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19. William Shipley (1714–1803) founded an association called the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in 1754, and he was a drawing master working in Northampton who wanted to promote innovation in commerce and industry. The Society of Arts, as it became known, soon attracted a diverse membership including noted architects, artists, and businessmen. It held its own series exhibitions of arts, crafts, and inventions from as early as 1760. These were modest affairs, but they had an intellectual vitality that that was missing from those developed later in France.
20. R. R. James, Prince Consort: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 194.
21. T. Martin, The Life of the Prince Consort, vol. II (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1876), 596.
22. P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Exposition Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World Fairs 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 10–11.
23. James, 196.
24. A. L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline 1895–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 27.
25. Charles Babbage (1791–1871) is sometimes referred to as the father of the modern computer. A mathematician who graduated from Cambridge University in 1816, he held the post of Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. He helped to found the Astronomical Society in 1820 and subsequently occupied a number of key posts in that organization. Always forthright in his opinions, he published a controversial book on the decline of English science in 1831, which led to the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Concerned with removing the drudgery and human inaccuracy from computation, he developed plans for a calculating machine, which he called the Difference Engine. He obtained government funds in 1834 to construct the machine but it proved difficult to manufacture. Babbage spent much of the next thirty-seven years and a large portion of his family fortune trying to perfect it. His relationship with the government soured as a result of their withdrawal sponsorship, and he never missed an opportunity to criticize politicians. Babbage was the principal founder of the Statistical Society in 1834, and he extensively wrote and commented upon industry and its relationship to science.
26. Joseph Paxton (1801–1865) was a gardener and architect who was superin-tendent of Chatsworth gardens from 1826. He was also a friend of the Duke of Devonshire and accompanied him on his travels between 1838 and 1840. He responded to the criticism of the Belgravians by altering his Crystal Palace design so that the trees were enclosed by the glass and iron building, rather than removed.