ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the testimony of the juror to Class 51 'apparatus used in chemistry, pharmacy and tanning yards', the Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University, Lyon Playfair, who used alarmist allegations about the nation's lack of 'inventiveness' manifested at the exhibition as a springboard to relaunch his previously unheeded campaign to promote scientific education in Britain. It focuses on counter Michael Sanderson's claims on the score, especially the assertion that there was a consensus in favour of Playfair's apocalyptic vision of relative industrial decline. The chapter considers what connection can reliably be drawn between the outcome of the exhibition and the subsequent development of British science education - which ironically seems to have begun its own Golden Age just as the industrial campaign was fading. Some historians of British science and technical education have followed Playfair's judgement as reliable and disinterested testimony on the actual state of affairs revealed by the Paris Exhibition of 1867.
