The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (Hardcover)

by Jenny Uglow (Author) "On 12 December 1731, Erasmus Darwin was born at the Old Hall in Elston, about ten miles north-east of Nottingham, the sturdy seventh child of..." (more)
Key Phrases: horizontal windmill, lunar society, inflammable air, Royal Society, Anna Seward, Erasmus Darwin (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In the late 1700s, five gifted inventors and amateur scholars in Birmingham, England, came together for what one of them, Erasmus Darwin, called "a little philosophical laughing." They also helped kick-start the industrial revolution, as Jenny Uglow relates in the lively The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Their "Lunar Society" included Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen; James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the steam engine; and Josiah Wedgwood, whose manufacture of pottery created the industrial model for the next century. Joined by other "toymakers" and scholarly tinkerers, they concocted schemes for building great canals and harnessing the power of electricity, coined words such as "hydrogen" and "iridescent," shared theories and bank accounts, fended off embezzlers and industrial spies, and forged a fine "democracy of knowledge." And they had a fine time doing so, proving that scholars need not be dullards or eccentrics asocial.

Uglow's spirited look at this group of remarkable "lunaticks" captures a critical, short-lived moment of early modern history. Readers who share their conviction that knowledge brings power will find this book a rewarding adventure. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
This hefty volume combines prodigious research with an obvious fondness for the subject matter. Uglow, an editor at U.K.'s Chatto & Windus publishing house, garnered praise for her incisive book on the life and images of William Hogarth as well as for her biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Here, Uglow details the wild inventions of the 18th century, with the turbulent changes in the Georgian world as backdrop, and so delivers a complete, though at times ponderously detailed, portrait of the men who formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The society was a kind of study group for the nascent Industrial Revolution, which would transform England in two generations. Among the lunar men were toy maker Matthew Boulton, James Watt of the steam engine, potter Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen, and physician and evolutionary theorist Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather. As Uglow writes, its members met on the full moon (to facilitate travel at night), "warmed by wine and friendship, their heads full of air pumps and elements and electrical machines, their ears ringing with talk, the whirring of wheels and the hiss of gas." Each was accomplished in his profession, and yet each applied boundless reserves of energy and inventiveness to outside interests, from the practical, such as canal-building, herbal medicines and steam-propelled water pumps, to the outright bizarre, such as Erasmus Darwin's fantastic mechanical talking mouth. Uglow's writing has great breadth of subject and character-along with the occasional bawdiness, too.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374194408
• ISBN-13: 978-0374194406
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #421,393 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scientific Friends Sparking the Industrial Revolution, October 16, 2002

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Many books, especially Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, have given insight into the London club and coffee house conversations devoted to literature and wit. At the same time were meeting in the city of Birmingham a diverse group of men who were involved in scientific efforts for their careers, and even more importantly, were pushing scientific investigation into all areas as a hobby, and who met for what one called "a little philosophical laughing." They called themselves the Lunar Society, because they had their meetings (dinner at two, continuing into the night) every month on a date near the full moon. (This was not a convention merely for scientific men; music concerts and assemblies were customarily clustered within the nights of the month when a bright moon might assist the audience in getting home.) They are the subject of _The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a large and detailed history by Jenny Uglow. Uglow has given us a look at London in her fine biography of Hogarth a few years ago; now we have Birmingham, and the boundless optimism of serious scientific amateurs. Uglow demonstrates that they really did change the world, bringing on the industrial revolution and making science the way to get things done.

The locale of Birmingham in the eighteenth century was made for such bustling men, for manufacturing had taken hold. One of the Lunar Men was Matthew Boulton, who at age eighteen invented just the thing for fashion, the inlaying of steel buckles with enamel. He became an industrialist whose patronage helped further the inventor James Watt. Watt was busy as a young man trying to prevent the primitive steam engines from wasting energy, and having done that spent his life perfecting them, installing them around the country, and trying to keep others from stealing his ideas. Josiah Wedgwood, the great manufacturing potter, also had a practical interest in science in such matters as regulating his kilns. He also had a particular interest in the Lunar Men's project of the canal system, which was a focus for their technological and geological enthusiasms, as a way of getting raw materials to his factories and finished wares to London. Perhaps the figure most central within the book is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the founder of the theory of evolution. Erasmus himself had a primitive idea about evolution, and his ideas about competition were similar to those of Malthus, who would inspire Charles Darwin's central thesis. Joseph Priestley experimented with gases and identified oxygen (under the eventually discarded phlogiston theory), as well as discovering the fundamentals of photosynthesis and inventing soda water. He was as well a dissenting minister, within the Unitarian church, and his house was burned by the mobs rioting against intellectualism (there were fears that the philosophers would institute changes like those of the French Revolution), and his eventual self-exile to America was a mark of the end of the Lunar Men's most active time.

Uglow gives wonderful personal details about these men and a multitude of minor characters. The amazing detail here represents a triumph of careful scholarship and digging into letters, chapbooks, and forgotten volumes. The Lunar Men helped form their society in significant ways; Uglow is very good, however, in showing historic influences on them, and a reader will learn plenty here about the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Industrial one, and in science, the revolutionary schemes of Linnaeus and Lavoisier. Best of all, this is a preservation of remarkable friendships cemented by the happy communal activity of learning things and experimenting.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makers of the Modern World, January 2, 2004

By	Donald B. Siano (Westfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (Paperback)

This extraordinarily well researched book about some extraordinary men is a wonderful discourse on the impact of the few on the many. It is a big book, richly filled with its illustrations and portraits, passionate for its subject, and a machine for readers wishing to be transported to another, most glorious, era. The time is the early industrial revolution in England and Scotland, and the men are the inventors and scientists, movers and shakers, who transformed England from a pastoral society into the cutting edge, world class industrial power.

Foremost among them were James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton, masters of the dramatically improved steam engine, which was to be critical in the parade of innovations to come. Erasmus Darwin and William Small, inventors of all sorts of peculiar things, performed the essential sociological act of keeping the circus of contacts going and diplomatically holding the center. And Priestly, discoverer of early chemical science, inventor of soda pop, makes his majestic performance in the drama. And we can even behold the trapeze-work of such lesser known figures as Keir and Wedgewood, who developed the business practices that finally got large scale industry churning. Hardly making an appearance in this treatise are the churchmen, politicians, activists for the poor, and other clowns and negativists who impotently resisted them.

This book is not just about the innovations of these men, but about their character, philosophy, and political views during those tumultuous, even riotous times. And characters they must have been. In this book you'll discover all of the weaknesses and trivialities that made them human, and the romance and perseverance that made then heroes. How I should like to have known them!

These men, and they were all men, we discover in Uglow's book, worked the rough edges of wealth and bankruptcy all their lives. The risks they took seem almost unimaginable today, with all of its restrictions, safety committees and assorted paranoias.

This is a real feast for anyone interested in discovering the courage and intelligence of these Northern Europeans, and the story of their headlong rush to transform the world.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story Of The Right Place And The Right Time, November 9, 2002

By	Richard R. Carlton (Ada, MI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A fantastically intriguing book for anyone with a decent sense of science and the industrial revolution who wants to explore a finely researched set of biographical stories about a group of the earliest of the wild amateur experimenters. The Lunar Society's remarkable set of characters (Darwin's grandfather, Priestley, Watt, Wedgwood) are like a who's who of the famous. The reading is a wonderful dive into the heady days of a new cultural paradigm similar to the recent silicon valley and dot.com phenomena. Literally everything they touched turned to gold.....a great story of a small group of thinkers who were in the right place at the right time to make a marvelous series of things happen.