Autumn of 1792. In his fourteenth year as President of the Royal Society of London, Joseph Banks steadfastly guarded the scientific interests of the aristocracy and landed gentry. Luigi Galvani's discovery that a current would stimulate a frog's severed legs had just begun to electrify the metropolitan and provincial lecture circuits. French natural philosophers busied themselves with the revolutionary task of developing a metric system. Richard Arkwright and John Smeaton, inventors who had proved so pivotal to the Industrial Revolution, had just died. As this generation was passing, Charles Babbage and John Herschel, who would later become leaders in the reform movement in British science, crawled around their nursery floors near London. And in the small Westmoreland town of Kendal, a young tutor spent his rare free days gardening. One night, when he brought a few floral specimens indoors for investigation, he realized to his surprise that a flower that had appeared sky-blue in the afternoon sun seemed red in the candlelight. After moving to Manchester a year later, this tutor, John Dalton, presented his first scientific paper. The subject was not the atomic theory for which he would become famous. Rather, he spoke on his own colour blindness. I This paper aims to show that these events have an important connection. In the 1820s-40s, the subject of colour blindness -and especially Dalton's colour blindness -galvanized those men of science who wanted to harness provincial knowledge. One of the most important issues in the reform movement generally was how to organize Britain's idiosyncratic styles of governance under one national system. This problem also loomed over the sciences. A loose coalition of reform-minded natural philosophers led the charge to re-define natural philosophy. This group included those who were active in the reform of London scientific organization (including the Royal Society), Cambridge education, and national funding for the sciences -men like George Airy, Charles Babbage,
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