Although largely remembered as an astronomer, the Reverend George Fisher (1794–1873) played a significant part in studying the performance and possible improvement of marine chronometers in the mid-nineteenth century. Appointed astronomer to the Royal Navy's Arctic expedition of 1818, while on the voyage Fisher carried out research into the effects of magnetism on the accurate running of chronometers on board ship. By this time, chronometers were standard equipment on many ships and their reliability was a matter of importance to all mariners. Fisher's published findings from this research led to considerable contemporary debate, and also influenced the work of others in the field. Moreover, as papers held at the National Maritime Museum show, he carried on his chronometer research in later life, making further contributions to the subject that have remained somewhat neglected.

In general history and popular culture, the long 1960s, a period roughly beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the mid-1970s, has been held to be a period of change. This paper offers a model which captures something of the long 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’ resulting from the interference of three waves. Wave One was an institutional dynamic that drew out experts from closed and hidden disagreement into situations where expert disagreement was open to public scrutiny. Wave One also accounts for the multiplication of experts. Wave Two consisted of social movements, institutions and audiences that could carry public scrutiny and provide a home for sea-change cultures. In particular, Wave Two provided the stage, audience and agents to orchestrate a play of disagreeing experts. Wave Three was marked by an orientation towards the self, in diverse ways. Modern science studies is a phenomenon of Wave Three. All three waves must be understood in the context of the unfolding Cold War.

This article explores the enticement of consumers for natural philosophy (buyers of books, audiences at public lectures and purchasers of instruments) in London between 1695 and 1720 through advertisements placed in two political newspapers. This twenty-five-year period witnessed both the birth of public science and the rage of party politics. A consideration of public science adverts within the Whig-leaning Post Man and the Tory-leaning Post Boy reveals that members of both the Whig and Tory parties were equally targeted and that natural philosophy was sold to London's reading population in bipartisan fashion. In the process of integrating natural philosophy into the wider culture through commercial sales, political allegiances were not imprinted on the advertising process. This conclusion raises questions regarding the historiographical assertion of Whig-supported public science and Tory opposition to it at the level of consumers.

The widespread adoption of standard time in Britain took more than fifty years and simple public access to a representation of it took longer still. Whilst the railways and telegraph networks were crucial in the development of standardized time and time-distribution networks, very different contexts existed, from the Victorian period onwards, where time was significant in both its definition and its distribution. The moral drive to regulate and standardize aspects of daily life, from factory work to the sale of liquor, led to time being used as a tool for control. Yet, as a tool, it was problematic, both in its own regulation and in the regulation of its distribution. Companies such as the Standard Time Company, in creating businesses out of time distribution, found themselves at the heart of discussions of time and standards, acting, as they did, as a nexus between the nation's master timekeeper, the Royal Observatory, and London public houses, Lancashire cotton mills and myriad small businesses. We can see this network both literally, in electric wires, clocks, batteries and relays, and metaphorically, transmitting Victorian moral concerns of ‘power’ and ‘intelligence’ between imperial state and individual. Naturally enough, the network itself was as contested as the message it transmitted.

In 1854 Admiral FitzRoy, acting as the first head of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, initiated a project to distribute fishery barometers to poor fishing communities. Over the next eleven years until his untimely death in 1865, FitzRoy oversaw the distribution of dozens of barometers. The distribution continued after his death and many of the original barometers are still in place. FitzRoy's tenure at the Met Department is today remembered for his innovative and controversial development of weather forecasts, the first of their kind in Britain, which were telegraphed to coastal towns to warn of impending storms. Against the backdrop of this dramatic attempt to predict the weather using the tools of telegraphy and synoptic mapping, the barometer distribution project looks like an unexceptional piece of administration, a routine shuttling of correspondence and instruments. Closer inspection reveals a case study in Victorian governance that shows how individuals could contribute to elite forms of science by remaining independent of them in key respects. Rather than providing disciplined and trustworthy registrations of nature's language, the fishery barometers distributed by FitzRoy and the Met Department were explicitly excluded from the wider project to map British and global weather. By being thus excluded, they helped augment the autonomy of their intended users, the poor fishermen who were thereby made into better, more independent, interpreters of the Met Office forecasts. By revealing the potential for an instrument to be useful when not registering, this episode suggests that instruments could augment as well as replace the autonomous judgements of individuals.

In his presidential address to the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874, John Tyndall launched what David Livingstone has called a ‘frontal assault on teleology and Christian theism’. Using Tyndall's intervention as a starting point, this paper seeks to understand the attitudes of Presbyterians in the north of Ireland to science in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The first section outlines some background, including the attitude of Presbyterians to science in the eighteenth century, the development of educational facilities in Ireland for the training of Presbyterian ministers, and the specific cultural and political circumstances in Ireland that influenced Presbyterian responses to science more generally. The next two sections examine two specific applications by Irish Presbyterians of the term ‘science’: first, the emergence of a distinctive Presbyterian theology of nature and the application of inductive scientific methodology to the study of theology, and second, the Presbyterian conviction that mind had ascendancy over matter which underpinned their commitment to the development of a science of the mind. The final two sections examine, in turn, the relationship between science and an eschatological reading of the signs of the times, and attitudes to Darwinian evolution in the fifteen years between the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and Tyndall's speech in 1874.

This paper concerns the movement of the old navigational instrument, the compass, into the new situation of the aeroplane in the early part of the twentieth century. In order for the technology that had so long resided on ships or in the hand to continue to function in new contexts, a huge amount of work was required. Relationships were forged and made fraught, inventions were made to contest and succeed one another, new scientific and technical knowledge was produced. Throughout, the perceived nature of compasses and magnetic fields underwent subtle but significant shifts. Until recently histories dealing with the emergence of the aerocompass have largely black-boxed the technological changes, with only superficial treatment of issues lying beyond the compass itself.1 John Bradley's exploration of the feud between the Admiralty and military compass designers, and the sections in both Bradley's and A. E. Fanning's work on lawsuits over originality,2 go some way towards rectifying this imbalance. This paper extends that work further. It focuses on events in Britain, particularly those centred on two institutions, the Admiralty Compass Observatory at Ditton Park, Slough, and the Royal Aircraft Factory (later the Royal Aircraft Establishment) at Farnborough.

This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarctica's sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions extended the influence of prominent glaciologists promoting RES and helped them gather sufficient support to test its efficiency. The organization and implementation of a large-scale research programme of RES in Antarctica followed these developments. The paper also examines the deployment of RES in Antarctic explorations, showing that its completion depended on the availability of technological systems of which RES was an integral part.