David Robinson on the other genius Darwin

LAST year, what with the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species and the 200th anniversary of its author's birth, it was impossible to visit a British bookshop without stumbling across a new book about Charles Darwin.

Perhaps it's now time to reconsider the claims made for another truly great British scientist – his grandfather.

Physicist Desmond King-Hele's biography of Erasmus Darwin was first published in 1963, but it remains an engrossing read. And the claims he makes for his subject are impressive enough.

Not only did he grasp the basics of evolution long before his grandson but he was probably the first person to work out how clouds form and to discover the principles of photosynthesis and artesian wells. As an inventor, he built an effective copying machine, a speaking machine (admittedly, the details have been lost) and the steering technique used in modern cars. He also imagined aeroplanes, steam turbines, cataract surgery, rocket motors, submarines, weather maps, and hydrogen-engined cars.

As a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, he was part of the intellectual powerhouse behind the Industrial Revolution. But it wasn't just the sunrise industries of the 18th century that occupied Darwin's mind.

It was the world around him. Because he wanted to know where the wind came from and why it changed, at his home in Lichfield he installed a weather vane that ran all the way down from the roof to his living room. And as the craze for botany swept across 1770s Britain, he built a botanic garden and translated Linnaeus's great work of classification from the Latin, coining words like "stamens" and "pistils" in the process.

On top of that, he was also the leading English poet of his day. His fame as a poet was short-lived, but even the 1866 History of the English Language gave him an 18-line entry, compared with nine for Shakespeare.

A feminist, opponent of slavery and a free-thinker, Erasmus Darwin is an easy man for the modern age to like, and King-Hele's subsequent edition of his letters only rounds out the portrait more fully. "Edgeworth," he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood about one of their Lunar Society's Irish friends, "has nearly completed a Waggon drawn by fire and a walking table that can carry 40 men."

For once, King-Hele's admirable scholarship doesn't tell us anything more. But wouldn't you like to know?