Genius of Britain (Text Only)

Robert Uhlig

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780007440337
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

Chapter 1

IDEAS FROM ABROAD

Bread Street in the City of London is an unlikely setting for the birthplace of modern science. Nowadays it’s little more than a dusty canyon squeezed between a succession of monolithic grey office blocks. There’s a sandwich bar, a few delivery bays and, at its junction with Watling Street, a tantalising glimpse of the magnificent baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666, the cathedral is a visual reminder of why, as a result of the fire and the 1940 ‘Blitz’ bombardment of London, nothing remains to remind us of Bread Street’s remarkable past, when it teemed with intellect, enquiry and creativity. Where Bread Street meets Friday Street, the most notable writers and thinkers of the day – including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Donne, who like his fellow poet, John Milton, was born in Bread Street – would meet to battle wits in a club founded at the Mermaid Tavern by Sir Walter Raleigh. Meanwhile, in the nearby churchyard of the old gothic St Paul’s, booksellers would set up their stalls while choirboys (like the ‘little eyases’ that Hamlet complained competed with his players) performed scenes from the latest plays. However, the location that can lay claim to playing a starring role in the opening act of the scientific revolution was further down Bread Street towards the river, where Peter Short, a freeman of the Stationers Company, operated a successful printing business behind a handsome shop front under a star-shaped sign.

In early 1600 Short was busy with books for Jonson and Marlowe. Having printed several of Shakespeare’s first editions and early texts in the previous three years, Short was in high demand, but the most influential book he would print that year – or any year, for that matter – belonged to William Gilbert, personal physician to Elizabeth I and president of the College of Physicians. If any one work marked the start of the scientific revolution – that moment when rational, empirical, experimental investigation replaced mysticism, conjecture and superstition as the means of explaining the world – then Gilbert’s book was it.

Concerned primarily with magnetism, electricity and astronomy, De magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (‘A new natural philosophy of the lodestone, magnetic bodies, and the great lodestone the earth, proved by many reasonings and experiments’) was the first work under the modern definition of physical science to be produced anywhere in the world. Its principal ideas were so remarkable that they would not be added to until Michael Faraday’s discoveries some 230 years later. However, the fact that these ideas had been formulated by an eminent medic who devoted eighteen years of his spare time (and several million pounds in modern money) to the task was only half the story. The most remarkable aspect of De magnete was not the content or the new theories that Gilbert put forward, but the way in which he formulated them.

For nearly 2,000 years science had relied on the writings of natural philosophers and mathematicians such as Aristotle, Pliny and Copernicus, who had published treatises on astronomy, geometry and the motion of heavenly and terrestrial bodies. They’d discussed the anatomy of animals, the structure of plants and the classification of species. Alchemists among them had searched for ways to turn lead into gold and physicists had declared the world to be constructed of four fundamental elements – earth, water, air and fire – built up in consecutive shells.

Although the conclusions of these early scientists and their successors differed, they all relied on applying philosophical methods in their attempts to understand the world. Using logical discourse and scholastic interpretation of earlier texts to develop their theories, they had developed an academic tradition that Gilbert shattered with his publication of De magnete.

Gilbert’s momentous breakthrough was to assert that nothing could be taken for granted or postulated if it could not be proved by extensive observations from repeatable experiments. This ethos, the bedrock of modern science, made Gilbert in effect the first scientist, although the term would not be coined for another 230 years. His book, a bestseller by the standards of its day (it was even pirated in counterfeit editions), was hugely influential and a profound influence on his contemporary Galileo Galilei, who is often regarded as the ‘father of science’ but who lauded Gilbert as the founder of the experimental method for which Galileo is usually given credit.

Like many iconoclasts, Gilbert travelled an unconventional route to his intellectual breakthrough. Having qualified at Cambridge University as a medic in 1569, he rapidly established himself as a physician to the aristocracy and court, which led to the Privy Council asking him to treat some sailors. This brought him into contact with Sir Francis Drake and his fellow Elizabethan circumnavigator, Thomas Cavendish.

Gilbert’s respect for these heroic mariners appears to have triggered a fascination with the nautical compass and magnetism, perhaps unsurprising as the compass was the most significant invention of its day. By increasing the safety and scope of sea voyages, the compass had opened up the Eastern hemisphere to Western travellers and made possible the age of exploration. It had played no small role in the settlement of North America in the 1580s and the sea battles that led to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. It is safe to say that the compass’s enabling role in trade, imperialism, warfare and missionary exploration had a greater influence on the course of history than the invention of either gunpowder or the printing press, and that it would push man’s perception of the world further than even Copernican astronomical theories.

Gilbert brought a fresh pair of eyes to the many superstitions that surrounded the mysterious workings of the compass. His curiosity and scepticism were in keeping with his habit over the years of questioning the adherence by his colleagues to the texts of the Greek physician, Galen, which explained the workings of the body as a collection of four mystical humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm – formed from the fundamental elements of fire, water, air and earth. According to Galenic medicine, disease resulted from the imbalance of these humours or the dominance of one of the four qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry. Although Gilbert had been taught Galenic medicine at Cambridge and the Galenic method was promoted by the College of Physicians, he dismissed its orthodoxy as rooted essentially in abstract philosophy. Instead Gilbert advocated an experience-based medicine and applied the same empirical mindset to his examination of magnetism and the workings of the compass.

In his introduction to De magnete, Gilbert did not pull any punches in rejecting the orthodox natural philosophy of his day. Damning some long-held beliefs, he commented that ‘in philosophy many false and idle conjectures arise from fables and falsehoods’ – brave words at a time when philosophers were burned at the stake for the heresy of challenging established Church-approved doctrine in other European countries. The opening sentence of De magnete’s prologue castigated his predecessors, accusing them of promoting theories ‘on the basis of a few vague and indecisive experiments’. Gilbert continued in a provocative and defiant dismissal of his predecessors’ work, declaring that ‘clearer proofs in the discovery of secrets and the investigations of the hidden causes of things are afforded by trustworthy experiments and by demonstrated arguments than by the probable guesses and opinions of the ordinary professors of philosophy’.

The book then described a series of brilliant and pioneering experiments, in the first tranche of which Gilbert demolished many common misnomers about magnets. At a time when sailors would be flogged for the offence of having garlic on their breath, Gilbert proved that it was impossible for garlic to demagnetise the ship’s compass or any other magnet, or incidentally for it to cure headaches. He then went on to show that a compass needle points along a roughly north–south axis and that it dips downwards if it is suspended. By examining the degree of dip of a compass needle in the vicinity of a spherical magnet, he showed that the needle pointed vertically at the magnetic poles of the sphere, which led him to declare that the Earth itself acted like a giant bar magnet. To acknowledge the similarities between the Earth’s magnetic field and that of a bar magnet, Gilbert was the first person to name the ends of a magnet its north and south poles.

Having overturned centuries of mysticism surrounding magnetism, Gilbert turned to other attractive forces. He discovered that amber, rock crystal and several gems would attract almost any light object when rubbed with silk. Realising that there was a distinction between this force and magnetism, which attracted only iron, Gilbert grouped all substances that showed the property under the name ‘electrics’, coining it from the Greek word for amber, elektron.

Gilbert’s passion for enquiry was unstoppable. Having become the first to make the distinction between static electricity and magnetism, he then turned to the heavens. As the first notable British supporter of the Copernican view that the Sun was at the centre of the universe with the Earth orbiting around it – not vice versa, as advocated by the Church – he devised elegant explanations for several hitherto unexplained astronomical phenomena. He also speculated that magnetism kept Earth on its celestial track, a conclusion that would not be bettered by Galileo or Johann Kepler, the German astronomer whose laws of planetary motion would later provide the foundations for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. (Both Galileo and Kepler drew heavily on Gilbert in their promotion of Copernicus.)

