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216 [326] LEXELL
LEBLANC [328] cold air, and floated on cold air as wood floated on water. It seemed natural to suppose that if a light bag were held, opening downward, over a fire, it would fill with hot air and be carried upward. This proved to be the case. On June 5, 1783, in the market place of their home town, the brothers filled a large linen bag, thirty-five feet in diame ter, with hot air. It lifted fifteen hundred feet upward, and floated a distance of a mile and a half in ten minutes. By No vember they went to Paris, where they managed a flight of six miles before a crowd of three hundred thousand that included Benjamin Franklin [272], Hot air, however, has very little buoy ancy and as soon as it cools down it has none. With Charles’s [343] suggestion that hydrogen be used, balloons that could lift men came into fashion. Man kind had always filled its myths and leg ends with flying men, flying horses, flying carpets, and so on. Leonardo da Vinci [122] had even tried to design flying machines two centuries before the Montgolfier brothers. However, 1783 was the first year in which men were ac tually lifted off the ground for prolonged periods. The scientific exploration of the upper atmosphere became a possibility. [326] LEXELL, Anders Johan Swedish astronomer Born: Abo, Sweden (now Turku, Finland) December 24, 1740 Died: St. Petersburg (now Lenin grad), Russia, December 11, 1784 The son of a city councillor, Lexell graduated from the University of Abo in 1760 and gained a professorial position at Uppsala in 1763. Invited to St. Peters burg by the Academy of Sciences, he ac cepted a post there in 1769 and re mained there for the rest of his life. In St. Petersburg, he was a close associate of Euler [275], In 1770 Lexell worked out the orbit of a comet observed in that year and deter mined its period of revolution to be five and a half years. It was the first short term comet to have its orbit calculated. In 1781 he studied the object discovered by Herschel [321] who himself thought the object must be a comet. It was Lex- ell’s observations that proved the orbit of the object to lie everywhere outside the orbit of Saturn and therefore to be a new planet—eventually called Uranus. What is more, Lexell eventually pointed out that the difficulties of establishing an accurate orbit might be the result of the gravitational interference of a hitherto unknown planet beyond Uranus—a sug gestion that was borne out a half century later with the work of Adams [615] and Leverrier [564] and the discovery of Neptune.
[327] WITHERING, William English physician Born: Wellington, Shropshire, March 1741 Died: Birmingham, October 6, 1799
Withering, the son of a surgeon, ob tained his medical degree from the Uni versity of Edinburgh in 1766. In 1775, he moved his practice to Birmingham where he prospered and where he joined the Lunar Society, whose members in cluded Priestley [312] and Watt [316]. He had an interest in botany, which caused him to listen with more patience than might otherwise have been possible to “old wives’ tales” concerning the folk remedies used by herb-gatherers. He picked up the use of foxglove, learned of its efficacy in the case of certain cases of edema (caused by heart failure) and of the doses safe to use. In 1785 he pub lished a careful report of his findings that added the very useful drug digitalis to the pharmaceutical armory of physi cians.
