Some Notes from Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything"

May 12, 2024

Amazing bits from Bill Bryson

“If you had to select the least convivial scientific field trip of all time, you could certainly do worse than the French Royal Academy of Sciences’ Peruvian expedition of 1735. Led by a hydrologist named Pierre Bouguer and a soldier–mathematician named Charles Marie de La Condamine, it was a party of scientists and adventurers who travelled to Peru with the purpose of triangulating distances through the Andes.

At the time people had lately become infected with a powerful desire to understand the Earth – to determine how old it was, and how massive, where it hung in space, and how it had come to be. The French party’s goal was to help settle the question of the circumference of the planet by measuring the length of one degree of meridian (or one-360th of the distance around the planet) along a line reaching from Yarouqui, near Quito, to just beyond Cuenca in what is now Ecuador, a distance of about 320 kilometres.

Almost at once things began to go wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. In Quito, the visitors somehow provoked the locals and were chased out of town by a mob armed with stones. Soon after, the expedition’s doctor was murdered in a misunderstanding over a woman. The botanist became deranged. Others died of fevers and falls. The third most senior member of the party, a man named Jean Godin, ran off with a thirteen-year-old girl and could not be induced to return.

At one point the group had to suspend work for eight months while La Condamine rode off to Lima to sort out a problem with their permits. Eventually he and Bouguer stopped speaking and refused to work together. Everywhere the dwindling party went it was met with the deepest suspicions from officials who found it difficult to believe that a group of French scientists would travel halfway around the world to measure the world. That made no sense at all.

Two and a half centuries later, it still seems a reasonable question. Why didn’t the French make their measurements in France and save themselves all the bother and discomfort of their Andean adventure? The answer lies partly with the fact that eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available, and partly with a practical problem that had first arisen with the English astronomer Edmond Halley many years before – long before Bouguer and La Condamine dreamed of going to South America, much less had a reason for doing so.

Halley was an exceptional figure. In the course of a long and productive career, he was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor of geometry at the University of Oxford, deputy controller of the Royal Mint, Astronomer Royal, and inventor of the deep-sea diving bell. He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium. He invented the weather map and actuarial table, proposed methods for working out the age of the Earth and its distance from the Sun, even devised a practical method for keeping fish fresh out of season.

The one thing he didn’t do was discover the comet that bears his name. He merely recognized that the comet he saw in 1682 was the same one that had been seen by others in 1456, 1531 and 1607. It didn’t become Halley’s comet until 1758, some sixteen years after his death. For all his achievements, however, Halley’s greatest contribution to human knowledge may simply have been to take part in a modest scientific wager with two other worthies of his day: Robert Hooke, who is perhaps best remembered now as the first person to describe a cell, and the great and stately Sir Christopher Wren, who was actually an astronomer first and an architect second, though that is not often generally remembered now.

In 1683, Halley, Hooke and Wren were dining in London when the conversation turned to the motions of celestial objects. It was known that planets were inclined to orbit in a particular kind of oval known as an ellipse but it wasn’t understood why. Wren generously offered a prize worth 40 shillings (equivalent to a couple of weeks’ pay) to whichever of the men could provide a solution. Hooke, who was well known for taking credit for ideas that weren’t necessarily his own, claimed that he had solved the problem already but declined now to share it on the interesting and inventive grounds that it would rob others of the satisfaction of discovering the answer for themselves. He would instead ‘conceal it for some time, that others might know how to value it’. If he thought any more on the matter, he left no evidence of it.

Halley, however, became consumed with finding the answer, to the point that the following year he travelled to Cambridge and boldly called upon the university’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton, in the hope that he could help.

Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him.

Set atop these odd beliefs and quirky traits, however, was the mind of a supreme genius – though even when working in conventional channels he often showed a tendency to peculiarity. As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years. In like manner, he did work in optics that transformed our understanding of light and laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and again chose not to share the results for three decades. For all his brilliance, real science accounted for only a part of his interests.

At least half his working life was given over to alchemy and wayward religious pursuits. These were not mere dabblings but wholehearted devotions. He was a secret adherent of a dangerously heretical sect called Arianism, whose principal tenet was the belief that there had been no Holy Trinity (slightly ironic, since Newton’s college at Cambridge was Trinity). He spent endless hours studying the floor plan of the lost Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem (teaching himself Hebrew in the process, the better to scan original texts) in the belief that it held mathematical clues to the dates of the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. His attachment to alchemy was no less ardent.

In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes bought a trunk of Newton’s papers at auction and discovered with astonishment that they were overwhelmingly preoccupied not with optics or planetary motions, but with a single-minded quest to turn base metals into precious ones. An analysis of a strand of Newton’s hair in the 1970s found it contained mercury – an element of interest to alchemists, hatters and thermometer-makers but almost no-one else – at a concentration some forty times the natural level. It is perhaps little wonder that he had trouble remembering to get up in the morning.

Quite what Halley expected to get from him when he made his unannounced visit in August 1684 we can only guess. But thanks to the later account of a Newton confidant, Abraham DeMoivre, we do have a record of one of science’s most historic encounters: In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge [and] after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. This was a reference to a piece of mathematics known as the inverse square law, which Halley was convinced lay at the heart of the explanation, though he wasn’t sure exactly how. Sr Isaac replied immediately that it would be an [ellipse]. The Doctor, struck with joy & amazement, asked him how he knew it. ‘Why,’ saith he, ‘I have calculated it,’ whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without farther delay. Sr Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it.

This was astounding – like someone saying he had found a cure for cancer but couldn’t remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia.

Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking of it. The appearance of the Principia was one of those moments. It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honours, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement.

Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work that had preceded him. ‘Nearer the gods no mortal may approach,’ wrote Halley in a sentiment that was endlessly echoed by his contemporaries and by many others since.

