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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
'[An] insightful analysis of 19th-century futurism ... Morus's account is as much a cautionary tale as a flag-waving celebration.' - DUNCAN BELL, NEW STATESMAN '[How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon] rattles thrillingly through such developments as the Transatlantic telegraph cable, the steam locomotive and electric power and recalls the excitable predictions of the fiction of the time.' KATY GUEST, THE GUARDIAN 'Excellent ... A terrific insight into why the Victorian era was a golden age of engineering.' - NICK SMITH, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE By the end of the Victorian era, the world had changed irrevocably. The speed of the technological development brought about between 1800 and 1900 was completely unprecedented in human history. And as the Victorians looked to the skies and beyond as the next frontier to be explored and conquered, they were inventing, shaping and moulding the very idea of the future. To get us to this future, the Victorians created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilisation of the resources of Empire - and they revolutionised science in the process. In this rich and absorbing book, distinguished historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage's dream of mechanising mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's tunnel beneath the Thames, from George Cayley's fantasies of powered flight to Nikola Tesla's visions of an electrical world, this is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures - a vibrant tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world and ultimately took us to the Moon.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Praise for Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future
‘There have been other Tesla biographies, but this is the one I have been waiting for. Neither hagiographic nor hatchet-job, it sets its mercurial subject in his cultural and historical context: a visionary and showman, part genius and part crank, totally a product of his age. Tesla cannot be understood without a clear view of the (uniquely American) legend he embedded himself within, and Iwan Rhys Morus expounds that view brilliantly. Tesla, he shows us, was – like his one-time boss and rival Thomas Edison – inventing nothing less than the electrified future.’
Philip Ball, author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen
‘Nikola Tesla saw himself as a rebel, a free-thinker, a disruptor and the sworn enemy of scientific mediocrity. Brilliant in his experimentation, chaotic in his methodology, Tesla was the twentieth century’s first visionary tech entrepreneur.’
Thomas Dolby, musician and sound tech pioneer
‘[This] crisply succinct, beautifully synthesized study brings to life Tesla, his achievements and failures … and the hopeful thrum of an era before world wars.’
Nature
‘Clear and engaging … a pleasure to read’
Physics Today
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Acknowledgements
I have been thinking about the Victorians and their science for a very long time – for most of my career as a historian of science, in fact. I started thinking about Victorian futures, in particular, while working on the AHRC-funded Unsettling Scientific Stories project. I’m fascinated by Victorian culture because in so many ways it’s still very close to us, but also often irreducibly alien. The origins of many of the ways we think and do things now lie in their century, even if we manifest them in some very different ways. This book is so long in the making, and I’ve had so many conversations along the way, that I cannot possibly thank everyone who has contributed to it in some way, but there are some I want to thank in particular. Conversations with Will Ashworth, Peter Bowler, Sarah Dry, Patricia Fara, Rob Iliffe, Bernie Lightman, Richard Noakes, Sam Robinson, Anne and Jim Secord, Charlotte Sleigh, Andrew Warwick and, of course, Simon Schaffer, at various times and in various places, have helped me enormously over the years as I tried to put my thoughts about the Victorian future into a more coherent framework. I’d like to thank Marina Benjamin for encouraging me to start the process of developing some of these ideas in aeon.co. Thanks also to my agent, Peter Tallack, for his enthusiasm and patience. I’m grateful to xAndrew Furlow, Duncan Heath and James Lilford at Icon Books, for everything, and to Jo Walker for the fantastic cover design; and to Claiborne Hancock and Nicole Maher at Pegasus, as well as Faceout Studio for the US cover.
Finally, my wife and best critic Amanda Rees has been, as always, wonderful. This is for you, Mandy.
Contents
Prologue
Inventing the Future
Not that long ago, in a galaxy not really all that far away …
It was 16 July 1909. There was a thunderous roar as His Majesty’s spaceship Victorious rose imperiously into the blazing blue sky, a stately column of silver and gold balanced precariously on a tongue of fire. His Majesty himself, Edward VII, had travelled all the way to India’s Deccan Plateau to see this latest triumph of scientific and technological ingenuity. Accompanying him were the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, the Royal Society’s president, Sir Archibald Geikie, and the Royal Astronomical Society’s newly elected president, David Gill, as well as the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Fisher. The prestigious gathering of notables only served to underline just how epoch-making the momentous occasion really was. It was the prelude to a pioneering journey of exploration unparalleled in history. Authors of scientific romances, such as the Frenchman Jules Verne or even H.G. Wells, had merely speculated about putting men on the Moon. Now, thanks to the combined expertise of the Empire’s 2engineers and men of science, it was really happening. This was no flight of fancy – it was taking place before their very eyes. In the tiny landing lighter Deliverance, perched on top of the huge rocket, three of His Majesty’s most experienced naval officers were ready to take the Empire into space and claim the Moon for Britain.
The triumphant flight of HMS Victorious was the culmination of more than twenty years’ determined effort by the leading men of science and engineering to conquer space and show to the world the superior reach and power of British technological ingenuity. The idea had first been mooted at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bath during the summer of 1888. The society’s president that year had been the eminent engineer Sir Frederick Bramwell, and during the public dinner that concluded the meeting, he had started speculating about just how far into space projectiles might be fired. He was interested in big guns, after all, and had delivered an address on the topic to the Birmingham and Midlands Institute just two years earlier.1 While it soon became clear that no gun, however big, would be sufficient, someone suggested that something along the lines of a rocket of some kind might do the job. Gradually, the enterprise took shape. Lord Salisbury, the Tory prime minister at the time of the meeting in 1888, was a scientific man and was easily persuaded that sending men to the Moon would not only be a scientific triumph, but that it was absolutely essential for the good of the Empire that Britain should get there first. Imperial and industrial rivals might not yet have the resources to accomplish such a stupendous task, but they would one day. It was imperative that Britain should lay claim to the Moon and its resources before it fell into potentially hostile hands.
