In Our Time - The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 3

Episode Date: January 6, 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. The 19th century blooms scientifically with numerous alternative, specialist learned societies and associations, all threatening the Royal Society's pre-eminence. Attempts to reform the membership criteria - marking scientific leadership's painful transition from patronage to expertise - are troubled, and organisations such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now the BSA) excite and enliven scientific discourse outside of London. Science becomes a realistic career and a path of improvement, and by the time HG Wells writes science fiction at the end of the 19th century, there are sufficient numbers of interested, informed readers to suggest that Edwardian society contained the beginnings of a scientific society.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. 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 programme. I'm standing in front of an elegant marble fireplace. It's been moved since, but in 1799, it's stored in the splendid Soho home of the President of the Royal Society,

the wealthy explorer and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. His Royal Society was sitting reasonably pretty, functioning as an adequate club for those gentlemen fellows who enjoyed their science and liked to hear of new and interesting discoveries from around the world. But the Royal Society's style of science wasn't delivering the prosperity to the nation that many had hoped it would. The best hope for that was coming from the new industrial heartlands of the Midlands and further north. These scientific Nouveau-Rich, such as the likes of the Lunar Society, had outflanked the Royal Society in the pursuit of useful Northern. knowledge. Standing around this fireplace on the 7th of March 1799, a deal was made to found a practical scientific institution for, quote, diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life. This became the Royal Institution. David Knight of Durham University and Simon Chaffer of Cambridge are with me here in 21 Alba Mile Street, just of London's Piccadilly, the home, not of the Royal Society, but of the Royal Institution. David Knight, what did the founders of the Royal Institution have in mind, and to what extent did they achieve it?

What they had in mind was the improvement of industry by the application of science, because it was all too clear that the early industrial revolution was powered by people who knew very little actual science. and it's notorious that the steam engine gave much more to science than science gave to the steam engine. And the hope was that agriculture, tanning, steam engines, all sorts of other manufacturing processes might be improved by the application of science, and that mechanics might come along to the lectures, perhaps in the gallery, separate from the main audience, and hear about new inventions and new ways of thinking. Was there any sense of which the mechanics and the inventors, almost none of whom went to school beyond the age of 14,

thought that they were doing very nicely, thank you, by changing the entire history of the industrial world without the application of science? I think they did. That was one problem. The other problem was that if they had invented a new process, they wanted to make money out of it. They didn't want to tell all their rivals at competitors

and everybody else just what was done. So they would show finished products, but they certainly didn't want people to know just how the processes were done. So although we're in this elegant place, which has been substantially refurbished and renovated recently with libraries and columns and Marble Fire presses, this was set up to make money. It did it by attracting the wealthy to courses of lectures.

This, of course, is very different from the original aim. But the person who managed to bring it about, really, was the young Cornishman Humphrodhury Davy, who turned out to be a brilliant orator and who fired up his wealthy audience with a vision of a country in which labour and pain were reduced by science, a baconian vision in which science would transform society.

He was the apostle of applied science. Before we move on to Davy or before we're back to Davy, Simon Schaffer, Banks was in effect setting up a competition for his own society. Did that worry him at all? I think Banks had many irons in the fire. What was at stake was a very complicated piece of what you might call social choreography, in which perhaps it would be possible to bring together in the same institution, expert learned men of science with socially elite, wealthy patrons and productive, ingenious artisans.

This was never going to be easy. A very good example of how difficult it was going to be was that in the original architectural drawings for the theatre of the Royal Institution, there was an outside staircase up which the artisans would come so that their sweaty palms would not disturb the more polite West End audience that would sit in the main body of the theatre. That staircase was abandoned when the building was finished, and the broken staircase, I think, symbolises some of the changes that the Royal Institution under Humphrey Davies' leadership and others went through. So for Banks, this was not so much a competition or a rival or a threat for his learned empire and his royal society,

but rather a way of extending its grip through organisations such as the society for bettering the condition of the poor, and organisations which while they were certainly keen on making sure that there were close links between learned knowledge on the one hand and artisanal production on the other were also very keen on preserving hierarchy and good manner. At the risk, David Knight of doing a great man version of scientific history, Humphrey Debr was very important to the Royal Institution. Can you tell us more about him, his background, where he became so intellectually powerful and influential? Well, he started off in Cornwall, and his father was an out-of-work woodcarver. But he got taken up by Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt from the Lunar Society, and Gregory Watt came to stay with the family.

