Author: Noah Moxham

By which, of course, I mean records of injuries. Archives themselves tend to be fairly safe environments (although in some remote and older collections, which I probably shouldn’t name, I have found myself teetering at the top of a ladder and wondering how long it would take someone to find me if I fell.) Nevertheless, the records of the Royal Society throw up surprisingly frequent instances of scientists subjecting themselves to the tortures of the damned in pursuit of new knowledge, as well as the occasional laboratory accident. In no particular order, here are a few I’ve stumbled across recently:

Portrait of Charles Blagden FRS, by Mary Dawson Turner, after Charles Phillips, 1816

1)   Charles Blagden and Joseph Banks – the protagonists of much of our recent research at the Publishing the Phil Trans project – entered rooms heated to very uncomfortable temperatures with a view to finding out what the human frame could stand, and to establishing the relative inefficiency of atmospheric air as a conductor of heat. Blagden wrote the results up for the 1775 volume of Phil Trans; accompanied by Daniel Solander and George Fordyce, they went into specially-heated chambers in which the mercury in the thermometer stood at various temperatures, for as long as they could tolerate it. Rooms heated to 125 or 130 Fahrenheit posed no great challenge, and they stayed in them for 20 minutes or more at a time; Banks, meanwhile, went solo into a room where the air temperature stood at 211 degrees (according to the only thermometer which hadn’t warped or cracked in the heat) and lasted seven minutes. Blagden’s manner of reporting the experiments protests perhaps a little too much in his willingness, indeed his eagerness, to hurt himself in the cause of science: “We all rejoiced”, he says, “at the opportunity of being convinced, by our own experience, of the wonderful power with which the animal body is endued, of resisting an heat vastly greater than its own temperature”. He did, however, go back for a second dose three months later, publishing a paper on these further experiments in the same volume.

2)   Almost anyone who did a science practical in school will remember the safety lectures; my science teacher added to the standard narrative about the careful use of bunsen burners and the wearing of lab coats and protective goggles at all times an anecdote about his own science teacher’s demonstration of the percussive detonation of gunpowder involving some gunpowder, a bench, a hammer, and a broken arm for the teacher. Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, the great French chemist and discoverer of boron, would perhaps have benefited from some basic instruction on workplace health and safety. Writing from Paris in 1808 (the letter had to go in the American diplomatic bag to get around the interruption of normal communication between English and French scientists caused by the Napoleonic Wars), Richard Chenevix explained to Blagden why not much had been heard from Gay-Lussac lately: “In preparing his potash he threw a large quantity of it into some alcohol an explosion immediately took place and he has suffered dreadfully. For a long time his sight was dispaired of but there are hopes at present.”

3)   Gay-Lussac was later put in charge of the giant voltaic battery Napoleon ordered to be built at the Polytechnic Institute in Paris. (Legend has it that Napoleon, whose own ideas of lab safety could have done with a quick refresher course, almost knocked himself out by applying his tongue to one of the battery’s terminals in order to test it.) Volta himself, as well as Alexander von Humboldt, both reported deliberately subjecting themselves to electric shocks; in Humboldt’s case, according to Joseph Banks, the experiment consisted of ‘put[ting] 2 blisters upon his back & to communicate these with his mouth Nose & Eyes by wyers that he might See taste & Smell Galvanism at the Same time in which he says he succeeded tho not without horrible pain which he sufferd like a True German.’ Banks recommended the account to a friend whom he thought it would amuse. It’s not clear which Banks found funnier – Humboldt’s self-inflicted injuries, or his performance of Teutonic fortitude.

Robert Boyle’s air pump, from his ‘New experiments physico-mechanicall’ (1660).

