The first of these was Josiah Wedgwood, who became a close friend of Darwin in 1765 while campaigning for the building of the Trent and Mersey Canal and subsequently closely modelled his large new pottery factory at Etruria, Staffordshire on Boulton's Soho Manufactory. Another new recruit, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, met Darwin, Small and Boulton in 1766 through a shared interest in carriage design, and he in turn introduced his friend and fellow Rousseau-admirer Thomas Day, with whom he had studied at Corpus Christi, Oxford. In 1767 James Keir visited Darwin in Lichfield, where he was introduced to Boulton, Small, Wedgwood and Whitehurst and subsequently decided to move to Birmingham.