Reading Gilbert’s description of his experiments in De magnete gives a sense of a free-thinking innovator struggling at times to impose a logical pattern on frequently puzzling and contradictory observations. For instance, Gilbert noticed that magnetic forces persisted across a flame, but that magnetic iron lost its power when raised to red heat. He also discovered that water moisture in breath disrupted static electricity but a coating of oil did not, and that droplets of water were themselves attracted by electric forces.

Packed with such observations, De magnete paints a picture of science in its rawest state. Newton would write nearly ninety years later of standing ‘on the shoulders of giants’ when coming to his conclusions. Forced to formulate his understanding from the most basic principles and observations, Gilbert had no such luxury and, in so doing, became one of the giants to which Newton would later refer. Only three years after De magnete was published, Gilbert died, most probably in the plague epidemic of 1603 that also killed his printer, Peter Short, but his influence had already shaken the world of science, prompting Kepler to write that he wished he ‘had wings with which to travel to England to confer with him’.

Although Gilbert undoubtedly drew on ideas coming out of the Renaissance in Italy, his fervent belief in experimentalism and his dismissal of the conventions of natural philosophy were all the more remarkable because they appeared at the time almost to come out of nowhere. For 250 years before Gilbert, scientific investigation had ground to a halt in Britain, largely as the result of disease and war. The great famine of 1315–17 and the Black Death, which entered England in 1348 through the port of Weymouth, killing up to half of the country’s population by 1666, had predictably devastating effects. In the century from 1276 to 1375, average life expectancy more than halved from 35 to 17 years. Many of those who survived or were born after these two natural threats to life were dragged into the Hundred Years’ War of 1337–1453 or the immediately succeeding Wars of the Roses of 1453–87. Unsurprisingly, two centuries of death and destruction revitalised interest in religion (and with it, a suspicion of nonreligious explanations for the universe), while the sharp decline in available labour prompted draconian legislation that led to social unrest and a rise in criminality. It turned Britain into a place in which scientific investigation was low on the agenda.

But before the destructive events of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, developments in science – or more properly, natural philosophy, as it was called – had been advancing rapidly by Western European standards. The source of this rich heritage in scientific learning can be found another 500 years or so earlier in the late seventh century, when the last vestiges of Roman civilisation in Britain were being overrun by Viking invaders. Like most of Western Europe, Britain had become a tapestry of rural populations and semi-nomadic people since the political disintegration of Rome nearly 300 years earlier. Four frequently warring cultures – Celtic-speaking Romano-British in the west, pagan Picts in Scotland, the Dal Riata Gaels in Ireland, and Anglo-Saxons and Jutes along the east coast – were sharing a territory that under the Romans had been largely unified as Britannia. The downfall of urban life had reduced the scope of learning and the only remnants of scholarship were now found in places such as Lindisfarne monastery, where monks worked tirelessly, copying sacred and historic texts to ensure the survival of early Greek, Latin and Christian literature.

For many of these clergymen, the study of nature formed only a tiny part of their interest. With little institutional support for the study of natural phenomena, they concentrated their attention on religious topics. Nature was studied more for practical reasons than abstract enquiry. The need to care for the sick led to the study of medicine and of ancient texts on drugs. The quest for determining the proper time to pray led them to examine the motion of the stars. And a requirement to compute the date of Easter led them to explore and teach rudimentary mathematics and the motions of the Sun and Moon.

