This book is about the cultural problems of early attempts to bring electricity into the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is thus a study of the domestication of electricity in two distinct but inter-related senses. First it concerns why and indeed whether householders decided to allow electricity into their homes, specifically to illuminate their houses with incandescent lamps. This is the issue of domestication construed as a matter of discretionary appropriation and incorporation of a new technology into the order of household life. In a closely related way this book is also about the extent to which electricity was interpreted as sufficiently tamed to be safely, reliably and comfortably introduced to the home. That is the issue of domestication qua technocratic control over the enigmatic natural agency of electricity. In this regard the uncertain identity and risks of electricity as well as the controversially glaring appearance and indeterminate prospects of its associated lighting technologies were serious problems. Accordingly I study the efforts by both ‘electricians’ (as both electrical physicists and engineers were non-disparagingly described during the late nineteenth century) and other male and female allies to deal with these problems, whether successfully or otherwise.

While the geographical focus is on Britain, comparative reference is made to the USA both to avoid national parochialism and to highlight the international dialogue and common cultures in the early domestication of electricity, as well as some key transatlantic contrasts. Put more broadly this book asks why, if electrical consumption has (still) not come to monopolize the cultures of transport, cooking, heating and traction in those two countries, how far and why did electricity ever accomplish unique predominance for domestic lighting and power? To raise this question in a provocative manner, I suspend the assumption that electrification was historically inevitable – an assumption which in any case cannot be supported either by empirical evidence or by counterfactual suggestions that the modern world is inconceivable without electrification.

Few historians of nineteenth-century German liberalism would attribute importance to the fact that both Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909) and Georg Varrentrapp (1809–86) participated in the foundation of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden in 1858. As local and national leaders of the democratic and liberal political movements from the 1860s to the 1880s, both men figure in political histories, in which appreciation of exotic animals played little part. This chapter will show that taking such details seriously can significantly enhance our understanding of Frankfurt's liberal political milieu. The link between the lifestyles and values of the liberal middle class and scientific rationality has been much discussed in nineteenth-century German history. A major area of research has been the development of municipal public health, where ambitious sanitary reformers achieved a successful union with the liberal middle class to clean up the city. I shall discuss public health in the next chapter; here I establish a link between the success of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden and the emergence of a self-consciously middle-class community in the city's suburbs.

This chapter will go against the conventional periodization of Frankfurt's political history, and trace the cause of the liberals' ascent in the German Reich to the city's topographical transformation in the 1850s. Frankfurt after the Prussian annexation in 1866, kept under firm liberal control, has been intensively studied by a number of political historians.

A University for Frankfurt

The entry of two new figures into Frankfurt's public life heralds the end of the period investigated in this study: Franz Adickes (1846–1915), burgomaster of Frankfurt from 1891 to 1912; and the British-born Jewish industrialist Wilhelm Merton (1848–1916). Adickes was the initiator and organizer, and Merton one of the chief sponsors of the University of Frankfurt, founded in 1914. The university project illustrates the symbiosis between private patronage and municipal initiative characteristic of the cultural politics of Wilhelmine Frankfurt. While most features of nineteenth-century Frankfurt's cultural life survived into Adickes's era, a crucial factor divides it from the period investigated in this study: the municipal government's active intervention in the city's cultural politics.

Before 1891, the municipal government rarely subsidized or controlled local intellectual or cultural institutions, let alone orchestrated a foundation. Yet immediately after his appointment, Adickes started inviting leading scholars to Frankfurt. For instance, his active campaign brought Paul Ehrlich's (1854–1915) Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy (Königliches Institut für experimentelle Therapie) from Berlin in 1899. Adickes won local wealthy citizens for his project as well. Historians have noted the strong presence of Jews among those who answered his call.

