Author: Mike Jay
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2009
Price: £20 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780300124392

Here’s a fascinating tale that will be near to the hearts of forteans. It’s the story of how an emerging way of understanding the world becomes accepted only after satisfying social, political, economic and religious orthodoxies. The experimental method is only a part of it.

In other words, it’s a portrait of how chemical science was born, as if covered by Fortean Times in 1799. That was the year that Dr Thomas Beddoes founded the world’s first private research laboratory, an institution for the study of “pneumatic medicine” in Bristol.

Less than a decade earlier, the idea that air was not a single element actually caused riots. Beddoes built on that heresy by suggesting that various “factitious airs” might be used in medicine. One of the airs in particular, which we know as nitrous oxide, seemed especially promising, though Beddoes barely realised its potential as an anæsthetic.

He relied on a remarkable circle of polymaths, inspiring some, training others, and event­ually alienating a few. They included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet laureate Robert Southey, Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt and Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus. It was an interlocking invisible college that worked across borders on virtually every scientific and social concern of the age.

The circle also included a sort of Cornish hillbilly, the precociously brilliant Humphry Davy, who later was knighted, discovered chlorine and became president of the Royal Society. Maturing into a boor, he event­ually scorned Beddoes, plunging the Pneumatic Institute into ignominy.

Jay wonderfully restores Bedd­oes’s reputation as a courage­ous and painstaking scientist, physician, revolutionary firebrand and social reformer – truly, one of the giants of rational thought.