Early Science: An Historical Perspective [Part 1]

 Early Science: An Historical Perspective

Introduction

 

Professor Tim Connell

25/11/2010

When the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in Plymouth Sound in 1620 they might have been surprised to learn that there were already cities in North America with street lighting, main drainage and libraries, only they were on the West Coast, and had names like Nuestra Señora de los Angeles and San Francisco de Asís. By the time Gresham College opened its doors in 1597, universities had already been operating in Mexico City and Lima for over fifty years, and Santo Domingo had had one since 1538. Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) are positive newcomers by comparison.

In the New World at least, Early Science was based firmly on observation and overwhelming intellectual curiosity in the face of so many wonders, ranging from some of the world's highest volcanoes, to an abundance of flora and fauna. On my window sill at home, I have a rather curious plant called the Marvel of Peru (Mirabilis Jalapa), the only one in the natural world to grow flowers of three different colours on the same stem without being a hybrid. (This is due, needless to say, to cytoplasmic inheritance.)[i] The leaves and roots, as well as the flowers, all have medicinal properties. It was discovered in 1542 in the Andes, not unlike its more celebrated neighbour the cinchona tree, also known as Peruvian or Jesuit's Bark which is the original source for quinine. It was indeed discovered by a Jesuit in the 1620s as a cure for malaria, or rather a Jesuit was treated for malaria by someone local.

The wealth of knowledge about flora and fauna was of course seriously damaged by the overall impact of the Discovery and Conquest, but there were men, principally the friars, who realised the value of what they saw, and dedicated their lives to collecting as much information as they could. The Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún produced the remarkable Florentine Codex in the 1560s by interviewing elderly Aztecs who had survived the upheavals of the previous four decades. The result was a work running to twelve volumes, including a Spanish-Náhuatl dictionary and grammar, and was published with the languages in parallel.[ii] All this was somewhat in contrast to Bishop Landa of Yucatan, who spent half of his time destroying every vestige of Mayan culture as works of the devil, and the latter half trying to save whatever he could, having realised the significance of Mayan learning in fields such as botany and astronomy.

Relatively little of this huge volume of material, however, came to be shared widely in Europe. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was the official chronicler to the Council of the Indies (similar in some ways to Richard Hakluyt), who first reported on the voyages of Columbus in 1493, but hisDecades were not published until 1530 - and not in English until 1887.[iii]

The attraction of the Spanish Main lay not so much in natural science as its mineral wealth, particularly in the form of gold and silver. There is little to suggest that Sir Francis Drake was into scientific experiments, although the contribution of Sir Walter Raleigh was far more extensive. He included scientific elements in his expeditions to Virginia and while in the Tower of London is known to have conducted scientific experiments.[iv] He and that other Elizabethan sea-dog Sir Humphrey Gilbert (who was also Raleigh's half-brother) planned an academy not dissimilar to Gresham College which would have taught maths, astronomy and navigation, mainly for the furtherance of trade - and to challenge the Spanish on the high seas.

But then these were dangerous times. Gresham College was founded in 1597, only eleven years after the Spanish Armada, Wadham College in 1610 - five years after the Gunpowder Plot. And 1660 was a pivotal year in English history with the Restoration of Charles II. It came only fifteen years after the Battle of Naseby, and only nine years after the Battle of Worcester. The Civil War must have been a searing memory for many people: there may have been as many 190,000 casualties[v], so everyone would have known someone who died, or may even have killed someone that they knew. Families, friends and neighbours were divided; many went into exile, priests were removed from their livings, and fellows from their colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge. A key figure in this period is John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, who was instrumental in drawing scientific figures into his circle, including names which would recur later such as Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Although a supporter of Cromwell, he was respected by the Royalists, who even sent their sons to Wadham under his tutelage. In 1659, however, he was appointed to Trinity College Cambridge by Cromwell himself, and, predictably enough, was removed the following year.[vi] That took him to London, where he was vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, and a key figure in the development of science again, becoming one of the two founding secretaries of the nascent Royal Society.[vii]

The 1660s must have been seen as a time of hope (and quite possibly, reconciliation), though people obviously had no idea that the Great Plague was around the corner, and that London would be destroyed by fire. Such items would have been rejected by cool scientific minds as the wild prognostications of astrologers.

