Famous Men of Science

PREFACE

Garfield said, "No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the record of those early influences which develop the character and direct the lives of eminent men."

These sketches show how young men have overcome difficulties, sometimes poverty, sometimes illness; how they have made failures before finding their true vocation. They show the results of energy, perseverance, and untiring devotion; how a cheerful face and a hopeful spirit like Agassiz's, or a gentle and kindly nature like Darwin's, can win its way against opposition.

A sketch of Benjamin Franklin, which otherwise would have a place in this volume, will be found in "Famous American Statesmen"; also one of Michael Faraday, in "Poor Boys Who Became Famous."

GALILEO GALILEI

"The same memorable day is marked by the setting of one of the most brilliant stars in the firmament of art and the rising of another in the sphere of science, which was to enlighten the world with beams of equal splendor. On the 18th of February, 1564, Michael Angelo Buonarotti closed his eyes at Rome, and Galileo Galilei first saw the light at Pisa."

Thus writes young Karl von Gebler, in the best life of Galileo ever written, his dying contribution to literature. Some other authorities place Galileo's birth on February 15.

He was the oldest in a family of five children born to Vincenzo Galilei, a Florentine noble, and Giulia Ammanati, who also belonged to an ancient family. Vincenzo wrote learnedly about music, and taught his boy to play on the lute and the organ; but he was poor and life was a struggle. However beneficial poverty may be in the development of character, most of us do not crave it for our children, so Vincenzo decided to place his son where he could earn a comfortable support. Music did not bring money. Galileo therefore should become a dealer in cloth; a necessity of life, rather than a luxury.

But the boy soon showed great skill in music, surpassing his father. He excelled in drawing and color, and could have become a noted artist. He loved poetry, and had a decided taste for mechanics, making machines of great ingenuity. It soon became evident that such a lad would not be satisfied to spend his life trading in wool.

He must be educated, but how? The family had moved from Pisa, where there were schools of repute, to Florence. An effort had to be made, by the greatest economy, to prepare Galileo to go back to the Pisan University. He showed great aptitude for Latin and Greek, and at seventeen was ready for Pisa.

For what profession should he study? Not what best suited his tastes, but that in which his father thought he could make money, medicine. Poor Vincenzo! who can blame him that he hated poverty for his brilliant son?

At college, Galileo became an ardent student of philosophy, and because he dared to think for himself, and did not always agree with the teachings of Aristotle, he was called "the wrangler." Until he was twenty he was scarcely acquainted with the rudiments of mathematics, because his father thought this study was a waste of time for a man who was to become a physician. How many parents make the mistake of bending their children to their own plans, instead of ascertaining what a boy or girl can do best in the world, and then fitting him or her for it!

While Galileo was studying medicine in Pisa, boarding with a relative, the court of Tuscany came to the city for a few months. Among the suite was Ostilio Ricci, a distinguished mathematician, and Governor of the Pages of the Grand Ducal Court. He was a friend of the Galilei family, and was pleased to see the bright young son, Galileo. When he taught Euclid, the medical student would stand shyly at the schoolroom door, and listen with intense interest. Soon he began to study mathematics secretly; then begged Ricci to teach him, who gladly consented, till the father forbade it, seeing that Euclid interfered with medicine.

Meantime, the youth of nineteen, kneeling at prayers in the Pisa Cathedral, had dreamily watched a bronze lamp swinging from an arch. The oscillations were at first considerable, but as they grew less and less, Galileo observed that they were all performed in the same time, measuring the time by feeling his pulse. The idea occurred to him that an instrument could be constructed which should mark the rate and variation of the pulse. He began to experiment, and soon invented the pulselogia, which the physicians hailed with great delight. The pendulum was not applied to clocks till a half-century later, but its invention attracted the attention of all scholars.

