During high summer 1721, while rioters and bankrupts gathered outside Parliament, Robert Walpole's new ministry forced through a bill to clear up the wreckage left by the stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the visionary projects swept away when it burst. In early August the President of the Royal Society Isaac Newton, a major investor in South Sea stock, and the Society's projectors, learned of a new commercial scheme promising apparently automatic profits, a project for a perpetual motion. Their (...) informants were a young Viennese courtier Joseph Emmanuel Fischer von Erlach, a contact of Desaguliers recently engaged in industrial espionage in northern England, and the Leiden physics professor Willem 'sGravesande, who had visited London five years earlier. They reported that they had been summoned to a remarkable series of demonstrations in the castle of Weissenstein, the seat of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. In a carefully guarded room of the castle there was set up a hollow wooden wheel covered in oilcloth, about 12 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick on an axle 6 feet in length. Its designer, a Saxon engineer and clockmaker Johann Bessler, who travelled Germany under the name Orffyreus, had been in Kassel for four years, published schemes for perpetual motion and been appointed commercial councillor. The Landgrave, well-known as a patron of advanced engineering schemes, commissioned him to build a new machine and put it on show before expert witnesses (Figure 1). (shrink)

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost (...) none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development. (shrink)

While Newton tried to make his telescope into a proof of the supremacy of his theory of colours over older theories, his instrument was welcomed as a way to shorten telescopes, not as a way to solve the problem of chromatic aberration. This paper argues that the image published together with the report on Newton’s telescope in Philosophical Transactions (1672) encouraged this reception. The differences between this visualization and other images of Newton’s telescope, especially that published in Opticks (1704), are (...) discussed. This paper shows that the image in Opticks adopted characteristics of a Cartesian program of visualization of machines and instruments which complemented a rhetoric which attributed primacy to theory over practice. The differences between the images in Philosophical Transactions and Opticks are also considered within the broader institutional context of Newton’s attitude towards the Royal Society. (shrink)

This paper argues that the development of early-modern science was strongly influenced by prevailing legal practices.1 This argument goes back to the work of Barbara Shapiro, who explored in a numb...

A frequently recounted episode in early modern medicine concerns the physician Helvetius's introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice after curing Louis XIV's son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. To this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity, and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores how Helvetius's reputation as a physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur was crafted through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking (...) to establish a definitive account of “what actually happened,” it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalized on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz's actions stemmed from a view of the public domain that downplayed discovery and emphasized disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest. (shrink)

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) was the most renowned engraver of Louis XIV's France. For the history of scientific publishing, however, Le Clerc represents a telling paradox. Even though he followed a traditional route based on classic artisanal training, he also published extensively on scientific topics such as cosmology and mathematics. While contemporary scholarship usually stresses the importance of artisanal writing as a direct expression of artisanal experience and know-how, Le Clerc's publications, and specifically the work on cosmology in hisSystème du (...) monde(1706–1708), go far beyond this. By reconstructing the debate between Le Clerc and the professor Mallemant de Messange on the authorship of this ‘system of the world’, this article argues that Le Clerc's involvement in publishing ventures shaped his identity both as an artisan and as a scientific author. Whereas the Scientific Revolution supposedly heralded a change from the world of ‘more or less’ to the ‘world of precision’, this article shows how an artisan could be more ‘precise’ than the learned scholar whose claims he disputed, and points to the importance of the literary field as a useful lens for observing the careers of early modern scientific practitioners. (shrink)

In recent years, historians of science have increasingly turned their attention to the “print culture” of early modern science. These studies have revealed that printing, as both a technology and a social and economic system, structured the forms and meanings of natural knowledge. Yet in early modern Europe, naturalists, including John Aubrey, John Evelyn, and John Ray, whose work is discussed in this paper, often shared and read scientific texts in manuscript either before or in lieu of printing. Scribal exchange, (...) exemplified in the circulation of writings like commonplace books, marginalia, manuscript treatises, and correspondence, was the primary means by which communities of naturalists constructed scientific knowledge. Print and manuscript were necessary partners. Manuscript fostered close collaboration, and could be circulated relatively cheaply; but, unlike print, it could not reliably secure priority or survival for posterity. Naturalists approached scribal and print communication strategically, choosing the medium that best suited their goals at any given moment. As a result, print and scribal modes of disseminating information, constructing natural knowledge, and organizing communities developed in tandem. Practices typically associated with print culture manifested themselves in scribal texts and exchanges, and vice versa. “Print culture” cannot be hived off from “scribal culture.” Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication. (shrink)

The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering what counts as cultural history in that domain and attempts to coordinate it with the sociologically informed studies of the past ten orfifteen (...) years. The label "sociocultural" seems a more useful term by which to capture recent developments. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is (...) to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise. (shrink)

I make three related claims. First, certain seemingly secretive behaviours displayed by scientists and inventors are expression neither of socio-professional values nor of strategies for the maximization of the economic value of their knowledge. They are, instead, protective responses to unavoidable risks inherent in the process of publication and priority claiming. Scientists and inventors fear being scooped by direct competitors, but have also worried about people who publish their claims or determine their priority: journal editors or referees who may appropriate (...) the claims in the manuscript they review or patent clerks who may claim or leak the inventions contained in the applications that cross their desks. Second, these protective responses point to the existence of an unavoidable moment of instability in any procedure aimed at establishing priority. Making things public is an inherently risky business and it is impossible, I argue, to ensure that priority may not be lost in the very process that is supposed to establish it. Third, I offer a brief archaeology of regimes and techniques of priority registration, showing the distinctly different definitions of priority developed by each system. (shrink)