A Short History of Nearly Everything

This chapter focuses on the origins and advances of geology. Bryson introduces a genius scientist by the name of James Hutton, who “almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly…created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth” (64).

A predominant question of the late 1700s was wondering how ancient clamshells and other marine fossils could be found on mountaintops. A group known as the Neptunists thought that every natural phenomenon could be explained by rising and falling sea levels. They believed “that mountains, hills, and other features were as old as the Earth itself, and were changed only when water sloshed over them during periods of global flooding” (65). On the other hand, the Plutonists believed that volcanoes were responsible for changing the face of the planet. While neither group could definitively account for seashells on mountaintops, Hutton deduced that the seashells on mountaintops had risen along with the mountains themselves. He gathered this insight while observing the gradual geological changes of his farmland, but it was a theory that suggested, for the first time, that Earth processes require vast amounts of time.

Despite Hutton’s genius, he was a terribly dull and unskilled writer. After writing his theories into a paper, and then eventually a two-volume book, they received virtually no attention. It wasn’t until five years after his death, in 1802, that Hutton’s close friend, John Playfair, wrote a simplified and elegant version of Hutton’s work entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Finally, Hutton’s work was well received by the small group of scholars who took an active interest in geology.

In 1807, a group of thirteen men met at a Freemasons Tavern and started a dining club called the Geological Society. The men weren’t academics, but they were exceedingly wealthy and had the time and money to spend their summers doing fieldwork, or “stone breaking,” as they called it. The club was a space to share their findings. Barely a decade later, membership had grown to four hundred, and geology had become the hot topic of the nineteenth century.

Bryson mentions many notable men who were at the forefront of geology. Dr. James Parkinson, best known for studying Parkinson’s disease,was one of the founding members of the Geological Society and the author of Organic Remains of a Former World, a vital geological text. Then there is Charles Lyell, a wealthy young man who became devoted to geology after studying under Reverend William Buckley at Oxford. Buckley was a leading authority on coprolites, or fossilized feces.

Bryson also explains how rocks used to be categorized by the timeperiod in which they came from (Devonian, Jurassic, etc.) by spans of time (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.), or even by epochs (Pleistocene, Pliocene, etc.). However, as Bryson states, “For most of the nineteenth century geologists could draw on nothing more than the most hopeful guesswork” (74). Scientists including Edmond Halley, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Charles Darwin, and Lord Kelvin all attempted to hypothesize the age of the Earth, and all failed miserably.

This chapter is all about the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and how these were essential to understanding the age of the Earth. Bryson begins by describing the many early blunders on the part of scientists to correctly identify dinosaur bones. First Bryson talks about Dr. Caspar Wistar, an anatomist, who, at a meeting for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, was given a strange, never-before-seen bone. Instead of correctly identifying the bone’s significance, Wistar brushed it off. This bone belonged to a hadrosaur, and had Wistar recognized its importance, he would have discovered dinosaurs a half century before anyone else.

Bryson also describes a strange rumor that was sweeping the globe due to French naturalist Comte de Buffon. Buffon, in his highly-regardedHistoire Naturelle, described America as a stagnant land lacking virility and vigor, despite the fact that he had never so much as visited it. Thomas Jefferson met these claims with contempt, and sent Buffon the body of a moose to prove that America had strong and mighty creatures. This sparked a discovery spree in America amongst naturalists, where ancient bones were being uncovered at unprecedented rates. While it was clear that massive beasts had once roamed America, unfortunately the naturalists were putting the bones together incorrectly. For example, the tusks of a mammoth were screwed on upside down, as the naturalists assumed that the “creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing” (81). This continued until Georges Cuvier, a man whose genius was in his ability to put a pile of bones together correctly. He correctly put the bones of the mammoth together, wrote a paper on it, and named the creature a mastodon. Cuvier also believed that the Earth experienced global catastrophes that in turn wiped out entire species.

