Aug 06 2011

Book Review: “Erasmus Darwin: A life of Unequalled Achievement” by Desmond King-Hele

Portrait_of_Erasmus_Darwin_by_Joseph_Wright_of_Derby_(1792)My next book review is on “Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement” by Desmond King-Hele which I reached via my former colleague, Athene Donald, you can read her review here.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) will always be best known as the grandfather of Charles Darwin. However he was a substantial figure in his own right. He was a doctor in and around Lichfield and Derby for his entire working life. By all accounts he was a good doctor, at a time when the medic’s tool kit was rather bare. Until quite late in his life he preferred not to attach his name to his work outside medicine, for fear of damaging his medical reputation.

In his later years he wrote a translation of Linnaeus’ work on plant classification, a serious academic work – from which many English words describing the anatomy of plants are descended. This was followed by a series of books (The Botanic Garden, Zoonomia, Phytologia and The Temple of Nature) part poetry and part essay on nature and medicine. His poetry directly influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; his fame, and regard, as a poet lasted into the later part of the 19th century but ultimately his style of poetry fell out of favour and, to a degree he sank into obscurity. I must admit I’m unable to determine the nature of the science / poetry link for Erasmus, poetry has always been something of a closed book to me. I don’t know whether poetry was more pervasive as a communication mechanism at the end of the 18th century or, at the time, poetry was a useful way to communicate science. Or whether simply by chance, both science and poetry fell upon Erasmus as they have done in the case of the author of this biography.

Alongside his work as a doctor Erasmus was at the heart of the Lunar Society, a group of friends and industrialists including James Watt (steam engine inventor), Matthew Boulton (factory owner), Josiah Wedgewood (factory owner) and Joseph Priestley (chemist, preacher and radical). These men were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. He was also friend, and doctor to, Joseph Wright of Derby – famous for his paintings of industrial and scientific scenes, King-Hele argues that several of the figures in “The Air Pump” are modelled on Erasmus and his family.

Erasmus developed a number of mechanical invention during his life, including the modern scheme for steering in a car (although developed at the time for horse-drawn carriages), a mechanical duplication machine for writing and a windmill with a vertical axis and, towards the end his life, agricultural machinery. There are even intriguing glimpses in his Commonplace Book of what looks like a gas turbine. Although many of these inventions appeared to function they did not catch on at the time, in part it seems because Erasmus was not passionate about their implementation (fearing for his medical reputation). It’s probably worth being a little cautious here: no doubt some of Erasmus’ inventions made it into real life but there is a big difference between a rough sketch in a notebook to a real, commercially viable device.

It’s quite staggering the number of miles travelling Erasmus put in: 10,000 miles a year or nearly 30 miles a day, at a time before motor vehicles and even reasonable roads. Miles travelled in support of his business as a doctor and in communication with his friends in the Lunar Society. This is where his ideas about carriage steering and suspension would have come from – he seems to have used a combination of light carriage and horse to get about.

Alongside medical publications in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Erasmus also presented papers on atmospheric physics, and on the operation of artesian wells (he was friends with the geologist, John Hutton) and as commented above, his poetry was published with lengthy scientific essays. Ultimately Erasmus Darwin’s science has not made it down through the years to us, this is largely because he put some fine thinking into a wide range of scientific areas, and in many cases was shown to be right, but he didn’t follow up those ideas with experiments and a more complete theory. Personal scientific renown is a fickle thing, it’s based on a desire to pull out “great figures” from history, rather than recognising the more collaborative, incremental nature of science. 

The Darwin family form a scientific dynasty: Erasmus, his son Robert (Charles Darwin’s father), three of Charles’ sons and his grandson Charles Galton Darwin were all Fellows of the Royal Society – a total of five generations. This highlights the advantages of birth as much as anything. Erasmus’ father Robert was a lawyer which was no doubt how Erasmus could afford to go to Cambridge and Edinburgh for his medical education. And so to the next generation where Robert (Erasmus’ son) gained entrance to the Royal Society on the basis of a thesis possibly written by his father; next up Charles Darwin who was able to devote his life to science through the wealth generated by his father and marriage into the wealthy Wedgewood family. This is not to reduce their achievements but to highlight that they had both ability and environment on their side.

