Intrepid: Alfred Russel Wallace did not shy away from debate with leading scientists. Credit: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM LONDON

The image of Alfred Russel Wallace as a self-effacing satellite to Darwin's more resolute brilliance has taken a fresh blow. An early, unpublished Wallace paper illustrates his boldness in approaching leading scientists with his ideas. In the spring of 1843, some 15 years before he wrote to Darwin setting out his thoughts on evolution, Wallace described possible ways to improve the mirrors used in telescopes in a letter and paper sent to William Henry Fox Talbot. At that time, Talbot was a leading man of science, already famous for his invention of a successful early form of photography.

I chanced upon this paper earlier this year as the result of a Google search. Finding that an 1843 letter by “Alfred R. Wallace, surveyor” had been transcribed online as part of a project called “The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot”, I contacted the project's director, Larry Schaaf, and asked whether the paper mentioned in the letter still existed. It did. Even the envelope in which the letter and manuscript were originally delivered to Talbot had been preserved. The paper is reproduced on the next page.

Having been forced to leave school at 13, Wallace had been working for six years for his older brother William, as a surveyor at various locations in the west of England and South Wales. But the curators of the Fox Talbot correspondence project had not realized this young surveyor was the Wallace who is now famous as one of the founders of the theory of natural selection.

At this point Wallace had not met his future colleague Henry Walter Bates, corresponded with or met Darwin, read the anti-creationist best-seller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (it was published the following year) or shown any real interest in the problem of the origin of species, which would lead to his most famous work.

Schaaf is a renowned authority on the early history of photography. He says the ideas Wallace expressed in his paper addressed challenges in optical engineering that may have been too difficult technologically to implement at the time.

According to Schaaf, Wallace was basically saying that gravity pulls a pool of mercury into a near-perfect plane and that by electroplating another metal on to the layer of mercury, one could form a perfectly flat mirror.

Later on in the paper, Wallace discusses curved mirrors. Schaaf says that at the time, these were cast in alloys and then ground by hand to the best trial and error curvature possible. They tarnished quickly and had to be constantly repolished, without changing the curvature. “Astronomers spent as much time doing that as they did looking at the heavens,” explains Schaaf. “So it was a real problem and Wallace and Talbot were exploring different but related approaches to solving it.” Talbot was obviously interested enough to keep the letter and paper, although it is not known whether he ever sent Wallace a reply.

But this may not be the end of the story. A technology known as 'liquid spinning mirror telescopy' is also based on the use of mercury, and is currently being developed at several locations around the world. According to Paul Hickson, the leader of one group that's developing it at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the first mention of the liquid-mirror technique can be found in a published letter by the astronomer Ernesto Capocci.

Capocci was a colleague of and corresponded with the noted optician and microscopist Giovanni Battista Amici, who in turn had received Talbot in Italy as a guest several times since the early 1820s and exchanged at least 24 letters with him. In fact, Amici visited Talbot while in London in 1844 on optics-related business, and less than three years later, his son Vincenzo, a mathematician, published a paper entitled “Considerazioni sulla teoria del moto dei liquidi” (Considerations on the theory of motion in liquids). So it is possible that some of Wallace's ideas found their way into published work after all.

Wallace was just 20 years old when he wrote the paper on mirrors, and it is, by seven years, his earliest extended writing on a technical subject that we know of. His first published paper, a short characterization of the Amazonian umbrella bird, appeared in 1850.

It is interesting that the young and self-educated Wallace had enough confidence in his idea to set it before the leading English thinker of the time on such matters. Fifteen years later he would do the same with Darwin. In his autobiography, Wallace describes how he never shied away from debate once he felt he had firmly grasped the basic elements of a question. When it came to serious discussion, mere weight of reputation meant little to him.

His correspondence with Talbot also helps us appreciate certain threads in Wallace's intellectual life that are often peripheralized in discussions of his contributions to evolutionary biology and biogeography. Remarks in his autobiography and several secondary sources suggest that he had mastered basic principles of optics, surveying, geodesy and astronomy by the age of 18 or 20.

This 'quickness' would later support his entry into a variety of debates. And Wallace's strong interest in optics and photography would inform several of his more unusual investigations, such as his interpretation of the canal-like structures appearing on contemporary photographs of Mars, over which he argued with the astronomer Percival Lowell.

My discovery of this paper underlines the increasing value of the Internet as a means of identifying archival sources relevant to ongoing research. Were it not for Schaaf's efforts in making the correspondence of Fox Talbot electronically accessible, this particular item might have remained undiscovered for another 163 years.

FURTHER READING

Fichman, M. An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003).

The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/

The Alfred Russel Wallace Page http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm

The British Library has recently obtained the original Wallace letter and paper; transcriptions of each may be viewed online at http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/transcriptDocnum.php?docnum=4807