Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and science's millennium - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Humphry Davy

Criticism, Summer, 1998 by Mark Kipperman

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Though he was a clever experimentalist and showman, Galvani argued for a weak theoretical interpretation of what he had observed. He failed, in fact, to accept one of the most important conclusions in the history of science. He had noticed that the frog danced even without any external current when its feet touched a silver box and Galvani touched the box with a metal rod. He could only postulate that some residual "animal magnetism" in muscles produced the effect. It was left to Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) to stumble upon the remarkable explanation that current would flow between two unlike metals, regardless of the presence of frogs or any organic matter at all. This "stunning discovery," says historian and scientist Gerrit Verschuur, "would transform the nature of the civilized world," allowing the construction of Voltaic cells ("piles" or batteries) and permit the electrical experimentation of Davy, Ampere, and Oersted.(23) But their experiments, in turn, were guided by idealist and utopian anticipations of unified forces.

The great Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) was also responsible for a discovery that changed both thinking about the nature of the universe and the material development of civilization. His conviction that electricity and magnetism were twin aspects of a single "original power" led to laws of electromagnetism that revolutionized science and industry. Oersted was led to this conviction of a connection because "thanks to the writings of Kant he really believed that such a connection must exist," despite the contemporary belief, based on the authority of Coulomb himself, "that there was no connection at all."(24) In the winter of 1820, in a famous lecture, he concluded before his audience that a moving current would produce heat, light, and magnetism, and offered to perform the experiment before them, then and there. And so, as electricity flowed in a wire beneath a compass, the slight deflection of the needle made history and confirmed in experiment what had long been anticipated by idealist naturalists (including Davy) who had expected a unity of the "powers" of nature (see Fig. 2).

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It remained only for another Kantian, Andre-Marie Ampere (1778-1836) to confirm in the early 1820s that magnetic forces circled around current-carrying wires and that helixes of such wires could actually create magnets. He had proved that "magnetism was the force produced by electricity in motion," and had already theorized that the earth itself generated its magnetism by its motion.(25) At least from the time of Davy's voltaic experiments in 1800, then, it was reasonable to seek experimentally for higher natural unities among disparate "powers," so that Davy could even trumpet to Coleridge in November 1800 that he had made "some important galvanic discoveries which seem to lead to the door of the temple of the mysterious god of Life."(26)

Actually, the step from Ampere's forces to the uniformity of fields was initially prepared for by Davy himself, who early on had already "demonstrated a relation between electricity and chemical affinity, and had shown connections between static and galvanic electricity, chemical affinity, heats of reaction, and the electrochemical series.... Chemistry could be organized and prosecuted through the recognition that chemical process was governed by the interplay of positive and negative [electrical] powers."(27) Moreover, though it is not widely known, Davy had, by 1802, contributed to a paper by Thomas Wedgwood on the use of silver nitrate to transfer images to leather and glass, and he had been experimenting for several years with photochemistry.(28) In 1799, he had published "An essay on heat, light, and the combinations of light," and speculated that "The general analogy of nature, the wonderful simplicity of causes, and the complexity of effects, would alone tend to prove that [light] is subservient to other purposes than those of vision and vegetation." Davy, who had read about Kant as early as 1796, began to suspect that light itself was fundamental to chemistry, magnetism, electricity, and even might be a transcendent origin of human intellect as well.(29) I suspect that these early interests in imaging were what led Davy to suggest to Faraday that patterns of magnetism itself might be drawn by iron filings on paper through which a current-carrying wire was passed. Davy then produced the first visible image, a kind of "magnetograph" of a physical field (see Fig. 3). In the early 1820s Faraday (also "imbued with a Kantian metaphysical belief in the unity of the forces of nature"(30)) would begin the stunning series of drawings of fields that would revolutionize physics and alter definitively the older Newtonian metaphors of discrete particles acting on each other across a distant void.(31) But in fact, the groundwork had already been laid in England by Davy's experiments in electrochemistry, experiments inspired not only by empirical curiosity but also by a climate of idealist and utopian anticipation.