In Our Time - The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2

Episode Date: January 5, 2010

As part of the BBC's year of science programming, Melvyn Bragg looks at the history of the oldest scientific learned society of them all: the Royal Society. Programme two begins in the coffee house Isaac Newton and the fellows of the early 18th century frequented. At the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we learn how Newton's feud with the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed tested the lines between government-funded research and public access. In the age of exploration, senior fellows accompany naval expeditions, such as Cook's expedition to Tahiti and subsequent discovery of Australia. International relations are fostered between scientists such as Benjamin Franklin, whose house in London serves as live-in lab and de facto American embassy. By the end of the century the President, Sir Joseph Banks, successfully embeds the Royal Society in the imperial bureaucratic hub of the new Somerset House. But while senior fellows concentrated on foreign fields, a more radical, dissident science and manufacturing base wrought the Industrial Revolution right under their noses.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. The Royal Society Isaac Newton took over in 1703 was in some trouble. As we heard yesterday, when Robert Hook died in that year, it lost its most devoted and ingenious fellow. The rebuilding of the city of London after the Great Fire had brought prestige to some fellows, notably Christopher Wren, and that had helped the society.

But that was almost 40 years ago. To make matters worse, the Royal Society had come off badly in a plan to redevelop the Gresham College site. Squeezed out of its digs, it had to find a new home. But the Society was in poor financial health, and its future looked uncertain. Yet that didn't stop the fellows continuing with their investigations, nor did it put them off their coffee. A gentleman by the name of Ralph Pawsby happened to attend a meeting of the Royal Society in June 1712. Where I found Dr. Douglas dissecting a dolphin, lately caught in the Thames,

where we're present the President, Sir Isaac Newton, both the secretaries, the two professors from Oxford, Dr. Halley and Keel, with others whose company we after enjoyed at the Grecian Coffee House. Well, we're in the Grecian Coffee House. It's now the Devereaux Pub,

tucked down an alleyway off the strand. In the company of Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at Cambridge University, and Michael Hunter, Professor of History at Birkbeck College University of London. Michael Hunter, was the dolphin dissection a typical

Royal Society experiment? Yes, I think that's the kind of hands-on operation that the fellows liked, and the meetings of the Royal Society had to be interesting to get fellows to go. One of the problems of the Royal Society was people just not turning up, and so

really a good performance was a key, I think, to getting a good attendance, and for the news of that then to spread around. Does it surprise you that Isaac Newton was at present there? It seems to be way off his beaten intellectual track. Well, it's notorious that Newton hardly missed a meeting during the time that he was present to the Royal Society in general. And so I suppose he probably sat through quite a lot of things that weren't at the top of his intellectual agenda for that reason. Simon Schupper, we heard yesterday that the fellow's style of science was wide-ranging and

collaborative, some would say scattergun. How did Newton's reputation for austere lone genius fit in with that collaborative group? There was always a tension, I think, once Newton had assumed the presidency in 1703, between the ideal of mathematical knowledge that his reputation embodied and the kind of work that the society in fact carried out. Rather early in the piece, Newton drafted what he called a scheme for established the Royal Society, by which he meant setting it on firm foundation. Newton had a very utopian, rather broad-ranging vision of the scope, as he saw it,

of what the society should cover. He divided learning into five parts, the mathematical sciences, the astronomical and optical sciences, the study of animals into which dolphin dissection fits nicely, the study of plants, and, of course, one of his favourite activities, the study of minerals and their activity. Not only that, but he also worked pretty hard to see if it were possible for the society to recruit

two permanent demonstrators. That's to say men whose job would be to show demonstrations and experiments to the fellows precisely to entertain them to make sure that they turned up. And Douglas, the dolphin dissector, was one of them. This business, let's go back to the end dolphins that for the moment that Michael was talking about, is there a feeling that he's got to keep them interested,

he's got to keep them going? Interest will flag unless they give them treats every month. Well, for all institutions in early 18th century, London of this kind, I think there are at least three factors in play. There's a sense of utility that this is practical applied knowledge in some sense. But perhaps even more importantly,

there's a sense of pleasure. This is show, and it's show of a very particular kind. It's a show in which one studies the works of God, to be sure, there's a theological element to this. Anatomy is the study of what God has wrought. One is supposed to adopt an attitude of admiration and amazement at the intricate contrivances of the animal and plant economy. But on the other hand, it's fun, and fun is what virtuosi also treasure.

