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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 175 of 680

Death in Beijing
  • Murder and Forensic Science in Republican China
  • Daniel Asen
  • Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    28 July 2016
  • In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation.

  • Travancore's magnetic crusade: geomagnetism and the geography of scientific production in a princely state

  • JESSICA RATCLIFF
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 49 / Issue 3 / September 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    21 June 2016, pp. 325-352
    Print publication:
    September 2016

  • In 1840 the raja of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, would offer his government's assistance to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its plan for a global system of magnetic observations. Over the next thirty years, the two directors of this princely state's observatory, John Caldecott and John Allan Broun, would pursue fundamental terrestrial magnetic research. Their efforts would culminate in the Trivandrum [Trevandrum] Magnetical Observations (1874). In what follows, the history of this publication is used to shed light on how and why a semi-autonomous princely state such as Travancore would engage the scientific community in Europe at this time. The article focuses in particular on the work of turning observation data into a published report and on how that labour would be distributed between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Because the production of such reports required dozens of hands and decades of labour, its history can reveal much about the concrete working relationship between informal colony and imperial metropole within the British Empire. The Trivandrum Magnetic Observations were produced within a global economy of science in which Travancore sometimes had the upper hand. At the same time, data and scientific productions tended to accumulate in Europe (at least for a time), where ultimately the consumers of scientific products and the arbiters of ‘scientific value’ also largely remained. Within the sprawling economic, political and cultural infrastructures that linked geomagnetic research in Travancore and Europe, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each region would cut in different directions. The history of the production of the Trivandrum Observations brings to light this robustly interconnected geography of scientific production within the British Empire. It also reveals some of the processes by which ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in the sciences were then becoming differentiated.

Dactylography and The Origin of Finger-Printing
  • Henry Faulds, William J. Herschel
  • Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    03 December 2015
    First published in:
    1912
  • The Scottish doctor Henry Faulds (1843–1930) and the English judge Sir William James Herschel (1833–1917) both recognised the potential of fingerprints as a means of identification. While working in Japan, Faulds had developed his methods after noticing impressions on ancient pottery. Herschel, during his service as a magistrate in India, had introduced a system of using fingerprints as a way of preventing fraud. In the course of a lengthy controversy, Faulds sought to be acknowledged for the significance of his discoveries. Although there is no doubt that Faulds was first to publish on the subject, it was Herschel's work, begun in the 1850s, which was later developed by Galton and Henry as the tool of forensic science we know today. Reissued here together, these two works, first published in 1912 and 1916 respectively, are Faulds' overview of the subject and Herschel's account of his work in India.

Page 175 of 680