Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (10 page)

9

The Magnet

K
ircher arrived back in Rome with manuscripts and souvenirs for Cardinal Barberini, only to find that the cardinal wanted nothing more to do with him. As Kircher later spun the story in correspondence, it was Barberini who “
delayed” him in Rome in the first place and charged him with producing “a hitherto unattempted work,” and now he had “not only abandoned all memory of me, but also abandoned any concern for all the studies and books that he had promised.”

Barberini's growing debts certainly had something to do with the decision to cut off Kircher's funding. It didn't help that Kircher planned to use the cardinal's money for an ostentatious work with a self-aggrandizing title. But there was also the question of Kircher's competence. He admitted that some people ascribed Barberini's decision “to my powerlessness and incapability and insufficiency.” Humiliated and reduced to very dark “states of spirit,” Kircher may have wondered whether the entire trip to Malta had been Barberini's way of getting rid of him.

But Kircher had a way of falling up. He found himself relegated to accepting one of the most prestigious scholarly positions in the Society of Jesus or anywhere else: the chair of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the position formerly held by Christopher Clavius (deviser of the Gregorian calendar). Kircher moved into the quarters Clavius once occupied, a series of rooms off the college's second-floor colonnade.
His cubiculum, as it was called, was much bigger than the professional cubicle of the twenty-first century. It was the place where he worked and slept: his bedchamber, laboratory, library, and workshop. When he first occupied the space, it already contained astrolabes, sextants, telescopes, clocks, and certain curiosities. There was a trick lantern, for example, that worked whether filled with oil or with water. Kircher added his own instruments, books, and manuscripts, as well as
limestone stalactites, ostrich eggs, samples of pumice stone, and other things he'd collected on his trip south.

As long as circumstances “held me in Rome,” Kircher wrote in his autobiography, “I decided that I ought to attain a reward for my trouble.” That is to say that if his spectacular work on the hieroglyphs had to wait, he would in the meantime do some spectacular things in the field of mathematics.

Although distraught over Jesuit involvement in Galileo's prosecution, certain intellectuals in Europe had recently decided that it was the Jesuits who might be able to solve one of the biggest scientific problems of the era: how to figure out longitude at sea. Latitude, how far north or south you were, could be determined by the position of the sun at noon, the duration of daylight, or the height of the North Star above the horizon. But determining degrees of longitude, how far east or west you were, was extremely problematic. In 1598 the Spanish king had offered a major monetary prize—today's equivalent of about half a million dollars, plus almost two hundred thousand a year for life—to the person who could discover a reliable way of doing it. One possibility hinged on better information about magnetic variation, the degree to which the compass needle differs, according to geographical location, from the true north of the North Star.

About a year after Kircher returned from Malta, the intellectual instigator Marin Mersenne wrote from Paris to urge him to coordinate an effort from Rome: the Jesuits needed to get “
someone in each college of the entire Society, by whatever means possible, to note accurately the variation of the magnet and the height of the pole star,” meaning the variation at each latitude. “If this task were completed and if the authority of the supreme pontiff should lend itself to it,” he wrote, “the result would be that at some time under the happy auspices of Urban VIII we would know the magnetic variation of the whole world, the altitudes of the pole, and the longitudes so long sought after.”

Over the next two or three years, Kircher left virtually no aspect of magnetism untouched or unconsidered, and took it upon himself to head the collaborative enterprise Mersenne had described—one of the first attempts to collect what would now be called scientific data on a worldwide basis. His letters of instruction were carried by post throughout Europe and by ship to colleges and missions in places like Goa, Guadeloupe, Macao, Manila, São Paulo, and St. Augustine. Not every venue had the right instruments or the right expertise;
one Jesuit in Lithuania who sent in variation readings worked as the cook in his college. In the course of directing this project, Kircher began to establish himself as a central contact and clearinghouse for Jesuit findings and reports on all manner of natural philosophy subjects.

After a while, when complicated inconsistencies in magnetic readings began to fade hopes for using them to determine longitude, Kircher became less interested in that particular project than in producing an impressive, elaborate, all-encompassing book on magnetism, one that would, as he put it, “
rattle my adversaries' distrust of my work.”
He decided that if Cardinal Barberini didn't want to support him, then he'd just have to go to the Holy Roman Emperor instead. Through a Jesuit in the court of Vienna, he was able to secure the help of Ferdinand III, who agreed to fund the publication of a volume with many engravings and printed with special typefaces. A student of languages and a composer of music, Ferdinand was then married to the first of two first cousins who would bear him children, Maria Anna of Spain.

When it was published in 1641, Kircher's finished book—
The Magnet, or the Art of Magnetics, in Three Parts, in which the Universal Nature of the Magnet as well as Its Use in All Arts and Sciences Is Explained by a New Method: In Addition, Here Are Revealed through All Kinds of Physical, Medical, Chemical, and Mathematical Experiments, Many Hitherto Unknown Secrets of Nature from the Powers and Prodigious Effects of Magnetic as well as Other Concealed Motions of Nature in the Elements, Stones, Plants, Animals, and Elucescent Things—
came in at 916 pages.

In addition to compiling global magnetic data, describing practical magnetic aids to cartography, coining the word
electromagnetism
, discussing the magnetic quality of romantic love, and many other things,
The Magnet
(
Magnes
in Latin) took on the heliocentrists. Both Kepler and Galileo had turned to magnetic principles to make their arguments for a sun-centered universe, but no one had directly refuted them on behalf of the pope, who, though he was once himself inclined toward the Copernican view, needed to strengthen the case for the decision against Galileo. Kircher, who once hinted to Peiresc that
he
was a Copernican, understood the position he was supposed to take. “
We must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black,” Ignatius had written, “if the hierarchical Church so stipulates.”

Gilbert had said that the Earth was a giant magnet, spun and pulled around the sun by its magnetic, spiritual, cosmic, animate rays. Kepler had agreed. Kircher declared this notion
“
absurda, indigna, et intolerabilis.”
Earth wasn't a magnet, he argued, it was just, in certain ways, more or less,
magnetic
. (In this he was, more or less, correct.) Kircher calculated that if the little terrella that Gilbert had experimented with could attract, say, one pound, a magnet the size of the earth could attract more than three octillion pounds. The figure he gave was 3,073,631,468,480,000,000,000,000,000.

“
Woe to all iron implements,” he wrote, “woe to all shod horses and mules, woe to all soldiers in armor, woe to Gilbert's kitchen utensils.”

Kircher argued that to the extent that there was magnetic force at work in the earth, it actually helped to
hold
it in place, right at the center of the universe, as the planets and the sun moved around it. Even if the sun did rotate and emit a magnetic effluvium to the planets, it wouldn't put them into perpetual orbit; a spinning magnet wouldn't put a magnet into orbit around itself. In general, Kircher declared, the comparisons to the magnet didn't hold up. And if Kepler “
wished to philosophize prudently and consistently,” he concluded, “he ought not to have gone beyond the limits of his analogy, lest he incur infinite contradictions and inextricable difficulties, which in truth he did.”

Kircher was actually a great proponent of the magnetic power of the sun, and so incurred some contradictions and difficulties of his own.
The Magnet
was meant to serve not only as a weighty testament to its author's own world-class intellectual capacity but as a major argument for the pervasiveness of the magnetic principle, for the natural presence of the unseen. As Kircher saw it, the magnet was “
that prodigal of nature, the true ape of the skies, the Idea of the universe in which whole new worlds are hidden, a divining rod and key to the unexhausted and undiscovered riches of the world.” In many areas, Kircher shared or lifted the views of Mersenne's nemesis, the famous Dr. Fludd. Fludd believed the universe itself possessed a kind of magnetic or sexual energy, operating through attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy, on a spiritual and physical level. Magnetic attraction was a “
coition or union” between bodies caused by the similarity of their nature. The lodestone, Fludd wrote, “
sucketh and attracteth from his center the body of Iron unto it, drawing forth of it his formal beams, as it were his spiritual food.” In a sense, for Fludd and Kircher, it wasn't the earth that was a magnet; the magnet was God, and God worked in magnetic ways.

—

KIRCHER AGREED
with Gilbert that magnetic polarity made young seedlings send their shoots up and their roots down. He likened the emanation of a flower's invisible fragrance to the emanation of a lodestone's invisible magnetic rays; that is, they were both somehow living spiritual emissions. And he believed, as he had previously attempted to show with his sunflower-seed clock, that trees and plants grew toward the sun (and in some cases toward the moonlight) by virtue of invisible magnetic attraction. He'd exchanged letters with Jesuits in Africa and Asia about exotic species that might manifest this principle. At the Collegio Romano he'd observed acacia, whose leaves opened up with the sun and closed at night. But of course it was the sunflower, brought to Europe from the Americas (the Incas venerated it as part of their sun worship), that figured most prominently in his thinking. Kircher admitted that his attempts to make workable clocks from sunflowers and sunflower seeds had been somewhat beset by complications. But he was apparently so convinced of the truth of the principle that a new fib was in order to help make his case. He wrote that he'd procured a “
kind of material”—the root or seed of a heliotrope of some type—from an Arab merchant on the docks of Marseille. This material was more sensitive to the sun, he claimed, and worked much better than a regular sunflower seed did to drive a clock.

As Kircher described it, herbal and mineral remedies operated by magnetic action; ingested medicine “
pulls what is similar to its own nature and ultimately draws and purges it.” Antidotes worked in the same way. The best treatment for snakebite: eating the meat of a snake, preferably the one that bit you. (Kircher claimed that he'd seen this work back in Germany, on a traveling salesman from Erfurt.) Even the poison in snake venom itself arrived there in the first place through magnetic means; it was taken up through snakes' bellies as they slithered around on the ground. By its (Aristotelian) nature the snake had an appetite for the toxic mineral and vegetable excretions in the soil that were “
putrid, contagious and noxious to men.” The natural job of all venomous creatures was to siphon up poisonous vapors and emissions, leaving the earth safe for human beings.

Spiders drew in their venom from the very air. In a section of
The Magnet
that Kircher said was worth the price of the whole book, he argued that magnetism was at work in the well-known cure for the bite of a certain spider found around the southern Italian town of Taranto. This “tarantula,” as it is called, has almost nothing in common with the much larger, hairy, and dangerous North American spider that was later given the same name. In fact, the Italian tarantula is now known to be basically harmless. But in Kircher's time, every summer, people who claimed they were bitten by the tarantula exhibited an array of troubling symptoms: delusions (imagining themselves as expert swordsmen, for example, or as ducks or fish), listlessness, jumpiness, twitchiness, giddiness, lethargy, unusual and excessive thirst for wine. Afflicted women ran around exposing themselves. Men experienced unrelenting erections. They could be cured only by certain kinds of up-tempo songs, “tarantellas,” to which they responded involuntarily in the form of a frenetic dance. The playing and dancing went on for hours. The cure could take anywhere from three to eight days. During this time villagers who had been bitten in
previous
years often experienced a recurrence of the disease from hearing the music, and began dancing as well.

The tarantula and its musical antidote, from
The Magnet