The Scientific Grand Tour: The Travel Diary of Martin Folkes (1690-1754)

<p>This volume provides a critical edition of an exceptional example of the ‘Scientific Grand Tour’ taken by Martin Folkes. Martin Folkes (1690–1754) was Newton’s protégé, antiquary, mathematician, and the only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In 1733-5, he went on Grand Tour as a scientific ambassador for the Royal Society, demonstrating Newtonian optics to Italian virtuosi. He also measured ancient and Renaissance buildings to understand past architectural engineering and design. His 97-page illustrated diary (in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, shelfmark MS Eng. misc.c.444) also challenges the long-standing, mistaken impression among scholars that the Royal Society was in decline in the eighteenth century. Analysing Folkes’s activities abroad and creating an edition from this source tracing his Italian route provides a novel reading of Newtonianism and the purpose of the Grand Tour as a vehicle for scientific research and statesmanship. The diary reveals that in Venice, Folkes recreated Newton’s experiments in optics for an invited and sceptical audience at the Palazzo Giustiniani, primarily to counter Paduan natural philosopher Giovanni Rizzetti's (1675-1751) claims he could not reproduce the experiments in the refrangibility of light in Newton's Opticks. When in Venice, Folkes also made contact with Anders Celsius (1701-44) and arranged for Celsius to obtain precision scientific instruments used in his expedition with Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698-1759) to Lapland to measure the shape of the earth by triangulation to prove Newton's theory that the earth was a flattened sphere. At the same time, the diary reflected Folkes's antiquarian interests in historic cartography, architecture and numismatics, not surprising as the Royal Society at this time was also involved in projects that integrated natural philosophy (‘science’) and antiquarianism (history/analysis of past material culture, a form of nascent archaeology) particularly before the re-establishment of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1717. Folkes was an exemplar of an interdisciplinary virtuoso of the Enlightenment, his scientific grand tour seeing him move seamlessly between disciplines in the arts and sciences.</p>