Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute: The Popularization of Science in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

IN the early 1840's, audiences of 2,000 persons assembled at the Lowell Institute in Boston to hear Benjamin Silliman of Yale College lecture on science. This event has been seen as a symbol of the popularization of science in the Jacksonian period, when men, caught up in the cult of self-improvement, fought to attend lectures on the wonders of God's creation.' But the phenomenon is important in another way. It modifies Tocqueville's view of American science a decade earlier as merely and meagerly supported. Instead it shows that by 184o America was capable of supporting scientific institutions and popular science of a high order. Although the Lowell Institute was a peculiarly Boston phenomenon, an examination of Silliman's lectures may reveal something about the nature of American science in the 184o's.2 The Lowell Institute was a product of Boston's new industrial fortunes in the 1830's which made large-scale philanthropy possible and of a long-standing interest in education, which was focusing on public schools and lyceums. The lyceums had spread so rapidly since the late 182o's, as one alternative to public school reform, that by 1839 Horace Mann could count 137 active chapters in Massachusetts.3 They stressed evening lecture-demonstrations on practical