![]() Desaguliers’ experiments and lectures entertained as well as informed, and demonstrated to his audiences the effects of electricity, the physical properties of gases, optics, and the orbits of the moon and planets. Science was emerging into popular culture and interest in Newton’s theories had spread beyond Oxbridge and the Royal Society to coffee houses and taverns. His house was close to the Rummer & Grapes tavern and to New Palace Yard, home to many of Desaguliers’ colleagues in Grand Lodge and to the Horn Tavern, where the lodge at the Rummer & Grapes later relocated.ĭesaguliers’ scientific lectures were exceptionally fashionable. He remained there until 1735 when the area was razed to clear the approach to the new Westminster Bridge. ![]() But in 1715 he moved to Channel Row, Westminster. ![]() In London Desaguliers lived first in Plough Yard, close to the Royal Society’s premises in Crane Court. He returned to Oxford periodically to lecture and was awarded a doctorate in 1719. He received his MA in 1712 and in 1713 following his marriage to Joanna Pudsey, settled in London. The introductions boosted Desaguliers’ career: Newton’s sponsorship led to his election as FRS, with his entrance and ongoing fees waived ‘in consideration of his great usefulness to the Royal Society’ and in Chandos Desaguliers secured a wealthy, well-connected, entrepreneurial patron.ĭesaguliers obtained his BA in 1709 and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England the following year by Bishop Compton at Fulham Palace. Keill introduced Desaguliers to Newton and to the Duke of Chandos, one of England’s wealthiest men, a fellow member of the Royal Society’s Council. He read divinity and experimental natural philosophy, studying under John Keill (1671-1721), a Fellow of the Royal Society and acolyte of Sir Isaac Newton, its President. Brought up in relative poverty, Desaguliers was educated at his father’s ‘French School’ in Islington, London, and at Bishop Vesey’s School in Sutton Coldfield, and in 1705 was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor scholar. He was born on 12 March 1683 at Aytré, a village near La Rochelle, to a Huguenot (Protestant) family that fled France for England the same year. Dr Jean (John) Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744), reformulated English Freemasonry, creating an organisation that reflected (and reinforced) the political and philosophical transformation then underway in Britain.
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