Читать книгу Lighthouses - Peter Williams - Страница 23

This situation, in which pure science, applied science and business occupied three different worlds with very little overlap, was institutionalized during the 200 years separating the Scientific Revolution and the high point of the Industrial Revolution, arguably the Great Exhibition in 1851. The first British institution formed to bring scientists together for the advancement of scientific knowledge was the Royal Society. It started almost informally when a group of natural philosophers and self-taught engineers met socially to share their ideas with like-minded people. On 21 November 1660, a group of 12 men met at Gresham College, London, following a lecture by Christopher Wren, the Professor of Astronomy at the college, to found what was to become the ‘Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. During the general discourse after the lecture they mooted the idea that these lectures should be opened to a wider audience with the aim of disseminating scientific learning to all. It has to be said that in those days ‘all’ would really mean the educated and higher strata of society. However, members were elected by invitation of existing fellows and by 1847 fellows were elected solely on scientific achievement and merit. The letters FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) after your name soon became coveted in the world’s scientific community.

In reaction to the Royal Society’s focus on pure science, in 1799 the Royal Institution of Great Britain was founded after an initial proposal for ‘Bettering the Conditions and Improving the Comforts of the Poor’ by the leading British scientists of the age. These included Henry Cavendish, noted for his discovery of hydrogen and early research into electricity, but its first president, George Finch, ninth Earl of Winchelsea, was better known for his organization and patronage of the game of cricket. This was the height of the Age of Enlightenment, when scientists and engineers wanted their work to be known and understood. Many of them were developing ideas to improve the lives of mankind and wanted to demonstrate their findings to a wider public. The Royal Institution promoted ‘diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements; and for teaching, by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life’. This is exactly what men such as James Chance did, but he, like many scientists who became engineers and businessmen, still remained outside the orbit of the scientific establishment.

The Royal Institution took its role as the promoter of science in England very seriously and possibly gave the lie to Babbage and Herschel’s accusations of England’s declining scientific accomplishments. Michael Faraday, who became the country’s leading experimental scientist and was appointed the first scientific advisor to Trinity House in 1835, started life as a bookbinder and became the Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution in 1813. It is reported that he got the job after the incumbent Assistant had been found fighting with the Instrument Maker, resulting in the former’s dismissal. This appointment was to be an undoubted gain for lighthouse engineering. Faraday’s and his contemporaries’ research resulted in many advances in science and engineering that had demonstrably practical applications. These included Humphrey Davy’s identification of 10 chemical elements and the discovery of sodium and potassium; Faraday’s invention in 1831 of the electrical generator, soon to be put to practical use as a power source for lighthouses; the Institution’s recognition that optical glass played a vital role in England’s astronomical endeavours; and many other scientific firsts, such as the determining of the atomic structure of crystals. This range of work resulted in the award of 14 Nobel prizes to Royal Institution scientists. The Institution, from its earliest days to the present day, has promoted science to the masses through weekly lectures with practical and sometimes highly entertaining demonstrations. In Victorian times these were so popular that Albemarle Street was snarled up with carriages – out of this chaos was born London’s first one-way street. The annual Christmas lectures founded by Faraday are still a highlight of the Institution’s calendar and are now broadcast on television. The Institution’s aim for more than 200 years contrasts with the no less important work of the other learned societies, the majority of which were founded in the same explosion of knowledge at this time.

These new learned societies were formed by members of the two key scientific bodies, as new inventions and disciplines came to the fore. They began to take applied science to the next step, that of its application not just to technology but to business. One of the first such disciplines was civil engineering. John Smeaton, designer of the 1759 Eddystone lighthouse, in 1771 founded a small ‘club’ of civil engineers, which, by 1818, had become the Institution of Civil Engineers, with many prominent Victorian engineers as members, including Thomas Telford and James Chance. The growth of mechanical engineering saw the formation of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. With the proliferation of railways and telegraph signalling, which needed electricity, very soon a group of telegraph engineers founded a society that in turn became the leading body in the development of electrical and later electronic engineering. Interestingly, it was to the civil engineers that most of the papers about lighthouse engineering were presented in the 1860s and beyond, by men such as James Chance and James Douglass, Trinity House’s first resident engineer. This illustrates the fact that lighthouse engineering was considered first and foremost a branch of civil engineering, even though the topics presented often had more to do with electrical and mechanical engineering. In 1867, James Chance’s paper ‘Optical Apparatus in Lighthouses’ was awarded the Civil Engineering Institution’s Telford Gold Medal, and in 1879 Chance and Douglass presented two papers a month apart on the subject of the electric light in lighthouses. Lighthouse engineering spanned the entire engineering discipline, but the tradition of Smeaton as a civil engineer had set a course, upon which it remained.

While the majority of British societies were based in London there were also similar Edinburgh-based meeting places. The Royal Scottish Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh both catered for local engineers and scientists. The Stevenson family of lighthouse engineers, five generations spawning eight prominent men, were supportive and gave many papers to spread the knowledge of their expertise over the years. In 1827, Sir David Brewster used the presentation to the Royal Society Edinburgh of a paper entitled ‘On the Theory and Construction of Polyzonal Lens and their combination with Mirrors for the purpose of illumination in lighthouses’ to argue that the Commissioners of Northern Lights and their engineer Robert Stevenson were guilty of malpractice in their selection of lighthouse lenses. Brewster claimed that he had invented dioptric lenses before the Frenchman Augustin Fresnel, an argument that was to fester for the next 35 years and that has never adequately been settled.

By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the disciplines of science and engineering were starting to evolve from natural philosophy through the enquiries of enthusiastic amateurs in the case of the former and a military-based need in the latter. The Industrial Revolution was well underway as society changed from a rural agricultural base to urban factories, using new skills and inventions to manufacture a wide range of goods. Science was becoming democratized and scientific knowledge was no longer confined to the higher institutions and universities. Science was beginning to enter the realm of business.

Notwithstanding the coming together of science and business in Britain in the first half of the 19th century, Trinity House failed to recognize the importance of science in lighthouses until 1835, when it appointed Faraday as its first scientific advisor, and treated business with the same disdain as most other ancient institutions. Faraday was never actually appointed a full-time employee of Trinity House and offered advice only when it was sought. Trinity House paid lip service to science, while the Elder Brethren, mainly drawn from retired mariners and bureaucrats from the Board of Trade, were not scientifically inclined and so were not on the look out for new scientific methods or technologies. The fiercely independent Trinity House reflected the additional failure of government-run organizations to sponsor scientific research for the benefit of institutions under their control. Babbage, Herschel, Brewster and other critics contended that the official status of scientific endeavour in Britain was still very lowly. And while Trinity House might not have seen itself as a business, its domain was squarely that of commissioning equipment from manufacturers who relied on profit from their enterprises to survive. Thus a situation pertained in which the English lighthouse authority eschewed both science and business, to the detriment of the lighthouses under its control. Possibly the single most glaring oversight by Trinity House, though, was not employing the services of optical scientists, preferring chemistry as the source of most of its scientific knowledge, as evidenced by the appointment of Faraday. The behaviour and science of light, in contrast to that of physical substances and chemicals, is the field of enquiry most important to attaining the best possible illumination in lighthouses.