0247
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Living Biographies of Great Scientists
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF
Great Scientists
By HENRY THOMAS AND
DANA LEE THOMAS
niustrations by
GORDON ROSS
Blue Ribbon Books
GARDEN aXY, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1941
BY GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC,
1946
BLUE RIBBON BOOKS
CL
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents and Illustrations
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INTRODUCTION
ARCHIMEDES (INCLUDING EUCLID) . . 5
Illustration {Archimedes) facing page 26
ROGER BACON • 13
Illustration facing page 2y
COPERNICUS
Illustration facing page 5S
GALILEO . 55
Illustration facing page 59 -
NEWTON.
Illustration facing page 66
LAVOISIER
Illustration facing page 6y
6g
DALTON . .
Illustration facing page 82
[V]
CONTENTS
HUMBOLDT 99
lllusti ation facing page 83
FARADAY 117
Illustration facing page 122
DARWIN 133
Illustration facing page 123
HUXLEY 1 51
Illustration facing page 134.
AGASSIZ 167
IllusUation facing page 155
MENDEL 187
Illustration facing page 186
PASTEUR 201
Illustration facing page iSy
KELVIN 219
Illustration facing page 218
HAECKEL 233
Illustration facing page 21 g
STEINMETZ 247
' Illustration facing page 2^0
MARIE CURIE . 265
Illustration facing page 2gi
BANTING 283
Illustration facing page 282
/EINSTEIN 299
Illustration facing page 2S3
[vi]
Introduction
Tkk READER OF BIOGRAPHY Hves iiot ODC life but many lives. For
he expands his own experiences by adding to them the experi-
ences of his fellow men. He sees the world, so to speak, through
many pairs of eyes and he thus learns to contact his neighbors
through many sympathetic chords of understanding.
Every biography is a window which enables us to look into
a different angle of reality. This is especially true of the biog-
raphies of the great scientists. For the scientists have made it
their business to decipher the secret of reality and to translate
it into the practical language of our everyday life.
The scientists — ^the thinkers and the doers of our human family
— ^have brought down to the rest of us a twofold blessing from
the ^^thousand several watchtowers” of their superior wisdom.
They have showed us our unimportance, and they have enabled
us to become more important. They have defined our place in
nature — an insignificant ant-heap of humanity infesting a tiny
mudbaU of pebbles and dust hidden away in one of the obscurest
comers of the universe. A sobering and yet at the same time an
ennobling thought. Each of us is but a mean atom of the uni-
verse, yet each of us is an atom of no mean universe. And thanks
INTRODUCTION
to the efforts of the scientists each of us is able, through the prac-
tical application of the laws of astronomy, physics, chemistry,
mathematics, medicine and biology, to develop into a happier,
healthier and more efficient citizen of the universe.
And a wiser citizen? Unfortimately, not yet. The scientists give
us our instruments for healing, and we turn them into weapons
for killing. But this is the fault of the pupils and not of the
teachers. The human heart seems to be a less apt scholar than
the human mind. The moral development of the human race
has lagged far behind its mental development. But here, too, the
lives of the scientists can serve as our guide. Most of them have
demonstrated by their own actions that the greater the knowl-
edge, the greater the humility. Every significant advance in sci-
ence, as nearly every great scientist has acknowledged, is the
result of the combined thought of many minds. A true under-
standing of the world — and this seems to be the practically uni-
versal verdict of the scientists — ^points to reciprocal cooperation
as the surest roadway to individual happiness.
H. T.
ARCHIMEDES
Great Scientific Contributions by Archimedes
Inventions;
The Screw of Archimedes for
making water run “up-
hill”
The pulley.
Scientific Treatises :
On the Sphere and Cylinder.
The Measurement of the Cir-
cle.
On Conoids and Spheroids.
On Spirals.
The Center of Gravity.
On Floating Bodies.
The Sand Reckoner.
The Method of Mechanics.
Geometrical Propositions.
The Cattle Problem.
Archimedes
W B.a-212 B.C.
1 liERO, the king of Syracuse, had given his jeweler a certain
weight of gold to be fashioned into a crown. When the crown
was finished, the suspicion arose in Hiero’s mind that his jeweler
had stolen part of the gold and replaced it with an equal quan-
tity of silver. Accordingly he commissioned his court scientist,
Archimedes, to detect the fraud if possible.
After many days of fruitless research, Archimedes was about
to abandon the task. But one morning, as he stepped into his
tub at the public bathhouse of Syracuse, he noticed the over-
flow of the water. The sight of this overflow set his imagination
aflame. Forgetting his naked condition, he leaped out of his
bathtub and ran home through the streets of Syracuse crying,
^^Eureka! Eureka! — I have found it! I have found if!^^
What he had found was a simple solution to his problem about
Hiero's crown. He would procure two masses of metal, one of
gold and one of silver, and each of equal weight with the crown.
Then he would in turn submerge each of the tlyee masses — ^the
gold, the silver and the crown — ^in a vessel filled with water and
measure the overflow of the water in each of the three cases.
As soon as possible he put this idea to the test and discovered
[5]
living biographies of great scientists
that the amount of water displaced by the crown was more than
the amount of water displaced by the gold, and less than
the amount of water displaced by the silver. And in this way
he knew that the crown consisted neither entirely of gold nor
entirely of silver, but that it was a mixture of both.
This simple method of comparing the weights of solids with
the weights of equal quantities of water supplied Hiero with the
solution to the mystery of the crown. But it supplied the rest of
mankind with a far greater gift — the key to the solution of one
of the profound mysteries of nature, the go-called “specific grav-
ity’" of the various substances which go into the making of the
world. This law of specific gravity, known to the present day
as the Principle of Archimedes, may be briefly stated as follows :
“A body immersed in a fluid loses as much in weight as the
weight of an equal volume of the fluid.”
Thus it was in the simple process of bathing that Archimedes
discovered one of the great secrets of nature. Yet bathing to
Archimedes, it is interesting to note, was not an ordinary process.
Rather it was an extraordinary event. So absorbed was he in hiij^
scientific experiments that, to quote Plutarch, “his servants with
the greatest diflSculty, and against his will, got him to the baths
to wash and anoint him.” And when finally they succeeded in
luring him to the baths, continues Plutarch, “he would ever draw
all sorts of geometrical figures with his fingers upon his naked
body.”
Geometry was his greatest passion. “Intoxicated and ravished
with the sweet enticements of this siren, which as it were lay
continually with Mm, he often forgot his meat and his drink.”
He lived in the springtime of the mathematical sciences — an
era in wMch the manipulations of numbers and the measure-
ments of triangles and circles were amongst the most exciting of
adventures in the academies and the colleges of the Greek world.
The magic of Euclid, the “Father of Geometry,” still lay like
a bloom over an enchanted age. This professor of mathematics
at the University of Alexandria had transformed the earth and
[4]
ARCHIMEDES
the heavens into a vast design of intricate configurations. And
with the deft fingers of his amazing intellect he had taken this
design apart and analyzed it into its simple components — ^points,
lines, angles, curves, surfaces, solids — a map of the infinite trans-
lated into the finite language of elementary mathematics. Euclid
made the impossible possible by the simplest of methods. When
his fellow professors at Alexandria told him that there was no
human way to measure the height of the Great Pyramid, he pro-
ceeded to measure it as follows : He waited for that hour of the
day when the length of his shadow was exactly equal to the height
of his person, and then he measured the length of the pyramid's
shadow. “This, gentlemen," he said, “is the exact height of the
Great Pyramid."
Though he simplified his geometry, Euclid insisted upon a
thorough study of its principles in order that his students might
fully understand them. The story is told that Ptolemy, the king
of Alexandria, once expressed his impatience at Euclid’s elaborate
manner of explaining his theorems. “Isn’t there," asked the king,
“a shorter way of learning geometry than through your method?"
“Sire," replied Euclid, “in the country there are two kinds of
roads — ^the hard road for the common people and the easy road
for the royal family. But in geometry all must go the same way.
There is no royal road to learning."
As to the details of Euclid’s life, very little is known about
them. One legend has it that the last — and best — ^section of his
famous Elements of Geometry was thrown into the fire by his
wife in a fit of temper. If this story is true, the probability is
that his wife lost her temper through no provocation on Euclid’s
part. For he was, the ancient writers tell us, “a gentle and kindly
old man." His students idolized Him. For he “guided them like
a father." Yet on occasion he could tame the more impertinent
of his “children" with the lash of a biting sarcasm. “Can you
tell me," asked one of his students after he had learned the first
theorem, “just what practical advantage there is in studying
geometry?" Whereupon Euclid turned to his servant. “Gramio,”
[5]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
lie said, ‘‘give this gentleman a dollar; he can’t learn without
money.”
Euclid himself, like most of the ancient Greek scholars, cared
little for the “practical” values of his scientific investigations. He
loved learning for learning’s sake. Shy, modest and aloof, he
“lived peaceably in his habitation” and allowed the world of
petty politics and of military glory to clatter by in its noisy and
vulgar parade. “These things,” he said, “shall pass. But the de-
signs of the heavenly stars shall remain eternally fixed.”
II
Quite different from this dispassionate life of quiet contempla-
tion was the career of Archimedes, the “spiritual grandson” of
Euclid. (Archimedes was the pupil of Conon, who was the
pupil of Euclid. ) As a young man he desired, like his great pred-
ecessor, to devote himself exclusively to mathematics. He con-
tinued the study of geometry from the point where Euclid had
left off. He calculated the ratio of the circumference of a circle
to its diameter; he devised a plan for counting the sand on the
seashore; he formulated a method for measuring the areas and
the volumes of circular and of spherical objects; and he dis-
covered the relation between the volume of a cylinder and that
of an inscribed ball. This last discovery was as simple as it was
ingenious. He constructed a cylindrical cup whose height was
equal to its diameter, and a sphere that fitted snugly into this
cup. He then fiUed the cup with water, immersed the sphere
in the water, and compared the amount of the overflow with the
original amount of the water in the cylinder. He thus found
that the volume of an inscribed sphere is equal to exactly two-
thirds of the volume of its enclosing cylinder. So proud was he
of this discovery that he ordered the figure of a sphere within a
cylinder to be carved upon his tombstone
For Archimedes, like Euclid, was anxious to be remembered
ARCHIMEDES
only as a philosophical mathematician. He wanted to be left
alone to his geometrical studies. But the insistent demands of his
environment compelled him to become an inventor as well as
a philosopher. Archimedes thoroughly disliked his compulsory
role as “a maker of the vile and beggarly and mercenary ma-
chines of commerce and war."’ But he was related to Hiero and
therefore felt constrained by a double obligation — as a subject
and as a kinsman — ^to obey the orders of the king.
Working under these orders, Archimedes produced no less
than forty inventions — ^some of them for commercial use but
most of them for military purposes. Perhaps the most interesting
of his commercial inventions was the so-caUed Screw of Archi-
medes. This hollow corkscrew, placed upon an inclined surface
with the lower end immersed in a pool of water and with the
spirals turning constantly from left to right, scoops up the water
at the bottom and spills it out at the top — ^thus compelling the
water to perform the apparently impossible ‘‘miracle’’ of flowing
uphill.
This commercial invention — employed even today for the
draining of swampy areas in the Netherlands — ^was to the con-
temporaries of Archimedes an object of profound amazement.
But more amazing than his “utensils of peace” were his engines
of war. His native city of Syracuse was besieged by the Romans,
and King Hiero called upon Archimedes to devise weapons of
defense against this siege. A Roman fleet, under the leadership
of Marcellus, had set sail against Syracuse. “I believe I can
destroy that fleet,” said Archimedes.
“By what means?” asked Hiero. »
“By means of burning mirrors.”
Hiero said nothing, but shook his head. His poor kinsman
had apparently lost his reason through overstudy.
Yet Archimedes made good his boast. For, “as soon as the
ships of the enemy came within bowshot of Syracuse,” he trained
upon them the battery of his mirrors which he had constructed
especially for the purpose. These mirrors were “huge concave
r^i
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
plates of metal” so designed as to focus the blazing light of the
sun upon the oncoming fleet.
In connection with this story it is interesting to note that Sir
Isaac Newton, after a series of expenments with concave mir-
rors, expressed his opinion that such an invention on the part
of Archimedes was not beyond the realm of scientific possibility.
Most of the historians, however, reject the incident as fictitious,
since no account of it is found either in Plutarch or in Polybius,
the two leading authorities on the life of Archimedes.
But there seems to be little disagreement among the leading
historians as to the authenticity of his other military inventions.
When the blockade around Syracuse had become a serious threat
to the further existence of the city, Hiero again called his kinsman
to ids aid. “Is it possible,” he asked, “to remove the enemy’s
ships?”
“Yes,” replied Archimedes. “It is possible even to remove the
earth.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“Merely this — ^that if I had a place in another world in which
to plant my feet, I could wrench the earth out of its course.” He
then went on to explain his theory of levers and pulleys — a dis-
covery of his own — ^by means of which he could move a maxi-
mum of weight with a minimum of effort.
When Hiero expressed his doubt as to the efficacy of this
plan, Archimedes proceeded to put it to the test. He’ constructed
a multiple pulley, attached the chain at one end of the pulley to
a large and heavily laden Syracusan ship, and handed the rope
at the other end of the puUey to Hiero. “Pull the rope, Sire, and
see what happens.”
The king pulled the rope, and a cry of astonishment escaped
from his lips. For the feeble effort of his two small hands had
lifted the ship as if by magic out of the water and dangled it into
the air.
It was not long before Marcellus, too, was to marvel at the
“magic” of Archimedes. The Roman commander had arrived
[ 8 ]
ARCHIMEDES
before the walls of Syracuse equipped with “a fleet of sixty vessels
filled with all sorts of arms and missiles.” Moreover, he had
erected “an engine of artillery on a huge platform supported by
eight galleys fastened together.” But all this stupendous armada
was merely a handful of toys in the enormous iron grappling
hooks that were attached to the pulleys of Archimedes. Descend-
ing upon the Roman ships like birds of prey, these “iron claws”
of Archimedes drew them “straight up into the air, and then
plunged them stern foremost into the depths.” At times, to vary
his defensive strategy, Archimedes carried the enemy's galleys
“high over the cliffs that jutted out beneath the walls of the
city, and then whirled them around and around and finally
dashed them with all their merchandise and men — a dreadful
spectacle — upon the jagged rocks below.”
When Marcellus saw the devastation visited upon his fleet,
he is said to have exclaimed: “Let us stop fighting against this
geometrical monster, who uses our ships like cups to ladle water
from the sea, and has whipped our most efficient engines and
driven them off in disgrace, and with the uncanny jugglery of
his mind has outrivaled the exploits of the hundred-handed
giants of mythology.” Finally the Roman soldiers had become so
fearful, observes Plutarch, that whenever they saw a bit of rope
or a stick of timber projecting a little over the wall they cried,
“Here comes Archimedes,” and turned their backs and fled.
Realizing the impossibility of conquest by assault, Marcellus
decided to overcome the Syracusans by means of a blockade. Yet
in spite of this blockade the ingenuity of Archimedes held off
the surrender of his city for three years. And even then it was
only through the carelessness of the Syracusans that their city
feU. It was on the night of the festival held in honor of Artemis,
the goddess of the moon. The people of the beleaguered city had
yielded themselves up too freely to their wine and their sport.
Shortly before dawn, “when their senses were befuddled and
their bodies worn out,” a number of Roman soldiers succeeded
in climbing over the walls and in opening the gates of the city
[9]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
from within. When the Syracusans awoke the next morning,
they found their city in the hands of the enemy.
As Marcellus looked down upon the city from the heights just
outside the walls, he is said “to have wept much in commiseration
of its impending fate.” For he knew that his soldiers, having been
held so long at the leash, could not now be restrained from “their
harvest of plunder.” Indeed, even among his officers many were
in favor of razing the city to the ground and putting all the in-
habitants to the sword. To this riotous fury of revenge Marcellus
vigorously objected. For he admired the courage bf the Syra-
cusans who had so long and so brilliantly held out against him.
He especially admired his “geometrical” opponent. “Let no one,”
he commanded, “dare to lay a violent hand upon Archimedes.
This man shall be our personal guest.”
Ill
As FOR ARCHIMEDES, he was sitting quietly in the market place
drawing a circle in the sand and calculating some abstruse
mathematical problem. So wrapped up was he in his thought
that he was surprised to see a drunken Roman soldier rush upon
him with his sword. “Before you kill me, my friend,” said Archi-
medes, “pray let me finish my circle.”
But the soldier paid no heed to him and transfixed him with
his sword.
“Ah well,” whispered the gentle old scientist as he lay dying
upon the ground, “theyVe taken away my body, but I shall take
away my mind,”
ROGER BACON
Great Scientific Contributions by Roger Bacon
Experiments in magnetism, op-
tics, gunpowder, poison
gases, etc.
Books :
Opus Majus,
Opus Minus,
Opus Tertium,
Compendium of the Study oj
Philosophy,
Compendium of the Study of
Theology,
Metaphysics,
A Critical Study of Aristotle,
Roger Bacon
1214-1294
He did not cause a great stir in the world of his contem-
poraries. He was one of nature’s stepchildren as judged by the
yardstick of personal success. He lived to a disillusioned old age,
having failed to see any of his dreams come true. And when he
died no one noted the day of his passing.
Yet gradually as his name emerged from the forgotten manu-
scripts, and as the formulas bearing his imprint were unfolded
to the incredulous eyes of the generations that followed, a world
of legend took shape around the axis of his achievements. And
the adulation heaped upon him after his death was as ridiculous
as the disrepute inflicted upon him while he lived. The living
scientist had been little more than a clown; the dead “magician”
was little less than a god. “By the natural condensation of the
air,” wrote a scholar of the Middle Ages, “Friar Roger, called
Bacon, made a bridge thirty miles long over the sea from England
to the Continent; and then, after passing over it safely with all
his retinue, he destroyed it by rarefying the air.” Another chroni-
cler of the fourteenth century declared that Roger Bacon had
constructed tw6 mirrors. “By one of them he could light a candle
at any hour, day or night; in the other he could see what people
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
were doing in any part of the world/^ It was further asserted that
the little Franciscan friar had fashioned an enormous head of
brass ‘‘from which he could obtain the answer to any question
he asked.’’ And the favorite utterance of this metal oracle, added
the medieval scholars, was the enigmatic sentence: 'Time is,
time was, time is past.”
Such was the world’s distorted estimate of Roger Bacon over
a period of several centuries. At last, however, the little Fran-
ciscan exacted from an erratic mankind the proper appraisal of
his achievements. There is a tablet at Oxford, on the site of the
Grey Friars — ^the Franciscan lodgings of the man whose works
had been so amusingly misunderstood. And this, in part, is the in-
scription upon the tablet :
“The great philosopher, Roger Bacon . . . who by the ex-
perimental method extended . . . the realm of science after a
long life of untiring activity . . . fell asleep in Christ a.d.
1292.”
II
Little is known about the external events of Roger Bacon’s life.
All we have is the summary of his internal hie — his ideas.
Bacon’s unorthodox ideas came to him as a result of his or-
thodox training at Oxford. He entered upon his scientific experi-
ments by way of protest against the Unscientific attitude of his
teachers. He felt that there was something wrong with a system
of education which had inherited its metaphysics direct from
Aristotle and which had formulated a series of blind dogmas
about the heavens and the earth without a single scientific ex-
periment to ascertain whether the doctrines of Aristotle were
true. Such was the comatose state of ignorance in which the
human mind had dwelt for fifteen hundred years. The majority
of the so-called “professors of science” at the universities were
nothing but learned doctors in mystical hocus-pocus. They Were
content “to do as Aristotle had done,” forgetting in their fool-
ROGER BACON
ishness that Aristotle had lacked the necessary instruments for
the verification of his scientific doctrines. And so, like the ancient
Greek philosopher, they combined their physics and their biology
and their mathematics into a universal and tightly organized sys-
tem of logic based upon their wishful thinking as to what was
best rather than upon their exact knowledge as to what was. They
did not school themselves to observe; they moralized. They be-
lieved that all matter was animated by a conscious aim. For
example, they said that the planets of the heavens moved in
circles, “in order to express their divine perfection in this perfect
geometric design of God.”
To a man of sense the ridiculousness of this antiquarian atti-
tude was quite apparent. To a man of sensitivity the fame that
was bestowed upon these “crystal gazers” into the past was down-
right disgusting. Roger Bacon was hardly thirty when he decided
that he could never become a part of this system. The professors
of illogic were arrogant, far too arrogant in their ignorance. A
man must follow the path of humility, thought Bacon, if he
wanted to search for the truth. “True knowledge stems not from
the authority of others, nor from a blind allegiance to antiquated
dogmas.” Rather it is a highly personal experience — a light that
is communicated only to the innermost privacy of the individual
through the impartial channels of all knowledge and of all
thought. “More secrets of knowledge have been discovered by
plain and neglected men than by men of popular fame,” con-
fided Bacon to his notes. “And this is so with good reason. For
the men of popular fame are busy on popular matters . . The
true scholar must turn away from the schools. Bacon had ar-
rived at a sound — and somewhat paradoxical — solution to his
problems. He would look to his religion for his science. He would
leave his academic position — ^he had been lecturing on philoso-
phy for some years at the University of Paris — and he would
become a Franciscan friar.
It is true that the gentle Francis of Assisi, the founder of the
Franciscan order, had been distrustful of learning and had en-
[^5]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
joined his followers “to think little and to do much.” But like
Roger Bacon, St Francis had harbored his suspicions not so
much against the principles of scholarship as against the pre-
tensions of the scholars. Spiritually, if not intellectually, St Fran-
cis and Roger Bacon were kindred souls. Both men were genuine
Christians in a world that had largely forgotten the essence of
Christianity. “I will conduct my experiments on the magnetic
forces of the lodestone at the selfsame shrine where my feUow-
scientist, St Francis, performed his experiments on the magnetic
forces of love.”
Ill
For the remainder of his life Bacon took no heed “of discourses
and the battle of words.” He followed the tendency of his
thoughts and in these he “found his rest.” Through observation
he acquired a firsthand knowledge of the “entire natural king-
dom.” The medieval philosophers had hotly pursued the phantom
of theoretical abstraction. “What others had striven to see dimly
and blindly, like bats in the twilight, I investigated in the full
light of the day.” He called himself a “master of experiment.”
And his experiments covered a territory almost as wide as the
world. There was nothing known to “laymen, old women, soldiers
and ploughmen” of which he was ignorant. He worked with
metals and minerals and made weapons of war. He studied
agriculture and mensuration. He took note of the remedies and
charms employed by old gossips, and he examined the books of
magicians in order that he might be able “to expose the falsehoods
of charlatans.” Nothing that deserved inquiry escaped him. How
else could a man ascertain the glory of God than by specializing
in an intimate study of all His works both great and small? “Let
no man boast of his wisdom, or look down upon the lowly, for
they have knowledge of many secret things which God has not
shown to those renowned for wisdom.” Bacon’s insatiable cu-
riosity led him to the discovery of many practical facts. He com-
puted the inaccuracy of the calendar employed in his day. He
ROGER BACON
demonstrated the characteristics of the magnetic field. He studied
the laws of optics and suggested the practicability of construct-
ing eyeglasses that would prove “helpful to the aged and to
those with weak eyes.” (What a fanciful idea! thought his con-
temporaries.) He hovered “tantalizingly close” to the principle of
the telescope. “I believe I have come upon cert a in laws whereby
a child might appear to be a giant and a man a mountain. . . .
Thus a small army might appear very large. ... So also we
might cause the sun, moon and stars in appearance to descend
here below, and similarly to appear above the heads of our
enemies. . . .”
He was interested in chemical analysis and left a strange note
about his discoveries in this field. “I have produced an explosion
caused by the bursting of a small piece of parchment that out-
roared thunder and a flash that exceeded the brilliance of
lightning.” But he concealed this formula for his invention of
gunpowder — ^for such it was — ^in cipher language in his man-
uscripts. He was afraid that the secret might fall into the hands
of those who would do harm with so powerful an invention. It
requires, he said, not only ingenuity but intelligence to employ
the principles of science to human advantage. Man is not made
for nature, but nature is made for man. “Look at things, try
them, see how they can act on you, and how you can act on
them.''
But this, asserted the savants of his day, was sheer blasphemy —
th is searching into the secrets of God for the benefit of man. The
Franciscans among whom Bacon had come in his quest for
peace — even they at last had lost patience with him. Scientists
who experimented with the works of God instead of accepting
them with an implicit faith were nothing less than magicians of
evil. The superiors of the order charged him with conspiring to
produce “heresies and novelties” against the accepted traditions
of mankind. They seized him and placed him in solitary con-
finement for fourteen years. When he was finally set free, just
before Ms death, he was a man with a broken body. But with a
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
spirit that nothing could break. “As for wealth/’ wrote this im-
prisoned sage on his diet of bread and water, “the true man of
science neither receives it nor seeks it ... If he frequented kings
and princes he would easily find those who would bestow on
him honors and wealth. But that would hinder him from pursu-
ing the great experiments in which he delights ... In his pursuit
of knowledge the philosopher can remove even the walls of his
cell to the outermost limits of the world.”
IV
The widespread knowledge of Roger Bacon had come to the
attention of at least one man who appreciated it. This man
was the pope. Some years before Bacon’s imprisonment it had
reached the pope’s ears that the modest friar had discovered
many answers to the “secrets of nature and many remedies for the
physical ills of men.” There followed a corresjpondence between
the two men. The pope requested Bacon to “declare through
your writing what remedies seem to you fitting for dealing with
those matters which you recently intimated to be of such mo-
ment; and do this secretly as far as yoii are able.” Whereupon
Bacon sent him his manuscript, the Opus Ma]us, through the
hands of one of his favorite pupils. But the roads were few and
travel was slow. The pope died within a twelvemonth, before
the manuscript reached him. The Holy See was plunged into a
great political struggle with the German emperors and in the
midst of the altercation no one found the time to examine the
greatest scientific treatise of the age. The manuscript fell into
complete obEvion for four hundred and fifty years before it
was finaUy published (in 1733). No wonder Bacon had ex-
pressed his utter contempt for the judgment of his fellow men !
During the years of his imprisonment, however, his cynical
contempt became transformed into philosophical aloofness. Little
by little the conviction grew upon him that his confinement
away from the bulk of mankind was more than merely physical.
ri81
ROGER BACON
It was the outward symbol of a spiritual cleavage between the
man of original thought and the world of superstitious dogma.
The real prisoners of life were not the thinkers whose bodies
were locked behind the bars of iron, but the dogmatists whose
minds were chained behind the bars of prejudice. He pitied his
jailers for the confinement of their souls. "^'May God release them
from the shackles of their ignorance.”
It was this purpose that had animated his scientific investiga-
tions and his religious convictions. He had tried to liberate the
human spirit through a more intelhgent understanding of the
eternal laws of the Creator. He had been accused as a heretic,
yet he regarded himself as the most honest of believers. For he
had tried to prove the validity of his belief — ^to fortify his love
of God with a knowledge of God. He had pursued his scientific
studies with but a single aim — ‘‘to reestablish upon a firmer
basis the divine teachings of the Church.”
And it was for this service that he had been condemned to
a “martyrdom of silence.” Yet he was not completely silent.
Toward the end of his imprisonment he was allowed to converse
with his pupils. The results of many of his researches — ^such as
his discovery of gunpowder and of poison gases — ^he had buried
in the mystery of cipher language so that unscrupulous laymen
might never utilize them for destructive ends. But the elements
of his constructive philosophy — ^those “principles of peace” that
were designed to lead to a better understanding between man
and man — ^these he passed by word of mouth to the pupils who
gathered eagerly around him. On one occasion he declared that
in the course of a single year he could familiarize an intelligent
student with the “whole pith of human knowledge.” And to
prove his contention he devoted himself with particular care to
a lowly disciple, “Poor John,” who spent a year with him m
assiduous study and who in this short time “so widened his field
as to amaze all who knew him.”
And so he worked with his pupils, and clarified his thoughts,
and prayed for the day of his release from prison. But gradually
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
he became aware that it was already too late for his release.
The end of the quest, and he was not yet eighty — a mere tyro
in the classroom of ultimate reality. A single year to survey the
entire domain of human thought, a whole lifetime to catch but
a fleeting glimpse of divine truth. He had only glanced at the
title page of God’s manuscript, and now he must close the book.
‘‘'A little groping toward the light — and then, the night.”
Often through the gratings of his prison he watched the
stars — cold and distant pinpoints of light mocking eternally at
the helplessness of man. And yet at times he read in those stars
a great and comforting thought. Some day perhaps the world
might discover the researches of a friar in God called Roger
Bacon. And the scientists would fashion lenses to bring the
distant near and to focus the rays of truth to a clearer human
vision. And then — ^who knows? — ^man might look upon his fel-
low man through the lenses of this magnified understanding and
recognize him for his brother . . .
And Bacon’s eyes grew luminous as he gathered his pupils
around him and gave voice to his prophetic dream:
“I believe that humanity shall accept as an axiom for its con-
duct the principle for which I have laid down my life — ^the right
to investigate. It is the credo of free men — ^this opportunity to
try, this privilege to err, this courage to experiment anew. We
scientists of the human spirit shall experiment, experiment, ever
experiment. Through centuries of trial and error, through agonies
of research . . . Let us experiment with laws and customs, with
money systems and governments, until we chart the one true
course — ^until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the
planets above have found theirs , . . And then at last we shall
move aU together in the harmony of our spheres under the great
impulse of a single creation — one unity, one system, one design.”
[ 50 ]
COPERNICUS
Great Scientific Contributions by Copernicus
Established the Copernican Books :
system of astronomy. Comment ariolus {Brief Corn-
Reformed the calendar. mentary).
On the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres,
A Treatise on Currency.
Nikolaus Copernicus
1473-1543
Eiom 1473 to 1543 a number of ambitious brigands were
devastating the earth. The Sultan Muhammad II, Pizarro, Caesar
Borgia, Charles the Bold, Suleiman the Magnificent, Baber,
Francis I — ^these are but a few of the many conquerors who
tried to erect a monument to their glory out of the murdered
bodies of their fellow men. Today the names of these conquerors
are all but forgotten. But three names stand out unforgettably
from that period of military turmoil — Columbus, Luther and
Copernicus. And these three names, it is interesting to note, are
the names not of fighters but of seekers. Columbus discovered
a new continent, Luther traced a new pathway to God, and
Copernicus found a new answer to the riddle of the universe,
II
The original name of Copernicus was Kopirnigy which means
humble. And this word summarizes both the parentage and the
personality of the “anatomist of the heavens.” He was the son
of an obscure baker in the Polish village of Thom, situated on
the banks of the Vistula. As a child he watched the sun as it
[23]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
‘'rolled along the heavens’" from the glory of the morning to
the glory of the evening. And at night he gazed at the in-
numerable little star-candles that lit up the circular ceiling of
the heavens. He asked his parents to tell him about the sun
and the stars, and they referred him to his uncle, the learned
bishop, Luke Wassilrode. The uncle sent him books on astron-
omy, and Nikolaus devoured them and then turned to the more
interesting story of the stars as unfolded in the open book of
the sky.
When he was ten years old, his father died and Nikolaus
was put under the guardianship of his uncle. His sorrow at his
father’s loss was tempered by the privilege that was now ac-
corded him to dip into the many volumes in his uncle’s library
— books not only on astronomy but on literature and painting
and sculpture and mathematics and music. He thus acquired
from the first a catholic interest in all the arts and sciences.
At eighteen he entered the University of Cracow and came
under the instruction of Professor Albert Brudzewski, one of
the leading astronomers of the day. His uncle, however, advised
him for practical purposes to turn his gaze from heaven to earth,
and to take up medicine instead of astronomy as his life’s work.
Accordingly he received his “doctor’s cap” at Cracow and
then asked his uncle’s permission to continue his studies in Italy.
The bishop generously gave his consent.
But before he started for Italy he applied himself for a time
to the study of painting — ^in order, as he remarked, “that I may
bring back my own concrete images of the beauties of that
country.”
And so, taking his brushes and his books, he went to Italy
where for three years he devoted himself to his medicine, his
art — ^and his astronomy. For he had learned to paint not only
the landscapes of the earth but the constellations of the heavens.
At the end of his three years of study (at the University of
Padua) his professors “placed upon his head” — as we are told
COPERNICUS
in the picturesque language of the day — “the two crowns of
medicine and of philosophy.’^
But then he settled down neither to his medicine nor to his
philosophy. Instead, he was appointed to the chair of astron-
omy (in 1499) at the University of Rome.
Here he spent four years — a period marked by brilliant lec-
tures, widespread fame, and final discontent. His discontent had
grown out of his habitual curiosity. He had been teaching his
astronomy in accordance with the Ptolemaic theory — a doctrine
which placed the earth in the center of the universe and relegated
the sun and the stars to the position of satellites that moved
around the earth. This Ptolemaic system had held sway for fif-
teen hundred years and seemed destined to hold sway forever.
For it was based, maintained the savants, upon the “infallible”
evidence of the senses. “The sky above us, as is obvious to anyone
who looks at the circle of the horizon, is an inverted bowl. And
the earth, as is equally obvious, occupies the very center of this
bowl.” Starting from this “self-evident fact,” the astronomers
maintained that the earth stands firmly in its place — an eternal
queen to which aU the heavenly bodies pay homage. The sun
travels over the earth by day, and under the earth by night,
while the stars travel under the earth by day and over the earth by
night. The universe, in other words, “is a perfect sphere which
makes a complete revolution amund the earth every twenty-
four houi^.”
But the astronomers had observed that this explanation of
the universe was not so simple as it had appeared at first. For
they noticed that some of the stars kept changing places in re-
lation to some of the other stars. These “wandering stars” or
“planets” seemed to have a motion of their own. One of these
planets, which the astronomers had named Venus, appeared at
times to follow the setting sun and at other times to precede the
rising sun. A second planet, Jupiter, made a leisurely journey
over the sky in twelve years. A third planet, Mars, made this
journey in two years; a fourth, Saturn, took thirty years to com-
[55]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
plete the journey; and a fifth, Mercury, seemed also to move
around the sky independently of the rest of the stars.
Then there was the moon, the eye of the night just as the
sun was the eye of the day. This, too, was an "Independent”
traveler, making its revolution of the sky in about twenty-eight
days.
Here, then, was the earth in the center, surrounded by seven
heavenly bodies — ^the moon, the five planets, and the sun — each
set like a jewel in a moving sphere of its own. And beyond and
above them all was the vast and all-embracing sphere of the fixed
stars.
This, in brief, was the Ptolemaic system of astronomy — a suc^
cession of spheres fixed within spheres, and all of them rotating
in different directions and at different speeds around the crown-
ing achievement of them all — ^the earth upon which we live.
“Man is therefore the center of all things.”
But little by little, as time went on and astronomers became
more observant of the skies, it became necessary for them to in-
vent additional spheres and more complicated motions in order
to explain the eclipses of the sun and of the moon and the oc-
casional “capricious” migration of a planet out of one sphere
into another. By the time of Copernicus the number of heavenly
spheres had been raised to seventy-nine and their motions had
become confused beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
And then the astronomers turned to mysticism. Whenever a star
or a planet seemed to be out of its proper orbit, they ascribed it
to “a conscious intent on the part of the living soul” of that
star or planet.
Such was the pseudo-scientific and semi-mystical astronomy
as taught by Copernicus at the University of Rome, But after
three years of this teaching he rebelled. In the course of his
omnivorous reading he had come across various hints about a
new kind of astronomy. Some of these hints dated as far back
as Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who had lived twenty cen-
turies before Copernicus. “The center of the universe,” said
[26]
COPERNICUS
Pythagoras, “is not the earth but the sun . . . The earth is merely
one of the stars that turns around the sun.” The philosopher
Aristotle, to be sure, had ridiculed this idea. But from time to
time, in the two thousand years that had elapsed between
Pythagoras and Copernicus, a few timid voices had dared to
reecho the Pythagorean suggestion in spite of Aristotle’s positive
assertion to the contrary. This suggestion about the mobility of
the earth had aroused the intellectual curiosity of Copernicus.
What if a new system of astronomy, based upon their theory,
were to explain all the eclipses, all the positions, all the motions
of the heavenly bodies'^ It was an idea well worth examining.
But the examination of this idea would be the work of a life-
time. It required leisure and seclusion and quiet reflection. Above
all, it required the abandonment of his teaching of a theory
about which he now had his grave misgivings. The seeker must
never presume to be a guide.
And so Copernicus gave up his professorship at the Univer-
sity of Rome and entered the priesthood in the Polish village of
Frauenbourg. From now on, his life was to be dedicated to the
advancement of the Word of God and to the contemplation of
the Works of God.
Ill
The newly appointed canon of Frauenbourg didn’t devote
all his energy to his religious duties and his astronomical studies.
For the poor of the parish needed medical attention, and Co-
pernicus gave them generously of his time and his skill. His skill
as a physician brought him so great a renown that sick people
from distant countries came to him for help after they had been
given up by their own doctors. And not infrequently the most
distinguished doctors of Europe wrote to him for his advice as
to the treatment of their difficult cases.
But even this did not exhaust the versatility of Copernicus.
Not content merely with his spiritual ministration and his med-
[57]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ical care for the parishioners, he looked after their material
comfort as well The village of Frauenbourg was situated on a
mountain, and the inhabitants therefore were unable to secure
running water. In order to get their water, they were obliged
to go to the river which was almost two miles away. Copernicus
resolved to “compel the water to come to the villagers instead
of compelling the villagers to come to the water.” Accordingly
he constructed a dam which raised the level of the river and
diverted its current to the foot of the mountain. Then he built
a mill which by a simple and ingenious mechanism churned
the rapid current of the river and raised the water to the level
of the church tower. From this elevation the villagers received
the water directly into their houses by means of pipes. In grateful
recognition of this service, the community placed at the foot
of the mechanism a stone inscribed with the name of Copernicus.
The name of Copernicus, indeed, had become synonymous
with kindness. And wisdom. Whenever a new project was
planned, for the benefit of learning or the betterment of life,
Copernicus was called upon to offer his suggestions. At the re-
quest of his government he worked out a new system of currency,
and at the invitation of the church he introduced practical re-
forms into the calendar. “Copernicus,” writes Clavius in his
monumental work on the calendar, “was the first to discover
the exact duration of the year.” (Actually Copernicus miscal-
culated the length of the year by 28 seconds.)
Having thus devoted his life to the threefold cultivation of
pity and piety and wisdom, Copernicus became an object of
esteem, almost of reverence, to a host of men and women.
Yet at the same time he incurred the hatred of some. Especially
of the so-called Teutonic Order. This Order consisted of a band
of robbers who, under the cloak of religion, plundered the clergy
and the laity alike. When Copernicus dared to object to their
depredations, they published a scurrilous pamphlet in which they
charged him with the very thefts of which they themselves were
guilty. Everybody, of course, laughed at their preposterous
COPERNICUS
charges. But this did not faze the ruffians of the Teutonic Order.
On the contrary, it egged them on to new and fiercer attacks
against Copernicus. They tried to accomplish with their ridicule
what they had failed to bring about with their rancor. They had
heard that Copernicus was investigating the heavens with a view
to determining the truth or the falsity of the Ptolemaic system.
Here was a vulnerable spot in the armor of their adversary. Ac-
cordingly they hired a number of clowns to go about the villages
and to burlesque his astronomical studies. These clowns would
gather a gaping mob around them and point out to them the
immovable earth and the moving sun — ""things which any fool
can see.’’ And then they would impersonate ""the crazy priest”
who ""contrary to all rhyme and reason” maintained that the
earth moved and the sun stood still.
The friends of Copernicus were indignant at this stupid and
malevolent persecution. But Copernicus only smiled. ""Let them
be,” he said. ""The movement of the heavenly bodies will be
influenced not in the slightest either by the ridicule or by the
respect of these foolish men.”
And so he continued to study the majesty of the heavens and
became more and more convinced of the insignificance of man.
And of the unimportance of the earth. This earth of ours, he
began to realize, is nothing but a speck of dust whirling forever
around the flame of the sun. Night after night he watched the
stars from his mountain top and little by little he worked out
that sublime theory of the heavens which to this day is known
by his name.
And this, briefly, is his theory — a theory which so accurately
accounts for all the inter-related movements and eclipses of the
heavenly bodies that it is today accepted as a fact:
The sun is the center of our universe, and our earth revolves
around it in a double motion — ^like a top spinning on its own
axis and around a circular (or rather oval) track. This double
motion explains the succession of the days and the nights as
well as the rotation of the seasons. But the earth is not the only
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
planet that spins around the sun. Other planets — Neptune,
Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury — are likewise
carried ‘'along the highways of the heavens’’ around this central
star of the universe. And these motions are the result not of
''capricious impulse within the living souls of the planets,” but
of the infallible and unchangeable laws of nature Each of these
planets revolves within its own individual orbit around the sun,
never swerving from its course, and never deviating by as much
as the fraction of a second from the immutable timetable of the
sky. Every planet at every moment is to be found at its appointed
place, every season arrives at its appointed time, and every mo-
tion of every heavenly body fulfills its appointed destiny.
Such, in the Copernican system of astronomy, is the unerring
eternal clockwork of the sky. Get the key to this clockwork — ^the
movement of the earth around the sun and of the moon around
the earth — and you will be able not only to explain but to pre-
dict the relative positions of every star and planet at every given
moment, the seasons in every section of the earth and the eclipses
in every segment of the heavens.
It took Copernicus over thirty \ears to elaborate this theory
of the heavens. And he worked out this elaborate' tlieor\ not only
experimentally, by means of his unaided senses — the telescope
had not as yet been discovered in his day — but also mathe-
matically, by the calculations of his precise mind. Patiently he
checked his limited observations against his mathematical for-
mulas — ^noting the eclipses of the moon in 1509 and in 15 ii,
the positions of Mars in 1512 and in 1518, the locations of Ju-
piter and of Saturn in 1520, and the conjunction of Venus and
of the moon in 1525 — and in every instance he found that the
actual phenomena agreed with his scientific calculations. And
at last, in 1 543, he was ready to declare to the world that the
earth is not a stationary prison from which we arc permitted to
behold the journeys of the stars, but a whirling chariot m which
our bodies are privileged to adventure over the open spaces of
the sky.
COPERNICUS
And thus in the final analysis the Copemican system, far from
belittling the dignity of man, actually glorified it. For in ‘liberat-
ing’" his body it also liberated his mind. It gave wings to his
imagination and aroused his intellectual appetite In the world
of philosophy, and especially in the realm of science, the work
' of Copernicus marks the beginning of the Modem Age.
IV
While Copernicus was at work on his astronomical theory he
corresponded about it with the leading scientists of Europe. But
again and again he hesitated to publish the results of his studies
— believing, as he wrote to the pope, that it would be wise “to
follow the example of the Pythagoreans who left nothing in
writing but communicated their observations orally, and then
only to those who were intelligent enough to understand them.”
In this hesitation Copernicus displayed perhaps a greater
degree of prudence than of patience. It is probable that for a
long time he was afraid to publish the book — ^not, however,
because of the peril to his life but because of the danger to his
theory. Unless and until he could substantiate his theory with a
sufficient support of corroborative evidence, he felt that he would
be merely bringing a premature idea into a hostile world. He
dreaded to see this precious idea of his destroyed before ever
it had a chance to become established. Finally, however, his
evidence was complete and he was ready to present his new
system of the world — “not as a hypothesis but as a fact.”
Too old to attend to the publication of the book himself — ^he
had now passed his sixty-ninth year— Copernicus entrusted it to
his friend, Tidemann Gysius, the bishop of Culm. The book
was issued in the spring of 1543. And it had a strange and
anonymous preface. “This book,” wTote the unknown “apologist”
for Copernicus, “is written to present not a scientific fact but a
playful fancy.”
[ 5^1
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
When the book came off the press, Copernicus was unable
to object to this pitiable travesty of his lifers work. For he was
already at death’s door. His body had been paralyzed some
weeks earlier. He died (May 24, 1543) a few days after the
publication of his deathless work.
GALILEO
Great Scientific Contributions by Galileo
Experiments in magnetism,
gravitation, motion, etc.
Inventions :
Compass.
Thermometer.
Improved telescope
Books :
The Messenger of the Stars.
On the Solar Spots.
On the Nature of Comets,
The Laws of Motion.
Dialogue on the New Science.
The Two Greatest Systems of
the World,
Galileo Galilei
1564-1642
YOUNG MEDICAL STUDENT at Pisa was kneeling in the Ca-
thedral. There was silence over the vast auditory save for the
annoying rattle of a chain. A sacristan had just filled a hanging
oil lamp and had carelessly left it swinging in the air. The tick-
tack of the swinging chain interrupted the student’s prayer and
started him upon a train of thought that was far removed from
his devotions.
Suddenly he jumped to his feet, to the amazement of the
other worshipers. A flash of light had descended upon him in
the rhythm of the swinging lamp. It seemed to him that this
rhythm was regular, and that the pendulum of the rattling
chain was taking exactly the same time in each of its oscillations
although the distance of these oscillations was constantly becom-
ing less and less.
Was this evidence of his senses correct? If so, he had hit upon
a miracle. He must rush home and find out iinmcdiatclv whether
he had suffered an illusion or di'^ccneied one of the great truths
of nature.
When he arrived home, he hunted up two threads of the same
length and attached them to two pieces of lead of the same
[55]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
weight. He then tied the other ends of the threads to separate
nails and was ready for his experiment. He asked his godfather,
Muzio Tedaldi, to help him in this experiment. “I want you to
count the motions of one of the threads while I count the mo-
tions of the other.
The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Another of Galileo’s
crazy ideas,” he mumbled to himself. But he agreed to help.
Galileo took the two pendulums, drew one of them to a dis-
tance of four hands’ breadth and the other to a distance of two
hands’ breadth from the perpendicular, and then let them go
simultaneously. The two men counted the oscillations of the
two threads, and then compared notes. The total was exactly
the same — one hundred counts in each case. The two threads,
in spite of the great difference in their starting points, had arrived
at the same point at the same time.
And thus, in the swinging motion of a cathedral oil lamp,
Galileo had discovered the rhythmic principle of nature which
today is applied in the counting of the human pulse, the meas-
urement of time on the clock, the echpses of the sun and the
movement of the stars.
II
Galileo was always experimenting. Even as a child he refused
to rely upon the authority of others. He submitted everything
to the scrutiny of his own senses and his own mind. The son of
a music master, he showed almost from infancy an interest in
“the music of the spheres.” His father referred to him as an
absent-minded little stargazer who saw strange visions and heard
uncanny sounds. At school, when the teacher was trying to ex-
plain the importance of the Latin preposition or of the Italian
verb, young Galileo’s mind was floating amongst the clouds in
the wake of the toy balloon which his father had bought him as
a birthday present. In his playtime he constructed all sorts of
crude little instruments resembling carts and mills and boats—
[56]
GALILEO
anything that his unusually keen senses had observed in his daily
walks.
At the age of twelve he was sent to the monastery school at
Vallombrosa, that ‘‘shady vale where pilgrims leave their soul
in a kiss.” Here, under the influence of the Benedictine monks,
Galileo flirted for a time with the thought of entering the re-
ligious order. But his father discouraged him from this thought
and removed him from Vallombrosa. He had other designs for
Galileo — he wanted him to be a cloth merchant.
Galileo, however, had ideas of his own. He now insisted upon
a scientific career for himself. He was eager to specialize in
mathematics — a field which in those unscientific days meant a
lifetime of obscure poverty. Finally the father and the son came
to a compromise. Galileo entered the University of Pisa to study
medicine.
And to plunge, secretly and heartily, into the study of mathe-
matics. Under his medical textbooks of Hippocrates and Galen
he concealed the works of Euclid and of Archimedes. And in his
spare moments he conducted experiments with instruments of
his own construction.
His professors soon got wind of his studies and his experiments.
And they disapproved of them. For it was nothing short of heresy
for a student to think for himself. All the scientific problems,
the professors declared, had been finally and conclusively settled
by Aristotle. Whenever a student dared to raise an objection to
a dogmatic pronouncement, the professor would settle the ar-
gument with a citation from Aristotle . Magister dixit^ the Master
has spoken. And that was that. But here was a young student
foolhardy enough to check the dogmas of his professors with his
own observations. His recklessness must be curbed — ^for the good
name of the university, for the good of his own soul. They wrote
to Galileo’s father about it, and the old musician warned his son
to mind his professors and to stop meddling with the unknown.
But Galileo disregarded the warning. He had made a profound
discovery — ^the fact that “the science of mathematics is the Ian-
[57]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
guage of nature ” And to the study of this language he was now
ready to dedicate his life.
Ill
Galileo’s professors refused to give him his doctor’s diploma.
And so he left the University of Pisa — a reputed failure in med-
icine and a “crackbrained juggler of useless figures.” But his
skill in the juggling of figures had won for him a brilliant reputa-
tion among some of the leading mathematicians of Italy — Giu-
seppe Moletti, Father Cnstoforo Clavio and Guidubaldo del
Monte — ^men to whom he communicated some of his scientific
observations and who honored him with the title of “the Ar-
chimedes of his day.”
But the Archimedes of his day found mathematics a poor
substitute for medicine. For at that period many were sick, but
few were curious. Galileo tried to get a number of pupils among
the nobility, only to discover that hardly anybody cared to ex-
change abstract figures for concrete loaves of bread and butter.
Fortunately, however, the chair of mathematics had become
vacant at the University of Pisa and Galileo was able to secure
the position — ^largely because of the fact that nobody else cared
for it. For the salary was only 6o scudi (about $65) a year.
In order to increase his income beyond the starvation point,
he began to practice medicine in his leisure moments. But his
leisure moments were few. For he was now busier than ever
with his experiments. It was his purpose, he said, to re-examine
the scientific doctrines of Aristotle instead of accepting them
as gospel truth. The way to arrive at a scientific truth, he main-
tained, was not to memorize the books of Aristotle, but to study
the Book of Nature.
The students listened to his lectures with ill-concealed smiles,
and the professors hurled anathemas upon his head. What did
this insolent young upstart mean by removing from their shelves
the sacred tomes of Auistotle and by replacing them with those
[58]
GALILEO
ridiculous contraptions of pieces of string and lumps of lead and
levers and circles and angles and planes? Why, these were toys
for children and not tools for the serious study of the mysteries
of the world. ‘‘Let him stop this nonsense,” they threatened, or
they would teach him a le«son he would never forget.
But he refused to stop his experiments, and therefore they
decided to put their threat into execution. Contrary to the teach-
ings of Aristotl^Galileo had asserted that two different weights
released simultaneously from the same height would fall to the
ground at the same time.^his assertion, insisted the professors,
was sheer nonsense. “Nobody but a fool can believe that a feather
and a cannon ball will travel downward through space at the
same speed.” Now was the time to expose this absurdity, to the
eternal disgrace of Galileo. They would compel him, in the pres-
ence of the entire faculty and student body of the university, to
make a public exhibition of himself and his stupid theories.
Galileo was only too happy to accept the challenge. The place
chosen for the “exhibition” was the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On
the appointed day the professors dressed themselves in their long
velvet robes and marched to the Tower. The students and many
of the townspeople had preceded them. It was a noisy and hi-
larious crowd of merrymakers, prepared to see the execution of
a man’s character. Curiously enough, it had never entered any-
body’s head to verify for himself the simple fact about falling
bodies. Magister dixit. Aristotle had spoken, so why bother to
exercise your own brain?
