At Home - Bill Bryson [8]
In Dorset, the perkily named Octavius Pickard-Cambridge became the world’s leading authority on spiders, while his contemporary the Reverend William Shepherd wrote a history of dirty jokes. John Clayton of Yorkshire gave the first practical demonstration of gas lighting. The Reverend George Garrett, of Manchester, invented the submarine.* Adam Buddle, a botanist vicar in Essex, was the eponymous inspiration for the flowering buddleia. The Reverend John Mackenzie Bacon of Berkshire was a pioneering hot-air balloonist and the father of aerial photography. Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf. The Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker of Cornwall wrote poetry of distinction and was much admired by Longfellow and Tennyson, though he slightly alarmed his parishioners by wearing a pink fez and passing much of his life under the powerfully serene influence of opium.
Gilbert White, in the Western Weald of Hampshire, became the most esteemed naturalist of his day and wrote the luminous and still much loved Natural History of Selborne. In Northamptonshire, the Reverend M. J. Berkeley became the foremost authority on fungi and plant diseases; less happily, he appears to have been responsible for the spread of many injurious diseases, including the most pernicious of all domestic horticultural blights, powdery mildew. John Michell, a rector in Derbyshire, taught William Herschel how to build a telescope, which Herschel then used to discover Uranus. Michell also devised a method for weighing the Earth, which was arguably the most ingenious practical scientific experiment in the whole of the eighteenth century. He died before it could be carried out, and the experiment was eventually completed in London by Henry Cavendish, a brilliant kinsman of Paxton’s employer the Duke of Devonshire.
Perhaps the most extraordinary clergyman of all was the Reverend Thomas Bayes, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, who lived from about 1701 to 1761. Bayes was by all accounts a shy and hopeless preacher, but a singularly gifted mathematician. He devised the mathematical equation that has come to be known as Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this:
People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. It is a way of arriving at statistically reliable probabilities based on partial information. The most remarkable feature of Bayes’s theorem is that it had no practical applications without computers to do the necessary calculations, so in Bayes’s own day it was an interesting but fundamentally pointless exercise. Bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that he didn’t bother to make it public. In 1763, two years after Bayes’s death, a friend sent it to the Royal Society in London, where it was published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions with the modest title of “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.” In fact, it was a milestone in the history of mathematics. Today Bayes’s theorem is used in modeling climate change, predicting the behavior of stock markets, fixing radiocarbon dates, interpreting cosmological events, and doing much else where the interpretation of probabilities is an issue—and all because of the thoughtful jottings of an eighteenth-century English clergyman.
A great many other clergymen didn’t produce great works but rather great children. John Dryden, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Thomas Hobbes, Oliver Goldsmith,