Before the Royal Society there was the Society of Astrologers (c.1647–1684), a group of around forty practitioners who met in London to enjoy lavish feasts, listen to sermons and exchange instruments and manuscripts. This article, drawing on untapped archival material, offers the first full account of this overlooked group. Convinced that astrology had been misunderstood by the professors who refused to teach it and the preachers who railed against it, the Society of Astrologers sought to democratize and legitimize their art. In contrast to the received view of seventeenth-century London astrologers, which emphasizes their bitter interrelationships, this article draws attention instead to their endeavours to mount a united front in defence of astrology. The article locates the society's attempts to promote astrological literacy within broader contemporary programmes to encourage mathematical education. Unlike other mathematical arts, however, astrology's religious credibility was an area of serious concern. The society therefore commissioned the delivery and publication of apologetic sermons that justified astrology on the basis of its sacred history. In this context, the legitimacy of astrology was more a religious than a scientific question. The society's public relations campaign ultimately failed, however, and its members disbanded in the mid-1680s. Not only were they mounting a rearguard action, but also they built their campaign on out-of-date historical arguments.

The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, ‘the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves’. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.

In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists’ knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century.

This article, which focuses on the political decision making around the leadership of India's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), shows how this process both decentralized scientific authority in India and led to changes in India's nuclear programme. New evidence presented from the deliberations of the Prime Minister's Secretariat (PMS) shows that Vikram Sarabhai, appointed chairman of the AEC in 1966, following the sudden death of the previous leader, Homi Bhabha, was the favoured candidate from the start of the process. His view on India's nuclear programme contrasted sharply with that of his predecessor, but his authority was protected, in part, from external challenge by the jurisdictional decisions made by the PMS. This article argues that the ambiguity inherent in India's developing nuclear programme was not the result of the apprehension of external threat, but the result of internal tensions within the relevant institutions, which are both revealed and (partially) resolved by the appointment process for the new chair.

This article will reveal how local scientific determination and ambition, in the face of rejection by funders, navigated a path to success and to influence in national policy and international medicine. It will demonstrate that Birmingham, England's ‘second city’, was the key centre for cutting-edge biological psychiatry in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The ambitions of Frederick Mott – doyen of biochemistry, neuropathology and neuropsychiatry, until now celebrated as a London figure – to revolutionize psychiatric treatment through science, chimed with those of the City and University of Birmingham's Joint Board of Research for Mental Diseases. Under Mott's direction, shaped by place and inter-professional working, the board's collaborators included psychiatrist Thomas Chivers Graves and world-renowned physiologist J.S. Haldane. However, starved of external money and therefore fresh ideas, as well as oversight, the ‘groupthink’ that emerged created the classic UK focal sepsis theory which, it was widely believed, would yield a cure for mental illness – a cure that never materialized. By tracing the venture's growth, accomplishments and contemporary potential for biochemical, bacterial and therapeutic discoveries – as well as its links with scientist and key government adviser Solly Zuckerman – this article illustrates how ‘failure’ and its ahistorical assessment fundamentally obscure past importance, neglect the early promise offered by later unsuccessful science, and can even hide questionable research.

This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world.

This article presents a case study of life and work at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (1835–1933) which reveals tensions between the lived reality of the observatory as a social space, and the attempts to create order, maintain discipline and project an image of authority in order to ensure the observatory's long-term stability. Domestic, social and scientific activities all intermingled within the observatory walls in ways which were occasionally disorderly. But life at Greenwich was carefully managed to stave off such disorder and to maintain an appearance of respectability which was essential to the observatory's reputation and output. The article focuses on three areas of management: (1) the observatory's outer boundaries, demonstrating how Greenwich navigated both human and environmental intrusions from the wider world; (2) the house, examining how Greenwich's domestic spaces provided stability, while also complicating observatory life via the management of domestic servants; and (3) the scientific spaces, with an emphasis on the work and play of the observatory's boy computers. Together, these three parts demonstrate that the stability of the observatory was insecure, despite being perpetuated via powerful physical and social boundaries. It had to be continually maintained, and was regularly challenged by Greenwich's occupants and neighbours.

This essay explores the research practice of French geometer Michel Chasles (1793–1880), from his 1837 Aperçu historique up to the preparation of his courses on ‘higher geometry’ between 1846 and 1852. It argues that this scientific pursuit was jointly carried out on a historiographical and a mathematical terrain. Epistemic techniques such as the archival search for and comparison of manuscripts, the deconstructive historiography of past geometrical methods, and the epistemologically motivated periodization of the history of mathematics are shown to have played a crucial role in the shaping of Chasles's own theories. In particular, we present Chasles's approach to the ‘material history’ of algebraic symbolism and argue that it motivated and informed his subsequent invention of a novel notational technology for the writing of geometrical proofs and propositions. In return, this technology allowed Chasles to carry out a programme for the modernization of geometry in keeping with epistemic requirements he had also delineated via a form of historical writing.

The late 1960s witnessed a key conjunction between political activism and the history of science. Science, whether seen as a touchstone of rationality or of oppression, was fundamental to all sides in the era of the Vietnam War. This essay examines the historian Robert Maxwell Young's turn to Marxism and radical politics during this period, especially his widely cited account of the ‘common context’ of nineteenth-century biological and social theorizing, which demonstrated the centrality of Thomas Robert Malthus's writings on population for Charles Darwin's formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. From Young's perspective, this history was bound up with pressing contemporary issues: ideologies of class and race in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the revival of Malthusian population control, and the role of science in military conflict. The aim was to provide a basis for political action – the ‘head revolution’ that would accompany radical social change. The radical force of Young's argument was blunted in subsequent decades by disciplinary developments within history of science, including the emergence of specialist Darwin studies, a focus on practice and the changing political associations of the history of ideas. Young's engaged standpoint, however, has remained influential even as historians moved from understanding science as ideology to science as work.

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination.

The digester, invented by Denis Papin in the 1680s, was a rudimentary pressure cooker used to soften hard bodies by boiling them at high pressure. In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Papin's work on the digester, arguing that his research was located at the intersection of the chemical laboratory and cooking practice. I then examine cases from the eighteenth-century European circulation of the instrument in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands in order to showcase the different practices in which the digester was embedded, including chemical research, philanthropic projects to feed the destitute, and proposals for the improvement of home cooking. The digester's history represents a key episode for demonstrating the intertwined nature of natural-philosophical research and the practice of economy or ‘thrift’. All users of the digester engaged in a rationalization of its functions through quantification, not only to fulfil a concern for precision but also to display the device's potential to reform practical daily life. The digester could save time and fuel, reduce material waste, make cooking easier and foster collective meal preparation for the needy.

Priorities in Medical Research (PMR) was published in 1988 by a select committee of the House of Lords. The report ushered in an era of NHS research and development (R & D) that lasted from 2001 to 2006. The inquiry's origins lay in concerns about academic medicine in the United Kingdom, yet PMR gave relatively little attention to this subject. Instead the report focused critically on the disconnect between the Department of Health and the NHS in R & D. This, the committee argued, had led to the neglect of research into health services and public health. To sidestep the report's unwelcome proposal for a National Health Research Agency, the department eventually grafted R & D management onto structures created as part of wider NHS reforms. The Medical Research Council successfully pursued a strategy of keeping the committee's attention away from sensitive aspects of its own programme. The final focus of PMR was shaped by an alignment between committee members with an industrial view of research and champions of health services research. The actions of the various actors involved are interpreted using elite models of the state, and the applicability of these models is critically examined.

Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970), written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain.

This article examines the most controversial of the activities of the India Meteorological Department (IMD): long-term seasonal forecasting for the South Asian subcontinent. Under the pressure of recurrent famines, in 1886 the imperial IMD commenced annual issue of monsoon predictions several months in advance, focused on one variable: rainfall. This state service was new to global late nineteenth-century meteorology, attempted first and most rigorously in India. Successive IMD leaders adapted the forecast in light of scientific and infrastructural developments, continuously revising the underlying methods of its production. All methods failed to achieve accurate prevision. Nevertheless, the imperatives of economic administration, empire and public demand compelled IMD scientists to continue annual publication of this unreliable product. This article contends that the seasonal forecast is best understood as an enduring ritual of good governance in a monsoonal environment. Through analysis of newspaper controversies, it suggests that although the seasonal forecast was the most compelling justification for the IMD's imperial and global importance, its limitations undercut popular trust in modern meteorology. Finally, this case illustrates the centrality of ‘tropical meteorology’ to the historical development of modern atmospheric science.

This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain's eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more ‘desirable’ middle and upper classes. Fisher's proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain's Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher's evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline.

Following some years of declining health, Professor Maurice Crosland passed away on 30 August 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. Author of four influential scholarly monographs, Maurice played major roles in the British Society for the History of Science during the 1960s and 1970s as an active Member of Council, Honorary Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science (1965–71) and Honorary President of the society (1974–6). His academic career began in 1963 with his appointment to a lectureship in the History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. In 1974 the by-then Reader in History of Science secured a £100,000 Nuffield Foundation Grant with which to establish, for the first time, a dedicated history-of-science group at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Appointed Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Unit for the History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science (known as the ‘History of Science Unit’ or simply ‘the Unit’), his objectives during the five-year Nuffield-funded period were to focus on promoting the research activities of the new group, build up much-needed library resources in a university which was barely ten years old, and effect a transition to a research and teaching Unit that would offer modules to undergraduates in each of the three principal faculties (Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences). His own research centred on French science during and after the Napoleonic period, with particular emphasis on the history of chemistry and the formal institutions and informal networks of Parisian science. In 1984 his work was recognized with the American Chemical Society's award of the Dexter Prize, a rare achievement for a British scholar.

Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM), a computerized catalogue of human genetic disorders authored and maintained by cardiologist and medical genetics pioneer Victor A. McKusick, played a major part in demarcating between a novel biomedical science and the eugenic projects of racial betterment which existed prior to its emergence. Nonetheless, it built upon prior efforts to systematize genetic knowledge tied to individuals and institutions invested in eugenics. By unpacking the process of digitizing a homespun cataloguing project and charting its development into an online database, this article aims to illuminate how the institution-building efforts of one individual created an ‘information order’ for accessing genetic information that tacitly shaped the norms and priorities of the field toward the pursuit of specific genes associated with discernible genetic disorders. This was not by design, but rather arose through negotiation with the catalogue's users; it accommodated further changes as biomedical research displaced the Mendelian paradigm. While great effort was expended toward making sequence data available to investigators during the Human Genome Project, MIM was largely taken for granted as a ‘legacy system’, McKusick's own labour of love. Drawing on recent histories of biomedical data, the article suggests that the bibliographical work of curation and translation is a central feature of value production in the life sciences meriting attention in its own right.

This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the ‘tropics’ as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of ‘othering’. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term ‘typhoon’ became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population.