Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Born in 1730 in Stoke-on-Trent, Josiah Wedgwood trained with his older brother, partnered with the potter Thomas Whieldon from 1754 to 1759 and treated the workshop like a chemistry lab. A translucent green glaze let him lease the Ivy House works in Burslem, and his wife Sarah’s dowry carried him through costly kiln failures. In 1765 he perfected creamware, thinner, lighter and harder-fired than tin-glazed faience and delftware, and after a tea set for Queen Charlotte he renamed it Queen’s Ware in 1767, winning on freight costs and weight-based import tariffs.

He built the Etruria works, partnered with Thomas Bentley in 1769 to run the London showrooms, and accepted Catherine the Great’s 1774 Frog Service of 944 pieces for about £2,700 to exhibit it publicly. To tame the kiln he invented pyrometric beads and was elected to the Royal Society in 1783. Black basalt, rosso antico and caneware led to jasperware, perfected with barium sulfate over some 3,000 trials and used for a copy of the Portland Vase and the 1786 abolitionist medallion.

• Pearlware followed creamware by 1780 as exports to America boomed.
• A green frog on every piece of the Russian service marked a palace at the Frog Marsh near St. Petersburg.
• Vitrification demanded precise heat: too cold left pots porous, too hot slumped them into lumps.
• A studio in Rome from 1787 to 1794 employed young sculptors to model classical reliefs in wax.
• After his death in 1795 the firm survived war and depression, added bone china, and its archive joined UNESCO’s UK Memory of the World Register.