Picturing science: comet watching

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

‘Looking at the comet till you get a criek in the neck’. Detail of a caricature by

Thomas Rowlandson, 1811. Source: National Maritime Museum

Having begun my series called Picturing Science, I realised that I have stolen the title of another website, which does at least give me an excuse to point those interested in imagery in the history of science to the Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit project. This fascinating academic project is looking in detail at images as an integral part of doing science, while my series is – for now at least – more focused on science in the public sphere.

Thus, while last week’s fanciful image was produced in the sober, educational context of an encyclopedia, this week’s takes us from the heavens right down to earth. It is a caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, published by Thomas Tegg in 1811, and can be viewed in full here.

On one level the print satirises the increasing popular interest in astronomy in the first half of the 19th century. With telescopes increasingly affordable, and comets in the news, there were undoubtedly more individuals than ever who, like this man in his nightcap and nightgown, were straining to view the heavens until they “get a criek [sic] in the neck”.

1805 had seen what is now known as Encke’s comet and Biela’s comet, two years later there was the much more spectacular Great Comet of 1807. In the year that this print was published, another bright comet, with a remarkable reddish colour and broad tail, was visible to the naked eye for around 260 days. This was the Great Comet of 1811.

As so often, in history and even today, the appearance of a bright comet was connected to particular events on earth. 1811, for example, saw a particularly good wine vintage, and so Comet Wine was marketed. However, it was also interpreted as having portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia the following year – not least by Napoleon himself – and became known as Napoleon’s Comet. However, something else of earthly – or, perhaps, earthy – concern is happening in this caricature.

While the old man’s eye is glued to his telescope, and his mind contemplating the heavens, another man takes advantage of the situation, paying lascivious attention to the astronomer’s young and attractive wife. Just to make the relationship clear, her fur stole appears to add a tail to the older man – a symbol, like horns, of the cuckold.

This joke, about astronomers and enthusiasts being so wrapped up in their ideas, views of nature and gadgets that they fail to see what is going on under their noses, is an old one. It appears in Gulliver’s Travels among the inhabitants of the floating island Laputa, who I mentioned inmy post on Swift and satire. It is, unsurprisingly, a common trope of caricature, something I discussed with some other examples in an old post on caricaturing astronomers.

You can see some other distracted astronomers and some 19th-century comet imagery from the National Maritime Museum’s collections and elsewhere on my Pinterest boards. Also on Pinterest are some morePutti of Science, collected by Danny Birchall after last week’s optical putti.

Picturing science: the eyes have it

Cross-posted from The H-Word blog.

Detail from an engraving depicting ‘Optics’ from the Encyclopaedia Londinensis.

Source: National Maritime Museum

In a series called Picturing Science, that seems appropriate to tired eyes at the end of the week, I am going to explore some images from the history of science. In this I am taking advantage of my role as a curator, and the kind permission of the Picture Library, to draw on the object and art collections of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

The imagery surrounding science has changed hugely over the course of history, and it is undoubtedly the case that the way it is depicted influences our ideas about it. The colouring, the context, the associations all play their part in giving signals about what science is, who does it, who should care about it and why.

The picture heading this post is a striking detail from the centre of a print, one of a number that were my first cataloguing project on joining the Museum back in 2008. You can see the full image here. It is dated 1820 and, although not a particularly fine or rare image, is a long, long a way from how we might choose to depict the subject – Optics – today.

It was published in Encyclopaedia Londinensis, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, published in 24 volumes between 1810 and 1829, complied by the printer John Wilkes.

I am not sure who wrote the long treatise on optics, and would be grateful if anyone can let me know here or @beckyfh. However, we do know one of the readers: George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal from 1835-1881, recalled that he owed much of his early education in optics and the other sciences to the Encyclopaedia, writing in hisAutobiography that it was “a work which without being high in any respect is one of the most generally useful that I have seen”.

The print engraver is J. Chapman, who was responsible for most of the plates in the Encyclopaedia. The artist of many of the more technical illustrations, such as this one, was J. Pass. However, this rather more fanciful image is credited to A.D.M. Whoever this was, they had a splendid way of imagining the science of light: rainbow nymphs surrounding an eye, in the corners putti demonstrate instruments and phenomena.

This putto shows off a camera obscura, a device for projecting an image onto a surface to aid the artist.

