Every science has its technical vocabulary, consisting in part of terms coined for explicit purposes and in part of words borrowed from ordinary discourse and used with greater or lesser degrees of precision. Words of the latter sort pose curious problems, some of them familiar to those historians of science concerned with, for example, what Galileo meant by forza and Newton by attraction. Indeed, analogous problems face any historian seeking to understand the older meanings of terms still in use today.

Early in June of 1867, Charles Darwin turned back the cover of his copy of the respected quarterly North British Review, to find on its opening pages a lengthy essay attacking his theory of natural selection. As with the vast majority of articles in the Victorian periodicals, the review was anonymous, prompting immediate speculation in Darwin's circle as to the author's identity. It was to be about a year-and-a-half before Darwin would learn that the engineer Fleeming Jenkin had written the essay. By then, Darwin had concluded that the critique was the most valuable he had ever read on The Origin of Species.

This paper aims to build an integrated account of the history of twentieth-century laboratories. The historical literature is fragmented, which has led to the impression that one type of laboratory has dominated, or has become more important than other types. The university laboratory has also unjustly shaped the conceptualization of other types of laboratory. This paper approaches laboratories as sites of organized knowledge production, and as entities engaged in different activities for different audiences at any point in time. Eight types of laboratory are identified, and their developments in the twentieth century are sketched. The two world wars of that century and models of innovation, building links between knowledge production in the laboratory and the impact of this knowledge outside the laboratory, are important catalysts of this history. The paper underlines that different types of laboratory have existed side by side, and continue to exist side by side.

The history of contraceptives met the history of drugs long before the invention of the contraceptive pill. In the first half of the twentieth century, numerous pharmaceutical laboratories, including major ones, manufactured and marketed chemical contraceptives: jellies, suppositories, creams, powders and foams applied locally to prevent conception. Efforts to put an end to the marginal status of these products and to transform them into ‘ethical’ drugs played an important role in the development of standardized laboratory tests of efficacy of contraceptive preparations; debates on the validity of such tests; evaluation of the long-term toxicity of chemical compounds; and the rise of collaborations between activists, non-profit organizations and the pharmaceutical industry. Chemical contraceptives were initially associated with quack medicine, shady commercial practices and doubtful morality. Striving to change the status of contraceptives and to promote safe and efficient products that reduced fertility in humans shaped some of the key features of the present-day production and regulation of pharmaceuticals.

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, gas discharge research was transformed from a playful and fragmented field into a new branch of physical science and technology. From the 1850s onwards, several technical innovations – powerful high-voltage supplies, the enhancement of glass-blowing skills, or the introduction of mercury air-pumps – allowed for a major extension of experimental practices and expansion of the phenomenological field. Gas discharge tubes served as containers in which resources from various disciplinary contexts could be brought together; along with the experimental apparatus built around them the tubes developed into increasingly complex interfaces mediating between the human senses and the micro-world. The focus of the following paper will be on the physicist and chemist Johann Wilhelm Hittorf (1824–1914), his educational background and his attempts to understand gaseous conduction as a process of interaction between electrical energy and matter. Hittorf started a long-term project in gas discharge research in the early 1860s. In his research he tried to combine a morphological exploration of gas discharge phenomena – aiming at the experimental production of a coherent phenomenological manifold – with the definition and precise measurements of physical properties.

This paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn.

The group which worked with Lavoisier in his laboratory also collaborated with him in publication and jointly edited the journal Annales de chimie. It has a good claim to be considered as a research school. Most historians of chemistry, who have studied the ‘chemical revolution’ in France, have focused uniquely on Lavoisier, giving scant attention to his co-workers and ignoring his assistants, thus overlooking their collective research, which created something of a precedent for nineteenth-century science. It has also been too easily assumed that the Lavoisier story ends with his death in 1794. After his demise, continuity with his ideas and method of working was provided by his former associates, particularly Berthollet in the Society of Arcueil. Further continuity was provided by the successive careers of Gay-Lussac, Dumas and Wurtz. In an increasing spirit of nationalism in the nineteenth century there developed a strong French tradition which looked back to Lavoisier as the founder of modern chemistry and a source of inspiration for collaboration in chemical research.

