In 1858 the report of the Royal Commission on the Queen's Colleges proclaimed the agriculture diploma a failure and recommended that it be abolished. The Commissioners’ report called into question the aims of the Queen's Colleges to introduce practical courses into the university. During the course of their investigation the Commissioners had asked Thomas Andrews (professor of chemistry and vice president of the Belfast college) whether he had many students who attended his classes primarily for the purpose of acquiring information applicable to manufacturing and industry. Andrews claimed that such students were very rare and further opined that ‘The demand for mere knowledge, for its own sake is not sufficient to induce a young man to pass through a fixed course of education’. Instead, Andrews told the Commissioners, the allure of the university was the prestige of a degree. Those who wanted practical information simply attended the one or two lectures relevant to their needs rather than matriculating for a full degree.

Despite Robert Kane's hopes that the new institutions would give a ‘practical and industrial character’ to university education, one of its most practical subjects was deemed a failure. The Queen's Colleges were a new type of university. One of their foremost supporters, Kane, saw the colleges as a place to extend and formalize technical education, training professional scientific men alongside lawyers and doctors. If science were to transform Ireland it would do so through the actions of men educated in scientific principles, particularly those sciences most applicable to the development of industry and agriculture. Thus the new colleges were to create a cadre of technocrats through two experimental diploma programmes in agriculture and civil engineering.

Early in the summer of 1873 at the Egyptian Hall in London's Piccadilly, the magician John Maskelyne (with his assistant George Cooke) was performing one of the most successful parts of his magical act: the spiritualist séance. Maskelyne's hands were tied securely, he was placed inside a cabinet on a chair and the door was closed, leaving only a small window high up, that allowed access from inside to out. Very quickly noises began inside the cabinet; a tambourine was played and then thrown out through the window onto the stage. Cooke rushed to open the doors of the cabinet, revealing Maskelyne still securely tied and sat on his chair. Was this the dead returned as spirits? Although not offering any explanation to the audience for the extraordinary phenomena produced, the character of Maskelyne and Cooke's performance clearly indicated that what had been seen was trickery (see Figure 9.1). This was the skill of the magician not the return of the dead. The aim – besides drawing in a large audience and its revenue – was to explode the claims of spiritualists, whom Maskelyne (like many other magicians) believed to be defrauding the public with their claims of spirit communication.

Meanwhile, at the Cavendish Rooms in London in June 1873 George Sexton, editor of the spiritualist periodical the New Era, gave a lecture on spirit-mediums and conjurers. His aim was to ‘deal severely’ with magicians who ‘burlesque and ridicule the whole subject of spirit-communion’ by employing their magical expertise to reproduce the phenomena found at spiritualist séances.

This chapter traces the changing character of published literature on brewing between the 1820s and 1850s. The backdrop to this change was the slowly emerging acceptance, in a variety of manufacturing industries, that chemically trained managers could make a decisive commercial difference. The largest breweries first began to appoint chemists of their own from the 1830s, although it was not for another three decades that a group of ‘brewing chemists’ emerged large enough to function as a community, a development I will discuss in chapter 8. Across the period covered by the present chapter, only a handful of texts was published by men brewing on their own account.

In the eighteenth century, it had been possible for a brewer such as Michael Combrune to theorize about the trade, before a public audience, with no other goal than establishing himself as a credible philosopher.

This is a book about vision and its historical fragility. It deals particularly with vision in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what might be called Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. If this were its only organizing principles it would be a vast book, indeed it would probably be a small library of books, such is the extent of scholarly interest in vision, visuality and perception. However, it has a particular focus (I recognize this pun and want to return to it in a moment). In it, I consider the role of vision across science and literature: how instruments, objects, places, people, eyes, ideologies, discourses and imaginations together make the many ways of seeing that characterize the second half of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. This is a project, largely, of cultural phenomenology. I am not interested in the things scientists or writers (and their fictional characters) saw, but what they did and thought when they looked at them, and what they said about that looking.

In October of 2000, climatologist Mike Hulme and an interdisciplinary group of colleagues opened the doors to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. Designed to bring together scientists, economists, engineers and business and policy advisors, the centre take sits name from John Tyndall, the nineteenth-century Irish physicist and mountaineer who identified and experimentally verified CO2 and water vapour as greenhouse gases between 1859 and 1862. As the Tyndall Centre has grown in size and public stature, so too has Tyndall increasingly become associated with his contribution to the discovery of the ‘greenhouse effect’, placing Tyndall himself near the beginning of a century-and-a-half genealogy of the modern science of climate change. For the Tyndall Centre researchers, the nineteenth-century name provides their twenty-first-century pursuits with the added weight and implied credibility of 150 years of scientific history. And for John Tyndall scholars, the association between the Tyndall name and modern climate change science offers our historical research a welcome visibility in the public eye.

While the ties between John Tyndall and the Tyndall Centre have been beneficial for all parties, I contend that the common presentation of Tyndall as a forefather of modern climate science is also problematic.

The importance of science in Irish popular discourse and public culture during the nineteenth century can hardly be overstated. The promotion of scientific ideas and the application of scientific principles and technologies was the impetus for educational institutions, lectures, voluntary societies, periodicals, museums and exhibitions. Irish nationalists, such as Charles Gavan Duffy, hoped that men of science would assume a role in building an Irish cultural and intellectual milieu. Yet the claim of Duffy that Ireland did not have its own school of scientific thought appears, at least on the surface, to have merit. Irish scientific men often looked to Britain, particularly England, as the centre of the scientific community and many Irish institutions were modelled on British counterparts. However, in scientific terms Ireland was not simply England in miniature. This book examines the middle of the nineteenth century, a crucial period for the development of science in Ireland, and asks what values were placed on science in Irish society and how these values were expressed through institutions, activities and publications.

The interplay between government-controlled institutions and ‘indigenous’ scientific organizations in the period 1840 to 1880 permanently changed the Irish scientific landscape. During the 1840s, science was particularly valued as a discourse which could generate economic and social progress; institutions offering scientific education multiplied. By the 1880s, although many institutions had begun as private initiatives, scientific training was almost exclusively in the hands of the government. Through the Queen's Colleges in particular, the British government embraced the idea that science education could be turned to economic benefit. During the 1850s and 1860s similar sentiments were expressed through popular, and privately funded, industrial exhibitions.

From around the turn of the nineteenth century, the institutions and practices of natural knowledge-making came increasingly under the control of a new breed of professionalizers. Jon Topham has elegantly summarized the shift

Most historians who have looked at this shift have focused on how it marginalized amateur enthusiasts, but the professionalizers' boundary work also had implications for trade communities such as the brewery. This chapter examines the question through the case of Thomas Thomson (1773–1852), an active professionalizer in his various roles as textbook author, journal editor, consultant on industrial topics and, from 1818, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, where he sought to build a research school of younger chemists.