Article ID: CBB009193364

The York Buildings Dragons: Desaguliers, Arbuthnot and Attitudes Towards the Scientific Community (2017)

unapi

The growing public awareness of natural philosophy and technology in the eighteenth century brought with it unintended consequences, including an enlarged space for satiric treatments of scientific issues, which have not always been recognized for what they are. A pamphlet entitled The York Buildings Dragons appeared in December 1725, with a second, augmented, edition in January 1726. It has generally been attributed to John Theophilus Desaguliers FRS (1683–1744), the Huguenot engineer, Newtonian expositor and leading Freemason. This article throws fresh light on the pamphlet: to provide more extensive background to the work, to describe its aims and methods, to define its mode as entirely satiric, to analyse its contents in greater detail, to show that Desaguliers cannot possibly have been the author and to suggest as a more plausible candidate the mathematician, physician and satiric author John Arbuthnot FRS (1667–1735). Historians of science and technology need to take care in assessing the pamphlet literature surrounding controversial innovations.

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Authors & Contributors
Anne Milne
Laetitia Rimpau
Alessio Bottone
Morris, Andrew M. A.
Alves Diniz, Marcio
Furniss, Tom
Concepts
Science and literature
Literary analysis
Natural philosophy
Poetry and poetics
Science and culture
Freemasonry
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
Renaissance
20th century
Places
England
Italy
Europe
Scotland
Scandinavia; Nordic countries
Germany
Institutions
Royal Botanical Society, London
Royal Society of London
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