Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.5.445
George Borg
During the mid–twentieth century, geochemistry—one of the core Earth sciences—underwent a spectacular transformation as a result of the introduction of electronic instruments based on physical principles. In this process, mass spectrometry became the workhorse analytical technique in isotope geochemistry. This essay concerns the dynamic relationship between discoveries of isotope systems and the variations in their relative abundances, on the one hand—discoveries that became the foundation of isotope geology—and the development of mass spectrometry, on the other. This relationship is illustrated by the career of physicist and instrument-builder Alfred O.C. Nier, who was based at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Nier’s 60o-sector mass spectrometer design of 1940 endowed the instrument with powerful new capabilities, as well as facilitated its adoption outside the nuclear physics community. In the course of developing and applying the instrument, Nier also made important discoveries, about the relative abundances of isotopes, that paved the way for geochemical research on the deep past. My thesis is that Nier’s early career, spanning the 1930s and 1940s, illustrates a dynamic relationship in which science and technology co-evolved synergistically. This pattern of research spread beyond Nier—who largely moved on from this research after the 1950s—to develop into a research tradition, initially based at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies and then spreading to other institutions, notably Caltech, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego. This tradition made crucial contributions to historical geology, including paleoclimatology, solar system history, and the tectonics revolution.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.5.518
Anna-Maria Meister
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.5.481
Jonathan Galka
Historians of science increasingly turn to ocean spaces, especially from the mid–twentieth century, when oceanography adopted new strategic and economic significance during and after World War II. Yet, the overdetermination of oceanography’s historiography by histories of conflict obscures the role that empire—its continuities and its ends—played in the transformation of ocean science and politics at the same time. This essay builds on recent work seeking to recover the role of empire’s endurance and its long shadows in the construction of mid-twentieth-century ocean science, politics, and law. Focusing on deep-sea sediments, I parse the work of H.M.S. Challenger (1872–1876) naturalist-cum-Challenger Office director John Murray alongside that of American economic geologist John Mero, who in the mid–twentieth century articulated all seabeds as storehouses of vast mineral wealth. Murray’s sedimentological taxonomies and representations as well as his collected data on global oozes, nodules included, formed much of the basis for Mero’s work. And, both Murray and Mero leveraged sediments to argue for proprietary positions premised on priority-in-time for resource discovery claims, and exclusive access based upon scientific knowledge and technical ability, both masked by tropes of equal access and opportunity. These data and practices helped Northern scientists build and maintain control over knowledge of the seabed and the value of its resources, as postcolonial and Cold War impetuses rearranged political and economic order at sea. Historicizing abyssal oozes illuminates the character of contemporary conflicts over the future of the international seabed, asking, who determines how the seabed will be valued?
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425
Eleanor S. Armstrong, Jordan Bimm
Essay| September 01 2023 The Trouble with Space Auctions Eleanor S. Armstrong, Eleanor S. Armstrong Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University, Institutionen för ämnesdidaktik 106 91 Stockholm eleanor.armstrong@su.se Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jordan Bimm Jordan Bimm Assistant Instructional Professor of Science Communication and Public Discourse, University of Chicago, 5737 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 jordanbimm@uchicago.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar eleanor.armstrong@su.se jordanbimm@uchicago.edu Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2023) 53 (4): 425–433. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eleanor S. Armstrong, Jordan Bimm; The Trouble with Space Auctions. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 September 2023; 53 (4): 425–433. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search On July 20, 2021, Sotheby’s, the storied centuries-old auction house, promised collectors the Moon—or at least the chance to bid on items involved in getting there. Among the eighty-seven lots up for sale was an Apollo Guidance Computer. This metallic box, designed by MIT’s Instrument Laboratory and produced by Raytheon starting in 1966, was an essential tool for navigating the lunar surface and an important forerunner of modern computing. Sotheby’s estimated that this celebrated artifact—frequently studied not only in space history but also in the history of technology—would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 USD. But when the auctioneer’s hammer hit the lectern, the price had skyrocketed to $746,000 USD. Other items on the block that day included a lunar surface checklist used by Neil Armstrong (sold for $63,000 USD) and Richard Feynman’s personal notes from the Challenger disaster investigation (sold for $44,100 USD). In case there was any doubt, Sotheby’s... You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"The Trouble with Space Auctions","authors":"Eleanor S. Armstrong, Jordan Bimm","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425","url":null,"abstract":"Essay| September 01 2023 The Trouble with Space Auctions Eleanor S. Armstrong, Eleanor S. Armstrong Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University, Institutionen för ämnesdidaktik 106 91 Stockholm eleanor.armstrong@su.se Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jordan Bimm Jordan Bimm Assistant Instructional Professor of Science Communication and Public Discourse, University of Chicago, 5737 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 jordanbimm@uchicago.