The members and associates of London’s Royal Society were experimentalists and letter writers. Simon Werrett, a history professor at the University College of London, uses their manuscripts, correspondence, and surviving material objects to explore their attitudes towards the objects in their lives. Werrett argues that for these early modern elites few objects had dedicated functions, but rather were valued for durability and adaptability. The practices surrounding objects and their use constituted an ethos he calls “thrift.” As experimentalists, Werrett’s protagonists conducted their investigations within this ethos, resulting in a kind of experimental investigation he calls “thrifty science.” The first part of his 2019 book, Thrifty Science, describes the values and practices of those early modern elite experimentalists. Two chapters are devoted to the practice of thrifty science in the early modern elite home, two more describe the care and repair of material objects, including those used in thrifty science, and two describe the markets for scientific apparatus and materials. Werrett includes an overview of the afterlife of thrifty science in the 19th and early 20th centuries as large-scale, industrial, and specialized investigative practices largely replaced the earlier ethos. His conclusion argues that thrifty science still has a role to play, and that modern recycling and makerspaces should be seen as more than vestigial remnants of an earlier era.
Werrett frames his argument as a before and after. In the beginning was “oeconomy,” an early modern spelling of our modern word “economy” which was derived from Latin, middle French, and middle English. Economy has had many meanings over time; Werrett uses oeconomy to denote the sense of stewardship, prudence, and “well-functioning” associated with the management of a household. By the middle, at least, of the 19C the most common senses of “economy” were technical and financial; the older sense of household management became known as home or domestic economy, and national financial affairs became political economy. Closely related to oeconomy are the practices, the ethos, that are consistent with it; thrifty practices are those that promote stewardship, prudence, and so forth. “Thrifty science” then is the kind of knowledge-seeking one gets in thrifty oeconomical world. This is Werrett’s, sometimes jarring, but mostly effective, way of reminding his readers that the early modern experimentalist may have had different values and objectives. Werrett’s first task is to orient his readers to the experience of his early modern subjects. As he develops his frame, Werrett also uses a modern concept from anthropology/sociology, the concept of “incomplete” or “unfinished” objects, i.e., objects without specific purposes, or “open-ended” objects. With these simple definitional frames established, Werrett uses them deftly to illustrate the world of thrifty science.
Beginning with the site of much early modern experimental philosophy, the house, Werrett argues that the new style houses with multiple rooms and hearths that were gradually replacing the older center-hall single-hearth houses of the Middle Ages were themselves open-ended objects. Rooms in these new houses did not yet have designated functions; for instance, with multiple hearths, multiple rooms could be used to prepare meals. Similarly, household utensils of the early modern period could be used for multiple purposes, including use in experimental investigations for testing recipes or chymical reactions. Werrett uses the notions of unfinished objects and the oeconomical ethos to illustrate the practice of early modern thrifty science. These elite practitioners “made use of” what was at hand. They “made do” with and “shifted” the uses of unfinished objects. Collectively, they practiced “thrifty science.”
Objects wear, break, and are no longer needed. Werrett describes the quotidian stewardship of objects – how they are maintained, repaired, and recycled. In the oeconomic ethos durability, maintainability, repairability were desirable qualities. It was good to have a well-made thing that could be used for multiple purposes, but only if it could be maintained and repaired. Much maintenance and repair were done in the household, but some repairs required skilled outsiders, e.g., compass pointers needed to have their tips remagnetized. Werrett shows by example how the worlds of elites and artisans intertwine. And by following the arc of an object’s life, he is able to show how thrifty science intersects with the world of scavengers, dustmen, and nightsoil collectors.
Some objects may be loaned, given, traded, or sold. Werrett describes a social economy of gift-giving and exchange for scientific objects that is like that for recipes and often involves the same households. Instrument makers and dealers commonly repaired and sold both new and second-hand objects; “second-hand” was not thought to mean inferior in the world of thrifty science. The number of second-hand markets and dealers for books and objects increased in the 18C. Scientific collections and equipment were included in estates and sold at auction. Werrett uses probate and auction records to trace this growing activity and to show how maintenance, repair and reuse practices were incorporated into the collective activity he calls thrifty science.
By the end of the 18C, the markets for scientific apparatus, books, material, collections, and related expertise had grown. The intense debates during the last part of the 18C between researchers arguing phlogiston and oxygen theories led to what has come to be called the “chemical revolution,” a productive way to explore the properties of matter that led to modern chemistry. Chemistry laboratories required increasingly specialized equipment and storage facilities. Other scientific equipment became more specialized, and sometimes became larger, e.g., larger lenses on telescopes. Ambiguities in experimental results led to searches for more precise measurements. Universities built special purpose facilities. The home, too, became specialized as rooms acquired designated purposes: kitchen, parlor, sitting room, storeroom, etc. As the scope and scale of experimental investigations increased and homes became less suitable, scientific activity moved out of the home, and, Werrett argues, the scientific enterprise became increasingly dominated by men. Werrett outlines the development of larger scale scientific investigation throughout the 19C and leading up World War I and notes that the increasing specialization of equipment gave “unfinished” objects a specific purpose. Such single-purpose objects were no longer part of the oeconomical ethos, but rather were part of “economic science.”
