Stephen Hales
Stephen Hales | |
---|---|
Born | Bekesbourne, England | 17 September 1677
Died | 4 January 1761 Teddington, England | (aged 83)
Awards | Copley Medal (1739) |
Scientific career | |
Fields |
Stephen Hales (17 September 1677 – 4 January 1761[1]) was an English clergyman who made major contributions to a range of scientific fields including botany, pneumatic chemistry and physiology. He was the first person to measure blood pressure. He also invented several devices, including a ventilator, a pneumatic trough and a surgical forceps for the removal of bladder stones. In addition to these achievements, he was a philanthropist and wrote a popular tract on alcoholic intemperance.
Life
Stephen Hales was born in
Hales was educated in
In 1709 he was ordained Priest at Fulham and on 10 August 1709 he was appointed Perpetual curate of the parish of Teddington, Middlesex and left Cambridge, although he retained his Fellowship until 1718. He became a Bachelor of Divinity in 1711.[6] Hales remained in Teddington for the rest of his life, except for occasional visits to his other parishes. He was an assiduous minister – in addition to parish duties he enlarged and repaired the church and commissioned a new water supply for the village – and well regarded although there is some evidence that his experimental work on animal physiology was viewed with misgivings.[2] Thomas Twining included a verse in his poem The Boat on Hales:
- Green Teddington's serene retreat
- For Philosophic studies meet,
- Where the good Pastor Stephen Hales
- Weighed moisture in a pair of scales,
- To lingering death put Mares and Dogs,
- And stripped the Skins from living Frogs,
- Nature, he loved, her Works intent
- To search or sometimes to torment.
In 1718, the poet Alexander Pope, a renowned dog lover, also criticized Hales's work. In conversation with his friend, Joseph Spence, Pope reportedly said of Hales: "He commits most of these barbarities with the thought of its being of use to man. But how do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above as dogs, for our curiosity, or even for some use to us?".[7] Pope, however was also a close friend of Hales[8] and considered him the model of the man who loves his God.[9]
In 1718 Hales was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and in the same year became rector of Porlock, Somerset, a post he held alongside the curacy of Teddington.
In 1720 he married Mary Newce, but she died the following year, probably in childbirth;
Hales's fame as a scientist grew from 1718 onwards, and by the mid part of the 18th century he had achieved an international reputation.
In his later years he received frequent visits from Frederick, Prince of Wales and his wife, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, both of whom were interested in gardening and botany. He gave Princess Augusta advice on the development of Kew Gardens,[3] and in 1751 he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager, following the death of Prince Frederick, a post he held until his death.
At the age of seventy Hales was chosen by the president and fellows of the Royal College of Physicians to preach the annual Crounian Sermon in the church of St Mary-le-Bow. He selected his favorite topic – "The Wisdom and Goodness of God in the formation of Man".[2] Hales died in his 84th year at Teddington on 4 January 1761 after a short illness.[2] At his own request he was buried under the tower of the church where he had worked for so many years. A monument to Hales was raised by Princess Augusta in the south transept of Westminster Abbey[11] after his death.[12]
Work
Hales is best known for his Statical Essays. The first volume, Vegetable Staticks (1727), contains an account of experiments in
Plant physiology and the chemistry of air
In Vegetable Staticks, Hales studied transpiration – the loss of water from the leaves of plants. He estimated the surface area of the leaves of the plant and the length and surface area of the roots. This allowed Hales to compare the calculated influx of water into the plant with the amount of water leaving the plant by transpiration through the leaves. He also measured 'the force of the sap' or root pressure.[16] Hales commented that "plants very probably draw through their leaves some part of their nourishment from the air". In Vegetable Staticks Hales prefigured the cohesion theory of water movement in plants, although his ideas were not understood at the time, so he did not influence the debate on water transport in plants in the 19th century.[17] He also speculated that plants might use light as a source of energy for growth (i.e. photosynthesis), based on Isaac Newton's suggestion that "gross bodies and light" might be interconvertible.[18]
In Vegetable Staticks Hales also described experiments that showed that "... air freely enters plants, not only with the principal fund of nourishment by the roots, but also thro' the surface of their trunks and leaves". While Hales' work on the chemistry of air appears primitive by modern standards, its importance was acknowledged by Antoine Lavoisier, the discoverer of oxygen.[16] Hales' invention of the pneumatic trough to collect gases over water is also considered a major technical advance. Modified forms of the pneumatic trough were later used by William Brownrigg, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley in their research.[16]
Animal physiology
Hales began his work on animal physiology with William Stuckeley while in Cambridge,
Hales also described a diverse range of work in Haemastaticks including his attempts to find substances that could be used to dissolve
Hales's work on the growth pattern of long
Inventions and other work
Bad air was thought to be a cause of ill-health and death in the 18th century. Death and disease were common in overcrowded ships and prisons. Hales was one of several people in the early 18th century (other notable inventors being John Theophilus Desaguliers, Mårten Triewald and Samuel Sutton) who developed forms of ventilators to improve air quality.[2] Hales' ventilators were large bellows, usually worked by hand, although larger versions were powered by windmills.[3] They were widely installed in ships, prisons and mines and were successful in reducing disease,[2] and aerating the lower decks of Royal Navy vessels to combat dry rot in the hulls.[26] Hales' ventilators were also used in preserving foods and drying grain.
Hales also experimented with ways of distilling fresh water from sea water; preserving water and meat on sea-voyages; measuring depths at sea; measuring high temperatures; and wrote on a range of subjects including
Philanthropy
In 1732 King George II granted a Charter for the foundation of the colony of Georgia and Hales was one of the twenty one members of the Board of Trustees.[2] The colony of Georgia was notable for its prohibition of slavery and rum.
