ABSTRACT
These three men came together at the right time, and the place they established duly flourished: Sir Joseph Banks was born to a high social position, while Count Rumford and Humphry Davy show how science could attract attention and respect, bringing tremendous social mobility if not always personal happiness. The Royal Institution owed its foundation and success to three very different people. Banks took along a pupil of Carl Linnaeus, Daniel Solander; and a team of artists who made a splendid visual record of the exotic sights they saw, and the specimens they collected. There Davy had discovered the properties of laughing gas, which became a craze; and had also made careful analyses of the oxides of nitrogen. For the Royal Institution, such things included war and the fear of political revolution; competition in the realm of science with France; industrialisation, agricultural improvement and new wealth; and new leisure and intellectual activity involving both men and women.
