The discovery and publication, in the first half of the twentieth century, of Isaac Beeckman's Journal made it possible to understand the role played by Beeckman in the development of the new ‘mechanistic’ physics, of which the principal actors were already well-known: Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes. In this context, Beeckman was first perceived as the missing piece in an already fully-formed puzzle, one in which he simply had to be fitted, with perhaps some rounding off at the edges where the new piece failed to fit perfectly into the space allocated for it. Since then, studies more specifically centred on Beeckman – including Klaas van Berkel's eminent and pioneering work – have made it possible to better understand the particularities of Beeckman's ‘mathematico-physical’ philosophy without measuring him against the standards of this ‘greater picture’ in which his philosophy had haphazardly been integrated, as was done previously.

A third step, which I aim to sketch here, might involve trying to understand how Beeckman's original philosophy was created by situating itself into a fabric of local relationships, through intensive and ongoing exchanges on specific well-defined questions that bore not so much on the great scientific discoveries of Galileo Galilei or Johannes Kepler, but on what made these discoveries possible in the first place.

No historian of science has contributed more to the study of Isaac Beeckman than Cornelis de Waard, the somewhat reclusive teacher of mathematics and physics from the city of Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Before 1905, the year in which De Waard rediscovered Beeckman's long-lost scientific notebook, the latter, a schoolmaster from Dordrecht, was just a shadowy figure in the margins of the study of Descartes, both in France and elsewhere. Through Adrien Baillet's biography of Descartes (1691), scholars knew that Beeckman was in some way involved in the maturing of Descartes’ ideas, but little else was known. After 1905, however, Beeckman gradually became better known to historians of science and philosophy. Certainly after De Waard's masterful edition of the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 in 1939-1953, it was possible to reconstruct Beeckman's own ideas about nature and its mechanisms, to study his dealings with Descartes and others, and to assess how he fits into what came to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

De Waard's edition of the Journal was a major contribution to the history of science, but, as we know, every edited publication is in some ways a distortion, and the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 is no exception. Every editor has to make choices about what to include and what not, how to arrange the material, and how to proceed with the annotation.

Introduction: Beeckman and the Zilsel Thesis

Isaac Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar. He was trained by his father as a candle maker and a constructor of waterworks, but he also studied philosophy, mathematics, theology and medicine. This mixed education seems to be the key to Beeckman's innovative attitude towards the study of nature. In his 2013 monograph on Beeckman his biographer Klaas van Berkel claims that this early modern researcher ‘was the first to devise a completely mechanical philosophy of nature, and thus introduced an approach that would become a cornerstone of the new science’. Van Berkel even goes further to stipulate that ‘Beeckman played a crucial but not always recognized role in the early stage of the Scientific Revolution’, even in such a way that Beeckman could be seen as ‘the missing link between artisanal knowledge and mathematical science’. With this latter statement Van Berkel refers to the thesis formulated in 1942 by Edgar Zilsel, namely that the new science emerged from the empirical work of artisans and from the interaction between craftsmen and scholars. Hands-on knowledge of materials and craftsmanship, combined with theoretical academic knowledge, or, succinctly put, ‘the union of hand and mind’, had resulted in the empirical and experimental methodology that formed the core of the new science of the seventeenth century.

In 1634, the Polish naturalist Jon Jonston (1603-1675) complained to the London-based intelligencer from Elbląg, Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662), that ‘the rector of Dordrecht Beeckman has something like a thousand experiments and sounds like a great philosopher, but he is morose and incommunicative’. Indeed, the only text that Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) published during his lifetime was his 1618 dissertation for a medical degree at Caen. This survives in only a single, incomplete imprint. Beeckman kept his extraordinary body of scientific work confined to his manuscript daily notes, the Loci communes. Yet, in Hartlib's next and only other discussion of Beeckman in his own copious daily notes, the Ephemerides, Hartlib noted Beeckman's desire to establish a ‘college of inventions’, hardly the mark of an incommunicative individual. How might we square Hartlib's two remarks and make sense of Beeckman's communicative strategies?

In his chapter in this volume, Arjan van Dixhoorn argues that Beeckman should be understood through the lens of a very long-standing culture centred on sociable communication: the consten-culture of the chambers of rhetoric, which prized joking, ingenuity, and cognitive exercises through engagement with the liberal arts. Van Dixhoorn argues that through the consten-culture, ‘explicit, bookish, academic, theoretical learning and tacit, bodily, artisanal, practical, experience-oriented knowledge had already been “interpenetrating” for two centuries’. Van Dixhoorn's criticisms of a misleading dichotomy between artisanal and textual approaches and identities are well taken. However, waves of emigration cutting across national and linguistic boundaries brought varied and sometimes competing forms of knowledge into conversation and spurred dynamic experiments in how to communicate and collaborate. Beeckman's ‘college of inventions’, which he called the Collegium Mechanicum, was one such experiment that distinguished itself from already extant forms of sociability, such as the joyful companies gathered by chambers of rhetoric.

Isaac Beeckman included around 240 images of his own making in his Journal. In addition, there are some musical scores and images taken from books studied or referred to by Beeckman and inserted in the Journal by its editor, Cornelis de Waard. In itself, the number of 240 images is not excessively high. The printed Journal has some 1,270 pages, so, on average, there is an image on every fifth page of the book. Nevertheless, it is a substantial number, and it is therefore strange that Beeckman's images have not been the subject of scholarly study before. All the more so since we know that Beeckman himself had a strong preference for Anschaulichkeit (picturability), both in the context of discovery and in the context of the dissemination of natural philosophical ideas. Beeckman only accepted explanations that could be represented by a real or mental image. Until the 1980s, historians of science in general were inclined to overlook the presence of images in texts and manuscripts. Since then, however, the importance of these visual tools has become widely recognized. It is therefore about time to ask what kind of images Beeckman used in his notebook, what these images were used for and, most importantly of all, what they tell us about the development of his mechanical philosophy. I will argue that these images are not merely illustrations of the text, but form an integral part of the argument that Beeckman wishes to make.

Isaac Beeckman has paid much attention to music all his life, and it seems likely that the seed for this fascination was laid during his youth. Middelburg appears to have had a lively musical culture in Beeckman's times; yet, it has never been mapped out. This essay aims to give an impression of a number of aspects related to music in Beeckman's hometown and its environment, and in doing so, to sketch a background that may have influenced Beeckman in his earlier years.

Although it is difficult to determine with certainty to what extent Beeckman possessed musical talent, the many remarks related to music in his Journal reveal a profound interest that is beyond any doubt. Beeckman does not discuss polyphonic music from the Renaissance in his Journal. By contrast, much attention is paid to Genevan Psalms, in particular relating to questions of modality, intonation, the practice and notation of leading tones (musica ficta), correct harmonization, etc. Born in 1588 in the Reformed milieu of a city in which many Protestants had settled down after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, this cannot come as a surprise. The explicit presence of keyboard instruments (organs, harpsichords) and bells (the introduction of the carillon) in Middelburg as well as the tuning of keyboard instruments seem to have aroused Beeckman's serious interest: he discusses matters of tuning (and the differences between organs and harpsichords related to this) rather in depth. The ‘floating’ of a pitch which is out of tune (against a properly tuned tone) is described by him with a fine term, wywauwen – in Dutch serving as an onomatopoeic word.

In 1905, the discovery of the so-called Journal of Isaac Beeckman was a major event in the small community of historians of science in Europe. The manuscript not only contained precious information about Beeckman's meeting with René Descartes in 1618 and their collaboration in deriving the law of falling bodies, but also copies of some unknown letters by Descartes to Beeckman, and an abundance of notes concerning various topics that were of interest to historians of the early modern period, such as the invention of the telescope, the principle of the conservation of movement, the refraction of light, the concept of air pressure and the corpuscular theory of matter in general. Although Beeckman had not been completely unknown before, from this point on his name became firmly entrenched in the grand narrative of what was soon to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his famous book The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (first published in 1949), Herbert Butterfield refers to Beeckman as ‘a man who stimulated others to take an interest in important problems and initiated a number of ideas’, though without specifying what these ideas were. In The Mechanization of the World Picture (English translation 1961), E.J. Dijksterhuis devoted no less than five pages to Beeckman's work, focusing on his work, with Descartes, on the law of free-falling bodies. In the same vein, John Henry in his slim volume The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (second edition, 2002) pointed to Beeckman in the context of the mathematization of natural philosophy. Isaac Beeckman, he says, ‘set an impressive example of how to use mathematics in physics’. In his more recent The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (2015), David Wooton also mentions Beeckman regularly.

Nonetheless, even though it would be incorrect to say that Beeckman has been neglected since his notebook was discovered more than a century ago, it is true that to this day the enormous richness of the Journal has not been fully exploited. Like Butterfield, Dijksterhuis only hints at the wealth of interesting topics discussed in Beeckman's notes by saying that although he did not publish his findings, Beeckman's ideas in his Journal are to be valued because they give the reader ‘some notion of the scientific thought of a gifted man of the early seventeenth century’.

INTRODUCTION

THE CONCEPT OF a formalized industrial education began to develop in Japan with the establishment of the Ministry of Public Works (Kōbushō) in 1870 (Meiji 3). It was part of the government policy aiming at the advancement of industrialization, and developing Japan into a modern nation comparable to the countries of Western Europe.

