The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  And York had Vernon Harcourt, the founding president of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Harcourt was the son of a well-liked, long-serving archbishop, connected by blood with several major aristocratic families. He was respected by men of science in London, such as W. H. Wollaston and the geologist Roderick Murchison, but was also friendly with the geologists and chemists at Oxford and Cambridge.57

  Harcourt jumped at the chance to host a meeting in York bringing together men of science—it would shine the spotlight on the town and its Philosophical Society. He sent word to Brewster that the Yorkshire Philosophical Society “rejoice that York is fixed upon”58 as the site of the first meeting of the new society, which he dubbed the British Association for the Advancement of Science—a name explicitly taken from the title of one of Bacon’s works: Advancement of Learning. (Regrettably, it would later be easily lampooned as the “British Ass,” and in 2009 the group would change its name to the more anodyne British Science Association.)

  Almost as soon as Harcourt agreed to take on the responsibility for running the meeting, which would take place in September, Brewster withdrew from the active planning of it, his time being taken up with his optical experiments. It was now up to Harcourt to envision the goals, membership, and organization of the new society. In doing so Harcourt sought—and received—the advice of those he considered the leading lights of science in England: Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell.

  Although ultimately Harcourt and his team in York were responsible for planning the first meeting, it was Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell who were the intellectual founding fathers of the British Association. Babbage had set the igniting spark of the British Association with his Decline of Science and his suggestions to Brewster about starting a new scientific society. Babbage also gave Harcourt specific suggestions about the role of the British Association, such as coordinating large-scale programs of observations by members from around the globe, including “heights of barometer every hour during the 24; height of the tides during ditto; height of water in great rivers during ditto; also height of rivers every hour during floods …; meteors; temperature of springs; temperature of the sea.”59

  Yet, somewhat oddly, Babbage refused to be named a member of any official committee, and did not even plan to attend the meeting in York. When he heard that Babbage would not be there, Brewster wrote to implore him: “It would break my heart if I do not find you there.” The following week Brewster tried again: “On my knees I implore you to be at York.”60 Babbage claimed that he needed to stay in London and oversee the construction of a new workshop for Clement and a fireproof building for the Difference Engine in the backyard of his new house on Dorset Street. Babbage had bought the house belonging to Wollaston after the chemist’s death a few years earlier. The government had just agreed to spend another £2,250 for these buildings, in order to protect their considerable investment in the Difference Engine. Babbage’s foresight in demanding the fireproof building would be demonstrated tragically several years later, in 1834, when the Houses of Parliament burned to the ground in the most destructive conflagration since much of London was gutted by the Great Fire of 1666.

  Herschel, still smarting from his loss in the Royal Society election, wanted nothing to do with the new society: he refused the presidency point-blank, and would not even attend the York meeting. Herschel did attend later meetings, and even consented to being named to the council of the British Association in 1832. But although he distanced himself at first from the new organization, Herschel was very much an influence on it. The year before the planning of the York meeting, his Preliminary Discourse had brought Bacon back into public attention as the “Master” of scientific method. Because of the prominence given to Bacon by such an eminent man of science, it was natural that Harcourt would fashion the new society on Baconian lines.

  Whewell was also initially skeptical of the new society. He told his friend James David Forbes (a young protégé of Brewster’s at the university at Edinburgh) that he had no wish to “rally round Dr. Brewster’s standard after he has thought it necessary to promulgate so bad an opinion of us who happen to be professors in universities.”61 Brewster’s article in the Quarterly Review on the decline of science had contained harsh criticisms of the state of science at the British universities, which Whewell took personally. While Whewell agreed with Babbage and Brewster’s accusation that the British man of science was not well supported by the universities or the government, he was offended by Brewster’s claim that “there is not one man in all the eight universities of Great Britain who is at present known to be engaged in any train of original research.”62 Brewster later professed to be surprised to hear that Whewell, who had published numerous scientific papers and was by that time Professor of Mineralogy, was offended by this remark. Brewster himself was smarting from his inability to be appointed to any professorship at Edinburgh; in 1833 he would lose the chair of Natural Philosophy to his own protégé Forbes, and would fume about that insult for the rest of his life.

  Although Whewell refused to attend the meeting in York, he sent back a cordial and encouraging letter to Harcourt, filled with suggestions that would come to shape the very nature of the new society and its meetings. And before long, Whewell threw himself into the practical organizing of the British Association, scrambling behind the scenes to get committees going, choosing presidents and council members, and planning the society’s regulations.

