Davy and Jane now accepted an invitation to spend the later part of that summer (the grouse-shooting season) in Scotland with Walter Scott, recently made a baronet by the newly crowned George IV. They travelled to the manse at Abbotsford separately, but both enjoyed mingling with the Scottish aristocracy and literary men like Scott’s son-in-law John Lockhart and Henry Mackenzie (author of The Man of Feeling), who took a fancy to Jane and travelled in her carriage during the endless hunting expeditions. Davy managed to spend most of his days shooting on the moors, and his evenings in Scott’s smoking room. With considerable diplomacy Scott had also invited Wollaston, who proved himself a keen fisherman, so that he and Davy were soon on good terms, teasing each other with piscatorial arcanae.
Lockhart later wrote an amusing account of Davy striding out at dawn in his full fishing gear, his white wide-brimmed hat stuck with innumerable fly-hooks and his enormous green waders far in excess of what any tinkling Scottish burn could possibly require. Yet Davy would also recite from memory passages of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, while sipping whisky during a moorland picnic. Lockhart recalled one of the Scottish ghillies whispering to him when Davy and Scott had kept the party up with their ‘rapt talk’ round the log fire, long after midnight: ‘“Gude preserve us! This is a very superior occasion! Eh Sirs!” — then cocking his eye like a bird — “I wonder if Shakespeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up?”’47
Back in London, Davy was elected President of the Royal Society unopposed in November 1820. In his acceptance speeches he tried very hard to smooth over old differences, and presented an uplifting vision of ‘The Progress and Prospects of Science’ to the assembled Society in December. He recalled the great tradition of ‘experiment, discovery and speculative science’, from the time of Hooke and Newton to that of William Herschel and Cavendish. If he was now in some sense their ‘general’ and leader, he announced, ‘I shall always be happy to act as a private soldier in the ranks of science.’ Perhaps there were some ironic smiles at that.
Prophetically, Davy picked out the fields of research in which the most exciting new work would be done: astronomy, polar exploration, the physics of heat and light, electricity and magnetism, geology, and the physiology of plants and animals. He was careful to mention by name the work of Wollaston, Dalton, John Herschel, the young Scottish physicist David Brewster and a number of French chemists. He urged the Fellows to be guided by the spirit of Bacon and Newton, to work soberly by ‘the cautious method of inductive reasoning’, but with passion, and ‘to exalt the powers of the human mind’. Finally he issued an exhortation, with a kind of challenge and warning attached. ‘Let us then labour together, and steadily endeavour to gain what are perhaps the noblest objects of ambition — acquisitions which may be useful to our fellow creatures. Let it not be said, that, at a period when our empire was at its highest pitch of greatness, the sciences began to decline …’48 That last sentence would come back to haunt the Society.
Davy’s initial determination to recover the support of the younger men was shown in several ways. He made attempts to befriend John Herschel (now twenty-eight) over Park Street dinners, and voted money for Charles Babbage’s first prototype of his famous ‘difference engine’, or calculating machine. In 1821 he made sure that the annual Copley Medal was awarded to young Herschel for his work on polarised light (as Banks had once assured it to his father for discovering Uranus). The award was accompanied by a handsome speech. ‘You are in the prime of life, in the beginning of your career, and you have powers and acquirements capable of illustrating and extending every branch of physical enquiry … May you continue to exalt your reputation, already so high.’ He concluded with a reference to the work of Sir William, now an almost legendary figure. John was urged to follow ‘the example of your illustrious father, who full of years and of honours, must view your exertions with infinite pleasure; and who, in the hopes that his own imperishable name will be permanently connected with yours in the annals of philosophy, must look forward to a double immortality’.49 Though obviously well intentioned, this must surely have sounded more than a little heavy-handed to John, and more than a little ludicrous to Babbage.
