Nature’s first issue

One hundred twenty-two years isn’t a very long time, really; certainly not on a geological scale (so, did dinosaurs live 150 million years ago, or 150,000,122 years ago?) and not even on the scale of human history, at least not for the most part. (Can you name the important advances made between 1100 and 1222?)

But the last 122 years have been special. At a pace that is absolutely astounding, the world has undergone a transformation–and the driving force behind that transformation has been science.

That’s why a publication I recently received is so fascinating. (To me, at least, and I hope to you as well, otherwise this column is a real waste of time.) It’s a reproduction of the very first edition of the distinguished science journal Nature, published Thursday, November 4, 1869.

Science’s place in society was just in the process of becoming established in those days. The very term was still quite new, and the older term, “natural philosophy” still crops up in Nature‘s first issue.

In the schools, the teaching of science was just beginning to catch on. A very long essay by W. Tuckwell discusses the teaching of science in schools (and, significantly, refers only to the teaching of science to boys; girls, obviously to the writer, not being interested in science).

“The teaching of science makes school-work pleasant,” Mr. Tuckwell notes, which is an observation far too many of today’s students would not agree with, although at the Saskatchewan Science Centre we whole-heartedly support the notion. He goes on to say something we even more whole-heartedly endorse: “The effect (of the teaching of science) on the boy’s character is beyond all dispute. It kindles some minds which nothing else could reach at all. It awakes in all minds faculties which would otherwise have continued dormant.”

Students who learn science, he says, have minds “in which are cultivated, as nothing else can cultivate them, the priceless habits of observation, of reasoning on external phenomena, of classification, arrangement, method, judgement.” Hear, hear!

The rest of the magazine shows that, 122 years ago, many scientific questions that seem quite basic to us were still being debated.

For example, the atomic theory of matter was still not universally accepted; M. L. Pasteur (Louis Pasteur to us less-formal modern types) had just recently patented the preservation of wines by the process of applying heat, not yet referred to as pasteurization and not yet applied to milk, and T. H. Huxley was in the process of determining what fossilized creatures were and were not “dinosaurians.”

A total eclipse of the sun over America generated a long article; only recently had scientists determined that the protuberances seen around the disk of the sun were actually part of the sun, and the prevailing opinion was that the corona that appears around the sun at totality, and which we now know to be the sun’s atmosphere, was really a phenomenon in Earth’s atmosphere. (There was still a school of thought that held that it was caused by the Moon’s atmosphere.)

Another interesting article reported on the theory of German epidemiologist Max von Pettenkofer concerning the cause of cholera. (A devastating epidemic of cholera had struck London just a decade earlier.) The bacterium we now know is the cause of cholera had been discovered by a fellow German, Robert Koch, but von Pettenkofer insisted that the real cause of the disease was a poison that the cholera germ produced only in the presence of some other mysterious substance, yet to be identified. (In fact, though the article doesn’t mention it, he was so convinced of this he drank a culture teeming with cholera bacteria and suffered only mild diarrhea as a result. From our vantage point it appears he was lucky, and the fact he was well-nourished to begin with undoubtedly helped, but it certainly must have seemed to him to support his own theories. It’s also an excellent example of two things: putting your money where your mouth is, and stupidity.)

All this is interesting not only because it gives us a benchmark against which to measure scientific progress of the last century and a quarter, but also because it reminds us that science is not a static collection of facts, written down and thereby somehow chiseled into the fabric of the universe forever.

Science is a process of discovery. It goes down blind alleys (Pettenkofer’s cholera theories), it involves personalities (Pasteur was engaged in a dispute with someone named M. Thenard), and sometimes it is dead wrong (the solar corona is definitely not a product of Earth’s atmosphere).

Science today is no different. It has high points and low points; moments of greatness and moments of humiliation. (Hmm. Reminds me of a certain football team.)

Some of what we are absolutely certain we know about the universe today is almost certainly absolutely wrong. But a great deal of it is right; and that body of accumulated knowledge continues to grow and continues to impact on our society–every aspect of our society. (If you can name even one human activity that science has not affected, please let me know. First prize is a free copy of my next column. You’ve been warned.)

T. H. Huxley, in an essay in that first issue of Nature, commented that, in the future, “curious readers of the back numbers of Nature will probably look on our best, ‘not without a smile.'”

In another 122 years, I wonder what “curious readers” will think of our best science?

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1991/09/natures-first-issue/

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