As the enterprise took shape, committees were formed to deliberate over the immense task ahead. Naval architects from the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, more used to designing dreadnoughts 3than rockets, debated competing plans for a space travelling vehicle. The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and the Royal Society bickered over which institution should take the lead – although that issue was resolved with the establishment of the National Physical Laboratory in 1900. In 1879, the BAAS had deliberated whether it was economically feasible to construct the Analytical Engine that Charles Babbage had designed, but never built, in the 1840s. They had thought the cost prohibitive then, but now the machine was essential, and engineers struggled with the task of not only getting it made but made much smaller and able to work by electricity, not steam. Chemists experimented to find the most efficient fuel and electricians worked on the complex circuitry that would allow the crew to control the colossal space-flying machine. Resources from all over the Empire and beyond were poured into the attempt – the costs involved were astronomical. The three naval officers who would risk it all for the Empire were carefully selected and rigorously prepared – only the most self-disciplined men would be fit for the great adventure.
Four days after its successful launch into space on the tip of the Victorious, the Deliverance landed safely on the Moon’s surface and for the first time in history, human feet stepped onto an alien world. The landing ground had been carefully selected – an apparently unobstructed area in the Sea of Tranquillity. When the three men stepped out of the Deliverance and stood on the Moon’s surface, they were prepared for anything. They were armed, of course. There was a distinct possibility that this apparently lifeless surface might still contain life – the remnants, maybe, of some former civilisation that had degenerated and collapsed as the lunar atmosphere seeped away into space. If some degenerate life remained, then it might well be hostile. The selenauts came prepared to prospect for potential resources as well. Was there water, hidden in some crevices 4somewhere, for example? A supply of water would be essential if Britain were ever to establish a permanent station on the Moon to exploit what mineral resources might be there. But in many ways, the mission’s main objective had already been achieved. The Union Flag now flew proudly over the Sea of Tranquillity, proclaiming to the world that the Moon belonged to Britain.
None of this really happened, of course, at least not in this universe. But there is still something compelling about this story. One reason for the contemporary popularity of steampunk, for example, is the sense that this fantasy of contemporary technology grafted onto the Victorian past is just teetering on the edge of reality.2 We can believe in Victorians with steam-driven computers. And we can believe Victorians or Edwardians travelling to space in ways we can’t really imagine of their predecessors. We can picture them belonging there, in ways that would be difficult to conceive a Puritan divine, or a Regency buck. One of the reasons it is easy to imagine Victorians on the Moon is that they imagined it themselves. The Moon seemed to be within the Victorians’ grasp, teetering almost on the brink of reachability. Not only in the writings of those authors we still read today – Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, for example – but in the stories told by dozens of others, Victorian readers travelled to the Moon and beyond.3 Writers that we have forgotten, such as George Griffith or Edwin Pallander, took their readers beyond the atmosphere, as well. There was a sense in which the Moon was almost familiar territory by the end of the nineteenth century, so often had the place been visited by scientific romancers.
Victorian writers were not the first to imagine going to the Moon, of course. The Bishop of Hereford, Francis Godwin, fantasised about 5travelling to the Moon in his The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither, published posthumously in 1638. In it, he speculated that flying chariots might travel beyond the atmosphere and to the Moon, towed by a flock of geese. Inspired by the example, another English cleric, John Wilkins, later Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and then Bishop of Chester, speculated in similar fashion in his The Discovery of a World in the Moone. Both clerics used their speculations about Moon travel as a way of popularising the latest astronomical ideas about the plurality of worlds – the view, based in theology, that not only must there be many worlds like ours out there, but that, like ours too, they must be inhabited. The key difference between stories like these and Victorian speculations is that Victorian writers really thought that travel to the Moon and beyond was within their grasp. Their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there. It wasn’t only scientific romancers that thought this. The year 1900 saw a flurry of popular speculation about what the world would be like at the end of the new century – and the end of the second millennium. Travel to the Moon was routinely cited as a technological feat that would have been accomplished by then.
A key reason for this confidence was that a new way of thinking about the future and its possibilities was emerging during this time – the way we think about the future now, in fact. New technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world. Just 50 years earlier, most people assumed that the future would simply be an extension of the present. Nothing much would change. Another king might sit on the throne in a hundred years, but no one thought the world would turn into a completely different place. Forward-looking Victorians, on the other hand, were proud that they lived in an age of progress. It was what made them 6different. They congratulated themselves on the ways they were transforming the world around them, just as they prided themselves on having the self-discipline to turn dreams of the future into reality. They turned men of science and engineers into heroes. Samuel Smiles included many of their biographies in his 1859 book Self-Help – he even suggested that reading about the lives of such great men was as useful as reading the gospels (a truly shocking thing to say in mid-Victorian England).4 The Victorian middle classes flocked to industrial and scientific exhibitions where they could see the future that science and technology would create taking shape before them. And if that were not enough, then they devoured scientific romances when they returned home. This book is about that transformation and the people who accomplished it, and how it produced our world today.
The very idea of progress was quite new and exciting at the beginning of the Victorian age.5 A young John Stuart Mill, who would mature into liberal England’s leading philosopher, wrote enthusiastically about the coming times. ‘The conviction is already not far from being universal, that the times are pregnant with change; and that the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance, in the human mind, and in the whole constitution of human society,’ he said. ‘It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriers; for the ancient bonds will no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine.’6 It was only in times of change, he thought, that people seriously considered the difference between the present and the past – and the future. Underpinning the idea of progress and change in society – that things can only get better – was a new understanding of change in nature. The world wasn’t static any more. Unlike the old cosmos, for ever in equilibrium, the Victorian universe had a sense of direction.7
Proponents of the nebular hypothesis – first suggested by Pierre-Simon Laplace – argued that the Solar System had not always been as it was since the creation of the world. It had begun as a cloud of dust and gas, floating in space, gradually coalescing into clumps of matter orbiting around a solid central mass. Over aeons of time, that central mass became the Sun, and the clumps of matter orbiting around it became the planets. The same process was still taking place elsewhere in the Universe, as new systems slowly coalesced out of the nebulae observed by William Herschel, or by Lord Rosse with his gigantic telescope, the Leviathan of Parsonstown, during the 1840s.7 According to transformationists, those who believed in the idea of evolution, it was not just planets that had emerged from cosmic dust, but life as well, slowly working its way up the ladder of complexity towards humankind. Radical social thinkers clung to ideas like these as evidence that change needed to happen in society too – that progress was part of the proper order of things. After mid-century, Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution by means of natural selection demonstrated to Victorian minds that competition and the survival of the fittest were natural and entirely inevitable elements of progress too.8
There was a downside to progress, though. The new science of energy implied that the world could not last for ever. There had to come a time when progress stopped. It was a basic principle of the energy physics developed during the second half of the century that work could only be done when energy flowed from a hot body to a colder body. But that process made the hot body colder, and the cold body hotter, as well. Eventually, when everything in the Universe had arrived at the same temperature, no more work could be done, no more energy could be transformed. There could be no life and no progress. This was the heat death of the Universe.9 At the same time, human progress carried the seeds of its own destruction. 8More civilised societies coddled the unfit, so they bred and put natural selection into reverse. The very speed of modern life made people nervous and unbalanced. Society would degenerate. H.G. Wells played both with heat death and degeneration in The Time Machine, as his time traveller encountered the degenerate Eloi and Morlocks of the future as he travelled forwards towards the end of life itself.10 Built into these scientific theories and romances was the recognition that the future would be different – that it was a strange new world that needed to be conquered and controlled.
In all sorts of ways, the Victorians were deeply invested in the future they were in the process of inventing, and in how it would come about. Theirs was going to be a technological future, produced by science and innovation. They could see the future being made in just this way all around them. New inventions, like the telegraph, the telephone and the radio, fed this vision of a future transformed by science. Right at the dawn of the Victorian age, satirists were already poking fun at the very notion of a future packed full of technological wonders. They pictured outlandish steam-driven chariots and baroque flying machines. Passengers were hurtled from one end of the Empire to the other through pneumatic tubes. But by mid-century, even as they lived in an increasingly steam-driven world, more people were dreaming of an electrical future. Increasingly, it almost seemed as if it were impossible to talk at all about electricity without invoking the role it would have in transforming the future. There would be electrical vehicles and electric power generated directly from the forces of nature. It would be electricity that powered the flying machines that the Victorians imagined filling the future’s skies – and flight was a central feature of how the Victorian future was imagined.
So far, I have been using the term ‘Victorian’ in a fairly sloppy fashion. The Victorians who are the main protagonists of this book 9were of a very specific kind. They were overwhelmingly middle class, and even more overwhelmingly male. There is a reason why the little piece of fiction that I introduced at the beginning of this chapter sounds rather like something out of the Boy’s Own Paper. It reads like that because the kinds of people who saw themselves as the makers of the Victorian future tended to see the world that way. They viewed the world around them – and the world that they were in the process of reinventing – through a very particular lens, and they saw it as belonging, and deservedly belonging, to people like themselves. There was something quite deliberate about the ways in which the protagonists in this book went about remodelling themselves and their institutions with an eye to the future. This was Victorian exceptionalism in action – they really thought they were different. Inventing what the future as a destination meant for people like themselves was part of the process of divorcing themselves from their own past. They prided themselves on possessing a self-discipline that their parents and grandparents had lacked – and it was that self-discipline that would make the future possible.
This book is about how and why the future was re-imagined by the Victorians and what went into that re-imagining. It sets out to try and understand what connects the Victorians’ future to us – and to our own imagined futures. Our present may not look very much like the futures they imagined, but to a very large extent, the ways in which we extrapolate from our present to our future is very similar to the ways they did it. Like them, we make our futures out of bits and pieces of our present, and we see it as made by science and technology. Fictions matter as much as facts in the ways we imagine our future. Our future is made as much out of Star Trek as it is out of scientific actualities. That was how Victorian futures worked as well. They were made by Verne and Wells, and other authors we’ve forgotten, as much as by Michael Faraday and Isambard Kingdom 10Brunel and countless forgotten experimenters and engineers. Just like ours, Victorian fantasies about the future offered ways of dealing with present-day dilemmas. But they described a destination, as well. They were where Victorians thought they were going, and they described the route for getting there.
