The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  Bacon also rejected the method of the philosophical ant, which “only collects, but does not use.” This kind of thinker piles up numerous facts about nature from observation and experiment, but does not create theories that explain those facts. And, what is worse, he collects facts in a haphazard, non-methodical way. Here Bacon was thinking about those doctors who prescribe medicines and treatments based on their past experience with them, not founded on any reasoning about why they work or any underlying theories about the human body. He may also have been referring to those medieval alchemists who conducted experiments randomly, searching for any substance (the “philosopher’s stone”) that could turn inexpensive metal into gold, with no interest in or guidance from a fundamental theory of matter.

  Bacon noted that, contrary to these approaches, the bee both collects and digests the pollen, to make something new: honey. The modern, reformed man of science was to emulate the bee: he must use both observation about the world and reasoning about those observations, to create new scientific theories. As Bacon put it, “I have established forever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical [observation-based] and rational [reason-based] faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the affairs of the human family.”61

  Bacon recognized that besides the dominance of medieval Aristotelian logic, another influential viewpoint would stand in the way of his reforms: the view that science and religion were in opposition. As far back as ancient Greece, natural philosophers had sometimes been persecuted for ascribing natural causes to phenomena such as thunder and lightning. In Bacon’s lifetime, in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his heretical ideas, including his view that the universe was heliocentric (with its planets revolving around the sun) and infinite, with innumerable planetary systems wheeling around within it. Bacon complained that superstition and immoderate zeal in religion held back science.

  But he did not think that religion ought therefore to be abandoned. Indeed, he hoped for a reconciliation between science and religion. In a quote later used by Charles Darwin on the frontispiece of Origin of Species (along with a similar statement by Whewell), Bacon admonished, “Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word or in the book of God’s work—divinity or philosophy. Rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficiency in both.”62 Studying the book of God’s works—His creation, the natural world—was as important as knowing His written word.

  A further check to progress in science, Bacon complained, was that discoveries were not rewarded; no honors, prizes, or benefits were gained by the discoverers, and no support was given for the work in the first place. The new man of science needed a new kind of scientific institution that would support his efforts to make discoveries. Bacon outlined what such a scientific institution would look like in his Utopian novella New Atlantis. In this popular work Bacon took up the innovative genre of exploration writing, adding his own twist. In travelogues of this kind, sparked by recent voyages of discovery launched from Europe, writers typically depicted civilized Europeans landing on a previously unexplored continent and finding it populated by savages. In Bacon’s version, the sailors are the savages, at least in comparison with the advanced civilization they happen upon.

  In his tale, a great ship sets sail from Peru, on the way to China and Japan by the South Sea route. Stopped by the cessation of winds in the middle of the ocean, the ship begins to drift, and the sailors expect a slow and horrible death. But they are rescued by members of a strange society, who grant them permission to land on their island and to stay as long as they wish. A leader of this society tells the men of their secret order, Solomon’s House.

  Solomon’s House, a prototype of a perfect research institution, accommodates groups of fellows with different knowledge-gathering jobs; some sail into foreign ports and engage in a bit of technological espionage; some collect experiments discussed in books; others conduct those experiments; some draw out practical results from those experiments; others use those experiments to design new types of studies; others take the results of those new experiments and interpret them, creating theories of the natural world that can in turn be tested by other fellows. The whole operation is funded by the king of this island. It was an image of organized science, publicly funded and supported, so sweeping in its scope that it seemed to Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell that the establishment of such a society could have far-reaching consequences not only for the study of nature, but also for the improvement of society.

  In their discussions about Bacon, the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club did not agree with each other about everything; their meetings often grew heated, especially over the issue of public funding for science. Herschel argued that men of science should support their own researches. He could think that, Whewell and Jones retorted—he had money in his family. Not everyone was so fortunate. Babbage, whose father was also wealthy, took the side of Whewell and Jones; even where there was family money, the government should support science as a matter of principle. Babbage would insist on this point to the extreme during his decades of arguing with the government over the financing for his calculating machines, to the extent that he abandoned the construction of his invention in order to avoid spending any of his own money for it.

  But the four men came together in agreeing that Bacon’s exhortations had gone unheeded; science, our friends thought, was not in much better shape than it had been before Bacon’s day. Many men of science did not pay attention to the method that they used in studying nature; they proceeded haphazardly instead of systematically. Some of those who did pay attention to scientific method were arguing for a return to medieval Aristotelian ways, which would be a terrible step backwards. Moreover, science was not then conducted for the sake of the public good; there was little emphasis on the notion that understanding natural law was intended to benefit the lives of people, that science should be aimed at “the relief of man’s estate,” as Bacon had put it.63 Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell knew that science should be reformed, and they pledged themselves to the task. The Philosophical Breakfast Club would develop an up-to-date version of Bacon’s method, and spread the word—in books, articles, and speeches. They would disseminate the image of the scientist as a social reformer, and show how scientific discoveries could be used to help society; Jones would take the lead here, by stressing the use of Bacon’s method in economics, a science that should be aimed toward improving the lot of the poorer members of the nation. And they would remake the institutions of science to be more like Solomon’s House in New Atlantis. They would, as Babbage put it to Herschel, “do their best to leave the world wiser than they found it.”64

  What is most amazing about this breathtakingly ambitious program is that these four men did bring about a revolution in science greater than any Bacon had hoped to spark in his own day.

