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"The growth of knowledge was impeded by inertia, superstition, persecution, censorship and ecclesiastical control of education."1Yet much progress-was made. Witchcraft, the worst superstition of all, disappeared, but Europe had already sacrificed 100,000 men, women and girls in this folly. Persecution diminished and censorship was circumvented in a variety of ways. There was a spreading eagerness for knowledge and as encyclopedias began to appear, knowledge and ideas spread. The Frenchman, Denis Diderot, published the Encvclopedie, which was the revolution before the revolution. It consisted of 28 volumes and was reprinted 3 times in Switzerland, 2 times in Italy, once in Germany and once in Russia. Voltaire and many lesser writers spread the word through the middle and upper classes.
Euler, Leonard - born in Switzerland, worked in Berlin and Russia, dying in St. Petersburg. Prolific in many sciences, but chiefly in mathematics. In algebraic calculus he developed the notion of a mathematical function. He formed laws of refraction and general equations of mechanics.
Lagrange, Joseph Louis - of French parentage, born in Turin, Italy and worked there as well as the Berlin Academy and the French Academie des Sciences. He was a protégé of Euler. His Mecanique Analytique is generally conceded to be the best of the century. It advanced upon Newton, using algebraic calculus. He was a leader in establishing the metric system.
D'Alembert, Jean - a French, abandoned child, who worked on refraction of light at interfaces, equations of motion, etc.
Black, Joseph - Born in France of Scottish parents; studied chemistry at Glasgow; came close to discovery of oxygen and developed the idea of latent heat.
Wilcke, Johan Carl - of Stockholm. Worked with radiant heat, distinguishing it from light, etc.; helped determine absolute zero.
Grav, Stephen - Londoner who conducted an electric charge for 765 feet.
Guillaume, Louis - of France and Watson, William - of England, both demonstrated "a circuit".
Franklin, Benjamin - of America, who identified lightning with electricity.
de Coulomb, Augustin - of France, who measured magnetic influences and electrical charges.
Volta, Alessandro - of Pavia, Italy. In the last year of the century he developed the first electrical-current battery.
Chemistry still lacked precision and as an abstract science had little to contribute to industry. Nevertheless, empiricism and measurement records led to great changes.
Bergman, Torbern Olof - of Sweden. He obtained pure nickel and worked with carbon.
Scheele, Karl Wilhelm - of Sweden. He anticipated Priestley's discovery of what was later called "oxygen" by Lavoisier. He discovered many new substances and their uses. He helped make photography possible by showing that sunlight reduces silver chloride to metallic silver.
Priestley, Joseph - of England and America. He identified oxygen and found the effect of chlorophyll in plants.
Cavendish, Henry - of England. He discovered what is now called "hydrogen" and recognized its relationship to water.
Lavoisier, Antoine - of France. The greatest chemist of all; changed chemistry from qualitative to a quantitative science; named combustible element in air "oxygen"; founded organic chemistry. Although he represented the Third Estate at the Provincial Assembly at Orleans in 1787, the Revolutionary Tribunal later condemned him and then beheaded him.
Hadlev, John - of England. Developed the sextant.
Harrison, John - of England. He developed the marine chronometer and this, with Hadley's sextant, equipped Britain to rule the waves.
Herschel, William - of England. He added Uranus to the planets.
Clairant Alexis - of France. Charted the moon's motions
Laplace, Pierre Simon - of Normandy. He did multiple astronomical studies, including the determination of the mass of the moon, developed an analytical theory of tides and an improved method of determining the orbit of comets.
Bering, Vitus - Danish captain in Russian navy. Explored east coast of Siberia to Aleutians and Alaska, so that Russia took possession of Alaska.
De Bougainville, Louis - France. Explored the South Pacif ic. Tahiti became French.
Cook, James - of England. Explored the Pacif ic taking possession of eastern Australia for Britain. He was killed in the Hawaiian Islands.
Linne, Carl (Linnaeus) - of Sweden. He attempted the classification of all plants. After his death in 1778 his library and botanical collections were sold to James Edward Smith, who with some others, founded the Linnaean Society of London.
Bradley, Richard - of England. He found the necessity of fertilization in plant reproduction.
Miller, Philip - of England. In 1721 he gave the first known account of plant fertilization by bees.
Ingenhousz, Jan - of Holland. Found the relation of light and carbon dioxide use by
plants.
de Buffon, George Louis Le Clerc - of France. The greatest naturalist of the century,
publishing several volumes on natural history.
Morgagni, Giovanni Battiste - of Italy. The founder of pathological anatomy.
Hunter, John - of England. He established some of the fundamentals of modern day surgery.
Avmand, Claudius - of England. He performed the first successful appendectomy in 1736. (Ref. 222)
Von Haller, Albrecht - of Switzerland. A physiologist with studies on bile and fat metabolism and contractility of muscle fibers, independent of nerves.
Jenner, Edward - of England. He developed cowpox vaccine for small-pox at the end of the century, thus making the first real impact on disease. Before that, Voltaire had estimated that 60% of all people born contracted that disease and that 20% died while another 20% carried severe scarring. The disease had reached epidemic proportions in
Paris in 1719, Sweden about 1750, Vienna in the 1760s and as noted previously, it reached London in 1766 and 1770. Before Jenner, isolated instances of protection from small-pox by use of attenuated small-pox virus occurred, taken f rom reports of ancient Chinese and Circassians on the Black Sea, but the mortality rate of this inoculation was 4%.
In addition to small-pox other epidemics appeared - typhus, typhoid fever, bubonic plague (killing 300,000 in Prussia in 1709), scarlet fever, diphtheria, yellow fever from America and whooping cough, which killed 40,000 children in Sweden between 1749 and 1764 (Ref. 8) No satisfactory treatment was available for these scourges. Hospitals were death traps, practicing physicians were, in general, poorly trained and mixed with and thwarted by a multitude of quacks and quackeries. Obstetrics appeared as a specialty in London. Ophthalmology made significant advances with the development of lens extraction for cataract by Jacques Darrel. Mastoidectomy was done in 1736. Gradually surgeons became separated from the barbers and techniques improved. The progress of anatomy and physiology had given a sounder base for medicine and medical education was improving.
If interested, the reader is advised to refer to the works of d'Voltaire, Claude Adrien Halvetius, Diderot, von Hallback, d'Alembert and Jean Rousseau, as in an outline of this sort adequate philosophical discussions are out of the question. Deism, so promoted by Locke, Voltaire and others, was the tremendous reduction of the complex, mysterious Christian theology to a single, simple entity with technological leanings. (Ref. 68) It embraced science without abandoning God. The Jesuit order, founded in the 16th century and acting to control education in most countries, led the polemic fight against Deism. As the "enlightened" monarchs adhered to that concept, the Jesuits were progressively expelled, from Portugal in 1759 and partially from France and Spain in 1767. Pope Benedict XIV abolished the order completely in 1773.
An accurate ship's chronometer was at last developed by John Harrison and set to the time of 0 longitude (Greenwich time) in 1736 and a gyroscope stabilizer was developed by Scot Serson in 1744, providing a stable reference for navigators. (Ref. 222)
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Last edited by Connexions on Oct 30, 2008 11:14 am GMT-5.
