Just as visitors to eighteenth-century London were puzzled by the modest nature of the Hanoverian Court of St James compared to the glories of the Bourbon Versailles or the Romanov St Petersburg, so too have historians wondered at the lack of magnificence of the eighteenth-century Royal Society when compared to the Academies of continental Europe. Where, after the death of Newton, are the likes of Buffon, Clairaut, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier and Linnaeus to be found in Britain? Why, until George III (and then only sporadically and indirectly), was the Royal Society not particularly Royal at all, being left to fend for itself in the cramped quarters of Crane Court – closer to stock jobbers and grocers than to courtiers and state officials – until the end of the century? What great inventions are to be laid at the door of the Fellows of a Society whose founding rhetoric included that of utility? And what, finally, are we to make of the obscure country parsons who sent in to the Society their seemingly random papers on Roman coins, violent thunderstorms or two-headed calves? The Royal Society of London was not an Academy that hired Academicians of great theoretical or mathematical brilliance to bring glory to its princely patron or to solve technical problems. It was a club that elected its own Fellows and relied upon them, and not the King, for funds and action. They respected the plain fact, and those who could produce it, and were suspicious of generalizations and generalizers. While they revered their greatest Fellow, Sir Isaac Newton, they largely ignored his mathematizing methodology and concentrated on the production of novel experimental effects, accurate measurement and meticulous natural history. Their energy waxed and waned, but never disappeared; this issue of the BJHS is dedicated to showing some of them at work at an important eighteenth-century London club.

It has been a singular privilege to preside over the BSHS as it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. As we share our festivities with the British Association annual meeting at Leeds, I am doubly honoured to be giving this address. A fiftieth anniversary is a sentimental occasion. It is a moment when we can express our gratitude to our many friends and forebears who by their dedication have enabled the Society to grow and flourish. That so many of those friends should be with us to share in our celebration is a source of delight to us all. To our past presidents, former editors, officers and councillors, I extend the warmest welcome. And to our visitors and guests from overseas, I should like to say how much we value your presence and contribution to this conference.

Is there not, then, an incongruous note in my title – a hint of foreboding perhaps? If tempted to speculate on its source one might have wondered whether it is in those rumours we sometimes hear that the end of science is nigh. When we can almost clone humans and almost explain the moment of creation, what is there left? Might the end of science not spell the end of its history? A moment's reflection suggests that this cannot be. After all, the question why science should have come to an end when it did would still keep historians in business. And the more intriguing question of why the end of science has been proclaimed at the end of each of the last four centuries would keep us in business even longer!

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night…

John 3: 1–2

A lady asked the famous Lord Shaftesbury what religion he was of. He answered the religion of wise men. She asked, what was that? He answered, wise men never tell.

Diary of Viscount Percival (1730), i, 113

NEWTON AS HERETIC

Isaac Newton was a heretic. But like Nicodemus, the secret disciple of Jesus, he never made a public declaration of his private faith – which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his personal beliefs. His one-time follower William Whiston attributed his policy of silence to simple, human fear and there must be some truth in this. Every day as a public figure (Lucasian Professor, Warden – then Master – of the Mint, President of the Royal Society) and as the figurehead of British natural philosophy, Newton must have felt the tension of outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church, while inwardly denying much of its faith and practice. He was restricted by heresy laws, religious tests and the formidable opposition of public opinion. Heretics were seen as religiously subversive, socially dangerous and even morally debased. Moreover, the positions he enjoyed were dependent on public manifestations of religious and social orderliness. Sir Isaac had a lot to lose. Yet he knew the scriptural injunctions against hiding one's light under a bushel. Newton the believer was thus faced with the need to develop a modus vivendi whereby he could work within legal and social structures, while fulfilling the command to shine in a dark world. This paper recovers and assesses his strategies for reconciling these conflicting dynamics and, in so doing, will shed light on both the nature of Newton's faith and his agenda for natural philosophy.

One of the challenges for historical biographers is to decide how far it is appropriate or legitimate to try to psychoanalyse their subject. On the face of it, such analysis might seem an obvious part of the biographical enterprise in a twentieth-century context. We are all heirs to the revolution in thought brought about by Freud's discovery of the unconscious in the nineteenth century, since when it has become commonplace that beneath people's conscious thoughts and statements lie deeper, more fundamental drives and motives, of which they are not aware and which are not under their conscious control. Indeed, speculation about such subconscious desires and impulses is normal in day-to-day conversation: this reflects and is reflected by the fact that words that originated as technical, psychoanalytical terms have become part of the general language, such as ‘neurotic’, ‘paranoid’, or even ‘death wish’ and ‘Oedipus complex’.

