HC 421H, Honors College colloquium: Women Write Science

November 23, 2004

My little rap concerns the connection between commercial culture and science. I was struck by Mrs. B's conversation with her pupils about what I imagine we might call organic chemistry. Caroline, surprised by the fact that cotton is "almost wholly carbon," asks why materials such as diamonds and cotton, chemically understood, can't be made "by some chemical process which [and here's where my other topic, economics or commercialism, comes in] would render them much cheaper, and more plentiful than the present mode of obtaining them?" (210). Mrs. B demurs:

You might as well, my dear, propose that we should make flowers and fruit, nay, perhaps even animals, by a chemical process. . . you must not suppose that a knowledge of the component parts of a body will in every case enable us to imitate it. (210)

Mrs. B goes on to explain that knowing something's material composition–she terms it analysis–is different from synthesis. The first provides "the most complete knowledge" "we" (and one wonders what particular "we" is being formulated here) can have. As for synthesis--the recomposition of those materials--

. . . the more complicated combinations of nature, even in the mineral kingdom, are in general beyond our reach, and any attempt to imitate organised bodies must ever prove fruitless; their formation is a secret that rests in the bosom of the Creator. (210-11)

Our smart pupil Caroline rephrases her question, claiming her interest was in inanimate nature, which allows Mrs B to reiterate that "the principle of life, or even the minute and intimate organization of the vegetable kingdom, are secrets that have almost entirely eluded the researches of philosophers" (211).

I'm struck, first of all, by the way this scene plays off fears of science (as well as other things) that appear in a contemporary literary text: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. On second reading, I'm struck by the qualifiers Mrs. B includes–notice the phrases "in almost every case," and "almost entirely." These seem to allow science to use and certify the "new" and value "progress," while at the same time they gesture towards limits on human knowledge, perhaps reminiscent of Faustus. Finally, I find it utterly fascinating that the "science of life" seems to have become the research interest of our heroine Evelyn Fox Keller, replacing her analyses of the language of science.

On the other hand, attention to "philosophical" questions–on which Mrs B concentrates in this passage, even when we remember that "philosophy" codes "science" at this moment–can mask the issue Caroline begins with. One could propose that Caroline is asking what drives scientific discovery. Mrs. B's disquisition, philosophically intriguing, demonstrates the "philosophical" underpinnings of science in the early nineteenth century. But it neglects, probably for good reason (or at least a number of reasons) that which has come to support science: its commercial possibilities. Not that Mrs B is entirely opposed to "practical science": notice her defense of it, couched in her defense of Humphry Davy's supposedly useless discoveries:

Such may be the illiberal [notice that word–it's the "liberal arts"] conclusions of the ignorant and narrow-minded [to find Davy's experiments useless]; but those who can duly estimate the advantages of enlarging the sphere of science, must be convinced that the acquisition of every new fact, however unconnected it may at first appear with practical utility, must ultimately prove beneficial to mankind. (257)

Mrs. B notes that the new metals Humphry Davy has discovered "have already proved eminently useful as chemical agents, and are likely soon to be employed in the arts" (257). Notice the use of "arts" here–we're back to the medieval division between the arts (the practical) and the sciences (the theoretical). Mrs. B is not opposed to progress, but notice the differences between the terms she uses ("illiberal," "arts," "acquisition") and those we use to describe the practical benefits of science.

Caroline is more prescient than Mrs. B regarding science's ability to imitate nature. In order to look at non-plant and non-animals fibers, I found a reliable internet history of rayon. In 1855, a Swiss chemist, after many attempts (on a global scale), created an "artificial fiber," not for use in clothes, but as a filament for electric lights–that was the initial impulse for such "fibers." Even in 1880, rayon was used for electric light filaments (note the root "fil," as in thread). Only in 1884, at the Paris Exposition, was rayon unveiled as the first "artificial silk." Rayon's first large-scale production plant went online, as we'd say today, in 1892. Rayon was also used for door handles and dial heads on machines, but its most lucrative use, once it was firmly established as artificial silk, became fashion. The first American rayon plant opened in 1910, and in 1925 rayon outsold silk for the first time.

I also checked out fake diamonds, the real thing being the source of one of Emily's signature comments ("That is astonishing! Is it possible to see two things apparently more different than diamond and charcoal?" [209]). Cubic zirconia (have you all heard of it?) was developed, not initially for the jewelry trade, but to replace the expensive rubies used in lasers. We're talking 1937 here, in Germany. In 1970 the Russians invested in cubic zirconia technology and began producing the stones for jewelry–they were quite expensive to begin with and became quite a fad in the 1980s. You can still buy cubic zirconia–check out E-Bay.

Caroline's astute questions of Mrs. B allow the mercantile a moment in both scenes I've pointed us too, even as the "commercialism" of science drops away into more philosophical (and literary, meaning cultural, if we think of Frankenstein) concerns. In fact, I don't think "drops away" is the right phrase. I would propose that the infrastructure as well as the intellectual habit of mind that eventually marries science with the mercantile is slowly forged in the nineteenth century–not without criticism, mind you, but, in a fashion similar to other things we've noticed this term: in a subterranean manner that we can detect through minute attention to language and metaphor.

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