Ironically, the Great Fire provided particular opportunities for members of Gresham College (which survived the fire and was actually used as temporary accommodation by the Corporation of London) and may have moved Christopher Wren and the people who met in his rooms for Rhenish wine and macaroons back into the Oxford orbit. These were the choicest spirits of the age, drawn together by their common interests, if not by mutual respect. The feud between Robert Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton is well known, even though their contribution to the development of science is beyond any doubt. Yet Hooke set up some slightly odd experiments (by modern standards) for the Royal Society, while producing those remarkable drawings from under his microscope. And whilst Newton is rightly seen as one of the greatest scientific thinkers ever to have existed, he dedicated a great deal of time to experimenting with alchemy.[viii]

We are here today to commemorate the founding of three different institutions, all of which are unique in their own particular way: one awarding degrees as part of an ancient university; one (once described as 'the third universitie of England'[ix]) offering no degrees at all, and one with an international membership of eminent people, pushing back the boundaries of science. Yet they were pivotal in the development of early science - and one would like to think that they still have a contribution to make today! But the work of the two colleges would not have been possible without the support of the people who bear their names: Sir Thomas Gresham, financial adviser to Queen Elizabeth (and quite possibly a money launderer and gun runner, and the man who drove the Hanseatic League out of London); Dorothy Wadham, a widow from a wealthy West Country family whose husband had expressed a wish to found an Oxford college.[x] But whereas Lady Gresham spent nearly twenty years trying to overtone her late husband's will, Dorothy Wadham declared that it would greatly offend her conscience to violate one jot of her husband's. King Charles, the Merry Monarch himself, gladly assented to be the patron of the new Royal Society, but he was not well known for being good with money, and it is an unfortunate reality that many of the early fellows and patrons of the Society were in arrears with their subscriptions.

Funding, of course, is still at the heart of all institutions and critical if science is to develop in the way that those visionaries saw three or four centuries ago. The new learning of our own age, discoveries like DNA, the human genome and biotechnology which constitute the cutting edge for us may be looked on with a wry smile in fifty or a hundred years (just look at the superhighway fifteen years on) in much the same way that we look back on some of the more way-out experiments of the early Royal Society or theories such as phlogiston.[xi] But further development will just not be possible unless the funding can be found, and guaranteed. We owe it to Sir Thomas and Lady Dorothy, and to those early luminaries of the Royal Society to ensure that somehow this is the case. It would be hard to persuade survivors of a civil war, a plague, a devastating fire, wars with the Dutch, and a revolution, that our situation today will not, somehow, permit it. In the same way that we can look back with gratitude to those early benefactors, those who come after us deserve to be able to look back with approval on our efforts to ensure that Gresham College, Wadham College and the Royal Society have ensured that they can flourish for the next three or four hundred years. We shall surely be called to account if not.

©Tim Connell, Gresham College 2010

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Early Science: An Historical Perspective

Early Mathematical Instruments

 

Professor Lisa Jardine

 

Early Mathematical Instruments

When
the invitation came to speak today on 'Early Mathematical Instruments',
my first thought was that the early Royal Society didn't have very much
interest in mathematical instruments, in the well-established meaning
of the term in the 17th century.  This was the Royal Society of London
for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which was not the
same thing.  But then I thought that, well I have only 25 minutes
towards the end of the day, so the audience might not be too devastated
if there isn't a great deal to say.  And then, more positively, well
there might be more to say than I imagine at first, and even the
relative lack of interest in an area that we might think of as central
to science and its history could itself be significant.

First,
what was meant by 'mathematical instruments' in the 17th century? - a
term with a much longer pedigree than 'experimental natural
philosophy'.  The Royal Society were certainly interested in instruments
but mainly the new-fangled optical instruments - the telescopes and
microscopes - and the even more recently fangled instruments of natural
philosophy, such as air-pumps or electrical machines.  Mathematical
instruments were much older, with an active tradition of writing and
publishing as well as making, and large numbers of specialist craftsmen
in manufacturing centres regulated by guilds and companies.  Optical
instruments and instruments of natural philosophy could be used in
making discoveries about the natural world, making experimental
investigations that might yield new natural knowledge.  Mathematical
instruments had no such ambitions - they were for solving problems that
were amenable to mathematic techniques, especially geometry - for
finding the time or the positions of the planets, for surveying land or
drawing a map, for navigating a ship, for designing a building, for
finding the distance of an artillery target and setting the charge and
the inclination of the gun to hit it, and so on - many fields of
application had been development for instruments such as sundials,
astrolabes, quadrants, theodolites, maps, globes, rangefinders,
inclinometers, and so on - but they did not interfere with natural
philosophy.  While this was a limitation to their competence, it was
also a source of freedom in their design and use.  They did not need to
conform to the strictures of natural philosophy.  My favourite example
of this is that terrestrial globes rotate on polar axes before
Copernicus proposes in 1543 that the earth might actually be doing the
same.  Such globes do not represent anticipations or precursors of the
Copernican system of the world; they simply offered a convenient device
for dealing with calculations relating time, date and geographical
position.

A
characteristic element in contemporary practical mathematics, the place
where you find mathematical instruments, was what was called the
'theoric'.  A theoric was an encapsulation of information, secured by a
systematic technique (usually a geometrical one), in a device that might
be an instrument but could also be a diagram or a construction. 
Results could be obtained from the theoric that were not entered in its
construction and that were extracted by the operation of proper
protocols by the knowing user.  The example most familiar to historians
is the theoric of planetary motion - a geometrical construction using
combinations of circles for predicting, or retrodicting, planetary
positions - but mathematical practice has many other examples in
different disciplines.  As the vehicle for an operative technique rather
than a causal explanation, the theoric belongs in the mathematical arts
and sciences rather than in natural philosophy; it does not make the
epistemological claims of natural philosophy regarding the true
understanding of nature.  The geometrical cartography of the 16th
century, for example, offered world maps that took a variety of forms,
shaped by different geometrical projections, and these varieties could
co-exist, to be deployed according to their suitability for different
purposes.