It was well said by Clerk Maxwell: ‘For the sake of persons of different types of mind scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolical expression.’

From N. V. Sidgwick's Presidential Address to the Chemical Society, London, 1937

During the years between 1930 and 1950, chemistry underwent a transformation that affected both research and education. New subdisciplines like chemical physics and physical organic chemistry emerged, encouraging an influx of ideas and experimental techniques from physics. X-ray crystallography and other spectroscopic methods became indispensable for determining structures of atoms, molecules and crystals; such chemical concepts as valence and bond were refined within a new explanatory framework based on principles of physics; and the study of reaction mechanisms and rates became closely intertwined with that of structures and properties of chemical compounds. In conjunction with these changes, introductory chemical textbooks began to shift their emphasis from thermodynamic equations and solution theories to three-dimensional arrangements of atoms in molecules and types of chemical bonds. There is no doubt that the most important impetus behind this transformation was the development of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s, and the most prominent among those who applied it to chemistry was Linus Pauling. And in Pauling's view, ‘the principal contribution of quantum mechanics to chemistry’ was the concept of resonance.

The entry of resonance into chemistry, or the reception of the theory of resonance in the chemical community, has drawn considerable attention from historians of science. In particular, they have noted Pauling's flamboyant yet effective style of exposition, which became a factor in the early popularity of the resonance theory in comparison to the molecular orbital theory, another way of applying quantum mechanics to chemical problems. To be sure, the non-mathematical presentation of the resonance theory by Pauling and his collaborator, George Wheland, helped to facilitate the reception; but this presentation was vulnerable to the confusion that arose among chemists owing to the similarity between resonance and tautomerism, or between foreign and indigenous concepts. The reception occurred at the expense of serious misunderstandings about resonance. This paper investigates the ways in which Pauling and Wheland taught, and taught about, the theory of resonance, especially their ways of coping with the difficulties of translating a quantum-mechanical concept into chemical language. Their different strategies for teaching resonance theory deserve a thorough examination, not only because the strategies had to do with their solutions of the philosophical question whether resonance is a real phenomenon or not, and whether the theory of resonance is a chemical theory or a mathematical method of approximation, but also because this examination will illuminate the role of chemical translators in the transmission of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries.

It is hard to think of a better subject for the exercise of retrospective analysis with which we are here concerned than Robert Boyle, the leading British scientist of his day, and arguably the most significant before Newton. A prolific and influential author, Boyle was lionized in his time both for his scientific achievement and for his piety and philanthropy. Of late, he has been the subject of attention from a variety of viewpoints which, as we shall see, raises the issue of how he is best understood. In particular, I want to argue that, for all his eminence, there are complications about Boyle's personality that cry out for scrutiny, and it is on the implications of these that I will dwell in the latter stages of my paper.

Boyle was born into one of the most privileged aristocratic families in England. His father, Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, was Lord High Treasurer of Ireland before the Civil War, and Robert, the youngest – and, as he himself claimed, favourite – son, was brought up in an opulent, privileged setting, surrounded by servants and with an entrée at the royal court. His elder brothers were suave and active figures, only too ready to be involved in the fighting of the Civil War – in which one, Viscount Kinalmeaky, was killed, though two others, Lords Dungarvan and Broghill, survived to go on to high state office under both Cromwell and Charles II. This background undoubtedly had a significant influence on Boyle, giving him an aristocratic demeanour to which his contemporaries almost automatically deferred. It also made him familiar with the mindless social milieu of landed society, in which it was all too easy (in Boyle's own words) to ‘squander away a whole afternoone in tatling of this Ladys Face & tother Lady's Clothes; of this Lords being Drunke & that Lord's Clap; in telling how this Gentleman's horse outrun that other's Mare’.

In May 1862 Desmond G. Fitzgerald, the editor of the Electrician, lamented that

telegraphy has been until lately an art occult even to many of the votaries of electrical science. Submarine telegraphy, initiated by a bold and tentative process – the laying of the Dover cable in the year 1850 – opened out a vast field of opportunity both to merit and competency, and to unscrupulous determination. For the purposes of the latter, the field was to be kept close [sic], and science, which can alone be secured by merit, more or less ignored.

