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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 452 of 680

  • 5 - THE ACADEMICIANS

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 167-202

  • Summary

    The Institute of France may be far more truly said to contain the essence of French science than the Royal Society of London can be said to contain that of Britain.

    (R. Chenevix, Edinburgh Review, 34 (1820), 411.)

    For twenty years…I must plead guilty to living only to deserve the approval of the Academy.

    (Pasteur, in letter of September 1866, Correspondance, vol. 2, p. 281.)

    The more academies are justly famous, the greater the wish to belong to them, and the greater the efforts that people make to reach this goal turns to the advantage of science and to the glory of the human spirit.

    (Arago, Eloge of L. Carnot (1837), M.A.I., 22 (1850), cxvi–cxvii.)

    An intellectual elite

    There is no doubt that the Academy constituted an intellectual elite. In many ways it was also a social elite but this is a different issue and it is best to deal with each aspect in turn. That members constituted an intellectual elite can be demonstrated in several different ways. We could for example, examine a number of case histories of the careers of Academicians. Of course, the First Class of 1795–6 consisted of a substantial core of men who had been members of the previous Royal Academy. They had come up through the old system of promotion from assistant to associate and finally to pensioner. Most had learned a great deal of their craft, so to speak, by ‘apprenticeship’ as junior members of the Royal Academy.

  • 3 - THE FUNCTIONING OF THE ACADEMY: SOME POSSIBLE ROLES

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 91-123

  • Summary

    A crowd of young people come regularly on Mondays to hear memoirs which are read at the Academy; it is a means of keeping in touch with science.

    (Journal des Débats, 19 September 1832.)

    At the [Royal] Academy [of Sciences] one can see many people in a short time

    (Letter from Jean Trembley-Colladon, Paris, 28 November 1786.)

    The Academy has among its members judges, who know how to examine [scientific work] prudently and conscientiously; they are able to reach a decision, to give their approval or to express reservations. Guardian of scientific traditions, …the Academy appears like a superior tribunal.

    (Armand Gautier, C.R., 153 (1911), 1274.)

    The many roles of the Academy

    A good scientific institution fulfils a number of roles. In the first place its very existence should encourage or even provoke the production of new knowledge. Secondly, it should provide some facilities for the production of that knowledge, possibly by giving access to a laboratory or by loaning scientific equipment or by giving grants, although we should beware of too high (and essentially twentieth century) expectations in these areas. Thirdly, it should receive the knowledge produced. This reception of knowledge is possibly the most fundamental aspect of a scientific society. The presentation to members of a well-organised piece of research at one of its regular meetings is surely at the heart of any scientific society. If there is discussion and even criticism, so much the better. But the existence of meetings, at which papers are presented, constitutes the minimum functioning of a society.

  • 9 - AN ACADEMY UNDER GOVERNMENT CONTROL

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 300-330

  • Summary

    The Royal Academy of Sciences will continue to remain under the protection of the King and will receive his orders through the particular Secretary of State, to whom his Majesty assigns the task.

    (Regulations of 1699 from Fontenelle, Histoire du renouvellement de I'Académie des Sciences, my italics.)

    It is by science that we have been vanquished [in the Franco-Prussian war]. The reason for this lies in the regime which has oppressed us for 80 years, a regime which subordinates men of science to politicians and administrators.

    (H. Sainte-Claire Deville, C.R., 72 (1871), 238, my italics.)

    Since the first days of August [1914], our Academy has only had one thought: to help the government in the defence of the motherland and of liberty.

    (Paul Appell, speaking as President of the Academy, C.R., 159 (1914), 824.)

    Government control of the Academy?

    The relationship between the Academy and the government was always a rather delicate one. Although Condorcet had used the expression ‘fonctionnaires publiques’ to describe members of the Institute which he planned, when the National Institute came into being in 1795 its members were not civil servants. Yet in so far as the National Institute was a government-sponsored body, its members obviously had a certain connection with the state, both in fact and in the public mind. They represented ‘official’, that is to say, government-sponsored science in a way the Royal Society never did, being ‘Royal’ in name only.

