In Our Time - The Lunar Society

Episode Date: June 5, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Lunar Society. In the late 18th century, with the ascendant British Empire centred on London, a small group of friends met at a house on the crossroads outside Birmingham and applied their minds to the problems of the age. Between them they managed to launch the Industrial Revolution, discover oxygen, harness the power of steam and pioneer the theory of evolution. They were the Lunar Society, a gathering of free and fertile minds centred on the remarkable quartet of Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly and Erasmus Darwin. The potter Josiah Wedgwood, another member, summed up the ethos of this group when he said that they were ‘living in an age of miracles in which anything could be achieved’.But how did the Lunar Society operate? What was the blend of religious dissent, entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual adventure that proved so fertile and how did their discoveries permanently change the shape and character of this country?With Simon Schaffer, Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; Jenny Uglow, Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick and author of The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future; Peter Jones, Professor of French History at the University of Birmingham.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What makes people want to believe in aliens? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Donald Trump last week announced that he'd be releasing the US government's UFO files. So why the renewed interest in life out there? And what deeper spiritual meaning might people be searching for? Check out the global story. We are serious journalists on BBC.com.

or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the late 18th century with the ascendant British Empire centred on London, a small group of friends met at a house on a crossroads outside Birmingham and applied their minds to the problems of the age.

Between them, they helped launch the Industrial Revolution, discover oxygen, harness the power of steam, and pioneer the theory of evolution. They were the Lunar Society, a gathering of free and fertile minds centered on the remarkable quartet of Matthew Bolton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin. The Potter, Joseph Wedgwood, another member,

summed up the ethos and ambition of this group when he said that they were living in an age of miracles in which anything could be achieved. But how did this lunar society operate? What was the blend of religious descent, entrepreneurial spirit, an intellectual adventure that proved so fertile, and how did they discover?

permanently change the shape and character of this country. With me to discuss the Lunar Society, a Jenny Uglo, honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick, and author of The Lunar Men, the Friends Who Made the Future. Simon Schaffer, reader in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, and Peter Jones, professor of French history at Birmingham University. Simon Schaffer, can you set the scene for us at the time,

say the mid-eighth century? What was Birmingham then? And what was it about the Midlands that proved to have these men in it? In many ways, the situation in the Midlands in the middle of the 18th century is something rather familiar to us. It's booming, bustling. Birmingham is a city already of 30,000 and more people with a vast range of trades. Many governed by the division of labour, so that there's lots of specialisms, lots of local expertise, lots of organisation of artisans into productive groups. Crucial also, I think, and the Lunar Society, will play an absolutely decisive role in this, is the efficiency of the transport network. In the 18th century, routes that matter are wet. Most roads are simply incapable of carrying goods over great distances or quickly enough. A very good example of this is that if you were brewing strong ale and you relied on roads, you could only send your ale away a few miles.

By the end of the period when the Lunar Society was functioning, you could export beer from Burton-on-Trent, which had the best water for beer in the world, over thousands of miles to India and beyond. So the link between extraordinarily efficient forms of trade organization and industrial organization and the desire for better communication, not just communicating goods, but also, and again I think the Lunar Society is very important for this, communicating ideas, the way in which industrial vision and scientific spirit so often relies on writing a letter, telling a joke, meeting occasionally,

what economic historians call the strength of weak ties, the way in which it's the informality of the society we're interested in, that I think gave it some of its strengths and virtues. Can we explore those trades and specialisms a little more closely, Simon? What sort of trades and specialisms are you? talking about? Are we talking about highly skilled craftsmen? Are we talking about why they're pioneering trades and specialisms in Birmingham at the time? Well, in a way that's perhaps slightly unfamiliar

for our myths of the Industrial Revolution, some of the dominant trades in Birmingham and in the West Midlands at this time are what were then called the toy trades. That means working with really large quantities of metal, but to make small, rather finely wrought goods, buckles, buttons, coins, medals, things like this. Matthew Bolton, one of the key early players in the emergence of the Lunar Society, inherits and expands a shop that's extraordinarily good at making very precise, rather fine metalwork

