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 THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF
AMERICAN SCIENCE

The Routledge History of American Science provides an essential companion to the most signifcant
themes within the subject area.
The feld of the history of science continues to grow and expand into new areas and to adopt
new theories to explain the role of science and its connections to politics, economics, religion, social
structures, intellectual history, and art. This book takes North America as its focus and explores
the history of science in the region both nationally and internationally with 27 chapters from a
range of disciplines. Part I takes a chronological look at the history of science in America, from its
origins in the Atlantic World, through to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the World Wars,
and ending in the postmodern era. Part II discusses American science in practice, from scientists
as practitioners, laboratories and feld experiences, to science and religion. Part III examines the
relationship between science and power. The chapters touch on the intersection of science and
imperialism, environmental science in U.S. politics, as well as capitalism and science. Finally, Part
IV explores how science is embedded in the culture of the United States with topics such as the
growing importance of climate science, the role of scientifc racism, the construction of gender, and
how science and disability studies converge. The fnal chapter reviews the way in which society has
embraced or rejected science, with refections on the recent pandemic and what it may mean for the
future of American science.
This book flls a much-needed gap in the history and historiography of American science studies
and will be an invaluable guide for any student or researcher in the history of science in America.

Timothy W. Kneeland is Professor of history and politics at Nazareth College. He is the author of
Declaring Disaster: Buffalo’s Blizzard of ’77 and the Creation of FEMA (2021), Playing Politics with Natural
Disaster: Hurricane Agnes, the 1972 Election, and the Origins of FEMA (2020), and Pushbutton Psychiatry:
A Cultural History of Electroshock in America (2008).
The Routledge Histories

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and
themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts,
they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged.
The Routledge History of American Sexuality
Edited by Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz and David Serlin
The Routledge History of Death since 1800
Edited by Peter N. Stearns
The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe
Edited by Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger
The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800
Edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure
The Routledge History of the Second World War
Edited by Paul R. Bartrop
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations
Edited by Tyson Reeder
The Routledge Global History of Feminism
Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Nova Robinson
The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World
Edited by Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns
The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration
Edited by Andreas E. Feldmann, Xóchitl Bada, Jorge Durand, and Stephanie Schütze
The Routledge History of American Science
Edited by Timothy W. Kneeland

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories/book-

series/RHISTS
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY
OF AMERICAN SCIENCE

Edited by Timothy W. Kneeland

 Cover image: Montage of Manhattan Project personnel at Los Alamos during
World War II. Everett Collection/Bridgeman Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Timothy W. Kneeland;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Timothy W. Kneeland to be identifed as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without
intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kneeland, Timothy W., 1962– editor.
Title: The Routledge history of American science /
edited by Timothy W. Kneeland
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, [2023] | Series: Routledge
histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2022024334 (print) | LCCN 2022024335 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367631710 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367626235 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003112396 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Science—United States—History. | Science—
United States—Historiography.
Classifcation: LCC Q127.U6 R68 2022 (print) | LCC Q127.U6
(ebook) | DDC 509.73—dc23/eng/20220601
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024334
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024335
ISBN: 978-0-367-63171-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-62623-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-11239-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003112396
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of Figures viii

List of Tables ix
List of Contributors x

Introduction 1
Timothy W. Kneeland

PART I
Te History of American Science 5

1 Science and the Atlantic World 7

J. Marc MacDonald

2 Science and the American Revolution 30

Sarah E. Naramore

3 Science in the Early Republic 44

David I. Spanagel

4 Science in the Antebellum South 63

Gregory Nobles

5 Science in the Civil War and Reconstruction 74

John Patrick Daly

6 American Science in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 84

Paul Nienkamp

v
 Contents

7 Science in World War I and World War II 97

Timothy W. Kneeland

8 American Science During the Cold War 110

James A. Spiller

9 The Disenchantment With Science: Anti-Science in the Postmodern Age 125

Krisztián Szabados

PART II
American Science in Practice 139

10 Social Studies of Science 141

Charles Thorpe

11 Laboratories and Field Experiences 158

Michael J. Lannoo

12 Science and Instrumentation 173

Jennifer L. Croissant

13 Science and History in the History of Science 182

H. Floris Cohen

14 Science and Religion 200

Gary B. Ferngren

15 The History of the History of Social Science 215

George Steinmetz

PART III
American Science and Power 229

16 Science, Empire, and Imperialism 231

Joseph L. Graves

17 American Science and the Military 243

Greg Whitesides

18 Science, Technocracy, and Public Policy in the U.S. 255

Michael Lubell

19 Environmental Science and Politics in the United States 272

Christine Keiner

vi
 Contents

20 Capitalism and Science 284

Paul Lucier

PART IV
American Science and Society 299

21 Climate Science in America 301

Paul N. Edwards

22 Structural Racism and Science 315

Joseph L. Graves

23 Gender and Science 326

Leslie Madsen

24 Disability and American Science 345

Marion Schmidt

25 Genetics and American Science 357

Joseph L. Graves

26 Science and Speciesism 371

Jeroen K. G. Hopster

27 Science in American Life 383

John Durant

Index 398

vii
 FIGURES

1.1 Benjamin Franklin 11

2.1 Thomas Jeferson 40
3.1 William Clark of Lewis and Clark Expedition 47
6.1 Smithsonian Institution, 1878 85
7.1 Vannevar Bush, scientifc advisor and key player in World War II 105
8.1 Capsule, Mercury, MA-6, the capsule in which John Glenn became the frst
American to orbit the Earth 120
9.1 Anti-vaxxers 2020 133
11.1 Chronology of acquisitions of major federal properties, by type. Note that the
vertical axes for national parks, forests/grasslands, and wildlife refuges are roughly
equal in scale, while the vertical axis for wilderness areas is increased by about a
factor of ten 168
11.2 The chronology of key federal legislation impacting settlement, the establishment
of land-grant universities, land set-asides, and environmental protection 169
12.1 Galileo with telescope 174
12.2 Microscope 175
14.1 Galileo and trial by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633 201
18.1 Alexander Dallas Bache of Coast Survey 259
20.1 Thomas Edison in his laboratory 292
22.1 Booker T. Washington and Andrew Carnegie 319
25.1 Ernest E. Just 359
27.1 Love Lives Here sign 393

viii
 TABLES

3.1 Formation of Natural History Institutions (1769–1844, based on Meisel 1967, Vol. 2) 49
11.1 Tasks of Field Biologists 159
22.1 Innovating for Stem Equity to Redress Structural Racism 323

ix
 CONTRIBUTORS

H. Floris Cohen is Professor Emeritus in Comparative History of Science at Utrecht University,

Netherlands. He served the History of Science Society as the editor of its journal, Isis (mid-2014 to
mid-2019). His magnum opus is How Modern Science Came Into the World. Four Civilizations, One 17th
Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam UP, 2010. His website address is www.hfcohen.com.

Jennifer L. Croissant is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at
the University of Arizona, with afliations in Anthropology and Sociology. Current interests include
critical studies of scientifc collaborations, including questions about the relationships between scien-
tifc instruments, platforms, and infrastructures, and the role that time, scale, and epistemology have
in coordinating scientifc work.

John Patrick Daly is Associate Professor of History at SUNY Brockport. He specializes in the cul-
tural and intellectual history of the Civil War era. His frst book, When Slavery Was Called Freedom:
Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War, 1830–1865, won honorable mention for the
Seaborg Award for best book on the Civil War (National Civil War Society). His current book The
War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction is being published by the University of Georgia
Press. Dr. Daly teaches and writes on a wide variety of topics, including the history of science, flm
and media studies, modern America, Irish history, religious history, African American history, and
world history.

John Durant is the Mark Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the MIT Museum and Adjunct Profes-
sor in the MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program.

Paul N. Edwards is Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford Uni-
versity and Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. He was
Lead Author for Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assess-
ment Report (2021). His previous work includes A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and
the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).

Gary B. Ferngren is Professor Emeritus of History at Oregon State University, where he taught
ancient history (Ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome) and history of science and religion from
1970 to 2020. His publications include The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An

x
 Contributors

Encyclopedia (Taylor and Francis, 2001); Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002; Second Edition, 2017); Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (JHUP,
2008); Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (JHUP, 2014); and (with Ekaterina Lomperis)
Essential Readings in Medicine and Religion (JHUP, 2017). He is a fellow of the International Society
for Science and Religion in Cambridge, England.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is Professor of Biological Sciences at North Carolina A&T State University
in the Department of Biology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, Section G: Biological Sciences. He is the author of Principles and Applications of Antimicrobial
Nanomaterials (Elsevier), 2021; Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (with Alan
Goodman, Columbia University Press), 2022; and A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist
Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems (Basic Books), publication fall 2022.

Jeroen K. G. Hopster, PhD (2019), is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
He has (co-)authored books on Buddhist philosophy, informal fallacies, counterfactual history, and
the relation between philosophy and science. His academic articles center on topics in climate ethics,
animal ethics, technology ethics, and moral change and have appeared in journals such as Philosophical
Studies, Erkenntnis, Ratio, Philosophical Psychology, and Biology & Philosophy.

Christine Keiner is Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology, and Society Department and
Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Oyster Question:
Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (2009) and Deep Cut: Science, Power,
and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (2020), both published by the University of Georgia Press.

Timothy W. Kneeland is Professor and Chair of History, Politics, and Law at Nazareth College.
He is the author of Declaring Disaster: Bufalo’s Blizzard of ’77 and the Creation of FEMA (2021); Play-
ing Politics with Natural Disaster: Hurricane Agnes, the 1972 Election, and the Origins of FEMA (2020);
Democrats and Republicans on Social Issues (2017); Pushbutton Psychiatry: A Cultural History of Electroshock
in America (2008). He has authored numerous chapter-length studies and encyclopedia articles on
the American presidency, politics, and science. In addition to teaching and writing, Dr. Kneeland is
a frequent guest on local television and radio programs, where he provides political analysis on local,
state, national, and international events.

Michael J. Lannoo is Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Indiana University and an afliate
of the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois, Purdue University, and the Field
Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In 2001, Lannoo received the Parker/Gentry Award for
Excellence and Innovation in Conservation Biology through the Field Museum of Natural History,
Chicago, Illinois. Lannoo is the author/editor of over 100 scientifc papers and ten popular scientifc
books, including Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism (2010), This
Land Is Your Land: The Story of Field Biology in America (2018), and most recently, co-authored with
Marty Crump, Women in Field Biology: A Journey into Nature (2022).

Michael Lubell is the Mark W. Zemansky Professor of Physics at the City College of the City Uni-
versity of New York (CCNY). He has spent much of his career carrying out research in high-energy,
nuclear, and atomic physics, as well as quantum optics and quantum chaos. He is an elected fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society
and is well-known in public policy circles for his groundbreaking work in Washington, DC, where
he served as Director of Public Afairs of the American Physical Society for more than two decades.
He has published more than 300 articles and abstracts in scientifc journals and books and has been

xi
 Contributors

a newspaper columnist and opinion contributor for many years. His contributions have appeared
in The New York Times, Scientifc American, The San Francisco Chronicle, Roll Call, The Hill, and APS
News, among others. He has been active in local, state, and national politics for half a century and
has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. His frst full-length book, Navigating the Maze:
How Science and Technology Policy Shape America and the World, published in 2019, has drawn plaudits
from senior policy makers, politicians, business leaders, and academics.

Paul Lucier studies the history of the Earth and environmental sciences and their ethical entangle-
ments with the business and technology of mining. His frst book, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting
on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (2008), explored the fraught relations of geology and the frst
energy industries. His current research focuses on scientifc explorations for gold and silver in the
American West.

J. Marc MacDonald is Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the Uni-
versity of Prince Edward Island. His publications and research focus on correspondence networks
and cultural exchange of science, technology, and medicine, and environment shifts throughout the
European, International, and Atlantic-World Enlightenment. His most recent publication is “Failed
Utopias and Practical Chemistry: The Priestleys, the Du Ponts, and the Transmission of Transatlantic
Science (1770–1820),” Annals of Science Special Issue, “Atlantic chemistries, 1600–1820.” 77:2 (2020):
215–52.

Leslie Madsen is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of Educational Development
in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Boise State University. Her work examines how late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth-century women scientists have made space for themselves in U.S.
natural history institutions. In addition, she studies how public historians and laypeople engage with
history in our age of accelerating, simultaneous ecological and human rights catastrophes.

Sarah E. Naramore is Assistant Professor of History at Northwest Missouri State University. Her
research focuses the history of the medical profession in the United States in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. She has published articles in Social History of Medicine, Journal of the History
of Medicine and Allied Science, and Endeavour.

Paul Nienkamp, PhD, Fort Hays State University. Recent publication includes “Agricultural Tech-
nology” in A Companion to American Agricultural History, edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Wiley-Black-
well; 1st edition (June 1, 2022).

Gregory Nobles is Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech, and his most recent books are John James
Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and The
Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

Marion Schmidt, PhD, is Research Associate at the Department for Medical Ethics and History
of Medicine at the University Medical Center Göttingen. She is the author of Eradicating Deafness?
Genetics, pathology, and diversity in 20th century America (Manchester University Press 2020), which was
supported by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship. Between 2020 and 2022, she coor-
dinated a deaf history research network funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, bringing
together scholars from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

David I. Spanagel is Associate Professor of History at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, pub-
lished “Putting Science to the Test: Initiating the World’s Longest Unfortifed Boundary” in the

xii
 Contributors

American Philosophical Society’s Transactions Volume 110, Part 4 [The Power of Maps and the Poli-
tics of Borders] (2021): 192–206.

James A. Spiller is Professor of History at SUNY Brockport, the State University of New York.
Specializing in modern United States history, his recent works include Frontiers for the American Cen-
tury: Outer Space, Antarctica, and Cold War Nationalism (2015) and “America’s ‘Space Frontier’ in an
Era of Space Tourism.”

George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He has
been a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor at the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales (Paris), the New School for Social Research (New York), and the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study (Princeton). His publications include The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality
and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa 2007), Regulating the Social: The
Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (1993), The Social Sciences in the Looking-Glass. Stud-
ies in the Production of Knowledge (2022); Sociology and Empire. The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline
(2013); The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others (2005), and
State/Culture. State Formation after the Cultural Turn (1999). In 2022, he will publish the frst volume
of The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, French Sociology and the Overseas Empire.

Krisztián Szabados is Director of Social Development Institute, a Budapest-based think tank. His
main feld of research is the development of pro- and anti-science political ideologies and move-
ments. He received his PhD from the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2021. He is a regular
presenter at international conferences and has published several articles and book chapters about the
link between populism and anti-science and the political theory of transhumanism. He is the co-
founder and former director of Political Capital Institute, one of the leading think tanks in Central
Eastern Europe.

Charles Thorpe studied Philosophy, Politics, Economics at Pembroke College, Oxford, and received
his PhD in Sociology (Science Studies) from the University of California, San Diego. He has taught
in the UK in the School of Social Sciences at Cardif University and in the Department of Science
and Technology Studies at University College London and is Professor in Sociology at the Univer-
sity of California, San Diego. He is author of Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (University of Chicago
Press, 2006), Necroculture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Sociology in Post-Normal Times (Lexington
Books, 2022). He is a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science (2017).

Greg Whitesides is Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Colorado-Denver and the
author of Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

xiii
 INTRODUCTION
Timothy W. Kneeland

Why a history of American science? The practical answer is that The Routledge History of American
Science will fll a much-needed gap in the history and historiography of American science studies.
Although the feld is rich with monographs on specifc topics, there has been no standard textbook
on the history of American science. The closest thing to a textbook has been collections of essays
published as Historical Writings on American Science (1986) and Science and the American Century: Read-
ings from “Isis” (2013), which are somewhat dated and of little value for contemporary audiences.
This despite the growth in the history of science, which has expanded into new areas and adopted
new theories to explain the role of science and its connections to politics, economics, religion,
social structures, intellectual history, and art. The ever-increasing number of citations included in
Isis’ annual “Current Bibliography” is evidence of the growth of the history of American science.
This yearly edition is a compendium of citations from across the felds of American science, arrayed
by topic that refect lively and ongoing discussions across academic journals devoted to specifc sub-
topics of science and highlighted in special issues of Isis or Osiris.
As the feld has evolved, a new generation of historians has arisen. As refective as their peers in
the past, they are busy revising the understanding of United States history by decentering the U.S.
from the globe, challenging the privilege of the male and white power brokers of science and society,
and researching the lives of those objectifed by scientifc ideas. It is time for a new history of the
American science, and these chapters ofer rich perspectives on the history of science and the way of
doing science in America.
Planned before the global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, the authors penned their chapters
during the time of COVID, when the nature and meaning of science formed one aspect of political
debates on individual freedom versus government control; between the left and the right; between
those who see science as a suitable adjunct to public policy and those who see it as a dogmatic tool
of power. Meanwhile, longstanding injustice, too often ignored, became part of a global civil rights
campaign that erupted during the pandemic and launched a public conversation on critical race
theory and structural racism. As academics, the authors are all conversant with these debates, and this
book has a number of themes running through it: the power of science, science as a tool of white
supremacy, and science as a means of oppression, but also science as a practical tool to improve the
human condition and science as a means of intellectual liberation. These chapters refect ongoing
research and debate, ofering a new understanding of science in America and new methods to study
American science, and their inclusion in this volume refects the times in which they were written
but also direction for the future study of the history of American science.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112396-1 1
 Timothy W. Kneeland

Part I of the book is a chronological and historiographical review of the history of American
science. The book opens with an extended chapter by J. Marc MacDonald that covers centuries
of American science through the lens of the Atlantic World. The chapter blends the voices of the
Atlantic World with keen insights into the historiography of science in the context of Atlantic-
World studies. Sarah E. Naramore shows how science became synonymous with what it meant
to be American during the era of the American Revolution. The Early American Republic is the
subject of David Spanagel. Spanagel ofers an overview of American science historiography and
demonstrates that science is inseparable from the society in which it is practiced. Gregory Nobles
shows how the antebellum South, obsessed with race, used science as a tool to strengthen white
supremacist structures and ideas. John Patrick Daly shows how the Civil War and Reconstruction
eras were seminal for coalescing institutes and networks of scientists that shaped the future of Ameri-
can science. Paul Nienkamp, examining the Gilded Age as the foundation of modern science, argues
that the groundwork laid during the Civil War came to full fruition in this era as land-grant colleges
and the Department of Agriculture applied science to economic ends. Nienkamp accompanies this
with keen historiography of the period and provides insights useful for future work. Timothy W.
Kneeland surveys the transformation of science during World War I and World War II, which frst
married science and corporations in industrial research and development. Funding from foundations
in the interwar years gave impetus to new disciplines in American science. Together, these elements
fused into the national security work of science during World War II. James A. Spiller demonstrates
the importance of basic research in an era in which the Big Science saw science as a tool for creating
new weapons and a cultural byproduct of American democracy. Spiller points to the lingering efects
of the Cold War on science 30 years after it ended. Krisztián Szabados rounds out the chronologi-
cal section by raising questions about the contemporary era in which science’s disenchantment has
developed. A partisan split exists between those who see science as rational and neutral and those
who believe it window dressing for the darker designs of government, tech companies, and other
social and political purveyors of power.
Part II of the book looks at American science in practice. The section begins with Charles Thor-
pe’s examination of the social studies of science, science as practice, and scientists as practitioners.
The chapter covers the history in great depth and provides insight into the current public skepticism
about the claims of science. Next, Michael J. Lannoo situates the place where science is conducted by
looking at the movement of biology from a scientifc activity based on feldwork to laboratory work
and emphasizes the role of feld biologists in sustaining biodiversity. Jennifer L. Croissant provides a
concise treatment of instrumentation as an extension of scientifc activity and shaping the worldview
of scientists. H. Floris Cohen examines the relationship between history and the history of science
through a historical and philosophical lens. Cohen’s provocative chapter ends with a wish list for the
future of the history of science. Gary Ferngren masterfully covers the relationship between science
and religion in an age of atheism and rejects the idea that religion and science are irreconcilable.
Finally, George Steinmetz provides a superb historiographic review of science and the social sciences.
Part III of the book explores the relationship between science and power. In the frst of three inci-
sive chapters provided by Joseph L. Graves in this volume, he explores the intersection of science and
imperialism as economic and politically oppressive systems. Greg Whitesides provides a historical and
historiographic review of science and the military, while technocracy and its challenge to democracy
is the chapter by Michael Lubell. Lubell ties the rise of technocracy to World War II and the national
security state. Next, Christine Keiner explores how settler colonists used science as a tool to exploit
and plunder the environment, but has become part of a global campaign to stop climate change and
restrain industrial pollution. The fnal chapter in this section is an essay on capitalism and science in
which Paul Lucier masterly shows how the state grafted science into law, economics, and public policy.
In Part IV, we see how science is embedded in the culture of the United States. Paul N. Edwards
looks at how naturalists moved from being sidelined researchers of climate to becoming advocates

2
 Introduction

for global political action to combat climate change, ranging from reducing CFCs to developing
sustainable practices to mitigate or eliminate climate change. Joseph L. Graves explains the role that
scientifc racism played in perpetuating systems of inequity. Graves ofers a lucid historiography,
which will be the basis for many future studies. Leslie Madsen examines the construction of gender
and proposes new insights into how future historians of science ought to approach nonbinary gender
expression. Joseph L. Graves turns our attention to the development of genetics and how it was a tool
of scientifc racism. Marion Schmidt fnds overlap in the history of science and disability studies and
ways the two disciplines diverge. Jeroen K. G. Hopster reviews the rise of speciesism and its connec-
tions to science. Writing from an ethical perspective, Hopster’s critique will generate future work on
this topic in American science. In our concluding chapter, John Durant reviews the manifold ways
the public has embraced or rejected science and concludes with refections on the recent pandemic
and American science’s future.

3
 PART I

Te History of American Science

 1
SCIENCE AND THE
ATLANTIC WORLD
J. Marc MacDonald

Introduction
The 1801 crossing and cargo of the cartel ship Benjamin Franklin was emblematic of Atlantic-World
science. The ship departed France destined for America, carrying four purebred merino rams and
superior equipment for Eleuthere Irénée du Pont’s (1771–1834) gunpower manufactory. However,
British warships intercepted the vessel. It was detained in Portsmouth for weeks and fnally reached
Philadelphia in July. Irénée shipped rams for Franco-Swiss agriculturalist and banker Etienne Deles-
sert (1735–1816). They belonged to a cosmopolitan network, formed around 1760, exploiting the
Peace of Amiens (1801–1803) to reinvigorate scientifc exchange.
Benjamin Franklin, like its namesake, epitomized transatlantic science. It transported merinos,
which improved agriculture and superior French chemical and mechanical equipment, which
improved American gunpowder. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), a uniting fgure in France and
Britain, made transatlantic voyages between 1724 and 1785, facilitating opportunities to observe
nature. Franklin’s infuence, centered on scientifc investigation, spanned the Atlantic World, endur-
ing after his death. He remained a beacon for American and European savants, especially those forced
abroad. Various factors motivated transatlantic transfer, including attractions (economic opportuni-
ties, founding asylums, science education) and repulsions (revolutionary violence, political instability,
ideological persecution). Atlantic-World cosmopolitanism facilitated scientifc expansion throughout
the Enlightenment, notwithstanding extraordinary obstacles occasioned by revolutions, wars, and
embargoes.

Historiography and Methodology

Atlantic-World science thrived in what I designate the Applied Enlightenment. Contemporaries
used “applied” and “enlightened age” or other light-related terms, in various languages, to describe
revolutions in science and politics. An exceptional example is American engineer and inventor Rob-
ert Fulton (1765–1815). Fulton, seeking to purchase a steam engine from James Watt (1736–1819),
corresponded with James Watt Jr. (1769–1848). In 1802, Fulton argued that Watt’s improvements—
unlike expensive empire—benefted Britain and mankind as “genius applied to useful works” directly
progressed “enjoyment of life.”1 James’ republicanism diverged from Watt’s moderation, but both
men regretted that politics, not science, dominated common conversation. In 1792, James called
the French Revolution an “enlightened age,” desiring disownment of monarchy and for histories

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112396-3 7
 J. Marc MacDonald

to champion liberty’s advancement and humanity’s improvement.2 Fulton shared these sentiments.
Their transatlantic Republican cohort promoted science, progressive politics, and amelioration. Ful-
ton, an epitome of transatlantic science, partook in networks, inventions, and experiments, forming
partnerships to facilitate steamboat transportation in America (MacDonald, 2015; Tise, 1998; Dan-
gerfeld, 1960).
Applied Enlightenment, persistent in the historiography, was originally associated with America.
Terms relating to “enlightened” appeared in English before 1780, and “Enlightenment” appeared
in other languages. However, the widely accepted “the Enlightenment” only entered English in
the 1860s. Popular usage began around 1950. Subsequently, its application became widespread.
Nevertheless, this all-embracing term became unworkable. Scholars increasingly recognized vari-
ous national Enlightenments and incarnations. This approach, also problematic, undervalued inter-
national cosmopolitan aspects of Enlightenment networks, which functioned across borders and
oceans. Transatlantic networks participated in “Industrial Enlightenment” (coined by Joel Mokyr),
wherein social change enabled links between technical knowledge and production. Atlantic-World
science incorporated industry but also encompassed chemistry, biology, agriculture, education, phi-
lanthropy, and other felds unconnected to industrial mechanical production (Lough, 1985; Schmidt,
2003; Mokyr, 2002; Jones, 2008).
The concept “Applied Enlightenment” emerged over half a century ago and is gaining renewed
historiographical acceptance. German British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009) created
the term in 1963, extolling America’s political experiment. It was later discussed by Peter Gay
(1923–2015), doyen of Enlightenment studies, again considering American politics and philosophy.
I adapted “Applied Enlightenment” in work on an international science network, subsequently dis-
covering similar usage in scholarship investigating Scottish topics. Jean-Francois Dunyach examines
Scottish Enlightenment “from below,” focusing on William Playfair (1759–1823), who attained neg-
ligible attention, unlike his brother John Playfair (1748–1819). Dunyach explores William’s graphical
inventions, scandals, passage through Enlightenments (Scottish, English, Industrial, French, Radical),
and reliance on cultural patronage networks. I support Dunyach’s appeal for expanded scholarship
on “applied” or “practical” Enlightenment “liberated from categories like ‘lower’ or ‘higher.’”3 Allan
MacInnes’ chapter, “Applied Enlightenment: Its Scottish Limitation in the Eighteenth Century,”
labels Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh “signifcant centres of applied Enlightenment.”4 This com-
prehensive focus on Scottish cultural transformation incorporates agriculture, industry, science, and
medicine, including transatlantic exchange as clear evidence of applied enlightenment (Dahrendorf,
1963, 2006; Gay, 1977; MacDonald, 2015; Dunyach, 2014; MacInnes, 2015).
I use Applied Enlightenment to describe a period (1760–1850) wherein Grand Tours—under-
taken by Britons on the Continent, or Europeans in Britain—shifted to visiting sites of scientifc and
industrial production. Savant-fabricants began applying knowledge to ameliorate subjects as diverse
agriculture, education, atmospheric and chemical composition, and merino-sheep breeding. In this
chapter, I apply this focus to Atlantic-World science, contributing to scholarship on eighteenth- and
early-nineteenth-century cultural exchange.
Scholarship on Atlantic-World science, Enlightenment, political revolutions, imperialism, and
Industrial Revolution is wide-ranging. Historians have focused on ideological and social factors,
which fueled transatlantic political revolutions, and historians of science expanded to explore Atlan-
tic-World knowledge circulation. Two edited collections, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World
and Colonial Botany, display this scholarship’s breadth. Historians working on technological transfer
have explored early industrialization in America and links to political independence. “Science and
the Atlantic World” investigates the crossover, and international character, of science and technol-
ogy circulating across the Atlantic Ocean in this period. By employing this methodology, I explore
how savants exploited connections and practical applications of late-Enlightenment knowledge. Cul-
tural currency allowed savant-fabricants to engage in transatlantic exchange despite imperial conficts,

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 Science and the Atlantic World

embargoes, and revolutionary shifts (Palmer, 1959–1964; Hobsbawm, 1962; Delbourgo and Dew,
2008; Schiebinger and Swan, 2007).

Early Enlightenment Transatlantic Science

The endurance and breadth of eighteenth-century Atlantic-World science was matched by its diver-
sity. An apex was attained with geodesic missions, in the 1730s, to the equator and arctic circle.
They were sponsored by France’s Académie des sciences, international in character, and ostensibly
intended to determine whether René Descartes (1596–1650) or Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was
correct about Earth’s shape. The geodesic division was bookended by transatlantic voyages. France’s
Royal Navy fell within the wide purview of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1618–1683), Contrôleur général
des fnances. Colbert, seeking to secure science to serve empire, sponsored establishing the Académie
des sciences (1666) to best London’s Royal Society. The Académie and Colbert arranged voyages by
Jean Richer (1630–1696)—an Académie astronomer—to Acadia (1670) and Cayenne, French Guiana
(1672–1673). Motivations included contending for North-Atlantic supremacy and countering Eng-
lish naval dominance, as expanded astronomical knowledge improved oceanic navigation. Richer’s
observations used newly invented pendulum clocks, sparking geodesic debates and subsequent voy-
ages. The pendulums, calibrated in France, oscillated slower in Cayenne. This imprecision puzzled
Académicians. Conversely, Newton seized upon it, stating in Principia mathmatica (Principles of Math-
ematics, 1687):

Now some astronomers, sent to distant regions to make astronomical observations, have
observed that their pendulum clocks went more slowly near the equator than in our regions
. . . indeed M. Richer first observed this in the year 1672 on the island of Cayenne.5

Newton identifed this as evidence of gravity’s centrifugal force, creating Earth’s equatorial bulge and
fatter poles, supporting his principle of universal attraction (Hankins, 1985; Terrall, 2002; Ferreiro,
2011; Olmsted, 1942, 1960; Newton, 1999; Greenberg, 1995).
Cartesians, supporting countervailing cosmology, determined a diferently shaped Earth. Des-
cartes’ preexisting theory, from Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy, 1644), postulated heav-
enly bodies swirling in streams, (vortices) in transparent fuid (ether), since creation. Competing
claims of planetary motion, not easily demonstrated, remained deadlocked. In 1718, France’s lead-
ing astronomer and cartographer, Jacques Cassini (1677–1756), published measurements claiming
proof of Descartes’ predicted elongated poles. Cassini-family measurements made in Europe, sup-
posing spherical Earth’s shape could be determined from one place, assumed diferences in north
and south curvature. Yet shape is best determined by direct measurements where diferences are
most pronounced: equator and poles. The scientifc feud became a patriotic controversy: English
natural philosophers championed Newton’s onion-shaped Earth; French savants defended a Cartesian
lemon-shaped Earth (Withers, 2007; Ferreiro, 2011; Hankins, 1985).
Transatlantic science and shifting European alliances helped resolve geodesic conficts. In 1732,
foremost Académie des sciences mathematicians—Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759)
and Alex-Claude Clairaut (1713–1765)—adopted Newton’s position, making the feud ideological
and generational. Overturning the Cassini-Cartesian position, however, required subsequent mea-
surements. France lacked suitable locations, but a Franco-Spanish alliance (1733) permitted access
to Peru and Spain’s traditionally inaccessible empire. In 1735, the equatorial mission (frst-proposed)
sailed to France’s Caribbean colonies Martinique and Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). Voyag-
ers stayed three months, initiating Atlantic-World science, which continued after joining Spanish
voyagers in Panama, and upon reaching Quito in 1736. They completed astronomical observa-
tions and pendulum experiments in the Andes, supported by indigenous guides, Saint-Domingue

9
 J. Marc MacDonald

slaves, French servants, pack animals, and precision instruments. The arduous expedition, plagued by
infghting, endured for years (Hankins, 1985; Terrall, 2002; Ferreiro, 2011).
The equatorial mission was overshadowed by the polar expedition to Sweden in 1736. Clairaut
and Maupertuis led French and Swedish astronomers and mathematicians, employing instruments
to record Arctic Circle measurements, fnishing in 1737. The quick-returning polar expedition
captured glory. After presenting to the Académie, Maupertuis promoted his mission and scientifc
reputation with publications and ostentatious portraits. His famous friend Voltaire (1694–1778), a
vocal Newtonian, propagandized in public campaigns. Voltaire, recognizing the voyage’s rhetori-
cal value for victory in the geodesic and philosophical confict, christened Maupertuis: “fattener
of the Earth and of Cassini.”6 Ultimately, expedition measurements were compared, corroborating
Newton’s onion-shaped Earth and position. Ironically, French transatlantic voyages, in the 1670s and
1730s, produced evidence confrming Newtonian science (Ferreiro, 2011; Hankins, 1985; Terrall,
2002; Ilife, 1993).
Both expeditions experienced difculties. Savants accustomed to Paris salons struggled conduct-
ing science in mountainous terrain, extreme temperatures, and uncultivated settings. Traveling indi-
vidually, equatorial voyagers took years, decades, or failed to return. Charles-Marie de la Condamine
(1701–1774)—Voltaire’s primary friend on the southern expedition—enhanced scientifc credentials.
Condamine’s publications captured popular imagination, recounting his mission and return on the
Amazon River, remaining authorities on South America until Alexander Humboldt’s (1769–1859)
nineteenth-century voyage. Conversely, Joseph de Jussieu (1704–1779), of the celebrated botanist
family, lingered 36 years in South America, delayed by ill health and devastation from meticulous
collections lost in transit (Ferreiro, 2011; Hankins, 1985; Terrall, 2002; Delbourgo and Dew, 2008).
Mid-century transatlantic trafc and imperial confict altered science and society. France lost the
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), surrendering principal colonies, creating shifts in conceptions of
the Atlantic. This provided voyagers seminal experience, including Louis-Antoine de Bougainville
(1729–1811). His education included gifted tutors (like mathematician A.-C. Clairaut) and experi-
ence as secretary in France’s embassy to London preceding the war. Bougainville was elected Royal
Society Fellow (1756), expanding scientifc credentials. Nominators included polar-geodesic voyag-
ers Clairaut and Pierre Charles Le Monnier (1715–1799). France failed diplomatically and militarily,
but Bougainville’s career advanced. He served as aide-de-camp to Louis-Joseph, marquis de Mont-
calm (1712–1759), commander in New France, who died fghting. Bougainville expanded naviga-
tional knowledge on transatlantic crossings and promoted exploration and trade over conquest and
colonization. Voltaire, similarly minded, mocked the war in Candide (1759): “You realise, of course,
that these two nations are fghting over a few acres of snow on the borders of Canada . . . they spend
more money on this glorious war than the whole of Canada is worth.”7 As France’s northern fortunes
faded, Bougainville joined eforts seeking southern alternatives. After turning down governorship of
Cayenne, he proposed a mission resettling Acadian refugees (living in France following British expul-
sion) on l’Îles Malouines (Falkland Islands). Bougainville envisioned the settlement as a springboard
for Pacifc expeditions. However, British imperialism interfered. In 1767, Bougainville surrendered
the nascent colony to Spanish ofcials, before embarking on his voyage circumnavigating the Earth
(1766–1769). This imperial-scientifc voyage intermingled astronomical, atmospheric, and cartologi-
cal measurements and natural history collection (Dunmore, 2005; Hodson, 2012).
British transatlantic science nurtured expansion. James Cook’s (1728–1779) surveying skills
helped Britain map strategic locations and win the Seven Years’ War. Cook’s cartography work map-
ping Newfoundland’s vital coastline (1762–1767) expanded his reputation, Royal Navy contacts, and
career. Coincidentally, in 1766, Joseph Banks (1743–1820) toured Newfoundland collecting botani-
cal and zoological specimens. Their participation in Atlantic-World science culminated in Captain
Cook’s frst voyage (1768–1771), to the South Seas, and Banks’ appointment as naturalist. The Royal
Society championed the voyage, essential in its campaign observing the 1769 Transit of Venus at

10
 Science and the Atlantic World

locations across Earth. Banks, overstepping authority preparing for Cook’s second voyage (1772–
1775), precipitated a rupture. Alternatively, Banks’ party completed a natural-history tour of Iceland
(1772). German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) and son Georg (1754–1794) flled
the void on Cook’s voyage. They fostered Pacifc and Atlantic-World science, including Johann’s A
Catalogue of the Animals of North America (1771) and Georg’s natural-history refections in A Voyage
Round the World (1777). Transatlantic science provided essential experience, as imperialism shifted
to Pacifc exploration and exploitation (Bewell, 2020; Withers, 2007; Ilife, 2008; Goldstein, 2019).
Britain’s expanding Atlantic-World hegemony coincided with shifting terminology. Cartogra-
phers disagreed on terms for the ocean separating Britain from North American colonies. Sea charts

Figure 1.1 Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) personifed transatlantic science.

11
 J. Marc MacDonald

and maps, into the 1700s, labelled familiar sections “Western Ocean” or “North Sea”—diluting
notions of a single ocean, viewing southern sections as distinct. In the 1760s, “Atlantic,” previously
linked to regions associated with Atlas (the mountain and myth), became increasingly applied to the
entire ocean. Interest expanded as transatlantic wars brought Britain victory (1763) and defeat (1783),
liberating its 13 colonies. One proponent of Atlantic-World science became a leading proponent of
political independence (Chaplin, 2008).
Benjamin Franklin personifed transatlantic science. Electrical experiments (Philadelphia;
1747–1753), working within an international community of experimenters, earned Franklin fame
throughout the Atlantic World. However, Franklin also garnered negative reactions. In 1756, Ger-
man philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) critiqued surpassing secure practices in natural sci-
ences, human excess against nature by disarming thunder, and Franklin as Prometheus of the modern
era. Kant speculated widely on nature but, notoriously, never left his native east Prussia. Conversely,
Franklin traveled extensively, crossing the Atlantic several times, expanding scientifc knowledge.
His prolonged return voyage from Britain (1726) inspired refection, discussions with mariners,
and theories on maritime phenomenon. Franklin’s 1762 chart depicted the Gulf Stream and British
imperial dominance, disregarding local knowledge. However, his charts from the 1780s demonstrated
American perspectives on the Atlantic Ocean and expanding political independence. Political shifts
ultimately, and often unintentionally, encouraged science (Delbourgo, 2006; Kant, 2012; Porter,
2000; Israel, 2017; Chaplin, 2008).
Franklin’s second British sojourn (1757–1762) spurred transatlantic science. In 1758, he met
savant-fabricant Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) and Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), versed
in electrical experiments and invention. Franklin subsequently abetted formation of the Lunar
Society of Birmingham, providing Dr. William Small (1734–1775) an introduction to Boulton.
Small instructed science at Virginia’s College of William and Mary (1758–1764), returned to
his native Scotland, attaining a medical degree at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1765, and
settled in Birmingham. Small, like Franklin a scientifc organizer, fostered an intellectual circle
in Virginia, which included student Thomas Jeferson (1743–1826). This expanded in Britain.
Anglo-Irish inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) recalled, “Dr. Small formed a link,
which combined Mr. Bolton, Mr. Watt, Dr. Darwin, Mr. Wedgwood, Mr. Day, and myself
together—men of very diferent characters, but all devoted to literature and science.”8 Franklin
also stimulated Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804) scientifc interests (Schofeld, 1963; Jones, 2008;
Robinson, 1962–1963).
Electricity initially connected Franklin and Priestley. In 1765, Priestley, preparing to write His-
tory of Electricity (1767), attained introduction to Franklin in London. Franklin and London friends
supported Priestley with experiments, materials, research, and to become a Royal Society Fellow.
Priestley’s Lunar Society links began in this period, culminating with his relocation to Birming-
ham (1780). Before this, Priestley, pursuing employment in 1772, notifed friend Unitarian minister
Richard Price (1723–1791) of desires to relocate to America to best establish his children. Priestley
also solicited Franklin regarding American teaching positions. John Winthrop (1714–1779), profes-
sor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard College, assured Franklin that Priestley would
beneft American colleges, but they lacked openings and disdained Priestley’s unorthodox religious
views. Priestley attained patronage in Britain, permitting time for experiments and publishing on
science and religion. In 1779, Priestley, again aimless, reminded Franklin of the college scheme.
Franklin—minister plenipotentiary to France (1778–1785) residing in Passy outside Paris—believed
America would beneft from Priestley instructing students. Nevertheless, obstacles included resis-
tance to Priestley, dangers for his family from transatlantic voyage, and diminished time for Priestley’s
experiments. Ultimately, persecution in Britain during the French Revolution precipitated Priest-
ley’s relocation to America. Violence from America’s Revolution (1775–1783) also spurred transat-
lantic trafc (Priestley, 1966, 1806; Schofeld, 1997; Franklin, 1959–2014).

12
 Science and the Atlantic World

Proponents of Atlantic science were among Loyalists escaping to Britain during America’s revolu-
tionary war. This included Dr. John Jefries (1744–1819) and Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814, later
Count Rumford). Both men—born British subjects in Massachusetts Bay, New England—practiced
science as youth. Jefries graduated from Harvard (1763), apprenticed in medicine in Boston, com-
pleted medical courses in London (1768–1769), and earned a medical degree from Marischal Col-
lege, Aberdeen (1769). Thompson, and friend Loammi Baldwin (1740–1807), attended Winthrop’s
natural philosophy lectures, apparently as unenrolled students. Winthrop’s popular lectures, especially
those on electricity, benefted from Franklin gifting electrical apparatus in 1758. Thompson began
constructing an electric machine in 1771, and Baldwin endangered himself conducting electrical fre
by kite in a thunderstorm, using Franklin’s methods. Thompson and Jefries participated in seminal
events in America’s revolution, withstanding opposition from patriot family and friends objecting to
their British loyalty. However, they appear to have frst met in England (Cash and Pine, 1983; Brown,
1979; Delbourgo, 2006).
Jefries’ and Thompson’s fates intersected, but contrasting characters ensured divergent outcomes.
Thompson, unlike most Loyalists, traveled covertly to London in 1776, abandoning his wife and
daughter. Jeferies escaped with his family, and many Loyalists, to Halifax in 1776, serving various
medical roles. His apothecary appointment lacked commission and pay, leading Jefries to London in
1779. Jefries met Thompson, ingratiating himself in high political circles, and hoped Thompson’s
infuence would resolve his predicament. Thompson instead sought advantage. Over months, Jef-
fries’ diary recorded waiting on Thompson, excuses, meetings, and evidence of an afair between his
wife Sarah Jefries (d. 1780) and Thompson. Jefries seemingly condoned it, for career advancement,
and possessed additional collateral: “political letters” pertaining to America’s rebellion, by Benjamin
Franklin and correspondents, entrusted to David Jefries (1714–1784) a patriot. However, John, his
Loyalist son, obtained them, brought them to London, and used them as leverage. Sarah apparently
attained the letters for Thompson, who, seizing advantage, had them elaborately bound and pre-
sented to King George III (1738–1820) (Brown, 1979; Jefries, 1778–1819; Merrill, 2018).
In the 1780s, Thompson and Jefries earned scientifc reputations. Thompson demonstrated
experiments, reducing cannon recoil, to Jefries. In 1779, Thompson was elected Royal Society
Fellow, and Philosophical Transactions published his work on military projectiles and gunpower (1781).
Jefries failed in similar aims, despite recording meteorological observations since 1774, becoming a
successful London physician, and attaining new scientifc heights in 1785–1786 (Brown, 1979; Jef-
fries, 1778–1819; Merrill, 2018).

Something in the Air

In the 1780s, Benjamin Franklin’s gaze, like Atlantic-World science, shifted skyward. People recorded
climate, determined air’s composition, and experimented with fying globes. Franklin—well posi-
tioned near Paris—championed ballooning and speculated on volcanic eruptions. After returning
home, Franklin’s support was solicited for France’s political and chemical revolutions.
Immanuel Kant knew not the prescience of christening Franklin “Modern Prometheus.” Franklin,
delighted learning of Joseph Priestley’s experimental researches, displayed Promethean foreknowl-
edge, envisioning unbounded potential for scientifc progress. Over a millennium, it could improve
transport by foating heavy masses, multiply agricultural production, and cure diseases and agedness,
permitting indefnite lifespans. Association with Prometheus expanded with Franklin’s leadership in
America’s Revolution. He was epitomized in the Latin epigram, attributed to Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot (1727–1781, Contrôleur général des fnances), as seizing “lightning from the heavens and the
scepter from tyrants” (1778). Such sentiments—stealing Zeus’ weapon and surpassing Prometheus’
theft of fre—were associated with electric experimenters since the 1750s. Philosophes integrated
politics, encapsulating French panegyric over Franklin’s dual feats. Turgot protégé Pierre-Samuel

13
 J. Marc MacDonald

du Pont de Nemours (1739–1817) called Franklin “the man whom nature allows its secrets to be
unveiled.”9 Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden (1791) immortalized Franklin’s victory over
tyranny by galvanizing patriotic fre. Politics drew Franklin to Europe, but he continued investigating
nature (Franklin, 1959–2014; Delbourgo, 2006; Israel, 2017; Darwin, 1791).
The Treaty of Paris (1783), concluding America’s Revolutionary War, remained unratifed for
months. Snow in America and ice and storms in the Atlantic delayed contact among capitals. Frank-
lin fnally sent the treaty, signed by George III, from Paris to Congress in May 1784. In waiting,
Franklin wrote “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” wondering if the 1783–1784 winter,
the most severe in years, resulted from widespread fog caused by excessive smoke from Icelandic
volcanic eruptions, spread throughout Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. Franklin’s accurate speculations
about eruptions disrupting climate remained unappreciated for decades. Laki’s eruption was but one
reason for Franklin’s skyward focus (Wood, 2014; Franklin, 1959–2014).
Balloonomania struck Europe in 1783. Joseph-Michel (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Mont-
golfer (1745–1799) invented and few hot-air balloons above France. News quickly spread to Brit-
ain. Joseph Banks, immune to the mania, had parlayed naturalist work from transoceanic voyages into
presidency of the Royal Society (1778–1820). Banks, favoring expanded exchange with the Académie
des sciences, encouraged friend Charles Blagden (1748–1820) to visit France in 1783. Blagden, a Royal
Society Fellow, became assistant and secretary to chemist Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) around
1783. Parisian contacts provided Blagden reports on fights, including Abraham Guyot (1743–1794),
traveling tutor of Stephen (1771–1794) and Benjamin Delessert (1773–1847) in Britain. Blagden
shared information with Banks, noting “all Paris is in an uproar about the fying machines . . . besides
the great one preparing by Montgolfer under the inspection” of Académie commissioners, “another
upon Dr Franklin’s plan of silk covered with elastic gum is making by subscription.”10 Franklin and
Passy neighbor Madeleine Delessert (1767–1839) joined select subscribers to witness Paris’ frst bal-
loon launch (27 August 1783) and sent Blagden descriptions (Gillespie, 1984; Lynn, 2006; MacDon-
ald, 2015).
Britain’s scientifc establishment remained unenthusiastic about balloons, sparking debates over
utility and scientific credibility. French and Italian aeronauts launching flights (1783–1784) in
London—competing for prestige, crowds, and legitimacy—were criticized as foreign, danger-
ous, and scientifcally suspect. Successful physician John Jefries sought to remedy this, funding
an ascent in 1784. Jefries’ meteorological interests and afuence combined with the equipment
and experience of French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753–1809). Once airborne, Jefries
used instruments, recording barometric air pressure, humidity, and temperature. Jefries also, with
Blagden as intermediary, fulflled Cavendish’s request for air samples at diferent heights. Cav-
endish compared samples with ground-level collections, revealing consistent concentrations of
dephlogisticated air (oxygen), but did not publish eudiometric fndings (Gillespie, 1984; Jefries,
1786; Jungnickel and McCormmach, 1999).
Jefries and Blanchard made history on 7 January 1785, achieving the frst cross–English Chan-
nel fight, at Jefries’ expense. Jefries was well-received by French society and court, who lauded
Blanchard, granting him a pension. Conversely, Jefries sufered insult in Britain, though scientifc
credibility earned him greater respect than other aeronauts. Banks had Jefries’ A Narrative of the Two
Aerial Voyages (1786) read before the Royal Society. The gesture was half-hearted, however, occur-
ring a year after the fights and months after Banks received the manuscript. Philosophical Transactions
did not publish it, and Jefries was not elected a fellow. Jefries remained grounded, and Blanchard
achieved America’s frst balloon fight (1793), above Philadelphia. Nevertheless, Jefries maintained
transatlantic cosmopolitanism, transmitting his self-funded Narrative and portrait to Franklin, in Phil-
adelphia (Gillespie, 1984; Jefries, 1786; Lynn, 2006; Jefries, 1778–1819).
Ballooning and ideological disputes created new nationalistic conficts and healed old ones. Amer-
ican republicans in Paris celebrated Jefries’ feat. In 1785, Jefries dined at Franklin’s Passy residence,

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recounting his voyage to a party, including John Adams’ (1735–1826) family. Its move to London,
when Adams became frst United States minister plenipotentiary to Britain, facilitated further heal-
ing. By 1787, Dr. Jefries was the family’s physician. Abigail Adams (1744–1818) praised him, despite
previous political aversion. Conversely, Banks and Franklin’s ballooning rift expanded. Banks initially
feted the invention, reading Franklin’s report before the Royal Society, which did not launch ascents,
but learned about them from newspapers. Fellows resisted balloonomania, believing utility arose not
from fights but demonstrable benefts to science and society. Franklin regretted England’s antipathy
to aerostatic experiments, given its mechanical superiority, desiring emulation between nations until
applied utility was found. He argued that magnetism and electricity began as amusements, ballooning
could have unforeseen benefts, and pride should not stymie scientifc progress (Jefries, 1778–1819;
Adams, 2005; Gillespie, 1984; Franklin, 1959–2014).
Aerostatic machines lacked practicality, but British antipathy included nationalistic aversion to a
French invention, dominated by French and Italian aeronauts. Banks—favoring natural history above
chemistry, engineering, or mathematics—dominated Britain’s scientifc institutions. Finally, fears of
uncontrollable science were justifed. Technical operation and public accessibility remained difcult
to regulate. Ascents and failed launches occasioned crime and riots. As elite science and society grew
increasingly concerned about unregulated public science and experiments, national antagonisms
emerged in chemistry (Gillespie, 1984; Lynn, 2006).

Science Interrupted
In the 1780s chemistry, like electricity, became connected to revolutionary politics. As Atlantic-
World revolutions disrupted science, practitioners focused on politics. Transatlantic science was
remarkably interconnected, allowing rapid communication on chemistry, climatic observations, bal-
looning, and politics. This expedited controversies and ideological feuds. Savants disputed epistemo-
logical implications and priority discoveries.
Mechanically inclined Britons, including Lunar men, briefy experimented with balloons. In
1784, James Watt hoped Matthew Boulton was cured from balloonomania. Much occupied their
Soho manufactory and pioneering steam engine partnership. Nonetheless, in 1785, Watt informed
James Jr., in Geneva for his education, of their infammable air balloon launch, permitting a passenger
and meteorological recordings (MacDonald, 2015; Musson and Robinson, 1969; Jones, 2008).
Cosmopolitanism fostered educational sojourns, marking shifts in chemistry. Fittingly, two trav-
eling aeronauts (French and Italian) delivered James Watt Jr. to Paris. Barthélemy Faujas-de-Saint-
Fond (1741–1819) visited Birmingham on his British tour of science and industry, with Count
Paolo Andreani (1763–1823), promoter of European and Atlantic-World science. Like James, sons
of other Lunar men studied abroad: Joseph Priestley Jr. (1768–1833), brought to Geneva in 1784
by his uncle—Ironmaster William Wilkinson (c. 1744–1808), relocating to serve France’s state
ironworks—and Matthew Robinson Boulton (1770–1842), conveyed to Versailles by Boulton and
Watt in 1786. Friends, especially the Delesserts, organized education in Geneva and Paris, whereas
Edmond-Charles Genet (1763–1834) arranged that in Versailles. Genet toured England in 1783,
serving France’s foreign department and as an Adadémie des sciences corresponding member. He
reached London with introductions from savants, including celebrated chemist Antoine Lavoisier
(1743–1794), and instructions to report on British industry. Mechanical societies and Royal Society
contacts gave Genet introductions for Soho and other manufactories. However, fears of industrial
espionage emerged. Josiah Wedgwood, Etruria pottery works founder, warned Boulton and Watt
and strategically limited Genet’s access at Etruria. Wedgwood regretted this, which countered incli-
nations for open communication with savant-fabricants from other nations. Caution was merited.
Genet leaked secrets on manufacturing and Priestley’s chemical experiments to France (MacDonald,
2015; Musson and Robinson, 1969; Jones, 2008; Priestley, 1969; Genet and Silliman, 1827).

15
 J. Marc MacDonald

Internal threats also existed. Manchester fabricant James Milne (d. 1816) pirated Richard Ark-
wright’s (1732–1792) cotton-carding machines, introducing improvements to France. In 1780, Milne
requested reception with Franklin, at Passy, concerning America. By 1787, Milne was in Georgia
encouraging cotton production. George Washington (1732–1799) identifed cotton as utile and
labor-saving machines of foremost importance for America. In 1789, Washington notifed Thomas
Jeferson of a visit by Milne, who spent years introducing cotton manufacturing in France, and
believed it would be more advantageous in America. Aspirations for industrial independence fueled
transatlantic relocations (MacDonald, 2015; Franklin, 1959–2014).
Cosmopolitans stoked chemical controversies in the 1780s. After moving to America, Genet
asserted in Vindication of Mr. E.C. Genet’s Memorial (1827), “In the laboratory of Dr. Priestly, the
father of pneumatic philosophy, I witnessed those interesting experiments improved by Lavoisier
and others, which have so much enlarged the circle of human knowledge.”11 British chemists (Watt,
Priestley, Cavendish) experimented transforming water into component parts: infammable air
(hydrogen) and dephlogisticated air (oxygen), and back into water. A priority dispute emerged over
discovering water was a compound, not an element. In 1783, French chemists replicated experi-
ments, after Genet provided the Académie des sciences information, and Charles Blagden shared details
in Paris. Lavoisier presented his theory to the Académie, as Cavendish did before the Royal Society.
Watt was not credited and believed powerful, wealthy men appropriated his theory. The Royal Soci-
ety ultimately published Watt and Priestley’s work, but the dispute lingered for decades (Miller, 2004;
Fauque, 2008; Perrin, 1973).
The Franco-British dispute involved phlogiston and new French chemical nomenclature. Despite
Genet’s subsequent grandstanding, Boulton and Watt’s 1786 Versailles visit was fruitless. They failed
to secure French steam engine patents, and Boulton grew unhappy with Genet’s arrangements for
Matthew’s education. The Delesserts and Abraham Guyot corrected this, establishing Matthew in
Paris, amidst growing tensions over chemistry. In 1788, Boulton asked Matthew to inform Guyot
that Priestley “and our Lunar Society” believed Lavoisier “and other Chymists are mistaken who have
fancied that they made ∆ [water] by the defagration of infammable and dephlogisticated air. They
have not.”12 Lavoisier; his wife, Marie-Anne (née Paulze, 1755–1836); and their scientifc circle, at
Paris’ Arsenal laboratories, collaborated through experiments and publications to challenge phlogis-
ton, the theory championed by British and German chemists. British chemists were understand-
ably testy. In 1787, Guyot advised Watt that the Académie Française was printing “the new chemical
nomenclature” that would “be the funeral oration for . . . poor phlogiston.”13 Scottish savants futilely
encouraged Joseph Black (1728–1799) to develop a superior nomenclature. However, by 1800, most
British chemists had adopted Lavoisier’s system (Genet and Silliman, 1827; MacDonald, 2015; Jones,
2008; Miller, 2004; Jungnickel and McCormmach, 1999).
The French and chemical revolutions, overlapping by 1790, would have benefted from Benja-
min Franklin’s presence. Guyot arranged Matthew Robinson Boulton’s journey from Paris to Soho
(1788) with Journal de Physique editor Jean-Claude de la Métherie (1743–1817) and German chemist
Friedrich Wolf (1766–1845). La Métherie, unlike most French chemists, supported phlogiston into
the Napoleonic era. Paradoxically, Wolf was an early Lavoisian. German chemists strongly adhered
to phlogiston—Lavoisier asserted in a pan-European assessment sent to Franklin in 1790—French
savants were divided between the old and new theory, and English savants were gradually abandon-
ing phlogiston. Lavoisier concluded, “This then is the revolution that has occurred in an important
branch of human knowledge since your departure from Europe. I consider This revolution as well
advanced and even complete if you join with us.”14 Wolf translated texts into German, uniting with
savants in Berlin, including Alexander Humboldt, to advance Lavoisian chemistry. Humboldt visited
Soho, touring England with Georg Forster. The German naturalists met in 1789 and toured Europe
(1790–1791). This and Forster’s transoceanic voyages inspired Humboldt’s Atlantic-World voyage
(1799–1804). Before revolutionizing biogeography, Humboldt helped Wolf spread the Chemical

16
 Science and the Atlantic World

Revolution. In 1790, Wolf predicted that its scientifc impact would resemble what France’s revolu-
tion did for humanity. This was accurate for chemistry, but politics proved detrimental for Lavoisier
and scientifc exchange (MacDonald, 2015; Hufbauer, 1982; Robinson, 1962–1963; Goldstein,
2019).
Political violence interrupted European science in 1791. Church and King mobs, enraged by a
dinner commemorating the French Revolution, destroyed Dissenters’ houses and churches in Bir-
mingham Riots (14–17 July). They razed Joseph Priestley’s house, destroying the library and labora-
tory, precipitating the family’s transatlantic relocation. Watt opposed Priestley’s revolutionary and
republican fervor, fearing that the disorder in France would reach Britain, but both men bemoaned
disrupted science. Watt regretted that the riots displaced Priestley, nearly disbanding the Lunar Soci-
ety, and that politics supplanted science at meetings. James Jr. expressed similar sentiments in Paris.
He and Thomas Cooper (1759–1839)—mixing business, politics, science—traveled as delegates of
English republicanism. Through Priestley’s auspices, they were received by Lavoisier, meeting “frst
rate Chemists at his house, but not a word of Chemistry was . . . spoken, they are all mad with poli-
tics.”15 The majority were radicals, though James identifed Lavoisier as a prudent moderate (Mac-
Donald, 2015; Jones, 2008; Schofeld, 1997).
Revolutionary instability hindered science. In 1790, Lavoisier updated Franklin on “our political
revolution,” additional to that in chemistry. The former—complete and beyond return to the old
order—weakened aristocrats, strengthened Democrats, and alarmed moderates, who feared events
too far gone. Lavoisier concluded, “We well regret at this moment your absence from France; you
would have been our guide and you would have marked for us the limits that we should not have
exceeded.”16 Unfortunately, Franklin died in Philadelphia in April 1790. The French Revolution
grew radical and unstable. Lavoisier, among tax collectors imprisoned in 1793, was guillotined in
1794. Radicalism unintentionally bolstered Atlantic-World science, as savant-fabricants sought asylum
abroad (Bell, 2005; Poirier, 1998).

Land of Liberty
Europeans scattered by political violence remained bound by cosmopolitan science. Exiles feeing
Geneva’s failed 1782 revolution sought asylum in Britain, a “Land of Liberty.” Projectors encouraged
exiles to form a Genevan colony in Ireland, foreseeing established industries and a college. However,
“New Geneva” miscarried within two years. One exile, Dr. Pierre Sylvestre (1759–1795), studied
medicine in Scotland, awaiting the colony. When it failed, scientifc friends provided introductions
to British savant-fabricants, including James Watt, aiding Sylvestre’s eforts to establish a medical prac-
tice. Another exile, Étienne Claviere (1735–1793), focused on America, sponsoring the speculative
tour by French propogandist Jean-Pierre Brissot (1735–1793) in 1788. They promoted expanding
industrial and agricultural knowledge, as Genevans sufered instead of settling in Ireland, hoping
that sufcient planning would establish utopia. Claviere and Brissot’s American project was diverted
with their leadership, as Girondins, in the French Revolution. They fostered republicanism, provok-
ing European wars and E.-C. Genet’s appointment as minister plenipotentiary to the United States
(1792). Genet’s mission—to expand republicanism, renew commercial treaties, and attain military
assistance—was a diplomatic disaster. It alienated an integral ally, compounding French instability.
Genet was recalled, following the Jacobin mass arrest of Girondins, but remained in America. Brissot
(beheaded by guillotine) and Claviere (committing suicide in prison) died in 1793. Nonetheless,
their infuence endured, inspiring Thomas Cooper’s settlement and promotional Some Information
Respecting America (1794), as did Franklin’s “Information to those who would remove to America”
(1784) (MacDonald, 2015, 2020; McNutt and Whatmore, 2013; Sheridan, 1994).
The purpose of Cooper and Joseph Priestley Jr.’s colony was debated. Joseph later claimed it was
to unite many English emigrating to America, combining industry and capital, not for religious or

17
 J. Marc MacDonald

political exiles. However, Priestley Sr. focused on harassment of Britain’s political and religious liber-
als. In 1793, Cooper covertly returned to England, attended Thomas Walker’s (1749–1817) treason
trial, and communicated to Watt Jr. intentions to name their settlement Asylum. British reform-
ers remained targets of violence and sedition charges. Priestley promoted the settlement, soliciting
investment, including from brother-in-law Ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728–1808). Before transat-
lantic departure, Priestley contacted Cooper regarding their proposed American settlement, a desired
refuge for Unitarians and friends of liberty, which motivated Priestley’s relocation to Northumber-
land (Graham, 1995; Schofeld, 1997; MacDonald, 2020; Priestley, 1806).
In the 1790s, botany intermixed with business and politics. In 1794, Watt Jr. contacted Stephen
Delessert, who botanized on European, British, and American travels, after denunciation by the Jaco-
bins and feeing France. He established a herbarium, subsequently expanded by Benjamin Delessert
into one of the world’s largest collections. James—confdent of Stephen’s “safe arrival in the land of
liberty,” and foundation of his commercial frm—noted as follows:

The number of persons who are emigrating here to America is very great & increasing
daily. Mr. Cooper sailed for Philadelphia about a fortnight ago with his wife & family and
will perhaps see you at New York . . . I fancy he will lose no time in firing upon his New
Settlement on the Banks of the Susquehannah.17

James introduced a Unitarian cotton manufacturer who fed England (after his family’s work-
shops sufered arson attacks from Church and King mobs), seeking an American establishment.
Another Unitarian, clothier Henry Wansey (1751–1827), toured with similar purpose. Wansey
occupied a New York lodging house with Priestley Jr. (awaiting his parents’ arrival from England)
and E.-C. Genet. Wansey acknowledged that Genet, a Girondist unable to return to France, was
marrying into American political elite. Genet’s opportunism persisted, intertwining science and
politics, as occurred with botanist André Michaux (1746–1802), in North America collecting
plant and animal specimens since 1785. Michaux, respected among naturalists and a member of
the American Philosophical Society, was appointed to an expedition of scientifc exploration
across America. This vanished, however, as Michaux mixed botanizing with political intrigue,
participating in Genet’s 1793 mission. After failing diplomatically, Genet promoted technological
innovations in America (MacDonald, 2015, 2020; Stafeu, 1970; Wansey, 1970; Williams, 2004;
Sheridan, 1994).
The Priestley-Cooper group promised great potential for improving American science and indus-
try. Between 1784 and 1790, Priestley organized apprenticeships for sons Joseph and William (1771–
1838) with their Wilkinson uncles, leading ironmasters. In 1793, Joseph attempted to lure Watt Jr.
into partnership in America, believing James’ knowledge of mineralogy, chemistry, and machining
qualifed him for the iron industry. Joseph suggested that this—combined with his knowledge of
manufacturing methods and ability to attain recent improvements and workers through his uncle
William—advantageously positioned them for iron manufacturing in America. James, sojourning in
Napoli, contemplated emigration but followed his father’s advice, avoiding the fates of friends facing
charges in Britain or feeing abroad. Joseph reached America in 1793, toured American manufac-
tories intending to enter into cotton manufacturing, and consulted with owners and Wansey, who
toured with similar purpose. However, their interests declined after discovering dilapidated woollen
manufactories, inferior machines, high expense, limited labor supply, and that excessive inexpensive
land rendered manufacturing unproftable. This led Joseph to the settlement scheme with Cooper
(according to Wansey, an investor), which miscarried, for various reasons, by 1794 (MacDonald,
2020; Schofeld, 1997; Graham, 1995; Priestley, 1806; Wansey, 1970).
Utopian schemes for an American “New Geneva” also failed. Pierre Sylvestre initiated a plan
in 1794 (as revolutionary violence reached Geneva), organizing families seeking to found an

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agricultural community in America. For assistance, Sylvestre contacted Albert Gallatin (1761–
1849), a Genevan occupying high American political ofces, who organized arrivals. Compet-
ing factions altered plans from agricultural, to industrial-commercial, to educational, dooming
the colony. However, a short-lived “New Geneva” settlement developed on Gallatin’s Pennsyl-
vania lands, attracting armory and glassmaking industries and French travelers (including botanist
Michaux). Another scheme involved relocating Académie de Genève professors, most profcient in
science, for a new Virginia college. Pierre Prévost (1751–1839) and Marc-Auguste Pictet (1752–
1825) and his brother alone were privy. This enticed American leaders desperate to develop sci-
ences. Jeferson identifed Geneva and Edinburgh as unrivalled in science education. However, in
1795 Pictet notifed Jeferson that improving conditions would likely revive their academy. Pictet’s
letter was transmitted by French chemist and diplomat Pierre-Auguste Adet (1763–1834), whom
Pictet credited with taming conditions in Geneva. Adet immersed himself in science in Geneva
and America. As “New Geneva” faltered, the Pictets initiated another project: Bibliothèque Britan-
nique. The periodical popularized British science and literature, translating works by Rumford,
Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), and other
Britons (Burrows, 1986; Jeferson, 1950–2013; McNutt and Whatmore, 2013; Conlin, 2000;
MacDonald, 2020, 2017).
Chemical conficts continued in America, by relocating Europeans, linking politics and science.
Adet, selected by the French Republic to relieve Genet’s Jacobin replacement, was a Lavoisian chemist.
In 1791, Adet pursued a physician posting in Saint Domingue but was appointed to France’s diplo-
matic mission to the colony. Lavoiser supported Adet, with loans and chemistry-based employment,
and helped Adet attain a political position in Geneva. This, and infuential chemists in government,
secured Adet’s Philadelphia posting. Like Genet, Adet’s mission was to improve American support, at
Britain’s expense, for France’s revolutionary wars. Adet fostered relations with Republicans, through
science and the American Philosophical Society, including Jeferson. He regretted not meeting Adet
in person to learn scientifc advances from across the Atlantic. Adet’s diplomatic frustrations, particu-
larly America’s rapprochement with Britain, provided time for chemistry. After serving the French
Revolution diplomatically, Adet remained half a year in America, advancing chemical revolution
against Priestley’s persistent phlogiston defense. Adet, part of Lavoisier’s campaign in France, pursued
genial exchange: publishing responses to Priestley’s attack on Lavoisier’s theory (1796), meeting
Priestley in Philadelphia, and maintaining correspondence after returning to France in 1797 (Conlin,
2000; Jeferson, 1950–2013).
European interest in American geography and botany thrived through the 1790s. As Adet’s diplo-
matic mission struggled, he notifed P.-S. du Pont of his desire to transfer. However, Adet’s election
to the American Philosophical Society (1796) provided renewed purpose: serving French science in
America. He advised Victor du Pont (1767–1827)—French consul for Georgia and the Carolinas—
that France lacked geographical knowledge of southern states, requesting a precise account. Adet
recruited Victor in supporting botanists’ eforts to collect, maintain, and transmit North American
natural history collections. In Paris, Victor’s father and brother established Du Pont Press, with loans
from Lavoisier. In the Prospectus, Du Pont proudly proclaimed “to end where Franklin began.”18
Franklin operated a press as a young man. Du Pont Press became printer for the Académie des sciences,
Lavoisier’s works (including his fnal scientifc publication), and American geography texts. Timing
was fortuitous, as French instability increased. In 1793, the Académie was abolished, and in 1794,
Du Pont was imprisoned, and Lavoisier was executed. Irénée du Pont operated the press during his
father’s absences. But they were both arrested in 1797, and presses were damaged in a government
raid. Du Pont acted prudently, avoiding deportation to French Guiana, and prepared for America,
a long-held desire. Since 1783, he had pondered relocating his family to America, fostered friend-
ship with Franklin and Jeferson, and arranged Victor’s diplomatic posts (1787–1797) (Conlin, 2000;
MacDonald, 2020; Saricks, 1965; Du Pont, 1923–1927).

19
 J. Marc MacDonald

Du Pont’s pretext, savant voyageur, averted suspicion and repercussion. Institut national (established
in 1795) encouraged expeditions to the Americas, Africa, and South Seas, providing scientifc cover
for Du Pont’s voyage. He rented his house to fellow Insitut member Louis du Bougainville to ofset
costs (an incessant problem). Though a pretext, Du Pont fulflled duties, sending mémoirs (read at
Institute meetings) from transatlantic observations on sea snails, aquatic plants, marine winds, cur-
rents, North American coastal geography, and potential utility of trees for France. In preparation,
Irénée studied botany, at the Jardin des plantes, and listed botanist as his passport occupation. Another
duty for Du Pont was inspecting nurseries André Michaux established in America (1786). They
supplied seeds, plants, and trees transported by Irénée to France in 1801. His return, to promote his
powder manufactory, fostered botanical exchange. In 1802, Irénée campaigned to preserve the nurs-
eries, believing the mission by Michaux’s son Francois (1770–1855), to disband botanical gardens,
misguided. Peace would permit French cultivation of superior American trees. Competing Euro-
pean nations paid dearly for superior American seeds. France was destroying advantages to improve
agricultural, forestry, vital industries like shipbuilding, and capital. As with gunpowder and merino
sheep, Irénée championed Franco-American exchange against British hegemony. Du Pont managed
a scientifc voyage in 1799. His sons exploited the Peace of Amiens to return to France to improve
industry. Other scientifc voyages were stymied by politics and war (MacDonald, 2020; Saricks, 1965;
Du Pont, 1923–1927).
Atlantic-World science reached a crescendo with Humboldt’s biogeographical voyage. Euro-
pean travels with Georg Forster shaped Humboldt’s scientifc methods, inspiring his own voy-
age. After several planned voyages miscarried, disrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, Humboldt
ventured to Paris in 1798. Bougainville, a septuagenarian planning to again circumnavigate the
Earth, invited Humboldt to join his fve-year scientifc voyage. Ofcials replaced Bougainville
with the younger Nicolas Baudin (1754–1803). Humboldt befriended physician and botanist
Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), selected for Baudin’s voyage, in Paris studying botany and zoology.
However, the expedition was indefnitely delayed, days before departure, with funds diverted to
war. Nevertheless, Humboldt and Bonpland, sharing scientifc and political views and passion for
exploration, traveled to Madrid. Spain’s King Carlos IV (1748–1819) permitted their self-funded
expedition throughout South America, ensuring independence and unrivalled access. Humbold-
tian science of physical geography emphasized the necessity of naturalists studying specimens in
native environments. His contributions surpassed earlier voyagers, focusing an impressive array
of instruments on overarching interconnections of Earth-bound science (Goldstein, 2019; Bell,
2010; Walls, 2008).

Applying Enlightenment
The French Revolution and consequent wars dispersed Europeans, like main characters in Voltaire’s
Candide. Families, united by science, fed across Europe or crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. Brit-
ish, French, and Swiss colony schemes failed to establish an El Dorado. Success came instead from
practically applying Enlightenment.
The Du Ponts, following two years cultivating fnances and information, departed France in
1799, reaching America in a new century. Du Pont’s Compagnie d’Amérique promoted their settle-
ment as an asylum to escape Europe’s revolutions. Irénée learned of inexpensive land from Ameri-
cans like Robert Fulton, in Paris promoting his submarine Nautilus, championed by chemist P.-A.
Adet and other promoters. Du Pont’s impractical plans included an agricultural-industrial Vir-
ginian colony, with urban commercial headquarters. Enthusiasm declined in 1798, when Victor
returned to France, reporting President Adams’ hatred of Du Pont and refusal to recognize Victor
as a diplomat. In 1794, Adams had welcomed Priestley and Swiss emigrés—escaping oppressive
aristocratic governments—notifying Jeferson that America was becoming a sanctuary for Europe’s

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fervent souls. Du Pont was denied such hospitality. In 1798, Adams warned Secretary of State
Timothy Pickering (1745–1829):

I shall not be guilty of so much affections of regard to science, as to be very willing to grant
passports to Dupont De Nemours or any other French philosophers in . . . our Country.
We have had too many French philosophers already.19

Delays failed to dampen Du Pont’s optimism. In Philosophie de l’univers (1799), he argued that Amer-
ica’s stable republican government presented possibly the sole asylum where exiles could attain peace
and industry restore fortunes. The family settled near New York, forming various schemes, typically
involving triangular transatlantic trade. In 1808, Du Pont informed Jeferson: “After the overthrow of
our Republic . . . when I was crossing to America, I hoped to found a Colony, a Pontanie.”20 Though
this failed, the family contributed to Atlantic-World science and education (MacDonald, 2020; Tise,
1998; Saricks, 1965; Du Pont, 1923–1927).
Eighteenth-century education was considered an experimental science. Joseph Priestley was a
foremost educator within Dissenting academies, England’s leading institutions. He, like Du Pont,
envisioned establishing an American college. Du Pont’s scheme involved retiring to Potianie and
instructing Virginia students with his extensive library. Priestley’s plan originated as he taught
chemistry, gratis, near London. In Northumberland, locals incorporated a college to be headed
by Priestley, who produced a plan, involving using his scientifc apparatus and library. Land was
attained, buildings designed, and instruction was to commence in 1795. However, by 1800 only a
building frame existed, stemming—Priestley believed—from political and religious bigotry. Priestley
resigned and had declined earlier ofers from other colleges. American students, deprived of Priest-
ley’s instruction, beneftted from that of his protégé, Cooper (MacDonald, 2020; Schofeld, 1997;
Jeferson, 1950–2013).
American leaders were cognizant of necessities to improve science education. Jeferson requested
Priestley and Du Pont’s guidance for the modern university planned for Virginia, requiring orga-
nization identifying useful sciences and omitting impractical ones. In 1800, Jeferson celebrated Du
Pont’s arrival, hoping Priestley would join them in Philadelphia, demonstrating fraternity and Amer-
ica as an asylum for greatness. Du Pont’s education plan was a sweeping survey. Priestley succinctly
advised on subjects, professors, organization; advising distinct instructors to teach natural philosophy,
experimental philosophy, and chemistry (MacDonald, 2020; Schofeld, 1997; Jeferson, 1950–2013).
Politics diminished Cooper’s contributions to American science education. He instructed chemis-
try, but his materialism aroused antipathy. In 1799, Cooper and Priestley criticized President Adams’
Federalist politics, motivating Secretary Pickering’s desire to expel them. Cooper (having avoided
trial in England) endured six-months imprisonment for libel in 1800. Priestley escaped charge but
regretted that age and distance barred relocation, with his library and laboratory, to Virginia to
instruct at Jeferson’s university. Cooper instructed chemistry at several universities (profting from
inheriting Priestley’s library and apparatus), attracting students, including Alfred du Pont (1798–
1856). Irénée’s manufactory pioneered industrial chemistry, but he sent his son to study with Cooper.
The Du Ponts—praising Cooper as Priestley’s protégé and America’s best chemist—had Alfred study
practical sciences (chemistry, geology, and mechanics) best suited for their operations, and apprentice
as Cooper’s laboratory assistant. Cooper, like Priestley and Du Pont, advised Jeferson on Virginia’s
university. As its establishment neared, Cooper was elected professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and
natural philosophy. Nevertheless, religious opposition prevented Cooper’s instruction (MacDonald,
2020; Tise, 1998; Schofeld, 1997; Jeferson, 1950–2013).
Cooper’s expertise with practical chemistry, chlorine bleaching, and textile manufacture in Man-
chester benefted Americans. He felded inquiries and published on dyeing calico and printing.
In 1799, politician and entrepreneur Robert R. Livingston (1746–1813) asked Priestley’s advice

21
 J. Marc MacDonald

on using river weeds to fabricate paper. Livingston attained a patent (from Adams and Pickering),
partnering in the scheme with Saint-Domingue refugee Pierre Delabigarre, who failed to estab-
lish Tivoli, a colony along the Hudson River. Priestley praised Livingston’s discovery—hoping he
improved bleaching and revolutionized paper manufacture—and involved Cooper, who provided
advice, suggesting methods of preparing and applying acid. This expertise beneftted American sci-
ence, industry, and education but would have expanded if unfettered by ideological opposition.
Livingston’s scheme failed, but he achieved transatlantic success with steamboats and sheep (Priestley,
1966; MacDonald, 2020; Dangerfeld, 1960).
Scientifc convergence in Paris, around 1801–1802, fostered previously unachievable collabora-
tion. In America, Livingston participated in projects applying steam engines to nautical navigation.
He attained a 20-year privilege, in 1798, to operate steamboats on New York waterways, form-
ing a partnership that built a vessel. British restrictions prohibiting technology transfer complicated
engine procurement. Livingston wrote to James Watt regarding experiments propelling boats and
perceived steam-power improvements, requesting information on engines. Watt failed to respond.
Consequently, Livingston contacted Priestley, closer at hand in Pennsylvania, for advice on steamboat
designs. Priestley conceded inexperience with machines but ofered insights on Livingston’s sup-
posed advances (Dangerfeld, 1960; MacDonald, 2020).
Solutions remained elusive until Livingston’s Paris sojourn (1801–1804) as minister to France.
Livingston negotiated expanded American access in the Louisiana Territory, which Spain secretly
ceded to France. Concern over France’s American expansion inspired Jeferson to enlist Du Pont, an
unofcial agent returning to Paris, and other ministers. Military failures in Saint-Domingue forced
Napoleon to abandon ambition, facilitating the Louisiana Purchase. Territorial expansion embold-
ened American schemers like Joel Barlow (1754–1812). This Republican poet supported Robert
Fulton, introducing him to Livingston in Paris. Fulton’s steamboat experiments predated Livingston.
Fulton contacted Boulton and Watt in 1794, regarding boat engines, without response. Fortuitously,
Fulton met Watt’s son Gregory (1777–1804) in Paris. Gregory forwarded Fulton’s inquiries to Watt
Jr., initiating commercial and Enlightenment exchange. Fulton praised Watt’s invention, fundamental
for British industrial development, decried imperialist colonialism, and asserted determination to
improve American industry. Livingston and Fulton (determined to ameliorate transportation) formed
a partnership, imported Boulton and Watt engines, and attained a steamship monopoly on the Hud-
son River, between New York City and Albany, ultimately operating a small feet (Ziesche, 2010;
Tise, 1998; Israel, 2019; MacDonald, 2015, 2020; Dangerfeld, 1960).
Atlantic-World science inverted Voltaire’s Candide. Its titular protagonist informed his valet, upon
departing El Dorado:

If we stay here, we shall be no different from anybody else; but if we go back to the old
world with a mere twelve sheep laden with Eldorado stones, we shall be richer than all the
kings of Europe put together.21

Applied Enlightenment adherents shipped sheep across the Atlantic, from Europe to the Ameri-
cas, enriched by wool from small yellow purebred Spanish merinos, not gems concealed on large
red South American sheep. The Treaty of Basel (1795) broke Spain’s merino monopoly. Société
d’agriculture member Etienne Delessert helped import thousands of sheep to France, renewing cross-
breeding formerly attempted with French breeds. Experiments succeeded, wool yields improved,
and Delessert developed herds on his farms near Paris. In 1801, Delessert introduced the frst full-
blooded merino ram to America, sending four on Benjamin Franklin, which transported Irénée du
Pont to Europe and back. According to Irénée, two rams were for Delessert’s Rosendale farms, one
for Irénée’s property near New York, and one a gift for Thomas Jeferson. Unfortunately, three
rams perished in transatlantic transit. The survivor, named Don Pedro, helped develop, improve,

22
 Science and the Atlantic World

and promote Du Pont and American breeding and industry (MacDonald, 2015, 2020; Dangerfeld,
1960).
Irénée and Victor returned to Europe to promote American projects. Victor solicited commer-
cial investment. Their frm, desperate for capital, had prospectuses detailing transatlantic schemes.
Irénée’s focus, the eighth plan, was gunpower manufacture. Factors repelling Joseph Priestley Jr.
from manufacturing enticed Irénée. Following tours, Irénée concluded that America’s few gunpower
manufactories, making inferior powder using inefcient methods, profted selling it cheaper than
English powder. Du Pont advised Jeferson—soliciting support—of their desire to found a superior
establishment. Irénée was versed in the craft, having served the Régie des Poudres for fve years. Du
Pont and Lavoisier (Régie director and childless) planned for Irénée to succeed Lavoisier, who with
his students perfected gunpowder production. In 1801, Irénée worked in France for months secur-
ing shareholders; meeting ofcials; learning advanced techniques; copying building, machine, and
technical designs; and organized shipments of superior instruments, samples, and refnery apparatus
on the Benjamin Franklin (MacDonald, 2020; Saricks, 1965; Du Pont, 1923–1927).
American ofcials helped Irénée thrive. He requested Robert Livingston’s aid importing mate-
rial to establish his manufactory and improve national industry. Jeferson contributed, recognizing
potential advancements and Du Pont’s past service to America. Securing the manufactory and gov-
ernment contracts required years. Irénée’s company faced challenges from European shareholders
and American competitors. Nevertheless, as Andrew Fagal explains: “By 1820, it was the largest
gunpowder frm in the United States, with a market that penetrated into every state and the wider
Atlantic world.”22 Such outcomes were unpredictable (MacDonald, 2020; Saricks, 1965; Jeferson,
1950–2013; Fagal, 2018).
Du Pont success in America was a culmination of Atlantic-World science. An incredible feat as
savant-facbricants, united by science, were harried by revolution and violence in various settings. Du
Pont and Priestley, infuenced by and befriending Franklin in Europe, aided Jeferson after relocating
to America. Ofcials warmly received the Priestley-Cooper families—experienced with practical
chemistry and pioneering British manufacturing—primed to establish American industries. How-
ever, plans for asylums, industry, and science education miscarried. Priestley and Du Pont probably
never met but shared similarities, including preoccupation with America, establishing their sons, and
liberalism. Political mob violence inspired them, in their sixties, to envision utopias and relocate their
families to America. Priestley stalwartly, but futilely, defended phlogiston as chemists across the Atlan-
tic World adopted Lavoisier’s system. Nevertheless, Priestley’s protégée, Thomas Cooper, infuenced
American chemical industries and education, despite antagonism. Du Pont, “the last Physiocrat,”
responded to Malthus and defended Physiocracy against early-nineteenth-century economists.23 As a
pre-revolutionary French statesman, Du Pont promoted Physiocracy, espousing that wealth derived
from reproductive agriculture, not “sterile” industry. Physiocrats translated and popularized Franklin’s
works, seeking association with his scientifc authority (MacDonald, 2020; Saricks, 1965; Conlin,
2000; Albeton, 2014; Du Pont, 1923–1927).
Irénée du Pont, not celebrated as a leading chemist or botanist in Europe or America, pros-
pered through opportunism and practical application. He was a Lavoisier protégée, but this intended
bureaucratic, not chemical, succession. Paradoxically, the Du Ponts—unproven in science or manu-
facturing and unwelcome by President Adams—became American industrial leaders. As with botany
and sheep, Irénée exploited the Amiens Peace, French antipathy toward England, and transatlantic
contacts to apply Enlightenment science in America.

Enlightenment Echoes
Transatlantic cosmopolitanism circulated into the nineteenth century. Paris remained a fulcrum for
Atlantic-World science. Visitors—hosted by Enlightenment families liked the Delesserts—included

23
 J. Marc MacDonald

Charles Blagden, Count Rumford, and M.-A. Pictet, after touring Britain collecting for Bibliothèque
Britannique. It published selections from Rumford’s economic soup essay since 1796, allowing Ben-
jamin Delessert and botanist Augustin-Pyramus (1778–1841) to found Paris’ frst dispensary (1800),
which became the Société philanthropique. Its executive included P.-S. du Pont, and Delessert and
Candolle. This pair helped found the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, which difused
knowledge among workers to prevent future revolutions. Similar concerns motivated establishment
of British institutions, marrying philanthropy, science, and industry. Joseph Banks and Henry Cav-
endish became aristocrat proprietors managing Rumford’s Royal Institution. It was modelled on
Anderson’s Institution, Glasgow, founded through John Anderson’s (1726–1796) last will and tes-
tament, to instruct groups excluded from universities. Remarkably, Allan MacInnes notes, “The
Andersonian Institute’s chief inspiration came from across the Atlantic, notably the Public College
of Philadelphia . . . promoted by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 as a more practical place of learning
than the existing American universities.”24 Rumford’s plans to instruct workers, however, miscarried.
Aristocrats feared that difusing knowledge among lower orders would foster revolution, and savant-
fabricants opposed unsanctioned exposure of manufacturing methods (MacDonald, 2015; Brown,
1979; MacInnes, 2015).
Rumford’s courting scientifc society in Paris included intimacy with Marie-Anne Lavoisier. She
rejected marriage proposals from former lover Du Pont (and Blagden’s advances) but married Rum-
ford in 1805. However, relations soured. Mme. Lavoisier-Rumford ruined Rumford’s experiment.
He disrupted her scientifc salons and worked to defeat Lavoisier’s caloric theory, declaring, “I think
I shall live to . . . drive caloric of the stage as the late M. Lavoisier (the author of caloric) drove away
Phlogiston. What a singular destiny for the wife of two Philosophers!!”25 Rumford failed in supplant-
ing caloric and marriage. Fortunately, other relationships formed in Paris produced harmonious
outcomes (Brown, 1979; Merrill, 2018; Bell, 2005; Poirier, 1998).
Cosmopolitanism nurtured an Atlantic-World merino-mania. In 1801, Robert Livingston
became interested in merinos, inspected France’s royal fock (enlarged from Spanish gifts), select-
ing several sheep. Extraordinarily, Livingston attained exportation permission, despite France’s
monopoly protections resembling Britain safeguarding advances, like Boulton and Watt engines.
Since the 1790s, Britain protected manufacturing advantage, restricting emigration and technol-
ogy export, and seized ships trading with French territories. Napoleon’s response, the Continental
System (1806–1814), undermined Britain to stimulate European manufacturing. Jeferson’s reaction,
the Embargo Act (1807), restricted exporting and shipping. Embargoes encumbering transatlantic
exchange were inopportune for breeders seeking applied Enlightenment to improve industries. Liv-
ingston, fnding merinos undervalued in America, collaborated with breeders, including Irénée du
Pont. Over years, Irénée implored his father—in France—to work with Etienne Delessert to send
merinos, believing encouraging American manufacturing would hinder British hegemony. By 1808,
they succeeded transporting merinos, requiring Napoleon and Jeferson’s permission. Jeferson’s role
stoked controversy. Federalist enemies, incensed about harm to New England merchants, attacked
Jeferson’s hypocrisy. He declared innocence, claiming benevolent communication of useful discov-
eries persisted among international scientifc societies despite war. However, the merino situation
was suspect. The Du Ponts’ scheme presented shipments as gifts from Du Pont, a Société d’agriculture
member, to Jeferson, soon leaving ofce. As with departing for America in 1799, the Du Ponts used
science as subterfuge for their transatlantic ambitions (MacDonald, 2020; Dangerfeld, 1960; Du
Pont, 1923–1927; Peskin, 2003; Kasson, 1999; Stapleton, 1987).
Scientifc exchange exposed desires for peace and cosmopolitan paradoxes. Charles Blagden
lauded Livingston’s merino work. They met in Paris in 1802, and in London in 1804, during
futile eforts to restore British-Franco peace. Blagden explained that Joseph Banks applauded
Livingston’s work, believing merinos would exceedingly beneft America. Over decades, Banks
worked diligently, promoting merinos in Britain. Banks championed national autonomy, a goal