  3

  EXPERIMENTAL LIVES

  HERSCHEL’S CAREER AS AN EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHER BEGAN with a simple procedure: “I poured nitric acid on camphor. No heat or effervescence.” The first member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club to graduate, Herschel moved to London and threw himself eagerly into a scientific life. In February of 1814 he drew up a list of what he needed to stock his new chemical laboratory: narrow- and wide-mouthed bottles, glass funnels, tabulated retorts, porcelain tubing, wire, a glass evaporating dish, a Wedgwood mortar and pestle, a frame saw, a hand lathe, brass scales, pliers, and, of course, chemicals: nitrate of potash, muriate of soda, sulfuric acid, muriate of ammonia, and black oxide of manganese. Herschel bought a new notebook, and titled it “Experiments &c on Various Subjects, viz. Optical Chemical & Nonsensical, and Queer things miscellaneously arranged for the benefit of posterity.” By the end of his life he would fill four huge volumes in a tiny script with descriptions of nearly 1,900 experiments.1

  Ever
since he was a small boy playing at his aunt Caroline’s, Herschel had been captivated by chemistry. The thought that by mixing two substances it was possible to cause a reaction, a change in the physical universe, seemed then almost magical. Now, as a freshly minted graduate of Cambridge who had immersed himself in the mathematical and the scientific for four years, Herschel was even more enchanted by chemical processes. He felt certain that secrets of nature lay waiting to be teased out, brought out into the clear light of day. And he was eager to capture some of those secrets himself.

  It was a most experimental age. Across the country and across Europe, savants were mixing chemicals, breathing newly created “airs,” sparking electrical currents, spinning magnetic disks, and separating light into colored rays by passing it through crystalline prisms. The forces of nature and her elemental substances were being laid bare for all to see. As Mary Shelley would write a few years later in Frankenstein, “These philosophers who seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles.… They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers.”

  Herschel and the other members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club—and the rest of the educated classes—avidly followed experimental developments in the pages of the Transactions of the Royal Society, and in the new magazines that were cropping up to share scientific news with the public: Nicholson’s Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, the Monthly Magazine or British Register, the Philosophical Magazine, the Monthly Review, among others. Hundreds of people at a time—many of them women—attended public lectures, complete with demonstrations of dazzling experiments, at venues such as the recently founded Royal Institution of London. It was only natural that once they graduated from Cambridge and started leading their scientific lives, Herschel and his friends would join the experimenting craze.

  Chemistry was then the most exhilarating experimental field. Portable chemistry laboratories were marketed to amateur researchers who wished to replicate well-known experiments in the privacy of their own homes.2 Books like Jane Marcet’s Conversations in Chemistry introduced the newest work in chemistry to a broad audience, even to children. A young Michael Faraday—a poor man’s son, mostly self-educated, who would one day be renowned throughout the world for his experiments showing the intimate connection between electricity and magnetism—read the Conversations while apprenticed to a bookbinder, and decided on the spot to devote himself to science. Eventually Faraday would be one of those introducing science to the crowds who thronged his popular lectures at the Royal Institution.

  Not long before, at the end of the eighteenth century, a chemical revolution had completely remade the discipline, and new discoveries were announced almost daily. Prior to that revolution, the four-element theory proposed by the ancient Greeks still, remarkably, held sway. This view proposed that all substances could be broken down into four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. To this mix, late-seventeenth-century natural philosophers had added a further component: phlogiston. The phlogiston theory held that every combustible substance contained a universal component of fire, the “phlogiston,” which was colorless, odorless, tasteless, and nearly weightless. Combustion occurred when the phlogiston held in a substance was released. This accounted for the fact that some combustible substances, such as charcoal, lost weight when burned; the weight loss was said to be due to the release of the phlogiston (charcoal was so reduced on burning that it was thought to be composed mainly of phlogiston). However, chemists soon realized that certain substances—such as metals—actually gained weight when heated. From that point on, phlogiston theory was rife with contradiction.

  In England, a supporter of the phlogiston theory made a discovery that was to have wide-ranging ramifications. On August 1, 1774, the Unitarian minister and political radical Joseph Priestley used a twelve-inch “burning lens” to focus sunlight on a lump of reddish brown mercury calx (mercuric oxide) in an inverted glass container placed in a pool of mercury. He found that the gas emitted caused a flame to burn intensely, and kept a mouse alive four times as long as it would have lived in a similar amount of regular air. Priestley dubbed this new gas “dephlogisticated air,” reasoning that it supported combustion so well because it had no phlogiston in it and so could absorb the maximum amount from the burning candle. He had, in fact, discovered pure oxygen.

  Priestley did not realize that this discovery would alter chemistry forever. While visiting Paris, he described his experiment and its results to fellow chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who quickly recognized that this was the clue he had been seeking to unlock the true nature of combustion. After replicating Priestley’s experiments, Lavoisier came to a thrilling conclusion: in combustion a substance did not give off phlogiston, but rather took on Priestley’s gas, which Lavoisier dubbed oxygene for “acid generator” (because Lavoisier believed, incorrectly, that all acids contained this gas). Oxygen, not phlogiston, was required for combustion.

  Lavoisier found that when combustion took place in closed vessels, whose contents before and after the process could be carefully measured, the total weight of the burned substance and the air around it remained the same. Certain substances became heavier after heating because they were taking on some of the oxygen from the air. Other substances lost weight because parts combined with the oxygen to form different gases.

  Lavoisier further explained that oxygen contained in the common air accounted for the fact that substances burned in the open, but not in an airless vacuum. Thus common air was actually a compound of oxygen and other gases. Later experiments based on work done by Henry Cavendish in England showed Lavoisier that water was also a compound, composed of oxygen mixed with another element, which he called “hydrogen.”

  Suddenly a whole new system of chemistry came into view, one that changed the very concept of an element. Lavoisier adopted the long-neglected idea originally proposed by Robert Boyle more than a century earlier: elements were to be understood as substances that could not be broken down further. By this definition, the ancient Greek group of four could no longer count as true elements. Common air is not an elemental substance, but rather is composed of several different gases, including oxygen. Water, too, is actually a compound, of oxygen and hydrogen. Fire, Lavoisier believed, was composed of two elements: lumiere (light) and calorique (heat). And earth is made up of a variety of elemental substances, mostly metals.

  Lavoisier published his new system in a monumental work, the Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry), which appeared in Paris in 1789, the year of the storming of the Bastille, marking the start of the French Revolution, and the year of America’s ratification of its constitution. This revolutionary work set the foundation for modern chemistry. It spelled out the influence of heat on chemical reactions, in the new non-phlogistic theory of combustion. It described the nature of gases and the reactions of acids and bases to form salts. It proclaimed, for the first time, the Law of Conservation of Matter: that in chemical reactions, matter changes its state, but not its quantity: matter cannot be destroyed, or created out of nothing. The book depicted in great detail the new and expensive apparatus Lavoisier had designed for his chemical experiments, illustrating them with thirteen exquisite engravings drawn by Lavoisier’s talented young wife, Marie-Ann Pierrette Paulze.

  Within a few years of publishing his treatise, Lavoisier fell victim to the revolutionary fervor in France, losing his head to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in 1794. But Lavoisier had the satisfaction of recognizing, a few years before his death, that he had been successful in igniting a “revolution … in chemistry.”

  Now, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, electricity was all the rage, and studies of it were part of a chemist’s repertoire. Ever since Luigi Galvani had ghoulishly made the legs of a dead frog dance by applying a metallic couple to connect nerve and muscle in the 1780s, “electricians” sought to understand this strange force. I
n 1800, Alessandro Volta had built the first electrical battery, known as the voltaic pile, by piling up several pairs of alternating copper and zinc disks separated by cardboard soaked in brine. When the top and bottom disks were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire.

  Volta’s description of the pile in the pages of the Royal Society’s Transactions sparked work on electricity by English chemists, including Humphry Davy. Davy was a close friend of Coleridge, with whom he discussed both poetry and science. A precocious lad, he began to study science seriously when apprenticed to a surgeon. This led to his being offered a position in charge of the laboratory of the Bristol “Pneumatic Institute,” which was formed to investigate the medicinal uses of airs and gases. Not long afterwards, Davy was hired as one of the first lecturers at the Royal Institution, and was soon regaling crowds of five hundred or more at a time with his demonstrations—sometimes involving the self-application of nitrous oxide gas (now known as “laughing gas”), to which Davy would become addicted. So many flocked to Davy’s lectures that Albemarle Street, where the Royal Institution was located, became London’s first one-way street to try to ease the congestion of carriages. After attending Davy’s lectures, Faraday sent him a three-hundred-page book of notes he had taken, so impressing the older man that Davy hired Faraday as his assistant and occasional valet. Faraday would soon become director of the laboratory at the Royal Institution, and later the first of its chemistry professors.3