The government started its efforts to promote top-level technical education by hiring foreign teachers to train senior engineers. This led to the foundation of the Imperial College of Engineering (Kōgaku-ryō, Kōbu-dai-gakkō, ICE) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works. Teaching began in 1873 and aimed at introducing modern industrial technology, which was ‘unprecedented in Japan’. The training of senior engineers at ICE achieved its first results from around 1880, when students educated at the school graduated as engineers and teachers. In response to this, officials of the Ministry of Education (Monbushō), who had until then focused mainly on general education, gradually recognized the need to train intermediate-level engineers, as well as the need for institutions for secondary industrial education. Several officials undertook concrete measures to systematize such technical education.

The expansion of industrial education downward from the education of senior engineers to the training of intermediate-level engineers reflects the rise of modern industry and the establishment of a capitalist society in Japan, centred on the policy of industrial development. The education policy was not only geared towards the expansion and maintenance of technical education institutions, but reflects a strong awareness of the need for a continuous technical education that should already start below the level of higher technical education. In other words, a consistent hierarchy for the training of engineers was envisioned to meet the needs of industry, comprising the training of senior engineers, intermediate-level engineers such as foremen (shokkōchō) and managers of manufacturing facilities (kōjō keieisha), as well as lower-level technical workers and craftsmen (shokkō). It was regarded as an urgent task to spread this message widely in society and train many industrial engineers. This was partly successful, as the historian Ishizuka Hiromichi confirms:

THE TERM ‘BOOK learning’ is often used derisively to describe knowledge that, while scholarly, is impractical. The well-known nineteenth-century British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), for example, lampooned what he considered a French over-reliance on books for training engineers, advising his apprentices that ‘a few hours spent in a blacksmiths and wheelwrights’ shop will teach you more practical mechanics’. There is a tendency to see the written word as the province of scholars, and embodied skills as the realm of the artisan. However, certainly in the case of early modern Japan, this would be to disregard the diverse types of publications produced by artisans, as well as the practical endeavours of the scholarly classes. Increasingly, attention is being paid to the ways in which practical knowledge is circulated in print. However, qua books – as material objects – technical manuals can also tell us much about the nature of the communities that use them. This exploration of translated technical manuals in nineteenth century Japan therefore adopts a ‘visual’ approach that highlights the materiality of these objects. This approach reveals facets of the technical community in Japan, such as how professional identities emerged and changed over time, the role of print in establishing professional authority, and the role of language in shaping professional identity.

The increasing appearance of foreign ships in Japanese coastal waters from the late eighteenth century was a catalyst for the study of new languages, including French, Russian, English and Manchu. The shogunate also started hiring translators to work in its Astronomy Bureau (tenmonkata) in Edo. Despite Western military threat being the impetus for this activity, few of the works translated under the auspices of the Astronomy Bureau focused on defence. Indeed, one of the largest projects conducted by the Bureau was a translation of a Dutch work based on Noël Chomel's Family Dictionary, which ultimately resulted in a 102-volume work in Japanese. Many scholars involved in this project also pursued private scholarship. Much of this focused on the history and geography of foreign countries, as well as on military matters, but there was also an interest in production techniques that could be adopted by artisans.

One translator who turned his attention to glassmaking techniques, Baba Sadayoshi (1787–1822), produced Biido seihō shû setsu (A collection of glass production methods) in 1810.

INTRODUCTION

MINING WAS A particularly important industry for the Meiji government that urgently needed to be promoted. This is demonstrated by the efforts of Japanese politicians to advance this field, and the relatively large number of foreign mining engineers whowere invited to Japan after the 1860s to modernize the industry, transfer their scientific knowledge and train miners. Given its great importance, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the establishment of a modern education system for mining engineers and miners in Japan, and its impact on the country's overall development. The topic of ‘mining schools’ (kōzan gakkō), meaning institutions whose curriculum was entirely or to a large part geared to the requirements of mining, is much less prominent in both Japanese and Western publications than other areas of technical education. Even in the book by Fathi Habashi, Schools of Mines, only 16 of the 588 pages deal with Asia. Ten of these pages cover Japan, and contain a few short paragraphs on some prominent foreign mining engineers who were called to the country. While various articles in Japanese deal with individual mines and individuals working in this field, there are as yet few overarching accounts of mining education in Japan. One exception is a relatively short chapter in the volume on mining and metallurgy in the series Nihon kagaku gijutsu-shi taikei, which will be discussed later.

In Europe the intensification of mining and metallurgy associated with the flourishing of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had spurred the foundation of mining schools and mining academies. These played an important role in the development of scientific and technical knowledge far beyond the field of mining.

INTRODUCTION

THE 2019 WEB of Science analysis of ‘highly cited researchers’ (the top 1% most quoted in scientific and scholarly journals in all fields of academic knowledge) includes 192 researchers in the field of engineering. Given the trend of ‘China's rise to the highest levels of research’ the evidence for the field of engineering is no exception: among the 192 researchers most cited in the journals analysed, 64 are based in China. Of the names of all ‘highly cited researchers’ in engineering, 105 (54.6%) are Chinese. As a contrast, this chapter looks back about 150 years to the period when the achievements of modern science and technology were otherwise distributed over the globe and were just being diffused to and adopted in East Asia. Decisive factors for establishing any new science and technology include the transfer of theories and applications, the linguistic encoding of this knowledge, and the institutions that accommodate and promote such innovations. This chapter focuses on the encoding and conceptualization of terms in the early phase of transfer, and it studies the China–Japan axis of what can be conceived of as a triangular relationship between the West (Europe and America), China and Japan.

FROM THE WEST TO CHINA AND JAPAN

The transmission of Western science and technology to China in the early modern and modern periods constitutes a well- studied field of research. Both the study of Jesuit translations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and interest in the translation practices of the mainly Protestant missionary teams of the nineteenth centuries as well as secular specialists have stimulated important monographs and collective volumes.

One of the most intriguing facets in this complex process of transmission is the interaction between China and Japan in the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1890s, the second phase of re-adoption or ‘return loans’ to China of the most central terms of politics and sociology coined in Japan is better known than the first. For instance, the important study by Wolfgang Lippert on the origins of Marxist Chinese terminology showed that sociōpolitical new terms were for the most part translations from the Japanese that had been taken over in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.

Yet the transmission of terms for science and technology between Japan and China also occurred earlier, from the 1840s to the 1890s, but has received less attention.

INTRODUCTION

THE ENGINEER KIKUCHI Kyōzō was born in what is now Yawatahama, Ehime prefecture, on Shikoku island in 1859, and started his studies at the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) at Tōkyō in 1879. After studying on the general course for two years, he opted to specialize in mechanical engineering (kikaika). He graduated in the spring of 1885 with a top-class degree, and made his career in the cotton spinning industry, working with a succession of leading textile companies until his resignation from the board of Dai-Nihon Spinning in 1940. He died twoyears later. Kikuchi was, par excellence, a trained engineer who also became a leading figure in the business world, using his technical expertise as a springboard for wider business involvement. The focus of this chapter is on Kikuchi's role as one of the architects of the development of one of Japan's most important industries in the pre-World War II period. It considers how he acquired his technical knowledge, how he developed that knowledge further, often through trial and error, and how he diffused it to a network of enterprises that included several of Japan's largest businesses.

Much has already been written on the process of technology transfer and the acquisition of technological expertise in Japan's industrial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including by a number of the authors in this volume. It has been powerfully argued that the import and dissemination of new technologies was well supported by social capability, business and information networks, human capital resources and the role of the Japanese state. One of the doyens of the history of technology in Japan, Nakaoka Tetsurō, has argued that latecomer countries such as Japan can only benefit from the advantages of backwardness by engaging in the production of standardized products, while trial and error was of crucial importance in technology transfer in the engineering field.

INTRODUCTION

IN THE WORK of the historian, besides systematic research based on sources, chance often plays a role that should not be underestimated. Many years ago, such a coincidence brought a bundle of source materials into my hands, which very quickly proved to be ground-breaking. These are notes and lecture notes, internship reports and diaries of a young Japanese engineer, named Ōhara Junnosuke. Born into a samurai family five years after the opening of the country by Commodore Perry in 1854, Ōhara in many ways represents the group of early engineers whose education was still rooted in the feudal era, who continued their education through different routes, and who belonged to the first generation to end up with a formalized education at a modern, Western educational institution. His personal papers provide invaluable insights into this process, which bridges the seemingly incompatible systems of traditional education in the Edo period and a modern Western-style technical education.

The following reconstruction of his biography during this transitional phase proves his career to be a typical example of the possibilities and problems at the beginning of the introduction of a technical education in Japan.

How his career unfolded, how the gaps and ruptures between the school of a feudal domain and modern technical higher education at the renowned Kōbu-dai-gakkō were filled, and how he achieved the requirements to graduate from the technical college, are quite characteristic of many careers in the technical sciences at that time.

The questions to be considered in a deeper analysis of Ōhara and his work in this transitional period around the Meiji Restoration are: Who was this man? What do we know about him? Was he famous? What did he learn? How did he study? What achievement can be ascribed to him that is significant enough to be the subject of an academic writing?