The Philosophical Breakfast Club (26 page)

Science was becoming more specialized. Already, in France, the Royal Academy of Sciences was divided into separate sections: mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, botany, anatomy, and physics. But those separate sections still met together as a group, and members in one section reported their findings to members in the others. It was important, Harcourt warned, to have one overarching scientific society. As he put it, “The chief Interpreters of Nature have always been those who grasped the widest field of inquiry, who have listened with the most universal curiosity to all information, and felt an interest in every question.”
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In York, the 353 new members attended en masse the same lectures and discussions. But as the meetings grew in size—reaching a high of 2,403 at the meeting in Newcastle in 1838—such large groups became unwieldy. Perhaps, too, the time had come to accept that not every natural philosopher could understand every scientific paper. The association eventually began to break itself into “sections” of different scientific specialties, holding separate sessions at the meetings: Section A, the mathematical and physical sciences; Section B, chemistry and mineralogy; Section C, geology and geography; Section D, natural history (zoology and botany). More sections were soon added: Section E, anatomy and medicine; Section F, statistics; Section G, mechanical sciences. Ultimately those divisions would be both a reflection of and a contribution to the greater specialization of the sciences. Indeed, soon Herschel would be telling Whewell, “Such is science now-a-days. No man can hope to know more than one part of one science.”
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But unlike at specialized societies like the Geological and the Astronomical, members working in all fields met at one time and place and joined together for the general meetings and public lectures, at dinner and breakfast parties, and at the all-important conversaziones. (The universalism of the British Association would soon be lampooned by Dickens as the “Mudfog Association
for the Advancement of Everything.”)
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Men of science in one field could learn from those laboring in other areas; they could help each other reach over the newly growing disciplinary boundaries to find solutions to scientific problems.

After his own speech, Harcourt read from a public letter sent in support of the new society by Whewell, bestowing his blessing on it; Whewell hailed the new society as heralding a “new and better era” in science.
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By the end of the meeting, Whewell would be elected (in absentia) as one of the vice presidents of the society. He was probably not happy to learn that his co–vice president was Brewster. But Whewell took up the office with zeal, becoming over the years the “Intellectual Atlas” of the association, as Harcourt would later call him.

Whewell attended every meeting between 1832 and 1841 (he attended more sporadically after being appointed Master of Trinity in that year). During this period he delivered twelve papers, as well as reports on mineralogy (in 1832), electricity/magnetism/heat (in 1835), and the tides (in 1838, 1839, and 1841). Whewell was one of the most popular evening lecturers. He was vice president of the association three times, and president in 1841.
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At the first meeting, also in absentia, Babbage was appointed one of three trustees—the only permanent officers provided by the new constitution of the British Association. Although the association had originally been Babbage’s idea, his official participation had to be bought. Lord Milton (later the Earl of Fitzwilliam), as first president, had urged during his presidential speech that government interference in science was “un-English.” Men of science should not beseech the government for money for their researches, he advised. Clearly, Babbage could not agree with that.
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Harcourt later wrote to Milton asking him to tone down his remarks for the printed version of the speech, being mindful that “our starving philosophers” might be “unwilling to have it proclaimed ex cathedra from the midst of themselves that there is something illegitimate in the direct encouragement of science.”
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Milton agreed to the changes, and Babbage was mollified. Although he attended many of the meetings after York, Babbage eventually became disenchanted with the association, as he did with almost everything later in life.

T
HE 1833
B
RITISH
Association meeting in Cambridge was a reunion of sorts for the Philosophical Breakfast Club: Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell were all present. Although the 1832 meeting in Oxford had been even more successful than the first meeting in York—with many Cambridge, Oxford, and London men of science in attendance—the Cambridge meeting firmly established the British Association as a scientific force in the nation. It also helped seal Whewell’s reputation as a leader of the scientific establishment. At the Cambridge meeting, Whewell was both at his prime and in his element. His friends could not help noticing how he “puffed out” a bit with pride and self-importance. How could he not, thinking of how far he had come, from Lancaster boy to Cambridge eminence? His enemies would later ridicule him, with the
Literary Gazette
mocking his vanity at the British Association meetings: “I am Sir Oracle. When I speak, let no dog bark.”
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The Cambridge meeting was held the week of June 24. Eight hundred fifty-two members attended, arriving on Monday afternoon. The next day, members witnessed the confrontation between Coleridge and Whewell. When Coleridge rose during the general meeting at the Senate House, and haughtily demanded that the members of the Association desist from claiming the title of “natural philosophers,” it must have seemed to the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club a golden opportunity. Twenty years after pledging to transform science, and “leave the world wiser than they found it,” Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Whewell had worked hard to bring about many changes in science. They had begun to shape natural philosophy into a profession. They had publicly called for public funding for scientific innovation, and had insisted on the importance of exquisitely precise measurement and calculation (so precise, in fact, that it was humanly impossible to attain it, necessitating Babbage’s Difference Engine). They had brought to the public’s attention the issue of scientific method, writing popular books and articles on the subject. They had advanced the idea that the methods of one science (geology) could be brought to bear on another (economics). They had argued for professorships in the sciences at the universities, and for adequate lecture rooms, laboratories, and salaries for those professors—and soon Whewell would be arguing that young men at Cambridge should be able to graduate with honors degrees in the sciences, as well as in classics and mathematics. They had been instrumental in the formation of scientific
societies: the Astronomical Society, the founding dinner of which was attended by Babbage and Herschel; the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which Whewell, Henslow, Sedgwick, and others had initiated; and now, most magnificently, the British Association itself. Soon, at this very meeting, Jones and Whewell, with Babbage’s help, would initiate the first British society devoted to statistics, introducing statistical methods not only to the new area of “social science” (including economics) but also to the natural sciences.

Certainly there was more work to be done to transform the sciences, and the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club would continue their labors for another quarter of a century. But now they had their chance to name this new professional that they had partly created and partly molded into form. And the name uttered that day was “scientist.”

Whewell, from his seat as the secretary of the Cambridge meeting, was best placed to provide that name. Although no evidence one way or the other exists, it is tempting to think that Whewell must have bandied about possible names before the moment in the Senate House. After all, he had already argued strongly about the importance of new words to name new scientific discoveries
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—why not, then, a new name for the new scientific discoverers? Perhaps, over drinks at the start of the meeting, the four friends had even discussed possible names. We will never know.

What we do know is that, at this meeting, on this day, the word
scientist
was uttered in public for the first time. And it is still the name used today for men (and, now, women) engaged in an activity much like what Whewell and his friends envisioned.

It seemed to satisfy Coleridge; he sat back down, and the rest of the meeting continued without discord. But it would not be until the end of the century that other men of science took up Whewell’s name for them. Indeed, Whewell himself rarely used the term again in his written works or correspondence; except for a book review in which he mentioned the invention of the new term (without naming the inventor), Whewell did not use the term in writing until his 1840 book
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
, and then only two times in that massive, two-volume work. Old habits die hard, and many men of science were still unwilling to see themselves as professionals in the way they were being urged to become. Unwilling, but also unable—because it would yet be decades before a man could graduate with a degree specifically in the natural sciences, or earn his livelihood being a scientist.

F
ROM
T
UESDAY
to Friday, the five existing sections ran concurrent sessions from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Administrative meetings for those involved on the organizational committees were held at ten in the morning. The Senate House was the scene of the evening events, open to the public: a discussion of the aurora borealis on Monday evening (in which both Whewell and Herschel took part), a geological lecture on mineral veins on Tuesday evening, a presentation by Whewell on the tides (a new scientific endeavor for him) on Thursday. Wednesday night there was a grand fireworks display over the Cam on the grounds of King’s College, preceded by an altercation between the porter of the building, who was refusing to let in the immense crowd, and John Henslow, professor of botany, who squeezed into the gate and was promptly knocked down by the porter and detained in the Porter’s Lodge for an hour! Friday at 3:00 p.m., Trinity College hosted a cold buffet dinner for 570 people, followed by an evening concert by Maria Felicita Malibran, the renowned French-Spanish mezzo contralto. Henslow—who had apparently recovered from his fisticuffs two nights before—led a botanical barge trip up the Cam on Saturday.
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“What a week!” Herschel exclaimed to Sedgwick when it was all over.
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Jones confided to Babbage that he had hated “the bustle and pageantry and pretension” of the proceedings.
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Although Jones had not been involved in the original conception of the British Association, he was a driving force of the Cambridge meeting. His situation had changed considerably after the publication of his
Essay on the Distribution of Wealth
. At the start of 1833 he had been appointed Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London, at a much higher salary than he had earned as a curate, and had moved to London with his wife. Whewell had interceded directly with the Bishop of London to help him secure the position.
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(Whewell was soon giving him useful advice about lecturing: be clear, give specific details, and do not use that “bow-wow style in which you sometimes preach!”)
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On Wednesday, February 27, 1833, at two in the afternoon, Jones gave his Inaugural Lecture. He had implored his friends to attend, telling Herschel that “if my friends do not grace me with their presence I shall hold a disconsolate palaver with empty benches.”
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Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell all showed up at King’s College to provide moral support. In his lecture, Jones outlined the inductive method of political economy he had
laid out in his book two years earlier. The correct, inductive method of political economy, Jones instructed his audience, required both “history and statistics.” History tells an economist the causes and effects of past economic measures; statistics tells him in detail the present condition of the nations of the earth, but without revealing causes and effects.
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