Sutton vs. Jacob: Was John Desaguliers a Prophet of Industrialization?

It’s a serious question. We come to it from my earlier look at Simon Schaffer’s “Enlightened Automata” (1999), in which he claimed that “Some historians still deny that natural philosophies ‘fed the fires of the industrial revolution.’ Others more convincingly indicate the intimate connections between the machinery of natural philosophers’ concerns and that of the new entrepreneurs and projects.” He specifically identified Geoffrey Sutton in the first camp, and Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart in the second.

Since the 1980s Jacob and Stewart have both consistently argued that the intellectual development of the sciences, the technical development of machines, and the economic development of industry were closely intertwined phenomena, particularly in Britain where the Industrial Revolution commenced. In 2004 they jointly published Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851, which offered an overview of their general argument. Jacob’s new book, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850 continues her multi-decadal mission.

Geoffrey Sutton’s Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment was published in 1995, but it is based on a dissertation he finished at Princeton in 1982. By the time it came out, Sutton was already operating on the fringes of academic history, and would not (to the best of my knowledge) produce further research.

Sutton allowed, “Enlightened thinkers believed that the application of the methods and techniques of science theory could reform political and economic thought, just as the applied fruits of scientific physics and chemistry could improve the human condition” (5). But the focus of his book was on how natural philosophical demonstration and disputation had their primary influence in polite, rather than practical, environments in 17th and 18th-century France.

There is no necessary conflict between at least the rudiments of the Jacob-Stewart and Sutton points of view. It is perfectly possible for the sciences to have been integrated into both practical and polite cultures. And, in fact, if we follow Schaffer’s specific citation in Sutton, we find that, in this instance, we are actually dealing with a more specific disagreement concerning how best to interpret the significance of certain lectures offered by John Desaguliers (1683–1744).

However, as we will see, this disagreement is one that points to larger historiographical problems.

Desaguliers is not really a well-known figure among those with a casual interest in the history of science. But, as one of the key acolytes of Isaac Newton, he is ubiquitous in professional histories of the development of the sciences in the 18th century. For Jacob, he is of particular interest as one of the early figures in the proliferation of public lectures on the new experimental and mechanical sciences, and, especially, as someone with an interest in applying philosophical knowledge to practical problems.

According to Jacob in her book The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), “The early eighteenth-century Newtonians rendered their science comprehensible to an audience that could be either genteel and educated or commercial and practical” (141). And the latter audience was critically important: “The interests of men who wished to weigh and move goods, to improve water transportation, to drain fens or remove the damp from mines dictated the format of the earliest lectures” (142).

No audience was expected to be able to apply the mathematics of Newtonian science. When Desaguliers began offering courses in 1713 “to such as are altogether unskilled in Mathematics,” he discussed the numerous applications of essential mechanical principles to practical problems, ranging from the functioning of mechanical engines to “the operations of levers, weights, pulleys, and the use of wedges,” to the ballistics of cannonballs and bullets. “Specific attention,” Jacob noted, “was given to using mechanical principles in order to augment human strength, and to applying mechanical principles to water flow and control” (143).

Desaguliers’s widely read two-volume book, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734/1744), also featured the applications of mechanics to practical examples. In Jacob’s view, “The economic vision of the text is surprisingly consonant with the basic principles around which the Industrial Revolution later occurred” (144). And, indeed, in the long run, the effects of such lectures gave rise to a culture capable of supporting the industrialization process (141):

…by the 1790s the linkage between scientific knowledge and industrial application had become commonplace. Indeed by that time the scientific knowledge of applied mechanics may have proved determining when decisions involving the introduction of new machinery, at considerable capital risk, had to be taken promptly and confidently…. By the 1790s we can find merchants who were able to correct the complex drawing plans of hired engineers. They were able to do so because two or more generations of scientific educators had plied their trade from the London coffeehouses to the valleys of Derbyshire.

Jacob continued to point to the significance of Desaguliers, even in short works such as her entry on “Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution” in John Heilbron’s Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (2003).

However, this significance attributed to Desaguliers was resisted by Sutton. Citing Jacob, he wrote (211–212): 

Much has recently been made of the importance of Desaguliers’s lectures for the development of a sort of mechanical consciousness, first in Great Britain and then Holland. This familiarity with machines allegedly fed the fires of the industrial revolution. One suspects that, as with the steam engine, cause and effect were more important in the other direction: Technology supplied the material for analysis by natural philosophers. It is certainly true that Desaguliers devoted several lectures to machines, although his analysis did not proceed beyond the application of the law of the lever—the observation that the speed with which a weight is raised is inversely proportional to the power that raises it. Yet what he analyzed were existing machines; he tried to explain how it was that men or horses might pull heavy loads in carts that rode on steel wheels turning on iron rails. Although he expressed fascination from the time of his early lectures with inefficient, fire-powered Newcomen engines, he provided more significant arguments concerning the limitations on work that men or horses could complete in a day. These arguments came only in response to reckless claims that machinery could accomplish an unreasonable multiplication of effort, and this only in the last year or so of his career. It is ironic that his definition of these limits might seem to set the stage for the industrial revolution: The great motor of industrialization was the steam engine, capable of delivering more power than men or horses ever could. Apart from standard analyses of simple machines, available from the early years of the seventeenth century, Desaguliers’s lectures generally explored the transmission of human or animal power rather than the application of great powers mechanically produced.

Sutton went on to note that Desaguliers’s lectures were not substantially different from those offered in other parts of Europe, which does not help to explain the “differential rates of industrialization” in Europe.

Of course, the particular problem of differential rates of industrialization is a problem that has long interested Jacob. Jacob argued in Cultural Meaning that, while a “large number of provincial literary and natural philosophical societies … spread all over France in the course of the century and in consequence made scientific knowledge available on an unprecedented scale,” the “aristocratic domination in those societies hardly permitted the kind of gentlemanly zeal for practical science that we see in late eighteenth-century Derbyshire or Birmingham.” Moreover, she pointed to studies that argued that “the contrast between French and British economic development” had, in any event, been overdrawn (202).

In her Oxford Companion piece Jacob pointed to “guild and other restrictions” inhibiting the French in developing “scientific instruments and technically advanced machinery,” and noted the delay in French universities adopting Newtonian science. In The First Knowledge Economy, Jacob has continued to concern herself with the failure of France to industrialize early in spite of its technical culture, and, crucially, in spite of widespread concern there over British prowess. In view of her emphasis on the peculiarly broad British “zeal” for practical culture, one might suppose that Sutton’s emphasis on the more genteel culture surrounding the sciences in France actually fits the bill of her argument.

Looking at the substance of Sutton’s criticism, though, there does indeed seem to be a large gap between the fairly thin overlap between the sciences and practical culture that we can definitely identify with Desaguliers, and the later, much more intense process of industrialization, the inauguration of which is supposed to have depended crucially on the culture Desaguliers represented.

Practical culture, and even an intense concern with “projects” and “improvements,” are not, of course, the same as industrialization, or even necessarily anticipatory of it. In our next post we will look more closely at the concept of “proto-industrialization” and Jacob’s position with respect to it.