Circus acrobats and strong men in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

The Romans had wanted their bread and circuses, the folk of 1859 would settle for just a circus, but it was rather less barbaric than the Roman namesake. The “equestrian circus” began in London in 1786, but 1859 was the year that the flying trapeze was added to the bill. The world’s first flying trapeze circus act was performed on November 12 at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris by Jules Léotard, 21, who had practiced at his father’s gymnasium in Toulouse. He wore the daring (for that period) tights which still carry his name.

A whole series of daring young men followed him, but few were as daring or showy as Charles Blondin, the tightrope walker. Starting on June 30, Blondin made 21 crossings during the summer on a rope 1100 feet long stretched 170 feet above the boiling waters of the Niagara Falls, from Prospect Park on the United States side to the Canadian side. 

On August 17 he carried his manager across the gorge on his back. The trip lasted 42 minutes and included 42 rest stops. Scientific American was scathing: “We did not suppose that two such fools existed on this hemisphere. The idea of such a thing is enough to congeal the blood.”

Doctor George Winship, a 25-year-old physician who trained in Cambridge Massachusetts could raise himself by either little finger until he was half a foot above it. He could also raise 200 lb by either little finger and lift 926 pounds dead weight, without the aid of straps or belts, said The Times. 

Closer to home, Scientific American used the same figures a week earlier, suggesting that both journals drew from the same original source or press release, as there was no time for the American material to have crossed the Atlantic.

The American account says Winship was due to give a lecture in Boston, but fainted twice. He attributed this to the atmosphere being close and impure, though others thought it was because he had not spoken in public before. His lecture was on physical education, but the aptly named the Boston Atlas reported that the strong man proved an infant. Winship seems to have disappeared from public notice thereafter.

For his own pleasure and the amusement of others, a gentleman in Liskeard, Cornwall fashioned himself a suit made solely from 670 rat skins, collected over three and a half years. It included neckerchief, coat, waistcoat, trousers, tippet, gaiters, shoes and even a rat hat.

It was a measure of the way people were being urbanised that dogs were now seen more as companion animals than as work assistants. The world’s first dog show was held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in June, while Birmingham held another show in November. To this day, Britain’s National Dog Show is organised by the “Birmingham Dog Show Society (founded 1859)”. The Battersea Dogs’ Home was established in 1860.

There was a poultry and pigeon show at London’s Crystal Palace in January. No doubt a few scientists who knew Darwin’s ideas would have dropped in to view the displays, because the selected breeds of birds were central to Darwin’s arguments about what could be achieved by selection of another sort, natural selection. Perhaps they took in a theatrical show while they were in town, but perhaps they did not, because many still thought the theatre lacked propriety.

Sporting fashions in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

To most Americans and Canadians today, cricket is a mystery, but Abraham Lincoln attended a cricket match between Chicago and Milwaukee in 1859, and a professional All England cricket team toured Canada and the USA during the year, playing five matches, the first overseas tour in any sport. Taking a cricket team to the US back then was not as bizarre as it sounds from today’s perspective.

In 1859, cricket was very popular in the mid-Atlantic states, in Boston and the New England factory towns, but it could also be seen in Baltimore, Savannah, New Orleans, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and even San Francisco, a total of perhaps 300 or 400 clubs.

Cricket even inspired American inventions. In March, M. Doherty of Boston patented a cricket bat that would not jar or bruise, but which would send the ball further. The blade had a wooden shell filled with cork or similar material, while the handle was hollow and contained a strip of whalebone, but in 1859, the baseball craze started to bite, and soon cricket would be eclipsed.

The writing was on the wall for cricket in September, when the ball game for the Massachusetts state championship caused enough interest for several railroads to issue excursion tickets to Boston’s Agricultural Fair Grounds.

Many new sports arose around 1859, perhaps because the lawnmower was now mature technology. The original mower was developed in 1830 from a machine used to remove the nap from cloth, and it allowed smooth, true grass surfaces, something almost impossible to create with a scythe or with grazing animals, but organic mowers still had a presence. The Illustrated London News reported in the middle of 1859 that a lightning bolt had struck a sheep in London’s Hyde Park, summarily terminating its earlier sterling grass control services.

After about 1860, horse-drawn and then motorised mechanical mowers did most of the work.

