The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 6: Science gets organized

Science and Power

The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Sciences were two of many scientific institutions founded in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for the purposes of advancing the power and prestige of monarchs and states.

In some ways this was nothing new. Scientists had been giving advice to governments on technical matters, such as gunnery and navigation, since the Middle Ages. However, there were some important differences. Government scientific patronage in the late seventeenth century was much more institutionalized on both the government and the scientific sides.

Tycho had dealt with the King of Denmark, and Galileo with the Duke of Tuscany, as one individual with another and their relationships had been expressed in the classic terms of patronage as an exchange of gifts. Late seventeenth-century monarchs patronized science by founding institutions rather than exchanging gifts with individual scientists.

The monarchs themselves played less of a personal role – Louis XIV had little to do directly with the Royal Academy of Sciences after its founding, and English monarchs tended to be uninterested in the Royal Society.

One eighteenth-century monarch who interested himself in science was Frederick II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia. Oster includes a brief passage from Frederick as document 16.3.

Although flattery of the monarch was expected (and received) from scientists receiving state patronage, their principal obligation to the state lay in practical and technological tasks. Two tasks which absorbed much scientific effort were navigation, where the longitude problem was still unsolved, and cartography.

Greenwich Observatory was founded in 1675 to establish more accurate tables of stellar and planetary positions for British navigators. The head of the Greenwich Observatory was designated Royal Astronomer despite having little or no direct contact with the King. (A relic of Greenwich’s preeminence in this field is its role as the starting point for the system of universal time – Greenwich Mean Time.)

Although the Paris Observatory, founded in 1667, was not as centrally organized, it and the Academy took on the task of providing the government with the first accurate map of France. French preeminence is embodied in the metric system. While not invented until the very end of the eighteenth century, the system was based on over a century of French work on the measurement of the earth.

Both navigation and cartography had obvious military applications, but science was also directly harnessed to the needs of war. Both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Sciences had members whose principal occupation was military, in the areas of ordinance and fortification.

The professionalization of science in France made it easier than British amateur science to integrate science into the day to day workings of the state . In the eighteenth century, France possessed the most scientifically sophisticated government in the world.

The strength of institutionalization should not be exaggerated. Some aspects of the boundaries between public and private remained fuzzy.

In France, the Cassini family was able to make management of the Paris Observatory virtually a hereditary assignment. Four Cassini generations would run the Observatory from its founding until the French Revolution of 1789.

In Britain, the question of whether the observations made at Greenwich by the Royal Astronomer were his property or that of the government would lead to a major conflict.

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