reading
Summer's ending
08/23/2010 22:24
So the summer is about over. Another week and a half, and school will be starting. That means there’ll be a few more people around campus. But really, I’ll still be spending most of my time reading. So how did I do this summer? Pretty well. Got a bunch of research done. Went places and took pictures of documents, that means. Still need to read the majority of them and fit them together into a story. And an interpretation.
And I read a lot of books and articles. My big list is starting to look a little brighter. Light colors are good in this map -- they mean I’ve read the book (blue) or article (gray). I’ve still got a way to go, but in some of the core themes, I’ve done quite a bit of major reading. So far, so good...
And I read a lot of books and articles. My big list is starting to look a little brighter. Light colors are good in this map -- they mean I’ve read the book (blue) or article (gray). I’ve still got a way to go, but in some of the core themes, I’ve done quite a bit of major reading. So far, so good...
New Reading List
05/28/2010 23:52
Comprehensive Exams in less than 12 months. So, it's time to be serious about the reading. More or less.
I put up a new (tentative) list, covering all my North American reading. I think I'll keep the British reading separate, on the Radicals site. The titles on this list will actually be split across two official "fields," but they really go toward the same basic goal. So they're together on this list, at least for now.
I put up a new (tentative) list, covering all my North American reading. I think I'll keep the British reading separate, on the Radicals site. The titles on this list will actually be split across two official "fields," but they really go toward the same basic goal. So they're together on this list, at least for now.
Rural People's Thoughts?
12/03/2009 14:48
So I’m looking at the first couple of pages of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Yeah, I know I should really be reading student papers or writing one of my two final papers for this semester. But I was curious. This is one of the books everyone in Environmental History mentions, like Raymond Williams The Country and the City (which I also bought this semester, and haven’t read yet).
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
Book History
06/17/2009 17:58
In the Introduction to A Handbook for the Study of Book History, Ronald and Mary Zboray explain what they think the field of Book History is about:
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
Changes in the Land
06/04/2009 16:26
More people’s history of science
04/30/2009 17:15
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…
Reading in the old days
04/28/2009 10:09
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1989)
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
before Darwin
04/23/2009 10:51
a few more notes from Millhauser’s Before Darwin
The idea that evolution was “in the air” is supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. Lyell was obliged to devote a good many pages of his Principles of Geology to repudiating it…for geology, blink the fact or gloze over it as one would, contradicted Scripture.”
The reluctance of major scientific figures doesn’t necessarily represent the feeling of all scientists (unless you subscribe to the “great man” theory and think they were all the scientists). Lyell was a knight and baronet. Cuvier was a baron. Erasmus Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution from 1770 to 1796, and he didn’t have the personal attachment to religion that his grandson did. It’s interesting, though. They’re willing to go only so far.
“since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” (71) Millhauser’s impressionistic style seems to capture some interesting clues. There’s a relationship between popular, out-loud debate and acceptance of new ideas (even among the elite). All kinds of things may be believed by “the informed few,” but they’re not dangerous unless spoken of. Reminds me of J.S. Mill and birth control.
“About the middle of the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armargh, carefully computed the date of creation and set it at 4004 B.C.” (194, n. 2) (Fall of the House of Ussher?)
If I need to go back to the primary sources on geology, here are the ones Millhauser talks about:
Whewell, Indications of Creator
John Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth, ~1670
Thomas Burnet, the Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684
William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, 1696
W. Worthington, The Scripture-Theory of the Earth, 1773
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1785, gradualist
John Whitehurst, Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1830-3, “uniformitarian”
Archbishop Sumner, Treatise on the Records of Creation, 1816
Granville Penn, Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies, 1822
William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology
Vestiges was reviewed in G.J. Holyoake’s Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette (119 no reference given) (Jan 8 1845, 9-12 by William Chilton; Feb 26, Mar 5 & 19 1845)
Also: “The compositor and former bricklayer William Chilton recognized Vestiges as an attempt to remove the radical edge from the weapons of materialism; see his “ ‘Materialism’ and the Author of the ‘Vestiges’,” Reasoner 1 (1846): 7-8.
“Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies” (119-20).
Even those you’d expect to support Vestiges, didn’t. “Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key.” as always, Huxley is ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. “Darwin feared ridicule; as early as 1844, in a letter that spoke a little superciliously of Lamarck’s ‘absurd though clever work,’ he anticipated comparison with this inept new version of it...When he published, then, he indicated his disapproval of Vestiges in terms that contrasted markedly with his courtesy toward such minor precursors as Matthews.” (148-9) But then, by the same token, he totally ignored his most significant precursor, his grandfather. So in a sense, bad treatment by Darwin is high praise.
“Wallace (who had once found the book stimulating to his own mind [and wasn’t above admitting it!]) always spoke of it with the respect due a pioneer” (150).
“Huxely…did not see it giving a substantial hint to Schopenhauer, or confirming Emerson’s intuition of nature, or intruding an argument or two into the contemptuous Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis,’ or gripping the attention of Lincoln as had only a half dozen books in his career. He did not see the first breach in the wall.” (151)
The idea that evolution was “in the air” is supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. Lyell was obliged to devote a good many pages of his Principles of Geology to repudiating it…for geology, blink the fact or gloze over it as one would, contradicted Scripture.”
The reluctance of major scientific figures doesn’t necessarily represent the feeling of all scientists (unless you subscribe to the “great man” theory and think they were all the scientists). Lyell was a knight and baronet. Cuvier was a baron. Erasmus Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution from 1770 to 1796, and he didn’t have the personal attachment to religion that his grandson did. It’s interesting, though. They’re willing to go only so far.
