What's in a Name?Series 1 · Episode IV — Five More Words Derived from Real People
What's in a Name?
A humane doctor whose invention killed thousands. A Viennese physician who could make people twitch with his hands. A French diplomat who introduced Europe to a leaf that would eventually kill millions. A German professor so modest he refused to name his own invention. And an American general whose facial hair outlived every battle he ever fought.
"A machine for beheading by means of a heavy oblique blade sliding in vertical grooves." — from the name of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738–1814), French physician.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a doctor, not an executioner — and he never wanted a killing machine named after him. When he proposed, in a 1789 speech to the French National Assembly, that all executions should be carried out by a consistent mechanical method, his argument was entirely humanitarian. At the time, how you died depended on your social class: nobles were beheaded (relatively quick, if the swordsman was good); commoners were hanged, broken on the wheel, or burned. Guillotin found this grotesque. A machine that beheaded everyone equally — swiftly, painlessly — was, he argued, an act of mercy and democratic principle.
His exact words to the Assembly were: "Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it." The gallery reportedly laughed. He did not intend it as a joke.
The device he proposed was not his invention — similar mechanisms had existed in Scotland (the "Maiden") and Italy (the "mannaia") for centuries. The specific model adopted by the Revolutionary government was designed by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt, refined by a surgeon named Antoine Louis (it was briefly known as the "Louisette"). It was first used on April 25, 1792, on a highwayman named Nicolas Pelletier. By 1793, during the Reign of Terror, it was operating daily in the Place de la Révolution.
Guillotin was appalled that his name became attached to it. He had never claimed to have invented the device — only to have recommended a humane execution policy. During the Terror, he was himself briefly imprisoned and feared he would meet the machine bearing his name. He survived. After the Revolution, he campaigned unsuccessfully to have the device renamed. His family, after his death in 1814, formally petitioned the French government to change the name. The government declined, so the family changed their own name instead.
In use: "The paper guillotine in the stationery room requires two hands and a firm downward stroke."
"To hold spellbound; to fascinate utterly." — from Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), German-Swiss physician who developed the theory of "animal magnetism."
Franz Mesmer was a Viennese society physician with an extraordinary ability to make people feel things. His theory — which he developed from the late 1770s onward — held that all living beings contained a magnetic fluid that flowed through the body in channels. Illness was a blockage of this fluid. Health could be restored by a trained practitioner (Mesmer) manipulating the fluid by touch, gaze, and mysterious hand gestures.
His treatment sessions became the talk of Vienna and later Paris. Patients sat around a large wooden tub filled with iron filings and water — the baquet — and held metal rods that Mesmer claimed transmitted magnetic force. Soft music played. Lights were dimmed. Mesmer, in a lilac silk robe, moved through the room making slow passes over his patients with his hands. Patients swooned, convulsed, laughed, wept, and frequently reported dramatic cures. His salon on the Place Vendôme had a waiting list of hundreds.
In 1784, Louis XVI appointed a Royal Commission to investigate Mesmer. Its members included Antoine Lavoisier (founder of modern chemistry) and Benjamin Franklin (then ambassador to France). The commission concluded, after careful controlled experiments, that animal magnetism did not exist and that the effects Mesmer produced were the result of patients' imagination and expectation. The report is a masterpiece of scientific reasoning, and its conclusion was devastating: Mesmer was, essentially, doing what we now call placebo therapy, combined with suggestion, group psychology, and theatrical showmanship.
He left Paris in disgrace and died in obscurity in Switzerland in 1815. But his methods, stripped of the magnetic-fluid theory and refined by followers including the Marquis de Puységur (who discovered hypnotic trance) and James Braid (who coined the word "hypnosis" in 1843), became the foundation of modern hypnotherapy. Mesmer was wrong about the mechanism but, in a sense, right about the phenomenon: suggestion and focused attention really do produce powerful psychological and physiological effects.
In use: "She was mesmerised by the way the sunlight caught the water — she stood there for a full ten minutes without moving."
"The principal alkaloid of tobacco." — from Jean Nicot de Villemain (1530–1600), French diplomat and scholar who introduced tobacco to the French court.
Jean Nicot was not a botanist, not a physician, and had no particular interest in plants. He was France's ambassador to Portugal, stationed in Lisbon from 1559 to 1561 on routine diplomatic business. One day, a Flemish merchant showed him a strange leafy plant recently arrived from the Americas — what the Portuguese called herba preciosa. Nicot was told it had remarkable medicinal properties. He was intrigued.
He obtained seeds and cuttings, grew the plant in his garden, and began experimenting. He reportedly treated a royal page's infected nose sore with tobacco poultices (the boy recovered, which proves nothing about tobacco but everything about the immune system). He also sent seeds and powder to Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother of France, who suffered from chronic migraines. Catherine tried tobacco snuff and reported relief. Word spread. The plant became fashionable at the French court almost immediately.
