The word 'scientist' was coined in 1834, as a joke
... and the scientists didn't like it!
That’s right! The word ‘scientist’ was coined as a joke. It first appeared in March 1834, in a rambling book review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. It was Somerville’s fourth book, and one of the first ever books in the popular science genre. The reviewer was the polymath William Whewell (pronounced ‘Hewell’). He was writing anonymously, but he loved the book so much he called it ‘masterly’. Predictably, he couldn’t get over the fact that a woman, of all creatures, could write so fabulously. Some women, he marvelled, had even ‘advanced so far in philosophy’ as to ‘look with dry eyes upon oxygen and hydrogen’.
But what impressed Whewell most of all was the sheer scope of Somerville’s writing. She touched on many different scientific subjects, from astronomy and physics to chemistry and geography. And, furthermore, she wrote about how these subjects were connected. Her achievement made him so giddy that he attempted a joke: What do you call someone who studies science in general? Well, since we already have labels like ‘artist’, ‘atheist’, and ‘economist’, why not embrace the same philological trope and plump for ‘scientist’?
Once the laughter had died down, in 1840, Whewell returned to the word. It was at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (which still exists as the British Science Association), and they were facing the same quandary. With so many members from different fields, what do they call one another collectively? ‘Men of science’ was the clunky norm. ‘Naturalists’ was another common descriptor. Whewell cleared his throat to propose ‘scientist’. No one laughed this time, but reactions were mixed. And they continued to be mixed for the best part of a century.
The chemist Michael Faraday felt the word was awkward ‘both to my mouth and ears’. The mathematician Lord Kelvin was used to ‘naturalist’ and would stick to that, thank you very much. In a letter to the gloriously-titled magazine Science Gossip, Thomas ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Huxley expressed his earnest hope that the publication wouldn’t adopt and be ‘defiled’ by the word ‘scientist’. (Please note that all these men are celebrated today as great ‘scientists’ anyway.) As time went on, ‘scientist’ also erroneously gained the reputation of being an American word, too, which didn’t do it any favours.
It wasn’t just the word itself that ‘men of science’ had a problem with, though, it was the incredible social change it came to represent. Science used to be the sole preserve of a leisured class. A man of science would have to, at least, be rich enough to kit out their own laboratory, dedicate most of their time to their scientific pursuits, and pay for whatever equipment and assistance they needed. Their curiosity alone, and a sense of pure discovery, would supposedly guide them. But by the early nineteenth century, science had become a school subject and people could get jobs in larger science and technology labs funded by government and private interest. Science was, arguably for the first time, a big business proposition. And you could be, for the first time, a salaried scientist.
Men like Faraday lamented that once you brought money into the equation, science ceased being pure. Being paid to do science was at odds with the ideal of a ‘liberally educated’ man, whose scientific interest was ‘intellectual cum philanthropic’. Money had always been a factor, though, and when you consider that Faraday himself ploughed a fortune into his scientific hobbies, as well as making money from those activities, it’s tempting to see this attitude as uncomplicated snobbery. But if we brush aside the implied keep-the-plebs-out attitude, and look at some of the first ‘scientists’, it gets easier to give him a whole lot more sympathy.
One such man was the ‘combative and rancorous’ Glaswegian chemist, Andrew Ure. Impressed by the sheer amount of yarn and fabric produced in the textile mills in the North of England, in 1835 he wrote The Philosophy of Manufacturers. This misanthropic text conceived of a factory as a machine, and proposed a new culture for working people. In short, they’d have sharply defined roles, be easily replaceable, and ruled by the clock, literally clocking in and out at the same time each day.
Working-class people, he seemed to think, were a problem to be solved; an unreliable component in the otherwise flawless factory machine. He saw workers, in fact, as another race entirely. They even had their own, unique biology, he thought, giving them a natural resistance to cholera. What’s more, he was convinced that their illnesses were down to their unusual enthusiasm for bacon. He was all for educating these naturally quite thick workers, as long as their education was moral in nature, and held on a Sunday, so as not to interfere with the great factory machine.
Some scientists were ingenious in taking advantage of the poorer sort, and designed experiments to further increase their own power in relation to their workers. In 1849, for example, the chemist James Prescott Joule devised a way to measure very slight changes in temperature, part of his effort to understand ‘the mechanical equivalent of heat’. His is one of the canonical experiments of nineteenth-century science, but it was also part of his plan to drive down wages.
Joule was not only a decorated Salford scientist, honoured with a statue in Westminster Abbey, he was also the son of a brewery owner (honoured with a Weatherspoons named after him). To brew their beer, his family needed brewers and maltsters, whose skills were notoriously difficult to teach. And this made them amongst the most valuable (and expensive) employees. But, if Joule could use science to understand and mechanise the craft of brewing, the brewery wouldn’t have to pay over the odds for skilled labour. So, Joule’s father indulged his boy’s scientific leanings and kitted out a lab for him. He’d even rope his dad’s working-class employees into helping him with his experiments, contributing to their own decline.
‘Men of science’ from the eighteenth century and earlier might have assumed all commoners were idiots, but it probably wouldn’t have crossed their minds to exploit them for financial gain (please leave me a comment or get in touch if you know any who did!) If that’s what it meant to be a professional ‘scientist’, no wonder so many felt it offensive.
We now use the word ‘scientist’ naturally and comprehensively, but it took until the early twentieth century before the word became widely accepted. I wonder what changed.
A lovely piece and how nice to be reminded that Mary Somerville was, in a way, the first scientist - and that as a mocking term became respectable, women scientists were edged out. I reviewed Susannah Gibson's The Spirit of Inquiry for the TLS and she was good on this too.
Great read, thanks for sharing, Paul!