British Scientists of the Nineteenth Century

J G Crowther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135028817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1935. J G Crowther has chosen five of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century – Davy, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Joule, Lord Kelvin and examines every aspect of their lives and work. Nineteenth century science appears in a different light from that in which its contemporaries regarded it, and Crowther shows that it is now possible to judge which were the most important discoveries, which the most significant personalities of the period; and how the passage of time has revealed many unsuspected connections between a scientist's discoveries and the social life and industry of his day.

III

JAMES PRESCOTT JOULE

1818–1889

III

JAMES PRESCOTT JOULE

1818–1889

JOULE is one of the most peculiar figures in the history of science. His quality as an experimenter has never been surpassed. The rapid maturity of his powers, his intellectual independence and clarity, and theoretical insight into the significance of his experiments might have made him an immediately fascinating personality. But he seems to inspire respect rather than excitement. The student usually learns that he was a great experimenter who determined the mechanical equivalent of heat, and established the principle of the conservation of energy, the chief contribution of the nineteenth century to physical science. An account of the measurement of the rise of temperature produced in water by rotating paddles is followed by comments on the comprehensive nature and importance of the principle of the conservation of energy. The student tries to be properly impressed, and passes on to something less important, but apparently more interesting. What is the explanation of this tendency to admire rather than respond to Joule’s extraordinary achievements?

His retiring disposition and the cultural barbarity of his environment are among the factors that have prevented Joule and his researches from having an expected fascination. His personality was not powerful enough to overcome the uncivilized darkness with which he was surrounded. If society with educated imagination had existed in Manchester, Joule’s discoveries might have been the material of a magnificent literature. He could make powerful imaginative deductions from his results, but only of a direct sort. He did not notably possess the power of applying a new idea through various regions of phenomena. The idea of the convervation of energy, and a calculation of the mechanical equivalent of heat, were published by J. R. Mayer, in Germany, before Joule had published similar results. Mayer was the intellectual complement of Joule, as he possessed a power of imaginative generalization equal in degree to Joule’s experimental power. In their different styles they were men of equal genius. Both of them, in spite of their achievements, failed to stimulate the right sort of cultural response in their contemporaries. This prevented the composition of a literature that explained the full interest of their work. The scientific work of Joule and of Darwin have certain resemblances in qualities. Their work was baldly scientific and the results were of vast importance, but neither was concerned with the explanation of the general implications. Joule’s papers are in fact less tedious to the general reader than many of Darwin’s. Besides the nearness of Darwin’s chief theme to the personal interests of humanity, he had the advantage of having its implications explained by T. H. Huxley, and Huxley’s pupil, H. G. Wells. Joule was interpreted by William Thomson, whose original genius was coarser than Joule’s, and who lacked the mastery of speech, and the insight into human nature, that made Huxley such a brilliant expositor. Thomson was seconded by P. G. Tait, a man of fine talent and high personal character, but lacking in philosophic depth. Tait conducted scientific controversies like football matches between teams of schoolboys. He was loved by his pupils, but the magnitude of the affection he inspired in them does not excuse the limitations of his personality. His patriotic and social narrowness seems to have been a product of the security of the British professional class and of Britain. His limitations seem to have been due to circumstances that his gifts did not enable him to overcome. He had not sufficient insight. Some of Thomson’s limitations seem to have been of a less pardonable sort.

It is possible that the theory of the conservation of energy is intrinsically less interesting than the theory of evolution. Its discovery is not attributed exclusively to Joule, as the discovery of evolution is so often attributed to Darwin, and its implications were not explained by a Huxley and a Wells. The inability of Joule and his circle to interest the public in the theory of the conservation of energy may have been connected with an unconscious resentment against physical science. Manchester was one of the centres of the barbarous industrialism based on the application of the steam-engine to manufacture. The subtler activities of the human intellect may have been repressed in the face of the brutal pursuit of wealth that accompanied the development of production by the applica-tion of physical science. The comprehensive human imagination could not be nourished by Joule’s discoveries because they sprang from poisoned social sources. They arose out of studies of engines that had been appropriated to the creation of private wealth instead of an increase of human dignity. Much of the popular interest in the theory of evolution was due to the convenience of the principle of natural selection to the philosophy of competitive industrialism. Theories of evolution had frequently been propounded before Darwin, but his theory secured recognition partly because it combined evolution with natural selection, and the idea of natural selection was popular for other than scientific reasons. It is possible that Darwin’s researches are not intrinsically more interesting than Joule’s, in spite of their vastly greater literary success, and that the difference in the effects inspired by them is partly due to the more direct connexion of Joule’s researches with the sordid aspects of machine indiistry. Problems of horse-power were closely connected with those of production and the pursuit of wealth, whereas the survival of the fittest seemed to be connected with the sublimer problems of life and death, though the phrase’s fascination derived its power not from these problems, but from its apparent justification of the methods of competitive industry.

Joule had no comprehensive imagination, so the failure to present the comprehensive implications of his work was due to the failure of his colleagues. Mayer possessed the highest degree of comprehensive imagination, but his work was not understood by his colleagues. The mode of his discovery of the principle of the conservation of energy and of the mechanical equivalent of heat was extremely ingenious, but even this was insufficient to stimulate contemporary imagination. The apparent inexplicable boredom with which so many students approach the brilliant researches of Mayer and Joule is partly due to the blight which has infected culture since the heat-engine was harnessed to the pursuit of private wealth instead of social improvement.

Joule was born on December 24th, 1818, at Salford, which is adjacent to Manchester. His ancestors were Derbyshire yeomen or small farmers. His grandfather had migrated to Salford, where he founded a brewery and became wealthy. The grandfather’s family, including his fourth son, Benjamin, conducted the business after he died. Benjamin Joule had five children, of which James Prescott Joule was the second. The eldest was Benjamin St. J. B. Joule. The ownership of the brewery passed to Joule’s father. He sold it in 1854, and died in 1858, at the age of 74. Thus the Salford brewery passed out of the family when James Prescott Joule was thirty-five years of age. He never had an active part in the management of it. Joule’s father was interested in politics, on the Conservative side. His eldest son acted for a time as his political agent. Joule also was a political Conservative, and he was very conservative, too, in his attitude towards affairs. When he was President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society he nearly always opposed any modification of the traditional procedure. Joule’s conservatism in affairs is in remarkable contrast with his radicalism in research. His early papers show an independence of authority unsurpassed in any great investigation by a young man under the age of twenty-five.

The Joule family do not seem to have been physically robust. His mother died in 1834, at the age of forty-eight, and his father was an invalid for the last nine years of his life. His younger brother died at the age of about forty-five. For the last twenty-five years of his life Joule appears to have suffered from nose-bleeding, presumably haemophilia. He was slightly deformed and in his youth was treated for spinal trouble. This does not seem to have been very serious as he was then physically active. Perhaps his later shyness and his general conservatism in affairs was increased by physical delicacy.

Joule and his elder brother were educated at their father’s house, Broom Hill, near Manchester. Like Davy, Joule received a very early impression of the machinery of the new industrialism. At the age of fifteen Joule began to do some work in the brewery in order to learn the business. A brewery contains many processes of interest to the scientific mind. The evolution of carbon dioxide raises questions of the nature and properties of gases other than air. Joseph Priestley started his classical experiments on gases by investigating the carbon dioxide obtained from a brewery. The science of bacteriology arose out of Pasteur’s studies of the problems of the French wine industry. Much wine was unaccountably being spoilt and he was asked to investigate why. In recent decades research of fundamental importance on the nature of acidity and its part in biological processes has been done by Sørensen of the Carlsberg Laboratories at Copenhagen. His studies of fermentation have led to the theory of hydrogen ion concentration.

The brewer must know something of the chemistry and physics of gases and liquids. He must be a sufficiently good bacteriologist to prevent his fermentations from being spoilt. He must know enough of engineering to be able to handle and pump large quantities of liquids and gases at various temperatures.

This third part of the brewer’s technique probably impressed Joule. His insight into the relation of the temperatures and pressures of gases, into heating apparatus, and pumping engines may have begun to grow during the hours he spent in the brewery in his boyhood. Davy played among the pumping machinery of mines, Joule among that of a brewery. When Joule’s father decided to send Joule and his brother to John Dalton for lessons in chemistry twice a week, he probably thought more of providing his sons with scientific knowledge of industrial value, than of educating their spirits through the study of science.

There were other circumstances that could have stimulated Joule’s interest in mechanism and science.

His brother’s diary contains an account of their expedition, on September 15th, 1830, “into a field near Eccles, to see the first trains which travelled between Liverpool and Manchester, and to their riding on several Saturday afternoons to a place between Eccles and Patricroft to watch the two trains (one on each set of rails) passing and repassing for the amusement of passengers to Newton-in-the-Willows and back.”

The early education of Joule was started by his half-sister, and continued, with that of his brother, by resident tutors. One of these was F. Tappenden, who came from a military school in the south, and remained with them from 1832 to 1834. They rode ponies and were already interested in scientific toys, as they passed electric shocks through friends and servants while arranging that the current should in appearance, though not in reality, pass through themselves. They repeated Franklin’s experiment on bringing down electricity by kites, and verified its dangers.

According to J. T. Bottomley, Joule’s first electrical machine was of the glass cylinder type. It contained a poker hung up by silk threads. Leyden jars consisted of bottles half-full of water standing in another vessel filled with water.

In 1834 their father decided to send them to study chemistry under John Dalton. The famous philosopher was then sixty-eight years old, and still, to the eternal discredit of his contemporaries, earning pocket-money by teaching children. He insisted that his pupils should have a good knowledge of arithmetic and the first book of Euclid before beginning chemistry, so the young Joules were specially prepared in these subjects by their tutor, Tappenden, before they went to Dalton. Even after this the pupils spent the first two years in two weekly lessons of one hour covering the same ground. They were not pleased with this, and when Dalton suggested they should proceed to the higher mathematics before starting chemistry, they declined. It is interesting to note the leisurely approach of the founder of modern chemistry to laboratory experi-ment in the teaching of chemistry, and his emphasis on the importance of mathematics. Through this attitude the Joules received little instruction in chemistry from Dalton, as his course was ended in 1837, owing to a severe attack of paralysis.

J. T. Bottomley writes that Dalton taught the Joules arithmetic, algebra and geometry, and then natural philosophy from Cavallo’s textbook, and then chemistry from his own New System of Chemical Philosophy.

It is possible that in this short period of instruction and contact Dalton communicated or strengthened in Joule intellectual attitudes of imperishable value. Dalton had established the atomic theory of chemistry by introducing systematic measurement and quantitative comparison into the investigation of the chemically equivalent weights of elementary substances, and abiding by the implications of measurements. As Osborne Reynolds has remarked, the chief distinction between Dalton and Joule and their early contemporaries was the same, namely, the substitution of quantitative measurement for phenomenal experiments. Joule arrived at the law of the conservation of energy through systematically measuring several physical and mechanical effects, and comparing them with the equivalent electrical effect. The works of Dalton and Joule are both distinguished by the emphasis on measurement, and independent reliance on its results. The relation of Joule to Dalton is inevitably compared with that of Faraday to Davy. All of these men received no higher education in the ordinary sense apart from self-instruction. Faraday acquired the technique of research during long years of daily labour with Davy, and had scarcely a thought of making an independent research until he was twenty-five. Joule had wonderful gifts of construction and manipulation which required little training, but it is possible that he was deeply indebted to Dalton for the independence of his intellectual attitude. Dalton evidently liked the young Joules, as they noted after calling on him in 1838 that he “seemed very pleased to see us.”

Another profoundly important source of Joule’s intellectual independence was his financial independence. As a rich young man he needed no conventional training to qualify him for a career, or introduce him to powerful future friends. His early researches were pursued partly in the spirit of a young gentleman’s entertainment, which happened to be science instead of fighting or politics or gambling. It is difficult to believe that any student who had received a lengthy academic training could have described researches in Joule’s tone of intellectual equality. The gifted student who had studied under a great teacher would almost certainly adopt a less independent tone in his first papers, because he would have the attitude of a pupil to his seniors, besides a deference due to appreciation of his senior’s achievements. A student without deference after distinguished tuition is almost always mediocre.

Some very valuable material concerning Joule was acquired by the late Professor W. W, Haldane Gee on behalf of the Manchester College of Technology. It was found in the cellars of Joule’s last place of residence, at 12 Wardle Road, Sale. The writer is indebted to the authorities of the Manchester College of Technology for the permission to examine and comment on this remarkable collection. The pieces of apparatus include the pump, receivers, and double-walled calorimeter used in the famous experiments, described later in this chapter, in which Joule proved that gases which expand without doing external work do not sensibly change in temperature. There are cores of two of the electro-magnets used in his experiments of 1839, a travelling microscope used in the callibration of his thermometers, and many other smaller items.

The note-books and manuscript notes are still more interesting. There are six laboratory note-books that contain Joule’s original accounts of all of his experiments done between the years 1839–1871.

The first note-book was used between 1839–43 and contains 260 pages. It was one of the old exercise-books from his boyhood. There are several pages of exercises in book-keeping. The real or imaginary accounts are dated 1825. Then there are more pages of exercises in arithmetic and commercial arithmetic, and a few pages on the properties of conic sections. All of these exercises are written in a copper-plate handwriting. Gee has suggested they were done under the superintendence of a tutor as a preparation for Dalton’s inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• I. HUMPHRY DAVY, 1778-1829
• II. MICHAEL FARADAY, 1791-1867
• III. JAMES PRESCOTT JOULE, 1818-1889
• IV. WILLIAM THOMSON, 1824-1907
• V. JAMES CLERK MAXWELL, 1831-1879
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX