by Bill Bryson
It is appropriate to be amazed. Who could have hoped that both the new rationalism and the new empiricism could be joined together in the most successful experiment in human thought to date? Here is a means of exploring nature which, though embedded in the empiricism of experimentation, is also capable of challenging (by way of the theory of relativity) our psychological sense of time, or (by way of quantum mechanics) our notions of causality, two linchpins of common-sense experience.
Who could have hoped? To that question, at least, we have an answer: the men who formed a ‘Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’.
1 There were, of course, political and sociological dimensions to this process, since the grandly unifying system of thought was not only scientific (or proto-scientific) but also religious and political, making challenges to the system ipso facto religious and political challenges. I will focus on the scientific aspects of the process, but it is of course naïve to think that this constitutes the whole story. The history of ideas is hardly hermetically sealed against all but questions of validity and falsification.
2 Many of these same scientifically inclined men had begun meeting earlier, in Oxford, at the end of the 1640s, during the Parliamentary Interregnum between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, laying the foundations for what would become, with the Restoration, the Royal Society, their ranks now swelled not only by Royalists, but the King himself.
3 The Scientific Works of Galileo (Singer, Vol. II, p. 252).
4 E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (NY, Prometheus Books, 1999), p. 76. Galileo’s rationalist attitude has been echoed by various modern physicists. Paul Dirac, for example, said: ‘It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments,’ and Einstein, too, made such remarks, for example telling Hans Reichenbach that he had been convinced before the 1919 solar eclipse gave confirming evidence that his theory of general relativity was true because of its mathematical beauty. In our day, the hegemony of mathematics has been claimed most insistently by champions of string theory, which has as yet been unable to produce any testable predictions. ‘I don’t think it’s ever happened that a theory that has the kind of mathematical appeal that string theory has has turned out to be entirely wrong,’ Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has said. ‘There have been theories that turned out to be right in a different context than the context for which they were invented. But I would find it hard to believe that that much elegance and mathematical beauty would simply be wasted.’ (Quoted on Nova, The Elegant Universe. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-weinberg.html.) String theory has been criticised by more empirically inclined physicists, some going so far as to claim the theory does not even qualify as scientific. Thus the schism between scientific rationalists and empiricists continues into our own day.
5 From his Letter to Pope Paul III, in the De Revolutionibus.
6 See extract on page 119.
7 The Ethics, I, Appendix. Some of the new rationalists, such as Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, argued that what was generative in mathematical reasoning need not be confined to the quantitative, but could range beyond, and thus give us a form of explanation so powerful as to obviate any need for observation at all. This belief caused them to attribute unlimited potency to a priori reason, and explains why they are now more characteristically classified as philosophers rather than scientists. But in their day there was no segregation between the two types of thinkers, philosophers all, and they all saw themselves as engaged in the same project of finding the mode of explanation to supplant teleology. A rationalist extremist like Spinoza was as engaged as any in the scientific project; indeed, he was in close communication with the Fellows of the Royal Society, through his communications with the indefatigably gregarious first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, and even offered, through Oldenburg, his critique of some of Boyle’s ideas, in several instances not finding them sufficiently scientific. So, for example, in De Fluditate 19, Boyle wrote of animals that ‘Nature has designed them both for flying and swimming,’ which provoked from Spinoza the response, ‘He seeks the cause from purpose’ (causam a fine petit), which is, of course, a relapse to the old system.
8 The metaphors of Francis Bacon are a feasting ground for feminist readings of the history of science.
9 Preface, The Instauration Magna, in Bacon, Francis, The Works, ed. by J. spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath (Houghton Mifflin, 1901), volume IV, 20f.
10 Robert Boyle, The Works of The Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (6 vols, London, 1672), vol. I, p. 356.
11 Ironically, it was to be the whole-number arithmetical laws of chemical reactions that would provide, some centuries later, the most direct evidence for the atomic theory of matter.