Although the Principia has been called ‘one of the most inaccessible books ever written’ (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn’t be pestered by mathematical ‘smatterers’, as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place – gravity.

Suddenly every motion in the universe made sense. At the Principia’s heart were Newton’s three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and his universal law of gravitation. This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here now you are pulling everything around you – walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat – towards you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you. It was Newton who realized that the pull of any two objects is, to quote Feynman again, ‘proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them’. Put another way, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula which is of course way beyond anything that most of us could make practical use of, but at least we can appreciate that it is elegantly compact. A couple of brief multiplications, a simple division and, bingo, you know your gravitational position wherever you go. It was the first really universal law of nature ever propounded by a human mind, which is why Newton is everywhere regarded with such profound esteem.

The Principia’s production was not without drama. To Halley’s horror, just as work was nearing completion Newton and Hooke fell into dispute over the priority for the inverse square law and Newton refused to release the crucial third volume, without which the first two made little sense. Only with some frantic shuttle diplomacy and the most liberal applications of flattery did Halley manage finally to extract the concluding volume from the erratic professor. Halley’s traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before, the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book’s publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society’s clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes. Newton’s laws explained so many things – the slosh and roll of ocean tides, the motions of planets, why cannonballs trace a particular trajectory before thudding back to earth, why we aren’t flung into space as the planet spins beneath us at hundreds of kilometres an hour – that it took a while for all their implications to seep in. But one revelation became almost immediately controversial. This was the suggestion that the Earth is not quite round. According to Newton’s theory, the centrifugal force of the Earth’s spin should result in a slight flattening at the poles and a bulging at the equator, which would make the planet slightly oblate. That meant that the length of a degree of meridian wouldn’t be the same in Italy as it was in Scotland. Specifically, the length would shorten as you moved away from the poles. This was not good news for those people whose measurements of the planet were based on the assumption that it was a perfect sphere, which was everyone.

For half a century people had been trying to work out the size of the Earth, mostly by making very exacting measurements. One of the first such attempts was by an English mathematician named Richard Norwood. As a young man Norwood had travelled to Bermuda with a diving bell modelled on Halley’s device, intending to make a fortune scooping pearls from the seabed. The scheme failed because there were no pearls and anyway Norwood’s bell didn’t work, but Norwood was not one to waste an experience. In the early seventeenth century Bermuda was well known among ships’ captains for being hard to locate. The problem was that the ocean was big, Bermuda small and the navigational tools for dealing with this disparity hopelessly inadequate. There wasn’t even yet an agreed length for a nautical mile. Over the breadth of an ocean the smallest miscalculations would become magnified so that ships often missed Bermuda-sized targets by dismayingly large margins. Norwood, whose first love was trigonometry and thus angles, decided to bring a little mathematical rigour to navigation, and to that end he determined to calculate the length of a degree.

Starting with his back against the Tower of London, Norwood spent two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York, repeatedly stretching and measuring a length of chain as he went, all the while making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise and fall of the land and the meanderings of the road. The final step was to measure the angle of the sun at York at the same time of day and on the same day of the year as he had made his first measurement in London. From this, he reasoned he could determine the length of one degree of the Earth’s meridian and thus calculate the distance around the whole. It was an almost ludicrously ambitious undertaking – a mistake of the slightest fraction of a degree would throw the whole thing out by miles – but in fact, as Norwood proudly declaimed, he was accurate to ‘within a scantling’ – or, more precisely, to within about six hundred yards. In metric terms, his figure worked out at 110.72 kilometres per degree of arc.

In 1637, Norwood’s masterwork of navigation, The Seaman’s Practice, was published and found an immediate following. It went through seventeen editions and was still in print twenty-five years after his death. Norwood returned to Bermuda with his family, where he became a successful planter and devoted his leisure hours to his first love, trigonometry. He survived there for thirty-eight years and it would be pleasing to report that he passed this span in happiness and adulation. In fact, he didn’t.

On the crossing from England, his two young sons were placed in a cabin with the Reverend Nathaniel White, and somehow so successfully traumatized the young vicar that he devoted much of the rest of his career to persecuting Norwood in any small way he could think of. Norwood’s two daughters brought their father additional pain by making poor marriages. One of the husbands, possibly incited by the vicar, continually laid small charges against Norwood in court, causing him much exasperation and necessitating repeated trips across Bermuda to defend himself. Finally, in the 1650s witchcraft trials came to Bermuda and Norwood spent his final years in severe unease that his papers on trigonometry, with their arcane symbols, would be taken as communications with the devil and that he would be treated to a dreadful execution. So little is known of Norwood that it may in fact be that he deserved his unhappy declining years. What is certainly true is that he got them.

Meanwhile, the momentum for determining the Earth’s circumference passed to France. There, the astronomer Jean Picard devised an impressively complicated method of triangulation involving quadrants, pendulum clocks, zenith sectors and telescopes (for observing the motions of the moons of Jupiter). After two years of trundling and triangulating his way across France, in 1669 he announced a more accurate measure of 110.46 kilometres for one degree of arc. This was a great source of pride for the French but it was predicated on the assumption that the Earth was a perfect sphere – which Newton now said it was not. To complicate matters, after Picard’s death the father and son team of Giovanni and Jacques Cassini repeated Picard’s experiments over a larger area and came up with results that suggested that the Earth was fatter not at the equator but at the poles – that Newton, in other words, was exactly wrong. It was this that prompted the Academy of Sciences to dispatch Bouguer and La Condamine to South America to take new measurements. They chose the Andes because they needed to measure near the equator, to determine if there really was a difference in sphericity there, and because they reasoned that mountains would give them good sightlines. In fact, the mountains of Peru were so constantly lost in cloud that the team often had to wait weeks for an hour’s clear surveying. On top of that, they had selected one of the most nearly impossible terrains on Earth. Peruvians refer to their landscape as muy accidentado – ‘much accidented’ – and this it most certainly is.