  • 6 - ELECTIONS: ‘GREEN FEVER’

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 203-241

  • Summary

    Election is the only valid method of creating Academicians.

    (Arago, Eloge of Monge, M.A.I., 24 (1854), lxxx.)

    The influence of an academy depends to a large extent on elections.

    (Darboux, M.A.I., 47 (1904), ccclxvii.)

    The prospect of a place in the Academy is a stimulus, which more than once has encouraged young men of science at the beginning of their career.

    (Journal des Débats, 19 September 1832.)

    Introduction

    The reference to ‘green’ in the title of this chapter is to the dark green embroidery on the black costume of members of the Institute. The ‘fever’ may be more difficult to understand a century later. It refers to the excitement often generated by elections, an excitement which could occasionally reach fever pitch. Of course there were some elections that were hardly contentious, such as those of many correspondents where the names of provincial or foreign candidates were hardly known in the Academy generally and the members had to depend heavily on advice from the relevant section. More passion usually went into elections for full (i.e. resident) membership. Many of the contestants, who had made a practice of presenting their research to the Academy over a period of many years, would be quite well known to members. They would be resident in Paris and be fairly well advanced in their careers.

    Several would be the holder of a position at one or more of the great scientific institutions of the capital, such as the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, or one of the grandes écoles.

  • 7 - REGISTRATION, JUDGEMENT AND REWARD

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 242-278

  • Summary

    It is above all by its Reports that the Academy can exercise great influence over the direction of people's minds in scientific research.

    (A.S., Comité secret, 1845–56, p. 124, 2 April 1849.)

    The Academy has always reserved for itself the right to establish the laws of science … The Academy is … the implacable enemy of theories [unsupported by good experimental evidence].

    (Liebig in private letters to Gerhardt, 1839, 1840, quoted by Schutzenberger, Inauguration du buste de Balard, 1896, pp. 11–12.)

    In the old days savants received pensions; today the Academy awards them prizes; this is surely the most noble and precious privilege of our organisation. It would be of interest to research how this patronage of science, which the Academy exercises and which is so extensive and so useful, has developed over the years.

    (Fremy's speech at Séance publique, 27 December 1875, C.R., 81 (1875), 1285.)

    A registration bureau

    Two of the most important functions of the Academy were to receive and to authenticate new scientific information. In addition the Academy was able to offer a whole range of rewards for good work. We will consider first the Academy's function as a registration bureau. It is useful to have in every advanced country a central agency for the collection of scientific information. The Academy fulfilled this function well and indeed, if it had not existed, it might have been necessary to invent it. That is to say that if there had not existed one elite body of scientists at the centre of scientific communication, there would have been a strong case to establish a government agency, probably staffed by civil servants.

  • 8 - THE PRINTED WORD

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 279-299

  • Summary

    Make of your … [Mémoires] a classical and selected compilation of the best of what you have done, leaving yourselves time for revision and correction. This is a means of assuring its future reputation.

    (Report of Commission of the First Class in 1809, P.V.I., 4, 228.)

    The communication, reading and publication of a paper presented to the Academy is … an affair of the inside of a week, and it is a certainty. … [It is not difficult] to show what a powerful engine the Academy of Sciences is in the production and encouragement of work.

    (Prof. J. Y. Buchanan, F.R.S., Nature, 69 (1903–4) 293.)

    The deficits for the Comptes rendus … have been made good by means of loans made with the authorisation of the Minister from the surplus from the Montyon account. But these loans, too often repeated, will end up by becoming a real abuse.

    (Letter from Academy to Minister of State, 28 October 1861. A.S., Copie de lettres, 1861–74, p. 33.)

