ABSTRACT
In the years immediately following Isaac Newton's death in 1727 contemporaries readily acknowledged that newspapers were influential in forming and conditioning public opinion about many issues. This chapter examines that it is not the author's wish to castigate authors for not reading the back pages of London's newspapers, rather it is his hope that it finds a place beside works that explore the means by which science became public. This is not to say that nineteenth-century readers were less sophisticated than those in the eighteenth century and less capable of comprehending science in the original or in its more professional guise. While we need to be careful in drawing lines between science, popular science, and commercial science, it seems safe to suggest that science which was meant to be profitable overtook science, meant to be professional, in the market place.