His mother took in paying guests, and he came to stay with the family. one winter, and he picked up on how bright Davy was, and when in Bristol an institution was set up to try to treat people suffering from lung diseases with Priestley's new fictitious heirs, Davy seemed the ideal person to come and be lab assistant. And there, he found one of these factitious heirs was laughing gas, and they all fell about laughing, and in the druggie society of Coleridge's Bristol. This was a wonderful thing. And then Davy was a very goody was then headhunted to come here as a bright man who might

give good talks, who had the right theory of heat to suit the royal institution's ideas, and it did turn out that he was a spellbinder. And the laboratory in the bottom, the Royal Society had no laboratory. This place had a laboratory down in the basement and David

turned that laboratory into a research laboratory instead of just being something that would test soil or mineral for landowners. And his public lectures became a sensation in London society. Mary Shelley, for example, had met Davy, and perhaps we owe Frankenstein to that visit to Cornwall. Well, we quite likely do, yes. And certainly Mary Shelley was among the people who came to the lectures, and that, of course, these were open to women.

Women could come once a year to the Royal Society. They had a conversatione in which you could bring along wives, daughters, girlfriends, whatever. But here, women came to the lectures from the start, and part of it was the treasurer realized their money was as good as anybody else is. But the Royal Society didn't do lectures of this attractive kind. They did straightforward papers. Can you tell us, Simon, what Davy's story tells us about a scientist in, we can almost call them a scientist properly now, in the 80s 20s, making their way in an institution which is not the Royal Institution,

it's not the establishment? Davy's career, as David is so beautifully discharges, described, showed exactly how genius could through scientific mastery and public appeal be rewarded with social triumph. I mean, this is a society of orders, of hierarchies, of politeness and exclusion, and Davy had managed to breach, to overcome many of those barriers, both by showing superbly the potential utilities of his research, but also by appealing, as it were, over the heads of a certain kind of scientific establishment to a much wider, admittedly highly fashionable audience who would then reward him with social advancement. And the lesson is not lost on Davy's

contemporaries and followers. There were some who thought that Davy had sold out. Coleridge was one of them. But on the other hand, there were those for whom Davy became role model. And it seems to me that it's precisely from that period, from the 1820s and 30s onwards, that you begin to see within London, first of all, and then elsewhere throughout the United Kingdom, the construction of a pattern of a certain kind of scientific career. Can you tell us, David, have we any idea how many people were employed as scientists in Humphrey Davis' day? in the 1820s and 30s.

It would be a very small number. There was the Astronomer Royal in London, had a full-time job, and most of the members of the Royal Society were doctors who practiced some science in their spare time. Some were industrialists, like Wedgwood and Watt. Some were clergy.

Again, they could do it, you know, practice science in the weekdays and to conduct services at the weekends, like Priestley, indeed. And in universities, in medical schools, there were a few jobs for people we would call scientists. But we're thinking of a scientific community, but perhaps a hundred, I should think. And most of those were not living by their science in the way that Davy did.

We know about the Davy lamp. What else did Davy himself push forward as an invention and discovery? He discovered potassium and sodium, these extraordinary new elements. And he invented the arc lamp. But I think the discovery he pushed when present to the Royal Society was a less fortunate one. And that was an idea for protecting the copper bottoms of warships and East India men, copper put on to keep them from worms in the sea. He worked out a way of protecting it by putting a more electropositive metal, iron, attaching it to the copper. And the iron would be dissolved and the copper spared.

And in the lab, this worked a charm. But on the sea, it didn't because barnacles and seaweed adhered like billiote, the protected copper and the ships sailed worse and worse. So it's one of these things where a lab experiment scaled up too hastily led to disaster. I began this section by talking about Joseph Banks and his wonderful fireplace and his generosity

in saying we will have another society. Perhaps the first big breakaway of many societies in the 19th century, but as they grew, the Linnaean, the horticultural, the geological, 184, 187, as they grow and grow. They threaten the centrality and even the supremacy of the royal society.

Did banks have anything to say about that? Well, he did, and it was with the geological society in 1807 that the row really exploded in public, because the geologists wanted to set up a society. Davy was one of the moving spirits who collected in the Freemasons tavern and wanted to set up this society. But Davy's vision, and he was Banks Protaget, he was, in that case speaking for banks, his vision was a small group of FRSs who would meet together. they would publish through the Royal Society's journals and so on, and if outsiders came, they would come as guests.

And that was the vision that Davy had got from Banks. But when the geologists wanted to have their own society, with their own president and treasurer and secretary and journal even, Banks was furiously hostile, and he more or almost demanded that those loyal to him should withdraw, and Davy duly did, along with some other promulies, members. So it was clearly a matter of tension. Banks thought if we didn't hang together, we'd hang separately, that that was appropriate to the 1790s, but not to the 1800s.

By the time Joseph Banks died in 1820, the dynamic Humphrey Davy was an international scientific superstar, and he'd been rising fast through the ranks of the Royal Society. He became the next president. We've moved to the fine Wolfson Room of what today is the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House, surrounded by an incredible collection of impressionist paintings. A Degas stares at me from across the room. In Davies' time, this room was the home of the Royal Society, and above my head are plaster reliefs of Charles II, founding patron of the Society,

and of George III, who gave them the room. An engraving from around that time shows ornate wooden benches set in front of the President's chair, a warm fire and House of Lords-style debating chamber. Clearly things had moved on, from the vivacious, youthful experimenting of a century before. Simon Schaffer, can you tell us something of the membership of the Royal Society in the 1820s? It was dominated still by the legacy of Joseph Banks,

a deeply genteel, if not indeed aristocratic group of men, but the more active members of the society were made up of three crucial groups, groups of people who would play an absolutely decisive role in the development of the society's affairs over the next generation. First of all, the medical men. Secondly, members of the military who combined military command with scientific and technical expertise. And finally, groups of disenchanted, often radical, reformist, younger men, for whom the death of the great Sir Joseph Banks was a welcome relief that at last perhaps reform, modernisation, rationalisation

would reach the grand old lady of the sciences. David Knight, how did reform go down with fellows of the Royal Society? Well, it went down well with some, but it went down very badly with others. And Davy, as the new president, found himself between hostile camps and unable to make real progress. But for the first time, in his part,

presidency, a majority of people who'd published a scientific paper sat on the council. Before then, it had always been a majority of people who'd never published any science. But attempts at reform were difficult. He was instrumental in setting up the Atheneum as a club for intellectual gentlemen, and their hope was that might siphon off people who really wanted leather-arm chairs and cigars and so on, and leave the Royal Society for science. But it didn't. work out. It seems to me looking at it as an amateur Simon Schaffer that the print that we have of the Royal Society in this magnificent room, man on high chair, people facing each other as they do in the House of Lords and so on. He's a long way from cutting up a dolphin. I agree. I think in the

150 years since the restoration, since the establishment of the society, everything has changed. Some of the things that have changed the most are the public faith. of the sciences that the Royal Society presented, gentlemanly, occasionally polemical, but definitely restricted debate. What there is not is public show of experiment or indeed public show of the anatomy of, was it a fish, was it a mammal,

these are not questions for the learned parliament, as you might say, of the sciences. These matters for street theatre, and they're rigorously excluded from the society's affairs. Not only that, but the membership of the society moves relatively effortlessly between genuinely wealthy and polite West End clubs, the chambers of power in Whitehall and Westminster, and the Royal Society itself. And one sees that in this image perfectly. This room should evoke for us, not just the separation of this Royal Society from one it had originally. but also the extremely close proximity of this Royal Society of the 1820s with the corridors of British military and administrative power.

David, after Davy's reform agenda founded, and Davy retired in 1827, who was there to succeed him? Well, the obvious candidate was John Herschel, son of the astronomer William Herschel and himself a considerable astronomer, a good mathematician, he would have been the obvious candidate, but in fact there was a standing candidate first and then a big election in 1830.

Herschel on the one hand, Babbage was his campaign manager and the Duke of Sussex, one of Queen Victoria's wicked uncles, on the other. The aristocratic people wanted the Duke of Sussex and the no-change lobby wanted the Duke of Sussex. The modernisers wanted Herschel.

