Search Results

This chapter refers to William Shipley, who had benefited from the aid of the Royal Society of Arts' first two presidents, Viscount Folkestone and Lord Romney, for his visions to be taken seriously and initiate the Great Exhibition. It points out how the Society capitalised on the credit it got for initiating the Great Exhibition in the 1950s and used that reputation to push for reforms. The chapter talks about the “Albert Medal” that commemorates the death of Prince Albert and was awarded to people who had done much to aid arts, manufactures, and commerce. It mentions Rowland Hill as the first recipient of the Albert Medal for his campaign to create the Penny Postage system. It also explains how the awarding of the Albert Medal each year allowed the Society to associate itself with household names or recognise its own activists, such as Henry Cole or John Alexander Milne.

This chapter discusses the Royal Society of Arts' promotion of commerce. It traces trade in the eighteenth century, which was closely tied to the coercive power of the state and was one of the principal sources of government revenue. It also describes trade as a tool for enriching a country at the expense of its neighbors, emphasizing the belief among rulers and politicians across Europe that it was essential to maximize a country's stock of specie. The chapter explains mercantilism as an attitude towards trade in which rivals were made to pay for exports, while as little as possible were spent on foreign imports. It also points out how mercantilist attitudes had geopolitical repercussions.

This chapter begins with the opening of the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851, which attracted six million visitors, a tenth of the entire population of Great Britain. It recounts how Henry Cole managed to make himself indispensable to the Great Exhibition's organisation, in which he accumulated responsibilities that allowed him to gradually reassert control. It also mentions utilitarian reformers who came to exercise an extraordinary influence over the Royal Society of Arts and promoted the development of enlarged generalisations and comprehensive measures. The chapter discusses how Cole and his allies reformed the entire system on protecting intellectual property in order to look after the creations of inventors and manufacturers. It points out that the campaign for patent reform was one of the Society's most successful lobbying efforts ever.

This chapter analyzes why the Royal Society of Arts never had a permanent function but was instead meant to find new things to improve. It discusses the utilitarian-supported reforms of the late nineteenth century that laid the foundations for state systems of education, health, and welfare to grow in size and complexity. It also points out changes in the membership of the Society that reflects the growth of both government and corporate bureaucracies. The chapter describes Society's new members in the mid-twentieth century that were increasingly drawn from the civil service, middle management, and chairmen or directors of companies. It also conveys how the Society reacted to the trend of bureaucracies by increasingly appealing to large firms for the sponsorship of its industrial design bursaries.

This chapter examines the most important achievements in the art and design of the book in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with special reference to iconic books. It begins with an overview of the literary revival and its impact on reading during the period. This is followed by a discussion on the influence of the English Arts and Crafts revival on Irish literary and cultural revival. It then considers the role of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland (ACSI) in the growth of iconic book publishing, the status of printing in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, the emergence of book designers, and improvements in illustrated book design and typography. Finally, the chapter looks at the ACSI exhibitions held between 1917 and 1925, along with the emergence of Talbot Press.

This chapter emphasizes Henry Cole and Prince Albert's intention to create a top-down system of industrial education, as seen in countries like France. It discusses how Cole sought to align the Great Exhibition with the movement for working-class self-sufficiency. It also talks about how Cole tried to use the Royal Society of Arts to set up new drawing schools for artisans in towns where there was not already a government school of design. The chapter draws attention to a civil servant named Harry Chester who wrote to the Society with a suggestion, imploring it to aid the mechanics' institutions in late 1851. It describes Chester's obsession to improve education, even inventing a slow-burning stove to make sure classrooms would be warm on cold mornings.

Beginning in 1876, Hipkins collaborated with the Cambridge-trained mathematician, phonetician, social reformer, and follower of Auguste Comte, Alexander John Ellis. Their aim was to establish the scales of musical systems across Eurasia. A warm friendship developed between them despite the social gulf between the craftsman and the independently wealthy gentleman-scholar. Their joint research venture came from Ellis’s reading in 1863 of Hermann Helmholtz’s book, On the Sensations of Tone. Helmholtz analyzed the human perception of pitch as requiring analysis with the methods of physics, physiology, and psychology. Helmholtz introduced his controversial theory that the perception of harmony was grounded in the mathematical ratios of overtones. The book struck Ellis with the force of a revelation. After many years of work and difficulties finding a publisher, he finally succeeded at seeing his translation of it into print. Ellis analyzed the historicity of pitch in researches that he presented to the Society of Arts, where his papers showed how the standard pitch of Western classical music had risen from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. This conclusion pointed in the direction of a more general understanding of musical sound as grounded in cultural preferences.

The Royal Society of Arts offered honorary and cash awards for creativity. The society initially was averse to patents and prohibited the award of prizes for patented inventions. Inventors of items that were valuable in the marketplace typically chose to obtain patents and to bypass the prize system. Owing to such adverse selection, prizes were negatively related to subsequent areas of important technological discovery. The society acknowledged that its efforts had been “futile” because of its hostility to patents and switched from offering inducement prizes toward lobbying for reforms to strengthen the patent system. The findings suggest some skepticism is warranted about claims that elites and non-market-oriented institutions generated technological innovation and long-term economic development.

The chapter draws attention to the Anti-French sentiment in Britain that reached a fever pitch in 1756 when the two nations embarked on the Seven Years' War. It narrates how the Association of Anti-Gallicans, the Royal Society of Arts' predecessors, reacted to the declaration of war by seizing a couple of French ships and rescuing a handful of its English prisoners. It also describes how the Society used its premiums in order to secure essential materials for the waging of war, which often complemented the efforts of the government. The chapter identifies the members of the Society that were in close proximity to the centers of power and connected with the growing British state as officials and politicians or as merchants and manufacturers. It also mentions Stephen Hales, who suggested that naval improvements should be one of the Society's priorities.

This chapter analyzes the Royal Society of Arts' renewed openness to ideas in the mid-1970s, which was led by its secretary, Christopher Lucas. It also mentions Arthur Aikin, who pioneered the practice of giving lectures for instruction and entertainment in the early nineteenth century. It also talks about how Samuel More used his connections to recruit members among the late eighteenth century's inventors, such as John 'Iron Mad' Wilkinson or Josiah Wedgwood. The chapter focuses on the secretary's job in the Society, which involved taking minutes at general and sub-committee meetings, listing of subscribers and drafts for the advertisements of the premiums, and managing the Society's correspondence. It also examines how the secretary combines their influence over recruitment with their ability to manipulate their unparalleled knowledge of the Society's administrative and electoral processes.

This chapter describes the Royal Society of Arts' founders by 1754, which had largely been aristocrats, clergymen, and natural philosophers, with the middle classes overwhelmingly represented by well-off merchants and artisans. It analyzes the scientific advances over the century that spawned new industries as scientists and inventors discovered new fuels, alloys, and chemical compounds. It also covers the emergence of a class of more specialized professionals, such as chemists that implemented or advised on the latest scientific advances. The chapter talks about professional inventors that changed Britain by concentrating their efforts on making improvements without having to then make money from the products of their new machines and techniques. It cites “Inventor seeks capitalist” as the common advertisement in the pages of nineteenth-century newspapers by inventors looking for someone to fund their patent.

The chapter deals with the recruitment and training of military musicians in the context of wider aspects of recruitment and training for music professionals. It deals with boy musicians, their training and recruitment, and with concerns over the training of musicians in London more generally and the establishment of what was to become the Royal Military School of Music.

This chapter examines the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is considered an industrial audit of the world that included exhibits from Britain's empire and other foreign nations. It talks about the East India Company, a private company that exercised control over almost all of the Indian subcontinent that provided displays of the products of India in the Great Exhibition. It also explains the aim of the Great Exhibition, which was to reveal to merchants and manufacturers in Britain the kinds of raw materials that might be imported for Englishmen to work upon. The chapter highlights the Royal Society of Arts' activities over the previous century, which focused on the spread of information instead of awarding premiums for exploiting new resources. It describes how the products of Britain's colonies brought attention to merchants and manufacturers in Britain itself.

This chapter describes the economic policy that the Royal Society of Arts has operated in since its founding in 1754. It describes the mercantilist operations of the Society in which they assumed that the most important matter in an economy was the amount of gold and silver it was able to obtain from its rivals. It also recounts how the Society encouraged industries to replace foreign imports and rewarded improvements that boosted exports, emphasizing that the more exports a country sold, the more gold and silver it acquired. The chapter looks into criticisms of the system of monopolies in the eighteenth century, arguing that monopolies allowed a handful of merchants to raise prices for consumers. It explains how the Society had tried to undercut the monopolists of domestic industries when it came to London's fishmongers or country millers.

This chapter introduces Henry Cole, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and became the conduit for utilitarianism into the Royal Society of Arts. It analyzes Bentham's proposed alternative that based everything on a fundamental guiding principle of achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It also mentions utilitarian reformers inspired by Bentham that introduced improvements for the benefit of “the masses” or the “people.” The chapter talks about Rowland Hill, a utilitarian reformer who tried to create a national prepaid postage system. It examines Hill's scheme to replace the messy postal system that favoured only the rich and powerful by promoting a flat rate so that any letter weighing under an ounce might be sent to anywhere in the country for just a penny.

This chapter draws attention to the Special Activities Committee of the Royal Society of Arts. It mentions the institution of the Benjamin Franklin Medal, which was originally intended to be specifically awarded to younger people in order to draw them into the Society. It also talks about Freddie Williams, who had already been elected to a fellowship at the Royal Society and awarded the first Benjamin Franklin Medal. The chapter discusses the Society's expansion by forming regional committees, which started with Birmingham in 1960 that eventually became a West Midlands committee. It elaborates on the idea of the expansion of committees that would promote discussions across the country and lead to new ideas and initiatives for the Society to adopt on a national basis.

Issues of status and class appeared with new twists when gold took the form of ancient coins and modern medals. The discovery of buried gold often pitted working-class finders, whose rational response was to melt their finds down for the bullion content, against educated collectors, who were appalled by such disregard for history and aesthetics. Gold medals, for their part, measured merit among the closed ranks of aristocratic politicians, sportsmen, students, and men of science, often in explicit contrast to cash awards doled out to people of less status or means. These graven images conjured nonmonetary (and, consequently, controversial) value by enabling Britons to discover their forebears, broadcast their erudition, or locate themselves in posterity.

Benjamin Franklin was America’s first Atlantic world intellectual. Inquisitive, energetic, and competitive, he learned about and was proud of his British family and intellectual heritage, British political history, and British culture. From the time of his youth, Franklin embraced a set of values that he attempted, across his long life, to speak about, refine, and implement. Franklin originally conceived of himself a loyal Briton, but beginning in the 1750s, he began to see the futility of gaining a fair hearing and representation for Americans in Parliament. From the 1750s onward, Franklin began to conclude that the colonies could do without the complicated system of British politics and political intrigue, without a system of taxation depriving Americans of their rights of representation, not to mention their productivity and commerce, and without the demeaning and begrudging subjection so frequently thrust their way. If any American could have gained the colonies a fair hearing, Franklin was the man to do so. That he did not succeed in gaining the attention of Britons in England only confirmed what he had known for many years: British Americans could make it without Britain.