24
 Science and the Atlantic World

ironically shared by French and American savants stimulating international exchange and cosmo-
politanism. Agricultural and industrial autonomy and improvement remained critical throughout
difcult decades of war and climatic shifts in the early 1800s (MacDonald, 2015; Dangerfeld,
1960).
Uncertainty soured views of progressive science. Thomas Malthus—rejecting positivism of earlier
generations—employed natural history and mathematics, asserting that population would overwhelm
sustenance, if progress permitted human perfectibility and limitless lifespans. Using uncredited evi-
dence, from Benjamin Franklin, Malthus argued that American population doubled every 25 years.
Mary Shelley (1779–1851), drawing on Franklin, reacted against progressivism by her father—
William Godwin, a titular critic in Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798). Frankenstein’s genesis was an
iconic ghost-story competition within Shelly’s literary circle, sojourning in Geneva. People across
the Atlantic World experienced record-low temperatures, naming 1816 “Year Without Summer.”
Harvest failures created famine, compounding economic depression following the Napoleonic Wars.
Mount Tambora’s 1815 eruption in Oceania caused North-Atlantic climatic chaos, as Franklin spec-
ulated with Laki in 1783. Cold, wet weather forced Shelly’s coterie indoors, facilitating discussions
(on experimental ideas, linked to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, on life’s origins and if it could be manufac-
tured from assembled components reanimated by galvanism) and ultimately Frankenstein; or The Mod-
ern Prometheus (1818). Shelly’s novel evoked Franklin’s science and Kant’s warnings against unbridled
excess. Dr. Frankenstein, refecting European anxieties, feared sailing uncharted waters, being con-
sumed by the immeasurable Atlantic, or having his uncontrollable scientifc creation migrate to the
Americas, propagate excessive descendants, and threaten human existence. Frankenstein’s fctional
Malthusian fears contained seeds of Darwinian evolution (MacDonald, 2017; Malthus, 1798; Shelly,
1994; Wood, 2014).
Atlantic-World natural history collection had extensive resonance. Benjamin Delessert’s musée
botanique hosted international botanists and sponsored transoceanic voyages. Like Joseph Banks’
botanical museum (Soho Square), Delessert’s musée promoted practical science through herbaria,
libraries, gardens, and international networks. Delessert’s immense herbarium was matched only by
those of friends A.-P. Candolle, in Geneva, and William Hooker (1785–1865), director of Royal
Botanical Gardens, Kew. Banksian patronage and botanical-collection tours established Hooker’s
career. In 1825, he visited Delessert in Paris, receiving hospitality, specimens for his herbaria, and
botanical books by Candolle. Hooker’s son Joseph (1817–1911) visited Paris, in 1845, and Delessert
facilitated introduction to Alexander Humboldt. The Delesserts added specimens from Humboldt
and Bonpland’s voyage to their musée (serving them as patrons and bankers) and presumably sent
merinos for Bonpland’s short-lived Santa Ana. Bonpland (remaining in South America for decades)
discussed the colony, in letters to the Delesserts and Humboldt, along with South American botany,
plant and animal cultivation, geographic distribution, and mineralogical paragenesis. Fittingly, in
1837, Bonpland learned from a fellow collector about Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) animal fossil
discoveries, as naturalist onboard the voyaging HMS Beagle. In 1845, Joseph Hooker wrote to Dar-
win wishing he too had visited Paris to meet his hero Humboldt, whose Personal Narrative of a Journey
to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1825) inspired Darwin’s voyage (MacDonald,
2017; Stafeu, 1970; Hoquet, 2014; Bell, 2010).
Science persistently circulated across the Atlantic, like its currents, as HMS Beagle embarked in
1831. Its library held phytogeographical works by Candolle (which later combined with Manthus’
work to infuence Darwin’s discovery) and biogeographical works by Humboldt, which Darwin read
on his voyage. Darwin’s early voyage was dominated by geological and natural history collection in
South America. The voyage—like science in this period and his consequent discovery—while inter-
national and global, remained remarkably interconnected. Atlantic-World science continued (as it
had since voyages in the 1670s infuenced Newton) helping demystify nature, as Darwin sailed south
in the Atlantic contemplating life’s greatest mysteries.

25
 J. Marc MacDonald

Notes
1 Birmingham, Birmingham Central Library (BCL), MS James Watt Papers (JWP) MS 3219/6/2 F. R. Fulton
(Paris) to J. Watt Jr., 5 February 1802.
2 BCL MS 3219/4/13/43 J. Watt Jr. (Nantes) to J. Watt (Birmingham), 17 October 1792.
3 Jean-Francois Dunyach, “William Playfair (1759–1823) Scottish Enlightenment from Below?” in Jacobitism,
Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, eds. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London: Pickering
& Chatto, 2014), 172.
4 Allan I. MacInnes, “Applied Enlightenment: Its Scottish Limitation in the Eighteenth Century,” in The
Enlightenment in Scotland: National and International Perspectives, eds. Jean-Francois Dunyach and Ann Thom-
son (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), 22.
5 Isaac Newton, The Principia: The Authoritative Translation: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, ed. and trans.
I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, and Julia Budenz (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999), 475.
6 Voltaire (Bruxelles) à P.-L de Maupertuis, 10 août 1741. Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. and trans. Theodore
Besterman (Paris: Gallimard, 1765), 523.
7 Voltaire, Candide; or Optimism, trans. John Butt (London: Penguin, 1947), 110.
8 James Watt (1736–1819), Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), and Thomas Day (1748–1789). Richard Lovell
Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq, ed. Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols.
(London: R. Hunter, 1820), vol. 1: 185.
9 P.-S. du Pont (Paris) à B. Franklin, 10 mai 1768. Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, eds.
William B. Willcox et al., 41 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–2014), vol. 15: 118.
10 C. Blagden (Soho Square) to J. Banks (Spring Grove), 23 August [1783]. Joseph Banks, Scientifc Correspon-
dence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765–1820 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), vol. 2: 124–125.
11 Edmond Charles Genet and Benjamin Silliman, Vindication of Mr. E.C. Genet’s Memorial on the Upward Forces
of Fluid (New Haven: T.G. Woodward, 1827), 18.
12 Matthew Boulton (London) to Matthew Robinson Boulton [Paris], January 1788. Quoted in Robinson,
“The Lunar Society,” 170.
13 BCL MS 3219/4/98. A. Guyot (Paris) to J. Watt (Birmingham), 24 May 1787.
14 1230 A. Lavoisier à B. Franklin (Philadelphie) 2 février 1790. Antoine Lavoisier, Oeuvres de Lavoisier—
Correspondance Volume VI (1789–1791), ed. Patrice Bret (Paris: Académie des sciences, 1997), 110.
15 BCL MS 3219/4/13/30 J. Watt jnr (Paris) to J. Watt (Birmingham), 22 March 1792.
16 A. Lavoisier à B. Franklin, 2 février 1790. Lavoisier, Oeuvres de Lavoisier, 110.
17 BCL MS 3219/4/129 J. Watt jnr (Soho) to S. Delessert (New York), 10 September 1794.
18 P.-S. du Pont, “(Prospectus) Printing Ofce of du Pont Deputé de Nemours à l’Assemblée Nationale,” 8
June 1791. Eleuthere Irénée du Pont, Life of Eleuthére Irénée du Pont from Contemporary Correspondence, ed. and
trans. Bessie Gardner Du Pont, 12 vols (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1923–1927), vol. 1: 144.
19 J. Adams (Quincy) to Timothy Pickering, 16 September 1798. National Archives. Founders Online, https://
founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2985 [Accessed 20 September 2021].
20 MS Winterthur 2–1095. DPDN 2/A/6. P.-S. du Pont de Nemours (Paris) à Son Excellence Thomas Jef-
ferson Président du Etats unis, 23 juillet 1808. [Draft].
21 Voltaire, Candide, 82.
22 Andrew J. B. Fagal, “The Mills of Liberty: Foreign Capital, Government Contracts, and the Establishment
of DuPont, 1790–1820,” Enterprise & Society, 19:2 (2018): 344.
23 Manuela Albeton, National Identity and the Agrarian Republic: The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between
America and France (1750–1830) (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 257.
24 MacInnes, “Applied Enlightenment,” 37.
25 Rauner Special Collection Library, Rumford Collection MS 5A 001825 B. Thompson (Paris) to Lady Vis-
countess Palmerston (London), 8 February 1804. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA.

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29
 2
SCIENCE AND THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION
Sarah E. Naramore

Introduction

The United States of America sympathize in our grief, for his name gave a splendor to the
American character, and the friends of humanity in distant parts of the world, unite with us
in lamenting our common loss,—for he belonged to the whole human race.
(Rush 1796, 5)

When American physician Benjamin Rush set out to eulogize his friend David Rittenhouse, he not
only remembered a single person but used the opportunity to make a statement about the idealized
American man of science. Rittenhouse made an impressive subject. During his lifetime, Rittenhouse
was an astronomer, supporter of independence, instrument-maker, and president of the American
Philosophical Society, the country’s premier scientifc institution. As indicated by Rush, this posi-
tion made Rittenhouse a fgure of political importance because of and not incidental to his scientifc
reputation.1 This combination of patriotism and science as well as Rittenhouse’s ordinary family
background made him an idea representation of the American man of science in the 1790s. He was
intelligent, interested in the common good, and not aristocratic. These attributes, in Rush’s telling,
would help create a new and strong scientifc tradition.
Natural knowledge—or science—is not produced in a vacuum. This is especially the case when
we consider the way science is organized (who does the work) and how that work is valued (empiri-
cal, experimental, or theoretical knowledge). The American Revolution and War for Independence
are not exceptions to this trend, as the Rittenhouse eulogy emphasizes. The late eighteenth century
dramatically changed the social and political structures of North American society, when 13 of Brit-
ain’s colonies went to war for independence and created the United States. These political changes in
turn afected the manner in which natural knowledge was produced and how it was understood by
contemporaries. The aims of American science to meet the questions and needs of a young republi-
can empire rather than those of colonies became evident even as the revolution was underway. Inter-
est in the West drove naturalists, surveyors, and geologists to claim new spaces. The urbanizing East
provided opportunities for new manufacturing and “useful knowledge” to put scientifc principles
to work. American institutions modeled themselves after those in Europe but with subtle republi-
can changes, like the abandonment of Latin or emphasis on useful and empirical information in an
age of grand theories. In short, the era of the American Revolution created a new self-consciously

30 DOI: 10.4324/9781003112396-4
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 CHAPTER III
THE PATH OF THE PLAY

T HE story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is

a curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see
life in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back
only half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who
adopted the word Expressionism to describe their aim and
technique. It has hung potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of
the more advanced and philosophic designers and directors of the
new stagecraft, a waiting stimulus to the playwrights. As an
unconscious impulse to reach beyond the limits of Realism its
beginnings are to be traced back twenty, thirty, almost forty years in
the work of some of Europe’s ablest realists.
The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the
realistic theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of
Realism, and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and
towards an intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come
out of Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that
is far on the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency
is clearly marked in The Wild Duck (1884) and develops gradually
through The Master Builder (1892) to completion in When We Dead
Awaken (1899). Strindberg’s Towards Damascus (1898) carries
strong hints of the spiritual intensity which threatened the outer
reality of so many of Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in
Swanwhite and The Dream Play, he is well embarked on a type of
non-realistic drama which finds a bizarre culmination in The Spook
Sonata in 1907.
Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and
Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though
neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced
in Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of
Wedekind is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in
the narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method
throughout. Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with The Seagull, keeps to a
Realism of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his
The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have
described, its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism.
Wedekind’s first play, the thesis-drama The Awakening of Spring,
written in 1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and
his sense of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he
produced in the two parts of Lulu—Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box—
dramas horrifically actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at
the same time so intense psychologically and so sharply defined and
apt in action that their Realism treads close on the boundaries which
Expressionism has over-passed.
There is a curious distinction in end and means between such
plays as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and
the newer expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The
earlier plays indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but
their language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound
to the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The
newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in
speech as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a
harmonious wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of
Der Sturm group, the language is so completely free from the bonds
of actuality that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé
depending on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished
piece of Expressionism, The Hairy Ape, the playwright strikes a
happy medium with speech which is realistic and characteristic in
idiom but which is developed in idea, intensity and length of
utterance clean past the possibilities of the people of the play.
Occasionally you find a pseudo-expressionist piece like Vatermord,
by Arnold Bronnen, whose action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic
—but whose language is often far from natural. This piece was first
produced in Berlin in the summer of 1922 when the mind of the
German capital could safely be described as neurotic. Its subject
matter—the incest and patricide of the Œdipus complex, with a little
adventitious homosexuality, all circling about a boy in his ’teens—
produced a stormy session between adherents and opponents, a
session finally ended by the Schutzpolizei with rifles and the
command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The run which followed
at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max Reinhardt may be
explained by the notorious subject matter, but there were critics to
assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power as well as
novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the stage from
an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs the
passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed
version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting
dash to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a
sentence:
I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /

Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s

dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise

I
I bloom
Before such an arrangement of words The Spook Sonata seems
almost mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in
the most matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad
woman who always sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot
when she is not talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the
ideas that stagger and affright you, the molding minds, the walking
Dead, the cook who draws all the nourishment out of the food before
she serves it, the terrible relations of young and old; all of them are
things having faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a
horrible clarity.
To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say
nothing of stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires
all three Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the
nauseating sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which
characterize the work of most of those who labeled themselves
expressionists in Germany during the past few years, match
Strindberg at his unhappiest, while the vigor with which they drive
their ideas forth in speech far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the
narrow sense in which such plays define it, is a violent storm of
emotion beating up from the unconscious mind. It is no more than
the waves which shatter themselves on the shore of our conscious
existence, only a distorted hint of the deep and mysterious sea of the
unconscious. Expressionism, as we have so far known it, is a
meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the unconscious, and the
meeting is startling indeed.
Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded,
as is Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the
best of the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—
were produced in leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden
and of Frankfort, and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by
the summer of 1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and
long-suffering repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and
Strindberg were produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure
expressionists, the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the
lesser Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act
opera, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, a composition by Paul
Hindemith on a playlet by the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was
being played.
This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points
an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of
Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite
olden time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title,
Murderer, Hope of Women. The emotion of the scenes, on the other
hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background
of color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same
time the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat
arbitrary, feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.
 A setting by Ludwig Sievert for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, an
expressionistic opera by Kokoschka. Ramps lead from the center of
the stage to raised platforms right and left. Dark walls rise at the back,
broken by triangular entrances at either side and by a grilled doorway
in the center, flanked by tall triangular pylons of red-orange.

Kokoschka himself designed a setting for Mörder, Hoffnung der

Frauen when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden
as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting,
hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather
badly executed. The pages of Die Neue Schaubühne have shown
several other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in
the more widely known productions these pieces have been lucky
enough to fall into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of
Dresden and Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from
Linnebach’s production of Hasenclever’s Jenseits in Dresden show a
simple and effective use of light and shadow and of little else, with
certain necessary elements of design projected by a sort of magic-
lantern technique upon the background of dome or curtain. In actual
performance Sievert’s setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and
arresting with dark surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the
feminine element dominant in the piece, and with a successful, if not
very subtle, use of red and red-orange on the pylon surfaces
guarding the prison door. The direction of the singers and chorus,
under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert, is a thoroughly expressive part of
music and setting.
Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers
have failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory,
they have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the
conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and
they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising
things. The most notable of the plays thus produced, Masse-
Mensch, deserves a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser
works by Karel Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater,
where it was first produced, the other read in a German translation.
In the first, The Insect Comedy, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic
artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque
piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer
methods in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as
symbolized in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog
finds a young man wandering in the woods, and puts him
comfortably to sleep on a grassy bank after a little talk with an
absurdly pedantical entomologist. He sleeps through the three
succeeding acts surrounded and occasionally disturbed by figures of
insects grown life-size. The first act passes with the brilliant
butterflies, who stand for the heedless, unproductive men and
women of the social and pseudo-artistic worlds with time for only
chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles beneath them. In the
production of this scene, the régisseur, K. H. Hilar, keeps the players
moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads lightly undulating, with
the restlessness of the antennæed world, while high around the back
of the scene various of the brightly costumed insects constantly
dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.
In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their
burrows on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous
profiteers and misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad
touch of comedy. A beetle has been murdering passing insects and
dragging their bodies down below for his wife to hoard. There enters
The Parasite, a tramp bug. He does not work. Why should he? He
has only to wait for the busy capitalists of his world to fill their
larders. Then, when the time comes, he will rise—or more accurately
descend—and the wealth of the world will be his. He ducks into the
beetle’s hole, and in a few moments he comes up, a swollen and
jovial Communist, dancing in glee. The ever-present prompter’s box
serves conveniently for one of the holes, and the background of
green and black woods is projected instead of painted; otherwise
there is little of interest in the staging of this scene.
The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers,
tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of
superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more
privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army
of ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a
background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its
surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts. A
glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and
smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture.
Presently there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War
threatens. The ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their
march. The officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier
phrases of command; from the back they philosophize and give
orders in good old Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict
and the lordship of a new race of ants.
The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis
of an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and
hopefully conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance
with other short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human
visitor. This end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring
vein through the introduction of a group of wanderers who come
upon the dead body, gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a
moment, and then pass on, singing, upon the ever-creative way of
the peasant.
R. U. R., Karel Capek’s other play (in German, W. U. R.) is a tale
of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his
earlier days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times
philosophic. The letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of
a firm engaged in manufacturing “Roboters,” or workmen stamped
out and given life by a machine. After a not very skilful exposition of
the nature of this new device for lightening the world’s work, the play
passes on to show the degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing
to labor. The “Roboters” are given pain in order to remind them not to
be careless and break their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire
something not unlike a soul. Presently comes a consciousness of
their station and their power. They rise and kill all mankind—except
one man. Later they find to their dismay that the secret formula of
the materials from which they were stamped out has been
destroyed. They wear out in twenty years. And there will be an end.
The last act shows their frantic appeal for a way to perpetuate
themselves. The one man finds it at last when he recognizes love
awakening in a male and a female “Roboter.” The process of
mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that Anatole
France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.
None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism
very far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough.
Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe that
there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a starlike
gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a morbid
vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to
Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and
significant a play as The Hairy Ape—a play that grows greater in the
perspective of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look
forward.
In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a
pictorial atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They
have gone more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They
have had a disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a
time before Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the
writer; and where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the
unhealthiness, of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in
color or design than it would be if it took the form of words. And they
have had behind them the history and the example of the movement
in art which we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows
logically into Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh,
Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp.
The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music.
And yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from
actuality in its materials, has made few and not very successful
attempts at the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has
been by very nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as
program music, it approached the suggestion of the actual. For the
rest, it has soared, soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of
spiritual reality. Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of
music, the way towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the
playwright is that he must always feel the pull of the actual life about
him; he must make his drama out of human beings and not out of
pure vision or pure emotional response. The world about him is
corrupt and corrupting outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful
within. He cannot, like the musician, leap away from its
entanglements by putting his hands to an instrument of abstract art.
But he can gain a certain release by forswearing as much as
possible the reproduction of the actual.
 CHAPTER IV
BLACK CURTAINS

T O-DAY we are thinking more and more of the future of the

theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of
production, of direction and the actor.
If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the
past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from
the maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of
success, we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads
of yesterday.
If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to
advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must
try to understand the present state of the art of theatrical production,
and the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A
share of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with
America; but the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the
past is German.
The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great
plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were
great theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with
Realism. Its greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—
were created in small countries almost outside the consciousness of
the nineteenth century theater. This was natural enough. Realistic
plays were, in the last analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They
were not theatrical. They did not spring out of the theater. Instead
they altered the theater to suit their needs. The theater that they
altered most was the German theater, and there the dramas of the
Scandinavians found their best audience.
But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at
the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for
presenting these plays. Its directors and its artists went on
experimenting. They had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the
romantic and classic periods. They put their brains and their
machines at work upon these pieces, as well as upon the realistic,
and soon they had developed methods of production for non-realistic
plays quite as admirable for the purpose as any of their tricks for
lifting the fourth wall before our very eyes. The German theatrical
organization became more and more restive under the realistic plays
and the old “classics.” It was preparing for something new. The
Zeitgeist was working. Soon it began to work upon the playwrights.
There came abortive beginnings in the expressionist plays I have
written about in the last chapter. And the German theater went on—
and goes on—experimenting.
Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the
Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only
Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America
experimented ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is,
there we are very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the
future. The expressionist drama, like every school of drama except
the realistic, is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as
much as it is a product of society in its mind and materials.
The story of the artistic development of the German theater past
the realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly
complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe
Appia, and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made
Realism still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism
of Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a
pregnant actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a
new imagination.
The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest
on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be
successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater
were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an
obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to
be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more
beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to
achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater
artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether
working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the
atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on
three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in visually
dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified the stage
picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as little as
possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from the
meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play),
or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an
adroit use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—
along the lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail
suggested the nature of the whole. The base of a huge column made
the audience visualize for itself the size of the building. Half an arch
springing off into darkness created the impression of a great vaulted
structure. Finally came a synthesis of all the available and
appropriate forces of the theater, and of all the qualities of the play;
this implying for the director the establishment of a certain apt
rhythm in the performance.
This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the
German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of
mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us
for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It
has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer
theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred
Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like
Reinhardt’s Sumurûn; and, at last, through the exceptional work of
our own artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to
directors of little theaters—who have given them their opportunities
or amplified their conceptions.
Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard
minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the
Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and
experiment leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a
theater cut off from the whole peep-hole convention of the
proscenium and the fourth wall.
 The Palace: a setting by Hans Strohbach for Der Traum, ein Leben, a
fantasy by Calderon. Columns of dull gold, painted to suggest a spiral
shape, are spaced against a black curtain, which is later drawn aside
to reveal a blood-red sky. In the foreground a group of plotting
Orientals.

The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few

talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very
greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German
theater. Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and
duchies, there had always been many centers of artistic life, each
about a court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial
development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city,
and directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the
larger cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public
institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment,
their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory
system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or
there in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing
a permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays,
old and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters
retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in
pocketbook and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were
organizations of playgoers among the middle and lower classes,
such as the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience
of subscribers to good work in the theater. Between endowment and
the security of a permanent audience, it was possible for these
German theaters to give uncommonly fine performances at
uncommonly low prices.
Along with the development of new methods in production went a
good deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in
theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and
Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to
improve the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so
marked as in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are
old indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones
continue the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by
three or four shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies
are not so good to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the
awkwardness of these shelves or Rangen, as they are termed in
German, produced an opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for
their elimination and for the substitution of an amphitheater type of
house with no balconies and with a steeper floor to allow of better
sight-lines. The fight of Ring vs. Rang has resulted in several
auditoriums designed by Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and
the Künstler, for example, in Munich, the slant of whose floors is far
too sharp; from the upper rows, the players are seen as in some far-
off pit. The slant is greater than necessary, and absolutely straight;
the practice of the American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the
floor in a gradually increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A
compromise between Rang and Ring might be found in a
development of the American house with only one balcony; a more
steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily have would thus bring two
amphitheaters or Rings into a single auditorium. Germany
possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in the
Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the
Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of
the Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of
the best features of the German houses. The chairs are almost
always too thinly padded; but the elimination of aisles more than
compensates. The whole audience is united in a single responsive
body. And because each row is a little wider than ours and the side
walls of the auditoriums are liberally supplied with doors, the
audience empties out more quickly than ours and in an orderly
manner that puts American fire-regulations to shame. I have seen
the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne walk out in a single
minute. It takes from three to four for a small theater in New York,
seating only six hundred, to clear itself.
A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German
theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal attitude
of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new things
in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to present to
the public every smallest reform in setting or theater that the world
has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of production
progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a few theaters
will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a similar way
you discover that the outstanding work of design before the war was
done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose
names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each
responsible for only a few productions.
One thing further you may learn about the past of the German
movement, even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922.
And that is that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has
been very far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous
ear; only the Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near
approach. But his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate
artists except Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer
and Schongauer are celebrated as etchers rather than as painters.
That should have been caution enough for those of us who had to
study the German stage at the distance of the half-tone. The fact of
the matter is that the German is a splendid theorist, a man of large
conceptions, and that therefore in the theater he has been able to
design settings of simple and excellent proportions, which create a
good effect in black-and-white. It is his sense of color that is at fault.
Stern, with the mixture of the Oriental in his blood which did so much
for Bakst, and some of the artists from Vienna and the South brought
something to the stage besides dramatic imagination and sense of
proportion. The test of color downs the rest.
When we think of the future of the German theater we must
naturally think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany
has been shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen
from dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The
effect of this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four
years of danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall,
which you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until
the soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back
into the Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women
behind the front believed that their forces were victorious. It is
possible for the theater to go on physically under almost any
conditions of privation; but you must reckon spiritually with an
extraordinary state of the public mind when you prophesy the future
of the German theater. Two things, perhaps, make optimism
possible. One: Germany and the German people have gone through
terrible things before; there was the Thirty Years War. Two: Germany
still has the wonderfully trained audience of pre-war days; it was a
broad democratic audience, and no shift in economic circumstances
can destroy so large a part of the cultured playgoers as war-poverty
has done in England, in France, and even to some extent in
America.
War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin
theater. Here we find another example of the exchange of ideals and
personalities which has often been noted between victor and
vanquished. Just as America has been Prussianized in its attitude
towards the foreigner and the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has
adopted many of the most evil features of the American theatrical
system. Within three years of the close of hostilities Berlin was being
rapidly Broadway-ized. Repertory was practically dead at all but
three or four theaters. Facing economic difficulties and the
competition of the movies for the services of the actors, Berlin found
it was a large enough city to support long runs for exceptionally great
or exceptionally mediocre plays. Even the three theaters that
Reinhardt formerly directed broke from repertory, and where they
had once shown ten or a dozen productions in two weeks, they
showed only three or (counting Sunday matinees of some old
favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory continues in the State and
City theaters and even in private ventures; but many artistic
playhouses are badly crippled by the economic troubles of the
nation, and some are forced to close down.
There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In
fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies that I
saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen cases
every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In
Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices
ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred
and twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity
of the production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty
marks to seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.
At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to
balance. The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its
expenditures. That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as
much of the talk of elaborate machinery and handsome productions
in pre-war days might suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a
reliance on the genius of design instead of elaboration of mechanics
are the vital needs in stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine
things in the simplifying of production, and it has done them in spite
of the temptations of bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to
do now through poverty is a matter for real hope.
 The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find
an excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness
of spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern
directors and designers to economize spiritually as well as
economically. The results have been seen in some of our dry,
meager “little theater” productions, full of bare formalism—a sort of
“simplism” that has no place in any art, let alone in the live, varied,
rich, and vigorous theater. Occasionally a German artist of real talent
falls into this thin manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted Towards
Damascus at the Frankfort Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is
physically interesting, but he has given his settings a mean, arid,
spiritually poverty-stricken appearance which is never beautiful, and
does not express in the least the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.
The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on
repertory. They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as
much as the worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him
the daylight hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new
pieces if repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a
repertory theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon
Broadway, and put in his days in front of the camera, as ours often
does. But—and this is highly important—the German actor has been
trained in a school of ideals and self-expression which makes him
demand more than the movies can give him. He must have some
sort of serious work in the theater, and he is finding it more and more
in special summer engagements or Festspiele. Thus many of the
greatest of the nation’s players are often assembled at salaries
which, by comparison with their motion picture earnings, are hardly
salaries at all.
There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are
intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people
live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside
themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in
Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and
economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human
spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this
lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection and
gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen on
the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out of
itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands an
echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and
more despicable Richard III than Shakespeare ever imagined. It
suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in Masse-Mensch at
the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of the
Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black
curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again
and again. Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a
background of emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of
spiritual blackness. The only colors to break the pall are the red of
blood, and the blue that strikes across the black a symbol of a
sinister cruelty.
Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the
Russian Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway
and in our “little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in
Germany” on the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and
more significant. If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or
if they were opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant
of nothing more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments
with a formal stage. Perhaps bunte Vorhänge are coming. Perhaps it
is always a little dark before dawn.
 CHAPTER V
THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES

T HERE are many things upon the German stage besides black
dawn. The twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past
of the new stagecraft lagging superfluous.
Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in
Frankfort where one of the three significant pairs of German
directors and artists labors, I have seen Peer Gynt given as
incompetently as any patron of an American small-town stock
company could demand. The settings were hideous; the same badly
painted backdrop served for two or three scenes in different
localities; the revolving stage rumbled noisily and did nothing to
shorten intermissions. While the orchestra played Grieg’s
introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark, waiting
actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were
dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky
shoes. At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like
thunder. Through as many scenes as could be endured, the same
players who gave a sharp, almost electric performance of Maria
Stuart the next night, acted Peer Gynt dully and sloppily to a running
fire of assistance from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking,
incidentally, that the souffleur, as he is euphemistically called, is no
necessity in the repertory theater. He may give a complete and
studied reading of the text one lap ahead of the actors in the
Grosses Schauspielhaus, the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the
Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing Theater in Berlin, and a dozen
other first-class theaters; but you don’t hear his voice in the State
Schauspielhaus of Berlin under Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-
Colombier in Paris, or during a performance of Masse-Mensch at the
Volksbühne.