On the Origin of On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of Species (1859)

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Let us try to imagine life in the first half of the 19th century when Charles Darwin began to ask questions about the nature.

In order to do so we must reduce so much from our knowledge and experience today that it turns out to be not an easy task. We take so much for granted and do not always remember that what is today was not necessarily there yesteryear.

Coach of the Nobility with coachman (about 1870)

For example, there were NO CARS. Horses and carriages ruled the roads and city streets were covered with their droppings - enemy cavalry was greatly feared in battle fronts.

Unfortunately, we have to use a bit later photo to remind us about what was there on the streets before cars as photography was very rare at the time - no digital instant images. Louis Daguerre (1781-1857) took his first picture of a person in 1833 at a time when Darwin was travelling over the seas on a wooden sail-boat.

"...in 1837. Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person in 1838 when, while taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian stopped for a shoe shine, long enough to be captured by the long exposure (several minutes)." (wikipedia)

It is so difficult to imagine a world without cars, isn't it!

But what about this shocking fact: when Charles Darwin was studying the nature there were no electric companies providing power for heating and running factories and illuminating the streets at night! A thing of such fundamental importance as electricity was practically unknown. London had gas lights, oil lamps and candles were used at home, firewood provided warmth in winter and that British hot water bottle had to be heated by fire. If they existed, as the use of natural rubber was known but its use not widespread. (Not to mention plastics, the decisive invention of our era.)

The idea that humans could actually fly using machines heavier than air was considered utopian by most reasonable Victorian men for whose pleasure and help and for bringing many children good God had created woman.

Victorian coal mine. Litography

From a BBC page telling about Victorian period children

The great technological achievement of the time was the invention of steel as the world had moved with it from the Iron Age to the current Steel Age by the end of the 18th century. Producing steel from iron required coal and the shaggy towns of miners were an important part of the landscape of England in Charles Darwin's times and caused Karl Marx to proceed with his ideas about inequality of the worker class.

As for the sciences, you get the picture...

For in order for us to understand his times we really have to make a determined effort to forget what we know today. So much has been learned about everything after the publication of  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on 4 November, 1859.

Field Marshal Arthur Welleslay, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769/1852) 

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Well, said Wellington, who lived at the time of Charles Darwin (or vice versa...)

There was technology at the time of Darwin, of course, as the industrial revolution was beginning with Steel and Steam. But that boat that took him to Galapagos Islands ... of all the places ... relied on ye good old wind to sail and had no engine as it left her anchorage of Barn Pool, Plymouth Sound on the morning of 27 December 1831. Few realized when HMS Beagle returned to Falmouth, Cornwall on 2 October 1836 that the information that young passenger on board had collected about nature would help him to produce a scientific theory that would change the world.

HMS Beagle (centre) from an 1841 watercolour by Owen Stanley, 

painted during the third voyage while surveying Australia.

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HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy. She was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames, at a cost of £7,803. In July of that year she took part in a fleet review celebrating the coronation of King George IV of the United Kingdom in which she was the first ship to sail under the new London Bridge. After that there was no immediate need for Beagle so she "lay in ordinary", moored afloat but without masts or rigging. She was then adapted as a survey barque and took part in three expeditions. On the second survey voyage the young naturalist Charles Darwin was on board, and his work would eventually make Beagle one of the most famous ships in history.
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The sail boat that took Darwin out there to study God's wonders was not rocket technology even in its days - such Cherokee-class ships were called coffin-brigs as they had the nasty tendency to sink in storms.

So progress in science is not necessarily in the funding for expensive advanced tools for observation but rather what we have between our ears - the brains to interpret the meaning of what we see.

Darwin had those...