Nicot returned to France in 1561 with tobacco seeds and enthusiastic reports. He spent the rest of his career as a scholar and lexicographer — his Trésor de la langue française (1606) is one of the earliest French dictionaries. He had no idea he had introduced to Europe a substance that would eventually kill more people than any war in history. He likely never smoked himself; he was a snuff man.
The tobacco plant was formally named Nicotiana tabacum in his honour by botanist Jacques Daléchamps in 1586. The specific compound responsible for tobacco's addictive and toxic properties — isolated by chemists Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and Karl Ludwig Reimann in 1828 — was named nicotine, after the plant, after the man. Nearly five trillion cigarettes are smoked every year. Jean Nicot is commemorated on each one.
In use: "The nicotine patch was supposed to help him quit, but he found himself absent-mindedly chewing the edge of it during stressful meetings."
"A laboratory burner that mixes air with gas before combustion, producing a very hot blue flame." — associated with Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (1811–1899), German chemist at the University of Heidelberg.
Here is the thing about the Bunsen burner: Robert Bunsen almost certainly did not invent it. The device that bears his name was designed by his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, who built it in 1854–1855 to Bunsen's rough specification of what he needed — a clean, adjustable gas flame for his new laboratory. Desaga did the engineering. Bunsen directed what he wanted but did not draw a single component.
Bunsen himself was so thoroughly uninterested in claiming credit for the burner that he never published a paper about it. He barely mentioned it. The device was named after him by grateful colleagues and students who associated it with his laboratory and his work. This was characteristic. Bunsen was legendarily modest: when students and fellow scientists praised his work, he would wave it away and redirect attention to his collaborators. He turned down three offers of chairs at other German universities, including Berlin — the most prestigious position in German science — because he preferred to stay in Heidelberg with his students.
What Bunsen actually cared about, and what the clean flame of the burner made possible, was spectroscopy — the analysis of the light emitted by elements when heated. Working with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff from 1859, Bunsen discovered that each element, when burned in the clean flame, emitted light at specific and unique wavelengths — a characteristic fingerprint. By passing this light through a prism and observing the resulting spectrum, you could identify which elements were present in a sample. In 1860 alone, Bunsen and Kirchhoff discovered two new elements — caesium and rubidium — by their spectral signatures. The age of spectral analysis had begun.
Bunsen had one other remarkable characteristic: he had lost the sight of his right eye in a laboratory accident involving cacodyl compounds (organoarsenic chemicals of unpleasant odour and terrifying toxicity) and thereafter worked with his left eye exclusively. He was known to put his remaining eye very close to specimens he was examining. His colleagues reportedly found this alarming.
In use: "She adjusted the collar on the Bunsen burner until the flame turned from orange to a steady blue — then set the beaker above it."
"Facial hair grown on the sides of the face, in front of the ears." — from General Ambrose Everett Burnside (1824–1881), Union Army general in the American Civil War, famous for his distinctive facial hair style.
Ambrose Burnside was, by most historical assessments, a mediocre general with magnificent facial hair. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, rising to command the Army of the Potomac — a position he twice asked Lincoln not to give him, on the grounds that he was not competent enough for it. Lincoln gave it to him anyway. He was right and Burnside was right: the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, fought under Burnside's command, was one of the worst Union defeats of the war, with 12,653 Federal casualties against 4,201 Confederate. He was relieved of command two months later.
What Burnside did have — aside from a generally likeable personality and genuine personal courage — was an unforgettable face. He wore his thick, dark brown facial hair in a striking style: large, full mutton-chop whiskers connecting his ears to his moustache, with his chin completely shaved clean. It was the opposite of the beard-and-clean-upper-lip style common at the time. The strip of hair ran down the sides of his face and connected across the upper lip, leaving the chin and lower face bare. It was dramatic. It was unmistakable. It was copied by admirers across the Union.
His contemporaries called this style burnsides — hair worn in the style of Burnside. The word appeared in print as early as 1875. At some point in the late nineteenth century, a linguistic reversal occurred: "burnsides" was transposed to "sideburns," perhaps through confusion with "sideboards" (another term for facial hair along the cheeks) or simply through the natural tendency of language to rearrange itself. By 1887, "sideburns" appears in American dictionaries. Today the original form "burnsides" is almost forgotten.
After the war, Burnside reinvented himself as a businessman, serving as president of several railroad companies, and as a politician, being elected Governor of Rhode Island three times and then United States Senator. He died in 1881, beloved in Rhode Island and remembered everywhere else primarily for Fredericksburg and facial hair.
In use: "He'd grown his sideburns long over the winter — thick and dark, coming down almost to his jaw. His mother said he looked like an 1870s senator. He took this as a compliment."
Coming in Episode V
- Maverick — the Texas rancher who refused to brand his cattle, and what it cost him
- Silhouette — the French finance minister so despised that his name became a synonym for worthlessness
- Cardigan — the battle, the charge, the earl, and the knitting
- Quisling — the Norwegian whose name became the universal term for traitor
- Algorithm — the ninth-century Persian mathematician whose Latinised name runs every computer on Earth
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