The Mammoth Book of Losers Page 16

  In 1855, Wallace published a paper entitled “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” in a prestigious natural history journal, Annals and Magazine of Natural History. His paper was read by many people, including Darwin, but almost no one recognized that this unknown young naturalist was making a big step towards a theory of evolutionary origins. Instead of the positive feedback Wallace had hoped for, he got a curt message from one scientist noting that he should stop theorizing and stick to gathering facts.

  Wallace was struck down with malaria again on the island Ternate in the Malay Archipelago and was bedridden for several days. While lying weak in a quinine-induced haze, he had a flash of insight on how species change. The result was a new scientific paper “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”. Although he didn’t actually use the term “natural selection”, he argued the same thing.

  Wallace had long been in the habit of writing to fellow scientists to share ideas. Instead of sending his paper directly to a publisher, on 9 March 1858 Wallace sent the manuscript to the person he thought might appreciate it the most – Charles Darwin. Wallace’s short essay covered all the basic ideas of evolution by natural selection and came with a covering letter, in which he said that he hoped the idea would be as new to Darwin as it was to him.

  Of course, it wasn’t new to Darwin at all. He had been working on the same idea for more than twenty years and thought it was all his own; he just hadn’t got around to publishing it. After two decades of procrastination, he had nothing to prove ownership apart from 230 pages of notes outlining his theory lying in storage under a stairway in his home in a securely sealed packet, labelled “Only to be opened in the event of my death”. He had put off publishing it because he was terrified of the implications. He knew that his theory was likely to cause deep offence,14 not least to his own wife Emma, who was deeply religious, as were many of their closest friends.

  When he eventually plucked up the courage to sound out a few close associates, like the geologist Charles Lyell, to gauge their reaction, they urged him to make his views public, but Darwin was too scared to publish. He told the Kew Gardens botanist Joseph Hooker that believing in evolution “felt like confessing a murder”. Darwin had already been warned by a couple of friends who had seen Wallace’s 1855 paper that the young man might be on to something, but he hadn’t taken their warnings very seriously. When he saw Wallace’s paper, he was devastated. Now he was about to be scooped by a young upstart.

  Darwin faced a dilemma – he could have quietly binned Wallace’s essay and no one would have been the wiser. After all, it had taken months to arrive and the international mail in the mid-nineteenth century was hardly reliable. After a great deal of agonizing on Darwin’s part, a couple of his powerful scientific friends arranged to have Wallace’s paper and Darwin’s various notes on the subject read at the same Linnean Society meeting, in London on 1 July 1858.

  It was customary at the Linnean Society for double contributions to be read in alphabetical order. And so in Darwin’s absence (he was burying his youngest child that day), his detailed notes were read out at length, and then, almost as an afterthought, came Wallace’s essay. Not that Wallace had any say in the matter; while Darwin was getting all the publicity, Wallace was still roughing it on the other side of the world.

  Some historians have argued that that Darwin received Wallace’s manuscript earlier than he admitted and stole some of his ideas to bolster his own theory. A study of 1858 postal connections, published at the end of 2011, retraced the 77-day journey of Wallace’s packet to Darwin, from Ternate to Down House, via a Dutch mail steamer and a brief trip on the back of a camel between Suez and Alexandria.

  In 1972, a researcher found another letter from Wallace to a friend named Bates that was also sent on the March 1858 steamer from the island of Ternate. The letter still bore postmarks from Singapore and London which confirmed that it arrived in London on 3 June 1858, two weeks before Darwin said he received the essay from Wallace.

  Thus began the mystery. How could Wallace have sent two letters two letters on the same day, travelling along the same mail route back to London, and yet one arrived two weeks later than the other? Did Darwin collude with his friends, Lyell and Huxley, to hide the truth that Wallace had been swindled?

  But we also have Darwin’s word that he received the letter exactly when he said he did. Everything we know about him suggests that he was a man of honour and incapable of behaving so unethically. All the same, we know that Darwin was mortified when he realised that someone else had got there first: he certainly had the means and motives to cheat his reval.

