British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

The inaugural lecture, or oration, delivered by Regiomontanus at the University of Padua in 1464 is deemed a document of remarkable significance in the history of science. Although it has attracted much scholarly attention, few efforts have been directed towards identifying the traces of Byzantine influence it might carry; that is to say, the extent to which Regiomontanus might have been influenced by the views of his patron, Bessarion. This paper responds to the need for such a study, arriving at the following conclusions. First, Regiomontanus's praise of astrology is in line with Bessarion's reaction to the official decisions taken against astrology in Constantinople at the Council of 1351 - decisions which were ultimately rooted in the hesychast controversy and in the confessional struggles between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome. Second, the legitimation of the Graeco-Arabic roots of astronomy in an institutional context, as undertaken by Regiomontanus, is in accordance with the intellectual influences Bessarion had absorbed in his youth in Constantinople. Third, contrary to some claims, it is likely that Regiomontanus does not adhere to a humanist anti-Arab agenda; rather, his views on the history of mathematics are a consequence of the Graeco-Arabic heritage of his patron, and of his lack of access to Arabic translations.

In 1820 two French scientists - Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou - discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the 'wondrous' fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases - plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward - would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was 'a global scientific obsession' with finding a 'substitute' for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949-53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.

The concept of 'science' occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of industrialization.

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808-59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.

The role of editorial staff in shaping early climate change narratives has been underexplored and deserves more attention. During the 1970s, the epistemological underpinnings of the production of knowledge on climate change were contested between scientists who favoured computer-based atmospheric simulations and those who were more interested in investigating the long-term history of climatic changes. Although the former group later became predominant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the 1980s, the latter had a sizable influence over climate discourse during the 1970s. Of these, one of the key popularizers of climate discourse during the 1970s was the British climatologist Hubert Lamb (1913-97). The correspondence between Lamb and journal editors who gatekept and curated different audiences helped craft resonant messages about climate change and its potential effects, and we explore Lamb's interactions with editors of Nature, the UNESCO Courier, The Ecologist and Development Forum in the 1973-4 period. Through understanding how climate change discussion was influenced by editors, we gain an insight into how such narratives had to be adjusted to fit into pre-existing discourses before their importance was more widely established, and how these adjustments helped shape conceptualizations of climate change as a global, human-caused phenomenon and a source of universal threat.

The Glaisher snowflakes (1855) are amongst the most recognizable images of snow crystals produced in the nineteenth century. Made with the intent of compiling a comprehensive record of snow crystal forms, they also appeared in a variety of print publications, from popular magazines to scientific textbooks, and briefly circulated through various scientific and artistic societies. In a time when reliable images of these small, transparent, ephemeral objects were few and far between, the Glaisher snowflakes were widely praised for both their beauty and their fidelity to nature. But their origin has so far been little examined. This article sheds light on how James and Cecilia Glaisher went about making them, and invites readers to see them through three interconnected perspectives: as products of a domestic environment, as products of a husband-and-wife collaboration, and as products of iterative image making.

This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials - of field notes, letters and photographs - and even of the shelves and bookcases - in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a 'proxy', or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.

It has been thirty years since the end of political apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Those decades have been marked by single-party dominance under the African National Congress (ANC), and the expansion of democratic rights and public goods like education, as well as neoliberal economic policies, growing inequality and, in recent years, corruption and maladministration scandals. On the heels of a historic election in May 2024, one which marked the end of the ANC's electoral dominance and was shaped, in part, by government mismanagement of the energy sector and extensive infrastructural decline, it is a timely moment to consider the history of South Africa's state and its relation to industries of extraction and energy production. Two new books do just that. Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures, by Gabrielle Hecht, takes a long view of the impact of extractive industries, arguing that contemporary South Africa may offer a cautionary tale of the devastating impacts of the Anthropocene, one that 'foretells planetary futures' in the way that the state has failed to reckon with the enduring communal and environmental impacts of the mining industry. Apartheid's Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, by Faeeza Ballim, historicizes the development of South Africa's electricity sector under the apartheid state and traces the roots of the current energy crisis back to the pursuit of authoritarian high modernism in the mid-twentieth century.

Given how thoroughly the history of quantum physics has been excavated, it might be wondered what these two hefty volumes by a physicist (Duncan) and a historian (Janssen) bring to the table. Aside from their inclusion of a wide range of recent work in this area, including some notable publications by themselves, the answer is twofold: first, as they state explicitly in the preface to the first volume, derivations of the key results are presented 'at a level that a reader with a command of physics and mathematics comparable to that of an undergraduate in physics should be able to follow without having to take out pencil and paper' (vol. 1, p. vi). In response to those who might raise Whiggish eyebrows, I shall simply play the 'you-try-reading-Pascual-Jordan's-groundbreaking-work-in-the-original' card. As the authors suggest, by using modern notation and streamlining derivations whilst also, they maintain, remaining conceptually faithful to the original sources (ibid.), the book is rendered suitable for classroom use, albeit at the higher undergraduate or graduate levels.