Politically Erasmus was a bit of a radical: anti-slavery, pro-(French) Revolutionary and supportive of an independent United States of America. He appears also to have been pretty close to being an atheist. King-Hele argues this caused him trouble in his later years when the government-led backlash to pro-revolutionaries struck, reducing his reputation as a poet. His, more radical, friend Priestley’s house was attacked by a mob in and he ultimately fled to the US to avoid persecution.

Charles Darwin took an enormous length of time before publishing “On the Origin of Species”, this wasn’t time wasted but spent in making many detailed experiments. Looking at his family we can perhaps see why he took so long about it: his grandfather, Erasmus suffered considerably opprobrium for his atheism and evolutionary ideas, Robert, Charles’ father, no doubt shared these ideas but kept quiet about them.

In contrast to many of the scientific figures I have read about, Erasmus Darwin sounds like an excellent friend and stimulating dinner guest. King-Hele’s biography is perhaps a little effusive about its topic but its very readable and well-sourced.

Jul 29 2011

Still love the NHS?

In todays news: reports that some NHS trusts were setting “minimum waiting times” which were “too long” for elective surgery. The reason being that if you wait long enough people will drop off your waiting list, either by going private or dying. That there even exist minimum waiting times set by the trusts should be a cause for concern, let alone how long they are.

For me this is personal: last year I had minor elective surgery – I started off in the NHS but then decided to use my private medical insurance. I wasn’t going to die of my condition, the worst-case was an emergency circumcision; however I was in discomfort, a bit of worry and occasional pain, and as time progressed things were getting worse.

So the idea that the NHS was waiting for me to drop off their waiting list pisses me off somewhat. If they’d said at the earliest possible instance “please piss off”, I would have done so immediately. Of course they didn’t tell me to piss off because had it become public they would have suffered from some opprobrium.

My private medical insurer had me treated within a month from first presentation, the only reason it wasn’t quicker was that my surgeon was going on holiday for two weeks and I decided not to make the time before he went – it could have been under two weeks. The NHS would have taken 4 months – I know this because through an administrative error I received an appointment for my operation on the NHS as I returned to work.

The behaviour of the trusts in this instance is entirely rational, as is that of my private hospital. The trusts have been paid already, if I don’t have an operation then they’re “quids in”. My private hospital, on the other hand, wants me to have an operation, because they won’t get paid until I have it. This is actually the problem with fully private medical systems: for people that can afford treatment it is in the interests of the provider to provide as much medical treatment as the patient can pay for.

The problem with the NHS is that it is a highly cost effective system directed at providing universal second-rate care. It will remain so because anyone proposing a change radical enough to make it better will be assailed by people who “Love the NHS” and want to “Save the NHS”. Notice here they don’t care about your treatment, they care about the service provider.

Don’t love the NHS, it is a public corporate entity, it can’t love you back. Only people can love you.

Jul 23 2011

Book review: “The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism”

Orange_BookI suspect most people will see me as an "Orange Book" Liberal Democrat, so I thought I should read the eponymous "The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism" edited by Paul Marshall and David Laws.

The Orange Book was first published in 2004, when Charles Kennedy was leader of the Liberal Democrats. He contributes a foreword which is fully supportive of the Liberal inheritance but a little guarded on the policies proposed. The book was written at a time when Labour had been in government for 7 years, the start of the Iraq War was one year past and the economic outlook was fair.

The contributors include Nick Clegg (an MEP at the time), Vince Cable, David Laws, Ed Davey, Chris Huhne, Susan Kramer, Mark Oaten, Steve Webb, Jo Holland and Paul Marshall. The essays cover Liberalism, localism, Europe, global governance, economics and social justice, the environment, the health service, crime, family policy and pension reform.

The value of the essay over a news presentation of policy is that the proposals are preceded with some sort of background indicating how they were motivated; as a consequence I found The Orange Book rather more interesting reading than I was expecting.

The book starts with an essay by David Laws on the Liberal inheritance; decomposing it into the personal (to do with individual freedoms), political (devolution and Europe), economic (free trade and controlling state as well as private monopolies), social liberalism (welfare and health by consumer power). Along with Paul Marshall in the introduction he has some harsh words for socialism.

