Science / History

Total 134 results found.

Historicizing Humans

Historicizing Humans

Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences
With an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek A number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire’s imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different ...
Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910

Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, ...
Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920

Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920

Ocular Horizons
This book explores the role of vision and the culture of observation in Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles—small, large, past and future—to survey Victorian conceptions of what vision was. He then explores how this Victorian vision influenced ...
James Watt, Chemist

James Watt, Chemist

Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age
In the Victorian era, James Watt became an iconic engineer, but in his own time he was also an influential chemist. Miller examines Watt’s illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt’s conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings. Part I ...
Science in an Extreme Environment

Science in an Extreme Environment

The 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition
On February 20, 1963, a team of nineteen Americans embarked on the first expedition that would combine high-altitude climbing with scientific research. The primary objective of the six scientists on the team—who procured funding by appealing to the military and political applications of their work—was to study how severe stress ...
Domesticating Electricity

Domesticating Electricity

Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914
This is an innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. Gooday shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain. The rapid take-up of electrical light and domestic appliances on both sides of the Atlantic had a ...
Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880

Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880

How did the brewing of beer become a scientific process? Sumner explores this question by charting the theory and practice of the trade in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From an oral culture derived from home-based skills, brewing industrialized rapidly and developed an extensive trade literature, ...
The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 3

The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 3

The Correspondence, January 1850–December 1852
As this volume begins, John Tyndall was a PhD student living in Marburg. He was unknown, almost broke, and working himself to the brink of mental and physical exhaustion in his determination to forge a reputation in science. In the period covered by this volume, he completed his degree, published ...
Science Museums in Transition

Science Museums in Transition

Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay ...
Engineering the Environment

Engineering the Environment

Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War
Promising an end to global hunger and political instability, huge climate-controlled laboratories known as phytotrons spread around the world to thirty countries after the Second World War. The United States built nearly a dozen, including the first at Caltech in 1949. Made possible by computers and other novel greenhouse technologies of ...
Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910

Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910

From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human ...
The Life Organic

The Life Organic

The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics
As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik Peterson tells the forgotten story of the ...
Field Life

Field Life

Science in the American West during the Railroad Era
Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes ...
When They Hid the Fire

When They Hid the Fire

A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America
When They Hid the Fire examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology that were adopted between the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, Daniel French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form ...
Communicating Physics

Communicating Physics

The Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887
The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot’s books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence ...

Total 134 results found.