Lawn tennis was developed in 1859 by a solicitor, Major Thomas Henry Gem and his friend, a Spanish merchant. The two were living in Birmingham, England, and played a game that they termed “pelota”, based on a Spanish ball game, which they played on Perera’s croquet lawn. This later came to be known as tennis, and 15 years later the two formed the Leamington Tennis Club, which laid out the rules of the game.

Croquet even featured in Alice in Wonderland.

In 1868, the All England Croquet Club was created to provide an official body to control croquet and to unify the laws. The club’s members leased four acres at Wimbledon in 1869, and tennis courts were added later when the croquet fad waned.

The club changed its name to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 1899, and has held that name to the present day, even if the world just thinks of it as ‘Wimbledon’. Croquet had become a British craze in the 1850s, and the first recorded croquet game in the USA was at Nahant, Massachusetts in 1859.

Football was also emerging. In May, the rules for “Australian Rules” football were developed, though the Football Association, the founding body for the world game (or ‘soccer’, if you must) only wrote out its rules in 1863, with Rugby codes developing about 1870.

1859 was the year in which Allan Robertson, the world’s first golf professional died, still hating the new-fangled ‘gutties’, the golf balls with gutta percha in their hearts. They made the game too easy, he thought.

Not all sports owe their birth to lawn mowers. Polo was started in India in 1859 by the Maharajah of Manipur, Sir Chandrakirti Singh (who called it by a name which literally meant “horse hockey”).

It was the year lacrosse was named as Canada’s national sport and the first ice hockey game appears to have been played in Halifax in 1859 (ice hockey became Canada’s national winter game in 1994).

The first modern Olympic Games were staged in Athens, not in 1896 but in 1859! A Hellenic grain merchant named Evangelos Zappas convinced the Bavarian-born King Otto I of Greece to patronize an Olympic festival at Athens.

Otto was driven out of Greece in 1862, which caused the second Olympiad to be somewhat delayed, and these days, we take the second attempt of 1896 as the first of the modern series.

A Meyerbeer opera, Le Prophète, opened in 1849. It featured apparent ice-skaters (roller skaters), but that and an 1849 ‘spin-off’ ballet, Plaisirs de l’Hiver ou Les Patineurs helped to make roller skates popular, while Les Patineurs remains in the orchestral repertoire today.

In 1859, the Woodward skate with vulcanised rubber wheels, was unveiled in London, but people did more than demonstrate their own strength and agility. They went to see the experts in action.

Hidden fashions in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

The problem with writing social/domestic history is that all too often, people at the time did not record the details of their everyday activities. We cannot always get the details we need to understand everyday life, even two life-spans in the past. William Perkin’s mauve, discovered in 1856, was new and different enough to draw attention, so we know it came into production in a major way in 1859, giving ladies a new (and safe) fashionable colour, even if it was derived from the noxious remnants of coal gas and coal oil production.

Sometimes an industrious journalist filled in the background while earning his fee, as when Septimus Priesse wrote about making and colouring bonnets. He described mordanting straw bonnets with an ounce of iron sulfate in two gallons of water, boiling them for an hour, then hanging them out to dry, adding that chip or leghorn straw needed less mordanting. Next, the bonnets were boiled in 2 gallons of clean water for an hour with half a pound of broken nutgalls and half a pound of logwood, two common dye sources of the time.

Then, he said, leave two ounces of best glue in two quarts of water overnight before boiling to dissolve it and straining the glue, now referred to as size. The next step was to soak the bonnets in the size, one at a time, before removing them, sponging off the excess size and drying before carefully shaping the hat, or placing it on a block to dry. The result will be a nice black bonnet. A few details might be deemed too intimate, but more often, they seemed too ordinary, so we sometimes have to rely on inference, or unpublished sources.

Diaries and letters are useful. Because Eliza Edwards’ letters described life in Hawaii to her family in New York, she included ordinary matters like donning rubber boots to walk through knee-deep rushing water. In her diary, Caroline Cowles Richards, a young girl in upstate New York, revealed how a friend pierced her ears for her so she could wear ear-rings — as well as revealing the fashion influences she experienced:

Mary Wheeler came over and pierced my ears to-day, so I can wear my new earrings that Uncle Edward sent me. She pinched my ear until it was numb and then pulled a needle through, threaded with silk. Anna would not stay in the room. She wants her’s done but does not dare. . . . It is nice, though, to dress in style and look like other people. I have a Garibaldi waist and a Zouave jacket and a balmoral skirt.