And then finally there's a sense of repute, of reputation. Under Newton, I think what we begin to see is the use of the society as an institution for distributing credit. So that to say that one is an FRS begins to be a very useful resource. Newton has a reputation which has come down to us for autocracy and ill-humour and that's the least of it really. And do you think that's fair? Yes. I think there's no question at all that Newton was a profoundly unpleasant person whom I wouldn't ever have wanted to have anything to do with

have I been alive in the early 18th century. And I think he harboured grudges very deeply. And there are notorious examples of this, for instance, concerning Flamsteed and, of course, earlier concerning Hook, who by this time was out of the way, but during his lifetime. Really? But during his lifetime, you know, clearly, there had been really bad blood between him and Newton.

Newton does consciously make sure that he gets his way in every way possible. And even insofar as Newton was able to have an effective role in relation to the Royal Society, particularly in establishing a premises for it for the first time, that was quite unpopular among the fellows and led to a lot of factionalism. So the society is sort of prone to factionalism, which hard as Newton tries, he's not able to eradicate. and in a way his decisiveness is prone to make it worse. He is a warden of the mint.

He's a ferocious warden of the mint and a great hanger of counterfeatures. He's soon to become an MP. How far is his appointment political and how far was it because of Principia Mathematica? I think it was primarily because of Principia Mathematica. I think that the fellows saw that here was someone who would make a real figurehead. And indeed that's what he did. I mean, despite the problems with actually running the society, There's no doubt that under his eegis, the society gained in stature, and he gained in stature,

through his association with the society. It was a very mutually beneficial arrangement whereby Newton and the Royal Society, I think, acquired a kind of status which the society hadn't had before. Let's try to place what it means to gain in stature in the beginning of the 18th century, science structure. So he gains in stature, the society gains in stature. What is it seen as by the people who matter around town? in other cities? It's very ambiguous. On the one hand, just as Michael says, this is an exercise in mutual backscratching. One of the things that the Royal Society offers Newton and his closest allies is a communications network. Secretaries had the job, and some of them discharged it very

actively of setting up and then maintaining Europe-wide, and in an interesting way, worldwide correspondence networks, incoming reports, messages and samples from, by this stage, around the globe, using the networks of the major trading companies like the Royal Africa Company or the East India company, but also using reports gathered from the learned, the erudite and the curious across Europe and in the colonies too. So Britain's empire was a factor in enriching the royal society, simply because it could fetch and carry information. This is true, but there's the ambiguity. One had to sieve these reports for their credibility, their trustworthiness, and that would inherently unstable since there were no very good ways of checking whether a particular report was even likely, let alone true. There were projects, some of them very important indeed, most of them, as might now seem rather trivial, which necessarily involved gathering global data. I mean, one of the most interesting for me is from the 1710s and 20s onwards towards the end of the,

of the Newtonian regime, when one of the secretaries, James Juren, rather eminent medic, disciple, very much a disciple of Isaac Newton, launched a nationwide meteorology network in which one would gather at the society incoming messages about not only spectacular weather events, but also routine variations in air pressure and temperature. we start to see the construction of something like an information bank. However, the society's resources are simply not up to establishing what we might now want to call a reliable database. The Newtonian Royal Society's reach always exceeds its grasp.

Michael Hunter, what's your assessment of his role as president? He came in in 70-03, he died still president in 1727, Had it moved on, was it more accepted in society, what sort of a force was it? I think it undoubtedly gained in prestige in conjunction with the great prestige that Newton had, both for the Principia and for the optics, but which really became the byword for how science should be done in this period. And insofar as the Royal Society was associated with that, I think the fellows were only too pleased to bathe in the sort of associated glory of being Newtonians. And that was clearly the fashionable way of doing science at the time.

But in the background, there are always these complementary scientific interests associated particularly with natural historians, the sort of people who'd been doing the dissections that you mentioned earlier in the programme, and that they are there too. And in fact, to an extent, insofar as Newton's decisiveness was divisive in the society, there were sort of people in the wings waiting to, as it were, come back into the society in a more active way. And of course, so when Newton does actually die in 1727, the Newtonians don't remain in control of the society. There's a sort of coup and Sahan Sloan and his associates take over instead. And so the society as a body in terms of its actual activities, I think changes dramatically. And that, I think, is typical of the way in which the society was constantly self-renewing throughout its early history. And that it had a sort of institutional strength which transcended great men, even if they were as great as Newton. Simon General.