Reforming science and its institutions was a vital element in inventing the future, and that is why this story starts with the battle for the soul of the Royal Society of London during the first half of the nineteenth century. The self-styled reformers who tried to take the society’s reins from the old guard who had dominated it for much of the past half-century wanted to turn it into the embodiment of a new and more disciplined science – a science firmly directed at transforming the future. Led by Charles Babbage and John Herschel, they were convinced that only people like them had the right kinds of qualities to change science. They agreed with their enemies that science was best done by gentlemen, but they had very different views about just what gentlemen were meant to do to become men of science. As far as they were concerned, it was all about self-discipline. They thought their enemies were mere dilettantes – and corrupt dilettantes at that. Fellowship of the Royal Society should be granted on what they knew, not whom they knew. Out of the science wars and these bloody battles between ambitious men spanning three decades emerged a new understanding of science as a process that needed specialised knowledge and disciplined minds (men like the winners, in other words – in their view, at least).
The new generation of engineers were just as keen on discipline, and they thought that their practical know-how and entrepreneurial spirit was the key to the future. Men such as Marc Brunel and his son Isambard, or that other father–son duo George and Robert Stephenson, tunnelled under the Thames and criss-crossed the landscape with railways. They could do this – in their view – precisely 11because of their unparalleled practical experience of men and machines. Their ability to get things done was built into their own bodies through hard work and application. Newspapers turned them into heroes. Relationships between the self-made practical men and the gentlemen of science could be fraught, even though they were increasingly to be found in the same sorts of places, sitting in the same committee rooms. At the beginning of the Victorian age, they still embodied quite different ideas about discipline, for one thing, and were fighting for different visions of the future. During the course of the century, however, both groups came to share a common culture of accuracy and precision. Science and engineering became co-dependent. There were electrical engineers in the Royal Society and men of science in the Institution of Electrical Engineers. They shared a common cause in making their expertise count in the corridors of political power so that they could actively engage in future-making.
One of the places where science and technology looked more and more like the same thing was the exhibition. Men of science and men of engineering were equally keen on mounting spectacles of discovery and invention as a way of selling their visions of the future. They put their wares on show at places like London’s Adelaide Gallery and the Royal Polytechnic Institution. The huge success of the Great Exhibition in 1851 inaugurated what many acknowledged was an Age of Exhibitions. People went to the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, as they went to later exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia and Chicago, to see the future – and the raw materials out of which that future would be forged. It was there that the Victorian public learned how the future would be made and what it would look like. But progress was also the business of speculative writers who filled the pages of popular magazines like Cassell’s and Pearson’s with visions of the technological futures – dystopian and utopian – that these 12scientific and engineering men might produce. In the end, it was this confluence of expert and visionary that made the Victorian future – and still casts its shadow over how we imagine the future now. At international exhibitions and in the pages of popular magazines, the Victorians could see what the future would bring and who would make it.
There is no escaping the overwhelming masculinity of this world, or its thorough grounding in the business of empire. Even if men of science and engineering were agreed about nothing else, they were agreed that what they did was a man’s affair. ‘Men of science’ was how the new breed of disciplined scientific gentlemen described themselves. The term ‘scientist’ had been invented to describe them in 1833, but it was rarely, if ever, used before the closing decades of the century. Even if it was hardly ever used, though, the fact that anyone thought it necessary suggests that some people, at least, understood that science had become something different now, and that there was a new breed of person doing it. The ‘someone’ in this case was William Whewell, polymath, mathematician and later Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He derived the new word by analogy with ‘artist’: a ‘scientist’ would be someone who practised science in the same way that an ‘artist’ was someone who practised art – and it is worth remembering that, for Whewell, art meant work done by hand (so rather like engineering). In part, even though he was one of their generation, Whewell was trying to draw a line between himself (a philosopher) and the scientific reformers by coining a new term for them: it was a recognition that they were intent on doing something different with the world of science.11
Men of science and engineers were singular men, according to this new way of looking at things. Everything they did, everything they achieved, was down to them as individual movers of the world. When Samuel Smiles argued that the ‘spirit of self-help is the root 13of all genuine growth in the individual’, he might have been (and probably was) thinking about men like these.12 Progress was the singular achievement of singular men: ‘The worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men,’ as far as Smiles was concerned, and ‘national progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.’13 Even as men of science and engineers alike battled to transform their institutions and ways of collectively doing things, the focus of the stories they (and others) told about themselves were unremittingly about individual character. These were men who had made themselves. As far as they were concerned, it was Michael Faraday’s ‘conjunction of Poverty and Passion for Science’, and his relentless drive for improvement that had made him the ‘hero of chemistry’, and not the careful training he had received at the hands of Humphry Davy, Europe’s leading chemist.14
Anyone who scoured the pages of Self-Help looking for improving biographies of women who had successfully helped themselves would have been disappointed. There are no women in Self-Help. As far as Smiles, his readers and the men they were urged to emulate were concerned, individual self-improvement was an entirely masculine affair. The notion that a woman might be a role model, or even a potential reader, would have simply been inconceivable. Men of science were clear that their science was a man’s domain. It required a cast of character that was distinctively masculine. Only men – and not even all men, but men of a very particular kind – had the right sort of mind for science. That the application of those minds actually depended on the hidden labour of armies of women was simply never acknowledged. If women had a place in science at all, it was as conveyors of knowledge made by men. So, Mary Somerville, for example, might write her On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences to huge acclaim 14from scientific gentlemen, or Arabella Buckley might charm children with her Fairy-Land of Science, but they weren’t making anything new.15 As far as the new breed of scientific and engineering men were concerned, not only was making the future men’s work, it could not possibly be anything other than a masculine business.
