Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [48]
The medicinal properties of spa waters were a major topic of inquiry for early modern investigators. Theywere thought to arise from dissolved "salts," and projectors of desalination machines like Walcot and Fitzgerald sometimes claimed that salt productionwould be a major ancillary benefit of their own inventions. In Paris, the Academy of Sciences mounted a systematic examination of spas from across France, and this helped spur English efforts. Grew himself presented discourses on spa salts at the Society while Croune affirmed the properties of the water at Epsom, currently London's most fashionable resort. Sir Theodore de Vaux reported a well at Acton that furnished water two or three times as rich in salt as Epsom's. Perhaps its power could be explained by the nitrous salt observable on the ground around the well itself, he suggested.49 At the Society, questions about seawater therefore found a ready reception partly because they coalesced with inquiries into the virtues of these other waters and their salts. What resulted was a rich set of investigations extending over decades and involving avast range ofphysical, chymical, and medical issues. Some of these issues remained rather tacit in the Society's public representation of its activities, because they fell into the province of chymistry or even into that of alchemy.50 But they certainly arose for those closely involved. While modern historians have understandably been captivated by the place of mechanics in the experimental philosophy of the 168os, it would not be inaccurate to say that the investigation of salts was a more sustained, and in the short term more promising, enterprise.
This work took inspiration not only from the seawater investigations, but also from the original Boylean program. That program had focused on the properties of the air. The most prominent experiments of the Society's first decade had been those performed with the air pump invented by Hooke for Boyle. The air-pump experiments, as is now well known, displayed not only a corpuscularian view of nature, but a way of arriving at natural knowledge that Boyle and his colleagues wished to promote.51 Now, moving on from those initial sequences, the Society asked questions about variations in the "spring" or pressure of the atmosphere. In particular, the fellows wanted to know what caused such variations. One hypothesis, which Hooke fostered, was that the cause of changes might be substances dissolved in the air, "much after the same manner as water dissolves salt." This led to a general project on the chemistry of mixtures, for which Grew published another long set of experiments. He took Hooke's suggestion further, to argue that the pressure of the air was in fact dependent on dissolved salts.52 Christopher Wren added that perhaps the salts were nitrous, and "impregnat[ed}" the air. If so, that would handily link the spring of the air to the aerial nitre. Boyle was more cautious, suggesting that aerial nitre was only one of a large number of aerial salts.53 At any rate, the idea of dissolved "salts" became, for a time, common ground between medicine, experimental philosophy, and, because of both spas and seawater, public affairs.
A duel over inventive priority therefore led by this route to a project for new natural philosophy. Grew set it forth in a Society discourse of late 1674. He now argued that "the whole Business of the Material World, is nothing else, but Mixture." He likened the compositions of "Atones, in Bodies" to the arrangements of letters in