Welcome to “Elizabeth Drinks Wine And Blogs About Early Modern Science”!
Tonight’s subject: William Gilbert. I had never heard of this guy before a few days ago. Maybe that means I am a bad Early Modern scholar? Anyway, I read about him in Elizabeth Spiller’s Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art Of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670 and was intrigued. Apparently we had magnets since forever, and used compasses and stuff starting in the 12th/13th centuries, but no one since the ancient Greeks really bothered to study magnets or magnetism until our man Gilbert was born in 1544.
Gilbert sounds to me like he was probably one of those annoying, popular guys who gets all the awards at the high school awards banquet. He basically got every degree you could get in the 16th century, was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1573, and became its president in 1600. Also, as if that weren’t enough, Queen Elizabeth had the intellectual hots for him, and appointed him to be her personal physician (MMM-HMMM). In the 1893 translation of Gilbert’s famous book, Edward Wright says that Queen Elizabeth showed Gilbert “many marks of her favor” (yeah, you read that right), and gave him an annual pension “said to be the only legacy left by her to anyone.” I bet that if there had been a TMZ back in 1600 they would have been all “QUEEN ELIZABETH SEEN WITH MAGNETIST GILBERT IN RENAISSANCE CLUB” and posted some picture of Liz looking sloshed and laughing at a compass.
ANYWAY, magnets. So no one since Thales and Theophrastus has really given two shits about what magnets do until Gilbert comes along and says “Hey, how do these things attract each other and why are they just lying around on the ground?” and does a bunch of experiments on them. He takes a lodestone and shapes it into a sphere, which he calls a “terrella,” because it’s like a miniature Earth. Oh yeah, did I mention that Gilbert is the one who figured out the Earth is magnetic? All those other guys were just waltzing around thinking that the North Star was the reason their compass needles were pointing north (if you know what I mean), and Gilbert was the one who sat down and went, “Wait, the force is coming from INSIDE THE PLANET!” He figured out that the Earth must have an iron core, and if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t call the North Pole and the South Pole “poles,” because we wouldn’t know they WERE poles. So we can thank him for making sure that all our childhood letters to Santa were addressed to the most accurate place.
His book, De Magnete magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure; Physiologia nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis demonstrata, or, as it likes to be called for short, “On the Magnet,” was not just awesome because it declared all of these things we now take as sort of universal truths. It was also awesome because it was one of the first instances of a scientist making his experimental method clear to his readers. Gilbert actually encouraged his readers to try to duplicate his magnet experiments, making it EXTRA easy by putting little asterisks in the margin where he describes an experiment. And this was before Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum.
This motherfucker INVENTED the terms “electric force” and “electric attraction” while rocking a top hat and ruffled collar. I don’t know what else you want from your scientists. I’ll give John Dryden the last words on Gilbert for tonight:
Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw,
Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe.
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