Situated with the frontage on Beacon St and the rear with access to Cathedral Close in Lichfield, Erasmus Darwin House was the home of the said Mr Darwin from 1758 to 1781.
A distinguished physician by trade (he was invited to become the royal physician but declined), Erasmus had ideas well ahead of his time including evolutionary biology, feminism and the notion of modern cars and aeroplanes. Although they never met, his books hugely influenced his more famous grandson Charles, who published "On the Origin of the Species by means of Natural Selection" in 1859.
He came up with an improved design for steering carriages and, it seems, may have been the source of a number of ideas upon which fellow members of The Lunar Society progressed patents and inventions. A founder member of the Society that was described as "a dining club and informal learned society of prominent industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals", it also included Josiah Wedgwood (whose eldest daughter Suzannah married Erasmus's son Robert - their grandson through this marriage was Charles), Matthew Bolton, James Watt and Joseph Priestley to name a few.
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