4)   No round-up of auto-experimentation in science would be complete without a mention of Robert Hooke. As well as a medical regimen, meticulously recorded in his diary, which was breathtaking in its variety and toxicity, Hooke subjected himself to the vacuum generated by the air pump he built for Robert Boyle. When the King’s cousin, Prince Rupert, attended a meeting of the Society in 1662, he was entertained with a demonstration of the air pump.  The need to put on a spectacular show for the royal guest was surely in everyone’s mind, and it’s been suggested that Hooke was very probably the unnamed man who thrust his arm into the exhausted receiver, which produced an immediate swelling, an enlargement of the veins in the arm almost to bursting point, and the speckling of burst capillaries when he eventually withdrew it.

Of course, there were particular experiments where volunteers were hard to find. We’ve already discussed the contentiousness and hysteria surrounding smallpox inoculation in the 1720s on this blog; another notable area of difficulty was blood transfusion. Hooke was also involved in these experiments in the 1660s, culminating in a successful transfusion from a live sheep into a penurious student named Arthur Coga.  This experiment was not soon repeated, but it gave rise to another notable scientific tradition – that of the student supplementing his income by participating in a clinical trial!

Publishing the Philosophical Transactions has recently been turning its attention to the long Presidency of Sir Joseph Banks and its impact on Phil Trans.  We’ve just begun ploughing through his published and unpublished correspondence held at the Royal Society, and these letters are fantastic; full of scientific information, valuable insight into the processes by which the Transactions were compiled, and bitchy gossip. Among the best are the letters Banks exchanged with Charles Blagden, who kept him apprised of scientific goings-on, opened Banks’s mail for him, and marshalled  the traffic at Banks’s house at 32 Soho Square – a continual back-and-forth flow of books, drawings, journals, newspapers, plant specimens and people – while Banks summered in Lincolnshire.

It was a busy summer for scientific happenings – among other things, the Montgolfier brothers flew the first successful hot-air balloon at Annonay in France, and a craze for ballooning swept Parisian society (Banks did his best to resist the spread of ‘Ballomania’, as it was known, to England – unsuccessfully, in the event – believing it to be a mere fad with no real scientific potential and one that might give considerable scope to unscrupulous entrepreneurs). Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley continued their independent experiments on ‘inflammable air’ [hydrogen] and the chemical composition of water (recently recreated for television by Brian Cox in the second instalment of his Science Britannica series, in which he also enthused about the age and significance of Phil Trans).

That same summer a large meteor was seen over England on the night of August 18^th, passing rapidly over Scotland and travelling down the east coast of England – it was seen at Lincolnshire, where it appeared to break up but the core continued, still blazing, more or less on its former trajectory , and at Ramsgate.  It was also seen from Brussels and France; and there was an unconfirmed sighting as far south as Rome. Blagden and Banks between them gathered reports of the event from across Britain and the Continent, and Blagden’s paper on the subject based on these observations was published in Phil Trans for 1784 to attempt to estimate the meteor’s size, altitude, and speed; it was visible for a little under a minute, its altitude was estimated variously between 50 and 60 miles, it appeared about as large as the Moon’s disc (Blagden reckoned its diameter at roughly half a mile) and its speed was calculated at 20 miles per second.

‘Meteor seen over Hewit Common near York’, by Nathaniel Pigott (Royal Society L&P/8/92)

These calculations of the meteor’s altitude and speed are remarkably plausible – and if Blagden’s estimate of its size is even marginally accurate then humanity can breathe a two-hundred-year’s delayed sigh of relief at its close shave.  Blagden didn’t see it like that, because he didn’t think meteors were physical bodies but electrical phenomena in the upper atmosphere.  His reasons for thinking this are striking.  When he heard that the Astronomer Royal, Nevill Maskelyne, was sending out queries of his own for an investigation of the comet, he wrote scoffingly to Banks:

‘I hear many years ago Professor [John] Winthrop, of Cambridge [Harvard] in new England, sent a paper to the R.S. containing a circumstantial theory of meteors as bodies revolving in very excentric elipses round our earth, & producing light by their effect upon our atmosphere.  This paper it was not thought proper to print; but most likely [Sir John] Pringle took his ideas from it, which Maskelyne is now going to hash up warm.  If every falling star be such a body, and it seems impossible to draw a line of distinction between them & the larger meteors, we are in high luck indeed that some of them, out of such an immense number, do not now & then miss their way, or get entangled in our atmosphere, and give us a smack.  That this good world may be preserved from such misfortunes is the hearty wish of

Your affectionate

C.B.’

