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.

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1919–33) and its sequel Secrets of Life (1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces the Secrets using an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines the Secrets series through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues that Secrets developed a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by the Secrets films.

Philip II a patron of the sciences? This aspect of his turbulent reign, like many others, bas brought conflicting assessments. He bas been praised for his enterprise and blamed for isolating Spain from the scientific revolution. More information has now become available as a resuit of research on related themes, and it seems opportune to reconsider Philip's relations with the sciences. This has not attracted much attention outside of Spain because of the general neglect of the history of Spanish science. Yet Spain was no intellectual backwater—it had a rich scientific culture which was still alive in the sixteenth century. And the question of Philip's patronage is important since Castile had become the heart of the most powerful empire in the West at a time when Europe was experiencing a new phase of the Reformation and the beginnings of scientific revolution.

This article presents evidence that an anonymous publication of 1573, a Letter sent by a gentleman of England [concerning …] the myraculous starre nowe shyning, was written by Thomas Digges, England's first Copernican. It tells the story of how it arose out of research commissioned by Elizabeth I's privy counsellors in response to the conventional argument of Jean Gosselin, librarian to Henri III of France, that the star was a comet which presaged wars. The text is significant because it seems to contain the observations and opinions that Digges held before he completed his other astronomical treatise, the groundbreaking Alae seu scalae mathematicae. It also casts some light on the development of Digges's radical and puritan views about the star, Copernican astronomy, the infinity of the universe and a belief that the ‘latter days’ of the world had arrived.

Jacob (‘Bruno’) Bronowski (1908–1974), on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era.

This paper examines the interrelations between astronomical images of nebulae and their observation. In particular, using the case of the ‘Great Spiral’ (M51), we follow this nebula beginning with its discovery and first sketch made by the third Earl of Rosse in 1845, to giving an account, using archival sources, of exactly how other images of the same object were produced over the years and stabilized within the record books of the Rosse project. It will be found that a particular ‘procedure’ was employed using ‘working images’ that interacted with descriptions, other images and the telescopic object itself. This stabilized not only some set of standard images of the object, but also a very potent conception of spirality as well, i.e. as a ‘normal form’. Finally, two cases will be contrasted, one being George Bond's application of this spiral conception to the nebula in Orion, and the other Wilhelm Tempel's rejection of the spiral form in M51.

Gaslight emerged as a new industry after 1800 in Britain, but not in other countries in Europe where the technology existed as well. Among the many groups trying, it was only the firm of Boulton & Watt that succeeded in commercializing the invention for two important reasons. The first was that they possessed skills and experience related to ironworking and to making scientific instruments, both of which they used as they developed gaslight apparatus. This development involved an extensive series of experiments that ultimately had its root in James Watt's own work with pneumatic chemistry. The second reason was that they possessed many resources such as access to capital, their existing network of industrial customers, and their abilities to publicize their work. As with the steam engine, the firm proved adept at advertising. Boulton & Watt did not give their full attention to gaslight except in two spurts between 1805 and 1809, and by around 1812 they had lost almost all interest in the technology. By this time, however, they had solved many problems associated with scaling up gaslight apparatus for industrial use, they had trained many people who would go on to do further important work in the early years of the industry, and they had drawn extensive public attention to the new invention. Finally, their advertising involved elevating the status of William Murdoch as an inventor while minimizing the role of the firm.

Despite much excellent work over the years, the vast history of scientific filmmaking is still largely unknown. Historians of science have long been concerned with visual culture, communication and the public sphere on the one hand, and with expertise, knowledge production and experimental practice on the other. Scientists, we know, drew pictures, took photographs and made three-dimensional models. Rather like models, films could not be printed in journals until the digital era, and this limited their usefulness as evidence. But that did not stop researchers from making movies for projection at conferences as well as in lecture halls, museums and other public venues, not to mention for breaking down into individual frames for analysis. Historians of science are more likely to be found in the library, archive or museum than the darkened screening room, and much work is still needed to demonstrate the major effects of cinema on scientific knowledge. Film may have taken as long to change science as other areas of social life, but one can begin to glimpse important ways in which ‘image machines’ (cameras, projectors and the like) were beginning to mediate between backstage experimental work and more public demonstration even around 1900.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changing social and cultural climates challenged the position of scientists in Western society. Ringer and Harwood have described how scientists reacted by adopting either pragmatist or ‘comprehensive’ styles of thought. In this article, I will show how a group of Dutch intellectuals, including many scientists, came up with an alternative approach to the dilemmas of modernity, and eventually became influential in shaping Dutch society. They combined elements of both styles into what I call a ‘synthetic technocrat’ ideology, a reaction against intellectual and political fragmentation. These ideas were often combined with pleas for educational reform, culminating in a plea for gebildete Tatkraft. I will analyse the development of the synthetic technocrat movement from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s. During this period, the movement became increasingly political in nature, but in a radically different way to comparable movements in other countries, especially Germany.

