Lost Science

APRIL 2017

A S T ON I SH I NG

F OL L OW I NG the SUC C E S SF U L LO ST TO TIME C OM E S T H I S FA SC I N AT I NG C OM PA N ION VOLU M E on L O S T SC I E NC E S T OR I E S f rom BE S T SE L L I NG AU T HOR K I T T Y F E RGUS ON. Acclaimed popular science writer Kitty Ferguson investigates little-explored byroads in the history of science, from Johannes Kepler’s nearly disastrous adventure into the realm of science fiction to a mid-twentieth-century experiment involving EEGs and rocket fuel. She introduces such underappreciated geniuses as Mary the Jewess, the first-century ancestress of modern chemistry; and Lise Meitner, who escaped Nazi Germany only to have her role in the discovery of nuclear fission ignored by the Nobel committee. Ferguson also takes us on astounding adventures with the likes of Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest, who invented the first automobile as a clever toy to amuse the Chinese emperor in seventeenth-century Beijing and then saved his own life by winning a bizarre astronomy competition in against his former torturer.

) National print and online publicity campaign ) Digital focus on science blogs and websites ) National radio tour ) L ocal events in Savannah, GA; on Hilton Head Island, SC; and in the surrounding area ) Cross-promotion on author’s website, kitty-ferguson.com KITTY FERGUSON has been writing and lecturing about science and scientists for over two decades.

She is the author of eight books; her 1991 biography Stephen Hawking: Quest for the Theory of Everything (Random House) was written with Hawking’s encouragement and help and was an international bestseller. She also was a consultant for Hawking’s book The Universe in a Nutshell (Random House).

Her most recent biography, Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work/An Unfettered Mind (St. Martin’s April 2017 Science & Nature / Science & Technology $22.95 ($25.95 Canada) Hardcover with Jacket 6" × 9" • 304 pages ISBN: 9781454918073

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Press), has been translated into 30 languages. Kitty has been interviewed by Forbes magazine, PBS’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and the BBC. She lectures widely in North America and Europe, and her appearances have included the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Hayden Planetarium in NYC, the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, and many universities. Kitty and her husband divide their time between Cambridge, England, and South Carolina.

For publicity inquiries, contact Ardi Alspach at (646) 688-2450 or aalspach@sterlingpublishing.com.

DISCLAIMER Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this uncorrected proof before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

TA L E S of F ORG O T T E N G E N I US

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LOST SCIENCE KITTY FERGUSON author of Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind

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CONTENTS !\"

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX

PART I: RIPPING YARNS ONE

Ferdinand Verbiest

THE EMPEROR’S NEW ASTRONOMY (1601–1688) . . . . . . . XX TWO

Benjamin Thompson, Lord Rumford

FARM LAD, SPY, ARISTOCRAT, RASCAL (1753–1814) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX

THREE Jean Chappe d’Autheroche

PURSUING VENUS (1677–1770) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX

PART II: IN THE SHADOWS FOUR

Mary the Jewess

LOST IN HER OWN LEGEND (1st–3rd centuries CE) . . . . . . . XX FIVE

Maria Sibylla Merian

WONDROUS TRANSFORMATIONS (1647–1717) . . . . . . . . . . XX SIX

Alfred Russel Wallace Verbiest

THE OTHER DARWIN (1823–1913)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XX

SEVEN Lise Meitner

ESCAPE TO OBSCURITY (1878–1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX

PART III: FORGOTTEN FIRSTS EIGHT Johannes Kepler

NEAR-FATAL FICTION (c . 1590–1634) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX NINE

Milutin Milankovic´

ASTRONOMY ON ICE (early 20th century) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX TEN

Barry Sterman

THE ILLUSIVE QUALITY OF STILLNESS (1965) . . . . . . . . . XX Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XX Photo Credits

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XX

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ONE Ferdinand Verbiest

THE EMPEROR’S NEW ASTRONOMY (1601–1688) n 1668, the “seventh year of Kangxi,” the Emperor of China was a powerless fourteen-year-old. His father, on his deathbed, had appointed four men to rule as regents until his son came of age. He had made unfortunate choices. Deadly clashes among the four had left two survivors—dangerous, ruthless men determined to keep the young heir to the throne under their control as long as possible. The boy was well educated and extremely intelligent. A year earlier, he had been allowed to attend to affairs of state, ruling only in name. He had nevertheless contrived to acquire a fearfully good grasp of the politics of the Chinese court and the workings of the Empire. The time was approaching when, according to law and tradition, he could dispense with the regency, and he was chomping at the bit. With the advice possibly of his tutor and his mother, the dowager empress, he looked for a way to rid himself of the two surviving regents. And his choice of weapon would seem curiously innocuous: the calendar. It was, in fact, an astute choice, and this teenager—the “Kangxi Emperor,” second ruler in the Qing Dynasty—was about to prove that he, too, could be a dangerous man.

OPPOSITE: Jesuit astronomers meet with the Kangxi Emperor in a tapestry from The Story of the Emperor of China Series, woven in France c. 1700. LEFT: A Chinese scroll portrait of the Kangxi Emperor at a calligraphy table, c. 1662–1722.

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LOST SCIENCE

superb scholarly tradition and a passion for advancing technology, they could not deny the validity of the discoveries that Galileo was making.

On the other hand, they could not throw aside the theological traditions of their faith—extrapolated not directly from the Bible but from longaccepted interpretations of it and the authority of St. Augustine and other church fathers—which followed Aristotle in insisting that the cosmos was centered on an unmoving earth. In fact, it took many decades for Copernican astronomy to supplant Ptolemaic astronomy in Europe. In China, Copernican astronomy didn’t gain a firm footing until Protestant missionaries arrived in the early 1800s.

Meanwhile, the great, eccentric Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had thrown scholars like the Jesuits a lifeline by proposing an ingenious model that kept the Earth as the unmoving center of everything, with the Sun orbiting the Earth and all the other planets orbiting the Sun. It was a brilliant compromise. Until Isaac Newton’s discoveries about gravity in the late seventeenth century, there was little evidence to argue the validity of one system over the other, except that one was decidedly simpler and more economical. Kepler had made adjustments when compiling his Rudolphine Tables in the light of his own reliance on Copernicus and his discovery that planetary orbits are elliptical, but those subtleties were not important for astronomers of the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the day-to-day practice of computing and predicting eclipses. Hence, the new European astronomy that the Jesuits brought to China was not, in fact, sun-centered Copernican astronomy. It was the more Church-friendly Tychonic astronomy.

By the 1660s, Adam Schall von Bell was growing old in the happy knowledge that his time in China had been fruitful for him and his order.

He began to consider who might succeed him in his high-ranking positions he had achieved. Ferdinand Verbiest was serving in a missionary post in a western province, but he already enjoyed high regard as a mathematician, so Schall chose him as his successor. In a letter supporting his choice, he wrote, “according to his reputation, [Verbiest] is well versed in all kind of 16

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<<019_PD_Tycho-Brahe-Mural-Quadrant (full page)>>

The Emperorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New Astronomy

An engraving of Tycho Brahe in his observatory, Uraniborg, on the island of Hven (now part of Sweden), from his book Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, 1598.

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TWO Benjamin Thompson, Lord Rumford

FARM LAD, SPY, ARISTOCRAT, RASCAL (1753–1814) n the autumn of 1775, a few months after the Battle of Bunker Hill in the War for American Independence, New Englander Benjamin Thompson settled his affairs, sold his land, cleared his debts, collected debts owed him, and made a hasty departure from the town of Woburn, Massachusetts. His step-brother Josiah Pierce took him to Narragansett Bay, allegedly to embark for the West Indies. Instead he boarded a British ship at Newport and sailed to Boston. It was an unusual, roundabout way of reaching a city only eleven miles south over land from Woburn, but Thompson had his reasons. He had been spying for the British and, though a Committee of Correspondence had failed to convict him, suspicion about his activities had grown uncomfortably strong among his neighbors. He had been cautious, writing dispatches in invisible ink he had invented from the nutgalls on the bark of oak trees. (He had devised a “cover” for collecting them by pretending to be plagued by recurrent diarrhea, for which they were a known cure.) Nevertheless, after one narrow escape from tarring and feathering—or worse—it was time to head for safety.

The British evacuated Boston the following March, and Thompson sailed to England, carrying dispatches to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Benjamin Thompson may be almost entirely forgotten in the history of science, but he was not a man to let himself be overlooked during his lifetime. He was an assiduous self-publicist, and he made certain that the documents he carried to London included a complimentary letter of recommendation from British General William Howe in Boston.

Portrait of Benjamin Thompson, Lord Rumford, undated engraving.