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar eleanor.armstrong@su.se jordanbimm@uchicago.edu Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2023) 53 (4): 425–433. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eleanor S. Armstrong, Jordan Bimm; The Trouble with Space Auctions. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 September 2023; 53 (4): 425–433. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.425 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search On July 20, 2021, Sotheby’s, the storied centuries-old auction house, promised collectors the Moon—or at least the chance to bid on items involved in getting there. Among the eighty-seven lots up for sale was an Apollo Guidance Computer. This metallic box, designed by MIT’s Instrument Laboratory and produced by Raytheon starting in 1966, was an essential tool for navigating the lunar surface and an important forerunner of modern computing. Sotheby’s estimated that this celebrated artifact—frequently studied not only in space history but also in the history of technology—would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 USD. But when the auctioneer’s hammer hit the lectern, the price had skyrocketed to $746,000 USD. Other items on the block that day included a lunar surface checklist used by Neil Armstrong (sold for $63,000 USD) and Richard Feynman’s personal notes from the Challenger disaster investigation (sold for $44,100 USD). In case there was any doubt, Sotheby’s... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135637583","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.389
Emilie Skulberg, Martin Sparre
Half a century before black hole images based on observations were released, physicists used calculations and simulations to depict what they thought the surroundings of black holes would look like. We focus in particular on the framing and reception of a 1978 image by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet. This handmade drawing was described as “realistic” even though black hole shadows had not yet been observed. Using his image to convince astronomers of the existence of black holes, Luminet argued for the accuracy of his image by emphasizing the physical effects taken into account in the simulation he used for his drawing and made references to photography in descriptions of it. At the same time, he presented the appearance of light near a black hole, as seen by a distant observer, as “optical distortions.” Like Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, Luminet was a creator of images used in General Relativity who had found inspiration in Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s work. But unlike the plays on perspective that Escher was known for, black hole images were not used to confound the beholder or to make the beholder aware of their role as an interpreter of contradictory images. Luminet instead used apparent “optical distortions” to further intuition about black holes. Focusing on what light near a black hole looked like, Luminet explained why his image looked the way it did to communicate the nature of what was invisible.
在基于观测的黑洞图像发布的半个世纪之前，物理学家使用计算和模拟来描绘他们认为黑洞周围的样子。我们特别关注法国天体物理学家让-皮埃尔·卢米内1978年拍摄的图像的构图和接收。这幅手工绘制的图被描述为“逼真的”，尽管黑洞的阴影尚未被观察到。卢米内特用他的图像说服天文学家相信黑洞的存在，他强调了他的图像的准确性，强调了他用于绘图的模拟中考虑到的物理效应，并在描述时参考了摄影。与此同时，他提出了黑洞附近的光的外观，正如远处的观察者所看到的那样，是“光学扭曲”。与诺贝尔奖得主罗杰·彭罗斯(Roger Penrose)一样，卢米内特也是广义相对论中所用图像的创造者，他从荷兰艺术家m·c·埃舍尔(M. C. Escher)的作品中找到了灵感。但与埃舍尔著名的透视剧不同的是，黑洞图像并不是用来迷惑观察者或让观察者意识到他们作为矛盾图像的解释者的角色。Luminet转而使用明显的“光学扭曲”来进一步了解黑洞。Luminet专注于黑洞附近的光线是什么样子的，他解释了为什么他的图像看起来是这样的，以传达不可见的本质。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.434
Mathias Grote
Essay| September 01 2023 Gaia’s Tissue Mathias Grote Mathias Grote Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin / Abteilung Geschichtswissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 100135, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany mathias.grote@hu-berlin.de Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar mathias.grote@hu-berlin.de Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2023) 53 (4): 434–443. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.434 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mathias Grote; Gaia’s Tissue. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 September 2023; 53 (4): 434–443. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.434 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search In the spring of 2020, when the shelves of hygiene products were emptying, a paradoxical product fell into my hands: a probiotic hand sanitizer. While the product’s claim to differentiate between bad bugs and good ones added to it cannot be discussed here, the mélange certainly embodied a collective ambivalence about microbes. Had we not learned in the preceding years that microbes were not our foes but rather partners in health (microbiome, phage therapy) and nutrition (fermentation), as well as in planetary homeostasis, such as through oceanic photosynthesis? In early 2020, these insights faced a sudden retreat. Yet, just three years distant, it seems safe to say that the pandemic did not elicit a wholesale backlash in humanity’s relationship to microbes, but rather, that the sea change revealing them as ubiquitous, as partners, if not as constituents of multitude selves seems to have prevailed. This essay explores this sea change... You do not currently have access to this content.
