As a member of the last generation of Brownie Girl Guides to earn a Thrift badge (discontinued in 2003), I was raised to associate thrift with a particularly gendered form of postwar make do and mend homemaking. To gain the small triangular Thrift badge, embroidered with a piggy bank, for my Brownie uniform, I had to darn a sock, make something out of secondhand material, and have my mother confirm that I kept my uniform clean and tidy. Simon Werrett's monograph Thrifty Science makes clear that the skills of keeping one's belongings neat and in good repair, and making something new out of old material, should not be restricted to early twentieth-century female domestic labor. Rather, he shows through a wide range of evidence drawn from the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, manuscript receipt books, diaries, wills, and letters, that thrift was considered an ideal way of interacting with the early modern material world. Advice books on household economy placed thrift as the Aristotelian mean between extravagance and miserliness, suggesting that being able to make use of one's material goods by taking care of possessions and choosing objects that could be put to multiple purposes was a skill valued by men and women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. To be thrifty was to thrive.

Werrett focuses on the practice of thrift by early modern scientific experimenters, who often worked from home and used household pipkins, linen cloths, and tobacco pipes for their experiments, taking notes on scrap paper and even old playing cards while working in their bedchambers or up on the roof. We hear how Benjamin Franklin (unsuccessfully) asked his family to catch lightning in electrical phials using rods attached to the side of the house, and learn how he improvised a kite to catch it from the sky with hemp twine, a silk handkerchief, and a door key. Thrift, Werrett is clear to point out, did not entail simple frugality, but rather the ingenious or inventive use of objects to hand, combined with purpose-built tools when necessary. Robert Symmer's two-fluid theory of electricity was inspired by witnessing his silk stockings crackle and spark when he removed them in a dark room, and he experimented with how they were attracted to his wallpaper and looking glass. Fine silk stockings, when put to use in an electrical experiment, could be just as thrifty as my darned Girl Guide sock.

Specialized purpose-built equipment could be used thriftily, through careful repair, adaptation, and sharing. Werrett shows how instruments were often bequeathed to collaborators and friends, or sold through secondhand dealers and auctions. By the nineteenth century, auctions were an important means to circulate natural-philosophical goods, and contributed to the dismantling of aristocratic science as private collections were shown and then dispersed into the emerging public sphere. The book ends with a chapter on the development of what Werrett terms economic science—that is, the shift of experimental science out of the home with its values of thrifty balance, and into the national sphere of industrial progress and profit, requiring dedicated teaching laboratories and specialized scientific equipment. Werrett's account is nuanced, and he uses language carefully, teasing out early modern concepts of shift, frugality, and refuse from more modern vocabularies of reuse, zero waste, and recycling. Thrifty Science is a timely reminder that science does not have to be purpose-built, expensive, and environmentally unsustainable.

Of evident import for historians of science, Thrifty Science should also be read by social, cultural, and economic historians, and particularly those who work on material culture, for what it tells us about the culture of making use of things. While the book does draw on surviving objects and depictions of early modern experimenters, evidence of thrifty practices and their cultural associations could be further teased out through case studies of instruments, tools, and visual accounts of early modern science. Cornelis Bega's compelling 1663 painting of an alchemist, used as the book's jacket image, is not examined by Werrett, but its depiction of a man in tattered clothing hunched over an alembic and surrounded by broken pots and curled papers suggests that there was a fine line between thrifty ingenuity and cluttered folly. By prompting such investigations, Werrett's clear and compelling account will then be made even more useful through its own thrifty application by scholars of visual and material culture.