The Philosophical Breakfast Club (32 page)

These calculations are extremely complex, involving many trigonometric functions. Like every other man of science in England at the time, Thomson knew about Babbage’s work creating a mechanical computer. Thomson began to wonder whether a similar kind of machine could be put to work calculating the tidal predictions using harmonic analysis.
Deciding in the affirmative, Thomson invented—and arranged to have built—a “tide predicting machine” in 1873. Using a complex arrangement of wheels and pulleys, the machine could be input with the constituents of the equation and would output a graph of the expected tide heights. Worked with a crank handle, the machine could run a year’s worth of tides for any port in about four hours.
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Besides influencing the later work in harmonic analysis, Whewell’s research on the tides more generally brought about a particular vision of what a modern scientist does. Whewell created in his own person the model of a modern-day professional research scientist, who realizes the need for data, arranges the international effort to find the required data, assigns computers to calculate the data, and—important—seeks funding for the whole endeavor. The first grant of the British Association, in 1833, was to Whewell, Lubbock, and others for work on the tides; much of it went to pay Dessiou for computing. In the end, Whewell received over £1,000 for making calculations from the tidal observations, the most any single man of science received in the early years of the British Association.
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This is a standard professional model today, but Whewell was perhaps the first real instantiation of it.

Whewell’s research on the tides not only transformed the image of the scientist, but helped transform science itself—into an international undertaking that relied upon governmental participation and support. Today’s examples of such efforts include the International Space Station and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Later, Whewell and Herschel would be the major force behind the government-financed international expedition to determine the magnetic structure of the earth. International “big” science was born in the tides of Britain and around the world.

W
HILE HIS TWO
friends were mapping the skies and the seas, Jones was suddenly made responsible for mapping the land. By the end of his efforts, rural England and Wales were completely mapped for the first time.

At the end of 1834, Robert Malthus died, leaving vacant his position as Professor of Political Economy at the East India College at Haileybury, where his students had referred to him affectionately as “Pop” (for “population”) Malthus. Jones and Whewell had befriended Malthus
some years earlier, during their fight against Ricardo’s political economy. Whewell had even performed optical experiments on Malthus, who was color-blind.
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Although Whewell and Jones disagreed with Malthus on the population principle, he shared their positive opinion of the value of inductive method in economics, and had often argued the point with his close friend Ricardo.

At the time of Malthus’s death, Jones was still officially Professor of Political Economy at Kings College in London. But he had never been called upon to lecture since his inaugural discourse in 1833—apparently not enough interested students could be found to make up a class.
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Jones soon discovered that Malthus had recommended him as his successor at the East India College. Maria Edgeworth reported the news to her brother, noting the irony that Malthus’s “pupils at Haileybury must now learn from Jones’s lectures the objections he made to Malthus’ system!”
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Whewell was thrilled—not only would Jones be earning a much higher salary (£500), but Haileybury, in Hertfordshire, was closer to Cambridge than was London; he told Jones that “I shall rejoice much to think you are so near.”
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The East India College had opened at Hertford Castle in February 1806 and moved to the “palatial buildings” built for it by the directors of the East India Company in 1809. It was something between a school and a university—boys entered when they were young, usually around sixteen, and left before the age of completing university. The college was intended to educate men hoping to receive appointments to the civil service in India. In a pamphlet published in 1817, Malthus explained that he and his colleagues tried to “inculcate … manly feelings, manly studies, and manly self-control.”
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The boys studied classical and general literature, Hindu literature, the history of Asia, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Sanskrit, Bengali, and Telugu (the language of one of the most ancient ethnic groups in India), as well as French, drawing, fencing, dancing, mathematics, natural philosophy, history and laws of England, and, of course, political economy. The college, with its lovely rural setting and eminent group of professors, became a center for intellectual activity, where men of science, literary figures, and politicians would often congregate on the weekends. Herschel, Babbage, and Whewell were frequent visitors during Jones’s career there.
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Jones threw himself into the position, preparing lectures and examination papers with relish. The students regarded him as the cleverest
of the professors. They appreciated that he never asked questions of them during his classes, nor expected any prior preparation from them. Jones merely checked their notebooks once a month to be sure that they had understood his lectures, which the students considered lucid and carefully argued. His popularity with the students was rooted as well in his propensity to share with them his love of the good things in life; one student remembered coming to him with a personal problem at three in the afternoon. After giving the student useful advice, Jones “then sent for a bottle of champagne to crown his exhortation with a little refreshment.”
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Five of the professors were also ordained clergymen, and they rotated the twice-daily compulsory church services among them. When it was Jones’s turn, the students groaned at his sermons—he had a stock of them, which he repeated in a predictable cycle—but they enjoyed the spectacle of his delivery. As one student later recalled:

Though pleased that Jones was nearby, Whewell worried that he would be less likely than ever to finish his second book on political economy, which was supposed to carry forward the arguments made in his first book. Herschel agreed with Whewell that Jones had been particularly slothful in the few years since he had been appointed to Kings College. When Herschel, in Africa, heard of his appointment at Haileybury, he wrote to his brother-in-law, “I don’t think it is a situation very fit for him—but anything with duties and regularly recurring call upon his store of knowledge in his own department, is better than the dreamy half extinct
existence in which he was vegetating.”
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Jones had spent the last few years not writing, not lecturing, indeed apparently doing not much of anything at all besides enjoying his life in London. Whewell had reverted to his old habit of wheedling Jones to write. During one of Jones’s recurrent spells of illness, Whewell wrote him, a bit harshly, “The only moral I can extract … is the importance of getting our speculations into such a form that not calamity or adversity shall have the power, by putting an end to us … to destroy the chance of our beautiful theories coming before the world.… You know as well as I do that those who theorize rightly are in the end the lords of the earth.”
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W
HEWELL GAVE UP
all hope of Jones completing his second book when Jones was appointed one of three commissioners charged with implementing what was then the largest government initiative ever enacted: the Commutation of the Tithes.

