2 From Franklin to Laplace

Our next five remarkable physicists were born in the thirty-one years from 1706 to

1736. Two came from France and one each from America, Dalmatia and England.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

It has been said of Benjamin Franklin that he found electricity a curiosity and

left it a science. He was undoubtedly the first important American scientist

and also the first international statesman of note whose reputation was

partly gained through his scientific work. Of course it is quite impossible

to do justice to the life-story of such an interesting person in the few pages

available here, but fortunately there are plenty of full-scale biographies.

The Franklins came from Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, in the

Midlands of England. About 1685 Benjamin’s father Josiah, with his first

wife Anne, emigrated from Banbury to escape from religious persecution.

She died in America after giving birth to her seventh child. Josiah then

married again, this time marrying Abiah Folger of Nantucket; her father

Peter Folger was a weaver, schoolmaster and writer of verses. Of their ten

children, the youngest son Benjamin, born on January 17, 1706, was the

eighth. Josiah had been a dyer in Banbury and became a tallow chandler and

soap boiler in Boston. He had a mechanical aptitude and sound judgement,

qualities that Benjamin both recognized and inherited. On both sides of

the family the boy had forebears skilled in the use of their hands and with

literary or intellectual gifts.

Franklin was writing an autobiography towards the end of his life.

Although it is not considered entirely trustworthy, this evergreen work in

homespun language is nevertheless a useful source of first-hand information.

Franklin writes that he ‘was put to the grammar school at eight years of

age’ but remained ‘not quite one year’. His father then sent him ‘to a school

for writing and arithmetic’; he failed arithmetic. Apprenticed at the age of

ten to his father’s business, which he did not care for, Franklin dreamed

of the sea; his father, fearful of losing him, then apprenticed the boy for

five years to his half-brother James, who was a printer in Boston. Later,

working in Philadelphia, he was noticed by the Governor of Pennsylvania,

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) 37

William Keith, who promised him some financial backing and persuaded

him in 1724 to go to London to complete his training as a printer and to

collect materials for setting up a press in Philadelphia. Once at sea Franklin

discovered that the Governor had sent him off without any letters of

introduction and without funds for purchasing printing equipment, merely

‘playing pitiful tricks on a poor ignorant boy’.

Franklin found himself in the London of Newton, Swift, Defoe,

Fielding and Samuel Richardson. As a young printer he aroused the admiration

of his fellow journeymen with his physical strength. He was a powerful

swimmer and in America sometimes drifted for hours floating on lakes,

towed by a string of kites. He began to question the validity of what he

was asked to print and was therefore moved to write a book of his own on

liberty and religion. The hundred copies that he then printed brought him

to the notice of the coffee-house clientele, and he thereby almost realized

an ambition to meet Newton. He was beginning to thrust himself forwards

and, by offering some North American curiosities to Sir Hans Sloane, the

Secretary of the Royal Society, he won an invitation to see the latter’s collection

at his house in Bloomsbury Square. After nineteen months in London,

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726. Almost at once he founded a

self-improvement club, called the junto.

38 From Franklin to Laplace

Franklin was a little under six feet tall and strongly built, with a

large head and square deft hands. His hair was blonde or light brown, his

mouth wide and humorous. He told later of ‘that hard-to-be-governed passion

of youth [which] hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women

that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great

inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health by distemper which

of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it’. One such

woman bore him a son, named William Franklin, of whom more later. On

September 1, 1730 he married a woman named Deborah Read, whose previous

husband, a bigamist, was presumed dead. She was a sturdy, handsome,

highly coloured woman, untaught and sometimes turbulent, little interested

in her new husband’s studies or speculations but economical, sensible

and devoted to him. ‘She proved a good and faithful helpmate, assisted me

much by attending the shop; we throve together, and have ever mutually

endeavoured to make each other happy.’ Together they raised his natural son

William, although she was not the mother. The formal gentry of Philadelphia,

disapproving of informal marriages, never accepted his wife socially.

He settled down and over the years cultivated a reputation for diligent

respectability. ‘In order to secure my credit and character . . . I took care

not only to be in reality industrious and frugal but to avoid all appearance

to the contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen at no place of idle diversion. I

never went out a-fishing or shooting . . .’

Within two years of returning to the land of his birth Franklin set up a

press that over the next decade became the most flourishing in the colonies.

With his lively outlook and a press at his disposal, he began to write his own

material and publish his own political studies, such as A Modest Enquiry

into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency. By 1732 he had produced

the first edition of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, illustrated with maxims

on the virtues of thrift and industry. This annual publication ran for 25 years

and made his fortune. The indefatigable Franklin became Public Printer to

the province of Pennsylvania, Deputy Postmaster of Philadelphia and Clerk

to the Assembly, publisher of The General Magazine and organizer of the

Union Fire Company. He helped to establish an institution of higher education,

called the Academy of Philadelphia, where the central themes were

to be the English language and practical studies. Later he was annoyed to

find that it degenerated into an old-fashioned classical school through local

paedagogic snobbery, but later still it evolved into the present University

of Pennsylvania. He also established a subscription library, later known as

the Library Company, where members of the general public were welcome

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) 39

to read the books, although only members could borrow them; the idea was

widely imitated in the American colonies.

About 1732 the Franklins had a son, christened Francis Folger

Franklin, who died of smallpox at the age of four; long afterwards Franklin

wrote to his sister Jane that a grandson of his ‘brings often to my mind

the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have

seldom seen equalled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think

of without a sigh’. A daughter, Sarah Franklin, known as Sally, was born at

the end of August 1743.

Franklin was largely self-taught in science – as he was in other

subjects – but this does not mean that he was uneducated. He had rigorously

studied the science of the day in the writings of the best masters

available. In 1741 he had organized the American Philosophical Society,

the first of many established at this period. It was based in Philadelphia,

where there were to be seven members – a physician, a botanist, a mathematician,

a chemist, a mechanician, a geographer and a general natural

philosopher – besides the president, treasurer and secretary. The Philadelphia

members were to meet at least once a month to transact their philosophical

business, consider such reports and queries as might have been sent

in by correspondents and arrange to keep all the members informed of what

they were doing. The society got off to a slow start and was moribund for

a time but eventually became one of the institutions of Philadelphia, as it

still is.

In 1746 Franklin met a certain Dr Archibald Spencer, an itinerant

lecturer on popular science, who had just arrived from Scotland, and who

demonstrated some electrical experiments to him. Fascinated, Franklin purchased

Spencer’s apparatus and sent for more from London. The same year an

account of various experiments made with the Leyden jar, together with one

of the jars, was sent in 1746 to the Library Company by a friend of Franklin

who lived in London and was interested in science. Franklin, aided by a few

friends, at once began to performexperiments and sent his London friend an

account of these and the view he had reached regarding the nature of electricity.

In his view, electricity is to be regarded as a fluid whose particles

repel each other. Matter when not electrified contains a definite quantity of

this fluid; if it contains more than this quantity it is electrified negatively

if the fluid is regarded as consisting of negative electricity, positively if it

consists of positive electricity, whereas if it contains less than this quantity

it is positively charged in the first case, negatively in the second. The

electrification of a body is due to the passage of this fluid into or out of it.

40 From Franklin to Laplace

Two bodies, each of which has more, or less, than the normal amount of the

fluid, repel each other, whereas two bodies, one of which has less and the

other more than the normal amount, attract each other.

A similar view of the nature of electricity had been put forward in

the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by SirWilliamWatson,

but Franklin was unaware of this. However, the clarity of Franklin’s exposition

and his demonstration that it gave simple explanations of many

of the phenomena associated with the Leyden jar led to the discovery of

many new effects and established his position as a physicist. The service

the one-fluid theory rendered to the science of electricity can hardly be

overestimated.

Franklin was also enthusing about the ‘wonderful effects of pointed

bodies, both in drawing off and throwing off electrical fire’ which were later

to suggest lightning conductors. ‘The doctrine of points is very curious,

and the effects of them truly wonderful; and from what I have observed on

experiments I am of the opinion that houses, ships, and even towers and

churches may be effectively secured from the strokes of light.’ He proposed

an experiment:

To determine the question, whether the clouds that contain lightning

are electrified or not, I would propose an experiment where it may be

tried out conveniently. On the top of some high tower or steeple, place

a kind of sentry box big enough to contain a man and an electrical

stand. From the middle of the stand let an iron rod rise and pass

bending out of the door, and then pass upright 20 or 30 feet, pointed

very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a

man standing on it when such clouds are passing low, might be

electrified and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud.

If any danger to the man should be apprehended (though I think there

would be none) let him stand on the floor of his box, and now and then

bring near to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the

leads, he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is

electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire and not affect him.

In 1752 the experiment was first carried out successfully in France,

then repeated in England. A few months later Franklin, in America, was

urging that another, more dramatic, experiment be carried out, the celebrated

experiment of generating sparks and shocks by flying a kite carrying

a pointed rod during a thunderstorm:

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) 41

The doctor, having published his method of verifying his hypothesis

concerning the sameness of electricity with the matter of lightning,

was waiting for the erection of a spire in Philadelphia to carry his

views into execution, not imagining that a pointed rod of a moderate

height could answer the purpose, when it occurred to him that by

means of a common kite he could have better access to the regions of

thunder than by any spire whatever. Preparing, therefore, a large silk

handkerchief and two cross-stocks of a proper length on which to

extend it, he took the opportunity of the first approaching

thunderstorm to take a walk in the fields, in which there was a shed

convenient for his purpose. But, dreading the ridicule which so

commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he

communicated his intended experiments to nobody but his son who

assisted him in raising the kite. The kite being raised, a considerable

length of time elapsed before there was any appearance of its being

electrified. One very promising cloud passed over it without any

effect, when, at length, just as he was beginning to despair of his

contrivance, he observed some loose threads of the hempen string to

stand erect and to avoid one another, just as if they had been

suspended on a common conductor. Struck with this promising

appearance, he immediately presented his knuckle to the key, and (let

the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that

moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident

electric spark. Others succeeded, even before the string was wet, so as

to put the matter past all dispute, and when the rain had wet the

string he collected electric fire copiously. This happened on June 3,

1752, a month after the electricians in France had verified the same

theory, but before he heard of anything they had done.

