The WiZard is In - 28-7-2011 at 09:27
Science 6 April 2001
Vol. 292 no. 5514 pp. 55-56
DOI: 10.1126/science.1060460
Essays on Science and Society
James Watt and the Lunaticks of Birmingham
Adam Hart-Davis
Several of my favorite “heroes” belonged to a group of intellectuals
in the English Midlands who, around 1765, began to come together
regularly to discuss what they called natural philosophy—
everything from the latest design of steam engines to the new
gases that were being discovered by Priestley, Lavoisier, and
others. They would meet for dinner and argue on into the night
before climbing on their horses to ride home. And because they
wanted to be able to see their way, they chose to meet each
month on the Sunday nearest to the full moon—which was why
they called themselves the Lunar Society of Birmingham, or the
Lunaticks.
The meetings were started by Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton,
and William Small. Erasmus was an enormously fat, popular, and
successful doctor, a prolific inventor, father of 12 children by his
two wives and two more by a governess, and grandfather of the
famous Charles Darwin. Boulton was a manufacturer of buckles
and a bold entrepreneur. Small was Boulton's doctor and had been
teacher and mentor of the great American politician Thomas
Jefferson. They were later joined by Charles Darwin's other
grandfather, the potter Josiah Wedgwood, chemist James Keir,
steam-engine builder James Watt, chemist Joseph Priestley, and
several others. In all, there were some 14 members, though not all
at the same time. The meetings were held almost every month for
more than 30 years. Arguably, there has never before or since
been such a regular concentration of scientific intellect meeting
under one roof.
&c.
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