The key, in that respect, was discipline. It was discipline, as far as many Victorians were concerned, that made the difference between women and men (or certain kinds of men). Men were, or were supposed to be, self-disciplined. They could keep themselves under control. Women, on the other hand, were too much at the mercy of their bodies to be capable of such discipline and therefore of making new knowledge. ‘The instances of men in this country who, by dint of persevering application and energy, have raised themselves from the humblest ranks of industry to eminent positions of usefulness and influence in society, are indeed so numerous that they have long ceased to be regarded as exceptional,’ said Smiles.16 His biographer, John Tyndall, identified his iron discipline as the key to Faraday’s pre-eminence in science. ‘Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano,’ Tyndall averred. Faraday ‘was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion’.17 This was the kind of discipline that was needed to turn the world on its head and turn science into a tool for remaking the future in a Victorian image.
And that image was an imperial image. Smiles, for one, was perfectly clear about the relationship between the discipline of science and engineering and empire-building. It was the ‘indomitable spirit of industry’, of the kind that underpinned Victorian science and engineering, that had ‘laid the foundations and built upon the industrial greatness of the empire, at home and in the colonies’.1815Victorian science and engineering were both made for empire and entirely its production. The future they were designed to generate was to be an imperial one. Throughout the century, it was the needs of empire that offered men of science some of their best arguments in favour of their disciplines. As the Welshman William Robert Grove put it: ‘Why is England a great nation? Is it because her sons are brave? No, for so are the savage denizens of Polynesia: She is great because their bravery is fortified by discipline, and discipline is the offshoot of Science. Why is England a great nation? She is great because she excels in Agriculture, in Manufactures, in Commerce. What is Agriculture without Chemistry? What Manufactures without Mechanics? What Commerce without Navigation? What Navigation without Astronomy?’19 The reformed science of the Victorians was honed to fulfil the requirements of relentless imperial expansion.
The discipline that was embodied in the science of accuracy and precision that flourished and grew during the nineteenth century was, as Grove observed, part of what made imperial governance possible. The physics of energy that reigned dominant throughout the second half of the century provided the scientific underpinnings of steam and telegraph – the technologies that governed the Empire. The institutions that were forged or reforged during the Victorian period – like the reformed Royal Society and new disciplinary bodies like the Astronomical Society or the Society of Telegraph Engineers – were unabashedly imperial institutions. The expertise and the expert knowledge made in those places circulated throughout the Empire and were essential to its maintenance – that’s what they were for, after all. The Empire’s resources provided the raw materials and the finance to build the Victorian age’s great engineering and scientific achievements. Those resources and achievements alike were to be seen, admired and owned at the century’s great exhibitions. And at 16those exhibitions the intimate link between dreams of empire and future dreams was forged and put on display. The kind of technological future that the Victorians imagined needed all the resources of empire to make it real.
The future that the Victorians invented was made up of the bits and pieces of their present. When electrical experimenters described their discoveries, for example, they described the future those discoveries would bring about, as well. Quite literally bringing the future into the Victorian middle-class home, Alfred Smee, electrical inventor and surgeon to the Bank of England, for example, told his readers how they would ‘enter a room by a door having finger plates of the most costly device, made by the agency of the electric fluid’. The walls would be ‘covered with engravings, printed from plates originally etched by galvanism’, and at dinner ‘the plates may have devices given by electrotype engravings, and his salt spoons gilt by the galvanic fluid’.20 It seemed impossible to talk about electricity at all without talking about the future as well, and in this case, what was on offer was a future in which Victorian middle-class aspirations would be fully satisfied. Just as important in making this future were the scientific romancers who turned to the present’s latest technologies to imagine new worlds in the future. They took men of science’s promissory notes about the possibilities of their inventions and turned them into fictional reality. In popular magazines and scientific journals, the Victorian future slipped easily back and forth between fact and fantasy.
Victorians were particularly fascinated by what would fuel these new worlds. They knew what fuelled the present and knew that the supply of coal would not last for ever. Even as the Stephensons were putting their steam locomotive, the Rocket, through its paces at the Rainhill Trials in the autumn of 1829, satirists such as William Heath were drawing cartoons poking fun at the prospect of a steam-fuelled 17future. Within a decade of those trials, steam was already looking old-fashioned. From the late 1830s onwards, electricity was eclipsing steam in the public’s imagination. Popular and technical journals were full of plans to build electric boats and electric locomotives. Experts argued over whether electricity would become more economic than steam power. The future pictured in scientific romances was overwhelmingly electrical, with electricity generated in limitless amounts from wind, sun or water. Nikola Tesla promised a future of wireless electricity everywhere (a future still being touted as late as the 1920s by Tesla promoters, such as the comics entrepreneur Hugo Gernsback). Meanwhile, committees of sober experts gathered at international exhibitions and set about establishing the standards and processes that really would make electricity the fuel of the future.
Invented by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke in 1837, the telegraph taught the Victorians just how transformative electricity could be. They were especially fascinated by the way it seemed to play with conventional notions of time and space. Information could travel at the speed of light and arrive at its destination quicker than the fastest means of human transport. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, the notion that a voice could be heard without the presence of the speaker seemed fantastic. Newspapers speculated that people would soon have telectroscopes – instruments for transmitting vision over long distances – in their parlours. George du Maurier had fun in Punch with a cartoon showing a comfortable Victorian pater and mater chatting to their children in the colonies. Telectroscopes were soon staples of scientific romance. Wireless telegraphy also spawned speculation of all kinds – about communication with other worlds, for example. Louis Pope Gratacap even imagined that the wireless might allow communication with the dead who had passed on to their next 18plane of existence on Mars. But these kinds of technologies were instruments of surveillance and oversight too.
