FOUR AMERICAN SCIENTISTS
Famous American Men oi" Science. By J. G. Crowther. (Seeker and Warburg. I5s.) MR. CROWTHER has put together four biographical sketches to make a lengthy book. His subjects are Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Henry, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Thomas Alva Edison. He deals with them separately, giving us in each case a rather bald account of the man's life, a brief appraisal of his character, and a fairly detailed analysis of his scientific achievements, which are considered in relation to the work of other scientists and to the social conditions of the time. Mr. Crowther takes the Marxian view that the scientific discoveries made in. a given period are not pure historical accidents but are determined by social needs. "Le plus grand hasard," said Henri Poincare, " est la naissance d'un grand homme." A deviation of a tenth of a millimetre in the path of a spermatazoon and Newton would not have been born. But Mr. Crowther would not allow us to infer from this that it was a matter of chance, in Poincare's sense, that classical physics developed as it did. For he holds that "Newton and his discoveries in mathematical astronomy were a product of the urge of the ruling mercantile classes to discover how they could increase their knowledge of the tech- nique of transport, and discover new sources of wealth, and increase their freights and profits." Such a theory is hard either to prove or disprove. It is not as if we could recreate the seventeenth century with Newton unborn. Mr. Crowther indeed makes no very serious attempt to justify his method of treating the history of science, even with respect to the limited field with which he is primarily concerned. But his assumption of its validity makes it possible to find in his book some traces of a controlling idea.
The two most common faults of scientific popularisers are facetiousness and fine writing. Mr. Crowther avoids both of these. Indeed his style is, if anything, too arid. There are times when his book resembles a transcription of lecture notes. This applies particularly to the section on Franklin, who is the most interesting character of the four but the least successfully treated. It was perhaps too ambitious of Mr. Crowther to attempt in a comparatively short space to deal with all of Franklin's multifarious scientific interests as well as his political career. He gives us a great deal of information, much of which is interesting in itself ; but the result is that we do not see the wood for the trees. The best thing in this section of the book is a digression at the end about the American constitution, which has been said by Woodrow Wilson, among others, to owe its form to the Newtonian system of mechanics. Franklin, though he was a signatory of the constitution, did not altogether approve of it. Being, we are told, "the most confident pioneer of the next advance of science beyond Newton," "he could not sympathise with lawyers in love with a scientific point of view already old-fashioned."
In contrast to Franldin, neither Joseph Henry nor Willard Gibbs furnishes much material for a biography. They were alike in their moral and intellectual integrity, their modesty and their lack of worldly ambition. Mr. Crowther writes with particular admiration of Gibbs, who has never received his due share of popular fame. He classes his work on chemical thermodynamics with Einstein's theory of relativity for its range and brilliance as synthetic abstract theorising. Of Henry it may be said that he might have been a greater scientist if he had been less conscientious a man. Unlike Edison, who never let the interests of his employers keep him from the pursuit of his own ends, Henry allowed first his teaching and then his secretaryship of the newly-founded Smithsonian Institution to stand somewhat in the way of his research. But for all that he was able to anticipate Faraday in the discovery of electro-magnetic self-induction and possibly in that of' electro-magnetic induction also ; and "the principles of the design of electro-magnets " were
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