Great Scientists during the 1800s

Beck-Handle Microscope

Last week's blog paying homage to Stephen Hawking raised my curiosity about what scientific discoveries occurred during the lifetime of Isaac Beckley Werner, from 1844-1895.  Even during the early years of such a young country, there were scientists at work, perhaps the best remembered being Benjamin Franklin.  However, as a young and evolving country, our clever minds seemed to focus more on inventions.  Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, but during the years after Isaac's birth there were several inventions we take for granted today:  Walter Hunt invented the safety pin in 1849 (the patent to which he sold for $400!); David M. Smith invented the spring clothes pin in 1853; Daniel C. Stillson invented the pipe wrench in 1869; George Westinghouse invented the Railway air brake in 1872; Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877; and Henry W. Seely invented the electric iron in 1881.

Charles Darwin

Although we appreciate these inventors, and many more that I did not name, America did not produce as many scientists.  To continue my homage to great scientists begun last week, I want to share the stories of five Europeans.  (I am saving one American scientist for next week's blog, as his amazing story deserves to be better known.)

I will begin with Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection remains well known even today.   Born in 1809 and died in 1882, his ideas about the origin of the species would have been known to Isaac Werner.  Because I have mentioned him in other blogs and because his name remains familiar today, I will not elaborate on his scientific discoveries.

Gregor Johann Mendel

Having begun with Darwin, who was born first among those I will mention, I will continue with Gregor Johann Mendel, born in July of 1822, died in January 1884, a scientist and an Augustinian friar and abbot.  From his experiments with pea plants between  1856 and 1863 he established certain rules of heredity caused by invisible "factors" which we now know as genes.  Prior to his work, it was thought that characteristics passed from parents in a blended form of inheritance, in which traits were averaged.  He began his research using mice, but his bishop disapproved of a friar studying animal sex, so Mendel began using plants as his experimental subjects.  His fellow scientists did not immediately appreciate the significance of Mendel's research, but today he is known as the "father of modern genetics."

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was born December 27, 1822 and died September 28, 1895 and is best known for developing the technique to stop bacterial contamination in milk and wine with a process we know as pasteurization.  However, he is also important for his work concerning vaccination, so important in preventing diseases and treating rabies and  anthrax victims. Unfortunately, rumors arose concerning his own accounts of discoveries, and when his laboratory notebooks were finally donated to the French National Library in 1971, and made more available for research in 1985 nearly a century after his death, personal traits of this man, who was surely a genius, were not always so admirable.

Wilhelm Rontgen

When a teacher intercepted an unflatering caricature drawn by Wilhelm Rontgen during his high school years, Rontgen was expelled, and the result was that he lacked the credentials to enter Utrecht University.  Born March 27, 1845 and died February 10, 1923, Rontgen was fortunately able to continue his studies at Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich as a mechanical engineering student, and later at the University of Zurich and the University of Strassburg.  Another twist to his life occurred during the time of W.W. I.  He planned to join family in America and had accepted a position at Columbia University in NYC when W.W. I broke out.  He never made it to America.  He had won the 1st Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his production and detection of electromagnetic radiation in a wave length know as X-rays (or Rontgen rays) and would have been a valuable scientific resource for America.

Marie Curie

The name of the last European scientist to be mentioned is probably familiar to you.  Marie Sklodowska Curie was born November 7, 1867 and died July 4, 1934, the child of a well-to-do family whose land and fortune were lost because of patriotic and political activities.  Her life was further changed when she fell in love with a young relative whose family opposed his marriage to a girl with no wealth.  Eventually her romantic life was revived by marriage to a fellow scientist with whom she won her first Nobel Prize in 1903 for physics and in 1911, well after his death, she won her second Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As for the young man whose family denied his choice of Marie as his wife, his feelings for her seemed not to have changed.  He was often seen in his final days sitting contemplatively before Marie's statute at the Radium Institute she had founded.  Her scientific achievements were the development of the theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of the two elements, polonium and radium.  It was her work and not wealth that mattered to her, and her humanitarian efforts were as admirable as her scientific achievements.  During W.W. I she understood that surgical theaters with X-ray equipment and generators to power the facilities at the front would give wounded soldiers the best chance for survival.  She tried to donate her gold Nobel medals to the war effort but the French National Bank rejected them; however, she did buy war bonds with her Nobel prize money.  Her war efforts for the soldiers meant little scientific research was done during this time, and exposure to the ionising radiation in her research and from unshielded equipment used in the field hospitals during the war are believed to be the cause of her death. 

I find it fascinating to consider history from a broad perspective.  While the struggles of Isaac B. Werner and his neighbors on the prairie are the center of my research, I am also interested in understanding those homesteaders within the larger context of other places and events.  The late 1800s were also the Golden Age for wealthy Americans, and as we see from this brief summary of scientists in Europe, it was a time of great scientific discovery.  What might Isaac Werner's creative mind have discovered if his education and tools had been those of the European scientists discussed in this blog?

Remember, images may be enlarged by clicking on them.

Next week's blog will focus on an American scientist working during Isaac Werner's lifetime.  His name is probably known to you, but the story of his life may surprise you!

Turmoil in the Gilded Age

Herbert Spencer

I am always intrigued by comparing what is happening during the same historical period in various parts of the country, as well as considering how those events have lessons for today.  When I came upon Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth, I had to read it! 

The dust jacket tease describes the book this way:  "The United States in the 1870s and '80s was deep in turmoil--a brash young nation torn by a great depression, mired in scandal and corruption, rocked by crises in government, violently conflicted over science and race, and fired up by spiritual and sexual upheavals.  Secularism was rising, most notably in academia.  Evolution--and its catchphrase, 'survival of the fittest'--animated and guided this Gilded Age."  While this description may have suited the East Coast region, it sounded very little like what was happening in Isaac B. Werner's community.

Isaac arrived in Kansas in 1878, and like many others, he made his first home in a dugout.  Crop prices were good in the early years, when there were fewer farmers growing crops and less of the prairie had been broken for fields.  Those prices led Isaac and many others to go into debt for livestock and equipment, and when prices for their crops dropped, they were buried in debts on which they could pay no more than the interest.

Henry Ward Beecher

The Banquet at Delmonico's in 1882 had little resemblance to Isaac's world of a subsistence living on food stored for the winter from what they could raise during the growing season.  At the banquet in New York City, "Dinner began at half past six with raw oysters on the half shell...With a new course arriving every ten minutes, the feast lasted two and a half hours, a band playing selected pieces throughout...   The menu, printed on an engraved seven-by-five card tatted with a silk bow to a red cloth backing, was written in French...  Course after course cascaded from the kitchen, ferried by haughty French waiters..."

The banquet was in honor of Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher who had expanded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution beyond animals to encompass human society, history, psychology and ethics.  Many of the wealthy men gathered to honor him had adopted his philosophy to justify their own success and the personal wealth they had acquired, often at the human expense of low wages and unsafe working conditions for their employees.  By accepting the notion that their success was based on their superiority--survival of the fittest--they justified the huge differences between their lifestyles and the extreme poverty and harsh working conditions of their employees.

Charles Darwin

Among those in attendance were Henry Ward Beecher (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher," 12-7-2012, and "Keeping a Journal," 6-6-2013 in the blog archives); Union General / Senator from MO / Interior Secretary / and adviser to President Rutherford Hayes, Carl Schurz; and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.  Among the other followers of Spencer were lawyers, ministers, academics, and paleontologists.

While these men seem to have had little in common with Isaac Werner, their abusive mistreatment of workers had much to do with the People's Party, in which miners, factory workers, and farmers came together politically to confront with their numbers at the ballot box the wealth and power of men like these.  As the reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote, " Werth elegantly reveals a firm philosophical foundation for all the antilabor excesses of the Industrial Age."  Those excesses impacted struggling workers like Isaac and led to the political movement in which he participated.

Historic Diaries

Isaac Werner's Journal

When I was a young girl I kept a diary.  Two of my diaries survive, both with faux leather covers and a flap from back cover to front with a metal closure secured by a lock that could probably be picked with a hair pin.  They contain the typical adolescent secrets, and my attempt to read one of them after I was an adult ended in disappointment.  Frankly, it was boring, even to the author.
 

Reading Isaac B. Werner's journal was another matter entirely.  Each day's entry was fairly mundane, but as one day built on another, I was transported back into another time.  His day-to-day chores and encounters allowed me to experience the era of my great grandparents and other settlers who had claimed homesteads on the prairie.  Isaac was influenced by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher, 12-7-2012 in the blog archives) and kept his entries free of most personal opinions and emotions, sticking to the weather and actual events during his days.

Queen Victoria

Isaac was not alone in keeping a diary in the 1800s.  England's Queen Victoria wrote almost daily for sixty-eight years, and her diaries constitute over one hundred volumes.  Isaac wrote daily from 1884 to 1891, filling 480 oversized pages, and the journal was labeled "Vol. 5th."  With the opening pages including entries from 1870-1871 and an unexplained gap of 13 years, it appears that four volumes were kept prior to 1870 when Isaac was in his mid-20s and volume five began.

Isaac's journal provoked a curiosity that led me to read a book title A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, written by Alexandra Johnson.  The author acknowledged the ancient keeping of journals and diaries, but it was her history of those kept in the 1800s and 1900s that I found most interesting.

Francis Kilvert

The words of an English country curate named Francis Kilvert writing in the 1870s particularly caught my eye because he was keeping a diary at the same time Isaac was keeping his.  Kilvert wrote:  "Why do I keep this voluminous journal?  I can hardly tell.  Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record...and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me."  I can't know whether Isaac shared Kilvert's anticipation that some future reader might enjoy his journal, but I certainly have enjoyed Isaac's record of his day-to-day life.

Charles Darwin

Alexandra Johnson also selected examples from travel and explorer journals and diaries.  One such example was Charles Darwin, whose notebooks and journals filled 2,070 pages and became the sources from which he formulated his theory of evolution and natural selection which led in 1859 to the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Cover art by Sophia Thoreau

Another explorer did not go far from home.  A reader of Darwin throughout his life and a friend of diarist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's exploration was of Walden Pond, which was only a mile and a half from the center of Concord, Massachusetts where he and his circle of friends lived.  Yet, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 he recorded his observations of nature and Indian trails while living in his secluded tiny cottage beside Walden Pond.  Those observations became the material for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854).  Thoreau explained his purpose for devoting himself to exploring and recording observations of Walden Pond and the surrounding environment, saying that he used his journals "to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  The cover art for Walden was done by his sister Sophia.

Unlike Thoreau, Isaac documented not so much the native plants but rather his meticulously kept records of planting, nurturing, harvesting, and storing the crops he introduced to the prairie's sandy loam soil.  Yet, he too wrote about the weather, the native birds, and nature's spectacles, such as eclipses, mirages, and sun dogs.

Next week's blog will continue sharing other examples of journal and diary keepers described in Alexandra Johnson's History of Diaries.