Blagden argued in his published paper that it was precisely because meteors were seen so frequently, yet never felt actually to hit, that they weren’t orbiting bodies like comets.  His crowd-sourced data was remarkably reliable; and from his description of the meteor you would swear he imagined it as a solid body, but he’s forced away from that conclusion because he can’t find any evidence for the logical endpoint of that line of thought: namely, the meteor’s impact.

Blagden’s dismissive mention of John Winthrop, Hollis Professor of natural philosophy and Astronomy at Harvard is intriguing, in this context.  Winthrop’s theory that meteors were of extra-terrestrial origin was substantially correct, and his paper, which the Society hadn’t seen fit to publish at the time, is still in the archives in the Letters & Papers series; but he was also responsible for one of the first attempts to treat earthquakes as geological phenomena.  Like meteors and comets, these had largely been regarded prior to the scientific revolution as manifestations of divine wrath or providential omens; Winthrop’s study of the effects of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which had also been felt in New England, attempted to measure the damage it caused and to quantify the forces involved, and he published the resulting lecture in Boston as well as sending an account to the Royal Society. This, along with numerous other descriptions of the Lisbon earthquake, formed the basis of an entire annual volume of Phil Trans.

Crowd-sourcing observations in this way was an important tool in Phil Trans, and continues to be important to modern science; as in the cases of Mass Observation, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and numerous other projects.  It’s also crucial to the history of science.  As I write the Royal Society is hosting a wikipedia edit-a-thon on Women in Science, in anticipation of Ada Lovelace Day. Expert volunteers are teaming up to work on the information available in the world’s most consulted encyclopedia, which should give rise to substantial improvements in both the number and quality of entries on women’s contribution to science.

Lightning-proofing St Paul’s and the Purfleet magazines.

It’s a well-attested fact that when a person embarks on a historical research project, however apparently specific, they start to see it everywhere. My commute to the Royal Society Library takes me under the Thames and past Purfleet, site of the Board of Ordnance’s gunpowder magazines after they were moved from Greenwich in 1765. You can’t see the one surviving magazine building from the train – the lines of sight aren’t quite right – but Purfleet is one of a couple of places on that route with a connection to the history of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In August 1772 the Royal Society was asked by the Board of Ordnance to put together a committee to consult on the best way of securing the new magazines at Purfleet against lightning strikes. Their caution was well-advised; there had been enough recent instances of fires started by lightning strikes, and an explosion in a firework shop in the City of London in 1715 had started a fire which one contemporary estimated to have caused half a million pounds’ worth of damage and killed 60 people before it was stopped – quite a lot more than the official death toll from the Great Fire of 1666. The danger of storing powder in populated areas was surely one of the factors in moving the magazines to Purfleet in the first place.

An example of the effects of a lightning strike: damage to the walls and rafters of Heckingham Workhouse, Norfolk, 1782. Watercolour subsequently published in Phil Trans 72 (1), 1782, pp.355-378.

The Society already acted for the Ordnance Board in a supervisory capacity; they carried out an annual inspection of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and made recommendations about its fabric, instrumentation, and staffing requirements, as well as supervising the annual publication of the Astronomer Royal’s observations. With a view to avoiding regaling the residents of Gravesend with an inadvertent firework display, the Society asked James Robertson, William Watson, Benjamin Wilson, Henry Cavendish, and Benjamin Franklin – that Benjamin Franklin – to inspect the Purfleet site and make recommendations. This they did, advising the installation of lightning conductors and suggesting specifications for them. Their recommendations were published in Volume 63 of the Philosophical Transactions.

