I highly recommend The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiousity Changed the World by Jenny Uglow. This is a collective biography of proto-scientists from 18th century England. They met once a month to discuss their findings, on the Monday closest to the full moon - when it would generally be lightest for a safe ride home after nightfall.
The book concerns itself with five primary lunar men - Darwin, Bolton, Wedgewood, Watt and Priestley - and secondarily with seven others - Whitehurst, Small, Keir, Withering, Edgeworth, Day, and Galton. Some or all of them were operating in the neighborhood of Birmingham from the 1750s through the 1790s. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson appear occassionally for good measure.
They were open-minded to a fault, curious, and intimately involved in each others lives. They start out together by chance, evolve into more influence by careful design, and are undone by counterrevolutionary fervor in the 1790s.
When they were young, science was just starting to flourish in England. Leyden jars made popular public demonstrations. One of the interesting trivia tidbits from this period is that a "toy" was originally any small piece of metalwork - buttons, buckles, or even ... toys.
Bolton is clearly the star of the book. An outspoken, larger-than-life, manufacturer of toys in that original sense. He is also the first person to build a factory, Soho Manufactory, in the modern sense.
However, his greatest contribution is probably leveraging the factory's earnings to promote the improved steam engine of his good friend, James Watt. Together they promote this technology to the early-adopters - miners who need to lift water out of their works.
Bolton is also tied up with Wedgewood, of pottery fame. Wedgewood also starts one of the early factories, Etruria. Together they sell metal and ceramic goods to the nobility and the growing middle classes. Further, to ensure that their goods get to markets in decent shape, they fund the digging of canals through the Midlands.
Digging for the canals, and explorations of caves used by ropers around Derby, the group finds evidence of both geological strata and fossils. Wedgewood is interested in the former as raw material for different ceramics, on which he experiments endlessly. Darwin used the latter to develop a proto-theory of evolution which his grandson would become famous for a century later.
Darwin is clearly the polymath of the group, involved in everything (and everyone through his medical practice), and constantly inventing new stuff: better windmills, copying machines, lamps, and so on. He also writes the first definitive book on botany, and is an early proponent of the medicinal use of both foxglove and opium.
All the men are involved in alternative religions, at that time primarily Presbyterianism. Priestley is actually a leading dissenting minister of the time. In his spare time he discovers oxygen and carbon dioxide - the latter quickly popularized in sodas.
Starting in the 1760s the group starts to agitate regarding slavery. In the next decades their interest shifts to the American and then French revolutions. Priestley's vocal support of the latter is the beginning of the end - his house is burned, he is chased out of the Midlands by a mob, and he eventually emigrates to the most liberal former colony, Pennsylvania. The group dies a slow death after the burning or Priestley's home; they're less public, older, and pass away one by one.
Along the way, Whitehurst uses the geological data they gather to develop the first theory of a dynamic Earth in which vocanism and uplift play a role. Withering does the seminal experiments with using foxglove to treat dropsy (foxglove is the source for the contemporary drug digitalis, and dropsy is the ancient name for what we now know as congestive heart failure). Small has time to educate Thomas Jefferson, return to England to support Watt emotionally through troubling times, before dying young - apparently of chronic malaria contracted in Virginia. Keir explores alkalis, builds a factory at Tipton to make acids, and becomes rich with a commercially viable method to make soap. Edgeworth indulges a streak for crazy inventions, while moving agricultural stewardship away from feudalism by encouraging improvements with grants of tenure to successul tenants, and discouraging subletting, family subdivision, and feudal dues. Day brings Rousseau and the noble savage to the group, leading to the anti-slavery and pro-revolution inclination, then writes the first commercially successful children's books. The group ends with Galton, who first shows that the older idea of splitting white light with a prism can be reversed (as popularized by pointilliasts a century later), before becoming the final repository of the libraries of several antecedents.
If I found fault with this book, it is that it dwelt too long on the personal interconnections (some charts would have helped here) and too little on the development of their various ideas.
UPDATE: A review of The Lunar Men appears to be the first post ever made on Marginal Revolution.
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