The Making of Modern Science

Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity: 1789 - 1914

David Knight

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745636764, 9780745636757
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

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.

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):⁵ ‘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.

We accept that science includes more than established facts, but also that it includes more than ideas. Whewell, Merz and their contemporaries took it for granted that science was progressively finding out truth about the external world, through observation and experiment. In writing its history, they were also evangelists, promoting science. We live in more pessimistic or suspicious times, careful about interpretations, reading between the lines. Nowadays, experts are distrusted and historians must write about Inquisitors, Nazis and others they do not admire. Science is no longer innocent. In the twentieth century, with fresh interest in organized science as a part of culture, some portrayed it as a social construct, projecting on to nature the structures and assumptions of societies.⁶ After all, the phrases ‘the struggle for existence’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ came into evolutionary thinking from the political economists Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) – it was ‘social Darwinism’ from the start.⁷ But that does not mean it was no more than a reflection of ‘Victorian values’. Models and metaphors are crucial, but I believe there is a real world, that we can find out more and more about it, and that the sciences are methods of doing this, patiently worked out over time – the nineteenth century being especially important. They are provisional (Balfour noted that much of what he had learnt forty years before was false) but with luck self-correcting. There is indeed no royal road to truth, no ready way to detect ‘pseudo-science’, and we must not forget instructive examples both of neglected truth and of unsuccessful sciences like phrenology and animal magnetism in our story. History is not only concerned with winners. And just as medical historians have come to look from below, at patients as well as doctors and nurses,⁸ so we must also remember those on the receiving end of the benefits and hazards of science (in both the industrialized and the colonial world), and the great number of people who were not involved in startling innovation but who carried on and adapted older, tried-and-tested practices, crafts and ideas.

‘Science’ is an abstraction: it is something carried on by scientists. Its history is more than the sum of biographies,⁹ but looking at lives wonderfully illuminates this human activity we call science.¹⁰ Apostles of science preached prosperity, the alleviation of toil and disease, and the pleasures of teamwork, as well as liberation from superstition and ignorance. Societies, publications, museums and exhibitions proliferated, peripatetic associations visited provincial cities like scientific circuses, transport and communications were revolutionized, religious practices such as calling days of prayer to alleviate plagues were challenged, and governments found themselves having to regulate science-based industries that were polluting the environment. Science’s twentieth-century connections with the military-industrial complex go back to the nineteenth, when scientific education and professions emerged, and science needed more and more money if it was to be carried forward. The English word ‘science’, which had meant organized knowledge of any kind, was restricted in the later part of the century to its present sense, and the word ‘scientist’ gradually came into use. What had began as a leisure activity (perhaps mildly comic) for European and North American men had by 1914 become a number of increasingly specialized disciplines in which people were educated and trained for careers in research, teaching and administration, or as technicians.¹¹ Women, Asians, Arabs, Africans and Latin-Americans had played important but backstage parts; by 1914 they were also breaking through into the limelight as science became a global activity. Our story starts in the age of revolutions.

In April 1789 George Washington had been inaugurated as the first President of the USA, and in July the storming of the Bastille marked the beginning of the first French Revolution. And in August 1914 the Great War began. The ‘long’ nineteenth century begins and ends with political cataclysms. Politics has never been the same since 1789, but it was also an important scientific date: Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu’s (1748–1836) natural system of botanical classification were published. In France, ‘two cultures’, scientific and humanistic, were perhaps becoming discernible; and a second scientific revolution was under way, in which science was becoming specialized, a demanding vocation (requiring accuracy, precision and numeracy) rather than a hobby. Men of science were mobilized to defend the infant French republic. They did oversee the conversion of church bells into cannons, but science did not yet seem very potent or threatening. In the opening years of the twentieth century, the tumultuous intellectual changes were in physics, genetics and medicine, and by then science-based industries were vital in national economies. The war of 1914–18 was not really the first world war – there had been such lamentable things in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries¹² – but it came to be described as the ‘chemists’ war’, notorious for the use of high explosives in bombs, artillery and torpedoes fired from submarines, and of poisonous gases, as well as the serious mobilization of scientists in the war effort. This meant the break-up of the international scientific community that had been a feature of the nineteenth century after two decades of warfare ended in 1815: in 1914, enemy aliens were soon expelled from scientific societies and academies, and amid stories of atrocities the free and open communication of knowledge again ceased.

FRANCE IN 1789

The science of what came to be called the Enlightenment was a matter of detecting and imposing order in and upon nature. This might be through mathematics and experiment, or description and classification: natural philosophy or natural history. Voltaire (1694–1778), in exile in England, encountered Newton’s physics, and popularized it among his countrymen, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) similarly got across the botany of Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). The great Encyclopaedia of Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1717–83) began as a project to translate Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia (1727) but turned into something much bigger and more important.¹³ The superbly illustrated¹⁴ scientific and technical articles were augmented by other notorious ones, eluding censorship, on politics and religion, helping to undermine the ancien régime with its absolute royal government, feudal privileges for aristocrats and persecution of dissenters from its established Roman Catholic Church. In the hands of these ‘philosophes’ and their successors, some of them avowed materialists,¹⁵ it seemed as though a modern, scientific world-view must challenge established traditions in politics and religion, assisting in the emancipation of the plebeians. Although Lavoisier was beheaded (as a ‘tax farmer’) in the Reign of Terror of 1794, and there was unease about elitism, science in France was to be associated with revolution and secularity from 1789 on. The life of a man of science who was also religious was not always easy.¹⁶

