The Philosophical Breakfast Club (53 page)

Whewell went to the Crystal Palace several times; Cordelia went once with their niece Kate Marshall. At the close of the exhibition, Whewell was asked personally by Prince Albert to deliver a lecture drawing out the “lessons to be learned of philosophy and science” from the event, as Whewell put it in a letter to his sister Ann.
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(Whewell thought highly of the prince’s interest in science—and his reliance on Whewell as a scientific expert—but found the prince to be “handsome and somewhat inanimate” in person.)
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Using a metaphor inspired by the photographic images and equipment that had been among the displays, Whewell described the total contents of the Crystal Palace as resembling an ideal picture made by a photographer who had somehow brought within his field of view the whole “surface of the globe, with all its workshops and markets,” its technology and its arts. The whole history of civilization could be seen at a glance; in this sense, Whewell gushed, the Great Exhibition obliterated space and time—turning its visitors into travelers across lands and ages in a blink of an eye.

One lesson to be learned by comparing different stages of civilization, Whewell argued, was that in less advanced countries, “the arts are mainly exercised to gratify the tastes of the few; with us, to satisfy the wants of the many.… There, Art labors for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less.” The wondrous workshops of France, with their exquisite tapestries and delicate porcelains, served kings and aristocrats, not the everyday needs of the people, while the British manufacturing concerns made popular goods at popular prices, to be enjoyed by those at all levels of society. With Bacon in mind, as always, Whewell implied that since knowledge is power, societies must put that knowledge to work for the good of all, not just for those more privileged few.

In this lecture, which was later published in England and then reprinted around the world, Whewell used his term “scientist,” once again juxtaposing it to “artist,” noting that the Great Exhibition was a grand gathering of “artists and scientists,” as well as of art and science.
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Up to this point, the term had still not become widely used; even Babbage, in his pamphlet on the Great Exhibition, deplored the fact that “science in
England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognized even as a class. Our language itself contains no
single
term by which their occupation can be expressed.”
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Babbage’s dismissal of Whewell’s term may have been motivated by his continued enmity toward Whewell, even almost twenty years since the publication of Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. But he was not the only one who disparaged the name “scientist.” Whewell had used the term in his
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
. In the margin of his copy of the book, Sedgwick jotted “better die of want than bestialize our tongues by such barbarisms!”
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(The term was considered “barbaric” by some linguistic purists because it was a Greek-Latin hybrid.)
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It would still be decades more before Whewell’s term became so commonly employed that we are shocked to discover it did not exist at all before 1833.

Babbage, living in the center of London not far from Hyde Park, went to the Crystal Palace frequently, often escorting Ada Lovelace or the Duke of Wellington, both of whom would die the following year. (Lovelace died at age thirty-six, in terrible agony, of uterine cancer, denied morphine at the end by her mother, who felt that Lovelace could better expiate her moral sins through intense suffering.) On one occasion, the popular duke was mobbed by his adoring public, and he had to be removed by the police for his own protection.
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Babbage was in his element here at the Crystal Palace, relishing its display of manufactured goods, calling the exhibition an “industrial feast”
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—though he thought that the commissioners should have stuck to their original plan of marking prices on the exhibitions. This would have allowed visitors to gain a just estimate of the commercial value of the different displays. Additionally, as Babbage pointed out, it would have served a profitable purpose: some visitors might have liked to purchase a shawl or a dress or some other useful and beautiful souvenir of their visit.
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But Babbage could not hide his bitterness over the fact that the model of his Difference Engine—“the greatest intellectual triumph of [the] century,” as he put it—had not been chosen for display, and that he had not even been invited as one of the commissioners choosing and judging the exhibits.
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After the exhibition closed, Babbage would write yet another ill-tempered book in which he would rant and rave about his exclusion from the Great Exhibition, and about the sorry state of British science. “Great nations,” he lectured his readers, “are often governed by very small people.” Babbage realized that he would be called “a cantankerous
fellow” for writing the book, but at this point in his life, at sixty-one years old, he seemed to relish the role.
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Darwin suspected that Babbage’s bark was worse than his bite, but most people by now accepted Babbage’s mis-anthropy.
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Later Babbage would discover that his name had been put forth as a possible Chief Industrial Commissioner, but that someone in the government had squelched it, reasonably noting that Babbage was “so utterly hostile” to those in power that he would be unlikely to work well with them, something that would be necessary in bringing off such an extravagant festival.
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Herschel had been tapped as one of the commissioners, and so he was forced to be at the exhibition nearly every day. As a member of the Commission on Scientific Instruments, Herschel met with representatives from all over the world to discuss science and technology, answered piles of letters and inquiries, and judged contests in his category. This was a hardship for Herschel—he would have been happy for Babbage to serve in his place—particularly since most of his time was taken up by his work for the Royal Mint, where he had been appointed master at the end of 1850.

On his fifty-fifth birthday, March 7, 1847, Herschel had finally put the finishing touches on his massive book
Cape Observations
, after ten years of labor. His aunt Caroline had lived just long enough to see this culmination of her nephew’s lifework in astronomy (she died ten months later, at the age of ninety-seven). Herschel was finally a “free man,” as Sedgwick joked to him.
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He felt free, but old—he was tired, often ill, and suffering from frequent migraines, many of which were preceded by hemiopsy, or half-blindness, where half of the visual field is covered in darkness or dark lines. Herschel realized that his most productive years as an original scientific researcher were behind him, and began to think that he should take on some kind of public service, as a way to use his time profitably.

