Satirizing Science

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Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth continue their series exploring how art and science have inspired each other with a focus on James Gillray's biting satire Scientific Researches! (1801) about the new pneumatic chemical experiments on show to fashionable society at the Royal Institution in London. Tilly Blyth reveals chemist Humphrey Davy's crude airbag is the clue to the success and failure of his famous experiments with laughing gas (nitrous oxide). Its erratic and unexplainable effects went on show to a preening aristocracy at the Royal Institution, but nitrous oxide's huge medical value in suppressing pain was passed over for another 40 years. Davy turned to poetry in an attempt to articulate and make sense of the sensations, in an age when the cultural value of science had still to be earned. At the Science Museum Ian Blatchford uncovers the coded and explosive references in Gillray's print to this gaseous moment. It had arrived at the same time as the worst excesses of the political revolution in France, and nitrous oxide became a powerful metaphor for the dangers of all kinds of scientific or political experimentation. So was Gillray's prolific pen powerful enough to derail science in this new chemical age? Producer Adrian Washbourne Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group Photograph (c) The Board of Trustees of The Science Museum