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Hello, in the late 18th century with the ascendant to British Empire centered on London,

a small group of friends met at a house on a crossroads outside Birmingham and applied their

minds to the problems of the age. Between them they helped

launch the Industrial Revolution, discover oxygen, harness the power of steam, and

pioneer the theory of evolution. They were the Lunar Society, a gathering of

free and fertile mines centered on the remarkable quartet of Matthew

Bolton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin.

The Potter, Joseph Wedgwood, another member, summed up the ethos and ambition of this group when he said that they were living in an age of miracles in which anything could be achieved.

But how did this lunar society operate?

What was the blend of religious descent, entrepreneurial adventure that proved so fertile,

and how did their discoveries permanently change the shape and character of this country.

With me to discuss the Lunar Society at Jenny Uglo,

on a revisiting professor at the University of Warwick, an author of The

Lunar Men, The Friends Who Made the Future.

Simon Shaffer, reader in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and Peter Jones,

Professor of French History at Birmingham University.

Simon Schaffer, can you set the scene for us at the time, say the mid-eighth century?

What was Birmingham then and what was it about the Midlands that

proved to have these men in it? In many ways the situation in the Midlands in the

middle of the 18th century is something rather familiar to us.

...