Among the members of the Lunar society – a group of scientists and industrialists based in the Midlands - was Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who lived in Lichfield. The Wedgwood family were thus among his acquaintances, and Wedgwood’s daughter married Erasmus Darwin’s son; they were to be the parents of Charles Darwin, the 19^th-century theorist of ‘evolution’.

He worked on copying machines of all sorts including silhouette-making – silhouettes were seen as images of the personality, of scientific interest; he invented a silhouette-making apparatus - a box in which the sitter sat, with a lamp on one side and a sheet of paper in the window on the other side, on which the silhouette of the sitter was reflected as a shadow cast by the lamp, whose outlines the draughtsman could then trace. His major investigations were in botany – photosynthesis, the evolution of plants – and in mechanics: he invented a copying machine, a concern of his contemporaries.

House of Erasmus Darwin in Lichfield

The house of Erasmus Darwin in Lichfield: front.
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House of Erasmus Darwin in Lichfield

The house of Erasmus Darwin in Lichfield: backgarden with herbs.
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