Keeping
in mind this contemporary meaning of 'mathematical instrument', we will
not find much of relevance in the early deliberations of the Royal
Society.  We can be sure that certain mathematical instrument makers
were known to certain fellows - we know, for example, of Hooke and Wren
employing them.  In bringing Oldenburg up to date with news of
plague-ridden London in 1665, Robert Moray wrote 'we all here are much
troubled with the loss of poor Thomson & Sutton' - Anthony Thomson
and Henry Sutton, two of the capital's finest mathematical instrument
makers. 

In
fact I want to take this opportunity to demonstrate just how
outstandingly good the best of the London makers could be at their
trade.  Henry Sutton was one of the most original among the makers - one
with significant interests in geometry and new designs, but he may also
have been the finest engraver when the Royal Society was founded.  The
Museum of the History of Science in Oxford we has a universal astrolabe
by Sutton and also - very unusually - an early pull taken from the inked
instrument.

What is this print for? - why was it made? - different possibilities have been suggested,.

But
what immediately strikes you when looking at this print is its
extraordinary quality - to pull such a print from so complicated an
instrument seems to me an act of bravado - an assertion of
self-confidence in outstanding skill.  Any untidiness or unevenness of
line that may not be obvious on the brass surface will immediately be
revealed by the print.

This
is fairly early as regards printing from copper plates in England. 
Sutton is saying that he is as good as any of the contemporary
engravers.

There may some leeway with a figurative print - there is nowhere to hide faults in a detailed projection such as this.

So,
mathematical instrument making has reached an impressive level of skill
in the 17th century, and English mathematicians and instrument makers
are introducing innovative and successful designs - some of which I'll
mention later - as well as cultivating manual skill, but this not a
discipline much in evidence at the Royal Society.

Searching the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions, I found only one article on a mathematical instrument in the contemporary sense, and it was by an alumnus of Wadham College.

This
is Christopher Wren's perspectograph, known to the mathematical
instrument maker Ralph Greatorex, and attributed to Wren, as early as
1653.  Wren described it to Greatorex, and later had one made by Anthony
Thompson.  Oldenburg had one.  Pepys had one made for himself.  Boyle
had one, and there was an example in the museum of the Royal Society.

That
Wren provides the instance where we can recover a link between
mathematical instruments and the Wadham / Gresham / Royal Society nexus
is typical of him.  His engagement with practical mathematics remained
distinctive from his early interest in sundials, through his activities
is drawing, instrument design, geometrical astronomy, machines,
surveying instruments, and so on.  By the mid-1660s it was far from
clear that all the promise of his precocious youth was going to lead to
any lasting and substantial achievement until the architectural
opportunities that came to him after the Fire of London so closely
matched and engaged the range of his practical mathematical talent.

Hooke
of course was the other figure whose practical mathematical interests
and skills could be turned to good effect in rebuilding London, though
his commitment to experimental natural philosophy, alongside practical
mathematics, was profound and sustained.  On the mathematical instrument
side he designed surveying, navigational and astronomical measuring
instruments.

Even two swallows
don't make a summer and we must return to the fact that mathematical
instruments, for all their development and significance in the 16th and
17th centuries, were not prominent in the work of the Royal Society. 
This had emphatically not always been the case for Gresham College and
its mathematical professors - for the early predecessors of Wren and
Hooke in Gresham's mathematical chairs.  Wren certainly was aware of
these precedents, saying in his inaugural address at Gresham in 1657
that the early professors had been 'Men of the most eminent Abilities,
especially in mathematical Sciences; among whom the names of Gunter,
Brerewood, Gellibrand, Foster, are fresh in the Mouths of all
Mathematicians'.  The reputations of these men were certainly in
practical mathematics and mathematical instruments - perhaps Edmund
Gunter most of all, for Gunter's sector

Gunter's rule

Gunter's quadrant

Samuel Foster too was preoccupied with instrument design - sundials, an improved quadrant, calculating instruments, and so on.

If
we focus on the early Royal Society group, moving through the Wadham
College period in the familiar narrative, we will see a shift in
emphasis from practical mathematics to experimental natural philosophy
and from a concern with developing sectors and quadrants to the
invention, improvement and deployment of telescopes, microscopes,
barometers and air-pumps.  This development is a connected narrative,
not an arbitrary sequence.  The problems confronted by the new
philosophy were inherited from the inadequacies and dilemmas of the old;
the ambitions and agendas of the new philosophy were influenced by
visionary, programmatic thinkers.  But the qualities and characteristics
of practical mathematics were an important resource for the emerging
experimental mechanical philosophy - mathematics as a tool of synthesis,
mechanics as a paradigm mode of causal operation in the natural world
as well as the artificial one, manipulative, operative knowledge as a
resource for the experimental approach to natural philosophy, and
instruments as the tools and embodiment of this experimental engagement
with nature.

