Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (19 page)

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night,

God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light

U
ntil the 19th century, smallpox was widespread, often lethal and left its surviving victims (including Queen Elizabeth I) disfigured by scars. Edward Jenner (1749–1823) was a country doctor based in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. Milkmaids had a reputation for beauty and Jenner noted that, while they frequently carried blisters on their hands, known as cowpox, from handling the udders of cows, they never developed the pustules of smallpox. He concluded that cowpox protected them so he extracted some pus from the blisters of a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes and injected it into James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener. James remained well so Jenner then deliberately injected James with smallpox, a potentially deadly disease. Nowadays this would lead to his being struck off the medical register. Fortunately for James and for the reputation of Jenner, the boy remained free of smallpox. The practice of vaccination spread rapidly, though not without opposition. Dr Benjamin Mosley (1742–1819) described the practice as ‘the ravings of Bedlam’ and another condemnation came from a surprising quarter: Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1919) who, with Charles Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. But others, including Napoleon and a delegation of Native American chiefs praised and rewarded him. Edward Jenner was also a keen naturalist and was the first to observe the habit of the young cuckoo in expelling other eggs from the nest which it occupied.

T
he invention of the steam engine is often attributed to James Watt or George Stephenson but in reality they simply improved on the designs of others, all of them being British. The first patent for ‘a new invention for raising water by the important use of fire’ was registered by Thomas Savery (c.1650–1715). His machine was designed to pump water out of tin mines. Steam was introduced under pressure into a sealed vessel, driving a piston to force water up a pipe and out of the mine. Cold water was then sprinkled on the vessel to condense the steam so that the piston fell back. Savery later went into partnership with Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729), a Devon blacksmith, who introduced a piston attached to a beam so that the pressure could be applied to the water as the piston fell as well as when it rose under pressure, thereby doubling its effectiveness. However the process of heating and cooling was extravagant in the use of energy. The contribution of James Watt (1736–1819) was to use a valve to release the steam from the piston cylinder into a separate condenser so that the process of continuously heating and cooling the mechanism was no longer needed.

These engines were heavy and needed large stocks of water and coal to power them. They were therefore only suitable as stationary engines in factories (or ships) and it took Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), ‘the Cornish Giant’, to devise a steam engine which would move on land. This he did by putting the heating source, a metal tube, inside the boiler so that all the heat generated by the fire was transferred to the water, none being lost to the surrounding atmosphere. His steam locomotive successfully climbed a hill outside Camborne in Cornwall on Christmas Eve, 1801, but Trevithick’s ingenuity was not accompanied by financial acumen and he died destitute.

Stephenson’s Rocket

Finally George (1781–1848) and Robert (1803–1859) Stephenson made further improvements by putting multiple tubes into the boiler, thereby increasing the amount of heat transferred and by placing the piston at a 45 degree angle to the wheel, thereby imparting motion more efficiently. So it took a lot of people to design Stephenson’s Rocket.

W
hen Nelson died at Trafalgar a grateful nation conferred a substantial pension of £2,000 a year on his wife Frances, from whom he had been estranged for six years. He had married Frances, an attractive and charming widow, while serving in the West Indies.

The future William IV was best man at the wedding. The marriage was childless but Frances was a faithful and loving wife, supporting Nelson from 1788–93 while he languished, unemployed and on half pay, at the family home in Norfolk. On Nelson’s death a peerage was conferred on his brother William which remains in the family. The 9th Earl Nelson, better known as detective sergeant Peter Nelson of Hertfordshire police service, died in March 2009 and was succeeded by his son Simon, also a policeman. Nelson did, however, have an illegitimate daughter, Horatia, by his mistress Emma Hamilton for whom he deserted Frances. Horatia was baptized Horatia Thompson in 1801 to disguise her paternity and then ‘adopted’ by Nelson and Emma. Horatia cared for the alcoholic Emma at Emma’s last home in Calais where she died in 1815 and Horatia later married Philip Ward, a curate to Nelson’s clergyman father, by whom she had ten children. Horatia herself survived to 1881 and is buried at Pinner, in Middlesex. Nelson’s closest living descendant is Anna Horatia Tribe, his great-great-great granddaughter who runs a guesthouse in Raglan, Monmouthshire.

A
rthur Wellesley (1769–1852), descendant of an Anglo-Irish family, was not a promising child. Awkward and dull at Eton he was thought fit only for a military career, a common choice for stolid sons of the aristocracy, and sent to the Academy of Equitation at Angers in 1786 — so he received his military training from his future enemy, the French! From 1787–92 he held commissions in six separate regiments without working in any of them since he was serving as a Member of the Irish Parliament for the family borough of Trim in County Meath. In 1793 he proposed to Catherine Pakenham, but was rejected because he would not be able to support her. He went to serve with the army in India, earned a reputation as a commander and a significant income and returned to England in 1805 when he had his only meeting with Nelson, a month before Trafalgar. He was not impressed, at first finding the notoriously egotistical admiral ‘vain and silly’. In 1806 he wrote to Catherine, whom he had not seen for twelve years, again proposing marriage. This time he was accepted but regretted his proposal upon meeting her, declaring ‘She has grown ugly, by Jove’. The marriage produced two sons but was unhappy. He found the short-sighted and nervous ‘Kitty’ irritating and clinging and in 1822 asked a female confidante, Harriet Arbuthnot ‘Would you have believed that anyone could have been such a damned fool? I was not the least in love with her. I married her because they asked me to do it’. His liaison with the courtesan Harriette Wilson elicited his famous observation ‘Publish and be damned’.