by Tom Anderson
Including firearms…
Interlude #3: Sometimes, All I Need Is The Air That I Breathe
INSTITUTE MISSION TAPE TRANSCRIPT 12/06/2019: CLASSIFIED LEVEL SIX
Dr Theodoros Pylos: It is at this point that we find it instructive to once again turn away from the general political upheavals of this period-
Dr Bruno Lombardi: -to concentrate on the scientific developments at hand.
Pylos: Strictly speaking, shouldn’t you say ‘natural philosophical’ developments?
Lombardi: No, Thermo. The term ‘scientist is anachronous at this time, but not ‘scientific’.
Pylos: How curious! I had assumed-
Captain Christopher Nuttall: Gentlemen?
Pylos/Lombardi: Sorry sir.
*
Man now stands like the worker in the mill who begins to realise how his work, his machine, relates to and fits in with the whole process of manufacture, in that case. Our understanding of how the universe is made—and for what purpose—is for ever increasing. We can only hope that the Creator is happier to see us do so than the mill owners.
- Joseph Priestley, 1807
*
From—“Air: A History” by Daniel Johnson (1966)
The discovery of elluftium [oxygen] by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778 was enormously influential in how chemical theories developed from thereon. For some years, natural philosophers struggled with how to incorporate this new concept into the established phlogiston theory. As it was then seen, a burning object gave off the substance known as phlogiston, which was visible as the flames themselves. Phlogiston’s exact nature was imprecise and we should not confuse it with the modern conception of a substance with defined mass: that idea would have to wait for a few more years. Phlogiston was seen as more of a ‘principle’, like light and heat.
It fell to Joseph Priestley, a noted English Dissenting clergyman and political radical, to link the two ideas. Priestley drew heavily on the mid-century works of Stephen Hales, who published detailed accounts of the circulatory systems of plants and animals. As part of his conception of the ‘Aerial Economy’,[109] Priestley developed the notion that air could be phlogisticated (by an item burning within it) or dephlogisticated. Dephlogisticated or ‘fixed’ air was vivifying when breathed. Priestley thus explained Hales’ earlier observation that it was dangerous to breathe stale air: it was phlogisticated.
Scheele had made similar observations, and Priestley—who had learned Swedish due to youthful arguments about Linnaean Racialism—read his original works. Elluftium was identified with dephlogisticated air. But how did this relate directly to phlogiston?
Priestley made numerous experiments with sealed glass vessels. A mouse sealed alone inside one would run out of air and die, but when a plant was also added, the mouse would live for much longer. Therefore, the plant was ‘fixing’ the stale air into the form that the mouse could breathe. But was the plant producing elluftium or absorbing phlogiston? It took Priestley some years, and several accidental observations, to realise that the answer was ‘both’.
His work On the Nature of Phlogiston (1785) was controversial as it suggested that phlogiston, or phlogisticated air, was deadly to animal life—going against the largely philosophical arguments at the time, “rudely interrupting them with empiricism” as Philip Bulkeley would put it in his biography of Priestley. Priestley rapidly expanded the paradigm of the mouse and plant to envisage a great cycle of the world, with animals taking up illuftium and breathing out phlogiston, and plants taking up phlogiston and expelling illuftium. This, his ‘Aerial Economy’ (inspired in its terminology by eighteenth-century Britain’s obsession with the stock market) purported to see a ‘Necessary and Natural Union’ between the different forms of life.
Priestley’s major breakthrough at this stage was to use a burning glass, then a new lab instrument, on a sample of calx of mercury.[110] He was able to reverse the combustion, leaving metallic mercury, and he proceeded to repeat this experiment with other calxes. Around the same time, Priestley’s lab assistant Anna Barbauld inadvertently performed the mouse-in-jar experiment after the jar in question was contaminated with a mixture of limestone powder and the caustic soda[111] that Priestley used to clean his equipment. She discovered that the mouse lived for much longer than it should have done. After more experiments, Priestley eliminated the possibility that the chemical (soda lime) was giving off elluftium, and therefore it must instead be absorbing phlogiston. This was the first indication that the two processes could be decoupled, whereas before there was the possibility that phlogiston going from A to B was simply an artificial mathematical negative of illuftium going from B to A.
Priestley’s discoveries were celebrated and debated both in Britain and on the Continent, but it was at this time that the French natural philosopher Charles-Augustin Coulomb threw a spanner in the works. Coulomb’s major work was on quantifying things which had thought to be unquantifiable, for example human labour (based on improving the economic production of plantation slaves in the West Indies). To do this, he developed new means of measurement, such as very precise torsion balances that let the tiny charge repulsion between two charged surfaces be measured in the form of a change in weight. While using this balance, Priestley’s French rival Antoine Lavoisier discovered that after a substance was burned, the combined calxes actually GAINED weight, when they should have lost phlogiston.
Most of the contemporaries attempted to explain this by philosophical means, claiming that phlogiston was an abstract principle with negative or sub-air weight, but Priestley instead used his new theories to argue that phlogiston was simply lighter than elluftium, and the phlogiston given out by the burning substance was more than balanced by elluftium being absorbed. This was, in fact, inaccurate—phlogiston is heavier than elluftium, but there is less given out than illuftium absorbed. Priestley did not think in terms of such defined quantities and it fell to Lavoisier, with his Coulomb methods, to discover this later on. Between them, largely via a series of half-friendly, half-hostile letters, Priestley and Lavoisier developed the idea that animal life is fuelled by a very slow, controlled version of combustion, thus linking these new ideas to Priestley’s earlier discovery of the Aerial Economy. This was not explicitly confirmed until the 1820s, when new techniques were developed.
Lavoisier and Priestley are both hotly debated by modern British and French scientists as the ‘Father of Modern Chemistry’. It took, however, Priestley’s successor Humphry Davy to work out the precise relationship between elluftium and phlogiston—that the act of burning incorporates elluftium into the substance that burnt, producing both the calx and phlogiston. Priestley did not need to know the exact nature of phlogiston in order to create a treatise on the Aerial Economy which found favour with King George III, a man who had grown up in rural Virginia and was choked by the smokes of industrial London.[112] Priestley argued that living in cities with their dephlogisticated air was bad for the human body and might even lead to a moral decline as the brains of men ceased to be fuelled correctly. He advocated the construction of many arboreal parks throughout towns in order to balance this out, and this was adopted by many British cities, most obviously London. As well as being chemically sensible, this was clearly also aesthetically pleasing. Arguably this was part of an international phenomenon in reaction to dawning industrialism, sharing a century with the first incarnation of the Physiocracy movement in France.
Despite his good relationship with the King, Priestley’s anarchist/republican leanings led to him being chased out of the country in 1791 by an angry mob, stoked by business interests Priestley had offended. He and his family emigrated to the United Provinces of South America, which was experimenting with political liberalism, and Priestley took his final discovery with him: soda water, water impregnated with phlogiston. Though the phlogiston itself might be harmful, water impregnated with the substance bubbled most delightfully and had medical applications. Thanks to Priestley, for the century to come it would
be UPSA businesses that dominated the world soda water market, and all those that would be derived from it...
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Lombardi: We may take this opportunity to notice the interesting ways in which the aforementioned events different from OTL and how this shaped a different path for science—something which these books naturally must leave out.
Pylos: Indeed. This process illustrates what the scientific historian Thomas Kuhn describes as ‘incommensurability’—scientific theories can never be directly compared, because what Newton called ‘gravity’, for example, is a different concept from what Einstein called ‘gravity’, using different units and underlying concepts.
Lombardi: Quite so. In OTL some theories are still, in the abstract, thought of as ‘correct’…
Pylos: Such as Galileo’s heliocentric solar system.
Lombardi: Yes, even though these ‘correct’ theories have very little in common with current theories.
Pylos: To follow up my example, Galileo had perfectly circular orbits, and still had the fixed stars with the sun at the centre of the universe. We now know these ideas are wrong, yet schools teach ‘Galileo was right’ as though it is an absolute, because we think of it as being purely a debate between him and the geocentrists.
Lombardi: Similarly, modern evolutionary theory is described as ‘Darwinian’, even though it has as little to do with Darwin as it has to do with Paley.
Pylos: Perhaps not the best comparison to make, given events in TTL…
Lombardi: Shh, spoilers.
Pylos: Oh right, sorry.
Lombardi: Anyway. In OTL, phlogiston theory is described as an ‘obsolete theory’ but in TTL it has survived by the Kuhnian method—simply by changing what it means by phlogiston.
Pylos: Instead of an abstract concept or ‘principle’, phlogiston has become a real substance—that which we call carbon dioxide.
Lombardi: Yes. If this sounds unlikely, you may be surprised to learn that exactly the same thing happened in OTL; Scheele’s work never spread, Lavoisier discovered oxygen, and regarded oxygen as an abstract principle, never identifying it with a specific element with weight and other defined properties.
Pylos: Quite, it was only his successors who changed the meaning of the term ‘oxygen’ so that it now means what it does today...so Lavoisier was ‘right’ in OTL and Priestley, with his phlogiston, was ‘wrong’. If we just used the term phlogiston instead in OTL, then Priestley would be ‘right’ and Lavoisier would be ‘wrong’.
Lombardi: Such is how science works.
(Background noise)
Nuttall: Ah, gentlemen, are you still digitising that segment on those scientist chaps? I need you to come and start putting that global history roundup into order.
Lombardi (muttering): Oy vey…
Chapter #15: Two Great Men
“A disturbing number of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived were foreigners.”
- John Spencer KS (Alliance Party, Oxfordshire); speech to the Combined House, 1921
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From:“England’s Captain, France’s Saviour” by Albert Harrison (1940)—
Having spent oceans of blood and failed to gain an inch of new territory in Europe in the 1740s and 50s—largely thanks to Louis XV’s unpopular policies—it is ironic that in the 1760s France gained considerable new lands with the death of only one man. When the Duke of Lorraine died without male heirs in 1765, his lands defaulted to France and were annexed to the Kingdom. These were the last remnants of the once-great state of Lotharingia, now reduced to a few scattered enclaves throughout the region. By assuming control over Lorraine, France completed the expansionist path that Louis XIV had instigated, and now unquestionably dominated that region.
The impact upon history of the end of Lorraine seemed, at the time, slight. Its only direct effect was to remove the Duke, a former King of Poland, from any consideration of restoration. This served to quicken the Russo-Prussian ambitions to divide the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the rest is—well—history.
An arguably far more significant acquisition by France was that of Corsica. The island was theoretically ruled by the Republic of Genoa, as it had been for centuries, but in practice rebels had held the island since 1755. Corsica had become an independent republic in all but name, with the Virgin Mary as titular monarch of the ‘kingdom’. Unlike the venerable oligarchic republics of Genoa, Venice and the Netherlands, the new republic in Corsica was constructed on modern Enlightenment principles—famously being the first nation to routinely allow women to vote and stand for election.[113] Its leader was Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli, who had served in the Neapolitan army and now commanded the rebel military forces as well as being effective head of state of the republic.
During the thirteen-year existence of the First Republic, an Enlightenment-inspired constitution was drafted and the state received praise from contemporary thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. James Boswell, a companion of Samuel Johnson, wrote an account of the Republic which made Paoli and the constitution famous (or notorious, depending on whom one asked) throughout Europe in the 1760s. It was this account which was one of the inspirations for the revolution in Platinea twenty years later that would give birth to the UPSA, and indeed the original Meridian Constitution owed much to Corsica’s.
In 1767 the Genoese lost the island of Capraia to the Corsican Republic and decided that this was the last straw; the old Italian republic now had little chance of ever subduing the rebels. Furthermore, the Genoese treasury was almost exhausted. Recognising this, the Genoese cut their losses and signed the island over to the Kingdom of France in exchange for financial reparations. The vast and experienced French army invaded in 1768. Paoli’s republicans fought hard before being finally (as it seems) defeated in 1769. Paoli and numerous other republican leaders and soldiers fled to Britain, which was at the time thought of as the most liberal country in Europe. In the 1760s, radical republicans were treated as amusing and entertaining curiosities by the British government, which did not see them as a serious threat until later on, and the Corsican refugees formed an exilic community in London not unlike the Huguenots before them.[114]
Among the Corsicans was Carlo Buonaparte, a young supporter of Paoli.[115] A law student prior to fleeing the island with his wife and two-year-old son Napoleone,[116] he decided to complete his studies, switching to English Common Law. Buonaparte converted to Anglicanism to escape the anti-Catholic laws and changed his name to the anglicised ‘Charles Bone’.[117] He received his law doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1774 and eventually became well-known for his skilful seeking out of loopholes in the anti-Catholic laws, freeing many English Catholics from legal trouble. Bone had mastered unaccented, idiomatic English and covered his tracks well; very few knew that he was himself Catholic (and foreign) in origin, though many made accusations (without evidence).
If Bone became an enemy of the ultra-Tory faction opposed to Catholic rights, this almost automatically made him popular with radicals who supported Catholic emancipation, including Charles James Fox, who became a close friend. Bone would eventually become an MP towards the end of the century.[118]
Though an interesting character in and of himself, Charles Bone is necessarily overshadowed by his eldest son, Napoleone, known to English ears as the ‘less foreign sounding’ Leo. Charles enrolled his son as a midshipman in the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen, as was customary at the time, and he served on HMS Ardent from 1777 onwards.[119] Mister Midshipman Bone passed his lieutenant’s examination at the RN school in Malta, ‘Anson’s Folly’, in 1783. He was transferred to HMS Raisonnable, during which time he served alongside the slightly senior Lieutenant Horatio Nelson, and the two young men became fast friends.
The Raisonnable scored several victories against French and Spanish ships in the Second Platinean War, and the British losses at the Battle of Trafalgar meant that several new captaincies were left open: thus first Nelson and then Bone were made master and commander, w
ith Nelson inheriting the Raisonnable and Bone taking over the almost obsolete 28-gun frigate HMS Coventry in 1786. He was noted for a concentration on rapid gunnery and weight of fire, a strategy that he had developed in connexion with Nelson,[120] and grew to command a great loyalty from his men. Boswell met him in 1788 and Bone makes a then-overlooked, but today well known, brief appearance in one of his accounts. Boswell described him as being the epitome of the Royal Navy commander whose men would follow him into the jaws of hell rather than face the shame of being left behind.
Bone was made post[121] in 1791, taking command of the newly built frigate HMS Diamond—bringing a great deal of his former crew with him, as the now outdated Coventry was paid off—and immediately making a name for himself with an action against Algerine pirates off Malta in 1793. But it would be with the coming of the Jacobin Wars in 1795 that Bone’s story becomes one not merely of history, but of legend...
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From: “John Company: The Life of Pitt of India” by James Rawlings (1974)—
