The Philosophical Breakfast Club (2 page)

Each of the men who brought about this revolution was brilliant, fascinating, and accomplished, and possessed of the optimism of the age. William Whewell (pronounced “Who-ell”) was plucked from obscure beginnings as the son of a carpenter, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men of science in the Victorian era. Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first computer, spent most of his life attempting to build it, but died thwarted and bitter, even though the British government had put at his disposal funds equal to the cost of two warships in those days. John Herschel was the son of the German astronomer William Herschel; he came to outshine his father as the age’s most renowned stargazer, as well as one of the inventors of photography and an accomplished mathematician, chemist, and botanist. Richard Jones—a bon vivant, and linchpin of the group’s discussions of science—helped raise an infant science, political economy (as economics was then called), to respectability.

It is their story that I shall tell, a story that is at the same time a tale of the age in which they lived and which they helped to shape.

And what an age it was! In no previous fifty-year period had so much been accomplished, as Disraeli recognized at the end of it. Perhaps the only period as remarkable has been the past fifty years, in which we have seen routine space exploration, the digital computer age, the Internet, the decoding of the human genome, and so many other developments. From the 1820s to the 1870s—from when the men set out in earnest to change science, until their deaths—a dazzling array of scientific achievements burst onto the scene. The period saw the invention of photography, the computer, modern electrical devices, the steam locomotive, and the railway system. It hosted the rise of statistical science, the social sciences, the science of the tides, mathematical economics, and modern “theories of everything” in physics.

During this half-century there were reforms of the welfare system, the postal system, the monetary system, the tax system, and factory manufacturing. Nations—emerging from wars that had spread over Europe—began to cooperate on scientific projects. A planet was unexpectedly discovered; it was only the second new planet to be discovered since
antiquity. Debates erupted about the presence of life on other planets. The skies of the southern hemisphere and the tides all over the world were mapped for the first time. A publicly funded expedition was sent to Antarctica to study terrestrial magnetism. New and sometimes troubling questions about the relation of science and religion were raised, questions that gained a fevered urgency when Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the accepted view of man and his position in the world.

In this age of great movement and change, of inventions and discoveries and speculations about distant and future worlds, the four friends plotted together ways to reform the scientist and his role in society. They hatched their plans at their Cambridge Sunday philosophical breakfasts, and pursued them as a team for the rest of their lives. After graduating, the men visited each other, traveled together throughout Britain and on the Continent, conducted joint experiments, compiled observations and information for each other, and together lobbied the government and scientific societies on behalf of shared intellectual interests as well as their individual financial interests. They read and commented upon each other’s manuscripts throughout their lives—so much so that it is often difficult to untangle the cords of influence, and determine who first thought of a particular idea. They introduced each other’s books to a broader public by writing reviews of them in the magazines of the day.

Their family lives were intertwined as well: they attended and officiated at each other’s weddings, named children after each other, served as godfathers to each other’s sons and daughters, sent their children on visits to the others, helped each other’s sons get settled at the university and find positions, and, finally, mourned together as, one by one, the members of the club died. Throughout it all, they corresponded: over the half-century of their friendship, thousands of letters were written, passed around, and discussed. They did not agree with each other on all the details, or on all the strategies, and sometimes argued bitterly. But reforming science was their shared project, and they pursued it with youthful passion from the time they met until their deaths.

Alone, none of these men could have accomplished so much. The friends goaded each other into making their discoveries, and cooperated in their efforts to transform the scientific world. They encouraged the others when circumstances began to make it seem impossible that they would ever succeed. And they shared their triumphs with each other,
even when they were scattered over the globe, in long and at times passionate letters.

As both Herschel and Whewell would remark in their writings on science, the scientific process is inevitably a social one. Discoveries are not made in a vacuum, but in the midst of whirling currents of politics, rivalry, competition, cooperation, and the hunger for knowledge and power. And the scientist does not work in isolation. Geniuses there may be, but even these require the interplay of other creative minds in order to discover, create, invent, innovate. The accomplishments of the Philosophical Breakfast Club marvelously illustrate the truth of its members’ views. Through the interaction of Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell, and the men and women around them, modern science was made.

Remarkably, then, these four men managed to bring into being their brash, optimistic, youthful dreams. But this very success carried with it an almost tragic irony: their own efforts would serve to make them obsolete. By carving out a particular role for the “scientist,” the four men left no room for those like themselves (which explains, indeed, why similarly inclined men of science were reluctant to take up the title “scientist”). They were not like the narrowly specialized scientists now filling up the section meetings at the British Association and other scientific societies, who know geology or astronomy but not both; not like the laboratory technicians conducting one kind of experiment, day after day; not like the teachers training a new generation of scientists how to construct an optical apparatus. They were widely and classically trained, readers of Latin and Greek, French and German, whose interests ranged over all the natural and social sciences and most of the arts as well, who wrote poetry and broke codes and translated Plato and studied architecture, who pursued optics simply because, as Herschel said, “Light was my first love,” who conducted the experiments that struck their fancy, based on the chemicals and equipment they happened to have on hand, who measured mountains and barometric pressure while on holiday in the Alps and observed the economic situation of the poor wherever their peripatetic wanderings took them. Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell are a strange breed: the last of the natural philosophers, who engendered, as it were with their dying breath, a new species, the scientist.

