In Our Time - The Cavendish Family in Science

Episode Date: May 20, 2010

From the 1600s to the 1800s, scientific research in Britain was not yet a professional, publicly-funded career.So the wealth, status and freedom enjoyed by British aristocrats gave them the opportunity to play an important role in pushing science forwards - whether as patrons or practitioners.The Cavendish family produced a whole succession of such figures.In the 1600s, the mathematician Sir Charles Cavendish and his brother William collected telescopes and mathematical treatises, and promoted dialogue between British and Continental thinkers. They brought Margaret Cavendish, William's second wife, into their discussions and researches, and she went on to become a visionary, if eccentric, science writer, unafraid to take on towering figures of the day like Robert Hooke.In the 1700s, the brothers' cousin's great-grandson, Lord Charles Cavendish, emerged as a leading light of the Royal Society.Underpinned by his rich inheritance, Charles' son Henry became one of the great experimental scientists of the English Enlightenment.And in the 1800s, William Cavendish, Henry's cousin's grandson, personally funded the establishment of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. In subsequent decades, the Lab become the site of more great breakthroughs.With:Jim BennettDirector of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of OxfordPatricia FaraSenior Tutor of Clare College, University of CambridgeSimon SchafferProfessor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Darwin College, CambridgeProducer - Phil Tinline.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Every Sunday, we talk about the week's tech news on this week in tech. Hi, this is Leo Leport. inviting you to join me this week with Lisa Schmeiser, Dan Patterson, and Yanko Rekkers. We're going to talk about the new 49 megabyte web page. It's the standard, you know. We'll also talk about Elon Musk. You've got some spleenin to do and the Yassify filter, new from Nvidia.

That's this week on this week in tech. you'll find it at twit.tv or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the centuries before scientific research was publicly funded, one of the best ways to pursue a career in experimentation

was to be lucky enough to be born rich or an Irish secret or both. Across 300 years, the Cavendish family provided a succession of figures, who, whether as patrons or practitioners, helped to push British science forwards. In the 17th century, the mathematician, Sir Charles Cavendish, and his brother William, promoted dialogue between natural philosophers at home and on the continent. William's wife, Margaret, became a visionary, if eccentric, scientific thinker.

In the 18th century, Lord Charles Cavendish, a leading light of the Royal Society, helped launch the career of his son, Henry, perhaps the greatest experimental scientist of the English Enlightenment. Under their ducal title, Devonshire, they built Chatsworth House, Barrow Infernest and Eastbourne. And in the 19th century, another William Cavendish, personally bankrolled the establishment of Cambridge University's Cavendish laboratory,

which was to become the setting of some of the great breakthroughs of the last hundred years. With me to discuss the role of the aristocracy in British Science and the role of the scientific Cavendishers, I'm joined by Jim Bennett, director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford, Patricia Farah, senior tutor of Clare College University of Cambridge, and Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at the University of Oxford. and the University of Cambridge and fellow of Darwin College. Simon, Simon Schaffer, can you give us some overall view of the role aristocracy played in British science in the early centuries of the modern scientific movement?

Yes, English aristocrats have a splendid track record at breeding and killing, and those have always been two very important themes in the sciences, managing land and fighting wars. But they had other advantages as well, especially in the early modern period. They were typically wealthy. They had leisure. They were connected to power.

And they've typically fulfilled one of the most important functions of any aristocracy, which is to provide an almost inexhaustible reservoir of eccentricity. Those factors, I think, explain at least in part the role that some great aristocratic houses have played in the sciences. The family we're interested in, the cavendishes, are notable also because they worked as patrons, that's to say a lot of their surplus wealth was channeled into the acquisition of people, of employees and clients, and also of hardware of instrumentation,

because the sciences that these cavernishes were peculiarly devoted to tended to be physical experimental sciences, rather than, for example, the natural historical or field sciences, which are much more typical of aristocratic pursuits. How did the Cavendish's first get in? Where's the first Cavendish of Count in this role, which goes on for several centuries? Yes, a good place to start is with Sir Charles Cavendish, she was born right at the end of the 1500s, a man whom his biographer, the splendid John Aubrey, described as short and bent,

therefore not fit either for court or camp, which describes already what the 17th century imagined aristocrats were good for, fighting and being courtiers, Charles Cavendish was wealthy enough to begin as a patron, especially and I think interestingly of that combination of mathematics and experiment, which is going to characterize early modern natural philosophy. Cavendish acquired from the 1630s onwards a really remarkable collection, as far as we can tell, of mathematical and optical works.

