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171 [260] BRANDT
VOLTAIRE [261] not really displaced until a century and a half later when radio communications made the whole world one, and a single clock could be made to do for everybody everywhere. [260] BRANDT, Georg Swedish chemist Born: Riddarhyttan, Vastman- land, July 21, 1694 Died: Stockholm, April 29, 1768 Brandt was the son of an apothecary who had gone into metallurgy. From the time of Agricola [132], minerals and medicines were grouped and the difference between the apothecary and the chemist was to remain nearly invisi ble well into the nineteenth century, reaching its climax with Scheele [329]. Brandt helped his father both in chem ical and metallurgical work and then went on to study medicine and chemistry under Boerhaave [248]. He obtained a medical degree in 1726 but did not prac tice. However, by 1751 his fame had grown so that he was one of the doctors called in to attend the dying Swedish king, Frederick I. Brandt’s metallurgical experience was useful to him, for in 1727 he was placed in charge of the Bureau of Mines at Stockholm, and three years later was made assay master of the Mint. He did considerable work on arsenic, but the deed for which he is best known was in connection with a particular min eral that had been used for a couple of centuries to make a deep blue pigment. The mineral resembled a copper ore in some of its properties but it yielded no copper, so German miners of the day had named it kobold after an earth spirit which, they believed, had bewitched the copper ore. About 1730 Brandt was able to treat the dark blue pigment in such a manner as to obtain out of it a new metal. It wasn’t copper, and it much resembled iron. Brandt gave it the name of the earth spirit, spelling it “cobalt,” and that is still the name of the metal. Brandt was the first man to discover a new element since Brand’s [216] discovery of phos
phorus three quarters of a century ear lier, but from his time on the pace of discovery of new elements never lagged. He was the first man to discover a metal entirely unknown to the ancients. Brandt differed from his predecessors such as Brand, Becher [222], and Stahl [241] and even from such great dabblers in chemistry as Boyle [212] and Newton [231] in that he was the first to be com pletely free of any alchemical taint. In his later years, in fact, Brandt made almost a hobby out of combating al chemy, much as men today might make one of exposing fortune-telling frauds. He showed that gold could be dissolved in hot nitric acid and made to precipitate out when the acid was cooled and shaken. Gold would then seem to appear out of nowhere, and this explained one of the ways knaves imposed on fools. When Brandt died, chemistry was about to reach full maturity under La voisier [334]. The end of alchemy for all but the most eccentric faddists, he did not live to see. [261] VOLTAIRE (François Marie Arouet) French author Born: Paris, November 21, 1694 Died: Paris, May 30, 1778 Voltaire was the son of a minor gov ernment functionary and his real name was François Marie Arouet. Voltaire was blessed, and cursed, with one of the sharpest wits of modem times. It was a blessing in that he could win any argu ment, for there is no one on record who ever involved himself in a controversy with Voltaire without coming out shred ded and a laughingstock. It was a curse in that he could not resist lampooning and satirizing the most respected beliefs of the nation and the most highly placed individuals. This led to his being imprisoned in the Bastille now and then, and on at least one occa sion of being beaten up by thugs hired by a gentleman who, smarting under rid icule, thought that sticks were more striking arguments than words. In 1726 Voltaire was sent off to En- [262] GRAY
MACLAURTN [263] gland for his own protection, where he remained three years. While there he made friends in the highest literary cir cles. He also studied the Newtonian theory and was present at the funeral of Newton [231], After returning to France (where he was to experience a continual series of ups and downs at the court of Louis XV, according to the manner in which he ex ercised his sharp tongue) he had one of his mistresses, the marquise de Châtelet [274], translate Principia Mathematica into French and he himself in 1737 wrote a commentary on the book. New ton was fortunate in his interpreter, for to find anyone who could write more charmingly than Voltaire was a task for a long summer’s day indeed. It was Voltaire, more than anyone, who made Newton fashionable