Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [47]
THE SCIENCE OF SALTS
In testing water-freshening machines, one set of questions loomed large. They meshed issues of knowledge and practice with those of life and nature. How could you tell if you had a "pure" sample of water? How could you decide if the sample were safe to drink? And what was drinkable water, anyway? After all, taste only told a drinker so much (and pure water, if it could have been obtained, would presumably have tasted rather nasty). Besides, the latest opinions of physicians and philosophers implied that pure water might well not be the desideratum in any case. Distilled water might lack some dissolved or suspended substance that was vital for health. There was even a plausible candidate for such a substance: the so-called aerial nitre, originally described by Paracelsus, which physicians and naturalists widely deemed responsible for both combustion and respiration. Hooke had developed theories of the aerial nitre in his Micro- graphia, while at Oxford the anatomist Thomas Willis had made it a central part of his project to understand the physiological processes of life. Truly pure water would have been denuded of this substance, and thus would be bad for you. At best, it would do you no good.46
The identity of such an everyday substance as water thus became a problem of critical importance for medicine as well as natural philosophy. Boyle worried about it consistently, from both perspectives. It lent the seawater purification debate an added complexity, for it meant that contests of authorship, priority, and property led ineluctably into questions of knowledge of nature itself. But to manage this kind of transition was surely why the Society existed. So could not the virtuosi stake a claim to authority here?
For some at the Society, at least, the problem of water's identity resolved itself into one of the identity of the person vouching for the water. This was a standard move in experimental philosophy, since it tied the credibility of claims to the evident moral authority of the person making them, much as Atkyns appealed to the gentility of his model patentee. Nehemiah Grew, the Society's curator of botanical experiments, took this tack. At the height of the dispute Grew published his own tract of experiments supporting the Fitzgerald camp. To him, the machine should be credited because to vouch for it "we have the Reputation of the Gentlemen who have your Majesties Patent for it." At the same time, he suggested that his own experiments should be believed because of his disinterest: "I have no share either in the Profit of it, or in the Credit of the Experiment."47
Robert Boyle's name was the most powerful of all to conjure with in this kind of rhetoric. Even decades after Boyle's death, Hales could be heard insisting that "it is not to be suspected that so worthy and good a Man as Mr. Boyle was, would impose a Falshood on the World." This last was a particularly interesting declaration, in fact, because according to Hales's own natural philosophy Boyle's testimony about the distillation machine could not be true at all. Fitzgerald's machine could not possibly have worked. Hales therefore struggled to reconcile his own science with Boyle's affirmation that it did work. He suggested that Fitzgerald must have distilled water that had already putrefied- a process that, he noted with relief, might indeed have produced drinkable water (he did not say how). Boyle had simply not noticed that his nephew had used an unrepresentative and corrupt sample. Even decades after his death, Boyle's renown for technical competence was apparently a minor loss compared to the need to preserve his good name.48
Boyle's testimony counted immensely in the battle itself. It encouraged other Society stalwarts to weigh in, and justified the fellows spending time and energy on further trials. Grew in particular claimed that his experiments at the