An Ocean of Air (39 page)

CHAPTER
2

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satisfied myself with respect to it
See Crowther,
Scientists of the Industrial Revolution,
p. 181.

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billion-dollar global beverage enterprise
Even in Priestley's time, his invention of new soda water attracted much attention, as well as a prestigious prize. In time it came to the ears of the Admiralty, who had long been trying to find a way to combat the scourge of scurvy. It was already well known that something in vegetables combated the disease; but sailors could go for months without obtaining fresh food and half a ship's crew could succumb to the bleeding gums, listlessness, and ultimately death before land was sighted and a new supply of greens obtained. Because rotting vegetable matter produced the same "fixed air" that appeared during fermenting, one doctor had suggested that the air fixed inside plants must be what prevented scurvy. When Priestley happened across his handy way of forcing fixed air into water, the Admiralty was eager to know more. He was even offered a place on one of Cook's voyages. Perhaps fortunately this time at least, his dissenting views meant that he was pulled from the rostrum at the last minute. Soda water is of no use in curing scurvy—the answer, as we now know, was vitamin C.

32 
gives us life: the element oxygen
Priestley also didn't realize that someone else, a young Swedish apothecary named Carl Scheele, had performed this same experiment a few years earlier. Scheele was self-effacing, and neither published his results nor tried particularly to interpret them. (He wrote a letter to French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who appears later in this chapter, about his findings, to which Lavoisier never replied.) Nonetheless, there are still those who maintain that Scheele was the "true" discoverer of oxygen. For an excellent fictionalized version of this story, see the play
Oxygen
by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman. A good quick summary of the dates and events, with references, appears at
http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/
senese/ 101/history/faq/discovery-of-oxygen.shtml.

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After me, the deluge
This quote is also sometimes attributed to his favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

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this method of levying taxes
Aykroyd,
Three Philosophers,
p. 13.

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pay thirty pieces of silver
Ibid., p. 89.

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almost uninterrupted by any reasoning
Ibid., p. 63.

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nothing left to explain
Ibid., p. 106 and following.

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the power of gravity
Much of this first atmosphere was blasted away in a cosmic collision that created our moon, but it was quickly resupplied from within by gases pouring out of volcanoes.

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the dull slime that came before
When he read this section, chemist Andy Watson from the University of East Anglia became indignant on behalf of microbes, saying they weren't at all "dull." He has an excellent point, and I reproduce his comment in full: "I'd like to point out that bacteria may not be very big or very fast, but in the field of biogeochemistry, their inventiveness makes animals look pretty dull. Bacteria exist that can use light, organic or inorganic chemical reactions as their energy source, that can use carbon dioxide, carbonate or organic carbon as their carbon source, that can live under aerobic or anaerobic conditions (or both), at temperatures from -1 degrees to 400 degrees C and pressures from
0
to at least 1,000 bars. And they do all the dirty jobs we'd rather not think about—without bacteria clearing up all the shit we animals produce, the earth as we know it would be finished in the blink of an eye!" Of course, Andy's right, though the point also remains that the world would look much less interesting if there were nothing but microbes on its surface.

47 
triggered the appearance of animals
One possible explanation is that evolution was kicked into action by mighty ice ages that blanketed the entire planet. See my book
Snowball Earth
(London: Bloomsbury and New York: Crown, 2003).

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the radiation from ten thousand chest x-rays
See Lane,
Oxygen,
p. 125.

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a million billion in every puff
Ibid., p. 310. Charmingly, Lane says that he smokes but plans to give up the habit when he finishes writing his book.

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born in the chemistry of oxygen
Ibid. Note that there are many additional suggestions for why we need to have sex. One of the most persuasive is the notion that we are in a continual race to out-evolve parasites. See Matt Ridley's excellent book
The Red Queen
(London: Penguin, 1994) for more about this.

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more appropriate to the man of toil
Aykroyd,
Three Philosophers,
p. 111.

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happiness in greater abundance
Ibid., p. 111.

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good will among all nations
Crowther,
Scientists of the Industrial Revolution,
p. 231.

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inlist Imagination under the banner of Science
Ibid., p. 254.

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four-fifths of the atmosphere
About this time many other chemists had begun to notice nitrogen, though the actual "discovery" of the element is usually attributed to a young Scottish chemist named Daniel Rutherford, who had isolated it a few years earlier.

CHAPTER
3

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losing three-quarters of his savings
Crowther,
Scientists of the Industrial Revolution,
p. 91.

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smoke and hurry of this immense capital
Gibbon, author of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
quoted in Crowther, p. 14.

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darkened by the least shade of envy
Crowther,
Scientists of the Industrial Revolution,

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Blackness, Soap and Honey
Ramsay,
The Life and Letters of Joseph Black,
p. 22.

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seems yet to surpass other purgatives
Donovan,
Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment,
p. 194.

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engage any further in it
Allan and Schofield,
Stephen Hales, Scientist and Philanthropist,
p. 30.

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the Oak with a vast explosion
Ibid., p. 43.

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dispersed throughout the atmosphere
He was obliged to publish his thesis as a condition of receiving his degree. It's just as well, for given his reticence about publicizing his own work we would otherwise know little about what proved to be a historic experiment.

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inconveniences that would result from its absence
Donovan,
Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment,
p. 192.

