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No European had ever witnessed — or at least recorded — this strange, extreme and quintessentially South Seas sport before. It
surfing
one really knew their composition, origins or distance. In general they were thought to be a few loose clouds of gas, hanging static in the Milky Way, some loose flotsam of God’s creation, and of little cosmological significance. Herschel suspected that they were star clusters at immense distances, whose composition might hold a clue to an entirely new kind of universe.
nebulae were nebulous
The question of whether they were ‘fallen’ in a religious sense, and required Redemption according to Christian doctrine, remained a moot point among astronomers, few of whom would have considered themselves as ‘atheists’ in any modern sense. ‘An undevout astronomer is mad,’ as the poet Edward Young reflected in Night Thoughts (1742-45).♣
saving ET
the growing sense of the sheer scale of the universe, and the possibility that it had evolved over unimaginable time, and was in a process of continuous creation, did slowly give pause for thought. For a poet like Erasmus Darwin, in The Botanic Garden (1791), it put the Creator at an increasing shadowy distance from his Creation.102
distance from the Creator
What in fact he had observed was the seventh planet in the solar system, beyond Jupiter and Saturn, and the first new planet to be discovered for over a thousand years (since Ptolemy). He would name it patriotically after the Hanoverian king, ‘Georgium Sidus’ (‘George’s Star’), but it eventually became known to European astronomers as Uranus. ‘Urania’ was the goddess of astronomy, and the new planet was seen to mark a rebirth in her science.♣
discovery of uranus
He thought that viewing the stars through a telescope both liberated the imagination and produced a certain kind of wonder, mixed with disabling awe or terror: ‘Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass. But from this situation, perplexing as it is, he endeavours to extricate himself; and by looking abroad into Nature, employs the powers she
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man as drop of water
Biblical God now seems content simply to initiate what is, in effect, a vast cosmological experiment, and then sit back as a passive observer.
passive god
For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc — my mind had been habituated to the Vast.’152
mind habiyuated to the vast
‘The eye is one of the most extraordinary Organs,’ he repeatedly told his correspondents. Classical physiology was wrong. Visual images did not simply fall upon the optic nerve, in the same sense that they fell upon a speculum mirror. The eye constantly interpreted what it saw, especially when using the higher powers of magnification. The astronomer had to learn to see, and with practice (as with a musical instrument) he could grow more skilful: ‘I remember a time when I could not see with a power beyond 200, with the same instrument which now gives me 460 so distinct that in fine weather I
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training the eye to see
These completely transformed the commonly held idea of our solar system being surrounded by a stable dome of ‘fixt stars’, with a broad ‘galaxy’ or ‘via lactae’ (meaning a ‘path or stream of milk’) of smaller, largely unknown stars spilt across it, roughly from east to west. This was a celestial architecture or ‘construction’, inspired fundamentally by the idea of a sacred temple, which had existed from the time of the Babylonians and the Greeks, and had not seriously been challenged by Flamsteed or even by Newton.179
via lactae
Curiously enough, Davy would later relate his love of science to this fascination with story-telling. What he always wanted to do was to hold an audience spellbound with wonders: ‘to gratify the passions of my youthful auditors’, as he put it. ‘After reading a few books, I was seized with the desire to narrate … I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all my originality.
science and story telling
To start with, it had been suspected since 1780 that the most basic of all elements — common water — was actually a subtle composition. It was finally ‘decomposed’, and shown to be an elastic compound of hydrogen and oxygen (H2O), in a classic public experiment by Lavoisier in his laboratory at the Paris Arsenal on 28 February 1785.
decomposition of water
The disappearance of the traditional world of the ‘four elements’ was revolutionary. It was as radical in the world of chemistry as Copernicus’s proof that the earth was not the centre of the solar system; or (some said) as Robespierre’s claim that the people, not the king, embodied sovereignty. Moreover,
the end of the 4 elements
The first task lay in the decomposing or analysing of chemical substances into their true compounds, and precisely weighing, measuring and recording the process.
