18th-century science
The science of the Lunar men
Sep 19th 2002
From The Economist print edition
IN THE middle decades of the 18th century a group of clever, merry, Birmingham men gathered every month on the Monday night nearest to the full moon to discuss pretty much everything under the sun. There was Erasmus Darwin, an enormously fat doctor, Matthew Boulton, a pushy metal-goods manufacturer, and Josiah Wedgwood, the man who turned fine pottery into a commercial goldmine. They were joined on occasions by James Watt, the engineer who fine-tuned the steam engine, and Joseph Priestley, a burning radical who discovered oxygen.
As these brief resumés suggest, the members of the Lunar Society were men of huge and varied talents. In an age before intellectual specialisation, it was not uncommon for a factory owner to read philosophy or for a doctor to play the flute beautifully. However, at the heart of the Lunar men's interests lay a driving curiosity in the workings of the natural world (fittingly, they had chosen the full moon to meet because it gave the most light as they stumbled home, drunk on fine ideas and clever talk). Together and separately, Darwin, Wedgwood and their friends classified fossils, made telescopes, created sparks of electricity, and came up with scores of ingenious suggestions for the world's improvement (this included towing icebergs from the Arctic to the equator to even out the climate). …
Book of the week: Reaching for the moon
James Buchan is fascinated by Jenny Uglow's depiction of the scientific club that formed the intellectual engine of the industrial revolution, The Lunar Men
James Buchan
The Guardian, Saturday 14 September 2002
***
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730-1810
by Jenny Uglow, 588pp, Faber, £25
In an early draft of part of The Wealth of Nations, which was discovered and published in the 1930s, there is an interesting sentence which Adam Smith removed from the version he printed in 1776. "It was a real philosopher," Smith wrote, "who could invent the fire engine, and first form the idea of producing so great an effect by a power in nature which had never before been thought of."
The fire engine is what we now call the steam engine: in this case, the model of Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine that belonged to the University of Glasgow, where Smith was professor of moral philosophy. In 1764, the college's brilliant young instrument maker, James Watt, was working to repair the engine and discover a means to prevent its steam power from dissipating uselessly.
What Smith wanted to say was that artisans, mechanics or mill-wrights might make gradual improvements to industrial processes, but great advances required a "man of observation" who could see over the walls that now compartmentalised intellectual labour: "one of those people whose trade it is not to do any thing but to observe every thing, and who are upon that account capable of combining together the powers of the most opposite and distant objects".
Jenny Uglow's sumptuous new book might have been designed to examine Adam Smith's contention for the purposes of what used to be called the Industrial Revolution. In the course of the second half of the 18th century, as every schoolchild knows, there were great alterations in the way Europe organised its knowledge of chemistry, mechanics, geology, electricity and botany; an acceleration of transport by way of canals and turnpikes; new manufacturing processes and colonial markets; a passion for domesticity; and agitation for an extension of the franchise. Europe and America changed between 1750 and 1800 at a pace beyond modern experience.
In examining how these changes came about, biographical historians have tended up to now to concentrate on Smith's own Edinburgh-Glasgow circle of Hume, Ferguson, Cullen, Black and Hutton, the philosophes of France, Benjamin Franklin, the German Aufklärer, and the London of Johnson and the Royal Society.
Jenny Uglow chooses to tell the story of a less well-known group of men, settled in the towns of Birmingham, Lichfield, Derby and what is now Stoke, and happy to make their lives in the district Johnson and Garrick had been so desperate to leave for London in the previous generation. Mostly, but not all, dissenters in religion, these were powerful minds that included Watt (1736-1819), who came south to Birmingham in 1774 after the usual Scottish banking crisis destroyed his hope of developing his engine north of the border; his future partner, the pioneer manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728-1809); the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795); the physician, poet and botanist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802); and, in time, the great radical preacher and chemist, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). James Keir, John Whitehurst, Thomas Day, William Withering, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and William Small made up the circle.
