JF Ptak Science Books Post 2417
I intended to write a small post about some ads that I found interesting in Nature in 1895--Epp's cocaine remedies, mostly. It was Holloway's Pills that lead me astray, looking to see what it was that was in them, which lead me straightaway to an article about the wealth of Mr. Holloway derived from his tasty patent cures, and then on to a site that hosted wills for England and Wales from 1858 to just about the present. So, being curious, I picked up the biggest 19th century English scientist and found to no great surprise that Charles Darwin left an estate of some £146,000 pounds, no doubt part of the family fortune, which is today "worth" about £12 million (according to whatsthecost.com, which is about average I'd say from the other sites that figure out translating old money to new).
https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/#wills
It seems that the only surprise for me is how surprising it was to find so many of these folks with considerable estates. Theoretically some made a lot of money via patents and inventions, and many started out life with family money, but just about everyone I checked out left the planet leaving behind personal fortunes. One surprise--Alexander Fleming, the penicillin man, left an estate of some £29,000 when he died in 1955. That's about £1.1 million today, which is a fair amount of money and gave him a comfortable life, but it just seems a bit low considering his achievement--believe me I'm not measuring worth via money; it just seems to me that more money would have stuck to him, somehow.
I spent about an hour tooling around the site and came away with 20 examples (with 7 of the 27 I started out with having no record of a will in these files, which I don't understand). Well, it is actually 20 scientists and Winston Churchill, who I just had to look up. (He left an estate of £304,000 when he died in 1965, or about £4.2 million.)
Then I looked up Alan Turing, and found that he did okay--I'm not sure why I was expecting to find him in hard times, but he certainly wasn't, with effects at £4,600 (£90,000 today).
And a few other examples of some major-domos:
- William Crookes (d. 1919) £29,013 (£1,078,355.98 in 2014)
- Thomas Huxley (d. 1895) £9,290 ( £885,159.87)
- W. Stanley Jevons (d. 1882) £6,980 ( £609,391.10)
- Michael Faraday (d. 1867) £8,000 (£644,974.61)
- Charles Babbage (d. 1871) £40,000 (£3,405,630.66)
- James Prescott Joule (d. 1889) £12,765 (£1,178,678.58)
- John Couch Adams (d. 1892) £32,433 ( £2,977,170.05)
- James Young Simpson (d.1870) £35,000 (£3,021,645.81)
- Henry Grey (as in Grey's Anatomy, who died very young, at 34, before his book came close to ever taking off) (d. 1861) <£9,000 ( £769,769.94)
- Alfred Russell Wallace (d. 1913) £5,823 (£482,347.46)
- Joseph Lister (d. 1912) £67,996 (£5,609,910.24)
- Charles Darwin (d. 1882) £146,000 (£12,746,576.00)
- Francis Galton (d.1911) £104,487 ( £8,872,364.77)
- James Dewar (d. 1923) £ 129,995 (£5,669,078.76)
- Frederick Soddy (d. 1956) £37,605 (£678,505.06)
- William Bateson (d. 1926) £25,435 (£1,122,679.34)
- Alexander Fleming (d. 1955) £29,321 (£554,960.10)
- Alan Turing (d. 1954) £4,603 (£91,041.68)
- John Herschel (d. 1871) <£30,000 ( £2,554,223.00)
- James Chadwick (d.1974) £33,146 (£249,333.66)
- C.V. Boys (d. 1944) £36,500 (£1,061,175.65)
There's another site run by the U.K. National Archives that presents wills from the 14th century to 1858, located here: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/wills.htm
I went right away to William Shakespeare and found him: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D898518#imageViewerLink
All of this is interesting and good and represents an enormous time hole, so I'm going to end this post here with enough bits and pieces to interest and help anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole. Have fun!
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