The seventeenth century in Britain was one of unparalleled scientific discovery. Why? Why the seventeenth century, and why Britain? The timing is straightforward to explain as part of the Renaissance, and although an explanation of the timing of the Renaissance and the reasons for this revival of culture in Western Europe lies outside the scope of the present book, as I have argued in Science: A History a convenient marker for the start of the scientific revolution that would transform first Europe and then the rest of the world is 1543, the year in which Andreas Vesalius published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body) and Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies). Copernicus was Polish, but had studied in Italy; Vesalius was from Brussels, studied briefly in Paris, and carried out his greatest work in Italy. Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance, which was fuelled by both scholars and manuscripts making the short journey from Constantinople around the time of the fall of Byzantium, in the middle of the fifteenth century. Other key (and related) developments brought about what has been called the First Industrial Revolution (I would prefer 'technological' rather than 'industrial') with the introduction in Europe of moveable type and the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. These changed the intellectual environment both by improving communications and providing information about new and exciting places, and by showing that the application of science could have practical benefits.
Fifty years after the publication of the books by Vesalius and Copernicus, Italy was still the centre of the scientific world, and in the early seventeenth century Galileo famously set out the stall of what we now call science, spelling out the key importance of experiment and observation, testing hypotheses rather than simply arguing in philosophical or logical terms about which idea is more elegant as an explanation of, say, the flight of a cannonball through the air or the passage of Mars across the night sky. In fact, Galileo was not the first person to state these ideas explicitly, and he would not have called himself a scientist, nor used the word 'science', which wasn't coined until the nineteenth century. It stems from the Latin scientia, meaning 'knowledge'; a term which Galileo and his contemporaries would have been thoroughly familiar with, although in a much broader context than our science. They would have regarded themselves as natural philosophers, the heirs to Greeks such as Pythagoras and Aristotle. But as the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In modern terminology, the people who are the subjects of this book were scientists, and what they did was science; only the saddest pedant would object to my use of the word science in this context.
Other things being equal, science should have taken off in Italy following the work of Galileo, and the revolution I describe in this book should have happened fifty years sooner than it did. But other things were not equal. The dead hand of the Catholic Church stopped the scientific revolution in Italy, with the conviction of Galileo for heresy serving as a powerful incentive for other scientists to give up their work, keep quiet about it, or head for more comfortable climes. In mainland Europe north of the Alps, the development of science was hampered by wars (often religious conflicts) and pestilence. Britain too had its civil war, but this was a different kind of conflict, and one which in the end produced a group of people determined, as we shall see, to keep religion out of science and to publish their discoveries for all to share. By comparison with most of its continental neighbours, by the second half of the seventeenth century England was a stable society (if partly because the horrors of the Civil War were still recent enough to serve as a reminder that a little tolerance might be better than the alternative), more or less democratic, increasingly prosperous, and tolerant, if not of all free-thinkers, at least of the kind of free-thinking involved in science. It was, indeed, fertile ground in which the seeds of science could grow. But although the plants that grew from those seeds began to flower in the 1660s, they were in fact planted in that fertile soil almost exactly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and nurtured through the efforts of three men - William Gilbert, Francis Bacon, and William Harvey. They were the heralds of the scientific revolution in Britain, and it is with them that my story starts.