Gresham College Research Articles

The Youth and Education of Christopher Wren

Accounts of Christopher Wren's early years are usually derived from the partial and inaccurate family history, Parentalia (1750). They are here reinterpreted in the light of recent research, including investigations of his family background, and of the mass of recent scholarship on the intellectual life of Civil War and Interregnum Oxford. College and University administrative records are also used. Born in 1632, Wren's childhood as the only boy in the large family of Christopher Wren, Dean of Windsor, is considered. He appears to have spent the First Civil War being privately tutored in his family in royalist-occupied Wiltshire, not, as usually asserted, at Westminster School, separated from his family; he attended Westminster only briefly, probably in 1645-6 after the Parliamentary occupation of Wiltshire and his father's imprisonment. His father and Christopher's brother-in-law, William Holder, were major intellectual influences. From 1646 he resided with Charles Scarborough, eminent physician and mathematician; there he encountered the group of natural philosophers which included former Parliamentarians and ex-royalists, notably from William Harvey's Oxford circle. John Wilkins, one of the former, intruded as Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, by the Parliamentary Commissioners in 1648, recruited Wren as a ‘fellow-commoner’ (privileged student). College records reveal Wren as something of an administrative anomaly; he was probably the intellectual companion of the Warden rather than a normal undergraduate student. He frequented the meetings of natural philosophers which Wilkins helped to animate. He showed a precocious talent in pure and applied mathematics, in astronomy, allied with an enthusiasm for scientific instruments. His various seniors took every opportunity to advance his career by bringing him to the attention of the influential, including Oliver Cromwell. His election to a fellowship of All Souls College, and his appointment to the chair of astronomy at Gresham College, London, is interpreted in this light. Detailed consideration ends with Wren's inaugural lecture at Gresham in 1657. However, administrative records are again used to examine the evidence for Wren's residence in Oxford (about one term in each year) during his time as Savilian Professor of Astronomy, 1661-9, when he turned his attention to architecture, and the possibility of constructing his itinerary for those years is considered. Wren's youth saw him massively exposed to serious intellectual adult society marked by a keen interest in mathematics and natural phenomena, although comprising various schools of political and religious thought; the possible affect of these milieus on his personality is tentatively explored, even while recognising that this may not represent the whole picture. Nevertheless Wren's intellectual seriousness and notable self-discipline, and his aversion to demonstrative enthusiasm, may well reflect the experience of his formative years.

John Aubrey, Hint-Keeper: Life-Writing and the Encouragement of Natural Philosophy in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century

In a prose satire written by Samuel Butler, 'An Occasional Reflection on Dr Charleton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham-College', the physician Walter Charlton is said to have invaded the Royal Society's fastnesses 'by Surreptition and Inviolation, and to have secretly deprived the Hint-Keeper' of a precious gift to the Society, the 'King of Macassar's Poison', and to have experimented on it in secret.1 Butler, an acute and well-informed satirist of scientific culture, also talks of the 'Hint-Keeper' in his character of 'A Pretender'. Here, the puffed-up pretender to knowledge 'fancies himself as able as any Man, but not being in a Capacity to try the Experiment, the Hint-keeper of Gresham College is the only competent Judge to decide the Controversy'.2 The character, seemingly Butler's invention, is thus an instrument of moral argument. But who is he, what does 'hint-keeping' involve, and what is the connection between keeping hints and the expression of an ethical position? I propose to answer these questions by considering the idea of the hint and practice of hint-keeping in the writing and scientific pursuits of Butler's friend and biographer John Aubrey, and his circle. I suggest that if we pay attention to the forms of knowledge transmitted and preserved by the hint we may find it to be a containing structure for some distinctive qualities of the culture and values of the early Royal Society. For both Aubrey's scientific practice and the rhetorical forms in which he commemorated the 'fine Notions and Inventions' of his biographical subjects are characteristic of a short-lived moment in the history of science, that of the pre-Newtonian seventeenth century, or the period before the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687.But what is a hint? To begin to answer this, we may revisit the central anecdote of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, in the form in which it was recorded by the antiquary William Stukeley. Stukeley records that he spent a warm April day in 1726 with Isaac Newton. Drinking tea under some apple trees, Newton told him howthe notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to him self. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter: and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or towards the center. If matter thus draws matter, it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.and so on.3 Newton is represented in this anecdote as intuiting his theory in a perfect nutshell, one fine afternoon under a tree, in pastoral solitude in Lincolnshire, with no mention of any scientific community, subsequent correspondence with Hooke, meetings with Halley or any kind of false starts or interruptions: a pre-Adamic, immediate, creation of light. Its narration in this form, as an exquisitely coherent tale, focussed exclusively on its intellectual content, has encouraged Newton's worshippers in their wish to imagine that his theory was 'Invented and perfected at the same time', the praise which, when voiced by Sir John Hoskins at the reception of the first book of the Principia at the Royal Society, so angered Hooke and prompted him to cry plagiary.4 By telling his friend a tale of a theory, so comprehensively intuited in retirement in a garden, rather than a more socialised narration of the path to the mathematically-demonstrated 'perfected' state of the Principia, and its subsequent extraordinary acclaim, Newton gave the world its most powerful biographical image of genius. Paolo Frisi tells the story of the twenty-two months' unbroken solitary concentration which produced the Principia: but it is the divine inspiration, rather than the human perspiration, which gave the apple anecdote its power. …

From the world brain to the world wide web Annual Gresham College BSHM Lecture

The world wide web has evolved into a universe of information at our finger tips. But this was not an idea born with the internet. This lecture recounts earlier attempts to disseminate information, such as H G Wells' world brain in the 1930s, Vannevar Bush's memex in the 1940s, and J C R Licklider's ideas of man--computer symbiosis.

A conversation between… Geoff Hoon and Vernon Bogdanor

Geoff Hoon was appointed Minister for Europe in May 2006, returning to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) where he was previously Minister in 1999. Prior to this appointment, Mr Hoon was Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Defence. A barrister by trade, before entering Parliament Mr Hoon lectured in law at Leeds University (1976–1982) and was Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Louisville, Kentucky in 1979 and 1980. Here, he is being interviewed by Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University and Professor of Law at Gresham College.

Hobbes'forgotten Natural Histories

AbstractThomas Hobbes' natural philosophy is often characterised as rationalistic in opposition to the emerging inductivist method employed by Francis Bacon and fellows of the Gresham College - later the Royal Society. Where as the inductivists researched and published a multitude of natural histories, Hobbes' mature publications contain little natural historical information. Nonetheless, Hobbes read numerous natural histories and incorporated them into his works and often used details from these histories to support important theoretical moves. He also wrote a number of natural histories, some of which remain either unpublished or untranslated. Hobbes' own mature statements about his early interest in natural histories are also misleading. This article attempts to review Hobbes' early writings on natural histories and argues that his works of the 1630s and 1640s owe a significant debt to the natural histories of Francis Bacon, Hobbes' one-time patron.

Editorial. An Italian correspondence, an Italian earthquake and the homes of The Royal Society

Introduction to the January 2005 issue of Notes and Records with a reproduction of an engraving by Nehemiah Grew, date unknown. The engraving shows Gresham College, Bishopsgate, London, the mansion of Sir Thomas Gresham and the original home of The Royal Society from 1660–1710, except for a short period just after the Great Fire of London when the Society was at Arundel House. The Society was founded at Gresham College following a lecture by Christopher Wren, at that time Gresham Professor of Astronomy. The College was named after Sir Thomas Gresham, son of Sir Richard Gresham, Lord Mayor of London (1537–38), who conceived the idea, brought to fruition by his son, of the Royal Exchange modelled on the Antwerp Bourse. Gresham College professors continue to give free public lectures in the City of London.

