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Zeitgeist (World Spirit). His influence can be traced in Davy, Coleridge and Vitalism, and indirectly he is the father of all forms of ‘alternative science’. His ideas can also be traced emerging in such later writers as Teilhard de Chardin or even James Lovelock with his Gaia theory.
    MARY SHELLEY, 1797-1851. Novelist, short-story writer and essayist. The godmother of British science fiction with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818, with an important Introduction about creativity and scientific ideas added to the 1831 edition). Her work really became known through stage adaptations 1820-30, and much later through film. See also her apocalyptic account of a global plague in The Last Man (1826). (See Chapters 7 and 10)
    PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822. Poet and essayist, fascinated by science, especially in his two long poems Queen Mab (1812) and Prometheus Unbound (1819), and his prose writings on atheism. He was particularly interested in theories of cosmology, geology, meteorology, mesmerism and electricity. Significant scientific ideas appear in ‘Notes to Queen Mab’ (1812), ‘Mont Blanc’ (1816), ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819), ‘The Cloud’ (1820) and ‘The Magnetic Lady to her Patient’ (1821). His long poem Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1815) reflects his interest in exotic exploration, and particularly in Mungo Park’s river journeys.
    DANIEL SOLANDER, 1733-82. Swedish botanist, trained under Linnaeus at Uppsala, and scientific assistant at the British Museum. FRS June 1764. Fat, lazy and lovable, he accompanied Joseph Banks on the great Endeavour voyage, and remained his great friend and confidant until his premature death at Banks’s house in Soho Square, aged forty-eight, in May 1782.
    MARY SOMERVILLE, 1780-1872. Mathematician and brilliant interpreter and populariser of science for adults, especially with her broad survey of current scientific trends, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). She translated (and clarified) Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), and with Caroline Herschel was elected one of the first two women Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1835. She also tutored Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (1815-52) in mathematics. A powerful hostess in Victorian scientific circles, she was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1869. The first women’s college in Oxford, Somerville - now co-educational - was named after her.
    ROBERT SOUTHEY, 1774-1830. Poet, critic and notable biographer. A good friend to young Davy at Bristol, he eagerly discussed the early relations between Romantic science and poetry, but was soon overtaken by the work and influence of Coleridge. He later wrote a fine all-action biography of Nelson (1813) - one of Davy’s heroes - and composed the famous children’s story ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. Curiously enough, ‘Goldilocks’ has become a familiar term used by cosmologists to describe the median placing of any planet within a solar system which has the potentiality of life - being ‘not too hot, not too cold’, and ‘not too big, not too small’.
    SIR BENJAMIN THOMPSON, COUNT RUMFORD, 1753-1814. Physicist, philanthropist and adventurer. Touring through Europe, he became the lifelong friend of Prince Maximilian of Bavaria, and between 1789 and 1795 was Minister for War and for the Army under Carl Theodor, for whom he created the Englische Garten as a public works project to help the unemployed of Munich. He established soup kitchens and a public health programme. His technical inventions included the Rumford stove, the Rumford lamp and the Rumford fireplace. He made a disastrous second marriage to Madame Lavoisier (1805), living beyond his means on the Champs Élysées; then lived obscurely in a Paris suburb with the last of his many mistresses, Victoria, who bore him a son, Charles. He has a statue and a monument in Munich, and a tombstone in Auteuil