  Whewell was disappointed that Herschel refused to take any interest in the infant association. Herschel thought that Whewell was wasting his time, which could more valuably be spent in scientific research. Whewell justified his involvement to Herschel, explaining to him that “if there be any obvious prospect of stimulating the zeal of men of science and giving a useful direction to their labors, I should be very unwilling to refuse a share in the task of raising the requisite shout.”63

  THE MEETING IN York opened on September 26, with the reception committee issuing tickets and helping to arrange accommodations for the attendees. At the time, the 353 participants constituted the largest scientific meeting ever held in Britain.64 No major Cambridge figure attended, and only one Oxford don was there. Most attendees came from Yorkshire and other northern cities, London (though not the most distinguished men of science among them), and Edinburgh.65 Few fellows of the Royal Society were in attendance. In later years the British Association would draw many of the more scientifically active members of the Royal Society, and there would be much overlap in membership. But natural philosophers from outside London, those from less wealthy families, and religious Dissenters (such as the Quaker chemist John Dalton) would from the start feel more at home in the British Association. Dalton himself never became a fellow of the Royal Society, but he eagerly attended the meeting in York, and was present at every meeting until his death in 1837.66

  That first night a “conversazione”—a session of promenading, light discussion, and light refreshments—was held at the museum of the society: the local newspaper described the museum, lit brilliantly with gas and filled with select company, including men of science, their wives and daughters, and local luminaries. One of the organizers found it “so showy and glittering that a stranger might have thought men had here met together to turn philosophy into sport.”67 It was a grand opening for what was aptly billed in the local newspaper as a “festival of science”68—a week filled with morning sessions on different sciences and business meetings, as well as dinners, balls, and evening lectures open to the public. At one of these public lectures, crowds flocked to hear William Scoresby speak for two hours on his magnetic researches.

  On Tuesday morning Harcourt addressed the large crowd. He opened his speech by explicitly pointing to the Baconian underpinnings of the new association. Taking a page from Herschel’s recently published Preliminary Discourse, Harcourt called Bacon the one who “first developed the true method of interpreting nature.”

  Harcourt next compared the new British Association with the Roy
al Society. He acknowledged that the Royal Society had been formed explicitly to play the role of Bacon’s Solomon’s House in New Atlantis. It had never, however, taken up Bacon’s proposal that a scientific society should publicly promote natural knowledge by guiding the researches of its members. The British Association, in contrast, would do this. It would do so by presenting reports on the state of each science (as Whewell had suggested) and by coordinating nationwide and international observations of meteorological, geological, and astronomical data (as Babbage had suggested).

  Not only was the Royal Society failing in its mission as a Baconian Solomon’s House, it was not even healthy as a scientific body. It “scarcely labors itself.” As a result of the weakness of the Royal Society, new societies were proliferating. As Banks had foreseen, the existence of these new societies, such as the Geological and Astronomical Societies, both of which he had vehemently opposed, were used by Harcourt as evidence of the moribund state of the Royal Society. “Colony after colony dissevers itself from the declining empire” of the Royal Society, Harcourt noted. The result was that “by degrees the commonwealth of science is dissolved.”69

  Science was becoming more specialized. Already, in France, the Royal Academy of Sciences was divided into separate sections: mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, botany, anatomy, and physics. But those separate sections still met together as a group, and members in one section reported their findings to members in the others. It was important, Harcourt warned, to have one overarching scientific society. As he put it, “The chief Interpreters of Nature have always been those who grasped the widest field of inquiry, who have listened with the most universal curiosity to all information, and felt an interest in every question.”70

  In York, the 353 new members attended en masse the same lectures and discussions. But as the meetings grew in size—reaching a high of 2,403 at the meeting in Newcastle in 1838—such large groups became unwieldy. Perhaps, too, the time had come to accept that not every natural philosopher could understand every scientific paper. The association eventually began to break itself into “sections” of different scientific specialties, holding separate sessions at the meetings: Section A, the mathematical and physical sciences; Section B, chemistry and mineralogy; Section C, geology and geography; Section D, natural history (zoology and botany). More sections were soon added: Section E, anatomy and medicine; Section F, statistics; Section G, mechanical sciences. Ultimately those divisions would be both a reflection of and a contribution to the greater specialization of the sciences. Indeed, soon Herschel would be telling Whewell, “Such is science now-a-days. No man can hope to know more than one part of one science.”71 But unlike at specialized societies like the Geological and the Astronomical, members working in all fields met at one time and place and joined together for the general meetings and public lectures, at dinner and breakfast parties, and at the all-important conversaziones. (The universalism of the British Association would soon be lampooned by Dickens as the “Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.”)72 Men of science in one field could learn from those laboring in other areas; they could help each other reach over the newly growing disciplinary boundaries to find solutions to scientific problems.

  After his own speech, Harcourt read from a public letter sent in support of the new society by Whewell, bestowing his blessing on it; Whewell hailed the new society as heralding a “new and better era” in science.73 By the end of the meeting, Whewell would be elected (in absentia) as one of the vice presidents of the society. He was probably not happy to learn that his co–vice president was Brewster. But Whewell took up the office with zeal, becoming over the years the “Intellectual Atlas” of the association, as Harcourt would later call him.

