The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

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  No one, not even John Playfair had a clue what this meant. In fact, what this obscure paragraph shows, and which absolutely no one at the time had spotted, was that Hutton had anticipated Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection by more than half a century. But Playfair only wrote up Hutton’s geological hypotheses; had he also made the effort to translate his friend’s speculations about evolution, it might have been Hutton, not Darwin, who became known as the “father of evolution”. To be fair, though, given the violent Establishment reaction against Hutton’s revolutionary ideas about the age of the Earth, he might not have lived long enough to enjoy it.

  The Wrong Chemistry

  The eccentric Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was distinguished by his long white beard and shaggy mane of white hair, which he cut once a year, a task performed every spring by a local shepherd with a pair of sheep shears.

  Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk in western Siberia in 1834, the youngest of either fourteen or seventeen children – the family was so big that no one could keep track of it. Although he fared badly at school, he showed a deep interest in science and, in 1855, he qualified as a chemistry teacher. He had an astonishing capacity for sustained spells of hard work; when he realized that there was no such thing as a Russian textbook in organic chemistry, he sat down and wrote one himself – all 500 pages of it – in just sixty days.

  His notoriously short fuse and foul temper made Mendeleev a difficult man to work with and he spent a large part of his life falling out with colleagues and storming out of laboratories. It cost him the Nobel Prize.

  Mendeleev did for chemistry what Newton did for physics and Darwin for biology. His greatest contribution – the Periodic Table of Elements – in which the elements are arranged in order of their atomic weight, came to him in a dream after he had fallen asleep during a game of patience. It was a miraculous piece of organization on which all of modern chemistry is based. Mendeleev’s table was such a brilliant piece of work, in fact, that it predicted the existence of elements that hadn’t yet been discovered.

  In 1906, the Nobel committee selected Mendeleev to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stepped in and overturned the decision. The man behind the intervention was the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who’d won the chemistry prize in 1903 for his theory of electrolytic dissociation. Mendeleev had been an outspoken critic of the theory and Arrhenius seized the opportunity to get his own back.

  Posthumous recognition of sorts came for Mendeleev in 1955 when the element 101 was named mendelevium in his honour. Aptly, it is a highly unstable element.

  Most Failed Attempts to be Named in a Scientific Textbook

  You may have come across the name Robert Hooke in your school Physics lessons. Hooke’s law of elasticity states: “The power of any spring is in the same proportion with the tension thereof”. Or you may have encountered him in connection with Boyle’s invention, the air pump. He was also the first person to describe a cell in biology; his book Micrographia, published in 1665, amazed the academic world by illustrating and commenting on findings made with a microscope. He had a hand in Huygens’ theory of the isochronous clock and Harrison’s longitude timekeeper. In fact, there wasn’t any subject that Hooke wasn’t prepared to delve into. He became involved in everything from anatomical dissections to map-making and scientific instrument-making and offered new explanations for all sorts of natural phenomena, from the life story of the mosquito to the origin of lunar craters. His ideas about the origins of the Earth, the formation of rocks and the development of species anticipated the works of great geologists like James Hutton and Charles Lyell and the naturalist Charles Darwin. In short, he mastered more branches of science than any other man could hope to achieve. And yet, unless you have a special interest in the history of science, the chances are you may never have heard of him at all.

  The world of English science in the mid-seventeenth century was run by gentlemen of independent means who had the time and money to dabble in “natural philosophy” as it was then called. In 1660, a group of twelve of these free-thinking amateurs got together at Gresham College in Bishopsgate, London, to form themselves into an association. There were no entry qualifications, only an admission fee of ten shillings’ membership plus one shilling per week subscription. A couple of years later, the newly restored King Charles II granted them a royal charter and they became The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, known simply as The Royal Society.

  The Royal Society’s labyrinth of separate committees and subcommittees covered the gamut of scientific knowledge from anatomy to zoology. Members debated such wideranging subjects as the birth of a dog with no mouth, the remedial properties of cow’s urine and the penis of a possum. Mesmerism was taken as seriously as mathematics or the properties of a unicorn’s horn. At any given time, you could find them attempting to grow moss on a dead man’s skull (the new cure for epilepsy) or blowing bellows into the chest cavity of a live dog to find out how lungs worked, or grafting a cock’s spur and feathers on to its head. Blissfully unaware of the importance of blood type compatibility, they once gathered to witness the transfusion of twelve ounces of sheep’s blood into the unfortunate Arthur Coga. (Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary: “The patient speaks well, saying that he finds himself much better, as a new man . . . but he is cracked a little in his head.”) You could listen to lectures on the existence of water on the Moon, devices for walking on ice, or how to make thunder and lightning effects for the stage, or you could learn about wombs in plants.2

  The Royal Society and the bizarre experiments that took place within its walls were the butt of many jokes. Jonathan Swift satirized it in Gulliver’s Travels when he described an academy on the island of Lepta where scientists performed all manner of pointless experiments, such as attempting to extract sunlight from cucumbers. Charles Dickens parodied The Royal Society as “The Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything”.

  In the very eye of this hurricane of scientific activity was Robert Hooke. In 1662, he was appointed as their first full-time Curator of Experiments, which basically made him the first ever fully professional scientist. His job was to provide a minimum of three experiments for each Society meeting. The demands on his time were huge, but Hooke had unlimited intellectual curiosity and great stamina. The variety of his work and his capacity for original research was astonishing. At any given moment, he could be working on air pumps or barometers or microscopes, or making astronomical instruments, or timepieces for mariners.

  Although unquestionably brilliant and almost superhumanly industrious, Hooke was certainly a difficult man to get along with and he had a talent for making enemies. He was also morbidly secretive, terrified that other scientists would try to steal the credit for his work. Secrecy wasn’t unusual among scientists, but for Hooke it was an obsession. Hooke dabbled widely and extensively but it never occurred to him that there might be other talented scientists working on projects similar to his own. He also never quite learned that in science you earned recognition, not by inventing theories, but by proving them. For example, he claimed he invented a pocket watch accurate enough to be used by navigators, but somehow neglected to produce a single working prototype to back it up. This was the recurring pattern of Hooke’s career, keeping his own ideas secret, then responding to the discoveries of other scientists by claiming that he had known about them for years. It led to a series of bitter, very personal and embarrassing clashes with fellow scientists over priority.

  His biggest mistake was when he fell out with the most powerful and the most vindictive man in the history of science – Isaac Newton. The most famous spat in the history of physics began with a bet. In 1683, Hooke was sitting in a London coffee house with his friends, the great astronomer Edmond Halley (of comet fame) and Sir Christopher Wren. The latter was Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College – an astronomer first, it is now largely forgotten, and an architect second.3

 
The conversation in the coffee house turned to the solar system. All three men knew that the planets orbited in an ellipse, but no one had ever been able to explain exactly why. Wren generously offered a prize of forty shillings to the first man who could provide the answer. Hooke claimed that he had already solved the problem; he just wasn’t going to tell anyone what it was – not yet, anyway. It was up to the others to find that out for themselves. Hooke would “conceal it for some time, that the others might have to value it”. No doubt this raised a couple of knowing smiles from his companions. He had also recently claimed he had discovered the secret of manned flight, another accomplishment Hooke chose to keep to himself.

  Halley immediately took up Wren’s challenge and decided to enlist some help from an expert. Where better to start than with Cambridge University’s Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton? When Edmond Halley tracked Newton down to his rooms at Cambridge and told him his problem, it did not take Newton long to produce a solution. At the heart of the explanation was a mathematical equation called the “Inverse Square Law of Gravitational Attraction”. In fact, Newton already had it all worked out on paper; he just couldn’t remember where he put it. Now this may seem truly astonishing4 but it would not have surprised anyone who knew Newton well. As a student he invented calculus, but then forgot to tell anyone about it for twenty-seven years. It was the same with his work in optics – extraordinary insights into the understanding of light, not shared with anyone for three decades.

  Halley urged Newton to write up his calculation again and produce a paper. But Newton did much more. After a couple of years’ hard slog, he produced Principia Mathematica, the great landmark mathematical work that outlined Newton’s laws of motion.

  When Robert Hooke heard about Principia – in particular, Newton’s Inverse Square Law of Gravitational Attraction – he made an extraordinary claim. He was sure that Newton had stolen the idea from a letter he had sent to him years earlier. The inspiration had been his and Newton’s calculations had merely confirmed it. Hooke demanded a formal acknowledgement.

  Newton, the touchiest of scientists, was livid. He and Hooke had form; they had already clashed a couple of times before. The first was a dispute over light waves. In January 1672, just over a week after he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, Newton presented a paper called Theory of Light and Colour. He promised that it was “the oddest if not the most considerable detection which has been made in the operations of nature”. This was quite a bold claim for a twenty-nine-year-old scientific novice, but when Newton’s paper was read out to the Royal Society, it did not disappoint. His revolutionary understanding of light was received with great enthusiasm. The only person not impressed was Robert Hooke. He wrote a note faintly praising the “niceness and curiosity” of Newton’s experiments, then proceeded to dismiss them as very inferior to his own “wave” theory of light. Any other young scientist might have taken this critique by a much more established colleague on the chin, but not Newton. Notoriously sensitive to criticism, he reacted like a petulant child and threatened to resign from the Royal Society.

  Newton finally ended his sulk eighteen months later. He wrote to Hooke, who was by now the Royal Society’s full-time secretary, to inform him that he was building a new telescope to study the path of heavy bodies falling to Earth. Instead of taking the olive branch, Hooke was at his patronizing best. He re-read Newton’s letter and found a tiny mistake (Newton was only human after all). Instead of keeping it to himself, Hooke delighted in sharing his rival’s error with his colleagues. Newton was furious.

  Now it seemed that Hooke was trying to take the credit for his discovery of gravity. This was the last straw for Newton, who threatened to stop the publication of his work completely, then thought better of it, but went through the manuscript and struck out every reference to Hooke, even the bits where Hooke was due at least some credit. Hooke’s albeit modest part in the greatest discovery in science was simply written out of history.

  Robert Hooke continued to press his charge of plagiarism against Newton for years, but he never received the acknowledgement he believed he was due. The rest of Hooke’s career, and his life, were overshadowed by his row with Newton. His public reputation also suffered, a pointed reminder of which he received in May 1676 when he went to the theatre to see playwright Thomas Shadwell’s newest work The Virtuoso. The play’s central character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, had spent £2,000 on microscopes to learn about the nature of eels in vinegar. He had transfused sheep’s blood into a madman who then bleated like a lamb, observed military campaigns on the Moon and read his Bible by the light of a rotting leg of pork (a reference to the recent discovery of bioluminescence). There was no doubt that Shadwell’s play was a satire on Hooke and London’s seventeenth-century gentleman scientists. Hooke didn’t get the joke; in fact, he was furious. “Damned dogs,” he wrote in his diary, “people almost pointed.”

  Hooke’s reputation wasn’t helped by his scandalous private life. He and Newton were the oddest of bachelors. Newton was solitary, obsessive and possibly gay; Robert Hooke’s single status, however, was not really out of choice. No authenticated portrait of him survives, so we have to rely on pen-portraits of people who knew him well. Take this account by his friend Richard Waller: “As to his Person, he was but despicable, being very crooked . . . he was always very pale and lean, and latterly nothing but Skin and Bone, with a Meager Aspect, his Eyes grey and full, with a sharp ingenious Look whilst younger; his nose but thin, of a moderate height and length; his Mouth meanly wide, and upper lip thin; his Chin sharp, and Forehead large; his Head of a middle size. He wore his own Hair of a dark Brown colour, very long and hanging neglected over his Face uncut and lank.”

