Thrifty Science

Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment

Simon Werrett

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226610399
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "Big Science, " then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett's new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin's use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton's investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

ONE

Thrifty Science:

Oeconomy and Experiment

An online search for “equip a laboratory” soon reveals the statement that “Biotechnology labs need specialized equipment for different types of processes and activities.”1 Several lists follow of the different instruments required. None are familiar, at least to a nonspecialist. Being “specialized” means being “narrow or specific in focus.”2 This is a common requirement for many kinds of instruments, laboratories, and procedures in modern science. According to the philosopher Robert John Ackermann, “Modern science is inconceivable . . . without the highly specialized instruments that scientists use to investigate nature.”3

To what degree was early modern science like this? Did the practitioners of “experimental natural philosophy” believe they needed specialized instruments and laboratories to do science? The argument of this book is that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century approach was quite different from that of today. The antonyms of specialized might be multipurpose, flexible, variable, or adaptable, and the material culture of early modern science was much more like that than we have tended to appreciate. In fact only a handful of English printed books used the term “specialized” before the eighteenth century, either as a synonym for “specified” (e.g., “an argument as specialized in the New Testament”) or to refer to a form of division in mathematics.4 Only in the nineteenth century did it become common to speak of specialized instruments. Clearly, early modern experimenters did devise and use what we would call specialized equipment with a single purpose such as the air pump or microscope.5 Until the nineteenth century, experimenters divided instruments into optical, mathematical, and philosophical categories.6 Optical instruments such as the telescope employed mirrors and lenses while mathematical instruments were used for making measurements. “Philosophical apparatus” was a term introduced by the German émigré Samuel Hartlib in 1649 and included air pumps and electrical machines, instruments that generated new natural effects such as the vacuum or electric fire. But instrumentation included a great deal more. Much of the material culture experimenters dealt with was valuable because it was flexible. Experimenters were keen to explore a variety of uses of mundane material objects that were ready to hand in order to learn about nature. This is what I call thrifty science.

This chapter explores some of the broader approaches to materials in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and suggests that if experimenters had a distinctive approach to materials in the period, then this reflected a wider attitude of the time. Of course people had no single “approach to materials,” and no doubt the ways in which they understood them were as diverse as materials themselves. But it is possible to identify shared attitudes, practices, and ideas that were different from present ones. One such set of ideas and practices surrounded “oeconomy,” an approach to the management of the household that had a significant impact on people’s decisions relating to material goods. Householders engaged in the oeconomic management of their possessions, putting things to good use, and a variety of literatures gave them advice on how to do this. The claim here will be that the morals and techniques of household oeconomy provide a window onto early experimental practice. Oeconomic literature provides a way to identify and make sense of thrifty science.

This chapter outlines some of the features of oeconomy and the related value of thrift and considers how some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century householders contributed to oeconomic and experimental thinking. The particular focus will be the way householders gave a value to making the most of materials, by using them for different ends, creating things that could serve many purposes, or by reworking and adapting things for some novel function. Early writings calling for an “experimental philosophy” shared in this approach to materials by invoking oeconomic ideals of making use of things, though they differed on whether household practices might count as a source of experimental knowledge. This chapter is less about specific instances of how thrifty science was practiced than about generating a broad picture of the values and approaches that lay behind such adaptive actions. The various practices of thrifty science and the objects they gave rise to then provide the focus of subsequent chapters.

Oeconomy

In early modern England, householders interested in learning about the good management of the home engaged with a literature of “oeconomy.” English ideas about oeconomy were rooted in ancient works such as Aristotle’s Politics and particularly the fourth-century BCE Oeconomicus of Xenophon, describing an art of governance or management that applied to the family and household or estate.7 Translated into Latin by Cicero, the text became available in English as Xenophons Treatise of House Holde published in London in 1532 and going through several editions in the sixteenth century.8 More works of domestic oeconomy appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at first addressed to the landed gentry and then increasingly to less well-off householders. These provided advice on “husbandry” and “housewifery” and included diverse topics ranging from gardening, cookery, and cleaning to medicine and the management of the family, which included both relatives and domestic servants.9 To take an example, England’s Happiness Improved was published in London in 1697 with a second edition following in 1699.10 It consisted of various recipes and advice for “better profiting a Family, and saving much Charges, &c.”11 Householders could learn to prolong the life of foods or possessions. Bread could be made more substantial and long-lasting by various means, and there were recipes to tenderize poultry, to preserve fowl and lard, to keep flowers fresh, to regloss faded paintings, to whiten linen, and to kill insects. A library washed with strong vinegar and scented with Storax and Brimstone would prevent worms from “eating and spoiling Books.”12 One meaning of oeconomy, then, was a certain kind of stewardship or care for material things, which would ultimately “encrease plenty, and promote pleasure,” as the subtitle to England’s Happiness Improved put it.

