Seeing Further (15 page)

Public taste for knowledge and novelty, however exotic or dubious, was evident everywhere during those months. In Norwich that summer journals puffed lectures by the notorious therapist Dr James Graham on electric sex. One Norwich onlooker was astonished that this ‘impudent empiric’ imagined he could restore virility by ‘the addition of an atmosphere charged with electrical particles and this proposal was privately defended by many persons of information as perfectly philosophical’.
⁵
A professional musician, William Herschel, had just announced what some reckoned must be a new planet to be named
George
in honour of His Majesty. We now call it Uranus. In July 1781 the Norfolk newspapers reported this ‘new discovery of an orb behind the Sun’, but worried that ‘at a certain period it will burst’.
⁶
That summer brought news of the Scottish engineer James Watt in Birmingham who’d developed a new mechanism for getting rotational motion out of a vertical steam engine. In London it was said the experiments of a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, Henry Cavendish, obtained pure water by sparking a mixture of airs. At a coffee house near St Paul’s Cathedral, a regular club met during the early summer of 1781 to watch the instrument maker Edward Nairne show off his new electric pistol.

Meanwhile, the Royal Society was settling into its plush if somewhat cramped new quarters at Somerset House on the Thames. Cavendish and Nairne were already Fellows, while Herschel and Watt soon would be. Dr Graham never was. Though the Society’s rooms were no longer where experimental inquiry happened, membership certainly added lustre. ‘Wherever I come’, one travelling lecturer and instrument maker had plaintively written, ‘I am constantly asked, if I am a Fellow of the Royal Society? And I as constantly find it no small disadvantage to say, No.’
⁷
The advantages of Society membership didn’t flow from the high status of scientists. The Royal Society contained no scientists, because there was no such thing in 1781. The Society’s status depended on late eighteenth-century social order. Ironmongers, bricklayers, glaziers and the women at the workhouse, whose parts in the Heckingham events were so salient, were not generally credited as informants by Royal Society gentlemen. There were no women among its Fellows and wouldn’t be until 1945. The Society was a focus of debate and a target of satire. The irascible botanist John Hill, whose marvellous remarks on Norwich provide my epigraph, suggested the Society should be displaced by a more efficient Royal Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society’s President, the Lincolnshire landowner, man-about-town and Captain Cook’s former botanising travel companion Joseph Banks, had just been honoured with a baronetcy. Candidate Fellows were vetted at one of his weekly breakfasts, then dined at the Society’s supper club. A London wit cruelly put words into Banks’ mouth:
‘untitled
members are mere swine: / I wish for princes on my list to shine. / I’ll have a company of stars and strings; / I’ll have a proud society of
kings
!’
⁸
Within eighteen months civil war erupted at Somerset House between the President and those who reckoned he was turning the Society into ‘a cabinet of trifling curiosities’.
⁹
In at least one respect the Society’s concerns that summer match ours. Banks’ men sought to use their powers to influence the British government with evidence-based public knowledge. Which takes us back to the Norfolk thunderstorm.

It was the Heckingham lightning rods that caused the furore. The rods were supposed to save the House from damage but had failed. They might even have helped cause the strike. There was disagreement about the details of the storm, the strike and the behaviour of the lightning rods. When installed at the House of Industry in 1777 by the Bungay ironmonger, a man with the resonant name of John Bobbitt, these rods embodied state-of-the-art experiments, so were newsworthy and dodgy. But surely it was easy to tell whom to trust about the June 1781 events? Simply check whether a story matched the relevant authorities’ reliable knowledge about how lightning behaved and rods worked. But this authority and this knowledge were exactly the matter of dispute. The Fellows of the Royal Society had been involved in two decades of argument about the behaviour of lightning rods. The Heckingham event was seen as ‘an
experiment
where a house armed with eight pointed conductors had been set fire to by lightning’.
¹⁰
Yet for the strike to be a worthy experiment, Society Fellows already had to know whose story to believe. But to know whom to believe, they had to know how the experiment should run.

