‘Making do’ and making space for science

The American social historian Susan Strasser has pointed to the value placed on ‘the stewardship of objects’ in the early modern period.Footnote ⁷ For Strasser, the stewardship of objects refers primarily to a widespread care over materials which operated in households. Strasser describes the routine efforts of men and women to ‘make do’ in this context, improvising with available materials, keeping domestic or workshop utensils in good repair, and reusing objects for other purposes. As she puts it, focusing on the case of colonial American households, people

Materials were repaired, reused, used by friends or relatives, or converted to new uses. For most people, scarcity, and to a lesser extent poverty, dictated that such activities were a matter of course. As Strasser puts it, ‘Everyone was a bricoleur’.Footnote ⁹ Reuse was not a choice, an alternative to throwing things away, but the norm, a situation reflected in the fact that there was no special vocabulary for these practices in the early modern world. Making do was just what was done.

‘The stewardship of objects’, ‘bricolage’ and ‘making do’ are thus Strasser's categories, not those of contemporaries, but they do capture a form of life which was widespread. Stewardship extended from the household to more widely distributed networks of artisans who made their living trading in old and discarded materials. From the fourteenth century in many European cities, scavengers of a new class were employed by municipal authorities to roam the streets with carts collecting waste. Coal ashes, bones, rags, cinders, night-soil, metals and shells were all gathered and refashioned into useful products.Footnote ¹⁰ In early eighteenth-century England, cast-off clothes were sold in London by the ‘old-clothes-men of Rag Fair and Rosemary-Lane’.Footnote ¹¹ Port towns such as Bristol, Hull and Yarmouth traded in old iron, bullets and cannon, and old cordage and sails were used to make brown paper in mills near Exeter and Southampton. Old wax, broken glass and old shoes were also collected for reuse.Footnote ¹²

The stewardship of objects also extended to the practitioners of science. If we associate the early modern period with a ‘new science’ it was also one in which the sciences remained very much engaged, on a practical level, with the old, as philosophers routinely repaired, reused and made do with material culture. Natural philosophers adapted methods from domestic and artisanal practice, which they knew as householders or by seeking out information from skilled workers, merchants and craftsmen. This is evident first in the places where natural philosophy occurred in the early modern period. Steven Shapin long ago noted that, in the seventeenth century, ‘The overwhelming majority of experimental trials, displays, and discussions that we know about occurred within private residences.’Footnote ¹³ Most experimental inquiry took place in adapted domestic spaces, sometimes known as ‘laboratories’ if they entailed chemical or pyrotechnic work.Footnote ¹⁴ Shapin and Deborah Harkness have highlighted the social tensions that such novel arrangements produced in early modern households, and Harkness stresses that this period was distinctive for adapting space to science, following the medieval pursuit of science in monasteries and the future use of dedicated laboratories for experimental inquiry.Footnote ¹⁵ It is notable that adaptation of existing space, rather than the construction of new sites, was so common, and this might be seen as part of a culture of making do. After all, the wealthy Robert Boyle could have afforded to build new spaces for science, but it was presumably simpler to adapt existing space. Indeed, Boyle and others exhibited a skill for turning the features of existing space to philosophical advantage, and this suggests the value of making do for early modern experiment.

The kitchen, for example, provided a ready source of fire and materials for chemical experiments. Investigating freezing, Boyle borrowed from kitchen practice when he considered the use of snow and salt to cool drinks and fruit. Trying other mixtures to see if they produced the same effect, he buried drinking-glasses in a mixture of snow, vinegar and ‘Kitchin sugar’.Footnote ¹⁶ Investigating porosity, Boyle kept bones close to a kitchen fire to keep them dry.Footnote ¹⁷ Boyle also exploited the conditions of his cellar to experimental ends. He compared the temperature of a cellar on a frosty night with the outside air and the temperature of his bedchamber, noting that cellars remained above freezing, so that beer did not freeze in them.Footnote ¹⁸ He described how to preserve fruit and flowers for a year by burying them inside glasses in a cellar.Footnote ¹⁹ And he investigated the insensible agitation of fluid bodies by placing fused salt of tartar in his cellar, where the moist air dissolved it into a clear liquor.Footnote ²⁰