Ed Davey’s piece on localism and Nick Clegg’s on Europe fit well together: envisaging respectively dissociation of power from Westminster to local councils and Europe. I commented after the election that an accommodation with the Tories over Europe was not as surprising as many people had thought; the seeds of this can be seen in Nick Clegg’s chapter where he advocates abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy and repatriation of the powers that led to the social chapter and much of the regional support mechanism leaving behind only those components that provide inter-country benefits and support for regions whose governments could not provide support themselves. Somewhat less comfortable an idea for Tories will be more foreign and immigration and asylum policy being handled at the European level. Clegg also provides a catchy headline to keep the EU in proportion: it has a budget of 1% of European GDP and a civil service the size of Birmingham City Council.

Ed Davey’s piece on localism (devolving power to local councils) is well-established Liberal Democrat policy, and looks to more control by local democratic institutions rather than central government. A benefit of this approach is that services can be crafted to local needs rather than a central blueprint, furthermore it allows for more experimentation at smaller scale as to how to best deliver services. To enable this shift there needs to be improvement in the accountability of local councils, with the ending of local one-party states through fairer votes.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom the chapters on global governance, liberal economics and social justice, and the environment passed me by without making a great deal of impact.

Mark Oaten’s headline of Tough Liberalism regarding crime seems a little out of place since the emphasis of his piece is on education within the prison system and seeing the process of release of prisoners into the community at the end of their sentences as a “settlement” not “re-settlement” since many prisoners have never had settled lives to return to.

David Laws’ second chapter is on the health service: it outlines the flaws of the NHS, what the goals should be for the health service and proposes a solution. He sees a scheme of simply boosting funding through the current mechanism as being a short-term solution – easily susceptible to future unravelling. Perhaps it will be a surprise to many that he sees one of the problems with the NHS that its cost control is too effective, referencing the phenomenally high bed occupancy rate which leads to longer waiting times. His proposal is for a National Health Insurance Scheme with the NHS as one potential supplier of care with providers only able to offer non-clinical services as top-up to the national insurance specified clinical services. This scheme is based on those found in other European countries.

The chapter by Steve Webb and Jo Holland on family policy seems a little more interventionist than might be considered Liberal with an apparent enthusiasm for encouraging marriage rather than partnership. However, one welcome idea is to scrap a target for getting 70% of single parents into work. This attitude has always struck me as a bit jarring: that work is so important that the State will encourage you to work whilst paying someone else for the work of raising your children.

The book finishes with a chapter on pensions, a subject close to my heart at the moment. Liberals have been at the heart of pensions from their inception in the UK with Lloyd George and later in the Beveridge Report implemented by Labour in the post-war government. The problem with pensions is that since Beveridge, in the 1940s, things have changed a lot. The original pension scheme is pay-as-you-go: current payers of National Insurance pay for current claimants. No-one is contributing to their own state pension. At the time of its foundation in 1948 this scheme was relatively inexpensive (only £4billion per year in current terms), currently the state pension costs £40billion per year – due to a larger retired population relative to those working. For this reason the value of the state pension has fallen over the years since there is not the political will to lift current contributions to match the original commitment. Marshall proposes a compulsory funded pension to supplement the current system. The funding system at least forces the government to be explicit about their liabilities in pensions. Over the next 20 years or so the pensions problem will become more acute: currently the dependency ratio (the ratio of those in retirement to those in work) is 0.3 by 2030 it will be 0.4.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the policies presented this is the type of policy discussion I expect to see taking place in my party. The "Orange Book" label feels more like an attempt to personalise a division between old-style Liberals and social democrats, and to cut off the Liberals from a Liberal past rather than any useful description of political thought. It also has the air of being more about Coalition with the Tories rather than any differences in policy.

Jul 21 2011

Book review: “At Home: A short history of Private Life” by Bill Bryson

book_at_home_ppbkI’ve been on holiday for a week, this has meant a lot of reading! Next up is “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. A thick book arranged thematically around the rooms in Bryson’s house, a rectory in Norfolk. The links between the various rooms and the topics discussed are sometimes tenuous, such as the one between the cellar and the Erie Canal.