Henry Briggs: The Trigonometria Britannica

In 1632, Henry Gellibrand, then the Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, arranged for the publishing of the Trigonometria Britannica (T. B.) by Adrian Vlacq in Gouda the following year: the work consisted of two Books, and sets of tables of natural sines in steps of one hundredth of a degree to 15 places, as well as tables of tangents & secants to 10 places, together with their logarithms. The explanatory Book I was the last work of Henry Briggs (1559-1631), Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, and was devoted mainly to the construction of his table of sines; while Book II, written by the youthful Gellibrand on the instigation of the dying Briggs, his mentor, contained instructions and examples on the use of logarithms in solving trigonometrical problems.

REPORT. Robert Hooke revivified

An international conference held from 6 to 9 July 2003 under the auspices of Gresham College and The Royal Society, and with the support of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Francis Ames-Lewis

<i>Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i>. Francis Ames-Lewis

Strategic interdisciplinary relations between a natural science community and a psychology community Part 1: The development of the contrasting paradigms.

Abstract The scientists and scholars of behavior--environment relations, since the inception of their discipline, have debated the matter of how best to organize their discipline and nudge it along an appropriate course of maturation. Two main alternatives have emerged: (a) Infiltrate the already organized discipline of psychology and convert it into a natural science discipline with a properly useful kind of focus on behaviors, (b) Establish an independently organized natural science discipline existing apart from organized psychology. The 300-year development and emergence of the non-behavioral natural sciences have provided relevant history lessons pertinent to the current dilemma. That history suggests that the behavior analysis community has been experimenting for half a century with the less promising alternative. THE ROYAL SOCIETY In 1645 civil war raged through England, although as war was conducted in those times, certain classes of people could ignore it sufficiently to go about their business. In keeping with the traditional and prevailing belief that all worthwhile wisdom was derived from the ancients, England's two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were exclusively devoted to the study of ancient languages and the works of ancient philosophers, religious and secular. Science, founded on observation and experiment, was relatively new and had no place in the curriculum of those universities. At neither Oxford nor Cambridge could one study the works of Galileo, who had founded mechanics, Gilbert, who had founded experimental physics, or Kepler, who had derived the laws of planetary motion (Andrade, 1960). However, the works of such men of science were admired and studied within an informal community of well read and influential English noblemen, some of whom were churchmen and some of whom were actual practitioners of the new experimental philosophy. Following a decade or more of somewhat regular if informal meetings devoted to a sharing of their common interests in natural philosophy, what two years later would become The Royal Society was formed by 40 men at Gresham College in 1660. It received its Royal Charter, and its name, in 1662. The Royal Society, as it was known thereafter, was for a long period perennially short of funds both to support the scientific activity of its Fellows and to publish results. Nevertheless, it did so to the extent that its limited resources permitted (Andrade, 1960). The rise of modern Western science proceeded on various fronts throughout Europe mainly through the work of an often loosely knit community of individuals, but it was The Royal Society that most represented the organizational embodiment of science and functioned as the hub of European scientific activity, in part because it welcomed foreign members. The Royal Society gradually became a kind of clearing house for the advance of scientific activity throughout the European continent. From the outset, The Royal Society maintained a strict organizational autonomy as its most important organizational resource (Andrade, 1960; Purver, 1967). From the time of the founders, a policy of religious tolerance was strictly observed, yet The Royal Society was noted for the maintenance of its scientific integrity through a deliberate disengagement, or emancipation, of science and philosophy from the coercion of particular religious systems. Even so, the early Royal Society was entirely a product of the religion--dominated culture in which it emerged. The Society reflected a prevailing view among its members that had been elaborated by Francis (1561-1626). As Purver (1967) concluded after her scholarly review of Bacon's works: Bacon ... saw science as the notification of a universal language to be learnt by the scientist in the service of God for the benefit of man (p. 147). From that perspective, the world was God's creation, and science was an extension of religion. …

Francis Ames-Lewis, ed. Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate. 1999. Pp. xxii, 234. $65.95. ISBN 1–84014-641-9.

Francis Ames-Lewis, ed. Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate. 1999. Pp. xxii, 234. $65.95. ISBN 1–84014-641-9. - Volume 33 Issue 1

:Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

:<i>Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i>

Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

Editorial Adieu: Cultivating Moral Courage in Business

Leaving an editorial chair provides an opportunity for the departing incumbent to deliver a final message to his readers. Seven years after founding Business Ethics. A European Review the editor can offer no better valedictory than to explore the role of moral courage in the ethical conduct of business. Not only does this provide an excellent illustration of the recent recovery of the subject of “virtue” ethics in moral philosophy in general, as well as in the application of morality to business. It also serves to highlight the important difference between ‘business ethics’ as a term applied to the study of right and wrong behaviour in business, and ‘ethical business’, which is business actually conducted on ethical lines. For the difference between behaving rightly and wrongly in any area of human activity, including that of business, is not simply a matter of knowledge, or of finding the “correct” answer. There is a crucial psychological gap between knowing what one ought to do and then actually doing it; as Ovid ruefully observed, we see and approve the better things, yet we follow the worse. This is where courage comes in, for the gap between ethical perception and ethical performance is bridged by moral courage, as the following article suggests. More colloquially, the author is accustomed to conclude his classroom teaching on business ethics by observing that it is one thing to work out, often laboriously and hesitantly, what is the correct line of behaviour to follow; it is quite another thing to have the guts to follow it. An early version of this paper was delivered in Gresham College, London, while a more developed account dates from the First World Congress of the International Society of Business, Economics and Ethics, held in Tokyo in 1996. The following is reprinted from International Business Ethics: Challenges and Approaches , edited by George Enderle earlier this year and published by the University of Notre Dame Press and Hong Kong University Press.

Robert Hooke's work as surveyor for the City of London in the aftermath of the Great Fire. Part one: Robert Hooke's first surveys for the City of London

It is known that Robert Hooke was one of the Surveyors appointed after the Great Fire to assist the City in its urgent task of rebuilding, but until now only a very general understanding of the extent of his work and the time he spent on it has been gained. By examining contemporary manuscripts from the City of London's records it is now possible to make a reasonable estimate of the time he spent on the first major activities he was called upon to undertake amidst the ruins: the staking out of widened streets; and the staking out, measurement and certification of foundations of private buildings. Evidence that he staked out and certified nearly 3000 foundations between March 1667 when rebuilding began and 1672 when he started his diary is discussed and presented against a general background of the three organisations for which he worked: the Royal Society, Gresham College and the City.

Neither ancient nor modern: Wallis and Barrow on the composition of continua. Part one: Mathematical styles and the composition of continua

John Wallis and Isaac Barrow were key figures in a transitional period in the development of mathematics in early modern England: their work reveals a tension between the emerging algebraic techniques and the more traditional geometric mode of thought. Both men were among the first professional mathematicians in England. Wallis studied at Cambridge, deciphered Royalist codes for Parliament during the Civil War, and was one of the secretaries to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. He was rewarded for his support of Parliament with the Savilian Professorship of Geometry at Oxford. Barrow was also a student at Cambridge and, in 1660, was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College. He subsequently became Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, before finally becoming the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The work of both Wallis and Barrow was at the forefront of English mathematics in the second half of the seventeenth century. But even though both enjoyed very similar educations and careers, their mathematical techniques were quite different. Wallis’s style is usually considered algebraic, while Barrow’s is considered geometric. At the same time each man’s work exhibited a similar tension between tradition and innovation - between the mathematical ideas inherited from the Greeks and the demands of the new methods and problems.

Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

Robert Hooke (1635‐1703): Proto‐Photogrammetrist

A few of the many interesting aspects of the mind, life and work of Robert Hooke (1635‐1703) are discussed, particularly some that are relevant to opto‐mechanical photogrammetric plotters and cameras. Evidence from primary and secondary sources is presented which indicates that Hooke devised instruments with optical and mechanical components which later came to be used in photogrammetric plotters, that he recognized the value of perspective projection in accurate recording of terrain, and devised a “Picture‐Box” for that purpose. The question of how far he progressed in photography in experiments with purple dyes is left open. These “photogrammetric” activities of Hooke's are shown to have been only a small part of his work in London which included duties as Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society, Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, and Surveyor to the City of London Authorities following the Great Fire in 1666.

Hooke recommemorated

Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.

Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s London

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.