Samuel John Galton

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Samuel Galton

Samuel John Galton (born June 18, 1753 in Duddeston / England (now part of Birmingham ), † June 19, 1832 ) was an arms manufacturer and banker in England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution . Because of his scientific research in the field of optics , colors and light, he was appointed to the Royal Society ; he was also a member of the Lunar Society , which also met for a time in his house Great Barr Hall near Birmingham.

Life

Galton came from a Quaker family , a peace church . This did not prevent Galton's father, Samuel Galton Sr., from running a gun manufacture. After intensive training at Warrington Academy in Lancashire , a private business school , Galton joined the company in 1773 as his father's deputy and became his father's equal partner a year later. Through the family of the other company partner and brother-in-law Galton seniors, Joseph Farmer, his company was also involved in the slave trade on the west coast of Africa. The early departure from this branch of business was apparently not justified by moral concerns, but by the higher profit margin in the trade in gold dust, which replaced the business with the slaves. It is not known whether Galton himself supported these business connections. However, Galton, along with Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton , was part of the welcoming delegation for Olaudah Equiano on a visit to Birmingham (1789), who had become a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement through his autobiography.

Through his marriage in 1777 to Lucy Barclay (1757-1817), whose family were also Quakers, Galton expanded his business to include banking; the Barclays Bank he married into still exists today.

In the course of industrialization, the Birmingham-based company Steelhouse Lane gun works worked closely with the machine manufacturer Boulton & Watt . Galton met leading figures from the Lunar Society, a liberal philosophical discussion group that included James Watt , Matthew Boulton and William Murdoch , who Galton knew through professional contacts, and Joseph Priestley, who was shortly before Galton's entry into Warrington Academy had given up teaching there and to whom a personal friendship quickly developed. After Priestley's liberal attitudes caused some unrest in Manchester (as a continuation of the Priestley Riots of 1791) and severe hostility at a feast on the 5th anniversary of the French Revolution , Galton put Priestley's wife under his personal protection and publicly sided with him him until Priestley emigrated to the United States that year.

His involvement, particularly in the arms trade , but also as a banker, increasingly shattered Galton's relationship with his fellow believers. In particular, Galton's production of war weapons, such as bayonets, has met with increasing criticism within his church since the 1790s and ultimately led to his exclusion from his community. Galton rejected the first official complaints, but in the long run he could not escape the increasing pressure. In 1804, Galton finally withdrew from the arms trade and banking business by handing them over to his son Samuel Tertius Galton, who ceased the arms trade for some time. As a result, the relationship between his fellow believers and Galton improved significantly. He did not resume business. Even so, by the time he died in 1832, his fortune grew from around £ 140,000 (1803) to around £ 300,000. For comparison: at the beginning of his career in his father's arms factory in 1775, his fortune was 10,000 pounds. In doing so, he ensured the family's financial well-being for future generations.

Scientific work

Galton's curiosity about the nascent systematic sciences quickly manifested itself in the form of observations which he noted down everywhere and on every subject, and a great passion for collecting scientific equipment and literature of all kinds. His friendship with Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen , and his Entry into the Lunar Society (1781) reinforced this curiosity. They quickly formed the basis for their own research. In his work Experiments on the Prismatic Colors of April 1781, for example, he stated that the individual colors that were generated by a Newtonian prism and arranged on a top turned back to white when turned quickly. This discovery is mostly attributed to the physicist Thomas Young , who made it a quarter of a century after Galton.

For his work, Galton was elected to the Royal Society on December 8, 1785.

Family relationships

Family ties with other members of the Lunar Society and their descendants

Galton's and Barclays son Samuel Tertius Galton (1783-1844) married Frances Ann Violetta Darwin (1783-1874), daughter of the founder of the Lunar Society, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin ). They in turn became the parents of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), an important British explorer.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Letters in the Birmingham City Archives on the Farmer's Slave Trade
  2. ↑ Jenny Uglow: The Lunar Men . P. 414; see literature list
  3. ↑ Jenny Uglow: The Lunar Men . P. 446f; see literature list
  4. ^ Letter from Galton to William Bird, Aug. 24, 1780, in the Birmingham City Archives
  5. ↑ Justification letter from 1795 in the archive of the Revolutionary Players  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk  
  6. ^ Barbara D. Smith: The Galtons of Birmingham . 1967, pp. 132-150.
  7. ↑ Jenny Uglow: The Lunar Men . Pp. 351, 546; see literature list
  8. ^ Entry on Galton, Samuel (1753 - 1832) in the archives of the Royal Society , London

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Galton, Samuel John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British entrepreneur and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1753
PLACE OF BIRTH Duddeston , England
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1832