Introduction

At the dawn of the twentieth century, The Scotsman newspaper predicted in an article titled ‘The Poetry of the Twentieth Century’ that the new era would be characterised by science (The Scotsman, 21 January 1901, p. 10). Even if news of its achievements, unlike news of politics or even the performing arts, remained outside the core of the content of the general press in the United Kingdom, throughout the century, science had significant meaning in the public sphere. Beyond knowledge, it denoted the qualities of modern civilisation.

Recent research has discarded the concept of ‘popularisation’ as diluted expert knowledge, and the presentation of science in the public sphere is now seen as its own rich and distinctive cultural activity (Bensaude-Vincent 2001; Cooter and Pumphrey 1994). Although studies of science in the public sphere have, until recently, concentrated most on the nineteenth-century context, the twentieth century has been explored through a conjuncture of interests from different fields (see Gregory and Miller 1998). Arne Schirrmacher, a leading interpreter of the German press, has focused attention to what he calls, following Foucault, the ‘dispositif’ or net of science communications institutions that have defined the conditions of this science communication’ (Schirrmacher 2013). This points to the material but also cultural infrastructure that has underpinned talk about science in the public sphere (Nieto-Galan 2016). Newspaper talk about science can be understood as one part of its construction in the public sphere.

Science, the Press and Ambivalence in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century

Historians’ neglect of science and the media in the twentieth century began to be addressed from the end of the 1970s by doctoral dissertations, several of which became important books (LaFollette 1979; LaFollette 1990; Lewenstein 1987; Broks 1988; Broks 1996). Based on a study of eight popular magazines, Broks showed that there was considerable interest in science in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century.