[328] LEBLANC, Nicolas (luh-blankO French chemist Born: Ivoy-le-Pre, Indre, Decem ber 6, 1742 Died: St.-Denis (near Paris), Jan uary 16, 1806 Leblanc, who was orphaned at an early age, was apprenticed to an apothe- 217 [329] SCHEELE
SCHEELE [329] cary by his guardian, a physician. He studied surgery and in 1780 became phy sician to the future duke of Orleans, who during the early days of the French Rev olution gained a dubious fame as Phi lippe Égalité, an aristocrat who voted for the death of the king but who was him self guillotined in 1793. In 1775 the French Academy of Sci ences had offered a prize for a practical method of manufacturing sodium hy droxide and sodium carbonate out of salt (sodium chloride). Leblanc developed what is now called the Leblanc process which, together with the work of Chevreul [448], made soap manufacture on a large scale possible for the first time with important effects on personal hy giene. In 1783 he was awarded the prize, which, however, was not paid. It was the first chemical discovery that had an im mediate commercial use. During the revolution the government (which definitely did need scientists re gardless of the comment to Lavoisier [334]) needed soda badly for a variety of industrial chemical industries and forced Leblanc to make his process pub lic without remuneration after the execu tion of his patron, Philippe Égalité. Le blanc was reduced to poverty in this fash ion. He received his factory back in 1802 but lacked the capital to start things rolling. In 1806 he killed himself. On the whole the revolution had been kinder to Lavoisier. In 1855, Napoleon III made restitution to Leblanc’s heirs. The Leblanc process was ultimately re placed by that of Solvay [735]. [329] SCHEELE, Karl Wilhelm (shay'- luh)
Swedish chemist Born: Stralsund, Pomerania, De cember 9, 1742 Died: Koping, Vastmanland, May 21, 1786 Pomerania has been part of Germany through most of its history (it is now part of East Germany). At the time of Scheele’s birth it belonged to Sweden, because of that country’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War a century earlier. Scheele can therefore be considered Ger man by ancestry; he usually wrote in German. But he did all his adult work in Sweden and is generally considered a Swedish chemist. He was the seventh child of eleven, and with children the only form of wealth in that family young Karl Wil helm could not be supported in idleness. At fourteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary. In those days this, for a boy with an active mind, was as good as a university education in chemistry, for apothecaries were profoundly interested in minerals and usually prepared their own drugs. Scheele taught himself chemistry and became an apothecary extraordinary, passing periodically to more and more famous establishments, till finally he was working at Stockholm and at Uppsala. (Later in life, he had ample opportunity to obtain a university position and all its prestige, but he preferred to remain an apothecary and concentrate on research. As a professor, he would have been one of many. As an apothecary, he was the greatest the world has seen. He also re fused to serve Frederick II of Prussia as court chemist and turned down the offer of a similar position in England.) In 1770 he met the Swedish miner alogist Bergman [315], who sponsored and encouraged him. This meeting was arranged through another chemist, Gahn [339], who was a friend, as was another excellent chemist, Hjelm [342]. (Sweden, in proportion to its population, has prob ably produced more first-rate chemists in the last two centuries than any other na tion in the world.) In the course of his research career Scheele probably discovered or helped discover more new substances in greater variety than any other chemist in a like period of time. He discovered a number of acids, in cluding tartaric acid, citric acid, benzoic acid, malic acid, oxalic acid, and gallic acid in the plant kingdom; lactic acid and uric acid in the animal; and molyb- dic acid and arsenious acid in the min eral. He prepared and investigated three
[329] SCHEELE
FITCH [330] highly poisonous gases, hydrogen flu oride, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen cyanide and managed to avoid killing himself. (He even recorded the taste of hydrogen cyanide—a report one would swear could only be made posthu mously. ) He was involved in the discovery of the elements chlorine, manganese, bar ium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen, and yet he is undoubtedly the unluckiest chemist in history, for de spite his phenomenal labors in uncover ing new elements, he does not receive undisputed credit for having discovered a single one. In some cases chemists in dependently made the same discovery a little sooner. In others Scheele did not quite carry matters far enough and chemists such as Hjelm, Gahn, and d’El- huyar [367] took the last step and got the credit. In the case of chlorine, Scheele prepared it in the 1770s but did not recognize it as an element. He thought it an oxygen-containing com pound. It was Davy [421], over thirty years later, who recognized the elemen tary nature of chlorine and he is the one usually given credit for its discovery. The most tragic case of all was that of oxygen, which, from the standpoint of chemical history, was the most sig nificant of all his discoveries. He pre pared it in 1771 and 1772 by heating a number of substances that held it loosely, including the mercuric oxide used by Priestley [312] a couple of years later. This was a clear “first” for Scheele, who described his experiments carefully in a book, which, however, through the negli gence of his publisher, did not appear in print until 1777. By that time Priestley had reported his own experiments, and it is Priestley who gets the credit for oxy gen.
(Scheele called oxygen “fire air.” Like Priestley, Scheele was a confirmed phlogistonist and did not interpret the role of oxygen in combustion correctly. That was left for Lavoisier [334].) However, copper arsenite, which Scheele studied, is still called Scheele’s green, while a calcium tungstate mineral is called scheelite. He also discovered the effect of light on silver compounds, which, half a century later, Daguerre [467] and others were to use in the de velopment of photography. Scheele’s private life had its share of misfortune. He suffered poor health and agonizing pain from rheumatism, which was aggravated by his long hours of work. He eschewed virtually all social life in favor of science, his only passion, and when he decided to marry he found he had time for it only on his deathbed. When he died he was only forty-three, and his death may have been hastened by his habitual tasting of the new com pounds he prepared. His final symptoms resembled those of mercury poisoning. [330] FITCH, John American inventor Born: Windsor, Connecticut, Jan uary 21, 1743 Died: Bardstown, Kentucky, July 2, 1798 It is hard to find a man so beset by misfortune as John Fitch. He had little schooling, a harsh father, and a nagging wife, whom he deserted. He made some money during the Revolutionary War when he was in charge of a gun factory, but the colonial currency became worth less. He passed the last part of the war as a British prisoner. In Pennsylvania in 1785 Fitch thought of building a steamship. With superhu man effort he obtained the capital and the necessary grants of monopoly from five states. In 1790 his fourth and best steamship traveled from Philadelphia to Trenton and back on a regular schedule. However, there were few passengers, the ship operated at a loss, his backers quit, and finally the ship was destroyed in a storm in 1792. He tried to begin again in France in 1793 but could obtain no funds. He re turned to America in deep depression and died (perhaps a suicide) nine years before Fulton [385] repeated his work and received credit for the invention of the steamship.
[331] BANKS
BANKS [331] [331] BANKS, Sir Joseph English botanist
June 19, 1820 Banks was that convenient but rare phenomenon, a scientist of great inde pendent wealth (which he inherited from his father in 1761) who spends that wealth liberally in the support of science. His interest in botany arose at the age of fifteen, when he became entranced with the flowery beauty of a country lane. While still a student at Oxford he financed a lectureship in botany, which is how the subject came to be taught there for the first time. In 1766 he made his first trip abroad, accompanying an expedition to New foundland, where he gathered new varie ties of plants and insects and earned a membership in the Royal Society. It became fashionable at about that time for sea expeditions intent on scientific exploration to carry naturalists who could make appropriate studies of the flora and fauna encountered. (This was to reach its peak some three quar ters of a century later, when Charles Darwin [554] made his first reputation on such a voyage.) Banks had his chance in 1768 on Cook’s [300] first expedition to the Pacific. He not only accompanied the ex pedition around the world but paid for all the necessary equipment. He hired a pupil of Linnaeus [276] as assistant and four artists as well. (Those were the days before photography.) The whole thing is supposed to have cost him £10,000 but at least he had an unparalleled chance to explore, for Cook landed on Australia. There Banks could browse through an isolated continent with life forms unlike those of any other. In fact the first point of landing, in 1770, near what is now Sydney, was named Botany Bay because of the delight of Banks in the prospect of ex ploration. (A quarter century later, Bot any Bay became a penal establishment.) A peninsula just south of the present city of Christchurch in New Zealand was named Banks Peninsula by Cook in honor of his botanist. Banks was the first to show that al most all the Australian mammals were marsupials and were more primitive than the placental mammals inhabiting the other continents. A century later Wallace [643] was to draw far-reaching conclu sions from this. After Banks returned from the South Pacific, he had a personal audience with George III, who wanted to know about his discoveries. He then accompanied an expedition to the North Atlantic, in 1772. In Iceland he discovered great geysers.
In 1778 he was elected president of the Royal Society, thanks to the influence of George III. He kept that post until his death, forty-one years later. This long tenure was not entirely good. Banks grew lax with age and while the membership of the Society grew, the standards declined and it became nearly moribund. In 1781 Banks was made a baronet. He remained a philanthropist to the end, supporting young men of talent, notably Robert Brown [403] and making his home a gathering place for men of sci ence. Banks was interested in helping found colonies in the far regions of the world, and it was largely through his efforts that the first colonies were established in Aus tralia. He is sometimes called the father of Australia. He also labored to trans plant plants from their native regions to other lands where they might be useful. It was through his efforts that the bread fruit plant was brought from Tahiti to the West Indies. One ship transporting these bread fruits, in 1788, was the Bounty under William Bligh, who had been a ship’s master under Cook on the latter’s final voyage to the Pacific. The crew of the
by the captain and against having to leave Tahiti (and thus supplied Charles B. Nordhoff and James N. Hall with a good theme). Banks was impressed with Franklin’s [2721 action in persuading the American rebels to leave Cook unmolested. 220 [332] HAÜY
JEFFERSON [333] Through the Napoleonic Wars he la- ' bored to follow this precedent and keep scientists above national angers and prej udices. It was an enterprise doomed to failure in later wars as nationalism grew more heated and as science began to play a greater and greater role in war making technology. [332] HAÜY, René Just (a-yoo-eeO French mineralogist
February 28, 1743 Died: Paris, June 1, 1822 Haiiy, the son of a poor weaver, trained for the church and became a priest in 1770. He grew interested in natural history and mineralogy only after he was thirty, through the circumstance of making friends with an old priest whose hobby was botany. In 1781 Haiiy had a fortunate acci dent. He dropped a piece of calcite and it broke into small fragments. It had been part of the collection of a friend and Haiiy was mortified. His embar rassment was assuaged somewhat when he noticed that the fragments clove along straight planes that met at constant angles, something Steno [225] had casu ally noted a century before but had not followed up. Haiiy broke more pieces of calcite and found that no matter what the original shape, the broken fragments were rhom- bohedral (that is, slanted “cubes”). He hypothesized that each crystal was built up of successive additions of what we now call a “unit cell” to form—in the absence of external interference—a sim ple geometric shape with constant angles and with sides that could be related by simple integral ratios. He maintained that an identity or difference in crys talline form implied an identity or dif ference in chemical composition. This was the beginning of the science of crystallography, which was to attain maturity over a century later with the development of X-ray techniques by Laue [1068] and Bragg [922], Haiiy was involved in the labors that went into the establishment of the metric system. With Lavoisier [334] he deter mined the density of water in order to set up a standard of mass. During the French Revolution, how ever, Haiiy, as a priest, was in consid erable danger. Scientific friends, who were in better standing with the govern ment, kept him alive, though he was im prisoned for a time. Despite his own in security, Haiiy tried, unsuccessfully, to intercede for Lavoisier, which was more than a few other friends of Lavoisier, more favorably situated, dared do. Haiiy survived to become a professor of mineralogy at the Museum of Natural History under Napoleon and wrote the first important texts on crystallography at Napoleon’s specific request. After Na poleon fell, however, Haiiy was deprived of his post, and spent his few remaining years in retirement. [333] JEFFERSON, Thomas American statesman and scholar
13, 1743 Died: Monticello, Virginia, July 4, 1826
The chief events of the life of Jeffer son are known to every well-read Ameri can. He was educated at William and Mary College and was admitted to the bar in 1767. He served in the Virginia legislature, took an active part in the American revolution and wrote the Dec laration of Independence. During the War of Independence he was governor of Virginia and after its end he succeeded Franklin [272] as min ister to France. He was secretary of state under Washington, the first President; and Vice-President under John Adams, the second. In 1800 he was elected third President and served two terms. After retiring in 1809 he remained a revered elder statesman until his death on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration he wrote. What is not so well known is that Jefferson was an accomplished scholar and gentleman-scientist of the last dec ades of the Age of Reason. He knew many languages, interested himself
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