The Making of Modern Science E-Book

David Knight

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: PHSS - Polity History of Science series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 730

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word 'scientist' was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. Bringing together the people, events, and discoveries of this exciting period into a lively narrative, this book will be essential reading both for students of the history of science and for anyone interested in the foundations of the world as we know it today.

Leseprobe

THE MAKING OF MODERN SCIENCE

THE MAKING OF MODERN SCIENCE

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, MEDICINE AND MODERNITY: 1789–1914

DAVID KNIGHT

polity

Copyright © David Knight 2009

The right of David Knight to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5799-8

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface: The Age of Science

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Approaching the Past

  1   Science in and after 1789

  2   Science and its Languages

  3   Applied Science

  4   Intellectual Excitement

  5   Healthy Lives

  6   Laboratories

  7   Bodies, Minds and Spirits

  8   The Time of Triumph

  9   Science and National Identities

10   Method and Heresy

11   Cultural Leadership

12   Into the New Century

Timeline

Notes and References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.   Dens for the wild beasts at the Paris zoo

  2.   Molecular models: A.W. Hofmann

  3.   Blue and yellow macaw

  4.   Pattern plate, annotated lithograph

  5.   Mr Walker’s improved steam engine, 1802

  6.   Sale catalogue of 2,665 of James Watt’s books (1849)

  7.   An intricately designed fossil creature – exploded drawing of a fossil ‘stone lily’

  8.   Buckland lecturing in Oxford, 1822

  9.   Dinosaur footprint

10.   Photographic illustration: C. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

11.   Notes taken by Robert Pughe, a medical student, beside text

12.   Portable laboratory, by Faraday

13.   Teaching laboratory at University College, London, 1846

14.   The latest thing – a section through the new Berlin chemical laboratory, 1866

15.   Phrenological heads

16.   Our cousin the gorilla being fitted for a suit

17.   Skeletons of the primate family

18.   The Queen and Prince Albert inspecting machinery

19.   Warning signals for impending bad weather

20.   Lord Rosse’s six-foot telescope

21.   Spiral nebula

22.   A naval survey voyage – burying a shipmate beneath the Arctic ice, under a portentous ‘mock Moon’

23.   Lecture theatre of the London Institution, 1828

24.   A field naturalist at work, pond-dipping

25.   Lecture prospectus, Royal Institution, 1825

26.   Prospectus for the new weekly journal, Nature, 1869

27.   Popular science and its nightmarish possibilities

28.   Facing up to the astonishing prospect of women graduates

29.   The prestige of science equivocally indicated in an advertisement for cocoa

30.   Cathode rays

PREFACE: THE AGEOF SCIENCE

Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the label ‘scientist’ was one of the most striking. In 1789 there had been natural philosophers and natural historians, and at a slightly less gentlemanly level, chemists, anatomists and instrument makers. Their childish curiosity continued into adulthood, when solving problems and finding explanations could be a leisure activity, maybe sociable. But science was, as Humphry Davy (1778–1829) put it to the young Michael Faraday (1791–1867) in 1812, a harsh mistress from the pecuniary point of view. Outside medicine, where scientific knowledge might help as a back-up to the all-important bedside manner and clinical experience, science was a vocation or hobby rather than a job or profession. The word ‘scientist’ was invented in 1833: the thing came later.

Science required skills: mechanical, mathematical, manual, logical, observational and organizational ability were in various degrees necessary. Medicine and mathematics were taught in universities, but in 1789 there were no degrees in science (or indeed in modern history, or modern languages and literature): Greek and Latin classics formed a liberal and traditional education for mandarins, and for the scholarship boys who would become clergy, tutors, judges and schoolmasters. Engineers and the majority of medical men learned on the job, as apprentices; and science similarly might best be learned, as by Faraday with Davy, in a kind of informal apprenticeship. There were in France, Prussia and Russia a few salaried posts to compete for in Academies of Sciences, but generally patronage was the key – in 1789 usually from the nobility and gentry, and by 1914 from established scientists. Those who scorned patronage, or could not find it, might live by their pens, as Grub Street hacks, or by giving public lectures;1 but for most, unless they were independently well-off like Charles Darwin (1809–82), some kind of profession was necessary to keep the wolf from the door, and science had to be a spare-time activity.

