Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
4.
Hands-off to Hands-on?
Some of these audiences went into hands-on chemistry. S.T. Coleridge
wrote to his friend Davy (Knight 2005a) for advice about setting up a
laboratory in the Lake District with his fellow-poet William Wordsworth,
and for anybody thus tempted 'portable laboratories' were available,
wooden boxes fitted up with apparatus, used in schools and at home,
suitable for both serious and recreational chemistry. John Dalton's friend
William Henry sold various sizes, at fifteen, eleven, or six and a half
guineas - James Watt junior bought one of the expensive ones.
3
They
might be devised to accompany a chemistry book. Then photography
became a craze by the middle of the nineteenth century, requiring exper-
tise in handling apparatus and chemicals. Hands-on chemistry included
the spice of danger. But for those who remained hands-off, it was the
dynamical character of chemistry that seemed most attractive. Priestley
had prophesied that natural philosophers working in chemistry, optics,
and electricity would eclipse Newton himself, getting below the surface,
and exploring the underlying forces (Priestley 1966, p. xv). This excited
poets and artists, as we see in recent studies of Percy Shelley and of
Coleridge, both well-read in chemistry and medicine (Ruston 2005,
Vickers 2005), and of Joseph Turner (Hamilton 2001); chemistry, the
leading science of the day, was moving away from a clockwork uni-
verse.
4
Working men (skilled artisans and craftsmen rather than laborers)
could also get to lectures, at Mechanics' Institutes lit (chemically) by gas
making evening classes possible, and at peripatetic meetings of organiza-
tions like the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
founded on a German model, and itself the model for societies in the
USA, France, and Australia. Gradually museums, originally intended for
ladies and gentlemen, were opened to a more general public - even on
Sundays, after a struggle, in Sabbatarian Britain. Exhibitions illustrating
science, technology, and general progress attracted huge audiences and
3
Henry, 1801, pp. 3, 14; 3
rd
ed., 1803, p. vi. A guinea was one pound, one shilling
(£1.05), the unit used for gentlemen's fees, prizes, and luxuries.
4
William Paley's
Natural Theology
(1802), the classic statement of the clockwork
metaphor, will be published in a new edition, ed. M.D. Eddy and D.M. Knight, Ox-
ford UP, 2006.
