Alternate Terminology: The Forgotten 19th Century Poet Who Named Our Modern World
- cepmurphywrites
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
I’m aware that on Youtube nowadays there is an irritating prevalence of using the word “forgotten” (or “that you’ve never heard of”) in video titles, which is frequently not true. Possibly the worst case I saw was a video describing Vichy France as “the forgotten Nazi puppet state” which, considering it was the most well-known, iconic and emblematic example of a collaborationist regime, does beg the question of which ones the content creator thought had been remembered. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll forgive me using the word in the title of this article, as I think it is fair to say that rather few people have heard of William Whewell (1794-1866).
I’ve called Whewell a poet in the title, and he was, but in fact he was a polymath – also making contributions to philosophy, divinity, economics and mathematics among others. In the latter subject he introduced the Whewell Equation, used to help describe the shape of curves tangential to straight-line plots. In many ways, Whewell was a last gasp of the ‘Renaissance Man’ before the increasing specialisation of subjects in the nineteenth century. I feel it is fair to say that compared to some of his contemporaries, such as Wordsworth, Longfellow or Tennyson, his poetry has not been particularly well remembered.
However, Whewell changed the world in a different way, which nonetheless still relied on the wordsmith abilities of a poet: he created the basis of the names which underwrite so much of our modern science and technology.
First of all, Whewell created the word scientist itself in the 1830s! In his time, the old term natural philosopher was seen as increasingly old-fashioned and not specific enough, criticised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (another poet!) among others. It was giving way to more specific terms like man of science and cultivator of science, but these were rather clumsy (and, even at the time, it was pointed out that the former was gendered language). Coleridge asked Whewell to come up with an alternative, and scientist was coined by analogy to artist, though Whewell was hesitant because it also evoked economist, which was not a well-respected term in the 1830s. At the time, the Royal Society laughed at him, with Lord Kelvin preferring naturalist and Faraday thinking it sounded awkward. But eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century, the term had caught on.
And it was not alone: Whewell had a genius for coining such terms. He has an entire Wiktionary page for words he invented, an honour usually only reserved for people like Shakespeare. Not only relatively obscure terms like catastrophism in geology (which is no longer contemporary) or paramagnetic in chemistry (which is) but terms any person would recognise like carnivore or linguistics. He named geological periods and taxonomic families. But perhaps his most significant nominative work came in the field of electricity.
Throughout the eighteenth century, there had been increasing interest in static electricity, which could be generated by ‘electric machines’. Benjamin Franklin had proven with his famous kite experiment that lightning was the same phenomenon as electricity – many others were electrocuted trying to replicate his feat. Luigi Galvani (who lent his name to galvanisation) believed that animals contained ‘animal electricity’ when he saw that a dead frog’s legs would twitch when touched with different metals; Alessandro Volta (who lent his name to the volt) disagreed and demonstrated that the electricity stemmed from those metals themselves, with the frog acting as a medium between them. Volta proved the effect was not related to life by inventing the “Voltaic pile”, a stack of alternating discs of copper (or silver) and zinc discs with brine-soaked cloth in between. Electricity was generated, then sometimes called Galvanic electricity, as opposed to the Franklinic electricity in lightning. (Needless to say, Whewell coined the latter term, though it wasn’t one of his more lasting efforts)
The Voltaic pile was, in fact, the first battery, to use modern terminology. In a number of languages, “pile” is still used as the term for battery. In fact the latter term is often misused in English. Batteries were originally called that because they were multiple piles or cells in series, by analogy to a battery of guns (several artillery cannons used together). The term battery has become so synonymous with electrical cells in English that today, people are often confused by hearing the term battery in its artillery context and assume it must mean something electrical!
