[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 156 (Saturday, November 8, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12196-S12197]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           JOSEPH HENRY, THE SMITHSONIAN AND FREDERICK SEITZ

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, Friday, the 7th of November 1997, on the 
occasion of the bicentennial of the birth of Joseph Henry, the Joseph 
Henry Medal was presented to Dr. Frederick Seitz at a dinner of the 
Smithsonian Council. Clearly, this was a special occasion, and it was 
singularly appropriate that Frederick Seitz should be the honoree. The 
citation of the splendid gold medal reads:

       The Board of Regents gratefully presents the Joseph Henry 
     Medal to Frederick Seitz in recognition of his manifold 
     contributions to The Smithsonian Institution. His advancement 
     of the Smithsonian's research and educational programs in the 
     sciences, history, and the history of science has exemplified 
     the ideals of James Smithson's mandate . . . ``for the 
     increase and diffusion of knowledge.''--May 4, 1997.

  Having received the medal, Dr. Seitz, with his enormous erudition and 
no less prodigious self-effacing manner, presented a paper of great 
interest. Entitled, Joseph Henry: 200th Anniversary of Birth, he wrote 
of the belated appearance of science as a large-scale activity in the 
American Republic, but also of four early pioneers: Benjamin Franklin, 
Benjamin Thompson, Henry A. Rowland, and Joseph Henry himself. Which of 
us would know that Franklin discovered the Gulf Stream? That is just 
one of the absorbing details of this fascinating disquisition. I ask 
that it be printed in the Record in honor of Frederick Seitz, Joseph 
Henry, and all that splendid company.
  The material follows:

                Joseph Henry; 200th Anniversary of Birth

       When I first heard the rumor that I would receive the 
     Joseph Henry Medal on this special anniversary, I assumed it 
     was a case of mistaken identity. Very friendly calls from 
     Senator Moynihan, Homer Neal and Marc Rothenberg, however, 
     finally carried conviction. Needless to say I will continue 
     to experience a sense of awe in playing a role on this 
     special anniversary since the scientific community, of which 
     I have been part for most of my life, owes so much to Henry, 
     as I shall presently relate.
       Our country, had so many difficult practical problems to 
     solve in its early days, that it did not take much interest 
     in the fundamental aspects of science, in contrast to the 
     European countries, until the end of the nineteenth century, 
     that is, about a hundred years ago when it created what was 
     then called the National Bureau of Standards. Even this step 
     had a very practical aspect since we were encouraging exports 
     and wanted to be in tune with standards of manufacture 
     internationally as well as at home. It is true that we did 
     have the closely linked Smithsonian Institution and National 
     Academy of Sciences at that time. However their existence was 
     in the last analysis tied closely to the unsolicited gift in 
     1832 of James Smithson, an English scientist who admired the 
     promises for the future of mankind that our republic offered. 
     Moreover, he felt that it was inevitable that we would 
     eventually become deeply involved in the pursuit of basic 
     science.
       Even though our country did not encourage the development 
     of the basic sciences until the century we are now leaving 
     behind, we did manage to produce from our own soil a few 
     world-class scientists, including four truly great 
     physicists, not least Joseph Henry, during the previous two 
     centuries. I would like to say a few words about each.
       The first was no less a person than Benjamin Franklin, born 
     in Boston in 1706, but more generally linked to Philadelphia, 
     his adopted home. We all know about the experiment with 
     lightning and the kite and his research with lightning 
     arrestors, however, this is only part of the story. He 
     discovered, as a result of extensive correspondence, that our 
     continental weather tends to have a

[[Page S12197]]

     strong eastward drift; he discovered what we now term the 
     Gulf Stream which encircles the Atlantic Ocean, although he 
     falsely ascribed it not to winds and Coriolis forces, but to 
     the influence of the emergence of a yet undiscovered 
     underground river.
       Perhaps even more remarkably, he was apparently the first 
     person to provide a good measure of molecular dimensions. He 
     noted that when a quantity of the right kind of oil is poured 
     onto water it spreads rapidly at first, but then stops 
     spreading and retains cohesion. He concluded that the 
     thickness of the oil film at the point of maximum spread mut 
     be linked to what we would now term the size of its molecular 
     constituents. Using measured quantities of oil he obtained an 
     entirely reasonable value for those dimensions.
       The second great scientists, namely Benjamin Thompson, is 
     probably entirely unknown to many of you. He was born in 
     Woburn, in what was then the colony of Massachusetts in 1753, 
     and developed a strong interest in science during his youth. 
     He was not sympathetic to the Revolution and moved to England 
     in 1776 where he joined the military and served throughout 
     the war as an administrator. In 1794, after serving in 
     various roles in England and on the continent he was offered 
     a high post in the Bavarian government which he held for 
     eleven years. There among many other activities he supervised 
     the boring of canon in the royal arsenal. Being highly 
     observant, he noted that the extent to which the canon became 
     heated during the drilling was essentially proportional to 
     the length of time the drilling had taken place. He concluded 
     that the heat content of the metal was a form of energy 
     closely related to the energy of work. This proposal stood in 
     sharp contradiction to the popular theory of the time to the 
     effect that heat was the manifestation of the presence of a 
     special weightless fluid called phlogiston. He wrote a 
     convincing treatise on this topic, thereby opening the 
     doorway to the field of thermodynamics and statistical 
     mechanics which occupied some of the best scientific minds 
     during the next century. I should add that the great Chemist 
     Lavoisier, who was guillotined in 1794 and whom Thompson 
     knew, had also come to the conclusion that the phlogiston 
     theory must be wrong. Thompson's treatise pointed the way to 
     a new positive approach.
       Thompson, incidentally, joined with Joseph Banks, the 
     President of the Royal Society in establishing the Royal 
     Institution in London where Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday 
     later carried out their great researches and gave popular 
     public lectures on science. It is easy to imagine that 
     Smithson had the Royal Institution in mind as a role model 
     for our country when he gave the money to create the 
     Smithsonian. I should also add that Thompson came to terms 
     with his native land at the end of the Revolutionary War, 
     establishing good relationships with the Massachusetts 
     community.
       Skipping chronological order for the moment, the third 
     great American scientist in my list is Henry A. Rowland, born 
     in Honesdale, Pennsylvania in 1848. He received his higher 
     education at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, 
     New York, and was appointed to the chair in physics at the 
     Johns Hopkins University when it opened its doors in 1876. He 
     carried on research in many areas of physics, but is probably 
     best known for the development of a machine which engraved on 
     a material such as glass so-called diffraction line gratings 
     that were of special use in separating different wavelengths 
     of light. He was also interested in telegraphic equipment and 
     invented a widely used form of teletype machine.
       Rowland gained early fame as a result of an experiment he 
     carried out in Europe in the laboratory of Hermann Helmholtz 
     in 1875, the year before he took residence in Baltimore. In 
     the previous decade, the very brilliant Scottish physicists, 
     James C. Maxwell, had collected all known information 
     concerning electromagnetic phenomena and placed it in the 
     form of a mutually consistent set of four mathematical 
     equations, generally known as Maxwell's equations. To achieve 
     what his intuition told him would provide appropriate 
     symmetry and balance in the equations, he modified one of the 
     set of four. In effect, the modification amounted to saying 
     that an isolated, moving electric charge would have a 
     magnetic field related to the velocity associated with it, 
     but one so weak for normal velocities achievable at the time 
     that it would be very difficult to measure. Helmholtz, 
     recognizing that the young American was an exceedingly 
     talented experimenter, suggested that he attempt to measure 
     that field, which Rowland did with ingenuity and notable 
     success in a remarkably short time. It should be added that 
     Rowland had to repeat the experiment twice in later decades 
     in order to convince others who had tried to duplicate his 
     work without success.
       I should also add that Maxwell noted that one set of 
     solutions to his modified equations describe free 
