Selling Science in the Age of Newton. Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge (review)

Early eighteenth-century London was awash with newspapers supported by the sale of advertising. By 1709 a total of 44,000 copies of eighteen different daily news papers were printed each week. Coffeehouses subscribed for multiple copies and actual readership numbers are thought to have been at least ten times the circulation figures. Many of the advertisements these newspapers carried were for science: advertising books, anatomical demonstrations, experimental lecture series, and instruments. In these notices the promoters could engage with potential audiences and create markets at the same time establishing authorial credibility and asserting the veracity of scientific facts. The rise of newspaper advertising coincided with the increasing public participation in scientific discourse and the large body of text in printed advertisements forms an important but under used primary source for historians of science in this period. How advertising made science into a commercial product in the period up to Newton’s death in 1727 is the subject of this book.

Based on his ‘close reading’ of advertisements in eighteen London newspapers whose back pages were set solid with advertisements, Wigelsworth analyses advertisements in terms of the theory and history of advertising. His examples are organized by products and subject areas in four central chapters. The first of these looks at the advertisements for books, lectures, and instruments in the Tory newspaper The Post Boy and the Whig newspaper The Post Man. Here, equal placement of advertisements in the two papers suggests that the marketing and reception of science showed little of the perceived Tory hostility to science. These papers came out three times a week. The daily papers that came later carried an even larger volume of advertisements, which Wigelsworth organizes by topic in the next chapter under headings such as ‘Anatomy and Medicine’, ‘Chemistry’, and ‘Geography and Measuring’. Two further chapters are increasingly detailed studies, one of longitude schemes, the other on the unauthorized publication of John Theophilus Desaguliers’s lecture series on Newtonian science and the disputes with booksellers that ensued. The language in the advertisements gives new insights into scientific incivility as when, following an already long exchange of insults, Desaguliers announces his translation of Gravesande’s Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1720) as ‘Lately publish’d.’ He then lays into his antagonists, the publishers of a rival translation: ‘Are you not a couple of silly Fellows, to think to tire me out by foul language?’ followed by eighteen lines detailing the errors in their edition. This verbal sparring was not merely empty rhetoric. Desaguliers’s livelihood depended on establishing and maintaining his credibility, both for the sake of his precarious position as curator of experiments at the Royal Society — he was not paid a salary but a discretionary annual ‘gratuity’ — and for his success as a public lecturer.

Selling Science reminds us of the value of comparing books with related goods and services offered for sale. The fee for a lecture series might be 3 guineas, but for those who wanted to teach themselves, the accompanying textbook might cost only as many shillings. Wigelsworth sees newspaper advertisements as a development of the ‘advertisements’ in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from its inception in 1665. These editorial announcements are not strictly comparable, but the discussion of the protocols of knowledge creation within the Royal Society provides a background to the dialogues with consumers in the eighteenth century. Advertisements for the books and the showy demonstrations of longitude projectors in particular demonstrate the appeal for the public of active participation in scientific debates. William Whiston advertised in 1714 that he would send up a fireball a mile into the air from Blackheath at exactly 8pm and ‘desires the Curious [. . .] to communicate their Observations as to its Azymuth, Altitude and the time it is visible everywhere’.

While Wigelsworth provides a...