6 SIMON SCHAFFER
CHARGED ATMOSPHERES: PROMETHEAN SCIENCE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY
Simon Schaffer is Professor of History of Science at Cambridge University and Trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry. His books include Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (with Stephen Shapin) and in 2006 he presented the BBC4 history of science series Light Fantastic.
EXPERIMENTS AND MATHEMATICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WORLD SEEM FAMILIAR PARTS OF SCIENCE. A CENTURY AFTER IT GOT GOING, THE ROYAL SOCIETY WAS ALSO DEEPLY COMMITTED TO ANOTHER FAMILIAR OBLIGATION OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS: ADVICE TO THE GOVERNMENT. AND AS SIMON SCHAFFER RELATES, IT WAS ALREADY RAISING A VERY MODERN QUESTION – WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH, WHOSE EVIDENCE SHOULD BE TRUSTED?
It is not without Reason, that Norwich has been called the City of Wonders; if we examine that great Collection of Miracles, the Transactions of the Royal Society, we shall find more than ten Times as many strange and wonderful Events dated from this City as from any City of the World. The strangest Things that can be devised are of all others the fittest for the Entertainment of the Royal Society.1
In search of a key moment in the story of the last 350 years of science and of the Royal Society, I’ve chosen an eighteenth-century and East Anglian episode of Promethean science. I use this term to mean an experimental enterprise that mixes a vaulting ambition to safeguard humanity against a major threat with the troubling hazards of following this science’s recipes. The episode grabs attention because we also live in an age when expert disagreement is wrongly treated as a sign of fatal ignorance and when it’s hard to make space for all the groups who care about the sciences’ direction. The problem lies in the relation between matters of fact, powerful because they seem to escape from human interests, and matters of concern, which count because people find them so interesting. That relation is the theme of this chapter. There’s local detail and lots of talk in this tale. The private life of public sciences is where we best see why we should not fear if Fellows fight. This otherwise forgotten moment of fireballs and flooded drains is at least dramatic: 12 June 1781, a dozen miles south-east of Norwich at the Heckingham House of Industry, then a recently built workhouse for the rural poor. Here’s what happened, as far as I can tell.
It was a Sunday, the Lord’s Day. After a showery Norfolk morning under a harsh south-westerly wind, the couple of hundred residents were given their usual Sunday dinner of meat, dumplings and beer. Between two and three in the afternoon a severe thunderstorm came up, with violent lightning and hail. Rain flooded the front courtyard. Just as the sky was clearing and the wind began to drop, the inmates heard a loud explosion and three of them fainted. A sheet of fire entered their rooms and, so they said, even came up to their waists. A woman at the dining-hall door saw three fireballs fall into the court, others saw them at the corner of the House and towards the east wing. Within a couple of minutes the corner of the south-east roof near the stables was burning. At least seven men worked quickly to save the building by digging a hole in the nearest part of the flooded courtyard to get water to extinguish the flames. The stroke had already smashed windows, raised the lead gutters and broken tiles and bricks. The men
removed more bricks and lead to get at the smouldering roof beams. Eventually, the fire was out. Within a few days, local glaziers, carpenters and bricklayers had fixed most of the damage. An ironmonger from nearby Bungay was paid to repair the sharply pointed iron rods rising high above each of the eight chimneys. He’d installed these lightning rods at the House just four years earlier. Three weeks later the gentry of the management committee voted cash rewards to the men whose efforts had saved its House of Industry after the dreadful lightning strike.