On 5 August 2011, the day before the Hiroshima Commemoration, Science magazine announced the start of a new and highly ambitious study: 2 million people will be monitored for at least thirty years in order to assess the effects of low doses of radioactivity. The study announced by Science concerns the entire population of the prefectural region of Fukushima, to the point where Akira Watanabe, vice-chairman of Fukushima University declared ‘We're all guineapigs.’ And indeed, for the second time in history, and willingly or not, part of the Japanese population has become an object of study for doctors and scientists. With this new epidemiological cohort, this population has sadly strengthened its position as the leading provider of data on low dose effects of radioactivity. As the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) pointed out in its last report, up until this study was announced, the data obtained from the medical monitoring of Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's populations were the main source of knowledge on the effects of exposure to low doses of radioactivity. Because the people living on the land contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster were not systematically monitored over a long period, over coming years the Fukushima data on low dose effects of radioactivity might provide crucial information to complement data gathered from monitoring survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings over recent decades.

The present work has sought to demonstrate the different, though intersecting, ways in which Europeans and Indians engaged with astronomy in India, between 1784 and 1876. In particular, it has highlighted the possibilities for a more nuanced characterization of the knowledge interface in colonial India. Most noticeably in the 1830s and 1840s, Europeans and Indians were bound to more collaborative and experiential constructions of knowledge in relation to modern astronomy, in the field and in some cases in the observatory (especially in Bombay). Rather than creating identifiable reconfigurations of ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ paradigms, individuals developed the knowledge to progress the work at hand through a more ‘co-constructive’ process. Yet for much of the period between 1784 and 1876, the engagement between Europeans and Indians in relation to astronomy seemed to be as much, if not more, about cosmological models, reflections on astrology and musings on chronological epochs rather than co-constructive developments of knowledge. Moreover, as well as the more overtly philosophical forms of engagement, evaluating traditional Indian astronomy and modern Western astronomy relative to each other, there was an increasing emphasis on the need to rationalize philosophically practical Indian engagement with modern astronomy, looking backwards while moving forwards. The historical literature has tended to concentrate more on this, but the significance of the more pragmatic engagement ought not to be understated.

Despite the important role that birds played in Charles Darwin's work – from the Galapagos mockingbirds and finches to the fancy pigeons of the Origin of Species (1859) and Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), to the battling, preening, singing males of The Descent of Man (1871) – Darwinism's initial impact on British ornithology has been little investigated. Paul Farber's study of the emergence of ornithology as a scientific discipline stopped at 1850, with ornithology established and classification its central concern. Darwin's theory was thus positioned to have either little or momentous effect: ornithologists could continue on their merry avian way, describing and classifying without regard to genealogy, or could welcome Darwin's insights as providing a path to the holy grail of a truly natural system of classification. The Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton (1829–1907), writing the entry on ‘Ornithology’ for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1885, argued that he and his colleagues had taken the latter path: ‘there was possibly no branch of Zoology in which so many of the best informed and consequently the most advanced of its workers sooner accepted the principle of Evolution than Ornithology’. Newton has himself been frequently invoked as the primary evidence of the ornithological embrace of Darwin, and casually cast as an early convert to Darwinism, even if one who played a comparatively minor role in the ensuing cultural and scientific debates over it. Gavin de Beer has called him one of those who ‘rallied to [Darwin's] side’ in the year after the Origin's publication. De Beer, Bernard Cohen and Janet Browne have all recounted Newton's sudden conversion to Darwinism upon reading the 1858 Darwin–Wallace paper for the Linnean Society.

It is no coincidence that the empirical body of this volume concluded with a consideration of the science of meteorology; a pursuit that relied so heavily on the use of calibrated instruments, uniform techniques of observation, and standardized information. Although attitudes were beginning to orientate towards a laboratory-based approach in the later years of the nineteenth century, the science of meteorology continued to depend on a dispersed network of observatories that could supply central locations like Kew with a mass of data on local weather. By extension, it relied on a host of local collectors to operate these sites and to follow the procedures set down by their metropolitan superiors. When put together with information from a host of other sites, the data local observers collected could be turned into synoptic weather charts that were issued to relevant bodies on a regular basis. An early example of such a chart was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851.

