No comments about Francis Blake: An Inventor's Life 1850-1913 (Historical Society).

1 comments about The Tree Collector: The Life and Explorations of David Douglas.

1. This is a page-turner for gardener and non-gardener alike. It includes many of the journal entries and letters that survive David Douglas' incredible travels, particularly in the Pacific Northwest in the early 19th century. His experiences on a 10,000 mile walk between the Pacific coast and Hudson Bay are unimaginable today. He collected over 200 species -- important sources today of timber as well as ornamental garden plants. This biography suggests that his death at age 35 by falling into a wild-animal trap in Hawaii may have been murder and not an accident as commonly thought.

5 comments about Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Fabulous Kite.

1. I enjoyed this book because the author obviously likes and respects Benjamin Franklin so the story of how he flew the kite is one of a celebration of Franklin. As an ex-US History I know the playful mischiefness wit of Franklin is lost in our classrooms. The book does a great job of exposing this other side of Franklin so often lost.



2. In the last couple of years we've had major biographies of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands, Walter Isaacson, and Edmund Morgan. Now we have Tom Tucker's take on Franklin the "electrical scientist." (Gosh, we haven't even gotten to the tricentennial of Franklin's birth, which will be in 2006. One wonders what's in the publishing pipeline!) This book has quite a few pros and cons. Here are the pros: Because of the 3 recent general biographies, we probably didn't need another one. Mr. Tucker has done us a service by electing to concentrate on Franklin the scientist. And although Mr. Tucker's background is in writing about science, he has an engaging "popular" style. There's nothing dry about this book. Another plus is that Mr. Tucker goes to great pains to show us how myth becomes enshrined as reality. He makes a pretty good case that Franklin never actually flew his "electric kite." Looking carefully at the primary sources, we see that Franklin gave instructions on how to construct such a kite, but never actually claimed to have conducted the "kite in a thunderstorm" experiment himself. He was also uncharacteristically evasive when questioned about details of the experiment. Mr. Tucker also points out that Franklin was not averse to a bit of self-promotion. If people wanted to assume that he had flown a kite in a thunderstorm....well, he wasn't going to disabuse them of the notion. Likewise, although Franklin came up with the idea and "blueprint" for the lightning rod, he apparently tooted his own horn by lying to his European "colleagues" when he claimed that lightning rods were being attached to public buildings in Philadelphia earlier than the historical evidence shows they were. Franklin was presumably miffed that the Royal Society in London had been virtually ignoring the papers he had written on electricity up to this point, and was trying to gain some respect. (There is also evidence that Royal Society member William Watson was trying to claim some of Franklin's theories and experiments had originated, independently, with himself.) So, those are the pros. What are the cons? Perverse as it may seem, zeroing in on Franklin the scientist is one of them. Frankly, (sorry, I couldn't resist) there isn't a whole lot to zero in on. Taking 237 pages to prove that Franklin didn't fly a kite in a thunderstorm, and that he lied about when the first domestic lightning rod was constructed, can tax your patience. Also, anyone who has read anything previous on Franklin won't be surprised by the author's comments that Franklin was fond of hoaxes, practical jokes, and that he was a lot more sophisticated than his public persona. However, the most grievous "negative" is that the author tries to assert that Franklin was responsible for our victory in the Revolutionary War. The logic is as follows: Franklin's self-promotion as an "electrical scientist" resulted in his being immensely popular in France. He parlayed this popularity into gaining a great deal of influence with Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, et al. Bingo....he convinced the French to form an alliance with the upstart Americans, which enabled us to win the war. While it is true that Franklin was popular and had influence, it is a long stretch to say that he was single-handedly responsible for the French coming in on the American side. Other Americans, such as John Adams, played key roles, and the French had excellent reasons of their own to enter the fray. Mr. Tucker may have felt that the basic theme of his book didn't quite pack enough of a wallop, and so he decided to "jazz" the narrative up with "The French Connection." But, he took things a bit too far. In any case, this book is worth reading for its exploration of myth vs. reality and for its elucidation of 18th century professional jealousy and backbiting within the world of the "electrical scientists."



