The Philosophical Breakfast Club (10 page)

Herschel often urged Babbage to come visit, bringing whatever chemicals he happened to have at hand so the two of them could experiment together. Although after graduating Babbage was spending much of his time writing and publishing mathematical papers, he admitted that visiting Herschel had revived his “chemico-mania.”
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Babbage and Herschel spent a summer together in Devonshire “mineralizing,” collecting unusual crystals to use in experiments. Herschel mocked Babbage for piling onto several horses loads of a mineral Babbage took to be a rare compound, only to find under chemical analysis that it was common carbonate of lime.

Whenever they were both in London, Herschel and Babbage went together to witness the experimental demonstrations of William Hyde Wollaston (brother of the Jacksonian Professor at Cambridge), who had become fabulously wealthy by discovering and patenting the process by which platinum was made malleable. Although he could afford vast quantities of chemicals, Wollaston used only the most minute amounts of substances in his experiments. It was remarked with some awe that his entire chemistry set could fit on a tea tray.
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Some said that he had unusual, even supernatural, sense organs, with which he could detect the effects of analysis on such small amounts of matter. Babbage more phlegmatically believed that Wollaston had particularly well-developed powers of concentration, which he focused with intense precision on every object being studied.
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Babbage and Herschel resolved to be more like Wollaston in their own experiments.

Later, Herschel and Babbage replicated and extended experiments that had been conducted by the French savant Dominique François Jean Arago. They set a thin disk of copper in rapid rotation below a magnetized needle hanging upon a silk thread. When the disk was not moving, there was no discernible magnetic force between the disk and the needle. But when the disk began to spin, the needle deviated from its position, and finally was dragged around with the rotation of the disk. Next they “reversed the experiment.” Herschel and Babbage mounted a powerful horseshoe magnet, capable of lifting twenty pounds, to a rotating lathe, and placed a circular disk of copper over it, suspended on a silk thread. As soon as the magnet was set in motion, the disk began to rotate.

The men replaced the copper disk with plates of different metals: zinc, tin, lead, antimony. They found that the best conductors of electricity made the plates that most activated the magnetic force.
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Some years later Faraday would show the significance of this fact by demonstrating that
these magnetic phenomena were the result of induced electrical currents, further establishing a connection between electricity and magnetism.

Jones, too, would soon be experimenting, although not in a laboratory like Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell. After graduating, and attaining a position as a country curate, Jones used his small vicarage garden to teach himself the rudiments of agriculture, starting from the chemistry of the soil, as Davy had outlined in his 1813 work
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry
. Jones may have carried out Davy’s recommendations for soil analysis, involving evaporation, titration, and precipitation, and the careful weighing of the products of these processes—processes that would require, Davy advised, a sensitive balance, a sieve, an Angland lamp, a collection of glass tubes and dishes, Hessian crucibles, porcelain evaporating basins, filter paper, a Wedgwood mortar and pestle, and “an apparatus for collecting and measuring aeriform fluids.”
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Jones became esteemed by his parish for his understanding of agricultural techniques. He used his knowledge to grow prize-winning roses. He became an avid beekeeper, carefully observing the social interactions of the hive and applying his findings to understand how humans acted in groups. He told Whewell that his bees were as good as Herschel’s optical instruments as a means for coming to scientific knowledge.
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It was a kind of human chemistry, and would one day help Jones in his great project of reforming economics.