And so the audience jeered on as Galileo climbed the steps
of the Leaning Tower, In one hand he carried a ten-pound
shot and in the other a one-pound shot. The moment came
Galileo released the two balls from the top of the tower. A shout
of derision — and then a murmur of amazement. The unbeliev-
able had actually happened! The two balls of iron had started
together from the top of the tower, had dropped through the
air together, and together had reached the ground
Galileo had proved his theory. But some of the professors still
[39]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
maintained that he was wrong. In spite of the evidence of their
eyes, they continued to advance the doctrines of Aristotle. And
to persecute Galileo,
III
Undismayed by his persecution, Galileo went on with his uncon-
ventional teaching — and his unconventional living. It was an
academic rule at Pisa for professors to wear their robes not only
in the classroom but on the streets as well. Galileo disobeyed this
rule, since he looked upon it as utterly ridiculous. The robes,
he insisted, interfered with his movements. Physically as well
as mentally he wanted to be at all times free. '^Conventional
clothes, like conventional ideas, are the invention of the devil.’’
Time and again he was compelled to pay a fine out of his meager
salary for his persistent infraction of the rule. Finally the author-
ities of the university became impatient with this young rebel
who dared to defy the established thoughts and customs of the
day. He was not, they concluded, the right sort of man to guide
the young. They must find some sort of pretext to dismiss him
from the university.
And this pretext was not long in forthcoming. Prince Don
Giovanni de Medici, the bastard son of Gosimo I, had invented
a dredging machine with which he proposed to clean the harbor
of Leghorn. A model of this machine was sent to Galileo for
his examination and report. Galileo’s report — ^which subse-
quently proved to be correct — ^was unfavorable. The machine,
he said, was extremely ingenious with the exception of one item
— ^it couldn’t work. Incensed at this “affront” to his dignity, Don
Giovanni demanded the dismissal of Galileo from the university
on the ground of incom.petence. The authorities of the univer-
sity were only too ready to accede to his demand. The students,
egged on by their Aristotelian professors, joined in the general
chorus of yelping, and Galileo was hounded out of the Univer-
sity of Pisa.
GALILEO
But he had his friends — Moletti, Clavio, Guidubaldo^ other
mathematicians and physicists who had followed his brilliant
experiments and appraised them at their proper value. With
the help of some of these friends he was able to secure another^
and better, position at the University of Padua. His salary was
now almost $200 a year — a fabulous sum to Galileo.
But even more gratifying than the increase in his pay was
the advance in his freedom. At Padua he was allowed to have
his say without the interruption of catcalls and hisses. When he
stepped upon the platform to deliver his first lecture (December
7, 1 592 ) he was greeted with an ovation. Pupils and professors
alike predicted a great future for him at this seat of learning
where men were free to think. For Padua, together with the
entire Venetian Republic, had been banned by the Church and
was therefore exempt from the restrictions of the Inquisition.
The Venetian scholars — and this included the faculty at Padua —
were true to their Faith, but they insisted upon the principle of
the separation of their scientific studies from their religious devo-
tions.
It was therefore with a clear conscience and an unfettered
mind that Galileo was now able to continue with his experiments.
And these experiments covered a wide range of theoretical and
practical knowledge — ^from the courses of the stars to the ma-
neuvers of the battlefield. Although he had never served in the
army, he had acquired a thorough knowledge of military architec-
ture. And this knowledge enabled him to secure a number of
private pupils — princes, nobles, soldiers — ^men who aspired to
devote their lives either to ruling or to fighting. These private
pupils, in accordance with the custom of the day, came to live
with Galileo. Some of them brought their servants along with
them. It was a merry and stimulating group that gathered around
the table of this young professor of twenty-eight.
But it was also a noisy group. And at times Galileo was glad
to escape from it~into the arms of the Venetian courtesans.
These “honored ladies/^ like the famous courtesans of ancient
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Greece, were regarded not as a vulgar class of “gold-diggers”
but as a charming group of female companions trained especially
for the purpose of supplying mental as well as physical diversion
to their distinguished clientele. They could discourse intelligently
on music, literature and art. They were invited to the banquets
and introduced to the wives of the nobles. Their clothes and
their manners were “modest yet seductive.” They taught many
a great lady of Venice how to take better care of her body and
her mind. In their bath water they used aromatic plants. They
anointed their hair, polished their naUs and their speech and
devoted themselves exclusively to the fine art of stimulating the
senses of their lovers.
And Galileo was a man of susceptible senses as well as of good
sense. He found great pleasure in the company of the courtesans.
Especially of one of them — Marina Gamba. He never married —
like Cicero he believed that a man can’t be both a good philos-
opher and a good husband — ^but he took Marina into his house
as his mistress and he became the father of three of her children.
His paternal obligations, added to the costs of his social diver-
sions and to the expenses of his scientific instruments, proved to
be a bottomless sieve to his inadequate earnings. Although his
salary kept constantly increasing, he was never out of debt. At
one time he was obliged to ask the treasurer of the university for
a two years’ advance in his pay. The treasurer granted his re-
quest, though not without displeasure.
And his obligations kept mounting up. The harassed young
teacher of Padua had now another source of worry to contend
with. His relatives in Pisa, having heard of his academic success,
had come to look upon him as the financial pillar of the family.
Their demands upon his purse were inexhaustible. His brother,
anxious to enter the service of a Polish nobleman, insisted that
Galileo advance him the money for his trip to Poland. This req-
uisite sum was greater than Galileo’s earnings for an entire year.
Galileo borrowed the money and sent it to his brother. And
then his sister, having fallen in love with a worthless young
[42]
GALILEO
scamp, demanded that Galileo supply her with her dowry. Galilee
borrowed one-third of the amount asked for, and promised to
pay the balance at a later date. But right after the marriage
his brother-in-law sued him for the unpaid balance. Another
debt, another burden — and the demands from his family kept
coming on and on.
Yet in spite of his burdens and his worries, Galileo found time
for his amusements — dinners and dances in Venice; private
musicales which he attended frequently as an auditor and oc-
casionally as a performer, for he was an expert player on the
lute; popular recitations and serenades and carnivals and bur-
lesques. He even composed several of the burlesques and probably
acted in some of them — broad suggestive farces written with
little delicacy and much wit. For Venice at that period was a
city of free thinking, frank living and boisterous laughter.
But these were merely the surface activities of Galileo’s life.
From first to last, his mind was dedicated to the pursuit of science.
He organized, in a palace situated near the bridge of Santa
Sophia, an Academy of Refugees — a scientific and philosophical
club consisting of men who had “escaped” to Venice from va-
rious parts of Italy in order that they might be free to continue
their studies and express their thoughts. It was at this club that
Galileo first disclosed the results of many of his observations and
experiments.'^e acquainted the members with the mysteries of
the magnet and the magnetic forces of the earth; he explained to
them the intricacies of the compass^ a new instrument he had just
invented; he demonstrated to them another of his inventions,
a machine designed to raise water and to irrigate the soil; he
showed them how to measure the temperature of the air by
still another of his invented instruments, the thermometer. And
finally he aroused their admiration with the most amazing in-
vention of them all — ^the telescope, “a gazer into the distant
stars.”
For the invention of the telescope Galileo neither deserved
nor claimed the full credit. On one of his visits to Venice he had
{43]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
heard that a Dutch optician by the name of Hans Lipperhey
had accidentally chanced upon a strange discovery. As he was
working on his spectacle lenses in his shop, this man had noticed
that by placing a convex and a concave glass together he could
make distant objects near. This accidental discovery interested
Galileo. With his usual thoroughness he began to study the
subject, to examine the curvatures and the grouping of various
types of glasses and to calculate, by means of precise mathemat-
ical formulas, the visual results of these different curvatures and
groupings.
Finally (on August 21, 1609) he was ready to make a public
demonstration of the first scientifically constructed telescope in
history. Followed by a crowd of his friends and admirers, he
climbed to the top of the Campanile in Venice. And then one
by one he allowed them to look through his “magic magnifying
glass.” To their astonishment they beheld “sails and shipping . . .
so far off that it was two hours before they could be seen with
the naked eye.” They beheld “the traffic in a dozen harbors,
the cattle grazing on the distant hillsides and the worshipers
going in and out of their churches in the faraway towns and
villages.” And then at night, turning their gaze to the heavens,
they beheld “the nearness of the distant stars.”
Galileo was overwhelmed with orders for his telescope. But
he presented it, without compensation, to the Duke of Venice.
Whereupon the Duke, not to be outdone in generosity, ordered
Galileo’s election to a professorship for life at the University of
Padua — ^at a salary equal in purchasing power to about $5000
a year.
Galileo had reached the height of his prosperity and his fame.
Yet he was unhappy. “The wings of Fortune,” he wrote in one
of his letters, “are swift. But the wings of Hope are drooping.”
Ever since his arrival in Padua he had entertained the hope of
returning in triumph to Pisa, the city out of which he had been
hounded in disgrace. Again and again he had petitioned Cosimo
de Medici, the Grand Duke of Florence (and of Pisa), to hire
[44]
GALILEO
him as his court mathematician. He had even dedicated one of
his books. Operations of the Compass^ to Cosimo. But the Grand
Duke had remained deaf to his petitions. And now that he had
accepted his lifelong professorship at Padua, Galileo resigned
himself to perpetual exile, the venerated prisoner of his fame.
And then Cosimo died, and his son Cosimo II, a former pupil
of Galileo's, came to the throne. He offered Galileo the posi-
tion which the famous scientist had so vainly and so ardently
sought. Galileo broke his contract with the University of Padua
and eagerly made his way to the court of Cosimo II.
And to the great tragedy of his life.
IV
The cause of Galileo's tragedy — and of his everlasting glory —
was his epoch-making book, Sidereus Nunctus (The Messenger
of the Stars), Galileo had written this book in the free atmos-
phere of Padua. And he was now confronted with it in the in-
quisitorial environment of Florence.
Galileo had printed his Sidereus NunciuSy as he wrote to
his friend, Belisario Vinta, in order to “acquaint all the philos-
ophers and mathematicians with some observations which I have
made on the celestial bodies by means of my spy-glass (mio
occhtale) and which infinitely amaze me. . . I give thanks t(s
God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of
marvellous things unrevealed to bygone ages ... I have ascer-
tained that the moon is a body similar to the earth ... I have
beheld a multitude of fixed stais never before seen . . . Moreover,
I have ascertained . . . the nature of the Milky Way . . . But the
greatest marvel of all is the discovery of four new planets ... I
have observed that they move around the sun."
And, he might have added, 'T have observed that the earth,
too, moves around the sun." But he failed to make this assertion,
either in his letter or in his book. He merely mentioned it orally
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
to some of his more liberal friends. To blazon it forth in writing
would be tantamount to delivering himself into the torture
chamber of the Inquisition. He remembered the fate of Giordano
Bruno, who had been burned at the stake (in i6io) for his
scientific deciaiations Galileo felt that it would be safer for him-
self, and healthier for science, if he could continue to live and
to conduct his experiments without the interference of the In-
quisition. Together with the Koran he believed that "‘the ink of
the scholar and the blood of the martyr are of equal value in the
eye of Heaven ”
But Galileo, in spite of his precaution, was destined to be a
martyr as well as a scholar. For throughout the Florentine ter-
ritory the Inquisition ruled with unlimited power and unflagging
watchfulness. The Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, had
noted the fact that Galileo, while ignoring the question of the
earth’s movement around the sun, had nevertheless declared
himself as a follower of Copernicus. Accordingly, on March 26,
1616, Galileo was ordered to present himself before the Inquisi-
tion.
When Galileo arrived at the Holy Office, Cardinal Bellarmine
‘"advised” him to “abandon his heretical opinions about the earth
and the sun and the stars.” He was not to think such thoughts,
nor to teach them, nor to defend them either orally or in writing,
“under the threat of persecution.”
Galileo, “with death in his soul,” signed his renunciation and
promised to obey. And the Cardinal released him with a tri-
umphant smile. With a single stern decree he had stopped the
planets from moving around the sun.
As for Galileo, he returned to Florence disheartened and
ashamed. For a time he continued with his experiments in the
quiet of his laboratory — and dared not disclose his discoveries to
the world. But genius is bom to be expressed just as the seed
is planted to grow. In the long mn, Galileo was unable to stifle
his thoughts. He published another book on astronomy, and
again he fell afoul of the dogmatic beliefs of the orthodox. Once
GALILEO
more he was summoned to appear before the Inquisition — and
this time on a far more serious charge. For he was now accused of
“recidivism” — ^that is, the second commission of a crime after
punishment for the first commission. The penalty for this “double
crime” was death.
When he received the second summons to the Inquisition,
Galileo was ill. The doctors issued an affidavit to that effect,
“Galileo is in bed, and he runs the risk of going to another world
rather than to Rome.” But the Inquisitors were relentless. “If he
is in any condition to come, let him be seized, bound in chains
and transported to Rome.”
He left for Rome in the frost of winter (January, 1633), and
arrived there more dead than alive. When he presented himself
before his judges he was in no condition, either physically or
mentally, to defend himself.
His trial lasted six months. In the course of this trial he re-
ceived the support not only of free thinkers but of many Catholic
scholars and churchmen as well. For the Inquisition was as un-
popular as it was powerful.
But the Inquisition had its way. On June 22, 1633, he was
compelled to abjure liis belief in the movement of the earth,
“Before the Holy Sainted Gospels which I touch with my hands,
I swear that ... I reject and detest my former heresies ... I
confess that my error has been one of vain ambition and pure
ignorance ... I now declare and swear that the earth does not
move around the sun . . .”
As his friends led him, trembling and exhausted, away from
the tribunal, Galileo is said to have remarked under his breath,
^‘Eppuf si muove^^ — But the earth does move!
V
“In the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His
Most Glorious Virgin Mother, Mary,” wrote the Cardinals of
the Inquisition, “we decree that Galileo’s books be prohibited by
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
a public edict, and we condemn their writer to the formal prison
of this Holy Office for a period determinable at our pleasure/’
‘Tet in spite of everything,” exclaimed Galileo, “I shall re^
main a Christian!”
And a scientist. Although he had received strict orders to
refrain from his scientific pursuits, he wrote another — and his
greatest — ^book while he was in prison at Arcetri. This book, The
Laws of Motion^ was a summary of all the basic principles of
mechanics. He wrote this work in secret, and had it smuggled
out for publication in Holland.
Galileo never saw a printed copy of the book. For he had
grown blind in his prison. But he enjoyed the comfort of holding
the book in his arms as he lay on his deathbed (January 8,
1642). “I esteem this the most of all my works,” he murmured.
“It is the outcome of my extreme agony.”
[^ 8 ]
NEWTON
Great Scientific Contributions by Newton
Formulated the laws of gravi- On Motion.
tation. Universal Arithmetic.
Invented infinitesimal calcu- The Method of Fluxions.
lus. The Mathematical Principles
of Natural Philosophy.
Books :
New Theory about Light and
Colors.
Isaac Newton
1642-1727
I Ie was born shortly after his father’s death — a puny, pre-
mature and sickly caricature of a child. The midwife who at-
tended at his birth didn’t expect him to live. “'Why, he was so
small I could have put him into a quart mug!” Such was
destiny’s whimsical way of introducing a prodigious mind to the
world.
Newton’s early years were spent with his mother. Then, by
reason of her marriage, he was transferred to the care of his
grandmother. At twelve he entered public school and boarded
with a druggist. But he was a “poor boarder and mischievous
knave.” He was always up to tricks that kept the poor apothe-
cary’s wits in a panic. It was difficult to cope with a boy of such
an unruly temperament and such unpredictable habits. He would
collect small hatchets, saws and hammers of all sizes and build
curious devices. He had become thoroughly acquainted with the
mechanism of a windmill that was being constructed near the
apothecary’s house and he decided tp build a windmill of his
own. And it would be an improvement on all the others, he de-
clared. He would run his machine with animal power! He would
place a mouse on a treadwheel and deposit a morsel of com
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
above the wheel just beyond the desperate reach of this hungry
miller. “Trust nature to set the mechanism in motion!”
He was always up to some trick of this sort. “Please, sir,” he
said one day to the druggist’s brother-in-law. “May I have that
box in the cellar to turn into a clock? I am certain you will never
again be late through ignorance of the correct time.” He built
a clock whose hands were regulated by the action of dripping
water that he poured into a pan every morning in the proper
quantity. Next he built a “mechanical carriage” that was regu^
lated by the hands and the feet of the rider. “Unfortunately, it
could move only on a smooth level. It just obstinately refused to
travel over the rough surfaces and ditches of the road.” He took
to flying kites and became interested in the “magic of sailing
through the atmosphere.” And one night he called his playmates
together and told them with a devilish gleam in his eye: “I’m
going to give the country folk the scare of their lives. I’ve just
made some lanterns which I shall attach to the tails of my kites
and fly them over the rooftops. People will think they are? falling
comets !”
Such were the amusements of the boy. In his more quiet mo-
ments he wrote poetry and drew charcoal sketches on the walls
of his bedroom. But his relatives expected him to be neither
a poet nor an artist. They wanted him to till the soil for his liv-
ing. He had gained a great deal of weight and stature, and he
looked like a promising farmer. And so his mother took him away
from his studies and sent him to work in the fields. Once every
week she made him go to market with her servant in order that
he might become acquainted with the “gentle art” of haggling.
But whenever he approached the town, Newton begged the
servant to go to the market and to transact the business himself.
“You’ll find me here on the way back,” he said. “I shall be study-
ing my books behind the hedge.”
One day Newton’s uncle became suspicious and trailed him
on Ms way to market. He came upon Ms nephew stretched out in
the grass, hard at work on the solution of a problem in mathe-
NEWTON
matics. The old man shook his head with grave and majestic
resignation. “Go back to your studies, Isaac/’ he said. “Either
you’re a great loafer or a great genius — ^the Lord alone knows
which.”
II
As THE LAD PURSUED his Studies through Trinity College, Cam-
bridge, he found himself possessed of a great handicap — ^mathe-
matical knowledge came too easily to him. What comes easily,
is easily despised. During his graduate work at Cambridge he not
only anticipated the academic solutions of the problems but he
frequently suggested to his professors newer and simpler methods
of solution.
But the study of mathematics was of no special interest to
Newton. He regarded this science merely as a rather indistinct
pathway into the mysteries of nature. He was concerned with far
greater mental conquests. For he was not only a thinker but a
dreamer, not only a mathematician but a poet. His was the
method not of the stodgy observer, but of the imaginative creator.
It was his purpose to plunge boldly rather than to grope timidly
into the unexplored forests of human speculation.
As a boy he had written verses expressive of a fundamental
attitude that the years could never extinguish. One of his poems
was entitled The Three Crowns:
Earth's crown^ thus at my feet I can disdain,
Which heavy is, and at the best but vain.
But now a crown of thorns I gladly greet;
Sharp is this crown, but not so sharp as sweet;
The crown of glory that I yonder see
Is full of bliss and of eternity,
rhus spoke the poet who was willing to suffer in the fulfillment
of his vision — ^to accept the crown of thorns as a prelude to the
greater crown of glory. Every great scientist is a poet with a
vision. But he is a special type of poet who seeks to interpret his
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
vision in the scientific light of the spectrum. In his university
lodgings Newton had constructed a chemical laboratory, and
on the ground by his window he had planted a garden. The poet
paced among the chemicals and the man of science walked
among the fiowei^. Before he had reached the age of thirty his
hair had turned gray — as if paling before the immensity of
thought confined within his head.
And he gave full sway to his thought, taking the entire uni-
verse for his domain. First he peered into the heavens as his great
dreamer-predecessors had done. He discovered the curious fact
that there are different degrees of refraction among the different
ra}s of light, and upon this principle he constructed a reflector
telescope which was designed to bring the heavenly bodies to a
brighter focus. He next investigated the nature of white light,
since he suspected that it was merely a composite of all the colors
in the spectrum. And finally he turned to his own little corner
of the earth and studied the plants in his garden — ^the shapes of
the stems, the texture of the leaves and the hues of the flowers —
the magic raiment of the growing things that “outrivalled Solo-
mon in all his glory.”
As a reward for his efforts, Newton was elected to member-
ship in the British Royal Academy of Science. And he was ap-
pointed — at the age of twenty-seven — to a full professorship in
mathematics at Cambridge Uni\crsity. This appointment, to a
mind of inferior caliber, would have meant a lifelong banishment
into the nebulous dreams of academic hairsplitting. Cambridge
was full of these men who called themselves professors and
research fellows and who were nothing but ‘^perpetual under-
graduates.” They were a queer lot, these research scholars. One
of them, a ‘Y^^ungster” of three score and ten, had shut him-
self completely up with his books and vowed that he would
never see the sunlight again. But at night he tottered down the
stairs, leaning feebly on his cane, and made the rounds of the
campus for exercise. He stared at the ground through dim-sighted
eyes, and whenever he caught sight of a worm he jabbed at it
{54]
NEWTON
with his stick and exclaimed viciously, '"Damn you, you haven^t
got me yet!’’
And even Newton, though he escaped the intellectual sterility
of many of his colleagues, was not quite able to escape their
eccentricities. Busy with his cosmic dreams, he had little time
to look after his personal appearance. Often he entered the uni-
versity dining hall with his neckband loose, his hose ungartered
and his breeches unbuttoned at the knee.
Yet with all his untidiness, Newton was a young man with a
romantic heart. On one occasion ‘‘the flame of a breathless pas-
sion” prompted him to propose to a young lady of his acquaint-
ance. Tenderly he held her hand and looked into her eyes. But
at the critical moment his mind wandered into other fields of
thought. He had become absorbed in the binomial theorem for
infinite quantities. Dreamily he grasped his sweetheart’s finger —
in his fit of abstraction he took it for his pipe-cleaner — and tried
to ram it up the stem of his pipe. Awakened by her cry of pain
he apologized sheepishly. “Ah, my dear, I beg your pardon! I
see it will not do I I am afraid I am doomed to remain a bache-
lor.”
He had few students in his classes. When he tried to teach his
latest discovery, the infinitesimal calculus, his class shuddered at
the novelty and the complexity of the subject and stayed away
from the formidable individual who had “foisted it upon the
world.” His fellow teachers were amazed at the facility of his
computations. He had discovered a method — and that as a mere
student— for the evaluation of infinity. By means of this “secret
method” he had computed the area of a hyperbola to “two hun-
dred and fifty figures.” But he hadn’t bothered to make his
formula public. living as he did in the subjective realm of his
fancy, he never dreamed of the sensation his discovery might
produce upon other people. Mathematics was but a game for his
personal amusement, and not an instrument for practical use.
For Newton had a queer sense of practical values. Once a visitor
asked him to appraise the worth of a prism. Fascinated with the
[55]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
prism as an object of scientific research, he rejdied unhesitatingly :
‘‘The value is so great I can not even ascertain it.” Whereupon
the visitor offered to sell the prism to him— at an exorbitant
price. Newton accepted the offer. “Why, you silly man,” ex-
claimed his housekeeper when she saw the purchase. “You need
only have paid a price according to the weight of the glass !”
The weight of the glass ! He was baffled at the weights and the
values set upon things by other people. On what principles of
logic did they measure, buy and sell? Often on his vacations he
would return to his mother's home and sit for many hours in her
garden meditating upon the strangeness of the world. And once,
as had happened so often before, an apple fell accidentally from
a nearby tree. It marked one of the turning points in the history
of human thought, this casual fall of an apple to the ground. For
it set the mind of the man seated in the garden spinning as dizzily
as the earth. Here was the true value of things — a value that the
appraisers of gems and the merchants of gold had never even
dreamed of ! It took the moonstruck poets, the only sane among
the insane, to interpret aright the riddle of the universe.
And this is how Newton interpreted the riddle of the falling
apple: The law of the universe is the attraction of mass to mass.
In a crude and fragmentary form this law had been recognized
for some time. People knew that weights fall to the earth because
of the gravity at the center. But they did not know that this
principle of gravity applies not only to the earth but to the entire
universe. From planet to planet and star to star, throughout
the incalculable terrain of space, this interplay of mutual attrac-
tion keeps every particle of the universe rolling over its appointed
orbit in its appointed time to its appointed place — a, complicated
system of motion obeying the simple law of gravity under the
watchful eye of the Eternal.
Newton returned to Cambridge in order to formulate this
simple key to the riddle of the universe. As a result of his leisurely
observation of the unimportant little things of his daily life, he
had made one of the most important discoveries of history. He
[5^]
NEWTON
had raised the province of the physicist to the comprehensive
plane of the astronomer and he had directed the imagination of
man from the fall of an apple to the movement of the stars.
Ill
At first Newton was reluctant to publish the results of his ob-
servations. For he was a shy and retiring philosopher. “I’ll print
nothing,” he had declared to his friends. “For that would only
result in attracting acquaintances. And that is what I seek to
avoid.” His discoveries were a private pastime designed to amuse
him in his solitary study. He was not bothered by a sense of obli-
gation toward society. He was alone in a fanciful superworld of
his own creation, trying to track down the footprints of the
Eternal. It was a fascinating game — an excitement he wished to
share with no one.
Finally, however, his friends convinced him that he owed a
duty to his fellow men. And so reluctantly he began to prepare
his manuscript for publication. He kept awake nights pacing
back and forth in his study and refreshed himself for the long
days ahead by a few hours’ nap at dawn. “The meals that were
carried to him warm for supper he would often eat cold for
breakfast.” A turn around his garden and then a sudden cry,
have found it !” A mad scramble up the stairs into his room lo
make a few hasty notations while standing at his desk. An absent-
minded saunter through the streets when he was invited to dinner
and a sudden realization that he would be too late for his ap-
pointment. And then with a sigh he would go dinnerless back to
his lodgings and resume the work on his theory. For hours on
end he would stare trancelike into a telescope which he had
mounted at the head of his garden. Sometimes he would turn
with a puzzled look to the gardener whom he had overheard
muttering, “This man knows more than the whole human race
combined.” The college librarian at Cambridge would refer to
him with a significant motion of his finger toward his head. “A
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
queer chap.’’ He had few intimates, but rumor had it that he
kept a cat. ‘'Disturbed by her comings and goings,” gossiped the
librarian, “Mr Newton had a hole cut in the wall for her con-
venience. And one day, when the cat came down with kittens
he resigned himself like a philosopher to the situation and cut a
smaller hole for them beside the first one . . . But this,” added
the librarian, “is only a story. I don’t know about it for sure.”
Nobody knew much about Newton “for sure.” Throughout
his life his personality had been a problem too difficult to unravel.
And finally, when the Pnncipia Mathematica came off the press,
the public found the book as difficult as the author. Even the
scholars were nonplussed A philosopher of the first rank called
upon Newton and asked the scientist to suggest a course of study
that might prepare him to understand the complex mathematics
of the Principia. Newton graciously drew up a list of “necessary
books” — an array so formidable that the philosopher in despair
decided to give up his examination of the Pnnctpia. “The read-
ing of the preliminary list alone,” he explained, “would consume
the greater part of my life.”
Yet in reality, argued Newton, his book wasn’t hard to under-
stand. “The principles of my theory are within the intellectual
grasp even of those who are unacquainted with the higher mathe-
matics. For the book deals merely with the simple laws of
matter.” Every particle of matter in the universe gravitates to-
ward every other particle of matter with a force inversely pro-
portional to the square of their distances. “Do not be disturbed
by my three volumes of geometric analysis.” The essential at-
tribute of matter is force — ^the innate power of resistance by
which every body “endeavors to persevere in its present state . . .
unless acted upon by some external force.” This element of force
— ^the tendency of the smaller body to resist and of the larger
body to pull, the reaction and the attraction of matter — ^has
transformed the static universe of the ancients into the dynamic
universe of modem science “Just gi\e me the mass, the position
and the motion of a system of heavenly bodies at any given mo-
[JS]
NEWTON
ment and I will calculate their future positions and motions
by a set of rigid and unerring mathematical calculations ... I
will calculate the tides and the motions of the waters and the
earth. For the earth attracts the moon and the moon attracts
the earth . . . and the force of each in turn tends to keep them
both in a state of perpetual resistance. Attraction and reaction
— ^reaction and attraction . . . The great masses of the planets
and the stars remain suspended in space and retain their orbits
only through this mysterious law of universal gravitation.”
The leading scholars and scientists hastened to challenge this
‘^‘outlandish” theory that the heavenly bodies moved in accord-
ance with mechanistic laws. What a strange new divimty he had
created with this mathematical theory of his — a machine-god
without a wiH ! And what a soulless sort of universe he had con-
cocted in his “deranged poetical fancy” — a conglomeration of
bodies whose only attributes are mass, position and extension!
“This crazy mathematician,” declared one of his critics, “will
not have twenty followers in his lifetime.”
And the prediction of this critic proved to be correct. Isaac
Newton lived forty years after the publication of his book and
his converts at the end of that period “numbered less than a
dozen.” But he remained unperturbed. It was with the utmost
indifference that he had published his book in the first place.
He cared little about the prospects of a general reading public
and he made no concessions to the reader. At no point did he
offer any clarification of his intricate text. Indeed he seemed to
write the book with only two or three of his scientific friends in
mind. It was to them alone that he addressed his arguments.
“As for the rest of the world, it can go hang for all I care.” To the
criticism that the universe as envisaged in his theory was “the
lifeless story of a planless mind” he replied: “The fact that the
universe is so beautifully designed in accordance with such har-
monious laws . . . must presuppose the existence of a Divine
Wisdom, the hand of a Divine Creator.” But he refused to be
drawn into any controversy as to the nature of God. “I can frame
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
no hypothesis about Him. I am a scientist and I do not speculate
about theological matters. I deal not with God, but with His
observable laws.”
Few of his contemporaries understood Newton. But that was
hardly surprising; the complex and paradoxical mathematician
scarcely understood himself. At the very hour of his triumph —
the completion of a cosmic theory that was to become the basis
of all future science — he was a dreadfully unhappy man. For^
ironically enough, he was anxious to be recognized as a second-
rate gentleman rather than as a first-rate genius. It was not enough
that he possessed a noble mind; he must try to acquire a noble
rank. Again and again during the writing of the Pnncipia Mathe-
matica he begged his influential friends to secure him a political
position with the royal court. It bothered him not in the least
that the world did not appreciate him as the supreme philosopher
since Aristotle so long as his countrymen would recognize him
as a paid political retainer of the British king,
IV
It was immediately after the publication of his Pnncipia that
Newton went into politics. At first he had shown himself a fear-
less opponent of James II when that stubborn monarch had at-
tempted to stifle the freedom of the universities. At the overthrow
of the Stuarts and the accession of William and Mary, he sat
as a member of the Convention that debated the new constitu-
tional order. By nature, however, Newton was not an orator.
He spoke only once at the Convention during the great debates
— and that was, to request an usher to close the window. The
new king was not impressed with Newton’s parliamentary
ability. On one occasion, when asked to consult Newton on a
political matter, William replied: ‘‘Oh, no. Newton is only a
philosopher.”
Yet the philosopher never relaxed his effort to become a
courtier. And at last, when the office of warden of the mint fell
NEWTON
open, Newton secured the appointment through the solicitation
of his influential friends. His great mathematical mind was
turned to the problems of coinage. The irony did not escape his
countrymen. A character in a play remarked: “Newton? Oh
ay — I have heard of Mr Isaac — everybody has heard of Mr
Isaac — ^great man — ^master of the Mint.” The name of Newton
had become an object of ridicule from the lowest to the highest.
“Some of my enemies,” wrote Swift in exquisite burlesque, “have
industriously spread the rumor that one Isaac Newton, an instru-
ment-maker living near Leicester Fields, and afterwards a work-
man at the Mint in the Tower, might possibly pretend to vie with
me for fame in future time.”
This descent of Newton’s from genius to mediocrity, remarked
his more relentless critics, was only to be expected. To write the
Principia had been merely a hobby with him. To become as-
sistant master of the king’s Mint had been his life’s ambition.
Newton had lost his sense of perspective, they said. His mind had
broken down under the strain of writing the Pnncipia and never
again would he be “fit for mental service.” Indeed, it was whis-
pered that during the writing of the book “which neither he nor
anyone else understood” he had suffered for a time a stroke of
insanity. One windy morning, so the story went, he had returned
from chapel and found that his cat had overturned a lighted
candle on the table and set fire to many of his important papers.
“Oh, Diamond,” he had cried, “little do you realize the mischief
you have done me!” And — continued the gossips — ^it was the
grief at the loss of those papers, the result of many years of in-
vestigation, that had finally overturned his mind. “Perhaps
too,” observed some of the London wags, “he had caught a
little touch of maiiess looking at the moon.” And, indeed, some
of his caprices were hardly those of a normal mind. “I must
withdraw from your acquaintance,” he wrote suddenly to a
friend, “and see neither you nor the rest of jny acquaintances any
moire.” To another of his friends he wrote an apology for a letter
he had sent him during a period when “I sat too often by the fire
[6i]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
and was seized with a distemper/’ On one occasion he had se-
verely criticized the work of his friend, the philosopher Locke.
Upon receiving from Locke a letter of grieved expostulation,
Newton replied: ‘T remember that I wrote to you, but what I
said of your book I remember not. If you please to send me a
transcript of that passage, I will give you an account of it if I
can.” Fits of temper, loss of memory, sudden outbreaks of suspi-
cion and equally sudden outbursts of compunction — ^were not
these the symptoms of a disordered mind? ''No doubt all these
rumors are exaggerated. But on the other hand, what else can
you expect of a man who keeps constantly gazing at the moon?”
V
Now that he was drawing an adequate income as the king’s
servant, Newton felt that he must live in the proper style. He in-
stalled himself in the fashionable neighborhood of Jermyn Street,
near Westminster, and took with him a favorite niece to become
mistress of his household. His next job was to establish himself,
if possible, as a "gentleman.” Pretty embarrassing that his estate
was so pitifully small. Yes, but he was the lord of his little manor,
and he would testify on oath at the Herald’s College that he was
descended from the famous Newton family of Lincolnshire. "Gan
you trace the connection?” he was asked. "Why, no.” Actually
he could trace a connection only as far back as his grandfather,
an honest but obscure farmer. But why despair? He would bolster
up his shaky pedigree by attaching himself to an impecunious
Scotch Laird. After all, it was not impossible to buy a noble pedi-
gree. "Do you know,” he remarked casually to a Scotch noble-
man, "that I too am a Scotchman? My grandfather was a gentle-
man of East Lothian — or was it West Lothian? Perhaps it was
my great-grandfather . . "Never heard of him,” replied the
Laird bluntly.
Ah, well, if he couldn’t be a nobleman he could at least be a
rich man. In addition to his city home he bought a country
[62]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
The members of the Royal Academy took up the cudgels in
behalf of Newton and England. The German savants, on the
other hand, were equally vehement in their defense of Leibnitz
and Germany. They lampooned the British as no scientists at all
but as mere pseudo-scientists. “The British proclaim their dis-
covery of an elephant on the moon when all they see is a fly on
the end of their telescope.”
Back and forth raged the international quarrel as to the priority
of the invention of calculus. At first Newton tried to keep out
of this quarrel. But finally, when even the British king had been
drawn into it, Newton undertook to prepare a defense of his
scientific reputation with something of the vigor he had em-
ployed in his effort to establish a family tree. But the contro-
versy was as inconclusive as it was violent. Leibnitz went to his
eternal rest, Newton returned to his backgammon, and the world
accepted its calculus with a gratitude directed not so much to the
ingenuity of an Englishman or of a German as to the genius of
the human mind.
VI
As THE YEARS PROGRESSED, Newton lost his interest in the
foolishness of controversy and the vanity of politics. His fame
and his fortune were secure. Time now to look for the security
of his soul — ^the final evaluation of his life not in the way of
worldly success but in the measure of human achievement. He
was finally convinced that he had been first and foremost a
scientist. He had foolishly regarded his mathematical investiga-
tions as a pastime and his pursuit of success as the primary busi-
ness of his life. He knew better now. “The value of life is not
measured by the weight of its accumulated baubles of glass.”
The prism of the human mind is not to be exchanged for minted
coin. At seventy-five he had learned to look through his telescope
with a brighter eye. “Knowledge is an accumulation of vision”
— the vision of the present superadded to that of the past. “If I
NEWTON
have seen farther/’ he said with a humility he had not shown in
his earlier days, “^it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
From this lofty eminence he was able to look fearlessly toward
his own approaching end. Men die, as the stars and the planets
die, in order to give birth to new energy, new planets and stars,
new life.
And he listened to the music of the spheres as they whirled in-
cessantly over their eternal course from life to death to renewed
life. It was in this music that he finally lulled himself to sleep.
Music, sleep, death, life — flight. Aye, that was it! In his mathe-
matical formulas Newton had somewhere caught and impris-
oned this secret of the universe.
Nature and Nature^ s laws lay hid in night,
God said, ^^Let Newton be!'^ — and all was light.
[651
Great Scientific Contributions by Lavoisier
Experiments and reports on
magnetism, specific grav^
ity, optics, sugar, starch,
gunpowder, etc.
Discovered the composition of
the air.
Laid ihc f(;j! dallon for the
modern of ipc chem-
ical elements
Founded the science of chem-
istry.
Books :
Elementary Treatise of Chem-
istry.
Physical and Chemical Essays.
Chemical Memoirs.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
1743-1794
J-iAVorsiER enjoyed the blessing of genius and suffered from
the blight of wealth. His genius advanced him to his glory; his
wealth led him to his death. His ancestors had risen “from the
dust to the stars.” His great-great-grandfather was a postilion in
the royal stables. His father was an advocate to the Parliament
of France.
Like his father, Antoine prepared himself for the bar. His in-
terests, however, lay in the field of science. He preferred investi-
gation to litigation. So absorbed had he become in his scientific
experiments that even as a young student he had cut himself off
from “the frivolous pastimes” of society. He excused himself
from his social obligations on the ground of ill health. And this
excuse was not entirely without foundation. He suffered from
chronic dyspepsia and lived for several months on an exclusive
diet of milk. His friends advised him to do less work and to take
more exercise. “A year longer on earth,” remarked one of them,
“is worth more than a hundred years in the history books.”
Lavoisier agreed to remain a little longer on earth. He ac-
cepted an offer that would enable him to combine his exercise
with his work. The famous geologist, Jean Guettard, had invited
[69]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Hs collaboration in the construction of a mineralogical atlas of
France. This meant an opportunity to travel, and Lavoisier was
eager to grasp the opportunity.
Together with Guettard he set out for the Vosges Mountains
in the summer of 1767. He had fifty louis (about $225) in his
pocket, a good horse between his knees, his faithful servant
Joseph by his side, the leading scientist of France for his master,
and the entire world for his playground. It was in the highest
of spirits that he rode off to his first adventure over the en-
chanted highway of science.
And his master, too, was in the highest of spirits — a state of
mind, however, that was all too rare for Guettard. This geologist
was as stubborn as a rock and as biting as the north wind. He
went about with a perpetual scowl on his face against the “ras-
calities” of his fellow men. One day a candidate for the Acad-
emy thanked him for his support. “Don’t thank me,” snapped
the old geologist. “I voted for your brain, not for you.”
But toward his young collaborator the peppery old scientist
acted with the severe tenderness of a father. “Lavoisier,” he said,
“has not only brains but character.” And Lavoisier’s refined but
oversensitive character was grateful for the tender sympathy
mixed with the occasional severity of his teacher. From infancy
he had been too anxiously sheltered against the cutting edges of
the world. His aunt — Lavoisier had lost his mother in his early
childhood — ^had tried to bring him up like a rare and precious
vase of fragile china. Even now that he was twenty-four, she
followed his journey through “the mountains and mines of
France” with a trembling heart. “Please let me hear from you
frequently,” she wrote to him in one of her daily letters. “I wait
for the postman as for the Messiah ... I fear for your health
... the stifling heat ... the dangerous precipices ... the
swampy forests . . . the wild beasts , . , Please be more care-
ful even than you have promised me to be . . , and don’t for-
get the ever-present anxiety of your loving friends.”
It was a relief for Lavoisier to have escaped from these trem-
LAVOISIER
bling hands into the care of a man who admired him but who
refused to coddle him. Guettard toughened the mind and the
muscles of his young protege. It would have terrified Lavoisier’s
aunt to realize how exacting was the work that her nephew must
undergo every day. Up in the morning at sunrise checking the
thermometer and the barometer, recording the nature of the soil
and the contour of the land, visiting the mines, the ironworks
and the quarries, analyzing the river waters and the lake waters,
collecting and classifying the various specimens of plants and
minerals and finally compiling the results of his investigations
in his notebook — ^such were the diversified activities of his daily
routine. On his return home from his journey late of an Oc-
tober evening, he didn’t forget to take the reading of the barom-
eter before he consigned his tired body to the comforts of his bed.
“The foolish boy will kill himself with overwork,” wailed his
aunt.
But instead of killing himself with his work, Lavoisier actually
throve on it. He came back to Paris fuU of energy and confi-
dence and grit. He entered his candidacy for the Academy and
somewhat to his own surprise — ^for he was only twenty-five at
the time — he was elected.
This was a tremendous honor, but it placed tremendous obli-
gations upon his young shoulders. Either alone or in collabora-
tion with other members of the Academy he was called upon to
prepare scientific reports on all kinds of theoretical and practical
matters — animal magnetism, specific gravity, the adulteration
of cider, the Parisian water supply, the theory of colors, the ex-
traction of oil from cabbage seeds, the manufacture of starch,
the distillation of phosphorus, the decomposition of niter, the
storage of fresh water in sailing vessels, the removal o** stains from
silks and woolens, the extraction of gold from the wishes of plants,
the nature and the temperature of lava, the removal of the ob-
noxious odors in the Parisian sewers, the manufacture of sugar,
the conversion of peat into charcoal, the respiration of insects,
the rusting of iron, the composition of powder for fireworks, and
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
hundreds of other similar subjects that were of interest to the
scientific world of his day.
These activities were enough to give anybody a full-time job.
Yet they formed only a small part of Lavoisier’s labors. He had
become associated with the Ferme, a company of ^'financial
farmers” who collected the taxes from the people and paid a
fixed sum to the government. The business of the Fermey like
every other kind of business, was a gamble. But it was regarded
as a very safe gamble. The chance of profit was far greater than
the risk of loss. It was always possible to squeeze out of the people
substantially more than the government required as its fixed
annual sum. Lavoisier entered this company of “financial farm-
ers” because he wanted more money — ^not, however, for himself
but for his scientific experiments. Personal greed was not one of
his characteristics. But it was an unsavory sort of business — a
gamble in which he was destined to win money and to lose his
life.
II
In the course of his work as a tax farmer Lavoisier met and
married Marie Anne Pierrette, the fourteen-year-old daughter
of the Farmer-General, Jacques Paulze. This marriage brought
the addition of a handsome dowry to the already comfortably
feathered nest of Lavoisier. And — ^since there’s no better formula
for success than a good pull combined with a good push — the
young scientist-financier induced his father-in-law to get him stiU
another job. He now held the triple office of AcadSmicien^
Permier^ a^d Rigisseur des Poudres (Manager of the Arsenal).
Yet his triple accumulation of duties did not prevent him from
attending regularly and conscientiously to his own experiments.
For these private experiments he reserved six hours a day — from
six to nine in the morning and from seven to ten in the evening.
He had fitted up a laboratory in the Arsenal, and in this labora-
tory he entertained many of the leaders of the scientific world —
Priestley, Blagden, Young, Watt, Tennant and Franklin, to men-
LAVOISIER
tion only a few. He fitted out his laboratory with the latest and
most expensive apparatus. And he hired as his assistants several
of the more brilliant — and the more needy — among the younger
scientists of the day. It required the greater part of his fortune to
maintain this lavish ‘^institute of experimentation.” And out of
this institute came the foundation for a science which revolu-
tionized the life of the world. For it was Lavoisier who resolved
the hazy mists of alchemy into the clear sunlight of chemistry.
Ill
When Lavoisier began his experiments at the Arsenal, the
chemical thought of the world was still wrapped in its medieval
swaddling clothes. Chemistry was regarded merely as the hand-
maid of medicine. And a rather clumsy handmaid at that. On
June 19, 1739, a British ‘‘chemist” by the name of Mrs Joanna
Stephens received from the London Gazette a prize of £5000
for the publication of a “scientific remedy” that had “cured Mr
Walpole, the Prime Minister, who had been suffering from the
stone.” This remedy was a pill concocted in part of the following
materials : “Eggshells and Snails, a Ball of Soap, Swines’ Cresses
burnt to a Blackness, Burdock Seeds and Honey.”
Other chemists, more methodical in their investigations but
equally unscientific in their conclusions, conducted experiments
in which they “demonstrated” that “one element can be trans-
muted into another element.” One of the leading scientists of
the seventeenth century, Johann van Helmont, described a
“process” that enabled him to “transform” water into wood. “I
took an Earthen Vessel, in which I put 200 pounds of Earth
. . . which I moystened with Rain-water, and I implanted
therein the Stem of a Willow Tree weighing five pounds; and at
length, five years being finished, the Tree . . . did weigh 169
pounds and about three ounces ... I had always moystened
the Earthen Vessel with Rain-water ... At length I again
weighed the Earth of the Vessel, and there were found the same
[75]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
200 pounds, wanting about two ounces. Therefore 164 pounds
of Wood, Barks and Roots arose out of Water only.^’ Previously
to that experiment, van Helmont had converted wood into ashes
and gas (a term which he was the first to use) . Hence, reasoned
this deluded chemist, water and wood and ashes and gas are
one and the same element.
Still other chemists ‘'demonstrated” that water can be trans-
muted into earth. They had noticed that when water was evapo-
rated in a vessel sealed against the admission of dust from the
air, a residue of earth was left at the bottom of the vessel. “Hence
the earth is born out of the water.”
It was this assertion that led Lavoisier to one of his first im-
portant discoveries. Ever since his journey with Guettard he
had been interested in the density and the nature of water. He
now entered upon a series of experiments in order to determine
whether the residue of earth left after the evaporation of water
was due to the decomposition of the water or to the erosion of the
interior of the vessel. His scientific motto was not to rely upon
speculation but to build upon facts. Je veux parler des faits. And
the facts that he discovered as a result of his repeated experi-
ments proved finally and conclusively that the residue of earth
from evaporated water came from the vessel and not from the
water. For in every carefully conducted experiment with pure
water the vessel had undergone a loss of weight equal to the
weight of the earth that remained in the vessel after the water
had disappeared. “Water therefore is unalterable” — a conclusion
that meant the Jfinal overthrow of alchemy, with its theory about
the “transmutation of water into earth, earth into iron and iron
into gold.”
But this was only the beginning of his experiments. He went
on to show that plants are not merely “quantities of water trans-
formed into quantities of wood,” but that they are compounds of
various substances derived from the water and the earth and the
air in which they live and upon which they feed.
Lavoisier’s next step was to discover the nature of some of
l74]
LAVOISIER
these substances. He was especially interested in the composition
of the air. A number of scientists, including van Helmont and
Joseph Priestley, had already observed that there are different
“kinds’’ of air — ^that is, different gases. It remained for Lavoisier
to announce (in 1777) that the air consists of “two elastic fluids,
one respirable and the other poisonous.” To the respirable or
vital fluid he applied for the first time the term oxygen (from
the Greek words oxys^ acid, and gennan, to generate) . And now
too for the first time he defined the chemical word element —
Lavoisier called it principe — as “a substance that chemical an-
alysis cannot resolve into any simpler substance.”
Here, then, was the foundation stone for the entire structure
of modem chemistry. Building upon this foundation, Lavoisier
not only discovered a new chemical theory but also compiled a
new chemical dictionary. Many of the terms invented by La-
voisier have become “the international vocabulary of the chem-
ists” down to the present time.
And now came the final step in his monumental labor as a
scientist — ^the publication of his Elementary Treatise of Chem-
istry (1789). Throughout the preparation of this book he had
strictly adhered to the formula never to advance to the unknown
except from the known, and never to deduce a definite result
except from an observed cause. “I wish to speak only of facts.”
The publication of Lavoisier’s Traite marked an epoch in
modern chemistry just as the pubKcation of Newton’s Principia
had marked an epoch in modem mechanics. A few of the old
alchemists scoffed at his “presumptuous ideas” and his “absurd
list of thirty-three separate elements.” They acted upon the an-
tiquated prejudice that “everything that is new is not tme and
everything that is tme is not new.” The majority of the contem-
porary scientists, however, were prompt to agree that Lavoisier
had opened up for them a new door into the mysterious labora-
tory of nature. “I am happy to see,” wrote Lavoisier in 1791?
“that my new theory has swept like a revolution over the intel-
lectual circles of the world.”
[75]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
IV
But at that moment the tide of another revolution was sweep-
ing over France. And it was getting ever closer to Lavoisier. The
Father of Chemistry, having liberated the world from the Reign
of Error, was about to fall a victim to the Reign of Terror. On
January 27, 1791 5 he was subjected to a virulent attack in
Marat’s newspaper, UAmi du Peuple. This attack, though it
pretended to preserve the interests of the people, in reality sub-
served the interests of Marat. For this leader of the revolution
had also aspired to become a leader of science. In 1780 he had
written a Treatise on the Nature of Fire, and Lavoisier had ex-
pressed his opinion — an opinion that subsequent researches cor-
roborated — ^that this Treatise was devoid of merit. Marat had
then and there resolved to get even with Lavoisier. In his con-
demnatory article of 1791 he more than lived up to his resolve.
^‘Citizens of France, I denounce to you the sieur Lavoisier, king
of charlatans, companion of tyrants, pupil of scoundrels, master
of thieves . . . Would you believe that this little publican, who
boasts an income of 40,000 livres, is engaged on a devilish in-
trigue to get himself elected as the administrator of Paris? . . *
Instead of electing him to this office we ought to string him up
to the nearest lamp-post . .
Lavoisier paid little attention to this inflammatory article, be-
lieving it to be merely the discharge from the tumor of a wounded
pride. But Marat continued his attacks, and before long he was
joined by a number of other revolutionists who had caught the
infection. They passed a decree to close the Academy of Science
— ^of which Lavoisier was now the director — denouncing it as
a “defunct repository of royalist thought.” And when Lavoisier
objected to this decree, they arrested him on the charge of trea-
son against the new government.
Realizing, however, that it would be difficult to substantiate
this charge, his enemies now accused him of a new crime — ex-
[763
LAVOISIER
tortion as a tax collector. They searched his house, they seized his
papers and — although they found no damaging evidence against
him — ^they transferred him to the “prison of the condemned.”
But Lavoisier did not lose his courage in the face of death.
“I have lived a reasonably long and happy life,” he wrote to his
cousin, Augez de ViUers. “I shall be spared the inconvenience
of old age, and I shall leave behind me a little knowledge and
perhaps a little glory. What more can anyone expect in this
world?”
The trial was perfunctory. The chief witness against La-
voisier was one of his former employees, a convicted thief and
forger. One of his advocates ventured to call the attention of
the judges to Lavoisier’s scientific work, only to be greeted with
the caustic retort that “the Revolution doesn’t need scientists, it
needs justice.”
Justice, however, was the last thing to be expected in the
revolutionary hysteria of the moment. Lavoisier was publicly
stigmatized as “a vampire whose accumulation of crimes is so
overwhelming as to cry out for vengeance.” And then came the
climax of the tragi-comedy. Lavoisier was condemned to death
on the imaginary and absurd ground of “plotting with foreign
nations and the enemies of France.”
He penned a final note to his wife. “Take care of your health,
my dear, and remember that I have finished my work. Thank
God for that . . .”