To Fitzgerald, the ‘occult’ status of the telegraph looked set to continue, with recent reports of scientific counterfeits, unscrupulous electricians and financially motivated saboteurs involved in the telegraphic art. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald reassured his readers that the confidence of ‘those who act for the public’ had been restored by earnest electricians, whose ‘moral cause’ would ultimately be felt and who ‘may be safely trusted even in matters where there is an option between a private interest and a public benefit’. As a prominent crusader for the telegraph, Fitzgerald voiced the concerns of many electricians seeking public confidence and investment in their trade in the wake of the failed submarine telegraphs of the 1850s. The spread of proper knowledge about the telegraph would hinge on securing an adequate supply of backers and the construction of telegraphy as a truly moral cause – an art cleansed of fraudsters, ignoramuses and dogmatists.

Wee people at London, are so humbly immersd in slavish business, & taken up wth providing for a wretched Carkasse; yt there's nothing almost, but what is grosse & sensuall to be gotten from us. If a bright thought springs up any time here, ye Mists & Foggs extinguish it again presently, & leaves us no more, yn only ye pain, of seeing it die & perish away from us. Humphrey Ditton to Roger Cotes, ca. 1703

THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

During the last decade of his life, Sir Isaac Newton took the measure of achievement. Probably shortly before 1725, Newton scribbled on the undated cover of a letter a brief list of those discoveries he believed belonged entirely ‘to the English’. Included were ‘the variation of the Variation’ (magnetic declination); the circulation of the blood; telescopic sights and the micrometer variously improved by his contemporaries, Robert Hooke and John Flamsteed; and ‘the Libration of the Moon’ likely in reference to Newton's own explanation of lunar eccentricity. Notably, this was not simply a personal calculation. Newton makes no mention of such controversial matters as the fluxional calculus, the refraction of light, or even the measure of universal gravitation, which he otherwise might have claimed as his own efforts. Even the private lights of the solitary genius could still accommodate a distinctly broader sense of the depth of national accomplishment.

The Royal Society in the eighteenth century cuts a poor figure in comparison with its robust parent of the seventeenth century. Contemporary satirists and modern historians alike have found little to recommend the weak and well-padded institution. After Newton's death in 1727, it was no longer the centre for natural philosophy, and even during his tenure as President the Society did not escape censure. Fascination with monstrous curiosities and antiquarian puzzles replaced serious scientific work, according to various detractors. Recently scholars have begun to re-evaluate this caricature and point to the myriad ways in which the Society cultivated natural philosophy and natural history during the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on one of the Society's frequently overlooked strengths: its extensive correspondence.

In late 1916 the British Government finally bowed to pressure from scientists and sympathetic elements of the public to organize and fund science centrally and established the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Since just before the turn of the century state funding for science had steadily increased: the National Physical Laboratory was established in 1899, the Development Commission in 1909 and the Medical Research Committee in 1913. The establishment of the DSIR marked an end to piecemeal support and it was therefore a watershed when the state

finally accepted its responsibility to fund science properly, to develop a coherent science policy and thus recognise that science and scientists were crucial components of modern national life; not just in wartime, but in the development of the peacetime economy as well.

At least this is how the history of the DSIR is currently still represented. The following analysis is more sensitive than previous treatments as it points out that the state's organization of a centrally planned and funded national policy for science began before the DSIR, and that this new body (in its support of pure research) reflected priorities established before the outbreak of the war. In previous accounts the DSIR was presented as a total break with the laissez-faire past. So, as historians we no longer follow the special pleading of the contemporary science lobby in arguing that the state was deaf to the needs of modern science. However, I want to argue that we are still deaf to the wider concerns of this contemporary pro-science rhetoric, which argued not only for centrally planned and funded science, but also often that scientists themselves should make policy for science.

On 31 May 1936 Professor Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a letter to the Austrian littérateur Arnold Zweig, warning him about the dangers of undertaking biographical research. Freud intoned that ‘anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be used’.

As a psychoanalyst, Freud knew only too well how readily each individual person employs the ubiquitous mechanisms of defence such as repression, projection, splitting and idealization, all of which operate to conceal our deepest, innermost affective states; and he questioned therefore how accurately someone could write a life history. Freud harboured other anxieties about the craft of biography. In his classic monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910, the great Viennese analyst not only lamented ‘the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available’, but also questioned the very enterprise of psychologically informed biographical work itself.