Herschel had asked Jones, at that time still hard at work at the Tithe Commission, whether he knew of any appropriate position. Jones at first demurred, saying that “I had rather see you in your grave!” than be enmeshed in the politics and machinations of an official government post. Jones made one exception: “The only thing fit for you is Mastership of the Mint.”
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The more he thought about it, the more Jones liked the idea of his friend in the position formerly held by his great predecessor, Isaac Newton. Using his contacts in the government, Jones managed to get
Herschel appointed to the post, telling Whewell, “It is really a glorious thing for many reasons.”
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Babbage later enviously admitted that he had hoped for the position himself.
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At first Herschel was gratified by the appointment. Soon, however, he began to rue the day he had accepted it. Newton had spent his tenure at the mint catching and prosecuting counterfeiters.
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Later the Master of the Mint became a political office, held by a member of the Cabinet with influence on the financial policies of the government. However, an act of Parliament right before Herschel took up the post changed it to a more administrative position.
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Instead of spending the bulk of his time arguing for particular economic and monetary policies—such as his idea of changing British currency to the decimal system, proposing to replace the pound sterling with a “100-millet” coin called a “Rose” or a “Rupee”
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—Herschel found himself in charge of a massive restructuring of the workforce of the mint, one that was not only time-consuming and energy-draining, but was bound to make him unpopular with the workers, many of whom lost privileges such as the right to use the mint’s printing equipment for private contract work after hours. During this period there was such a high demand for silver and gold that the mint was having trouble coining enough, and Herschel was forced to put the workers on twelve-hour shifts, another hugely unpopular measure. Rather than being in the position of an “elder statesman” of the government, Herschel found himself besieged by tedious administrative and personnel negotiations. It was just about the most stressful occupation one could imagine for someone with Herschel’s sensitive and “over-excitable” tendencies.
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Herschel was extremely unhappy during the next few years. He had to spend long periods separated from his family in gloomy rooms he had taken in Harley Street in London. He was not always able to get home to Collingwood over the weekends; one year he even missed Margaret’s birthday.

Between his work at the mint and for the Royal Commission, Herschel was rising each morning at six, working at home on business of the Royal Commission until nine, then hurrying in to the mint, where he spent most of the day, rushing from there to the Great Exhibition every afternoon, and when the gates of the Crystal Palace closed for the night he would return wearily to Harley Street, where he would stay up finishing all his mint correspondence. His health got even worse; letters from this time
find Herschel complaining about insomnia (for which Faraday sent him a “healing liquid,” some particularly fine whiskey), migraine headaches, nervous system disorders, and depression. In addition to Faraday’s whiskey, Herschel began to treat his discomfort and sleeplessness with opium and laudanum. The pain got so bad that, for a time, he was confined to a wheelchair, and looked old beyond his years, completely white-haired and with huge pouches under his eyes (as testified by a photograph taken of him around this time). He complained that his life had become “unendurable.” One bright spot came in December 1852, when his son Willy graduated with brilliant success from the Haileybury College, thanks to the extra tutoring he received from Jones. In May of 1853, Herschel tried to resign from the mint, but was implored by the assistant secretary to the treasury, Charles Edward Trevelyan, to stay on a little longer. He longed for the day he could leave the mint and return to Collingwood.

H
ERSCHEL’S SITUATION
was all the more bleak because of his service on the Royal Commission charged with proposing reforms of the curriculum and examination system at the University of Cambridge, a position that put him at odds with Whewell (and took up more of his time). As Master of Trinity and vice-chancellor of the university, Whewell had tried to be a force for change at Cambridge, pushing for rules requiring professors to lecture on material covered by the Tripos, and requiring students to attend the lectures of at least one professor. He was unsuccessful in these attempts to undermine the entrenched—and expensive—system of private tuition. But Whewell was victorious in another battle, one that helped establish science as a true profession, with a recognized form of training.

In 1848, Whewell was responsible for introducing a new Tripos exam in the Natural Sciences, which covered anatomy, physiology, botany, geology, mineralogy, and chemistry—and the history and philosophy of science, for which Whewell’s books served as the main texts. (Whewell also supported a new Tripos in Classics and one in the Moral Sciences, which included moral philosophy, political economy, jurisprudence, English law, and modern history.) It took Whewell years of lobbying the other heads of colleges before the Natural Sciences Tripos was accepted as an avenue to degree the way the Mathematics Tripos was. At first, students could only sit for the exam after taking the Mathematics Tripos. This
delay upset Whewell, who called the “fear of innovation” on the part of the university “very childish.”
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This requirement was overturned in 1860; finally, at that point, students could graduate with a degree in the natural sciences. Because of Whewell, the university was established as a place to train scientists as well as clergymen and mathematicians. Henry Sidgwick, who would later be appointed to the chair in Moral Philosophy previously held by Whewell, remarked that “it is to Whewell more than to any other single man that the revival of [natural and moral] Philosophy in Cambridge is to be attributed.”
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At the same time as he pushed for reform at the university, however, Whewell bitterly resented the idea that change could be forced on Cambridge by the government, and he was dismayed that some of his old friends, such as Herschel, Peacock, and Sedgwick, were taking part in that effort by serving on the Royal Commission. Being on the opposite sides of this dispute upset both Herschel and Whewell, who argued good-naturedly about their differences, especially related to the power structure of the university: the commission was recommending a change to the old “caput” system, under which the heads of colleges exerted a disproportionate amount of power in university decisions.
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As one of those heads, Whewell was, naturally, loath to let that power go, complaining about “the democratic frenzy” that would be unleashed.
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With his usual mordant humor, Jones told Whewell after listening to his complaints about the Royal Commission, “I heartily wish they would make you dictator. The multitude of cooks will spoil the broth I fear.”
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