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LOST SCIENCE

The front page of the July 7, 1774 edition of The Massachusetts Spy, or, Thomas's Boston Journal, a revolutionary newspaper published by Isaiah Thomas. As a British spy, Thompson began an affair with Thomas's wife, Mary, in order to learn what was discussed at revolutionary meetings held at Thomas's shop.

In London, Thompson began a new life on a higher stratum of society than he had enjoyed in New England, even after his marriage. General Howe’s letter, coupled with Thompson’s own charm, skill, and his reliable and rare knowledge of what was happening in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America, served him admirably. Germain appointed him his private secretary, and within three years he was an undersecretary of state. Not that Thompson made an unfailingly good impression among his English acquaintances. Germain was not well-liked, and Thompson suffered by association. It didn’t help that he built a rather shady reputation among the Tory American expatriate community in London as the man through whom favors from British officials could be sought. His price was steep and results were not guaranteed. One Dr. John Jeffries recorded in his diary that he was amenable to his wife spending night after night for three months with “Mr. Thompson of Pall Mall.” The favors Jeffries hoped for never materialized.

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FARM LAD, SPY, ARISTOCRAT, RASCAL

Thompson’s first scientific experiments in England at Germain’s estate in the summer of 1778 tested the force of gunpowder in a new way—a development of major value to the military and in line with his continuing interest in heat. Thompson submitted a paper to the Royal Society of London (then known as the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) under the lengthy title, “New Experiments upon Gun-powder, with occasional Observations and practical Inferences; to which are added, an Account of a new Method of determining the Velocities of all Kinds of Military Projectiles, and the Description of a very accurate Eprouvette for Gun-powder.” In 1779 the Royal Society elected him a fellow, recording that this largely self-taught twenty-seven-year-old was “a gentleman well versed in natural knowledge and many branches of polite learning.” He would go on to publish more than seventy papers in his lifetime.

In 1778, Thompson submitted a paper on his gunpowder experiments to the Royal Society, who elected him a fellow in 1779. Here, a drawing of one of the experiments.

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APRIL 2017

A S T ON I SH I NG

F OL L OW I NG the SUC C E S SF U L LO ST TO TIME C OM E S T H I S FA SC I N AT I NG C OM PA N ION VOLU M E on L O S T SC I E NC E S T OR I E S f rom BE S T SE L L I NG AU T HOR K I T T Y F E RGUS ON. Acclaimed popular science writer Kitty Ferguson investigates little-explored byroads in the history of science, from Johannes Kepler’s nearly disastrous adventure into the realm of science fiction to a mid-twentieth-century experiment involving EEGs and rocket fuel. She introduces such underappreciated geniuses as Mary the Jewess, the first-century ancestress of modern chemistry; and Lise Meitner, who escaped Nazi Germany only to have her role in the discovery of nuclear fission ignored by the Nobel committee. Ferguson also takes us on astounding adventures with the likes of Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest, who invented the first automobile as a clever toy to amuse the Chinese emperor in seventeenth-century Beijing and then saved his own life by winning a bizarre astronomy competition in against his former torturer.

) National print and online publicity campaign ) Digital focus on science blogs and websites ) National radio tour ) L ocal events in Savannah, GA; on Hilton Head Island, SC; and in the surrounding area ) Cross-promotion on author’s website, kitty-ferguson.com KITTY FERGUSON has been writing and lecturing about science and scientists for over two decades.

She is the author of eight books; her 1991 biography Stephen Hawking: Quest for the Theory of Everything (Random House) was written with Hawking’s encouragement and help and was an international bestseller. She also was a consultant for Hawking’s book The Universe in a Nutshell (Random House).

Her most recent biography, Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work/An Unfettered Mind (St. Martin’s April 2017 Science & Nature / Science & Technology $22.95 ($25.95 Canada) Hardcover with Jacket 6" × 9" • 304 pages ISBN: 9781454918073

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Press), has been translated into 30 languages. Kitty has been interviewed by Forbes magazine, PBS’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and the BBC. She lectures widely in North America and Europe, and her appearances have included the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Hayden Planetarium in NYC, the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, and many universities. Kitty and her husband divide their time between Cambridge, England, and South Carolina.

For publicity inquiries, contact Ardi Alspach at (646) 688-2450 or aalspach@sterlingpublishing.com.

DISCLAIMER Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this uncorrected proof before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

TA L E S of F ORG O T T E N G E N I US

)

LOST SCIENCE KITTY FERGUSON author of Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind

12/19/16 3:37 PM