Great Generalists of History: Charles Durant

Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).

Charles Durant went on to write the first American book on seaweed, and according to this article, at least, the best one. The whole article is worth reading, especially if like me, you’re interested in seaweed.