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Vol. 25:3 ISSN 0160-8460 Fall 1997
Spotlight on Documentary Editing
December 17, 1997, marks the bicentennial of the birth of Joseph Henry, the premier American scientist of the 19th century and the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. We spotlight the Joseph Henry Papers project in celebration of this event.
Keepers of the Flame by Patrick Hughes
Joseph Henry's state funeral in 1878 was the most impressive since that of Abraham Lincoln.
"I was . . . in Washington when this good man died," said William Tecumseh Sherman, and "felt in the very air the evidence of universal grief; saw the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court pay a just respect to his memory and follow him to his grave. . . ."
"A Loss to All the Nation," headlined the New York Times, as newspapers throughout the country and overseas reported Henry's passing.
Eight months later the Congress held a special joint session to eulogize his memory.
Five years after his death, the government was closed for the dedication on the national mall of Henry's congressionally commissioned nine-foot bronze statue. John Philip Sousa led the Marine Band in the inaugural performance of a march he composed for the occasion.
Two decades after his death, the great man was chosen as one of 16 immortals honored by a circle of statues in the Library of Congress, two for each of eight categories of human achievement. His companion scientist was Isaac Newton. His other peers included Beethoven, Homer, Michelangelo, Moses, Plato, and Shakespeare. Never before or since has America so honored a man of science.
In 1954, the National Historical Publications Commission named Joseph Henry to a list of great Americans whose papers were most worthy of publication. In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Smithsonian Institution co-sponsored and launched the Joseph Henry Papers project.
Today it is the job of science historian Marc Rothenberg and his small staff to recapture and document Henry's indispensable contributions to science and American life. They work next door to the Castle where Joseph Henry and his family lived while he was Secretary of the Smithsonian. To date eight annotated volumes of Henry's papers most pertinent to the history of American science and culture have been published and work has begun on volume nine. Up to six more volumes are planned. Henry is the only American scientist who is the subject of a major papers publication project.
Yet most Americans today have never even heard of Joseph Henry, the most famous American scientist of the 19th century.
"It's a classic paradox," says Rothenberg, editor of The Papers of Joseph Henry, "and a sad reflection of how our society has lost its appreciation of the crucial need for people with the guts and determination to search for basic truths, rather than pursuing only practical and immediate-payoff applications."
Henry himself insisted - vehemently, if necessary - that basic research was of fundamental importance to American society, and as Secretary he molded the Smithsonian into a national and global clearinghouse for scientific research and the communication of scientific knowledge for the benefit of humanity. To do this, he personally corresponded with almost every scientist of significance in the United States and many overseas.
"It is in the study of objects considered trivial and unworthy of notice by the casual observer that genius finds the most important and interesting phenomena," Henry wrote in 1853, pointing out how Isaac Newton's study of soap bubbles eventually led to the wave theory of light and Luigi Galvani's research on the muscle contraction of a frog led to a new branch of science: electrochemistry.
"You can't understand America without understanding the history of American science and technology," says Rothenberg, "and to do that, you need to understand the central role played by Joseph Henry. His unique achievements gave science and basic research great political and public credibility."
In 1842, the famous English scientist Michael Faraday told one of Henry's students that "by far the greatest man of science your country has produced since Benjamin Franklin is Professor Henry." Most of Henry's contemporaries shared this view. Indeed, because of his own pioneering experiments with electricity, he was, with Franklin, a founding father of the Electric Age.
Though Henry published scientific papers on a wide variety of subjects - including acoustics, astrophysics, electricity, electromagnetism, meteorology, molecular forces, optics, sunspots, and terrestrial magnetism - his
Joseph Henry's statue stands at the entrance to the Smithsonian Castle. Photograph by Rick Vargas, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
international scientific reputation was based primarily on his work in basic and applied electromagnetism.
Among his many discoveries and inventions in this field were mutual induction, self-induction, improved and sophisticated electromagnets, the electric relay, the concept of the electric transformer, and the electric motor - which runs everything from trains to vacuum cleaners and toothbrushes.
Henry's work in electromagnetic induction was the scientific foundation for the development of the telegraph and telephone, and thus the launching pad for the 19th-century communications revolution that forever changed human society.
Henry, an idealist, saw himself as a citizen scientist, with a social responsibility to apply scientific knowledge for the public good. Accordingly, he didn't patent his inventions, but made them freely available to others. In addition, he personally counseled Samuel F.B. Morse, who subsequently patented electromagnetic telegraphs in the United States, as well as Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. While Bell gratefully acknowledged his debt to Henry, Morse disavowed Henry's impact on his work.
In 1846, Henry was elected the first Secretary of the Smithsonian on the proposition that the office should be held by the greatest living American scientist. As Secretary, Henry was advisor to presidents, cabinets, and members of Congress on all aspects of science and technology. He had tremendous influence on the careers of other scientists and the livelihoods of inventors. Even the future of various government scientific activities depended in part on his support and his ability to convince members of Congress or cabinet members of their scientific value.
"His name has been for years a name of power, having the weight of recognized and fixed authority in all civilized lands," ran an article in the New York Evening Post following his death. "He sat for years at the receipt of customs in the world of investigation and discovery; he was father confessor to all searchers for scientific truth. To him all investigators came, as to a father, with reports of their triumphs, and through him their discoveries were made known to the world.... It was a place of great honor, great influence, great power that he held, and no man ever filled such a position more worthily."
In the days after Henry's death there was newspaper speculation about who might take his place. The consensus among his scientific peers, however, was that Henry had been unique, and his place could never be filled.
Recommended Reading:
Albert E. Moyer, Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). [The first scholarly biography of Henry in two generations. Its author is a professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.]
The eight volumes of The Papers of Joseph Henry published to date are available from the Smithsonian Institution Press. To order volumes of the Henry papers or Professor Moyer's biography, call 800-782-4612.
For more information about the Joseph Henry Papers Project, visit the project's home page on the Smithsonian Institution's Web site www.si.edu, or wrote to Marc Rothenberg, Joseph Henry Papers Project, MRC 429, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560.
The Joseph Henry Papers staff, from left: Kathleen Dorman, assistant editor; Deborah Jeffries, historian; Frank Millikan, historian; and Marc Rothenberg, editor.
