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By relating the human predicament to the scientific solution, Davy produced one of the great demonstrations of scientific ‘Hope’. He showed that applied science could be a force for good previously unparalleled in human society, and might gradually liberate mankind from untold misery and suffering.
This was the first, historic, mention of Faraday in print, and it effectively launched his scientific career.107
There was a new emphasis on technology and applied science. Coal-gas pipes now snaked (above ground) through the London streets, so that Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament were illuminated with the new gaslights, ‘most Brilliant’, Banks noted approvingly8 There were paddle ships powered by steam engines, which could ply the Thames against the tide, and make all-weather crossings to France.
the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in April 1815.
‘Tremendous is the punishment inflicted by the Class of Virtuous Women on those who err & stray from the paths of Propriety … It is surely a more severe destiny than that of immediate death.’13
And though so much inferior, as I know, To those who, by the dint of glass and vapour, Discover stars and sail in the wind’s eye, I wish to do as much by poesy.17
Banks would not commit the Royal Society to support the abolition of slavery in the black colonies.
To see a sort of Human Beings emerging from Slavery & making the most rapid Strides towards the perfection of Civilization,
She was eagerly introduced to his glittering Cambridge friends, among them the mathematician Charles Babbage, future
‘God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives, or that capacity, that enviable capacity, of husbanding every atom of time, which some possess, and which enables them to do ten times as much in one life.’23
At the age of eighteen, Shelley had been expelled from university for publishing a pamphlet, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. At
The cosmos as revealed by science must contain many thousands of different nebular systems, and therefore millions of habitable planets, so it was impossible to sustain a narrow, religious concept of one Almighty Christian Redeemer. Since there would be so many other
‘fallen’ worlds to redeem, the idea of God being born and crucified on each planet became absurd.
It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman
In his ‘Essay on a Future State’ (1819), he argued that the scientific and anecdotal evidence for the total cessation of all mental and bodily functions after death was definitive. There was no Future State.29
The increasing separation and professionalisation of the individual scientific disciplines had begun at the universities. It would become the general hallmark of Victorian science.
‘Let Whatever Shines be Noted’.
Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science
Image from the Hubble Telescope showing Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy or ‘island universe’, which is steadily approaching our Milky Way. (
‘Let us then labour together, and steadily endeavour to gain what are perhaps the noblest objects of ambition — acquisitions which may be useful to our fellow creatures. Let it not be said, that, at a period when our empire was at its highest pitch of greatness, the sciences began to decline …’48 That last sentence would come back to haunt the Society.
There was even a story put about that Davy had deliberately encouraged Faraday to undertake a potentially lethal chemical experiment, which had nearly blinded him. It
It all throws light on a new and highly significant human relationship that was emerging in professional science: that between the director and his research assistant, between master and pupil, between sorcerer and apprentice.56
When he formed the Royal Astronomical Society with Charles Babbage in 1820, their first Honorary Member was his aunt Caroline, and this gesture sealed the bond between them. John had strong views about science being open to women — the Society’s second Honorary Member was to be Mary Somerville.
It contained a wonderful phrase: ‘Coelorum per-rupit claustra’ – ‘He broke through the barriers of heaven’; or as a later friend translated, ‘He o’er-leapt the parapet of the stars.’67
Mr Shelley is unfortunately too well-known for his infamous novels and poems. He openly professed himself an atheist. His
‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.’70
For time has withered all the beauteous flowers That once adorned my youthful coronet.
‘In my youth, and through the prime of manhood, I never entered London without feelings of pleasure and hope. It was to me as the grand theatre of intellectual activity, the field of every species of enterprise and exertion, the metropolis of the world of business, thought, and action. … I now entered the great city in a very different tone of mind, one of settled melancholy … My health was gone, my ambition was satisfied, I was no longer excited by the desire of distinction; what I regarded most tenderly [my mother], was in the grave … My cup of life was no longer sparkling, sweet, and
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In a wonderfully sardonic aside, Davy added that his metaphor of the ‘cup of life’ was scientifically derived from the chemical fermentation of ‘the juice of the grape’, and then after a certain lapse of time, its oxidisation and acidification.101
The phrase is famous from the Gospels: the risen Christ’s first words to Mary Magdalene.
The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth.’106
The Consolations is one of the most extraordinary prose books of the late Romantic period. Its title links it to the tradition of Boethius’ medieval Consolation, a form of renouncing the world before death.
‘To the Supreme Intelligence, the death of a million of human beings, is the mere circumstance of so many spiritual essences changing their habitations, and is analogous to the myriad millions of larvae that leave their coats and shells behind them, and rise into the atmosphere, as flies on a summer day.’125
Part man of science and part mystic, The Unknown is yet another projection of Davy’s secret myth of himself, now the pilgrim scientist on his last journey.
‘That the fish has in millions of generations ripened into the quadruped, and the quadruped into man; and that the system of life by its own inherent powers has fitted itself to the physical changes in the system of the universe.’128
Davy also puts forward the sustaining idea that men of science like Archimedes, Bacon and Galileo had actually advanced human civilisation far more than statesmen, religious leaders or artists.
‘Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feeling; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they like wise extend its analogies; and, though conversant with the minute forms of things, they have for their ultimate end the great and magnificent objects of Nature … And hence they are wonderfully suited to the progressive nature of the human intellect
the progressive nature of science as an expression of man’s ‘immortal’ spirit,
It certainly belongs to the new Romantic genre of memoir, that includes in various ways Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805-50), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1816) and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).
speculated whether the human brain itself might be ‘an electric pile, constantly in action’.144
large stone statue erected to Davy, dominating Market Jew Street, showed his frock-coat with a missing button ‘because Lady Davy was a bad wife and would never sew it back on’.
What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this — that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind … that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton …
‘The Idea of Creativity in the Sciences and the Humanities’.
‘That is complete and utter balls … We don’t have to put up with such rubbish.’
The deaths of Joseph Banks in 1820, William Herschel in 1822, and finally of Humphry Davy in 1829, marked the passing of an age.
Public concern about the role of science in society was now widespread.
‘The Progress of Science … is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration.’3
Babbage’s prototype computer later became one of the legends of Victorian science, and a parable about the failure of government research funding.
At the point when he ran out of money in 1832, Babbage had succeeded in constructing one self-contained section of his Difference Engine No. 1, employing 2,000 brass components, which still exists and works impeccably as an automatic calculator.
However, Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed in the 1840s to use 4,000 brass cogs, was actually constructed by the Science Museum in 1991, and with some minor alterations works to this day, capable of calculating to thirty-one places of decimals — an impressive power. It weighs three tons and cost £300,000 — considerably cheaper, in relative terms, than the original.4 ♣
