The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  In spite of ill health, bitter resentment towards Newton and others and his anger over the way he had been treated during his long career, he kept working, even though by now he had acquired a reputation as an inventor of useless and impractical gadgets and ideas – he suggested that the day should be divided into twenty-nine hours, for example, or that cancer might be cured by smoking tobacco. In one of his final lectures to the Royal Society, he announced that there were people living on the Moon.

  Hooke’s final years were a long and ungraceful decline. According to his friend Waller, he was “much over-run with scurvy”. He also became extremely miserly and never changed his clothes or washed and refused to spend money on soap. It was widely rumoured that he had actually starved to death his live-in maidservant. The forgotten man of science spent the final year of his life blind and bedridden, before dying alone and broke, or so it was assumed, believing to the last that he, not Newton, had discovered gravity. He was buried at St Helen, Bishopsgate, in an unmarked grave. After his death, his executors discovered a treasure chest hidden in his cellar stuffed with money and expensive jewellery.

  You might think that having triumphed in his priority dispute with Hooke that Isaac Newton would have let the matter lie, but he was determined to obliterate Hooke’s name from scientific history. Thanks to Newton, there isn’t even a single known surviving portrait of Hooke to commemorate his extraordinary life. In 1703, the year of Hooke’s death, the Royal Society relocated to new headquarters and the move was personally overseen by Newton. One of the many items to be relocated, hanging in Newton’s old office, was Robert Hooke’s portrait, the only one of him that was ever known to have been painted, but during the move it mysteriously disappeared. There is little doubt that Newton had it destroyed.

  Today, the only achievement you will find Robert Hooke’s name next to in science textbooks as being his alone is an obscure piece of relatively worthless information about the tension in a spring – not much for a man now regarded as one of the great intellectual giants of his age.

  Least Convincing Attempt to Prove God’s Work in All Its Glory

  The Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse was the author of a number of successful books on zoology and marine biology, but is mostly remembered for his strangest – Omphales – published in 1884.

  As a devout Christian, Gosse was preoccupied with the knotty problem of whether or not the biblical Adam possessed a belly button. It goes without saying that, strictly speaking, Adam didn’t need an umbilical cord, having never spent time in a womb. But as the prototype for all men, was he equipped with all the working parts? Gosse’s conclusion in his book Omphales (Greek for navel) was that Adam did indeed have a belly button. God had created Adam’s navel – and the fossil record – to create the impression that the world was very old. It was an almighty hoax to tempt humankind and test their faith.

  Gosse thought his explanation was a work of genius and sat back to enjoy the plaudits, but to his astonishment they didn’t come. Scientists simply sniggered, while fellow Christians really didn’t like the implication that God was a practical joker.

  When thousands of copies of Omphales remained unsold, Gosse was genuinely mystified. Convinced that the title of the book was the problem, he reissued it with the more accessible title of Creation. This didn’t help. Crushed by overwhelmingly indifference, he gave up science and took up watercolour painting instead.

  “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.”

  President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903

  Most Pointless Lines of Research by Someone Who Should Have Known Better

  “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”

  Albert Einstein

  As any scientist will tell you, progress is achieved through trial and error – but mainly error. Scientists are, after all, much more human than we ever give them credit for. And even the greatest of them all could get it horribly wrong.

  It is impossible to overstate Sir Isaac Newton’s contributions to science. He had arguably the sharpest scientific mind the world has ever known. What he produced in just a few short years (his anni mirables – years of wonder, as they became known) became the cornerstone for maths and physics as we know them today. In 1999, the Sunday Times named him Man of the Millennium. In 2002, BBC viewers voted him the sixth-greatest Briton of all time, ahead of Shakespeare and Darwin. His friend and fellow scientist Edmond Halley said of him, “No closer to the gods can any mortal rise.” What a shame, then, that the bulk of his life’s work was just a complete waste of time.

  Newton was more than a little bit odd. Neurotic, humourless and solitary, he pursued his science like a hermit. He got into ugly disputes with other scientists, including Robert Hooke and the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He took part in bizarre self-experimentation. He once stuck a large, blunt needle into the back of his eye socket between his eyeball and the bone and jiggled it about, nearly blinding himself in the process, then stared directly into the Sun with one eye for as long as he possibly could just to see what would happen. Although he escaped any permanent damage, he had to lie down in a darkened room for days before his eyesight recovered. He had no interest in any kind of social activity and made few friends, apart from one strange and stormy relationship with a young Swiss student called Nicholas Fatio de Duillier.5 It was said that Newton laughed only once in his entire life, when someone asked him what use he saw in Euclid.6

  He went properly “mad” for a while in 1692 when he was fifty. He experienced a breakdown followed by a period of mental instability that lasted for the best part of eighteen months. A Cambridge colleague described the episode as “a distemper that much seized his head”; it may have been triggered by depression or overwork. Whatever the cause of his illness, those closest to him were convinced that he had lost his mind. He became deeply paranoid, accusing colleagues of conspiring against him. He sent a very strange letter, written in a shaky hand, to the philosopher John Locke, accusing Locke of trying to “embroil him with women and other means”.

  Newton recovered from his “black year”, wrote a few letters of apology to various people and was soon back at work. His breakdown, however, had a longer-lasting effect. Although he had emerged from his period of psychosis with his faculties apparently intact, his work took off in a new and very, very weird direction.

  In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes bought a trunkload of Newton’s papers at auction. He was expecting to find loads of notes relating to calculus or optics. What he actually found astonished Keynes and everyone else. By the time he was famous, Newton had more or less given up proper science. He was now obsessed with the study of alchemy.

  Alchemy first became fashionable in Europe in the twelfth century. Its exponents hunted for the most sought-after object of the day, the Philosopher’s Stone, a mythical, magical article said to possess not only the ability to change base metals into gold but capable also, if mixed properly with wine, of producing the Elixir of Life, a cure for all illnesses. In 1404, the English parliament passed the Act of Multipliers which prohibited anyone from practising alchemy (despite the fact that no one had ever succeeded at it). It was still legal in Scotland, where one of its most famous advocates was the Italian John Damien de Falcuis, alchemist to King James IV of Scotland. Having repeatedly failed to deliver on his promise to turn base metal into gold, in September 1507 Damien tried to impress his employer by “flying” to France by launching himself off the walls of Stirling Castle, which was perched high on top of a cliff. The alchemist only made it as far as a dunghill directly beneath the castle walls.7 Despite these repeated setbacks in his experiments, King James was still very generous to Damien and gave him a pension of 200 ducats when he finally retired from the court in 1513, but alchemical research was never quite the same again.

  Newton had dabbled in it on and o
ff for years, but when he was in his forties and at the peak of his powers it become an obsession. He was anxious to prove that a substance known as “child of Satan” (antimony) gave off magnetic rays that would attract the life force of the world. Newton believed that it contained “God’s signature”. He spent a fortune on alchemical books and equipment and built a small furnace in his garden. Hidden away in his laboratory with his assistant Humphrey Newton (no relation), Newton slogged for up to nineteen hours a day, spending sleepless nights poring over ancient texts, hunched over bubbling retorts of mercury, lead, antimony and sulphur, trying to cook up the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. His work on alchemy was so all-consuming that he often forgot to eat and sometimes went to bed at five or six in the morning. It was all very baffling for his assistant, who noted simply, “What his aim might be I am unable to penetrate it.” It has often been suggested, although never proven, that Newton’s breakdown may have been caused by his exposure to these heavy metals.

  In all, the greatest mind in science spent over thirty of the most productive years of his life trying to change base metals into gold and wrote over a million words on the subject – an exercise in futility and wishful thinking that amounted to so much waste paper.8

  At a stretch, you could forgive Newton for his alchemy. At the time, there was a very dim understanding of the laws of science and nature and the idea of turning lead into gold was no more remarkable than manned space flight or splitting the atom. But alchemy wasn’t Newton’s only line of pointless research. He was a deeply religious man (he once broke off all relations with his best friend because he told him a crude joke about a nun) and to outward appearances was a respectable, orthodox member of the Church of England, but he was secretly a member of an obscure heretical sect called Arianism. It was named after the fourth-century Libyan Arius who was excommunicated for his views in AD 321. Followers of Arianism rejected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – that is, that Christ and God were as one. Newton kept very quiet about his religious beliefs. By this time he was, ironically, a master of Trinity College and, if his employees had found out about it, he would have lost his job, or worse.

  There was, however, an even more curious aspect to Newton’s faith. After completing his monumental Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he began to devote more and more of his time searching for hidden codes in the Bible, which he believed contained God’s secret laws for the universe. He claimed that the mathematical formulae in Principia were first revealed by God to a group of mystics at the dawn of civilization, a tradition to which Newton was chosen as heir. He believed that the Old Testament King Solomon, son of David, was “the greatest philosopher of the world”. Newton was convinced that Solomon had secretly incorporated the pattern of the universe into the design of his temple.

  He taught himself Hebrew and spent long hours poring over floor plans of Solomon’s temple hoping to find mathematical clues to the Second Coming of Christ. Newton predicted that the world would end in 2060, a calculation he made by studying the Book of Daniel and the date of the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire. The Second Coming of Christ, according to Newton, would follow plagues and war and would precede a 1,000-year reign by the saints on Earth – of which he would be one.

  Newton spent more time and energy writing about biblical history than he did on any of his great scientific works. During the last thirty years of his life, he wrote over a million words attempting to establish a new chronology for the Old Testament. But whatever his skills as a scientist, Newton was a terrible historian. For example, as his starting point for his timeline, he took as fact the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, including the winged harpies and multi-headed serpents. He re-wrote his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms at least sixteen times before he was happy with it. When it was finally published, a year after his death, even his most dedicated admirers were left scratching their heads as to why the great man had devoted his unique talent to such a bizarre project. When the full range of his oddball religious beliefs became apparent, years after his death, Newtonian scholars quietly swept the details under the carpet.

