Notes Rec. R. Soc.

(2008) 62, 17–29

doi:10.1098/rsnr.2007.0034
Published online 9 January 2008

ASSISTANTS TO ENLIGHTENMENT: WILLIAM LEWIS,

ALEXANDER CHISHOLM AND INVISIBLE TECHNICIANS
IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

by
LARRY STEWART*

Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada S7N 5A5

Artisans, assistants and technicians in laboratories remain largely anonymous amid the
rapidly expanding experimental practice of the eighteenth century. Where their activities can
be traced, it is apparent that the binary conceptions of scholar and craftsman, of philosopher
and practitioner, hardly held during the first industrial revolution. Who actually did the work
in the early-modern laboratory remains an important issue. In the case explored in this article,
William Lewis, chemical lecturer, and Josiah Wedgwood, pottery manufacturer, both
employed the skill and expertise of Alexander Chisholm. Chisholm moved among industrial
innovators, gathering the knowledge of workmen, and promoted the experimental method
ultimately employed in the Wedgwood manufactory.

Keywords: industrial revolution; chemistry; utility; Chisholm; Wedgwood

INTRODUCTION
At the height of the first industrial revolution, the chemist and manufacturer James Keir wrote
to the young Thomas Wedgwood about some experiments Keir was then conducting at his
chemical works at Tipton, near Birmingham. Keir, author of a Dictionary of chemistry,
embraced the democratic programme of the industrial Enlightenment, a ‘diffusion of a
general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all classes of men.’; he was both a
member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and Fellow of the Royal Society.1 He told Tom
Wedgwood of a vitriolated tartar, in modern terms a sulphate of potassium, identified at least
since the early eighteenth century and used widely in dyeing, even as a medicine, a teeth
whitener and ‘a good aperitive [sic]’.2 Well acquainted with Midlands manufactures, Keir
was then primarily fascinated by the curious phosphorescent light given off by the substance.
Equally interesting, moreover, was Keir’s recognition that, whereas many late-eighteenth-
century chemists were paying attention to such mysterious properties, the luminous effect had
been well known to the workmen at my manufactory for many years past. . When the
workmen have occasion in the night to take the liquor out of [their iron boilers], so that the
vitriolated tartar becomes exposed, they see this salt give phosphoric light, and those who
have been at sea compare it to the luminous appearance of the Sea in the wake of the Ship.3

*StewartL@[Link]

17 This journal is q 2008 The Royal Society

18 L. Stewart

Of course, such a chemical reaction, and the heat and light associated with producing it,
was but one small part of chemical manufactures—and of British contemplation of broader
European contributions, in experiments and in nomenclature, to the so-called chemical
revolution. More significant, for my purpose here, is the assertion that the phosphorescence
was readily familiar to workers among the fumes and reactions of the manufactory.
Little trace now appears of those very men who reported to philosophers and industrialists
such as Keir. Anonymity was a commonplace. A couple of years after Keir’s trials, the steam-
engine proprietor James Watt, in his workshop at the Soho manufactory near Birmingham,
was similarly exploring the effects of some newly discovered airs. In the autumn of 1794 he
reported to Keir’s friend, the democratic doctor Thomas Beddoes, of his experience with a
heavy inflammable air:
I inhaled a little of it cautiously, but had scarce withdrawn the pipe from my mouth
before I became so giddy, that I could not stand without a support. I had also
considerable nausea. A healthy young man, who stood about 6 feet from the hydraulic
bellows when I discharged about a cubic foot of this air, was effected in the same
manner, as it passed by him towards an open door. Another young person, merely from
smelling to it as it issued from the bellows, fell upon the floor insensible, and wondered
where he was when he awakened. None of us experienced any disagreeable effects in
consequence of the vertigo, &c. only in going to bed six hours afterwards, I felt some
small remains of the vertigo. Several other persons have inhaled it since; and all were
affected in the same manner.4
But, who were the workers who experienced Watt’s airs and Keir’s lights? Among the
artisans and assistants, notably those whose work led them into daily contact with
the very reactions that attracted the philosophically inclined, factory and workshop
experience have remained largely invisible. From that age of nomenclature, few workers’
names endure.
There are many reasons why this might be so. In the first instance, workplace experience
was also that of the everyday, not to be much remarked upon, but nonetheless of some
occasional worth to alert natural philosophers. It was philosophers, rather than mechanics,
who by contemplating natural phenomena could also take intellectual possession of them
and print their speculations. Amid the variously skilled early-modern work force, very few
mechanics and artisans appeared in the so-called Republic of Letters. This is no wonder,
given the attitude once reflected by the diarist and Fellow of the Royal Society John Evelyn.
Evelyn had complained to Robert Boyle, in 1659, about ‘the many subjections . of
conversing with mechanical capricious persons’.5 With few exceptions, such as the highly
adept Robert Hooke, author of the magnificent Micrographia, mechanics did not publish;
nor were they often noted. Their traces, such as they remain, may yet appear in patent
records, in diaries or mentioned in letters. However, in the world of the workshop,
publication (if it interested them at all) did not magnify their prestige. Perhaps equally
significant was the fact that mechanics, artisans and craftsmen who have proved essential to
the expansion of scientific knowledge might be isolated by their educational experience in
trades or by their social origins. This may partly explain our inability to resolve the
anonymity, or even to hint at an answer, as Stephen Pumfrey reasonably suggested, to the
question of ‘Who did the work?’ Hints of technical expertise, concealed in the interiors of
the laboratory and the workshop, remain as conspicuous as they are ephemeral throughout
early-modern experimental practice.6 Yet such was not, this paper suggests, without
occasional resolution.
 Assistants to Enlightenment 19

