became specialty meeting places. They were quieter and cheaper
than taverns; for a penny, one could sip a cup of coffee by the
fire, read the newspapers, and engage in conversation. Merchants,
stock jobbers, politician groups, soldiers, doctors and clergymen,
scholars, and literary men all had special coffee house meeting
places. Notices and letters of general interest were posted
therein. Many merchants, brokers, and underwriters, especially
those whose houses had been burned in the fire, conducted their
business at their coffee house and used it as their business
address. Men in marine insurance and shipping met at Lloyd's
Coffeehouse, which was run by Edward Lloyd who established it for
this purpose in 1687. Lloyd provided reliable shipping news with a
network of correspondents in the principal ports at home and on
the continent and circulated a handwritten sheet of lists of
vessels and their latest movements at his coffeehouse. The patrons
cheered safe arrivals and shared their grief over ships lost. They
insured their own risks at one moment and underwrote those of
their friends the next. Auctions of goods and of ships and ship
materials which had been advertised in the newspapers were
conducted from a pulpit in the coffeehouse.
French wine was consumed less because of heavy taxation and
spirits and beer were consumed more. The streets were alive with
taverns, coffee houses, eating houses, and hackney coaches past 9
p.m. at night. Coffee houses were suppressed by royal proclamation
in 1675 because "malicious and scandalous reports" defaming his
majesty's government were spread there, which disturbed the peace
and quiet of the realm. But this provoked such an uproar that it
was reduced to a responsibility of the owner to prevent scandalous
papers and libels from being read and hindering any declarations
any false and scandalous reports against the government or its
ministers.
London air was filthy with smoke from coal burning. In 1684 the
streets were lit with improved lights which combined oil lamps
with lenses and reflectors. Groups of householders combined to
hire lighting contractors to fulfill their statutory
responsibility to hang candles or lights in some part of their
houses near the street to light it for passengers until 9:00 p.m.,
and later to midnight. In 1694 a monopoly was sold to one lighting
company. In 1663 a body of paid watchmen was established in
London. An office of magistrate was created and filled with
tradesmen and craftsmen, who could make a living from the fines
and fees. This was to supplement the unpaid Justices of the Peace.
The public was encouraged to assist in crime prevention, such as
being witnesses, but most policing was left to the parishes.
Crowds punished those who transgressed community moral standards,
threatened their economic or social interests, or offended their
religious or patriotic beliefs. Often a crowd would react before
the call of "stop thief" or the hue and cry from the local
constable. Pickpockets would be drenched under a pump. Cheats
would be beaten up. Dishonest shops and brothels would be
ransacked or destroyed. The most common targets were promiscuous
women and pregnant servants.
There were many highway robberies and mob actions in London. Mobs
in the thousands would turn out against the Catholics, especially
at times of unemployment and trade depression. Working people
still saw demonstrations and violence as the best way to achieve
their economic goals, since strikes didn't work. For example, the
silk workers used street violence to get protective legislation
against imports and mechanization in 1675. The manufacture of silk
material had been brought to England by French workers driven from
France. In 1697, three thousand London silk weavers demonstrated
outside the Commons and East India House against the importation
of raw silks by the East India Co., and a couple months later,
they attacked a house in the city owned by a gentleman of the
company. In 1701, heavy duties were imposed on the import of
Indian silks and wearing of Indian silks was prohibited by
statute. Sometimes mobs would break open the prisons to release
fellow rioters or take action against strike breakers or
informers. Parish constables elected by their neighbors could not
control the mobs and stayed within their parishes. Dueling was
still prevalent, even though against the law.
In London and Westminster, it was hard to enforce the requirement
that inhabitants keep the street in front of their house clean and
store the filth until the daily raker or scavenger came with cart
and dung pot. So a commission was made responsible for paving and
keeping clean the streets, making and repairing vaults, sewers,
drains, and gutters, and removing encroachments. It compensated
those with encroachments of over 30 years. It assessed inhabitants
of such streets 16d. per square yard from the front of their
building to the center of the street. Women continued to empty
their pails and pans outside their doors and did their washing on
stools in the streets. There was a penalty of 5d. for throwing
filth in front of one's house, and 20d. for throwing it elsewhere
in the streets. Scavengers and rakers could lodge their coal
ashes, dust, dirt, and other filth in such vacant public places as
the commission deemed convenient for accommodating country carts
returning otherwise empty after their loads were sold.
However, this system did not work because people would not pay
their assessments. So there was a return to the former system of
requiring citizens to sweep and clean the streets in front of
their buildings twice a week and keep the filth until a scavenger
or raker came. The penalty for not doing so was 3s.4d., later
raised to 10s. Any one throwing coal ashes, dust, dirt, rubbish,
or dung onto the streets or lanes incurred a fine of 5s. There was
a fine of 20s. for hooping or washing any pipes or barrels in any
lane or open passage or repairing coaches, sawing wood, or
chiseling stones in the streets. Pigs kept in or about one's house
had to be forfeited.
One way that people traveled was to be carried in sedan chairs
held up by two horizontal poles with one man at the front ends and
another man in back. There were so many sedan chairs and coaches
for hire in London that the watermen lost business. All hackney
coaches in London or Westminster were required to be licensed and
marked with their owner's distinctive mark so that complaints
could be made. Their maximum rate was 10s. for a 12 hour day, and
18d. for the first hour and 12d. for every hour thereafter.
Licensed coachmen were not allowed to practice any other trade.
The coaches paid the commission 5 pounds yearly. Hay sold along
the road brought 6d. per load, and straw 2d. per load, to the
commission. There had to by paid 3d. for every cart load of hay
sold at the hay market and 1d. for every cart of straw, to go
towards paving and repairing the hay market street. Overall,
agriculture improved. Fields that would have been left fallow were
planted with new crops which restored indispensable chemical
elements to the soil. At the same time, they supplied winter food
for stock. The size and weight of animals for slaughter grew.
There was so much stock breeding that it was more economical for a
family to buy meat, milk, and eggs, than to maintain animals
itself. There was an explosion in the growing of beans, peas,
lettuce, asparagus, artichokes, and clover. The demand for food in
London and other urban areas made enclosure for crop cultivation
even more profitable than for sheep grazing. The government made
no more attempts to curtail the enclosure of farm lands. The
number of enclosures grew because copyholders were not successful
in obtaining the legal security of tenure. But most land was not
enclosed.
In 1661 in Essex, the wages for mowing one acre of grass were
1s.10d.; for reaping, shearing, binding one acre of wheat 4s.; and
for threshing a quarter of wheat or rye 1s.
Wives participated with their husbands in general agricultural
chores and did the dairy work including making cheese. Every
householder kept chickens because egg production was cheap, their
market price being only 1s. for a hundred. Wives also took care of
the gardening work and traditionally kept for their own the cash
that came in from garden, dairy, and poultry products. A wife made
jellies and preserves when the fruit trees, bushes, and vines were
bearing. Imported sugar enabled fruit to be preserved as jam in
jars sealed with a layer of mutton fat to make them airtight. She
was likely to concoct medications from her herbs. Meat had to be
smoked or salted when there was not enough fodder to keep animals
alive through the winter. She saw to it that the soap was boiled
and the candles molded. She cooked the daily meals, did the
washing, produced cloth for the family's use, and sewed the
family's clothing.
Women had less work and lower pay than men. Since most cottages
had a spinning wheel, spinning work was readily available to
wives. In the 1670s, a female weaver or spinner was paid 2-4d. per
day. A domestic servant, who was usually female, was paid 40-80s.
a year. Men in the trades objected to competition from lower-paid
women. Aristocratic ladies actively managed their family's
household and estates. The only work available to a high middle-
class woman who was waiting to get married was to be a governess
in another household or a lady-in-waiting to a gentlewoman.
Children often worked; this was recommended so that they were
under the direct supervision of their parents rather than getting
into mischief in the village. The mother typically mingled
severity with gentleness, but the father did not dare to err on
the side of leniency. Discipline was by whipping. Children were
treated as little adults. The lack of a conception of childhood
innocence even extended to the practice of adults to tell bawdy
jokes in their presence or play with their children's genitals.
About 1660, the Royal Society for science was founded by Charles
II, who became its patron. It was formed from a discussion group
of the new experimental philosophy. It included the Baconians
formerly at Oxford and Cambridge, who were ejected at the
Restoration, and a group of Gresham professors of geometry and
astronomy. The Royal Society met at Gresham College. Its goal was
to compare ideas in mathematics and science and identify specific
aims of science. Charles himself had his own laboratory and
dabbled in chemistry and anatomy. Similar societies were formed
all over the world. Theologicians warned that scientific research
was dangerous. But it's advances improved agriculture,
manufactures, medicine, surgery, navigation, naval architecture,
gunnery, and engineering.
Issac Newton was a genius, who in his childhood designed and built
model windmills, water wheels, water clocks, and sundials. He came
from a family which had risen from the yeomen ranks to the gentry.
For a few years after graduating from Cambridge University in
1665, he secluded himself in the countryside to study. Here, using
the work of Wallis, he formulated the binomial theorem that
expands (A+B) raised to the nth power, where n is an integer,
fraction, or negative number. When n was a negative number, the
expansion never terminated; instead of a finite sum, there is an
infinite series. He then developed the notion of a number being
the limit of an infinite converging series of partial sums, such
as the limit of 1+(1/2)+(1/4)+(1/8)...= 2. By considering the
state of motion of a mass-point in an infinitely short time under
the influence of an external force, he developed rules for finding
areas under algebraic curves [integration], such as the hyperbola,
and finding tangents to algebraic curves [differentiation], which
he recognized as inverse processes. That is, taking the integral
and then the differential of a function results in a return to
that function.
Newton discovered that colors arose from the separation rather
than a modification of white light, that is natural sunlight. He
did this using a prism to dissect the white light into its
spectrum of constituent colors and then using a prism and lens to
recombine the colors to reconstitute white light. The spectrum was
the same as that of a rainbow. He determined the angle of
refraction of each color by beaming white light through a prism,
and then through a hole in a board which isolated one color, to
another prism. When he discovered that all colors reflect from a
mirror at the same angle, he invented and built the reflecting
telescope, which used a parabolic concave mirror and a flat mirror
instead of a convex lens, thereby eliminating the distortions and
rainbow coloring around the edges that resulted from the
refraction of different colors at different angles. He deemed a
ray of light to consist of a rapidly moving stream of atomic
particles, rather than Robert Hooke's pulses or Christian Huygens'
waves, because shadows showed a sharp boundary between the light
and the absence of light. He reasoned that if light was made up of
pulses or waves, it could spread around obstacles or corners as
sound seemed to do. He approximated the speed of sound.
Newton opined that an object moves because of external forces on
it rather than by forces internal to the object. He connected the
concepts of force and acceleration with a new concept: mass. He
found that the acceleration of a body by a force is inversely
proportional to its mass, and formulated the equation that force
equals mass time acceleration. Another law was his principle of
inertia that any body, in so far as it is able, continues its
state either of rest or in uniform, rectilinear motion. His next
law was that when a body A exerts a force on a body B, then B also
exerts a force on A which is equal in amount but opposite in
direction.
Newton had a radically novel idea that equated instantaneous
acceleration to the gravity force which provoked it. He theorized
that the same gravity force that pulled an apple down from a tree
extended out to the moon hold it in its orbit around the earth. He
connected these movements by imagining a cannon on a mountain
shooting a series of cannonballs parallel to the earth's surface.
The first shot had only a tiny charge of explosive, and the
cannonball barely makes it out of the muzzle before falling to the
ground. The second shot is propelled by a larger charge, and
follows a parabolic arc as it falls, The next shots, fired with
increasingly more propellant, eventually disappear over the
horizon as they fall. Lastly, with enough gunpowder, a speeding
cannonball would completely circle the earth without hitting it.
He combined the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry, first
making observations, and then generalizing them into a theory, and
finally deducing consequences from the theory which could be
tested by observation. He carried mathematization of data from
experiments as far as possible. His universal theory of
gravitation is based on the idea of forces between objects rather
than from one object to another; e.g. the apple exerts a force
toward the earth as well as receiving a force from the earth. His
law of gravitation explains how the whole universe is held
together. This law holds that every object in the universe
attracts every other object with a single gravitational force that
is directly proportional to the product of their masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their
centers. Newton had first believed in the Cartesian system of
celestial vortices of aether than swirled the planets and comets
around their orbits. The gross features of the universe led to his
recognition that the attraction between two bodies decreased
inversely to the square of the distance between them. Then he came
to accept Hooke's hypothesis that planets are kept in their orbits
by the combination of an attractive power of the sun and of motion
in a straight line that was tangential to their orbits. From
astronomical data, he calculated this centrifugal acceleration of
each planet to be the inverse square of its distance from the sun.
He also calculated the "centripetal" accelerations necessary to
bring the planets into their orbits. His experiments had shown
that he centripetal force in a circular orbit was equal to the
mass of the body times the square of its velocity, all divided by
the radius of the circular path. He used calculus and differential
equations to determine centripetal forces of elliptical orbits,
where the distance from the sun, the velocity, and the
acceleration were variables. He correlated the moon's orbit with
the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth.
Then he formulated the idea that the ultimate agent of nature was
a force acting between bodies rather than a moving body itself.
Gravity did not act in proportion to the surfaces of bodies, but
in proportion to quantity of matter, its penetration to the very
center of all bodies without diminution, its propagation to
immense distances decreasing in exact proportion to the square of
the distance. Newton showed that a single gravitational force
could account for the way falling objects descend to the ground,
the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, the motion of the moon in
its orbit around the earth, the course of the tides every twelve
hours, the lower densities of the earth's atmosphere at greater
heights, the paths of Jupiter's satellites, and the ellipitical
motions of the planets in their orbits around the sun. It had been
thought that invisible angels moved the planets. He proved from
his law of gravitation and his three laws of motion the truth of
Kepler's laws of ellipitical planetary motion. He demonstrated
from data collected from the comet of 1680 that comets moved
according to his law of gravitation. Non-periodic comets were
observed to follow hyperbolic paths. He used the concept of a
common center of gravity as a reference point for other motions.
The fact that the center of gravity of the solar system was within
the body of the sun verified that the sun was indeed at the center
of it.
Newton's "Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis", was
published in 1687. The church denounced it as being against the
scripture of the Bible. Newton did not agree with the established
church on many points, such as the trinity, and was considered a
heretic. He had his own interpretations of the Bible and doubted
the divinity of Jesus. But it was accepted for dissenters like
Newton to qualify for full civil rights by maintaining an outward
conformity and taking the sacrament in the established church once
a year. Newton was given a royal dispensation from taking holy
orders as prescribed by the rules for tenure of fellows of his
college at Cambridge University. He did believe in a God who
created the universe and who had a ubiquitous presence in all
space. When Catholic King James II tried to have a Catholic monk
admitted to the degree of a Master of Arts at Cambridge University
without taking the oath of adherence to the established
Protestant church, in order to participate in the business of the
university, Newton was active in the opposition that defeated
this attempt.
When Newton's laws were applied to the paths of the moons of
Jupiter, it was noticed that the moons were a few minutes ahead of
time at that time of year when Jupiter was nearest to the earth
and a few minutes behind time when Jupiter was farthest from the
earth. Olaus Roemer, a Danish astronomer, postulated that
Jupiter's eclipses of its moons lasted seconds longer the farther
away Jupiter was from the earth because it took their light longer
to reach the earth. He concluded that light does not travel
instantaneously, but at a certain speed, which he calculated in
1676.
In 1668, Christian Huygens formulated the law of conservation of
momentum [mass times velocity], which held that when objects
collide, they may each change direction, but the sum of all their
velocities will remain the same. Huygens also recognized the
conservation of what was later called "kinetic energy", which is
associated with movement. In 1690, he posited the theory that
light consists of a series of waves. It states that all points of
a wave front of light in a vacuum may be regarded as new sources
of wavelets that expand in every direction at a rate depending on
their velocities. He thought this a better explanation of bending
and interference of light than Newton's particle theory.
In 1661, Robert Boyle, called the father of modern chemistry,
defined an element as a substance that cannot be further
decomposed and distinguished it from a mixture, which is easily
separable, and a compound, which is not easily separable. He used
a pump he developed and a glass jar to create a confined air space
for experiments. He noted that burning objects such as candles and
coal, when placed in the receiver of his air pump, went out after
a time although air was still present. He opined that animals were
dependent upon a fresh supply of air to live. He studied the
relationship between the volume, density, and pressure of gases.
He proved by experiment that the volume of a gas at a constant
temperature varies inversely to the pressure applied to the gas.
Since gas is compressible, he opined that gases must be composed
of discrete particles separated by void, and also that basic
physical properties were due to motions of particles, or atoms,
which was an ancient Greek conjecture. This cast doubt on the
theory that everything was composed from the four basic elements:
air, water, fire, and earth. Boyle's laboratory at Oxford was
denounced by the Oxford clergy as destroying religion. In 1679,
the steam pressure cooker was developed.
Robert Hooke, the son of a minister who died when he was thirteen,
helped Boyle build his air pump. He was a genius with innate
mechanical skill. He applied a spiral spring to regulate the
balance of watches. A lord financed him as a Gresham lecturer for
50 pounds a year. In 1666, he used a pendulum to measure the force
of gravity and showed that the center of gravity of the earth and
moon is a point describing an ellipse around the sun. In 1667, he
explained the scintillation of the stars by irregular atmospheric
refractions. He formulated the theory that light is composed of
pulses. Hooke's Law states that the amount an elastic body bends
or stretches out of shape is in direct proportion to the force
acting on it. He invented the odometer, a wheel to measure
distances. He constructed an arithmetical machine. He invented the
universal joint, which can move in many angles. At his death,
Hooke had thousands of pounds stored in an iron chest.
Wallis wrote a treatise on algebra which was historical as well as
practical. In 1668, he postulated the correct theory of impacts of
inelastic bodies, based on the principle of conservation of
momentum. During this time, he also deciphered enemy messages for
royalty and was made a royal chaplain.
Royal astronomer and genius Edmond Halley, the son of a soap
maker, studied tides, magnetism, and the paths of comets and
stars. He went on voyages to study the heavens from different
positions, thereby laying the foundations of physical geography.
He showed that the stars change in position in relation to each
other. With Newton's help, he calculated the orbit of a comet he
saw in 1682 to be elliptical rather than parabolic and then proved
it was the same comet that had appeared in 1531 and 1607,
indicating it's regularity; it was then named "Halley's comet".
However, the Church of England still embraced the idea that comets
and eclipses were evidence of God's wrath. Greenwich Observatory
was built in 1675. Halley used a barometer to measure the density
of the atmosphere and related its readings to elevations into the
atmosphere and to weather. He determined that the cause of the
tropical trade winds was the sun warming the tropical air at the
equator, causing it to rise blow away from the equator to replace
cooler air. He illustrated the tropical winds with the first
meteorological map. He made a descent in a diving bell, which was
used to try to reach wrecked treasure ships. He compiled a table
of mortality, which originated the science of life-statistics. He
studied fossils and perceived them as remnants of living beings
that had died long ago, and imagined a succession of living
things. Halley surveyed the tides and coasts of the British
Channel for the king in 1701.
In 1675, apothecary Nicolas Lemery divided substances into
mineral, vegetable, and animal. He wrote a dictionary of
pharmaceuticals.