    Publication

    In the sixteenth century a major figure like Copernicus could devote a large part of his life to the publication of a single book which expounded his ideas. When in the seventeenth century the first permanent scientific societies were founded, the method of publication through great books gradually came to be supplemented by smaller scale communications. Often written originally in the form of letters, they came to be published as papers or memoirs, possibly describing a series of experiments and suggesting a conclusion.

  • Preface

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp xiii-xvi

  • Summary

    If institutionalised research is to be productive, a fairly wide margin for the autonomy of its practitioners has to be built into the institutions. One of the central problems for scientific establishments financed and controlled by extraneous agencies thus becomes that of the balance between dependence and independence.

    (Norbert Elias, ‘Scientific establishments’ in Sociology of the Sciences, 6 (1982), 4.)

    From science, all statesmen and politicians want are instrumentalities, powers but not power: weapons, techniques, information, communications, and so on. As for scientists, what have they wanted of government? They expressly have not wished to be politicised. They have wanted support in the obvious form of funds, but also in the shape of institutionalisation and in the provision of authority for the legitimation of their community in its existence and in the activities, or in other words for its professional status.

    (Charles C. Gillispie, Science and polity in France at the end of the old regime, Princeton, N.J., 1980, p. 549.)

    Major institutions deserve their histories no less than leading scientists, although the task may take longer and the interpretation may be more complex. Sometimes an individual catches the imagination of the public as if he were science itself, but scientific organisations in the long run may have greater power and influence than any private individual. Scientific organisations have the power to encourage, to constrain and conceivably even to subvert the scientific endeavour. Controlled and financed by governments in modern times, they are sometimes called upon to unleash and direct powerful natural forces.

  • INTRODUCTION

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    The National Institute will be in a way the epitome of the world of learning, the representative body of the republic of letters, the honorable goal of all the ambitions of science and of talent, the most magnificent recompense of great effort and of outstanding success.

    (Daunou, Report to the Convention, 19 October 1795.)

    I have no hesitation in saying, after having recently seen the Academy of Sciences at its weekly labours, that it is the noblest and most effective institution that ever was organised for the promotion of science.

    (Sir David Brewster, Report of 20th meeting of the British Association, Edinburgh, 1850, p. xli.)

    I was not mistaken with respect to the Academy of Sciences and the other academies founded on the same basis; they are bodies depending on the government and functioning by its orders…For thirty years not a single cog in the wheels of the Academy of Sciences has been worn out; it is the same system in operation; it turns around the same axis; the handle of the machine has often been changed but never the spring; it has outlived the downfall of all its masters. It has always … made the sounds required of it, stifling those which did not please it, raising up to the highest place an individual favoured by the government, even if he is an idiot.

    (F. V. Raspail, Nouveau système de chimie organique, 2nd edn, 1838, vol. 1, pp. xxvi–xxvii.)

    The growth of science over the last few centuries has been compared by some critics to the opening of Pandora's box.

  • 1 - SCIENCE IN FRANCE

  • Maurice Crosland, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    Science under Control
    Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    12 March 1992, pp 11-49

  • Summary

    I must…acknowledge that literature, which formerly held the first degree in the scale of the moral riches of this nation, is likely to decline in priority and influence. The sciences have claimed and obtained in the public mind a superiority resulting from the very nature of their object, I mean utility. The title of savant is not more brilliant than formerly, but it is more imposing; it leads to consequence, to superior employments and.…to riches.

    (F. W. Blagdon, Paris as it was and as it is (2 vols., 1803), vol. 1, p. 395.)

    Only imagine, however, a city like Paris, where the cleverest heads of a great kingdom are grouped together in one spot, and in daily association and strife incite and stimulate each other to mutual emulation; where all that is of most value in the kingdoms of nature and art, from every part of the world, is open to inspection; and all this in a city where every bridge and square is associated with some great event of the past, and where every street-corner has a page of history to unfold. And, in addition to all this, not the Paris of a dull and stupid age, but the Paris of the nineteenth century, where for three generations such men as Molière, Voltaire and Diderot have kept up a mass of intellectual power such as can never be met with a second time in any single spot in the whole world.