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority.

In the 1940s and 1950s, British and American journals published a flood of papers by doctors, pathologists, geneticists and anthropologists debating the virtues of two competing nomenclatures used to denote the Rhesus blood groups. Accounts of this prolonged and often bitter episode have tended to focus on the main protagonists' personalities and theoretical commitments. Here I take a different approach and use the literature generated by the dispute to recover the practical and epistemic functions of nomenclatures in genetics. Drawing on recent work that views inscriptions as part of the material culture of science, I use the Rhesus controversy to think about the ways in which geneticists visualized and negotiated their objects of research, and how they communicated and collaborated with workers in other settings. Extending recent studies of relations between different media, I consider the material forms of nomenclatures, as they were jotted in notebooks, printed in journals, scribbled on blackboards and spoken out loud. The competing Rhesus nomenclatures had different virtues as they were expressed in different media and made to embody commitments to laboratory practices. In exploring the varied practical and epistemic qualities of nomenclatures I also suggest a new understanding of the Rhesus controversy itself.

The most perplexing aspect of Galileo's work in physics is without doubt the sharp distinction one can draw between his essentially dynamic studies in such juvenilia as De Motu and the consciously kinematical approach of his later output—particularly the Two New Sciences. Whether one chooses to call this a shift from the “why” of motion to the “how”, or, as I should prefer, a shift from dynamics to kinematics, there can be no denying its existence. The Galileo who wrote that “The present does not seem to be the proper time to investigate the cause of the acceleration of natural motion …” is, on the face of it, a very different man from the one who had earlier written almost an entire treatise on precisely this topic.

The Royal Society took as one of its patron saints Francis Bacon, who envisaged the great calling of science as acting as a means of effecting ‘the relief of man's estate’ through a partnership between philosophers and politicians. The object of this paper is to examine the extent to which this goal was realized from the time of the Society's foundation until the end of the eighteenth century. By doing so it attempts to analyse not only the character of the unreformed Royal Society but also that of the unreformed British state, for the argument of this article is that relations between the Royal Society and the government were not fundamentally different from relations between other academies and their governments.

What was different was rather the character of the British state with its oligarchically based patterns of patronage and influence, which contrasted with the clearer lines of government intervention evident in the more centralized and absolutist regimes which predominated on the Continent. From such a perspective the activities of the eighteenth- century Royal Society take on greater significance. The apparent character of a gentlemen's club is transmuted when one considers that in the social and political context of the eighteenth century such an institutional milieu helped to link the Royal Society to the workings of government. True, as the paper demonstrates, in the first half of the century such linkages were more potential than real, but in the second half of the century they began to be realized, setting the stage for a fruitful partnership between British science and government which was to develop in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries as the Royal Society acted as the principal agent of government advice – a belated realization of the Baconian ideal.

Three questions of major historical interest may be asked concerning the neglect and the rediscovery of Mendel's work.

1. Why was it so little noticed between its publication in 1866 and its rediscovery in 1900?

2. What factors determined its rediscovery?

3. What factors favoured the rapid growth of Mendelian genetics?

It is with the second and third of these questions that this paper is concerned.

This essay analyses the circulation of political models and administrative practices drawn from the Enlightenment statecraft of metropolitan Portugal and their inscription in specific colonial contexts of Angola in the mid-eighteenth century. The purpose here is to show how these models had to be ‘unpacked’ when confronted with foreign contexts, reconfigured and even reinvented for local circumstances. During the 1750s, the Lisbon government conceived a new imperial project to territorialize the colony through the intellectual and physical appropriation of this Central African space. In order to do so, three levels of this administrative knowledge are distinguished: the quantification and systematization of information, cartography, and the archive. For each, this essay demonstrates how they were made available to, appropriated by or transformed by both the colonial and the African societies in the colonial context.

