James Hutton Biography

All right, in science this week, we're going to continue our study of geology. And as a part of that study, it's important to know some influential people that helped to give us the theories that geology is based upon. So one of these leading persons is a geologist named James Hutton. Okay, and he lived between 1726 and 1797. So on your paper, you have an assignment to write down key facts about him. And this is one of them. So you need to put the the dates that he was living. So he lived in the 1700s, or what we would call the 18th century. And this is a picture of him. James Hutton transformed our concepts of the Earth and the universe by deciphering the message carried by common rocks. And to decipher means to make sense of it. He discovered that our planet is enormously older than people believed. He gathered evidence with his own eyes rather than relying on what everyone knows, or the written word. In other words, he came up with his own ideas, not just based upon what other people thought and believed in that time. And he did not base his ideas on biblical beliefs. Prior to his work, it was generally accepted in the West that the Earth was about 6,000 years old, based on literal interpretation of the Bible's timescale. Now Hutton devised one of geology's fundamental principles, uniformitarianism. Now that is a really long word class, so I would like for you to say this word with me. Uniformitarianism. Which says that the same natural processes we see operating today are the ones that have always operated, and that these everyday natural processes have shaped our world. Other theories that require an immense amount of time, such as evolution by natural selection and continental drift, would not have been credible without Hutton's work. So we've already learned about plate tectonics, right, and how the Earth's plates shift, and how over time they shift, they collide, they create, you know, mountain building and all of that. Without James Hutton, we wouldn't maybe even believe that that's possible, but his work has helped to prove this. So here's his beginnings. James Hutton was born into a prosperous family in 1726 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the United Kingdom. Prosperous means wealthier. His birthday, which is kind of to debate, they say June 3rd, which was based on an old calendar, or June 14th, which was based on the modern calendar. And you can just say June of 1726, and that will be fine. His father, William Hutton, was a merchant and the city's treasurer. So if you're a merchant, you sell goods, and if you're a city treasurer, it means you keep track of city money. So his father died when James was just three years old. Now James's mother, Sarah Balfour, a merchant's daughter, was a housewife. Following the death of her husband, she managed the family home, taking a keen interest in the education of James and his three sisters. Now James did have an older brother who died at a young age. At age 10, James started classes at Edinburgh High School at only 10 years old. So right around the time you, the age you are right now, he went to high school. So his mother helped him advance very quickly in school. So let's read about his time in the university. In November 1740, at the age of 14, he enrolled to study humanities, meaning Greek and Latin, with philosophy and mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. In one lecture, the professor of logic attempted to illustrate a philosophical theory to the class. He did this by describing how gold can be dissolved by aqua regia, an acid made by mixing nitric acid with hydrochloric acid. Now neither of these acids alone can dissolve gold, only the mixture of the two can. So he's in class watching his professor explain this and he is, it is inspiring him. It's making him very curious. To Hutton, the description was fascinating, not because it supported the professor's logic, but because it revealed the power of the science of chemistry. He began reading about chemistry and performing his own experiments. He and his friend James Davey tried to find the best way to extract ammonium chloride, which was a rare and valuable chemical compound used in metalworking, dyeing, and medicines. And when they say dyeing, they mean like making material colors, that kind of dye. From Edinburgh's plentiful supplies of soot. So what they're saying is they were able to take soot, which is like that heavy black ashy stuff from like burning coal in a fireplace. Back in this day, that's when they relied heavily on burning coal, which is very bad for our environment. And it would make this soot in the air. And they found a way to extract this ammonium chloride from it. These experiments laid the foundations of what would later become a profitable business, meaning they would later make a lot of money from this. Let's read about law, chemistry, and medicine. In 1743, after graduating, Hutton was apprenticed to a lawyer. So meaning he's learning under a lawyer, like he's the student of a lawyer. But he devoted more time to chemistry than he did to the legal matters. Deciding that a career in medicine would be more interesting than law, he enrolled again at the university. So in the year 1744 to 1747, he studied science and medicine. He also worked as a