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Brewster was instrumental in forming the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which was his attempt to establish an alternative body that would promote science as a career and act as a rival organisation to the Royal Society and Royal Institution. In his 1830 article in the Quarterly Review, which reviewed Charles Babbage’s book on the decline of science (see above), he first proposed the formation of the BAAS. He was convinced government alone could properly patronize science. The article carried cavalier remarks about English universities and roused the wrath of both William Whewell and George Airy, eminent scientists at Cambridge. Shortly afterwards, the BAAS was invaded by scientists and mathematicians from Trinity College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin who began to expound Fresnel’s wave theory of light, but without any references to dioptric lenses for lighthouses. To Brewster, the Cambridge invasion showed that the BAAS would not be the reforming institution he envisaged. But at the second annual meeting of the BAAS in Oxford Brewster was the central figure. He produced his paper on optics and along with three other religious dissenters (Faraday, Robert Brown and John Dalton), he received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree, which was highly unusual. Occurring just after the Third Reform Bill had become law, this was a political gesture. As a loyal Whig, Brewster was knighted in 1831, a rare honour for a scientist let alone a dissenting one. But in 1835, to use Morrell’s words, he ‘vented his spleen’ in the Edinburgh Review, about the invasion of the BAAS by the Cambridge mathematics coterie, an act of apparent disloyalty to his fellow members that provoked the Irish astronomer and physicist Thomas Romney Robinson to refer publicly at the 1835 BAAS meeting to Brewster as one who wielded ‘the concealed dagger of a lurking assassin’.

The BAAS accepted the wave theory against Brewster’s advice. This group was led by Herschel and Airy. They compared it to Newton’s theory of gravitation and Brewster, a fan of Newton, could not accept this. At the 1842 meeting he declared publicly and ominously that learned societies – meaning the Royal Society and the Association – were subject to the ‘incubus of the undulatory theory’ thus denigrating the Cambridge set. In G.N. Cantor’s review of Brewster’s theories of light, contributed at the 1981 Brewster symposium, he points out that Brewster held on to Newton’s projectile theory of light long after others accepted the wave theory. By the early 1840s, he had become an embittered, lonely outcast from British optics, as well as a lone voice in the lighthouse-lens wilderness:

The battle lines dividing him from his opponents were not merely concerned with the wave theory of light but spread to many other areas. He was a Scot, his opponents principally English; there was a generation gap between them; he was an experimentalist, they were mathematically trained theoreticians; he failed to gain a chair, whereas many had already gained disciples; he was an Evangelical, they were mostly broad churchmen.

This profile of Brewster makes his difficulties in persuading the scientific establishment and lighthouse authorities in Britain to adopt dioptric lenses, related in the next chapter, more understandable. It also illustrates how science in Britain sat aloof from business and government while in France the three enjoyed a close relationship, leading among other things to France taking the lead in the application of optical science to lighthouses.