Historians of science suffered a major loss this past January with the death of Roland Jackson. Jackson originally earned a doctorate in molecular immunology and a postgraduate certificate in education from Oxford University, and he spent the first part of his career in science education. In the 1990s, he joined the Science Museum in London as its head of education, and from 2002 to 2013 he was chief executive of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, renamed the British Science Association in 2009. Jackson’s career in the history of science ramped up in 2013, when he became a member and visiting fellow of London’s venerable Royal Institution.

Jackson’s historical research focused initially on John Tyndall, who was a professor of physics at the Royal Institution from 1853 to 1887—and also a mountaineer, a passion that Jackson shared. Jackson published The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual in 2018, and with his wife Nicola Jackson and Daniel Brown, he edited a volume of Tyndall’s poetry that appeared in 2020. Jackson was also an editor on the international project to publish Tyndall’s correspondence, and his scholarly articles included clear expositions of how Tyndall’s research on carbon dioxide and atmospheric heat retention related to earlier, neglected work by Eunice Foote on the topic.

For more on Jackson and his career, see the Royal Institution’s obituary. In this post, we would like to offer an appreciation of a second strand of Jackson’s historical research, which resulted in the publication in 2023 of Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State along with a supplemental volume of case studies. In undertaking this project, Jackson aspired to provide the first systematic overview of the sprawling subject and succeeded as well as anyone probably ever could.

How scientific advice was conveyed

The history of “scientific advice” primarily concerns how relevant technical knowledge is brought to bear on policy. Jackson constrained this topic by limiting his examination to scientific, engineering, and medical knowledge, excluding fields such as political economy, economic statistics, and the nascent social sciences. Thus, while the book covers a wide range of policy areas, from shipbuilding to public health, it explicitly avoids others such as education, crime, and labor relations.

Scientific advice is a topic that is distinct from but related to other topics that today also fall under the rubric of “science policy,” notably state support for scientific research and science education and the direct employment of scientists and engineers by the state. In 19th-century Britain, there was no such unified conception of science policy, notwithstanding some gestures in that direction. Examples of efforts concerned directly with the status of “science” included Charles Babbage’s 1830 polemic Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and Some of Its Causes, a parliamentary committee led by the astronomer Lord Wrottesley that in the 1850s advocated unsuccessfully for a “Board of Science,” and a royal commission led by the Duke of Devonshire that produced a series of uninfluential reports on science and science education in the 1870s.

Even if science, per se, was not the focus, Jackson’s book shows that “men of science” (in the parlance of those times) and engineers were frequently included on a parade of bodies established throughout the century: “select committees,” “royal commissions,” and similar entities. These were organized to collect testimony and offer recommendations on specific issues or events, and they usually comprised people from a range of backgrounds that might also include administrators, politicians, peers, and various other figures engaged in relevant affairs. While some such bodies were intended to continue indefinitely, most were expected to meet only for months or a few years.

Appointments to such bodies were influenced by arbiters of prestige, which for science often meant the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Historians have thoroughly documented how the British Association was founded in 1831 out of dissatisfaction at that time with the Royal Society, and particularly its habitual extension of membership to influential figures with little scientific background. In the context of Jackson’s history, the cultivation of close connections with those in power can be seen in a different light: Joseph Banks led the Royal Society from 1778 until his death in 1820 and was frequently criticized for his lax membership standards, but he was also consulted regularly on policy matters.

Still, the British Association represented the emergence of an influential new model, in which prestige was cultivated by vouchsafing the credentials of members. This philosophy also informed the workings of the more specialized science and engineering societies that proliferated over the course of the century. But personalities mattered, too, and certain figures gained public fame and became mainstays on committees, such as the physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, the astronomer George Airy, and the civil engineer Thomas Telford. Chemist Lyon Playfair gained influence through a connection to political leader Robert Peel and eventually became an important member of Parliament himself.

Scientific advice in British history

While Jackson’s book provides a good general analysis of the structure of scientific advice in 19th-century Britain, its greatest strength rests in its overview of the numerous specific bodies that were set up. These bodies intentionally created a rich trail of documentation, which was published and sold to the public and often quoted in Parliament and the press. Now, it is valuable source material: Jackson, for instance, consulted more than 700 Parliamentary Papers in the course of his research.

The history of these advisory bodies tracks the evolution of the British state as it slowly developed a more active role in domestic affairs along with a larger, more professionalized civil service. This history also reflects the increasingly technical nature of policy problems in Britain, with industrialization, urbanization, and transportation bringing a continual stream of new questions to the fore. However, throughout the century, British politics also left many issues to be addressed by private initiative and local government, meaning scientific advice remained limited, and was nearly absent in areas such as agriculture, where national policy was dominated by issues related to competing interests over trade and land.

Military affairs were one area where there was a consistent need for both state-led technical work as well as advice, beginning with problems such as mapping and navigation and moving into areas such as arms manufacturing and shipbuilding. At the beginning of the century, the Royal Observatory and the Board of Longitude were already longstanding institutions dedicated to improving navigation, and the Admiralty created its Hydrographic Office in 1795. When Parliament dissolved the Board of Longitude in 1828, the Admiralty replaced it with a three-person Resident Committee of Scientific Advice comprising Michael Faraday, Thomas Young, and Edward Sabine. However, Young soon died and Sabine departed for Ireland, leaving Faraday as a singularly important adviser, though, as astronomer royal, George Airy’s influence would soon rise.

According to Jackson, the British army had a weak interest in science and engineering, but this was less true of the civil administration in the War Office and the Board of Ordnance. The board initiated the Ordnance Survey of Britain’s land in 1791 and, in the late 19th century responsibility for the survey was passed on to civil bodies. The Board of Ordnance also created Britain’s Geological Survey in 1835. The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich was responsible for training artillery and engineer officers and became an important center for technical education and applied research; Faraday, notably, was a professor there from 1829 to 1852. Jackson’s book does not cover the British Empire, observing the subject deserves a full volume of its own.

In domestic policy, scientific perspectives jostled with other perspectives and tended not to dominate, notwithstanding the occasional rise in influence of a figure such as Edwin Chadwick, a follower of Jeremy Bentham who stressed scientific approaches in advocating sanitation projects and the notorious 1834 Poor Law reforms. More often advice was sought only in reaction to mounting problems and was implemented and enforced in regulations sporadically. Railway accidents, for instance, were a perennial concern, with 276 deaths reported in 1858 and 1,100 in 1872. Such tolls led to the appointment of a Royal Commission on Railway Accidents, which met from 1874 to 1877 and recommended various reforms including improving trains’ brakes. However, automatic braking was not actually required until the Railway Regulation Act of 1889. Some accidents, such as the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, were so spectacular that they instigated a dedicated tribunal to weigh causes and assign blame.

Such examples are only glimpses into a dense book that should be an essential reference guide to anyone interested in the history of policy, particularly—but not only—as it intersects with the history of science and engineering. It is likewise a history of policymaking in areas that harbored technical dimensions, such as public works, weights and measures, excise taxation, and coal and gas production. It is a great regret that we will not see more products of Jackson’s agility in historical research, but we will benefit from those we already have for many years to come.

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William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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