Chapter eight — THE DRIVE FOR POWER

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. Sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions in the eighteenth century were made by many lesser men banded together. What drove them was the conviction that every man is master of his own salvation.

We take it for granted now that science has a social responsibility. That idea would not have occurred to Newton or to Galileo. They thought of science as an account of the world as it is, and the only responsibility that they acknowledged was to tell the truth. The idea that science is a social enterprise is modern, and it begins at the Industrial Revolution. We are surprised that we cannot trace a social sense further back, because we nurse the illusion that the Industrial Revolution ended a golden age.

The Industrial Revolution is a long train of changes starting about 1760. It is not alone: it forms one of a triad of revolutions, of which the other two were the American Revolution that started in 1775, and the French Revolution that started in 1789. It may seem strange to put into the same packet an industrial revolution and two political revolutions. But the fact is that they were all social revolutions. The Industrial Revolution is simply the Eng­lish way of making those social changes. I think of it as the English Revolution.

What makes it especially English? Obviously, it began in England. England was already the leading manufactur­ing nation. But the manufacture was cottage industry, and the Industrial Revolution begins in the villages. The men who make it are craftsmen: the millwright, the watchmaker, the canal builder, the blacksmith. What makes the Industrial Revolution so peculiarly English is that it is rooted in the countryside.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, in the old age of Newton and the decline of the Royal Society, England basked in a last Indian summer of village industry and the overseas trade of merchant adventurers. The summer faded. Trade grew more competitive. By the end of the century the needs of industry were harsher and more pressing. The organization of work in the cottage was no longer productive enough. Within two generations, roughly between 1760 and 1820, the customary way of running industry changed. Before 1760, it was standard to take work to villagers in their own homes. By 1820, it was standard to bring workers into a factory and have them overseen.

We dream that the country was idyllic in the eighteenth century, a lost paradise like The Deserted Village that Oliver Goldsmith described in 1770.

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.

How blest is he who crowns in shades like these,

A youth of labour with an age of ease.

That is a fable, and George Crabbe, who was a country parson and knew the villager’s life at first hand, was so enraged by it that he wrote an acid, realistic poem in reply.

Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy Swains,

Because the Muses never knew their pains.

O’ercome by labour and bow’d down by time,

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?

The country was a place where most men worked from dawn to dark, and the labourer lived not in the sun, but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labour were immemorial, like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer’s time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines; the millwrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self-made career in 1733 by working at mill wheels, at the age of seventeen, having been born poor in a village.

Brindley’s improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. It was the first multi-purpose machine for the new indus­tries. Brindley worked, for example, to improve the grinding of flints, which were used in the rising pottery industry.

Yet there was a bigger movement in the air by 1750. Water had become the engineers’ element, and men like Brindley were possessed by it. Water was gushing and fanning out all over the countryside. It was not simply a source of power, it was a new wave of movement. James Brindley was a pioneer in the art of building canals or, as it was then called, ‘navigation’. (It was because Brindley could not spell the word ‘navigator’ that workmen who dig trenches or canals are still called ‘navvies’.)

Brindley had begun on his own account, out of interest, to survey the waterways that he travelled as he went about his engineering projects for mills and mines. The Duke of Bridgewater then got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Duke’s pits at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester. It was a prodigious design, as a letter to the Manchester Mercury recorded in 1763.

I have late been viewing the artificial wonders of London and natural wonders of the Peak, but none of them gave me so much pleasure as the Duke of Bridgewater’s navigation in this country. His projector, the ingenious Mr Brindley, has indeed made such improvements in his way as are truly astonishing. At Barton Bridge, he has erected a navigable canal in the air; for it is as high as the tree-tops. Whilst I was surveying it with a mixture of wonder and delight, four barges passed me in the space of about three minutes, two of them being chained together, and dragged by two horses, who went on the terrace of the canal, whereon I durst hardly venture ... to walk, as I almost trembled to behold the large River Irwell underneath me. Where Cornebrooke comes athwart the Duke’s navigation . . . about a mile from Manchester, the Duke’s agents have made a wharf and are selling coals at three pence halfpenny per basket. . . Next summer they intend to land them in (Manchester).

