Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

Universities in the United States grafted the doctorate onto an existing structure, the undergraduate college, whose standards approximated those of a French lycée or German Gymnasium. Seeking the grail of appropriating European wisdom, American professors (complemented by a large number of European imports) taught specialized courses to students registered for an advanced degree. This new structure – departing from the freedom to choose courses which was enjoyed by European students – slowly but inexorably increased the time required for obtaining a doctorate and inflated the length of doctoral dissertations. As higher learning experienced an uneven course in Europe under the excesses of fascism and Stalinism, the modified American model provided a new standard for research training.

From the end of the nineteenth century, foreigners were astounded by the material resources of American universities. The English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), and German biologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924) held significant university posts in America; by the end of the century, an American lecture tour was obligatory for leading scientific lights, like Englishman Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), German Felix Klein (1849–1925), and Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1904, who ironically referred to his tour as a voyage to El Dorado). Immigrant talent educated in the United States – physicists Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931) and Michael Idvorsky Pupin (1858–1935) – rose to the heights of their discipline. But all comers did not stay. Max Abraham (1875–1922) took the measure of a physics chair at Urbana in 1909 and then returned to Europe, where he had no comparable position. Einstein’s first scientific collaborator Jakob Laub (1882–1962) declined to fill Abraham’s Urbana chair, opting instead for one at La Plata in Argentina. Shortly after the turn of the century, Ernest Rutherford would not forsake McGill University in Montreal for Yale (although he did leave when Manchester beckoned). The United States of the 1890s held no permanent attraction for young Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), fresh out of Cambridge and married to an American Quaker. For scientists at the peak of their career in Europe, the preferred arrangement was a visiting lectureship, like those liberally endowed before the First World War. Under this arrangement, physicists Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) and Max Planck taught at Columbia University. After 1918, Einstein was lured to the California Institute of Technology for months at a time. As these examples suggest, by the first decade of the twentieth century, it was normal for German or French professors to take leave from their universities in order to occupy positions abroad, notably in the New World. There were even world-ranging, extramural professorships. In 1914, for example, geophysicist Gustav Angenheister (1878–1945) became a special professor who split his time between Göttingen and the capital of Western Samoa.

Technology has made commuting professors an established feature of academic life. In the 1920s, theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) commuted by train from Göttingen to his lectureship at Hamburg. The possibilities of commuting coincided with the end of the university science institute as a personal empire, presided over by the professor and his wife. The institute or laboratory became a university monument, rather than (as it was during a brief moment, between approximately 1870 and 1910) a living part of a professor’s aura. Only the president’s mansion, often conspicuously located on the campus of a new university, allowed state or private overseers to place an administrator on public display. But because the presidential office served as an obvious focus for student discontent, the mansion sometimes became a white elephant. Today, the president of the University of Southwestern Louisiana lives happily on campus, but the gothic presidential mansion of the University of Tokyo stands vacant – the victim of student protests a generation ago.

Along with the end of the university institute came the rise of the university department. By 1900 professors and lecturers sometimes organized sequences of courses, assigning responsiblity for all the parts of a domain, but the spectacular fragmentation of knowledge led to a hierarchical structure for managing it only in the United States. There, the arrangement extended to a military command structure, with a department chair, professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and a host of supporting staff. The departmental innovation coincided with the rise of the department store and the departmentally structured industrial firm. The inspiration is found in the administrative units of the federal government. With the model of academic departments in science, American universities distanced themselves from the European tradition where a professor taught what he liked. Science instruction became highly organized and goal-oriented. In the nineteenth century, European academics were traditionally able to take advantage of fast-breaking developments in neighbouring disciplines; in the twentieth century, innovative American academics spent much time and energy breaking out of disciplinary confinement.

Both geographical decentralization and interdisciplinary innovation have become watchwords in academic science. Electronic information-processing to some extent obviates the necessity for a scientist or scholar to reside at an ancient college of learning. Universities everywhere have adapted to new socioeconomic conditions by expanding curricula. They have always responded in this way, although never as quickly as their critics would like.

Measured and deliberate innovation is one of academia’s heavy burdens. It is also a great strength. Emerging fields of knowledge become new scientific disciplines only after they have found a secure place in universities. We look to universities for an authoritative word about the latest innovations. New scientific ideas emerge in a variety of settings, but they become the common heritage of humanity only when processed by an institution for advanced instruction like the modern university.