     electromagnetic waves traveling with the speed of light in a 
     vacuum. He decided that ordinary visible light must consist 
     of electromagnetic waves. Helmholtz was quick to pick up on 
     this and convinced his brightest young colleague, Henrich 
     Hertz, to look into the matter on a laboratory scale to see 
     if he could generate much longer waves, independent of a 
     light source, using available electrical equipment. The ages 
     of wireless telegraphy, radio, television and radar loomed 
     over the horizon.
       It would be equivalent to shipping oil from Texas to Saudi 
     Arabia for me to present a detailed biography of Joseph Henry 
     on this occasion since his background is well known to most 
     of you. In brief, he was born in Albany, New York, just 200 
     years ago and spent a portion of his early years living with 
     his grandmother in nearby Galway, a few miles west of 
     Saratoga. Incidentally, if you chance to pass through Galway 
     please note the handsome high school building, probably built 
     in the 1920's, which bears Henry's name. He studied at the 
     Albany Academy, which still exists, and early on had 
     difficulty deciding whether to become an actor or a 
     scientist. Fortunately, science won. He began a series of 
     highly innovative experiments with electromagnets and soon 
     discovered the induction of electric fields by changing 
     magnetic fields--the basis for one of Maxwell's equations. 
     Michael Faraday, in England, made the same discovery somewhat 
     later, but published his results before Henry managed to. 
     Never the less the international community has given credit 
     to Henry by naming the unit of measurement of magnetic 
     inductance after him. In connection with this research, he 
     invented the so-called electric transformer, so valuable in 
     alternating current circuits.
       Although well established at the Albany Academy, he 
     accepted an appointment at what is now Princeton University 
     in 1832, and continued to carry on his research there, 
     focusing in part on various aspects of telegraphy. Much of 
     his original equipment is well preserved in the physics 
     department.
       In 1846 he was offered the post of Secretary of the newly 
     created Smithsonian Institution which he accepted even though 
     he was reluctant to leave the special environment that he had 
     enjoyed at Princeton. He was soon widely recognized as the 
     dean of American science as he developed the new institution 
     into a center for research as well as public exhibitions 
     related to science. He was to serve in the post for thirty 
     two years.
       In 1863, when the Civil War broke out, a small group of 
     scientifically oriented individuals in Washington, led by 
     Alexander Bache, a great grandson of Franklin, and Commodore 
     Charles Davis, succeeded in having a bill that created a 
     National Academy of Sciences passed by the Congress. Their 
     intention was to rally the available scientific community 
     into research associated with the war effort. The bill was 
     sponsored by Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. President 
     Lincoln signed the charter. Henry took an interest in the 
     activities of the new organization from the start, 
     recognizing fully its potentialities. During the course of 
     the war Henry became a good friend of President Lincoln who 
     expressed much admiration for him.
       When, at the end of the war, the founders were at somewhat 
     of a loss in deciding what to do with the Academy during 
     peacetime, Henry agreed to become its president and retained 
     leadership until his death in 1878. During that period he 
     essentially made the Academy a temporary wing of the 
     Smithsonian, holding regular scientific meetings, expanding 
     the membership and challenging the members to do everything 
     they could to increase the amount of basic scientific 
     research being carried on in the country. By the time of his 
     death, the National Academy, although still closely tied to 
     the Smithsonian, was a well-running organization prepared to 
     play a major role in guiding the progress of good science in 
     the Republic.
       I should add at this point that immediately after World War 
     I, another great Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles D. 
     Walcott, who had served as the very effective president of 
     the Academy during that war, succeeded in obtaining private 
     funds which made it possible for the Academy to have a new 
     home of its own on Constitution Avenue. Walcott, 
     incidentally, was also a New Yorker, having been born in New 
     York Mills near Utica in 1850.
       Our debt to Joseph Henry can perhaps be summarized by 
     saying that, in addition to establishing a high standard for 
     scientific research through his own laboratory work, he 
     encouraged general acceptance of those standards and took 
     leadership in establishing National institutions which could 
     carry them forward. In other words, he did for the promotion 
     of science in our country what Washington had done in helping 
     to establish the republic in which we have the good fortune 
     to live. I can think of no higher praise.

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