Not only did the French have to scale some of the world’s most challenging mountains – mountains that defeated even their mules – but to reach the mountains they had to ford wild rivers, hack their way through jungles, and cross miles of high, stony desert, nearly all of it uncharted and far from any source of supplies. But Bouguer and La Condamine were nothing if not tenacious, and they stuck to the task for nine and a half long, grim, sun-blistered years. Shortly before concluding the project, word reached them that a second French team, taking measurements in northern Scandinavia (and facing notable discomforts of their own, from squelching bogs to dangerous ice floes), had found that a degree was in fact longer near the poles, as Newton had promised.

The Earth was 43 kilometres stouter when measured equatorially than when measured from top to bottom around the poles. Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working towards a result they didn’t wish to find only to learn now that they weren’t even the first to find it. Listlessly, they completed their survey, which confirmed that the first French team was correct. Then, still not speaking, they returned to the coast and took separate ships home.

Something else conjectured by Newton in the Principia was that a plumb line hung near a mountain would incline very slightly towards the mountain, affected by the mountain’s gravitational mass as well as by the Earth’s. This was more than a curious fact. If you measured the deflection accurately and worked out the mass of the mountain, you could calculate the universal gravitational constant – that is, the basic value of gravity, known as G – and along with it the mass of the Earth. Bouguer and La Condamine had tried this on Peru’s Mount Chimborazo, but had been defeated by both the technical difficulties and their own squabbling, and so the notion lay dormant for another thirty years until resurrected in England by Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal. In Dava Sobel’s popular book Longitude, Maskelyne is presented as a ninny and villain for failing to appreciate the brilliance of the clockmaker John Harrison, and this may be so; but we are indebted to him in other ways not mentioned in her book, not least for his successful scheme to weigh the Earth.

Maskelyne realized that the nub of the problem lay with finding a mountain of sufficiently regular shape to judge its mass. At his urging, the Royal Society agreed to engage a reliable figure to tour the British Isles to see if such a mountain could be found. Maskelyne knew just such a person – the astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason. Maskelyne and Mason had become friends eleven years earlier while engaged in a project to measure an astronomical event of great importance: the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun. The tireless Edmond Halley had suggested years before that if you measured one of these passages from selected points on the Earth, you could use the principles of triangulation to work out the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and thence to calibrate the distances to all the other bodies in the solar system. Unfortunately, transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more, and there were none in Halley’s lifetime.fn3 But the idea simmered and when the next transit fell due in 1761, nearly two decades after Halley’s death, the scientific world was ready – indeed, more ready than it had been for an astronomical event before.

With the instinct for ordeal that characterized the age, scientists set off for more than a hundred locations around the globe – to Siberia, China, South Africa, Indonesia and the woods of Wisconsin, among many others. France dispatched thirty-two observers, Britain eighteen more, and still others set out from Sweden, Russia, Italy, Germany, Ireland and elsewhere. It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. Unluckier still was Guillaume le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit – just about the worst place to be, since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.

Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit in 1769. With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments and had everything in a state of perfect readiness. On the morning of the second transit, 4 June 1769, he awoke to a fine day; but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the Sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit of three hours, fourteen minutes and seven seconds. Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year. Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship. It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast. When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.

In comparison, the disappointments experienced by Britain’s eighteen scattered observers were mild. Mason found himself paired with a young surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon and apparently they got along well, for they formed a lasting partnership. Their instructions were to travel to Sumatra and chart the transit there, but after just one night at sea their ship was attacked by a French frigate. (Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren’t.) Mason and Dixon sent a note to the Royal Society observing that it seemed awfully dangerous on the high seas and wondering if perhaps the whole thing oughtn’t to be called off. In reply they received a swift and chilly rebuke, noting that they had already been paid, that the nation and scientific community were counting on them, and that their failure to proceed would result in the irretrievable loss of their reputations. Chastened, they sailed on, but en route word reached them that Sumatra had fallen to the French and so they observed the transit inconclusively from the Cape of Good Hope. On the way home they stopped on the lonely Atlantic outcrop of St Helena, where they met Maskelyne, whose observations had been thwarted by cloud cover. Mason and Maskelyne formed a solid friendship and spent several happy, and possibly even mildly useful, weeks charting tidal flows. Soon afterwards Maskelyne returned to England, where he became Astronomer Royal, and Mason and Dixon – now evidently more seasoned – set off for four long and often perilous years surveying their way through 244 miles of dangerous American wilderness to settle a boundary dispute between the estates of William Penn and Lord Baltimore and their respective colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland.

The result was the famous Mason–Dixon line, which later took on symbolic importance as the dividing line between the slave and free states. (Although the line was their principal task, they also contributed several astronomical surveys, including one of the century’s most accurate measurements of a degree of meridian – an achievement that brought them far more acclaim in England than the settling of a boundary dispute between spoiled aristocrats.) Back in Europe, Maskelyne and his counterparts in Germany and France were forced to the conclusion that the transit measurements of 1761 were essentially a failure.

One of the problems, ironically, was that there were too many observations, which when brought together often proved contradictory and impossible to resolve. The successful charting of a Venusian transit fell instead to a little-known Yorkshire-born sea captain named James Cook, who watched the 1769 transit from a sunny hilltop in Tahiti, and then went on to chart and claim Australia for the British crown. Upon his return there was now enough information for the French astronomer Joseph Lalande to calculate that the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun was a little over 150 million kilometres. (Two further transits in the nineteenth century allowed astronomers to put the figure at 149.59 million kilometres, where it has remained ever since. The precise distance, we now know, is 149.597870691 million kilometres.) The Earth at last had a position in space.

As for Mason and Dixon, they returned to England as scientific heroes and, for reasons unknown, dissolved their partnership. Considering the frequency with which they turn up at seminal events in eighteenth-century science, remarkably little is known about either man. No likenesses exist and few written references. Of Dixon, the Dictionary of National Biography notes intriguingly that he was ‘said to have been born in a coal mine’, but then leaves it to the reader’s imagination to supply a plausible explanatory circumstance, and adds that he died at Durham in 1777. Apart from his name and long association with Mason, nothing more is known. Mason is only slightly less shadowy. We know that in 1772, at Maskelyne’s behest, he accepted the commission to find a suitable mountain for the gravitational deflection experiment, at length reporting back that the mountain they needed was in the central Scottish Highlands, just above Loch Tay, and was called Schiehallion. Nothing, however, would induce him to spend a summer surveying it. He never returned to the field again. His next known movement was in 1786 when, abruptly and mysteriously, he turned up in Philadelphia with his wife and eight children, apparently on the verge of destitution. He had not been back to America since completing his survey there eighteen years earlier and had no known reason for being there, nor any friends or patrons to greet him. A few weeks later he was dead.

With Mason refusing to survey the mountain, the job fell to Maskelyne. So, for four months in the summer of 1774, Maskelyne lived in a tent in a remote Scottish glen and spent his days directing a team of surveyors, who took hundreds of measurements from every possible position. To find the mass of the mountain from all these numbers required a great deal of tedious calculating, for which a mathematician named Charles Hutton was engaged. The surveyors had covered a map with scores of figures, each marking an elevation at some point on or around the mountain.

It was essentially just a confusing mass of numbers, but Hutton noticed that if he used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much more orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines. Extrapolating from his Schiehallion measurements, Hutton calculated the mass of the Earth at 5,000 million million tons, from which could reasonably be deduced the masses of all the other major bodies in the solar system, including the Sun. So from this one experiment we learned the masses of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the other planets and their moons, and got contour lines into the bargain – not bad for a summer’s work. Not everyone was satisfied with the results, however. The shortcoming of the Schiehallion experiment was that it was not possible to get a truly accurate figure without knowing the actual density of the mountain. For convenience, Hutton had assumed that the mountain had the same density as ordinary stone, about 2.5 times that of water, but this was little more than an educated guess.

One improbable-seeming person who turned his mind to the matter was a country parson named John Michell, who resided in the lonely Yorkshire village of Thornhill. Despite his remote and comparatively humble situation, Michell was one of the great scientific thinkers of the eighteenth century and much esteemed for it. Among a great deal else, he perceived the wavelike nature of earthquakes, conducted much original research into magnetism and gravity, and, quite extraordinarily, envisioned the possibility of black holes two hundred years before anyone else – a leap that not even Newton could make.

When the German-born musician William Herschel decided his real interest in life was astronomy, it was Michell to whom he turned for instruction in making telescopes, a kindness for which planetary science has been in his debt ever since. But of all that Michell accomplished, nothing was more ingenious or had greater impact than a machine he designed and built for measuring the mass of the Earth. Unfortunately, he died before he could conduct the experiments, and both the idea and the necessary equipment were passed on to a brilliant but magnificently retiring London scientist named Henry Cavendish.

Cavendish is a book in himself. Born into a life of sumptuous privilege – his grandfathers were dukes, respectively, of Devonshire and Kent – he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a ‘degree bordering on disease’. Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort. Once he opened his door to find an Austrian admirer, freshly arrived from Vienna, on the front step. Excitedly, the Austrian began to babble out praise. For a few moments Cavendish received the compliments as if they were blows from a blunt object and then, unable to take any more, fled down the path and out the gate, leaving the front door wide open. It was some hours before he could be coaxed back to the property. Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter. Although he did sometimes venture into society – he was particularly devoted to the weekly scientific soirées of the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banks – it was always made clear to the other guests that Cavendish was on no account to be approached or even looked at. Those who sought his views were advised to wander into his vicinity as if by accident and to ‘talk as it were into vacancy’. If their remarks were scientifically worthy they might receive a mumbled reply, but more often than not they would hear a peeved squeak (his voice appears to have been high-pitched) and turn to find an actual vacancy and the sight of Cavendish fleeing for a more peaceful corner.

His wealth and solitary inclinations allowed him to turn his house in Clapham into a large laboratory where he could range undisturbed through every corner of the physical sciences – electricity, heat, gravity, gases, anything to do with the composition of matter. The second half of the eighteenth century was a time when people of a scientific bent grew intensely interested in the physical properties of fundamental things – gases and electricity in particular – and began seeing what they could do with them, often with more enthusiasm than sense.

In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm. In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face. Cavendish, for his part, conducted experiments in which he subjected himself to graduated jolts of electrical current, diligently noting the increasing levels of agony until he could keep hold of his quill, and sometimes his consciousness, no longer. In the course of a long life Cavendish made a string of signal discoveries – among much else, he was the first person to isolate hydrogen and the first to combine hydrogen and oxygen to form water – but almost nothing he did was entirely divorced from strangeness. To the continuing exasperation of his fellow scientists, he often alluded in published work to the results of experiments that he had not told anyone about.

In his secretiveness he didn’t merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him. His experiments with electrical conductivity were a century ahead of their time, but unfortunately remained undiscovered until that century had passed. Indeed, the greater part of what he did wasn’t known until the late nineteenth century, when the Cambridge physicist James Clerk Maxwell took on the task of editing Cavendish’s papers, by which time credit for his discoveries had nearly always been given to others. Among much else, and without telling anyone, Cavendish discovered or anticipated the law of the conservation of energy, Ohm’s Law, Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures, Richter’s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles’s Law of Gases, and the principles of electrical conductivity. That’s just some of it. According to the science historian J. G. Crowther, he also foreshadowed ‘the work of Kelvin and G. H. Darwin on the effect of tidal friction on slowing the rotation of the earth, and Larmor’s discovery, published in 1915, on the effect of local atmospheric cooling … the work of Pickering on freezing mixtures, and some of the work of Rooseboom on heterogeneous equilibria’. Finally, he left clues that led directly to the discovery of the group of elements known as the noble gases, some of which are so elusive that the last of them wasn’t found until 1962. But our interest here is in Cavendish’s last known experiment when, in the late summer of 1797, at the age of sixty-seven, he turned his attention to the crates of equipment that had been left to him – evidently out of simple scientific respect – by John Michell. When assembled, Michell’s apparatus looked like nothing so much as an eighteenth-century version of a Nautilus weight-training machine. It incorporated weights, counterweights, pendulums, shafts and torsion wires. At the heart of the machine were two 350-pound lead balls, which were suspended beside two smaller spheres. The idea was to measure the gravitational deflection of the smaller spheres by the larger ones, which would allow the first measurement of the elusive force known as the gravitational constant, and from which the weight (strictly speaking the mass) of the Earth could be deduced. Because gravity holds planets in orbit and makes falling objects land with a bang, we tend to think of it as a powerful force, but it isn’t really. It is only powerful in a kind of collective sense, when one massive object, like the Sun, holds onto another massive object, like the Earth. At an elemental level gravity is extraordinarily unrobust. Each time you pick up a book from a table or a coin from the floor you effortlessly overcome the gravitational exertion of an entire planet. What Cavendish was trying to do was measure gravity at this extremely featherweight level.

Delicacy was the keyword. Not a whisper of disturbance could be allowed into the room containing the apparatus, so Cavendish took up a position in an adjoining room and made his observations with a telescope aimed through a peephole. The work was incredibly exacting, involving seventeen delicate, interconnected measurements, which together took nearly a year to complete. When at last he had finished his calculations, Cavendish announced that the Earth weighed a little over 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds, or six billion trillion metric tons23, to use the modern measure. (A metric ton, or tonne, is 1,000 kilograms or 2,205 pounds.) Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be disturbed by someone yawning seventy-five feet away, but they have not significantly improved on Cavendish’s measurements of 1797. The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding. Interestingly, all of this merely confirmed estimates made by Newton 110 years before Cavendish without any experimental evidence at all. At all events, by the late eighteenth century scientists knew very precisely the shape and dimensions of the Earth and its distance from the Sun and planets; and now Cavendish, without even leaving home, had given them its weight. So you might think that determining the age of the Earth would be relatively straightforward. After all, the necessary materials were literally at their feet. But no. Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

To understand why, we must travel north to Scotland and begin with a brilliant and genial man, of whom few have ever heard, who had just invented a new science called geology. Triangulation, their chosen method, was a popular technique based on the geometric fact that if you know the length of one side of a triangle and the angles of two corners, you can work out all its other dimensions without leaving your chair. Suppose, by way of example, that you and I decided we wished to know how far it is to the Moon. Using triangulation, the first thing we must do is put some distance between us, so let’s say for argument that you stay in Paris and I go to Moscow and we both look at the Moon at the same time. Now, if you imagine a line connecting the three principals of this exercise – that is, you and me and the Moon – it forms a triangle. Measure the length of the baseline between you and me and the angles of our two corners and the rest can be simply calculated. (Because the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, if you know the sum of two of the angles you can instantly calculate the third; and knowing the precise shape of a triangle and the length of one side tells you the lengths of the other sides.) This was in fact the method used by a Greek astronomer. Hipparchus of Nicaea, in 150BC to work out the Moon’s distance from the Earth. At ground level, the principles of triangulation are the same, except that the triangles don’t reach into space but rather are laid side to side on a map. In measuring a degree of meridian, the surveyors would create a sort of chain of triangles marching across the landscape. How fast you are spinning depends on where you are. The speed of the Earth’s spin varies from something over 1,600 kilometres an hour at the equator to zero at the poles. In London the speed is 998 kilometres an hour.

***

Other bones and fossilized footprints were found in the Connecticut river valley of New England after a farm boy named Plinus Moody spied ancient tracks on a rock ledge at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Some of these at least survive – notably the bones of an anchisaurus, which are in the collection of the Peabody Museum at Yale. Found in 1818, they were the first dinosaur bones to be examined and saved, but unfortunately weren’t recognized for what they were until 1855. In that same year, 1818, Caspar Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botanist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbing shrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria. By this time, however, palaeontological momentum had moved to England.

In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning – aged eleven, twelve or thirteen, depending on whose account you read – found a strange fossilized sea monster, 17 feet long and now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel. It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue-twister ‘She sells sea-shells on the seashore.’)

She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though none of these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn’t terribly relevant at the time since nobody then knew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creatures strikingly unlike anything we might now find. It wasn’t simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils – though she was unrivalled at that – but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage.

If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you to take it, for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation11. Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions for scholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in considerable poverty. It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of palaeontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close.

His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings – he was vain, self-absorbed, priggish, neglectful of his family – but never was there a more committed amateur palaeontologist. He was also lucky to have a devoted and observant wife. In 1822, while he was making a house call on a patient in rural Sussex, Mrs Mantell went for a stroll down a nearby lane and in a pile of rubble that had been left to fill potholes she found a curious object – a curved brown stone, about the size of a small walnut. Knowing her husband’s interest in fossils, and thinking it might be one, she took it to him. Mantell could see at once it was a fossilized tooth, and after a little study became certain that it was from an animal that was herbivorous, reptilian, extremely large – tens of feet long – and from the Cretaceous period. He was right on all counts; but these were bold conclusions, since nothing like it had been seen before or even imagined. Aware that his finding would entirely upend what was understood about the past, and urged by his friend the Reverend William Buckland – he of the gowns and experimental appetite – to proceed with caution,

Mantell devoted three painstaking years to seeking evidence to support his conclusions. He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for this uncharacteristic error.) One day, while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell’s creature became the iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related. Mantell prepared a paper for delivery to the Royal Society.

Unfortunately, it emerged that another dinosaur had been found at a quarry in Oxfordshire and had just been formally described – by the Reverend Buckland, the very man who had urged him not to work in haste. It was the megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease. Buckland, it may be recalled, was foremost a geologist, and he showed it with his work on megalosaurus. In his report, for the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, he noted that the creature’s teeth were not attached directly to the jawbone, as in lizards, but placed in sockets, in the manner of crocodiles. But, having noticed this much, Buckland failed to realize what it meant: namely, that megalosaurus was an entirely new type of creature.

Still, although his report demonstrated little acuity or insight, it was the first published description of a dinosaur – and so it is to Buckland, rather than the far more deserving Mantell, that the credit goes for the discovery of this ancient line of beings. Unaware that disappointment was going to be a continuing feature of his life, Mantell continued hunting for fossils – he found another giant, the hylaeosaurus, in 1833 – and purchasing others from quarrymen and farmers until he had probably the largest fossil collection in Britain. Mantell was an excellent doctor and equally gifted bone hunter, but he was unable to support both his talents. As his collecting mania grew, he neglected his medical practice. Soon, fossils filled nearly the whole of his house in Brighton and consumed much of his income. A good deal of the rest went to underwriting the publication of books that few cared to own. Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex, published in 1827, sold only fifty copies and left him £300 out of pocket – an uncomfortably substantial sum for the times.

In some desperation Mantell hit on the idea of turning his house into a museum and charging admission, then belatedly realized that such a mercenary act would ruin his standing as a gentleman, not to mention as a scientist – so he allowed people to visit the house for free. They came in their hundreds, week after week, disrupting both his practice and his home life. Eventually he was forced to sell most of his collection to pay off his debts. Soon after, his wife left him, taking their four children with her.

Remarkably, his troubles were only just beginning. In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the most popular attractions in London – in effect, as Richard Fortey has noted, the world’s first theme park. Quite a lot about the models is not strictly correct. The iguanodon’s thumb has been placed on its nose, as a kind of spike, and it stands on four sturdy legs, making it look like a rather stout and awkwardly overgrown dog. (In life, the iguanodon did not crouch on all fours, but was bipedal.) Looking at them now you would scarcely guess that these odd and lumbering beasts could cause great rancour and bitterness, but they did. Perhaps nothing in natural history has been at the centre of fiercer and more enduring hatreds than the line of ancient beasts known as dinosaurs.

At the time of the dinosaurs’ construction, Sydenham was on the edge of London and its spacious park was considered an ideal place to re-erect the famous Crystal Palace, the glass and cast-iron structure that had been the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and from which the new park naturally took its name. The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon.

Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s life hell. Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head and rushed out again.

In 1825, aged just twenty-one, Owen moved to London and soon after was engaged by the Royal College of Surgeons to help organize their extensive, but disordered, collections of medical and anatomical specimens. Most of these had been left to the institution by John Hunter, a distinguished surgeon and tireless collector of medical curiosities, but had never been catalogued or organized, largely because the paperwork explaining the significance of each had gone missing soon after Hunter’s death. Owen swiftly distinguished himself with his powers of organization and deduction. At the same time he showed himself to be a peerless anatomist with instincts for reconstruction almost on a par with the great Cuvier in Paris. He became such an expert on the anatomy of animals that he was granted first refusal on any animal that died at the London Zoological Gardens, and these he would invariably have delivered to his house for examination. Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway. He quickly became a leading expert on all kinds of animals living and extinct – from platypuses, echidnas and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and the extinct giant birds called moas that had roamed New Zealand until eaten out of existence by the Maoris. He was the first to describe the archaeopteryx after its discovery in Bavaria in 1861 and the first to write a formal epitaph for the dodo. Altogether he produced some six hundred anatomical papers, a prodigious output.

But it was for his work with dinosaurs that Owen is remembered. He coined the term dinosauria in 1841. It means ‘terrible lizard’ and was a curiously inapt name. Dinosaurs, as we now know, weren’t all terrible – some were no bigger than rabbits and probably extremely retiring – and the one thing they most emphatically were not was lizards, which are actually of a much older (by 30 million years) lineage. Owen was well aware that the creatures were reptilian and had at his disposal a perfectly good Greek word, herpeton, but for some reason chose not to use it. Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was his failure to note that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles20: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurishchians. Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyes – a face to frighten babies. In manner he was cold and imperious, and he was without scruple in the furtherance of his ambitions. He was the only person Charles Darwin was ever known to hate.

Even Owen’s son (who soon after killed himself) referred to his father’s ‘lamentable coldness of heart’. His undoubted gifts as an anatomist allowed him to get away with the most barefaced dishonesties. In 1857, the naturalist T. H. Huxley was leafing through a new edition of Churchill’s Medical Directory23 when he noticed that Owen was listed as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Government School of Mines, which rather surprised Huxley as that was the position he held. Upon enquiring how Churchill’s had made such an elemental error, he was told that the information had been provided to them by Dr Owen himself.

A fellow naturalist named Hugh Falconer, meanwhile, caught Owen taking credit for one of his discoveries. Others accused him of borrowing specimens, then denying he had done so. Owen even fell into a bitter dispute with the Queen’s dentist over the credit for a theory concerning the physiology of teeth. He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant, whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was astonished to discover that he was suddenly denied access to the anatomical specimens he needed to conduct his research. Unable to pursue his work, he sank into an understandably dispirited obscurity. But no-one suffered more from Owen’s unkindly attentions than the hapless and increasingly tragic Gideon Mantell.

After losing his wife, his children, his medical practice and most of his fossil collection, Mantell moved to London. There, in 1841 – the fateful year in which Owen would achieve his greatest glory for naming and identifying the dinosaurs – Mantell was involved in a terrible accident. While crossing Clapham Common in a carriage, he somehow fell from his seat, grew entangled in the reins and was dragged at a gallop over rough ground by the panicked horses. The accident left him bent, crippled and in chronic pain, with a spine damaged beyond repair. Capitalizing on Mantell’s enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging his contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to try to do original research, but Owen used his influence at the Royal Society to ensure that most of his papers were rejected. In 1852, unable to bear any more pain or persecution, Mantell took his own life. His deformed spine was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons where – now here’s an irony for you – it was placed in the care of Richard Owen, director of the college’s Hunterian Museum.

But the insults had not quite finished. Soon after Mantell’s death, an arrestingly uncharitable obituary appeared in the Literary Gazette. In it Mantell was characterized as a mediocre anatomist whose modest contributions to palaeontology were limited by a ‘want of exact knowledge’. The obituary even removed the discovery of the iguanodon from him and credited it instead to Cuvier and Owen, among others. Though the piece carried no byline, the style was Owen’s and no-one in the world of the natural sciences doubted the authorship. By this stage, however, Owen’s transgressions were beginning to catch up with him. His undoing began when a committee of the Royal Society – a committee of which he happened to be chairman – decided to award him its highest honour, the Royal Medal, for a paper he had written on an extinct mollusc called the belemnite. ‘However,’ as Deborah Cadbury notes in her excellent history of the period, Terrible Lizard, ‘this piece of work was not quite as original as it appeared.’ The belemnite, it turned out, had been discovered four years earlier by an amateur naturalist named Chaning Pearce, and the discovery had been fully reported at a meeting of the Geological Society. Owen had been at that meeting, but failed to mention this when he presented a report of his own to the Royal Society – at which, not incidentally, he rechristened the creature Belemnites owenii in his own honour.

Although Owen was allowed to keep the Royal Medal, the episode left a permanent tarnish on his reputation, even among his few remaining supporters. Eventually Huxley managed to do to Owen what Owen had done to so many others: he had him voted off the councils of the Zoological and Royal Societies. To round off the retribution, Huxley became the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Owen would never again do important research, but the latter half of his career was devoted to one unexceptionable pursuit for which we can all be grateful. In 1856 he became head of the natural history section of the British Museum, in which capacity he became the driving force behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum.

The grand and beloved gothic heap in South Kensington, opened in 1880, is almost entirely a testament to his vision. Before Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even they found it difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket – that is, assuming they had passed the interview – and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.

Owen’s plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging working men to visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum’s space to public displays. He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people could appreciate what they were viewing. In this, somewhat unexpectedly, he was opposed by T. H. Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily research institutes. By making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for. Still, his altruism towards his fellow man generally did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failed – though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his own statue commands a masterful view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum, while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over people snacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts.

It would be reasonable to suppose that Richard Owen’s petty rivalries marked the low point of nineteenth-century palaeontology, but in fact worse was to come, this time from overseas. In America in the closing decades of the century there arose a rivalry even more spectacularly venomous, if not quite as destructive. It was between two strange and ruthless men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. They had much in common. Both were spoiled, driven, self-centred, quarrelsome, jealous, mistrustful and ever unhappy. Between them they changed the world of palaeontology. They began as friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between them – nobody is quite sure what – and by the following year they had developed an enmity that would grow into consuming hatred over the next three decades. It is probably safe to say that no two people in the natural sciences have ever despised each other more.

Marsh, the elder of the two by eight years, was a retiring and bookish fellow, with a trim beard and dapper manner, who spent little time in the field and was seldom very good at finding things when he was there. On a visit to the famous dinosaur fields of Como Bluff, Wyoming, he failed to notice the bones that were, in the words of one historian, ‘lying everywhere like logs’29. But he had the means to buy almost anything he wanted. Although he came from a modest background – his father was a farmer in upstate New York – his uncle was the supremely rich and extraordinarily indulgent financier George Peabody. When Marsh showed an interest in natural history, Peabody had a museum built for him at Yale and provided funds sufficient for him to fill it with almost whatever took his fancy. Cope was born more directly into privilege – his father was a rich Philadelphia businessman – and was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 in Montana, while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby.

When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway. He was having too good a season. At one point he ran into a party of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth30. For a decade or so, Marsh and Cope’s mutual dislike primarily took the form of quiet sniping, but in 1877 it erupted into grandiose dimensions.

In that year a Colorado schoolteacher named Arthur Lakes found bones near Morrison while out hiking with a friend. Recognizing the bones as coming from a ‘gigantic saurian’, Lakes thoughtfully dispatched some samples to both Marsh and Cope. A delighted Cope sent Lakes $100 for his trouble and asked him not to tell anyone of his discovery, especially Marsh. Confused, Lakes now asked Marsh to pass the bones on to Cope. Marsh did so, but it was an affront that he would never forget. It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand and often ridiculous. It sometimes stooped to one team’s diggers throwing rocks at the other team’s. Cope was caught at one point prising open crates that belonged to Marsh. They insulted each other in print and poured scorn on each other’s results. Seldom – perhaps never – has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity. Over the next several years the two men between them increased the number of known dinosaur species in America from nine to almost one hundred and fifty.

Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name33 – stegosaurus, brontosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops – was found by one or the other of them. Unfortunately, they worked in such reckless haste that they often failed to note that a new discovery was something already known. Between them they managed to ‘discover’ a species called Uintatheres anceps no fewer than twenty-two times. It took years to sort out some of the classification messes they made. Some are not sorted out yet. Of the two, Cope’s scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some fourteen hundred learned papers and described almost thirteen hundred new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs) – more than double Marsh’s output in both cases.

