James Watt was certainly a ‘man o’ pairts’, but he was also a coherent whole. For too long our historical understanding of him has emphasized the many parts, seeing the whole only dimly, if at all. By pursuing the links between his practical and theoretical work I have tried to set this to rights. Watt was an engineer. He was certainly an expert, as J. D. Forbes put it in his discussions of these questions, at contrivance. Forbes admired Watt's invention of the parallel motion as showing Watt's genius for contrivance, but he argued that this in itself would never have been the basis for ‘reputation’. Watt's reputation derived from his quality as a philosophic engineer. I have argued that what gave his engineering its philosophic quality or dimension was largely chemical in character. Watt was a chemist, whose chemistry of heat provided the philosophical dimension to his engineering. That philosophical dimension was very different from the equivalent dimension of what became known in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘engineering science’. In engineering science heat was understood as a form of energy, convertible into other forms according to the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. All this was foreign to the intellectual world that Watt inhabited. However, because Watt was adopted as an icon and founding father of their field, the engineering scientists of the nineteenth century were not averse to smoothing over some of the differences between his world and theirs. Watt the chemist and engineer became Watt the mechanical engineer.

In my early chapters I showed how popular representation of Watt, which became a minor industry itself in the nineteenth century, presented the mechanical Watt. This was a natural and easy thing to do given the association of Watt in the popular mind with contrivance. The products of that genius for contrivance, or so it seemed, were everywhere in Victorian Britain, the engines, the linkage and control mechanisms to convert the power of those engines into useful work, the indicators designed to monitor, measure and adjust their performance.

By the late 1850s, the Royal Observatory was running at the high level of efficiency for which, as was described in the previous chapter, Airy's tenure was already well known. After two decades as Astronomer Royal, Airy was a central and powerful figure in British science. He had not entirely avoided controversy. The recent loss of priority of the discovery of Neptune to the French was a huge blow to his public image. Airy's work on ship magnetism had brought him some notoriety as well; a ship was controversially lost just after its compasses had been adjusted according to Airy's method. It was from the operation of Greenwich meridian astronomy, however, that Airy maintained his upstanding character. There was a regular time service and a regular output of astronomical observations. Subjects on which the observatory steadily published included observations of minor planets, tables of the moon's motion, longitude determinations of foreign observatories, and refinements to the instruments of precision astronomy. Against this backdrop of routine observation, Airy introduced plans for attacking the problem of the sun's distance.

The value of the sun's distance (then referred to in terms of solar parallax), was continuously refined throughout the nineteenth century. During the 105-year gap between the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century transits of Venus, astronomers recalculated and reanalysed the 1761 and 1769 observations, sometimes when improved values of longitude for the observation stations were made available, sometimes when new approaches to the selection and combination of observations were developed. As the Edinburgh Review put it in 1873, ‘many restless astronomical spirits … continued to nibble at these figures’. In 1825, Johann Franz Encke produced a parallax of 8˝.54 (⋃154m km / 95.7m mi) by updating the longitude data for the results from the 1761 and 1769 transits. The British Nautical Almanac used this value from 1834 to 1869.

Introduction

While there was evidence of a significant practical engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to modern astronomy in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Bombay in the 1830s and 1840s, this was arguably stifled in the long term. Due to a combination of racialized colonial institutions and attenuated educational schemas, the opportunities for sustained interactions based on collaborative and experiential constructions of knowledge, free of express awareness of fixed ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ paradigms, were limited in time and space. From the 1860s, it seemed that a more philosophical engagement in relation to astronomy was acquiring a new salience. There was a return to the themes and conceptualizations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalism, though now even Indians contributed to the discussion in the journals of the learned societies and through the medium of commercial, printed almanacs. The emphasis was on expressly demonstrating, through discursive means, that the paradigms of Indian astronomy (and astrology) could be reconciled with those of modern Western astronomy. Even when there was evidence of practical engagement, there was a concerted effort to refer to the paradigms of traditional knowledge. The historical literature has tended to focus on exactly these sorts of philosophical engagements in relation to science in colonial India. Yet though this is quite reasonable, and in fact there is more to add to existing characterizations, it is important to situate the philosophical engagement and the more practical engagement historically.

