Read Online Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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Great Eastern depart on her first transoceanic voyage. He suffered a serious stroke on board the ship, and died just a few days before the voyage.
Turner and Brunel are bound by tighter connections than the fortuitous link of the Temeraire ’s demise with the inauguration of regular transoceanic service by the Great Western in the same yearof 1838. Turner also loved steam in its major manifestation on land—railroads. In 1844, his seventieth year, Turner painted a canvas that many critics regard as his last great work: Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway. Brunel built this two-hundred-mile line between London and Birmingham between 1834 and 1838 (and then used the same name for his first great steamship). Turner’s paintingshows a train, running on Brunel’s wide seven-foot gauge, as the engine passes over the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, another famous construction, featuring the world’s flattest brick arch, as designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The trains could achieve speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour, but Turner has painted a hare running in front of the engine—and, though one can’t be sure,the hare seems poised to outrun the train, not to be crushed under “the ringing grooves of change,” to cite Tennyson’s famous metaphor about progress, inspired by the poet’s first view of a railroad.
We revere Turner, and rightly so. But why has the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as inspired in engineering as Turner in painting, as influential in nineteenth-century history as any person inthe arts, slipped so far from public memory? I do not know the full answer to this conundrum, but the myth of inexorability in discovery, ironically fostered by science as a source of putative prestige, has surely contributed by depicting scientists as interchangeable cogs in the wheel of technological progress—as people whose idiosyncracy and individual genius must be viewed as irrelevant to an inevitablesequence of advances.
Art and science are different enterprises, but the boundaries between them remain far more fluid and interdigitating, and the interactions far richer and more varied, than the usual stereotypes proclaim. As a reminder of both overlaps and differences, I recently read the first issue of Scientific American —for August 28, 1845, and republished by the magazine to celebrateits 150th anniversary.
Scientific American was founded by Rufus Porter, a true American original in eccentric genius and entrepreneurial skill. Porter had spent most of his time as an itinerant mural painter, responsible for hundreds of charming and primitively painted landscape scenes on the interior walls of houses throughout New England. Yet he chose to start a journal devoted primarily tothe practical side of science in engineering and manufacturing. In fact, the initiating issue features, as the main article, a story about the first landing in New York of “the greatest maratime [ sic ] curiosity ever seen in our harbour”—none other than Brunel’s second ship, the Great Britain. “This mammoth of the ocean,” Porter writes, “has created much excitement here as well as in Europe . . . During the first few days since her arrival at New York, she has been visited by about 12,000 people, who have paid 25 cents for the gratification.”
If an artist could initiate a leading journal in science, if Turner could greatly enhance his painted sunsets by using a new pigment, iodine scarlet, just invented by Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution, a leading scientific laboratory foundedby Count Rumford in 1799, then why do we so consistently stress the differences and underplay the similarities between these two greatest expressions of human genius? Why do we pay primary attention to the artist’s individuality, while constantly emphasizing the disembodied logic of science? Aren’t these differences of focus mostly a matter of choice and convention, not only of evident necessity?The individuality
Turner and Brunel are bound by tighter connections than the fortuitous link of the Temeraire ’s demise with the inauguration of regular transoceanic service by the Great Western in the same yearof 1838. Turner also loved steam in its major manifestation on land—railroads. In 1844, his seventieth year, Turner painted a canvas that many critics regard as his last great work: Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway. Brunel built this two-hundred-mile line between London and Birmingham between 1834 and 1838 (and then used the same name for his first great steamship). Turner’s paintingshows a train, running on Brunel’s wide seven-foot gauge, as the engine passes over the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, another famous construction, featuring the world’s flattest brick arch, as designed and built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The trains could achieve speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour, but Turner has painted a hare running in front of the engine—and, though one can’t be sure,the hare seems poised to outrun the train, not to be crushed under “the ringing grooves of change,” to cite Tennyson’s famous metaphor about progress, inspired by the poet’s first view of a railroad.
We revere Turner, and rightly so. But why has the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as inspired in engineering as Turner in painting, as influential in nineteenth-century history as any person inthe arts, slipped so far from public memory? I do not know the full answer to this conundrum, but the myth of inexorability in discovery, ironically fostered by science as a source of putative prestige, has surely contributed by depicting scientists as interchangeable cogs in the wheel of technological progress—as people whose idiosyncracy and individual genius must be viewed as irrelevant to an inevitablesequence of advances.
Art and science are different enterprises, but the boundaries between them remain far more fluid and interdigitating, and the interactions far richer and more varied, than the usual stereotypes proclaim. As a reminder of both overlaps and differences, I recently read the first issue of Scientific American —for August 28, 1845, and republished by the magazine to celebrateits 150th anniversary.
Scientific American was founded by Rufus Porter, a true American original in eccentric genius and entrepreneurial skill. Porter had spent most of his time as an itinerant mural painter, responsible for hundreds of charming and primitively painted landscape scenes on the interior walls of houses throughout New England. Yet he chose to start a journal devoted primarily tothe practical side of science in engineering and manufacturing. In fact, the initiating issue features, as the main article, a story about the first landing in New York of “the greatest maratime [ sic ] curiosity ever seen in our harbour”—none other than Brunel’s second ship, the Great Britain. “This mammoth of the ocean,” Porter writes, “has created much excitement here as well as in Europe . . . During the first few days since her arrival at New York, she has been visited by about 12,000 people, who have paid 25 cents for the gratification.”
If an artist could initiate a leading journal in science, if Turner could greatly enhance his painted sunsets by using a new pigment, iodine scarlet, just invented by Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution, a leading scientific laboratory foundedby Count Rumford in 1799, then why do we so consistently stress the differences and underplay the similarities between these two greatest expressions of human genius? Why do we pay primary attention to the artist’s individuality, while constantly emphasizing the disembodied logic of science? Aren’t these differences of focus mostly a matter of choice and convention, not only of evident necessity?The individuality
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