  At the age of thirty-five, Newton had turned his back on proper science completely,9 but he had two new careers. The first was as a very reticent MP for Cambridge University – he spoke in Parliament only once, to ask an usher to close a window to stop a draught. His other job was Master of the Mint, the institution that controlled the production of coins for the whole country. One of his duties was to prosecute counterfeiters. A successful prosecution usually meant the death sentence. Newton personally pursued counterfeiters to the gallows with chilling efficiency – the same ruthless streak he showed when seeing off his scientific rivals.

  You can’t help wondering what might have been if only Newton had stuck to science.

  Second-Most Pointless Lines of Research by People Who Should Have Known Better

  In terms of scientific importance, Edmond Halley (1656–1742) ranks a distant third behind his two contemporaries Newton and Robert Hooke, but he managed to cram more into his career than either of them.

  Halley was an outstanding polymath, publishing on such diverse subjects as mortality rates, how to determine the positions of the tropics, how the length of the shortest day varies with latitude, how deformed fingers are inherited within families, how crabs and lobsters re-grow amputated claws and the age of the Earth. He predicted that Venus would transit the face of the Sun in 1769 and explained how accurate timings of the event from widely spread locations could greatly aid navigation, allowing Britannia to rule the waves. He was a naval captain, the leader of the first ever scientific expedition made by the Royal Navy, a diplomat and, it seems highly likely, even a spy working for the British Government.10

  Halley was a precocious student with a keen interest in astronomy. He was making observations at sixteen and wrote his first scientific paper while still an undergraduate at Oxford. He even played a very important role in persuading a reluctant Isaac Newton to share with the world his ideas about gravity. If it hadn’t been for Halley, Newton’s Principia Mathematical, arguably the most important book in science, might never have been published in the first place.

  When the first part of Newton’s Principia was delivered to the Royal Society in April 1846, they didn’t want to publish it because their one previous effort at publishing a book, Francis Willoughby’s History of Fishes, had been an embarrassing sales disaster. There were so many unsold copies of it lying around that the Royal Society tried to fob Halley off with fifty books instead of the £50 they owed him in wages.

  Halley felt honour bound to pay for the publication of Principia out of his own pocket. Fortunately, there was a happy ending: Principia was a modest commercial success (it was a difficult read and written in Latin – Newton didn’t want it accessible to any old riff-raff) and Halley was able to make a small profit out of it. He went on to use Newton’s new theory to correctly predict the return of a certain meteor. When Halley’s Comet returned bang on schedule – on Christmas Day 1758 – it was an outstanding moment in scientific discovery and confirmed Edmond Halley as one of the greatest astronomers of all time.

  So much for the sensible stuff. It might be significant that Halley once wrote a paper on the benefits of taking opium, because he was also responsible for one of the weirdest theories ever proposed by a respected scientist.

  On 25 November 1691, Halley read a paper to the Royal Society entitled “An Account of the Cause of the Change of the Variation of the Magnetical Needle with an Hypothesis of the Structure of the Internal Parts of the Earth”. Halley’s paper set out to prove that the Earth’s core comprised three concentric spheres, stacked inside one another like giant Russian dolls. The two larger shells, he explained, were roughly the same size as Mars and Venus, while the solid inner sphere was about the size of the planet Mercury.

  What Halley proposed next was slightly more surreal. The interior of the Earth, the great astronomer explained to his audience, was inhabited. He never got
around to specifying what sort of creatures these underground species might be, but Halley went on to explain that God in his infinite wisdom had simply provided extra living space by maximizing the interior surfaces of the Earth, plus an atmosphere and a special source of light to support life. This light source would occasionally burst out through fissures in the North Pole, spreading through the atmosphere as the aurora borealis display. Halley gave an example to back up his theory. “We ourselves live in cities where we are pressed for room, commonly build many stories over the other, and thereby accommodate a much greater multitude of inhabitants.” He finished off his lecture by challenging his audience to think of “a less absurd” hypothesis. We don’t know what Halley’s fellow scientists made of all this elaborate subterranean speculation because, perhaps wisely, he never mentioned it again in public.

  Although he was the first scientist of major repute to endorse it, to be fair Halley was not the first – or the last – respected scientist to seriously consider hollow-earth theory. Fifty years earlier in 1641, the great German renaissance man and pioneer of microscopy Athanasius Kircher, grappling with an understanding of plate tectonics, suggested that giants made of fire lived beneath the Earth’s crust. Relatively speaking, Kircher’s theory wasn’t all that odd given that he also believed that the plague was caused by rotting mermaids.

  Halley’s exciting version of hollow-earth theory encouraged others to take it up, occasionally adding their own modifications. For the devoutly Christian, it was the ideal place for sinners to repent before the Last Judgment. A mathematician, the Scot Sir John Leslie proposed that the Earth, in fact, had two interior suns, which he named Pluto and Proserpine. The famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler replaced Halley’s multiple spheres theory with a single hollow sphere which contained a sun 600 miles wide that provided heat and light for the flourishing civilization that lived within. Euler lost his eyesight, literally, after staring at the Sun for too long.