"By thus shutting the door of the universities .... and keeping the means
of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance, and
therefore less able to give you disturbance. But though ignominiously and
unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, which, as maintained by
public funds, ought to be open to all the community, and driven to the
expedient of providing at a great expence for scientific education among
ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed
in a more enlightened age, are more liberal...Thus while your universities
resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, and offensive
to the neighbourhood, ours are like rivers, which, taking their natural
course, fertilize a whole country'. (Joseph Priestley, A letter to right
honourable William Pitt, First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the
Exchequer, 1787).


  On Oct 7 2010, Morris Peter wrote:

>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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