After four years' residence at Pisa, Vincenzo Galilei appealed to the reigning Grand Duke, Ferdinand de Medici, to grant to his son one of the forty free places founded for poor students, but the request was denied, and Galileo, unable to pay for his doctor's degree, was obliged to leave the university without it. Already he had learned bitter lessons of privation and disappointment, but youth has a brave heart, and looks ever toward the sunlight.

He went back to his home in Florence to study the works of Archimedes, whom he called his "master," to write his first essay on his Hydrostatic Balance, and to earn the reputation of a bold inquirer in geometrical and mechanical speculations. The father had now given up all hope of a fortune coming through medicine! Henceforward, the genius which was to shed lustre on his own name, otherwise buried in obscurity, was to have its own bent, and work out its own destiny.

If we are in earnest, a door opens sooner or later; but our own hands usually open it. At twenty-four a door opened to Galileo. Marquis Guidubaldo, a celebrated mathematician, appreciating what the young scientist had done, began a correspondence with him, and a valuable friendship resulted. The marquis asked him to study the position of the centre of gravity in solid bodies. Galileo applied himself to it, and wrote a valuable essay, which waited fifty years for publication. Perhaps no person can be really great who has not learned patience, and Galileo had many lessons in this virtue before he died.

Through the influence of the marquis, he was brought to the notice of Ferdinand I., reigning Grand Duke, who appointed him to the mathematical professorship at Pisa. This was a great honor for a young man of twenty-six, one who had been too poor to take his degree. The salary was small, less than a hundred dollars a year; but he earned somewhat by the practice of medicine, by lectures on Dante and other literary subjects, and by lessons to private pupils. Of course, he had little or no leisure; but he thus learned one of the most valuable lessons of life, – to treasure time as though it were gold. How glad his father and mother must have been that their wool projects had come to naught!

The professors at Pisa, with a single exception, Jacopo Mazzoni, in the chair of philosophy, were opposed to the new-comer. They were all disciples of Aristotle, and had not Galileo, when a boy among them, dared to oppose the great Grecian? And now, to make matters worse, he had taken some friends to the top of the Leaning Tower, and had put to the test the belief of two thousand years, – that the rate at which a body falls depends upon its weight. When the different weights fell to the pavement at the foot of the Leaning Tower, at the same time, the learned were astonished. If Aristotle could be wrong in one thing, he might in others, and this young man would revolutionize the teaching of the times!

The feeling became so strong against the investigator that after three years at Pisa he resigned. When will the world learn toleration for those whose opinions are different from the popular thought? From Galileo to Darwin we have persecuted the men and women whose views were unlike our own in theology, in science, or in social matters.

Through his friend, the Marquis Guidubaldo, the mathematical professorship at Padua was obtained for Galileo. He was now twenty-nine, and becoming widely known throughout Italy. His father had just died, leaving the whole family, a wife and four children, dependent upon him for support; not a small matter for an ambitious and hard-working professor.

Padua gave the young man cordial welcome. Vincenzo Pinelli, a learned nobleman, who possessed eighty thousand volumes, mentioned him to Tycho Brahe, the great Danish astronomer, as a man whom it would be well to cultivate; but the Dane was too cautious about his own reputation, and did not write Galileo till eight years later, and died the following year.

An associate of Tycho Brahe was wiser than his master, and sent Galileo his new book, "Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicum." A warm letter of thanks went back to the immortal John Kepler, saying: "Many years ago I became a convert to the opinions of Copernicus, and by that theory have succeeded in fully explaining many phenomena which on the contrary hypothesis are altogether inexplicable. I have drawn up many arguments and compilations of the opposite opinions, which, however, I have not hitherto dared to publish, fearful of meeting the same fate as our master Copernicus, who, although he has earned for himself immortal fame amongst the few, yet amongst the greater number appears as only worthy of hooting and derision; so great is the number of fools."

John Kepler, like Galileo, lived a pathetic life. His childhood was spent in the little beer-shop of his wretchedly poor father. At six he had a severe attack of small-pox, and his eyes were permanently weakened. He was put to the plough, but his delicate body could not bear the work. At last, through charity, he became a theological student at Tübingen. But here he began to think for himself, and, probably, would have been obliged to leave the university.