among nonscientists. This was particularly im portant in France where the pre-New tonian views of Descartes [183] still dominated. Voltaire, in fact, was the liv ing embodiment of the Age of Reason, the most shining light of the last period in history in which it was chic for a man of humanistic culture to understand and admire science and for a scientist to love the humanities. Voltaire died on the eve of the French Revolution, which his writings had done much to bring about. The quiet twilight of the feudal aristocracy of Europe, with its condescending patronage of things scientific, was broken in that holocaust. Science itself, after 1800, expanded in so many directions that it became no longer possible to study it as a mere minor ad junct to a humanistic education. It re quired a specialist to learn as much of science as was necessary to advance re search. The Age of Reason died with Voltaire. The Age of Specialized Science took its place and is still with us, now more than ever. [262] GRAY, Stephen English electrical experimenter Born: about 1696 Died: February 25, 1736 Gray, the son of a dyer, may have re ceived instruction from Flamsteed [234], He grew avidly interested in the infant study of electricity and made his key dis covery in 1729. He found that when a long glass tube was electrified by fric tion, the corks at the end (which were not touched) were also electrified. The electric fluid, whatever it was, had trav eled from the glass to the corks and he thus discovered electrical conduction. He experimented further, conducting electricity through long stretches of twine and, eventually, found that not ev erything would suffice for the purpose. Some substances would not conduct elec tricity. Desaguliers [253] soon catego rized the situation by speaking of “con ductors” and “insulators.” [263] MACLAURIN, Colin (mak-law'- rin)
Scottish mathematician Born: Kilmodan, February 1698 Died: Edinburgh, January 14, 1746
Maclaurin, the son of a minister, lost his father six weeks after his birth and his mother when he was nine years old. He was brought up by an uncle, also a minister. In 1709, at age eleven, Mac laurin entered the University of Glasgow intending to study for the ministry but grew interested in mathematics instead, and obtained his master’s in that disci pline in 1715. In 1717, when he was still not yet twenty, he was appointed profes sor of mathematics at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and two years later was elected to the Royal Academy. He met Newton [231] in London, and in 1724, moved on to a professorial chair with Newton’s strong recom mendation. Maclaurin was probably the greatest mathematician in the British Isles in the generation following Newton and did much to tighten and extend the calculus. In particular, in 1742 he wrote in defense of Newton against the criti cisms (well-based) of the foundations of calculus by the philosopher George Berkeley. In so doing, he did much to improve matters so as to make the criti
[264] BOUGUER
DU FAY [266] cisms less trenchant. In a way this con tributed to the British idolatry of New tonian mathematics, so that after Mac- laurin mathematics vegetated in Great Britain and made no further progress, Babbage [481] and his friends stirred things up again. In 1745 a Highland army, supporting Charles Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the Stuart Pretender) marched on Edin burgh. Maclaurin supervised the defense with remarkable energy for a mathe matician but was forced to flee when the Highlander Jacobites took the city. The Jacobite ascendancy was short-lived and Maclaurin soon returned to Edinburgh, but his health had been undermined and he died soon after. [264] BOUGUER, Pierre (boo-gairi) French mathematician
February 16, 1698 Died: Paris, August 15, 1758 Bouguer’s father was a hydrographer (that is, a geographer of the waters of the earth, both fresh and salt) and math ematician who brought his son up in the same profession. By 1730 Bouguer was a professor of hydrography at Le Havre, succeeding his father, and he was one of the foremost on the La Condamine [270] expedition. He wrote a useful book about the expedition. He also invented a heliometer, to mea sure the light of the sun and other lumi nous bodies. With it he was the first to attempt a quantitative measurement of the comparative luminosities of the sun and moon and is considered a founder of photometry, the measurement of light in tensities. [265] BAKER, Henry English naturalist
1774