Cope might have done even more, but unfortunately he went into a rather precipitous descent in his later years. Having inherited a fortune in 1875, he invested unwisely in silver and lost everything. He ended up living in a single room in a Philadelphia boarding house, surrounded by books, papers and bones. Marsh, by contrast, finished his days in a splendid mansion in New Haven. Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later. In his final years, Cope developed one other interesting obsession. It became his earnest wish to be declared the type specimen for Homo sapiens – that is, to have his bones be the official set for the human race.

Normally, the type specimen of a species is the first set of bones found, but since no first set of Homo sapiens bones exists, there was a vacancy, which Cope desired to fill. It was an odd and vain wish, but no-one could think of any grounds to oppose it. To that end, Cope willed his bones to the Wistar Institute, a learned society in Philadelphia endowed by the descendants of the seemingly inescapable Caspar Wistar. Unfortunately, after his bones were prepared and assembled, it was found that they showed signs of incipient syphilis, hardly a feature one would wish to preserve in the type specimen for one’s own race. So Cope’s petition and his bones were quietly shelved. There is still no type specimen for modern humans. As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crippling accident. Mantell’s twisted spine remained on display at the Hunterian Museum for nearly a century before being mercifully obliterated by a German bomb in the Blitz.

What remained of Mantell’s collection after his death passed on to his children and much of it was taken to New Zealand by his son Walter, who emigrated there in 1840. Walter became a distinguished Kiwi, eventually attaining the office of Minister of Native Affairs. In 1865 he donated the prime specimens from his father’s collection, including the famous iguanodon tooth, to the Colonial Museum (now the Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington, where they have remained ever since. The iguanodon tooth that started it all – arguably the most important tooth in palaeontology – is no longer on display. Of course, dinosaur hunting didn’t end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossil hunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun.

In 1898, the year that fell between the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than anything found before was discovered – noticed, really – at a place called Bone Cabin Quarry, only a few miles from Marsh’s prime hunting ground at Como Bluff, Wyoming. There, hundreds and hundreds of fossil bones were to be found weathering out of the hills. They were so numerous, in fact, that someone had built a cabin out of them – hence the name. In just the first two seasons, one hundred thousand pounds of ancient bones were excavated from the site, and tens of thousands of pounds more came in each of the half dozen years that followed.

The upshot is that by the turn of the twentieth century, palaeontologists had literally tons of old bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any of these bones were. Worse, the agreed ages for the Earth couldn’t comfortably support the numbers of aeons and ages and epochs that the past obviously contained. If Earth were really only twenty million years old or so, as the great Lord Kelvin insisted, then whole orders of ancient creatures must have come into being and gone out again practically in the same geological instant. It just made no sense. Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with results that only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity College in Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 million years – way beyond anything anybody else was suggesting. When this was drawn to his attention, he recalculated using the same data and put the figure at 153 million years. John Joly, also of Trinity, decided to give Edmond Halley’s ocean salts idea a whirl, but his method was based on so many faulty assumptions that he was hopelessly adrift. He calculated that the Earth was 89 million years old – an age that fitted neatly enough with Kelvin’s assumptions but unfortunately not with reality. Such was the confusion that by the close of the nineteenth century, depending on which text you consulted, you could learn that the number of years that stood between us and the dawn of complex life in the Cambrian period was 3 million, 18 million, 600 million, 794 million, or 2.4 billion – or some other number within that range.

As late as 1910, one of the most respected estimates, by the American George Becker, put the Earth’s age at perhaps as little as 55 million years. Just when matters seemed most intractably confused, along came another extraordinary figure with a novel approach. He was a bluff and brilliant New Zealand farm boy named Ernest Rutherford, and he produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more. Remarkably, his evidence was based on alchemy – natural, spontaneous, scientifically credible and wholly non-occult, but alchemy nonetheless. Newton, it turned out, had not been so wrong after all. And exactly how that became evident is, of course, another story.

The notable exception being the Tyrannosaurus rex, which was found by Barnum Brown in 1902.

Robert Brown

It is perhaps telling that one of the most important observations of the century, Brownian motion, which established the active nature of molecules, was made not by a chemist but by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown. (What Brown noticed, in 1827, was that tiny grains of pollen suspended in water remained indefinitely in motion no matter how long he gave them to settle. The cause of this perpetual motion – namely, the actions of invisible molecules – was long a mystery.)

to a brilliant young man named Humphry Davy, who was appointed the institution’s professor of chemistry shortly after its inception and rapidly gained fame as an outstanding lecturer and productive experimentalist. Soon after taking up his position, Davy began to bang out new elements one after another – potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium (depending on which branch of English you favour).

He discovered so many elements not so much because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious technique of applying electricity to a molten substance – electrolysis, as it is known. Altogether he discovered a dozen elements, a fifth of the known total of his day. Davy might have done far more, but unfortunately as a young man he developed an abiding attachment to the buoyant pleasures of nitrous oxide. He grew so attached to the gas that he drew on it (literally) three or four times a day. Eventually, in 1829, it is thought to have killed him.

Fortunately, more sober types were at work elsewhere. In 1808, a dour Quaker named John Dalton became the first person to intimate the nature of an atom (progress that will be discussed more completely a little further on) and in 1811 an Italian with the splendidly operatic name of Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quarequa and Cerreto, made a discovery that would prove highly significant in the long term – namely, that two equal volumes of gases of any type, if kept at the same pressure and temperature, will contain identical numbers of molecules. Two things were notable about the appealingly simple Avogadro’s Principle, as it became known. First, it provided a basis for more accurately measuring the size and weight of atoms. Using Avogadro’s mathematics, chemists were eventually able to work out, for instance, that a typical atom had a diameter of 0.00000008 centimetres15, which is very little indeed. And second, almost no one knew about it for almost fifty years.

Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson Book 5) (English Edition)

also extremely interesting, these errors:

http://errata.wikidot.com/0767908171

The Sheep that thinks it's a Wolf

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