Kafka2
Whale-raping abomination
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2001
- Messages
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Historical Filth- Nutty Professors
Science has changed our world and transformed the way we live, but I can't help wondering what the course of scientific progress would have been like if scientists didn't tend to be so darned bizarre. There have been depictions of mad scientists many times in fiction, from Dr Frankenstein to Jerry Lewis's "Nutty Professor", but the truth is just as outlandish as the fiction. To prove this point, here's a selection of the more loopy minds ever to have forced forward the march into the modern age.
This particular "Filth" collection would not have been possible with the magnificent "A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson. Buy a copy for every room in your house. So what do you ned to be a nitty professor? You need to be the following things.....
Be socially-inept.
Henry Cavendish
Scientists are often unkindly charicatured as social inadequates who don't get as much sex as they'd like. This libel is caused by jealousy, a lack of understanding for these hard-working professionals, and the fact that it's true. Take Cavendish as the archetype- a brilliant man who was the first to isolate hydrogen and oxygen, and made ground-breaking discoveries in physics that open the way forwards for many successors.
Was he shy? You bet. He even conducted all dealings with his housekeeper by letters, as he couldn't bring himself to speak to her. Although he was frequently seen at society events, they tended to result in him sprinting out in panic when someone misguidedly spoke to him. The same thing happened when enthusiastic fans called at his home (he bacame famous for his works), leaving his servants attempting to coax their unnerved employer home hours after his visitors had seen him disappear over te horizon. His personality could only emerge through his work- a particular favourite being his study of electricity in which he steadily subjected himself to stronger shocks while carefully noting down the level of agony they caused in increasingly shaky handwriting until he passed out.
Be unlucky.
Guillaume le Gentil
If their plans all went smoothly, we'd never be treated to frustrated geniuses bemoaned their failures as the smoke clears around them. For a showcase example of what happens when Lady Luck decides she's got a gold-plated grudge against a scientist, check out Guillaume le Gentil.
Guillaume left France in 1760 in order to observe the transit of Venus from India the next year, but due to an appalling journey he was still at sea (in moutainous storms) when the transit occurred. Being the stubborn type, he elected to stay in India for another eight years in order to catch the next transit and spent all that time getting everything juuuuuuust right- only for a cloud to completely obscure the 1769 transit. The depondent Guillaume headed back to the port, but caught dysentery which incapacitated him for nearly a year. His eventual passage home took him through almost constant storms, and he finally reached France only to find that his family had decided he was long-dead and had taken his estate, leaving him near-penniless.
Be mad.
Sir Isaac Newton
Yes, yes, he was a bright one. In fact, let's get all the obligatory fawning out of the way up front, shall we? An intellectual colossus who almost single-handed dragged the world into the age of reason a defined how we think about the world around us, blah blah blah.
What really makes him interesting to your average "Historical Filth" reader isn't his genius, however. It's the fact that he was titanically odd. Going beyond the general requirement for great scientists to be a bit eccentric, for large chunks of his life Newton was barking mad. He had at least two major breakdowns that left him raving incoherently for extended periods. The hilarious part though is that it was the periods in which he was (apparently) lucid that he got really strange. Like the time, for example, when he pushed a bodkin (a large needle) into his eye socket between the eyeball and bone. Then waggled it about for a bit to see what would happen as the point squidged against the eyeball and other gubbins inside his head. Or the time he sat down at stared directly at the sun for several minutes- again to see what would happen (several days of blindness, predictably enough).
Newton's biggest problem was that he spent only a tiny fraction of his life working on the stuff he's famous for. The vast majority of his working life was spent on alchemy, feuding with his fellow scientists and bouncing off the walls. There's a lot of speculation as to why he was so loopy, but chief among the suspects is the fact that over the course of his life he ingested so much mercury (while trying to create gold) that in the summer he was probably several inches taller than he was on cold winter mornings.
Be jealous.
