...E NÃO ESQUECER O AVÔ DARWIN E SEUS AMIGOS



"In the mid-eighteenth century, three men - Erasmus Darwin, a doctor, Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham metal-goods manufacturer, and the porcelain man Josiah Wedgwood - were at the centre of a society that met in Birmingham on the Monday nearest each full moon (so they had enough light to get home in the evening) for, as Darwin put it, 'a little philosophical laughing'.

The group included James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen, the conjuror Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Thomas Day, a follower of Rousseau. Together, they classified plants and isolated gases, they built clocks and telescopes, they flew in hot-air balloons and invented machines that could speak, performed tricks with magnets and dreamt up recipes for disappearing ink. Many of them were self-taught, some were dissenters and radicals, all were ingenious. And in this spectacular, epic book, Jenny Uglow shows how childlike daydreams and Heath-Robinson contraptions gave way to some of the greatest inventions of mankind. (...)


Soho House in Handsworth, Birmingham,
a regular venue for meetings of the Lunar Society

But the figure who comes across as the hero of the tale is the extraordinary Darwin, grandfather of Charles. What is so appealing about Darwin, in Uglow's account, is that although he was a great inventor, physician and poet (he wrote, among other works, a long poem on the sex life of plants), he saved lives by understanding what you might call the alchemy of the emotions. Not unlike Joseph Bell, the doctor who inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes a century later, Darwin observed human beings in all their psychic splendour, and saw what they gave away despite themselves as well as their more ordinary symptoms. In Zoonomia, a book written towards the end of his life, he listed scarlet fever and measles, but also included entries for other afflictions: anger, ambition, credulity, love". (texto integral aqui)

(2009)