This one shows us the phenomena of refraction, with light appearing to bend a stick as it passes through water.

This chap seems to have his telescope trained directly on the charming sight of the red nymph (take a look!).

And, finally, in the bottom left corner, this putto has created the whole scene by holding up his prism - the iconic instrument of of optics – to split light into its seven colours.

It is a science not disembodied but, apparently, teaming with people, even if they are of a distinctly mythical sort.

 

Update:

The artist, A.D.M. is identified on the Wellcome website as Ange Denis Macquin, who seems to have written (or illustrated?) a book on animals and a Latin poem on gastronomy… The Hebrew at the top of the picture appeared to be, as might be guessed, “And God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light”.

 

Gulliver’s travels in science and satire

Cross posted from The H Word blog.

For historians of science, Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels is well known both as a work of what we might call proto-science fiction and as a satire on the experimental philosophy that was being promoted by the Royal Society at the time of its publication – two years before the death of Isaac Newton.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a talk at the very same Society that Swift had mocked as wasting time on projects such as the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers. It was given by Dr Greg Lynall, a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, which looks well-worth a read from the review posted on the website of the British Society for Literature and Science.

Swift was a High Church Anglican and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Knowing this, some might leap to the conclusion that here was someone who did not and could not understand the important work being done by Fellows of the Royal Society, that here was a clash of world views and evidence of a natural hostility between science and religion. This, of course, is completely off track. It ignores the complexity of Swift’s views, the validity of some of his targets and the fact that, while sectarianism might be rife, the importance of religion per se was not in question.

In many ways the whole of Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on the scientific approach of the Royal Society. It is presented as a travel narrative, reporting on extraordinary sights and experiences in foreign lands in a calm, detached and, whenever possible, quantitative fashion. The Royal Society had often encouraged travellers to make such records and reported on information collected in circumstances that ranged across formal experiment, mathematical proof, astronomical observation, field work, library work, happenstance and even hearsay. Curiosities and natural monstrosities took their place alongside Newton’s crucial experiment.

The most significant section of the book from the history of science point of view is Gulliver’s visit to the floating island, Laputa, where the inhabitants are enamoured of mathematics, measuring, quantifying, experimenting and astronomical predictions. The island floats by magnetic levitation, in what seems to be one of the only ‘practical’ applications of their knowledge – their obsession with accurate measurement has led them to apply the use of quadrants to the art of tailoring, resulting only in badly-fitting clothes. Their heads literally in the clouds, they have to be woken up from their speculations to communicate with Gulliver.

Swift was satirising the ubiquity of Newtonian philosophy in polite society of 1720s London, but he was not being ‘anti-experimental philosophy’, just as no one today is ‘anti-science’. Yes, there was fun to be poked at some of the extravagances and plain oddness of the new philosophy and some its followers, just as in Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso, which targeted Robert Hooke. However, it works as satire because of genuine concerns lurking beneath – and some of those concerns remain legitimate today.

Most obviously, in Laputa, Swift criticises a world of mathematical and philosophical endeavour that does little or nothing to better people’s lives, especially those of their subjects in the colony Balnibarbi, located beneath the floating Laputa. In fact, satirising the power relations of Britain and Swift’s native Ireland or, more broadly, the rich and poor, we find that Laputa is used to subdue Balnibarbi by threats to block the sun or rain, by throwing down rocks, or even crushing rebel cities by lowering Laputa onto them.

While, in the real world, there was much rhetoric around the beneficial usefulness of new knowledge and, indeed, much focus on practical problems like navigation, mining and agriculture, Swift was surely right that useful applications of the new knowledge either seemed a long time coming, or were clearly in the interests of King, government, military and landowners (who, after all, are much more useful patrons of science than the poor).

Lynall’s talk made it clear how political much of Swift’s satire was, even when the focus might appear to be science. While often associated with the Tories, Swift was suspicious of party politics and the patronage and jobbing that went along with them. Newton became one of the targets of his attacks not because of his science, but because of his influential and very well remunerated position as Master of the Mint, bestowed on him by the Whigs.

Swift once claimed that he had a “perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression”. Lynall showed that if the knowledge or authority of experimental philosophy were used in backing it, that too should be called out. A key episode was where Newton presented evidence to back William Wood’s application for a valuable contract to make new coinage for Ireland. Corruption and bribery – including involvement ofthe King’s mistress – were widely rumoured, as was the claim that the coins were of inferior quality. Swift took Newton, and what he viewed as his fraudulent use of technical evidence in the assays he carried out in Wood’s favour, as legitimate targets for denunciation in his Drapier’s Letters and vicious satire.

Swifts targets were political and often very personal. But, where he smelt corruption, it would seem that the sins of blinding people with ‘the science’ or impressive credentials only made a bad job worse. Meanwhile, the folly of being satisfied simply with the wonder of astronomical prediction, experimental apparatus and exact measurement, while outside people continue to starve, is one we should always be reminded of by the best critics and satirists.

 

The trouble with ‘science’

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Test tubes? Check. Pipette? Check. Safety glasses? Check. White coat? Check. Random coloured liquid? Check. Photograph: Alamy

I find that I am nearly always on my guard when I come across the words “science” and “scientist” in a sentence. OK, maybe not nearly always; after all, I call myself a historian of science, I write this post in the science section of the Guardian’s website and am forever using the words myself. Nevertheless …

“Scientists say …” is a phrase that hides far more than it explains. Which scientists, working in what field, where and why? Geologists are unlikely to be saying much, for example, about cancer, although if they are we should probably assess their comments differently from those emanating from a medical research lab. One group of chemists/astronomers/climate scientists may say something very different to another. Scientists can be academics, working in industry or for government departments, military or civilian. They can be pursuing original research or making use of routine techniques.

“Scientists say” is little more use, in fact, than “they say”. It just sounds more authoritative. Strangely, though, while use of the term is usually unhelpfully vague, the iconography of science and scientists is very often too specific. Thus test tubes and white coats have become the overriding symbol for people and activities that may have nothing whatsoever to do with these objects.

The words also start my historical sensibilities twitching, on the alert for anachronism. “Scientist” is a particular problem, being a word of fairly recent invention. While it was coined in the 1830s, by William Whewell, it was barely used at all until the end of the century, as this Google Ngram indicates.

Using “scientist” when discussing a period when the word was not used can be seriously misleading. We risk loading an individual’s views, status, ambitions and work with associations and ideas that would have meant nothing to them. The word allows us to forget to enquire whether they did something else to make their living, or were personally wealthy, and that science was not a career or vocation. Not only did the word not exist but there was no equivalent and no such idea.

Of course “science” is equally problematic. The root, “scientia” is simply knowledge or understanding, and what we now think of as science was, until the 19th century, natural philosophy and a range of more specific and practical fields: astronomy, mathematics, chymistry, physick and so on. Its meaning is historically unstable, and what counts as scientific in one period is not the same as what counts in another.

All this naturally makes it somewhat dubious that we should call a discipline that includes research on the pre-modern period history of science. It is shorthand, of course, but not for “the study of everything that looks like science to us today” or “the study of everything that we can trace as having led to today’s science”, but something more like “the study of humanity’s ideas about and interaction with the natural world”. Our definition carefully avoids connotations of the professional contexts that are surely ubiquitous in the word’s meaning today.

This leads me to another common misuse of “science”, which is as a synonym simply for “nature”. An example, as my fellow H-Worder, Vanessa, pointed out on Twitter the other day, is the Facebook page I fucking love science, which often seems to confuse the two. Our knowledge about nature is certainly mediated by science, but the two are not the same thing – nature gets on just fine without anyone watching, and our ideas about it have changed over the course of history, and will change in the future.

If it’s not “Yay science!” being written on a picture of a wild animal, it’s “science” being celebrated for our mobile phones, or blamed for not having given us rocket packs. These things are, of course, technology, which, historical research suggests, is more likely to be a driver for than any kind of simple or direct outcome of science. If you really want a particular gadget what you need is goal-oriented R&D, not “science”.

Maybe these expanded definitions reflect a similar shorthand to the one I described for “history of science” above, or maybe they simply show that the word “science” continues to have fluctuating boundaries. But it is worth being clear what we’re talking about when “science” is used to create authority, leverage funding, concentrate concerns or promise solutions. So, while I don’t want to ban its use, let’s think what we really mean.

Heritage and the Royal Institution

Cross-posted from The H Word blog [first published 29 January 2013].

The Royal Institution in about 1838, by T H Shepherd. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It has been interesting to observe reactions to the recent news about the financial troubles at the Royal Institution potentially being so severe that they might have to sell their Georgian premises on Albemarle Street. There have been calls and petitions to save the building based on an appeal to history and nostalgia. Equally, there have been questions (e.g.here, here, and here) about the RI’s modern role and whether this is well-served by a vast Mayfair building and the traditions that it celebrates.

Without treading too far into the question of what the RI does or should do as an institution for the communication of science in the 21st century, it is worth thinking about it as a site of scientific heritage and ask what makes it unique and worth preserving even if the Royal Institution itself should cease to exist.

Scientific heritage can be a difficult thing to assess, preserve and interpret. Removed from their context, old scientific instruments are apt to lose much of their meaning. Those which survive in museums are often not those which were ever used, for outdated equipment tends to be replaced and thrown away. The large technology and infrastructure of modern science poses enormous challenges for collection and preservation. Buildings in which scientific work has been done are often unexciting architecturally and opaque to the uninitiated.

Unesco, responsible for the inscription of World Heritage, has recently begun to notice that scientific heritage is under-represented on its lists. The problems of aesthetics and size are pertinent, along with the fact that science is often not understood as a manifestation of human culture in the same way that palaces, art works or technological sites like bridges and railways are.

When Unesco weighs up the importance of world heritage, it does so with the aid of three categories: immovable, moveable and intangible heritage. The first includes buildings, monuments, sites and landscapes. Plainly some of these are movable, or at least alterable, but they are associated with a particular place and very often the linking of a set of buildings or their placing within a landscape lends them greater significance than they might have on their own.

Moveable heritage, broadly speaking, consists of things that could end up in museums, such as paintings, objets d’art, textiles, scientific instruments, furniture, books and manuscripts. While individual items of immovable heritage may be hugely important or valuable, their inclusion within a larger collection, or their placing within a particular location can greatly enhance their significance and meaning.

Finally, intangible heritage is the stuff that is harder to pin down. Unesco defines it as including “living expressions and the traditions that countless groups and communities worldwide have inherited from their ancestors and transmit to their descendants, in most cases orally”. Things inscribed as intangible heritage include dances, festivals, recipes and a bewildering variety of traditions.

Intangible ideas and traditions can also play an important role in assessing the significance of items in the other two categories. Given the fact that the history of science is associated with many intangibles (i.e. things that we no longer touch or hold) – such as people, ideas, skills, discussions and so on – it is clear that this third category can be an extremely useful concept to bear in mind.

Arguably, when all three of these types of heritage come together, we have something particularly valuable. I am lucky enough to work within a World Heritage Site which includes a site of outstanding scientific significance. The Royal Observatory includes buildings designed for science, which are enhanced by their housing historic instruments used on that site, and other wonderful objects. On top of this there are the intangibles associated with the work of the Astronomers Royal and with the concepts of the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time.

The RI has a similar combination. It has a building long used for scientific and related purposes, parts of which were designed specifically for their role – most obviously the lecture theatre. It also has significant book, object and archive collections, made more significant by their close association with the place in which they are displayed or stored.

The building and objects are associated with the intangibles surrounding the people and scientific research undertaken at the institution. While Faraday’s electrical work and the discovery of 10 elements are usually highlighted, there was a wide range of work done in analysis and testing materials and techniques, often for private or government clients.

In addition to this, of course, the RI had a key role to play in the story of the relationship between science and the public. It is hard to think of another historic site that has combined these roles over such a long period of time and, especially, one that is still inhabited by the same institution. The RI’s intangible heritage is undoubtedly heightened by this fact.

It is true that the RI’s primary audience was a privileged one, catering for a very different market to, say, popular attractions with scientific content or working men’s institutions. It is not, perhaps, a tradition we would be keen to perpetuate (and the RI certainly does not do so exclusively), but we can recognise that getting society leaders on board with the messages of Davy, Faraday and their successors was hugely significant for British science in the period of its nascent professionalisation.

While science communication and outreach can and should take place beyond such hallowed halls, there is benefit in having at least some of it flavoured and informed by science’s heritage. It reminds us that science is not disembodied, pure knowledge, but that it is created by people in particular times and places, with particular equipment and in response to the demands and possibilities of the society in which they inhabit. The heritage of the RI also shows that science has to be communicated – and that this is a business with a long and often rather repetitive back story from which audiences and communicators alike can learn.

The combination of types of unique scientific heritage at the Royal Institution should be cherished. I also suspect its continuity on one site both enhances its significance and may be the best chance of its preservation.

Science, the public and the history of science

Cross-posted from The H Word blog. This post relates to the Twitter spat that took place between various scientists, science advocates, historians, philosophers, communicators at the end of last year. For some context and links to other related posts, see Peter Brok’s post, notes and comments.

Some Twitter-types may have noticed that the New Statesman editorial by Brian Cox and Robin Ince on science, evidence and policy provoked some discussion and debate between the authors and various people loosely within the fields of History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies.

One interesting post on the piece has been written by Jack Stilgoe here in the Guardian. Let me say straight up that, like Stilgoe, there was plenty I agree with in the piece. Particularly the meat of their article, in paragraphs 4 to 7, including the clear acknowledgement that science is work-in-progress and that it cannot be the only thing that policy-makers take into account.

Likewise, most of those engaged in the Twitter discussion would have been in complete agreement that science is an excellent way of producing evidence vital for informed policy and that the scientific evidence on climate change is clear.

So why the fuss? It was an opinion piece that discussed the nature of science and the role of science in society. These are areas that people in HPS and STS have devoted their careers to researching. The view of science that was presented here does not chime with the current consensus within these disciplines, and that naturally provoked a reaction – just as scientists are provoked to react by those who reject or ignore their research.

Both sides of this discussion have more in common than not, and the criticism was made in good faith and with a genuine belief that science, science communication and the use of scientific evidence in government policy, would benefit. We aim to aid, not to jeopardise understanding of scientific evidence, by following the evidence uncovered by our disciplines (and, yes, there are other kinds of evidence than scientific).

Broadly, my objections fall into two categories:

1. The piece suggests that science is separated from the “moral, geopolitical and economic components”, even if they rightly acknowledge that it must be part of policy-making

2. Some large and a-historical claims are made regarding changing attitudes to science and technology

On the first, I agree with what Stilgoe has written: “Climate science cannot be separated from climate politics”, for scientists are people and they are funded by people. Choices about scientific research and its interpretation are also influenced by geographic, economic, moral and other frameworks. Failing to acknowledge this places an impossible burden on science and its practitioners and inhibits good discussion around different kinds of evidence and opinion.

While there are lots of good phrases about this in the piece, it remains the case that we have scientific evidence on one side of the equation and everything else on the other. It is right to say that scientific evidence “should not be seen or presented … as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged”, and yet it and “the scientific method” are given a unique place in this discussion. It is the only thing placed as an “adjudicator above opinion”, and they explicitly see a border between science and politics, even if it is portrayed as an unclear one.

The second issue arises in the article’s framing, especially the big opening: “The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The foundation for these changes is the scientific method”. This was bound to get the historical and philosophical radar twitching, even if it seems peripheral to the focus of the piece.

“[U]nparalleled human advances” is questionable, for almost any other 100-year period can give a similar sense. In the West in recent centuries, science and technology have certainly played a huge part in those changes, but claiming that the kind of technological innovations Ince and Cox are referring to are due to “the scientific method” is something most scholarship in the history and philosophy of science rejects. Firstly, there are many scientific methods and many, when studied in detail, are not particularly methodological. Secondly, new technology tends to lead to new scientific research, rather than vice versa.

This is fairly trivial in the context, however galling to those who carry out research that demonstrates these points. However, more problematic is the fact that the piece goes on to claim that our cushy life and unquestioning consumption of incomprehensible technology is leading us to be less impressed by and accepting of such novelties. Apparently we are devolving:

The technology and advances in knowledge that cosset us have removed, to a large extent, the need to use our ingenuity and to think rationally. Believing complete drivel was once selected against; now it gets you an expert slot on daytime TV.

In fact, historical research suggests that levels of “believing complete drivel”, like those of greeting innovations with “excitement and awe” or boredom or suspicion have not changed a great deal. There is no evidence that “humbug and charlatanism are able to creep into our lives with greater ease”, and I have yet to find anyone arguing that “we are no longer obliged to continue the scientific exploration of nature” or that “scientific progress is no longer desirable or necessary”.

It is untrue and unhelpful to claim that those who question or ignore certain scientific findings are opposed to science in general. Such statements set up unnecessary dualisms and a “you’re either with us or against us” feeling. Frankly, if people only accept part of the package, better that than none. We need to avoid situations where people, who for whatever cultural, religious or personal reasons are unconvinced by scientific arguments in one area, find themselves forced into taking sides in a science/anti-science dichotomy.

