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Apples to advocacy: Evaluating consumer preferences for hard cider policies
- Aaron J. Staples, Philip H. Howard, David S. Conner, J. Robert Sirrine, Marcia R. Ostrom, Michelle Miller
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- Journal of Wine Economics / Volume 18 / Issue 4 / November 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 28 November 2023, pp. 286-301
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Hard cider is a sector of a maturing craft beverage industry that continues to experience growth in the United States. Cider is also experiencing challenges, however, such as competition from other alcohol markets, changing consumer preferences, the supply chain, and inflationary pressures. National policy changes may help promote more optimal outcomes for this sector, but public support is important to policy formation. This study uses survey data from a best-worst scaling experiment of consumers in four leading cider-producing states (Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, and Vermont) to understand preferences toward ten broad cider policy initiatives. The results of multinomial logistic modeling reveal that consumers prefer policies mandating ingredients, nutrition facts, and allergen labeling across all ciders. The least preferred policy initiatives include allowing producers to use vintage on labeling and funding regional cider development. These results have important implications for stakeholders across the industry, including the benefits of labeling disclosures in marketing and the need to improve public awareness of barriers to cider industry development.
Timely intervention and control of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak at a large skilled nursing facility—San Francisco, California, 2020
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- Ellora N. Karmarkar, Irin Blanco, Pauli N. Amornkul, Amie DuBois, Xianding Deng, Patrick K. Moonan, Beth L. Rubenstein, David A. Miller, Idamae Kennedy, Jennifer Yu, Justin P. Dauterman, Melissa Ongpin, Wilmie Hathaway, Lisa Hoo, Stephanie Trammell, Ejovwoke F. Dosunmu, Guixia Yu, Zenith Khwaja, Wendy Lu, Nawzaneen Z. Talai, Seema Jain, Janice K. Louie, Susan S. Philip, Scot Federman, Godfred Masinde, Debra A. Wadford, Naveena Bobba, Juliet Stoltey, Adrian Smith, Erin Epson, Charles Y. Chiu, Ayanna S. Bennett, Amber M. Vasquez, Troy Williams
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- Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology / Volume 42 / Issue 10 / October 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 14 December 2020, pp. 1173-1180
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- October 2021
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Objective:
To describe epidemiologic and genomic characteristics of a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak in a large skilled-nursing facility (SNF), and the strategies that controlled transmission.
Design, setting, and participants:This cohort study was conducted during March 22–May 4, 2020, among all staff and residents at a 780-bed SNF in San Francisco, California.
Methods:Contact tracing and symptom screening guided targeted testing of staff and residents; respiratory specimens were also collected through serial point prevalence surveys (PPSs) in units with confirmed cases. Cases were confirmed by real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction testing for SARS-CoV-2, and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) was used to characterize viral isolate lineages and relatedness. Infection prevention and control (IPC) interventions included restricting from work any staff who had close contact with a confirmed case; restricting movement between units; implementing surgical face masking facility-wide; and the use of recommended PPE (ie, isolation gown, gloves, N95 respirator and eye protection) for clinical interactions in units with confirmed cases.
Results:Of 725 staff and residents tested through targeted testing and serial PPSs, 21 (3%) were SARS-CoV-2 positive: 16 (76%) staff and 5 (24%) residents. Fifteen cases (71%) were linked to a single unit. Targeted testing identified 17 cases (81%), and PPSs identified 4 cases (19%). Most cases (71%) were identified before IPC interventions could be implemented. WGS was performed on SARS-CoV-2 isolates from 4 staff and 4 residents: 5 were of Santa Clara County lineage and the 3 others were distinct lineages.
Conclusions:Early implementation of targeted testing, serial PPSs, and multimodal IPC interventions limited SARS-CoV-2 transmission within the SNF.
Personality Polygenes, Positive Affect, and Life Satisfaction
- Alexander Weiss, Bart M. L. Baselmans, Edith Hofer, Jingyun Yang, Aysu Okbay, Penelope A. Lind, Mike B. Miller, Ilja M. Nolte, Wei Zhao, Saskia P. Hagenaars, Jouke-Jan Hottenga, Lindsay K. Matteson, Harold Snieder, Jessica D. Faul, Catharina A. Hartman, Patricia A. Boyle, Henning Tiemeier, Miriam A. Mosing, Alison Pattie, Gail Davies, David C. Liewald, Reinhold Schmidt, Philip L. De Jager, Andrew C. Heath, Markus Jokela, John M. Starr, Albertine J. Oldehinkel, Magnus Johannesson, David Cesarini, Albert Hofman, Sarah E. Harris, Jennifer A. Smith, Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen, Laura Pulkki-Råback, Helena Schmidt, Jacqui Smith, William G. Iacono, Matt McGue, David A. Bennett, Nancy L. Pedersen, Patrik K. E. Magnusson, Ian J. Deary, Nicholas G. Martin, Dorret I. Boomsma, Meike Bartels, Michelle Luciano
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- Twin Research and Human Genetics / Volume 19 / Issue 5 / October 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 22 August 2016, pp. 407-417
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Approximately half of the variation in wellbeing measures overlaps with variation in personality traits. Studies of non-human primate pedigrees and human twins suggest that this is due to common genetic influences. We tested whether personality polygenic scores for the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) domains and for item response theory (IRT) derived extraversion and neuroticism scores predict variance in wellbeing measures. Polygenic scores were based on published genome-wide association (GWA) results in over 17,000 individuals for the NEO-FFI and in over 63,000 for the IRT extraversion and neuroticism traits. The NEO-FFI polygenic scores were used to predict life satisfaction in 7 cohorts, positive affect in 12 cohorts, and general wellbeing in 1 cohort (maximal N = 46,508). Meta-analysis of these results showed no significant association between NEO-FFI personality polygenic scores and the wellbeing measures. IRT extraversion and neuroticism polygenic scores were used to predict life satisfaction and positive affect in almost 37,000 individuals from UK Biobank. Significant positive associations (effect sizes <0.05%) were observed between the extraversion polygenic score and wellbeing measures, and a negative association was observed between the polygenic neuroticism score and life satisfaction. Furthermore, using GWA data, genetic correlations of -0.49 and -0.55 were estimated between neuroticism with life satisfaction and positive affect, respectively. The moderate genetic correlation between neuroticism and wellbeing is in line with twin research showing that genetic influences on wellbeing are also shared with other independent personality domains.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
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- 05 August 2015
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Notes
- David Philip Miller
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II - Realities
- David Philip Miller
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Dedication
- David Philip Miller
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Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- David Philip Miller
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2 - The Demise of the ‘Chemical Watt’ in the Nineteenth Century
- from I - Representations
- David Philip Miller
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- James Watt, Chemist
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- 05 December 2014, pp 33-58
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Summary
During the course of the nineteenth century Watt's chemical work and its importance to his improvements of the steam engine were effectively obscured. There was a significant disjunction between public characterizations of Watt in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries and those extant by the early twentieth. As Watt's early reputation developed and grew, contemporary sources frequently identified him as a chemist and recognized the relevance of his chemical work to the steam engine improvements. By the early twentieth century, however, Watt's chemistry had passed from view. This is readily seen in the events and publications that celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1919 and the two hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1936. So, by some process, during the course of the nineteenth century the recognition of the chemical basis of Watt's steam engine improvements, especially of the first phase of them involving the separate condenser, evaporated. What was that process?
A central element in this process was the ‘water controversy’ concerning whether Watt, Cavendish or Lavoisier should be recognized as the discoverer of the compound nature of water. I have examined this controversy, and the forces that drove it, in considerable detail elsewhere. In this chapter I focus on the way in which the controversy, together with Watt's ‘self-fashioning’ in the later years of his life, radically transformed Watt's chemical reputation and in particular determined the extent to which he was recognized as a chemist at all.
Watt engaged in considerable recasting of his achievement in the years between about 1800 and his death in 1819. During the very early nineteenth century important investigations were being conducted which began to question the material theory of heat, and, even more acutely, the role of heat as a chemical substance. These were key ideas upon which Watt had built his original understanding of steam and of the steam engine. More particularly, from around 1790, a number of investigators, including Agustin de Bétancourt, Gaspard de Prony and John Dalton, conducted and published steam experiments, which in terms of methods, results and interpretation presented challenges to Watt's own.
I - Representations
- David Philip Miller
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5 - The Steam Engine as Chemistry
- from II - Realities
- David Philip Miller
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- 05 December 2014, pp 125-146
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Summary
There are two ways in which the centrality of the chemistry of heat, water and steam to Watt's steam engine improvements can be discerned. One, which will be pursued later in this chapter, is to reconstruct in a technical sense – building on what we now know about Watt's chemistry – the conceptual world in which, and through which, Watt's thinking about the steam engine took place. A second is to gain an appreciation of what we might call the ‘ecology of steam’. By this I mean the broader chemical cosmology, embracing meteorology and geology, of which steam and the steam engine were a part, for Watt and his contemporaries. I start with the wider chemical picture.
The Ecology of Steam: Meteorology, Geology and The Botanic Garden
Newcomen engines are known as ‘atmospheric’ engines. This is because the drive on the piston is provided by the atmosphere working against the partial vacuum created in the cylinder by the condensation of the steam. But there was, and is, a deeper sense in which steam engines were atmospheric engines even when Watt put the steam itself to work in driving the piston. The engines were seen as trading on processes that were ubiquitous in the natural world and responsible for other atmospheric and geological phenomena. Meteorological and geological understandings were thus important to the science of heat and steam that underpinned the steam engine. Those who thought about steam and the steam engine sought, and found, coherences between phenomena in the realm of engines, meteorology and geology. Indeed, I suggest that a steam engine was sometimes thought of as a kind of local corralling of the wild forces of nature. In the twentieth century nuclear physicists sometimes spoke about the act of deploying nuclear forces to provide energy via nuclear reactors as ‘twisting the tail of the dragon’. I believe that the same sense of domesticating a wild phenomenon attended eighteenth-century steam engine technology. The steam engine in the eighteenth-century landscape was, not just aesthetically, but also ecologically, part of what went on around it.
CONTENTS
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3 - The ‘Mechanical Watt’: The Making of a ‘Philosophical Engineer’
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- David Philip Miller
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Summary
The chemists of the nineteenth century did not embrace Watt as one of their number, but the case was very different with its engineers. In fact not only did the engineers ‘pull’ Watt into their company but the chemists, and other elite scientists, as we saw, ‘pushed’ him in that direction. Watt was, according to the likes of James David Forbes, an indifferent chemist but a ‘profound’ engineer. He was characterized as a ‘philosophical engineer’ because of his understanding, command and use of physical law.
My argument in this chapter is that Watt was made into an ‘engineer’ in the nineteenth century – perhaps it would be better to say ‘engineers’ since he was constructed as multiple manifestations of the type during that period. The implication of this process of construction is that Watt was not an engineer in the late eighteenth century, during his own lifetime. To divest Watt of the status of engineer may seem perverse and I do not mean this literally. His contemporaries often referred to Watt, and he designated himself, as an engineer. Indeed, ‘James Watt, Engineer’ was the extended identifier that he used in his published papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. His collaborative publication on pneumatic medicine with Thomas Beddoes used the same phrase on the title page. But it is only apparently perverse to problematize this self-identification because the term ‘engineer’ underwent a remarkable evolution from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. In understanding Watt's self-designation as ‘engineer’ we need to understand, I suggest, what that term meant in his own time. Having done that we can then comprehend something of the way that Watt habitually presented himself to the world, and how he sought to negotiate the ambiguous status that ‘engineer’ then brought with it. For Watt was no ordinary engineer, and he and his friends wanted to make that clear.
7 - Conclusions
- from II - Realities
- David Philip Miller
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Summary
James Watt was certainly a ‘man o’ pairts’, but he was also a coherent whole. For too long our historical understanding of him has emphasized the many parts, seeing the whole only dimly, if at all. By pursuing the links between his practical and theoretical work I have tried to set this to rights. Watt was an engineer. He was certainly an expert, as J. D. Forbes put it in his discussions of these questions, at contrivance. Forbes admired Watt's invention of the parallel motion as showing Watt's genius for contrivance, but he argued that this in itself would never have been the basis for ‘reputation’. Watt's reputation derived from his quality as a philosophic engineer. I have argued that what gave his engineering its philosophic quality or dimension was largely chemical in character. Watt was a chemist, whose chemistry of heat provided the philosophical dimension to his engineering. That philosophical dimension was very different from the equivalent dimension of what became known in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘engineering science’. In engineering science heat was understood as a form of energy, convertible into other forms according to the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. All this was foreign to the intellectual world that Watt inhabited. However, because Watt was adopted as an icon and founding father of their field, the engineering scientists of the nineteenth century were not averse to smoothing over some of the differences between his world and theirs. Watt the chemist and engineer became Watt the mechanical engineer.
In my early chapters I showed how popular representation of Watt, which became a minor industry itself in the nineteenth century, presented the mechanical Watt. This was a natural and easy thing to do given the association of Watt in the popular mind with contrivance. The products of that genius for contrivance, or so it seemed, were everywhere in Victorian Britain, the engines, the linkage and control mechanisms to convert the power of those engines into useful work, the indicators designed to monitor, measure and adjust their performance.
James Watt, Chemist
- Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age
- David Philip Miller
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In the Victorian era, James Watt became an iconic engineer, but in his own time he was also an influential chemist. Miller examines Watt’s illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt’s conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.Part I of the book – Representations – examines the way James Watt has been portrayed over time, emphasizing sculptural, pictorial and textual representations from the nineteenth century. As an important contributor to the development of arguably the most important technology of industrialization, Watt became a symbol that many groups of thinkers were anxious to claim. Part II – Realities – focuses on reconstructing the unsung ‘chemical Watt’ instead of the lionized engineer.
1 - Of Statues, Kettles and Indicators – The ‘Mechanical Watt’
- from I - Representations
- David Philip Miller
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Index
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6 - The Indicator Understood, or Why Watt was not a Proto-thermodynamicist
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- David Philip Miller
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Summary
Introduction
Later nineteenth-century histories of the steam engine were most often written by practising engineers and scientists. They exhibited the common tendency of practitioners to write ‘Whig’ history, that is, to interpret past historical actors and actions in modern terms. This genre of literature, then, assimilated Watt to the modern traditions and conceptions of thermodynamics. In its turn this later nineteenth-century literature has left its mark on modern historical writings.
I am concerned in this chapter with two processes of assimilation of Watt to thermodynamics. The first involves conceptual assimilation of Watt to mid-nineteenth-century understandings of ‘energy’. A typical example of conceptual assimilation is an essay by Keith J. Laidler, which presents Watt and his engine as practical progenitors of that science. Certainly the steam engine was an important resource for those developing thermodynamic understandings. But to picture Watt and his engine ‘pushing’ in that direction is problematic. Even sophisticated and nuanced treatments of the issue fall into a similar trap. The eminent historian of technology, Donald Cardwell, implicitly placed the work of Black and Watt on heat into a tradition of the ‘physics’ of heat, a line leading to the ‘Rise of Thermodynamics’. I have already argued that the excellent and detailed account of the origins of Watt's key invention by Richard L. Hills is also on dangerous territory when deploying the concept of the ‘perfect engine’ in telling that history. Although the term does come from Watt's own accounts of how he arrived at his invention, and therefore must in some sense be reliable, what the term meant to Watt is all too easily lost sight of and elided into later visualizations of ideal heat engines that every modern student learns about as the basis of thermodynamics. The second process of assimilation involved the steam indicator, a device that, because of its mid-nineteenth-century involvement with thermodynamic theory, was often taken as some kind of natural bridge between that theory and Watt, who invented the instrument. As I will show, the rather mysterious, chequered and just plain misunderstood, history of this device encouraged a ‘telescoping’ of its later and early history.