Davy had also been curiously undiplomatic about his old patron and predecessor in the Chair, Sir Joseph Banks. It was surely a moment for generosity, especially considering the support Banks had given him over the Bakerian Lectures and the safety lamp. Yet he circulated a sketch of Sir Joseph which seemed unnecessarily grudging and critical: ‘He was a good humoured and liberal man, free and various in conversational power, a tolerable botanist, and generally acquainted with natural history. He had not much reading, and no profound information. He was always ready to promote the objects of men of science; but he required to be regarded as a patron, and readily swallowed gross flattery. When he gave anecdotes of his voyages, he was very entertaining and unaffected. A courtier in character, he was a warm friend to a good King. In his relations to the Royal Society he was too personal, and made his house a circle like a court.’50
So Davy dismissed Banks as a dilettante and a patriarch. There was little recognition of the huge scientific network that he had established, nor of the way in which he had kept British science alive and international in a time of war. Above all there was no recognition of Davy’s personal debt to him, let alone of the heroic way he had battled against personal illness and disability. Perhaps this can be partly explained by Davy’s immense anxiety to assert his own authority at this juncture. Perhaps, too, he wanted to be seen as speaking for the younger generation of professional men of science. But it was a hurtful and puzzling document all the same.
That summer Davy went down to Penzance, to glory a little in his own immortality. He was given a public dinner by the Mayor, interviewed and toasted, presented at a provincial ball, all to the immense satisfaction of his ageing mother. He was the guest of honour of the newly founded Geological Society (to which he made a handsome contribution), and was congratulated by its jocular new President, John Ayrton Paris. Paris may have mentioned that he had ambitions to become Sir Humphry’s eventual biographer. At all events he shrewdly noted that Lady Davy could not be persuaded to accompany the great man on this filial visit.♣ Davy, aged forty-two, innocently revelled in the role of local boy made good, and wrote dreamily to his old friend Tom Poole in Somerset: ‘I am enjoying the majestic in Nature, and living over again the days of my infancy and early youth … I am now reviving old associations, and endeavouring to attach old feelings to a few simple objects.’51
For a time Davy felt that he had achieved his greatest ambition in becoming President of the Royal Society. Yet his peremptory genius in the laboratory made him something of a tyrant in the Committee Room. Over the next three years, to his dismay and astonishment, he found that his popularity, while still immensely high with the general public, was increasingly resented at Somerset House. His social ambitions and snobbery were easily mocked, and he did not have the gift of drawing out hidden talents. As John Herschel had feared, he was irascible, and easily drawn into feuds.
This was particularly marked in the case of Michael Faraday, who was after all Davy’s star pupil, now aged twenty-nine. In 1821 Faraday had married very happily, after a tender two-year courtship sparking numerous love letters, including some rather neat light verse.52 His bride was Sarah Barnard, a pretty, quietly-spoken girl and fellow Sandemanian who was happy to move into his modest set of rooms above the Institution, thus enabling him to continue with his formidable daily workload in the laboratory below. Faraday lectured, published papers, and developed a strong connection with the French physicists, notably Pierre Hachette and André Ampère.53
However, there was no increase in his salary, and in 1823 Davy took the extraordinary step of blackballing Faraday’s election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society. This was all the more surprising since Faraday had just been elected to the scientific Accademia in Florence, and to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Davy’s explanation was th
at Faraday had offended Wollaston, by plagiarising some experiments concerning electro-magnetic rotation and falsely claiming priority in results. But Faraday had already established his own authority in this field (which he would soon revolutionise), and anyway he was always meticulous in such matters. Evidently no deliberate plagiarism was intended, and Wollaston himself (as mild as ever) was much inclined to dismiss the whole affair. Davy seemed incapable of recognising Faraday’s rising star in the world of international science.
