UK defence R & D played a leading role in the development of gallium arsenide and other III–V semiconductor materials. Often touted as the semiconductor of the future because of its potential for high-speed computing, gallium arsenide had unique properties compared to silicon that made it attractive for military applications. Some consumer applications were also developed, and these eventually became significant with its use in mobile phone handsets in the mid-1990s. However, despite the apparent advantage of close links to the defence establishments and early access to expertise in III–V technologies, UK companies had limited success in these civil markets, preferring instead to focus on defence procurement.

Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics.

In the late spring of 1947, the experimental physicist P. M. S. Blackett succumbed to the temptations of theory. At this time, Blackett (1897–1974) was fifty years old. He was a veteran of the Cavendish tradition in particle physics and he was on his way to an unshared award of the 1948 Nobel Prize for his experimental researches in nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. His photographs of cloud-chamber tracks of alpha particles, protons, electrons and positrons were well known to practitioners of particle physics, even as they now grace the pages of physics textbooks.

Blackett's turn toward theory in 1947 involved some risk for a well-established experimental physicist. The 3 May 1947 issue of Nature carried an announcement of his forthcoming lecture at the Royal Society:

Professor P. M. S. Blackett, Langworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester, will deliver a lecture on ‘The Magnetic Field of Massive Rotating Bodies’ at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 15, at 4:30 p.m.

Blackett circulated a preliminary draft of his paper among colleagues in several different fields, including the geophysicist Sydney Chapman and the astrophysicist Harry Plaskett.

The medium of visual representation played a crucial role in the Enlightenment project of taking intellectual possession of nature, and of dominating it. Pictures helped to categorize the various natural phenomena, to disseminate knowledge about their appearance and, so to speak, to capture them on paper or canvas. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, natural historians treating extreme and threatening natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, waterspouts or geysers, increasingly supplemented their written accounts with engraved illustrations. In this paper, I concentrate on the visual treatment of earthquakes in learned publications. I discuss two different types of graphic representation of this natural phenomenon, which had always been considered as virtually ‘undepictable’.

After the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, research into the subject was greatly stimulated. Two scholars, the British natural philosopher John Michell and the Dutchman Johan Drijfhout, published earthquake treatises in learned journals, and each complemented his text with a diagrammatic illustration. By translating their theoretical considerations into the abstract form of geological sections, these natural philosophers moulded a new visual language for seismology and earth history. An entirely different example of visual representation as a tool in research into earthquakes can be seen in the approach to the earthquake in Calabria in 1783. The Neapolitan Academy of Science and Letters sent some of its members to investigate the devastating effects of this earthquake on the landscape and the nature of the country. The topographical changes were recorded on the spot by trained draughtsmen, with the aim of providing accurate and comprehensive visual documentation. The pictures are remarkable in the way they reveal a conflict between the new demands of modern empirical science and the established ‘picturesque’ conventions of landscape painting.

Often overlooked by historians, specialist gardeners with an expert understanding of both native and exotic plant material were central to the teaching and research activities of university botanic gardens. In this article various interrelationships in the late Georgian period will be examined: between the gardener, the garden, the botanic collection, the medical school and ways of knowing. Foregrounding gardeners’ narratives will shed light on the ways in which botanic material was gathered and utilized for teaching and research purposes, particularly for medical students, as well as highlighting the importance of the garden as a repository of botanic material for the classroom. In this way, the blurred lines between art and science, skill and scholarly activity, and shared pedagogic practices between botany and anatomy will be revealed.

The early East India Company (EIC) had a profound effect on London, filling the British capital with new things, ideas and people; altering its streets; and introducing exotic plants and animals. Company commodities – from saltpetre to tea to opium – were natural products and the EIC sought throughout the period to understand how to produce and control them. In doing so, the company amassed information, designed experiments and drew on the expertise of people in the settlements and of individuals and institutions in London. Frequent collaborators in London included the Royal Society and the Society of Apothecaries. Seeking success in the settlements and patronage in London, company servants amassed large amounts of data concerning natural objects and artificial practices. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, company scholars and their supporters in London sought to counter critiques of the EIC by demonstrating the utility to the nation of the objects and ideas they brought home. The EIC transformed itself several times between 1600 and 1800. Nonetheless, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its knowledge culture was characterized by reliance on informal networks that linked the settlements with one another and with London.