They took him to the guillotine on a May morning in 1794.
“Only a moment to cut off his head,” remarked Lagrange to
Delambre, “and perhaps a century before we shall have another
Hkeit.”
[77]
DALTON
Great Scientific Contributions by Dalton
Investigations in meteorology. Books and Essays :
Disproved the false “science” On Color Blindness,
of alchemy. The Atomic Theory,
Established the atomic theory The Molecular Theory,
in chemistry. New System of Chemical Phi’-
losophy.
John Dalton
1766-1844
,A. LITTLE THATCHED ROOF in Eaglcsficld, Cumberland Coun-
try. A sturdy Quaker father who won his living at the hand-
loom. A gentle Quaker mother, ‘‘Gudewife” Deborah, who lived
by the motto “for God and husband.” Such was the environment
of the tiny infant bom into the English winter of 1766.
The puny infant grew to be a stubborn, conscientious lad.
Once put to a task he would grapple with it against all odds with
the tenacity of a bulldog. Mr Robinson, the Quaker school-
master, often gave the boys difficult problems in mathematics;
and most of the boys, after a period of futile labor, would quit
and ask their teacher to reveal the answer. But Dalton was never
among the quitters. “Please don’t help me, Mr Robinson. I must
do it myself.”
Many were the heated disputes in the schoolroom as to the
best method to solve the problems set by Mr Robinson. One day
the boys placed a wager to back their convictions But gambling
was poison to the senj^tive Quaker conscience. “Ye shall not bet
money,” commanded Mr Robinson — ^'‘but maybe candles.”
Once this subtle moral distinction was laid down, John Dal-
ton proceeded to win the bets and was thus plentifully sup-
[8z]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
plied with ‘'farthing dips” of light. Always he sought for light.
At twelve he had acquired enough of an education, according
to the standards of the village, to start a school of his own.
Boldly he nailed a message to his father’s door announcing the
event. He, John Dalton, had opened “a house of learning for
both sexes at reasonable rates.” In addition to their learning, he
informed his prospective pupils, he would supply them with
“free paper, pens, and ink.” This added inducement could
hardly fail to attract notice. Paper, pens and ink were among the
rarest of English commodities.
The school throve. The students were of all ages, ranging from
“wee bratlings” to “hulking lads and lassies of seventeen.” The
little children sat on the knee of the youthful teacher and humbly
lisped their A B C’s, But the older students were far less docile.
When the “principal” attempted to admonish them for their
laziness they towered above him with a threatening iook. “Want
to go out to the graveyard and fight?”
At fifteen Dalton was tempted to give up his teaching and to
go into “the agriculture business” with his uncle, a wealthy farmer
who was very fond of him and who had no children of his own.
But the young scholar soon dismissed his temptation. His elder
brother, Jonathan, was conducting a Quaker school in the
nearby town of Kendall, It might be a good idea to form a part-
nership in that school. Accordingly Dalton purchased an um-
brella — ^for he was now “a grown gentleman” — ^slung a bundle
of clothing over his shoulder, and trudged forty miles across the
Cumberland Mountains to his new job. And to the greater glory
of England.
II
The brothers introduced technical courses into their school.
And to supplement their income, they assisted many of the
townspeople in the running of their businesses and the writing of
their wills. In that age of almost general illiteracy the pen was a
[82]
DALTON
mighty instrument. John especially became an '^object of won-
der” for his ‘legendary culture.” He took an active part in the
religious discussions of the townsfolk and he made frequent con-
tributions to the farmers’ almanacs. The unlettered people of
the Cumberland Country had come to look upon him as an
uncanny weather prophet. For he had begun to take a daily, al-
most hourly, reading of the weather — a practice which he con-
tinued for fifty-seven years until the evening of his life when his
hand was so feeble that he could scarcely make his entry legible.
He used crude, homemade instruments to measure the rainfall
in a country where “it rained every day”; and he sold these
instruments to the farmers so that they might make their ob-
servations along with him. He was very humble and very pains-
taking in the application of his “tiny human measuring rod”
to the “infinite patient plans of God.”
He wrote enthusiastically to his friends at home about his
favorite hobby. He had observed that those who were entirely
ignorant of the matter supposed it to be a work of enormous
difficulty — 2L task beyond the means of anyone but a profound
scholar. “This, however, is a great mistake. A very little knowi-
edge of arithmetic is sufficient for the theory of measuring the
rainfall.” A very little knowledge and a great deal of humility.
For the raindrops of God cannot be measured by the instrument
of pretentiousness.
The Kendall “scholar” was indeed no scholar of booklore pre-
tensions. He had read very little. He was merely a simple spirit
offering a recipe to other simple spirits linked to his own by a
common love for mental adventure. In one of his letters, written
to an “unlettered” girl of his native village, he prepared a table
of mensuration and then followed it up with an apologetic post-
script: “Ignorance, no doubt, will look upon this as a trifling
and childish amusement . . . but ... if to be able to predict
the state of the weather with tolerable precision, by which great
advantages might accrue to the husbandman, to the mariner,
and to mankind in fireneral, be an object worthy of pursuit, that
[83]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
person who has in any manner contributed to attain it cannot be
said to have lived or to have labored in vain.”
He undertook a series of lectures on natural philosophy based
on his personal observations. He planned this series to include
talks on “the laws of motion, color, wind, sound, harvest moons,
lunar eclipses, planets and tides — ^subscription to the whole, half
a guinea.” But the lectures were not a success. People couldn’t
discern the dignified scientist under the homely demeanor of the
country bumpkin. After a while he stopped talking to others and
continued his work in silence. He roamed over the countryside,
collecting many specimens of flowers and pressing them in his
books with the object of selling them — ^since “they look pretty
and attract the attention of the learned and the unlearned.” He
would fill a book of two quires for “half a guinea.” But no one
seemed at all impressed.
Yet undaunted he went on with his work. To his botanical
studies he added a collection of common insects — especially but-
terflies and moths. “Some of these specimens may be thought
puerile,” he declared. “But nothing that enjoys animal life, or
that vegetates, is beneath the dignity of a naturalist to investi-
gate.” He made experiments to observe the process of destruction
in the vitality of snails, mites and maggots when they were im-
mersed in water or deposited in a vacuum. And then he com-
menced to experiment on himself to determine the relationship
between the intake of his food and the yield of his perspiration.
But the world remained still unimpressed.
Ill
He heard that in Manchester the Presbyterians had founded a
college dedicated “to truth, to liberty, to religion” — an institu-
tion designed to serve as a protest against the dominant British
universities which excluded Unitarians and Quakers. He applied
for a position to teach natural philosophy and mathematics in
[84]
DALTON
this “school of dissenters.'^ Largely because of “the lack of better
candidates," he secured the job. But he found the academic re-
strictions of his new life unpalatable and decided to return to
his private tutoring.
In order to meet his expenses, modest as they were, he was
obliged to teach both day and night. Each day-student paid him
ten guineas a year; and each night-pupil, two shillings a lesson,
“And yet in spite of all this," he wrote with his unfailing good
humor, “I am not rich enough to retire."
As a further aid to his early “retirement," he prepared a book
on grammar. In this book the timeworn subject of English syntax
was put under the scrutiny of a vigorous and original mind. The
result was a work of fascinating highlights. And of fantastic
errors — such as his listing of phenomenon as a masculine noun
and of phenomena as a feminine noun.
The book enjoyed but a mediocre sale. But again Dalton re-
mained unperturbed. He published a series of essays on his
meteorological investigations with the prefatory remark that as
usual he had relied not upon “a superabundant assistance from
books" but upon his own observations. After the publication of
the book he discovered that some of his conclusions had been
forestalled by a French scientist whose work he had never read.
“I am delighted," he observed with rigorous honesty, “that two
people utterly unknown to one another have arrived independ-
ently at the same knowledge."
His own knowledge came almost always out of his personal
experience. The principles of individual vision, for example —
those strange laws which completely isolate one personality from
another — ^were brought home to him in a peculiaily striking
manner. One day he had bought for his mother a pair of stock-
ings which he had espied in a Kendall shop window. His mother
was delighted with the present, and at the same time puzzled.
“You have brought me a grand pair of hose, John; but what
made you fancy such a bright color?" Her Quaker instincts were
[85]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
shocked. “Why, I can never show myself at a meeting in them.”
“They’re a very nice sort of go-to-meeting color,” John an-
swered. Were they not of a dark conservative blue?
“Why, they’re as red as a cherry, John’”
Dalton looked disturbed. “Strange, isn’t it, Mother?”' And
then he recalled other similar instances. “Young women tell me
they are surprised to see me in the street in a green coat. And I
always answer that my coat is a dark snuff -red. Now who in the
world is right?”
He was determined to investigate this curious inconsistency
between his own vision and that of other people. Were there
many like him? Were there more perhaps than the world sus-
pected? Finally he found in Marysport two men — ^brothers — ^who
confessed to a similar idiosyncrasy of vision. Yellow to them was
the most conspicuous color in the solar spectrum. Rose and pink
seemed to them to have an affinity with sky blue. They saw no
difference between blood-red and green. These peculiarities co-
incided exactly with Dalton’s own experience. Jokingly a friend
had written to him: “I find by your accounts that you must
have very imperfect ideas of the charms which . • . constitute
beauty in the female sex; I mean that rosy blush of the cheeks
which you so much admire for being light blue . .
As a result of this observation, Dalton formulated a theory
to explain the strange phenomenon of what we call today “color-
blindness.” And though he never discovered the physiological
causes of this defect, the powerful psychological lesson was not
lost upon him. He had gone through twenty-seven years of his
life seeing a world of certain colors only to discover by accident
that the vast majority of his fellows saw a different world. But
was his any the less real? This, henceforth, was to be the purpose
of his life — ^to search for the reality that lay behind the contra-
dictory evidence of our human senses.
[ 86 ]
DALTON
IV
The years of groping were over. He had decided upon chem-
istry, the realm of objective truth, as his life's work. For almost
thirty years after his resignation from Manchester College he
lived and experimented at the house of a generous clergyman,
the Reverend Mr Johns. With his blunt and forthright honesty,
Dalton had offered himself as a willing guest to his willing hosts.
“One day, while my mother was standing at her parlor window,"
related the clergyman’s daughter, “she saw Mr Dalton passing
on the other side of the street; and on her opening the window,
he crossed over and greeted her. ‘Mr Dalton,’ said she, ‘how is
it that you so seldom come to see us?’ ‘Why, I don’t know,’ said
he, ‘but I have a mind to come and live with you.’ ’’ And that
was how it had happened.
His daily life never varied over the long stretch. His labora-
tory was his shrine. He generally rose at eight, lighted his labora-
tory fire before breakfast and devoted the entire morning to his
experiments. He dined at one, “but always entered in much haste
when the dinner was partly over." He spent his afternoons in the
laboratory and retired from his work only, to take tea at five,
“rarely coming in until the family had nearly finished." After
tea he repaired again to his “fire" where he worked until the
supper hour at nine. After his supper, at which he ate a “meth-
odical quantity" of food, he joined the family in the living room
for an hour or two of pleasant recreation.
On Thursdays he took the afternoon off and went bowling on
the Dog and Partridge Green, Methodically he played a fixed
number of games, took tea at the inn and smoked his “church-
warden" as he recovered his strength for the journey home.
When the warm weather set in he conducted his meteorological
experiments in the Lake Country and thus combined business
with pleasure. He climbed the mountains not only to test his
barometers but also to “bring into exercise a set of muscles which
[87]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
otherwise would have grown stiff/’ Often as he climbed with a
party of friends he led the way at so brisk a pace that no one
could keep up with him. On these excursions he took his food
along in his knapsack — and was not averse to '‘mixing a little
brandy with his water.”
Periodically he visited his native village of Eaglesfield where
he mingled with the yeomen and "had a real gude crack about
the old days.” As the years went on and he remained in the
"blissful state of unmarriage,” his friends began to inquire if
he had ever thought of taking a wife. "I haven’t the time,” he
told them. "My head is too full of triangles, chemical processes
and electrical experiments to think of any such nonsense.”
Nevertheless he was not entirely a stranger to love. He had
become acquainted with the “handsomest creature in Manches-
ter,” he confessed in one of his letters to his brother. He had
thought he was foolproof against mere beauty in a woman. But
thk was no ordinary woman. “She began ... to compare the
merits of Johnson’s and Sheridan’s dictionaries; to converse upon
the use of dephlogisticated marine acid in bleaching; upon the
effects of opium on the animal system, etc., etc. I was no longer
able to hold out, but surrendered at discretion . , .” But then
he concludes : “My captivity . . . lasted about a week . .
Other matters held him captive more securely. He was experi-
menting with the effects of heat upon gases, liquids and solids.
He was surmising strange things about the chemical elements.
The chemists of the period were making their tests in a midnight
of uncertainty. Some of them had picked out a few stray beams
of light here and there; but none of them had been able to hit
upon any great universal principle that governed the various
changes in the composition of chemicals.
To discover such a principle intrigued Dalton more than
any affair of the heart. And gradually a momentous idea dawned
within him. In the realm of physics Newton had demonstrated
that the particles of matter were attracted by the weight of their
atoms. Was it not possible that chemical bodies, too, might be
[ 88 ]
DALTON
found to consist of ultimate particles of atoms? To apply the
atomic theory, the glory of physics, to chemistry would be a
startling yet obvious innovation. Dalton could scarcely resist the
appeal of his new hypothesis. He had found in his experiments
that ‘‘in certain compounds of gaseous bodies the same elements
are always combined in the same proportions.’" The ringing
declaration of a fellow scientist never ceased sounding in his
ear. “God ordered all things by measure, number, weight.” Why
should this not be true of chemistry as well as of physics? Why
should the atom be the exclusive property of the physicists?
The possibilities of the theory were immense. Here at last
was a simple principle fixing the proportions in which all chemi-
cal bodies combine. “If the relative weight of one atom to that
of any other atom were known, the proportions or weights in
all its combinations might be ascertained.” Once a table of
relative weights of these ultimate particles could be established
the chemist would find himself in possession of the basic tools
for his science. Such was the glory of the light that entered the
methodical mind of the little Manchester Quaker as he toiled
indefatigably at his test tubes. He struck the final fatal blow
against the pretensions of the alchemists who had promised to
transmute iron into gold and death into life. “Chemical analysis
and synthesis,” he declared, “can go no further than to the
separation of particles from one another, and to their reunion.
No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of
chemical agency. We might as well try to introduce a new planet
mio the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as
to create or to destroy a particle of hydrogen.” Or to transmute
the particle of one element into that of any other dement.
And now, having introduced the atomic theory from physics
into chemistry, he proceeded to set up a table of the relative
weights of the atoms that constitute the different elements. This
table was rather crude. Dalton possessed neither the skill nor
the exactitude of many of his followers. Moreover, his laboratory
was far from being adequately equipped for acciuate experi-
[89]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
mentation. But he had estabUshed himself once and for all as a
lawgiver. Let the others attend to the details of the administra-
tion.
And — ^it must be admitted — ^he was not always tolerant of his
more accurate administrators. In the notation of his formulas
for the various elements, for example, Dalton had introduced a
complicated system of circular markings. But when the Swedish
chemist, Berzelius, ventured to substitute the simplified system of
writing the first letter of the element with a number placed below
to indicate the number of atoms in the compound — a method
employed to the present day — ^the conservative-minded Dalton
was shocked at the innovation. “Berzelius's symbols are horrify-
ing," he remarked. “A young student in Chemistry might as
soon learn Hebrew as make himself acquainted with them. They
appear like a chaos of atoms . . In spite of his great discovery.
Dalton was indeed color-blind.
And his generation looked on and marveled. What was this
amazing scientist — a dull-witted plodder who had been chosen
by God to give His law through a moment of supreme intuition,
or a genius in the realm of thought, bhthely unconcerned with
the ordinary investigations of man? But, plodder or prophet, the
quiet little Quaker of Manchester attended faithfully to his fire
and slowly transformed the chaos of alchemy into the “order
supreme” of chemistry.
V
He was now famous. He had been elected President of the
Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. And he had
been invited to lecture at the Royal Institution in London. Here
he met the great Sir Humphry Davy. “The principal failing in
his character as a philosopher,” said Dalton, “is that he does not
smoke.”
With the advance of his fame he had acquired an air of as-
surance that was as suiprising to himself as it was to his audi-
DALTON
ences. “Nowadays/' he wrote to one of his friends, “I can enter
the lecture-room with as little emotion as I can smoke a pipe
with you on Sunday evenings."
And so he went on his lecture tours with a cheerful heart and
a confident smile. And with an open eye. He observed every-
thing with the zest of a child to whom the world is new. Of
Edinburgh he wrote: “This is the most romantic place and
situation I have ever seen . . . The houses touch the clouds . . .
In this place they do not build houses side by side . . . they
build them one upon the other — ^nay they do what is more
wonderful still, they build one street upon the other. . . He
was especially fond of observing the ladies in his audiences —
those who “wore their dresses tight as a drum" as well as those
who “threw them around their figures like a blanket." But, he
added, “most ladies look charming whatever their dress."
He enjoyed the contact of society and the savor of the con-
vivial life. Indeed he was obliged to pay dearly for his too easy
toleration of the cup that cheers the heart. For on one occasion
he contracted a serious case of lead-poisoning from a bottle of
porter in a London pub.
In due time he recovered from the poison of the beer and
from the fumes of a too intense popularity. He was glad to return
to Manchester and to his “comparatively obscure" way of life.
After all, he wasn’t a man of the world. Why pretend? At his
lectures the fashionable classes of London had been shocked at
his uncouth habits and his unlettered style. It was good to be
back among the modest surroundings of his simple folk. In the
busy world he loomed large and important. He had been elected
to the Royal Society of England and to the Academy of France.
In that world he must wear lace and preserve an artificial de-
meanor. Sir Humphry had presented him with the royal medal,
and he had responded with a prepared and hollow speech. The
atmosphere was stifling. Quakers just didn’t take kindly to
medals. It was such a relief to be himself again.
Yet the world wouldn’t let him stay by himself. He had be-
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
come a goldfish swimming in the transparent bowl of his fame.
Everybody outside of Manchester must catch a glimpse of the
“illustrious author of the Atomic Theory.” The visitors came in
droves to his shrine. Among these visitois was the savant, M.
Pelletier, who in his grand Gallic imagination had tried to pic-
ture his meeting with John Dalton. Without a doubt this great
Mr Dalton must be the wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen
of Manchester, occupying an official suite in a large university
dedicated to the pursuit of science — an institution somewhat like ,
his own College de France, or the Sorbonne — a place of crowded
auditoriums where Mr Dalton delivered lectures in advanced
chemistry and bowed to successive waves of tremendous ap-
plause. Such was M. Pelletier’s dream of John Dalton. When he
arrived in Manchester he was jolted to find no clue as to Dalton’s
whereabouts. No one in the city seemed to have heard of him.
After a diligent search, however, Pelletier was led to an alley and
ushered into the back room of a small shabby house. He found
an elderly man peering over the shoulders of a little lad who was
“ciphering” on a slate. M. Pelletier’s eyes almost popped out of
his head. “Have I the honor of addressing M. Dalton?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered the honest Quaker. “Will you kindly sit down
while I put this lad right about his arithmetic.”
VI
For A TEME nothing could lure Dalton away from Manchester.
Sir Humphry Davy invited him to a polar expedition sponsored
by the Royal Society with the backing of the Admiralty. This
opportunity meant a goodly sum of money and additional fame.
But Dalton declined the invitation. “The thought of quitting
the regular habits of a sedentary life for a seafaring one,” he
wrote apologetically, “outweighs with me any inducement which
the proposed scheme can offer.”
Finally, however, he allowed himself once more to be lured
into the world. And the temptress was the dty dl Paris. Here
DALTON
he met two of the most renowned of his contemporary fellow
scientists, Humboldt and Laplace. Together, over the polite
formalities of their social teas, these three scientists discussed the
secrets of the heavens and the substances of the earth. Wherever
he went in Paris, Dalton was lionized. When he entered the
sacred precincts of the Institute, the president and the members
rose to a man and bowed — an honor which had not been ac-
corded even to the great Napoleon when he had taken his seat
among the renowned ‘‘forty.’’ Everybody pointed him out when
he rode through the streets or walked into a public building. And
throughout his triumphal procession in Paris he was chaperoned
by Mile Clementine Cuvier, the only child of the eminent sci-
entist. “Ah, she was a bonny lass!” he remarked long afterwards.
“She treated me hke a daughter,”
When he returned home from his Parisian triumph, he put
away his sentimental memories and renewed “the perpetual
struggle of the mind against the stubborn fortress of ignorance.”
And as his years and his labors advanced, his friends began more
and more to notice the similarity of his face to that of another
great scientist. One evening an acquaintance by the name of
Mr Ransome called on him and found him sitting with a cat
upon his knee, a newspaper at his elbow and a plaster cast at his
side. Mr Ransome picked up the cast and looked at it carefully.
“I am glad you have had this likeness made of your features,
Mr Dalton. Posterity will never cease to be grateful for this
thoughtfulness on your part.”
“But it isn’t my likeness you’re looking at,” replied the chem-
ist, much amused. “It’s Sir Isaac Newton’s.”
“What a striking resemblance!” exclaimed Mr Ransome.
“Indeed, I should call it a miraculous resemblance!”
“No miracle at all,” smiled Dalton. “You see, my friend, it
was the selfsame Mind that molded the features for us both.”
[93]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
VII
Every life moves far too swiftly. A few anecdotes, one or two
passages of laughter, a midnight flight of sorrow, and then the
end. The Quaker in the somber stockings and the buckled shoes
and the white neckcloth slowly tapped his way with his cane
to the finish of the street, to the last dim corner where the future
trails off into the nameless metropolis of the dead. He tried to
halt his steps with medication in the hope that he might tarry
a little longer amongst the people he loved so well. But his
medicine proved to be of no avail. And his friendships were of
no avail, and the distinctions of an adoring world. They had
inscribed his name in shining letters upon the rolls of the scien-
tific academies at Berlin, Munich, Moscow. And they had in-
terceded with the British king to grant him a pension. And a fund
had been raised to “halt his footstep in a trap of plaster” and to
erect a marble statue to his eternal glory. A grim jest, this, for a
dying mortal — a melting substance mocked by its solid shadow.
They completed the plans and selected the sculptor for the
statue. They “took his profile as large as life . . . and then
sketched a front view of the face on paper.” They walked him
through the apartment of the sculptor and showed him busts
and statues without end. They gave him Tuesday for a holiday
and told him he should see his head molded in clay on Wednes-
day. Already he felt that he had joined the ranks of the honor-
ably embalmed.
When the statue was finished, he pointed to it sadly, ^^There is
the great chemist, Dalton. I am only the hoUow nonentity of a
man.”
He was seized with a paralytic stroke and partially recovered
to return to his laboratory fires. But the fires of his life were going
slowly out.
And one night, shortly after the completion of his statue, he
tottered into his laboratory and groped for the books in which
[94}
DALTON
he had been recording his weather reports. Night after night for
fifty years — ^the same rigorous attention to the selfsame humble
task. Nearly 200,000 readings. He noted the hour — a quarter to
nine. It was precisely at this hour that he made his nightly re-
cordings. He picked up his pen. His hand trembled. He entered
the reading of the barometer, noted the temperature, and then
wrote in the final column: “Little rain this — His manservant
stood quietly by his side, waiting, Dalton’s head nodded and he
began to put down his pen. Then suddenly he shook himself
awake. For he realized that he had not finished the sentence.
Clasping the pen once more in his feeble fingers, he wrote the
final word “ — evening.”
And the evening departed, and the morning came. But Dal-
ton’s eyes were closed.
Great Scientific Contributions by Humboldt
Founded the science of natu-
ral history.
Books :
The Kosmos.
Aspects of Nature.
Voyage to the Equinoctial Re-
gions of the New Conti-
nent.
The Mountains and the Cli-
mate of Central Asia.
The Geography of the New
Continent.
The New Species of Plants.
The Kingdom of New Spain.
Alexander Von Humboldt
1769-1859
1 Ie was the son of Major von Humboldt, chamberlain to
Frederick the Great. He passed his boyhood at the ancestral
estate of Tegel, where he fed his eyes upon the miracles of the
plants in his father’s garden and his mind upon the miracles
of the books in his father’s library. Books of adventure — ^strange
scenes in strange places — ^were his special delight. From early
childhood he declared that he would devote his life to travel —
to the study of the world and of all the wonders that it contained.
One day a great man came to Tegel and had dinner with his
father. He observed the precocious lad and questioned him about
his interests. Just before he left he placed his hand upon Alex-
ander’s head. ‘^My child/’ he said, “I believe you have a distinct
talent for science.” And then he turned to Alexander’s father.
‘^‘Herr von Humboldt, I would urge you to guide this child into
the field of natural history.”
“Thank you. I will do as you say, Herr von Goethe.”
II
“All things are engaged in writing nature’s history.” These
words had stamped themselves indelibly upon Alexander’s mind.
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Everywhere he had caught glimpses of the writing in this uni-
versal book of nature. 'The rolling rock leaves its scratches on
the mountain; the river, its channels in the soil; the animal, its
bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in
the coal. The fallen drop makes its sculpture in the mud ©r stone;
not a footstep in the snow, or along the ground, but prints in
characters more or less lasting a map of its march.” Yes, and
every act of man “inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows.”
But to read the meaning of the whole, you must travel exten-
sively and experience deeply. You must go through the book of
the world from the first page to the last, study every living
species, observe every growing thing, examine every available
specimen in the multitudinous handiwork of God. In Hum-
boldt’s day the science of natural history was as yet in its in-
fancy. It had not kept pace with the immense progress made
in some of the other branches of science. And Humboldt, now
a student at the University of Gottingen, felt with regret that
“whilst the number of accurate instruments is daily increasing,
we are still ignorant of the height of many mountains and ele-
vated plains.” There had been numerous scientific expeditions,
to be sure, but the leaders of those expeditions had been in-
terested mainly in observing the external features of the countries
they visited. “In order to know a country it is necessary to make
a thorough exploration into its interior” — a form of scientific
adventure practically unknown to the Europeans of the early
nineteenth century.
It remained for Humboldt to take the first pioneering step
in that direction. Born and brought up in a country which had
no navy and no colonial possessions, he had nevertheless con-
ceived a “violent passion for tra\el beyond the distant seas,” Hav-
ing completed his study of the little books in his father’s library,
he was now ready to open the bigger book of the world.
[lOO]
HUMBOLDT
III
He was bound for Mexico and Cuba in the corvette, Pizarro, It
was the Spanish king who had given him this great opportunity
of his life — ^to visit the Spanish possessions in America. The
ship was plowing its way through a moody tropical night. The
young scientist sat on the deck absorbed in thought. The moon
broke fretfully through the clouds and scattered bits of light
like amber marbles upon the waves. Humboldt had come a long
way with his instruments. He had left his scholarly brother Wil-
liam behind in a world groaning under the hobnailed boots of
Napoleon’s armies. In front of him, just beyond the horizon, lay
the mountains of the West Indies — ^the lookout of the New
World. The waters whispered at his feet. The screech of a sea
bird shot 'like an arrow through the air. Slowly the ship bells
tolled. Death to the Old World. Hail to the New!
But there was death, too, on shipboard. A malignant fever had
broken out among the passengers of the Pizarro. One of them
was not destined to reach the New World. The bells were now
tolling his requiem. The sailors sank to their knees in prayer as
his body was lowered into the sea.
Passengers and sailors alike were relieved when the Pizarro
finally reached the South American coast. Humboldt disem-
barked with Aime Bonpland, a fellow naturalist who had come
along with him. Together they planned to write “a scientific
rather than a personal narrative” of their journey. “Amidst the
overwhelming majesty of Nature and the stupendous objects that
she presents at every step, the (studious) traveller is little dis-
posed to record in his journal matters which relate only to him-
self.”
Together the two scientists made their way through pathless
forests and lit their evening fires to the sound of the guachoro
(South American nightbird). They entered the caves in which
these nightbirds made their nests and which were believed by the
[^ 0 ^ ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
natives to house the spirits of departed men. They examined the
curious plant of the dragon-blood whose white bark was stained
with its purple juice. They tarried a while in Cumana where
they had to be on their guard continually, to prevent the Zambos
— half Negro and half Indian — ^from stealing up behind them
and crushing their heads with their palm-tree clubs.
They then turned their steps toward Caracas and found a
paradise of coffee-trees and sugar canes. Next they explored the
wilderness of the Amazon and noted the cow-trees ^'which gave
forth geysers of milk.'’ They rode through stagnant pools alive
with electric eels — dangerous creatures that swam under the
bellies of the horses and would have sunk them with electric
charges to the heart had not the natives vanquished them with
their harpoons. They took excursions along rivers whose sandy
banks were covered with crocodiles lying motionless in parties of
eight or nine and basking with open jaws in the sun. Every
year a number of the natives disappeared through those gaping
jaws.
The two traveler-scientists hired a boat of Indian build and
journeyed slowly down the Orinoco. In front of the boat’s cabin
sat the Indian oarsmen, two by two, chanting their native jingles
to the rhythm of the oars. The hold of the boat was loaded with
all sorts of animals and plants. When the scientists disembarked
for the night they built a fire around their camp to keep away
the tigers.
Throughout his travels Humboldt was particularly interested
in the native tribes. He noticed everywhere a striking similarity
in the customs and traditions of the different primitive races.
‘‘Like certain families of plants, which notwithstanding the dif-
ferences of climate and locality retain the impress of a common
type, the legends respecting the primitive state of the globe
present among all nations a resemblance that cannot be over-
looked.” Wherever he went he found, in one form or another,
“the selfsame substance of myths and fables” concerning the
creation of the world, the flood and the regeneration of mankind.
I loa]
HUMBOLDT
‘‘There is an underlying unity — a real science of universals — •
in the equation of life. All life is one/^ This truth seemed to
Humboldt to find its most vivid expression in the climate of the
tropics — especially at noontide, when there exists a great calm
of nature. “The beasts of the forests retire to their thickets; the
birds nestle among the foliage or in the fissures of the rocks.’’
Man too is at rest. But amid the apparent stillness of the hour
there is a stifled sound, “an incessant murmur of insects.” What
an extent and multitude of living matter! Myriads of insects
“crawl on the ground and flutter around the sunstricken plants.
Confused sounds issue from every bush, from the decayed trunks
of the trees, from the crevices of the rocks, from every nook and
cranny of the drowsy earth.” Thus does nature proclaim to man
how under a thousand different forms life draws its united
breath.
This idea of the unity of life had begun to fascinate Hum-
boldt. From his observations of the multitudinous forms of life
he now developed the elements of a world philosophy. In the
thick recesses of the Jungle he had learned to consider man as
of relatively little importance. “In this country of abundant
vegetation whose growth no human agent cultivates or impedes,
in this America where crocodiles and water-serpents lord it in
the streams, where jaguars, peccaries, tapirs and monkeys fear-
lessly roam the forests which they inhabit as if it were an ancient
inheritance” — ^in this vastitude of non-human existence the
human race shrinks to desolate nothingness!
This, then, was the purpose of Humboldt’s travels — ^to study
the meaning of man in the mystery of nature. With this purpose
to guide him, he continued his explorations from the Amazon to
the Rio Negro, He entered into regions where he was compelled
to battle his way against swarms of pestiferous insects. The
natives were philosophical about this perennial plague of nature
and made meals on white ants and on termites roasted in paste.
In one of the settlements Humboldt found a Christian monk
whose legs were so covered by insect stings that it was impossible
[^03]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
to tell the original color of his skin. This man of God related
sickening stories about the appetites of his neighbors whose om-
nivorous diet extended not only to insects but to human flesh.
A short time before Humboldt’s arrival in this settlement the
chief of the tribe had fattened his wife and then roasted her for
a public banquet. One of the Indians in Humboldt’s canoe — a
man of mild and engaging demeanor — casually remarked that
he was a cannibal. He declared in animated sign language that
of all parts of the human body he preferred the palms of the
hands as the chief delicacy. This preference, he added, applied
equally to bears. He was dismissed from further service.
Down the Rio Negro sailed the explorer’s boat with its strange
cargo. Many curious animals and birds had been collected and
added to the “crew.” Whenever the clouds gave warning of an
impending rainstorm, these “sailors” got into a strange commo-
tion. The macaw emitted frightening screams. The little monkeys
scurried for refuge under the loose jackets of the men. The tou-
can beat against the bars of its cage in an effort to gain its
freedom and to chase the fish that leaped to the surface in the
approaching storm.
And now past the Rio Negro and back into the channel of the
Orinoco sailed Humboldt and his crew. They reached the slope of
a mountain where a huge rock, scooped by the waters of a thou-
sand centuries, had been hollowed into a vast sepulcher — a ceme-
tery in stone containing nearly six hundred skeletons of an ex-
tinct tribe. “Each skeleton reposes in a sort of basket . . . The
size of each basket is proportioned to the age of the dead . . .
There are some for infants prematurely bom.” Humboldt col-
lected several skulls, the bones of a child six years old, and two
skeletons of full-grown adults. Aware of the natives’ superstition
toward the bodies of the dead, Humboldt concealed the skeletons
under his mule packs. But the subterfuge failed to deceive the
tribesmen. Their primitive sense of smell, delicate as a dog’s,
betrayed the presence of the skeletons and aroused their resent-
ment against the treatment of their “old relations.”
{104]
HUMBOLDT
One of the most interesting of Humboldt’s experiences in this
land of the “old relations” was a trip through imderground cav-
erns while the spacious Orinoco roared overhead. And one of hk
most gruesome experiences was a visit to the Otomacs, as savage
a tribe as existed in those regions inhabited by the “Sons of the
Devil.” These men intoxicated themselves with a violent powder.
They inhaled it through the nose with the forked bone of a bird
and sneezed themselves into a fighting fury in their battles. And
when there were no battles to be fought against other tribes, they
turned their fury into the killing of one another within their own
tribe. They rarely resorted to blows in order to kill. They merely
dipped their nails in poison and “stung” their victims to death.
On through the broad expanse of the Orinoco, onward toward
the town of legendary fame and fabulous wealth — El Dorado.
The dream of every traveler. The fairyland of gold. Many of
the early explorers had sought for it in vain. Sir Walter Raleigh
had almost, but never quite, reached it. Always the natives told
him it was but a little journey ahead, just beyond the horizon —
and forever beyond his reach. Soon the name of the city had
passed from its place on the maps into the realm of the myths.
Yet adventurers kept still searching for that mythical haven —
are searching for it to this day. For El Dorado is not only the city
of gold, it is the vision of every soul’s fulfillment.
Gaily bedight
A gallant knight.
In sunshine and in shadow.
Had journeyed long.
Singing a song.
In search of El Dorado.
Humboldt failed in his quest for El Dorado. But he had found
the fulfillment of his song. He had now reached the concluding
stages of his voyage. From South America he had traveled to
Cuba and to Mexico, climbed the slope of Chimborazo to a
height no man had reached before, taken sail for the United
[^05]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
States and spent a happy time at Philadelphia and Washington.
And then he turned his eyes homeward. He had been gone five
vears — a period in which he had laid the foundations for Every-
man’s bridge to the El Dorado of his dreams. He had founded
the science of a systematic natural history of the world. He was
now ready to arrange and collate and bind together the book
of life into a sensible unit and a logical plot.
IV
Humboldt returned to find himself one of the most talked
about men in Europe. The rumors of his travels had spread like
wildfire through every capital. Several times he had been re-
ported dead. His brother William had waited anxiously for any
news of him. And on a pleasant August day news came. Hum-
boldt had arrived at Bordeaux and would shortly be in Paris !
His arrival was hke the triumphal return of a victorious gen-
eral. Much had happened in the political and the military for-
tunes of Europe since he had taken ship for America. The armies
of Napoleon had met and conquered the strongest opposition
that Europe had been able to offer. Empires had fallen, dynas-
ties had collapsed and millions had died in Napoleon’s quest for
glory. Yet Humboldt’s quest for knowledge had been equally
potent in capturing the imagination of Europe. The "^'conqueror
of human ignorance” had brought back from his ^'peaceful
battles” a host of “prisoners” — ^specimens of botany, geology,
mineralogy and zoology — the richest collection ever garnered
from a foreign continent. Within a few years he had absorbed a
lifetime of experience that would serve as an inspiration for all
future naturalists — all thoughtful and daring and aspiring men.
And now he laid the plans for his mighty book, the history of
his travels. To the preparation and the writing of this book he
was to devote the bulk of his remaining years. This remarkable
man who combined the body of the adventurer with the mind
of the scholar could now retire into the sedusion of the cloister
[106]
HUMBOLDT
as cheerfully as he had formerly plunged into a jungle of tigers.
Slowly and methodically he examined the material for his
book and divided it into six parts. In the first section he would
relate the story of his adventures — with no other object than
that of ‘‘preserving some of those fugitive ideas which present
themselves to a naturalist whose life was spent almost wholly in
the open air.'' Then he would devote a volume to each of the
special branches of science — zoology, astronomy, physics, geology
and botany. In addition to the main subdivisions he would in-
clude a political and moral history of the Spanish and the Portu-
guese in New Spain, and a sociological survey of the numerous
tribes of natives in the wilds of the continent. The title for this
gigantic work? — ^the Kosmos. For the subject matter embraced
the entire universe in its scope.
Only one other man — ^Aristotle — had ever been able to ac-
complish such a comprehensive study as this. Humboldt realized
that in this undertaking he would need the assistance of the
greatest scientists of his generation. And immediately he set him-
self to the task of appointing and organizing his famous col-
laborators — ^the chemist Gay-Lussac, the astronomer Arago,
the anatomists Latreille and Cuvier, the mathematician Laplace,
the mineralogists Vauquelin and Klaproth, and the botanists
Bonpland and Kunth.
At Arcueil, a village about three miles from Paris, the scholars
met to discuss their plans and to share with one another the
results of their individual studies. As for Humboldt himself, he
prepared a number of books that were to serve as preliminary
studies to the Kosmos. He wrote on the geography of plants, on
agriculture and mining, and a preliminary narrative of his
travels to the “Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent." The
astonishing variety of his works moved even old Goethe to un-
qualified admiration. “He is like a fountain with many pipes;
you need only to get a vessel toehold under it, and on any side
refreshing streams flow at a mere touch."
His writings and his conversational powers had already gained
Im}
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
for him, it would seem, a reputation that could hardly be bright-
ened by any future work. Society looked upon him as “the high-
priest” of the intellectual world. “Whenever he enters the room
he replaces the puppet show of our former activities . . . He
is like an elephant who can with equal ease tear down an oak or
pick up a pin!” He was invited to lecture at Berlin. And in the
audience was Ms intimate friend, the king of Prussia. He was
appointed to the Privy Council and he was addressed thereafter
as “His Excellency the Baron von Humboldt.”
Yet Humboldt was still restless, still dissatisfied. He was sixty
now and his hair was as snowy as the peaks he had scaled so
long ago. But there were yet other mountains he must transcend.
He must travel again. There were vast reaches of the world he
must still explore before he could complete his studies for his
monumental Kosmos. There were the fields of Siberia, and the
vast reaches of the Ural Mountains, there were mineral deposits
to investigate, tribes to visit, specimens to collect. He had spent
almost a quarter of a century of research with the leading schol-
ars, and here he was only at the beginning of Ms labors. And yet,
was it fitting for a man of Ms reputation and years to shoulder
a traveler’s pack as eagerly as a lad of twenty?
His answer was in the affirmative. “To be a wise man is not
enough.” He must be “the wisest of men.” At the invitation of
the Russian Czar he set out on a scientific journey to the Ural
Mountains. The Czar had given him a military escort for Ms
safety, an expert cook for Ms comfort and an officer of the mines
to assist Mm in his mineralogical researches.
They started from Moscow. At Nijni Novgorod they were
joined by a nobleman who owned several large mining estates
in the Urals. They passed through the country of the Tartars
where they found a Mollah at prayer before the tomb of a
saint. They offered him a seat in their carriage so that he might
make the rounds of the distant shrines. Wherever they stopped?
the Mollah performed his devotions while the rest of the com-
pany examined the ruins.
[io8]
HUMBOLDT
They reached an outpost of Mongolia and Humboldt pre-
sented the Chinese commander with a piece of blue cloth in
exchange for a book on Chinese history. Informing the com-
mander that his brother William was a linguist who would find
the book valuable, he requested him to inscribe his name upon
the fly leaf. The host graciously wrote “Chin-Foo’" — and kept
as a memento the pencil which Humboldt had handed to him
for the inscription.
Humboldt sought for platinum in the Ural Mountains, he
collected specimens of sea life in the Caspian, he measured the
temperature of the sun in Siberia, and he studied the plants and
the animals in the lowlands of the Russian steppes. Then he
returned to Berlin after an absence of six months and a trip of
eleven thousand miles.
Humboldt never left the capital again. He settled down in
the Oranienburgerstrasse near the palace of the king. He was
a frequent guest at the royal court. Indeed the palace had be-
come his second residence. No man in Europe was more cele-
brated. Or more happy. Yet his advancing years brought him
pain as well as happiness. His brother William, one of the fore-
most of European scholars in comparative literature, had caught
a severe cold while visiting his wife’s grave and had passed away
in Humboldt’s arms. Humboldt would never forget the final
words of the man who had been so much a part of Mm. “I shall
soon be with our mother, and then I shall understand the laws
of the Mgher world.”
V
At last Humboldt commenced his great work. He was past
seventy and he was engaged in the writing of this book until his
death at ninety. Like Paradise Lost, dictated in the evening ca-
reer of a poet bereft of his sight, the Kosmos was written in the
twilight career of a scientist bereft of his friends. One by one.
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
like autumn leaves, they had dropped from the tree of life. An
entirely new generation had sprung up — ^men and women who
respected and loved him but who could not take the place of the
old. It was in an alien world that Humboldt wrote his great epic
poem of scientific research.
He was compelled to do all his writing at night. For in the
morning he examined his notes, in the afternoon he received the
constant stream of visitors who came to worship at his feet, and
in the evening he dined with the king.
His life was a spring of ever-bubbling energy. And the harder
he worked, the greater the demands upon his time. The world
will not leave a celebrity alone, no matter what his age. He was
invited to cooperate in every literary and political and social
movement of the day. The king exploited his practical skill in
diplomacy just as the scholars exploited his extraordinary genius
in science. Writers of geographies relied upon his firsthand
knowledge of South America. Students of economics sought him
out for his thorough mastery of the fiscal system of Germany.
The leading writers of the country came to him to kindle their
own talents at the flame of his poetical inspiration. The com-
pilers of German dictionaries consulted him for his great insight
into the history and the meaning of words.
Yet greatness is but another name for modesty. Often in his
later years he remarked to his friends : “You should have known
my brother William. He was by far the more clever of us two.”
He regarded his brother as a real teacher and himself as a mere
pupil.
And a pupil he remained to the end. On the cold mornings of
midwinter the students at the University of Berlin would crowd
into the lecture room to hear Bockh discuss Greek literature and
antiquities. “We used to see in the crowd of students,” remarked
a future author, “a small, white-haired, old and happy-looking
man dressed in a long brown coat.” This man was Alexander
von Humboldt, the “father of modem science,” who came to
^^0 through again what he had neglected in his youth.” During
[/lo]
HUMBOLDT
the lectures Humboldt sat on the fifth bench near the window,
taking notes like the other students on a sheet of paper. In the
evening he attended the lectures of Ritter on physical geography.
On one occasion, while discussing an important geographical
problem, Ritter quoted Humboldt as his authority. All eyes
were turned upon the white-haired scientist who rose slightly
from his seat, bowed and then resumed taking notes. Whenever
he was absent from the lecture room the students passed the
word around that ‘‘Alexander has cut class today to take tea
with the King.’’
Gradually his shoulders had become stooped. He was ap-
proaching his ninetieth winter. It was evident that all those who
wished to see him had very little time left for their pilgrimage.
Bayard Taylor, the American poet, had come all the way to
Berlin in order to meet “the world’s greatest living man.” The
talk turned to American affairs. Despite the fact that he was
busily engaged on the Kosmos^ Humboldt kept himself at aU
times posted on current history. He understood American politics
and American personalities. He inquired after Washington Ir-
ving. “He must be at least fifty years old,” he remarked.
Bayard Taylor informed him that Irving was seventy.
“Ah,” murmured Humboldt, “I have lived so long I have al-
most lost the consciousness of time.” And his eye dimmed. He
had lived long indeed. He belonged to the age of Jefferson and
Gallatin. He had heard of George Washington’s death while he
was journeying in South America. He looked with a sad smile at
Bayard Taylor, “You have traveled much, my friend. You have
seen many ruins. Now you have seen one ruin more.” He held
out his hand to his departing visitor. This hand had clasped in
friendship many of the leading personages of the century — Fred*,
erick the Great and Schiller, Napoleon Bonaparte and William
Pitt, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Beethoven
and Walter Scott.
Bayard Taylor paid a second and final visit to Humboldt the
following >ear. In answer to his knock, the door was opened by
[zzi]
HUMBOLDT
Humboldt^s faithful servant, Seiffert, who exclaimed cordially,
'“^Welcome back!’’ And then the servant added that “His Ex*
celiency” had been quite ill and that Mr Taylor would not find
him as strong as on the previous visit. “But thank God his illness
is practically over!”
Mr Taylor was ushered into Humboldt’s study. The white-
haired scientist was standing at a table which was covered with
the proof sheets of a new volume of the Kosmos. “This is what
I have been doing since you were last here,” he remarked to
Bayard Taylor as be picked up the proofs. “Several of the vol-
umes have already been published. This one is just about to
come from the press.”
“Do you find yourself still capable of such exacting labor?”
ventured Taylor.
“I sleep little,” answered Humboldt, “Work is my life. The
day before yesterday I worked for sixteen hours correcting these
sheets.”
Yet he admitted that he was unwell. With perfect scientific
dispassion he discussed his physical debility, “He seemed to con-
sider the body as something independent of himself,” wrote
Taylor afterwards. “He seemed to watch, with a curious eye, its
gradual decay, as he might have watched that of a tree during his
younger days of exploration.”
He was very much absorbed in his memories. He told anec-
dotes about Alexander the First of Russia, and mentioned a
trip he had taken to England during the trial of Warren Has-
tings. He related how in a single night he had listened to the
speeches of Burke, Pitt, and Sheridan. Finally, as Taylor was
about to leave, Humboldt begged him to pay him another visit.
“You must bring your wife with you. I must be polite enough
to live until then.”
In the spring he walked arm in arm with the king through
the quiet gardens of the palace, Sans Souci^ built by Frederick
the Great as a haven to which he might retire after the heat of
his battles. But for Humboldt there was no haven of rest from
[112]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
his labors. Nor did he wish for any such rest until the fifth volume
of the Kosmos was completed on his eighty-ninth birthday.
And the completion of his book meant the fulfillment of his
life. Never did conqueror receive so generous an ovation from
so great a number of people. Shortly after the publication of the
last volume of the Kosmos the American Embassy at Berlin
invited him to a celebration of Washington’s birthday. The sec-
retary of the legation offered two toasts — ‘"‘to George Washing-
ton, the Father of his Country, and to Baron von Humboldt, the
King of Science whose shoes no common kings are worthy of
unloosing.”
The aged scientist rose and in a feeble voice tried to say a
few words. But hardly anyone could hear him amidst the general
cheers. And then his friends, solicitous for his health, bundled
him into a greatcoat and led him away.
In spite of his now rapidly failing strength, his friends boldly
predicted that he would live to take part in a mighty celebra-
tion of his ninetieth birthday. But he told them that he expected
to die in the spring. And when April came, the citizens of Berlin
began to miss the familiar figure of the Baron strolling under
the Lindens. “Where is His Excellency?” they asked one another.
But no one could give answer.
Von Humboldt had taken another ship for a New World.
[ 1 ^ 3 ]
FARADAY
Great Scientific Contributions by Faraday
Experiments in electromag-
netism, Ae conversion of
electricity into power, into
light, etc.
Books and Treatises :
Chemical Manipulation.,
The Chemical History of a
Candle,
On the Various Forces of Na-
ture,
The Liquefaction of Gases,
Researches in Chemistry and"
Physics,
Michael Faraday
1791-1867
In 1857 MICHAEL FARADAY had arrived at what most men
regarded as the sximmit of worldly achievement. Professor Tyn-
dall had offered him the presidency of the Royal Society. But
‘‘the -most brilliant scientist of his generation’^ refused the honor.
“Tyndall,” he said, “I must remain plain Michael Faraday to
the last.”
These words adequately summarize Faraday’s unusual per-
sonality. Throughout his life he declined academic distinctions
and economic rewards in order that he might be free to inves-
tigate Nature’s mysteries as “plain Michael Faraday.”
And his origin was indeed of the plainest. His father was a
blacksmith, and his uncles were grocers and cobblers and farmers
and clerks. One of his brothers was a plumber, and the others
too passed their lives along the obscure and unambitious level
of their origin. But through some freak of nature — ^we regard
as a “freak” any law of nature that we don’t understand — ^the
less than ordinary seed of the Faradays produced the one supreme
flower of Michael’s genius.
As a child he showed no promise of his future genius. An
“average pupil in a common day-school,” to use Ms own ex-
{117]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
pression, he received but a scanty education in “^‘the rudiments
of reading, writing and arithmetic/’ His hours out of school
“were passed at home and in the streets” — ^playing marbles,
taking care of his baby sister, and “watching the sunsets.”
His formal schooling came to an unexpected end because of
a defect in his speech. Unable to articulate the letter R, he pro-
nounced his elder brother’s name “Wobert.” Again and again
his teacher, a desiccated old maid who loved precision and hated
children, had tried to ridicule him out of this defect. Finally,
when she saw that ridicule failed, she decided to resort to blows.
Calling Robert to her desk — he was a pupil in the same class
with Michael — she gave him a halfpenny and ordered him to
buy a cane with which she promised “to give Michael a public
flogging.”
But Robert had ideas of his own about the matter. He pitched
the halfpenny over a wall and then ran home to report his
teacher’s cruelty to his mother. Mrs Faraday, deciding that the
children’s health was more important than their education, took
both boys out of the school.
In the meantime their father, unable to make a living in the
Surrey village of Newington Butts, had resolved to remove his
family to London — “the city of magic and miracles whose streets
are paved with gold.” Accordingly the Faradays adventured to
the city and took up their residence over a coach-house in Man-
chester Square.
But the change in the Faradays’ residence produced no change
in their fortune. The family was still obliged to live on hard
crusts of bread buttered with hope. Michael’s personal ration
was a loaf a week which his mother allowed him to portion out
for himself — an excellent training foi a future scientist. Every
Monday, when he received his loaf of bread, he divided it care-
fully into fourteen sections— two sections per May, one for break-
fast and one for supper. And thus through his careful “man-
agement” he never went altogether hungry although he never
felt fully satisfied.
[,i8]
FARADAY
When he reached his thirteenth year his parents found it
necessary to put him to work Fortunately he was able to get
a congenial job not far from his home. He became an errand
boy to George Riebau, a bookseller and stationer at No, 2 Bland-
ford Street. Mr Riebau conducted, among other services to his
customers, a newspaper lending library; and it was the duty
of Michael Faraday to carry the papers around to the customers
and then to call for them when the customers were through
with them. On Sundays he was obliged to get up before dawn
in order to deliver the papers and to collect them again in time
to “make himself neaf ’ for the morning church services.
Mr Riebau’s customers remembered him as a bright-eyed
youngster, with a load of brown curls upon a head that “was
always thrust forward to ask questions.” This inquisitive forward
thrusting of his head cost him a bleeding nose on one occasion
when a door was suddenly opened outward against his face.
Mr Riebau’s customers, however, were pleased with his serv-
ices, And so too was Mr Riebau who promoted Michael, at
the end of a year, to a “free apprenticeship” in bookbinding at
his establishment.
This new job was to Michael a precious gift from the gods.
For it enabled him to become acquainted not only with the
outside but also with the inside of books. In his spare moments
he read aU sorts of volumes that came to be bound at Riebau’s
shop, and he saw a new enchanted world unfolding itself before
his eyes. “I loved especially,” he tells us, “to read the scientific
books which were under my hand; and, amongst them, delighted
in MarceFs Conversations in Chemistry and the electrical trea-
tises in the Encyclopaedia Britannicaf^ Guided by his reading, he
made “such simple experiments in chemistry as could be defrayed
in their expense by a few pence per week.” He also constructed
“an electrical machine, first with a glass phial, and afterwards
with a real cylinder.”
One day, as he was walking near Fleet Street, he noticed on
a billboard the announcement of a series of lectures on natural
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
philosophy to be delivered by Mr Tatum — ^price, one shilling
per lecture. Faraday was anxious to attend these lectures, but
he had neither the time nor the money for the purpose. Luck
was on his side, however, for both his employer and his brother
came to his aid. His employer generously allowed him to take
time off from his work; and his brother Robert, with equal
generosity, supplied him with the price of admission.
And thus he received another taste of science and took a
further step toward his future career. But Faraday was as yet
unaware of his destiny as one of the pioneer scientists of the
world. He expected to remain all his life a bookbinder — a man
only superficially connected with the world of thought. From
his apprenticeship at Riebau’s he graduated to the position of
journeyman binder to M. de la Roche — a Frenchman who
possessed neither the sympathy nor the intelligence of Mr Riebau.
After a short and disagreeable trial Faraday left his employer
and began to look for a job in another bindery.
It was a critical time for Michael. His father was now dead,
and his mother was in direst poverty. And try as he would, he
couldnT find another job as a bookbinder. What in the world
was he to do?
This was one of the darkest hours of his life — and the fore-
runner of one of his brightest days. For, as he was desperately
trying to find his way through the night, the famous English
scientist Sir Humphry Davy was making his greatest discovery — ^
the discovery of Michael Faraday.
II
“Try desperately to succeed — ^and do not hope for success.’^
This was Faraday’s motto throughout his life, and it was in ac-
cordance with this motto that he met Sir Humphry Davy. In
the course of his apprenticeship he had attended some of Sir
Humphry’s lectures and had copied them out in a neat hand
and given them an attractive binding. He now sent these notes
[Z20]
FARADAY
to Sir Humphry — Michael was modest but he was not timid —
and he respectfully asked the great scientist for a job in his lab-
oratory, He expected no answer to this request, for he had re-
ceived no answer to a similar request which he had made to
another scientist — Sir Joseph Banks. But much to his surprise
he got not only a reply but a job from Sir Humphry, OfiScially
his new position was that of assistant to Sir Humphry in the lab-
oratory of the Royal Institution, Actually his duties consisted
in washing the bottles, polishing the desks, cleaning the inkwells
and sweeping the floors of the laborator}\ Faraday had been
promoted from a bookbinder to a janitor.
But before long he was able to demonstrate to Sir Humphry
that he was much more than a janitor. His quick mind, his
analytical perception and his helpful though deferential sug-
gestions established him as a fellow-wanderer ‘'into regions yet
untrod’’ and fellow-reader of “what is still unread in the man-
uscripts of God.” Sir Humphry allowed him to take an active
part in his experiments. In some of these experiments both Davy
and Faraday sustained injuries, though fortunately of a minor
nature. “Of these,” writes Faraday to his friend Benjamin Abbot,
“the most terrible was , . . when a compound of chlorine and
azote . . , exploded . . . The explosion was so rapid as to blow
my hand open , . . and to tear off a part of one of my nails . . .
Sir Humphry received several cuts on his hands and face , .
And thus they worked side by side — ^master and servant, oi
rather teacher and pupil — exploring the mysteries of nature,
interpreting its symbols and taming its powers. And more and
more as they worked together, the teacher began to rely upon
the pupil. Within a few months Sir Humphry was so thoroughly
convinced of Faraday’s ability that he invited him to accom-
pany him as his “philosophical assistant” on a series of lectures
throughout the leading cities of Europe.
To the blacksmith’s young son (of twenty-two) who had never
traveled beyond the horizon’s distance from London this con-
tipental journey was nothing short of a miracle. He started on
[ 121 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
his journey on Wednesday, October 13, 1813. “This morning,”
he wrote in his diary, “forms an epoch in my life.”
His journey proved to be full of surprises — some of them
pleasant, others painful, all of them informative. In his diary
he noted his excitement at the “luminescence of the sea at night,”
the solemn grandeur of the mountains, his first sight of a glow-
worm, the forest of Fontainebleau “dressed in its airy garment
of crystalline hoar frost,” the crater of Vesuvius — “that bot-
tomless gulf which belches forth wreaths of smoke and showeis
of flaming rocks.” In Paris he caught a glimpse of Napoleon
“sitting in one comer of his carriage, covered and almost hidden
by an enormous robe of ermine, and his face overshadowed by
tremendous plume of feathers,” He was delighted at the unex-
pected nobility of the human heart when he noted that the
Enghsh scientists were allowed free passports in France although
the English armies were fighting against the armies of France.
And he was chagrined at the unexpected meanness of the human
heart when he observed Lady Davy’s attitude toward him. Al-
though Faraday was now recognized everywhere as Davy’s phil-
osophical assistant, Lady Davy treated him as her husband’s
lackey. “She hkes to show her authority,” he wrote to Abbot,
“and I find her extremely earnest in mortifying me.” She took
every opportunity to “show him his place,” forgetting that her
own husband had but recently risen from a similar place. Finally
she reached the climax of her petty annoyances. It was at Ge-
neva. The Genevese philosopher, Professor de la Rive, had in-
vited Faraday as well as the Davys to dinner. A place had been
set at the table for Faraday as a mark of his equality with the
rest of the company. But Lady Davy objected. Faraday, she
insisted, was her husband’s servant and as such must be com-
pelled to eat with the other servants.
Whereupon Professor de la Rive, to show his disgust for Lady
Davy’s conduct, ordered dinner to be served in a separate room
for Faraday, as befitted the dignity of “a lonely young philos-
opher who lived above the petty squabbles of his fellows.”
[122]
FARADAY
Faraday swallowed his humiliation with a wholesome season-
ing of philosophy. This experience had provided him with the
data for a new and interesting scientific observation. The human
mind, he noted, is a peculiar compound of sublimity and slime.
Ill
In the spring of 1815 Sir Humphry and his assistant started
back for England. ‘‘You may be sure,” Faraday wrote hurriedly
to his mother, “that my first moments will be in your com-
pany . . And then he added a postscript : “ ’Tis the shortest
and (to me) the sweetest letter I ever wrote you.”
He was delighted to return home and to resume his job as
assistant technician at the laboratory of the Royal Institution.
The Institution was a combined technical school, public lecture
forum and learned society. Though but fifteen years old at the
time of Faraday’s return from the Continent, it had already
come to be recognized as “the home of the highest kind of
scientific research, and of the best and most specialized kind of
scientific lectures.” And now Faraday was accepted as an in-
tegral part of the organization — ^not only as a research student
but as an occasional lecturer- One of his friends gives us a vivid
if rather crude picture of the young scientist as he appeared on
the platform;
Warmth in his hearty good humor in his face^
A friend to mirth but foe to vile grimace —
Neat was the youth in dress, in person plain,
A mind that toiled for truth and not for gain.
His earnings at this time were scanty — ^thirty shillings a week —
but they were sufficient for his needs. Indeed, he considered
them sufficient for the needs of two instead of one. For he began
to pay court to a young lady — Sarah Barnard, Earlier m life,
to be sure, he had written in his notebook a diatribe against
love. “What is love? A nuisance to everybody but the parties
{123]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
concerned.’^ But now he persisted in declaring his love even to
the nuisance of his beloved. When he made her a written pro-
posal of marriage she penned on the margin of the letter — ‘Tove
makes philosophers into fools/’
But the philosopher persisted in his folly, and finally Miss
Barnard consented — to the lifelong happiness of both. For the
wife turned out to be a perfect complement to the husband.
If Michael Faraday never cared for money, Sarah Faraday
never cared for the luxuries that money could buy. For nearly
half a century she took tender care of his body and left his mind
free to travel in the poetical fairyland of scientific research.
And it was indeed a fairy world in which he lived — an im-
practical child seeking for adventure in an unexplored land of
perpetual enchantment. His genius in the fields of chemistry
and of electricity had amazed all England. Hds services as an
expert were in constant demand in the law courts. For a short
time he yielded to this demand and within a single year he
earned for his expert testimony no less than $5,000. If he con-
tinued with this work, his friends advised him, he could con-
fidently look forward to about $25,000 a year. But he gave it
all up in order to be free to pursue his scientific investigations.
And it was about this time (1827) that he passed up another
opportunity for worldly success. He had been offered the chair
of chemistry at the University of London, but he declined the
offer. His scientific researches at the Royal Institution required
all his time and energy.
And the salary that he now received for “the variety of his
duties” — ^we are quoting the memorandum of the directors of
the Royal Institution — and for “the zeal and ability with which
he performs these duties” was “£ioo (about $500) per annum,
house, coals, and candles ” A poor enough return for the “most
important discoveries of the day” — ^but it was aU that the direc-
tors of the Royal Institution, with their inadequate endowment,
were able to afford. “We are living on the parings of our own
skin.”
{1241
FARADAY
This, then, was the sacrifice of Faraday in the cause of science.
And it was a sacrifice most cheerfully endured. For Faraday did
not regard himself as a martyr. He enjoyed the simplicity of his
life — ^with its zestful labors and its joyful discoveries. Whenever
in the course of an experiment he found the key to a new truth,
he leaped and shouted like a child. And, too, in his leisure mo-
ments he played like a child. He loved his recreation as he loved
his work. Theaters, horse races, dances (he once went to a
masked ball dressed m a nightgown and a nightcap), occasional
trips to the country to attend a husking bee or a sheep-shearing
festival — ^such were the amusements that relaxed him in his
brief vacations from his scientific labors.
And thus we see him tripping through the laboratory of his
life — an observant, playful, thoughtful little child of a man, well
below the average in height, but tough of muscle and resolute
of mind — brown hair parted in the middle and covered with a
hat that had to be especially made for him because of the unusual
length of his head from front to back — ^ringing voice, wide and
generous mouth, eyes full of fun and heart full of laughter.
Of honest laughter. His honesty was his greatest glory — and
his severest handicap. When his associates at the Institution asked
him for his opinion about their work, he gave them his frank
appraisal rather than his unreserved praise. And this frankness
on his part gained him not a few enmities — ^including even that
of the man whom he most greatly admired, Sir Humphry Davy.
One of Sir Humphry’s most important inventions was the “safety
lamp” — a miners’ lantern which, Sir Humphry claimed, would
never explode. When Faraday examined this safety lamp, how-
ever, he found that it was not always safe. And he so reported to
the Parliamentary Committee investigating the hazards of the
British mines. The life of the miners, he felt, was more important
than the honor of his teacher.
But Davy felt otherwise. He resented the “tittle-tattle” of his
former “servant,” and he questioned the competence of this
“young upstart” to pass upon the work of his master. For several
[^25]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
years he harbored this grudge against Faraday, and finally he
got his revenge. A number of Faraday's admirers had proposed
Mm as a candidate for the Fellowship of the Royal Society, a
scientific body of which Sir Humphry was President. When
Faraday's name came up for election, there was one black ball
against him — ^that of Sir Humphry Davy.
This one negative vote was insufficient, of course, to hurt the
reputation of Faraday. But it did much to sully the name of
Davy. Yet Faraday bore no resentment against his former master
and present adversary. 'He never forgot," writes Jean Dumas
in his Eloge Histonque, "what he owed to Davy." Years af-
terwards, when Sir Humphry was dead, Faraday was chatting
with Dumas m the library of the Royal Institution. Suddenly
he pointed to Sir Humphry’s picture and said in a voice trem-
bling with emotion: "There, my friend, was a great man!"
iv
Faraday had no time for petty bickerings or personal spites.
For he had dedicated his entire life to a single task — the deci-
phering of the secret alphabet of nature. His purpose, he said,
was not to build machines but merely to discover facts. "Let
others attend to the harnessing of the forces of nature. I am
content merely with the study of the correlation of these forcesJ*
For he was a philosopher as well as a scientist. He was anxious
to find a unifying principle in the multitudinous diversity of
nature. Again and again in his notebooks we come across such
expressions as the following: Try to convert magnetism into elec-
tricity . . . Study affimUes between gases and liquids . . . Con-
nection between magnetism and gravity . , . Are all phases of
electricity identical in nature ? . . . Correlation between electricity
and light . . . Always seeking to discover the one divine answer
to all our human riddles.
His extended career of discovery may be roughly divided into
three periods:
[156]
FARADAY
In the first period (1816-1830) he experimented largely in
the field of chemistry, with occasional excursions into the myster-
ies of magnetism. He studied the composition of glass, the nature
of boracic acid, the separation of manganese from iron and
the production — for scientific study rather than for practical
use — of rustless steel. But more and more his interests were drawn
to the problems of ‘‘electro-magnetic rotation/’ The law of mag-
netic revolution, he wrote to Professor de la Rive, “is simple
and beautiful.” The orbit of an electric wire around a magnetic
pole and the orbit of the earth around the sun — ^were they not
perhaps the interwoven threads of a simple and harmonious
design of nature?
In order to explore the hidden harmonies of this possible
design, the philosopher-scientist entered upon the second period
of his investigation (1831-1839). In this period he devoted
himself almost exclusively to magnetism and electricity. “I am
busy just now on electro-magnetism,” he wrote to his friend,
Richard Phillips, “and think I have got hold of a good thing,
but can’t say. It may be a weed instead of a fish that after all
my labor I may at last pull up.” And, indeed, time and again
he pulled up “a weed instead of a fish,” His notebooks are full
of the constantly reiterated expression — “No result.”
One day as he was working in his laboratory, however, he
suddenly cried to his assistant, “Do you see, do you see?” He had
succeeded at last in converting magnetism into electricity. To
Faraday it was but another manifestation of the unity of nature.
To the rest of the world this discovery marked the beginning of
the age of electrical machines.
But Faraday paid a high toll for this discovery. “I am so
involved in my experiments,” he had written to Professor de la
Rive, “that I have hardly time for my meals.” As a result of
this strain his health had become undermined until finally his
doctor ordered him to take a protracted vacation. It was not
until five yeans later that he was able to enter upon the third
period of his investigations (1844-1860). In this period he
[127]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ranged over a wide field of miscellaneous experiments, the most
important of them deahng with the relationship between elec-
tricity and light. It was from the inspired mind of Faraday that
Edison first received the electric spark which today illumines
the world.
V
At the conclusion of his daily work Faraday was accustomed
to watch the sunset hand m hand with his wife. “A glorious
sunset,” he wrote to one of his friends, “brings with it a thousand
thoughts that delight me.” To the end of his life he enjoyed
looking at the day as it folded up into the chrysalis of the night —
only to rise into the wings of another day. “How old and how
beautiful is this figure of the resurrection!” he remarked in his
journal.
His strength, overtaxed by his laborious experiments, was
failing again. Together with his waning strength be began to
notice a gradual failing of his memory. With his customary
gentle humor he refers to this infirmity in one of his letters to
his friend. Professor Schonbein. “I have no doubt my answer
to your letter is very unsatisfactory. But, my dear friend, please
remember that I forget^ and that I can no more help it than a
sieve can help the water running out of it.”
And it was with his customary gentle humor that he watched
the ebbing away of his own life. “The important thing,” he
said, “is to know how to take all things quietly.”
One day an employee of the Royal Mint, a young man by the
name of Joseph Newton, was sent down to perform an experiment
at the laboratory of the Royal Institution. He noticed an old
man, dressed in a shabby suit, observing him with a whimsical
look in his eye. “I suppose,” said Newton, “you’ve been here
for a number of years?”
“Yes, a good many years.”
“Sort of janitor here?”
[ 138 ]
FARADAY
^^Yes, sort of/’
“I hope they pay you well?”
could stand a little better pay.”
‘‘And what, my man, is your name?”
“Michael Faraday.”
Plain Michael Faraday to the last.
DARWIN
Great Scientific Contributions by Darwin
Formulated the theory of evo-
lution.
Books and Treatises :
The Voyage of the Beagle,
The Origin of Species,
The Descent of Man,
The Variation of Animals and
Plants,
The Expression of the Emo^
tions.
Volcanic Islands.
Fertilization of Orchids,
Movement in Plants.
Geological Observations,
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
into the priesthood of anthropology, the study of Man. And it
was the lifelong devotion of his priesthood to acquaint his fellow
men with the story of their epic though as yet far from completed
journey from the lowly to the sublime.
II
Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, on the same day with Abraham
Lincoln (February is, 1809) — a coincidence which led one of
his biographers to see him as “the emancipator of the human
mind from the shackles of ignorance, just as Lincoln was the
emancipator of the human body from the shackles of slavery.”
The year 1809 was lavish with its meteoric shower of geniuses.
In that one year an entire basketful of them was dropped into
the lap of humanity — Darwin, Lincoln, Gladstone, Chopin,
Mendelssohn, Poe, Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Eliz-
abeth Barrett Browning, to mention only a few. Every one of
these “superior children of the human race” contributed some-
thing toward the permanent beauty and nobility of the world —
and the contribution of Darwin was not the least among them.
He came of excellent stock on both sides. His paternal grand-
father, Erasmus Darwin, was a famous naturalist who wrote a
poem on the Loves of the Plants and a prose work on the Laws
of Organic Life, His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was
Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated founder of the Wedgwood
potteries. A healthy interest in the arts and sciences, therefore,
was only to be expected in the Darwin household.
As a child Darwin was gentle, meditative and acutely ob-
servant of his surroundings. Even when he was confronted with
danger he was able to pursue his observations in the midst of
his fear. One day, absorbed as usual in his thoughts, he was
walking through the fortifications of Shrewsbury and stepped
absent-mindedly over a parapet. Suddenly he found himself fall-
ing through the air — ^to his death, as he believed. Yet his wits
were alert. This was but another interesting experiment for a
{134}
DARWIN
scientifically-minded little fellow. ‘‘The number of thoughts
which passed through my head during this very short but sudden
and wholly unexpected fall was astonishing ... all of which
seemed hardly compatible with what physiologists have . . . stated
about each thought requiring an appreciable amount of time.”
From his earliest childhood he formed the habit of noticing
things for himself. He loved to collect and to study all sorts of
pebbles, shells, coins, birds’ eggs, flowers and insects. He rarely
captured his insects alive, preferring to pick them up when he
found them dead. For he didn’t think it right to kill them with
his own hands. Yet with the naive logic of childhood he felt no
compunction about killing birds with a gun — at a distance. He
enjoyed hunting for a number of years, until one day he saw
the struggles of a wounded bird and made up his mind not ever
again to bring suffering or death to any living creature for the
mere sake of sport. “A gentle heart,” said an ancient philos-
opher, “is but another name for a vivid imagination.”
Darwin inherited his gentleness from his mother. But he had
little opportunity to know her well, for she died when he was
eight years old. His father. Doctor Robert Waring Darwin, was
a huge mountain of joviality and efficiency — he weighed some-
thing like three hundred and fifty pounds — and, in the words
of his son, “one of the wisest of men.” Yet he was not sufficiently
wise to understand his son’s character. He considered Charles a
good-for-nothing loafer whose only mission in life was to “mess
up the house with his everlasting rubbish.” In order to knock
some “old-fashioned common sense” into his head, Doctor Dar-
win sent Charles to a classical school. But the youngster paid no
attention to his Latin and his Greek. Instead, he fixed up a secret
laboratory in his father’s garden and began to dabble in chemis-
try and in pmsics This, in the opinion both of his schoolmates
and of his teachers, was “the activity of a deranged mind.” The
boys nicknamed him “Gas”; the head master gave him up as a
poco curante — a rather careless creature; and his father, dis-
gusted with Ms experimenting and his “rat-catching,” removed
[^ 35 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
him from the classical school and sent him up to Edinburgh
University to study medicine.
At first Darwin was not disinclined to follow in his father’s
footsteps. But the lectures on anatomy soon began to bore him.
And as for the lectures on materia medica, he found them “some-
thing fearful to listen to.” Moreover, his sympathetic tempera-
ment couldn’t bear the sight of the surgical demonstrations. One
day, as an operation was being performed on a child, he rushed
out of the amphitheater. At that period they were still operat-
ing without anaesthesia, and the screams of the agonized child
kept haunting him for years.
It was quite evident to Darwin’s father that his son was not
cut out to be a doctor. And so he tried to turn him into a cler-
gyman. As a youngster Charles had shown distinct religious ten-
dencies. As he ran to school each morning after breakfast he
prayed to the Lord to aid him in arriving before it was too late.^
But — and this was a point which his father had overlooked —
Darwin started so late for school that it was necessary to pray.
The youngster was not the type to adapt himself to the conven-
tional life of the student. For three years he drifted lazily along
the curricular requirements of Christ’s College, Cambridge — ■
years that were “sadly wasted,” as he tells us, “in praying, drink-
ing, singing, flirting and card-playing.”
Yet it was here that he met the eminent scientist. Professor
Henslow, through whose recommendation he was allowed to
sail as a naturalist on the Beagle. Fortunately Doctor Darwin
was wealthy enough to indulge his son in his “impractical
whims.” The hurdle of financial worry, at least, would be re-
moved from his “unprofitable” quest for scientific truth.
Ill
For five years (1831-1836) the Beagle sailed over the seas
and Darwin was privileged to behold with his own eyes “the
rondure of the world and the mysteries of its teeming life.” With
[136]
DARWIN
the precision of a scientist and the imagination of a poet — ^for
every great scientist is a poet — ^he collected, observed and clas-
sified the scattered fragments of the Chinese puzzle of existence
and tried to piece them together into a comprehensive and com-
prehensible design.
Thus far, however, he had formed no definite idea as to the
^ direction in which his investigations were leading him. Like
every true observer, he started not with a theory but with facts.
It was to take him twenty years of laborious research before he
could determine that his vast accumulation of facts, when ex-
amined impartially, pointed to but a single theory — ^the theory
of evolution.
The whole world to Darwin was a big question mark — a
problem in mathematics with many unknown quantities, a ge-
ometric theorem which must be solved rather than a work of
art which must be admired. He confessed that at a very early
age he had lost his taste for literature, art and music. But he
had found the other side of the golden coins of literature and
art and music in his science.
And he possessed one precious thing that was greater even
than his passion for science — and that was, a love for his fellow
men. Once, when the Beagle had anchored off the coast of Brazil,
he saw an old Negro woman, in a party of runaway slaves, dash
herself to death over a precipice in order to escape from her
pursuers. “In a Roman matron,” he observed, “this would have
been called the noble love of freedom. In a poor Negress it
is regarded as mere brutal obstinacy.”
The barbarism of slavery disgusted and repelled him beyond
measure. “Near Rio de Janeiro,” he records in his Beagle Jour-
nal, “I lived opposite to an old lady who kept screws to crush
the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where
a young mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and
persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.”
Twenty years before the Civil War he expressed his detestation
of slavery in words as passionate as ever came from the li|^ of
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LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
an American abolitionist. “Those who look tenderly at the slave
owner and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put
themselves into the position of the latter . . . What a cheerless
prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself
the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little
children — ^those objects which nature urges even the slave to
call his own — ^being torn from you and sold like beasts to the
first bidder ^ And these deeds” — here speaks the spirit of William
Lloyd Garrison himself — “these deeds are done and palliated
by men who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who
believe in God, and pray that His Will be done on earth !”
Throughout his life Darwin kept his heart open to the suf-
ferings of men just as he kept his eye open to the secret of their
descent.
And his sensitive heart and observant eye were lodged in a
feeble frame. Darwin inherited his father’s stature, but he did
not inherit his father’s strength. His trip on the Beagle was an
unmitigated torture of protracted sea-sickness. Added to the suf-
ferings of ill health were the discomforts of a voyage that were
enough to undermine the constitution of a more powerful man
than Darwin. The food was insufficient and indigestible — ^to the
end of his days Darwin suffered from repeated attacks of vomit-
ing as a result of the “poisons he had absorbed on the Beagle”
There were frequent spells of unendurable cold and unendurable
heat. Again and again, in the swampy regions that he visited
in his search for scientific data, he suffered from the bites of
venomous insects. On some of his explorations into the jungle
he was obliged to go for days at a time without water. Under-
mined by the accumulation of these hardships he returned from
his voyage a broken man.
But a man cage' for thejTOven^re of science — and for the
no less exacting adventuji^f marrikge. Shortly after his return
from his voyage he marned his cousin, Emma Wedgwood,
bought a large country house with a spacious garden, and set-
DARWIN
tied down to raise a family of ten children and to discover if
possible “the secret of their true ancestry/’
As a first step in his search for the ancestry of the human race
he compiled the story of his discoveries during his voyage on
the Beagle — a scientific treatise that reads like a fascinating ro-
mance. For in everything that he wrote he had but a single
aim — ^to make clear to others the truth as it appeared to him.
“Honest simplicity” was his lifelong motto. “It is a golden rule,”
he said, “always to use, if possible, a short old Saxon word.
Such a sentence as 'so purely dependent is the incipient plant on
the specific morphological tendency’ does not sound to my ears
like good mother English — ^it wants translating ... I think too
much pains cannot be taken in making the style transparently
clear and throwing eloquence to the dogs.”
And he did have to take great pains in order to make his
style transparently clear. He found good composition extremely
difficult, and it was only by dogged determination that he was
able to hammer out a free and easy and interesting style. “It’s
dogged as does it,” he wrote upon a card which he pinned up
over his desk.
He regretted that he had no taste for poetry, and yet his
Voyage of the Beagle is full of poetical passages. Note, for exam-
ple, his description of Brazil: “The land is one great, wild, untidy,
luxuriant hothouse, made by Nature for herself, but taken pos-
session of by man, who has studded it with gay houses and for-
mal gardens.” The first sight of this country threw him into “a
perfect hurricane of delight and astonishment — The form of
the orange-tree, the cocoanut, the palm, the naango, the tree-
fern, the banana, will remain clear and separate; but the thou-
sand beauties which united these into one perfect scene must
fade away. Yet they wiU leave, like a tale heard in childhood, a
picture full of indistinct but most beautiful figures.”
The Voyage of the Beagle^ after a hundred years, is still as
romantic as a tale of adventure out of the Arabian Nights.
[^ 59 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Darwin’s next book, however, was more purely scientific. It dealt
with the nature and the habits of the barnacle, that curious little
sea-animal which ^‘'stands on its head in the bottom of its shell-
cup and kicks its food into its mouth with its feet.” It took
Darwin eight years to write this book. And they were perhaps
the busiest eight years of his life. In sticking to this one subject
for so long a period, Darwin seemed to have absorbed into his
own character something of the tenacity of the barnacle. A good
many of his friends ridiculed him for wasting so much good
effort on so unprofitable a task. But he was winning a reputation
as an outstanding naturalist and he was training the sinews of
his intellect for the great work of his life.
For throughout these years he was gradually gathering his
material, sifting it carefully through his critical mind, and build-
ing up his theory about the Origin of Species and the Ascent
(misnamed the Descent) of Man.
IV
The theory of evolution was not original with Darwin. Thou-
sands of years before the Christian era the writers of the Chinese
sagas had expressed a vague idea of the development of man
from the lower animals. This idea had received further elabora-
tion at the hands of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus (342-270
B.G.), and of the Roman poet, Lucretius (96-55 b.g.). With
the coming of Christianity, however, the story of Creation had
superseded the theory of evolution, and it was not until Darwin’s
day that this theory was resurrected and placed upon a scien-
tific basis.
When Darwin was ready to publish his theory of evolution
he felt, as he put it, ‘like a prospective murderer.” For he was
about to kill the orthodox ideas about man and God. He ex-
pected everybody to treat him with contempt. In a letter to his
friend. Professor Asa Gray of Harvard University, he wrote:
“As an honest man, I must tell you that I have come to the
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DARWIN
heterodox conclusion that there are no such things as independ-
ently created species ... I know this will make you despise
me . .
But his genius had enabled him to come upon a great discov-
ery, and his honesty would not let him rest until he made this
discovery known to the world. And so he felt it his duty to kill
an old dogma in order to reestablish what he regarded as a still
older truth.
But if he had to kill, he did so with a gentle thrust. At no point
did he descend to bitter controversy. He simply stated his own
side without attacking the other side. Indeed, he stated no side
whatsoever — he merely presented facts. He did not want to hurt
anybody or to disturb anybody’s belief. ''Let each man hope
and believe as he can.” As for himself, he found it not only rea-
sonable but comforting to believe that man had risen from
savagely to civilization rather than that he had fallen from
civilization to savagery. His theory of evolution gave him the
groundwork for a New Testament of his own — ^the Bible of the
progress of man.
He had first formulated this theory of progress, in a tentative
outline, as early as 1839 — ^twenty years before the publication
of the Origin of Species, In 1842 he developed this outline into
a sketch of 35 pages, and in 1844 he expanded it further into a
manuscript of 230 pages. But instead of printing this manuscript
he continued for another fifteen years to test his data, to pick flaws
in his arguments, and to check and recheck his conclusions over
and over again. For he was, throughout his career, his own most
exacting critic, with the result that he was able to anticipate
and to answer practically all the objections that were later to
be raised by his opponents.
It was not until 1858 that Darwin was ready at last to publish
the result of his investigations. And then, just as he was putting
the finishing touches to his manuscript, he awoke one day to
find that another scientist had unwittingly stolen all his thunder.
On June the i8th of that year he received from his friend, Alfred
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LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Russel Wallace, an original paper on Evolution with a request
for his frank criticism as to the validity of the theory. Wallace
was at that time living on the other side of the globe (in Ma-
laya). He was altogether unaware of the fact that Darwin, too,
had hit upon the idea of the origin of species and that he had
been quietly working on this idea for the past twenty years. And
so it was with the utmost innocence that he was now asking
Darwin to introduce him to the world as the originator of the
evolutionary theory.
What was Darwin to do in this predicament? Wallace’s article
was an exact transcript of his own findings on the subject. “I
never saw a more striking coincidence!” exclaimed Darwin in a
letter to the famous geologist. Doctor Lyell. ‘Tf Wallace had
had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have
made a better short abstract.”
Darwin’s first impulse was to step aside and to give Wallace
the entire credit for the discovery, ‘T would far rather burn my
whole book,” he said, ‘‘than that he or any other man should
think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.” Doctor Lyell,
however, insisted that in all fairness to himself Darwin ought
to publish his own views at once. He expressed his conviction
that Wallace would gladly accept the situation as soon as he
learned that Darwin had anticipated him in the discovery by
about twenty years.
Finally Darwin agreed to have the theory presented to the
Linnaean Society as the joint work of Wallace and himself. And
W'allace, not to be outdone in generosity, declared it to be “a
singular piece of good luck” that gave him any share in “a dis-
covery for which Darwin alone was responsible.”
And thus ended one of the most remarkable controversies in
history — a controversy in which each of the opponents tried to
advance the interests of the other at the expense of his own
glory.
Now that the theory had been presented to the scientific world,
Darwin went rapidly ahead with the preparation of his man-
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DARWIN
uscript for the general public. The first edition of the book was
issued on November 24, 1859, under the cumbersome title —
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Pres--
ervation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life*
This book, which “swept away the story of Adam and Eve
and the Garden of Eden in a deluge of scientific data/’ may be
briefly summarized as follows: In this world of ours there is
constantly being produced an unlimited multiplication of living
creatures. The food supply, however, is limited. So, too, is the
available living-space in the world. The result is a life-and-death
competition between all living things, an everlasting struggle for
existence. Those that are best fitted to their environment are
able to live, and the rest are doomed to die. The evolutionists
call this process the “survival of the fittest.’’ But in the course of
time the environment keeps changing — ^from sea to land, from
valleys to mountains, from glacial periods to periods of warmer
climate, and so on. During these changes it becomes necessary
for the living creatures also to change, or to evolve from one
species to another, in order that they may survive under the
new conditions. The process by which this evolution takes place
is called natural selection — ^that is, nature’s selection of those
characteristics which enable the species to survive, and her elim-
ination of those characteristics which are no longer necessary
for survival in the new environment.
This, in a nutshell, is the whole story of evolution. The un-
limited multiplication of life leads to a struggle for existence and
to the survival of the fittest through the process of natural selec-
tion and the consequent development from one species to an-
other. In accordance with this theory, man is but a step removed
from the so-called lower animals. Darwin explains this step in
his next book — The Descent of Man.
Darwin is generally credited (or discredited) with the theory
(that men are descended from monkeys. As a matter of fact, he
never said anything of the sort. He believed that men and apes
are both evolved from a common prehistoric ancestor that is
[1431
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
now extinct. The ape, in other words, is not our forefather but
our distant cousin.
Man, according to Darwin, is the highest form of animal life
on earth. He has gained the mastery over the other animals
through the law of the survival of the fittest. By the word fittest
Darwin means not necessarily the strongest or the most ruthless
but the most adaptable. Among the lower animals, to be sure,
natural selection assumes the form of elimination through phys-
ical strife. Within the human sphere, however, the process of
individual strife is being gradually superseded by the progress
of social cooperation. Selfish aggressiveness is giving way to
mutual aid. In spite of our occasional lapses — ^such as the ephem-
eral triumphs of a Napoleon or a Hitler — ^the law of civilization
is slowly but surely emerging out of the lawlessness of the jungle.
Step by step we are absorbing the lesson that the best way to
insure the survival of the individual human being is to work
for the friendly collaboration of the entire human race.
Man, believes Darwin, is a social animal. He is not a fallen
angel, but a risen savage. His path is not downward, but upward.
Yet, on the other hand, he is not a creature set apart from all
other living creatures. On the contrary, he is intimately related
to everything that moves and breathes and struggles to live. In
the scale of evolving life he is still to be classed as an animal.
But he is an animal with an infinite capacity for love.
V
The life of darwin was perhaps the best proof of his theory
of evolution. His capacity for love seemed to grow from year
to year. He was drawn to people, and people in turn were drawn
to him. In his bluish-gray eyes there was a perpetual twinkle of
sympathetic understanding. Such was the kindly serenity of his
face that strangers would come away from their first visit with
tears of joy in their eyes. As for his intimate friends — and he
had many of them — ^they found in his gentle personality a “per-
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DARWIN
petual benediction/’ For friendship to Darwin was the greatest
of all the blessings bestowed upon the human race. ''Talk of fame,
honor, pleasure, wealth,” he wrote in one of Ms letters, "all
these are dirt compared with the affection of friendship.”
But the friendliness of his character was most apparent in his
attitude toward his enemies. In spite of ail their vituperations,
he never uttered a harsh word against any of them. On the con-
trary, he always thanked them for their criticism. For the primary
object of his life, he said, was to ascertain the truth. And in the
search of the hidden byways of truth, "two minds are better
than one.” He was at all times ready to acknowledge the weak
links in the chain of his arguments — ^to concede his defeat when-
ever the arguments of his opponents were more convincing than
his own. "If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head
and annihilated so much the better.”
He never assumed a superior attitude either toward his antag-
onists or toward his collaborators. Throughout his life he acted
the part of the humble assistant rather than that of the im-
posing master. He was especially grateful to the unrecognized
workers in the laboratory, the uninspired gatherers of data, the
"hodmen of science,” for the invaluable help they were able to
give him. He looked down upon no creature, however lowly.
His servants, like the members of his family, were in his eyes
invested with the selfsame dignity — the dignity of their com-
mon membership in the society of the human race.
He possessed that true stamp of the superior mind — a modest
honesty. One day Gladstone paid him a visit. When the Prime
Minister left him, Darwin remarked; "Mr Gladstone seemed
to be quite unaware that he was a great man, and talked to me
as if he were an ordinary person like myself.” To which remark
Gladstone, when it was reported to him, replied: "My feeling
toward Mr Darwin was exactly the same as Mr Darwin’s feel-
ing toward me.”
Darwin had something of Buddha’s fellow feeling toward all
mankind — indeed, toward all nature. He talked about trees and
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
grass as if they were living things. He would scold a plant-leaf
for its “ingenuity’’ in screwing itself out of a basin of water in
which he had tried to immerse it. Vexed with the behavior of
certain seedhngs with which he was experimenting, he said:
“The little beggars are doing just what I don’t want them to.”
He looked upon every plant as upon a living personality. He
enjoyed the beauty of his flowers, and he was thankful to them
for the “graciousness” of their beauty. He would touch their
petals gently, with the infinite love of a sage and the simple ad-
miration of a child.
His character was Christlike, yet he refused to call himself
a Christian, “For myself,” he said, “I do not believe that there
ever has been any revelation.” He was not, however, an atheistj,
but regarded himself rather as an agnostic. He was not very cer-
tain, he said, of his belief in God. But he was quite certain of
his belief in man. “I believe that in the distant future man will
be a far more perfect creature than he is today.” AlS for the im-
mortal destiny of the individual soul, on this question too ht
was an agnostic. “The whole subject (of immortality),” hft
said, “is beyond the scope of man’s intellect . . . But man can do
his duty.”
His own duty, as he saw it, was to toil unflinchingly through-
out his life in order to bring a little more light to his fellow men.
And he toiled, as we have seen, under two tremendous handicaps
— ^his wealth, which made hard labor unnecessary, and his suf-
fering, which made any kind of labor almost iippossiblc But he
overcame his handicaps, thanks to his own firmness and lo the
gentleness of his wife. For Emma Darwin, whom he immortal-
ized as “the best and kindest of wives,” was the “one condition
which enabled him to bear the strain and fight out the struggle
to the end.” Passionately devoted though she was to the doctrines
of the English Church, she nevertheless stood side by side with
her agnostic husband She attuned her life to the slower tempo
of his own semi-invalid existence, she encouraged him without
ever driving him, she kept in touch with his experiments, she
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DARWIN
corrected his proofs and she fortified his arguments with effective
words and phrases. Above all, whenever he was in pain she
cared for him with such uncomplaining tenderness that he often
said to her: ‘‘It is almost worth while to be sick to be nursed by
you.”
But Darwin repaid his wife’s devotion with an equally tender
devotion of his own. And the beautiful harmony of their life
was reflected in the characters of their children. The Darwins
were a family of thoroughbreds — all of them were thoroughly
bred in the best British tradition of joyousness, generosity and
mutual respect.
The sense of respect — ^that is, the habit of sympathetic
thoughtfulness for the feelings of others — ^was the keynote of the
Darwin character. On his last visit to London, at the age of 73,
Darwin was seized with a fainting spell just as he was about to
enter the house of a friend. The friend was out; but the butler,
noticing Darwin’s condition, urged him to come inside.
“Please don’t trouble yourself. I shall find a cab to take me
home.” And the considerate old naturalist staggered away from
the door.
For three months he waited patiently for the end. “I am not
the least afraid to die,” he said. “I am only sorry that I haven’t
the strength to go on with my research.”
His death was the signal for a worldwide chorus of denuncia-
tion. His enemies consigned his “unrepentant soul” to hell. But
one old lady in England thought otherwise. “To be sure Darwin
has proved there is no God,” she said. “But God is so kind He
will forgive him.”
HUXLEY
Great Scientific Contributions by Huxley
Books :
On the Anatomy of Medusae.
The Theory of the Vertebrate
Skull
Physiography.
Man^s Place in Nature.
Essays on various scientific sub-
jects.
Lay Sermons.
The Advance of Science.
The Crayfish.
Discourses Biological and Geo-
logical
Earthquakes and Volcanoes.
Evolution and Ethics.
Thomas Henry Huxley
1825-1895
Fhysically I am the son of my mother. ... I can hardly
find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty
for drawing . . • a hot temper . . . and that amount of tenac-
ity of purpose which unfnendly observers sometimes call ob-
stinacy.”
He needed his obstinacy. He was a self-made man. Born at
Ealing, just west of London, he entered the semi-public school
of the district at eight, left it at ten, and never had another bit
of regular schooling. His formal introduction to learning had
left nothing but bitter memories. “The society I fell into at school
was the worst I had ever known . . . The people who were set
over us cared as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as
if they were baby farmers.” It was here that he received his first
inkling of the struggle for existence. “Bullying was the least oI
the ill practices among us.” Only the fittest survived.
Tom’s father had been senior master of the Ealing School.
But when the enterprise encountered financial difficulties, he was
relieved of his post. Taking his family to Coventry he secured a
position in a local savings bank. Troubled by his material
worries he allowed Tom’s mental faculties to “just naturally
[^50
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
grow” without benefit of classes. As a result, young Huxley’s
educational curriculum consisted largely of a single R — Reading
Every morning before dawn he lit his candle, pinned a blanket
around his shoulders, and sat up in his bed devouring all sorts
of books on every conceivable subject. He had a picturesque
mind. He could find an essay on geology as exciting as a novel,
and a treatise on logic as invigorating as a drama.
It was in this informal manner that Huxley traveled over the
endless road to knowledge. But he never drove himself unduly.
“I worked extremely hard when it ^pleased me, and when it did
not — which was a very frequent case — I was extremely idle.”
His earliest desire, in spite of his mathematical deficiency, was
to become a civil engineer. The idea of building bridges held a
great fascination for him. But as he grew older he transferred his
interests from the building of bridges to the healing of bodies.
The entire Huxley family had gone ‘"medicine minded.” His
sisters had become engaged to physicians and his brother, too,
had started to explore “the deserts of anatomy” in order to dis-
cover the pathways to the oasis of health. Not to be outdone,
Tom Huxley joined the family caravan.
For two years he studied medicine and then he hired himself
out as an “assistant practitioner” to Dr Chandler — an acquaint-
ance of the Huxleys who worked among the poor in the East
End of London. Here Tom was able at first hand to observe the
suffering that comes from poverty. “Alleys nine or ten feet wide
. . . with tall houses full of squalid, drunken men and women,
and the pavement littered with still more squalid children.”
Humanity reduced to the level of brutes — and treated as such.
Huxley learned something else besides medicine in his ministra-
tions among the poor. The world needed healing not only from
its physical disease, but from its social sickness as well.
11
He had received a free scholarship at the Charing Cross Hospi-
tal, and he had taken honors in anatomy and physiology. He
[^52]
HUXLEY
tried to enter the College of Surgeons but he was too young — ^not
quite twenty. He was faced with several years of aimless drifting
— a prospect he didn’t like in the least — ^when events took a
strange turn. One day a fellow student suggested that he join
the navy. His vivid imagination took fire at the thought. He
wrote a hasty letter to “influential” relatives, negotiated briskly,
and reported for duty as assistant surgeon in the Haslar Naval
Hospital.
Huxley was bored, however, with his new adventure as a
sailor without a ship. He had hoped to be taken along on an
expedition to the distant seas. And — ^such was the smiling temper
of his fortune — ^his hope was realized. One day his superior, Sir
John Richard, called him into his study. “Young man, how
would you like to sail to the South Seas under Captain Stanley?”
Huxley’s heart beat high. Stanley had taken part in a fabulous
expedition to the Strait of Magellan and to the Arctic regions
where he had almost lost his life. He was like a hero out of the
old sagas. To sail with Captain Stanley^ True enough, Huxley
was to serve merely as a “half-officer” on the voyage. When he
entered his tiny cabin on the Rattlesnake — Captain Stanley’s
ship — ^he was compelled to stoop in order to move about. But this
cabin was a palace to the boy of twenty-one. Here he could
dream to his heart’s content — ^reading his books, studying
through the microscope whatever strange specimens of life they
might discover on the expedition, making sketches, taking notes,
piercing incessantly through the sea-mists to new visions, new
islands, new facts. Always he had an insatiable thirst for facts,
Huxley was not disappointed with his voyage. For in the
course of it he found many an adventure. He charted mountain
ranges that had never before been recorded; he helped to save
a shipwrecked white woman who had been captured by natives;
he struck up a friendship with a chieftain who claimed him as
the spirit of his dead brother; he went ashore at Sydney and
“danced the light fantastic” with the “elegant Australian girls.”
And — ^most exciting adventure of them all — ^he found himself
1 ^ 55 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ladylove exceeding fair with soft blue eyes and yellow hair/’
He wrote to his mother from Sydney and told her of his engage-
ment. “Henrietta has been to school two years in Germany,
speaks German, and is interested in German literature.” Appar-
ently these accomplishments would “put her right” in the eyes
of a fond mother whose husband had once taught school.
But they decided not to marry until Huxley got established as
a recognized scientist. He left Henrietta in Sydney and returned
home to his influential friends. They suggested that he “go down
to the meeting of the British Association and make himself no-
torious somehow or other.” In order to succeed, they told him, a
man must do “a little trumpetmg now and then.” Tom was a
sensitive fellow, but love had taken complete sovereignty over
him. With a feigned assurance that concealed a trembling heart
he delivered a lecture on oceanic hydrozoa (underwater animals)
before an audience of scholars who had a habit of “waving and
wagging one coat-tail when they applauded.” There appeared a
small notice of this lecture in the Literary Gazette.
And then fortune smiled upon him again. He submitted for
publication a paper he had written aboard the Rattlesnake on
the anatomy of a species of jelly fish he had studied on his voy-
age. The paper was hailed as the basis for “a new branch of
philosophic zoology.” It was also the basis for Huxley’s future
success. It brought him the Royal Medal and an election to the
Royal Society. “And now,” he wrote enthusiastically to Henri-
etta, “if only I had four hundred pounds a year!”
And Henrietta wrote back — “Let us be patient.”
Ill
They were married after seven years of patient waiting, Hux-
ley was now one of the most promising young scientists in Eng-
land. He had passed the goal of four hundred pounds a year.
He was a contributor to the Westminster Review, a teacher at
the Government School of Mines and a lecturer at the Royal
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HUXLEY
Institution. He iaced his future prospects with ‘^^complete equa-
nimity.’'
He especially enjoyed his teaching The Government School of
Mines’ had instituted free evening courses for workingmen.
“Mass Education” had become the battle cry of the British in-
telligentsia. Everywhere in London the air was “pink with the
new social philosophy.” Huxley was an ideal teacher, a self-made
man speaking in brisk unacademic language to self-made men.
“I am sick of the dilettante middle class. I am glad I am not at
Oxford. Here in London the air is free of the dons and the un-
dergraduates and the ancient rituals.” Here were workers who
lived among facts, Huxley’s explanations of the glacial epoch
weie masterpieces of melodrama. His style was racy. Thousands
of people from every grade of society stormed the doors of the
lecture hall. But only the laborers were admitted. All kinds of
subterfuges were resorted to. One clerk attempted to gain ad-
mittance by asserting he was a “driver” — ^neglecting to add,
however, that the only thing he “drove” was a quill.
It was at the School of Mines that Huxley at last found his
vocation. He was to become a popularizer of science. With the
magic wand of his intellect he touched the dead bones of an-
tiquity — and behold, the bones took on flesh and came back to
life.
Huxley was not only a popularizer of scientific knowledge, but
a crusader for scientific causes. An\ unrecognized pioneers?
Huxley saw to it that they won recognition. Any challengers to
a reasonable theory? Huxley was ready with a two-fisted intellect
to enter the fight.
At this moment there was an unusually spirited fight raging
around the new Darwinian theory of evolution. It offended the
dignity of many people to acknowledge their descent from the
lower animals. At a meeting of the British Association (in i860)
the Bishop of Oxford had turned to Thomas Huxley with a
sarcastic smile. ‘T beg to know^ is it through your grandfather or
your grandmother that you claim your descent from a monkey?”
1^55]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
The audience was aghast. Tom Huxley’s eyes glistened as he
rose to his feet. He felt no need to be ashamed of having an ape
for a grandfather, he asserted. 'Tf there were an ancestor I might
possibly feel shame in recalling it would be — a man like the
Bishop of Oxford.”
For twenty-five years the battle for evolution went on with
unabated fury. And Huxley stayed always in the forefront of the
fight. The newspapers headlined the issue, “Children of Adam,
or Heirs of the Apes?” One of the contributors to Punch ex-
pressed himself on the subject in a little poem which a contem-
porary wag called A Bit of Doggonlla:
Ami satyr or man?
Pray tell me who can^
And settle my place m the scale,
A man in ape’s shape ^
An anthropoid apCy
Or a monkey deprived of his tad?
All England was divided on “the controversy of evolution
which threatened to become a revolution.” Huxley delivered
scores of lectures in favor of Darwin. And these lectures kept
constantly winning “new converts to irreligion.” People who
came to stone Huxley remained to applaud. His appeal was
simple and eloquent. “Does my belief really brutalize and de-
grade mankind? Is the poet or the philosopher or the artfet whose
genius is the glory of his age degraded by the . . . certainty that
he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage
whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more
cunning than the fox? ... Or is he bound to howl and grovel
on all fours because ... he was once an egg?”
He collected his arguments and published them in a volume —
Man’s Place in Nature — ^which served as a challenging supple-
ment 10 Darwin’s Origin of Species, Darwin himself was a shy
recluse who had no taste for public disputes. He had written
a book on the abstruse physiological theory of the transmutation
[^56]
HUXLEY
of species — a scientific treatise for which he expected nothing
more exciting than a dignified burial in the dust of a paleonto-
logical library along with the other honored and innocuous dead,
He was struck with amazement and alarm at the furor he had
created. And then along came a faithful bulldog of a friend to
protect him against the rage of his adversaries. He was relieved
to find a man who not only understood him but who was ready
to fight for him.
For Darwin himself was no fighter. He had never meant to
set himself up as an iconoclast. He had been too deeply absorbed
in the recreations of his insects to hear the rumblings of the
thunder that he had set loose with his new ideas. And now that
the storm had broken in all its fury he was content to pass on
and to leave the field to those who had more heart for the fight.
IV
In all his quarrels Huxley had worthy associates. He be-
longed to the X Club — a coterie of ^^gentlemen assassins of other
people’s prejudices.” They met once a month. On the day before
the meeting the secretary sent to each member a simple reminder
on a postcard — ^X, plus the date of the meeting. Once every
summer there was a week-end picnic to which the members were
asked to invite their ladies. The postcard for this event read —
“X’s YVs.” Although the gatherings were strictly informal^
‘‘just a few friends who did not want to drift apart,” they never-
theless resulted in a whole “galaxy” of distinctions. Five of the
members received the Royal Medal, three the Copley, one the
Rumford. Six were presidents of the British Association; and
three, presidents of the Royal Society.
It was at a meeting of the X Club that Huxley coined the
word which defined his attitude toward religion. “In this club,”
one of the members had remarked, “most of us are atheists. We
know there is no God.” Whereupon Huxley retorted: “As for
myself, I am merely an agnostic, I don’t know.” He was a passive
[^57]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
non-believer rather than an active disbeliever — a dissenter but
not a deserter from the tenets of the church. ‘T have been provi-
dentially saved from a life of sin/’ he once remarked whimsically^
^‘by three unorthodox factors — Carlyle, Science, and Love. The
philosophy of Carlyle has taught me that a deep sense of re-
ligion is quite compatible with the entire absence of theology.
Science has given me the support of authority without dogma.
Love has opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human na-
ture.”
He felt that he needed no other bulwarks against the vicissi-
tudes of this world or of the next — ‘If, indeed, there is a next
world.” It mattered not at all to him that people called him a
heretic, an infidel, and other hard names. He knew that in ac-
cordance with the British law the word of a sneak thief who
swore on the Bible would be taken against his own word. But he
stuck to his honest convictions. “Huxley’s passion,” said Herbert
Spencer, “was not only for truth but for something which is
considerably rarer — candor.”
His religion was that of a candid skepticism — a constructive
rather than a destructive doubt. His attitude toward life was that
of the scientist-poet. Truth is wisdom plus beauty. “Teach a
child what is wise — ^that is morality; teach a child what is wise
and beautiful — that is religion,”
V
^‘Teach a child what is wise and beautiful.” This was the para-
mount object of Huxley’s life. In 1870, thanks to the efforts of
Huxley and of other like-minded pioneers, the British Parliament
passed an act to offer free education to the children of needy
parents. Huxley was elected a member of the new school board.
With the pitiless scalpel of his logic he cut deep into the “intel-
lectual snobbishness” of the British aristocracy. “What might nor
the poor and lowly among men achieve if given the opportunity
to education? And what would happen to many othem of the
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HUXLEY
'best’ in society? . * . We have all known noble lords who would
have been coachmen, or gamekeepers, or billiardmarkers, if they
had not been kept afloat by our social corks.” In order to pre-
serve a democracy, he declared, you must have not a minority of
noble births but a majority of nimble brains.
He dedicated his life to the training of this majority — ^with
his books, his experiments, his lectures. Especially with his lec-
tures. He reveled in his classroom contacts. Here he was at his
best. He struck the students speechless with his biting sarcasm.
Once he picked up the notebook of an earnest but incompetent
Irish student who had been assiduously diagramming a sheep’s
liver. Huxley studied the drawing for a few moments. “It re-
minds me,” he remarked’ wryly, “of the Cologne Cathedral in a
fog.” On another occasion, at the conclusion of a lecture at the
blackboard, he asked the men if he had made himself perfectly
clear. One bold voice spoke out: “All, sir, but one part during
which you stood between me and the blackboard.” The professor
frowned. “I did my best to make myself clear,” he said. “But it
seems I couldn’t render myself transparent.”
Throughout his life he was a whiplash to^ little minds. Yet the
flourish of his wit was worse than its sting. For at bottom he was
a gentle soul. And a sick body. He could thank a dyspeptic Ever
for his sarcastic tongue. As he passed middle age he began to
suffer acutely from the “blue devils” of depression and hypo-
chondria.
He took frequent trips to the Mediterranean to fiE his lungs
with good sea air. But as often as he returned to his professional
duties he found his attacks recurring. His friend Hooker had
suggested nicotine as an antidote to his gastric disturbances. As
a result he became an incessant cigar smoker — ^but still his diges-
tion remained unimproved.
At fifty-nine he had aE his teeth extracted. He feared that this
was a grave forewarning. In his zoological studio he had noted
that the decay of an animafs teeth was a frequent premonition
of its death. In his sixtieth year he faded rapidly. He was forced
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
to give up his work on dissection since it entailed too great a
demand on his ebbing strength. Once when he was younger he
had remarked lightly, “At sixty all scientists should be stran-
gled.” He resigned his professorship and his inspectorship at the
Department of Fisheries. And finally, with a heavy heart, he
gave up the greatest of his honors — the presidency of the Royal
Society. In a speech of touching simplicity he explained to the
members that in view of all their kindness he could not consider
holding the office “for a single moment after my reason and my
conscience have pointed out my incapacity to discharge the
serious duties of this office.” And then, when he had finished the
speech he turned to his friends and said in a low voice, “I have
just announced my official death.”
But he was not as yet ready to die. A new attack had been
launched against him and the old lion was ready once more for the
fight. The Honorable Mr Gladstone had written in a weekly
periodical a bristling denunciation against those who disap-
proved of the biblical account of the world’s creation. The Duke
of Argyll had followed up this article with a paper on the “Reign
of Terror” instituted by the naturalists who were trying “to
destroy the foundations of God.”
Instantly Thomas Huxley was cured of all his ailments. A lusty
fight was to him the very elixir of life. He took up his pen
with his old-time vigor. “The antagonism of science is not to
religion, but to the heathen survivals and to the bad philosophy
under which religion herself is well-nigh crushed.” This had been
his lifelong argtiment. Why this constant attack upon science
as the enemy of religion? Science did not reject religion. It
merely questioned “this or that philosophical speculation, this or
that theological creed.” Science had been too long neglected as
the poor Cinderella in the respectable family of human culture.
“She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner;
and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted
to low and material interests.” While her sisters, Philosophy and
Theology, are engaged downstairs in a ceaseless quarrel with
[ 750 ]
HUXLEY
each other. Science in her garret “has fairy visions beyond their
ken/’ She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of
the world. She observes the great drama of evolution as it unfolds
in its beauty and its terror. And she tries to transform the terror
into beauty. It is true that the strong animals prevail over the
weak in the jungle. But in the gardens of mankind the meanest
flower may be trained to flourish as beautifully as the stateliest
tree. “Society differs from nature in having a definite moral
object.” This doctrine had gradually become Huxley’s inner-
most conviction. “The course shaped by the ethical man — ^the
member of society — necessarily runs counter to that which the
non-ethical man — ^the primitive savage — ^tends to adopt.” When
properly understood, both evolution and religion point to the
selfsame end — the refinement of brute force into human love.
When Huxley spoke such words as these, the lips of the satyr
grew tender with the devotion of the prophet. Here was a phi-
losopher who smote his fellows for their foolishness — out of his
great respect for their inherent wisdom. How could they accuse
him of wanting to destroy? How could they brand him with a flip-
pant disregard for human faith? Was it impossible for them to
conceive of a man who had tasted his share of grief and who at
three-score years could still retain the courage to think? “I have
graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; I have
taken my share in all the deep joys and the deeper anxieties of
life ... I have felt the burden of young lives entrusted to my
care ... I have stood alone with my dead before the abyss of
the eternal . . This had been his personal struggle for ex-
istence. And out of the painful process of gradual adaptation,
out of his sanguine youth, his aggressive middle age, his mellow
later years — out of all these aspirations and successes and sor-
rows had come the gradual evolution known as Thomas Huxley.
From rash skepticism, to skeptical intelligence — ^to a final per-
ceptive glimpse. “The thinking man alone can check the natural
struggle of brute strength.”
And so he entered once more into the arena of thought and
i6j ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
found the %igor of a renewed >outh in his winter years. Forgotten
was the weakness to which he had yielded m a moment of foolish
fear. His energy had caught its second breath. He no longer
shuddered at the prospect of physical exertion. On the contrary,
he exulted in it. He took a tnp to Switzerland (1888) and walked
eighteen miles, including a climb of two thousand feet, in a
single day. He scoffed at the absurdity of his ever having yielded
to dilated heart,” He made a solemn vow to prolong his
labor and to postpone the inevitable end. “For at the end of life
all one*s work looks so uncommonly small!”
VI
He built himself a house at Beachy Head on the seaside.
Like the old philosopher, Candide, he spent his declining years
in the cultivation of his garden. And then came the greatest irony
into the life of this master of irony. He was canonized into a
“respectable institution.”
The agnostic had been exalted into a saint. He received the
honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the citadel of British
orthodoxy, the University of Cambridge. “I shall be glorious in
a red gown!” he wrote sarcastically* He was appointed Dean of
the College of Science. “The only ambition that remains to me,”
he laughed, “is the Archbishopric of Canterbury.”
And finally he was knighted. He accepted this honor, like all
the others, with his tongue in his cheek. “Ancestral nobility” was
to him little more than a farce. “My zoological studies have car-
ried me so far back to my remote ancestors that my immediate
ancestors no longer interest me.”
He never came to court, and he paid but an occasional visit to
London. He had grown deaf in one ear and he therefore felt
sensitive about accepting social invitations. He never could sit
at table, he complained, without making an enemy of the neigh-
bor on his deaf side.
And so he plodded his lonely but cheerful way through his de-
[162]
HUXLEY
dining years. “There goes Professor Huxley” — once remarked
an old lady — “faded but still fascinating.”
As he grew older he withdrew more and more from society
into the solitude of his garden. When his youngest granddaughter
paid him a visits she looked at him with a puzzled expression in
her eyes. “You are the curiousest old man I ever saw!”
A curious man with his curious plants. Here in his garden he
inspected his creepers and tended his gentians and sheltered his
exposed shrubs against the wind and collected his essays for final
publication. The story of progress. From the seed of the past
through the growth of the present to the buds and stems of to-
morrow.
And what is this hope of tomorrow — this ultimate purpose of
the evolutionary process, this gradual acquisition of knowledge
through incessant struggling and suffering? Is not the end of all
this struggle the survival of the mentally fittest and ethically
best? . . .
VII
Huxley passed through a severe winter in his seventieth year.
Yet he had never felt more cheerful. The doctors shook their
heads, but he laughed at them. As the spring approached, he
wrote to his friend Hooker and told him not to pay any attention
to the alarming reports that were being published in the news-
papers about his health. “I don’t feel at all like sending in my
checks.”
Three days later he was dead.
AGASSIZ
Great Scientific Contributions by Agassiz
Founded the Museum of Com-
parative Zoology at Har-
vard.
Books, Treatises and Re-
searches :
Species of Fishes (in the Ama-
zon River) .
History of the Fresh Water
Fishes of Central Europe.
The Growth of Continents,
^Researches on Fossil Fishes.
Critical Studies on Fossil Mol-
luscs,
The Structure of Animal Life,
Zoological Nomenclature,
The Glacial System,
Geological Sketches,
Louis John Rudolph Agassiz
1807-1873
He was born at motiek, a Swiss village nestled on the shore
of Lake Morat among the foothills of the Bernese Alps. He came
of a Huguenot family which had escaped from France during
the persecutions of Louis XIV.
His immediate ancestors on his father’s side had been clergy-*
men for six generations. On his mother’s side, too, he came of
an intellectual — and sturdy — ^stock. Nature had endowed him
with a physical and mental heritage of unusual caliber. He was
a man bom for action and thought.
From early childhood he developed a passion for collecting
fishes and birds and mice and rabbits. His brother Auguste was
likewise animated by the collector’s mania. The two boys started
a home museum of “rare and, interesting living things.” At four-
teen it was the modest aim of Louis, with the help of his brother,
to memorize the Latin names “of every known animal and
plant.” Already he had drawn up a manifesto, which he read to
an audience of his own fancy, about his future career as a great
scientist.
“I shall advance in the sciences. I shall receive my prelimi-
nary training at Neuchatel and matriculate at a university in
[167]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Germany. I shall finish my education at Paris. Then 1 shall begin
to write.” He was resolved to become an outstanding man of
letters.
His parents, to be sure, had other ideas for Louis. They
wanted him to join the business firm of his uncle at Neuchatel.
But they committed a serious error. At fifteen they allowed him
to enter upon a two years’ course of study at the College of
Lausanne. “Time enough for business later on,” they said. They
were wrong. From the moment he entered coUege, Louis Agas-
siz never changed his allegiance from learning to earning. He
had decided upon the course of his life, and in this course he
persevered to the end.
II
He had learned that his early ambition to classify all the dif-
ferent species of the plant and the animal kingdoms by merely
giving them Latin labels was not enough. He must familiarize
himself not only with their names but also and especially with
their structures. Then he would be able to follow their classifi-
cations and, if necessary, to give them new classifications of his
own. He felt that a firsthand observation of nature, even with
his unpracticed eye, was worth far more than a stuffy perusal of
all the learned Latin treatises on the subject. But if he was to “see
for himself where the truth lay” he must wear the proper specta-
cles. A knowledge of anatomy was the indispensable tool of the
naturalist. Accordmgly he entered the Medical School at Zurich
and came into contact with some of the leading anatomists of
the day. He spent many of his waking hours in the dissecting of
animals and at night he slept “in a menagerie” of forty birds.
He read practically nothing outside of his “living” texts. “The
life histories of the feathered songsters were his only novels. The
accidental deaths of his pets were his sole tragedies.”
Then, Heidelberg. He was nineteen when he appended his
name to the students’ list at that university. He took fencing les-
[i68]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
with him in a book on natural history which he was preparing
for publication. Louis was overwhelmed with excitement. He
wrote to his sister Cecile a letter in which he enthusiastically dis-
cussed his plans. “WUl it not seem strange when the largest and
finest book in papa’s library is one written by his son, Louis? Will
it not be as good as to see my prescription at the apothecary’s^”
Even his parents were pleased at the prospect. They heard that
the advance sheets of the manuscnpt had created a sensation
among the leading scientists of the day. “Let him play with
science for a w'hile, if only he will stick to his medicine as his
life’s work.”
They allowed him to pursue his naturalistic studies until he
received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Now his name could
appear with an academic title on his forthcoming book. Agassiz
felt certain of his destiny. Should the book prove a success — and
he was confident that it would — ^his parents would ultimately
consent to his adoption of science as his life’s vocation. After all,
what his parents wanted for him was not necessarily a medical
but a successful career.
With this thought in mind Agassiz set himself indefatigably to
his scientific studies. Let other students while away their time
in pleasure. He would follow his own course. He would be not
merely a great naturalist but the greatest naturalist of his time.
The desire to travel in the interests of his studies had come upon
him strongly. When he learned that Alexander von Humboldt
was looking for assistants to accompany him on an expedition to
the Ural Mountains he addressed, with the impulsiveness of
youth, a letter to M. Cuvier, the friend of Humboldt, to inter-
cede in his behalf. “For six months I have frequented a black-
smith’s and carpenter’s shop, learning to handle hammer and
axe. And I also practice arms, and exercise with the sabre and
the bayonet. I am strong and robust, I know how to swim, and I
do not fear forced marches ... In a word, I seem to myself
made to be a traveling naturalist. I need only to regulate the
[170]
AGASSIZ
impetuosity which carries me away. I beg you, then, to be my
advocate with Herr von Humboldt.”
But his petition came too late. Humboldt had already selected
his assistants. And Louis Agassiz, to fulfill the promise he had
given his parents, continued his medical studies. In spite of his
distaste for the profession, he threw himself into these studies
with the energy that was part of his natural temper. And he
accomplished prodigious results. He wrote more than seventy-
five theses on anatomy, surgery, obstetrics and pathology. In
April, 1830, Madame Agassiz received the following note from
her son* “Dismiss all anxiety about me. You see I am as good as
my word.” The young man who was already known throughout
Europe for his book on natural science had, true to his promise,
taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine.
Ill
He went to PARIS, the center of scientific learning, and pre-
sented himself before Cuvier. The great anatomist received him
with open arms. He gave Agassiz a nook in his laboratory and
freely bestowed upon him his instruction and advice. The young
man had come to Cuvier with a definite purpose. He had heard
that the old Frenchman was preparing a book on fossil fishes —
a subject which Agassiz himself had been diligently studying
for some time. He hoped that when he showed his notes to
Cuvier, the latter would commission him to do the entire work.
And Agassiz was not disappointed in his hope. Cuvier turned
over to him his entire collection of fishes and told him to go
ahead with the book. “I work regularly fifteen hours a day,”
wrote the young scientist to his parents. His small monthly allow-
ance was insufficient to his needs. For he was obliged to hire an
artist for the sketching of Ms specimens. Often he went hungry
long before the end of the month. The publisher of a scientific
journal, the Bulletin, offered him the editorship of the depart-
ment of zoology — z. position wMch would substantialy have
[^ 7 ^]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
increased his income. But Agassiz declined the offer. For it would
have taken two hours daily from his research. His father begged
him to come home and to settle down to surgery. His master
Cuvier pleaded with him to relax from his research. ‘‘Hard work
kills/’ he warned the young man. The old naturalist was only
too well aware of the meaning of these words. Shortly after his
warning to Agassiz he was himself stricken with paralysis on
his way to the Chamber of Deputies. Within a few days he was
dead.
It was a tremendous blow to Agassiz, this loss of his great
colleague and friend. Where now would he receive the encour-
agement to continue his research? His money was as “rare as
some of his zoological specimens.” He must dismiss his artist. He
must give up his science. And condemn himself to surgery for
life. “If you follow surgery,” wrote his mother, “you will perhaps
reach the result of your work in the natural sciences a little
later.” Agassiz knew what that meant. “A little later” was
“never.”
But again his good fortune came to the rescue in the guise of
an old man. This time it was Cuvier’s friend, Alexander von
Humboldt, who acted the part of the Good Samaritan. Agassiz
had called upon the illustrious scientist shortly after his arrival
at Paris, and Humboldt had promised to write to the publisher,
Cotta, regarding the manuscript which the young man was pre-
paring. For several weeks there was no word either from Hum-
boldt or from the publisher — ^weeks of hunger, privation, de-
spair. And then at last Agassiz received a response— a letter that
was quite different from anything he had expected. It contained
a check for a thousand francs ! The old scientist had learned of
the young scientist’s plight. “You will surely pardon my friendly
good will toward you, my dear M. Agassiz, if I entreat you to
make use of the accompanying small credit,” he wrote in words
of exquisite tact. “You would do more for me, I am sure,”
This was but an initial step in Humboldt’s sponsorship oi
Agassiz. He used his influence to obtain foi the junior naturalist
[172]
AGASSIZ
a professorship at the Swiss university of Neuchatel. And so
Agassiz returned home — and not as a surgeon. His parents were
now completely won over to the thought that their son could
make a good living even as a scientist.
IV
His success as a natural historian was assured. Installed as
a teacher at the university, he had become an immediate favorite
both with the faculty and with the students. He had gained the
patronage of Humboldt, and through him the admiration of the
king of Prussia. At twenty-five he had transformed Neuchatel by
the magic of his personality and his talent into a great center of
science. His colleagues throughout Europe were impressed by
the intense energy of his researches. “When I am at Neuchatel
and knock at the door of Agassiz,” jestingly remarked the geolo-
gist, Leopold von Buch, “I am always afraid lest he will take me
for a new species.”
Agassiz did not confine his energy to his teaching and his
studies. He was a great lover of children, and the children
shared his great love for nature. He enjoyed firing their imagi-
nation as he strolled with them through the hills and the fields
and talked to them of the works of God. Never did he believe
in a textbook illustration of the beauty of nature. His was a
living science, waiting to be unfolded to the eyes of all. He
taught his little colleagues the elements of geography by climb-
ing with them a moimtain and pointing out the vast panorama
below. He initiated them into the mysteries of botany while they
gathered the flowers of the field. When he gave them a lesson
on the tropical fruits he presented them with oranges and ba-
nanas and invited them to eat these fruits while he explained
their structure. The children looked upon him not as their in-
structor but as their playmate. He was as full of gaiety as the
most frolicsome of his little pupils.
He had introduced a new method of education. He had re-
[ml
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
nounced the stuffy classroom and returned to the gardens of the
old Greek philosophers. And like the old Greek philosophers he
was not only an assiduous teacher but a persevering student as
well. Every moment that he could spare from his pupils he de-
voted to his own researches. For a time indeed it seemed that
he had overexerted himself to his serious injury. The doctors
feared that he was becoming permanently blind. But even that
affliction did not deter him from his work. For hours he sat
in a darkened room and practiced handling his fossil specimens
until he acquired so delicate a sense of touch that he no longer
feared his impending blindness. “Come what may, I shall be
able to go on with my research.”
But the fates, having tested him, gave him back his sight.
And then he plunged more enthusiastically than ever into his
work. His fame spread all over continental Europe and beyond.
The leading naturalists of England invited hhn to examine their
collections of fossil specimens. As a result of his original re-
search m ichthyology (the science of fishes), Sir Charles Lyell in-
formed him that he had won the Wollaston prize — a sizable sum
of money which he did not hesitate to accept since he had spent
“his last penny” on this research. He made a trip to England and
received a cordial welcome. He had become the toast of the
scientific world.
Yet there were some who remained skeptical about his genius.
These skeptics maintained that there was more froth than sub-
stance to his scientific claims. And they decided to put hhn to
the test. A fossil fish had just been discovered in a stratum so
low and indicative of so remote an epoch that it had thus far
yielded no other specimens of organic remains. Agassiz, who
had not as yet heard of the discovery of the fish, was invited to
a gathering of the skeptics and confronted with a question de-
signed to lead him into a trap. If given a certain low geologic
stratum, he was asked, could he venture, to describe the type of
fish that might be found there? For a moment the Swiss natural-
ist was silent. Then he went to the blackboard and after a few
[174]
AGASSIZ
prefatory remarks in which he discussed the laws and the order
of creation he sketched the outlines of the ‘^ypotheticaF’ fish
that might be found in such a given stratum. When the fossil that
had actually been discovered was now brought forward and
compared with the sketch, the audience burst into a thunder of
applause. For the conception of Agassiz was absolutely correct.
‘‘This man,” exclaimed one of the amazed spectators, “has
unearthed the very plans of God as if by a miracle !”
There was nothing of the miraculous, however, in the scientific
method of Agassiz. He had merely learned to read the world
as intelligently as some of the other scientists had learned to read
their books. To his mental as well as to his physical eye the
world presented an organic structure. It told a logical stor}/, and
anyone could learn to understand its related parts. Even as a
young student he had learned that the study of the bodily struc-
ture of animals must be related to the study of the bodily struc-
ture of the earth. “Geology is but an extension of zoology.”
It was not surprising, therefore, that Agassiz turned from fos-
sils to glaciers. He wandered over the valley of the Rhone and
he climbed the boulders of the Juras. He lived in a cabin pitched
upon a glacier that was churned again and again by a tempest of
pulverized ice. Together with his party he struggled over vast
terraces, sinking into the snow, tiptoeing over thin layers of ice,
spanning crevasses that looked bottomless, scaling cliffs and
clinging to life by a slender rope. And thus gradually “all the
physical laws of the glaciers were brought to light.”
At one point Agassiz had determined to descend into the
heart of the glacier — a feat which had been accomplished by no
man before him. His companions protested vigorously against
the dangerous project, but in the end they were compiled to
give in to his obstinacy. They lowered him into a glacial well in
a mass that was moving at the rate of forty feet a day. It was an
even chance that Agassiz might remain buried forever in this
frozen grave. Out of sight he sank seated upon a board. The
deeper he descended the more intense the gloom. He was fasd-
[175]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
nated by the blue bands of ice that ran around the walls of the
pit — a greenish blue at the top and a midnight blue below. When
he reached a depth of eighty feet he found a wall of ice that
divided the passage into two tunnels. He selected one of the tun-
nels and contmued his descent to a depth of one hundred and
twenty feet. Suddenly he found himself plunged into cold water.
He signaled to be hoisted immediately, but his companions
misunderstood the signal. They continued lowering him — ^to
certain death, as he thought. Once more he shouted and this time
he was understood. As he began his ascent he saw huge icicles
that pointed at him from above and threatened at every moment
to transfix him. It was a tremulous and breathless philosopher
that finally came to the surface amidst the cheers of his friends.
But this narrow escape did not deter him from further ad-
ventures in the interests of science. From the Alps he went on to
study the glacial formations of the Scottish highlands. And
finally he published an account of his geologic investigations.
He advanced the theory — ^regarded as revolutionary in the
scientific circles of the day — ^that Europe at one stage had been
completely covered by a soKd sheet of ice. “Siberian winter es-
tablished itself for a time over a world previously filled with a
rich vegetation . . . Death enveloped all nature in a shroud . . .
Springs paused; rivers ceased to flow; the rays of the sun, rising
upon this frozen shore . . . were met only by the breath of the
winter from the north and by the thunders of the crevasses as
they opened across the surface of this mighty ocean of ice,”
His book on the glacial period, Le Systeme Glaciaire, proved
to be as monumental a contribution in the field of geology as
his works on fossil fishes had been in the field of ichthyology.
And his reputation increased proportionately — ^not only among
the savants, but among the common people as well. On one of
his trips with a party of friends he stopped on the road for re-
freshment. An elderly traveler overheard the name “Agassiz”
and came over to the youngish-looking individual who had been
addressed by that name.
{lye]
AGASSIZ
“Pardon me, but are you the son of the celebrated Professor
Agassiz of Neuchatel?’’
Agassiz smiled, and one of his companions remarked, “You
are standing before Professor Agassiz himself/’
The stranger turned away with an apology, and one of the
bystanders heard him whisper to himself: “Such a modest
young body for such a wise old head!”
The admiration for this “wise old head” was nowhere greater
than in America. The trustees of the Lowell Institute invited
him to deliver a course of lectures in Boston. Agassiz was only
too happy to accept the invitation. The idea of a trip to the new
continent in the interest of science had long been one of his
“unattainable” dreams. And here was his dream unexpectedly
come true!
When the popular young professor left for America the little
university town of Neuchatel was plunged in gloom. To be sure,
Agassiz had promised that he would return; but there were
many who feared that he might succumb to the fascinations of
the New World.
Yet they all rejoiced in his good luck, and they wished him a
hearty bon voyage. The Prussian king presented him with a gift
of fifteen thousand francs. And the king of all the scientists sent
him a godspeed message written in a hand that trembled with
age. “Be happy in your new undertaking, and preserve for me
the first place in your heart. When you return I shall be here
no more, but the king and the queen will receive you on this
‘historic hill’ of Sans Souci with the affection which, for so
many reasons, you merit, . . . Your illegible but much attached
friend — ^Alexander von Humboldt.”
V
Agassiz was thirty-nine yeai^ old when he arrived in Boston
(October, 1846). He fell an immediate and willing captive to
the charm of American democracy. “A characteristic feature of
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LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
American life/’ he wrote to a friend in Europe, “is to be found
in the frequent public meetings where addresses are delivered.
Shortly after my arrival in Boston I was present at a meeting of
some three thousand workmen, foremen of workshops, clerks
and the like. No meeting could have been more respectable or
better conducted. All were neatly dressed; even the simplest
laborer had a clean shirt. It was a strange sight to see such an
assemblage, brought together for the purpose of forming a li-
brary, and listening attentively in perfect quiet for two hours to
an address on the advantages of education.”
He was a European who spoke broken English. Yet in the
language of the heart he already felt himself a native of the great
republic. He was perfectly at home among the American people.
“What a people! ... In the Old World a man of exceptional
gifts is content to devote himself to a lifetime of cloistered study
while at his side thousands of his fellow men vegetate in degra-
dation . . . Here in the New World everybody lives well, is
decently clad, learns something, is awake and interested . . ,
Instruction does not — as in some parts of Germany, for instance
— ^furnish a man with an intellectual tool and then deny him the
free use of it. In America all men are allowed to employ their
talents for the common good . . .”
But if he found among the general masses an eagerness for
learning he found also among the intellectuals a high standard
of scholarship. At Harvard College, whose faculty he joined
within a year after his arrival in Boston, he met a group of
teachers whose brilliancy could hardly be matched anywhere
in Europe. Among his intimate colleagues at this University-on-
the-Charles were such men as Longfellow, Felton, Pierce, Wy-
man and Asa Gray. His wider circle of friends included Chan-
ning and Emerson, Ticknor, Motley, Whittier and Lowell. Small
wonder, then, that Agassiz felt little inclination to go horned
And now the final tie that linked him with his former home
was broken. His wife died. He sent for his children, married an
[^ 78 ]
AGASSIZ
American woman and settled down to the business of transform-
ing his adopted country into the scientific center of the world.
But his old country did not give him up without a struggle.
The trustees of the University of Zurich appealed to him as “a
good European’’ to return home. And they held out a remunera-
tive professorship as a bait. The Emperor Napoleon “com-
manded” him as a French citizen to come back to Paris and to
accept a position at the Jmdin des Plantes. To the Zurich re-
quest he replied gently that his obligation to his new country was
of more moment to his conscience than his affiliation with the
old; to the emperor’s demand he replied more sternly that
he was not a French citizen, although his ancestry was of
French origin. “For centuries my family has been Swiss, and in
spite of my ten years’ exile I am still Swiss.” Swiss by birth, but
American by affection. America was to become the home of
his most ardent dream — a museum of natural history.
When he had first arrived in Cambridge he had stored his
precious collections in an old building on the college grounds.
For a short time he had left Harvard to accept a professorship at
the Charleston Medical School and a fear for the safety of his
specimens had haunted him throughout his absence. When he
returned to Harvard he was determined to find an adequate
shelter for them in a permanent museum.
But his plans for a museum had now grown far beyond the
exigencies of his personal interests. This treasure house of the
ages was to become the embodiment of his life’s philosophy.
Here the student would find his laboratory and here too the lay-
man would see spread out before him an exhibition of specimens
so arranged that each individual part of nature would at once
show its intimate relationship to the whole — “an epitome, as it
were, of the Creation.” So ran his dream. Ardently he discussed
it with his friends, with the light of prophecy in his eye and a
prophetic enthusiasm on his lips.
And then one of bis friends died and left him fifty thousand
dollars for the establishment of the museum. Agassiz accepted
[ml
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
this bequest, but only on one condition — ^that the proposed in-
stitute be known not as the Agassiz Museum but merely as the
Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, It now remained
for the Massachusetts legislature to vote a grant of land. Some
of the assemblymen were rather skeptical about the construction
of a “palace for bugs.” But they voted the grant.
The museum was erected as a “gateway to the world of sci-
ence” and as an embodiment of the doctrines of the Swiss pro-
fessor. Here he was master over the vast universe of the mind as
he led his students, step by step, down the illuminated aisles of
the centuries. With the fervor of a poet he taught the tenets of
his scientific creed — “I believe.”
VI
Agassiz renounced the Darwinian conception of evolution
which affirmed that the development of living organisms came
about wholly through natural selection from accidental varia-
tions, He could not, like Darwin, conclude that “the develop-
ment from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the com-
plex” was merely a mechanical and material process. On the
contrary, he believed that this development was the result of
the highest ethical forces forever at work in the universe. The
Darwinians had banished all purpose in the life of the individual.
The only law they recognized was the organic law of physical
force. This, maintained Agassiz, is the hopeless conception of a
godless world. “Evolution,” he said, “takes place not according
to organic forces within but according to an intelligent plan
without.”
This challenge to the Darwinian theory of evolution was fun-
damental. Once the doctrine of divine creation is superseded
by the dogma of natural selection, man has been robbed of his
spirit and reduced to an automaton with mechanical wheels for
a soul. Agassiz intuitively foresaw the destructive consequences
of the Darwinian theory if carried to its inexorable conclusion.
[zSo]
AGASSIZ
The too literal interpretation — or rather misinterpretation — of
this theory was destined to give rise to the Superman of Fried-
rich Nietzsche and to the exaltation of physical force as the
only basis for conduct among men.
Many of Agassiz’ pupils, for want of scientific evidence, re-
jected their teacher’s doctrine of a divine guidance. But Agassiz
was a teacher not only of science but of ethics. His observations
tended to convince him that the Darwinian theory of the trans-
mutation of the species was incorrect. There was a distinct dif-
ference, he felt, between the generation of a species and the
creation of a species. The Darwinian biologists had never
stepped beyond the physical laws of generation to the causes for
creation. “Animals can generate — ^that is, reproduce — their kind;
God alone can create a new kind.” This he firmly believed. “The
idea of the procreation of a new species by a preceding species
is a gratuitous supposition opposed to all sound physiological
notions.” He found it impossible to believe that the “biological
phenomena, which have been and still are going on upon the
surface of our globe, are due to the simple action of physical
forces. I believe they are due, in their entirety, as well as indi-
vidually, to the direct intervention of a creative power, acting
freely and in an autonomic way ... I am certain that there
is not only a material connection but also and especially an in-
tellectual coherence in things. . . . This intentional plan I have
tried to make evident in the organization of the animal king-
dom . , .” This was the dream of his museum, the sole purpose
of his teaching — to give back to man his lost understanding of
God.
Formally Agassiz had the mind of a metaphysician. Actually
he was a hard-headed pragmatist in his method of instruction.
When he was asked to cite what he regarded as his greatest
achievement he replied, “Observation. I have taught men to
observe.” To the uninitiated pupil who first came to his daises
his teaching was difficult. He would place before his pupil the
skeleton of an old loon or the body of^a smelly fish and tell him
[z8i]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
to note down his observations about the specimen. Then he
would leave him to his task without a word of advice or a ques-
tion or a comment. When he returned he would merely ask with
a friendly smile, “Well, what have you seen?’' When the pupil
finished describing his observations, Agassiz would reply, “That
is not enough. Go back to your specimen and look some more.”
Look, look, look — ^was his constant injunction. To look was to
know. From all those who wanted to study nature under his
supervision he exacted the same toil that he had imposed upon
himself. But this toil had at last begun to tell on him. The splen-
did constitution that had enabled him to sleep night after night
on a glacier with only a blanket under him, to stumble up the
peaks of mountains and to descend into the depths of icy cav-
erns — all in the interests of science — ^was now beginning to fail
him. His old master, Cuvier, had uttered prophetic words when
he had said that “work kills ” His friends urged him to take a
vacation. And the devotee of learning took their advice in
characteristic fashion. He left the museum at Cambridge for the
tropics of Brazil. He exchanged his teaching engagement for a
trip of exploration to collect specimens of the fresh-water fishes
in the South American rivers. Never did he work more strenu-
ously than during this “vacation.” He delivered lectures on the
steamer that took him to South America. When he arrived there
he worked from early morning till late at night gathering and
arranging his specimens. And when he returned to the United
States he delivered a course of lectures at Cooper Union, in
New York City, on the results of his trip.
And then he went back to add his new specimens to the col-
lections of his beloved museum. Here was another group of
links binding more closely together the chain of evidence that
the order of nature was not mechanical but purposeful, not the
accident of a blind force but the design of a Supreme Intellect.
For Agassiz regarded his scientific vocation as a priesthood. His
museum was his cathedral, and it was here that the modern
scientist carried on the work of the ancient prophets, “It is the
AGASSIZ
business of the prophets and the scientists alike to declare the
glory of God.”
VII
At last the prophet-scientist had worn himself out completely
with his labors. He suffered a paralytic stroke. The doctors pre-
scribed ‘‘a long rest” in the country. They never expected him to
recover. But again the fighter who all his life had struggled
against odds came out victorious in the unequal battle. Within
a few months he was back at Cambridge. He appeared to be in
perfect health again. He received and accepted an offer to make
a scientific cruise to the Pacific. When he reached Santiago he
learned that the French had elected him foreign associate of the
Institute. ^‘The distinction pleased me the more because it was
so unexpected,” he wrote to a friend. And then he added with a
touch of whimsical sadness, “Unhappily ... it is to a house
in ruins that the diploma is addressed.”
Yet in spite of the premonition of his approaching end, his
active mind was still preoccupied with great projects. He had
long been planning a summer school where teachers of nature
might undertake scientific investigations under his guidance.
But he had no capital for such an undertaking. “In the course
of my life,” he had once remarked, “I have found time for
everything except for making money.” Fortunately a wealthy
admirer in New York, Mr John Anderson, presented him with
a tract of land on Buzzard’s Bay together with a substantial sum
of money for the proposed summer school. On July 4, 1873,
Agassiz set sail for Buzzard’s Bay with all the enthusiasm of
youth. The spirit in the man refused to die.
When he arrived on the island he found that the work on
the buildings was as yet far from completed, although the stu-
dents chosen for the class were expected to arrive in a few days*
Undaunted, Agassiz called the carpenters together. “There is
no personal gain involved in this school. There is no money to
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
be made. Its one purpose is to promote education. We are con-
fronted with an emergency. Tomorrow is Sunday. It is up to
you to decide whether you work or rest.”
“We work!”
When the boat from New Bedford arrived with its cargo of
young men and women the dormitories were ready to receive
them. The bam had been transformed into a reception hall, the
platform was covered with flowers; and the walls were brightly
festooned with silk draperies. On the wharf as the students dis-
embarked stood the old Professor alone. His great face beamed
with pleasure; his white hair glistened in the sun. He gathered
his students around him and paused in silent prayer.
Agassiz returned to Cambridge in the fall. The sands of his
allotted time had nearly mn out. He prepared to write for the
Atlantic Monthly a series of articles defending his theories on
evolution. But he could hardly steady himself for the effort. He
hadn’t the strength to face the coming winter. It was getting
dark and late. “I want to rest,” he said. “I am tired; I am ready
to go.”
At times as he trudged to and from the museum he felt a
strange drowsiness. He was sleep-walking in a world he no longer
recognized. But whenever he opened his eyes and saw again
the life around him, his heart sang a silent psalm to the Creative
God whom he knew and adored.
Then late one day in December he put away his specimens
for the last time. And men grieved for the family and the friends
he left behind him. But no one grieved for Louis Agassiz. “There
was little of him that could die.”
[184]
MENDEL
Great Scientific Contribution by Mendel
Discovered and formulated the Treatise :
Mendelian Laws of Plant Hybridization.
Heredity.
Gregor Johann Mendel
1822-1884
In the spring of 1850 Gregor Johann Mendel presented him-
self for examination as a high school teacher at Altbriinn. He
had already taught for some time as a substitute teacher, but
he was anxious to secure a permanent appointment. “The re-
spectful undersigned,” he wrote in his application, “would deem
himself happy if he should be able to satisfy the highly respected
examiners, and thus to fulfil his desire.”
But Mendel was not able to satisfy “the highly respected ex-
aminers.” They “ploughed” him in natural sdence. “The can-
didate,” wrote the examiners, “has not mastered this subject
sufficiently to qualify him as a teacher in the higher schools.”
Disappointed in his first attempt, Mendel went back to his
textbooks and several months later presented himself for a second
examination. Again the examiners “flunked” him. “This (second)
examination paper would hardly allow us to regard the candidate
as competent to become an instructor even in the lower schools.”
Such was the verdict of the contemporary “experts” on the
scientific ability of one of history’s outstanding scientists.
1^87]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
II
Mendel’s failure in his examinations was due to his original-
ity. He wrote above the heads of his examiners. ^This candidate/’
they complained, “pays no attention to technical terminology.
He uses his own words and expresses his own ideas instead of
relying upon traditional knowledge.”
But Mendel continued to use his own words and to express
his own ideas. For he came of a stubborn and tenacious stock.
For generations the Mendels had stuck to their guns and insisted
upon their rights. On more than one occasion they had defied
the authorities who had tried to impose their arbitrary will upon
them. It was in the Mendel blood to select a course of action,
or to enter upon a train of thought, and to pursue it to the end
in spite of all opposition or failure.
And the course of action that Gregor had selected was to dis-
cover and to demonstrate some of the hidden secrets of nature.
To discover these secrets not out of the textbooks but out of the
heart of nature herself,
Mendel’s love for nature, like his tenacity of purpose, came
to him from several generations of peasants and gardeners. Born
in the Moravian village of Heinzendorf, “the flower of the
Danube,” he was brought up with a passion for growing things.
His father, a peasant by profession, was a horticulturist by in-
clination, Mendel spent many an hour of his childhood tend-
ing the plants in his father’s garden.
Tending the plants, and observing them. He developed an
early love for study. “Just what is it that gives the colors and
the shapes to the different trees and fruits and flowers?” For-
tunately he was able to leam something about these secrets in
his elementary schooling. For the Countess of Waldburg, the
lady of the Heinzendorf manor, had insisted upon the introduc-
tion of the study of nature as part of the curriculum in the
schools of the district. The school inspector, Pater Friedl, referred
!i88]
MENDEL
to this scientific study of nature in the elementary schools as a
“scandal.*^ But, luckily for Mendel’s future development as a
natural scientist, the Countess of Waldburg refused to eliminate
this ‘Scandal” from the Heinzendorf schools.
Following his elementary training at Heinzendorf, Mendel en-
tered the high school at the neighboring town of Troppau. He
worked his way through the six classes of the high school on
“half rations.” For his parents were unable to finance him to
three square meals a day. As a result of his privations, he fell
seriously ill (in 1839) was compelled to interrupt his studies
for several months.
His poverty and his illness threatened to put an end to his
studies altogether, when a piece of good luck came to him in
the shape of ill luck to his father. One winter day, as his father
was chopping down a tree, the trunk fell upon his chest and
partially crushed it. Unable to go on with his work on the farm,
he sold it to the husband of his eldest daughter, Veronika, and
gave a substantial part of the proceeds to his other two children,
Joi|ann and Theresia. The sum given to Theresia was meant
as her dowry, but the young girl generously turned every penny
of it over to Johann. Encouraged by this gift, Johann took up
the study of philosophy at the Olmiitz Institute and after four
years of hard study, occasional illness and perpetual himger he
was ready to enter upon his life’s career.
But here was a perplexing question. Just what was Mendel’s
career to be? “It is incumbent upon me,” he wrote, “to enter a
profession in which I may be spared perpetual anxiety about a
means of Hvelihood,” He went to one of his teachers. Professor
Michael Franz, and asked his advice about this matter. Profes-
sor Franz recommended a monastic life as best suited to meet his
pupil’s requirements. And so, on October 9, 1843, Mendel en-
tered the Augustinian monastery at Altbriinn, assumed the name
of Gregor, and settled down to a life of prayerful devotion and
practical toil.
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
III
Shortly before MendeFs arrival at Altbriinn a botanical gar-
den had been planted on the monastery grounds under the su-
pervision of one of the monks. Father Aurelius Thaler, a botanist
noted for his profound learning, spiritual fervor and capacious
thirst. Father Thaler was in the habit of following up a hard
day in the garden with a merry evening at the tavern. Displeased
with this friar’s excessive love for the winecup the abbot of the
monastery, Father Cyril Napp, decided one night to teach him
a lesson. Decking himself out with all the insignia of his office,
he sat down to wait for the erring member of his fold in the
porter’s lodge. It was not until late in the night when the way-
ward friar knocked for admission. His imagination, like his
tongue, had been highly stimulated by “the cup that gladdens
the heart.” At the sight of his chief all dressed in his “heavenly
regalia” he was for a moment flabbergasted. But he quickly
pulled himself together. With a deep and reverential bow he ad-
dressed himself to the abbot: “Lord, I am not worthy to come
under thy roof.” Then he turned on his heel — and went back
to the tavern.
This merry “godson of Friar Tuck” died just before Mendel
came to the monastery. But he left behind him not only the
memory of a pleasant personality but also the legacy of a well
stocked and scientifically tended garden. This garden was to
Mendel like a gift from above. Here he spent all his spare mo-
ments, “watching and nursing the plants from their infancy to
their old age.” And in this botanical interest Mendel was not
alone. Several of his fellow monks, sons of peasants like himself,
shared his love for scientific gardening. It was a congenial group
in which he now found himself — congenial not only temper-
amentally but intellectually as well. In their evenings they dis-
cussed theology, literature, philosophy, science, and occasionally
even politics. For those were the revolutionary days of the eight-
[ 190 ]
MENDEL
een-forties. Men were opening their minds to new thoughts
and their hearts to new visions Even in the sheltered retreats of
the monasteries these new thoughts and new visions had begun
to take root. Some of MendeFs associates left the monastery for
the larger world, since they preferred to fight rather than to
pray for their fellow men.
As for Mendel, the revolutionary current swept him along
for a while and then left him behind. He was a student rathei
than a fighter. In spite of his peasant tenacity — a tenacity which
we shall see most vigorously displayed in his later years — he was
too sensitive a soul for the blows and the bloodlettings of the
everyday world. He couldn’t bear to see suffering. He tried for
a time to serve as a parish priest, but his superiors found him
unfitted for this work, ‘‘the reason being that he is seized by an
unconquerable anguish when he is obliged to visit the bed of a
sick or a dying person . . . Indeed, this infirmity of his has made
him dangerously ill, and that is why we have found it necessary
to relieve him from service as a parish priest.”
And so Mendel returned to his monastery and his garden.
But he was dissatisfied with the passive life of the monastic or-
der. His temperament was too energetic for mere contempla-
tion. It craved for action as well. MendeFs was not only the
receptive but also the instructive type of mind. He wanted to
teach as well as to study. He applied for a position as substitute
teacher in the local high school and got the job at a substitute’s
salary — ^that is, 6o per cent of the amoimt paid to the regular
teachers.
His work at the school was satisfactory, his demeanor kindly,
and his conduct “reputable — except for the fact that he has on
six occasions been to the theater ’ Ho%vcver, the school authori-
ties were inclined to wink at this “aberration” on his part. After
all, they admitted, “he has never gone to the theater alone, but
always in the society of one of his colleagues.” In spite of his
“fondness for mummery,” they concluded, ^^he is competent
enough to serve as a substitute teacher.”
[191]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
As a substitute, but not as a permanent teacher. For the ex-
aminers, as we have already seen, had decided that he was too
ignorant a scholar to be entrusted professionally with the instruc-
tion of the young. He remained an “amateur” teacher to the
end of his days.
IV
Mendel’s teaching did not interfere with his monastic duties
at Altbrunn. He continued to live at the cloister and to cultivate
the plants in its garden. He was a jovial, short and stocky little
fellow, with a high forehead, a wide and generous mouth, a
healthy appetite and a hearty laugh. His gray-blue eyes looked
out through their glasses with a perpetual twinkle of cordial good
wiU. He was a contented spirit in a beautiful world. Yet there
were times when his contentment gave way to indignation. The
world was beautiful, but man was doing his best to make it
ugly. The dreams of the creators were all too frequently crushed
by the ambitions of the destroyers. The Prussians had invaded
Austria (1866) and their yoke lay heavy upon the inhabitants
of the conquered land. “The Prussians entered Briinn on July
12,” wrote Mendel to his brother-in-law, Leopold Schindler,
“and their billeting was extremely oppressive . . . Horses, cows,
sheep and fowls were carried off in great numbers; so were
fodder and grain — ^with the result that even well-to-do landown-
ers have been reduced almost to beggary . . . The (invading)
soldiers occupy the beds, while the regular inhabitants are com-
pelled to lie on the floor or to sleep in the stable.”
But the evil of the Prussian invasion passed, and Mendel was
able to go on undisturbed with Ms work. He had become inter-
ested in the cross fertilization of the common pea. “Out of the
simplest tMngs shall ye know the truth.” Mendel hoped, through
his study of the heredity of plants, to learn something about the
secret of the heredity of man. “How can we explain the manifold
[ 19^ ]
MENDEL
shapes and colors of living things?” In order to find a possible
answer to this question, he asked for a little plot of land in the
monastery garden and proceeded to transform this plot into a
Hying textbook. He selected twenty-two varieties of the edible
pea — ^varieties differing in shape, size and color — and for seven
years he mated, remated and transmated them and carefully
noted the characteristics of their “children.”
And this, in brief, is the summary of the characteristics he
discovered in the successive generations of the “children of the
garden” :
X. When two different types of plants (or of animals) are
mated, all the offspring of the next generation will be alike.
This he called the law of uniformity.
For example, if you cross a red flower with a white flower, all
the offspring will be gray.
2. When the uniform offspring of the different plants are
mated, the resulting offspring will not be uniform, but will seg-
regate themselves into different forms according to a definite
numerical ratio. This he called the law of segregation.
For example, if you cross the gray flowers that have sprung
from the crossing of the red flower and the white flower, you
will get the following results:
Out of every eight offspring, two will be red, two will be
white, and four will be gray. The crossing of the red flowers of
this generation will always produce red flowers. The crossing
of the white flowers of this generation will always produce white
flowers. But the crossing of the gray flowers of this generation
Hke the crossing of the previous generation of gray flowers, will
out of every eight offspring produce two red flowers^ two white
flowers^ and four gray flowers. And all these flowers in turn will
act in accordance with the MendeHan law of segregation. The
reds will produce only reds, the whites will produce only whites,
and the grays will produce reds and whites and grays in the pro-
portion of two reds to two whites to four grays. This law of
proportional segregation will hold true of every successive gen-
[^ 95 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
eration of the ‘'inter-marriage” of plants or of animals or of
human beings.
The above is a somewhat loose and simplified explanation of
the Mendelian laws of heredity. The crossing of two different
breeds does not always produce an intermediate breed. If, for
example, you mate a black dog with a tawny dog, you will most
likely get a htter not of brown dogs but of black dogs. But aU
the dogs in this first litter will be uniformly black, and all the
dogs in the interbreeding of this litter will be segregated into
black, tawny and brown in the ratio of two to two to four. Thus
the Mendelian laws of absolute uniformity as a result of the breed-
ing of two different types, and of proportional segregation as a
result of the interbreeding of hybrid (or mixed breed) types,
will still hold true.
V
Such was the mathematical design of nature that Mendel dis-
covered in the laws of the physical inheritance of living and
growing things. It took him seven years of patient research to
make this discovery. And it took the world thirty years to idealize
that a great new discovery had been made. When he first read
his paper on Plant Hybridization before the Altbriinn Society
for the Study of Natural Science, his audience listened politely,
applauded faintly and promptly forgot the whole thing. He
published the paper, and it lay neglected on the dusty shelves
of a few libraries. Disheartened at this universal apathy toward
his scientific efforts, he went back to his monastic duties and his
teaching. In the cloister and the classroom at least he received
a measure of recognition for his labors. Indeed he was rather
popular with his fellow friars and his pupils.
Especially with his pupils. They Hked their rotund and jolly
little teacher — ^his figure had fiUed out substantially as a result
of the plentiful rich food at the monastery — and they came
eagerly to his classes, not so much to imbibe his knowledge as
[194]
MENDEL
to chuckle over Ms anecdotes. He told them about the funny
antics of his “children” — ^the plants and the insects and the ani-
mals wMch he kept in his garden and his cloister for his exper-
iments. He related to them how one night, when he was asleep,
his pet hedgehog had crept into one of his top boots. “Imagine
my surprise in the morning when I tried to put on my boot
and my big toe stepped upon a thousand needles!” He frequently
invited his pupils into the monastery where he acquainted them
at first hand with the habits of his bees and his birds and his
mice. Whenever the circus came to town, he took his entire class
along with him to have a little “chat” with the animals. One of
these “chats” came near to proving rather serious to Mendel.
In his effort to attract the attention of the monkeys in one of
the cages, he got too close to the bars. Whereupon the largest
of the monkeys snatched off his spectacles. It was only with dif-
ficulty, and at the expense of a number of painful scratches,
that Mendel succeeded in persuading the animal to give up his
glasses. In spite of his pain, he had a good laugh together with
his pupils over his comical “wrestling” match with the monkey.
His pupils admired this good-natured sort of humor that could
laugh at its own discomfiture. But most of all they admired his
gentleness. His impartial smile served alike to compliment the
brilliant and to encourage the stupid among Ms pupils. Remem-
bering his own grief at his failure to pass his examinations, he
rarely allowed any of Ms pupils to suffer a setback. Toward the
end of the term he asked whether any of them wanted better
marks. Then he would allow them to question one another.
Naturally each of them would be as lenient as possible toward
his neighbor in the hope of an equal lenience in return. To those
of his pupils who still fell behind after this friendly cross ques-
tioning he extended an invitation to come to the monastery gar-
den for special tuition without pay.
Finally, however, he was obliged to give up his teaching. For
he received a new honor wMch required new duties. He was
elected abbot of the monastery at Altbriinn.
{ 195 }
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
VI
One of mendel’s first acts as the new prelate of Altbriinn
was to return the kindness of his sister, Theresia, who had given
up her dowry in order that he might go on with his education.
He now repaid her with the education of her three sons, as-
suming the entire expense of their high school and college train-
ing. And even to strangers he was lavish with his purse. His gifts
for the most part were anonymous. “There is no sense in humiliat-
ing the beneficiary by advertising yourself as his benefactor.’'
Though he enjoyed a substantial salary as head of the cloister,
he proved to his own satisfaction the adage that “it is more
blessed to give than to receive.”
Prelate Mendel loved to give and he loved to live. He always
entertained his friends — out of his own pocket — at the monas-
tery. On festival occasions, such as the Corpus Christi day and
the day of St Thomas, he kept open house and larder to the
entire village. As for his Christmas celebrations, they were like
“a succession of enchantments out of the Arabian Nights.”
And yet he lived to taste the bitter fruits of unpopularity.
For he entered upon a course of action which, though it seemed
to him justified, was nevertheless stubborn and in the opinion
of many of his acquaintances iU advised. The Reichsrat had
passed a bill (1874) the taxation of church property “in
order to supply the financial needs of religious worship, and
especially in order to increase the salaries of parish priests.”
Mendel regarded this bill as unconstitutional and refused to pay
the tax on the monastery at Altbriinn. Instead he offered to send
a “voluntary contribution” to the state treasury, “since I do not
close my eyes to the fact that an increase in the Moravian reli-
gious fund is necessary.”
The state refused to accept the contribution and Mendel re-
fused to pay the tax. For several years the obstinate struggle
went on. In turn the government tried to persuade him with
MENDEL
promises of promotion and to intimidate him with threats of
punishment. But Mendel refused to be either cajoled or fright-
ened. His intimate friends advised him to give in. MendeFs
only reply was to accuse these friends of having turned against
him. He regarded himself as a “lonely crusader struggling for
the right.^’ The state, on the other hand, looked upon him as
a “foolish old man who refuses to obey the law.^’
As the years advanced and the struggle remained undecided,
Mendel began to suffer from a pathological irritability. He com-
plained before his nephews that he was persecuted. “There is
a plan being concocted to send me to a lunatic asylum.”
Such was the clouded and embittered atmosphere in which
he spent the remaining years of his life. His one desire was to
live to see the day when the “obnoxious law” against his mon-
astery would be revoked. This desire was not destined to be
fulfilled. In the spring of 1883 he suffered a heart attack. He
recovered partially from this attack, and spent the last few
months of his life “among his flowers and his birds and his bees.”
He had attached a wire cage to the monastery beehives and he
had placed a number of bees in that cage. When one of his vis-
itors asked him the reason for this “segregation” of the bees he
explained jestingly: “I have put a queen there, together with
a number of drones. The queen is choosing a proper husband,
for it is just as unfortunate among bees as it is among human
beings when a good woman is mated to a bad man.” He was
still experimenting with the laws of life though he knew that
his own life was at an end.
The end came on January 6, 1884. A great concourse of
people mourned the passing of a lovable though rather obstinate
old priest. But not a single one of the mourners realized that
a supreme scientist had just passed away.
[ w]
PASTEUR
Great Scientific Contributions by Pasteur
Researches in fermentation.
Discovered remedies for silk-
worm diseases;^ chicken
cholera, anthrax, etc.
Introduced the process known
as pasteurization.
Established the germ theory in
animal and human dis-
eases.
Instituted the practice of disin-
fection in surgical opera-
tions and of inoculation
against hydrophobia.
Louis Pasteur
1822-1895
He is the meekest, smallest and least promising pupil in my
class/’ wrote the schoolteacher of Louis Pasteur. But the
youngster had an insatiable curiosity. “Let me remind you/’ ob-
served his teacher one day, “that it’s the pupil’s business not to
ask questions but to answer them.”
And he possessed another rare quality — z patient tenacity for
work. “The three most important words in the dictionary,” he
wrote while still in his early teens, “are — will, work, wait. These
are the three cornerstones upon which I shall build the pyra-
mid of my success.”
II
The son of a tanner, he got the smell of the leather in his blood.
Once, when he was ill and homesick while studying at the JScole
Normale in Paris, he wrote to his father: “If I could only catch
a whiff of the tannery once more, I’m sure I’d get well.”
From the smell of the tannery to the “odors of the laboratory”
was but a step. From earliest childhood he had made up his
mind to be a chemist. “Too bad he’s wasting his time on this
useless science/’ said the villagers of Arbois to his father. But
[201]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
■pasteur phe had faith in his son. “I know I can depend upon
Louis to do the right thing.”
Yet even his father had begun to have his doubts when
Pasteur received his Bachelor of Science degree with nothing bet-
ter than a “mediocre” in chemistry. “Just be patient and trust
me,” wrote the unsuccessful student to his father. “I shall do
better as I go on.”
And he went on to study for his doctorate in chemistry. In order
to earn his expenses he accepted a number of private pupils
teaching them from five to seven in the morning. And in order
to stretch his earnings as far as possible he rationed his food,
his recreation and his firewood down to the bare level of sub-
sistence. He frequently suffered from hunger pangs. “But for-
tunately I was also subject to frequent headaches, so that the one
pain tended to cancel out the other.”
During this period he received further fuel to his ambition in
the lectures of the great chemist, J. B. Dumas. “You cannot
imagine the popularity of these lectures,” he wrote to his father.
“M. Dumas is not only a scientist but a poet as well. He arouses
the curiosity and kindles the imagination.”
Spurred on by this man of superior understanding, Pasteur
wrote two theses, instead of one, for his doctor’s degree. When
the news of this degree arrived at Arbois there was great
rejoicing in the Pasteur home. “We cannot judge your essays,”
wrote his father, “but we certainly can judge your character.
You have given us nothing but satisfaction.”
Indeed a satisfactory if not a brilliant career was now open
to Pasteur. He received an appointment as laboratory assistant
to Professor Laurent at the £cole Normale. He entered upon a
series of experiments in crystallography — ^the study of the forms
and the structures of chemical crystals — and he began to at-
tract notice as a young man who was likely, “through sheer
doggedness, to attain a fair measure of distinction.”
And then suddenly he threw aU his chances to the winds. The
Revolution of 1848 had broken out. Pasteur’s imagination took
[202 ]
FASTEUR
flame “at the altar of freedom.” He sacrificed his savings of a
hundred and fifty francs to the cause and offered, “should the
occasion arise,” to sacrifice his life. He left his position at the col-
lege and enlisted in the National Guard at the city of Orleans.
Fortunately the occasion for his supreme sacrifice did not
arise. When the Revolution was over he returned to his labora-
tory and to his interrupted study of “crystalline formations in
chemical substances.” As a result of his painstaking researches
in this field, he laid the foundation for the discovery of several
new chemical compounds. “It is merely a matter of constructing
new kinds of buildings,” explained Pasteur, “through the chance
discovery of bricks and stones cut into new shapes and sizes.”
His modest “chance discovery” — actually the result of many
months of assiduous research — came to the attention of M.
PouiUet, professor of physics at the Sorbonne. This eminent
scientist provided Pasteur with a letter of recommendation that
served as an open sesame to the doors of the University of Stras-
bourg. “M. Pasteur,” wrote Professor Pouillet, “is a most distin-
guished young chemist. He has just completed a remarkable
series of experiments. Given the opportunity at a first class
university, he should go very far . .
In January, 1849, Pasteur entered upon his duties as professor
of chemistry at Strasbourg. And at once he set to work upon a
new research — ^the way to a woman’s heart. The young woman
in question was Mile Marie Laurent, the daughter of the rec-
tor of Strasbourg University. Shortly after his arrival at the
university he wrote to the rector announcing his intention to pro-
pose to his daughter. “My father is a tanner at Arbois. My
(three) sisters help him in his business and in the house, taking
the place of my mother whom we have had the misfortune to
lose last May. My family is comfortably off but not rich . . .
As for myself, I have long ago resolved to surrender to my sisters
the whole share of the inheritance which would eventually be
mine. I have therefore no fortune. All that I possess is good
health, good courage and my position in the University ... I
r 203]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
plan to devote my life to chemical research with — I hope — ^some
degree of success • , . With these humble assets I beg to submit
my suit for your daughter’s hand.”
The rector, like a sensible father, turned the letter over to his
daughter and told her to make her own decision. The decision
was unfavorable. But Pasteur was too well trained a scientist to
give up a problem after a negative first result. “I am afraid,” he
wrote to the young lady’s mother, ‘‘that Mile Marie attaches
too much importance to first impressions, which can only be un-
favorable to me. There is nothing in me to attract a young girl.
But memory tells me that when people have known me well,
they have liked me.” And like a good scientist who neglects no
avenue of approach to the possible solution of his problem, he
wrote a letter to Mile Marie herself. “All that I ask of you,
Mademoiselle, is not to judge me too quickly. You might be mis-
taken, you know. Time will show you that under this cold and
shy exterior there is a heart full of affection for you.”
His precise and persistent method won out. The marriage was
announced for May 29, 1849. But at the last moment there was
a hitch. The guests had arrived, the bride and her parents were
waiting, the priest was ready for the ceremony — ^but there was
no groom. “Where in the world is that young chemist?”
Where, but in his laboratory? His best friend, Chappuis, hur-
ried down to the laboratory and found him there leaning over
his test tubes.
“Did you forget about your wedding?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Finishing my work, you idiot. Surely you wouldn’t expect me
to quit in the middle of an experiment !”
Ill
His wife never regretted her decision to marry him. At times, to
be sure, she scolded him for bis “excessive absorption” in his
{204]
PASTEUR
work. “But I comfort her by saying that I shall lead her to fame ”
And he did lead her to fame. And to sorrow. For it was not easy
to be the wife of a scientist whose very brilliance aroused the
jealousy and the hatred of his less gifted fellow scientists.
This jealousy and this hatred began to crop out at the very
beginning of his career. His investigations had led him from
chemistry to biology. “I am pursuing as best I can/’ he wrote
to Ghappuis, “the impenetrable mystery of Life and Death. I
am hoping to mark a decisive step very soon by ‘solving . . . the
celebrated question of spontaneous generation.” His closest
friends urged him to refrain from this study. “I would advise no
one/’ wrote Dumas, “to dwell too long on so controversial a sub-
ject.”
For the origin of life was too “touchy” a question to be ex-
amined scientifically. Tradition was firmly and aggressively on
the side of those who believed that life can originate spon-
taneously out of dead matter. Aristotle, for example, had de-
clared that “life can be engendered by the drying of a moist body
or by the moistening of a dry body.” Virgil had stated that
“bees can spring into fife out of the carcass of a dead bull,” Van
Helmont had advanced the even more fantastic “method for the
creation of mice” in the full-grown state: “Press a quantity of
soiled linen into a vessel containing some grains of wheat or a
piece of cheese for about three weeks, and at the end of this
period the adult mice, both male and female, will spring up
spontaneously in the ^^essel.”
It was against this sort of traditional superstition that Pas-
teur dared to undertake his series of experiments. And im-
mediately the older scientists began to aim their poisoned shafts
against him. Especially virulent were Professor Pouchet, direc-
tor of the Natural History Museum of Rouen, and Nicolas
Joly, professor of physiology at the University of Toulouse.
These two men, in order to “prove” their point against Pasteur,
undertook a series of “experiments” which were neither ade-
quately prepared nor accurately executed. “M. Pouchet and M.
[305]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
' Joly/’ wrote Pasteur to his father, “may say what they like, but
truth is on my side. They do not know how to experiment. It is
not an easy art; it demands, besides certain natural qualities, a
long practice which naturalists have not generally acquired
nowadays.” But his opponents went vigorously ahead with their
denunciation of Pasteur. Proclaiming to the world that they
had “definitely established the fact of spontaneous generation,”
they called Pasteur a “circus performer, a charlatan and a
clown.” Pasteur bore all this contumely with a patient smile. “A
man of science,” he explained to his wife, “should think of what
will be said of him in the coming centuries, not of the insults
or the compliments of the present day.”
Finally the controversy as to the probable origin of life was
referred to a commission of eminent scientists, including Profes-
sor Dumas, After a thorough examination of the findings sub-
mitted by Pouchet and Joly on the one hand and by Pasteur on
the other, they handed down a decision m favor of Pasteur. “Life
alone can produce hfe.”
IV
Having established the evidence as to the origin of life, Pas-
teur next became interested in the problem of the preservation of
Hfe. A mysterious disease had attacked the silkworms in the
province of Alais and the entire silk business of France was
threatened with ruin. Pasteur, whose achievements had now
won him a seat in the Academy, was invited to investigate and if
possible to check the disease. Again a tempest of abuse descended
upon his head. This tempest increased in volume as month
after month went by and Pasteur was able to make no head-
way against the epidemic. “What does a chemist know about
matters of healing?” complained the mulberry cultivators whose
silkworms were dying by the thousands every day. And the
public took up the cry. “A chemist? Not even that. He’s nothing
but a parasite Hving on the fat of the land while the business of
[206]
PASTEUR
France is heading for a crash.” To all of which outcries and
complaints Pasteur had but a single reply — ‘Tatience.”
And he needed patience. While he was investigating the silk-
worm epidemic one of his children died. Then another, and a
third. “To go on persistently with your work under such con-
ditions,” remarked a friend, “must require a great deal of
courage.” “I don’t know about my courage,” replied Pasteur.
“But I do know about my duty.”
He stuck to his duty eighteen hours a day, from five in the
morning to eleven at night. He suffered a paralytic stroke, and
for a time the doctors despaired of his hfe. Yet his mind was
active while his body lay paralyzed. It was in the “restful hours
of his illness” that he discovered the solution to the problem upon
which he had spent so much of his labor and strength. “The dis-
ease of the silkworms is inherited through diseased eggs from one
generation to another. Eliminate the diseased eggs and you will
produce a healthy crop of silkworms.”
A simple solution after a heartbreak of toil. Yet the abuse
against Pasteur did not stop even then. The silkworm seed mer-
chants, who saw in Pasteur’s formula an end to their indiscrimi-
nate selling of “bad seed for good money,” began to spread ma-
licious stories about him. As a result of these stories, the word
passed around that Pasteur had utterly failed in his effort to stop
the disease and that he had been driven out of Alais under a
shower of stones.
When Pasteur heard this report — ^he was recovering from his
paralysis at the time — he merely shrugged his shoulders once
more. “Patience.”
And his patience had its reward. The silkworm cultivators
tried his remedy — and in every instance produced healthy crops.
The grateful countryfolk of AJais set up a statue in his honor.
But he found greater pride in “the honor of having alleviated,
at my personal sacrifice, a misfortune that threatened my coun-
try.”
[207]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
V
His personal sacrifices had traced their story on his pale furrowed
face and in his stem sad eyes. For his efforts in behalf of his
fellows he received inadequate pay. Nor did he require more
than he received. Once, when he visited Napoleon III and the
Empress Eugenie, the imperial couple expressed their surprise
at his failure to derive financial benefit from his scientific work,
“In France,” replied Pasteur, “a scientist would be lowering
himself if he worked for personal profit.” At no personal profit
he undertook a series of experiments on the diseases of wine.
Within a single year the French wine industry had lost several
million dollars as a result of the mysterious “souring” of the
produce. After a careful investigation of the matter, Pasteur dis-
covered that this souring was due to the action of bacteria in the
fermenting liquid. His problem now was to destroy the bacteria
without at the same time injuring the quality of the wine. He
tried several antiseptic substances, but with no result. And then
he tried heating the wine to various temperatures — and came
upon a tremendous discovery. If he raised the wine to a tem-
perature of 55 degrees centigrade (about 131 degrees fahren-
heit), he found that he could thus preserve the quality of the
wine and at the same time destroy the poison of the bacteria.
Such was the origin of the now universally accepted process
known as pasteurization — process applied not only to wine but
also to many other varieties of perishable foods and drinks — es-
pecially to cream and milk. If the world today enjoys a greater
degree of health than was known in earlier generations, no
small part of the credit is due to the patience of Pasteur in his
study of the fermentation of wine.
VI
“To HELP mankind” was the primary object of his life. He en-
tertained the hope for a day of better health, higher aspirations,
[208]
PASTEUR
and a greater understanding between man and man. ^‘To moral
cooperation through international science."’ But in 1870 Kaiser
Wilhelm I and his chancellor of the crimson fist proclaimed a
different kind of doctrine — “the glorification of force and the ex-
tinction of moral justice.” And their army proceeded to put this
doctrine into practice.
When the German army invaded France, Pasteur offered his
services to his country, but his partial paralysis disqualified him
for fighting. He showed his contempt for the German military
madness, however, by returning an honorary diploma of Doctor
of Medicine which he had received from the University of Bonn.
“I am led by my conscience,” he wrote to the Principal of the
Faculty of Medicine, “to request that you efface my name from
the archives of your university, and to take back that diploma,
as a sign of the indignation inspired in a French scientist by the
barbarity and hypocrisy of him (Kaiser Wilhelm) who, for the
satisfaction of his criminal pride, persists in the massacre of two
great nations.” And the answer from Bonn was couched in the
characteristic arrogance of the aggressor: “M. Pasteur — ^The
undersigned, now Principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Bonn,
is requested to reply to the affront which you have dared to
offer to the German nation in the sacred person of its august
Emperor, King Wilhelm of Prussia, by conveying to you the ex-
pression of its utter contempt . . . P.S. Wishing to keep its files
free from taint, the Faculty returns your letter herewith.”
With a heavy heart Pasteur noted the depredations of the in-
vading army whose rule for conquest, as formulated by Bis-
marck, was “to leave the inhabitants of occupied territory nothing
but their eyes to weep from.”
Added to Pasteur’s general distress was his personal anxiety
about his son who had enKsted in the French army and who
was now fighting under General Bourbaki. The news reached
Pasteur that Bourbaki had sustamed a disastrous defeat and that
his army was fleeiug before the onslaught of the Germans. The
stricken old chemist and his wife started off in search of their
[205]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
son — hoping against hope that he might still be numbered among
the living. In a dilapidated old carriage — the only vehicle avail-
able at the moment — ^they set out from Arbois and followed the
snow-covered route of the retreating army. Everywhere the high-
ways were littered with the bodies of the dead. Everywhere the
sick and the wounded stragglers, their uniforms hanging in tatters
from their frozen bodies, were begging for food and for the com-
fort of a blanket to wrap around their shoulders. And everywhere
a desolate old man kept repeating the self-same question : “Have
you seen Sergeant Pasteur?” The invariable answer was a nega-
tive shake of the head. Nobody knew whether Sergeant Pasteur
was dead or alive. “All I can tell you,” said one of the stragglers,
“is that out of twelve hundred men in his battalion of Chassews,
only three hundred are left.”
Slim chance of ever meeting their son again. . • •
At last, however, there was a ray of hope. Their all but dis-
mantled carriage had just limped into Pontarlier. A group of
shivering soldiers were huddled over a fire. “Sergeant Pasteur?
Yes, we saw him yesterday . . . He is still alive, but very low . . .
Perhaps you can meet him on the road to Chaff ois . .
Out of Pontarlier toward Chaff ois. A cart was rumbling over
the frozen road. Within it, on a bundle of straw, lay a soldier
covered with a ragged coat. It was too dark to make out his
features. The questing old chemist turned to the driver of the
cart. “Have you seen Sergeant Pasteur?”
The soldier raised his head. “Father! Mother!” . . .
He recovered from his wounds, rejoined his regiment, and
survived the war. A grain of comfort in the sorrowful life of
Pasteur.
VII
After the war Pasteur continued with his self-imposed task of
arresting disease. In his researches on the silkworm epidemics
and on the fermentations of wine he had discovered a single
vital principle — that the malady in each of these cases was due
PASTEUR
to the presence of poisonous micro-organisms, or germs. Why
not apply this principle in the treatment of human disease?
Pasteur was especially interested in trying out his ideas in
surgery. The death rate that followed surgical operations was
appalling. In the great majority of cases the decision to operate
upon a patient was tantamount to a death sentence. ‘‘The opened
wound,” as Pasteur pointed out to a gathering* at the Academy
of Medicine, “is exposed to millions of germs — ^in the air, on the
hands of the surgeon who performs the operation, in the sponges
that bathe the wound, in the instruments that pry into it, and
on the bandages that cover it.”
When the members of the French Academy heard these words,
they smiled into their beards and shook their heads and went on
killing their patients with their “good old-fashioned” methods.
In Scotland, however, there was one man who paid heed to
Pasteur’s warning. This man was Joseph Lister, professor of
surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Following Pasteur’s
advice he submitted every object involved in the operation — ^his
hands, his instruments, the sponges, the bandages and even the
area surrounding the incision — ^to a thorough disinfection of
carbolic acid. And with splendid results. Within two years he
reduced the fatalities of his surgical cases from ninety per cent to
fifteen per cent.
Yet the surgeons of the French Academy remained stubbornly
opposed to Pasteur’s theory of disinfection, even in the face of
Lister’s successful application of this theory. It was a new idea
and therefore — ^they argued — ^it was a bad idea.
As for Pasteur, he was ready to accept and to fight for any
idea — especially in the field of medicine — as soon as it was
definitely supported by adequate facts. “The facts with regard
to surgery have demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that many a patient has died through the poisonous action of
the Infinitesimally Small.” And so he entered upon a crusade
to stamp out a double source of infection — ^the physical microbe
that attacked the human body, and the “mental microbe” that
l2Il]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
retarded the human mind. “I will force them to see in spite
of themselves,” he said again and again of his opponents. “They
must see !” One day a member of the Academy of Medicine was
lecturing to his colleagues on puerperal (childbirth) fever — a
disease which in 1864 had killed over three hundred women in
the Paris Maternity Hospital alone. The lecturer was explaining
his ideas as to the cause of this fever, when a voice interrupted
him: “Nonsense and fiddlesticks! It isn’t any of the things you
mention, but the doctors and the nurses that are responsible
for puerperal fever. They murder the mothers by carrying the
microbe from an infected patient to a healthy one!”
“And can you tell me,” asked the lecturer sarcastically, “what
this microbe of yours looks like?”
Whereupon Pasteur walked to the blackboard, took a piece of
chalk and rapidly sketched the outline of a chain-like organism.
“There, that is what it looks like.”
The meeting was thrown into an uproar. The older doctors
insisted that Pasteur was an interloper, an amateur, a man who
knew nothing whatsoever about medicine and who had better
stick to his chemicals and his crucibles. The younger men, how-
ever, paid heed to his words. Little by little they introduced his
methods of sterilization until, as one of Pasteur’s biographers
(L. Descours) remarks, “the maternity hospitals ceased to be
the ante-chambers of death.”
VIII
Pasteur continued to befuddle the reactionaries, to bring down
their denunciations upon his head, and to fight his scientific
battles for the preservation of life. Through his methodical
process of repeated experimentation he discovered the principle
of immunizing a person against the violent form of a disease by
inoculating him with a mild form of that disease. This simple
method of transforming a virus into a vaccine has saved an
incalculable number of lives.
[212]
PASTEUR
He first employed this discovery in the stamping out of an
epidemic of anthrax — a deadly fever of the spleen — ^that threat-
ened to exterminate the sheep and cattle industry of France.
In the course of his researches in this field he was obliged^ as
usual, to fight not only against the virulence of the plague but
against the equally stubborn virulence of human prejudice. At
one of the meetings of the Academy of Medicine, Pasteur ac-
cused his adversaries of malignity as well as of stupidity. Where-
upon one of the physicians. Dr Jules Guerin, started up from
his chair and made a rush at Pasteur. The pugnacious doctor
was held back by a fellow member of the Academy, but the
meeting ended in a general uproar.
The next day Guerin challenged Pasteur to a duel. But
Pasteur returned the challenge. “My business,” he said, “is to
heal, not to kill.”
And then came the most dramatic episode in his lifelong
business of healing — ^his famous battle against hydrophobia. For
some years he had been experimenting with the inoculation of
the saliva of mad dogs into healthy rabbits. At times he varied
his experiments by subjecting the rabbits directly to the bites
of the mad dogs. On one occasion a large bulldog, though
furious with pain and foaming at the mouth, persistently refused
to bite the rabbit that had been thrust into his cage. It would
be necessary, concluded Pasteur, to suck the saEva out of the
dog’s jaws and then to inject it into the rabbit.
The dog was tied securely upon a table and Pasteur, with a
glass tube in his mouth, bent down to the mouth of the enraged
animal. “This,” wrote a bystander, “was the supreme moment
of Pasteur’s life.” Calmly, as if unaware of the fact that he was
courting death, he sucked the venomous saliva drop by drop
into the tube. And then, when he had gathered a suflScient
quantity of the poison into the tube, he turned to his assistants.
“Well, gentlemen, we can now proceed with the experiment.”
Within a few months after this experiment an Alsatian boy,
Joseph Meister, was bitten by a mad dog. His mother, on the
[ 2 ^ 3 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
advice of the local physician, took him to Pasteur. Here was an
opportunity to test out on a human being the anti-rabic inocu-
lation that had proved so successful in the case of animals.
Yet Pasteur hesitated. How certam could he feel that his
remedy would succeed^ Was it not within the realm of possi-
bility that the inoculation, instead of preserving the victim’s
life, would only introduce a more aggravated type of the disease?
Was he therefore justified m taking the risk, especially when
it concerned another person’s life?
He took the risk. And he won. The night following the final
inoculation was one of sleepless terror for Pasteur but of peace-
ful sleep for the stricken child. Thirty-one days passed, and there
were no recurring symptoms of the disease. The boy was com-
pletely cured. Pasteur had conquered hydrophobia.
IX
A NUMBER of belated distinctions — election to the Academy,
the Cross of the Legion of Honor, medals, ribbons, diplomas,
banquets, ovations, parades — and Pasteur remained through it
aU a modest seeker for truth. His present popularity was as
amazing to him as his earlier disgrace. “I can’t understand why
people make such a fuss over me.” Elected by the Government
to represent his country at the International Medical Congress
in London, he entered St James’s Hall amidst a thunder of
cheers. Unaware that he was the cause of the acclamation, he
turned to his escort, ‘Tt must be the Prince of Wales arriving.
I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier.”
He returned to Paris and to his work at the Pasteur Institute —
a hospital built in his honor for the combating of infectious
disease. And here he spent the rest of his days in his “humble
effort,” as he expressed it, “to extend the frontiers of life.”
His seventieth birthday was the occasion of a national holiday.
Pasteur attended a celebration in his honor at the Sorbonne.
He was too feeble, however, to express in person his thanks to
[ 51 ^]
PASTEUR
the delegates who had come from various countries to join in
the celebration. He asked his son to read his speech for him.
‘‘Gentlemen . , . you bring me the greatest happiness that can be
experienced by a man whose invincible belief is that science and
peace will triumph over ignorance and war . . . Never permit the
sadness of certain hours which pass over nations to discourage
you . . . Have faith that in the long run the nations will leam to
unite not for destruction but for cooperation, and that the
future will belong not to the conquerors but the saviors of man-
kind . .
This was Pasteur’s farewell message to the world.
[215]
KELVIN
Great Scientific Contributions by Kelvin
Experiments in the measure-
ment of the atom, heat,
refrigeration, electricity,
etc.
Inventions :
Siphon recorder.
Galvanometer.
New type of compass, etc.
Books and Treatises :
On Natural Philosophy.
On Electricity and Magnetism.
Mathematical Papers.
Popular Lectures and Ad-
dresses (3 volumes).
The Wave Theory of Light.
The Molecular Tactics of a
Crystal.
The Dynamic Theory of Heat.
(William Thomson)
1824-1907
■' ‘■ 7 X'"- ' '\ '. ^—-—.-5'
He
X 1e CAME of a race of Scotch Covenanters who had been
persecuted out of their country for their religion. At the age of
twelve he lost his mother. His father, a professor of natural phi-
losophy at Glasgow University, provided for his six children a
system of education that would toughen their minds for the pro-
tection of their hearts. He planned this system of education to
be wide as well as deep. Almost from infancy the children grew
up with a friendship for extended vistas of thought. They ab-
sorbed the principles of geology and of astronomy. Plants were
their playmates. They learned about the struggles of empires to
gain new victories and about the struggles of ideas to win a
foothold among men. Around the table they peered with fascina-
tion at the toy globe of the earth and took dream trips to its
furthermost limits. And then they transferred their gaze to an-
other and vaster globe that their father had bought for them —
the sphere of the heavens with its epic story of which the earth
was merely a syllable.
WiUiam was the youngest of the children, but he had the
keenest imagination of them all. He foimd himself spellboimd
by this tale of the two globes. At an early age he had accepted.
1219 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
the challenge to unravel the mystery of its plot. When he was
sixteen years old he transcribed in his diary an eleventh com-
mandment — an intellectual call to his reason just as the Ten
Commandments were a religious call to his conscience:
Mount where Science guides:
Goj measure earthy weigh air^ and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run^
Correct old Time and regulate the sun.
II
His rise to intellectual maturity was rapid. At seventeen he
entered the University of Cambridge. At eighteen he wrote an
outstanding paper on the dynamics of heat and contributed sev-
eral articles to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Upon
graduation he met some of the leading physicists of France and
of England and gave them valuable suggestions on their re-
searches. At twenty-two he was appointed professor at the Uni-
versity of Glasgow.
His aggressive vitality was rather too much for the mild-man-
nered Scots who served as his colleagues on the faculty. Hardly
had he been elected to an honor coveted by many a gray-haired
rival when he determined to revolutionize the department of
physics at Glasgow. He came to his elders with a request for a
room where he might carry on his experiments outside of his
classes. It was an unheard-of piece of audacity. For generations
the economical Scottish professors had been content to mess up
their lecture halls with their experiments. Why in the world
should this young upstart require a special room all by himself?
Yet their curiosity got the better of their resentment. “If you
insist upon it, you can have the old cellar from which we’ll re-
move the wine barrels.”
And thus the first modem laboratory in the British Isles was
bom in a wine cellar.
Young Thomson set to work with the gusto of a hurricane.
[320]
KELVIN
He was the perfect personification of his own theory of dynamics.
Organizing a staff of thirty volunteers from his class of ninety
students, he kept them going at a furious pace. The work piled
up so rapidly that he found he needed more space — ^^an extra
room for thinking,’’ ^
Again his colleagues looked at him in amazement. ‘^‘You may
occupy the tower,” they said.
From morning to night he plumbed the depths and scaled
the heights. From experimental activity to abstract speculation.
And in the evening he walked to his home — only fifty yards
away — ^where the body of the technician and the soul of the
philosopher resigned themselves to the sleep of a man in perfect
health.
Ill
Again the dynamite of his energy exploded amidst the conserv-
atism of his colleagues. He demanded still more space. And
again they acceded to his demand. ‘‘Professor Thomson, you
have a marvelous genius for annexation.”
The academic and the lay world alike were mystified at the
outpouring of his enthusiasm. For a period of weeks the visitors
who came to the laboratory to watch him at his work were
startled to find him blowing soap bubbles. And all the students
in the room walked back and forth for hours with their faces
puffed and their eyes shining as they kept releasing bubble after
bubble into the air. One of the visitors ventured to ask for the
meaning of all this activity.
The professor glared at him for a few seconds. And then m
a tone that implied pity for anyone who was unable to draw
his own conclusions from such obvious evidence, he repKed: “I
am calculating the thickness of the uncolored spot on the soap
bubble, I have found that this thickness measures one twenty-
millionth of a millimeter.” The following month he confided to
another visitor that he had ordered his students to smoke their
pipes and to blow rings from their lips in order to illustrate the
[221]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
dynamical model of the atom. ‘T have measured the atomj
too/" he explained. “I have found it to be one two-hundred-
miUionth of a centimeter in size.""
He was exciting to the students, this mercurial professor of
theirs. One never knew what he was going to do next. One day
his friend Helmholtz, the German scientist, came to the labor-
atory and watched his experiment with a gyroscope. A heavy
metal top was spinning rapidly. The professor wanted to show
that the top would become rigid in its rotation and hoped thus
by analogy to prove the rigidity of the earth. Suddenly he seized
a hammer and hit the top a crashing blow. The metal flew off
in a centrifugal direction and crashed through Helmholtz’s hat
which was hanging on a rack. The students were in an uproar.
Helmholtz joined feebly in the laughter. “Something went
wTong/" explained the professor innocently. “I"U buy you a
new hat.""
There was nothing dull about his teaching. “I"ve put an end
to the reading of stale essays,” he said. His classroom and his
research laboratory were packed with all sorts of apparatus.
Nothing was left to the imagination. Gadgets were heaped upon
tables; they hung from the ceilings; they were fastened to the
walls. Triple spiral spring vibrators, a pendulum thirty feet long
with a twelve pound cannon ball suspended from the end, a
terrifying machine in which a number of billiard balls kept
speeding hither and thither to illustrate the dynamics of a nebula,
heaps upon heaps of gyroscopes. He whirled one on top of the
other, he twisted and tortured and juggled them in his efforts
to study the gyrations of the planets. In one comer, suspended
from the ceiling, was an innocent-looking device — a metal ring
covered with mbber “to illustrate the nature of the dewfall.”
One day he called for water and poured it upon the ring until
the rubber bulged downward. More water. Finally the rubber
burst “like an overburdened dewdrop"" — bright over the heads
of the students sitting in the front row “I always like my illustra*
tions to soak in,” chuckled the professor.
[ 222 ]
KELVIN
His ^^lectures” were not lectures at all in the usual sense. They
were feats of mental — and of physical — ^gymnastics. “He sprang
like a tiger into the classroom,” observed one of his students,
“tearing off his professor’s gown as he bounded down the aisle
to the platform.” He hurried through the prescribed text in the
Bible and then looked smilingly at the students. “Today I will
lecture on the propagation of luminar motion through a tur-
bulently moving inviscid liquid.”
They hardly understood a word of what he said. But they
were fascinated by his gestures. When he talked about the dance
of the stars, he was as likely as not to execute a jig upon the
platform. A solemn algebraic formula — and then presto. He
would reach for the pointer and balance it on top of his finger
while a hundred men held their breath. “See here. If I balanced
this pointer upon a granite mountain, it would strain the entire
earth.” When he lectured on the principles of sound he pro-
duced an old French horn that he had played in the orchestra
during his college days and blew upon it a mighty musical blast
as the students rose to their feet and cheered. If he spoke on
the principles of velocity, he took out an old rifle that he had
once carried as a guardsman and fired a voUey of shots at the
pendulum.
Like all other men of vigorous personality, he had his prej-
udices. He was particularly incensed against the “muddled hu-
man system of weights and measures.” And for good reason.
Once, while preparing to shoot at the pendulum, he had in-
structed his assistant to load the rifle with a “dram” of powder.
He was referring to the avoirdupois dram. But the assistant
thought he wanted the apothecaries’ dram, which is twice the
amount of tfie avoirdupois unit. Accordingly he put into the rifle
a sufficient charge of powder to have blown off the professor’s
head — and the heads of a few of his star pupils as well. Happily
the marksman, just as he was about to fire, discovered the error.
“I have always been suspicious of the words and the works of
the human mind,” the professor sighed.
[S23]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
IV
As FOR HIMSELF, he was a man of precise words and of prac-
tical works. He took a greater interest in concrete mechanical
devices than he did in abstract mechanical laws. He had assumed
the active directorship of a factory in addition to what he called
his ‘"passive” professorial duties. When the French physicist,
Joule, had announced his startling theory that heat was an
energy which could be transformed into work he immediately
seized upon the practical application of this theory and busied
himself with plans to harness the energy for industrial use. He
devoted a great deal of thought to the concept that was making
its way into the physics of the mid-century — ^the idea of energy
as the source of matter. From his study in thermodynamics he
caught a glimpse of the mighty principle of the transformation
and the indestructibility of energy — and this eminently practical
man who thought of all knowledge in terms of its “usefulness”
to humanity, found himself paradoxically enough embarking
upon a theoretical philosophy of life. “Every planet,” he ex-
plained to his pupils, “is like a toe dancer. It is poised and bal-
anced. It is all aquiver with living energy.” But what was the
nature of this energy? At fifty-three he began to write a book
on the subject. But he never completed it, for he could find no
answer to his question.
His study of thermodynamics — ^the energizing power of heat —
ranged all the way from the outermost limits of the universe to
the confines of his own person. He wore a woolen vest as a sort
of thermostat to regulate the temperature of his body. Whenever
he felt cold he would pile on several more vests; whenever he
felt warm he would discard them. In the winter it was nothing
for him to wear eight or nine of these vests. To his friends who
laughed at this idiosyncrasy he declared haughtily: “To every
man his proper vest, to suit his time and temper best.” Life was
all a matter of temperature.
[224]
KELVIN
He constantly observed his surroundings with a view to im*
proving them — ^not only for himself but for the general public
as well. One day he looked at his supper with a sudden in-
spiration. Why not apply his studies of the human body to the
heating and the cooling of food? At high temperatures the mol-
ecules of matter are extremely active. At low temperatures they
are extremely sluggish. Heat hastens the process of change; cold
retards it. Across the channel, in France, Pasteur had demon-
strated the fact that germs could be destroyed at very high tem-
peratures and that foods could be preserved by a process of boil-
ing. Here in England it dawned on Thomson that germs might
also be destroyed at very low temperatures and that food could
thus be preserved by the process of cooling! Such was the par-
adoxical practicality of William Thomson’s mind.
As he walked over the fields early in the morning he observed
how the dew had helped to protect the vegetation from the
frosts of the night. And in this simple protective process he beheld
the principle of one of the most modern of the arts — ^refrigera-
tion. Thus two contemporary scientists were almost simultane-
ously harnessing the heat and the cold for the better health of
mankind. The future generations were to subsist largely upon a
diet of pasteurized liquids and kelvinized solids.
But the English physicist was more fortunate than the French
chemist. While the Frenchmen hounded Pasteur almost into the
grave the Englishmen raised Thomson to a peerage.
And so ‘‘Wullie Tamspn” — as his Scottish friends still called
him — ^became the first Baron Kelvin. The king took him into
his council, and people bowed and scraped before him. But
‘^Wullie Tamson” remained the same honest, energetic, out-
spoken, playful child of a man. It was with a childish delight
that he once heard himself announced at a dinner party on the
occasion of his visit to America. Unexpectedly detained on im-
portant business, he had been late in arriving at his friend’s
house. Six-thirty, seven, seven-thirty — ^and still no sign of Lord
Kelvin. Everybody was alarmed when suddenly the draperies
[225]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
were parted and the colored butler announced with a booming
voice: ‘‘Ladies and gen'lmen, de Lawd am come!”
It was as a judge of the scientific section at the Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia that Lord Kelvin had been invited
to Amenca. He spent six weeks examining every mechanical
device on the exhibition grounds. Finally, as he was getting
ready to depart, a friend asked him to look at a “funny little
contraption” lying on a table in an out-of-the-way comer. Kelvin
y^alked over to the table. Several of the judges were making
sarcastic remarks about the “contraption” as the inventor tried
to explain its use. Kelvin picked up the instmment and looked
at it. At this moment a pompous individual walked up to the
table. It was Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil. He held out
his hand to the inventor. “Professor Bell, I am delighted to see
you again.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“Tell me, have you made any further progress with your
telephone?”
“If it please Your Majesty, pick it up and listen. I shall go
to the other end of the room and say a few words.”
Alexander Graham Bell walked to the end of the wire, Dom
Pedro took the instmment in his hand. “My God, it talks!”
“Do you mind if I try it?” It was Lord Kelvin speaking. Then^
as he put the instmment to his ear — “It certainly does talk!
It’s the most amazing thmg Fve seen in America!”
And he returned to England determined to put this “most
amazing” of inventions before the British public. He encountered
a torrent of abuse from every newspaper and magazine in the
country. “The inventor of the so-called telephone is an impostor
- — a ventriloquist — a fraud.” The London Times devoted a
column to the “scientific” explanation of the reasons why the
human voice could never be sent along an electric wire. But
Kelvin persisted. And finally he got the British public to listen
to the new voice.
{226]
KELVIN
V
His unflagging energy prompted him to take an active part
in every scientific endeavor. Having interested himself in Far-
aday’s magnetic and electric researches, he had found an op-
portunity to translate his predecessor’s theories into practical
use. He had been appointed technical advisor to the company
organized by Sir Charles Bright and Cyrus Field for the puipose
of laying the Atlantic cable between England and America. It
was Kelvin’s perfection of the galvanometer — or needle detec-
tor — ^which “picked up” the almost imperceptible current of elec-
tricity that trickled out from the cable after a trip of over two
thousand miles. And it was Kelvin’s invention of the siphon
recorder — or electric pen — ^which finally “wrote out” the cabled
message in a wavy line upon a piece of paper.
A wavy line upon a piece of paper — ^nothing more. Kelvin
was a hard-headed scientist. He laughed at the effusions of the
poets who rhapsodized about the “miracles” of his inventions.
He saw life as an essay in logic and not as a work of art. One
day his friends took him to hear a Beethoven symphony. He was
greatly impressed. He reached for his little notebook with its
green covers — ^he had filled hundreds of them with his observa-
tions. “Think what a complicated thing is the result of an or-
chestra playing,” he wrote. “Think of the smooth gradual in-
crease and diminution of pressure ... A single curve, drawn
in the manner of the curve of the price of cotton, describes all
that the ear can possibly hear . , .”
Lines and curves and angles of energetic power — ^such was
the world concept of this tough-minded man of science. Tough-
minded and gentle-hearted. For seventeen years he took care of
an invalid wife* Every morning he carried her down to the
parlor and every evening he carried her up to bed. And when
she died, he was for a time inconsolable.
But nature smites with one hand and caresses with the othen
[257]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Three years after the loss of his wife he found another woman.
It was a strictly scientific courtship. He had met her at Madeira
while he was superintending the construction of a cable from
England to Brazil. He taught her the art of telegraphy. For six*
teen days they exchanged innumerable dots and dashes of love —
he from the ship where they were repairing the cable, she from
her villa on the shore. Finally, as the ship was steaming away,
he signaled to her in the code they understood so well: 'T will
come back for you/' And she signaled in reply: ‘T will wait."
VI
As HE GREW OLDER, he complained that the time was passing too
rapidly for him. “A second is too short; we must have longer
units.” Every day he spent several hours dictating. A secretary on
one side of him, a secretary on the other, each taking down notes
on an entirely different subject. Hustle, hustle, hustle! The
years are fleeting! “Those who live slowly create their own ob-
stacles.” He had planned enough work for two centuries and his
problem was to “finish it in a single lifetime,” Always he gave
orders, always he expressed opinions, always he “dissected” ideas
— ^until his parrot. Dr Hookbeak, shouted shrilly at him from
her cage: “Lord Kelvin! Lord Kelvin! Shut upf”
And now he was nearing the end of the road. A lifetime of
theories and inventions, only to be swept into the shadow by
newer theories and better inventions, William Roentgen, Henri
Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie — ^what a vast rich field they
had opened up for future investigation! What a revolution they
had produced in the scientific conception of the world! How
inadequate was his own conception as compared to theirs! He
smiled ironically on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his
assumption of the professorship at Glasgow. His friends were
enumerating the achievements of his career — ^the new compass
that was impervious to the oscillations of gunfire, the sounding
wire that warned sailors against hidden rocks, the machine that
[228}
KELVIN
enabled men to forecast the tides, the instrument that registered
the strength of an electric current passing through a wire, dozens
of practical devices for the more accurate recordings of weights
and measures, and so on and on. Mere toys for children. “I am
not really an inventor. I am just a dreamer sleeping in the
arms of the past.”
Three years after his jubilee he resigned his professorship at
the University of Glasgow. The trustees informed him that they
would have been glad to retain his services, but he shook his
head. ^^No sentimentality, if you please. I have outlived my use-
fulness.”
He faced his students for the last time. “It has come to be my
belief that as a man grows older, the pictures he looks upon with
the most pleasure by his fireside are those which bring before
him again his college days. . . . Make your whole life fuU of
pictures which are bright, and clear, and clean.”
And so he left his professorship. But not the university. As long
as there was breath in his body he could never break the last
tie with old Glasgow. At the beginning of the academic year of
1899 this aged scholar of seventy-six walked into the registra-
tion room along with the undergraduates and enrolled his name
- — “Lord Kelvin, Research Student.” He was at last too wise to
teach. From now on he would only learn.
And then the sagest of teachers, Death, sought out this student
in his eighty-third year and led him iorward to the Great Lab-
oratory for his Final Experiment.
[229]
HAECKEL
Great Scientific Contributions by Haeckel
Books anb Essays :
The Riddle of the Universe.
History of Creation.
The Wonders of Life.
The Last Link.
General Morphology of Organ^
isms.
Monograph on Radiolaria.
Evolution of Man.
Life in the Sea.
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel
1834-1919
In A RECENT microscopical lecture,” wrote Haeckel to his
parents during his college days at Wurzburg, “Professor Leydig
suddenly stopped and pointed to me with the greatest astonish-
ment. ‘I’ve never seen the like of it in my life !’ he cried. ‘This
young man can look through the microscope with the left eye
while with the right eye he can draw what he sees . . This
curiosity in my physical make-up,” continued Haeckel, “is of
the utmost importance in the study of natural history.”
Together with his double physical vision Haeckel was blessed
with a double mental vision. One half of him was an observant
scientist; the other half, an imaginative artist. He was equally
adept at sketching a human muscle and at painting a rural
landscape. It was this combination of the seeing eye and the
aspiring heart that made him one of the outstanding German
personalities of the nineteenth century.
II
His stock was a mixture of nobility and peasantry — ^with the
peasant element in the ascendant. He never to the end of his
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
days acquired the refined artificialities of the aristocracy. In his
youth he describes himself as “a wild lad with chubby red
cheeks and long blond hair . . . careless in my dress and fre-
quently forgetful of my table manners.” Shy in the presence
of other people, he was passionately fond of walking, swimming
and collecting ail sorts of curious plants. Always on his holidays
from school he went off adventuring into the forest in quest of
"new specimens of growing and living things.” When his elders
asked him what he wanted to become he answered, “I will be
a Reisef ’ — a childish form of the word Reisender, a traveler.
He was destined, however, to do most of his traveling on the
mental rather than on the physical plane. His father, a govern-
ment official, moved his family from Potsdam to Merseburg and
from Merseburg to Berlin. But Ernst did not accompany
his parents to Berlin. Instead, he matriculated at the University
of Wiirzbprg. Here he hoped to specialize in botany with a view
to following “the footsteps of Humboldt and Darwin into the
tropical forests.” His parents, however, had other hopes for him.
They wanted him to specialize in medicine.
His entire university career was a struggle between his dis-
taste for medicine and his passion for botany. “I am convinced,”
he wrote again and again to his parents, “that medicine is not
my field.” . . . “The study of disease fills me with an uncon-
querable disgust (which is due probably to weak nerves and
hypochondria) and I shall never be able to adapt myself to it.”
On the other hand, he experienced the keenest delight whenever
he discovered a new plant. “The day before yesterday I took
a walk on the shore near the Main where the ships unload
their cargoes. Suddenly I foimd among the shrubbery a strange,
yeUow-colored, cruciferous plant, related to the black cabbage
but still quite unknown to me . . . Can you imagine my ecstasy!”
But his parents couldn’t imagine his ecstasy. They told him
to forget about his plants and to stick to his medicine. And
Haeckel dutifully complied with their wishes. He bought a micro-
scope — shaving saved up the money for it by subsisting for a
HAECKEL
time on “sour kidney and buttermilk soup’’ — ^and plunged faith-
fully into his anatomical studies. He successfully completed these
studies and absorbed his materia medica — “the most terrible in-
strument of torture ever devised for the intellect of man” — and
passed his examinations for the doctor’s degree. “And now, my
dear parents, here I am — ^Herr Doktor Haeckel — a lanky,
dried-up lath of a young medico, with shaggy, yellow-brown hair,
a mustache and a beard — only three or four inches long — of the
same color, and with a long pipe in his mouth.” But when he
comes home, Haeckel warns his parents, he wiU bring along with
him something besides his microscope and his medical books.
“You will have to reserve an extra room for a beautiful haycock
(of plant specimens). This will become a pleasant addition to
my botanical treasure house.”
Even though he was now licensed to practice medicine, he
looked upon “the hit-or-miss art of healing” as a high class form
of quackery. “When you get sick,” he said, “you can choose one
of two courses. You can leave it to nature if you want to re-
cover, or you can go to a doctor if you want to die.”
Nevertheless he was “reconciled,” as he told his parents, “to
the thought of a medical career.” For several weeks he served as
an interne at the Wurzburg Hospital, attending to the births of
“those rascally babies who insist upon coming into the world at
an hour when all honest people ought to be sound asleep.” His
“obstetrical duties” came, at a most inopportune time — ^precisely
nine months after the Wurzburg Carnival. “During the period
of my service at the lying-in hospital the babies arrived literally in
shoals, so that I was awakened several nights in succession.”
And yet, “since medicine is to be my career, I will try my
best to endure it.” Indeed, with the scientific nonchalance of the
' finished” medical student he began to look forward to his
first post mortem- -“the most interesting, yea the only interesting
part of medicine.” And then he got his initial post mortem —
an autopsy upon the body of a fellow interne “to whom I had
[255]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
been talking intimately only a few days ago.” This episode cured
him of his medical ambitions for the rest of his life.
In deference to the wishes of his parents, however, he con-
tinued his medical practice for one year. But during this entire
period he had only three patients — owing principally to the fact
that he fixed his consultation hour from five to six in the
morning. By the end of the year he had succeeded in proving to
his father that he was not '‘cut out” for the medical profession.
What to do now? Unfit for medicine in spite of his training,
he felt equally unfit for botany because of the inadequacy of his
training. For a time he played with the idea of devoting his hfe
to landscape painting. But he realized that as an artist he was
merely a gifted imitator and not a creative genius. Good enough
for an amateur — he painted in his lifetime more than a thou-
sand landscapes — but woefully incompetent (he confessed to
himself) for a professional.
And so at twenty-five he found himself confronted with a
dark wall. Yet somewhere, he believed, an opening would rise
unexpectedly out of this impenetrable darkness. For he had an
eager faith in God — this young man who later was to deny His
existence. In a letter to his parents he expressed his determina*'
tion, under the guidance of heaven, to face the future unper-
turbed: "Fear God, do that which is right, and be afraid of
no man.”
Ill
Just as he had expected he found his opportunity — or rather,
he seized his opportunity — ^in the field of natural science. He had
wheedled his father into allowing him a year’s vacation "for
travel and general study.” He spent the greater part of the
year in fishing for "rare forms of sea life” at Messina. Among
other interesting specimens he discovered and studied and classi-
fied those "pure and beautiful snowflakes of the sea” — ^the radzo-^
laria. He prepared a monograph on this subject and on the
[^56]
HAECKEL
strength of it secured a professorship in zoology at the Uni-
versity of Jena.
And then came the first of his two tragic romances. He fell
in love with his cousin, Anna Sethe, a young woman ^^of rare
gifts of mind and soul.’’ They were married and lived happily —
for just two years. It was precisely on his thirtieth birthday that
his young wife died.
For a time his friends feared that he wouldn’t survive the
blow. “Work alone can save me from going mad.” And so he
plunged into his work and prepared within a single year a
twelve-hundred-page summary of his scientific ideas — ^the Gen--
eral Morphology of Organisms. Throughout the writing of this
manuscript Haeckel lived like a hermit, working eighteen hours
a day and getting about three or four hours’ sleep out of the
twenty-four.
Haeckel dedicated this book as a living monument to his wife.
He named after her one of his favorite medusae — a fairy-like
jellyfish “whose long, trailing tentacles remind me of her lovely
golden hair.”
