Cry "Good for history, Cambridge and Saint George"? Essay Review of Mary Jo Nye (Ed.); The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 5. The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

FIRST PARAGRAPH This volume is the third thus far published of The Cambridge history of science, planned in eight parts over the last decade by Cambridge University Press. Noting the incompleteness of George Sarton’s heroic solo endeavour on a comparably magisterial scale (Sarton, 1953–1959), Cambridge general editors David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers adopted a more pragmatic multiple author approach in devising this new series. They devote the four latter volumes to that fertile wonder ‘modern science’, its modernity construed chronologically as the post-1800 era. While Volume 6 encompasses the biological and earth sciences ( Bowler & Pickstone, forthcoming), Volume 7 deals with the social sciences ( Porter & Ross, 2003), and Volume 8 examines the sciences in national and international setting ( Livingstone & Numbers, forthcoming). Lindberg and Numbers thus circumscribe the territory of Volume 5 to be the history of physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics in the Euro-American world. Although this might seem a fairly conventional—even conservative—subject clustering, few historians would have felt undaunted by the heterogeneity of such material, the narrowness of the brief and the long two-century period of coverage. This volume must therefore be judged with sensitivity to the difficulties of leading thirty-seven scholars in diverse specialisms to produce a coherent product, and the sheer impracticability of Sarton’s near-Shakespearean ambitions for unitary drama. Useful comparisons can thus be made with recent works that offer a multi-perspectival view over comparably broad terrain: John Krige and Dominic Pestre’s stimulating and uncomplacent Science in the twentieth century (1997), and the more radically inclusive bibliographical essays in Arne Hessenbruch (Ed.), The reader’s guide to the history of science (Hessenbruch, 2000)

How do different student constituencies (not) learn the history and philosophy of their subject? Case studies from science, technology and medicine

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Why should H.E. teachers concern themselves with how their students do or don’t learn? Much has been said recently about the alleged merits and demerits of ‘student-centred’ learning, especially on the extent to which student autonomy in the learning process is beneficial to their long-term interests. This paper is a not a contribution to that debate. Rather it focuses on how teachers might uphold their conventional educational responsibilities but make their role more effective. Its central thesis is that this role is most effective when treated not so much as the ‘teaching’ of students as the process of helping students to learn. This particular study concerns how university students of science, technology and medicine (STM) can be helped to learn the history and philosophy of their respective subject from practitioners in the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine. But I will not be focussing on those students (sometimes the majority) who have no trouble learning to think in historical and philosophical ways about their subject. They are not the ones who require most help from us. More importantly, I look at those students who—despite the best efforts of their teachers—find the historical or philosophical sensibility to be difficult, repellent, uninteresting, irrelevant, pointless or simply weird. In the worst case scenario such students learn nothing substantial or valuable from classes in the history and philosophy of their subject, and become bored, alienated or hostile to the whole enterprise

Taking apart the roads ahead: user power versus the futurology of IT

How often have futurologists ever succeeded in making accurate global predictions? Bell’s utopian vision of a leisure-laden ‘Post-Industrial’ society now seems hopelessly naive; Fukuyama’s ‘End of history’ thesis was arguably just a fleeting Reaganite delusion about the stabilization of post Cold War politics. Notwithstanding the failure of such widely hailed prophesies, and despite the lack of any well-attested laws about the historical development of information technologies, a brazenly upbeat futurology pervades many debates on new IT. This is most obviously the case in Bill Gates’ recently updated The Road Ahead. To challenge Gates’ prognostications about the future of information technologies, I will argue for the importance of users (vis-à-vis producers) in the social shaping and ‘consumption’ of IT, especially the power of many (if not necessarily all) such users to resist falling into futures that others prescribe for them. I contend that the non-passivity of IT users undermines the cogency of any claims about the inevitability of technological change, and helps to explain why so many past ‘futures’ of IT have never fully materialized

Technology transfer and cultural exchange: Western scientists and engineers encounter late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Engineer was only one of many British and American publications that took an avid interest in the rapid rise of Japan to the status of a fully industrialized imperial power on a par with major European nations. In December 1897 this journal published a photographic montage of "Pioneers of Modem Engineering Education in Japan" (Figure I), showing a selection of the Japanese and Western teachers who had worked to bring about this singular transformation.' The predominance of Japanese figures in this representation is highly significant: it is an acknowledgment by British observers that the industrialization of Japan-the "Britain of the East"-was not a feat accomplished solely by Western experts who transferred their science and technology to passive Japanese recipients. Yet in focusing primarily on native teachers active in Japan after 1880, this image excludes several of the very foreigners who had trained this indigenous workforce in the preceding decade. Rather than attempting to assess the careers of each of the many international experts involved in Western encounters with Japan before and after the Meiji restoration in 1868, we will focus on disaggregating the highly individualized responses of just some of the Englishspeaking characters. In documenting their diverse encounters with Japanese people and technologies, we will look at the complex phenomena of cultural exchange in which they participated, not always without chauvinism or resistance

“A many-sided crystal”: Understanding the manifold legacy of Silvanus Phillips Thompson (1851–1916)

Was Silvanus Phillips Thompson primarily a physicist, electrical engineer, biographer, or teacher? His obituarists could not agree. I argue Thompson was in fact a polymathic generalist who, as a philanthropic Quaker, worked not to promote his own expertise but rather to ensure the public was swiftly informed of the most important techno-scientific research and applications of his contemporaries. I illustrate this in a comparison of Thompson and his longer-lived friend Oliver Lodge: working in closely-related areas, they had contrasting profiles and commitments. After inspecting Thompson's work as textbook author and bibliophile, I resolve his apparently paradoxical status as both radical critic and figurehead of multiple institutions. Finally, to flesh out his friends' representation of him as a “many-sided crystal,” I analyse Thompson's multi-facetted posthumous reputation, especially in reviews of the Life and Letters written by his widow Jane and daughter Helen exactly 100 years ago

Silvanus Phillips Thompson (1851–1916): An introduction to the spotlight section

The extraordinary career of the British Quaker polymath, Silvanus Phillips Thompson (1851–1916), encompassed fame in physics, electrical engineering, mathematics, history of science, educational method, painting, music, textbooks, X-rays, popular lectures, the promotion of women's rights, book-collecting, and not least his leadership in encouraging fellow Quakers to embrace the challenging results of research in the natural sciences. His public-facing career, with a reputation that ranged across Western Europe at least, centred on the sincere yet critical communication of new technical and historical knowledge, in a mastery of four languages. Yet his kaleidoscopic work has not received any sustained historical examination since the Life and Letters produced by his widow Jane and daughter Helen in 1920. The centenary of his death was marked by an interdisciplinary workshop at the Westminster (Quaker) Meeting-House, “‘A Many-sided Crystal’: The Quaker Physicist and Electrical Engineer Silvanus Phillips Thompson” on September 16, 2016. This spotlight section of Centaurus captures four of the revised contributions to that event, and these cover Thompson's contributions to historical theory, biographical practice, and commercial technology, as just a few elements of the rich and complex legacy that emerged posthumously from his multifarious, polymathic talents. These collectively point us to a revised view of Thompson as a pre-First World War European figure who gained his authority not from specialization in a single area of esoteric research, but from a life of public service that integrated the literary arts and historical writing with sciences and engineering, all incorporated within an active Quaker practice. The papers in this collection thus show how Thompson came to be an historian of science with an unprecedented mastery of contemporaneous techno-scientific arts and sophisticated skills in historical-biographical writing, working harmoniously in a secular world with a rigorous yet non-dogmatic faith

Purchase, use and adaptation: interpreting ‘patented’ aids to the deaf in Victorian Britain

Despite the enormous number and variety of hearing devices sold in the nineteenth century, and currently displayed in a variety of museums across the UK and the United States, there has hitherto been no commercially focused study of the business of selling and making them. While this might be because remaining company records are very sparse, another key issue is that such technologies, unlike artificial limbs, do not fall obviously in the domain of disability, nor medicine or communications. Hence they have until recently been under-represented in the historical studies of the Victorian period. We focus on the diverse lived experiences of hard-of-hearing people who did not necessarily identify as (partially) ‘deaf’ but who were nevertheless treated normatively by hearing contemporaries as if relatively deaf. By engaging with their experience of hearing aids to either pass as ‘hearing’ or at least be visibly ‘hard-of-hearing’, our study complements the recent work of Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi on medical encounters with deaf subjects; of Jennifer Esmail on Deaf sign-language culture, and of Mara Mills on USA hearing technologies in the twentieth century

Networks of Power? Rethinking class, gender and entrepreneurship in English electrification, 1880-1924

Traditional energy histories have treated electrification as an inevitability: the assumption has been that making cheap energy supply readily available for the masses required the energy efficiency uniquely attainable by large-scale networked electricity grids. While our account does not question that assumption, such a rationale can only explain the onset of electrification for contexts in which large scale electricity grids are already accessible to all. It cannot explain the earliest phase of electrification: what motivated the take up of electricity before such grids and their attendant economics actually existed to make it affordable and indeed competitive? We focus on the case of England before its National Grid was launched in 1926, a time when such alternatives as coal or its by-product coal-gas offered energy in a form that was cheaper or more convenient than stand-alone electrical installations and highly localised electricity infrastructures. Our initial aim is to survey a range of cultural rather than technocratic reasons for the early take-up of electricity in the 1880s to 1890s, treating it then as a luxury rather than a commonplace utility. In doing so, we return to Thomas Hughes’ seminal Networks of Power (1983) to examine how far the growth of electrical power supply was shaped not just by engineers and politicians that predominate in his account, but by old-money inherited aristocracy that Hughes touches upon only briefly. Specifically we investigate how the nascent electrical industry looked to these powerful wealthy aristocratic technophiles, male and female, to serve as ‘influencers’ to help broaden the appeal of domestic electricity as essential to a desirable life-style of glamorous modernity

Electrifying the country house: taking stories of innovation to new audiences

Could country house museums be indispensable sites for learning about both science as well as history? Given current logistical constraints, would it be worthwhile for school teachers to arrange student visits to such places to learn about STEM subjects? At first sight such epitomes of British heritage do not appear to offer much to such audiences. However, recent research shows that some country houses were once key sites of technological innovation, especially in the Victorian invention of electric lighting. Our collaborative work with staff at Cragside, Lotherton Hall and Standen demonstrates their capacity and enthusiasm to use such insights to present more STEM-related content to visitors within the context of their existing historical offers. Drawing on the results of an AHRC-funded impact and engagement project, we show how co-produced stories of household electrification can supply fresh inter-disciplinary ways of engaging STEM audiences with the historic country house