OWNING THE EXPERIMENT

Was there an essential conflict between intellectual ownership and payment for labour in the
laboratory? Artisans and craftsmen, without whom laboratory practice would often have
proved very difficult, lived by their skill. Certainly, the need to gain a living plagued many a
mechanic. In this they were surely distinct from the privileged philosophers of the gentry and
aristocracy.7 Whatever expertise mechanics may have possessed was, nevertheless, theirs to
sell. Their very skill and ability, in workshop or laboratory, recommended them to moneyed
philosophers with whom they might seek employment. In the Royal Society, Robert Hooke
was a paid demonstrator but his skill clearly elevated him beyond a mere servant. As Rob
Iliffe has pointed out, Hooke determined that his role was more worthy than his salary
implied. He was to use his considerable knowledge of instrument-making and machines ‘to
improve and increase the distinguishing faculties of the senses’.8 In the evolving functions of
both experimentalists and their assistants there would inevitably be tensions. Take the case of
Denis Papin in the late seventeenth century, dogsbody to the Royal Society, who was
ultimately hobbled by ‘financial dependence . in constant danger of being reduced from
conditions of service to those of servitude and servility’.9 After a sojourn in mainland Europe,
in search of a princely patron, Papin had the nerve in 1709 to propose to the Royal Society the
building of a distilling apparatus of 80 tons, run by a ‘fire engine’, but only after demanding
an advance of £400 to begin, and the salaried post as inspector of such engines as might be
constructed. Similarly, in 1711, Papin proposed the establishment of a new inventions
company as a joint stock.10 For any number of reasons, this was altogether too mercenary for
a Society aspiring to gentility.
In contrast, it is also transparent that the Society did employ, as ‘Curator of Experiments’,
the brilliant Robert Hooke, whose own origins were of a family in trade. Hooke’s history was
driven in part by the necessity of employment, although through skill and connection to Sir
Christopher Wren and the Royal Society he generated significant wealth.11 Those without
independent means necessarily had to turn labour into reputation and worth. The hard
scrabble of mechanics was not of itself an absolute impediment to recognition. Nor was it
always a road to utter servility. The exceptional Hooke was nonetheless able to join what
might be called the ‘Republic of Experiment’. Even so, as Pumfrey and Steven Shapin have
both pointed out, social status was critical to the emergent image of natural philosophy in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.12 The question therefore remains: what part
did the mechanics’ skill play in the world of philosophers? The links between craft and
philosophical contemplation must have been as varied as circumstances demanded.
One possible means to detect the traces of craftsmen and mechanics in the universe of early-
modern science is to explore the warrens and alleys of Europe’s great cities. Here, amid trade
and labour, we might examine the epicycles of exchange between merchants and projectors,
between inventors, navigators and instrument makers upon whom early-modern empires would
rely.13 Of course, this leads us through a social history of shopkeepers and tradesmen, of
brewers and labourers, in narrow streets, to taverns, coffee houses and lecture halls where
experiments tied practitioners to new-found audiences. In such a view, the so-called scientific
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not lurk in books alone. At the very
least, instrument makers and lecturers occupied a parallel world to that of scholars.14 Similarly,
as recent historians have pointed out, science and industry in the eighteenth century could not
rely on the printed discourse or debates between natural philosophers.15 To take but one
example, as Richard Sorrenson, Rob Iliffe and Mary Terrall have variously revealed, the early
20 L. Stewart

eighteenth-century debates over the shape of the Earth functioned, in part, as disputes not
merely about Cartesian or Newtonian theory but over the importance of scientific instruments in
the polemic that followed expeditions.16 Thus, in the promotion of experimental and
observational science, much might depend on the skill of the instrument maker.

