The Birmingham Lunar Society

Once upon a time, they say, there was a wonderful Golden Age of scientific communication, an age when the most prominent scientists and admiring lay-people were in frequent contact, either with each other, or with each others’ works. To exist at all this age probably had to await the development of the railway, the telegraph, and machine type-setting.

I suspect this Golden Age came at the absolute height of public scientific interest and endeavour, a time when scientific creativity was pouring out all over the place, and discoveries sparked off other discoveries, almost at the speed of light. All that was required was the transmission of the original idea.

Calculating what destroyed the Golden Age is harder: it might be sufficient to blame television, but the era probably died earlier than that. Maybe there never was any Golden Age of science communication at all. One thing is certain, though: there was a definite Dark Ages for scientific communication, and they died out around 1800, when scientific journals were first published, including the journal which nearly robbed Alessandro Volta of his rightful credit.

If you were a scientist in provincial England in the late 1700s, or worse yet, in colonial Australia, tidings of new discoveries were an unconscionably long time coming, and much of the news came only in the form of private mail. This helps to explain why so many scientists banded together to share their news, but what I find harder to explain is why a few of these groups were so hugely successful. Groups like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, for example.

The ‘Lunatics’ got their name from their solution to the risks of travelling the dangerously rutted roads around Birmingham to get to their meetings. It was unsafe to travel those roads in the dark of a moonless night, so they would meet on the night of the full moon. The real problem with Birmingham was that it might have been a good place for building a factory, but it was the most dreadful starting place for a trip to London.

It wasn’t much better for getting to Edinburgh from either, the city where so many of the members had learned their science. They might as well have been in the colonies! For any sort of intellectual stimulation, they and their friends had to rely on what came to hand in their home town, or near to it.

They were a tightly interlinked and brilliant little group, and the Royal Society in London had nothing on them. The Royal Society’s members were a bunch of dullards and dilettantes by comparison. Upper Class twits, Tories, that sort of thing, nothing like the Birmingham mob at all.

And that brings us to one of the problems with the Birmingham Lunatics: they were seen as a mob of radicals, people who felt American and French Revolutions were Good Things and said so, which wasn’t a good idea, for the spirit of a former-day Senator McCarthy was alive and well in eighteenth century England.

At one point, the mob even burned down Priestley’s house to show what they thought of him. If ‘Congreves’ (the matches, that is, named because, like the incendiary rockets of Sir William Congreve, they set fire to things) had been invented back then, they might have got Joseph Priestley as well, but they had to send off for ‘some fire’, and Priestley made his escape. Recall, though, that while the members called themselves ‘Lunatics’, it was a real lunatic, Farmer George, King of England, who tried to get the Royal Society to reverse its stand on lightning rods, simply to contradict the American rebel, Benjamin Franklin.

You will find this story elsewhere. To its credit, the Royal Society refused the King’s demand, but Farmer George would never have tried the same stunt on the Lunar Society of Birmingham. After all, one of their corresponding members was that same villainous Ben Franklin, and one of the Society’s sources of inspiration (some call him a founder), William Small, had been the teacher of Thomas Jefferson in America, and had now come to Britain.

The other founders included a country doctor, Erasmus Darwin, who is fairly well-known as grandfather to Charles Darwin, but Erasmus was quite an intellectual giant in his own right. As we have seen, long before Charles got into the evolution business, Erasmus had proposed a Lamarckian sort of evolution, beating Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck to the idea by a number of years.

Charles’ other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood was a member as well. So was William Withering, who discovered that the foxglove plant contained a steroid substance which we call digitalis, and use for heart disease.

It didn’t take long for other members to come rolling up, and the effectiveness of such a society soon became obvious. This was a time of breakthroughs and new ideas, a time for rapid development. It was also a time of simple apparatus to measure the extents of simple principles, so almost any participant could experiment further.

As I mentioned, they were mostly trained at that cradle of scientific education, the University of Edinburgh, and many of them were involved in manufacturing, so new problems arose quite frequently, nice knotty problems for the others to tackle.

But what would it take to establish a similar Golden Age of science and science communication and application today? Was there a magical formula, or was it just good fortune that so many people came together and sparked off each other? Was it because they were elitist, or only attracted an elite? As newsgroups, fora and email lists develop and mature on the Internet, will they begin to fill that role?

Only time can tell — but I think the email list is already dying away.