The Philosophical Breakfast Club (28 page)

Another part of scientific practice, taken for granted today, that was firmly established by the British Association meetings was the habit of following the presentation of papers with vigorous discussion by scientific peers, discussion that helped further the progress of science. After the York meeting, Murchison reported to Whewell about “the highly instructive conversations which followed each paper.”
¹⁰⁷
This was not the norm at the time. Only the Geological Society had anything like this; indeed, even recently the Duke of Sussex had rejected calls for reintroducing such discussions into the Royal Society, which had discontinued them long before. The duke was afraid the result of such freedom would be the airing of petty personal disputes and other “irregularities” that would be antithetical to the scientific character of the meetings. It was not until 1845 that, under the example of the British Association, the Royal Society would begin to allow discussion of presented papers once again.
¹⁰⁸

The British Association also pioneered the tradition of making research grants to men of science; they used funds raised by the meetings, especially the money earned from the “ladies’ tickets.” Previously it had been more usual to offer prizes for solutions to particular problems, such
as the “Longitude Problem.” But grants provided money for work not yet completed, which encouraged greater participation by men of science who were not independently wealthy. Grants also encouraged innovation, “thinking outside the box,” because a recipient was not limited to solving only one preordained problem.
¹⁰⁹
Grants became a major part of the landscape of science, not only in England but even in France; by the 1840s the Royal Academy of Sciences copied the British Association and began to institute the practice of giving grants rather than prizes.
¹¹⁰

The Royal Society stubbornly lagged behind. In 1828 Wollaston had left money in his will for a “Donation Fund” of the Royal Society, to be used for “promoting experimental researches.” In a letter written soon before his death, Wollaston had urged the society to spend the income from the fund “liberally.” But his generous bequest remained mostly unused until the 1850s, even though by 1842 the fund was worth £4,844.
¹¹¹

Whewell was one of the main forces pressing the British Association to give grants to its members. The funds of the association “ought to get spent, and not saved, and with good management we may get money’s worth out of it,” he pointed out pragmatically.
¹¹²
For instance, after the Glasgow meeting in 1840, Murchison told Whewell that “we netted £2600 here … and have employed a very large part of it in grants for scientific research.”
¹¹³
In the first few years of the association, grants were given for studying the tides (much of that money went to Whewell), for comparing iron produced by the hot-air and cold-air blast furnaces, for research on the contours of ships, for a chemical analysis of the atmosphere, for studying fossil fish, and for analyzing the raw data from large series of astronomical observations.
¹¹⁴
The British Association transformed science in England and, arguably, in the world.

T
HE
B
RITISH
A
SSOCIATION
was not universally loved. In 1832 the
Times
(which had ignored the 1831 York meeting altogether) called the new society “useless and childish.”
¹¹⁵
The organizers were criticized for the amount of socializing that went on at the meetings. By 1835 an anonymous critic was calling the meetings “extensive humbugs,” noting that “with the aid of concerts and balls, beautiful women, sound claret and strong whiskey, the sages [make] out remarkably well.”
¹¹⁶

Others could not help but be amazed at the quantity of eating and drinking that went on during the gatherings. For their part, the
philosophers had set themselves up for criticisms on this count: in a letter to Lord Milton right before the York meeting, Harcourt ventured to end with the reminder that “philosophers are very fond of venison,” asking whether Milton could supply some for the meeting from his estate.
¹¹⁷
After the Liverpool meeting in 1837, a slightly dazed Sedgwick wrote to the wife of Charles Lyell that “mountains of venison and oceans of turtle” were on hand to feed the hungry savants. “Were ever philosophers so fed before?” Sedgwick mused. “Twenty-hundred-weight of turtle were sent to fructify in the hungry stomachs of the sons of science!”
¹¹⁸
It would not be long before the society found itself ridiculed for the display of gastronomical science at each of the meetings. The editor of the
Quarterly Review
attacked the “gastropatetic turtle-philia” of the Association.
¹¹⁹

Even Brewster would later refer to the British Association as a “huge and unwieldy monster. The philosophical Frankenstein, which we have called into existence.”
¹²⁰
But once summoned up, the British Association—and the changes it would herald in science—was unstoppable.

“L
AST NIGHT A BRISK SQUALL, AND THE
‘P
HOSPHERIC
S
EA
’
IN HIGH
perfection running a train out behind the ship for several ship’s lengths. It is an assemblage of shining individuals which when seen on the surface are like stars, when turned down deep under water and mixed with air, look nebulous.… Altogether this is one of the most magnificent sights I ever saw.” So wrote Herschel in his diary on the evening of December 6, 1833, from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He and his family were on their way to the Cape Colony at the foot of Africa, where they would spend four happy years.

Herschel’s scientific objective in his sojourn at the Cape Colony was to map the stars of the southern hemisphere, matching his father’s earlier charting of the northern stars. The famous astronomer Edmond Halley—who discovered that the comet now bearing his name reappears every seventy-five years or so—had plotted the locations of 341 southern hemisphere stars he observed from the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic Ocean in 1676. More recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille had gone to the Cape of Good Hope and observed almost ten thousand southern stars. But more work still needed to be done.

Herschel was also propelled southward by the desire to escape the intrigues and backbiting, the scheming and gossiping, that had plagued him in London and Slough. While his friend Babbage seemed to thrive on such a diet, Herschel could not abide it. The loss of the presidency of the Royal Society, and his unwillingness to play a leading role in the new British Association, caused him to withdraw from active participation in the scientific politics of the day. He wished nothing more than to stay at his telescope, making his observations and calculations, conducting chemical and optical experiments on the side. But it was getting
increasingly difficult to remain detached from the scientific establishment while living in England.

He had first mentioned his desire to travel to the Cape Colony in January of 1831, mere months after losing the Royal Society presidency.
¹
But Herschel did not start seriously planning the trip until after his mother’s death. During her lifetime Herschel knew that she would be strongly opposed to any voyage that would keep him from her for a long period; even in 1827, when he had thought of traveling to Tenerife to study the volcanoes there, he told Whewell to keep quiet about it; as Whewell reported to Jones, “I was told … he did not wish these plans to be talked of, as his lady mother will most likely set her face against them.”
²
(In the end, Herschel did not go to Tenerife.) On January 4, 1832, Mary Herschel died, at the age of eighty-three. In February her son, just about to turn forty, began to make preparations for the long voyage.

Herschel wrote letters to the widow of his school friend Fearon Fallows, who, at the time of his death, had been the head of the Royal Observatory at the Cape, and to Margaret’s brother, Duncan Stewart, who had gone to the Cape as a colonial functionary sometime earlier. They informed Herschel about the climate, what provisions the family should bring with them, and where he was most likely to find comfortable accommodations.
³
Babbage found information for him about houses near the Cape.
⁴
Thomas Maclear, who would soon be taking up the position as new head of the observatory, suggested that the Herschels leave their youngest child, William, still an infant, in England, fearing he would not survive the long voyage or a protracted stay in Africa.
⁵
John and Margaret did not even consider being separated from their child: indeed, while at the Cape, Margaret would bear three more babies, and Herschel would remain convinced until his last days that the time the children spent there was the healthiest and most wholesome in their lives.

His friends were not surprised by his decision to go, but mourned the loss of his company. Jones told Whewell in February that Herschel was coming to visit him for a few days. “His wife writes word that he has something to talk to me about—I earnestly hope it may not be his scheme of expatriation which I can neither relish nor find fault with.”
⁶
Whewell told another friend that “I cannot look at so long an absence of a man whom I admire and love so much, without dear regret.”
⁷

Herschel began to make a new primary mirror for his twenty-foot
reflector, which he intended to transport with him to the Cape. He traveled to Hanover, for what he imagined would be his last visit to his aunt Caroline, and was charmed to see that, even at eighty-two years old, she was quite “fresh and funny at ten or eleven p.m., and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances! to the great delight of all who see her.”
⁸
He wrapped up the work he was doing on the nebulae, turning in the last proof sheets of his paper on the “little mists” the night before he left London.

The Duke of Sussex, who had prevailed over Herschel in the election for president of the Royal Society, offered financial assistance for the expedition, perhaps hoping to smooth over the tension remaining between the two rivals. The British Admiralty proposed free passage on a navy ship. Herschel refused both generous offers, telling his friend John Lubbock that he wished to be beholden to no one. As always, Herschel saw himself as an independent agent, a scientist (to use Whewell’s new word) not by profession but by avocation, free to observe or not observe, calculate or not calculate, as he saw fit. And as he had argued against Babbage and Whewell at their breakfast meetings in Cambridge, he believed that men of science should support their own activities, at least if they had the resources to do so.
⁹
At £500 for the round-trip fare, the cost of the expedition was considerable even before the family arrived at the Cape Colony. (The fare was expensive compared to other ships—Maclear, who was traveling to Africa to take up his new post, wanted to travel with the Herschels, but had to choose a less expensive vessel.)
¹⁰

In late October 1833, Whewell took the coach to London for one last visit with Herschel and Margaret, who were supervising the loading of their luggage—including the numerous crates holding the disassembled telescope—onto the
Mountstuart Elphinstone
, a ship of 611 tons, “a very respectable structure to a landsman’s eye,” according to Whewell.
¹¹
On the tenth of November, Herschel and his family left for Plymouth, where, three days later, they embarked on the ship, which had taken on baggage and supplies in London before traveling through the English Channel to its departure port. The Herschel party was made up of Herschel and his wife, their two daughters and ten-month-old son, Mrs. Nanson the baby nurse, and two manservants, including John Stone, the mechanic who would supervise the work of reassembling the telescope and aid Herschel in his nightly sweeps of the sky. Herschel had arranged for three stern cabins on the “larboard” side (left looking from stern to bow, what would later be known as the port side), the most comfortable accommodations
on the ship, and one below, for the two men. Jones was there to see them off, with a small party of others who gathered in John and Margaret’s cabin to bid them a bon voyage.
¹²
The ship set sail on November 13. Their voyage would last nine weeks and two days.

The farther he traveled from England, the more Herschel felt the frustrations of England melting away. Like a young boy, he joyously tossed message-filled bottles overboard in the hope that they would find their way to some shore. He kept a scientific journal, avidly recording the temperature of the sea water; his pulse rates; experiments on the melting point of “cocoa-nut oil”; his determination of lunar distances; the detailed, minute-by-minute description of a lunar eclipse; and hourly meteorological readings. When the crew caught a strange fish, Herschel happily reported that he “got the eyes,” which he then dissected, sketching the optic nerves. He fished up some of the phosphorescent sea creatures whose glowing trail behind the ship reminded Herschel of the nighttime sky; he wrote up observations of their structure, noting, “They do not sting the fingers but when applied to the lips, irritate, like nettles.”
¹³

The family celebrated the start of 1834 on board; at the top of the page in Herschel’s journal entry for New Year’s Day, Margaret lovingly scrawled, “A Happy New Year to dear Jack.” By this time, however, everyone on ship, even Herschel, was anxious to reach land. The nurse, Mrs. Nanson, was ill in bed, one of the children was “fretful,” and “Baby [William] teething & Mamma has contracted a habit of beating me at chess.—Begin to be tired of keeping a Meteorological Register & wish for sight of land.”
¹⁴
Finally, on the fifteenth of January, at dawn, the captain awakened Herschel to show him a magnificent sight: “The whole range of the Mountains of the Cape from Table Bay to the Cape of Good Hope was distinctly seen, as a thin, blue, but clearly defined vapour.”
¹⁵
The next day the ship dropped anchor, and the passengers prepared to disembark onto small boats that would take them to the Old Jetty, the man-made strip protecting the shore from the punishing treatment of the tides. It would take fifteen boats to convey the crates of scientific instruments brought by the Herschels, a process that was carried out over a period of several days.
¹⁶