The bedchamber also served as an experimental site. Boyle's bedroom window provided a place for experiments. Investigating whether metal particles would preserve a blue tincture from putrefaction, Boyle noted that although ‘the Vial was left unstopt in a window in my Bed-Chamber for many weeks, yet I (whose Organs of smelling are very tender, and who did often put the Vial to my Nose) did not perceive the Liquor to grow at all stinking’.Footnote ²¹ On another occasion, Boyle compared the rise and fall of mercury in an inverted glass tube with the actions of a weather-glass by observing it in his bedchamber:

The frame and the bedroom window allowed Boyle to keep the apparatus safe and helped him to observe the tube over a period of several weeks.

Particular rooms thus provided particular conditions and material opportunities for experiment. Boyle was not alone in adapting spaces in this way. Newton famously controlled the light entering from the windows of his rooms in Cambridge to aid his optical investigations. Earlier, in the 1630s, Kenelm Digby used the window of his rooms in Gresham College, several of which he adapted into a laboratory, to congeal a lye made from nettles: ‘I calcined [nettles] in the fair and large Laboratory, that I had erected under the Lodgings of the Divinity Reader: And I exposed the lye to congeale in the Window of my Library, among my Lodgings at the end of your Great Gallery.’Footnote ²³ White nettles appeared in the frozen lye, showing that flowers and plants could be reconstituted from their own ashes, part of a larger investigation into the resurrection of plants and animals from their calcined ashes.

Francis Bacon noted the value of cellars for congealing substances, and how phosphorescent materials retained their lustre longer in cellars than elsewhere.Footnote ²⁴ In New Atlantis, Bacon described deep caves of the ‘Lower Region’: ‘we use them for all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies’.Footnote ²⁵ Bacon reckoned that domestic spaces were essential to natural philosophy, even if they were considered lowly:

Alchemy and magic no doubt provided some of the inspiration for such comments. Kitchens were long used by alchemists, as depicted in Pieter Bruegel's well-known engraving The Alchemist in the Peasant's Kitchen (1558). Bruegel's image recalls the social tensions of adapted space noted by Shapin and Harkness, with the children exiled to play at the edge of the room and outside in the yard as the alchemist vainly seeks after gold in the kitchen.Footnote ²⁷ Meanwhile, alchemists learned from culinary technique. Aristotle took terms such as ‘roasting’ and ‘boiling’ from cookery to describe natural processes, and alchemists such as Geber took from this the idea that alchemy could use artificial means to imitate nature's generative processes, employing only the ingredients used by Nature.Footnote ²⁸ Early modern court apothecaries were also typically adapted kitchens, so that, as Bruce Moran has written, ‘the line between kitchen and apothecary was not always clearly defined’.Footnote ²⁹ Early modern books of secrets and natural magic typically included cooking recipes and in the early seventeenth century they invited women to pursue distillation and the preparation of medicines in their kitchens.Footnote ³⁰ Making do with existing space thus generated new forms of space and new social or gender opportunities and tensions in the household.

Recycling techniques in experimental settings

That such adaptations might be seen as belonging to a culture of ‘making do’ is supported by reviewing some of the practices that natural philosophers undertook within their adapted spaces. Natural philosophers, like householders and artisans, worked to preserve material culture, to reuse old materials and tools, and to repair broken items, so that a significant component of early experimental practice emerged from acts of making do. Techniques came from a variety of sources. Some followed everyday and domestic practice, some were borrowed from artisans, others were exclusive to natural philosophers.

Obtaining instruments and materials for early modern philosophical inquiry entailed producing them oneself, purchasing them, receiving them as gifts or recycling or adapting them from existing artefacts. In practice, these activities should not be sharply distinguished – there was rarely a clear line separating the ‘new’ and the ‘used’. This is because production might incorporate old materials, purchases of new goods might be made with a mind to the durability and ease of repair of the item purchased, and adaptation might incorporate new elements into an existing artefact.

