IN 1647, on one of his rare visits to Paris, René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, looked up Blaise Pascal to inquire about his claim that he’d created a vacuum. Descartes was fifty-one, Pascal twenty-four. Descartes, by all accounts, was a mousy little man with a large head, projecting brow, long bony nose, eyes wide apart, and hair growing down his forehead nearly to his eyebrows. Pascal, on the other hand—the young upstart mathematician-cum-natural philosopher—was said to be handsome, with a prominent and manly nose, full mouth, and large eyes. As a child, he’d constructed from scratch Euclid’s first thirty-two propositions. He’d written a treatise on conic sections at the age of sixteen and, the same year, invented the first calculator, to relieve his father of the burden of doing sums. His father was a tax collector.
Descartes brought with him three friends and three boys; Pascal had by his side Gilles Personne de Roberval, “the greatest geometrician in Paris and the world’s most disagreeable man,” according to a friend of the Pascals’. Pascal demonstrated his creation of a vacuum, a simple replication of the famous experiment of Evangelista Torricelli, performed three years earlier: he poured mercury into a basin and filled a narrow glass tube, closed at one end, with the same substance. Then, with his middle finger plugging the open end, he turned the tube upside down, plunged it into the basin, and removed his finger. The liquid in the tube dropped, leaving a space that had to be a vacuum.
No, said Descartes. Didn’t Monsieur Pascal know that air was a substance finer than wool, and its fibers had penetrated the glass of the tube? Roberval ridiculed this idea. Later, when Pascal gave his friends an example of a fantasy for which obstinacy alone could win approval, he cited Descartes’s opinions on matter and space—something like the story of Don Quixote, he said.
Descartes suggested an experiment. Pascal should climb a mountain with his basin and tube to see whether the mercury in the tube would be lower at the top than at the foot of the mountain. It should be lower at the top because, Pascal claimed, the weight of the atmosphere determined the level of the mercury, and on a mountain, the atmosphere would weigh less. Parenthetically, Pascal’s creation of a vacuum was also evidence for the existence of an atmosphere.
But Pascal was too weak to climb a mountain. He suffered from intestinal tuberculosis and tuberculous pseudo-rheumatism, and could hardly walk. So Descartes advised him to stay in bed every day until he was tired of being there, and to drink a lot of bouillon.
Three years later Descartes died, before fulfilling his promise to the world to prolong a human life by several centuries.
Pascal did take Descartes’s suggestion, however, by proxy. He instructed his brother-in-law to climb a mountain in central France, the Puy de Dôme, with his basin, tube, and mercury—an embryonic barometer, in fact—and register the mercury’s level at the base and at the summit. At the foot of the mountain it was 26¼ inches; at the top, 23⅙ inches. Pascal had won.
After Descartes’s death, in the 1650s, Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “the great Pan is dead.” I like to think he was referring to Descartes. In the spirit of impish dismissal, it doesn’t take much to see Descartes as Pan. Pascal called Cartesianism the “Romance of Nature,” and Pan in mythology was nature, earth, body, intoxication, bestiality, sexuality, and worse, perhaps—obscurantism. The hairy goat-god with horns and hooves and a prominent chin, who lived in woods and caves and raced across mountains, whose sexual appetite was inexhaustible, may have looked like Descartes too, or a parody of him. Didn’t Descartes inspire his adversaries with terror, just as Pan had done to mortals?—hence our word “panic.”
Pascal, on the other hand, is best thought of as Mercury. One wonders whether he or his brother-in-law knew what the ruins were on the summit of the Puy de Dôme: a Roman temple dedicated to Mercury. He probably drained the mercury market in France when he was performing his experiments. Mercury was swiftness, flight, cleverness, air, commerce, mind, culture, and clarity of message. Descartes as Pan, the Calibanistic grotesque, and Pascal as Mercury. They could have been brothers.
All at once, on that chair, nailing up my thermometer, I saw my brother Paul hunched over an oscilloscope, as he’d once hovered over his balsa-wood airplanes. I’m not sure what he was doing—running tests, checking data. I’d found it in his attic after his death, the same oscilloscope he’d built when I was a teenager. Heavy and cylindrical, the size of a vacuum cleaner.
The chair was so shaky I couldn’t absorb the recoil of the hammer without bringing it to the verge of collapse. I had to tap the nails lightly. This didn’t seem to matter. I could have pushed them in with my thumb, it seemed, the window frame was that rotten. The bracket was flimsy, the thermometer plastic, and neither of them would last the first windstorm, I suspected.
Chaney Instruments in Wisconsin. White thermometer, red liquid. Markings for both Fahrenheit and centigrade. Sixty-nine in the shade.
Around the front of the house, a school bus drove past. I just caught the yellow blur.
What was that red liquid that indicated the temperature? Not mercury, surely. Perhaps colored alcohol, or maybe ethylene glycol, something that can’t freeze up. It resembled a thin line of blood, I thought. My Britannica tells me that in their early incarnations every conceivable liquid was tried in thermometers: water, spirit of wine, linseed oil, mercury, I’eau second—an acid solution of copper nitrate produced in refining gold—turpentine, alcohol, petroleum, I’eau de vie (brandy), saturated salt, olive oil, oil of chamomile, and oil of thyme. Food appears to be a theme in the history of thermometers; no wonder we mount them outside kitchen windows.
The liquid in the tube had been sealed inside a vacuum, or so I assumed. Light and heat pass through vacuums, air and sound do not. We take vacuums for granted today, or, to be more accurate, partial vacuums; the perfect vacuum is still somewhat elusive. Light bulbs and picture tubes operate in vacuums, we vacuum pack coffee, we’ve even coined a verb: to vacuum means to clean. But vacuums were once hotly debated, for religious as well as scientific reasons, and the history of the thermometer is hopelessly entangled with that bitter debate.
As it turns out, Pascal was not the one who formulated the epithet “the great Pan is dead.” It had wide currency in European history. Milton used it, as had Rabelais earlier, and Eusebius before him, and other Christian apologists. Of modern thinkers, Nietzsche mentioned it in The Birth of Tragedy. It can be traced back to Plutarch’s De defectu orac-ulorum, “The Decline of Oracles,” an essay written about claims that the years are getting shorter, the ancient oracles and religions are withering away, and the gods are really demons. As Plutarch tells the story, a ship was passing the island of Paxi when someone shouted that the great Pan was dead, and those onboard should announce it to the mainland.
Christian apologists fastened on this story as a passing of the torch: the death of the old gods, the birth of Christianity. Pan was paganism incarnate, the god of nature, the universal god of the pre-Christian era. Furthermore, it’s clear in Plutarch’s essay that his point is a shocking one: the gods in fact can die, since the gods are really demons.
And what happens when they die? “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” said Pascal in the Pensées. He answered himself in the same work by declaring that the Nothing depended on the All, and one leads to the other. Just as Pan’s death coincided with Christ’s birth, so Pascal’s vacuum—his Nothing—was really a proof of Christ’s existence, since Christ is our All. But this was dangerous territory. The Church disapproved of vacuums. The notion of a vacuum had been championed by such atheists as Epicurus and Lucretius, both enemies of religion. And a vacuum, most philosophers thought, was simply illogical. It posited nothing where something—space—existed. And if a vacuum did exist, neither light nor sound could pass through it, and we could never detect it.
They were right about sound, at least. Experiments conducted in the early seventeenth century, with bells inside vacuums rung by a magnet outside, confirmed that a sound couldn’t pass through airless space.
Pascal’s interest in vacuums was encouraged by his father, Étienne, who’d given him a copy of Hero’s Pneumatics. Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria, a first-century a.d. contemporary of Plutarch, was famous for constructing machines that provided miracles for temples. In the Pneumatics he describes pipes and vessels from which wine and water alternately flow, or from which wine flows when water is withdrawn, or from which wine flows when water is poured into a neighboring vessel. He describes a machine for producing the sound of a trumpet when a temple door is opened, figures made to dance by fire on an altar, and statues that pour libations on a fire lit between them, thus extinguishing it. His best-known device was a machine for opening the doors of a temple when a fire is lit on an altar outside them. All these contrivances work by means of gears, secret tunnels, heated air, and siphons created by vacuums. And all of them were hidden behind false walls or underneath floors—vide the Wizard of Oz.