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh
The greatest rivalry in scientific history has to be attributed to these feuding American palaeontologists. Both as ambitious and ruthless as each other, they started out as friends and colleagues. The 19th century world of dinosaur discovery was a high-profile business, however, and by 1868 they had begun to use increasingly underhand methods to undermine the other, and be acclaimed as the greatest discoverer of new species.
By 1877 they had already produced dozens of poisonous articles rubbishing each other, so they tried a new tactic and switched to all-out war. The fossil fields of America saw mass brawls breaking out between their workers, with scientific digs being abruptly curtailed by ock-hurling navvies. Both Cope and Marsh blatantly stole each other's specimens and falsely claimed the other's work as their own. If you want a measure of just how frantic the headlong rush to discover new species became, just consider the fact that between the two of them, they managed to "discover" the species now known as Uintatheres Anceps no fewer than 23 times. It was only after both were dead that the dust settled, revealing that the number of known dinosaur species was actually far lower than originally believed.
Be reckless.
Karl Scheele
A brilliant Swedish chemist, Scheele revolutionised the production process of phosphorus and discovered no fewer than eight elements (including nitrogen and oxygen), as well as compounds such as ammonia and glycerin. This meant he had a massive impact on the worlds of science and industry, and might have had an even greater impact were it not for his eccentricity.
Scheele firmly believed he had to taste every substance he worked with in order to fully understand it. When you consider that he was the discoverer of prussic acid you get some sort of appreciation of just how ill-advised this belief was. It probably came as no surprise when he was discovered dead at the age of 43, slumped over his desk where his final experiment was taking place, with a vaguely surprised expression on his face.
Be destructive.
Thomas Midgley
Many scientists have come up with inventions that proved to be destructive, but Midgely takes some beating. His first great contribution to the cause of leaving the Earth a charred, poisened cinder was to solve the problem of engine knocking by adding lead tetraethyl to petrol. This is why you, dear reader, have lead levels in your blood that are 650 times higher than your great-great-grandparents experienced. Fashion fades, but heavy metal neurotoxins are eternal....
Midgley spent much of his later years attempting to cover up just how many deaths his little invention was causing, but amazingly he still found time to top his pevious exploits when he decided to find a cheaper method of refridgeration. Yes- "Satan's Scientist" then invented CFC's, which have continued to gobble huge holes in our ozone layer ever since.
It's tempting to think that the forces of nature might have started conspiring to bump this rampant destroyer off, but instead the next thing Midgley destroyed was himself. Crippled by polio, he invented an ingenious system of cables and pulleys to help him get out of bed in the morning- but with typical Midgley effectiveness, one morning he managed to get tangled up in the works and was strangled by his own invention.
Be egotistical.
Carl Linne (aka Carolus Linnaeus)
Another Swede, Linnaeus was the author of the Linnaean system (developed from the 1730's) of taxonomical classification for plant and animal species. This was considered to be an important and noteworthy achievement by just about everybody- the exception being Linnaeus himself. He was fimly convinced that it was the greatest achievement in the history of science, and spent the rest of his life repeatedly pointing this out to anyone who cared. Adopting the self-granted title "Prince of Botanists", he split his time between further taxonomical work and writing his own hagiographies.
He had his detractors, and these critics are easily detected. They're the people who have weeds and parasites named after them, courtesy of the irate "Prince". Linnaeus also had another intriguing eccentricity- he thought flowers and plants were capable of love, and sex with passion. This tended to make his botanical tracts unexpectedly racey reads, with lengthy passages reading like a cross between an airport romance and a gynaecology textbook.
Above all, experiment on yourself.
J B S Haldane
The stereotype of this scientist is your Dr Jekyll- subjecting himself to extraordinarily dangerous and bizarre experiments. Hilariously enough there are loads of scientist who did just this, and the master of them all was my personal favourite nutty professor- J B S Haldane.