A
FTER A YEAR
in London it became clear that Herschel could not continue the charade of studying the law, when he was in fact working full-time on his scientific pursuits. He had tried to do it all, admitting to Babbage “how ardently I wish I had ten lives, or that capacity, that enviable capacity of husbanding every atom of time, which some possess, and which enables them to do ten times as much in one life.”
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But he was exhausted. Herschel sought relief in an academic post, applying for the newly vacant professorship of Chemistry at Cambridge; he lost by only one vote.
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After spending some weeks in the summer of 1815 at the seaside resort of Brighton to recover his strength, Herschel decided to accept an offer made to him some months earlier by one of his former teachers at St. John’s: to return to Cambridge as a sub-tutor and examiner in mathematics. Although not as prestigious (or well paid) as a professorship, it at
least offered the chance for an academic career and, better yet, a return to Whewell and Jones—Babbage had recently graduated.
²³

But Herschel quickly realized he was not made for teaching. Soon after arriving in the fall of 1815 he described his routine to Babbage: “You are pretty well aware what a job it must be to be set from 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day examining 60 or 70 blockheads, not one in ten of whom knows anything but what is in the book.… In a word, I am grown fat, full and stupid. Pupillizing has done this.”
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By the summer of 1816, Herschel decided to leave Cambridge for good, and help his aging father, who had recently been created a Knight of the Guelphic Order, becoming Sir William Herschel. No longer could Sir William or Caroline spend long nights at the telescope, but important parts of the elder Herschel’s life work were still incomplete. Herschel spent the summer with his father in Dawlish, a popular resort on the Devonshire coast. It was a particularly cool and gray season in England, because of the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies the year before; the weather reflected the somber mood of John as he made his life-changing choice. At the end of the summer, John agreed to become his father’s assistant.

Leaving Cambridge was hard for Herschel to do, however much he hated his tutoring duties. He told Babbage, “I shall go to Cambridge on Monday where I mean to stay just time enough to pay my bills, pack up my books, and bid a long—perhaps a last farewell to the University.… I always used to abuse Cambridge as you well know with very little mercy or measure, but, upon my soul, now that I am about to leave it, my heart dies within me.”
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Herschel embarked upon his career in astronomy. First he had to learn the basics—how to grind and polish telescope mirrors, how to observe with a telescope, and how to carry out his father’s special method for sweeping the sky to look for double stars. William Herschel had listed over eight hundred double stars in several major star catalogs, in a number of cases proving that they must be binary stars—physically related pairs orbiting around common centers of gravity, not merely unrelated pairs seen by accident in the same direction in the sky. These binary systems generated great scientific interest, because they showed that Newton’s law of gravitation—which accounts for the planetary orbits in our solar system—held beyond our solar system and thus was a truly universal law. John Herschel’s first work in astronomy consisted in studying these
double stars, trying to detect any changes that might have taken place in the positions of the components of the binary systems since his father’s observations in the early part of the century. He used these differences as the basis for determining the orbital periods of the systems. Later, he and his new friend Sir James South would produce a catalog of 380 double stars, an impressive achievement that would win them the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society and the Lalande Prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris.
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In order to study the double stars, Herschel needed to master his father’s technique of star-sweeping. The technique is based on the fact that, at night, the stars appear to drift from east to west, making a full circuit in twenty-four hours. This is due to the spinning of the earth on its axis in the course of a day. By keeping the telescope trained on one part of the sky, all the objects at a certain declination (or latitude on the celestial sphere) are carried successively into the field of vision as the stars drift east to west. The poet Keats was not far wrong when he immortalized the elder Herschel’s discovery of Uranus: “then felt I like some watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken.”
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The stars’ positions and movements could be noted and measured with the use of a micrometer attached to a powerful telescope. It was exhausting, painstaking observational work.
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But Herschel did not give up his laboratory work. He could be found at night viewing the light of the stars through the telescope, and during the day decomposing the light of the sun into its colored rays using prisms and crystals. He was now fully engaged in a scientific life.