Historians of science have often presented the inter-war period as a time when British scientific communities radically questioned existing scholarship on ‘race’. The ascendancy of genetics, and the perceived need to challenge Nazi ‘racial’ theory have been highlighted as pivotal issues in shaping this British revision of ‘racial’ ideas. This article offers a detailed analysis of British scientific thinking in the inter-war period. It questions whether historians have exaggerated or oversimplified the prevalence of anti-‘racial’ reform. It uses a wide range of scientific writings to consider issues of continuity and change in ‘racial’ thinking in mainstream British scientific communities. The article probes the relationship between science and politics, focusing on the extent to which ideological factors affected both the scientific agenda and conclusions as regards ‘racial’ issues. Far from dismissing the idea that events in the inter-war period triggered changes in the way in which British scientists dealt with ‘race’, the article argues that the seeds of the post-Second World War international scientific rejection of ‘race’ were sown in inter-war Britain amid considerable ambivalence and discord.

We must remember that the investigator, whether a biologist, an economist, or a sociologist, is himself a part of history, and that if he ever forgets he is a part of history he will deceive his audience and deceive himself.J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics, 1938

This paper examines the relationship between the Admiralty and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, by studying the roles of the Hydrographer and the Astronomer Royal as they worked together on the problem of communicating accurate time to ships. The collaboration between the Astronomer Royal and the Hydrographer directed the development of time balls and other visual signals throughout their period of use in Britain and its colonies. This paper focuses on the time ball and clock developed by the Astronomer Royal William Christie and the Hydrographer William Wharton as a key example of significant and productive collaboration between the two institutions. The paper also highlights the importance of the telegraph system to visual time signals. The ability to drop a time ball at a distance from an observatory created significant opportunities to improve the time signal service to mariners and stimulated further innovation in this field.

Secret, owned, Georgian medicines were normally known as patent medicines, though few had a current patent. Up to 1830, just 117 medicines had been patented, whilst over 1,300 were listed for taxation as ‘patent medicines’. What were the benefits of patenting? Did medicine patenting affect consumer perception, and how was this used as a marketing tool? What were the boundaries of medical patenting? Patents for therapeutic preparations provided an apparent government guarantee on the source and composition of widely available products, while the patenting of medical devices seems to have been used to grant a temporary monopoly for the inventor's benefit.

This paper is about collecting, travel and the geographies of science. At one level it examines the circumstances that led to Isaac Lea's description in Philadelphia of six freshwater mussel shells of the family Unionidae, originally collected by John Kirk during David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64. At another level it is about how travel is necessary in the making of scientific knowledge. Following these shells from south-eastern Africa to Philadelphia via London elucidates the journeys necessary for Kirk and Lea's scientific work to progress and illustrates that the production of what was held to be malacological knowledge occurred through collaborative endeavours that required the travel of the specimens themselves. Intermediaries in London acted to link the expedition, Kirk's efforts and Lea's classification across three continents and to facilitate the novel description of six species of freshwater mussel. The paper demonstrates the role of travel in the making of mid-nineteenth-century natural history and in developing the relationships and credibility necessary to perform the research on which classifications undertaken elsewhere were based.

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the scene of several lively debates concerning the structure of the Earth. Though the ideas of groups like the ‘Wernerians’ and the ‘Huttonians’ have received due attention, little has been done to explicate the practice of mineralogy as it existed in the decades before the debates. To dig deeper into the eighteenth-century subject that formed the foundation of nineteenth-century geology in Scotland, this essay concentrates on Rev. Dr John Walker, the University of Edinburgh's Professor of Natural History (1779–1803). In pursuing this topic, it builds on an earlier BJHS article in which I excavated his early career as a mineralogist (1749–79). After first addressing a few historiographical points and the provenance of the student manuscripts upon which this study is based, I explain the method that Walker used to arrange minerals. I then move on to show that, like his younger attempts at mineralogical classification, his mature system was based predominantly upon chemistry. This sets the stage for the last half of the essay where I reconstruct the mineralogical system that Walker taught to the hundreds of students who sat in his natural history lectures from 1782 until 1800. I then conclude with a few observations about the relevance of his mineralogy to the scientific community of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh.