New scientific programs were all keen to demonstrate the usefulness of experimental natural philosophy. Yet the public utility of these collective enterprises was far from given. “I overhear,” Thomas Sprat writes, “the whispers, and doubts of many, who demand, what they have done all this while? and what they have produced, that is answerable to these mighty hopes, which endeavor, to make the world conceive of their undertaking?”. Moreover, acquitting the intellectual and practical aims of vast...