The Romantic Poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Blake et al—were roughly contemporary with the likes of Willian Herschel and Humphry Davy and a surge in exploration and discovery.
It hardly seems fair, but we all study (or used to) the romantic poets in high school but unless you read the sidebars in the science book you'll not remember Herschel (built a major observatory and discovered the first new planet in thousands of years) or Davy (discovering iodine, disinfecting power of chlorine, miner's safety lamp, etc). You have to hear about Faraday's Law, of course, and a jazzed-up story of Franklin testing lightning. And if you follow up on Franklin you find a scientist and ambassador and writer who made his mark many ways; and you might wonder “Were they men of such huge genius that they could do anything?” (and where are their like now?), or “Were the pluckings so easy that anybody could make discoveries?”
It is true that what they worked so hard to find out is taught as elementary knowledge now, but when you are starting from nothing or even from misconceptions (fire, earth, air, and water); it is very hard to make those first discoveries. A detachment of soldiers to help you explore is all very well, but when untreatable diseases attack and human enemies outnumber you ten thousand to one a few muskets won't keep you alive.
This book is a story of some of those scientists and explorers—British or living there—from the late 1700's through the early 1800's, illustrated with some of the comments and poetry of the romantic poets—who were very familiar with and often wrote about the discoveries around them. In fact Coleridge knew several of them very well, and appeared at scientific meetings.
The main characters are
- Joseph Banks who was with a team exploring Tahiti. He was President of the Royal Society for decades, and sponsored numberless researches.
- Ballooners! The hot air (and hydrogen) balloon craze opened up a new way of looking at the world, new excitements, and new ways of dying.
- William Herschel, a musician who dedicated himself (and his sister!) to astronomy; to better ways of seeing with the best instruments in the world (which he made) and methodical searching of the sky.
- Mungo Park explored in West Africa, and told a fascinating tale of unheroic adventure after his first trip. Scholars tried to figure out what happened with his second.
- Humphrey Davy, who almost invented anesthesia with laughing gas and went on to a grand career in chemistry; though his great love may have been fishing.
The romantic poets were fascinated by wonder and mystery, and they could find it in the exotic creatures painted by the explorers (no cameras); in the growing realization that the universe was far huger than anyone had dreamed, with vast emptiness holding scattered islands of light; in the mysterious new rules hidden inside ordinary processes; and in the expectation of continued growth of innocent knowledge and power to drive away all human ignorance and misery. And superstition—could men be like gods? The science of the day was reflected in the poetry of the day. And opposed: Blake hated what he thought was dissecting beauty.
Holmes does not just quote the famous poets. The scientists themselves wrote poetry, for this was an age when education was supposed to be broad. I suspect that we would have more polymaths if we wanted them, and if they could survive our entertainment-soaked dissipation with their concentration intact.
Herschel's discovery of a new planet (Uranus) was earthshaking. None of the ancient astronomies or mythologies mentioned any but the five, but now we knew more; we thus must know more than all the ancients with their stories of stars and gods. Examined so, the conclusion does not follow, but this was the kind of symbolic impact the discovery made. Holmes seems sympathetic.
Davy's first major job was with a clinic whose philanthropist creator meant to try to heal diseases with gases. Davy discovered the properties of nitrous oxide (after experimenting with things like carbon monoxide!), by testing them on himself and eventually on volunteers. But eventually chemistry beckoned, and he went on to discover new elements, and when called to help miners he carefully worked through the properties of “firedamp” to discover how to keep it from igniting. Wire mesh conducts heat away from a methane flame well enough that even when there is enough methane in the air that the mesh glows red hot the fire fails to propagate into the room beyond.
Herschel's sister Caroline gets her due in this account. She seems to have been a dedicated and able apprentice who contributed to his work and made discoveries on her own account as well.
Electricity seemed to have some connection with life, since little jolts could make dead muscles twitch, and so they had great debates about the soul and Vitalism. In response Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (partly based on some real people), which has colored the picture of the scientist ever since. Is he a searcher of truth or tampering with things he doesn't understand?
The end of the book comes at the end of an era: Banks is dead, Davy is dead, and “natural philosopher” is explicitly redefined as “scientist” by a new generation of scholars and specialists.
Bank's stay in Tahiti involved much danger and sex, but he stayed with them enough to learn of the patterns of their life, and of their institution of arreoy in which men and women indulged in “free love” with the stipulation that all children born were to be destroyed unless a man was willing to acknowledge and raise it, at which point the man and woman were out of the group. I find this a chilling echo of the current American scene.
There's lots to learn, and it is a fascinating book. Read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment