The York buildings dragons: Desaguliers, Arbuthnot and attitudes towards the scientific community

Abstract

The growing public awareness of natural philosophy and technology in the eighteenth century brought with it unintended consequences, including an enlarged space for satiric treatments of scientific issues, which have not always been recognized for what they are. A pamphlet entitled The York Buildings Dragons appeared in December 1725, with a second, augmented, edition in January 1726. It has generally been attributed to John Theophilus Desaguliers FRS (1683–1744), the Huguenot engineer, Newtonian expositor and leading Freemason. This article throws fresh light on the pamphlet: to provide more extensive background to the work, to describe its aims and methods, to define its mode as entirely satiric, to analyse its contents in greater detail, to show that Desaguliers cannot possibly have been the author and to suggest as a more plausible candidate the mathematician, physician and satiric author John Arbuthnot FRS (1667–1735). Historians of science and technology need to take care in assessing the pamphlet literature surrounding controversial innovations.