physician's assistant. Edinburgh did not offer medical degrees. So to complete his education, he spent two years studying in Paris, France, before qualifying as a doctor of medicine at Leiden University in Holland in 1749. So he did become a doctor of medicine. So then he would have been known as Dr. Hutton. Now Hutton, Dr. Hutton, now age 23, moved to the United Kingdom's capital city of London, where he hoped to establish a medical practice. However, business failed to boom for the young doctor, so he wasn't able to start his business. So let's read about his chemicals manufacturing. Remember how I said it would lead to a profitable business and make lots of money? Okay. Hutton was delighted when his old friend, James Davey, contacted him and told him that as a result of their earlier chemical investigations, they would be able to manufacture ammonium chloride in Edinburgh, so he'd be able to go home. He returned to Edinburgh in the summer of 1750 and began receiving substantial profits from the chemicals manufacturing partnership. So he's making a lot of money now with his friend. Now this is a picture of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is in Scotland, and this is in the 1700s. For many years afterwards, Edinburgh's air was often thick with heavy smoke from domestic coal fires, meaning in people's homes they were burning coal. Hutton and Davey found a way of profiting from the soot. So soot is that black kind of residue from the burning of coal. Now let's read about his farming and geology. Hutton purchased a number of houses in Edinburgh with his business profits, and then he rented them out. So in other words, he's investing his money in homes. So he buys these homes with money he's made, and then he lets people stay in those homes, and the people have to pay him, right? They're renting the home from him. So he's still making money. He's making money off his money. Confident of an ongoing healthy income, he turned his attention to farming. So now that he knows he will continue to have money coming in from all his rental properties, he's now going to turn his attention to farming. When he was three years old, so at the age of three, he had inherited two farms from his father, meaning when his father died, his father left him two farms. But these were being operated by local managers, so other people have been running this the farms for him. After doing some research, he traveled to England in 1752 to investigate the best farming practices there. So he's going to study other farms. He did this for two years in various locations. During his travels, he found he greatly enjoyed the rural way of life. Rural means to be outside of town, right? To be out in the country away from a bunch of people and away from the city. Hutton quickly realized that knowledgeable farmers place great value on their soil's health and its productivity. So meaning the soil that plants are grown in needs to be healthy in order to be productive. So in order to be healthy and grow lots of whatever they're trying to grow, whether it be wheat or corn or grains of some kind, right? During his travels, he began paying close attention to farming soils. He saw a large range of different soils and he became increasingly interested in the rocks he saw. He started making discoveries about rocks and although he was not the first to make these discoveries, he made them independently. Meaning he didn't just read about other people's discoveries, he discovered them on his own on this land that he was investigating. He noticed many rocks seem to have started as deposits of sand or mud in water. He noticed rocks far inland, high above sea level, that contain the shells of marine life. So they're nowhere near the water. How did these shells get there? Well, in the spring of 1754, he spent a few months traveling through Holland, Flanders, and northern France observing farming practices. He spent much of his time looking at the land and rocks because he was now as interested in geology as he is in farming. So, remember his excitement at farming and studying the land? He's now just as interested in the geology of the rocks, okay? And this picture is kind of an example of what he would find. Finding seashells and rocks on high ground spurred Hutton to investigate rocks ever more deeply. At late summer 1754, Hutton returned to Sly Houses, one of the Scottish farms his father had left him. For the next 10 years or so, some say 14 years, he managed the farm while continuing to pursue his interest in geology. Eventually, with his farm performing highly efficiently, meaning his farm is doing well and being very productive, he got itchy feet. Guys, do you think they mean like literally itchy feet? No. They mean he got restless. He needed a new challenge. He began spending increasing amounts of time in Edinburgh. Remember, he's been in the rural countryside, and now he's getting this point where he's really wanting a new challenge or a new adventure. So, he starts spending more time in the city. In 1768, at the age of 42, he rented out his farm and he returned permanently to Edinburgh, where he was welcomed into the home shared by his three sisters. So, at 42, he moves back to live with three sisters. Okay, let's read about a remarkable club. In Edinburgh, Hutton enjoyed