The
story of Gresham College itself, from the practical mathematics of
Gunter to the experimental philosophy of Hooke is an institutional
strand in the same narrative.  As early as the mid-1640s, when Foster
was still in post and John Wallis was becoming involved, what Wallis
remembers being discussed are:

the Circulation
of the Bl{ood}, the Valves in the Veins, the Copernican Hypothesis, the
Nature of Comets, and New Stars, the Satellites of Jupiter, the Oval
Shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, {the} spots in the Sun, and its
Turning on its own Axis, the Inequalities and Selenograp{hy} of the
Moon, the several Phases of Venus and Mercury, the Improvement of
Telescopes, and grinding of Glasses for that purpose, the Weight of Air,
the Possibility or Impossibility of Vacuities, and Natures Abhorrence
thereof; the Torricellian Experiment in Quicksilver, the Descent of
heavy Bodies, and the degrees of Acceleration therein;

So, there is mathematics but there is a strong shift towards natural philosophy.

When
Wren writes from Wadham College in February 1656/7 - probably to
William Petty - giving him what he calls the 'Philosophical News', his
dioptrical work includes the anatomy of the eye, alongside the
improvement of microscopes and telescopes; he reports a micrometric
survey of the moon, which involved adapting traditional instrumental
measurement to the astronomical telescope, alongside a study of the
earth's magnetic variation; anatomical dissection for which he is
providing the drawings, and experiments in intravenous injection.

And
the trend continues as the Royal Society institutionalises an emphasis
on natural knowledge.  But of course, all the while, the world of
mathematical instruments continues to develop and the English makers
continue to improve and flourish - we have seen the level of skill
achieved by Henry Sutton - and new textbook writers emerge to explain
how the instruments are used and the geometrical techniques applied to
practical ends.  Practitioners still need to find the latitude, the
time, measure land, draw maps, and so on.  You need only visit the
Museum of the History of Science to see that the material remains of
science from the 17th century comprise quadrants, sundials, artillery
and surveying instruments, sectors, rules and slide rules, rather than
air-pumps and electrical machines.  The makers were operating successful
businesses, with workshops, reception spaces, even demonstration
spaces, items in stock, items to order, and so on.

Indeed
when the Royal Society proposes to keep a 'stock' of experiments, which
in effect means a collection of natural philosophical instruments, it's
hard not to think that the instrument shop, as it was managed in the
17th century, was as much a model as the very few collections of natural
rarities.  We see this happening, in real time, so to speak, at a
meeting in December 1673, when Hooke was showing an experiment on the
relationship between magnetic attraction and distance.

Upon
this occasion Sir William Petty moved, that the Society would give
orders, that there might be a constant apparatus of instruments ready
for the making of several kinds of experiments depending on several
heads; for instance, for experiments of motion, optical, magnetical,
electrical, mercurial, &c.  And that such instruments, as had been
formerly used by the Society, and were out of order, might be repaired,
and all these put together in a room by themselves, to be ready upon
occasion for strangers, or for repetition and farther prosecution of the
several sorts of experiments.

An
extraordinary statement - proposing just the kind of cabinet of physics
that would become so popular among institutions in the 18th century,
and setting out its main divisions - optical, magnetical, electrical,
and so on.  And of course the emphasis in this stock of instruments is
very much in natural philosophy, even though the proposal is shaped by a
former surveyor and designer of ships.

I
want to conclude with one residual instance of the methodology of
practical mathematics - one instance of survival within the Royal
Society.  It does not concern an instrument directly but a theoric - the
characteristic synthesising tool of practical mathematics, and in fact a
theoric that takes its form from an instrument, in a kind of analogy. 
We have seen that Wren was perhaps temperamentally and intellectually,
and eventually certainly professionally engaged with practical
mathematics and mathematical instruments.

Wren
had been active at Gresham College, with his colleague there Lawrence
Rooke, in experiments on the collisions of bodies prior to a visit by
Christiaan Huygens in 1661, when Huygens used his account of elastic
impact to predict - correctly - the results of their experiments.  This
looks like an obvious candidate for an study in experimental natural
philosophy.  Wren and Rooke has used, they said, 'balls of wood and
other stuff hanging by threads' - frames of this sort were later
included in standard cabinets of physics - while the overall context for
the discussion was the laws of impact enunciated by Descartes in his
'Principles of Philosophy'.  Mechanical impact was to be the basis of
Cartesian natural philosophy and the fundamental ingredient in its
causal explanations, but Descartes- actual laws seamed seemed very
dubious and in need of correction.

