In 1733, the Queen’s Gallery at Kensington Palace acquired a new object of curiosity: a mechanical model of the solar system. Commissioned by the Queen Consort, Caroline of Ansbach, it was the creation of Thomas Wright, mathematical instrument-maker to the King. Wright’s orrery was not new: he had remodelled an earlier one already in George II’s collection and from Caroline he received the large sum of £336 for ‘making all the Machinery and Wheel-Work to perform the Motions of all the planets… to the Great Orrery’. His handsome, gilt-metal-decorated instrument included all the planets then known: Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the Sun and the Moon.
By 1733, Queen Caroline’s enthusiasm for science was well known. She had wooed Sir Isaac Newton, increased the pension paid to Astrologer Royal Edmond Halley, attended lectures at the Royal Society (founded in 1660 by Charles II to promote ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’) and, following a series of experiments in which she took a close interest, agreed to the inoculation of her children against smallpox, at the time a new and widely mistrusted procedure. For her favourite son, William Augustus, she ordered that a laboratory be made in the cellars of St James’s Palace, where the 10-year-old Prince also had his own printing press. In 1734, accompanied by her children, she visited the natural history collections assembled by Queen Anne’s former doctor Sir Hans Sloane and afterwards corresponded with him on the subject of botanical taxonomy.
The Grand Orrery purchased by Caroline of Ansbach for her husband, George II, in 1733.
Caroline’s fascination may have been unusual for the period, in which, with few exceptions, science was widely regarded as a male preserve, but in the annals of royal history she is one of several figures who took a keen and questioning interest in science and scientific progress, adding equipment and treatises to the collections in palaces and royal residences.
Historically, royal education typically involved some instruction in science, although this was not always entrusted to a specialist. In June 1544, John Cheke was appointed tutor to the future Edward VI. He was chiefly renowned for his knowledge of Greek. His remit was to teach the prince ‘of tounges, of the scripture, of philosophie and all liberal sciences’, and it is clear that the ‘liberal sciences’ — which included geometry, arithmetic and astronomy — were neither his nor the young Edward’s primary concern.
Cheke was also among those responsible for the education of the future Elizabeth I. Her sharp intellect embraced wide-ranging interests, including, briefly, alchemy, as well as new scientific knowledge and gadgetry, the last evidenced in her ownership of a brass astrolabe for calculating the time. Presented to Elizabeth in 1559, it was made by Thomas Gemini, a Netherlandish copper-plate engraver who had begun his career plagiarising the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius. However, if Elizabeth had hoped to hear of advances in scientific knowledge during her visit to Cambridge in 1564, she was destined for disappointment. The ‘learned disputation’ by students staged in her honour consisted of a debate in Latin on two motions clearly close to the young men’s hearts: ‘simple food is preferable to complex’ and ‘dinner should be more generous than lunch’.
A double-barrelled air pump and reservoir fashioned by George Adams formed the centrepiece of pneumatics apparatus commissioned by George III in 1761.
By contrast, a focus on geometry played a part in the education of the future George III, a feature of the broader moral training devised for the then prince by the Earl of Bute. Geometric problems were considered as an exercise that encouraged the Prince to identify truth by tracking it through the extended chains of reasoning that were part of such calculations.
Dispiriting as this sounds, the young King grew up with a genuine interest in science and mathematics that not only occupied his leisure time, but shaped his patronage and collecting. In 1761, he commissioned from London’s finest scientific-instrument-makers a selection of pieces used for demonstrating and proving diverse theories, including an air pump made by George Adams employed in the study of gases — among other things, Adams’s pump proved that the removal of air from around an object prevented the transmission of sound made by that object. The same maker also supplied a philosophical table, equipped to enable the royal student to carry out experiments that confirmed theories of mechanics, in particular the relationships between matter, motion and forces.
Adams, the appointed instrument-maker to the King, was also commissioned to make this mahogany, ivory and brass philosophical table in the early years of George III’s reign.
The King then went a step further, commissioning not simply scientific instruments, but — driven by his love of astronomy — an entire observatory at Richmond, now part of Greater London. Halley had predicted that, in 1769, Venus would cross between the Earth and the Sun, enabling astronomers to calculate the distance between the two.
The King’s observatory was designed by architect William Chambers and completed in time for George and his wife, Charlotte, to witness the transit of Venus on June 3. Delighted with the new building, the King requested that his grandfather George II’s orrery, remodelled at Queen Caroline’s request, be moved there from Kensington Palace. He displayed it alongside ‘some excellent mathematical instruments… [and] excellent apparatus for philosophical experiments’ that were used not only by George III himself, but in his children’s education. Many years later, a clergyman and amateur clockmaker, the Revd George Tough, presented the science-loving monarch with another orrery, chiefly made from engraved glass. It remains in the Royal Collection.
Unsurprisingly, science was well represented in George III’s extensive collection of books. Among titles listed in the catalogue of his library at Kew Palace, compiled in 1780, was a two-volume guide, American Husbandry, published in 1775 (‘Containing an account of the Soil, Climate, Production and Agriculture of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies’), a 12-volume French survey of natural history and, under the subject heading ‘Medecina’, handbooks including Robert James’s lengthily titled 1743 guide: A medicinal dictionary; including physic, surgery, anatomy, chymistry, and botany, in all their branches relative to medicine. Together with a history of drugs; an account of their various preparations, combinations and uses; and an introductory preface, tracing the progress of physic, and explaining the theories which have principally prevail’d in all ages of the world. Despite a troubled relationship with his heir, the future George IV, George III did pass on to his eldest son aspects of his scientific curiosity. Following the death of scientific-instrument-maker George Adams, the Prince of Wales appointed Adams’s son his optician.
A historic brass telescope situated within the cupola at the top of the The King's Observatory in Richmond.
A passion for science also animated Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, enriching both the Royal Collection and London itself. Technological innovation was a key focus of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Prince’s brainchild. The exhibition’s profits contributed to the building of the Science Museum and the Royal Albert Hall, which initially hosted regular science lectures and displays, such as the demonstration of a Morse Code link between Britain and Persia offered by the Society of Telegraph Engineers in 1872. In 1851, scientific and technological exhibits in the Crystal Palace included the most up-to-date telescopes, a prototype submarine, hydraulic presses and a revolving light for lighthouses. High-quality, but inexpensive lacquered brass microscopes exhibited by the Sheffield-based Chadburn Brothers manufactory were so admired by the Prince that he subsequently rewarded the company with his Royal Warrant.
Albert also took an interest in the displays of photography and photographic equipment, as the medium had intrigued him since the early 1840s. The displays in 1851 encouraged him to expand his fledgling collection of photographic prints that, by the time of his death in 1861, had grown to more than 10,000 items. Among that collection today is the 1855 charming Study of a Young Boy by Hugh Welch Diamond, a man unusual among early photography enthusiasts. A catalyst for his passion was his role as superintendent of the female department at Surrey County asylum. Diamond became convinced that patients’ facial features revealed their mental state and that photographs of their faces and expressions were, therefore, valuable tools for diagnosis. He expounded this hypothesis in a paper presented in 1856 to the Royal Society of Medicine, On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity. Study of a Young Boy is quite different from such harrowing images, an engaging Chardin-esque composition that shows its subject holding a glass container, sitting at a table on which are arranged several pieces of scientific equipment. Diamond was a founder of the Photographic Society of London, of which Prince Albert became a patron, contributing £50 towards research into causes of the fading of photographs, one of his particular concerns.
Engineering, industrial design and conservation were among areas of scientific knowledge and research that captured the attention of another Prince Consort, the late Duke of Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly, Prince Philip, a former naval officer, also interested himself in navigational aids. Absent from the Royal Collection, however, is the Battenberg Course Indicator, designed in 1892 by the Duke’s maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who served as First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Prince Louis’s gadget was intended to track the position of ships in relation to one another in convoys, a very practical application of science guaranteed to appeal to his sailor-scientist grandson.