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Just finished reading The Invention of Air, a book about Joseph Priestley. I recommend it.
Priestley is a fascinating character. He was an amateur scientist in the purest and most beautiful sense of the word. In 1765, aged 32, Priestley was working as a schoolteacher and minister in Warrington, England. He was avidly following electricity experiments at the time and decided to write a “popular history” of the field. To pitch his book, Priestley traveled to London to a coffeehouse meeting of the Honest Whigs, where he first met — and was encouraged by — Benjamin Franklin.
Priestley left that meeting with:
- Access to Franklin’s personal library and all correspondence on electricity (a kind gesture from the American statesman).
- A promise for funding to support the book’s printing.
- Encouragement, by the Honest Whigs, to conduct his own experiments while writing the book.
This was undoubtedly one of the most important scientific meetings of all time. Priestley went back to Warrington and immediately began working. He wrote his entire 700-page history in a single year, and also began his own experiments. During various attempts to replicate published experiments, Priestley discovered that charcoal conducts electricity, a finding that led to his election to the Royal Society that same year (1766).
But I think the most fascinating part of Priestley’s life is not his experiments, but rather the way he supported his work. For a time, Priestley was funded by subscribers, an arrangement which was highly unusual in the late-1700s, when many independent scientists had immense personal wealth or got support from a wealthy patron.
Henry Cavendish, for example, inherited two fortunes during his lifetime. He had so much money, in fact, that the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Biot called him "the richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of the rich."
Galileo Galilei was funded almost entirely by Cosimo II, a Medici. Tycho Brahe was funded handsomely by King Frederick II of Denmark. (Indeed, the Danish King spent so much money on Brahe’s experiments that it’s been estimated that about 1 percent of the Danish crown’s total revenue went to the scientist. Brahe was also given an entire island for his experiments, on which he constructed an astronomical observatory and alchemy laboratory, called Uraniborg; “the first custom-built observatory in modern Europe,” according to Wikipedia.)
But Priestley was not wealthy. He attracted support from wealthy sponsors (including Lord Shelburne, who later became Prime Minister) on occasion, but often struggled for funds.
This is why Priestley turned to his network of “subscribers,” who collectively sent him about 200 guineas per year. At the time, one guinea was worth 21 shilling, or roughly £1.05, meaning Priestley’s subscribers sent him about £210 per year. This is a lot, considering a skilled artisan, at the time, made about £50 per year and £100 was enough to maintain a solidly middle-class household with servants. (A seaman sailing with the East India Company only earned about £21 per year!)
Subscribers included the Galtons (father and son), Sir George Savile, Josiah Wedgwood, and other figures of the local community. In exchange for about 10 guineas per year, these subscribers received not only the satisfaction of supporting a prominent scientist and hearing about cutting-edge experiments before anybody else, but also early access to Priestley’s books and publications. “Without assistance I could not have carried on my experiments except on a very small scale and under great disadvantages,” Priestley once wrote.
Indeed, Priestley thought a good deal about science funding, and was ahead of his time on the subject. In 1767, he also outlined plans for industry-funded research centers. Priestley liked that the large institutes then supporting science, such as the Académie Française, supported research, but "he objected to the centralized nature of those societies,” writes Steven Johnson in The Invention of Air. Priestley didn’t like that a single individual (like Antoine Lavoisier in France) had so much power over the research of the institute.
Instead, Priestley proposed “smaller and more nimble clusters,” where many different companies all contribute funds to a research center. Each research center would have a “director of experiments,” who would perform experiments on behalf of the supporting companies. The companies that gave more money would have more control over which experiments got done, and all companies would have proportional votes relative to their funding levels.
It seems this idea never panned out (or, at least, I’m not aware of anyone who has tried this.) But the idea of industry-funded R&D is much older than I anticipated, and we owe part of its vision to Joseph Priestley.
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