scholarly journals Josiah Wedgwood’s portrait medallions of Fellows of the Royal Society

1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-53 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ceramic Material ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
British Broadcasting Corporation ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Metallic Oxides ◽  
Television Programme ◽  
Public Museums ◽  
Pure White

Thanks to the invention of photography, the film and now the perfection of television, the ordinary citizen, reading his illustrated newspaper, viewing a cinema film or television programme can see and recognize the features of many of the Fellows of the Royal Society. The television and radio programmes produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation, to celebrate the tercentenary of the Royal Society enabled us to see and hear them and to view the results of their scientific researches. Earlier generations were not so fortunate. Prior to the latter decades of the eighteenth century only a few of our ancestors could see the features of the Fellows in paintings or sculptured busts. Even these were few and far between, and could be seen only in private family collections, in art galleries, or in public museums. Josiah W edgwood’s Invention of Jasper—an Artistic Triumph In 1774 Wedgwood produced a ceramic material which he called jasper which enabled him to reproduce quite cheaply perfect portrait medallions. Wedgwood’s jasper, a close-grained stoneware body of exquisite beauty and delicacy, was the result of years of patient and prolonged experiments at his Etruria Works. It was capable of being stained throughout its substance with metallic oxides and the colour most in demand was soon known as ‘Wedgwood Blue’. Other colours used by Wedgwood in his manufacture of the medallions were green, lavender, sage, lilac and yellow. The actual portraits were usually of pure white jasper, which was almost translucent against a black or coloured background.

The woman who could not sing “Happy Birthday”: couple psychoanalysis at the baby grand piano

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-98
Author(s):  
Brett Kahr
Keyword(s):  
British Broadcasting Corporation ◽  
Happy Birthday ◽  
Television Programme ◽  
Grand Piano

This article describes the author’s work as a presenter on the four-part British Broadcasting Corporation television programme, 'Making Slough Happy', in which he used music and singing for therapeutic purposes. In particular, he offers a glimpse into how he helped a woman, gripped by long-standing vocal inhibitions, to achieve her dream of singing “Happy Birthday” to her child.

Recording the Aloes at Chelsea - a singular solution to a difficult problem

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Singular Solution ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
General Series ◽  
History Of

In the Royal Society archives there is a collection of drawings of Aloes and other plants, made by two of the great botanical artists of the eighteenth century - Georg Dionysius Ehret and Jacob van Huysum. Although the Manuscripts General Series Catalogue records this manuscript only as a ‘Volume of 35 botanical paintings by Georg Dionysius Ehret’ of unknown provenance, the manuscript catalogue of the Arundel and other manuscripts, said to be the work of Jonas Dryander (1748-1810), provides the first clue linking these drawings to the two artists, and to the important collection of Aloes growing at that time in the Society of Apothecaries Physic Garden at Chelsea'. The history of the commissioning of the drawings is told briefly in the Journal Books of the Royal Society, and in the Minutes of Council, but the significance of these lovely and important drawings has been almost completely overlooked.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the TermAnthropocene

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Morton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Earth’S Crust ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Radioactive Materials ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
Huge Data ◽  
Earth's Crust ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
Geological Period

Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the termAnthropocene. In case we need reminding,Anthropocenenames the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000.1In 1945, there occurred “The Great Acceleration,” a huge data spike in the graph of human involvement in Earth systems. (The title’s Kubrick joke stems from the crustal deposition of radioactive materials since 1945.) Like Marx, Crutzen sees the steam engine as iconic. As this is written, geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz are convincing the Royal Society of Geologists to make the term official.

‘Your very obliging correspondence’: the Royal Society and the provincial Republic of Letters in Georgian Lincolnshire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Sims
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
International Networks ◽  
Research Fields

It has been said that the Royal Society of the eighteenth century was in decline. The ground-breaking experimentation of the Restoration period was long gone, to be followed by talk rather than action, and the pages of Philosophical Transactions were filled with papers by provincial clergymen on natural curiosities and antiquities. But the links between the Royal Society and the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (SGS)—founded in 1712 and still in existence as the country's longest-lived provincial learned society—show a connection not just between city and country, but between scientific and antiquarian research, fields that had not yet assumed their distinct modern forms. A fruitful correspondence existed between the two societies for several decades in the first half of the century, and a number of Fellows (including Newton) became honorary members of the SGS. In this article, I show that the SGS did not simply rely on its metropolitan connections for intellectual sustenance, but rather, that this joint association allowed it to flourish as a dynamic society that cultivated international networks.

