For the social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, measurement, quantification and calculation were of particular social and political significance. Karl Marx, in Capital, based his critique of classical political economy on an analysis of the quantification of labour as a commodity. Max Weber, in Economy and Society, emphasized the importance of rational calculation in the conduct of modern bureaucratic organizations. And in his major work, The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel highlighted what he called ‘the calculating character of modern times'.

The paper reports new findings about Galileo's experiments with pendulums and discusses their significance in the context of Galileo's writings. The methodology is based on a phenomenological approach to Galileo's experiments, supported by computer modelling and close analysis of extant textual evidence. This methodology has allowed the author to shed light on some puzzles that Galileo's experiments have created for scholars.

In this article, I argue that the French philosopher René Descartes was far more involved in the study of plants than has been generally recognized. We know that he did not include a botanical section in his natural philosophy, and sometimes he differentiated between plants and living bodies. His position was, moreover, characterized by a methodological rejection of the catalogues of plants. However, this paper reveals a significant trend in Descartes's naturalistic pursuits, starting from the end of 1637, whereby he became increasingly interested in plants. I explore this shift by examining both Descartes's correspondence and several notes contained in the Excerpta anatomica. Grounded in direct observations, Descartes's work on vegetation provides a modest, though not unimportant, contribution to a natural-philosophical approach to the vegetal realm. This had a direct bearing on his lifelong ambition to explain the nature of living bodies and also fuelled the emergence of botany as a modern science.

It was well said by Clerk Maxwell: ‘For the sake of persons of different types of mind scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolical expression.’

From N. V. Sidgwick's Presidential Address to the Chemical Society, London, 1937

During the years between 1930 and 1950, chemistry underwent a transformation that affected both research and education. New subdisciplines like chemical physics and physical organic chemistry emerged, encouraging an influx of ideas and experimental techniques from physics. X-ray crystallography and other spectroscopic methods became indispensable for determining structures of atoms, molecules and crystals; such chemical concepts as valence and bond were refined within a new explanatory framework based on principles of physics; and the study of reaction mechanisms and rates became closely intertwined with that of structures and properties of chemical compounds. In conjunction with these changes, introductory chemical textbooks began to shift their emphasis from thermodynamic equations and solution theories to three-dimensional arrangements of atoms in molecules and types of chemical bonds. There is no doubt that the most important impetus behind this transformation was the development of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s, and the most prominent among those who applied it to chemistry was Linus Pauling. And in Pauling's view, ‘the principal contribution of quantum mechanics to chemistry’ was the concept of resonance.

The entry of resonance into chemistry, or the reception of the theory of resonance in the chemical community, has drawn considerable attention from historians of science. In particular, they have noted Pauling's flamboyant yet effective style of exposition, which became a factor in the early popularity of the resonance theory in comparison to the molecular orbital theory, another way of applying quantum mechanics to chemical problems. To be sure, the non-mathematical presentation of the resonance theory by Pauling and his collaborator, George Wheland, helped to facilitate the reception; but this presentation was vulnerable to the confusion that arose among chemists owing to the similarity between resonance and tautomerism, or between foreign and indigenous concepts. The reception occurred at the expense of serious misunderstandings about resonance. This paper investigates the ways in which Pauling and Wheland taught, and taught about, the theory of resonance, especially their ways of coping with the difficulties of translating a quantum-mechanical concept into chemical language. Their different strategies for teaching resonance theory deserve a thorough examination, not only because the strategies had to do with their solutions of the philosophical question whether resonance is a real phenomenon or not, and whether the theory of resonance is a chemical theory or a mathematical method of approximation, but also because this examination will illuminate the role of chemical translators in the transmission of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries.

The atomic theory of Dalton implied that there were more than 30 different kinds of matter, the chemical elements. William Prout (1815) was the first of a long line of distinguished speculators who sought to show, by argument and experiment, that this diversity overlay a more fundamental unity. Contrary to a common opinion, this was not an eccentric and unpopular movement, but involved many of the great names of nineteenth-century chemistry; and some of their speculations have proved to be very near the mark. It may be that this strong current of well-informed speculation enabled the discoveries of cathode rays and of radioactivity (which provided the first real evidence of the complexity of the atom) to be integrated into the body of science with such remarkable rapidity.

This paper is based on my M.Sc. dissertation: ‘The Origins of Numerical Taxonomy’ 1985, submitted to the University of Leicester during the tenure of a D.E.S. State Studentship. For this work I drew extensively on interviews with Professors A. J. Cain, G. A. Harrison, R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath. I am very grateful to them for their time, interest and encouragement. Without the indefatigable assistance of Jon Harwood, this paper would never have been finished.

