Andrew Crosse

Andrew Crosse

Andrew Crosse (born June 17, 1784 in Broomfield , Somerset , † July 6, 1855 ibid) was a British naturalist who was particularly concerned with experiments on electricity . Crosse was an early pioneer in the field of the practical applications of electricity and became known especially after press reports about his experiments on electrocrystallization carried out in 1836, in the course of which insects appeared to appear out of nowhere, but which later turned out to be cheese mites , which are probably his Contaminated instruments.

Childhood and youth

Crosse was the eldest son of Richard Crosse and Susannah Porter. In 1788 he accompanied his parents to France, where he went to school in Orléans for a while. From the age of six to eight he was tutored by a tutor, Reverend White, in Dorchester , where he learned Greek. On February 1, 1792, he was sent to Bristol to continue to school. Around the age of twelve he persuaded one of his teachers to be allowed to take part in science lectures. One of these lectures dealt with electricity, which led to Crosse's lifelong interest in the field. His first experiments during his school days consisted in building a Leyden bottle . After finishing school, Crosse attended Brasenose College in Oxford .

life and work

After Crosse finally lost both parents at the age of 21 - his father died in 1800, his mother in 1805 - he took over the running of family affairs. After giving up his work for the barrister , he devoted more and more of his free time to studying electricity in Fyne Court , his mansion, where he built his own laboratory. He was also engaged in mineralogy and was interested in crystalline deposits in caves. Around 1807 he combined his interests and experimented with electrocrystallization, in particular with calcium carbonate from a cave near Holwell . He followed up on this work from around 1817 and produced a total of 24 electrocrystallized minerals.

One of Crosses experiments consisted of an apparatus to study the electrical properties of the atmosphere ("an extensive apparatus for examining the electricity of the atmosphere"). It was a cable about two kilometers long (later shortened to about 550 meters) that was carried by pillars and trees, with the help of which he could determine the polarity of the atmosphere in different weather conditions. His results were published by his friend George Singer in 1814 as part of the work "Singer's Elements of Electricity and Electro-Chemistry".

Together with Humphry Davy , who later (1827) visited Fyne Court, Crosse was one of the first researchers to produce large voltaic columns . Although Crosse also built larger ones , Henry Minchin Noad's “Manual of Electricity” describes one of his batteries, which was composed of 50 Leiden bottles with a total surface area of ​​6.8 m². With the help of its cables, Crosse was able to charge and discharge them up to 20 times per minute, accompanied by a bang that was almost as loud as a cannon blow ("accompanied by reports almost as loud as those of a cannon") . Because of such experiments, he became known locally as "the thunder and lightning man" ("the thunder and lightning man"). In 1836 Richard Phillips reported a wide variety of Volta columns in Crosse's laboratory, 2500 total, of which 1500 were in operation when he was present.

Although little of his work was published and Crosse did research largely out of private interest, he was persuaded in 1836 to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bristol. After sharing his discoveries privately with a friend in Bristol, he was also invited to present them to both the chemical and geological sections of the meeting, where they met with great interest. This included his research on electrocrystallization, the electricity of the atmosphere, and his improvements to the voltaic column.

Crosse isolated by electrolysis successfully copper from its ores, experimented with the electrolysis of sea water, wine and brandy, to clean them, the effects of electricity observed on vegetation and headed various other interests after. He also dealt with the practical uses of electricity and magnetism. He did pioneering work in the development of the loudspeaker and telegraphy, but did not deal with the development of these technologies himself.

controversy

A few months after the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science , Crosse was busy with another experiment on electrocrystallization when, on day 26 of the experiment, he observed what he called “the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail ”(“ the perfect insect that stands upright on a pair of bristles that formed its tail ”). The aim of the experiment was actually to produce artificial quartz crystals on the surface of a stone under electrical voltage, which Crosse continuously sprinkled with an acid solution. More and more such creatures appeared, and two days later they moved their legs. Hundreds of these animals appeared over the next few weeks, climbed across the table, and hid whenever they got the chance. Crosse identified them as belonging to the genus Acarus .

Irritated by these results, Crosse mentioned the incident to some friends and also shared his findings with the London Electrical Society . A local newspaper found out about it, published an article about the “extraordinary experiment” and named the insects “Acarus crossii”. The article was subsequently picked up in the British Isles and continental Europe. Some of the readers seemed to get the impression that Crosse somehow created the insects, or at least claimed that he did. He received angry letters accusing him of blasphemy and attempting to take God's place as Creator; some of them even contained death threats. Local farmers blamed Crosse for the powdery mildew on their wheat and commissioned an exorcism . Crosses' opposition was so fanatical that he had to retreat to the solitude of his Fyne Court residence.