The other aspect of the society, which I think is certainly in debate and much discussed, is its relationship with other institutions of the British financial military state, with the Admiralty and the Navy Board, and with the new institutions set up in this period, such as the Board of Longitude, Britain is turning from a relatively minor, constantly bankrupt society, into something like a military power within Europe. The period 1702 to 1714,

the period of the War of the Spanish Succession, marks a really important entrance by British troops into the European theatre under the command of Marlborough. And the repute of Britain as an aggressive and well-funded military and fiscal state I think goes along with the reputation of some of its institutions, even though that reputation is clearly wildly exaggerated when one contemplates the reality. As we've heard, Newton was a difficult man to get on with. He held grudges.

One of the fiercest was with the first astronomer royal John Flamsteed. We now moved to Greenwich, where the Royal Observatory, designed by Royal Society fellow Christopher Wrenn, had been built in 1675. It was funded by Charles II and the Observatory was an attempt to put science in the service of the nation, particularly its Navy. Flamsteed was soon made a fellow of the Royal Society

and he set to work cataloguing every visible star with unprecedented accuracy, a process which took him many years, too many years in the opinion of the Royal Society President Isaac Newton. We're here in the Observatory in the echoing octagon room where Simon Schaffer and myself have been joined by Rebecca Higgott, curator of the history of science and technology at the Royal Observatory. Rebecca, it's a beautiful room, half-panelled with elegant, tall, leaded windows on all sides,

but is it any good for astronomy? Well, it depends what kind of astronomy you want to do in it. It wasn't good for the kind of astronomy that Flamsteed is really well known for, which is decades and decades worth of meridian observations produced year after year, the stuff into the catalogue that was published finally after his death. But you can do other kinds of observations here. The room is tall because it houses the important clocks that are here made by Thomas Tompian. But Flamsteed used those clocks to, in a sense, test the regularity of the Earth's rotation.

And to do that, he needed to make astronomical observations through the long windows that the room also has. So he could take a view with a fixed telescope through those windows to check the passage of stars across a meridian line or other places as well since the windows face in several directions. Can you tell us a little more about these clocks? Why are the clocks important in this observatory? They were cutting-edge technology. They were the most accurate clocks that really could be made by a top clock maker of the time. So they had very long pendulums, hence the height of the room,

so they were trying to find ways of creating more and more accuracy in these things so that, as I say, Flamsteady could try and test the accuracy of clock against the accuracy and regularity of the Earth's revolution. How did Newton and the Royal Society view the Royal Observatory? Did they think they should be in charge of it and of all the stuff that came out of it, information that came out of it? There was a lot of towing and fro. People have very different ideas about what the Royal Observatory was,

who it was for, and ditto, the status of the Astronomer Royal. Flamsteed really liked to think of himself as a court astronomer, as the King's astronomer, in the way that Tico Brahe or someone in Denmark had been. So someone who had a degree of independence, status, as someone who could essentially decide their own program and like Tico or someone, wait 30-odd years before publishing their magnumopus to the best standards that they possibly could.

The Royal Society took the idea of the observatory rather differently as something that had a duty, and likewise the astronomer had a duty to produce data for the public use, for public utility. And they were therefore demanding that Flamsteed would publish. And they were asking about this from early on, and it continued to be a question. with more and more anxiety as time went on. Did this become a battle between Newton and Flamstead?

It was a battle between Flamstead and a number of different fellows. There was already bad feeling between Flamstead and people like Hook, people like Halley, existed even before Newton came as president of the Royal Society. So he was stepping into what was already quite a divided situation. Partly the distance of Greenwich from London made a difference, and then also Flamstead's sense that he owed perhaps more to his patrons or to the government or to the king, then he did to the Royal Society. So there was already a gulf that Newton could then come into,

though bad feeling had also been sort of spilling up between the two when Newton asked Flamsteed for data, Flamsteed gave it to him, but then didn't ever feel he was getting any sort of reciprocal information back from Newton and felt he was being treated as a servant rather than as a colleague. So there was already that brewing before the real dispute began. Simon Schroffer, how did these observations fit into the work that the Royal Society was about at the time? and why were they so important to them? Flamsteed's observations are absolutely fundamental

for many of the projects that the Royal Society, and especially Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton, were engaged in at this period. Newton and Flamsteed first interacted both about computations of the paths of comets, which were of exceptional importance in Newton's astronomy, since Newton was heavily committed and celebrated for the demonstration that comets move as planets do.

