Until the 17th century, science was something done mostly in private. Scientific knowledge and scientific practice were limited largely to the upper classes, done often by clerics and sponsored largely by wealthy patrons for their own aggrandizement. In some cases, as we saw with Paracelsus, scientific knowledge was purposely obscured and kept secret.
In the late 17th century, however, several things conspired to bring science into the public arena. First, the expansion of printing and a growing middle class created an unprecedented supply of and demand for new books, helping to create a broad community readers, and hence scholars and scientists, right across Europe. Second, the new experimental and mathematical natural philosophy represented by Newton—i.e. the synthesis of the experimental, practical, philosophical, and collecting traditions—required a public forum, the “scientific society,” to function properly. Because the new science was based on people experiencing the results of experiments first hand, the scientists of Newton’s generation needed a place to demonstrate their experiments publicly. This new way of doing science also required scientists to band together to pay for the increasingly expensive instruments and apparatus required by the mechanical philosophy. These things—a new middle class, a new mass print culture, the epistemic need for public demonstration, and the increasing costs of scientific work—combined to create a new culture of public science in late-17th and early-18th centuries, a culture which lasted well into the 19th century.
One of the earliest manifestations of this new public science was the “Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge,” known usually simply as the Royal Society. Founded under the patronage of King Charles I of England in 1660, the Royal Society provided a public forum for discussing the new mechanical philosophy and for performing public experimental demonstrations. It also housed a museum to provide ready access to natural historical specimens. Royal patronage was one way in which the scientists of the Royal Society helped pay the increased costs of conducting science in the new way, but it also placed some burdens on them. If the King was putting up the money, he literally expected some bang for his buck. To meet both needs—to provide for public demonstration and to please their patron the King—the officers of the Royal Society created the position of “Curator of Experiments.”
The first Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society was Robert Hooke. Though a first rate scientist in his own right, Hooke’s main job for most of his career was to prepare demonstrations for his peers and spectacles for the patrons of the Royal Society. One of his most popular and important public demonstrations was of the air pump, an apparatus designed to refute the old Aristotelian idea that “nature abhors a vacuum” by pumping all the air out of a glass globe with a hand crank. The vacuum that the air pump produced was proved by placing a candle—or a small animal or bird—in the globe and watching it expire as the air was sucked out of recptacle. This was one of many gruesome demonstrations devised by Hooke to educate and entertain his audience. Hooke’s successor as Curator of Experiments, Francis Hauksbee, was also a great showman, inspiring and delighting his audiences throughout the early 1700s with demonstrations of his “electrical machine,” a device for producing large charges of static electricity.
In the emerging mass culture of Europe, these spectacles quickly moved outward from the Royal Society and other scientific societies established in Germany, France, and Italy to reach a much broader audience. Electricity in particular became a fashionable entertainment, a physical manifestation of the new “Enlightenment” culture spreading throughout Europe. In parlors and dining rooms throughout Europe, wealthy people staged electrical demonstrations for their dinner guests. Women’s lips were charged to give “electrical kisses” to their dates. Swords were charged to set a glass of brandy on fire. Dead frogs were charged to make their legs twitch. The King of France even passed a charge of electricity through a line of 200 soldiers holding hands to watch the one on the far end jump in the air when the charge arrived at the end of the line. Ultimately, these entertainments filtered down even to ordinary people as traveling showmen staged similar spectacles for audiences in urban theaters and country fairs around Europe. Benjamin Franklin, that hero of early American science and pioneer of the science of electricity, would often perform these kinds of stunts for his own eating companions, bringing live turkeys to his picnics and electrocuting them on site.
It is hard for us to imagine how these kinds of scientific demonstrations would have amazed 18th century spectators. In an age where the only artifical light came from candles, producing an electrical shock or a glow from a chemical in a charged glass globe would have been absolutely amazing. These were the scenes that Joseph Wright of Derby so famously painted in images like A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery and An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, which I asked you to study for Tuesday’s class.
In the comments section below, please let me know what you think these paintings say about how people felt about public science in the 18th century. What do their faces say about the experience of attending a public scientific demonstration? What kind of people are in the audience? What do the paintings tell us about the demonstrators? What kind of people are they? Please make direct reference to the characters, colors, light patterns, and other aspects of the paintings in your comments.
We won’t be making up Tuesday’s missed class, so comments for this post are mandatory and must be at least 500 words. These comments will, however, count triple towards your total for the semester (i.e. 3 out of 10). Over the weekend I will post something new on Tuesday night’s film and Thursday’s lecture, at which time comments for this post will close. Therefore I suggest you get this one done quickly. Please email me if you have questions.