As a result of his involvement with the Board of Trustees of Georgia, Hales learnt of the problems resulting from overcrowding of ships and this spurred him to invent a ship ventilator and undertake experiments to distil fresh water from sea water and to use salt to preserve meat on board ship.
Hales was one of the co-founders of the
Testimony
"The credit for carrying out the first catheterization of the heart of a living animal for a definite experimental purpose is due to an English parson, the Reverend Stephen Hales. This scientifically interested layman undertook in Tordington (sic) in 1710, 53 years after the death of William Harvey (1578–1657), the first precise definition of the capacity of a heart. He bled a sheep to death and then led a gun-barrel from the neck vessels into the still-beating heart. Through this, he filled the hollow chambers with molten wax and then measured from the resultant cast the volume of the heartbeat and the minute-volume of the heart, which he calculated from the pulse-beat. Besides this, Stephen Hales was also the first, in 1727, to determine arterial blood pressure, when he measured the rise in a column of blood in a glass tube bound into an artery."
— Werner Forssmann, [30]
The genus of trees Halesia was named after him by John Ellis in 1759.[31] The American Society of Plant Biologists awards the Stephen Hales Prize[32][33] annually to a scientist for work in plant biology.
Publications
- Description of ventilators (in French). Paris: Charles-Nicolas Poirion. 1744.
- Account of a useful discovery to distill double the usual quantity of sea-water, by blowing showers of air up through the distilling liquor. Londone: Richard Manby. 1756.
See also
References
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11915.required.)
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(help) (Subscription or UK public library membership - ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Archibald Edmund Clark-Kennedy. Stephen Hales, D.D., F.R.S.: an eighteenth century biography. Cambridge University Press, 1929.
- ^ ISBN 0-85967-482-7.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 834.
- ^ Dawson, P. M. The Biography of Stephen Hales, D.D., F.R.S. The Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1904; 15 (159): 1–19.
- PMID 33944401.
- ^ Joseph Spence, Observations, anecdotes, and characters of books and men collected from conversation, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), vol. 1, p. 118.
- ISBN 978-0-486-42263-3.
- ^ In the Epistle to a Lady, 1. 198: Works of Pope (Twickenham edn.) iii (2)
- ^ PMID 338121.
- ^ 'The Abbey Scientists' Hall, A.R. p21: London; Roger & Robert Nicholson; 1966
- ^ Stephen Hales. Westminster Abbey. Retrieved on 15 June 2013.
- ^ Online: Statique des végétaux.
- ^ ISSN 0021-1753.
- S2CID 34576272.
- ^ a b c Brown S and Simcock DC (2011). "Stephen Hales and the practice of science". Medical Physiology Online. Online (Oct): 1–9.
- ^ Floto F. Stephen Hales and the cohesion theory. Trends Plant Sci. 1999;4(6):209.
- S2CID 170669199. quoting Opticks
- PMID 6386767.
- PMID 7884783.
- PMID 335256.
- ^ PMID 21542394.
- ^ "Stephen Hales".
- PMID 8315630.
- .
- OCLC 610026758.
- PMID 4553667.
- S2CID 7591233.
- JSTOR 20087193.
- ^ "Nobel Lecture, The Role of Heart Catheterization and Angiocardiography in the Development of Modern Medicine". Nobel Prize.org (Official website of the Nobel Prize). Retrieved 25 February 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-252-00120-8.
- PMID 3304746.
- ^ Awards and Funding – Awards – American Society of Plant Biologists. My.aspb.org. Retrieved on 15 June 2012.
Further reading
- Hales, Stephen (1727) Vegetable Staticks, London: W. and J. Innys – from the Missouri Botanical Garden's library
- Hales, Stephen (1738). "Philosophical experiments: containing useful, and necessary instructions for such as undertake long voyages at sea. Shewing how sea-water may be made fresh and wholsome: and how fresh water may be preserv'd sweet. How biscuit, corn, &c. may be secured from the weevel, meggots, and other insects. And flesh preserv'd in hot climates, by salting animals whole. To which is added, an account of several experiments and observations on chalybeate or steel-waters ... which were read before the Royal-society, at several of their meetings", London: W. Innys and R. Manby
- Parascandola, John; Ihde, Aaron J. (1969). "History of the Pneumatic Trough". Isis. 60 (3): 351–361. S2CID 144799335.
- Stephen Hales at the Galileo Project — details on Hales's life and work
- For a calendar of manuscript correspondence and writing of Stephen Hales see: D.G.C. Allan and R.E. Schofield, Stephen Hales. Scientist and philanthropist (London: Scolar Press, 1980), p. 178, and for his published writing see ibid p. 191
- For Hales's work as parish priest of Teddington see: David G.C. Allan, Science, Philanthropy and Religion in 18th century Teddington: Stephen Hales DD, FRS, (1677–1761) (Twickenham: Borough of Twickenham Local History Society, 2004). This work contains reconstructions of the enlargement of St Mary's Church, Hale's copyhold parsonage house and a map of his drainage scheme (Map by Ken Howe).
- For a general assessment see: David G.C. Allan, Hales, Stephen (1677–1761) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- For the 2009 celebration of his life and work see The William Shipley Group for RSA History Newsletter no. 22 (Nov 2009)
- For Hales's association with the Society of Arts see David G.C. Allan, 'Founder of the Society of Arts' group article in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online supplement, 2008)
- Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
External links
- "Archival material relating to Stephen Hales". UK National Archives.
- Stephen Hales (1727) Vegetable staticks – digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library
- Hutchinson, John (1892). . Men of Kent and Kentishmen (Subscription ed.). Canterbury: Cross & Jackman. pp. 60–61.