Oeconomy, then, related to what the historian Karen Harvey has called “the material detail of everyday domestic life.”13 Oeconomy simultaneously entailed moral prescriptions about the good order of the household and identified domestic virtues as a foundation of society. Authors supposed a well-ordered household would generate a well-ordered state, but differed on what “order” should mean.14 Most books discussed the right management of the family and servants, the place and duties of husbands, housewives, and children in the home. This patriarchal order, in which the man was the master of the house, typically proposed a division of labor between the genders, with women attending to “housewifery” inside the home and men to “husbandry” outside, though in practice such divisions did not necessarily apply.15 Housewifery included “physick” or the preparation of medicines, cookery, brewing, cleaning, housekeeping, and managing accounts, while husbandry entailed looking after the estate or grounds, gardening, farming, and animal rearing. Oeconomic writing reflected this gendered division of labor, with women writing on cookery, medicine, and advice for maids, mostly in private manuscripts but also in some printed books. Men wrote, and were able to publish, works on husbandry, medicine, estate management, and the management of servants. Crossing these gender divisions in print might lead to criticism, but both men and women read works ostensibly aimed at only one gender.16

Throughout the literature, the material and the moral were closely intertwined. Husbandry, for example, was often connected to the toil of Adam in the Garden of Eden and given a spiritual, Christian purpose.17 Husbandry prevented hunger, generated wholesome labor, and made use of idle land.18 Thus the household was not just a material site but a moral space for the cultivation of patriarchal and Christian virtue: a respect for order and hierarchy, religious devotion, and civic-mindedness. As audiences for books on oeconomy shifted from landed gentlemen to working households in the eighteenth century, these values changed to ones serving a more commercial society such as good discipline, good credit, and personal morality.19

The meaning and scope of “oeconomy” did not remain static in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over time, writers identified oeconomy less with individual households than with larger systems of material circulation and proposed that a theoretical understanding of these would help them to flourish. Instead of referring to good practice in the home, scholarly commentators insisted that oeconomy should have a more general meaning as a system of management or order applied to some entity as a whole, which it was then their role to comprehend and master. As Richard Drayton has shown, husbandry remained a salient location of such discussions, as did the related field of natural history, because natural resources could be presented as critical sources of wealth to be managed.20 Already in the 1620s the English writer Gervase Markham argued that theory was a better guide than experience in oeconomy. For Markham, the best writers on husbandry were “Schollers,” whose nation flourished “more by their Theorie, then by the practise of all the pessants of that Kingdome.”21

In the eighteenth century, scholars continued to offer schemes and proposals for enhancing wealth through improved husbandry, a role that natural historians also came to occupy. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus did much to expand notions of oeconomy. His 1749 essay “Oeconomy of Nature” explained how God managed a perpetual cycle of birth, life, death, and decay where nothing was wasted.22 Promoting state intervention in such an oeconomy, Linnaeus proposed elaborate schemes to identify, transfer, and acclimatize plants around the world to enhance Swedish wealth.23 Although a domestic botany might be part of these schemes, Linnaeus was taking oeconomy far beyond the home or even state. Natural historical accounts of the exemplary divine or ideal human management of nature followed across Europe and helped inspire numerous experiments in Britain in botany and scientific agriculture. Spurred by anxiety over war, debt, and revolution, a community of late eighteenth-century figures such as Joseph Banks, Arthur Young, Thomas Malthus, and Jeremy Bentham promoted what C. A. Bayly and Drayton have called “agrarian patriotism.”24 This urged the improvement of national finance through state-supported experiments in scientific agriculture and a paternalist management of labor on the basis of enlightened principles. In these schemes households, landed estates, and farms might participate in national improvement through consumption and patriotic labor, while import substitution and self-sufficient resource management established security.25 This was supposed to happen on a scale far beyond the individual home and would be managed not by householders but by the enlightened paternalists who guided them. By now the notion of oeconomy was no longer equivalent to the thrift of the household. Young was explicit in contrasting homely frugality with these larger pursuits in his Rural Oeconomy (1770),

The reader will allow me to use the words Rural Oeconomy in their enlarged sense, and not merely confined to the practice of frugality, which is the common acceptation of oeconomy. Frugality conveys but a narrow idea; a man may undoubtedly be very frugal, and yet a vile husbandman: we must therefore understand by oeconomy, the system of GENERAL MANAGEMENT.26

A variety of private and state-supported “oeconomic societies” emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century to encourage improvement along these lines, through the rationalization of practical expertise, mechanical invention, prize competitions, and experiments in commodity substitution.27 All of these efforts served to broaden the definition of oeconomy.28 As Lissa Roberts has argued, “oeconomy” in the second half of the eighteenth century came to signal an arena in which

the investigation of nature merged seamlessly with concerns for material and moral well-being, in which the interdependence of urban and rural productivity was appreciated and stewarded, in which ‘improvement’ was simultaneously directed toward increasing the yields of agriculture, manufacturing and social responsibility.29

It was in this context that new notions of “political economy” arose, which also shifted the notion of good management away from the household to the state’s guidance of finance, industry, and commerce (and by 1800 dropped the “o” from “oeconomy”).30 James Steuart, the first writer to title his book as one of “political oeconomy,” promoted the idea that the state as a whole might be imagined as a great household whose oeconomy needed to be kept in good order.31 But thereafter, political economy was increasingly divorced from the idea of the household as the model of virtue, though the household might be seen to contribute to prosperity through consumption.32

Thrift: A Just Medium of Concern

Ideas of oeconomy thus linked together the moral order of the household and the well-being of the state, but shifted from patriarchal and Christian prescriptions for ordering the home as a model of virtue for the nation to enlightened and “economic” views of the household as a consuming unit contributing to a larger circulation of commodities and labor. Similar shifts occurred in relation to a key element of oeconomy, the idea of thrift. Books on oeconomy understood as household management often emphasized the value of moderation, frugality, and thrift. A broadsheet of 1607 told of the “Good Hows-holder” whose home contained “Not daintie Fare and Furniture of Gold, But handsom-holsom (as with Health dooth stand).”33 Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1  Thrifty Science: Oeconomy and Experiment
• 2  Making a Home for Experiment
• 3  Shifty Science: How to Make Use of Things
• 4  The Power of Lasting: Maintenance and Cleaning
• 5  The Broken World: Repairs and Recycling
• 6  Secondhand Science
• 7  Auctions and the Dismantling of Science
• 8  The Palatial Laboratory: Economy and Experiment
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index