Tithing is a notion that derives from early Jewish society.
Tithe
literally means “a tenth part.” The idea was that one tenth of a land’s produce and livestock would be given to the land’s “minister,” or local clergyman, in exchange for the use of the land. Tithing was typical in most early Christian societies as well (and still exists in many synagogues and churches today, where members are encouraged to “tithe” their income for the support of the congregation). For centuries, in England and Wales, tithes had been a way for the clergy to be supported by the landowners and farmers; it also was a way to link the clergy to the land and its people, to make their fortunes dependent upon the productive toil of the community.
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By the eighteenth century, tithe payments made up the bulk of most clergymen’s income, especially in rural areas. But it was considered a most irksome tax by both the clergy, who had to collect it, and the landowners, who had to pay it. Tithing in kind, the most common form, meant that the pastor had to travel to the farms to collect bales of hay, stalks of corn, bundles of wood, buckets of milk, even pigs and cows. Landowners were generally unwilling to make the payments, and caused as much difficulty as they could to the clergyman. A farmer might, for instance, inform his vicar that his crop was ready for tithing, so that the clergyman would ride his horse and a wagon—perhaps rented for the occasion—to the farm, only to be presented with a single turnip, and the promise of more to come. Even when he could collect the tithes, a clergyman was then often
forced to sell the produce at the market lest it spoil before he could eat it. Thus we have enshrined in the historical records a disturbing image of the vicar of Battersea: during tithing time, it is reported, “nothing was more common than to meet his carts in the streets retailing his tithes: ‘Come, buy my asparagus: Oh, rare Cauliflowers!’ ”
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The system of tithes undermined the dignity of the clerical position, and strained the relationship between clergy and parishioners.

By the early nineteenth century, many of the tithes were substituted by money payments, a predetermined amount that was paid every year, regardless of the value of the harvest. This solved the problem of having to hand over produce. But it required regular valuations of the land and its produce, meaning more work by the clergy and more efforts by the farmer to evade an accurate assessment. The amounts paid by money were assessed in a large variety of ways: there was no uniformity from place to place. Often, values remained the same over the length of a clergyman’s incumbency, even if this lasted fifty years. Clergymen of lower social stations—who depended the most on the tithes for their survival—were not in a position to argue with the powerful landowners; indeed, the tithing system made them more dependent on the rich members of their community, leading to the extreme deference shown by the clergymen lampooned in the works of writers such as Jane Austen. Her William Collins (in
Pride and Prejudice
) is made a figure of fun because of his almost pathological reliance on the good opinion of his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh—whose influence over him extends to his choice of a bride.

At the same time, the landowners complained that the tithes were a disincentive for them to improve their land. Why should they invest in new agricultural technologies, which required the outlay of large sums of money, if their eventual profit would only be eaten away by the vicar? By the time of the report of the Poor Law Commission in 1834, it was being alleged in numerous cases that farm laborers had been thrown off the land by landowners who would rather leave their land fallow than pay the heavy burden of the tithes. It was said that in Herstmonceux (Hare’s parish), “the whole labor force has been thrown upon the [poor] rates, for the avowed purpose of fighting the parson.”
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Political economy fanned the flames of dissent. Ricardo had argued that the tithe should be abolished, as it was actually a tax on everyone, because consumers paid more for produce driven up in price by the tithe.
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Radical politicians called for the elimination of tithes. Clergymen were portrayed in snide cartoons
as “parsons in the pig-sty,” choosing the plumpest pig for their tithe in kind.

On the other side, the Church of England supported the tithes, arguing that tithes were a kind of property belonging to the Church, and should be preserved on that basis. The excesses of the French Revolution and its aftermath—with its aristocracy literally losing their heads along with their lands—were used as a rallying cry: “No French Revolution on British Soil!”

The Reform Bill of 1832 opened the floodgates to nationwide reform of the tithe system: such reform began to seem inevitable. In 1834, even the
Times
, always a friend to the Church, asserted, “All men of all parties express the most anxious desire to see the tithe question set at rest.”
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Major bills designed to solve the tithe problem were introduced in 1833, 1834, 1835, and 1836, until the last of these was successful.

This final bill, introduced by Lord John Russell, was partly written by Jones. His friend John Drinkwater Bethune, army officer and military historian, had received instructions from Lord Russell to prepare four bills on Church matters, and conferred with Jones. Together the two men—probably over several bottles of claret—composed a sketch of a tithe bill that was eventually placed before the House of Commons. Jones’s work on the bill was not purely public service, or a favor to a friend—he hoped to gain an appointment as one of the Tithe Commissioners. Whewell wished him luck: “I hope you have now a fair prospect of success both in your public and private project.”
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