There's something else going on which I think is really fascinating in terms of the history of the Royal Society, which is the very long, socially and politically fraught question of the relationship between observers and theoreticians, a problem which survives to this day. Flamsteed, on the one hand, was telling Newton as President of the Royal Society, I'm not just an observer. I understand the properties of light. I understand the motion of the planets. I have my own views about those phenomena and the theories which explain them.

And I am not simply a servant who sends numbers up river to a much greater, much smarter man. So I think what's at stake is also that apparently eternal struggle between the role of those who produce unrivaled accuracy in observational terms and the role of those who can then use the data to satisfy one or other model of how the heavens go. Was this conjunction the Royal Society and the Royal Observatory, some kind of major staging post in the history of the Royal Society? So the affairs of public astronomy, of state astronomy, are a really crucial means

through which the Royal Society can advertise itself as a group of experts who should be treated as privileged consultants to the British state. We've moved out of the Observatory, and we're standing on the hill overlooking Greenwich Park and the old naval college built by Christopher Wren, one of the founding members of the Royal Society. Beyond that, the big sweep of the Thames,

we can see the whole Oxbow here, beyond that, the city of London. 300 years ago, this stretch of water would have been choked with vessels, many of them naval fighting ships. This was the age of maritime expansion, exploration, and growing international trade. Cargos from all over the world passed here on their way to the market. markets and exchanges of London further upstream. Simon Schaffer, the earlier old society fellows were interested in the world around them.

We've discussed their world correspondence. And they had tales from passing merchant ships and lists of flora and fauna from far-flung fields. Did the fellas themselves get involved in long sea voyages or did they rely on second-hand reports? Both of those. What begins to happen in the 1700s is that travellers themselves, emerge as expert fellows of the Royal Society, and fellows begin to see ocean voyages as opportunities for systematic study. A splendid example of this is, of course, the work of Edmund Halley.

Halley had been commissioned as a member of the Royal Navy. He had very close links with the East India Company trading between London and the Spice Islands and South Asia. Halley had been on voyages to the South Atlantic, had surveyed the variation of the magnetic compass, had written for the Royal Society on monsoons and trade winds, and it was the work of Halley and his closest allies that began to suggest to the Royal Society and its leadership that the study of these phenomena could be plowed back into the improvement

of imperial commerce and trade. We're looking, obviously, at the Thames and the city of London, but we're also looking at the beautiful building, My Wren, who was intricately involved with the Royal Society from the beginning, and by the end of the sense you were talking about, the Royal Society was advising the Navy. So in that sense, it had fulfilled by that time a useful purpose. What was it advising it on?

There were many practical problems the naval administration had to solve. They had to solve. problems of ship design. They had to solve, above all, problems of the health of mariners, the notorious problem of scurvy. On long voyages, mariners would die in their scores because of what we know was vitamin deficiency. Then there were many rival schemes, some plausible, some not, which needed assessment for solving the problem of scurvy. And the Royal Society's fellows often advised, on whether these schemes should be adopted. Right at the beginning of the 18th century,

a protagonist of these projects was Hans Sloan, a Northern Ireland physician of great distinction and wealth, who in the 1690s had himself been on a voyage to the West Indies, to Jamaica, to act as a personal physician to the then-governor. He didn't do very well as physician to the governor, who died in office, but he did extremely well for himself, first of all, by producing eventually,

a remarkable series of descriptions of the natural history, wealth and wonders of the West Indies and laying the foundations of the collection that would later be the founding collection of the British Museum. Another Irishman of that time published a satire on the Royal Society in Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, how did that book take on the science? of the day. Swift satire

on the natural philosophers and what were called projectors, schemers, entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers of London in the 1720s was really remarkable and perceptive because what Gulliver's travels amounts

to is a systematic and pretty excoriating examination of what you learn if you are a traveller, whether you should be believed, and perhaps above all, how the most visionary schemes turn into vicious tragedy. So in the third book of Gulliver's travels,

Gulliver meets a college of projectors and philosophers who stage the most implausible schemes, extracting sunlight from cucumbers in the kind of energy form of recycling. What Swift was satirizing perhaps more than anything else in Gulliver's travels, especially his description of the Academy of Projectors was the entire financial, entrepreneurial, stock-broken culture of the time, the culture of the South Sea bubble, and of corrupt men who'd con the public

by pretending to the kind of expertise that fellows of the Royal Society seemed to manage. Crucial there, I think, was the relationship between the culture in which the Royal Society flourished and the kind of world in which you were to, told, trust me, give me your money, because a member of the Royal Society says that this scheme will work. Another Enlightenment satirists residing in London during this age of empire and exploration would eventually go on to be one of the most influential founding fathers of the United States of America.

Benjamin Franklin was supposed to hear as a diplomat in 1757 to represent the colonists at the Houses of Parliament. But he was also a keen and able scientist and his relationship with the Royal Society of the mid to late 18th century, tells us a great deal about how many fellows believe that science could transcend politics and even ultimately war. The House where we lived, number 36, Craven Street survives today in the shadow of Charing Cross Station,

and it's been turned into a small museum. It was built in 1730, it's elegant, panelled, and still as it was. I'm joined now by Marcia Balisciano, curator of the Benjamin Franklin House and Simon Schaffer is here too. Marcia, a year after Franklin had been elected as a Royal Society Fellow in 1756,

he came to London, settled in this house, the house we're in now, he came as a diplomat. How did that go along with his work as a scientist? Well, initially his main mission was to try and get the Penn family who were the proprietary owners of Pennsylvania who lived near to the house in Spring Garden, which is today the side of the British Council.

to start paying for some expensive things that were happening on the home front, like the French and Indian War, which is essentially a proxy war between the British and the French. So Franklin came with that idea that he should be performing his diplomatic duties, but it was such a joy for him to be in London and a joy for him to be in this house. It's so well located. and he also was exposed to so many colleagues and friends who he had been corresponding with for many years who were fascinated about science. So even though while he lived here at Craven Street, he was always involved with diplomacy and politics, he never forewent his pursuit of science.

Simon, why did the Royal Society become interested in Benjamin Franklin? In the 1740s, certainly one of the most fashionable sciences of the age was electricity. This was mainly because in 1745, German and Dutch natural philosophers had managed to produce a device called a Leiden jar, we would now call it a capacitor, which was capable of producing

the most remarkable shocks from electricity. Explaining how this device worked was a challenge, a puzzle, an anomaly. And then in 1748, one of the most important electrical experimenters in London, and a fellow of the Royal Society, William Watson, received a letter from Philadelphia, signed by Benjamin Franklin, which not only described the phenomena of the Leiden jar, but also offered an account of how it worked. Watson read this letter at the meeting of the Royal Society in 1748, and the And rather characteristically, I think, of the society at the time, they were both impressed by what Benjamin Franklin had to say, decided that everything he said was either false or already well known and set out to check what he was claiming about the way electricity worked.

And from then, really for the rest of Franklin's career in London and beyond, his name becomes closely associated with the drama of electricity. Did Franklin bring his political friends in this room into the Royal Society arena? Did he mix the two? I think that he did. He wasn't a respecter of persons in a sense. Franklin could function well with the great and good, but his great friends were dissenters like he was,

people who were the natural philosophers. supposedly while he lived in the house, he borrowed a steam engine pump from Matthew Bolton, business partner of James Watt, and apparently enjoyed showing it off to guess, and Bolton had to write asking for him to return it because he had kept it on site so long. A lot of people know different aspects about Benjamin Franklin,

but many people don't realize that he was actually a musician as well. Franklin saw the musical glasses, and he thought they were quite interesting. He liked the sound that they had. made, but Franklin, ever the improver, thought there's got to be a better way because it's hard to sustain a note from one glass to another as you move up the octave. So he had glass bowls ground to different octaves. He ran a rod through the center of the bowls. He invented a treadle so that it would spin, and he dipped his fingers in water, and he put it on the glass, and it made

a very ethereal noise. Now, one thing about our harmonica here at Craven Street that Franklin would have loved is that it's electrified. And so it makes it a lot easier to play. Franklin eventually left London in 1775, having failed in his efforts to preserve a peace between Britain and her American colonies. Yet even at the height of the War of Independence, Franklin wrote personally to American naval captains asking them not to attack Captain James Cook, also a fellow of the Royal Society, on his third great voyage of exploration. Franklin was aware of the voyage because despite the war, he'd kept in touch with the society's new president, the botanist Joseph Banks. Banks had made his name some years earlier, as a scientist

aboard Cook's first grade voyage to Australia, and on his return held fashionable audiences enthralled with his swashbuckling tales and stories of exotic creatures. His fame was greater even than Cook's himself, and his influence reached the highest echelons of the establishment. Banks managed to negotiate a new home for the Royal Society in Somerset House. next to Waterloo Bridge, which is where we are now, in a room overlooking the courtyard on one side and the River Thames on the other. It's called the model room. It used to be full of models of ships of the British Navy.

It is now empty. Simon Schaffer, when we look out of the windows over the courtyard, you get a clear sense of the concentration of power here at Somerset House. To the left is the inland revenue where income tax was introduced, and the general registry. Also housed here was the Royal Stomers. Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Academy, and the rooms just underneath this one, the rooms of the Royal Navy Board. How did Banks manage to get the Royal Society included in this

power concentration? The single most important resource Joseph Banks had was the friendship of the King, and he exploited it ruthlessly for four decades to make his society identified as in a way it had never been before with the British monarchy. Indeed, for some of his critics, Banks himself treated the sciences as his kingdom, just as the mad king, George III, treated the United Kingdom as his domain. David Knight, the Professor of History of Science at Durham University, has also joined us. David, if we look at the opposite side of this building, we get a double sweep of the river, pass and sent paws down to the docks to the left, and up to Westminster and Whitehall to the right,

and below us in the boathouse, now cut off by the Victorian Bankment, is a barge with sets of oars and oarsmen, as were, to row the Navy commissioners and perhaps the President of the Royal Society, up and down the river to Greenwich and back, the river to avoid the slums and the diseases there. This again speaks of a city of influence and talks about a place influentially positioned. Can you take us further in that? Well, we heard that Banks had sailed with Cook and before that even he'd sailed to Canada and he'd done some zoological and botanical work out there

so near to his heart all the time was exploration and the Navy and near to his heart as well was the British Empire it was he who suggested Botany Bay might be the place to export British convicts to and it was he

Botany Bay was named for the work in botanising that he had done there. So in a sense, he became the godfather of Australia. And he made sure that marino sheep were smuggled out of Spain and kept at Kew Gardens and crossed with British varieties. But then he made sure that marino sheep was sent to Australia, and that became the foundation of the Australian wool industry. Banks is also a new. kind of career that he's going to devote himself to science administration. The expectation would

have been that he'd become an MP or a country squire at least or something of that sort. But science administration became his route to the sort of power and influence that we'd heard about. There's no doubt of his eminence as a botanist, is there? I mean, he was a serious scientist. He was a serious scientist, but he did work a lot through allies like Solander and Dryander, pupils of Linnaeus, Solander went with him on the voyage. He never got around eventually to publishing seriously in botany. He became a patron rather than a man of science himself. But he did know it. In terms of gathering information and specimens, this was a brilliant place because there'd be lots of young naval officers hanging around this place, waiting for a ship,

and knowing that this was here being asked to bring back specimens, being asked to bring back information. He could gather all that. They just had to walk across the courtyard, didn't I? They did. And the Linnean system of natural history classification, classification of plants, meant that you could learn pretty quickly how to do it, and ship surgeons and young officers, midshipmen and so on. Yes, fell in with Banks' projects and brought things home. Can you just tell us what the Linnean system is? The linear system? The linear system is based on counting

the number of male and female sexual parts in the flower and then you put it into its group accordingly. So you can quickly group, provided you've got a flower rather than just the leaves, you can quickly group your new species into the right sort of compartment. Let's talk about one particularly famous, unsuccessful experiment organised by Banks soon after he moved here.

