My father, always powerfully built, started to put on weight after the war and decided to go at regular intervals to a fat farm in Wales. These visits never seemed to do him much good, weight-wise, but he would come back from them looking happy and well, his London pallor replaced by a healthy tan. It was only after his death, many years later, that, looking through his papers, I found a sheaf of plane tickets that told the true story – he had never been to the fat farm at all, but loyally, secretly, had been going to visit Bennie in Portugal all these years.
10. A Chemical Language
Uncle Dave saw all science as a wholly human, no less than an intellectual and technological, enterprise, and it seemed natural to me, in my turn, to do the same. When I set up my lab and started some chemical experiments of my own, I wanted to learn about the history of chemistry in a more general way, to find out what chemists did, how they thought, the atmosphere in centuries past. I had long been fascinated by our family and family tree – by tales of the uncles who had gone off to South Africa, and of the man who had fathered them all, and of the first ancestor of my mother’s of whom we had any record, an alchemically inclined rabbi, it was said, one Lazar Weiskopf, who lived in Lübeck in the seventeenth century. This may have been the incitement to a more general love of history, and a tendency, perhaps, to see it in familial terms. And so the scientists, the early chemists, whom I read about became, in a sense, honorary ancestors, people to whom, in fantasy, I had a sort of connection. I needed to understand how these early chemists thought, to imagine myself into their worlds.
Chemistry as a true science, I read, made its first emergence with the work of Robert Boyle in the middle of the seventeenth century. Twenty years Newton’s senior, Boyle was born at a time when the practice of alchemy still held sway, and he still maintained a variety of alchemical beliefs and practices, side by side with his scientific ones. He believed that gold could be created, and that he had succeeded in creating it (Newton, also an alchemist, advised him to keep silent about this). He was a man of immense curiosity (of ‘holy curiosity’, in Einstein’s phrase), for all the wonders of nature, Boyle felt, proclaimed the glory of God, and this led him to examine a huge range of phenomena.
He examined crystals and their structure, and was the first to discover their cleavage planes. He explored color, and wrote a book on this which influenced Newton. He devised the first chemical indicator, a paper soaked with syrup of violets which would turn red in the presence of acid fluids, green with alkaline ones. He wrote the first book in English on electricity. He prepared hydrogen, without realizing it, by putting iron nails in sulphuric acid. He found that although most fluids contracted when frozen, water expanded. He showed that a gas (later realized to be carbon dioxide) was evolved when he poured vinegar on powdered coral, and that flies would die if kept in this ‘artificial air.’ He investigated the properties of blood and was interested in the possibility of blood transfusion. He experimented with the perception of odors and tastes. He was the first to describe semipermeable membranes. He provided the first case history of acquired achromatopsia, a total loss of color vision following a brain infection.
All these investigations and many others he described in language of great plainness and clarity, utterly different from the arcane and enigmatic language of the alchemists. Anyone could read him and repeat his experiments; he stood for the openness of science, as opposed to the closed, hermetic secrecy of alchemy.
Although his interests were universal, chemistry seemed to hold a very special appeal for him (even as a youth he called his own chemical laboratory ‘a kind of Elysium’). He wished, above all, to understand the nature of matter, and his most famous book, The Sceptical Chymist, was written to debunk the mystical doctrine of the Four Elements, and to unite the enormous, centuries-old empirical knowledge of alchemy and pharmacy with the new, enlightened rationality of his age.
The ancients had thought in terms of four basic principles or elements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. I think these were pretty much my own categories as a five-year-old child (though metals may have made a special, fifth category for me), but I found it less easy to imagine the Three Principles of the alchemists, where ‘Sulphur’ and ‘Mercury’ and ‘Salt’ meant not ordinary sulphur and mercury and salt but ‘philosophical’ Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt: Mercury conferring luster and hardness to a substance, Sulphur conferring color and combustibility, Salt conferring solidity and resistance to fire.
Boyle hoped to replace these ancient, mystical notions of Elements and Principles with a rational and empirical one, and provided the first modern definition of an element:
I now mean by Elements [he wrote]… certain Primitive and Simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made up of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those call’d perfectly mixd Bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved.
But since he gave no examples of such ‘Elements’ or of how their ‘unmingledness’ was to be demonstrated, his definition seemed too abstract to be useful.
Though I found The Sceptical Chymist unreadable, I was delighted by Boyle’s 1660 New Experiments, where he set out, with an enchanting vividness and a wealth of personal detail, more than forty experiments using his ‘Pneumatical Engine’ (an air pump that his assistant Robert Hooke had invented), with which he could evacuate much of the air from a closed vessel.[13] In these experiments Boyle effectively demolished the ancient belief that air was an ethereal, all-pervading medium by showing that it was a material substance with physical and chemical properties of its own, that it could be compressed or rarefied or even weighed.
Evacuating the air from a closed vessel that contained a lit candle or a glowing coal, Boyle found that these ceased to burn as the air was rarefied, although the coal would begin to glow again if air was reintroduced – thus showing that air was necessary for combustion. He showed, too, that various creatures – insects, birds, or mice – would become distressed or die if the air pressure was reduced, but might revive when air was readmitted to the vessel. He was struck by this similarity between combustion and respiration.
He investigated whether a bell could be heard through a vacuum (it could not), whether a magnet could exert power through a vacuum (it could), whether insects could fly in a vacuum (this he could not judge, because the insects ‘swooned’ with reduction of air pressure), and he examined the effects of reduced air pressure on the glowing of glowworms (they glowed less brightly).
I loved reading about these experiments and tried repeating some of them for myself – our Hoover was a good substitute for Boyle’s air pump. I loved the playfulness of the whole book, so different from the philosophical dialogues in The Sceptical Chymist. (Indeed, Boyle himself was not unaware of this: ‘I disdain not to take notice even of ludicrous experiments, and think that the plays of boys may sometimes deserve to be the study of philosophers.’)
Boyle’s personality appealed to me greatly, as did his omnivorous curiosity, his fondness for anecdote, and his occasional puns (as when he wrote that he preferred to work on things ‘luciferous rather than lucriferous’). I could imagine him as a person, and a person I would like, despite the gulf of three centuries between us.
13
Hooke himself was to become a marvel of scientific energy and ingenuity, abetted by his mechanical genius and mathematical ability. He kept voluminous, minutely detailed journals and diaries, which provide an incomparable picture not only of his own ceaseless mental activity, but of the whole intellectual atmosphere of seventeenth-century science. In his
Many of Hooke’s ideas were almost completely ignored and forgotten, so that one scholar observed in 1803, ‘I do not know a more unaccountable thing in the history of science than the total oblivion of this theory of Dr. Hooke, so clearly expressed, and so likely to catch attention.’ One reason for this oblivion was the implacable enmity of Newton, who developed such a hatred of Hooke that he would not consent to assume the presidency of the Royal Society while Hooke was still alive, and did all he could to extinguish Hooke’s reputation. But deeper than this is perhaps what Gunther Stent calls ‘prematurity’ in science, that many of Hooke’s ideas (and especially those on combustion) were so radical as to be unassimilable, even unintelligible, in the accepted thinking of his time.