George Greenough (1778–1856) was one of the influential group of early nineteenth-century English geologists who rejected both Hutton's and Werner's attempts to propound all-embracing geological theories, and followed a deliberately empirical approach. He travelled through Scotland in 1805, studying geological phenomena in the light of both the Plutonist and the Neptunist theories, and generally concluded that neither was entirely satisfactory as an explanation of the observable facts. He was also the first to suggest that the ‘Parallel Roads’ of Glen Roy were the successive beach-levels of a former lake: this theory was later attacked by Darwin but ultimately vindicated by Agassiz's glacial theory. The more important geological passages from Greenough's MS. journal of the tour are reproduced and discussed in this paper. They illustrate some of the scientific problems that were involved in accepting either Hutton's or Werner's theory entire.

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man (1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia (1864), and Swinburne's notorious Atalanta in Calydon (1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.

This paper focuses on the defection of nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo from Britain to the USSR in 1950 in an attempt to understand how government and intelligence services assess threats deriving from the unwanted spread of secret scientific information. It questions whether contingent agendas play a role in these assessments, as new evidence suggests that this is exactly what happened in the Pontecorvo case. British diplomatic personnel involved in negotiations with their US counterparts considered playing down the case. Meanwhile, the press decided to play it up, claiming that Pontecorvo was an atom spy. Finally, the British secret services had evidence showing that this was a fabrication, but they did not disclose it. If all these manipulations served various purposes, then they certainly were not aimed at assessing if there was a threat and what this threat really was.

Whereas the academic discipline of the history of science has made enormous strides in half a century, ironically, recognition from without has often been disappointing. Private success has not been matched by public status. The work of the Science Museum in London as one of the few widely accessible windows into the discipline is therefore worth remarking upon here, and more detailed investigations are even now under way. The foundation of the British Society for the History of Science at the Museum, in 1947, symbolized a role that the Museum had already played for decades and plays to this day: the pre-eminent public space of the history of science. This distinctive role has of course been shared by other object-based museums attracting large numbers of visitors in places such as Manchester, Greenwich and Edinburgh as well as in Munich and Washington.

This article argues that the study of astronomical observing instruments, their transportation around the globe and the personal and professional networks created by such exchanges are useful conceptual tools in exploring the role of science in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The shipping of scientific instruments highlights the physical and material connections that bound the empire together. Large, heavy and fragile objects, such as transit circles, were difficult to transport and repair. As such, the logistical difficulties associated with their movement illustrate the limitations of colonial scientific enterprises and their reliance on European centres. The discussion also examines the impact of the circulation of such objects on observatories and astronomers working in southern Africa, India and St Helena by tracing the connections between these places and British scientific institutions, London-based instrument-makers, and staff at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. It explores the ways in which astronomy generally, and the use of observing instruments in particular, relate to broader themes about the applications of science, the development of colonial identities, and the consolidation of empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. In considering these issues, the article illustrates the symbiotic relationship between science and empire in the period, demonstrating the overlap between political and strategic considerations and purely scientific endeavours. Almost paradoxically, as they trained their sights and their telescopes on the heavens, astronomers and observers helped to draw diverse regions of the earth beneath closer together. By tracing the movement of instruments and the arcs of patronage, cooperation and power that these trajectories inscribe, the role of science and scientific objects in forging global links and influencing the dynamics of the nineteenth-century British Empire is brought into greater focus.

The paper examines the reputation of C. S. Sherrington as both eminent physiologist and eminent representative of scientific culture. It describes Sherrington's ‘figurehead’ status. In his career, research and personal manner, he embodied a life of science, not only not in opposition to humanistic values but in fact appearing to be the highest achievement of those values. An analysis of Sherrington's research, of his lectures on Man on His Nature and of his poetry supports this account. The paper uses Sherrington's reputation to describe the values of an establishment group of English-speaking scientists and physicians in the 1930s and 1940s.

This article seeks to illuminate the shifting and unstable configuration of scientific print culture around 1800 through a close focus on William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, generally known as Nicholson's Journal. Viewing Nicholson as a mediator between the two spheres of British commercial journalism and scientific enquiry, I investigate the ways he adapted practices and conventions from the domain of general-readership monthly periodicals for his Journal, forging a virtual community of scientific knowledge exchange in print. However, in pursing this project Nicholson ran up against disreputable associations connected with the politics of journalism and came into conflict with more established models of scientific publication. To illustrate this, I turn to examine in detail the practice of reprinting, a technique of information transmission which the Journal adapted from general periodicals and newspapers, looking at a clash between Nicholson and the Royal Society that exposes disagreements over the appropriate role for journals during this period of reorganization in the scientific world.

This paper sets out to examine the changes which took place in Thomas Young's concepts of the ether between 1799 and 1807. During the earlier part of this period he supposed the ether to consist of mutually repelling subtle particles which are attracted to particles of matter. Hence, he considered that the ether is denser within dense bodies than in rare ones. Furthermore, Young proposed that the ether density does not change abruptly at an interface; instead the denser ether extends beyond the geometrical limit of a body to form an atmosphere around it. As this hypothesis of an atmosphere of dense ether surrounding material bodies will be the central subject of this paper, I shall in future refer to it as the ether distribution hypothesis.

This paper presents the story of two calculating machines invented by Sir Samuel Morland (1625–95) in the 1660s. These instruments are the earliest known mechanical calculators made in England. Their designs are unusual and very much of their time. They appealed to some, especially at court, and were dismissed by others, such as Robert Hooke. The first part of the paper introduces Morland and the courtier–inventor's world, in which a reputation as a ‘machinist’ or an engineer could accompany high social status. It considers why a former diplomat and postal spy would turn to invention in general and to mechanical calculators in particular as a career move in the Restoration court. The second part addresses the instruments – attention to their design reveals Morland's inspiration. The paper concludes with an examination of the market for the calculators in London, Paris and Florence. While it is notable that the calculators circulated both in court and in the commercial sphere, even more interesting is the contrast between their receptions in these two spheres. The story of these machines and their maker helps flesh out the poorly understood world of the courtier–inventor in early modern England.

In the late 1960s teams of engineers working independently in Japan, Switzerland and the United States used newly created electronic components to completely reinvent the wristwatch. The products these groups developed instigated a global revolution in the watch industry and gave everyone, whether they needed it or not, access to the split-second accuracy once available only to scientists and technicians. This radical change in timekeeping technology was in the vanguard of a dramatic shift from a mechanical to an electronic world and raises important issues about technological change for scholars interested in late twentieth-century history. Examining the work of three teams of engineers, this paper offers a comparative approach to understanding how local differences in culture, economy, business structure and access to technological knowledge shaped the design of finished products and their acceptance by users.

Presidential addresses offer an opportunity to reflect on the history of our subject and where the history of science stands in our own day. Such reflections are particularly appropriate with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) which is marked in 1997. Some may consider that looking back over our past is either an unacceptable luxury or an occasion for the kind of celebration that can all too easily degenerate into hagiography and an excuse to rake over the past in a thoroughly uncritical manner. This address – and I trust the events of 1997 – will try to avoid such excesses and instead contribute to the historiography of our subject.

Between 1856 and 1858, a group of entrepreneurs and engineers led by the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen J. W. Brett, Charles Bright and E. O. Wildman Whitehouse sought to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland. Their projected cable would be far longer, far more expensive, and far more difficult to lay than any previously attempted; that such an ambitious undertaking was launched and quickly drew financial backing was testimony to the technological enthusiasm of the mid-Victorian era. After many setbacks, the cable was successfully completed early in August 1858. The first messages it carried were met with rapturous excitement on both sides of the Atlantic – making its failure after just a few weeks of fitful service all the more humiliating. Identifying the causes of that failure, and assigning blame for them, became crucial to ensuring the future of transoceanic cable telegraphy. Were the causes of the failure intrinsic to the enterprise, and the vision of a network of transoceanic cables no more than an unrealistic dream? Or did the collapse of the cable result simply from a series of unfortunate and correctable errors? How those questions were answered in the autumn of 1858 would go far toward determining the prospects not only for renewing the Atlantic project, but also for any attempt to extend submarine cables more widely around the world.

Edinburgh has long been recognized as one important place where early glacial theory was promoted and debated. This paper, rather than attend to the longer-term development of glacial theory, focuses on the ways in which the theory was assessed, disseminated and received in and through the scientific culture of early Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh's scientific and educational societies, science journals, newspapers and field sites are brought to view through examining their engagement with, and use of, early glacial theory. Tracking the theory's passage across a range of spaces bound up with the promotion of geology in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh signals relations between local geological endeavour and other sorts of scientific and cultural work. Particular, though not exclusive, attention is given to practices more readily defined as ‘popular’.