Obviously, many of the instruments used by philosophers were new, purchased from instrument-makers or made by hand, but these might incorporate old or cheap materials or adapt existing components. As such, philosophers followed the normal domestic practice of ‘bricolage’ in using old materials to make new things, such as clothes. In the seventeenth century, for example, Samuel Pepys, president of the Royal Society, wore a ‘grey cloth suit and faced white coat, made of one of my wife's petticoats’.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, philosophical instruments were made with used materials. It has been estimated that some 10 per cent of all iron used in seventeenth-century England was recycled, and the trade in ‘old brass’ was international. Galileo purchased old brass for his instrument-maker Mazzoleni from Germany, for a third of the price of new, and made his first telescopes using organ pipes and lenses ground on a cannon ball.Footnote ³² Alternatively, cheap materials could replace more expensive ones, as when astronomical instruments such as astrolabes were made from paper.Footnote ³³

Natural philosophers also adapted domestic goods and waste to philosophical uses. It is well known that a variety of pots, pans, jugs and bottles were used in early modern experiments.Footnote ³⁴ James Watt famously deployed a kettle to investigate steam, and Joseph Priestley often adapted household utensils to chemical ends, making an earthen trough to collect gases with a container ‘commonly used for washing linen’ which he passed on to a friend after he had finished with it.Footnote ³⁵ Priestley used gun barrels and broken tobacco pipes to extract air from solids, generated fixed air by adding acid to ‘sawings of marble’, and carried jars of air around immersed in water on ‘common tea-dishes.’Footnote ³⁶ This practice extended to less obvious artefacts, such as playing cards. Because early modern playing cards were only printed on one side, the blank sides of defunct cards were used for a variety of purposes, as notepaper, as calling cards or even as a form of currency. Dr John Morgan of the College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, thus advertised ‘A course of lectures on the materia medica’ on a playing card in 1765.Footnote ³⁷ Domestic space, Morgan's house, provided the venue for the lectures, while the card was made authoritative by applying Morgan's wax seal below his announcement. Botanists may have taken playing cards into the field to make notes on. In 1783 the French naturalist Jean-Pierre Bergeret proposed that the principles of his new system of botanical nomenclature ‘can be written on fewer than twelve playing cards’.Footnote ³⁸ Certainly Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, a series of philosophical contemplations, on playing cards, during countryside walks punctuated with botanizing.Footnote ³⁹ Used cards also enabled new ways of organizing knowledge. Edward Gibbon employed old playing cards to create one of the earliest card indexes, in this case of the books in his library.Footnote ⁴⁰

Chemical substances could also be produced using old materials. James Arden's lectures on natural philosophy included the advice that after making ink, ‘bits of old Iron and broken Galls kept in the Vessel with the Ink, will improve the Colour’.Footnote ⁴¹ Physicians made the emetic preparation of antimony called regulus antimonii martialis using ‘common Nails or any old iron, in small Pieces, put into a large Crucible’.Footnote ⁴² This was fused with antimony, nitre and tartar in a furnace to produce a scoria, which was mixed with more nitre to produce the regulus. Recipes sometimes followed folk practice, which philosophers might test and criticize. The surgeon Charles Peter thus denied that in using steel as a treatment for melancholy and other illnesses he was following the use of ‘old Iron, or infusions of old Nails, for these are the common Medicines of old Women, and of some Men too, who are not of the Physick Line’.Footnote ⁴³

Alternatively, using old materials linked scientific and medical practitioners to larger concerns dealing in scrap and waste. In the 1730s, the physician Thomas Knight reported,

Similarly the chemist Richard Watson reported in the 1780s that green vitriol was made in Deptford by laying heaps of pyrites in the open air, which over time released ‘acid of sulphur’, combining with iron to produce green vitriol. This was washed into receptacles with rain water and then boiled with old iron to saturate the acid and purify it, creating ‘English vitriol’. Two hundredweight of old iron produced one ton of vitriol.Footnote ⁴⁵ Watson also communicated how German artisans obtained copper from ‘copper water’ by dissolving old iron in it to precipitate the copper.Footnote ⁴⁶

