Some Final Thoughts of Sir John Herschel, F.R.S.Author(s): Robert SharpSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 56, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 183-186Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557666 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 56 (2), 183-186 (2002) C 2002 The Royal Society

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS OF SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, FR.S.

by

ROBERT SHARP

Science Museum Library, Imperial College Road, London SW7 5NH, UK

SUMMARY

In a collection (MS350) in the Science Museum's Archive Collection, of some 325 letters to Thomas Andrews are four from Sir John Herschel written in the last months of his life. They, and a later memorandum by Andrews in the same collection, elucidate a particular case of priority with reference to an 'ice calorimeter', indicate Andrews's role in bringing it to light, and afford Herschel a last opportunity to muse upon aspects of priority invention in general.

Early in January 1871 Dr Thomas Andrews, ER.S. (1813-85), Professor of Chemistry at, and Vice-President of, Queen's College, Belfast, sent a copy of his recent paper, 'On the heat developed in the combination of acids and bases',' to Sir John Herschel, ER.S. (1792-1871). Herschel replied with thanks on 24 January,2 commenting:

Referring to your earlier papers (as cited) R.I. Acad. 1841 & 18433 ... I see that you have employed in all these enquiries delicate thermometers, with allowance for the specific heat of the vessels used. I see also in this paper that you refer to a 'Mercurial Calorimeter' used by Messrs. Favre & Silbermann,4 but of whose availability you do not speak favorably.

He suggests as probably likely to prove more reliable, the modification of Lavoisier's5 ice calorimeter proposed by myself in my 'Results of Observations at the Cape of Good Hope',6 ... a modification devised with express reference to researches of this kind and requiring an apparatus involving no sort of difficulty & probably very little expence [sic] in its construction. Of the nature of the Mercurial instrument of Messrs. F & S I have no knowledge this being the first intimation I have had of its existence.

Andrews referred to 'Cape Observations' and found a full description of the ice calorimeter. In a manuscript memorandum,7 written later to clarify the letters from Herschel, he wrote:

Although occupied at the moment with work of a different kind, the method appeared so promising that I resolved to try it experimentally and even consulted my friend Prof. James Thomson8 on some matters of detail, when to my surprise I found that in a No. of Poggendorff's Annalen which had just arrived in this country, a method similar in principle and even in most of its details had been successfully applied by Prof. Bunsen9 of Heidelberg to the determination of the specific heats of a number of elementary bodies.

183

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184 Robert Sharp

Andrews immediately sent an extract from Bunsen's paper10 to Herschel, proposing, 'if he did not object to my doing so, to write a short note to Prof. Poggendorff," for insertion in the Annalen, stating that Sir J. Herschel had suggested many years before the method so happily applied by Prof. Bunsen, but doubtless without any knowledge of what Sir J. Herschel had written'. Herschel replied on 5 February12 that he was 'very glad to take advantage of your obliging offer ... [regarding] my claim for an early suggestion of the improved Ice calorimeter. It is very likely that Prof. Bunsen never saw my Cape Observations and such a thing might very well be hidden and have passed out of remembrance in an Astronomical work.' Then he added:

I am pretty well used to that sort of thing. It was but the other day that I fell upon a notice in the last issued No. of the Notices of the Impl. Acad. of Vienna (No. 1 1871) by a M. Harkuff [?] putting in a sealed paper and a claim 'Zur Wahrung seiner Prioritat' for a system of Polarized Telegraphic Signals, which can hardly be anything but some application of the suggestion for the use of polarized light in a telegraphic communication in p.357 of my 'Familiar Lectures'13 to which stands appended a foot-note to the effect that it is there mentioned to prevent a patent being thereafter taken out for such an invention.

Herschel continued:

But the most flagrant specimen of Patentizing through thick and thin is that of Bessemer'4 in taking out a patent15 for a suspension saloon for the Channel Steamers to obviate sea sickness in the very teeth of a correspondence then recently carried on by weekly publication in the Journal of the Society of Arts (on occasion of some letters on the same subject by a Mr. Scarth [and Herschel himself])16 in which I recalled attention to what after all is the only true suspension in the structure of a swing cot illustrated by an engraving, and published in the Journal of that Society so long ago as July [actually January] 4 1861.17 In the face of such publications I can hardly doubt that such a patent (other than as covering some subordinate detail) would be held invalid.

Returning to Bunsen's apparatus, which 'seems very well devised', Herschel concluded 'I should prefer a mixture of snow and water (well stirred to get rid of air bubbles) to a partial freezing unless the water were previously freed of air by boiling. And an adjusting screw to set the instrument to zero at the commencement of an experiment could ... be dispensed with.'

Armed with Herschel's permission, Andrews sent a short note on the ice calorimeter to Poggendorff. 'I wrote at the same time to Sir J. Herschel informing him that I had sent forward the note, but without giving him a copy of it, as I wished the note to be one for which I alone would be responsible'. Herschel, on 22 February,18 again replied with thanks: 'I am very glad to see this method of estimating evolved caloric (equally applicable to cases of absorbed should such occur) introduced into practice-all questions of priority apart because I am sure it is the only perfectly dependable one. I wish the true principle of Astrometry (Heliothermometry) could be restored....'

Andrews's note was immediately inserted in the Annalen,19 Poggendorff sending him 'a printed slip in anticipation of the publication of the number of which I enclosed a copy to Sir J. Herschel'. On 13 April, in a brief reply,20 Herschel wrote 'The Paragraph is all that could be wished'. He asked for his brevity to be excused 'as

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Some final thoughts of Sir John Herschel, F.R.S. 185

I am suffering under so severe an attack of Pulmonary complaint as almost incapacitated me from writing at all'. In his memorandum Andrews wrote, 'It gave me sincere pleasure to have been able to gratify Sir John Herschel on this occasion more particularly as the last letter was written a very short time before his death. The handwriting was feeble and tremulous.' Bunsen, in the Annalen, replied21 to Andrews's note but Herschel would not have seen it; he died on 11 May.

NOTES

1 Trans. R. Soc. Edinb. 26, 85-95 (1869-70). 2 MS 350/3/2. 3 Andrews actually cited his papers of 1841, 'On the heat developed during the combination

of acids and bases', Trans. R. Irish Acad. 19, 228-248 (1843), and of 1843, 'On the thermal changes accompanying basic substitutions', Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 134, 21-37 (1844).

4 Pierre Antoine Favre (1813-80) and Johann Theobald Silbermann (1806-59). Andrews, in note 2 above, cites Favre & Silbermann in Annis Chem. Phys. 37, 497 (1853). In fact, their sequence of articles entitled 'Recherches sur les quantites de chaleur degag~es dans les actions chimiques et moleculaires' appeared in Annales 34, 357-450 (1852), 36, 5-47 (1852) and 37, 406-509 (1853). They had earlier (from 1844) published a number of papers on heat and calorimetry in Comptes Rendus de l'Acadimie des Sciences.

5 Namely of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, ER.S. (1743-94), with Pierre-Simon Laplace, ER.S. (1749-1827). See A.-L. Lavoisier & De La Place, 'Memoire sur la Chaleur', Mom. Acad. Sci. 94, 355-40 (1784), read 18 June 1783.

6 J.FW. Herschel, Results of Astronomical Observations made during the years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8 at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 446-447 (Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1847). Herschel offers 'a suggestion for the improvement of the Ice Calorimeter of Lavoisier and Laplace which may rescue it from the disrepute into which it has (it appears to me undeservedly) fallen, in consequence of the experiments of Wedgwood (Phil. Trans. 1784) [i.e. "An Attempt to compare and connect the Thermometer for strong Fire, described in Vol. LXXII. of the Philosophical Transactions, with the common Mercurial Ones", 358-384] and restore it to the place it ought to hold as an exact philosophical instrument'. Wedgwood's objections to it were twofold: first, 'That the drainage of the water melted off from the pounded ice is uncertain', and secondly, 'That while melting in one part of the apparatus, it is arrested and prevented from running off by actually freezing again in another'. Herschel felt that the first objection 'is undoubtedly valid, especially when small quantities are concerned'. Regarding the second, however, 'simultaneous thawing and freezing ... undoubtedly took place ... and is attempted to be accounted for by him on grounds to which no one at this time will attribute any weight ... that ingenious artist must have been deceived as to the real temperature of his ice'. He then goes on lengthily to describe the procedure that must be followed and the construction of the apparatus.

7 MS 350/3/8; undated, possibly transcribed by Andrews's son. 8 ER.S. (1822-92), then Professor of Civil Engineering at Queen's College, Belfast. 9 Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen, For.Mem.R.S. (1811-99). 10 R. Bunsen, 'Calorimetrische Untersuchungen', Annln Phys. Chem. 141, 1-30 (1870). 11 Johann Christian Poggendorff (1796-1877), editor of Annalen der Physik und Chemie from

1824 to 1876. 12 MS 350/3/3. See note 24. 13 J.EW. Herschel, Familiar lectures on scientific subjects (Alexander Strahan, London, 1867). 14 Sir Henry Bessemer, ER.S. (1813-98), a prolific patentee.

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186 Robert Sharp

15 3707 of 22 December 1869. 16 1 R. Soc. Arts 17, 897-898, 907, 917 (1868-69). 17 Ibid., 9, 97-98 (1860-61). 18 MS 350/3/4. 19 T. Andrews, 'Historische Notiz iiber das Eiscalorimeter', Annln Phys. Chem 142, 320-321

(1871). 20 MS 350/3/5. 21 R. Bunsen, 'Bemerkung zu Hrn. Andrews's Notiz fiber das Eiscalorimeter', Annln Phys.

Chem. 142, 616-618 (1871). Bunsen actually does say that he never saw Herschel's Cape Observations and that, seemingly, no one else had either in the quarter century since

publication. He proceeds to analyse how his calorimeter differed from Herschel's. This note was followed, in the same volume, by another note by C. Bohn (i.e. Johann Conrad Bohn, 1831-97), 'Bemerkung fiber das Eiscalorimeter', 618-620, drawing attention to the claims of R. Hermann of Moscow (i.e. Hans Rudolph Hermann, 1805-79) to have developed such an instrument in 1834.

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