Brindley went on to connect Manchester with Liverpool in an even bolder manner, and in all laid out almost four hundred miles of canals in a network all over England.

Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterize all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. Like Brindley, they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.

The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use. The canals were arteries of com­munication: they were not made to carry pleasure boats, but barges. And the barges were not made to carry luxuries, but pots and pans and bales of cloth, boxes of ribbon, and all the common things that people buy by the pennyworth. These things had been manufactured in villages which were growing into towns now, away from London; it was a country-wide trade.

Technology in England was for use, up and down the country, far from the capital. And that is exactly what technology was not in the dark confines of the courts of Europe. For example, the French and the Swiss were quite as clever as the English (and much more ingenious) in making scientific playthings. But they lavished that clockwork brilliance on making toys for rich or royal patrons. The automata on which they spent years are to this day the most exquisite in the flow of movement that have ever been made. The French were the inventors of automation: that is, of the idea of making each step in a sequence of movements control the next. Even the modern control of machines by punched cards had already been devised by Joseph Marie Jacquard about 1800 for the silk-weaving looms of Lyons, and languished in such luxury employ­ment.

Fine skill of this kind could advance a man in France before the revolution. A watchmaker, Pierre Caron, who invented a new watch escapement and pleased Queen Marie Antoinette, prospered at court and became Count Beaumarchais. He had musical and literary talent, too, and he later wrote a play on which Mozart based his opera The Marriage of Figaro. Although a comedy seems an unlikely source book of social history, the intrigues in and about the play reveal how talent fared at the courts of Europe.

At first sight The Marriage of Figaro looks like a French puppet play, humming with secret machinations. But the fact is that it is an early storm signal of the revolution. Beaumarchais had a fine political nose for what was cooking, and supped with a long spoon. He was employed by the royal ministers in several double-edged deals, and on their behalf in fact was involved in a secret arms deal with the American revolutionaries to help them fight the English. The King might believe that he was playing at Machiavelli, and that he could keep such contrivances of policy for export only. But Beaumarchais was more sensi­tive and more astute, and could smell the revolution coming home. And the message he put into the character of Figaro, the servant, is revolutionary.

Bravo, Signor Padrone—

Now I’m beginning to understand all this mystery, and to appreciate your most generous intentions. The King appoints you Ambassador in London, I go as courier and my Susanna as confidential attachée. No, I’m hanged if she does — Figaro knows better.

Mozart’s famous aria, ‘Count, little Count, you may go dancing, but I’ll play the tune’ (Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino . . .) is a challenge. In Beaumarchais’s words it runs:

No, my lord Count, you shan’t have her, you shan’t. Because you are a great lord, you think you’re a great genius. Nobility, wealth, honours, emoluments! They all make a man so proud! What have you done to earn so many advantages? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more. Apart from that, you’re rather a common type.

A public debate started on the nature of wealth, and since one needn’t own something in order to argue about it, being in fact penniless, I wrote on the value of money and interest. Immediately, I found myself looking at . . . the drawbridge of a prison . . . Printed nonsense is dangerous only in countries where its free circulation is hampered; without the right to criticize, praise and approval are worthless.

That was what was going on under the courtly pattern of French society, as formal as the garden of the Chateau at Villandry.

It seems inconceivable now that the garden scene in The Marriage of Figaro, the aria in which Figaro dubs his master ‘Signor Contino’, little Count, should in their time have been thought revolutionary. But consider when they were written. Beaumarchais finished the play of The Marriage of Figaro about 1780. It took him four years of struggle against a host of censors, above all Louis XVI himself, to get a performance. When it was performed, it was a scandal over Europe. Mozart was able to show it in Vienna by turning it into an opera. Mozart was thirty then; that was in 1786. And three years later, in 1789 — the French Revolution.

Was Louis XVI toppled from his throne and beheaded because of The Marriage of Figaro? Of course not. Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door. What made Napoleon call the last act of the play ‘the revolution in action’? It was Beaumarchais himself, in the person of Figaro, pointing to the Count and saying, ‘Because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius. You have taken trouble with nothing, except to be born’.

