Read Online The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick - Free Book Online Page A

Society’s motto was “Nullius in Verba,” Latin for, roughly, “Don’t take anyone’s word for it,” and early investigators embraced that freedom with something akin to giddiness.
    The meetings of the Royal Society in its young days sound like gatherings of a group of very smart, very reckless Cub Scouts. Society members gathered in a large room with a bare table and a roaring fire. In a group portrait, the men—the company was all male—would have looked more or less alike, but that was largely because everyone wore wigs. (In England and France, fashion followed the court. When Charles II began to go gray, and when the Sun King’s hairs began to clog the royal hairbrush, the monarchs donned wigs, and soon no gentleman in Europe would venture out in public in his own hair.)
    Half a dozen chairs, reserved for important visitors, sat empty on most days, while spectators jostled for space on two wooden benches. Seating was catch as catch can. New arrivals found places “as they think fit, and without any Ceremony,” one French visitor wrote in amazement, “and if any one comes in after the Society is fixed, no Body stirs, but he takes a Place presently where he can find it, so that no Interruption may be given to him that speaks.” Whisperers were hushed indignantly.
    The highlights, most weeks, were “demonstrations,” the livelier the better. Hooke and Boyle carried out a long series of experiments to explore “the expansive forces of congelation”—they put water in a glass tube and froze it—and then everyone settled in to watch the tubes break “with a considerable noise and violence.” Noise was always a great selling point. The members of the Royal Society were forever studying giant hailstones, for instance, in the hope that they would explode with a deafening crack when thrown into the fire. As a bonus, some hailstones had a strange shape or color. In those cases, the scientists’ descriptions took on the tone of a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” item about a potato in the shape of a donkey.
    Hooke had a particularly admired touch. He had figured out how to pump the air from a bell jar. (Official credit for building the air pump went to Boyle, for several years Hooke’s employer.) Now he carried out experiment after experiment while his fellow scientists watched enthralled. “We put in a snake but could not kill it,” one onlooker wrote perplexedly, but a chicken made a better show. “The chick died of convulsions outright, in a short space.” What was the magical substance in ordinary air that living creatures needed in order to keep breathing, and why did some animals need more of it than others?
    Soon Hooke and the others moved beyond experiments with birds and mice (and, less dramatically, with burning candles, which also seemed to need to “breathe”). On May 7, 1662, the Society needed something out of the ordinary for a particularly distinguished guest, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to the king. Out came the much-loved air pump. “We tried several experiments of Mr. Boyle’s Vaccuum,” wrote the diarist John Evelyn, who was in attendance. But what to put inside? Another mouse?
    Robert Hooke had a better idea. “A man thrusting in his arm”—this was Hooke himself—“upon exhaustion of the air had his flesh immediately swelled, so as the blood was neere breaking the vaines, & unsufferable,” Evelyn noted contentedly. “He drawing it out, we found it all speckled.”
    Transfusions made even better theater. On a November afternoon in 1667, forty witnesses crowded into the Society’s meeting room to watch a blood transfusion from a sheep to a human. The subject was one Arthur Coga, “who, hearing that the Society were very desirous to try the experiment of transfusion upon a man, and being in want of money, offered himself for a