Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. Bill Bryson
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to me all that far-fetched. I was then living in what was still the golden or bug-eyed monster age of science fiction – the late forties – so I took spaceships for granted. This was before the disappointing news had come in – No intelligent life on Mars – and also before I’d read H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in the light of which any life intelligent enough to build spaceships and come to Earth would be so much smarter than us that we’d be viewed by them as ambulatory kebabs. So I considered it entirely possible that, once I’d grown up, I might fly through space and meet some extraterrestrials, who then as now were considered to be bald, with very large eyes and heads.
Why then couldn’t there be a flying island such as Laputa? I thought the method of keeping the thing afloat with magnets was a little cumbersome – hadn’t Mr Swift heard of jet propulsion? – but the idea of hovering over a country that was annoying you so they’d be in full shadow and their crops wouldn’t grow seemed quite smart. As for dropping stones on to them, it made perfect sense: kids of the immediately post-war generation were well versed in the advisability of air superiority, and knew a lot about bombers.
I didn’t understand why these floating-island people had to eat food cut into the shapes of musical instruments, but the flappers who hit them with inflated bladders to snap them out of their thought trances didn’t seem out of the question. My father was by that time teaching in the Department of Zoology at the University of Toronto, and growing up among the scientists, and thus being able to observe them at work, I knew they could be like that: the head of the Zoology Department was notorious for setting himself on fire by putting his still-smouldering pipe into his pocket, and could have made excellent use of a flapper.
When I got as far as the Grand Academy of Lagado I felt right at home. In addition to being the golden age of bug-eyed monsters the late forties was also the golden age of dangerous chemistry sets for children – now prohibited, no doubt wisely – and my brother had one. ‘Turn water to blood and astonish your friends!’ proclaimed the advertisements, and this was no sooner said than done, with the aid of a desirable crystal named – as I recall – potassium permanganate. There were many other ways in which we could astonish our friends and, short of poisoning them, we did all of them. I doubt that we were the only children to produce hydrogen sulphide (‘Make the smell of rotten eggs and astonish your friends!’) on the day when our mother’s bridge club was scheduled to meet. Through these experiments, we learned the rudiments of the scientific method: any procedure done in the same way with the same materials ought to produce the same results. And ours did, until the potassium permanganate ran out.
These were not the only experiments we performed. I will not catalogue our other adventures in science, which had their casualties – the jars of tadpoles dead from being left by mistake in the Sun, the caterpillars that came to sticky ends – but will pause briefly to note the mould experiment, consisting of various foodstuffs placed in jars – our home-preserving household had a useful supply of jars – to see what might grow on them in the way of mould. Many-coloured and whiskery were the results, which I mention now only to explain why the Grand Academy ‘projector’ who thought it might be a brilliant idea to inflate a dog through its nether orifice in order to cure it of colic raised neither of my eyebrows. It was a shame that the dog exploded, but this was surely a mistake in the method rather than a flaw in the concept; or that was my opinion.
Indeed, this scene stayed with me as a memory trace that was reactivated the first time I had a colonoscopy, and was myself inflated in this way. You had the right idea, Mr Swift, I mused, but the wrong application. Also, you thought you were being ridiculous. Had you known that the dog-enlarging anal bellows you must have found so amusing would actually appear on Earth 250 years later in order to help doctors run a tiny camera through your intestines so they could see what was going on in there, what would you have said?
And so it is with the majority of the experiments described in the Grand Academy chapters of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift thought them up as jokes, but many of them have since been done in earnest, though with a twist. For instance, the first ‘projector’ Gulliver meets is a man who has run himself into poverty through the pursuit of what Swift devised as a nutty-professor chase-a-moonbeam concept: this man wants to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers so he can bottle them for use in the winter, when the supply of sunbeams is limited. Swift must have laughed into his sleeve, but I, the child reader, found nothing extraordinary in this idea, because every morning I was given a spoonful of cod liver oil, bursting with Vitamin D, the ‘Sunshine Vitamin’. The projector had simply used the wrong object – cucumbers instead of cod.
Some of the experiments being done by the projectors interested me less, though they have since contributed to Swift’s reputation for prescience. The blind man at the Academy who’s teaching other blind people to distinguish colours by touch was doubtless intended by Swift to represent yet more foolishness on the part of would-be geniuses, but now there are ongoing experiments involving something called the BrainPort – a device designed to allow blind people to ‘see’ with their tongues. The machine with many handles that, when turned, causes an array of oddly Chinese-looking words to arrange themselves into an endless number of sequences – thus writing masterpieces eventually, like the well-known infinitely large mob of monkeys with typewriters – is now thought by some to be a forerunner of the computer.
Predicting the future and suggesting the invention of handy new devices was, however, very far from Swift’s intention. His ‘projectors’ – so called because they are absorbed in their projects – are a combination of experimental scientist and entrepreneur; they exist within Gulliver’s Travels as pearls on his long string of human folly and depravity, midway between the Lilliputians and their tiny fracas and petty intrigues and the brutal, nasty, smelly, ugly and vicious Yahoos of the fourth book, who represent humanity in its bared-to-the-elements Hobbesian basic state.
But Swift’s projectors aren’t wicked, and they aren’t really demented. They’re even well meaning: their inventions are intended for the improvement of mankind. All we have to do is give them more money and more time and let them have their way, and everything will get a lot better very soon. It’s a likely story, and one we’ve heard many times since the advent of applied science. Sometimes this story ends well, at least for a while – science did lower the human mortality rate, the automobile did speed up travel, air conditioning did make us cooler in summer, the ‘green revolution’ did increase the supply of food. But the doctrine of unintended consequences applies quite regularly to the results of scientific ‘improvements’: agriculture can’t keep up with the population explosion with the result that millions are leading lives of poverty and misery, air conditioning contributes to global warming, the automobile promised freedom until – via long commute distances, clogged roads and increased pollution – it delivered servitude. Swift anticipated us: the projectors promise an idyllic future in which one man shall do the work of ten and all fruits shall be available at all times – pace automation and the supermarket – but ‘The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the meantime, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.’ Under the influence of the projectors the utopian pie is visible in the sky, but it remains there.
As I’ve said, the projectors are not intentionally wicked. But they have tunnel vision – much like a present-day scientist quoted recently, who, when asked why he’d created a polio virus from scratch, answered that he’d done it because the polio virus was a simple one, and that next time he’d create a more complex virus. A question most of us would have understood to have meant, ‘Why did you do such a potentially dangerous thing?’ – a question about ends – was taken by him to be a question about means. Swift’s projectors show the same confusion in their understanding of ordinary human desires and fears. Their greatest offence is not against morals: instead they are offenders against common sense – what Swift might have called merely ‘sense’. They don’t intend to cause harm, but by refusing to admit the adverse consequences of their actions, they cause it anyway.
The Grand Academy of Lagado was recognised by Swift’s readers as a satire upon the Royal Society, which even by Swift’s time was an august and respected institution. Though English seekers after empirical facts had been meeting since 1640, the