Science in London

In 1660, the Royal Society of London was created, when an informal college of natural philosophers who met weekly to discuss and promote ‘physico-mathematical experimental learning’ was granted a royal charter by Charles II. It is the oldest national scientific institution in the world, and critically important to the development of western science and state.

But science was not the preserve of the Royal Society: it was happening all around London in a variety of different ways. Merchants and midwives, sailors and surgeons, gardeners and engineers, teachers and tailors were all involved in the study of nature. Through their paid work or through their own curiosity, they experimented, invented, and shared their work with one another and, through the rapidly expanding world of print, with the wider world. Flora, fauna, and material technologies from around the world were flooding the London markets, and the shops of apothecaries and barber-surgeons were decorated with exotic objects, while new kinds of plants were grown in botanical gardens and market nurseries.

Coffeehouses increasingly became the places in which such knowledge was gathered and exchanged alongside business news and financial transactions. They were places where physicians consulted with patients and dispensed medicine, shipping deals were struck or exploration trips begun, and wanted people were tracked down. They were considered better spaces to discuss and debate than taverns because coffee kept the mind alert and sober. Coffeehouse owners increasingly catered to the demand for information by providing their customers with free newspapers, teaming up with printers to sell books, and pinning up daily share prices on the tobacco-stained walls.

The Royal Society met and socialised at coffeehouses, and Fellows such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane, and Isaac Newton would make the rounds of coffeehouses on an almost daily basis, eager to discover new research and engage with the discussions resulting from the latest Philosophical Transactions or book publication. Increasingly, too, experimenters employed by the Society performed feats of mechanical or chemical innovation in front of coffeehouse audiences, helping to spread Newtonian science across society and make the pursuit of it highly fashionable.

The coffeehouses were, theoretically, open to everyone. A French writer stated: ‘What a lesson to see a lord, or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-merchant, and a few others of the same stamp pouring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffee houses… are the seats of English liberty.’[1] They were sometimes called ‘Penny Universities’ because of the education one could receive for the price of a dish of coffee. This image became enfolded into the idea of Britain as a ‘polite’, Protestant nation, profiting from a natural dispensation towards toleration, reason, and brilliance.

In reality, however, they were not as open and free as it was claimed: women were not allowed, unless they were serving, there were significant behavioural codes that could be deployed to exclude people of lower classes. Newton used them to track down and prosecute counterfeiters, and information shared within them could easily be passed on to the authorities as treason. As the eighteenth century wore on, too, the coffeehouses split into exclusive clubs for different social and political cliques, and the ‘free’ exchange between them was lost.