T
HEY WERE DIGGING THE CANAL THE YEAR
W
ILLIAM
W
HEWELL
was born. The Lancaster Canal would wend its way from Preston, in the south, where the Ribble River reached into the Irish Sea, up past Garstang, an arm of the canal dipping again into the sea at Glasson, before winding through Lancaster and heading north to Kendal, at the edge of the Lake District. In 1794, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing and engineering ruled Britain, and both were present at the great work of building this canal.

Whewell would grow up surrounded by the canal works and the great waterway itself, impressed with these monuments to the immense powers of human invention and technology. Later he would come to see himself as an engineer of Science, plotting the course of a mighty body, just as the canal’s engineer, John Rennie, had planned the path of a mighty waterway. This child of the Industrial Revolution would one day initiate a Scientific Revolution that would change the world.

T
HE STORY OF
the canal begins in 1772, when a group of Lancaster merchants came together with the idea of constructing a new waterway that would connect with the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, near Wigan, and proceed northward through Preston and Lancaster to Kendal. Work on canals had been going on for some decades, ever since 1755–61, when the Sankey Brook in Lancashire had been turned into a canal for bringing cheap coal to Liverpool; after that, an age of canal building was begun, powered by the industrialists who wanted cheap means of transporting their goods from factories to markets.

In recent times the port of Lancaster had been one of the busiest in Britain. Even today, many fine Georgian buildings stand in the port area, constructed during its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century. But by the
last third of the century, trade to the port had been suffering from the silting-up of the Lune estuary, which led from the Irish Sea three miles inland to Lancaster. The newer, larger ships could not make it through the river up to the port.

Lancaster was a major manufacturer of linen textiles, mostly sailcloth. The firms producing the heavy canvas were owned by “flaxmen,” suppliers of flax, who transformed themselves into manufacturers by fitting up rooms with heavy sailcloth looms and facilities for warp-winding and starching. If shipping ceased in Lancaster, so would the sailcloth trade. Merchants in Lancaster glanced enviously at their counterparts in Liverpool, who were thriving—in great part because of the success of the Leeds-and-Liverpool Canal.
¹

The Lancastrians first approached James Brindley, who had designed the famous Bridgewater Canal, which brought coal to Manchester from the Duke of Bridgewater’s collieries at Worsley. The first of the great canals, the Bridgewater was an engineering wonder, with its fingers reaching deep into the mine at Worsley, its aqueduct over the Irwell River carrying barges high in the sky, and its destination in Manchester: a tunnel leading the coal right into the center of the city. Ill health forced Brindley to pass the Lancaster job along to his son-in-law, Robert Whitworth. Debates over Whitworth’s plans, and those of his successors, dragged on for almost twenty years.
²

Finally, in 1791, impatient merchants and rattled traders petitioned Mayor Edward Suart for a public meeting to decide once and for all whether a link with the Leeds and Liverpool Canal would be pursued. At that meeting, a resolution was passed approving the building of a canal. John Rennie—renowned for fitting out corn mills, for his drainage works in the fens, for building waterworks, docks, and harbors—was asked to submit a plan. His survey differed from the earlier ones by proposing to cross the deep Ribble Valley with a tramway rather than with the canal itself, so the canal would be cut in two sections, north from Preston and south from Clayton, connected by a long bridge passing over the valley. Only the southern part of the Lancaster Canal would connect by water with the Leeds-to-Liverpool waterway. But Lancaster would have its connection to the sea, at nearby Glasson. An act of Parliament was obtained to authorize the new navigation, and work on the canal began late in 1792.

L
ESS THAN TWO
years later, William Whewell came into the world: on May 24, a birthday he would share with the young princess Victoria when she was born twenty-five years later. As a baby and young boy he was sickly; his parents secretly worried over him, especially when they lost two other infant sons soon afterwards. But he would grow up to be a tall, strapping man, one whose physical vigor became, to many, a symbol of his intellectual strengths.

His parents were John and Elizabeth Whewell, who lived on Brock Street in Lancaster, a short distance to the west of the canal works. Both John and Elizabeth were twenty-five when they married; William arrived a scant nine months later. John Whewell was a house carpenter and joiner with a workshop employing one or two journeymen. The business built houses, including the door frames and window frames, repaired fences, and possibly constructed cabinets as well. His people had come to Lancaster from Bolton, farther north in Lancashire, half a century before.
³
John Whewell was admitted by all to be a man of great sense.

Elizabeth Whewell was of the old Lancaster family of Bennisons. An intelligent and cultured woman, Elizabeth published her poems in the Lancaster
Gazette
, the first local newspaper; she bestowed upon her son a love of reading and writing poetry that he never lost. Elizabeth died in 1807, when William was thirteen. He lost his father in 1816, soon before receiving his fellowship at Trinity College. William would also lose three brothers: not only the two who died in infancy, but also a third, John, with whom William was close. Born in 1803, John died when he was eight years old, soon after William left home for Cambridge. From the letters William sent John from school, it is apparent that John, too, was a boy of uncommon abilities; in what would be his last year he was already writing poetry judged quite fine by William, who nevertheless cautioned him, “I would not have you write so much as to neglect reading.” Already a teacher at heart, William suggested to John that he study history and parts of natural philosophy, as they were “not above your comprehension.”
⁴
William had three sisters. One, Elizabeth, died in 1821; in later life he corresponded frequently with his remaining sisters, Martha and Ann, though they did not see each other often.