The 19th century was the age of significant discoveries, industries, and inventions. It introduced the railroad, the steamship, electricity, the telephone, the lightbulb, and the car, and brought back news of far away islands, a seventh continent, and a seemingly endless supply of newly discovered species of plants and animals. Nations around the globe, especially those of an imperial standard, like Great Britain, France, Russia, and Germany, produces explorers, scientists, and adventurers.
On Dec. 15, 1821, at the Hôtel de Ville, the location of the Paris City Council, it was busy as usual. But on this day, it was busy for a rather exceptional reason. Two hundred and seventeen of France’s brightest minds, including several foreigners, assembled with the objective of pursuing and promoting the world’s knowledge, in all its physical forms. Led by the likes of Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace; Claude Louis Berthollet; François-René de Chateaubriand; and Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert, the world’s first geographical society was formed.
American Expansion and Explorers
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, America was quickly becoming an empire in its own right, expanding across the vast lands of the North American continent. By the time France founded the first geographical society, America had added its 24th state: Missouri. There were also the territories of Michigan, Arkansas (then-spelled “Arkansaw”), the recently-acquired Florida, Oregon (shared with Great Britain), and the Unorganized Territories.
Powell, born in 1834, had grown up in the rough terrain of Ohio and the U.S. territory of what later became Wisconsin. He taught himself botany, geology, and zoology. He later attended the Illinois Institute, Illinois College, and Oberlin College, though never long enough to a degree. Powell’s time was filled with exploring, studying American lands, and paddling the Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio rivers.
In 1858, Powell became secretary of the Illinois Natural History Society Museum (INHSM), until the Civil War began in April 1861. He joined the Union Army and became one of its topographers. A year after the war began, he lost his arm during the Battle of Shiloh. He returned to the army in time for the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863. Only a few months before the war’s end, Powell’s health forced him to resign. But he was far from resigning from exploring.
In 1865, he was hired by Illinois Wesleyan University as professor of geology. A year and a half later in the spring of 1867, he became the curator for the INHSM. Adventure’s pull was a little too strong to keep him in the museum or classroom, and he coordinated a 12-person expedition, which included his wife Emma Dean, to Colorado. She joined him again in 1868 for a 23-person expedition of the Colorado River and its tributaries. In 1869, Powell led nine men in four boats 1,000 miles down the Green River.
Congress sponsored his second expedition down the Colorado River and into the Grand Canyon in 1871. The 16-month expedition (May 1871 to September 1872) was chronicled by Powell in his “Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons”—a book that remains in print.
A Meeting of Natural Philosophers
While Powell was exploring the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, a letter, signed by 43 of the country’s most prestigious individuals, including William Tecumseh Sherman, Salmon Chase, and Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, was sent to professor Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. It requested that Henry attend and preside over a meeting which was to be held for the “purpose of forming a society, having for its object the free exchange of views on scientific subjects, and the promotion of scientific inquiry among its members.”
The meeting was held on March 13, 1871, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Regent’s Room, and resulted in the creation of the Philosophical Society of Washington (PSW). From this society spawned numerous other American scientific societies, including the Anthropological Society, Biological Society, Chemical Society, Entomological Society, and Geological Society.
The Century and the Cosmos
On Jan. 13, 1847, “upwards of one hundred” individuals, which included sculptors, clergymen, lawyers, merchants, and painters, were invited to attend a nonscientific gathering. It was the beginning of the now-prestigious Century Club, “composed of authors, artists, and amateurs of the Letters and the Fine Arts.”When Dutton returned to Washington, he broached the question to Powell. Not one to waste time, on Nov. 16, 1878, Powell invited to his home a number of people who had indicated interest in such a club. Two days later, Powell sent a circular to proposed members, which resolved to form a club modeled after the Century and the Scientific Club of London. When the men met again on Dec. 2, it was proposed that the club lease rooms at the Corcoran Building. Also, Garrick Mallery, an ethnologist, proposed a club name: Cosmos Club. After some debate and several ballots the name was accepted on Jan. 6, 1879, and thus began the “private social club dedicated to men distinguished in science, literature and the arts.” Powell was voted the club’s first president.
Additionally, on Dec. 12, 1878, the Cosmos Club invited members to join the PSW, and PSW members “voted to join with the new club to prevent a purposeless rivalry between two groups with similar aims,” thus beginning their interlocking relationship.
By 1882, as the Club grew, it established its residence on Lafayette Square in a collection of homes along the east side of the Square. It was not until 1887 that the Cosmos Club became the location for the PSW’s regular meetings, where it still meets today. The PSW, however, is not the most famous club to be associated with the Cosmos Club.
A Most Famous Society
In 1888, on a cold Friday evening, 33 distinguished gentlemen gathered in the Assembly Hall of the Cosmos Club. Explorers, lawyers, military officers, bankers, naturalists, cartographers, meteorologists, and geographers, among others, had been personally invited to the Club. The letter, delivered just three days prior to the meeting, stated that the purpose of the gathering was to consider “the advisability of organizing a society for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.”One of the primary leaders of this assemblage was Gardiner G. Hubbard, a prominent lawyer and co-founder of Bell Telephone Company. He was also the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. More importantly, at least for this meeting, he was a man who “desire[d] to promote special researches by others, and to diffuse the knowledge so gained, among men, so that we may all know more of the world upon which we live.”
It was during this week in history, on Jan. 13, 1888, that, as one of the invited recalled, “the first explorers of the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone, those who had carried the American flag farthest north, who had measured the altitude of our famous mountains, traced the windings of our coasts and rivers, determined the distribution of flora and fauna, enlightened us in the customs of the aborigines, and marked out the path of storm and flood” gathered around the Assembly Hall’s large mahogany table to form America’s geographical society. Its name was the National Geographic Society, and it was, perhaps unforeseen by its founding members, destined to become the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organization.
Its magazine, with its first edition printed later that same year, became one of the most famous in the world, and its sales helped fund hundreds of explorations and scientific missions around the globe.
Much of the success of America’s scientific societies can be credited to having a singular place to assemble. That, in large part, at least in Washington, can be credited to John Wesley Powell. Interestingly, the Assembly Hall of the Cosmos Club is now called the John Wesley Powell Auditorium. Additionally, when artist Stanley Meltzoff recreated that January evening in the Cosmos Club 75 years later, he placed Powell directly in the center, his hand (his only one) touching a large globe, his eyes looking directly at the painting’s viewer.
