BY THE LIGHT OF
THE MOON
Robert Gray Patton
Chit-Chat Club --
September 10, 2007
Meeting once a month on a Monday evening to dine well and to
discuss cultural affairs is a very civilized and rewarding activity, and I
suspect we all know that we are far from the first to do so. In fact I would like to talk now about a
group of brilliant men of the 18th century who also met, dined, and
talked, and whose meetings gave life and energy to great socioeconomic change in
their country and the world. Their
gatherings were held on the Monday nearest the full moon, so that they would
have safe lunar illumination on their way home. And thus they called themselves the
Lunar circle, later, more officially, the Lunar Society.
These men lived in the English Midlands—Birmingham, Lichfield, Derby—a
country whose well-watered hills drained west to the Mersey and Liverpool, south
to the Severn and Bristol, and east via the Trent to the North Sea. As was most of England at that time,
this was a largely agricultural region, but its abundance of coal, iron, clay,
and fast-flowing streams supported modest family-run potteries, smithies and
forges, textile and flour mills, and small metal-working manufactories.
The Lunar men met regularly from 1765 until 1810, their productive apogee
being from 1780-1791. Though their
professions and vocations varied, the glue that held them together was a
passionate interest in all areas of science, or as it was called then “natural
philosophy.” They regarded
themselves as “philosophers,” as did other men of science at that time, and were
fondly known to each other as “lunatics,” their deliberations as
“lunatious.” Beyond pure science,
they applied their prodigious and inventive ingenuity to its practical
application in manufacturing, mining, transportation, education, and social
welfare. They were as fully in step
with the Enlightenment as were Adam Smith, Joseph Black, and James Hutton in
Edinburgh and admired the philosophes across the Channel—Voltaire, Diderot, and
Condorcet. They were advocates of
unfettered free enterprise and not at all averse to profit, and committed to the
idea that their work would improve the health, wealth, and happiness of
all. They were fully convinced of
the inevitability of progress. In
the words of Joseph Priestly, a leading member of the society, “nature,
including both its materials and laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world
abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it and
will grow daily more happy. Thus,
whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and
paradisiacal beyond what our imaginations can now
conceive.”
We can hope it may yet be so.
Being men of the Enlightenment, most were skeptical of Anglican doctrines
and creeds, many were “rational dissenters” or deists, and some were
atheists. As dissenters, many were
denied the political and educational privileges reserved for Anglicans. Some were self-educated, some went to
dissenting academies, the most prominent being Warrington, or to the
universities in Edinburgh or Glasgow.
They felt that at Oxford “the rigours of the mind languished in the
pursuit of classical elegance,” and that the north provided “a more robust
exercise” in learning.
The Lunar Society existed during the reign of George III, who, when not
periodically disabled, flexed his muscles to fortify the power of the crown, a
power shared by the Whig oligarchy.
Parliamentary seats were controlled by the wealthy or aristocratic,
voting was limited, seats and bills were bought and sold. The Lunar members were ardent supporters
of political reform, and of universal male suffrage. They of course despised the slave trade,
which flourished in nearby Liverpool, and were ardent Wilberforce
abolitionists. Most of them
supported the colonists during the American Revolution, and, at least until the
Reign of Terror and the regicide, were strong supporters of the French
uprising. But they themselves gave
vitality even as they helped to give birth to their own revolution—the
Industrial Revolution. Events in
the West Midlands of the late 18th century were to be paralleled by
another techno-social event, that of the late-twentieth century in Silicon
Valley. In each case, ideas with
enormous practical application fundamentally changed how life in the West, if
not most of the world, would be conducted.
And now to the cast of Lunar characters. First it is most essential to point out
that few of the accomplishments of these great men were achieved without
encouragement and the incorporation of ideas from the others. The monthly Monday meetings were
supplemented by frequent visiting and correspondence. With rare exception, they regarded each other with admiration and
affection. Their families had close
social ties, and in one very notable case, there was
intermarriage.
Prominent members included James Keir, a Scottish physician and soldier, who came to
Birmingham and the Lunar Society in 1768.
He founded the first large chemical industry, where he produced sodium
hydroxide from salt, the process for which remains a mystery even today. Then there was William
Murdoch, a brilliant mechanical engineer
who invented gas lighting, built a working model of a steam powered vehicle, and
contributed much to the development of the steam engine. William Withering was chief physician of the Birmingham General
Hospital, also an accomplished botanists and chemist. He was the first to
establish the use of foxglove, or digitalis, for congestive heart failure. There was Samuel
Galton, oximoronically a Quaker gunmaker,
who was the grandfather of Francis Galton the eugenicist. But the most prominent Lunar men were
Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and
Joseph Priestley.