论文| 2023年9月1日盖亚组织Mathias Grote Mathias Grote Institut f r Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin / Abteilung Geschichtswissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 100135, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany mathias.grote@hu-berlin.de搜索作者的其他作品:本网站PubMed Google Scholar mathias.grote@hu-berlin.de自然科学历史研究(2023)53(4):434-443。https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.434查看图标查看文章内容图表和表格视频音频补充数据同行评审分享图标分享Facebook Twitter LinkedIn电子邮件工具图标工具获得权限引用图标引用搜索网站引文马蒂亚斯格罗特;盖亚的组织。自然科学历史研究2023年9月1日;53(4): 434-443。doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.434下载引文文件:Ris (Zotero)参考文献管理器EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex工具栏搜索搜索下拉菜单工具栏搜索搜索输入搜索输入自动建议过滤您的搜索所有内容自然科学搜索中的历史研究2020年春天，当卫生用品的货架清空时，一个矛盾的产品落入了我的手中:一种益生菌洗手液。虽然该产品声称可以区分添加在其中的有害细菌和有益细菌，但这里无法讨论，但该产品确实体现了一种对微生物的集体矛盾心理。在过去的几年里，我们难道没有认识到微生物不是我们的敌人，而是健康(微生物组，噬菌体治疗)和营养(发酵)以及行星稳态(例如通过海洋光合作用)的伙伴吗?在2020年初，这些见解面临着突然的退缩。然而，就在三年前，似乎可以肯定地说，这场大流行并没有引起人类与微生物关系的全面反弹，相反，表明它们无处不在的巨大变化，即使不是作为众多自我的组成部分，也是作为伙伴，似乎已经占了上风。这篇文章探讨了这一巨大变化……您目前没有访问此内容的权限。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.349
Katy Duncan
This article explores the overlooked history of atmospheric electricity in the last third of the nineteenth century, delineating the work of Austrian physicist Franz Exner and German schoolteachers Julius Elster and Hans Geitel, and identifying the consequences of their work for twentieth-century physics. Since the earliest days of electrical science, the constant electrification of the atmosphere had been a persistent puzzle, with histories by historians and physicists alike typically focusing on what came after the discovery of gaseous ions in the atmosphere in 1899: cosmic rays, radioactivity, particle physics, and quantum phenomena. I argue that Exner and Elster and Geitel’s creative work in atmospheric electricity before 1899 provided the essential conditions for these twentieth-century discoveries. Their divergent theories, experiments, instruments, and environments, developed to understand the origins of the atmosphere’s electrification, provided a setting for new ideas about charge, determinism, and measurement to arise. This paper expands on the existing scholarship that has pointed to the fruitful interactions between physics and meteorology in British contexts in this period. In disentangling Exner’s and Elster and Geitel’s differing views on geographical and meteorological conditions I offer a new perspective on the recent vertical turn in the history of science. The paper concludes by suggesting that while the ionic revolution of 1899 was foundational for much of twentieth-century physics, it constituted a significant theoretical undoing for atmospheric electricians, leaving the field with even less understanding of the atmosphere’s electrification than before.
