Exploring our archives

Since it’s almost Easter, I thought an egg related post might be in order.

The Hooke Folio details a meeting on 16th January 1679, where Mr Henshaw gives an account of Dr Kuffler’s way of ‘hatching chickens’ using artificial methods rather than leaving the eggs to hatch naturally with the mother hen. Kuffler kept the eggs on a wire over a balneum (similar to a modern day bain marie) with a cover over and placed it close to a furnace. He turned the eggs each day for eighteen days before removing them and putting them ‘on a hair cloth near the ash hole of a stove’. Soon after  Kuffler claims the eggs began to hatch and three days later the chicks were able to feed themselves. Kuffler’s method of artificially incubating the eggs prompted further discussion on 23rd January 1679 concerning whether the chickens produced ’ would be fruitfull & produce eggs and chickens as others that were hatchd the naturall way’. To which Mr Henshaw confirmed that they ‘were euery deale as fruitfull … as the other’.

The Hooke Folio’s account of Kuffler’s work shows how the Fellows of the Society were interested in the way the workings of nature could be ’artificially’ replicated and how the results of such artificial methods compared to those of the natural world.

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Phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical element found in inorganic rocks, is essential to DNA and RNA and is now used for a variety of purposes, from toothpaste to explosives. Its earlier history provides a good example of where alchemy and science overlap. First discovered in the 1660’s, the Royal Society’s early correspondence and experiments regarding it betray a mixture of spiritual and practical interest, as well as some confusion over what should properly be classed as phosphorus. A from Henry Oldenburg to Marcello Malpighi in 1677 describes the German chemist Balduin sending specimens of phosphorus to both the King Charles II and the Royal Society. Oldenburg notes that this stone (shown by later historians to have been calcium nitrate) ‘absorbs the light of the sun or a lamp that afterwards, in the dark, it radiates like incandescent iron or charcoal’. He also observes that this was a different substance from ‘Bologna stone’, a source of baryte, some species of which, like phosphorus, emit a glow on contact with oxygen. This property of the stone made it the focus of attention from alchemists, who identified it as the long sought after ‘philosopher’s stone’, capable of transforming metals into gold.

The interest of fellows such as Isaac Newton in alchemy is well known and references to alchemic myths such as the Table of Hermes litter the early records. The Royal Society also had more a practical aim in mind, however, in making trials on specimens of phosphorescent materials that they acquired: that of providing an alternative light source to candles and oil-lamps. They were encouraged in this effort by the reports of ‘perpetual noctiluca’ coming out of German at the time. Oldenburg’s letters to Adolf Balduin, who was made a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his phosphorus experiments urge him to divulge details of these claims. In February 1682, Hooke reported to the Society that these attempts were still in progress, noting that a Dr Eshalts ‘hoped he should suddainly haue the perpetuall noctiluca as to Enlighten a whole Room being able already to Read a large print by it’. Further correspondence with Eshalts during 1682 discusses the possibility that phosphorus might by made from serum, cows’ milk or human spittle as well as urine.

The Society performed their own experiments with the various phosphorescent materials they were able to obtain. Hooke tried in 1679 to make a type of phosphorus shine after being exposed to the moonlight but failed, even when using a burning glass. On 10 June 1691, the Society witnessed an experiment involving a ‘lapis smargadine’, literally an emerald-coloured stone. This was ground to a powder and placed on a copper plate which was heated, and ‘after the said Powder had been Showed vpon the plate in the shape of R.S. then the Room being Darkened by cloing the Shutters the powder on the plate began to appear white & shining, but [the] All the other parts of the plate did not at all shine for it was not soe great a heat as to make that red hot’. As part of his studies of respiration, Robert Boyle also made experiments with phosphorous wood in an ‘exhausted receiver’, showing that it required a chemical reaction with the air to keep burning (see Fulton’s 1960 article in Notes and Records).
The Philosophical Transactions of 1735 contains some similar experiments using phosphorus synthesized using the ‘acid salt’ (calcium phosphate) of urine as well as an attempt to use it in glass-making. Phosphorescent materials retained their magical allure for some time, and their association with other doctrines of alchemy. For example, a letter to Hans Sloane from a French correspondent dated 1737, stated that phosphorus was a good antidote to the poison of snakes. This idea is one that is constantly associated with bezoar stones, another concept central to alchemy.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the generation of light, with its innately religious implications, continued to inspire mystical explanations. Likewise, the invention of electricity inspired new religious conceptions, even among those who worked most closely with it, as demonstrated by Noakes’ discussion of Varley’s spiritualism in January’s issue of Notes and Records.

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Last Sunday marked two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Like many men of their social class at the time, the members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had connections to the slave trade. As Govier has pointed out, the Royal Society invested their first substantial endowment, 1,300 pounds from the sale of Trinity College, in the Royal Africa and East India Companies, both of whom were involved in enslaving Africans for sale or work on their plantations. Several members of the Royal Society were involved with these companies: for example Paul Neile FRS was prominent in the RAC, while Jeremy Sambrooke and Sir John Lawrence are prominent in both the Council meetings of the early Royal Society and the correspondence of the East India Company, of whom both were Commissioners.

References to slavery in the early records of the Royal Society also reveal some degree of practical involvement in the mechanics of the trade. One example that occurs in the Hooke folio appears to refer to the making of ‘trade beads’ or ’slave bead’, glass beads used to trade with Africans in exchange for slaves. For example, at a meeting of April 22 1680 Robert Hooke presented his efforts to replicate a bead made of a blue stone said to be ‘much esteemed by those of Guiny’, which was testing along with some glass beads designed to counterfeit these beads. Apparently the fake bead was unconvincing, being reportly ‘[in] noe wise soe beautyfull & cleer of colour as that of Guiney’. An experiment of heating the bead in the flame also proved the superiority of the real stone, while it ‘could not be melted but it flawed & crackd like a Stone. the counterfeit ones melted very easily.’ Hooke promised to make a more convincing replica of the stone.

Some of the implications of slavery were a cause for concern for the deeply religious mathematician, Robert Boyle, as papers in his collection reveal. A copy in the Boyle Papers (Vol. 4 f. 118) of a draft Act of Parliament proposed in 1670 notes that the principle that a Christian should not be enslaved by another men of the faith has led to planters and owners of slaves actively discouraging the conversion of slaves for fear of losing their property and investment. The proposed solution was not the abolition of slavery, however, but the provision that the baptism of slaves would not affect the ’service’ due from them to their ‘former masters’. Proposals (f. 127-8) that seem to have been drafted by Boyle himself the same year list two proposal, which may have been regarded as alternatives, as their provisions are otherwise contradictory. The first allows for the freeing of a Christian slave but not the offspring of this slave while the second proposes rights for a Christian slave, including the ownership of goods and the right to seek legal redress against mistreatment by a master. The final document (f. 144) refering to slavery in this collection of papers is a copy of a letter of the East India Company to their colony at St Helena dated 9 December 1670. This orders that Christian slave who are able to demonstrate their knowledge of the faith should remain slaves for seven years, after which they should become free planters. There does not seem to be any evidence that this command, remarkably enlightened for its time, was followed and slavery continued to be a mainstay of the income Britain received from its plantations for over a century.

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A quick note to flag up the lastest Royal Society Podcast:

Robert Hooke: the archival tragedy of dying intestate
A fascinating look at the disorganised paper trail left by Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments, and at the efforts of contemporary historians to piece together his paperwork and restore his legacy.

You can access it at www.royalsoc.ac.uk/podcasts - note that the Podcast is an ‘enhanced’ Podcast, with images and audio which will not play on some MP3 players.

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One of the earliest passages in  the Hooke folio records the Society’s receipt of a letter from Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) describing his observation of what he termed ‘animalcules’ in water together with a number of testimonials attesting to the truth of his discovery.

The ‘animalcules’ he describes are in fact the earliest observations of protozoa. Protozoa  are animal-like, single-celled organisms most commonly found in water and very rarely visible without the use of a microscope.

Leeuwenhoek’s observations prompted Hooke to conduct a series of experiments during Royal Society meetings in an attempt to see the ‘exceedingly small animals’ which Leeuwenhoek described. His initial experiment which observed pump water through a single microscope at a meeting on the 1st November 1677, met with little success and he decided to use pepper water in his next experiment. Unfortunately this did not work either. At the meeting of the 15th November 1677, Hooke finally sees ‘exceedingly small animals’ in rain water with a small amount of black pepper added to it and by the 6th December 1677, Hooke had refined the microscope sufficiently that ‘the small insects’ appear ‘much more magnified and clear’.

The Hooke Folio is particularly useful in charting the development of Hooke’s experiments to view protozoa because the records held by the Society (prior to the rediscovery of the Folio) break off abruptly part way through describing Hooke’s experiment on 15th November 1677 and do not recommence until the 6th December 1677. The Folio pages, missing from the official records, describe, amongst a number of other things, how Hooke modified the microscope so that the ‘animals’ could be seen more clearly and a debate amongst the fellows about how the ‘animals’ might be generated in the water and whether pepper somehow influences this generation.

This interest in protozoa is evident throughout the Folio, in fact some of the last pages of the Folio from 1691 record Mr Henshaw’s observations of ‘animals’ in pepper water.

