Abstract
In 1705 Thomas Salmon, a Bedfordshire clergyman, had the distinction of organising a musical performance at a meeting of the Royal
Society: it was intended to support his theories about the mathematics of musical tuning. Although his theories have since sunk without trace, the lengths to which he went to form relationships with musical instrument makers and performers illustrate that even the most abstruse of mathematical theorising could have a vital practical and social dimension. In this talk I will trace what we can reconstruct of the path Salmon walked between theory and practicalities.

¹Dr Benjamin Wardhaugh is a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he studies the social history of early modern mathematics. He is the author of _Music, Experiment and Mathematics in England, 1753–1705_ and is also working on a textbook, _How to Read Historical Mathematics_.