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We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great and unknown beings …
It was popularly regarded as an invisible and volatile fluid stored in glass Leyden jars, ever ready to leap out with a bang.
In fact, for Davy, science was becoming increasingly patriotic.165
Here matter itself seemed to be breaking into life from a previously secret and hidden world, at the chemist’s sole command.
‘When he saw the minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, he could not contain his joy — he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight; some little time was required for him to compose himself to continue the experiment.’167
It also voted funds for a huge new voltaic battery to be constructed for his future use, a trough of ‘600 double plates of four inches square’, said to be four times as powerful as any in England.
In it he advocated a five-year training course for all physicians, financed by public taxation, and a national policy of preventative medicine: the first remarkable glimmerings of a National Health Service. There were also glimpses of the old radical doctor. He suggested that family health would be universally improved if all wives were provided (free of charge) with anatomy lectures, washing machines (steam-powered), fresh vegetables and pressure cookers.179
perhaps the first animal-rights manifesto ever written.
The idea of exquisite, close observation of natural phenomena has its own literary history. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1664, with its exquisite drawings of fleas and other tiny creatures, championed the idea of minute observation at scales smaller than normal human vision. But
meticulous description of the baby cuckoo (while still blind) relentlessly wheelbarrowing its smaller ‘rival’ sparrow chick backwards, between its half-formed wings, up the side of the nest until it was thrown out, has all the power of a moral allegory, but
The explosive appeal of potassium and sodium to young chemists is wonderfully caught in Oliver Sacks’s autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Sacks
and two teenage friends first watch as ‘a frenzied molten blob’ of potassium threatens to set light to his bedroom laboratory, and then go out to throw a three-pound lump of sodium in Highgate Ponds. ‘It took fire instantly and sped around and around the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it. We all exulted — this was chemistry with a vengeance!’ Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp.122-3.
In a way the collection was an intellectual time-bomb, for, sequentially displayed, the specimens visibly demonstrated, to anybody who cared to examine them, how directly and evidently man’s skeletal structures (skull, hands, feet) and internal organs (heart, liver, lungs) had evolved from ‘lower’ animal forms. They were compelling proof of a certain kind of continuous physiological ‘evolution’, and they clearly suggested that man had developed directly from the animal kingdom, and was not a unique ‘creation’.
Blumenbach introduced the first classic racial divisions between Caucasian, African, Asiatic and Indian types.
Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted’.
In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed that the development of this physiological organisation could be observed unbroken, ‘from an oyster to a man’.17
Science, he argued, had an autonomous right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state.
One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that ‘The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses’; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: ‘Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad.’24
Lamb mischievously described Newton as ‘a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle’. Keats joined in, agreeing that Newton had ‘destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’. Haydon
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings: Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: – We murder to dissect.
an argument that he was otherwise inclined to dismiss as the ‘absurd orang-utang theory’.
When Mary eloped with Shelley to France and Switzerland in 1814, their shared journal indicates that they were already discussing notions of creating artificial life.
Indeed, it was to be an utterly new form of fiction — the science fiction novel.
They then, famously, set themselves a ghost-story-writing competition.
‘But examine the “mind,” the grand prerogative of man! Where is the “mind” of the foetus? Where is that of a child just born? Do we not see it actually built up before our eyes by the actions of the five external senses, and of the gradually developed internal faculties? Do we not trace it advancing by a slow progress from infancy and childhood to the perfect expansion of its faculties in the adult …’
There is something more than deathly about those stones. It is as if Frankenstein is burying scientific hope itself beneath the earth.
Yet the changes have influenced almost all subsequent stage and film productions. They altered the scientific and moral themes of the book, and shifted it permanently towards a mixture of gothic melodrama and black farce.
‘And what was I? Of my creation and my creator I was absolutely ignorant … Where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing … I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome. I was not even of the same nature as man … When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a Monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe the agony that
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There is an elegant passage in his notebooks wondering what causes men to blush, and the female nipple to become erect. Shelley
She may also have had some West Indian blood in her veins. There was certainly something tropical in her temperament.
He wrote in his journal that he thought her ‘more French than English, and partaking of the Creole vivacity and suppleness’. It is not quite clear what he meant by this last compliment, perhaps that Jane was volatile and sexually provocative. She certainly had social ambitions: ‘as a lion-catcher, I would pit her against the world. She flung her lasso over Byron himself.’3
An example is — look long on a spot of pink, & close your eyes, the impression will continue for some time & will then be succeeded by a green light. For some days after I quitted you I had the pink light in my eyes & the rosy feelings in my heart, but now the green hue & feelings — not of jealousy — but of regret are come.’13
storm her with more scientific seductions.
‘If this be romantic, it is romantic to pursue one’s object in science; to attach the feelings strongly to any ideas; it is romantic to love the good, to admire the wise, to quit low and mean things and seek excellence.’16
instead of being an exciting alkali or acid, become a neutral salt.
It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton.
‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves
It will give to Science a new kind of eclat; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’
the formal problem of how far scientific data could any longer be convincingly expressed in poetry (as
the paradoxical fact that Newton’s genius in many ways hindered chemistry by turning attention to ‘optics, mechanics, and astronomy’.
He began to investigate explosives, using a formula communicated to him by the French physicist André Ampère. This
manufactory
On 1 March he interviewed a young bookbinder for the post of Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution. The young man’s father had been a London blacksmith. His chief recommendations were punctuality, neatness and sobriety. His name was Michael Faraday, aged twenty-one.
Geology in every sense of the word is a superficial science.62
Was the eel nature’s voltaic battery, and did it hold a clue to Vitalism? — a question which would come to haunt Davy.
‘The aspirations for immortality are movements of the mind similar to those which a bird makes with its wings before they are furnished with feathers.’64
since nothing is ever destroyed in the physical universe, only transformed (the First Law of Thermodynamics), then man himself must be immortal in some spiritual sense. It
Holding an iron gauze over a Bunsen burner, and observing that, against all expectation, the flame does not pass through it, is now one of the elementary experiments performed in school chemistry classrooms. It
His lamp not only caged the flame, it transformed it into a canary.88
Davy designed his own coat of arms, showing the safety lamp encircled with a Latin motto which announced: ‘I Built the Light which brings Safety’.92
