THE LUNAR MEN 上市 Deposited
BOULTON BOOK
The E-Sylum: Volume 5, Number 46, November 17, 2002, Article 16
BOULTON BOOK: THE LUNAR MEN
Here is an excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal
review of a new book relating to Matthew Boulton.
We numismatists know of him as a coiner, but his
interests and accomplishments were far broader than
just that."The phrase "lunar men" sounds other-worldly, but it is far
from that. It refers to a group of 18th-century British savants
in and around Birmingham, England, a provincial city that
by 1765 had become a center for the investigation of nature.
Meeting at one another's houses on the Monday nearest the
full moon -- to have light to ride home by -- they developed,
among other things, the new technologies that helped
transform England from an agricultural nation to an industrial
power. Jenny Uglow's "The Lunar Men" (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 588 pages, $30) gives us a compelling account of
these extraordinary polymaths and of the world in which they
lived.The friends whose curiosity "changed the world" were the
potter Josiah Wedgwood, the physician-poet Erasmus
Darwin, the metalware manufacturer Matthew Boulton,
the Scottish inventor James Watt and the minister Joseph
Priestley. Men of business and affairs, they were at the
same time engrossed by science. They operated as a sort
of industrial research group, discovering methods of
manufacture and facing soon-to-be-familiar problems
of patent infringement, free trade and labor unrest."- 2002-11-17
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