If you're into diving, you may well know of Haldane already, and be grateful. Most of his work was concerned with the safety of deep-sea divers, and to pursue these studies he undertook lengthy studies on the effects of compression/decompression and gas inhalation on human subjects. Those human subjects were assistants, family, his wife, random passers-by and (on one occasion) the former Prime Minster of Spain, Juan Negrin. These subjects tended to be bundled into an experimental decompression chamber by the relentlessly cheerful Haldane, with instructions to hold up a note to the tiny window if they felt unwell, or found themself experiencing massive seizures/coma.
He started from an early age, thanks to his scientist father- the legendarily eccentric and absent-minded John Scott Haldane. Even before he was a teenager, Haldane Jr would regularly be seen taking part in heart-warming bonding sessions with his doting father- these consisted of them both donning gas masks to inhale any number of bizarre gas-masks while taking notes on who passed out first. Haldane's unstoppable good cheer wasn't even dented by fighting in the trenches in the first World War- incredibly, he claimed with all sincerity to have thoroughly enjoyed the experience because it gave him the opportunity to find out what killing people felt like. This helped him earn a reputation as a fearless (even enthusiastic) soldier, and even getting wounded twice didn't dampen his mood in the slightest.
Returning to his experiments after the war, he subjected himself to unbelieveable pressures in his new decompression chamber. One particularly violent decompression caused him to suffer a seizure so incredibly violent that it left him with several crushed vertebrae. As soon as he could stagger out of his bed, he repeated the experiment on himself, and was greatly intrigued to discover that this time it made all of his dental fillings explode.
Observers noted that just about every experiment Haldane carried out resulted in somebody bleeding, vomiting or suffering a fit- usually Haldane himelf. Everything was just another facet to study to him, as demonstrated when he carefully made notes while his wife suffered a series of decompression fits that left her breakdancing across the floor. Once she had stopped jerking, he helped her up, happily sent her off to cook dinner, and then tried an experiment in oxygen deprivatio that left him with no sensation in his buttocks for the next six years.
I'll leave you with a quote from Haldane. He noted that perforated eardrums caused by his experiments usually healed, but even if they didn't, the resulting deafness is more than compensated for as "one is able to blow cigar smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."
Science has changed our world and transformed the way we live, but I can't help wondering what the course of scientific progress would have been like if scientists didn't tend to be so darned bizarre. There have been depictions of mad scientists many times in fiction, from Dr Frankenstein to Jerry Lewis's "Nutty Professor", but the truth is just as outlandish as the fiction. To prove this point, here's a selection of the more loopy minds ever to have forced forward the march into the modern age.
This particular "Filth" collection would not have been possible with the magnificent "A short history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson. Buy a copy for every room in your house. So what do you ned to be a nitty professor? You need to be the following things.....
Be socially-inept.
Henry Cavendish
Scientists are often unkindly charicatured as social inadequates who don't get as much sex as they'd like. This libel is caused by jealousy, a lack of understanding for these hard-working professionals, and the fact that it's true. Take Cavendish as the archetype- a brilliant man who was the first to isolate hydrogen and oxygen, and made ground-breaking discoveries in physics that open the way forwards for many successors.
Was he shy? You bet. He even conducted all dealings with his housekeeper by letters, as he couldn't bring himself to speak to her. Although he was frequently seen at society events, they tended to result in him sprinting out in panic when someone misguidedly spoke to him. The same thing happened when enthusiastic fans called at his home (he bacame famous for his works), leaving his servants attempting to coax their unnerved employer home hours after his visitors had seen him disappear over te horizon. His personality could only emerge through his work- a particular favourite being his study of electricity in which he steadily subjected himself to stronger shocks while carefully noting down the level of agony they caused in increasingly shaky handwriting until he passed out.
Be unlucky.
Guillaume le Gentil
If their plans all went smoothly, we'd never be treated to frustrated geniuses bemoaned their failures as the smoke clears around them. For a showcase example of what happens when Lady Luck decides she's got a gold-plated grudge against a scientist, check out Guillaume le Gentil.