Wren
formulated his own theory of impact soon afterwards, but the
disappointment with it among his colleagues was understandable. 
Everyone agreed that it predicted the experimental results and produced
the same results as that of Huygens, but it seemed to lack the
appropriate ambition in natural philosophy - Wren had stopped too soon -
at the formal expression of his results - and did not go on to offer a
demonstration or explanation.  When that was pointed out to him, Wren
averred that he was finished - that that was it - that was all he
planned to do - 'he is against' it was reported, 'finding a reason for
the experiments of motion ... and says that the appearances carrie
reason enough in themselves'.  Wren's theory would more properly have
been called a 'theoric'.

It
took the form on an analogy with the balance.  Consider the 'bodies'
(we might say 'masses' but that would be anachronistic) as the weights
on the balance and their velocities as the distances of the respective
weights from the fulcrum.  Wren's analogy reduced all the experiments to
only 2 general cases.  One is when the balance is in equilibrium, the
velocities are inversely proportional to the respective bodies, the
centre of gravity coincides with the fulcrum of the balance.  In that
case the velocities are unchanged after collision except that their
directions are reversed.  The collision is 'balanced'.  Where this is
not the case, where velocities are not inversely proportional to bodies
and the centre of gravity of the imagined balance does not coincide with
the fulcrum, the situation after collision is represented by displacing
the fulcrum to an equal distance on the other side of the centre of
gravity.

As
with any theoric, this is a formalisation of a set of observations that
can be used to yield any number of results not included in the work of
formulation - in that way it is like a geometrical construction of
planetary motion (one has to say a non-Keplerian construction), a map
drawn to scale, or any number of mathematical instruments.  In refusing
to offer an explanation Wren was, at that point, declining to go with
the mainstream ambition of the Royal Society.  As William Neile put it:

...
for Dr Wren I think he assumes his axiome a great deale sooner than he
need to doe ... to conclude that the aparence is the reality and that
the aparence must not be denied to vbe really true under pretence that
it is an axiome meethinks is not very philosophicall.

As
I said, for that moment, Wren was not following the Royal Society into
experimental philosophy, but he was in an older tradition - among
sectors, globes, astrolabes and the great population of mathematical
instruments.

©Lisa Jardine, Gresham College 2010

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Early Science: Wadham College

 

Dr Allan Chapman

It is an enormous delight and an honour to be involved today, and what I want to do is follow my good friend Professor Briggs and to talk about Wadham and the early Royal Society, or the pre-Royal Society.

Thomas Sprat's book, "A History of the Royal Society", written in 1667 has been mentioned.  You might think that rather strange to write the history of a society seven years after it was created.  Bearing in mind of course that history, in Sprat's way of thinking, is not what we call history today - it was an account of the Royal Society and an apologia for the Royal Society.  In fact, Sprat was a Wadham man, an early Fellow of the Royal Society, a subsequent Bishop of Rochester, and whose portrait hangs in hall for all of you to see afterwards, along with Wren, Wood, and Wilkins.

In that book, he gives a very strong bias to Wadham.  Wadham, Dr Wilkins is certain, is where the Royal Society was founded.  He says very little about Gresham, and perhaps this is partly due to his own bias, partly due to he society's bias for 1667, but we have to bear in mind that, in addition to Wadham, Gresham was itself a meeting place for natural philosophers in London.  We know that this was going on by at least 1645, and where it was often said that natural philosophers would resort to Gresham as a way of escaping these troubled times - in other words, the fanaticism, mayhem and confusion of England in 1645.  However, why was this natural philosophy, the study of what we now call science, so important?

I would suggest a number of things had happened.  One of these - and this comes up in Dr Wilkins' writings - was the beginning of the great voyages of exploration which began in the 15^th Century. Why were these voyages of exploration scientific?  What is experiment about?  It is about testing something and having other people test it for you.  If you took your ship and you discovered a new continent or a new island, and you came home and said, 'I have found this new continent or this new island,' and people said, 'Oh, I don't believe that - that's a load of nonsense!' you could then say, 'Right, go and look - here are my sailing directions.  Follow it!'  Then they would come home and say, 'Yes, there is a continent there, and it has these features.'  I would see this as a very early form of peer review, but also this is empirical.  This was not rooted in ransacking Aristotle, Pliny or any of the ancient writers.  It was a hands-on approach to knowledge, and it was also using that one thing that was so crucial to this movement: instruments. 

Think of the ship as a scientific instrument.  What do the microscope, the telescope, the barometer and the air-pump tell you?  They shape your senses, they take your perceptions to where they cannot go without that device: to see the craters on the Moon, an evacuated space, or whatever.  A ship takes you to places you cannot get to without it.  It is not for nothing that Wilkins, in his own later writings, is always speaking not only of the learned Galileo, but Columbus, Magellan, and of course, maintaining the patriotic dimension, our own Sir Francis Drake.  The great navigators are all there because they saw navigational discovery as an early form of experimentation.  Now, this is one of my pet ideas, and I float it amongst you today. 