Baker, the son of a law clerk, was ap prenticed to a bookseller where (like Faraday [474] a century later) he took the opportunity to read books, including some on microscopy. He later stayed with a relative whose daughter had been born deaf. Baker undertook to teach her to speak and to read, and was successful —so successful that he made a profes sion out of teaching those with a variety of speech defects and made a good living out of it. He kept his methods secret for the natural reason that only so could he continue to command high fees. Through work of this sort he attracted the interest of the novelist Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe), and in 1729 Baker married the youngest of De foe’s daughters. Baker was also a science writer, and in particular he wrote on the microscope and introduced it to the general lay pub lic, describing its construction and its uses. Like Leeuwenhoek [221], he used the microscope to observe everything he could and reported on all of it. Of par ticular importance was his observation of the shapes of various kinds of crystals. [266] DU FAY, Charles François de Cistemay French physicist
Du Fay served in the army from the age of fourteen, but after his retirement became the superintendent of gardens for King Louis XV in 1732, a post that gave him security plus time for experi mentation. He repeated the experiments of Gray [262] on electrical conduction, and noted that damp twine was a con ductor while dry twine was an insulator. In 1733 Du Fay experimented with suspended bits of cork, which he elec trified by touching them with an already electrified glass rod. He found the pieces of cork repelled each other. This effect of repulsion had been noted by Guericke [189] but Du Fay now studied it in de tail.
He found that two electrified objects sometimes attracted and sometimes re pelled each other. A cork ball electrified by means of a glass rod attracted an other which had been electrified by
[267] MAUPERTUIS BERNOULLI
means of a resinous rod. If both were electrified in the same way, either both by glass or both by resin, they repelled each other. Du Fay postulated the existence of two different electrical fluids: “vitreous electricity” and “resinous electricity.” Each repelled itself but attracted the other. It remained for Franklin [272] to introduce the modem convention of call ing them “positive” and “negative.” Du Fay, who never married, died of smallpox at forty. [267] MAUPERTUIS, Pierre Louis Moreau de (moh-pehr-tyoo-ee') French mathematician
September 28, 1698 Died: Basel, Switzerland, July 27, 1759
Maupertuis, the spoiled child of well- to-do parents, spent part of his youth as a musketeer in the army, joining in 1715 but leaving in 1723 to become an in structor in mathematics at the French Academy of Sciences. In 1728 he visited England, was elected to the Royal Soci ety, and became an extravagant admirer of Newton [231], who had just died. He leaped at the chance in 1736 to head an expedition to Lapland, in conjunction with the expedition of La Condamine [270] to the equator, to measure the cur vature of the earth. After all, a success ful result would help establish Newton’s theory. Maupertuis’ group completed its task far more quickly than La Con- damine’s, but not nearly so precisely. In 1743 Maupertuis was elected to the French Academy and in 1744 yielded to the blandishments of Frederick II of Prussia. He went to Berlin and was ap pointed head of the Academy of Sci ences there in 1746. He was, however, a quarrelsome and unlikable man and con ducted a loud argument with Voltaire [261] (who had befriended him, but whose witty comments Maupertuis found insupportable) over the principle of least action. This principle, first advanced by Maupertuis in 1744 (and sharpened a century later by Hamilton [545]), seemed to show that nature chose the most economical path for moving bodies, rays of light, and so on. Maupertuis worked out theological implications from this and, though Euler [275] supported him, Voltaire scoffed. Maupertuis lost the argument of course, since one could not bandy words with Voltaire and come out the winner. Voltaire’s ridicule drove Maupertuis to Basel, where he took the side of Newton against Leibniz [233] in the argument over which man had priority in the cal culus. On the continent he was in the minority. This argument is supposed to have hastened his death. [268] BERNOULLI, Daniel (ber-nool'- ee)
Swiss mathematician Born: Groningen, Netherlands, February 8, 1700 Died: Basel, March 17, 1782 Daniel Bernoulli came of an amazing line of Swiss mathematicians and phys icists descended from a Flemish fam ily, driven out of the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century because of their Protestant beliefs. His uncle Jacob (or Jacques), a contemporary of Newton [231] and Leibniz [233], was a mathe matician nearly in their class. His father, Johann (or Jean), was almost as capa ble and was a professor at Groningen when Daniel was bom, though the family returned to Switzerland in 1705. Both uncle and father extended the cal culus to new applications. Two brothers, a cousin, and a couple of nephews (not to mention other relations) were also mathematicians or scientists. As for Daniel, he began as a mathe matician, despite his father’s desire that the young man follow a business career. Daniel’s older brother taught him geome try, and though he studied medicine and obtained a medical degree in 1721, it was as a professor of mathematics that he began teaching in St. Petersburg, Rus sia, in 1725. He returned to Switzerland in 1733 and grew interested in science. In doing so, he became the first non English scientist to accept without reser-
[269] KLEIST
LA CONDAMINE [270] vation the Newtonian view of the uni verse. His book on the flow of fluids (hydro dynamics) in 1738 showed that, as the velocity of fluid flow increases, its pres sure decreases. This is still called Ber noulli’s principle and is used in produc ing vacuums in chemical laboratories by connecting a vessel to a tube through which water is running rapidly. Bernoulli was the first to attempt an explanation of the behavior of gases with changing pressure and temperature. The changes had been observed by men such as Boyle [212], Mariotte [203], and Amontons [244], but none of them had attempted an explanation. Bernoulli began by assuming that gases were made up of a vast number of tiny particles, a suggestion that was at least as old as Hero [60]. Bernoulli pro ceeded to treat the situation mathe matically, using the probability tech niques of Pascal [207] and Fermat [188]. He obtained fair results although his methods were not rigorous. The mere fact that he could do so would have given a powerful boost to the concept of atomism if his work had been paid more attention. A century later Joule [613] im proved the treatment and still later Max well [692] and Boltzmann [769] were to complete it, but by then atomism was well established. [269] KLEIST, Ewald Georg von (kliste) German physicist
Koszalin, Poland), December 11, 1748 Kleist was the son of a district magis trate. He was educated at the University of Leiden where he picked up an interest in science then returned home to become dean of the cathedral of Kamin in Pomerania. Kleist’s contribution to science con sisted of his attempt to store an elec tric charge and the accidental invention of an efficient means of doing so. He had, in fact, invented Musschenbroek’s [257] Leyden jar, independently of Musschenbroek and at just about the same time. He had discovered what he had done in the same way, too, by giving himself an accidental shock that all but jarred his teeth loose. [270] LA CONDAMINE, Charles Marie de (la-kohn-duh-meen') French geographer
La Condamine, bom into the wealthy nobility, joined the army at the age of seventeen but left it to engage in a scientific career. In La Condamine’s time most of the world, except for the polar regions and some of the empty stretches of the Pacific, had been opened up, but much was left to do. Areas had been crossed without having been carefully studied by a scientific eye. La Condamine en deavored to correct that with trips along the coasts of Africa and Asia and in 1730 had, as a result, been elected to the Academy of Sciences. His great adventure, however, lay in an expedition to South America. It had, as its purpose, nothing less than the de termination of the shape of the earth. The earth was, roughly speaking, a sphere, of course, but Newton [231] had pointed out that the speed of rotation of the earth’s surface increased steadily from zero at the poles to a bit over a thousand miles an hour at the equator. Centrifugal force increased corre spondingly and, in theory, the earth should then be an oblate spheroid, bulg ing at the equator and flattened at the poles. The pendulum data reported by Richer [217] seemed to back Newton’s views. However, Cassini [209] and his son, with their usual wrongheadedness, insisted on the basis of inadequate sur veys in France that the earth’s surface curved more and more as one traveled north. Therefore the earth was flattened at the equators and bulged at the poles and was a prolate spheroid. If the Cas
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