Commerce, Credit, and Transaction: The Rhetorical Origins of Big Science

Part of a larger project on the languages of ‘big science’ from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, this chapter considers the earliest form of the large-array model of scientific collaboration and the gathering of data. The term ‘big science’, coined during the Cold War, is a concept of far earlier origin, in the networking and language of Henry Oldenburg (1618–1677), the first Corresponding Secretary of the Royal Society and largely responsible for the emergence of a collaborative, transnational ethos in scientific behaviour. I discuss Oldenburg’s rhetorical modes, often framed in the language of commercial transaction, in his decade and a half shepherding his colleagues and correspondents, gatekeeping the precincts of Baconian enquiry, and editing both the Philosophical Transactions and the epistolary manners of his more fractious associates.