But why was Wadham important?  In 1648, there was no interest in science in the College, but in that year, because of profound political changes going on in the nation and in London, a Commission was sent to the university, by Parliament, and its purpose was basically a purge.  It was to get rid of Royalist dons, and if you would accept the Parliament as your governor, you kept your job; if you did not, you were ejected.  Wadham lost its sixth warden, John Escott, most of its Fellows, and virtually all the other Colleges had holes blown in their academic bodies.  How did you refill them?  Well, largely by placed men sent from London, many of them good academics, good scholars, yes, but people who were sympathetic to Parliament and not to the King.  You may expect this would bring in hard-nosed people with no real interest in the intellectual content as opposed to the politics.  With Wilkins, it was a breath of fresh air.

Wilkins was of Royalist sympathy, but he was not a Cavalier.  He certainly considered many things in the new parliamentary movement very close to his heart, and without being a fanatic, he accepted the wardenship of Wadham in 1648.  What he did was to start to form around him a group of friends. 

I should emphasise that science, in the way in which we are talking of it today, had no part of the university curriculum.  The Laudian statutes of 1636 did not include experimental science.  So what existed with Wilkins was a club or a group of friends coming together. It was a group of friends who recognised their fellow interests and joined this company, as a place where they could come and try out and test their ideas. They might do their research elsewhere, but would then come along, on Wednesday afternoons, to the warden's lunches in the main quad, and there talk to their friends about their work in astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, mechanics, microscopy and many more subjects.

I think it significant too that when the Royal Society came into being, in 1660, it was not an academy, like the academies of continental Europe.  It was a fellowship, modelled on the egalitarian principles of Oxford and Cambridge fellowships. It was self-electing, self-regulating, and self-running, and that model of the early Royal Society not only encapsulated intellectual freedom but also showed that there was a model for later learned societies.  Why did this country, with all of her principal learned societies and fellowships have self-elected bodies?  I would suggest that this principle, captured in the early Royal Society, pervaded, and it started at Wadham.

Here, Wilkins founded a philosophical and experimental club.  It included Christopher Wren, the young Robert Hooke, Seth Ward, Thomas Willis of Christ Church and, in 1654/55, the Honourable Robert Boyle, an Irish aristocrat scientist. He lived at Stalbridge in Dorset and was invited by Wilkins to come and reside in Oxford. 

He took lodgings on the High Street, and there conducted a series of researches that laid the foundations to the gas laws. He used an air-pump, a newly contrived scientific device capable of evacuating a space of air so that he could test the chemical. This was called the 'physico-mechanical' properties of a vacuum, a device which was fundamental to the growth of modern chemistry, because it gave rise to a whole series of new ideas and questions about combustion.  Why does combustion happen outside a vacuum but not inside a vacuum?  Why will gunpowder burn in a vacuum but not explode?  Does the saltpetre contain trapped air?  Does it release in vacuo in a fizzle but not in a bang?  These questions gave rise to all sorts of extraordinary ideas.

The group of people that Wilkins assembled around him made Wadham one of the leading intellectual centres in Europe in the 1650s.  It was by no means an insular society.  These men travelled.  They corresponded with Paris, Bologna, Leiden and the Hague.  These men were often generally well-travelled, and because we still had a Latinate culture, there was no barrier in terms of communicating with a Frenchman, a Dutchman or an Italian.  At their meetings, they sometimes read out letters sent to them from philosophers in foreign countries.

Furthermore, it was a highly convivial body.  They seemed to like each other, and it also had the extraordinary effect of bringing together men who actually shared a passion for natural science, but who probably otherwise would not have really been drawn to each other. 

Wilkins was sympathetic to Cromwell and the English Revolution.  Christopher Wren was the son of the Dean of Windsor and he had an uncle incarcerated for being a recalcitrant Royalist Bishop.  Yet he and Wilkins got on well. Thomas Willis, the great pioneering anatomist, as any medic will tell you, was the discoverer of the Circle of Willis, the circulatory system that serves the brain. 

He was a staunch Royalist.  He was married to the evicted Dean of Christ Church's daughter, Mary Fell.  He was himself an absolutely, solid High Anglican Laudian and Royalist.  Yet, as a scientist, he shared a commonality with these men, because in fact, he had lost his job.  He had been effectively barred from Christ Church because of his Royalist principles, and he had actually started having to earn his living as a working doctor.  He says he, one day a week, would ride to Abingdon to take patients at Abingdon Fair.  At Abingdon Fair, people would come along with their sick and injured, and pay Willis.  Perhaps they would come to him from being a rich student of Christ Church, but it seems that this was his making as a working doctor, because he saw things there, and he learnt things through this practice that he would never have learned as a classically academic physician.  However, it was the connection with Wilkins and their friendship which was so powerful.

Astronomy was the primary science that these people were pursuing, in the wake of Galileo's initial discoveries in 1610.  Everybody at that time wanted to know whether or not the other planets were inhabited.

This morning I was looking at Venus before dawn, which is a spectacular searchlight in the eastern sky. If you look at a planet wit the naked eye, you see the bright lights in the sky.  You look at them through a telescope, and they are worlds. 

Jupiter has four little moons going around it.  Venus shows faces going around the Sun.  Saturn had what they called 'protruberances', from the Greek, antae, things that poked out, and as Christian Huygens in Holland discovered in 1659, were actually a ring around Saturn. 

They wondered why God had not put inhabitants on the planets if they were worlds. Bear in mind too that these people saw their science and their Christian theology as intimately connected. Their view was that if humans did not build houses if there was no one to live in them, nor would God make worlds and not put living beings on them. 

There was an immense amount of discussion about the nature of the inhabitants of these worlds.  The scientists wondered whether we could build telescopes big enough to see them.  In 1655, some years later, Robert Hooke got into a rather interesting literary scrape with a French astronomer, Denis Papin, about the nature of these beings. At one stage, Hooke said he believed that certain parts of the Moon, viewed under a telescope, reminded him of the 'fair pastures of Salisbury Plain'. Now, it takes a lot of imagination to see Salisbury Plain on the moon. Astronomy, therefore, was crucial.

Chemistry too was very important. People wanted to know what the world was made of.  Aristotle was being increasingly challenged at this time. His the idea that there were only four elements - earth, air, fire and water - and the Paracelsian idea of the principles of - mercury, sulphur and salt - were being criticised. 

The Belgian chemist Johann Baptista van Helmont, who died in 1644, showed a new way in analytic chemistry. When the air-pump was invented in the 1650s, scientists could now do something they had never been able to do before: experiment on things in a zero air environment.  They realised that not only do you need air to have fire, but you also need air to live. In addition to that they understood that it was not just air in general that was important, but that it was a specific part of the air that sustained flame and sustained life. 

John Mayo of Wadham did that initial quantification and came to the realisation that air itself is not uniformly supportive of life - only a part of it is.   Now, of course, I am jumping the gun here.  He did not discover oxygen. That would take another 100 years of experimentation.  However, it showed something crucial: living things and burning things are chemically connected.  Not only that, it showed that blood seemed to circulate around the human body or animal bodies. This was in the wake of what Harvey had published in 1628.  All of these new discoveries fitted the new Harveyian theory of physiology, not to mention microscopic researches which discovered the capillaries. The great international lecturer of this science, Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, noticed the capillaries. This was postulated and suggested by Harvey but while they were not visible in 1628 they were by 1663.  It is clear that this was a crucial idea.

Another of my pet interests is relevant here. My very good friend Bob Williams of Wadham knows this. The issue is why this happened in Oxford. 

The university was important but there was another factor. I have called these Oxford's 'hidden chemists', because, although we talk of academic chemists - Boyle, Hooke and others - in Oxford, in 1660,  there were about 15 manufacturing apothecaries, who were themselves skilled chemical manipulators.  These men were the first people to teach chemistry in the University.  The first chemical teachers in Oxford were not the dons - the dons were the students! 

Peter Stroul, whom Boyle brought over from Germany, gave a series of lectures, attended by dons, on manipulative chemistry, and then rivals got onto the bandwagon.  Anthony Wood, the ubiquitous diarist of 17^thCentury Oxford, tells us that he attended a course of lectures given by Mr Clark of St Mary's Parish.  Mr Clark was a manufacturing apothecary, and he mentions about 12 men who attended these lectures. They learned about distillation, acids, the basic techniques of what you do, and all of them who attended these courses - paying about a guinea each, a good little business - were actually senior members of the University.  So therefore, the first chemists in Oxford were not the dons; the dons were the first chemistry students in Oxford. 

When Boyle set up in the High Street, one of the reasons he found Oxford so appealing was that if he wanted a pound of sulphur or saltpetre, or if he wanted some glass blown or a piece of metal filed to produce a form, he could send his assistant up the road to Mr So-and-So or Mr So-and-So, and it was available. He could not do that in Salisbury or York.  Oxford had this particular community.  That is so crucial to why this takes off in the 1650s. 

The chemists in Oxford were businessmen. The association of their science with practical courses - buying, selling and profit-earning teaching - was a fascinating combination.  Some years ago, in fact, a student of mine did a thesis working on the locations of these chemists.  Most of them were in the High Street or in Cat Street, and their premises are clearly discernable from what we can find on the ground today. 

Here was a remarkable body of people.  There were students, academics and private gentlemen coming together to do their research, and also too a remarkably open and international community. 

You have to bear in mind that people travelled in the 17^th Century, especially people who were academics, clergymen and so on, and also too, men who were hoping that they would get political advantage.  Remember, Cromwell was not getting any younger.  His generals were likely to start another civil war when he died.  People wanted to work out which side they were going to be on if the world again broke out into civil war.  It was useful to talk in London with politicians, to be in secret correspondence with the Prince, or King Charles II as he would become, and to travel from here to London.