The Victorians needed to find new ways of dealing with the avalanche of numbers they had created. As far back as the 1820s, Charles Babbage was already fantasising about calculating by steam. His Analytical Engine may never have been built, but the concept – as well as the mechanical calculators in common use by the end of the century – raised questions about the nature of intelligence and humanity. It was food for satire, too, though. As far as some critics were concerned, the notion that it would be possible to build an artificial human, indistinguishable from the real thing, was simply a joke. But what would it take to make a real automaton? Edward Page Mitchell speculated in the New York Sun about fitting Babbage’s machine inside a human head to create a genius. Both E.E. Kellett and Alice Fuller imagined a perfect female automaton. Tesla fantasised about the art of telautomatics that would make war redundant, whereby self-acting weapons working by wireless would make conflict a matter of action at a distance and that deploying their destructive power would be unthinkable. Would machines in the future be able to process information as well as – or better than – mere humans?
Flying was the ultimate Victorian fantasy. Flying machines were frequent topics of discussion and speculation in engineering magazines. The engineer George Cayley, for example, was an assiduous promoter of powered flight. Models of his prototypes could be seen at the Adelaide Gallery and the Royal Polytechnic Institution, which he helped establish in the 1830s. Cayley wanted to claim for Britain ‘the glory of being the first to establish the dry navigation of the universal ocean of the terrestrial atmosphere’. His ambition underlines the fact that from the beginning this was a fantasy about military and imperial power. Just as the British Navy ruled the waves and made 19the Empire possible, so inventors imagined how Britain might dominate the sky – or what the consequences might be of allowing some other power to do so. George Griffith’s The Outlaws of the Air had anarchists terrorising Europe with flying machines. By the beginning of the Edwardian era, Britain’s dreadnoughts were the last word in technological warfare. Those seemingly impregnable ironclads provided the model for what warships of the air might look like. What would happen to all that power if the fantasy of war in the air was ever realised? Tesla argued that automated flying machines powered by his wireless system would bring all war to an end. These were the technologies, real and fantastical, that Victorians imagined filling their futures, and their ambitious reach for the skies – and for the stars beyond – perfectly captures the hubris that powered their making of a science designed for world-changing.
In many ways, the future that the Victorians made is the future that we have inherited. By that I don’t mean to suggest that they predicted our present (they didn’t), but that we think about our future in the same way as the Victorians did – and that this way of imagining the future as a different country, to be arrived at through science and technology, was very much a Victorian invention. In this respect, we still imagine our current future according to a Victorian rule book. The Victorians’ future, in fact and fiction, was generated to a large extent by extrapolating from the present. Telegraphs and telephones made it possible to imagine the telectroscope. Wireless communication across the sea made it possible to fantasise about communication with other worlds (or in Tesla’s case, to speculate that he had already achieved it). Ironclad battleships sailing the seas made ironclads in the sky – or flying through space – more plausible. When Victorians read about these anticipated futures, they knew that they had seen and read about elements of them already. They had seen them at world fairs. They had read 20about them in magazines and newspapers. They knew a future made out of them was simply a matter of time.
So, as far as those Victorians who went to these exhibitions, or read about the latest scientific marvels in popular magazines, were concerned, their future was going to be scientifically generated. In some senses, that was what science was now supposed to be for. It was meant to be a tool for refashioning their world, and for refashioning their society, too. Creating futures was an essential aspect of the business of invention. Along with their understanding that the future would be one generated by science came the Victorians’ view of who the makers of the future were. The future was going to be made by singular men, and it would be a future made by design for particular kinds of people – people like them, in other words. This is why understanding the Victorian invention of the future – of the way we now think about the future – is so important. As we’ve inherited the way we imagine and try to make our own future from the Victorians, we’ve also inherited some of the unthinking assumptions that came with that Victorian rule book. The best way of trying to think through those assumptions that still guide us is to understand where they came from in the first place, and how they were put to work.
Notes
1 Frederick Bramwell, Our Big Guns: An Address Delivered in the Town Hall, Birmingham (London: William Coles and Sons, 1886).
2 Brandy Schillace, Clockwork Futures: The Science of Steampunk and the Reinvention of the Modern World (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017).
3 Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
4 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London: John Murray, 1859).
5 Peter Bowler, Progress Unchained: Ideas of Evolution, Human History and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
6 John Stuart Mill, ‘The Spirit of the Age’, Examiner, 9 January 1831, p. 20.
7 Simon Schaffer, ‘The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress’, in Jim Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131–64.
8 Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
9 Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1998).
10 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
11 Sydney Ross, ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word’, Annals of Science, 1962, 19: 65–85.298
12 Smiles, Self-Help, p. 1.
13 Ibid., p. 2.
14 Letter from the Duke of Somerset to Charles Babbage, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (London: Icon Books, 2004), p. 102.
15 Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
16 Smiles, Self-Help, p. 12.
17 John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), p. 45.
18 Smiles, Self-Help, p. 23.
19 William Robert Grove, A Lecture on the Progress of Physical Science Since the Opening of the London Institution (London: London Institution, 1842), p. 37.
20 Alfred Smee, Elements of Electro-metallurgy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Longman, 1841), p. 147.
Chapter 1
Science Wars
Sir Joseph Banks was dead. When he finally died at about 8am on 19 June 1820, the tyrannical old man had been president of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge for more than 40 years. Banks’ lengthy reign at the pinnacle of England’s premier scientific society had offered him a unique opportunity to shape science in his own image. The ‘loss to Science by the demise of this excellent man and liberal patron will be long and severely felt’, said the newspaper notices of his death.1 The networks of influence and the power of patronage he had amassed during his office were certainly worth fighting over. Within days of his death, a fierce battle royal was already being waged over his legacy. The Morning Post reported a rumour that both Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (one of the many sons of the late George III, and brother of the soon-to-be-crowned George IV), and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (later king of Belgium) had been suggested as possible candidates for the presidency. It was, the paper thought, ‘highly indecorous to the Royal Personages, disrespectful to the Royal Society, and disgraceful to the character which the Members of that 22Learned Society ought to maintain’, that anybody not possessing ‘the scientific acquirements and general fitness of those whose character, talents, and acquaintance with the objects of the Royal Society, may designate as Candidates’, should put their names forward like this.2
To understand why the vacant presidency of the Royal Society following Banks’ death seemed such a ripe plum that even royal princes might think it was worth plucking, we must take a journey right to the heart of English science as it appeared during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Banks had worked hard during his presidency to make it into such a valuable prize. By 1820, the Royal Society’s presidency was at the centre of a far-flung web of patronage and influence. As president, Banks had been assiduous in concentrating as much power as possible in his own hands. He and his cronies dominated not just the Royal Society, but the Board of Agriculture, Kew Gardens, the British Museum and the Board of Longitude, to name just a few of early nineteenth-century London’s centres of cultural and intellectual power. Banks had close links to the court of George III too. He could use his ability to offer fellowships to the influential to bolster his own power. He could offer patronage, he could make introductions to the right quarters, he could offer funds. In short, Banks was the man who could make things happen in the world of English science. Anyone who wanted to get anything done in the scientific field had to make sure of Banks’ support to achieve it.
The science war that engulfed the Royal Society for the next decade turned out to be a crucial one, with far more at stake than control over the society’s purse strings or the power of patronage. This would become a battle for the soul of science. The men who had been waiting in the wings for an opportunity to stamp their own authority on the Royal Society had a very different vision from Banks and his cronies of what science was, how it should be ordered and what it could achieve. The campaign by these men to wrest control 23of the Royal Society from Banks’ allies and fellow travellers and make it their own was the first of a protracted series of skirmishes spread out over the next two decades. And by the time the science wars were over, the Royal Society, and the vision of science it stood for, had changed irrevocably. To understand that transformation and what it meant for the future of science, we need to begin with Banks and to explore the uses he made of the Royal Society during his own long tenure at its head.
The story of Banks’ success began in 1768 when he was appointed as the official naturalist to travel with Captain James Cook on his voyage to the south seas on HMS Endeavour.3 He was the eldest son of a wealthy Lincolnshire landowning family and since his father died in 1761, while he was still a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Banks had control of the entire family fortune. His wealth and family connections made it easy for him to pursue his enthusiasm for botany. By this time, he had taken part in one voyage of exploration already. Two years earlier in 1866, he had sailed to Labrador on the HMS Niger captained by Sir Thomas Adams. It was his connection with John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, that secured him his place on the Niger, accompanied by his Eton school friend Constantine John Phipps, who was already a navy lieutenant. Those connections also helped him to get his fellowship of the Royal Society in the same year while he was still in North America.
It was the success of this voyage that led to his appointment to the Endeavour two years later. That voyage would be a joint enterprise between the Admiralty and the Royal Society to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti. It was a typical eighteenth-century collaboration, with both participants conscious that a successful observation would be both a national triumph and provide useful knowledge for navigation. The Royal Society’s council asked in 24particular that ‘Joseph Banks Esq., Fellow of the Society, a gentleman of large fortune, who is well versed in natural history’, should embark on the voyage too.4 The expedition made Banks. He came back with a shipload of unique specimens from the new continent that Cook discovered in the south seas. Their judicious distribution in the right places helped cement Banks’ reputation and make him powerful friends in influential positions. In 1776, he bought 32 Soho Square and used his new London residence to host regular soirées and entertainments. By then he was already a member of the Royal Society’s council. When Sir John Pringle, president of the Royal Society, resigned his position in 1778, Banks seemed the obvious successor.
When Banks took on the presidency, the Royal Society had been in existence for a little over a century. It was by design a society of gentlemen, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic. It was important philosophically because the status as truth-tellers of the gentleman fellows was held to guarantee the knowledge they produced: it was all a matter of who could be trusted.5 More pragmatically, the society’s survival depended on its leaders being able to circulate smoothly through the upper echelons of English society. By the 1760s, the Royal Society was an integral part of a web of mutual patronage and influence that included departments of state such as the Admiralty, cultural institutions such as the British Museum and commercial enterprises such as the East India Company. This was the Royal Society that Banks inherited when he became president. During the following 42 years, Banks would work hard at maintaining and expanding that network of interests. Symbolically, in 1780 he physically moved the Royal Society from its old, cramped quarters in Crane Court to more luxurious apartments at Somerset House on the Strand, right at the heart of commercial, fashionable and political London.25
Somerset House where the Royal Society moved in 1780.
Engraving from Thomas H. Shepherd, London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century (London: Jones & Co., 1828)
Under Banks’ presidency, Somerset House was set to become a vital centre for the making of useful and polite knowledge. Both Banks himself and the Royal Society generally had extensive links of patronage and mutual interest with the Admiralty. Under his direction, the Royal Society collaborated with the Admiralty in voyages of collecting, exploring and exploiting natural resources in newly discovered territories. Scientific men who wanted to make their reputation through these sorts of activities needed to go through Banks and the society to find opportunities for work. The case of the botanist Robert Brown offers a good example. He had to lobby Banks – and get others to lobby on his behalf – to get a place on HMS Investigator as a naturalist.6 In return, Banks expected to get his share of the specimens Brown collected. William Bligh’s ill-fated voyage on HMS Bounty to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and deliver them to the West Indies was another of the Banksian 26Royal Society’s collaborations with the Admiralty.7 This was another example of how science could be made useful and turned to individual profit, as well as offering a way to make gentlemanly and professional reputations.
