In 1863, Victorian physicist John Tyndall published a series of twelve lectures on Heat, as a Mode of Motion, written for an educated, popular audience. Based on public presentations he had been holding at the Royal Institution of Great Britain since the late 1850s, this comprehensive work of several hundred pages discusses in detail the mechanical theory of heat, various instruments for measuring heat phenomena and numerous phenomena themselves. Yet for all its comprehensiveness, Tyndall's exposition contains a curious but significance absence. The science of heat, still new but rapidly becoming established, was based on two fundamental laws – the law of energy conservation and the entropy law, the first and second laws of thermodynamics. In Heat Tyndall focused on the conservation law. He described extensively the transformation of energy from one form into another, while emphasizing the continuous and cyclically balanced nature of the process. Energy circulated through the world changing forms, creating effects and producing technological and natural phenomena in an endless cycle of quantitatively equivalent transformations.

In 1863 the entropy law was still known as the dissipation law, but although it lacked a clear terminology, the effects and consequences of energy dissipation were attracting increasing scientific attention. They seemed to indicate that energy transformations had a direction and that, while the amount of energy in the world remained constant, the amount of transformable energy continuously diminished.

In 1854, Punch introduced its readers to Mr John Paterfamilias, ‘a man of an inquiring, but by no means robust mind’, addicted to reforming his suburban household along ‘rational and sanitary principles’. Undeterred by disastrous experiments in gas-fitting, and alarmed by adulteration reports in the Lancet, Paterfamilias decides to brew for himself, aided by his son Newton – a priggish 7-year-old, similarly addicted to scientific authority – and a ‘very clear little practical treatise’, priced 2s. The instructions dictate that mashing should begin at the preposterously low temperature of 78°F: having no thermometer, Paterfamilias accepts his servant's approximation of ‘one pail o'bilin' to three o'cold’. Having mixed the water and malt, Paterfamilias runs off the wort immediately, and is greatly surprised by its watery thinness: ‘I don't think all the gluten can have been converted into saccharine’, remarks Newton sagely. They press on regardless to the fermentation stage. Decanted into a household water-cask, the brew exhales a sufficient blanket of carbon dioxide to strike the inquisitive Newton insensible, and in six weeks proves to be perfect vinegar. ‘The fermentation’, puzzles Paterfamilias, ‘must have been acetous instead of vinous’.

Adolphe Ganot (1804–87) and Edmund Atkinson (1831–1900) are obscure figures in the pantheon of science. However, their education and careers tell us a great deal about the making of science in nineteenth-century Europe, illustrating the emergence of physics as a discipline in interaction with mathematics, chemistry and medicine. Furthermore, they exemplify the major role of teaching, reading and writing in science. Recognition of the important role of these practices in the making of science is still rare. However, there is already cutting-edge work pointing in this direction.

In this chapter, I offer a practical example of this approach by examining the work of Ganot and Atkinson. In this context, I stress the connections and intersections between textbook science and journal science and between teaching and research. In addition, this chapter serves the purpose of transferring the focus from the broad overview of the emergence of the physics textbook previously presented, to the specific case that this book is primarily concerned with.

The contribution of Ganot and Atkinson to physics was marked by the production of textbooks which soon acquired canonical status in France, England and other countries as tools for teaching and research and thus for the disciplinary formation of physics. However, little was known then – and still today – about Ganot and Atkinson, beyond their textbook authorship. I begin this chapter by introducing contemporary testimonies on these authors.

The connection between science, showmanship and popular display was enduringly compelling for nineteenth-century audiences in Britain. Writing in 1872, in the Leisure Hour, John Timbs remembered some of the most popular of the scientific exhibitions that had taken place in London during the preceding fifty years. The electric eel employed by Faraday was, in fact, one of several that would be exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science on the Strand – this time for just one shilling – where feeding time proved to be an especially attractive performance once it was realized that the fishes captured their prey by discharging an electric shock. Faraday's experiment and more general zoological accounts of the acquisition, careful nursing and behaviour of the eel were reported widely, not least by Timbs himself, who, as founding editor of the Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art, had given the fish star-billing on the frontispiece of the 1840 edition.

Introduction

On 1–5 November 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) held a Joint Expert Meeting in Ottawa, Canada, with the support of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Health Canada, the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The purpose was to ‘review toxicological and health aspects of Bisphenol A (BPA)’. This joint meeting was one of the many events marking a controversy that started in the US and spread to many Western countries and international organizations from the early 2000s. Some scientists and environmental health advocacy organizations are of the opinion that exposure to very low doses of xenoestrogen, which belongs to the new category of endocrine disruptors, can cause serious diseases. The fact that BPA is present in food has prompted anti-bisphenol activists to call for a ban. Regulatory agencies and industry argue that BPA is harmless ‘when used as intended’ and that populations’ exposure through contaminated food is ‘well below levels considered harmful’. The conclusions of the experts at the joint meeting were consistent with those of the firms producing and using BPA, which disregard any arguments put forward by scientists and environmental health movements. The latter group do not consider the tests implemented in the evaluations of the expert committees as ‘science’. They claim that science is bypassed altogether.

