ABSTRACT
Early public lecturers were the first systematically to address the question of how science and civic life should engage. This question is just as old as its two chief elements: modern natural science and modern public life. Starting around the middle of the seventeenth century, each of these, the nascent ‘public sphere’6 and the new body of scientific practices, helped crucially to constitute the other. By 1700, the study of nature was becoming a public project in both the political and the commercial sense. The earliest royal academies of science had been founded in London and Paris in the 1660s. Meanwhile experimenter-entrepreneurs – driven by the expense of new apparatus such as air pumps and, later, electrical generators – had taken to giving public demonstrations, selling subscriptions to courses of lectures and marketing popular texts. These produced a paying public for natural knowledge and, simultaneously, a public programme in the study of nature.7