“since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” (71) Millhauser’s impressionistic style seems to capture some interesting clues. There’s a relationship between popular, out-loud debate and acceptance of new ideas (even among the elite). All kinds of things may be believed by “the informed few,” but they’re not dangerous unless spoken of. Reminds me of J.S. Mill and birth control.
“About the middle of the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armargh, carefully computed the date of creation and set it at 4004 B.C.” (194, n. 2) (Fall of the House of Ussher?)
If I need to go back to the primary sources on geology, here are the ones Millhauser talks about:
Whewell, Indications of Creator
John Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth, ~1670
Thomas Burnet, the Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684
William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, 1696
W. Worthington, The Scripture-Theory of the Earth, 1773
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1785, gradualist
John Whitehurst, Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1830-3, “uniformitarian”
Archbishop Sumner, Treatise on the Records of Creation, 1816
Granville Penn, Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies, 1822
William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology
Vestiges was reviewed in G.J. Holyoake’s Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette (119 no reference given) (Jan 8 1845, 9-12 by William Chilton; Feb 26, Mar 5 & 19 1845)
Also: “The compositor and former bricklayer William Chilton recognized Vestiges as an attempt to remove the radical edge from the weapons of materialism; see his “ ‘Materialism’ and the Author of the ‘Vestiges’,” Reasoner 1 (1846): 7-8.
“Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies” (119-20).
Even those you’d expect to support Vestiges, didn’t. “Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key.” as always, Huxley is ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. “Darwin feared ridicule; as early as 1844, in a letter that spoke a little superciliously of Lamarck’s ‘absurd though clever work,’ he anticipated comparison with this inept new version of it...When he published, then, he indicated his disapproval of Vestiges in terms that contrasted markedly with his courtesy toward such minor precursors as Matthews.” (148-9) But then, by the same token, he totally ignored his most significant precursor, his grandfather. So in a sense, bad treatment by Darwin is high praise.
“Wallace (who had once found the book stimulating to his own mind [and wasn’t above admitting it!]) always spoke of it with the respect due a pioneer” (150).
“Huxely…did not see it giving a substantial hint to Schopenhauer, or confirming Emerson’s intuition of nature, or intruding an argument or two into the contemptuous Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis,’ or gripping the attention of Lincoln as had only a half dozen books in his career. He did not see the first breach in the wall.” (151)
Erasmus in Darwin books
04/21/2009 11:57
There’s a rush to publish books on Darwin for his bicentennial. A pile of books on prominent display in the library. Half on Darwin and half on Lincoln. It’s great that people want to call attention to evolution, especially given the rise in Creationism and its cousins. But it’s interesting what people who write about Charles Darwin have to say about his grandfather, Erasmus.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
2 books on the Vestiges
04/16/2009 16:55
This quote comes from the Introduction of Milton Millhauser’s Just Before Darwin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). The other book, which I ran across accidentally, because it mentions Charles Bradlaugh, is crammed full of good info. So I ordered a copy of James A. Secord’s Victorian Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Should be here next week (because I won’t pay extra for shipping).
I’m reading these because I’m beginning to get the impression that ideas of biological evolution were popular among regular people for several decades before Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. It almost seems that Charles Darwin was merely the figure who forced the scientific establishment (represented by the Royal Society) to consider a topic they’d been studiously avoiding ever since Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus published his Zoonomia in 1796!
Millhauser says part of the problem with Vestiges is that it was in English, and it was inexpensive. This made it available and affordable for the masses. “Once again,” Millhauser says (is he referring to Erasmus Darwin?), “the public was informed, by a by a glib pseudo scientist without even Lamarck’s pretensions to authority, that the true Adam of the human race was a baboon” (5). This sums up the issue nicely: it has to do with public, rather than scientific, understanding of humanity’s origins. It has to do with the control of scientific information by an elite class of authorities (naturally drawn from the upper classes and educated at the best “public” schools). And it has to do with the inevitable demise of a biblical creation story that no educated Englishman actually took seriously, but that nearly all believed should be upheld (as Plato’s Noble Lie) for the common people, especially in lieu of an alternative story that maintained the authority of the established church.
Millhauser dismisses Erasmus Darwin and Charles Lyell in an endnote, saying “they each devote to evolution only a small portion of a work dealing with some other major theme” (191 n. 4). This is true, and Vestiges deserves recognition as the first complete book on the subject to achieve wide readership. But it ignores the relationships between the ideas of Darwin and Lyell and those of Chambers. Making his case for a study of Chambers, Millhauser identifies the issue of synthesis, and especially of synthesis by amateurs. He says “An early Victorian layman might still feel…that he had perceived a truth that the professionals had somehow managed to ignore or even to hush up, and that this might provide the principle of unification, the frank definition of the central tendency of science, for which the world was waiting” (8). This is an idea that has particular resonance for me at this point, not least in the political implications such a changed understanding of the world might have on regular people in the early 19th century.
MIllhauser’s story of Robert Chambers’ young life is interesting, but his coverage of the Vestiges’ reception and impact focus entirely on the elite. Even his claim that the “development hypothesis” was “in the air” only deals with the air immediately surrounding elite scientists and their writings. Millhauser claims about 28,000 copies of the Vestiges were sold in Britain and a similar quantity in the U.S. But he doesn’t elaborate on this at all. I’ll have to wait a few more days, and find out about that in Victorian Sensation.
Erasmus Darwins in Massachusetts
04/15/2009 18:30
That’s right. Erasmus Darwin came up with the idea that all life on earth was descended from a single microscopic ancestor in 1770. In 1796, he published the first volume of his Zoonomia, which was heralded as the Principia of the medical profession, and discusses his ideas on evolution. And in 1803, Darwin’s posthumous poem The Temple of Nature elaborated his position even more explicitly. Darwin also founded Birmingham’s Lunar Society, translated Linnaeus, and was a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the American Philosophical Society. When his grandson Charles published On the Origin of Species, his critics thought they’d be able to silence him by quoting verbatim from tracts written against his grandfather’s theories.
Erasmus Darwin never visited America, and although he was a political radical and a supporter of American independence (and critic of the Pitt government’s repressions in the 1790s), I’m surprised that he was so well-known in a remote western-Massachusetts hill-town like Ashfield. Looking a little farther, I’ve found there are sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there is no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records. (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online)
It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in most cases they’re actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” Similarly, there is no record of “Darwin” being a common family name in these Massachusetts towns, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843.
In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But this initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. So the odds are high that there are many more Erasmus Darwins I haven’t yet discovered!
As bizarre as the mere fact of all these young Darwins in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts towns, is where the towns were. If people were going to be naming their children after a British scientist (obscure or famous), you’d expect them to live in cities, close to institutions of higher learning like Harvard, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be dead wrong.
Most of the people naming their children after Darwin lived in central or western Massachusetts. I found most of them in Worcester, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Though they weren’t completely absent from the Boston area, there were more towns close to the coast without a Darwin than with one. The towns marked in green on the map have at least one “Darwin.” Several have more than one. Two, Ashfield and Leominster, have six.
I’ve started looking into the histories of these towns, to see who these “Darwins” were. And, perhaps more importantly, who their parents were. In looking at the first dozen or so, it seems that some of them were educated people, ministers or doctors. Others were farmers, shoemakers, and tavern-keepers. The whole thing suggests that people in some of the remotest parts of Massachusetts were thinking about issues and reading books I would never have expected them to be so interested in. It’s a whole different picture of the intellectual life of regular people in the early 19th century than you get in the “standard” texts!
I’m going to try to write little sketches of the lives of some of these people, because I think they’ll turn up interesting insights. Maybe this’ll turn into something, if I can pull together enough of them and they turn up some of the surprises that seem to be lurking in this material…
Metahistory
04/14/2009 18:14
I read Hayden White’s Metahistory. Okay, I admit, I only read some of it.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
Pseudo-Science
04/13/2009 15:18
“The term pseudo-science was introduced into the history of science by George Sarton and the other founders of the discipline, and it reflects their positivistic convitcion that the history of science is a narrative of the progressive victory of the physical, mathematical sciences over religious, metaphysical, and occult views of nature…In Comte’s account [in Cours de philosophie positive, 1830-42], the decisive epochal break separating the dark ages of religion and metaphysics from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment is the result of the Scientific Revolution and the consequent utilization of science by the intellectual and political elite to master nature and perfect society. “Recent scholarship showing the persistence of ancient traditions of esoteric religion and occult philosophy well into the modern epoch poses a fundamental challenge to these historiographical models—particularly when primary sources show that Bacon, Newton, and other founders of the modern age had a deep reverence for the truths hidden in the myths and symbols of the prisca theologia.” (Preface)
Okay, so starting at the top: pseudo-science assumes there’s a regular, authoritative science that people are being silly, backward, or perverse in trying to evade. This seems clear, looking backward. We believe we understand how science progressed from its primitive roots to its mature, legitimate current form. But, as Conner has shown in his People’s History of Science, that assumption too may be incorrect. And certainly, the people who were driving “science” forward in the early modern period had no roadmap showing them which were the “legitimate” and which the erroneous elements of their studies.
So, we have “natural philosophers” like Bacon, Boyle, and Newton. All of them have classical educations (this may be the main thing that distinguishes them from the “low mechanicks” who produced a lot of the technological innovation leading to new scientific theories, following Conner again), so they presumably believed in some sort of continuity in the “grand design.” This means that, whether they believed in an active, historical god or in Spinoza’s deistic/pantheistic “whatever,” they believed in order. Newton was looking, after all, for a universal law of gravity; not a local one.
Next, there’s the question of periodization. A split between a dark age and an Enlightenment makes sense, for the enlightened. What about everybody else? I suspect the two designations obscure a lot of change that may have been happening in the lives and societies of regular people during the “dark” ages; just as they hide the fact that a lot stayed the same for most people after the Enlightenment. Tied to this is the idea of learning to “master nature and perfect society.” For whom? And, for whom?
The fact that superstition persists to this day doesn’t necessarily challenge the scientific world-view, or the history of science. I hope these articles aren’t going to stop with a suggestion that because these early scientists were Christians, there’s something to it. On the other hand, the idea that they may have found social, moral, and even scientific insights in esoteric and mythological documents that were at the time part of the classical canon doesn’t seem far-fetched. The implications of their scientific discoveries (or systematizations of other people’s discoveries, if you go with Conner’s implication that the elite scientists’ role was mostly communicating the discoveries of technologists and trying to create over-arching, generalized natural philosophy out of them) were often scary; because they directly challenged the “truths” that formed the basis of early-modern society. So they’d be expected to try to reconcile their scientific insights with those of “other magisteria.”