The publication of L. Pearce Williams's definitive biography of Faraday has led to lively discussion of the influence of Naturphilosophie on Davy and Faraday, and of the role played by Bosco vichean atomism in their scientific development. In a recent article J. Brookes Spencer argued that Boscovich's force law, involving interaction between point atoms independent of surrounding particles, was only compatible with Faraday's view of gravity and not with his views on other forces. This would of course contradict the notion of unity which is absolutely fundamental to Boscovich's Theoria.

In this paper I want to examine in some detail one eighteenth-century attempt to restructure the foundations of mechanics, that of Leonhard Euler. It is now generally recognized that the idea, due to Mach, that all that happened in the eighteenth century was the elaboration of a deductive and mathematical mechanics on the basis of Newton's Laws is misleading at best. Newton's Principia needed much more than a reformulation in analytic terms if it was to provide the basis for the comprehensive mechanics that was developed in the eighteenth century. Book II of the Principia, in particular, where the problem of the resistance offered to the motion of a finite body by a fluid medium was raised, was generally (and rightly) thought to be in large part mistaken and confused. There were also a number of areas crucial to the unification of mechanics which Newton did not deal with at all in the Principia: particularly the dynamics of rigid, flexible and elastic bodies, and the dynamics of several bodies with mutual interactions. Although a start had been made on some of these topics in the seventeenth century (notably by Galileo, Beeckman, Mersenne, Huygens, Pardies, Hooke, and Leibniz), it was only in the eighteenth century that they were subjected to detailed examination, and Euler's contribution to the development of these topics, and hence to the unification of mechanics, was immense.

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, urban life underwent increasingly rapid change as towns outgrew their limits, industries polluted their skies and rivers, and a host of new types of building appeared to cater for new needs and activities. Not only did towns look different, but, as Thomas Markus has said, ‘they also ‘felt’ different in the organization of the spaces they contained.’ Buildings which housed scientific activities—the learned societies, literary and philosophical societies, professional institutes, mechanics institutes, and by the end of the century the new civic universities—were one manifestation of this different ‘feeling’. These were quite new types of building, and we should therefore expect them to give us valuable information about the development of science, about ‘images’ of science and the meaning of those images, as well as the actual practice of science.

BBC Television's Horizon series, fifty years old on 2 May 2014, despite its significance to the history of the public culture of science, has been little studied. This microhistorical account follows the gestation and early years of the programme, demonstrating how it established a social and cultural account of science. This was a result of televisual factors, notably the determination to follow the format of the successful arts television programme Monitor. It illuminates how the processes of television production, with a handful of key participants – Aubrey Singer, Gerald Leach, Philip Daly, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Ramsay Short, Michael Peacock and Robert Reid – established the format of the programme. This occurred over seventeen months of prior preparation followed by three troubled years of seeking to establish a stable form. This was finally achieved in 1967 when the programme adopted a film documentary approach after extended attempts at making it as a studio-based magazine programme. The story has implications for understanding the social accounts of science that were circulating in the key decade of the 1960s.

Traditional historiography of science has constructed secrecy in opposition to openness. In the first part of the paper, I will challenge this opposition. Openness and secrecy are often interlocked, impossible to take apart, and they might even reinforce each other. They should be understood as positive (instead of privative) categories that do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. In the second part of this paper, I call for a historicization of the concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘secrecy’. Focusing on the early modern period, I briefly introduce three kinds of secrecy that are difficult to analyse with a simple oppositional understanding of openness and secrecy. In particular, I focus on secrecy in relation to esoteric traditions, theatricality and allegory.

With the coming of the French Revolution in 1789 and its attack on monarchy, the landed aristocracy, the religious establishment and religion itself, and especially with the coming of the sans culottes and the First French Republic and its ‘Terror’ in 1793–94, fear of revolution swept the British establishment. Sensing revolution everywhere, successive Tory governments, rooted in the alliance of the Church of England, the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, practised a consistent and harsh policy of repression. Neither the fear nor the repression eased with the arrival of, or indeed, with the departure of, Napoleon who, as Emperor from 1804 to 1815, seemed determined to conquer Britain by means of revolutionary propaganda, economic blockade and/or military invasion.

Until the first quarter of the seventeenth century there was a great deal of agreement about the nature of mathematical practice. Mathematicians, as well as their patrons and clients, viewed all possible aspects of their work, both theoretical and practical, as being included within their discipline. Although the mathematical sciences were a fairly recent foreign import to England, which can barely be traced back beyond the mid-sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a large and growing body of practitioners with a unified view of their subject's identity. Divisions began to appear, however, and they were often framed in terms of the proper mixture of theory and practice in mathematical education.