over a large range of different kinds of goods. Ginny Uglah, the first meetings were organised by, Simon's mentioned, Matthew Bolton, who built a manufactory outside Birmingham, and married two heiresses, one after the other, and a very wealthy man. Can you describe his position in bringing about, forming this society? Yes, in Bolton, as Simon has said,

inherited his father's small toy trade business. His first wife came from Litchfield, which was where Erasmus Darwin happened to be a young doctor at the time. Now Bolton had terrific technical knowledge. He was really interested in all the aspects of his trade, in gilding, in the chemistry of metals, and dye stamping, and just generally a very, very inventive young man, but not educated, not university educated, leave school at 14. In Litchfield, Darwin is exactly the opposite, it seems. He has been to Cambridge. He's been to Edinburgh. But he is, bubbling with scientific ideas.

And I think that the initial society actually came out of a meeting of two minds. These were people that could talk to each other and they hadn't actually got anybody else quite to talk to. Darwin hoped that Bolton would make his wonderful ideas for inventions in his manufacturing. Then other friends joined slowly over the years. But it starts as French.

We're talking now about them meeting in the late 1750s, so they're in their mid to late 20s, they're young men and they're starting out, they're on the make. By the mid-1760s, a few years later, they've been joined by William Small, a doctor who has taught in America, where he's actually taught Jefferson, the future president,

who's actually a mathematician, and also interested in chemistry by one of Erasmus Darwin's friends, fellow students from Edinburgh, James Keir, who's a tremendously innovative, careful chemist who comes to the Midlands. Other people, Richard Lovell Edgeworth,

father of the novelist Mariah Edgeworth, who's an amateur inventor of enormous flair and sort of bravado and jollity. And it begins, I think, as a not quite as a sort of serious think tank for industrial ideas, but for a group of people, and I think there were groups like that all over the country who love talking about these things.

When and why did they call themselves the Lunar Society? Well, they don't refer to themselves formally as the Lunar Society. In fact, they have very little formal organisation at all. They don't have minutes, they don't have officers. but we know that in the 1770s, when they were very busy, they were beginning to drift apart. Matthew Bolton decided they should try and meet once a month. And at the end of their lives, it's Joseph Priestley, who comes later even in 1780, who dedicates his last book to my friends of the Lunar Society.

But the Lunar Society was so-called because they met on the Sunday and then the Monday, nearest to full moon every month, simply to have light to. get home by. And this is absolutely standard mid-18th century practice at all the concerts, all the assemblies around the sort of bright weeks of the moon. So I think there were lunar societies all over the place

like the monthly society, but we remember this one because of the people in it. And Wagerwood came in. Can you give us some idea of what these meetings were like? They would turn up, then what? At Bolton's house, they'd be put up to his house for one night, two at most, and what would happen? I think they arrived,

they tended to arrive sort of early afternoon or whatever, and then they had a long dinner, which would be actually mid-afternoon, which goes on. And then you have the family there. You have the wives came to dinner, children came to dinner, certainly sons later came. But then, as it were, you imagine them clearing this great mahogany table, and they get out their latest plans, and they start talking about what they've been working on. For instance, they might have an electrical machine which somebody can demonstrate, or Priestley will talk about his latest discovery.

in gases. And certainly they often had, as it were, laboratories or workrooms attached to their house, so they would all go off there. And actually, they really tried things out. They tried measuring steel, as it were, when it was hot and when it was cold. You know, they did experiments together. And these went on certainly late into the night. And often their letters say, you know, you can stay over till the next day.

And if one of them is particularly excited about something, They sort of summon the others. Do you come over to, not always at Soho, do come over to Litchfield. I want to show you what I've discovered in Derbyshire, these new minerals or things like that. Peter Jones, thankfully we have a lot of correspondence. What does the correspondence tell us about them?

I think the correspondence reminds us that they were men of their generation, they were men of the Enlightenment. Their most productive decades fell between roughly 1760 and 1800. They were linked up across the whole of Europe to similar men with similar preoccupations and a few women as well. And it's commonly, I think, suppose that they must be understood chiefly as a kind of prototype for the Industrial Revolution,

that is to say they, in a sense, were profits of the next generation. But I think if you look at them in a broader context, as I tend to do, in a pan-European context, you notice straight away that in fact they are quintessentially men of their own generation, the Enlightenment generation. They're not a kind of general star. for the Industrial Revolution at all. I don't even really think that you could describe as a kind of think tank of boffins

for the Industrial Revolution, although I don't dispute for a moment that they did conduct experiments with real industrial applications, but they had a range of interests which go far beyond science, as we understand it, and those interests could be purely speculative, even playful interests,

and they are corresponding with men, across Europe on very similar topics, themes. So they will be known in European cities, these men, their reputation. Yes, indeed, yes. I mean, some more than others. Priestley has been mentioned. He was probably regarded as the finest product of the lunar group in terms of his knowledge and his chemical achievements,

which will no doubt come to. But Bolton would be known because of his entrepreneurial activities. Simon mentioned how he was the... the foremost manufacturer of toys, that's small metal goods in Birmingham, and the bulk of that production was exported across Europe, and so Bolton, as it were, promoted his scientific interests on the back of his commercial activities.

So I don't really feel that you can compartmentalise their activities. When you read their correspondence, they can switch from really rather playful remarks about science with a small S, to commercial applications of recent discoveries, to money-making, in a very modern go-getting sense as well. It's not really helpful, I think,

to imagine that they are sort of isolated Republic of Letters, group of scientists who cut themselves off from the real world. They did, too certainly shouldn't cut themselves off from London, didn't they, in the great established societies there? Yes, I think that there's a very interesting relationship between the lunar men and London. Some of them clearly loathed the matrients. and what it stood for.

For some of them, it stood for taxes. It stood for corruption. It stood reasonably enough for vast amounts of bribery. And it stood for a whole establishment of church and state, which several, though of course certainly not all, of the lunar men, really loathed. Priestley is the spectacular example here, but there are others. There were a surprising number of Unitarians and dissenters.

Indeed. Indeed, although by no means all of the lunar men were non-conformists, many of them were, and many of them would have been seen by the more fashionable and conservative elements of London society as being quite beyond the pale. Gunpowder Joe is one of Priestley's many nicknames. And that's because, in a very famous speech and text, he imagines laying a train of gunpowder under the English establishment. He says, as Priestley, that electrical machines and air pumps could be weapons against the English establishment because the truths of his natural philosophy show that the doctrines of the Anglican Church, of the monarchy,

and of the whole English political system are simply unsound. Jenny Yuga, let's just get some idea, three or four brief headlines of the work they did. We've got some of the names. They've got Erasmus Darwin. We've got Wedgwood. We have James Watson, his steam engines, and Matthew Bolton, bring. them all together. But Wedgwood said he wanted to surprise the world with wonders. So he wants to surprise the world. It's not just Birmingham and Litchfield. It's a lot. And he wants wonders. Can you tell

us briefly some of the wonders that came out over those years of that gathering of man? Yes. And Wedgewood's wonders, he was thinking specifically about his own trade of pottery and Stoke-on-Trent. He's just north of Birmingham. And what he does is use his chemistry amazing notebooks, you know, 35 years of experiments to create these new ceramic bodies, first of which is creamware, and then there's this famous Jasper way that we know, the Wedgwood Blue and White.

Okay, so that seems like a small artistic venture, in fact, fantastically complicated because you had to know about heat, you had to know about clay, you had to know about, you know, the ingredients, and that, in a way, leads to joining wind completely different, as Peter is a different sort of interest like the formation of the earth

the discovery of strata, the sense that even Derbyshire could have been a volcanic area so from something as simple The Old Testament date of the creation and so on and very shocking the earth is thousands, millions of years older than the Bible says

but at the same time James Watt is working on the separate condenser improving the steam engine which is eventually going to give the power which will first help drain the mines in Cornwall and then be in the factories in Manchester. So that's one enormous discovery.

Priestley, who liked to make light of his mode of discovery, didn't he? Because he wanted everybody to feel they could be a scientist, discovers not only the gas, which is later called oxygen, but also the secrets of photosynthesis, of nitrogen, of so on. So it's, it's,

chemistry, it's geology, it's engineering, its physics, lots of discoveries. Their speculation is totally unfettered. I think this is the characteristic of the English Enlightenment. There is no constraint at all. There are no moral constraints, there are no religious constraints to speak of, there are no political constraints before 1789,

at any rate when the French Revolution begins to intrude upon the scene. There are no hierarchies in the West Midlands that one needs to worry about. And you think this gave it a particular energy of those not to be found in London and other capital centres? Well, I do. Yes, I do. I see the Lunar Society in a sense as a kind of archetype of enlightenment discussion in the 18th century, but I see it at the extreme end, if you like, because what excited visitors to the Soho Manufacturing and those few visitors who were invited to attend the meetings of the Lunar Society was how daring. it was. Here was science, as it were, taken out of the pantheon, taken out of the academy,

made normal, made exciting, made tasteful, and actually made domestic. It actually takes place in the home. Jenny Hugo, there's a lot of fun in this, and it would be a pity to miss that out. There really was a lot of fun, and I think Erasmus Doin particularly liked picking up from others grand ideas that couldn't be tested, like. the idea of all the navies be far better occupied instead of fighting each other in pulling icebergs to the equator which would equalise the temperature for the tropic zones

and make a lot warmer up here. I was on the winner there. Definitely. He wanted to change the wind as well, didn't they? Oh, he wanted to change the wind. Yes, he worked out about coal fronts and things like that. It's a sort of mad and wonderful idea of completely bettering human. Darwin, a man who enjoyed his comfort.

So, you know, less windless, mud, nice the temper. but he was also interested in language, which again a shared interest. So he invented a speaking machine, which actually took the shape, as it were, of a column, which would be the neck, and leather straps, which would be, as it were, the vocal cords, which are operated by bellows, and little leather or wooden lips, and he managed to make it say, I think probably, um, mm, and e, you know, like that. He didn't pronounce the Lord's Prayer in the under. Don't think it did. But

Bolton, who is known to be always out for a winner, says to Erasmus Darwin, right, I've got a contract here, Erasmus. You can get your machine to say the Lord's Prayer and recite the Ten Commandments. I'll give you £1,000. Sign here.

So he couldn't lose, really. So is that combination of play and seriousness? Serious physiology, actually. In an enormously entertaining object. But also danger, I would argue. I mean, that's a game and it's a wonderful toy. And there are toys like that elsewhere in Europe,

in Paris, in Hungary and so forth. What's, I think, so fascinating about the play, the enjoyment and the enthusiasm, is that it's always edged. In this case, the thought is, maybe there's nothing going on in humans other than what they are materially. And that's a very dangerous thing to say in the middle of the 18th century.

There's a sense of industrial discipline that goes along with the play and the enjoyment and the fun that one should never lose sight of. Matthew Bolton, of course, will simply shift whole villages in order to extend and build his factories. There are ways in which, to quote Josiah Wedgwood, one should turn the men, the workers, into machines that cannot err. This is the group that invent systems like clocking on. There are also astonishing differences within the lunar men

about some of the most important and most terrible social issues of the time. One thinks, for example, of the slavery issue. Slavery is indispensable for British economic growth and life at this period. Matthew Bolton, Chief Birmingham manufacturer, has a very different attitude, a rather positive attitude, to what's called the sugar economy, than, say, Josiah Wedgwood or Joseph Priestley,

where Wedgwood helps lead the campaign for the abolition of slavery, where Thomas Day writes one of the most moving, and really one of the earliest anti-slavery tracts in English, Bolton will host, support, and endorse the whole rationale of the slavery system. So there are divisions, about stuff that matters within the lunar group

and I think there are many dark sides to this enlightenment vision but that's really what the enlightenment is in a sense it's that combination of vision and dystopia which we really have to try and understand Peter John. Well I agree with you about Bolton I think Bolton was a weather vein really his social status was insecure in his own mind he wasn't an esquire until later on in life