{"title":"Between the Mountain, the Meadow, the Calm, and the Storm","authors":"Katy Duncan","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.4.349","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the overlooked history of atmospheric electricity in the last third of the nineteenth century, delineating the work of Austrian physicist Franz Exner and German schoolteachers Julius Elster and Hans Geitel, and identifying the consequences of their work for twentieth-century physics. Since the earliest days of electrical science, the constant electrification of the atmosphere had been a persistent puzzle, with histories by historians and physicists alike typically focusing on what came after the discovery of gaseous ions in the atmosphere in 1899: cosmic rays, radioactivity, particle physics, and quantum phenomena. I argue that Exner and Elster and Geitel’s creative work in atmospheric electricity before 1899 provided the essential conditions for these twentieth-century discoveries. Their divergent theories, experiments, instruments, and environments, developed to understand the origins of the atmosphere’s electrification, provided a setting for new ideas about charge, determinism, and measurement to arise. This paper expands on the existing scholarship that has pointed to the fruitful interactions between physics and meteorology in British contexts in this period. In disentangling Exner’s and Elster and Geitel’s differing views on geographical and meteorological conditions I offer a new perspective on the recent vertical turn in the history of science. The paper concludes by suggesting that while the ionic revolution of 1899 was foundational for much of twentieth-century physics, it constituted a significant theoretical undoing for atmospheric electricians, leaving the field with even less understanding of the atmosphere’s electrification than before.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135637577","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}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.278
S. Teasley
This article explores the agency of animal materiality, class, and context in shaping social values within wood research and manufacturing communities in mid-twentieth-century Japan, with a focus on animal glues (nikawa 膠) in relation to other adhesives. It relates the materiality and affordances of adhesives to their value within multiple technosocial contexts, in which glues made from mammalian skin, bones, and hooves remained the predominant adhesive within wood product manufacturing microenterprises but were being replaced by casein-, soybean-, and carbon-based adhesives in academic and corporate laboratories. Working primarily from research reports and consultation records compiled by industrial research institutes embedded within small-scale manufacturing communities, the article proposes that the materiality of animal glues and the larger assemblage of materials-energy-environment-tools-skill-knowledge present in, between, and around labs and workshops both rendered that materiality highly evident to human users and prompted them to value nikawa in highly divergent ways, depending on class and context. The affordances of animal-based glues, alongside those of plant- and carbon-based glues and other substances used with them in manufacturing, led different social groups to value them differently. The result was a bifurcation of value between adjacent but separate social groups, with workshop owners preferring to use animal glues, even as technical advisors labored to dissolve small workshop owners’ attachment or adherence to animal glues, and to prompt them to adopt newer, more “modern” adhesives as part of industrial rationalization and modernization. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"Sticky Solutions","authors":"S. Teasley","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.278","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the agency of animal materiality, class, and context in shaping social values within wood research and manufacturing communities in mid-twentieth-century Japan, with a focus on animal glues (nikawa 膠) in relation to other adhesives. It relates the materiality and affordances of adhesives to their value within multiple technosocial contexts, in which glues made from mammalian skin, bones, and hooves remained the predominant adhesive within wood product manufacturing microenterprises but were being replaced by casein-, soybean-, and carbon-based adhesives in academic and corporate laboratories. Working primarily from research reports and consultation records compiled by industrial research institutes embedded within small-scale manufacturing communities, the article proposes that the materiality of animal glues and the larger assemblage of materials-energy-environment-tools-skill-knowledge present in, between, and around labs and workshops both rendered that materiality highly evident to human users and prompted them to value nikawa in highly divergent ways, depending on class and context. The affordances of animal-based glues, alongside those of plant- and carbon-based glues and other substances used with them in manufacturing, led different social groups to value them differently. The result was a bifurcation of value between adjacent but separate social groups, with workshop owners preferring to use animal glues, even as technical advisors labored to dissolve small workshop owners’ attachment or adherence to animal glues, and to prompt them to adopt newer, more “modern” adhesives as part of industrial rationalization and modernization. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84575970","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}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.197
Lisa Onaga, L. Douny
This special issue, “Making Animal Materials in Time,” delves into the history of animal materials used in craft and scientific endeavors since the eighteenth century. We regard animal materials as dynamic elements with particular properties granted context-specific and culturally fluid meanings by those who work with them—often to the point of dissolving their original animal materiality. Focusing on this multi-dynamic at the intersection of history of science and the anthropology of techniques permits a reformulation of the concept of affordance, as material affordances, to create the theoretical capacity for a discussion of the diverse processes of rendering animal bodies into new substances, materials, and things. Six case studies illustrate how human historical actors distinguished animal materials as they observed, envisioned, extracted, processed, and changed animal bodies and tissues into new elements. Collectively, these papers present a strategy for examining connections between the spatial and temporal qualities of animal materials situated in human-scale material practices. The animal materials featured in this special issue serve as boundary objects across practical settings, contexts, regions, and cultural world settings that instrumentally link the history of science to anthropologies of craft knowledges.
