Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist

For a recent issue of Antenna, the newsletter of SHOT’s Mercurians, I updated a short essay on Joseph Henry’s contributions to radio, referring to his experiments of 1841–42 in which he sent and received electromagnetic signals between two floors of his laboratory and investigated the oscillatory character of the received impulses from thunderstorms as far as eight miles away. My interest was originally piqued by Henry’s own description in his articles on meteorology published in 1859.

When I rewrote this last year, I pulled down from my bookshelf the only two Henry biographies: the memorial volume published soon after his death in 1878, and Thomas Coulson’s Joseph Henry: His Life and Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), in hopes that they might say more. But the books held tantalizingly little detail of the technology or experimental procedures that Henry used.

Had it been available then, Albert E. Moyer’s new volume would have filled in a few blanks, since it focuses on just that early part of Henry’s life, before he took control of the fledgling Smithsonian Institution. However, the book covers primarily his scientific and personal life, with little attention even to his greatest contribution to applied technology, the electromagnetic telegraph. His scientific work with electromagnets and induction is treated very thoroughly, and his disputes with Samuel F. B. Morse and Theodore Vail are described insofar as they bear on his scientific reputation, but technical or social references to the telegraph are largely lacking. Some of the Morse and Vail source material, to judge from the date of 17 March 1997 given in endnote 8 (p. 332), was a last-minute addition to Moyer’s manuscript.

Coulson considered Henry’s entire life; Moyer concentrates on the first half. Coulson took a public view and chiefly used books and published papers; Moyer relies on private letters and documents and has a correspondingly deeper insight. Regrettably, for many readers of this journal at least, Moyer does not say enough about the technologies that Henry’s scientific discoveries spawned.

Moyer’s nearest approaches to technological nitty-gritty come in his quotes from contemporary student notebooks, such as this one on the battery used to power Henry’s large electromagnet (p. 143):

One student who had assisted Henry recalled that the professor “fairly leaped from the floor in excitement when he saw his instrument suspending and holding a weight of more than a ton and a half.” . . . Although graduates of Henry’s course would vividly recall the brute strength of his giant magnet, they also probably remembered the side effects of the large battery used to power the magnet. As one senior noted in his diary during an 1846 demonstration of the magnet, the great volume of hydrogen gas evolved by the battery caused “sneezing and coughing”—each student’s sense of smell “became tortured & wrung until everybody’s eyes became red and gave forth water.” Similarly, in a run of experiments in 1840, Henry attributed recurrent head pain, stomach upset, and even a momentary, partial loss of vision to the fumes.

Other notebook entries, incidentally, record Henry’s unguarded classroom remarks on scientific credit, often at odds with his reserved or even furtive public posture.

What Moyer sets out to do, he does very well. And for anyone familiar only with Henry’s grumpy-walrus portrait from late in life, the cover illustration, an 1845–50 daguerreotype, is a revelation.