The man who coined 'scientist' also found a spot where the sea stands still
Before 1833 there were natural philosophers and men of science, but no scientists. William Whewell supplied that word, handed Faraday 'anode' and 'cathode', and in between marshalled coastguards across a dozen countries to watch the tides, predicting a patch of the North Sea where the water should barely rise at all.
Whewell was born in Lancaster in 1794, the eldest child of a master carpenter who hoped his son would take up the trade. Mathematical talent at grammar school won him a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1812. There he took the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry, finished as Second Wrangler in 1816 and later became Master of the college, a post he held until a fall from his horse killed him in 1866.
His range was extraordinary even by Victorian standards: mechanics, geology, astronomy, economics, sermons, translations of Goethe. His lasting experimental work was on tides. Existing theory explained the forces behind them but not how tidal waves travel around continents, and port tide tables were often guarded as trade secrets. In June 1834 British coastguards at every station logged the water level every fifteen minutes for two weeks; a year later observers from the United States, France, Spain, Norway and other nations joined in, making it one of the first citizen science projects.
Plotting the results as cotidal lines, which join places where high tide arrives together, Whewell inferred a point in the southern North Sea with essentially no tide. In 1840 the surveyor William Hewett anchored HMS Fairy there and measured a rise of no more than a foot, confirming what is now called an amphidromic point. The work brought Whewell the Royal Medal in 1837.
Those years of tidal analysis fed his philosophy. In the History of the Inductive Sciences and its sequel he argued that discovery means binding scattered facts together with a new conception, as Kepler did with the ellipse, and he sided with Kant against John Stuart Mill on necessary truth. Along the way he coined consilience, physicist, linguistics and catastrophism, and supplied Faraday with electrode, ion and dielectric.
Source: William Whewell
