Prior to becoming a secretary of the Royal Society in 1784 Charles Blagden (bapt. 1748–d. 1820) served as a surgeon in the British army during the Revolutionary War in America. In the two unpublished letters of 1778 discussed here, Blagden provides his Welsh friend John Lloyd (1749–1815) with a vivid description of the current state of affairs in America, from a British perspective, and with insights into continuing scientific endeavour in a time of war. The letters illustrate the attempt that two men made to keep alive an intellectual life and are testimony to the rapidity with which matters of scientific interest could be disseminated in the eighteenth century, even during a major international conflict.
{"title":"Charles Blagden in revolutionary America: two unpublished letters to John Lloyd","authors":"P. Frame","doi":"10.1098/RSNR.2017.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Prior to becoming a secretary of the Royal Society in 1784 Charles Blagden (bapt. 1748–d. 1820) served as a surgeon in the British army during the Revolutionary War in America. In the two unpublished letters of 1778 discussed here, Blagden provides his Welsh friend John Lloyd (1749–1815) with a vivid description of the current state of affairs in America, from a British perspective, and with insights into continuing scientific endeavour in a time of war. The letters illustrate the attempt that two men made to keep alive an intellectual life and are testimony to the rapidity with which matters of scientific interest could be disseminated in the eighteenth century, even during a major international conflict.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"361 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47112385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In mid July 1860, the Athenaeum published a summary of the discussions about Charles Darwin's theory that took place at the British Association meeting in Oxford. Its account omitted the famous exchange between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Huxley, the rising man of science. A fuller report of the meeting was published a week later in a local weekly, the Oxford Chronicle, but this has gone unnoticed by historians. The Oxford Chronicle supplies a new version of Wilberforce's question to Huxley, with more material about religious objections to human evolution and the proper role of authority in popular scientific discussions. Excerpts from the Athenaeum and Oxford Chronicle accounts show that they likely had a common ancestor, and other sources corroborate details given only in the Oxford Chronicle. This discovery reveals that the Athenaeum narrative—until now the longest and best known—was censored to remove material that was considered objectionable. The Oxford Chronicle gives us a fuller story of what was said and how the audience reacted to the encounter between Huxley and Wilberforce.
{"title":"Censoring Huxley and Wilberforce: A new source for the meeting that the Athenaeum ‘wisely softened down’","authors":"R. England","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2016.0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0058","url":null,"abstract":"In mid July 1860, the Athenaeum published a summary of the discussions about Charles Darwin's theory that took place at the British Association meeting in Oxford. Its account omitted the famous exchange between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Huxley, the rising man of science. A fuller report of the meeting was published a week later in a local weekly, the Oxford Chronicle, but this has gone unnoticed by historians. The Oxford Chronicle supplies a new version of Wilberforce's question to Huxley, with more material about religious objections to human evolution and the proper role of authority in popular scientific discussions. Excerpts from the Athenaeum and Oxford Chronicle accounts show that they likely had a common ancestor, and other sources corroborate details given only in the Oxford Chronicle. This discovery reveals that the Athenaeum narrative—until now the longest and best known—was censored to remove material that was considered objectionable. The Oxford Chronicle gives us a fuller story of what was said and how the audience reacted to the encounter between Huxley and Wilberforce.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"371 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41376804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a ‘love of truth’, but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question ‘why?’. The aside made by Albert Einstein in private correspondence in 1952—‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’—has now become a meme. Yet in the twentieth century, science was shaped by many forces, and the practical utility of science in the real, messy problematic worlds of its formation seem far removed from the seeming innocence of curiosity-driven research. In my lecture and this paper, I ask why scientists say they ask ‘why?’, and trace the curious history of the idea of curiosity-driven science. In particular, I distinguish between a long and short history of curiosity in science, with the latter associated with the term ‘curiosity-driven science’ and the UK administration of Margaret Thatcher.
{"title":"2016 Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar lecture The curious history of curiosity-driven research","authors":"J. Agar","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2017.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a ‘love of truth’, but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question ‘why?’. The aside made by Albert Einstein in private correspondence in 1952—‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’—has now become a meme. Yet in the twentieth century, science was shaped by many forces, and the practical utility of science in the real, messy problematic worlds of its formation seem far removed from the seeming innocence of curiosity-driven research. In my lecture and this paper, I ask why scientists say they ask ‘why?’, and trace the curious history of the idea of curiosity-driven science. In particular, I distinguish between a long and short history of curiosity in science, with the latter associated with the term ‘curiosity-driven science’ and the UK administration of Margaret Thatcher.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"409 - 429"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49507758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The growing public awareness of natural philosophy and technology in the eighteenth century brought with it unintended consequences, including an enlarged space for satiric treatments of scientific issues, which have not always been recognized for what they are. A pamphlet entitled The York Buildings Dragons appeared in December 1725, with a second, augmented, edition in January 1726. It has generally been attributed to John Theophilus Desaguliers FRS (1683–1744), the Huguenot engineer, Newtonian expositor and leading Freemason. This article throws fresh light on the pamphlet: to provide more extensive background to the work, to describe its aims and methods, to define its mode as entirely satiric, to analyse its contents in greater detail, to show that Desaguliers cannot possibly have been the author and to suggest as a more plausible candidate the mathematician, physician and satiric author John Arbuthnot FRS (1667–1735). Historians of science and technology need to take care in assessing the pamphlet literature surrounding controversial innovations.
{"title":"The York buildings dragons: Desaguliers, Arbuthnot and attitudes towards the scientific community","authors":"P. Rogers","doi":"10.1098/RSNR.2017.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0019","url":null,"abstract":"The growing public awareness of natural philosophy and technology in the eighteenth century brought with it unintended consequences, including an enlarged space for satiric treatments of scientific issues, which have not always been recognized for what they are. A pamphlet entitled The York Buildings Dragons appeared in December 1725, with a second, augmented, edition in January 1726. It has generally been attributed to John Theophilus Desaguliers FRS (1683–1744), the Huguenot engineer, Newtonian expositor and leading Freemason. This article throws fresh light on the pamphlet: to provide more extensive background to the work, to describe its aims and methods, to define its mode as entirely satiric, to analyse its contents in greater detail, to show that Desaguliers cannot possibly have been the author and to suggest as a more plausible candidate the mathematician, physician and satiric author John Arbuthnot FRS (1667–1735). Historians of science and technology need to take care in assessing the pamphlet literature surrounding controversial innovations.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"335 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47311983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality. Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840–1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist or more orthodox in their religion, found reconciliation. Unlike Wallace, Buckley emphasized the lawful evolution of morality and of the soul, drawing from the theological tradition of traducianism. Significantly, Buckley argued for a mutualistic and deeply theistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution, particularly the evolution of morals, without sacrificing the uniformity of natural law. Though Buckley's understanding of the evolutionary epic has been represented as emphasizing mutualism (Gates 1998) and spiritualist theology (Lightman 2007), here I demonstrate that her distinctive addition to the debate lies in her unifying theory of traducianism. In contrast to other authors, I argue that through Buckley we better understand Victorian spiritualism as more of a religion than an occult science. However, it was a conception of religion that, through her evolutionary traducianism, bridged science and spiritualism. This offers historians a more complex but satisfying image of the Victorian worldview after Darwin.
{"title":"The evolving spirit: morals and mutualism in Arabella Buckley's evolutionary epic","authors":"J. Larsen","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2016.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0056","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality. Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840–1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist or more orthodox in their religion, found reconciliation. Unlike Wallace, Buckley emphasized the lawful evolution of morality and of the soul, drawing from the theological tradition of traducianism. Significantly, Buckley argued for a mutualistic and deeply theistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution, particularly the evolution of morals, without sacrificing the uniformity of natural law. Though Buckley's understanding of the evolutionary epic has been represented as emphasizing mutualism (Gates 1998) and spiritualist theology (Lightman 2007), here I demonstrate that her distinctive addition to the debate lies in her unifying theory of traducianism. In contrast to other authors, I argue that through Buckley we better understand Victorian spiritualism as more of a religion than an occult science. However, it was a conception of religion that, through her evolutionary traducianism, bridged science and spiritualism. This offers historians a more complex but satisfying image of the Victorian worldview after Darwin.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"385 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45391789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bernard Lightman, A companion to the history of science . Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2016. Pp. xvi + 601. £120.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-118-62077-9. Assembling a one-volume companion to the history of science across ages, scientific disciplines and global space is a particularly daunting task. The editor has approached this challenge in a somewhat unconventional way, as the companion is not organized chronologically or according to disciplines but in four overarching thematic sections devoted to roles, spaces, communication and tools in the history of science. The first thematic section explores social roles in the world of science from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the notion of the persona, the contributions in this section analyse a wide range of roles and social identities involved in the study of the natural world, including, for example, the alchemist, the instrument maker and the human experimental subject. This approach provides the reader with a strong sense of the shifting intellectual hierarchies among those who have studied nature through history. Moreover, the section also brings out illuminating contrasts, for example between the natural historian and the natural philosopher, and it historicizes the contested relations between amateurs and professionals. The second thematic section analyses the spaces and places that have been central in the study of the natural world and includes public and domestic as well as professional domains. A …
{"title":"A riverbank of science","authors":"Casper Andersen","doi":"10.1098/RSNR.2017.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Bernard Lightman, A companion to the history of science . Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2016. Pp. xvi + 601. £120.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-118-62077-9.\u0000\u0000Assembling a one-volume companion to the history of science across ages, scientific disciplines and global space is a particularly daunting task. The editor has approached this challenge in a somewhat unconventional way, as the companion is not organized chronologically or according to disciplines but in four overarching thematic sections devoted to roles, spaces, communication and tools in the history of science.\u0000\u0000The first thematic section explores social roles in the world of science from antiquity to the present. Drawing on the notion of the persona, the contributions in this section analyse a wide range of roles and social identities involved in the study of the natural world, including, for example, the alchemist, the instrument maker and the human experimental subject. This approach provides the reader with a strong sense of the shifting intellectual hierarchies among those who have studied nature through history. Moreover, the section also brings out illuminating contrasts, for example between the natural historian and the natural philosopher, and it historicizes the contested relations between amateurs and professionals.\u0000\u0000The second thematic section analyses the spaces and places that have been central in the study of the natural world and includes public and domestic as well as professional domains. A …","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"431 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/RSNR.2017.0027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44247922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent years have seen the development of a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of scientific naturalism in the nineteenth century. It has become apparent that scientific naturalism did not emerge sui generis in the years following the publication of Charles Darwin's On the origin of species (1859), but was present, if only in incipient form, much earlier in the century. Building on recent scholarship, this article adopts a geographically focused approach and explores debates about geology and phrenology—two of the diverse forms of knowledge that contributed to scientific naturalism—in late-Georgian Belfast. Having provided the venue for John Tyndall's infamous 1874 address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Belfast occupies a central place in the story of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism. However, in uncovering the intricate and surprising ways in which scientific knowledge gained, or was denied, epistemic and civic credibility in Belfast, this discussion will demonstrate that naturalism, materialism and the relationship between science and religion were matters of public debate in the town long before Tyndall's intervention.
{"title":"Rocks, skulls and materialism: geology and phrenology in late-Georgian Belfast","authors":"Jonathan Wright, Diarmid A. Finnegan","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2017.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen the development of a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of scientific naturalism in the nineteenth century. It has become apparent that scientific naturalism did not emerge sui generis in the years following the publication of Charles Darwin's On the origin of species (1859), but was present, if only in incipient form, much earlier in the century. Building on recent scholarship, this article adopts a geographically focused approach and explores debates about geology and phrenology—two of the diverse forms of knowledge that contributed to scientific naturalism—in late-Georgian Belfast. Having provided the venue for John Tyndall's infamous 1874 address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Belfast occupies a central place in the story of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism. However, in uncovering the intricate and surprising ways in which scientific knowledge gained, or was denied, epistemic and civic credibility in Belfast, this discussion will demonstrate that naturalism, materialism and the relationship between science and religion were matters of public debate in the town long before Tyndall's intervention.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"72 1","pages":"25 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44929593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public lecturing on astronomy was prevalent in Britain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Many lecturers were private entrepreneurs operating lecturing businesses without institutional affiliations. Private lecturers enjoyed popularity in various places and sites ranging from metropolitan theatres to provincial town halls. By focusing on private lecturers, including Deane Franklin Walker (1778–1865), John Bird (d. 1840) and Robert Children, this paper explores the private astronomy lecturing trade and compares it with public lectures that took place inside scientific institutions. The careers of two London-based institutional lecturers, John Wallis (1788–1852) and George Henry Bachhoffner (1810–1879), are analysed as a comparison. Despite the trend towards institutionalized science, the activities of private astronomy lecturers had not been undermined by institutional competitors until the early 1860s. Astronomy remained largely an amateur practice in early Victorian Britain; public lecturing on astronomy was also far from a profession. Many astronomical lecturers, whether private or institutional, were not scientific practitioners working on original research or observational tasks. Some of their lecturing, and particularly their Lenten astronomical lectures, purveyed a distinctive kind of popular astronomy, which was a blend of instruction, amusement and religious sentiments. They indicate complex features of performance and showmanship beyond simply conveying popularized scientific knowledge.
在整个十九世纪上半叶，天文学的公开讲座在英国盛行。许多讲师都是在没有机构背景的情况下经营演讲业务的私营企业家。私人讲师在从大都市剧院到省级市政厅的各个地方和场所都很受欢迎。通过关注包括Deane Franklin Walker（1778-1865）、John Bird（1840）和Robert Children在内的私人讲师，本文探讨了私人天文学讲师行业，并将其与科学机构内的公共讲座进行了比较。对两位伦敦机构讲师约翰·瓦利斯（1788-1852）和乔治·亨利·巴赫霍夫纳（1810-1879）的职业生涯进行了比较分析。尽管科学有制度化的趋势，但直到19世纪60年代初，私人天文学讲师的活动才受到制度竞争对手的破坏。在维多利亚时代早期的英国，天文学在很大程度上仍然是一种业余实践；关于天文学的公开演讲也远远不是一种职业。许多天文讲师，无论是私人还是机构，都不是从事原始研究或观测任务的科学从业者。他们的一些讲座，特别是四旬斋天文学讲座，提供了一种独特的流行天文学，它融合了教学、娱乐和宗教情感。它们表明了表演和表演技巧的复杂特征，而不仅仅是传达普及的科学知识。
{"title":"A shared arena: the private astronomy lecturing trade and its institutional counterpart in Britain, 1817–1865","authors":"Hsiang-fu Huang","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2017.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Public lecturing on astronomy was prevalent in Britain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Many lecturers were private entrepreneurs operating lecturing businesses without institutional affiliations. Private lecturers enjoyed popularity in various places and sites ranging from metropolitan theatres to provincial town halls. By focusing on private lecturers, including Deane Franklin Walker (1778–1865), John Bird (d. 1840) and Robert Children, this paper explores the private astronomy lecturing trade and compares it with public lectures that took place inside scientific institutions. The careers of two London-based institutional lecturers, John Wallis (1788–1852) and George Henry Bachhoffner (1810–1879), are analysed as a comparison. Despite the trend towards institutionalized science, the activities of private astronomy lecturers had not been undermined by institutional competitors until the early 1860s. Astronomy remained largely an amateur practice in early Victorian Britain; public lecturing on astronomy was also far from a profession. Many astronomical lecturers, whether private or institutional, were not scientific practitioners working on original research or observational tasks. Some of their lecturing, and particularly their Lenten astronomical lectures, purveyed a distinctive kind of popular astronomy, which was a blend of instruction, amusement and religious sentiments. They indicate complex features of performance and showmanship beyond simply conveying popularized scientific knowledge.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"72 1","pages":"319 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42566377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite being characterized as ‘one of the worst agricultural accidents in Britain in the 1960s’, the ‘Smarden incident’ has never been subjected to a complete historical analysis. In 1963, a toxic waste spill in Kent coincided with the publication of the British edition of Rachel Carson's Silent spring. This essay argues that these events combined to ‘galvanize’ nascent toxic and environmental consciousness. A seemingly parochial toxic waste incident became part of a national phenomenon. The Smarden incident was considered to be indicative of the toxic hazards that were born of technocracy. It highlighted the inadequacies of existent concepts and practices for dealing with such hazards. As such, it was part of the fracturing of the consensus of progress: it made disagreements in expertise publicly visible. By the completion of the episode, 10 different governmental ministries were involved. Douglas Good, a local veterinary surgeon, helped to effect the ‘reception’ of Silent spring in the UK by telling the ‘Smarden story’ through local and national media and through the publications of anti-statist organizations.
{"title":"Pesticides, pollution and the UK's silent spring, 1963–1964: Poison in the Garden of England","authors":"J. F. M. Clark","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2016.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Despite being characterized as ‘one of the worst agricultural accidents in Britain in the 1960s’, the ‘Smarden incident’ has never been subjected to a complete historical analysis. In 1963, a toxic waste spill in Kent coincided with the publication of the British edition of Rachel Carson's Silent spring. This essay argues that these events combined to ‘galvanize’ nascent toxic and environmental consciousness. A seemingly parochial toxic waste incident became part of a national phenomenon. The Smarden incident was considered to be indicative of the toxic hazards that were born of technocracy. It highlighted the inadequacies of existent concepts and practices for dealing with such hazards. As such, it was part of the fracturing of the consensus of progress: it made disagreements in expertise publicly visible. By the completion of the episode, 10 different governmental ministries were involved. Douglas Good, a local veterinary surgeon, helped to effect the ‘reception’ of Silent spring in the UK by telling the ‘Smarden story’ through local and national media and through the publications of anti-statist organizations.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"297 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0040","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48956896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This issue of Notes and Records contains three papers and an essay review. The papers may be read, in rather different ways, as commentaries on the relationship between science, technology, medicine and war. War appears in these studies as an opportunity for the display of diverse technologies in the Crimea; as the unavoidable context for chemical work in the first half of the twentieth century; and as a chilling metaphor—Rachel Carson's ‘war against nature’—for the potentially devastating effect of pesticides and other chemicals on the natural world. The three papers comment, also, on the changing status and perception of technocracy—by throwing new light on the complex interplay of scientific innovation, large-scale industry and …
{"title":"War, nature and technoscience","authors":"B. Marsden","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2017.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0032","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of Notes and Records contains three papers and an essay review. The papers may be read, in rather different ways, as commentaries on the relationship between science, technology, medicine and war. War appears in these studies as an opportunity for the display of diverse technologies in the Crimea; as the unavoidable context for chemical work in the first half of the twentieth century; and as a chilling metaphor—Rachel Carson's ‘war against nature’—for the potentially devastating effect of pesticides and other chemicals on the natural world. The three papers comment, also, on the changing status and perception of technocracy—by throwing new light on the complex interplay of scientific innovation, large-scale industry and …","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":"71 1","pages":"231 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2017.0032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43587131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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