It was characteristic of Franklin that he should at once apply this discovery

to useful purposes by inventing lightning conductors, long pointed

rods reaching beyond the highest point of a building and in metallic communication

with the ground. He had not only established that lightning

was in the nature of an electrical discharge but also demonstrated that

buildings could be protected from its effects by the installation of a lightning

conductor. Before long this became standard practice for churches and

other major buildings, so that, when Franklin returned for his second visit,

Europe was well prepared to receive the electrician from the American

colonies.

42 From Franklin to Laplace

Experiments like these made his reputation as a man of science. He

published articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

and wrote a little book about electricity that went through three editions in

England and two in France. In 1709 Sir Godfrey Copley had bequeathed to

the Royal Society a fund of one hundred pounds to be spent on experiments

or otherwise. In 1736 the Society had voted to ‘strike a gold medal in the

amount of five per cent of the fund as an honorary favour for the best experiment

carried out during the year’. Franklin was awarded the gold medal ‘on

account of his curious experiments and observations on electricity’ and was

elected to the Society. There was similar enthusiasm in Paris for what he

had achieved. In America, Harvard, William and Mary and Yale Colleges

awarded him honorary degrees.

Franklin was becoming more deeply involved with civic affairs and

public life. He was elected a member of the Assembly of Pennsylvania in

1751 and two years later was appointed deputy Postmaster-General for the

British colonies in North America, a royal office he held for over twenty

years. As a member of the Assembly, he represented the colony in various

ways. In 1751 came the first of his warnings to the British government,

concerning the transportation of convicts. ‘If felons were the scourge of

Britain’, he wrote, ‘rattlesnakes were the scourge of America’ and he proposed

to have some sent over to be liberated in St James’ Park and other

such places throughout Britain.

Since his marriage to Deborah in 1730 Franklin had not sought intimate

friendships with other women. However, at the beginning of 1755,

when he was approaching fifty, he met one Catherine Ray, the first of a

series of younger women who fell under his spell and found him adorable.

After the initial meeting they did not meet again for over eight years and

after that they met only twice more. However, they continued to exchange

letters for almost forty-five years, letters that are a delight to read. At eightythree

he wrote to her for the last time ‘among the felicities ofmylife I reckon

your friendship, which I shall remember as long as life lasts’.

Much has been written about Franklin, mainly about his political

activities, especially his prominent role in the events leading up to the

Declaration of Independence. The general history of this period is so well

known that just an outline of Franklin’s part in these events will be sufficient.

It is necessary to begin by recalling that William Penn, the True

and Absolute Proprietary of the province, had been granted various special

privileges, which passed to his heirs when he died. The governor of the

province was a nominee of the Proprietaries, as they were called; although

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) 43

Franklin was initially one of their supporters, by this time he had turned

against them. Earlier in the century there had been major conflicts with

the French, who, with some Indian support, were threatening the British

colonies from the west. For many years British subjects in the northern

colonies had also felt threatened by the constant encroachments the French

were making on Nova Scotia and along their northern frontiers. Organized

fighting began in 1755 and was not formally ended until eight years later.

These immensely expensive French and Indian wars, as they were called,

were ruinous to the British economy. Since Pennsylvania was threatened,

Franklin took the initiative of raising a militia from the colonists to support

the British troops involved. The Governor objected to this, especially when

Franklin was elected colonel of the militia, and from then on the Penns and

their supporters took every opportunity to discredit him.

One of the grievances of the people of Pennsylvania was that the

Proprietaries, although wealthy, refused to contribute to the cost of the

provincial government, particularly in its dealings with the Indians. In 1757

Franklin was sent by the Assembly to London to see whether something

could be done about this. The mission was not an easy one; it lasted for five

years, and his efforts did not achieve much, as we shall see.

When Franklin sailed for England for the second time he took his

son William with him. In London they lodged at the house of a widow

named Margaret Stevenson (this has recently been converted into a small

Franklin museum). He enjoyed her company and enjoyed even more that

of her daughter Polly, of whom more later. His first political action was

to see the Lord President of the Council in Whitehall, who gave him a

lecture about the constitutional position, to the effect that the Assembly

had no right to tax the Proprietaries. Then he went to see William Penn’s

son Thomas, who represented the interests of the Proprietaries. He too was

most unhelpful. After that Franklin succumbed to a serious illness, which

lasted eight weeks.

Franklin’s scientific reputation had preceded him, and, once he had

recovered, he spent some time on experimental work. In London he demonstrated

an electrical machine he had built, which threw a spark nine

inches long. He went to Cambridge with his son and performed some

more experiments. They went on to Northamptonshire, to call on some

of the English Franklins, and to Birmingham, to look up some of Deborah’s

relations. They made a tour of Scotland, meeting men of distinction, in

the course of which he received an honorary degree from the University of

St Andrews.

44 From Franklin to Laplace

On his return to London Franklin tried to see William Pitt the Elder,

the prime minister, but found him too preoccupied with other problems.

Unable to interest the government in the colonists’ cause, he turned to

the press for support, and as a result public opinion began to turn against

the Penns. Eventually a compromise was reached, but it was not at all

what the Assembly had hoped for. After all his efforts, Franklin’s mission

essentially ended in failure. In no hurry to return home, he remained in

London, increasingly the unofficial spokesman for the American colonists.

Meanwhile his son William, who had been studying law at the Middle

Temple, had made such a good impression that, after he qualified as a barrister,

he was appointed Governor of the State of New Jersey. Franklin went

to visit the Low Countries, meeting the men of science there, and was back

in London in time for the coronation of King George III. Just before he was

due to return to America he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil

Law from the University of Oxford.

On his return to Philadelphia Franklin became Speaker of the

Assembly. He had been away five years. He had many friends but also powerful

enemies who went to great lengths to discredit him. The Assembly

decided to petition the King to govern the province directly, rather than

through the governor, and Franklin was sent back to England in 1764 to

deal with this. However, when he arrived in London he found that matters

had taken a turn for the worse. The British government had decided that

the colonies should contribute to the cost of their own defence. Stamp duty,

on newspapers and publications, was the method chosen. Although the

same tax was imposed at home it was deeply resented in America; there

was widespread disorder, but in Britain this was not understood. Franklin

was called to the Bar of the House of Commons to explain the reasons for

American opposition to the Stamp Act and succeeded in having it repealed,

but only to see the principle of taxation without representation reaffirmed

by the imposition of customs duties on imports to the colonies.

Up to this point Franklin had been strongly pro-British: ‘I have long

been of the opinion’, he said, ‘that the foundations of the future grandeur and

stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations,

they lie low and are little seen, they are nevertheless broad and

strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom

has ever yet erected.’ However, America and Britain were rapidly drifting

apart, and there was little that someone in Franklin’s position could do

about it. ‘In England I am regarded as too much an American’, he declared,

‘and in America as being too much an Englishman.’ The assemblies of

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) 45

Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts asked him to represent them, as

well as Pennsylvania. Edmund Burke, who had been briefed by Franklin,

spoke persuasively in Parliament in favour of conciliation with the

colonists, but all in vain.

While this was happening he managed to find a little time for

science. In 1766 he had met Joseph Priestley, a Unitarian minister with an

interest in science, who repeated some of Franklin’s electrical experiments

and performed others, which led him to formulate the inverse square law of

electrostatics. Priestley and Franklin became close friends. Franklin spent

his last day in London before returning home discussing scientific matters

with Priestley. (It is to Priestley that we owe the account of the kite experiment

quoted above.) Earlier Franklin had been to France and met some of

the scientists in Paris, and had also visited Germany.

Once the War of Independence finally broke out, Franklin’s life

became bound up with the course of the revolution. As is well known,

he was one of the founding fathers of the American Republic. When

Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was submitted

to Congress Franklin was much involved in the resulting deliberations.

He was a member of the Second Continental Congress and drew up a plan

of union for the colonies. He was then sent to France, with two other commissioners,

to try to enlist French support for the revolutionaries. Although

the French were naturally pleased that the British had this problem on their

hands, they had no desire to support what might prove to be a losing cause.

Franklin was lionized in Paris, thanks to his scientific reputation but not

only that: to many Frenchmen his simplicity of dress, his native wit and

wisdom, his gentle manners free of affectation seemed to exemplify the

virtues of the natural man, the personification of many ideas cherished

in the Age of Enlightenment. He had the distinction of being elected one of

the eight foreign associates of the Paris Academy (not to be confused with

the corresponding members, who were much more numerous).