One early sign of the emergence of this tension is the kind of accusation made in the priority dispute between William Oughtred and Richard Delamain taking place around 1632. Their bitter conflict began over who first invented the Horizontal Quadrant, a form of sundial, and the Circles of Proportion, a logarithmic calculating device that can be considered a precursor of the slide rule, and ended in a dispute over what constituted proper mathematical practice. Oughtred accused Delamain of making his students ‘only doers of tricks, and as it were Juglers’ by teaching them the use of instruments without any theoretical foundation. Instruments, Oughtred claimed, could only be used with understanding by students who had a proper theoretical foundation. He advocated postponing their use until after the theoretical foundations of a subject had been thoroughly mastered. Delamain, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to teach practical instrumental operations without insisting upon a theoretical grounding. This paper will use the dispute between Oughtred and Delamain to investigate the breakdown of consensus over internal mathematical boundaries, the rhetoric and strategies involved in attempts to gain authority by mathematical practitioners, and the extent to which their roles were negotiated, both with other practitioners, and with their patrons and students.

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

It has long been recognized that unnecessary cruelty to animals was held to be morally wrong by many classical moralists and medieval scholastics, and was echoed repeatedly in the early-modern period, though not necessarily reflecting any particular concern for animals, but rather to indicate the supposed brutalizing effects on the human character. The prevalence of the more radical view that cruelty to animals was wrong regardless of human consequences has only been dealt with comparatively recently, in the pioneering work of Keith Thomas with regard to early-modern England. Thomas suggested that a remarkably constant and coherent argument underpinned the bulk of pamphleteering and preaching against animal cruelty in the period; man was entitled to domesticate animals and kill them for food and clothing but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. While wild animals could be killed for food or in self-defence, and game and vermin could be hunted, it was deemed wrong to kill only for pleasure. While this position could be found among Protestants of many different persuasions, the particular focus of successive campaigners changed over time. Preceding the Civil War the attack was concentrated on cock-fighting, bear-baiting and the ill-treatment of domestic animals; in the later seventeenth century it broadened out to include the caging of wild birds, brutal methods of slaughter, hare-hunting and vivisection.

There is no evidence to suggest that even as late as January 1672, when Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, anyone (except those unknown few who had in the previous years attended his Lucasian lectures at Cambridge) had any inkling of his new theory of colours. His name exploded on the scientific scene as the inventor and constructor of a new kind of telescope—what later became known as the reflector (which was somewhat misleading compared with its name during the seventeenth century: the catadioptrical telescope). Had the erudition of the London virtuosi been a little broader, they would have known that in fact he was not the inventor of the telescope, even though the precise form he gave it was his. Not only was the idea a hundred years old, during which period it was repeatedly suggested by various writers, but also Newton himself took the idea straight from the most recent of these suggestions, namely that included in James Gregory's Optica promota of 1663. The situation becomes even more ironic when we realize that the new instrument was admired for wrong reasons and on merits that were far from Newton's intentions. Nevertheless, admired it was, and there was a good reason for this: Newton's instrument was in fact the first reflector actually to be constructed and, moreover, for a few weeks (before its mirror became tarnished) it performed quite well. Several astonomers became interested because of the high magnifying power relative to its dimensions (about 7 inches long, with a magnification of 38).

This essay analyses discussions of national versus international or transnational science, with an emphasis on the journal Osiris from 1986 to 2009, including the concepts of national science, national styles and characters in science, scientific internationalism, transfer of science and scientists from one nation to another, and comparison of different national examples. The author argues that perceiving science as a ‘national’ activity has not only been persistent, it is also perhaps inevitable. This special issue on transnational histories of science raises the question of what is gained and lost by such an approach. First of all, what is the distinction between ‘transnational’ and ‘international’? The dictionary defines the latter as something existing, occurring, or carried on between two nations, while the former extends or operates across national boundaries. Thus ‘international’ implies some sort of commerce. In contrast, transnational is a loosely defined term.

The most reliable source for a reconstruction of Galileo's progress toward a science of motion is the series of undated fragmentary notes on that subject preserved in Codex A of the Galilean manuscripts at Florence. A gathering of such fragments was published by Favaro in the National Edition of Galileo's works, following the Discorsi. The more sophisticated fragments are clearly associated with the composition of that work, and show a definite and consistent understanding of acceleration. Eliminating those, it will be found that the earlier notes fall into recognizable groups. First, there are some that refer to “moment of gravity”, or to the impetus of a body along a line of descent, and are associated with the discussion of inclined planes in De motu. Second, some refer to descent along arcs and chords of circles, associated with Galileo's letter of 29 November 1602 to Guido Ubaldo. These first two groups of notes do not explicitly refer to accelerated motion, and should not be assumed to do so implicity, where such an assumption can be avoided.

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained.