and had shown that temperature varied from one end of the
spectrum to the other—the red end of the spectrum being hotter than the violet
one. From this Herschel proceeded in 1800 to the discovery of infrared light
beyond the red portion of the spectrum. Inspired by Herschel’s discovery and
anxious to preserve the spectrum’s symmetry, Ritter postulated that there must
be yet another invisible part of the spectrum at the other, violet end. In 1801,
Ritter succeeded in showing that something emanating from just beyond the violet
end of the spectrum darkened a silver chloride compound just as ordinary light
did. He had found the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. The Italian Macedonio
Melloni’s experiments on radiant heat during the 1830s—showing that it could be
made to manifest physical properties similar to those of light—were also widely
regarded as making the identity of light and heat secure. Another new and
rapidly developing technology of the early nineteenth century seemed to
demonstrate conclusively the relationship between the powers of light and
chemical affinity. Experimenters had long known that light had an effect on
certain chemical compounds (like the silver chloride in Ritter’s experiments on
ultraviolet light). The development of photography, however, had the effect of
making this relationship graphically visible. Light shining onto surfaces
specially treated with certain chemicals could produce stunning images of
real-life scenes, objects, and even people. Louis Jacques Mand´e Daguerre in
France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England both developed successful
techniques for creating and preserving these impressive and novel images.
Fascinated commentators regarded the new technology as an unprecedented example
of nature’s powers being put at the service of humankind. As the experimental
natural philosopher William Robert Grove joked, the day would soon come when
“instead of a plate being inscribed, as ‘drawn by Landseer, and engraved by
Cousins,’ it would be ‘drawn by Light, and Engraved by Electricity!’”11 Michael
Faraday enthused over Talbot’s 11
W. R. Grove, “On a Voltaic Process for Etching Daguerreotype Plates,”
Philosophical Magazine, 1842, 20: 24.
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“photogenic drawings,” exclaiming that “what man may do, now that Dame Nature
has become his drawing mistress, it is impossible to predict.”12 Many
commentators regarded these proliferating examples of the apparent conversion or
interchangeability of one force for another as evidence of at least some kind of
underlying unity, though just what kind of unity it might be was a subject for
debate. In England certainly, many took a similar perspective to that of Humphry
Davy, who had argued that all these manifestations of force were to be regarded
as different ways in which nature’s powers had been made available for
humanity’s benefit. Charles Babbage in his Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
in 1832, providing his perspective on the sources of economic wealth and
progress, started with an overview of the natural powers that produced useful
work and the machines that could be used to make those powers available for
exploitation. Central to that analysis was Babbage’s insistence that all these
various machines should be regarded as technologies that transformed power
rather than creating it. Windmills, waterwheels, steam engines, and so on were
properly seen as machines that converted the powers of nature into a form that
could be made useful. Other commentators on political economy concurred. Nature
presented a wealth of interrelated powers. The task of natural philosophers and
experimenters was increasingly plausibly regarded as finding practical ways to
put those powers to work. There was a big difference between the grand
metaphysical accounts of nature’s unity that prevailed in the late eighteenth
century—and in many ways reached their apogee with Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie—and the proliferating force transformations of the first few
decades of the nineteenth century. The force transformations resulted from
practical laboratory technologies. The experiments that produced these
transformations often ended up looking more like machines designed to convert
one kind of power into another than like indications of underlying organic
unity. New analyses of political economy looked to machinery as a way of
explaining progress. As human labor (itself from this perspective the result of
yet another force transformation) was increasingly replaced by more and more
productive machinery, economic progress would be indefinite. New technologies
like batteries, electromagnetic engines, thermoelectric couples, and even
cameras could be slotted conveniently into economic stories that pointed to
machines designed to maximize the efficient production of power from natural
resources as the source of new 12
Quoted in I. R. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 175.
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71
social and economic progress and of wealth. They provided new ways of forging
links between the progress of natural and political economies. Correlating the
Forces Several natural philosophers, particularly in Britain, turned to the new
laboratory experiments developed during the first half of the century to provide
the building blocks for ambitious new accounts of the natural economy. At the
very least, practical examples of how the unity of nature could be made tangible
and useful provided vivid illustrations of metaphysical principles. Audiences at
William Robert Grove’s lectures at the London Institution or at one of Michael
Faraday’s Friday evening discourses at the Royal Institution during the 1840s
could literally see forces being transformed one to another. It is no accident
that the first public utterances by both these natural philosophers concerning
the interconvertibility of natural powers were made in lectures before a popular
audience. As well as spectacular demonstrations, however, experiments like these
provided flesh for the bones of new accounts of nature and the progress of
natural laws. In an increasingly hardnosed and utilitarian culture they also
provided solid examples of why such accounts of the natural economy really
mattered. They showed how natural philosophical principles could be used to make
nature’s work useful. They were a good way, therefore, of explaining to the
Victorian public how natural philosophers themselves were useful and productive
as well. Grove, a Welshman from Glamorganshire, had been appointed professor of
experimental philosophy at the London Institution in 1841. That institution,
founded in 1805 by a clique of City businessmen as a rival to the more
aristocratic Royal Institution on Albemarle Street, was itself devoted to
solidifying the link between science and commerce. Charles Butler declared at
the London Institution’s inauguration ceremony that science and commerce
combined would “record the heavens, delve the depths of the earth, and fill
every climate that encourages them with industry, energy, wealth, honour, and
happiness.” When they are separated, “Science loses almost all her Utility;
Commerce almost all her dignity.”13 Grove, a graduate of Brasenose College
Oxford who had trained for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, had made his scientific
reputation with his work on the construction of powerful and long-lasting
electric batteries. He would have agreed with Butler’s sentiments. One of his
first tasks 13
C. Butler, Inaugural Oration (London, 1816), 40.
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following his appointment as professor at the London Institution was to deliver
a public lecture on the progress of the physical sciences since the
institution’s founding. He took advantage of the opportunity to deliver his own
encomium on the importance of linking science and industry. Grove’s lecture
placed recent developments in physics within the context of a progressive
ideology that saw developments in science and society as necessarily going hand
in hand. The discoveries he would discuss, he claimed, had already “wrought
epochal changes in our knowledge, and will work gradual changes in our political
history.”14 His lecture provided his audience with a tour of the latest science,
from the steam engine (“the grandest mastery of mind over matter”) through
electricity and magnetism to photography (“the most remarkable discovery of
modern times”), with constant emphasis on their utility and contribution to
social progress. As Grove put it, “The student who in his closet successfully
interrogates Nature, not only gives to man new physical knowledge, but works an
indelible change in his moral destinies.”15 Running through the lecture was the
view that the recognition that nature’s powers were interconnected lay at the
root of recent discoveries and their social benefits: “Light, Heat, Electricity,
Magnetism, Motion, and Chemical-affinity, are all convertible material
affections; assuming either as the cause, one of the others will be the
effect.”16 It was humankind’s capacity to manipulate these relationships that
resulted in scientific, social, and economic progress: “Why is England a great
nation? Is it because her sons are brave? No, for so are the savage denizens of
Polynesia: She is great because their bravery is fortified by discipline, and
discipline is the offshoot of Science. Why is England a great nation? She is
great because she excels in Agriculture, in Manufactures, in Commerce. What is
Agriculture without Chemistry? What Manufactures without Mechanics? What
Commerce without Navigation? What Navigation without Astronomy?”17 Grove soon
coined a new phrase for his conviction that nature’s powers were mutually
convertible: the correlation of physical forces. In a series of popular lectures
at the London Institution, published as an essay when Grove left his post there
in 1846, correlation was used as the organizing principle around which he
arranged his survey of the physical sciences. His position was “that the various
imponderable agencies, or 14
W. R. Grove, On the Progress of the Physical Sciences (London, 1842), 6. Ibid.,
30. 16 Ibid., 30–31. 17 Ibid., 37. 15
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the affections of matter which constitute the main objects of experimental
physics, viz. Heat, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Affinity, and Motion
are all Correlative, or have a reciprocal dependence. That neither taken
abstractedly can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others,
but that either may, as a force, produce or be convertible into the other, thus
heat may mediately or immediately produce electricity, electricity may produce
heat; and so of the rest.”18 Correlation played a role as a rhetorical device
for Grove, providing him with a narrative structure that held together the
experimental displays that made up his lectures, while at the same time, of
course, the experiments’ role became that of making correlation visible (figure
3.3). The theatricality of correlation is evident in one of Grove’s examples,
designed to show the production of all the other modes of force from light. In
this experiment a Daguerreotype plate was placed in a glass-fronted box filled
with water, along with a grid of silver wire connected to the plate to form a
circuit along with a galvanometer and a Breuget helix. When light fell on the
plate following the removal of a shutter covering the glass front, the
galvanometer needles twitched and the Breuget helix expanded. As Grove
explained, “[T]hus, Light being the initiating force, we get chemical action on
the plate, electricity circulating through the wires, magnetism on the
[galvanometer] coil, heat in the helix and motion in the needles.”19 This kind
of display of correlation was important in Grove’s own experimental work as
well. For him, the main significance of the gas battery (the ancestor of the
modern fuel cell), which he invented in 1842, was that it represented “such a
beautiful instance of the correlation of natural forces.”20 In the gas battery,
electricity was produced through a process that combined oxygen and hydrogen to
produce water. The electricity produced could then be used to decompose the
water into its constituent elements once more. Grove saw this as the ultimate
example of correlation in action. Like Grove, Faraday first made his thoughts
concerning the interrelationships of nature’s powers public in a lecture, this
time to one of the Royal Institution’s popular Friday evening discourses.
Faraday had been instrumental in first establishing the discourses in the 1820s
as a forum for showcasing the latest scientific discoveries and spectacular new
inventions. By the 1840s they were immensely popular, Faraday himself 18
W. R. Grove, On the Correlation of Physical Forces (London, 1846), 7–8. Ibid.,
28. 20 W. R. Grove, Literary Gazette, 1842, 26: 833. 19
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3.3 The frontispiece of Henry M. Noad’s Lectures on Electricity (1844) showing
an idealized (if messy) electrician’s workshop. In the foreground is an
Armstrong hydroelectric machine, and a Wheatstone and Cooke five-needle
telegraph hangs on the wall behind it. Various items of electricians’ apparatus
such as induction coils and batteries are scattered around. On the right, on top
of the arch, is Grove’s gas battery, illustrating the correlation of physical
forces.
drawing enthusiastic crowds of hundreds when he performed. This was the context
in which Faraday first made public his speculations concerning the
interconvertibility of the forces and the relationship between force and matter.
He kicked off the 1844 season of Friday evening discourses on 19 January with a
lecture entitled “A Speculation Concerning Electric
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75
Conduction and the Nature of Matter.” He attacked conventional notions of matter
as solid particles, suggesting instead that matter should be regarded as being a
manifestation of force. His argument was that since matter is only recognized
through the forces it exerts, matter and force should be regarded as in some
sense identical. Rather than visualizing the material world as made up of solid
particles in space, Faraday saw it as a plenum through which forces acted on
each other. Faraday’s claims concerning the conservation of force and of matter
was in many ways a theological imperative. God had created a certain, finite
amount of matter and of force. Since this was created by God, it could in no way
be destroyed by any other agency than God’s. Force was therefore conserved in
any interaction. Faraday was less convinced, however, that forces were
interconvertible. He was clear that they were interrelated—much of his
experimental work was devoted to demonstrating such relationships, as with his
work on electromagnetism and magneto-optics and his efforts to find a
relationship between electricity and gravitation—but was unconvinced that this
interrelationship could produce actual conversion from one kind of force to
another. In his referee’s report to the Royal Society on James Prescott Joule’s
experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat, Faraday recommended that Joule
modify his conclusions for precisely these reasons. Joule wanted to argue that
his experiments showed that heat and motion really were mutually
convertible—that a particular amount of motion could be turned into a particular
amount of heat and vice versa. Faraday disagreed. He argued that all the
experiments showed was that a certain amount of motion always resulted in the
same amount of heat and that nothing further could legitimately be inferred from
the experiments. Joule had to modify his conclusions to suit Faraday’s
objections. Like Faraday, however, Joule took the conservation of force to be a
fundamental theological principle. The difference between their views is perhaps
best encapsulated by the observation that Faraday believed in the conservation
of forces while Joule believed in the conservation of force. Joule took it as
axiomatic that nothing that God had created could be destroyed by man and that
force, therefore, simply had to be conserved in any interaction. It was a
fundamental assumption rather than an experimentally derived generalization.
Coming from provincial Manchester rather than the metropolis, Joule had to find
alternatives to the prestigious London institutions in order to make his voice
heard. By 1842 he had been elected a member of the local Manchester Literary &
Philosophical Society, having delivered a paper there a few months
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previously entitled “The Electrical Origin of the Heat of Combustion.” He also
performed before the British Association for the Advancement of Science when
they gathered in Manchester later that year and on other occasions later in the
1840s, notably in 1847 when his experiments caught the attention of the young
William Thomson. The most comprehensive presentation of his views on the
conservation of force was made, however, to a local and provincial audience
gathered for a public lecture at St. Anne’s Church School in Manchester in 1847.
Illustrating his performance with such force transformations as experiments with
voltaic batteries and electromagnetic engines, Joule aimed to convince his
audience of the reality of conservation and conversion processes in nature. It
was an ambitious program. He needed to demonstrate conclusively that “the
phenomena of nature, whether mechanical, chemical or vital, consist almost
entirely in a continual conversion of attraction through space, living force and
heat into one another. Thus it is that order is maintained in the
universe—nothing is deranged, nothing is ever lost, but the entire machinery,
complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously.”21 Any apparent loss of
living force (as he translated the eighteenth-century Latin mathematical term,
vis viva) was simply the result of the conversion of that force into another
form according to a strict principle of equivalence. As in the case of Grove and
his principle of correlation, Joule was using his notion of the conservation of
force to place his kind of physics right at the center of natural philosophy. If
he was right, then all nature and all natural processes were governed by the
principle to which he laid claim. Grand and overarching accounts of natural
philosophy like this were increasingly popular during the 1830s and 1840s in
England. John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy, published in 1830 as the introductory volume of Dionysius Lardner’s
Cabinet of Natural Philosophy, laid out a synthetic framework for the sciences.
The same could be said for William Whewell’s magisterial History of the
Inductive Sciences and its companion Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Mary
Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in 1834 had a similar
agenda. Such texts were bestsellers for their time, going through numerous
editions and revisions. They laid out a range of visions of the sciences as a
unified whole at just the historical moment when natural philosophy seemed to be
fragmenting into a myriad specialist disciplines. The conjunction is hardly
coincidental. Texts like these could 21
Quoted in C. Smith, The Science of Energy, 72.
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77
be used to try and hold the edifice of science together when it appeared to be
in danger of breaking up. Crucially, they offered a range of new accounts as to
what kind of role in culture the natural philosopher might hope to play. This
spate of mid-nineteenth-century syntheses of the physical sciences were
exercises in marking out new territory. All these scientists—a word coined by
William Whewell in 1832—were trying to redefine the field of their science, as
well as the cultural role of science and scientists. New accounts of the
correlation, conservation, and conversion of forces served as means of
redefining and restating the importance of physics, both as an intellectual
exercise and as an economic one. Syntheses such as these, drawing on the latest
experiments, showed how nature could be put to work in earnest. The natural
philosopher’s role, on this showing, was to manage the process of making
nature’s powers part of the workforce. The laboratory technology that was used
to make correlation or conversion visible—the voltaic batteries, electromagnetic
devices, and photographic apparatus—could be made to join the steam engine on
the factory floor. In these new articulations of the ways in which nature was
hooked together, laboratory apparatus could be used to forge secure links
between progress in nature and progress in society. From this perspective, the
implication was that natural philosophers had a central role to play, not only
in uncovering nature’s secrets but in placing them firmly at the center of the
cultural stage. Energy’s Empire A new word appeared in physics at about
midcentury: energy. The word was bound up with a new doctrine as well: the
conservation of energy. By the end of the nineteenth century all of physics and
much of the other sciences as well revolved around this new concept. Its early
proponents— physicists such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James
Clerk Maxwell—argued vociferously that physics needed to be reorganized around
this fresh idea if it was to be placed on a secure footing. Opponents,
particularly the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel, disagreed strongly. They
argued that the old concept of force should retain its preeminence since
everyone had an instinctive appreciation of its meaning from their everyday
experiences. Energy in comparison was a chimera, a theoretical construct with no
tangible expression in the real world. By the end of the century, by contrast,
many physicists would have argued that energy was the real world. For its
promoters, energy was the hidden
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link that bound the disparate phenomena of nature together. Energy, not force,
was the quantity conserved during the transformation of electricity into heat,
or heat into motion. They aimed to use the new concept to forge a powerful new
science, tailored for the modern industrial age. The promoters of this new
science of energy were quite self-conscious in their efforts to revolutionize
not just physics but the whole of natural philosophy. They aimed at an
achievement comparable to Newton’s in providing a new and secure foundation for
their science. A good indication of what was at stake was the recurrent
bickering over who could be credited with the discovery of the grand principle
of the conservation of energy. William Thomson and his irascible close ally
Peter Guthrie Tait, professor first at Queen’s College Belfast and then at
Edinburgh, hailed James Prescott Joule as the discoverer. The materialist John
Tyndall, friend of T. H. Huxley and admirer of German science, pointed to the
obscure German physician Robert Mayer instead, unwilling to give the laurels to
the devout Anglican Joule. William Robert Grove pointed to his own The
Correlation of Physical Forces as an early enunciation of the principle. For the
energy physicists, however, Grove’s claim was “humbug” and the man himself
though “not a bad fellow” was “woefully loose and unscientific.”22 For them,
Grove was one of the old guard, lacking in the rigorous mathematical
apprenticeship needed to appreciate the new theory in all its glory. The
doctrine of conservation soon acquired its bible with the publication of the
ambitious Treatise on Natural Philosophy, coauthored by William Thomson and
Peter Guthrie Tait between 1862 and 1867. The aim of the book in many ways was
to make energy real—to bring the abstractions of the Cambridge mathematical
Tripos down to Earth. As one reviewer put it: “The world of which they give the
Natural Philosophy is not the abstract world of Cambridge examination papers—in
which matter is perfectly homogenous, pulleys perfectly smooth, strings
perfectly elastic, liquids perfectly compressible—but it is the concrete world
of the senses, which approximates to, but always falls short of the mathematical
as of the poetical imagination.”23 James Clerk Maxwell agreed: “The two northern
wizards were the first who, without compunction or dread, uttered in their
mother tongue the true and proper names of those dynamical concepts which the
magicians of old were wont to invoke only 22 23
P. G. Tait to W. Thomson, 2 December 1862, quoted ibid., 176. Quoted ibid., 192.
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by the aid of muttered symbols and inarticulate equations.”24 It was an answer
to the complaint that the new energy physics was too abstract, too divorced from
mundane reality. The text provided a comprehensive articulation of the doctrine
of the conservation of energy, insisting on and illustrating its universal
application throughout the physical world and on its foundational role in
physics. It also invoked a highly distinguished pedigree for the new idea.
Energy’s precursor was no less a sage than the illustrious Isaac Newton. In
their preface, Thomson and Tait (or T and T , as they facetiously referred to
each other in private correspondence) announced this heritage proudly: “One
object which we have constantly kept in view is the grand principle of the
Conservation of Energy. According to modern experimental results, especially
those of JOULE, Energy is as real and indestructible as Matter. It is
satisfactory to find that NEWTON anticipated, so far as the state of
experimental science in his time permitted him, this magnificent modern
generalization.”25 They were themselves, they announced, “Restorers” rather than
“Innovators.” They presented the conservation of energy as placing physics back
onto the true path first blazed by Newton himself. This was, in part, a campaign
to guarantee for energy an impeccably British ancestry against the claims of
German interlopers such as Mayer and Helmholtz. In the same way, the insistence
that Joule, in particular, should be recognized as the discoverer was, as much
as it was aimed to satisfy English amour propre, also aimed at underlining the
claim that the conservation of energy was a firmly empirical discovery, solidly
based on experimental evidence rather than being derived from airy and abstract
speculation. In popular lectures, magazine articles, and books, Thomson and
Tait, along with allies such as Balfour Stewart, professor of natural philosophy
at Manchester’s Owens College, set out to proselytize for the new doctrine. They
wanted to show fellow scientists and the broader public that the conservation of
energy was far more than just a narrow scientific principle but that it applied
to the whole of natural philosophy and beyond. It was an idea that could explain
everything from the movements of the stars and planets down to the mechanism of
life itself. As Stewart put it in his The Conservation of Energy (1873), the
Universe could be regarded “in the light of a vast physical machine” and “the
laws of 24 25
J. C. Maxwell, “Thomson and Tait’s Natural Philosophy,” Nature, 1879, 20: 215.
W. Thomson and P. G. Tait, Treatise on Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 1867), vi.
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energy as the laws of working of this machine.”26 His popular introduction,
published as part of the International Scientific Series, took the reader
through energy and its transformations from the energy of a rifle bullet fired
from a gun to the infinitesimal chemical reactions taking place in the human or
animal body. In The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State
(1875), Stewart and Tait proclaimed the complete conformity of the new physics
to Christian orthodoxy. They went on to show that even “immortality is strictly
in accordance with the principle of Continuity (rightly viewed); that principle
which has been the guide of all modern scientific advance.”27 The new doctrine
of energy was also at the heart of James Clerk Maxwell’s attempt to construct a
comprehensive theory of electromagnetism from Faraday’s experimental researches
and scattered speculations. Born into a genteel Edinburgh family in 1831,
Maxwell was first taught natural philosophy by James Forbes at the university
there while imbibing metaphysics from Sir William Hamilton. In 1850 he went to
Cambridge to study for the mathematical Tripos, first at St. Peter’s and then at
Trinity College. He made quite an impression, graduating as second wrangler and
joint Smith’s prizeman in 1854 and obtaining a college fellowship at Trinity a
year later. (The Smith’s Prize for mathematical proficiency was established by
the bequest of Robert Smith, a former master of Trinity College, on his death in
1768.) Cambridge’s rigorous training in mathematical analysis provided him with
the skills he would need as an ambitious young physicist eager to make his mark
on the new science of energy. Maxwell was encouraged by Thomson to familiarize
himself with Faraday’s researches; his paper “On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” read
to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1855 and published in their
Transactions a year later, was his first essay into the field. He returned to
the topic some years later, publishing “On Physical Lines of Force” in the
Philosophical Magazine between 1861 and 1862. The papers were part of a
concerted effort to turn Faraday’s speculations about lines of force in space
into something more concrete. Maxwell appropriated Faraday’s speculations to
provide a solid pedigree for his mathematics of energy. “Nothing is clearer,” he
told Faraday, “than your description of all sources of force keeping up a state
of energy in all that surrounds them . . . You seem to see the lines of force
curving round obstacles and driving plump at conductors and swerving towards 26
27
B. Stewart, The Conservation of Energy (London, 1873), v. B. Stewart and P. G.
Tait, The Unseen Universe (London, 1875), 28.
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81
certain direction in crystals, and carrying with them everywhere the same amount
of attractive power spread wider or denser as the lines widen or contract.”28 As
far as Maxwell was concerned, those lines of force were real. His task was to
find the mathematics that described their behavior. In “On Physical Lines of
Force” he elaborated a complex mechanical model of molecular vortices and idle
wheels to represent his theory. This was the kind of medium that his mathematics
described—the ether. It might not be the model that existed in reality, but it
was “a mode of connexion which is mechanically conceivable, and easily
investigated.”29 In “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” published
in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1865, Maxwell refined the
theory yet again drawing on the latest mathematics to flesh out his
understanding of the ether—the space-filling medium in which electromagnetic
energy was stored and through which it traveled. Maxwell’s electromagnetic
theorizing culminated with the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873),
published just two years after he had been appointed first Cavendish Professor
of Physics at the University of Cambridge (figure 3.4). Like his energetic
allies Thomson and Tait, he was trying to build the foundations of a
comprehensive new science based on the concept of energy. The treatise brought
together and elaborated the fruits of his earlier papers, putting the flesh on
the bones of the electromagnetic ether. As Maxwell had already explained in his
“Dynamical Theory,” “In speaking of the Energy of the field . . . I mean to be
understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it
exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The
energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy. The only question is,
Where does it reside?”30 The treatise provided a comprehensive account of just
where that energy resided, spelling out the mathematical properties of the
space-filling ether. It showed, among other things, how waves of electromagnetic
energy traveled through the ether at the speed of light, suggesting that light
was itself an electromagnetic phenomenon. In Maxwell’s hands, the ether became
the new focus for the physics of energy. As far as British physicists were
concerned, the defining feature of the ether was that it was a mechanical
construct. While Maxwell was clear 28 J. C. Maxwell to M. Faraday, 9 November
1857. In L. P. Williams, The Selected Correspondence of Michael Faraday
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 2: 882. 29 Quoted in C. Smith,
The Science of Energy, 227. 30 Quoted ibid., 232.
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3.4 A page from Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). He is
describing William Thomson’s method for determining the value of the standard
unit of resistance (the ohm) as used by the British Association for the
Advancement of Science’s Committee on Electrical Standards.
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83
3.5 Maxwell’s representation of a possible mechanical structure for the
electromagnetic ether.
that his 1862 model of vortices and idle wheels was only a hypothesis and not
necessarily an accurate representation of what the ether’s structure was really
like, there was no question but that the ether had some kind of mechanical
structure (figure 3.5). Just as the machines on Britain’s factory floors were
made up of pistons and pulleys, flywheels and governors, cranks and gears, so
was the electromagnetic ether. The conservation of energy was meant to be a
theory that applied in the real world. The link between the engines and machines
of Britain’s factories and the electromagnetic ether was that both could be
approached with the same physics, the same theories and models. This was because
they had the same kind of structure—they were made of the same kind of things.
In this way the high mathematical physics of Maxwell and his successors really
did have universal applicability. It explained the factory as much as it
explained the ether—and derived its credibility from its capacity to explain
both. In his review of Oliver Lodge’s Modern Views of Electricity (1889), the
French philosopher and physicist Pierre Duhem condemned the British proclivity
towards mechanical models: “Here is a book intended to
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expound the modern theories of electricity and to expound a new theory. In it
there are nothing but strings which move around pulleys, which roll around
drums, which go through pearl beads, which carry weights; and tubes which pump
water while others swell and contract; toothed wheels which are geared to one
another and engage hooks. We thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly
ordered abode of reason, but we find ourselves in a factory.”31 Lodge, professor
of physics at University College Liverpool and an enthusiastic modeler of the
ether, would happily have concurred with this assessment. Like his fellow
Maxwellian at Trinity College Dublin, George Francis FitzGerald, he took
modeling the ether to be a crucial heuristic and pedagogical activity. Since the
ether was a mechanical system, trying to construct mechanical models that
reproduced its properties was a valuable way of finding out more about it. It
was also a useful way of demonstrating its properties to others. Lodge and
FitzGerald were convinced that the Holy Grail of physics would be a purely
mechanical model of the ether—one that was not only useful heuristically and
pedagogically, but that could be taken to be a true representation of the
ether’s real structure. According to Lodge, “If a continuous incompressible
perfect fluid filling all space can be imagined in such a state of motion that
it will do all that ether is known to do; if, simply by reason of its state of
motion, it can be proved capable of conveying light and of manifesting all
electric and magnetic phenomena which do not depend on the presence of matter;
and if the state of motion so imagined can be proved stable and such as can
readily exist, the theory of free ether is complete.”32 This was the late
nineteenth-century version of the end of physics. Lodge had a likely candidate
in mind as well in the form of FitzGerald’s vortex sponge model, first devised
in 1885. From the 1880s through the end of the century, refining this model into
an adequate representation of the real ether was the central goal of British
physics. Success would mean the reduction of all physics to mechanics—the
science of matter and motion. Maxwell’s equations defining the operations of the
electromagnetic field could then be rewritten in purely mechanical terms. By the
end of the nineteenth century the physics of energy was triumphant. The doctrine
of the conservation of energy was a central and indispensable plank not only in
physics but across a whole range of 31
P. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1954), 70–71. 32 O. Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity
(London, 1889), xi.
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85
sciences. This physics of energy was widely accepted as being the physics of the
ether as well. The ether in some form or other was generally accepted as the
universal medium through which energy traveled (at the speed of light) and in
which it was stored. As Pierre Duhem had rather snootily noted, this energy
physics was also the physics of the factory. It forged a link in the chain
binding the high mathematics of Cambridge analysis to the realities of
industrial culture. The conservation of energy was a broad church, however, and
not all its adherents understood it in the same way as its high priests. William
Robert Grove, in the final edition of the Correlation of Physical Forces (1874),
was still staking his claim to its discovery. In his obituary of Grove in the
scientific magazine Nature in 1896, the physicist Andrew Gray, Lord Kelvin’s
successor to the chair of natural philosophy at Glasgow, acknowledged his theory
of correlation as a precursor of the conservation of energy. The phrases
“correlation of physical forces” and “conservation of energy” were still
interchangeably used in the popular (and even occasionally in the professional)
sphere at the end of the century. Energy did nevertheless provide its adherents
and practitioners with a powerful tool, not only for understanding nature, but
for carving out a niche for themselves as professional scientists in fin de
si`ecle industrial culture. Conclusion The nineteenth century was a period of
massive and unprecedented social upheaval. Populations exploded, national
borders were redefined, new political systems and ideologies were forged,
industrialization and urbanization destroyed old ways of life and created new
ones. Natural philosophy’s place in this new social order needed to be
redefined. This was a highly contested process. Not everyone—not even all men of
science—agreed what natural philosophy should look like and what it should say
about nature and society. The perspective of, say, an early nineteenth-century
German enthusiast for Naturphilosophie would in this respect be very different
from that of a midcentury advocate of the correlation or conversion of forces,
regardless of any superficial similarity in their views about the unity of
nature. To realize their competing visions, practitioners of natural philosophy
had to forge new spaces and new institutions for themselves. They had to turn
their science into something that mattered for their rapidly changing industrial
culture. They had to convince their audiences that natural philosophy made a
difference. In this process, physics and physicists were transformed. In many
ways, the
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history of nineteenth-century science was one of constant refashioning as
natural philosophers and scientists tried to find a secure cultural niche for
themselves and their productions. Physics certainly was transformed by the end
of the century. New institutions and laboratories proliferated and chairs were
established in new civic universities. It was the dominant science, and its
practitioners wielded the power to adjudicate over the proceedings of
disciplines far removed from theirs. Physics, thanks to the conservation of
energy, was recognized as the foundational discipline. This may seem
self-evident to modern sensibilities—what other science should be regarded as
the model against which all others have to measure themselves? That position was
not purchased without a fight, however. In the early years of the
nineteenth-century chemistry might have appeared a better candidate. At
midcentury, astronomy still ruled the roost as the exemplar of scientific
methodology. Physics in the nineteenth century reorganized itself and
reorganized the world around it at the same time. The conservation of energy
turned out to be the ideal tool for creating and holding together a new
discipline that crossed the boundaries between factories, laboratories, and
university studies and lecture halls. Its affiliations with the mathematical
world of the mind made lab work respectable for the sons of gentlemen, while its
connections with the world of telegraph cables, electric power, and factory
engines made it a practical occupation for the sons of trade.
4 The Science of Showmanship
Throughout the nineteenth century, the most visible of the physical sciences in
many ways was the burgeoning science of electricity. Electricity provided the
technology for a whole range of vivid and spectacular demonstrations of nature’s
powers, and of man’s powers over nature. As the century advanced electricity
gave rise to a whole range of new industrial technologies as well. Across Europe
and America, many identified their century with unprecedented economic and
social progress. Many agreed also that the combined forces of science and
industry could be identified as being at the root of this newfound prosperity.
For these observers, it was precisely the development of new ways of
understanding nature and exploiting her resources that seemed to promise
never-ending progress. Electricity in many ways seemed to epitomize this
process. New industrial technologies like electroplating provided luxury goods
for the growing middle classes; the electric telegraph provided practically
instantaneous communication across the globe; by the end of the century
electrical energy was providing light and power in households all over the
Western world. The electrical future increasingly seemed to promise more. Much
of nineteenth-century physics was inextricably embedded in these new industries
as well. The science of electricity was very much about making this new power
spectacularly visible and making it useful too.
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These kinds of links between electricity and the worlds of showmanship and
industry were hardly new by the nineteenth century. Since the early eighteenth
century spectacular electrical demonstrations of nature’s powers had been part
of the stock in trade of philosophical showmen. They could use electricity to
show off not only God’s powers in nature but their own abilities to control
those powers. Natural philosophical lecturers, performing in coffeehouses and
salons across Europe, vied to produce more and more spectacular experiments. New
and more powerful electrical machines were constructed, along with new devices
like the Leyden jar to store and concentrate the electric effluvium (as it was
often described). Genteel coffeehouse habitu´es could be amazed, shocked, or
even beatified (crowned by a fluorescent halo) by the new electric fluid. As we
saw in the introduction, there was an entrepreneurial edge to many of these
electrical activities in the eighteenth century as well. Popular lecturers such
as John Desaguliers and Benjamin Martin in England and instrument makers such as
the Dutchman Martinus van Marum had their eye on attracting potential patrons to
make their productions commercially viable. The American Benjamin Franklin’s
invention of the lightning rod was motivated by practical commercial concerns as
much as by philosophical curiosity. Exhibition played a crucial role throughout
nineteenth-century culture for a number of reasons. The rising middle classes
flocked to a whole range of public entertainments as the century progressed,
from theatrical productions to grand musical soirees or fireworks displays.
Following the unprecedented success of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal
Palace in 1851, imitations sprang up all over Europe and the United States. By
the final decades of the century, international exhibitions and world fairs were
annual events in cities throughout the western hemisphere. Other forms of
display were also proliferating. As relationships between producers and
consumers of goods changed, department stores featuring gaudy displays of
commodities on sale became common features of metropolitan streets. Advertising
developed new ways of drawing the consumer’s attention. Natural philosophers had
their place in this world of display. Many earned their living through popular
lectures drawing crowds through spectacular experimental demonstrations. They
had to compete directly for customers with the theaters, panoramas, dioramas,
and magic lantern shows of metropolitan culture. Electricity was a crucial
resource for such performances, and electrical experimenters worked hard to find
new and spectacular ways of making electricity visible.
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The nineteenth century witnessed an upsurge in invention as well. Hopeful
entrepreneurs and inventors flocked to the patent offices, aiming to make their
fortunes through this or that new improvement or spectacular breakthrough.
Arguments raged concerning the relationship between science and the industrial
arts. Some, like Charles Babbage, insisted that there was an inseparable
dependence. The natural sciences, according to Babbage and his allies, were the
powerhouse that generated economic progress through a constant supply of new
ideas to be applied in new machines and technologies. Others disagreed, arguing
that there was no link between the rarefied ideals of natural philosophy and the
grubby business of invention and salesmanship. Electricity had an important role
to play in these kinds of debates too. To many, it was the prime example of
science applied successfully to the arts. New technologies such as the electric
telegraph seemed to demonstrate conclusively the central role of natural
philosophical discovery in inventive activity. Again, others disagreed,
suggesting that the history of such inventions tended to show they were the
products of inspired tinkering by practical men rather than the systematic
application of natural laws. There was, of course, a close connection between
these joint concerns with exhibition and utility. There was in the first
instance very little practical difference between the process of producing a new
piece of electrical apparatus as part of a public lecturer’s or demonstrator’s
box of tricks and inventing a new device with an eye to the marketplace. The
devices themselves were as often as not practically identical, or at least
closely related. When lecturers put themselves and their demonstrations of
nature in action on show, they were frequently quite literally inhabiting the
same space as that where hopeful inventors exhibited their own productions. In
the Victorian public’s mind there was very little difference between a device
designed to demonstrate some natural principle and an item of economic utility
on sale. Again like the telegraph, the two could often be the same. Crucial
cultural events such as the Great Exhibition played an important role in
crystallizing such perceived relationships as well. The Crystal Palace was only
one of the more impressive spaces where invention and discovery rubbed
shoulders. The place of the physical sciences and of electricity in this culture
of exhibition and entrepreneurship was not uncontested or uncontroversial. Many
men of science argued determinedly that the sciences had no proper role in such
a context. Crass utilitarianism and grubby display were alike beneath the
dignity of natural philosophy. Others had no
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such qualms. Many such arguments in the end boiled down to the simple question
of who the man of science—in this case the electrician—was. Was he (he was
almost invariably a “he”) the disinterested discoverer of natural principles,
the polite purveyor of new experimental knowledge to a genteel middle class or
aristocratic audience? Or was he the flamboyant showman shocking (sometimes
quite literally) his audience with the latest example of man’s dominance over
nature, demonstrating his mastery over nature through his control of the
machines he exhibited? Or was he the hardheaded inventor of revolutionary new
technologies, industriously playing his part in transforming the
nineteenth-century economic landscape? As the century progressed, the science of
electricity was to be a key battleground in resolving such questions.
Foundations of a New Science In the early 1780s, Luigi Galvani, the professor of
anatomy at the University of Bologna, carried out a series of experiments that
demonstrated, he claimed, that there was a specific electricity produced by
animal bodies (figure 4.1). He found that when the nerves and muscle of a frog’s
leg were connected by means of a metallic conductor, the leg twitched. This
indicated, according to Galvani, the existence of a flow of electricity running
through the dead frog’s nervous system. This animal electricity—or galvanism as
it was soon to be designated in honor of its discoverer—was to be a source of
major controversy. Galvani and his adherents insisted
4.1 Some of Luigi Galvani’s experiments on animal electricity.
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that the source of the electricity was the animal tissue and that Galvani had
therefore discovered an entirely novel variety of electric fluid. His opponents,
notably Alessandro Volta at the University of Pavia, were just as adamant that
the metal in contact with the tissues was the source. The electricity was simply
produced by the contact of two dissimilar metals according to this view. All the
animal tissue did was facilitate that contact. The dispute raged over two
decades as both Galvani and Volta produced experiment after experiment, each
proving his own and disproving the other’s claims. No one denied the existence
of this novel form of electricity. The issue was its origin. Was there, as
Galvani claimed, an innate electricity in animal bodies, or was the electricity
found in such circumstances merely the result of metals in contact, as Volta
asserted? In 1800, Volta made public a new experiment that he thought was
decisive. When a pile of zinc and copper discs was constructed, each copper and
zinc pair separated by a paper disc soaked in acid or a saline solution, an
electric current flowed from one end of the pile to the other. This was Volta’s
final model of what happened in Galvani’s experiment. No animal tissue was
needed, suggesting, of course, that there was no specific animal electricity
after all. Volta toured Europe with his voltaic pile, as it soon became called,
demonstrating to excited savants at the Institut de France in Paris and
elsewhere the power of his new instrument (figure 4.2). Galvani’s nephew,
Giovanni Aldini, likewise went on a Grand Tour to demonstrate that electricity
could be produced from animal tissue without the intervention of metallic
conductors. In London he even carried out spectacular electrical experiments on
the corpse of an executed felon. The focus of European attention, however, was
Volta and his new instrument in its various permutations. It seemed that he had
discovered a new and powerfully versatile source of the electric fluid. In 1801,
Napoleon, the new French emperor, awarded him a medal for his services to
science and to celebrate the grand discovery made on what was, by then, newly
conquered French territory. The question of the source of electricity in the
voltaic pile remained open, however. Volta and his newfound French allies
insisted that it was the contact of the metals. Others, notably among the
revolutionary French state’s enemies across the English Channel, insisted that
it must lie elsewhere. The rapidly rising star of English science in the 1800s
was Humphry Davy, newly arrived at the Royal Institution in London, itself just
established to place natural philosophy at the service of the embattled English
state by improving agriculture and the industrial arts. Davy seized on the
voltaic pile as a powerful new weapon in his armory of chemical
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4.2 Some early examples of Alessandro Volta’s voltaic piles.
apparatus. Along with other pioneering English experimenters such as William
Cruickshank and William Nicholson, he transformed Volta’s small-scale device
into a giant instrument for chemical demonstration and analysis. Davy used this
potent new resource to dazzle and amaze his genteel Royal Institution audience
with his capacity to subjugate nature. It provided the foundation for his
growing reputation as a consummate philosophical performer. At the same time it
provided the evidence for Davy’s chemical view of electricity. Davy could use
the powerful electrical forces produced by the voltaic battery to tear chemical
compounds apart and reveal their constituent elements. Soils could be analyzed,
new chemical elements such as chlorine could be isolated by subjecting them to
the currents from the Royal Institution’s batteries. The implication was
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4.3 Michael Faraday’s demonstration apparatus showing that a current-carrying
wire could be made to revolve around the central magnet. Michael Faraday,
Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2, plate 4.
that the electric force was chemical in origin as well. Davy claimed that the
voltaic pile’s electricity derived from chemical reactions rather than from the
contact of its metals. His French counterparts, particularly those in the
Laplacian camp, still followed Volta in maintaining that metallic contact was
what mattered. While English, French, and Scottish experimenters continued to
debate the respective merits of the chemical and contact theories of galvanic
action, their counterparts elsewhere, particularly in the German lands,
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took a different perspective. They saw the electricity produced by the voltaic
battery as a microcosm of the metaphysical unity of nature. As we saw earlier,
Romantic natural philosophers such as Johann Wilhelm Ritter in Jena hoped to
employ the galvanic battery as an instrument of metaphysics. It could be used to
demonstrate the fundamental unity of the seemingly different forces that
governed the Cosmos. The breakthrough in this respect was made by Ritter’s
Danish collaborator Hans Christian Oersted, professor of physics at the
University of Copenhagen, in 1820. A keen exponent of Kantian metaphysics,
Oersted aimed to use the battery to find a link between electricity and
magnetism. After careful experimentation he succeeded in showing that a
magnetized needle could be made to deflect in the presence of a current-carrying
wire. News of the amazing discovery fascinated Europe’s philosophical community.
Oersted’s short Latin publication was rapidly translated into English, French,
and German. His experiment was repeated before skeptical audiences (particularly
in Paris) as electrical experimenters tried to make sense of this strange new
phenomenon. Some of the most diligent efforts to repeat and expand on Oersted’s
work were made at the Royal Institution by Davy’s laboratory assistant, Michael
Faraday. Faraday had come under Davy’s patronage following the end of his
apprenticeship as a bookbinder. He had joined Davy on his Grand Tour through
war-torn Europe in 1813, when his master was invited to Paris to be fˆeted by
Napoleon and awarded a medal for his philosophical discoveries. By 1820, Faraday
was starting to experiment in his own right and was anxious to make a name for
himself as an independent philosopher. In 1821, in a careful series of
experiments he demonstrated that a current carrying wire could be made to rotate
around a magnet. His work not only verified Oersted’s claims concerning the
relationship of electricity and magnetism, it also seemed to confirm that the
force from the wire did not act as forces usually did—towards a central
point—but that it rotated around the wire instead. Faraday’s achievement was not
universally acknowledged at the genteel Royal Institution. One of the
institution’s patrons, William Wollaston, was already engaged in a series of
experiments to investigate the apparent rotatory motion of current carrying
wires near magnets. It appeared unseemly that a mere laboratory assistant should
have preempted his discoveries. The discovery was, however, sufficient to
establish Faraday as a philosopher in his own right, a position that he
carefully consolidated at the Royal Institution over the next decade.
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4.4 Michael Faraday lecturing before an audience including Prince Albert and the
prince of Wales at the Royal Institution.
By 1830, Faraday was a fellow of the Royal Society and director of the
laboratory at the Royal Institution. He was widely recognized as having stepped
into Humphry Davy’s shoes as the foremost exponent of natural philosophy to the
English upper classes (figure 4.4). In 1831, he embarked on an ambitious
experimental program that was to make him one of Europe’s premier electrical
experimenters as well. In what turned out to be only the first installment of
his Experimental Researches, presented before the Royal Society on 24 November
1831, Faraday showed that magnets could be used to create electricity. When a
bar magnet was inserted into a wire coil and again when it was removed, a brief
current was recorded on a galvanometer connected to the coil. Also, when a
current was passed through a coil of wire wrapped around a soft iron ring, a
current could also be recorded on another, unconnected coil of wire wrapped
around the same ring whenever the original current was switched on or off.
Faraday called this effect induction, to remind his auditors and readers of the
familiar field of ordinary (static) electricity. As in his demonstrations of a
decade earlier, Faraday had opened up a whole new field of enquiry into the
links between electricity and magnetism,
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as well as spawning a whole range of new electrical instruments and devices to
put the new phenomena on show. Over the next three decades, Faraday produced
twenty-nine series of these Experimental Researches, translating the results of
his endeavors in the Royal Institution’s basement laboratory to an increasingly
expectant audience. A few years later Faraday made another breakthrough. In his
“third series” he outlined a number of experiments designed to confirm and
demonstrate the identity of the electricities. It was still an unresolved issue
whether the electricity deriving from a galvanic battery was the same as the
electricity derived from an electrical machine or Leyden jar. This was
particularly so in that many of their effects seemed very different in scale and
kind. Faraday set out to show by careful measurement that the electricities were
in fact identical in that the effects of a given electricity could be reproduced
with electricities from different sources. The differences usually observed
could be attributed to variations between sources in the quantity and intensity
of electricity being made available. In further research he established as well
the chemical equivalence of electricity. A given amount of electricity used to
break down a chemical compound would do so in proportion to the elements
contained. When water was decomposed by electricity, for example, twice as much
hydrogen as oxygen was given off in keeping with water’s chemical composition of
two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. Faraday used this apparently absolute
relationship to propose a new way of measuring electricity. He suggested that
the amount of gas given off when electricity was passed through a tube of water
could be used as an absolute measure of the quantity of electricity. He baptized
the new instrument the Volta-electrometer. By the beginning of the 1840s Faraday
was firmly established as one of Britain’s foremost (if not the foremost)
experimental natural philosophers. He was also beginning to publish some of his
private speculations concerning the nature of electricity, force, and matter. He
was increasingly convinced that electricity should be regarded as a force
occupying the space surrounding conductors rather than as a fluid (or fluids)
flowing through the conductors themselves. He elaborated this view in papers
such as “Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter”
(1844) and “Thoughts on Ray Vibrations” (1846). His views were bolstered by his
magneto-optic experiments of 1845, in which he demonstrated that a ray of
polarized light passing through glass along a magnetic line of force would be
rotated according to the direction of the line of force. There is an interesting
link between the view of matter that Faraday was promoting here—that what
mattered was the distribution of
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lines of force in space—and his pedagogical strategy. Faraday’s aim in the
lecture theater was to direct his well-bred audience’s attention away from the
grubby details of the apparatus he used to produce the phenomena. He wanted them
to see that nature (not he or his instruments) was doing the work. His view of
matter directed attention away from the instruments and towards the space
surrounding them as well. His pedagogy and his ontology went hand in hand. Very
few natural philosophers took Faraday’s strange views on lines of force in space
seriously until they were picked up by James Clerk Maxwell a decade later. Most
British electricians maintained the view, implicitly at least, that electricity
should be regarded as some kind of imponderable fluid. Their task was to make
that fluid visible. In France, a more mathematical approach to electricity
developed, drawing largely on the Laplacian tradition of looking at natural
processes as resulting from the action of central forces. The initial response
in France to Oersted’s experiment was to see if it could be fitted into the
Laplacian straitjacket. Jean Baptiste Biot and his student Felix Savart reduced
the phenomenon to a simple law. Imagining the needle as consisting of molecules
of magnetism each with a north and south pole, they wrote early in 1820: “Draw
from the pole a perpendicular to the wire; the force on the pole is at right
angles to this line and to the wire, and its intensity is proportional to the
reciprocal of the distance.”1 Such language had the virtue of preserving the
Laplacian insistence on simple forces acting on points (or molecules) in space
and transformed the phenomenon into a mathematical generalization. Biot’s fellow
Frenchman and adversary Andr´e-Marie Amp`ere, on the other hand, was less wedded
to the Laplacian worldview. He used Oersted’s experiment to try to break down
the distinction between electricity and magnetism. He argued that the best way
to understand the way in which electricity and magnetism interacted was to think
of the two forces as identical. Magnetism was the result of electricity in
motion. Permanent magnets could be regarded as consisting of a number of loops
of electric current. The direction of the current in the loop determined the
magnet’s polarity. Amp`ere bolstered this view by showing how a current-carrying
helix could be made to act like a magnet. He showed that current-carrying wires
attracted and repelled each other as well—just like magnets. Amp`ere—a
coconspirator with anti-Laplacians such as Arago, Fourier, and Fresnel—saw
himself as the founder of a new science of electrodynamics that moved away from
Laplacian shibboleths. 1
E. Whittaker, History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity: The Classical
Years, 82.
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Carefully contrived experiments were crucial for Amp`ere’s work, both as
demonstration and measurement. His claims concerning the electrodynamic nature
of magnetism were considerably more credible to his skeptical academical
colleagues in Paris once he could show them (as he did on 25 September 1820)
that current-carrying helices really could be made to act like feeble magnets.
By the 1830s and 1840s, distinct ways of doing electricity were emerging.
Volta’s invention of the voltaic pile (precursor of the modern electric battery)
provided a powerful new source of the electric fluid. Oersted’s experiment of
1820, followed by Faraday’s and Amp`ere’s experiments, forged a new, intimate
connection between electricity and magnetism. Different languages of electricity
were also emerging. Faraday, addressing as he did a primarily lay if socially
prestigious audience at the Royal Institution, presented his work in the
vernacular. Amp`ere across the Channel, speaking as he did to his colleagues at
the Acad´emie des Sciences, spoke the language of mathematics. Faraday was in
any case deeply suspicious of any efforts to express natural philosophy in
abstract mathematical terms. This was a common view among British experimenters,
who argued that the abstract manipulations of algebraists led the natural
philosopher too far away from the phenomena they were meant to be studying.
French experimenters tended to take the opposite view, arguing on the contrary
that mathematics provided a language of precision that allowed for clear and
unambiguous descriptions of real phenomena. What underpinned both languages,
however, was an increasing array of experiments and instruments designed to make
electricity visible. The Technology of Display While electricity had provided
natural philosophers with a source of spectacular demonstrations of nature’s
powers since the eighteenth century, Volta’s invention of the battery and
Oersted’s demonstrations of the link between electricity and magnetism provided
experimenters with the raw materials for a whole range of new technologies. Ways
of rendering the electric fluid visible on a grand scale proliferated during the
first half of the nineteenth century. There was more to this quest for striking
displays of the forces of nature than simply a desire to put on a good show,
though as many experimenters were dependent on income earned from lectures for
their living this was certainly a consideration. The arrays of batteries,
electromagnets, galvanometers, induction coils, magneto-electric machines, and
voltameters that made up the technology of display in a
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very real sense constituted the electrical world as well. They provided models
for the operations of natural systems. The cosmos could quite literally be seen
as being composed of machines, analogous to the ones that electricians
demonstrated at lectures and exhibitions. A conducting sphere rotating around a
magnet by means of thermoelectricity, for example, was “obviously analogous to
the natural state of the earth”2 and explained its rotation as the result of the
difference in temperature between the equator and the poles. This perception
also had an important role to play in sustaining electricians’ authority as
interpreters of the natural world. By demonstrating their skills in
constructing, manipulating, and controlling their instruments, they guaranteed
to their audiences their mastery over nature as well. One of the centerpieces of
the technology of display was the electromagnet, invented in 1824 by the English
electrician William Sturgeon. Sturgeon,—the author of the analysis of the
Earth’s rotation mentioned in chapter 3—earned a precarious living through
instrument making and lecturing. The electromagnet—a coil of copper wire wound
around a soft iron horseshoe—was one of a number of devices he submitted to the
Royal Society of Arts, for which he won a prize of thirty guineas and a silver
medal. The explicit aim in constructing this portable set of tabletop apparatus
was to find ways of making the electric fluid more visible as economically as
possible (figure 4.5). To this end, Sturgeon was looking for ways of maximizing
the effects produced with his apparatus without a concomitant increase in the
size of the source of power. In this process he found that by wrapping a wire
coil around a soft iron core, he could dramatically increase its magnetic power.
An added advantage of this new device was that the magnetic power could be
switched on and off instantaneously simply by connecting or disconnecting the
source of electricity. The new instrument could graphically demonstrate the
powers of electricity and magnetism and the demonstrator’s ingenuity by raising
and dropping large weights at will. Sturgeon’s electromagnet was a comparatively
small-scale device— literally a piece of tabletop equipment. In other hands,
however, the instrument became truly gigantic. The Dutch natural philosopher
Gerrit Moll found ways of significantly increasing the power of the
electromagnet by rearranging the ways in which the wire was coiled around the
arms of the magnet. Innovations introduced by the American experimenter Joseph
Henry massively increased the instrument’s power. Henry, 2
W. Sturgeon, “On Electro-Magnetism,” Philosophical Magazine, 1824, 64: 248.
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4.5 The electromagnetic table-top apparatus that William Sturgeon presented to
the Society of Arts in 1824. His electromagnet is shown in the top left-hand
corner.
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4.6 The massive electromagnet built by Joseph Henry for use in classroom
demonstrations at New Jersey College in Princeton.
professor of natural philosophy at the Albany Institute and later at New Jersey
College (now Princeton University) found that by packing the coils tightly and
varying both the length and thickness of the wire he could significantly augment
the magnet’s lifting power (figure 4.6). In his first experiments, Henry
succeeded in constructing electromagnets
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that could support between 20 and 40 pounds of weight. Within a few years,
however, his skills at electromagnet construction had developed to the extent
that he could construct instruments capable of supporting more than 600 pounds
using the electricity from a single voltaic pair. The electromagnet he
constructed for Yale College in 1831 could sustain 1,600 pounds. Like his
English counterpart Sturgeon, and for similar reasons, Henry was concerned to
maximize the power of his instruments for the minimum outlay in terms of battery
power. The production of economical and effective batteries was a perennial
concern for early nineteenth-century electrical experimenters. Volta’s original
design of a pile of zinc and copper discs provided only a comparatively feeble
current and was soon superseded. Volta himself developed an alternative
design—the couronne des tasses—in which plates of zinc and copper were placed in
cups of acid. Early English battery designers such as William Cruickshank and
William Nicholson favored a trough design. A long wooden trough was divided into
a number of partitions each containing a plate of zinc and copper. The metal
plates were connected and the trough filled with acid to produce a battery of
several elements or pairs of metals as required, allowing for the development of
a powerful current of electricity. Designers recognized that different kinds of
batteries were required for different purposes. An intensity battery consisted
of a number of pairs of small plates connected consecutively (in series, in
modern terminology). Quantity batteries, on the other hand, consisted of a
single large pair of plates. Intensity or quantity batteries were used according
to what kind of electrical effects were required for a particular demonstration
or experiment. Some of these batteries could be huge. William Pepys at the
London Institution, for example, in 1823 had constructed a quantity battery
consisting of two plates fifty feet long by two feet wide. A perennial problem
with early battery designs was their constancy. The current in a basic voltaic
cell tended to decrease rapidly with time as polarization effects built up. As a
result, effective displays of battery power could be carried out only with
freshly charged apparatus and could not be sustained for lengthy periods of
time. Much effort was devoted to solving this difficulty. In 1836, John Frederic
Daniell, professor of chemistry at King’s College London, designed the first
constant battery. A few years later, in 1839, William Robert Grove, soon to be
appointed professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution,
designed a more powerful cell using nitric acid and platinum plates instead of
copper. Robert von Bunsen in Germany soon produced his own version of the
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Grove cell, using cheap carbon rods instead of the more expensive platinum. This
underlines the importance of economy as well as constancy for instrument makers.
As John Shillibeer, an English battery designer, remarked, what was needed was a
battery that “requires but a little food, and with that little will perform a
good honest day’s work.”3 More than simply financial imperatives were at stake
in this concern with economy (though again, these mattered). Electrical
instruments were held to mirror the operations of nature. Since nature was held
to operate with due economy, so battery makers aimed at economy in their designs
as well. In order to convince others of the superiority of their battery
designs, experimenters needed reliable and generally recognized ways of
assessing battery power. One of the earliest instruments designed to this end
was the galvanometer, itself a comparatively straightforward application of
Oersted’s original needle experiment. In a simple galvanometer a magnetized
needle was suspended inside a coil of wire connected to a battery. The extent to
which the needle deviated was an indication of the battery power. The instrument
was first developed by Johann Schweigger, professor of chemistry at the
University of Halle, as a way of augmenting the Oersted effect, hence its
original designation as an “electromagnetic multiplier.” As we saw previously,
Faraday in the early 1830s suggested that the amount of gas given off by the
decomposing action of an electric current could provide a measure of the
quantity of electricity involved. Other experimenters proposed the length of
wire that could be rendered red-hot by a current; the length of a spark that
could be produced between the terminal wires; or the weight that could be
suspended from an electromagnet connected to a battery, as alternative measures
of a battery’s power. Typically, battery designers lauding their instrument’s
powers would employ a whole range of different methods of assessment. A crucial
question was what precisely these various methods and instruments should be
regarded as measuring. Faraday’s assertion that the amount of gas decomposed by
the passage of electricity could be taken as an absolute measure of the quantity
of electricity passing was subjected to scathing criticism by William Sturgeon.
Sturgeon pointed to the range of factors that could in practice affect the
decomposition process, such as the area submerged in the decomposing liquid or
the distance between the poles. He also denied that there was any such
straightforward correlation as Faraday had described between quantity of current
and 3
J. Shillibeer, “Description of a New Arrangement of the Voltaic Battery,” Annals
of Electricity, 1836–37, 1: 225.
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decomposition of gases. His main point was that no single method of assessment
should be taken as providing an absolute measure. Different methods provided
information about different things. Electromagnets or galvanometers provided
information about the magnetic powers of a battery, voltameters provided
information about the chemical powers, and so forth. In many ways the issue at
stake was what was being measured. While Faraday and others wanted “absolute”
measurements of electricity, Sturgeon and some of his fellow instrument makers
simply wanted ways of comparing the capacities of various kinds of batteries to
produce different kinds of effects. Their concern was simply to make electricity
visible to greatest effect. This was what mattered for public demonstration.
Rival instrument makers rapidly picked up on the potential of Faraday’s
experiments on electromagnetic induction as well for the cause of spectacular
public exhibition. Efforts were made to replicate his experiments even before
their publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, much
to Faraday’s dismay. The Italian experimenters Vincenzo Antinori and Leopoldo
Nobili published their own experiments on induction before the end of 1831,
directing their efforts in particular to broadening the range of visible
electrical effects that could be produced with the induced current. Faraday
himself soon designed an apparatus that allowed him to demonstrate the
production of an electric spark from the induced current to his Royal
Institution lecture audiences. In Paris, the prominent instrument maker
Hippolyte Pixii set about producing an instrument that could produce an extended
current rather than the short-lived bursts that Faraday had detected. Pixii’s
machine, in which a horseshoe electromagnet was rotated in front of the poles of
a horseshoe magnet, could be used to decompose water into its constituent gases,
for example—an effect that required a lasting current. Faraday’s transient
effect was in the process of being transformed into something robust, reliable,
and replicable. A similar effort to build a machine for generating a continuous
current by means of electromagnetic induction was produced in 1832 by the
American instrument maker Joseph Saxton, then working in London at the National
Gallery of Practical Science, Blending Instruction with Amusement, or the
Adelaide Gallery as it was popularly and understandably abbreviated. Saxton was
soon embroiled with Pixii in a priority dispute concerning their respective
inventions, which was only resolved by a public contest at the Adelaide Gallery
in which both the Pixii and the Saxton machines were put through their paces. It
was not long before yet another such machine, developed by the London instrument
maker
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Edward Clarke, was entered into contention. By the mid-1830s, machines such as
these were sufficiently reliable to produce the whole range of effects from an
induced current. Shocks, sparks, chemical decomposition, electromagnetism could
all be produced at the turn of a handle. Instrument makers learned that, just as
with electromagnets, the length and thickness of wire in the coil could be
varied to produce different effects to best advantage. Short, thick wires
produced quantity effects, while long, thin wires were best for intensity. The
priority disputes that surrounded each announcement of a new effect produced by
means of the induced current underlines the importance of the technology of
display to electricians’ culture. It mattered a great deal who could
legitimately claim the property rights to such productions. Another
electromagnetic apparatus developed during the mid-1830s to exploit the
potential for display of induced currents was the induction coil. Consisting of
two coils of wire, one placed inside the other, and both wound around a central
iron core with one coil connected via some switching mechanism to a battery, the
induction coil could be used to magnify the electrical effects that could be
produced from a comparatively small battery. The first such devices were
produced by the Irish priest and natural philosopher, Nicholas Callan, at the
Catholic seminary of St. Patrick’s College, in Maynooth near Dublin. Induction
coils in particular had the advantage of being comparatively small and easily
transportable. By the 1840s they were increasingly popular as means of
administering electricity for medical purposes. Such devices were commonly sold
with a clockwork ratchet or electromagnet attachment to accomplish the automatic
switching on and off of the battery current without the need for constant manual
intervention to ensure a continuous flow of electricity. From the 1850s onwards,
more powerful and larger induction coils, commonly called Ruhmkorff coils after
their inventor, ¨ the German Heinrich Ruhmkorff, were increasingly employed for
the ¨ production of large currents of electricity. They were particularly useful
for the production of large electric sparks for spectroscopic analysis and for
the study and display of electrical discharges through vacuum and low-density
gases. By the 1840s and 1850s instruments of all kinds to display and show off
electrical effects were ubiquitous. Devices like Barlow’s wheel or Marsh’s
pendulum, along with a whole range of other electrical paraphernalia, were to be
found in any philosophical instrument maker’s catalogue in the United States,
Britain, France, and the German states. Barlow’s wheel, invented by Peter
Barlow, the English mathematician and
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professor at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy, demonstrated electromagnetic
rotation by means of a copper disc suspended between the poles of a magnet. When
a current was passed along the radius of the disc it rotated. Marsh’s pendulum,
invented by James Marsh, a Woolwich instrument maker, worked on a similar
principle. In Amp`ere’s cylinder, an entire voltaic cell, cunningly mounted
around a central magnet, could be made to rotate on its own axis. These devices
were not meant exclusively for laboratory or even lecture theater use. They were
designed for a wider public consumption as well. Parlor game tricks involving
electricity had a long pedigree by the 1840s and 1850s. A favorite was the Venus
kiss, where a girl—suitably electrified and sitting on an insulated
stool—challenged her male admirers to kiss her. The result, of course, was
shocking. These philosophical toys, as they were commonly known, were additions
to a repertoire of electrical showmanship stretching well back into the
eighteenth century. Despite the apparent frivolity or ephemerality of some of
the electrical technology of display, its importance in understanding the
culture of electrical science at midcentury is clear. For many if not most
electricians, the business of designing and demonstrating instruments that could
be used to make electricity visible was constitutive of the science of
electricity. Quite simply, as practicing electricians this is what they spent
their time doing. By producing such instruments they were quite literally
reproducing nature. It is certainly the case that it was through devices and
instruments such as these that the mass of the public both in America and Europe
encountered and made sense of the science of electricity. As the case of the
induction coil and its descendant the Ruhmkorff coil ¨ illustrates very well,
the extensive electrical technology of display developed by midcentury also
constituted the direct ancestors—often very little changed—of later
nineteenth-century laboratory teaching apparatus. In many ways the age of
classical physics rested on a base provided by early nineteenth-century
electricians’ technology of display. Electricity for Sale As noted at the
beginning of this chapter, there was an intimate connection between electrical
exhibition and entrepreneurship. The technology of display could be and was
adapted to put electricity to work in a very real sense. An important part of
the rationale for the emphasis on making various machines designed to make
electricity visible was that the result was to demonstrate the economy of nature
as well. Hopeful inventors
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quickly picked up on the possibilities of putting nature’s economy to work for
their personal benefit also. Regardless of strictures from highminded gentlemen
of science who believed that any effort to turn science into profit was beneath
their dignity and the high standing of their vocation, inventors flocked to the
patent offices with a plethora of schemes to turn electrical gadgetry into hard
cash. The batteries, coils, electromagnets, and measuring instruments that
constituted the stock in trade of the electrician could be exploited to make
electrical science a serious commercial proposition. By midcentury, electricity
was being used to produce cheap luxury goods for the middle classes, to
communicate practically instantaneously over massive distances, to power
locomotives, and to illuminate city streets. Electrometallurgy was the first
successful commercial technology (or family of technologies) to be developed
from the electricians’ technology of display. In its simplest form, this was a
process whereby electricity was used to coat an artifact made from some
electrically conductive substance with a layer of more expensive or more durable
metal, usually silver. The technique was, in many ways, a by-product of efforts
during the 1830s to improve the performance of electrical batteries. In a
Daniell cell, in which the copper plate of the battery was submerged in a
solution of copper sulfate, it was noticed that the copper reduced from the
sulfate solution while the battery was active tended to coat the copper plate
and that in some circumstances it could be peeled off to produce a relief copy
of the plate to which it had adhered. The refinement of this process led to two
electrometallurgical technologies: electroplating and electrotyping. In
electroplating, a layer of more expensive metal could be coated onto a less
expensive metal, providing a way of mass producing luxury goods such as
silverware for the middle classes. In electrotyping, the layer of metal building
up on the plate would be removed to produce a relief image. This provided a
cheap way of mass reproducing images for printing, for example. Several
individuals laid claim to being the inventors of electrometallurgical processes.
Moritz Hermann von Jacobi in St. Petersburg claimed priority in invention of the
process he named “Galvanoplastik.” A Liverpool entrepreneur, Thomas Spencer,
claimed for himself the honor of having been the inventor of electrotyping. The
disputes surrounding the question of priority, in England in any case, were
particularly virulent. Spencer was accused of having stolen other people’s work.
Some went so far as to suggest that there was literally nothing to have
invented, since the whole technology was simply a spin-off from a
well-established
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and recognized side-effect of the action of constant electrical batteries. The
passions involved in these debates serve to underline, however, both the
importance and the sensitivity of such issues for contemporary electricians’
culture. Being able to claim priority in invention of a process such as this
could, in some circles at least, provide as much kudos as a claim to
philosophical discovery. This was a feature of practical electricians’ concerns
with the minutiae of technical processes. The first “strictly
electro-metallurgical patent” (as it was described by Alfred Smee in his history
of the process) was granted however, to a Birmingham merchant, James Shore, in
March 1840. Shortly afterwards the cousins George and Henry Elkington were
granted a patent for various electroplating processes. Within a decade,
electrometallurgy was big business. The basic technologies of electric
telegraphy also had their origins in the machines and instruments making up the
technology of display. The early English telegraph pioneer William Fothergill
Cooke was inspired to consider the possibilities of using electricity to
transmit signals across large distances in 1836, when he attended a lecture at
Heidelberg, where a device for displaying electrical effects over long wires,
invented by the Russian diplomat Pawel Schilling, was demonstrated. Like many
others, however, Cooke soon found that there was a big difference between
getting such a device to work on the small scale of a laboratory or lecture
theater and making it work in the outside world. He was soon collaborating with
the experimental philosopher Charles Wheatstone, professor of natural philosophy
at King’s College London, in an effort to turn his demonstration devices into a
robust and practical technology. Wheatstone had himself been working on the
possibilities of exploiting electricity for long-distance communication and had
been working on the problem of making electrical effects visible at a distance.
In particular, he was aware of Joseph Henry’s work on increasing the power of
electromagnets—a crucial part of telegraph technology. Henry had visited London
only recently on a European tour to acquire philosophical instruments for New
Jersey College and had demonstrated his experiments to Wheatstone in person. He
knew, therefore, of the importance of winding the coils on an electromagnet
properly to maximize their power. The key to Wheatstone’s success in making
telegraphy work over distances, however, was his knowledge of the German
experimenter and mathematician Georg Simon Ohm’s experiments. In 1827, Ohm, a
schoolteacher at the Jesuit Gymnasium at Koln, had published a num¨ ber of
experiments on the relationship between current strength and exciting force in
current-carrying wires. Ohm’s law established that
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current strength was equal to the exciting force divided by a constant he
designated “resistance.” Ohm’s work was not widely read at the time. It was not
published in English until 1841, for example. Wheatstone could read German,
however, and recognized that Ohm’s work was what he needed in order to
understand the problems of transmitting electricity over long distances, as
required to build a successful telegraph. It was through telegraphy that the new
electrical terminology of currents, potential differences, and resistances came
to replace the older terminology of quantities and intensities, though many
electricians, like Michael Faraday, strenuously resisted the newfangled
concepts. When Wheatstone became embroiled in a series of disputes with his
erstwhile collaborator Cooke over their respective roles in inventing the
electrical telegraph, it was to his understanding of Ohm’s work that he pointed
to demonstrate the privileged knowledge that made the telegraph possible. In the
meantime, however, Wheatstone and Cooke acquired an English patent for their
electric telegraph in June 1837. In the United States, Samuel F. B. Morse was
also working on the possibility of transmitting messages over long distances by
means of electricity. Like Cooke, he had stumbled on the idea after encountering
examples of electrical demonstration devices during a trip to Europe. In his own
famous words: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of
the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted
instantaneously by electricity.”4 In many ways, this notion of exhibition at a
distance was exactly what telegraphy was about and underlines its dependence on
the technology of display. Like Wheatstone and Cooke, Morse too found himself in
difficulties over the problem of how to get electrical effects to work through
long wires. Again, Joseph Henry’s work on electromagnets proved to be the key to
making this version of the telegraph work. The basic principle of the telegraph
was quite straightforward. All that was required was a source of electricity
(like a battery), a circuit breaker of some kind to enable specific signals to
be sent, and a way of making the signal visible. Making such apparatus work,
however, required skill, ingenuity, and a detailed knowledge of the ways
electrical instruments worked in practice as well as entrepreneurial acumen. In
1840, Morse and his backers were awarded a grant of $30,000 by the U.S. Congress
to build a test line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Morse’s success in
America, along with Wheatstone’s and Cooke’s in Britain, made the telegraph a
reality. 4
E. L. Morse, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals (New York, 1914), 2:
6.
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A few years after Morse’s deployment of an electric telegraph on the
Washington-to-Baltimore line, the U.S. Congress awarded a substantial grant
($50,000 in this case) to another electrical project. Charles Grafton Page, a
Harvard graduate and official at the U.S. Patent Office, had put forward to
Congress a proposal to build and test an electric locomotive. Like the
telegraph, early electromagnetic engines had their roots firmly in the
technology of display. The first motors had their origins in William Sturgeon’s
electromagnet. The electromagnet’s capacity to rapidly switch its magnetic power
on and off raised the possibility of producing a motive force by means of
electricity. A number of electricians and instrument makers constructed
different kinds of electromagnetic motors during the 1830s. Joseph Henry in the
United States developed two kinds of motors—rotatory and reciprocating—for use
in classroom demonstrations. Francis Watkins, a London instrument maker, had
electromagnetic motors of his own design on sale from the mid-1830s onwards.
William Sturgeon also developed his own version of the engine, as did William
Ritchie, professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution. A good
example of the ways in which the possibilities of electrical locomotion could
enthuse inventors is the case of Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith. By his
own account, Davenport was completely untaught in electricity until he came
across one of Joseph Henry’s electromagnets during a visit to some iron works in
Crown Point, New York. Excited by the possibilities of electromagnets for
producing motive power, he set about learning all he could about the science and
practice of electricity and was soon constructing massive electromagnets of his
own. According to a possibly apocryphal account, being short of funds he used
silk from his wife’s wedding gown as insulation for the wires (Henry was also
reported to have used his wife’s silk underwear as a source of insulating
material for his early electromagnets). By the mid-1830s he was touring the
eastern seaboard of the United States exhibiting a rotatory electromagnetic
engine and attempting to acquire funds to purchase a patent, which he eventually
did in 1837. Settling in New York, he financed his inventive activities by
exhibiting his engine to presumably less than enthusiastic crowds before
returning penniless to Vermont in 1842. In Russia in the meantime, an
electromagnetic engine was famously put on show by Jacobi, who succeeded in
propelling a boat along the River Neva by means of its powers. Inventors and
pundits alike were optimistic that transforming relatively small engines like
those of Davenport or Jacobi into something capable of performing useful work on
a truly commercial level was
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simply a matter of scale. Making an economically viable engine was simply a
matter of bigger electromagnets. Commentators were hopeful that “half a barrel
of blue vitriol, and a hogshead or two of water, would send a ship from New York
to Liverpool.”5 A systematic effort to investigate this potential was soon
carried out by James Prescott Joule by means of detailed experiments aimed at
assessing the “duty” of electromagnetic engines—“duty” being an engineering term
for the amount of work done for a given quantity of fuel consumed. Joule soon
came to the pessimistic conclusion that electromagnetic engines could never
outperform those powered by steam and expanded his researches to embrace the
study of engine efficiency more generally. Joule’s pessimism had little
immediate effect, however. In 1842 Robert Davidson, an instrument maker from
Glasgow, was carrying out experiments financed by the Edinburgh and Glasgow
Railway Company on electric locomotion. Charles Grafton Page in the United
States was using his congressional funding to good effect to build an electrical
locomotive. While most electrical patents entered during the 1840s concerned
electrometallurgy and telegraphy, an increasing number detailed improvements in
ways of providing illumination. Edward Staite in England applied for a number of
patents covering his electric arc light, which used the spark between two points
of charcoal as the source of light. Like many such entrepreneurs, Staite was a
consummate publicist of his new inventions. In 1848 he held a grand exhibition
in Trafalgar Square in London, in which his latest light was put into action so
impressively that “the Nelson column, which was selected as the principal point,
[was] frequently as conspicuous as noonday.”6 In 1849, there was even a new
ballet, Electra, performed in London and specifically commissioned to show off
the brilliance of Staite’s electric arc light (figure 4.7). From the 1850s
onwards, arc lights like the ones developed by Staite were an increasingly
common feature of theatrical performances. The new lights were striking in their
verisimilitude. When the French engineers Lacassagne and Thiers put their arc
lighting system on show in Lyon, pundits marveled at the light, which was “so
strong that ladies opened up their umbrellas—not as a tribute to the inventors,
but in order to protect themselves from the rays of this mysterious new sun.”7
Requiring high-intensity currents as they did, arc lights also provided a
commercial use for induction coils that 5
Mechanic’s Magazine, 1837, 27: 405. Patent Journal, 1849, 6: 80. 7 Quoted in W.
Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 55. 6
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4.7 The ballet Electra at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1849. With electric
lights.
could be used to give high intensity from comparatively small electric
batteries. Enthusiasm concerning the economic possibilities of electricity was
rife from the 1840s onwards. The success of telegraphy in particular seemed to
augur well for future developments. Alfred Smee enthused that “to cross the
seas, to traverse the roads, and to work machinery by galvanism, or rather
electro-magnetism, will certainly, if executed be the most noble achievement
ever performed by man.”8 William Robert Grove, in his inaugural lecture at the
London Institution, itself established to promote the alliance of science and
commerce, similarly hailed the power of electricity: “Had it been prophesised at
the close of the last century that, by the aid of an invisible, intangible,
imponderable agent, man would in the space of forty years, be able to resolve
into their elements the most refractory compounds, to fuse the most intractable
metals, to propel the vessel or the carriage, to imitate without manual labour
the most costly fabrics, and, in the communication of ideas, almost to
annihilate time and space;—the prophet, Cassandra-like, would have been 8
Quoted in I. R. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 184.
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laughed to scorn.”9 Even before midcentury, electricity’s past seemed to bode
very well indeed for future triumphs of man’s powers over nature. It seemed to
be only a matter of time before electricity not only provided the key to
unlocking nature’s secrets, but established itself as the ultimate source of
continuing economic power and progress as well. Science on Show Electricity’s
technology of display and the culture of entrepreneurship literally shared the
same cultural space in the Victorian era’s exhibition halls and galleries. From
the 1830s onwards, a number of galleries of practical science appeared in London
and in some provincial cities. These were places where the Victorian public
could go to see the latest developments in science and the arts, displayed for
their edification. Shows and exhibitions of various kinds were staples of
Victorian popular culture. The metropolitan public could sample a whole range of
enlightening entertainment. Magic lantern shows provided glimpses of natural and
manmade curiosities of various kinds. Dioramas and panoramas transported the
paying customer to exotic and historic times and places. One of the specialties
of London’s Regent’s Park Colosseum, for example, was a huge panorama of the
city, viewed as it would be seen from the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral. A range
of exhibition halls catered for a wide variety of tastes and interests.
Exhibitions of scientific and technological artifacts and processes took their
place in this context. They were aimed at the kind of clientele that attended
other forms of exhibition. In cities such as London, Paris, and Philadelphia,
natural philosophical entertainments were part of metropolitan life. Electricity
played a key role in many of these exhibitions. As the century progressed and
national and international exhibitions proliferated, electricity continued to be
crucial. Exhibitions were crucial for electricity as well. They were where, for
most of the century, the public went to see and admire electricity in action.
Electrical entertainments came in all kinds of guises. They could be quite
formal and elite occasions such as the Friday evening discourses at the Royal
Institution in London, presided over by Michael Faraday. At these affairs,
prominent men of science would be invited to demonstrate the latest discovery,
invention, or curiosity to an audience largely composed of the cream of London
society and the metropolis’s scientific elite. Faraday himself was a frequent
and popular performer, demonstrating 9
W. R. Grove, On the Progress of the Physical Sciences (London, 1842), 24.
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the latest of his electrical discoveries. Less formal, but almost as
prestigious, were the occasional gatherings organized by John Peter Gassiot, a
wealthy wine merchant, enthusiastic electrician, and treasurer of the London
Electrical Society. When notable foreign natural philosophers visited, such as
Auguste de la Rive in 1843, Gassiot hosted “electrical soirees,” where the
latest and most spectacular electrical experiments were on show. Such events
were in some ways extensions of the longstanding tradition of performing crucial
experiments before prominent witnesses so that their authoritative presence
could underwrite the experiment’s credibility. Events such as these, however,
were at the higher end of the social spectrum. Most of the public witnessed
electricity in less exalted company. The National Gallery of Practical Science,
Blending Instruction with Amusement, known simply as the Adelaide Gallery, was
established between Adelaide Street and Lowther Arcade on the Strand in London
in 1832. Its founder, Jacob Perkins, was an American inventor and entrepreneur
who had settled in London a decade or so previously. A native of Philadelphia,
Perkins was familiar with Peale’s Museum of Natural Science and Art, founded by
Charles Willson Peale as a repository for natural historical and philosophical
curiosities of all kinds. Perkins may well have had Peale’s Museum in mind when
he set about founding his own gallery, initially designed to showcase his own
inventions but soon expanded to encompass the arts and sciences generally.
Electricity was an important feature of the gallery’s exhibitions. Perkins had
hired Joseph Saxton, another recent Philadelphian arrival in London, as the
gallery’s instrument maker. Saxton’s time was largely devoted to electrical
matters, such as the magneto-electric apparatus discussed earlier in this
chapter. The gallery as a whole was famous as a place where there “were artful
snares laid for giving galvanic shocks to the unwary,”10 including, according to
one possibly apocryphal tale, the duke of Wellington. The Adelaide Gallery soon
had a competitor in the Royal Polytechnic Institute, which opened its doors on
Regent Street in 1836. Similarly designed to attract the paying public through
exhibitions of the latest in invention, one of the polytechnic’s star
attractions from the early 1840s onwards was a custom-built Armstrong
hydro-electric machine. These devices, invented by the industrialist W. G.
Armstrong, exploited the capacity of steam released from a high-pressure boiler
to produce static 10
146.
Quoted in W. H. Armytage, A Social History of Engineering (London: Faber &
Faber, 1961),
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electricity. The polytechnic’s machine could produce electric sparks a
spectacular twenty-two inches in length. By the 1850s, London had another
commercial exhibition hall for the arts and sciences in the Royal Panopticon of
Arts and Sciences on Leicester Square. Its proprietor was Edward Clarke,
previously a philosophical instrument maker and himself a prolific inventor of
magneto-electric gadgetry during the 1830s. In the provinces, the Royal Victoria
Gallery for the Encouragement and Illustration of Practical Science (usually
called simply the Royal Victoria Gallery) was established in Manchester in the
late 1830s. William Sturgeon was hired as superintendent and experimented there
with, among others, the young James Prescott Joule. As the example of the
inventor Thomas Davenport suggests, such exhibitions were increasingly common in
the United States as well. Exhibitions such as these in which the paying public
(the usual fee in London was one shilling) came to ponder natural philosophical
curiosities in the same space in which they could witness the latest invention
or industrial product had a very important effect on the way in which sciences
such as electricity and its products were made sense of. To a very large degree,
these were the places where the broader public encountered electricity as well
as other scientific artifacts and devices. The context in which they saw science
in action, therefore, was one in which commodities were on show. The machinery
on show at exhibition halls such as the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal
Polytechnic Institute were commodities to be bought and sold. They were not for
sale at the exhibitions, but the purpose for which their inventors or owners had
put them on show there was straightforwardly commercial. They were there to be
advertised, to attract potential buyers and customers. This, therefore, was the
context for electricity at the exhibitions as well. This was clearly the case
for the electric telegraphs, the products of electrometallurgy, and the
prototype electromagnetic engines that went on show from the 1840s onwards. It
mattered for other, less avowedly commercial, electrical productions as well.
Electricity at the exhibition was being turned into a commodity itself, just
like the objects surrounding it. Nineteenth-century exhibition culture in many
ways reached its zenith with the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
all Nations, held at the Crystal Palace (especially designed for the occasion by
Joseph Paxton) in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. The Great Exhibition had its
precursors, notably in France, where a series of national exhibitions took place
regularly in Paris between 1798 and 1849. The original impetus for organizing
the Great Exhibition came from the Royal Society of Arts,
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which had itself been organizing small exhibitions of arts and industry for
several years. Under the patronage of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband,
the aim was to exhibit on a grand scale the industrial progress of mankind. The
exhibition was going to provide a visual instantiation of the grand principle of
the division of labor and provide an impetus to international competition and
commerce. The exhibition was also designed to instantiate the relationship
between science, industry, and art. As Prince Albert put it, “Science discovers
these laws of power, motion, and transformation; industry applies them to the
raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable
only by knowledge. Art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and
gives to our productions forms in accordance with them.”11 Electricity was well
represented at the Great Exhibition. Electric telegraphs of various kinds were
among the more common electrical exhibits. Albert himself had drawn attention to
the way in which in the new progressive era, “thought is communicated with the
rapidity, and even the power, of lightning.”12 Queen Victoria was also duly
impressed by the powers of the telegraph, noting in her diary after a visit to
the Crystal Palace that “it is the most wonderful thing . . . Messages were sent
out to Manchester, Edinburgh &c., and answers received in a few seconds— truly
marvellous!”13 Also on show were a spectacular array of examples of the
electroplater’s art, mainly supplied by Elkingtons. Various examples of
electromagnetic motors were also on show, notably a new design by the Danish
inventor Soren Hjorth, who was awarded a prize for his exhibit. There was an
electromagnet constructed by James Prescott Joule on show as well, capable of
supporting a weight of more than a ton. Edward Staite had examples of his
electric arc lights on show. One of the more visible and spectacular electrical
exhibits was Charles Shepherd’s electric clock, which was prominently displayed
in the Great Transept of the Crystal Palace. The main clock was 1.5 meters in
diameter and kept time in synchronism with two others placed elsewhere in the
building, all powered by a battery of Smee voltaic cells. Voltaic batteries of
various kinds were also on display. The Great Exhibition’s success inaugurated a
new era of increasingly spectacular international exhibitions throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century. Cities and nation-states vied to provide
the most 11
Quoted in R. Brain, Going to the Fair, 24. Quoted ibid., 24. 13 Quoted in K.
Beauchamp, Exhibiting Electricity, 84. 12
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successful performance. The scale that such exhibitions aimed at is illustrated
by the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, whose site at the Champ de Mars
covered forty-one acres. The exhibition’s main building, the Palais du Champ de
Mars, was designed by Gustave Eiffel, who later in the century was to design the
Eiffel Tower as part of another Parisian international exhibition. Cyrus Field
was awarded a grand prize for his work on the recently completed transatlantic
telegraph cable, parts of which were on show. The Vienna International
Exhibition of 1873 staged a massive public demonstration of the motive power of
electricity. The Palace of Industry featured machines by the Gramme company,
generating electricity, powering machine tools, and lifting water. At the Berlin
International Exhibition of 1879 the exhibits included a Siemens & Halske
electric traction locomotive that could carry eighteen passengers around 300
meters of narrow-gauge circular track. More than 100,000 passengers took the
trip around the track during the exhibition. Electricity was particularly
visible in the increasing number of American exhibitions held during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of
1876 featured a number of telegraphs on display as well as a repeat by the
Gramme company of its Vienna display. The highlight, however, was the first
display of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which won a prize at the
exhibition. By the time of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893
truly spectacular electrical displays were increasingly a staple of such events.
The Electricity Building was lit by 120,000 electric lights (figure 4.8).
Visitors could travel from building to building around the site by electric
railway. Edison and the Westinghouse Company battled fiercely for the privilege
of providing the power plant to drive the exhibition’s electrical exhibits. At
the California Midwinter International Exposition in San Fransisco’s Golden Gate
Park a year later, a copy of the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the French
exposition of 1889, was constructed. Unlike the original however, this tower
featured some 3,200 colored electric lights as well as a powerful searchlight
mounted on top. Being seen at the exhibitions was becoming increasingly vital
for budding electrical entrepreneurs and inventors. These were the places where
electricity encountered its publics. By the end of the nineteenth century,
exhibitions like these were, therefore, crucial forums for electricians and
their publics alike. The fight between Edison and Westinghouse (which
Westinghouse won) for the honor of electrifying the Columbian Exposition is a
good illustration of the extent to which fin de si`ecle electrical concerns
valued the opportunity such events afforded them of putting their wares before
the public.
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4.8 The spectacular central display in the Electrical Building at the World
Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Exhibitions, however, were important for electricity and electricians for
reasons beyond the opportunity they afforded inventors and public to display and
admire electrical commodities. By providing a showcase for electricity they
provided a showcase for electricians as well. Prominent men of science such as
Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz acted as
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jurors on such occasions, highlighting their role as arbiters of progress for
late Victorian industrial culture. Electrical experimenters such as James Clerk
Maxwell used the exhibitions to survey the latest available equipment for their
laboratories. International exhibitions were also occasions for international
congresses of scientists. At the Columbian Exposition in 1893, the International
Electrical Congress took place as well. They completed the work begun at the
previous congress in Paris in 1881 (itself also associated with an electrical
exhibition) of establishing secure standards for electrical measurements. Late
nineteenth-century inventor-entrepreneurs often represented themselves as
flamboyant characters. In many ways showmanship seems to have been part and
parcel of the business of electrical invention. A good example is Nikola Tesla,
the Serbian immigrant to the United States who made a particular name for
himself as an inventor and showman. Tesla’s public lectures were a byword for
dramatic display. His high-potential, high-frequency electrical apparatus could
produce a whole array of spectacular lights and amazing sparks and effects of
all kinds (figure 4.9). The highlight of Tesla’s performances was when he placed
himself in the circuit of his electricity-generating equipment, holding
illuminated
4.9 Nikola Tesla showing off with one of his gargantuan high-frequency,
high-potential induction coils.
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lightbulbs in his hands and passing sparks between his fingers. Literally making
himself a part of his invention was ideally calculated to demonstrate his own
mastery over it. The French physicist Ars`ene d’Arsonval, like Tesla known for
his researches into electrical effects at high potentials and frequencies, gave
demonstrations in which he made himself part of his experimental apparatus as
well. Other electrical inventors such as Thomas Edison in the United States and
Sebastian di Ferranti in England similarly fashioned themselves through
exhibition. Edison was certainly very conscious of the role his image as the
“wizard of Menlo Park” played in bolstering his status as inventor. In a way,
electrical inventors were putting themselves as well as their inventions on
show. From the galleries of practical science of the early Victorian years
through to the massive and flamboyant international exhibitions of the
nineteenth century’s closing years, exhibitions were crucial for the science of
electricity and for electricians themselves. These were preeminently the places
were electricians (and a whole range of other men of science) placed themselves
and their productions before the public. Exhibition throughout the century had a
central role to play in defining electricity’s place in culture. Not only did
the electrician William Sturgeon lecture at the Adelaide Gallery and later the
Royal Victoria Gallery in Manchester, but his instruments and inventions were on
show there as well. The same could be said of Edison’s, Tesla’s, and even Lord
Kelvin’s appearances at international exhibitions in the 1880s and 1890s.
Electricity as a science and as a string of ever more spectacular inventions was
made sense of by the public—placed in context—in terms of the places where it
appeared. In the nineteenth century that place was the exhibition. The
Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review editorialized in 1892 that “[i]t would
be interesting if we could know how the future historian will deal with an
institution which is peculiar to the nineteenth century. Commencing with the
second half of the century, we have had International, General and Special
Exhibitions of all kinds. Bazaars and marts are old enough, but an exhibition,
though allied to both, is neither one nor the other, and no preceding
institution will be found to exactly compare with it.”14 Conclusion The science
of electricity underwent a massive transformation during the first half of the
nineteenth century. As new ways of producing electricity 14
Telegraphic Journal, 1892, 30: 120.
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proliferated, there were more and more places where electricity and its products
could be encountered. Novel electrical technologies, experiments, and
instruments made up a new world to be explored and articulated. New sources of
electricity raised questions about the identity of electricity, for example. Was
the electricity generated by a voltaic battery or an electromagnetic machine the
same as that derived from a static electricity generator? In particular,
electricity provided new terrain for experimenters anxious to make their
reputations. Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday in England, Hans Christian Oersted
in Denmark, and Andr´e-Marie Amp`ere in France, to cite only a few examples,
forged careers and names for themselves as natural philosophers by means of
electrical experiments. Thus, they were instrumental in forging meanings for
electricity as well. The new science produced through electricity was contested
territory. Electricity was a fluid, it was a force; it was evidence for the
unity of nature, it was just one more imponderable power; it was the product of
practical experiment, it was the product of abstract mathematical reasoning.
Whatever electricity was, all the nineteenth-century protagonists agreed that it
was well worth fighting for. Nineteenth-century commentators were certainly
aware of the central role exhibitions played in the century’s public life. The
Telegraphic Journal concluded its discussion of exhibitions with the observation
that “the institution existed in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
because it was one suited to the requirements of the period.”15 Exhibitions
provided a way of bringing science, scientists, and scientific productions
inside public culture. In many ways they were expressions of late Victorians’
confidence in their capacity to transform nature and culture through technology.
Electricity was key in these temples to progress. In many ways it was the
absence of a good account of what electricity really was that made it so
attractive. In a joke making the rounds at the time, a college professor asked a
student what electricity was: “The student hesitated, and tried to think of an
answer, but in vain, it was no use. He could not recall it, but in self-defence
said, ‘I did know, but have forgotten.’ The professor replied, ‘This is
terrible. The only man who knew what electricity was has forgotten!’”16 It was
this mysterious quality that made electricity so amenable as a conduit for
progress. Its effects could be put on show in spectacular fashion despite the
uncertainty surrounding their
15 16
Ibid. Telegraphic Journal, 1886, 18: 281.
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origins. Seeing electricity at work made tangible the prospects of future power
when its secrets finally were revealed. In many ways exhibitionism became more
culturally acceptable as the nineteenth century went on. In the first decades of
the century, while showmanship was certainly central to the natural
philosopher’s activities—take the careers of Humphry Davy or Michael Faraday as
examples—that showmanship was restricted to a particular context. There was a
big difference between dazzling audiences with spectacular science in the
genteel setting of the Royal Institution on the one hand and pulling in the
crowds at the Adelaide Gallery on the other. By the end of the century however,
few eyebrows would have been raised by Lord Kelvin’s activities as a juror at
International Exhibitions. Science had ceased to be a gentlemanly vocation and
become a hard-nosed profession. Science and electricity at these massive fin de
si`ecle scientific gatherings were weapons in the cause of imperialist
expansion. Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace onwards were the occasion for a
great deal of rhetoric concerning their role in establishing international
harmony, mutual understanding, and peaceful commerce. In reality, however, their
internationalism had a hard competitive edge. These were occasions for the
ostentatious display of commercial, technological, and scientific supremacy. The
heated discussions between German and British delegates at the 1881
International Electrical Congress organized at the Paris Exhibition that year
concerning the introduction of absolute standards of measurement in electricity
are—as we shall see in the final chapter—a good indication of the extent to
which that national competitiveness could be found at the very core of
scientific culture. Electricity’s very visibility and the way in which it
increasingly permeated Victorian culture made its disciplining increasingly
crucial.
5 The Science of Work
As the nineteenth century progressed, the concept of work was becoming a focus
of attention to an unprecedented degree. More than an occupation, a means of
earning a living, or even an indicator of social status, work was increasingly
regarded as a moral imperative as much as a physical necessity. Work was treated
as a measure of a person’s moral worth in just the same way as it was an
indicator of an individual’s economic value. The key to this in many ways was of
course the Industrial Revolution. Massive transformations were taking place in
the organization of labour in factories and workplaces. New machines and
processes were deskilling workers, introducing new categories of labor, and
changing perceptions of what it meant to work. Andrew Ure, the Scottish chemist
and enthusiast for the new factory system—“the Pindar of the automatic
factory,”1 as Karl Marx called him—remarked gleefully that the very meaning of
the word “manufactory” (later shortened to the now-familiar “factory”) had been
turned on its head by the progress of industry: “The term Manufacture, in its
original signification, undoubtedly means a work performed by hand; whereas at
present it almost signifies a work performed without hands.”2 The machine seemed
to be taking over in the world of work. The new 1 2
K. Marx, Capital (1867; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 544. A.
Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835), 1.
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5.1 James Watt’s steam engine. Trying to understand the relationship between
heat and motion in engines such as this would play an important role in the
development of nineteenth-century thermodynamics.
science of political economy, drawing largely on Adam Smith’s hugely influential
Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, sought to make sense of these
transformations and particularly of the new role machinery seemed to be taking
on at the center of production. The focus of attention was the steam engine,
hailed as an unparalleled new source of productive power. The hero of steam was
the Scotsman James Watt (figure 5.1). He was not, of course, the actual inventor
of the steam engine. Inventors such as Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen had
already applied the power of steam to practical use, using their engines to pump
water out of mines. Watt was celebrated, however, for the improvements he had
carried out on the steam engine, significantly increasing its efficiency with
his invention of the separate condenser. He was the archetypal self-made man to
be admired for the way in which he had put his own ingenuity and knowledge to
work. Originally a Glasgow instrument maker in the 1760s, he was seen as having
put his links to natural philosophers and chemists such as Joseph Black and
William Cullen, both experts on the science of heat, to
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good use. The rapid expansion in use of the steam engine following Watt’s
innovations drew increasing philosophical interest in its workings. Men of
science eager to demonstrate the practical utility of their vocations speculated
on its operations. The science of heat increasingly became the focus of intense
philosophical concern. Some natural philosophers argued that heat was an
imponderable fluid like light or electricity. It was the presence or absence of
this fluid—called “caloric”—that made a body hot or cold. Others suggested that
heat should be regarded as vibrations in the particles that made up a body. The
more motion was imparted to these particles, the hotter the body appeared to be.
The steam engine was widely recognized as having played a major role in bringing
about Great Britain’s industrial supremacy by the end of the eighteenth century.
To Britain’s enemies and industrial rivals, conquering the steam engine seemed
the key to conquering the nation as well. Revolutionary France, in particular,
regarded the systematic application of science to industry as being as much a
prerequisite of supremacy as was the valor of its soldiers. One product of the
Revolution in France was the systematic training of engineers and men of
science. The pres´ tigious Ecole Polytechnique was devoted to producing cadres
of trained men able to put their scientific and technical skills at the service
of the state. Even following Napoleon’s defeat this focus on scientific
education continued. Sadi Carnot, the son of a hero of the revolutionary wars
and a pioneer of the new science of work, was a direct product of this kind of
training. His work combined political economy and scientific acumen to produce a
new theory of the working of the steam engine and the best means to increase its
efficiency and place it at the service of France. Efficiency was the goal for a
new generation of English and Scottish natural philosophers as well. Men such as
James Prescott Joule in Manchester and the Thomson brothers, James and William,
in Glasgow came from heavily industrial backgrounds. Their scientific values,
like their moral and religious values, were the products of booming commercial
cities where a premium was placed on hard work and an eye for making the most
from every shilling. In scientific terms that meant finding and defining the
conditions under which engines of all kinds worked best— how to maximize their
outputs for a minimum outlay in terms of fuel and labor. Natural philosophers
from hardheaded industrial backgrounds wanted to know how to minimize waste in
nature as well as the factory. The new science of heat—thermodynamics—forged out
of British industrial culture during the 1840s and 1850s was not just about
understanding the steam engine, which was increasingly regarded as the model for
the
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way in which nature worked. William Thomson, knighted and eventually elevated to
the peerage for his services to industry, used Carnot’s theories and Joule’s
experiments to make the science of thermodynamics the exemplar of a whole new
way of doing physics. Thermodynamics could demonstrate how the Universe would
end in heat death. It could also be used to pour scorn on the claims of
geologists and evolutionary theorists concerning the development of life on
earth. New ways of doing physics were emerging in the German lands as well.
German natural philosophers of the 1840s were turning their backs on the
speculative Naturphilosophie of the previous generation. German science as it
stood at the end of the eighteenth century and the first few decades of the
nineteenth was widely regarded as having become bogged down in metaphysics and
rampant, unsupported speculation. A new generation of Young Turks aimed to
revitalize German science and make their own careers at the same time, by
refounding their disciplines on a secure foundation of empiricism, materialism,
and rationalism. New scientific institutions proliferated along with new
opportunities to promulgate new visions of nature and the best ways of
uncovering its secrets. This was an atmosphere in which ambitious young men of
science such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Rudolf Clausius could put forward
grand new generalizations founded on a new vogue for careful experimentation.
The new generation of German men of physics prided themselves that however
grandiose their theories, they were carefully grounded in sober reality. Like
their French, English, and Scottish counterparts, they sought to take the steam
engine and turn it into a model of the universe. The dynamical theory of heat as
it was developed during the course of the nineteenth century posited a central
role to the man of science in the development of Victorian culture. Scientific
culture, according to the vision both of nature and society put forward by the
pioneers of this new science, was industrial culture as well. The steam engine
and its offshoots provided the force that powered Victorian society. According
to the confident and hard-nosed natural philosophers who espoused the new
physics of work, something very much like it provided the powerhouse on which
the cosmos ran as well. The universe operated on the same principles as those
that governed, or at the very least ought to govern, the well-regulated
Victorian factory. Such a synthesis placed the physicist at the center of the
action. He understood the dynamics of nature and of society and could therefore
be trusted to oversee their operations. Across Europe and America during the
nineteenth century, as men of science sought to forge careers for themselves and
a secure cultural niche for the
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disciplines they were in the process of constructing, this strategy was played
out over and over again. Constructing the science of work was part of the
process of constructing the Victorian physicist in relation to his culture.
Engineering France Even before the French Revolution, engineering education was
already playing an increasingly important role in the thinking of French state
officials, particularly in the military. Following the upheavals of the last two
decades of the eighteenth century, major reforms took place within the French
educational system, just as they did in French society more generally. These
educational reforms were implemented with a view to putting in place a highly
centralized regime of education, designed to produce highly technically
proficient military officers fit to serve in the modern “grande arm´ee.” The
centerpiece of this new technical educa´ tional system was the Ecole
Polytechnique. Potential members of the officer class were trained there in the
latest developments in science as an essential element in acquiring the
knowledge necessary to engage in modern warfare. Graduates of the e´ cole, as
well as being trained for the military, were prepared for a wide range of public
services. Under the leadership of revolutionary pioneers such as Gaspard Monge,
the e´ cole was conceived as an institution devoted to the widest possible
dissemination of technical knowledge. Knowledge gained there could be put to
work in improving the state of French industry, much as it might be employed to
build bridges or improve military ballistics. One figure in particular provides
an ideal example of the close links in France during this period between
revolutionary politics, the military, and industrial organization. Lazare
Carnot—a member of the Committee of Public Safety under that architect of the
Terror, Robespierre—was a hero of the Revolution; he later became one of the
most prominent of Napoleon’s generals. Carnot was deeply engaged in technical
matters as ´ well. He was one of the leading figures behind the Ecole
Polytechnique. He played a crucial role in efforts to introduce the division of
labor and new machinery into French industry during the closing years of the
eighteenth century. The aim was quite explicit. Revolutionary France badly
needed large quantities of armaments to fight a war on several fronts. At the
same time, contemporary commentators were well aware of the military advantages
Britain gained from its expanding industries. Exporting the Revolution was going
to mean importing British industrial
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technologies such as the steam engine and new means of organizing the workforce.
Carnot was an engineer and a savant in his own right as well. His Essai sur les
Machines en General of 1783 and Principes Fondementaux de l’Equilibre et du
Mouvement of 1803 offered a general theory of the working of machines. He was
particularly known for his researches on the work done by waterwheels, linking
the work done by the turning wheel to the fall of water between two different
levels. Lazare’s son, Sadi Carnot, born in 1796, was therefore well placed to
develop an interest in work and engines and to recognize their importance to the
French Republic. Sadi was educated by his father until the age of ´ sixteen,
when he entered the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in 1812. By the time he was
approaching graduation in 1814, however, Paris was under siege and the
Napoleonic regime was rapidly coming to an end. He joined the Corps of Engineers
and remained an army officer for most of the rest of his life. Following the
restoration of the French monarchy, Lazare Carnot was exiled and Sadi Carnot
found himself laboring under the stigma of a now infamous family name. In 1820
he was retired on half pay; he settled in Paris, where he moved on the fringes
of philosophical ´ circles, attending lectures at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des
Mines, and elsewhere. He played a leading role in the Association Polytechnique,
a ´ society of former students from the Ecole Polytechnique with an interest in
popular scientific education. Barred from elevation in the ranks or from public
office as a result of his unfortunate family connections, he had plenty of time
on his hands. When Sadi Carnot visited his father in exile, Lazare told his son:
“If real mathematicians were to take up economics and apply experimental
methods, a new science would be created—a science which would only need to be
animated by the love of humanity in order to transform government.”3 Carnot
spent much of his time traveling through France and the rest of Europe, taking
advantage of his opportunities to study industrial organization and practical
economics by visiting factories. He made himself expert on the economics of
industrializing society and on the machines that operated Europe’s factories.
The result of all this, coupled with his interest in popular scientific
education, was a small pamphlet, Reflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu,
published in 1824. The book was about heat engines, or more particularly, the
steam engine, which already seemed “destined to produce a great revolution in
the civilized world” and would “afford to the industrial arts a range the extent
of 3
Quoted in S. Carnot, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, ed. E. Mendoza,
xii.
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129
which can scarcely be predicted.”4 Carnot wanted to analyze the heat engine—to
find out how it operated, how heat produced work, and what the limits of its
efficiency might be. This was to be his contribution to applying the
experimental method to economics. Carnot regarded heat as central to the
operations of the natural economy. Nature was an “immense reservoir” of heat
that could be regarded as responsible for a whole range of phenomena, from the
agitations of the atmosphere to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. To
understand the ways in which heat acted to produce such different kinds of
movements, Carnot argued that the problem needed to be expressed in as general a
way as possible. The problem with previous analyses was that they had been too
specific—too wedded to particular mechanisms. The result was that it became
difficult to recognize the general laws and principles underlying the phenomena.
The mechanical theory—Newton’s laws of motion—could be used to analyze those
machines that were put in motion by sources of power other than heat. In those
cases “all imaginable movements are referred to these general principles, firmly
established, and applicable under all circumstances.” This was what was wanted
for heat engines as well. “We shall have it,” argued Carnot, “only when the laws
of physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known
beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.”5
Carnot started, nevertheless, with a specific analysis, following the steam
engine through its cycle of operations. “What happens in fact in a steam-engine
actually in motion? The caloric developed in the furnace by the effect of the
combustion traverses the walls of the boiler, produces steam, and in some way
incorporates itself with it. The latter carrying it away, takes it first into
the cylinder, where it performs some function, and from thence into the
condenser, where it is liquefied by contact with the cold water which it
encounters there. Then, as a final result, the cold water of the condenser takes
possession of the caloric developed by the combustion. It is heated by the
intervention of the steam as if it had been placed directly over the furnace.
The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric. It fills the same
office as in the heating of baths by steam, except that in this case its motion
is rendered useful.”6 This was the crucial fact for Carnot. What mattered in a
steam engine—and in any other kind of heat engine for that matter—was the
movement of caloric from a hot to a cold body, not its consumption. It was this
movement 4
Ibid., 3–4.
5
Ibid., 6.
6
Ibid., 6–7.
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that produced work. “The production of motive power is then due in steam-engines
not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm
body to a cold body, that is, to its reestablishment of equilibrium—an
equilibrium considered as destroyed by any cause whatever, by chemical action
such as combustion, or by any other.”7 Carnot’s conclusion was that “[w]herever
there exists a difference of temperature, wherever it has been possible for the
equilibrium of the caloric to be re-established, it is possible to have also the
production of impelling power.”8 Indeed, work could be carried out only if there
were a difference in temperature. If all the Universe were at the same
temperature, there could be no flow of caloric and consequently no work could be
performed. The question then arose of the exact relationship between work and
heat: “Is the motive power of heat invariable in quantity, or does it vary with
the agent employed to realize it as an intermediary substance, selected as the
subject of the action of the heat?”9 Carnot had established that a temperature
difference allowed work to be done; he also argued that the situation could be
reversed: “wherever we can consume this power, it is also possible to produce a
difference of temperature, it is possible to occasion destruction of equilibrium
in the caloric.”10 The question he aimed to answer was whether the amount of
work produced by the flow of caloric from a higher to a lower temperature was
the same in all cases as the amount of work required to produce that difference
of temperature in the first place. There was a distinct analogy between Sadi
Carnot’s model of caloric doing work by flowing from one temperature level to
another lower one and his father Lazare’s analysis of the work done by water
turning a waterwheel while flowing from a higher level to a lower. Sadi Carnot
argued that the motive power produced by the fall of caloric from one
temperature level to another could never exceed the amount of work that would be
required to produce that temperature difference. Otherwise perpetual motion
would be possible—a proposition that he, like all respectable late eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century natural philosophers, regarded as absurd. The bulk of his
pamphlet was devoted to detailed calculations and illustrations to demonstrate
the general principle that “[t]he motive power of heat is independent of the
agents employed to realize it; its quantity is fixed solely by the temperatures
of
7 9
Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8.
9
Ibid., 9. Ibid.
10
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the bodies between which is effected, finally, the transfer of the caloric.”11
He was emphatic, nevertheless, that the ideal would never in practice be
attainable. The point of his work was in the end both pragmatic and socially
progressive—to put the theory of how to produce work from heat at the disposal
of France. “To know how to appreciate in each case, at their true value, the
considerations of convenience and economy which may present themselves; to know
how to discern the more important of those which are only secondary; to balance
them properly against each other, in order to attain the best results by the
simplest means: such should be the leading characteristics of the man called to
direct, to coordinate the labours of his fellow men, to make them co-operate
towards a useful end, whatsoever it may be.”12 Carnot’s treatise was formally
presented to the French Acad´emie des Sciences by his friend the engineer and
veteran of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, Pierre Simon Girard. It was not well
received. Few members of the elite academy regarded Carnot’s Reflexions as being
in the least germane to their concerns. Girard made other efforts to bring his
friend’s work to public attention as well. Writing in the prorepublican Revue
Encyclop´edique he averred that “Monsieur Carnot is not afraid of tackling
difficult questions; and in this first production he shows himself capable of
going into a matter which has become today one of the most important with which
theoreticians and physicists can occupy themselves.”13 Among engineers, anxious
to exploit his findings concerning ways of maximizing the efficiency of heat
engines of various kinds, Carnot’s work was better thought of. Academicians,
however, regarded his arguments as long-winded, poorly formulated, and
frequently incorrect. Carnot’s work disappeared almost without trace,
particularly following his early death from cholera in 1832. It was hardly
surprising that when William Thomson, visiting Paris two decades after its
publication, searched high and low for a copy of the Reflexions, he could not
find a copy, nor even a bookseller who had ever heard of it. One Frenchman who
did pay attention to Carnot’s work, however, ´ was the engineer and
mathematician Emile Clapeyron. Unsurprisingly, Clapeyron shared many of Carnot’s
broader interests and concerns. He ´ was a graduate of the prestigious Ecole
Polytechnique who had published extensively on the organization of public
projects and popular technical education, as well as on technical engineering
matters. He had worked in Russia with the French engineer Gabriel Lam´e during
the 1820s before 11
Ibid., 20.
12
Ibid., 59.
13
Ibid., xiii.
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returning to France in 1830. In 1834, he published a paper in the Journal ´ de
l’Ecole Polytechnique entitled “Memoir on the Motive Power of Heat.” Here he set
out essentially to translate Carnot’s work into the abstract mathematical
language familiar to the French academic elite. Intriguingly, as well, he
expressed Carnot’s findings in terms of indicator diagrams: effectively graphs
of pressure against volume. They had originally been developed by James Watt as
a way of determining the work done by his improved steam engines and were a
closely guarded trade secret. Clapeyron had possibly encountered them in Russia,
where they were used by Boulton and Watt engineers building steam engines for
Russian manufacturers under license. They provided in any case a striking and
easily accessible way of representing Carnot’s theories. Studying and improving
the efficiency of steam engines was certainly a matter of ongoing concern among
French engineers, anxious to find ways of placing their industries on a par with
those of their old enemies across the English Channel. The steam engineer Marc
S´eguin’s De l’Influence des Chemins de Fer (1839) discussed matters pertaining
to steam engine efficiency at some length. Later in the century, S´eguin was to
point to this publication as containing an early expression of the principle of
the equivalence of heat and work. A mark of the importance increasingly accorded
such matters by the French government was the award by the Ministry of Public
Works of financial support to Victor Regnault—one of the rising stars of French
physics during the 1830s— to carry out extensive experimental research on steam
engine efficiency. Regnault embarked on a systematic effort to redetermine
experimentally all the data that might be required. The task on which he set out
was enormous. The results of his endeavors were not published in full until
1870. In the meantime, however, Regnault’s Paris laboratory became one of the
premier sites in Europe for the experimental investigation of the science of
work. French concern with the science of work, like French science more
generally, largely revolved around the state. During the revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars and later in the century in terms of commercial rivalry, finding
ways of improving the productivity of French industry were seen as an important
national imperative. Not only national economic productivity, but national
pride—and during the wars, national survival as well—depended on putting science
at the state’s service. Sadi Carnot’s work, straddling the permeable boundary
between economics and physics, was an effort to bring abstruse natural
philosophy to bear on a very practical question—how to make steam engines work
better.
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The aim of such improvement was to enhance economic productivity, to increase
the amount of work available, and in the end enhance the well-being of mankind.
In that sense at least, Sadi Carnot’s Reflexions was an eminently Republican
text. It was meant as an example of the way in which physics could be a matter
of real, tangible public benefit. It was also firmly technocratic in its vision.
The answer to France’s (and society’s) ills lay in the hands of technical
experts, prepared and willing to put their knowledge of nature at the service of
the state. The Culture of Dissipation Britain in the early decades of the
nineteenth century was a rapidly industrializing country. Towns that had been
little more than villages a few decades earlier were in the process of being
transformed into sprawling cities, their populations booming with the creation
and expansion of new industries. In cotton mills, factories, and mines
throughout the country, the steam engine and the division of labor were proving
the foundation of unprecedented economic expansion. A new culture was being
forged as well in these industrial towns and cities. The self-made men who ruled
the roost in these new urban conglomerations were a very different breed from
the old aristocracy and professions that still dominated the metropolis and the
country’s political life. Having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they
valued self-help and hard work. They abhorred waste and inefficiency. The new
industrialists regarded the single-minded pursuit of wealth as a perfectly
respectable goal in its own right. Their politics was largely liberal and
free-market, their religion nonconformist, though as the century progressed they
veered more and more towards Toryism and the Anglican Church. Many of this new
breed admired science, as long as it could be put to practical use for the
benefit of mankind and the size of their purses. In particular, the science they
valued also valued work, efficiency, and the diminution of waste. Manchester was
a major center for this new self-confident provincial culture. Its population of
more than 300,000 in the 1830s was more than ten times its size a century
earlier. It was an important center for the cotton industry that produced so
much of the country’s newfound manufacturing strength. It also boasted a
flourishing Literary and Philosophical Society, founded as early as 1781 as a
forum through which to express the cultural and philosophical aspirations of its
rising middle classes. When James Prescott Joule, a successful brewer’s son from
Salford, a suburb of Manchester, started experimenting on engine efficiency in
the
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Five
late 1830s, the city already had a thriving scientific culture. Joule’s tutor
was the eminent chemist John Dalton, and he was soon collaborating with the
electrician William Sturgeon, recently moved from London to be superintendent of
the Royal Victoria Gallery for the Encouragement and Illustration of Practical
Science. Joule’s early experiments were on the newly invented electromagnetic
engines. As we saw previously, however, he rapidly became discouraged with this
work and expanded his researches to look at the question of engine efficiency
more generally. He was soon fascinated by the relationship between heat and work
and in trying to find ways of maximizing the production of motive power from
heat. Joule experimented diligently throughout the first half of the 1840s. His
particular concern was to find ways of quantifying the relationship between heat
and work—the mechanical equivalent of heat, as he called it. He argued that his
experiments were conclusive proof that heat was not a particular
substance—caloric—but a form of motion, or vis viva. With his brewing
background, Joule was well versed in the precision thermometric measurements
required to ground such ambitious claims. His potential audience at the Royal
Society, however, was reluctant to accept his experimental efforts, rejecting
his work for publication in their Philosophical Transactions. They did not trust
this provincial, whose links were with Sturgeon and the unsavory London
Electrical Society rather than with elite gentlemen of science. Joule persevered
throughout the 1840s, refining his techniques and his experiments. In 1845 he
presented the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science with the results of what is now known as his paddle wheel experiment
(figure 5.2). In this experiment, weights attached through pulleys to a paddle
wheel enclosed in a container of water caused the paddle wheel to rotate as the
weights fell. Joule argued that the experiment showed how “the force spent in
revolving the paddle-wheel produced a certain increment in the temperature of
the water.” In other words, the motion of the weights was transformed into heat
in the water. This conversion could be accurately measured: “when the
temperature of a pound of water is increased by one degree of Fahrenheit’s
scale, an amount of vis viva is communicated to it equal to that acquired by a
weight of 890 pounds after falling from the altitude of one foot.”14 Once again,
little attention was paid to Joule’s work on this occasion, but when he
presented a new 14
J. P. Joule, “On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat,” Reports of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, 1845, 15: 31.
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5.2 James Prescott Joule’s famous paddle wheel experiments, demonstrating the
mechanical equivalent of heat.
version of his experiments to the BAAS two years later in Oxford in 1847, the
audience contained a very receptive pair of ears belonging to the ambitious
young Glaswegian natural philosopher, William Thomson. Like Manchester, Glasgow
in the first half of the nineteenth century was a thriving industrial citadel,
profiting both from the cotton mills in its hinterland and the shipbuilding
industry of the city itself. Like Manchester also, it had an active scientific
culture, based around the university and the Glasgow Philosophical Society,
where hardheaded industrialists, businessmen, engineers, and sympathetic
university academics rubbed shoulders and shared values based on work and
efficiency. The Thomson family had moved to Glasgow from Belfast—another center
of industry and self-help Presbyterian values—when James Thomson, the father,
was appointed professor of mathematics at Glasgow College in 1832. Like their
father, William Thomson and his older brother James shared in the Glasgow ethos,
inherited from the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, of hard work,
religious toleration, and self-discipline. James Thomson the younger, after his
graduation from Glasgow College in 1840, aimed at a career in engineering,
having been a passionate inventor in his youth, trying to find ways of
minimizing the waste and
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maximizing the economic efficiency of engines. In 1843 he was apprenticed to
William Fairbairn’s machine-making engineering firm. William Thomson, with his
talent for mathematics, on the other hand, following his own graduation from
Glasgow a year later, headed for a second degree in Cambridge and the
mathematical Tripos. As we have already seen, Cambridge by the 1840s was
probably one of the best places in Europe at which to acquire a rigorous
mathematical training. The analytical revolution of two decades earlier had
transformed the syllabus. The system of tutors guaranteed personal attention and
plenty of opportunity for practice. Thomson’s tutor was William Hopkins of St.
Peter’s College, known for his reliable production of high wranglers. Thomson
did well, graduating second wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman in 1845.
Following his graduation, he visited Paris, where as well as searching
unsuccessfully for Carnot’s Reflexions (and making do with Clapeyron instead) he
worked with Victor Regnault in his physics laboratory. Given Regnault’s concern
with steam engines, this was ideal further training for a hopeful natural
philosopher with Thomson’s interests in work, efficiency, and the annihilation
of waste. The experience provided him with a thorough grounding in experimental
practice to complement the mathematical expertise he had acquired at Cambridge.
The experience was soon to be put into practice when later the same year he was
appointed to the vacant chair of natural philosophy at Glasgow (figure 5.3).
Throughout his time at Cambridge and after, William and his brother had been in
constant correspondence over the vexed issue of heat, work, and waste. The issue
was to vex Thomson for several decades to come. James Thomson had encountered
the Carnot-Clapeyron theory of the motive power of heat during his engineering
training. As he explained it to his brother, he had learned that “during the
passage of heat from a given state of intensity to a given state of diffusion a
certain quantity of mechanical effect is given out whatever gaseous substances
are acted on, and that no more can be given out when it acts on liquids or
solids.”15 What concerned both brothers was the waste involved in the process in
practice. A water mill wasted work by spillage of water from the wheel buckets;
a steam engine wasted work by releasing steam or water when it was still hotter
than its surroundings. Following Carnot, they both believed that caloric, or
heat, was conserved during the production of work. Their problem was in how to
get the most out of it. Increasingly, they 15
Quoted in C. Smith, The Science of Energy, 42.
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5.3 William Thomson’s teaching laboratory at Glasgow. The three windows on the
left on the ground floor are those of the physical laboratory; the three above
belong to the apparatus room. Entrance to both rooms was through the door in the
pentagonal tower on the left.
regarded the Carnot-Clapeyron theory, in which work was the result of caloric
flowing from one temperature to a lower one, as the best available account of
the workings of engines. William Thomson’s experiments in Glasgow on a Stirling
air engine seemed to confirm this view. This was why he found Joule’s claim at
the Oxford meeting of the BAAS in 1847, of experimental proof that mechanical
work was the result of an absolute loss of heat, deeply puzzling. Thomson
expressed his conundrum in trying to reconcile Carnot and Joule in a famous
footnote to his “Account of Carnot’s Theory of the
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Motive Power of Heat,” first read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1849:
“When ‘thermal agency’ is thus spent in conducting heat through a solid, what
becomes of the mechanical effect which it might produce? Nothing can be lost in
the operations of nature—no energy can be destroyed. What effect then is
produced in place of the mechanical effect which is lost? A perfect theory of
heat imperatively demands an answer to this question; yet no answer can be given
in the present state of science.”16 If work were simply the result of heat
falling from one temperature level to another, as Carnot suggested, then what
happened to the work that might have been produced if there was no engine there
for it to operate on? Conversely, if, as Joule argued, the production of work
required an absolute loss of heat, where did the heat go in cases where no
useful work was apparently being done, as in the case of simple heat conduction?
In 1849, when Thomson presented his account of Carnot’s theory to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, he still had no answer to these pressing questions. Within
a few years, however, Thomson thought he had solved the problem. In a series of
papers entitled “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat,” presented to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh between 1851 and 1855, he laid the framework of the new
science of heat he would call thermodynamics. His theory rested on two central
propositions. The first one, derived from Joule, stated: “When equal quantities
of mechanical effect are produced by any means whatever from purely thermal
sources, or lost in purely thermal effects, equal quantities of heat are put out
of existence or are generated.”17 In other words, he had fully accepted Joule’s
assertion of the mutual convertibility of heat and work. Thomson’s second
proposition rested on his reading of Carnot. He stated: “If an engine be such
that, when it is worked backwards, the physical and mechanical agencies in every
part of its motions are all reversed, it produces as much mechanical effect as
can be produced by any thermo-dynamic engine, with the same temperatures of
source and refrigerator, from a given quantity of heat.”18 He had abandoned his
earlier commitment to Carnot’s insistence that caloric, or heat, be conserved
during this process. He concluded that in any process of heat transfer that did
not fulfill Carnot’s criterion of perfect reversibility—in other words, in any
real engine—there was “an absolute loss of mechanical energy available to
man.”19 16 19
Quoted ibid., 94. Quoted ibid., 107.
18
Quoted ibid., 110. Quoted ibid., 124.
19
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Thomson’s universe now had a sense of direction. It was a universe in which the
capacity for doing useful work was continually being lost. Carnot’s perfectly
reversible engine was an ideal that could not exist in the real world. Every
time a real engine operated, friction, bad lubrication, imperfect insulation,
and any number of other effects colluded to dissipate energy. These were not
just facts of life, they were facts of the Universe. Any natural process
involved an inevitable loss of heat that
5.4 The title page of William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait, Treatise on
Natural Philosophy.
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Five
might have been converted into useful work by falling between two temperature
levels. Once that capacity to do work had been lost it could not be recovered.
There was a strong moral imperative implicit in all of this. If work was
continuously being lost, it behooved the canny operator to take advantage of as
much of it as he could while it remained available. This was the worldview
shared by Thomson, Joule, and an increasing number of other engineers and
natural philosophers from nonconformist, industrial backgrounds. Men such as W.
J. Macquorn Rankine, a Clydeside engineer and later professor of civil
engineering and mechanics at Glasgow, and Peter Guthrie Tait (with whom Thomson
wrote Treatise on Natural Philosophy), Cambridge wrangler from an Edinburgh
banking family and professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Belfast, before
returning to Edinburgh as professor of natural philosophy in 1860, played key
roles in helping Thomson during the 1850s and 1860s to further articulate this
new science of thermodynamics, based on the mechanical equivalent of heat and
the universal tendency towards dissipation (figure 5.4). For Thomson and his
coworkers in Britain, one of the major virtues of the new science of
thermodynamics was precisely the way in which it provided the universe with a
sense of direction. Man could direct the operations of nature but could not
reverse them. The Universe had a beginning and—more importantly—it had an end.
There would come a time when all heat had been dissipated. The energy would all
still be there— nothing would have been lost—but the universe would be at a
uniform temperature, and without heat transfer from higher to lower temperatures
no work could be done and the universe would be at a standstill. This “heat
death of the Universe” evoked powerful images (figure 5.5). H. G. Wells made
good use of the scenario in the closing pages of The Time Machine. Moving
forward through time, Wells’s traveler eventually arrived at a desolate future:
“The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the
blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a
deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing
scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and
motionless.”20 It was a scene that never changed, since the Earth had long since
ceased rotating on its axis. Moving another thirty million years into the
future, the traveler witnessed an eclipse of the sun over a now lifeless planet:
“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the
east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. 20
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; reprint, London: Everyman Library, 1995),
73.
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5.5 The end of the world and the heat death of the Universe as envisaged by
Camille Flammarion in 1893.
From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds
the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.
All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of
insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”21
It was a graphic description of Thomson’s universe, though the materialist Wells
provided his book with a cheeky evolutionist narrative that would have left
Thomson fuming. Indeed Thomson, and his antimaterialist allies regarded
thermodynamics as a powerful weapon with which to counter Darwinian evolution.
In a series of papers in the early 1860s, appearing shortly after the
publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Thomson argued that
thermodynamics clearly demonstrated that natural selection was wrong. The Sun
could not have been provided with an infinite store of energy nor was there any
obvious chemical or mechanical source of energy with which it could be
replenished. The Sun’s heat had therefore to be finite. There were only two
possible hypotheses concerning the sun’s origins: “The sun must . . . either
have been created as an active source of heat at some time of not immeasurable
antiquity, by an over-ruling decree; or the heat which he has already radiated
away, and that which he still 21
Ibid., 75.
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possesses, must have been acquired by a natural process, following permanently
established laws. Without pronouncing the former supposition to be essentially
incredible, we may safely say that it is in the highest degree improbable, if we
can show the latter to be not contradictory to known physical laws. And we can
do this and more, by merely pointing to certain actions, going on before us at
present, which, if sufficiently abundant at some past time, must have given the
sun heat enough to account for all we know of his past radiation and present
temperature.”22 Thomson’s calculations and his figures provided him with a
conservative estimate of the age of the sun: “It seems, therefore, on the whole
most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years,
and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the
future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth cannot
continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life, for many million
years longer, unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great
storehouse of nature.”23 Similar calculations placed strict limits on the
possible age of the Earth, making Darwin’s estimate of 300,000,000 years for the
“denudation of the Weald” alone, for example, appear hopelessly optimistic. The
dynamical theory of heat, in Thomson’s articulation, was very much a product of
a Scottish and northern English industrial sensibility. Its creators came from
backgrounds that valued hard work, selfdiscipline, and thrift and abhorred
dissipation and waste. This is what the dynamical theory was about. Waste was
endemic—an unavoidable feature of life built into the very fabric of the
universe. Waste could be minimized, however, even if could not be eliminated
entirely, by careful and disciplined attention. It was a theory that arose from
very pragmatic considerations. Joule’s initial interest in engine efficiency had
come about as a result of his experiments to maximize the efficiency of the
electromagnetic engines enthused over by his fellow electricians in the London
Electrical Society. His concerns about the practical improvement of engines led
him to consider the relative advantages of work from different sources. Thomson
had been motivated by the equally practical concern he shared with his brother
to find a theory that could be exploited to minimize the waste of power in steam
engines. These concerns mattered to them because they were concerns that
mattered to the cultures they inhabited. They wanted to put natural philosophy
to work so that it 22 23
W. Thomson, Popular Lectures and Addresses (London, 1889), 1: 363–64. Ibid., 1:
368.
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could minimize the wastage of the industrial society they inhabited and increase
its profits. The thermodynamic model also had the virtue of recapturing the idea
of progression from those they regarded as dangerous materialists. The German
Science As we saw earlier, major changes were afoot in German natural philosophy
during the second quarter or so of the nineteenth century. A new generation of
practitioners were anxious to dissociate themselves from what they regarded as
the metaphysical excesses of the previous generation’s Naturphilosophie. In
Prussia in particular, major educational reforms during the early years of the
century had greatly expanded the number of students attending university. Unlike
at the old English universities, research was increasingly starting to be
considered part of a professor’s duties at these new German institutions. The
new University of Berlin, opened in 1809, had close links with the Berlin
Academy of Sciences. It was entirely funded by the Prussian state. By
midcentury, the reforms were coming to fruition. The population was educated to
an unprecedented degree. These were not disinterested initiatives on the part of
the Prussian state. Education, and technical education in particular, was seen
as the key to industrialization and modernization. This state-sponsored
expansion of the educational system, in turn, provided opportunities at all
levels to the new generation of hopeful natural philosophers. It provided them
with the resources to reshape German science in their own image and to forge it
into a central feature of nineteenth-century German notions of statehood. The
science of work was crucial here as well. It was to prove an indispensable
linchpin in the process of refounding German science on a materialist,
rationalist (and nationalist) basis. While his English, French, and Scottish
contemporaries became engaged in constructing a science of work as a product of
their concern with the steam engine and its efficiencies, the German doctor
Julius Robert Mayer, as befitted his profession, was more concerned with the
human body. Born the son of an apothecary in the city of Heilbronn in the
kingdom of Wurttemberg in 1814, Mayer studied medicine at the University ¨ of
Tubingen during the early 1830s. In autobiographical sketches written ¨ later in
life, he maintained that as a child he had been fascinated by machinery and the
quest for a perpetual motion engine. Having completed his medical degree at
Tubingen by 1838, he went to Amsterdam, where, ¨ having completed the relevant
examinations, he enlisted as a ship’s doctor
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with the Dutch East India Company. After spending some time in Paris, he
embarked from Rotterdam aboard the ship Java, sailing for the Dutch East Indies
in 1840. In the course of his duties as ship’s doctor, he became aware of the
unusual color of the venous blood of his shipmates. It was unusually red,
appearing more like arterial than venous blood. The implication was that the
heat of the tropics bore some relationship to the oxygenation of the blood. He
eventually concluded that in the tropical heat the body expended less effort in
maintaining its internal heat and that as a result less oxidation took place in
the blood. It was to this observation that he attributed his interest in heat,
work, and the body. Back in Heilbronn in 1841 and embarking on a medical
practice on dry land Mayer tried to interest others in his speculations
concerning heat and work. He tried unsuccessfully to publish his work in the
prestigious Annalen der Physik und Chemie, edited by Johann Christian
Poggendorff. In his first published work, “Remarks on the Forces of Inanimate
Nature,” published in the Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie in 1842, he argued
for a relationship between “fallforce,” motion, and heat: “We can make clear to
ourselves the natural connection existing between fallforce, motion and heat in
the following way. We know that heat appears when the individual massy particles
of a body move closer to each other; compression produces heat; now, what holds
for the smallest massy particles and the smallest spaces between them must well
also apply to large masses and measurable spaces. The descent of a weight is a
real reduction in the volume of the earth, and thus must certainly stand in
connection with the heat that thereby appears; this heat must be exactly
proportional to the size of the weight and its (original) distance. From this
consideration one is led quite easily to the above-discussed equation of
fallforce, motion, and heat.”24 Such hypothetical arguments were unlikely to
gain favor with the new leaders of German science, committed to precision in
experiment and language. Mayer attributed to his voyage on the Java the
discovery “that motion and heat are only different manifestations of one and the
same force, and that consequently motion or mechanical work and heat, which had
hitherto mostly been regarded as entirely disparate things, must also be able to
be converted and transformed into one another.”25 He had a specific figure for
the quantitative relationship between motion and heat in mind as well, derived
from published figures for the heating of air by 24 25
Quoted in K. Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy, 24–25. Quoted
ibid., 28.
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compression. He asserted that “the fall of a given weight from a height of
around 365 meters corresponds to the heating of an equal weight of water from 0◦
to 1◦ .”26 Mayer’s work had little impact at the time, though it presumably
impressed the eminent chemist, Justus Liebig, who edited the Annalen der Chemie
und Pharmacie. Mayer had little to say about the matters that concerned other
enthusiasts for the science of work. His theories were couched in speculative
and obscure terms as well. To many of his potential audience he must have read
like a Naturphilosoph himself, although he roundly repudiated any such
connection. He made clear, moreover, that he was no materialist—and materialism
was very much in vogue among the new generation of German natural philosophers.
Like his near contemporary Mayer, Hermann von Helmholtz approached the science
of work from a medical perspective as well. Born in 1821, the son of a Prussian
Gymnasium teacher, Helmholtz studied medicine at the University of Berlin, with
the Prussian army paying his way. In return for four years of medical education
he undertook to spend the next eight years serving the army as a medical
officer. He therefore spent the years between 1843 and 1848 as a staff surgeon
based at Potsdam until his patron, the eminent anatomist and physiologist
Johannes Muller, ¨ engineered his early discharge from the military and secured
for him in 1849 a position as associate professor of physiology at the
University of Konigsberg. During his years in the army, Helmholtz had been a
pro¨ lific publisher on physiology, having carried out experiments on, among
other things, the role of heat in muscle physiology. He was part of an ambitious
young coterie of experimental physiologists, including Emil du Bois Reymond and
Carl Ludwig, who were anxious to turn physiology into a robustly materialist
experimental science, purged of dubious metaphysical trappings like the life
force. For this group of physiologists anything that happened in the body, like
anything that happened in the steam engine, should be measurable and strictly
quantifiable. In 1847, Helmholtz published his latest contribution to this ¨
campaign—Uber die Erhaltung der Kraft (On the Conservation of Force). The essay
was privately published in pamphlet form. Like Mayer before him, Helmholtz had
attempted to interest Poggendorff and his prestigious Annalen der Physik, but
had also been rebuffed. Helmholtz’s physiological work had been aimed at showing
how the heat of animal bodies and their muscular action could be traced to the
oxidation of food—their fuel. In this he was following in the footsteps of
Liebig, who had pioneered 26
Quoted ibid., 25.
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research into the connections between the chemistry of nutrition and vitality.
Where Carnot, Joule, and Thomson had been concerned to identify the origins of
work in the steam engine, Helmholtz was concerned with its origins in the human
engine. One of Helmholtz’s particular concerns was to show that the supposition
of a vital living force violated the principle of the impossibility of perpetual
motion, since a living force would in principle be producible out of nothing.
All the work produced by a human body, like all the work done by a steam engine,
had to be accounted for. In his essay Helmholtz posited a purely mechanical
universe in which the exact quantitative relationship of different forces to
each other was susceptible of mathematical demonstration. For Helmholtz, there
was an obvious connection between human and machine work. “The idea of work is
evidently transferred to machines from comparing their performances with those
of men and animals, to replace which they were applied. We still reckon the work
of steamengines according to horse-power.”27 He traced the origins of the
science of work to eighteenth-century efforts to produce mechanical automata
that could replace living beings. This focused attention on the forces that
animated living bodies and their origins. This was then the basis for comparison
between humans and machines in terms of the sources of the work they performed.
The conclusion was the principle of the conservation of force: “We cannot create
mechanical force, but we may help ourselves from the general storehouse of
Nature. The brook and the wind, which drive our mills, the forest and the
coal-bed, which supply our steam-engines and warm our rooms, are to us the
bearers of a small portion of the great natural supply which we draw upon for
our purposes, and the actions of which we can apply as we think fit. The
possessor of a mill claims the gravity of the descending rivulet, or the living
force of the moving wind, as his possession. These portions of the store of
Nature are what give his property its chief value.”28 Nature, from this
perspective, was a storehouse of work that could be exploited through various
mechanisms, including the human body and the steam engine. While Mayer and
Helmholtz were moved by physiological considerations to investigate the science
of work, Helmholtz’s fellow Prussian, Rudolf Clausius, approached the issue,
like his British and French 27
H. Helmholtz, “The Interaction of Natural Forces,” in D. Cahan (ed.), Science
and Culture,
28
Ibid., 29.
20.
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contemporaries, from the perspective of the steam engine. Born in 1822, he
entered the University of Berlin in 1840, studying mathematics and the natural
sciences. After qualifying as a Gymnasium teacher he remained in Berlin
throughout the 1840s, obtaining a doctorate in 1848 with a dissertation on “the
light-dispersing and luminous effects of the atmosphere through theoretical
considerations,”29 following in the footsteps of his patron, the physicist
Heinrich Gustav Magnus. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, he
turned to the study of the motion of gases and elastic bodies. It was this
research that focused his attention on the problems of heat and work, through
his reading of Regnault’s experimental work and of Clapeyron’s and others’
theories. He was soon appointed as a physics teacher to the Berlin Artillery and
Engineering School and as a Privatdozent (or tutor) at the University of Berlin.
Unlike Mayer and Helmholtz, Clausius was successful in publishing his first
venture into the science of work—“On the Moving Force of Heat, and the Laws
Regarding the Nature of Heat That Are Deducible Therefrom”—in the Annalen. It
appeared in 1850. Clausius’s publication was based on his reading of William
Thomson’s 1849 “Account of Carnot’s Theory.” His argument was simple: Thomson
was mistaken in supposing that Carnot and Joule were necessarily at odds with
each other in any crucial respect. It was possible, he argued, to reconcile
Carnot’s claim that work was the result of heat flowing from one temperature
level to another, lower, temperature level, with Joule’s assertion that work was
the product of conversion from heat. The trick, he claimed, was simply to drop
Carnot’s assumption that heat was conserved during the process. There was no
reason to suppose that the production of work by heat did not require both the
flow of heat from one temperature level to another and the conversion of a
certain proportion of the heat into work. As he put it, “It is not at all
necessary to discard Carnot’s theory entirely, a step which we certainly would
find it hard to take, since it has to some extent been conspicuously verified by
experience. A careful examination shows that the new method does not stand in
contradiction to the essential principle of Carnot, but only to the subsidiary
statement that no heat is lost, since in the production of work it may very well
be the case that at the same time a certain quantity of heat is consumed and
another quantity transferred from a hotter to a colder body, and both quantities
of heat stand in a definite relation to the work that is 29
Quoted in C. Jungnickel and R. McCormmach, The Intellectual Mastery of Nature,
1: 164.
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Five
done.”30 This was much the conclusion at which Thomson would arrive in his 1851
paper “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat.” Indeed, Thomson’s resolution of his
dilemma was based on his reading of Clausius’s paper. Clausius worked on
refining his theories of heat throughout the 1850s and beyond. Increasingly, as
we shall see, he started making explicit links between the theory of heat and
the work on gases in motion that had first drawn his attention to the problems
of heat and work. Clausius was interested in the kinetic theory of gases—the
idea that the large-scale properties of gases could be understood as the results
of the small-scale movements of the particles, or molecules, of which the gases
were made up. He understood heat to be simply an effect of the motion of such
particles—hot gases were made up of fast-moving particles, colder gases were
made up of slower particles. Work, then was the result of “the alteration in
some way or another of the arrangement of the constituent molecules of a
body.”31 In 1865, Clausius introduced a new word— “entropy”—into his version of
the dynamical theory of heat. He could then reformulate the second principle of
the dynamical theory of heat as the assertion that the entropy of the universe
tends to a maximum. Both Helmholtz and Clausius made their names with their
contributions to the science of work. Not only were they established as key
figures in German science, they were as a result of their work on heat players
on the international stage as well. Their success and that of those like them in
other new-forged disciplines, in attracting attention to their theories, also
made German science successful. Throughout the nineteenth-century German
laboratories and research institutes were increasingly attractive places of
pilgrimage for young scientific acolytes keen to study at the feet of these new
masters of physics. The science they produced was selfconsciously abstract and
rationalist. It was avowedly and deliberately the antithesis of the previous
generation’s wildly metaphysical Naturphilosophie. Arguably, the research
tradition forged in mid-nineteenth-century German research institutes might well
be regarded as the direct precursor of twentieth-century theoretical physics. It
was a tradition that regarded mathematical theorizing about nature as an
autonomous activity in its own right. It was becoming clear by the 1860s,
however, that this German science that might appear to the casual observer as
having so much in common with it, was also the direct antithesis of the new
natural 30
R. Clausius, “On the Motive Power of Heat, and on the Laws which can be Deduced
from it for the Theory of Heat,” 112. 31 Quoted in C. Smith, The Science of
Energy, 167.
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149
philosophy that William Thomson and his acolytes in England and Scotland held so
dear. The Statistical Universe As we have just seen, one of the things that drew
Clausius to study heat and the science of work was his interest in the kinetic
theory of gases—the idea that gases were made up of large numbers of rapidly
moving particles and that their heat was the result of these rapid movements.
The idea that heat was a form of motion was not new, of course. Benjamin
Thompson, the flamboyant refugee from the American War of Independence, had
carried out experiments showing that heat was produced during the process of
drilling a cannon bore, which he suggested showed that heat was a form of
motion. Sir Humphry Davy came to the same conclusion on the basis of experiments
involving the melting of ice by friction. James Prescott Joule regarded his own
experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat as having decisively
established that heat was the result of motion. What interested Clausius was the
question of just what kind of motion was heat. Was it the result of the internal
particles making up a body vibrating, for example? Or was it the result of
translational motion from one position to another? Heat might even be the result
of particles rotating on their own axes. Others, of course, had no truck with
the idea that heat was a form of motion at all. The fate of two British
contributors to discussions of such matters provides a good example of the
view’s marginality for much of the first half of the century. In 1820, John
Herapath, an English journalist and mathematician, submitted a manuscript, “A
Mathematical Inquiry into the Causes, Laws, and Principal Phenomena of Heat,
Gases, Gravitation, &c,” to be read at the Royal Society and published in its
Philosophical Transactions. Among other things, Herapath in his manuscript
offered a mathematical derivation of the ideal gas law (relating the pressure,
volume, and temperature of a gas) on the basis that the heat of a gas was
proportional to the internal motion of its constituent particles. The paper was
rejected. Similarly, in 1845 a young tutor for the East India Company in Bombay,
John James Waterston, submitted a paper to the Royal Society, “On the Physics of
Media that are Composed of Free and Elastic Molecules in a State of Motion.” It
was dismissed by John Lubbock, one of the society’s referees, as “nothing but
nonsense.”32 Half a century later, 32
Quoted in S. Brush, The Kind of Motion we Call Heat, 1: 140.
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Five
with the kinetic theory of gases well-established, Waterston’s manuscript was
discovered by Lord Rayleigh in the society’s archives, dusted down, published in
the Philosophical Transactions for 1892 and triumphantly hailed as a British
precursor. Herapath’s ideas were picked up by James Joule during the course of
his own speculations on the origins of heat during the late 1840s. But Joule
himself was at the time still a largely obscure figure, and his views attracted
little attention. ¨ Clausius’s paper “Uber die Art der Bewegung, welche wir
W¨arme nennen” (On the Kind of Motion that we call Heat) was published in the
Annalen in 1857. In this paper Clausius argued that the heat of a gas must be
made up of several kinds of motion on the part of its constituent particles.
Particles in a gas must have rotational and vibrational motion as well as
translational motion. The total heat of a gas must therefore be proportional to
the sum of these motions. On the basis of this model, Clausius could calculate
various properties of his hypothetical gas and compare them with the known
properties of real gases. Clausius assumed that compared with the volume of a
gas as a whole, the volume taken up by the particles themselves was
infinitesimally small. He also assumed, for purposes of calculation, that all
the particles moved with the same average velocity, which he calculated for
different gases as being hundreds, if not thousands, of meters per second. In
the face of objections that these figures must be false, since otherwise gases
would diffuse far more quickly than they were known to do, Clausius soon
abandoned the assumption that the volume of the particles themselves was
infinitesimal. Instead he introduced the concept of the “mean free path,” or the
average distance that a particle could travel in a straight line before
colliding with another particle. Clausius’s efforts alerted others to the
possibilities of using a dynamical (or kinetic) theory of gases as a way of
providing a convincing model of heat and work on a microscopic level. James
Clerk Maxwell’s “Illustrations of the Dynamical Theory of Gases,” published in
the Philosophical Magazine in 1860, made use of Clausius’s concept of the mean
free path. But where Clausius had every particle in a gas moving at the same
average velocity, Maxwell drew on the science of statistics to allow for a
random distribution instead. Nineteenth-century statistics had its origins in
the study of populations of people rather than of inanimate objects. Maxwell had
become interested in statistical theory as a student at Cambridge, after reading
John Herschel’s review in the Edinburgh Review of Adolphe Quetelet’s work on
probability. Quetelet was interested in what he called “social physics” and
turned to statistics as a way of understanding large
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populations. Herschel’s review was an effort to bring Quetelet’s work to a wider
audience and certainly seems to have convinced the young Maxwell, who wrote to
his friend Lewis Campbell that “the true logic for this world is the Calculus of
Probabilities . . . the only ‘Mathematics for Practical Men’, as we ought to
be.”33 This was the logic that he applied about ten years later to understanding
the dynamical theory of gases. Maxwell, in his Philosophical Magazine
contribution, argued that collisions between the constituent particles of a gas
would produce a distribution of velocities rather than leading towards an
equalization of velocities. On this basis, he calculated what the statistical
law governing the distribution of velocities in a gas might be. He also
established the equipartition theorem, arguing that the energy of the particles
of a gas was equally distributed among their modes of motion: rotational,
translational, and vibratory. The picture of the microscopic world that Maxwell
produced was one of particles whizzing haphazardly through space, colliding with
each other and bouncing off in random directions. The movements of these
individual particles were impossible to predict. Just what these particles were
also remained an open question. Like William Thomson, Maxwell toyed with the
idea (put forward by Helmholtz) that they were in fact vortices in the ether and
that the large-scale properties of matter could in theory be calculated from the
characteristics of these vortices. One thing Maxwell was sure of, however. The
motions of these particles might be random, but the particles themselves were
not. Maxwell not only argued that particles of the same elements of matter were
identical, but that their identity was proof of the existence of a divine
manufacturer. Maxwell was keenly aware that the probabilistic nature of his
arguments caused problems for the new thermodynamics. In particular, it raised
questions about irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics. He
illustrated the problem in a letter to P. G. Tait in 1867 by introducing the
idea of an intelligent being who had the ability to change the direction of
individual particles of a gas. Maxwell imagined a situation where particles of
gas were confined in two partitions, separated by a frictionless sliding door.
The particles of gas in each partition would have a distribution of velocities
as determined by Maxwell’s own distribution law. By opening and closing the door
at the appropriate time, the being—“Maxwell’s Demon,” as William Thomson later
baptized him— could change the distribution of velocities, confining the faster
particles 33
143.
L. Campbell and W. Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan,
1882),
152
Five
to one partition and the slower ones to another. The result would be that the
gas in one partition became hotter and the gas in the other became colder—an
apparent flow of heat from a cold to a hot body without any work having been
carried out on the system, in seeming contradiction to the second law of
thermodynamics. Maxwell used the apparent paradox of the demon to raise
questions about determinism and the relationship between physical phenomena on
the microscopic and the macroscopic scale. What it showed, he argued was that
the second law of thermodynamics “has only a statistical certainty.”34 Maxwell’s
ideas about interpreting thermodynamic laws statistically were taken up by the
Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann, educated at Linz and at Vienna
under the physicist Josef Stefan, was in many ways a typical product of the new
style of German physics education. He argued that the laws of thermodynamics
could no longer be taken to apply absolutely in the microscopic realm. In
particular the second law of thermodynamics, stating that the entropy of the
universe was continually increasing, had to be understood as a statistical,
rather than a strictly deterministic, generalization. In other words it was
possible, if not very likely, that under certain circumstances entropy could
decrease. His ideas were, to put it mildly, controversial. Boltzmann clashed
repeatedly during his career with opponents such as the physicist and
philosopher Ernst Mach, who argued that Boltzmann’s ideas made nonsense of the
whole enterprise of physics. Mach felt that Boltzmann’s ideas were excessively
metaphysical and went beyond the boundaries of what was observable and therefore
knowable in science. Many of his German contemporaries had problems with
Boltzmann’s insistence on the reality of the atomic theory, which they felt went
against current trends towards doing away with mechanical models in the British
tradition. In Boltzmann’s case these abstruse discussions had tragic
consequences. Boltzmann committed suicide in 1906, apparently convinced that the
world of physics had failed to understand and appreciate his ideas. Critics such
as Mach were unhappy with the identification of thermodynamics with the atomic
theory. They felt that physics should deal only with observable phenomena and
avoid the unnecessary introduction of theoretical entities like atoms. The
American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs shared this concern, arguing that “one
is building on an insecure foundation, who rests his work on hypotheses
concerning the constitution of matter.” Gibbs had gained his degree and his
doctorate at Yale 34
Quoted in P. Harmann, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell, 139.
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before spending three crucial years studying in Paris, Berlin, and Heidelberg
during the 1860s. He returned to the United States to become professor of
mathematical physics at Yale with a distinctly Germanic perspective on physics.
Gibbs’s work in thermodynamics was devoted to reducing the science to its
simplest possible formulation. As he put it, “In the present state of science,
it seems hardly possible to frame a dynamic theory of molecular action which
shall embrace the phenomena of thermodynamics, of radiation, and of the
electrical manifestations which accompany the union of atoms.” Rather than
trying to explain the “mysteries of nature” in this way, Gibbs declared himself
“contented with the more modest aim of deducing some of the more obvious
propositions relating to the statistical branch of mechanics.”35 His Elementary
Principles in Statistical Mechanics (1902) sought to place thermodynamics on a
“rational foundation” that avoided paying too much attention to elaborate
mechanical models. Maxwell’s view of the implications of the atomic theory was
unambiguous: “if the molecular theory of the constitution of bodies is true, all
our knowledge of matter is of the statistical kind. A constituent molecule of a
body has properties very different from those of the body to which it belongs .
. . The smallest portion of a body which we can discern consists of a vast
number of such molecules, and all that we can learn about this group of
molecules is statistical information.”36 All our knowledge of the universe, in
other words, was statistical. This meant that the kind of knowledge that was
discoverable about the microscopic world of molecules in motion was the same
kind of knowledge that was discoverable about human society—it applied to groups
rather than single individuals. In fact, in a paper read to the Cambridge
Apostles in 1873, “Does the progress of Physical Science tend to give any
advantage to the Opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over that of the
Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the Will?,” Maxwell implied that it was
the statistical nature of the Universe that provided it with its sense of
direction. The second law of thermodynamics did not necessarily apply to single
particles. It did, however, apply to the Universe as a whole. The statistical
logic that Maxwell had described as the only true logic for “practical men”
really did seem to underpin that most practical of sciences, thermodynamics.
Maxwell’s contribution to the Apostles’ debate suggests, moreover, that quite a
lot hinged on what might otherwise 35 36
439.
Quoted in S. Brush, Statistical Physics and the Atomic Theory of Matter, 77. L.
Campbell and W. Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan,
1882),
154
Five
appear to be rather esoteric discussions about the choice of appropriate
mathematical method or mechanical model. Such discussions had important
ramifications for the scope and limits of human knowledge. Conclusion The
nineteenth-century science of work developed in different ways in different
contexts. Natural philosophers in England, France, the German lands, and
Scotland had a range of interests and concerns. They might share what the
historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn has described as a “concern for engines,”
but the various ways in which that concern manifested itself was wholly
contingent upon particular local cultures. The Industrial Revolution in England
and Scotland had already resulted in massive and continuing changes to the
cultural (and physical) landscape of the two countries. Similar processes were
under way in France and the German lands by the second quarter of the century.
One outcome of this was to focus philosophical and practical attention on the
problem of work—its origins and the ways of maximizing its output. The ways in
which this shared concern were manifested were, however, very different from
country to country. In a variety of ways the science of work proved to be a good
way of forging a scientific career as well. It was a way of showing how natural
philosophy could itself be put to work for the national good. In this way it was
to prove central to the process of finding and defining an increasingly central
role for the scientist in public culture as the nineteenth century progressed.
British natural philosophers in particular were keen to emphasize the
cosmological role of the science of work. They saw the second law of
thermodynamics in particular as playing a central role in making the universe
progressive. It was to be understood as a grand principle of dissipation that
showed how the universe was gradually progressing as energy became dissipated
and no longer available for conversion into useful work. It was a conception of
progress that could be put to work to counter the then prevailing materialist
view of progress popularized by the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
It could be used as well to expose the fallacies and pretensions of geologists
and proponents of evolution by natural selection, who required that the earth
have an indefinitely long history to provide the time required for their
developmental mechanisms to operate. Joule’s and Thomson’s physics could show
them that such an indefinite bank of time simply could not have existed. This
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is an example of the centrality of local cultural concerns to the development of
the science of work throughout the century. Making common ground among
physicists from different cultures and backgrounds as to what the science of
work really was itself required work. It could have important implications not
just for understanding the steam engine, or even understanding the Universe, but
for understanding the nature of knowledge itself. As disputes between German and
British pioneers and their supporters demonstrated in particular, agreement as
to who the discoverers of thermodynamics were first of all required agreement as
to just what the science of thermodynamics was.
6 Mysterious Fluids and Forces
As we have seen already, the new science of electricity appeared to promise a
great deal to nineteenth-century people. The mysterious fluid seemed capable
literally of performing wonders. Commentators and pundits waxed lyrical about
the capacity of electricity to send signals almost instantaneously over vast
distances. The electric telegraph was “a spirit like Ariel to carry our thought
with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth.”1 Despite the
gloomy prognostications of James Prescott Joule for one, that electricity could
never economically replace steam, popular observers remained sanguine that
electricity’s unleashed power would provide the key to indefinite economic
expansion and progress. As audiences flocked to exhibitions to witness more and
more examples of electricity’s wonders, electricity seemed to be the key that
might unlock more of nature’s secrets as well. Natural philosophers, electrical
engineers, entrepreneurs, and showmen were all keen, therefore, to delve deeper
into the strange fluid’s mysteries. By the end of the nineteenth century,
electricity had been joined by a plethora of other previously unheard-of fluids
and forces. These new powers held out the promise of communication without
wires, miracle cures for diseases, and even of ways of talking to the dead. In a
world where the potentialities of science, technology, and human 1
[A. Wynter], “The Electric Telegraph,” Quarterly Review, 1854, 95: 119.
156
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
157
6.1 John Peter Gassiot’s experiments with discharge tubes from the Philosophical
Transactions, 1858.
ingenuity appeared to some at least to be limitless, who was to say what new
powers science might find? As early as the 1850s, men such as William Robert
Grove and John Peter Gassiot were working on the strange glowing effects
produced by passing electrical currents through partly evacuated tubes (figure
6.1). Humphry Davy had shown back in the 1820s that the color of electrical
sparks varied according to the metal making up the poles. The glowing,
multicolored tubes seemed to be a variation on the same phenomenon. By the 1870s
more and more experimenters were working on trying
158
Six
to explain these mysterious discharges. William Crookes thought they were
evidence of a fourth state of matter, on top of the traditional triumvirate of
solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Experimenters showed how the glows varied
according to the strength of the currents passing through the vacuum tubes as
well as the type of gas and its concentration in the tubes. Analysis of the
discharges promised a new way of identifying the elements as well. The color of
the glow seemed specific to the chemical elements present in the discharge tube.
Experimenters discovered that magnets could be used to change the shape and even
the direction of the strange discharges—cathode rays, as they were later called.
Lecturers showed off photographs of the myriad shapes and arrangements the
mysterious glows exhibited. While many, if not most, practical telegraph and
electrical engineers still tended to discuss electricity in terms of a fluid
flowing down wires in just the same way that water flowed down a pipe, a new
generation of theoretically inclined physicists—followers of James Clerk
Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories—took seriously the notion of electromagnetic
fields. As far as they were concerned, most of the interesting things took place
away from the wires that made up electrical circuits. They focused their
attention on the field surrounding them. Self-taught mathematical physicist
Oliver Heaviside developed his own sophisticated mathematical take on Maxwell’s
physics, showing how electrical energy moved through the ether. The experimenter
and prolific public lecturer Oliver Lodge was convinced as well that ways could
be found of detecting the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the
ether. Both were pipped to the post in 1888 by the German physicist Heinrich
Hertz, a student of Hermann von Helmholtz (himself one of the towering figures
of nineteenth-century German physics) who announced to the world that he had
found a way of propagating and detecting these long-sought-for electromagnetic
waves. To Maxwellians in Britain it seemed to be the final proof that
demonstrated the real existence of their master’s hypothesized electromagnetic
ether—after all, you could not have waves without a medium for them to move
through. Others were finding more novel ways of communicating at a distance.
Late nineteenth-century Europe and America saw a groundswell of interest in
spiritualist phenomena. More and more people claimed to be able to receive and
transmit messages from the dead. Successful mediums (as they were called) became
household names. While some scientists dismissed these men and women as
charlatans, others argued that the phenomena they produced cried out for proper
scientific investigation.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
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The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 for just that
purpose. Maybe mediums’ brains could somehow receive messages transmitted
through the ether from beyond the grave. If so, then electrical theory and
electrical experimentation were what was needed to find out what was going on.
William Crookes was one of the most prominent of these psychical researchers. He
put his expert knowledge of electricity to work in trying to find out whether
mediums were lying when they claimed to be able to materialize ghosts that would
walk around in Victorian drawing-room s´eances. It seemed to many that there was
nothing preeminently outrageous about such claims. Electricity had already
produced wonders—why should it not turn out to be a way of communicating with
another world? After the discoveries and breakthroughs of the 1880s, the 1890s
seemed to many to be on the cusp of further and greater innovations. The search
was on for more new forces and powers. Despite the expectations, Wilhelm
Rontgen’ s discovery of some extraordinary rays in 1895 took ¨ the world by
surprise. Rontgen seemed to have found a new kind of radi¨ ation that made it
possible to see through solid objects. The mysterious X rays appeared to pass
through solids in just the same way that rays of ordinary light passed through
transparent materials such as glass. Within months of the discovery, X rays were
already being applied in medicine. It took only a little longer for schoolboy
jokes about the virtues of X-ray spectacles to start circulating. Within a few
years, Marie and Pierre Curie in Paris had come up with another new kind of
radiation. Radioactivity revealed a whole new world of energy, hidden away in
apparently solid matter. The Curies’ discovery opened up a new vista in physics
too. It provided a window into the ultimate structure of matter and provided new
clues as to how the building blocks of the universe might be held together. The
discovery and investigation of these mysterious fluids and forces during the
second half of the nineteenth century played a pivotal role in the
transformation of physics. As the new discipline became institutionalized in
university laboratories across Europe and America, more and more budding
practitioners turned to them as a source of experiments with which to make their
reputations. They were turned into the raw material of a new culture of
experimental research and theoretical speculation in physics. They demonstrated
also how inseparable the new discipline still was from showmanship and
exhibition. Doing physics still involved finding new ways of making the forces
and powers of nature visible in as spectacular a way as possible. New
technologies such as cathode
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ray tubes, radio transmitters, and X-ray photographs provided graphic evidence
of humanity’s hard-won power over nature and the possibilities for future
progress. They were powerful arguments as well for those who wished to argue for
the practical material benefits of training and research in physics for national
economies. While these technologies formed the material basis for the
consolidation of Maxwellian physics, however, they also planted the seeds of its
downfall in the early decades of the twentieth century. An ambitious new
generation of physicists could use these tools to refashion a new physics just
as the previous generation had used them to bolster the old. Tubes That Glow in
the Dark Electrical enthusiasts throughout the early part of the nineteenth
century were continually on the lookout for spectacular new experiments that
could be used to make electricity visible. Particularly following Oersted’s
discovery of electromagnetism and the proliferation of demonstration devices
that followed from Amp`ere, Barlow, Faraday, and Sturgeon, among others, a whole
technology of display was developed with the aim of making it possible for
audiences to see electricity in action. As we saw earlier, apparatus for showing
the production of mechanical effects by means of electromagnetism, for
demonstrating electrical shocks, and for exhibiting chemical effects such as the
decomposition of water took pride of place in lecture theaters and exhibition
halls as well as laboratories. Some of the most spectacular effects that
electricity could produce, however, involved the electric spark. Striking
multicolored scintillations could be produced between the poles of powerful
galvanic batteries. Different colors could be produced by using different metals
for the poles. Copper produced one color, platinum another, and so on. These
powerful discharges had a utility beyond their impressive appearance. The
powerful light they produced seemed a good candidate for commercial
exploitation. As a result of all this, by the 1840s much experimental attention
was being devoted to the physics of the electric spark and the circumstances
surrounding its production. William Robert Grove had been experimenting with
electrical discharges from at least 1840. In particular, working with his newly
invented nitric acid battery, he had been carrying out a series of experiments
on the appearance and behavior of electrical sparks in different media, arguing
that “the voltaic arc bears a similar relation to common flame,
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
161
to that which electrolysis bears to ordinary chemical action.”2 By the 1850s,
Grove was long departed from his professorship of experimental philosophy at the
London Institution and the resources that position provided him. His
experimental work was increasingly focused on working out the phenomena
associated with electrical discharges under various conditions. In 1852 he
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society his
observations that when the electrical discharge between two poles took place
inside a tube evacuated of air, a diffuse glow was visible and that dark gaps or
bands could also be seen at various points along the tube. He accounted for
these bands in terms of the interrupted electrical discharges produced by the
coil. Grove continued with this work for the following decade. In 1858 he
described as well how he had found some interesting magnetic effects on the
discharge. It seemed that by moving magnets around the tube in which the
electrical discharge was taking place, he could make it change its shape and
direction, just as Davy in the 1820s had found he could deflect an electric arc
with a magnet. Grove had come across the possibility of using magnets to
manipulate the electric discharge in the work of the University of Bonn
physicist Julius Plucker. Plucker had been struggling with his position in Bonn
for ¨ ¨ more than a decade. A student there, he had originally been appointed a
Privatdozent in mathematics and physics there in 1825, being promoted to
extraordinary professor of mathematics in 1828 and then to ordinary professor in
1835. For most of the 1840s and early 1850s he was to all intents and purposes
in charge of the physics cabinet at the university as well, despite efforts to
persuade him to restrict his attention to his mathematical teaching. His
discharge tube experiments in the late 1850s were in many ways the culmination
of his experimental career. He observed that when a simple point was used as a
negative electrode in his experiments, the glowing light between the electrodes
was concentrated along the line of the magnetic force passing through that point
as if the glow was following the line of the magnetism. He found, as well, that
the walls of the vacuum tube itself glowed under the effect of the discharge and
that holding magnets near the tube could alter the position of that glow. John
Peter Gassiot, Grove’s friend and ally in ongoing battles to reform the Royal
Society, was also involved in experimenting on electrical 2
W. R. Grove, “On some Phenomena of the Voltaic Disruptive Discharge,”
Philosophical Magazine, 1840, 16: 482.
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discharges during the 1850s. Gassiot, once a leading member and treasurer of the
London Electrical Society, was the scion of a wealthy wine merchant family. He
had the wherewithal to invest in experiment on a scale that few of his
contemporaries could. The “electrical soir´ees” at his house in Clapham Common
during the early 1840s are a good indication of his fascination with making
electrical effects spectacularly visible. Like Grove, too, he was interested in
the striae, or “stratifications,” of the electrical discharge and the conditions
under which they were produced. He could experiment on a large scale, noting
that he “had the opportunity of experimenting with upwards of sixty of
Geissler’s vacua-tubes, in which many beautiful and novel results are produced;
in some, for several seconds after the discharges had ceased, the tubes remained
throughout their entire length highly phosphorescent.”3 The mercury air-pump,
developed in 1855 by German glassblower Heinrich Geissler, had dramatically
improved the production of evacuated tubes for such experiments. Gassiot took
the view that the stratifications in the discharge “arose from pulsations or
impulses of a force acting on highly attenuated matter.”4 Discharge experiments
like these rapidly became established as part of the technology of display of
electrical performers of various kinds. In British eyes at least, the new
technology remained intimately associated with the names of Grove and Gassiot.
Cromwell Varley, in a communication to the Royal Society on electrical
discharges in rarified media in 1871, commenced with an effusive acknowledgment
of “the labours of Mr. Gassiot” and an apology “lest he should appear to be
attempting to appropriate the glory which so justly belongs to that gentleman
and to Professor Grove.”5 Varley, a leading telegraph engineer, was particularly
interested in using photography as a means of capturing the appearance of the
glowing tubes. Photographic technology could capture images that were beyond the
power of the naked eye. “The light was so feeble that, though the experiment was
conducted in a perfectly dark room, we were sometimes unaware whether the
current was passing or not. An exposure of thirty minutes’ duration left, as
will be seen, a very good photographic record of what was taking place.”
Varley’s description of the way in which the discharge glow developed with
increased current 3 J. P. Gassiot, “On the Stratification in Electrical
Discharges,” Philosophical Transactions, 1859, 149: 137. 4 Ibid., 156. 5 C.
Varley, “Some Experiments on the Discharge of Electricity through Rarified Media
and the Atmosphere,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1871, 19: 236.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
163
was striking: “a tongue of light projected from the positive pole towards the
negative, the latter being still completely obscure. The light around the
positive pole was to all our eyes white, while the projecting flame was a bright
brick-red.”6 The most prolific and energetic researcher into discharge phenomena
during this period was William Crookes. Crookes, the son of a well-off
businessman and a successful entrepreneur in his own right, was an enthusiastic
experimenter. He had studied at the Royal College of Chemistry and been
impressed by Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution. Early in his
career, he attracted the attention and patronage of the natural philosopher and
telegraph entrepreneur Charles Wheatstone, who steered him in the direction of
his first Royal Society grant. During the 1860s, Crookes was particularly
concerned with elucidating the behavior of a curious piece of apparatus he
called a radiometer. Puzzled by the apparent gain in weight of substances
weighed in a vacuum when they were heated, Crookes built an instrument in which
a delicately balanced vane, enclosed in a flask from which the air had been
removed, could be made to rotate under the influence of heat or light. Crookes
first argued that the movement was caused by pressure exerted by the radiation
itself. He soon changed his mind however, arguing instead that residual air
molecules in the flask caused the movement. He raised the question, however, of
whether the substance remaining in the flask “should not be considered to have
got beyond the gaseous state, and to have assumed a fourth state of matter, in
which its properties are so far removed from those of a gas as this is from a
liquid.”7 Looking for further examples of his newly proposed “fourth state of
matter” Crookes lighted upon those curious glowing electrical discharges. His
interest was initially captured not so much by the glowing discharges
themselves, but by the dark space that observers agreed could be seen around the
negative pole in these kinds of experiments. Crookes interpreted this dark space
as further evidence of his fourth state of matter. He argued that it was the
result of “molecular pressure” of the same kind that caused movement in his
radiometer. “This dark space is found to increase and diminish as the vacuum is
varied in the same way that the ideal layer of molecular pressure in the
radiometer increases and diminishes. As the one is perceived by the mind’s eye
to get greater, so the 6
Ibid., 238. W. Crookes, “Experimental Contributions to the Theory of the
Radiometer,” Chemical News, 1876, 34: 277. 7
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Six
other is seen by the bodily eye to increase in size.”8 In Crookes’s view, the
difference between ordinary gases and his fourth state of matter lay in the
hugely increased mean free path of the gas molecules—that is to say the average
distance the molecules traveled before colliding with each other. This mean free
path was much longer in the fourth state, and according to Crookes the dark
space was a measure of it. “The thickness of the dark space is the measure of
the length of the path between successive collisions of the molecules. The extra
velocity with which the molecules rebound from the excited negative pole keeps
back the more slowly-moving molecules which are advancing toward the pole. The
conflict occurs at the boundary of the dark space, where the luminous margin
bears witness to the energy of the discharge.”9 According to Crookes, as the
vacuum in the discharge tube was increased, so did the mean free path of the
molecules. This explained the way in which the glass of the tube itself appeared
to phosphoresce at a very high vacuum. When the mean free path of the negatively
charged molecules streaming across the tube reached the same length as the size
of the tube, the molecules collided with the sides of the tube as well as with
each other, causing the glass to glow. When a cross was placed between the
negative electrode and the wall of the tube, a shadow was formed on the glass
where the stream of molecules was prevented from hitting it. Crookes even found
that when the cross was removed, the area that had been in its shadow now glowed
more brightly. “Here, therefore is another important property of Radiant Matter.
It is projected with great velocity from the negative pole and not only strikes
the glass in such a way as to cause it to vibrate and become temporarily
luminous while the discharge is going on, but the molecules hammer away with
sufficient energy to produce a permanent impression upon the glass.”10 One of
Crookes’s most striking illustrations of the power of these streams of radiant
matter is also a graphic illustration of the exhibitionist tendency of his
experiments. In this experiment, a little glass railway, carrying a tiny
locomotive with a paddle wheel was placed between aluminum poles in an evacuated
tube. The streams of radiant matter flowing between the 8
W. Crookes, “Molecular Physics in High Vacua,” Proceedings of the Royal
Institution, 1882, 9:
140. 9
W. Crookes, “On the Illumination of Lines of Molecular Pressure,” Philosophical
Transactions, 1879, 170: 135. 10 W. Crookes, “On Radiant Matter,” Chemical News,
1879, 40: 106.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
165
poles would strike the paddle wheel, causing it to rotate and propel the little
locomotive along its miniature track. Few of his contemporaries found Crookes’s
claims concerning the fourth state of matter convincing. In particular the
length of mean free path for molecules required by his notions of the fourth
state were glaringly at variance with those posited by the kinetic theory of
gases. For a physicists’ culture that increasingly lauded high mathematical
theory, Crookes’s experiments, however spectacular, could never ultimately
compete with the theory-laden pronouncements of a Maxwell. Even a mathematical
physicist such as George Gabriel Stokes remained an admirer of Crookes’s work,
however. “For enlarging our conceptions of the ultimate workings of matter, I
know of nothing like what Crookes has been doing for some years,” he marveled to
a friend. “I wish you could see some of the work in his laboratory.”11
Enthusiasm for discharge tube (or cathode ray tube) experiments continued.
Plucker’ s student Wilhelm Hittorf had ¨ been working on them throughout the
1870s, having published work on magnetic deflections and the production of
shadows as early as 1868. In Britain, Warren de la Rue and Hugo Muller carried
out detailed ex¨ periments aimed at elucidating the exact circumstances under
which the discharges were produced to best effect and producing some stunning
illustrations along the way. They were insistent that far from being some
manifestation of a fourth state of matter, the “electric arc and the stratified
discharge are modifications of the same phenomenon.”12 Experiments with cathode
ray tubes were at the cutting edge of experimental physics for much of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Their performers were convinced that
understanding those mysterious glowing tubes would provide the key that could
crack open the secrets of matter, even if they disagreed over just what those
secrets might be. Everyone agreed that powerful forces were at play inside those
tubes that could tear apart the bonds that usually held matter together.
Exhibiting those powerful forces was a matter of some concern to these
experimenters as well. William Crookes certainly kept a weather eye on the
show-off potential of his experimental apparatus even as he and his assistants
were working away in the laboratory. Crookes, as a self-made man who plied his
scientific trade outside the walls of academe, was 11
Quoted in R. deKosky, “William Crookes and the Fourth State of Matter,” 58. W.
de la Rue and H. Muller, “Experimental Researches on the Electric Discharge with
the ¨ Chloride of Silver Battery,” Philosophical Transactions, 1880,171: 109. 12
166
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particularly alert to such possibilities. The strange, flickering glows inside
the discharge tubes were a potent image of the mysteries of nature that modern
physics promised to lay bare. They pushed at the boundaries of mundane reality
and posed the question of what else was out there waiting to be uncovered. They
emphasized the newfound powers of their creators as well—and their claims to
authority in the modern world. Waves in the Ether Developments like Crookes’s
and his fellow-experimenters’ work on cathode rays made it clear to their
contemporaries just how much more lay out there, waiting to be discovered. The
search was now well and truly on for new and mysterious manifestations of
nature’s forces. The discovery of new phenomena like these could provide
forceful demonstrations of the power of modern physics and its practitioners.
They were graphic illustrations of the ways in which physicists could impose
their mastery over nature. They promised new utilitarian advances as well.
Telegraphy had already demonstrated how electricity could revolutionize the
world and by the 1870s other electrical technologies were making their mark too.
Who was to say what equally unprecedented advances might be made on the backs of
other novel discoveries? These new findings provided powerful backing for new
theoretical generalizations as well. For many ambitious young physicists, in
Britain in particular, they provided the final proof of the existence of an
electromagnetic ether—that the ether was the medium through which
electromagnetic as well as simply optical phenomena manifested. Looking back
from the vantage point of the 1890s, Oliver Lodge was adamant as to what the
past two decades’ experiments demonstrated: “Persons who are occupied with other
branches of science, philosophy, or with literature, and who have not kept quite
abreast of physical science, may possibly be surprised to see the intimate way
in which the ether is now spoken of by physicists, and the assuredness with
which it is experimented on. They may be inclined to imagine it is still a
hypothetical medium whose existence is a matter of opinion. Such is not the
case.”13 The publication of James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism in 1873, with its rich theoretical synthesis, laid the groundwork for
a new generation of his followers, committed to his view of the ether as the
anchorage for electromagnetic energy. This perspective, 13
O. Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity (London, 1892), viii.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
167
which drew the physicist’s attention away from the coils and wires of electrical
apparatus and towards the apparently empty space around them, was at gross
variance with the approach of the hands-on electrical engineers who dealt with
such apparatus every day as they maintained the nation’s telegraph lines. Their
view of electricity was robustly simple. It was just like water running down a
pipe. Few of them had much time for Maxwell and his newfangled ideas, which
seemed to bear little relevance to their everyday experiences. Maxwell’s
followers, on the other hand, saw this ongoing battle of practice versus theory
as an ideal opportunity to press their own claims to expertise over and above
those of the practical men. If they could show that they understood better than
the engineers themselves what was going on in the telegraph network, then they
would have shown that theory really mattered. It would be a major boost for the
cultural authority of physics. The major protagonists in this war between
physicists and practical men were William Henry Preece—who ran Britain’s
nationalized telegraph network through the Post Office—for the practicals, and
the two Olivers, Heaviside and Lodge, for the theoreticals (figure 6.2).
Heaviside, a self-trained mathematician of considerable brilliance, had been
working on his own reformulation of Maxwell’s theory, producing along the way
the four Maxwell’s equations that are central to modern understandings of
Maxwell’s work. His work drew attention in particular to the problems of
self-induction in rapidly oscillating currents—self-induction being the tendency
first noted by Faraday for an electric current to oppose changes in its own
strength. According to Maxwell’s (and Heaviside’s) theory, the faster the
oscillations, the less like a fluid in a pipe electricity became. In very
rapidly alternating currents, the electricity ran almost entirely along the
surface of the wire rather than along the interior. This meant that under such
circumstances, self-induction rather than the resistance of the wires became the
major factor in designing cables. Preece dismissed this as nonsense. It was no
more than “a bug-a-boo.” Lodge encountered selfinduction as well in his work on
lightning. He argued in lectures before the Society of Arts that self-induction
mattered far more than resistance in the design of lightning conductors and that
traditional conductors designed for low resistance were useless for handling
sudden lightning bolts. Preece, a member of the 1882 Lightning Rod Conference
whose conclusions Lodge was attacking, dismissed his conclusions as absurd. As
far as the Maxwellians were concerned, the key to establishing Maxwell’s theory
and demolishing the practicals’ pretensions to down-toearth knowledge was to
find a sure way of showing that electromagnetic
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Six
6.2 The satirical magazine Punch’s view of the debate between scientific and
practical electricians in 1888. The triumphant practical man William Henry
Preece is walking all over the recumbent Maxwellian, Oliver Lodge.
energy really did travel through the ether. In the early 1880s, the Dublin
professor George Francis FitzGerald had worked out in some detail the theory of
the matter and had calculated the amount of energy that would be given off. The
trick was to find some way of detecting those mysterious vibrations in the
ether. Oliver Lodge, by 1881 professor of physics at Liverpool, was determined
to solve the problem. Lodge had been intrigued by the ether for years: “At an
early age I decided that my main
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
169
business was with the imponderables—as they were then called—the things that
worked secretly and have to be apprehended mentally. So it was that electricity
and magnetism became the branch of physics which most fascinated me.”14 Lodge
was no Cambridge-trained mathematician, though. His route to understanding
“things that worked secretly” would be through experimentation. He modeled his
Liverpool laboratory on the lines recommended by the illustrious Sir William
Thomson and traveled to Germany to pick up the best equipment available. One of
Lodge’s projects was to investigate lightning at the behest of the Royal Society
of Arts. It was a practical project aimed at improving the design of lightning
rods. As a practical electrical experimenter in the tradition of William
Sturgeon, Lodge set about finding a laboratory model for the way lightning
worked and struck upon the Leyden jar. Lightning was like the discharge from a
Leyden jar magnified a thousandfold. This had an important consequence. As all
electricians knew, Leyden jar discharges oscillated rapidly. This meant that
lightning did so as well. Far from being a single discharge of electricity from
heaven to Earth, a stroke of lightning was a rapid succession of discharges in
both directions. The trick to understanding lightning, for Lodge, was to
carefully investigate the characteristics of Leyden jar discharges in his
laboratory. Lodge wanted to show that what mattered in such situations was
self-induction rather than resistance. If he showed in his Leyden jar
experiments that the discharges would follow a path of high resistance and low
self-induction, rather than one of low resistance and high self-induction, he
would have shown that was how lightning behaved as well. It was his announcement
of the results of these experiments that so aroused the ire of William Henry
Preece at the Post Office, incensed by the interference of a mere physicist in
the affairs of hardheaded practical men. Lodge soon realized, however, that more
was at stake in his experiments than lightning rods. His experiments with Leyden
jars convinced him that he was well on his way to finding ways of producing and—
more importantly—detecting those elusive oscillations in the ether that
FitzGerald’s work predicted. The electrical currents that surged back and forth
along the wires of his experimental apparatus in imitation of the lightning
could be made, by proper arrangement, to stabilize into static, standing waves
that could be measured. This was his next task. In the runup to the British
Association for the Advancement of Science’s meeting 14
O. Lodge, Past Years (London: Stodder & Haughton, 1931), 111.
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Six
at Bath in 1888, Lodge worked hard to produce a spectacular experimental
demonstration to convince the crowds of the existence of electromagnetic waves.
“A long wire about one-eighth or one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter was
stretched round the theatre at South Kensington, several times round,” he
recalled in his autobiography. “On now sending a series of oscillating pulses
along that wire, a glow was to be seen on the wire in the dark at the ventral
segments of each pulse, while it was dark at the nodes, exactly in accord with
Melde’s experiments of a string attached to a tuning-fork . . . The point of the
experiment was not another demonstration of the oscillations, but a proof that
true waves ran along the wires, being thereby guided and prevented from
spreading into space, and by reflexion were converted into stationary waves
which showed themselves by nodes and loops.”15 He had found what he was looking
for; he had vindicated himself and his fellow Maxwellians against the
recalcitrant practical men. He was too late, however. Before the Bath meeting
the young German physicist Heinrich Hertz announced to the world his detection
of electromagnetic waves in space (figure 6.3). Hertz was in many ways the
golden boy of German physics. He was one of Helmholtz’s Berlin products, having
turned to physics after an early flirtation with engineering. He had been
trained, therefore, by one of the grand masters of German physics, one moreover
who had made his reputation as an experimentalist as much as he had as a
theorist. Working with Helmholtz in his laboratory, Hertz slowly built up a
reputation for himself during the late 1870s and early 1880s as a diligent and
skilled experimenter. His early interest in engineering gave him a distinct edge
over many of his German contemporaries. The view of electromagnetism that Hertz
acquired from his teacher was very different from that held by his Maxwellian
contemporaries in Britain. Helmholtz had little time for Maxwell’s
electromagnetic ether filling all space. Action took place at a distance rather
than directly through an intervening medium. Hertz first made a name for himself
as an independent experimenter with an experiment designed to confound the
theories of Helmholtz’s rival in the field of German electricity, Wilhelm Weber.
By the mid-1880s, when Hertz was his own man first at Kiel and later from 1885
at Karlsruhe, he was still working on problems largely defined by Helmholtz’s
perspective on physics and aimed at bolstering his mentor’s theories against
local German adversaries.
15
Ibid., 183–84.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
171
6.3 Some of the apparatus that Heinrich Hertz used to demonstrate the existence
of electromagnetic waves in the ether.
At Karlsruhe, Hertz initiated a series of experiments into the properties of
electrical discharges. He still saw himself as working on problems initiated by
Helmholtz—and in particular on a prize question proposed by Helmholtz in Berlin
as early as 1879 on the electrical effects of dielectrics (substances like air
or glass that do not, under normal circumstances, conduct electricity) on
neighboring conductors. In his Karlsruhe laboratory he became increasingly
intrigued by the properties of some of the demonstration apparatus. In
particular, he was interested in the sparking effects of coils arranged so that
they were adjacent to each other. Hertz worried away at the problem, trying to
find better ways of experimentally reproducing the phenomena. After spending
some time trying (and failing) to get rid of some irritating “side sparks” that
detracted from what he regarded as the main phenomenon, he gave up in disgust
and switched his attention to the side sparks themselves. He found he could use
these side sparks as indicators of surges of current across nearby spark gaps
(in other words, dielectrics). They could be used to probe for interesting
electrical effects. Over the next few years, he gradually built
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Six
up a repertoire of what seemed to be wavelike effects by manipulating his
apparatus. He could demonstrate nodes in standing waves. He could detect
reflections and even interference patterns just as if the mysterious waves were
rays of light. Finally, in 1888 he revealed his experiments to the world.
Looking back at his experimental endeavors of the past few years from the
vantage point of a successful conclusion, Hertz now placed his work firmly in
the context of Maxwellian physics. His electric waves were a vindication of
Maxwell. While the experiments and the phenomena they produced stood
independently of any theory, their significance largely lay in the way they
sorted out the wheat from the chaff in electromagnetic theory. “Since the year
1861 science has been in possession of a theory which Maxwell constructed upon
Faraday’s views, and which we therefore call the Faraday-Maxwell theory. This
theory affirms the possibility of the class of phenomena here discovered just as
positively as the remaining electrical theories are compelled to deny it . . .
as long as Maxwell’s theory depended solely upon the probability of its results,
and not on the certainty of its hypotheses, it could not completely displace the
theories which were opposed to it. The fundamental hypotheses of Maxwell’s
theory contradicted the usual views, and did not rest upon the evidence of
decisive experiments. In this connection we can best characterise the object and
the result of our experiment by saying: The object of these experiments was to
test the fundamental hypothesis of the Faraday-Maxwell theory, and the result of
the experiment is to confirm the fundamental hypothesis of the theory.”16 His
electric waves were to be interpreted as the jewel in the crown of Maxwellian
physics. Lodge in Liverpool responded to Hertz’s triumph with commendable
humility, his chagrin tempered presumably by the knowledge that these Hertzian
waves provided some very heavy ammunition for his battle with the practical men.
He was unequivocal in his interpretation of their significance: “In 1865,
Maxwell stated his theory of light. Before the close of 1888 it is utterly and
completely verified. Its full development is only a question of time, and
labour, and skill. The whole domain of Optics is now annexed to Electricity,
which has thus become an imperial science.”17 Lodge was soon out demonstrating
electric waves to excited audiences, with sometimes spectacular results. As he
recalled, “I exhibited many
16 17
H. Hertz, Electric Waves (London: Macmillan, 1893), 19–20. O. Lodge, Modern
Views of Electricity (London, 1892), 336.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
173
of the Leyden Jar experiments both to the Royal Institution and the Society of
Telegraph Engineers, in a lecture on ‘The Discharge of a Leyden Jar,’ where were
shown many striking experiments. The walls of the lecture-theatre, which were
metallically coated, flashed and sparked, in sympathy with the waves which were
being emitted by the oscillations on the lecture-table—an incident which must be
remembered by many of those present. This was a novel result, surprising to
myself also, and I hailed it as an illustration or demonstration of the Hertz
waves.”18 When Hertz died at the early age of thirty-six in 1894, Lodge paid
generous tribute to his memory in a lecture at the Royal Institution. Other
Maxwellians were quick to jump onto the Hertzian bandwagon. William Crookes
concurred with Lodge in his assessment of what had happened. “Whether vibrations
of the ether, longer than those which affect us as light, may not constantly be
at work around us, we have, until lately, never seriously enquired. But the
researches of Lodge in England and of Hertz in Germany give us an almost
infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electric rays, from wave-lengths of
thousands of miles down to a few feet.” The business-minded Crookes was not slow
to grasp the commercial possibilities either. “Rays of light will not pierce
through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the
electrical vibrations of a yard or more in wave-length of which I have spoken
will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then,
is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts,
cables, or any of our present costly appliances.” This was, he insisted “no mere
dream of a visionary philosopher. All the requisites needed to bring it within
the grasp of daily life are well within the possibilities of discovery.”19 Nor
was telegraphy the only possibility. Crookes speculated that the “ideal way of
lighting a room would be by creating in it a powerful, rapidly-alternating
electrostatic field, in which a vacuum tube could be moved and put anywhere, and
lighted without being metallically connected to anything.”20 Crookes was quite
right. By the 1890s Guglielmo Marconi was already experimenting with wireless
telegraphy under the aegis of the British Post Office. Nikola Tesla was
experimenting to realize the dream of electric light without wires. It all went
to confirm Oliver Lodge’s robust claim that one could no more deny the existence
of the ether than one could deny the existence of matter. 18
O. Lodge, Past Years (London: Stodder & Haughton, 1931), 185. W. Crookes, “Some
Possibilities of Electricity,” Fortnightly Review, 1892, 51: 175. 20 Ibid., 177.
19
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Not everyone subscribed to this imperialist reading of Hertz’s experiments,
however. When George Francis FitzGerald asserted at the Bath meeting of the
British Association that the existence of electric waves was the final proof of
Maxwell’s theory, an opponent from the practical men’s camp retorted that so far
as he could see “the Hertz experiments prove nothing.”21 From the practicals’
perspective, the Maxwellians’ efforts to use their expertise as physicists to
adjudicate over matters of practical, hands-on electricity were impertinent
attempts by young upstarts to foist their book learning on men who had imbibed
their craft through hardwon experience. This kind of debate underlines the point
that, as in many other cases, what was at stake here was authority. Physics and
physicists had to find a cultural role for themselves if the new discipline was
to be ultimately successful. Hertz’s waves were from this perspective a gift,
albeit a hard-fought-for one. They demonstrated graphically the physicist’s
power to manipulate nature, to make things happen as if by magic. For large
sections of the public they raised the possibility as well that discoveries of
more mysterious forces in the ether were yet to be made and that other kinds of
transmitters and receivers were waiting to be found. The Other World Many late
nineteenth-century commentators clearly felt that new discoveries like cathode
rays and electric waves were only the tip of the iceberg. A whole order of
forces was waiting to be discovered in the ether. Crucially, many argued that
physics was on the verge of delivering answers to fundamental questions of life
and death. The Victorian period was in many ways the heyday of alternative
scientific practices. Mesmerism and table turning flourished in the early part
of the period. There was intense interest in spiritualism around the end of the
century. For many (though by no means all) of their practitioners, these
practices were not alternatives to science—they were scientific themselves. The
phenomena they produced could be studied and manipulated in just the same way as
physicists could study and manipulate electricity or the ether. Significant
numbers of physicists in Europe and America concurred with this assessment. A
far larger number disagreed vociferously. Practitioners of mesmerism or
spiritualism were either frauds or dupes and men of science who took their
practices seriously were themselves deceived. 21
Quoted in B. Hunt, “Practice vs. Theory,” 351.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
175
Nevertheless, such phenomena were the subject of serious inquiry. To some
physicists at least, they seemed ripe for incorporation into the new physics of
the ether. An early example of such an effort was the work of the German natural
philosopher Karl von Reichenbach. His announcement in 1845, in the pages of the
Annalen der Chimie und Pharmacie, edited by the illustrious Justus Liebig, that
he had discovered a new kind of force was greeted with considerable interest.
This odic force, as he called it, seemed to emanate from the poles of magnets
and from living beings. It could be sensed only by particularly sensitive female
subjects—typically, hysterical or nervous women. Such subjects could actually
see the new force as a flame emanating from the poles of magnets or as an aura
surrounding living matter. Reichenbach was emphatic that what he had discovered
was a physical force just like electricity or magnetism, albeit one that seemed
to have a particularly close affinity with the processes of life. He and others
speculated that it might be correlated with other physical forces and therefore
fitted in to the grand new universal systems of interrelated forces being
offered by natural philosophers like William Robert Grove. Odic force was a
subject of intermittent experimental research for much of the century. Its
apparent close relationship to living matter made it a particularly intriguing
topic of inquiry. A proper understanding of odic force’s relationship to other
forces might deliver the secret of life itself. Many enthusiasts for odism had
interests in another flourishing midcentury practice as well—mesmerism.
Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, already had a long history by the Victorian
period. The practice was developed in the late eighteenth century by the
Viennese physician Anton Mesmer. He argued that living matter contained an
innate animal magnetism that he and similarly adept practitioners could
manipulate in various ways to produce trancelike states in their subjects. A
number of early Victorian natural philosophers, like the radical doctor John
Elliotson and the popular writer and lecturer Dionysius Lardner, professor of
mechanical philosophy at University College, were convinced of mesmerism’s
reality. To Lardner it was clear that the mysterious agent behind the phenomena
“is material, is propagated through space in straight lines; that various
corporeal substances are pervious by it with different degrees of facility, and
according to laws which still remain to be investigated; that it is reflected
from the surfaces of bodies, according to definite laws, probably identical with
or analogous to those which govern the reflection
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of other physical principles, such as light and heat; that it has a specific
action on the nervous systems of animated beings, so as to produce in them
perception and sensation, and to excite various mental emotions.”22 It was just
like any other force of nature. Even many of the mesmerists’ most committed
opponents found it difficult to deny the reality of the phenomena that could
apparently be produced by animal magnetism. Their strategy instead was to deny
the existence of the magnetic fluid that, according to the mesmerists, caused
the phenomena. In effect, they tried to transform mesmerism from a practice that
might legitimately be studied by physicists into one that was best dealt with by
another rising new discipline—psychology. According to the physiologist William
Benjamin Carpenter, for example, the mesmeric trance was simply the result of
pathological processes in the brain rather than the outcome of some mysterious
force: “ideas which take possession of the mind, and from which it cannot free
itself, may excite respondent movements; and this may happen also when the force
of the idea is morbidly exaggerated, and the will is not suspended but merely
weakened, as in many forms of insanity.”23 People in mesmeric trances were
simply people who had allowed themselves to lose control over their own minds
and bodies. Not everyone was convinced, however. Even as interest in mesmerism
waned significantly during the second half of the century, many experimenters
remained convinced that there was some hitherto undiscovered connection between
mental and nervous processes and the operations of the ether. Many attempts to
make sense of the human mind and body in terms of electrical processes had been
made by the final decades of the nineteenth century. The telegraph, in
particular, was an increasingly common metaphor for the nervous system from
midcentury onwards. The nerves were characterized as telegraph wires carrying
messages to and fro between the brain and the body’s peripheries.
Electrophysiologists were thought to have “tapped the wires of the living
telegraphic system.”24 The brain itself from this perspective was a mass of
electrical circuits. “Could we picture to ourselves the changes in the brain
when its higher centres are in a state of molecular disturbance, as when one is
thinking rapidly . . . could we, in such circumstances of mental turmoil,
examine the phenomena of the brain, we could, in all probability, obtain
evidence 22
Quoted in A. Winter, Mesmerized, 55. W. B. Carpenter, Human Physiology (London,
1853), 672. 24 J. G. McKendrick, “Human Electricity,” Fortnightly Review, 1892,
51: 638. 23
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
177
of rapid changes of potential, and of currents flashing in a thousand
directions, pursuing paths the intricacies of which are many times greater than
if all the telegraphic and telephonic wires of London were concentrated in one
vast exchange.”25 As ether physics gained ground over its opponents towards the
end of the century it seemed to offer a new way of looking at the human mind and
body as well. Oliver Lodge was one of the first to suggest that the latest
electric wave technology could be used to model the body. The eyes, he
suggested, acted just like coherers—a kind of detector for electric waves.
Others took up the suggestion enthusiastically. The medical electrician William
Hedley argued that Lodge’s work showed how human beings interacted with the
ether. “The conductor, whether it be a wire or a living body, only guides the
energy and concentrates it for useful work. Applying this to that very imperfect
conductor, the human body, it is evident that the latter may be regarded as an
appliance capable of utilising in a variety of ways energy transmitted by the
ether.”26 The sense organs were a set of receivers “syntonised for the reception
of similarly vibrating etherial impulses radiating from some given source.”27
Others took matters further. William Crookes speculated that “other sentient
beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to
which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to
which we are blind . . . Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of
surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays
of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic
phenomena.”28 Furthermore, he argued, “In some part of the human brain may lurk
an organ capable of transmitting and receiving other electrical rays of
wave-lengths hitherto undetected by instrumental means. These may be
instrumental in transmitting thought from one brain to another.”29 These kinds
of speculations seemed to some, at least, to offer possible answers to puzzles
like Reichenbach’s odic forces. Maybe the high-strung women who claimed they
could see flames emanating from the poles of a magnet were somehow attuned to be
able to see magnetic forces. Jean Charcot in Paris carried out experiments to
assess the effect of magnets 25
Ibid., 639. W. S. Hedley, “Apologia pro Electricitate Suˆa,” Lancet, 1895, 1:
1103. 27 Ibid. 28 W. Crookes, “Some Possibilities of Electricity,” Fortnightly
Review, 1892, 51: 176. 29 Ibid. 26
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on sensitive, hysterical women. William Henry Stone, medical electrician, member
of the Society for Psychical Research and physician at St. Thomas’s Hospital in
London, carried out similar experiments in an effort to check Charcot’s
conclusions. He found some evidence that placing his patient’s head between the
poles of a powerful electromagnet alleviated her headaches. He felt bound to add
though that having tried the experiment on himself, he could notice no definite
result. William Barrett, professor of experimental physics at Dublin’s Royal
College of Science, also carried out experiments under the aegis of the Society
for Psychical Research to investigate Reichenbach’s odic forces. He concluded
that there was a strong case in favor of the existence of some peculiar and
unexplained luminosity around the magnetic poles, which could only be seen by
certain individuals. For William Crookes, however, ether physics offered
something far more revolutionary than a way of explaining mysterious magnetic
auras. It offered a way of communicating with the dead. Spiritualism, as the
practice came to be called, was increasingly popular towards the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Spiritualism offered a
system of practices whereby people could commune with the spirits of the dead.
Mediums offered themselves as conduits through which spirit guides could pass
messages from the dead to the living, offering condolences, imparting
information, and describing their existence in the spirit world. While many
spiritualists quite explicitly cast their practices in direct opposition to what
they regarded as the excessively materialist stance of modern science, some
physicists regarded spiritualist phenomena as being ripe for physical
explanation in terms of the ether. Spiritualism was yet another example of the
ether’s mysterious powers waiting to be unlocked. This was the kind of thing
Crookes had in mind with his talk of sentient beings with sense organs
responsive to different wavelengths of electromagnetic rays and of humans with
organs in their brains that could receive and transmit thought. He and similarly
minded physicists were deeply involved in investigating spiritualist phenomena.
To many of his fellow physicists it seemed a very dangerous road to follow. He
was in danger of becoming the tool of charlatans (if not becoming a charlatan
himself). Crookes and his fellow electrician, the telegraph engineer Cromwell
Varley, had been involved in investigating spiritualist phenomena since the
1860s. Electricians, dealing as they did with a mysterious force that seemed to
act at a distance through some medium or other, seemed wellqualified to
investigate such matters. Some spiritualists agreed with this
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
179
assessment. The American spiritualist Emma Hardinge argued that her practices
made use of “the self-same forces of the telegraph, worked by vital instead of
mineral electricity.”30 Varley concurred, going so far as to invoke spiritualism
in an attempt to explain the mysterious workings of the telegraph to a
skeptical, working-class East End London audience. Making spiritualism
scientific however, required the imposition of laboratory standards onto the
s´eance. “Each circle should be under the management of a clever man and each
should carry on a continuous and exhaustive examination of the groundwork of the
subject. Once establish a clue to the relations existing between the physical
forces known to us and those forces by which the spirits are sometimes able to
call into play the power by which they produce physical phenomena—once establish
this clue there will be no lack of investigators, and the whole subject will
assume a rational and intelligible shape to the outside world.”31 Crookes and
Varley entered into their spiritualist investigations by bringing all the
impedimenta and paraphernalia of modern science to bear on the problem. Crookes
imported the latest and most advanced laboratory precision measurement apparatus
into the s´eance in an effort to measure the psychic force exerted by the medium
Daniel Dunglas Home in the early 1870s. Convinced that not only mediums but all
human beings could manifest such forces to some degree, he searched hard for a
way of reliably detecting such minuscule manifestations. It was no coincidence
that these spiritualist researches took place at the same time as his
investigations of the equally intangible forces manifested inside the
radiometer. With Varley, Crookes devised an electrical means to detect imposture
in cases of spirit manifestation—instances in which spirits seemed to become
physically tangible and visible during the course of a s´eance. Photographs
demonstrated the spirit’s presence while the electric circuit showed that the
medium—typically secluded in another room—was not moving during the course of
the manifestation. According to Crookes and Varley, their experiments with
Florence Cook and the ghostly Katie King provided tangible evidence that
whatever else might be going on, Florence and Katie were not the same material
person (figure 6.4). As Varley insisted, even an experienced electrician would
simply find it impossible to escape the circuit without springing the trap. 30
E. Hardinge, “What is Spiritualism?” Human Nature, 1867, 1: 568–69. My thanks to
Richard Noakes for this reference. 31 Quoted in R. Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an
Occult Art,” 445.
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6.4 Katie King the ghost captured on a photographic plate.
Oliver Lodge—almost the high priest of ether physics—was also increasingly
interested in the possibilities of psychic forces manifesting themselves through
the ether. He certainly concurred with Crookes’s assessment that there was no
reason to doubt that the ether might interact, or provide a vehicle for
interaction, with living matter and mind in ways hitherto unimagined. Lodge had
started experimenting seriously on such matters a few years after taking up his
professorship in Liverpool in 1881. His experiments followed the spiritualist
Irving Bishop’s performances in the city in 1883, in which incidents of “thought
transferences” were claimed to take place on stage. Asked to carry out some
experiments on the phenomenon, he did so, being sufficiently impressed by the
results to write them up for Nature. Somewhat to his surprise, the editor
published them. Lodge was convinced that “thought-transference or . . .
‘telepathy’
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
181
from one person to another was a reality.”32 Looking back at the progress of
physics in his autobiography, Lodge declared his conviction that “the scheme of
physics will be enlarged so as to embrace the behaviour of living organisms,
under the influence of life and mind. Biology and psychology are not alien
sciences . . . they belong to the physical universe, and their mode of action
ought to be capable of being formulated in terms of an enlarged physics of the
future, in which the ether will take a predominant part.”33 Many
nineteenth-century physicists regarded the involvement of some of their fellows
in matters psychic as being distasteful at best and a surrender to charlatanry
at worst. Dabbling in mesmerism, odic forces, or spiritualism was a betrayal of
everything the young science of physics stood for. Similarly, many spiritualists
regarded the efforts of Crookes, Lodge, and Varley to trespass on their
territory as an impertinent irrelevance. Spiritualism was for them in direct
opposition to science and had no need for its support. Spiritualism from this
perspective was an antidote to the oppressive materialism of scientific culture.
Even spiritualists sympathetic to physicists’ aims were unhappy at their
insistence on imposing laboratory protocols and disciplines on the culture of
the s´eance. For these physicists and their supporters, however, there was
nothing unusual about their interest—and nothing inimical to physics either. On
the contrary, they regarded their discipline’s history as a vindication of their
stance. The progress of physics throughout the century was after all punctuated
by the discovery of new forces. There was in their view nothing to distinguish
psychic forces from the list of those already discovered. Far from it—they
offered a rich new field of inquiry and another opportunity to wield physics’
newfound cultural authority. Radioactivity By the last decade of the nineteenth
century, Maxwellian physics, as Oliver Lodge had indicated, appeared supremely
triumphant. The discovery of electric waves and the moves that were soon being
made to transform wireless telegraphy into a viable commercial technology placed
the reality of the electromagnetic ether beyond reasonable doubt. The ether was
real because it could be manipulated—it could be made to do things. It was the
ultimate vindication of the new physics’ claim to cultural authority 32 33
O. Lodge, Past Years (London: Stodder & Haughton, 1931), 275. Ibid., 350–51.
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in the modern age. Pundits speculated as to what new properties of this
universal medium might next be discovered and placed at the service of humanity
through the powers of physics. Writers in the new genre of science fiction
penned stories in which the citizens of future utopias lived lives of
unparalleled luxury and leisure, all fueled with energy harvested from the
ether. Other more pessimistic authors warned of a future in which war machines
of unimaginable capabilities wreak havoc on the remnants of human civilization
utilizing hitherto undiscovered forces latent in the ether. Ether physics seemed
to many of its practitioners to be firmly settled as the framework within which
future progress would take place. The search was on for new understandings of
its properties and for further forces that might lie hidden within it. The
breakthrough came at the tail end of 1895, when the relatively unknown Wilhelm
Rontgen announced a spectacular new discovery to ¨ the world. Rontgen, born in
Dusseldorf in 1845, had studied mechanical ¨ ¨ engineering at Zurich
Polytechnic, emerging with a diploma in 1868. Unsure as to his future career, he
turned for advice to August Kundt, the professor of physics at the university,
who suggested he consider experimental physics as a possibility. Rontgen took
the advice and duly ¨ produced a doctoral thesis on the study of gases. For the
next two decades he rose slowly through the ranks of the German university
system. Moving from institution to institution, he was eventually appointed
professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in 1888. Like Hertz, ¨
Rontgen had been working during the 1880s on the effects of electrical ¨
currents in dielectric media like the air. Also like Hertz, he was making a
reputation for himself as an adept experimentalist, helped no doubt by his
engineering background. In Wurzburg during the mid-1890s he ¨ interested himself
in experimental research on the properties of cathode rays. The result of that
interest was his announcement to the world that he had discovered a hitherto
completely unknown form of radiation emanating from the Crookes tubes he used
for his experiments. Rontgen ¨ dubbed the mysterious radiation X rays. Rontgen’
s experiments were designed particularly to examine the ¨ properties of cathode
rays that had leaked from the discharge tube. To this end, in order to shield
the fluorescence caused in the tube by the rays, the tube was masked by a
covering of black paper. In the course of his experiments, Rontgen noticed a
curious phenomenon. A screen coated with ¨ barium platinocyanide placed at some
distance from the tube—beyond the range of any stray cathode rays—glowed in the
dark whenever a current passed through the tube. Puzzled by the strange effect,
he carried
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
183
6.5 An X-ray photograph of the hands of the duke and duchess of York in the
Illustrated London News, July 1896.
out more experiments to try to understand what was going on. Gradually he became
convinced that he had discovered a completely new kind of ray—a ray that could
pass through solid objects. He even found that he could take photographs with
it. A paper announcing his discovery to the world was hurriedly communicated to
the Wurzburg Physical Medical ¨ Society just after Christmas 1895 and copies
sent out to eminent physicists throughout Europe. They caused a sensation.
According to Rontgen, ¨ the rays appeared to behave just like light, except that
they could pass through solid objects. His paper included a photograph to
illustrate his claims. It was a picture of a human hand—his wife’s—made
transparent by the rays. Experimenters rushed to repeat Rontgen’ s experiment.
In England, ¨ the electrical engineer A. A. Campbell Swinton was one of the
first to succeed, marveling at “the exceedingly curious fact that bone is so
much less transparent to these radiations than flesh and muscle, that if a
living human hand be interposed between a Crookes tube and a photographic plate,
a shadow photograph can be obtained which shows all the outlines and joints of
the bones most distinctly”34 (figure 6.5). In Cambridge, 34
A. A. Campbell Swinton, Nature, 1896, 53: 276.
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the physicist J. J. Thomson rushed to investigate the mysterious rays’
properties, writing to Nature before the end of February with an account of
experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory confirming Rontgen’ s ¨ views on the
rays’ lightlike qualities. In the United States, the flamboyant electrical
entrepreneur Thomas Alva Edison quickly recognized the rays’ potential,
announcing with great fanfare to the press his intention to produce an X-ray
photograph of a living human brain. Back in Germany, Rontgen himself performed a
demonstration of his discovery ¨ for the delectation of the kaiser in person.
Experimenters labored hard to improve the technology, finding out what size and
shape of tube was best to produce the X rays and trying to understand just what
their properties were. It did not take long for medical men to recognize X rays’
potential either (figure 6.6). After all, the first published X-ray photographs
were of the bones inside a human hand. The British Medical Journal quickly
commissioned Sydney Danville Rowland, a young medical student at St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, “to investigate the application of Rontgen’ s
discovery to Medicine and Surgery and to study practically ¨ its
applications.”35 Before the end of February he had demonstrated his results
before the Medical Society of London. Earlier the same month John Cox, professor
of physics at McGill University in Montreal, used X-ray photography to help
doctors locate and remove a bullet from a patient’s leg. In Cambridge, Edward
Douty, surgeon in charge of the gynecology department at Addenbrokes Hospital,
took up X rays, while the Cavendish Laboratory provided an informal service to
the hospital as well. By May, the first medical journal devoted to X rays had
already appeared—the Archives of Clinical Skiagraphy. X rays were taken up as
therapy as well as for diagnosis. Leopold Freund in Vienna used X rays to remove
a mole from a young girl’s back. By the early years of the twentieth century, X
rays had become a standard part of the armory of hospital electrotherapy
departments. The public was fascinated by X rays and their possibilities.
“Roentgen mania,” as the Electrical Engineer called it, swept across Europe and
America. Crowds flocked to X-ray photography studios to have their innards
photographed. Edison developed a special fluorescent screen so that people could
see their own insides without even having to wait for a photograph to be
developed. By 1897 a “Thomas A. Edison X Ray 35
Quoted in M. Weatherall et al., On a New Kind of Rays (Cambridge: University
Library, 1995), 5.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
185
6.6 X rays were soon in use for medical purposes, as illustrated here.
kit” was on the market. Such gimmicks soon became popular fairground
attractions. People were particularly intrigued by the possibilities X rays
offered of making solid objects transparent. Cartoonists had a field day with
the concept, with Punch publishing a cartoon depicting the kaiser’s discomfiture
when John Bull’s considerable backbone was revealed by
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X ray. It did not take long for the more prurient possibilities to be explored
either: I’m full of daze Shock and amaze; For now-a-days I hear they’ll gaze
Thru’ cloak and gown—and even stays, These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.36
as one magazine speculated. Newspapers advertised X ray–proof clothing to
protect the public from the prospect of an involuntary scientific striptease. X
rays soon became a staple in futuristic science fiction. Among physicists, X
rays quickly proved to be a particularly fruitful field for new experimental
inquiries. Ambitious experimenters could hope to make their reputations by
expanding physicists’ understanding of the mysterious rays and their properties,
or even by coming up with the discovery of yet another hitherto unknown kind of
radiation. In France, Henri Becquerel, scion of a distinguished scientific
dynasty stretching back to the beginnings of the century, took up the search
with enthusiasm. He was intrigued by the possibility that the source of X rays
might be the phosphorescence in the glass walls of the Crookes tubes and set out
to investigate whether other sources of phosphorescence also produced hitherto
unknown kinds of radiation. After some false starts, he found that a sample of
uranium salts apparently did just that. In his report to the Acad´emie des
Sciences, Becquerel described how he had wrapped a photographic plate in sheets
of thick black paper to exclude sunlight and then placed a sample of the
phosphorescent substance on top of the paper. When the photographic plate was
developed, the image of the phosphorescent substance could clearly be seen on
the negative. It seemed that the uranium salts gave off some kind of radiation
that could pass through the black paper and affect the plate. A few years later,
another French physicist, Ren´e Blondlot, professor of physics at Nancy, seemed
on the verge of an equally groundbreaking discovery. Like Becquerel, Blondlot
had been inspired by Rontgen’ s ¨ researches to carry out his own
investigations. He took up the task of looking into the physical properties of X
rays, being particularly concerned to find out whether or not they could be
polarized, like ordinary 36
Quoted in C. Caufield, Multiple Exposures, 7.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
187
light. Experimenters had so far been unable to find a way of polarizing X
rays—something of a problem for those who argued that they were waves in the
ether just like other forms of radiation like light or electric waves. Blondlot
suggested that X rays might in fact already be polarized and carried out some
experiments, using the brightness of an electric spark as a detector to confirm
his suspicions. He soon became convinced, however, that what he was detecting
with his spark was not X rays at all but yet another new kind of radiation,
which he dubbed N rays, after his native city, as he announced his results to
the world in spring 1903. Other experimenters rapidly confirmed Blondlot’s
discovery and added to it. Particularly intriguing seemed the discovery that N
rays were given off by the nervous systems of living beings. The eminent French
physicist Ars`ene d’Arsonval, expert on the interactions of electricity with the
human body, described how the rays could be detected emanating from Broca’s
center in the brain during the process of speech. Some laboratories consistently
failed to reproduce the French results, however, notably the illustrious
Cavendish in Cambridge. In an effort to understand Blondlot’s techniques better,
the American physicist R. W. Wood visited his laboratory at Nancy. During one
experiment he surreptitiously removed a vital part of Blondlot’s apparatus. The
N rays continued to appear nonetheless. To his opponents the revelation was
decisive. N rays were a figment of Blondlot’s imagination. By the end of 1904
they had disappeared back into the ether. Becquerel’s radiation did not go away,
however. His discovery became instead the starting point for the researches of a
recent Sorbonne graduate who was looking for an interesting topic for her
doctoral thesis. Maria Sklodowska, or Marie Curie as she became better known
following her marriage to the French physicist Pierre Curie, had come to Paris
in search of a physics education in 1891. Determined to stay in France following
her graduation and marriage, Marie Curie turned to Becquerel’s work as a source
for further research at the end of 1897 precisely because little had been done
with it since 1896. Everyone else in the field was too busy with X rays to pay
much attention to the curious rays given off by uranium. Marie Curie’s initial
aim was to try and understand the ionizing behavior of Becquerel’s radiation—its
capacity to make air a conductor of electricity. For this she would use the
sensitive measuring apparatus recently devised by her husband. She was soon
intrigued, however, as she tested different materials, by the fact that
pitchblende—a compound of uranium—seemed to give off more of the mysterious rays
than did pure uranium itself. She surmised that this meant the strange radiation
was not
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specific to uranium after all and that pitchblende contained another, hitherto
unknown, element that possessed the mysterious radiating property to an even
greater extent. Pierre soon abandoned his own researches to help his wife, and
the two Curies set about identifying the constituent of pitchblende that seemed
to give off the new rays in such copious quantities. This was dirty work. Large
quantities of pitchblende had to be broken down into its constituent parts to
isolate the tiniest amounts of the mystery element that seemed to produce the
rays. They eventually concluded that not one, but two different new elements
were hidden away in the pitchblende. In July 1898, they announced the existence
of a new element they called polonium (after Marie Curie’s native Poland) to the
Acad´emie des Sciences. Their joint paper was titled “On a New Radio-active
Substance Contained in Pitchblende.” A new word had entered the language of
physics. The day after Christmas 1898 witnessed another presentation to the
academy. This one was titled “‘On a New Strongly Radio-active Substance
Contained in Pitchblende.” They had found their second element, dubbed radium,
and had separate spectroscopic evidence of its existence, provided by Eug`ene
Demarc¸ ay (figure 6.7). Marie Curie took upon herself the monumental task of
distilling a pure sample of the two elements from the necessary mountains of
pitchblende. In a presentation to the International Congress of Physics held in
Paris in 1900 to coincide with the universal exposition, the Curies outlined
their discovery and their latest work on the properties of the strange rays to a
fascinated international audience. They ended their lecture with a question: was
the source of this mysterious energy to be found inside radioactive bodies, or
outside them? As they and their audience were beginning to realize,
radioactivity seemed to violate some of the most hallowed principles of physics.
In 1903 the Curies, along with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize for
their discoveries. Following her husband’s tragic death in a street accident in
1906, Marie Curie devoted her life to radioactivity. From 1907 onwards she
presided over Parisian research on the new phenomenon, carefully garnering and
protecting access to the difficultto-acquire sources of the mysterious
radioactivity. Her laboratory was devoted in particular to establishing
standards in radioactivity, providing accurate measurements of emissions from
different sources. As with X rays, much early interest in radioactivity focused
on its possible medical uses. If X rays could cure, then radioactivity, which
seemed so similar in its effects on the body, could be used in the same way. The
telephone
6.7 Marie and Pierre Curie’s shed laboratory, where the first samples of the new
element radium were isolated.
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inventor Alexander Graham Bell suggested that “there is no reason why a tiny
fragment of radium sealed into a fine glass tube should not be inserted directly
into the very heart of a cancer, thus acting directly upon the diseased
material.”37 Outside of physics laboratories, hospitals and medical
practitioners made up most of the market for radioactive substances until well
into the twentieth century. The stuff was expensive. Laboratory directors such
as Marie Curie had to make sure that they forged good contacts with industrial
suppliers to make sure that their research was not hampered by their raw
material’s running out. X rays and radioactivity provided the ingredients for a
major shake-up of physics. Radioactivity in particular seemed to represent an
entirely new kind of energy that seemed to defy established categories. It
simply was not clear where it fitted into the physics of energy conservation and
the ether. Over the next few decades these strange emanations were to provide
the tools and building blocks for an entirely novel picture of the physical
world and its constituents. Their discovery and the apparent capacities of
physicists to manipulate them at will were the focus of immense public interest.
They seemed to be only the first in a long line of discoveries just waiting to
be made that would transform human destiny. That X rays and radioactivity
appeared to hold the key to curing disease was a major attraction as well. They
showed just how valuable physics could be when placed at the service of
humanity. Their discovery at the dawn of a new century symbolized the prospects
for scientific progress that the future held. Radioactivity seemed set to
dominate popular perceptions of physics in the twentieth century as electricity
had dominated for most of the nineteenth century. It also appeared to provide a
rich new mine of discoveries for the increasing numbers of hopeful young
physicists just entering an expanding profession. Conclusion Natural
philosophy—what became the new discipline of physics— seemed to offer a great
deal to thoughtful observers midway through the nineteenth century. It promised
an ever deepening understanding of the mysterious forces that governed the
Universe. It promised to provide a continually expanding mine of forces and
energies that could be put to work, powering an ever growing economy. To its
promoters, physics and the capacity it appeared to provide for technological
innovation and 37
Quoted ibid., 26.
Mysterious Fluids and Forces
191
unprecedented manipulation of natural powers seemed to be the key to indefinite
progress, intellectual, cultural, and economic. It was a given for most of these
Victorian commentators that increased knowledge of the workings of the Universe
went hand in hand with such progress. Some of them might believe that increasing
knowledge was a perfectly respectable end in itself, but few, if any, denied the
imperative that such knowledge should be put to work as well. For physics’
entrepreneurs, the constant stream of spectacular new discoveries that flowed
from new laboratories in Europe and (increasingly) America were an inspiration.
Scientific shows and displays of technological marvels underpinned the power of
discovery, reminding audiences—if they needed reminding—of just what physics
could offer. The new forces and energies that seemed to appear so effortlessly
from the ether during the second half of the nineteenth century were in fact the
products of considerable labor and ingenuity. These were the decades during
which physics as a discipline was created and consolidated. This was a process
that itself required concerted effort. New constituencies had to be persuaded of
the benefits that physics could deliver before the laboratories from which these
discoveries emerged could be established and supported. Physics’ cultural
authority—its claims to provide a better way of looking at and understanding the
world—did not burst full-grown from Jupiter’s head. It had to be argued for. The
new discoveries were an important part of this process themselves. They provided
hard evidence for the skeptics (of whom there were many) that physics really
could deliver the goods. This was one reason why showmanship remained an
integral part of physics throughout the century. Physicists had to show their
skeptical audience that they had nature under control. Discoveries that could be
made spectacularly visible and provide tangible evidence of the action of
otherwise unseen forces were central to their success in securing their cultural
niche.
7 Mapping the Heavens
Astronomy rather than natural philosophy was the eighteenthcentury science. It
was the science that set the standard to which others aspired. The phenomenal
success of Newton’s Principia in setting the study of celestial motions on an
apparently secure and certain mathematical footing had made astronomy the
archetypal science. Newton’s triumph in reducing the night sky’s complexities to
a simple law set the standard for achievement throughout natural philosophy.
There were other reasons for astronomy’s high status as well. As Europe’s
maritime nations squabbled over conquered territories in the New World and the
Indies, mastery over the seas became crucial. Solving the problem of
longitude—to be able to know one’s position on the high seas with precision—was
essential and astronomy seemed to be the key. Observatories were founded to map
the sky with increasing accuracy. Expeditions set out to study celestial
phenomena from outposts of empire—with the aim of positioning those outposts
more securely on the terrestrial globe. William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus
demonstrated the power of new telescopes to push back the frontiers of the
unseen. Herschel’s ambition was to produce a natural history of the heavens—to
produce a map of the skies that charted each celestial object and put it
securely in its place. Astronomy’s high status and evident utility at the end of
the eighteenth century meant that it was one of the few sciences to attract
substantial state patronage. As such, it was a 192
Mapping the Heavens
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fruit ripe for the picking to ambitious young radicals as the new century
commenced. In England, astronomers were at the forefront of opposition to Sir
Joseph Banks’s corrupt and despotic rule (as they saw it) over the Royal Society
and English science. Banks had his fingers tightly wrapped around the
government’s purse strings and astronomers were determined to get a piece of the
action. This was what lay behind the foundation of the Astronomical Society in
1820. With George Bidell Airy’s appointment as astronomer royal in 1835, the
Greenwich Royal Observatory became the focus of an industrialized science.
Greenwich was reorganized as a factory system with banks of computers (of the
old-fashioned human variety) toiling away producing numbers in industrial
quantities. One of the projected functions of Charles Babbage’s ill-fated
calculating engines was to be the production of astronomical tables. Other
observatories throughout Europe emulated Airy’s schemes at Greenwich. Far from
being ivory towers, nineteenth-century observatories were at the center of
industrial culture. With the advent of the electric telegraph they could be
linked together as well. Simultaneous telegraphic observations of celestial
events across Europe led to ever more accurate determinations of those
observatories’ place on Earth. As an afterthought, they gave the world the
Greenwich time signal as well. These were in many ways the model institutions of
nineteenth-century science. Not only could astronomy provide an accurate map of
the Universe, it had the capacity to provide a chart of its history as well.
Looking through a telescope at the heavens was like looking back through time.
Clues to the origins of the Solar System could be found by searching the night
sky. The nebular hypothesis was one of the most popular—and most
controversial—constructions of nineteenth-century science. According to the
hypothesis, the Solar System in its present state had developed through the
operations of natural law from a cloud of gaseous matter just like the nebulae
that Sir William Herschel had glimpsed through his telescopes. The nebular
hypothesis—the term was coined by the polymathic William Whewell—bore the
imprimatur of no less a figure than the illustrious Laplace, who had speculated
on planetary origins in his Exposition du Syst`eme du Monde. In the hands of
popular expositors such as Robert Chambers and John Pringle Nichol, the nebular
hypothesis was a powerful argument in favor of a progressive, evolving Universe.
Evolution in the heavens was convincing evidence of evolution on Earth and an
inducement to favor social progress as well. Proving (or disproving) the nebular
hypothesis was one of the many motives behind Lord Rosse’s
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construction of his massive telescopes in an effort to determine whether nebulae
were truly gaseous or not. While laboratory physicists looked to Europe’s
observatories as models of how to organize their own fledgling institutions,
astronomers picked up on the latest laboratory technologies as well. Astronomers
turned in particular to photography and spectroscopy to provide them with new
tools to analyze the heavens. Photography, according to its supporters, could
provide new standards of objectivity in the representation of celestial
phenomena. It replaced the subjective vagaries of the naked eye and the
draughtsman’s pen with the cold certainties of light and chemistry. It cut out
the middleman as well. Astronomers no longer needed to depend on the whims of
painters and engravers. With photography, astronomical objects could draw
pictures of themselves. Spectroscopy opened up the possibility of resolving
heavenly bodies into their constituent elements. The Sun’s spectrum could be
compared with that produced by any number of terrestrial elements to give a
definitive breakdown of its makeup. The introduction of these new technologies
meant that astronomy could take place on a tabletop as well as through ever more
massive telescopes. It also made what had been a quintessentially observational
science subject to the disciplines of experiment. Astronomical laboratories had
to be transportable as well. Astronomers trotted the globe with their apparatus,
chasing and capturing the latest celestial apparitions wherever they appeared.
