The Age of Wonder Read Free Page B

his Theory of Life (1816-19) to discuss the issues. Attended and spoke at the historic third meeting of the BAAS at Cambridge in 1833, at which the term ‘natural philosopher’ was first replaced by the word ‘scientist’. (See Chapters 6 and 10)
    WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800. Poet who suffered from disabling depression all his life, but whose lively letters and long, rambling poem The Task give a vivid response to the scientific advances of the day, especially Banks’s voyage and the balloonists. (See Chapter 1)
    BARON GEORGES CUVIER, 1769-1832. FRS 1806. The leading French zoologist and comparative anatomist of his day, he taught at the Museum of Natural History, Paris. He disagreed with Lamarck, rejecting the concept of evolution, and proposing a theory of biological development through global catastrophe. He published twenty-two volumes on ichthyology (fishes).
    JOHN DALTON, 1766-1844. Chemist, meteorologist and early theorist of atomic weights, producing a pioneering Table of 20 Elements in 1808, and laws on the thermal expansion of gases. A shy, retiring personality closely associated with his home town, Manchester, and reluctant to join the Royal Society in London. Herschel and Babbage thought he was shamefully neglected, but 40,000 people attended his funeral in Manchester.
    ERASMUS DARWIN, 1731-1802. FRS 1761. Physician, poet, polymath and inventor. Moving spirit of the Lunar Society at Birmingham, which met each month on the night of the full moon (in theory so they could walk home safely). A close friend of James Watt and Matthew Boulton, he described much. of the new science of the day in his long and remarkable poem The Botanic Garden (1791). Its extensive and highly informative prose notes on cosmology, geology, meteorology, chemistry and physics - a didactic method later used by Southey and Shelley - provide an encyclopaedic account of the state of science at the turn of the eighteenth century.
    HUMPHRY DAVY, 1778-1829. President of the Royal Society 1820-27. (See Chapters 6, 8 and 9)
    MICHAEL FARADAY, 1791-1867. Chemist and physicist of genius, inventor of the electric motor, dynamo and transformer. Director of the Royal Institution, London, for over thirty years. He was Davy’s great protégé, and unlike his patron one of the most popular figures in British science. (See Chapters 8, 9 and 10)
    BARTHÉLEMY FAUJAS DE SAINT-FOND, 1741-1819. French geologist and traveller, a specialist in volcanoes. He was a great anglophile, and in his Travels in England and Scotland in Examining the Arts and Sciences (1799) he gave a vivid account of interviewing Herschel and Caroline at work. He also wrote with enthusiasm about ballooning.
    JOHANN GEORG FORSTER, 1754-94. German botanist and travel writer. With his father he joined Cook’s second Pacific expedition (the one that brought back Omai), and he subsequently published a vivid and somewhat scurrilous account of it in English, A Voyage Round the World (1777). He was appointed Professor of Natural History at Kassel, and corresponded frequently with Banks. His father Johann Rheinhold Forster, who had published a more sober Observations during a Voyage Round the World (1778), outlived him.
    BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1706-90. FRS 1756. Physicist and statesman, he was American Ambassador to France 1776-85, and proved an invaluable source of information about French science for Banks, notably on mesmerism and ballooning 1783-84. He specialised in work on the properties of electricity: the static charge, the lightning surge and the lightning conductor. (See Chapters 3 and 7)
    LUIGI GALVANI, 1737-98. Italian physician, Professor of Anatomy at Bologna University. His dramatic claim to have discovered reanimation or ‘animal electricity’, when dead specimen frogs were fixed with metal pins, was disproved in a celebrated paper sent to the Royal Society by Volta in 1792. Nevertheless the term ‘galvanism’ remained loosely applied to a wide range of electrical phenomena,