Dear listmembers

Those of us keen, for whatever reason, to gauge the attitude of the 
current UK government towards the history of science might find 
enlightenment in the thoughts of David Willetts, Minister of State for 
Universities and Science, as presented at the Conservative Party 
Conference in Birmingham on Monday. Or possibly not. His speech (full 
text at 
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/10/David_Willetts_Scholarships_to_help_Armed_Forces_families.aspx 
) begins as follows:

"Here in Birmingham, where I was brought up, is the right place to focus 
on the big challenge of growth and prosperity [...] When science, 
engineering and enterprise come together, you can change the world. But 
it does not always work out. At the same time as Boulton and Watt were 
designing steam engines, their friend Joseph Priestley successfully 
obtained oxygen and carbon dioxide from air. He did the experiments but 
it was a Swiss businessman who made money by using his technique to put 
fizz in water - he was called Joseph Schweppe."

Let's pass over any questions about the relevance of oxygen or the 
likelihood of deriving fixed air from the atmosphere. I drew a blank on 
Joseph Schweppe: nearly fifteen seconds of painstaking deskbound 
research, however, brought me to Jean (or Johann) Jacob Schweppe, a 
jeweller turned soda-water manufacturer from Hesse, sometime resident of 
Geneva and possibly naturalised Swiss (except when deemed French).

Schweppe's ODNB entry clearly explains that he was entering a market 
already crowded with domestic suppliers when he started selling 
carbonated waters in London in 1792. Farrar, Farrar and Scott's series 
on the Henry family of Manchester for _Ambix_ in the late 70s notes that 
Thomas Henry was experimenting on fixed air impregnation at the same 
time as Priestley, and that he commercialised the results on a large 
scale quickly enough to tackle head-on, for a time, Schweppe's expansion 
of agencies into the northern towns. Schweppe, no doubt, was the most 
successful (and is the best remembered, though not as to his forenames) 
of the early soda-water vendors in England, but the exercise of stuffing 
him into the mould of the penicillin-era "foreign theft" fable is 
bafflingly contrived.

Obviously, we belong to a community of people trained to take history 
seriously, which is not the general approach: it's inevitable that past 
actors and preoccupations, in the hands of the speechwriter, end up as 
brightly coloured, briefly amusing analogues of whatever present-day 
assertion was going to be made anyway. (See also Charles Darwin's 
well-known lines on adaptability, beloved of leaders promoting unwelcome 
changes, which the naturalist somehow forgot to write in his own 
lifetime). The difference here is that it's peculiarly difficult to 
follow how the excursion into chemical history connects to what follows: 
talk of using closer academic-industrial links to remedy "that old 
British problem of failing to make the most of our own discoveries and 
inventions."

The best I could come up with is this: Britain's unique shortcoming in 
technological style (as perennially insisted on in Martin Wiener-ish 
decline narratives) is now deemed to be so resonant and seductive that 
it can strike at any moment in history -- even including the 
pre-decline, full-steam-ahead period of industrial pomp. Priestley, 
obliged (as a mere historical character) to precisely exemplify one 
monolithic set of values or another, unwisely chose his nationality than 
his era: he thus carefully failed to commercialise his discoveries, and 
the rewards were scooped up by Schweppe in consequence of his Swissness. 
Hence the emerging Swiss dominance of manufacturing industry in the 
later nineteenth century ("Swiss", of course, being interchangeable with 
"French" or "German"). I hope this clears matters up for good.

Best regards
James