But the question whether there are in fact other magisteria is one of those “prefiguring” issues Hayden White describes in Metahistory (which I’m also reading -- stay tuned for a post). Assuming there’s a unity (in scientific knowledge, general human understanding of the universe, and particularly history) means we’ve already made an interpretive choice. Whether the choice is for comedy or tragedy doesn’t really matter. The only way out (for Smith, and maybe for Northrop Frye, who he draws on) is satire.
But there is evidence the new scientists had a sense they were doing something fundamentally different. John Friend (1675-1728) was a disciple of Newton’s and wrote a history of science in 1725-6 in which “the mystical religious outlook of the Paracelsians could not be tolerated. Friend rejected Paracelsus as an idle systematizer whose whole cosmology and religious-vitalistic outlook toward nature were the very antithesis of the new science.” (7)
John William Draper (1811-1882) see his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1863) and History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874)
See also Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (1877) This is also a partial transcript of religion vs. “atheism” in the form of science, so it serves 2 purposes.
These people might be useful for a little “Who’s Who in the History of Atheism” if I wanted to do such a thing…whether or not they’re atheists is a possible issue (but is it, really?)…
James Joseph Walsh (1865-1942) made the case for religion. His 1907 book The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries claimed that the church had done much to encourage medicine, including supporting anatomical studies in the Italian universities and establishing hospitals.
See also Herbert Butterfield, “The Whig Interpretation of History,” (1931)
Golden Bough
04/10/2009 09:42
No matter. There’s a woodland lake in Nemi, 18 miles southeast of Rome. The lake is in the crater of an extinct volcano. 1928 lake lowered and two of Caligula’s pleasure-barges discovered on bottom. A few miles away is a larger lake (Albano) in another old crater. (The Turner painting takes place at the gates to the underworld, another crater lake called Avernus, near Naples.)
The lake is called a mirror, but close up, its waters are a warm greenish-blue. The crater is a horseshoe, open at the south end. There’s a flat area to the north – part of the caldera floor that the lake doesn’t cover, and on the eastern and western sides, the hills rise a couple of hundred meters immediately. On their lush green sides two hill-villages are visible overlooking the lake.
Frazer says the lake was called “Diana’s Mirror” by the ancients. Frazer points to a necessary connection, a “subtle link …between the natural beauty of the spot and the dark crimes which under the mask of religion were often perpetrated there.” (1:1) The lake “lies so deep down in the old crater that the calm surface of its clear water is seldom ruffled by the wind.”
The shrine was on the north side, between the lake and the town of Nemi. Diana Nemorensus (“of the Woodland Glade”) had her temple here. “On the north and east it was bounded by great retaining walls which cut into the hillsides and served to support them. Semicircular niches sunk in the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels…On the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses…the temple itself was not large…solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned with Doric columns…cornices of marble and friezes of terra-cotta…enhanced by tiles of gilt bronze.” (1:3)
There was also a temple of Isis hidden in the woods. (1:5)
“beechwoods and oakwoods…had not yet begun, under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those intruders of a later age…the lemon and the orange.” (8)
“In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily around him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained the office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.” (9)
“the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.” (9-10)
“According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch [that the priest was “defending” at the sacred oak] was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead” (11) (except, again, this happened at Avernus. The Cumaean Sibyl lived 22 miles from Naples, not 18 miles from Rome).
“during her annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake,” (12)
This is a great setting, and the event that Frazer describes in the early pages of the Golden Bough is great! I’m thinking of using this in a dream sequence in my new story. I like the idea of pulling a scene from Frazer’s book, if I’m going to write a story that takes place partly in Victorian England, and deals with mythical characters. The Victorians were really into comparative mythology, and it bordered on a whole pile of stuff we now think of as pseudoscience, but which they took pretty seriously. More on that, later...
Scientists
03/20/2009 16:05
John Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors (New York: Random House, 2002).
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
Tesla
03/19/2009 19:45
“Eighteen clean linen napkins were stacked as usual at his place. Nikola Tesla could no more have said why he favored numbers divisible by three than why he had a morbid fear of germs or, for that matter, why he was beset by any of the multitude of other obsessions tht plagued his life.” (Margaret Cheney, Tesla, Man Out of Time (New York: Dorset Press, 1981), 1) Cheney identifies Tesla pretty clearly as what we’d call obsessive-compulsive. Is this accurate? She tends to skirt over many of the main elements of her story. Could be from lack of conclusive evidence – maybe she’s doing the best she can with scant documentation. Or maybe she feels this adds to the drama of the story.
“The strange thing about this tube lighting was that it had no connection to the loops of electrical wiring around the ceiling. Indeed, it had no connections at all, drawing all its energy from an ambient force field. He could pick up an unattached light and move it freely to any part of the workshop.” (2) Another frustrating element of the story. It’s unclear to me when Tesla developed this technology, and a complete mystery how it worked. I find it hard to believe that NO ONE has figured it out in over a century. I suspect the technique requires excessive amounts of electricity to work – which would make it practical for Tesla’s lab but not for commercial or residential applications.
In many cases, I wonder if this is the key to Tesla’s ambiguous position in science. His ideas were revolutionary, and most of them worked. But many were ridiculously impractical. The later competition with Marconi could be seen in this light too: the worldwide broadcasting capability was conceptually meaningless to people who didn’t see a market. If you’re looking for the ability to send a simple message point to point, then the worldwide web and 500 channels of TV aren’t worth paying for. Modern readers prefer Tesla’s solution, because we know where communications technology led.
One of Cheney’s main sources is Tesla’s short book My Inventions. It seems to be a promotional pamphlet, and Tesla probably exaggerates a little. He says “If memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annals of science. In investigating the behavior of high frequency currents I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success.” (55) Again, what might be a marvelous success in Tesla’s lab might also be completely impractical for lighting the apartment next door.
Some of Tesla’s ideas found there way into science fiction. As a young man, he had the idea for a “gargantuan elevated ring around the equator. At first it would have scaffolding. Once this was knocked away the ring would rotate freely at the same speed as the Earth.” (17) It’s a visionary idea, but Cheney seems uninterested in the fact that a vision isn’t the same as an invention. This may be the problem with many of Tesla’s other ideas.
In his 1891 Columbia lectures, Tesla showed a “button lamp” (55) which was a forerunner of the electron microscope. It might be interesting to speculate what might have happened if people (if Tesla) had understood what he had, and used it! Tesla’s European contemporaries were Henri Becquerel, the Curies, J. A. Fleming, Sir James Dewar and Lord Kelvin. These people could have taken his ideas farther into their own fields.
Cheney seems to suspect Tesla was gay, but she doesn’t want to come out and say it. She is adamant that he never had a sexual relationship with any of the women known to be his friends. But he did “at one period maintain an apartment at the luxurious Hotel Marguery on the west side of Park Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets at the same time that his residence was at another hotel; and he once told Kenneth Swezey that he used it for meeting ‘special’ friends and acquaintances.” (84)
Tesla apparently believed in the therapeutic effects of electricity. He told a reporter “I don’t believe I could have borne up but for the regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.” (107) Tesla also believed in the power of oscillating vibrations, as a way of boosting electrical power as well as doing physical work. He boasted to reporters that he had a pocket-sized oscillator that he could use to destroy the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge (116, the ESB was built in 1939 – like many of Cheney’s statements, these lack a specific time and place. So it’s hard to know when he made these claims, or whether he continued making them for decades).
Chauncey McGovern of Pearson’s Magazine in London wrote a May 1899 article called “The New Wizard of the West.” He wrote regular sci/tech articles for Pearson’s, and seems like an interesting character in his own right. A more recent writer, Leland Anderson (1977), suggested “Tesla’s 1903 patents 723,188 and 725,605 contain the basic principles of the logical AND circuit element.” (131) These patents, although they were devoted to preventing interference of radio-controlled weapons, have made it difficult for later applicants to receive patents on AND gates. This is an interesting element of intellectual property law that I was completely unaware of. Cheney later says Tesla’s 1901 patents “in which he describes the supercooling of conductors to appreciably lower their resistance…is yet another instance in which his pioneer work has gone unacknowledged—possibly because it might open a door for the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate later claims.” (153)
“World Telegraphy [Tesla elsewhere calls this the World System] constitutes, I believe, in its principles of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to the general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence.” (179, same text found in 1904 Public Opinion article.
Bibliography:
“Nikola Tesla,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Tesla’s Oscillator and Other Inventions,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Nikola Tesla and the electrical Outlook,” The Review of Reviews, 1895.
Cochrane, Charles Henry. The Wonders of Modern Mechanism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896) Just past the article on Tesla is a longer article on Electric Locomotives.
Routledge, Robert. Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1896)
Tesla, Nikola and Thomas Commerford Martin. The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894) Includes the Columbia, London and Paris lectures.
Tesla, Nikola. Electrical Communication with the Planets, 1902
Tesla, Nikola. Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires, 1904
Tesla, Nikola. “The Future of the Wireless Art,” Massie, Walter W. amd Charles R. Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1909)
“Home Workshop: Simplified Tesla Coil,” Kenneth M. Swezey, Popular Science, Dec. 1934.
“Cigar-Box Tesla Coil Works Weird Wonders,” Tracy Diers, Popular Science, Jan 1946.
Bradlaugh and Anthropology
03/18/2009 14:46
I’m thinking about a story that includes CB and some of the scientists of his day. Darwin is the obvious one who comes to mind, but I’m actually more interested in the people around Darwin (both before and after), who either elaborated ideas similar to Darwin’s, or alternatives.
Victorian Sensation needs another, closer look (as does the Vestiges). And there are some interesting leads in a series of lectures on Anthropology given by CB in 1881 at the Hall of Science. These are interesting for several reasons. First, they show CB in the role of scientific lecturer. Significant, because he isn’t just debating churchmen or attacking the Bible (this is the picture his rivals wanted to paint of him; and even the sympathetic reader might fall into this belief, given the huge volume of writing and speaking CB did on anti-religious topics).
The lectures show CB disseminating the latest ideas of British and French scientists to the general public. The Hall of Science attracted crowds of working people, so the nature of these talks is altogether different from lectures by the scientists themselves to academic audiences. As a result, it’s interesting to look at the type of information that was making its way into the general public’s understanding of contemporary science (both from the pulpit of the Hall of Science, and in the form of 2-penny reprints of CB’s talks).
CB begins the first of his three talks with a quote from Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature: “The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place man occupies in nature and of his relation to the universe of things.” Thomas H. Huxley had himself been lecturing to working men at Jermyn Street since 1855. The lines CB quotes are the beginning of Huxley’s section “On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals,” which he had given as a series of lectures at Jermyn Street in 1860. Huxley wrote to his friend Dyster, “I am sick of the dilettante middle-class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-headed fellows who live among facts.”
CB goes on to quote Dr. Paul Broca, Dr. James Hunt, and W.H. Fowler on the scope of anthropology. The science seems to have contained an element of archaeology and physiology, as well as an unfortunate focus on race based on contemporary ideas from craniology and language theory. He cites as his main sources Dr. Paul Topinard’s text, Huxley’s book, Geiger’s “History of the Development of the Human Race,” and Letourneau’s Biology.
CB is clearly interested in establishing in his listeners’ minds that the anthropological point of view is at odds with Christianity. Discussing the controversy over single or multiple origins, he notes that “polygenists” like Louis Agassiz, Gliddon and Nott, “having in view the very few thousand years then claimed by the Churches for man’s existence on earth, contended that the ordinarily accepted time was insufficient for the development of known diversities of type…But two features have now to be considered which were then excluded: one, the admittedly huge period of time man has inhabited the earth; the other, the light resulting from the untiring labors of Darwin in the path opened out by Lamarck and somewhat hesitatingly trodden by Wallace.”
In addition to being the field that “more than any other science finds itself in conflict with religious and political institutions,” anthropology in CB’s mind is the best place to look for moral answers. “To know what man should do,” he says, “it is first necessary to know what man is, and what it is he can do.” This is a key to CB’s interest in lecturing to his working-class audiences on the subject. The other key is anthropology’s potential as a source of insight for the biological improvement of humanity. He quotes Topinard saying “it is undeniable that man by a certain method of high breeding and well-managed crossing is capable of being changed in successive generations in his physical as well as in his moral character. According to the modes adopted he will go on either degenerating or improving.” While these words in Topinard’s “Introduction” form the closing point in an argument regarding the utility of anthropology, CB would have seen their congruence with his belief in individual self-determination. Perfectibility in CB’s mind was all about individuals making the right choices. As such, it was quite distinct from the top-down, large-group focus a eugenicist might use to interpret Topinard’s words. Biological improvement and moral choice was also a refutation of the type of historical inevitability proposed by Marx and his followers. And it was a positive application of the principles that led CB to support population control doctrines. Anthropology provided a way out of both the accusation that “atheism is only a rejection,” and the claim that Neo-Malthusian ideas were “against life.”
Victorian Sensation needs another, closer look (as does the Vestiges). And there are some interesting leads in a series of lectures on Anthropology given by CB in 1881 at the Hall of Science. These are interesting for several reasons. First, they show CB in the role of scientific lecturer. Significant, because he isn’t just debating churchmen or attacking the Bible (this is the picture his rivals wanted to paint of him; and even the sympathetic reader might fall into this belief, given the huge volume of writing and speaking CB did on anti-religious topics).
The lectures show CB disseminating the latest ideas of British and French scientists to the general public. The Hall of Science attracted crowds of working people, so the nature of these talks is altogether different from lectures by the scientists themselves to academic audiences. As a result, it’s interesting to look at the type of information that was making its way into the general public’s understanding of contemporary science (both from the pulpit of the Hall of Science, and in the form of 2-penny reprints of CB’s talks).
CB begins the first of his three talks with a quote from Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature: “The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place man occupies in nature and of his relation to the universe of things.” Thomas H. Huxley had himself been lecturing to working men at Jermyn Street since 1855. The lines CB quotes are the beginning of Huxley’s section “On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals,” which he had given as a series of lectures at Jermyn Street in 1860. Huxley wrote to his friend Dyster, “I am sick of the dilettante middle-class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-headed fellows who live among facts.”
CB goes on to quote Dr. Paul Broca, Dr. James Hunt, and W.H. Fowler on the scope of anthropology. The science seems to have contained an element of archaeology and physiology, as well as an unfortunate focus on race based on contemporary ideas from craniology and language theory. He cites as his main sources Dr. Paul Topinard’s text, Huxley’s book, Geiger’s “History of the Development of the Human Race,” and Letourneau’s Biology.
CB is clearly interested in establishing in his listeners’ minds that the anthropological point of view is at odds with Christianity. Discussing the controversy over single or multiple origins, he notes that “polygenists” like Louis Agassiz, Gliddon and Nott, “having in view the very few thousand years then claimed by the Churches for man’s existence on earth, contended that the ordinarily accepted time was insufficient for the development of known diversities of type…But two features have now to be considered which were then excluded: one, the admittedly huge period of time man has inhabited the earth; the other, the light resulting from the untiring labors of Darwin in the path opened out by Lamarck and somewhat hesitatingly trodden by Wallace.”
In addition to being the field that “more than any other science finds itself in conflict with religious and political institutions,” anthropology in CB’s mind is the best place to look for moral answers. “To know what man should do,” he says, “it is first necessary to know what man is, and what it is he can do.” This is a key to CB’s interest in lecturing to his working-class audiences on the subject. The other key is anthropology’s potential as a source of insight for the biological improvement of humanity. He quotes Topinard saying “it is undeniable that man by a certain method of high breeding and well-managed crossing is capable of being changed in successive generations in his physical as well as in his moral character. According to the modes adopted he will go on either degenerating or improving.” While these words in Topinard’s “Introduction” form the closing point in an argument regarding the utility of anthropology, CB would have seen their congruence with his belief in individual self-determination. Perfectibility in CB’s mind was all about individuals making the right choices. As such, it was quite distinct from the top-down, large-group focus a eugenicist might use to interpret Topinard’s words. Biological improvement and moral choice was also a refutation of the type of historical inevitability proposed by Marx and his followers. And it was a positive application of the principles that led CB to support population control doctrines. Anthropology provided a way out of both the accusation that “atheism is only a rejection,” and the claim that Neo-Malthusian ideas were “against life.”
Intellectual Origins
01/15/2009 14:01
Adair was apparently a legendary professor, who mentored a generation of historians. I first ran into him in the introduction to Daniel Sisson’s published dissertation. Sisson pretty much lifted his thesis, it turns out, from Adair’s introduction. But Adair was much more careful in his statement than Sisson turned out to be in his extrapolation of it.
This dissertation was unpublished forever, but the list of borrowers of the original document at Yale is supposedly a who’s who of history, at least in the minds of the borrowers. Many of Adair’s grad students seem to have found hints and ideas in it that they were able to pursue in their own studies.
Adair begins by situating his study as a post-Beard analysis of Jefferson and Madison’s political ideas. He asks whether something more should be added to Beard’s economic analysis, to explain why, although Hamilton and Madison’s economic ideas were “practically identical,” Madison, “the great antiparty philosopher of the Constitutional Convention, went into opposition and helped organize a highly effective party with Jefferson—supposedly Hamilton’s direct antithesis in economic doctrine”? (9-10)
The answer, Adair says, is that Jefferson and Madison shared a political outlook informed by the classical traditions going all the way back to Aristotle. Hamilton was also a student of the classics, Adair says; but his scholarship was shallower, and he failed to adapt what he learned in the ancient texts to the conditions in early America. He was too much of an idealist.
This is an interesting argument, and intuitively it’s very satisfying. Elite education in the eighteenth century was classical, and all three men (and John Adams, and the rest of the members of the Constitutional Convention) had a shared language. Adair makes his case that the founders didn’t just come up with their political philosophy by watching their neighbors in the Virginia piedmont, as some Turner-influenced historians apparently claimed. But the question of specifically how each man was able to adapt this shared classical heritage into their various plans for the American republic is left largely unanswered.
Adair leans heavily on the Scottish philosophers, especially David Hume, as progenitors of the founding fathers’ world view. He lists the books Madison studied under (Scottish) John Witherspoon at Princeton. In addition to Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes, Madison read Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Adam Smith. (26) The inclusion of Smith suggests the Republicans were not the economic illiterates that supporters of Hamilton make them out to be. Fisher Ames described Madison as “a thorough master of almost every public question that can arise, or he will spare no pains to become so.” (28) In a note, Adair mentions that by the 1850s, the prominence of continental political classics in school curricula was decreasing, resulting in an observed decrease in references to the ancients in political speeches. (31) But all evidence suggests Madison and Jefferson (and their serious contemporaries) arrived on the scene at the peak of classical scholarship.
Adair says Jefferson’s most powerful influence was Aristotle, and that the hope that a class of virtuous yeomen could stabilize a republic was lifted directly from the Politics. He describes Shay’s rebellion as a debtors’ revolt, echoing an interpretation based on politically motivated contemporary sources (like Knox’s letters to Washington). Leonard Richards’ recent study of the members of the rebellion contradicts the traditional story. Adair says the “ominous event” (quoting Madison, 61) sent the founders rushing back to their shelves for answers in “Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle.” Maybe this was part of the solution…but maybe it also limited the effectiveness of the final solution. The two missing pieces of Adair’s puzzle seem to repeatedly be: how did regular people react to all this classically-inspired politics, and how accurately did the founders really understand their situation, before they fit it to the models written by the masters two millennia earlier?
Adair hints at the possibility of over-applying classical analogies, but only among Jefferson and Madison’s adversaries. Hamilton is described as brilliant, but with a shallow understanding of the classics (76). Adams’ use of Thucydides account of the sedition at Corcyra in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States is shown to be not only “the most tenuous” of analogies (65), but also to miss the point that Shays and his rebels were behaving symbolically rather than trying to take over the State of Massachusetts. Adair argues that because the principals of the debates believed these analogies significant, we should consider their relationship to the events. This is probably true with respect to Adams’ paranoia, and may be an approach to assessing not only the strengths (as Adair suggests), but the weaknesses of the founders’ vision.
Gouverneur Morris’ posthumous opinion of Hamilton is quoted at length, and probably contains the seeds of a book or two:
Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself. More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He knew well that his favorite form [monarchy] was inadmissible, unless as the result of a civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction, that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country could be established in no other way. (77) (from)
“For nearly a generation American political thinkers had shared Locke’s exclusive concern,” Adair says, “with curbing the powers of kings. But now in the summer of 1787, the Convention delegates were almost unanimously agreed that the people themselves presented an additional problem.” (109) And perhaps the delegates’ nearly unanimous opinion highlights yet another problem. Ironically, after arguing that Beard ignored politics and ideas, Adair blames Hamilton for economic policies that “divided the American people into sharper cleavage than had existed since 1776.” (114) The reduction of the Confederacy’s problems to Hamilton’s national financial schemes, and the reduction of Hamilton to “a victim of his Plutarch and his Tacitus,” is the book’s greatest weakness. (Adair even quotes Woodrow Wilson: Hamilton was “a very great man, but not a great American,” to which a previous reader wrote in the margin, “TOSH!”)