In fact this was the Royal Society’s second committee on the matter of lightning conductors. Some readers may remember a dramatic news photo of lightning striking the Vatican during the last papal conclave, jokingly interpreted in some quarters as a mark of divine displeasure at Benedict XVI’s resignation from the papacy. Back in 1769, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, legitimately concerned about the danger to the handsome fabric of Wren’s building, displayed a more practical and less providential attitude, and called the Society in to advise, perhaps remembering the damage caused to the old building by two separate lightning strikes, as well as a more recent one at St Bride’s nearby that had blown an eight-foot section off its beautiful tiered spire. The results of this consultation were also published, in Phil Trans 59. The Society then revisited St Paul’s in 1773, a week after it was actually struck by lightning, and while viewing the damage gloomily noted that their instructions hadn’t been followed precisely – the conductors weren’t continuous and had been allowed to rust, which severely diminished their effectiveness, as Franklin and others had pointed out.

A little unusually, however, one member of the committee publicly dissented from the recommendations. Benjamin Wilson was so concerned about the merits of pointed as opposed to blunt lightning conductors – he thought that a broader surface area at the top of the conductor stood a better chance of surviving a lightning strike undamaged – that he put his objections in writing, and published them in the same volume of the journal. The committee saw no reason to change their recommendation, however, and said as much in the fairly bland note they printed in reply to Wilson.

The conductors at Purfleet were put to the test by a lightning strike in 1778, which did some damage to the brickwork and the roof, renewing the anxiety of the Board of Ordnance and spurring Wilson on to a series of experiments to model the effects of a lightning strike indoors, at the Pantheon on Oxford Street; these were reported in the Phil Trans for 1778, and the apparatus he used is illustrated below. Wilson continued to insist that broad-tipped lightning conductors would work better; the Society continued to stick to its original position, and to insist in print that the Purfleet conductors had worked perfectly adequately.

‘A view of the Apparatus and part of the Great Cylinder in the Pantheon’, by Benjamin Wilson.
From ‘Sundry papers relative to an accident from lightning at Purfleet, May 15, 1777’, Phil Trans 68, 1778, pp.232-317

The Royal Society had supplied advisory committees of this kind before, and would continue to do so through the nineteenth century and beyond. But it’s a little unusual to see the results being published; these articles in the Phil Trans show the Society engaging positively with the idea that science, or natural knowledge, should be deployed for the public good, an idea which had been part of its brief since its inception but which it had sometimes struggled to live up to. It’s even more unusual to see them publishing a dissenting opinion. Resistance to controversy became a very strongly entrenched aspect of the Society’s public face in the eighteenth century, and after the Society took over the publication of Phil Trans in 1752 – it had previously been the private venture of the Society’s Secretary – some of that culture seems to have spread to the Phil Trans as well. The selection of papers for publication was taken by secret ballot and without discussion, just as the Society’s meetings had been transformed from the lively discussions of its early years into a respectful forum in which papers were listened to in silence.

The lightning-proofing committees represent two facets of the Society at this time; it was becoming bolder in its ventures into the public arena, yet oddly restrictive of free debate in its meetings and publications. Joseph Banks, who became President in 1778 and served until 1820, hugely increased the Society’s advisory roles in government affairs, but he was also known for his rather autocratic leadership. It would be this, in the early nineteenth century, which led to increasing calls for reform of the Society, from within and without – calls that would have substantial, if gradual, effects on the Society’s membership, its practices of discussion, and the Phil Trans themselves.

Publishing the Philosophical Transactions has now been under way for a month, and as we orient ourselves in the Royal Society archives we’re beginning to find fascinating historical material relating to the pitfalls of science publishing…

When vaccination against smallpox was introduced to Britain from the Middle East in the early 1720s, members of the Royal Society found themselves on the wrong side of both conventional wisdom and contemporary piety. Inoculation against smallpox by variolation – deliberately infecting a healthy patient with a mild case of the disease – was introduced to Britain in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the English ambassador at Constantinople.

