Part 83

London was residential and commercial. Around the outside were tenements of the poor. From 1520 to 1690, London's population had risen tenfold, while the nation's had only doubled. London went from 2% to 11% of the nation's population. In 1690, London's population was about half a million. After 1690, London's population grew at the same rate as the nation's. The first directory of addresses in London was published in 1677. Business began to follow the clock more strictly and many people thought of their watches as a necessity.

London coffee houses, which also sold wine, liquors, and meals, became specialty meeting places. They were quieter and cheaper than taverns; for a penny, one could sip a cup of coffee by the fire, read the newspapers, and engage in conversation. Merchants, stock jobbers, politician groups, soldiers, doctors and clergymen, scholars, and literary men all had special coffee house meeting places. Notices and letters of general interest were posted therein. Many merchants, brokers, and underwriters, especially those whose houses had been burned in the fire, conducted their business at their coffee house and used it as their business address. Men in marine insurance and shipping met at Lloyd's Coffeehouse, which was run by Edward Lloyd who established it for this purpose in 1687. Lloyd provided reliable shipping news with a network of correspondents in the principal ports at home and on the continent and circulated a handwritten sheet of lists of vessels and their latest movements at his coffeehouse. The patrons cheered safe arrivals and shared their grief over ships lost. They insured their own risks at one moment and underwrote those of their friends the next. Auctions of goods and of ships and ship materials which had been advertised in the newspapers were conducted from a pulpit in the coffeehouse.

French wine was consumed less because of heavy taxation and spirits and beer were consumed more. The streets were alive with taverns, coffee houses, eating houses, and hackney coaches past 9 p.m. at night. Coffee houses were suppressed by royal proclamation in 1675 because "malicious and scandalous reports" defaming his majesty's government were spread there, which disturbed the peace and quiet of the realm. But this provoked such an uproar that it was reduced to a responsibility of the owner to prevent scandalous papers and libels from being read and hindering any declarations any false and scandalous reports against the government or its ministers.

London air was filthy with smoke from coal burning. In 1684 the streets were lit with improved lights which combined oil lamps with lenses and reflectors. Groups of householders combined to hire lighting contractors to fulfill their statutory responsibility to hang candles or lights in some part of their houses near the street to light it for passengers until 9:00 p.m., and later to midnight. In 1694 a monopoly was sold to one lighting company. In 1663 a body of paid watchmen was established in London. An office of magistrate was created and filled with tradesmen and craftsmen, who could make a living from the fines and fees. This was to supplement the unpaid Justices of the Peace. The public was encouraged to assist in crime prevention, such as being witnesses, but most policing was left to the parishes. Crowds punished those who transgressed community moral standards, threatened their economic or social interests, or offended their religious or patriotic beliefs. Often a crowd would react before the call of "stop thief" or the hue and cry from the local constable. Pickpockets would be drenched under a pump. Cheats would be beaten up. Dishonest shops and brothels would be ransacked or destroyed. The most common targets were promiscuous women and pregnant servants.

There were many highway robberies and mob actions in London. Mobs in the thousands would turn out against the Catholics, especially at times of unemployment and trade depression. Working people still saw demonstrations and violence as the best way to achieve their economic goals, since strikes didn't work. For example, the silk workers used street violence to get protective legislation against imports and mechanization in 1675. The manufacture of silk material had been brought to England by French workers driven from France. In 1697, three thousand London silk weavers demonstrated outside the Commons and East India House against the importation of raw silks by the East India Co., and a couple months later, they attacked a house in the city owned by a gentleman of the company. In 1701, heavy duties were imposed on the import of Indian silks and wearing of Indian silks was prohibited by statute. Sometimes mobs would break open the prisons to release fellow rioters or take action against strike breakers or informers. Parish constables elected by their neighbors could not control the mobs and stayed within their parishes. Dueling was still prevalent, even though against the law.

In London and Westminster, it was hard to enforce the requirement that inhabitants keep the street in front of their house clean and store the filth until the daily raker or scavenger came with cart and dung pot. So a commission was made responsible for paving and keeping clean the streets, making and repairing vaults, sewers, drains, and gutters, and removing encroachments. It compensated those with encroachments of over 30 years. It assessed inhabitants of such streets 16d. per square yard from the front of their building to the center of the street. Women continued to empty their pails and pans outside their doors and did their washing on stools in the streets. There was a penalty of 5d. for throwing filth in front of one's house, and 20d. for throwing it elsewhere in the streets. Scavengers and rakers could lodge their coal ashes, dust, dirt, and other filth in such vacant public places as the commission deemed convenient for accommodating country carts returning otherwise empty after their loads were sold.

