The Philosophical Breakfast Club (25 page)

Whewell dejectedly reported to Jones, “So far I as I can make out all Herschel’s friends are disposed to give the old lady [the Royal Society] over.… What will come of this I do not exactly see nor much care.”
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But Babbage was ready with some ideas of what could come of the loss. He moved to put into play a plan he had been contemplating on and off for several years: to establish a society that would rival the Royal Society in size and influence, and which would transform science—and not only in England.

T
HE ROOTS OF
this effort reached back to September of 1828, during Babbage’s despair-driven tour of Europe. Babbage had arrived in Berlin to find that the natural philosophers of Europe would soon be holding a huge meeting there. On the eighteenth of that month the brilliant
German mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, and the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted joined numerous other esteemed men of science who were converging on the Prussian capital for a gathering of a size and scope greater than any other scientific meeting ever held in Europe. Masses of people from all ranks of Prussian society—including royalty—crowded into the theater, eager to hear the opening address by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, recently returned to his native city after years spent living in Paris.
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Babbage was impressed by the eminence of the natural philosophers at the meeting—and even more by the high social rank of those who had come to hear them. He could not help comparing the situation in Prussia to that in England, where (he felt bitterly) savants were hardly accorded the time of day by royalty. On his return home, Babbage wrote a letter about the meeting to his friend David Brewster.

Brewster, a well-known man of science who had already won the Copley medal of the Royal Society for his work on optics, and who had invented the kaleidoscope (originally intended as a scientific instrument, not a children’s toy), was a generally pleasant, amiable man with sandy-colored hair and blue eyes, who could be cheerful and friendly when at ease—but he was also extremely intolerant of anyone who slighted his work or took credit for his discoveries, and at those times his anger could be cutting.
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He and Babbage shared a prickly nature and a sense of being underappreciated by their compatriots. Brewster had written to Babbage a few years earlier that he felt “melancholy” to “look around us in society and to see the charlatans and empirics of science, flourishing and succeeding in life while men of sterling talent [like the two of them], of indefatigable industry and of the finest moral attainments are languishing in obscurity and neglect.”
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After Babbage wrote him with news of the Berlin conference, Brewster encouraged him to draw up a brief article on it, which he then published in the journal he edited, the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
. Writing this article gave Babbage an idea: Why not initiate a grand European academy of science, which would transcend geographic and political barriers? Approving of this suggestion, Brewster wrote to his friend the Whig politician Sir Henry Brougham, trying to enlist his support in the project. “Mr. Babbage and I would take the oar if you would touch the helm,” Brewster
offered.
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Nothing came of this, and the idea was dropped, while Babbage exerted his energies to reform the Royal Society.

After Herschel was defeated in his race for the presidency, Babbage wrote again to Brewster, urging the notion of a new scientific association to displace the Royal Society. Brewster agreed that the Royal Society “seems to be gone.”
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He decided that they should plan a grand meeting of natural philosophers in York—the most central city for the “three kingdoms” of England, Ireland, and Scotland. He asked Babbage to write to Herschel, “who should be President.”

York had attractions other than mere geographic convenience. It was the home of the thriving Yorkshire Philosophical Society, which had existed for almost a decade. Societies such as this one had been sprouting up in the provinces since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Early mill owners, merchants, capitalists, and engineers married their financial interests in new technology with an intellectual basis in the natural sciences.
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And York had Vernon Harcourt, the founding president of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Harcourt was the son of a well-liked, long-serving archbishop, connected by blood with several major aristocratic families. He was respected by men of science in London, such as W. H. Wollaston and the geologist Roderick Murchison, but was also friendly with the geologists and chemists at Oxford and Cambridge.
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Harcourt jumped at the chance to host a meeting in York bringing together men of science—it would shine the spotlight on the town and its Philosophical Society. He sent word to Brewster that the Yorkshire Philosophical Society “rejoice that York is fixed upon”
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as the site of the first meeting of the new society, which he dubbed the British Association for the Advancement of Science—a name explicitly taken from the title of one of Bacon’s works:
Advancement of Learning
. (Regrettably, it would later be easily lampooned as the “British Ass,” and in 2009 the group would change its name to the more anodyne British Science Association.)

Almost as soon as Harcourt agreed to take on the responsibility for running the meeting, which would take place in September, Brewster withdrew from the active planning of it, his time being taken up with his optical experiments. It was now up to Harcourt to envision the goals, membership, and organization of the new society. In doing so Harcourt sought—and received—the advice of those he considered the leading lights of science in England: Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell.

Although ultimately Harcourt and his team in York were responsible for planning the first meeting, it was Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell who were the intellectual founding fathers of the British Association. Babbage had set the igniting spark of the British Association with his
Decline of Science
and his suggestions to Brewster about starting a new scientific society. Babbage also gave Harcourt specific suggestions about the role of the British Association, such as coordinating large-scale programs of observations by members from around the globe, including “heights of barometer every hour during the 24; height of the tides during ditto; height of water in great rivers during ditto; also height of rivers every hour during floods …; meteors; temperature of springs; temperature of the sea.”
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Yet, somewhat oddly, Babbage refused to be named a member of any official committee, and did not even plan to attend the meeting in York. When he heard that Babbage would not be there, Brewster wrote to implore him: “It would break my heart if I do not find you there.” The following week Brewster tried again: “On my knees I implore you to be at York.”
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Babbage claimed that he needed to stay in London and oversee the construction of a new workshop for Clement and a fireproof building for the Difference Engine in the backyard of his new house on Dorset Street. Babbage had bought the house belonging to Wollaston after the chemist’s death a few years earlier. The government had just agreed to spend another £2,250 for these buildings, in order to protect their considerable investment in the Difference Engine. Babbage’s foresight in demanding the fireproof building would be demonstrated tragically several years later, in 1834, when the Houses of Parliament burned to the ground in the most destructive conflagration since much of London was gutted by the Great Fire of 1666.