Franklin settled down in Palsy, on the western outskirts of Paris,

where he was joined by Polly Stevenson. His flirtatious reputation seems

mainly to refer to this period, when he lived an active social life despite

being plagued by gout and kidney stones. Franklin enjoyed contact with the

many scientists in Paris and made the acquaintance of Alessandro Volta,

a strong supporter of Franklin’s ‘one-fluid’ theory. Volta initiated the next

stage of electrical science with his invention of the battery, which made

possible the production of a continuous electric current. Franklin was also

a leading member of the commission appointed to investigate the claims

46 From Franklin to Laplace

of Franz Anton Mesmer; its report gave the death blow to Mesmerism, the

belief that magnets could be used to cure sickness.

The mission to Paris was successful, bringing to the colonists badly

needed financial support in their struggle. He organized pro-American propaganda

and was not above a little intelligence work. In 1778 Congress

appointed him Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of France; two years

later John Adams was also sent to London to negotiate a peace settlement

with Great Britain. Although Adams and Franklin had previously been on

good terms, they now began to clash; the diplomatically inept but socially

superior Adams did not wish for Franklin’s help in the negotiations. However,

in 1781 Adams and Franklin were appointed as joint commissioners

to negotiate the final peace.

By this time Franklin was already seventy-seven and increasingly concerned

about his health. He asked Congress for permission to retire, but,

although his duties were lightened somewhat, it was to be two more years

before he was able to return to America. Just as the war was ending Franklin

was able to observe the first manned balloon flights take place in France and

was impressed by their military possibilities. Never a man to miss an opportunity

for a little scientific work, he made some observations of the Gulf

Stream on the way back to America; he appears to have been the first man

of science to study the great current. He arrived back in the land of his birth

to a hero’s welcome. The last five years of his life were spent as President of

the Province of Pennsylvania; he also had a seat on the Constitutional Convention.

He disinherited his sonWilliam as a pro-British renegade. He found

time to write some more of his autobiography, which was first published

in 1868.

Benjamin Franklin died of pleurisy in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790,

having just received the news of the outbreak of the French Revolution,

which took such a very different course from the American. More than

twenty thousand people attended his funeral in Philadelphia. The French

National Assembly went into mourning; in the United States Congress the

House of Representatives did so, the Senate did not. In his youth he wrote

an epitaph for himself:

The Body of

B Franklin Printer

(Like the Cover of an old Book

Its Contents torn out

And stript of its Lettering & Gilding)

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) 47

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be lost:

For it will, (as he believ’d) appear once more,

In a new and more elegant Edition

Revised and corrected,

By the Author.

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787)

For one who participated in the actual work of science the interests of

Boscovich were extraordinarily varied even by the standards of the eighteenth

century. Despite the limitations imposed upon his thought by religious

obedience, he is increasingly recognized as a natural philosopher of

world stature, one of the last of the polymaths. In science his interests

ranged through mathematics, physics, astronomy and geodesy, but there

was so much else that he put his mind to.

Roger Joseph was the son of Nikola Boscovich, a Croatian merchant of

the Dalmatian port of Dubrovnik, then known as Ragusa, and Paula Bettera,

the daughter of a merchant whose family came from the city of Bergamo, east

of Milan. He was born on May 18, 1711; his father died when he was ten; his

mother, a robust and active woman with a happy personality, lived until she

was 103. His eldest sister was the only sibling who married; another sister

became a nun, his eldest brother became a soldier, a second brother a Jesuit

priest, a third brother a monk. The family was noted for its seriousness,

piety and literary interests.

Roger Boscovich was drawn to a religious career and began his education

in the Jesuit college of Dubrovnik, following the standard curriculum,

and then offered himself for more protracted and severe religious and

48 From Franklin to Laplace

intellectual training by the Jesuits in Rome. So in September 1725 he

crossed the Adriatic to Ancona and then went on by land to Rome, entering

Sant’Andrea delle Fratte on the Quirinal as a novice at the age of fourteen.

After four years he was ready to enter the Gregorian University, the apex of

the Jesuit system of education.

Boscovich was extraordinarily sharp of mind, comprehensive in intelligence

and tireless in application – in short an outstanding student. He

learned science in a way characteristic of his later career, through independent

study of mathematics, physics, astronomy and geodesy. In 1735 he

began studying Newton’s Opticks and Principia at the Gregorian University,

where he made himself an enthusiastic propagator of the new natural

philosophy. He composed a lengthy scientific poem on eclipses, in Latin

hexameters, which he went on revising for many years, until it was eventually

published in 1779. The exact sciences were what always appealed to

him – in the first instance mathematics. He was directed to spend some

time teaching novices at Sant’Andrea, and then, although he had not yet

completed his theological studies, he was appointed professor of mathematics

at the Gregorian University itself. This post, which he held for nineteen

years from 1740, largely determined the course of his future career. Teaching

interested him as method as well as for content. In this respect, as in

others, his spirit was progressive. He published a textbook of his teaching

in 1754 – Elementa universae matheseos – of which the third and final

volume contains an original theory of conic sections.

The year 1740 was when Benedict XIV succeeded to the papacy. His

reign recalled the best years of the Renaissance. Benedict XIV was a profound

scholar and a vivid personality, magnanimous and virtuous in his private

life, who surrounded himself with the leading intellectuals of Rome. The

Papal Secretary of State, the able and versatile Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga,

shared Dubrovnik connections with Boscovich, who naturally came to his

attention, and Valenti’s residence soon became like a second home to him.

During this period of his life he was entrusted with several practical and

diplomatic commissions for lay and ecclesiastical authorities, as was not

unusual among qualified clergymen of his time.

In 1735 there had been a resurgence of rumours that the long-standing

cracks in the dome of St Peter’s basilica – which had been completed in

1590 – presaged an imminent collapse. The new Pope consulted various

experts, one of whom recommended demolishing the huge structure and

rebuilding it. Others reported that no danger threatened the dome. However,

for further reassurance a commission consisting of Boscovich and two

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) 49

French scientists was appointed to investigate the causes and make recommendations.

Boscovich drafted the report, which, by analysing the problem

in theoretical terms, achieved – despite certain errors – the reputation of a

minor classic in architectural statics. He undertook further such work for

the Pope later.

In 1744 Boscovich, now thirty-three, finally completed his theological

studies and, after nineteen years of training, was ordained priest and so

became a full member of the Society of Jesus. He could now devote himself

to professorial duties, especially research. He was a scholar with a growing

reputation among the brilliant intellects of Rome, but his work was also

becoming known elsewhere. The next fourteen years, from 1744 to 1758,

were his most prolific period of mature scholarship, but there was much else.

For example, he was interested in archaeology. In 1743 a Roman villa was

discovered and excavated above the town of Frascati, the ancient Tusculum,

on the western slopes of the Alban hills. Boscovich published a description of

what was found there, particularly a sundial. In 1750 he published a critical

study of a red granite obelisk with hieroglyphic writing that had just been

discovered in the Campus Martius. He composed a series of memoirs on

the practice of hydraulic engineering and on the regulation of the flow of

the river Tiber and other watercourses. He made a survey and map of the

Papal States and made a plan for the harbours at Rimini and Savona. Parma,

Genoa, Lucca, the Venetian Republic – all had occasion to seek his advice

on questions of practical hydraulics.

Boscovich was particularly interested in astronomy and used to spend

much of his time observing the heavens. The solar eclipse of 1748 provided

him with a fine opportunity to demonstrate the spectacle at the Gregorian

University before a brilliant assembly of notables, including cardinals,

princes and numerous prelates. In 1735 the Paris Academy had decided to

test Newton’s theory that the earth was flattened at the poles by comparing

careful geodetic measurements made in the tropics and the arctic. This

necessitated international cooperation in geodesy, in which Boscovich was

a leading participant. He collaborated with an English colleague, then rector

of the English Jesuit college in Rome, on the arduous task of surveying two

and a half degrees of the meridian between Rome and Rimini. On his initiative,

meridians were also measured in Austria, Piedmont and Pennsylvania.

It was during this fruitful period that Boscovich was active in the

Accademia degli Arcadi. This exotic society had been founded by Queen

Christina of Sweden when she was in Rome. Only poets were admitted as

members; the men were called shepherds, the ladies nymphs. Each member

50 From Franklin to Laplace

took a classical name suggestive of life in Arcadia; Boscovich was known

as Numenius Anigreus. Scientific interests were strong in the academy but

poetry predominated. Boscovich took the opportunity to regale the members

with passages from his long poem about eclipses. The meetings of the society

enabled him to get to know a wide circle of influential people in a stylized

Arcadian setting, making links that provided valuable introductions when

he travelled abroad. His career as professor of mathematics at the Gregorian

University was now coming to an end and he was preparing for a new role as

scholar-diplomat. Experience of social life in high ecclesiastical, academic

and diplomatic circles in Rome later proved to be an important aspect of his

training for the wider field of activity that his Jesuit superiors were planning

for him or approved as occasion arose.

In 1757 Boscovich undertook the first of several diplomatic missions

when he represented the interests of the Republic of Lucca before the Imperial

court in Vienna in a dispute with Tuscany over water rights. Vienna

was a Jesuit stronghold and Boscovich had excellent contacts there. With

the Seven Years War about to begin, it was a difficult time to settle such a

dispute, but he won the case. The Empress Maria Theresa consulted him

on the structure of the thirty-year-old Imperial Library, which was already

showing defects.

However, his principal occupation in Vienna was the completion of

his great work in the field of natural philosophy, Theoria philosophiae naturalis,

redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existensium (A Theory

of Natural Philosophy, Reduced to a Single Law of the Forces Existing in

Nature), which appeared in the autumn of 1758. This daringly original work,

the mature expression of ideas that Boscovich had put forward in a series

of papers from 1745 onwards, was well known and influential for 150 years

thereafter. Faraday, Clerk Maxwell and Kelvin were all interested in his

ideas, as were many of the leading continental scientists of that period.

That it should be so neglected today, at least in the western world, is ironic

since Boscovich’s ideas are in several respects in tune with modern thought.

The Boscovich theory is developed mainly by geometrical methods. It is

concerned with observable phenomena, not their causes. No quantitative

predictions are made, the aim being to demonstrate that a single interaction

law of the type proposed can in principle account for a wide range of physical

properties. Thus he presented, in the formof a logical and mathematical

scheme, a programme for point atomism, in which all primary particles are

identical, a single oscillatory law determines their interactions, only relational

quantities enter and the distinction between empty and occupied

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) 51

space disappears. The essentials of the theory were summarized by the

English physicist Henry Cavendish as follows:

matter does not consist of solid impenetrable particles as commonly

supposed, but only of certain degrees of attraction and repulsion

directed towards central points. They also suppose the action of two of

these central points on each other alternately varies from repulsion to

attraction numerous times as the distance increases. There is the

utmost reason to think that both these phenomena are true, and they

serve to account for many phenomena of nature which would

otherwise be inexplicable. But even if it is otherwise, and if it must be

admitted that there are solid impenetrable particles, still there seems

sufficient reason to think that those particles do not touch each other,

but are kept from ever coming into contact by their repulsive force.

Although Boscovich was dedicated to the Society of Jesus, he was

out of sympathy with certain policies of his ecclesiastical superiors. He

was disappointed by the negative attitude that a number of Jesuit philosophers

adopted towards his own system of natural philosophy; some Jesuit

fathers even regarded the theories of Newton as heretical. He resented their

rejection of proposals he had advanced in arguing for the modernization of

education both in method and in subject matter. While he was in Vienna his

patron Cardinal Valenti had died. Benedict XIV had also died; although the

next Pope was also well disposed towards him personally, it seemed that he

could be more useful to his Order away from Rome, so his superiors decided

to send him to Paris. In 1759 Boscovich set off on his travels, seeing various

notables on the way. In Marseilles he met some of the Jesuits recently

deported from Portugal; the Vatican’s hesitant reaction to the persecution of

his Order there was an indication of what was to come. As soon as he arrived

in Paris he found the Order under attack in France as well. Philosophes such

as d’Alembert were attacking the power of the Catholic Church generally,

but the Jesuits were a particular target. Nevertheless, Boscovich was personally

well received in aristocratic, scientific and literary circles. The Paris

Academy had long before elected him a corresponding member following

the publication of a discourse of his on the aurora borealis.

Boscovich had come to Paris during one of the most disastrous years

in the history of France. The country was in financial crisis, and the whole

population was longing for peace, but the war was dragging on. France had

been defeated on land and sea. All Canada, except Montr´ eal, had been lost.

Boscovich’s reputation and influential contacts opened doors for him and

52 From Franklin to Laplace

his reports back to Rome indicate that he was discharging his mission successfully,

whatever that might have been (the Jesuits were accused of being

spies for the Vatican). During the six months he stayed in Paris he took

the opportunity to attend the meetings of the Academy. The academician

Alexis Clairaut wrote to a colleague ‘he is one of the most amiable men I

have ever known and I cannot compare him to anyone but yourself for the

combination of knowledge and social qualities. We saw one another very

often and I introduced him to all my friends who thought the same.’ A diplomatic

intervention on behalf of his native city of Dubrovnik took him to

the court at Versailles; the Jesuits were well in with the royal family.

While Boscovich was in Paris he was elected to honorary membership

of the St Petersburg Academy and made plans to visit Russia at an

early date. Although he was happy enough in the French capital, and was

to return there later, in 1760 he crossed over to London, where again his

reputation had preceded him among literary and scientific cognoscenti. He

stayed in England (then still at war with France) for seven months, during

which he had discussions with representatives of the Anglican Church; met

Benjamin Franklin, who showed him some electrical experiments at the

house of the painter Richard Wilson; and visited the universities of Oxford

and Cambridge. When Boscovich was in London, Cavendish invited him to

the Royal Society Dining Club, where he met John Michell, a near contemporary

of Cavendish from Cambridge, who made important observations

and discoveries at his home at Thornhill, near Wakefield in Yorkshire. It

seems possible that one or both of Cavendish and Michell had arrived at

the same theory as Boscovich independently. He met many other leading

personalities of the time: for example he dined with Samuel Johnson on

several occasions, conversing in Latin, for, although he could read English,

he was unable to speak it. He sat for a portrait, now only known through

a copy. At the start of 1761 the Royal Society elected him a fellow, and, in

recognition of the honour, he dedicated to it the poem on the eclipses of the

sun and moon, on which he had been working for so many years. He then

lent his weight to efforts to persuade the society to organize an expedition

for the purpose of observing the transit of the planet Venus in June 1761.

Boscovich left England suddenly on December 15, 1760. It had been

arranged that he would join the new Venetian ambassador to the Sublime

Porte in Venice and that they would then travel to Istanbul together. On

the way to Venice he was received as a favoured guest by Duke Stanislas

of Lorraine and Bar, who was still styled King of Poland. The duke was

one of the most cultured rulers of the time; he surrounded himself with

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) 53

a constellation of artists and men of letters, instituted coveted prizes for

the encouragement of the arts and sciences and founded a royal society of

letters, which became known as the Academy of Stanislas. Boscovich was

elected a foreign associate during the four days he spent at Nancy, the capital

of the Duchy.

Boscovich had planned to arrive in time to make observations of the

transit of Venus in Istanbul. However, he was still in Venice when the

transit occurred, but, since the local weather was overcast, he was unable

to observe it. Fortunately the British ambassador to the Porte, an amateur

scientist himself, was able to observe the transit in Istanbul and report on

this important event to the Royal Society. When Boscovich and Correr, the

Venetian ambassador, reached Istanbul in November 1761, Boscovich fell

seriously ill with a leg infection and had to remain there for several months

of recuperation. When he had partially recovered he set off again, this time

in the company of the British ambassador, and travelled through Turkey and

Bulgaria to Moldavia, but, after an accident that further injured his leg, he

abandoned the original plan of going on to Russia. Instead he went to Poland,

where he spent several months. In Warsaw he was received in ecclesiastical

and diplomatic circles, and afterwards wrote a careful assessment of the

political situation in that country. His diary of the tours he made through

Bulgaria and Moldavia amounts to a systematic description of the region; it

was published in Italian in 1784, having already been translated into French

and German.

From Poland Boscovich finally returned to Rome – by way of Silesia,

Austria and Venice – arriving back there in November 1763 after an absence

of over five years. The Vatican consulted him on the age-old problem of

draining the Pontine marshes. The report he produced for the papal government

served as the basis for all subsequent work on the drainage problem.‘

I am afraid that the drying up of your marshes is taking up a great deal of

your time’, wrote his friend Alexis Clairaut, ‘You take on all sorts of duties.

Take great care I beg of you not to overtax yourself and don’t go and ruin

your health which is precious to mathematicians.’

Boscovich was now fifty-two years old and had reached another

turning-point in his active life. He received an invitation to become professor

of mathematics at the University of Pavia, which, after a period of

stagnation, was being revived under Austrian administration. At Pavia he

organized his department realistically and lectured himself, with an emphasis

on applied mathematics. In research he concentrated his efforts mainly

in the field of optics and the improvement of lenses for telescopes and

54 From Franklin to Laplace

played a leading role in the organization of the observatory at the Jesuit

College in Brera near Milan in 1764. The observatory when completed was

a remarkable achievement, appraised by all the experts as the finest yet constructed.

Its design benefited from his knowledge both of architecture and

of astronomy; he spent quite a lot of his own money on the building and

its equipment. However, he was irked when he found that his work on the

observatory was not sufficiently appreciated by the authorities at the Jesuit

college. His expert advice was also sought in connection with a structural

problem concerning the dome of Milan Cathedral.

Recalling his interests in the transits of Venus, the Council of the

Royal Society invited him to lead an expedition to California for the purpose

of observing the second of the famous pair of transits, that of 1769.

Unfortunately political conditions prevented him doing so; the Jesuits had

been expelled from Spain and Naples in 1767 and from Parma and Malta the

following year, and their total suppression was being demanded; in those

circumstances it was not thought wise for him to leave Lombardy.

In his old age Boscovich was becoming increasingly irritable; he often

took offence over real or imaginary slights. Partly this may have been due

to his ulcerated leg, which was getting worse. He went to Paris for treatment,

but it was not the doctors of Paris but an unqualified barber-surgeon

in Brussels who finally managed to cure him. In 1770 there was a reorganization,

which resulted in Boscovich moving to the department of optics

and astronomy at the Scuola Palatina in Milan, where he would be near the

observatory he had built and considered he should control. Unfortunately

the transfer provoked opposition among his colleagues at the observatory

and in the university at large, resulting in petty annoyances that he was

unable to rise above. In 1772 the court in Vienna yielded to the demands of

the majority and relieved Boscovich of his ‘concern’ for the observatory. In

despair he resigned his professorship as well. All his world was dissolving;

the final blow came the next year, when the Pope ordered the suppression

of the Society of Jesus.

By this time Boscovich was in his sixty-third year and had spent most

of his savings on the observatory. In the hope of receiving a pension, he

applied to some of the institutions he had served at various times in his life,

but without success. He thought of retiring to Dubrovnik, his birthplace,

where his mother was still alive. However, influential friends persuaded

him to return to Paris instead, and this time he stayed in the French capital

for nine years. With the approval of Louis XV a well-paid post was arranged

for him as director of optics for the French navy; consequently he became

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) 55

a subject of the French crown. An opportunity for him to return to the

Brera observatory arose, but by that time he felt committed to France. In

Paris, during this, the last productive period of his life, he mainly worked on

problems of optics and astronomy, for example the theory of the achromatic

telescope. He renewed his acquaintance with the leading French scientists

of the day and with visitors such as Franklin and Priestley. In search of

health and tranquillity, Boscovich spent the greater part of each year in the

countryside residing at the estates of one or other of his friends among the

rich and powerful.

Priority disputes were all too common in the eighteenth century. One

of Boscovich’s more tiresome disputes was with the young Laplace over a

method that Boscovich had devised for determining the paths of comets;

another was on priority over the invention of a device that became important

in the design of geodetic telemeters. Laplace wrote an account of the

history of the Brera observatory without even mentioning Boscovich. However,

these were relatively minor distractions in his last years of constructive

work. Despite failing health, he continued to lead an active social life

among the good and the great. A new edition of the poem on eclipses, with

Latin original and French translation on opposite pages, was published in

Paris, with a flattering dedication to Louis XVI.

Boscovich published over a hundred dissertations, papers and books.

In 1782 he received leave from the king to return to Italy in order to prepare

a collection of his works on optics and astronomy for the press. He settled in

Bassano, north of Rome, where he had assistance in the task, but the strain of

reading proofs told on his health. Once again he set off on his travels, without

leaving Italy, to visit old friends and make peace with his enemies. He found

a cordial welcome in Milan, where former opponents were inclined to let

bygones be bygones, and settled down to work in the Brera observatory; but

sadly his mental powers were leaving him, forgetfulness, anxiety and fear

for his scientific reputation grew on him.

When it became clear that his mind was failing, Boscovich was moved

to the Jesuit college in Monza. His condition rapidly worsened and was

accompanied by other problems. He died of a lung ailment on February 13,

1787 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Bordone in Milan. No

trace of his tomb can be seen nowadays. Today the citizens of Dubrovnik

claim him as their most illustrious son. The Serbs claim him as a Serb, on

his father’s side; the Italians as an Italian, on his mother’s side, and describe

him as largely Italian by culture and career; while the French point to his

adoption of French nationality.

56 From Franklin to Laplace

Henry Cavendish (1731–1810)

As a fellow-scientist wrote, Henry Cavendish possessed a clarity of comprehension

and an acuteness of reasoning that have been the lot of very few

of his predecessors since the days of Newton. At home and abroad he was

regarded as the most distinguished British man of science of his day. Among

his many achievements are the demonstration of the existence of hydrogen

as a distinct substance, the demonstration that water is a compound and the

determination of the density of the earth. He was also one of the pioneers

of electrical research, presaging much of the work of Coulomb, Faraday and

Ohm. Clerk Maxwell, who edited some of his papers, was fascinated by

his character: ‘Cavendish cared more for investigation than publication. He

would undertake the most laborious researches in order to clear up a difficulty

which no-one but himself could appreciate, or was even aware of. And

we cannot doubt that the result of his enquiries, when successful, gave him

a certain degree of satisfaction. But it did not excite in him that desire to

communicate the discovery to others which, in the case of ordinary men of

science, generally ensures the publication of their results.’

Lord Charles Cavendish, the third son of the second Duke of

Devonshire, married Lady Anne Grey, the fourth daughter of Henry, Duke

of Kent. She was living in Nice, owing to frail health, when her first child

Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) 57

Henry was born on October 10, 1731. A second child, Frederick, was born

in England two years later, but their mother died shortly afterwards. Little

is known of the early years of the two boys, except that they attended

the Hackney Academy, a London school well thought of in its day for the

education of children of the upper classes in sound classical learning. Each

of the brothers went up to the University of Cambridge, matriculated as a

nobleman and resided there for four years, but left without taking a degree.

The college to which they belonged was St Peter’s, commonly known as

Peterhouse. Shortly after the younger brother had left Cambridge they made

the customary tour on the continent; apart from Paris, it is not known where

they went. Henry may well have studied mathematics and physics when he

was in Paris. The brothers did not have much to do with each other later in

life, although they remained on good terms.

After returning to England, Henry Cavendish went to live with his

father at a house in Great Marlborough Street, in the Soho district of London,

and apparently continued to do so until his father died. It was during this

period of almost thirty years that he carried out the fundamental electrical

research which so impressed Clerk Maxwell. He began his research career

by assisting his father, a gifted experimental physicist, who was a prominent

fellow of the Royal Society. Lord Charles made some valuable investigations

into heat, electricity and terrestrial magnetism. Franklin remarked that ‘It

were to be wished that this noble philosopher would communicate more of

his experiments to the world, as he makes many, and with great accuracy.’

Lord Charles was not a wealthy man but the financial allowance he

made to his eldest son was so small as to be described as niggardly by contemporaries.

It is not known just where the money came from, but, in 1783,

when his father died, or even before, Henry Cavendish became extremely

wealthy, apparently through a succession of legacies from relatives. However,

by this time he had become accustomed to living parsimoniously.

His large library of scientific works, housed in Bedford Square, was open

to any serious scholars. At one time it was in a somewhat neglected state,

so, having been told of a German scholar in straitened circumstances who

was capable of classifying the books in a satisfactory manner, Cavendish

arranged for him to act as his librarian; in return Cavendish gave him the

princely sum of £10 000, with which to purchase an annuity. He could be

remarkably generous when he felt so inclined.

Cavendish’s principal residence was a large villa at Clapham, then just

a village south of London. Most of its rooms were equipped with scientific

apparatus. It was at Clapham that he made his discovery of the composition

58 From Franklin to Laplace

of water and measured by means of a torsion balance the density of the earth.

There was a ladder up a large tree in the garden, from the top of which he

made astronomical and meteorological observations. He was very much a

man of habit, invariably dining off leg of mutton and taking exactly the same

walk every day on his own. His pathologically shy and nervous disposition,

on which anyone who had any contact with Henry Cavendish was apt to

remark, has been attributed to his comparative poverty during the first forty

years of his life.

In appearance Cavendish was tall and thin, his face intelligent and

mild. His voice was hesitant and somewhat shrill. He retained the dress

of his youth – faded violet suit with high collar, frilled shirt-wrists and a

knocker-tailed periwig. Each year on a fixed day his tailor provided him with

a new suit that was a replica of the old one. When out-of-doors he was to

be seen wearing a three-cornered hat. He would often be accompanied by

Sir Charles Blagden, who for seven years acted as his assistant. As secretary

of the Royal Society, Blagden made frequent visits to the continent, usually

to Paris, where he was a friend of Berthollet and Laplace, amongst others, and

courted the lively widow of Antoine Lavoisier. When eventually Cavendish

parted with Blagden’s services he provided him with an annuity of £500 and

left him a legacy of £15 000 in his will.

Cavendish’s interests extended over a wide field of natural philosophy,

and every subject of investigation was subjected to a rigorous quantitative

examination. The results he obtained with simple methods and apparatus

were amazing. He was not only a highly skilled experimentalist but also

a capable mathematician. In common with others in England during this

period, he employed the methods of Newton, for example the fluxional

notation for differentiation. In chemistry he adhered to the old caloric

theory of heat, although the experiments he performed were helping to

undermine it. Like Newton, he had a deep dislike of controversy. As a result

he published remarkably little; for example only two research papers on

electricity, although, when Clerk Maxwell was editing Cavendish’s electrical

researches for publication, after his death, he found twenty packages full

of manuscripts on mathematical and experimental electricity.

The vast bulk of the Cavendish papers must have given Maxwell

pause, but, once he had begun, he found them fascinating. Cavendish had

quietly presaged many of the important results of the following century. He

had performed some extraordinarily accurate experiments with the crudest

of equipment, using a pair of pithballs, on strings, which repelled each other

to measure charge and his own body to measure resistance. In going through

Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) 59

the papers Maxwell found many of the experiments mentioned so original

that they seemed worth repeating, checking or improving. Cavendish

had done his experiments by making himself part of the electric circuit

and noticing how intense the electric shocks he felt under different circumstances

were. To check his conclusions he would summon his servant

Richard to replace him and then observe his servant’s reactions. Visitors

to his laboratory were often pressed into taking part instead of Richard;

Cavendish offended a visiting American physicist, who refused to act as a

guinea pig and went off saying ‘when an English man of science comes to

the United States we do not treat him like that’.

Although Franklin’s work had been published twenty years earlier,

Cavendish’s paper ‘An attempt to explain some of the principal phenomena

of electricity by means of an elastic fluid’ involves basically the same idea,

but gives it a mathematical treatment, quantitative rather than qualitative.

Both Cavendish and Franklin served on a committee of the Royal Society

to report on the best way of protecting buildings from lightning; they recommended

the installation of pointed conductors. However, others were in

favour of blunt ends, and George III agreed.Anotorious controversy erupted,

with political overtones, since pointed ends were thought somehow to be

unpatriotic.

Although Cavendish mainly lived as a recluse owing to a morbid

dislike of society, he nevertheless participated in the intellectual life of

London. He was a member of the Royal Society of Arts, a trustee of the

British Museum, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a manager of the

Royal Institution and a foreign associate of the Paris Academy. Like his

father, he was prominent in the Royal Society, to which he was elected

in 1760, served on the Council and some of its committees; and regularly

attended the Dining Club, to which he often brought guests. They were

advised that it was useless to try to engage him in conversation on any

non-scientific topic. The only known portrait of him, now in the British

Museum, was drawn surreptitiously at one of the club dinners.