Not everybody agreed with fashion. Empress Eugénie of France had pioneered the crinoline, but she declared in 1859 that she was giving it up. Unmoved by the edict of a mere empress, the style held on. It was claimed in the press that in Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan had, by decree, imposed a limit upon the luxury of the Turkish women of high position, and ordered certain changes in their costume.

This does not ring true: perhaps it was put about by somebody annoyed by the challenge of trying to pass crinolined ladies on a narrow street, or to fit them into a pew, a doorway, an omnibus, or a carriage.

On the other hand, the crinoline was good for business. It had sparked 100 patents in France in four years: 4 in 1855, 16 in 1856, 30 in 1857, 37 in 1858, and 13 by July 1859. Covered steel crinoline (wire) sold at 50 cents a pound, and about three quarters of a pound was needed for one hooped skirt. The estimated usage in 1859 was 5 million pounds. At the end of the November, Scientific American reported that in Derby, 950,000 hoop skirts had been made since April 1, using 9,100,000 yards of tape and 445 tons of steel.

A Mr Wappenstein in Manchester received a patent in 1859 for making artificial whalebone from animal horn. This would be cut in long helical strips which were then flattened and heated before being coloured. They were suitable for use in both umbrellas and crinolines.

According to cricket lore, round-arm bowling was developed by a cricket player’s sister, who found that her crinoline got in the way of conventional underarm bowling. She is usually named as Christine or Christina Willes, but she is alleged to have come up with her innovation in the early 1800s, half a century before the crinoline. Her dress may not have been embroidered, but it appears that the story was.

An advertisement in the Victorian Cricketer’s Guide of 1859-60 offers batting gloves, wicket-keeping gloves, and “leg guards” but no protective boxes for the male players. There was no real call for them at the time, as the umpire would call ‘no ball’ if any bowler raised his arm above his shoulder.

Life in 1859

In 2007, I realised that the sesquicentenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was coming. As an active historian of things scientific, I decided to write my own account, and casting around for themes, I read Richard Dawkins' comment to the effect that "the world changed after Darwin published", the suggestion being that the book caused change, when my view was that Darwin's book was but a symptom of a fast-changing world.

1859 was the year that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln turned 50 (they were born on the same day in 1809) and by the end of the year, their names were becoming known, all over the civilised world. It was the year of the first oil well, the invention of the slide rule and spectroscopy (rapidly giving us enough extra chemical elements to make the Periodic Table mean something). It was also the year in which Mendel started investigating the genetics of peas, the Suez canal was started, key evidence for the germ theory of disease was being assembled, and tobacco-smoking was first identified as a cause of cancer—and that's just for starters!

Railways, telegraphs under the sea, steamships and internal combustion were all tying the world together in amazing ways.

The end result was a work entitled Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, which saw the light of day in 2008 as a print book which you may or may not be able to pick up somewhere: here's a quick outline.

The work is certainly available from Amazon as a Kindle e-book, and also from Booktopia, or you can listen to me talking about it here.

Anyhow, my next few entries are drawn from chapter 7 of that book, and they serve to describe life in that era. If you want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry. I will begin with fashions.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

George Bernard Shaw, Doctor’s Dilemma, preface.

British men in the 19th century were generally clean-shaven until soldiers returned from the Crimea with beards, though “literary men” had beards sooner. The young Charles Darwin had no beard, old Charles Darwin was bearded. In early 1861, Abraham Lincoln explained just before his inauguration why he would be the first US President to have a beard in office: an 11-year-old girl, Grace Bedell, wrote and suggested he should grow one because his face was thin, but if fashion did not sway Lincoln, it must surely have influenced Grace Bedell.

Men used lead-based dyes on grey beards or hair and many bright colours contained a variety of heavy metals. Women who dyed their hair were at risk, but they had more to fear from arsenical dyes in their gowns, while everybody was threatened by green wallpaper, dyed with arsenic compounds — but it was fashion. Fashion was just as lethal to the whales which supplied whalebone for corsets and crinolines, and it had been as bad for the beavers which had provided the fur needed to make gentlemen’s hats until the 1850s.

Then the varnished silk hat took over, but Scientific American did not like them, saying the hard-shell hats were a menace. Some of these had gauze tops for ventilation, but most did not. While felt hats are somewhat porous and so somewhat ventilated, silk plush hats were saturated with lac-varnish and completely airless. They needed perforations at or near the band, argued the reporter. Later in the year, William Warburton obtained a patent for a machine that used heated points to perforate the sides of a hat, a system that Scientific American recommended for any headwear coated with varnish.

Ladies’ underwear was causing some worry. With the development of the crinoline, where hoops of whalebone, wire or other stiffening converted the dress into a giant bell, exposure of the limbs was more likely. Legend has it that ladies, fearful of being blown on their sides by wind or swooning, suddenly wanted more modest underwear, but the evidence is, at best, scanty — unlike the new underwear, it seems.

And in Britain, the poor were still being banged up in workhouses. I may or may not get back to discuss the fate of Thomas Drewery's orphans in Victoria, not long after that, but I have already described the fate of Australian poet, Jennings Carmichael, who died in an English poorhouse.

What is a good scientist?

Before I take one last look at the scientific method, what makes somebody a scientist? In the world of advertising, anybody pushing a treatment or cure and wearing a white coat is seen as a scientist, and most people who say they can refute Darwin, Einstein or “Big Pharma” will also claim to be a scientist — as will a goodly proportion of climate deniers.

Is it all about equipment? This is
Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg.

The term has been used since 1840 to describe people who study scientific subjects: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist”, said William Whewell (1794 – 1866), writing in 1840. Before this date, scientists were usually referred to as natural philosophers.

In general, we expect that scientists will work in accordance with the scientific method, and that they will report their findings in such a way as to allow others to repeat the experiments they describe. There are also expectations that the work of a scientist will not be based on fraud, faith or pious hopes, and that the work will be properly notified in the “scientific literature”, that is, by a “paper”, a report published in a peer-reviewed journal devoted to such reports.

Most people see an advantage in calling their subject “a science”, while the “real scientists” prefer to keep science pure, so that “social sciences”, “political science”, and especially “creation science” are rejected by mainstream scientists, on the ground that these other “scientists” do not have a clear body of theory and laws which can be used to generate new experiments and studies.

That said, we can’t ignore the scientists, because they are strange beasts. Gilbert White, vicar of Selborne and Jane Austen’s near neighbour, had a gentleman amateur’s fascination with weather records. So did John Dalton, schoolmaster and amateur chemist, who gave us the modern notion of the atom in 1808. Dalton kept a weather diary for 57 years until he died in 1844.

Dolly Pentreath memorial, Mousehole, Cornwall.

White also corresponded with people like lawyer Daines Barrington who, among other things, examined the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to see if the boy was a clever hoax, managed by boy’s father. Barrington suggested in a report to the Royal Society that the lad was not only genuine, but likely to be greater than Händel. Barrington also interviewed the last speaker of Cornish, Dolly Pentreath, and had some original ideas about fossils and polar exploration. White wrote to him about the keys in which owls hooted at Selborne.

Gilbert White died in 1793, Daines Barrington in 1800, at a time when the men of science were still expected to commit themselves to a range of endeavour and enquiry. By the late 1850s, that era was over and the up-and-coming scientists had begun to specialise.

The names of those planning to attend the Leeds meeting of the British Association in 1858 were listed in The Times, ahead of the meeting. The list reads “Sir David Brewster, Professor Faraday, Sir Roderick Murchison, Dr Whewell, Professor Wheatstone, Professor Airy, Sir William Hamilton, Sir Benjamin Brodie, Robert Stephenson, M. P., General Chesney, Mr. Hopkins, Mr. Darwin …”.

Darwin’s name is followed by 33 others, few of them known today, even to those familiar with the period. Darwin was top-drawer, but not one of the truly great names like Astronomer Royal George Airy or William Whewell, the man who coined the word ‘scientist’.

Brodie (a surgeon who opposed amputating diseased joints), Chesney (Francis Rawdon Chesney, who surveyed a Suez Canal route in 1829) and Hopkins (probably William Hopkins, a mathematician, geologist and Cambridge coach), people barely heard-of today, were all mentioned ahead of Darwin, but like him, many of them entered science through a back door. It was a field that any determined person could enter.

Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice who read then books he was binding, carried out some experiments, attended some lectures, and then joined the world of experimental science. Wheatstone first came to attention as a maker of musical instruments (and the inventor of the concertina) but he went on from there.

Brewster trained as a clergyman, and in 1825 Darwin was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh but was so horrified by an operation performed on a child without anaesthetic that he gave up his studies without completing the course. Scientists were not trained as such before about 1850: they emerged, and got together and talked, like the members of the Birmingham Lunar Society.

I suppose you want to know about them, well you should have been paying attention: I did them three weeks back!