To Benjamin Franklin from Joseph Banks, 23 March 1784
From Joseph Banks
ALS: University of Pennsylvania Library
Soho Square March 23 1784
Dear Sir
After the Storm which has agitated the Royal Society since Christmas with no Small degree of Violence We have drop’d into a flat Calm. It seems as if the debates have exhausted the annual supply of genius or at least skimmd off the Cream of it as nothing very interesting appears either in Presence or Prospect.9
The best papers we have had is Dr. Blagdens general thoughts on Meteors in which he has made an Observation gatherd from the Examination of as many accounts as he Could procure from all periods which is, that Meteors appear always to have followd a direction somewhat near the Magnetical meridian which analogy between Magnetism & Electricity seems likely to produce discoveries.1
Mr. Herschel has given us Some good Observations on the Planet Mars2 in the Couse [Course] of which he has descanted much on large luminous Areas seen in the Polar regions of that planet which in the Course of some years Observation he has Observd to increase or diminish as their respective poles were opposd to or inclind from the Sun whence he concludes them to be Masses of Snow & Ice accumulating about the poles of that planet in a manner similar to what happens on ours the first Observation I think that we have had tending to Prove a similarity of Creative arrangement in the Similar parts of our System.
The business of Aerostates seems to Come now towards rest in France no advances appear to have been made by the Clumsey means hitherto proposd of guiding them indeed any one who Sees a bird strugling against the wind notwithstanding his shape is apparently contrivd to Present the Smallest possible Surface to it will hesitate much in beleiving it possible for men to Give usefull direction to a machine which always must present an enormous one increasing in Proportion as it Carries up additional Strengh to move it.
Smeathmans Idea is ingenious but I fear impracticable the weight of his Plane must if it is made of Materials sufficiently strong to support its own extention be more than the Proportion of Ballon fit to Ride upon it Can Support to say nothing of the danger of Oversetting nor is it new for it was suggested in Conversation to me Some Months before I receivd it from Smeathman.3
Mr. Argand has procurd a Patent for his Lamp which the officers of Police at Paris Seem to have borrowd from him without any valuable consideration4 it appears to me A real improvement I only Lament that we are to pay the piper to whom in all likelyhood all Europe will dance.
Our old Friend Smeaton is just About to publish his Account of the Building of Edistone Lighthouse.5 I was with him this morn & lookd over the plates most of which have been engravd these 20 years but he left off business with the last year & now means to amuse himself with this publication.
Yours Faithfully
Jos: Banks
9. The resignation on Nov. 27 of Charles Hutton (X, 303n), the Royal Society’s assistant secretary of foreign correspondence, became the occasion for a challenge to Banks’s leadership of the institution. Between December and February, Banks’s critics charged that he had interfered in the election of officers and fellows and that he did not possess sufficient credentials as a scientist to head the society. Banks’s supporters, rallied by Charles Blagden, submitted a resolution of confidence that was carried overwhelmingly at the meeting of Jan. 8, 1784. Resolutions by the opposition to reinstate Hutton and to limit the role of the president in the admission of fellows were defeated on Feb. 12 and 26, respectively. Paul Henry Maty, principal secretary of the society and a leader of the opposition, resigned as secretary during the next regular meeting on March 25. The election of Blagden as his successor on May 5 further consolidated Banks’s position: Harold B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743–1820 (London, 1988), pp. 194–201.
1. In his “An Account of some late fiery Meteors …,” read before the Royal Society on Feb. 19, Charles Blagden hypothesized that meteors were not combustible vapors or solid bodies, as previously thought, but that they instead consisted of electricity. Based on his claim that all large meteors move along the magnetic meridian, Blagden postulated a resemblance between electricity and magnetism: Phil. Trans., LXXIV (1784), 201–32.
2. William Herschel’s “On the remarkable Appearances at the Polar Regions of the Planet Mars …” was read before the Royal Society on March 11: Phil. Trans., LXXIV (1784), 233–73.
3. Henry Smeathman had been in Paris since August, 1783, hoping to find sponsors for the establishment of a free-labor colony in Sierra Leone: XL, 426–7. Unable to raise funds for that project, he designed a steerable flying machine that he hoped would earn him sufficient capital to finance the colony himself. He wrote a memoir on Feb. 2, 1784, describing his invention, which the Duke of Dorset reviewed and certified. Having thereby established his rights to the invention, Smeathman showed the memoir to BF on Feb. 6, and later claimed that BF approved of his sending it to Banks as the first step in his quest for sponsorship. According to Smeathman, “As soon as Dr. Franklin had read my Memoir, he launched half a sheet of paper obliquely in the air, observing, that that was an evident proof of the propriety of my doctrines.”
Smeathman described his machine as “a mixed form of a fish, a bird, and a bat, flat-bottomed, and presenting a large membrane on each side, and two wings of very simple construction, and a very broad tail or rudder.” In the drawings he sent to Banks on Feb. 11 (Royal Society Archives), an elongated balloon sits atop a frame resembling a hull with wings on each side and a back rudder; this is what Banks calls a “Plane.” A passenger car hangs suspended below the hull by four ropes. Smeathman posited that once the machine was in the air, it would be able to glide on the wind like a bird or a boat on water, and be steered by the rudder: Smeathman to John Lettsom, Feb. 7, April 17, and July 16, 1784, in Thomas J. Pettigrew, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom … (3 vols., London, 1817), II, 270, 275–80. In his Feb. 11 letter to Banks, Smeathman asserted that none of the three men to whom he had shown his plan—the Duke of Dorset, BF, and Dr. Broussonet—had doubted that the vessel could easily be steered: Neil Chambers, ed. Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765–1820 (6 vols., London, 2007), II, 258–61.
4. For Ami Argand’s oil lamp, see XLI, 144n, and the headnote to “Aux Auteurs du Journal de Paris,” [before March 31], below.
5. A Narrative of the Building and a Description of the Construction of the Edystone Lighthouse with Stone … by John Smeaton (XIX, 158n) was not published until 1791.