Introduction
- David Philip Miller
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- Book:
- James Watt, Chemist
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 1-10
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Summary
By way of introduction I need to do two things. The first is to provide a historical outline of the life of James Watt, a general overview that will assist in situating my specific, and rather specialized, argument about the centrality of chemistry to his life and work. The second is to explain the structure and the strategy of my study, as well as some of the basic assumptions that underlie it.
The ‘Great Steamer’ – A Life Outlined
James Watt, who the geologist Roderick Murchison referred to in 1839, with a peculiar mixture of deference, affection and condescension, as ‘the Great Steamer’, had been born just over a hundred years earlier, in 1736, to a moderately prosperous merchant family in Greenock, a small town on the lower reaches of the River Clyde, near Glasgow in Scotland. Watt's paternal grandfather was a ‘professor’ of mathematics, teaching that subject and navigation in a community dominated increasingly in the mid-eighteenth century by maritime trade. Watt's father was a ships’ chandler and general merchant. While Watt's elder brother John entered the family business – he was lost at sea on a merchant venture – the family was prosperous enough to invest in an informal apprenticeship for Watt to the London-based instrument maker John Morgan. The young Watt's time in London was undoubtedly difficult. He worked exceedingly hard and suffered problems with his health. But the experience opened up for him a world of instruments, skills and trade that profoundly shaped his later career.
The next step in that career was Watt's establishment as an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, within the confines of the College. Though Watt certainly did make and repair instruments for the professorate of the College he also engaged in a more general trade in musical instruments and fancy toys. In the early days he was also an agent for his father's business and plied the general hardware trade. By all accounts, as a child Watt had been studious and thoughtful, though his education at the local grammar school had been badly interrupted by health problems.
4 - Watt's Chemistry of Heat
- from II - Realities
- David Philip Miller
-
- Book:
- James Watt, Chemist
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 85-124
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
I argued in Chapter 2 that the realities of Watt's chemical work and understandings were obscured in the nineteenth century by his own narratives of his invention, and by the ‘water controversy’. In the latter, elite scientists, such as members of the Cambridge group and the leadership of the Chemical Society, sided with Cavendish and condemned Watt's chemistry as archaic, more of a stain on his reputation than a valuable addition to it. Watt's supporters, on the other hand, made their claim for their hero in a way that artificially and incidentally modernized the nature of his chemical claims and arguments (as well as Cavendish's). It remains a difficult task to understand Watt's chemistry on its own terms, but in this chapter I will make an attempt. I am guided by a conviction that it is a mistake to separate in an a priori fashion, as authors usually do, Watt's philosophical (or theoretical) chemistry and his practical chemistry. That mistake is probably predicated also on the belief that Watt failed as a chemical theorist (that is in his public venture into the chemistry of water and airs), while still doing interesting things as an ingenious ‘cookbook chemist’ with glazes, varnishes, inks, bleaching agents, medically promising airs and, of course, steam.
The bifurcated approach to Watt's chemistry is misleading on two counts. First, a number of Watt's practical ventures did draw upon his theoretical ideas. Second, there is a good case for seeing Watt's chemical ideas as in turn evolving as a result of his practical engagements. We will see in detail in this chapter and the next that Watt's experiments on steam, undertaken in part to inform his attack on the practical problem of steam engine improvement led him to develop a chemistry of heat that went beyond that of his mentor Joseph Black. Watt was thoroughly convinced that there was a connection between the chemistry of steam and the chemistry of airs. In fact ice, water, steam, mist, water vapour, common air and other airs were all subject to the chemistry of heat and their practical and theoretical study was interrelated as a result.