Fantastic Metropolis

When it began, there was no single paradigm for electrical research. Instead, a number of theories, all derived from relatively accessible phenomena, were in competition. None of them succeeded in ordering the whole variety of electrical phenomena very well. That failure is the source of several of the anomalies that provide background for the discovery of the Leyden jar. One of the competing schools of electricians took electricity to be a fluid, and that conception led a number of men to attempt bottling the fluid by holding a water-filled glass vial in their hands and touching the water to a conductor suspended from an active electrostatic generator. On removing the jar from the machine and touching the water (or a conductor connected to it) with his free hand, each of these investigators experienced a severe shock.

—Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

What’s amazing about all this is that several of these men were members of a little social club headquartered in Birmingham, England, known as the Lunar Society: just on a casual perusal of their membership roll we can find luminaries like Erasmus Darwin (ancestor to Charles and Sir Francis Galton as well, that popularizer and namer of the Eugenics movement); the aforementioned Joseph Priestley; William Withering (who discovered digitalis’s effect on heart disease); Josiah Wedgewood (if you like pottery, Josiah’s the guy who figured out how to industrialize their manufacture). And their correspondents and casual members included figures such as Thomas Jefferson (acquainted with the school via his teacher and mentor William Small) and Benjamin Franklin (whose experiments in electricity were first published by Priestley roughly a decade after they’d been conducted). And there were several others worth mentioning, like architect James Wyatt and Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame that Samuel Slater brought in his mind from England to America.

Between the Darwin-Wedgewood line that spawned both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, the work of Priestley and Lavoisier in the discovery of oxygen and the development of the oxygen theory of combustion, and Priestley’s publication of Franklin’s experiments (which even Kuhn credits with helping to end the idea of fluid electricity and setting electrical research on the path picked up by such figures as Faraday and Hans Christian Ørsted), these men did more than the accomplishments in science and industry they’re credited with. They helped set the stage for not one, not two, but three shifts in the very nature of thought in these selected fields within one hundred years, successfully manipulating the rising cultural impetus towards the justification of industrialization towards their own ends both material and intellectual. It’s one thing to help create whole industries, as several of their members did, but to alter the very way men and women of science thought was a far more incredible achievement, which is demonstrated by how very difficult it was even for them. Even Priestley, who was involved not once but twice in these impressive shifts of the established paradigm (to use Kuhn’s word) couldn’t quite believe it: he never fully abandoned phlogiston.

As an aside, the whole Darwin-Wedgewood line reminds me of Wold Newton a little bit. But let’s keep that between you and me, shall we?

So what? you may ask. What does a social club in Birmingham in the late 18^th- and early 19^th-century, even one as compellingly stocked with outsized characters who would come to have a dramatic effect on scientific thought and our culture, have to do with a French maniac who in many ways repudiated everything they stood for? Let me have yet another one of my little digressions here, and I’ll start to bring our cast of characters together, I promise.

I mentioned briefly, while discussing the Bible Communists and other consequences of the religious flourishing called the Great Awakening in the wake of the spread of industrialization in North America (caused in part by that crafty Samuel Slater, with his head full of the designs of Richard Arkwright, former partner to the man Slater was apprenticed to and also member of the Lunar Society… you see how these things become recursive , don’t you?) a man named John Murray Spear. Spear, like Noyes, was the product of a religious New England upbringing brought suddenly into violent relief by the waves of epistemic change radiating out of the Blackstone Valley and across the countryside: Spear’s reaction, like Noyes’, was to become involved in revivalism and the Universalist church, although in Spear’s case his religious path was almost hereditary. His brother Charles, whom he would work alongside in apostolic zeal for the abolition of slavery, was also a Universalist minister and would become famous for his work in attempting to abolish the death penalty. Yes, a fervent Christian who opposed the death penalty. It was a different age, I suppose, one where the terms “Bible” and “Communism” were often said in the same breath and not as antagonists. At any rate, John Murray Spear would serve, during the period of time in which Noyes decided to move from the sinful works of man and the belching demons of “progress” into a strange mix of Rousseau- and Christianity-inspired communal living, as a pastor, a social reformer, a zealous advocate for woman’s suffrage and the end of slavery, for which he was attacked by mobs in Portland, Maine and even forced to resign his ministry in New Bedford. In many ways, John Murray Spear was on a trajectory that would eclipse Noyes and take him further into realms of eccentric behavior that the dreamer of the phalanstere would have approved of. Spear’s Unitarian Universalism would mutate into something else entirely… a conversation that would lead to construction.