The Philosophical Breakfast Club (5 page)

Whewell lived carefully to keep the expenses down. Not for him the pleasures of all-night drinking revels, long rides on fine horses, shooting parties, hours spent reading newspapers and gossiping in the newly popular coffee shops. Instead, in his second year, Whewell took on a pupil to tutor, to make extra money.

Yet there were some pleasures to be had for Whewell. He found, to his slight surprise, that he was something of a ladies’ man. Although certain wags at the university would mock him for his strong Lancaster accent, women seemed to find it charming. His robust frame, his large eyes and well-formed nose, found their way into the hearts of many. Later his friends would joke with him about the effect he had on women. Even his prim late-Victorian biographer would note cryptically of Whewell’s early days at Cambridge that “some of Mr. Whewell’s friends … were of a less studious turn … and tradition still records the name of one in whose company not a little of his time was supposed to have been wasted.” Unfortunately, history no longer records her name, but it was most probably a local girl, perhaps one named Marianne, who was mentioned in several letters between Whewell and his friend Julius Hare. Portions of one of their letters about Marianne were censored by someone with thick, dark paper and a strong glue that holds fast yet today; later in life Whewell, thinking of his epistolary legacy, may have found the youthful discussion too salacious for public consumption.
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Local families with daughters of marriageable age would often entertain the students, inviting them for teas, dinners, and dances, hoping that their daughters might capture the heart of a future parish priest or professor. Men like Whewell, who hoped to get fellowships, had to resist, since fellows were required to remain unmarried.

A holdover from the Middle Ages, when fellows of the colleges were often monks or friars, this celibacy requirement persisted until the end of the nineteenth century. Even after the Reformation, when Anglican
clergy could be married, it was felt that the “fellowship” of college life required keeping out the distractions of wives and children. Some fellows secretly kept families hidden away in neighboring towns such as Huntingdon. Some were “otherwise accommodated,” as the historian G. M. Trevelyan dryly put it—the thriving prostitution business in Cambridge serviced not only the students but the fellows as well.
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Whewell reveled in his recognition that he was surrounded by the “best and the brightest.” The professors of the university included E. D. Clarke, the wildly popular professor of mineralogy, whose lecture hall was crammed with hundreds of eager students; Isaac Milner, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics who, although he never lectured in the subject, was still renowned for his result in the Tripos exams years before: the examiners had thrillingly described his performances as
“Incomparibilis”
; and Francis Wollaston, Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, who publicly demonstrated more than three hundred experiments a year. The Chemistry professor was Smithson Tennant, discoverer of the element osmium, later used in the manufacture of fountain-pen tips and phonograph needles.

Even more than the faculty, the students and fellows were men of growing reputation who would soon remake the scientific, political, and literary worlds. Whewell befriended George Peacock, the reforming mathematician who would later be appointed dean of Ely Cathedral, and Julius Charles Hare, the theologian and scholar of German literature and history, who would bring the study of German language and scholarly methods into vogue in England. Whewell became close friends with the future astronomer Richard Sheepshanks and with Richard Gwatkin, a young mathematician who would later be reckoned the finest private tutor at Cambridge. Whewell met and befriended Adam Sedgwick, then a fellow of Trinity, soon to be considered one of the founders of modern geology. But the most important of his new acquaintances were those men he later called “friends of a lifetime”: John Herschel, Charles Babbage, and Richard Jones.

In February of 1813 Whewell reported excitedly to his father that he had “been several times in company” with John Herschel, “son of Dr. Herschel, the celebrated Astronomer Royal.” Herschel was three years ahead of Whewell, a student of St. John’s College, the fierce rival and next-door neighbor of Trinity. Trinity men called the Johnians “pigs” or “hogs,” meaning “gluttons,” after Horace’s self-deprecating comment
that he was
“epicuri de grege porcum,”
a pig from the herd of Epicurus; the men from the two colleges regularly fought with clubs and fists. But once Whewell and Herschel met in late 1812 through Herschel’s close friend John Whittaker, they recognized each other as intellectual soul mates. Herschel presented him to Charles Babbage, whose wit and hearty, ringing laugh appealed to the younger man. Around the same time, Whewell was introduced to Richard Jones by Charles Bromhead at Caius College, elder brother to Edward Bromhead, a Trinity man in Whewell’s year.

Herschel and Babbage had become acquainted in 1810, soon after Babbage came up to Cambridge; Herschel was a second-year man by then. They quickly became fast friends; within two years Herschel was signing summer letters to Babbage with “yours till death / shall stop my breath.” Both were from well-off families. Herschel had the additional accoutrement of a famous father, the astronomer Frederick William Herschel (known as William), discoverer of the planet Uranus.

The elder Herschel was the son of an army musician in Hanover, Germany, who adopted the same profession as his father when he was fourteen. In 1758 William Herschel came to England, a penniless refugee of the Seven Years’ War. He eked out a small living as a musical copyist and instructor to a small military band in the north of England. In 1766 William Herschel was appointed to the post of organist at Bath Spa.

The springs at Bath Spa had been considered medicinal for hundreds of years. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ill or depressed would come to sit, wearing coarse smocks, in the iron-rich water. In the eighteenth century this cure was modified to the more socially appealing one of drinking a glass or two of the water each day. Now the wealthy would come to socialize, attend balls and dinners, and “take the waters” during a social season that extended from September to May. Bath had the largest entertainment market outside London, with a lively concert schedule.
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William Herschel eventually had so many wealthy private pupils among the visitors and residents that more than twenty recitals a year were needed just to display their talents.

Busy as he was, Herschel began to read works on astronomy, and longed to have a telescope of his own. He resolved to make one, painstakingly grinding his own eyepieces. Finally he had a seven-foot reflecting or Newtonian telescope, that is, one with a curved optical mirror to reflect the image from the heavens. He began to examine the skies late at night, after his concerts had ended. On March 13, 1781, he observed an object
not on any celestial chart. Assuming it was a new comet, he wrote a short notice for the
Transactions
of the Royal Society of London, a publication read by men of science all over the world. The famous French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace realized that Herschel had, in fact, found a new planet, which would become known as Uranus. This was amazing. Since antiquity it had been assumed that the planets that could be seen with the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn)—plus Earth, once Copernicus realized it was a planet as well—were the only ones orbiting our sun. Herschel was the first
discoverer
of a new planet.

This striking accomplishment gained Herschel an appointment as the king’s personal astronomer at Windsor Castle. He and his sister, Caroline, who had been helping him with his observations, moved to Slough, then a small village near Windsor. Herschel was given an income of £200, and Caroline, notably, her own income of £50, by King George III. They undertook the construction of a huge telescope with a focal length of forty feet and a main mirror forty-eight inches in diameter, weighing over 2,000 pounds. Until dismantled by John Herschel in 1839, this would be the largest reflecting telescope in the world, the first to extend observations beyond our solar system.

While the ironworks for the motions of the telescope were being fitted, it became a fashion for visitors to use the huge empty tube, then lying on the ground, as a promenade. One day George III and the Archbishop of Canterbury were walking inside; when the archbishop became disconcerted due to the darkness, the king, who was in front, turned back and said, “Come, my lord bishop, I will show you the way to heaven.”
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When the works were completed, the telescope became one of the scientific wonders of the age. Even Franz Joseph Haydn visited Herschel while in England and spent an evening looking through the telescope and discussing music; Haydn had already shown an interest in astronomy some years earlier when he wrote the opera
Il Mondo della Luna
, in which Ecclitico poses as an astronomer in order to win the hand of the beautiful Clarice—in the process fooling people into believing that he has used a telescope so strong that he could see men on the moon!
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When Haydn returned to Europe, he publicized Herschel’s symphonies, which the musician/astronomer had composed between 1759 and 1770.
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Ladders fifty feet in length led up to a movable podium, where the observer sat. The whole mechanism stood on a revolving platform. Two workmen would move the platform slowly to follow the diurnal course of
the heavens. This remarkable telescope had a magnifying power of one thousand times. But in England’s climate it could only be used about one hundred hours a year; its large mirror was prone to be dewed up in damp weather or frozen in cold weather.
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William Herschel used it to describe accurately, for the first time, the Milky Way, and to find two new satellites of Saturn.

