Crosbie Smith

Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain (III)

1845 saw the solution of a stubborn problem in the mathematical theory of electricity: what is the total force of attraction between two oppositely charged spherical conductors. This conceptually simple problem had defeated the best mathematicians of Europe, including S. D. Poisson, George Green, and C. F. Gauss. But William Thomson, twenty-one years old and fresh from the mathematical tripos at Cambridge, effectively wrote down a solution in three lines. How is that possible? What resources did he draw on? I shall use these questions to focus an exploration of the relationship between societal forces and scientific work during a particularly important episode in the history of British natural philosophy, when the entire subject was transformed by the births of field theory and thermodynamics and the rebirth of mechanics. Solution of the two-spheres problem will show concretely how political economy helped to solve problems in natural philosophy. More generally and importantly, it will show that the transformation of natural philosophy in the 1840s was part of a sweeping transformation in British scientific culture. Temporality now entered in an essential way into the explanation of natural systems. Time was rediscovered. If evolutionary biology is the best known example, it is also a rather late one. More important initially were such diverse fields as engineering, astronomy, geology, mathematics, natural philosophy, and political economy. The process in general would sort out progress from progression. In natural philosophy that meant sorting out conservation from dissipation (energy from entropy) or work from waste.

‘Mechanical philosophy’ and the emergence of physics in Britain: 1800–1850

Summary In the late eighteenth century Newtons Principia was studied in the Scottish universities under the influence of the local school of ‘Common Sense’ philosophy. John Robison, holding the key chair of natural philosophy at Edinburgh from 1774 to 1805, provided a new conception of ‘mechanical philosophy’ which proved crucial to the emergence of physics in nineteenth century Britain. At Cambridge the emphasis on ‘mixed mathematics’ was taken to a new level of refinement and application by the introduction of analytical methods in the 1820s. The fusion of these two schools, with emphasis on conceptual unity on the one hand, and mathematisation on the other, came about from the 1830s onwards, and reached full expression in the new framework of a unified mathematical physics based on the energy principle.

Natural Philosophy and Thermodynamics: William Thomson and ‘The Dynamical Theory of Heat’

William Thomsons image as a professional mathematical physicist who adheres, particularly in his work in classical thermodynamics, to a strict experimental basis for his science, avoids speculative hypotheses, and becomes renowned for his omission of philosophical declarations has been reinforced in varying degrees by those historians who have attempted, as either admirers or critics of Thomson, to describe and assess his life. J. G. Crowther, for example, sees him as a thinker of great intellectual strength, but deficient in intellectual taste; a scientist aware only of his immediate work and without depth of vision. Not well read in the literature of the subjects of his research, Thomson is seen, moreover, as one whose achievements owe little to the work of others, and whose great personality ‘is an expression in the realm of ideas of the power and blindness of capitalism’, especially through ‘his view of the world in terms of engineering conceptions’. On the other hand, even Sir Joseph Larmor, for whom Thomson was nothing less than a hero, is to be found ascribing to him the epithet of pragmatist.

From Design to Dissolution: Thomas Chalmers' Debt to John Robison

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwins theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

“Imitations of God's Own Works”: Making Trustworthy the Ocean Steamship

“?… may we not say in the words of Bacon? — ‘The introduction of new inventions seemeth to be the very chief of all human actions. The benefits of new inventions may extend to all mankind universally, but the good of political achievements can respect but some particular cantons of men; these latter do not endure above a few ages, the former for ever. Inventions make all men happy without either injury or damage to any one single person. Furthermore, new inventions are, as it were, new erections and imitations of Gods own works.’”

Engineering the Universe: William Thomson and Fleeming Jenkin on the nature of matter

Summary Based largely on unpublished manuscript material from the Kelvin papers, and especially on a series of letters exchanged in 1867 between Fleeming Jenkin (the first Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University) and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), this paper aims to examine the background and content of the Thomson-Jenkin speculations on the nature of matter. The letters formed an interlude in a long collaboration over electrical patents and raise the fundamental question of whether these speculations, involving the construction of a variety of conceptual models, derive primarily from older traditions of speculative matter theory, or from contemporary problems within natural philosophy qua physics. The correspondence also provided the immediate background to Jenkins North British review article of 1868 on ‘Lucretius and the atomic theory’.

‘Or vast fiery cross, on the banner of morn’: reading the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's shipwrecks

During the nineteenth century shipwrecks served as flexible constructs through which survivors, authors, preachers, editors and proprietors could articulate shared cultural values. This article focuses on the loss of three major steamships, the Tweed, the Forth and the Amazon, all of which belonged to the prestigious Royal Mail Steam Packet Company operating mail, passenger and high-value freight services between Southampton and the Caribbean from 1841. The wreck of the Tweed on the Alacranes reef off the coast of Mexico with heavy loss of life inspired one influential survivor to shape a narrative of providential deliverance through civilising objects such as the mariners compass and within the liturgical framework of the Church of Englands Book of Common Prayer, a copy of which had actually been rescued from the wreckage. The loss of the Forth on the same reef two years later, however, produced a far more conventional account of masculine heroism in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. But it was the sudden destruction of the Amazon by fire on her maiden voyage that inspired sermons not only of deliverance but of eschatological warnings of the end of time itself. These dramatic narratives transformed loss of life and property at sea into powerful cultural symbols of empire and religion that transcended the material disintegration. The once-proud steamers thus become the ideological sites of enduring contests between civilisation and chaos, light and darkness, and life and death. Concomitantly, a cultural history that reasserts human agency challenges historical patterns that impose predetermined direction on shipwrecks simply as instances of technological inadequacy, economic mismanagement or human error.

British mail steamers to South America, 1851–1965. A history of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and Royal Mail Lines

tive if someone had taken up the point mentioned in Michael Kershaw’s essay, ‘A different kind of longitude: the metrology of location by geodesy’, that the measurement of the figure of the earth, on which accurate charts and maps depended, became an increasingly international rather than just an Anglo-French affair during the nineteenth century. However, despite any minor shortcomings, this is an extremely valuable collection of essays for anyone with an interest in the history of exploration, navigation and the practical applications of science.

Power and Wealth: Reputations and Rivalries in Steam Culture

‘Labour’, asserted the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ‘is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’. As such, labour was the key to understanding the wealth of nations since the total ‘annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes’. Moreover, the wealth of a nation was regulated on the one hand by ‘the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied’ (Smith’s famous ‘division of labour’) and on the other by ‘the proportion between those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed’. Reversing Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century dictum that ‘wealth is power’, Smith effectively made ‘useful labour’ or ‘power’ the basis of ‘real’ wealth for nation and empire.2

Conclusion: Cultures of Technological Expertise

Preceding chapters have explored steam power, steamship, railway and telegraph technologies in the making (chs 2–5). These chapters have focused on the cultural construction of empires: usually built as personal and business empires but often closely interconnected one with another and in relation to the larger geopolitical empires of the nineteenth century. In this concluding chapter we expand upon several cultures of technological expertise, already touched upon in our specific investigations of the new technologies. These cultures, we suggest, played fundamental roles in generating, promoting and sustaining many of the engineering projects with which we have been concerned.