Introduction

In the public imagination a scientist today is someone in a laboratory. A man or a woman in a white coat, with safety glasses and a tube in his or her hand. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the laboratory became the ultimate place where new knowledge is created. By the end of that century, the former workplace of chemists, situated on the fringes of the learned world, had turned into a central and indispensable element in the infrastructure of science and science education. A true ‘laboratory revolution’ had taken place, changing both the sciences and the universities.

Over the past decades, the rise of the laboratory, its growth in numbers, its architectural presentation, and its internal organization have been studied by many historians. Another subject of detailed research has been the tremendous changes laboratory research brought about in the kind of knowledge we strive for. One important but understudied aspect of the Laboratory Revolution, however, is the impact it had on the university as a centre of science and learning. Of course, not all laboratories were university laboratories. Private laboratories remained important for a long time, and today industrial and testing laboratories employ more researchers than university laboratories. But the rise of university laboratories deserves special treatment because it is there that new generations of researchers are trained and educated. In the nineteenth century simple lecture halls gave way to purpose-built laboratories, which would dominate the cityscape. Even academic disciplines that ostensibly needed no laboratory space to develop, such as astronomy and linguistics, each acquired their own laboratories.