Some of the drawings of the Villard de Honnecourt's manuscript—of which Lassus and Willis gave the first comprehensive editions in the middle of the nineteenth Century—are little technical sketches whose captions do not always make clear the processes that they are intended to explain.

For French chemistry the early 1770's were lively years of discovery and controversy. Two neglected areas of research were opened up in 1772 with the publication of the Digressions académiques by Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and with the first knowledge of later British pneumatic chemistry. Guyton's book established the general fact of weight-gain in metals upon calcination, thereby raising the problem of reconciling this gain with simultaneous loss of phlogiston. The spread of pneumatic chemistry, which proceeded rapidly in 1773, stimulated a renewed interest in the nature of air and its part in chemical composition. It was, of course, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier who perceived a relationship between these two developments—one which he believed would revolutionize the current understanding of chemical processes. In 1772 Lavoisier began the series of investigations which culminated in his Opuscules physiques et chimiques (1774), in which he demonstrated that weight-gain in both calcination and combustion is correlated with absorption of an equal weight of air.

A great deal has been written concerning the impact of new technology on traditional publishing processes, leading to new forms of electronic publishing. Much less thought has been given to the effects of computerization on archival material. Yet, increasingly, records previously held in hard-copy form are being stored and handled electronically; this is particularly true of information in the scientific/technological/industrial area. In coming years, this will affect the work both of the archivist and of the historian seeking to use these records. It makes sense to try and anticipate the problems that computerization may create.

The periodical History of Science opened auspiciously in 1962 with an article by L. Pearce Williams on ‘The physical sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century: problems and sources’. He criticized the nearly exclusive reliance on printed sources then quite common in studies of Victorian science, concluded that much remained to be discovered and closed his paper with these words: What papers exist in private hands can only be guessed. I know of a trunk in an attic containing unpublished letters from Darwin, Huxley, Kolbe, Pasteur and a host of others. They are, unfortunately, not available to the scholar and there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of such boxes scattered through America and Europe. As they are discovered, catalogued and made available to scholars, the shape of nineteenth-century science will gradually lose its blurred outlines and the origins of modern science will become clear.

Nuclear history always compels. Scholars (and readers) can immerse themselves in the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb and its successor weapons, the tantalizing prospect of carbon-free energy, or the study of a natural phenomenon deeply at odds with our everyday experience of the world. There is thus always something profound at stake when we write nuclear history – be it physical, economic or intellectual. And while it may seem that the end of the Cold War should have diminished the academic attention accorded to the subject, it actually just allowed the historiography to evolve. To the wealth of technical and political studies that once dominated nuclear history, we can now add a host of excellent cultural, environmental, literary and transnational studies. Those of us who entered the field shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union have been able to follow these developments first-hand, from the initial uncertainty of where nuclear history would go without its original raison d’être to seeing the possibilities opened up in a post-Cold War world. The books under review here provide important and timely additions to this historiography. Luis A. Campos's Radium and the Secret Life provides a rigorous and compelling account of the uses of radium in early twentieth-century biology; Timothy J. Jorgensen's Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation offers an accessible and illuminating analysis of the benefits and risks of radiation. The books also make for a fascinating juxtaposition. They complement each other well, but also contain some intriguing differences that allow us to reflect on the nature of nuclear history in the early twenty-first century.

Some of the early superstitious beliefs concerning communication by means of magnets are mentioned.

Some of the suggested ‘static telegraphs’ are described, together with the reasons for their failure. An account is given of the rise of the use of the electric current in the telegraph by continental workers early in the nineteenth century, and the manner in which this method became known in England. The work of Cooke and Wheatstone is briefly outlined, and the assistance given to the English workers by Joseph Henry.

The development of the American telegraph in the hands of Morse is reviewed, and the similarity of the difficulties experienced by Morse and by Cooke. The origin of the relay is examined.

The commercial success of the telegraph was largely due to the several needs it fulfilled, and the uses of the telegraph are enumerated.

Submarine telegraphs and especially the Atlantic telegraph are described together with the mechanical and electrical difficulties associated with long distance telegraphy through cables. In this connection the work of William Thomson is very briefly reviewed.

The growth of the telephone out of the telegraph at the hands of Bell in America is described, and is shown to be achieved as a result of the synthesis of Bell's knowledge of physiology and of electricity. The paper concludes with a statement of the commercial success of Bell's telephone.

A recently published book, James Prescott Joule and the concept of energy, by H. J. Steffens, includes a chapter entitled ‘Conjectures on J. R. Mayer and J. P. Joule’. In it the author raises an intriguing possibility.