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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 146 of 516

  • ‘We want no authors’: William Nicholson and the contested role of the scientific journal in Britain, 1797–1813†

  • IAIN P. WATTS
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 3 / September 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 February 2014, pp. 397-419
    Print publication:
    September 2014

  • This article seeks to illuminate the shifting and unstable configuration of scientific print culture around 1800 through a close focus on William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, generally known as Nicholson's Journal. Viewing Nicholson as a mediator between the two spheres of British commercial journalism and scientific enquiry, I investigate the ways he adapted practices and conventions from the domain of general-readership monthly periodicals for his Journal, forging a virtual community of scientific knowledge exchange in print. However, in pursing this project Nicholson ran up against disreputable associations connected with the politics of journalism and came into conflict with more established models of scientific publication. To illustrate this, I turn to examine in detail the practice of reprinting, a technique of information transmission which the Journal adapted from general periodicals and newspapers, looking at a clash between Nicholson and the Royal Society that exposes disagreements over the appropriate role for journals during this period of reorganization in the scientific world.

An Account of the Basalts of Saxony
  • With Observations on the Origin of Basalt in General
  • Jean François d'Aubuisson de Voisins
  • Edited and translated by Patrick Neill
  • Published online:
    05 January 2014
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
    First published in:
    1814
  • Jean-François Daubuisson (1769–1841), geologist and engineer, was an Officer of the Légion d'Honneur, Knight of St Louis and Chief Engineer at the Royal Mining Corps. He published numerous papers on geology, mining and hydraulics, and is best known for his textbooks, Traité de géognosie and Traité d'hydraulique. He studied geology and mineralogy in Freiburg with Abraham Werner, the key proponent of Neptunism, the theory that all rocks had an aqueous origin. Later in his career Daubuisson was to side with the Plutonists, who argued that basalts formed from molten rock. However, in this paper, published in French in 1803, he describes his observations of the basalts of Saxony and argues that they, and all basalts, are sedimentary. This English translation by the Secretary of the Wernerian Natural History Society was published in 1814, and provides a fascinating insight into this discredited but once influential theory of the Earth.

  • ‘What things mean in our daily lives’: a history of museum curating and visiting in the Science Museum's Children's Gallery from c.1929 to 1969

  • KRISTIAN H. NIELSEN
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 3 / September 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 December 2013, pp. 505-538
    Print publication:
    September 2014

  • The Children's Gallery in the Science Museum in London opened in December 1931. Conceived partly as a response to the overwhelming number of children visiting the Museum and partly as a way in which to advance its educational uses, the Gallery proved to be an immediate success in terms of attendances. In the Gallery, children and adults found historical dioramas and models, all of which aimed at presenting visitors with the social, material and moral impacts of science and technology on society throughout history. Also, there were numerous working models with plenty of buttons to press, handles to turn and ropes to pull. Controversial visitor studies carried out in the 1950s revealed that the historical didacticism was more or less lost on the children who came to the Gallery. Consequently, the New Children's Gallery that opened in 1969 had to some extent abandoned the historical perspective in favour of combining instruction with pleasure in order to make the children feel that ‘science is a wonderful thing’.

An Account of the Nature and Medicinal Virtues of the Principal Mineral Waters of Great Britain and Ireland
  • And Those Most in Repute on the Continent
  • John Elliot
  • Published online:
    18 December 2013
    Print publication:
    29 August 2013
    First published in:
    1789
  • Although he was tried for attempted murder and died in Newgate Prison, the natural philosopher and apothecary John Elliot (1747–87) published a number of significant scientific works in the first part of the 1780s, especially with regard to sensory perception. This 1789 second edition of a 1781 work is essentially an alphabetically arranged catalogue of the principal British mineral waters, their properties and uses, along with those 'most celebrated ones which the English valetudinarian may have occasion to visit on the continent'. In his introduction, Elliot classes the waters according to their respective mineral properties and supplies details of the four classes of substances found united with water, and three methods for analysis. An extract of Joseph Priestley's 1772 pamphlet Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, with Dr John Nooth's alternative method as an appendix, forms an entertaining preface, informative as to the history of producing carbonated water.

Page 146 of 516