The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  From the greater strength and vivacity of the flame of a candle, in this pure air, it may be conjectured, that it might be peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid cases, when the common air would not be sufficient to carry off the phlogistic putrid effluvium fast enough. But, perhaps, we may also infer from these experiments, that though pure dephlogisticated air might be very useful as medicine, it might not be so proper for us in the usual healthy state of the body: for, as a candle burns out much faster in dephlogisticated than in common air, so we might, as may be said, live out too fast, and the animal powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air. A moralist, at least, may say, that the air which nature has provided for us is as good as we deserve.

  My reader will not wonder, that, after having ascertained the superior goodness of dephlogisticated air by mice living in it, and the other tests above mentioned, I should have the curiosity to taste it myself. I have gratified that curiosity, by breathing it, drawing it through a glass-syphon, and, by this means, I reduced a large jar full of it to the standard of common air. The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air; but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself have had the privilege of breathing it …

  Being at Paris in the October following, and knowing that there were several very eminent chemists in that place … I frequently mentioned my surprise at the kind of air which I had got from this preparation to Mr Lavoisier, Mr le Roy, and several other philosophers, who honoured me with their notice in that city; and who, I daresay, cannot fail to recollect the circumstance.

  The eminent French chemist Antoin-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), to whom Priestley divulged his discovery, understood the theoretical implications of it, as Priestley did not. Lavoisier had already announced, in 1772, that he was ‘destined to bring about a revolution in physics and chemistry’. Unlike the older scientists he realized that atmospheric air was not an ‘element’ but a compound of gases, and he identified Priestley’s discovery as the active component of air for which he had been searching. He called it ‘oxygen’ (Greek: ‘acid former’), in the belief that all acids contained it. In 1783 he made public his complete renovation of chemical theory, and Mme Lavoisier ceremonially burned the books of the phlogiston theorists to mark the new era. Unfortunately Lavoisier, who had been a tax-collector under the ancien régime‚ was guillotined at the time of the French Revolution.

  Source: Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, London, 1775.

  Discovering Uranus

  The planet Uranus was discovered by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822). The son of an army musician, Herschel came to England in 1757 to follow a musical career, as teacher, composer and performer, and became organist of a fashionable chapel in Bath. An amateur astronomer, he constructed new and powerful telescopes, grinding the mirrors himself, and it was through one of those that, in 1781, he saw Uranus, the first planet to be discovered since prehistoric times. Fame, and a £200-per-year pension from George III, quickly followed, and Herschel gave up music for full-time astronomy. He developed a theory of the evolution of stars, and was the first to hypothesize that nebulae (misty white patches among the stars, visible through a telescope) were clouds of individual stars, forming separate galaxies.

  Uranus takes 84.01 years to orbit the sun. It is an extremely cold planet, and is thought to consist of a rocky core and an ice mantle 8,000 kilometres thick. Nine of its twenty rings were discovered in 1977; the rest were photographed by the Voyager 2 probe in 1986.

  Though not a very good poet, Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was singular in that he wrote a modern epic poem about the progress of science, The Torch-Bearers. In the following extract (heavily indebted to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues), Noyes imagines Herschel’s thoughts while conducting a concert in Bath.

  My periwig’s askew, my ruffle stained

  With grease from my new telescope!

  Ach, to-morrow

  How Caroline will be vexed, although she grows

  Almost as bad as I, who cannot leave

  My workshop for one evening.

  I must give

  One last recital at St Margaret’s,

  And then – farewell to music.

  Who can lead

  Two lives at once?

  Yet – it has taught me much,

  Thrown curious lights upon our world, to pass

  From one life to another. Much that I took

  For substance turns to shadow. I shall see

  No throngs like this again; wring no more praise

  Out of their hearts; forego that instant joy

  – Let those who have not known it count it vain –

  When human souls at once respond to yours.

  Here, on the brink of fortune and of fame,

  As men account these things, the moment comes

  When I must choose between them and the stars;

  And I have chosen.

  Handel, good old friend,

  We part to-night. Hereafter, I must watch

  That other wand, to which the worlds keep time.

  What has decided me? That marvellous night

  When – ah, how difficult it will be to guide,

  With all these wonders whirling through my brain!

  After a Pump-room concert I came home

  Hot-foot, out of the fluttering sea of fans,

  Coquelicot-ribboned belles and periwigged beaux,

  To my Newtonian telescope.

  The design

  Was his; but more than half the joy my own,

  Because it was the work of my own hand,

  A new one, with an eye six inches wide,

  Better than even the best that Newton made

  Then, as I turned it on the Gemini,

  And the deep stillness of those constant lights,

  Castor and Pollux, lucid pilot-stars,

  Began to calm the fever of my blood,

  I saw, O, first of all mankind I saw

  The disk of my new planet gliding there

  Beyond our tumults, in that realm of peace.