Herschel, still smarting from his loss in the Royal Society election, wanted nothing to do with the new society: he refused the presidency point-blank, and would not even attend the York meeting. Herschel did attend later meetings, and even consented to being named to the council of the British Association in 1832. But although he distanced himself at first from the new organization, Herschel was very much an influence on it. The year before the planning of the York meeting, his
Preliminary Discourse
had brought Bacon back into public attention as the “Master” of scientific method. Because of the prominence given to Bacon by such an eminent man of science, it was natural that Harcourt would fashion the new society on Baconian lines.

Whewell was also initially skeptical of the new society. He told his friend James David Forbes (a young protégé of Brewster’s at the university at Edinburgh) that he had no wish to “rally round Dr. Brewster’s standard after he has thought it necessary to promulgate so bad an opinion of us who happen to be professors in universities.”
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Brewster’s article in the
Quarterly Review
on the decline of science had contained harsh criticisms of the state of science at the British universities, which Whewell took personally. While Whewell agreed with Babbage and Brewster’s accusation that the British man of science was not well supported by the universities or the government, he was offended by Brewster’s claim that “there is not one man in all the eight universities of Great Britain who is at present known to be engaged in any train of original research.”
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Brewster later professed to be surprised to hear that Whewell, who had published numerous scientific papers and was by that time Professor of Mineralogy, was offended by this remark. Brewster himself was smarting from his inability to be appointed to any professorship at Edinburgh; in 1833 he would lose the chair of Natural Philosophy to his own protégé Forbes, and would fume about that insult for the rest of his life.

Although Whewell refused to attend the meeting in York, he sent back a cordial and encouraging letter to Harcourt, filled with suggestions that would come to shape the very nature of the new society and its meetings. And before long, Whewell threw himself into the practical organizing of the British Association, scrambling behind the scenes to get committees going, choosing presidents and council members, and planning the society’s regulations.

Whewell was disappointed that Herschel refused to take any interest in the infant association. Herschel thought that Whewell was wasting his time, which could more valuably be spent in scientific research. Whewell justified his involvement to Herschel, explaining to him that “if there be any obvious prospect of stimulating the zeal of men of science and giving a useful direction to their labors, I should be very unwilling to refuse a share in the task of raising the requisite shout.”
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T
HE MEETING IN
York opened on September 26, with the reception committee issuing tickets and helping to arrange accommodations for the attendees. At the time, the 353 participants constituted the largest scientific meeting ever held in Britain.
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No major Cambridge figure attended, and
only one Oxford don was there. Most attendees came from Yorkshire and other northern cities, London (though not the most distinguished men of science among them), and Edinburgh.
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Few fellows of the Royal Society were in attendance. In later years the British Association would draw many of the more scientifically active members of the Royal Society, and there would be much overlap in membership. But natural philosophers from outside London, those from less wealthy families, and religious Dissenters (such as the Quaker chemist John Dalton) would from the start feel more at home in the British Association. Dalton himself never became a fellow of the Royal Society, but he eagerly attended the meeting in York, and was present at every meeting until his death in 1837.
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That first night a “conversazione”—a session of promenading, light discussion, and light refreshments—was held at the museum of the society: the local newspaper described the museum, lit brilliantly with gas and filled with select company, including men of science, their wives and daughters, and local luminaries. One of the organizers found it “so showy and glittering that a stranger might have thought men had here met together to turn philosophy into sport.”
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It was a grand opening for what was aptly billed in the local newspaper as a “festival of science”
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—a week filled with morning sessions on different sciences and business meetings, as well as dinners, balls, and evening lectures open to the public. At one of these public lectures, crowds flocked to hear William Scoresby speak for two hours on his magnetic researches.

On Tuesday morning Harcourt addressed the large crowd. He opened his speech by explicitly pointing to the Baconian underpinnings of the new association. Taking a page from Herschel’s recently published
Preliminary Discourse
, Harcourt called Bacon the one who “first developed the true method of interpreting nature.”

Harcourt next compared the new British Association with the Royal Society. He acknowledged that the Royal Society had been formed explicitly to play the role of Bacon’s Solomon’s House in
New Atlantis
. It had never, however, taken up Bacon’s proposal that a scientific society should publicly promote natural knowledge by guiding the researches of its members. The British Association, in contrast, would do this. It would do so by presenting reports on the state of each science (as Whewell had suggested) and by coordinating nationwide and international observations of meteorological, geological, and astronomical data (as Babbage had suggested).

Not only was the Royal Society failing in its mission as a Baconian Solomon’s House, it was not even healthy as a scientific body. It “scarcely labors itself.” As a result of the weakness of the Royal Society, new societies were proliferating. As Banks had foreseen, the existence of these new societies, such as the Geological and Astronomical Societies, both of which he had vehemently opposed, were used by Harcourt as evidence of the moribund state of the Royal Society. “Colony after colony dissevers itself from the declining empire” of the Royal Society, Harcourt noted. The result was that “by degrees the commonwealth of science is dissolved.”
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