3. Tom Tucker's thesis -- that Ben Franklin's most famous and dramatic scientific experiment was a hoax -- holds up surprisingly well for most of his book. Tucker competently details the history of the eighteenth century science surrounding electricity, the various experiments with the phenomenon throughout Europe, and the personalities involved with its controversies. He is almost convincing in his portrayal of Franklin as something of an intellectually ambitious crank, using the sage of Philadelphia's numerous and well-documented literary hoaxes, among other things, to support the case for Franklin's alleged scientific hoaxes (the flying of the kite being but one of several scientific hoaxes Tucker says Franklin made up).

   Tucker undermines his own book, however, by stretching his claims too far. He argues that Franklin's most famous scientific hoax was responsible for his oversized reputation in Europe, and that this reputation among Europeans was responsible, in turn, for Franklin's success as a diplomat in France during the Revolutionary War. Since France's support was a major factor in the American colonies winning their freedom from England, Tucker believes Franklin's hoax might have freed the American colonists: "It might have been a kite, the story of a kite, the hoax that won the American Revolution."

   Of course that's a ludicrous judgment. And this highly questionable claim led me to look into how well Tucker's other claims on Franklin stand up. Even though "Bolt of Fate" was only just recently published, Walter Isaacson, the author of "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" deals with Tucker's claims in a long footnote in his biography, and he is mostly dismissive of them. Isaacson writes, "[Tucker's] book does not address the detailed evidence I. Bernard Cohen cites on this question and is, I think, unpersuasive. Franklin's kite description is in no ways similar to his literary hoaxes, and if untrue would have been an outright lie rather than a hoax. Tucker also makes the odd allegation that Franklin's description of his sentry box experiment was a death threat to the president of the London's Royal Society.... The comprehensive analysis by Cohen, a professor of the history of science who is the foremost authority on Franklin's electrical work, addresses fully and more convincingly the issues surrounding Franklin's sentry box, kite, and lightning rods." [Page 534]

   I have not read Cohen's research, and so I'm not able to affirm Isaacson's judgments comparing it and Tucker's work. I can say that there are parts of Tucker's book which are interesting and valuable, and other parts in which its claims seem greatly overdone. Read "Bolt of Fate" for enjoyment, but also with more than a little caution.




4. I give this book three stars because it is basically fun and entertaining. However, much of the speculation about Franklin's elaborate hoax is based on reading between the lines in letters that Franklin wrote, or in just analyzing his over-all personality. One has to wonder how accurate this approach is several centuries after the fact. If you have more time, I would suggest reading one of the books about Franklin's over-all scientific career instead of this book, or maybe along side this book.



5. [This review was presented at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table in New York City, October 2, 2007.]
   
   The title ... might lead you to think we're pondering an academic version of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, but happily this book is a great deal more, a serious contribution to the history of science and its interplay with society.
   One might think, since people have undoubtedly always received shocks when shuffling across carpets, that natural philosophers would have sustained a steady curiosity in the phenomenon through the centuries, and made consistent but plodding progress in examining it. Well, apparently not. Beginning around 1743, and peaking over the next ten years, electricity was suddenly a huge European fad that gripped everyone, from serious scientists to high society to middle-class dilettantes to fair-going country bumpkins. It was suddenly realized that static electricity could be generated at will, by creating friction against a spinning glass jar; and with it, you could not only attract confetti up to your hand, you could make bells ring without touching them, or inflame a glass of brandy. Better yet, you could--in the pure interest of science--ask a willing, electrically-charged young man and a willing but neutral young lady, to touch, and enjoy the mildly prurient result of their shared convulsive shock. In 1746, the invention of the Leyden jar, forerunner of the electrical storage battery, made these parlor tricks into a new mass entertainment, fascinating everyone from village taverns to royal palaces.
   One who caught the bug was the successful Philadelphia entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin. In March 1747, Franklin wrote a friend that he was "totally engrossed" in the subject. Tucker, who has written on the history of invention before, goes to some pains to demonstrate that Franklin made genuine scientific contributions to the subject over the next few years. Among other things, in the process of meticulous experimentation on the properties of electricity, it was Franklin who coined positive, negative, plus, minus, and battery as electrical terminology.
   Franklin kept current with scientific progress in Europe, and he knew that he'd done original and valuable work. He reported his efforts in the detailed epistolary style of the day to members of the British Royal Society. But not only did the colonial unknown get no thanks and no recognition for his labors, one of the best-known British scientists, the man to whom his letters were entrusted, William Watson, proceeded to plagiarize him.
   This is the point at which Tucker's revisionist thesis kicks in. A subsequent missive Franklin wrote in 1750 contained what was known as the "sentry box experiment," in which a long iron rod was to be erected vertically into the sky and bent around into an open-fronted sentry box so that the bottom of the rod, hanging free, would not get wet, and then a person could supposedly conduct electrical experiments with it during a thunderstorm! The author asserts that, though phrased in bland scientific terms, Franklin's "experiment" was intended, and would have been received, as a sarcastic invitation to his nemesis to go commit suicide. Fortunately, no one ever attempted the sentry-box as Franklin originally wrote it. In May of 1752, however, some French experimenters, having read it in translation and taken it seriously, made some common sense revisions. They set up the rod as directed, but left a Leyden jar in the sentry box rather than a person. When lightning struck the rod, the rod charged the Leyden jar just as static electricity would have, demonstrating that lightning was electricity. Twitting the Royal Society, the Frenchmen gave profuse tribute to the unknown American, and Benjamin Franklin became world-famous overnight.
   This put him into a serious fix, however. The question now was, what had happened when he did the experiment? Tucker's thesis is that Franklin stepped back, punted, and scored a touchdown: he dreamed up the famous electric kite experiment, intimated--but never precisely declared in so many words--that he'd already done it, and claimed it proved conclusively that the spark you get at the doorknob and lightning are one and the same. Franklin's clincher was an assertion to the Europeans that, by the by, we in Pennsylvania are already using iron rods to protect our buildings ... which was a bold-faced fib, but which catapulted Franklin to even greater fame, and was quickly backed up by instructions casually published in his Almanac for 1753.
   Franklin went, according to our author, from being a scientist whose hard work had not been credited to a scientist credited for a proof he hadn't really originated. We might like to believe that Franklin would struggle tenaciously for his due while piously disclaiming the applause for what he wasn't, but ... that wasn't Franklin. (Nor, of course, was it typical of any of his contemporaries, or of too many geniuses before or since.)
   Tucker devotes a great deal of primary source research to showing us exactly why the image we all share--of heroic Ben mucking about with a kite and a key in a driving rainstorm--is preposterous and simply never happened. I found it both interesting and convincing. His corollary contention--that the fame Franklin achieved as a result of this never-denied myth enabled him to coax the French into an alliance twenty-five years later, and thus "won" the American Revolution--is considerably more arguable ... but still engaging and provocative speculation.
   If you have any special interest in Franklin or in the science of the Age of Reason, I think you'll find Tom Tucker's Bolt of Fate both entertaining and worthwhile.

1 comments about Candid Science II: Conversations with Famous Biomedical Scientists.

1. During his six-year tenure as Editor-in-Chief of The Chemical Intelligencer, István Hargittai, sometimes with his wife Magdi, interviewed more than 120 eminent scientists, more than half of whom were Nobel laureates....
   Hargittai seeks to elicit the stories behind the most important achievements in twentieth-century biomedicine directly from some of their most eminent participants. They tell us about their backgrounds, families and lives, both personal and professional, childhoods (Like me or others of my generation, some had chemistry sets or were inspired by Paul de Kruif¡¦s Microbe Hunters or Sinclair Lewis¡¦ Arrowsmith), influences and career choices, motivations, aspirations, heroes (scientific or otherwise), mentors, hardships and triumphs, philosophies, hobbies and nonscientific interests (several are accomplished musicians), and their seminal discoveries.
   Nobel laureates describe how the prize affected their lives, research, and careers. Most are modest and admit the role of luck in their good fortune (Kary B. Mullis is the sole exception). In reply to Hargittai¡¦s serious questions a number of the conversations are laced with humor.
   Each interview is prefaced with a biographical sketch and includes one or more portraits of the interviewee, many photographed by Hargittai or his wife. The volume contains 176 illustrations of apparatus, formal and informal group portraits, notebooks, letters, models, commemorative postage stamps, plaques, and drawings. Three of the interviewees are now deceased, underscoring the importance of such oral histories. Several scientists discuss their differences with other scientists and competitors.
   On the whole, however, most of the scientists are well acquainted with each other and are mutually supportive, and their names crop up frequently in each other¡¦s interviews. Some offer suggestions as to Nobel-caliber scientists whose candidacy was overlooked.�nAn unusually high proportion of the interviewees (at least 22) are Jewish, so the issues of Judaism, the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism are discussed by many of them.
   In his preface Hargittai states, ¡§The science of the second half of the 20th century was dominated by the biomedical fields and this is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The present selection of interviews gives a cross section covering a broad range of topics, personalities, and circumstances of recording.¡¨ I agree with Hargittai¡¦s assessment and heartily recommend his book, suitable for both complete reading or browsing, to biomedical scientists, biochemists, chemists, historians of chemistry and or science, and general readers interested in the ¡§inside story¡¨ of the workings of 20th century science.