Some accounts say that Hero worked in Ptolemy’s museum at Alexandria, whose library became the most famous in the world. If so, we can guess how far the gods had fallen by Hero’s and Plutarch’s time. They’d become museum pieces, relics and statues and toys and automata. Chants of their priests had been exchanged for blueprints for building mechanical birds that pipe and flap their wings and lay wooden eggs. And mortals were left to buy dream books, and leave offerings at a rock whose significance escaped them, and dance around a pole without remembering what it meant.
Hero firmly believed in a vacuum, and predicated his inventions on it. Vacuums created siphons that extracted liquids from containers, reducing their weight, thus activating counterweights—and opening temple doors. His work with heated air and airtight compartments and the creation of siphons became known to Pascal and other Europeans through a series of translations, first into Italian (1547), then Latin (1575), then Italian again (1589 and 1592). Galileo knew of Hero, as did Robert Fludd, two of the four or five or six men, depending on your historian, credited with independently inventing the thermometer. Galileo’s instrument was probably the first, though Fludd’s had a scale, making it a true thermometer.
Fifty years before Pascal’s experiment on the Puy de Dôme, Galileo was puttering around in his kitchen. Here’s how an eyewitness describes it:
He took a small glass flask, about as large as a small hen’s egg, with a neck about two spans long and as fine as a wheat straw, and warmed the flask well in his hands, then turned its mouth upside down into a vessel placed underneath, in which there was a little water. When he took away the heat of the hands from the flask, the water at once began to rise in the neck, and mounted to more than a span above the level of the water in the vessel. The same Sig. Galileo had then made use of this effect in order to construct an instrument for examining the degrees of heat and cold.
Italy’s Hero, Galileo went on to invent the geometrical and military compass, pendulum regulators for clocks, and vibration counters derived from the pendulum; to build telescopes and microscopes and binoculars; to discover the phases of Venus and spots on the sun and Jupiter’s moons; and to be “vehemently suspected of heresy” by the Inquisition for his advocacy of the Copernican system. After his death, his finger was cut off and preserved in a confection of crystal and silver similar to those medieval reliquaries used for the body parts of saints. It may be seen today in the Science Museum in Florence. Mounted on a stem, the crystal bubble with its finger inside bears an odd resemblance to some of Hero’s designs, and to Galileo’s early thermometer.
Reliquaries for the pious, thermometers for the practical. Perhaps the thermometer is Pan’s reliquary. Of the other claimants for the invention of the thermometer, Robert Fludd is the strangest. Not only did he know Hero well, but in one of his many scientific/theological treatises the great Pan appears and narrates the text, as Fludd’s Principle of Universal Nature.
Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus, lived and worked with one foot in the Middle Ages, one in the Scientific Revolution. A graduate of Oxford, a fellow of the London College of Physicians, he was also, in the words of a contemporary, a “Trismegistian-Platonick-Rosy-crucian Doctor,” and a “cacomagus” (a black magician) who believed in geomancy (divination from the pattern of thrown pebbles) and in the weapon-salve, a medicine he defended in Doctor Fludd’s Answer unto M. Foster, Or, The Squeesing of Parson Fosters Sponge. The weapon-salve was an ointment concocted of human tissue, blood, and fat. It was said to heal wounds by being applied not to the wound itself but to the weapon that caused it. Smear the salve on the weapon and keep the wound clean with a linen cloth dipped in the patient’s urine, and a cure would be effected . . . by magnetism.
Unlike Galileo’s, Fludd’s embryonic thermometer, or “weather-glass,” had a scale, though the scale by our convention was upside down: cold was up and hot was down. In Mosaicall Philosophy, Fludd’s last book, he claims that Moses invented the weather-glass and received it “figured or framed out by the finger of God” (not of Galileo). God operates in the world by attraction and repulsion, or contraction and expansion—or cold and heat. God’s divine spirit is light—another form of heat—and we humans assimilate it into our bodies in the process of breathing. Our lungs then carry it to our hearts, where it separates into our vital spirit and the gross parts that mix with blood to nourish flesh.
And how do we know this? We look at the thermometer. “I would . . . have each discreet Reader to understand, that, when he beholdeth this Instrument’s nature, he contemplateth the action (as it were) of a little world,” Fludd said. Like the human body, the thermometer is a microcosm of the universe, and God’s vital spirit circulates inside it—expands and contracts—as it does in our bodies. “This formall Champion of Light, namely Heat, warreth perpetually against the cold gardian of Darknesse . . . and all this is effected by the Act spagerick or separative Act of God’s Spirit or Word.” And: “It must needs follow, that [God] is the agent, as well in the contraction and dilation generally, without the Glasse, as particularly within the Glasse.”
That should give some of the flavor of Fludd. His thermometer is not just “an experimentall Instrument” but a “spirituall weapon.” And in his later work it comes to replace the universal monochord as a symbol of the living (expanding and contracting) universe with its calibrated harmonies scored and tuned by God, a universe permeated by His divine spirit, or “aerial quintessence.” It was relatively easy for Fludd to adapt the weather-glass to baser functions too, for example to uroscopy—diagnosis by means of gradations of color in the patient’s urine—and to the illustration of pulse rates, with musical notes punningly arranged on a “scale” to demonstrate the tempo. Pictures of both instruments, identical to the thermometer, appear in his books.
If Fludd was correct that God impressed nature with secret characters at the time of Creation, and that our job is to read them and understand the maker’s majesty, then all this history was written in the thermometer I was mounting outside my brother’s kitchen window. And God was in the liquid inside the glass tube, that thin thread of blood. No wonder nailing it up warmed the house.
I tapped in the other nail and could tell it hadn’t bitten. When I pulled on the bracket both nails came out. I’d have to find another spot. I climbed down and checked the time: 12:45. Then I moved the chair over to try the window’s other side, and, climbing up, grasped the chairback and stood there testing out the wobble, shifting my weight and going lighter where I could, first one leg, then the other, to countermand the chair’s collapse.
Chaney Instruments of Wisconsin now told me it was warmer. The thin red line had climbed above 70. But I realized I’d been holding the thermometer in my left hand while nailing with the right. Holding it, that is, with three fingers clamped against my palm, my thumb and forefinger gripping the nail. Such dexterous monkey tricks.
We take temperatures in our social life too. A guy is hot, a nose ring cool, a woman frigid, an interest lukewarm.
Do thermometers lie? They’re often inaccurate. “Wind chill,” for example, means that heat loss due to the wind’s convective cooling can make any warm body considerably colder than the indicated temperature. But aren’t all measurements a fiction, regardless? The melting point of butter once was proposed as an absolute extreme for the thermometric scale. Seven times in the twentieth century, the Consultative Committee on Thermometry, a subcommittee of the International Committee on Weights and Measures, revised the International Practical Temperature Scale, established in Paris in 1927. Thermometers lose their accuracy, being little machines—exchanging energy for matter—and thus subject to entropy.
The early thermometer had more serious problems. In a handbill printed in 1631, a London firm offered a thermometer for sale:
Note that this water ascendeth with could [cold] and descendeth with heate. If in 6 or 8 howers the water fale a degre or more it wil sureli rain within 12 hower after. . . . You may bye the glasses . . . att the signe of the Princes arms in Hale Street.
This is a thermometer yet sounds like a barometer. But the barometer hadn’t yet been invented. And that’s my point. It took Pascal’s experiment on the Puy de Dôme, and the subsequent evolution of the barometer, to complete and seal the invention of the thermometer by Galileo and Fludd.
The device described in the 1631 handbill was evidently based on Fludd’s weather-glass; the language is the same as that in his Medicina Catholica, published two years earlier. Why this instrument could forecast the weather as well as measure temperature, no one quite knew. Nor did anyone care, at least not for several decades. Thermometers were becoming popular in Europe—people really did hang them outside windows—and so what if they happened to serve a dual purpose? Actually, their purpose wasn’t thought of as dual except in retrospect. It takes a keen mind to recognize a problem where no problem exists. Enter Pascal. In a letter describing the results of the experiment on the Puy de Dôme, he wrote: “From [this experiment] there follow many consequences, such as . . . the lack of certainty that is in the thermometer for indicating the degrees of heat (contrary to common sentiment). Its water sometimes rises when the heat increases, and sometimes falls when the heat diminishes, even though the thermometer has remained in the same place.” (Keep in mind that the scales of the first thermometers were upside down relative to ours.)
