BROADWAY BOOKS 2011When H.M.S. Beagle set sail from Plymouth Sound on December 27, 1831, the ship’s young naturalist, Charles Darwin, was a self-proclaimed “natural philosopher.” By the time he disembarked the ship about five years later, he was a “scientist”—a word invented in the intervening years by fellow Cambridge University alum and polymath William Whewell.
Much else had changed as well. Whewell and a group of his friends had begun to modernize the concept of the natural philosopher, a project first hatched in 1812, when they met as undergraduates at Cambridge University
Each of the four men was brilliant, self-assured, and possessed of the optimism of the age: Whewell, who later created the fields of mathematical economics and the science of the tides; Charles Babbage, a mathematical genius who would invent the prototype of the first modern computer; John Herschel, who mapped the skies of the Southern hemisphere and coinvented photography; and Richard Jones, a curate who went on to shape economic science. The four composed what I call the “Philosophical Breakfast Club,” also the title of my latest book, ...
