The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - Richard Holmes

[Bern]

The story of the men and women who made necessary the coining of a new word - 'scientist' - first inscribed in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1840. 

The principle players are Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphry Davy but the accompanying cast - a big one, characters like Caroline Herschel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mungo Park, Lord Byron, Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage - get plenty of lines. Even the walk-on actors add to the milieu. Dr Peter Mark Roget, a young medical student from Edinburgh and future compiler of Roget's Thesauraus, is one of them. He gets on the nitrous with Davy, who experimented enthusiastically on himself at Bristol's Pneumatic Institution.

With so much history at his disposal, the author does a great job in selecting the most interesting bits. The chapter on the first balloonists is full of them.

Like the story of Dr John Jeffries, an American physician living in London and member of the unofficial British Balloon Club, among the first to see what Google Maps satellite view has made commonplace. Jeffries gave the first truly vivid account of the changing appearance of the ground as seen 'from a bird's eye view, as it is called' ... there was the strange flattening out of hills and buildings, the emergence of previously unsuspected patterns in the foliage of woods, or the cultivation marks in fields, or the branching streets of a town ... the whole world became 'like a beautifully coloured map or carpet'. The creation of the British Ordnance Survey - the first state mapping programme in the world - was party inspired by balloons.

Napoleon's revolutionary army set up a Corps d'Aerostation. Gaston Tissandier, in his 'Histoire des Ballons et Aeronauts Célèbres' (1890), recounts that the young military balloonists took local girls up with them for joyrides and thrilling aerial love-making over the side of the basket, so the first Mile High Club was also formed.

The man who popularised ballooning in England was a twenty-five-year-old Italian, Vincent Lunardi, who we might identify as a dandy by Jon Bounds' visual guide to Dandies and Fops of the British Isles.  An incorrigible flirt and ladies' man, he once mildly shocked a salon of supporters by proposing a toast to himself: 'I give you me, Lunardi - whom all the ladies love.'  150,000 watched his first ascent and he sold exclusive rights to his story, and an in-depth interview, to the Morning Post.

Celebrity is a theme that runs throughout the book - Banks cut a rug through Tahitian society, Davy attracted women by the score to his lectures and experiments - but the 'Age of Wonder' gets knee-deep in the 'terror' too. Can science replace god? The chapter 'Dr Frankenstein and the soul' rescues Mary Shelley's story from its pop-culture trappings and gets truly diabolical.