  Whewell attended every meeting between 1832 and 1841 (he attended more sporadically after being appointed Master of Trinity in that year). During this period he delivered twelve papers, as well as reports on mineralogy (in 1832), electricity/magnetism/heat (in 1835), and the tides (in 1838, 1839, and 1841). Whewell was one of the most popular evening lecturers. He was vice president of the association three times, and president in 1841.74

  At the first meeting, also in absentia, Babbage was appointed one of three trustees—the only permanent officers provided by the new constitution of the British Association. Although the association had originally been Babbage’s idea, his official participation had to be bought. Lord Milton (later the Earl of Fitzwilliam), as first president, had urged during his presidential speech that government interference in science was “un-English.” Men of science should not beseech the government for money for their researches, he advised. Clearly, Babbage could not agree with that.75 Harcourt later wrote to Milton asking him to tone down his remarks for the printed version of the speech, being mindful that “our starving philosophers” might be “unwilling to have it proclaimed ex cathedra from the midst of themselves that there is something illegitimate in the direct encouragement of science.”76 Milton agreed to the changes, and Babbage was mollified. Although he attended many of the meetings after York, Babbage eventually became disenchanted with the association, as he did with almost everything later in life.

  THE 1833 BRITISH Association meeting in Cambridge was a reunion of sorts for the Philosophical Breakfast Club: Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell were all present. Although the 1832 meeting in Oxford had been even more successful than the first meeting in York—with many Cambridge, Oxford, and London men of science in attendance—the Cambridge meeting firmly established the British Association as a scientific force in the nation. It also helped seal Whewell’s reputation as a leader of the scientific establishment. At the Cambridge meeting, Whewell was both at his prime and in his element. His friends could not help noticing how he “puffed out” a bit with pride and self-importance. How could he not, thinking of how far he had come, from Lancaster boy to Cambridge eminence? His enemies would later ridicule him, with the Literary Gazette mocking his vanity at the British Association meetings: “I am Sir Oracle. When I speak, let no dog bark.”77

  The Cambridge meeting was held the week of June 24. Eight hundred fifty-two members attended, arriving on Monday afternoon. The next day, members witnessed the confrontation between Coleridge and Whewell. When Coleridge rose during the general meeting at the Senate House, and haughtily demanded that the members of the Association desist from claiming the title of “natural philosophers,” it must have seemed to the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club a golden opportunity. Twenty years after pledging to transform science, and “leave the world wiser than they found it,” Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell had worked hard to bring about many changes in science. They had begun to shape natural philosophy into a profession. They had publicly called for public funding for scientific innovation, and had insisted on the importance of exquisitely precise measurement and calculation (so precise, in fact, that it was humanly impossible to attain it, necessitating Babbage’s Difference Engine). They had brought to the public’s attention the issue of scientific method, writing popular books and articles on the subject. They had advanced the idea that the methods of one science (geology) could be brought to bear on another (economics). They had argued for professorships in the sciences at the universities, and for adequate lecture rooms, laboratories, and salaries for those professors—and soon Whewell would be arguing that young men at Cambridge should be able to graduate with honors degrees in the sciences, as well as in classics and mathematics. They had been instrumental in the formation of scientific societies: the Astronomical Society, the founding dinner of which was attended by Babbage and Herschel; the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which Whewell, Henslow, Sedgwick, and others had initiated; and now, most magnificently, the British Association itself. Soon, at this very meeting, Jones and Whewell, with Babbage’s help, would initiate the first British society devoted to statistics, introducing statistical methods not only to the new area of “social science” (including economics) but also to the natural sciences.
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  Certainly there was more work to be done to transform the sciences, and the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club would continue their labors for another quarter of a century. But now they had their chance to name this new professional that they had partly created and partly molded into form. And the name uttered that day was “scientist.”

  Whewell, from his seat as the secretary of the Cambridge meeting, was best placed to provide that name. Although no evidence one way or the other exists, it is tempting to think that Whewell must have bandied about possible names before the moment in the Senate House. After all, he had already argued strongly about the importance of new words to name new scientific discoveries78—why not, then, a new name for the new scientific discoverers? Perhaps, over drinks at the start of the meeting, the four friends had even discussed possible names. We will never know.

  What we do know is that, at this meeting, on this day, the word scientist was uttered in public for the first time. And it is still the name used today for men (and, now, women) engaged in an activity much like what Whewell and his friends envisioned.

  It seemed to satisfy Coleridge; he sat back down, and the rest of the meeting continued without discord. But it would not be until the end of the century that other men of science took up Whewell’s name for them. Indeed, Whewell himself rarely used the term again in his written works or correspondence; except for a book review in which he mentioned the invention of the new term (without naming the inventor), Whewell did not use the term in writing until his 1840 book Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, and then only two times in that massive, two-volume work. Old habits die hard, and many men of science were still unwilling to see themselves as professionals in the way they were being urged to become. Unwilling, but also unable—because it would yet be decades before a man could graduate with a degree specifically in the natural sciences, or earn his livelihood being a scientist.