Cultures of Literature, Science and Technology

English literature between 1800 and 1914 was marked by an intense interest in sciences of all kinds. Science and technology transformed Britain's intellectual landscapes and Britons' everyday lives, making a profound and wide-ranging impact on literary culture. The ancestry of humans, the workings of the mind, the depths of space, the age of the earth and the powers of nature were topics which exercised the imaginations of novelists and poets as well as scientists, engineers and philosophers. But this was not an encounter between two mutually hostile, uncomprehending and separated ‘cultures’ of twentieth-century science and the humanities, like that imagined and lamented by novelist and one-time chemist C. P. Snow in his Rede Lecture (1959). In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, scientific, technological and literary practices overlapped to a surprising degree. As many recent studies have shown, novelists and poets borrowed subject-matter and metaphors from those in scientific and engineering communities, transforming natural and technical knowledge for the wider public in the process. Conversely, in a process which has attracted less scholarly attention, literary culture played a vital role in the practice of science and engineering during this period. Scientific practitioners' experiments with fictional and other narrative and poetic genres, and the representations of their work in literary periodicals, materially affected the way in which their science and engineering were understood by the wider public and by their fellow investigators.

In her biography of her father, Sir David Brewster, Maria Gordon described his emotional response to the memory of Isaac Newton and his youthful admiration of Colin MacLaurin's tombstone, at which he gazed and ‘pondered over the words, to be envied by every aspirant to scientific fame, “Newtone Suadente”’. The biography repeatedly reinforces the idea of a connection between Brewster and Newton, for example with an image of the ‘biographer and loving disciple’ standing before the moonlit statue of Newton at Cambridge. Maria even asserted that there ‘was much similarity between the genius, the characteristic individuality, and the career of both’, making the unlikely claim that had they ‘been contemporaries doubtless there could have been mutual warm personal sympathies’. More plausibly, she believed that ‘there was something approaching to the known and personal in the affectionate admiration which Brewster ever cherished for Newton’. Indeed, Brewster seemed to feel a personal injury from the perceived attack on Newton in Biot's 1822 article.

Although Brougham and the SDUK had accepted Biot's interpretation of Newton's life, Brewster viewed it as deeply threatening. He chose to respond with his own biography, The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, in which he analysed Biot's evidence for Newton's breakdown and introduced new material to refute the Frenchman's conclusion. This material helped to counter claims that Newton's faculties had been permanently impaired and that, after 1692–3, he studied only theology. However, it also added weight to the supposition that an illness, which at least temporarily affected Newton's mental health, had occurred. Brewster also used the Life to publicize a number of agendas that he considered fundamentally important to the progress of science and which reflect his writings on the ‘decline of science’ debate. Brewster's views on the support of science by private and government patronage were informed by both his experience of trying to forge a scientific career and his understanding of the nature of scientific genius.

Numerous scholars have commented on the focus in literature and science studies on biological and earth sciences, their history, their texts and their terminology, and have noted that comparatively little attention has yet been given to the physical and above all the mathematical sciences. As Mary Poovey wrote in A History of the Modern Fact (1998), for the literary critic, ‘numbers constitute something like the last frontier of representation’. This essay uses a discussion of Victorian mathematical discourse to ask questions about the limits of historicist literature and science studies. It asks these questions by exploring Euclidean geometry, a kind of scientific knowledge which has been very notably neglected by literature and science studies, and which may be substantially resistant to the methods we generally use in this field. While non-Euclidean geometry has attracted some attention in Victorian literary studies, the Euclidean geometry which played such a large role in British mathematical education through the nineteenth century has barely been discussed in historicist literature and science scholarship. Its cultural history is not yet well explored. Yet among the branches of knowledge which were intimately connected with Victorian science, there are very strong reasons for considering geometry one of the most culturally influential.

Above all, it had extraordinarily wide dissemination in nineteenth-century culture, thanks to its zealously protected place in the education of a surprisingly large sector of the population.

In 1896, J. T. Merz wrote of ‘the individual greatness, but also the isolation of English men of science and their discoveries’. For Merz, it was only in the final third of the century that the ‘machinery of science’ exemplified by French institutions and German universities were more widely developed in England. Before this England ‘possessed no well-trained army of intellectual workers’ needed to carry forward the pioneering work of the individual genius. Although Merz suggested that science in Scotland had benefited from a more continental university system, a successful publishing industry and well-run parochial schools, it was Scottish individuals and not institutions that held Merz's attention. Scottish lovers of nature like Hugh Miller, Thomas Edward and David Robertson, along with their English counterparts, were portrayed as nursing new sciences like geology and zoology ‘in their unpretentious infancy’. Merz's stress on individual genius and his conception of scientific method as ‘exact and mathematical’ was in keeping with other commentators who, from the 1850s, had increasingly stressed the ‘fortunate cast of intellect’ and theoretical knowledge required to do advanced scientific work. While he still saw a role at the end of the nineteenth century for the ‘scientific amateur’ he defined this type of worker as a heroic individual producing novel ideas.

Six years after Merz's reflections on English (and Scottish) science were made, evolutionist, geographer and city planner Patrick Geddes offered a more positive assessment of the past contributions and future possibilities of associational natural history. Speaking to the newly-formed Dunfermline Naturalists’ Society, Geddes pointed to the example of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science with its regional museum (‘the best in the country’) and the devotion of its members to the cause of local science. The Perthshire Society epitomized for Geddes the advantages of provincial science not only for increasing knowledge of local flora and fauna but for training citizens for a new age.

In its earliest decades, civic electrification was closely associated with futurity: wherever the electric light dawned, so the story goes, modernity was at hand. As David Nye shows in Electrifying America, this resulted from electrical promoters’ (apparently) confident forecast that coming decades would bring a utopia wrought by convenient electrical utilities and household devices. Though no licensed clairvoyant, Thomas Edison was among the most vocal on this theme, prophesying among other things, that electricity would bring the ending of night, the intellectual equality of men and women, and even the end of sleep. Above all, as Edison's associate Arthur Kennelly wrote in 1889 for Scribner's, the American home, the ‘cradle’ of the nation's future, would be the greatest beneficiary of this transition.

Introduction

Public urban arboretums did not generally fulfil the original objectives of rational recreationists. Popularity, cost of maintenance and public clamour for access facilitated their decline as botanical educational institutions and they became increasingly indistinguishable from other urban leisure parks to an extent unanticipated by Loudon. This was reflected in demands for wider access, the abolition of privileged private subscriptions and the desire for municipal funding and control. The process was hastened by the success of special festivals, the demand for sports and recreational facilities and the provision of ponds, aviaries, lakes and other ornamental features. Public parks and arboretums became important centres for civic and patriotic display and communal feeling with processions and ceremonies, military events and the provision of imperial monuments and trophies. As we have seen, arboretums can be represented as idealized, objectivized collections akin to printed arboretums in arboricultural treatises, like laboratories. However, the reality was that they were fragile creations requiring constant maintenance and many utilized glass houses to lessen the impact of climatic and seasonal changes. Systematic botanical tree collections in urban areas presented special problems of maintenance and preservation, usually without the workforce and resources available on landed estates. The effort required to maintain significant public urban arboretum collections is evident from the well-documented difficulties that curators and staff had in accommodating the demands of public access, pollution and the encroachment of industrial and residential building.

Like many a young man who has enjoyed a comfortable childhood, Francis Darwin simply drifted into a career, in his case medicine. There is no record that the choice caused him any great anguish or soul searching. There were, after all, plenty of precedents in his family for entering medicine, albeit often unhappy ones, and medicine seemed a sensible choice given his general interest in biology, encouraged in childhood first by his father and later by his school. He might not have had a great passion for the subject itself, or have been driven by any religious vocation to heal the sick, but there is no evidence that he was strongly pulled in any other direction. Family and friends alike commented that, above all, Francis was a steady man, not given to whims or transient enthusiasms. He was, however, burdened with a heavy sense of duty.

On graduating in 1870, aged twenty-two, from Trinity College, Cambridge with a BA degree (first class), he moved on to St George's Hospital, where he registered to take an MB degree from the University of London. Required to carry out small pieces of research and to write a thesis towards his final degree, Francis soon found an interest in, and flair for, physiology. Perhaps he was enthused with the spirit of the age, for these were indeed exciting times for the subject in Britain. New ideas and approaches, already well established in France by men like Claude Bernard, and in Germany by Carl Ludwig and others, were at last infiltrating Britain's staid institutions. Leading the establishment of physiology as a respected discipline in British university laboratories were Michael Foster and John Burdon-Sanderson.

It was Foster who in the late 1860s had introduced at University College, London (UCL) the very first course in experimental physiology in Britain. When in 1870 Foster moved on to a chair in Cambridge, he was replaced by Sanderson. Quickly realising that he could not on his own make the laboratory a success, Sanderson strove to build around himself a group of the most able young physiologists.

Having spent earlier chapters considering how scientific instruments gave rise to new ways of seeing and how contexts for vision affected the observer, the following two chapters of this final section examine the eye itself. The eye is both an optical instrument and a conduit for acts of perception. In this, it is very like either the microscope or the telescope, both of which ‘see’ by focusing light through a lens and seem to have an active influence on what is observed. But the eye also sees from within the body of an observing human subject and is therefore always looking from specific contexts. The study of the eye has a long history before the nineteenth century. Yet as a distinct medical practice, as ophthalmology, it took hold during the nineteenth century. Indeed in theory and particularly in practice the second half of the century is the period of greatest activity; when Hermann von Helmholtz began to publish his Treatise on Physiological Optics while developing the ophthalmoscope, and when Edmund Landolt and Jonathan Hutchinson made optical disease the subject of popular lectures for the citizens of Paris and London.

What emerges from much of the published work on optics and ophthalmology, written either for a general audience or the specialist, is both a fascination with the eye's fallibility and an admiration for the complex adaptation that made it such a successful organ of sight.