To resolve this apparently intractable puzzle, the Fellows had to rely on their deep sense of who should be trusted: gentlemen were judged more reliable than servants, local worthies more credible than the poor and indigent. So they commissioned stories, drawings and three-dimensional models from men they already had reasons to trust. Perhaps these accounts would settle the matter without having to be on the spot. Unlike the names of the workhouse inmates, the Society recorded exactly who these valued correspondents were. They included Samuel Cooper, one of the Heckingham overseers, an eminent doctor of divinity and a wealthy landlord. He’d already sent the Society thunderstorm reports from Norfolk. The Fellows also heard from Dixon Gamble, a merchant and town steward from Bungay; from George Cadogan Morgan, a Welsh radical of sophisticated philosophical interests and fierce politics who’d become a unitarian preacher at Norwich’s famous Octagon Chapel; and from that city’s principal bookseller Abraham Brook, who marketed electrical and optical instruments in Norfolk. These gentlemen had apparently scoured the building and interviewed the poor inmates, the reliability of whose recollections they barely accepted. During these interviews, they worried about the tale of the spectacular fireballs reported by ‘one of the cripples in the House of Industry, a middle-aged woman’, then wondered ‘if any credit could be given to the testimony of such a person in a matter like this’.
¹¹
According to Morgan, who quizzed Heckingham’s residents soon after the strike, ‘the contradictory absurdities which they asserted and maintained, are scarcely conceivable’.
¹²

By the year’s end these confused reports got to London. The effect was almost as explosive as the original strike. If the best technique for preserving buildings against lightning were in question because of some Norfolk oddity, this mattered to the government. The Heckingham stories soon reached the ears of the King, and through him the Board of Ordnance, one of the largest state departments, supplier of military munitions for the American War. Based at the Tower of London, the Board was concerned
with the protection of its arsenals against fire. Ordnance officers heard about the apparent failure of the Heckingham lightning rods in December 1781: ‘the whole Board are much alarmed’.
¹³
The Royal Society seemed the obvious organisation to contact, because they had a long track record in these matters. Over Christmas the Board’s secretary wrote to Joseph Banks. This was ‘a matter of the highest importance’, but ‘no
authentic
account has yet come to the knowledge of the Royal Society’.
¹⁴
Since the stories they got from Norfolk were so confused and the details were such a matter of concern, within a few days Banks and his Somerset House colleagues decided to send a pair of Fellows to Norfolk to investigate.

The principle of such lengthy and lofty pointed metal rods as a defence against lightning rested on a mix of old and recent thinking. Since the early eighteenth century, experimenters had been able to make electric sparks and shocks using friction machines of glass, leather and metal. These were lucrative items in their shows. ‘Lightning is in the hands of nature what electricity is in ours’, the London instrument maker George Adams put it, ‘the wonders we now exhibit at pleasure are little imitations of the great effects which frighten and alarm us’.
¹⁵
The imitation analogised the stormy atmosphere with glass jars and metal rods inside their well-stocked rooms. According to the Royal Society’s leading electrical experimenter, the apothecary William Watson, ‘we see every day more and more the perfect analogy (to compare great things with small) between the highly electrified glass jar in the experiment and a cloud replete with the matter of thunder’.
¹⁶

In early 1748 Watson read the Society a letter from an ingenious printer in Philadelphia, second city of the British empire. Quaker networks linking London with the City of Brotherly Love helped news of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments reach the Society. His demonstrations were supposed to show that electrical fire was an unevenly distributed active fluid gathered in atmospheres round bodies: the fluid would flow so as to restore balance, a satisfying thought for a prudent book-keeper, between excess (or positively charged) and deficient (or negatively charged) regions. Sparks and lightning were such restorative flows, if in dramatic form. As often, the Society initially held that what was right in Franklin’s story was already well known and what was wrong must be rejected. Even so, these stories about charged atmospheres were judged prize-winning achievements in electrical philosophy. In 1753 the Society’s new President, the Earl of Macclesfield, otherwise preoccupied with persuading a slightly unwilling nation to accept a foreign Gregorian calendar and thus seemingly lose eleven days of its precious time, awarded the Society’s prestigious Copley Medal to Franklin. ‘True it is’, observed the noble Earl, ‘that several learned Men, both at home and abroad, do not entirely agree with him in all the Conclusions he draws, and the Opinions which he thinks may be deduced from the Experiments he has made.’ However, he remarked, though not yet entirely convincing nor even a Fellow, at least Franklin was ‘a Subject of the Crown of Great Britain’.
¹⁷
All that changed in the next two decades: following Franklin’s move to Europe, his theory would become Society orthodoxy, he won a Fellowship and helped liberate his nation from British rule.