Fortunately for science, he heard some lectures given by Michael Möstlen, famous in mathematics and astronomy. A new world opened to Kepler. He applied himself with all the ardor of youth, and at twenty-two became professor of mathematics at Grätz, in Styria. He was soon driven away from this Catholic stronghold, on account of his Protestant faith. Tycho Brahe heard of his needs, and made him his assistant at Prague, with a salary of seven hundred and fifty dollars a year. This seemed regal splendor to the poor astronomer. Now he studied the heavens with hope and delight.

But sorrows soon came. His children died, his wife became insane, and died also. The salary could not be paid, on account of the religious wars which convulsed Germany. He wrote almanacs, took private pupils, and in all ways tried to support his second wife and children, while he studied the heavens year by year, discovering his three great laws. The mathematical calculations for the first law, that the planets move in elliptical orbits round the sun, which is placed at one of the foci, filled seven hundred pages. His "Harmonies of the World" contained his third great law: "The squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportioned to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun."

Such was his joy when he discovered this law, after seventeen years of labor, that he said, "I have written my book. It will be read; whether in the present age or by posterity matters little. It can wait for its readers. Has not God waited six thousand years for one to contemplate his works?" In a last fruitless attempt to recover twenty-nine thousand florins, owed him by the government, worn out with want and disappointment, he fell ill and died at Ratisbon, leaving thirty-three works, twenty-two volumes in manuscript, and his family in the direst poverty. Such was the man who admired Galileo in his youth, and who stands with him in the admiration of the generations that have come and gone since these two men lived and wrote and suffered.

At Padua, Galileo soon attracted great numbers to his class-room. Often a thousand gathered to hear his lectures, and when the hall was too cramped, he spoke to the people in the open air. He was above the middle height, well proportioned, with cheerful countenance, witty in conversation, and enthusiastic in his manner. So learned that he could repeat by heart much of the works of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Seneca; he was yet modest and unassuming, saying that he never met a man so ignorant but that something might be learned from him.

He labored incessantly. He wrote treatises on Fortifications, on Mechanics, on Gnomonics, on the laws of motion, on the celestial globe, which were copied by his pupils, and sent by them far and wide over Europe. He took a workman into his family, and began to superintend the making of the compass which he had invented, and the thermoscope, or heat indicator, which led in later years to the thermometer. His experiment was made by a "glass bottle about the size of a hen's egg, the neck of which was two palms long, and as narrow as a straw. Having well heated the bulb in his hands, he placed its mouth in a vessel containing a little water, and withdrawing the heat of his hand from the bulb, instantly the water rose in the neck, more than a palm above the level of the water in the vessel."

During the first six years at Padua, his salary rose from about one hundred dollars to five hundred dollars, yearly. All this time, when his mind should have been free from care for his great work, he was beset with difficulties. His sister, Virginia, had married before his father's death, but a promised dowry had never been paid, and now the brother-in-law demanded the payment. The mother, worried over the prospect, wrote to her son, Galileo, "If you carry into effect your intention of coming here next month, I shall be rejoiced, only you must not come unprovided with funds, for I see that Benedetto is determined to have his own, that is to say, what you promised him; and he threatens loudly that he will have you arrested the instant you arrive here. And as I hear you bound yourself to pay, he would have the power to arrest you, and he is just the man to do it. So I warn you, for it would grieve me much if anything of the kind were to happen."

Livia, another sister, had become engaged to a Pisan gentleman, with the promise of a dowry of eighteen hundred ducats, eight hundred of which must be paid down. The "Pisan gentleman" could not burden himself with a wife, without funds to help support her and himself. So Galileo generously, if not wisely, borrowed six hundred ducats, and paid the necessary eight hundred, giving his sister beautiful clothes and house furnishings.