Beaumarchais represented a different aristocracy, of working talent: the watchmakers in his age, the masons in the past, the printers. What excited Mozart about the play? The revolutionary ardour, which to him was represented by the movement of Freemasons to which he belonged, and which he glorified in The Magic Flute. (Freemasonry was then a rising and secret society whose undertone was anti-establishment and anti-clerical, and because Mozart was known to be a member it was difficult to get a priest to come to his deathbed in 1791.) Or think of the greatest Freemason of them all in that age, the printer Benjamin Franklin. He was American emissary in France at the Court of Louis XVI in 1784 when The Marriage of Figaro was first performed. And he more than anyone else represents those forward looking, forceful, confident, thrusting, marching men who made the new age.

For one thing, Benjamin Franklin had such marvellous luck. When he went to present his credentials to the French Court in 1778, it turned out at the last moment that the wig and formal clothes were too small for him. So he boldly went in his own hair, and was instantly hailed as the child of nature from the backwoods.

All his actions have the stamp of a man who knows his mind, and knows the words to speak it. He published an annual, Poor Richard’s Almanack, which is full of the raw material for future proverbs: ‘Hunger never saw bad bread.’ ‘If you want to know the value of money, try to borrow some.’ Franklin wrote of it:

In 1732 I first published my Almanac ... it was continued by me about 25 years ... I endeavoured to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it; vending annually near ten thousand . . . scarce any neighbourhood in the province being without it. I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books.

To those who doubted the use of new inventions (the occasion was the first hydrogen balloon ascent in Paris in 1783) Franklin replied, ‘What is the use of a new-born baby?’ His character is condensed in the answer, optimistic, down to earth, pithy, and memorable enough to be used again by Michael Faraday, a greater scientist, in the next century. Franklin was alive to how things were said. He made the first pair of bifocal spectacles for himself by sawing his lenses in half, because he could not follow French at Court unless he could watch the speaker’s expression.

Men like Franklin had a passion for rational knowledge. Looking at the mountain of neat achievements scattered through his life, the pamphlets, the cartoons, the printer’s stamps, we are struck by the spread and richness of his inventive mind. The scientific entertainment of the day was electricity. Franklin loved fun (he was a rather improper man), yet he took electricity seriously; he recognized it as a force in nature. He proposed that lightning is electric, and in 1752 he proved it — how would a man like Franklin prove it? — by hanging a key from a kite in a thunderstorm. Being Franklin, his luck held; the experiment did not kill him, only those who copied it. Of course, he turned his experiment into a practical invention, the lightning conductor; and made it illuminate the theory of electricity too by arguing that all electricity is of one kind and not, as was then thought, two different fluids.

There is a footnote to the invention of the lightning conductor to remind us again that social history hides in unexpected places. Franklin reasoned, rightly, that the lightning conductor would work best with a sharp end. This was disputed by some scientists, who argued for a rounded end, and the Royal Society in England had to arbitrate. However, the argument was settled at a more primitive and elevated level: King George III, in a rage against the American revolution, fitted rounded ends to the lightning conductors on royal buildings. Political interference with science is usually tragic; it is happy to have a comic instance that rivals the war in Gulliver’s Travels between ‘the two great Empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu’ that opened their breakfast egg at the sharp or the rounded end.

Franklin and his friends lived science; it was constantly in their thoughts and just as constantly in their hands. The understanding of nature to them was an intensely practical pleasure. These were men in society: Franklin was a political man, whether he printed paper money or his endless racy pamphlets. And his politics were as downright as his experiments. He changed the florid opening of the Declaration of Independence to read with simple confi­dence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’. When war between England and the American revolutionaries broke out, he wrote openly to an English politician who had been his friend, in words charged with fire:

You have begun to burn our towns. Look upon your hands!

They are stained with the blood of your relations.

The red glow has become the picture of the new age in England — in the sermons of John Wesley, and in the furnace sky of the Industrial Revolution, such as the fiery landscape of Abbeydale in Yorkshire, an early centre for new processes in making iron and steel. The masters of industry were the ironmasters: powerful, more than life — size, demonic figures, whom governments suspected, rightly, of really believing that all men are created equal. The working men in the north and the west were no longer farm labourers, they were now an industrial community. They had to be paid in coin, not in kind. Governments in London were remote from all this. They refused to mint enough small change, so ironmasters like John Wilkinson minted their own wage tokens, with their own unroyal

faces on them. Alarm in London: was this a Republican plot? No, it was not a plot. But it is true that radical inventions came out of radical brains. The first model of an iron bridge to be exhibited in London was proposed by Tom Paine, a firebrand in America and in England, protagonist of The Rights of Man.

Meanwhile, cast iron was already being used in revol­utionary ways by the ironmasters like John Wilkinson. He built the first iron boat in 1787, and boasted that it would carry his coffin when he died. And he was buried in an iron coffin in 1808. Of course, the boat sailed under an iron bridge; Wilkinson had helped to build that in 1779 at a nearby Shropshire town that is still called Ironbridge.

Did the architecture of iron really rival the architecture of the cathedrals? It did. This was a heroic age. Thomas Telford felt that, spanning the landscape with iron. He was born a poor shepherd, then worked as a journeyman mason, and on his own initiative became an engineer of roads and canals, and a friend of poets. His great aqueduct that carries the Llangollen canal over the river Dee shows him to have been a master of cast iron on the grand scale. The monuments of the Industrial Revolution have a Roman grandeur, the grandeur of Republican men.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way. And for another, a majority of them were not members of the Church of England but belonged to a puritan tradition in the Unitarian and similar movements. John Wilkinson was much under the influence of his brother-in-law Joseph Priestley, later famous as a chemist, but who was a Unitarian minister and was probably the pioneer of the principle, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.

Joseph Priestley, in turn, was scientific adviser to Josiah Wedgwood. Now Wedgwood we usually think of as a man who made marvellous tableware for aristocracy and royalty: and so he did, on rare occasions, when he got the commission. For example, in 1774 he made a service of nearly a thousand highly decorated pieces for Catherine the Great of Russia, which cost over £2000 — a great deal of money in the coin of that day. But the base of that tableware was his own pottery, creamware; and in fact all the thousand pieces, undecorated, cost less than £50, yet looked and handled like Catherine the Great’s in every way except for the hand-painted idylls. The creamware which made Wedgwood famous and prosperous was not porcelain, but a white earthenware pottery for common use. That is what the man in the street could buy, at about a shilling a piece. And in time that is what transformed the kitchens of the working class in the Industrial Revolution.

Wedgwood was an extraordinary man: inventive, of course, in his own trade, and also in the scientific techniques that might make his trade more exact. He invented a way of measuring the high temperatures in the kiln by means of a sort of sliding scale of expansion in which a clay test — piece moved. Measuring high temperatures is an ancient and difficult problem in the manufacture of ceramics and metals, and it is fitting (as things went then) that Wedgwood was elected to the Royal Society.

Josiah Wedgwood was no exception; there were dozens of men like him. Indeed, he belonged to a group of about a dozen men, the Lunar Society of Birmingham (Birming­ham was then still a scattered group of industrial villages), who gave themselves the name because they met near the full moon. This was so that people like Wedgwood, who came from a distance to Birmingham, should be able to travel safely over wretched roads that were dangerous on dark nights.

But Wedgwood was not the most important industrialist there: that was Matthew Boulton, who brought James Watt to Birmingham because there they could build the steam engine. Boulton was fond of talking about measurement; he said that nature had destined him to be an engineer by having him born in the year 1728, because that is the number of cubic inches in a cubic foot. Medicine was important in that group also, for there were new and important advances being made. Dr William Withering discovered the use of digitalis in Birmingham. One of the doctors who has remained famous, who belonged to the Lunar Society, was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. The other grandfather? Josiah Wedg­wood.

Societies like the Lunar Society represent the sense of the makers of the Industrial Revolution (that very English sense) that they had a social responsibility. I call it an English sense, though in fact that is not quite fair; the Lunar Society was much influenced by Benjamin Franklin and by other Americans associated with it. What ran through it was a simple faith: the good life is more than material decency, but the good life must be based on material decency.

It took a hundred years before the ideals of the Lunar Society became reality in Victorian England. When it did come, the reality seemed commonplace, even comic, like a Victorian picture postcard. It is comic to think that cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. Yet these simple things — coal in an iron range, glass in the windows, a choice of food — were a wonderful rise in the standard of life and health. By our standards, the industrial towns were slums, but to the people who had come from a cottage, a house in a terrace was a liberation from hunger, from dirt, and from disease; it offered a new wealth of choice. The bedroom with the text on the wall seems funny and pathetic to us, but for the working class wife it was the first experience of private decency. Probably the iron bedstead saved more women from childbed fever than the doctor’s black bag, which was itself a medical innovation.

These benefits came from mass production in factories. And the factory system was ghastly; the schoolbooks are right about that. But it was ghastly in the old traditional way. Mines and workshops had been dank, crowded and tyrannical long before the Industrial Revolution. The factories simply carried on as village industry had always done, with a heartless contempt for those who worked in them.

Pollution from the factories was not new either. Again, it was the tradition of the mine and the workshop, which had always fouled their environment. We think of pollution as a modern blight, but it is not. It is another expression of the squalid indifference to health and decency that in past centuries had made the Plague a yearly visitation.

The new evil that made the factory ghastly was different: it was the domination of men by the pace of the machines. The workers for the first time were driven by an inhuman clockwork: the power first of water and then of steam. It seems insane to us (it was insane) that manufacturers should be intoxicated by the gush of power that spurted from the factory boiler without a stop. A new ethic was preached in which the cardinal sin was not cruelty or vice, but idleness. Even the Sunday schools warned children that

Satanfinds some Mischief still

For idle Hands to do.

The change in the scale of time in the factories was ghastly and destructive. But the change in the scale of power opened the future. Matthew Boulton of the Lunar Society, for example, built a factory which was a showplace, because Boulton’s kind of metalwork depended on the skill of craftsmen. Here James Watt came to build the sun-god of all power, the steam engine, because only here was he able to find the standards of accuracy needed to make the engine steam-tight.

In 1776 Matthew Boulton was very excited about his new partnership with James Watt to build the steam engine. When James Boswell, the biographer, came to see Boulton that year, he said to him grandly, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have — power’. It is a lovely phrase. But it is also true.

Power is a new preoccupation, in a sense a new idea, in science. The Industrial Revolution, the English revolution, turned out to be the great discoverer of power. Sources of energy were sought in nature: wind, sun, water, steam, coal. And a question suddenly became concrete: Why are they all one? What relation exists between them? That had never been asked before. Until then science had been entirely concerned with exploring nature as she is. But now the modern conception of transforming nature in order to obtain power from her, and of changing one form of power into another, had come up to the leading edge of science. In particular, it grew clear that heat is a form of energy, and is converted into other forms at a fixed rate of exchange. In 1824 Sadi Carnot, a French engineer, looking at steam engines, wrote a treatise on what he called ‘la puissance motrice du feu’, in which he founded, in essence, the science of thermodynamics — the dynamics of heat. Energy had become a central concept in science; and the main concern in science now was the unity of nature, of which energy is the core.

And it was a main concern not only in science. You see it equally in the arts, and the surprise is there. While this is going on, what is going on in literature? The uprush of romantic poetry round about the year 1800. How could the romantic poets be interested in industry? Very simply: the new concept of nature as the carrier of energy took them by storm. They loved the word ‘storm’ as a synonym for energy, in phrases like Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and thrust’. The climax of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is introduced by a storm that breaks the deadly calm and releases life again.

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

To and fro they were hurried about!

And to and fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

The loud wind never reached the ship,

Yet now the ship moved on!

Beneath the lightning and the Moon

The dead men gave a groan.

A young German philosopher, Friedrich von Schelling, just at this time in 1799, started a new form of philosophy which has remained powerful in Germany, Naturphilosophie — philosophy of nature. From him Coleridge brought it to England. The Lake Poets had it from Coleridge, and the Wedgwoods, who were friends of Coleridge’s, and indeed supported him with an annuity. Poets and painters were suddenly captured by the idea that nature is the fountain of power, whose different forms are all expressions of the same central force, namely energy.

And not only nature. Romantic poetry says in the plainest way that man himself is the carrier of a divine, at least a natural, energy. The Industrial Revolution created freedom (in practice) for men who wanted to fulfil what they had in them — a concept inconceivable a hundred years earlier. But hand in hand, romantic thought inspired those men to make of their freedom a new sense of personality in nature. It was said best of all by the greatest of the romantic poets, William Blake, very simply: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’.