2 comments about George Beadle, an Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century (New England Monographs in Geography).

1. High marks for telling an interesting story well. George Beadle was a old-fashioned, principled country boy from Nebraska. But he and a cast of brilliant colleagues revolutionized how biology is done, and that is the highlight of the book. It is best when showing how Beadle got where he did scientifically. George Beadle was a driven, brilliant workaholic who kept his emotions tightly bottled, like his flies, except fpr short, well-directed bursts of anger directed at lab workers for sloppiness. His wonderful institutional personality contrasts sharply with more infamous, disagreeable sorts, like Delbruck and Watson, who appear later in the book. The book moves along smartly and efficiently, but lapses in a couple areas. I recognize this is a book about biology, but it's also a biography, and so Beadle's personal life is fair game, besides being inherently as interesting as much of the later administrative info, in which the book becomes bogged down. So, here goes: Frequent references are made to the unpleasant personality of George Beadle's first wife, Marion. But no attempt is made to flesh this out in any effective way. What did she say and do that was so offensive to so many people. What was her problem? She remains too much of a mystery, given that she was an important part of Beadle's life. This lack of info contrasts with the often overly detailed, and somewhat murky explanation of the neurospora life cycle. I had to read it three times to understand what they were talking about and have taught this stuff for 20 years. The authors are scientists, not historians or novelists, and it shows. Still, it's close to a page-turner for the first half.



2. A page turner on the excitement of uncovering many secrets of life from the rediscovery of Mendel to the threshold of revealing the genetic dictionary and how it is translated into living forms told by two leading biochemical geneticists.

3 comments about Shark Lady.

1. This book was a great book that I read. What made the book great was that it was mostly about sharks and I love sharks.



2. I am an educator at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. I teach about sharks and the marine environment because I think education is the best conservation tactic we have. My lifelong fascination with sharks and the ocean all began with this book. Eugenie Clark was an inspiration. This book did a marvelous job of conveying Dr. Clark's enthusiam and awe for not just sharks but for science. This book changed my life.



3. Unforgettable. I'd recommend it for children and adults alike. Reading of this woman's adventures had a great impact on how I look at the world. From the story of her childhood to some of her most exciting adventures with the sharks, the book is as masterfully written as any I've known. I can't believe this stuff actually happened.

No comments about On the Frontier.

1 comments about Now Hear This: The Life of Hugh S. Knowles, Acoustical Engineer and Enterpreneur.

1. This excellent publication chronicles the life of Hugh S. Knowles (LF). From his meager and violent beginnings as a youth living in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution to his death in 1988.

   Born in Iowa in 1904, Knowles spent most of his youth in Mexico in the midst of the Revolution. Even during his youth he exhibited great abilities, which led to his graduation from high school at the age of fourteen. His stint in the Merchant marines was a maturing experience, and the beginning of his career as an engineer. His college years almost proved to be too much, as he was talking a full course load each semester while holding done two jobs. His marriage to Josephine proved to be his true soul mate and a remarkable woman herself. She toiled endlessly throughout her entire life to support the family and his companies. Her untimely death at an early age left Hugh and his children devastated.

   As Hugh traveled through life, he had a sincere interest in not only technology, but also the people he dealt with. He was a perfectionist, who always insisted on overseeing the development of produced by Knowles Electronics. He had a personable side to him, as was well respected by not only his peers, but other individuals that he encountered in life. His final years with wife Nancy were reflective.

   The book nicely mixes personal/family history with technology, explaining Hugh's invention in a manner understandable to the non-engineer. Susan Goodwillie gives us in-site into Hugh's fascination with the invention of the transistor and his understanding of its importance and future applications.

No comments about The Last Wali of Swat.

No comments about More Letters of Charles Darwin: A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters. Volume 2.