Abstract
By 1741, or possibly a year or two earlier, Martin had found a new way of earning a living. In a letter written from Chichester on 14 November 1741 to Sir Hans Sloane, then still President of the Royal Society, he said that ‘my chiefest dependence to maintain them [his family] is by reading lectures on nat. & exp. philosophy from town to town in ye country’. In a similar letter written next day to the Duke of Richmond, he mentioned that he had ‘a little shop’ as well, so presumably he was still trying to sell microscopes and other optical apparatus from his Chichester home; perhaps his wife had to look after the business while he travelled around the country.
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Notes and References
This remark confirms that Martin was born in about 1704/5. 2. Reading Mercury No. 339, 4 June 1744. The pocket microscope advertised was said to be ‘not so large as a snuff-box’, and was priced at four shillings.
The rise of the itinerant lecturer in the second quarter of the eighteenth century has not yet been subjected to detailed study, but for an outline of the lecturing scene in general see Musson & Robinson, pp. 32–41.
A Supplement containing Remarks on a Rhapsody of Adventures of a Modern Knight-Errant in Philosophy (Bath, 1746), pp. 28–9.
For an account of Desaguliers’s life see Hurst; Stokes; Rowbotham, ‘John Theophilus Desaguliers’. The works by Hurst and Stokes were privately printed and are relatively scarce.
For London lecturers in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, see Rowbotham, ‘The Teaching of Experimental Philosophy…’
[Horne], p. 23.
De Morgan, p. 153.
An elaborate all-brass instrument of this type, by R. Glynne, London, comprising an orrery within a large armillary sphere, is at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, Inv. 69–190. A very similar instrument was depicted in a large print, The Compleat Orrery Described…, by the lecturer Samuel Dunn, published in 1780.
For details of English provincial newspapers of this period, see Wiles.
For Bath in the eighteenth century see Barbeau; Gadd; Goldsmith; Wood.
Goldsmith, p. 46.
Rackstrow.
Bath Journal No. 133, 10 September 1746.
Freke.
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Millburn, J.R. (1976). Itinerant Lecturer, 1740–55. In: Benjamin Martin. Science in History, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-7882-2_4
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