  To be fair, the humble Wallace was very generous about receiving less credit and seemed content with his role of almost total anonymity. He said he was flattered even to have had a part in prompting Darwin to publish his own theory. In fact, he and Darwin became good friends and Darwin, in turn, campaigned to secure Wallace a government pension.

  Wallace went on to publish dozens of books and papers and built a reputation as one of the greatest field biologists of the nineteenth century, but his fame faded quickly after his death and, for a long time, he was a relatively obscure figure in the history of science. Darwin, on the other hand, remains venerated to this day, his features appearing on the current £10 note.

  The suspicion remains that Wallace got a raw deal. It is undeniably remarkable that two people should have independently reached such a strikingly similar theory at the same time. There is also the uncomfortable fact that Darwin submitted Wallace’s paper, along with his own, to be read out at the Linnean Society without seeking Wallace’s permission, which if not a crime, was certainly a breach of ethics. What would have happened if Wallace had sent his paper to a publisher instead of Darwin? The history of science would have been very different. The term “Darwinism” would be unknown, and we would most likely speak of “Wallacism” today when talking about natural selection.15

  Worst Science Pundit

  In the 1830s, Dionysius Lardner was a popular scientific lecturer and writer whose talks on a wide range of subjects from steam engines to magnetism drew huge audiences and made him a celebrity.

  He also had a knack for getting it spectacularly wrong. In 1838, Lardner warned that “steam intercourse” between the continents of Europe and America was impossible because coal-fired ships would require so much fuel there would be no room for passengers. “As to the project announced in the newspapers of making the voyage from New York to Liverpool,” Lardner snorted, “they might as well talk of making a voyage to the moon.”

  Brunel’s Great Western made the crossing very soon afterwards. Twelve months later, Lardner predicted that rail travel above 40 mph would be lethal for passengers, who would die of asphyxiation.

  His private life was similarly gaffe-prone.16 In 1840, Lardner hit the headlines again when he eloped to France with the wife of a cavalry captain, who tracked the couple down to a Paris hotel bedroom, where he gave Lardner a sound flogging. The scandal, widely reported in the press, ended with Lardner fleeing to America with his lover to begin another career as an expert in science and technology.

  He was hired by a firm of locomotive builders to investigate a fatal accident where a boiler had exploded on a new train. Lardner confidently pronounced that the accident had been caused by lightning, which meant that the company was not personally liable for the accident as it was an “act of God”. It was pointed out at the coroner’s inquest that there was no lightning present at the time, that the pumps had been faulty, the water indicator was badly designed and the bridge-bands had been made of cast iron rather than wrought iron.

  Most Convincing Surrender to Newton’s Law of Gravity

  In 1912, an Austrian-born French tailor, Franz Reichelt, invented a fashion accessory for aviators to help them survive a fall from their new-fangled aircraft: the “coat parachute”. He tested his device by dropping dummies from the fifth floor of his apartment building
.

  Far from satisfied with the limited range of results, he applied for permission to jump from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The tower owners reluctantly gave way, provided that Reichelt obtained police authorization and signed a waiver absolving them of all responsibility. Incredibly, the police allowed him to get on with it. It had not occurred to them that he was planning to test the parachute by wearing it himself.

  At 7 a.m. on a cold February morning Reichelt, accompanied by a handful of well-wishers and press photographers, climbed to the level of the first platform, stepped over the edge and plunged to a painful and messy death.

  Today, Reichelt’s contribution to the invention of the modern parachute is largely ignored. But he is the mainstay of dozens of books and websites about stupid deaths.

  “He’s passé. Nobody cares about Mickey anymore . . .

  I think we should phase him out.”

  Roy Disney on his brother Walt’s creation Mickey Mouse, 1937

  The Forgotten Man of Forensics

  The Victorian polymath Francis Galton could fill a chapter on his own as a prolific author of useless research. He wrote down, logged, cross-referenced and quantified anything and everything he came across – the length of a man’s nose, the strength of his hand grip, or the number of brush strokes on a painting (the results of which he reported in his article entitled “Number of Strokes of the Brush in a Picture”. He once wrote a scientific paper on male facial hair.

  In 1897, he published a paper on the precise length of rope required by a hangman to break a criminal’s neck without decapitation, in which he triumphantly revealed an error in previously used calculations that did not take into account the bigger neck muscles in fat men. A select bibliography of some of Galton’s more esoteric works might include: “Arithmetic by Smell” (Psychological Review, 1884); “Intelligible Signals Between Neighbouring Stars” (Fortnightly Review, 1896); “Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men” (Macmillan’s Magazine, 1861); “Note on Fitting Normal Curves to Distribution of Speeds of Old Homing Pigeons” (Homing News and Pigeon Fanciers Journal, 1894); not forgetting his seminal “Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles” (Nature, 1906). In his spare time, he also developed a complex formula for determining the best way to make a cup of tea.

  Statistically, Galton’s work was bound to hit on something eventually that was actually useful. And to be fair it did, although it turns out that he probably stole the idea from someone else.

  Galton spent several years pestering his acquaintances for their thumbprints, which he recorded with a little inky pad and roller he kept in his pocket. Galton’s primary interest in fingerprints was as an aid in determining heredity and racial background. He was disappointed to find that fingerprints offered no firm clues as to an individual’s intelligence or genetic history but, after studying 2,500 sets of prints, he suddenly realized that they were all different and that fingerprints do not change over the course of a lifetime. In 1892, he published a 200-page essay simply titled “Fingerprints”, in which he established the individuality and permanence of fingerprints and wrote up a classification system for them. Galton took full credit for inventing fingerprint identification but his “discovery” was, to say the least, highly controversial.

  Fourteen years before the publication of “Fingerprints”, a Scot called Henry Faulds was working in Japan as Surgeon-Superintendent of Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo. Faulds was another of those eccentric gentlemen of science who dabbled in a bit of everything, but his background was very much unlike that of Galton, who enjoyed all the advantages of wealth and class.

  Faulds had been born into great austerity in the small town of Beith, Ayreshire. At thirteen, he was forced to leave school and went to Glasgow to work as a clerk to help support his family. He later studied medicine at Glasgow University.

  Faulds also was deeply religious and, in 1874, he was sent by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland to set up a medical mission in Japan. He became fluent in Japanese, taught at the local university and was responsible for founding the Tokyo Institute for the Blind.

  In 1878, he visited an archaeological dig and noticed that shards of ancient pottery had the fingerprints of those who had made them embedded in their work. Moreover, the fingerridge patterns were unique to each individual. A piece of pottery could be matched to a particular potter by the ridge markings left in the clay. Faulds hit upon the idea of solving crime by fingerprinting. He got the chance to put his theory into practice when a bottle of surgical alcohol was stolen from his hospital. He was able to trace the culprit through a set of ten greasy prints on the bottle to one of his employees. Later, he was able to show the local police that a sooty palm print left on a hospital wall by a suspected burglar could not have been left by the person accused of the burglary. It was the first time in recorded history that both innocence and guilt were proven by the use of fingerprints.

  In 1880, Faulds wrote up his findings and sent them to Charles Darwin. He hoped a word or two from the great Darwin might help him find backers to fund his research. The elderly Darwin pleaded illness and forwarded the letter to his cousin, Francis Galton, with a note: “My Dear Galton, the enclosed letter may perhaps interest you, as it relates to a queer subject.” But Galton was apparently too busy to read it so he, in turn, forwarded it to the Royal Anthropological Society, who took no notice at all.