The key word is ‘delight’, the key concept is ‘liberation’ — a sense of fun as a human right. Naturally, the marching men of the age expressed the impulse in invention. So they produced a bottomless horn of plenty of eccentric ideas to delight the Saturday evenings of the working family. (To this day, most of the applications that lumber the patent offices are slightly mad, like the inventors themselves.) We could build an avenue from here to the moon lined with these lunacies, and it would be just about as pointless and yet as high-spirited as getting to the moon. Consider, for example, the idea of the zoetrope, a circular machine for animating a Victorian comic strip by flashing the pictures past the eye one after another. It is quite as exciting as an evening at the cinema, and comes to the point rather quicker. Or the automatic orchestra, which has the advan­tage of a very small repertoire. All of it is packed with homespun vigour which has not heard of good taste, and is absolutely self-made. Every pointless invention for the household, like the mechanical vegetable chopper, is matched by another superb one, like the telephone. And finally, at the end of the avenue of pleasure, we should certainly put the machine that is the essence of machineness: it does nothing at all!

The men who made the wild inventions and the grand ones came from the same mould. Think of the invention that rounded out the Industrial Revolution as the canals had begun it: the railways. They were made possible by Richard Trevithick, who was a Cornish blacksmith and a wrestler and a strong man. He turned the steam engine into a mobile power pack by changing Watt’s beam engine into a high-pressure engine. It was a life-giving act, which opened a blood-stream of communication for the world, and made England the heart of it.

We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; we had better be, for we have many things to put right in it. But it has made our world richer, smaller, and for the first time ours. And I mean that literally: our world, everybody’s world.

From its earliest beginnings, when it was still dependent on water power, the Industrial Revolution was terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihood it overturned. Revolutions are — it is their nature, because by definition revolutions move too fast for those whom they strike. Yet it became in time a social revolution and established that social equality, the equality of rights, above all intellectual equality, on which we depend. Where would a man like me be, where would you be, if we had been born before 1800? We still live in the middle of the Industrial Revolution and find it hard to see its implications, but the future will say of it that in the ascent of man it is a step, a stride, as powerful as the Renaissance. The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature.

That was done by scientists and romantic poets who saw that the wind and the sea and the stream and the steam and the coal are all created by the heat of the sun, and that heat itself is a form of energy. A good many men thought of that, but it was established above all by one man, James Prescott Joule of Manchester. He was born in 1818, and from the age of twenty spent his life in the delicate detail of experiments to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat — that is, to establish the exact rate of exchange at which mechanical energy is turned into heat. And since that sounds a very solemn and boring undertaking, I must tell a funny story about him.

In the summer of 1847, the young William Thomson (later to be the great Lord Kelvin, the panjandrum of British science) was walking — where does a British gentleman walk in the Alps? — from Chamonix to Mont Blanc. And there he met — whom does a British gentleman meet in the Alps? — a British eccentric: James Joule, carrying an enormous thermometer and accompanied at a little distance by his wife in a carriage. All his life, Joule had wanted to demonstrate that water, when it falls through 778 feet, rises one degree Fahrenheit in temperature. Now on his honeymoon he could decently visit Chamonix (rather as American couples go to Niagara Falls) and let nature run the experiment for him. The waterfall here is ideal. It is not all of 778 feet, but he would get about half a degree Fahrenheit. As a footnote, I should say that he did not — of course — actually succeed; alas, the waterfall is too broken by spray for the experiment to work.

The story of the British gentlemen at their scientific eccentricities is not irrelevant. It was such men who made nature romantic; the Romantic Movement in poetry came step by step with them. We see it in poets like Goethe (who was also a scientist) and in musicians like Beethoven. We see it first of all in Wordsworth: the sight of nature as a new quickening of the spirit because the unity in it was immediate to the heart and mind. Wordsworth had come through the Alps in 1790 when he had been drawn to the Continent by the French Revolution. And in 1798 he said, in Tintern Abbey, what could not be said better.

For nature then . . .

To me was all in all — I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion.

‘Nature then to me was all in all.’ Joule never said it as well as that. But he did say, ‘The grand agents of nature are indestructible’, and he meant the same things.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1070