Reactions to Paine have coloured the understanding and appreciation of him, and he has been recognised as primarily a political or religious figure, but there is an important feature of his work which has long been neglected, his interest in science.
The impressions we have of fighting in the American War of Independence are largely gathered from romanticised films made in Hollywood. However, the times of Thomas Paine are more remote and perspective often focuses more accurately on individuals and events.
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Paine’s fame as a writer on social, political and religious themes plus his controversial activities, has tended to obscure his passionate interest in scientific matters. Paine was perhaps the first person to recognise the critical implications of the growing stream of scientific discoveries.
Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in The Age of Reason he shows he had gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.
Paine’s project was more appreciative of the potentialities of iron than either the Coaibrookdale Iron Bridge, based as it was on principles of wood construction, or Burden’s bridge, which, it was agreed by all observers, was based on the principles of stone construction.
In 1805, Thomas Paine addressed a tract to the Board of Health of the United States entitled “Of the Cause of the Yellow Fever; And the Means of Preventing it” in places not yet effected with it. In 1807, Clio Rickman printed and published this tract in London.
