Archaeology is often considered one of the most visual of the sciences to emerge in the nineteenth century. Its dependence on description and illustration, the use of photography as a tool to support its practice, its centrality in museums and exhibitions, and the employment of its discoveries in popular entertainments, as well as in pictorial art, attest to the many cultures of visuality with which it inter-penetrated and inscribed mutual influence. Yet unlike other scientific disciplines its accumulation of knowledge did not rely upon technologies that extended visual capacity. In contrast to medicine and astronomy which needed microscopes to look at the very small and telescopes to look at the very large, archaeology could look deep into the past with the human eye alone. The most privileged of archaeologists was therefore the fieldworker, who could look with their own eyes at archaeological objects in situ as well as study them in the museum, university or other ‘centre of calculation’ as Bruno Latour has named these sites of knowledge presentation. Yet the embodied vision of the archaeological fieldworker – embodied not only within the organs of perception but also in the cultural milieu of the archaeological site – was far from simple. The fieldworker was caught up in a series of overlapping ways of seeing that drew influence (often unwonted and unnoticed) from the social, political and personal relations with which the archaeological site was necessarily involved.

This book is another history of the making of physics in the nineteenth century, yet a singular one. Overall, a different focus on events and actors, and a more accurate and well-balanced periodization distinguishes it from previous accounts. My aim is not to offer a complement to previous histories of physics, but to pinpoint problems in its standard historiography, to propose solutions, and to contribute to the writing of a new history of physics in consonance with current historiographical challenges.

This book characterizes the making of physics as a discipline in the nineteenth century as a process driven by practices of school teaching and pedagogical writing, book production and distribution, and studying and reading, shaped by persistent international communication. The originality of this approach lies in its focus on education, book culture, international comparison and cross-national transit.

It is not by chance that the concept of discipline is a cultural product of nineteenth-century society. Historians have characterized disciplines in several ways which are often applied separately: a particular corpus of knowledge, a sequence of questions, problems and methods, an institutional framework, the profile of a community of practitioners, the invention of a genealogy, a tradition and a self-image, the establishment of a common language, a discourse and a distinctively recognizable literature, or the enforcement of power through a normative structure of social authority and control.

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the ‘end of history’. Expressing the unalloyed triumphalism of American liberalism at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama's controversial declaration also gave voice to postmodernist aspirations to escape from the fixed identities, traditions and institutions of the past and live in a pluralistic present of self-fashioning and unfettered desire. This aspiration seemed to place in jeopardy humanity's historical sense, threatening an unexpected nihilistic outcome to twentieth-century debates about the nature and significance of that sense and its place in the formation and maintenance of social ties and cultural bonds. In an important paper of 1976, the British historian Lawrence Stone examined these debates from the perspective of the professional historian. His tone was both celebratory and cautionary. While looking to the future with diminished expectations and some apprehension, Stone identified the ‘new history’ of the previous forty years as a period of unsurpassed creativity ‘in the whole history of the profession’, brought on by ‘borrowings from the social sciences’. The interaction between the traditional narrative form of history, professionalized between 1870 and 1930, and the neighbouring disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology and demography issued in the formation of new fields of historical inquiry, including demographic, cultural and social histories, as well as histories of mass culture, science and the family, which, at the time of Stone's writing, were still in ‘their heroic phase of primary exploration and rapid development’.

On 14 January 1895, the British engineer Sebastian de Ferranti (1864–1930) lectured at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on the recent history of his electricity meter – a great commercial success to that date. The Society had been established in the 1820s to promote communication between men of science, engineers, instrument makers and manufacturers. In his lecture, de Ferranti resorted to ‘Ganot's physics’ to explain the basic mechanism of his meter. He considered obvious that his audience was familiar with Ganot's Elementary Treatise on Physics Experimental and Applied, the fourteenth edition of which had been published by the house of Longmans a few years earlier.

De Ferranti's reference did not merely have an expository function. In fact – he confessed – this had been the source from which he had started to work on the design of his meter. His inspiration came from a group of diagrams of Ampère's laws of the interaction between currents, which Ganot had introduced in the first edition of his Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée (1851) and developed subsequently. The same diagrams appeared in the first edition of the Treatise, an English translation commissioned by the Franco-British publisher Hippolyte Baillière (1809–67) to Edmund Atkinson (1831–1900), a young chemist just embarked on a career as a college ‘Lecturer on Chemistry and Physics’.

In fin-de-siècle Britain, Atkinson's translation of Ganot's textbook marked the standard in school and college physics.

As we saw in Chapter 4, Ganot's physique was shaped by the forms of production of the Traité and the Cours and by Ganot's perspectives on the discipline of physics and on its relations with pedagogical practice. Ganot's physique did not place a fundamental emphasis on theory and was sophisticated in its exposition of physical practice and its associated uncertainties and opposing views. It was inductivist and pedagogically instrumentalist and had a strong focus on instrument description and manipulation. This approach was shaped by the techniques of printing and illustration used by Ganot and his associates.

In the previous chapter we have seen that the preparation of an English edition of Ganot's Traité was part of a general plan of appropriation of the French scientific and medical map of knowledge into Britain, led by the publisher Hippolyte Baillière. Baillière was the brains behind this operation which provided Ganot's physique in England with the status of standard scientific work, composed by a precise, powerful and attractive textual and visual exposition.

In assuming the lead in the making of Ganot's physique in England, after Baillière's death, Atkinson strengthened his authorial status, marking a decisive moment in the configuration of Atkinson's physics. However, what were the differences and common aspects between Atkinson's physics and Ganot's physique? What was the role of Longmans in the configuration of Atkinson's physics? And how did the forms of production of Atkinson's textbooks intervene in the making of his physics?

The previous chapter introduced John Richardson as the first author to draw together the powerful rhetorical positions of the practical commercial brewer and the philosophically literate theorist. In 1784, Richardson extended this approach in a new direction by issuing a 250-page treatise, Statical Estimates of the Materials of Brewing. The title recalls Stephen Hales's Statical Essays of 1727–33 on pneumatic chemistry: one of Richardson's interests, as we will see below, was the contribution of gases to the character of drink. The book's real focus, however, was indicated by its subtitle: A Treatise on the Application and Use of the Saccharometer. This was a floating device for measuring wort and beer strength numerically: it provided, said Richardson, a universal indicator of the value of brewery products and practices.

Richardson's project invites comparison with Michael Combrune's grand claims for the thermometer a quarter of a century earlier (chapter 2).

In 1865, the Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden company was founded in Dublin with the aim of building a unique and permanent exhibition space. The first event to be hosted in the palace would be an industrial exhibition and the new company's shareholders hoped that the hall would aid in the cultivation of the natural and mechanical sciences through public lectures, further exhibitions and a library. Among the supporters of the exhibition was the author and satirist William Smyth who penned a celebratory drama with characters such as goddesses of industry and pleasure, ‘Erin’ and Erin's servant, a fairy queen. The fairy queen was tasked with the erection of the palace itself: ‘Here Erin finds a useless green, / And, with a happy, careful thought, / She tells me to transform the scene, / And all this waste expel.’ With a wave of the fairy's wand, she replaced waste land with a monument to industry and progress. The idea that industrialization would simply sweep aside an unproductive agricultural past and replace it with an orderly industrial future was prevalent in nineteenth-century Ireland. Rather than Erin and a fairy queen, science was often the key character in narratives of improvement and industrialization. Museums and exhibitions served as stages for acting out scientific and industrial prowess in visual form. Through the display of scientific and industrial objects, the curators of museums and exhibitions symbolically expelled wastes and replaced them with order, industry and scientific progress.

This chapter examines the museum and the exhibition as locations for science education and popularization in nineteenth-century Ireland. The chapter focuses on the natural history collections of the Queen's Colleges and on a series of privately funded industrial exhibitions in Dublin and Cork.

By the autumn of 1872, John Tyndall (1820–93) was at the height of his influence. He had published two well-received books the previous year: his adventuresome Hours of Exercise in the Alps, an account of his most breathtaking mountaineering exploits, and his more cerebral Fragments of Science, a candid discussion of his views on everything from dust and disease to prayer and miracles. He dedicated the latter volume to his ‘friends in the United States’, where he was set to embark for the first time, finally succumbing to repeated invitations from the nation's leading intellectuals, including Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It was an opportune time for him to set sail. He had just returned from another fulfilling climbing season in his beloved Alps, and his rooms at the Royal Institution – where he lectured, researched and lived – were undergoing renovation. Yet a more controversial reason to flee England simmered in the background, one that would follow him across the Atlantic. That July, three months before he set sail, the London Contemporary Review published an anonymous letter, ‘The Prayer for the Sick: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate its Value’, along with an introductory note by Tyndall. The letter suggested that, if organized correctly, the efficacy of the weekly prayers of all thirty thousand congregations throughout England could be tested experimentally through quantitative methods.