He patronised a number of major scientific instrument makers, notably the London optician Richard Reeves, and perhaps most importantly, he sponsored. and took part in a Europe-wide correspondence network which laid the foundations of aspects of what will come to be called the Republic of Letters. But from reading for this programme, one thing that is just as important is that he got stuck in himself. He was a mathematician. It wasn't a world-class, Europe-class, even British-class mathematician, but he got on with doing it, according to brief lives.

That's absolutely true. It's clear that in the correspondence that he had with some of his greatest contemporaries, such as the English mathematician John Pell and French mathematicians, Maidouge, Mersenne, and others, he was engaging in challenge problems. He was engaging, above all, in one of the most fascinating puzzles

that mathematics then faced, which was linking together the newfangled algebras, algebraic geometries that had been developed by Descartes and his colleagues, to see if those kinds of, of analysis could be used to improve the behaviour of instruments,

especially optical instruments. Jim Bennett, can we go along with this? Can we develop this idea of instruments, which Simon's introduced, along with his brother William, Charles commissioned and collected instruments, particularly telescopes. The commissioning was important because

they got, as I, let me be colloquial, they got stuck in. They just didn't say, let's have a telescope. They wanted this particular sort of telescope. They went and worked along with it. They wanted more precision. And this lasted. over the centuries. They more than took an interest. They took a hand. That's exactly right.

Simon pointed out that Charles was the first person to patronise Richard Reeve, who was the first English optical instrument maker of any note. And they wanted Reeve to try to make asphyrical lenses because it was known from

things that Ed Kepler had discovered that these spherical lenses that were used in spectacles were not what were required for precision astronomy. Can you just explain the difference, so we all know, very much including me, what the distinction is? Well, the section of a normal

spherical lens will be a circle whereas if you have this hyperbolic lens which everyone wanted but no one could make, it would be a hyperbola. So that would be very, very difficult because when you're grinding and polishing lenses, they just tend to go into sections of spheres.

But that's an interesting example of an ambition that Cavendish had from his mathematical background trying to get Reeve to go beyond. what was at all possible, what wasn't going to be possible for a long time. But as you say, when he's in exile in

Paris, he has the possibility of a new... He's in the Civil War. Indeed, in the 1640s, he can patronise other instrument makers, notably Italian telescope makers, where the best glass and the best lenses are to be had. So they, he and his brother William, amass what must have been one of the best collections

of telescopes in Europe at the time. They had telescopes by Torricelli, the pupil of Galileo. They had four telescopes by Divini, leading telescope maker in Italy. This was the generation after Galileo. And it's curious because a lot of people

thought that Galileo had cleaned up in the heavens. He'd discovered what there was to discover and telescopic astronomy in terms of discovery. It was kind of finished and there wasn't much future to it. The end of history. And yet it was still an exciting thing to be engaged with. And princes and cardinals and even emperors sponsored the best telescope makers, and there were competitions between these telescope makers.

So it was exciting because it had cosmological implications. There was a new sort of commercial entrepreneurial possibilities. There were possibilities for patronage that hadn't existed before. And it was, after all, studying the heavens. So there was a kind of nobility about this. topic. So part of the if you're a clever and interesting aristocrat, one of the things you did

was this, besides amassing and, what did you say, breeding and fighting. I'm not trying to... Plenty of fighting in the 17th century, but still. Yeah, I'm not trying to say that all aristocrats were into this, but certainly... Nor were mocking it. It's a terrific... I mean, without it, where would we be in anyways?

