Gillray (James)

New Discoveries in Pneumatics! _or_ an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air,
London, Henry G. Bohn, 1849.
a social satire set in the Royal Institution, which was founded in 1799 and met with great early success, but which by 1802 stood accused of over-popularising of science through the medium of its lectures, here mocking them as trivial and pandering to the fashionable elite. The scene depicts Thomas Young, Professor of Natural Science, experimenting on on one of the institution’s founders, Sir J.C. Hippisley, by inserting a tube into his mouth, feeding a gas from a succession of flasks and chambers on the table before them, and causing an alarming explosion to emit from Hippisley’s rear end. At their side stands the bemused figure of young Humphry Davy, then the assistant lecturer, who had in reality delivered talks on pneumatic chemistry. The audience is gathered in a semi-circle in the foreground, and includes the physicist Count Rumford, watched with bem in 1801 following the resignation of his predecessor, the scholar and essayist Isaac D’Israeli, father of later British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, the lords Gower, Stanhope and Pomfret, the antiquary and astroner Sir Henry Englefield, the famous blue stocking Mrs Frederica Augusta Locke, the poet and dilettante William Sotheby, the drawing master Peter Denys, and several others,.