Henry, later Lord, Brougham recalled seeing him at a Royal Society

Conversazione and hearing ‘the shrill cry he uttered as he shuffled quickly

from room to room, seeming to be annoyed if looked at, but sometimes

approaching to hear what was passing among others. His walk was quick

and uneasy. He probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than

any man who lived to fourscore years, not at all excepting the monks of La

Trappe.’ Of the many stories told about his idiosyncrasies, one concerns a

distinguished foreign scientist who said that he wished to meet ‘one of the

60 From Franklin to Laplace

greatest intellectual ornaments of this country, and one of the most profound

philosophers of all time’. Cavendish was so embarrassed that he was

reduced to total silence and escaped in his carriage at the first opportunity.

Cavendish made a number of journeys by carriage within Britain,

always in the summer, when conditions of travel were least difficult, and

generally accompanied by Blagden. Although usually their main purpose

was to visit other men of science, generally some scientific work was done

en route; for example they studied the variation of barometric pressure with

altitude, or collected specimens of minerals to be examined at leisure on

their return. They inspected many of the places where science was being

applied in industry, as the industrial revolution began to gather momentum.

Often the people he met were later guests of his at the Royal Society Dining

Club.

Cavendish died on February 24, 1810, at the age of seventy-eight,

and was buried in All Saints Church, Derby, now designated the cathedral,

where his famous ancestor Bess of Hardwick had built an elaborate tomb

for herself. Owing to his frugal life-style, he had accumulated a fortune of

over a million pounds, a huge sum in those days; he was one of the richest

men in England. When he died none of this wealth went directly to support

scientific research; he believed that it should return to the family from

which it came. However, many years later the University of Cambridge benefited

from the generosity of the Cavendish family through the endowment

of the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics and the Cavendish

Laboratory.

Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736–1806)

The end of the Thirty Years War left France the most powerful nation in

Europe. Although the golden age of French science was yet to come, some

remarkable physicists were already distinguishing themselves before the

end of the ancien r ´egime. One of the first was Coulomb, the subject of our

next profile. He has been described as the complete physicist, rivalled in

the eighteenth century only by Henry Cavendish, combining experimental

skill, accuracy of measurement and great originality with mathematical

powers adequate to all his demands. He invented the torsion balance and

used it to show that the force between electrically charged particles is proportional

to the product of their charges and inversely proportional to the

distance between them. This fundamental result is known as Coulomb’s

law; the unit of electrical charge is also named after him.

Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736–1806) 61

Charles Augustin Coulomb was born in Angoulˆeme on June 14, 1736.

Little is known of his mother, Catherine Bajet, except that her mother was

from the wealthy de Senac family. Charles’ father, Henry Coulomb, after a

period of military service, had been appointed to a minor government administrative

post, that of ‘Inspecteur des Domaines du Roi’. Charles was born

away from his ancestral province, for the Coulombs came from Languedoc,

and the family had lived at least several generations in Montpellier. They

had traditionally been lawyers; Charles’ older cousin Louis was head of a

branch of the family that was active in politics and finance throughout the

eighteenth century.

As an inspector of the king’s lands, Henry Coulomb was liable to

be transferred from place to place in the course of royal business; thus,

early in Charles’ childhood, the family moved to Paris, where his father

became involved in tax-farming. His mother, who wished her son to become

a physician, arranged for him to attend the Coll`ege des Quatre Nations,

probably between the ages of ten and fifteen. The college had been founded

by the will of Cardinal Mazarin upon his death in 1661 and had a good

reputation for mathematics. Charles also attended lectures on the subject

at the Coll`ege Royale de France and decided that he wanted to become a

mathematician.

At some point Charles’ father lost all his money through unwise

investments and returned to Montpellier, leaving the rest of the family

62 From Franklin to Laplace

behind in Paris. Since his mother still wanted him to study medicine, and he

did not, Charles went to join his father and other relatives, including a cousin

who introduced him to the Soci´et´e Royale des Sciences de Montpellier,

which was modelled on the Paris Academy but on a smaller scale and without

funding of its own. He was not yet old enough to become a full member,

but in 1757 was admitted as an adjunct. Charles read his first paper, on

geometry, at one of its meetings and later two more on mathematics and

three on astronomy.

For a career Charles considered engineering, either civil (Ecole de

Ponts et Chauss´ ees) or military (Ecole du G´ enie). Having decided on the

military option, he returned to Paris for further study to pass the entrance

examination and then entered the school at M´ezi` eres. He graduated after a

year with the rank of lieutenant en premier and then, after a short period

of leave, was posted to Brest and assigned to minor duties. Suddenly, however,

his career took an unexpected turn. Three years after the start of the

Seven Years War, the British navy had appeared before Port Royal, the chief

town of the French colony of Martinique, with seventeen ships and 8000

men. After destroying the town and its fort they withdrew, but later they

returned and controlled Martinique until 1763. When the Treaty of Paris

restored the island to France, the French Minister of War decided that the

islands in the French Antilles must be put in such a position that they

could be defended in future engagements with the British and called for

major work on fortifications to be carried out in Martinique.

It was not originally intended that Coulomb would play a large role

in the fortification of this island in the Caribbean; he was conscripted at

the last moment to replace another newly qualified engineer who had fallen

ill. ‘I was responsible for eight years’, Coulomb wrote later, ‘for the construction

of Fort Bourbon and for a work-gang of 1200 men, where I was

often in the situation of discovering how much all the theories, founded

on hypotheses or on experiments carried out in miniature in cabinets de

physique, were insufficient guide in practice. I devoted myself to every form

of research that could be applied to the enterprises that engineering officers

undertake.’ Coulomb was inexperienced but his work was exemplary and he

was promoted to captain. By 1770, with the fort almost complete, he became

seriously ill and asked to be allowed to return to France. Unfortunately his

superior officer wished to do the same, with the result that Coulomb had

to remain another year, to the long-term detriment of his health.

On his return from Martinique in 1772 Coulomb was posted to

the inland French town of Bouchain. Since no engineering works were in

Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736–1806) 63

progress there, he had time to write a memoir concerning the mechanics

of civil engineering, an Essay on an Application of the Rules of Maxima

and Minima to some Problems in Statics, Related to Architecture, which

he presented to the Paris Academy in the spring of 1773. It dealt with the

strength of materials, the design of arches and similar matters. The report

on the essay said that ‘under this modest title Coulomb encompassed all

the statics of architecture’, and this led to him being placed on the first step

of the ladder which was to lead to full membership of the academy eight

years later. Coulomb’s next posting was to the Channel port of Cherbourg,

where again his duties allowed time for scientific work, and this was when

he turned his attention to physics.

In 1773 the Paris Academy had announced the subject of one of its

regular prize contests to be the best means of constructing magnetic compasses.

After no award had been made in 1775, the academy doubled the

prize and reset the contest for 1777. Coulomb submitted a memoir entitled

Investigations of the Best Method of Making Magnetic Needles, one of his

most important works. What he wrote contained the elements of all his

major physical studies: the quantitative study of magnetic phenomena, torsion

and the torsion balance, friction and fluid resistance and the germ of

his theory of electricity and magnetism. He shared the prize with another

candidate. Another memoir he had written, On the Service of Officers of

the Corps du G´enie, addressed various problems within the corps and in

its relationship with the rest of the French army and played a significant

role in the reorganization which took place in 1776. The following year he

was transferred from Cherbourg to Besanc¸on, where he returned to writing

about civil engineering, notably his method for executing under water all

types of hydraulic works without the necessity of drainage, which was also

presented to the academy.

While their son was in Martinique Coulomb’s father Henry had died,

and his mother died in 1779. He went to Paris to monitor the administration

of his mother’s substantial estate, of which he was one of the beneficiaries,

and while this was in progress was ordered to proceed to the Atlantic port

of Rochefort, where he would be involved in constructing a new type of fort

on an island in the estuary of the River Charente. Unfortunately the overall

commander was the marquis de Montalembert, and this was a pet project of

his. Montalembert had little regard for the Corps Royal du G´enie and was

engaged in a long-standing quarrel with the chief military engineer, into

which Coulomb was dragged. Montalembert’s controversial design for the

fort was like a land-based man-of-war, made entirely of timber, expensive

64 From Franklin to Laplace

to construct and full of defects; moreover, he kept changing his mind about

the details.

Coulomb won another academy prize in 1781, this time for the solution

of problems of friction of sliding and rolling surfaces, and the resistance

to bending in ropes, and the application of these solutions to simple

machines used in the French navy. He developed a generalized theory of

friction and a series of empirical formulae that soon became standard. When

on leave in Paris to sort out further problems related to his mother’s estate

he read a memoir to the academy, On the Limits of Man’s Force and on

the Greatest Action that One Can Exert for some Seconds, from which is

Concluded the Impossibility of Flying in the Air like Birds.

Like his contemporary the mathematician Gaspard Monge, Coulomb

always kept himself busy. When his next posting turned out to be Lille, he

wrote a memoir on the theory and design of windmills. His ambition, never

fulfilled, was to incorporate his various investigations into a comprehensive

new course of engineering – not so much a course of mathematics or

engineering-drawing for the student but more a handbook for the practising

engineer. He persuaded the corps to post him to Paris, essential if he was to

become a full academican. Coulomb was finally elected in 1781, after being

front-runner in 1779. In the corps he was promoted to capitaine en premier

de la premi`ere classe.