Bryson moves on to William Smith, who brought clarity and cohesion to rock dating. He noticed that “By noting which species appeared in which strata, you could work out the relative ages of rocks wherever they appeared” (82). This is important considering the paleontological momentum that began occurring all over the world. In 1812, in England, a child named Mary Anning found a fossilized sea monster, today known as the Ichthyosaurus. She went on to spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils and revealing to the world that strange creatures once existed that don’t now. In the same vein, Gideon Algernon Mantell was a doctor and bone collector who found innumerous dinosaur fossils, including the Hylaeosaurus. However, Mantell didn’t get credit for his findings. Instead, a man named Richard Owen, the leading expert on “all kinds of animals living and extinct—from platypuses, echidnas, and other newly discovered marsupials to the hapless dodo and other extinct giant birds,” was credited with coining the term dinosauria, which means “terrible lizard” (88). Bryson points out that Mantell and Owen lived as enemies, and that Owen often stole other people’s research. However, one good thing came out of Owen: he created what we know today as the modern museum.

Feuds ran rampant during this time in paleontology. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, two men responsible for discovering “Nearly every dinosaur that the average person can name,” worked in such a competitive and reckless state that they constantly rediscovered the same species, collectively working to make a huge classification mess, some of which still isn’t sorted out to this day (93).

Bryson states that “by the turn of the twentieth century, paleontologists had literally tons of old bones to pick over. The problem was that they still didn’t have any idea how old any of these bones were” (95). This resulted in a slew of scientists trying to estimate the date of the Earth. While many got it wrong, a farm boy from New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford, “produced pretty well irrefutable evidence that the Earth was at least many hundreds of millions of years old, probably rather more” (96). 

This chapter details how chemistry moved from the practice of alchemy to a respectable science. For much of the eighteenth century, scientists often walked the line between alchemy and chemistry, resulting in bizarre and accidental discoveries. Bryson mentions Hennig Brand, a man convinced that he could turn urine into gold. After letting fifty buckets of urine stew in his cellar for months and converting it into paste, the substance began to glow and suddenly ignite into flame. Thus, Brand accidently discovered phosphorous. However, Swedish chemist Karl Scheele made the substance profitable by using it to invent matches. Brand went on to discover eight elements and various useful compounds, but didn’t receive recognition for any of them. Strangely, Brand insisted on tasting every substance he worked with, which ultimately led to his untimely death at the age of forty-three.

This century marked an obsession with élan vital, the mysterious force that brought objects to life. Bryson states that:

“No one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to the full effect in her novel Frankenstein) and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did not) (99).

It was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who “thrust chemistry into the modern age” (99). A member of minor nobility, Lavoisier, alongside his fourteen-year-old wife, spent most of his days in his home laboratory. While he never discovered a new element, he helped to make sense of other people’s findings, “identified oxygen and hydrogen for what they were and gave them both their modern names,” and helped found the metric system (100). His genius was cut short by the French Revolution; in 1793, during the Reign of Terror, Lavoisier was beheaded.

Bryson points out that “chemistry, having come so far in the eighteenth century, rather lost its bearings in the first decades of the nineteenth” (102). Nitrous oxide was discovered, but people used it as a recreational drug long before they realized it could be used as an anesthetic during surgery. Count Von Rumford, also known as Benjamin Thompson, discovered thermodynamics and invented such useful objects as a drip coffeemaker and thermal underwear. He also founded the Royal Institute, the learned society that actively promoted chemistry as a science, and propelled Humphry Davy into the spotlight. Due to electrolysis, the “technique of applying electricity to a molten substance,” Davy discovered a dozen new elements (104).

Bryson goes on to mention other notable chemists. John Dalton, a Quaker, was the “first person to intimate the nature of the atom,” while Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro discovered that “two equal volumes of gases of any type, if kept at the same pressure and temperature, will contain identical numbers of molecules” (104). Sweden’s J.J. Berzilius became the first person to decide that elements should be abbreviated by their Greek or Latin names, and Ivanovich Mendeleyev created what is known today as the periodic table. Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie discovered radium, which eventually killed Curie—she died of leukemia from radiation poisoning.