How are social distinctions identified and how much emphasis is placed on social class? What role does social class play in helping you understand human motivation and aspiration? How are gender roles portrayed?

Bill Bryson makes it abundantly clear in his 2003 book A Short History of Nearly Everything that wealth and gender matter a great deal in the sciences and in the scholarly world of academia. As his title suggests, Bryson covers vast territory in his study, with a multitude of individuals and their varied contributions to the sciences each presented in a somewhat whimsical but still informative manner. A constant theme throughout is the role family wealth played in the ability of “gentlemen” of means to spend the time necessary to tinker in theory and to experiment in efforts at solving mysteries and advancing knowledge. In cases where scientists were not fortunate to come from wealthy families, many achieved wealth through the successful achievement of scientific goals.
Among the examples of prominent discoverers and scientists whose financial resources provided the opportunity to dabble in research are astronomer Percival Lowell, “who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God),” Henry Cavendish, an English scientist born “into a life of sumptuous privilege,” and Charles Lyell, a British lawyer who “came from a background of comfortable wealth and intellectual vigor,” who enjoyed studying geology while influencing the theories of evolution advanced by his friend Charles Darwin. All of these men(!) came from privileged backgrounds, and all enjoyed the benefits of living in the upper strata of class-conscious British society. So important was class and wealth in the advances achieved in the world of science that wealthy gentlemen even found ways to gather for intellectual discussions about their respective endeavors. Emphasizing the role of class and the cloistered nature of British society, Bryson writes the following about the gatherings such men of distinction in the early nineteenth century:

“In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemasons Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club to be called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner.  The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty fifteen shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. . . The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren’t people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen with the wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level.” [Emphasis added]

One can easily conclude from reading Bryson’s book that scientific advances were improbable without the money to finance individual and collective academic endeavors. Discussing the scientific contributions of Antoine Lavoisier, who made major contributions in the study of oxygen, hydrogen and other chemical elements, Bryson writes the following:

For Lavoisier, the appeal of the institution was that it provided him with the wealth to follow his principal devotion, science.

While class distinction played an important role in Bryson’s thesis, gender was also a major issue distinguishing the fortunate few from the rest of society. Writing about American astronomer Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Telescope was named), Bryson notes the influence on Hubble’s research made by the earlier work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made important contributions in the study of stars and astronomical measurements involving distances between rapidly moving objects:

“Hubble’s luck was to come along soon after an ingenious woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt had figured out a way to do so. Leavitt worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a computer, as they were known. Computers spent their lives studying photographic plates of stars and making computations—hence the name. It was little more than drudgery by another name, but it was as close as women could get to real astronomy at Harvard—or indeed pretty much anywhere—in those days.” [Emphasis added]

Additionally, A History of Nearly Everything discusses the vital contributions to the study of radiation made by Marie Curie, whose findings were so important that even her female gender could not obscure the scale of her achievements. Bryson notes that, despite her two Nobel Prizes,

“She was never elected to the Academy of Sciences, in large part because after the death of Pierre she conducted an affair with a married physicist that was sufficiently indiscreet to scandalize even the French—or at least the old men who ran the academy, which is perhaps another matter.”

Left unspoken, because the blatant hypocrisy is so evident, is the fact that no male scientist would have been denied admission to the Academy of Sciences because of his sexual liaisons. Men were almost expected to have mistresses; women were expected to play by a different set of rules, and those rules continue to exist to greater or lesser extents.
A History of Nearly Everything is subtle in its description of the roles of wealth and gender in the study of the sciences, especially of geology, a real gentleman’s field of study. With some exceptions, wealth was an indispensable ingredient of scientific endeavor. Those who came from humble beginnings could only really pursue their scientific passions after their earlier efforts proved profitable both to themselves and to others. For women, second-class status precluded the achievement attained by men and certainly precluded the opportunities to pursue research enjoyed by their male counterparts.