However, this system did not work because people would not pay their assessments. So there was a return to the former system of requiring citizens to sweep and clean the streets in front of their buildings twice a week and keep the filth until a scavenger or raker came. The penalty for not doing so was 3s.4d., later raised to 10s. Any one throwing coal ashes, dust, dirt, rubbish, or dung onto the streets or lanes incurred a fine of 5s. There was a fine of 20s. for hooping or washing any pipes or barrels in any lane or open passage or repairing coaches, sawing wood, or chiseling stones in the streets. Pigs kept in or about one's house had to be forfeited.

One way that people traveled was to be carried in sedan chairs held up by two horizontal poles with one man at the front ends and another man in back. There were so many sedan chairs and coaches for hire in London that the watermen lost business. All hackney coaches in London or Westminster were required to be licensed and marked with their owner's distinctive mark so that complaints could be made. Their maximum rate was 10s. for a 12 hour day, and 18d. for the first hour and 12d. for every hour thereafter. Licensed coachmen were not allowed to practice any other trade. The coaches paid the commission 5 pounds yearly. Hay sold along the road brought 6d. per load, and straw 2d. per load, to the commission. There had to by paid 3d. for every cart load of hay sold at the hay market and 1d. for every cart of straw, to go towards paving and repairing the hay market street. Overall, agriculture improved. Fields that would have been left fallow were planted with new crops which restored indispensable chemical elements to the soil. At the same time, they supplied winter food for stock. The size and weight of animals for slaughter grew. There was so much stock breeding that it was more economical for a family to buy meat, milk, and eggs, than to maintain animals itself. There was an explosion in the growing of beans, peas, lettuce, asparagus, artichokes, and clover. The demand for food in London and other urban areas made enclosure for crop cultivation even more profitable than for sheep grazing. The government made no more attempts to curtail the enclosure of farm lands. The number of enclosures grew because copyholders were not successful in obtaining the legal security of tenure. But most land was not enclosed.

In 1661 in Essex, the wages for mowing one acre of grass were 1s.10d.; for reaping, shearing, binding one acre of wheat 4s.; and for threshing a quarter of wheat or rye 1s.

Wives participated with their husbands in general agricultural chores and did the dairy work including making cheese. Every householder kept chickens because egg production was cheap, their market price being only 1s. for a hundred. Wives also took care of the gardening work and traditionally kept for their own the cash that came in from garden, dairy, and poultry products. A wife made jellies and preserves when the fruit trees, bushes, and vines were bearing. Imported sugar enabled fruit to be preserved as jam in jars sealed with a layer of mutton fat to make them airtight. She was likely to concoct medications from her herbs. Meat had to be smoked or salted when there was not enough fodder to keep animals alive through the winter. She saw to it that the soap was boiled and the candles molded. She cooked the daily meals, did the washing, produced cloth for the family's use, and sewed the family's clothing.

Women had less work and lower pay than men. Since most cottages had a spinning wheel, spinning work was readily available to wives. In the 1670s, a female weaver or spinner was paid 2-4d. per day. A domestic servant, who was usually female, was paid 40-80s. a year. Men in the trades objected to competition from lower-paid women. Aristocratic ladies actively managed their family's household and estates. The only work available to a high middle- class woman who was waiting to get married was to be a governess in another household or a lady-in-waiting to a gentlewoman. Children often worked; this was recommended so that they were under the direct supervision of their parents rather than getting into mischief in the village. The mother typically mingled severity with gentleness, but the father did not dare to err on the side of leniency. Discipline was by whipping. Children were treated as little adults. The lack of a conception of childhood innocence even extended to the practice of adults to tell bawdy jokes in their presence or play with their children's genitals.

About 1660, the Royal Society for science was founded by Charles II, who became its patron. It was formed from a discussion group of the new experimental philosophy. It included the Baconians formerly at Oxford and Cambridge, who were ejected at the Restoration, and a group of Gresham professors of geometry and astronomy. The Royal Society met at Gresham College. Its goal was to compare ideas in mathematics and science and identify specific aims of science. Charles himself had his own laboratory and dabbled in chemistry and anatomy. Similar societies were formed all over the world. Theologicians warned that scientific research was dangerous. But it's advances improved agriculture, manufactures, medicine, surgery, navigation, naval architecture, gunnery, and engineering.

Issac Newton was a genius, who in his childhood designed and built model windmills, water wheels, water clocks, and sundials. He came from a family which had risen from the yeomen ranks to the gentry. For a few years after graduating from Cambridge University in 1665, he secluded himself in the countryside to study. Here, using the work of Wallis, he formulated the binomial theorem that expands (A+B) raised to the nth power, where n is an integer, fraction, or negative number. When n was a negative number, the expansion never terminated; instead of a finite sum, there is an infinite series. He then developed the notion of a number being the limit of an infinite converging series of partial sums, such as the limit of 1+(1/2)+(1/4)+(1/8)...= 2. By considering the state of motion of a mass-point in an infinitely short time under the influence of an external force, he developed rules for finding areas under algebraic curves [integration], such as the hyperbola, and finding tangents to algebraic curves [differentiation], which he recognized as inverse processes. That is, taking the integral and then the differential of a function results in a return to that function.

Newton discovered that colors arose from the separation rather than a modification of white light, that is natural sunlight. He did this using a prism to dissect the white light into its spectrum of constituent colors and then using a prism and lens to recombine the colors to reconstitute white light. The spectrum was the same as that of a rainbow. He determined the angle of refraction of each color by beaming white light through a prism, and then through a hole in a board which isolated one color, to another prism. When he discovered that all colors reflect from a mirror at the same angle, he invented and built the reflecting telescope, which used a parabolic concave mirror and a flat mirror instead of a convex lens, thereby eliminating the distortions and rainbow coloring around the edges that resulted from the refraction of different colors at different angles. He deemed a ray of light to consist of a rapidly moving stream of atomic particles, rather than Robert Hooke's pulses or Christian Huygens' waves, because shadows showed a sharp boundary between the light and the absence of light. He reasoned that if light was made up of pulses or waves, it could spread around obstacles or corners as sound seemed to do. He approximated the speed of sound.

Newton opined that an object moves because of external forces on it rather than by forces internal to the object. He connected the concepts of force and acceleration with a new concept: mass. He found that the acceleration of a body by a force is inversely proportional to its mass, and formulated the equation that force equals mass time acceleration. Another law was his principle of inertia that any body, in so far as it is able, continues its state either of rest or in uniform, rectilinear motion. His next law was that when a body A exerts a force on a body B, then B also exerts a force on A which is equal in amount but opposite in direction.

Newton had a radically novel idea that equated instantaneous acceleration to the gravity force which provoked it. He theorized that the same gravity force that pulled an apple down from a tree extended out to the moon hold it in its orbit around the earth. He connected these movements by imagining a cannon on a mountain shooting a series of cannonballs parallel to the earth's surface. The first shot had only a tiny charge of explosive, and the cannonball barely makes it out of the muzzle before falling to the ground. The second shot is propelled by a larger charge, and follows a parabolic arc as it falls, The next shots, fired with increasingly more propellant, eventually disappear over the horizon as they fall. Lastly, with enough gunpowder, a speeding cannonball would completely circle the earth without hitting it. He combined the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry, first making observations, and then generalizing them into a theory, and finally deducing consequences from the theory which could be tested by observation. He carried mathematization of data from experiments as far as possible. His universal theory of gravitation is based on the idea of forces between objects rather than from one object to another; e.g. the apple exerts a force toward the earth as well as receiving a force from the earth. His law of gravitation explains how the whole universe is held together. This law holds that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a single gravitational force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. Newton had first believed in the Cartesian system of celestial vortices of aether than swirled the planets and comets around their orbits. The gross features of the universe led to his recognition that the attraction between two bodies decreased inversely to the square of the distance between them. Then he came to accept Hooke's hypothesis that planets are kept in their orbits by the combination of an attractive power of the sun and of motion in a straight line that was tangential to their orbits. From astronomical data, he calculated this centrifugal acceleration of each planet to be the inverse square of its distance from the sun. He also calculated the "centripetal" accelerations necessary to bring the planets into their orbits. His experiments had shown that he centripetal force in a circular orbit was equal to the mass of the body times the square of its velocity, all divided by the radius of the circular path. He used calculus and differential equations to determine centripetal forces of elliptical orbits, where the distance from the sun, the velocity, and the acceleration were variables. He correlated the moon's orbit with the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth. Then he formulated the idea that the ultimate agent of nature was a force acting between bodies rather than a moving body itself. Gravity did not act in proportion to the surfaces of bodies, but in proportion to quantity of matter, its penetration to the very center of all bodies without diminution, its propagation to immense distances decreasing in exact proportion to the square of the distance. Newton showed that a single gravitational force could account for the way falling objects descend to the ground, the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, the motion of the moon in its orbit around the earth, the course of the tides every twelve hours, the lower densities of the earth's atmosphere at greater heights, the paths of Jupiter's satellites, and the ellipitical motions of the planets in their orbits around the sun. It had been thought that invisible angels moved the planets. He proved from his law of gravitation and his three laws of motion the truth of Kepler's laws of ellipitical planetary motion. He demonstrated from data collected from the comet of 1680 that comets moved according to his law of gravitation. Non-periodic comets were observed to follow hyperbolic paths. He used the concept of a common center of gravity as a reference point for other motions. The fact that the center of gravity of the solar system was within the body of the sun verified that the sun was indeed at the center of it.

Newton's "Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis", was published in 1687. The church denounced it as being against the scripture of the Bible. Newton did not agree with the established church on many points, such as the trinity, and was considered a heretic. He had his own interpretations of the Bible and doubted the divinity of Jesus. But it was accepted for dissenters like Newton to qualify for full civil rights by maintaining an outward conformity and taking the sacrament in the established church once a year. Newton was given a royal dispensation from taking holy orders as prescribed by the rules for tenure of fellows of his college at Cambridge University. He did believe in a God who created the universe and who had a ubiquitous presence in all space. When Catholic King James II tried to have a Catholic monk admitted to the degree of a Master of Arts at Cambridge University without taking the oath of adherence to the established Protestant church, in order to participate in the business of the university, Newton was active in the opposition that defeated this attempt.

When Newton's laws were applied to the paths of the moons of Jupiter, it was noticed that the moons were a few minutes ahead of time at that time of year when Jupiter was nearest to the earth and a few minutes behind time when Jupiter was farthest from the earth. Olaus Roemer, a Danish astronomer, postulated that Jupiter's eclipses of its moons lasted seconds longer the farther away Jupiter was from the earth because it took their light longer to reach the earth. He concluded that light does not travel instantaneously, but at a certain speed, which he calculated in 1676.

In 1668, Christian Huygens formulated the law of conservation of momentum [mass times velocity], which held that when objects collide, they may each change direction, but the sum of all their velocities will remain the same. Huygens also recognized the conservation of what was later called "kinetic energy", which is associated with movement. In 1690, he posited the theory that light consists of a series of waves. It states that all points of a wave front of light in a vacuum may be regarded as new sources of wavelets that expand in every direction at a rate depending on their velocities. He thought this a better explanation of bending and interference of light than Newton's particle theory.

In 1661, Robert Boyle, called the father of modern chemistry, defined an element as a substance that cannot be further decomposed and distinguished it from a mixture, which is easily separable, and a compound, which is not easily separable. He used a pump he developed and a glass jar to create a confined air space for experiments. He noted that burning objects such as candles and coal, when placed in the receiver of his air pump, went out after a time although air was still present. He opined that animals were dependent upon a fresh supply of air to live. He studied the relationship between the volume, density, and pressure of gases. He proved by experiment that the volume of a gas at a constant temperature varies inversely to the pressure applied to the gas. Since gas is compressible, he opined that gases must be composed of discrete particles separated by void, and also that basic physical properties were due to motions of particles, or atoms, which was an ancient Greek conjecture. This cast doubt on the theory that everything was composed from the four basic elements: air, water, fire, and earth. Boyle's laboratory at Oxford was denounced by the Oxford clergy as destroying religion. In 1679, the steam pressure cooker was developed.

Robert Hooke, the son of a minister who died when he was thirteen, helped Boyle build his air pump. He was a genius with innate mechanical skill. He applied a spiral spring to regulate the balance of watches. A lord financed him as a Gresham lecturer for 50 pounds a year. In 1666, he used a pendulum to measure the force of gravity and showed that the center of gravity of the earth and moon is a point describing an ellipse around the sun. In 1667, he explained the scintillation of the stars by irregular atmospheric refractions. He formulated the theory that light is composed of pulses. Hooke's Law states that the amount an elastic body bends or stretches out of shape is in direct proportion to the force acting on it. He invented the odometer, a wheel to measure distances. He constructed an arithmetical machine. He invented the universal joint, which can move in many angles. At his death, Hooke had thousands of pounds stored in an iron chest.

Wallis wrote a treatise on algebra which was historical as well as practical. In 1668, he postulated the correct theory of impacts of inelastic bodies, based on the principle of conservation of momentum. During this time, he also deciphered enemy messages for royalty and was made a royal chaplain.

Royal astronomer and genius Edmond Halley, the son of a soap maker, studied tides, magnetism, and the paths of comets and stars. He went on voyages to study the heavens from different positions, thereby laying the foundations of physical geography. He showed that the stars change in position in relation to each other. With Newton's help, he calculated the orbit of a comet he saw in 1682 to be elliptical rather than parabolic and then proved it was the same comet that had appeared in 1531 and 1607, indicating it's regularity; it was then named "Halley's comet". However, the Church of England still embraced the idea that comets and eclipses were evidence of God's wrath. Greenwich Observatory was built in 1675. Halley used a barometer to measure the density of the atmosphere and related its readings to elevations into the atmosphere and to weather. He determined that the cause of the tropical trade winds was the sun warming the tropical air at the equator, causing it to rise blow away from the equator to replace cooler air. He illustrated the tropical winds with the first meteorological map. He made a descent in a diving bell, which was used to try to reach wrecked treasure ships. He compiled a table of mortality, which originated the science of life-statistics. He studied fossils and perceived them as remnants of living beings that had died long ago, and imagined a succession of living things. Halley surveyed the tides and coasts of the British Channel for the king in 1701.

In 1675, apothecary Nicolas Lemery divided substances into mineral, vegetable, and animal. He wrote a dictionary of pharmaceuticals.

John Ray and Francis Willughby were friends who traveled together to study plants and animals respectively. John Ray started the science of zoology with his edition of Francis Willoughby's "Ornithology" on birds and his own "History of Fishes". He also attempted the first scientific classification of animals in his "Synopsis of Quadrupeds". Ray compared anatomies and experimented on movements of plants and the ascent of sap. He knew what fossils were. Ray first suggested the concept of species in classification of animals and plants. He opined that the goodness and wisdom of God was shown not only by the usefulness of animals to man's uses as taught by the church, but also by the adaption of animals to their own lives and surroundings. The vast array and dispersal of animals found by world explorers all over the world cast doubt on the biblical story of Noah putting two of every kind of animal on an ark. The science of botany began with Ray's "History of Plants", and the researches of Robert Morrison, who was Charles' physician and keeper of his gardens. The idea from fossils that existing species of animals were modifications of predecessor animals conflicted with the religious belief that Noah's ark had preserved all the varieties of animals. The idea that fossils were remnants of dead animals existing before man conflicted with the religious idea that Adam's fall began sin and caused death.

Nicholaus Steno, a Danish physician, demonstrated in 1669 that layers of strata of rock are always deposited with the oldest layers on the bottom and the youngest layers on the top, which began the science of geology. John Aubrey described Stonehenge, thus founding prehistoric archaeology. He thought it to be a Druid temple.

The telescope and compound microscope, which has an objective lens and an eyepiece lens for producing a wide range of magnifications, were further developed. Nehemia Grew, the son of a grammar school master who later became a physician, observed and drew plant anatomy, including leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, ovules, pollen grains, and stamens. He was the first to observe the existence of sex in plants. Italian Marcello Malpighi, a physician, used the new compound microscope to study human skin, spleen, kidneys, and liver and also compared the livers of several types of animals. Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhock, a cloth manufacturer who made microscopes to inspect the quality of cloth, turned them to use in understanding the life cycles of mites, lice, and fleas. He correctly described human blood cells. When he found what he described as tiny animals (bacteria, protezoa, and rotifers), he sent clear descriptions of them to the Royal Society in London as proof against the theory of spontaneous generation, which held that lower forms of life could arise from nonliving matter. This started the science of bacteriology. The cellular basis of life was discovered. Human blood vessels were examined. When the egg in the female reproductive system was discovered, the status of women was lifted.

Physician Thomas Willis, son of a farmer, dissected brains of men and animals to study the anatomical relations of nerves and arteries. Excess urine had been associated with a wasting disease. Willis identified diabetes mellitus with excess of urine with sweetness. Physician Thomas Sydenham, son of a gentleman, observed epidemic diseases of London over successive years, thus founding epidemiology. He also furthered clinical medicine by emphasizing detailed observations of patients and maintaining accurate records. He wrote a treatise on gout and identified scarlet fever. He introduced a cooling method of treating smallpox. But he still relied on the big three treatments: blood- letting, purging, and sweating. Blood-letting was to draw off bad blood so that it could be replaced by a better fluid. Another treatment used was cupping, whereby a vacuum was created by heated glass cups to draw blood to the surface of the skin. John Locke performed one of the first successful operations on a kind of abscess of a man's liver. It was common for people who felt ill to take a laxative and rest at home.