    (Johann Peter Eckerman, Gespräche mit Goethe (1827), ed. H. Houben, Wiesbaden, 1959, pp. 476–7).

  • Why monopoly failed: the rise and fall of Société La Fuchsine

  • Anthony S. Travis, Willem J. Hornix, Robert Bud, Henk van den Belt
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 25 / Issue 1 / March 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 45-63
    Print publication:
    March 1992

  • Historians are invariably wiser after the event. Their approaches to the subject of this paper, the Société La Fuchsine, make no exceptions to this rule. That company was formed in December 1863 with the participation of the Crédit Lyonnais bank to exploit the patent monopoly on the synthetic dyestuff known as fuchsine, and its derivatives, of the Lyons firm of Renard frères et Franc. No one could have foreseen that before the close of the decade this whole adventure would end in utter failure. In the eyes of contemporaries La Fuchsine was one of the most impressive and awe-inspiring firms of the European dyestuffs industry in the 1860s. Yet by 1868 La Fuchsine was virtually bankrupt, although it dragged out its legal existence until 1875. However, in every other sense it was already dead well before that date.

  • Technology in decline: a search for useful concepts: The case of the Dutch madder industry in the nineteenth century

  • Anthony S. Travis, Willem J. Hornix, Robert Bud, Johan Schot
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 25 / Issue 1 / March 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 5-26
    Print publication:
    March 1992

  • Until late in the nineteenth century, madder was the most popular natural red dye. Holland was the largest and best-known supplier. As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the province of Zeeland and adjoining parts of the provinces of South Holland and Brabant developed into important producers. In the course of the seventeenth century these areas even succeeded in acquiring a monopoly position. Early in the nineteenth century, however, this position came under attack because France had gone over to industrial production methods from around 1800, whereas Holland continued to produce with craft technologies. After 1820, as a result, a period of stagnation and decay set in. The fate of the Dutch madder industry would have been completely sealed if the production capacity of the French factories had been sufficiently large to satisfy the great increase in demand. Consequently, in Holland, after 1845, a process of revival based upon the French manufacturing methods began slowly and hesitatingly. This process started too late and was not persevered with sufficiently to regain lost markets. The Dutch producers remained strongly attached to their own out-dated, craft methods of production.

  • BJH volume 25 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 25 / Issue 1 / March 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. b1-b7
    Print publication:
    March 1992
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  • Science's powerful companion: A. W. Hofmann's investigation of aniline red and its derivatives

  • Anthony S. Travis
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 25 / Issue 1 / March 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 27-44
    Print publication:
    March 1992

  • Since the eighteenth century chemistry has been deemed to be useful, yet how it might find widespread application, particularly in the case of its most advanced developments, was generally unclear. The discovery of synthetic dyestuffs has often been considered as the turning point towards much closer linkage between chemistry and the manufacture of useful products. How this occurred can best be seen in the case of August Wilhelm Hofmann, who for two decades after 1845 was director of the Royal College of Chemistry in London. As the teacher of many pioneers of the dye industry, Hofmann can be considered its first scientific leader. Indeed, the compounds he studied from 1860 were products made in the factories of his former students and assistants. They in turn were the first to recognize Hofmann's role in stimulating the practical application of science. Henry Armstrong, the chemist and educator, went so far as to imply that this was germane to Hofmann's pedagogic and research strategies: ‘it is clear that the influence he exercised in introducing scientific method into industry was in no sense accidental, but the considered expression of innate convictions’. These convictions were also encouraged by the need to attract funds from industrial sponsors for the Royal College of Chemistry, and they charged the rhetoric that served to enhance Hofmann's ambition and the discipline of chemistry before international audiences.

Page 452 of 680