Discovering Water

James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century 'Water Controversy'

David Philip Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351943758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The 'water controversy' concerns one of the central discoveries of modern science, that water is not an element but rather a compound. The allocation of priority in this discovery was contentious in the 1780s and has occupied a number of 20th century historians. The matter is tied up with the larger issues of the so-called chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. A case can be made for James Watt or Henry Cavendish or Antoine Lavoisier as having priority in the discovery depending upon precisely what the discovery is taken to consist of, however, neither the protagonists themselves in the 1780s nor modern historians qualify as those most fervently interested in the affair. In fact, the controversy attracted most attention in early Victorian Britain some fifty to seventy years after the actual work of Watt, Cavendish and Lavoisier. The central historical question to which the book addresses itself is why the priority claims of long dead natural philosophers so preoccupied a wide range of people in the later period. The answer to the question lies in understanding the enormous symbolic importance of James Watt and Henry Cavendish in nineteenth-century science and society. More than credit for a particular discovery was at stake here. When we examine the various agenda of the participants in the Victorian phase of the water controversy we find it driven by filial loyalty and nationalism but also, most importantly, by ideological struggles about the nature of science and its relation to technological invention and innovation in British society. At a more general, theoretical, level, this study also provides important insights into conceptions of the nature of discovery as they are debated by modern historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Initial Orientations

Being first in science is important, as it is in geographical discovery. Entering virgin territory geographically or conceptually is a privilege that few of us will experience. 'Proudly to have thought where none have thought before' might be the scientist's Star Trek experience. However, merely thinking and discovering are a world apart, as we shall see. Discovery is a social as well as an intellectual process. It is, we will argue, a property ascribed to certain intellectual, and practical, processes rather than inherent in them.

This book concerns discovering water, specifically discovering that water is not an element, as had been thought from ancient Greek times until the eighteenth century, but rather a compound. To be able to claim that momentous discovery would be a precious thing. It is perhaps understandable that there was a contest, a priority dispute. What is surprising is how long that dispute lasted and the variety of people drawn into the lists. The contest endured for at least seventy years, from the 1780s into the 1850s. Those in the running to be credited with the discovery were the dour Scottish engineer and improver of the steam engine, James Watt, the aristocratic and eccentric natural philosopher, Henry Cavendish, and the French chemist, tax farmer and victim of the revolutionary guillotine, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. They took relatively little part in open priority dispute themselves. It was in the 1830s through to the 1850s, when the original protagonists were long dead, that the 'water controversy', or the 'water question' as it was often called, reached its highest intensity. I am interested to understand why this was so.

It will be useful to establish some basic features of the controversy's chronology and dramatis personae. The water question reached its peak in the aftermath of the 1839 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Birmingham. That meeting was a small one because it was held amidst Chartist agitation. Those who attended were deliberately marking the relationship between science and industrialization. The Association had met since its founding in 1831 in major academic venues, regional centres and commercial ports, but this was a highly symbolic meeting in a primarily manufacturing town. The President-elect of the Association at Birmingham was the Reverend William Vernon Harcourt, the Oxford-educated son of the Archbishop of York. Harcourt had been one of the founders of the Association in 1831 at its first, York, meeting.

On the evening of Monday, 26 August 1839, Harcourt delivered a discourse to the Association's General Meeting in Birmingham Town Hall. Touching on a variety of topics, Harcourt addressed himself to the water question. Specifically, he took issue with claims published by the Perpetual Secretary of the French Académie des Sciences, François Arago, shortly before, in his long-delayed Eloge de James Watt. Arago, aided in production of the Eloge by Watt's son, James Watt Jr, and by the prominent lawyer and politician, Henry, Lord Brougham, had made strong claims that Harcourt took issue with.¹ Arago claimed priority in the discovery of the compound nature of water for James Watt. Even more contentiously, he claimed to show, with the aid of Brougham's investigations, that the other British claimant to the honour, Henry Cavendish, had taken Watt's ideas as his own. Harcourt defended Cavendish's claim to priority and rebuked those who cast aspersions on his honesty. Although Harcourt tried to give due recognition to Watt's steam-engine improvements, the reception of his 'Address' was mixed. Many were aghast that Harcourt should take this occasion to launch what they construed as an attack upon a local hero who symbolized for many that union of science and industrial development that the Birmingham meeting was supposed to celebrate.

The 1840s saw a spate of publications on the water question as Harcourt and his supporters among the 'Gentlemen of Science' of the Association squared off against Arago, Brougham, James Watt Jr and Watt's relative and recruit as family historian, James Patrick Muirhead. Pamphlets and books became the occasion for long essays in the various reviews through which so much intellectual debate in early Victorian Britain took place. In 1851, a Scottish chemical lecturer, Dr George Wilson, published his Life of the Honourable Henry Cavendish. A peculiar biography, this work was largely devoted to a thorough dissection of the water question and the literature that it had generated up to that point. In the following decades an orthodoxy emerged that gave the palm to Cavendish.

A similar sort of orthodoxy had emerged in the period between the 1780s and the publication of Arago's Eloge. The dispute between the protagonists themselves had been brief and mild compared with what was to come later. The term 'water controversy' was not employed in the 1780s, but the question of the discovery of the composition of water was of great moment. Many people perceived it as a key event in the battle between the supporters and opponents of the chemistry of phlogiston. Precisely what happened during the combustion of inflammable air was in dispute. The answer that was eventually accepted and became part of the new system and language of chemistry associated with the name of Lavoisier, was, of course, that 'hydrogen' burned with 'oxygen' to produce water as a compound of those two gases. Lavoisier's claim to the discovery was challenged, especially in Britain by supporters of Cavendish. Watt, too, was sometimes given credit for having important ideas on the subject. On the whole, however, by the 1790s Cavendish was regarded as the discoverer, in Britain at least.

Returning to the rationale for this study, it might be considered that the second phase of the water controversy is a peculiar topic for book-length examination. Even the first phase has not received substantial modern treatment, being very briefly dealt with, for example, in Jan Golinski's excellent study of the public culture of chemistry during the relevant period.² This itself is perhaps an indication that historians have thought the water question to be somehow unworthy of treatment, as a 'storm in a teacup'.

The fact that Watt and Cavendish themselves remained rather cool about the issue, at least in public, means that the second phase of the controversy is easily seen as a minor imbroglio driven by Watt Jr's filial concerns, Scottish nationalism, and Arago's and Brougham's political agendas. This perspective is doubly attractive if one is convinced, as most modern historians appear to be, of the solidity of Cavendish's claim and the tenuousness of Watt's. The recent biographers of Cavendish, Jungnickel and McCormmach, were wary of the controversy because in their view (which has much going for it) the historical picture of Cavendish has been severely distorted by the undue attention given to the water controversy.³ Although Wilson's biography vindicated Cavendish's claim, it neglected to develop many other aspects of his life and in some ways painted a rather jaundiced picture of the man. Having discussed the first phase of the controversy, Jungnickel and McCormmach offer the following observation:

A second water controversy arose long after the participants in the first were dead. It was prompted by the Secretary of the French Academy D.F.J. Arago, who in his éloge of Watt asserted that Priestley was the first person to prove that air could be converted into water and that Watt was the first person to understand it. The consequent furor initiated by Harcourt's presidential address at the British Association meeting in 1839 was sustained by a passion of another kind, nationalism. Since the revived controversy was the occasion for Cavendish's unpublished scientific work to begin to be made public, it had that value if perhaps no other.⁴

Clearly, in writing this book I am asserting that, on the contrary, the water controversy is a worthy and a useful topic. I am also arguing that there was much more driving it than competing nationalisms pitching the Scot versus the Englishman. At the simplest level, the sheer 'air time' that the controversy received, especially in its second, Victorian, phase, makes it worthy of study. We need to be curious about what our forebears found important about this issue, however trite it may seem to us now. More technically, study of the water controversy usefully documents an example of a long-delayed priority dispute. Robert Merton argued many years ago that priority disputes in science are a vital element in understanding the nature of science and of the scientific community. Priority disputes were particularly revealing, Merton suggested, when they were conducted not by the immediate claimants to priority but by others who, apparently, had little to gain personally from the settlement of the controversy. Merton's contention was that such priority disputes are important because they reveal the normative structure of science and how it drives the scientific community.⁵

I share Merton's view that such episodes are revealing, but my account of why they are so differs markedly from his. My account is based in a philosophy and sociology of science that rejects the kind of universal normative explanation of scientific action that animates Merton's scheme and gives his approach much in common as an explanatory strategy with universalist philosophies of science. The water controversy is not in my view a secure basis for discerning how scientific communities in general operate. It can be used, as I use it, to support what is called a 'finitist' account of scientific practice and to illustrate a specific view of scientific discovery.⁶

Far from being merely an object lesson in the pernicious influence of nationalism in science, the controversy is a window onto the cultural politics of early Victorian science. The fact that the controversy loomed large for many members of the early Victorian scientific community, the way that they divided up on it, and how they argued their cases are all indicative of deep currents and major emergent structures in early Victorian culture. These features of the controversy feed into larger debates about the nature of science, about the relationship between science and technology and economic transformation, about the appropriate organization of scientific activity, and so on. This is why, in my view, the water controversy is worth studying.

James Watt (1736–1819) and Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) were iconic figures in Victorian culture.⁷ Though their significances were many and varied, as a first approximation Watt represented a close liaison between science and technology, one, moreover, unmediated by a university-trained scientific élite. Watt's accomplishments demonstrated that it was possible for the intelligent autodidact to rise to great things, including, perhaps, philosophical insight and scientific discovery. Men such as Watt combined science and action to promote industrial development. Many members of the industrial middle class regarded them as scientific heroes to be revered and emulated.

On the other hand, the emergent, university-trained, and increasingly specialized scientific élite considered too much popular adulation for Watt as 'philosopher' or 'scientist' to be dangerous. As that élite sought to negotiate their relationship with governments and wider publics, they were cautious about portraying too close a link between science and practical utility. They needed support for sustained trains of research aimed primarily at understanding the natural world. Only if such support was forthcoming would the real benefits of utility eventually flow, they argued. This was an argument on the basis of 'ultimate utility' but also on civilizational grounds. For the scientific élite Cavendish was a more apposite icon than Watt. Cavendish represented in their estimation a person who pursued a methodical, cautious, sustained train of research. This research was of the highest quality and driven by curiosity alone. The highest standard was reached precisely because the research was pursued in this manner. Ultimately, much rested upon the outcome of the contest between these competing icons and ideologies: relations between science and government; the organization and hierarchy of science education; and the organization of scientific institutions. In this sense, as a historian, to enter the water controversy and merely seek to arbitrate it is in my view to miss the point.

A key feature of this book is that I do not seek to resolve the water controversy. In terms of modern controversy studies I seek a 'symmetrical' approach. I aim to understand and explain the stances taken and arguments involved, not judging their relative value. Given that the modern scientific, and historical, consensus is that Cavendish discovered the compound nature of water, many readers will find a symmetrical approach disturbing. This is because when credit has already been distributed, to pursue a symmetrical approach is automatically to challenge the status quo.⁸ I give the case of Watt and his supporters more credit than most people would consider they deserve. I do this not by explicitly siding with the Watt camp but just by taking them seriously. This approach, however, offers advantages to historical understanding.

Suppose that my stance were more of a 'realist' one – that there were a correct answer to the question 'Who discovered the composition of water?' Suppose that I then set out to ascertain that correct answer through historical research devoted entirely to the actions of the original protagonists in the 1780s. Where would this place me in relation to the Victorian water controversy? I would end up throwing my weight on one side of the balance, the side that was right (or most right) in my view. Their understanding, in so far as it coincided with mine, would require no further explanation. They would have simply got the history right. My task in that situation would be to explain why those who got the history 'wrong' were diverted from the truth. The problem with this, of course, is that my historical research into what happened in the 1780s cannot stand outside the controversy itself. I will bring philosophical conceptions to the task that will align me in the controversy. In particular, I will have to bring to the task conceptions of what it means to discover something. If my conceptions coincide, let us say, with those maintained by the supporters of Cavendish, then it is not surprising that I end up sharing their view of the identity of the discoverer. My task, then, is not only to describe the competing discovery accounts offered by the supporters of Watt and Cavendish, but also to bring out the underlying, competing, criteria of what constitutes discovery. This allows me to build plausible connections between substantive positions taken in the priority dispute, different stipulations about what the criteria of discovery should be, and the interests that sustained them. In this way the nature, course and significance of the water controversy in early Victorian scientific culture can be better understood. This understanding does not depend on resolving the original controversy and, I argue, is best served by not attempting such a resolution.

The Structure of the Story

The theoretical stances that inform my approach are delineated in Chapter 2 and are based in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Underlying the work of the 'Edinburgh School' in SSK and of my own approach is a 'finitist' account of knowledge and meaning. This is a quite general account applicable to the terms of scientific discourse, including such concepts as 'scientific discovery'. Finitism radically contextualizes those terms. When applied to the notion of 'discovery', finitism leads us to an 'attributional' model of the ...