Gunpowder and Geometry: The Life of Charles Hutton: Pit Boy, Mathematician and Scientific Rebel
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August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne.
In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust-choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad – gifted at maths and languages – and for a time he hoped for a different life. Many hoped.
Charles Hutton, astonishingly, would actually live the life he dreamed of. Twenty years later you’d have found him in Slaughter’s coffee house in London, eating a few oysters with the President of the Royal Society.
By the time he died, in 1823, he was a fellow of scientific academies in four countries, while the Lord Chancellor of England counted himself fortunate to have known him. Hard work, talent, and no small share of luck would take Charles Hutton out of the pit to international fame, wealth, admiration and happiness. The pit-boy turned professor would become one of the most revered British scientists of his day. This book is his incredible story.
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Additional information
| Publisher | William Collins (23 Jan. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 320 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0008299986 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0008299989 |
| Dimensions | 12.9 x 2.4 x 19.8 cm |
by Kevin M
Few readers will have heard much – if anything – of Charles Hutton before opening the pages of this book. And, to be fair, Hutton may not have done quite enough to achieve the lasting recognition of contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy or Laplace. However, as this book reveals, his story is a remarkable account of the life and achievements of a largely self-taught mathematician from humble beginnings to a successful career specialising in what would now be called applied mathematics.
The book benefits – but possibly also suffers – from Mr Wardhaugh’s apparent admiration for his subject. There is almost an over-abundance of detail about what might be regarded as peripheral aspects of Hutton’s life, but this reader’s judgement at least falls in the author’s favour in capturing, and also making reasonably accessible to non-specialist readers, the trajectory of Hutton’s remarkable life. Mr Wardhaugh’s care in avoiding the temptation of making the book a simple hagiography of his subject is also welcome, as he covers the less attractive features of Hutton’s personality as well as his successes.
For reader’s interested in the story of the development of scientific and mathematical thinking in Britain in the years spanning the close of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth centuries this is a book that will enlighten and entertain, particularly in the retelling of the petty rivalries that were a feature of this period in history.