Citizens of London would likely have felt the same way if they learned about Michael Faraday's experiments with electricity which were funded by the Royal Society, given that electricity was considered a party trick at the time. A government which spends public money on scientific exploration is doing its job to guard society against the cost of lost discoveries.
That's not necessarily true; some leaps are so obvious that it was only a matter of time before someone got to them, but there are critical jumps which are not so simple. If Newton hadn't invented Calculus, it's impossible to predict when another soul would have...so it's a damn good thing that he was supported by the Royal Society.
