ABSTRACT
THE increasing volume of experiments and observations made at sea from the mid-eighteenth century onwards reflect a growing interest in marine science which, favoured by the growing climate of diversity in science and the opportunities provided by the voyages of discovery, soon overtook the work of the seventeenth century. The period between 1750 and the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars was fertile in new ideas and inventions which were to prove very significant. As in the seventeenth century the people involved in these developments included some well-known figures such as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), envoy of the nascent United States to the French court, Sir Charles Blagden (1748-1820), Richard Kirwan (1733-1812), who came to the defence of the phlogiston theory, Richard Watson (1737-1816), who by much pulling of strings, in the approved eighteenth-century manner, became successively professor of chemistry and professor of divinity at Cambridge and bishop of Llandaff, and the equally opportunist Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753P-1814) who progressed from dubious beginnings in America, where he collaborated with the British during the war of independence, to a position of cast-iron respectability as the chief minister of the Elector of Bavaria and the founder of the Royal Institution.