  In other words, even in his best periwig, Hooke was not attractive to women. Other unflattering descriptions of Hooke call him “dwarfish” and mention a “twistedness which grew worse with age”, a reference to his pronounced stoop, which he blamed on long hours spent at a workbench lathe, but is more likely to have been caused by a congenital condition. Hooke was certainly someone to be stared at. He was so odd-looking that people avoided him in the street or openly laughed at him. Newton’s barb – directed in a letter to Hooke sent on 5 February 1676, observing, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants . . .” – was a cleverly disguised insult. Newton wasn’t just mocking Hooke’s intellectual pretensions, he was also laughing at his disability.

  But Robert Hooke had a sex life, although not with the plentiful supply of London prostitutes available at the time. Given his reputation as a miser, he probably hated the idea of paying for sex. Like Samuel Pepys, Hooke was a candid diarist and, like Pepys, could not keep his hands off his servants. In Hooke’s sex diary, he used a symbol to signify an orgasm, usually next to the names of housemaids, especially Nell Young and her successors Doll Lord and Bette Orchard. Taking sexual advantage of your female employees was one thing; having sex with your niece almost a third your age was another.

  Robert Hooke had a brother, John, who was a grocer on the Isle of Wight. In 1672, John sent his ten-year-old daughter Grace up to London to live with her Uncle Robert. At some point in the early 1670s, John Hooke, via Robert, arranged for her to become engaged to the son of Thomas Bloodworth, a wealthy merchant who had been both a Sheriff and a Lord Mayor of London. There was some sort of pre-nuptial legal contract that bound the two to marry at a later date. Robert Hooke acted as an intermediary between his brother and Bloodworth. For reasons unknown, at some point the Blood-worths decided to break off the contract.

  In 1678, John Hooke hanged himself, possibly because he was struggling with mounting debts. Robert Hooke then became his niece’s guardian, but it is clear from his diary that he was also sexually obsessed with her. In effect, Hooke groomed her. He paid for her education, bought her gifts and clothes and, when she reached sixteen, began sleeping with her. He even flaunted the relationship and took her out on the town. When the tiny, twisted little hunch
back scientist was seen out and about with a pretty young girl on his arm, even though the age difference wasn’t particularly gross by the standards of the day, they would have certainly turned heads. The relationship continued until her premature death from pneumonia in 1687, at the age of twenty-seven. Hooke was devastated by his niece’s death and never fully recovered from it.

  Hooke was also a raging hypochondriac and took various alarming self-medications, which he listed meticulously in his diary. There were purgatives, emetics, mercury, tobacco, spirit of wormwood (unfermented absinthe) and laudanum (opium in liquid form), even steel filings. One particularly toxic substance he favoured was sal ammoniac – ammonium chloride. He became addicted to a variety of painkillers and, as the side-effects of the drugs worsened, took even more dubious pharmaceutical remedies to dull the pain. In 1689, he delivered a lecture at the Royal Society on a new substance he had discovered, “a certain plant which grows very common in India” – cannabis. Hooke said he appreciated its aphrodisiac qualities.

  Hooke’s self-medication took its toll and he became a feeble, emaciated wreck, increasingly plagued by bouts of depression and severe dizzy spells, which he attributed to wearing a heavy wig, and was prone to anxiety attacks, especially when he suspected that someone was trying to steal one of his ideas. He also took a small pinch of silver filings every now and then to improve his memory, but he never forgot about any of the perceived injustices he had suffered at the hand of Newton and others.

  As his health and productivity declined, Hooke was fast declining into an aggressive, paranoid and miserly old crank. His relationships with other scientists deteriorated into bitter acrimony over more petty priority disputes – in the case of Christian Huygens, over the invention of the balance-spring watch. His conviction that he had been overlooked and deprived due recognition for a whole range of scientific discoveries – some justified, others wishful thinking – were a serious embarrassment to his colleagues at the Royal Society.