How are we to proceed? We should simply accept that “It is not logical to challenge the findings of science unless there are specific, evidence-based reasons for doing so”. But the trouble is that people do challenge, and being told that they can’t isn’t likely to stop them. There is no call here to improve communication with those who have doubts about the message. In the end, we are left simply with “Believe us”.

Finally, I do think that scientists are better at science than me, and that successful science communicators are better at communicating science (to a large audience, if not to all audiences). I also think that when scientists, rightly, get involved with discussing the nature of science (philosophy) and its role in society (history, social sciences) they might accept that there are other realms of scholarship that have thought about these things long and hard, and have important things to add to the conversation.

Report on Oceanic Enterprise conference

On 25-26 January, several members of the Longitude Project team were in California for our conference at the Huntington Library, Oceanic Enterprise: Location, Longitude, and Maritime Cultures 1770-1830. It was an extremely enjoyable and interesting meeting, which I attempted to summarise in a post over on the Longitude Project blog. (It’s worth clicking on the link to see Simon Werrett’s appropriately themed fantasy conference dinner menu, if not my ramblings.)

Piltdown Man and other phantom species

Cross-posted from The H Word.

John Cooke’s painting The Piltdown Gang, with anatomist Arthur Keith in a white coat, and behind him (in front of a portrait of Darwin) Charles Dawson. Photograph: Rex

 

Today [first published 18 December 2012] marks a century since the official presentation to the Geological Society of London of what was later to be revealed as one of the most notorious hoaxes in the history of science. This was Piltdown Man, initially accepted by many as the fossil remains of an early human.

The hoax, created by combining parts of a medieval human skull with the lower jawbone of an orang-utan, was only exposed in 1953. While doubts had certainly arisen, within Britain at least, the hope that an Englishman had found in Sussex support for Darwin’s theory ofevolution, and backing for the conventional view that human evolution had been led by the development of a larger brain, created a climate in which the claim was largely supported.

The specimen was, therefore, given a Latin name: Eoanthropus damson (Dawson’s dawn man, after the collector and almost-certain hoaxer Charles Dawson). E dawsoni was not the only species that Dawson conjured into reality. Back in the 1890s, Dawson had announced the find of the teeth of what appeared to be a missing link between reptiles and mammals. This too gained sufficient credibility to be given a scientific name: Plagiaulax dawsoni.

Although the specimens were forgeries, the fact that they were named, illustrated, published and discussed meant that the species nevertheless achieved some sort of existence, at least for several decades. It feels a little as if there should be some sort of limbo, perhaps similar to the place that ballpoint pens and odd socks go, reserved for these phantom species.

It would be a crowded place for, when you stop to count, there are a large number of these non-beings, usually enjoying a brief virtual existence before being re-identified as a variant of a known species or a simple mistake. Most have little impact: the ones we recall are those that generated much enthusiasm and controversy. I came across an example of the latter in an essay by Anne Flore Laloë, included in a collection published earlier this year. This was a supposed creature identified by Thomas Huxley.

Like Dawson’s two “missing links”, Huxley’s Bathybius haeckelii was a much-desired link between inorganic matter and organic life. It was “discovered” in 1868 when Huxley re-examined samples of mud from the Atlantic seafloor, taken a decade before during the sounding work done in preparation for the laying of telegraph cable.

Huxley spotted what appeared to be a veined, albuminous ooze, having “so far the attributes of a Vegetable, that it is able to elaborate Organic Compounds out of the materials supplied by the medium in which it lives, and thus to provide the sustenance for the Animals imbedded in its midst”.

The name of Huxley’s new species was given in honour of Ernst Haeckel, who had suggested the existence of Urschleim (primordial slime) as the origin of all life. This was a discovery, rather like the more recent “arsenic life“, that created considerable excitement. However, while arsenic life was quickly and successfully challenged, it turned out that B haeckelii was to enjoy a more prolonged existence, turning up in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean before being shuffled off to the phantom species limbo by John Young Buchanan of the Challenger expedition in the 1870s.