Other scientists tried to repeat the experiment. WH Weekes went to great lengths to ensure that the experiment was carried out in closed conditions by placing the experimental setup under a glass cover. According to his own information, his experiment did not reveal hundreds, but at least five of the mysterious insects, but because of the controversy that Crosse had sparked, Weeke's results were never published. In February 1837, many newspapers reported that Michael Faraday had also successfully recreated Crosse's experiment. However, this was not true; Faraday hadn't even tried. Later researchers, such as Henry Noad, Alfred Smee , John George Children, and Golding Bird , were unable to successfully replicate Crosse's experiment. Crosse himself never claimed that he created the insects; instead he suspected that there were hidden insect eggs in his samples. Later commentators agreed that the insects were likely cheese mites and contaminated Crosse's instruments.

It has been wrongly suggested that this episode was the inspiration for the Frankenstein story , although it could not be, since Crosse's experiment took place almost 20 years after the novel was published. The idea that Crosse's experiment was a model for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein probably originated from Peter Haining's 1979 book The Man who was Frankenstein . Mary Shelley actually knew Crosse through a mutual friend, the poet Robert Southey . She and Percy Shelley attended a lecture by Crosses in London in December 1814, in which he described his experiments on the electricity of the atmosphere. Edward W. Cox wrote a report in the Taunton Courier in the fall of 1836 about the two of them visiting Fyne Court to examine Crosses' work.

Other interests

Crosse also wrote a lot of poetry and enjoyed walks on the Quantock Hills , which is also where Fyne Court is, "at all hours of day and night, in all seasons" ("at all hours of the day and night, all seasons"). He was passionate about nature and local geology.

Politically, Crosse advocated access to education for financially disadvantaged people, argued against emigration, and supported the campaign by local farmers against falling food prices and high taxes during the 1820s. He also got involved with friends who were striving for political office. Crosse followed the battle of Waterloo , boarded a ship at Exeter and was able to see the captured Napoleon Bonaparte on the deck of the HMS Bellerophon near Plymouth .

Crosse also acted as the local justice of the peace .

Private

Crosse married Mary Anne Hamilton in 1809 and they had seven children together, three of whom died very early. Mary Hamilton herself died in 1846, four days after the death of Andrew Crosse's brother, after being ill for several years. On July 22, 1850, at the age of 66, Crosse married a second time, namely the 23-year-old Cornelia Augusta Hewett Berkeley; the couple had three children together.

Andrew Crosse suffered a stroke on the morning of May 26th, 1855, from the consequences of which he finally died on July 6th of the year in the same room in which he was born.

Commemoration and legacy

Crosses laboratory bench is in the aisle of St. Mary and All Saints Church in Broomfield; an obelisk was erected in his memory in the churchyard .

Much of Crosse's mansion, Fyne Court, burned down in 1898, and the garden and 260,000 m² property are now owned by the National Trust and open to visitors. A number of documents relating to Crosse and his work are kept in the Somerset Record Office . In December 2008 Somerset County Council bought two letters for £ 400 to add to the collection.

literature

• Andrew Crosse: Description of some experiments made with the voltaic battery [...] for the purpose of producing crystals; in the process of which experiments certain insects constantly appeared. Transactions and Proceedings of the London Electrical Society 1, 1841, pp. 10ff.
• JA Secord: Extraordinary Experiment: Electricity and the Creation of Life in Victorian England. In: The Uses of Experiment. D. Gooding, T. Pinch, S. Schaffer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, pp. 337ff.
• Alex Boese: Elephants on LSD. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-499-62439-1 , p. 25ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Vincent Waite: Portrait of the Quantocks. London 1964, ISBN 0709111584 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q} Cornelia AH Crosse: Memorials scientific and literary of Andrew Cross, the electrician. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Robert, London 1857.
3. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. Edition 1911, Volume V09, p. 185.
4. ^ RF Pocock: Andrew Crosse: Early nineteenth-century amateur of electrical science. IEE PROCEEDINGS-A, Vol. 140, No. May 3, 1993.
5. ^ Anthony Hyman: Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1982, ISBN 0691023778 , pp. 234, 287.
6. ^ Real-life Frankenstein who inspired SF , The Guardian , June 11, 2001
7. ^ Frankenstein of Fyne Court? . In: BBC Somerset . Retrieved March 13, 2008.
8. ↑ Remembering the 'Thunder and Lightning Man' at Fyne Court . In: Somerset Wildlife Trust . Archived from the original on January 3, 2008. Retrieved May 5, 2015.
9. ↑ Obituaries: Peter Haining , Telegraph, published December 28, 2007, accessed November 25, 2010
10. ^ Peter Haining: The Man Who Was Frankenstein . TBS The Book Service Ltd ,, 1979, ISBN 978-0584103564 , p. 160.
11. ↑ Andrew Crosse . In: Answers.com . Retrieved March 13, 2008.
12. ^ Church of St. Mary and All Saints . In: Images of England . Archived from the original on October 4, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved March 9, 2008. 
13. ^ Letters acquired by Somerset County Council . Retrieved December 21, 2008.