Adair says Hamilton’s reductive mistake was his assumption of class struggle, that ultimately “faction [would] pivot entirely upon the conflict of haves and have-nots.” (120) Madison saw past this Hobbesian error after long review of his classics, Adair says, and “challenged the basic postulate upon which the ancient mixed government depended for its justification; and in so doing he exploded the justification for a permanent will in the community to keep the immutable strife of the few and the many within bounds.” But he never really says what those other elements of factionalism were, or how Madison proposed to keep them in check or play one against the other to stabilize his system. This is where a look back at Turner, who Adair threw out in the preface, might be helpful. Both Jefferson and Madison had experienced the frontier, and when the Louisiana Purchase was completed Madison breathed a sigh of relief and added a generation onto his expectation for America’s survival. (160) But Madison did the math, and decided that by 1930, Americans would “necessarily [be] reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life. The proportion being without property…cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its right to be safe depositories of power over them.” (161) “It would be impossible to base a republican government on a minority, without creating ‘a standing military force, dangerous to all parties and to liberty itself.’” Madison’s classics apparently held no answer; he simply hoped when the time came “the wisdom of the wisest patriots” in a future generation would pull them through (from “Notes on Suffrage” written during the Virginia Convention of 1829-30).
The American Revolution of 1800
12/29/2008 13:56
This was originally a PhD dissertation, apparently for Douglass Adair, who Sisson says inspired his research. It begins well, and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library (which is saying something, as I’ve pared that down to about 30 books). The reviewers almost unanimously hated it, and the book does bog down pretty quickly, while at the same time not going deep enough into unpublished primary material. Most of Sisson’s primary quotes seem to be lifted from secondary sources or published selections of his subjects’ papers.
Even so, Sisson’s thesis is provocative. He challenges historians with finding the modern two party system too soon in post-Revolutionary America, insisting that this was emphatically NOT the goal of anyone in the 1790s. Instead, he builds a definition of revolution based on Jefferson’s understanding of the classics. Following the Gracchi brothers, Sisson says, Jefferson and his Republican associates built a “second city” revolutionary movement to take power away from the Federalists they believed were betraying the spirit of ’76 and moving toward monarchy.
Sisson quotes Jefferson’s claim that “The Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” One of his reviewers points out that this quote comes from a private letter, and is taken out of context. Regardless, it may highlight Jefferson’s understanding of what he was doing in the 1790s. Sisson opens an interesting train of thought here. Why did the ’76 revolution fail to produce the changes Jefferson wanted, requiring a second “revolution” in 1800? What did the 1790s teach Americans about the operation of democracy, in a world where there wasn’t the unanimity they may have expected? Did the Republicans think they were wiping out the monarchists and finishing the revolution, while at the same time they were showing Americans how to operate their democracy? Did Henry Adams undermine Jefferson’s own interpretation of his campaign and presidency?
Sisson claims “During the period of High Federalist ascendancy Jefferson noted again and again the Federalists’ lack of faith in the meaning of the first American Revolution.” (11) There’s a lot of space to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” is the true or legitimate one. It succeeded because he rallied the people to it in 1800, but was he following or shaping public opinion? Sisson also observes that Jefferson “adopted a posture of philosophical vagueness that allowed his opponents to read into his intentions a positive view of the future.” Jefferson’s ability to clothe (disguise?) his program to create a mass movement for it is interesting, but it’s precisely the idea of partisanship that Sisson is arguing against.
Sisson mentions Bernard Bailyn and Douglass Adair repeatedly; the best things I get out of this book may be echoes of them, and the references to their work—that I’ll now go and find.
Sisson portrays Adams’ firing of Pickering from his cabinet as his moment of clarity, when he realizes the High Federalists have betrayed the revolution and “plung[es] a sword” into his own administration. (21) It’s interesting that he refuses to throw Adams under the bus; but he needs to sustain that argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams betray it? Even though his argument is weak, I come away from it with new interest in both Jefferson and Adams.
Jefferson’s remark that “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time,” (50) pretty much damns Sisson’s argument that the politicians of 1790 were unaware of partisanship. His point that they abhorred the idea of parties and factions in their writing begs questions about the purposes of the writings he quotes. Could Jefferson and his contemporaries have desired a one-party state in the same way current politicians desire “bipartisanship”? As a code for “us getting our way and the other guys seeing the errors of their ways?
Were the Republicans and Federalists REALLY scared it was going to come down to war again? Or were they using popular reaction to the French Revolution for political purposes? No doubt they were sincere; but maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t like to see the “founding fathers” using all these tawrdy political devices to achieve what we consider our historic destiny?
To the extent that the standard histories see the 1790s as the beginning of a completely modern 2 party system, I think Sisson makes a compelling counter-argument. Ironically, it reminds me a lot of the 2008 campaign. Two parties each trying to completely wipe out the other, a candidate with a revolutionary goal which he dissembles in order to build a mass movement and avoid alarming his opponents, charges by ideological purists that “he’s not going far enough.”
Sisson opens some space around (what he claims is) the standard interpretation and stirs things up, as does Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed. If this is the case, then what did the founders EXPECT to happen after they won? And, if the binary, 2-party choice continually reproduces these poles, is this really the way to go? If the only choices are black and white, then people will choose the pole they think is closest to their real color, even though it’s a poor match. Maybe the mistake is in mobilizing campaigns around these poles (or believing that’s what the founders were about), rather than changing the game so that everyone gets more of what they want. If Sisson’s point is that the founders thought they were doing that, then it was an interesting one.
