John Robison, the son of John Robison, a Glasgow merchant, was born in Boghall, Baldernock, Stirlingshire (now East Dunbartonshire) and attended Glasgow Grammar School and the University of Glasgow (MA 1756).

After a brief stay in London in 1758, Robison had joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman, and accompanied Thomas Wolfe on his expedition to Quebec and Portugal (1756-62), where his mathematical skills were employed in navigation and surveying.

Returning to England in 1762, he had joined the Board of Longitude—a team of scientists who had tested John Harrison’s marine chronometer on a voyage to Jamaica.

On his return, he had settled in Glasgow engaging in the practical science of James Watt and Joseph Black in opposition to the systematic continental European chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier and its adherents such as Joseph Priestly.

In 1766, he had succeeded Black as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow.

In 1769, he announced that balls with like electrical charges repel each other with a force that varies as the inverse-squared of the distance between them, anticipating Coulomb's law of 1785.

In 1770, he had traveled to Saint Petersburg as the Secretary of Admiral Charles Knowles, where he taught mathematics to the cadets at the Naval Academy at Cronstadt, obtaining a double salary and the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Returned to Scotland in 1773, Robison had taken up the post of Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, lecturing on mechanics, hydrostatics, astronomy, optics, electricity and magnetism.

His conception of mechanical philosophy has become influential in nineteenth-century British physics.

His name appears in the 1776 "Minute Book of The Poker Club", a crucible of the Scottish Enlightenment.

In 1783, he had become General Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1797 his articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica give a good account of the scientific, mathematical and technological knowledge of the day.

He has also prepared for publication (which will occur in 1799) the chemical lectures of his friend and mentor, Joseph Black.

Robison had worked with James Watt on an early steam car, but this project had come to nothing and has no direct connection to Watt's later improvement of the Newcomen steam engine.

He, along with Joseph Black and others, give evidence about Watt's originality and their own lack of connection to his key idea of the Separate Condenser.

Robison does, however invent the siren some time before 1799, though it is Charles Cagniard de la Tour who will name it after producing an improved model.

Robison’s sirens are used as musical instruments; specifically, they power some of the pipes in an organ.

Robison’s siren consists of a stopcock that opens and closes a pneumatic tube.

The stopcock is apparently driven by the rotation of a wheel.

Towards the end of his life, Robison has become an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, publishing Proofs of a Conspiracy ... in 1797, alleging clandestine intrigue by the Illuminati and Freemasons (the work's full title is Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies).

The secret agent monk, Alexander Horn, has provided much of the material for Robison's allegations.

Robison describes eighty-four German Masonic lodges and states that the outlawed Illuminati still operate covertly.

French priest Abbé Barruel independently develops similar views that the Illuminati had infiltrated Continental Freemasonry, leading to the excesses of the French Revolution.

The Reverend G. W. Snyder sends Robison's book to George Washington in 1798 for his thoughts on the subject, in which he replies to him in his Letter to the Reverend G. W. Snyder (24 October 1798).

Modern conspiracy theorists like Nesta Webster and William Guy Carr believe that Robison's book described what the Illuminati may have started was the template for the subversion of otherwise benign organizations by radical groups through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Spiritual Counterfeits Project editor Tal Brooke has compared the views of Proofs of a Conspiracy with those found in Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope (Macmillan, 1966).

Brooke suggests that the New World Order, which Robison believed Adam Weishaupt (founder of the Illuminati) had in part accomplished through the infiltration of Freemasonry, will now be completed by those holding sway over the international banking system (e.g., by means of the Rothschilds' banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank).

Augustin Barruel, born at Villeneuve de Berg (Ardèche), had entered the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, in 1756 and taught grammar at Toulouse in 1762.

The storm against the Jesuits in France had driven him from his country and he was occupied in college work in Moravia and Bohemia until the suppression of the order in 1773.

He had then returned to France and his first literary work had appeared in 1774: Ode sur le glorieux avenement de Louis Auguste au trone.

That same year he became a collaborator of the Année littéraire, edited by Élie Catherine Fréron.

His first important work was Les Helveiennes, ou Lettres Provinciales philosophiques, published in 1781.

National affairs in France were meanwhile growing more and more turbulent as Barruel had continued his literary activity, which from this point forward is concerned especially with public questions.

From 1788 to 1792, he had edited the famous Journal Ecclesiastique founded by Joseph Dinouart in 1760.

In this periodical was published Barruel's La Conduite du. S. Siège envers la France, a vigorous defense of Pope Pius VI.

He had likewise written a number of pamphlets against the civil oath demanded from ecclesiastics and against the new civil constitution during 1790 and 1791.

He had afterward gathered into one Collection Ecclésiastique all of the works relative to the clergy and civil constitution.

The storm of the French Revolution had in the meantime forced Barruel to seek refuge in England, where he became almoner to the refugee Louis Francis II of Bourbon, Prince of Conti.

Here, in 1793, he had written the Histoire du Clergé pendant la Revolution Française, dedicating the work to the English nation in recognition of the hospitality that it had showed toward the unfortunate French ecclesiastics.

It has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and English.

The English version, which has gone through through several editions, has done much to strengthen the British nation in its opposition to French revolutionary principles.

While in London, Barruel had published a work in English, A Dissertation on Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in the Catholic Church, but none of his works have attracted so much attention as his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, written and published in French in 1797-78.

In the book, Barruel claims that the French Revolution is the result of a deliberate conspiracy or plot to overthrow the throne, altar and aristocratic society in Europe.

The plot was allegedly hatched by a coalition of philosophes, Freemasons, and the Order of the Illuminati.

The conspirators had created a system that has been inherited by the Jacobins, who had operated it to its greatest potential.

The Memoirs purports to expose the Revolution as the culmination of a long history of subversion.

Barruel is not the first to make these charges but he is the first to present them in a fully developed historical context and his evidence is on a quite unprecedented scale.

Barruel has written each of the first three volumes of the book as separate discussions of those who had contributed to the conspiracy.

The fourth volume is an attempt to unite them all in a description of the Jacobins in the French Revolution.

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is representative of the criticism of the Enlightenment that spreads throughout Europe during the Revolutionary period.

His basic idea is that of a conspiracy with the aim of overthrowing Christianity—or more to the point, any and all forms of political and social organization based on conformity to the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

It inspires John Robison, who has been working independently on his own conspiracy theory, to extend his book Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe and include several quotations from Barruel.

Barruel’s book concludes, like Robinson, that when the Illuminati was driven underground, it had resurfaced as an organization called the German Union, allegedly a principal in the fomenting of the 1789 French Revolution.

His version of the revolution, which blames specific men and points out a single cause, has been rejected by the majority of scholars, as the concept of a "master conspiracy" lies on the fringes of historical analysis.