Graeme Gooday

Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain

The appearance and proliferation of physics laboratories in the academic institutions of Britain between 1865 and 1885 is an established feature of Victorian science. However, neither of the two existing modern accounts of this development have adequately documented the predominant function of these early physics laboratories as centres for the teaching of physics, characteristically stressing instead the exceptional cases of the research laboratories at Glasgow and Cambridge. Hence these accounts have attempted to explain, somewhat misleadingly, the genesis of these laboratories purely by reference to the stimuli of professionalized research programmes, instead of considering the contemporary growth in demand for the professional laboratory teaching of physics. In failing to consider such physics laboratories in terms of the political economy of British education, these accounts have also failed a fortiori to correlate this development with the contemporaneous extension of laboratory teaching methods to other scientific disciplines, a movement dubbed as a laboratory ‘revolution’ by later nineteenth-century commentators.

Does Science Education Need the History of Science

This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general public at a time when debates over “intelligent design” are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate.

Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science

This essay presents an alternative to interpretations of laboratories as institutions for controlled investigation of nature that are either placeless or “set apart.” It historicizes the claim by showing how the meaning of “laboratory” has both changed and diversified over the last two centuries. Originally a laboratory could be a site of organic growth or material manufacture, but it can now be a specialized domain for technological development, educational training, or quality testing. The essay then introduces some contingencies of geography and gender by showing how boundaries between laboratories and other spaces—especially domestic kitchens—could be permeable or nonexistent; importantly, some spaces served as experimental laboratories without ever being designated as such. A key corollary, however, is that there were limits to this permeability: not all social spaces could be turned consensually into laboratories, and laboratory users could be intolerant of certain imported technical cultures.

Re‐writing the ‘book of blots’: Critical reflections on histories of technological ‘failure’

Abstract Although an interest in technological ‘failure’ has become prominent in recent history of technology, historians have not always clearly articulated the presuppositions of attributing ‘failure’ to technology. This paper undertakes a critical examination of two main historiographies of ‘failure’: ‘failure’ as categorization of ‘pathological’ technologies that clearly demarcates them from ‘successes’, and ‘failure’ as a mundane and inevitable prerequisite of subsequent ‘success’. To reconcile these divergent analyses, this paper argues that historians should not treat ‘failure’ as residing in the technology itself. It is rather a matter of imputation according to socially‐embedded criteria of what constitutes success and failure. Accordingly judgements of ‘failure’ are prone to interpretive flexibility in a manner that is not necessarily settled by any process of ‘closure.’ I will argue that any ‘failure’ of technologies should be located in the socio‐technical relations of usage, especially in the...

“Vague and Artificial”: The Historically Elusive Distinction between Pure and Applied Science

This essay argues for the historicity of applied science as a contested category within laissez-faire Victorian British science. This distinctively pre-twentieth-century notion of applied science as a self-sustaining, autonomous enterprise was thrown into relief from the 1880s by a campaign on the part of T. H. Huxley and his followers to promote instead the primacy of “pure” science. Their attempt to relegate applied science to secondary status involved radically reconfiguring it as the mere application of pre-existing pure science. This new notion of extrinsically funded pure science that would produce only contingently future social benefits as a mere by-product came under pressure during World War I, when military priorities focused attention once again on science for immediate utility. This threatened the Cambridge-based promoters of self-referential pure science who collectively published Science and the Nation in 1917. Yet most contributors to this work discussed forms of “applied” science that had no prior “pure” form. Even the U.K.s leading government scientist, Lord Moulton, dismissed the books provocative distinction between pure and applied science as unhelpfully “vague and artificial.”

Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830–1930

This book looks at how hearing loss among adults was experienced, viewed and treated in Britain before the National Health Service. We explore the changing status of ‘hard of hearing’ people during the nineteenth century as categorized among diverse and changing categories of ‘deafness’. Then we explore the advisory literature for managing hearing loss, and techniques for communicating with hearing aids, lip-reading and correspondence networks. From surveying the commercial selling and daily use of hearing aids, we see how adverse developments in eugenics prompted otologists to focus primarily on the prevention of deafness. The final chapter shows how hearing loss among First World War combatants prompted hearing specialists to take a more supportive approach, while it fell to the National Institute for the Deaf, formed in 1924, to defend hard of hearing people against unscrupulous hearing aid vendors. This book is suitable for both academic audiences and the general reading public. All royalties from sale of this book will be given to Action on Hearing Loss and the National Deaf Children’s Society.

Listening in combat – surveillance technologies beyond the visual in the First World War

The arts of combat have long motivated humans to extend the range of, and refine the capacities of, their senses. For centuries, innovations from both military and civilian origins have extended and enhanced those capacities in ever-escalating strategic efforts to secure crucial intelligence both to win battles and win new markets. Much is known about the visual technologies that co-evolved between civilian and military usage: the telescope in the seventeenth century, the observation balloon in the eighteenth century, and the submarine periscope in nineteenth century, extended to trench usage in the First World War. We focus here on the sense of hearing, its technological enhancements, and its interplay with other senses, thereby to explore the sensory interplay of vision and sound in extreme human combat situations. We argue that, both for those at the battle front and those remote from it, the significance of this increased significant of hearing in the early twentieth century cannot be understood without reference to the combat experiences and technological initiatives of the First World War. Our core claim is that the rise of listening cultures of various forms during and after the First World War owed much to the changing technologies, strategies and behaviors, cultivated in the context of military endeavors.

Museums, objects, and historical meaning

Once upon a time, writing the histories of technical artefacts was the preserve of curators and antiquarians. Intellectually ambitious historians of science and technology habitually spilled their ink on such abstract entities such as theories, systems and conceptual revolutions. These were the interpretive foci that kept stories of knowledgemaking in a safely detached terrain for those mid-twentieth scholars disdainful of neo-Marxist agendas of materiality and artisanal skill. Twenty-first century scholars pursuing a more inclusive post-Cold War historiography are no longer obliged, however, to seek out epochal achievement in the elusive stratosphere of ‘pure’ knowledge, allegedly free (somehow) of material constraint or rationale. Instead we have learned to share with museum specialists the importance of interrogating objects as mediators of the many factors that matter so much to the historian of the techno-sciences. Prominent among this field is Lorraine Daston’s project to interpret the material particular as an indispensable part of attaining richer and more inclusive historical understanding. Owing much to scholarship museum studies and material culture studies, her approach to the biographies of things informs much of what we find in Voskuhl’s new book, blending together the material, cultural and social in longue durée perspective. And just as a biographer of a human subject would not linger merely at the joyous moment of conception, such an approach enables us to understand the changing historical significance of artefacts long after the innovation has occurred and its creators are gone – if not always forgotten. Like the two elegant eighteenth century automata that are its subject matter, Androids in the Enlightenment is a carefully honed and dexterously multi-facetted enterprise. Indeed we find here a sophisticated escape from the artificial straitjackets of the mindbody and human–machine dichotomies contrived by Rene Descartes over a century before the rise of mechanical automata at the heart of this volume. Out of ten mechanical android simulacra that we know to have been constructed in the European ‘Enlightenment’, it focuses on the two that survived to be preserved in museums today: the harpsichord playing La musicienne by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz c.1772–1774 now displayed in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and the dulcimerplaying La joueuse de tympanon by David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing c.1785 exhibited in the Musée des arts et métiers-CNAM, Paris. Analysis of these two lady ‘android’ musicians puts into perspective the artificial flautist, tambourine-player and digesting duck more notoriously fabricated several decades earlier by Jacques du Vaucanson (Wood, 2003). Although Vaucanson’s devices attained greater attention and thus celebrity in their own time, Voskuhl’s account privileges instead the less familiar mechanically feminized – and delicately precise – court performers for quite plausible reasons. Not

Communicating with Hearing Loss

This sets up an experiential comparison between the loss of hearing and the loss of vision to show both how they were inter-related through the reliance of many hard of hearing people on vision to conduct communications. This is explored in relation to both the use of lip-reading, often taught by women, and correspondence networks between deaf people, also characteristically suiting the needs of isolated hard of hearing women.

Institutionally Organizing for Hearing Loss

This looks at the organisations set up to advocate the rights of deaf and hard of hearing people in response to eugenic and economic discrimination against them. We focus first on the Deaf and Dumb Times as a forum for the heterogeneous deaf community with hard of hearing journalists articulating the nature of their exploitation and repression. Next we look at how the National Institute for the Deaf in 1924 emerged to a new umbrella role: one key factor was how the First World War changed the perceptions of deafness through new sympathy for combatant hearing loss. This transformed the advocacy of the pre-War organisations into a more unified national approach to defend the needs of hard of hearing people to trustworthy advice and support.