a life of intellectual inquiry in science. That's a very fancy way of saying intellectual is this mental inquiry. He's asking lots of questions. When you have intellectual inquiry, you are very curious, right? You ask a lot of questions. And for him, he was asking a lot of questions about geology and science and how the world formed. He started getting together every week in a tavern with two friends. Their names were Adam Smith, who was the founder of modern economics, and Joseph Black, who was a great chemist. He discovered magnesium, carbon dioxide, and the principles of latent heat and specific heat. So, these two men were both leading founders and very influential people of their time. Hutton also became great friends with James Watt. Now, James Watt was the person whose improvements to the steam engine triggered the Industrial Revolution. This was the era of the Scottish Enlightenment, because remember, Edinburgh is in Scotland. The meetings became known as the Oyster Club. Soon, several other intellectuals, such as David Hume, often cited as the greatest philosopher to write in English, so that's what David Hume was known for, joined the three original members. So, that would have been James Hutton, Adam Smith, and Joseph Black. So, David Hume joined them, okay, for lively discussions over a plate of oysters and a glass or two of wine, ale, or whiskey. So, that's probably how it got to be known as the Oyster Club, because they would eat oysters together. So, here's James Hutton's contributions to science. So, what did he give to science? Why is he so important? Hutton embarked on expeditions to catalog the rocks around Scotland's coasts, islands, and mountains. He also undertook a painstaking survey of many of the rocks of England and Wales, with the result that his knowledge of Great Britain's rock formations was unparalleled, meaning no one else had nearly as much knowledge of the rocks as James Hutton. Okay, so this, if you're looking at this, the black and white portion of this illustration would have been what would be visible for the eye, right? As you're walking along, this is what you would see, the parts that are in black and white. Now, the other parts that are kind of in this orange to yellowish-brown looking colors, this is a depiction of what he said the ground, the soil beneath, the layers beneath his feet looked like, okay? So, this would be like a cross-section cut, if you were to just cut down and peel away, okay? So, Hutton's Uniformity at Jedburgh, Scotland, one of the most important locations in the development of geological science. Hutton said that this location had at times been under the sea. The bottom section of rocks in this image is the oldest. Here, rock layers formed over an immense amount of time, then were tilted to be almost vertical when they were uplifted as they rose out of the sea. Then, they were eroded, forming the layer immediately above them. The land then sank below the sea again, and more horizontal layers were laid down over another very long period of time. The rocks then emerged again from the sea. So, this is how he's showing how these layers ended up like this over this very long period of time. In the spring 1785, the 58-year-old James Hutton gathered his evidence and presented the story of our planet revealed by its rocks to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In his presentation that he went before this Royal Society, it was called Theory of the Earth, and his presentation later became a two-volume book. Now, prior to Hutton's work, Western cultures had generally accepted that the earth was only about 6,000 years old, and that it would continue for only about 1,000 more years. That's what people believed until James Hutton came along. People explained layers and rocks by referring to the biblical flood a few thousand years earlier. Hutton said the world was enormously older than 6,000 years. In fact, rather than a short past and an even shorter future, he put forward the view that the world was unimaginably old, and there was no reason to predict its end. So he's disputing this. He believes it's way longer than 6,000 years old, right? And that he does not believe that the world is going to end in 1,000 years, that there's no way to predict the end of it. So this is a quote said by James Hutton. The result, therefore, of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. He said this in 1785. So here's Hutton's rock cycle. Hutton pictured a cycle in which rocks were eroded into small particles, carried eventually to the sea. So here's the erosion of the land transported to the sea. There they would gradually be buried ever more deeply under more eroded material. The heat of the earth would then fuse these small particles back into solid rock and then later lift the rock back to the surface, and then the cycle would begin again. So he is the one who came up with this theory of a rock cycle, right? Of which we still hold that theory today of how rocks cycle around. Okay, so that was his geological cycle theory. So here's his conclusion. Hutton concluded that earth's interior has a very high temperature. We know that to be true. Earth's heat provides the energy to create new rocks. Erosion of land by water and air creates materials such as silt, soil, and small