Obtaining ‘new’ instruments and materials thus linked natural philosophers, chemists and physicians to domestic practices, and also to international networks of artisans and merchants dealing in old materials. It was also common for philosophers to obtain materials and apparatus ‘second-hand’, a term originating in the fifteenth century and used to designate used goods by the seventeenth. Natural philosophers thus shared in the common practice of passing on clothes, books and material possessions between friends and relations, or from one generation to the next. Like domestic goods, scientific goods were scarce, and so exchange was just as important as production, purchase or collection, if not more so. Specimens, books and instruments were routinely exchanged in person-to-person interactions or as accompaniments to correspondence, often operating in the form of a gift economy.Footnote ⁴⁷

Philosophers often passed on scientific materials from one generation to the next, reproducing techniques and material culture through inheritance. Samuel Pepys inherited his terrella magnet from William Barlow, and Robert Boyle left his ‘best microscope and … best loadstone’ to Robert Hooke.Footnote ⁴⁸ The lifetime of apparatus might stretch over several generations and instruments travelled long distances. After the death of the lecturer in natural philosophy John Horsley in Morpeth, Northumberland, in 1732, his lecturing instruments were purchased by Caleb Rotheram, who ran a dissenting academy in Kendal in Cumbria, after whose death they were purchased by John Holt, lecturer in natural philosophy at the Warrington Academy in Lancashire, where they were also used by Joseph Priestley. Then they were presented to Hackney New College in London in 1786, and then to the library of Dr Williams in London's Cripplegate, where they still remained in 1821.Footnote ⁴⁹

Bequests also constituted a source of instruments for institutions. In the early 1720s, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek bequeathed a collection of his microscopes contained in a small cabinet to the Royal Society, which were sent over from the Netherlands by his daughter Maria. These were not intended as ‘museum pieces’, since the president, Martin Folkes, made sure the microscopes could still be used, printing details of the collection in the Philosophical Transactions to ‘be of Use, by putting any curious Observer in Mind of a Number of Minute Subjects, that may in a particular Manner deserve his Attention’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Used books, of course, were regularly sold or exchanged among the learned, assisted by a variety of second-hand booksellers, and were also sold at numerous auctions, an important site for early modern natural philosophy. In England, the earliest auctions took place in coffee houses in the City of London, the same places where the virtuosi gathered to conduct experiments.Footnote ⁵¹ Robert Hooke noted how he met friends and philosophical acquaintances at auctions, which he attended frequently, so that besides supplying philosophers with books and later specimens and instruments, auctions were an important place for encouraging sociability, that key ingredient in early modern science.Footnote ⁵² Auctions also transformed learning by making materials accessible to new classes. Cynthia Wall calls attention to the way auctions were held to be ‘dismantling’ aristocratic culture in the eighteenth century, breaking up the contents of great homes to redistribute them to a growing middle class.Footnote ⁵³ Scientific auctions similarly dismantled learning, separating the collections of wealthy patrons and nobles to distribute materials to scholars and the enlightened public. The second-hand market thus had a significant impact on the demography of scientific inquiry in this period.

Preservation and repair

Once philosophers had obtained instruments and materials, they made an effort to keep them in good repair and prolong their useful life. This entailed techniques for preventing damage to apparatus, for preserving substances or, if artefacts were broken or ‘injured’, for repairing them. Maintenance could be carried out by philosophers themselves, or delegated to expert instrument-makers and artisans. Once again, domestic and artisanal techniques provided resources for these practices, which demanded both material and social judgements to undertake.