Martin Folkes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science ◽  
Definition Of

In 1750, Martin Folkes became the only individual who was President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he contributed to efforts to unite both organizations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, this chapter outlines the book’s analysis of the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organizations in the early Georgian era in the context of Folkes’s life and letters. While it is normally assumed that natural philosophy and antiquarianism are disciplines that were fast becoming disconnected in this period, this work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. Using Folkes’s life and letters, this biography will examine the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and sciences in early Georgian Britain and reassess the extent to which the separation of these ‘two cultures’ developed in this era. It will also consider to what extent Folkes continued the Newtonian programme in mathematics, optics, and astronomy on the Continent. In this manner, the work will refine its definition of Newtonianism and its scope in the early eighteenth century, elucidating and reclaiming the vibrant research programme that Folkes promoted in the period of English science least well understood between the age of Francis Bacon and the present.

Exciting an Emulation

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-60
Author(s):  
Anton Howes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
Government Revenue

This chapter discusses the Royal Society of Arts' promotion of commerce. It traces trade in the eighteenth century, which was closely tied to the coercive power of the state and was one of the principal sources of government revenue. It also describes trade as a tool for enriching a country at the expense of its neighbors, emphasizing the belief among rulers and politicians across Europe that it was essential to maximize a country's stock of specie. The chapter explains mercantilism as an attitude towards trade in which rivals were made to pay for exports, while as little as possible were spent on foreign imports. It also points out how mercantilist attitudes had geopolitical repercussions.

scholarly journals The preparation of eye-preserving glass for spectacles

1914 ◽  
Vol 214 (509-522) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Molten Glass ◽  
Ultra Violet ◽  
Metallic Oxides ◽  
Infra Red ◽  
Glass Plates ◽  
Glass Workers ◽  
The Invisible

Since March, 1909--in connection with the Glass Workers' Cataract Committee of the Royal Society--I have been experimenting on the effect of adding various metallic oxides to the constituents of glass in order to cut off the invisible rays at the ultra-violet and the infra-red ends of the spectrum. The work has been done chiefly in my own laboratory. I have been aided by Mr. Harry Powell, of the Whitefriars Glass Works, who prepared several pots of coloured glass from my formulae on a much larger scale than could be made outside a glass works. From these glasses cylinders and sheets were made. The main object of this research is to prepare a glass which will cut off those rays from highly heated molten glass, which damage the eyes of workmen, without obscuring too much light or materially affecting the colours of objects seen through the glass when fashioned into spectacles, but the work necessitated an examination of the screening properties of glass plates for ultra-violet and luminous light, and therefore the research was enlarged so as to embrace the three forms of radiation.

scholarly journals VIII. Remarks on the tendency to calculous diseases; with observations on the nature of urinary concretions, and an analysis of a large part of the collection belonging to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital

1829 ◽  
Vol 119 ◽  
pp. 55-81 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
County Hospital ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
Extensive Practice

Having, since my residence in the neighbourhood of Norwich, and my connection with the county hospital, paid considerable attention to calculous diseases and their concretions, I beg leave to lay some observations on those subjects before the Royal Society, to whose Transactions we owe much valuable information on the branches of pathology which relate to urinary complaints. Part I.— Of the tendency to Calculous Diseases . The county of Norfolk has long been remarkable for the occurrence of cal­culous diseases among its inhabitants; but there are no means of ascertaining how far this disposition extended, previous to the establishment of its hospital in 1772. Many of its cases went, of course, to the metropolis before that time; but there is, besides, every reason for concluding, that the operation of litho­tomy was frequently performed in Norfolk, during all the preceding part of the eighteenth century, both from the reputation and extensive practice of Mr. Gooch, one of the principal surgeons and surgical writers of his time, who lived near Norwich; and the occasional observations made by that gentleman in his surgical works, as to the skill, and experience in lithotomy, of practi­tioners in different parts of the county.

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