The Age of Wonder (82 page)

ALESSANDRO VOLTA, 1745-1827. FRS and Professor of Experimental Physics, Como, Italy, 1775. He disproved Luigi Galvani’s theory of animal electricity in 1792, and went on to produce a historic paper on the first chemical pile or battery, which Banks was quick to publish in the Royal Society journal
Philosophical Transactions,
1800. This was the basis for future pioneering work by Davy (London), Berzelius (Stockholm) and Gay-Lussac (Paris). He gave his name to the volt, a measure of the force of an electrical current. He was visited by Davy in 1814.

ADAM WALKER, 1731-1821. Inspirational science teacher at Eton College, who taught the use of the telescope and microscope, and believed in a plurality of worlds (‘30 thousand suns!’). His science primer,
Familiar Philosophy
(1779), was an early best-seller in the popular science field. During a long and eccentric career he invented the patent empyreal air-stove, the Celestine harpsichord and the eidouranion or transparent orrery, a portable device for projecting an illuminated model of the solar system and the main constellations. His
Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy
(1805) was eagerly read by the young Shelley, and covered the basics of Romantic science including astronomy, chemistry, electricity, geology and meteorology.

JAMES WATT, 1736-1819. Engineer and member of the Lunar Society. In partnership with Matthew Boulton he developed new forms of steam engine, for use in mines and textile manufacture. The international unit of electricity, the watt (a measure of the overall power of an electrical current), was named after him. Helped Davy construct his gas-breathing devices at Bristol. His ailing son Gregory Watt junior was a gifted geologist, and an early friend of Davy’s at Bristol until his premature death in 1804.

THOMAS WEDGWOOD, 1771-1805. Chemist and inventor of early photographic method, using glass plates painted with silver salts in a camera obscura. Fragile youngest son of the pottery king and philanthropist Josiah Wedgwood, he was ill for most of his short life and was supplied with opiates by Banks and Coleridge.

WILLIAM WHEWELL, 1794-1866. Geologist and natural historian. The son of a Lancashire carpenter, he eventually became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His
Philosophy of Inductive Science
(1859) became the standard Victorian work on the methodology of inductive science, and included an imaginative notion of the ‘trial hypothesis’. At Trinity he was celebrated for his less imaginative strictures: no dogs, no cigars, and no women.

GILBERT WHITE, 1720-93. Naturalist and Hampshire clergyman, author of the famous botanical and natural history
Journal
which he kept for over thirty years, and which was published as
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
(1788). Among a myriad other things - swallows, tortoises, snowflakes, birdsong - he was fascinated by balloons, and compared them with bird flight and migration. Widely read by other writers, such as Coleridge and Charles Darwin, he gently championed the notion of precise, patient and exquisite observation of the natural world for its own sake.

WILLIAM HYDE WOLLASTON, 1766-1828. FRS. A chemist and metallurgist, he quietly made his fortune from patenting various forms of malleable platinum. Famous for his patience and precision in the laboratory, and his good nature in society, he refused to become involved in various controversies at the Royal Society stirred up by Davy. John Herschel wrote a revealing sketch of the two men as contrasted scientific personalities. (See Chapter 10)

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY, 1734-97. Dramatic painter of experimental and industrial scenes, who reinterpreted late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment science as a mysterious, romantic adventure into the unknown. Close friend of Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar men. His most influential pictures were
The Orrery
(1767, frontispiece of this book),
The Air Pump
(1768, National Gallery, London) and
The Alchemist
(Derby, 1770). He also produced some striking, almost apocalyptic industrial scenes of factories and forges (especially at night), and many fine individual portraits.

EDWARD YOUNG, 1683-1765. Poet and clergyman. His major work,
Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality
(1742), a poem in twelve books, was a traditional Christian meditation on the way the universe demonstrated God’s design and divine creativity. He announced, ‘An undevout astronomer is mad,’ though he had some doubts about the size and complication of the cosmos as revealed by Newton’s mathematics: ‘Perhaps a
seraph’s
computation fails!’ (Book IX, lines 1, 226-35). A later edition of the poem was superbly illustrated with William Blake’s watercolour engravings, a consolation for those terrified by the new cosmology.

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The Bigger Picture

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Edward Young,
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S
PECIALIST
A
RTICLES

J.A. Bennett, ‘The Telescopes of William Herschel’ (with illustrations),
Journal for the History of Astronomy
7, 1976

Michael Hoskin, ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’,
Journal for the History of Astronomy
11, 1980

Michael Hoskin, ‘Caroline Herschel’s Comet Sweepers’,
Journal for the History of Astronomy
12, 1981

Simon Schaffer, ‘Herschel on Matter Theory and Planetary Life’,
Journal for the History of Astronomy
11, 1980

Simon Schaffer, ‘Uranus and Herschel’s Astronomy’,
Journal for the History of Astronomy
12, 1981

Simon Schaffer, ‘Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy’,
British Journal for the History of Science
13, 1986

Simon Schaffer, ‘On the Nebular Hypothesis’, in
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edited by J.R. Moore, CUP, 1988

The Balloonists

Thomas Baldwin,
Airopaidia,
1786 (the narrative of a solo voyage in Lunardi’s balloon, including the first aerial sketches made from a balloon basket)

Henry Beaufoy,
Account of an Ascent with James Sadler, from Hackney,
1811, British Library catalogue B.507 (I)

Henry Beaufoy,
Two Balloon Scrapbooks of Henry Beaufoy, 1783-1843
(Item 57 in the McCormack Collection), Princeton University, USA

David Bourgeois,
L’Art de Voler,
Paris, 1784

Catalogue of Well-Known Balloon Prints and Drawings,
Sotheby’s, 1962

Tiberius Cavallo FRS,
The History and Practice of Aerostation,
1785

William Cowper,
The Task
(poem), in
Letters and Poems,
1785