Fireworks and color in the sixteenth and seventeenth century

It has commonly been assumed that there were no colors in fireworks prior to the early nineteenth century. This essay argues that there were a variety of color recipes in early modern manuals on fireworks, though the nature and value of color in displays differed quite significantly from later periods. Color was used in pyrotechny in production practices, and carried alchemical, medical and other associations. Colored fire was not the principal or exclusive location of color in early modern displays which gave much weight to colorfully painted scenery, decorations and costumes. That modern authors place so much emphasis on colored fire is due to the promotion of color in pyrotechny by writers working in the age of the Chemical Revolution

Disciplinary culture: artillery, sound, and science in Woolwich, 1800–1850

The rise of military music around 1800 offers a suggestive context in which to examine the connections between science, music, and the military. Olinthus Gregory was representative of a community of reform-minded mathematicians and astronomers who sought to introduce greater precision and more mathematics into science, applying mathematical calculation to music and the sciences. His proposal to regulate tempo with a pendulum followed what was no doubt a familiar sight for him at the Woolwich Arsenal—the use of the pendulum by the drum-major to regulate marching music. Indeed, a number of such projects converged on Woolwich, an experimental space where new scientific and musical regimes emerged. The “calculating eye” secured authority by presenting science as objective and freed of emotions, but music's ability to evoke emotions was powerful. Thus, while music was a resource for the exact science promoted at the Arsenal, it could also threaten it

Voyages of maintenance: Exploration, infrastructure, and modernity on the Krusenstern–Lisianskii circumnavigation between Russia and Japan from 1803 to 1806

Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803–7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure and repair work in enabling a voyage of exploration, and reveals the tensions and debates that considerations of maintenance evoked among ships’ officers, crews, and the peoples they encountered

Food, Thrift, and Experiment in Early Modern England

This essay uses the framework of “thrifty science” to highlight commonalities between two early modern endeavours that seem distinct today – experimental science and cookery. Comparing Isaac Newton’s experiments on light using glass prisms with Anne Shackleford’s recipes for fruitcakes I argue that for early moderns the culture of domestic thrift united the two enterprises more than we might imagine. Thrift and frugality were values of “oeconomy” or household management and encouraged householders to diversify the uses of things, a motive for experimentation across various endeavours, including what came to be defined as cookery and natural philosophy. While the home was a common ground for diverse experiments, efforts to institutionalise experiment divided it into more distinct forms, prompting a separation of practices that came to seem self-evident later on

Green is the Colour: St. Petersburg's Chemical Laboratories and Competing Visions of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century

Histories of chemistry in eighteenth-century Russia have often ignored or downplayed the scientific character of chemical sites, treating the chemical laboratory of M.V. Lomonosov in St. Petersburg's Imperial Academy of Sciences as the definitive site of Russian chemistry. This essay surveys a variety of Russian medical, military, and academic institutions as chemical sites, and suggests that dividing them up as scientific or non-scientific sites, as Lomonosov sought to, is unhelpful, as many were integrated and engaged in connected enterprises. A case study then shows how the setting of Russian court society provoked competition within the network of Russian chemical sites. Competition led Lomonosov to urge a sharp division of labour between chemical artisanry and chemical science, forging a distinction that historians of Russian chemical sites have often reproduced subsequently

Preserving Nature: Domestic Thrift and Techniques of Conservation in Early Modern England

Against an assumption that conservation practices only became ‘scientific’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay shows how, on the contrary, preservation techniques in early modern England were an inspiration for new forms of scientific inquiry and knowledge. Following the framework of ‘thrifty science’, the essay demonstrates how the thrifty value of making use and extending the life of goods encouraged a variety of preservation practices, which some scholars identified as valuable resources for a new experimental philosophy. In practice, preserving techniques crossed between domestic, experimental and academic sites. Since ‘thrifty science’ included the preservation of human and non-human ‘bodies’, the essay argues that an appreciation of early modern conservation necessitates an interdisciplinary approach

Matter and facts: material culture in the history of science

This chapter explores changing approaches to material culture in the history of science and ways that archaeology and the history of science have served each other in the assessment of historical evidence. Historians have increasingly explored the role of the body, instruments, models, and other materials in the history of science, and use material re-enactments to learn more about past scientific practices. This work offers archaeologists opportunities to better understand archaeological assessments of evidence. Archaeology in turn offers new ways for historians of science to appreciate the material dimension of science and the places where it is practiced

Introduction: rethinking Joseph Banks

Following a series of workshops funded by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the papers in this special issue provide new perspectives on the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Moving beyond a focus on Banks's work with Captain Cook's first voyage of exploration to the Pacific, the papers expand on, while challenging, views of Banks as a ‘centre of calculation’ and all-powerful agent of science and imperialism in Georgian Britain. Banks is shown to have relied on a variety of expert men and women as actors and audiences for botany, operating with more diversified agendas and practices than previous pictures of him have suggested