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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 246 of 516

  • Railway interests and the ‘rope of air’, 1840–8

  • HENRY ATMORE
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 37 / Issue 3 / September 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 September 2004, pp. 245-279
    Print publication:
    September 2004

  • This paper examines the usefulness of the category ‘interest’ in the history of technology through a case study of the failed attempt to introduce atmospheric railway traction in Britain in the 1840s. It argues for a reflective deployment of the term in question, sensitive to contemporary usages. A schematic typology of railway ‘interests’ shows just how various these were. Financial interests, for example, were not the same as professional ones; or an investor might feel the pull of contrary interests, depending on whether she was checking her dividends or taking a train. The history of atmospheric traction demonstrates the interlocking of railway ‘interests’, and their utility in explaining the success or failure of railway technologies. As might be expected, determinism, whether technological or ‘social’, does not answer the case. ‘Interest’ relations are contingent, and so must be understood the failure of the atmospheric railway.

  • Textbooks, popular lectures and sermons: the quantum chemist Charles Alfred Coulson and the crafting of science

  • ANA SIMÕES
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 37 / Issue 3 / September 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 September 2004, pp. 299-342
    Print publication:
    September 2004

  • In this paper I address C. A. Coulson's teaching activities, writing textbooks and delivering popular science lectures, as well as his popular lectures on religion and the ‘scientific’ sermons delivered in his capacity as a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. I will pay particular attention to his thoughts on science. His commitment to forging a way to reconcile science and religion was built upon a reflection on the aims and methods of science within the broader framework of science's role in post-Second World War society. By noting that Coulson valued chemistry, mathematics and science in general, as a kind of religious activity, I argue that he wrote masterful textbooks and delivered popular science lectures as lay sermons. These were activities which Coulson pursued energetically to build a community of science adepts and proselytes. And winning young, and indeed not so young, people to science meant teaching them one of the languages that could be used to reach God. In the same way, I extend my argument to his popular lectures on religion and his ‘scientific’ sermons and claim that they should be viewed as popular science lectures addressed to an audience that was often ignorant, or even suspicious, of science.

Page 246 of 516