For over half a century, from 1924 to 1986, the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) worked to modernize the British home by bringing the blessings of labour-saving appliances to the aid of British women. Adopting a strategy of facilitation, the EAW sought, on the one hand, to educate women about electricity and its advantages in the home, encourage them to demand greater access to that electricity and keep them abreast of new developments in appliances and the infrastructure (from a national grid to sufficient outlets) necessary for enjoying them. On the other hand, the organization sought to discover the real needs and desires of the women themselves, and to bring this forcibly to the attention of the electrical industry in Great Britain ; to make the ‘women's point of view’, as it was called, a factor in the production, distribution and application of electricity in the home.

Although the very masculine electrical industry was a decisive part of both the EAW's context, and of its financial and advisory structure, the group proudly insisted that it was a women's organization in which women addressed other women about women's concerns and well-being. In its early years, the excitement of women coming together in a modern cause was palpable, but as the leadership aged and electricity turned from modern vision to commonplace reality, the almost religious zeal and pace of activities began to falter. A late-hour attempt to highlight nuclear power plants as evidence of a renewed and equally exciting modern moment fell short, and in 1986 the EAW quietly dissolved itself, the casualty of large social changes, some of which it had proudly helped to bring about.

BSHS members might be interested to learn that an organization named the ‘A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund’ has recently been established in order to restore and protect the hitherto neglected grave of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), one of the greatest tropical naturalists of the nineteenth century. Wallace is best known as being the co-originator, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and for his book The Malay Archipelago, which is regarded as one of the most important of all Victorian travel works.

Wallace is buried together with his wife Annie in Broadstone Cemetery, Dorset. The grave is marked by an unusual and striking monument: a seven-foot tall fossilised conifer trunk from the Portland beds mounted on a large cubic base of Purbeck stone. Unfortunately, the monument has not been properly maintained for many years and it is now in poor condition. Furthermore, the lease on the grave has only fourteen years left to run before it expires, after which there is a danger that the plot could be used for another burial.

The primary aims of the Wallace Memorial Fund are to restore the monument, apply for it to be officially listed by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and to extend the lease on the plot. A. R. Wallace's grandson Mr Richard Wallace (who is the treasurer of the Fund) plans to transfer the lease to the Linnean Society of London once the restoration work has been completed. This will ensure the grave's long-term protection.

A secondary aim of our project is to commission English Heritage to produce a commemorative ceramic plaque and install it on ‘The Dell’ (Grays, Essex), where Wallace lived from 1872 to 1876. This is the only surviving one of three houses which Wallace built (it is currently a convent) and he wrote his important book The Geographical Distribution of Animals there. It is also notable in being one of the first houses in Britain to have been constructed of concrete.

The total cost of the project will be approximately £4955. Contributions to date total £3000 leaving £1955 still to be raised. If any members of the Society would like to make a donation then cheques should be made payable to ‘The A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund’ and sent to Dr G. W. Beccaloni, A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund, c/o Entomology Department, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD (Tel. 0207 942 5361, E-mail: g.beccaloni@nhm.ac.uk).

Privilege brings obligations – noblesse oblige. Boyle came from a deeply privileged background. If we are to locate him through twentieth-century eyes in order to rediscover his psychic space, then this background needs to be borne in mind. It was a constant shaping force for him. Twentieth-century eyes mean a new perspective. As Eliot wrote of Pascal, Boyle's contemporary, ‘every generation sees preceding ones differently. Pascal is one of those writers who will be, and who must be, studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it’ – and so it is with Boyle.

Boyle's childhood was beset by tragedy. From a psychological point of view, there can be fewer worse tragedies than the premature loss of a mother. His mother died of consumption when he was three. She was forty-two and he was her fourteenth and penultimate child. It seems clear that this early loss haunted him for the rest of his life, its unconscious effect always there. At some level he may have felt partly responsible for her death – that his birth had helped to wear her out, to finish her off, to consume her. It would seem that he missed out on mourning in the conventional sense, or rather in the sense that Freud emphasized as being all-important in his paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Boyle did use, in his autobiographical writing as ‘Philaretus’, the word ‘disaster’ to describe this early tragedy, and it is a powerful enough word in the context. But what happened to his grief ? Was it worked through? Was it lived with? Or was it just sublimated into his work, his wide range of preoccupations? Was it something that remained as a constant, underlying refrain in his life, that he needed to defend himself against?

In the late spring of 1947, the experimental physicist P. M. S. Blackett succumbed to the temptations of theory. At this time, Blackett (1897–1974) was fifty years old. He was a veteran of the Cavendish tradition in particle physics and he was on his way to an unshared award of the 1948 Nobel Prize for his experimental researches in nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. His photographs of cloud-chamber tracks of alpha particles, protons, electrons and positrons were well known to practitioners of particle physics, even as they now grace the pages of physics textbooks.

