More people’s history of science

04/30/2009 17:15
dan at work
This book by Conner continues to offer great detail, and more importantly for me, story ideas. Conner’s a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York – how is it this school seems to specialize in biographers? I read a Mark Twain bio by Ron Powers a few months ago – also a John Jay faculty member. I’d like to sit in their faculty lounge for a while!

Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch “mechanic” and alchemist, demonstrated a submarine in the Thames in 1620. He kept people submerged in comfort for three hours, using bottled oxygen. Why does no one know about this? Because there was no word for OXYGEN for another two centuries. Drebbel had “empirically learned to generate it by heating saltpeter. Robert Boyle later credited Drebbel with recognizing that the air we breathe is a mixture of various ‘airs,’ one of which is essential for sustaining life.” (252) According to wiki, Drebbel also invented a chicken incubator connected to a mercury thermometer (which he also invented), that automatically kept it at a constant temp. This is one of the first feedback-based control systems. Drebbel died in poverty, a tavern-keeper, in 1633.

Again, the what-if possibilities seem endless. What if the elite scientists like the members of the Royal Society (founded 1660) had been more open to empiricism, and less dependent on a priori theorizing? If I can connect the dots, even loosely, between these ideas…

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