Guillaume left France in 1760 in order to observe the transit of Venus from India the next year, but due to an appalling journey he was still at sea (in moutainous storms) when the transit occurred. Being the stubborn type, he elected to stay in India for another eight years in order to catch the next transit and spent all that time getting everything juuuuuuust right- only for a cloud to completely obscure the 1769 transit. The depondent Guillaume headed back to the port, but caught dysentery which incapacitated him for nearly a year. His eventual passage home took him through almost constant storms, and he finally reached France only to find that his family had decided he was long-dead and had taken his estate, leaving him near-penniless.
Be mad.
Sir Isaac Newton
Yes, yes, he was a bright one. In fact, let's get all the obligatory fawning out of the way up front, shall we? An intellectual colossus who almost single-handed dragged the world into the age of reason a defined how we think about the world around us, blah blah blah.
What really makes him interesting to your average "Historical Filth" reader isn't his genius, however. It's the fact that he was titanically odd. Going beyond the general requirement for great scientists to be a bit eccentric, for large chunks of his life Newton was barking mad. He had at least two major breakdowns that left him raving incoherently for extended periods. The hilarious part though is that it was the periods in which he was (apparently) lucid that he got really strange. Like the time, for example, when he pushed a bodkin (a large needle) into his eye socket between the eyeball and bone. Then waggled it about for a bit to see what would happen as the point squidged against the eyeball and other gubbins inside his head. Or the time he sat down at stared directly at the sun for several minutes- again to see what would happen (several days of blindness, predictably enough).
Newton's biggest problem was that he spent only a tiny fraction of his life working on the stuff he's famous for. The vast majority of his working life was spent on alchemy, feuding with his fellow scientists and bouncing off the walls. There's a lot of speculation as to why he was so loopy, but chief among the suspects is the fact that over the course of his life he ingested so much mercury (while trying to create gold) that in the summer he was probably several inches taller than he was on cold winter mornings.
Be jealous.
Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh
The greatest rivalry in scientific history has to be attributed to these feuding American palaeontologists. Both as ambitious and ruthless as each other, they started out as friends and colleagues. The 19th century world of dinosaur discovery was a high-profile business, however, and by 1868 they had begun to use increasingly underhand methods to undermine the other, and be acclaimed as the greatest discoverer of new species.
By 1877 they had already produced dozens of poisonous articles rubbishing each other, so they tried a new tactic and switched to all-out war. The fossil fields of America saw mass brawls breaking out between their workers, with scientific digs being abruptly curtailed by ock-hurling navvies. Both Cope and Marsh blatantly stole each other's specimens and falsely claimed the other's work as their own. If you want a measure of just how frantic the headlong rush to discover new species became, just consider the fact that between the two of them, they managed to "discover" the species now known as Uintatheres Anceps no fewer than 23 times. It was only after both were dead that the dust settled, revealing that the number of known dinosaur species was actually far lower than originally believed.
Be reckless.
Karl Scheele
A brilliant Swedish chemist, Scheele revolutionised the production process of phosphorus and discovered no fewer than eight elements (including nitrogen and oxygen), as well as compounds such as ammonia and glycerin. This meant he had a massive impact on the worlds of science and industry, and might have had an even greater impact were it not for his eccentricity.
Scheele firmly believed he had to taste every substance he worked with in order to fully understand it. When you consider that he was the discoverer of prussic acid you get some sort of appreciation of just how ill-advised this belief was. It probably came as no surprise when he was discovered dead at the age of 43, slumped over his desk where his final experiment was taking place, with a vaguely surprised expression on his face.
Be destructive.
Thomas Midgley
Many scientists have come up with inventions that proved to be destructive, but Midgely takes some beating. His first great contribution to the cause of leaving the Earth a charred, poisened cinder was to solve the problem of engine knocking by adding lead tetraethyl to petrol. This is why you, dear reader, have lead levels in your blood that are 650 times higher than your great-great-grandparents experienced. Fashion fades, but heavy metal neurotoxins are eternal....