Such stories have been used by creationists to suggest that supporters of evolution are either easily duped or untrustworthy fraudsters. It cannot be denied that when a phantom species becomes famous, it is likely to be fulfilling a role or roles much desired by at least part of the scientific community – filling a theoretical gap, providing proof of common assumptions, flattering national pride or justifying new research funding.

However, while there have been a handful of hoaxes, it is usually perfectly good science, intermixed as it necessarily is with theoretical expectations and cultural assumptions, that creates, sustains and then banishes phantom species. Just like other ideas – phlogiston, universal ether, quintessence, gravitational vortexes and, likely, dark matter and string theory – they are products of, and spurs to, the development of science.

First catch your spider: astronomical arachnids

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Spiders have played a key role in the history of astronomy. This is not simply in being creatures that have kept vigil with the nocturnal astronomer, who is inspired, Robert-the-Bruce-like, by their skill and tenacity, but something far more fundamental.

Spider silk was sufficiently fine, sufficiently uniform and sufficiently strong to be used in the focus of a telescope’s eyepiece for precise measurement. Rather than cross-hairs, astronomers spoke of “wires”, against which the position of a star might be read. Several such spider-silk “wires” or “threads” might help time the transit of a star across the local meridian or, moveable, help measure the distance between binary stars.

Looking the other day for something else, I was pleased to come acrossan 1894 article in the journal of the British Astronomical Association by one of the Royal Observatory’s assistants, E Walter Maunder, that was a how-to guide to “Making a Spider Line Reticule”.

My headline is taken from Maunder, who refers to “Mrs Glasse“, whoseThe Art of Cookery was famously supposed to have instructed readers to “First catch your hare”. In the spirit of the best how-to and make-and-mend housewife, Maunder was sharing his knowledge as money-saving advice for those who could not afford a professionally made filar micrometer. That said, spiders were being caught and used by astronomers at Greenwich for years, and were to be until at least the 1950s.

Unlike Mrs Glasse, Maunder had some hints on animal capture. The spider required was Epeira diadema, “the handsome coronetted spider of our gardens”, although “she has no astronomical monopoly” and an ordinary house spider might do. As he says, “The best time for a raid is the month of October” – until it recently turned cold I spotted many beautiful garden spiders with magnificent webs even in uninspiring urban front gardens.

To catch and keep your spider, she should be “lifted out of her web and placed in a small paper bag, the bag being closed by gently twisting up its mouth. Any number of spiders may be secured and kept ready for use when required if each one is imprisoned in a separate bag.”

Next comes the crucial step, with the acquisition of a “fork”, aka “a piece of wire bent into the shape of a U”, about 12-15 inches long, with the two points about 3 inches apart; “of sufficient width, that is, to well overlap the frame to be webbed, so as to give enough tension to the webs to keep them straight”.

Just previous to winding, the fork should be coated with the usual commercial “brown hard varnish.” The operator then mounts on a stool, so as to give his spider a further drop, places his fork ready to his hand, and taking the paper bag in his left hand, and a small straight piece of wood, gently lifts out the spider. The operator then takes the fork, and when the spider has dropped two or three feet, puts in his fork, and gently winds up, pushing forward the fork as it is rotated, so that the thread lies on it in a zig-zag manner. Other forks may be filled if the spider is in the humour for spinning. If Arachne is inclined, however, to be obstinate, gently blow on her with a full steady breath…

The filled forks were to be placed vertically for about an hour, after which time it was possible to pack them away in boxes until required.

Maunder’s article then carefully describes the process of fitting the threads to a frame, and fixing them at a proper tension with some more varnish – applied, he suggests, with another unlikely astronomical instrument: a knitting needle.

Of such things – and sealing wax and string – are the most distinguished careers made.

Whewell’s Ghost on Facebook and Twitter

I have decided that it is time to take the Facebook page and Twitter account of Whewell’s Ghost in a new direction. In part inspired by our earlier discussions about the future of The Giants’ Shoulders history of science blog carnival (and my guilt and always failing to send links into the horrible blog carnival submission system), I will be posting as many links to history of science posts and articles as I can to Facebook. This will also be picked up by the Twitter account.

So please – ‘Like’ here http://www.facebook.com/whewellsghost and ‘Follow’ @WhewellsGhost https://twitter.com/WhewellsGhost.

Please also feel free to let me know about posts @beckyfh – and all future hosts of The Giants’ Shoulders should stop by to see what I’ve been reading and enjoying!