In the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in the Moving Picture News that advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive ‘mental pictures’ were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its ‘second birth’ was founded upon the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the ‘mind-cure’ of the body through the positive application of ‘mental pictures’. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day.

On the morning of Friday the fourth of December 1863, August Hofmann, professor of chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, lectured at the College on spectro-chemical analysis to Victoria, the Princess Royal, Princess of Prussia and eldest daughter of the Queen and the severely missed late Prince Consort. This event illustrates the spectacular success that the fledgling science of spectro-chemical analysis enjoyed during the 1860s.

Logbooks and sea charts may appear rather straightforward evidence to present at a naval court martial. However, their introduction into proceedings in the early nineteenth century reveals an important shift. Measuring the depth of water soon became a problem both of navigation and of discipline. Indeed, Captain Newcomb's knowledge of the soundings taken at the Battle of the Basque Roads proved crucial at Lord Gambier's court martial in June 1809. Through a case study of Edward Massey's sounding machine, this paper reveals the close connection between disciplinary practices on land and at sea. The Board of Longitude acted as a key intermediary in this respect. By studying land and sea together, this paper better explains the changing make-up of the British scientific instrument trade in this period. Massey is just one example of a range of new entrants, many of whom had little previous experience of the maritime world. More broadly, this paper emphasizes the role of both environmental history and material culture in the study of scientific instruments.

This article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology (as opposed to the older mode of natural history). However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between ‘mere collectors’ and ‘entomologists’ as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822–1892), which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians.

For geologists and antiquaries of the late 1850s debates over ancient stone tools were frustrated by a lack of accepted criteria. The artefacts were hard to interpret. It was not self-evident how to judge whether they were ancient or modern, natural or man-made; or indeed whether stone tools could pre-date the use of metal tools at all. Antiquary and papermaker John Evans provided a system that offered to resolve these issues. His criteria and his use of re-enactment, making his own stone implements, gained acceptance among flint experts across fluid disciplinary boundaries and enabled authoritative interpretations of the underdetermined objects. This paper explores how Evans drew on the concerns of his industrial culture to make sense of prehistoric artefacts and support his claim to access the past through his own actions. Situated industrial concerns provided the resources for his flint work: from a patent dispute with astronomer and fellow industrialist Warren de la Rue, through his role in the Victorian arms trade, to the struggle to displace skilled manual labour in his factories. Evans is remembered for pioneering the techniques and classificatory system of modern Palaeolithic archaeology and as one of the founders of the re-enactment science of experimental flint knapping. His work played a significant role in helping reconceive the antiquity of man, yet the system of proof for this grand claim was deeply situated in his industrial culture. This paper explores how the industrial resources of a Victorian papermaker made human history.

The slow emergence of Dalton's chemical atomic theory has long been a considerable puzzle to historians of science The lengthy delay between Dalton's early work on mixed gases (September 1801) and particle weights (September 1803) and the eventual publication of the first part of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (June 1808) has called forth a variety of explanations. It is now more than half a century since A. N. Meldrum stressed

“…the efforts Dalton had to make, in order to arouse attention to the importance of his ideas regarding atoms. For some nine years (1801-1810), if not longer, he endeavoured to spread abroad his ideas, both by private communications and publicly, by his writings and by lectures in various parts of the country…

“Dalton's chemical theory was formed by the 6th September 1803, and he proceeded forthwith to extend and apply it, and make it known in every direction…”

And though Meldrum's view is now no longer accepted, no systematic and detailed account of Dalton's activities over these years is available to replace Meldrum's assertions.

