The birth of the tourist

This is drawn from Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, a social history of science in the year 1859. Find out more here.

Travelling from London to Rome took 21 weary days in 1843. It took just two-and-a-half days by 1860, and tourism had become a mass commodity. Just as new technology brought fast travel to the masses, so Thomas Cook brought the masses to fast travel. He augmented the technology with group excursions, travellers’ cheques, hotel coupons and round-trip tickets, teaching first a nation, then the world, to obey timetables.

Cook began simply, arranging for a temperance group of 485 people to go from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 at a shilling a head, with a brass band, speeches and food thrown in. He built up slowly, then left his job in 1845 to run tours full time. By 1848, he was taking parties to Scotland and the Lake District, then running ‘specials’ to see the Great Exhibition in 1851, and private trains to London to see the Duke of Wellington lying in state before his funeral in 1852.

Mr Cook’s train with 28 carriages of paying customers ran across Brunel’s magnificent Saltash Bridge between Devon and Cornwall, when it opened in 1859. Ten years later, he was offering a 105-day tour of Egypt and Palestine, and one of his 1872 brochures is reported to have inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne seems to be one of the few writers of his time who was sensitive to how the world was shrinking.

Cook offered a world tour lasting a more relaxed 222 days but Verne’s Phileas Fogg used timetables to find a faster way. In 1859, it might have been possible for a New Zealander to reach London comfortably, via Suez and Marseilles in eighty days, but getting around the world in that time was still a bit of a challenge.

Some travellers had more pressing reasons to travel than ‘merely’ seeing the world, motives like dodging spouses or obligations. The classifieds in London’s The Times of 3 January reveal that people could advertise for missing friends in Australia; a New York enquiry agency offered to provide information about traders or to collect debts. In London, Charles Frederick Field, a former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police of the Metropolis, offered London and Continental Private Inquiries, and access to his New York agent.

Just before Christmas 1859, the New York Times reported that a burglar named Hod Annis had been taken back to Boston. He had been arrested in Philadelphia, and managed to escape the clutches of the law, but he was undone when he telegraphed his mistress to send him money, and the authorities intercepted his requests. His travels had been in vain.

Up until 1859, travel books were written either by intrepid explorers to recoup their costs, or as guides for intending emigrants. With steamships making foreign travel more available, the need for guidebooks grew—Murray’s Guide to Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1859 was the beginning of a long line of them. The author was Edward Eastwick and the ‘Murray’ who gets more credit than the author was John Murray, the publisher of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Eastwick advised his readers that on arriving at Madras (Chennai), the trick was ‘to get into a palankeen and be carried to the club, if a bachelor; or if travelling with ladies, to some friend’s house. There are, indeed, hotels which may be repaired to as a dernier ressort’.

Isabella Bird Bishop, who became the first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892, published her The Englishwoman in America in 1856. She was publishing still in 1900 having started when her clergyman father sent her to America to research American Christianity for him. A relative of William Wilberforce and cousin to John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862, she was well connected enough to get an introduction to John Murray, who accepted her first work, and she never looked back.

After the death of her parents, Bishop sailed for Melbourne in 1872, then visited New Zealand and Hawaii before crossing America and reaching New York at the end of 1873. There were more travels, and she circumnavigated the world three times, a record that few humans could have matched in the nineteenth century.

And it was all down to steam transport. Steamships were also used to take an England cricket team to North America in 1859, the first international tour involving any team sport. England won every match.

Sometimes, travel failed to broaden the mind. An American visitor to Berne had returned claiming that everything in Berne smelled of cheese. ‘Cheese is the Bernese otto of roses’, he grizzled, playing on the words of the then common use of ‘attar of roses’, an oil distilled from rose petals, and still used in many perfumes. Every city had its smells, but the odour of horse dung was common to all of them.

Oersted's experiment

 This is from a book I am about to start pitching:

Hans Oersted is remembered in the name of the unit of magnetic field strength, the oersted. He was also the person who coined the term ‘electromagnetic’. With that sort of introduction, it should not be hard to work out that it was Oersted who first observed the magnetic effect of an electric current. All the same, Oersted was trained in metaphysics (a branch of philosophy), rather than in physics.

Nonetheless, in 1806, he became professor of physics and chemistry at Copenhagen. As well as being the first to prepare metallic aluminium, Oersted is remembered for his discovery of electromagnetism, which he made during a lecture. His discovery of the electromagnetic effect was immediately translated into several languages, though not entirely reliably. The 1826 English source I found for his work contained a contradiction which was not in the 1820 French version I happened to have to hand, so my quotation below is a mix of the two versions.

If he had written in Latin, and we had all been forced to learn Latin, this problem would not have arisen, but even by the 1820s, Latin was no longer universally understood.

The first experiments…were set on foot in the classes for electricity, galvanism and magnetism, which were held by me in the winter just past. By these experiments it seemed…that the magnetic needle was moved from its position by the help of the galvanic apparatus…when the galvanic circuit was closed, but not when open, as certain very celebrated physicists in vain attempted several years ago…

A modern re-enactment of Oersted’s experiment. My choice of the aluminium ruler was deliberate.

You can see the way this worked in the illustration above, but as this is simple enough for the reader to try, let me note that the entire apparatus is one compass, one AA cell, a length of insulated wire and some sticky tape, plus an aluminium ruler which is optional, but it would have pleased Oersted. I bared one end of the wire, taped it to one end of the dry cell (this was sloppy practice but good enough) and bared the other end.

I taped the dry cell to the ruler (or to the rule if you are a pedant), taped the compass to the ruler to stabilise it, and that was it. As you can see, a single dry cell was enough to bring about a noticeable swing. Incidentally, if you reverse the wire (and as a result, the current), the swing reverses, and the same reversal happens if the wire is under the compass.

One of the great continuing arguments in science relates to the need to justify research in advance, usually for the benefit of bean counters, weasels and other parasites, by showing what research is useful for. Even the most useless-looking piece of science can become useful, as Karl Pearson was to discover. Here, Lord Kelvin reflects upon Oersted’s researches:

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results.
—Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), 1846, quoted R. A. Gregory, Discovery (1916), 241.

Aside from Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, the main players in the unravelling of Faraday’s electromagnetism include Georg Ohm, Hans Oersted, and James Clerk Maxwell, who brought us to the point where we could see light as an electromagnetic wave, much as Michael Faraday had expected, leading on to George FitzGerald, and then to Heinrich Hertz, Guglielmo Marconi and beyond.

There are also the users of electricity and magnetism, from Joseph Henry and Edward Davy, who both invented an electric relay, Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell, and people like Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla who made our modern uses of electricity possible.

There was far more to magnetism than compasses for navigation. After Oersted found that a variable current in a wire would make a compass needle deflect from its usual direction, André Marie Ampère (1775–1836), found that like currents attract, then he discovered the solenoid in 1826: this was a coil of insulated wire with a current passing through it, and it would be the basis of transformers, electric motors, relays and electromagnets. The most common and audible household use of the solenoid today is probably in the switching systems which commonly turn the water flow on and off in washing machines.

Ampère completed his work while believing incorrectly in two ‘magnetic fluids’, which he called a northern fluid, and a southern fluid. So long as he observed correctly, and so long as his theory allowed him to make sensible predictions to test, it mattered little. Then in 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, and soon after, invented the very first electric motors.

Following on from this in 1845, Faraday discovered what we now call the Faraday effect, where a magnetic field makes the plane of polarised light rotate. This later influenced James Clerk Maxwell to come up with the idea of electromagnetic radiation, which led to Hertz inventing radio. And it all came from one simple observation by Oersted, a lifetime earlier!

Science is like that…

And that, by the way, is my preferred name for the book.