Faraday’s supporters, of whom there were an increasing number, thought that Davy seemed motivated, at least unconsciously, by jealousy of his old pupil. Some may also have believed that his painful experience of the safety lamp controversy had made him oversensitive about priority disputes. Yet others suggested darkly that Sir Humphry was influenced by a different kind of magnetism, the negative polarity of Lady Davy towards her erstwhile ‘valet’. Again, all this was much as John Herschel had foretold. Faraday’s election became an embarrassing cause célèbre, with notices pinned up and torn down from the Royal Society’s noticeboard. Faraday’s seconders in the ballot eventually included the names of John Herschel, Babbage, Charles Hatchett, Peter Roget (from the old Bristol Pneumatic Institute days), Dr Babington (one of Davy’s fishing cronies), Davies Gilbert (his campaign manager), and even Wollaston himself.
In the end Faraday’s election had to be proposed no fewer than eleven times, a proceeding without precedent, and was not ratified until January 1824. The Royal Society’s minutes noted that finally there was only one vote cast against him, but according to the club rules it remained anonymous. It was obviously Davy’s own. It seems that the President had been isolated and humiliated.54
There was even a story put about that Davy had deliberately encouraged Faraday to undertake a potentially lethal chemical experiment, which had nearly blinded him. It was said that one Saturday evening in March 1823, looking in at the Royal Institution’s basement laboratory, Davy had casually suggested to Faraday that he try a further analysis of chlorine crystals by heating potassium chlorate with sulphuric acid in a sealed glass tube. (The properties of potassium chlorate — used to produce medical chlorine — were one of Davy’s great chemical discoveries.) After Davy left, Faraday did so, and the subsequent explosion, in Faraday’s own words, ‘blew pieces of glass like a pistol-shot through the window’, lacerating his face and filling his eyes with tiny fragments of glass. Sarah Faraday spent the rest of the evening tenderly sponging them out with cold water.
This sinister story gained credibility as it circulated. So much so, that thirteen years later Faraday was still being asked about it, and was not entirely inclined to exculpate his old professor. Perhaps Davy — knowing very well the properties of potassium chlorate — had set him a kind of pedagogical object lesson; or, frankly, a trap. Perhaps he wanted to underline just how much Faraday still had to learn in chemical matters. ‘I did not at that time know what to anticipate, for Sir H. Davy had not told me his expectations, and I had not reasoned so deeply as he appears to have done. Perhaps he left me unacquainted with them to try my ability.’55
Though apparently disingenuous, this is a surprisingly damaging suggestion, and does imply some ill-will on Davy’s part. Yet it also reveals that Faraday still thought of himself (married and aged thirty-one) as Davy’s naïve apprentice, whose ‘ability’ might very reasonably be put to the test. Faraday also fails to mention the fact that the chlorine experiments took place over several days, and produced not one but several explosions. The first was a minor one that surprised, but did not harm, him. He then deliberately pursued the course of the experiments, presumably now forewarned of what might occur. The explosion that nearly blinded him was actually the third to shake his laboratory. Neither Faraday nor Davy wore the ‘safety spectacles’ that are now de rigueur in laboratory work. It all throws light on a new and highly significant human relationship that was emerging in professional science: that between the director and his research assistant, between master and pupil, between sorcerer and apprentice.56 ♣
Davy was more successful in forming new friendships outside the Royal Society, notably with the rising politician Robert Peel, then Home Secretary. Like Banks before him he tried to raise the government’s awareness of science and technology. With Peel he became a Trustee of the British Museum, and helped develop the Great Russell Street site, which included organising George III’s great bequest of books, which became the famous King’s Library. The collection also included the Greek and Egyptian statuary which had inspired Shelley, Keats and Leigh Hunt to write their fine, thoughtful sonnets about Nature, Time and Empire. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, a meditation on the enormous stone head of Ramses II, was one of the last poems he wrote before departing for Italy. It might be described as a meditation on imperial hubris.57
Davy wanted to establish a stronger scientific presence at the Museum, and make it more open to the general public. He suggested reorganising it as three main departments under separate management: ‘a good Public Library — a Gallery of Art — a Gallery of Science’. After four years of frustrating committee meetings — not his forte — he had made little headway, writing in 1826: ‘I have been to the British Museum, but I despair of anything being done for Natural History. The Trustees think of nothing but the Arts, and money is only obtained for these objects.’58 ♣
He took over another of Banks’s pet projects, the foundation of the Royal Zoological Society with Sir Stamford Raffles, and drafted its Prospectus, proposing a zoological garden in Regent’s Park. He agreed with Peel that it should aim to rival the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and have at its heart the collection of wild animals from all over the world, and finding ways of adjusting their natural habitats to a northern climate. He could not forbear to add that these might perhaps include ‘eight or ten races of partridges’. He also pursued Banks’s enthusiasm for polar research, and took over his protégé Parry. In July 1826, Maria Edgeworth, staying as his guest in Park Street, came down to breakfast to find ‘Sir Humphry with a countenance radiant with pleasure and eager to tell me that Captain Parry is to be sent on a new Polar expedition’.59
Davy also became a founder member of the all-male Athenaeum, where he could gracefully withdraw from Lady Davy’s company in the evenings. As the club was in another part of Somerset House, this was very convenient, and it became virtually an extension of his own presidential study room. He insisted to his fellow founder, the Tory MP and Secretary to the Admiralty John Wilson Croker, that scientific members should be put up with literary and artistic ones, and candidates should be drawn equally from the Royal Academy and the Royal Society. His own list of personal recommendations included John Herschel.
But there was another contretemps when on Davy’s advice Michael Faraday was appointed the first Club Secretary. Faraday assumed that at last this was a mark of social acceptance. However, he soon found that the position was really a low-grade, time-wasting clerical appointment, an affair of lists and envelopes, and carried the £100 salary of a clerk. He quietly withdrew. It was hard to know if his old patron Davy had intended a professional kindness or a social slight. Perhaps, concluded Faraday, he barely knew himself. But from now on Faraday, who was very happy in his own drawing room, would make his own way.
Davy’s relations with his protégé would remain enigmatic and uneasy, until in 1825 Faraday was eventually proposed as Director of the Royal Institution. Here Sir Humphry Davy was forced to give his approval, and gravely sealed the appointment. So at long last Michael Faraday — modest, unworldly and utterly unlike his patron — was finally appointed to the position that would soon make him world-famous.
6
For John Herschel it was the shadow of his father, and the great forty-foot telescope, which seemed longest. By 1820 it was clear to John that his father was failing. William, now aged eighty-one, could no longer handle the larger telescopes, and was fretful and forgetful over his scientific papers. He grew petulant and anxious if his son wa
s away from Slough too long, and uneasy when John and Babbage made their first extended Continental tour together, visiting France and Italy for four long months between July and October 1821.
In Paris they met the great Alexander von Humboldt, who inspired them with his tales of the South American forests and mountains, which he had visited during his legendary five-year expedition between 1799 and 1804. His Personal Narrative had been published in 1805, and translated throughout Europe. It included his visions of the great Amazon river, and his famous account of how he nearly died trying to climb the 20,700-foot Mount Chimborazo (he reached 19,309 feet). They were much struck by his dynamic philosophy of science: ‘To track the great and constant laws of Nature manifested in the rapid flux of phenomena, and to trace the reciprocal interaction — the struggle, as it were — of the divided physical forces.’60
Humboldt had become a central figure at the great Berlin Academy of Sciences, which Herschel and Babbage particularly wished to emulate. He knew and greatly admired William Herschel’s work, but was inclined to underestimate his son’s potential. ‘John Herschel appears to me inferior to the originality of his father, who was astronomer, physicist and poetical cosmologist all at the same time … The science of the Cosmos must begin with a description of the heavenly bodies and with a geographical sketch of the universe: or perhaps I should say with a true mappa mundi, such as was traced by the bold hand of William Herschel.’61 But Humboldt, now fifty-two, treated the young men in kindly, avuncular fashion, told them how much he admired English science, and how he had heard Joseph Banks lecture in London shortly after his return from the round-the-world voyage of 1768-71. So the torch of Romantic inspiration was passed on.62
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