Читать книгу Lighthouses - Peter Williams - Страница 22

The French ascendancy in science and what Britain could do to counter it was a topic of hot debate at institutions such as the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institution, where most of Britain’s intellectual elite congregated. Neglect of the sciences by government and the education system came under particular scrutiny. A virulent critic of the establishment was Charles Babbage, a successor to Newton as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and author of the 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and Some of its Causes. ‘Science has long been neglected and declining in England,’ he wrote. He laid the blame on the educational system, where men advanced from the public schools to the universities ‘ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge’. Babbage’s views were supported by England’s foremost astronomer, Sir John Herschel, who bewailed the scarcity of men of science, whom society regarded as a lower breed and little better than mechanics. Sir David Brewster, who features as a controversial figure throughout this story, in his review of Babbage’s book lent support to his friend, stating that few of the country’s natural philosophers bore ‘the lowest title that is given to the lowest benefactor to the nation, or to the humblest servant of the Crown’. In other words, he felt that scientific achievements were not sufficiently recognized in the country. He went on to ask rhetorically, ‘Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water?’ Ironically, Brewster was honoured with a knighthood for services to science just a year later, but this was bestowed by a radical Whig government that also had its differences with the scientific establishment.

The lowly status of science in England as perceived by these critics was paralleled by the humble place occupied by business in the eyes of the class elites. It was the connection between science and business in France that made it possible for Fresnel’s lens ideas to be implemented, because many men of high scientific and technical aptitude left the universities and went into manufacture. This was how men such as François Soleil (an optician) and firms such as St Gobain were able to make the highly complex dioptric lenses. Why was it that in England science and business were worlds apart – and both looked down upon – while in France they occupied more level ground? How did the institutions of government in Britain support and encourage any relationship between the two?

The English class elites were dismissive of businessmen who took their discoveries and turned them to profit, while scientists seemed to regard scientific discovery as an end in itself rather than one stage in a process that ultimately led to contented citizens and greater wealth. Scientists looked down upon businessmen, while seats of learning, the professions of law, medicine and accounting, the armed services and the religious and political classes all saw themselves as superior. If the class system was endemic to all societies the Victorians certainly perfected it. Technical men, inventors and engineers very rarely came out of university, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, where practical sciences were hardly taught at all. They tended to be self-taught with little of the higher learning that more highbrow natural philosophers regarded as a prerequisite for admittance into the learned institutions.

The early 19th century is commonly seen by historians of the Industrial Revolution as a time when scientists and craftsmen came together to produce technology in the service of a great commercial leap forward, but this was not an inevitable process. Preceding the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, commencing in the mid-17th century, was divided into two distinct parts. There was the tradition of the classical sciences, which included astronomy, mechanics, mathematics and optics. These fields originated in antiquity, dating back to Aristotle. They were not experimental in approach and relied on theoretical knowledge and deductive reasoning. The second, Baconian approach, concentrated on the systematic study of electricity, magnetism and heat, and was characterized by empirical investigation. This was a more qualitative and experimental approach and depended on the development of instruments, such as lenses and the telescope and the observation of natural phenomena in order to infer scientific laws. David Brewster and James Chance were rare examples of men who combined both approaches in their lifelong careers.

An interesting example of the disjuncture between these two approaches occurred at the turn of the 19th century when the port of London solicited proposals for the building of a bridge across the River Thames. It amply shows how government, the scientific establishment and ambitious industrialists were at odds with each other, yet how, in spite of this divide, the march of technological progress won through. The Parliamentary Commission charged with this endeavour called upon ‘the Persons most eminent in Great Britain for their Theoretic as well as Practical Knowledge of such Subjects’. Thomas Telford, who was later to become the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, proposed the revolutionary idea of a single-span iron bridge. The Commission appointed two committees to evaluate Telford’s idea, one comprising mathematicians and natural philosophers, the other builders and engineers.

Parliament had no means of comparing the submissions because the scientists were not equipped with practical experience in mechanics, while the craftsmen had no theoretical knowledge to support their plans. The theoreticians submitted complex suggestions but were often ridiculed for their impracticality. One such submission came from the Astronomer Royal, which was later derided as ‘a sentence from the lofty tribunal of refined science, which the simplest workman must feel to be erroneous’. Isaac Milner, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge at the time, was at least ready to admit that the theoretician ‘may … appear learned, by producing long and intricate Calculations, founded upon imaginary Hypotheses, and both the Symbols and the Numbers may be perfectly right to the smallest Fraction, and the Bridge be still unsafe’.

Science had clearly not emerged from the closed world of academe. Engineers such as Telford were lionized for their brilliant edifices by the contemporary press and by ordinary people who crossed their bridges and rode their railways, but the learned institutions of science were slower to recognize their work. What some have termed the Second Scientific Revolution, which combined the Hellenistic with the Baconian traditions, was later characterized by men such as Brewster and James Chance. They were driven both by the intrinsic value of pure science and the benefits that knowledge could bring to the lives of men.