Unlike the geological maps considered in Chapter 3, which were based on information collected over many months and years, synoptic weather maps were compiled from information collected in almost real time. They represented changes taking place in the atmosphere at a national scale and were perhaps the ultimate Victorian triumph over geography. As was noted in the previous chapter, however, we should resist the assumption that meteorology represented an inevitable march towards a standardized national weather. We should assume instead that it was defined by a set of practices that extended unevenly across a physical landscape; that actively constructed geographies of centre and periphery; and that relied on a set of social and intellectual relations that could at times produce unexpected outcomes. These assumptions run through the book more generally.

Science in Regional Context

By considering the operations of nineteenth-century science in regional context, the intention has been to reconsider a fairly simplistic model of centre-periphery relations. All of this is not to deny the power of particular ideas, individuals and institutions, which certainly shaped the fortunes of Cornish science from without, occasionally against the wishes of local practitioners.

Introduction

While certain Orientalists and other European scholars in India were still considering the possibilities for philosophical and practical engagement with Indian astronomy, some individuals focused more squarely on researches in astronomy traceable to problems and methods emanating from contemporary Europe. With this increasing sense that pursuing modern astronomy in India meant practising a Western science in an Indian context, exploration of the paradigms of Indian astronomy appeared to become less and less significant. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europeans in India were moving towards observatory mode, with an observatory being established at Madras in 1786. In this context, historical glances back to the more recent period of Zij astronomy – associable with Islamic influence – under the rule of Jai Singh (1688–1743) to some extent reflected continuing efforts to research the past in pursuit of a practical engagement with Indian astronomers. However, the dominant theme of the early nineteenth-century European engagement with astronomy in India was the further establishment of observatories for the practice of modern Western astronomy, under the aegis of the East India Company. Though the historical literature has considered Madras in some depth, arrangements in Bombay and Calcutta have been largely ignored, and so in this respect, there is much more to be learned from the East India Company records. Europeans took to the practice of modern astronomy in and around these observatories in the coastal metropolises.

It was a sunny morning in Jamestown, St Helena, on 7 November 1677. Given its extreme remoteness – St Helena is a tip of volcanic land in the South Atlantic Ocean equidistant between South America and Africa – Jamestown was surprisingly urbane in the 1670s. For over a hundred years, the port had been a supply outpost of the British East India Company and, before that, was used by the Portuguese. Far south of the equator, usually cloudless, formerly uninhabited and now English-civilized, St Helena was a perfect place to observe the southern night sky. In November 1677 one aspiring astronomer, a well-off twenty-one-year-old Englishman named Edmond Halley, was here to map the southern stars and to observe a relatively rare transit of Mercury. That is what he was doing on the sunny morning of 7 November, at around 9 o'clock. Halley had his telescope (fitted with a smoked-glass filter) pointed at the sun. A small black notch appeared at the outer edge of the solar disc, creeping into the limb of the sun. The notch grew into a small black semicircle. It was the silhouette of the planet Mercury, cast onto the sun as seen from Earth. Halley watched with special interest as, at approximately 9.30, the shadow's entire shape, a circular silhouette, finally completed itself.

Introduction

In the spring of 1959, representatives of twenty-six nations from both sides of the Iron Curtain gathered in Prague to negotiate. The Cold War was at its height: ten years before, NATO had been born, and in response, just four years prior, the Warsaw Pact. But this gathering in Prague featured neither diplomats, nor any mention of armaments or border disputes. Those who gathered in the Narodni Klub were mostly scientists, doctors and health officials. They sought, instead, to settle a striking divergence that had become ever more apparent over these same years in national approaches to industrial hazards. Specifically, they sat down to debate differences in so-called ‘Maximum Allowable Concentration Levels’ (MACs), the numerical limits many of these nations had established for toxins in their workplaces. Behind their disagreements, ostensibly over just what levels to prescribe, lay issues of appropriate knowledge and technique; also – as will come as no surprise to readers of this book a differences of culture and power. In broad outline, the contrasts were vintage Cold War: those from the US and the USSR sharply disagreed, and the Europeans were caught in-between. In ways that STS scholars or historians have as yet hardly explored, the disagreements also foreshadowed the future course of toxics regulation not just in workplaces but across many other spheres of the industrialized world.