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

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

THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

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

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

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

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

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

In December of 1675, in a desperate race with Christiaan Huygens over a patent for a spring-regulated watch, Robert Hooke, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) characterized the clock maker Thomas Tompion as a ‘Slug’, a ‘Clownish Churlish Dog’ and a ‘Rascall’, because Tompion was making a watch of Hooke's design too slowly for the latter's taste. It was Hooke's watch, not Tompion's; Hooke was the patron and Tompion the client. Fifty years later Tompion's apprentice, George Graham, made watches and clocks and quadrants for other Fellows of the Royal Society, yet these instruments were known as Graham's clocks and Graham's quadrants. Language such as Hooke had used towards Tompion was inconceivable towards Graham; he was a member of the Royal Society's governing body, the Council, and had published several significant papers in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in which his testimony on and experiments in astronomy, magnetism, horology and metrology were unquestioned. Yet in the early decades of the eighteenth century one could still go to his shop in London's Strand and buy a watch or a clock from him. Like Tompion, George Graham, FRS was a shopkeeper. Nor was he alone in the eighteenth century, at that supposed bastion of gentlemen, the Royal Society. Nearly two-thirds of the membership had to work for a living in one way or another, some rather grandly as high government officials, senior army officers, clerics with ample livings and physicians and lawyers with large and successful London practices ; others more modestly as sailors, surgeons, apothecaries, schoolteachers, engineers, attorneys and instrument-makers. The latter group included some of the most scientifically eminent members of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century: the sailor James Cook (geography), the printer Benjamin Franklin (electricity), the teacher and preacher Joseph Priestley (chemistry), the instrument-maker and engineer James Watt (chemistry), the musician William Herschel (astronomy), and the silk weaver and optician John Dollond (optics). None of these men were gentlemen (though many of their sons or grandsons became so) yet they made science and were acknowledged to have done so; their papers were published and their best work awarded medals.

The Oral History Project of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) ended on 10 July 1998, after almost nine months' duration. Twenty-nine interviews are now available on fifty-eight tapes and in transcript – not all, but nearly all of them on open access for scholars. With this oral history project, the BSHS commemorates its fiftieth anniversary. In particular it pays tribute to the field in the decades 1945–65, during which the historical, philosophical and sociological study of science and technology expanded in an unprecedented way, not least of all in higher education. Who were the individuals involved in this expansion, what factors contributed to its coming about, what purposes did the subject serve, what changes did it undergo, what audiences and functions had the BSHS, how was the process of expansion situated within the larger cultural and political context of the time and did it reflect that context? The project sought to explore these and similar questions.

The project's purpose was to gather material which would otherwise go unrecorded, and thus to create an archival resource for future research, consisting of the interviews (on tape and in transcript), returned questionnaires and any material (biographical or other) received in the course of this project.

In the article “Politics by other means: Justus von Liebig and the German translation of John Stuart Mill's Logic” by Pat Munday, published in our December 1998 number, an unfortunate proof reading error occurred on p. 403. The third sentence should have read “Chemical methods, popular and professional publications about chemistry, technological applications, promoting the careers of former students and even politics – all were central concerns stemming from Liebig's notion of chemistry as the central science.” We apologize to Professor Munday for this error.