Samuel Hartlib

Samuel Hartlib was a seventeenth-century polymath of German-Polish origin, born in Elbing in Royal Prussia, who settled in England in 1628 and lived there until his death in 1662. He is remembered less for a system of his own than as a tireless organiser of knowledge: the "Great Intelligencer of Europe" kept up a vast correspondence with scholars, physicians, farmers and statesmen, circulated their inventions and treatises, and tried to secure funding for a research institute on the model of the Salomon's House that Francis Bacon imagined in the New Atlantis. He championed the educational ideas of Jan Comenius and John Dury, encouraged John Milton to publish his thoughts on education, and promoted agriculture, medicine and religious toleration. His circle is counted among the foundations of the Royal Society, and his surviving papers are kept at the University of Sheffield.