Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

Question.--How would you destroy disease germs in the patient?

Answer.--My idea is the germ is not the cause of the disease at all, but the disease is the cause of the germs. You will never get any germs in anybody until there is a separation or decomposition there, something. Put that down, you old doctors, as a fact, that germs don't make disease!

Question.--What would cause the disease, doctor?

Answer.--They didn't have the disease; they simply had the poison, and I pulled it out.

Question.--You say the disease was the cause of the germ?

Answer.--Yes, sir.

Question.--What causes the disease?

Answer.--Well, persons are liable off-hand to disease the world over, of course.

Would-be doctors, some truly and naively well-intentioned, traipsed over to the American Health College to get these pearls of wisdom from Campbell.

The old quack may not have had any lab, or an operating theater, or medical instruments to work with, but he did have an office. In that office, one recruit recalled, was a rather unusual feature:

In the doctor's little office was a pane of red glass and a pane of blue glass. I was curious to know what that was for, and the doctor explained it by saying they would vitalize the remedy they were to give the patient, or sometimes food, depending entirely on the nature of the disease; it would be placed beneath the red glass or blue glass.

And there, thousand of miles away, we see it again: that mysterious pane of blue glass in the window.

Why?

To understand the blue glass in San Francisco and Cincinnati, first you must travel yet again, this time even farther east to Philadelphia, to the backyard of Brigadier General Augustus J. Pleasonton, the officer in charge of Union forces defending the state of Pennsylvania. In 1861, as the Civil War erupted around him, Pleasonton found himself in the backyard of his Spruce Street home one day, planning and undertaking a mission of massive import to his country, and to the world around him:

He was planting grapes.

To be fair, Augustus already had a respectable military career behind him.

Born in 1808 and an eager West Point cadet by the age of fourteen, he spent his youth bouncing around the country in the infantry, then in the artillery, then in helping to map the Western frontier. He resigned his army commission at the age of twenty-eight, studied law, and founded a practice in Philadelphia. There he rose quickly through the ranks of local respectability, briefly serving as the state's paymaster general in 1839, and then as the president of a local railway company. Nor did he ever entirely leave the military behind. He stayed on as a brigade major in the Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia, and was rewarded for his loyal service by a musket ball to his groin, courtesy of an armed mob that he helped to quell in Philadelphia in 1844.

When not catching bullets in his shorts or filing court briefs, Pleasonton had one overriding passion--he read, and read voraciously. He was fascinated by books on physics, galvanism, natural science, and geology. He built up an extensive library, and one well-thumbed volume in particular was Professor Robert Hunt's Researches on Light: An Examination of All the Phenomena Connected with the Chemical and Molecular Changes Produced by the Influence of the Solar Rays (1844). Hunt had just a few years before published A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, the first English work on the subject, and his research into the action of light on inorganic chemicals like silver nitrate placed him at the cutting edge of a new medium. But although he is remembered today as a founder of photography, Hunt's work interested Pleasonton for a very different reason: for his other chapters, on how light affected organic materials. Hunt had dug up accounts of experiments that, to Pleasonton, showed that different wavelengths of visible light could accelerate or retard the carbon dioxide production, and the growth rate, of plants. Blue light, it seemed, was especially good at speeding up growth. And it was easy enough to procure blue light, Hunt noted--all you needed was blue glass.

The idea appealed to Pleasonton. For all his civic respectability, he had always been a sky-gazing sort of fellow, someone prone to staring out into the blueness of the sky above and wondering what it all meant. "For a long time,"

he later recalled, "I have thought that the blue color of the sky, so permanent and all-pervading ... must have some abiding relation and intimate connection with the living organisms on this planet."

Pleasonton set himself to designing his own experiment in blue light agriculture, one on a far greater scale than the few straggling seedlings that had been observed in Britain and France. He planned out an enclosed grapery, a sort of greenhouse for his backyard. At more than two thousand square feet in area and sixteen feet high, it would be hard for his neighbors not to take some notice of his work. Ground was broken in the autumn of 1860, and by March the grapery was ready. It looked like a typical large greenhouse, save for one feature--every eighth pane in its roof was of blue glass. This would be, he reasoned, enough blue light to stimulate the plants, but not so much as to lower the temperature of his greenhouse.

That April, like innumerable other gardeners in the city, he planted his vine cuttings, and he tended anxiously to them over the months that followed. All he could really do was prepare, wait, and see what grew out of it.

Even in the midst of Civil War, General Pleasonton was always ready to make some time for his backyard experiment. One day in September 1861, he received a most important visitor: Robert Buist, a horticulturist and owner of a local plant nursery. It was Buist who had sold the general his vine cuttings that spring, and now he wanted to see how they were coming along. Pleasonton led Buist out into his backyard and opened the door to the grapery; his visitor walked inside and, after some hesitation, carefully examined the vines.

Pleasonton watched the expression on the horticulturist's face. Buist was awestruck.

"I have been cultivating plants and vines for the last forty years," Buist marveled. "I have seen some of the best vineyards and conservatories in England and Scotland. But I have never seen anything like this growth."

Buist kneeled down to measure the thickness of the vines near the ground, and then measured their growth from one end to the other. Forty-five feet.

"I visited last week," he continued, "a new grapery near Darby, the vines in which I furnished at the same time as yours. They were of the same varieties, of like age and size, when they were planted as yours. When I saw them last week, they were puny spindling plants not more than five feet long."

Pleasonton was delighted, and when Buist visited again one year later for the general's first harvest of grapes, he was astounded yet again by the luxuriant growth of thick vines all around the greenhouse. He examined the vines again and sized up the grapes on them; then, taking out a pencil and pad, Buist did a few quick calculations.

"Do you know," he turned to Pleasonton, "you have twelve hundred pounds of grapes in this grapery?"

--I had no idea, the general responded.

"You have indeed that weight of fruit, but I would not dare publish it," Buist mused. "No one would believe me."

Each year through the 1860's brought thicker and heavier harvests from the greenhouse. Pleasonton leafed through his volumes of Hunt and Becquerel and began to wonder--if animals were built from many of the same basic organic compounds as plants, wouldn't they too stand to benefit from blue light? But how would you test something like that?

In the fall of 1869, Pleasonton built himself a piggery on an outlying farm, arranging the barrows so that on one side a litter of pigs would grow up under a clear glass window, while on the other side another litter of pigs would mature under a pane of blue glass. Under clear glass, four pigs that weighed a total of 203 pounds fattened up in a few months to 530 pounds; under the blue glass, four scrawnier pigs, weighing a total of 167 pounds, fattened to 520