Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Bill Bryson
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divers considerable observations of his concerning insects…
…said, that an iron back in a chimney well heated, useth to make a noise like that of bell-metal.
…observed, that a bean cut into two or three pieces produces good beans.
…desired farther time to make his collection of insects for a present to the society.
…mentioned, that a lady had…
…related, that a cornet in Scotland…
…mentioned, that he had known wheat…
Until finally, ‘having discoursed of his opinion concerning the smut of corn, viz., that it proceeds from the root, and not the mildew, [Long] was desired to give his discourse in writing’.
In these first years a great many animals were cut up, poisoned, or suffocated. ‘It is a most acceptable thing to hear their discourse, and see their experiments,’ wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary, and he seemed particularly drawn to experiments involving cats and dogs. ‘…And so out to Gresham College, and saw a cat killed with the Duke of Florence’s poyson, and saw it proved that the oyle of tobacco drawn by one of the Society do the same effect…I saw also an abortive child preserved in spirits of salt.’
…And anon to Gresham College, where, among other discourse, there was tried the great poyson of Maccassa upon a dogg, but it had no effect all the time we sat there.
Then to Gresham College, and there did see a kitling killed almost quite…
Chickens were ‘choked’ and fish were ‘gagged’. The members strangled dogs and dissected living cats. Not all had the stomach for these experiments. Robert Boyle did, and he took pride in this. ‘I have been so far from that effeminate squeamishness, that one of the philosophical treatises, for which I have been gathering experiments, is of the nature and use of dungs,’ he boasted. ‘I have not been so nice, as to decline dissecting dogs, wolves, fishes, and even rats and mice, with my own hands. Nor, when I am in my laboratory, do I scruple with them naked to handle lute and charcoal.’ The Society’s armoury of mechanical instruments was small in these early years, but one that proved endlessly useful was Boyle’s air pump, or ‘pneumatical engine’. Among the items placed in glass vessels, from which the air was then exhausted, were birds, mice, ducks, vipers, frogs, oysters and crawfish. Typical experiments would bring the creatures ‘to Deaths door’, whereupon the Society would observe gasping, vomiting and convulsions. Respiration held many mysteries; so did the circulation of the blood. An experiment could last for many hours or could end in seconds: ‘I have this to alledge,’ wrote Boyle, ‘that, having in the presence of some Virtuosi provided for the nonce a very small Receiver, wherein yet a Mouse could live sometime, if the Air were left in it, we were able to evacuate it in one suck, and by that advantage we were enabled, to the wonder of the Beholders, to kill the Animal in less than half a minute.’ The experimentation was not, for some time, organised or systematic; sometimes the wonder of the beholders was the chief result. The Philosophical Transactions served as a progenitor of Ripley’s Believe It or Not as well as the Physical Review.
‘There follow topsy-turvy without any order experiments of all sorts,’ wrote Goethe more than a century later, ‘news of happenings on earth and in the heavens.’ Goethe bore the Royal Society no small resentment, which he nursed by devotedly reading its history, as set down by both Thomas Sprat and Thomas Birch. He translated many pages of extracts, and he complained: ‘Everybody communicates what happens to be at hand, phenomena of Naturlehre, objects of Naturgeschichte, technical operations, everything appearing topsy-turvy without order. Many things quite insignificant, others interesting only in outward appearance, others merely curious, are accepted and given a place.’
It was not until late in 1671 that the members heard about a young Lincolnshire man, Isaac Newton, who had invented a new kind of telescope at least ten times more powerful, inch for inch, than any in existence.
Engravings of Boyle’s air pumps. The top left engraving is from the backpiece to New Experiments: Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects, by Robert Boyle, 1660.
He had not sent it to them. He had made it in 1668 or 1669 in Cambridge, where he had just become the new Professor of Mathematics, but kept it mostly to himself. Cambridge being some distance from London, more than two years passed before the news, and then the telescope, reached the Royal Society. As they could see, it was not just a serious scientific advance but a technology with military application. They studied it and showed it to the King. Henry Oldenburg wrote to the twenty-nine-year-old on their behalf. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘Your Ingenuity is the occasion of this addresse by a hand unknown to you…’ In short order they elected him a member, though none had yet met him.
For some time Newton had been reading the Society’s reports and taking careful note. News of a fiery mountain: ‘Batavia one afternone was covered with a black dust heavyer than gold which is thought came from an hill on Java Major supposed to burne.’ Lunar influence: ‘Oysters & Crabs are fat at the new moone & leane at the full.’ Now he wrote to Oldenburg at the only address he knew – ‘Mr Henry Oldenburge at his house about the middle of the old Palmail in St Jamses Fields in Westminster’ – and said he had news of his own. He advertised it enthusiastically: ‘…in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of Nature.’
The meeting of 8 February 1672 began as usual with the reading out of letters newly arrived. First came a conjecture from John Wallis that the Moon’s varying distance to the Earth, its perigee and apogee, might ‘much influence the rising and falling of the mercury in the barometer’. He hoped that members of the Society who had barometers would investigate. It was another idea destined for the dustbin.
Next, Tommaso Cornelio wrote from Naples, in Italian, to refute common stories told of the odd effects of the bite of the tarantula. His observations suggested that most such stories were fictitious. (Many, he added soon afterward, come from ‘young wanton girles who by some particular indisposition falling into this melancholly madness, perswade themselves according to the vulgar prejudice, to have been stung by a Tarantula’.)
The third letter was more complicated: ‘Of Mr Isaac Newton from Cambridge, concerning his discovery of the nature of light, refractions, and colour…’ Sunlight, according to this letter, is not homogenous, but consists ‘of different rays’. These rays come in pure and indivisible colours. The Society’s note-taker wrote this down: ‘Some, in their own nature, are disposed to produce red, others green, others blue, others purple, &c.’ Newton made a further claim, even more counter-intuitive:
The most surprising, and wonderful composition was that of Whiteness. There is no one sort of Rays which alone can exhibit this. ’Tis ever compounded, and to its composition are requisite all the aforesaid primary Colours, mixed in due proportion. I have often with Admiration beheld, that all the Colours of the Prisme being made to converge, and thereby to be again mixed,…reproduced light, intirely and perfectly white.
This was more interesting, if scarcely more believable, than the Odd Monstrous Calf. It was ordered that the author be solemnly thanked; also that Boyle, Hooke and the Bishop of Salisbury peruse and consider it and report back.
What followed is a story told many times. Newton’s experiment of sunlight refracted by two prisms – so ingeniously conceived, carefully performed, and exquisitely narrated – came to be seen as a landmark in the history of science. It established a great truth of nature. It created a template for the art of reasoning from observation to theory. It shines as a beacon from the past so brightly as to cast the rest of the Society’s contemporaneous activity into relative shadow.
But this is by definition hindsight. That week in February, thinking nothing of history, Hooke dashed off a critique in a matter of hours. He claimed that he, as Curator of Experiments, had already performed such experiments many hundreds of times. He assured the Society that light is a pulse in the ether