ABSTRACT
Advertisements for public lectures on natural philosophy, the opening of the first museums of natural history, and the proliferation of instrument makers selling pocket microscopes, telescopes and orreries, 'for Ladies and Gentlemen rather than noblemen or Princes', illustrated that there was a demand in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England for scientific knowledge among Svider polite society'.1 Despite rich scholarly analysis of the interplay between cultural factors and the reception of the new science in early modern English society, little work has been done to elucidate the role and influence of the first subscription newspapers in this dissemination of natural philosophy.2 Question-and-answer coffeehouse newspapers, with subscribers writing the
1 The quotation is from Thomas Wright, A description of an astronomical instrument,
being the Orrery deduced (London, 1720), frontispiece. An orrery is a small model of the universe along with a moveable calendar. For more on public science, see Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. Wess, Public &> Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford, 1993); J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1979); J. E. McClellan, Science Reorganised: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985); R. Porter, S. Schaffer, J. Bennett et al, Science and Profit in 18th Century London (Cambridge, 1985); Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, 1994).