Between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, roughly two hundred expeditions set out for what is now the Canadian Arctic, from its boundary with Alaska in the West, along the northern shore of Canada and including the Arctic archipelago between that shore and the pole, to the marine boundary with Danish Greenland in the East. For more than half a century, these expeditions were little concerned with Canada as a political entity; after all, it had not yet been truly created as a nation. Besides, science was a major part of the mandate of many of the Arctic expeditions, almost half of which achieved significant scientific results; and science, while partly a national activity, was also a trans-national one. John Franklin's last expedition, made famous by disaster, had, typically, been largely motivated by scientific curiosity; the resolution of geomagnetic questions loomed large in Franklin's instructions.

The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray (1666–1736), ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), ‘the electrical fluid is no local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’.

Bernard Norton's research concentrated on the Biometrical school of Darwinism and the social implications of the hereditarian ideas that began to gain popularity in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In this article I want to look at the previous generation of evolutionists, the evolutionary morphologists against whom the Biometricians (and their great rivals, the early Mendelians) were reacting. Despite the prominence of evolutionary morphology in the post-Darwinian era, comparatively little historical work has been done on it. In helping to fill this gap, I hope to honour Bernard Norton's memory by throwing light on a movement that forms a conceptual bridge linking the original Darwinian debate to the Biometrical – Mendelian controversy. I shall also argue that evolutionary morphology had ideological overtones that helped to shape the cultural environment within which the eugenics movement would emerge. Although originally a product of the Victorian faith in progress, evolutionary morphology seemed to confirm that exposure to an unstimulating environment led to degeneration. It thus fuelled the concern over racial degeneration which the supporters of eugenics would seek to allay through the application of their new hereditarian philosophy.

During the nineteenth century an intellectual elite formed in Germany which owed its status primarily to educational qualifications rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. With the ascendency of this elite, which Fritz Ringer has called the German ‘mandarins’, came their acceptance as the spiritual bearers of culture in German life. Politically they controlled the life of the Reichstag and hence were the spokesmen of the nation. As an intellectual elite they fed a diet of German idealistic philosophy to the educational class. The university professors, as the most influential members of this class, spoke for the mandarin elite as a whole; and most cultivated Germans looked to the academicians for their understanding of political and cultural issues. Hence, German academic opinion became a sort of ‘mandarin ideology’.

The attempt to narrow the general discourse of the problem of error and to focus it on the specific problem of experimental error may be approached from different directions. One possibility is to establish a focusing process from the standpoint of history; such an approach requires a careful scrutiny of the history of science with a view to identifying the juncture when the problem of experimental error was properly understood and accounted for. In a study of this kind one would have to examine the evolution of the method of experimentation and related topics so that clear criteria would underlie the analysis.

The nineteenth-century engineering hero Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prominent patent abolitionist in debates about the patent system in Britain. His opposition is usually regarded as principled, that is, based in liberal laissez-faire opposition to monopolies and to the constraints of bureaucracy. Against this it is argued that Brunel's views on patents evolved. As late as 1840, despite lessons about patents from the bad experiences of his father, Brunel could still consider taking out a patent himself, something that a decade later he denied he had ever contemplated. Brunel's engineering persona, his experiences and conduct of engineering practice were the base from which he eventually formulated principled opposition to the patent system. The paper examines his responses to importunate inventors who pestered him with inventions in the 1840s and elucidates how he dealt with the patented inventions of others that he wanted to use in his projects. It is suggested that for Brunel patent abolitionism was in effect a way of doing business before it became a political cause. The case suggests the value of approaching the history of patents and, by implication, of intellectual property more generally, through detailed examination of practices.

To those not engaged in the practice of scientific research, or telling the story of this enterprise, the image of empirical observation may conjure up images of boredom more than anything else. Yet surprisingly, the profoundly uninteresting nature of research to many science workers and readers in history has received little attention. This paper seeks to examine one moment of encroaching boredom: nineteenth-century positional astronomy as practised at leading observatories. Though possibly a coincidence, this new form of astronomical observation arose only a few decades before the English term ‘boredom’, for which the Oxford English Dictionary has no record prior to 1850. Through examining forms of observatory labour and publications, I offer in this paper an example of how boring work and reading helped shape a scientific discipline.