By Frank James, Professor of the History of Science and Head of
Collections. It is an oft repeated story that Albemarle Street
was the first one-way street in London because of the crush of
carriages bringing wealthy aristocrats and members of the upper
middle class to hear lectures at the newly founded Royal
Institution during the opening decade of the nineteenth century.
The content of the lectures was not just about science (as we
now construe the term) where the very young Cornish chemist
Humphry Davy reigned supreme, but also literature where Davy's
close friend the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge
lectured on poetry. Furthermore, the Whig wit Sidney Smith,
whose idea of heaven was ‘eating paté de foie gras to the sound
of trumpets' and who viewed ‘Switzerland as an inferior sort of
Scotland', lectured on moral philosophy. The Royal Institution
did not begin keeping records of visitor numbers until the late
1820s, but judging by comments in newspapers, letters and
diaries both Davy and Smith