Edmund and the History of Fishes, A Tale of Science

Once upon a time, long, long ago there lived a man with Ideas. This man was brilliant, but reclusive and bad with people. Let’s call him Isaac.

Our Friend Edmund, 1687

One day, a young astronomer, much better with people, let’s call him Edmund, went to Isaac and asked him a question which would prove to be one of the most important questions every asked of anyone. Edmund asked,

what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.

Isaac replied that it would, of course, duh, be an ellipse. Now, this may be common knowledge today but Edmund found this answer very exciting and he asked to see the work Isaac had done to come up with this answer. Isaac had done a lot of thinking about this kind of question, but, turned out, he couldn’t quite track down the bit of paper on which he had come up with this response.

So he went away and wrote. And he wrote. And he wrote. And eventually he came up with a whole book packed full of his ideas not only about the shape of the orbit of planets but about how things were in the universe in general.

Meanwhile at the Royal Society, where Edmund was a clerk, the Society published what they thought was going to be an absolute blockbuster book. It was going to have stunning illustrations like never before seen in 1686. It was by eminent naturalists John Ray and Francis Willughby and was called De Historia Piscium (The History of Fishes).

It, like a fish out of water, was a flop. The Society had grossly overestimated the interest of the general and specific public in even the mostly beautiful woodcut engravings of fish and now it had an expensive loss on its hands, stacks of books about fish and certainly couldn’t go on making other commitments to other books, even ones which were going to revolutionise the understanding of the universe.

Willughby's Fishy Illustrations

Edmund, on the other hand, had been working his socks off trying to get grumpy, reclusive Isaac to finish and publish his book. But now—worse—there was no money to publish because it had all being soaked up by the History of Fishes. The Society was so skint that they were actually paying Edmund in copies instead of his £50 salary.

Thankfully, Edmund believed fiercely in Isaac’s work and managed to scrape together the cash from his own meagre funds and publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known among its best friends as the Principia.

Isaac (Newton), of course, went on to eternal fame and glory as the definer of gravity and classical mechanics as a whole and Edmund (Halley) went on to generally be a great all-around guy and use the Principia to calculate the trajectory of a famous comet that bears his name.

The Royal Society is still shuffling its feet in a somewhat embarrassed way and has this to say about The History of Fishes:

“While it may seem surprising to some people that the early Fellows of the Royal Society nearly passed up the opportunity to publish Newton’s Principia, we mustn’t forget that Halley, Newton, Ray and Willughby were all working in the very earliest days of the scientific revolution.  Although the Principia may have gone on to achieve lasting fame and glory, we hope that visitors to our new online picture resource will be able to appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”

Which I think reads amusingly like a sheepish grin and an unnecessary excuse over 300 years later.

One part of this story remains to be addressed: Did Isaac ever fully answer Edmund’s question? The answer appears to be ‘no’, at least not right away. I can’t follow the maths on this page, but it does explain saying that the argument Newton did give only the 'converse proposition' to the original question and that

the answer to Halley’s question “followed from” the converse proposition, which of course is not a generally valid argument. Newton later claimed that he hadn’t included the proof for the original question – the one that prompted the entire work – because he regarded it as “very obvious”.

…You can see what Halley was working with. The argument was sort of included in later editions, but only through the efforts of various other mathematicians and natural philosophers.

But Halley was nevertheless, along with everyone else who understood Newton’s work, justifiably impressed by what he had done and even wrote him a charming ode that concludes with the glowing lines:

Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare,
Come celebrate with me in song the name
Of Newton, to the Muses dear; for he
Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth:
So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast
The radiance of his own divinity.
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.

But in the light of Newton's achievement, let us spare a thought, for Halley who befriended and worked with this unusual man Newton, invested time and money in him, and put up with being paid in books about fish, out of sheer belief that his Ideas were worth something and ought to be out here not in there.