The Age of Wonder Read Free

clock, with brass compensated pendulum (private archive, John Herschel-Shorland, Norfolk).
    CHARLES BABBAGE, 1791-1871. FRS 1816. Brilliant young mathematician, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, close friend of Herschel’s son and Caroline’s nephew John Herschel. Irascible and outspoken critic of the Royal Society under the ageing Banks and the ailing Davy, supporter of the fledgling BAAS, and inventor of various Difference Engines (mechanical computers). (See Chapter 10)
    SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1743-1820. President of the Royal Society. (See Chapter 1 and passim )
    ANNA BARBAULD, 1743-1825. Poet, educationalist and bluestocking, she was greatly interested by scientific ideas. She was a close friend of Joseph Priestley, witnessed many of his early experiments, and wrote a poem in the voice of one of his laboratory mice. Her epic poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ (1812) predicted a crisis of Empire and intellectual life in Britain enveloped in ‘Gothic night’, and the rise of American power. A formidable editor, she produced a fifty-volume edition of contemporary British novelists. (See Chapter 6)
    FRANCIS BEAUFORT, 1774-1857. Sailor, hydrographer and inventor of the Beaufort wind scale, one to twelve (hurricane). He wrote some interesting accounts of the ‘after-death’ experiences of drowning sailors.
    ANNA BEDDOES, 1773-1824. Volatile younger half-sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, wife of the physician Thomas Beddoes, and possibly Humphry Davy’s lover at the Pneumatic Institute, Bristol, 1799-1801. Shortly afterwards she had an affair with Beddoes’s friend Davies Giddy in London, though she returned to nurse her husband when he was dying of heart failure. Anna had four children: Anna (1801), Thomas (1803), Henry (1805) and Mary (1808). Neither of these first two may have been legitimate. Davies Giddy acted as their legal guardian after Beddoes’s premature death. Anna’s son Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) became a poet and political activist, the author of several macabre poetic dramas including The Last Man (1823) and Death’s Jest Book (1850), lived exiled in Germany, and committed suicide in Switzerland. Anna herself went to live abroad, moving restlessly to Belgium, then France, then Italy, and finally dying in Florence, aged fifty. (See Chapter 6)
    THOMAS BEDDOES, 1760-1808. Physician, chemist, philanthropist and political radical. Davy’s mentor at Bristol, and close friend of the leading members of the Lunar Society in the Midlands. His experimental use of drugs and gases, and the antics of his wife Anna, undermined his public reputation. With the collapse of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute as an experimental centre, he transformed it into the philanthropic Preventative Medical Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor. He had an early concept of a free national health service, providing particular help for women with children. A heroic but marginalised figure, he was never supported by Banks at the Royal Society. (See Chapter 6)
    CLAUDE BERTHOLLET, 1748-1822. FRS 1789. Leading French chemist, friend of Lavoisier’s, head of the scientific expedition - including balloon section - that accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in 1789. Later an admirer of Davy’s, and friend of Banks’s confidant Blagden. His glamorous pupil and protégé was Joseph Gay-Lussac.
    JACOB BERZELIUS, 1779-1848. Outstanding Swedish chemist, Professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Stockholm 1807. His pioneering work in electro-chemistry included the first accurate table of atomic weights, establishing twenty-eight elements (1828), and giving them their internationally accepted ‘initial letter’ symbols, as H 2 0. Warmly congratulated Davy on the Bakerian Lectures and the safety lamp, but from 1815 was increasingly challenging his dominance. Married late, aged fifty-six, when his best scientific work was done, to a woman thirty-two years his junior.
    XAVIER BICHAT, 1771-1802. French physician and anatomist, worked