Pascal’s point is that there are times when, according to our senses, the temperature is hot but the thermometer doesn’t show it, and vice versa. Having created a vacuum, and having discovered why vacuums are difficult to create—not because nature abhors a vacuum but because we live beneath an ocean of air—Pascal realized what was wrong with those early thermometers: they were open to air. This is exactly what Fludd admired about them, since in his universe air was akin to vital spirit. But being open to air also meant that thermometers responded to the pressure of the atmosphere as well as to temperature—and the pressure of the atmosphere was what Pascal measured when he created a vacuum on the Puy de Dôme.
Pascal offered no solution to this problem, not once he abandoned science for religion. Maybe he thought the answer was obvious: to seal the glass tube. Besides, science for Pascal was not a spiritual weapon, as it was for Fludd, and the two realms of science and faith were separated by an unbreachable wall. As a scientist, Pascal scoffed at his contemporaries who parroted the ancient axiom “Nature abhors a vacuum.” “I can hardly believe,” he said, “that nature, which is not animate nor emotive, is susceptible of horror, since the passions presuppose a soul capable of feeling them.” As a believer, he titled one section of the Pensées, “Nature Is Corrupt,” but an editor’s note beneath the title explains that “though Pascal allowed for this heading he allotted no fragments to it.” In other words, in his new dispensation, nature hardly merited a mention.
The mystical Fludd and the dry, pious, skeptical Pascal were early-seventeenth-century contemporaries. The antagonism between scientific and mytho-theological thinking is such a given in Western history that we tend to forget those, like Fludd, for whom the two were inseparable. For Pascal, they were opposites. Pascal’s view won. Today nature doesn’t breathe or possess vital spirits or bear God’s signature or prove the Bible.
It took one of the last of the Medicis, Ferdinand II, the grand duke of Tuscany, to surgically disjoin the thermometer and barometer. He couldn’t have known he was also dividing science and religion. Actually, it took his glassblower to do it. Ferdinand suggested that in making a thermometer, sealing the glass tube would eliminate the effects of atmospheric pressure. So the thermometer as we know it was born. Ferdinand also published instructions for marking the scale of degrees on the tube. But the impulse to codify the thermometer’s measurements—to create a scale—opened up a final Pandora’s box.
The thermometer measures heat, but what is heat? Fludd’s idea of contraction and expansion was closest to the truth. His contemporary Francis Bacon, though, is the one usually credited with our definition: “When I say of motion that it is the genus of which heat is a species I would be understood to mean, not that heat generates motion or that motion generates heat (although both are true in certain cases) but that itself, its essence and quiddity, is motion and nothing else. . . . Heat is a motion of expansion, not uniformly of the whole body together, but in the smaller parts of it.”
Bacon wrote this after thermometers were invented. So the quiddity called heat wasn’t defined until the instrument for measuring it had been created. That seems sensible—or does it? The makers of the first thermometers didn’t understand heat the way we do today; most of them assumed that heat and cold were opposites, not aspects of the same thing. In other words, the pioneer scientists—or, as they called themselves, natural philosophers—didn’t first discover the nature of heat then deduce a way to gauge it. The gauge came first. First one conceives of measuring something, then the object becomes endowed with quantity, which is the same as saying it becomes an object.
Therefore thermometers created heat, and it is true in more than just a fanciful sense that nailing up a thermometer outside my brother’s window warmed his house. And in the same spirit of reasons thrown up like flying buttresses before the church is built, the thermometer’s scale predated even the invention of thermometers. The scale came first, then the instrument, then last, the corpus delicti, heat.
Our experience often shows this. We know the effect before the cause. This is the way history unfolds when history isn’t yet history but something being experienced. When history becomes an object of study, it’s usually the opposite: we know the cause first, thus robbing both cause and effect of human interest.
Galen conceived of the notion of degrees of heat and cold in the second century. In the fourteenth, the Schoolman Nicole Oresme of Paris said that for measuring things of continuous quantity such as motion or heat, “it is necessary that points, lines, and surfaces, or their properties be imagined. . . . Although indivisible points, or lines, are non-existent, still it is necessary to feign them.”
To feign them. Then all scales are fictional, and an upside-down thermometer is just as meaningless, or meaningful, as a right-side-up one. It depends on what we agree upon, on our social contract. The notion that there could be a “natural” or “true” scale was a chimera pursued by early thermometrists who, in pursuing it, multiplied existing scales until they had to be mounted on boards ridiculously wide, to accommodate all the competing systems. One thermometer built in 1841 had eighteen scales, not just the Fahrenheit and Réaumur, but the Old Florentine, the New Florentine, the Hales, Fowler, Paris, H. M. Poleni, Deslisle, Bellani, Christin, Michaelly, Amontons, Newton, Société Royale, De la Hire, Edenburg, and Cruquiu, making it the Babel of European science.
Why so many scales? Before a scale could be standardized, it needed at least one fixed point, preferably two. For the cold end, the temperatures of snow, of ice, of a mixture of ice and salt, of a very deep cellar, and of the freezing point of water were all proposed. For the warm end, the temperature of the human body, of melting butter, and of boiling water. A consensus eventually developed around the freezing and boiling points of water, but not on how many degrees should divide the space between the two. Even those points weren’t absolute, however, since water boils at different temperatures according to atmospheric pressure. The Catch-22 of scales was this: the constancy of freezing and boiling points of water had to be assumed, because there was no scale with which to measure them and determine their constancy. Those points would in fact create such a scale—but how could they do so if they weren’t fixed?
The solution was to pretend they were fixed. Today we say that the temperature of steam over pure water boiling at normal atmospheric pressure, along with the temperature of melting ice—not affected by atmosphere—determines our thermometric scale. And what is normal atmospheric pressure? That which exists at sea level. And why is it normal? Because most people live there. In science as in the rest of human history, “normal” and “natural” mean what most people do.
In a recent book, Lennard Davis has shown that our meanings of the words “normal” and “norm” are relatively young; before the midnineteenth century, normal meant perpendicular, and norm referred to a carpenter’s square. As the century progressed, normal evolved into average, and came to be associated with the normal distribution curve, a.k.a. the bell curve. Once the normal was so defined, it established a range that produced the abnormal at the curve’s extremities. It’s no coincidence, then, as Davis points out, that the nineteenth-century statisticians who borrowed the bell curve from astronomy (where it was known as the “error law”) were also eugenicists who thought the race could be improved by lopping off its extremities and abnormalities.
So with temperature scales. One reason the freezing and boiling points of water were proposed to frame a scale may well have been our shared experience of extremes. Between those two points lies our body’s temperature—a natural and moderate compromise. So the scale becomes a line displaying natural states, and helps define a range of normal distribution, and weathermen compare each night on the news the actual temperature with the norm for that date.
Moderating extremes is a recent innovation in human history, relatively speaking. Aristotle could define virtue as a mean between extremes—as with courage, a mean between cowardice and foolhardiness; or thrift, a mean between prodigality and parsimony—because by the fourth century b.c. some human beings around the Mediterranean Sea had learned how to live in moderate comfort, inside houses lit by oil lamps, with slaves to do their work and braziers to keep them warm. To put this in perspective, as Carl Sagan tells us, human beings lived outdoors for 99.9 percent of human history, following game and crops. Some still do. But most don’t; and what most people do or don’t do, by definition, is the norm.
What most people do is nail up thermometers outside their kitchen windows, or install weathervanes or bird feeders, or plop lawn jockeys down beside their front steps. In other words, they find ways to announce a domesticated environment. The thermometer as a sign of civilized behavior and nature brought to heel suggests fire captured and tamed, cooked food, private life, central heating, and comfort. The thermometer is also a fiction that measures something real—heat and cold—and to call it a fiction is simply to acknowledge its role as a cog in the immense machinery of human culture. Take away the thermometer—or the nail, the word “bread,” the magnetic coil, paper money—and the whole interlocking edifice collapses. No one has that power, of course—to remove the gears and wheels that keep our lives turning. But some, like my brother, do remove themselves.