As I have commented before my book “reviews” are as much about noting things that I learnt from a book as they are “reviews” but in this case I struggle since there are simply so many facts to absorb.

Since Bryson lives in a rectory “men of the cloth” feature; here I learnt the distinction between vicars and rectors: vicars received the little tithes of the parish, and rectors the great tithes. This meant for many years that they had quite considerable incomes for not necessarily a great deal of work. Some made great use of their copious spare time for strenuous intellectual activity, as a measure of this Bryson suggests searching for vicars and rectors in the Dictionary of National Biography – there’s an awful lot of them, more even than politicians. The era of wealthy reverends finally ended with the collapse of agricultural incomes in the 1870s.

Agricultural incomes collapsed in part through the arrival of long distance imports from North America and New Zealand. These were facilitated in part by steam ships but also by the introduction of refrigerated transport arising from the Wenham Lake Ice Company, started in 1844. Prior to this transport within the US had been improved by the building of the Erie Canal linking New York City to the Great Lakes. The Erie Canal was built between 1817 and 1825, and was the making of New York City since it provided a link through the Appalachian Mountains from the populous East to the breadbasket of the mid-West. At the time it was a substantial achievement – it was to be the biggest canal in the world at a time when the US did not have a single native born canal engineer. The link with cellars is that what goes on in the cellar holds the whole house up (well, not quite, but it’s a literary device) and that materials are important in enabling development: building the Erie Canal was facilitated by the invention of a new hydraulic cement.

Whilst agricultural incomes were collapsing in the UK, the US was experiencing its Gilded Age during which industrial output surged and some people become tremendously wealthy (such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt amongst many others). They spent this money on houses, amusing themselves and philanthropy – very little seems to have gone in tax – Bryson states there was no permanent income tax in the US until 1914.

I was surprised by the late arrival on the scene of professional architects. The book talks in some detail about John Vanburgh (1664-1726) who designed Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, however it was not until the end of the 19th century that compulsory examinations were required of architects in Britain and a full-time academic courses were established. Vanburgh was brought up in my home town – Chester.

I was also interested to read of John Lubbock who grew up in the same village as Charles Darwin. As a keen entomologist he discovered in 1886 the pauropoda – a family of mites, but not only this: in later life he was to introduce both the Bank Holidays Act and the Ancient Monuments Act. He was also first president of the Institute of Bankers and married the daughter of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, one of the founding fathers of archaeology. He founded the Electoral Reform Society – it difficult to read his biography and not be astounded by the sheer range of his achievements.

1851 pops up regularly – this is the year of the Great Exhibition in London. Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal Palace in which it was housed, taking advantage of standardised components (the iron glazing bars) and newer, cheaper materials (plate glass) to build a quite remarkable building. The speed with which he achieved this is incredible: design to completion in under 16 months. George Peabody stepped in to fund the American contribution at the last minute, an area which displayed many ingenious machines for manufacturing. Many Londoners learnt the wonder of the flushing toilet; this would lead to a flood of toilets being installed across the city, overwhelming the sewerage system which would be then be rebuilt by Joseph Bazalgette.

The book ends with the decline of the British country house during the first part of the 20th century following the introduction of death duties by William Harcourt.

Exceedingly readable, as you would expect from Bill Bryson, and endlessly interesting. There’s a sizeable bibliography and index but no footnotes. There’s evidence of depth in what he writes, in the sense that he does dig a little deeper into stories rather than necessarily repeating the most popular version. And I leave you with this quote:

    

In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.

Jul 16 2011

Lead mining in the Yorkshire Dales

Bunting level: building, level entrance and hush

Bunting level: building, level entrance and hush

On a recent trip to the Yorkshire Dales we came across the remnants of lead mining; as with many things in the field these are blank discoveries with no indication of what they mean at the site. A very long time ago I did an OA level in geology, and I seem to have inherited an interest in industrial archaeology, so I resolved to find out more…

The majority of the mine workings we saw were in Gunnerside Gill, which extends north from Swaledale shown on the map below. On the ground we found rock strewn gullies and heaps of gravel, still devoid of vegetation. There were also ruined mine buildings, the occasional opening into the hillside and the odd bit of rusting ironwork. The most distinctive elements of the remains are the “bouse teams”, these are sets of bunkers – just the dividing walls remain – which were used to store the ore (or bouse). Quite a few of the stone surfaces are covered in a reddish deposit; elsewhere this has been identified as a lichen, but I believe it’s lead oxide. The workings are named by the “level” or horizontal tunnel which they served, the photos here are taken around the Bunting (or Bunton) level.

 

Lead mining, bouse teams

Lead mining: bouse teams at Bunting Level

Further down the Gill, closer to Gunnerside, are the Sir Francis Level workings; although these are less extensive at ground level, they turn out to have quite fantastic remains underground. Intrepid cavers have been down and taken some impressive photos, and you can read more about the Sir Francis Level workings in this report , here and here too. These were the most recent workings in Gunnerside Gill and were in operation from 1864 until 1891.

Lead mining has been carried out in the Yorkshire Dales since Roman times, the workings at Gunnerside Gill started in the 16th century but the majority of the visible surface remains are from the 19th century. The Bunting (or Bunton) level where the photos were taken was opened in 1802 and closed in 1898.

Lead mining: entrance to Bunting level

Lead mining: entrance to Bunting level

The Yorkshire Dales are substantially formed from limestone and gritstone outcrops laid down in the Carboniferous Period some 320 million years ago1. The lead ore occurs in veins which were deposited hydrothermally: hot pressurised liquids containing a range of minerals were forced through cracks in the native rock and deposited what they carried when the pressure and/or temperature dropped. The minerals are not conveniently deposited by type but mixed together. The veins are quite narrow – typically only a metre wide – but stretch deep underground.

This is reflected in the manner in which they are mined: initially vertical shafts were mined down to follow the veins. Later horizontal “levels” were mined to meet up with these vertical shafts which made the extraction of both ore and water easier – water will drain out of a level but puddle in the bottom of a shaft. In addition to this type of mining “hushing” was also used: this involves sluicing large quantities of water down the line of the vein to erode out the rock. This process was used in the Gunnerside Gill area from the 1780s to 1820s, and is what has left a large part of the surface remains. These are marked on the map as “hushes”. The extent of the workings can be seen quite clearly in Google Earth images (here).

The particular mineral in which the lead occurred is galena (lead sulphide), it is relatively dense and this property was used to separate out the galena from other minerals using a process akin to panning for gold. The ore containing rock is broken up into pieces and as far as possible the galena rich chunks are picked out and chipped off using hammers – this is known as dressing. This ore is then further broken up into smaller pieces. Earlier, this would have been done manually but later it was done using a water-powered mills, and still later it was done by steam-powered machines. These smaller pieces of ore are then buddled in troughs or hotching tubs – basically this simply means add water then shake, this separates out the material by density.

Lead mining, mill culvert

Lead mining: mill culvert at Bunting Level

Stonebreaker, with Sharon in background

Stonebreaker above Bunting Level with Sharon in background

Once reasonably well-separated ore is obtained it is converted to metal in two chemical steps. First the ore is roasted to drive off the sulphur and convert it to lead oxide, then the oxide is smelted with carbon which removes the oxygen from the lead to produce the metal. There were smelting mills in Gunnerside Gill but ore was also transported underground to the next valley and smelted in the Old Gang Smelting Mills. We didn’t visit these but they had flues extending up the hillside a distance of hundreds of metres. The reason for this was two-fold: firstly, the gases driven off the ore during smelting were pretty noxious and secondly, the long flue allows soot to condense back out as it cools and this soot can be contain high concentrations of minerals.

Life for the miners sounds pretty grim; they were expected to work for 6 hours a day underground and the mine workings were often inaccessible without accommodation so their days may well have started with an hour or so walking simply to get to work. The Swaledale Museum, in Reeth, as well has having a great deal of other information on lead mining has some mining company rules, dated 1872. One of them states: “Children aged 12-16years only allowed to work 54 hours per week, or 10 hours per day.”

Footnotes

1. See p13-22 of this report by the North Yorkshire Geodiversity Partnership for more geology.

2. Related is this report on the Peak District Lead Mining Industry

3. English Heritage scheduled monument report