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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE DISCORDANT CONSENSUS: DIALOGUES ON THE EARTH’S AGE IN AMERICAN SCIENCE, 1890–1930 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By SYLWESTER JAN RATOWT Norman, Oklahoma 2009 DISCORDANT CONSENSUS: DIALOGUES ON THE EARTH’S AGE IN AMERICAN SCIENCE, 1890–1930 A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE BY Dr. Peter Barker, chair Dr. Ralph Hamerla Dr. James Hawthorne Dr. Hunter Heyck Dr. Stephen Weldon c Copyright by SYLWESTER JAN RATOWT 2009 All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgments Utterances only acquire meaning in dialogue. Consequently, the people who have engaged in dialogue with me during the writing of this dissertation are the ones who deserve to receive credit for any insight that may have resulted, while not being held responsible for any confusion which still remains. Ryan Fogg has contributed the most to this dialogue. Peter Barker has been a mentor through my transition from non-historian to historian, guiding me as I have grown intellectually. He has allowed me the intellectual freedom to explore and come to my own understanding of history while at the same time providing steady guidance to make sure my education and this project had focus and came to a completion. Hunter Heyck and Stephen Weldon have been invaluable teachers and it is in conversation with them that I have learned much about the art of history. James Hawthorne and Rich Hamerla provided additional insights and challenged me to expand my thinking even further. All have been extremely patient and accommodating to my pondering history and philosophy of science Great appreciation goes to the rest of the faculty at the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma for teaching a novice the craft of history and providing support for education, especially Steven Livesey, Katherine Pandora, Kenneth Taylor, and Kathleen Crowther. This appreciation is extended to the faculty and staff of the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries, especially Marilyn B. Ogilvie and Kerry Magruder who have provided valuable support for my education. iv A number of individuals and institutions have also been helpful and supportive during my stay away from Oklahoma. The faculty and student of the University of Pennsylvania History and Sociology of Science Department, the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the American Philosophical Society have all made Philadelphia a fruitful place to work and live. Great amount of respect and appreciation goes to librarians, archivists and staff at the various institutions which have facilitated my research. Those included the Library of Congress, the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the National Academies of Science–National Research Council Archives, the Yale University Library, American Philosophical Society Library, American Museum of Natural History Archives, Princeton University Libraries, University of Pennsylvania Li- braries, Temple University Libraries, Othmer Library of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Free Library of Philadelphia and, of course, the University of Okla- homa Libraries. The participants of the University of Oklahoma History of Science Colloquium, American Historical Association, Chemical Heritage Foundation Brown Bag series, and the Temple University Barnes Conference have asked thoughtful questions which have helped me and deserve of my gratitude. My appreciation goes out to everyone else who has discussed history with me over the years, especially to Lynnette Regouby, Cornelia Lambert, Kate Sheppard, Sejal Patel and Anke Timmermann. Long before this study commenced, I have been fortunate to have exceptional education and support from my family, both the Polish and the American, and teachers again both in Poland and United States. Finally, thanks goes to Isaac and Harry Saltzman, and the people at Benna’s. v Contents Abstract viii Introduction 1 Historiography . 2 Theoretical Considerations . 9 Dialogues on the Age of the Earth . 25 I 19th Century 31 1 Discord of Utterances 32 “On the Secular Cooling of the Earth” . 34 Rates of Sedimentation and Denudation . 43 The Earth’s Age in America . 49 2 W J McGee, Clarence King, and Individual Understanding 55 W J McGee . 56 Clarence King . 69 3 The Desire to Communicate: The 1890s and a Common Reply 85 vi II 20th Century 115 American Science at the Turn of the 20th Century 116 4 Challenging the Scope of Consensus 125 Chamberlin-Moulton Cosmogeny . 127 Chemistry . 134 Early Radio-activity . 138 G. F. Becker and an Attempt at a New Consensus . 144 5 Fragmentation 163 Radio-active Dating . 164 Joseph Barrell and Geological Dating . 167 Astronomy . 178 Paleontology . 183 The Symposium at the American Philosophical Society . 186 Conclusion . 191 6 Rise of a New Common Answer 194 NRC and Cooperative Research . 196 Lane’s Committee . 198 NRC Bulletin No. 80 . 208 Age of the Earth during the 1930s . 216 Conclusion . 220 Conclusion 222 List of Abbreviations 232 Bibliography 233 vii Abstract The history of investigation of the Earth’s age during the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries has been often presented as a narrative of a disciplinary conflict. In this dissertation, I investigate the evidence which supports such accounts as well as evidence contrary to it. I conclude that this disciplinary conflict narrative underestimates the complexity of the historical situation and points to broader inadequacies in understanding of group knowledge and consen- sus. The larger question I ask is “what does it mean for a group of people to know something?” I argue that we need view the historical actor as composed of (dialog- ically interacting) multiple subjects: the individual who strives for understanding and multiple community members who strive to communicate. Furthermore, I introduce the concept of an imagined community member, the image that an in- terlocutor has of an anonymous member of a given community, who represents its knowledge, assumptions, and expectations. Based on an investigation of previously unexamined archival and printed sources, I argue for a new periodization of dialogues on the Earth’s age in America. Prior to the 1890s, only isolated American scientists spoke about the topic. After a period of intensified discussion during the years 1892–3, the scientific community started to give a uniform answer to the question about the Earth’s age,which was the disciplinary conflict story. This uniform community response, however, corre- sponded only to a consensus of response, not a consensus of shared belief. The next period covering the first two decades of the next century, corresponded to the viii fragmentation of the discussion of the Earth’s age into multiple, non-interacting, largely disciplinary dialogues. A new consensus did not emerge again until around 1930, when a new community emerged and claimed jurisdiction over the question of geological time. In addition to challenging the disciplinary conflict narrative I also argue that the significance of the discipline of chemistry, and of two individ- uals, Joseph Barrell and Alfred C. Lane, to the dialogues on the Earth’s age has been undervalued in current historiography. ix Introduction “I am convinced that science goes on and progresses at the expense of those absorbed in her pursuit. That men’s souls are burned as fuel for the enginery of scientific progress.” Clarence King The question “what does it mean for a group of people to know something?” has been under-investigated by historians. This dissertation’s main argument is that the answer to the above question is non-trivial and has consequences for how we think about the role of knowledge for individuals and communities. I come to this conclusion based on an investigation of how scientists in the United States at- tempted to answer the question “How old is the Earth?” during the period roughly between the Civil War and World War II. Based on this investigation, I challenge the current historiography by arguing its shortcomings are the consequence of not asking the question about group knowledge. I suggest a possible way in dealing with the question of group knowledge. There is little unique to the specific case of the Earth’s age research which would suggest that the solution proposed here is only limited to this particular historical event. If one of the large questions of philosophy is how to proceed from unique, local experiences to universal knowledge, then this investigation may be considered a contribution to that project because it asks a more targeted version of the same question: How do we proceed from making claims about beliefs of single individu- als to making a claim about beliefs of the entire group? This investigation assumes that there is a fundamental difference between lived experience and the account 1 of that experience. Therefore, investigating how one goes from a group of individ- uals knowing to the group as a whole knowing, I explore the consequences of the difference between lived experience and its account. This dissertation is about individuals trying to answer the question “How old is the Earth?” Science is social, of course, (and so is language) but the view of science I present is not as something that primarily exists in a society. The concern here is not with the society but with communities within the society, and with the individuals producing the knowledge and the consequences of the produced knowledge for those individuals. In many ways, this dissertation is old-fashioned. Its subject is an intellec- tual question. The historical actors are mostly white males from American, east coast, establishment institutions. The sources used are traditional publications and manuscripts. Yet if my claim that there are two sites in which knowledge needs to be concurrently investigated—the individual knower and knowledge community— is correct, then there is something novel about my investigations and the conclu- sions have consequence for other historians relying in their investigations on what seems to be records of individual beliefs.

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