rock particles, which are carried into the sea, where layers of these materials are deposited over long timescales. As the layers gather, the earliest layers become buried ever more deeply in the earth, where they are turned into stone by the earth's heat. Stone is eventually uplifted to form new land. The new land is eroded over a long period of time, beginning the cycle over again. The cycle Hutton envisaged, so what he envisioned, right, could only take place over an immense number of years. This was, he pointed out, because the processes of erosion, sedimentation, and uplift take place exceedingly slowly. So here's another quote he The volcano was not created to scare superstitious minds and plunge them into fits of piety and devotion. It should be seen as the vent of a furnace. In June 1788, he took his friend, John Playfair, who was a mathematics professor, to look at the rock layers showing evidence of the earth's great antiquity, meaning it's a number of years old, so how old it was. It's ancient, right, antique, antiquity, that's what that means. So John Playfair said this, the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time. So he got very excited just to look at these rocks and think of how old they had to be and what was their story. So here's Hutton's uniformitarianism, so say that with me, uniformitarianism was not an overnight success, meaning people didn't just instantly believe him because he had this theory. They didn't always believe what he said. In fact, Playfair did more than Hutton to popularize Hutton's ideas, which were either ignored or attacked when people realized what he proposed. So most of the time, people didn't take him serious. They thought he was crazy. Hutton's ideas were unpopular with the church because they challenged the biblical timescale of the world. In fact, Hutton supported the view that God did create the earth, but he disagreed with the literal interpretation of the Bible as being at odds with scientific evidence. Hutton's ideas were so unpopular with scientists that many of whom supported Abraham Werner's theory of neptunism, which said incorrectly, might I add, that rocks and earth's crust were formed by crystallization of minerals on the seabed. And we know that that is not true. Hutton's theory, which opposed neptunism, was called plutonism. Plutonism is kind of a hard word to say. So Hutton's uniformitarianism, in time it was accepted, but it was not accepted really until after he died. In 1802, five years after Hutton's death, Playfair, his friend, published illustrations of Huttonian theory of the earth. So he named it Huttonian theory of the earth, after James Hutton, right? So it has his name in it. A book which finally gathered significant support for Hutton's ideas. Between 1830 and 1833, Charles Lyell, who was born in the year Hutton died, published Principles of Geology in three volumes, which won over the of scientists to Hutton's uniformitarian idea. The idea that the same natural processes we see operating today are the ones that have always operated. And over an immense amount of time, these have shaped our world. There was still some scientific opposition to the idea of an incredibly ancient earth. A physicist said, the earth's interior could not continue to be hot if the earth was billions of years old. It would be cold by now. But they were wrong, because they did not know our planet's interior is heated by the long-term decay of radioactive elements, because these were not yet discovered. Okay. Evolution by natural selection. In 1794, Hutton stated the principle of natural selection. Many years spent studying farms and running his own farm may have given him a clearer insight than most intellectuals into the principles of selection. Okay. And I'm not going to read you this quote, but you are more than welcome to pause this video and read it to yourself. It has a lot of rather large words, but what he's saying is that he knows natural selection that if the strongest animals survive to carry on the species. So here's some more personal details, and then the end of his life. So Hutton never did marry, but in 1747, when he was 21 years old, he did father a son, James Meaton Hutton. Although Hutton financially supported his son and his son's mother, whose surname was Eddington, they saw very little of one another. In fact, when Hutton left Edinburgh in 1747 to study in Paris and Leiden and then work in London, it is possible that he did this as a way of distancing himself from Miss Eddington and his son, because he never would marry her. James Hutton died in Edinburgh on March 26, 1797 at the age of 70, after suffering poor health and pain for a number of years that were caused by bladder stones. He was buried in Edinburgh's Greyfriars churchyard. He had made no will, meaning he didn't have a plan for what was to happen with his land after he died, so his estate then passed to his surviving sister. And when his sister died, she left Hutton's largest farm to his grandchildren, the children of his one and only son, James. And that is it. And then if you, when you cite this page, this is where this came from. Okay, so you have your paper that you can fill out with the details and most interesting things you found in this, and then turn it in. Okay, have a wonderful day.