‘When we begin the study of any
science, we are in the situation, respecting that science, similar to that of children … We ought to form no idea but what is a necessary consequence, and immediate effect, of an experiment or observation … We should proceed from the known facts to the unknown.’22
Gregory Watt was the prodigal son of the great Scottish engineer James Watt. At
His new idea was based on the recently discovered chemistry of respiration. His concept was that inhaled gases, ‘factitious airs’, by entering the bloodstream via the lungs, could alter and improve the whole constitution, and thereby cure major diseases. On 31 October 1794 he wrote to Davies Giddy: ‘Incontestable proof has been given that the application of airs or gases to the cure of diseases is both practicable and promising.
Such a career — that of the professional research scientist — did not yet exist. (Neither of course did the term ‘scientist’ itself, as will emerge.)
‘We cannot entertain a doubt that every change in our sensations and ideas must be accompanied by some corresponding change in the organic matter of the body. These
Davy had in effect described what is now known as the ‘carbon cycle’.43
the Institute’s most influential supporters: the powerful Wedgwood family at Cote House, and James Watt and the Lunar Society in Birmingham.
long tradition of thermal baths and healing spa establishments.
As part of his policy of
progressive public medicine, Beddoes advertised free pneumatic treatments for people suffering from consumption, asthma, palsy and scrofula.
‘This evening April 27th [1799] I have felt a more high degree of pleasure from breathing nitrous oxide than I ever felt from any cause whatever — a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable, I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents.’58
A gas that could blot out feelings – ana-thesia – and then bring them back.
Dr Peter Mark Roget, then a young medical student from Edinburgh, and the future compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus (1852), found, ironically enough, great difficulty in choosing the words to describe his feelings aptly.
The rival claims of poetry and science became a passionate topic between them.
Poetry, he argued, would be good for Davy’s science.
On 11 October Gregory Watt wrote to Davy: ‘get an air holder of gas prepared for I am determined to ascend the heavens’.80 A
Nevertheless he spent several evenings talking excitedly with Davy, and had repeated inhalation sessions at the Dowry Square laboratory. He must have compared the gas with his already extensive and overpowering experience of opium.81
He used only one descriptive phrase which is reminiscent of a line from his great opium poem of 1797, ‘Kubla Khan’: he spoke of ‘more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced’.
Coleridge was now living with Charles and Mary Lamb
Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world.
portable gas chamber especially designed by James Watt. This
He felt that the new poetry and the new science were so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited Davy to move north and establish a chemistry laboratory in the Lake District. Coleridge announced: ‘I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.’106
described most poets as ‘sporters with the feelings of the world’,
‘You, my dear philosopher,’ he reassured Davy, ‘have wisely relinquished the stormy Parnassus, where transient sunshine only contrasts the cloudy sky, for the mild and unvarying temperature of the central grotto of science.’
‘The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the
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He later had long discussions with Coleridge about the nature and significance of human pain. Coleridge wondered, for example, why God might have created a world in which human childbirth, one of the great productive aims of nature, was so painful as well as so dangerous for women.
Fanny Burney’s account of her own mastectomy — having a breast removed, without anaesthetics, by a military surgeon in her Paris apartment in 1811 — is perhaps more shattering than any account of a limb amputated on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars.
Nitrous oxide only began to be tried again experimentally some forty years later. This was in America, when Dr Horace Wells had a tooth extracted under the gas during a demonstration lecture in Connecticut in December 1844. Wells awoke, announced that he had not felt ‘a pin-prick’, and proclaimed ‘a new era in tooth-pulling’.135
the final acceptance of anaesthesia in Britain did not really come until Queen Victoria admitted to having taken a whiff of chloroform during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in April 1853.
‘I attended Davy’s lectures to enlarge my stock of metaphors,’ Coleridge wrote afterwards.
He began by claiming a central place for chemistry in the development of scientific knowledge: botany, zoology, medicine, physiology, agriculture, all ultimately depended on knowledge of chemical processes.
‘the unequal division of property and of labour, the difference of rank and condition amongst mankind, are the sources of power in civilized life, and its moving causes, and even its very soul’.♣
‘If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed.’152
This was the new science as sexual chemistry.
You are to be the Historian of the Philosophy of feeling. — Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature. Do not give up your birthright.’