  A few weeks later, Faulds sent a paper to the scientific journal Nature titled “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand”, in which he described how to take impressions using printer’s ink and mentioned the use of prints in forensic identification of criminals. Crucially, he also mentioned in closing the “forever-unchangeable finger-furrows of important criminals”. It seems that no one took the Faulds article very seriously because his claims were not supported by data, although in the very next issue of Nature there was an indignant letter from William Herschel, grandson of the famous astronomer, that he had been using fingerprints as a means of identification while working as a civil servant in India since 1860.17

  What Faulds did with his research after that is unclear, although we know that in 1888 he took his discovery to Scotland Yard, who dismissed him as a crank, possibly on account of his aggressive and generally weird behaviour. He followed up with letters to police forces all around the world, to no avail. The scientific study of fingerprints seems to have sunk without a trace, until Galton revived it four years later.

  When Faulds read Galton’s “Fingerprints” and realized that it contained no mention of his own contribution, he was furious. He was convinced that he had been cheated out of his claim as the true inventor of fingerprinting by a conspiracy hatched between Herschel and Galton. He spent years badgering government departments, demanding official recognition. When he heard that Galton had received a knighthood, he even petitioned the Liberal Home Secretary Winston Churchill for one of his own.

  Meanwhile, his professional life fell apart. Faulds returned to Britain after quarrelling with the missionary society which ran his hospital in Japan. He worked as police surgeon at first in London and then in North Staffordshire. He died in 1930 aged 86 in Wolstanton, embittered, unrecognized and financially destitute.

  In 1938, a Scottish judge George Wilton published a book entitled Fingerprints: History Law and Romance, in which he tried to correct the injustice that had been done to the memory of Dr Faulds. In fact, right up to his death at the age of 101, Wilton gave lectures and wrote letters on the subject.

  Belated recognition for Faulds finally came in Japan where a memorial tablet was erected in 1951 at the site of his old hospital in Tsukiji, giving him credit as the true discoverer of fingerprinting.

  Most Successful Attempt to Destroy a Reputation as a Great Scientist

  On 18 June 1952 the front page of the Los Angeles Times carried the headline: “BRILLIANT SCIENTIST KILLED IN EXPLOSION”. The victim, thirty-seven-year-old Jack Parsons, was the unsung hero of the space race, recognized as the one of the world’s foremost authorities on rocket pr
opulsion. Parsons invented a range of solid and liquid fuels whose later forms were eventually to help drive Apollo 11 to the Moon. Werner von Braun acknowledged Parsons as the “true father of the American space programme”. His innovations also led to a range of first-generation American missiles, including the solid-fuelled submarine-launched Polaris. His work was so highly regarded that French scientists a generation later named a crater on the dark side of the Moon after him. But Parsons’ contribution to science was almost completely overshadowed by a very colourful private life.

  Jack Parsons’ death in his backyard laboratory was initially reported as a terrible accident – he was the victim of mishandled chemicals. And that is how the press might have let the matter lie, had it not been for the fact that four hours after Parsons’ death, his mother Ruth killed herself with a fatal overdose of Nembutal.

  The press began to dig deeper. A couple of days later, the police let slip that Parsons had been investigated by them before – more than once. America’s foremost rocket scientist was living a curious double life. There was talk of drugs, of black magic and “deviant” sexual activities. It went from a straightforward story about the tragic death of much respected member of the scientific community to one of sensational and lurid speculation.

  Before Jack Parsons, rocket science was the stuff of sci-fi and B-movies. The first serious attempt to advance the science of rocketry was by an American – Robert Goddard – who began experimenting with rocket propulsion in the early 1900s. In 1920, he speculated how a rocket might reach the moon. When the press picked up on it, Goddard was portrayed as a madman. When he launched an eleven-foot missile in 1929, his local paper covered the story beneath the cynical headline: “MOON ROCKET MISSES TARGET BY 238,799½ MILES” . In 1940, he was mocked in the House of Congress as “a crackpot with mental delusions that we can travel to the Moon” and the entire House fell about laughing.