This was nowhere more evident than at Harvard. It had begun as a Puritan college in1636. More than thirty partners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and so the college they established near Boston naturally followed the Emmanuel pattern. Equally influential was the Scottish model, in particular Aberdeen. Scottish universities were non-residential, democratic rather than religious, and governed by local dignitaries-a forerunner of boards of trustees. The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed President of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown ten-fold. But Eliot was concerned with more than size. 'He killed and buried the limited arts college curriculum which he had inherited. He built up the professional schools and made them an integral part of the university. Finally, he promoted graduate education and thus established a model which practically all other American universities with graduate ambitions have followed.' Above all, Eliot followed the German system of higher education, the system that gave the world Planck, Weber, Strauss, Freud and Einstein. Intellectually, Johann Fichte, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant were the significant figures in German thinking about education, freeing German scholarship from its stultifying reliance on theology. As a result, and as we have seen, German scholars acquired a clear advantage over their European counterparts in philosophy, philology and the physical sciences. It was in Germany, for example, that physics, chemistry and geology were first regarded in universities as equal to the humanities.88 The graduate seminar, the PhD, and student freedom were all German ideas. From Eliot's time onwards, the American universities set out to emulate the German system, particularly in the area of research. However, this German example, though impressive in advancing knowledge and in producing new technological processes for industry, nevertheless sabotaged the 'collegiate way of living' and the close personal relations between undergraduates and faculty which had been a major feature of American higher education until the adoption of the German approach. The German system was chiefly responsible for what William James called 'the PhD octopus'. Yale awarded the first PhD west of the Atlantic in 1861; by 1900 well over three hundred were being granted every year.89 The price for following Germany's lead was a total break with the British collegiate system. At many universities, housing for students disappeared entirely, as did communal eating. At Harvard in the 1880s the German system was followed so slavishly that attendance at classes was no longer required-all that counted was performance in the examinations. Then a reaction set in. Chicago was first, building seven dormitories by 1900 'in spite of the prejudice against them at the time in the [mid-]West on the ground that they were medieval, British and autocratic'. Yale and Princeton soon adopted a similar approach. Harvard reorganised after the English housing model in the 1920s.90 At much the same time that the pragmatists of the Saturday Club were forming their friendship and their views, a very different group of pragmatists was having an effect on American life. Beginning around 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, America produced a generation of the most original inventors that nation-or any other-has seen. Thomas P. Hughes, in his history of American invention, goes so far as to say that the half-century between 1870 and 1918 was a comparable era to Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy or the Britain of the industrial revolution. Between 1866 and 1896 the number of patents issued annually in the United States more than doubled and in the decade from 1879 to 1890 rose from 18,200 to 26,300 a year.91 Richard Hofstadter, in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , has written about the tension in the United States between businessmen and intellectuals, of Herman Melville's warning, 'Man disennobled- brutalised / By popular science', of Van Wyck Brooks chiding Mark Twain because 'his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery', of Henry Ford who famously remarked 'history is more or less bunk'.92 But America's first generation of inventors do not seem to have been
especially anti-intellectual. Rather, they inhabited a different culture and this was because, as we have seen, scholarship and research were still coming into being in the nineteenth-century universities. They were still predominantly religious institutions and would not become universities as we know them until the very end of the nineteenth century. And likewise, since the industrial research laboratory didn't come into common use until around 1900, most of these inventors had to construct their own private laboratories. It was in this environment that Thomas Edison invented the electric light and the phonograph, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, and telegraphy and radio came into being.93 It was in this environment that Elmer Sperry pioneered his gyrocompass and automatic control devices for the navy and in which Hiram Stevens Maxim, in 1885, set up for manufacture, and demonstrated, 'the world's most destructive machine gun'. By using the recoil from one cartridge to load and fire the next, the Maxim far surpassed the Gatling gun, which had been invented in1862. It was the Maxim gun that inflicted a great deal of the horror in colonial territories at the high point of empire.94 It was the German Maxim which inflicted 60,000 casualties at the Somme on 1 July 1916. And it was these inventors who, in collaboration with financial entrepreneurs, were to create some of America's most enduring business and educational institutions, household names to this day-General Electric, AT amp;T, Bell Telephone Company, Consolidated Edison Company, MIT. In the context of this book, perhaps the telegraph is worth singling out from these other inventions. The idea of using electricity as a means of signalling had been conceived around 1750 but the first functioning telegraph had been set up by Francis Ronalds, in his garden in Hammersmith in London, in 1816. Charles Wheatstone, professor of experimental philosophy at King's College, London, and the man who had first measured the speed of electricity (wrongly), was the first to realise that the ohm, a measure of resistance, was an important concept in telegraphy and, together with his colleague Fothergill Cooke, took out the first patent in 1837. Almost as important as the technical details of telegraphy was Wheatstone and Cooke's idea to string the wires alongside the newly-built railways. This helped ensure the rapid spread of the telegraph, though the much-publicised capture of John Tawell, who was arrested in London after fleeing a murder scene in Slough, thanks to the telegraph, hardly did any harm. Samuel Morse's code played its part, of course, and Morse was one of several Americans pushing for a transatlantic cable. The laying of this cable was an epic adventure that lies outside the scope of this book. While the cables were being laid, many had high hopes that the more speedy communication they would permit would prove an aid to world peace, by keeping statesmen in closer touch with one another. This hope proved vain, but the transatlantic cable, achieved in 1866, made its mark quickly in commercial terms. And, as Gillian Cookson has written in The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World , 'From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.'95 35 Enemies of the Cross and the Qu'ran-the End of the Soul ' To Chapter 35 Notes and References In 1842, George Eliot, the English novelist, stopped going to church. Her doubts over Christianity had begun early but she had been deeply influenced by David Friedrich Strauss's book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined , which as we have seen was published in Germany in the middle 1830s and which she had rendered into English. In her rather tortured translation, Strauss had concluded 'There is little of which we can say for certain that it took place, and of all to which the faith of the Church especially attaches itself, the miraculous and supernatural matter in the facts and destinies of Jesus, it is far more