The most important partnership of the industrial revolution was that of
Matthew Boulton and James Watt.
Boulton, born in Birmingham in 1728, was the son of a buckle and button
maker, and joined his father in the family business. He had enormous entrepreneurial talent,
and by the time he was 17 had greatly expanded the manufacture and export of
buttons, watch-chains, and inlaid buckles, which were the fashion on the
Continent as well as in England. He
inherited the business in 1759 and soon bought an old mill in nearby Soho, which
in time was to become the site of the renowned Soho Mill, the largest hardware
manufactory in the world. He
produced a wide variety of well-designed wares, ornamental as well as
utilitarian, silverware, jewelry, clocks, candlesticks, vases and urns, some
decorated with an inlaid gold imitation called ormolu. The King and Queen
welcomed him to St. James Palace.
Catherine the Great was also a customer, and an admiring visitor to
Soho. When completed in 1765, the
Soho factory employed a thousand skilled workers who were well-treated and paid,
and had a “mutual assurance society.”
Boulton engineered innovative labor-saving devices, and organized
work-flow in assembly-line fashion.
Transport to and from markets and ports was facilitated by the rapidly
expanding canal system, the largest of which, the Grand Trunk, passed very near
the Soho works. The factory became
an important tourist attraction, drawing crowds from the Continent and
America. Benjamin Franklin, who had
Midland roots, visited often, and was much admired and welcomed by Boulton and
friends during his 20 years in England.
It was his letter of introduction to Boulton which brought Dr. William
Small into the Lunar circle. Dr. Small, born and educated in
Scotland, moved to America and taught mathematics and science at William and
Mary. There his most devoted
protégé was Thomas Jefferson, who said that being educated by Small “probably
fixed the destiny of my life.”
After returning to England, Small became a doctor in Birmingham and later
Boulton’s physician and scientific advisor. He is said to be the “networker” who
brought the Lunar Circle together in its nascent days and who was certainly very
instrumental in uniting Boulton and Watt.
His early death from Virginia-acquired malaria was devastating to all his
friends in Birmingham and deprived them of a valuable source of scientific
inspiration.
James Watt was born on January
19, 1736, in Greenock, a small fishing village on the Clyde. His father was a ship-chandler, and
could not imagine that his son’s inventiveness would, within the century, turn
his sleepy town into a major steam-ship harbor. Watt was a fragile, sickly lad and was
home-schooled. His brilliance was
soon obvious to all when he, at the age of six, was solving geometric
problems. With his father’s tool
bench at his disposal, he was soon to show that the creative skills of his hands
equaled those of his mind. It was
decided that he should become a maker of scientific instruments. He quickly outstripped the skill of his
teachers in Glasgow so went to London to work. But his frail health forced his return
to the cleaner air of Glasgow, where we was able to find work at the University,
producing and selling instruments.
When business was slow, he read avidly, books on all subjects, literary
and scientific, and made musical instruments, even a barrel organ for one of the
professors. He was taken into the
circle of the leading intellectual figures of the school, Adam Smith and Joseph
Black, the preeminent chemist of the land, among them.
The University had a model of the
Newcomen steam engine, and it was given to Watt to repair. He saw that it was very inefficient in
power and cost of fuel. Its
piston’s motion depended on a vacuum produced by the condensation of steam
within the cylinder, and it soon became Watt’s idea that the engine could be
vastly improved by having a separate condenser. He worked obsessively on his new version
of the engine, making many models, and eventually patented his idea in
1769. Lacking capital, he formed a
partnership with John Roebuck, owner of the Carron Ironworks, but Roebuck’s
workers lacked the skill to produce a good working engine. In 1774, Roebuck’s business failed, and
Boulton was able to come to the rescue, buy Roebuck out, and the partnership
with Watt was born. The two always
got along harmoniously. Watt’s
anxieties, depressions, chronic migraines, diffidence but brilliant
inventiveness were counterbalanced by Boulton’s energetic optimism, skill in and
love of business, and possession of the magnificent factory and skilled work
force at Soho. By 1776, the engine
was ready for commercial application.
It was a reciprocating engine, powering the up and down motion of a beam,
ideal for pumping. And there was
then a critical need for pumps to dry out the many coal, iron, tin, and copper
mines, which in that wet land were constantly filling with water. The few extant Newcomen engines used
tremendous amounts of coal and were limited in power, not enough to dry out any
except the more shallow mines. The
Boulton-Watt engine proved vastly superior. Its first application was in the heavily
mined Cornwall area, where many mines had been “drowned out.” Since each engine at that early time had
to be assembled in situ, Boulton and
Watt had to move to Cornwall for a year or so. It was a difficult project. The Cornish miners were a cantankerous
lot. But the project was quite
successful, and the steam engine market expanded quickly. Watt’s next step was to enable the
engine to turn a wheel, and in 1781, the rotary engine was born. By the 1790s there were several hundred
of these engines powering paper mills, cotton mills, flour mills, and iron mills
throughout Britain, the Continent,
and sugar mills in the Caribbean.
By 1802 the first steam-powered boat, the Charlotte
Dundas, plied the waters of the Clyde, and
the railroads were only 30 years away.
When Boswell visited the Soho Foundry Boulton said to him, “I sell here,
sir, what all the world desires to have, power!”
Another early
member of the group was Josiah Wedgwood, born in 1730, in Burslem, Staffordshire, north of
Birmingham, where there were numerous small potteries, one of them his
father’s. Their product was then a
simple earthenware, providing utility rather than beauty. Wedgwood was, at nine, apprenticed,
after his father’s death, to an older brother, and showed great talent. His brother later refused him a
partnership, thus making one of the greatest blunders in business
history.
After an
apprenticeship with Thomas Whieldon, the most admired potter in the region,
Josiah was able to set out on his own, before long producing ceramic wares of
very high quality. He soon was
exporting to other parts of England and to America. While in Liverpool on business, he
re-injured his right leg, which had been damaged by osteomyelitis in childhood.
Fortuitously, his attending
surgeon, Dr. Hunter, was a scholar and “natural philosopher” who taught Josiah a
great deal, starting him on a course of self education. During his convalescence
there he also met the chemist Joseph Priestley and Thomas Bentley, a gentleman
of culture, who was to become his life-time business partner. He returned to his pottery in Burslem
and continued, through constant experimentation with thousands of glazes and
clays, to perfect his product and expand his sales. His cream ware was in great demand in
England, France, and America. He
presented a set to Queen Charlotte, who was so pleased that she appointed him
“Potter to His and Her Majesty.”
Catherine of Russia ordered a set of 950 pieces. Josiah lost money on that transaction,
but was more than satisfied to have his work in such regal display.
Soon
thereafter, after the Pompeii excavations had led to the craze throughout
England and the Continent for classical pottery, Wedgwood began to produce
vases, urns, and dishes of the same Etruscan style, made of a new clay of his
formulation called “black basalt,” and decorated with Hellenic figures. There was such a growing demand for his
work that expansion was inevitable, and he built a new factory, with a mansion
nearby, called Etruria, in
recognition of the Etruscan motif of his new pottery. His factory was strategically located
right on the banks of the Trent-Mersey Canal, for easy transport of his wares to
Liverpool, and for importation of clay to Etruria, and, as the network of canals
was expanded, for shipment to his London showroom. His constant experiments with new clays,
glazes, and designs continued, and he hired the best artisans to decorate his
plates.
His next
innovation was Jasper ware, a blue stoneware often decorated with white
porcelain, which remains particularly popular today. His ultimate achievement in this
material was a copy of the first century Roman Portland Vase, the original of
which had been in the collection of Lord Hamilton, Emma’s husband. The factory at Etruria hired several
hundred workers, for whom Wedgwood built houses on the site, and for whom he
established, as did Boulton, a form of retirement insurance. He provided medical care and schooling,
determined that all economic classes should be well educated.
Wedgwood met
Erasmus Darwin and Boulton in about 1767 and then became a member of the Lunar
circle. He, as did most of the
group (Boulton excepted) held liberal political views, and was a Unitarian. The Wedgwood-Darwin connection became
very close, and Robert Darwin, a son of Erasmus, married Susannah Wedgwood. Their son Charles Darwin in turn
married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, and so had the financial means to support his
great life’s work, unencumbered by the interference of a day-job
Erasmus
Darwin, another of the Lunar Circle
founding members and certainly the most colorful, was the absolute embodiment of
the English enlightenment.