68 
carbon dioxide in the air around it
Van Helmont was partly right in that some water had gone into providing the sap and in stiffening the new growth. But all of the solid matter had come instead from the air.

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100,000 million tons of plant material
See, for instance, "Life's a gas, if you're a plant," prepared by the United Kingdom's John Innes Centre for the Chelsea Flower Show. You can find this at
http://www.jic.bbsrc.ac.uk/chelsea/handouts
2004
.htm
.

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more like a battle
See the excellent feature by Fred Pearce, "The kingdoms of Gaia," in
New Scientist,
June 16, 2001, p. 30.

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beau-ideal of a scientific lecturer
New York Daily Tribune,
October 23, 1872, p. 6.

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by the exercise of imagination
John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher,
p. 181.

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instantly resigned from the club
Tyndall had a tendency to be oversensitive about criticism. At the early age of thirty-three he had been offered one of the two annual Royal medals by the Royal Society (which was a great honor, not only because the other recipient that year was Charles Darwin). He was about to accept when heard that one member of the council had opposed the award and was complaining bitterly about it. Immediately he wrote a letter to the secretary of the society politely declining their honor. Huxley tried to convince him to change his mind, but Tyndall was obdurate. Later, Huxley wrote that at least it was a "good sort of mistake," and added dryly that it was "not likely to do harm by creating too many imitators."

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why the sky is blue
He was almost right. In fact the blue of the sky derives from scattering not from particles in the air but from the air molecules themselves, as Lord Rayleigh later proved.

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burning useless coal deposits
See Weart,
The Discovery of Global Warming,
pp. 4–7.

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climate looked to be significant
Ibid., pp. 23–24.

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what difference this would make
We now know that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the CO2 we've released has gradually disappeared into the ocean, which has considerably slowed down the build-up of CO2 in the air.

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had been absolutely right
The drop in carbon dioxide wasn't quite enough to cause the entire change in temperature, but this paper demonstrated once and for all that, added together with other greenhouse gases such as methane, it is a very important component.

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temperatures soaring or plummeting
See, for example, "The 'flickering switch' of late Pleistocene climate change," by K. C. Taylor et al.,
Nature,
vol. 361 (February 4, 1993), pp. 432–36.

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A recent project
D. A. Stainforth et al.,
Nature,
vol. 433 (January 27, 2005), pp. 403–406.

CHAPTER
4

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and a sneeze
, 400,000 Watson,
Heaven's Breath,
p. 157.

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bacteria simply fall with them
See, for instance, "Spora and Gaia: how microbes fly with their clouds," by W. D. Hamilton and T. M. Lenton,
Ethology, Ecology and Evolution,
vol. 10 (1998), pp. 1–16.

90 
those distant lands would be yours
With due respect to the otherwise peerless Ira Gershwin song "They All Laughed," Columbus was not the first to realize that the world was round. In fact this had been known by all educated persons since the ancients.

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if he should be successful
When Columbus approached them, Isabella and Fernando were flush from their triumphant routing of the Moors at Granada. They had resolved to drive out all infidels from the Iberian peninsula, and one of Columbus's most persuasive arguments was that, with the supposed wealth he would bring from China, they could pursue their goals in a new crusade to wrest Jerusalem and the Holy Lands back from Moslem control. In the same crusading spirit, the monarchs had also banished any Spanish Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. A few tides before Columbus the last ship of refugees had set sail, bound for Moslem lands or for the Netherlands, the only Christian country prepared to receive them. Columbus would have been astonished to know that he was about to discover a continent that would eventually prove a refuge from this persecution.

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finest air in the world
Columbus's journal, pp. 9 and 13.

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very readily become Christians
Not all the native peoples that Columbus encountered were quite so friendly, but that's another story.

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justify his "scientific" claims
Then, as now, this approach was a controversial one, and there are interesting parallels with the current popularity of "Intelligent Design" as a supposed branch of science. One contemporary reviewer of
The Physical Geography of the Sea
wrote: "It is now, we think, almost universally admitted, and certainly by men of the soundest faith that the Bible was not intended to teach us the truths of science. Our author, however seems to think otherwise, and has taken the opposite side in the unfortunate controversy which still rages between the divine and the philosopher." Another lauded Maury's "strong and sincere religious feelings" but added: "He unhappily does not see that in forcing Scripture to the interpretation of physical facts, he is mistaking the whole purport of the sacred Books, misappropriating their language and discrediting their evidence on matters of deep concern by applying it to objects and cases of totally different nature." See the introduction to
The Physical Geography of the Sea
by Matthew Fontaine Maury, 8th edition, edited by John Leighly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. xxvi.

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nobody ever mentioned
Cox,
Storm Watchers,
p. 63.

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charlatanism known in the world's history
Cox,
Storm Watchers,
p. 63. Fortunately, Congress never approved Maury's request, and he disappeared from public view in 1861 at the start of the Civil War when he joined the Confederacy.

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the contrary in the southern
Ferrel's autobiography in
Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences,
p. 296.

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big enough to swamp the effect
For an amusing description of some of the many unwitting disseminators of this myth, see
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/
BadCoriolis.html.

104 
truly comprehend the winds
See three papers in
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
vol. 47 (1966): Jordan, J. L., "On Coriolis and the deflective force," pp. 401–403; Landsberg, H. E., "Why indeed Coriolis," pp. 887–89; and Burstyn, Harold L., "The deflecting force and Coriolis," pp. 890–91.