Among these monks was ‘the Venerable’ Bede, often called the father of English history for his most famous work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Born on the lands of the Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Wearmouth and Jarrow in around 672, Bede was entrusted to the care of the monks at the age of 7. By the time he was ordained a deacon at 19 Bede was a conscientious choir attendee, but he refused higher office after he entered the priesthood, preferring to spend his time studying the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians. Drawing on works by Aristotle, Pliny and Sosigenes held by the monastery library, this astonishingly versatile scholar had by 703 produced the first British work on science. De temporibus (On Time) was concerned mainly with calculating the date of Easter and became a standard text for the Church. It also included a new chronology of the world that placed the date of creation as 3952 BC, which had the effect of suggesting that Christ was not incarnated at the time advocated by the Church. Enraged that Bede had departed from the precise chronology of the Six Ages of the World theory accepted by theologians at the time, a group of drunken monks accused him of heresy at a dinner in front of Wilfred, Bishop of Hereford. Bede defended the accusation in a letter to Wilfrid, but didn’t desist from continuing to challenge orthodox beliefs.

Twenty years later, in about 723, Bede wrote a longer work, a codex called De temporium ratione (On the Reckoning of Time). Many centuries before Renaissance scientists in Italy came to the same conclusions, it suggested that the world was round and that its spherical shape could explain the lengthening and shortening of daylight hours. With chapters on how the relative positions of the Sun and Moon influenced the appearance of New Moons at evening twilight, it also suggested how the Moon and latitude affected tidal cycles. Bede also highlighted shortcomings in the accuracy of the Julian calendar, warning that it would eventually put Easter out of phase with the March equinox and place the months out of synchrony with the seasons.

The Julian calendar had been introduced by Julius Caesar on the advice of Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer. It advocated one leap year every four years to maintain synchrony with the solar cycle. But Bede warned that this adjustment was slightly inaccurate and that adhering to it would ultimately create chaos. In spite of Bede’s warnings, it took more than 1,000 years for the error to be addressed in Britain. By then, it was necessary to correct by 11 days, so Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752. Ever since then, the Gregorian calendar has been used, which tweaks for the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar by omitting the leap day at the end of three out of four centuries – just as Bede had suggested would be needed.

As the earliest indication of scientific thought in Britain, Bede’s works were highly influential. De temporium ratione found an eager audience at home and in continental Europe, where it sparked an interest in computus, the calculation of the date of Easter, one of the most important considerations of the Christian Church. Even 200 years later the Church still felt a debt to Bede, a Swiss monk called Notker the Stammerer writing that ‘God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth’.

Bede’s works might have been lost to future scholars had not Alfred the Great, the first king of all Anglo-Saxon England, stepped in during the ninth century to ensure their survival. Although Alfred made his reputation as a masterful military tactician and courageous guerrilla warrior who ended Viking advances into southern England, he was also a learned man who earned his epithet ‘the Great’ as much for his educational reforms as for military achievements.

As a child, Alfred committed tracts of Anglo-Saxon poetry to memory. When he succeeded his brother to the throne in 871, Alfred taught himself to read and write, then mastered Latin. Concerned that his subjects should have access to learning in the new era of peace and stability, he went on to translate several Latin works into Anglo-Saxon, including those of Bede and Boethius, the Roman philosopher who had written extensively on ancient Greek science.

With Bede’s texts preserved, the next leap in scientific investigation in Britain came shortly after the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066.

At this time, most of Europe was extremely ambivalent about science. It was an intensely theological period with a great suspicion of anything that appeared to contradict Christian teaching. Scientific and mathematical activity had shifted to the Middle East, where scholars drew on ancient Greek texts acquired following Muslim invasions of former Hellenistic cities in the seventh century. Muslim trade with Chinese and Hindu merchants, and the sharing of a common language throughout the Arab Empire, led to an Islamic Golden Age in which engineering, ast...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Timeline
• Foreword by James Dyson
• 1. Ideas from Abroad
• 2. The First Scientists
• 3. A Society for Science
• 4. The Greatest Scientist of All
• 5. A Bright Light in the Sky
• 6. Chemists Spark Their Own Revolution
• 7. Power from Progress
• 8. The Origins of Life
• 9. Darwin’s Revolution
• 10. Sparks Fly
• 11. End of an Epoch
• 12. Into the Atomic Age
• 13. The Expediency of War
• 14. The Meaning of Life
• Key Dates in British Science
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher