The world today would probably be a very different place if they’d had Risk Assessments in 17th century Britain. If we’d been as preoccupied with ‘Health & Safety’ and scientific ethics committees back then as we are now, scientists wouldn’t have been able to get up to half the hair-raising laboratory exploits which they’d deemed Good Ideas and subsequently made brilliant discoveries and observations (well, some of the time. A lot of the time I imagine the only observations were
“*?!@*!!, that hurt!”).
Sir Isaac Newton. Mezzotint by J. MacArdell after E. Seeman, 1726. Image: Wellcome Images
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was no exception. He is of course renowned for his famous discovery of gravity, prompted by the most well-timed apple to ever fall out of a tree in history*. But, like many scientists of his day, as well as being a thinker he was also frequently given to self-experimentation.
One day – at a time when he was studying refraction of light and colour perception – Newton was seized by the notion to take a long needle (called a ‘bodkin’, used for stitching leather) and ‘put it betwixt my eye and [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ – just to see what happened, of course. Incredibly, the answer was not a lot, or at least nothing like the horrendous lasting damage you would expect from sticking an excruciatingly large needle in your eye. Instead, Newton noted that ‘there appeared severall white, darke and coloured circles’ in his vision.
Outlandish experiments on eyes that would make us lesser mortals cringe seemed to be Newton’s forte, as in his notebooks he also recounts pressing on his eyes with his fingers on several occasions, and notes the different coloured circles he saw as a result of this pressure. On another occasion he decided to stare into the Sun for as long as his eyes could bear, just to see what effect it had on his vision when he then looked at sheets of white paper. Again, he remarkably suffered no lasting damage from this episode of kamikaze eye experimentation. Despite his worrying lack of self-concern, you can’t deny the enthusiasm with which he embraces the ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ mind-set which has been responsible for of some of the most brilliant scientific discoveries.
Perhaps one of the strangest thoughts is that – of all things – a book about fish might have prevented Newton’s most famous work – the ‘Principia Mathematica’ – which revolutionised mathematics, from ever being published. In 1686, when Newton wanted to publish his mathematical masterpiece, The Royal Society was in bad financial waters having just funded ‘The History of Fishes’ by John Ray and Francis Willughby: a now obscure work full of beautiful – but expensive – engravings and diagrams of fish. Luckily for science-as-we-now-know-it, Edmund Halley (after whom the famous comet is named, but his is a story for another Friday…), a friend and admirer of Newton, decided to pay for the publication of the ‘Principia’ himself. Fortunately for Newton, Halley had a position as a clerk at the Society, however due to their financial situation they struggled to pay him his salary; and it seems they were so close to bankruptcy that he was allegedly paid in copies of ‘The History of Fishes’. I doubt we could so easily find a scientist today who would be as willing to take one for the team and be paid for their efforts in books on fish. One can only imagine what he did with them. All in the name of science, eh?
*And while we’re on the subject of Isaac Newton, I thought I’d share this little gem with you:
‘Oh, he was that man who had a light bulb fall on his head.’ – One enthusiastic little boy at a school science workshop I was running, in answer to the question ‘Can anyone tell me who Isaac Newton was?’ He said it with such conviction, nodding sagely and looking knowledgably around at his friends, that I experienced a definite moment of ‘eh?’ I’m not sure if he was thinking of Newton or Thomas Edison, but either way, he made me chuckle!
More on Newton, and some excerpts from his notebooks: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Footprints_of_the_Lion/private_scholar.html
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