The colonial medallist’s new invention was the lightning rod, first announced in his Philadelphia almanac the same year as his Royal Society prize. Since he found in his experiments that sharp needles could quietly withdraw electrical fire from the atmosphere of charged objects some inches away, so on a grander scale pointed metal rods well connected to damp earth should let electrical fire flow silently between the Earth and thunder clouds. He offered hope of disarming lightning, just as the mythical Prometheus had stolen fire from Olympus for humanity’s benefit and was thus punished by Zeus. Many Enlightenment sages, including Immanuel Kant, compared Franklin with the fabled Titan. One popular 1770s English writer on farming and weather put it pithily: ‘Dr Benj. Franklin’s soaring genius has realised the fable of Prometheus’ bringing fire down from heaven’.
¹⁸
The Secretary of the French Royal Academy of Sciences apologised to Franklin in 1773 that ‘I have never had the happiness to meet the
modern Prometheus
’.
¹⁹
The poet, philosopher and botanist Erasmus Darwin admired Franklin’s heroism, but guessed Prometheus’ punishment after stealing heavenly fire was really an allegory for a gin-soaked hangover. There were some more seriously dissident voices. An eminent French experimenter, sceptical of the worth of these fashionable rods, warned of the lethal dangers ‘were we to bring into being the Prometheus of the fable’.
²⁰
Within a generation the American with his lightning rods would be celebrated as victor over both tyranny and thunderbolts in a single evocative image of ingenuity and independence.

It seemed to many storytellers that since the rods were obviously rational and effective, any opposition to their use must stem from popular and religious narrow-mindedness. An English traveller in southern Germany
was ‘told that the people of Bavaria were at least 300 years behind the rest of Europe in philosophy and useful knowledge’, so they still riskily rang church bells during thunderstorms to ward off threats.
²¹
When fierce storms hit not only Norfolk but also lands across the North Sea in 1781, many Dutch and Flemish bell ringers died. From summer 1781 the city of Arras in northern France was racked by a lawsuit because of citizens’ opposition to a new lightning rod: the rod’s safety was successfully defended by a precise young lawyer with the schoolboy nickname ‘The Barometer’. His real name was Maximilien Robespierre, a man soon to be identified with Terror.
²²
One East Anglian minister reflected on an old story about members of a congregation marked with the sign of the cross after lightning hit their cathedral and wished ‘the Bishop’s attention had not been so much absorbed in the wonderful’.
²³
When a reckless Russian experimenter tried the electricity of his woefully arranged rod in a thunderstorm, he was killed. In response to this electric martyrdom, London’s
Gentleman’s Magazine
commented that ‘we are come at last to touch the celestial fire, which if we make too free with, as it is fabled Prometheus did of old, like him we may be brought too late to repent of our temerity’.
²⁴

However fabulous such tales, resistance to these devices was not entirely based on prejudiced ignorance. It is just as wrong to assume that scriptural fundamentalism completely explains why many nineteenth-century commentators challenged Darwin’s model of natural selection. Promethean science is debatable and its standing is never explicable by rough-shod appeals to lack of knowledge and to bigotry. There were reasons to wonder about, as well as wonder at, the modern Prometheus. Franklin’s account was the best the Society’s Fellows knew, but ambiguous
and in several ways false. His small-scale experiments suggested to him that rods must be sharply pointed and could silently draw electrical charge from the dangerous atmospheres of thunder clouds. Modern sciences say both claims are untrue. On the vast scale of a lightning strike, the difference between pointed and blunt rods doesn’t matter. There’s evidence that pointed tips can make lightning rods into bad receptors. These rods cannot quietly discharge a cloud and their presence in an electrically charged region can make a strike more likely. But Franklin never abandoned his claims that rods could prevent a strike and had to be sharply pointed, just like those Mr Bobbitt erected at Heckingham in 1777 and which failed to work in 1781. ‘A long
pointed
rod’, Franklin told the Royal Society in 1772, ‘may
prevent
some strokes as well as conduct others that fall upon it.’
²⁵
Throughout the period these compelling but dubious claims were among the Royal Society’s major preoccupations.