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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 287 of 680

The Morals of Measurement
  • Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice
  • G. J. N. Gooday
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004
  • The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialization of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanized practice. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on the metrological standards used in measurement, this book shows the central importance of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour. Alongside ambiguities about the very nature of measurement and the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in generating error-free numbers, the book also addresses controversies over the changing identity of the measurer through the themes of body, gender and authorship. The reader will gain fresh insights into a period when measurement was widely treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.

  • Giving wings to logic: Mary Everest Boole's propagation and fulfilment of a legacy

  • K. G. VALENTE
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 43 / Issue 1 / March 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 November 2009, pp. 49-74
    Print publication:
    March 2010
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  • In his influential Laws of Thought (1854), the mathematician George Boole presented a formulation of logic using algebraic expressions and manipulations. His widow, Mary Everest Boole, undertook an ambitious project of disseminating his ideas by introducing lay audiences to the law of pulsation, a prescription for correct reasoning that incorporates two of his fundamental insights. Contemporary scholarship presents a fragmented picture of Mary Boole, regarding her largely as a source of information on the religio-psychological impetus for her husband's contributions to logic, among other matters. Some studies rightly acknowledge that her better-known commentary on educational reform relates to a promotion of the Laws of Thought, yet these typically fail to expand on how she articulated such relationships for readers. This paper provides a more complete understanding of her efforts by examining texts on various subjects motivated by a dedication to propagating as much as fulfilling the intellectual legacy she associated with her husband. In doing so it considers her interventions – like those undertaken by other Victorian women who sought to cultivate scientific enterprises – within a contextual framework broad enough to include strategic responses to cultural realities and possibilities.

Page 287 of 680