THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
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American. In
1840,
the two entrepreneurial professors opened a com–
mercial photography studio at the top of the University building in Wash–
ington Square; they also taught photography to the likes of young
Matthew Brady. They collaborated successfully on another project at
NYU in the
1840S.
Tinkering with an early version of his telegraph,
Morse called on Draper to help design cables that might transmit electro–
magnetic signals over distances longer than that of their studio perimeter.
Draper framed and tested the hypothesis that the conducting power of an
electric wire varied directly with its diameter, an equation that made com–
mercial telegraphy possible. When in
1844
Morse transmitted the mes–
sage "What hath God wrought?" from Washington to Baltimore he might
just as readily have asked "What hath Draper wrought?"
The Cambridge historian of religion, Owen Chadwick, in
The Secu–
larization of the European Mind in the 19th Century,
has dismissed
Draper as a shallow vi ll age atheist:
Draper's books contain the paean of praise to science, a hymn, its
mighty achievements, among them the telegraph, telescopes, bal–
loon, diving bells, thermometer, barometer, medicines, railway, air
pump batteries, magnets, photographs, maps, rifles, and warships
.... Draper never stopped to ask himself why anyone who
invented a camera or possessed a barometer might be led to think
his faith in the God of Christianity shaky.
I'm convinced that while the twentieth-century mind may not be secu–
larized by telescopes, balloons, diving bells, and thermometers-or surf–
ing the Internet for that matter-a glance at the bills of mortality might
lead aging academics to show at least some respect for reductionist sci–
ence. Recall that in the fifty years since the
Partisan Review
conference
was held, the longevity of Americans has increased about a decade and
a half. But the rate of that increase since
1952
isn't as steep as the
decline in the rate of deaths. The obvious conclusion is that our coun–
try is aging. Looking at the gray-haired participants at this conference,
I am reminded of Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's:
"Si monu–
mentum requiris circumspice."
If
you require a monument to our aging
population, look about you.
Wren and the other founding members of the Royal Society started
the materialist ball rolling with their Horatian motto
"Nullius in
Verba,"
an earlier version of "No ideas but in things."
For the members of this society, having laid before their eyes so
may fatal instances of the errors and faults of the past, have begun
