ONE - Travelling Facts

Summary

Travelling Fact 1

What a clever idea to stick black silhouettes of birds-of-prey on windows to stop small birds flying into the glass! When Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz (Nobel Prize winners for their work on animal behaviour) originally showed that certain species of birds on the ground instinctively take cover in the presence of overhead moving silhouettes of such predators, they had no reason to imagine those window stickers as an outcome. Yet, their facts travelled well enough to prompt owners of glass walls around the world to take their own evasive action by sticking these birds-of-prey shapes on their walls. Years of experience later, according to other facts sent out into the public domain by reputable authorities (such as the Audubon Society), it turns out that those silhouettes don’t work. Stationary “flying” predators do not scare away genuinely flying birds. (Separating the original scientific facts from their experimental context and reversing that situation subverted that instinctual behaviour.) So even while those scientific facts – still suitably qualified – have travelled well in the scientific communities (albeit with debates about how to interpret them), the efficacy of those black silhouettes turns out to be the scientific equivalent of an “urban legend.” The facts travelled far, but not entirely well (Burkhardt, this volume).

Travelling Fact 2

St. Paul’s Cathedral dominates the City of London skyline and epitomises the arrival in England of a new aesthetic style from Italy, and we might reasonably assume that construction methods just travelled alongside the new style. Both the extraordinary construction of the building and the career of its architect, Christopher Wren, are well studied, yet the details of how the technical facts required for its construction travelled to England and from where they came (if indeed they travelled from abroad) remain opaque. So, the historian wonders: Did the details of the construction design come through architectural treatises, or through travelling craftsmen, or through Wren’s own visual inspections of such buildings elsewhere? And how do the clues left by carpenters in roof beams, joists and joints tell stories about the facts of construction itself? Was the roof built and assembled off-site and reassembled on-site like a giant IKEA flat-pack; or was it built in situ? This is the stuff of history, but a history dependent on the study of real stuff to reveal what facts travelled, raising interesting questions about the nature of facts that travel embedded in artefacts and technologies, and just what it means for such facts to travel well. The building stands – but do we yet understand the travelling facts of how it came to do so (Valeriani, this volume)?