Yeah, yeah. It was certainly something you could engage with, and these instruments were very expensive. so it required a patron with some wealth in order to encourage it. William, he helped his wife Margaret, to interest her in science. She's an example. First of all, rare that a woman got the chance to be taught, especially by somebody as good as William. How does her work embody the sort of strengths and weaknesses of the amateur in that field? Well, you could perhaps take the instruments as,

as an example there because while Charles and William are working with telescopes and buying to say the best telescopes in Europe, Mark has kind of put onto the microscope as something that she might take an interest in and that's an interesting juxtaposition there

where she does something which is on a perhaps inappropriate, more modest smaller scale it doesn't have the heroic context of the telescope. She's given something more modest and less ambitious. And then although it went against the rubber the green in many ways, Patricia Farras,

she was allowed to go to the Royal Society for a day's visit. Although women were not allowed to go there in those days, and shown around and allowed to use microscopes. Can you tell us what happened then? Well, her whole visit was surrounded by hostility and controversy because shortly before she went, she'd written some very savage satires on the Royal Society, and in particular on Robert Hook and his experiments with microscopes.

So when she demanded to go... What did the satire's consisto? I mean, Robert Hook is universally nowadays praised for the accuracy, precision of his work in micrographia and so on. What was she satirizing then? She basically was accusing him and men like Robert Boyle of building toys for boys, to use the modern phrase. She said, Hook is using these microscopes. There's all sorts of distortions, which was true. He was only looking at the external characteristics.

he couldn't see what the essence of something was, but perhaps most importantly, she said, what's the point of doing all this? If you see a bee magnified underneath a microscope, that's fine. What you really need to be able to do is work out how to get more honey. Or you can see some other insect.

You're not going to be able to stop it stinging you. And one of the most famous pictures that Hook showed right at the very beginning was to show the edge of a knife, to show that it's blunt, because it's made by human beings, not by God. And she said, okay, the knife looks blunt under the microscope, but I can still use it to cut.

What is the point of all of this? So when she managed to get herself invited to the Royal Society, they could hardly turn her down because she was married to one of the richest people in the country. Boyle was forced for her entertainment to put on a show of experiments. And rather bravely, the 10th one he showed in the series, the last one, was the microscope.

which gave her an ideal opportunity to be very critical in public about the microscope. Was she a lone voice, or was she sort of, insofar as this could be called a popular circle, there weren't many people involved in this anyway. But people said, oh, that's a subtle I've been thinking, but didn't dare say it. There were a lot of satires directed against the Royal Society. But most of them were silly. I mean, they're mind amusing, but they accuse them of weighing air and thinking that was funny.

In fact, it was extremely important. But for satire has to be successful, there has to be an edge of truth in them, doesn't there? And, I mean, there was a certain validity in poking fun at all these virtuosos going to their weekly experiments. And a lot of the experiments were for entertainment rather than for genuine scientific exploration.

Someone like Robert Hook was an absolutely marvelous experimenter, absolutely brilliant man. But one of the things that he had to do was keep the fellows of the Royal Society. entertained through his demonstrations. And the fact that this was conducted, these experiments were as often conducted in private houses as a law society,

made it easier for a woman, in this case, Margaret, to engage yourself inside it. Yes, I think if women wanted to practice natural philosophy, they really needed three things. They obviously needed the brains and the interest. They needed the money, so that they had the money and the leisure.

And also, just as importantly, they needed the right sort of man, and either a brother or a father or a husband, someone who was going to allow them or even encourage them, as William Cavendish did, they needed a man who was going to let them do the sort of work, which was seen as being very unsuitable for women. We're spending a lot of time on her, I think,

in proportion to the impact you had on science. She didn't have that much impact at the time. I think it's very interesting. She's really only become famous since the 1970s and 80s when she's become rescued. Why do you think she's become rescued? Is it to do with... She was a very prolific writer.

Yeah, but lots of prolific writers. But there's lots of prolific writers. She wrote a whole host of books on natural philosophy, which is a very unusual thing for a woman to do. She was also, she was critical of the sort of science that men at the Royal Society were doing. So I think in some ways her agenda resonated quite closely with the sort of thing that feminists were interested in

towards the end of the 20th. century and she did write some very sort of pithy comments about how power resides with men and not with women which are very adaptable for the feminist course. Jim Bennett, let's move on. The Cavendish has moved on. We'll talk about how they moved on in a moment or two, but in terms of where the name or the title went to and came from. Several generations were in the 18th century and we have got Lord Charles Cavendish. How did he establish himself and what did he contribute? Well he, he, didn't practice, well, when he became a fellow of the Royal Society, for example,

in the 1720s, I think it was, he didn't have any record of scientific achievement. He was elected to fellowship on the basis of his family connections. It's interesting that, actually, that was questioned when he was elected, because Hans Sloan said, well, why are we

electing someone who's the son of a peer who hasn't yet inherited the title? Because peers were allowed to become fellows, just by virtue of their standing, but technically the son of a peer was still a commoner. So although the Ross, and Sloan raises this problem as a technical issue about fellowship of the Royal Society, which gives you an interesting insight into the qualifications for fellowship,

actually they didn't change the rules, but it's interesting that that was brought up as a point of concern, not his scientific record, but whether he really had the social status that equipped him, allowed him to enter the society under this Now there's a lot of serious out there about that, Patricia, at the time. Yeah, yeah. But to be fair to Lord Charles, he did contribute enormously to the program of the society and at administrative level. He took office. He was a member of committees.

He was a frequent member of council. He became vice president, not president, even though they wanted him to be president. He contributed enormously to the workings of the society. And when he did do serious scientific work, it was significant. For instance, the very first piece of work he did was with James Bradley, the very famous astronomer, and the work involved the attempt to discover the parallax of the stars, which would have been the first ever proof, and ended up, in fact, being the first proof achieved, the first proof of the orbital motion of the earth.

And this was probably the most celebrated result in 18th century astronomy. And in the early, at the start of this program of observations, Charles was part of that. He published only one paper in his career on self-registering thermometers, and he was awarded the complimentary medal for that. So when he did do things, when he chose to be engaged, he was a significant player, but mostly he was in helping in the running of the society rather than contributing experimental science of his own. Because that's one of the interesting things about the cabinet is.

They're sort of everywhere. it, they're running things, and as we'll see soon they're building things, they're always at this subject one way and another. Simon, Chavar, can you tell us how Lord Charles brought his son, Henry's rather deeply reclusive and slightly eccentric son, Henry, how he brought him into the arena? Yes, Henry Cavendish, as you said, surely the most eminent of the experimental philosophers of the English Enlightenment is elected to the Royal Society at a comparable age to his father before he was 30

he'd already however and under his father's direct patronage and support begun that remarkable series of experimental scientific inquiries that as it were by our standards would justify election to the society. I think what's important to stress are two things. First of all, the aristocratic mode is very often likely to be hostile to or concerned with publishing one's worth too spectacularly. I think if we go back to Margaret, for example, the tension between earning your living by your pen and nobles oblige is very marked, right?

through the period that we're thinking about. So that on the one hand, what Lord Charles gives to his son, Henry, is a passport into the very highest echelons of the British scientific establishment. And on the other hand, what these Cavendishes and their allies and social equals do is to give

experimental natural philosophy the social legitimacy, without which it could scarcely have flourished. And also his father gave him an income and a big house inside the house he built a laboratory and amongst other things and he stated in this house most of the time as I read he went out once a week to the Royal Society and that was all

and he set about trying to weigh a mountain. Can you tell us how to who went about that? Yes Henry was spectacularly reclusive and shy in public would for example order dinner simply by leaving notes on the table for his servants