Midgley spent much of his later years attempting to cover up just how many deaths his little invention was causing, but amazingly he still found time to top his pevious exploits when he decided to find a cheaper method of refridgeration. Yes- "Satan's Scientist" then invented CFC's, which have continued to gobble huge holes in our ozone layer ever since.
It's tempting to think that the forces of nature might have started conspiring to bump this rampant destroyer off, but instead the next thing Midgley destroyed was himself. Crippled by polio, he invented an ingenious system of cables and pulleys to help him get out of bed in the morning- but with typical Midgley effectiveness, one morning he managed to get tangled up in the works and was strangled by his own invention.
Be egotistical.
Carl Linne (aka Carolus Linnaeus)
Another Swede, Linnaeus was the author of the Linnaean system (developed from the 1730's) of taxonomical classification for plant and animal species. This was considered to be an important and noteworthy achievement by just about everybody- the exception being Linnaeus himself. He was fimly convinced that it was the greatest achievement in the history of science, and spent the rest of his life repeatedly pointing this out to anyone who cared. Adopting the self-granted title "Prince of Botanists", he split his time between further taxonomical work and writing his own hagiographies.
He had his detractors, and these critics are easily detected. They're the people who have weeds and parasites named after them, courtesy of the irate "Prince". Linnaeus also had another intriguing eccentricity- he thought flowers and plants were capable of love, and sex with passion. This tended to make his botanical tracts unexpectedly racey reads, with lengthy passages reading like a cross between an airport romance and a gynaecology textbook.
Above all, experiment on yourself.
J B S Haldane
The stereotype of this scientist is your Dr Jekyll- subjecting himself to extraordinarily dangerous and bizarre experiments. Hilariously enough there are loads of scientist who did just this, and the master of them all was my personal favourite nutty professor- J B S Haldane.
If you're into diving, you may well know of Haldane already, and be grateful. Most of his work was concerned with the safety of deep-sea divers, and to pursue these studies he undertook lengthy studies on the effects of compression/decompression and gas inhalation on human subjects. Those human subjects were assistants, family, his wife, random passers-by and (on one occasion) the former Prime Minster of Spain, Juan Negrin. These subjects tended to be bundled into an experimental decompression chamber by the relentlessly cheerful Haldane, with instructions to hold up a note to the tiny window if they felt unwell, or found themself experiencing massive seizures/coma.
He started from an early age, thanks to his scientist father- the legendarily eccentric and absent-minded John Scott Haldane. Even before he was a teenager, Haldane Jr would regularly be seen taking part in heart-warming bonding sessions with his doting father- these consisted of them both donning gas masks to inhale any number of bizarre gas-masks while taking notes on who passed out first. Haldane's unstoppable good cheer wasn't even dented by fighting in the trenches in the first World War- incredibly, he claimed with all sincerity to have thoroughly enjoyed the experience because it gave him the opportunity to find out what killing people felt like. This helped him earn a reputation as a fearless (even enthusiastic) soldier, and even getting wounded twice didn't dampen his mood in the slightest.
Returning to his experiments after the war, he subjected himself to unbelieveable pressures in his new decompression chamber. One particularly violent decompression caused him to suffer a seizure so incredibly violent that it left him with several crushed vertebrae. As soon as he could stagger out of his bed, he repeated the experiment on himself, and was greatly intrigued to discover that this time it made all of his dental fillings explode.
Observers noted that just about every experiment Haldane carried out resulted in somebody bleeding, vomiting or suffering a fit- usually Haldane himelf. Everything was just another facet to study to him, as demonstrated when he carefully made notes while his wife suffered a series of decompression fits that left her breakdancing across the floor. Once she had stopped jerking, he helped her up, happily sent her off to cook dinner, and then tried an experiment in oxygen deprivatio that left him with no sensation in his buttocks for the next six years.
I'll leave you with a quote from Haldane. He noted that perforated eardrums caused by his experiments usually healed, but even if they didn't, the resulting deafness is more than compensated for as "one is able to blow cigar smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."
thx for another great article
Well, you know your own time restraints best. 