This paper explores the relationship between operations research (OR) as practised during the Second World War and the claims of many of its proponents that it constituted an application of scientific method. It begins with an examination of the pre-war work of two of the most notable leaders in wartime OR, the British experimental physicist Patrick Blackett and the American theoretical physicist Philip Morse. Despite differences in their scientific work, each saw science as an essentially creative act relying on the skill and judgement of the individual scientist in the deployment of rational methods for the development of legitimate conclusions. When scientists began to study military operations, their investigations were defined by the technically sophisticated heuristic practices already surrounding military planning. They did not seek to replace these practices with their own rational methods. Rather, they became scholars of the military's methods and adapted their pre-war experience by shifting their self-disciplined attitude to their own work to bodies of military knowledge. Thus scientists learned so well to navigate an alien heuristic system that investigations they conducted within it took on the characteristics that they judged defined scientific work.

In the overwhelmingly public world of the twentieth century, science often seems simultaneously remote and ubiquitous. There are many complex reasons for this, of course, not the least being the capacity of technology for material transformation and the apparent inability of scientific discourse to communicate its practice to the unanointed. In some ways, our current predicament appears similar to that of the late eighteenth century when so many promises had already been made of what natural philosophy might accomplish, and when many clamoured for access to the power of natural philosophical practice. At that point, on the verge of the stunning dislocations of the industrial revolution, many of the literate and mechanical public took considerable steps to bridge the gap otherwise policed by social distinction.

During the first half of the nineteenth century the Stirling brothers and John Ericsson made significant attempts to design hot air engines which could provide an economical alternative to high-pressure steam. They believed that it would be possible to gain fuel efficiencies superior to those obtained with steam by employing a heat exchanger within the air engine cycle, erroneously supposing that such a heat exchanger could eliminate the large loss of heat incurred in the condenser of the steam engine. The Stirling brothers called their heat exchanger an economizer because it prevented the waste of heat, but Ericsson coined the term regenerator because he imagined that the power of the heat (caloric) could actually be regenerated, i.e. re-used in the engine to generate mechanical work. Ericsson's term became commonly accepted, so that Stirling's economizer is now also referred to as a generator. These attempts to attain high horsepower outputs with hot air engines were abandoned after the dramatic failure of Ericsson's notorious paddle steamer in the early 1850s. Further ventures were aimed at the more limited goal of low horsepowers and generally ignored the regenerator principle.

The exploitation of the lead resources of this country by the Romans commenced very soon after their arrival and shows every sign of being a well organized trade. Little evidence of deep mining has survived and it is probable that most of the ore was obtained by means of shallow workings, mainly in Somerset, Salop, Flintshire and Derbyshire. Although the silver content does not seem ever to have been as high as that of some well-known mines in the Mediterranean, it is clear that silver has been extracted by the Romans from some of the British lead. The lead was cast in carefully made moulds, producing pigs with inscriptions which indicate their date. These were then used for the pipes, cisterns and pewter tableware which contributed to the high standard of living of the period.

In a paper which examined the ‘simultaneous emergence of evolutionary theories in biology and sociology in the nineteenth century’, J. C. Greene said of Comte that ‘it was not from biology that his inspiration [the inspiration of his evolutionary view] was drawn; his writings and letters in the formative period sing the praises of Bichat and Gall but not of Lamarck. His intellectual debt in social theory lay in a different direction—to Condorcet's Sketch of an historical picture of the progress of the human mind, to the historical writings of Hume and Robertson, and to the ideas of Saint-Simon’. This statement from a paper published almost twenty years ago as an exploratory reconnaissance of virgin territory is representative of the kind of confused judgements which still surround a discussion of the inter-relations between social, biological and medical thought in the century 1750 to 1850. It makes some valid points which a critical examination should not be allowed to overwhelm, the most significant being that Comte is unequivocally identified with the Enlightenment tradition represented here by Condorcet, Robertson and Hume. But since it is a very condensed statement about a complex set of relationships, it invites interpretations which the author did not necessarily intend.

When customers like Samuel Pepys visited the shop of Thomas Tuttell, instrument maker to the king, they could purchase a pack of mathematical playing-cards. The seven of spades, reproduced as Figure 1, depicted the diverse connotations of magnets, or loadstones. These cards cost a shilling, and were too expensive for many of the surveyors, navigators and other practitioners shown using Tuttell's instruments. They provide an early example of the products promising both diversion and improvement which were increasingly marketed to polite audiences. Tuttell's description of loadstone as ‘a treasure of hidden vertues’ encapsulated many contemporary perceptions of these naturally occurring magnets which were to endure throughout the century. This phrase, with its hints of concealed financial and epistemological benefits, resonates with major eighteenth-century analytical themes, such as commercialization, the opposition between vice and virtue, and the fascination with the occult in the face of Enlightenment rationality. This card is emblematic of the multiple interpretations and utilizations of magnetic phenomena during the eighteenth century. It thus provides a useful starting-point for exploring some of the disputes which arose as enterprising individuals concerned with natural philosophy promoted themselves, their activities and their products.

Until recently, historians of mathematics usually agreed in refusing to consider the numerous geometrical publications of Thomas Hobbes as a contribution to the development of mathematics in the seventeenth century. From time to time, one could find statements that although Hobbes did not find new theorems he undoubtedly had profound insights into the logical foundations of mathematics, but these occasional remarks did not encourage historians to go deeper into Hobbes's mathematical thought. In the end, the general conclusion was that Hobbes's preoccupation with squaring the circle, doubling the cube (starting when the philosopher was more than forty years of age), and challenging Euclid's definitions were better ignored, at least in the history of science. In particular, his controversy with the Savilian professors Seth Ward and John Wallis was seen as a ‘deplorable affair’, liable only to damage the reputation of the protagonists.

This article documents the history of the Allais paradox, and shows that underneath the many discussions of the various protagonists lay different, irreconcilable epistemological positions. Savage, like his mentor von Neumann and similar to economist Friedman, worked from an epistemology of generalized characterizations. Allais, on the other hand, like economists Samuelson and Baumol, started from an epistemology of exact descriptions in which every axiom was an empirical claim that could be refuted directly by observations. As a result, the two sides failed to find a common ground. Only a few decades later was the now so-called Allais paradox rediscovered as an important precursor when a new behavioural economic subdiscipline started to adopt the epistemology of exact descriptions and its accompanying falsifications of rational choice theory.

In 1854 Admiral FitzRoy, acting as the first head of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, initiated a project to distribute fishery barometers to poor fishing communities. Over the next eleven years until his untimely death in 1865, FitzRoy oversaw the distribution of dozens of barometers. The distribution continued after his death and many of the original barometers are still in place. FitzRoy's tenure at the Met Department is today remembered for his innovative and controversial development of weather forecasts, the first of their kind in Britain, which were telegraphed to coastal towns to warn of impending storms. Against the backdrop of this dramatic attempt to predict the weather using the tools of telegraphy and synoptic mapping, the barometer distribution project looks like an unexceptional piece of administration, a routine shuttling of correspondence and instruments. Closer inspection reveals a case study in Victorian governance that shows how individuals could contribute to elite forms of science by remaining independent of them in key respects. Rather than providing disciplined and trustworthy registrations of nature's language, the fishery barometers distributed by FitzRoy and the Met Department were explicitly excluded from the wider project to map British and global weather. By being thus excluded, they helped augment the autonomy of their intended users, the poor fishermen who were thereby made into better, more independent, interpreters of the Met Office forecasts. By revealing the potential for an instrument to be useful when not registering, this episode suggests that instruments could augment as well as replace the autonomous judgements of individuals.

Hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century, yet the history of science has often treated them as stages for scientific practice, not as the play itself. Drawing on recent work in the history of science and of international relations, the introduction to this special issue suggests avenues for exploring the phenomenon of the international scientific conference, broadly construed, by highlighting the connected dimensions of communication, sociability and international relations. It lays out a typology of scientific conferences as a way of gaining an overview of their diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the international scientific conference is a central locus for understanding science as a social, cultural and political practice.