I know all this because of the many reports of the events at Heckingham gathered during the next eight months, including a very detailed account assembled by a couple of Fellows of the Royal Society sent to Norfolk to find out exactly what had happened. Before this inquisitive journey to the House of Industry, the Royal Society Fellowship had to rely on hearsay, with all its typical problems of trust and credibility. ‘I cannot hear of any persons seeing it at the instant it happened’, reported one of their Norwich correspondents, though he had reason to believe that ‘it would soon have destroyed the whole building’.2 This episode illuminates the fundamental relation in the history of the sciences between what people say and who they are. Much of the best-known science relies on judging others’ stories. Three days after the publication of The Origin of Species Darwin wrote to Thomas Henry Huxley recalling an informative evening in a South London ‘gin-palace amongst a set of pigeon fanciers’. Darwin told Huxley that ‘the difficulty is to know what to trust’.3 Knowing something of the storyteller helps in assessing the worth of the story. In the eighteenth century there were now stylish barometers in the houses of the gentry and some of the middling sort. But in rural society many were expert at reading the sky for signs; most still got their long-range weather forecasts from their pocket almanacs, based on planetary aspects and traditional lore. I can learn a little of the Norfolk weather almost twenty-three decades ago thanks to the work of the modern Climatic Research Unit, now based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The unit’s long-term data show that on 17 June 1781 a threatening low-pressure region dominated the atmosphere above south-east England and had done so for a fortnight. By these modern scientific standards, nothing meteorologically unfamiliar seems to have taken place at Heckingham that summer.
In other respects that season’s wider world seems strangely familiar. The summer was distressingly wet. An increasingly unpopular Westminster government soldiered on with a reduced majority before being thrown out the following spring. Shares were in trouble, unemployment rising and the economy in crisis. British troops overseas were enmeshed in a long-running war against radical insurgents – before surrendering to American and French forces at Yorktown in Virginia in October 1781. The following March, all the bells of Norwich, the second largest town in the country, rang out to mark the prospects of peace. The witty and learned Edward Gibbon published two more volumes of his history of a great empire’s decline and fall. The papers were full of celebrity gossip, mainly about disreputable actresses and politicians’ mistresses. Shopkeepers touted new gadgets such as fountain pens and automatic clocks. In July 1781 Norwich even hosted an auction of ‘every article curious and rare’ brought back from the late and glorious Captain James Cook’s voyages into the Pacific Ocean: ‘shells, cloaks, helmets, capes and necklaces curiously wrought with feathers’.4
Public taste for knowledge and novelty, however exotic or dubious, was evident everywhere during those months. In Norwich that summer journals puffed lectures by the notorious therapist Dr James Graham on electric sex. One Norwich onlooker was astonished that this ‘impudent empiric’ imagined he could restore virility by ‘the addition of an atmosphere charged with electrical particles and this proposal was privately defended by many persons of information as perfectly philosophical’.5 A professional musician, William Herschel, had just announced what some reckoned must be a new planet to be named George in honour of His Majesty. We now call it Uranus. In July 1781 the Norfolk newspapers reported this ‘new discovery of an orb behind the Sun’, but worried that ‘at a certain period it will burst’.6 That summer brought news of the Scottish engineer James Watt in Birmingham who’d developed a new mechanism for getting rotational motion out of a vertical steam engine. In London it was said the experiments of a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, Henry Cavendish, obtained pure water by sparking a mixture of airs. At a coffee house near St Paul’s Cathedral, a regular club met during the early summer of 1781 to watch the instrument maker Edward Nairne show off his new electric pistol.
Meanwhile, the Royal Society was settling into its plush if somewhat cramped new quarters at Somerset House on the Thames. Cavendish and Nairne were already Fellows, while Herschel and Watt soon would be. Dr Graham never was. Though the Society’s rooms were no longer where experimental inquiry happened, membership certainly added lustre. ‘Wherever I come’, one travelling lecturer and instrument maker had plaintively written, ‘I am constantly asked, if I am a Fellow of the Royal Society? And I as constantly find it no small disadvantage to say, No.’ 7 The advantages of Society membership didn’t flow from the high status of scientists. The Royal Society contained no scientists, because there was no such thing in 1781. The Society’s status depended on late eighteenth-century social order. Ironmongers, bricklayers, glaziers and the women at the workhouse, whose parts in the Heckingham events were so salient, were not generally credited as informants by Royal Society gentlemen. There were no women among its Fellows and wouldn’t be until 1945. The Society was a focus of debate and a target of satire. The irascible botanist John Hill, whose marvellous remarks on Norwich provide my epigraph, suggested the Society should be displaced by a more efficient Royal Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society’s President, the Lincolnshire landowner, man-about-town and Captain Cook’s former botanising travel companion Joseph Banks, had just been honoured with a baronetcy. Candidate Fellows were vetted at one of his weekly breakfasts, then dined at the Society’s supper club. A London wit cruelly put words into Banks’ mouth: ‘untitled members are mere swine: / I wish for princes on my list to shine. / I’ll have a company of stars and strings; / I’ll have a proud society of kings!’ 8 Within eighteen months civil war erupted at Somerset House between the President and those who reckoned he was turning the Society into ‘a cabinet of trifling curiosities’.9 In at least one respect the Society’s concerns that summer match ours. Banks’ men sought to use their powers to influence the British government with evidence-based public knowledge. Which takes us back to the Norfolk thunderstorm.
