CROSSE, ANDREW

(b. Broomfield, Somersetshire, United Kingdom, 17 June 1784;

d. Broomfield, 6 July 1855), electricity, chemistry, geology, natural law.

Crosse was among the earliest electrochemists to use electricity in mineral solutions to form naturally occurring crystals under experimental conditions. His observations of tiny insects within a laboratory environment supposed to be hostile to life precipitated an international controversy about the role of miracles and natural law in the formation of life. Despite the unwanted notoriety, Crosse was regarded as an eminent gentleman-philosopher whose avocation in experimental science promoted scientific learning in provincial regions of Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Education and Early Electrical Experiments . Andrew Crosse lived with his parents, a younger brother, and half sister at a small estate, Fyne Court, in the parish of Broomfield, Somersetshire, England. His father, Richard Crosse, was a politically liberal high sheriff for Somersetshire whose scientific friends included Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Like his father, Andrew’s mother, Susannah Mary Porter, supported her son’s scientific interests by employing a clerical tutor and, after her husband’s death, supplying Andrew with electrical apparatus for use in experiments.

For secondary school studies, Andrew Crosse attended Reverend Samuel Seyer’s Royal Fort School in Bristol, where young Crosse befriended other sons of the landed gentry. In 1802, he enrolled at Brasenose College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner—a status that conferred certain special privileges such as dining with the college’s fellows. After taking his degree and upon reaching his majority, he returned home in 1805 to manage his family’s estate and nurse his terminally ill mother. He continued to live at Fyne Court with his brother and half sister until he married Mary Anne Hamilton in 1809. Over the next decade Mary Anne gave birth to seven children, with only four surviving into adulthood.

After leaving Oxford, Crosse abandoned plans to pursue a career in law to devote his time to electrical experiments at his estate. He outfitted a laboratory in the music hall of Fyne Court where he routinely conducted his experiments. He befriended literary and scientific men, most notably the chemist Humphry Davy and the amateur experimental electrician George John Singer, who supplied Crosse with a battery table of fifty large Leyden jars along with other equipment. In the organ gallery of the music hall Crosse assembled an instrument designed to measure atmospheric electricity, consisting of a cylindrical electrical machine and brass ball suspended over a large capacitor. He connected the ensemble to one-third mile of copper wires strung along the trees of his estate and observed that fog produced a much larger potential than other atmospheric conditions. His production of noisy and bright discharges in these experiments caused neighbors to dub him “the thunder and lightning man” (C. Crosse, p. 114). He reported his observations in lectures he delivered at the Taunton Mechanics Institute, Bristol, of which he was chairman. Singer described the experiments in Elements of Electricity and Electro-Chemistry (1814), a widely circulated textbook.

During this time, Crosse also conducted electrocrystallization experiments in which he sustained voltaic currents in mineral solutions that caused crystals to form on the current-carrying platinum wires. He began these studies as early as 1807, when he visited the nearby Holwell Cave and became fascinated by its rich stalactites and stalagmites. After several years, he produced more than two hundred varieties of crystals that included aragonite, malachite, and quartz. In 1836, he reported on his formation of crystals, improvements on the voltaic battery, and observations on atmospheric electricity to the Geological and Chemical Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Bristol. His audiences favorably received the evidence that his experiments seemed to provide in support of theories explaining naturally occurring geological formations by electrical action. Crosse emerged as “one of the great show-beasts of the meeting,” having achieved national repute as a scientific philosopher of eminence (C. Crosse, p. 150).

The Acari Controversy . Crosse’s new public recognition turned into notoriety when his next set of experiments caused an international sensation. While making further electrocrystallization experiments at Fyne Court in 1836, he unexpectedly observed the appearance, development, and propagation of tiny mites within conditions that he believed were destructive to life. He gave no opinion about the cause, but his observations prompted others to speculate about such agents as miracles and spontaneous generation. In the experiments, Crosse dripped a dilute solution of silicate of potash (potassium silicate) and hydrochloric acid on a porous stone of red iron oxide, electrified with current passing from a voltaic battery through platinum wires. Over the course of several weeks, he observed tiny white specks on the stone that gradually developed into mature insects. Advised by the British comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen, he concluded they were cheese mites and assigned them to the genus Acarus. An unauthorized account about the “Extraordinary Experiment” appeared in the local Somerset County Gazette and, reprinted by newspapers across Europe, made Crosse’s discovery famous.

But readers generally denounced the news of an electrician allegedly professing natural—rather than divine— agency in the creation of life. Scientific experts were drawn into the fray, with one widely circulated report claiming that the famous chemist Michael Faraday had successfully replicated the experiment, but Faraday publicly denied any interest in the question. An experiment by John Edward Gray and John George Children, zoologists at the British Museum, however, failed to generate the Acarus; their null results thus lent support to the deistic side of the debates. Others showed more sympathy toward the possibility of spontaneous generation. Crosse’s friend, the Sandwich surgeon William Henry Weekes, reported having successfully reproduced the Acari (as Weekes termed the insects) in his trials. References to Crosse’s experiments in further popular texts, including Robert Chambers’s anonymous and widely controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), John Newbery’s children’s book, The Newtonian Philosophy, Henry Noad’s Lectures on Electricity (1844), and Alfred Smee’s Elements of Electro-biology (1849), helped to make the galvanic insects famous among Victorian readers.

Later Researches . Retreating from the debates, Crosse returned to private research and his life as a liberal, local magistrate and country squire of means. At Fyne Court, he and his wife managed a dispensary where they offered electrotherapy to Broomfield villagers suffering from rheumatism and paralysis. Despite his retreat from scientific society, he maintained his intellectual friendships, hosting several distinguished guests, including Faraday, at his private laboratory. He also attended the less publicized meetings of the Electrical Society in London, of which he was a member, and the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, of which he was a vice president. Mary Anne Crosse died in 1846, and on 22 July 1850, Andrew married Cornelia Augusta Hewitt Burns, a member of his London intellectual circle who shared in his scientific interests. Their marriage produced one son, born in 1852.

As with his earliest experiments, Andrew Crosse’s last set of electrical experiments lent support to the latest theoretical developments in geology. In experiments he conducted in the 1850s, he employed a sustaining Daniell’s battery to electrify a gold coin resting on a slab of marble in a weak sulfuric acid solution. He observed carbonic gas bubbles emerging from the decomposing marble and flecks of gold oxide separating from the coin, and he argued that the mechanical action of the bubbles was sufficient to dislodge the flecks. The interpretation resonated with a turn toward mechanical explanations of geological phenomena. However, when he presented his argument at the 1854 BAAS meeting in Liverpool, members reacted with skepticism. After the meeting, he returned to his experimental trials to resolve the criticisms, but a terminal paralytic seizure interrupted his work. Cornelia, who had assisted him, completed the unfinished experiments. Through a paper read to the Chemical Section of the BAAS at Glasgow in 1855, she presented results that vindicated her husband’s argument.

Andrew Crosse acquired national eminence for his electrical studies and international notoriety for stirring debates over divine versus natural causes. His private avocation at his country estate epitomized a form of country-house scientific research in Britain that gradually diminished alongside the rise of professional scientific institutions and the building of specialized laboratories toward the end of the nineteenth century. Accompanying his public fame is the popular image of Crosse as the embodiment of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein character; however no evidence exists confirming that Crosse may have inspired the gothic novel. His experiments, no doubt, contributed to the culture of electricity in which Frankenstein also participated. Posthumously, his manor house—largely destroyed by a fire in 1894—was given to the National Trust in 1967. Primarily through the efforts of the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation, the remaining structure, including the undamaged music hall, was restored in 1977 for tenancy by the trust and for other public uses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY CROSSE

“Experiments in Voltaic Electricity.” Philosophical Magazine 46 (1815): 421–446.

“Mr. Crosse’s Experiments.” Bristol Advocate 1, no. 21 (4 February 1837): 165.

“Description of Some Experiments Made with the Voltaic Battery.” The Transactions and the Proceedings of the London Electrical Society, from 1837 to 1840, 1841, 10–16.

OTHER SOURCES

Anonymous [Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft]. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones, 1818.

Bragg, William. “Extraordinary Experiment.” Somerset County Gazette 1, no. 1 (31 December 1836): 3.

Crosse, Cornelia A. H. Memorials, Scientific and Literary, of Andrew Crosse, the Electrician. London: Longman, 1857.

Hunt, Robert. “Crosse, Andrew (1784–1855),” revised by J. A. Secord. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Also available (by subscription only) at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6799

Mead, Audrey. Andrew Crosse: Scientific Squire of Broomfield. Broomfield: Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation, n.d.

———. The Story of Fyne Court and Broomfield. Reprint. Broomfield: Somerset Wildlife Trust, 1997.

Morus, Iwan. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Noad, Henry M. Lectures on Electricity: Comprising Galvanism, Magnetism, Electro-Magnetism, Magneto- and Thermo-Electricity. Rev. ed. London: G. Knight, 1849.

Opitz, Donald L. “Crosse, Andrew.” In The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, edited by Bernard Lightman. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.

Secord, James A. “Extraordinary Experiment: Electricity and the Creation of Life in Victorian England.” In The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, edited by David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Singer, George John. Elements of Electricity and Electro-Chemistry. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, and R. Triphook, 1814.

Smee, Alfred. Elements of Electro-Biology, or, The Voltaic Mechanism of Man; of Electro-Pathology, Especially of the Nervous System; and of Electro-Therapeutics. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849.

Telescope, Tom, Pseud. [John Newbery]. The Newtonian Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy in General, Explained and Illustrated in Familiar Objects. Rev. ed. London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1838.

Weekes, William H. “Details of an Experiment in Which Certain Insects, Known as the Acarus crossi, Appeared.” Proceedings of the London Electrical Society 1 (1842): 240–256.

Donald L. Opitz