EXPERIMENT AS SKILL

Throughout the first decades of the eighteenth century there was a rapid expansion of public
lectures on natural and experimental philosophy. These attracted sufficient subscriptions that
it was not long before there were large numbers of competitors advertising in the daily press,
promising increasingly dramatic entertainment by new apparatus designed expressly for
display. Suffice it to say here that the emergence of demonstrations and paying auditors also
expanded the market of amateurs and dilettantes that instrument makers sought to reach.
Moreover, it is apparent that although lectures might address many subjects, from physics and
mathematics to astronomy and chemistry, the apparent boundaries between such disciplines
were distinctly porous and evaporated sometimes according to the impulses of the lecturers.
Take William Lewis, son of a brewer in Richmond. Lewis was able to attend Christ Church,
Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but was soon giving chemical lectures in his
laboratory in New Street, Fetter Lane, London. Like Hooke before him, Lewis came from a
merchant family, which may have predisposed him to practical matters. By his twenties,
Lewis set out particularly to advertise his chemical lectures as improvements to pharmacy
and trades.17 Despite all of the rhetoric by mid-century, this was much more easily promised
than achieved.
It was common practice to attract an audience to dramatic demonstrations, but some
lecturers also explicitly tied experiment to commerce. To do so, Lewis had to avoid the
elaborate and expensive apparatus that demonstrators increasingly employed. He aimed for a
broad dispersal of useful knowledge. This could hardly be attained if improvement was
dependent on expensive devices, much beyond the common alembics and crucibles in the
arsenal of the practical chemist. Thus, by 1748, he was planning to publish by subscription a
Commercium Philosophico-Technicum: or The Philosophical Commerce of Arts. He had, he
claimed, created ‘a small, commodious, and easily manageable apparatus, procurable at a
moderate expense’ that would help to bridge barriers. This was, he believed, a time when
‘[t]he discoveries and improvements made in one art, or even its common processes, are
generally little known to those who are employed in another.’. Thus, Lewis argued, ‘a
colour which will bear fire, and unite with vitreous bodies in fusion, concerns equally the
glass maker, the enameller, and the painter on porcelain’.18 To propose a technical manual by
subscription was hardly new; the Newtonian John Harris had done so as early as 1704.
However, by mid-century, there were many associated with the Royal Society, and shortly in
the Royal Society of Arts, who believed that useful knowledge must necessarily be
disseminated. What else could ‘useful’ possibly mean? This surely was the Baconian
approach of the immensely successful lecturer John Theophilus Desaguliers in the Royal
Society who published by subscription his Lectures on Experimental Philosophy (1734,
1744), especially considering the mechanics of the latest steam engines.19 Similarly, Robert
Dossie (the son of an apothecary), of the Royal Society of Arts, was, by 1759, describing
many of the great industrial practices around Britain, such as Joshua Ward’s vitriol works in
Twickenham.20 Technical concerns and mechanical apparatus were therefore elements
common to the experimental promotions of the first half of the eighteenth century. As Hooke
 Assistants to Enlightenment 21

had once made clear, artisans and craftsmen, especially in the instrument trades, were not
foreign to the extension of an experimental method; indeed, mechanical crafts were essential
to their philosophical projects.
Technical skill and sensory knowledge, in what Pamela Smith has recently described as
‘artisanal epistemology’, had long been merged with an experimental life.21 There was not
much difference between the lathes of early metal workers and those found in James Watt’s
garret workshop by the end of the eighteenth century, or between the crucibles and alembics
located in the cellars of the seventeenth-century alchemist and the laboratory soon laid open
in Lewis’s Commercium Philosophico-Technicum (1753–65). Lewis’s proposal to publish by
subscription was seemingly abandoned and he turned to a new integration of craft and
experiment, provoked in part by the reports of the Académie des Sciences:
.an inconvenience to be feared is, the want of that knowledge, and of those general
principles, which bind arts as it were together, and establish between them a reciprocal
communication of light. All the arts, for example, that employ iron, have common
principles, but it would be in vain to expect the knowledge from those who exercise these
arts, each of whom knows only the application of those principles to his own art. The
farrier, the locksmith, the cutler, know how to work iron; but each of them knows only the
manner of working which he has learnt, and is perfectly ignorant that the art of working
iron has general principles, which would be infinitely useful to him in a great number of
unforeseen cases, to which his common practice cannot be applied—’Tis only by bringing
the arts as it were to approach to one another, that we can make advances toward their
perfection: we shall thus put them in condition of mutually illustrating one another, and
perhaps of producing a great number of useful discoveries: ’tis only by this means that
we can know effectually their true principles, and enable them to receive assistance
from theory.
Lewis went on to argue that ‘there are numerous particulars, greater or less, in almost
every page, but whose want is striking when these fragments come to be joined and
methodised into one whole’. Experiments would induce a convergence of isolated knowledge
and would address ‘the difficulty and tediousness, in some cases, of obtaining the necessary
informations among different workmen.’.22 Lewis was the heir of a long tradition of
technical transfer, of skills, operations and engines passed on from one generation to the next,
just as the dyes, glazes and even the enamelling furnace of chemical manufacture had been. In
this he had gathered together much new information by mid-century, some from authors in
mainland Europe, such as that of the chemist Caspar Neumann, whose lectures Lewis
supplemented and published.23 It was probably his own assistant Alexander Chisholm who
translated Neumann’s account of phlogiston theory and who thus gives us a glimpse of the
merging of a scholarly education with laboratory skill.