The science student was invented in the 1790s with the founding of the École Polytechnique in revolutionary France, entered through competitive examination, with formal courses in science and engineering taught by academicians active in research. But the graduate student came from Germany, where Justus von Liebig (1803–73) at the small University of Giessen opened a teaching laboratory in the 1820s and began PhD programmes in chemistry – the first notable research school.2 The German model of the research university soon spread over Europe, and in the second half of the century reached Britain and the USA.3 Graduates found jobs in teaching and also in industry and commerce. The number of established posts in universities and technical institutions (including government laboratories) increased rapidly, especially after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when the better-educated nation won.4 From this point ‘applied science’, long promised, actually began to deliver the goods. With qualifications came group solidarity,5 career structures, professions and social recognition. The scientist was no longer an absent-minded virtuoso or dilettante but a valuable citizen transforming economies and world-views. This consolidation happened at the same time as nationalities in Europe were cohering, and Australians began to stop thinking of themselves as Britons who happened to be in the southern hemisphere.6

Science is thus a practical, intellectual and social activity that became momentous during the nineteenth century. We must therefore be aware not just of geniuses and their discoveries but of scientific societies: open, learned, professional, formal or informal (maybe just networks), and in all these categories cutting across lines of class, region and nation, and increasingly specialized. Science was both public knowledge and meritocratic, a route to social mobility and a vehicle of modernity. Scientific education might be critical, with more or less conscious consideration of ‘scientific method’, but often it was and is dogmatic, perhaps necessarily so, to prevent today’s students falling into yesterday’s errors.7 There are right answers in elementary, established science: the teaching may be hands-on but cannot be open-ended, and there is perforce much to be learned more or less by rote. Notoriously, simplified explanations must be ‘unlearned’ as students progress. Overall, a way of thinking is promoted – cautious and sceptical, involving ideal situations, controlled conditions as in a laboratory, models and general laws. Scientists wrestle with questions difficult to answer, and very occasionally with questions difficult to ask, but they hope for answers that are definite or have definite probabilities. This seems very different from ethical or political questions. The supposed ‘two cultures’ and ‘science wars’ that set science against other ways of thinking, and the scientism that supposes scientific methods are the only valid ones in any field, emphasize this difference.

In the nineteenth century science made a huge impact on the public, or publics, as it impinged on food production, transport, communications, fashion, art, literature, politics, religion, and even on national prestige and confidence. Although many were religious believers, scientists became part of a clerisy, a secular intellectual elite taking over the roles of prophet and instructor previously played by the clergy.8 Not everybody was happy about this. Grim industrial cities, mines and factories appalled observers, but it was through improved technology that they were bettered, as governments gradually dropped laissez-faire attitudes and occupied themselves with clean water, sewers, factory inspection, legislative control of the purity of food and drugs, and the safety of railways and shipping. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), taking issue with the confidence of the poet of Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), and of Davy, struck contemporaries as just another gothic-horror novel; but its vision of the scientist as a sorcerer’s apprentice, playing God, has proved to be astonishingly resonant.9 It provided a counterweight to the mass of writings, lectures, great exhibitions, botanic gardens and illustrations emphasizing the progressive and beneficent nature of science.10 Both popularization of science and strong reactions against it in occultism, magic and spiritualism, as well as opposition to vaccination and vivisection, were prominent features of the nineteenth century. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), co-discoverer of natural selection, was unusual among scientists in managing to embrace all these things, along with socialism.11

Popular science was not always what academicians would have wanted: phrenology, mesmerism and animal magnetism were more popular than the austere and exact sciences (and indeed the last of them remains popular, though the theory was exploded by Benjamin Franklin, 1706–90). We must also not forget, in our enthusiasm for thoughts never thought before and sights never seen, those at the receiving end of science, who paid the price for its progress. Traditional values and ways of life were lost. New explosives such as gun-cotton blew up and killed people making it, chemical works poisoned people and animals living nearby, officials classified people (perhaps as atavistic or degenerate),12 and many found their skills becoming useless in the face of mechanization. Triumphs of metropolitan science like synthesizing indigo, and growing rubber and quinine at Kew so that seedlings could be sent to plantations in the colonies, damaged the economies of India, Brazil and Peru where the plants originated. Those far from centres of science in Europe and North America were expected to provide, as it were, raw materials upon which those at ‘home’ could reason, and to whom credit would be given. Theorizing, and even naming, was reserved for those in metropolitan centres, to whom provincials and colonials should defer. Only at the end of this period were Asians and Africans able to play the full part in science that their ancestors once had. Similarly, women were widely excluded from the active end of science during this period of separate spheres (She knows but matters of the house, / And he, he knows a thousand things13); but one reason for the word ‘scientist’ displacing ‘man of science’ was that by 1900 women were at last able to break in and be recognized.

The nineteenth century was an age of technological progress, of empire-building, of new nations, new specialisms and professions, new possibilities, and new understanding of the natural world. In a brief telling of this age of science, much must be left out. Science has had its context as well as its content; I have tried here to preserve a balance. In looking at science, I believe that we can easily tip too much towards the content, the theories, experiments and creative individuals, and away from the social and historical context – the ethical and religious beliefs, the educational systems, the societies and clubs, the publishers, the popularizers and the publics. Accordingly, while I have tried to do justice to the intellectual aspects of science, some would have wanted more about evolution and conservation of energy, those great generalizations that brought a new coherence to science in the 1850s. Evolution and energy do indeed permeate the story, but I have tried to place them in contexts of progress, religious doubt, ethical debates, scientists’ claims for status and respect, and improvements to dyes, lighting, transport, explosives and battleships. In the early part of the nineteenth century, science lagged behind technology, and men of science sought to explain how inventions worked. But science then got ahead, and applied science became the key to new industries. In the later years of the century, ‘pure’ science was distinguished from applied: but really it is hopeless to try to separate science, technology and medicine – all aspects of one intellectual, practical and social activity that we are concerned with here. Interpreting nature involved thinking about what to do with that knowledge. This is well exemplified in chemistry, the science most studied in the nineteenth century, vital in medicine and in industry, the source of wealth and power, which gave us atomic theory, molecular models, an understanding of matter and its relations to electricity, and photography. I have tried to give chemistry its due in the story.

Science, as an element of Western culture14, transformed the world in the nineteenth century, but we cannot focus upon its context everywhere. Western Europe has to be the centre of our story: and while I have tried to do justice to France, the centre of things in 1789, and to Germany, the most important scientific nation in 1914, I have used examples from Britain out of greater familiarity with that context, and more than their cosmic importance warrants. A different perspective would no doubt give a somewhat different picture. The intellectual and practical achievements associated with science, and the interpretation of nature, will naturally fill our story, but the coming of the scientist will be its core. And we shall be looking at how science and scientists were received and perceived, as well as how they were made.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my colleagues in Durham who have invited me to lecture and to give seminar papers, and have listened patiently and suggested new thoughts to me; and to those in the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, the Historical Section of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the British Society for the History of Science and the Geological Society, who have also invited me to hold forth, and given me valuable feedback. I have also benefited much from being invited to lecture to local groups and societies, not specialists in the history of science: such occasions have not only been a great pleasure, but the audiences’ warm welcome, wide and curious knowledge, and demand for a broad view have been a delight.

Many thanks to Leigh Priest, who prepared the very full and efficient index.

This book has had a long gestation, and my family has been extremely patient throughout the pregnancy: I am very grateful.

MAN THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE14

SAY! When the world was new and fresh from the hand of its Maker,

Ere the first modelled frame thrilled with the tremors of life,

Glowed not primeval suns as bright in yon canopied azure,

Day succeeding to day in the same rhythmical march;

Roseate morn, and the fervid noon, and the purple of evening –

Night with her starry robe solemnly sweeping the sky?

Heaved not ocean, as now, to the moon’s mysterious impulse?

Lashed by the tempest’s scourge, rose not its billows in wrath?

Sighed not the breeze through balmy groves, or o’er carpeted verdure

Gorgeous with myriad flowers, lingered and paused in its flight?

Yet what availed, alas! These glorious forms of Creation,

Forms of transcendent might – Beauty with Majesty joined,

None to behold, and none to enjoy, and none to interpret?

Say! Was the WORK wrought out! Say, was the GLORY complete?

What could reflect, though dimly and faint, the INEFFABLE PURPOSE

Which from chaotic powers, Order and Harmony drew?

What but the reasoning spirit, the thought and the faith and the feeling?

What, but the grateful sense, conscious of love and design?

Man sprang forth at the final behest. His intelligent worship

Filled up the void that was left. Nature at length had a soul.

Sir John Herschel

‘Homo, naturæ minister et interpres.’ – Bacon – Herschel’s note

INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING THE PAST

Ours is an epic story. Most people in 1789 saw science as a hobby: but by 1914 they could not doubt that it was a crucial part of ‘Western civilization’, empirical knowledge that not only lay behind material progress, prosperity and power, but had also transformed world-views, fine art and literature, and the way humans thought about themselves and each other – how science was perceived is as important as how it was achieved. This book is the story of how that intellectual and social revolution happened, through a series of themes that follow each other with some chronological rationale. It is not a critical bibliographical essay, but the references will guide anyone who wants to pursue things further and disagree creatively with what they find here. Nevertheless, it is right to begin with an assessment of how we historians have got to where we are, and how we work. Science began with curiosity, through experience in homes, workshops and libraries.1 Taken more seriously, it involves observing, recording, testing, tinkering, pondering, arguing and generalizing, so as to interpret and (within limits) to control nature. It isn’t obvious that anyone should do or take it very seriously. Most people never have. But given that since 1800 more and more people (first in the West, now everywhere) have done so, made careers out of it and transformed the way we live, its history is important for us all. Much history of science was and is written for and by these curious folk, the scientists. Textbooks, especially in chemistry,2 used to contain potted histories. Scientific journals publish reviews of ‘literature’, with bibliographies, sometimes going back many years, on particular topics of current interest to their readers. They also publish elegies or obituaries, to be taken with due doses of caution; and sometimes brief biographies of their readers’ great predecessors. In journals, glossy house magazines and websites, scientific societies often include historical articles, as well as the reminiscences of distinguished elderly scientists, who may also write their memoirs or reprint their essays and addresses. These are augmented by published interviews, sometimes surprisingly candid, with practitioners reflecting upon lives in science.3 Such writings may be inaccessible to outsiders, especially when algebraic or chemical equations feature largely; but if they can forget their training in using the abstract noun and the passive verb, scientists write well – better than many historians of science. Theirs is not the pretentious, turgid academic prose of those trained in the social sciences: like Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)4 and the popularizer William Paley (1743–1805),5 scientists writing for the public generally try never to write an obscure sentence, though they don’t always succeed.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, therefore, history of science and medicine was mostly written by scientists, insiders describing their world and its past. Like lawyers, clergy and other professionals, they dwelt chiefly upon precedents, case studies and examples useful to them that were instructive to their readers. Alchemy, the earth-centred cosmos, René Descartes’ (1596–1650) planetary vortices, and phlogiston might be discussed as warnings of pitfalls to be avoided, wanderings from the royal road to truth. This was applied history, pragmatic, didactic, placing the student (like the author) in a long and great tradition, and indicating a glorious future. Seeing how we got where we are, ruefully noting defeats but celebrating victories rather than dwelling upon ways not taken or the losers, is reputable if incomplete. And when well done – sometimes by serious historians of science – this approach pays off, yielding a good story, perhaps an epic.6 Humphry Davy, as President of the Royal Society in 1820 soon after the defeat of Napoleon, saw himself as a general in the army of science.7 Military metaphors remain popular: science is a war, against hunger, disease, ignorance and superstition (maybe religion), and intellectual torpor.8 Wars against abstractions can never be won: the show must go on, and on.

WHIG HISTORY

Such history is now, like imperialism, out of academic fashion. It can be uncritical, anecdotal and accessible only to insiders: but the main criticism was that it is ‘Whig’ history. The Whigs were the party that welcomed William of Orange and Mary Stuart in place of King James II in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Very suspicious of royal prerogatives, sympathetic to the Americans’ fight for independence in 1776, a later generation (fearing and detesting inglorious and bloody revolution) pushed through the Reform Bill of 1832, giving votes to the middle classes in the new industrial cities of Britain. The party leader Charles James Fox (1749–1806), in his History of James the Second (a tyrant and arch-villain in Whig eyes),9 and the former Cabinet minister Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) in his best-selling and beautifully written History of England (1848–61), saw history as a great unfolding political drama, gradually leading to representative constitutional government, and foresaw further progress. This is the sort of history that governments would like schoolchildren to learn: things are getting better and better, and the past is viewed through the eyes of the present, with opponents of progress denounced in the terms of a later political correctness. Whig history was itself denounced by Herbert Butterfield in 1931 as contrary to seeing the past as it was, the ideal of historians since Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803),10 and thereafter academic historians have been conscious of losers and suspicious of fine writing.11 Historiographic traditions matter to us because they affect how scientists see each other, and are perceived.

Butterfield also wrote about the origins of modern science, an intellectual revolution that he perceived as perhaps more important than the Renaissance and Reformation so beloved of historians in their categorizations.12 It is curious that this book is just as Whiggish in its celebration of the Scientific Revolution as Fox and Macaulay were in their delight in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the time of the new astronomy of Galileo (1564– 1642) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727), became a great object of study.13 It was also the time of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, with the beginnings of modern philosophy. And historians of science, just emerging as a professional group, found it easy, especially in France, to approach history of science as a branch of intellectual history.14 Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) was the great exemplar,15 in a tradition that went back to William Whewell (1794–1866), an omniscient pundit in Victorian Cambridge. Whewell’s hefty History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) was written to show how method – getting the right end of the stick and the appropriate idea – was crucial in the development of science.16 ‘Inductive epochs’, when a new idea brought disparate observations together, punctuated the development of science, and could (and should) be weighed up by the historian. Whewell thus (rather idiosyncratically) judged the work of Faraday as on balance more important in chemistry than that of Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), usually taken as its founding father. It seemed as if the history and philosophy of science formed one subject, a part of what was more loosely called History of Ideas. Historians neglected traditions messier and more empirical than astronomy, such as medicine, chemistry and natural history – and natural magic, too.17 Revisionists have revealed how very important these things were in early modern science, in an age of geographical discovery, religious and political ferment, and also of witch-hunting in Europe and the USA.18

FLIRTING WITH PHILOSOPHERS

Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) gave a new twist to this philosophical tradition. He perceived the history of science as an alternation of periods of quiet normal science developing within a framework established by an exemplary figure, a Newton or a Lavoisier, that he called a ‘paradigm’, and occasional revolutionary upsets when, after anomalies had accumulated, someone saw that with different assumptions far more could be explained.19 If such people succeeded in persuading their sceptical and conservative contempor– aries and the next generation that they were right, then their ideas became the new paradigm, and the science set off on a new tack. Theirs, then, are the names we remember in the history of science. There was not just one Scientific Revolution, but many, some upsetting more apple-carts than others. This big picture implies a focus upon great men and women, geniuses, and upon brief and dramatic episodes.20 But in fact Kuhn’s emphasis upon the scientific community and the need to convince it helped reinforce the idea of science as public knowledge. Historians, whose special concern is with the particular but who need to lift their eyes from it, were stimulated to look afresh at institutions, their members (in what was called prosopography, or collective biography), rules, activities and publications: in fact, not only at Kuhnian revolutions but at normal science.21

Scientists mostly disliked Kuhn’s view of their activities – normal science could seem a bit like careerism and painting by numbers – and became on the whole less interested in history as syllabuses grew fuller. Then, with the 1960s, we entered the heady days of the DNA spiral, the space race and the promise of nuclear power in the glowing future. They found more attractive the view of the philosopher Karl Popper, in which science was a matter of conjectures and refutations.22 Hypotheses are dreamed up somehow, but are scientific insofar as they are testable. Science is provisional, consisting of generalizations that have survived all attempts so far to refute them. The task of scientists is to test their hypotheses and those of others in the cool light of reason and experiment: they must be sceptical. It may seem psychologically implausible to see scientists actively seeking evidence against their ideas. Indeed, the pattern does not fit actual humans in the past, who defended their views forcefully in sometimes furious debate.23 But it might be a basis for revisionism, always important in history, making heroes of Pope Urban VIII and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce because of their searching questioning of the sun-centred cosmos and of evolution. That would be ironic because Popper intended to distinguish science from other activities, like psychoanalysis or politics (or indeed natural theology), which are not directly falsifiable: his method was a filter to exclude ‘pseudo-science’. Such categorizing may be misleading for the historian, but after all science does have features that make it distinct from other activities, and that is why its history and philosophy are special and worth studying.

Philosophers, not too worried about how actual scientists had behaved, were prepared to ‘rationally reconstruct’ the past,24 and then moved for a time into increasing abstraction, wondering if the existence of a white handkerchief might confirm ‘all ravens are black’, and what might happen if blue and green turned into grue and bleen. Historians of science, who had already found that academic historians were not (despite Butterfield) very open to their advances, now broke off their affair with philosophers also and began a flirtation with sociologists. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), founders of this discipline, had both been much involved in science, and hoped that its route to positive knowledge could be followed in human sciences.25 Comte had seen three stages of thought – religious, metaphysical and then positive – in the development of individuals and of civilization, and this positivism was very attractive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then, in the same context, Marxist ideas – introduced to Anglophone historians of science by the Russian delegation at the Second International Congress for the History of Science in 193126 – proved powerful as well as fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. Bacon in the seventeenth century had written that printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass had made the modern world. Later scholars concerned with big scientific ideas had nevertheless neglected technology, seeing it as inseparable from science but depending on it. Marxists reversed that.

INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL HISTORY?

Historians of science thus found themselves debating how far they should be ‘internal’ or ‘external’ in their emphases. Were scientific advances brought about by people solving problems inherited from their predecessors, dwarfs on the shoulders of giants maybe but able to see a bit further? Or were they consequences of economic and social situations, of a zeitgeist where the individuals concerned were of minor importance and there were practical problems to be solved? Interest in the history of specific sciences over long periods, a feature of both scientists’ history and international congresses, had promoted internalism. The fact of simultaneous discovery in science when the times were ripe, not uncommon even when discoverers are not conscious of being in a race and do not know of each other, favoured externalism. This encouraged focus upon social factors and on the constraints under which scientists operated in different societies, and led, for example, to an illuminating study of the Royal Institution in which Davy and Faraday were portrayed as tools of the ruling class.27 But those of us attracted to history of science through the excitement of ideas, and interested in kinds of minds and what makes individuals tick, could not accept that this was the whole story. The sources (letters, wills, notebooks, sketches, reports, papers, books, specimens, apparatus, buildings, mountains) showed that the development, the content, of science cannot be reduced to, but must not be divorced from, its wider context.28 And sources are for historians what observations, experiments and calculations are for scientists: there, connections are perceived, bright ideas arise and hypotheses are tested.

Partly in reaction to arid debate about internal and external factors, biography with its focus upon individuals entered upon a new lease of life. Not confined to world-historical individuals, Hegelian heroes who defied the ordinary rules, but looking hard also at representative lives, biography in the hands of serious historians of science was much more fun to read than treatises. It used to be the case that writers might separate the science from the life of their subject, in distinct chapters; or write one without the other. Sometimes, as with Priestley’s very long entry in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography, where different authors wrote on the chemist and the cleric, it seems as though they were describing two people of the same name who lived at the same time. Nevertheless, getting the balance right between the science that made a person famous, and the ordinary things that made him or her typical, setting the scene without overloading it, is not straightforward.29 Here also there is a problem with sales. Lives of Galileo and Darwin are legion, and yet publishers cry out for new ones. What’s new about a new biography is a new biographer, and that interaction is important, but sometimes that’s all that can be said about it. Lives of scientists less prominent in the public mind do not sell – unless, as with the surprising case of John Harrison (1693–1776) in Longitude,30 a story of pertinacity and persistence in the face of inertia in high places can be made into a drama. Nevertheless, recently we have had important biographies of Darwin’s ally Wallace, and of his even-less-known opponent John Phillips (1800–74);31 and because science and technology have been routes to social mobility, biographers since Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) have made them accessible through the genre of prospering self-help. The converse, unfair neglect, has also promoted interest in Gregor Mendel (1822–84),32 the pioneer of genetics, whose sad story is a nightmare for scientists who feel disregarded, and an encouragement to cranks who hope for ultimate recognition (though posterity never did anything for anyone).

Historians feel queasy about biography in reaction to hero-worshipping Victorians like Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), but do write them, to our great profit because they bring out the full context and force us to appreciate that people in the past lived under different circumstances with different expectations – the past is indeed a foreign country, and ‘science’ has by no means always been the same thing. Biographies of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) – making his way in the world, involved far more than Darwin in public science and taking on the religious establishment – have wonderfully illuminated the world of Victorian science and intellectual life.33 Biographies are best written after the death of their subject, but it is possible to write a biography of a science as of a living person.34 Histories of institutions are not unlike biographies, and will contain biographical sketches and insights. As one historian put it, ‘natural history has always been a sociable business . . . Books dealing with individual naturalists rarely give a sense of these entangled webs, the contacts that have always made the world of natural history work.’35 The Darwin Correspondence wonderfully illuminates all this.36

Universities, companies, publishers, professional institutes and scientific societies love to publish histories of themselves,37 which may be bland, anecdotal, glossy and self-congratulatory, but when written by those with serious historical concerns are extremely valuable, reminding us that science is a social activity (even if carried on by an absent-minded professor in an ivory tower). Here, sources new to the historian of science are available: minutes of meetings, treasurers’ and bursars’ papers, contracts, drafts of books and papers, referees’ and readers’ reports in the process of peer review, correspondence, papers received and filed but never published, memoranda, laboratory and field notebooks, and diaries may all cry out to be used. When they are, a new perspective is opened up for us: we meet clashes, ambition and personalities, but also institutional loyalties and visions of what science is and what it’s for. This may sometimes look like history of science with the science left out, but that view is too narrow: scientific institutions have their special characteristics as well as their resemblance to churches, Masonic lodges, industries and the civil service.