the only effective portrait we have of Henry is one which was made in secret by the artist William Alexander at a Royal Society dinner where Alexander had to stand on one side of the room and Cavendish on the other side and Alexander made a quick and hasty sketch of the great man but we mustn't get carried away Cavendish was very well networked precisely because of his enormous his fabulous wealth he was by our standards of millionaire and because of his father's influence. So, for example, in the late 1760s, when the Royal Society and the Royal Observatory under the Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne,

organised observations of the transits of Venus, Cavendish was there as the backstage theorist, working out the sources of error, because Cavendish, perhaps more than anything else, was driven by the cult of precision. For Cavendish, if one could, measure it it wasn't worth knowing. And what Cavendish did, perhaps more than anything else, was to extend the regime of precision to global, indeed universal extent. So the weighing of the mountain is a very good example. In the project of the 1760s, British astronomers, including the famous Mason and Dixon, who surveyed the border of Maryland, the Mason-Dixon line, had discovered that there were systematic errors in the observations they were making.

large, but enough to draw Cavendish's attention. He attributed them to the pull of the Appalachian mountains on the plum lines these observers were using. And that gave Cavendish the idea that it might be possible to measure the attraction of the earth by looking at the deviations to a plumb line on one and the other side of a large isolated mountain. This was fantastically complicated maths and genuine field astronomy, as it's been called. So thanks to Cavendish's initiative, Maskeline and his assistants went to Scotland to a mountain called Shehallion in Perthshire and measured these deviations and were able from these remarkably accurate observations sometimes disturbed by local drinks parties and fires

to estimate the weight of the mountain and thus by inference the weight of the earth. Another, something else which he occupied himself greatly, Patricia, where I was hydrogen. Now there's a battle for who discovered hydrogen There's a priestly, there's a Wazier, but let's talk about Cavendish's contribution here. Well, Cavendish, basically, his basic experiment was to put some metals, some zinc or some iron

into some acid, and lots of bubbles came. He collected the bubbles together. And he collected a gas which he called inflammable air. It's called inflammable air, because if you strike a match, it blows up, it explodes. And at this time in England, the basic sort of theory structural structure of chemistry was very different from the one that we've got now. And it was

dominated by a substance called phlogiston, which is very, very easy to laugh at, but which did make sense of a lot of chemical actions that people could see, particularly in mines, for example, the whole theory originated in the German mining industry. And Cavendish was a very stalwart defender of the phlogiston theory. So for him, there was inflammable air, and there was another very, very important gas called deflogisticated air. Deflogisticated air is what we would call oxygen. And I think the easiest way to think about phlogiston and oxygen is to think of them as opposite. So oxygen is a very pure gas. Phlogiston is sort of similar to dirt. The more you, conceptually, the more you take away the phlogiston, you add the oxygen and vice versa.

So Cavendish constructed a whole, with Joseph Priestley, constructed a whole theoretical framework. based on inflammable air, which soon became used for balloons because it's lighter than ordinary air, and de-flogisticated air, which we would call oxygen. And he did another experiment. He had an electrical machine, and he had some deflogisticated air and some inflammable air, and he sparked them electrically, and he found water. and that was an incredibly important chemical activity.

He had his gas. He got what we would now call H2O, but I'm trying very hard to use the vocabulary that he would himself have used. He thought, interestingly, he didn't see inflammable air, what we now call hydrogen. He didn't see inflammable air as an element. He sort of havered a bit about exactly what it was,

but he thought it was probably water and phlogiston combined together. He kept his results unpublished for quite a long while, but he did talk about them, which was slightly his undoing. Eventually he did publish his results. In the meantime, by a circuitous route, his results got to France where Lavoisier discovered them. And Lavoisier repeated all the experiments, and it was Lavoisier who introduced the nomenclature that we have today.