MAKING THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

Alexander Chisholm’s career offers particular evidence of the blurring of lines between a
laboratory life and the world of manufacturers in the eighteenth century. Chisholm was
seemingly accomplished in experimental chemistry, probably the result of an education in
natural philosophy and mathematics that he would have encountered at King’s College,
Aberdeen, from which he graduated MA in 1743. Shortly before mid-century, Chisholm
came to London, where he encountered William Lewis—apparently accidentally—while
browsing in a bookshop. He was soon in the employ of Lewis, a rising star in London’s
technical world and only then recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.24 Chisholm
22 L. Stewart

worked with Lewis for more than three decades, during which time they conducted a large
number of chemical and industrial trials, visited numerous manufacturing sites, and scoured
continental chemical tracts. Lewis clearly regarded Chisholm as his assistant and servant; at
Lewis’s death in 1781 Chisholm was living with him in Kingston, and received in his will
Lewis’s shirts and £100, only double what Lewis left to his cook.25 But Chisholm’s role as
laboratory assistant can be at least partly restored through several notebooks that reveal the
extent of their research. Although many are still missing, the survival of some bound volumes
will bring us back to the Midlands, to the Wedgwoods, to Keir and to James Watt and
his sons, and to the integration of chemical experiments with manufacturing in the first
industrial revolution.
Chisholm’s position, and his assistance to Lewis, perhaps partly clarifies the trajectory and
range of technical skills exchanged between industry and the early-modern laboratory. From
documents in the Royal Society of Arts it can be demonstrated that Lewis and Chisholm had
been in communication with the Reverend Stephen Hales, of Teddington, who had an
enormous influence on the development of pneumatic chemistry throughout the eighteenth
century. Hales was also closely involved in evaluating proposals of dyes for the Society of
Arts. In 1760 Hales received from Lewis a letter, delivered by Chisholm, in which a method
for dyeing sheep’s wool was discussed along with enclosed samples.26 But Chisholm was no
mere factotum. He was clearly involved directly in Lewis’s chemical research. Various
notebooks survive in the Wedgwood papers, some of which can be tied directly to Chisholm’s
years with Lewis in London. These reveal that in the summer of 1768 they made a tour of the
Staveley and Ketley ironworks, examining pig and bar iron, but they were equally adept at
harvesting chemical and industrial information from foreign sources, much of which ended
up in their commonplace books.27 A ‘London Experiment Book’ is a particularly fascinating
document, begun in 1772–73 but containing several hands, including that of Chisholm, and
which continues after 1781 beyond the death of Lewis. This particular notebook has a vast
range of detailed instructions for producing colours in earthenware, the preparation of
numerous fluxes, and the proper glass useful for colouring. These recipes are clearly from the
last decade of Lewis’s experiments, but they are supplemented by much later work on the
calx of cobalt (with costs of materials and workmen’s wages) and, most notably, experiments
on prismatic colours for glazed ware probably gleaned separately from the commonplace
book of Thomas Bentley, porcelain manufacturer of Liverpool.28
The intersections between Lewis, Bentley and, ultimately, Josiah Wedgwood were
obviously serendipitous, traced only in the remaining records of their research. But they
nevertheless allow us some insight into the evolution of the laboratory assistant and
manufacturer in the industrial revolution. Few manufacturers could afford to ignore the latest
possible developments and techniques that might induce improvement. That had been
Lewis’s primary objective. In contrast, Thomas Bentley, dissenter and improver, had become
partner to Josiah Wedgwood in 1769 and had moved to London to manage their showrooms
and to start an enamelling business in Chelsea. Bentley was immensely well read and seems
to have influenced Josiah by encouraging his cultivation of natural and experimental
philosophy. However, the partnership lasted little more than a decade, ending with Bentley’s
untimely death in 1780 of a fit of apoplexy at his home near Chiswick. This was a low point
for Wedgwood, who had lost not only a partner knowledgeable in experimental arts but also a
widely read friend of taste and sophistication.29 In the next year, Lewis also died, leaving
behind about 200 volumes from decades of experience in chemical trials and evaluations of
manufacturing, much of which was completed for the Society of Arts. By fortuitous
 Assistants to Enlightenment 23

circumstance, their practical legacies merged. Alexander Chisholm, suddenly without

employment, encountered the despondent Josiah Wedgwood, and some of the threads tying
laboratory and trades have thus survived.
It is through Wedgwood’s philosophical remains that the visibility of Alexander Chisholm
is partly restored. Although, like Lewis, Chisholm had the benefit of university instruction,
his role at Kingston had been to assist in experiments and, especially, to translate for Lewis
many of the works published in mainland Europe. This task was very probably continued for
Josiah Wedgwood as well, thereby allowing the industrialist to have access to the leading
edge of chemical research. It is now difficult to identify with precision the work that
Chisholm, or Wedgwood, may have obtained at the sale of Lewis’s library in 1781. It is
similarly uncertain which of the manuscripts in Chisholm’s hand were completed for Lewis
before 1781. This is especially true because many of the works Chisholm translated were
clearly of interest to both Lewis and Wedgwood and were even, possibly, part of Bentley’s
legacy. Among the Wedgwood Archive and in the British Library are translations of
extracts from numerous works, some philosophical but many dealing with the properties of
ores and experimental practice. Thus, in the Wedgwood papers in the British Library, is to
be found a translation of the Montpellier physician Gabriel-François Venel from the
Encyclopédie of 1753. Here particular note was taken of Venel’s lament of the state
of chemistry:
Chemistry is little cultivated among us: this science is but of very moderate extent even
among the learned, notwithstanding the pretensions to universal knowledge which make
the reigning taste of our times. The chemists form still a distinct people, and that not
numerous, having their own laws, their own language, and their own mysteries, and living
almost insulated in the middle of a great people, who are little desirous of any commerce
with them, and expect almost nothing from their industry..
The more ignorant do not distinguish the chemist from the Blower: both these names
sound equally ill in their ears. This prejudice has done more harm to the progress, or at lest
[sic] to the propagation of the art, than the most solid objections taken from the bottom of
the thing itself, for[?] men are more afraid of ridicule than of error.
Among these people of the more ignorant kind, to have a laboratory to prepare therein
perfumes, colours, enamels, phosphori, to know in gross the chemical practices, and the
more curious and less common processes, in one word to be a workman in operations and a
professor of arcana, is to be a chemist.30
Of course, as Wedgwood and Chisholm readily understood, the boundaries between
chemists and industrialists, as between artisans and experimentalists, were increasingly
obscured. Craft and skill might confer as much credibility as scholarship.
This is manifest in the breadth of chemical business at Wedgwood’s manufactory at
Etruria in the Midlands. It is apparent that Chisholm and Lewis had an early interest in the
very airs out of which much more well-known philosophers such as Joseph Priestley and
Antoine Lavoisier soon fashioned a revolution. Indeed, as Lewis’s work reveals, his access to
continental chemists, such as Pierre Joseph Macquer, led him to consider the very increase of
weight in calcination that would induce so much confusion among the proponents of the
doctrine of phlogiston. Lewis remarked, following Macquer, that
It is well known to the chemists, that the metals called imperfect, or those which calcine in
the fire, gain weight in their calcination; a phenomenon not a little astonishing, and of
which they have not been able to assign any probable cause, unless it be the absorption
of air.31
24 L. Stewart

Thus, in the world of Lewis and Chisholm, the examination of the properties of bodies
used in industrial processes led them, perhaps inevitably, to the consideration of a
philosophical chemistry.
Immediately after Chisholm’s removal to Etruria in the 1780s, he embarked on an
immense range of chemical tests. These involved the shrinkage of clays, the attributes of
numerous earths, the sources of colour in ores and, as one might expect for the time, the
greater mysteries of the elusive phlogiston. Earthenware was, of course, subject to
shrinkage in the kiln, but this was far from predictable. Moreover, the several kinds of
apparatus specifically manufactured for chemical experiments might variously react both
in their production and in laboratory use.32 The contraction of clay was the most obvious
problem, but it also presented possibilities. This ultimately led to Wedgwood’s porcelain
pyrometer, which enabled the fairly consistent measurement of temperatures related by
the shrinkage of clay pellets in the device. The result in 1782 so impressed the Royal
Society’s President, Joseph Banks, that Wedgwood was elected a Fellow.33 In a curious
letter, written many years later to James Watt Jr, Wedgwood’s son Josiah described the
production of the original pyrometer from Cornwall clay mixed with alum. Because the
Wedgwoods received many requests for the device it was Chisholm who, it was claimed,
had ‘assisted my father in the original experiment’ and had since attempted numerous
times to restore the original ‘ratio of contraction’ but without success. There was, the
young Wedgwood argued, ‘little chance of procuring specimens[?] that shall agree in their
contractions with the original ones’.34
After leaving Aberdeen in the 1740s, Alexander Chisholm had gained a wealth of
experience as an experimental chemist, in assistance to both Lewis and Wedgwood. His
life with Lewis and his link to the Society of Arts would undoubtedly have prepared him
for the broad scope of business in Wedgwood’s manufactory. By the 1780s, Etruria
produced so much chemical ware it was constantly inundated by requests from dilettantes
such as the evangelical Anglican Thomas Gisborne or from those intent on exploring
pneumatic chemistry such as James Watt and Joseph Priestley, or even from continental
experimentalists such as Lavoisier. It was often, in the absence of Wedgwood, left to
Chisholm to respond to demands for apparatus. He seems to have played a major role in
many tests of wares, glazes and colours in the Wedgwood workshop. Chisholm’s
correspondence with potential customers revealed a shortage of stock and limitations on
some of the apparatus to bear heat and resist acids. Nevertheless, as he once told
Gisborne, ‘you may depend upon your directions being punctually executed, as I well
know that Mr. Wedgwood, independently of any other consideration, has great pleasure in
accommodating gentlemen in these respects, & in contributing his mite to facilitate
chemical inquiries’.35 Although Chisholm was clearly adept in the laboratory and knew
enough of the management of the factory to correspond with potential customers, his role
would become even more extensive.
Chisholm soon found an important part in the education of Wedgwood’s sons, even after
they had gone off to Edinburgh between 1787 and 1789. He was in frequent communication
with Tom Wedgwood, notably about the laboratory and furnaces at Etruria, ultimately
providing Thomas with an extended consideration of the properties and ‘matter of fire’
which then had attracted the philosophical chemists.36 Chisholm reported to Tom on
Lavoisier’s application of heat on ‘a variety of bodies of the earthy & metallic classes’, and
provided his version of a ‘theory of fire’ synthesized, ‘different parts having different
authors’.37 This communication may have played some role in the young Wedgwood’s own
 Assistants to Enlightenment 25

ambitions. Throughout the 1780s, Wedgwood had showed great promise as a chemist, and
in late 1791 he communicated to the Royal Society the results of his experiments on the
production of light and heat, by combustion of various bodies, conducted in his father’s
cream or ‘Queen’s’ ware.38 However, the young Wedgwood was perpetually ill and in
1791, when the manuscript of the second phase of his experiments was completed, the draft
was essentially in Chisholm’s hand, as Tom complained he was ‘not able to write
myself.’.39 In the years leading up to his publications in Philosophical Transactions, Tom
Wedgwood was also exploring substances such as white lead that were transported between
Etruria and James Keir at Tipton. Keir repeated Tom’s experiments on the potential for
glazing in the spring of 1792, read his paper on heat and light, complimenting the
Wedgwoods as ‘truly deserving the name which the old chemists took for themselves, of
Philosophers by Fire’.40 It was the midst of these enterprises that Alexander Chisholm
became the Wedgwoods’ chemical tutor as well as assistant and potter.

CONCLUSION: BOUNDARIES AND SKILL

Chisholm’s career clearly reveals the erasure of any presumed intellectual boundaries between
philosophers and the practitioners of mechanic arts. Indeed, few of the experiments conducted
at the pottery at Etruria did not depend very heavily on Chisholm’s expertise. However, there
were also deeper issues reflected in these relationships throughout the industrial revolution. As
David Miller has argued, there was often a ‘philosopher beneath the skin of the engineer and
entrepreneur’.41 The effective evolution in experimental and industrial practice in the late
eighteenth century imposed a certain ambiguity in roles, from manufacturer, to artisan, and
skilled operator of experiments. All, on occasion, might draw on some of the heavily
contested theoretical and scholarly conflicts such as those regarding heat or light.42 Many
early-modern manufactories seemingly had laboratories or, at the very least, what they
described as workshops where it was apparent that experiments were conducted. This was true
of Keir at Tipton, Wedgwood at Etruria, and James Watt at Soho. Skill in the laboratory was
crucial. It was Matthew Boulton, the financial wizard behind the Boulton-Watt enterprise, who
was most adamant that trades and laboratory technique were critical in the training of a young
man. In an age when technical skill was increasingly highly regarded, Boulton told his son:
A man will never make a good Chymist unless he acquired dexterity, & neatness in making
expts, even down to the pulverising in a Mortar, or blowing the Bellows, distinctness,
order, regularity, neatness & Cleanliness are necessary in the Laboratory, Manufactory, &
the Counting house.43
All of these well-known manufacturers conducted laboratory trials, examined nameless
substances, and depended on the knowledge of their assistants. Perhaps, however, there remains
the broader issue of how manufacturers took advantage of the skill their assistants possessed.
This is revealed in the appreciation of a philosophical education even among men, such as
James Watt or Josiah Wedgwood, who are otherwise now regarded essentially as great
industrial innovators. Undoubtedly many factory assistants were artisans and labourers with
little technical knowledge except that which was absorbed in the course of their work. But
Lewis and Keir both accepted that, although occasionally burdensome, this information could
nevertheless be invaluable. Moreover, early industrialists seem to have a deep appreciation of
the necessity of access to the latest philosophical explorations, indeed to merge technical and
philosophical training where possible.
26 L. Stewart

There are numerous examples of manufacturers’ insisting that their sons be led to a
practical education rather than to the arts. Similarly, Thomas Bentley’s father, a country
gentleman on the border of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, had apprenticed Thomas to a
woollen and cotton manufacturer in Manchester.44 Land and industry were more closely
allied than might be realized. The link lay in the search for improvement. Even
landowners consulted industrialists such as Watt about the proper education of sons. Coke
of Brookhill Hall, Nottinghamshire, enquired of both Priestley and Watt of the best
method to educate a son for the ‘Iron or Cotton branches’. Coke had resources on his own
estate near the Cromford Canal, and development was on his mind. He thought it might be
best to send his 15-year-old son to Glasgow, ‘where he might attend the chemistry, natural
philosophy, & mathematical Professors, but a situation where he would see more of the
practical Branches of these Things in Germany or Saxony perhaps would be more
proper’.45 When gentlemen sought technical education for their sons, it is obvious that
industrial expectations had magnified the importance of the mechanical. As the
momentum of the industrial revolution gathered pace, the skills of an Alexander
Chisholm reflected the blurring of the boundaries between the experimental philosopher
and the evolving skills of the artisans and craftsmen on which both Enlightenment and
Improvement depended.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This essay was made possible with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, and grant no. RZ-50593-05 from the NEH for collaborative
research on ‘The first generation of British industrialists’. I wish to thank Otto Sibum and the
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, for the opportunity to explore
issues of industry and experiment, as well as the staff of the Birmingham Central Library, the
Royal Society of Arts, the trustees of the Wedgwood Museum and Ms Helen Burton of Keele
University Archives for their assistance.

NOTES
1 [James Keir], The first part of a dictionary of chemistry, & c. (Pearson & Rollason, Birmingham,
1789), p. iii.
2 On vitriolated tartar see William Lewis, A course of practical chemistry. In which are contained
all the operations described in Wilson’s Complete course of chemistry (for J. Nourse, London,
1746), p. 305.
3 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E1-694. Keir to Thomas Wedgwood, 17 March 1792. I wish
to thank the Wedgwood Museum and Ms Helen Burton for making these manuscripts available
to me.
4 James Watt to Beddoes, 2 September 1794, in Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations
on the medicinal use, and on the production of factitious airs (Part I by Thomas Beddoes, M. D.;
Part II by James Watt, engineer) ( J. Johnson, London, 1796), pp. 113–114.
5 Quoted in Malcolm Oster, ‘The scholar and the craftsman revisited: Robert Boyle as aristocrat
and artisan’, Ann. Sci. 49, 255–276 (1992), esp. at p. 265.
6 Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Who did the work?: experimental philosophers and public demonstrators in
Augustan England’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 28, 131–156 (1995).
7 Oster, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 256, 263, n. 36, regarding the extensive debate over the scholar and the
craftsman.
 Assistants to Enlightenment 27

8 Rob Iliffe, ‘Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s
London’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 28, 285–318 (1995), esp. at p. 298.
9 Pumphrey, op. cit. (note 6), p. 142.
10 Royal Society, Classified Papers, III (2), 18 January 1708/9; Classified Papers, XVIII, 28, 26
April 1711.
11 Iliffe, op. cit. (note 8); Jim Bennett, Michael Cooper, Michael Hunter and Lisa Jardine, London’s
Leonardo. The life and work of Robert Hooke (Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen Inwood,
The man who knew too much. The strange and inventive life of Robert Hooke 1635–1703
(Macmillan, London, 2002).
12 Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Ideas above his station: a social study of Hooke’s curatorship of experiments’,
Hist. Sci. 29, 1– 44 (1991); Steven Shapin, ‘The house of experiment in seventeenth-century
England’, Isis 79, 373– 404 (1988); Shapin, ‘“A scholar and a gentleman”: the problematic
identity of the scientific practitioner in early modern England’, Hist. Sci. 29, 279–327 (1991);
Shapin, The social history of truth. Civility and science in seventeenth-century England
(University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. ch. 8.
13 For Boyle on the virtue of labour see Oster, op. cit. (note 5), p. 260.
14 See, for example, Deborah E. Harkness, The jewel house. Elizabethan London and the scientific
revolution ( Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007); J. A. Bennett, ‘The mechanics’
philosophy and the mechanical philosophy’, Hist. Sci. 24, 1–28 (1986); Pamela H. Smith, The
body of the artisan. Art and experience in the scientific revolution (University of Chicago Press,
2004). Cf. Mario Biagioli, ‘From print to patents: living on instruments in early modern Europe’,
Hist. Sci. 44, 1–48 (2006); and Iliffe, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 289 and 311.
15 Jim Bennett, ‘Shopping for instruments in Paris and London’, in Merchants & marvels.
Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe (eds Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen),
pp. 370–395 (Routledge, New York, 2002); L. Stewart, ‘Science, instruments and guilds in early-
modern Britain’, Early Sci. Med. 10, 392–410 (2005); and especially A. D. Morrison-Low,
Making scientific instruments in the industrial revolution (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007).
16 Mary Terrall, ‘Representing the Earth’s shape: the polemics surrounding Maupertuis’s
expedition to Lapland’, Isis 83, 218–237 (1992); Rob Iliffe, ‘“Aplatisseur du monde et de
Cassini”: Maupertuis, precision measurement, and the shape of the Earth in the 1730s’, Hist. Sci.
31, 335–375 (1993); Richard Sorrenson, ‘George Graham, visible technician’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 32,
203–221 (1999); Terrall, The man who flattened the Earth. Maupertuis and the sciences in the
Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
17 F. W. Gibbs, ‘William Lewis, M. D., F. R. S. (1706–1781)’, Ann. Sci. 8, 122–151 (1952), esp.
at p. 124.
18 William Lewis, Commercium Philosophico-Technicum; or, the Philosophical Commerce of Arts:
Designed as an Attempt to Improve Arts, Trades, and Manufactures (H. Baldwin, London, 1763),
‘Preface’, p. xii; Gibbs, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 126–127; Gibbs, ‘William Lewis and platina.
Bicentenary of the “Commercium Philosophico-Technicum”, Platinum Met. Rev. 7, 66–69
(1963); and A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and technology in the industrial revolution
(University of Toronto, 1969), pp. 53–54.
19 Larry Stewart, The rise of public science: rhetoric, technology, and natural philosophy in
Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), chs 7 and 8; Carlo Poni,
‘The craftsman and the good engineer: technical practice and theoretical mechanics in J. T.
Desaguliers’, Hist. Technol. 10, 215–232 (1993).
20 F. W. Gibbs, ‘Robert Dossie (1717–1777) and the Society of Arts’, Ann. Sci. 7, 150–151 (1951).
21 Smith, op. cit. (note 14), chapter 2 and pp. 234–236. On this issue see the essays by Maxine Berg,
Lilliane Hilaire-Perez, Larry Stewart, Kristine Bruland, Joel Mokyr, and Margaret Jacob in a
special issue of Hist. Sci. 45 ( June 2007); cf. Iliffe, op. cit. (note 8), p. 298.
22 Lewis, op. cit. (note 18), preface, pp. xiii-xv. Notice of his experimental approach to the different
crafts and manufactures was taken by the Gentleman’s Magazine 35, 338–340 (1765).
28 L. Stewart

23 Gibbs, op. cit. (note 17), p. 130.

24 Gibbs, op. cit. (note 17), p. 128; Frederick G. Page, ‘Lewis, William (bap. 1708, d. 1781)’, in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [[Link]
[Link]/view/article/16609]; cf. William P. D. Wightman, ‘Aberdeen University and the
Royal Society’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 11, 145–158 (1955). The standard biographies suggest that
Chisholm was a graduate of Marischal College, but this belief seems to have been mistaken.
Personal communication from Ms June Ellner, Archives, King’s College, Aberdeen.
25 Public Record Office, National Archives, Prob 11/1074. 19 February 1781.
26 Royal Society of Arts, Guard Books, vol. 23, no. 1, 16 February 1760. For Lewis’s assessment for
the Society of American potash see vol. 23, no. 46, 27 January 1767. See also D. G. C. Allan and
Robert E. Schofield. Stephen Hales, scientist and philanthropist (Scolar Press, London, 1980),
pp. 104 and 106.
27 F. W. Gibbs, ‘A notebook of William Lewis and Alexander Chisholm’, Ann. Sci. 8, 202–220
(1952), esp. at pp. 211ff.
28 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS., E26-19122. ‘London Experiment Book’ [1772–1773], esp.
at pp. 3–30, 53–70 and 281–283.
29 Alison Kelly, ‘Bentley, Thomas (1731–1780)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2004) [[Link] Brian Dolan,
Josiah Wedgwood. Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment (Harper, London, 2004).
30 British Library, Add. MS. 28314. Wedgwood MSS. Vol. VIII, 72–73; Jonathan Simon, Chemistry,
pharmacy and revolution in France, 1777–1809 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005), pp. 66–77.
31 Gibbs, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 206 and 209; Gibbs, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 130–131; Lewis, op. cit.
(note 18), p. 461. Macquer’s Dictionnaire de chymie, contenant la théorie & pratique de cette
science (1766) ultimately seems to have become a basic reference work. It was this that James
Keir edited and amended. See Richard R. Yeo, Encyclopaedic visions: scientific discoveries and
Enlightenment culture (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 108.
32 See J. A. Chaldecott, ‘Wedgwood’s ceramic wares for chemical use: production and supply from
1779 to 1794’, Ambix 28, 182–205 (1981); and Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the
commercialization of the potteries’, in The birth of a consumer society. The commercialization of
eighteenth-century England (eds Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb), pp. 100 –145
(Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982).
33 Josiah Wedgwood, ‘An Attempt to Make a Thermometer for Measuring the Higher Degrees of
Heat, from a Red Heat up to the Strongest That Vessels Made of Clay can Support’, Phil. Trans.
R. Soc. 72, 305 –326 (1782).
34 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E4 3322 [copy], Josiah Wedgwood, jun., to James Watt, jun.,
30 March 1800.
35 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E3 2126. Chisholm to Thomas Gisborne, 11 April 1783;
Robert Hole, ‘Gisborne, Thomas (1758–1846)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2004) [[Link]
36 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E44 28903. Chisholm to Tom Wedgwood, 23 December
1786; and E44-28904. Chisholm to Tom Wedgwood, n.d.; Trevor H. Levere, ‘Wedgwood,
Thomas (1771–1805)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press,
2004) [[Link] see also Keele University, Wedgwood
Moseley Collection, WM 18. Josiah Wedgwood, jun. to Chisholm, 11 January 1787, seeking
assistance with a paper he was about to write for the Chemical Society.
37 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E44-28903, Chisholm to Tom Wedgwood, 23 December
1786; E44 -28904, Chisholm to Tom Wedgwood, n.d.
38 Thomas Wedgwood, ‘Experiments and Observations on the Production of Light from Different
Bodies, by Heat and by Attrition’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 82, 28–47 (1792); Wedgwood,
‘Continuation of a Paper on the Production of Light and Heat from Different Bodies’, Phil. Trans.
R. Soc. 82, 270–282 (1792).
 Assistants to Enlightenment 29

39 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E40 28420–28421 (1792).

40 Keele University, Wedgwood MSS. E1 697. James Keir to Tom Wedgwood, 19 April 1792.
41 David Philip Miller, ‘The usefulness of natural philosophy: the Royal Society and the culture of
practical utility in the later eighteenth century’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 32, 185–201 (1999), esp.
at p. 197.
42 Cf. Jan Golinski, ‘Conversations on chemistry: talk about phlogiston in the coffee house society,
1780–1787’, in Discussing chemistry and steam: the minutes of a coffee house philosophical
society, 1780–1787 (eds Trevor H. Levere and Gerard L’Estrange Turner), pp. 191–205 (Oxford
University Press, 2002).
43 Matthew Boulton to Matthew Robinson Boulton, 19 December 1787, quoted in David Philip
Miller, Discovering water. James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the nineteenth-century ‘water
controversy’ (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004), p. 90.
44 Dolan, op. cit. (note 29), p. 110.
45 Birmingham Central Library, James Watt Papers, 4/13/23. Daniel? Coke to Watt, 29 March 1792.