As is widely known, the Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation (1833–36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756–1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. Less widely appreciated is the extent to which the Bridgewater Treatises rank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and ‘celebrity’, resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series ‘encouraged other competitors into the field’, most notably Charles Babbage's unsolicited Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837). As late as 1882 the political economist William Stanley Jevons was intending to write an unofficial Bridgewater Treatise, and even an author of the prominence of Lord Brougham could not escape having his Discourse of Natural Theology (1835) described by Edward Lytton Bulwer as ‘the tenth Bridgewater Treatise’.

It is customary to regard ‘tropical medicine’ as a product of the late nineteenth century, ‘its instrument the microscope, its epistemology the germ theory of disease’. The accepted interpretation is that tropical medicine was a European concept: originating in Britain and France and exported to the colonies by pioneering medical scientists. This interpretation is useful inasmuch as ‘tropical medicine’ as a discipline with its own journals, institutions, qualifications, and an exclusive discourse did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and partly in response to metropolitan imperatives. But the European perspective of existing histories of ‘tropical medicine’ has obscured important developments in the understanding of diseases in the tropics which took place prior to 1890; most of which occurred in the colonies themselves – and especially in India. In order to distinguish this body of knowledge from its later, institutional incarnation, it will be referred to here as ‘tropical hygiene’: the term most commonly used by medical men in India until the 1890s.

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote a short story based upon the life of Eleanor Ormerod. A wealthy spinster, Ormerod achieved notoriety in late nineteenth-century Britain as an economic entomologist. In 1904, Nature compared her to Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. In terms of recent scholarship devoted to the history of women in science, Ormerod's career differed markedly from that of her two predecessors. The emotional or intellectual support of a brother, husband, father, or male family relation made no considerable contribution to her commitment to the study of entomology. Furthermore, her life as an independent spinster offered no positive proof for Francis Power Cobbe's dictum: as she aged, Eleanor Ormerod showed no tendency to become a ‘women's rights woman’. She publicly accepted or internalized the dominant, masculine ideology of science; and by contemporary standards, she achieved success.

Until late in the nineteenth century, madder was the most popular natural red dye. Holland was the largest and best-known supplier. As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the province of Zeeland and adjoining parts of the provinces of South Holland and Brabant developed into important producers. In the course of the seventeenth century these areas even succeeded in acquiring a monopoly position. Early in the nineteenth century, however, this position came under attack because France had gone over to industrial production methods from around 1800, whereas Holland continued to produce with craft technologies. After 1820, as a result, a period of stagnation and decay set in. The fate of the Dutch madder industry would have been completely sealed if the production capacity of the French factories had been sufficiently large to satisfy the great increase in demand. Consequently, in Holland, after 1845, a process of revival based upon the French manufacturing methods began slowly and hesitatingly. This process started too late and was not persevered with sufficiently to regain lost markets. The Dutch producers remained strongly attached to their own out-dated, craft methods of production.

In what follows I use the term ‘academic engineering’ to describe the teaching of engineering within a university or college of higher education: specifically, this differentiates an institutional teaching framework from the broader assimilation of engineering working practices in nineteenth-century Britain by the then standard method of apprenticeship or pupillage, and from the practice of engineering as a profession. The growth of academic engineering, both in terms of student numbers and the variety of courses, profoundly influenced the structure of what we might call ‘practical engineering’, the status of engineering as a profession searching for recognition within society, and the corporate relationship between engineers and places of higher education. These are issues which I will only touch on here.

Over forty years after the foundations of the special theory of relativity had been securely laid, a heated debate, beginning in 1965, about the correct formulation of relativistic thermodynamics raged in the physics literature. Prior to 1965, relativistic thermodynamics was considered one of the most secure relativistic theories and one of the most simple and elegant examples of relativization in physics. It is, as its name apparently suggests, the result of the application of the special theory of relativity to thermodynamics. The basic assumption is that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are Lorentz-invariant, and, as a result, a set of Lorentz transformations is derived from thermodynamic magnitudes, such as heat and temperature.

Since the eighteenth century chemistry has been deemed to be useful, yet how it might find widespread application, particularly in the case of its most advanced developments, was generally unclear. The discovery of synthetic dyestuffs has often been considered as the turning point towards much closer linkage between chemistry and the manufacture of useful products. How this occurred can best be seen in the case of August Wilhelm Hofmann, who for two decades after 1845 was director of the Royal College of Chemistry in London. As the teacher of many pioneers of the dye industry, Hofmann can be considered its first scientific leader. Indeed, the compounds he studied from 1860 were products made in the factories of his former students and assistants. They in turn were the first to recognize Hofmann's role in stimulating the practical application of science. Henry Armstrong, the chemist and educator, went so far as to imply that this was germane to Hofmann's pedagogic and research strategies: ‘it is clear that the influence he exercised in introducing scientific method into industry was in no sense accidental, but the considered expression of innate convictions’. These convictions were also encouraged by the need to attract funds from industrial sponsors for the Royal College of Chemistry, and they charged the rhetoric that served to enhance Hofmann's ambition and the discipline of chemistry before international audiences.

The Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the post-war nuclear arms race with fission and fusion bombs have been the subject of many discussions and historical studies. In fact, these subjects, and the way in which they were generally dealt with, have led to retrospective distortion with respect to the spectrum of ‘atomic’ weapons discussed and explored during the wartime Manhattan Project and immediately after the Second World War. Specifically, it has made observers of the cold war's early nuclear arms race overlook the fact that the military use of radioactive reactor fission products in so-called radiological warfare weapons, was a very real possibility at the time, both for the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the military, as well as for relative outsiders and the general public. Thus, for many observers it came as something of a surprise when the United States in 1976 introduced radiological weapons as an issue of UN arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

A resurgence of interest has occurred in ‘Newton's method of approximation’ for deriving the roots of equations, as its repetitive and mechanical character permits ready computer use. If x = α is an approximate root of the equation f(x) = 0, then the method will in most cases give a better approximation as

where f′(x) is the derivative of the function into which α has been substituted. Older books sometimes called it ‘the Newton–Raphson method’, although the method was invented essentially in the above form by Thomas Simpson, who published his account of the method in 1740. However, as if through a time-warp, this invention has migrated back in time and is now matter-of-factly placed by historians in Newton's De analysi of 1669. This paper will describe the steps of this curious historical transposition, and speculate as to its cause.

Historians are invariably wiser after the event. Their approaches to the subject of this paper, the Société La Fuchsine, make no exceptions to this rule. That company was formed in December 1863 with the participation of the Crédit Lyonnais bank to exploit the patent monopoly on the synthetic dyestuff known as fuchsine, and its derivatives, of the Lyons firm of Renard frères et Franc. No one could have foreseen that before the close of the decade this whole adventure would end in utter failure. In the eyes of contemporaries La Fuchsine was one of the most impressive and awe-inspiring firms of the European dyestuffs industry in the 1860s. Yet by 1868 La Fuchsine was virtually bankrupt, although it dragged out its legal existence until 1875. However, in every other sense it was already dead well before that date.

In his recent study of the Sandemanian religious beliefs of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Geoffrey Cantor points out that relatively little is known of Faraday's early life. Yet Cantor, like many biographers and authors, believes that the early life of an individual is important and needs to be studied carefully to develop a full and rounded account of the subject. The problem with Faraday is that not much was noted down at the time since his father came from the artisan class, being a Sandemanian blacksmith from north-west England who had moved to London in early 1791. When a person dies at a great age there is always a problem about finding out about their early life, views and friendships. This is especially difficult if their social background is particularly humble or if they do not write an autobiography. Furthermore those who knew them when they were young are either dead, or at an advanced age where their memory may have become faulty. This circumstance can lead to anecdotal stories, without much basis, becoming enshrined uncritically in the literature. The life of Faraday provides many examples of this.

The rise of the synthetic dye industry was based on exciting discoveries of nineteenth-century chemists. They prepared in their laboratories, from components of coal tar, coloured substances with potentially promising dyeing properties. However, this was only part of the story.