Apart from statics, about which I shall say nothing, there were three chief centres of interest in mechanics in the 1660's:

(1) the motions of pendulums;

(2) the laws of motion;

(3) the free fall of heavy bodies and the motion of projectiles.

In the first the influence of Huygens was dominant; I have placed it so because it was of very lively contemporary concern. The second area of interest descended partly from Galileo and partly from Descartes; the third from Galileo alone. Perhaps one should consider adding a fourth area, the investigation of central forces, but this in fact did not attract much attention as yet.

This study explores the origins and consequences of a unique, secret, French–American collaboration to prospect for uranium in 1950s Morocco. This collaboration permitted mediation between the United States and France. The appearance of France in an American-supported project for raw nuclear materials signalled American willingness to accept a new nuclear global order in which the French assumed a new, higher position as regional nuclear ally as opposed to suspicious rival. This collaboration also permitted France and the United States to agree tacitly to the same geopolitical status for the French Moroccan Protectorate, a status under dispute both in Morocco and outside it. The secret scientific effort reassured the French that, whatever the Americans might say publicly, they stood behind the maintenance of French hegemony in the centuries-old kingdom. But Moroccan independence proved impossible to deny. With its foreseeable arrival, the collaboration went from seductive to dangerous, and the priority of American and French geologists shifted from finding a major uranium lode to making sure that nothing was readily available to whatever post-independence interests might prove most powerful. Ultimately, the Kingdom of Morocco took a page out of the French book, using uranium exploration to assert sovereignty over a different disputed territory, its de facto colony of the Western Sahara.

The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray (1627–1705). The 1750s saw the emergence of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1733–1782) to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to accompany him on HMS Endeavour to the Pacific.

This paper follows the history of an object. The purpose of doing so is to come to terms with a distinctive kind of research object – which we are calling a ‘test object’ – as well as to chronicle a significant line of research and technology development associated with the broader nanoscience/nanotechnology movement. A test object is one of a family of epistemic things that makes up the material culture of laboratory science. Depending upon the case, it can have variable shadings of practical, mathematical and epistemic significance. Clear cases of test objects have highly regular and reproducible visible properties that can be used for testing instruments and training novices. The test object featured in this paper is the silicon (111) 7×7, a particular surface configuration (or, as it is often called, a ‘reconstruction’) of silicon atoms. Research on this object over a period of several decades has been closely bound up with the development of novel instruments for visualizing atomic structures. Despite having little direct commercial value, the Si(111) 7×7 also has been a focal object for the formation of a research community bridging industry and academia. It exhibits a complex structure that became a sustained focus of observation and modelling. Our study follows shifts in the epistemic status of the Si(111) 7×7, and uses it to re-examine familiar conceptions of representation and observation in the history, philosophy and social study of science.

Historians have given much attention to museums and exhibitions as sites for the production and communication of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But few studies have analysed how the activity and participation of visitors was designed and promoted at such locations. Using Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London 1884 as the empirical focal point, this paper explores a new mode of involving exhibition audiences in the late nineteenth century. Its particular form of address is characterized by an ambition to transform the visitors' self-understanding by engaging them with various techniques of scientific observation and representation of social issues. By analysing the didactics of this particular project, I argue that the observational ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and associated modes of representation in this instance became an integrated part of a political vision of self-observation and self-reformation. Thus the exhibit and related projects by Galton not only underpinned a theoretical lesson, but also were part of an effort to extend a complex set of practices among the general public.

National exhibitions and festivals perform a number of roles at the same time. In the first half of the twentieth century exhibitions were first and foremost trade fairs, occasions on which to promote British goods but at the same time provide an opportunity for cementing imperial relations. Exhibitions are also sites of aesthetic discourse where, for example, particular architectural or design ideologies may be promoted; in addition, they provide platforms for the conspicuous display of scientific and technical achievement; and finally, they provide opportunities for creating and projecting ideas of national identity, however multi-faceted those might be. Furthermore, in order to encourage the widest possible attendance and popularity, most exhibitions from the late nineteenth century onwards included a large number of purely entertaining attractions, which of course provided places for the mingling of social classes, something that appealed to post-1945 notions of a properly democratic society. Exhibitions therefore always perform a number of functions, some of which may indeed conflict with each other, and need to be analysed on a number of levels.