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Advertisements as science texts
Review
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. 36 No. 3
Advertisements as science texts Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Ashgate, 2010. 218 pp., Hardback: £65.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-0075-2 Richard Dunn Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology, Royal Museums Greenwich, United Kingdom
Almost since they were first produced, newspapers have contained advertisements as a necessary part of turning a profit. Looking at the adverts that appeared in Newton’s age, Jeffrey Wigelsworth argues, can tell us all about English society’s interests and values at that time. In many ways, this is a timely work, then, since increasing volumes of newspapers and other primary source material are becoming widely available online, and this work can offer the historian of science some help in reading at least a part of this rich archive. Wigelsworth’s central argument is that during Newton’s lifetime science and advertising combined to create a commodity for sale to the English public; this is a book about the marketing of science. The period under investigation is particularly rich, he suggests, because it saw the rise of public science and the growth of English newspapers. Over a few decades, adverts evolved into the standardised forms we would more readily recognise today, while the notion of science for (and by) the public became more firmly embedded. Beginning with the evolution of different forms of advertisement in the first years of the Philosophical Transactions, Wigelsworth then focuses on those that appeared in two widely read political newspapers, the Whig Post Man and Tory Post Boy, arguing that science was marketed equally on both sides of any political divide. He then considers advertisements as ‘science texts’ (p. 71) in London’s daily newspapers, before detailing two case studies: the response to the 1714 Longitude Act and the public conflict, carried out in a war of adverts, between the author and lecturer, John Theophilus Desaguliers, and two booksellers, William Mears and John Woodward. Wigelsworth highlights very well the importance of one part of the early-modern newspaper that it can be easy to overlook and illustrates his argument with some engaging material. I was particularly struck, for instance, by the ‘anodyne necklace’ (p. 46), which would not be out of place in Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian. There are also good connections to be made to the growing body of writing on the rise of public and ‘polite’ science in the eighteenth century, to which Wigelsworth adds further substance. I was, however, left with a number of questions. How, for example, do the advertisements relate to the other texts in
newspapers? Many of what seem to be news reports appear to have been little more than puff pieces for those they mentioned; there was certainly no clear delineation between news and marketing. While the author successfully casts the net more widely in his discussion of the Desaguliers dispute in Chapter 6, there was scope to do this more comprehensively in the earlier chapters. Likewise, can it be taken for granted that all of the things promised in adverts were already available for purchase? Many advertisements must have been speculative, seeking financial supporters before further work was to be done – this certainly seems to have been the case for many of the schemes announced in the wake of (and even before) the 1714 Longitude Act. Finally, I couldn’t help wondering who ‘the public’ were. Was there really, for example, a public market for longitude schemes, or were these aimed at a more specific group of individuals? In several places I also found the author’s use of terminology rather loose. Phrases such as ‘science writing’ and ‘the environment of public science’ (p. 144) abound, often presented in an unquestioning way. Given the great care taken by so many historians of science concerning terminology in this period, I would have expected similar circumspection in this text. I did wonder if this was due to the author’s uncertainty as to his intended audience, perhaps trying to turn what was an academic piece into something more popular. Perhaps a bit more editorial work could have helped the desired transformation into a coherent monograph with broader (though still academic) appeal. In the opening pages, the author produces a lovely quote from Thomas Jefferson, that, ‘advertisements . . . contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.’ (p. xiii). One wonders if he has taken this too literally. Taken on its own, this material can lead to as many misreadings of history as can the over-reliance on any other single source, and the author seems at times to fall into this trap. Nonetheless, Wigelsworth has highlighted, and done much to justify the significance of, an important historical resource that can be easily overlooked. In this sense, he has fulfilled his aim to ‘complement rather than to challenge or criticize’. It’s a good start, but what is needed now is a more comprehensive synthesis of the different sources to create a richer whole.
Corresponding author: Dunn, R. ([email protected]). www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2012.06.003
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. 36 No. 3
Advertisements as science texts Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Ashgate, 2010. 218 pp., Hardback: £65.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-0075-2 Richard Dunn Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology, Royal Museums Greenwich, United Kingdom
Almost since they were first produced, newspapers have contained advertisements as a necessary part of turning a profit. Looking at the adverts that appeared in Newton’s age, Jeffrey Wigelsworth argues, can tell us all about English society’s interests and values at that time. In many ways, this is a timely work, then, since increasing volumes of newspapers and other primary source material are becoming widely available online, and this work can offer the historian of science some help in reading at least a part of this rich archive. Wigelsworth’s central argument is that during Newton’s lifetime science and advertising combined to create a commodity for sale to the English public; this is a book about the marketing of science. The period under investigation is particularly rich, he suggests, because it saw the rise of public science and the growth of English newspapers. Over a few decades, adverts evolved into the standardised forms we would more readily recognise today, while the notion of science for (and by) the public became more firmly embedded. Beginning with the evolution of different forms of advertisement in the first years of the Philosophical Transactions, Wigelsworth then focuses on those that appeared in two widely read political newspapers, the Whig Post Man and Tory Post Boy, arguing that science was marketed equally on both sides of any political divide. He then considers advertisements as ‘science texts’ (p. 71) in London’s daily newspapers, before detailing two case studies: the response to the 1714 Longitude Act and the public conflict, carried out in a war of adverts, between the author and lecturer, John Theophilus Desaguliers, and two booksellers, William Mears and John Woodward. Wigelsworth highlights very well the importance of one part of the early-modern newspaper that it can be easy to overlook and illustrates his argument with some engaging material. I was particularly struck, for instance, by the ‘anodyne necklace’ (p. 46), which would not be out of place in Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian. There are also good connections to be made to the growing body of writing on the rise of public and ‘polite’ science in the eighteenth century, to which Wigelsworth adds further substance. I was, however, left with a number of questions. How, for example, do the advertisements relate to the other texts in
newspapers? Many of what seem to be news reports appear to have been little more than puff pieces for those they mentioned; there was certainly no clear delineation between news and marketing. While the author successfully casts the net more widely in his discussion of the Desaguliers dispute in Chapter 6, there was scope to do this more comprehensively in the earlier chapters. Likewise, can it be taken for granted that all of the things promised in adverts were already available for purchase? Many advertisements must have been speculative, seeking financial supporters before further work was to be done – this certainly seems to have been the case for many of the schemes announced in the wake of (and even before) the 1714 Longitude Act. Finally, I couldn’t help wondering who ‘the public’ were. Was there really, for example, a public market for longitude schemes, or were these aimed at a more specific group of individuals? In several places I also found the author’s use of terminology rather loose. Phrases such as ‘science writing’ and ‘the environment of public science’ (p. 144) abound, often presented in an unquestioning way. Given the great care taken by so many historians of science concerning terminology in this period, I would have expected similar circumspection in this text. I did wonder if this was due to the author’s uncertainty as to his intended audience, perhaps trying to turn what was an academic piece into something more popular. Perhaps a bit more editorial work could have helped the desired transformation into a coherent monograph with broader (though still academic) appeal. In the opening pages, the author produces a lovely quote from Thomas Jefferson, that, ‘advertisements . . . contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.’ (p. xiii). One wonders if he has taken this too literally. Taken on its own, this material can lead to as many misreadings of history as can the over-reliance on any other single source, and the author seems at times to fall into this trap. Nonetheless, Wigelsworth has highlighted, and done much to justify the significance of, an important historical resource that can be easily overlooked. In this sense, he has fulfilled his aim to ‘complement rather than to challenge or criticize’. It’s a good start, but what is needed now is a more comprehensive synthesis of the different sources to create a richer whole.
Corresponding author: Dunn, R. ([email protected]). www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2012.06.003