3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies

Above the deafening cacophony of a dozen screaming four-year-olds, a daycare teacher admonishes, ‘Now share!’ The concept of sharing a toy – of sacrificing individual possession for a communal experience, of deferring pleasure until others have taken a turn at gratification – is altogether foreign to the toddler, whose universe heretofore has been entirely self-centred and unabashedly selfish. It is seen as an important measure of maturity when the child is able to transcend the universe of ‘me and mine’, and to begin to entertain the idea of a greater social imperative.

The development of science seems to recapitulate the odyssey of every individual as he matures from infantile egotism to participation in the universe of social give-and-take. In the ancient and medieval worlds, learning about the natural world proceeded by fits and starts. People recorded intriguing theories and thoughts, constructed ingenious mechanisms and monuments, and even established schools. There existed, however, no special notion of a common mission to uncover new truths about nature, no clear idea that a division of labour could prove especially conducive to the rapid accumulation of knowledge. Earlier thinkers tended to guard and keep secret what they knew, fearing that good ideas might be stolen by a rival.

With the Scientific Revolution of the mid seventeenth century, the cultivation of natural knowledge ceased to be solitary and introspective; it became shared and communal. By working together, according to this new outlook, philosophers could accomplish more than they could by working separately; the cumulation of individual efforts by sharing would result in more gains to science than the summing of its isolated parts. Furthermore, what contemporaries labelled the ‘new science’ – signified by a corporate or composite effort – also aimed to replace words with deeds, the library with the laboratory, and systems with facts. This emphasis on activism, experiment, and experience stimulated the establishment of scientific societies, special associations where individuals could congregate and cooperate in advancing the new science.1 In this chapter we examine the anatomy of the new societies.

These institutions for sharing became the dominating and distinguishing feature of science during the second half of the seventeenth century. Scientific societies were an essential component, not a mere by-product, of the Scientific Revolution. They became a vital instrument for formulating and transmitting scientific norms and values. They transcended the pedagogical tradition associated with universities and established a new routine, inspired by everyday circumstances. Scientific societies held meetings at regular intervals; they elected officers and set up committees. Such daily activity led to the establishment of ‘a seasonal calendar of ritual: the first formal meeting of the year, periods of election, ordinary meetings, breaks for religious and state holidays, public meetings, vacation’ and so forth.2 Scientific societies may have exalted the tedious and the dull, but they enshrined a secular calendar for these mundane affairs – an essential figure of modernity. In other words, time was organized without the traditional appeal to sacred celebrations or agricultural cycles.

What led natural philosophers to embrace a new ideology associated with sharing? Certainly they did not think that invention would cease to be the fruit of one mind and would become a collective procedure. They were, after all, proud of their own discoveries. Rather, they saw advantages to associating with a group of like-minded people. The form of their association departed from medieval guilds. Associations for promoting the new science ignored matters of faith and livelihood. Nor did scientific associations seek to train apprentices. They were an avocational service club – the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Odd Fellows or Rotarians.

The learned society or academy of the seventeenth century incited and rewarded independent work. It also provided an avenue for communicating the results of scientific investigations, at first by means of the private correspondence of a secretary, and later through formal minutes and journals. Scientific societies housed books in their libraries, displayed specimens in their museums, and collected instruments in their cabinets, all these services assisting the investigations of individual members. Groups were naturally better able to purchase the costly tools required by the new science, whether telescopes, microscopes, or burning-mirrors. In this way, scientific societies made the materiel for conducting science accessible in a convenient and relatively inexpensive form. By the end of the seventeenth century, any man of scientific reputation and accomplishment belonged to a learned society or academy.

Nascent scientific organizations fulfilled less obvious functions, as well. Just to be associated with these enterprises conferred prestige on a member. This has been true virtually from the beginning, and ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) or ‘membre de l’Institut’ (member of one of the national academies of France) is today a coveted designation. In addition to this honorific function, periodic meetings of societies provided a forum for individuals to meet and discuss their work. Universities had no real place for the exchange of ideas among equals (there were neither faculty clubs nor professorial offices), but in the halls of the academy, controversies could be aired, alliances forged, and criticisms vetted.

Whence the notion for these associations? Some of them found inspiration in an invocation of Platonic free assembly and corporate activity, beyond political control. Others looked back to the Renaissance, when learned men came together under the influence of a particular patron or court. Yet, as we shall see, the Royal Society of London represented a novel departure: For the first time, individuals united together in a public body dedicated to the corporate prosecution of scientific research.

Engines of the Scientific Revolution

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, promoted ‘a cluster of disciplines concerned with natural and mechanical phenomena to the exclusion of others, linked by common methods’. It aimed to advance the realms of natural philosophy and natural history (roughly equivalent to our physical and biological sciences), and distanced itself from discussions of theology or scholastic philosophy, which it perceived as sterile. The Society’s devotion to the production of knowledge, rather than to its dissemination, sets it apart from other contemporary institutions. Its importance and prestige was confirmed by royal incorporation at the hand of Charles II.3

Sir Francis Bacon, a lawyer and chancellor to James I, became the patron saint of the Royal Society and of many other scientific societies as well. Bacon’s scientific contributions were unremarkable, but he enjoyed tremendous posthumous influence as the principal polemicist for the new science. In the New Atlantis (1627), he called for the creation of research institutions to accommodate the new learning. There he described ‘Salomon’s House’ – a collaborative effort dedicated to ‘the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Bacon maintained that only by combining the efforts of individuals could humankind hope to tackle the enormous range of questions that should be raised about the natural world. This programme formed one of the components of his projected Great Instauration, a work incomplete at the time of his death, and it complemented the inductive approach sketched in his New Organon (1620).4

Baconian ideology infused the creation and early years of the Royal Society. As the Society’s apologist Thomas Sprat put it, Bacon’s writings contained ‘the best Arguments, that can be produced for the Defence of experimental Philosophy, and the best Directions, that are needful to promote it’. Bacon’s views not only permeated Sprat’s official History of the Royal Society (first published in 1667), but they also found expression in the Society’s charters, diffusion in the Philosophical Transactions, and reiteration in the writings of fellows like Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and John Evelyn (1620–1706). Baconianism so well reflected the motivations of diverse associations of scientifically inclined amateurs in England that historians still try to identify the group that led directly into the creation of the Royal Society. Depending on which historian’s arguments one believes, the Royal Society may be traced to a gathering of gentlemen associated with Gresham College in London, to a less pragmatic network of London philosophers and social reformers, or to a collection of natural philosophers who eventually came to reside in Oxford.

The first of these, Gresham College, had been founded in 1597 by a legacy of the London merchant Sir Thomas Gresham to provide a series of educational lectures on a variety of topics for the local townspeople. Gresham also established resident professorships in astronomy, geometry, and medicine. His former townhouse provided a natural meeting place for scientifically inclined men, including sometime lecturers Robert Hooke (1635–1702), Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and Isaac Barrow (1630–1677).

A second London group of Puritans and Parliamentarians, who flourished during the 1640s and 1650s, was attracted by the millenarian zeal exuded by Continental collaborators Jan Comenius (1592–1670), Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), and Theodore Haak (1605–1690). John Dury (1596–1680), William Petty (1623–1687), and John Evelyn numbered among the reformers who viewed the association of scientists in a scheme by Hartlib for an ‘Office of Address’ as a mechanism for practical improvement and social advancement. The ‘office’, motivated by Protestant fervour, collected information about utilitarian discoveries and inventions.

Still another group – including Seth Ward (1617–1689), Thomas Willis (1621–1675), and William Petty – went up to Oxford from London because their mentor John Wilkins (1614–1672) had assumed the wardenship of Wadham College. Wilkins, brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell, made the remarkable transition from Puritan divine to Anglican bishop. His followers were part of the Royalist exodus from London (and Gresham College) that had occurred during the upheaval of the Commonwealth period, when the Puritans assumed the reins of government. Robert Boyle’s move to Oxford attracted others to the quiet college town, including architect Christopher Wren and experimenter Robert Hooke. This small group of natural philosophers organized weekly meetings to perform and conduct experiments. Some scholars contend that this was the incipient Royal Society – an association that had existed as an ‘invisible college’ under the Puritans and even previously during the reign of Charles I.

Whatever its historical antecedents, the creation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was assured when twelve men of diverse backgrounds – from Royalist to Cromwellian – gathered at Gresham College during the early days of the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660. They resolved to meet weekly to discuss and advance natural philosophy. Two years later, Charles II granted the group a royal charter. A second charter of 1663 established the operating rules and procedures of the Society. These actions bestowed upon the group of 115 scientific virtuosi a corporate status comparable to the one enjoyed by lawyers in the Inns of Court and by medical doctors in the College of Physicians. The incorporation of the Society itself meant that it could own property, employ officers, possess a seal and coat of arms, and license its own books.5 These were significant legal privileges at the time.