In the early nineteenth century, scientists such as Michael Faraday were using the Voltaic pile as a source of electricity to do something new: split chemical compounds into their components. Faraday was one of the greatest scientists in history, the father of the science of electromagnetism and the first to give the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, paving the way for the important field of scientific outreach to the general public. Considering this, it is all the more impressive that he was from a humble background and self-taught; working as a bookbinder’s apprentice, he read the textbooks he was binding and learned from them, then became assistant to Sir Humphry Davy. It was his work on electricity that was most influential, with the unit of capacitance, the farad, being named after him. Remarkably, he achieved all this while knowing only very basic mathematics, and it took the genius of James Clerk Maxwell to turn Faraday’s electromagnetic discoveries in four mathematically beautiful equations.
Lacking a classical education, Faraday turned to Whewell when it came to naming his work and discoveries. It is still somewhat true even today that, if you make a scientific discovery and you want people to take it seriously, you need to create a Greek or Latin compound word to emphasise how impressive it is. For example, Faraday’s experiments in which he used electricity to split chemical compounds were dubbed electrolysis by Whewell, from electro + lysis (splitting) in Greek, a term which is still widely used today and remains relevant. In an electrolysis experiment, two different metals are (typically) immersed in a liquid containing the chemical being split and then hooked up to the source of electricity; one of these metals gradually seems to break down and is deposited in turn on the other metal. The chemical is split into negatively and positively charged fragments, with the positive ones going to the metal into which the negative electric charge is flowing and the negative ones going to the metal linked to the positive terminal of the battery.
By the way, if you find it confusing that electricity is a flow of negative charge, blame Ben Franklin for guessing it the wrong way around – even now, engineers routinely have circuit diagrams where the ‘conventional current flow’ is drawn in as positive to negative, even though we have known this is wrong for over a century!
Anyway, Faraday needed terminology to name all this. Due to Franklin getting it backwards, he thought electricity flowed from the positive to the negative. As such, the positive metal was named the cathode by Whewell, from Greek kato ‘downwards’ and hodos ‘way, road’. The negative metal was named the anode, from the Greek for ‘upwards’ and ‘way’. Faraday himself came up with the general term electrode for either, by linking ‘electric’ and hodos. At the time, atomic theory was still controversial and Faraday did not truly know what the positive and negatively charged fragments of chemical moving to the electrodes were, but a term for them was also needed. The Greek word ienai means ‘to go’ and the neuter present participle is ion, so that is the term Whewell proposed. An ion would be any charged fragment, with a cation being specifically a positively charged one and an anion being a negative one.
These are not even the only terms Whewell coined, but long after his death, they would form the basis for a shift in the English language. It was hypothesised that there was an indivisible quantity of electric charge, which the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney named ‘electron’ in 1891, from ‘electric + ion’ – the term Whewell had created. Six years later, J. J. Thomson and his team identified the electron as a particle.
From the electron and the related term electronics for technology that manipulates electrons, the suffix -tron was launched into the public consciousness as a term associated with science, technology and advancement. Some of these terms remained in the realm of science itself, like synchrotron and cyclotron (two types of particle accelerator) or klystron and magnetron (types of vacuum tube, the latter used in radar and microwave ovens). Others were copied as the terms circulated into the public consciousness: a Jumbotron is a large visual display at US sports matches, a Mellotron is an electronic instrument, Trinitron (from trinity + tron) is a groundbreaking type of colour television tube patented by Sony. Or what about the impact on fiction – Transformers have Cybertron, Megatron, and Galvatron, Marvel has Ultron, anime has Voltron, and so on, and so on. Not to mention, of course, Tron!
Other terms have come and gone in science and technology. As well as all the -trons, the early to mid-twentieth century is also associated with the prefix ‘Nu-‘ (for ‘new’ and also sounding like ‘pneu-‘) or ‘X-o-matic’ (from ‘automatic’) for new wonder products. Yet ‘-tron’ seems to be seen as less dated and still sticking around to this day: for example, Audi launched a range of electric cars in 2009 called the ‘e-tron’.
Just think: without this one poet’s skill with coming up with scientific terminology, so many things in our world would have been named very differently…
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
The Twilight's Last Gleaminghttps://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/the-death-of-zeitgeist-and-the-reflective-superheroes-of-the-mid-2000s.7314/
among others.