Coulomb was called upon to advise on engineering projects outside

Paris, notably the construction of canals, which had become strategically

important at a time when the British navy, with its command of the seas,

prevented coastal shipping from operating normally. In 1784 he was named

intendant des eaux et fontaines du roi, particularly concerned with waterworks

in the Paris region. This was no sinecure; there were not only problems

in engineering but also litigation arising from private concessions, and

by 1790 he had given the office up. Coulomb was also active in the field of

public health, in hospital reform, in the construction of relief maps of places

of strategic importance and on the commission established to reform the

chaotic systems of weights and measures. However, before the commission

reached any conclusion the Revolution began and Coulomb lost his place in

the resulting purge. He resigned from the Corps du G´enie in 1791, after 31

years of service, partly in protest at changes made by the National Assembly.

To escape the Terror he went to his house north of Paris, close to the chˆateau

Chaumontel near Luzarches, and then went on further to another property

he owned near Blois in the Loire valley. This was just a farmhouse where

he often went on holiday and liked to entertain friends from Paris, often

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) 65

fellow-scientists. He loved the countryside and took a particular interest in

plant physiology.

For some years Coulomb had been living with a young woman from

Dou´ e, thirty years younger than he was, named Louise Franc¸oise LeProust

Desormeaux; it is not known when he married her, but their first son,

Charles Augustin II, had been born in 1790 and their second, Henry Louis,

in 1797. In Paris they lived on the rue du Chantre, close to the cathedral of

Notre Dame. In 1801 he was elected to the largely honorary presidency of the

Institut de France and the following year he was appointed by Napoleon to a

commission to reconstitute the French educational system, the last public

service of his career. In his four years as Inspecteur-G´en´ eral de l’Instruction

Publique he participated in the foundation of the new semi-militarized

system of French education, reflecting the ideas of Napoleon. He moved

to an apartment on the left bank of the Seine, where in June 1806 he contracted

the fever which led to his death on August 23, 1806.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827)

The early nineteenth century was a golden age for science in France. The

mathematical physicist Laplace was one of the leading figures. He sought

to reduce physical phenomena to mechanical theories involving particles

of matter and the forces acting between them, on the model of physical

66 From Franklin to Laplace

astronomy. Laplace and his followers, such as Biot and Poisson, achieved

great successes with the corpuscular theory of light and with fluid theories

of electricity and magnetism, in which the postulated electrical and magnetic

fluids consist of particles acting on one another through short-range

forces. Most of all, however, he was renowned for his success in applying

Newtonian gravitational theory to problems in celestial mechanics.

Beaumont-en-Auge is a small town in the Calvados district of

Normandy, not far from Pont l’Ev ˆeque. Pierre Laplace (or La Place) was

engaged in farming and was also an official of the local parish. The family

of his wife Marie-Anne (n´ee Sochon), who came from nearby Tourgeville,

were rather more prosperous farmers. Their second child Pierre-Simon was

born on March 28, 1749. Between the ages of seven and sixteen he attended

the local Benedictine school, where his paternal uncle Louis Laplace was a

teacher. Apart from this uncle, who was interested in mathematics, there

is no sign of intellectual distinction on either side of the family.

Laplace’s father wanted him to make a career in the Church, and in

1766 the young man entered the University of Caen for theological training.

His mathematical interests were already apparent, however, and he was

encouraged in this by his teachers. In 1768, at the age of nineteen, he went

to Paris with a letter of recommendation to d’Alembert. The story of how

d’Alembert gave Laplace difficult mathematical problems to solve as a test

of his ability has often been told: the young man was able to solve them

overnight. Much impressed, d’Alembert used his influence to secure Laplace

a position at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, teaching the cadets elementary

mathematics. This lasted for the next seven years.

The immediate aim of Laplace was to become a member of the Paris

Academy. So he began to submit research papers to the permanent secretary,

who wrote afterwards that he had never before received in so short a time

so many important papers on such varied and difficult topics from such

a young man. Laplace was first proposed for election in 1771. After two

unsuccessful attempts, he achieved adjoint membership in March 1773, at

the early age of twenty-four.

Laplace’s first contributions to mathematics involved using integral

calculus to solve difference equations, but his main interest lay elsewhere.

He was a great admirer of the work of Newton and in 1774, having come

of age intellectually, he set himself the task of perfecting the Newtonian

world-picture. The fundamental problem, the long-term stability of the

solar system, is an unresolved question even today. Laplace investigated

the outstanding problems of celestial mechanics and, in a remarkable series

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) 67

of memoirs written between 1783 and 1786, he resolved many of them. For

example, it had been observed that the orbit of the planet Jupiter was shrinking

and the orbit of Saturn expanding; he demonstrated that the orbital

eccentricities are self-correcting and that the mean motions of the planets

are invariable. He also explained the acceleration of the moon around the

earth, the perturbations produced in the motion of the planets by their satellites

and the orbits of comets.

During these fruitful years Laplace collaborated with Lavoisier on

important physical and chemical experimental work. He made a study of

the vital statistics of Paris and used probabilistic techniques to estimate

the population of France. As well as teaching at the Ecole Militaire he was

appointed examiner of the artillery cadets; one of his first examinees was

the future Emperor. Significantly Monge, just three years his senior, was the

examiner of naval cadets at this time, and the experience they each gained

in their respective capacities stood them in good stead when, later on, they

cooperated in the planning of the Ecole Polytechnique.

Little is known of Laplace’s private life at this time, but there are

clear signs that d’Alembert was beginning to resent the way his prot´eg´e

was superseding his own work in rational mechanics. Although Laplace

had extensive knowledge of other sciences, in the Academy he wanted to

pronounce on everything and already he was developing a reputation for

arrogance, which made him unpopular with his fellow academicians. A

visitor to Paris wrote ‘I have seen much of M. de la Place, he is amiable and

a great geometer, but he is tremendously punctilious and hasty, he hardly

listens to anyone but himself.’

In 1788 Laplace married Marie-Charlotte de Courty de Romanges,

whose family came from Besanc¸on. She was twenty years younger than

he was. They had two children, a son, Charles-Emile, who pursued a military

career, ending up with the rank of general, and a daughter, Sophie-

Suzanne, who married into the nobility but died in childbirth at the age of

twenty-five.

The rationalization of the chaotic system of weights and measures in

use in different parts of France had been under discussion for years. In May

1790 the Revolutionary Government charged the Academy with the task of

making recommendations for reform and Laplace, together with Lagrange

and Monge, served on the commission appointed to deal with the problem.

They made recommendations for units of length, area, volume and mass,

with decimal subdivisions and multiples. They also proposed decimal systems

for money, angles and the calendar. It was at Laplace’s suggestion that

68 From Franklin to Laplace

the basic unit of length was named the metre. The Revolutionary calendar

lasted only a short while, even in France, and the decimalization of angle

measurements was not generally accepted, but the other metric units were

gradually adopted around the world.

In 1793 Laplace and others were expelled from the Acad´emie des

Sciences on political grounds, just before all the Academies were suppressed.

To avoid the Terror, he took the precaution of moving his family from Paris

to the nearby town of Melun. By 1795 the danger appeared to be over. The

Thermidorean regime had placed the introduction of the metric system

and all matters pertaining to navigation and official astronomy under the

administration of the new Bureau des Longitudes. Membership of the wellfunded

Bureau was regarded as a full-time occupation and rewarded liberally.

Laplace served regularly as a member, often used its meetings as the

forum in which to present appropriate papers and published frequently in its

journal, the Con- naissance des temps, which originally was just a nautical

almanac.

In 1796, Laplace published his popular scientific classic, the Exposition

du syst`eme du monde (Explanation of the Solar System), which

eschews the use of mathematical formulae. In particular he discussed the

nebular hypothesis (that the solar system condensed from a cloud of rotating

gas) which had been proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant,

albeit without mathematical underpinning. It is not known whether Laplace

knew this; he seldom gave acknowledgements. Moreover, Laplace is even

thought by some to have foreseen the concept of the black hole, whose

characteristics were deduced much later in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The Exposition contains this statement of Laplace’s general point

of view:

The algebraic analysis soon makes us forget the main object [of our

researches] by focusing our attention on abstract combinations and it

is only at the end that we return to the original objective. But in

abandoning oneself to the operations of analysis, one is led to the

generality of this method and the inestimable advantage of

transforming the reasoning by mechanical procedures to results often

inaccessible by geometry. Such is the fecundity of the analysis that it

suffices to translate into this universal language particular truths in

order to see emerge from their very expression a multitude of new and

unexpected truths. No other language has the capacity for the elegance

that arises from a long sequence of expressions linked one to the other

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) 69

and all stemming from one fundamental idea. Therefore the geometers

[mathematicians] of this century convinced of its superiority have

applied themselves primarily to extending its domain and pushing

back its bounds.