Besides these sisters, Galileo had a lazy brother to provide for, Michelangelo, a young man of some musical talent and elegant manners, with the not unusual gift of being able to spend much and earn little. Galileo obtained a situation for him with a Polish prince, and spent two hundred crowns in getting him ready for the new position. He went thither, but soon returned, and another place had to be procured for him, at the court of the Duke of Bavaria.

While there, instead of helping to pay his sister's dowry, as he had promised, he married; had an extravagant wedding feast, and then wrote his hard-working brother: "I know that you will say that I should have waited, and thought of our sisters before taking a wife. But, good heavens! the idea of toiling all one's life just to put by a few farthings to give one's sisters! This yoke would be indeed too heavy and bitter; for I am more than certain that in thirty years I should not have saved enough to cover this debt."

With all the pressure upon him for money, Galileo kept steadily on in his absorbing studies. In the year 1609, he constructed a telescope. It is true that Hans Lipperhey, of Germany, had invented a spy-glass, and presented it to Prince Maurice, so that the principle was understood; but nobody gave it practical illustration till Galileo, having heard of the glass, began to reflect how an instrument could be made to bring distant objects near. In a leaden tube, he fixed two glasses, both having one side flat, and the other side of the one concave, and the other convex. By this, objects appeared three times nearer and nine times larger. A few days later, he hastened with his leaden tube to Venice, to exhibit it to the Doge and the Senate. He wrote to a friend: —

"Many gentlemen and senators, even the oldest, have ascended at various times the highest bell-towers in Venice, to spy out ships at sea, making sail for the mouth of the harbor, and have seen them clearly, though without my telescope they would have been invisible for more than two hours. The effect of this instrument is to show an object at a distance of, say, fifty miles, as if it were but five miles off.

"Perceiving of what great utility such an instrument would prove in naval and military operations, and seeing that His Serenity greatly desired to possess it, I resolved four days ago to go to the palace and present it to the Doge as a free gift. And on quitting the presence-chamber, I was commanded to bide awhile in the hall of the senate, whereunto, after a little, the Illustrissimo Prioli, who is Procurator and one of the Riformatori of the University, came forth to me from the presence-chamber, and, taking me by the hand, said, 'that the senate, knowing the manner in which I had served it for seventeen years at Padua, and being sensible of my courtesy in making it a present of my telescope, had immediately ordered the Illustrious Riformatori to elect me (with my good-will) to the professorship for life, with a stipend of one thousand florins yearly.'"

This must have been a comfort to the now famous Galileo, as it was, doubtless, to the useless Michelangelo, and the two brothers-in-law! He could now live in comparative peace and rest.

On his return to Padua, he began eagerly to study the heavens. He found that the surface of the moon was mountainous; that the Milky Way was composed of an immense number of small stars and nebulous matter; that Orion, instead of being made up of seven heavenly bodies, had over five hundred stars; and that the Pleiades were not seven, but thirty-six. In January, 1610, he discovered the four moons of Jupiter, and that they revolved around him. July 25 of the same year, he discovered the ring of Saturn; in October, the phases of Venus, and later, the solar spots.

Florence and Padua were in a blaze of excitement. These new discoveries seemed to prove that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but that Copernicus was right when he declared the sun to be the centre. Great opposition began to develop itself. Some of the Aristotelians declared that the telescope of Galileo showed things which do not exist. "It was ridiculous," they said, "that four planets (Jupiter's moons) were chasing each other around a large planet.

"It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn round. If the earth revolves, it must also have an angel in the centre to set it in motion; but if only devils live there, it would, therefore, be a devil who would impart motion to the earth.

"The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all belong to one species; namely, that of stars – they, therefore, all move, or all stand still.

"It seems, therefore, to be a grievous wrong to place the earth, which is a sink of impurity, among the heavenly bodies, which are pure and divine things."