So in Lavoisier's framework, Cavendish's inflammable air became hydrogen, and Priestley's deflogisticated air became oxygen. Oxygen means acid bringer, hydrogen means water bringer. And it started there. There was a controversy, claiming that. Another one, Jim, about the water controversies. Can you say what part Henry played in that, and how he clashed with James Waters?

do you want to talk about that? You're pointed to Simon, but you haven't come in for a while, so if you wanted to say something that's fine. If not, I'll go back to Simon. I think Simon has written extensively on these water controversies, and I would hesitate to... That's very flattering. All I would say about that

for the story that we're concerned with here is, on the one hand, we need to remember how much high precision mattered to these fights. The amount of water left when gases are sparked with each other is tiny. So one needs very

high class chemical balances and hardware and that meant these were experiments very difficult to do unless you had the sort of resources and space and technicians that people like Cavendish

in London and Lavoisier, who was a very wealthy tax farmer in France, commanded. The essence of the water controversy was a priority dispute, and the chief alternative claimant to Cavendish in Britain was James Watt, the steam engineer, manufacturer and entrepreneur. What's interesting from that point of view is that what,

and his closest allies in the 1770s and 80s, reckoned that too much credit was being given to Henry Cavendish in this project because Cavendish was an aristocrat. and James Watt was a greener clad. And we begin to see, very heavily marked, the social hierarchy, working its effect within British science. Can I ask you then, Jim, to elaborate the social hierarchy. We're talking about Camisish, what comes in,

we're talking about, mention, just mention people in Europe and say, how many is going on, what's the sort of shape of it? Is it still in-person's houses? We haven't got laboratories built at universities yet at this stage. What's long and the short of it? Well, certainly Henry's situation where he had the leisure, he had the talent, of course, but he had the leisure and the wealth and the premises and so on and the connections from his family. So inside his house, the world laboratories.

Indeed. And he had a small group of like-minded friends. They all were involved in the same kinds of cultural activities, trustee of the British Museum, fellow of the Royal Society, member of the Royal Society Club, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and so on. There was a very small group. and Henry's position allowed him to move very freely

there. The other thing which is relevant to inside his own house. I meant socially freely. He would go, it wasn't just the Royal Society he would go out to. He would go to the antiquaries meeting, not so frequently but certainly regularly to the British Museum trustees and he enjoyed

he was very clubbable. That's the other funny thing about Henry. Despite his social goshiness and so on, there's something about the British club culture that sells celebrated Henry's peculiarities. He was an ornament there, and his eccentricity added colour to their social world. And that's an interesting aspect of the British situation. But the other thing which links to what Simon said is that he was able to patronise the very best instrument makers. And the very best instrument makers at this time, particularly in terms of precision, the sort of precision work that Henry was interested were in London. And for instance, Edward Nairn was, Henry's favourite maker and Edward Nairn was a fellow of the Royal Society

so there's a very interesting fluidity in London which allowed, James Watt of course was an instrument maker which allowed instrument makers to achieve significant standing in this intellectual world and to be respected for the kinds of things they could bring to the discourse which no one else could. I think there's some very interesting differences in social hierarchy between France and in England

so in England we've got the situation where Cavendish is moving in an exclusively male culture and part of the legend is that he couldn't bear to see even in one of the maids in his own house. So he could move in this masculine club culture. Whereas in France there wasn't equality between men and women, but women were valued because they civilised society. They calm men down and enabled men to engage in a cultured, conversation. So there were mixed salons often run by women as hostesses in France. The other

important difference, I think, relevant to this discussion is that in France there was quite a close bond between the state and scientific research. So right from the very beginning of the Royal Society in Paris, in the middle of the 17th century, the king had pledged money and he was a driving force partly because it added to his own glory. And he contributed money. to scientific research. And there was a small band of people who were paved just to do research. In England, the situation was completely different. Although they called themselves the Royal Society, the word royal was just about all that the king gave them. And so if you wanted to belong to the Royal Society, if you wanted to practice science, you either had to be independently

wealthy, like the Cavendishers, or you had to be an instrument maker, someone who could earn their living by selling instruments. So I think those are two very important differences in social structure between France and England, which actually in a way shape the different patterns of research in France and England for a couple of centuries. They're both very influential. Jim Bennett, in the 90th century we have another William

family, the grandson of Henry's cousin. This family kept itself going by, and not dubious, but certainly, tenuous even, but extended connections. extended family, wasn't it right? Now, how did he take up the family scientific religion? We can call him the Duke of Devonshire, because he's got the

title, is Seven Duke of Devonshire, and he inherited Chats for us, which had lost an amazing amount of money, and he was told, sell bits of it off, and then he was told, no, that would be too humiliating. So he went and invested in Barrow in Furnace. His investment was extraordinary, the amount of things

he built, and that made him after a few years, he was getting bigger income than any other private business isn't in Britain. and then he built Eastbourne for, I think maybe he hadn't time for Eastbourne, but can you just say what he turned his mind to in the area of science? Well, it's interesting because here again

we go back to the Cavendishers as primarily figureheads, not in William's case, a contributing scientist. He didn't do that I can think of any scientific work that we would regard as, you know, publishable in the journals and so on. And yet he was no slight. I mean, he was first Smith's prizeman, which means that he did very, very well in the mathematical examination

as a student in Cambridge. Second Wrangler. So that's no mean achievement, and yet he turned himself towards public life. He was a great public servant. He was, as you indicated, a great entrepreneur. That was a bit of a roller coaster. Sometimes he was the wealthiest man,

and sometimes it all went badly wrong. It's very reminiscent of today because it could all kind of go pear-shaped rather quickly as he discovered. But that was his main role was in public life. He was a great Whig politician and so on. He was the first chancellor of the University of London, held that office for 20 years from 1836.

So his role was as a patron of education, as a Victorian figure of great moral probity and personal integrity, who was greatly trusted and respected in Victorian society and, of course, a man of great wealth. So when the University of Cambridge was hoping to find, looking to find a teaching, an experimental teaching resource for the natural sciences tripos,

Cavendish was there. But before we get to Cambridge, which we can't escape with Simon Chavez, he led, William, between 1871, 1984, led a Royal Commission on, scientific instruction and the advancement of science. Now, these are called the Devonshire papers, which people who've read them thoroughly

say are extraordinarily impressive. Are they? And what happened to them? They are. They've been described. The Devonshire Commission's reports have been described as the doomsday book of British science. And that's not wrong. In eight reports, eight very thick, impressively. Victorian reports

released between 1871 and 1875, we have testimony from almost all the leading scientists of the epoch, plans, maps, budgets, accounts of all the major scientific institutions of Britain and the Empire,

and really radical proposals for, and how relevant this is, massively increased state support for teaching and research and advice in the sciences. The Duke was no doubt

aided by his colleagues on the commission. They included Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, and above all, the secretary of the commission, Norman Lockyer, who just founded what was going to become the world's most important science journal, Nature. So with this team, what Devonshire was able to do was to recommend the establishment of a department of education and science, to recommend the establishment of an expert scientific advisory council for government, massively to increase science teaching at the elementary schools, to attack the hegemony of the classics at Oxbridge and at the great public schools. He was told by one Oxford interviewee that at Oxford men are typically bribed to study anything but the sciences.

and even more interestingly in retrospect Devinshire's commission took a very ferocious, very forward view against religious tests for admission to universities and science courses. How much of this briefly, how much of this was taken up? Because in a previous discussion, the idea was that this was a magnificent report. If had it been put into practice, this country would have gone way ahead of Germany and the United States but most of it was not implemented. because of government dithering was the word used?