The mathematical arguments supporting Laplace’s theories were kept

for his masterpiece, the monumental five-volume Trait ´e de m´ecanique

c´ eleste (Treatise on Celestial Mechanics), which was published between

1799 and 1825. In it he completed Newton’s work in this field. Whereas

Newton believed that divine intervention would be necessary in order to

‘reset’ the solar system periodically, Laplace argued that the law of universal

gravitation implied its long-term stability. When Napoleon observed that

Laplace’s voluminous treatise did not mention God as creator of the universe,

Laplace is said to have replied ‘Sir, I do not have need of that hypothesis’,

and when Napoleon repeated this to Lagrange, the latter remarked ‘Ah,

but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.’ When Laplace

was finishing the M´ecanique c´ eleste he wrote to his correspondent Mary

Somerville in London that the task had forced him to reread ‘with particular

attention the incomparable Principia of Newton, which contains the germ

of all his investigations. The more I study this work the more I admire it,

it takes me back above all to the time when it was published. But at the

same time as I felt the elegance of the synthetic method by which Newton

has presented his discoveries, I have recognized the unavoidable necessity

of analysis to fathom questions which can only be dealt with superficially

by his synthesis. I see with great pleasure that your mathematicians now

devote themselves to analysis, and I no longer doubt that in following this

method with the peculiar wisdom of your nation, they will be led to make

important discoveries.’

Although the main field of Laplace’s research was celestial mechanics,

he also made important contributions to the theory of probability and

statistical inference. In his Th´eorie analytique des probabilit´es (Analytical

Theory of Probability) of 1812 he summarized, in a masterly introduction,

all that was then known in the area of probability and its applications. This

work introduced the technique known later as the Laplace transform, a

simple and elegant method of solving integral equations. Some of Laplace’s

contributions to the theory of probability were derived from questions in

astronomy, for example the central-limit theorem as applied to the inclination

of the orbits of comets. Laplace believed that, through probability,

mathematics could be brought to bear on the social sciences and suggested

70 From Franklin to Laplace

various applications.With his fellow academician Lavoisier he also worked

on various problems in physics, including thermal conductivity and capillary

action. He is best known for his concept of potential, as an analytical

device, which proved to be invaluable in such a wide range of subjects, as

gravitation, electromagnetism, acoustics and hydrodynamics.

He seemed to have had the whole literature of the exact sciences at his

fingertips. In his own work, however, he frequently neglected to acknowledge

the sources of his results and left the impression that they were his

own when they were not.

Laplace considered himself the best mathematician in France; his colleagues

thought that, although this might well be true, a little modesty

would not have come amiss. There was great amusement when it emerged

that, due to administrative error, the proud Laplace had been enrolled as a

student rather than a professor at the short-lived Ecole Normale. If anything

his arrogance increased as he grew older. After he had become successful

he ignored his parents and elder sister. That Laplace was vain and selfish

can hardly be denied; his behaviour towards the benefactors of his youth and

his political friends was mean and ungrateful, while his appropriation of the

results of those who were comparatively unknown appears well-established.

After his death an anonymous critic wrote that ‘The genius of Laplace

was a perfect sledgehammer in bursting purely mathematical obstacles, but

like that useful instrument, it gave neither finish nor beauty to the results . . .

nevertheless, Laplace never attempted the investigation of a subject without

leaving upon it the marks of difficulties conquered: sometimes clumsily,

sometimes indirectly, but still his end is obtained and the difficulty is conquered.’

From the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth

Laplace dominated the Paris Academy, imposing his scientific preferences

and deterministic ideology on younger colleagues. When the suppressed

academies were revived, as part of the Institut de France, Laplace was elected

vice-president of the new Acad´emie des Sciences at the organizational meeting

in December 1795 and five months later became president. That office

was more than honorary; it ensured that he was a member, frequently chairman,

of the numerous committees where policies were formulated and

decisions pre-empted. Laplace threw himself into this political work with

ability and enthusiasm. He now presided over the Bureau des Longitudes. He

taught at the Ecole Normale when it was opened briefly in 1795 and in 1800

was instrumental in forming the constitution of the Ecole Polytechnique,

where he served as a graduation examiner. Laplace was known for the

‘rapidity’ of his teaching and in his writing was notorious for his frequent use

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) 71

of the phrase ‘it is easy to see’, by which he skipped steps in his exposition,

confounding some of his later readers.

This was a period when prominent scientists were being increasingly

called upon to undertake various forms of public service. Laplace was one of

the most prominent. In 1799 Napoleon, by this time First Consul, appointed

him Minister of the Interior, but he was not a success in this office and

after six weeks Napoleon replaced him by his brother Lucien Bonaparte.

As the former Emperor remarked after he had been exiled to St Helena, ‘a

mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a

mediocre administrator . . . Laplace could never get a grasp on any question

of its true significance, he sought everywhere for subtleties, had only problematic

ideas, and in short carried the spirit of the infinitesimally small

into administration’. Even so, under the Empire, Laplace became a senator

and held the office of Chancellor, as the result of which he became

wealthy. He was made a count of the Empire and decorated with France’s

highest honours, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and the Order of

the Reunion. There is a portrait bust of him by Houdon in the Institut de

France.

From 1806 Laplace spent much of his time on his country estate at

the village of Arcueil, about five miles south of the city of Paris. The great

chemist Berthollet owned an adjoining estate. The two wealthy academicians

organized a small, informal society for scientific research at Arcueil,

and much good work was done by this Soci´et´e d’Arcueil in its early years.

Promising young scientists from the Polytechnique and elsewhere were

encouraged to participate. Naturally the patronage of someone as influential

as Laplace was a distinct advantage in career terms.

In the Senate, Laplace voted against the continuation of Napoleon’s

rule in 1814, supporting Louis XVIII instead. After the restoration of the

Bourbon monarchy the following year, he was rewarded with the title of

marquis and was appointed president of the committee to oversee the reorganization

of the Ecole Polytechnique. In this capacity he reduced the length

of the course from three years to two and made it a prerequisite for entry

into the more specialist schools known as Ecoles d’Applications, such as

the Ecole de Ponts et Chauss´ ees, which had been revived. The emphasis

on military engineering was reduced and new courses in history, morality

and ‘social arithmetic’ were introduced. However, mathematics remained

central to the course, and throughout most of the nineteenth century the

Polytechnique, with professors of the calibre of Amp` ere, Cauchy, Fourier,

Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre, Monge, Poisson and Poncelet, was the best

place to study the subject in France or anywhere else.

72 From Franklin to Laplace

Laplace’s political opportunism allowed him to prosper and continue

his scientific work. Yet his power was waning, as new discoveries started to

undermine his beliefs and his theories began to be superseded. Laplace found

himself increasingly isolated in the scientific community of the Restoration;

he remained loyal to the Bourbons for the rest of his life. When the literary

Acad´emie Franc¸ aise, of which he was a member, issued a declaration in

support of free speech, he refused to sign it.

During his declining years Laplace lived mainly on his estate in

Arcueil. In the elegantly furnished mansion, set in a beautiful park, he welcomed

many of the scientists who visited Paris and entertained them in

style. One of his guests was Mary Somerville, who described him as ‘not

tall, but thin, upright and rather formal. He was distinguished in his manners

and I thought there was a little of the courtier in them, perhaps from

having been so much at the court of the first Napoleon.’ Humphrey Davy

also visited Laplace at Arcueil and described him as ‘rather formal and grand

in manner, with an air of protection rather than courtesy.’ A more detailed

picture of life at Arcueil was given on the occasion of a visit by John Dalton

in July 1822 by one of his companions:

At four in the afternoon, by coach with Dalton to Arcueil, La Place’s

country seat, to dine. Engaged the carriage to wait for our return at

nine. On alighting we were conducted through a suite of rooms where

in succession, dinner, dessert, and coffee tables were set out; and

onwards through a large hall, upon a terrace, commanding an extent of

gardens and pleasure grounds . . . as yet we had seen no-one, when part

of the company came into view at a distance; a gentleman of advanced

years and two young men . . . we approached this group, when the

elderly gentleman took off his hat and advanced to give his hand to

Dalton. It was Berthollet. The two younger were La Place’s son and

the astronomer royal, Arago. Climbing some steps upon a long avenue

we saw at a distance La Place walking uncovered with Madame Biot

on his arm; and Biot, Fourier and Courtois, father of the Marchioness

of La Place. At the front of the house this lady and her granddaughter

met us.

At dinner Dalton was on the right hand of Madame La Place and

Berthollet on her left, etc. conversation on the zodiac of Denderah and

Egypt, Berthollet and Fourier having been there with Napoleon . . .

after dinner abroad in the beautiful grounds . . . Dalton walking with

La Place on one side, and Berthollet on the other.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) 73

Laplace possessed a remarkably good memory, which he retained to

an advanced age. As Fourier said, ‘he has not cultivated the fine arts but he

appreciated them. He was fond of Italian music and of the poetry of Racine,

and he took pleasure in quoting from memory various passages of this great

poet. Paintings attributed to Raphael adorned his apartments and they were

found besides portraits of Descartes, Franc¸ois Vieta, Newton, Galileo and

Euler.’ After a generally healthy and vigorous life, he died after a short illness

on March 5, 1827 at Arcueil, just before his seventy-seventh birthday. The

date, it was noted, was almost exactly a century after the death of Newton,

the scientist to whom he was so often compared. Berthollet, his partner in

the Soci´et´ e, had died five years previously. Initially Laplace was buried in

Paris, at the cemetery of P`ere Lachaise. In 1878 the monument erected to

him was moved from there to his birthplace of Beaumont-en-Auge, and ten

years later his remains were transferred from P`ere Lachaise to the family

estate of St Julien de Mailloc, where they were re-interred with the remains

of his wife and children. The marquise, who lived until 1862, endowed a fund

to allow the highest-ranking student in each year of the Ecole Polytechnique

to be given a complete set of the works of her late husband. Unfortunately,

many of his unpublished papers were destroyed by a fire at the Chˆateau de

Mailloc in 1925, which was then owned by his great-great-grandson, the

Count of Colbert-Laplace.