Libri, one of the Pisan professors, spoke of the new discoveries as "celestial trifles." When he died, Galileo naïvely remarked, "Libri did not choose to see my celestial trifles while he was on earth; perhaps he will, now he is gone to heaven."

Galileo now longed for freedom from teaching, that he might have his time for study and writing. He had planned, he said, "two books on the system of the universe; an immense work (idea, concetto), full of philosophy, astronomy, and geometry: three books on local motion, a science entirely new; no one, either ancient or modern, having discovered any of the marvellous accidents which I demonstrate in natural and violent motions; so that I may, with very great reason, call it a new science, discovered by me from its very first principles: three books on mechanics, two on the demonstration of its first principles, and one of problems; and though this is a subject which has already been treated by various writers, yet all which has been written hitherto neither in quantity nor otherwise is the quarter of what I am writing on it. I have also various treatises on natural subjects, on sound and speech, on sight and colors, on the tide, on the composition of continuous quantity, on the motion of animals, and others; besides, I have also an idea of writing some books on the military art, giving not only a model of a soldier, but teaching, with very exact rules, all which it is his duty to know that depends on mathematics; as, for instance, the knowledge of encampment, drawing up battalions, fortifications, assaults, planning, surveying, the knowledge of artillery, the use of various instruments, etc."

With all this work in mind, he resigned the professorship at Padua, and removed to Florence, the Grand Duke Cosmo II. giving him a yearly salary of about one thousand dollars, and the title of Philosopher to His Highness.

His first thought, as ever, was for his family. He asked an advance of two years' salary, and paid the dowry debts of his sisters' grasping husbands.

In 1611, his expenses paid by the Grand Duke, he went to Rome to show his "celestial novelties," as they were called, to the pope and the cardinals. He was received with great attention, and all seemed delighted to look upon the wonders of the heavens, provided always that nothing could be proved against the supposed assertion of the Bible that the earth did not move!

Galileo soon published his "Discourse on Floating Bodies," which aroused violent opposition; "Spots observed on the Body of the Sun," and the "Discourse on the Tides."

Four years later, he was again in Rome to plead for the Copernican system, and to defend his own conduct in advocating a thing in opposition to the Catholic church. He said: "I am inclined to think that the authority of Holy Scripture is intended to convince men of those truths which are necessary for their salvation, and which, being far above man's understanding, cannot be made credible by any learning, or any other means than revelation by the Holy Spirit. But that the same God, who has endowed us with senses, reason, and understanding, does not permit us to use them, and desires to acquaint us in any other way with such knowledge as we are in a position to acquire for ourselves by means of those faculties, that, it seems to me, I am not bound to believe, especially concerning those sciences about which the Holy Scriptures contain only small fragments and varying conclusions; and this is precisely the case with astronomy, of which there is so little that the planets are not even all enumerated."

However, in spite of Galileo's logic, the church decreed that all books which stated the Copernican system as true should be prohibited; as a mathematical hypothesis, it might be speculated upon. This was a great disappointment to Galileo, who loved and revered the Roman Catholic faith. He went home to the Villa Segni, at Bellosguardo, near Florence, and for seven years led a studious and secluded life.

His greatest comfort, during these quiet years, was the devotion of his daughter, Polissena, who had entered a convent as Sister Maria Celeste. While in Padua, Galileo had three children by Marina Gamba, a Venetian woman of inferior station. She afterwards married a man of her own class, and Galileo took his children to his own home; a condition of things possible with the low moral standard of the time. The two daughters were placed in a convent, while the son, Vincenzo, was educated for the profession of medicine, but he seems to have been a disappointment and a source of discomfort.

Maria Celeste, in the convent of St. Matthew, loving and tender, and helpful to all around her, wrote constantly to the man whom she idolized. "I put by carefully," she says, "the letters you write me daily, and when not engaged with my duties, I read them over and over again. This is the greatest pleasure I have, and you may think how glad I am to read the letters you receive from persons who, besides being excellent in themselves, have you in esteem."