Methods for preventing damage included nealing, whereby ceramic chemical vessels such as crucibles were baked to prevent them from cracking. Robert Boyle thus spoke of vessels ‘being first well neal'd to prevent cracking’ before being used in experiments.Footnote ⁵⁴ Boyle noted that the term came from ‘Workmens language’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Artisanal technique was thus judged reliable among scholars. Transporting instruments also demanded care. Goods were often damaged in transit, and there was little trust in porters. In eighteenth-century England, dealers told consumers of glassware to purchase 25 per cent excess to cover breakage.Footnote ⁵⁶ Granville Wheler lamented that in shipping electrical equipment from Canterbury to London, ‘the resin cakes must be packed up very carefully or they will suffer: mine do so very much in going up to London and returning’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The concern to prevent damage to instruments also influenced their design, and affected decisions over experimental agendas. Philosophers preferred robust, easily repairable instruments, and abandoned experiments if they threatened to damage the apparatus. In his version of the Torricellian experiment, Boyle noted that warming the air increased the height to which a column of mercury in a glass tube was raised, and yet, he wrote, ‘I made no doubt, that it might have been rais'd much higher, but I was unwilling by applying a less moderate heat to hazard the breaking of my Glasses, in the place I then was in, where such a mischance could scarce have been repair'd.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Philosophers also worked to preserve the substances used in experiments and instruments. Some described how chemicals could be recovered. Salt solutions could be evaporated to dryness for reuse. The apothecary Robert Dossie explained how the preparation of yellow poudre de chartreux entailed boiling antimony with a solution of alkaline salt and water – ‘The same solution of alkaline salts, which was at first used, may, after the sulphur has precipitated from it, on its growing cold, be equally well used again as any fresh quantity.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Chemists recycled liquids through distilling apparatus to improve their yield. Thus Pierre Joseph Macquer explained how, in the distilling of essential oils from plants,

Needless to say, instruments did break, and this led experimenters to consider their repair. Repair constituted one of the major constituents of artisanal labor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Richard Dunn observes of a large collection of instrument-makers' bills from the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘the bills do not just list the sale of new instruments … most of the entries are for the cleaning and repair of equipment’.Footnote ⁶¹ ‘Makers' spent much time replacing worn parts, mending cracked glass or fragile components, cleaning lenses and lacquering wood. Trade cards announced this role. The card of John Oliver of Grub Street in London explained that he ‘Makes and Repairs all sorts of Glaziers Plumbers Tools at the Lowest Prices’.Footnote ⁶² In the sciences, Galileo and James Watt are among the more celebrated figures who offered services repairing instruments.Footnote ⁶³ Repair was also a significant object of philosophical inquiry, and natural philosophers sought to collect and communicate information on techniques. Cements, or ‘lutes’ for fixing glass and ceramics, were often discussed by chemical philosophers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Robert Boyle explained how linseed oil was used to make pastes for cementing broken pipes; he also described how to mend ‘clefts and commisures’ using paper, which absorbed water to swell up and fill holes. Leaks in ships could be stopped on the same principle using dried salt beef.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is often assumed that repair work was especially valued in the provinces, where, as A.D. Morrison-Low has recently argued in the case of nautical instruments, makers were fewer, instruments were rarer and skilled repairmen could make a good living maintaining instruments, especially in port towns where octants, sextants and compasses were often renovated and resold.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, the difficulty of procuring new instruments in the European colonies has been seen as prompting repair cultures and adaptability in colonial instruments.Footnote ⁶⁷ Further studies are needed to examine such claims, allying as they do the old and used with the periphery and the new with the centre. It may be that repair and reuse were common everywhere, but were adjusted to local resources and possibilities.

Deciding when instruments needed repair was not a simple business, prompting disagreements between makers and users, narratives of heroic repair work, and regressive disputes over the competence of instrumental performances.Footnote ⁶⁸ Philosophers traversed diverse sites and communities in pursuit of repairs. Robert Hooke ordered his servants to mend his clothes, or took them to a tailor to be repaired. He had a Mr Scarborough mend his chimney, and left jewellery and mathematical instruments for repairs with Mr Haux and the clockmaker Tompion.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the following century, repair seems to have been a particular concern among electricians, whose apparatus included many items made of glass, an expensive commodity in the eighteenth century (a dozen quality drinking glasses could cost a week's wages for many people).Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus Joseph Priestley, Tiberius Cavallo, Benjamin Wilson and other electricians agonized over the best ways to mend the glass of Leyden jars, which were liable to crack during electric discharges.Footnote ⁷¹ Wilson described how to use wax, resin, turpentine and olive oil to seal cracks in a Leyden jar, while the lecturer Cadogan Morgan advocated using lower charges in experiments to avoid this problem.Footnote ⁷² Alternatively, one could avoid using glass in the first place. Tiberius Cavallo communicated a method used by Beccaria to make coated electrics (glass coated with conductors such as tinfoil or gilt paper) without using glass. Beccaria melted a mixture of colophonium and powder of marble, which he poured over tinfoil and spread about with a hot iron, then covered with another sheet of tinfoil. Cavallo reckoned that this could be advantageous, ‘if broken, it may be repaired by a hot iron; but glass, when broke, can never be repaired’.Footnote ⁷³

