The Art of Innovation

BBC Radio 4 LW

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

The Art of Innovation: Satirizing Science

Satirizing Science

BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation, Satirizing Science

Ian Blatchford and Tilly Blyth on the impact of Gillray's satire in a new chemical age.

Ian Blatchford and Tilly Blyth on weird goings-on at The Royal Institution with hallucinatory gas and the impact of Gillray's Scientific Researches! in a new age of chemistry.

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth continue their series exploring how art and science have inspired each other with a focus on James Gillray's biting satire Scientific Researches! (1801) about the new pneumatic chemical experiments on show to fashionable society at the Royal Institution in London.

Tilly Blyth reveals chemist Humphrey Davy's crude airbag is the clue to the success and failure of his famous experiments with laughing gas (nitrous oxide). Its erratic and unexplainable effects went on show to a preening aristocracy at the Royal Institution, but nitrous oxide's huge medical value in suppressing pain was passed over for another 40 years.  Davy turned to poetry in an attempt to articulate and make sense of the sensations, in an age when the cultural value of science had still to be earned. 

At the Science Museum Ian Blatchford uncovers the coded and explosive references in Gillray's print to this gaseous moment. It had arrived at the same time as the worst excesses of the political revolution in France, and nitrous oxide became a powerful metaphor for the dangers of all kinds of scientific or political experimentation. So was Gillray's prolific pen powerful enough to derail science in this new chemical age?
  

Producer Adrian Washbourne

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group

Photograph (c) The Board of Trustees of The Science Museum

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

How art and science have inspired each other.

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth explore how art and science have inspired each other.

In this landmark series, art historian and Director of the Science Museum Ian Blatchford and technology historian and Head of Collections of the Science Museum Tilly Blyth explore the art of invention and the invention of art and reveal the symbiotic relationship between the two. Many feel science takes the magic out of creativity. These programmes show how scientific advance facilitates creativity. And further, how artistic and scientific endeavour are inspired by the same desires and, often, are the result of intimate conversations between good friends. Galileo's painter friend Ludovicio Cigoli paints a maculate moon on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and what does Galileo see when he looks through his telescope? A maculate moon. The poet Samuel Coleridge and the chemist Humphrey Davy were very close friends. Scientific innovators are creative thinkers. And the creation of art is dependent on technological development, as well as an aesthetic sense. Throughout history, artists and scientists have both desired to make sense of the world around them and change it, 

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group. 

Image credit: Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Art of Innovation

Satirizing Science

Genres

Series

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4