HISTORY FROM BELOW

As writing history from below became an objective for many twentieth-century historians, those concerned with science began to look seriously at popularization. A major project to sample science in nineteenth-century periodicals in English led to the publication of three books, and a much increased understanding of what most people read about science. For, after all, those who study it seriously, attend learned lectures and meetings and read scientific journals, were and are a very small minority.38 The publics – from the powerful and well-educated to the barely literate – who support science and technology through taxes and purchases, need to know about it and ought to have some say in how this expensive activity is carried on. We usually think about those doing science, but there are others – all of us much of the time – who have science done to them, who are at the receiving end as medieval congregations were for theology. We may be subjected to tests, find our empirical knowledge despised and disregarded by so-called experts, our crops being patented by someone else, or our livelihood taken away by some innovation that makes our skills obsolete. The science that people want to know, or that those in the media think they want to know, is rather different from that which academicians and professors feel they ought to know: public understanding of science is a fascinating and confused topic.39 ‘Breakthroughs’ and ‘eureka moments’ of discovery are announced, then mostly come to nothing. The history of science, like that of relationships, is full of broken promises. Health is and was always a preoccupation, and so is the feeling that science threatens not just jobs but also values. Science is and was often approached through the personal: rows between celebrities are good fun. Ballyhoo, in the form of great international exhibitions and hands-on museums, resulting in the setting-up of educational quarters such as London’s ‘Albertopolis’ in South Kensington (following Berlin’s Museum Island), must not be disregarded.40

As well as those general periodicals in which science featured but was not prominent, there were scientific journals, and from the late eighteenth century some were private ventures, separate from societies and academies. They might bring those engaged in science in different ways into a self-conscious community, coming to think of themselves as scientists. Thus in Germany chemists engaged in crafts, industry and medical activity were brought together by a journal, while in France Lavoisier and his disciples launched a journal to promote their vision and version of chemistry, and to publish faster than the Academy did.41 In Britain, private journals began a little later, and were at first general: one, Philosophical Magazine, still continues though it has mutated into a physics publication.42 It was rapidly joined by Nicholson’s Journal, then by Annals of Philosophy, but it absorbed these and other competitors, so that as science became more professional these informal outlets were increasingly replaced by more specialized journals, often published by newly specific societies (for geology, astronomy, chemistry, zoology and so on) and increasingly inaccessible to outsiders.43 In contrast to those in laboratory and mathematical sciences, publications in the widely popular science of natural history remained readable.44 Meanwhile, there had been a revolution in publishing, greatly reducing the costs so that books ceased to be luxuries in a world of increasing literacy.45 Study of books and publishing is crucial for understanding how science was and is carried on.46

WHAT THEN IS HISTORY OF SCIENCE?

General history used to be a matter of kings and queens, of popes and prime ministers, admirals and generals, and their dates, saved from aridity only by some thread of epic that guided the reader through the maze. More recently, these great personages have been almost written out in the rise of social history. We do not want to go so far in the history of science, but there also the common man and woman must receive much more of the attention formerly lavished upon the great discoverers. The nineteenth century was the Age of History as well as the Age of Science: both became academic disciplines, crucial to understanding humanity and nature. They have in common the problems of deciding what, from masses of possible evidence, is relevant; of being careful not to throw out babies with the bath-water as new insights become infectious; and of interpreting an unfamiliar world, a project that can never be completed because continually revised in the light of observation, fashion and brilliant perceptions of a world suddenly more coherent. These last come from geniuses, which to Davy and his contemporaries were spirits, genies, djinns that might function as a muse for the receptive and talented,47 and to later more prosaic generations came to mean the person so inspired.

So, whereas history of science has been seen variously as a tale of triumphs, a branch of intellectual history, investigation of a flimsy superstructure erected upon economic reality, a series of individual careers, a study of equipment and machinery, or a matter of human interactions, academic historians of science have become more self-conscious about their approach and reluctant upon the whole to paint big pictures.48 Like scientists in positivist times, they keep their heads down, paint more or less exquisite miniatures and tend to leave grand vistas to others.49 So in this book, necessarily using a broad brush, I shall be an opportunist, picking and choosing among these historiographic traditions to suit the subject matter and context. For others, a closer focus upon narrower themes, such as the making of scientific instruments, the rise of romantic biology in Germany or the publication of a notorious book in England, where many factors can be weighed and given full credit, has cast bright light upon science and culture.50 Natural history is nowadays at last being given its due, rather than being portrayed as an awkward stage like adolescence,51 and there are bibliographies accompanied by essays to help those who are new to the history of sciences.52 There are also companions of various kinds,53 and dictionaries, both of concepts54 and of scientists. The multi-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography is being updated, with entries for people previously left out, while for readers of this book the Dictionary of Nineteenth-century British Scientists will prove a most valuable resource indeed.55 So will the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available online, and rewritten a century on from its Victorian predecessor (which is not superseded when Victorian perspectives are wanted), and many other national biographies. Published letters such as the Faraday Correspondence, and that huge international enterprise, the Darwin Correspondence, which will go on for many years more, are wonderful ways into nineteenth-century networks in the electrical and the life and earth sciences.56 Two great multi-volume compilations are also in process of coming out: the Cambridge History of Science, published by Cambridge University Press, and the Storia della Scienza, published by Enciclopedia Italiana.

The history of science, like science itself, has its societies and journals. Some are general, like the History of Science Society, based in the USA, which publishes Isis and Osiris, and the British Society for the History of Science, whose journal is the BJHS, along with similar societies in other countries. There is also a commercially published general journal, Annals of Science; the Royal Society publishes its historical Notes and Records, as well as obituaries of its Fellows (British and foreign), which are a valuable source, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews usefully augments the sometimes very narrowly focused papers published elsewhere. More specialized are the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, which publishes Ambix; the Society for the History of Natural History, publishing Archives of Natural History; the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and its journal Technology and Culture; and the Newcomen Society and its Transactions, for the history of engineering, while for history of medicine there is the Society for the Social History of Medicine, publishing Social History of Medicine. All these societies also hold meetings and conferences, and are international in their membership; their journals have, like scientific ones, been a subject of scholarly study.57 Scientific societies, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society, have their historical groups or sections. Anyone with a serious interest in the history of science, technology or medicine will need to join one of these groupings. There are also various local societies and institutions which have strong interests in the field.

1

SCIENCE IN AND AFTER 1789

PREAMBLE

Electricity a hundred years ago had been a matter of parlour tricks: now it was the key to understanding physics. Science had been transformed, and life with it. So Arthur Balfour (1848–1930), President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and Prime Minister, told the world in 1904.1 We cannot fathom the nineteenth century if we leave out the science. At that same period the German-educated polymath John Theodore Merz (1840–1922), having retired from chemical and electrical engineering in Newcastle, was writing his magnificent History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century.2 Half (the first two of its four volumes) is devoted to science, in thematic chapters. There was no doubt in his mind that ‘our century was the scientific century’, and that the place to begin was France. He coined the useful term ‘research school’. He believed that in later life, from ‘personal knowledge and experience’, one could handle a hundred years or so as contemporary history, checked against memories: he would have met many people born and brought up in the eighteenth century, as I did people from the nineteenth. He was writing the history of his own times, and I am not. Today, our indirect personal experience cannot take us further back than about the 1880s. Nevertheless, we have some advantages: we know how stories turned out, what happened next. We have witnessed the test of time. Our perspectives, and hence what we seek and find in the past, are different.

Merz, in focusing upon scientific thought, was following the footsteps of Whewell, of Trinity College, Cambridge.3 Writing against the current view that science meant open-mindedly accumulating facts until generalizations emerged, Whewell saw it as a matter of getting the right perspective, in an imaginative leap, and then filling in this broad picture by directed observation and experiment.4 His History of the Inductive Science was meant to demonstrate this, with the characteristic Fundamental Idea or essence of each science as his clue: chemistry was analytical, geology dynamic, botany classificatory, physics mechanical. Merz, writing at a time when Idealism was triumphant in philosophy, looked similarly at the astronomical, the atomic, the mechanical, the genetic, the statistical and other views of nature. While Merz is a wonderful guide, and our later writings are in a sense footnotes to that amazingly footnoted work, his was not the last word. He quoted Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1739–1842): ‘History must from time to time be rewritten, not because many new facts have been discovered, but because new aspects come into view, because the participant in the progress of an age is led to standpoints from which the past can be regarded and judged in a novel manner.’ Science is an intellectual activity, but practical and social as well, and scientific life and practice must be our themes also.