In the summer of 1894 the astronomer Percival Lowell began to construct his new observatory on a peak above the Arizona town of Flagstaff. Lowell's explicit aim was to study the planet Mars in search of the canals described by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. From the moment of Mars's near approach to Earth later in 1894 until his death twenty-two years later, Lowell looked at the planet and sought out its canals. His work was widely publicized, much debated and continually criticized, yet its impact on Martian astronomy, as well as on a broader public understanding of Mars, was significant and enduring. One of the most consistent keynotes of Lowell's investigations was the role played by vision in the practice of astronomy. In an essay on common errors in Martian observation, for example, Lowell wrote of the problems associated with telescopy:

Introduction

Estate arboretums carried the impulse for tree collecting amongst the landed classes into the nineteenth century and were of considerable importance in the development of arboretums. The economic, botanical and iconographic significance of trees in British society, underscored by the prizes for planting awarded by the Society of Arts, encouraged landowners and their agents to undertake large-scale planting. Special kinds of tree collections or plantations were nurtured on many estates, usually associated with landscape gardens or their boundaries, although some came to occupy large areas or were spread along drives and rides. Estates also managed the remains of much older tree collections of great commercial, botanical or antiquarian interest, such as the sections of ancient Sherwood Forest lying within the Nottinghamshire Dukeries. Grand tree collections provided visible evidence of the magnificence, power, leisurely discernment and cultural pre-eminence of aristocracy and gentry – suggesting continuity and permanence just as their authority was beginning to erode. Frequently associated with the improvement, construction or reconstruction of houses, grand arboretums also provided an opportunity for the nouveau riche to assert their status and gain admittance to the landed classes. Larger estates had extensive resources and manpower, providing an important forum where landscape gardeners, gardeners and woodsmen could train and conduct experiments. Some gardeners and landscape gardeners such as Joseph Paxton, William Barron and William Coleman were launched into professional pre-eminence by great estates and aristocratic encouragement, their success enhancing their patron's reputation.

I argued in Chapter 2 that the realities of Watt's chemical work and understandings were obscured in the nineteenth century by his own narratives of his invention, and by the ‘water controversy’. In the latter, elite scientists, such as members of the Cambridge group and the leadership of the Chemical Society, sided with Cavendish and condemned Watt's chemistry as archaic, more of a stain on his reputation than a valuable addition to it. Watt's supporters, on the other hand, made their claim for their hero in a way that artificially and incidentally modernized the nature of his chemical claims and arguments (as well as Cavendish's). It remains a difficult task to understand Watt's chemistry on its own terms, but in this chapter I will make an attempt. I am guided by a conviction that it is a mistake to separate in an a priori fashion, as authors usually do, Watt's philosophical (or theoretical) chemistry and his practical chemistry. That mistake is probably predicated also on the belief that Watt failed as a chemical theorist (that is in his public venture into the chemistry of water and airs), while still doing interesting things as an ingenious ‘cookbook chemist’ with glazes, varnishes, inks, bleaching agents, medically promising airs and, of course, steam.

The bifurcated approach to Watt's chemistry is misleading on two counts. First, a number of Watt's practical ventures did draw upon his theoretical ideas. Second, there is a good case for seeing Watt's chemical ideas as in turn evolving as a result of his practical engagements. We will see in detail in this chapter and the next that Watt's experiments on steam, undertaken in part to inform his attack on the practical problem of steam engine improvement led him to develop a chemistry of heat that went beyond that of his mentor Joseph Black. Watt was thoroughly convinced that there was a connection between the chemistry of steam and the chemistry of airs. In fact ice, water, steam, mist, water vapour, common air and other airs were all subject to the chemistry of heat and their practical and theoretical study was interrelated as a result.

In April 2004, as discussions reached a conclusion on the new European Community regulation on chemicals and their safe use (EC 1907/2006), dealing with the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances (REACH), the WWF publicized the results of blood tests on thirty-nine European Members of Parliament (MPs) who were not exposed to any particular chemical pollutants. No fewer than 76 persistent toxic chemical substances were found in their blood, out of the 101 for which they had been tested. On average, each MP carried a cocktail of forty-one toxic products composed of substances that were persistent (not biodegradable) and bio-accumulative (that accumulate in the body). Thirteen chemical residues (phtalates, perfluorinated components) were systematically found in all the MPs' blood samples.

Since the early 1990s, revealing the systematic presence of toxic chemical substances in each individual's body and measuring the ‘toxic body burden’ has become one of the main means of action for activist organizations like the WWF. But the toxic body burden is more than that; it has also become a research subject for public health specialists, doctors, toxicologists and biologists increasingly interested in the effects of substances present almost permanently in human bodies. Surveys highlighting the increasing contamination of human bodies are also undertaken by government institutions such as the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), which has set up programmes that regularly measure and publish results confirming the presence of numerous chemical contaminants in human bodies.

This book is a study of the arrival of electricity in the late-nineteenth-century domestic sphere, arguably one of the most abiding technical-cultural transformations of the modern era. The ‘domestication’ of electricity is represented here as a haphazard, accident-prone and controversial business; the assimilation of electricity into the home was marked by mystery, conflicting interests, a marked gendering of roles and iconographic culture. In this chapter I explain how this approach to the subject both extends established historical approaches and adds new perspectives and explanations to this transformation. In so doing I offer some alternatives to familiar assumptions in the historiography of what is commonly known as ‘electrification’.

It is easy to interpret historians of electrification as narrating the unfolding technologization which followed relatively straightforwardly from the development of patents for incandescent electric light in 1878 and the evolution of the dynamo generator in preceding decades. Furthermore it can sometimes seem that presumptive natural endpoint of electrification is the comprehensive utilization of electricity.

In 1858 and 1867 there were two events relating to Newton and his reputation that received thorough coverage in the daily and weekly press. They were of popular interest but were also to receive attention from two experts, Brewster and De Morgan. The first event was the erection of a statue of Newton in Grantham. The second was a literary cause célèbre that saw a challenge to Newton's position as the discoverer of the laws of gravitation from the publication of a number of forged documents. The very different attitudes of Brewster and De Morgan will be compared with the reactions of other men of science and a wider public in order to highlight the consistency of outlook from the two biographers of Newton and the relationship of their work to a non-expert perception of him. A close examination of the research relating to Newton with which De Morgan was engaged at the time of these events demonstrates that historians who have viewed it as having a morality and a reverence for Newton that would be more consistent with the work of Brewster have misunderstood his intentions.

De Morgan's bugbears in fact remained those explored in his 1855 review of Brewster's Memoirs of Newton. As time went on he became, if anything, more hard-line in his approach and his criticism of Brewster was increasingly severe. De Morgan's last and longest work relating to Newton was not published in his lifetime but the two events on which this chapter focuses gave him the opportunity to repeat his message publicly. Although the two men did not correspond after the publication of the 1855 review, 1867 saw them involved in a communication of sorts, carried out through the pages of a literary weekly and a national newspaper. The concerns of both men harked back to the debates of the 1830s, and, by the late 1860s, would appear to have been of limited appeal or importance to other men of science and the general public.

The continuities with which we ended the last chapter show, if there is any question, that the Civil War and emancipation did not end the monogenesis/polygenesis debate. Instead, its end came with Darwin's deployment of natural selection as a theory of both continuity (genealogy or common descent) and discontinuity (modification, adaptation, extinction, selection) – a deployment that shattered the natural history of man upon which polygenesis rested. Linné's scheme of classification, because it was founded on the assumption of fixity, makes sense only when allied with Cuvier's natural history i.e., the fixity of species within a period and place was allied with the marked differences between places on the Earth as well as the differences between the ages of the earth.

As with the ibis and the Negro, the key referent was the place of humans and human varieties within the natural order represented by the various systems of classification. ‘Nature is man writ large, and man nature writ small’ was a common ideology of the day and one could not be faulted in venturing to say that it is an ideology that we continue to share. While a rigid classification could not account for change, more imaginative classifications did allow for the possibility of variation within species. What remained was the exploration of the mechanisms that would allow for change over time and yet remain consistent with the needs of a rational system of classification.