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Today David Miliband announced the UK’s new climate change bill, getting the message across with this video on YouTube. Climate change has become a matter of increasingly concern, especially after last month’s report that global warming could involve a rise in temperatures of around 4 degrees by the end of the century, with chaotic consequences. The Royal Society has been involved with the investigation into climate change: a study launched in January will focus in particular on the effects of ground-level ozone, one of the greenhouse gasses likely to influence warming.

Although most of the opposition to the view that human activity is responsible for climate change has now dissipated, studying the interaction between the properties of the air and the weather has long been hotly debated. In the seventeenth century the concept of air having a changeable gaseous nature rather than representing a static element was a new and controversial idea. The existence of some exhaustible property of air could be proven by Robert Hooke’s experiments with the now familiar experiment using a candle flame inside a jar. He repeated this using a chick and then himself, who fortunately both remained ‘very lively’. The possibilities afforded by this new understanding of air were also demonstrated in Boyle’s famous airpump, described in his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects.

Not everyone was convinced immediately: Thomas Hobbes was famously critical of the credibility of Boyle’s experimental proofs. Many also doubted the validity of the experiments that the Royal Society performed to test air pressure using barometers and to compare the weights of various substances in air and water.

A page of the Hooke folio that does not seem to have survived elsewhere, probably dating from 1678, defends the various experiments against an attack on them as ‘triuiall and impertinent tricks’ by those who think themselves ‘masters of all knowledge a priori and by Reuelation and dispise[d] such as is acquired by experimental inquiry’. He goes on to argue that, concerning air:

An exact and thorough knowledge of that is of more concerne
to mankind then all the other physicall knowledg in the world. for
it is by that we continually subsist & wthout it we cannot liue one
tenth part of an hower. tis from that proceeds the causes of Infi=
nite of Diseases, and It affordes as many Remedys for those Distem
pers…that is the cause sine
qua non of all vegetables and animalls vpon the Land and it Influences euen
the fish in the sea. Infinite and vnspeakable are the vses of it to the husband
man the merchant the tradesman the mechanick &c and that age will be
Deseruedly famous that perfects the theory of it.

Hooke’s argument apparently gained acceptance among the Royal Society, who continued to investigate the properties of the air and their effects on the atmosphere. As a recent article in Amix notes, Nehemiah Grew came up with an interesting if incorrect theory that attributed barometric variations to the changing concentrations of saline bodies in the air, that affected atmospheric pressure. By the time of the Great Trigonometrical survey in India, observers were directed to record the chemical composition of the air.

Despite the innovations of John Evelyn in predicting the consequences of man’s interference with the environment in his discourse on forest trees, the impact of man on the composition of the air would only become significant after the industrial revolution and not fully appreciated until long after that. Furthermore, the age which Hooke envisages in which the understanding of the air and our interaction with it is perfected still seems far distant.

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Did you see the lunar eclipse on Saturday night? Lunar eclipses occur when the earth blocks the sun’s light by passing between the sun and the moon and we see the earth’s shadow gradually cast across the moon. Although lunar eclipses are not particularly rare, with a clear sky, as on Saturday night, the sight of the moon with a red or copper hue is an impressive sight.

The Folio records accounts observing both solar and lunar eclipses and, interestingly, these were viewed as sufficiently important to be included in the index to the Folio. Such accounts tended to be in the form of letters, for instance in July 1782, Cassini writes to Flamstead, describing an eclipse of the moon in Dantizick, whilst in December 1685, Hevlius writes to Aston ,again with an account of a lunar eclipse in Dantizick. These descriptions are not confined to the Hooke Folio, however, and form part of a wider pattern of interest in lunar eclipses within the early Royal Society. For example accounts of eclipses are sent from various places including Paris and Moscow, whilst in 1666, Gresham-Professor of Geometry Mr Rook’s methods for observing a lunar eclipse are published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He says that the observer, preferably using a telescope rather than the naked eye, should pick out three of the ‘eminentest spots’ which ‘lie nearest the ecliptick’ and note the time a shadow is first cast on each one and when they are ‘completely entered in’ and out of the shadow. Rook also comments that observing lunar eclipses is important, not only for the astronomical information that could be gleaned, but also for the geographical information, such as comparing how observations made by scientists in various countries both differed and converged.

If you missed Saturday’s eclipse, one should be visible (weather permitting) on July 16th, though only if you live in Asia, the Pacific or the West of the Americas, if you live in Europe then you’ll have to wait until 9th January.

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In November 1681, the folio records that ‘Mr. Hooke Produced A new sort of Instrument for Describing the Rhombs or spirall lines vpon the Planisphericall projection on the pole of the world and shewed how the same would easily Describe all manner of Proportionall spiralls whether Greater or Lesse whether wider or narrower. And mentioned also what vse it might be for nauigation and sea charts.’ A few months later, Hooke produced a globe about a foot in diameter fitted with this instrument, and claimed that he could ‘thereby both Geometrically and mechanically Draw all the Rhumb lines vpon it most exactly’. A ‘rhumb line’, although sometimes used to indicate a straight line between two points on a Mercator chart, seems here to have its modern meaning of a curve that crosses each meridian at the same angle and the spirals Hooke refers to describe the way in which a rhumb spirals towards one of the poles.

The instrument designed by Hooke apparently had numerous applications: this is probably what he used in June that year to demonstrate the truth of Archimedes’ ancient theory on spirals, namely that ‘If a straight line drawn in a plane revolves uniformly any number of times about a fixed extremity until it returns to its original position, and if, at the same time as the line revolves, a point moves uniformly along the straight line beginning at the fixed extremity, the point will describe a spiral in the plane.’

Hooke later used the instrument in other ways, attaching it to a compass in order to describe a parabola. This apparently met with some opposition: at a meeting of 15 February 1682, it was noted that Flamstead had ‘cavilled against’ Hooke’s method, ‘affirming it to be fals’. On the repeated demonstration of the working of the instrument, however, the Society agreed that it was ‘true and certain and the best way yet known of describing that curve’. The final reference is in March 1682 and refers to the use of the instrument to describe an ellipse. By this entry Waller has noted ‘Quere Mr Hunt what this was and how performed’. Apparently, then the instrument and its method of use had been lost by the time Waller acquired Hooke’s papers in 1708. Richard Waller, a strong supporter of Hooke’s claims to priority had also made annotations against Hooke’s manuscripts about clocks or watches in Trinity College Cambridge – perhaps believing that they contained the solution to the long-term problem of longitude. He may, therefore, have also believed that this lost instrument was a significant piece of equipment in Hooke’s claim to have invented a new method of planispherical projection to be used in mapping.

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The first part of the folio (around 100 pages) contains Hooke’s extracts from early Royal Society journals. One of the recurring discussions centres on the chariot designs of Hooke and Thomas Blount. Although the use of the term ‘chariot’ might conjure up images of the classical two-wheeled variety, this is a thoroughly seventeenth-century version on both two and four wheels (though the use of the term ’chariot’ possibly stemmed from the fashion for using classical terms during the period). This provides a good example of how experiments and designs were presented to the Society as a kind of work in progress, which were discussed at meetings and where members could suggest improvements or offer solutions to difficulties encountered by the experimenters or designers.

Hooke and Blount showed their designs over the course of a number of meetings and various adjustments were made. For example Hooke realised that the springs of the chariot needed to be shortened for ease of turning in the street (which may also indicate the narrowness of seventeenth-century streets). However, shorter strings would impede the comfort of the rider, so following a series of experiments, Hooke decides to shorten and double the strings to accomodate both for the comfort of the rider and the demands of turning the chariot. He also experiments with the positioning of the rider in relation to the wheels, realising that this will impact on the burden felt by the horse.

By June 1665, Hooke was getting close to perfecting the design, but he was unable to show it again until 14th March 1666 as the Society’s meetings were suspended due to the plague, however prior to the recess, he was urged to perfect his chariot.

Hooke brought the chariot with him on his return to London. It was drawn by one horse and gave ‘great ease to the Riders both to him that sitts in the chariot and to him that sitts ouer the horse vpon a springy saddle’. By 23rd May 1666, Hooke and Blount’s chariots were requested to be shown ’Saturday following in the afternoon’ to ‘compare’ them. Exactly what is meant by ‘compare’ is not stated, though I do like to think that some kind of race might have been involved - just imagine the scene - Hooke and Blount at St George’s Field on a Saturday afternoon, Hooke on one side with his chariot, Blount on the other, whilst members of the Royal Society looked on - who needs rugby and football matches, when you can watch chariots on a Saturday afternoon?

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Very few people like going to the dentist, but imagine what dental treatment would have been like in the seventeenth century.

The first recorded dental treatments actually occured in ancient Egypt and China and by the seventeenth century, treatments included tinctures, styptics and extractions. In July 1678, Dr Holder suggests that toothache can be treated by putting oil of tobacco into the hollow of a rotten tooth, though Hooke remarks that such treatment sent a maid servant into convulsions and led to her death, so it might not be a good method after all.

A few months later in January 1679, they continue their discussion of teeth, but here recount how teeth could be aritficially set in place of old ones. They find that if a new tooth was inserted as soon as the rotten one had been drawn out ‘the gums would coalesce and inclose the teeth as firmly almost, as if they were natural.’ This treatment was carried out on a young lady whose teeth were ‘much rotted by eating sweet meats’ by extracting the bad teeth and replacing them with those of a young boy. The treatment, for the young lady proved successful, though was perhaps not so good for the now toothless young boy.   

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