In his book The Great Instauration (1975), Charles Webster suggests that questions about the Royal Society’s origins and true character can be resolved by determining the Society’s active members. Webster identified twelve fellows – among them Boyle, Evelyn, Petty, and Wren – whose activity dominated and sustained the fledgling Society during its first two and a half years. Webster concludes that preliminary meetings were held in London during the closing years of Cromwell’s republic and that ‘diversity of outlook and experience’ brought a remarkable advantage to the group. He contends that it is ‘superfluous’ to ask whether the nucleus was Puritan or Anglican, Parliamentarian or Royalist. The early Society evolved continually in terms of its composition and interests, just as religious beliefs and political convictions fluctuated beyond its confines.

The diverse religious and political composition of the Royal Society set a premium on limiting activity to natural philosophy. The exploration of experimental and mathematical problems concentrated the energies of early fellows and minimized more fundamental differences of opinion. In this way, the Society’s work remained unaffected by the collapse of Cromwell’s republic and the restoration of the monarchy. In Webster’s words, ‘scientific work was insulated from ideological friction’. Science, according to this view, is an anodyne for social dislocation.

The Royal Society dedicated itself to ‘the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind’. It was governed by a president and a council of twenty-one fellows, from whose ranks were elected a treasurer and two secretaries. The Society employed at least two Curators of Experiments, obtained the cadavers of criminals for anatomical demonstrations, and built quarters for its assemblies in London. Fellows had to be elected by the general membership and upon election had to pay an admission fee, in addition to an annual subscription.

Although the Royal Society may be considered an organization that rewards the achievements of a scientific elite, its membership down from the early days has been relatively large, especially when compared with the size of other national scientific organizations. From its inception, the Society included a large proportion of virtuosi from the leisured classes, men whose interests have encompassed historical, literary, artistic, and archaeological studies. To the more avid scientific practitioners in the Society, the concerns of this element (who were needed for their wealth and social status) appeared aimless, unfocused, and obscure. The virtuosi also gave the Society a tendency to devolve into a social club for gentlemen. (When this current took hold in the Society during the early nineteenth century, it was ironically a member of the aristocracy, the duke of Sussex, son of George III, who reformed the Society and restored its learned purpose.)

Historian of science Marie Boas Hall has recently shifted attention from the organization’s origins and sociological composition to what actually occurred at its meetings. She has been particularly interested in the extent to which experiments were performed by the Society’s paid employees, both curators and operators, during its early years. Empirical discussions and demonstrations of experimental results seemed to offer a respite from potentially divisive political or religious issues. The airing of hypotheses, says Boas Hall, in contrast, led to ‘disputes and wranglings’ inappropriate to a ‘quiet atmosphere of learned debate’.

Boas Hall concludes that although the early Society paid lip-service to the promotion of ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, early enthusiasm soon gave way to the mere reading of papers and discussion about experiment. Although a small core of virtuosi maintained interest in the demonstration of experimental phenomena by operators (the title is significant) like Robert Hooke, most fellows sensed that the descriptions of experiments in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions possessed more enduring value than demonstrations. In the words of A. Rupert Hall, the Royal Society became ‘a place of report rather than a research institute’. Rhetoric and the prestige that flowed from association with eminent names like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle nevertheless ensured that contemporaries and historians alike have linked the Royal Society with the new experimental philosophy.6

The early Royal Society’s fulfilment of the Baconian imperative depended entirely on individual initiative, whether Operator Robert Hooke’s enthusiasm for performing experiments or Secretary Henry Oldenburg’s (ca.1618–1677) prosecution of the plan for creating a universal natural history. Oldenburg’s zeal for the task led to the publication of some ‘histories’ (more properly, narratives) of trades in the Philosophical Transactions. These experiential accounts derived from Oldenburg’s queries addressed on a regular basis to correspondents all over the world; by 1668, the annual volume of incoming and outgoing letters supervised by Oldenburg generally exceeded 300. James McClellan characterizes the Royal Society as encouraging ‘a vaguely defined Baconian empiricism that meshed well with the format of its meetings and the looser interests of its members’. He also sees the outward turn away from a dedicated Baconian core as the mechanism that propelled the Society to become the most important learned society of the second half of the seventeenth century.7

Part of the Royal Society’s Baconianism may have been rhetorical. The society encompassed a heterogeneous membership and tended to create myths about its cohesiveness when it was under attack. And attack its critics did. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for example, Jonathan Swift ridicules the futile projects pursued in the ‘Academy of Lagado’, inspired by the research undertaken by members of the Royal Society. Historian Martha Ornstein is so persuaded of the rhetorical use of Baconianism that she sees the imagery of ‘Salomon’s House’ as fulfilling for learned societies what the Communist Manifesto did for socialism.