The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World

"It is too easy to think that ‘science’ is what happens now, that modernity and scientific thought are inseparable. Yet as Laura Snyder so brilliantly shows in this riveting picture of the first heroic age, the nineteenth century saw the invention of the computer, of electrical impulses, the harnessing of the power of steam – the birth of railways, statistics and technology. In ‘The Philosophical Breakfast Club’ she draws an endearing – almost domestic – picture of four scientific titans, and shows how – through their very ‘clubbability’ – they created the scientific basis on which the modern world stands." – Judith Flanders, author of Inside the Victorian Home

"The four busy geniuses who inhabit Laura Snyder’s wonderfully engaging book did not invent friendship or science, but by combining those pastimes in their "philosophical breakfasts," they managed to invent much else, from the very word "scientist" to versions of the computer and the camera." -- Joyce E. Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of History, Harvard University

"By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life." – Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses

"In this elegantly written book, Snyder has brought to life four of the most important British scientists of the first half of the nineteenth century…[She] tracks the intertwined lives of these four figures—their loves, their personal successes, and their devastating failures--while casting light on every facet of British science during their lifetime…Snyder relies on sound scholarship without losing sight of what makes these men so fascinating." --Bernard Lightman, Professor of Humanities and Director, Institute of Science and Technology Studies, York University

"Who would not want to be invited to breakfast with the young philosophers and scientists that Laura Snyder portrays so vividly and with searching imagination? Charles Babbage, William Whewell, John Herschel, and Richard Jones, even as students at Cambridge, plotted the reform of science, which in the early nineteenth century hardly existed in the British universities.  As they attained intellectual and institutional power, they continued their efforts, often working through elite social networks.  At exquisite dinner parties, for instance, Babbage would demonstrate his new invention, the analytical engine, a forerunner of the modern computer, and therewith beguile the young Charles Darwin just back from his Beagle voyage.  Science and the personalities who created it spring to life in Snyder’s compelling biographical depictions." -- Robert J. Richards, Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science, University of Chicago