These were typical 18th-century men and so they formed a club. They were to meet at one another's houses on the Sunday nearest the full moon for early afternoon dinner, philosophical (or as we'd say "scientific") discussion and experiments. They could then ride home by moonlight. Formally constituted on New Year's Eve of 1775, the club survived with more or less regularity until the French Revolution brought a revulsion against religious dissent and "philosophy" in general and caused Priestley to seek asylum in the United States in 1794. It was a sort of university at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were not organised to teach the new sciences, and the only technical education available (apart from apprenticeship) was at the Edinburgh medical school.
In a parade of brilliant pictures, we see these men collecting fossils and minerals in the Derbyshire caves, planning canals, draining Cornish mines, making Blue John vases and creamware dinner services, inventing soda water and reprographic machines, identifying new gases or "airs", ballooning, agitating against slavery, excavating, classifying, building, taking out and defending patents, writing theories of the earth or (in Darwin's case) extraordinary industrial pastorals such as The Loves of the Plants . Birmingham and the Potteries are captured at a moment when they have ceased to be villages but are not yet teeming industrial cities.
Jenny Uglow shares with the late Roy Porter an unabashed provincialism. Like Porter (and Karl Marx and Adam Smith, for that matter), she believes that science is not a pure enterprise but a reflection of society's values and its patterns of trade and labour and social class. Her great contribution is an emphasis on family relations, which is neither feminist, nor yet girly, but dead on the historical button and very pleasant to read.
Beside its passion for experiment and classification, the later 18th century was in thrall to sentiment and feeling. In according the franchise of feeling to neglected or mistreated fractions of society - children, plantation slaves, animals and, above all, women of the better sort - the cult of sentimentality did more than any movement to emancipate social life. It still influences the political projects of our era. The Lunar Men were no virtuous bachelor circle like Hume, Smith and Hutton in Edinburgh, but warm, passionate and clumsy in their family lives. Though immensely fat, stammering and lame, Darwin - grandfather to The Origin of Species - had four wives and countless children.
Under the influence of Rousseau's Sophie, Thomas Day attempted to create the perfect wife out of an orphan from Shrewsbury he adopted and named Sabrina (the Latin for the River Severn). She proved insufficiently Lacedaemonian when he dropped hot wax on her neck and, abandoning his "philosophical romance", he sent her off to boarding school in Sutton Coldfield. Women enter this scientific world not merely as startled or terrified spectators, as in Joseph Wright's The Air Pump , but as the industrious and loving companions of J-L David's great double portrait of the chemist Lavoisier and his wife. As if to show she does domesticity by choice, Uglow displays an effortless command of quite complex processes of engineering and chemistry.
History-writing, like industrial manufacturing, depends almost wholly for its profitability on suppliers. In other words, your history book will tend to be as good or bad as your sources. Darwin's letters and the business correspondence of Wedgwood and his partner Thomas Bentley, and Boulton and Watt, are as fresh and lively as any historian could want. Uglow's chapters are brief, and their content carefully varied. Illustrations are dispersed through the text, which is always a treat.
If there are one or two signs of strain, they are only be expected in a book of 600 pages. Like the labels "Scottish Enlightenment" or "Sturm und Drang", the Lunar circle brings order to what would otherwise be a jumble of historical phenomena, but should not be overrated. The book's cover shows a part of Rigaud's picture of the great Italian aeronaut, Vincenzo Lunardi, and two companions floating over the clouds in a hydrogen balloon. None, as far as I know, went near Birmingham unless on foot. The connection is the subliminal L-U-N-A-R. But who would begrudge so blithe a company? Lunardi waves his hat, Mr Biggin takes measurements, and Mrs Sage strikes a pose as they ride the blue air, soon to fill with the smog that was the unintended consequence of all that philosophy.
· James Buchan's history of Edinburgh philosophy will be published by John Murray next year.
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