B
ABBAGE’S ROAD TO
his own scientific life was a more circuitous one, owing in part to his prickly nature. Like Herschel, Babbage had been expected to finish his university career as senior wrangler. That is not what transpired, however. The year prior to sitting for the Tripos, an undergraduate had to perform an “Act.” This relic of ancient times presorted students into classes for the examination. Each year the moderators of the Tripos received a list of students aspiring to honors the next year. The moderators sent notes to those students informing them that they would be “keeping an act” on a given date in several weeks’ time. Each student would reply with three slips of paper indicating the propositions for which he planned to argue. The moderator would choose three
other candidates to argue against these propositions, and the two sides debated—all in Latin, usually pretty poor Latin, at that. As Whewell later described the scene to his old schoolmaster, “The Latin would make every classical hair on your head stand on end.”
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The moderator adjudicated the disputations and at the end decided where each student would be placed in the initial classification for the Tripos. The moderator had the power to fail a candidate on the spot for inability in Latin, general ignorance, or inappropriateness; he would signal this failure by proclaiming
“descendas,”
Latin for “you will go down.”

For reasons no one can explain to this day, Babbage provocatively chose to defend the heretical statement “God is a material agent.” Had he written that to his moderator, he would have been barred even from performing the Act. Babbage climbed the stairs to the speaker’s boxed-in podium, where all expected him to argue for another, less controversial proposition. Instead he dropped his bombshell. The moderator, the Reverend Joseph Jephson, was stunned. A fellow student described what happened once Babbage uttered his proposition: “Jephson’s Piety received such a violent shock that
‘Descendas’
thundered from his lips.… All Peterhouse was in an uproar, when the direful news came that their crack man had got a
descendas.
”
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Herschel, exasperated, told a mutual friend that Babbage “richly deserved his punishment.… Upon my soul it is a pity the man is so intemperate. He is like a hot poker, which you may play with till you burn your fingers unless you take a devilish deal of care.”
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Instead of taking top honors, Babbage ended up “gulphing it”—gaining an ordinary, non-honors degree without examination. Peterhouse was left once again without a senior wrangler. Babbage remained at Cambridge until the summer of 1814, and then returned to his family’s home.

He wrote to Herschel in August with some startling news. “I am married and have quarreled with my father,” Babbage informed his friend. “He has no rational reason whatever; he has not one objection to my wife in any respect. But he hates the abstract idea of marriage and is uncommonly fond of money.” Herschel was shocked. “ ‘I am married and have quarreled with my father’—Good God Babbage—how is it possible for a man to calmly sit down and pen those two sentences—add a few more which look like self-justification—and pass off to functional equations?” He also wondered at Babbage’s neglecting to mention his wife’s name in his letter: “You have not informed who the lady is? I presume it can be no secret.” Babbage responded with a longer letter outlining the faults of
his father, who was a “tyrant” in the family, “tormenting himself and all connected with him.” He had a “temper which is the most horrible that can be conceived.”
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Babbage did also finally divulge the name of his new wife to his best friend.

In the summer of 1811, while vacationing with his family in Teignmouth, Babbage had met and started courting Georgiana Whitmore, a sweet young woman with golden brown hair from a prominent family of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire. Babbage’s list of expenses for that summer includes several entries for costs associated with attending balls; he most probably met Georgiana at one of these. Perhaps he was introduced to her by his friend Edward Ryan, who was courting (and later married) Georgiana’s sister. The two became engaged in 1812, though none of Babbage’s friends, not even Herschel, knew of this. Babbage kept the secret for two full years. (Babbage later explained to Herschel that he had thought the news would be “uninteresting” to him!)
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On the evening of July 24, 1814, Babbage took a chaise to Teignmouth with his college tutor, who had taken holy orders. The tutor married the young couple the next morning.
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Babbage knew the marriage was against his father’s wishes, but went ahead anyway. Benjamin Babbage was furious. He objected to his son marrying before being established in any profession; although Benjamin was wealthy, and as the only son Charles would be expected to inherit that wealth, the elder Babbage did not believe that young men should marry without enough of a personal income to support their families. As punishment, Benjamin Babbage limited Charles and Georgiana to the £300 Charles had received as his allowance while at Cambridge. They had an additional £150 from Georgiana’s family, making £450 a year, a very respectable upper-middle-class income. But Charles no longer wished to be dependent upon his father, so he began to seek some employment.