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Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Graeme Gooday
Graeme Gooday
Affiliation:
Unit for the History of Science, Physics Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR, U.K.
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Extract

The appearance and proliferation of physics laboratories in the academic institutions of Britain between 1865 and 1885 is an established feature of Victorian science. However, neither of the two existing modern accounts of this development have adequately documented the predominant function of these early physics laboratories as centres for the teaching of physics, characteristically stressing instead the exceptional cases of the research laboratories at Glasgow and Cambridge. Hence these accounts have attempted to explain, somewhat misleadingly, the genesis of these laboratories purely by reference to the stimuli of professionalized research programmes, instead of considering the contemporary growth in demand for the professional laboratory teaching of physics. In failing to consider such physics laboratories in terms of the political economy of British education, these accounts have also failed a fortiori to correlate this development with the contemporaneous extension of laboratory teaching methods to other scientific disciplines, a movement dubbed as a laboratory ‘revolution’ by later nineteenth-century commentators.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 25 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1990

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References

Early drafts of this paper were read at the University of Kent in November 1987, and at the University of Glasgow in September 1988. In a revised form it was jointly awarded the ‘Singer Prize’ by the British Society for the History of Science in January 1989. For this extended version of the Singer Prize essay I am grateful to Crosbie Smith, Alex Dolby, Andrew Warwick and John Brooke for their valuable advice and criticisms, and to Simon Schaffer and Sophie Forgan for the inspiration provided by their work. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the SERC/ESRC.

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