Whereas in England the Royal Society, dating from the 1660s, was in effect an intellectual gentlemen’s club, supporting and publishing the researches of a minority of active Fellows, its contemporary Académie des Sciences in Paris was an elite salaried body of forty-four eminent men of science.¹⁷ As civil servants, they were required from time to time to undertake practical investigations into gunpowder or street-lighting, and to adjudicate on perpetual-motion machines and Mesmerism. They enjoyed prestige and authority, and it was possible in France for a bright boy to envisage a scientific career: elsewhere, he would also need another profession, such as medicine, the Church or the law.¹⁸ Academicians were elected for life, and some, like Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), lived to a great age: there were set numbers for different sciences, and the total was fixed. After a death, the survivors would nominate – in effect elect – their next colleague, who stepped into the dead man’s shoes. Would-be academicians therefore had to make themselves known and respected in Paris in the hope of a vacancy; it was a competitive world, with canvassing and block voting. Sometimes the categories might be stretched a bit so that a bright man could get in, the ham-fisted applied mathematician Denis Poisson (1781–1840), for example, as an experimental physicist.¹⁹

Associated with the Académie was the Paris Observatory, founded like its Greenwich counterpart with the improvement of navigation in mind, because we can tell where on Earth we are only by looking at the heavens. Important projects had included work on the exact shape of the Earth; and following the Revolution, and the adoption of the new metric system in place of the various and arbitrary-seeming feet and inches in use, the metre was defined as a fraction of the Earth’s circumference, which entailed new measurements.²⁰ Also in Paris was the Jardin du Roi, renamed Jardin des Plantes in the revolutionary period, the splendid botanic garden on the left bank of the Seine²¹ where several generations of the Jussieu family reigned. Associated with it from 1793 was a Museum of Natural History, and after the Revolution the royal menagerie was brought from Versailles and the zoo set up adjoining it. Zoologists were appointed – Georges Cuvier (1769– 1832) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) – and gave lectures open to the public. In these heady days of liberty and equality, medical lectures were also readily available and Parisian hospitals became great centres of medical learning and activity.²² A former abbey was converted in 1797 into a museum of science and technology, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, including models submitted to the Academy for approval as new inventions. Here lecturers held forth in due course to working men.

Figure 1 Dens for the wild beasts at the Paris Zoo: J.P.F. Deleuze, History and Description of the Royal Museum of Natural History, Paris: Royer, 1825, p. 364

At all these places, scientific careers were opening up by 1800. The Revolution provided opportunities for able young men and new patrons on the lookout for protégés. The educational system, which had depended upon privilege and patronage, was also revamped, and especially important was the foundation in 1794 of the École Polytechnique to train engineers and scientists, where entry was by competitive examination. There were innovative medical schools, as at Leiden and Edinburgh, but most universities were conservative places, giving students very much the same education, humanistic and liberal, as that of their fathers and grandfathers. A new idea, embodied in the French Hautes Écoles, was to ally teaching and research: everybody was learning, and it was the duty of professors both to add to knowledge and to pass it on to students. The École Polytechnique under Napoleon became increasingly militarized, but the École Normale, for training teachers, was also involved in scientific education, and the university, reorganized under Napoleon with branches in the provinces, began to adopt the ideal of research and teaching too. Thus training and opportunities became available to bright young men attracted to the sciences. Unfortunately, the salaries involved were low, and especially after 1815 a practice (le cumul) became widespread whereby prominent men held several jobs, and got much of the work done by juniors to whom they paid a pittance – rather like dignitaries in the contemporary Church of England.²³

The mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) and the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748–1822) flourished under Napoleon, becoming senators and peers. This involved a good income with few duties, and they acquired country houses in what was then the rural suburb of Arcueil. There they founded a select society, inviting their protégés to discuss their research before bringing it to the Academy.²⁴ Papers presented there were published, with greater rapidity than the Academy could achieve. Most of these disciples became academicians in due course: Laplace and Berthollet were responsible for selecting, training and encouraging the next generation of elite men of science, such as Poisson and the great chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), in this semi-formal way. The meetings might be described as residential research seminars, or workshop conferences, in attractive surroundings.

This concentration of resources, coupled with government approval for science, meant that Paris, with its large critical mass of qualified manpower, was the world centre of excellence across all the sciences for thirty years or so. There were extremely able men of science in other countries: Priestley and Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) in England, Joseph Black (1728–99) and James Hutton (1726–97) in Scotland, Tobern Bergman (1735–84) and Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–86) in Sweden, Luigi Galvani (1737–98) and Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) in Italy, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) in America, and Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) in Germany, for example. But they had to look enviously to Paris and its institutions for standards and recognition as their nations were, from the scientific point of view, in a different league from France, where the main stream of science flowed. Hence it was the French government which asked two academicians, Jean-Baptiste Delambre (1749– 1822) of the Observatory, and Cuvier, to report in 1808 on the progress of science in Europe since 1789.²⁵ The reports were larded with praise for Napoleon, but the centrality of France was appropriate. The two men were joint secretaries of the Institut, for ‘mathematical’ and ‘natural’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface: The Age of Science
• Acknowledgement
• Man The Interpreter Of Nature
• Introduction: Approaching The Past
• Chapter 1: Science In And After 1789
• Chapter 2: Science And Its Languages
• Chapter 3: Applied Science
• Chapter 4: Intellectual Excitement
• Chapter 5: Healthy Lives
• Chapter 6: Laboratories
• Chapter 7: Bodies, Minds And Spirits
• Chapter 8: The Time Of Triumph
• Chapter 9: Science And National Identities
• Chapter 10: Method And Heresy
• Chapter 11: Cultural Leadership
• Chapter 12: Into The New Century
• Timeline
• Notes And References
• Index