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13588 results in History of science and technology

Page 471 of 680

  • Social mobility and scientific change: Stephen Gray's contribution to electrical research

  • Michael Ben-Chaim
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 23 / Issue 1 / March 1990
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 3-24
    Print publication:
    March 1990

  • The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray (1666–1736), ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), ‘the electrical fluid is no local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’.

  • ‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864–85

  • Ruth Barton
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 23 / Issue 1 / March 1990
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 53-81
    Print publication:
    March 1990

  • ‘Our’ included not only Hooker and Huxley but their fellow-members of the X-Club. ‘Our time’ had been the 1870s and early 1880s. For a five-year period from November 1873 to November 1878 Hooker had been President of the Society, Huxley one of the Secretaries, and fellow X-Club member, William Spottiswoode, the Treasurer. Hooker was followed in the Presidency by Spottiswoode, and on Spottiswoode's death in 1883 Huxley was elected President. During this period other X-Club members—Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, George Busk, Sir John Lubbock, and Thomas Hirst—were ordinary members of the Council of the Society. As the Table below (p. 60) shows, there were at least three members of the X-Club on the Council of the Royal Society from November 1870 until November 1882. On eight occasions in this period there were four or more X-Club members on the Council. ‘Our time’ came to an end in 1885 when ill-health forced Huxley's retirement after only two years in the Presidency, and G. G. Stokes at last became President.

  • BJH volume 22 issue 4 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 22 / Issue 4 / December 1989
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. b1-b13
    Print publication:
    December 1989
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  • BJH volume 22 issue 4 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 22 / Issue 4 / December 1989
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. f1-f2
    Print publication:
    December 1989
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Page 471 of 680