The Society for Useful Knowledge Read Free

their political influence and economic well-being through the creation of subscription libraries, lecture and study circles, voluntary fire brigades, cooperative insuranceschemes, and local militias. Improvements in printing technology and communications—Franklin was, after all, a successful publisher, an innovative postmaster, and a master intellectual networker—spread their ideas far and wide.
    The close affinities between the leading lights of the colonial movement for useful knowledge and the revolutionary generation of American political leaders ensured that the values and attitudes of the knowledge societies would be institutionalized in the new republic. The two groups often overlapped directly, sometimes at the very highest level: Franklin served for three years as Pennsylvania’s chief executive; Jefferson headed the American Philosophical Society for eighteen years; and John Adams directed Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences for more than two decades. Washington and Hamilton stand out among the Philosophical Society’s many politically prominent members of the period.
    These figures, their colleagues, and associates all placed a premium on the utility of knowledge and tended to value the inventor, the experimenter, and the mechanic over the theoretician, the metaphysician, or other learned authority. Once in power, they wasted little time enshrining this notion and rewarding its practitioners under American law. Article One of the U.S. Constitution explicitly calls on Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Among the earliest items to come before America’s new legislative body were the granting of patents and the issuing of copyrights, areas where the influence of Tench Coxe’s ideas was considerable. 7 Washington’s so-called Farewell Address, delivered in 1796, linked the diffusion of knowledge to the long-term survival of American democracy.
    In a sure sign of the intellectual and economic ferment at work, knowledge associations, in emulation of the American Philosophical Society, proliferated throughout the period, from New England south to New Orleans and westward to Cincinnati, Nashville, and St. Louis. Each society was at the outset local in nature, designed to allow for the personal exchange of ideas and shared interests that still characterized the practice of Enlightenment science. In general, they were open to different walks of life and less reliant than their European counterparts on the social or economic elite. This ensured an approach to knowledge that appealed equally to the farmer, the artisan, the merchant, or the “curious” gentleman. 8
    Over time, a degree of specialization began to appear within the broader movement for useful knowledge. At first, this mostly took the form of small,localized professional associations, for example uniting physicians in Boston or Philadelphia. More significant was the branching out of the knowledge societies to address agricultural improvement, the development of manufactures, or other specific questions in applied science. They frequently offered prizes or cash premiums for solutions to problems in industry or farming, encouraged the exchange of information and ideas among members and with other, like-minded associations, and increasingly distributed public funds in support of these efforts.
    Franklin’s Society for Political Inquiries served as an effective incubator for both the industrial vision of Tench Coxe and the ideal of practical education championed by Benjamin Rush. There were even societies devoted to specific technological challenges. The Rumsean Society, created by Franklin in 1787, was formed to support the work of steamboat designer James Rumsey, who carried on a seemingly endless patent fight with rival inventor John Fitch that also drew in Jefferson, Rush, Washington, and other leading political and scientific figures. Other groups included the Society