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Samuel Hartlieb (c. 1600 - 1662), was a polymath - meaning an expert in many subjects. He was interested in science, medicine, agriculture, politics, education, etc. He is better known as Samuel Hartlib in England, where he settled permanently, married and died.

Hartlib set out with the goal "To record all human knowledge and to make it universally available for the education of all mankind".

Life

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

Hartlib relocated to England just before the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642. He had had to flee religious persecution in his homeland, and the English Parliament invited him as a man of great Protestant vision.

He also 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.

He unsuccessfully established a school in Chichester, and then lived in London, as 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 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 the Scottish preacher John Dury and Comenius. Comenius had the concept of a "tree of knowledge", continuously branching out and growing. The seventeenth-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 encyclopaedia, in which people could keep adding new information.

He valued useful knowledge that could increase crop yields, cure disease and so on. To this end, Hartlib 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!

Hartlib was a contemporary of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

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.

External links

• The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple - Biblical metaphors of knowledge in early modern Europe -- Special section on Samuel Hartlib. Published by the Museum of the History of Science at at the University of Oxford

• Articles lacking sources from December 2007
• 1600s births
• 1662 deaths
• Agriculturalists
• English schoolteachers
• English inventors
• English non-fiction writers
• Letter writers
• Alumni of the University of Cambridge
• German-English people
• People from Elbląg
• People from Royal Prussia
• Alumni and faculty of University of Königsberg