It involved Captain Blas, I will imply, and the idea was to find a way to feed the slaves in the Caribbean. Can you tell us how that went? Well, Banks in Tahiti had noticed that the breadfruit was growing plentiously and easily and was a nourishing kind of fruit. He thought that that would be the ideal thing to grow in the West Indies to feed the slaves. He wasn't particularly in favour of slavery, but given that there were slaves, they might as well be properly fed. And so Captain Bly, who'd served with Cook and learned with Cook the techniques of navigation,

was given command of a ship that was to go to Tahiti with gardeners on board and transplant breadfruit into little tubs and take them right around the world to the West Indies. And the trouble was that Tahiti proved so attractive to members of the crew and Captain Bly is so unattractive to members of the crew that there was the famous mutiny. Captain Bly was set adrift with the officers' in a small boat and a few loyal members in a small boat, which he navigated amazingly right through to Dutch possession

halfway across the Pacific, and the others settled down with their Tahitian wives in Tahiti and then sailed to another island. You could say that Bligh's expedition was disrupted by a selfish young man called Fletcher Christian and the thugs who went along with him. You could say that, but Bligh had a reputation subsequently also for fomenting mutinies. seems to have been a bossy and rather unattractive sort of person. He was sent off again, this time successful expedition, accompanied by a troop of Marines to keep the crew in order.

And though the expedition did work, it did take the breadfruit to the West Indies second time round. Did the breadfruit catch on? It did. But I don't think the slaves much relished it. But it did catch on, and it did grow in the West Indies. So this, Simon Sharper, is banks being proactive? What sort of the leader was here? Was this typical?

He sees something that could help the empire and gets on with it. It's typical, I think, of a whole Banksyan agenda. Banks's greatest and, tragically, at the time uncompleted project was the Flora of the South Seas, which had it been printed in Banks' lifetime, would have been the towering monument, not only of Linnaean botany, but of British imperial science for centuries to come.

Why could they have been so important? I think that one of the most important aspects of the Banksyan project is the fundamental idea of the possibility of transplantation. I mean, it's really important to see how extraordinarily ambitious and world transforming this kind of campaign is. Banks was not the only person who engaged in it. Indeed, the whole Linnaean system had been invented by Linnaeus, so that, as Linnaeus put it, we could have our own West Indies in Lapland.

rather than paying vast amounts of coin for importing expensive and splendid drugs and spices from elsewhere, why not grow it at home? And it was these sets of transplantations that he saw as representing the future of a British agricultural world empire which needed to recover from the principal political and economic disaster of George III's reign,

which was the loss of the North American colonies. So the idea of the Royal Society being a force in government and a force for the good and the growth of the British economy, which had been one of its establishing features, was still going forward with Banks, was actually reinvigorated by the side of it. It was extraordinarily reinvigorated by Banks' regime. But let's not forget how loathsome the Banksyan regime was to its many critics, since it relied on a very highly centralized system of oligarchy vested in Joseph Banks and his immediate coterie of friends.

to have Banks' approval meant power, to have his enmity meant banishment. And early in his regime in the year 1783 until 1785, there was nothing less than civil war within the Royal Society at Somerset House, which roughly speaking divided Banks and his immediate allies from a group of astronomers, led by the Astronomer Royal Neville Maskeline, and mathematicians who saw Banks' regime not only, as corrupt and illegitimate, but also as monopolising almost all state power and patronage in favour of botany and as they saw it the trivial sciences. Now this was a serious argument

because the opposition to banks was being led by the only significant permanently paid scientific officer of the Crown, the Astronomer Royal, the man whose work had made British navigation function. We sit here in this room that had once been occupied by large numbers of models of British warships. Those British warships could be delivered to where they needed to be, thanks to the programme run from Greenwich, not thanks to the programme run by Joseph Banks, thanks to the Longitude programme, which masculine dominated. So this was a very serious civil war. It was eventually resolved almost entirely in Banks' favour. At the end of the century, Banks was at the height of his power,

but the military scientific complex in which he presided was turning its attention to war with Napoleon Bernaparte's France. Such a war would require all the resources Britain could muster. At the same time, while Banks and the senior fellows had been concentrating on empire and international agriculture, businessmen and mechanics, way outside London, had started the Industrial Revolution, almost behind the Royal Society's back.

It was time to put science, in the service of the nation at home as well as abroad. Join us tomorrow as we look at Joseph Banks' fierce battle to keep the Royal Society at the centre of science and take on board what's known as the Second Scientific Revolution. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others, such as Material World, where Quentin Cooper discusses everything from archaeology to zoology. To find out more, visit bbc.co.ukh, forward slash podcasts.