Three years later he married again — ^this time not out of love
but out of a desire for companionship. He moved into a “roomy”
cottage which he named the Villa Medusa and settled down to
a lifelong study of the mystery of life. For exercise he took long
walks — ^he was always a good athlete, having established a record
in the broad jump — ^puttered around in his garden, and pounded
on his chest with his fists “to make it breathe deeply” as he
stood at the open window of his bedroom. Sometimes he re-
sorted to this chest-pounding on his way from his house to the
college — ^to the great amusement of his students.
In the lecture-room, however, his students felt nothing but
the highest admiration for their teacher who “talked like the devil
and sketched like a god.” Sitting at a small table, except when
he got up to draw a diagram on the blackboard, he delivered
his lectures in a voice that was “perfervid, scintillating, assured.”
He expressed his ideas with deference to few and with apologies
1 ^ 37 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
to none. He suffered from no sense of false modesty. One day
when a friend asked him, '‘Who is your favorite author?’’ he
promptly replied, "Ernst Haeckel.”
But if his favorite author was Ernst Haeckel, his favonte
scientist was Charles Darwin.
IV
It was in 1866 that Haeckel met "the genealogist of the
world’s greatest family tree.” This meeting with Darwin, Haeckel
telk us, was one of the supreme moments of his life. "The
carriage stopped before Darwin’s pleasant ivy-covered and elm-
shaded country house. Then, emerging from amidst the creepers
which surrounded the shadowy porch, I saw the great scientist
advancing towards me — a tall and venerable figure, with the
broad shoulders of an atlas supporting a world of thought . , .
The charming, candid expression of the whole face, the soft,
gentle voice, the slow, deliberate speech, the simple and natural
train of his ideas, took my whole heart captive during the first
hour of our conversation, just as his sublime words had taken
my whole mind by storm at the first reading. It was as if some
exalted sage of Hellenic antiquity, some Socrates or Aristotle,
stood in the flesh before me.”
Haeckel became the champion of Darwin in Germany just
as Huxley had become his champion in England.^ ("The heresy
of Darwinism,” remarked an English clergyman, "has now
entered upon an unholy alliance of three H’s — ^Haeckel, Huxley
and Hell.”) Unlike Darwin, Haeckel announced himself aggres-
sively as a missionary of free thought. "There is no God,” he
said. "And,” added a facetious adversary, "Haeckel is His
prophet.” He attacked the "fanaticism of religion” with an ^
equally vehement fanaticism of irreligion. He wrote book after
book to disprove the divinity of God and to establish the divin-
ity of Nature. And with the appearance of each book a new
avalanche of vituperation fell upon the head of the author.
1^38]
HAECKEL
At the turn of the century, when evolution had become somewhat
respectable, a visitor at the University of Jena spoke to the
janitor about the popularity of Haeckel’s courses. “Yes,” replied
the janitor, “but I have seen him stoned down that street there.”
When he delivered one of his early lectures on Darwinism to a
great assembly of naturalists, the audience rose in a body and
left him to expound his ideas to an empty room. On another
occasion when he came as a delegate to a Freethinkers’ Con-
vention at Rome, the Pope ordered a “divine fumigation” of
the entire city.
The name of Haeckel was anathema everywhere — except in
the little University of Jena. Here he remained undisturbed for
fifty years More than once he offered to resign from the uni-
versity in order that “it may escape the stigma of harboring an
infidel.” But Dr Seebeck, the head of the governing body,
always refused his offer. “I don’t like your ideas, and that is why
I insist upon your remaining here. In a little university you have
but a little influence. In a bigger university, however, you can
do a great deal of harm . . . Besides, the older you get, the less
radical you’ll become.”
And Haeckel grew older and became more radical — and stiU
remained at Jena. As time went on and his ideas became popu-
lar, he received numerous offers from larger universities at more
attractive salaries. But he turned them all down. Here at Jena
Goethe had written some of his finest lyrics. Here Schiller had
taught history for ten years. Haeckel loved the traditions of the
college. And he loved the atmosphere of the town — das hebe
ndrrische Nest, with its meandering cobble-stoned streets, its
Gothic towers, its fragrant little gardens and its gossipy houses
whose gables, like the faces of beldames in fluted red caps, leaned
toward one another “in a perpetual whisper.” Above all, lie
loved the Thuringian Mountains that ringed the little city and
kept away from it the noises and the traffic of the outside world.
“Here I have everything I want, everything I can use. Why
should I think of uprooting my life?”
[239]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
In this quiet fruit-bowl of a valley nestled under the inverted
bowl of the heavens he took his long walks and delivered his
lectures and wrote his books and formulated the outlines of a
new scientific credo — “the irreligious religion of Monism.^’
V
The Monism of Haeckel is the Pantheism of Spinoza trans-
lated into the scientific language of the nineteenth century.
Monism (from the Greek monos, which means single or alone)
is the doctrine that the entire universe is a single unit. This
doctrine is opposed to the Dualistic theory that the universe con-
sists of two parts — ^the Creator of the World and the Created
World.
The world, according to Haeckel, has not been created by an
external God. It is the result of “one great process of evolution
operating through an unbroken chain of transformations that
are causally connected.”
In this causal and unbroken chain of connections all plants
and animals form a single genealogical tree from the primordial
cell to the modem man.
The soul of man is no different from the soul of the lower
animals. Both in men and in animals the soul is nothing more
than “the totality of the cerebral functions.” These living func-
tions of the brain are ended at death, and so it is absurd —
declares Haeckel — “to believe in the personal munortality of
the soul.”
Just as there is no soul distinct from the body of man, so
too there is no God distinct from the body of the world. God is
the sum total of the matter and the energy — the body and the
spirit — ^that compose the inseparable unit of the world’s sub-
stance.
So much for the theoretical side of Monism. Let us now take
a brief glance at the practical side. In the evolutionary stmggle
for existence — asserts Haeckel — ^the law of competition among
iHo]
HAECKEL
the lower animals gives way to the law of cooperation among
men. The human individual can best survive through the appli-
cation of the social instinct of reciprocal interdependence. The
most effective form of government for human society is Nomoc-^
racy — ^the rule of justice in accordance with the laws of nature.
These laws of nature, as applied to human conduct, require
mutual respect for one another’s opinions, tolerance in religious
matters, and freedom for the individual up to but not beyond
the point where his freedom would interfere with the freedom of
other individuals.
This scientific approach to human ethics brings Haeckel — and
he admits it — ^very close to the religious approach. In summa-
rizing the ^‘rational morality” of his monistic religion he con-
cludes that ‘‘man, since he is a gregarious (social) animal, must
strive to attain the natural equilibrium between his two dif-
ferent obligations — ^the behest of egoism and the behest of
altruism. The ethical principle of the Golden Rule has expressed
this double obligation twenty-five hundred years ago in the
maxim: Do unto others as you would that they should do unto
youf^
And thus we find in Haeckel the paradox of a man who denies
God and accepts Jesus After all, Haeckel was not a freethinker
but a free thinker. Released from the shackles of prejudice he
had chosen a new path to the heart of the world’s mystery.
And he had found there the selfsame truth that had been dis-
covered by the prophets of the old religions. The old prophets
had said, “God is love,” Haeckel merely paraphrased these
words into the scientific dictum, “Nature is friendly toward the
noblest aspirations of man.”
VI
At the age of sixty-five he put all his scientific and philosophic
thought into a single volume — The Riddle of the Universe. It
became an immediate best seller and remained so for a quarter
[ 2 ^^ ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
of a century. But he derived little joy from his success. For in
the course of the writing of this book he had entered upon the
second of his tragic romances. One day in 1898 he received a
letter from an unknown young woman. “Please forgive this
intrusion from a stranger, and be a little patient. I will write as
briefly as a woman can ... By accident one of your books, The
Natural History of Creation^ feU into my hands. What a new
world rose before me ! ... Is it any wonder that I require more
after having read your book? . . . WiU you reach me your hand,
my esteemed Professor, and tell me what to read? . . Signed,
Franziska von Altenhausen.
Haeckel sent her a list of books to read. After a few more
letters they exchanged pictures, and then they exchanged hearts.
Haeckel was imhappy at the Villa Medusa. His life had been
embittered by the incessant nagging of a feeble-minded daughter
and an invalid wife. Here was a young woman — she was only
thirty — ^who soothed his “wounded old heart” with the balm of
adoration. For five years they kept up a clandestine and passion-
ate correspondence. “What an amazing thing” — ^he wrote — “that
a young girl like you and an old man like me should have fallen
so desperately in love with each other!” And Franziska wrote
back: “Don’t call yourself an old man. In spirit you are a young
god.”
They had several secret trysts, in various parts of Germany.
“From the depths of my heart,” he wrote to her after their first
meeting, “I thank you for the two memorable days that brought
me the happiness of your personal acquaintance ... You must
surely have perceived from my awkward behavior how com-
pletely your kind visit has upset the ordinary composure of my
prosaic existence — ^the radiance of a sweet spring fairy who
brings fragrant blossoms to the dungeon of a poor, lonely cap-
tive.”
After another meeting — “How enchanting was our bridal
journey yesterday!”
And Franziska to Haeckel, after still another meetings — “Our
[ ^ 4 ^ ]
HAECKEL
dear days together seemed to me like a beautiful dream too
lovely to endure. Its memory still enfolds me so magically that
it is difficult for me to express in words what moves my heart.
Only be sure of this — ^in those few hours you grew far, far
dearer to me than ever before,"^
Age, wrote Haeckel in one of his letters to Franziska, is no
guard against folly. Torn between his disloyalty toward his own
wife — he deceived her, he said, for her own peace of mind —
and his infatuation for Franziska, he entertained for a time the
idea of committing suicide. “The important question of self-
destruction (the very term is nonsense — ^it should be called self-
deliverance) has occurred to me very often in recent weeks.’’
He gave up this thought in favor of another avenue of escape —
a trip to the Indian Ocean. “Franziska, dearest, best beloved
wife of my heart — I depart for the tropical seas to escape from
you and from myself — two rare and extraordinary souls made
for each other — ^who, separated, must wander lonely through
life . . He traveled to India, Singapore, Buitenzorg, Sumatra,
Java — ^but wherever he went he carried along his sorrow.
“Man,” he wrote to Franziska from Port Said, “escapes him-
^If nowhere.”
And so he returned home and waited — ^for what? “We must
agree never to see each other again,” wrote Franziska, “as long
as your wife lives.” Haeckel gave his consent to this agreement.
And then they met again — and again.
Ardently they both \ earned for the day when his wife would
leave them free. But they expressed this yearning only by innu-
endo. “The poor thing,” writes Haeckel, “has been in bed again
for the past eight weeks. I assure you that I am doubly patient
and attentive now.” And Franziska, in reply — “You must be
very careful of your poor, dear wife. How is her heart? Is there
any hope?”
Every day, indeed, the doctors expected his invalid wife’s
heart to flicker out. . . .
But it was Franziska’s heart that gave out. One winter mom-
[243I
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ing Haeckel received a telegram from Ursula Altenhausen. “My
sister Franziska died suddenly last night.”
VII
Haeckel lived on for another sixteen years — ^tragically alone.
And then, on a midsmnmer night in 1919, he fell mercifully
asleep. “The riddle of man’s life,” he wrote a few days before
he died, “remains imanswered. But — impavidi progrediamur, let
us go forward imafraid !”
STEINMETZ
Great Scientific Contributions by Steinmetz
Discovered the law of hyster-
esis^ or loss of power, in
alternating electric cur-
rents.
Formulated method of calcu-
lating alternating currents.
Invention:
Invented ^‘lightning arrestors”
to protect high power
transmission lines.
Books, Pamphlets and Lec-
tures •
On Electric Discharges.
On Engineering and Mathe-
matics.
Relativity and Space.
Radiation^ Light and Illumina-
tion.
Theory and Calculation.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865-1923
He was born deformed. The left leg wasn’t “just straight”
and there was a hump on his back. ^‘But he’ll get along all right/’
the doctor assured his father.
Karl Heinrich stiffened. ‘‘Oh yes, he’ll get along all right.”
All the Steinmetzes did. In spite of their handicaps. For genera-
tions they had toiled and suffered on the constantly shifting
frontiers of Germany and Poland. They had lived by their
shrewdness. They had been innkeepers and shopmen, small town
bourgeoisie who knew how to bargain and to eke a narrow
margin of profit out of life. Never had they asked for quarter.
Never fear for the newcomer. “He’ll manage somehow.”
And within a year little Karl had to manage without his
mother. His father, a lithographer for a German railroad, placed
him under the care of his grandmother.
In the large room of the house on Tauenzienstrasse in Breslau
the frolicsome child played with his Grossmutter and learned
how far he could exploit her love. She entertained him with
folk tales of her native Poland and with biblical stories about
the ancient Hebrew cities of splendor and gold.
< “We too have miracle cities, have we not, Grossmutter?”
[247]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
asked the child. “Perhaps when I grow up I can help to build
one of them.”
With his wooden blocks he constructed the Temple of Solo-
mon and when grandmother wasn’t looking, he set a candle
inside “to light it up.” But the flame fed on the blocks and
threatened to grow into a conflagration until his grandmother
rushed over and deluged the building in water.
Karl was hurt and mystified. So this is what happens when
you try to give too much light. As he grew older, his mind laid
plans to seek for a light that would shine in the temple without
reducing it to ashes.
He entered the gymnasium at an age when he was “scarcely
beyond his infancy.” At five he conjugated Latin verbs. At
seven he learned Greek and a smattering of Hebrew. At eight
he possessed a “respectable knowledge” of algebra and geometry,
Upon his completion of ten years of study he was ready to
graduate with the highest honors. Nervously he awaited the
event.
It was the custom for the graduating class to appear on the
platform in full dress and to participate in an oral examination,
Karl could not afford to own a formal suit. But he rented one,
And then, on the morning before the great occasion there ap-
peared on the bulletin board of the school the following notice :
“Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz, by reason of his excep-
tional scholarship, is not required to submit to the, oral examina-
tion.”
Slowly he folded his formal suit and put it away. The tears
on his cheeks were hot. He understood the reason for his ex-
emption. The crippled body of the student. The crippled minds
of the teachers. They were ashamed to show him before the
public. They had singled him out, alone among the students,
only to make him the more painfully aware of his loneliness.
Karl Steinmetz never wore a full dress suit again.
[ 2 ^ 8 ]
STEINMETZ
II
Shortly after he entered the University of Breslau he gave
evidence of a prodigious intellect. His professors were amazed at
his ‘‘magical juggling’' of figures. They nicknamed him Proteus.
The ancient little hunchback of the sea. According to the
Greek legend, Proteus was no bigger than the human hand.
When trapped, he could change himself into a thousand dif-
ferent shapes. But if the captor held firm, he would gradually
resume his real shape, and whisper into the ear the secrets of the
world. For the wrinkled little god possessed all the knowledge
that men were searching for, . . , So, too, did this little Proteus
of a Steinmetz, said the students with an uneasy smile. They were
somewhat afraid of his “uncanny mind.”
But Steinmetz craved companionship, and he sought for the
society of his more serious fellow students. One day a classmate
invited him to tea and told him about the plans of the German
workers for a new social order — a world free from want, a
cooperative commonwealth whose motto, based upon the Golden
Rule, would be, One for all and all for one. “Will you join us
socialists?” asked his classmate.
Karl’s heart leaped with excitement. Here was a young man
interested in matters beyond the usual frolics and duels of the
average student. Of course he would join him and his socialists !
At first his new “crusade” was a pleasant diversion from his
studies. For the early socialism of Germany was a peaceful move-
ment to secure, by political means, many of the reforms that we
in America have gained within the past ten years But due to
the arrogant stupidity of Bismarck the movement was driven
underground. As a result of this suppression the “cause” of
socialism gained momentum. But the members of the socialist
party had won the badge of martyrdom.
The “movement” had now become an exciting adventure for
Steinmetz. He wrote letters in invisible ink to fellow agitators
[ 349 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
who were detained by the authorities. He undertook to edit the
socialist weekly — The FeopWs Voice — with its challenging and
somewhat absurd motto : “We don’t know what the government
wants, but we are against it.”
Karl Steinmetz had found congenial company at last. He was
a full-fledged member of the “Noble Order of the Dispossessed.”
Gradually his mathematical problems took up less and less of
his time as the “larger social problem” began to occupy the fore-
most place in his mind.
And just now this problem called for an immediate and per-
sonal solution. The PeopWs Voice was in financial straits. One
day the printer and the paper merchant appeared together de-
manding the immediate payment of a bill that had been overdue
for several months. But Karl’s sense of humor didn’t desert him.
He led his two creditors into the rear office of The People^ s Voice
and offered to give them in payment a complete file of the
weekly’s back numbers. “Very interesting historical matter,” he
explained, “quite unobtainable elsewhere.”
Finally a bailiff appeared to attach the furniture. “May I
offer you a complete file of our back numbers?” inquired the
intrepid editor. “Quite unobtainable elsewhere.”
It was a gay life. And it was coming to an end. For he was
about to graduate from college — ^with the highest honors in
mathematics, to the great joy of his father. It was rumored that
the authorities were planning to publish his senior thesis in the
official scientific journal. A brilliant career was ahead.
One evening Steinmetz rounded up his socialist friends and
announced that he wanted to give a beer party in celebration of
his success. It was a merry company that swarmed into the
restaurant. Each man called for a stein of beer. Each man pro-
posed a toast, to which the entire company responded in chorus.
As the evening wore on, the voices grew louder and the humor
broader. They sang in complete disorder.
And then Steinmetz proposed a -final toast. “To my father,
whose greatest desire it has been to see me graduate with honors.
[250]
K-i, .
STEINMETZ
To my escape over the Swiss border from the police who, as I
have been tipped off, are planning to arrest me as a socialist. To
my senior thesis that might have come to a glorious end in
publication 'rather than in a hideaway suitcase. To the world and
its irony, let’s drink
In the dawn he tiptoed into his father’s room. The older man
stirred in his sleep. ‘T have had such a pleasant dream, Karl —
your future ”
“Yes, father,” he murmured. “My future ... It was a pleasant
dream, was it not^”
A few hours later he left Germany and his father forever.
Ill
At ZURICH he earned a scant income writing articles on as-
tronomy. He attended courses at the Polytechnic Institute, room-
ing with a fellow student “on the top floor of the last house at
the end of the final street at the edge of the town.” And here
came an important turn in his life. His fellow lodger, Asmussen,
told him of a country which he had visited — “a land of magic”
where the “social question” did not exist. “If you came to
America you could discard your preoccupation with politics and
devote yourself exclusively to mathematics. There is a crying
need for engineers in America.”
A land of opportunity where everyone was given a second
chance — even a cripple who was hounded by the German police.
Perhaps in the West he might find the light that glowed but
didn’t scorch. His roommate had spoken of the Goddess of
Liberty who held in her uplifted hand the torch that lighted the
gateway of the New World.
It mightn’t be a bad idea to sail for America. But how was
he to raise the money for the passage?
It was his fellow lodger who — ^involuntarily — ^found an answer
to the question. He had fallen in love with a Swiss girl and he
had written about his “blessed romance” to an uncle who lived
[ 55 ^]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
in San Francisco and who supplied him with his monthly allow-
ance. The answer was a stern command that Asmussen come to
America at once. Furthermore, he gave notice to his nephew
that he was cutting off his allowance.
The saddened lover fingered his bank roll reflectively. 'T’ll
pay your expenses to New York, Karl, if you come along with
me,
Steinmetz hesitated for an instant. “What can you do here,
Karl? You can’t return to Germany. The only good business in
Switzerland is that of a hotel keeper. Have you got a hotel?”
And so it was decided. They came by steerage. The steamship,
La Champagne s docked in the New York harbor on a warm
June day. The officials looked over the shipload of prospective
Americans. They were not at all impressed by the little dwarf
of a man who limped up to them. Could he speak English? He
didn’t understand, didn’t answer, Asmussen, who spoke English
fluently, interpreted the question. “A few ” mumbled Stein-
metz sheepishly.
Had he any money? “Nein.” Had he any job? “Nein.” Un-
desirable alien! They would ship him home. No one asked to
see the treatise on higher mathematics that he had along with
him — di work that singled him out as one of the few geniuses of
his generation. To the detention room with him!
But Asmussen stepped in. He showed the officials a bank roll
He asserted that these funds were at the disposal of Stein-
metz. “I will personally see to it that my friend does not become
a public charge.”
The authorities yielded. The unprepossessing young cripple
limped up the busy streets of New York, with only a few letters
of recommendation to electrical firms, a capital of mathematical
symbols and a slender luggage of hope. He moved with Asmussen
into a tenement in Brooklyn and started immediately to look
for a job. He applied to the chief engineer of the Edison Electric
Company and received a curt rebuflF. “There are too many engi-
neers coming to America these days.”
[252]
STEINMETZ
He visited the manufacturing establishment of Rudolph Eiche-
meyer. The secretary, taking him for a tramp, was preparing to
shoo him away when Mr Eichemeyer himself strode into the
office. The young foreigner made a stumbling attempt to intro-
duce himself. Rudolph Eichemeyer looked at him kindly. Here
was a fellow German. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’’ Within an hour's
conversation he had learned all about Steinmetz. “I too am a
political refugee,” he remarked. “I fled from Germany in 1848.
Come around in a week. There may be a job waiting.”
There was a job waiting — ^the position of draughtsman at
twelve dollars a week. Eichemeyer was a manufacturer of hats.
But in his spare moments he experimented with electrical gadgets
of his own devising. ‘^Are you interested in electricity?” he asked
Steinmetz. “If so, you may study some of the generators IVe
been tinkering with. Clumsy contraptions, I admit — elementary
attempts to supply the world with power and light. Most of us
are still groping blindly in this field. We blunder and stumble
and snatch Tiere and there at a little electricity, an incandescent
lamp, a wire, but mostly we know nothing about the general
laws. We do not as yet understand how to control electricity.”
And then he took Steinmetz to a window overlooking the busy
street. “There is a throne awaiting some man — a seat of untold
power over vast cities and industries and millions of men and
women — such is the kingdom of light lying in wait for its law-
giver . . .”
Even for a friendless immigrant who had eluded the police in
his native land? That night when work was over there was a
flush on the face of a little hunchback as he hitched his way
home.
IV
Within three years Karl Steinmetz had assumed the throne in
the kingdom of light. He had joined the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers. He had reviewed the notes he had taken
. [255]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
on electrical transformers at the Polytechnic in Switzerland. And
he had made a thorough study of Eichemeyeris generators. Did
the industry need an expert mathematician? The entire realm of
mathematics had limped its way to America in that summer
month of 1889. The electrical engineers were complaining that
they were unable to estimate beforehand the efficiency of any
generators which they were planning to build. And this inability
to foretell the power capacity of an engine under construction
was due to hysteresis — an (unpredictable) loss of energy. The
engineers had noticed that a current passing through a core of
iron sets up a magnetic north pole and a magnetic south pole,
and that when the current reverses its direction, so also are the
poles reversed. This alternating magnetism, the engineers had
further noticed, meant a loss of power and efficiency. But no-
body knew how to estimate the amount of this loss in advance
and therefore nobody knew how to build a machine that would
reduce the hysteresis to a minimum. It was a hit-or-miss method,
and the misses were far more frequent than the hits.
Such was the electrical state of affairs in the i88o’s. A race
of engineers in the wilderness of experimental electricity were
looking for a Moses to lead them to the promised land of
mathematical certainty. But for a long stretch of time no voice
spoke to them.
And then at a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers in January 1892, one of its most obscure members
walked to the platform and in halting, broken English read
to the assemblage a mathematical paper. In this paper he for-
mulated, definitely and for all time, the exact law of hysteresis.
No need any longer to build a generator blindly. Karl Stemmetz
had tamed electricity to the service of man.
Now he was no longer a German ^"^alien” but an American
pioneer. Accordingly he must adopt an American name. Charles
August Rudolph Stemmetz? Charles Rudolph Stemmetz?
Charles August Steinmetz? No — ^none of these would do— they
[254]
STEINMETZ
were too hyphenated. Charles Steinmetz? That was better. But
still something was wrong. Most Americans, he had noticed,
had middle names. And then a puckish laugh shook his little
frame of five foot three. Why not Proteus for a middle name?
The old nickname of his student days. Proteus, the god of a
thousand shapes, the guardian of a thousand secrets, the in-
terpreter of the mystery of the tempest and the fire and the
sea . . From that day on, he signed his name Charles Proteus
Steinmetz.
V
In this same year which marked the discovery of the law of
hysteresis (1892) the Edison General Electric Company of New
York merged with a rival company and formed the gigantic
trust of the General Electnc Works. This new organization
bought out the firm of Rudolph Eichemeyer and received, along
with its other assets, the services of young Steinmetz. The com-
pany moved its general offices to Lynn, Massachusetts, and
Steinmetz went to that city together with the rest of the office
personnel.
A friend who had known him in New York paid him a visit
a month after his removal to Lynn and was amazed to find him
in sad straits. His clothes were ragged. He looked pale and thin.
He had not paid the rent for his room. Through a clerical over-
sight his name had been omitted from the payroll. For four
weeks he had received no salary and he was too shy to make
inquiries. “Perhaps,” he told his friend, “they don’t think I’m
worth a salary as yet. Perhaps they feel that I ought to be grate-
ful for the experience I’m getting with the firm.”
It was soon made clear to him, however, that he was not ex-
pected to work for nothing. Indeed, he learned that his financial
worries were over for the rest of his life. For the executives of
the company realized that they had captured a Merlin of the
, [255]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISIS
modem age and they would never let him go. They sealed him in
comfort and turned the key. The little man blinked in bewilder-
ment as he looked at his new shoes and his new clothes and the
platters of tasty meats that were set up before him- He pinched
himself to see if he were really awake.
And then, satisfied that this was no dream, he took out his
wand and worked another miracle. He had observed that alter-
nating current had gradually begun to replace direct current as
the best means of transmitting electricity over great distances.
But as a result of this replacement a new difficulty had arisen
It was easy enough to calculate the regular flow of direct cur-
rent according to Ohm’s Law. But no mathematical law had as
yet been discovered to measure the irregular flow of alternating
current. Steinmetz now discovered this law. It was a mathemati-
cal formula that required three volumes of complicated equa-
tions.
“This man,” declared the chairman of the board of directors,
“isn’t cut out to be an engineer. He isn’t a toolmaker but a
lawgiver — a thinker in a class with Newton.” From that day on
they gave him no orders, made for him no regulations, and
classified him for no particular job. “Here is our entire plant.
Do anything you want with it. Dream all day, if you wish.
We’ll pay you for dreaming.”
The company moved from Lynn to Schenectady and dressed
the city out in a constellation of light. And into this Bagdad on
the Mohawk rode the pigmy king in triumph. As the lights
streamed from the humming dynamos and a thousand suns
danced in the midnight air Steinmetz knew at last that he had
come home. This was the miracle shrine that had been awaiting
him from his childhood days. Here in the electric city ahve with
batteries and wires of power devised largely out of his abstract
mathematical formulas he sat hunched at the switch — a modem
Jehovah ready to wield his thunderbolts over the cities of men.
A Jehovah with a little red beard and a stogy in his mouth. A
flibbertigibbet of a celebrity. Newsmen cornered him and photo-
[255]
STEINMETZ
graphed him and made much ado about “selling” him to the
public. But still he was timid. He fancied that people were
fascinated by his pisturesque personality rather than by any
appreciation of his thoughts or his feelings.
Did they know, for example, why he had moved into a big
hoTise on Wendell Avenue? And did they realize how lonely he
was in the midst of these luxurious surroundings? At first he had
taken lodgings with a landlady. But he was ill at ease. He burnt
her carpets with his acids, damaged her walls with his gadgets,
ruined her disposition with his noises in his home-made labora-
tory at all hours of the day and the night. And that was why
he had built himself a mansion — a hermitage for the housing of
all his laboratory needs, a spacious temple of light. But he
trembled at the thought of moving into the vast palace — a. king
without a family, without a friend. The reporters waxed en-
thusiastic about the splendor of the house and never bothered
themselves about the loneliness of the owner.
But he tried to conquer his loneliness. One evening he paid
a visit to his laboratory assistant — a young man who had just
taken a wife. Timidly he invited the young couple to come and
live with him. “In this way, you see, my house can become a
home.” Soon there might be a family in this house — children of
sounder flesh than his own. Some day, perhaps, they would call
him godfather . . .
The young couple accepted his invitation and moved into the
house on Wendell Avenue. But Steinmetz still remained alone —
shrinking from the company of his fellows who were fashioned
so differently from himself. Out of his suffering for his own ugli-
ness he had developed a tenderness toward all ugly things. In
the conservatory adjoining his house he cultivated a “distorted
paradise” — of cacti plants. No delicate flowers for him. No
foliage of beauty. But ugly misshapen cacti. He spent thousands
of dollars preserving them in a hothouse against the blasts of
whiter. People shuddered at his taste.
“If you want to make me really happy,” he told his acquaint-
[257]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ances, ‘'send me alligators.” He built a pool for five of them,
and decorated it with lilies. Accompanying him as he limped
through the grounds of his estate was a homely mongrel who
would never have gained his master’s affection had he been
slick and pedigreed. “Send me sick fowl and anemic kittens. I
will fatten them.” The outcast animals reached him in swarms.
And then came the climax to his collection in the “garden of
the hornble and the misfit” — a Gila monster. The more curious
among the people of Schenectady went to their encyclopedias
for an account of this monster. “A huge, sluggish lizard . . .
Its head equals the size of its body, and its tail equals the size of
its head . . . With its two spearlike teeth it holds on to its victim
while the saliva oozes from its venomous mouth . .
Such was the gentle pet. Steinmetz kept him in a cage and
every year placed a dozen eggs by his side. Once a month the
creature roused himself from his slumbers in the sun and ate
an egg. And then he shut his scaly eyelids.
Ugly creatures, these. Nobody cared for them, yet somehow
they made their way in life. Steinmetz closed his eyes whimsically
over his cigar.
VI
He was raised (in 1901) to the presidency of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers. The following year he was
given an honorary degree at Harvard University. “I confer
this degree upon you,” said President Eliot, “as the foremost
electrical engineer in the United States and therefore in the
world.”
When George R. Lunn entered upon his term as the socialist
mayor of Schenectady, he appointed his fellow socialist of
Breslau president of the Board of Education. Steinmetz was
happy at the opportunity to put some of his social theories into
practice. He increased the number of city playgrounds, he in-
stituted special classes for the mentally slow and for the im«
[ 25S ]
STEINMETZ
migrants unfamiliar with the English language^ and he
introduced glass-enclosed classrooms on the roofs of the school-
houses for the tubercular childrenl ‘‘Bring light into the lives
of people — a light that does not destroy but only heals.”
The skeptics wagged their heads over his social activities.
How could this engineer of a great monopoly reconcile his
capitalistic profession with his socialistic idealism? In answer
to this question Steinmetz wrote a book — Amenca and the New
Epoch. It is precisely through the expansion of capitalism that
we shall bring about state socialism, he declared. From the large
scale corporation to the corporate state. “Eventually private
ownership will give way to government ownership under private
management.” And all this, through the peaceful use of the
ballot.
He was a great believer in economic reform through political
means. In 1922 he ran on the socialist ticket for the ofBce of
state engineer. His specific platform was the harnessing of water
power. “For this in a large measure means the liberation of
man.” Puffing vigorously at his cigar he terrified all the lovers
of beauty with his proposal that the water of the Niagara Falls
be channeled into a huge plant for hydroelectrical purposes.
What was the esthetic pleasure of a honeymooning couple as
compared to the physical welfare of the human race? He
estimated that the potential energy of Niagara Falls was six
million horsepower. “This would bring to the state about two
billions of dollars annually — ^to be spent on housing, playgrounds
and schools.” And then as he enumerated these advantages
his face softened into a puckish smile. For a compromise sug-
gestion had occurred to him. On the six working days of the
week the water could be diverted to supply the power for the
hydroelectric machinery. But on Sundays the power could be
closed down and the water could then be allowed to tumble
over the precipice “in all its holiday beauty.” His eyes beamed
with excitement as the full glory — and the full humor — of
the vision dawned upon him. “What a spectacle it would make,
[259]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
with the water beginning to trickle, slowly at first, then tumbling
more and more impetuously until it became the thundering
Niagara that we know! Wouldn’t that be a display infinitely
more impressive than what we have now?” He was defeated at
the polls.
But he went on with his utopian dreams. ‘^The progress of
the human race,” he once remarked, “is merely a matter of
intelligent engineering.” And then he went on to cite an ex-
ample in order to clarify his idea. “If the Bering Strait were
blown up and widened and deepened, we would be able to
divert the whole course of that current to the north of North
America. If that current ran above our continent, it would melt
all the ice and snow of Canada and Alaska, and there would
be no more glaciers in Greenland or icebergs in the Atlantic.
... It would make all of North America warmer in the
winter and milder in the summer It would double the habitable
area of the globe. It would remake the world.”
And on another occasion: “I b-^heve that the engineers of
the future will bring about a four-hour working day. Work is
a curse. The chief aim of society should be the abolition of it.”
As for himself, however, he sought no cessation from his work.
His beard was graying even as he grew young with his thoughts
of the 1 future. The total of cigar stubs that he had thrown
away mounted appallingly. And still Steinmetz continued with
his experiments.
Now 'he was studying lightning arrestors — devices to pro-
tect electrical machinery from the bolts of an angry sky. Now
he was building electric condensers that succeeded in capturing
some of the characteristics of these celestial bolts. All around
him his associates were clamoring for more power, more light
— ^higher currents to press through the wires — ^higher voltage!
And now at last Charles Proteus Steinmetz was ready for
Ms final experiment. “Gome in, gentlemen,” he told the group
of reporters and of distinguished scientists who had gathered
at the door of his laboratory. “I have manufactured lightning!”
C^do]
STEINMETZ
Quiedy they entered. In the comer of the room they saw a
monster generator. Spread out before them was a miniature
village with houses and trees and a white-steepled church. “If
you please, gentlemen, I will show you the devastating power
of electricity.”
There was a subdued hum and a glow in the vacuum tubes
as they warmed up to discharge their power. And then — a
terrific crash. A zigzag flame broke over the village. The trees
and the houses and the steeple were enveloped in a whirlpool
of smoke.
As the smoke cleared the trees were dust, the houses were a
heap of ruins, and the white steeple of the church had entirely
disappeared.
Steinmetz looked at his astonished audience with a whimsical
smile. “Incalculable is the power of electricity to destroy,” he
said, “when wielded by a foolish hand. . . . But equally in-
calculable, when wielded by a wise hand, is the power of
electricity to build.”
VII
Side by side with the cacti the owner of the Wendell House
had planted the grounds with orchards lovely and fragrant.
But the shadows threatened aU the beauty, all the ugliness.
Steinmetz was getting old and wayworn. One autumn morn-
ing (October 26, 1923) his adopted son, Joseph Hayden, en-
tered the bedroom of the engineer. He had sensed that Dr
Steinmetz had passed a restless night. “I’ll bring up the break-
fast tray,” he suggested. “Better to eat a snack before, you
try to get up.”
“All right. I will lie down again.”
A few minutes later Hayden’s son came into the room with the
breakfast. He drew close to the bed. The little man was sound
asleep.
Somewhere in the silent air lurked a voice speaking words
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
that only a little child in Breslau and a kindly old grandmother
would understand. “I am tired building with my blocks, Gross-
mutter. I will lie down again. And when the morning comes,
I will make another temple so much better than the one I
built today.”
[2fo]
MARIE CURIE
Great Scientific Contributions by Marie Curie
Discovered radium, and estab- Books and Papers :
Hshed its healing power in Radioactivity,
certain diseases. Radiology and War,
The Magnetization of Tem^
pered Steel,
Marie Curie
1867-1934
In 1903 MADAME CURIE was the most celebrated woman in the
world. She had just shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together
with Pierre Curie and with Henri Becquerel. Screaming head-
lines in the newspapers, thousands of letters from autograph
seekers, innumerable requests for lectures, messages from “de-
parted spirits” forwarded through the “collaboration” of trance
mediums, banquets, honors, titles, reporters, photographers,
curiosity hunters — all these had descended upon her in an
avalanche of unwelcome hosannas. Manufacturers of popular
articles solicited her endorsement. A horse breeder asked for her
permission to name his favorite horse after her. For many years
the spotlight of public adulation kept singling her out as the
foremost of public characters — save one. As she got out of a
train to deliver a lecture in Berlin one day, she was pleasantly
surprised to find herself alone. The mob had stormed to another
part of the platform where Jack Dempsey was getting out of the
same train. The world’s champion physicist was not quite so im-
portant a personage as the world’s champion pugilist.
Madame Curie thoroughly despised the distinctions and the
distractions of glory. She regarded herself as a captive chmned
[^65]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
and led nnwilHngly in a triumphal procession. She threw away
her caps and her gowns and her titles and her medals as soon as
she got them. The only things she kept were the menus from the
banquets at which she sat as a martyred guest. “These menus,
made of thick, hard cardboard, are so convenient for scribbling
down my mathematical calculations
Speaking of this most modest of celebrated women, the most
modest of celebrated men — ^Albert Einstein — once remarked:
“Marie Curie is, among all distinguished people, the only one
whom fame has not corrupted.'’
II
Manya SKLODOVSKA, known today as Marie Curie, came of a
Polish stock of noble and honest peasants. Her parents had risen
above the soil into the rarefied atmosphere of higher education.
Her father was a professor of physics at the Warsaw High
School, and her mother was an accomplished pianist. Manya —
a pet name for Marya — ^inherited her father’s brains and her
mother’s hands. She showed an early aptitude for experimental
science. But her parents didn’t allow any of their five children
to do much studying. There was a taint of consumption in the
family. Whenever Manya became absorbed in her books,
Madame Sklodovska would put her hand gently on the child’s
head. “Go and play in the garden, Manyusha. It’s so beautiful
outside.”
Every evening at their prayers the children added a final
sentence; “And please, God, restore our mother’s health.”
But it pleased God to take Madame Sklodovska from her chil-
dren — there were four now; one of them had died of typhus.
Manya was only ten when she was left motherless.
It was a sad and impoverished family that gathered around
the table after Madame Sklodovska’s departure. Manya’s father
had lost bis position in the high school because of Ms aspiration
[^ 65 ]
MARIE CURIE
for the freedom of Poland from the tyranny of the Russian czar.
He had opened a boarding school, but with indifferent success.
The maintenance of his family seemed a task beyond his feeble
powers. Four healthy mouths to be fed, four growing bodies to
be clothed, and four active minds to be educated. Desperately he
invested his inadequate savings in the hope that the numerator
of his possessions might grow equal to the denominator of his
needs. But he lost his entire investment. He had nothing to look
forward to.
Nothing but four children with superior brains and superior
grit. All these children were destined to rise from poverty to
achievement. For the strength of the Polish soil was within them.
And the aspiration of the Polish heart. The aspiration of a
free soul in a chained body. The Sklodovski children, like their
father, were rebels. They fought against adversity and they
fought against tyranny. Every morning when Manya walked to
school, she passed by a statue dedicated the Poles faithful to
their Sovereign'^ — ^that is, to the Poles who were faithless to their
country. Manya always made it a point to spit upon this statue.
If, by inadvertence, she failed to perform this act of disrespect,
she turned back to make good her failure — even at the risk of
coming late to school.
This gallant little rebel expressed her contempt for oppression
not only in the absence but also in the presence of her oppress
sors. Among her teachers who represented the alien governing
power over Poland was Mademoiselle Mayer, the German super-
intendent of studies. This ‘'slithering spy with her muffled slip-
pers’’ was a little bit of a woman with a prodigious capacity for
hate. She made life unbearable for her Polish pupik — especially
for “thaft Sklodovska girl” who dared to answer her lashing
tongue with a scornful smile. But Manya was not always content
with a mere smile of silent scorn. One day “the spy” attempted,
with a none too gentle hand, to straighten Manya’s unruly
Polish curls into a conventional Gretchen braid. In vain. Man-
[ 367 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
ya’s hair, like her spirit, refused to yield to the tyrant’s touch.
Exasperated at ^‘the capricious head and the contemptuous eyes”
of her Polish pupil, Mayer finally shouted.
“Stop staring at me like that ! I forbid you to look down upon
me!”
Whereupon Manya, who was a head taller than Mayer,
replied sweetly: “I can’t very weU do anything else. Mademoi-
selle,”
Yet in spite of her rebellion Manya carried off the gold medal
at the completion of her high school course (in 1883). It had
become a habit with the Sklodovskis to win this highest award
for scholarship. There were by this time three gold medals in the
family.
And now, said her father, enough of study for the present.
Let her go to the country for a year and build up her body.
“This pretty child must not, like her mother, fall a victim to
consumption.”
Manya gladly consented to her father’s suggestion. For she
loved her play as she loved her work. She yielded herself “body
and soul” to the luxury of idleness. “My dear little devil,” she
wrote to her school friend, Kazia, “I can hardly believe there is
any such thing in existence as geometry or algebra.” She spent
her summer days roaming in the woods, swinging, swimming,
fishing, playing battledore and shuttlecock, or just lying on the
grass and reading — “no serious books, I assure you, but only
absurd and harmless little novels.” And she spent her winter
nights and days — dancing. Those Polish dances! Starting at
sunset and continuing in relays as the revelers, with the fiddlers
at their head, journeyed from farmhouse to farmhouse, dancing
away the night, beyond the dawn, beyond the sunset of the fol-
lowing day and into the sunrise of the next. And the moh tireless
as well as the most graceful dancer of them all was Manya
Sklodovska. “All the young men from Cracow asked me to
dance with them . . . very handsome boys . . • you can’t
imagine how delightful it w^ ... It was eight o’clock of the
[268)
MARIE CURIE
(second) morning when we danced the last dance — a white
mazurka.” And then she had to throw away her slippers of
russet leather, for ‘‘their soles had ceased to exist . .
III
After her yearns vacation she returned to Warsaw and to an
uncertain future. Her older sister, Bronya, wanted to study at
the Sorbonne, in Paris. So too did Manya. But there weren't
enough funds in the family to finance even one of them, let alone
both, through the university. An insoluble problem, it seemed,
yet Manya found the solution. “I will get a job as governess and
help you through college. Then you will get a doctor's degree
and help me in return.”
It seemed an audacious plan, but it worked. Manya became a
“teaching servant” in the family of Madame B , a stupid,
vulgar and intolerant woman who economized on oil for the
lamps and who gambled away her money on cards. “My ex-
istence,” wrote the young governess, “has become unbearable
... I shouldn't like my worst enemy to live in such a hell.”
Fortunately she was able to exchange this for a better position
in a somewhat more intelhgent home. Her new “mistress,”
Madame Z , was fully as intolerant though not quite so
vulgar as her former employer. “Madame Z has a bad
temper, but she is not at all a bad woman . . . Some of her
children — ^she has a whole collection of them — are really de-
Hghtful.”
Especially Casimir, the eldest son. A university student at
Warsaw, he had come home for vacation and had promptly
fallen in love with the pretty little Sklodovska who not only
could talk like a scholar but who could dance like a goddess. And
Manya, affectionate and sensitive and lonely, returned his love.
But there was to be no marriage between them. Gasimir's
mother refused to accept a governess into her family — forgetting
that she herself had been a governess before her marriage. For a
[ 2 ^ 9 ]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
time Manya played with the idea of suicide. "T have buried all
my plans, sealed and forgotten them,” she wrote to one of her
cousins. “The walls are too strong for the heads that try to break
them down ... I mean to say farewell to this contemptible
world. The loss will be small, and regret for me will be short . .
She got over her despondency, however. The Sklodovskis
were not the suicide type. She returned to her teaching and her
scrimping and continued to support Bronya at the Sorbonne.
The latter, thanks to Manya’s assistance and to an inborn talent
for enduring the pangs of hunger, succeeded in starving and
studying her way through to a medical degree. She married
Casimir Dluski, a fellow student in medicine, and was now
ready to conclude her half of the bargain with Manya. The
young governess was able at last to see the fulfilment of her most
ardent dream. The Sorbonne!
IV
Marie sklodovska — ^she had registered her first name in the
French manner — student in the Faculty of Science — age, 23 —
hair, ashen-blonde — ^personality, taciturn — ability, exceptional.
She always sat in the front row at the lectures; but the moment
the lectures were over, she glided out like a shadow. Her sad ex-
perience with the social conventions had planted within her an
aversion for all sorts of society. “Fine hair, fine eyes, fine figure
of a girl,” remarked the boys at the university. “But the trouble
is, she won’t talk to anybody.”
For four years “she led the life of a monk.” Refusing to be a
burden to her sister, she lived alone. She had hired, at fifteen
francs (about $3) a month, a sixth-floor attic in the Latin
Quarter. The only light came in through a loophole in the
slanted ceiling. The room had no heat and no water. In this
prison of a room she lived upon a general diet of bread and
butter and tea — ^with the luxury of an egg or a fruit thrown in
on the rarest of occasions. In the winter she put a handful of
[270]
MARIE CURIE
coal into a toy stove and sat doing her equations with numb
fingers long after the fire had gone out. Then, at about two in
Lhe morning, she crept into an iron bed with insufficient covers.
One day a classmate reported to the Dluskis that Manya had
fainted in front of her. Casimir hurried to her attic where he
found her at work on her next day’s lessons.
'‘What did you eat today?”
Manya looked up with an evasive smile. “Today? I don’t re-
member.”
“Come, come, Manya. No evasions. What did you eat todays”
“Oh, cherries . . . and everything ”
Finally he got the confession out of her. For the past twenty-
four hours she had lived on a handful of radishes and half a
pound of cherries. Much against her will he carried her off to
his house where Bronya fed her and rested her up for a few
days. And then, in spite of all the protestations of the Dluskis^
she returned to her attic and her hunger and her books.
She lived in the world of her books. And of her lectures. In
spite of her poverty and her hunger, she felt like an intrepid ex-
plorer adventuring over an unfamiliar sea. And she meant to
make every mile of it familiar as she kept journeying from day
to day to an ever expanding horizon. Physics, chemistry, mathe-
matics, poetry, music, astronomy — ^the entire circle of the earth
and the heavens had come within the range of her intellectuaJ
domain. But above all she was interested in her experiments. Sh€
regarded the laboratory as a delicate musical instrument upon
the keys of which, with the skillful fingers inherited from her
mother, she kept constantly seeking to combine old notes into
new tunes.
Her professors, delighted with her imagination and her en-
thusiasm and her skill, kept encouraging her to undertake new
researches. And one day, emboldened by her success, she de-
clared that she would carry her special researches not into one
but into two fields. She would try for a double master’s degree —
in physics and in mathematics.
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
And she succeeded. She passed first in the master’s examina-
tion in physics (1893), and second in the master’s examination
in mathematics (1894).
A brief vacation in Poland, and then back to Paris — and to
her second love affair. After her first unfortunate plunge into the
whirlpool of romantic passion, she had vowed to dedicate the
rest of her life to a single passion for science. She had no use
for men.
Ar.d at that time there lived in Paris a young man, Pierre
Curie, who had no use for women. He, too, had devoted his life
to the exclusive pursuit of science.
One day they met at the apartment of M. Kovalski, a Polish
professor of physics who was visiting Paris. “When I came in,”
wrote Marie, “Pierre Curie was standing in the window recess
near a door leading to the balcony. He seemed very young to me,
although he was then aged thirty-five. I was struck by the frank
expression of his eyes and by a slight appearance of carelessness
in his tall figure. I liked his slow, reflective words, his simplicity
and his smile, at once grave and youthful. We started to converse
on matters of science . . • and before we knew it we were
friends.”
Pierre Curie, the son of a French physician, had become a
bachelor of science at sixteen and a master of physics at eighteen.
When he met Marie, he was head of the labora’ory at the
Parisian School of Chemistry and Physics. His achie ements had
already placed him in the front rank of French scientists. He had
formulated the principle of symmetry in the structure of crystals.
Together with his brother Jacques he had discovered the im-
portant phenomenon of piezoelectricity — ^that is, the generation
of electricity by means of pressure. He had invented a new ap-
paratus for the precise measurement of minute quantities of
electricity. And he had constructed an ultra-sensitive instrument
— ^known as the Curie Scale — ^for checking the results of scientific
experiments.
For all these achievements he was receiving from the French
[272}
MARIE CURIE
State the miserable salary of three hundred francs (about $6o^
a month.
On this inadequate salary he timidly proposed marriage to
Mademoiselle Sklodovska; and Mademoiselle Sklodovska — ^with
equal timidity, it must be confessed — accepted.
Yet the marriage turned out to be not only a partnership of
genius but also a comradeship of love. After an unconventional
wedding without a lawyer or a priest — ^both of them were free-
thinkers — ^they enjoyed an equally unconventional honeymoon
bicycling over the country roads of the Ile-de-France. Then they
returned to Paris and settled down to the work which was to
bring glory to the name of Curie and healing to an a&icted
world.
V
Marie took care of the house, gave birth to a baby girl, then to
another, studied for her doctorate in physics, won a fellowship
with a monograph on the magnetization of tempered steel, and
spent all the rest of her time collaborating with her husband in
his experiments. The doctors warned her of a tubercular lesion
in the left lung — ^the Sklodovski family taint. They advised her
to go to a sanatorium. But Marie wouldn’t think of it. She was
too deeply absorbed in her laboratory work. She and Pierre had
become interested in the experiments of Henri Becquerel. This
eminent French physicist, while examining the salts of a “rare
metal,” uranium, had discovered that these salts emitted a ray
which apparently could penetrate opaque objects. A compound
of uranium, which he had placed on a photographic plate sur-
rounded by black paper, had made "^an impression on the plate
through the paper. This, so far as we know, was the first human
observation of the penetrating quality of certain strange types
of rays.
What was the nature of this mysterious property of penetra-
tion through opaque objects? And whence came this peculiar
[ 275 ]
jblVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
energy? These questions exercised a strong fascination upon the
minds of Mane and Pierre Curie. Here was a subject for originai
study^ a thesis worthy of a doctor’s degree at the Sorbonne !
Such was the enthusiastic yet humble beginning of the research
that led to the discovery of radium. Marie had started out on the
road to an ordinary doctorate. She found at the end of the road
— the Nobel Prize in Physics.
But the traveling of the road was long and arduous and heart-
breaking. It took a man and a woman of supreme imagination
and of supreme courage to go on unfalteringly to the end.
Almost from the first they encountered insurmountable diffi-
culties — and they surmounted them. The laboratory that the
director of the School of Physics gave them for their experiments
was an old and dilapidated woodshed. In this damp and cold
shanty of a workroom — in the winter the temperature of the
laboratory averaged about 44"^ — ^the consumptive little pioneer
and her husband plunged resolutely into the unknown. With
their pitiably inadequate apparatus they examined the nature
of uranium and found that the mysterious radiation of this metal
was an atomic property — ^a scientific discovery which years later
(in 1945) was to lead to the invention of the atomic bomb. And
then the light of a great thought fell upon Marie. Perhaps uranium
was not the only chemical element that possessed the power of
irradiation. Perhaps there were other substances with even greater
powers of ‘"penetrating the impenetrable.” She must try and
see . , .
And so another and even more daring venture into uncharted
seas. Madame Curie took up all the known chemical bodies and
submitted them to a rigorous test. And before long she discovered
what she was after. Uranium was not the only element with that
mysterious power of irradiation. Another element, thorium, pos-
sessed the same power in about the same degree. To this power
Madame Curie now gave the name of radioactivity — ^the active
and penetrating property of certain types of rays.