Finally, when instruments were damaged beyond repair the broken parts could still be reused for other purposes. Lavoisier proposed that to contain liquids for distillation, ‘The best utensils for this purpose are made of the bottoms of glass retorts and matrasses.’Footnote ⁷⁴ A heated iron ring connected to a wooden handle could be placed around the broken vessel to make it usable.Footnote ⁷⁵ Priestley used pieces of broken crucibles to hold materials heated with a burning lens.Footnote ⁷⁶

The motivations for making do

Having established that natural philosophers engaged in practices of making do and the stewardship of objects, it is next necessary to ask why they did it. What were the motives for such practices among early modern scientific practitioners? To the degree that philosophical sites coincided with domestic spaces, they no doubt participated in the ‘making do’ of the early modern household. As Strasser notes, making do, stewardship and bricolage were a response to scarcity and the need to avoid expense. Natural philosophers suffered from both. They faced unique problems of scarcity because they dealt in rare or unusual materials. The French chemist Nicolas-Louis Vaquelin wrote that red lead, mined in Russia, had become ‘exceedingly scarce … it is sold at present for its weight in gold’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Peter Simon Pallas added that ‘it is difficult to procure the quantity necessary for experiments’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The scarcity of specialized instruments also prompted concern. Uppsala's professor of chemistry Tobern Bergman complained that it was hard to find crucibles for precisely weighing substances because those commonly available ‘have rough surfaces filled with little holes, which hide a quantity of the matter very considerable where experiments are made upon minute portions’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Some claimed that distance from urban centres determined the need to make do. Discussing the use of rain gauges, the English agriculturalist William Marshall wrote that ‘gentlemen who reside at a distance from the metropolis may find it difficult to procure a mathematical apparatus’ and therefore might make their own gauges consisting ‘of a common tin tunnel to collect the rain-water; a common glass bottle to receive it; and a small China vessel to measure it in’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Philosophers also had to trade the need for scarce materials and instruments off against the expense of obtaining them. They often mentioned trying to avoid high costs in their investigations. Joseph Priestley adapted kitchenware to chemical experiments on airs because, as he put it, this was good for ‘keeping off such as would involve me in expense’.Footnote ⁸¹ Cavallo sought a substitute for glass in electrical apparatus as something which ‘might answer better than glass for this purpose, [or] at least be cheaper’.Footnote ⁸² Making science appeal to the public also prompted authors to keep in mind the costs of experimenting. Speaking of the contents of a planned book on chemical theory, Boyle wrote, ‘I declined several Experiments that required either more skill, or more time, or more expence than could be well expected from most Readers, and chose rather to employ such Experiments as may be more easily or cheaply tried.’Footnote ⁸³ Similarly, Thomas Sherley prefaced the translation of a book of secrets of 1677,

As in the case of repair, a concern over the expense of instruments could have consequences for experimental results. A striking instance of this is Priestley's work on dephlogisticated air. In early experiments, Priestley failed to produce dephlogisticated air from substances such as Roman vitriol, manganese, and green copperas by heating small quantities of material on quicksilver with a burning lens or in a gun barrel. He later generated the air successfully by heating substances in long retorts with their bellies immersed in sand and the necks in water or mercury. Priestley wrote that he had not discovered the better method out of a concern for economy. In the early experiments, he explained,

While the avoidance of expense was no doubt important to natural philosophers, another less obvious motivation for their stewardship may have been a sense of wonder at the inherent properties of materials, no doubt understood as divinely ordained. In his 1671 ‘Essay of Men's Great Ignorance of the Uses of Natural Things’, Robert Boyle referred to practices of repair and adaptation as evincing the unexpected properties and uses of materials that might be gleaned by more systematic philosophical inquiries. Hence, ‘Tobacco … was suffered yearly to rot and perish like other herbs’ while indigo ‘would uselessly perish’ until men discovered processes to make them into useful commodities. Other uses of materials produced wondrous effects, as when ‘out of the skulls and bones of dead men … chymists do ordinarily, to the wonder of the ignorant, draw store of spirit, and oil, and phlegm’. Boyle thought these techniques, producing ‘considerable and unlikely effects’, were ‘strange’ and pleasing.