And so the Duke of Sussex won. Herschel went off to map the Southern Stars much more fruitfully and said, afterwards that he thought nothing so fortunate had ever happened to him as losing that election. Babbage was one of the people who started openly to criticise the Royal Society. Babbage, the famous Cambridge mathematician, writes his reflections on the decline of science in England in 1830,

in which he lays into the Royal Society in no uncertain terms. He's particularly disdainful of the membership process. If the candidate has the good fortune to be perfectly unknown by any literary or scientific achievement, however small, he is quite sure of being elected to the fellowship as a matter of course. If, on the other hand, he has unfortunately written on any subject connected with science or is supposed to be acquainted with any branch of it, the members begin to inquire what he has done to deserve the honour.

And, unless he has powerful friends, he is sure of being blackballed. For a Cambridge-Lukasian professor to launch such a public attack on the Royal Society suggests that things had come to a pretty pass. What do you have to say about that, David? He had hoped to be one of the secretaries of the Royal Society. John Herschel was one, and he'd hoped to be the other. But he was a disappointed man, and he went on being disappointed in all sorts of ways right through his life. But on the other hand, he did have a vision of something much more like the Parisian Academy of Sciences,

and the Royal Society clearly wasn't moving that way. Their elections for academicians were closely fought things and all sorts of scientific merit was taken into account and he saw it as stuck in amateurishness and Britain way behind the continent. Babbage and Herschel were described by their enemies as the bandits and they described Banks, Davy and their friends as little better than old corruption.

I mean this is public fighting of, very high order, and it was ferocious, and it drew the attention of most of the London and national press. It's been said that the Royal Society at this stage was treading water. It wouldn't be too cruel to say that it was sinking, would it, not only from a

babbage ferocity point of view, as it were, but we told that by the 1830s, peer review meant that all that was necessary publication was in the scent of one fellow, pretty dire. Well, I think peer review had

always been a pretty shaky thing, and often the reading by the Secretary of the Society would have been quite enough, or say so from banks. I think this call is looking from a more modern perspective when we would expect something like two experts in the field to have read it, and it goes with admission to the membership when we would again expect that evidence of aptitude would have been required. Certainly, in any international needs, the Royal Society was not measuring up to what they were doing in France. But the 1820s are this decade brewing up to the Reform Bill in politics. They are a decade of cuts and unemployment and political battle.

And I think the Royal Society's reform is part of that battle for Roman Catholic emancipation and emancipation for dissenters and so on too. So we have the Duke of Sussex on the one hand, and we have the Reform Movement and the Reform Movement, and the Reform Bill, on the other hand. When did Reform and the Royal Society meet up? At first, with the election of the Duke of Sussex, quite a lot of members withdrew in effect from the society.

They didn't resign from the society. Faraday, Hersch, Babbage and others, said, we're not going to play a part in it, we're not going to serve on the Council. It now has nothing to do with us. But gradually, they drifted back again into the society after a few years of absence and the reformers and the conservatives

got together in the classic British compromise. But it's not really until about the 1850s when the society begins to get a government grant for research purposes and so on, that it begins to play a real role again. And I think for this, this was a period of uncertainty in finding its feet and so on.

So one of the initial founding ideas or principles keeps recurring as almost the salvation of the Royal Society. When all's said and done, however low it drops, the Royal Society is still the place to come to fix into government, to connect with government, to get the government forces on your side and to talk to the government forces about your own forces. Yes, it has that all-important charter. It's a chartered body, and that gives it a constitutional position and the president a right to be consulted and involved in decisions and so on. Yes. Six years after Babbage's book on the decline of English science, a physician called Augustus Bottson. C Granville, wrote a critique of the state of the Royal Society and suggested some reforms. Lamenting the sheer number of rival organisations, he warned that... The geological, the astronomical, the mathematical, the zoological, the geographical, and the statistical societies,

the Royal Institution, the Society of Arts, and above all, the British Association, will shoot upwards into mighty trees and interlacing their far-spreading branches over the royal oak planted by Charles, and reared by Newton, which was once the sovereign and sole occupier of the soil, they will cast their blighting shadow over it, whereby it shall perish entombed before its death. Above all, the British Association, he writes. This was a British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, modeled on a German organisation, a group of radical young men, frustrated by the fosterness and elitism of the Royal Society set out to bring scientific knowledge and debate into the towns and cities of the UK. Each annual meeting would be held in a different corner of the UK and still is today.

Its most famous meeting was in Oxford. In last year's Darwin celebrations, we heard a lot about the debate held in Oxford in 1860, the famous Huxley-Wilberforce debate on Darwinian evolution and the descent of man. It was held in the building we're in now, in this wing of the Oxford University of, Museum of Natural History, where the British Association, the BA, was holding its meeting that year. Simon Schaffer and David Knight are still with me, and Frank James, Professor of the History of Science of the Royal Institution, joins us. David Knight, this is a fine building.

Clearly, it had an influence on the design for London's Natural History Museum some years later, and it was completed just in time for the BA meeting that year. Was that a coincidence? How seriously were BA meetings taken by hosting cities? They were taken extremely seriously and it was like bidding for well one almost says the Olympic Games but not quite on that level and cities put in bids

and they said that if they were chosen they would build a museum, a mechanics institute, a lecture hall, something of that sort. Can you give us an idea of the difference there would be between a BA meeting, British Association meeting and Royal Society meeting? Royal Society meetings, particularly the beginning of the century were really pretty dull affairs, and the papers would often be read by the secretary.

This was not a very compulsive occasion. The president would be sitting there with a mace in front of him, and he would be wearing court dress. It was a very formal sort of occasion, and it was not open to the general public. Whereas the British Association from the start was going to be open to the general public. Women could come and did. Very occasionally, women were allowed to speak. but this was altogether rather an unusual and odd circumstance. And one of the aims was to encourage local worthies. And in some sciences particularly such as descriptive natural history and descriptive astronomy, local people, amateurs, could contribute to projects run by professionals

and the British Association could harness that expertise. I think it's extremely eloquent that it's at the third meeting, of the British Association at Cambridge in 1833 that the word scientist is coined since it seemed to some people, Coleridge, for example, the poet ST Coleridge, that we did not have in English in 1833 a word to name this new, large group

of cultivators of the sciences. They were clearly not natural philosophers. They were not the erudite or the lords. learned, they were not the virtuosi. So we needed a new word, and this was the word, scientist. So it seems to me significant that it's not from the Royal Society that the notion of the scientist emerges, but from the British Association. How did the British Association establish such powerful influence in such a comparatively short time? It met in the sort of otherwise dead season, and it chimed in with the Industrial Revolution going away like Billy Ho,

the time and it also depended upon railways because you could then have easy communications around the country. But a lot of it was that it brought publicity for science at a time when there weren't other things happening in the city season and cities realized that bringing a whole lot of intellectuals to them, a couple of thousand, would boost hotels and restaurants and all the rest. Simon, there was room for satire in these things and particularly Charles Dickens who took a swipe at the BA. Can you tell us about that? Dickens wrote a remarkable and still, I think, hilarious group of essays called the Mudfog Papers about the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything, which has its annual meeting beautifully treated by Dickens as an imaginary

journalist. There are several aspects of Dickens' satirical assault on the ambitions and culture of the British Association, which I think tell us quite a lot about where the sciences were. in the public imagination in this period in the middle of the 19th century. One is that he's already diagnosing what we might call the threat of science and technology. He talks about scientific projects presented to the society for the advancement of everything, which are going to undermine morals, which are going to undermine welfare, which are going to impose more or less by violence new forms of order on the city streets. He also satirises what must have seen to many the absurdly utopian ambitions of the sciences.

And Dickens is beautiful, I think, as usual, about the ambiguity of that in the social relations of science. If you think about little Dorrit, where he treats Daniel Doiss, the great inventor of a marvelous machine, whose marvels are then entirely frustrated by the inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies of the society. circumlocution office. There, he's not satirising the ambitions of science. He's satirizing the extremely sclerotic relationship between government's support for science and the ambitions of practical invention. So I think what Dickensian satire, in many equivalent writings of the time, reminds us, is that a relationship we might now want to take for granted, that's to say the relationship between investment in scientific training and economic and technological progress

is not evident at all to mid-Victorians. Frank James, can we talk then about other societies which came in and began to have an effect on the public in the way that the Royal Society was and began to expand interest in science? You start getting a strong public interest around about the turn beginning of the 19th century with the founding of the Royal Institution and that expands throughout the 19th. century into places, institutions like the British Association and all the specialist learned

societies. And what's quite interesting is that if you go through the newspaper reports, the Times, the Athenium, the literary gazette, the equivalent today of the spectator and new statesmen, you'll see endless reports of scientific meetings are really quite specialised natures, including the Chemical Society and oral astronomical society. And there's clearly a need, at least perceived from a newspaper editor's desk, for the public to be informed of the latest scientific work. Have you any views on why that grew, why that increased at that particular time? What's going on? I think one of the thing that's, I mean, there's lots of things that are going, but I think one thing that is going on is the way in which science is beginning to be used by

some people to oppose religion. And you see this coming over from France in the late 18th, 19th century. And basically, people want to try and convince themselves that science is still a religious activity and so they have to try and understand what modern science is staying about the nature of the modern world and they move on into the big debates between science and religion that you get in the 1870s and 1880s of science is taken away as a religious activity towards a much more secular activity. Are you suggesting that when it became a much more secular activity, public interest began to wane a little or did it increase because of that? Once it becomes a secular activity, it does seem to wane, one has to say,

because there gets to a point where people cannot actually understand the sort of science that is being reported in newspapers unless they have actually had a scientific training. And most people, by the end of 19th century, have not had a scientific training. The Great Exhibition, that had an incredible impact on this country. Can you tell us how you think that's spilled over into an interest in the experimental sciences?

Well, the Great Exhibition is really the only international exhibition in the entire history of the world have ever made a profit. What it did with that profit was to buy up all the land around South Kensington and we're able to build what was called Albertopoulos, an institution for the science and art. So the new government department of science and art, art being technology in this particular sense, not the fine arts. And that gave an enormous philip to using science as a means of education. Thousands and thousands of school teachers, for example, took their exams

at the Department of Science and Arts examination halls in South Kensington. And they then went out to teach science up to children up to the age of... 14 in the new state schools that were rapidly being established towards the end of the 19th century. And brought thousands and thousands of their pupils to the museums? Judging by the audience figures, yes, they must have come from somewhere. Where does this leave the Royal Society then, Simon? I think that's a very interesting question.

It seems to me that after 1848, the Royal Society becomes perhaps more than anything else an accreditation system. It's a system for awarding prizes and grants. It is not, in effect, a system where science itself is actively pursued. Rather, it's a system for blessing the results of already successful work. And that problem of accreditation remains central, it seems to me, to one of the principal functions of the society.

I think there's actually a problem with the World Society during the late 19th century, and that is in mid-century there are about 400 fellows and, say, 4 to 5,000 members. of the scientific community, so roughly one in ten. As De Morgan, Augustus DeMorgan said, they then fairly represent science, or FRS. By 1900, the World Society is about the same sort of size still, but the scientific community has expanded, so there are real issues about what they're actually accrediting,

and there are lots of people who you think will be fellows of the World Society, but who aren't because they haven't been elected. The World Society becomes increasingly specialized, increasingly narrow. The philosophical transaction becomes almost unreadable to people who aren't experts in that particular subject of the paper. And that's one reason why science moves away from the general public because the public simply cannot understand what's being written. David, the Royal Society's transactions indeed were separated in the 1880s

into physical sciences and life and earth sciences. And ironically, that's just the time that Gregor Mendel was publishing his mathematical analysis of genetics, which of course would have fallen plumbed between such stools. but that bears out what Frank was saying that even the papers there couldn't be understood by the whole fellowship they would be in A or B. So there's a sense of the Royal Society being displaced in the second half of the 19th century, firmly displaced?

Displaced as a centre of activity. It is somewhere you come and report, work that you've reported in progress to the chemical society, the physical society, or zoological society, whatever it is. What's happening in the cashier of the Royal Society, The people still want to belong to it. They think it's an important place to belong to?

Yes, it gets an even greater cachet as the years go by. Because the scientific community expands, but it stays the same size, the competition to get into the world society becomes ever and ever greater. With the cashier of FRS after your name, in the early 19th century, this was quite good for a doctor, perhaps, to the ERFRS. Later on, it vindicated you, in the eyes of contemporaries, you became a kind of authority, and therefore, of course, if you also want to raise grants, you want to raise money for your institution,

you wanted a good sort of professorship and people working with you, it was always a big boost. Simon? I think the Royal Society stays not only the most prestigious scientific organisation in Britain, but one of the most prestigious scientific organisations in the world. It's very important to remember. The very definition of the scope of science is in flux at this period. and while they were deeply troubled by the proliferation of other organisations, you begin to see Fellows of the Royal Society pontificating about topics well outside their area of expertise

because they're Fellows of the Royal Society. And I think that kind of public activity, trust me, I'm a scientist, I'll tell you how the economy works, is a very important aspect of the high status of the letters FRS. Towards the end of the 19th century then, science had emerged as less exclusive, in some tentative way democratised. Science education extended to most schools, professional science courses were available at most British universities,

many journals existed for reporting new work in progress, and the Royal Society played its part in reporting key findings in its own influential and bulging publications. To facilitate the expansion in 1857, the Society had moved from its limited space in Somerset House to where we are now, the ornate facades of Burlington House, just off Piccadilly, in the heart of London's clubland. By 1880, the Royal Society had been joined by the Linnaean and Chemical Societies, the Royal Academy, the Geological and Royal Astronomical Societies,

and the Society of Antichrist, all known collectively today as the Courtyardard societies. And this courtyard is probably best known today for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition, held every year since it moved in. But Frank James, as a historian of science, what does this location and this collection of learners societies tell us of the government's view of science, of its relationship to science at the end of the 19th century? Well, it tells us that the government believed

that science was absolutely central to the way the country should be run in providing expertise. And the other thing, the particular location of Burlington House tells you, is that we're in the centre of a major scientific complex You have organisations like the Wall School of Mines in German Street, the World College of Chemistry, up in Oxford Street, the Royal Institution just around the corner in Aramil Street. So this part of London was absolutely central to the scientific enterprise in the late 19th century.

And it's just a stroll down Whitehall to the houses of Parliament. So we're very near the centres of power here. There's an awful lot going on in science, as we can see in this courtyard. So our focus has got to be the Royal Society. And Simon, other societies, other institutions, publishing their journals, they're getting on, they're moving ahead in some ways. Are the famous Royal Society transactions still as important, still as influential? No. One of the great transformations in the sciences in the second half of the 19th century

is the degree of specialisation of the sciences accelerates beyond any precedent whatsoever. The claim was that the amount of specialised. articles being published was now so large that one researcher simply would not know whether his work had been anticipated or what literature he should be reading. So one of the crucial functions of the society here at Burlington House was as a kind of bibliographic and information management centre. Indeed, the library of the Royal Society expanded so fast at Burlington House that within a few years, this place to which they'd moved because Somerset House was too crowded, was itself far too crowded. Every single room of the Royal Society in Burlington House by 1900 was full

of papers and books. They set out to make catalogs, to overhaul their library, to above all try and standardize the way in which scientists wrote and published. And this was a very important campaign that the society ran. We're also now joined by Lisa Jardine of Queen Mary University of London. How would you assess that contribution, the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers, this attempt to index the whole of science? How would you assess that in the progress of the history of science?

Well, I'm an archival historian. I, of course, think it's the most important thing the Royal Society ever did. You have to set, I think what we keep having to set alongside one another, the information and education function of the Royal Society and its function as a provider of funding for the most cutting-edge research that is being done in any period. And the archive and the library are a fabulous aspect of that need, and it's a need still today,

to get scientific knowledge out to the wider audience to make it public. H.G. Wells is writing towards the end of the century and writing books about signs, writing books which feature signs, and getting a huge following. What does this tell us about the place of science then, Lisa Jardine? Well, if you take a novella like The Time Machine with its extraordinary vision of the implications of science in civilization, namely that we actually make ourselves obsolete,

that we become so dependent on the technology and so useless in ourselves, that we ultimately die out, that argument couldn't have been presented to any but a highly alert audience who really understood the potential of science and technology. You can only do the kind of brave new world ending if you have already got an audience who are absolutely fixated and fascinated with the detail of science, the detail of technology, the growth of scientific institution, who really believe that science is taking over the world. In Edwardian Britain and science seemed to be working pretty well.

On the whole, its running had made the painful transition from patronage to expertise. And it seemed to some that while scientific knowledge was still a specialist knowledge and not to be confused with the skills of running a country, you could feel reasonably sure that a bright future lay within the grasp of a nation in possession of learned people, meeting in learned societies, applying scientific knowledge to the problems of the day. But as Francis Bacon asserted at the outset, knowledge is power. And as we'll discuss tomorrow, the full extent of that power was to be demonstrated only too horribly in the trenches of the First World War.

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.com.uk forward slash podcasts.