  What will they christen it? Ach – not Herschel, no!

  Not Georgium Sidus, as I once proposed;

  Although he scarce could lose it, as he lost

  That world in ’seventy-six.

  Indeed, so far

  From trying to tax it, he has granted me

  How much? – two hundred golden pounds a year,

  In the great name of science, – half the cost

  Of one state-coach, with all those worlds to win! …

  To-night,

  – The music carries me back to it again! –

  I see beyond this island universe,

  Beyond our sun, and all those other suns

  That throng the Milky Way, far, far beyond,

  A thousand little wisps, faint nebulae,

  Luminous fans and milky streaks of fire;

  Some like soft brushes of electric mist

  Streaming from one bright point; others that spread

  And branch, like growing systems; others discrete,

  Keen, ripe, with stars in clusters; others drawn back

  By central forces into one dense death,

  Thence to be kindled into fire, reborn,

  And scattered abroad once more in a delicate spray

  Faint as the mist by one bright dewdrop breathed

  At dawn, and yet a universe like our own;

  Each wisp a universe, a vast galaxy

  Wide as our night of stars.

  The Milky Way

  In which our sun is drowned, to these would seem

  Less than to us their faintest drift of haze;

  Yet we, who are borne on one dark grain of dust

  Around one indistinguishable spark

  Of s
tar-mist, lost in one lost feather of light,

  Can by the strength of our own thought, ascend

  Through universe after universe; trace their growth

  Through boundless time, their glory, their decay;

  And, on the invisible road of law, more firm

  Than granite, range through all their length and breadth,

  Their height and depth, past, present, and to come.

  Alfred Noyes, The Torch-Bearers, London, Sheed & Ward, 1937.

  The Big Bang and Vegetable Love

  Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of Charles, was a doctor, inventor and poet. He helped to found the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which provided the main intellectual impetus for the Industrial Revolution in England. Among its members – and Erasmus’s friends – were Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, of steam-engine fame, and Joseph Priestley (see p. 40). Erasmus’s inventions included a speaking-machine, an artificial bird with flapping wings (which remained at the drawing-board stage), a sun-operated device for opening cucumber-frames, and a horizontal windmill, which was used to grind colours at his friend Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery.

  Over half a century before his grandson’s The Origin of Species, Erasmus expounded a theory of evolution, declaring that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament’, during a time-span of ‘millions of ages’. He was the first scientist to analyse plant nutrition and photosynthesis, and to explain the process of cloud formation.

  He took up poetry-writing in his fifties, and his two-part poem The Botanic Garden anticipates the ‘big-bang’ theory of the universe. The first event in the cosmos, according to Erasmus’s account, is an explosion, sparked off by God saying ‘Let there be light’, whereupon:

  … the mass starts into a million suns;

  Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,

  And second planets issue from the first.

  Erasmus defends his explosion theory in one of the poem’s many ‘Philosophical Notes’:

  It may be objected that if the stars had been projected from a Chaos by explosions, that they must have returned again into it from the known laws of gravitation; this however would not happen, if the whole Chaos, like grains of gunpowder, was exploded at the same time, and dispersed through infinite space at once, or in quick succession, in every possible direction.

  One of the ‘second planets’ to ‘issue from the first’ in Erasmus’s account is the moon, which separates from the earth leaving a hole now occupied by the South Pacific. The Goddess of Botany, accompanied by various Gnomes, Sylphs and Nymphs, is a witness of these cosmic disturbances, and she reminds the Gnomes of the alarm they felt at the moon’s emergence:

  Gnomes! how you shrieked! when through the troubled air

  Roared the fierce din of elemental war;

  When rose the continents, and sunk the main,

  And Earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.

  Gnomes! how you gazed! when from her wounded side,

  Where now the South Sea heaves its waste of tide,

  Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car,

  Circling the solar orb, a sister star,

  Dimpled with vales, with shining hills embossed,

  And rolled round Earth her airless realms of frost.

  The notion that the moon originated by fission from the earth, which has found some supporters in the twentieth century, became known as the ‘Darwinian theory’, not because of Erasmus but because of his great-grandson Sir George Darwin, who worked out a mathematical basis for the idea.

  The second part of Erasmus’s poem, The Loves of the Plants (1789), ministered to the craze for botany in the 1770s and 1780s. Captain Cook’s famous voyage in the Endeavour had brought back to England, via Botany Bay, 1,300 hitherto unknown species of plants, thanks to the labours of young Joseph Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook. The founding of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, celebrated in Erasmus’s poem, was a monument to this new enthusiasm for greenery. The great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) had introduced the system of modern plant classification in the middle years of the eighteenth century, and Erasmus translated some of his works. The Loves of the Plants personifies 90 different species, and recounts their sex-lives, paying strict attention to Linnaeus’s botanical descriptions:

  Sweet blooms Genista in the myrtle shade,

  And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid.

  Two knights before thy fragrant altar bend,

  Adored Melissa! and two squires attend.

  Meadia’s soft chains five suppliant beaux confess,

  And hand in hand the laughing belle address;

  Alike to all, she bows with wanton air,

  Rolls her dark eye, and waves her golden hair.

  What this means, as Erasmus’s notes explain, is that the flower of the Broom (Genista) has ten males (stamens) and one female (pistil); the Balm (Melissa) has four males and one female, with two of the males standing higher than the other two; and the American Cowslip (Meadia) has five males and one female, with the males’ anthers touching one another.

  Erasmus’s romances become more complicated as the plants’ male and female organs increase in number. Lychnis, for example (Ragged Robin), has ten males and five females, the males and females being found on different plants, often at some distance from each other. ‘When the females arrive at their maturity’, Erasmus recounts, ‘they rise above the petals as if looking abroad for their distant husbands. The scarlet ones contribute much to the beauty of our meadows in May and June.’ Versified, this becomes:

  Five sister-nymphs to join Diana’s train

  With thee, fair Lychnis! vow – but vow in vain;

  Beneath one roof resides the virgin band,

  Flies the fond swain, and scorns his offered hand;

  But when soft hours on breezy pinions move,

  And smiling May attunes her lute to love,

  Each wanton beauty, tricked in all her grace

  Shakes the bright dew-drops from her blushing face;

  In gay undress displays her rival charms,

  And calls her wondering lovers to her arms.

  Erasmus’s notes abound with curious botanical information. Of Madder, a plant that yields a red dye, he records: ‘If mixed with the food of young pigs or chickens, it colours their bones red. If they are fed alternate fortnights with a mixture of madder and with their usual food alone, their bones will consist of concentric circles of white and red’; of Menispermum (a climbing tropical plant), Erasmus notes that its berries, dropped into water, make fish drunk.

  The poem correctly predicts several technological developments – among them submarines, which will exploit Priestley’s discovery of oxygen.

  Led by the Sage, lo! Britain’s sons shall guide

  Huge Sea-Balloons beneath the tossing tide;

  The diving castles, roofed with spheric glass,

  Ribbed with strong oak, and barred with bolts of brass,

  Buoyed with pure air shall endless tracks pursue,

  And Priestley’s hand the vital flood renew.

  Rather surprisingly, Erasmus was an extremely popular and influential poet. Young Wordsworth imitated him. Coleridge called him ‘the first literary character in Europe’, and his great fantasy-poems, Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, borrow scenes and phrases from Erasmus. Shelley, his keenest disciple, took from him the idea of combining science and poetry in famous lyrics like ‘The Cloud’ and ‘The Sensitive Plant’, and followed his lead in attacking superstition, tyrants, slavery, war and alcohol.

  Source: Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 1789–91.

  Taming the Speckled Monster

  Smallpox is a killer disease that has been compared in virulence to the Black Death. Until the eighteenth century epidemics were frequent. Survivors were often blinded or disfigured. A mode of partial immunization common in China, India and the near East was to inject some of the pus from a smallpox vesicle into the body of a
healthy person. The English bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who had herself been scarred by a smallpox attack two years earlier) discovered this in 1717 while resident in Adrianople, where her husband was British ambassador, and wrote to her friend Sarah Chiswell with the news.

  A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they gave it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation. Every Autumn in the month of September, when the great Heat is abated, people send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small pox. They make partys for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly 15 or 16 together) the old Woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox and asks what veins you please to have open’d. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lye upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens 4 or 5 veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the Middle of the forehead, in each arm and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross, but this has a very ill Effect, all these wounds leaving little Scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who chuse to have them in the legs or that part of the arm that is conceal’d. The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day and are in perfect health till the 8th. Then the fever begins to seize ’em and they keep their beds 2 days, very seldom 3. They have very rarely above 20 or 30 in their faces, which never mark, and in 8 days time they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded there remains running sores during the Distemper, which I don’t doubt is a great releife to it. Every year thousands undergo this Operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that they take the Small pox here by way of diversion as they take the Waters in other Countrys. There is no example of any one that has dy’d in it, and you may believe I am very well satisfy’d of the safety of the Experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little Son. I am Patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it if I knew any one of ’em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps if I live to return I may, however, have courrage to war with ’em.