It was the Heckingham lightning rods that caused the furore. The rods were supposed to save the House from damage but had failed. They might even have helped cause the strike. There was disagreement about the details of the storm, the strike and the behaviour of the lightning rods. When installed at the House of Industry in 1777 by the Bungay ironmonger, a man with the resonant name of John Bobbitt, these rods embodied state-of-the-art experiments, so were newsworthy and dodgy. But surely it was easy to tell whom to trust about the June 1781 events? Simply check whether a story matched the relevant authorities’ reliable knowledge about how lightning behaved and rods worked. But this authority and this knowledge were exactly the matter of dispute. The Fellows of the Royal Society had been involved in two decades of argument about the behaviour of lightning rods. The Heckingham event was seen as ‘an experiment where a house armed with eight pointed conductors had been set fire to by lightning’.10 Yet for the strike to be a worthy experiment, Society Fellows already had to know whose story to believe. But to know whom to believe, they had to know how the experiment should run.
To resolve this apparently intractable puzzle, the Fellows had to rely on their deep sense of who should be trusted: gentlemen were judged more reliable than servants, local worthies more credible than the poor and indigent. So they commissioned stories, drawings and three-dimensional models from men they already had reasons to trust. Perhaps these accounts would settle the matter without having to be on the spot. Un
like the names of the workhouse inmates, the Society recorded exactly who these valued correspondents were. They included Samuel Cooper, one of the Heckingham overseers, an eminent doctor of divinity and a wealthy landlord. He’d already sent the Society thunderstorm reports from Norfolk. The Fellows also heard from Dixon Gamble, a merchant and town steward from Bungay; from George Cadogan Morgan, a Welsh radical of sophisticated philosophical interests and fierce politics who’d become a unitarian preacher at Norwich’s famous Octagon Chapel; and from that city’s principal bookseller Abraham Brook, who marketed electrical and optical instruments in Norfolk. These gentlemen had apparently scoured the building and interviewed the poor inmates, the reliability of whose recollections they barely accepted. During these interviews, they worried about the tale of the spectacular fireballs reported by ‘one of the cripples in the House of Industry, a middle-aged woman’, then wondered ‘if any credit could be given to the testimony of such a person in a matter like this’.11 According to Morgan, who quizzed Heckingham’s residents soon after the strike, ‘the contradictory absurdities which they asserted and maintained, are scarcely conceivable’.12
By the year’s end these confused reports got to London. The effect was almost as explosive as the original strike. If the best technique for preserving buildings against lightning were in question because of some Norfolk oddity, this mattered to the government. The Heckingham stories soon reached the ears of the King, and through him the Board of Ordnance, one of the largest state departments, supplier of military munitions for the American War. Based at the Tower of London, the Board was concerned with the protection of its arsenals against fire. Ordnance officers heard about the apparent failure of the Heckingham lightning rods in December 1781: ‘the whole Board are much alarmed’.13 The Royal Society seemed the obvious organisation to contact, because they had a long track record in these matters. Over Christmas the Board’s secretary wrote to Joseph Banks. This was ‘a matter of the highest importance’, but ‘no authentic account has yet come to the knowledge of the Royal Society’.14 Since the stories they got from Norfolk were so confused and the details were such a matter of concern, within a few days Banks and his Somerset House colleagues decided to send a pair of Fellows to Norfolk to investigate.