But this was only the beginning of her research. In her exami-
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
far beyond the Curie pocketbook. It was a problem that seemed
beyond solution.
But they solved it. If the new element, they reasoned, existed
in the pitchblende and was yet different from uranium, then it
could be isolated from the residue of the pitchblende after the
uranium had been extracted. This residue was regarded as al-
most worthless. The Curies could have considerable quantities of
it for little more than the cost of transportation.
And so these “queer"’ scientists, to everybody’s amusement,
began to order tons upon tons of “rubbish” to be shipped to their
woodshed. And when this “rubbish” arrived they began to throw
it, shovel by shovel, into an old cast-iron stove with a rusty pipe.
For four years they kept at it like a couple of stokers in the hold
of a ship — shoveling, gasping, coughing at the noxious fumes,
forgetful of their discomfort and intent upon a single thought —
to lure the secret of the new element out of the blazing metal.
And finally they lured out the secret — ^two secrets. For instead
of one they found two new elements — a substance which they
named polonium after Marie’s native country, and another sub^
stance which they called radium.
The nature of polonium was amazing enough. Its radioactiv-
ity was ever so much more powerful than that of uranium. But
the nature of radium was the eighth great wonder of the world.
For its power of radiation was found to exceed that of uranium
by one and a half million per cent.
VI
It was customary for the recipients of the Nobel Prize to call
for it in person at Stockholm. But the Curies were unable to
make the journey. They were too ill. Quietly, modestly, humbly
they went on with their work — and with their privations. They
spent aU their money on their further experiments and remained
gloriously forgetful of their personal interests. When the thera-
peutic value of radium was established — ^it had been found
[276]
MARIE CURIE
effective, among other things, in the treatment of cancer — ^their
friends urged upon them the necessity of patenting the process
of extracting radium. To do so would have meant considerable
wealth to the Curies, since radium was valued at $150,000 a
gram. But they refused to derive any income from their discov-
ery. “Radium is an instrument of mercy and it belongs to the
world.”
They refused not only profits but honors as well. All they
asked of the world was to give them a good workroom for their
experiments. When the dean of the Sorbonne wrote to Pierre
that the Minister had proposed his name for the Legion of
Honor, Pierre — ^seconded by Marie — ^replied as follows: “Please
be so kind as to thank the Minister and to inform him that I do
not feel the slightest need of being decorated, but that I am in
the greatest need of a laboratory.”
On one occasion, however, Pierre did allow his name to be
presented for distinction. His scientific colleagues had insisted
that he become a candidate for the Academy of Science — ^not so
much for the sake of the honor itself as for the opportunity it
would bring him to secure a professorship at the Soibonne. And
a laboratory.
Reluctantly he started out upon his round of visits to the mem-
bers of the Academy. It was the regular custom for every candi-
date to make these calls and to “drum up” his own qualifications
for the honor. Here is how one of the Parisian journalists de-
scribes Pierre Curie’s “campaign” for the Academy: “To climb
staffs, ling, have himself annoxmced, explain why he had come
— all this sordidness filled him with shame in spite of himself. But
what was even worse, he had to set forth his distinctions, de-
clare the good opinion he had of himself and boast of his knowl-
edge and of his achievements — ordeals which seemed to him be-
yond human endurance. Consequently he extolled his opponent
sincerely and at length, saying that M. Amagat was much better
qualified than he. Curie, to enter the Academy . . .”
The Academy elected M. Amagat.
[277]
living biographies of great scientists
Pierre Curie was highly successful in his efforts to escape from
fame. So, too, was Marie. Her simple disguise for avoiding
recognition was to remain undisguised. Nobody at first sight
would have suspected that the young peasant woman in her un-
assuming black dress was the celebrated winner of the Nobel
Pnze. One day an American reporter, hot on the trail of the
Curies, had heard that they were spending their vacation in Le
Pouldu, a fishing village of Brittany. Arriving at the village, he
inquired his way to the Curie cottage. He found a rather unas-
suming young woman sitting barefoot on the doorstep.
“Are you the housekeeper in this place?’^
“Yes.’’
“Is the lady inside?”
“No, she is out.”
“Do you expect her in soon?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Could you tell me something intimate about her?” asked the
reporter as he sat down on the doorstep.
“Nothing,” replied Marie, “except one message that Madame
Curie told me to convey to reporters: Be less inquisitive about
people^ and more inquisitive about ideas/^
VII
Finally Pierre Curie was accepted into the society of his inferior
— and therefore envious — ^fellow scientists. “I find myself in the
Academy without having desired to be there and without the
Academy’s desire to have me.”
After several meetings with his colleagues he wrote to a
friend: “I have not yet discovered what is the purpose of the
Academy.”
Yet it served one good purpose — ^it enabled Pierre to get an
appointment to the Sorbonne. Together with the appointment
came the offer of a well equipped laboratory. The lifelong dream
of the Curies was about to be fulfilled.
[278]
MARIE CURIE
And then, one rainy morning in April, 1906, Pierre left his
home to visit his publisher. A few hours later they brought his
lifeless body to Marie. He had slipped on the wet pavement, and
a heavy truck had run over him.
Marie’s happiness was at an end. But not her work. She ac-
cepted an offer to assume her husband’s professorship at the
Sorbonne — ^it was the first time in French history that a position
in higher education had been granted to a woman. She went on
with her experiments in Pierre’s new laboratory, of which she
had now become the director. She took care of her children. She
prepared papers on her researches. And every night, before going
to bed, she wrote an intimate account of her thoughts to her dear
departed. It was as if she were writing a letter to someone still
alive.
‘‘I am offered the post of successor to you, my Pierre; your
course and the direction of your laboratory. I have accepted. I
don’t know whether this is good or bad . . .”
*‘My Pierre, I think of you without end. My head is bursting
with it and my reason is troubled. I can not understand that I
am to live henceforth without you , .
‘‘My little Pierre, I want to tell you that the laburnum is in
flower, the wistaria, the hawthorn and the iris are beginning —
you would have loved all that . .
“I no longer love the sun or the flowers. The sight of them
makes me suffer. I feel better on dark days like the day of your
death, and if I have not learned to hate fine weather it is because
my children have need of it . .
It was for her children’s sake that she went on — and for
humanity’s sake. A little more work to lessen the sufferings of
her fellows. In 1911, when she received the Nobel Prize for the
second time, she accepted it merely as another opportunity to
widen the scope of her researches. The healing power of radium
— this now w'as the paramount quest of her life. When the World
War of 1914 broke out, she organized and personally supervised
a number of X-ray outfits for the treatment of wounded soldiers
[279]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Throughout the length and breadth of the country she journeyed
— ^an angel of mercy with a beautiful white face and with pained
and acid-bitten fingers.
In spite of her fatigue and her pain and her sorrow she was
always ready with her encouraging smile and her gentle word.
^‘Will it hurt?” asked the frightened soldiers when they saw the
formidable X-ray apparatus. ‘‘Not at all,” was her invariable
reply. ‘Tt’s just like taking a photograph.”
The war was over. Travels, distinctions, interviews, medals,
lectures, banquets — and labor and sorrow. And, to the very end,
an “incurable inaptitude” for material success. “Dreamers,” she
said, “do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it.”
She was now approaching the end of her dream. “Ah, how
tired I am!” she murmured as she came home from her labora-
tory one day. The next morning she couldn’t rise from her bed.
The doctors who came to examine her were unable to diagnose
her disease. It resembled influenza, tuberculosis, pemicioui
anemia — ^yet it was none of these. Not until after her death did
they discover the real nature of her illness. It was “radium
poisoning” — ^the gradual decay of the vital organs through a
lifetime of excessive radiation.
Madame Curie had died a martyr to her work.
[280]
BANTING
Great Scientific Contribution by Banting
Discovered the value of insulin Wrote various papers on this
in the treatment of dia- discovery,
betes.
Frederick Grant Banting
1891-1941
The shells burst under the impulse of a heavy bombard-
ment. The Canadian regulars were giving the Boche as much
as they took. Men stared grotesquely from the mud at Cambrai
— ^wanting eyes, wanting limbs, wanting souls. Bodies lay pro-
miscuously with alien bodies in the last embrace of death,
crushed and twisted beyond recognition. . . .
The blood trickled in a little stream from the lips of young
Fred Banting. He was breathing hard, dreaming fitfully. In
his delirium he imagined himself bending over the hoe on his
father’s farm in Alliston, Ontario. The sun was hot, frying his
feet in the soil; the perspiration streamed over his face. There,
now! He paused to wipe his lips with the back of his arm.
Gradually his eyes cleared. This was no farm. This was a
hospital. He was stiff on his back. Around him lay boys and
men in pain.
‘^Hello, son. We’ve got to operate.” It was the army doctor’s
voice.
Banting turned over on his side. “You’re not going to take
my arm away from me. Not if I can help it, sir!”
They might as well tell him the truth. He was serving with
[283]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
the army medical corps of the 44th battalion. These boys knew
how to take it.
'‘We must amputate, my boy. Otherwise we may not be
able to save your life.'’
"Oh no, not my arm FlI risk the chance of dying,"
A stubborn, fighting fool. Those were the words that de-
scribed him best. Back in 1915 he had left his medical course
at the University of Toronto and had rushed off to enlist as
a private. But they had ordered him back to his education.
He would be more serviceable to his country with his medical
degree. In 1916 he had joined up again as a doctor. You
couldn't argue with these farm lads. They were not used to
being answered back when they did their thinking in the fields.
They stood on their rights as tenaciously as they rode their
plows.
"You see. Doctor, Fm a surgeon myself and I need all the
limbs God gave me for the service."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders and moved on to other
beds, to other hospitals filled with ruined daring men.
Fred Banting "risked his chance" — and lived.
II
He returned home from the war as quietly as he had left. He
entered the Toronto Children's Hospital as resident surgeon.
It was fun patching up sick bodies, giving human beings another
chance at life. In Flanders he had seen the work of a mighty
hand of destruction — ^inflicting wounds, but never healing them,
"It is like the ingenious technique of a Great Surgeon gone mad."
But, after all, Fred Banting was a physician and not a
philosopher. He couldn't afford the time to bother about the
problems of the Higher Operating Room. He was far too busy
with his own problems. And so he merely shrugged his shoulders
and put together the bits of broken bones and tied the muscles
^Hd straightened out the legs and the arms as best he could.
[284]
BANTING
And then he decided to set up for himself. He moved to
London, Ontario, hung out his shingle, and waited. Within
the first thirty days only one patient rang the bell. Banting’s
income for the month amounted to exactly four dollars. ^‘Seems
Fm not going to be successful,” he smiled grimly. ^^But at
any rate I’m fool enough to be stubborn.”
Whatever happened, he would remain stubborn until the
day he died.
Ill
The western Ontario medical school accepted his services
as ^‘'part time” lecturer in pharmacology. It was a field of which
he had but a limited knowledge. In a literal sense he regarded
himself as a student rather than as a teacher. One day he was
called upon to prepare a lecture on diabetes. All over the
world there were millions of diabetics who “tried in vain to
live by starving.” For diabetes was listed as “one of the fatal
diseases — ^remedy unknown.” Banting secured the literature on
the subject. He read a number of articles, prepared his notes
and turned in for the night. But he was unable to rest. Wave
after wave of drowsiness swept over him, only to recede before
the ever recurring question* “Why is it that some bodies,
unlike all others, are unable to burn the sugar content in
their blood and to transform it into fuel?” It was due, of course,
to a defect in their pancreas — ^that elongated gland which
secreted the fermentive juices and which digested the food into
bodily energy. But what caused this defect? Take the case of
Joe Gilchrist, for example. He was one of the millions starving
to death as a result of this mysterious disease. Joe Gilchrist was
his friend, and a doctor like himself. They had played marbles
and wrestled and attended medical school together. And now
he was slowly dying, helpless, feeling the acetone odor on his
breath. . . .
“Oh well, there’s no help for it, I suppose.” And yet . . .
1^85]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
“Scattered on the healthy pancreas are dark spots like little
islands.” They must be there for a precise reason. Yes, but
precisely for what reason? Just what was the nature of these
pancreatic spots? Again and again the doctors had tried to
isolate and to analyze them — ^but in vain. They had noticed
only one definite fact — that the “island spots” of a patient
who had died from diabetes were found to have shriveled up
to a fraction of their normal size, while those of a patient who
had died from other causes were found to have retained their
original size. Such was the fact As to the reason for this fact,
nobody could explain it.
Banting tossed and turned that night, as the problem tan-
talized him. He was stubborn, terribly stubborn. Those mystenous
islands, he felt, contained the solution to the problem of
diabetes. And he meant to find this solution.
Suddenly an idea set his brain humming. For a few moments
he attempted to “spark the gap” between the idea and the
delicious wave of drowsiness that was descending upon him.
And then he drifted off to sleep.
The following morning he arrived at the office of his superior.
“Professor Macleod,” he said, “I would like ten dogs and an
assistant.”
The shrewd old professor looked up from his desk. “Are you
bent on a surgical experiment? I think we can grant your re-
quest.”
“It has nothing to do with surgery, sir. IVe a hunch I can
Induce the fatality of diabetes.”
Professor Macleod laughed good-naturedly. “Every year at
the spring fever season some young doctor comes to me with
a cure for diabetes.”
“I believe I can find a way “to check it,” persisted Banting.
“At least I want to try. I would like to conduct experiments on
the pancreas.”
“The world’s greatest physiologists have been experimenting
for years on the pancreas. And what is the sum total of their
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BANTING
achievements^ TheyVe concocted a starvation diet to torture the
victim slowly to death/’
“Fm stubborn. Doctor Macleod.”
“Have you had the necessary training to conduct experi-
ments in physiology? To speak bluntly, what do you know about
diabetic research?”
“Practically nothing, sir. That is why I shall need a specialist
to assist me.”
“Very well, Banting, you may go ahead.”
IV
When banting’s friends and associates heard of his plans
they begged him not to abandon his surgical opportunities for
a fantastic experiment. At first he listened to them. He re-
turned to his classroom in London, Ontario — ^for one winter.
At the approach of spring he stood in a stuffy little alcove
at the Medical Building in Toronto — “a self-appointed re-
searcher, untitled, unpaid.” He had taken down his shingle,
disposed of his surgical instruments, sold his furniture. For he
knew that his research was not to be the matter of a few weeks.
His equipment was worse than inadequate — ^it was simply
nonexistent. His only laboratory was a bench. And his training
was no better than his equipment. Never in his life had he
undertaken an original experiment.
Nevertheless it was with high hopes that he faced his as-
sistant — Charles Herbert Best — a medical student barely out
of his teens. This youngster had shown aptitude in chemistry.
He would know how to analyze the sugar content in the blood
and the urine. And Banting himself would do all the necessary
surgical work on the dogs.
Enthusiastically the two young men set to work. Fred Ban-
ting had read in a medical journal that if you tie off a pancreas
duct, the digestive juice cells “shrivel up and die.” This gave
[287]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
him an idea. He would got the digestive juices of the pancreas
out of the way and he would thus isolate and study the mys-
terious “insular spots” which apparently contained the ke)
to the solution of diabetes. “I have a theory, Charlie, that the
island cells supply the fuel which bums up the excess of sugar
in the healthy body. When this fuel fails, the sugar multiplies
and the body becomes diabetic.” His logic seemed to him in-
fallible. “Our job, therefore, is to tie oflp the pancreatic ducts of
our dogs, to wait several weeks for the degeneration of the
juices, and then to remove and to analyze the residue — or the
mup — of the island spots.”
They started experimenting on their dogs. From ten the
number had risen to ninety-one. But still no results. And then,
when they were experimenting on their ninety-second dog, a
miracle happened. The dog, whose pancreas they had removed,
lay dying of diabetes. A shot of the “island” extract, and the
sugar in his blood began to decrease. A few hours later the
dog was on his feet, barking and wagging his tail.
Banting was jubilant. He had discovered the elixir of life
for diabetics. He had been right in his theory. It was the extract
from the pancreatic “islands” that burned up the poison of
excessive sugar in the body. He called this extract isletin — ^which
means island chemical.
Their experiments were at an end, thought the two young
scientists. But they were mistaken. Their miracle proved to be
short-lived. Within twenty days the dog was dead of excessive
sugar.
What had happened? They hadn’t given the dog enough
isletin. They hadn’t been able to secure enough. This “island
extract” was as unattainable in large quantities as the rarest
of minerals. “We’ve been experimenting with an elixir of our
dreams.”
But Banting was still hopeful of ultimate success. One day
as he sat in his laboratory his thoughts went back to his father’s
farm in Ontario. A hard, patient, stubborn life — ^this constant
[m]
BANTING
succession of sowing and weeding and harvesting and looking
after the cattle . . .
That was it — ^the cattle! He knew now where he would get
his isletin in sufficient quantities to prolong the life of diabetics.
He would extract the necessary juices from the unborn calves.
The pancreas of an animal in its embryonic stage consisted
almost entirely of ‘Island spots/’ The other digestive juice cells
had not as yet developed beyond the rudimentary stage. Here
was a great gift to humanity — ^in the bodies of unborn cattle.
And of slaughtered cattle. The pancreatic glands of the
animals killed in the shambles had been thrown away as so
much rubbish. Now this “rubbish” would become an important
factor in the saving of life, thought Banting.
And he was right. With the help of the isletin extracted from
the unborn and the slaughtered cattle he succeeded in keeping
diabetic dogs alive for an indefinite period. Banting had dis-
covered a positive check if not a complete cure for diabetes in
animals. There remained but a single — and fateful — question:
Would isletin check diabetes in human beings?
One day, as he was walking in the street. Banting came across
his old classmate, Joe Gilchrist. The poor fellow was rapidly
“wasting away in streams of sugar.” He was emaciated and
pallid and hopeless, for he had reached the last stages of the
disease.
Banting looked at his friend. “Hello, Jee.”
The answer came in a flat, dispirited voice. “Hello, Fred.”'
“I’d like you to come over to my laboratory, Joe. I’ve been
busy with some experiments that will interest you.” Fred Ban-
ting’s feelings, however, did not reflect the confidence of his
voice as he led Joe Gilchrist to the laboratory. He gave his
friend an injection of glucose, and then followed it with a
shot of isletin. “Let us see now whether the extract will bum
up the glucose.”
Two hours passed slowly. Gilchrist breathed into the Douglas
“test bag.” Banting’s assistant tested the sick man’s breath and
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LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
looked quietly at Banting. And Banting knew Best’s message.
There was no sign of change in Joe. He wasn’t burning the
sugar they had fed him. His breath was heavy and it came
in gasps. Banting could not bear to look into his friend’s eyes.
He rose, gave Best some instructions and left the laboratory.
He boarded a train and sped north to Ontario. Here he would
spend a few days with his folks and bury his mind in the
stillness of the farm. But the click of the wheels over the rails
pounded into his consciousness with terrible force. The ticking
away of the moments of a man dying from too much sugar . . .
The telephone rang in the Banting farmhouse. It was Joe
Gilchrist at the other end. He w^as talking rapidly, excitedly, to
Banting. There was a cheerful lift to his voice. '‘Right after you
left yesterday I started to breathe easily. My head cleared. My
appetite returned. Today, to be sure, my legs are dragging again.
I’m tired, but I’m not worried. I’m coming back for another
shot of that extract . . . The elixir of life . ,
V
When professor maoleod heard of Banting’s success he im-
mediately gave up all his other duties and took personal charge
of the experiments. He changed the name isletin to its Latinized
equivalent, insulin. Like wildfire the news spread that a check
for diabetes had at last been found.
Professor Macleod came before the Association of American
Physicians and read an official report of the experiments that
had been conducted in "my medical laboratories.” At the con-
clusion of the report a voice from the audience called out:
"We move that the Association tender to Dr Macleod and his
assistants a rising vote expressing its appreciation of his achieve-
ment.”
Fred Banting was not a bit concerned over this misplaced
honor. But he was very much concerned over the condition of
his patients. Crowds of them were being brought into Toronto
BANTING
begging for insulin to save their life. But there was not yet
enough to go around. Nor was the method of its injection as
yet perfected. Joe Gilchrist was still dying. Banting pleaded for
money and more money to carry on with his experiments.
He now did most of his work in the diabetic ward of the
Christie Street Hospital for Returned Soldiers. Here he walked
from bed to bed and injected the precious extract into the veins
of those who were most hopelessly sick. The patients suffered
no illusions. They knew they were taking terrible risks^ for in-
sulin was a two-edged sword. In large doses it lowered the
sugar content of the blood to such a degree that the patient
suffered a violent shock, fell into convulsions and died. In
order to avoid this shock it was necessary to balance the lower-
ing of the sugar with an injection of glucose. But as yet the
adjustment of this delicate balance was a matter of trial and
error.
The soldiers, however, were not afraid. Expecting death in
any case, they were willing to offer themselves as the objects of
his experiments. ‘‘There’s always the chance that this time it
may work.”
Joe Gilchrist was chief of the “rabbits” for Banting’s ex-
periments. He, too, was now a patient at the hospital. The
other patients called him Captain, Whatever is good enough for
Captain is good enough for us.
And little by little Banting was getting results. His “boys’*
were eating better, were gaining weight. Reports from other
clinics began to pour into headquarters. Fifty diabetics in ad-
vanced stages had been given insulin. Ten of them had been
carried into the emergency ward in coma. All ten had revived
from the coma. Forty-six patients were reported improved. Six
of them were almost completely recovered. “Fred Banting is
moving in the right direction at last.”
And in the nick of time to preserve the lives of such men as
Edng George V of England, Hugh Walpole, George Eastman,
H, G. Wells and Dr George R. Minot. Thanks to the insulin
[29O
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
treatment. Dr Minot was spared to the world for the discovery
of an equally great gift of mercy — ^the liver treatment for the fatal
disease of pernicious anemia.
At last Banting received his due recompense — ^the Nobel Prize
for Medicine (1922). This prize was awarded jointly to him
and to Professor Macleod. As soon as Banting received the prize
money he sent half of it to his assistant, Charlie Best. In the
telegram that accompanied the check he wrote: “You are with
me in my share — always.'^
VI
After the battle of flanders Fred Banting had received the
iron cross for “coolness under fire.” He now proved himself
equally cool under a different sort of fire — a barrage of dis-
tinctions and honors. The Canadian Government organized the
Banting Research Foundation to carry on his work and granted
him an annuity of fifteen hundred pounds. The citizens of
Toronto built an institute (1930) in his name. King George V
created him (1934) a Knight Commander of the Order of the
British Empire. The Royal Society named him to a Fellowship
(1935) for his “outstanding contribution” to the knowledge of
diabetes. “All I know about diabetes,” he remarked, “can be
told in about fifteen minutes.” He took all his honors with a
smUe and went modestly on with his work.
He had now extended his work to other fields. He had en-
tered upon a series of experiments on the suprarenal gland and
on the causes of cancer. There were so many problems still
unexplored. How could he rest? “It is not within the power of
the properly constituted human mind to be satisfied.” Once an
answer comes to a question, one must search in its constituents
for a new question, for the blessed realm of a new anxiety^
where at the journey's end new medals may be won., Not that
the medals are worth anything once they are received. “The
greatest joy in life is the getting, not the having” — ^the con-
[292]
BANTING
sciousness of an important job well done. And what if others
have taken the credit for your work? This only proves the
importance of the work. ‘Tt is not the thinker that counts in
human progress, but the thought.” The thinker dies, but the
thought lives on.
When the hours of patient searching were over. Banting
took a brush and canvas and tramped over the countryside
sketching the scenes before him. For painting was his means
of relaxation. And he was clever at it. “Banting is one of
Canada’s most exciting amateur artists,” remarked his colleague,
Best. For many years he had apprenticed himself stubbornly
to a mastery of landscape painting. It was a labor of love, this
recording of his affection for the soil. He liked to paint nature
in her winter as well as in her summer moods. He enjoyed
tramping over the fields on his snowshoes while the winds
whistled in from the gulf and Quebec was a-tingle with the
"old. At noon he stopped to build a fire, thawing his hands over
his tea and warming his mind with his thoughts. And then,
when his fingers made contact with the paint, they were alive
with power. It was such fun to escape from the stuffy little
cubbyhole of his experiments to this laboratory of the outdoors.
So good to breathe this peaceful air . . .
And then, a sudden halt to his peaceful experiments and
his painting. The autumn of 1939. The second World War had
broken out. In an old shabby suit spotted with cigarette ashes
he turned up at a hospital base in Ottawa and asked for Colonel
Rae, the officer in charge. “I’m too old to fight, sir, but I’d like
to join up with your medical unit with the lowest ranking you
can give me.”
They gave him the rank of captain and he protested violently.
“I would much prefer to be a private.” They raised him to the
rank of major and he protested still more violently. Finally,
when they threatened to raise him to the rank of colonel, he
consented to serve as major. “A man can try his best,” he said
with a resigned smile, “even in an exalted post.”
[293}
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
VII
He was forty-nine. In the darkness of the world’s autumn,
once more a stubborn groping research to combat a malignant
disease — an assault on human freedom. He aided in establish-
ing and in classifying reserv'es of blood to supply transfusions
for the troops and the civilians under fire. He took several trips
to England as medical liaison officer. He was appointed chair-
man of a committee organized for the purpose of correlating
the medical research work of the Canadian and the British
armies.
In February 1941 he took off in a bomber for London —
the stubborn capital that was keeping its good right arm flung
high in a challenge when the Nazi buccaneers of the air
threatened to amputate it.
There was much to be done for her — the stubborn lady
London. Fred Banting was on the threshold of a new devotion,
a new life of service. Now he was high above Newfoundland,
headed toward the sea, busy wdth a special problem. Those
young men of the Royal Air Force who took steep drops in
dive bombers, was there not a way to keep them from losing
their brief moments of consciousness as they pulled out into
the higher altitudes again?
His head nodded drowsily. He looked down over the sil-
houetted landscape. It was the motionless face of his mother, con-
cealed in a shroud. But he knew her beauty — ^he had often
transferred to his canvas the shadows of her features and the
sunlight in her eyes, ‘T shall devote much more time to painting
when the war ends . .
The radio operator rushed over to him. “Orders from the
pilot. Sir Frederick. You must bail out at once!”
An outstretched wing of the ship hit an old tree. One of the
landing wheels crashed through the frozen ice of a lake. The
wreckage of the plane became imbedded in five feet of snow.
{294]
BANTING
The injured pilot stumbled over to the cabin. The radio
operator was dead. Banting lay quiet with his eyes wide open
and the blood streaming from a gash in his head. The pilot
tried to rouse him. His lips moved. With a great effort of the will
he began to speak — rapidly, nervously, as if he were at his
desk dictating memoranda to his secretary or in the classroom
delivering a lecture. The pilot produced a pencil and paper and
pretended to take down the notes. But he couldn't make head
or tail of them. He knew that this was the effort of a great
mind to record its final message — perhaps a new formula for
the stamping out of another disease. But the formula would
never reach the world. . . .
Night fell and Banting passed for a few hours into a fitful
sleep. With the coming of the dawn he awoke, lifted his head
and continued to speak. Intermittently he fell asleep, then
struggled back to consciousness and kept on dictating his in-
coherent notes.
The pilot realized that he must get help and get it soon,
or Doctor Banting would not live through the day. Feebly he
stumbled through a wilderness of rock and bush and ice. The
wind blew into his face and stopped his forward progress after
a pitiably short advance. His swollen legs were numb with the
cold. He turned around and crawled back to the plane. Doctor
Banting had somehow freed himself from the wreckage and had
•struggled into the open, five feet away.
This was the last of his stubborn acts. He was silent now.
[295]
Great Scientific Contributions by Einstein
Formulated the theory of rela-
tivity.
Established a mathematical
basis for the structure of
the universe.
Replaced the ‘‘gra\itationaI at-
traction*’ theory of New-
ton with the theory of a
‘‘gravitational field in the
time-space continuum.”
Books and Treatises :
Principle of Relativity,
Time, Space and Gravitation.
Ether and Relativity.
On the Method of Theoretical
Physics.
Albert Einstein
1879 -
One day his father brought him a compass. It was a small
toy to amuse the child. Albert trembled with excitement as he
gazed upon the “magic’’ needle turning toward the north. He
saw before him not a plaything but a miracle. He was too
young to understand the principle of magnetism, yet instinctively
he felt that he was standing upon the threshold of an en-
chanted world.
It was the same way with the little fellow when he played
the violin. His eyes glistened, and his hand shook far too pas-
sionately for a healthy youngster. It was the music that so
agitated him. Very often he would stand as if in a trance while
hii^ mother played a Mozart or a Beethoven sonata on the
piano. But when the talk turned to politics and people spoke of
Bismarck and the rise of the German Empire, Albert would grow
frightened and leave the room.
He was a queer child. Not much like the son of an electrical
engineer. One day a regiment of the Kaiser’s soldiers marched
through the streets of Munich and “all the good Germans”
flocked to the windows to cheer. The children especially were
fascinated at the sight of the flashing helmets and the arrogant
im]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
goose-step of the soldiers. But Albert Einstein shuddered. He
despised and feared these ''fighting monsters.’’ He begged his
mother to take him away to a land where he would never have
to become one of them. And his mother^ to quiet her son,
promised that she would.
A queer child indeed. He had none of the enthusiasms, and
little of the mentality, of other children. His father was pained
at the reports from Albert’s teachers. They told him that the
boy was mentally slow, unsociable, "adrift forever in his foolish
dreams.” They nicknamed him Pater Langweil — Father Bore.
But Albert was unaware of the anxiety of his elders. He felt
very keenly ahve in a world full of wonder. And he probed
into this world all by himself. He needed no other company.
He composed songs and set them to words in praise of God.
He played in his garden or walked in the streets singing his
songs aloud. He was incredibly happy.
But soon he was to learn bitter things. At home he had been
brought up in the Jewish faith. At the state school he was in-
structed in the Catholic religion. And the heart of the child
found nothing irreconcilable between the Old Testament and
the New. They were both beautiful poems, sad and true, these
stories about the sufferings of the Prophets and the martyrdom
of the Saviour. He loved both stories with an equal fervor, just
as he loved his compass and his songs. But one day the teacher
brought into the classroom a large nail. And he told the
students that this was the nail with which Jesus had been
crucified. And suddenly all eyes were turned upon Albert, as
if he had crucified Jesus. He saw the faces of his fellow students
transfixed with a strange kind of hatred. And he couldn’t under-
stand it. His face blushing with shame — for the others, not for
himself — ^he rose from his seat and rushed out of the room.
He was alone, save for the companionship of his books. He
formed a friendship across the centuries with Euclid, Newton,
Spinoza, Descartes — ^mathematicians and philosophers whose
works he had mastered before he was fifteen. And he adored
[500I
EINSTEIN
the poets and the musicians — ^Heine, Schiller, Goethe, Beethoven,
Mozart and Bach. Here was a world of order, of harmony,
of law — a logic that reacted as a balm upon a sensitive nature
bewildered by the illogic of his teachers and his fellow pupils.
When Albert was in the secondary school he found it more
necessary than ever to ‘‘drown his solitude in his books.” For
his father had lost his business and had moved his family to Milan
in the hope that the change of scenery might baring back his
financial health. Albert was left alone in Munich.
On his vacations, however, he visited Milan and found the
Italian atmosphere congenial to his dreaming soul. He renounced
his German citizenship. But he didn’t apply for Italian papers.
He desired to remain unattached — a citizen of the world.
His father was annoyed at his eccentricities. The time had
come for Albert to shoulder the responsibilities of a man. He
was already sixteen. Herr Einstein urged him to forget his
"‘philosophical nonsense” and to apply himself to the “sensible
trade” of electrical engineering.
Albert was desolate. His very instincts rebelled at the idea
of his becoming a tradesman. But how could he stand up
against the whole world?
He got the answer to this problem one day when he read an
essay of Emerson’s. “If a man plant himself indomitably on
his instincts, the world will come round to him.”
II
Albert’s stubbornness won out. His father allowed him to
specialize in mathematics. He took the entrance examinations
for the Zurich Polytechnic Academy — and failed. He was de-
ficient in his knowledge of foreign languages.
Back to the secondary school and his study of syntax. After
a, brief and intensive application to his prepositions and his
participles he presented himself once more as a candidate for
the Zurich Polytechnic Academy. This time he was successful.
[50^]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
His plajQS had now matured. He would prepare himself
for a teaching position in mathematics and in physics Vora-
ciously he read every book he could find on these subjects.
But his intellectual appetite had extended to several of the
kindred fields in philosophy and in science. He yielded to the
spell of Ernst Mach’s positivism and of Darwin’s evolution.
He absorbed the utopian economics of socialism. He admired
the methodical pessimism of Schopenhauer and the methodical
optimism of Kant. And always, as in childhood, he developed
his intellectual dreams within the framework of his passion for
music. He visited the Music Hall and listened to the magic of
Joachim’s violin. And then he retired to his lodging and im-
provised on his own violin until late into the night.
And thus he finished his studies and received his teacher’s
certificate. But he received no teacher’s appointment. He was
a Jew. Wherever he applied for a position, he was met with
the same evasive answer: “Personally I have no objection; but
there are others, you see . .
For a while he resorted — ^unsuccessfully — ^to private tutoring,
and then he got a clerical job at the Swiss patent office in
Berne. Hour after hour he bent over his desk adding his figures
and dreaming of the stars. In his spare moments he covered
his note paper with complicated mathematical formulas. But
when he heard the footsteps of his employer, he threw the paper
into the basket. Dr Halle, kindly as he was, had no -sympathy for
the “speculative nonsense” of his^ young employee.
But to Einstein these studies of his spare moments were any-
thing but speculative. His abstract formulas—one of them held
within it the secret of the atomic bomb — ^had taken on the texture
of reality. He had found, he believed, a new key to the riddle of
the universe. But he confided this belief to only a few of his
intimates — and to Mileva Marie, his Serbian schoolmate whom
he had made his wife. “I have been trying to solve the problem
of space and time.”
When he finished what he regarded as the correct solution to
[302]
EINSTEIN
the problem, he brought it into the office of the Annalen der
Pkysik, ‘T would be happy/’ he said timidly to the editor, ‘"if
you could find the room to publish this in your paper.”
The editor found the room, and the obscure clerk of the Swiss
patent office became one of the most famous scientists in the
world.
Ill
Einstein was twenty-six when he solved the problem of celes-
tial harmony. It was the solution of the artist as well as of the
scientist. He had tried to analyze the pattern of the stars just as
the musician analyzes the pattern of the sonata. How are the
parts interrelated in order to produce the concordance of the
whole?
All the earlier attempts to solve the structure of the universe,
observed Einstein, had been based upon a false assumption. The
scientists had supposed that whatever seemed true to them^ look-
ing out upon the universe from their own point of view, from
their own relative position in their own little comer of the world,
must necessarily be true for everybody else^ looking out upon the
universe from every other point of view. But actually — asserted
Einstein — ^there is no such absolute truth. The same landscape
presents different faces to different people looking upon it from
different vantage points. It is one thing to the pedestrian, quite
another thing to the motorist, and still another thing to the
aviator. Every experience is relative to the person who undergoes
that particular experience. The only objective reality in the uni-
verse is that which constitutes a combination of every possible
point of experience. Absolute truth can be ascertained only
through the sum total of all relative obsei'rations. This is but a
mathematical way of restating the Spinozist doctrine that the
Mind of God is the combination of all human minds encom-
passed within the framework of eternity — sub specie aeternitatis,
Einstein was a thoroughgoing disciple of Spinoza.
[505]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
But not of Newton. Contrary to the doctrine of Newton that
everything tends naturally to remain at rest, Einstein declared
that everything is actually in a state of motion. But the velocities
of the various moving bodies of the universe, he explained, are
relative to one another. To this relativity of motion, however,
there is one exception — the constant velocity of light. This
velocity — about 186,000 miles a second — is the maximum speed
that we know. It is the one unchanging factor in aU our equa-
tions about the relative speed of moving bodies.
The law of relativity, declared Einstein, applies not only to
the speed but also to the direction of a moving body. Suppose we
drop a stone from a tower to the ground. To us the stone will
appear to fall in a straight line. To a theoretical observer in
space — to Einstein an “observer” meant either a person or a re-
cording instrument — the stone would describe a curved line, in-
asmuch as this observer would record not only the motion of
the stone upon our planet but also the motion of our planet
around its axis. To still another observer, stationed not in empty
space but on another planet, subject to a different motion from
that of our own planet, the faffing stone would describe still an-
other path. All the paths*, or directions, of a moving object are
therefore relative to the various vantage points from which the
movements of the object are observed.
And so we find that both the speed and the direction of a mov-
ing body are relative. But this, continues Emstein, is not yet the
whole story. There is a third factor in relativity — ^the relative
size of a moving body. All bodies contract in motion. To an
observer sitting inside a rapidly moving train the train is longer
than it is to another observer who watches it from the outside.
The rate of the contraction of a moving object increases with
its increasing speed. A stick measuring a yard in a state of so^.
called rest would shrink to zero if it were set in motion at the
speed of light.
Space, then, is relative. So, i:oo — declares Einstein — h time.
The past, the present and the future are merely three points in
[304]
EINSTEIN
time analogous to the three points in space occupied by — ^let us
say — Washington, New York and Boston. Scientifically speaking,
it is just as logical to travel from tomorrow to yesterday as it is to
travel from Boston to Washington. To an impartial observer of
the universe all time, like all space, would be present in a single
glance.
Time, like space, is a matter of relative motion. If a man
could attain a speed greater than the speed of light — ^which of
course is humanly impossible — he would overtake his past and
leave the date of his birth in the future. He would see effects
before their causes and he would see events before they actually
occurred. Time is merely a planetary clock that measures motion.
Each moving planet has its own system of local time which
differs from all other time systems. The time system of the earth,
far from being an absolute measurement for time everywhere,
is nothing but a local schedule of the earth’s rotation around the
sun. A day is a measurement of motion through space. Our
own point in time depends wholly upon our own position in
space. The light which brings us the image of a distant star may
have traveled through space for a million years before it reached
the earth. Hence the star that we see today is the star of a mil-
lion years ago. Similarly an event that took place upon the earth
thousands of years ago — ^like the Battle of Marathon — ^may have
just reached the eyes of an observer on another planet who con-
sequently looks upon this event as an episode of today.
Today upon this planet, therefore, may be yesterday upon
another planet and tomorrow upon a third planet. For time is a
dimension of space — and space is a dimension of time. Actually
— asserts Einstein — ^the universe consists of a space-time con-
tinuity; both space and time are dependent upon each other.
Neither can be expressed independently. Both must be con-
sidered as coordinate aspects of motion in our mathematical
approach to reality. The world is not three-dimensional. It con-
sists of the three dimensions of space and of an additional fourth
dimension — ^time.
[505I
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
IV
Einstein was amused at the flurry of attention that he re-
ceived for his ''superior” wisdom. "Before God we are all
equally wise, equally foolish,” he said. He wasn’t the least bit
excited when he received the offer of a professorship at Zurich.
Professors had always bored him. He was an artist. He had no
use for .he pedantic type of mind. "Pedants collect their facts
as dogs collect their bones — only to hoard them in the dust.”
Few of the so-called scholars, he had noticed, understood the
meaning of speculative thought. Hardly any of them were dream-
ers. They laughed when you told them that it is possible for the
scientist to search for the secret of physical laws just as pas-
sionately as the composer searches for the secret of musical har-
mony. "The great scientist and the great composer are alike in
one respect — both of them are great poets.”
It was as a poet that Einstein greeted the arrival of his first
child. He took far greater joy in wheeling the baby carriage than
in delivering his lectures at the university. He trembled before
the vacuous eyes and the gaping mouths of the audiences who
had come to purchase a penny’s worth of knowledge at the foun-
tain of his wisdom. He was not a man to lead crowds or to
teach crowds or to mingle in crowds. He was a solitary student,
"a singular, taciturn, lonely seeker.” It mattered little to him
that he had built up a solid reputation amongst the learned so-
cieties of Europe, that the distinguished mathematician, Poin-
care, had greeted him as the "conqueror of Newton” and that
the eminent physicist, Lorentz, had acknowledged him as one
of the foremost scientists of history. It was unessential that the
famous universities of Utrecht and of Leyden had offered him
professorships. He looked back regretfully upon the old days
when he had served as a clerk under Dr Halle — a position in
which he had found the time and the quiet to carry on his re-^
[506]
EINSTEIN
searches without ceremony, without ostentation, without ban-
quets.
He finally accepted the position of professor ordinarius at the
University of Berlin. For his family must live somehow. During
his walks through the streets of the Prussian capital he con-
tinued to build upon his theory of relativity. Flis early specula-
tions had led to a great number of interesting conclusions. But
they had given rise to an equally great number of further ques-
tions. A ‘^demoniacal curiosity’’ had taken possession of him to
seek out the final lair of truth — ^the underlying cadence in the
movement of the stars through the symphony of time and space.
More and more in his moments of relaxation he turned to his
violin and improvised new themes that gave wing to his specu-
lative thoughts.
But there was a sudden interruption to these thoughts. Europe
had exploded into war (1914). The sensitive soul of Einstein
recoiled in dismay. “This war is a vicious and savage crime. I
would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an
abominable business.”
But few people now listened to him. Creative thought had
no place in a world bent upon destruction. It was all a matter
of relative values . . .
Throughout the conflict Einstein lived in a cosmos of his own
creation. Shutting himself up in a shabby little attic away from
the other rooms in a Berlin apartment house, he set to work veri-
fying and elaborating upon the essential principles of his theory
of relativity. The slightest domestic episode was enough to start
him off on a significant train of thought. Once he climbed a lad-
der to change a picture on the wall. But absent-mindedly he
forgot the business at hand, lost his footing and landed on the
floor. When he got to his feet he commenced to speculate on the
causes of the upset. The fall of the ladder in Einstein’s attic was
destined to play no less important a role in science than the fall
of the apple in Newton’s garden. For it led Einstein to under-
take a critical analysis of the theory of gravitation.
[307]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISl'S
Once more, as in the analysis of motion and space and time, he
arrived at startling conclusions. The physicists, he declared, had
been fundamentally wrong in their belief that objects jell, in the
sense that they were pulled down to a center of gravitation. Scien-
tifically speaking, no object is ever pulled down. Indeed, there is
no such thing as ‘‘down” — or “up” — ^in the universe. “The mo-
tion of a body is due solely to the tendency of matter to follow
the path of least resistance,” Bodies in their travels through
space select the easiest paths and avoid the most difficult. There
is no more reason to assume an absolute gravitational force
through space than to assume an absolute dimension of time. Just
as there are local schedules of time, so too there are local fields
of gravitation. But these fields have no mysterious force or pull.
Every mass — ^like the sun, for example — creates at its center a
curving or “warping” of the neighbonng space into a “hill.” And
the masses in the vicinity of that hill — like the earth and the
other planets of the solar system — ^move around the slopes 'of
that hiU for the simple reason that this is the easiest way for
them to move. Einstein proved this “curvature” theory of space
by means of a series of mathematical formulas. The significant
point of the theory is this: The shortest distance between two
points is not a straight line, but a curved line, since the universe
consists of a series of curved hills and all objects in this universe
travel around the curved slopes of these hills. Indeed, in this
univeree of ours there is no such thing as motion in a straight
line. A ray of fight traveling toward the earth from a distant
star is deflected, or turned aside, when it passes the hill-slope of
space around the sun. Einstein figured out mathematically the
exact degree of this deflection.
And his figure proved to be correct. At the eclipse of 1919
the observatories of Cambridge and of Greenwich, each acting
independently of the other, sent out an expedition of astronomers
to photograph the direction of the starlight during the eclipse.
Both groups found that their photographs corroborated the pre-
diction of Einstein almost to the exact decimal point which he
[308]
EINSTEIN
had figured out in his mathematical formulas. The ray of light
did curve in the manner and the degree as described in the cal-
culations of Einstein. A new conception of the universe had been
bom in the human mind.
When Einstein received the photographs of the astronomers
he looked at them with a cynical twinkle in his eye. “Now that
my theory of relativity has been proved trae,” he chuckled,
“Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare
that I am a citizen of the world. Had my theory proved false,
France would have said that I am a German and Germany
would have declared that I am a Jew.”
V
No ONE was more surprised at the sudden deluge of fame that
descended upon Einstein than the scientist himself. Like Byron
he awoke one day to find his name on everybody’s lips. Not only
learned men of science but millions of common people through-
out the world had adopted him as a household idol. The results
of the astronomers’ expedition had been telegraphed to all the
newspapers. He was kept busy posing for photographs, sub-
mitting to interviews, turning down offers from Hollywood —
including one invitation to make a film at forty thousand dollars
a week. In his bevdlderment he turned to his wife. “This won’t
last. It can’t last. People have gone temporarily crazy and to-
morrow they will forget all about it.” Fame was the last thing he
desired. As his notoriety kept increasing from month to month
he became frankly annoyed. He had hoped to spend his entire
life in quiet research. And now he couldn’t hear his own
thoughts for the noisy acclamation. "What did people want with
him? Why would they not permit him to live like anyone else?
What barbarous nonsense was all this? “Everybody talks about
me, and nobody understands me.”
Indeed, nobody even cared to understand this amazing
[309]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
juggler of mathematical ideas. One evening a young lady intro-
duced her fiance to the pastor of her church. The following day
the pastor met the bride-to-be and took her aside. ‘T approve
of your young man in every respect save one/’ he told her. ‘‘He
lacks a sense of humor. I asked him to explain to me Einstein’s
theory of relativity and he actually tried to do it.”
Einstein's popularity had risen to appalling heights. He couldn’t
take his daily walk in the streets without being surrounded by
photographers, reporters and autograph hunters. Every day
baskets of m^ail arrived at the little Berlin apartment. Famous
statesmen, obscure pacifists, unemployed workmen, lovelorn
ladies — everybody wrote to him. The supreme irony had settled
upon him. “I have become a demigod in spite of myself,” A
young devotee volunteered to be his disciple in “cosmic medk
tation.” An inventor confided to him his plans for a new flying
machine. A would-be explorer asked his advice on a trip to
the Asiatic jungles. An actor begged him to become his manager.
A cigar manufacturer announced that he had produced a new
brand of cigars and named it Relativity.
“The public looks upon me as a strange new animal in the
circus of the world.” He smiled. And he tried to go on with his
work in his quiet, modest way. When he was invited to speak
to a distinguished group of scientists at Oslo, he pulled out a
shabby dinner jacket and brushed it carefully. “If anyone thinks
I am not dressed elegantly enough,” he told his wife, “Fll put a
tag on this coat with the notice that it has just been brushed.”
He arrived for another of his lectures — at the University of Berlin
— ^in a homely pair of sport knickers and sandals. He walked
about the streets of Berlin wrapped in an old sweater and in new
dreams. Let the circus-minded public gossip and glare. He would
be just simply himself.
His simplicity was no theatrical pose on his part. Once the
queen of Belgium invited him to pay her a visit. Never suspect-
ing that a reception committee of state dignitaries would await
him at the station in their limousine, he alighted from the train
[310]
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
provincialism. He showed them the design of an interstellai
harmony. And he foretold that some day tiieic would be a
similar harmonious design among the nations on the earth.
He met Aristide Briand, the French premier, and discussed
with him the necessity of a Franco-German pact to end hatred.
He accepted a post as the German representative of the League
of Nations committee for intellectual cooperation, and he dis-
cussed with Henri Bergson the architecture of the “New Re-
public of Decency’’ that the men of good will were bent upon
raising throughout the world. “It is plain that we exist for our
fellow men — the first place for those upon whose smiles and
welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those un-
known to us personally but to whose destinies we are bound by
the tie of sympathy.”
Others were not so convinced of his credo. He barely escaped
assassination at the hands of a Russian noblewoman who har-
bored imperialistic ambitions. All over the world the gentle
scientist who had desired nothing more than an opportunity for
his private studies — unless it be public justice for his fellow men
— became a target for political abuse. Cries were raised against
him on the grounds of his racial origin. Antisemitism had
caught post-war Germany in full tide. He was aghast at the
savage intolerance of his German countrymen, but he felt con-
vinced that under the right kind of leadership they might yet re-
turn to the sanity of their old time cultural and moral standards.
When he found his name high on the black list of the German
right-wing assassins he crossed over to the refuge of Holland,
But he encountered the ferment of unrest even in that toler-
ant country. Indeed everywhere in the world humanity seemed
to be beating a hasty retreat to barbarism. People had lost their
sense of proportion. The Mark Twain Society offered him the
position of honorary vice-president. But when he learned that
this society had offered a similar post to Benito Mussolini, Ein-
stein flatly rejected the dishonor.
He went on a journey to the Orient, In India he was shocked
Isis]
EINSTEIN
to see millions of men living in slave labor and transporting
their fellow men literally upon their backs. He refused to become
a party to such human degradation. He never rode in a rickshaw
throughout his entire trip. He went to China and saw men and
women and children groaning aloud at their work in the cotton
mills. He visited Japan and discounted the ceremonious treat-
ment he received at the hands of the grownups. Instead, he
turned to the Japanese children. He accepted from them scrap-
books of their drawings. And he listened with joy to their talk.
*Tn the children lies the hope of the world.’’ They must never
be brought up to hate. They must never abuse the hard-won
achievements of the human race. “Let us hope,” he told his
little friends, “that your generation will put mine to shame,”
VI
The wandering philosopher-minstrel, with his mathematical
formulas and his violin, traveled on to Palestine and Spain and
Latin America. Finally he arrived in the United States. And here
at last he found a land where human beings of all classes lived to-
gether in tolerable friendship.
One day in November 1932, while Einstein was talking to a
group of scientists on the Pacific Coast, a winter storm broke
with fury in Berlin. Adolf Hitler took over the affairs of the Ger-
man people.
The German Government, hoping to receive the indorsement
of the “world-builder” for the Nazi regime, begged Einstein to
return. Hitler would “overlook the fact that he was a Jew.”
But Einstein refused. And so Hitler put a price of twenty thou-
sand marks upon his head. A band of storm troopers broke into
his summer home at Caputh on the charge that he had concealed
1 quantity of arms and ammunition with which to overturn the
government. They found in the “arsenal” nothing that re-
sembled “arms” except an old bread knife grown rusty with dis-
use*
LIVING BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Hounded from his native land — ^the Nazis had received his
resignation from the University of Berlin “without regret” — ^he
accepted a professorship at Princeton. Here he hoped to go on,
peacefully and quietly, with his old academic curriculum of
human friendships and cosmic dreams.
At the present writing he mingles with the professors and the
students and the townsfolk and the Greek who keeps the restau-
rant and the Italian who runs the barber shop on Nassau
Street. He has received his citizenship papers. “I am an Ameri-
can now!” he remarked proudly on the day of his naturaliza-
tion. He is placid and even optimistic beneath a shock of hair
that has long turned white and eyes that have suffered and a
forehead whose deep wrinkles make him look older than his
years.
Often now he sits in the darkness of his study and smokes his
pipe — too assiduously, his doctor warns him, for his heart is weak
and the smoking does it no good. And Elsa, his (second) wife who
always was so careful to limit him to the doctor’s prescribed
budget, has passed along. The smoke from his pipe whirls into
complicated spirals that defy even the mind of a mathematician.
A strange, inexplicable mystery — this universe with its spirals of
smoke and its whirlpools of nebulae and its generations of hating,
fighting men. Will it ever be given to any scientist to arrive at
the final solution? And always when he considers this question he
finds comfort in a single word — Courage!
1314}
