John Banks

an independent and itinerant lecturer of Natural and Experimental Philosophy on the threshold of English Industrial Revolution

Abstract

In eighteenth century England the courses of Natural and Experimental Philosophy given by independent and/or itinerant lecturers, whose textbooks and syllabi were based on Newtonian Physics, became the main instruments for spreading and popularizing an idea of Applied Science which effectively proclaimed the application of the results of scientific knowledge to the needs of population and to the production of material life. Thus, the independent and/or itinerant lecturers’ activities, with their courses and publications, spread knowledge of the principles of Mechanical and Experimental Science among those men who became protagonists in the transformation of their country into the first industrial power of the world. Amongst those lecturers was John Banks who offered his courses and specialized knowledge in Mechanical Physics and Machinery to many manufacturers, engineers and mechanics, who stood in the forefront of England’s industrial transformation, and was himself one of the main intellectual exponents of this process.