The Age of Wonder (43 page)

Antoine Lavoisier had been the leading chemist in Europe. Elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1768 at the early age of twenty-five, he had established at the Arsenal in Paris the finest chemical laboratory of its time. Earning vast sums from his official post at the royal tax-collecting agency, the Fermiers-Général, Lavoisier poured his wealth into scientific research. His laboratory was equipped with the most sophisticated and expensive instruments available, such as the precision pair of scales made by Nicholas Fortin and said to be worth 600 livres. He also had a beautiful and highly intelligent wife, Marie-Anne Paulze, whom he trained up as a full-time scientific colleague.

Only thirteen when she married Lavoisier, Marie-Anne learned English and translated all the scientific papers by Priestley and Cavendish as soon as they appeared. She also acted as Lavoisier’s laboratory assistant, wrote up his scientific journals, and drew all the illustrations for his
Traité.
Lavoisier’s execution by order of the Revolutionary Convention in 1794 (he was accused of embezzling tax funds) was a disaster for French science. It also nearly overtook Marie-Anne: her beloved father was guillotined on the same day as Lavoisier, the next man to climb the scaffold (in the present Place de la Concorde) after his gifted son-in-law.
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Lavoisier had written an influential seven-page Preface to his
Traité Élémentaire,
defining his scientific method. This declaration seized young Davy’s imagination. Writing with great simplicity and clarity, Lavoisier championed the idea of precise experiment, close observation and accurate measurement. Above all, the man of science was humble and observant before nature. ‘When we begin the study of any science, we are in the situation, respecting that science, similar to that of children…We ought to form no idea but what is a necessary consequence, and immediate effect, of an experiment or observation…
We should proceed from the known facts to the unknown.
’
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Lavoisier was not of course the first to champion scientific observation and precision.
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He criticised Descartes’ speculative theories, and quoted the philosopher Condillac-‘instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen to imagine them’-who in turn quoted Bacon and the early members of the Royal Society in London: Newton, Halley, Hooke. Lavoisier was a great anglophile. He praised Bacon’s philosophy of discovery, and set out the aims and ideals of experimental science as a great Romantic adventure of the mind. Davy never lost this vision, and it remained with him until the very last of his writings, set down in an essay to be called ‘The Chemical Philosopher’.
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Now for the first time there are accounts of Davy’s own experiments, as recalled by his brother John: ‘His apparatus consisted chiefly of phials, wine-glasses, teacups, tobacco pipes, and earthen crucibles; and his materials were chiefly the mineral acids and alkalis in common use in medicine. He began his experimental trials in his bedroom in Mr Tonkin’s house.’
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On the cover of one notebook Davy carefully drew in ink an olive wreath encircling the flame of a lamp: the bays of poetry surrounding the light of science. Characteristically he headed another notebook ‘Newton and Davy’.

For a dizzy moment he believed he had disproved one of Lavoisier’s basic claims, the existence of heat as a separate element called ‘caloric’. By rubbing together two large lumps of ice in a vacuum, Davy produced heat by simple friction (motion), which steadily melted the ice, though no ‘caloric’ element had been separately introduced, and nothing had been allowed to escape. He thereby believed he had demonstrated that ‘caloric’ could not be a chemical entity in itself, and that the most famous French chemist must have been wrong. In fact the heating effect of friction had already been demonstrated by Count Rumford in Munich (by boring metal cannons), and Davy had partly misunderstood Lavoisier’s terminology. Nevertheless, hugely excited, he began to compose a series of scientific papers, part experimental and part speculative, which he entitled ‘Essays on Heat and Light’.

In summer 1797 a new lodger came to stay with Grace Davy, arranged through the ever-solicitous Tonkin. Gregory Watt was the prodigal son of the great Scottish engineer James Watt. At twenty-five he was the youngest member of the Lunar Society, brilliantly clever but physically frail-probably consumptive-and emotionally unstable.
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He had graduated in geological sciences from Glasgow University, and had been sent to Cornwall to convalesce from what was termed a ‘nervous illness’.

After initial suspicions, Davy formed a close friendship with Watt, and took him on madcap field expeditions to explore the local slate and tin mines, plunging fearlessly into the nearby Wherry mine, which ran out deep under the sea. They gathered a huge range of mineral specimens, and went drinking in the evenings. Watt-fully six years older-teased Davy as ‘my dear Alchemist’, and announced that he would be Davy’s ‘mystagogue in his initiation into the orgies of the mirth-inspiring Bacchus’, by which one may understand that they drank a little French wine together in honour of Lavoisier-and possibly of Mlle Nancy.
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Years later, in his Geology Lectures, Davy would fondly recall these expeditions. Gregory passed on Davy’s name to his father, who in turn wrote about the young prodigy to his friend Dr Thomas Beddoes of Bristol.

Thomas Beddoes was regarded indulgently as a sort of secular saint by the Watt family: a holy fool of science. A gifted physician and lecturer, he had been forced to resign from his Fellowship at Oxford for his staunchly (and tactlessly) held republican and atheist views. He was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, and was much liked by the whole group of Lunar Men based around Birmingham, but especially by the Watts. At Oxford one of his best students had been the wealthy young Cornishman Davies Giddy, who was already lending Davy books from his extensive scientific library.

Beddoes, who lived in Rodney Place, Clifton, had a wide knowledge of European science, and had probably the most up-to-date scientific library in the west of England. He praised Lavoisier for his ‘study of impalpable substances…bringing within the sphere of the senses…fire, electricity, and magnetism’.
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In 1798, although it was wartime, he planned to open a new kind of democratic clinic, the Bristol Pneumatic Medical Institute, at 6-7 Dowry Square, Hotwells, on a hillside above the river Avon. Beddoes was now thirty-eight years old, and he felt it was the moment to try out his big idea: a radical centre for free public medicine, and research into inhalable gases, drugs and diets.

The Pneumatic Institute had been on his mind since 1794. Using the Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle, Beddoes had issued a number of idealistic pamphlets and questionnaires, to drum up financial and medical support. He wrote: ‘The Institution will be conducted with the utmost publicity so that all mankind may reap the benefit of it. The expense is estimated at 3 or 4 thousand pounds.’ Reassuringly for subscribers, his bankers would be Coutts & Co. of London.
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Beddoes had already tried treating various diseases (notably consumption, palsy and strokes) with drug regimes, using opium and digitalis, and experimental diets. His new idea was based on the recently discovered chemistry of respiration. His concept was that inhaled gases, ‘factitious airs’, by entering the bloodstream via the lungs, could alter and improve the whole constitution, and thereby cure major diseases. On 31 October 1794 he wrote to Davies Giddy: ‘Incontestable proof has been given that the application of airs or gases to the cure of diseases is both practicable and promising. There is for instance the best reason to hope that Cancer, the most dreadful of human maladies may by some of these substances be disarmed of its terror and its danger too.’
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He planned to house up to a dozen in-patients, and to treat up to 300 out-patients a week, most of them without charge.
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But financing philanthropy was always difficult. Eventually Beddoes thought that sufficient income could be generated by the sale of portable gas-inhaling equipment to local aristocrats, who he assumed were always more or less ill, and in need of gas treatment. But he needed initial capital: he asked Giddy for a gift of £350, got financing from James Watt, applied publicly to Joseph Banks at the Royal Society, and privately to the Duchess of Devonshire. Knowing perhaps that the duchess was not averse to a flutter, Beddoes put his proposal in terms of a wager, promising he could ‘cure gout for 500 guineas with a new specific’, but was happily prepared ‘to forfeit 5,000 guineas’ if he failed. Five thousand guineas was also the sum he had hoped for from the Royal Society.
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In the event it was another liberal aristocrat, William Henry Lambton, who supplied most of the funds, in return for having Beddoes tutor his sons.

Beddoes’s republican sentiments were always closely tied up with his view of public medicine. The following spring, while informing Giddy that he was treating a young woman for stomach ulcers, he observed that ‘the quondam Patriot William Pitt was almost done for’, and ironically enclosed a brown silk hat-ribbon printed in gold letters with the patriotic slogan: ‘Licensed to Wear Hair Powder. Pitt for Ever!’
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It was a philanthropic project, typical of an age that also produced in Bristol at exactly this time Coleridge and Southey’s Pantisocratic scheme to start a self-governing commune on the banks of the Susquehanna in America.
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Beddoes was now looking for a young, enthusiastic assistant to promote this quixotic scheme. But he also wanted to appear realistic. He wrote carefully to Davies Giddy in July 1798: ‘I can open for [Davy] a more fruitful field for investigation than anybody else. Is it not also the most direct road to fortune?…He must devote his time [here] for two or three years…It will be considered as part of his medical education…He does not undertake to discover cures for this or that disease; he may acquire just applause by bringing out clear, though negative results…I would gladly place [these] at the head of my first volume.’

In effect Beddoes was offering Davy the chance of his first scientific publication, as well as a salaried research post.
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Davy now began his own lively correspondence with Beddoes in Bristol, describing his ‘new theories’ of combustion and respiration. He announced that he had a whole series of other papers on gases, electricity, heat and-most intriguingly-the universal energy transmitted by starlight. Beddoes read these eagerly, and, encouraged by James Watt, invited Davy-not yet twenty-to join the Institute as an assistant.

It is significant that Davy (and his mentor Tonkin) clearly saw this as a step forward to a career in medicine, not in chemistry or the physical sciences. Such a career-that of the professional research scientist-did not yet exist. (Neither of course did the term ‘scientist’ itself, as will emerge.) Davy would continue to think of a career in medicine, even of taking a medical degree at Oxford, until he was thirty. But what he was pioneering was the role of the public man of science in British society, and this was to be one of his greatest and most fruitful inventions.
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On 1 October 1798, Davy was formally released from his indentures in Penzance, and appointed Superintendent of the Pneumatic Medical Institution in Bristol. It was a momentous move, both in terms of geography and career. His old supporter Tonkin approved, but his mother was acutely anxious and wept at his parting, while his little brother John was inconsolable. Davy set out on the long journey eastwards, round Dartmoor and through Exeter, riding on the top of the coach for economy. All along the route he passed through villages hung with flags and bunting. On enquiring, he was told that the whole nation was celebrating the news of Nelson’s victory over the French at the battle of the Nile. But it was almost as if they were cheering
him
-Humphry Davy from Penzance, a son of genius.

At Bristol Hotwells he found Dr Beddoes to be ‘uncommonly short and fat’, a kindly but distracted host, and ‘extremely silent’ unless holding forth on some scientific topic or theory. Beddoes suffered from asthma, hated all physical exercise, but was passionately committed to his idea of public medicine, especially to benefit the poor. Rather surprisingly, he had married into the Edgeworth family, a clan of gifted Dublin doctors and intellectuals. His Irish father-in-law once described Beddoes as ‘a little fat Democrat of considerable abilities, a great name in the Scientific world as Naturalist and Chemist-good humoured, good natured, a man of honour & virtue [though] his manners are not polite’.
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Davy was prepared for eccentricity in a scientific genius. The real surprise was Beddoes’s young wife, twenty-four-year-old Anna, the younger half-sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. She was the precise opposite of the doctor (a good proof of ‘polarities’, Davy later thought): thin, energetic, talkative-and dazzlingly pretty-and not at all a bluestocking. A miniature of 1787 shows her with long blonde hair cut in a fringe, wide provoking eyes, and a tender voluptuous mouth. Anna was vivacious and alarmingly direct, with a love of the countryside inherited from her Irish roots. Davy reported back innocently to his mother in Penzance that Mrs Beddoes was ‘the reverse of the Doctor, extremely cheerful, gay, witty; she is one of the most pleasing women I ever met with…we are already very great friends’.
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Soon they were going for long walks together along the banks of the Avon, and Davy was half in love with her. Several years later he would recall these walks in one of his best poems, ‘Glenarm by Moonlight’, describing the ‘hours of confidence’ they shared.