Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish, and the Nineteenth-Century "Water Controversy" (review)

In the early 1780s, aristocratic natural philosopher Henry Cavendish conducted a series of experiments in which he burned together common air and inflammable air (hydrogen) for the purpose of measuring the resulting reduction in their total volume. Along the way, he found that the exploded airs left behind a coating of dew on his glass apparatus. Intrigued, he conducted a new series of experiments that showed that, when burned at a proportion of two parts inflammable air to one part common air, the airs, in his words, "turned into pure water" (qtd. in Miller 29). At the time, Cavendish did not claim that he had discovered that water was a compound of two gases. Mechanical engineer James Watt, the perfecter of the steam engine, had already deduced that water could "be converted into some kind of air" if only it could be heated enough; on learning of Cavendish's experiment in 1783, he explained the observation as the outcome of the combination of airs (qtd. in Miller 51). "Water," he wrote, "is composed of dephlogisticated (oxygen) and inflammable air, deprived of their latent heat [through an explosion]" (qtd. in Miller 30).

Which one of these men, then, discovered that water was not an element, but rather a compound of gases? The question ignited a controversy that outlived them both. David Philip Miller does not take part in this dispute; he is more interested in why the two men believed they discovered the composition of water and especially in the various processes through which individuals in later years attributed each of them with the discovery. By studying these two phases of the "water controversy," Miller hopes to understand how different interested parties within early Victorian scientific culture employed rival strategies to crown their respective champions as the discoverer of water's true nature.

Miller briefly describes the contest between the rival claimants—which at that time also included Antoine Laurent Lavoisier—in the late eighteenth century. Miller is more concerned with—and readers of Victorian Studies may well be more interested in— the secondary contest over attributing the discovery in the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time, different camps aligned on either side of the Watt-Cavendish divide according to personal, national, and professional interests. On Watt's side stood his son, championing his father as a natural philosopher—something more, in his eyes, than just a mere engineer. James Watt, Jr., undertaking what Miller terms a "filial project," doggedly defended his father's position as water's discoverer in journals, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in correspondence with members of the scientific community. He also worked closely with the second most important Watt promoter, natural philosopher Dominique Arago, whose motives were rooted in his perception of the scientific culture of his native France. Arago complained that the science of the academy was not feeding his country's industrial development. For him, Watt provided the model for linking theory and utility, and Arago's Eloge de James Watt (1839) was a powerful force through which he advocated his position. Miller's analysis of Arago's motives and actions provides a commendable cross-cultural study-within-a-study.

In the most fascinating chapters of the book, Miller describes those who hoist the banner of Cavendish. It is in these chapters that Miller uses the water controversy to shed light on important changes taking place in the culture of Victorian science in the early to mid-century. Those who championed Cavendish, explains Miller, did so for the way he served their project of delimiting the boundaries of their field. Individuals such as William Vernon Harcourt, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, attributed the discovery to Cavendish because of the way he practiced science, because Cavendish asked the right questions—seeking truth rather than utility—and because Cavendish, like other Oxford, Cambridge, and Metropolitan elites, was a proper [End Page...