Britain and the Rise of Science

Laying the groundwork at Oxford

Modern science began when mathematical models replaced abstract ideas of 'sympathies' and 'innate virtues' as ways of explaining how the world works, and how we might harness nature to enhance human power over it. Arab and Indian mathematics and science played an important part in laying the foundations for modern science, and major early figures came from mainland Europe and beyond. In Britain, scientific development reached its zenith in the second half of the 17th century, during the period known as the 'scientific revolution'.

The foundation was laid for modern science in Britain long before the Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) demonstrated a model of the universe in which the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. At Merton College, Oxford, Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253) and his student Roger Bacon (1219-1292) argued that geometry was the basis for comprehending the mysteries of nature, and that mathematical models provided our understanding of the world around us.

By the time Galileo, in Italy, announced that the Copernican system was more than merely a mathematical model, and that the earth 'really' moved around the sun, the 'new philosophy' had emerged from the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge, and started to make an impact on people's everyday lives.

The empire of man over things

Sir Christopher Wren © We may trace the birth of the so-called 'scientific revolution' in Britain to the activities of three influential figures, all of whom flourished around the year 1600, and all of whom belonged to an exclusive inner circle of advisers to the royal family of the day, Elizabeth I, James I, and above all James's eldest son Prince Henry (who died in adolescence).

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), often called the 'Father' of modern science, made no major scientific discoveries himself, but wrote extensively on empirical scientific method - the procedures by which experimentalists could arrive at general laws governing the natural world. He served as Lord Chancellor under James I, but was disgraced in 1621 for accepting bribes from clients, and retired to his estate, where he published his major work, the Novum Organum (1623). In this he expressed the classic view that only by following the laws of nature could man triumph over his environment: 'The empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.'

It is to Bacon that we owe the strong strand of pragmatism in 17th-century British science. Western scientific progress, he argued, was built upon a foundation of three key technological discoveries, which had changed man's ability to control the natural world. These three were printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. 'For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.' (Voltaire, an admirer of Bacon, later added the invention of glass to the three discoveries, as fundamental to the advancement of knowledge.)

William Gilbert (1544-1603) was court physician to Elizabeth I and (briefly) to James I. In his 'De magnete' [On the magnet] (1600), written ten years before Galileo published his 'Starry Messenger' (1610), Gilbert proposed that the earth was a giant magnet or lodestone, with its poles at either geographical pole. He argued that the earth rotated about its axis because of terrestrial magnetism.

Democratising the Great Instauration

John Flamsteed © William Harvey (1578-1657), was also a court physician, who served both James I and Charles I in this capacity, and was physician to Sir Francis Bacon (whom he described as having 'the eye of a viper', and writing science 'like a Lord Chancellor'). His experiments on the movement of the blood in the body of animals were assisted by his privileged court position and James I's passion for hunting - Harvey was granted access to all game immediately it had been slaughtered, dissecting and observing in situ. In 1616, Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood in his Lumleian lectures at the Royal College of Physicians; his De motu cordis et sanguinis [On the motion of the heart and of the blood] was published in 1628.

Gilbert's and Harvey's classic publications matched Bacon's theoretical expectation that close and repeated observation of nature would yield powerful laws, on the basis of which dramatic alterations could be made to man's environment (though Bacon complained that Gilbert extended his generalisations about magnetism to explain the phenomena with rather too much enthusiasm). It is probably no accident that these three groundbreaking scientific thinkers came from a single intellectual milieu. The combined effect of their influential writings kick-started the scientific revolution in England.

The Civil War (1642-9), and the execution of Charles I, led in England to the establishing of first a Commonwealth, and then a Protectorate, under Oliver Cromwell. Between 1650 and 1659, both the victorious parliamentarians and the defeated royalists turned enthusiastically to science and technology for its potential economic and social benefits.

Collaborative data-collection, organisation of knowledge, and production of new practical outcomes played a major part in the agenda of the Commonwealth. Royalists in retirement on their country estates, meanwhile, turned to intellectual pastimes in search of money-making initiatives to relieve their financial difficulties. By 1660, when Charles II, who had himself dabbled in chemistry and become fascinated with clock mechanisms during his exile, returned, the 'new natural philosophy' had become a fashionable pursuit for gentlemen and commoners alike.

Science and commerce in Restoration London

An astrolabe, used in navigation at sea © Science took off in Britain with the Restoration of the monarchy. In late 1660, John Wilkins (1614-72), former Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, with a group of talented young experimental scientists and some gentlemen 'virtuosi' (amateur enthusiasts), founded the Royal Society, and persuaded the new king to be its patron. A driving force behind state encouragement for applied science was a dire cash shortage in the public purse. From its inception, the Royal Society was pledged to research and innovation in all areas of trade and technology.

Among those active in the Society in the early years were some of the major figures in British science: Robert Boyle (1627-91), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), and Sir William Petty (1623-87). Boyle's experiments with his vacuum pump were central to the Society's programme of weekly experiments, presided over by Hooke, the Society's first Curator of Experiments. Wren's and Petty's contributions spanned an extraordinarily wide range of technologically driven discoveries, from detailed observation of the progress of comets, to attempts at blood transfusion from one large dog to another.

In 1675 the Royal Observatory was established at Greenwich, and the talented astronomer John Flamsteed (1646-1719) appointed the first Astronomer Royal. Paid for with military money, the Observatory's explorations of the heavens using state-of-the-art telescopes and instruments were intended to put Britain ahead of France in the race to solve the problem of finding a way of measuring longitude at sea. Among those closely associated with charting the heavens over the next 25 years were Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Newton, who emerged from scholarly near-reclusiveness at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1690s, to become Master of the Royal Mint (assuring the reliability of English coinage), and President of the Royal Society in 1703, now stands as a figurehead for British scientific achievement. His Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), in whose data-collection and computations fellow Royal Society members - including Wren and Halley - played a significant part, set science on its modern course (although few contemporaries understood it).

The roots of industrialisation

Long-term, however, 17th-century advances in microscopy, medicine, chemistry and biology have probably been as important as Newton's laws of motion, and the development of precision instruments placed Britain in the forefront of specialist equipment-making (a field in which Wren and Hooke were particularly active). This kind of mass-produced new technology looked set to make the fortune of the inventor and patent-holder, and as a result, the smooth collaboration amongst members of the Royal Society (and their cooperation with foreign members abroad) was regularly marred by ugly priority and patent disputes. These indicate the growing tension between the 'group' model of science (Bacon's dream of Solomon's house) and the individual, 'virtuoso' model.

By 1700 there were scientific institutions across Britain, and a commitment to science as the firm basis for success in commerce and industry, and for national prosperity, was an established plank in the political agenda. Britain's rapid industrialisation over the next century, and its domination of world trade, confirmed the importance of science in driving the economy.

With the inevitable increasing professionalism of science, the success of the activities of the gentlemen amateurs who had founded the Royal Society, and who had always been regarded with some amusement by the public at large, looked increasingly irrelevant. However, the patterns of group activity, documenting and corroborating experimental results, and public dissemination of outcomes (including publication in science-dedicated journals), which the Society established, set lastingly important standards for scientific practice. In the long run, these standard protocols and procedures may turn out to have left a more lasting legacy than 'discoveries' made by individual scientist-members.

Find out more

Read on

Greenwich Observatory, vol 1, by Eric G. Forbes (London, 1975)

Greenwich Observatory, vol 2, by A. J. Meadows (London, 1975)

Greenwich Observatory, vol 3, by Derek Howse (London, 1975)

Directory of British Scientific Instrument Makers 1550-1851 by Gloria Clifton (National Maritime Museum, London, pub. July 2002

About the author

Lisa Jardine is Director of the AHRB Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. She is the 2002 Chair of Judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Her latest book On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren is published by HarperCollins. She is currently working on a companion biography of Robert Hooke.