Mr Bolton So I think his activities were designed to some degree to attract attention to himself, to enhance his own reputation. You can certainly see that embedded in the Soho Manufactuary, in the way in which he tirelessly shows visitors around this factory, even to his own detriment, as it were. His attitudes on politics and the social issues of the day do vary, and you can't make a neat case to say that all these men

have similar views on morality, on religion and on politics. Bolter may have hesitated about slavery, but on the other hand, he was more favourable towards the American colonists in their revolt. The politics comes in now, after 1789, French Revolution, this seems to mark the beginning of the end for the Lunar Society. Can you lead us to that, Jenny? In 1789, a large proportion of the British public welcome the fall of the Bastille and the lunar men very much. Because they saw it as the end of a sort of absolutist system in France,

and they hoped it was leading to a democracy, to our glorious revolution. It was supposed to be, as it were, a repetition of 1688. As the revolution progressed, and particularly with the terror, the givor, the givor, the killing of the king. Of course, public opinion in Britain reacted very strongly against it. Now, the lunar society, both because they're connected with the dissenters

and Joseph Priestley in particular has been leading a great campaign for repeal of acts against the dissenters and also because of their science, which is thought to be like the sort of reason, you know, like the French philosoph, the people who they thought had caused the revolution, become a sort of persona known grotto.

They become the kind of people that you can put a label on as dangerous. These are the dangerous sort of thinkers, the dangerous sort of dablers with, as you say, matter, that have caused this terrible problem in France. So that's what, I mean, very specific thing happened, but that's really how the backlash comes. The specific thing followed a rather impolitic and incautious dinner party given by Joseph Breastly to mark two years the fall of the Bastille in 1791 in Birmingham, which caused or prompted or, anyway, followed the Birmingham riots.

Can you just outline what happened in the Birmingham riots? Yes, I mean, between the fall of the Bastille in the summer of 89 and 91, as Jenny says, there was an enormous amount of intellectual ferment. There was a really considerable publication, but also social organisation, precisely in places like Birmingham, also in London and elsewhere. elsewhere in the north, Joseph Priestley playing an absolutely active role along with his most close political allies. In July of 1791, there's a revolution dinner, which he helps host. And this becomes an occasion, rather an excuse for the local magistrates, who are Tories in Birmingham,

in a sense to hold back, but also to encourage very fierce rioting within Birmingham and other times. towns in the West Midlands. Priestley wasn't in fact at the dinner, but nevertheless his house was burnt down, his laboratory destroyed, his papers confiscated and above all, all his equipment smashed. There's a whip round by his allies, including Erasmus Darwin. There are horrified letters to Birmingham from as far afield as Italy, Paris. There's even a letter from Russia sympathising with and supporting. the cause of liberal toleration in Birmingham,

which is now going to be under threat. Priestley has to leave Birmingham, moves to London to Hackney, and then eventually emigrates to the United States. Those kinds of events, these men's figures burnt in effigy, their reputation dragged through the mud, I think do have an enormous effect, both intellectually and really, on the prospects of what they saw

as enlightened reconstruction within Britain. And I think it also widens some of the tensions and splits within the lunar group itself. Do you want to take that forward? Yes, I think we have to acknowledge that the French Revolution or rather its impact in Britain marks the beginning of the slow decline of the Lunar Society. There's a very revealing remark by James Water,

a letter to one of his European correspondence in which he says simply that politics has killed chemistry. What he means is that I don't get any messages about chemistry from my friends abroad any longer. They're far too interested in politics to be talking about the decomposition of water or the discovery of new gases. And politics does divide the lunar group.

Bolton is a churchman, anxious to be respectable above all, but Priestley is on the most radical end of the non-suitary. conformity spectrum. Galton, another member of the lunar group, is a Quaker, also targeted during the riots. James Watt himself is a kind of lapsed Presbyterian, but very much a supporter of the status quo, but even he feels a little bit nervous at the prospect of the mob heading north towards the manufacturing. In fact, both Bolton and Watt, who live very close together, take precautions in case the

mob should come in that direction, but it doesn't. You in this finally, Simon, you've said in remarks I've read, that in a sense it represents the best and the success and failure, the lunar man, very briefly. Yes, I mean, I think it's an extraordinary sign of the vitality and I would say the reality of the English Enlightenment. I mean, for far too long it's been argued that there was no Enlightenment in England and that the Enlightenment should be spoken in French.

And I think what the lunar men remind us of is that that's not necessarily true. But a failure in the sense that a lot of the social ideals that went along with this vision of how knowledge and education and social progress would be secured, whither or are challenged or, above all, become the object of derisive laughter. There's nothing so corrosive in English culture. as satire directed against the fun of the intellectuals. Thank you all very much. We've just made it. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.