Physician, polymath, natural philosopher, inventor, prolific writer and
poet, he was said by Coleridge to “possess a greater range of knowledge than any
man in Europe.” He was the
grandfather of Charles, and also of Francis Galton, father of eugenics. He was born in 1731 in Elston, the son
of a lawyer. He studied at
Cambridge, then went to Edinburgh for his medical training, and set up practice
in Lichfield in 1756. He practiced
mid-18th century medicine, doing his share of bleeding, blistering,
and purging, and using opium liberally, but he did encourage healthy diet, fresh
air, sanitation, water purification, and vaccination as well as giving
conscientious attention, sympathy and cheerful encouragement to his
patients. In doing so, he traveled
about 10,000 miles a year over muddy and rough roads to visit the sick. Famed for his diagnostic and prognostic
skill, he was asked to be the personal physician to George III but fortunately
was able to decline.
He was a big,
clumsy man, by no means handsome, and spoke with a stammer, but the power of his
intellect and wit made him quite attractive to women, a gift on which he
capitalized well. He became a
teetotaler after he started practice, but his love of food matched that of his
fondness for ladies, and he developed such a girth that later in life he had to
cut a semicircular hole in his dining table. He was married twice and had 13
children, four by his first wife who died in 1770. He then, with his housekeeper, Miss
Parker, had two “natural” daughters who were raised as part of the family. In their adulthood he established for
them a school for girls and wrote a progressive work on the education of
women. Finally, he fell in love
with Elizabeth Pole, a beautiful and witty young widow 16 years younger than
he. She had been vigorously wooed
by several handsome young swains in the area, and her choice of Darwin was said
to be “a triumph of intellect over aesthetics.” This very happy marriage produced seven
more children.
By 1766, Darwin
had met Boulton, Small, Wedgwood, and others, by which time regular meetings of
the Lunar Circle had begun. He
involved himself fully in their work—steam power, canal digging, mining,
ceramics, to which he contributed ideas and inventions of his own. He developed an improved steering
mechanism for carriages, which is the same as that used in the modern
automobile; he invented a horizontal
windmill, used by Wedgwood to grind pigment; he perfected a hydraulic lift for canal
locks; he developed a wind
gauge, discovered cold and warm weather fronts, and described accurately the
cause of cloud formation and the composition of the upper atmosphere. He even proposed a hydrogen powered
vehicle. Perhaps related to his
stammer, he was fascinated by the mechanics of speech and constructed a wooden
talking machine which could make the sounds of the vowels and consonants, and
could actually say “mama” and papa.”
Knowing of Darwin’s anti-religious bias, Boulton, with wit, offered him
£1,000 for a machine “capable of
pronouncing the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments.” Darwin, of all the Lunar group, was the
most religiously skeptical. At
times his writings profess complete atheism, and at times a deist inclination,
referring to the “first great cause,” rather than God.
Over his
lifetime he wrote thousands of lines of poetry, all supplemented by many pages
of footnotes. He wrote in the style
of Pope—ten syllable lines in rhyming couplets. For example, he conjectured on
the use of steam in prophetic verse:
Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered steam, afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the air.
Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move.
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.
He wrote to inform, as well as the
entertain, and for a time his work was very popular. He was even mentioned seriously as a
possible poet laureate. Horace
Walpole wrote, “Mr. Darwin has destroyed my admiration for any poetry but his
own.” He was well known to
Coleridge and Wordsworth. Although
they later scorned his formal style, they certainly plundered his poems for
images and phrases in their own.
Bits of Darwin can also be found in Shelley, Byron, and
Keats.
His major works were a fusion of art and science. Darwin had translated Linnaeus’s system
of plant classification, based on the sexual anatomy of the flowers. He then set it all to verse, and in
reversal of Ovid, he metamorphosed the plants to people, describing the act of
pollination in romantic terms:
How the young rose in beauteous damask pride
Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;
With honey’d lips the enamoured woodbines meet
Clasp with fond arms and mix their kisses sweet.
This lengthy work, called “The
Loves of the Plants,” was a best-seller, even though considered somewhat
risqué. Its sequel, the
encyclopedic “Economy of Vegetation,” was a wide-ranging poetic treatise on all
science illustrated by William Blake. “Zoonomia,” which covered all of medicine
and human biology, and “Phytologia,” a brilliant work on plant physiology,
reproduction, and principles of agriculture, were sold widely in Europe and
America.
But his most important work was “The Temple of Nature,” in which he gave
a picture of evolution and reproduction, arguably as advanced as that of his
grandson. He proposed that, during
millions of ages before man, all warm-blooded animals had arisen from a single
living cell, which “the great first cause” endowed with power to reproduce, and
had continued to improve by its own inherent activity (no intelligent
design!) and to deliver down those improvements by generation to its
posterity. In ten lines he goes
from the Big Bang to the origin of life:
Ere Time began, from flaming chaos
hurl’d
Rose the bright spheres, which form the circling world;
Earths from each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issued from the first.
Then, whilst the sea at their coevel birth,
Surge over surge, involv’d the shoreless earth,
Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves. . . .
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth.
And then the specks evolve:
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
He recognized that sexual reproduction was necessary for evolution to
work. He saw sexuality as “the
chef-d’ouvre, the masterpiece of nature,” and said that through “the sexual mode
of reproduction a countless variety of animals are introduced into the world,
and much pleasure is afforded to those which already exist in it”—a pleasure we
can assume he often enjoyed himself.
And he anticipated Mendel in proposing that there were particles in the
blood of each parent by which physical and behavioral traits were transmitted to
and blended in their young.
Darwin, too, was thrilled about the French Revolution and said somewhat
dangerously in 1790, “The success of the French against a confederacy of Kings
gives me great pleasure, and I hope they will preserve their liberty and spread
the holy flame of freedom over Europe.”
And he called Franklin, “the greatest statesman of the present, or
perhaps of any century, who spread the happy contagion of liberty among his
countrymen, and delivered them from the house of bondage and scourge of
oppression.”
Joseph Priestly shared with his
Lunar associates their early enthusiasm for the French Revolution and for
Franklin. But unlike most of the
group, for whom nature was primary and religion decidedly secondary, Priestly
was first a theologian. Science was
his hobby, even though at the peak of his career he was called the greatest
English scientist since Newton. He was raised by a Calvinist aunt,
and educated at the dissenting academies, Daventry and Warrington, which were
more progressive in their curriculum than the Oxbridge universities, and, unlike
them, open to students of all beliefs.
During his adolescence he emerged from “the dark hole of Calvinism” into
a more cheerful and hopeful theology, one that abandoned established
orthodoxies. Though a passionate
believer in the Christian God, he came to believe that the Church had been
corrupted by such doctrines as the Trinity, the miraculous conception, original
sin, predestination, the atonement, and divine inspiration of the
scripture. He hoped that if these
“superstitious outerworks” were removed, then the true religion might be
acceptable to his unbelieving friends like Darwin, Franklin and Gibbon. Even more boldly, he rejected the
dualism of body and soul, believing that the latter was material and not
immortal. He could not go quite so far, however, as to reject Christ’s own
miracles and resurrection, and did believe in the millennium and a glorious
Second Coming.
After two
church positions, he was appointed to the faculty of Warrington Academy, where
he first met some of the Lunar group, and was awarded an honorary doctorate at
Edinburgh for his Rudiments of English Grammar. This was followed by a 900 page history
of electricity, some of which described his own experiments, and his
Newton-derived theory of the inverse square law of attraction between charged
particles. In this work he had
encouragement and advice from his friend Benjamin Franklin.
In 1767,
Priestley became minister of a church in Leeds, which fortuitously was adjacent
to a brewery. He noticed that there
was a gaseous layer above the fermenting beer, which overflowed the edges of the
vat, as though heavier than air, and in which a candle flame was
extinguished. His studies showed
that it was what we now know as carbon dioxide. He found that it could be dissolved in
water, and the result was a pleasant fizzy liquid. It was the ancestor of all carbonated
drinks. That discovery alone would
have given him everlasting fame, but he left it for Jacob Schweppe 20 years
later to make a commercial success of his discovery. Priestley moved ahead to study the
properties and components of “normal air,” and of many other “airs,” later
renamed “gases” by Keir. At first
he used ingenious adaptations of kitchen utensils, but he soon acquired a
patron, the liberal Whig Lord Shelburne, who gave him a well-equipped laboratory
of his own design and supported him and his family for a decade. He isolated and identified nitrogen,
ammonia, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride, nitrous and nitric oxides, sulfur dioxide
and trioxide, but most important a new gas, which made up twenty percent of the
volume of “normal air.” This he
showed to be the component of air necessary for all animal life and he found
that it could be produced by green plants exposed to sunlight. He later related his finding to the
French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered its essential role in
combustion, and called it “oxygen.”
In 1780,
Priestley, by then having become officially a Unitarian, was given a church, the
New Meeting House, in Birmingham, which he describes as the “happiest event” of
his life. He had the most liberal
congregation in England, and became a fully integrated member of the Lunar
Society, which gave him the pleasure of discussing and contributing to the pure
and applied scientific ideas of the other members. For example, he and James Watt showed
that water was produced by the combination of hydrogen and
oxygen.
During that
happy next decade, he continued his religious and political writing. The History of the Corruption of
Christianity was published in 1782, and predictably provoked much negative
reaction, although Thomas Jefferson said that it “was the basis of his own
faith.” In his essays on the First
Principles of Government, Priestley, not Bentham, first stated that the purpose
of good governance “was to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number”
and that people were not obligated to support a government which did not do
so. He urged the repeal of laws
restricting the rights of dissenters and felt betrayed by Edmund Burke and William Pitt when they
refused.
By 1791, the
increasingly violent events in Paris were, not surprisingly, viewed with great
alarm by the English Crown, Parliament, and Church. Priestley’s militant support of the
revolution and of political reform at home, combined with his heterodox
religious views brought charges of heresy and treason. He was fiercely attacked by Burke, and
his blissfully happy days in Birmingham were coming to a tragic end. On July 14, 1791, a mob rampaged through
the city in support of “Church and King,” burning his house and laboratory, his
and many other dissenting churches.”
Priestly and his family fled to London, but even there the atmosphere was
threatening, and in 1794 they set sail for America. In that same year Lavoisier was beheaded
in Paris.
Priestley
refused an offer of a position at the University of Pennsylvania since he wanted
to start a dissenting community in Northumberland, a small town on the
Susquehanna. In his laboratory
there he discovered carbon monoxide.
He lived until 1804, long enough to see his friend Jefferson become
president, and said, “I now for the first time in my life find myself in any
degree of favour with the government of the country in which I
live.”
The Birmingham
riots and departure of Priestley took a good bit of wind out of the sails of the
Lunar Society. The members were
aging and had reached a level of attainment in which their interdependence and
collaboration were no longer so needed.
Boulton and Watt had became enormously prosperous with the steam engine,
which powered industry and transportation for more than another century. Watt continued constantly inventing, and
Boulton became a major producer of hard currency. Darwin had moved to Derby with his new
bride in 1781, and, as he reduced his strenuous medical practice, produced his
major literary works. He was
humbled and silenced to a degree by mounting conservatism in the country. He died in 1802. Wedgwood had died in 1795. When Boulton died in 1805, the Soho
works were left to his and Watt’s sons.
Watt died in 1819, and is memorialized in Westminster Abbey.
There was a
gradual dissolution of the Lunar Society until it came to an end in 1813, by
which time there had been a turning of public opinion against the enlightenment
philosophy, rational dissent in religion, and democratic reform. The pastoral hills of the Midlands were
soon undermined by collieries, and smokestacks from the blackened industrial
cities poured into the air noxious carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur
dioxide, some of Priestley’s discovered “airs.” The industrial revolution had arrived,
and with it perhaps the inception of global warming.
Had this
revolution brought with it the “glorious and paradisiacal” world that Priestley
had imagined? However that may be
answered, we can justifiably admire the exuberant, hopeful optimism of this
group of men so well described earlier by Erasmus Darwin: “What inventions, what wit, what rhetoric,
metaphysical, mechanical, and pyrotechnical, will be on the wing, bandy’d like a
shuttlecock from one to another of this troop of
philosophers.”
May we say the
same about our own Monday night proceedings?
REFERENCES
The Lunar Society of Birmingham, Robert E. Schofield
The Lunar Men, Jenny Uglow (Particularly recommended—comprehensive and
highly readable)
Joseph Priestley, F. W. Gibbs
A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804, Robert E. Schofield
The Memoirs of Dr. Joseph
Priestley
The Lives of Boulton and Watt, Samuel Smiles
Doctor of Revolution, Desmond King-Hele
The Writings of Erasmus
Darwin, Desmond
King-Hele
Wedgwood, the First
Tycoon, Brian
Dolan