Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish.

Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician.

Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.

They were all educated at universities though.

Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.

It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.

The article doesn't say much about the role of religion in this matter. Surely what one could study was limited by what was allowed by the church.

The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time.

For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description?

Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution.

Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.

It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world.

I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.

> Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research.

I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.

Isn’t the idea of an aristocratic scientists with a lower class sidekick (actual scientist) doing all the work part of the trope, though? Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure I can come up with any examples. But, I thought that was the whole thing.

One example [1] of a group that was doing stuff outside universities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham

Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.

I think that's also not fully true. The trope is that the rich nobles were swimming in money and in their boredom they just tinkered and did hobby stuff and then this resulted in the discoveries.

But for example Galileo from Wikipedia:

> Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The youngest, Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo), also became a lutenist and composer who added to Galileo's financial burdens for the rest of his life.[22] Michelangelo was unable to contribute his fair share of their father's promised dowries to their brothers-in-law, who later attempted to seek legal remedies for payments due. Michelangelo also occasionally had to borrow funds from Galileo to support his musical endeavours and excursions. These financial burdens may have contributed to Galileo's early desire to develop inventions that would bring him additional income.[23]

Or Kepler:

> His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city. By the time Johannes was born, the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist.

I think the pattern is less that they were so free from concern that they started to research, and more that they worked hard to get funded. And often incidental jobs, like calculating easter and astrology stuff (Kepler in Prague) and to the science as a bonus. Similar to how artists were mostly commissioned (like Leonardo) but also did their own "passion projects".

The typical intellectual was not some duke or baron or huge lord or the son of such. They had to be somewhat stable of course, but that's also true today. Today's professors also don't typically come from abject poverty.

Thanks for elaborating on it, it’s good to learn. The trope though is more about the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and Royal Society era. But yeah they were never actual nobility, just upper-middle class. And indeed during the Renaissance and early modern period it was much more about patronage. A number of Greek philosophers were also wealthy, although others were simply frugal.

Nevertheless, my general point stands in that their research was almost never their job and they needed other means to support themselves, just like artists. And this was true throughout history until the paradigm shift described in OP’s article.

> it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker

Where is this coming from? Nietzsche was a university professor. He did however serve as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War.

You are right, not sure where I misremembered that from.

That’s an impressive off-the-cuff cataloguing - few could do that.