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I hope you enjoy the program. I'm standing in front of an elegant marble fireplace. It's

been moved since but in 1799 it's stood in the splendid so-ho home of the President of the Royal Society, the wealthy

explorer and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. His Royal Society was sitting reasonably pretty,

functioning as an adequate club for those gentleman fellows who enjoyed

their science and like to hear of new and interesting discoveries from around the world.

But the Roy society style of science wasn't delivering the prosperity to the nation that many

had hoped it would. The best hope for that was coming from the new industrial heartlands

of the Midlands and further north. These scientific Nuvorich such as the likes of the Lunar Society the Around this fireplace on the 7th of March 1799 a deal was made to found a practical scientific

institution for, quote, diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction

of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching

by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of science to the common purposes

of life. This became the Royal Institution. David Knight of Durham University

and Simon Schaffer of Cambridge are with me here in 21 Albemile Street just

of London's Piccadilly, the home not in the Royal Society but of the Royal Institution.

David Knight, what did the founders of the Royal Institution have in mind and to what extent did they achieve it?

What they had in mind was the improvement of industry by the

application of science because it was all too clear that the early Industrial

Revolution was powered by people who knew very little actual science.

And it's notorious that the steam engine gave much more to science

than science gave to the steam engine.

And the hope was that agriculture, tanning, steam engines, all sorts of other

...