The E-Sylum:  Volume 5, Number 46, November 17, 2002, Article 16

BOULTON BOOK: THE LUNAR MEN

  Here is an excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal
  review of a new book relating to Matthew Boulton.
  We numismatists know of him as a coiner, but his
  interests and accomplishments were far broader than
  just that.

  "The phrase "lunar men" sounds other-worldly, but it is far
  from that. It refers to a group of 18th-century British savants
  in and around Birmingham, England, a provincial city that
  by 1765 had become a center for the investigation of nature.
  Meeting at one another's houses on the Monday nearest the
  full moon -- to have light to ride home by -- they developed,
  among other things, the new technologies that helped
  transform England from an agricultural nation to an industrial
  power. Jenny Uglow's "The Lunar Men" (Farrar, Straus and
  Giroux, 588 pages, $30) gives us a compelling account of
  these extraordinary polymaths and of the world in which they
  lived.

  The friends whose curiosity "changed the world" were the
  potter Josiah Wedgwood, the physician-poet Erasmus
  Darwin, the metalware manufacturer Matthew Boulton,
  the Scottish inventor James Watt and the minister Joseph
  Priestley. Men of business and affairs, they were at the
  same time engrossed by science. They operated as a sort
  of industrial research group, discovering methods of
  manufacture and facing soon-to-be-familiar problems
  of patent infringement, free trade and labor unrest."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor 
at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com

To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum