@jonty In his book ‘At Home’ Bill Bryson discusses how lots of interesting endeavours and discoveries came from clergymen, largely because they were a well-educated, wealthy group of people with lots of free time. They only needed to do one sermon a week and many of them just bought a book of sermons, so didn’t need to prepare any of their own. (I couldn’t help but think about basic income during this section of his book!)

@jonty Of note: Thomas Bayes (of Bayes’ theorem), Edmund Cartwright (inventor of the power loom), George Garrett (inventor of the submarine), Jack Russel (breeding small dogs), Thomas Malthus (population theory), William Buckland (first scientific description of dinosaurs), Octavius Pickard-Cambridge (spider expert), William Shepherd (wrote a history of dirty jokes), John Mackenzie Bacon (pioneering balloonist and aerial photographer) John Michell (devised a method to weigh the Earth)