We
know too that this was a period that saw the beginning of a ripening transport system within Oxford and London, indicating the speed of communication.  Anthony Wood tells us of what might be called the ancestor of the Oxford Tube, the Flying Coach, which did it, from the Angel Inn on the High to London, in 15 hours!  You did not need an overnight stop.  Now, that was fast-going!  He mentions making that journey himself to London.   Now, Wood himself was very much an Oxford Fellow who travelled greatly, but he wanted to try out the new express coach.

Whenever any of these men were in London, either for political, professional, legal or medical reasons, they often haunted Gresham College.  That was the natural place to go to meet men who shared their interests.  There were also lecturers who accumulated around themselves friends. 

Lawrence Rooke had a group forming around him.  They knew the date on which Rooke lectured, they went along, attended the lecture, and then entered the social world of conversation afterwards. Again this was a fellowship kind of world - the world of bringing in people who liked each other, knew each other, and had a commonality of interest. The entire relationship was based on friendship rather than any kind of formal political or financial relationship. 

Gresham, therefore, is sadly ill-documented for this period, but we do know that these men were in and out of Gresham regularly, and it is not for nothing that when the monarchies were sworn in 1660, it was a meeting at Gresham where they decided to apply to the King for the title of what would become the Royal Society.

Let me just finish too by saying another thing about Wilkins.  Wilkins was a great personality.  He was the kind of man who, as it was said, '...could bring harmony in these destructive times.' He was a big figure with tremendous charisma, and as a result of this, he brought undergraduates, dons and friends into his community. 

He was also interested in the arts, and in Anthony Woods' diary for 1657, there is a reference to the great German violinist Baltzar being invited to Oxford by Dr Wilkins of Wadham.  Baltzar was a sort of international violinist of the mid-17^th Century.  Wilkins invited him here.  He had concerts put on, in Wadham, whether in hall or not, but certainly had several musical soirees in the lodgings. Here, Anthony Wood, who fancied himself as a really fine figure, was invited, and Mr Wood was told, 'Bring your violin.' He said in his diary, with great pride, 'I played a duet with the great Baltzar!'  Wilkins brought this very wide range together, including people interested in the arts, music and a wide variety of things. 

As of course Jim mentioned earlier, he left to become Master of Trinity, then Vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, and then, in 1668,  Bishop of Chester! It was remarkable that a man who started his career as the son of a goldsmith; became an Anglican clergyman; was closely involved with Cromwell and the Parliamentary regime; who married Cromwell's youngest sister, Robina, so that Cromwell was his brother-in-law; and who actually died with a mitre on his head as Lord Bishop of Chester.  That took charm, ingenuity and a tremendous capacity for friendship, and it is why I find John Wilkins one of the most fascinating men of this time. 

He was also too a great encourager of the young Christopher Wren, and of course the young Robert Hooke, also from Christ Church. 

Wilkins was a brilliant communicator, and his books, such as 'Mathematical Magick', 1658, introduced the English speaking world to ideas in machinery.  Also, his earlier book on the Moon was the first publication of the great Continental discoveries in astronomy adapted for English readers.  So, in other words, his role as a popular writer is also very, very significant. 

But running right through Wilkins' thoughts was a wish to fly to the Moon, and in fact, he proposed a machine, using springs and wings, to lift him off the ground.  He suggested that this might actually get him to the Moon, but even if it failed, it would be jolly handy for flying about the world!  Wilkins was visionary. He also suggested that if mankind could reach to the Moon, we could have a good commercial relationship with the Moon men. For 14 days in the lunar cycle, the 28-day lunar cycle, half the Moon is always in darkness.  It must get cold so he thought we could sell English broadcloth to the Moon men.  What a visionary concept! 

Likewise, he ante-dates supersonic travel.  He suggested that this machine could get you anywhere in the world within 12 hours or so.  All you do is this: you start the machine going; it rises in the sky, to what he thought might be beyond the Earth's gravitational attraction, watch the Earth rotate below you, and if you were going to Boston, Massachusetts, you would rise from Wadham Quad, hike in space for five hours, see Boston come beneath you, and go straight down.  He thought of this in 1640! 

So both Wilkins' genius and his capacity to enthuse and to draw people together were simply profound. I find he is one of the most fascinating figures of the early Royal Society.  Of course, one of the key reasons why he never became President of the Royal Society is because he had besmirched his stanchion by marrying Cromwell's sister - which was not the thing to do at the Restoration.  However, to actually turn his politics around sufficiently to become Bishop of Chester a few years later says a lot about the man.

So I hope therefore, by not talking so much about Gresham - although I love Gresham passionately and I am deeply honoured to be a Gresham Professor - I have given you the sense of where Wadham's role stood in this movement, because it was this group of friends who met here, under Wilkins' aegis, as a fellowship and a friendship, that would be the nucleus of what would become the Royal Society, after 28^th November 1660. 

Thank you.

©Dr Allan Chapman, Gresham College 2010