Samuel Hartlib

Samuel Hartli(e)b (ca. 1600 – 1662) was a German Briton polymath, an expert in many subjects, called "the Great Intelligencer of Europe". [Arved Hübler, PeterLinde, John W. T. Smith. "Electronic Publishing '01: 2001 in the Digital Publishing Odyssey". IOS Press. 2001. ISBN 1586031910] Interested in fields such as science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education, he settled in England, where he married and died. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

Hartlib set out with the goal "To record all human knowledge and to make it universally available for the education of all mankind".Fact|date=February 2008 His work has been compared to modern internet search engines. [Eine Vorgeschichte der Internet-Suchmaschine [http://adressbueros.tantner.net/projekt.html] ]

Life

Hartlib was born in Elbing (Elbląg) in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. He studied at the Gymnasium in Brieg (Brzeg), at the Albertina, and briefly at the University of Cambridge.

Hartlib, taking refuge from the Thirty Years War that ravaged large parts of Germany, relocated to England with the Scottish preacher John Dury in 1628. He had to flee religious persecution in his homeland, and the Parliament of England invited him as a man of great Protestant vision before the English Civil War broke out in 1642.

Hartlib put much effort into getting Comenius of the Protestant Moravian Brethren to visit England. His letters, in German and English, have been the subject of close modern scholarship.

Hartlib unsuccessfully established a school in Chichester and then lived in London. He was a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard and also in Duke's Place next to the 17th century synagogue in Beavis Marks. He became one of the best-connected intellectual figures of the Commonwealth era, and was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed-machines and siege engines. In 1655 he wrote 'The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees' in which Christopher Wren had designed and built a glass enclosed bee-hive. The 'Hartlib circle' of contacts and correspondents was one of the foundations of the Royal Society of London which was established a generation later, in 1660. Hartlib died in poverty probably because he was associated with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth and so was sidelined after Charles II's Restoration.

Activities

Hartlib is often described as an "intelligencer". His main aim in life was to further knowledge and so he kept in touch with a vast array of contacts, from high philosophers to gentleman farmers. He maintained a voluminous correspondence and much of this has survived; it is housed in a special Hartlib collection at the University of Sheffield in England. Hartlib's two closest correspondents were Dury and Comenius. The latter had the concept of a "tree of knowledge", continuously branching out and growing. The 17th century was a time when knowledge was not categorised or standardised by global conventions, and libraries were mostly private. Hence, men like Hartlib and Comenius wanted to make the spread of knowledge easier and to facilitate this. Hartlib and his friends were deeply religious, and saw their work as the work of God. They wanted to enlighten and educate and to thus, improve society.

One of Hartlib's pet projects was the "Office of Addresses" — he envisaged an office in every town where somebody might go to find things out. For example, at a practical level, Hartlib thought people could advertise job vacancies there — and prospective employees would be able to find work. At a more studious level, Hartlib wanted academics to pool their knowledge so that the Office could act as a living and growing form of encyclopedia, in which people could keep adding new information.

Hartlib valued useful knowledge that could increase crop yields, cure disease and so on. To this end, He was very open-minded. He often tested the ideas and theories of his correspondents. For his own trouble with kidney stones he took to drinking diluted sulphuric acid — a cure that may have in fact been the death of him. He was interested in theories and practices that modern science would laugh at — for example, sympathetic medicine. This involved using things in nature that bear a resemblance to the ailment. Hence, a sympathetic cure might be to take a kidney bean (looks like a kidney) and to bury it in the dead of night on the full moon.

One of Hartlib's great interests was agriculture. He worked to spread Dutch farming practices in England, such as using nitrogenous crops like cabbage to replenish the soil with nitrogen, to increase the yield of next season's crop. Hartlib wrote to many ordinary landowners, as well as to leading academics, in his quest for knowledge.

The work of Paracelsus, a religious zealot who made bold claims for his science, was also one of the inspirations to Hartlib and early chemistry.

Work

*Hartlib's correspondence and notes, over 25,000 pages, were published in 1995 on CD.

Literature

* H. M. Knox: William Petty's Advice to Samuel Hartlib, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May, 1953), pp. 131-142

External links

* [http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/hartlib/index.asp?C=hartlib Samuel Hartlib] at The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple: Biblical metaphors of knowledge in early modern Europe. Published by the Museum of the History of Science at at the University of Oxford.