Dear James,

I think you are making far too much of this. I suspect it was intended
to be at least partly tongue in cheek. I am not sure Willetts was really
trying to make a exact parallel between soda water and penicillin,
although he was clearly alluding the myth of 'foreigners stealing
British ideas'. I knew David Willetts when we were both at university
and yes, he is very clever although perhaps not as clever as his moniker
would make out. But he did PPE so not a historian of science or even a
scientist.  I am intrigued though to know where he got the anecdote
from. Was it a story that went the rounds when he was growing up in
Birmingham? Or was it supplied by a speechwriter? I am not sure I would
be so censorious about JJ's nationality or the idea that he succeeded
where Priestley 'failed'. Knowing he came to London from Geneva, I too
had assumed he was Swiss and it is true that his firm did eventually
drive most of the earlier soda water manufacturers out of business. Of
course Priestley himself never even tried. But it is rather odd that the
speechwriter failed to use that fount of all wisdom, Wikipedia, which
does give the correct name and land of birth, and more or less the
correct story.

But you did fail to spot another problem with this story. It at least
implies that Priestley first made artificial fizzy water and discovered
oxygen in Birmingham when of course neither was the case. He first made
fizzy water in Leeds. I spent a long time in the early 90s pinning down
the exact spot with the aim of making it a historic chemical landmark,
and eventually traced it to a set of traffic lights on a main road in
the middle of Leeds. I later did the same exercise for oxygen (let's for
now overlook the whole Priestley-Scheele-Lavoisier issue) and came down
to three possible locations, a wing of Bowood House long demolished (the
idea it was discovered in the current library at Bowood is clearly
false), his sitting room in his home on Calne Green or Lansdowne House
in Berkeley Square (at a spot which is now a pavement next to GSK's
London head office). Of these three, I think Lansdowne House (long
demolished) is the most likely but having stayed at his house in Calne
and compared the fireplace there with his drawings in his books on
gases, it must run it a close second. But anyway not Birmingham. So I
suspect Willett's story may be a garbled tale that did the round of
chemistry classes in Birmingham, and King Edward's School in particular,
in the 1970s when chemistry teachers still liked to leaven their lessons
with a bit of cod history. 

Cheers,

Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: Promoting discussion in the science studies community
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of James Sumner
Sent: 06 October 2010 22:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: David Willetts and the history of chemistry

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_Schola
rships_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

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