The Enlightenment
The 18th century was a time of intellectual excitement against of backdrop of economic turmoil and social crisis.
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The expansion of the scientific spirit was first and foremost founded on reason and experimentation. Many discoveries showed the development of scientific curiosity: Henry Cavendish put to the fore the Hydrogen atom, chemist Lavoisier discovered the composition of air, physicist Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is an electrical phenomenon… In that context, the Montgolfier brothers made the first hot air balloon fly on June 4th, 1783. A sheer emulation existed, as shown by the immediate replica by Jacques Charles, who made the first hydrogen balloon fly on August 27th, 1783. He chose hydrogen because it has a better rising force because it is fourteen times lighter than air. Thus, a true competition began between hot air balloons and hydrogen balloons.
All those discoveries give Man the feeling of taking possession of the universe that, until then, God was considered the sole master.
But the spirit of Enlightenment is also linked with the protest against a hierarchic society. The nobility was confronted to its power and wealth getting weaker while the bourgeoisie, that sprung from the Third Estate, knew a noticeable rise. Its influence grew at the same time as its economic power rose. The Montgolfier brothers again illustrate this mutating society. They came from a family of five generations of papermakers from Ardèche and the family-owned paper factory is famous well beyond the region. It would actually fund in part their first experiments, though the young Academy of Sciences (1666) would also finance the project.
Finally, the Enlightenment were also a time when sciences rime with show. Scientific experiments are extremely dramatized and give way to sheer awe. People rush to see the balloons fly, the electrification sessions by abbot Nollet, the magnetism sessions in Versailles as well as Paris. These shows kill two birds with one stone; science at the time belonged to what we would call today a development program: in the countryside, agronomy appeared, the force of rivers enabled the conception and the exploitation of hydraulic water frames, mineralogy became a trendy field, since mines and natural resources were a new interest.
In other words, the 18th century is a great time for the reconfiguration of science; it influences more and more fields, lives of men and women. Indeed, a new social dissemination can be seen, made possible thanks to the rise, throughout Europe, of prestigious institutions like Academies and Universities (Uppsala, Göttingen, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford…) People can attend lectures: at the Sorbonne, they rush to public physics classes of abbot Nollet.
The Encyclopedia, a global work that is so emblematic of the Enlightenment, symbolizes well this ambition from the 18th century, that time when people tried to encapsulate knowledge: seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations, by more than a hundred and fifty authors.
If today it is impossible to be an amateur scientist, in the 18th century, science was not necessarily something technical; it was part of culture, a certain scientific poetry existed and science could be found in novels like Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1721).