Blackett's turn toward theory in 1947 involved some risk for a well-established experimental physicist. The 3 May 1947 issue of Nature carried an announcement of his forthcoming lecture at the Royal Society:

Professor P. M. S. Blackett, Langworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester, will deliver a lecture on ‘The Magnetic Field of Massive Rotating Bodies’ at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 15, at 4:30 p.m.

Blackett circulated a preliminary draft of his paper among colleagues in several different fields, including the geophysicist Sydney Chapman and the astrophysicist Harry Plaskett.

The Royal Society took as one of its patron saints Francis Bacon, who envisaged the great calling of science as acting as a means of effecting ‘the relief of man's estate’ through a partnership between philosophers and politicians. The object of this paper is to examine the extent to which this goal was realized from the time of the Society's foundation until the end of the eighteenth century. By doing so it attempts to analyse not only the character of the unreformed Royal Society but also that of the unreformed British state, for the argument of this article is that relations between the Royal Society and the government were not fundamentally different from relations between other academies and their governments.

What was different was rather the character of the British state with its oligarchically based patterns of patronage and influence, which contrasted with the clearer lines of government intervention evident in the more centralized and absolutist regimes which predominated on the Continent. From such a perspective the activities of the eighteenth- century Royal Society take on greater significance. The apparent character of a gentlemen's club is transmuted when one considers that in the social and political context of the eighteenth century such an institutional milieu helped to link the Royal Society to the workings of government. True, as the paper demonstrates, in the first half of the century such linkages were more potential than real, but in the second half of the century they began to be realized, setting the stage for a fruitful partnership between British science and government which was to develop in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries as the Royal Society acted as the principal agent of government advice – a belated realization of the Baconian ideal.

It is a tempting exercise, both historically and psychoanalytically, to contribute to a psychoanalytic understanding of Robert Boyle. Over many years, historians of science have been amassing evidence of science as a social activity, part of the culture of its time. As these studies progress, they stumble into psychoanalytic territory willy nilly. Indeed, the very notion of enquiry into nature becomes a psychoanalytic issue, as soon as we think of it as an emotionally charged approach to an object. If we think of Boyle as an early modern scientific investigator and as a personification of the tensions surrounding the investigation of nature as an object in the psychoanalytic sense, then we have a double reason for bringing a psychoanalytic understanding to bear upon him.

One of the criticisms of a psychoanalytic enquiry into any historical figure or situation is that the object of study is not present in the way a patient is present. It is not simply that the patient is not there – after all, there is documentary evidence to stand in for the missing person – but that the key feature that makes the enquiry psychoanalytic is missing. There is no transference, and no way to monitor the accuracy of interpretations. That means that the analyst cannot sit in the place of the objects in which the subject has an intense emotional investment, and from which vantage the subject of these investments can be studied. In that sense, the enquiry cannot be said to be properly psychoanalytic in method.

From its very beginning the Royal Society was regarded by many, if not most, of its founders as centrally concerned with practical improvement. How could it be otherwise? The study of nature was not only a pious act in and of itself – a reading of the book of nature – but it was also the way in which God's Providence would provide discoveries for the relief of man's estate. The early ideologues of the Society, such as Robert Boyle and Thomas Sprat, continually returned to the usefulness of natural philosophy in that sense. They were no doubt stimulated in this not only by the narrow purpose of gaining support for their novel institution but also by quite genuine beliefs about the role that natural philosophy could play in creating a stable political and economic order through which prosperity might increase and the years of civil war be left behind. However, by the late seventeenth century the Society, especially after the demise of the history of trades programme, became much more a deliberative forum than a projective organization.

On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’

Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon's project was a compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here. First, however, it will be instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening in on the deliberations.

Before the Second World War, few scholars knew how to incorporate science, technology and medicine into social, political or economic history. Nowadays many historians know the methods: university courses, books and (some) museums manifest their skills. For the ‘greats’ of science, and for many lesser figures and groups, we are able to relate scientific ‘works’ to ‘lives’, contexts and audiences, with an analytical sophistication matching the best of current intellectual and cultural history. This progress in historiography owes much to the intellectual and institutional bases built in the 1950s and 1960s, not least in the universities of northern England. Among the pioneers, Donald Cardwell was a perspicacious and persistent innovator, especially in Manchester, where he helped develop both a school of historians and a marvellous museum of science and industry.