By the early years of the twentieth century, astronomers regarded photography as one of the most valuable tools at their disposal, a technique which not only provided an accurate and reliable representation of astronomical phenomena, but also radically changed the role of the astronomical observer. Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, wrote in 1905: ‘The wonderful exactness of the photographic record may perhaps best be characterised by saying that it has revealed the deficiencies of all our other astronomical apparatus – object-glasses and prisms, clocks, even the observer himself.’ H. C. Russell, government astronomer in Sydney, suggested that photography might in the future make the observer redundant: ‘In many cases the observer must stand aside while the sensitive photographic plate takes his place and works with the power of which he is not capable… I feel sure that in a very few years the observer will be displaced altogether.’ Such visions were not uncommon at the time, emanating from the trust invested in the photographic process after the spectacular achievements of the late nineteenth century.

The atomic theory of Dalton implied that there were more than 30 different kinds of matter, the chemical elements. William Prout (1815) was the first of a long line of distinguished speculators who sought to show, by argument and experiment, that this diversity overlay a more fundamental unity. Contrary to a common opinion, this was not an eccentric and unpopular movement, but involved many of the great names of nineteenth-century chemistry; and some of their speculations have proved to be very near the mark. It may be that this strong current of well-informed speculation enabled the discoveries of cathode rays and of radioactivity (which provided the first real evidence of the complexity of the atom) to be integrated into the body of science with such remarkable rapidity.

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century.

BBC Television's Horizon series, fifty years old on 2 May 2014, despite its significance to the history of the public culture of science, has been little studied. This microhistorical account follows the gestation and early years of the programme, demonstrating how it established a social and cultural account of science. This was a result of televisual factors, notably the determination to follow the format of the successful arts television programme Monitor. It illuminates how the processes of television production, with a handful of key participants – Aubrey Singer, Gerald Leach, Philip Daly, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Ramsay Short, Michael Peacock and Robert Reid – established the format of the programme. This occurred over seventeen months of prior preparation followed by three troubled years of seeking to establish a stable form. This was finally achieved in 1967 when the programme adopted a film documentary approach after extended attempts at making it as a studio-based magazine programme. The story has implications for understanding the social accounts of science that were circulating in the key decade of the 1960s.

Traditional historiography of science has constructed secrecy in opposition to openness. In the first part of the paper, I will challenge this opposition. Openness and secrecy are often interlocked, impossible to take apart, and they might even reinforce each other. They should be understood as positive (instead of privative) categories that do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. In the second part of this paper, I call for a historicization of the concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘secrecy’. Focusing on the early modern period, I briefly introduce three kinds of secrecy that are difficult to analyse with a simple oppositional understanding of openness and secrecy. In particular, I focus on secrecy in relation to esoteric traditions, theatricality and allegory.

With the coming of the French Revolution in 1789 and its attack on monarchy, the landed aristocracy, the religious establishment and religion itself, and especially with the coming of the sans culottes and the First French Republic and its ‘Terror’ in 1793–94, fear of revolution swept the British establishment. Sensing revolution everywhere, successive Tory governments, rooted in the alliance of the Church of England, the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, practised a consistent and harsh policy of repression. Neither the fear nor the repression eased with the arrival of, or indeed, with the departure of, Napoleon who, as Emperor from 1804 to 1815, seemed determined to conquer Britain by means of revolutionary propaganda, economic blockade and/or military invasion.

Until the first quarter of the seventeenth century there was a great deal of agreement about the nature of mathematical practice. Mathematicians, as well as their patrons and clients, viewed all possible aspects of their work, both theoretical and practical, as being included within their discipline. Although the mathematical sciences were a fairly recent foreign import to England, which can barely be traced back beyond the mid-sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a large and growing body of practitioners with a unified view of their subject's identity. Divisions began to appear, however, and they were often framed in terms of the proper mixture of theory and practice in mathematical education.

One early sign of the emergence of this tension is the kind of accusation made in the priority dispute between William Oughtred and Richard Delamain taking place around 1632. Their bitter conflict began over who first invented the Horizontal Quadrant, a form of sundial, and the Circles of Proportion, a logarithmic calculating device that can be considered a precursor of the slide rule, and ended in a dispute over what constituted proper mathematical practice. Oughtred accused Delamain of making his students ‘only doers of tricks, and as it were Juglers’ by teaching them the use of instruments without any theoretical foundation. Instruments, Oughtred claimed, could only be used with understanding by students who had a proper theoretical foundation. He advocated postponing their use until after the theoretical foundations of a subject had been thoroughly mastered. Delamain, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to teach practical instrumental operations without insisting upon a theoretical grounding. This paper will use the dispute between Oughtred and Delamain to investigate the breakdown of consensus over internal mathematical boundaries, the rhetoric and strategies involved in attempts to gain authority by mathematical practitioners, and the extent to which their roles were negotiated, both with other practitioners, and with their patrons and students.

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

There is no evidence to suggest that even as late as January 1672, when Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, anyone (except those unknown few who had in the previous years attended his Lucasian lectures at Cambridge) had any inkling of his new theory of colours. His name exploded on the scientific scene as the inventor and constructor of a new kind of telescope—what later became known as the reflector (which was somewhat misleading compared with its name during the seventeenth century: the catadioptrical telescope). Had the erudition of the London virtuosi been a little broader, they would have known that in fact he was not the inventor of the telescope, even though the precise form he gave it was his. Not only was the idea a hundred years old, during which period it was repeatedly suggested by various writers, but also Newton himself took the idea straight from the most recent of these suggestions, namely that included in James Gregory's Optica promota of 1663. The situation becomes even more ironic when we realize that the new instrument was admired for wrong reasons and on merits that were far from Newton's intentions. Nevertheless, admired it was, and there was a good reason for this: Newton's instrument was in fact the first reflector actually to be constructed and, moreover, for a few weeks (before its mirror became tarnished) it performed quite well. Several astonomers became interested because of the high magnifying power relative to its dimensions (about 7 inches long, with a magnification of 38).

It has long been recognized that unnecessary cruelty to animals was held to be morally wrong by many classical moralists and medieval scholastics, and was echoed repeatedly in the early-modern period, though not necessarily reflecting any particular concern for animals, but rather to indicate the supposed brutalizing effects on the human character. The prevalence of the more radical view that cruelty to animals was wrong regardless of human consequences has only been dealt with comparatively recently, in the pioneering work of Keith Thomas with regard to early-modern England. Thomas suggested that a remarkably constant and coherent argument underpinned the bulk of pamphleteering and preaching against animal cruelty in the period; man was entitled to domesticate animals and kill them for food and clothing but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. While wild animals could be killed for food or in self-defence, and game and vermin could be hunted, it was deemed wrong to kill only for pleasure. While this position could be found among Protestants of many different persuasions, the particular focus of successive campaigners changed over time. Preceding the Civil War the attack was concentrated on cock-fighting, bear-baiting and the ill-treatment of domestic animals; in the later seventeenth century it broadened out to include the caging of wild birds, brutal methods of slaughter, hare-hunting and vivisection.

While the British Empire conventionally is recognized as a source of research subjects and objects in anthropology, and a site where anthropological expertise might inform public administration, the settler-colonial affiliations and experiences of many leading physical anthropologists could also directly shape theories of human variation, both physical and cultural. Antipodean anthropologists like Grafton Elliot Smith were pre-adapted to diffusionist models that explained cultural achievement in terms of the migration, contact and mixing of peoples. Trained in comparative methods, these fractious cosmopolitans also favoured a dynamic human biology, often emphasizing the heterogeneity and environmental plasticity of body form and function, and viewing fixed, static racial typologies and hierarchies sceptically. By following leading representatives of empire anatomy and physical anthropology, such as Elliot Smith and Frederic Wood Jones, around the globe, it is possible to recover the colonial entanglements and biases of interwar British anthropology, moving beyond a simple inventory of imperial sources, and crediting human biology and social anthropology not just as colonial sciences but as the sciences of itinerant colonials.

The most reliable source for a reconstruction of Galileo's progress toward a science of motion is the series of undated fragmentary notes on that subject preserved in Codex A of the Galilean manuscripts at Florence. A gathering of such fragments was published by Favaro in the National Edition of Galileo's works, following the Discorsi. The more sophisticated fragments are clearly associated with the composition of that work, and show a definite and consistent understanding of acceleration. Eliminating those, it will be found that the earlier notes fall into recognizable groups. First, there are some that refer to “moment of gravity”, or to the impetus of a body along a line of descent, and are associated with the discussion of inclined planes in De motu. Second, some refer to descent along arcs and chords of circles, associated with Galileo's letter of 29 November 1602 to Guido Ubaldo. These first two groups of notes do not explicitly refer to accelerated motion, and should not be assumed to do so implicity, where such an assumption can be avoided.

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained.

This essay examines Jane Marcet's 1806 Conversations on Chemistry in the context of a newly emerging ideology of science. As part of this emergence, a new public for chemistry had to be formed and clearly demarcated from that of ‘public men’ of science. Although this essay examines Marcet's relation to Humphry Davy's public lectures on chemistry, it focuses on the encouragement she received from the highly intellectual Geneva elite, to whom she was related. Comparing her work to the influential Bibliothèque britannique founded by members of this elite, it asks why a group of patrician intellectuals would want to cultivate women's interest in chemistry and encourage the popularization of science in the aftermath of a revolution which threatened their national identity and power. It suggests that the answer may lie in the recourse to science to establish moral and political authority in the aftermath of this very revolution.

General notions of the biosphere are widely recognized and form important elements of contemporary debate concerning global environmental change, helping to focus attention on the complex interactions that characterize the Earth's natural systems. At the same time, there is continued uncertainty over the precise definition of the concept allied to a relatively limited critique of its early development, which was linked closely to advances in the natural sciences during the late nineteenth century and particularly, it is argued here, to the emergence of biogeochemistry. In the light of this, the principal aim of the paper is to explore the development and subsequent dissemination of biogeochemical renderings of the biosphere concept, focusing primarily on the work of the Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii (1863–1945). The paper identifies four key moments which, it is argued, help to explain the development and subsequent dissemination of a biogeochemical understanding of the biosphere. First, we draw attention to the particularities of St Petersburg's natural-science community during the late nineteenth century, arguing that this was instrumental in providing the basis for Vernadskii's future work related to the biosphere. Second, we consider the ways in which Vernadskii's ideas concerning the biosphere were able to move to the West during the first half of the twentieth century with specific reference to his links with the French scientists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Edouard Le Roy, and the US-based ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson. Third, we reflect more purposefully on matters of reception and, in particular, the emergence of a set of circumstances within Western ecological science after 1945, which encouraged a positive engagement with biogeochemical understandings of the biosphere. Finally, we examine the 1968 UNESCO-sponsored Biosphere Conference, which represented the first time the biosphere concept was employed at the international level. Furthermore, this event was in many ways a high point for a specifically biogeochemical approach, with the subsequent popularization of the biosphere concept during the course of the 1970s helping to broaden the discourse markedly.

It is inherent in the process of producing mechanical and hence electrical energy from a heat engine that much of the energy input is released as relatively low temperature heat. By various techniques it is possible to produce reject heat at a temperature useful for space heating or industrial process heating, giving a much higher overall efficiency of conversion and saving fuel over separate production of electricity and heat. Heat from combined heat and power (CHP) plant, or from another central source, can be piped in the form of hot water or steam to users' premises, in district heating (DH) networks.

The Marxist history of science has played an enormous role in the development of the history of science. Whether through the appreciation of its insights or the construction of a political fortress to prevent infusion, its presence is felt. From 1931 the work of Marxists played an integral part in the international development of the history of science, though rarely have the connections between them or their own biographies been explored. These networks convey a distinct history, alongside political, methodological and personal implications, impressing on us a greater understanding of the possibilities that were present and were lost in the most turbulent of decades. Two of the most notable were Boris Hessen, a founder of Marxist history of science, and J. G. Crowther, one of its most prolific exponents. My examination explores aspects of the dialogue between these controversial figures, starting with brief biographical sketches. Their lives became briefly entwined following the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931, demonstrated with reference to the meeting and the correspondence between them until Hessen's death. In doing so, some new facts and old controversies surface, though most importantly the nature of the correspondence carries implications for the Marxist history of science and for the wider movement of which it is part. The Russian delegation to the congress declared that science was at a crossroads. The history of science was at a similar crossroads in the 1930s.

Having coined the word ‘eugenics’ and inspired leading biologists and statisticians of the early twentieth century, Francis Galton is often studied for his contributions to modern statistical biology. However, whilst documenting this part of his work, historians have frequently neglected crucial aspects of what motivated Galton to establish his eugenics research programme. Arguing that his work was shaped more by social than by biological science, this paper addresses these oversights by tracing the development of Galton's programme, from its roots in a debate about political economy to his appeals for it to be taken up by sociologists. In so doing, the paper not only returns Galton's ideas to their original context but also provides a reason to reflect on the place of the social sciences in history-of-science scholarship.

The publication of L. Pearce Williams's definitive biography of Faraday has led to lively discussion of the influence of Naturphilosophie on Davy and Faraday, and of the role played by Bosco vichean atomism in their scientific development. In a recent article J. Brookes Spencer argued that Boscovich's force law, involving interaction between point atoms independent of surrounding particles, was only compatible with Faraday's view of gravity and not with his views on other forces. This would of course contradict the notion of unity which is absolutely fundamental to Boscovich's Theoria.