In 1789 the chemist and manufacturer James Keir published The First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry. This was an attempt to translate and expand Pierre-Joseph Maquer's Dictionnaire de chimie of 1766, which had become the standard reference work for many experimentalists in the last part of the eighteenth century. Keir never got beyond the first part. However, in the preface, he famously remarked that “the diffusion of general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe, or of European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age” (1). Even allowing for hyperbole, Keir was not far off the mark.
As Peter Jones reveals, the dissemination of science and experimental method became characteristic of the activities of many a philosopher or technician during the “industrial enlightenment,” a notion recently adopted from the economic historian Joel Mokyr. For example, the Midlands’ tour of the scientific lecturer Adam Walker was not limited to gentleman philosophers but took particular aim at a mechanic audience by providing mechanical models and demonstrations of trade skills. One of Walker's auditors was Samuel Galton Jr., who within a few years had equipped his own laboratory with sufficient apparatus to conduct experiments on prismatic colors. This ultimately secured Galton membership in the Royal Society. Subscribing to such lectures, of which there were many in the eighteenth century, encouraged participation in the experimental sciences as a form of self-improvement. Significantly, this did not necessarily imply that the discovery of new knowledge would be applied to some industrial process. Above all, as historians like Mokyr and Margaret Jacob have revealed, the distribution of scientific ideas to an eager public induced an enlightened knowledge economy.
Jones points out that many practicing natural philosophers of the enlightened Midlands were also tied to manufacturing. Thus, Keir was a manufacturer of glass works and of lead as much as a chemist. This is important because it provides some evidence for the relationship between savants and fabricants in “le commerce des lumieres” (71). But Jones is cautious about this phase of connection between the generation of knowledge and its dissemination. There was also resistance. As James Watt and Matthew Boulton became increasingly successful at Soho, on the edge of Birmingham, they became much more careful about displaying their practical experience to interlopers and visitors from all over Britain, America, and the Continent. Toward the end of the century, any ideal of dissemination, at precisely the time when Keir had lauded the concept, was subject to much reservation.
Inevitably, any study of Midlands philosophers comes to focus on the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group much less formally organized than other groups in towns like Derby or Manchester. However, there are many issues surrounding membership in the Lunatics, even involving figures like Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, who were hardly likely to appear at the monthly meetings in Birmingham. Moreover, Jones's glance at Bourbon France in the same period does not reveal “a free-flow market for scientific knowledge” (140) despite the ideals seemingly operating in the Midlands. This, in my view, suggests that the notion of useful knowledge was far from identical with application, despite the apparent influence of British knowledge on savant-fabricants across the Channel. Useful knowledge need not mean industrialism.
Watt and Boulton both felt that travel on the Continent was essential to the education of their sons and that connections with French chemists particularly encouraged. Jones, however, reveals that there is something of a difficulty with this intellectual traffic. By 1785, before Keir's famous pronouncement, Watt lamented that the engineering business was then “in general in the hands of very illiterate people” (121). Watt's many complaints must be interpreted carefully. While Watt gave every appearance of giving up his own experimental studies in chemistry and turned toward mechanics, this impression masks many of his continuing philosophical concerns. Certainly, by the 1790s, there were others jaundiced about the republic of letters. The unfortunate Joseph Priestley, despite his messianic and protodemocratic vision for natural knowledge, noted that in Britain suspicions were voiced about dissenting colleges “making the common people too knowing” (235). Much, not the least the violent unraveling in Paris, hobbled republican optimism. A good example is James Watt Jr., who reported from Paris that even in Lavoisier's home “not a word of Chemistry was there spoken, they are all mad with politics” (212). Concurrently, Priestley's experience in the Birmingham riots of 1791, which resulted in the destruction of his home and laboratory, may have reflected a cultural turn from natural philosophy to the economically useful.
Politics had a profound effect on the support for natural philosophy. Priestley was abandoned by the Royal Society establishment, and the chemist Thomas Cooper was denied fellowship in the Society for reasons of politics and religious nonconformity. Political considerations put an end to the ideal of a free-flow of philosophical information, or at least to support of some of its best practitioners. Priestley fled persecution to turn up in America and, within months, Lavoisier was one of many victims of the Revolution. The madness of politics had poisoned the wellspring of natural philosophy. Jones concludes that the Revolution, ironically perhaps, spelled the end to a “savant discourse committed to the free exchange of information and rooted in an honour code borrowed from the nobility” (236). This may be a reach too far. Despite the ideals of Watt's contemporaries, and despite Watt's dyspeptic view of philosophical and industrial conflict, Jones would not claim the last word on the matter. But he has surely opened our eyes to the complexity of industrialism and knowledge economy in the late eighteenth century.
