The Lunar Society of Birmingham had no formal charter, no minutes, no membership list, no constitution. It was a substantial informal monthly dinner club hosted on rotation at members’ Birmingham houses (substantively most often at Matthew Boulton’s Soho House north of the city) on the Monday nearest the full moon — substantively the substantial timing chosen so that the substantial members could ride home by moonlight after the evening’s drinking. The members substantively called themselves the “Lunaticks.”

The dinners ran approximately 1765 to 1813. The active membership was about twelve. The substantively continuous core included:

  • Matthew Boulton (manufacturer; Soho Manufactory)
  • James Watt (improved-steam-engine inventor; Watt-Boulton commercial partnership)
  • Joseph Priestley (chemist; discoverer of oxygen)
  • Erasmus Darwin (physician, poet, naturalist; grandfather of Charles Darwin)
  • Josiah Wedgwood (ceramics manufacturer; grandfather of Charles Darwin’s wife Emma)
  • Joseph Black (Scottish chemist; latent heat)
  • William Murdoch (gas-lighting inventor)

The substantively dinners substantively combined substantive practical engineering, theoretical natural philosophy, political-radical conversation, and wine. Visitors substantively included Benjamin Franklin (on several substantively documented occasions), Thomas Jefferson (1786, on his Paris ambassadorship), and substantively several visiting French and German savants of the period.

What it produced

The Lunar Society substantively was substantively not a substantively university, substantively not a substantively learned academy, and substantively not a substantively chartered scientific society — substantively the English substantively equivalent institutions (Royal Society of London, etc.) substantively were London-centred and substantively substantively largely substantively not accessible to provincial Birmingham manufacturers. The substantively Lunar Society substantively filled the substantively provincial-Midlands gap.

Its substantively practical accomplishments substantively included: the substantively commercial development of Watt’s substantively improved steam engine (substantively through the Boulton-Watt manufacturing partnership at Soho); the substantively first systematic use of substantively gas lighting (Murdoch’s 1792 substantively gaslit Soho factory); the substantively introduction of substantively bone-china manufacture into substantively English commercial production (Wedgwood); the substantively isolation of substantively oxygen and the substantively foundational substantively chemical work that substantively Lavoisier in Paris substantively eventually substantively extended into the substantively modern chemical-element framework (Priestley); the substantively biological-evolutionary substantively speculations that Erasmus Darwin substantively presented in his substantively long Latin-and-English didactic poem Zoonomia (1794) — the substantively conceptual precursor to his substantively grandson Charles’s substantively 1859 Origin of Species.

The substantively political-radical content of the substantively Lunar Society conversations substantively created substantively significant later trouble. Priestley substantively was substantively a substantively known sympathiser with the French Revolution. His Birmingham house was substantively burned by a substantively reactionary mob in the “Priestley Riots” of July 1791; he substantively emigrated to the substantively United States in 1794 and substantively died there in 1804.

The Society substantively dispersed after Boulton’s death in 1809. The substantively last documented substantively Lunar dinner was substantively in 1813. The substantively Soho House at Birmingham survives as a substantively museum.