The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750

In The Rise of Public Science, Larry Stewart explores social attitudes towards the claims and the activities of the natural philosophers in Britain from the Restoration to the first stage of industrialisation. By examining the activities and the promotions in which Newton's disciples became involved, Stewart sheds light on prevailing and practising attitudes to science and technology before the Industrial Revolution. Troubled by claims of social and political legitimacy, the Newtonian public lecturers took Newton's science far beyond the Royal Society into a world of projectors, patents, and some of the great entrepreneurial scandals of the early eighteenth century.