Room to Experiment

If the first year at Oxford was golden, the second year was lead. A bad case of jet lag that lasted three weeks and barely controlled asthma left me physically exhausted. I was homesick for my housemate/husband and our Sherman Terrace condo in Madison, nicknamed the Ice House because in the winter its windows frosted on the inside with thin scrolled patterns like those of Varykino in the original Dr. Zhivago (1965) film. But most of all: Oxford had changed.

Dr. Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova at Varykino in Doctor Zhivago (1965)

The Room at Keble

Even though I was in the same room that I had last year (1986), the people in the surrounding rooms had changed and it was much noisier. “The noisiest time of day at college is from 5:00 o’clock at night until 11:00. That’s absolutely the worst time. You can’t get anything done here. It’s just useless to try to do anything during that period because there is constant noise—music, people . . . just impossible. For me, I find that is the best time to sleep. The music isn’t so loud that it can prevent me from sleeping. So rather than waste the time being annoyed because I can’t work, it is better to sleep in the early evening hours while other people are out messing around. Then I get up at 10:30 at night and get to work. I feel a little worried about typing in the middle of the night, but the woman upstairs said that she couldn’t hear me. . . . The only thing about this weird schedule (I am getting used to it—it is not really that insane) is that it screws up my medicine-taking. It’s DEATH to all social life because if the only time you are awake is the middle of the night, obviously no one is going to come by and there’s nothing to do. The level of concentration I can achieve in the middle of the night is more intense, higher, stronger than any concentration I could achieve during the daytime.”

College Rooms as Laboratories

The problems arising from living in college were different in the seventeenth century. There were no laboratories, so budding scientists (who were viewed as dangerous conjurors) carried out their experiments in their college rooms.

In May 1642, John Aubrey writes:

“Thomas Allen (1542–1632) was educated here at Trinity College and became a Fellow before retiring to Gloucester Hall. In those dark times, astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things, and the vulgar verily believed Thomas Allen was a conjuror. He had a great many mathematical instruments and glasses in his room, which confirmed the ignorant in their opinion, and his servant used to frighten freshmen and simple people by telling them he had seen spirits coming up Thomas Allen’s stairs like bees. I was told this before I came up to Trinity by an old man . . . who was at Oxford over seventy years ago. Looking at Allen’s picture today, it seems to me he was a handsome, sanguine man of excellent habit and body. I have been told he had a wide circle of acquaintance that he visited in the long vacation.

Once at Holm Lacy, staying with Mr John Scudamore, he left his watch in his chamber window (watches were rare then). The maid came in to make the bed and hearing a thing in a case cry ‘Tick, tick, tick,’ concluded it must be the devil. She picked up the watch with fire tongs and flung it out the window into the moat to drown out the devil. But the watch was saved when the string caught on a sprig of elder that grew up from the moat (confirming in her mind that it was indeed the devil). So good old Allen got his watch back again.”¹

William Harvey, portrait by Daniël Mijtens, ca. 1627, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“I have seen Dr. William Harvey [yes, the famous physician who first identified the full circulation of blood in the body] come to Trinity College to visit my friend Ralph Bathurst’s brother George, who is a Fellow here too. I feel too shy, too unimportant, to press for an acquaintance with the famous doctor. . . . In George Bathurst’s rooms there is a hen laying eggs, which he and Dr. Harvey dissect. They are repeating Aristotle’s experiments, hoping to see the progress and way of generation. Their interest is in the interior of the egg and first beginnings of the chick, which can be seen, like a little cloud, by removing the shell and placing the egg into warm clear water. In the midst of the cloud is a tiny point of blood, as small as the point of a needle, which beats.”²

Room to Experiment

College dorm rooms have always been a place for experimentation—experiments with drugs, sex, and alcohol.

In the 1970s, the girls brought electric fondue pots to college and experimented with cooking and throwing fondue parties in their rooms. “We can all recall that fondue pots were at the height of their popularity in the 70s, when folks would fill them up with melty cheese, smooth chocolate, and piping-hot oil for cooking small hunks of mystery meat. Yum!”³

Cheese fondue. Photo by Angela Pham on Unsplash

In 2007, the indie rock band Alt-J started in a dorm room at the University of Leeds. Gwil Sainsbury talks about their beginning:

“Me, Joe and Thom all studied fine art, on the same course in the same year, and Gus was in halls with Joe, and Gus also took one of the History and Art modules that we were taking. We just spent a lot of time together in each other’s bedrooms, we didn’t have much equipment; we had barely any equipment. It was just an exciting thing to do and I think at university, if you were gonna be a in a band at any point, it seemed like the best point to do it.”⁴

“In their second year of studies, [Joe] showed [Gwil] some of his own songs and the pair began recording on GarageBand in their hall rooms with [Gwil] acting as producer. The band’s sound arose from living in student halls, where noise had to be kept to a minimum, so that they were unable to use bass guitars or bass drums.”⁵

If you have any stories about doing experiments in your room or know someone else who did, please share in the comments.

1. Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 2015), 41-42.

2. Ibid., 51-52.

3. Kaitlynn Yarbrough, “The 1970s Called and They Want Us to Bring Back Fondue Night,” Southern Living, July 14, 2020. https://www.southernliving.com/food/kitchen-assistant/electric-fondue-pot

4.  Megan Downing, “An Interview with Gwil from Alt-J ∆ (theedgesusu.co.uk),” The Edge, September 16, 2012.

5. “Alt-J.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-J.