Accounts of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel have long emphasized his originality although not always in glowing terms. His ‘besetting fault’, stated The Times in 1859, was a ‘seeking for novelty, where the adoption of a well-known model would have sufficed’. Certainly Brunel had a flair for bold experiment and the many hagiographic treatments of him, marking him out as a ‘visionary’, have minimized his debts to his predecessors. Of course, Brunel did learn from others but, with engineers more often represented as men of works than of words, the fact that his knowledge and practice were bound up with literacy is rarely admitted. Even for the best known engineers, reading and writing await sustained historical attention. So too does the exploration of an early nineteenth-century ‘engineering literature’: those writings produced, consumed and variously appropriated in connection with engineering practice. It has been difficult to document literary practices for members of a notoriously ‘papyrophobic’ profession. In this chapter, however, I ask what Isambard Kingdom Brunel read and wrote, how he read and wrote, why he wrote as he did, what he wrote about the literary productions of others – and why he sometimes avoided, and advised others against using, print. Answers to those questions reveal a literary landscape of early nineteenth-century engineering.

The fourth volume of the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall (RGSC), published in 1832, included a handsome pull-out map as its frontispiece. The map showed, in full colour, the underlying geology of Cornwall (see Figure 3.1). It had been produced by Dr Henry S. Boase to illustrate his 308-page paper in the same volume, entitled ‘Contributions Towards a Knowledge of the Geology of Cornwall’. In printing this map the Society had achieved one of its foundational aims of facilitating the production of a scientific map of the entire county of Cornwall. The sense of a territory having been overcome and claimed by science was well-conveyed in the same volume's opening paper, written by John Hawkins FRS, then Vice-President of the RGSC:

At the twentieth anniversary meeting of the Society, held the following year, the Chair of the meeting, Davies Gilbert (who had been President of the Royal Society of London from 1827 to 1830), complimented Boase on his work on the geology of Cornwall, noting that it had attracted ‘considerable attention’ at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge and would ‘take precedence of every other subject in the Geological Section’ at the Association's next meeting in Edinburgh.

In the previous chapter we saw how the local characteristics of the production of Ganot's textbooks shaped the making of his physique in nineteenth-century Paris. But how was Ganot's physique communicated across France and beyond? The aim of this chapter is to show the major role that publishers and booksellers had in this context, and to demonstrate that their appropriation of Ganot's textbooks through professional practice did not only involve circulation, but also the production of new meanings for Ganot's physics in England.

By the early 1860s, Ganot's Traité had had nine editions and was well known in France and abroad. His Cours had just been published and, owing to its success, Ganot was thinking about preparing its second edition. From the beginning of his publishing venture, Ganot placed his textbooks in the shops of the major scientific and medical publishers in Paris, and in provincial cities with large lycées and with faculties of science such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg and Toulouse. Booksellers supplying his books, such as Hachette, Delalain, Labé, J.-B. Baillière and Victor Masson, had competing physics textbooks in the market, or began to prepare them between the late 1850s and early 1860s. Ganot also sold his books by the post, and he arranged their distribution in Belgium – the major foreign customer for French books, followed by England.

Particle accelerators, space shuttles, the Manhattan Project – these are classic examples of ‘big science’. The term emerged after World War II as a label for the enormous scientific projects of modern times. It is sometimes hard not to see big science as a unique signature of the present day. But of course in a relative historical sense every period has had its own ‘big science’: intellectual or technological projects executed on what was a dramatic scale for the time. Historians, increasingly interested in the historical precedent for today's big science, have begun to talk about the ‘bigger science’ of previous periods. The eighteenth-century transits of Venus are a stock example of early big science. The nineteenth-century transits are not, but only because their story is less well known. In this chapter, the outlines of what was the big science of Victorian times will be presented. The large-scale research programmes of the period share similar characteristics, such as institutional settings, programme designs, public representations and types of personnel involved.

The bigger science of a period often was not the most significant or visible science in historical or even contemporary terms. For example, for the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin does not fit into this category. Neither does Michael Faraday or James Clerk Maxwell (and indeed it is largely through the lens of the history of laboratory physics that the belief that big science had no historical precedent was established). The big science of Victorian Britain has only a small place in the current historiography. And from within an account of big science in the nineteenth century, the entire landscape of scientific culture looks different. For example, from this angle the military emerges as the central institution of Victorian science. The Admiralty was especially influential on science in both cultural and financial terms. Currently however, military institutions are almost entirely absent from the historiography of Victorian science.

Ganot's and Atkinson's skills as teachers, readers and writers were crucial for the design of their textbooks. Their physics, however, was the result of a collaborative project resulting from the interaction between science pedagogy and printing practices. The purpose of this chapter is two-fold. Firstly, I will analyse the material qualities of Ganot's textbooks, and establish how they potentially prescribed the communication of Ganot's physique. Secondly, I will characterize Ganot's physique by analysing the structure, order and narrative of his textbooks, in the framework of major themes in the historiography of nineteenth-century physics. In the conclusion, I will show how the study of the interaction between form and meaning helps us to a better understanding of nineteenth-century physics as disciplinary knowledge.

The making of Ganot's textbooks in France and England was a business that involved many actors. It was only through the interaction of the author, printer, draughtsman engraver and bookseller that Ganot's textbooks were created. Next to them was an equally important and large group of professionals – printing technicians and book trade workers – in charge of the wide range of tasks leading to the production of a textbook and its marketing. Ganot's textbooks were considered outstanding, not only for their pedagogical arrangement, their contents and their language, but also for their mise en page, their paper, typography, illustrations and size.

When Elizabeth Gaskell was starting to write her life of Charlotte Brontë in 1856, she copied into her manuscript a snippet from the Quarterly Review: ‘Get as many anecdotes as possible. If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ In Chapter 1, I described how nineteenth-century authors of eccentric biography – many of them struggling hacks eager to compile new books from old material with a minimum of editorial input – took to the newspapers, scissors in hand, to collect snippets of text which they could use in their publications. Anecdotes were the perfect material for this endeavour. Discreet, circumscribed narratives, they could be cut and pasted at will. They could stand alone or alongside other anecdotes, but required little or nothing by way of contextualization, serving to evidence each character's alleged eccentricity through simple accumulation. As a unit of biographical narration, the anecdote is central to the history of science and eccentricity.

Anecdotes feature not only in eccentric biography, but also in many of the other types of source upon which this book has drawn: newspaper reports, autobiographical sketches, discovery accounts, travel narratives, book reviews, visiting accounts, reminiscences, and local histories. Anecdotes are perfect for sharing: readers of anecdotes can readily share in the writer's satisfactions, disappointments and surprises because anecdotes narrate events in terms not, necessarily, of what actually happened, but of what should have happened, what people might generally have agreed would have been most fitting for the occasion. For example, we don't, in reality, know whether Julia Byrne's anecdotal tourist, discussed at the end of the last chapter, ever existed, let alone whether he ever made it to Walton Hall to see Waterton ride around his estate on the back of a cayman. But we do know that stories like this have been told and retold about Martin, Hawkins and Waterton since their lifetimes, and constitute much of what we remember about them today. These anecdotal and seemingly rather trivial narratives are the building blocks of the stories we tell ourselves about science, eccentricity and our past.

The engagement between scientific practices and literary forms in the nineteenth century is typically studied in terms of published writings, from the rhetorical techniques of scientific papers and the poetics of popularization to the scientific content of famous novels or poems. However, the majority of poems composed in nineteenth-century Britain were never published, but formed part of a largely uncharted world of private circulation, surviving (if we are lucky) in albums, diaries, commonplace-books or archives, and only rarely emerging in book form. Among the gentility, such practices had a distinguished pedigree: humorous epigrams and occasional poems had long served as a mark of cultured conviviality, functioning as a socially acceptable medium for critique, debate, or jockeying for status. As classical education spread into the middle classes and the mixed culture of Regency and early Victorian drawing-rooms, this practice spread with it, adapting to its new social contexts and persisting in the face of print culture's meteoric rise. In the early nineteenth century, these largely humorous compositions (like other informal utterances and representations shared within an intimate circle, such as jokes and caricatures) served to amuse, cement social norms and reinforce group coherence.

Occasional verses on scientific topics were not merely trivial, especially those produced in the early nineteenth century when the social norms of science were undergoing rapid transformation and group coherence could no longer be taken for granted.

Scientific societies, unlike short-lived evangelical awakenings, were for the Catholic controversialist and botanist James Britten a more permanent sign of a maturing scientific nation. For Britten the welcome maturing of science signalled by the establishment of local societies was explained by a longer national history of the effective diffusion of a scientific mentality. Such sentiments were shared by commentators otherwise separated by serious theological disagreement. Charles Kingsley, whose infamous spat with John Henry Newman put him firmly in an opposing religious camp, shared Britten's appraisal of scientific societies. In a lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery in 1872 on the subject of ‘the study of natural history for soldiers’, Kingsley opined that a naturalists’ field club supplied ‘sound inductive habits of mind’ as well as promoting physical well being and manly moral virtues. Yet appeals to universal benefits, to a scientific zeitgeist or to national progress do not exhaust the reasons offered for the founding of a local scientific society. This chapter introduces Scottish natural history societies active between c. 1831–1900 by recovering three different but related perspectives discernable in contemporary accounts of their foundation and growth. The first perspective, epitomized by Britten and Kingsley, is that of commentators who offered a portrayal of Scottish natural history societies which pictured them as bodies contributing to national and universal scientific progress. The second, more local, perspective was propounded by founding members who promoted the social utility of associational fieldwork as a cultural and scientific pursuit. A third and related perspective, accenting responsibility for the welfare of the host town, presented natural history societies as part of a wider array of institutions committed to civic improvement through the education of local citizens.

Plants have determined man's history and they will determine his future. Whether they were suspended in the primeval soup of the oceans, or more firmly anchored after their emergence onto land, plants modified the earth's early atmosphere, fixing carbon dioxide (CO2) and releasing oxygen (O2), making possible the evolution of primitive animal life and, much later, of man himself. Plants are at the base of every food chain, supplying us with both building and clothing materials, with wood for cooking and heating, and with fuels to generate power. Such green threads connect our most fundamental activities yet, despite this, we have until very recently taken plant growth and health for granted. Many aspects of plant physiology remain a mystery to us, particularly where they concern plants under the variable conditions of the field – away from the controlled conditions of the laboratory. Still in its infancy is the study of how the physiology of an individual plant is modified when it functions as a member of a community in a natural environment. One concern of the greatest current interest is the extent to which plants, with their capacity to fix CO2, might ameliorate changes in the composition of the earth's atmosphere that threaten our safe and familiar world.

Given the importance and urgency of the latter, it is salutary to review the progress we have made in our scientific understanding of plant growth and to reflect that our understanding began less than three centuries ago. And this is where the Darwin family comes in.

A strong green thread ran through that family, connecting different generations across two hundred years. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), his grandson, Charles (1809–82), and his great grandson, Francis (1848–1925), were all botanists of distinction, each fascinated by the movements of plants as they seek light, nutrients and water.

Mention of the name Darwin has for too long conjured an image of just one of them, Charles, his theory of evolution, fossils, struggles for survival in the animal world, and man's origins with the apes. As this book will reveal, the image is misleading where Charles in concerned.