One question that ran through nineteenth-century astronomy is still very much
alive today. Victorians were fascinated by the possibilities of extraterrestrial
life. William Herschel had speculated publicly about the existence of life on
the Moon and even in the Sun. He suggested sunspots might be windows in the hot
exterior through which might be glimpsed the cool interior where the Sun’s
inhabitants could be found. For many Victorians this was an issue with real
theological significance. Some commentators argued that since there were
indisputably other worlds— the Moon, planets, and stars—they must be inhabited
since otherwise their creation could have fulfilled no purpose. Others countered
that the existence of life on other worlds would rob the Christian revelation of
its uniqueness. By the end of the century, the question had moved beyond the
abstract. The rise of new communication technologies like wireless telegraphy
raised the possibility of actually communicating with the mysterious inhabitants
of Mars or the Moon. Science fiction writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells
speculated concerning the possibility of travel to the stars. Astronomers such
as Percival Lowell and Giovanni
Mapping the Heavens
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Schiaparelli claimed to have observed canals on Mars—conclusive proof of
extraterrestrial life. Astronomy was transformed during the course of the
nineteenth century, setting the standard for collaborative, multidisciplinary
science on a massive scale. Observatories had never really been lonely
watchtowers where solitary sentinels scanned the skies, and by the
nineteenth-century observatories were centers of intensive mass labor. Airy at
Greenwich imposed the division of labor as ruthlessly as any Victorian mill
owner. Astronomy combined a reputation as the archetypal exact science—
mathematical and abstract—with an enviable capacity to draw on state patronage.
Astronomy mattered for imperial governance. Astronomy demanded resources on a
massive scale as well. Its practitioners needed access to glassmakers,
instrument makers, electricians, mathematicians, accountants and bean-counters,
and a host of others. Managing an observatory was very much like managing a
factory and needed the same kinds of disciplinary surveillance. Men such as Airy
and Adolphe Quetelet in Belgium and Johann Franz Encke in Berlin needed to
deploy and manage their forces efficiently not just in their observatories but
across whole continents to achieve their goals. As astronomers taught physicists
valuable lessons about managing large institutions, so physicists provided
astronomers with a whole panoply of new resources for studying the stars. The
division between the disciplines was increasingly fluid as personnel, practices,
and resources passed back and forth between the one and the other. Industrial
Astronomy Nineteenth-century astronomy was very far from being the solitary,
individualist pursuit of popular imagination. For much of the previous century
astronomy had increasingly been recognized as an essential adjunct to maritime
supremacy and prowess. State-supported observatories were established in
England, France, and the German lands not because of some abstract urge to
further knowledge of the heavens but because that knowledge was recognized as
having real strategic significance. Accurate maps of the stars were needed to be
able to accurately position ships at sea. Astronomy was widely regarded by
many—John Harrison and his clocks notwithstanding—as the real key to solving the
problem of longitude. In England by the beginning of the century, astronomical
endeavors were the subject of substantial state patronage. The British
Admiralty, in particular, poured money into projects that were perceived
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as bolstering the navy’s capacities to rule the waves. The primary function of
the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, established by Charles II in 1675 with the
aim of extending maritime power very much in mind—and other, Continental
establishments—was not to make new astronomical discoveries, but to continually
hone and refine knowledge of the exact position of known objects in the sky. It
was a business that needed routine and careful management as much as innovation.
Partly as the result of the significant amounts of state largesse channeled
through the British Admiralty into astronomy, the discipline was one that early
attracted the reforming attentions of zealous Young Turks. The Board of
Longitude, which under the aegis of the Admiralty oversaw the publication of the
Nautical Almanac with its charts of astronomical data, was regarded by them as
being in hock to the corrupt cronies of Sir Joseph Banks, who, through his
long-standing presidency of the Royal Society, maintained a stranglehold over
English science. The foundation of the Astronomical Society in 1820 was a direct
challenge to Banks’s authority—and one that he strenuously opposed. It was an
effort to establish an alternative power base on the part of reforming
astronomers. The Astronomical Society’s reforming stalwarts wanted to have their
say in the distribution of the Admiralty’s coppers. They saw themselves as
disciplined, meritocratic, and vocationally minded gentlemen who could rise to
the challenge of putting English astronomy on a proper, businesslike footing.
They saw their opponents as amateurish dilettantes, wedded to effete
aristocratic interests. Leading members of the Astronomical Society—such as
Francis Baily, John Herschel, and Sir James South—played a leading role in
efforts to reform the Royal Society following Banks’s death in 1820. Business
was the model for the Astronomical Society’s cadres of reformers. Many of its
founders had close links with the City. Francis and Arthur Baily, along with
Benjamin Gompertz, were stockbrokers. Charles Babbage was the son of a wealthy
banker. In their view, the foundation of astronomy—like the foundation of good
business—was precise measurement and exact calculation: in a word, good
bookkeeping. Astronomy, like business, both encouraged and required a habit of
exactitude founded on discipline of self and of others. As such, the central
function of astronomy was to produce more accurate tables of the skies. Rather
than indulging in theoretical speculation, the new society’s members were to
take on the task of placing their discipline on a sound base of reliable
calculation. The key to progress in astronomy as in financial speculation was
the elimination of error, and that was best achieved by placing
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procedures on a proper and transparent footing. As Baily remarked of Babbage’s
projected calculating engine (and with both accountancy and astronomy in mind),
“the great object of all tables is to save time and labour, and to prevent the
occurrence of error in various computations.”1 Herschel concurred that good
nautical computation “would consist in approximating as nearly as possible to
that pursued in the observatory, and divesting it of those technicalities which
are not only puzzling to learn, but which really act as obstacles to its
improvement by placing it in the light of a craft and a mystery.”2 That ideal
was soon in the process of being realized at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory,
following the appointment of Cambridge senior wrangler George Bidell Airy as
astronomer royal in 1835. Like many of the mill owners and Victorian factory
managers with whom he had so much in common, Airy was very much a self-made man.
Born in 1801, he entered Cambridge in 1819 and graduated as senior wrangler
before being elected to a fellowship at Trinity College. His mathematical and
astronomical interests aligned him at Cambridge with the Analytical Society’s
reforming clique—he was a student of the meliorist reforming don (and later
bishop of Ely) George Peacock. After a stint in the Lucasian Chair of
Mathematics, he was appointed in 1827 as Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the
university and director of the recently reestablished university observatory. In
a foretaste of things to come, he managed to persuade the university authorities
to substantially increase the salary that came with the post. He repeated the
trick when he was offered the post of astronomer royal. Unlike his predecessors,
Airy did not intend to combine the post with a lucrative ecclesiastical living
and demanded the extra cash to make up the difference. He ruled the roost at
Greenwich for the next half-century, transforming it into the epitome of
nineteenth-century observatories. Airy imposed a “factory mentality” on the
Royal Observatory. Work there was organized according to a strict hierarchy. At
the top of the tree, of course, was Airy himself. Beneath him in the chain of
command were his trusted lieutenants, Cambridge graduates who looked after the
day-to-day management of the institution. Lower in the pecking order were the
“obedient drudges”—the computers and observers who did the work. They were
typically appointed in their midteens and trained exclusively to carry out
particular specialized tasks or calculations. They were 1 2
Quoted in W. Ashworth, “The Calculating Eye,” 415. Quoted ibid., 431.
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selected straight from school on the basis of competitive examination and
typically left to become City clerks within ten years. Like contemporary mill
owners and other enthusiasts for the factory system, Airy was well aware of the
advantages of juvenile labor—it was easily trained, malleable, and above all,
cheap. Under Airy’s single-minded direction, Greenwich became a veritable
production line of astronomical observations and calculations, churned out in
published form on a regular and reliable basis. The observatory’s brief, in
Airy’s view, was not “watching the appearances of the spots in the sun or the
mountains in the moon, with which the dilettante astronomer is so much charmed .
. . it is to the regular observation of the sun, moon, planets, and stars
(selected according to a previously arranged system), when they pass the
meridian, at whatever time of day or night that may happen, and in no other
position; observations which require the most vigilant care in regard to the
state of the instruments, and which imply such a mass of calculations
afterwards, that the observation itself is in comparison a mere trifle.”3 Other
European observatory managers concurred with Airy’s vision of how astronomy
should be organized. Indeed, the superior managerial skills of Continental
observatory directors was one of the factors English reformers held up as
necessitating a thorough overhaul of native practices. The work of the German
astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was celebrated by Herschel as “the
perfection of astronomical bookkeeping.”4 When the Gottingen-educated astronomer
Johann Franz Encke ¨ (discoverer of the eponymous comet) became director of the
Berlin Observatory in 1825, he initiated a thoroughgoing reform of the
institution. With the support of the influential Alexander von Humboldt he
lobbied successfully for more funds, better instruments, and a new building for
his establishment. Under his direction the Berlin Observatory acquired an
enviable reputation for the quality and accuracy of its star catalogues.
Similarly, Franc¸ ois Arago in France and Adolphe Quetelet in Brussels made
their reputations as observatory directors largely on the basis of their
managerial talents. Like Airy, both instituted regimes at their observatories
that sought to replace the idiosyncrasies of individual observers with
disciplined, instrumentalized, and routinized procedures. It was no coincidence
that Quetelet’s other claim to fame was as one of the founders of the science of
“social physics.” In his statistics, as in his astronomy, the aim was to
eliminate variation and cultivate uniformity. 3 4
G. B. Airy, “Greenwich Observatory,” Penny Cyclopaedia, 1838, 11: 442. Quoted in
W. Ashworth, “The Calculating Eye,” 429.
Mapping the Heavens
199
The controversy surrounding the disputed discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846
provides an instructive example of the priorities (and nonpriorities) of
industrial astronomy. In late 1845, the diffident young Cambridge mathematician
John Couch Adams approached Airy with the intriguing suggestion that, by
calculating from hitherto unexplained observed perturbations in the orbit of the
planet Uranus, he could predict the position of a new and previously unsuspected
planet beyond Uranus’s orbit. He had already shown his results to James Challis,
Airy’s successor as Plumian Professor and director of the Cambridge Observatory.
Airy ignored Adams’s suggestion that a search for the new planet in the
predicted position might be a worthwhile proposition. In the meantime, the
French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier had been carrying out his own
calculations. Unlike Adams, he published his results and communicated his
findings to a number of European observatories. On 25 September 1846, two days
after receiving his communication, the Berlin astronomer J. G. Galle wrote to
Leverrier, “The planet whose position you indicated really exists. The same day
I received your letter I found a star of the eighth magnitude that was not
recorded on the excellent Carta Hora XXI (drawn by Dr. Bremiker) . . . The
observation of the following day confirmed that it was the planet sought.”5
While Leverrier was lionized across Europe for his discovery, news leaked out in
England that Adams had suggested the existence of this planet before Leverrier
had, but that Airy and Challis had failed to act on his suggestion. The two men
were pilloried in the press as a result. Airy was unrepentant, however. In his
view, searching the skies for errant planets was no part of the Royal
Observatory’s remit. As he pointed out in another context to Greenwich’s Board
of Visitors, “the Observatory is not the place for new physical investigations.
It is well adapted for following out any which, originating with private
investigators, have been reduced to laws susceptible of verification by daily
observation.”6 The observatory’s primary function, he insisted, was the
measurement and calculation of astronomical data for purposes of national
utility. Intriguing as Adams’s calculations might have been, it was not Airy’s
job to pursue them further. The regime at Greenwich was simply not designed to
accommodate such haphazard undertakings. It was for Adams as a private
individual to pursue his potential discovery with his own resources; it was not
the business of state-sponsored industrial astronomy. Airy had been unimpressed,
5 6
Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. “LeVerrier,” 277. Quoted in
A. Chapman, “Private Research and Public Duty,” 122–23.
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in any case, by the speculative nature of Adams’s calculations. They took too
much for granted for the hardheaded business astronomer. Too much speculation—in
astronomy as in fiscal affairs—was something to be avoided. Like his friend
William Whewell, Airy drew a distinction between the progressive sciences—those
that were still engaged in the process of discovery—and the permanent sciences
that were already fully worked out. In his view, only the permanent sciences
(like his brand of astronomy) should be eligible for state support. More
expressive of Airy’s views concerning the proper role of the Royal Observatory
was his grand plan, developed during the late 1840s and early 1850s, to make
Greenwich the central node in an international network of observatories. Using
the rapidly developing new technology of electromagnetic telegraphy it would be
possible, he argued, to send signals practically simultaneously between
different observatories, marking the time at which prearranged observations of
particular astronomical phenomena were carried out. The result would be vastly
improved accuracy in measurements of those observatories’ spatial location and
hence in the astronomical data they produced. As the first step in this plan
Airy, with the collaboration of Charles Vincent Walker, former secretary of the
London Electrical Society, outlined a scheme to hook the Greenwich Observatory
into the expanding national telegraph network with the aim of sending out a
standardized telegraphic time signal throughout the nation. Airy argued to the
Board of Visitors that the telegraph could be “employed to increase the general
utility of the Observatory, by the extensive dissemination throughout the
Kingdom of accurate time-signals, moved by an original clock at the Royal
Observatory.”7 The vision was one where “we may soon expect to see every series
of telegraph-wires forming part of a gigantic system of clockwork, by means of
which, timepieces, separated from each other by hundreds of miles, may be made
to keep exactly equal time, and the clocks of a whole continent move, beat for
beat, together.”8 Airy’s and Walker’s plan required unprecedented cooperation
not only between Greenwich and Continental observatories but among a range of
business interests as well. Telegraph and railway companies had to be convinced
of the benefits that might accrue from the distribution of telegraphic time from
the Royal Observatory. He had to persuade them 7 8
Quoted in D. Howse, Greewich Time and the Longitude, 95. G. Wilson, Electricity
and the Electric Telegraph (London, 1855), 59–60.
Mapping the Heavens
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that his plan would turn Greenwich time into a universal commodity: “wherever we
choose to stretch the telegraph-wires throughout the length and breadth of the
land, we could set up a clock and read on its face the evidence of the care
which the far distant astronomer bestowed on his observatory clock.”9 For Airy,
beyond the virtue of embedding his observatory ever more firmly in the
commercial life of the country, the ultimate payoff of the project was the
production of an accountable network of observatories throughout Europe. As
Walker explained to the Times, with the signaling system in place, “Mr. Airy at
Greenwich, and M. Arago at Paris, will thus be able to fix a time when the eye
of each shall be directed to the same star at the same time, and signal to each
other as each wire [of the transit instrument] is passed.”10 In the United
States, observatory managers such as William Cranch Bond at Harvard College
Observatory and Truman Stafford at Chicago’s Dearborn Observatory offered their
commercial services in selling the true time to local jewelers and railway
companies. The establishment of the Greenwich time signal provides a fine
example of the ambitions of industrial astronomy in action. Early
nineteenthcentury reformers, in England at least, regarded the state of
astronomy as parlous. The science had been hijacked by a gaggle of effete,
ineffective, and self-interested dilettantes who lacked the discipline to set
astronomy on a proper footing and failed to appreciate its possibilities. Thus,
astronomy’s institutions required a thorough overhaul by hardheaded business
astronomers who could impose the regulation the science needed. Observatories
were to be regarded as factories dedicated to the production of numbers in
industrial quantities. For fans of Adam Smith, it was selfevident that the best
way of maximizing production in a factory was by a ruthless imposition of the
division of labor. For astronomers such as Airy in England and Quetelet in
Belgium, exactly the same lessons pertained to the conduct of observational
astronomy. It was best carried out by hierarchically ordered and disciplined
cadres of workers organized according to the division of labor. By midcentury,
therefore, astronomy was a model of coordinated and collaborative science. In
the interests of uniformity, observatory managers turned more and more to
instrumentation and strict regimes of calculation and observation in order to
minimize the impact of individual idiosyncrasies on their intellectual
productions. 9
Ibid., 63–64. Quoted in I. R. Morus, “The Nervous System of Britain,” 466.
10
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The Nebular Hypothesis Other forms of astronomy that also fitted in well with
Victorian ideals of progress developed during the first half of the nineteenth
century. Following William Herschel’s lead, astronomers scanned the sky with
ever larger and more powerful telescopes. New astronomical discoveries— finding
novelties in the night sky—were sources of considerable kudos. William Herschel,
after all, had made his name and practically founded an astronomical dynasty
with his spectacular discovery of Uranus. Telescopic astronomy gained additional
significance during the first half of the nineteenth century as general
perceptions of the Universe transformed. Eighteenth-century cosmologists
typically regarded the cosmos as a timeless, changeless equilibrium. Their
nineteenth-century inheritors more frequently visualized the Universe as being
in a state of continuous progression. Telescopes that made it possible to gaze
ever further into the cosmic vastness could therefore be regarded as doing far
more than just providing a glimpse of the Universe’s structure. They opened a
window onto the Universe’s past as well. Discussions on such topics had massive
contemporary resonance. If the Universe was in a state of evolution, then maybe
so was life on Earth. If progress in nature was a matter of natural law, then
maybe social progress and emancipation rather than subservience to the status
quo should be the norm as well. One theory held particular resonance. The
nebular hypothesis, as it was popularly dubbed, had an impressive pedigree. It
was partially founded on William Herschel’s compendious observations of nebulae—
what seemed to be clouds of gaseous matter in space (figure 7.1). It carried the
hallmark of Newtonian authenticity provided by the authority of the French
physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace. As Herbert Spencer, one of the nebular
hypothesis’s many enthusiastic promoters, argued, “To have come of respectable
ancestry is prima facie evidence of worth in a belief as in a person; while to
be descended from discreditable stock is, in one case as in the other, an
unfavourable index.”11 By that criterion, the nebular hypothesis came from
distinguished stock indeed. Laplace had suggested in his Exposition du Syst`eme
du Monde, at the close of the previous century, that nebulae might be regarded
as the birthplaces of the stars and planets. In strict accordance with Newtonian
mechanics, he envisaged a process whereby swirling clouds of cosmic gas
gradually coalesced, first into clumps of matter around a slowly thickening
central 11
Quoted in S. Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,”
132.
Mapping the Heavens
203
7.1 The Orion nebula as pictured by John Herschel.
mass, and finally into discrete satellites orbiting that glowing mass—just like
the planets orbiting around the sun. To many, it seemed a persuasive scenario.
Auguste Comte, the rising star of French philosophers, popularized and defended
the idea as part of his developing creed of positive philosophy. Nebulae came in
all shapes and sizes. John Herschel in his popular volume Treatise on Astronomy
for the best-selling Cabinet Cyclopaedia unreservedly credited his father for
“the most complete analysis of the great variety of those objects which are
generally classed under the head of Nebulae, but which have been separated by
him into—1st, Clusters of stars, in which the stars are clearly distinguishable;
and these, again, into globular and irregular clusters. 2d, Resolvable nebulae,
or such as excite a suspicion that they consist of stars, and which any increase
of the optical power of the telescope may be expected to resolve into distinct
stars; 3d, Nebulae, properly so called, in which there is no appearance
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Seven
whatever of stars; which, again have been subdivided into subordinate classes,
according to their brightness and size; 4th, Planetary nebulae; 5th, Stellar
nebulae; and, 6th, Nebulous stars.”12 The “great power” of William Herschel’s
telescopes had revealed “an immense number of these objects, and shown them to
be distributed over the heavens, not by any means uniformly, but, generally,
speaking, with a marked preference to a broad zone crossing the milky way nearly
at right angles.”13 About his father’s speculations John Herschel was rather
more circumspect. “The nebulae furnish,” he remarked, “an inexhaustible field of
speculation and conjecture.” Most of them were made up of stars, he asserted,
but “if it be true, as, to say the least, it seems extremely probable, that a
phosphorescent or self-luminous matter also exists, disseminated through
extensive regions of space . . . what we may naturally ask, is the nature and
destination of this nebulous matter? Is it absorbed by the stars in whose
neighbourhood it is found, to furnish, by its condensation, their supply of
light and heat? or is it progressively concentrating itself by the effect of its
own gravity into masses, and so laying the foundation of new sidereal systems or
of insulated stars?”14 Some speculations concerning the Universe’s origins could
have distinctly subversive implications. The radical lecturer Thomas Simmons
Mackintosh—a committed disciple of the utopian socialist Robert Owen—made quite
a name for himself during the 1830s across Britain with his electrical theory of
the universe. Lecturing in Owenite Halls of Science and Mechanics’ Institutes
the length and breadth of the country, Mackintosh put forward a view of the
Universe that had electricity rather than gravity as its driving force—all
“motion throughout the solar system is effected by the agency of electricity.”15
He took advantage of the reappearance of Halley’s comet in 1835 to promote his
theory, arguing that comets were “immense volumes of aeriform matter discharged
from the sun by the agency of electricity”16 and that they would eventually
condense into planets. Electricity acted to prevent the planets from falling
into the sun, but as that electricity dissipated, the eventual fate of the Solar
System was inescapable: “The river flows because it is running 12
J. Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy (London, 1833), 40. Ibid., 401. 14 Ibid.,
406–7. 15 T. S. Mackintosh, “Electrical Theory of the Universe,” Mechanic’s
Magazine, 1835–36, 24: 13
228. 16
Ibid., 11.
Mapping the Heavens
205
down; the clock moves because it is running down; the planetary system moves
because it is running down; every system, every motion, every process, is
progressing towards a point where it will terminate.”17 The relentless unfolding
of natural law meant that the universe had a discrete beginning and end. There
was no room for God in Mackintosh’s cosmological picture and no room for
Christian salvation either. The radical message behind his cosmology was that
mankind needed to make its own salvation on earth while there was still time.
Even more dangerous in the eyes of many gentlemen of science, however, was the
use made of the nebular hypothesis in the notorious Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation. Published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges was in fact the
work of the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. Born in 1802, the son of a
hand-loom weaver, Chambers had by the 1830s made a name and some fortune for
himself as a bookseller and publisher. Along with his brother William he ran
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal from the early 1830s onwards, selling eighty
thousand copies a week by the 1840s. Originally a Tory, Chambers was by now a
firmly liberal Whig and the journal an expression of middle-class Whig values of
improvement and progress. Vestiges was dangerous in the eyes of its opponents
precisely because it was aimed at and written for exactly the kind of solid,
respectable middle-class citizen who read Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. It could
not be dismissed as easily as the patently radical rantings of an avowed
socialist such as Mackintosh. The anonymous author (though many among the
gentlemen of science suspected Chambers by the end of the 1840s) had done his
homework as well. Vestiges made good use of the latest in natural philosophy to
underpin its message. Chambers’s argument was simple. The history of the
universe was the history of the gradual unfolding of natural law. He hammered
the lesson home with examples ranging from the supposed development of stars and
planets from nebular gas to the transmutation of species. For cautiously
reformist gentlemen of science this was dangerous stuff. “The nebular
hypothesis,” Vestiges announced to its readers, “is, indeed, supported by so
many ascertained features of the celestial scenery, and by so many calculations
of exact science, that it is impossible for a candid mind to refrain from giving
it a cordial reception, if not to repose full reliance upon it, even without
seeking for it support of any other kind . . . seeing in our astral system many
thousands of worlds in all stages of formation, from the most rudimental to that
immediately preceding the present condition of those 17
T. S. Mackintosh, The Electrical Theory of the Universe (Boston, 1846), 371.
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Seven
we deem perfect; it is unavoidable to conclude that all the perfect have gone
through the various stages which we see in the rudimental.”18 The conclusion was
inescapable: “the whole of our firmament was at one time a diffused mass of
nebulous matter, extending through the space which it still occupies. So also,
of course, must have been the other astral systems. Indeed, we must presume the
whole to have been originally in one connected mass, the astral systems being
only the first division into parts, and solar systems the second.” There was
another conclusion as well: “that the formation of bodies in space is still and
at present in progress.”19 The importance of this appearance of continuous
progress (and its implications for the progress of society) had also already
been emphasized by John Pringle Nichol—another fan of the nebular hypothesis.
“In the vast Heavens, as well as among phenomena around us, all things are in a
state of change and PROGRESS,”20 he proclaimed, making quite explicit the
intimate connection between celestial physics and social dynamics. An avowed
political radical, Nichol progressed himself during the 1830s from Scottish
schoolmaster through popular lecturer and journalist on political economy and
natural philosophy until in 1836 he was appointed professor of astronomy at
Glasgow. In his popular and influential Views of the Architecture of the Heavens
(1837) he was adamant that the nebular hypothesis demonstrated the existence of
a progressive order in the universe that stretched from the formation of stars
and planets to the actions of men on Earth. According to Nichol and his allies,
the nebular hypothesis demonstrated the need for and indeed the inevitability of
social reform. Society was subject to exactly the same kind of progressive
forces that made the Solar System out of an inchoate cloud of stellar gas.
Nichol’s friend and political ally John Stuart Mill concurred and thought that
Nichol’s book would be the making of him. For Mill, Nichol, and their
associates, the nebular hypothesis was only one part—though an absolutely
crucial part—of a wide-ranging and comprehensive science of progress. The
science of progress incorporated Mill’s logic, David Ricardo’s political
economy, George Combe’s phrenology, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of
evolution by means of transmutation as well. Nichol was relentless in his
campaign to underpin progressive change in society with the revelation of
continuous progress in the heavens. Like Chambers, he emphasized that the
nebular 18
[R. Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844),
19–20. Ibid., 20–21. 20 J. P. Nichol, Views of the Architecture of the Heavens
(Edinburgh, 1837), 206. 19
Mapping the Heavens
207
7.2 Lord Rosse’s telescope.
hypothesis’s main selling point was its very simplicity. Regardless of any
cavils from the gentlemen of science, the hypothesis was so compelling as to be
self-evident. Anyone with eyes to see and sufficiently powerful telescopes to
look through could confirm the fact for themselves. The nebulae were there to be
seen in the heavens and common sense did the rest. For those who could not gain
access to large telescopes for themselves, Nichol’s crowd-pleasing lectures were
an equally compelling substitute. His shows were famous—to some notorious—for
their “gorgeous style, gigantic diagrams and enthusiasm.” Nichols was celebrated
as “the prose laureate of the stars”21 and traveled as far afield as New York to
give his performances. To his opponents, however, his lectures seemed full of
bombast rather than substance; the nebular hypothesis a misreading of the
evidence of the heavens. Working out just what the evidence of the heavens might
be in this regard was one of the issues the aristocratic Lord Rosse hoped to
resolve with the construction of his gargantuan telescope, the Leviathan of
Parsonstown, at his family seat at Parsonstown in King’s County (now County
Offaly), Ireland (figure 7.2). Rosse was an enthusiastic 21
Quoted in S. Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis,” 150.
208
Seven
astronomer with the leisure and resources to indulge his passion on a massive
scale. Building on William Herschel’s telescopic achievements, by the early
1840s Rosse had already constructed a thirty-six-inch reflecting telescope at
Parsonstown and was about to embark on an even more audacious project. Between
1842 and 1845 work was under way on the Leviathan, which was to be seventy feet
in length with a mirror six feet in diameter. The engineering achievement alone
was widely celebrated as a symbol of progress. Rosse “had no skilled workmen to
assist him. His implements, both animate and inanimate, had to be formed by
himself. Peasants taken from the plough were educated by him into efficient
mechanics and engineers.”22 Rosse mechanized the process, using steam-powered
tools to polish the gigantic mirror. The final product was definitional of the
aim of telescopic astronomy, and with it Rosse set out to scour the skies for
nebulae and try whether his telescope’s awesome power could resolve them. The
more nebulae that could be resolved into constituent stars, the less plausible
was the prospect of what Herschel had called “true nebulae” and therefore the
nebular hypothesis. Rosse’s main ally was Thomas Romney Robinson, an Anglican
divine and director of the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. He was a fervent
opponent of Papism on the one hand and the materialist radicalism associated
with the nebular hypothesis on the other. Their target was the Orion nebula that
Nichol had pinpointed in Views of the Architecture of the Heavens as a likely
candidate for true nebula status. Early in 1846, Rosse wrote to inform Nichol
that the Leviathan had been successful in resolving the Orion nebula. It was, as
Nichol ruefully remarked, no more than a “SAND HEAP of stars.”23 Robinson and
Rosse had been working hard to discredit William Herschel’s observations, on
which the claims of the nebula’s unresolvability—and hence the plausibility of
the nebular hypothesis—rested (figure 7.1). Robinson in particular went out of
his way to undermine Herschel’s reputation, asserting that his nebular
observations were worthless since Herschel was an incompetent telescope maker.
Despite the Leviathan’s reputation, however, its observations could not be
decisive. Faced with the apparent resolvability of the Orion nebula, Nichol
enthusiastically picked up on others of Rosse’s observations—such as his reports
on spiral nebulae—as new evidence of the existence of the kind of interstellar
gaseous fluid required by the nebular hypothesis. 22 23
A. Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century (London,
1900), 115. Quoted in S. Schaffer, “The Leviathan of Parsonstown,” 214.
Mapping the Heavens
209
Disputes concerning true nebularity dragged on for most of the rest of the
century. No observations, not even ones with as powerful an instrument as
Rosse’s Leviathan, could ever be really decisive since so much rested on their
interpretation. As the astronomer Otto Struve said to Rosse in 1868, “In my
opinion if a nebula is resolvable it will offer the same appearance on any
occasion when the images are sufficiently favourable. Thus admitted, your own
observations show that, with regard to the central part of the nebula of Orion,
this term ought not to be applied, for in different nights you see resolvability
in different parts of the nebula.”24 Where Rosse saw stars, Struve and others
saw constantly changing patterns of “nebulous matter” sometimes tangling into
“separate knots.” Rosse and his workers insisted that the superiority of their
instrument should give them the final say. There was nothing about their
observations that could force their opponents to capitulate, however. Too much
was at stake as far as Nichol and his fellow proponents of the science of
progress were concerned. Once in the public gaze, Rosse’s observations ceased to
be his property and could be read in a variety of ways quite conducive to the
nebular hypothesis. New kinds of instruments and new technologies were competing
with the Leviathan of Parsonstown as well for the status of being the ultimate
arbiters on the matter. The Sky’s Laboratories While Lord Rosse and his
Leviathan might at first sight conform comfortably enough with the traditional
image of the astronomer as lonely and heroic watcher of the skies, his
operations in reality were quite different. The Leviathan was very much a
product of industrial culture. Other innovations in astronomy during the middle
parts of the nineteenth century also owed much to the physicist’s laboratory and
the mechanic’s workshop. These decades saw the introduction of a number of new
technologies into the practice of astronomy with the aim, at least in part, of
making its processes less subject to the vagaries of the human observer and
therefore more “objective.” Establishing that objectivity was by no means a
straightforward task. It was not at all obvious to contemporary commentators
that the replacement of human illustrators with photographs as means of
recording the appearance of the heavens, for example, was necessarily to make
the representations more objective. They had to be persuaded. Turning the
observatory into a physicist’s 24
Quoted ibid., 221.
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Seven
laboratory was a business that involved the introduction of novel kinds of
discipline and work organization as well as of new kinds of instruments.
Astronomy’s audiences needed to be persuaded as well that these novelties really
would make their picture of the heavens more real. Photographic pioneers were
quick to suggest that astronomy was one science that might clearly benefit from
their services—unsurprisingly given that some astronomers, notably John
Herschel, played key roles in developing new photographic technologies. Herschel
had been involved in experiments on the sensitivity of various chemical
substances to light since the 1820s. He was a close associate of William Henry
Fox Talbot, who had introduced the calotype method of photography. Herschel
produced his first photographs in 1839 and was instrumental in introducing the
term “photography” to describe the new technology. Franc¸ ois Arago, the
director of the Paris Observatory, was similarly instrumental in bringing the
discoveries of the French inventor Louis Jacques Mand´e Daguerre to the
attention of the Acad´emie des Sciences. He was also one of the first to
suggest, shortly after Daguerre’s announcement of his new photographic—or
daguerreotype—process in 1839 that the new technique might have a useful role to
play in astronomy. An early daguerreotype of the moon by Daguerre was probably
taken at Arago’s suggestion. Photography was touted as a means of making
astronomical observations more objective—freeing them from the constraints of
human subjectivity. They might also have the virtue of superior sensitivity.
Chemicals that reacted to light that the human eye failed to register could
capture images of stars and celestial phenomena that mere men might miss. This
was one way in which photographs could help with the nebular hypothesis—they
might provide evidence of that elusive nebular fluid that the naked eye might
miss. The possibilities of astronomical photography received a major boost when
the Harvard astronomer William Cranch Bond exhibited daguerreotypes of the moon
taken at the Great Exhibition in 1851. They were not the first of their kind,
but they were notable for their clarity and their obvious affinity to naked eye
impressions. They were celebrated as showing that photography really could
replace and improve upon individual perceptions. Bond had produced the
daguerreotypes with the help of Boston photographer J. A. Whipple. It was a
process that required considerable experimentation to find the best chemicals
for the exposure and a great deal of human ingenuity. Well into the 1850s George
Phillips Bond (William Cranch Bond’s son and successor as director of the
Harvard Observatory) was still emphasizing the extent to which astronomers
Mapping the Heavens
211
remained dependent on the skills of artists, engravers, and photographers to
produce credible images of celestial objects. Such remarks underlined the
difficulties to be overcome in using photography to turn astronomy into what
George Bidell Airy called a “self-acting” science. Behind the scenes,
photography remained very far from self-acting—it was dependent on its
aficionados. In Britain, one of those aficionados was Warren de la Rue, who for
much of the nineteenth century was firmly established as the country’s premier
astronomical photographer. Born in London in 1815 and educated in Paris, de la
Rue was the son of the founder of a stationery manufacturing firm. A member of
the London Electrical Society, he was a keen enthusiast for natural philosophy,
publishing on chemistry and electricity from the late 1830s. During the 1840s he
turned his attention to astronomy and was soon an advocate of photography. In
1851 he produced his first photograph of the Moon, using the newly developed wet
collodion process and pointing his camera through his own thirteen-inch
reflecting telescope. Coming from a well-heeled manufacturing family had
distinct advantages. De la Rue could afford his own private observatory. He had
access to the resources (and the leisure) that remained essential for working
with a still cumbersome and time-consuming new technology. Exposure times—even
for a bright object like the Moon (one of the reasons de la Rue chose it as the
object of his early experiments)— were a significant factor. De la Rue had to
find ways of accurately tracking his target during the process. De la Rue worked
hard to improve the process, designing a driving clock that could move his
telescope in tandem with the Moon. With the new technology—and a move to cleaner
air outside London at what was then the picturesque village of Cranford (now a
suburb of London)—he could produce images of impressive clarity. He also managed
a stereoscopic (three-dimensional) portrait of the Moon that turned the eminent
John Herschel into an instant fan. “I hasten to testify my admiration of this
transcendent and wonderful effort,” the astronomer enthused. “It is a step in
nature but beyond human nature as if a giant with eyes some thousands of miles
away looked at the moon through a binocular.”25 From the mid-1850s onwards he
was also attracting Airy’s attention, always on the lookout for ways of making
the observer redundant. Airy argued that photography could introduce new
standards of accuracy and objectivity from physics into astronomy: “it will
supersede hand-drawing 25
Quoted in H. Rothermel, “Images of the Sun,” 144.
212
Seven
altogether, and even now the results obtained are much more accurate than
anything hitherto done by mapping or hand-drawing.”26 Photography could
eradicate the otherwise ineradicable “personal equation”—the idiosyncrasy that
marked even the most alert and dedicated watcher’s observations with an
indelible individual taint. As such this import from physics could be an ideal
addition to Airy’s industrialized Greenwich regime. Having been involved in
studying sunspots during his self-imposed exile at the Cape of Good Hope, John
Herschel, inspired by de la Rue’s successes with lunar photography, was anxious
for experiments with solar photography as well. In 1854 he prompted Edward
Sabine—a fellow scientific reformer, campaigner for the “magnetic crusade” to
map terrestrial magnetism, and influential member of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science’s Kew Observatory Committee—that it would be “an
object of very considerable importance to secure at some observatory . . . daily
photographic representations of the sun, with a view to keep up a consecutive
and perfectly faithful record of the history of the spots.”27 De la Rue was soon
recruited for the job and duly set up shop at Kew—where the British Association
for the Advancement of Science maintained its observatory—with the aid of a £150
grant from the Royal Society. By 1858, de la Rue had perfected a working
photoheliograph and instituted a successful regime “to determine all the data
necessary for ascertaining the relative magnitudes and positions of the sun’s
spots.”28 The instrument’s possibilities as a means of providing reliable
representations of another solar phenomenon—the eclipse—were soon spotted. In
1860 plans were mooted to carry the photoheliograph to Spain to capture an
eclipse of the sun there. Pictures of solar eclipses were notoriously unreliable
and hopes were high that photography might prove to be the answer. Illustrators
and engravers during the 1830s and 1840s had developed an array of techniques in
efforts to make sufficiently realistic representations of the elusive
phenomenon. The comparative rarity of eclipses was one problem. Another was
their short duration and the difficulty of looking at them for extended periods.
Astronomers gave their draftsmen detailed instructions as to what they should
look for and how they should try to depict their impressions. Finished drawings
were out of the question. Observers made rapid sketches while an eclipse was in
progress and tried to fill in the blanks from memory. The camera made such
skills 26
Quoted ibid., 145.
27
Quoted ibid., 152.
28
Quoted ibid., 153.
Mapping the Heavens
213
redundant, but introduced a whole range of new techniques instead. Photographing
an eclipse was a labor-intensive process. Plates had to be carefully prepared
beforehand. One assistant stood ready to hand plates to the photographer while
another stood by to uncover and cover the telescope at the crucial moments.
Another was ready to rush the exposed plates away to be developed
immediately—the plates would spoil quickly if not dealt with on the spot. All
this took place as a rule in some foreign clime far removed from the
astronomer’s home observatory. Expeditions were essential to capture rare and
transient astronomical phenomena like eclipses. Astronomers had to pack their
bags and move lock, stock, and barrel to the appropriate spot on the Earth’s
surface where the phenomenon might best be observed. De la Rue’s expedition to
Spain in 1860 with the Kew photoheliograph is a good example. To deal with the
expected difficulties of photographing the elusive phenomenon and the
idiosyncrasies of the apparatus, de la Rue had a complete photographic
observatory built for the occasion, divided into one part with a removable roof
containing his heliograph and another equipped as a photographic room. The
Admiralty, which was bankrolling the expedition, put up a ship to transport the
astronomers and their traveling observatory en masse to Spain. The resulting
photographs were a hit. Detailed preparations were similarly essential for the
projected expedition to observe the Transit of Venus across the Sun’s face in
1874—an event that had last taken place more than a century previously (figure
7.3). Airy and de la Rue were discussing plans for photographs as early as 1868.
A model set up at Greenwich was used to train observers before they set out for
the five observing stations in Egypt, Hawaii, New Zealand, and two South Pacific
islands. The observing stations and their equipment were all identical, having
been built at Greenwich before being shipped out to be reassembled on site.
Despite all efforts, however, the expedition was a flop. The results turned out
to be wildly inconsistent and nothing from the photographic parts of the
enterprise ever saw print. It was an instructive lesson in the limits of
instrumentalized standardization. Spectroscopy was the other addition to the
armory of astronomy during the second half of the nineteenth century. The new
technique was the outcome of early nineteenth-century observations that the
color of flames or of electric sparks between electrodes varied according to the
makeup of the electrodes. The light when viewed through a prism gave a spectrum
unique to each particular element. The brilliant German optical instrument maker
Josef von Fraunhofer had noted that light from the Sun exhibited characteristic
lines in its spectrum when viewed through a
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7.3 Astronomers testing their equipment in preparation for observing the Transit
of Venus.
prism. He had used these lines, which came to be known as Fraunhofer lines, to
demonstrate the quality of his optical apparatus. Such a technology could,
however, also be used by astronomers to identify the makeup of celestial bodies
by studying the characteristics of their light. As James Clerk Maxwell noted, it
was a striking vindication of the universality of physics: “when a molecule of
hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these
vibrations; and carrying them in its immense bosom for three years, delivers
them in due course, regular order and full tale into the spectroscope of Mr
Huggins at Tulse Hill.”29 The result, according to Mr Huggins himself—William
Huggins, owner of a private observatory—was that “an astronomical observatory
began, for the first time, to take on the appearance of a laboratory. Primary
batteries, giving forth noxious gases, were arranged outside one of the windows;
a large induction coil stood mounted on a stand on wheels so as to follow the
positions of the eye end of the telescope, together with a battery of several
Leyden jars; shelves with bunsen burners, vacuum tubes and bottles of chemicals,
especially of specimens of pure metals, lined its walls.”30 The German physicist
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff took the lead in solar spectroscopy with experiments in
the 1850s and 1860s. Kirchhoff 29 30
J. C. Maxwell, Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge, 1890), 2:
322. Quoted in S. Schaffer, “Where Experiments End,” 268–69.
Mapping the Heavens
215
claimed that on the basis of detailed spectroscopic analysis of the Sun’s light
he and his coworkers could actually reproduce the solar atmosphere in their
laboratory. Kirchhoff in 1861 used his spectral findings to promulgate a new
theory of the Sun’s composition. The Sun, according to his spectroscope, was
made up of an incandescent, luminous fluid. Sunspots were cloudlike spots that
floated high above its surface. Kirchhoff’s model, and his assertion that the
Sun’s constitution could be reproduced under laboratory conditions, was strongly
disputed by the French astronomer Herv´e Faye, who argued that drawing such
analogies between laboratory experiments and inaccessible celestial phenomena
was tendentious at best. Kirchhoff’s sunspot model was just as strongly disputed
across the Channel in England. The dominant model there—formulated by William
Herschel and strongly defended by his son—was that sunspots were holes through
the Sun’s atmosphere to the dark (and habitable) surface beneath. Unlike the
Frenchman, however, British astronomers such as William Huggins and Norman
Lockyer were more than happy to agree with Kirchhoff’s claim that spectroscopy
was the key to understanding the solar (and stellar) constitution. There was
little doubt in Lockyer’s mind that spectroscopy was the key to unlocking the
Sun’s secrets. “There is an experiment by which it is perfectly easy for us to
reproduce this artificially,” he said of his claim that observed changes in the
width of lines in the solar spectrum were the result of pressure changes in the
Sun’s atmosphere: “we can begin at the very outside of the Sun by means of
hydrogen, and see the widening of the hydrogen lines as the Sun is approached;
and then we can take the very Sun itself to pieces.”31 It was a powerful claim.
One reason for spectroscopy’s power as a tool for astronomers was the way it
allowed them to make their observations public. Stellar phenomena invisible to
the layperson could be reproduced in the laboratory—and more importantly in the
lecture theater—and made accessible to all. Astronomers could tell stories that
explicitly linked what was going on in the physics of a piece of terrestrial
demonstration apparatus to what took place in the heart of the Sun, or the
uncharted depths of interstellar space. Spectroscopy and solar physics could be
marketed as tools that provided vital information about the age of the Sun and
the lifespan of the Cosmos—topics that mattered to a generation obsessed with
degeneration, evolution, and the heat death of the Universe.
31
Quoted ibid., 283.
216
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Victorian astronomers were well aware of the extent to which the importation of
these new technologies transformed their discipline. David Gill, Britain’s
resident astronomer at the Cape Colony, represented them to a Royal Institution
lecture audience as the acme of astronomy: “It is these after all that most
appeal to you, it is for these that the astronomer labours, it is the prospect
of them that lightens the long watches of the night.”32 While their products
might be inspirational, the procedures and disciplines accompanying these new
practices—carried over from the nineteenth century’s growing laboratory
culture—had their closest affinities to the industrialized astronomy of George
Bidell Airy and his cohorts. As Airy’s style of stargazing required the
mobilization of ranks of ordered, disciplined observers and computers,
astronomical physics needed the mass orchestration of new resources, skills, and
workers as well. This was an astronomy that needed chemists, electricians, and
photographic entrepreneurs as well as opticians and telescope makers. Ways had
to be found of integrating these newcomers into older ways of doing things.
Despite his enthusiasm, it was notable that even Airy balked at bringing too
much of the new physics into the Royal Observatory, though he did establish an
Astro-Photographic and Spectroscopic Department in 1874—it was a tool of
spectacular discovery ill-suited to Greenwich’s more utilitarian remit. In
Britain at any rate, astronomical physics found its feet in smaller, often
private observatories like those of de la Rue at Cranford and William Huggins at
Tulse Hill, rather than under the aegis of state astronomy. Other Worlds One of
the reasons the Victorian public, as well as astronomers, were so fascinated by
the prospect of finding out more about the physical characteristics of celestial
bodies was that it seemed to shed light on the possibility that those other
worlds might be inhabited. The question of extraterrestrial life was both
controversial and topical throughout the nineteenth century. It was not just an
issue confined to the margins of cultural and intellectual life—some of Europe
and America’s most respected astronomers lined up to opine on the matter.
Neither was this a new issue. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the
question of extraterrestrial life and the possibility of a “plurality of worlds”
had 32
Quoted ibid., 267.
Mapping the Heavens
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a long history. The infamous Giordano Bruno had been an enthusiastic proponent
of the idea that life existed not only on the Moon and other planets, but on the
stars as well. Johannes Kepler had been a little more circumspect but still
believed that other planets were probably inhabited. Even the great Sir Isaac
Newton expressed the view that if all parts of the Earth were inhabited, then
there seemed no reason to suppose that God would have left the heavens
uninhabited. Newton’s remarks underlines the theological implications of
discussions of the plurality of worlds—implications that were still there in the
nineteenth century. William Herschel—whose reputation as an astronomer remained
high throughout the nineteenth century—was a particularly enthusiastic advocate
of the plurality of inhabited worlds. He was adamant that the Moon must be
occupied by inhabitants of one kind or another. He was confident as well that
his increasingly powerful telescopes would eventually provide irrefutable proof
on the matter. He even toyed with the idea that he had already seen such
evidence. On one occasion he noted following some telescopic observations of the
moon that “I believed to perceive something which I immediately took to be
growing substances. I will not call them Trees as from their size they can
hardly come under that denomination . . . My attention was chiefly directed to
Mare humorum, and this I now believe to be a forest.”33 Some of his
contemporaries thought that Herschel’s preoccupation with lunar (and solar) life
rendered him “fit for bedlam.” He was not, however, the only Enlightenment
astronomer to entertain the possibility of extraterrestrial life by any means.
Laplace discussed the possibility in his M´ecanique C´eleste. The argument was
supported by J´erome Lalande, professor of astronomy at the Coll`ege ˆ Royale,
who argued that “the resemblance is so perfect between the earth and the other
planets that if one admits that the earth was made to be inhabited, one cannot
refuse to admit that the planets were made for the same purpose.”34 The German
astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen was one of the early nineteenth century’s
most enthusiastic advocates of extraterrestrial life—as well as being one of the
century’s most prolific astronomical writers. In 1824, in his “Entdeckung vieler
deutlichen Spuren der Mondebewohner, besonders eines collassalen Kunstgeb¨audes
derselben” (Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially
One 33 34
Quoted in M. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 63. Quoted ibid., 79.
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of Their Colossal Buildings) he argued that the colored tints he observed on the
Moon’s surface should be interpreted as evidence of vegetation. He claimed to
have seen pathways through his telescope, demonstrating the existence of lunar
animals roaming on the surface. He had also seen a variety of geometrically
shaped features that he speculated might be artificially constructed roads and
cities. One large, star-shaped structure in particular was labeled a temple.
Some of his contemporaries regarded all of this as evidence that the professor
of astronomy at the University of Munich had—like William Herschel—taken leave
of his senses. The plurality of worlds was nevertheless part of the common
discourse of astronomical debate in the German lands. Even those such as Carl
Friedrich Gauss, Wilhelm Olbers, and Johann Joseph von Littrow, who regarded
Gruithuisen’s claims as patently absurd, were themselves sympathetic to the
possibility that life existed on other worlds. In Britain, William Herschel’s
stellar reputation, if nothing else, guaranteed discussions of the plurality of
worlds a sympathetic hearing. John Herschel, as an assiduous defender of his
father’s achievements, was an advocate of pluralism as well, if a rather more
circumspect one than his parent. The planets, according to John Herschel, were
“spacious, elaborate and habitable worlds.” The stars were “effulgent centres of
life and light to myriads of unseen worlds.”35 Herschel’s arguments in favor of
this conviction were classic examples of British natural theological argument.
“Now, for what purpose are we to suppose such magnificent bodies scattered
through the abyss of space?” he queried. “Useful, it is true, they are to man as
points of exact and permanent reference; but he must have studied astronomy with
little purpose, who can suppose man to be the only object of his Creator’s care,
or who does not see in the vast and wonderful apparatus around us his provision
for other races of animated beings.”36 John was not the only defender of the
elder Herschel’s reputation. W. H. Smyth, admiral in the British navy and
astronomical enthusiast, asserted that the “inhabitants of every world will be
formed of the material suited to that world, and also for that world, and it
matters little whether they are six inches high, as in Lilliput . . . whether
they crawl like beetles, or leap fifty yards high.”37 These were theological
arguments—assertions that a recognition of the plurality of worlds was also a
recognition of 35
J. Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy (London, 1833), 2. Ibid., 380. 37 W. H.
Smyth, Cycle of Celestial Objects (London, 1844), 1: 92. 36
Mapping the Heavens
219
God’s power and benevolence. The popular writer Jane Marcet in her best-selling
Conversations on Natural Philosophy (1819) was an advocate of pluralism as well.
Not all British commentators concurred with this assessment. An equally
best-selling popular writer, Mary Somerville, argued in her Connexion of the
Physical Sciences (1834) that “the planets, though kindred with the earth in
motion and structure, are totally unfit for the habitation of such a being as
man.”38 Sir Charles Lyell deployed his geological expertise to cast doubt on the
prospect of “the plurality of habitable worlds throughout space, however
favourite a subject of conjecture and speculation.”39 Lyell’s friend Charles
Darwin, on the other hand, was a fan of pluralism, at least in his younger days.
More dangerously for gentlemen of science, arguments in favor of the existence
of extraterrestrial life lay at the center of the subversive Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation. The anonymous author (later revealed to be the
publisher Robert Chambers) argued of the planets that “every one of these
numberless globes is either a theatre of organic being, or in the way of
becoming so . . . Where there is light there will be eyes, and these, in other
spheres, will be the same in all respects as the eyes of tellurian animals, with
only such differences as may be necessary to accord with minor peculiarities of
condition and of situation.”40 Discussions of the possibility, at least, of the
plurality of worlds was part of the common currency of astronomical debate in
Britain as well as the German lands, and the balance of opinion seemed if
anything to veer towards the positive. In 1853, however, the English natural
philosopher William Whewell delivered a devastating critique of the pluralist
position in his anonymous pamphlet, Essay on the Plurality of Worlds. Whewell
had previously been at least sympathetic to the possibility of extraterrestrial
life, suggesting in 1833 that stars other than the Sun might also “have planets
revolving about them; and these may, like our planet, be the seats of vegetable
and animal and rational life.”41 By the 1850s, however, disgusted and shocked by
the success of Vestiges and the impious uses to which it put the pluralist
argument, the polymathic master of Trinity College, Cambridge—a devout Anglican
and staunch Tory—had changed his mind. He now wanted 38
M. Somerville, Connexion of the Physical Sciences (London, 1834), 264. Quoted in
M. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 223. 40 [R. Chambers], Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844), 161–64. 41 W. Whewell, Astronomy
and General Physics (London, 1833), 207. 39
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to show that “dim as the light is which science throws upon creation, it gives
us reason to believe that the placing of man upon the earth (including his
creation) was a supernatural event, an exception to the laws of nature. The
Vestiges has, for one of its main doctrines, that even this was a natural event,
the result of a law by which man grew out of a monkey.”42 By this reading, any
defense of pluralism was in danger of descending into an argument in favor of
natural law and a denial of special creation. Whewell argued strenuously that
“in the eyes of any one who accepts the Christian faith,” the Earth could never
be “regarded as being on a level with any other domiciles. It is the Stage of
the great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation.” The “assertions of
Astronomers when they tell us that it is only one among millions of similar
habitations”43 demanded strenuous refutation. Whewell’s diatribe certainly
raised eyebrows. As one reviewer commented, “We scarcely expected that in the
middle of the nineteenth century, a serious attempt would be made to restore the
exploded idea of man’s supremacy over all other creatures in the universe; and
still less that such an attempt would have been made by one whose mind was
stored with scientific truths. Nevertheless a champion has actually appeared,
who boldly dares to combat against all the rational inhabitants of other
spheres; and though as yet he wears his vizor down, his dominant bearing, and
the peculiar dexterity and power with which he wields his arms, indicate that
this knight-errant of nursery notions can be none other than the Master of
Trinity College, Cambridge.”44 The venerable Scottish natural philosopher, Sir
David Brewster, pitched in with venom, dismissing Whewell’s arguments as
degrading astronomy and subverting true religion. In the unkindest cut of all,
he even compared Whewell (unfavorably) to the author of the heretical Vestiges.
The Rev. Baden Powell, Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry, was more
circumspect. His view was that “by the light of inductive analogy, astronomical
presumption, taking the truths of geology into account, seems to be in favour of
progressive order, advancing from the inorganic to the organic, and from the
insensible to the intellectual and moral in all parts of the material world.”45
He was unambiguous that the “material world” included other 42
Quoted in M. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 275. [W. Whewell], Essay
on the Plurality of Worlds (London, 1853), 44–45. 44 Quoted in M. Crowe, The
Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 282. 45 Baden Powell, Essays on the Spirit of
Inductive Philosophy, the Unity of Worlds, and the Philosophy of Creation
(London, 1855), 231. 43
Mapping the Heavens
221
planets orbiting around other suns as well. John Herschel’s response in a letter
to the besieged master of Trinity was dismissive: “So this then is the best of
all possible worlds—the ne plus ultra between which and the 7th heaven there is
nothing intermediate. Oh dear! Oh dear!”46 One of the most prolific and popular
expositors of the argument for extraterrestrial life during the second half of
the nineteenth century was Camille Flammarion. Born in Montigny-le-Roi in 1842,
by the age of sixteen he had persuaded the eminent Leverrier, discoverer of
Neptune and by then director of the Paris Observatory, to hire him as an
apprentice. At the age of twenty, he published his first book, La Pluralit´e des
Mondes Habit´es, an audacious and robust defence of pluralism that went through
numerous editions (fifteen by 1870) and was translated into several languages.
Unlike his patron Leverrier, who was a practitioner of Airy-style industrial
astronomy, Flammarion was an enthusiast for astronomical physics and the
possibilities it held of providing real information about the physical
constitution of other worlds—and of their inhabitants. For Flammarion there was
nothing about the Earth that marked it out as being particularly fit for life.
There was nothing unique about humankind’s habitation and everything to suggest
that other worlds might prove at least as hospitable to life. Far from the
Earth’s being the world best established for the maintenance of life, a great
number of other worlds were far superior in terms of inhabitability to our own
humble planet. If there really was life on other planets, it was a short step to
ponder how communication might be established between the inhabitants of Earth
and those of other worlds. Telegraphy and later telephony and wireless
telegraphy established the possibility of communicating over vast distances. An
increasing number of commentators from about the 1860s onwards speculated
whether the vast interplanetary and interstellar chasms might be bridged in
similar fashion. The Frenchman Charles Cros came up with the suggestion that
electric light rays could be focused using parabolic mirrors so as to be strong
enough to be detected by any inhabitants of Mars or Venus that might be looking
at Earth through their telescopes. He proposed a code to establish
communication. In 1891 Flammarion announced the bequest of 100,000 francs to the
Acad´emie des Sciences to establish a prize for the first person to communicate
with the inhabitants of another planet and receive a reply within the next ten
years. In England Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) suggested in the
Times that signals from mirrors reflecting sunlight might 46
Quoted in M. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 311.
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be detected by telescope-wielding Martians. In America the flamboyant inventor
Nikola Tesla pronounced that “with an expenditure not exceeding two thousand
horsepower, signals can be transmitted to a planet such as Mars with as much
exactness and certitude as we now send messages by wire from New York to
Philadelphia.”47 One form of communication with life from other worlds was held
to have already taken place. Analysis of meteorites—generally accepted to have
an extraterrestrial origin—seemed to indicate that many contained carbon-based
substances of organic origin. If these stones falling from the sky came from
other worlds, then the organic remains they contained were clearly the remains
of the indigenous life forms of those other worlds. The physicist Sir William
Thomson, searching around for evidence to confute Darwinian evolution, quickly
latched onto the possibilities. In his presidential address to the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871 he announced that “because we
all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time
immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard as probable in
the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving
about through space.” Furthermore, the “hypothesis that life originated on this
earth through moss-grown fragments of another world may seen wild and visionary;
all I maintain is that it is not unscientific.”48 Evolutionists, sensing they
were the target of Thomson’s speculations, reacted scornfully. The prospect of
life itself crossing interplanetary space was, however, very much in the air
when H. G. Wells penned the War of the Worlds in 1898. It was no coincidence
either that Wells chose Mars as the subject of his fiction. The Planet of War
hit the headlines in 1877 with the announcement by the Italian astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli that he had discovered an extensive system of canals on
the planet’s surface. This was unambiguous proof that Mars was not only
inhabited but inhabited by intelligent beings. Schiaparelli enjoyed a solid
reputation as a cautious and reliable observer. He had studied with Encke in
Berlin and Struve in Pulkowa before becoming director of the Brera Observatory
in Milan in 1862. For more than two decades after his momentous discovery,
astronomers across Europe and America lined up on one side or another of the
disputed question: had Schiaparelli really seen canals or were they 47
Quoted ibid., 398. W. Thomson, “Presidential Address,” Reports of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, 1871, 41: 269–70. 48
Mapping the Heavens
223
7.4 The canals of Mars as observed by Percival Lowell in 1905.
an optical illusion? The popular historian of astronomy Agnes Clerke, writing in
1885, was in no doubt, however, that the canals’ existence had been fully
substantiated. In 1894 the American astronomer Percival Lowell joined the fray.
At his Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Lowell confirmed that he too
had seen the canals and put forward the theory that they were designed to carry
meltwater from the planet’s polar icecaps to the equator. Disputes concerning
the canals’ reality (and the evidence they afforded of Martian life) carried on
well into the twentieth century and were grist for the mills of a generation of
science fiction writers (figure 7.4). Debates concerning the possibility of
extraterrestrial life caught the Victorian public imagination for a variety of
reasons. Such discussions intersected with a number of major cultural concerns.
Extraterrestrial life had important theological consequences. To some it was
evidence of God’s munificence and the reliability of natural theological
arguments. Others like Whewell came to regard the plurality of worlds as
suggesting a dangerous dilution of Anglican doctrine. To many radical advocates
such as Robert Chambers the plurality of inhabited worlds was, like the nebular
hypothesis, proof of the universal operations of natural law and hence of the
possibilities of human social (and spiritual) progress. In William Thomson’s
hands it became an anti-Darwinian bludgeon. Astronomers— particularly those
advocates of astronomical physics—picked up on
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arguments concerning extraterrestrial life as providing a powerful new incentive
and affirmation of the cultural relevance of their labors. Their endeavors could
through such debates have important things to say about mounting late
nineteenth-century concerns about humanity’s place in the Universe.
Extraterrestrials represented both fears and hopes concerning what humankind’s
own future in the coming new century might be. As Schiaparelli speculated about
the Martian society that had built the canals, he concluded that the
“institution of a collective socialism ought indeed to result from a parallel
community of interests and of universal solidarity among the citizens . . . The
interests of all are not distinguished from the other; the mathematical
sciences, meteorology, physics, hydrography, and the art of construction are
certainly developed to a high degree of perfection; international conflicts and
wars are unknown; all the intellectual efforts which, among the insane
inhabitants of a neighbouring world are consumed in mutually destroying each
other, are unanimously directed against the common enemy, the difficulty which
penurious nature opposes at each step.”49 Conclusion Astronomy had never really
corresponded to its romantic image as a solitary science in which lonely
watchers scanned the skies from their watchtowers. By the end of the nineteenth
century it corresponded to that image even less. Astronomy was a labor- and
time-intensive exercise that demanded the allocation of resources on an
impressive scale. Successful observatories needed the managerial regimes of
factory production. From the beginning of the century, astronomers were already
the recipient of considerable state patronage throughout Europe. It seemed a
prerequisite of imperial expansion. Astronomers’ careful cataloguing of the
skies could lead to ways of more accurately positioning ships at sea—solving the
problem of longitude. Such knowledge could put a seafaring nation anxious for
overseas expansion and nervous of the territorial ambitions of its neighbors at
a distinct advantage. As well as their apparent utility, astronomers rode high
on Newton’s reputation. His Principia was celebrated for having placed the
science of celestial motion on an apparently certain footing. Astronomers could
predict the future movements of the planets with clockwork confidence. Their
science had gathered for itself a reputation for mathematical exactitude that
was the envy of other 49
Quoted in M. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 515.
Mapping the Heavens
225
natural philosophers. It was the model discipline against which others measured
themselves. Nineteenth-century astronomers fashioned themselves and their
science so that they appealed to a broad swathe of constituencies. Astronomy
remained an important adjunct of the state. Precision about the stars could
deliver precision about political geography as well. Observatories became
factorylike centers of calculation, machinelike in their reliability. The
science of the stars could be made to matter for terrestrial politics too.
Understanding the history of stellar evolution delivered important messages
about the proprieties of contemporary social organization. This turned
telescopes into potential weapons of insurrection that merited careful policing.
Astronomers such as Lord Rosse at Parsonstown needed to be careful what use was
made of their discoveries. Not just anybody could be allowed to speculate on the
meaning of the heavens. The anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation was ridiculed by gentlemen of science for his presumption in
opining on matters beyond his ken. Only specialist astronomers had the nous to
properly interpret the message of the stars. At the same time, moreover, large
parts of astronomy were becoming adjuncts of physics. Men such as William
Huggins argued that their work had brought celestial phenomena literally into
the physical laboratory and the lecture theater. In this respect, while
astronomers continued to provide physicists with important lessons in the
management of large-scale institutions, physics by the end of the nineteenth
century had become the dominant partner. Physics rather than astronomy was the
nineteenth-century science.
8 Places of Precision
Precision measurement seems to us to be at the very heart of modern physics.
Measuring their effects as accurately and precisely as possible seems a
prerequisite for understanding how the laws of nature operate. This
preoccupation is, however, a comparatively recent phenomenon. It was only during
the nineteenth century that laboratory disciplines started to put a whole new
emphasis on precision measurement. Particularly towards the end of the century,
as many physicists concluded that the end of physics was nigh—that they had
established the general laws by which the Universe operated—the task at hand
seemed to be one of consolidation. With few fundamental discoveries left to
make, measurement seemed to many the path to a scientific reputation. Finding
more and more ingenious ways of determining the exact value of constants and
units was the big task ahead for physics. Establishing common standards of
measurement was seen as the key to progress. For physicists such as James Clerk
Maxwell, this was a moral crusade as well. Maxwell argued that the absolute
identity of molecules was proof positive that they were manufactured articles
fresh from some celestial production line. If they were manufactured articles
then they required a designer—God. On this view there was a direct line between
the physicist’s routines of precision measurement and Victorian Anglicanism.
Maxwell’s remarks provide another clue as well to account for this concern with
precision. Laboratories by the 226
Places of Precision
227
second half of the century were increasingly part of an industrial culture that
depended on disciplined regimes of accuracy and exactitude. Factories depended
on finely measured, identical, and interchangeable components just as laboratory
physics depended on reliable, robust, and universal constants. Laboratories in
the eighteenth century were few and far between. A few individuals—those who
could afford to do so—maintained private laboratories in their own homes, where
they carried out their own researches. Universities, however, did not maintain
laboratories in anything resembling the modern sense. There might be a room or
an annex behind a lecture theater where demonstrations were prepared, but these
were not places of research—and neither were university professors expected as
part of their duties to carry out any such research. Laboratories proliferated
during the nineteenth century, however. No longer spaces of private exploration,
they increasingly became centers of research and— just as importantly—teaching.
Physics professors were expected to pass on their experimental skills as much as
their book knowledge to the next generation. In Britain, France, Germany, and
North America, institutions of higher learning jostled to acquire a physics
laboratory—and preferably an eminent physicist to direct it. Laboratories became
part of the trappings of a modern university. Students would learn the skills of
precision measurement in a carefully disciplined and regulated atmosphere. Even
as far afield as Japan, European experimental physicists were imported to
establish teaching laboratories and pass on the increasingly vital skills of
accurate experimentation. In Britain by the end of the century, the preeminent
leader of the pack was without doubt Cambridge’s prestigious Cavendish
Laboratory. By the early years of the twentieth century the majority of
physicists manning university physics laboratories throughout Britain and its
colonies had passed through its portals. The Cavendish manufactured experimental
physicists as surely and successfully as it manufactured reliable measurements.
The Cavendish’s success was not achieved without encountering opposition,
however. Many worried that a laboratory might not sit well with the reputation
of an ancient university catering to the needs of the sons of the upper classes.
Some of the dons were certainly concerned that there was more than a whiff of
the factory floor about a late Victorian laboratory—hardly an appropriate
adornment then for a civilized institution. James Clerk Maxwell, as the first
Cavendish Professor, had to work hard to convince them otherwise. He had to find
ways of integrating the laboratory into the university’s established, hallowed
regime.
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The Cavendish’s reputation by the end of the century was proof of his success.
He and his successors, Lord Rayleigh and J. J. Thomson, had transformed the
place from a potential thorn in Cambridge’s side to a real rose in the
university’s crown. For Cantabrigian physicists and other Britons, the major
competition during the final decades of the nineteenth century seemed to be
coming from the Germans. For much of the century German physics seemed to be in
the ascendancy, having taken over from an early lead by the French under
Laplace’s leadership. British physicists certainly pointed to German physics as
being at the root of the new German state’s rising industrial (and military)
clout and lobbied for increased government funding accordingly. The Germans
themselves, however, were less confident. They saw their own physics
institutions and laboratories as being in just as much dire need of reform. In
particular, according to the electrical entrepreneur and industrialist Werner
von Siemens, the new Reich needed its own physical laboratory to keep the
opposition at bay, and he was prepared to put up the money for it. The result
was the PhysikalischTechnische Reichsanstalt, founded in 1887 after more than a
decade’s planning and with the eminent Hermann von Helmholtz at its head. The
aim was to create an institution devoted to the imperial, industrial, and
intellectual needs of the ambitious new state. The fledgling institution would
compete with and outstrip the best in Europe in the production of scientific
standards, making physics a tool of German industrial progress and expansion.
The most ambitious—and consequential—of the late nineteenth century’s grand
standardizing projects was the scheme to found an international system of
electrical units. Standards like these were deemed essential for the burgeoning
international telegraph cable industry on which European and American imperial
expansion increasingly depended. As well as ruling the waves, the late
nineteenth century’s colonial powers needed to have fast and reliable ways of
communicating with their distant peripheries. This meant a network of underwater
telegraph cables criss-crossing the globe. That network’s reliability depended
crucially on electrical standards. To maintain the highest efficiency, the
cables’ electrical characteristics—particularly electrical resistance—had to be
known with precision. This was what underlay the British Association for the
Advancement of Science’s campaign to establish a reliable unit of resistance—the
ohm—in the 1860s. Early efforts were spearheaded by Maxwell at King’s College
London and the apparatus moved with him to Cambridge in the 1870s. Under
Rayleigh, standardizing the ohm became
Places of Precision
229
a major focus of the Cavendish’s activities. It was no accident that British
researchers led the field here—most of the world’s undersea telegraph network
was British owned. One of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt’s ambitions
was to muscle in on Cambridge’s preeminence in this area. By the end of the
century, large physics research and teaching laboratories were a part of the
cultural landscape. Across Europe, North America, and beyond, universities
without such facilities were rapidly becoming the exception rather than the
rule. Such places were widely recognized as being powerhouses of industrial
culture. As well as producing the hosts of experimental physicists needed to
fill new university positions, these laboratories produced disciplined cadres of
engineers and technicians destined for careers in industrial laboratories and
workshops. These institutions were wedded to a cult of precision. Making better
and ever more accurate measurements of nature’s constants was the order of the
day. The emphasis on precision fostered discipline. That was the key to
unlocking nature’s secrets. Increasingly as well, this laboratory discipline was
coming to be regarded as a saleable commodity. By the end of the century
physicists had a recognizable career structure stretching from undergraduate
training through supervised postgraduate research to an industrial or academic
position. Spokesmen for the discipline argued for ever larger allocations of
public funds to expand the profession. Physics, they argued, had a crucial role
to play in fin de si`ecle culture and in furthering social and economic
progress. It was a key weapon in any industrial nation’s armory. The Rise of the
Laboratory Until well into the nineteenth century, institutional laboratories
for research—and more crucially, for teaching—in physics were something of a
rarity. In no European country was research, in anything resembling the modern
sense of the word, taken to be part of the duties of a university professor, for
example. A professor’s role was regarded as pedagogical—his task was to transmit
established knowledge to his students, not to produce new knowledge. University
lecture theaters might have an annex—typically behind the lecturer’s
podium—where demonstrations were prepared, but there was no clear distinction
between the backroom work of experiment and the front-of-house activity of
demonstration. In some ways, the emergence of the laboratory as a distinctive
research—and pedagogical—space in its own right can be thought of as
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the building of a wall between those two spaces. Research was coming to be
regarded as an autonomous activity in its own right rather than as an adjunct to
teaching. As such it was seen as requiring its own institutional spaces.
Furthermore, it was coming to be regarded as something for which a specific
regime of training was needed as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
laboratories were, if not ubiquitous yet, certainly more common as institutional
spaces. The structures of French academies were revamped and research started to
be recognized as part of a Faculty member’s remit; German physics professors
insisted that their cabinets of philosophical instruments be overhauled; in
Britain, natural philosophers pointed to Continental developments and insisted
on the need to emulate them. French experimental natural philosophy and its
institutions enjoyed a high reputation already at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. British and German natural philosophers regarded with envy
the facilities and state support their French counterparts were offered. French
physical sciences, like the rest of science, had been systematically reordered
following the Revolution and under Napoleon’s imperial rule. The result was a
strictly regulated and hierarchical system of institutes and faculties, largely
revolving around Paris. French universities were reorganized under Napoleon into
a single University of France, with faculties in the various provincial centers,
including science faculties. Experimental and mathematical physics were high on
the agenda, though subservient to medicine and law. Foreign students anxious to
imbibe the best possible ´ natural philosophical education flocked to Paris to
study at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Sorbonne. The laboratories where they
clamored to train with masters such as Gay-Lussac and Jean-Baptiste Dumas were
not state financed, however. They were private domains. French laboratory
physics had a history of concern with precision stretching back to Coulomb’s and
Lavoisier’s pioneering experiments at the end of the eighteenth century. It was
an integral part of the Laplacian approach to physics and survived the demise of
the Laplacian program. By the second half of the century, however, French
physicists were increasingly agitated by what they saw as the decline of their
science. French physics institutions seemed moribund compared to the innovations
taking place at German universities, or even in Britain. Foreign students seemed
more interested in studying in Berlin than in Paris. French politicians and
industrialists worried as well about the way French industry seemed to lag
behind its European competitors. The message was rammed home by France’s
disastrous military defeat by Prussia in 1871. French
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231
8.1 Michael Faraday cheerfully at work in the basement laboratory of the Royal
Institution.
physics advertised itself as a solution to the problem. Technical education and
laboratory training could produce new cadres of proficient engineers and
technicians who would revolutionize French industry. Science faculties quite
deliberately sought to transform themselves into institutions with a direct
industrial role. As much as preparing teachers for the nation’s lyc´ees,
scientific directors now regarded themselves as committed to the task of
producing a scientifically literate workforce. Auguste Lamy at Lille in the
1850s, for example, tailored his research and his teaching on thermodynamics to
fit the needs of local Lillois industry, drawing in crowds in the process. Later
in the century, science faculties across France aimed to produce engineers for
the nation’s burgeoning electrical industry. As in Britain and Germany, the
inculcation of precision physics in the laboratory was seen as having a distinct
payoff in national productivity. In Britain, one of the first institutional (as
opposed to private) laboratories with more than just a supporting role for its
adjacent lecture theater was the one at the Royal Institution. Sir Humphry Davy
and following him Michael Faraday used the institution’s laboratories to further
their own research activities (figure 8.1). Originally a chemistry laboratory,
with Faraday in charge the work done in the Royal Institution’s basements
shifted towards physics experiments. The laboratory was used for Faraday’s own
private research and not to train students (he never
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had any) in laboratory skills and disciplines. As university professors acquired
more institutional space for their experimental activities, however, it became
more common for some of them to encourage favored students to join them in their
laboratories. Nowhere was experimental training a formal prerequisite of
academic study. Enthusiastic favorites could learn the rudiments of experiment
at their masters’ feet instead. James D. Forbes, professor of natural philosophy
at the University of Edinburgh, for example, encouraged students to spend time
with him in the laboratory. The status of these laboratories was often
ambiguous. The physical space might be provided by the university, but more
often than not it was the individual professor who provided the apparatus out of
his own pocket, as did Charles Wheatstone at King’s College London, with the
experiments that led to his invention with William Fothergill Cooke of the
electromagnetic telegraph. When William Thomson arrived back in Glasgow in 1846
to take up his position as professor of natural philosophy, he was anxious to
take advantage of the opportunity to embark on his own ambitious program of
experimental work. He soon turned to his students to provide him with assistance
in this labor-intensive business and gradually, as “other students, hearing that
some of their class fellows had got experimental work to do, came to me and
volunteered to assist in the investigation,”1 the basis of an academic teaching
laboratory began to form. Arrangements were formalized in the mid-1850s with the
university agreeing to provide Thomson with laboratory space that could
accommodate his students as well. By 1862, Thomson could boast to Helmholtz that
“I have had a really convenient and sufficient laboratory for students. Out of
about 90 who attend my lectures, about 30 have applied for admission to the
laboratory, and of these 20 or 25 will work fairly. I hope I may have half a
dozen who will do good work.”2 By then they were helping Thomson with his work
on electrical measuring apparatus, with an eye to the telegraph industry and
their mentor’s role in the plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic.
They were learning the value (in all senses of the word) of precision
measurement. Thomson’s Glasgow innovations established a model that other
British physicists sought to emulate. In 1866, George Carey Foster established 1
Quoted in G. Gooday, “Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching
Laboratories in Victorian Britain,” 31. 2 Quoted ibid., 35.
Places of Precision
233
a physics teaching laboratory at University College London. He was followed
later the same year by Robert Clifton at Oxford. In 1868 Peter Guthrie Tait
formalized James Forbes’s old arrangements and established a teaching laboratory
at the University of Edinburgh. By 1885, speaking at the opening of the physics
laboratory at University College Bangor in North Wales, William Thomson could
claim that “[t]he physical laboratory system has now become quite universal. No
University can now live unless it has a well-equipped laboratory.”3 Others were
still a little less gung-ho on the issue. Reminiscing about his appointment at
Liverpool in 1881, Oliver Lodge recalled that “it was no joke having to start a
laboratory from the beginnings and collect all the apparatus. Physical
laboratories were rather novelties in those days. Carey Foster’s had been the
first of its kind in England; I mean a place where students were trained to
perform experiments for themselves.”4 At Liverpool, Lodge found himself in the
unenviable position of equipping a physics department in the rooms of an old
lunatic asylum. The padded room, he noted, became incorporated into his
laboratory. According to Lodge, British models were still so few and far between
even by the 1880s, that he felt obliged to “make a tour of the Continental
laboratories and gain experience that way.”5 For Britain’s new breed of
laboratory managers, the apparently inexorable rise of the laboratory was proof
of their field’s progress and evidence of a new, disciplined ethos of precision.
Frederick Guthrie, professor of physics at the Royal School of Mines, argued in
1870 that “the exact and experimental sciences are now so much more fully
developed that it is impossible to remain any longer contented with attempting
to teach an experimental class by means of a blackboard and a piece of chalk; it
is now necessary to have an efficient apparatus for teaching these subjects.”6
Robert Clifton at Oxford concurred. As he sought to convince the university in
1868 of the need for new facilities, he insisted that “it has now become
necessary for students to achieve fuller instructions than can possibly be given
in public lectures and it is as important for a student of physics to become
acquainted by actual experience with accurate 3
Quoted ibid., 42. O. Lodge, Past Years (London: Stodder & Haughton, 1931), 153.
5 Ibid. 6 Quoted in G. Gooday, “Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics
Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain,” 36. 4
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Eight
physical processes, as it is for students of chemistry or physiology to receive
practical instructions in these departments of science.”7 The point was to
inculcate an ethos of precision. This was what progress in physics depended
upon. Britain was not alone in fostering the cult of precision and identifying
the laboratory as the key to progress in physics. As Oliver Lodge’s remarks
indicate, some Britons did indeed worry that they had been rather slow in
getting the message. Many looked to the German example for inspiration. Germans
themselves were proud of their successes. Werner von Siemens boasted in 1883
that “[n]o nation in the world has done so much for scientific and technical
education as Germany, and especially Prussia.”8 As in Britain, university
teaching laboratories were very much a nineteenth-century innovation. From the
early eighteenth century, German natural philosophy professors had habitually
assembled physical cabinets—collections of instruments usually for demonstration
purposes—which sometimes extended to lecture theaters and workshops. Again as in
Britain these were usually the property and responsibility of the individual
rather than the institution. In 1833, however, Wilhelm Weber established a
laboratory at the University of Gottingen ¨ where he offered his students
hands-on experience of performing experiments. He continued the practice and
established a laboratory at Leipzig when he moved there in 1837. He was emulated
by Heinrich Gustav Magnus in Berlin in 1843 and by Franz Neumann at Konigsberg
in 1847. ¨ Both these were private initiatives in the professors’ own homes. It
was not until 1862 that Magnus persuaded the university to take over the
laboratory’s funding. German states for much of the first half of the century
took the view that scientific discovery was not the business of the university
instructor. It was not an attitude that encouraged universities to provide
laboratories. By the 1860s, however, state-funded university laboratories were
becoming more common. Crucially, the teaching regime increasingly included a
Praktikum: a course of training in laboratory experimentation. By the 1870s as
well, more and more German universities were establishing their own physics
institutes. The expansion of experimental physics—and the cultivation as in
Britain of the cult of precision—was helped by German physicists’ insistence
that new German industries, particularly the rising electrical industry, were
“the children of physics,” for whom the time 7 8
Quoted ibid., 38. D. Cahan, “The Institutional Revolution in German Physics,” 1.
Places of Precision
235
had come “to reimburse their Mother for her former nursing.”9 As Emil Warburg
argued in 1881, if physics were the source of Germany’s newfound industrial
might, then new institutes and laboratories were essential to meet “the daily
increasing need of successfully communicating in a contemporary manner the
theories and methods of physics to a larger audience and of winning a larger
number of arms for the advancement of science.”10 Men of physics such as Rudolf
Virchow argued that the impact of physics on national life would not just be
“the ever-greater extension of material productivity” but to make it “the maxim
of our thinking and of moral action.”11 Physics could teach the virtues of
precision in everyday life as well as in the laboratory. The bible of the new
German physics institutes was Friedrich Kohlrausch’s Leitfaden der praktischen
Physik (1870) with its lengthy discussions of techniques of precision
measurement and exhaustive tables of constants. Increasingly throughout the
century, American natural philosophers and physicists were working to convince
their institutions of the importance of laboratory work in the production of
scientifically literate and proficient students. When the electrician Joseph
Henry was hired from Albany by New Jersey College in Princeton, he was adamant
that he should have a laboratory equipped with the best European instruments. He
set out on a trip to London and Paris to stock up on the essential apparatus.
The laboratory he so stocked was for his private use and for the preparation of
lecture demonstrations only, however. His students’ contacts with experiment
were limited to Henry’s own spectacular performances in the classroom. There was
no hands-on experience. By the end of the century, however, American physicists
had fully imbibed their European counterparts’ expressions of enthusiasm for
hands-on laboratory training and the importance of precision. Many had acquired
their own training in experiment at the feet of European masters in Britain and
Germany and brought the cult of precision back home with them. Henry Rowland at
Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University was a particular enthusiast. The
spectroscope diffraction gratings he developed at his Hopkins laboratory set new
standards in precision that impressed even the Europeans. A colleague noted on a
trip to Europe in the 1880s that the “Germans spread their palms, looked as if
they wished they had ventral fins and tails to express their sentiments”12
concerning Rowland’s inventions. 9
Ibid., 39. 10 Ibid., 41. 11 Ibid., 40. Quoted in G. Sweetnam, “Precision
Implemented,” 284.
12
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By the 1870s the newly restored Meiji regime in Japan was looking with interest
at the successes of Europe’s precision laboratories. Meiji officials were
anxious to transform imperial Japan into an industrial power comparable with, if
not superior to, European and American economies. To this end they were keen to
recruit British physicists in particular to staff new scientific institutions
and pass on the tricks of the experimenter’s trade. The Imperial College of
Engineering in Tokyo, established in 1873, hired William Ayrton—one of Thomson’s
Glasgow stalwarts and a veteran of the Indian Telegraph Department—to introduce
Japanese students to the delights of electrical engineering. By 1877 the
students under Ayrton’s command were “well practiced in the construction and use
of galvanometers, electrometers, resistance coils and condensers, etc., and in
the performance of all the tests employed in a land line, or submarine cable
testing office: artificial lines having been arranged, as far as practicable,
with resistance coils, condensers, and a hundred yards or so of the Atlantic
cable that were at our disposal.”13 By the time Ayrton returned to London in
1878 to put the teaching skills he had acquired in Tokyo to work at the London
City and Guilds Institute, his Japanese students had received a grounding in the
business of precision measurement that was the envy of any Western laboratory.
His star student, Rinzaburo Shida, graduated to work with William Thomson in his
Glasgow laboratory before returning to Tokyo in 1883 as professor of telegraphy
at the Imperial College of Engineering. Precision transformed laboratories
across Europe and beyond into industrial powerhouses. The “spirit of accuracy”
was lauded as not only providing a much needed guarantor of present success and
future progress in physics, but as underpinning the future usefulness of physics
as well. Like Victorian factories, physics laboratories could be depended upon
to produce a steady stream of diligently designed, mass-produced, and
standardized products. It was a public expression and validation of the
self-discipline that careful training inculcated into the science and its
practitioners. Being precise was both difficult and easy. The culture produced
carefully standardized instruments and units that were seemingly
straightforwardly transferable from one place to another. On the other hand the
business of precision experiment required real commitment and arduous training.
Producing an accurate measurement of a physical phenomenon that would pass
muster with an increasingly hard-nosed 13
Quoted in Y. Takahashi, “William Ewart Ayrton at the Imperial College of
Engineering in Tokyo,” 200.
Places of Precision
237
and competitive community of expert physicists required a great deal of hard
labor. Despite (or perhaps because of) the finely balanced precision
instrumentation that increasingly filled these new academic laboratories,
painstakingly acquired skills were the order of the day. Just as we saw earlier
that grueling preparation underlay the apparently effortless analytical
performances of Cambridge mathematicians, hard work was essential to make the
grade as an experimenter too. The Making of the Cavendish By the end of the
nineteenth century, any survey of physics laboratories would certainly have
identified Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory as one of the most successful both
in terms of teaching and research (figure 8.2). In the course of little more
than a quarter century, Cambridge had established itself—to all appearances
securely—as being among the foremost producers of experimenters and experimental
physics. The first three Cavendish Professors—James Clerk Maxwell, Lord
Rayleigh, and J. J. Thomson—remain stellar figures in the firmament of physics.
To many eyes at the end of the century, Cambridge seemed synonymous with
experimental physics. Achieving that identification was not an easy task,
however. Establishing a role for laboratory physics and the cult of precision in
that venerable institution was by no means straightforward. Dons used to dealing
with the sons of gentlemen—and wedded to the ideal of a liberal education—needed
considerable persuasion that an establishment of a sort more usually associated
with grubby industry than pure intellect was really worth having. Its promoters
had to persuade the doubters that laboratory physics, despite the unpromising
appearance, was a fit vehicle for the promotion of liberal educational
ideals—that it could train and discipline the mind appropriately. It was a
dilemma of which the Cavendish’s early professors were keenly aware and worked
hard to overcome. In 1869—and in the teeth of considerable opposition—a
university committee reported to the senate on the vexed question of the
teaching of experimental physics at Cambridge. They noted that the “importance
of cultivating a knowledge of the great branches of Experimental Physics in the
University was prominently urged by the Royal Commissioners appointed in 1850 to
inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University and
Colleges of Cambridge.”14 Topics such as 14
Quoted in J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874—1974, 23.
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Eight
8.2 An exterior view of the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane, Cambridge.
electricity, heat, and magnetism were occupying an increasingly important place
in the examinations for the mathematics Tripos, and it seemed a good time to
consider how those subjects might be better taught. It was no coincidence that
another royal commission—presided over by the duke of Devonshire, the
university’s chancellor—was soon to be considering the question of scientific
and technical education throughout the country. The committee concluded that it
was time for the university to establish a professorship of experimental physics
and that the “founding of a Professorship would be incomplete unless means were
also supplied to render the Professor’s teaching practical, and assistance given
to him,
Places of Precision
239
8.3 A group of laboratory students in the Cavendish Laboratory. Note the
presence of a female student.
both in the Laboratory and Lecture-room. The need of providing instruments,
Apparatus and Laboratories is obvious, and it seems not less necessary to obtain
some additional assistance in giving personal instruction to students in the
Laboratory”15 (figure 8.3). While the university dithered over finding the cash,
the duke of Devonshire announced his willingness to fund the proposal out of his
own considerable pocket. William Cavendish, the seventh duke of Devonshire, had
himself been second wrangler and Smith’s prizeman at Cambridge. He was also a
successful and prominent industrial entrepreneur. His offer of largesse was well
timed. It broke the colleges’ resistance to the proposal, and the search was
soon on for Cambridge’s first professor of experimental physics. The obvious
candidate was William Thomson, by then easily the most eminent British
physicist. He was unwilling to leave Glasgow, however. The electors then looked
to Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin, but he too was unwilling to abandon the
security of his position there 15
Quoted ibid., 24.
240
Eight
for an uncertain future at Cambridge. The eventual choice was James Clerk
Maxwell, at the time retired to live the life of a country laird on his Scottish
estates at Glenlair. Maxwell was initially dubious. He had, as he said, “no
experience of this kind.” Furthermore, he worried that the “Class of Physical
Investigations, which might be undertaken with the help of men of Cambridge
education, and which would be creditable to the University, demand, in general,
a considerable amount of dull labour which may or may not be attractive to the
pupils.”16 He was eventually persuaded, however, and took up the chair in 1871.
Maxwell was well aware from the outset that his fragile position would require
careful consolidation if he were to overcome the dons’ suspicions. The new
laboratory, when it opened in 1874, must not look too much like a workshop or,
as Maxwell worried, “we may bring the whole university and all the parents about
our ears.”17 In his inaugural lecture he was anxious to reassure his auditors
that the new laboratory under his direction would be a center for far more than
mere mechanical drudge work. Precision measurement mattered indeed but should
not be confused with industrial production. If that were all it was, then
Maxwell argued, “Our Laboratory may perhaps become celebrated as a place of
conscientious labour and consummate skill, but it will be out of place in the
University, and ought rather to be classed with the other great workshops of our
country.”18 This was a paradox that needed careful management, since after all,
precision measurement was to be at the core of the Cavendish Laboratory’s
activities. Maxwell presented it as something that fitted eminently well with
the university’s natural theological tradition. Showing the high standards of
accuracy and precision with which nature had been mass-produced was, argued
Maxwell, a good way of demonstrating the powers of its designer: “we may learn
that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement . . . are ours because they
are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not
only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth
consist.”19 Maxwell visited Thomson at Glasgow and Robert Clifton at Oxford
searching for guidance on how to design and organize his new laboratory. He
hired William Garnett, fourth wrangler in 1873, as demonstrator. The laboratory
was stocked with apparatus (paid for by the duke of 16
Quoted ibid., 34. Quoted in S. Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and Its
Instrumentation,” 33. 18 Quoted ibid., 25. 19 Quoted in S. Schaffer, “Metrology,
Metrication and Victorian Values,” 460. 17
Places of Precision
241
Devonshire) mostly pertaining to the physics deemed relevant to the mathematics
Tripos such as heat, electricity, and magnetism. Students were few and far
between. There was no requirement that undergraduates studying for the
mathematics Tripos, or even the natural sciences Tripos established in 1854,
should attend at the laboratory. Maxwell was keen that those students that there
were, like W. M. Hicks, later professor of physics and vice-chancellor at
Sheffield University, worked under their own steam. He set Hicks to work on
measurements of electrical resistance and of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Students were encouraged to make their own apparatus, which according to Hicks
was “worth any amount of routine measurement.”20 Maxwell’s scheme was to give
his students a thorough grounding in measurement and the use of instruments—
overseen by Garnett as demonstrator—before they embarked on their own projects.
The British Association’s Kew magnetometer, transferred to Cambridge, was used
to introduce students to the vagaries of experiment and the skills they needed
to acquire. Each student entering the laboratory was, like Hicks, given the task
of using the magnetometer to measure the Earth’s magnetic field. Maxwell’s
tragic death at an early age in 1879 left the Cavendish looking for a successor
who could continue the legacy of precision experiment that he had bequeathed it.
The favored candidate was Lord Rayleigh, another aristocratic former wrangler
with a considerable scientific reputation. Rayleigh was initially unwilling,
worrying that such a position might be beneath his dignity, despite
encouragement from the duke of Devonshire. William Thomson pleaded with him that
if “you could see your way to take the Chair it would I am sure be much to the
benefit of the university, and of science too, as the Cavendish Laboratory would
give you means of experimenting and zealous and duly instructed assistants and
volunteers and would naturally lead you to more of experimental research than
might be your lot, even with all your experimental zeal and capacity for
investigation, if you remain independent”21 (figure 8.4). What clinched it for
Rayleigh, however, was the agricultural depression, which made it impossible for
him to maintain his private laboratory at his country estate in Terling, Essex,
in the style to which he had become accustomed. He deigned to take the
professorship for a period of five years, by which time to hoped the depression
might be over. Despite
20 21
Quoted in J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874—1974, 62. R. J. Strutt,
Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 100.
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Eight
8.4 The Cavendish Laboratory’s lab assistants in 1900.
his initial reluctance, however, Rayleigh arrived in Cambridge with some very
definite ideas concerning the Cavendish’s future direction. Rayleigh wanted a
massive expansion of the Cavendish’s teaching program; in particular he wanted
to increase the number of undergraduates trained in the laboratory—most of
Maxwell’s students had already graduated when they studied there. The new regime
was to be systematic, modeled on Helmholtz’s practice in Berlin. Under the new
dispensation “each experiment was set out permanently on a table to itself, and
written directions were provided. The classes were at regular hours, and a
demonstrator was in attendance, who assigned the experiment, and gave help in
any difficulty, finally approving or disapproving the numerical result.”22
Rayleigh hired two new demonstrators, R. T. Glazebrook and W. N. Shaw, to
replace Garnett. Their textbook, Practical Physics, based on the Cavendish
course, soon became a classic of laboratory physics instruction. In April 1880,
students were informed that the “Cavendish Laboratory will open daily from 12
April for the use of students, from 22
Ibid., 105.
Places of Precision
243
11 am until 5 pm, and the Professor or Demonstrators will attend daily to give
instruction in Practical Physics. The fee for the use of the Laboratory will be
two guineas per term.”23 Training began from the basics—Rayleigh complained that
at the beginning “[a]nyone who could handle a thing without knocking it off the
table was an acquisition”24 —and aimed to give a thorough grounding in the
discipline of precision measurement. As well as teaching them experimental
skills, Rayleigh was inculcating his students with laboratory discipline. They
were being taught the value of systematic and patient routines of inquiry.
Rayleigh also wanted to put the Cavendish’s research on a systematic footing. He
was emphatic in his own experimental work concerning the importance of
systematization. Glazebrook remarked of his superior’s researches that they were
“marked by the same characteristics: perfect clearness and lucidity, a firm
grasp on the essentials of the problem and a neglect of the unimportant. The
apparatus throughout was rough and ready, except where nicety of workmanship or
skill in construction was needed to obtain the result; but the methods of the
experiments, the possible sources of error, and the conditions necessary to
success were thought out in advance and every precaution taken to secure a high
accuracy and a definite result.”25 These were the values to be inculcated into
the Cavendish’s ethos. As Sir Arthur Schuster recalled, however, Rayleigh’s
concern with system went beyond his individual researches: “One idea to which he
attached importance and which was entirely his own, was to identify the
laboratory with some research planned on an extensive scale so that a common
interest might unite a number of men sharing in the work.”26 Rather than being a
place for the demonstration of individual experimental virtuosity, Rayleigh
planned the Cavendish as a center for collaborative enterprise. The enterprise
he chose was an ambitious one. He wanted to establish the Cavendish as a center
for the redetermination of electrical standards—a project with which Maxwell had
been involved from the 1860s. Such a project if successful would establish the
laboratory firmly at the heart of physics. Five years after his appointment—and
with the agricultural depression comfortably behind him—Rayleigh resigned the
Cavendish Professorship and returned to his private laboratory at Terling. His
successor 23
Quoted in J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874–1974, 88. R. J. Strutt,
Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 106. 25 Quoted in J.
G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874–1974, 98. 26 R. J. Strutt, Life of
Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 109. 24
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at the Cavendish, J. J. Thomson, was already familiar with the value system he
left behind, having worked at the laboratory himself under Rayleigh’s direction.
From a respectable, middle-class Mancunian background, Thomson had studied at
Manchester’s Owens College before gaining a scholarship to Trinity College,
Cambridge. He crammed with the wrangler-making coach E. J. Routh to graduate
second wrangler and gain a coveted Trinity College fellowship. It was only then
that he started working at the Cavendish Laboratory, a month after Maxwell’s
death. The aim was to acquire for himself a thorough grounding in the rudiments
of precision experiment to go with the grounding in mathematical physics with
which the Tripos had equipped him. This was very much in line with Maxwell’s own
vision of the laboratory, as J. J. Thomson put it, as “a place to which men who
had taken the Mathematical Tripos could come, and, after a short training in
making accurate measurements, begin a piece of original research.”27 When
appointed to replace Rayleigh in 1884, Thomson was young but already a fellow of
the Royal Society. His appointment surprised many—including Rayleigh—who still
thought of Thomson as more of a mathematician than an experimentalist. The work
Thomson had undertaken at the Cavendish under Rayleigh’s direction had been a
classic piece of Maxwellian experimental physics. His challenge was to determine
the ratio of the electrostatic to the electromagnetic units of electric charge.
According to Maxwell’s theory the ratio should be equal to the velocity of
light. The project had the potential, therefore, to be a bravura demonstration
of the program of systematic precision measurement that Rayleigh was putting in
place at the Cavendish as well as a powerful vindication of Maxwell’s theory of
electromagnetism. Thomson’s efforts were not, however, particularly successful,
and he soon moved on to help Rayleigh with his grand collaborative project to
redetermine electrical standards. He was cutting his experimental teeth on
cutting-edge technology. By the mid-1880s his reputation as a diligent and
productive experimenter was high. He was a good example of what the Cavendish
regime under Rayleigh could produce. Moving on to find his own experimental
projects as professor, he took up the study of cathode rays of the kind
pioneered, as we saw earlier, by William Crookes. The research would pay
dividends with his discovery of the electron a decade or so later. J. J.
Thomson’s mounting reputation as an experimenter underscored the Cavendish’s own
rising star. He continued and consolidated 27
J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections (London, 1936), 95.
Places of Precision
245
Rayleigh’s program of systematic experimental instruction. As he recalled, the
“number of science students in Cambridge increased rapidly after 1885.”28 A new
wing to the Cavendish was opened in 1896 to relieve the pressures of massively
increasing numbers. There was “a very large room used for the elementary classes
in practical physics, for examinations in practical physics for the Natural
Science Tripos and for entrance scholarships to the Colleges. Besides this there
was a new lecture-room, cellars for experiments requiring a constant
temperature, and a private room for the Professor.”29 In 1895 it became possible
for graduates of universities other than Cambridge to enter the Cavendish as
research students, initially for the degree of M.A. but later gaining Ph.D.s. As
Thomson noted, “since the M.A. degree did not entitle a man to be called
‘doctor’, our students were at a disadvantage when competing for teaching posts
with those who had been to a German university and had obtained the Ph.D.
degree.”30 The influx (and eventual outflux) of foreign students allowed by the
new regulations enabled the spread of the Cavendish’s values of precision—and
its reputation—across Europe, America, and the Empire. By the end of the
nineteenth-century Cambridge and the Cavendish stood at the heart of an
expanding worldwide network of competing laboratories and institutes. It also
represented the core values of Victorian physics. Maxwell had regarded the
laboratory as an outpost through which the ethos of precision measurement could
be introduced to and intertwined with the Cambridge culture of liberal
education. Exact measurement could be a way of broadening and disciplining the
mind as well. Care and diplomacy had been required to reassure a skittish
university establishment that bringing a laboratory to Cambridge was not after
all tantamount to converting the college cloisters into factory floors.
Maxwell’s plan had been to make the place available to graduates who had already
persuaded the university of their trustworthiness by going through the Tripos
ritual. Under Rayleigh and J. J. Thomson the Cavendish did indeed become more of
a production line, albeit one churning out only a small number of quality items
every year. Its students were systematically introduced to a carefully
worked-out culture of experimental discipline through carefully graded routines.
The values they imbibed and exported as they scattered across the empire and the
globe were ones of discipline, diligence, and precision as the hallmarks of
experiment.
28
Ibid., 123.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., 137.
246
Eight
Berlin’s Imperial Institute As J. J. Thomson’s concerns about his students’ job
prospects indicate, there was little doubt in British laboratory physicists’
minds as to who their main rivals were. By the 1880s, Germany’s new physics
institutes looked like a formidable force. By the standards of envious onlookers
they appeared well funded and well organized. To some German physicists,
nevertheless, however enviable their institutions might seem compared with those
in other European countries, things were still not good enough. Increasingly
during the 1870s and 1880s they lobbied the new government in Berlin for more
resources. In particular, they wanted an institution devoted to research not
teaching. While British and French physicists pointed to the awesome reputation
of German physics and its apparent role in boosting the new state’s rapidly
expanding industries, some of their German counterparts were insisting that far
more needed to be done if future German industrial supremacy were to be
achieved. They were anxious to persuade the Bismarckian state that physics had a
key role to play in the Reich’s future. The eventual result of this lobbying was
the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, set up in 1887 with Hermann von
Helmholtz as its director, committed to physics research as an arm of the
imperial state. The new institution was to be a powerful rival to the Cavendish
in the world of precision measurement. The resources that some German states
committed to their physics institutes were already formidable. During the 1870s,
Prussia committed more than 1.5 million marks to Helmholtz’s Berlin Institute.
The British physicist John Tyndall, Faraday’s successor at the Royal
Institution, remarked enviously to a colleague that “you will find in the Berlin
laboratory the very things which my American and British friends and I should
like to see in operation in all college and university laboratories in America
and in the British Empire.”31 The powerful and influential industrialist Werner
von Siemens argued, however, that this was simply not enough. His complaint was
that “[s]cientific research itself, however, is not a professional activity
within the state structure; it is only a tolerated private activity of
scientists alongside their profession . . . The sad consequence of all this is
that in most cases scientific projects that might revive and stimulate entire
areas of life are not undertaken.”32 The German states encouraged and financed
physics teaching, according to 31 32
Quoted in D. Cahan, “The Institutional Revolution in German Physics,” 23. Quoted
ibid., 1.
Places of Precision
247
Siemens, at the expense of progress in research. The institutes produced legions
of teachers instead of the experimenters who could make a real contribution to
the Reich. The solution in his view was a new imperial institution committed to
research. Werner von Siemens was a powerful voice in the new Germany. Siemens
and his brother had made their fortunes as pioneers in the new electrical
industries that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. While
Werner took care of the German end of affairs, his brother Wilhelm emigrated to
Britain, eventually taking up British nationality and turning himself into Sir
William Siemens. During the 1840s, Werner von Siemens, along with his partner J.
G. Halske, was at the forefront of German telegraphy. He regarded himself as a
physicist as much as an industrialist. “My love always belonged to science as
such,” he said, “while my work and accomplishments lay mostly in the field of
technology.”33 In 1884, Siemens decided to put his money where his mouth was and
offered to fund the establishment of a Reich physics institute. He had made a
similar offer to Prussia the previous year. It was to be an institute for
research alone: “The teachers and laboratories of the universities and
pedagogical schools are not appropriate for the purpose; neither are the
professors employed by them. The more active these latter are and the more they
have proved themselves to be pathbreaking researchers, the more they are
overburdened by their teaching obligations and the extra duties bound up with
them.” He was convinced that “[f]rom the planned natural scientific workplace,
both material and ideal advantages of great importance would accrue to the
Reich.”34 Lobbying in favor of some kind of national or imperial physics
research institute had been going on since the early 1870s. Men such as the
physiologist Emil du Bois Reymond, Wilhelm Foerster (director of the Berlin
Observatory), and Hermann von Helmholtz argued that Prussia and the Reich needed
some kind of institute devoted to precision measurement. It was an argument that
found favor with Prussian military strategists such as Helmut von Moltke.
Opinions were mixed as to what exactly the new institute should do. Helmholtz
wanted a body that granted funds for precision instruments. Others wanted a
commercial testing station. Little concrete happened until the 1880s and
Siemens’s offer. Siemens argued that “England, France, and America, those
countries which are our most dangerous enemies in the struggle for survival, 33
34
D. Cahan, An Institute for an Empire, 36. Ibid., 40–41.
248
Eight
8.5 An artist’s sketch of the proposed new Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt.
have recognized the great meaning of scientific superiority for material
interests and have zealously striven to improve natural scientific education
through pedagogical improvements and to create institutions that promote
scientific progress.”35 Despite Siemens’s offer, persuading the Reich’s
bureaucracy—particularly gaining Bismarck’s indispensable support—was difficult.
Some powerful interest groups, including engineers, industrialists, and
physicists, worried that the proposed Reichsanstalt would encroach onto their
own territory. It was not until 1887 that eventual agreement was secured. The
proposed institution needed careful planning. It would need “well-planned rooms
protected from external disturbances, excellent and costly instruments” as well
as “the complete devotion of the scientists.” Siemens was worried that “Bismarck
. . . still holds science for a type of sport without practical meaning” and
that a great deal of work still needed to be done to convince him otherwise. The
public and fellow physicists needed to be convinced that this would be “a place
of work open to all outstanding German scientists”36 and not just for a cabal of
Berlin insiders (figure 8.5). In Siemens’s plan, the institute would be divided
into two 35
D. Cahan, “Werner Siemens and the Origins of the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt,” 204–5. 36 Ibid., 276.
Places of Precision
249
sections—physical and technical—under the control of an overall president. The
technical section would be responsible for choosing scientific problems, setting
the budget, and generally administering the institute. The physical section
would have as its main task the development of new experimental investigations.
The technical section was to be subdivided into five carefully chosen
subsections, representing areas where the Reich hoped for industrial supremacy:
materials testing, precision mechanics, optics, thermometry, and electrical
standards testing. Siemens had already chosen the man who would be in charge of
this great new enterprise. His choice was the grand old man of German
physics—Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was widely recognized in Germany and
elsewhere as being head and shoulders above his contemporaries. To one fan he
was the “Imperial Chancellor of German Science.” An American student studying
under him remarked that “the whole scientific world of Germany, nay, the whole
intellectual world of Germany, stood in awe when the name of Excellenz von
Helmholtz was pronounced. Next to Bismarck and the old Emperor he was at that
time the most illustrious man in the German Empire.”37 It was proof of his
preeminence that when he was appointed to head the new Berlin Physics Institute
in 1871 he could command the staggering sum of 315,000 marks to be spent on his
official residence there. He had enough clout that he virtually held the Reich
to ransom before agreeing to take up the position as the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt’s president. He demanded a salary of 15,000 marks along with an
annual bonus of 9,000. The government in the end had little choice but to
capitulate. As they recognized, the institution had to a large extent been
designed with Helmholtz in mind as its eventual director. Helmholtz enjoyed a
wide reputation as well as a public spokesman for science in Germany. He seemed
ideally suited for the task of putting physics in its proper place at the heart
of the German state. Helmholtz proved to be an inspirational leader at the
Reichsanstalt, as he had at the Berlin Physics Institute. Like his counterparts
at the Cavendish Laboratory, Helmholtz was keen to get his people working as a
team. Once the institute’s building was complete, the scientific section had its
own Observatorium built for the purpose, designed to be free from external
disturbances. The entire building was constructed on a thick
thousand-square-meter concrete slab for maximum stability and the external walls
were shielded from direct sunlight to help ensure a 37
D. Cahan, An Institute for an Empire, 65.
250
Eight
constant temperature. Each of the floors was devoted to a different aspect of
the Reichsanstalt’s research. Thermodynamics work took place on the ground
floor, where it was easiest to control the temperature. Electrical and optical
work was on the highest floor, with the offices and library in the middle. The
experimenters also had access to a machine house and a separate entirely
iron-free building for magnetic experiments. These were unrivaled facilities
that underlined the Reich’s hopes for what physics could deliver. Under
Helmholtz’s direction, the scientific section was divided into three
laboratories working on heat, electricity, and optics. The heat laboratory
focused on finding better materials for thermometers, improving the accuracy of
thermometric measurements at high temperatures, and improving the design of heat
engines—all precision projects. The electrical laboratory was in the business of
competing with the Cavendish in providing accurate and reliable electrical
standards—a matter of particular concern to Werner von Siemens—as well as
experimenting on the effects of magnets. They carried out experiments for the
Reich navy, trying to minimize the disruptive effects of iron on ships’
compasses. At the optics laboratory, the main concern was to establish reliable
industrial standards in the measurement of light, following Fraunhofer’s
achievements earlier in the century. This was a particularly pertinent concern
as Germany led the world in optical instrumentation. Under Otto Lummer,
Helmholtz’s former student and assistant at the Berlin Physics Institute, the
laboratory’s workers experimented to develop a more reliable photometer—an
instrument for comparing the intensity of light from different sources. The
concern throughout was to establish standards of precision measurement that
could be put to industrial use. Making such standards would be a tangible
demonstration of German superiority in precision physics and a warning shot
across the bows of its industrial competitors in the rest of Europe and America.
Disaster struck the Reichsanstalt in the schwarze Jahr of 1894. Helmholtz died.
Finding a replacement was not to be easy. His deputy, Ernst Hagen, worried that
it was “unforeseeable how the situation here at the Reichsanstalt will develop
since Helmholtz has died . . . The main problem lies in the fact that basically
everything here was tailor-made for Helmholtz’s person.”38 The eventual choice
as successor was Friedrich Kohlrausch, author of the ubiquitous Leitfaden.
Beyond his reputation 38
Ibid., 123.
Places of Precision
251
as the author of one of Germany’s most widely used physics textbooks, Kohlrausch
had much to recommend him. He was a veteran administrator, having been in charge
of five physics institutes before arriving at the Reichsanstalt. His father,
Rudolf, had himself been an eminent experimentalist in midcentury and had
ensured a fine training and good contacts with the best in the field for his
son. Friedrich had acquired his doctorate with Wilhelm Weber at Gottingen in
1863 before going ¨ on to codirect the Gottingen Physics Institute with his
former mentor ¨ later in the decade. When he received the call to Berlin,
Kohlrausch was director of the Strassburg Physics Institute—one of the largest
(and most expensive to build) in Germany. As well as being an old hand at
administration, Kohlrausch had something else to recommend him. He had built his
career as an experimenter on the activity that was in many ways the
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt’s raison d’ˆetre—precision measurement.
Looking back over his career in 1900, he opined that “measuring nature is one of
the characteristic activities of our age.”39 From that perspective, Kohlrausch’s
activities had certainly been preeminently characteristic. A colleague, Heinrich
Rubens, remarked that “no other physicist has surpassed Kohlrausch in the skill
and care with which he used instruments and methods.”40 He had been responsible
for inventing and developing a whole range of revolutionary new precision
instruments—dynamometers, galvanometers, magnetometers, and reflectometers. In
particular, he had made his reputation in the field of electrical measurement
and the establishment of electrical standards. From the beginnings of his career
working with Weber he had devoted almost forty years to working at determining
the values of electrical and magnetic constants and units. He had represented
German interests at many of the international congresses devoted to working out
acceptable international standards of electrical measurement and was widely
recognized as the German expert in that industrially crucial field. He was
regarded as eminently well-placed to steer the Reichsanstalt towards helping
ensure German domination of the expanding electrical industries. The
Reichsanstalt expanded massively under Kohlrausch’s direction. It had more or
less doubled in size by 1903. Kohlrausch devoted the same kind of diligence to
his administrative tasks as he did to his vocation of 39 40
Ibid., 129. Ibid., 130.
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precision measurement. A former colleague, Svante Arrhenius, described him as
having “always lived as orderly as a chronometer and is in all social relations
a strict formalist. His principal scientific endeavour is directed at improving
measuring methods, so as to make the probable error smaller. Indeed he has an
all-too-great predilection for finely rounded numbers.”41 In Phileas Fogg style,
Kohlrausch clearly expected those around him to conform to his orderly
expectations. The informal regime inaugurated by Helmholtz as director was
replaced by a far more formal and rigid administration. Kohlrausch agreed,
however, with Helmholtz and the institute’s founders about the Reichsanstalt’s
wider purpose. It was there to place physics at the service of the Reich. The
different laboratories of the science section pursued much the same
activities—albeit on a larger scale—as they had under the previous
administration. Much of the institute’s expansion took place in the technical
section, which by the late 1890s was fully devoted to serving the needs of
German industry for scientific testing. The Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt was in many ways an entirely unprecedented institution. In no
other European country had the community of physicists persuaded their national
government to support their research in such lavish fashion. It was testament to
the success with which physicists had maneuvered themselves into positions of
real power and influence in the new German Reich. Men of science such as Hermann
von Helmholtz could wield political clout that was the envy of contemporaries
elsewhere in Europe. His public pronouncements on the state of science and of
its relevance to German cultural life mattered. The Reichsanstalt was celebrated
at home and recognized abroad as a triumphant expression of an ambitious new
industrial power’s potential. The German physics community had been fashioned
into a seemingly indispensable arm of the state. That fashioning had taken place
around the cult of precision. As in Britain, physicists had successfully argued
that their concern with precision measurement not only contributed to industrial
progress, but that it also expressed important cultural values. The
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt was an instantiation not only of the
utility that the German Reich hoped for from the systematic application of
physics to industry but of the virtues of self-discipline and application that
the new state wanted to foster in its citizens.
41
Ibid., 134–35.
Places of Precision
253
A Real, Purchaseable Tangible Object The importance of international standards
in physics for national industry (and for national prestige) was underlined in
the ongoing battles that dogged the second half of the century surrounding the
measurement and use of electrical standards. The debates capture not only the
ways in which precision mattered for the formation of physics as a discipline
and as an important, self-defining part of the physicist’s art, but the ways in
which precision expressed views concerning the cultural place of physics and its
potential utility. Being in a position to define international standards in an
increasingly important field of research like electricity put the victorious
party in a position of some advantage. It meant that everyone else had to come
to them to have their apparatus validated. It also signaled the consolidation of
electricity as a science. As William Thomson pointed out, turning an electrical
unit into “a real, purchaseable tangible object” so that “we may perhaps buy a
microfarad or a megafarad of electricity,”42 would bring physics fairly and
squarely into the Victorian marketplace. It demonstrated that physics had value
in a way even the most hardheaded industrialist could understand and appreciate.
This was what standardization was all about. It encompassed the progress in
scientific knowledge and in industrial supremacy that disciplined physics could
deliver. The spread of commercial electric telegraph networks from the 1840s
onwards encouraged the creation of a new breed of electrical experts. Putting
these networks together and—just as importantly—maintaining them once they were
up called for extensive electrical know-how. Telegraph engineers such as Latimer
Clark soon realized that one of their biggest problems was finding the location
of faults in the lines. Particularly with underground cables, unless the
engineer could find a way of more or less precisely locating a fault—such as a
break—valuable time was lost and valuable labor wasted digging along the line to
find the problem. Latimer Clark had joined the Electric Telegraph Company as an
engineer in 1850, when the company was still easily the largest in Britain, from
a background in civil engineering. He rapidly became a pioneer in the new field.
Along with others such as Cromwell Varley, Clark realized that the key to
finding faults in underground wires was measurement. A good knowledge of the
characteristics of their copper wires—particularly 42
Quoted in S. Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation,” 32.
254
Eight
of their resistance to the passage of current—was a prerequisite to finding
faults. One simple method, for example, was simply to see what length of wire in
the workshop gave the same galvanometer reading as the faulty wire. The length
of the wire then determined the position of the break in the line. This only
worked, of course, if the test wire and the cable had similar resistances. Ways
were needed of calibrating the components of telegraph circuits. The problem of
measurement became more urgent from the 1850s onwards with the development of
underwater telegraphy. The first commercial underwater cable was laid between
Dover and Calais in 1851. It soon became clear that underwater telegraphy had
its own particular problems. The problem of locating faults accurately and
quickly became more urgent. After all, dredging for a faulty cable underwater
was a considerably more costly business even than digging for one on land.
Submarine cables also suffered from a problem known as retardation— signals
tended to become smeared and merged into each other over long distances. The
cables seemed to leak, so that more current was needed to ensure a good signal
at the other end. All of this meant that telegraph engineers needed a good
understanding of the electrical characteristics of their equipment. They needed
to be able to measure those characteristics and they needed to be able to
compare them effectively with their workshop or laboratory apparatus. By the
late 1850s, telegraph engineers were therefore increasingly working with
standardized pieces of equipment like resistance coils or condensers. As William
Thomson recalled, looking back at the history of precision electrical
measurement, “Resistance coils and ohms, and standard condensers and
microfarads, had been for ten years familiar to the electricians of the
submarine-cable factories and testing-stations, before anything that could be
called electric measurement had come to be regularly practised in almost any of
the scientific laboratories of the world.”43 Matters came to a head in many ways
with the ambitious plans of the late 1850s and early 1860s to lay down a
telegraph cable across the Atlantic, linking the Old World with the New. The
Atlantic cable’s promoter, Cyrus Field, had coaxed a fortune from his backers to
finance the enterprise, as well as securing the cooperation of British and
American governments. It was a disaster when the first cable failed in September
1858 after barely a month of operation. Since 1857, William Thomson, a director
of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, had been carrying out 43
W. Thomson, Popular Lectures and Addresses (London, 1891), 1: 82–83.
Places of Precision
255
experiments at his Glasgow laboratory on the cable being used in the enterprise,
finding out in the process that it was of extremely variable quality. While
Thomson argued that this was a major defect—albeit one about which little could
be done since much of the cable had already been manufactured and was indeed in
the process of being laid—the company’s electrician, Wildman Whitehouse, argued
that cable resistance (or conductivity) mattered little. The key to successful
signaling in his view was the use of his patent induction coil apparatus to send
rapid, high-intensity bursts of electricity down the cable. The pinpointing of
Whitehouse’s high-intensity jolts as one of the primary causes for the cable’s
failure did much to concentrate minds on Thomson’s suggestion that strict
quality control of cable production was essential. Following the cable’s
failure, the British government and the Atlantic Telegraph Company convened a
committee to oversee an inquest into its early demise. Taking evidence from a
raft of telegraphic experts, they also commissioned research on an unprecedented
scale into the electrical characteristics of telegraph cables. Latimer Clark
alone carried out experiments on hundreds of miles of copper wire and the new
insulating material gutta-percha. Another key witness was Fleeming Jenkin, a
young engineer from R. S. Newall’s cable factory at Birkenhead near Liverpool.
He carried out extensive experiments on the relative resistances of copper and
gutta-percha in an effort to calculate the amount of current that would leak out
through the insulation in a telegraph cable. In comparing the resistances of
different substances like this Jenkin in particular came up against the problem
of standards. There were no commonly agreed units of electrical measurements in
which he could express his results. There were by this time a number of
resistance standards in use. Telegraph engineers in Britain used coils
calibrated in miles of copper wire, in France they used kilometers of iron wire,
and so on. What the new tests highlighted, however, was the very unreliability
of these standards themselves. Their reliability depended on the purity of their
components, which was exactly what the inquest to the failed Atlantic cable cast
doubt upon. Into this breach stepped the British Association for the Advancement
of Science. At its Manchester meeting in 1861 it established a committee on
electrical standards to look into the whole vexed question. The committee, which
included Fleeming Jenkin, William Thomson, and Charles Wheatstone (inventor of
the telegraph) in its ranks, was soon joined by James Clerk Maxwell. Their aim
was to act on the suggestion, put to the British Association by Sir Charles
Bright and Latimer Clark, that “the
256
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science of Electricity and the art of Telegraphy have both now arrived at a
stage of progress at which it is necessary that universally received standards
of electrical quantities and resistances should be adopted, in order that
precise language and measurement may take the place of the empirical rules and
ideas now generally prevalent.”44 It was not a straightforward matter. The
committee needed to set up a standard that met the needs of laboratory
physicists and practical telegraph men. The British Association’s ohm, as the
crucial standard of electrical resistance came to be called, was the product of
much hard work and negotiation. Maxwell was a critical figure; it was at his
laboratory at King’s College London that the crucial experiments to establish
the value of the ohm were carried out. When he received the call to Cambridge
and the Cavendish Laboratory, he was determined that the British Association’s
ohm and its instrumentation would follow him there. It was too important a piece
of intellectual and commercial property to leave behind. In his groundbreaking
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Maxwell argued that “the determination of
electrical resistance may be considered as the cardinal operation in
electricity, in the same way that the determination of weight is the cardinal
operation in chemistry.”45 Carrying out this cardinal operation was to be one of
the Cavendish Laboratory’s chief tasks. The British Association measuring
apparatus consisted of a rapidly rotating coil with a magnetized needle at the
center (figure 8.6). As the coil rotated in the Earth’s magnetic field, a
current would be induced that caused the needle to deflect. The size of the
deflection depended on the diameter of the coil, the rate at which it was spun,
and the coil’s resistance. Measuring the needle’s deflection, the coil’s
diameter, and the rate at which it was spun gave a highly accurate value for the
coil’s resistance. This would make it possible to produce a standard resistance
coil, defined as one ohm. Simple as it might appear in principle, getting the
experiment right required the mobilization of major resources. Some of Britain’s
most skilled engineers and scientists devoted themselves to the problem.
Measurements of unprecedented precision were needed to get at the right level of
accuracy. Following Maxwell’s death, his successor, Lord Rayleigh, made the
project his own. Measuring the ohm would provide the Cavendish with a
collaborative project that would help bind its workers into a disciplined,
unified corps and establish a set of laboratory values in more senses than 44 45
Quoted in B. Hunt, “The Ohm Is Where the Art Is,” 58. J. C. Maxwell, Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism (Cambridge, 1873), 1: 465.
Places of Precision
257
8.6 The British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee for
Electrical Standards’ apparatus for measuring the ohm.
one. As Rayleigh started work on the project in 1880, it was a concerted team
effort: “The apparatus had been set up on the ground floor of the laboratory, in
the room then known as the ‘magnetic room’ . . . The revolving coil was set up
on a brick pillar . . . The observations were made late at night, to avoid
magnetic and other disturbance. Rayleigh regulated the speed, Dr. Schuster took
the main readings, and Mrs. Sidgwick recorded the readings of the auxiliary
magnetometer.”46 When Schuster left to become professor of physics at
Manchester, Eleanor Sidgwick—the wife of the professor of moral philosophy and
university reformer Henry Sidgwick, and Lady Rayleigh’s sister—took over his
role, while Lady Rayleigh herself often came in to replace her on the
magnetometer. Triumphantly, the revised ohm gave a value for the mechanical
equivalent of heat, measured electrically, that tallied with the mechanically
measured value to an unprecedented degree of precision. It was a result that
closely tied the Cavendish ohm to the whole body of nineteenth-century energy 46
R. J. Strutt, Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 114.
258
Eight
physics. James Prescott Joule hastened to congratulate Rayleigh on his success.
“It is an extraordinary and gratifying result for all of us, and I congratulate
your lordship and Schuster on the admirable experiments you have brought to so
successful an issue,”47 he wrote. Rayleigh, the Cavendish, and the British
Association ohm were not without their opponents, however. As early as 1851,
Wilhelm Weber (Kohlrausch’s old mentor) had published a highly sophisticated
absolute system of standards based around units of force and motion. Following
developments introduced by subsequent theorists, Weber’s system had the
advantage—to theoretically inclined physicists at least—of tying electrical
quantities directly to the fundamental concepts of energy and work. Their
definitions were highly complex, however. The resulting units were also very
difficult to measure. Most seriously, Weber’s units seemed of little use to
jobbing electricians. Their values were too small to be of any practical use to
anyone whose concern was to work with miles rather than inches of wire. The
theory behind Weber’s system was also increasingly suspect to British physicists
weaned on Maxwell’s field theories of electromagnetism. More robust opposition
came from Werner von Siemens, who advocated a standard resistance based on the
use of columns of mercury. In his view, there was simply no need for any great
metaphysical heart wrenching. All that was needed was to define the unit of
electrical resistance in terms of the resistance of an arbitrary column of
mercury. What mattered was that the unit chosen should be of a size useful for
the telegraph industry: “those cases in which the expression of absolute measure
is of advantage occur very seldom and only in purely scientific exercises,” he
argued. In Siemens’s opinion, not only was the search for absolutism
unnecessary, it was also suspect. It was a distraction from the task at hand.
His standard (and arbitrary) mercury column resistances were handy simply
because that was all they were designed to be—“every other definition would not
only burden unnecessarily the calculations which occur in modern life, but also
confuse our conception of the measure.”48 Part of the problem was that just as
the British objected to Weber’s system on the grounds that it involved adherence
to Weber’s theory, Siemens recognized that the British Association ohm, for 47
Ibid., 117–18. W. von Siemens, “Suggestions for the Adoption of a Common Unit of
Measurement of Electrical Resistance,” Reports of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, 1862, 32: 154. 48
Places of Precision
259
example, increasingly embodied Maxwell’s energy physics. Buying one meant buying
into the other as well. Siemens’s campaign to establish the
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt throughout the 1870s and early 1880s was
largely about trying to overcome this British imperialism in the field of
electrical measurement and theory. The new institute could provide a rallying
point for the opposition. At international congresses during the 1880s, the
Germans fought hard against the British Association standard. It was a losing
battle. In many ways, even the setting up of the Reichsanstalt was an admission
of defeat. It was an acknowledgment that absolutism, not pragmatism, was the way
to go after all. The ohm demonstrated how physics furthered industrial,
Victorian values. In many ways it is completely unsurprising that British
electricians led the pack in the development of electrical standards and
eventually dominated the field. After all, by the final quarter the century,
British cable companies dominated the world’s telegraph industry as well. The
episode shows how the cult of precision fostered in physics laboratories across
Europe fitted in with a wider set of values. Precision measurement could be seen
as an answer to the question Victorian cynics often posed of physics—Cui bono?
Whom does it benefit? What is it for? A great deal of labor was expended in the
process. Establishing the ohm took mobilization on a grand scale. In Britain
alone, laboratories at Cambridge, Glasgow, and London played central roles.
Engineers, instrument makers, and physicists alike required and acquired new
skills in the process. The biggest task of all was to make all of that labor
appear invisible. All the customer purchased at the end of the day was a coil of
wire. That coil stood for an absolute and universal system of measurement that
was accepted as being independent of any local skills or resources. The whole
point about the standard ohm was that despite the great efforts required to
produce it in particular laboratories like the Cavendish, it was meant to work
unproblematically anywhere in the world. In that way at least, the ohm was very
much the epitome of Victorian values. Conclusion From being rare, exotic places
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, physics laboratories by the end of
the century seemed ubiquitous. Every self-respecting university anywhere in
Europe, the Americas, the colonies, or beyond needed a physics laboratory. As an
institutional space, it had become part of the fundamental apparatus of
learning. Not only elite universities, but even high schools might well have
their own
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Eight
teaching laboratory by the end of the period. Such laboratories as existed in
the previous century had as a rule been private places, the domain of particular
individuals who had the resources to indulge in the experimental investigation
of nature. By the end of the century most laboratories were public institutions.
They were in principle open to all—all, that is, who had the appropriate
credentials and qualifications. As the discipline of physics emerged out of
natural philosophy during the course of the century, laboratories came to be
that new discipline’s archetypal institution, as experiment appeared to be the
archetypal activity. They were the training grounds where acolytes acquired the
skills they needed to investigate nature and put its products to work.
Laboratories forged physics’ links with industry and brought large parts of the
industrial ethos with them into the citadels of academe. Precision mattered for
late nineteenth-century physics as a way of inculcating new disciplinary regimes
as much as anything else. It was a crucial element in the fashioning of
physicists as much as of physics. In the new academic teaching laboratories, the
transmission of skills from mentor to student was a highly regimented process.
Laboratory teaching, as well as what was taught, was increasingly standardized.
The values of precision linked the world of late Victorian energy physics and
its laboratories to the world of industry as well. Not only did the standardized
electrical units produced in these laboratories have an immediate role to play
in electrical industry, but the work regime and the ethos that had produced
those units blended easily with those of industrial culture too. When Maxwell
assured his audience of Cambridge dons that he had no intention of turning the
Cavendish into a “manufactory of ohms,” he was addressing a real concern. He was
not entirely convincing in his denials either. Late Victorian laboratories
manufactured physicists as well, moreover. At the beginning of the
twentieth-century, Cambridge products were to be found reproducing the
Cantabrigian ethos of precision all over the globe. The same could be said of
Germany’s physics institutes as well. Spreading the values of precision meant
multiplying and disseminating the places of precision and its duly trained
adepts too.
9 Imperial Physics
On 17 December 1907, William Thomson, long since knighted and then ennobled as
Baron Kelvin of Largs, died. His death symbolized the end of an era in European
physics. He was buried next to Newton in Westminster Abbey. The ceremonial
surrounding his funeral was a tangible demonstration not only of his own stature
as a man of science but of the high place physics by then occupied in British
and European culture. His first biographer, the physicist Silvanus P. Thompson,
writing only a few years later remarked how the occasion “brought together one
of the most wonderful congregations that has ever assembled in that historic
building.”1 Representatives of innumerable British and foreign universities
attended the proceedings. The lord mayor of London and the lord provost of
Edinburgh were there. The duke of Argyll represented the king. Silvanus Thompson
thought the pomp and circumstance indicated “some revival of recognition of what
the nation owes to science and to her great men.”2 From his admittedly partial
point of view he was confident that the “nineteenth century has, intellectually,
been the golden age, not of art or of poetry, not of drama or of adventure, but
of science.”3 Kelvin epitomized the values of “laborious humility” that physics
stood for at the end of one century and the dawn of another. 1
S. P. Thompson, Life of Lord Kelvin (London: Macmillan, 1910), 2: 1209. Ibid.,
2: 1212. 3 Ibid., 2: 1213. 2
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Lord Kelvin’s physics had indeed been the epitome of imperial science. The
instruments he had invented—the highly sensitive mirror galvanometer in
particular—and the theories he had promulgated underwrote Britain’s supremacy in
the field of international cable telegraphy. His work had been at the cutting
edge of research that had played a key role in inventing this new discipline
called physics. By the end of his life Kelvin in Britain—like Helmholtz in
Germany—had come to stand for a particular kind of imperial physics. This was a
cocksure new science, its spokesmen confident and self-assured, convinced that
they held the keys to unlocking nature’s secrets. To all appearances, late
nineteenthcentury (and early twentieth-century) physics was a spectacular
success. It seemed uncontroversial to suppose that the general outlines at least
of a comprehensive physical understanding of nature had been triumphantly
established. Practitioners could tackle problems that would have been unheard of
a generation or two earlier. They could analyze the makeup of the distant stars.
They could send messages through the ether. They could measure the properties of
ether and matter with hitherto undreamed-of precision. On the dark side, they
could also predict the death of the Sun. As we have seen throughout the previous
chapters, none of this was achieved without a great deal of work and effort. The
science of physics did not fall unaided from the laps of the gods. Neither did
nature suddenly start speaking for itself. To make the kind of science that
turn-ofthe-century commentators and pundits marveled at and celebrated had
required the marshalling of human and material resources on a previously
unprecedented scale. Even if by twenty-first-century standards the numbers of
practicing physicists and their laboratories at the beginning of the twentieth
century were tiny, they represented a whole new order of magnitude when compared
with previous centuries. To achieve this, physicists had to show that they could
deliver the goods—they had to fashion themselves and their science so that they
and it could be shown to matter for Victorian culture. This was not easily done.
Many groups during the period regarded the whole idea of science with
indifference, if not outright hostility. They had to be persuaded that this new
science was, if not a positive benefit, then at least not a threat. Just as the
practice of physics was molded to fit the contours of Victorian culture, that
culture itself was remolded by the findings and practices of the newly dominant
discipline. Progress was the buzzword of the Victorian age. In civilization, in
industry, and in the production of knowledge, the age seemed to be
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positively striding ahead. William Whewell smugly remarked that the Great
Exhibition of 1851 provided a frozen tableau of human progress in the arts. At
one end of the scale were the barbaric and primitive productions shipped in from
outposts of empire. At the other were the sophisticated outpourings of American
and European factory culture—entirely a “more skilful, powerful, comprehensive,
and progressive form of art.”4 Different mid-nineteenth-century cultures
represented different stages in the progress of mankind brought together as if
in a time capsule at the Crystal Palace. Whewell, of course, argued as well that
science had nothing to do with this. According to the master of Trinity College,
progress in the sciences was something entirely different from progress in the
mere arts of life. Radical natural philosophers earlier in the century argued
that by demonstrating progress in the laws of nature they could establish
progress as a necessary feature of social existence as well. The nebular
hypothesis in their hands was an argument for social reform, if not for
revolution. Later physicists demonstrated the progressive nature of their
science in a different way. They reckoned they could show that physics was a
prerequisite of the very industrial progress that so many of their fellow
Victorians were so keen to celebrate. Their physics reproduced that industrial
culture as well. For physicists such as Kelvin or Maxwell, that their science
forged a shared culture between the factory and the laboratory was one of its
key features. The same discipline and the same attention to detail pertained in
each. The same kinds of objects were to be found both in one and in the other.
Physics ennobled manufacture by laying bare its affinities to the work of God.
Molecules were evidence of design and a designer because they were all the
same—just like the products of a Victorian engineering workshop. Precision
measurement proved this and so could become a way of displaying the divine plan.
This is probably the opposite of what we would think today. In an age like ours
completely attuned to mass production, idiosyncrasy rather than uniformity seems
a better index of intelligence and design. At the same time, affinities with the
workshop exemplified physics’ own utility. Campaigns to standardize and to
tighten the boundaries of precision showed just what the disciplines of the
laboratory could offer back to industry. The physics that governed the workings
of the ether was just as relevant on the factory floor—and just as productive.
Physicists placed themselves at the heart of late Victorian culture 4
W. Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art
and Science,” Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London,
1852), 8.
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by showing how they could harness nature’s machinery in the name of material
progress. Physics and Fin de Si`ecle Culture Physics lay at the very heart of
turn-of-the-century culture. Beyond its seeming promise to deliver hitherto
unprecedented material progress and offer concrete solutions to the mysteries of
the universe, it spoke powerfully to deeply held cultural concerns and fears. In
new genres of popular literature physics was used to project the possibilities
and dangers of future utopias and dystopias. The new science might be the
vehicle for delivering Paradise on Earth. It might also be the key to building
powerful new weapons that might destroy humanity. To a generation that regarded
the prospect of a European war in the near future as an inevitability, some of
the destructive possibilities offered by physics were disturbing indeed. Physics
spoke to increasing concerns about the degeneration of the species as well. Turn
of the century commentators viewed the prospects for humanity as bleak. Humans
were degenerating under the impact of civilization. The middle classes were
suffering from nervous strain and failing to procreate as they should. The
physics of energy conservation as well as eugenics seemed to offer a solution as
well as an explanation for the malaise. The same resource proved useful for men
concerned with increasingly vociferous calls for women’s education and political
emancipation. Physics taught that women’s bodies could not deal with the
responsibilities of public as well as private life. Women’s education would only
accelerate the degenerative trend. Two novels, Frankenstein and Dracula, provide
interesting insights into deep changes that had taken place in public
perceptions of physical science from one end of the century to the other.
Frankenstein, written in the 1810s, in the century’s infancy, dealt with fears
concerning what natural philosophy might prove capable of delivering in the
coming years. Its nightmare of artificial life unleashed betrayed fears of
physics unrestrained. Dracula, at the other end of the century, raised the
specter of physics’ limitations. It was an English stiff upper lip and a dose of
Yankee grit that saved the day at the end of the novel, not the scientific and
technological paraphernalia that the protagonists turned to in their efforts to
track the monster to his lair. Bram Stoker, Dracula’s author, was a graduate of
Trinity College Dublin and well versed in the latest physics and its
possibilities. The physicist who went too far, transgressing social and natural
boundaries, was still a potent image though. Jules Verne’s
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Captain Nemo might be a brilliant scientist, but that did not save him from his
submarine exile. If anything, the suggestion was that it was his single-minded
pursuit of physics that had consigned him to the deep. H. G. Wells’s Time
Machine (1895) postulated a bleak future indeed for humanity. In the War of the
Worlds (1898) the nightmare was of humankind’s impotence when faced with the
threat of annihilation from a scientifically and technologically superior alien
species. In the Time Machine, however, the enemies were all of humanity’s own
making. Thrust into the distant future by his machine, the Time Traveller found
himself faced with Eloi and Morlocks, two separate species that were both
degenerate descendants of humankind. Far from inaugurating an age of indefinite
intellectual and material progress, science and technology had produced the
opposite effect. Cosseted by their inventions and deprived of intellectual
stimulation by their cocooned and protected lives, the middle classes had
evolved into the childlike Eloi, living in a seeming Paradise but preyed upon by
the bestial Morlocks, subterranean guardians of the machines their human
ancestors had once operated. As the Time Traveller came to realize, the apparent
utopia was just that: “The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a
different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and
general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead I saw a real aristocracy, armed
with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial
system of the present day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over
Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man.”5 Where Wells expressed a
popular fear of the degenerative dangers of technically dependent civilization,
a more optimistic gloss was offered by the prolific Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his
only foray into what would now be called science fiction. The protagonist of The
Coming Race (1871) found himself faced with a subterranean civilization compared
to which surface-dwelling humans were at the stage of technological infancy.
This underground utopia depended on the mysterious force, vril—“electricity,
except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to
which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as
magnetism, galvanism, &c.”6 Vril powered this mysterious civilization’s
machinery and gave its inhabitants seemingly magical mental powers, “akin to
those ascribed to mesmerism, electrobiology,
5 6
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; reprint, London: Everyman Library, 1995),
44–45. E. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871; reprint, Dover: Alan Sutton,
1995), 20.
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odic force, &c., but applied scientifically through vril conductors.”7 Their
control over this all-pervasive natural force had given the Vril-ya absolute
dominance over their world. They controlled the weather and could wield weapons
of unparalleled destructive capacity against any enemy rash enough to challenge
them. Bulwer-Lytton’s book was a massive hit, and vril entered the popular
imagination. In one form at least it survives into the twenty-first century,
despite its literary inventor’s descent into comparative obscurity. Advertisers
decided that bovine vril—or Bovril— would be the ideal name by which to sell the
latest food product designed to improve the British diet. Fears concerning
racial and species degeneration were fueled by eugenic speculation about the
likely fate of humankind if some of the debilitating effects of civilization
were not overcome. Eugenic commentators pointed to the seemingly degraded bodily
state of British army recruits for the Boer War as disturbing evidence of trends
towards physical deterioration already in place. The conservation of energy
provided a ready answer to the question of why such a decline was taking place.
The human body contained only a finite amount of energy. Modern life with its
frenetic pace took a heavy toll in nervous energy with the result that not
enough was left to properly sustain the body’s physical frame. Masturbation and
other evils endemic in an increasingly effete and enervated culture only added
to the problem. Men who squandered their precious reserves in solitary
contemplation (of one sort or another) were not only endangering their own
health, but the health of their children and the future of the race. For late
Victorian and Edwardian commentators on their respective nations’ health none of
this was idle scaremongering. Their concerns, after all, were dictated by the
latest theories in physics. Particularly in the early years of the twentieth
century, when European prophets of doom reckoned that a Continent-wide war was
practically inevitable, the social Darwinist consequences of failing to take
seriously these threats to national virility seemed dire. Physics offered a
solution as well as an explanation of the new modern malaise, however. Where
Bulwer-Lytton’s fictional Vril-ya had vril, their real-life counterparts had
electricity. Electricity had a long history as a panacea stretching back well
into the eighteenth century. It had its therapeutic heyday, however, in the late
Victorian and Edwardian age. It was widely touted as the latest scientific cure.
Electric baths, belts, corsets, hairbrushes, pills, and rings were advertised as
able to “give wonderful 7
Ibid.
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267
support and vitality to the internal organs of the body, improve the figure,
prevent chills, impart new life and vigour to the debilitated constitution,
stimulate organic action, promote circulation, assist digestion, and promptly
renew the vital energy the loss of which is the first symptom of decay.”8
Electric gadgets might offer a discreet cure for the effects of those youthful
indiscretions a respectable gentleman might be unwilling to share with his
doctor. Electricity’s perceived close relationship with the vital force had a
downside as well. In 1890, New York carried out its first electrocution—a new
term coined for the latest and most scientific method of judicial killing.
Electricians quarreled with each other in the public prints as to whether this
novel employment of their expertise was a stain or a bloom on their science’s
reputation. If the conservation of energy gave men a hard time, women got an
even rougher deal. Men were the victims of overcivilized society or of their own
(correctable) vices. Women were at the mercy of their constitutions. Only so
much energy could be contained in a woman’s body. Its proper purpose was to be
directed towards childbirth and nurturing, and woe betide the woman who diverted
it to some other use. This was a law of nature rather than of society. As the
psychologist Henry Maudsley pointed out in 1874, if “it were not that woman’s
organization and functions found their fitting home in a position different
from, if not subordinate to, that of men, she would not so long have kept that
position.”9 A woman’s social place was an inevitable consequence of the laws of
conservation: “it is not a mere question of larger or of smaller muscles, but of
the energy and power of endurance of the nerve-force which drives the
intellectual and muscular machinery; not a question of two bodies and minds that
are in equal physical conditions, but of one body and mind capable of sustained
and regular hard labour, and of another body and mind which for one quarter of
each month during the best years of life is more or less sick and unfit for hard
work.”10 The health and future of society dictated that women should conserve
what meager energy resources they had for the rigors of childbirth. This was an
important argument for opponents of increasingly insistent women’s voices
calling for equal education and equal political rights. Women who overeducated
themselves by this argument simply stopped being women. Overstimulation of the
brain led to a redirection of the 8
Quoted in I. R. Morus, “A Grand and Universal Panacea,” 105. H. Maudsley, “Sex
in Mind and Education,” Fortnightly Review, 1874, 15: 479. 10 Ibid., 480. 9
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vital nervous force away from the reproductive organs and towards the brain
instead. The inevitable result was sterility, the loss of specifically female
physical features such as breasts, and the development of male characteristics
like facial hair. Any move to force women into ways of life that went against
their nature as dictated by the laws of physics would be disastrous both for the
individual woman who stood in danger of losing her essential femininity and for
the human race as a whole. Commentators such as Joseph Mortimer Granville,
inventor of nerve-vibration therapy, fulminated against “unwomanly women who
lead their weaker but not less worthy sisters into these strange regions” as
“the enemy of their sex.”11 He feared that the “strong-minded womanism of the
day” would “sooner or later infallibly destroy the respect in which woman is
held by man, and undermine the feeling which gives her a claim to his
protection.”12 Ironically enough, just as physics was providing powerful
ammunition for misogynistic diatribes such as these, women were increasingly
demanding entry into physics laboratories for themselves. This was not,
therefore, by any means a unanimous opinion. BulwerLytton endowed his female
Vril-ya with physical and intellectual characteristics that were equal if not
superior to those of the males. Several late nineteenth-century physicists
welcomed women students into their laboratories and classrooms. They still had
to overcome considerable resistance. While the patrician Lord Rayleigh went so
far as to collaborate and even copublish with women physicists, his Cavendish
successor J. J. Thomson took a rather dimmer view. He joked to a woman friend
that “you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures—in my
elementary one I have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some
of them not so young neither, as someone says in Jeames’ Diary) and they take
notes in the most painstaking and praiseworthy fashion, but the most
extraordinary thing is that I have got one at my advanced lecture. I am afraid
she does not understand a word and my theory is that she is attending my
lectures on the supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out
her mistake.”13 In his Recollections and Reflections Thomson reflected with
equanimity on the violent opposition of Cambridge students to the admission of
women to degrees. He was sure that while women’s intellect might be up to the
basics, they would be unable to cope with the complexities of advanced physics.
11
J. Mortimer Granville, While the “Boy” Waits (London, 1879), 259. J. Mortimer
Granville, Youth: Its Care and Culture (London, 1880), 98. 13 R. J. Strutt, Life
of J. J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 28–29. 12
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269
Physics entered fin de si`ecle cultural discourse in many ways. It was a vehicle
for the expression of deep fears about what a new century had to offer and about
the limitations of material progress. Late Victorians were fascinated by the
philologist Max Muller’ s ruminations on solar mythol¨ ogy. He read myths like
the Nordic death of Balder (and maybe even the death of Christ) as metaphors
expressing fears of solar destruction—that the Sun might not rise again in the
morning. Victorian physics made those fears materially tangible with its
predictions of the eventual death of the Sun, graphically visualized at the end
of Wells’s Time Machine. The conservation of energy proved to be a powerful tool
with which to approach concerns about racial purity and danger. It could show
how the stiff upper lip and self-discipline so beloved of late Victorian and
Edwardian admirers of the imperial spirit were in fact prerequisites of human
salvation. It provided good reasons for keeping women in their place. At a time
when increasingly intense rivalry among nations was widely regarded as the
inevitable order of the day, physics provided a diagnosis of the problem, a new
arena for the staging of international competition—and a new source of potential
tools for the job when war eventually came. Physicists at War When European war
did break out in 1914, physicists were quick to come forward, offering their
science’s services to their nation-states. There was nothing at all surprising
about this. Physics had formed an arena for international competition for more
than half a century. From their midcentury beginnings, international exhibitions
of the arts and sciences had been regarded as showcases for industrial and
scientific rivalries among nations. The British and French in particular looked
on anxiously as the century progressed and succeeding exhibitions showed
increasing evidence of growing German industrial might. European states
celebrated their great men of science as symbols of national virility and power.
Idealistic commentators might wax lyrical about the international nature of
science, but national amour propre was in practice far more typical. Britons and
Germans vied fiercely on the question of whether the conservation of energy was
a British or a German discovery—though John Tyndall played the traitor and
awarded the laurels to the German Robert Mayer. The British and French clashed
over Adams’s and Leverrier’s claims to the discovery of Neptune. The potential
dangers to national prosperity and security of increasing German scientific and
industrial prowess was a constant
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refrain from British and French physicists alike trying to coax more resources
from recalcitrant governments throughout the final decades of the nineteenth
century. As early as 1851 and the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace,
British commentators at any rate regarded the occasion as an opportunity to show
off the superiority of their own arts and sciences. In just the same way they
reacted with consternation to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 and its
evidences that national competitors were in the process of stealing center
stage. In Paris in 1900 some optimistic commentators still saw exhibition
culture as an antidote to internecine warfare: “The Exhibition of 1900 had been,
not only a success, but a benefaction. It had served to relax the nerves of the
French nation after a terrible drama and it had brought about a truce, if not
between parties, at least between nations; hatred of the foreigner, so lively in
1899, was less virulent.”14 Others, however, were more realistic in their
assessment: “Economic crowds merge in our Babel, along the rue des Nations,
where each pavilion upholds the ethnic character of its country, of its race.
This contradiction of a cosmopolitanism endorsed by all and a nationalism each
day more intransigent, everywhere more jealous of maintaining or restoring the
integrity of the race, of the mother-tongue, of the laws, the traditions: is
this not one of the great unknowns of the problematic legacy our century leaves
to its successor?”15 So where were the physicists in all of this? As usual, by
the close of the nineteenth century, they were at the center of things.
Polemicists such as Charles Babbage had been putting physics at the heart of
exhibition culture since the 1850s. The exhibitions formed shop windows for the
latest physical discoveries, instruments, and inventions as well as industrial
applications. To exhibition-goers at least, demonstrations of telephones,
phonographs, or cinematography formed a seamless web with displays of
galvanometers, X-ray apparatus, or astronomical photographs. The industrial
physicist Werner von Siemens was convinced that exhibitions could “convince
ourselves and the world that German industrial hard work has developed to a
higher level under the bountiful rays of the recovered unity and power of the
Reich, and that it can engage the industrial competition of the world with calm
assurance.”16 And this was in the context of resurgent French triumphalism at
the Paris 14
Quoted in R. Brain, Going to the Fair, 152. Quoted ibid., 165. 16 Quoted ibid.,
163. 15
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271
Exhibition of 1889, celebrating a hundred years of the French Revolution.
Physicists of all nations played key roles in international exhibitions—as
instigators, organizers, jurors of competitions. Such exhibitions formed useful
venues for international scientific congresses of all kinds. They were perfect
opportunities for showing the world how much physics mattered—and for reminding
governments back home of the kudos that physics could attract and for showing
off in front of the competition. International scientific rivalry was
particularly intense in the field of electricity—and with good reason. The
massive underwater cable telegraph industry dominated by Britain was universally
recognized as having immense strategic significance. Securing lines of
telegraphic communication between the periphery and center of burgeoning empires
was vital. Given British dominance of the industry things could be quite
difficult for American, French, or German interests looking for lines of
communication immune to potential, if not actual, British interception. Germany
was to find out just how much this mattered in 1914, when Britain cut the cables
between Berlin and the rest of the world. British strategists were just as keen
to ensure that there was a secure “All-Red Route” safe from prying enemy eyes
and ears. British governments paid handsome subsidies to telegraph companies
operating alternative lines that sustained those vital All-Red connections. The
rapid development of the new electrical power industries was adding to the
science’s significance as well. One perceptive American visitor to the Paris
exhibition in 1900 (none other than Henry Adams) reported back that “[s]ince
1889, the great economy has evidently been electricity. Since 1840, electricity
must have altogether altered economical conditions. Looking forward fifty years
more, I should say that the superiority in electric energy is going to decide
the next development of competition. That superiority depends, in its turn, on
geography, geology and race-energy.”17 A major battle in these internecine
electrical wars took place in Paris in 1881. At that year’s International
Exhibition, representatives from various countries gathered together in an
effort to solve the vexed issue of international electrical units. The British
were anxious to defend the inroads into enemy territory made through the success
of the British Association’s ohm and the efforts of the Cavendish Laboratory’s
crack troops of precision measurers under Lord Rayleigh. The Germans were just
as keen to recover lost ground and reassert the superiority of Werner von
Siemens’s mercury standard. They had sent their big guns to the 17
Quoted ibid., 166.
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conference table—Helmholtz, Siemens, and Emil du Bois Reymond. The British cause
in turn was championed by the redoubtable Sir William Thomson. As Thomson’s
biographer recorded, “The debate grew warm. One who was present has narrated the
unforgettable scene of comedy of Thomson and Helmholtz disputing hotly in
French, which each pronounced more suo, to the edification of the
representatives of other nationalities.”18 An uneasy truce was eventually
established, with the British Association’s measured value for the ohm being
accepted by all combatants, but with the proviso that it should be concretely
represented by a Siemens mercury column. Hostilities would be recommenced the
following year over the question of just how long that mercury column ought to
be. The French managed to win a minor skirmish as well, displacing the German
Weber with their illustrious countryman Amp`ere as the name for the
international standard of electrical current. When battle resumed the following
year, Thomson was desperate to marshal his forces. He wrote begging Rayleigh to
attend at Paris. “We could get on but very badly without you,” he complained,
“and in fact I suppose your ohm must be declared the one and true ohm for our
generation. Could you not, in an international cause of such importance, and in
direct relations with your professorial work, arrange to have lectures
postponed, and laboratory work cared for in your absence for the week or ten
days which should suffice for Paris and the Committee?”19 In the event, even
though Rayleigh declined to drag himself away from the Cavendish, the British
forces did well enough. Thomson reported back to the absent Rayleigh that the
Cavendish squad’s measurements were being accepted as definitive. Thomson
dismissed discrepancies between the Cavendish’s values for the Siemens unit and
H. F. Weber’s results with a sneer: “It seems after all probable that it was the
particular one or two standards called Siemens units which we had that caused
the discrepancy.”20 Desultory fighting over the issue continued for almost a
decade. It was not until a conciliatory gathering at the British Association’s
Edinburgh meeting in 1891 that peace was finally declared with warweary
delegates from Britain, France, Germany, and the United States agreeing that the
ohm was to be defined as the resistance of a column of mercury 106.3 cm long of
1 square mm area at a temperature of 0◦ centigrade—virtually no different in the
end from the Cavendish value. 18
S. P. Thompson, Life of Lord Kelvin (London: Macmillan, 1910), 2: 775. R. J.
Strutt, Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 124. 20 S. P.
Thompson, Life of Lord Kelvin (London: Macmillan, 1910), 2: 790. 19
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By the beginning of the twentieth century, then, these hard-foughtfor,
internationally agreed-on electrical standards were enshrined in the legal
systems of various nation-states. In Britain, for example, electrical standards
were policed and enforced by the government Board of Trade. If physics was part
of the cultural fabric, it was coming to be an arm of the state as well. The
possibility of setting up a national physical laboratory in Britain had been
mooted at that very British Association meeting in Edinburgh in 1891 by Oliver
Lodge. The gauntlet was taken up again halfway through the decade by the British
Association, and a Treasury committee with Lord Rayleigh as chairman was set up
to consider the matter. The result was the setting up of the National Physical
Laboratory at Bushy Park—a former royal palace—under the supervision of the
Royal Society. Rayleigh succeeded in having Richard Glazebrook, his onetime
laboratory demonstrator at the Cavendish, appointed its director. The NPL
inherited from the Cavendish the mantle of maintaining Britain’s lead in the
business of electrical measurement. Just as Germany’s Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt had the task of maintaining the Reich’s increasingly formidable
reputation in physics and its applications to industrial advancement, so the NPL
took on the role of making sure that British physics could readily be made
available for the service of empire. Britain’s physicists duly responded when
war was declared in 1914. Cavendish-trained graduates flocked to put their
physics to work helping out with the war effort. Unsurprisingly, the National
Physical Laboratory with Glazebrook still at its head was an important center
for war work. Since 1909, Glazebrook along with Rayleigh had been at the core of
the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, established “for general advice on the
scientific problems arising in connection with the work of the Admiralty and War
Office in aerial construction and navigation.”21 Rayleigh’s own earlier work on
aerodynamics played an important role. When war broke out, the committee was
important in bringing academic physicists into the fold. Physicists such as
Frederick Lindemann and Frederick Aston found their way into aeronautics
research at Farnborough and the Royal Aircraft Factory. Airplanes were not
British physics’ only contribution either. Cavendish men worked on explosives
and on problems of submarine detection as well—inaugurating a tradition of
scientific boffinry that lasted well into the twentieth century. The Great War
in Britain was a physicists’ war to an extent that is now often forgotten. 21
R. J. Strutt, Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), 338.
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Under the aegis of the Admiralty’s Board of Invention and Research labored the
cream of high Victorian and Edwardian physicists, including J. J. Thomson,
Oliver Lodge, Ernest Rutherford, and William Crookes. Like the NPR in Britain,
the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt was at the outset the fulcrum of
German physicists’ contributions to their country’s war effort. When war broke
out, Emil Warburg, the Reichsanstalt’s president since 1905, immediately placed
his institution at the service of the Ministry of War. This, after all, was one
of the purposes for which the Reichsanstalt had been established—to put physics
to work for the glory of the Reich. Unlike their British counterparts, however,
who knew full well what to do with the National Physical Laboratory’s resources,
the German Imperial Army and Navy were not sure what use to put this help to. By
1915 half of the Reichsanstalt’s personnel had either enlisted in the armed
forces or been sent to carry out industrial war work. Those who remained in
Berlin turned their resources to testing and improving war materiel. They
carried out work on electrical equipment for the military, developing
nonmagnetic alloys for the Navy and researching artillery ballistics. Soured by
defeat, Warburg recalled later that during the war the physicists remaining at
the Reichsanstalt “had been greatly burdened by testing work and by conducting
largely unimportant work for the army.”22 Following Germany’s surrender in 1918,
the Reichsanstalt, product as it was of the short-lived Reich’s aspirations for
the new century, was a sad ghost of its old imperial self. Physics was a
combative business by the beginning of the twentieth century. Far more than just
individual pride and amour propre were at stake in the proper allocation of
credit for discovery, for example. National interest was at stake as well.
Physics was an arena where countries as well as individuals competed for kudos.
The lavish last farewell accorded Lord Kelvin was an indication of the important
role physics had come to play in national self-images. The same can be said of
the eulogies for Helmholtz in Germany, or a little earlier in the nineteenth
century the impressive funeral in Washington for Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian
Institution’s first secretary and the United States’ premier man of science. The
resources that physics could offer for national competitiveness were
increasingly recognized and regarded as making the science a prize well worth
fighting for. Battles over international physical standards had real
consequences in terms of control over increasingly crucial and strategic
industries as well. When the long anticipated war eventually broke out in 22
D. Cahan, An Institute for an Empire, 226.
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1914, physics was ready to do its bit. That was the downside of physicists’
success in making their discipline an important arm of early twentiethcentury
nation-states’ apparatus. The End of the Ether The ether was the crowning glory
of late nineteenth-century physics. It was a massive success story that seemed
to its promoters to be as real as the telegraph cables and electrical
paraphernalia whose behavior it was originally invoked to explain. For
physicists such as Oliver Lodge and William Thomson, the ether simply was not
something about whose existence there could be any really serious doubt. They
had very good reasons for this confidence as well. The ether was a formidable
and powerful explanatory tool. The all-pervasive medium contained the mechanism
through which the grand doctrine of the conservation of energy operated and
became manifest. It explained the operations of telegraphs and telephones; it
was the medium by which electromagnetic waves traveled through otherwise
empty-seeming space; it transmitted messages from the distant stars to
physicists’ laboratories on Earth. Late nineteenthcentury physicists were well
versed in the ether’s idiosyncrasies. They had developed powerful mathematical
and experimental technologies to unravel its secrets. They were as familiar with
it as they were with any of the other tools of the physicist’s trade. Within a
couple of decades of the century’s end, however, the ether was dead. It had been
revealed as a baroque fantasy better fitted for the amused condescension of a
new generation than for any serious consideration on their part. When J. J.
Thomson announced in 1897 his demonstration that cathode rays were composed of a
stream of negatively charged particles or corpuscles—later renamed electrons (a
word coined by G. F. FitzGerald’s physicist uncle, George Johnstone Stoney, and
borrowed by Joseph Larmor, a prominent ether physicist, three years earlier)—his
findings were in no way interpreted as an attack on the ether. On the contrary,
most British physicists were already agreed that the rays were composed of
particles of some sort. In any case, in Thomson’s own view, his subatomic
corpuscles were really vortices in the ether. What Thomson’s work did suggest,
however, was that the traditional notion of atoms as the smallest units of
matter needed rethinking. These newfangled corpuscles were smaller than the
smallest known atoms—Thomson’s experiments deflecting the rays in an
electrostatic field indicated that the corpuscles had one one-thousandth the
mass of a hydrogen atom. The experimental
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technologies that Thomson deployed in his experiments provided powerful new
tools for further research as well. Ether theorists such as G. F. FitzGerald
were unhappy with Thomson’s notion that his corpuscles were constituents of
atoms. That was why they suggested they were “electrons” instead. In ether
terms, electrons were pure, nonmaterial packets of electricity in the ether.
FitzGerald recognized the power of Thomson’s experiments, though. If Thomson
were right, then it “would be the beginning of great advances in science, and
the results it would be likely to lead to in the near future might easily
eclipse most of the other great discoveries of the nineteenth century.”23 To his
immediate contemporaries, Thomson’s assertion that cathode rays were made up of
particles that were themselves constituent parts of atoms seemed at best an
intriguing hypothesis. Agreeing with FitzGerald, they needed more data. As the
Electrician editorialized: “Prof. J. J. Thomson’s explanation of certain cathode
ray phenomena by the assumption of the divisibility of the chemical atom leads
to so many transcendentally important and interesting conclusions that one
cannot but wish to see the hypothesis verified at an early date by some crucial
experiment.”24 It was not too long, however, before such subatomic particles
proliferated. Thomson’s notion of subatomic particles seemed a promising way of
accounting for the new phenomenon of radioactivity just being discovered by the
Curies. Some of those emanations could be studied experimentally in a similar
fashion and shown to consist of streams of particles of definite mass and
velocity. In the early 1900s Thomson was speculating about the structure of the
atom, regarding it as “built up of a number of corpuscles in equilibrium or
steady motion under their mutual repulsions and a central attraction: it is
surprising what a lot of interesting results come out.”25 He was not the only
one engaged in such speculations. The Cavendish-trained Charles T. R. Wilson’s
invention of the cloud chamber in 1911 provided a powerful new tool for the
investigation of these strange particles. Experimenters could now see the tracks
left behind by individual corpuscles. Leaving his negatively charged cathode ray
corpuscles behind him, J. J. Thomson was working during the 1900s on what he
called “positive rays” from gas discharge tubes. He was looking for positively
charged analogues of his corpuscles. From 1910 onwards with Frederick Aston 23
Quoted in I. Falconer, “Corpuscles, Electrons, and Cathode Rays,” 273. Quoted
ibid., 274. 25 Quoted in I. Falconer, “J. J. Thomson’s Work on Positive Rays,”
267. 24
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as his research assistant he started developing new and more powerful ways of
studying and making visible the basic constituents (as he saw them) of matter.
As with Wilson’s cloud chamber, these were technologies that left tangible—and
permanent—traces of the movements of otherwise invisible entities. They provided
graphic evidence that there was more to this universe of proliferating subatomic
particles than a theorist’s reverie. To the experimenters who worked with them,
subatomic particles seemed material enough. They could be manipulated and
directed at will. The bright patches on photographic plates and fluorescent
screens were proof of their passage. They provided grist as well for new models
of atomic structure that themselves raised new problems. If, as Thomson’s
prot´eg´e Ernest Rutherford argued, atoms were made up of electrons orbiting
around a central nucleus for example, why were they stable? According to
Maxwell’s theory, the orbiting electrons should emit electromagnetic waves. As a
result they should collapse in a fraction of a second as their orbital energy
disappeared. Not to do so without another source of energy was an apparent
contradiction of the inexorable and sacred law of the conservation of energy. In
Germany, the new breed of theoretical physicists were worrying away at problems
to do with the theory of radiation. Max Planck in Berlin was particularly
interested in trying to integrate thermodynamics and electromagnetism. Planck
had been extraordinary professor of physics at Berlin since 1889 and following
his mentor Helmholtz’s death was increasingly regarded as the Prussian capital’s
preeminent theoretician. During the late 1890s he was looking for a mathematical
expression that could describe the distribution of energy across the
electromagnetic spectrum—an equation that linked energy with the frequency of
electromagnetic waves. The same constant factor kept on turning up in his
calculations. This magic number, dubbed Planck’s constant (symbolized in
equations as h), was interpreted by its inventor as the “quantum of action.” The
number was soon turning up elsewhere. In particular the young Danish physicist
Niels Bohr used Planck’s constant to solve Rutherford’s problem of the stability
of his atomic model. According to Bohr, atoms were made up of electrons orbiting
around a central core in discrete orbits defined by Planck’s constant. They
could move from one orbit to another only by absorbing or emitting energy in
exact packets, defined by Planck’s constant. This was peculiar. It was starting
to look as if the waves of energy traveling through the ether traveled in
discrete chunks—just as if they were made up of particles. According to Bohr,
energy traveled in quanta.
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While some turn-of-the-century physicists were messing around with subatomic
particles—effectively in their view investigating the smallscale structure of
the ether—others were investigating the ether’s properties on a grander scale.
In 1887 two American experimental physicists, Albert Abraham Michelson and
Edward Morley, had come up with an intriguing observation. They had been
carrying out an experiment to try to detect the movement of the Earth through
the ether and had come up with a null result—they could not find the ether drift
they were searching for. It looked as if, according to the Michelson-Morley
experiment at least, the ether was somehow dragged along by the Earth’s surface
as the planet orbited the Sun. This was a peculiar—and rather irritating—
conclusion since other aspects of ether theory assumed that the ether was not
convected in this way. Oliver Lodge carried out a famous experiment with his
enormous whirling machine to try to reproduce this dragging effect artificially,
but to no avail. One suggestion that made sense of the Michelson-Morley
observation and reconciled it with the rest of physics was the hypothesis
offered in 1889 by G. F. FitzGerald, who pointed out that if matter moving
through the ether contracted in the direction of its motion, the null result was
precisely what was to be expected. Few paid attention at first to FitzGerald’s
bizarre suggestion. During the late 1890s, however, Joseph Larmor, probably
Britain’s premier ether physicist, was working out his own novel speculations
and by 1897 had calculated that the Michelson-Morley null result was actually a
requirement of his new theory. It was also implied by this new theory that
electrical systems moving through the ether would contract in exactly the manner
predicted by FitzGerald. The Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz had came to
a similar conclusion in 1892 on the basis of his theoretical work on
high-velocity electrons and developed a set of mathematical transformations
(later to be known as the LorentzFitzGerald transformations) describing the
contraction. Lorentz had applied Maxwell’s equations on a microscopic scale,
showing that the contraction was the product of the way the electromagnetic
forces between his electrons interacted with the stationary ether. The hunt was
soon on among experimenters to find ways of experimentally detecting this
peculiar phenomenon, particularly in view of ominous claims that Michelson and
Morley might have got their experiment wrong and that there was indeed a
measurable motion through the ether. By now an important plank of ether physics
depended on there being no such thing. Frederick Trouton, following a suggestion
by FitzGerald before his death, argued that there might be an electrical way of
testing the Michelson-Morley
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experiment. Larmor reckoned that he could show from this experiment that
anything other than a null result would be tantamount to the heresy of a
perpetual motion machine. Trouton fell out with his theoretical masters,
however, by continuing to try to measure the effects of the Earth’s movement
through the ether—he was intrigued by the possibility raised by Larmor that
inexhaustible energy might be mined from the ether in this fashion. Observers of
Trouton’s disagreements with his erstwhile mentors commented that he was going
against received wisdom. The possibility of measuring the Earth’s movement
through the ether was “denied by one school of physicists among whom must be
placed Larmor, Einstein, and . . . Sir O. Lodge.”26 That was how Einstein’s
announcement of his special theory of relativity in 1905 was first read in
Britain. It was Einstein’s work, however, that would over the following decade
make the ether start coming apart at the seams. Albert Einstein in 1905 was a
humble patent examiner in Switzerland, having graduated from Zurich Polytechnic
a few years previously. In his soon-to-be-revolutionary paper “On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” published in the Annalen der Physik, Einstein
introduced two new principles into physics that led eventually to a completely
new understanding of the nature of space and time. According to his principle of
relativity there was no privileged, absolute perspective from which to view
events in the universe. Everything was relative—except for the velocity of
light, which remained the same in all frames of reference. This was the second
principle—the constancy in all frames of the velocity of light. There was no
such thing as Newtonian absolute space and therefore, of course, no ether. The
ether as a hypothesis was superfluous to requirements. Einstein might have been
dealing with the same kinds of problems in the electrodynamics of moving bodies
as was Larmor, but he was coming at them from a very different perspective. His
work was informed by the tradition of German theoretical physics rather than
Cambridge ether physics. Einstein’s little publication helped to rescue him from
comparative obscurity in his Zurich patent office and soon catapulted him onto
the world stage. On the way he struck the death knell of ether physics. Many
British physicists still committed to the ether found it easy at first to
accommodate Einstein’s rather outr´e ideas on relativity into their worldview.
To a nonexpert observer at least it was not easy to see there was any great
difference between what Einstein had to say and Larmor’s latest 26
Quoted in A. Warwick, “The Sturdy Protestants of Science,” 325.
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theories. For a decade after 1905 Einstein—now a fully accredited member of
Germany’s academic theoretical physics community—beavered away at the problem of
generalizing his new theory. The trick was to find a way of accounting for
gravity. He produced his coup in 1916 with his “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen
Relativit¨atstheorie,” again published in the prestigious Annalen der Physik.
Here he argued that gravity could be understood as the curvature of space-time—a
geometrical property of non-Euclidean space. He applied his theory to solve the
problem of the planet Mercury’s hitherto anomalous orbit around the sun. There
was another test as well. According to Einstein’s theory, light passing by a
body with a strong gravitational field—like the Sun—should bend. The
announcement by Einstein’s British fan, Arthur Eddington, in 1919 that he had
observed just that during that year’s total eclipse of the Sun, was regarded by
many as the final nail in the ether’s coffin. The end of the ether as a viable
physical construct marked the end of the nineteenth century’s imperial physics
as well. The ether had encapsulated the hopes and the hubris of late Victorian
physical science. Working out and minutely measuring its intimate properties was
going to herald the end of physics—the final theory of everything. Its
proponents were confident that the ether was as real as anything else in their
physics. They could manipulate it as easily and as purposefully as any of the
increasingly complex pieces of apparatus that littered their laboratories. It
was the machine culture of late nineteenth-century Europe and America inscribed
on the Universe. The ether looked plausible to its makers just because its
ingredients were so familiar. The wheels and pulleys of the factory floor were
transformed into celestial mechanics—a process that had the virtue of ennobling
the one while giving the other a much-needed practical edge. Just as the ether
was coming apart at the seams during the early years of the twentieth century,
so was the culture that produced it. It had been the product of a generation of
physicists who were on the whole supremely confident and self-assured of the
progressive nature of their science and its potential for society. Successive
generations were to have far fewer illusions. Conclusion From a vantage point
over a century later, much of nineteenth-century physics looks a little
peculiar, if not downright bizarre. Late Victorian models of the ether in
particular look odd, with their gears and pulleys and wheels. It is far easier
to sympathize with the French physicist and
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philosopher Pierre Duhem and his ridicule of such constructions than it is to
understand the attraction they held for their supporters. Most misplaced to
modern eyes is the immense confidence that these late nineteenth-century
theorists had in their science. We know, after all, that within less than a
generation those fantastical constructions were to come crashing down about
their ears. It is still tempting for many historians of science and scientists
to try to overlook what appear from today’s perspective to be the errors and
excesses of past scientific heroes. By obscuring or forgetting the bits that
seem odd, incongruous, or just out of place in sober-minded science we hope that
we can continue to present the history of physics (and that of other sciences)
as a grand, triumphant narrative of truth emerging out of ignorance. In that at
least we still have a great deal in common with our Victorian predecessors and
their faith in progress. Leaving out, or reducing to the level of amusing
anecdote, those parts of nineteenth-century physics that fail to conform
comfortably with our present-day views of what physics is—or should be—about is
to do the past a great disservice. It is also a denigration of the full richness
and complexity of contemporary scientific culture. One feature of the history of
nineteenth-century physics that may strike modern readers as particularly
surprising is the comparatively recent date at which physics (or any of the
other sciences for that matter) became an academic discipline in anything like
the contemporary sense. Until well into the nineteenth century—in Britain at any
rate—practicing physicists were as likely, if not more likely, to be found
outside as inside universities. Michael Faraday, perhaps the greatest of
nineteenth-century scientific heroes, never set foot in a university as either
student or teacher. This is often portrayed as an achievement on Faraday’s
part—evidence of his innate genius or heroic efforts at self-education. It is,
of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Faraday’s informal
apprenticeship at the Royal Institution under Sir Humphry Davy’s tutelage was
probably as good as it got in terms of an early nineteenth-century education in
chemistry and natural philosophy. Certainly for the first half of the nineteenth
century, even in countries such as France and some of the German lands where
natural philosophy or physics had a more prominent place in the university
curriculum, teaching to produce physicists—as opposed to well-rounded
individuals—simply was not part of what universities typically did. It was even
more uncommon for universities to actively encourage, let alone financially
support, any activity that might now be recognized as experimental research in
physics. Making physics into a university discipline with attendant regimes of
training, career structure,
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and opportunity if not obligation to do research was very much an achievement of
the second half of the nineteenth century. In many ways, nineteenth-century
natural philosophers and physicists were a far more varied bunch than their
modern counterparts. They had not undergone similar training regimes, neither
were they obliged to acquire particular qualifications to become accredited
practitioners of their science. Even where university teaching in natural
philosophy existed, it was not designed with the aim of providing accreditation
or training for budding physicists. The argument for making natural philosophy
part of the university curriculum was that physics could be a valuable means of
inculcating a liberal education—of producing wellrounded, well-informed
potential members of the ruling classes. Most hopeful nineteenth-century
physicists then had to make their careers up as they went along. There simply
was no obvious, well-worn route for them to follow. The lucky ones were
independently wealthy, vocationally minded gentlemen such as Charles Babbage or
John Herschel who could pursue their interests without undue concern for the
need to make a living. Those less fortunate had to find ways of earning a crust
that allowed them to practice their science as well. The result was that for
most of the period, the question of what kind of person the physicist should
be—how trained, how employed, how situated in society—was very much open to
different interpretations. Gentlemen of science in the earlier part of the
century, for example, often looked down their noses at those who tried to profit
from their science by taking out patents for inventions. At least partly as a
result of the socially insecure place of physics and physicists within
nineteenth-century culture, cultivating the public mattered for practitioners
then to a degree that may seem surprising now. Public lectures for a popular
audience were a significant source of income for many men of science. Some
performers were truly popular as well. Fashionable London flocked in its
hundreds to Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution. John Tyndall
later in the century was a popular draw as well. The real superstars such as
Lord Kelvin even went on international tours. Audiences crammed into galleries
of practical science, sold out the Great Exhibition of 1851 and rushed to
international expositions throughout Europe and America, anxious to see and
admire the latest products of science and industry. They did so because to some
degree at least they shared in and endorsed (though not entirely uncritically)
the ethos of optimistic progress through science that those enterprises
represented. Polite, middle-class, and working-class society in different
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ways accepted physics as part of their culture. Knowing physics was part of what
it meant to be a cultivated person in nineteenth-century Europe and America. As
well as the ever-present exhibitions and lectures, newspapers and popular
magazines routinely reported the latest discoveries and pronouncements. Popular
books and pamphlets explained the latest inventions and theories to their
readers at levels often far more technical than would be acceptable in today’s
mass media. Because of this popularity—and because of the assumptions of its
practitioners and their audiences concerning what kind of role science should
play in society—nineteenth-century physics could be a political hot potato. The
nebular hypothesis is probably the best example of this. Lessons drawn from the
heavens concerning the progressive unfolding of natural law were quite
straightforwardly accepted as having important consequences for the way in which
society should be organized. Natural philosophical systems that veered too close
to the materialistic were castigated by conservative churchmen and politicians
for undermining the social fabric and giving the hoi polloi ideas above their
station. Radicals just as cheerfully turned to physics for ammunition. Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels lauded William Robert Grove’s doctrine of the correlation
of physical forces and the theory of the conservation of energy as politically
correct (that is to say materialist and progressive) science. Access to physics
could be a political issue too. Radical spokespersons early in the century
attacked the gentlemen of science for trying to maintain a monopoly on
knowledge—for insisting that only they and their kind could be trusted to do
science. Their radical opponents argued that on the contrary science should be
available to all and that physics in particular was the proper province of those
who worked for a living and therefore had hands-on knowledge of machines and of
natural processes. By their own lights, by the end of the nineteenth century
physicists and their commentators reckoned their science as a success story.
They marveled at physics’ massive strides forward in knowledge over the last
century. They celebrated their physics as tangible evidence of their culture’s
progressive modernity. Not everyone was a fan, of course. The overarching
problem was the materialism of modern science as a whole. Antivivisectionists
attacking physiology for its penchant for animal experimentation held that this
was only the thin edge of the wedge. More than a few physicists evinced at least
some sympathy with this argument. Several eminent late Victorian physicists
looked sympathetically, if skeptically, at psychics and spiritualists. They
thought that the world of the spirit could be embraced within the ambit of
physics as well. On the
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whole, though, physicists saw the triumph of their discipline inscribed on the
world around them. It was visible in the factories and in the evergrowing
telegraph network. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was there in the
cinema, the motor car, and the radio; it even powered flight. The great thing
about their physics for the Victorians was that it really seemed to work. It was
a science that delivered the goods. While most late nineteenth-century
physicists were supremely confident of the security of the content of their
science—that they had at least a general outline of a comprehensive account of
the universe—they were rather less confident concerning the security of the
institutions on which their science depended. To many of them, their
hard-fought-for institutions and the cultural place of physics that they had
worked so diligently to establish still seemed very fragile. Turn-of-the-century
physicists were keenly aware that their science depended on their institutions
and that those institutions’ continuing vitality depended on physics’ being able
to maintain its privileged cultural position in nineteenth-century society as
the ultimate authority on nature. Senior members of the profession—and physics
was by now a profession—had lived through and participated in the struggles that
had been needed to establish physics in its current position of cultural
authority. That this privileged social place might yet slip from their grasp was
a real concern. This seems particularly ironic from a modern perspective, of
course. It is after all the institutions that late nineteenth-century physicists
labored to establish that have survived to the present day largely unchanged
while large parts (though by no means all) of their physics has fallen by the
wayside. Social structures turned out in the end to be considerably more durable
than physical theories. This book has, I hope, given some sense of how physics
fitted into nineteenth-century culture. By doing so, it should also have
instilled some sense of the historically contingent nature of modern science and
its institutions. Science is not a given. It is a cultural achievement of
immense and unprecedented significance. A hundred odd years on since the
scientific struggles related in this book, physics is part of the everyday
fabric of our lives. This sentence is being written with a machine that could
have been built only with the detailed knowledge of the workings of subatomic
particles that modern physics provides. As this book shows, that knowledge did
not come from nowhere. Since physics is a product of culture, as the nineteenth
century recognized, it is also part of a common culture. The shape of modern
scientific institutions, the status of scientific experts, their relationship to
government and to industry are not engraved in stone. It is up to citizens of
the twenty-first century to decide whether
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and how they value physics and physicists—what role they will play in this
century’s culture. Nineteenth-century physicists’ awareness of the fragility of
their fledgling discipline and the ease with which the cultural niche they had
carved for themselves could be whittled away meant that they worked hard to
engage their publics. That is one lesson at least that the history of imperial
physics has to offer the postmodern age.
Bibliographic Essay
In the following few pages I provide a brief (and necessarily very incomplete)
survey of the vast available literature for the benefit of those who wish to
investigate the history of physics in more detail. The essay also provides me
with an opportunity to note some of the sources and authors whose researches
have made this book possible. Chapter 1: Queen of the Sciences Steven Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), provides
a brilliantly erudite survey of the first Scientific Revolution. Mario Biagioli,
Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), discusses the
rise of patronage and the place of natural philosophy within court culture.
Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), outlines Bacon’s project to
reform natural philosophy for the commonwealth. The role of mathematics is
discussed in Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), while the rise of experimental philosophy is the focus of
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), and Steven Shapin, The Social History of
Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The idea of the clockwork
universe and its consequences are outlined in Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and
Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986). Public science in eighteenth-century England is the focus of Larry
Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), and Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992). The European scene is canvassed in William Clark, Simon
Schaffer, and Jan Golinski (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999). 287
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The first volume of Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and
Electricity (London: Thomas Nelson, 1951), is still worth consulting as a
general survey of nineteenth-century physics, though readers should beware the
anachronistic mathematical notation and, if they carry on into the second
volume, the idiosyncratic refusal to credit Einstein with the theory of
relativity. Robert Purrington, Physics in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1997), is a good recent survey. Another perspective
can be found in Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996). Peter Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), surveys the rise of energy physics. Chapter 2. A
Revolutionary Science The classic account of French physics under Laplace is
Robert Fox, “The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics,” Historical Studies in the
Physical Sciences, 1974, 4: 89–136. Eugene Frankel, “Corpuscular Optics and the
Wave Theory of Light: The Science and Politics of a Revolution in Physics,”
Social Studies of Science, 1976, 6: 141–84, fleshes out some of the details with
regard to the key science of optics. The institutional background and political
networks are surveyed in Maurice Crosland, The Society of Arcueil (London:
Heinemann, 1967), and Science under Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992). For a comparison of French and English mathematical traditions see
Joan Richards, “Rigor and Clarity: Foundations of Mathematics in France and
England, 1800–1840,” Science in Context, 1991, 4: 297–319. The background to
mathematics in Cambridge is discussed in John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of
Enlightenment: Science, Religion, and Politics from the Restoration to the
French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For the
“analytical revolution” see Harvey Becher, “Radicals, Whigs, and Conservatives:
The Middle and Lower Classes in the Analytical Revolution in Cambridge in the
Age of Aristocracy,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1995, 28:
405–26, and William Ashworth, “Memory, Efficiency, and Symbolic Analysis:
Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and the Industrial Mind,” Isis, 1996, 87:
629–53. Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the
Factory System,” Critical Inquiry, 1994, 21: 203–27, expands on Babbage’s
project. Harvey Becher, “William Whewell and Cambridge Mathematics,” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science, 1980, 11: 1–48, takes the Cambridge story
further. The rise of the mathematics Tripos and the coaching system is discussed
in Andrew Warwick, “Exercising the Student Body: Mathematics and Athleticism in
Victorian Cambridge,” Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (eds.), Science
Incarnate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and “A Mathematical
World on Paper: Written Examinations in Early Nineteenth-Century Cambridge,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Physical Science, 1998, 29b: 295–319. More
detail is provided in Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise
of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Peter
Harman (ed.), Wranglers and Physicists (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1985), surveys the field. Joan Richards, Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of
Geometry in Victorian England (Boston: Academic Press, 1988), gives an overview
of English mathematics. Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, The
Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), provides an exhaustive survey of
the institutional
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rise of German physics. David Cahan (ed.), Herman von Helmholtz and the
Foundation of Nineteenth-Century Science (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), fleshes out the picture, as does Kathryn Olesko, Physics as a
Calling (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Chapter 3. The Romance of
Nature The impact of the Romantic movement on natural philosophy is surveyed in
Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially D. Sepper, “Goethe,
Colour, and the Science of Seeing”; W. Wetzels, “Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic
Physics in Germany”; and C. Lawrence, “The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and
Romanticism.” H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the
Inorganic Natural Sciences,” Studies in Romanticism, 1970, 9: 193–215, and W.
Wetzels, “Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism,” Studies in
Romanticism, 1971, 10: 44–59, deal with physics more particularly. See also
Myles Jackson, “A Spectrum of Belief: Goethe’s ‘Republic’ versus Newton’s
‘Despotism,’” Social Studies of Science, 1994, 24: 673–701, which deals with
Goethe’s anti-Newtonianism. Coleridge’s romanticism and his views of natural
philosophy are canvassed in Trevor Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981). Davy’s romanticism is discussed in David Knight,
Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
The classic overview of conversion experiments and their role in the development
of the theory of the conservation of energy is Thomas Kuhn, “Energy Conservation
as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” The Essential Tension (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977). The origins of the Royal Institution and its
politics of urbane utilitarianism are discussed in Morris Berman, Social Change
and Scientific Organization (London: Heinemann, 1978). Conservation, conversion,
and correlation are analysed in Peter Heimann, “Conversion of Forces and the
Conservation of Energy,” Centaurus, 1974, 18: 147–61; Geoffrey Cantor, “William
Robert Grove, the Correlation of Forces, and the Conservation of Energy,”
Centaurus, 1976, 19: 273–90; Iwan Rhys Morus, “Correlation and Control: William
Robert Grove and the Construction of a New Philosophy of Scientific Reform,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1991, 21: 589–621. Faraday’s
contribution is discussed in David Gooding, “Final Steps to the Field Theory,”
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1981, 11: 492–505. Daniel Siegel,
Innovation in Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), and Peter Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), discuss Maxwell; Bruce Hunt, The
Maxwellians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), gives an incisive analysis
of his followers. Geoffrey Cantor and John Hodge (eds.), Conceptions of Ether
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), surveys the consolidation of the
ether. Chapter 4. The Science of Showmanship The Galvani-Volta debate and its
consequences form the focus for Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992). Volta’s impact in revolutionary France is
outlined in Geoffrey Sutton, “The Politics of Science in Early
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Napoleonic France: the Case of the Voltaic Pile,” Historical Studies in the
Physical Sciences, 1981, 11: 329–66. Faraday’s massive contribution is laid out
in L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965), David
Gooding and Frank James (eds.), Faraday Rediscovered (London: Macmillan, 1985),
and Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (London: Icon
Books, 2004). James R. Hoffmann, Andr´e-Marie Amp`ere (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), outlines Amp`ere’s contribution. The importance of
experiment and demonstration is established in David Gooding, “Experiment and
Concept-Formation in Electromagnetic Science and Technology in England,” History
and Technology, 1985, 2: 229–44; Iwan Rhys Morus, “Different Experimental Lives:
Michael Faraday and William Sturgeon,” History of Science, 1992, 30: 1–28; Iwan
Rhys Morus, “Currents from the Underworld: Electricity and the Technology of
Display in Early Victorian London,” Isis, 1993, 84: 50–69; and Iwan Rhys Morus,
Frankenstein’s Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Albert
Moyer, Joseph Henry (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), discusses
the American perspective. Brian Gee, “The Early Development of the
Magneto-Electric Machine,” Annals of Science, 1993, 50: 101–33, looks at
experiment and utility, while Iwan Rhys Morus, “Manufacturing Nature: Science,
Technology, and Victorian Consumer Culture,” British Journal for the History of
Science, 1996, 29: 403–34, relates it to exhibition. For electric light see
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the
Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Jeffrey
Kieve, The Electric Telegraph (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1973), gives a
social history of telegraphy; Bruce Hunt, “Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy,
and the Rise of Field Theory,” History of Technology, 1991, 13: 1–19, examines
its impact on later physical theory. Yakub Bektas, “The Sultan’s Messenger:
Cultural Constructions of Ottoman Telegraphy, 1847–1880,” Technology and
Culture, 2000, 41: 669–96, provides a cross-cultural perspective. Ken Beauchamp,
Exhibiting Electricity (London: Institute of Electrical Engineers Press, 1997),
and Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), look at electrical exhibitions later in the century. Robert Brain,
Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions
(Cambridge: Whipple Library, 1993), provides some interesting perspectives.
Chapter 5. The Science of Work The context of engineering in revolutionary and
pre-Revolutionary France is laid out in Ken Adler, Engineering the Revolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). The introduction to Sadi Carnot,
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986; originally published 1824), translated and edited by Robert Fox,
lays out the context for Carnot, as well as being an invaluable edition of his
writings. Another, earlier translation, Eric Mendoza (ed.), Reflections on the
Motive Power of Fire and other Papers on the Second Law of Thermodynamics by E.
Clapeyron and R. Clausius (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), also contains
translations of key papers by Clapeyron and Clausius. Donald Cardwell, From Watt
to Clausius (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), gives the steam
background and context. Robert Fox, The Caloric Theory of Gases from Lavoisier
to Regnault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), provides useful detail.
Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy (Chicago: University
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of Chicago Press, 1999), is a brilliant and indispensable account of English,
Irish, and Scottish developments. More details on Lord Kelvin are found in
Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord
Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Crosbie Smith and Norton
Wise, “Measurement, Work, and Industry in Lord Kelvin’s Britain,” Historical
Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1986, 17: 147–73; Norton Wise (with the
collaboration of Crosbie Smith), “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural
Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History of Science, 1989, 27:
263–301, 391–449; 1990, 28: 221–61; and Norton Wise, “Mediating Machines,”
Science in Context, 1988, 2: 77–113, are all well worth reading. Joule’s
contributions are laid out in Donald Cardwell, James Joule (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1989), and the details of the paddlewheel
experiment are the focus of Heinz Otto Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical
Equivalent of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early
Victorian England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1995, 26:
73–106. The Manchester context more generally is outlined in Robert Kargon,
Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1977). Mayer’s contribution is exhaustively covered
in Ken Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993). Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of
Energy (London: Hutchinson, 1974), identifies Helmholtz as the discoverer. There
is an interesting perspective on Helmholtz in Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Some of his popular scientific
writings are collected in David Cahan (ed.), Science and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995). Joe Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of
the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), lays out the disputes
between thermodynamics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. The history of
statistical mechanics is discussed in Stephen G. Brush, The Kind of Motion We
Call Heat (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976), and Statistical Physics and the
Atomic Theory of Matter from Boyle and Newton to Landau and Onsanger (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983). Ted Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking,
1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), provides important
context. Some of the cultural dynamics are discussed in Greg Myers,
“Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social
Prophecy,” Patrick Brantlinger (ed.), Energy and Entropy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989). Chapter 6. Mysterious Fluids and Forces Some of the
background to Victorian developments in discharge tube physics is outlined in
Frank James, “The Study of Spark Spectra, 1835–1859,” Ambix, 1983, 30: 137–62.
Crookes’s work is the focus for Robert deKosky, “Spectroscopy and the Elements
in the Late Nineteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science,
1973, 6: 400–23, and “William Crookes and the Fourth State of Matter,” Isis,
1976, 67: 36–60. Crookes is also discussed in Frank James, “Of Medals and
Muddles: The Context of the Discovery of Thallium: William Crookes’s Early
Spectro-Chemical Work,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1984, 39: 65–90,
and Hannah Gay, “Invisible Resource: William Crookes and His Circle of Support,”
British Journal for the History of Science, 1996, 29: 311–36. Bruce Hunt,
“Practice vs. Theory: The British Electrical Debate, 1888–1891,” Isis, 1983,
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74: 137–62, deals with the British Maxwellians’ efforts to find electromagnetic
waves. Hertz’s discovery of radio is the focus of Jed Buchwald, The Creation of
Scientific Effects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Hugh Aitken,
Syntony and Spark (New York: Wiley, 1976), and Sungook Hong, “Marconi and the
Maxwellians: The Origins of Wireless Telegraphy Revisited,” Technology and
Culture, 1994, 35: 717–49, deal with the aftermath. Alison Winter, Mesmerized
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), discusses some of the mesmeric
background to psychic research. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), deals with spiritualism in general. Richard
Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the
Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” British Journal for the History of
Science, 1999, 32: 421–59, provides an important analysis of the close
relationship between psychic and telegraphic research, as does his “Instruments
to Lay Hold of Spirits: Technologizing the Bodies of Victorian Spiritualism,”
Iwan Rhys Morus (ed.), Bodies/Machines (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002). Arne
Hessenbruch, “Calibration and Work in the X Ray Economy, 1896–1928,” Social
Studies of Science, 2000, 30: 397– 420, discusses the consolidation of X-ray
technologies. Mary Jo Nye, “N-Rays: An Episode in the History and Psychology of
Science,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1980, 11: 125–56, gives
the details of the “discovery” of N-rays. Sorya Boudia, “The Curie Laboratory:
Radioactivity and Metrology,” History and Technology, 1997, 13: 249–65, and
Xavier Roqu´e, “Marie Curie and the Radium Industry: A Preliminary Sketch,”
History and Technology, 1997, 13: 267–91, deal with the origins and early
development of radioactivity. A recent and informative biography is Susan Quinn,
Marie Curie: A Life (New York NY: Simon and Schuster, 1995). A more popular view
of radioactivity is Catherine Caufield, Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the
Radiation Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989). Chapter 7. Mapping the
Heavens Robert Smith, “A National Observatory Transformed: Greenwich in the
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Astronomy, 1991, 22: 5–20,
provides a good overview of industrial astronomy at the Greenwich Observatory.
There is more detail on George Bidell Airy in Allen Chapman, “Science and the
Public Good: George Bidell Airy and the Concept of a Scientific Civil Servant,”
Nicolaas Rupke (ed.), Science, Politics, and the Public Good (London: Macmillan,
1988). Airy and the discovery of Neptune are discussed in Allen Chapman,
“Private Research and Public Duty: George Bidell Airy and the Search for
Neptune,” Journal of the History of Astronomy, 1988, 19: 121–39, and Robert
Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action: the Discovery of Neptune,” Isis, 1989,
80: 395–422. Astronomical discipline is discussed in Simon Schaffer,
“Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in
Context, 1988, 2: 115–45, and Will Ashworth, “The Calculating Eye: Baily,
Herschel, Babbage, and the Business of Astronomy,” British Journal for the
History of Astronomy, 1994, 27: 409–41. The invention of Greenwich time is
discussed in Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (London: Philip
Wilson Publishers, 1997), and in Iwan Rhys Morus, “The Nervous System of
Britain: Space, Time, and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British
Journal for the History of Science, 2000, 33: 455–75. American innovations in
the astronomical uses of time are discussed in Ian Bartky, Selling the True Time
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(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Simon Schaffer, “The Nebular
Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” James R. Moore (ed.), History,
Humanity, and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), deals
with the politics of the nebular hypothesis, while James Secord, “Behind the
Veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges,” in the same collection, focuses on Chambers
and his contribution to the debate. Simon Schaffer, “The Leviathan of
Parsonstown: Literary Technology and Scientific Representation,” Tim Lenoir
(ed.), Inscribing Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), deals
with the impact of Lord Rosse’s telescopic observations. The introduction of
physics into astronomy is discussed in Holly Rothermel, “Images of the Sun:
Warren de la Rue, George Bidell Airy, and Celestial Photography,” British
Journal for the History of Science, 1993, 26: 137–69, and in Alex Pang, “The
Social Event of the Season: Solar Eclipse Expeditions and Victorian Culture,”
Isis, 1993, 84: 252–77, and “Victorian Observing Practices: Printing
Technologies and Representations of the Solar Corona,” Journal of the History of
Astronomy, 1994, 25: 249–74; 1995, 26: 63–75. Stellar spectroscopy is discussed
in Simon Schaffer, “Where Experiments End: Tabletop Trials in Victorian
Astronomy,” Jed Buchwald (ed.), Scientific Practice (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995). The elder Herschel’s views on lunar habitation are one of
the topics of Simon Schaffer, “Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar
Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1980, 13: 211–39. The
development of the extraterrestrial debate is followed in Michael Crowe, The
Extraterrestrial Life Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Chapter 8. Places of Precision A comprehensive and recent survey of the rise of
precision in physics is Norton Wise (ed.), The Values of Precision (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995). The rise of laboratory physics and regimes of
measurement in Britain is discussed in Romualdas Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physics
Laboratories in Britain,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1976, 7:
405–36. Particularly important are Graeme Gooday, “Precision Measurement and the
Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain,” British Journal
for the History of Science, 1990, 23: 25–51, and “Teaching Telegraphy and
Electrotechnics in the Physics Laboratory: William Ayrton and the Creation of an
Academic Space for Electrical Engineering in Britain,” History of Technology,
1991, 13: 73–111. Germany and the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt are
dealt with in David Cahan, An Institute for an Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), “Werner Siemens and the Origins of the
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1872–1887,” Historical Studies in the
Physical Sciences, 1982, 12: 253–83, and “The Institutional Revolution in German
Physics, 1865–1914,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1985, 15:
1–65. Cahan deals with German precision in “Kohlrausch and Electrolytic
Conductivity: Instruments, Institutes, and Scientific Innovation,” Osiris, 1989,
5: 167–85. An interesting German episode is discussed in Myles Jackson, Spectrum
of Belief (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). French academic laboratories are
discussed in Terry Shinn, “The French Science Faculty System, 1808–1914:
Institutional Change and Research Potential in Mathematics and the Physical
Sciences,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1979, 10: 271–332.
Precision in U.S. laboratories is one theme of George Sweetnam, “Precision
Implemented: Henry Rowland, the Concave Diffraction
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Grating, and the Analysis of Light,” N. Wise (ed.), Values of Precision. The
introduction of physics into Japan is discussed in Yuzo Takahashi, “William
Edward Ayrton at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo: The First
Professor of Electrical Engineering in the World,” IEEE Transactions on
Education, 1990, 33: 198–205, and in Graeme Gooday and Morris Low, “Technology
Transfer and Cultural Exchange: Western Scientists and Engineers Encounter Late
Tokugawa and Meiji Japan,” Osiris, 1998, 13: 99–128. Bruce Hunt, “The Ohm Is
Where the Art Is: British Telegraph Engineers and the Development of Electrical
Standards,” Osiris, 1994, 9: 48–63, deals with the importance of telegraphy for
the standards industry, as does his “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable
Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain,” Bernard Lightman (ed.),
Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The
imperial context of telegraphy is explored in Daniel Headrick, The Invisible
Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991). J. G. Crowther, The Cavendish Laboratory (New York:
Science History Publications, 1974), gives the basic history of the laboratory.
Romualdas Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge,”
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1970, 2: 127–52, provides some more
context concerning its origins. Simon Schaffer, “Late Victorian Metrology and
Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms,” Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens
(eds.), Invisible Connections (Bellingham: SPIE Press, 1992), deals brilliantly
with the industrial ethos at Cambridge, with more of the same in his “Metrology,
Metrication, and Victorian Values,” Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in
Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Women physicists at
Cambridge are discussed in Paula Gould, “Women and the Culture of University
Physics in Late Nineteenth-Century Cambridge,” British Journal for the History
of Science, 1997, 30: 127–49. The Cavendish under J. J. Thomson is the focus of
Isobel Falconer, “J. J. Thomson and Cavendish Physics,” Frank James (ed.), The
Development of the Laboratory (London: Macmillan, 1989). Chapter 9. Imperial
Physics Most of the material in this last chapter is by way of summation of the
argument developed in previous chapters. Thus, those interested in a closer look
should look no further than the texts already mentioned. Some additional sources
on particular issues are, however, worth mentioning. Physics and views of the
body (particularly women’s bodies), is discussed in Janet Oppenheim, Shattered
Nerves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Cynthia Eagle Russett,
Sexual Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also Iwan Rhys
Morus, “A Grand and Universal Panacea: Death, Resurrection, and the Electric
Chair,” Iwan Rhys Morus (ed.), Bodies/Machines (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002).
Views on late nineteenth-century science and the state are found in Robert
Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century
Exhibitions (Cambridge: Whipple Library, 1993). Late nineteenth-century ether
physics is discussed in Bruce Hunt, “Experimenting on the Ether: Oliver Lodge
and the Great Whirling Machine,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences,
1986, 16: 111–34, and “The Origins of the FitzGerald Contraction,” British
Journal for the History of Science, 1988, 21, 67–76. Oliver Darrigol,
Electrodynamics from Amp`ere to Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), provides a useful overview of theoretical developments.
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Important new insights are to be found in Andrew Warwick, “On the Role of the
FitzGerald-Lorentz Contraction Hypothesis in the Development of Joseph Larmor’s
Electronic Theory of Matter,” Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences,
1991, 43: 29–91; “Cambridge Mathematics and Cavendish Physics: Cunningham,
Campbell, and Einstein’s Relativity, 1905–1911,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, 1992, 23: 625–56; 1993, 24: 1–25; “The Sturdy Protestants
of Science: Larmor, Troughton, and the Earth’s Motion through the Ether,” Jed
Buchwald (ed.), Scientific Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995). J. J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron is outlined in Isobel Falconer,
“Corpuscles, Electrons, and Cathode Rays: J. J. Thomson’s ‘Discovery’ of the
Electron,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1987, 20: 241–76; the
aftermath is discussed in Isobel Falconer, “J. J. Thomson’s Work on Positive
Rays, 1906–1914,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1988, 18:
265–310. A recent overview is Jed Z. Buchwald and Andrew Warwick (eds),
Histories of the Electron: The Birth of Microphysics (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001). The origins of Bohr’s model of the atom are discussed in John Heilbron
and Thomas Kuhn, “The Genesis of the Bohr Atom,” Historical Studies in the
Physical Sciences, 1969, 1: 211–90. The literature on Einstein is massive.
Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), is still as
good a place to start as any. For some indication of the British physics
community’s insecurities at the beginning of the last century and its role in
the Great War, see Andrew Hull, “War of Words: The ‘Public Science’ of the
British Scientific Community and the Origins of the Department of Scientific and
Industrial Research, 1914–16,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1999,
32: 461–81.
Index
Acad´emie Royale des Sciences, 7, 9, 14, 23, 25–27, 30, 39, 91, 98, 131, 186,
188, 220–21 Accademia del Cimento, 7 Adams, John Couch, 199–200, 269 Adelaide
Gallery, 104, 114–15, 120, 122 Airy, George Bidell, 44, 193, 195, 197–98,
200–201, 211–13, 216 Albert, prince, 116 Aldini, Giovanni, 65, 69 All-Red Route,
271 American Revolution, 6 Amp`ere, Andr´e-Marie, 32, 97–98, 121, 160, 272
Analytical Society, 34–35, 40, 197 animal magnetism. See mesmerism Annalen der
Physik, 47–49, 144–45 Antinori, Vincenzo, 104 Arago, Franc¸ois, 29–32, 97, 198,
210 Armagh Observatory, 208 Arrhenius, Svante, 252 Aston, Frederick, 273, 276
Astronomical Society, 36–37, 39, 193, 196 Atlantic cable, 117, 254–55 Atlantic
Telegraph Company, 254, 255 atomic structure, 277 atomic theory, 152 Ayrton,
William, 236
297
Babbage, Charles, 24, 33–39, 41, 70, 89, 193, 196–97, 270, 282; Analytical
Engine, 37–38; Calculating Engines, 37, 193, 197; Reflections on the Decline of
Science in England, 39 Bacon, Francis, 9 Baily, Francis, 36, 196–97 Banks,
Joseph, 36–37, 193, 196 Barlow, Peter, 105, 160; Barlow’s wheel, 105 Becquerel,
Henri, 186, 188 Beddowes, Thomas, 62 Belfast, 1 Bell, Alexander Graham, 117, 190
Berlin International Exhibition, 117 Berthollet, Claude-Louis, 23, 27 Bessel,
Friedrich Wilhelm, 198 Biot, Jean-Baptiste, 27, 30–32, 97 Bishop, Irving, 180
Bismarck, Otto von, 248–49 Black, Joseph, 124 Blondlot, Ren´e, 186–87 Bohr,
Niels, 277 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 25, 50–52, 152 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 23, 26–27, 29,
32, 91, 94, 125, 127, 230 Bond, George Philips, 210 Bond, William Cranch, 201,
210 Borda, Jean-Charles, 23 Bovril, 266
298
Index
Brewster, David, 220 Bright, Charles, 255 Bristow, Charles, 42 British
Association for the Advancement of Science, 76, 134–35, 137, 169, 174, 212, 222,
228, 255, 272–73 Bruno, Giordano, 217 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 265–66, 268; The
Coming Race, 265 Bunsen, Robert von, 102 California Midwinter International
Exposition, 117 Callan, Nicholas, 105 caloric theory of heat, 31, 64–65, 125,
129–31, 134, 137 Cambridge University, 24, 33–34, 40–41, 43–45, 78, 80, 136,
238, 240, 245; coaches, 41–42; mathematical Tripos, 24, 34, 40–45, 78, 80, 136,
238, 240, 245; sport, 43 Campbell, Lewis, 151 Campbell Swinton, A. A., 183
capillary action, 27–28 Carnot, Lazare, 127–28, 130 Carnot, Sadi, 125–26,
128–30, 132–33, 136, 138–39, 146; Reflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu,
128, 131, 133, 136 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 176 cathode rays, 158–59, 182,
244, 275–76 Cavendish Laboratory, 184, 187, 227–29, 237–45, 249–50, 256–60,
271–73 Cavendish Professorship, 227, 237–39, 243 Challis, James, 199 Chambers,
Robert, 93, 205, 219, 223 Charcot, Jean, 177 Charles II, 9, 196 Clapeyron,
Emile, 131–32, 136, 147; Carnot-Clapeyron theory, 136–37 Clark, Latimer, 253,
255 Clarke, Edward, 103, 115 Clausius, Rudolf, 25, 126, 146–50 Clerke, Agnes,
223 Clifton, Robert, 233, 240 clockwork, 14, 26, 58, 200 cloud chambers, 276–77
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61 Combe, George, 20
computers, 197 Comte, Auguste, 205 conservation of force, 146 conversion of
forces, 56, 63, 74–76 Cook, Florence, 179 Cooke, William Fothergill, 108–9, 232
corpuscular theory of light. See particle theory of light correlation of
physical forces, 56, 72–73, 76, 78, 85, 175 Crookes, William, 158–59, 163–66,
173, 177–81, 244, 274 Cruickshank, William, 92, 102 Crystal Palace. See Great
Exhibition Cullen, William, 124 Curie, Marie, 159, 187–88, 190, 276 Curie,
Pierre, 159, 187–88, 276 Cuthbertson, William, 10 Daguerre, Louis Jacques
Mand´e, 69, 210 Dalton, John, 134 Daniell, John Frederic, 102 d’Arsonval,
Ars`ene, 120, 187 Darwin, Charles, 141–42, 219, 221; Origin of Species, 141
Darwin, Erasmus, 11 Darwinian evolution, 141 Davenport, Thomas, 110, 115
Davidson, Robert, 111 Davy, Humphry, 37, 55, 62, 64–65, 70, 91, 94–95, 121–22,
149, 157, 231, 281 Demarc¸ ay, Eugene, 188 Desaguliers, John, 88 Descartes,
Ren´e, 15 Devonshire, duke of, 238–41 diffraction, 30–31 discharge tubes,
162–63, 165–66, 182, 186, 276 dissipation, 139–40, 154 Dracula, 264 Duhem,
Pierre, 83–84, 281 Dulong, Pierre, 29 Dumas, Jean-Baptiste, 230 duty, 111
dynamical theory of heat, 126, 138, 142, 148 ´ Ecole des Mines, 128 ´ Ecole
Normale, 23
Index ´ Ecole Polytechnique, 23, 26, 30, 125, 127–28, 131, 230 Eddington,
Arthur, 280 Edison, Thomas Alva, 117, 120, 184 Eiffel, Gustave, 117 Einstein,
Albert, 5, 279–80 electrical engineers, 158, 167 electrical standards, 243–44,
249–53, 255–56, 259 electrical units, 228, 253, 258, 271; ohms, 228, 256–58,
260, 272 electric arc light, 111, 116 electric clock, 116 electric fields, 158,
258 electricians, 90, 99, 106–8, 118, 142, 178–79 electricity, 55, 61–62, 65–67,
72, 84, 87–98, 103, 105, 112–13, 118, 120–21, 156, 159, 166, 204–5; animal
electricity, 61, 65, 90, 91; medical electricity, 266–67 electric telegraph, 87,
89, 108–11, 115–16, 156, 158, 166–67, 176–77, 200–201, 228, 232, 247, 253–54,
256, 271, 275, 284; Electric Telegraph Company, 253 electrocution, 267
electrodynamics, 97–98, 279 electromagnetic engines, 65, 70, 76–77, 98, 110–11,
115, 121, 134, 142 electromagnetic waves, 158, 170, 172–74, 177, 181, 275
electromagnets, 68, 98–105, 108, 110, 116 electrometallurgy, 87, 107–8, 111, 115
electrons, 244, 275, 277 Elkington, George and Henry, 108 Elliotson, John, 171
Encke, Johann Franz, 195, 198, 222 energy, 56, 77–81, 84, 138–41, 154, 158,
166–67, 190, 258, 277; conservation of, 78–79, 84, 86, 190, 264, 267, 269, 275,
283 Engels, Friedrich, 283 entropy, 148, 152 ether, 18–19, 28, 44, 56–57, 81–85,
151, 158, 166–70, 173, 176–82, 190, 262, 275–80; electromagnetic waves, 81, 277;
ether drift, 278–79 experiment, 12, 63–64, 71 extraterrestrial life, 194–95,
216, 219, 221–24. See also plurality of worlds
299
Faraday, Michael, 5, 21, 56, 67, 69, 71, 73, 80, 94–98, 103–4, 109, 113, 121–22,
160, 163, 167, 172, 231, 246, 281–82 Fawcett, Phillipa, 44 Faye, Herv´e, 215
Ferranti, Sebastian di, 120 Field, Cyrus, 117, 254 First World War, 17–18,
273–74 FitzGerald, George Francis, 84, 168–69, 174, 275–76, 278 Flammarion,
Camille, 221 Foerster, Wilhelm, 247 Forber, James D., 232–33 force, 26, 56, 61,
63, 77–78, 94, 96 Foster, George Carey, 233–34 Fourier, Joseph, 29, 32, 97
fourth state of matter, 158, 163–65 Fox Talbot, William Henry, 67, 69, 210
Frankenstein, 264 Franklin, Benjamin, 11, 88 Fraunhofer, Josef von, 213, 250;
Fraunhofer lines, 214 French Revolution, 6, 16, 22, 54, 127 Fresnel, Augustin,
29, 32, 97 Galilei, Galileo, 7, 12 Galle, J. G., 199 Galton, Francis, 42, 221
Galvani, Luigi, 61, 65, 90–91 galvanism, 61–62, 91 galvanometers, 95, 98, 103–4,
270 Garnett, William, 242 gas battery, 73 Gassiot, John Peter, 114, 157, 161–62
Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 47–48, 218 Geissler, Heinrich, 162 genius, 5, 55, 58, 62
ghosts, 159, 179 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 152–53 Gill, David, 216 Girard, Pierre
Simon, 131 Glasgow, 1 Glazebrook, Richard T., 242–43, 273 God, 15, 75, 88, 205,
220, 223, 226, 263 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 55, 58, 67; Zur Farbenlehre, 59
Gompertz, Benjamin, 36, 196 Gottingen, University of, 47–48 ¨
300
Index
Great Exhibition, 88–89, 115–16, 210, 263, 270, 282 Grove, William Robert,
56–57, 69, 71–72, 76, 78, 85, 102, 112, 157, 160–62, 175, 283 Gruithsen, Franz
von Paula, 217–18 Gulliver’s Travels, 13 Guthrie, Frederick, 233 Hagen, Ernst,
250 Halle, University of, 47, 103 Halske, J. G., 247 Hardinge, Emma, 179
Harrison, John, 195 Hauy, Ren´e-Just, 23 heat death of the universe, 140 heat
engines, 129–31 Heaviside, Oliver, 158, 167 Hedley, William, 177 Heidelberg,
University of, 47 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 21, 46, 51, 79, 118, 126, 145–48, 158,
170–71, 228, 232, 239, 242, 246–47, 250, 252, 262, ¨ 272, 274; Uber der
Erhaltung der Kraft, 145 Henry, Joseph, 99, 101–2, 108–10, 235, 274 Herapath,
John, 149–50 Herschel, John, 24, 33–39, 41, 76–77, 150–51, 196–97, 203–4,
210–12, 218, 221, 282 Herschel, William, 34, 69, 192–94, 202, 204, 208, 215,
217–18 Hertz, Heinrich, 158, 170–74 Hicks, W. M., 241 Hittorf, Wilhelm, 165
Hjorth, Soren, 116 Home, Daniel Douglas, 179 Hopkins, William, 42, 136 Huggins,
William, 214–16, 225 Humboldt, Alexander von, 198 Hutton, James, 64 Huygens,
Christiaan, 28 hydro-electric machine, 114 indicator diagrams, 132 induction,
95, 104; self-induction, 167, 169 induction coils, 98, 105–6, 171 Industrial
Revolution, 123, 154 Institute Nationale. See Academie Royale des Sciences
International Electrical Congress, 119, 122 inverse square law, 28 Jacobi,
Moritz Hermann von, 107, 110 Jefferson, Thomas, 11 Jenkin, Fleeming, 255 Joule,
James Prescott, 56, 65, 75, 78–79, 111, 115–16, 125–26, 133, 137–38, 140, 142,
146, 149–50, 154, 156, 258 Kelvin, Lord. See Thomson, William Kepler, Johannes,
217 kinetic theory of gases, 148–49, 165 King, Katie, 179 Kirchhoff, Gustav, 51,
214–15 Kohlrausch, Friedrich, 235, 250–52; Leitfaden der Praktischen Physik,
235, 250 Kuhn, Thomas, 154 Kundt, August, 49, 182 laboratories, 12, 19, 55–56,
63–64, 77, 194, 226–60, 268 Lalande, J´erome, 217 ˆ Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 206
Lamy, Auguste, 23 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 21, 23, 26–29, 32, 202, 217, 228;
Mecanique Celeste, 23, 26–27, 217 Lardner, Dionysius, 175 Larmor, Joseph, 44,
275, 278–79 Lavoisier, Antoine, 65, 230 Leverrier, Urbain Jean Joseph, 199, 221,
269 Liebig, Justus, 145, 175 lightning rods, 11, 88, 169 Lindemann, Frederick,
273 lines of force, 80–81, 96–97 Littrow, Johann Joseph von, 218 Lockyer,
Norman, 215 Lodge, Oliver, 57, 83–84, 158, 166–73, 177, 180–81, 233–34, 273–75,
278–79 London Electrical Society, 114, 134, 142, 162, 200–211 London
Institution, 71–72, 102, 112, 161 Longitude, Board of, 196 longitude, problem
of, 192 Lorentz, Hendrick Antoon, 278; Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations, 278
Lowell, Percival, 194, 223
Index Lubbock, John, 149 Ludwig, Carl, 145 Lummer, Otto, 250 Lyell, Charles, 219
Mach, Ernst, 152 Mackintosh, Thomas Simmons, 204–5 magnetism, 55, 67, 72, 94, 98
Magnus, Heinrich Gustav, 147, 234 ´ Malus, Etienne Louis, 27–29 Manchester
Literary & Philosophical Society, 75, 133 Marcet, Jane, 219 Marconi, Gugliemo,
173 Mars, canals of, 195, 222–24 Marsh, James, 106; Marsh’s pendulum, 105
Martin, Benjamin, 88 Marum, Martinus van, 10, 88 Marx, Karl, 123, 283
mathematics, 12, 22–23, 31–36, 40–41, 44, 81, 85, 98; calculus, 33–35; fluxions,
33, 35 Matteucci, Carlo, 66 Maudsley, Henry, 267 Maxwell, James Clerk, 24,
42–44, 56, 77–83, 97, 118, 150–53, 166–67, 172, 214, 226–28, 237, 240–45, 256,
259–60, 263, 277; Maxwell’s Demon, 151; Maxwell’s equations, 167; Treatise on
Electricity & Magnetism, 56, 81, 166, 256 Maxwellians, 158, 167, 170–74, 181
Mayer, Robert Julius, 78–79, 143–47, 269 mean free path, 150, 164 measurement,
23, 96, 104, 134, 179, 186, 226, 229, 235, 240–41, 245, 251–54, 260, 263, 273
mechanical equivalent of heat, 65, 75 Melloni, Macedonio, 69 Mesmer, Anton, 175
mesmerism, 174–76, 181, 265 Michelson, Albert, Abraham, 278 Michelson-Morley
experiment, 278 Mill, John Stewart, 206 Moll, Gerrit, 99 Moltke, Helmut von, 247
Monge, Gaspard, 127 Morley, Edward, 278 Morse, Samuel F. B., 109–10 Mortimer,
Joseph Granville, 268
301
Muller, Hugo, 165 ¨ Muller, Johannes, 145 ¨ Muller, Max, 269 ¨ Napoleonic Wars,
6 National Physical Laboratory, 273 natural selection, 141 natural theology,
218, 240 Naturphilosophie, 25, 59–63, 66–67, 70, 85, 126, 143, 148 nebulae, 202,
204, 207–9 nebular hypothesis, 193, 202, 205–9, 223, 283 Neptune, 199, 221, 269
nerve-vibration therapy, 268 Neumann, Carl, 25, 47 Newcomen, Thomas, 124 Newton,
Isaac, 5, 12, 15, 23, 26, 28, 33, 56, 58–60, 78–79, 192, 217, 224; Newtonianism,
26, 59, 202; Principia, 12, 23, 56, 192, 224 Nichol, John Pringle, 193, 206–9
Nicholson, William, 92, 102 nitrous oxide, 62 Nobel Prize, 188 Nobili, Leopoldo,
104 Novalis, 60, 63 N rays, 187 odic force, 175, 177–78, 181, 266 Oersted, Hans
Christian, 55, 67, 94, 97–98, 121, 160 Ohm, Georg Simon, 108; Ohm’s law, 108
Olbers, Wilhelm, 218 Owen, Robert, 204 paddle wheel experiment, 65, 134 Page,
Charles Grafton, 110–11 Paris Universal Exposition, 117, 270 particle theory of
light, 28–29 Peacock, George, 34–35, 197 Peale, Charles Willson, 114 Peale’s
Museum, 114 Peltier, Jean Charles, 68 Pepys, William, 102 Perkins, Jacob, 114
perpetual motion, 130, 146 personal equation, 212 Philadelphia Centennial
Exhibition, 117
302
Index
photography, 55, 69, 72, 77, 158, 162, 179, 194, 210–13, 270
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 51, 228–29, 246–52, 259, 273 pitchblende,
187–88 Pixii, Hippolyte, 104 Planck, Max, 277; Planck’s constant, 277 Plucker,
Julius, 161 ¨ plurality of worlds, 216–23. See also extraterrestrial life
Pneumatic Institution, 62 Poggendorf, Johann Christian, 48, 144–45 Poisson,
Sim´eon-Denis, 31 polarity, 60 political economy, 36–37, 55, 64, 70–71, 124
Pouillet, Claude, 31 Powell, Baden, 220 Preece, William Henry, 167, 169
Priestley, Joseph, 11, 15–16 professionalization, 20 psychology, 176 Quetelet,
Adolphe, 150–51, 193, 198, 201 radioactivity, 159, 188, 190, 276 radiometers,
163 radium, 188, 190 Rankine, W. J. Macquorn, 140 Rayleigh, Lady, 257 Rayleigh,
Lord, 44, 150, 228, 237, 241–45, 256, 258, 268, 271–72 refraction, 28; double
refraction, 27–28 Regnault, Victor, 132, 136, 147 Reichenbach, Karl von, 175,
177–78 relativity, special and general, 18, 279–80 retardation, 254
Revolutionary War, 6 Reymond, Emile du Bois, 46, 145, 247, 272 Ricardo, David,
206 Richie, William, 110 Riemann, Bernhard, 25, 48 Rinzaburo Shido, 236 Ritter,
Johann Wilhelm, 55, 60–62, 66, 69, 94 Rive, Auguste de la, 114 Robinson, Thomas
Romney, 208 romanticism, 55, 57–59 Rontgen, Wilhelm, 159, 182–84 ¨
Rosse, Lord, 193, 207–9, 225 Routh, W. G. J., 244 Rowland, Henry, 235 Royal
Institution, 62–65, 67, 71, 73, 91–92, 94–95, 98, 104, 110, 113, 122, 163, 173,
216, 231, 281–82 Royal Observatory, 9, 193, 195–96, 198–200, 213, 216 Royal
Panopticon of Arts and Sciences, 115 Royal Polytechnic Institution, 114–15 Royal
Society, 7, 9, 13–14, 33, 36–39, 63, 75, 104, 134, 149, 161, 163, 196, 212, 273
Royal Society of Arts, 99, 115, 169 Royal Victoria Gallery, 115, 120, 134
Rubens, Heinrich, 251 Rue, Warren de la, 105, 211–13, 216 Ruhmkorff, Heinrich,
105 ¨ Ruhmkorff coils. See induction coils ¨ Rumford, Count. See Thompson,
Benjamin Rutherford, Ernest, 274, 277 Sabine, Edward, 212 Savart, F´elix, 97
Savery, Thomas, 124 Saxton, Joseph, 104, 114 Schelling, Friedrich, 55, 59–63, 70
Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 195, 222 Schilling, Pawel, 108 Schlegel, Friedrich, 60
Schuster, Arthur, 243, 257–58 Schweigger, Johann, 103 science fiction, 182, 186,
194 Seebeck, Thomas Johann, 67, 69 S´eguin, Marc, 132 Shaw, W. N., 242
Shillibeer, John, 103 Shore, James, 108 Sidgwick, Eleanor, 257 Siemens, Werner
von, 228, 234, 246–48, 250, 258, 270–71 Siemens, Wilhelm von, 247 Smee, Alfred,
108, 112 Smith, Adam, 124, 201; Wealth of Nations, 124 Smyth, W. H., 218 social
physics, 150, 198 Society for Psychical Research, 159, 178 Society of Telegraph
Engineers, 173 solar eclipses, 212
Index Somerville, Mary, 76, 219 Southey, Robert, 62 spectroscopy, 194, 235;
solar spectroscopy, 214–15 Spencer, Herbert, 202 Spencer, Thomas, 107
spiritualism, 158, 174, 178–81, 283 Stafford, Truman, 201 Staite, Edward, 111,
116 statistics, 150, 152–53, 198 steam engines, 65, 72, 124–26, 128–39, 132,
136, 142, 146–47 Stefan, Josef, 152 Stern, Moritz, 47 Stewart, Balfour, 79–80
Stoker, Bram, 264 Stokes, George Gabriel, 44, 165 Stone, William Henry, 178
Stoney, George Johnstone, 275 Strassburg, University of, 49 Struve, Otto, 209,
222 Sturgeon, William, 67–68, 99, 102–4, 110, 115, 120, 134, 160, 169 Sun, age
of the, 142 Tait, Peter Guthrie, 42, 44, 56, 78–80, 140, 151, 233 technology of
display, 98–99, 106, 108, 113, 160 telescopes, 192–93, 202, 204, 207–8;
Leviathan of Parsonstown, 207–9 Tesla, Nikola, 119–20, 173, 222 theoretical
physics, 49–52, 148, 279–80 thermodynamics, 125–26, 140–41, 151–53, 250; second
law of, 151–54 thermoelectricity, 99 Thompson, Benjamin, 64–65, 149 Thompson,
Silvanus P., 261 Thomson, J. J., 44, 184, 228, 237, 244–46, 268, 274–76 Thomson,
James, 125, 135 Thomson, William, 1, 3, 21, 24, 42, 44, 56, 76–80, 118, 120,
122, 125–26, 135–38, 140, 142, 146–49, 151, 154, 169, 222–23, 232–33, 236,
239–41, 253–55, 261–62, 272, 274–75, 282 time signal, Greenwich, 193, 200–201
transit of Venus, 9, 213 Treatise on Natural Philosophy, 78
303
Trouton, Frederick, 278–79 Tyndall, John, 78, 246, 269, 282 underwear, silk, as
source of insulating material, 110 unity of nature, 57–58, 61, 63–64, 70
uranium, 186–87 Uranus, 34, 69, 192, 199, 202 Ure, Andrew, 66, 123 Varley,
Cromwell, 162, 178–81, 253 Venus kiss, 106 Verne, Jules, 194, 264 Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation, 154, 205, 219–20, 225 Vienna International
Exhibition, 117 Virchow, Rudolf, 235 Volta, Alessandro, 61, 65, 91–93, 98, 102
voltaic battery, 55, 65, 70–71, 76–77, 91–94, 98, 102–3, 107, 116, 121 Walker,
Charles Vincent, 200–201 Warburg, Emil, 49, 235, 274 Waterston, John James,
149–50 Watkins, Francis, 110 Watt, James, 124–25, 132 wave theory of light,
28–31 Weber, Wilhelm, 47, 170, 234, 251, 258, 272 Wedgwood, Josiah, 11 Wells, H.
G., 140, 194, 222, 265, 269; The Time Machine, 140, 265, 269; War of the Worlds,
122, 265 Westinghouse, George, 117 Wheatstone, Charles, 108–9, 163, 232, 255
Whewell, William, 41, 52, 76–77, 193, 200, 219–20, 263 Whipple, J. A., 210
Whitehouse, Wildman, 255 Wilson, C. T. R., 276–77 Wollaston, William, 94 Wood,
R. W., 187 Wordsworth, William, 62 work, 123, 126, 128, 130–32, 136–39, 142,
144, 146–48, 154, 258 World Colombian Exposition, 117, 119 World War I. See
First World War X rays, 159–60, 182–90, 270 Young, Thomas, 30
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