{"title":"Making Animal Materials in Time","authors":"Lisa Onaga, L. Douny","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.197","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue, “Making Animal Materials in Time,” delves into the history of animal materials used in craft and scientific endeavors since the eighteenth century. We regard animal materials as dynamic elements with particular properties granted context-specific and culturally fluid meanings by those who work with them—often to the point of dissolving their original animal materiality. Focusing on this multi-dynamic at the intersection of history of science and the anthropology of techniques permits a reformulation of the concept of affordance, as material affordances, to create the theoretical capacity for a discussion of the diverse processes of rendering animal bodies into new substances, materials, and things. Six case studies illustrate how human historical actors distinguished animal materials as they observed, envisioned, extracted, processed, and changed animal bodies and tissues into new elements. Collectively, these papers present a strategy for examining connections between the spatial and temporal qualities of animal materials situated in human-scale material practices. The animal materials featured in this special issue serve as boundary objects across practical settings, contexts, regions, and cultural world settings that instrumentally link the history of science to anthropologies of craft knowledges.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75487243","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}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.308
M. Szczygielska
While artifacts made of ivory fill the shelves and storage rooms of museum collections across the world, ever more stringent legal measures restricting or banning the ivory trade have turned these objects into troublesome treasures. Ivory is a biological material derived from the tusks and teeth of several extant and extinct animals. The physical and aesthetic properties of elephantine ivory in relation to its use and symbolic significance shaped the material cultures of classed whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Ivory from elephant tusks displays a characteristic macroscopic motif known as the Schreger pattern, which is often used by conservators and forensic researchers as an identifying characteristic. First described by German odontologist Bernhard Schreger in 1800, this pattern of crossing dark and bright lines is attributed to an optical phenomenon of light refraction. By proposing a refractive reading of ivory, this article explores the role of animal-derived materials in the construction of human identities. This method of analysis allows the properties of ivory—luster, brilliance, whiteness, and toughness—to be seen as agentive material properties that historically co-produced human racial and classed ideals. Analyzing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources in dental anatomy, ivory commerce, and technical microscopy permits an unraveling of this animal material’s ties to specific colonial regimes of trade and resource extraction, and its technical role in precursors to materials science. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.
{"title":"Reading Teeth","authors":"M. Szczygielska","doi":"10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2023.53.3.308","url":null,"abstract":"While artifacts made of ivory fill the shelves and storage rooms of museum collections across the world, ever more stringent legal measures restricting or banning the ivory trade have turned these objects into troublesome treasures. Ivory is a biological material derived from the tusks and teeth of several extant and extinct animals. The physical and aesthetic properties of elephantine ivory in relation to its use and symbolic significance shaped the material cultures of classed whiteness at the turn of the twentieth century. Ivory from elephant tusks displays a characteristic macroscopic motif known as the Schreger pattern, which is often used by conservators and forensic researchers as an identifying characteristic. First described by German odontologist Bernhard Schreger in 1800, this pattern of crossing dark and bright lines is attributed to an optical phenomenon of light refraction. By proposing a refractive reading of ivory, this article explores the role of animal-derived materials in the construction of human identities. This method of analysis allows the properties of ivory—luster, brilliance, whiteness, and toughness—to be seen as agentive material properties that historically co-produced human racial and classed ideals. Analyzing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources in dental anatomy, ivory commerce, and technical microscopy permits an unraveling of this animal material’s ties to specific colonial regimes of trade and resource extraction, and its technical role in precursors to materials science. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Making Animal Materials in Time,” edited by Laurence Douny and Lisa Onaga.","PeriodicalId":56130,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91372680","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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