Yes, most of it was not implemented in the 1870s and 80s, and indeed some of the more visionary proposals not implemented until the First World War and after. So on the one hand, then, the recognition of the role of science and technology and international economic competitiveness, and on the other hand, which I think really focuses our attention on what the role of the great aristocracy might be seen, said to be in the history of British science,

we have the Duke of Devonshire emphasising more than anything else the necessity for large-scale, systematic state patronage of scientific research and teaching. So by the end of the 90th century,

despite this great commission, there's still a feeling that British science is out of date, having stormed ahead in earlier centuries at early is that feeling? Absolutely. I mean, you just, from the middle of the century onwards, you just had to look at German industry and see how successful that was. By putting money into science? By investing in science and also in Germany they

developed what's now is a very common phenomenon. The research laboratory, the idea that you have groups, teams of people all working on a similar problem. The situation in Cambridge was completely different. You couldn't do practical science. The only way you could become an experimenter is by essentially apprenticing yourself to a another very, very famous scientist. And when all these pleas for reform came along, starting with commissions in the 1850s, Oxford set about building the Clarendon Laboratory

and Cambridge, in its wisdom, decided to call another committee. And they considered the whole problem, and then they shelved it in sort of rather typical Cambridge fashion, and as I come from Cambridge, I think I can say this. So Senate House shelved the proposals, and the Duke of Devonshire got so incredibly fed up with this that he said, look, you need £6,300, here it is, here's the money, we're going to open a laboratory,

so that young men, maths graduates, mainly at the beginning, maths graduates can learn how to do experimental science. So Jim Bennett, can I go over to you? Because as Chancellor, and as a wealthy Chancellor, he just got on with it. They said, committed, shelving, all the things that British has talked about, Cambridge, it's the whole, it's the institutionalisation of intellectualism which never works, does it really? Anyway, he just said, I've got the money, I'm going to build it, there you go.

And he built the Cavendish Laboratory. Yes, it's true that he had the financial capital, but I think he also had the sort of public capital. I mean, he was a man of enormous, as I said, probity and respect. He was a great public figure by this time. He'd been 20 years, Chancellor of the University of London. So it wasn't just financial capital that he had. The family name, of course, helped. He had this aristocratic capital,

but I think his public service, by the 1870s, allowed him that kind of, you put it in a rather cavalier way, and it was true. It was forcing this through and enabling it in a very confident way, but it wasn't just the aristocratic possibility, I don't think. No, I wanted to tell us,

we mentioned Clarendon, there was Kelvin up in Glasgow, Manchester was doing it. So there's, I mean, independently as well, sort of hegelty-piggledy really they were sort of climbing up the precipice without help of ropes. Yes, and different models. The higgledy-pigglediness is seen in the different models.

I mean, there's a strong commercial element in the Glasgow situation. You know, Kelvin is in business as well as a professor of natural philosophy. The Clarendon case is the trustees of the Clarendon estate, which has been, you know, around since the 17th century. So there are all sorts of possibilities.

There isn't this, to contrast again with France, there isn't this central organisation. It just sort of happens locally in England in a way that's appropriate to the circumstances. But again, to fast forward, sorry about this, Jim. The Cavendish Laborology did take off very brilliant. Now, persons went there and from 1900, significant discoverers were being made.

Absolutely, the Cavendish. I don't know whether that's still the case, but has always been seen as this. of boys' own example of, and it was boys at this stage, of how to do physics, the kind of, the combination which we've seen already in the Cavendish history of experimental precision, obsessive experimentation linked to advanced theory is something that Henry Cavendish himself pioneered and was taken up by the laboratory. And it was something that Maxwell was the first professor, and it was something that he absolutely,

insisted on was precision and accuracy. Yes, it's wonderful that James Maxwell is appointed to take over and it's sad that he lived for such a short time, but just as a tiny postscript, the way he paid back, Clark McLeodagh, paid back the Cavendishers was to discover the papers of Henry. He didn't discover them. The Duke of Devonshire gave them to him.

The Duke of Devonshire gave them to him. I'm rushing, okay? My fault. He didn't discover them. We've got enough time to talk about them. And he investigated them and discovered how good Henry Cavendish was. Yes, Maxwell's edition of Henry Cavendish's papers on electricity is itself a scientific masterpiece because for the first time people were able to see what it was that perhaps the greatest aristocratic scientist in British history, Henry Cavendish,

had been doing backstage and in private. Thank you very much, Patricia Ferris, Simon Schaffer and Jimber. Next week we'll be talking about Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, written in 1550. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.