Had Paul ever nailed up his own thermometer? The evidence suggests that he hadn’t, although they don’t last forever, those cheap thermometers like the one in my hand. I’d found some solid trim on the window’s other side. Several relics of nails, minus heads, stuck out of it, left from the plywood shutters that had boarded up the house. Perhaps, when the heat was still functioning, when he’d first bought this house, a thermometer had been here. Paul could have consulted the temperature one day and decided not to go to work, not to brave the subzero cold outside. How much more inviting to brew up a pot of tea, to watch The Price Is Right in pajamas, robe, and slippers.
But gradually, one by one, his domestic servomechanisms failed. He replaced them at first; the boiler was only ten years old, installed by Sears in the late eighties—I’d found the receipts. The water pump, however, looked to be ancient, constructed mostly of rust. I’ll never know the exact sequence of events, or the manner in which Paul’s vigilance eroded. Perhaps it felt akin to that vaudeville routine in which a man runs back and forth behind a long table to keep a row of plates spinning while an impish assistant continually hands him new plates to add.
He retired. He grew old. Things got to be too much for him. The water heater sprung a leak. The front steps collapsed, and in a spasm of industry he cleared away the rotten wood. Then the toilet would not flush, the plumbing ceased to function, the phone line went dead. The ride-around mower, left out all winter, wouldn’t start, and its four tires went flat. Eventually the central heating broke down, and what good would a thermometer be then? Especially in a cold climate, the thermometer marks the boundary between a managed environment and the larger world that exceeds one’s supervision. For Paul, that boundary no longer existed.
Male menopause, I’ve heard, occurs at the age when one can’t even muster up the will to change a light bulb. Most of the bulbs in Paul’s house had burned out. He did manage to do something, though. Among his voluminous papers, I’d found a receipt for nursing home insurance, bought a year before he died. ’
Once a common and acceptable temperature scale was agreed upon, it was possible to measure the thermal expansion of metals. Engineers could then compensate for thermal effects, enabling them to build more precisely calibrated machines and instruments. This helped make the Industrial Revolution possible.
As Fludd’s Principle of Universal Nature, the great Pan isn’t so much dead as irrelevant. He’s been replaced by heat. Sadi Carnot, fascinated by the first steam machines, devised the theory of heat engines that fueled the enormous industrial expansion still heating up the globe. In 1824 he said this about heat; as you read it, try substituting “Pan” for “heat”:
It is to heat that we must attribute the great and striking movements on the earth. It causes atmospheric turbulence, the rise of clouds, rain and other forms of precipitation, the great oceanic currents that traverse the surface of the globe and of which man has been able to harness only a tiny fraction for his own use; lastly, it causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
From an immense natural reservoir we can draw the motive power we need; nature in offering us all sorts of combustibles has given us the means of generating at any time and anywhere the latent motive power. To develop that power, to appropriate it to our own use is the purpose of heat-engines.
Parenthetically, the internal combustion engine, made possible by Carnot’s theory, relies on a piston to be returned to its position—after being fired to the top of a cylinder—by air pressure. So Pascal and, through him, Hero of Alexandria still haunt the modern world.
Pascal talked about a hidden God. Our hidden God is heat. Thermometers with their fictional scales transform heat, a thing of nature, into heat, a thing of culture. Nature, of course, was the object of science, or emerged as such in the seventeenth century. But to talk about a nature that “emerged” is a figure of speech. What emerged was a new way of framing the world on the part of human beings. We saw things differently and had a new meme, “nature.” A meme is Richard Dawkins’s term for a unit of culture—wearing baseball caps backwards, for example—that evolves out of other units, just as morphological and biological characteristics of organisms (via genes) change through evolution. That nature could be thought of as a unit of culture is not, by the way, a recent notion. Pascal said as much in his Pensées. Number 126: “Nature is itself only a first custom, as custom is a second nature.”
As for my brother Paul, perhaps the reason he never nailed up a thermometer outside his kitchen window is that he wasn’t normal. “Normal” is our way of regulating nature. One way to achieve it is to manage deer herds; another is to nail up a thermometer, as I was doing now. This proves that I myself am normal, does it not?