In 1788 Herschel married Mary Pitt, née Baldwin, the widow of a wealthy London merchant. William was then fifty, and Mary thirty-eight. After four years, John was born, on March 7, 1792. He would have no siblings, and was doted on by both parents. He was also quite close to his aunt Caroline, who had moved out of William’s house when he married, to a small cottage nearby. John inherited his father’s and aunt’s musical skills, and music was an important part of his entire life. It would later be said that “the Herschels were a musical family; music was their vocation, science was their recreation.”
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But John found his “recreation” early: Caroline later wrote that “many a half or whole holiday [John] was allowed to spend with me was dedicated to making experiments in chemistry, where generally all boxes, tops of tea-canisters, pepper-boxes, teacups, etc., served for the necessary vessels and the sand tub furnished the matter to be analysed. I only had to take care to exclude water, which would have produced havoc on my carpet.”
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Although John would later say that “light was my first love,” it seems more the case that his heart was lost first to chemistry.

Just before he was eight, his parents sent John to Eton, only a mile away from Slough on the highway to Windsor. But one day, while visiting, Mary saw John knocked down by an older boy, and she withdrew him from the school straightaway. He entered instead a school run by his father’s friend Dr. Gretton at Hitcham, a village in the neighborhood of Slough, where his mother could keep a watchful eye on him. There he mostly studied classics—ancient Greek and Roman history and literature. John’s parents engaged a private tutor, a Scottish mathematician named Rogers, to teach him science, modern languages, literature, music, and mathematics.
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By the time he went up to Cambridge, John could speak German, French, and Italian, and knew Latin and Greek.

His formal education was supplemented by watching his father and aunt in their astronomical labors, and by travel; before he reached the university, John had already taken carriage trips with his family throughout England, Wales, and Scotland, and had even gone across the Channel
to Paris, where the famous astronomer and his family were entertained by Napoleon Bonaparte.

He went up to St. John’s in 1809, uncertain of his future plans. Soon after, a friend of the family told John that he would one day rival Isaac Newton in greatness.
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He initially fought against the idea of following Newton and his father into astronomy, but in the end he found himself doing just that. The immense forty-foot telescope, which loomed above his childhood, would soon point the way to his own fame.

H
ERSCHEL WOULD OFTEN
confide his doubts about the future to Charles Babbage. Like John, Charles came from a privileged background. Charles was born on December 26, 1791, in Walworth, Surrey, a hamlet within walking distance across London Bridge from the City, where his father was a partner in the banking firm Praed, Mackworth and Babbage. Both his father, Benjamin, and his mother, Elizabeth (Betty) Plumleigh Teape, were from old Devonshire families, in the countryside surrounding Totnes and Teignmouth on the southern coast of England. When Charles was fifteen, his father retired and bought a house in Teignmouth; Charles lived there until he left for Cambridge.
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Charles had two brothers, both of whom died young, and a sister, Mary Ann, with whom he remained close all his life. Babbage was sickly in his youth, and as a result his schooling was intermittent at best. For a short time, when he was older and stronger, he was sent to the academy of the Reverend Stephen Freeman, in Enfield, Middlesex, where he studied mathematics and ignored classical studies, which were not of interest to him. As he later boasted, the young Babbage mostly taught himself.

Babbage was always fascinated by mechanical things. As a child, he would take apart his toys to find out what was inside them, and how they worked. One day his mother took him to an exhibit of mechanical wonders in Hanover Square put on by a man named Merlin. Such exhibits were common at the time. The novelist Fanny Burney—mother of Babbage’s Cambridge friend Alexander D’Arblay—described the protagonists of her
Evelina
visiting an exhibition much like this one, seeing a metal peacock that spread its tail every hour, a swan that “swam” across a mirrored pond, and a pineapple that opened to reveal a nest of singing birds.
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Reading this novel after meeting Alexander would have struck a chord with Babbage, as he vividly remembered his visit to Merlin’s
exhibition for the rest of his life. He recalled that Merlin, noticing the boy’s evident precociousness, took him up to his workshop. There Babbage and his mother were shown two silver figurines, each about one foot high. One of these appeared to walk or glide back and forth over a surface about four feet in diameter, raising an eyeglass to her face and bowing frequently. Babbage remembered her as being “graceful” in her motions. But he was most struck by the second figure. He called her an “admirable
danseuse
” who “attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes,” Babbage rhapsodized years later, “were full of imagination, and irresistible.”
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