“Ordinary” people and philosophers in the laboratories and workshops of the early industrial revolution

Abstract

In the summer of 1812, the one-time "confectioner" and pastry cook James Sadler crashed his hot air balloon into the cold Irish Sea. Driven by heavy winds far offshore from his launch near Dublin, Sadler was luckily rescued by a passing fishing trawler. He was fortunate even to survive, this for the second time, having had previously an uncontrolled ditching in the Bristol Channel with the chemist William Clayfield in 1810.1 Sadler was only one of those, in the late eighteenth century, variously dismissed or even occasionally admired as they translated their new technical skills into employment. Sadler’s career, however, began rather less dramatically before the 1780s as apprentice to his father, at a "refreshment house" on Oxford’s High Street. But it was his exposure to Oxford’s chemical laboratory that lifted him from obscurity.