Stewardship also manifested, no doubt, the widespread value of thrift among early moderns; that is, a concern for frugality, simplicity and the avoidance of waste, stemming from religious and moral grounds as much as from practical necessity. To define ‘thrift’ is not simple. The term changed its meanings over time, and it is outside the scope of this essay to follow those changes in detail, but since the time of Max Weber critics have shown how senses of thrift moved between a moral, ascetic restraint and a more economically minded concern for saving money and for careful expenditure.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thrift could be negatively associated with miserliness or avarice, but more commonly it carried the positive connotation of diligence and temperance.Footnote ⁸⁷ As Boyle wrote of his French master Marcombes, ‘Thrifty he was extremely, and very skilful in the flights of thrift; but less out of avarice, than a just ambition, and not so much out of love to money, as a desire to live handsomly at last.’Footnote ⁸⁸

The career of Benjamin Franklin provides perhaps the clearest example of a philosopher concerned with thrift. Franklin's sense of thrift was rooted in his upbringing among New England Puritans, for whom thrift was a public aspiration to self-discipline and moral constraint.Footnote ⁸⁹ Expressing what Stephen Innes called ‘a secularized version of the Protestant ethic’, Franklin sought to avoid the squandering of time and money in all areas of his life.Footnote ⁹⁰ From the 1730s, he was also a Freemason, for whom restraint was similarly important: ‘use the blessings of heaven with temperance and moderation’, as one New England Mason put it.Footnote ⁹¹ Seeking to avoid excess and expense shaped Franklin's learning and his civic works. He often bought goods second-hand and valued the chance to borrow books from friends and acquaintances.Footnote ⁹² This desire to avoid buying new books led Franklin to establish Philadelphia's first library among his fellow members of the Junto, and following that he founded a popular subscription library which was copied throughout the United States.Footnote ⁹³ Franklin also worked to bring order to the streets through the collection of waste. He carried out studies on efficient street-sweeping and introduced the first scavengers to Philadelphia, to pick up reusable materials.Footnote ⁹⁴

As he grew older, Franklin developed this thrift into what he called a ‘philosophy of virtue’ encouraging industry and frugality, both in himself and in others. ‘Frugality’ he defined as: ‘Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e. waste nothing.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Franklin exploited his skills as a printer to spread this philosophy abroad, printing proverbial sentences on thrift in his journal Poor Richard's Almanack, which he collated into a famous essay, ‘The Way to Wealth’, in 1757. Here he exhorted his audience not to waste money on superfluities: ‘The Art of getting Riches consists very much in Thrift.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Domestic thrift was thus conjoined with philosophy and with commerce, and Franklin's print shop, as an extension of his artisan household, was likewise a place of thrift. For example, his wife helped in the printing shop by ‘purchasing old linen rags for the paper-makers’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Franklin was also a keen accountant, urging the need for careful bookkeeping, since even a tiny profit or loss could quickly turn into a significant one. As Otto Sibum has shown, Franklin's bookkeeping habits extended through his moral life, his commercial transactions and his scientific inquiries. He kept careful accounts of his own virtues, entering dishonorable acts into a ledger which he made using a reusable ivory memorandum book written in pencil and rubbed out when necessary. He resolved arguments by drawing up a balance sheet of pros and cons, which he then matched and cancelled out until only one side predominated. To refine this method he proposed a more abstract ‘moral or prudential algebra’ which gave a weighting to the different arguments. As Sibum shows, Franklin approached electricity in the same quantitative way, treating a surplus of electricity in a body as a credit, and a deficit as a debit, termed plus or minus. Electrical theory became ‘a bookkeeping problem that was to be solved algebraically’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Household thrift thus extended into Franklin's artisanal and natural-philosophical endeavours, shaping his practice and his theories of nature.