Fellows of the Royal Society were among the early champions of the technique but it also became the subject of much wider scrutiny when members of the Royal Family, fearful of the series of outbreaks of the disease in 1721 but equally fearful of its cure, agreed to a singularly inhumane clinical trial.  Six condemned prisoners were to be subjected to the procedure in exchange for clemency if they survived.  They did, and the royal children were duly inoculated.  The treatment soon became widespread, though physicians kept a careful eye on the outcomes and compared notes.

Portrait of James Jurin, by James Worsdale, ca. 1740s © The Royal Society

One of these was James Jurin, then Secretary of the Royal Society.  He was also the editor and publisher of the Philosophical Transactions, and he used the journal to track and promote the success of inoculation in England.  He solicited accounts of trials from physicians up and down the land and published them in Phil Trans as they arrived.  It’s a striking early instance of an attempt to co-ordinate medical research. It also suggests the extent to which the journal could be used as a mechanism of persuasion, a means of promoting a particular medical agenda.

This was the more necessary because, despite the notoriety of the royal inoculation, the technique hadn’t gained straightforward acceptance everywhere.  It met with resistance from people who assumed, not wholly unreasonably, that to infect oneself intentionally with smallpox was to invite disaster; and from the pious, who argued that to attempt to cure or prevent smallpox was to presume against God, who visited the disease upon its victims as a trial, a punishment, or a blessing, according to interpretation.  Edmund Massey preached a striking sermon on the folly of inoculation in 1722, taking Job’s boils as his text. Reading him, one suspects that his objections extend beyond the practice of inoculation to medical intervention as such: and indeed, half way through the text, he suggests that most patients would be better off if their doctors left off doctoring and prayed for them instead.

The case for inoculation was finally unanswerable: fewer than 2% of those inoculated died of the procedure, where the death rate among those who caught the natural disease during an outbreak could be anywhere between 10 and 25%.  In absolute terms, Jurin calculated, 7% of all deaths were caused by smallpox. Jurin and his colleagues began to collate those figures in the Phil Trans from early 1723, and the article was republished as a pamphlet when new information became available. Jurin also published updated accounts annually.

However, reports also began to be spread in the London newspapers of patients dying of the treatment.  Fear of the disease was very high, and in the summer of 1722 it was never out of the papers, in the form of reports of the epidemic in Paris, the deaths of prominent victims, accounts of successful and unsuccessful inoculations (as in a letter from Salisbury reporting on the death of an MP’s daughter in Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly Journal of 26 October and inveighing against the “wicked and sinful” practice), and adverts for patent medicines and specifics against it. Some of these had spectacular names – the “only true original royal chemical washballs” which were advertised in issue after issue of the Daily Courant and the Weekly Journal, for instance.

One reference in particular caught the eye of Thomas Nettleton, a physician in Halifax, who saw it reported in several papers sent up from London (unfortunately he doesn’t say which ones) that a patient of his had died from being infected with smallpox in the name of inoculation.  In fact the patient had done no such thing, but Nettleton was too anxious about the damage this could do to his reputation, and to the cause of inoculation more broadly, to let it pass without a speedy rebuttal.  He wrote about the matter to Jurin, who consulted with a colleague and paid for space in the London Daily Journal to refute the assertion and print certificates to that effect from the physicians and families of those involved.  It’s a powerful indication that when contentious research or new treatments were misreported, the usual channels of scientific communication, highly respectable but slow to appear and limited in their circulation, weren’t adequate to address the mistake; more public action was needed.

In a world where popular and ephemeral print was gaining ever more traction – and particularly when new medical procedures or new research were counter-intuitive and frightening in their implications – medical researchers and natural philosophers had to defend themselves on two fronts, gathering data and establishing the credibility of their work through the learned journal on the one hand, and venturing into the rather less controlled environment of the Grub Street press on the other.  The ways in which developments in other media impinged upon the Philosophical Transactions, whether to make the journal more publicly engaged or less, will be one of the key themes of our project…