The East India Company was another important node in the web of influence surrounding the Royal Society. By the end of the eighteenth century, the company was already in many ways effectively an arm of the state and an important instrument of empire as well as a source of substantial commercial profit for its members.8 Banks used his influence there to promote both his own and the Royal Society’s concerns and offered advice as to how they might best exploit the natural resources of the territories they governed for economic gain. As the King’s adviser on matters botanic, Banks could use the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as a repository for exotic flora brought back from voyages and expeditions of exploration. Kew was the centre for their redistribution as adornments for aristocratic gardens or as new crops for exploitation at home or in the colonies. It was Banks that suggested to the East India Company that the climate in some of the territories they controlled in north-east India was ideal for growing tea. In 1801, Humphry Davy carried out a series of experiments at the Royal Institution (another important node in Banks’ web of influence) on the potential use of catechu (or terra japonica) in the tanning industry. He had acquired his supply of the plant from Banks, who in turn had acquired it through his connections with the East India Company. It should be quite clear from these connections whose interests Banksian knowledge was meant to serve.9
To his enemies – and Banks acquired many during the course of his long presidency – the system he had developed to control English science was corrupt, venal and self-serving. ‘Those haters of light – the crafty, intriguing, corrupt, avaricious, cowardly, plundering, rapacious, soul-betraying, dirty-minded BATS’ was how Thomas 27Wakley, the firebrand founder of The Lancet described the leaders of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons in 1832, but the words could just as easily have been used by one of Banks’ critics fifteen years earlier to describe him and his regime.10 It is not surprising that the strident attacks on the Banksian model of polite and useful knowledge that increased in volume and intensity during the final years of his presidency coincided with an increase in equally strident attacks on establishment corruption more generally. They were all part and parcel of the same shameful state of affairs as far as hopeful reformers were concerned. Many of Banks’ detractors were representatives of a new generation of men of science who had quite different views of how science should be done and what (and whom) it should be for. They detested the Banksian system while at the same time desperately wanting to get their hands on the power and patronage it represented. The war between them and the old guard became a war between competing visions of science, and between alternative futures.
The business of knowing
On Friday 13 November 1807, a group of gentlemen met at the Freemasons’ Tavern on Great Queen Street near London’s Covent Garden. It was not a particularly auspicious day for establishing a new scientific society, particularly since – as Humphry Davy pointed out – there were thirteen of them assembled there, to add to the bad luck.11 Nevertheless, this turned out to be the first meeting of the Geological Society of London. The attendees may not have realised it, but it was a meeting that would set the scene for a different vision of science and its significance. Besides Davy, the flamboyant galvanic maestro from the Royal Institution, the group included the two Quaker brothers Richard and William Phillips, who were the sons of a London bookseller and printer and who both had interests 28in chemistry and mineralogy. Another of the founder members was their fellow Quaker, mentor and teacher William Allen, a practising chemist and pharmacist who, along with the Welshman Silvanus Bevan, ran an apothecary shop at Plough Court off Lombard Street. As a Quaker, Allen was a fervent abolitionist. The chemist William Haseldine Pepys was another attendee. The meeting was presided over by George Bellas Greenough, a lawyer and heir to a fortune made from the patent medicine trade, who would later be appointed as the society’s first president.12 With few exceptions – the most obvious being Davy himself – these were not the sorts of men who moved comfortably in the exalted circles occupied by Joseph Banks and his coterie at the Royal Society.
Freemasons’ Tavern where both the Geological and the Astronomical Societies held their first meetings.
Engraving, European Magazine and London Review, 1811, 59
Whether or not the little gang of thirteen that gathered at the Freemasons’ Tavern really intended their fledgling society to challenge Banks’ iron grip on English science is unclear. It is perfectly 29clear, though, that that was how the Royal Society president soon came to understand it. Banks had already countenanced the establishment of some new scientific societies during his presidency. He had been happy to support the establishment of the Linnean Society in 1788, for example. After all, it catered for men who shared his interests in botany and collecting, and who showed no particular inclination to strike out independently in any case. He was rather more suspicious of the Geologicals, however, particularly as he came to understand that it was to be more than the mere dining club he had first thought it to be.13 The problem was that the Geologicals did not seem willing to accept that their society would only operate as a satellite revolving around Banks’ Royal Society. They also seemed to represent a different vision of what science was and how it should be organised. As far as Banks was concerned, the Geologicals were specialists (a term that acquired something like its modern meaning around this time) in a way that the Linneans, for example, were not. This meant that they were a lesser breed of philosopher. They were too focused on the details – too narrow-minded. They might have a fine grasp of those details, but they missed the grandeur of the big picture that was the real business of science.
That was not how the Geologicals saw it. From their perspective, the grandeur and the use of science lay precisely in those fine details. As Leonard Horner, one of the early joiners, described, they were concerned with the systematic collection of geological knowledge. ‘Their object,’ as Horner put it, required ‘a minuteness of detail, and trouble, which they conceive would not be consistent with the present views of the Royal Society to undertake – yet they are aware that they are entering upon a branch of science, which is an important object of attention to the Royal Society and that very valuable communications on the subject frequently appear in the Transactions of the Society.’14 This was not work for dilettantes or those with 30
