Acceptance of Augustin Fresnel's wave theory of light posed numerous questions for early nineteenth-century physicists. Among the most pressing was the problem of the properties of the luminiferous ether. Fresnel had shown that light waves were transverse. Therefore, since, among ordinary materials, only solids support transverse vibrations, there existed striking likenesses between highly tangible solids and the highly intangible ether. Accordingly, such men as Augustin-Louis Cauchy, James MacCullagh, Franz Neumann, and George Green constructed various theories of an elastic-solid ether.1 At the same time, however, the disconcerting implausibilities of an all-pervasive solid provoked considerable apprehension in regard to the elastic-solid tradition. Thomas Young found the concept ‘perfectly appalling’ and argued that ‘the hypothesis [that fluids can support transverse vibrations] remains completely open for discussion, notwithstanding the apparent difficulties attending it.’2 John Herschel, probably the most important English advocate of the wave theory, regarded the concept of a solid ether as only a temporary device, useful ‘till the real truth shall be discovered.’3 Consequently, despite the accomplishments which helped to make the elastic-solid theory ‘the most celebrated special form of the wave theory’,4 there were important voices of reservation.

In his Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, first published in 1911, Charles Paget Lapage, physician to the Manchester Children's Hospital, wrote that one ‘only has to watch a group of feebleminded children to see that most of them have some peculiarity’. These words appear towards the end of an extensive discussion of the physical characteristics that could be found in feeble-minded children and are accompanied by a plate comprising four photographs of ‘Feebleminded Children showing Defective Expression’ (Figure 1).

Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal was not only a chemical manufacturer and one of the first ‘industrial scientists’ but was also, according to his own testimony, one of the early supporters of Lavoisier's system of chemistry. It might be assumed that Chaptal's pioneering work in industrial chemistry was intimately linked with his acceptance of the oxygen system of chemistry; more specifically, that this theory served to direct and inform his applied research and contributed not a little to its success. Indeed, he himself in 1790 explicitly stated this to have been the case. A close study of his work prior to 1790 fails, however, to establish the importance of such a linkage. First, his selection of research topics proves to have owed little to the ‘new chemistry’ but much to the scientific and economic milieu of his province of Languedoc and of Montpellier, its administrative seat. Second, the significance of his acceptance of the ‘new chemistry’ appears rather problematic, not the least because of the rather hazy boundaries between the phlogistic and Lavoisian theories in the 1780s. Third, it is not clear from the evidence available how the new theory helped solve the various problems of industrial chemistry he faced, or could have done so, other than to offer alternative explanations for processes with which he was already familiar and indeed had often mastered. It will be suggested that it is precisely this less dramatic role which was filled by the new chemistry: that of ‘rectifying’ his ideas by providing alternative and more satisfactory rationalizations of his experiences and experiments in the laboratory and the factory, not that of enabling him to simplify and perfect old processes nor to invent new ones. To put the point more bluntly: Chaptal's early successes and reputation in industrial chemistry were not a by-product of his allegiance to the new chemistry; rather, his growing adherence to that system was a by-product of its ability to provide satisfactory post-hoc explanations of the chemical processes and products with which he was concerned.

This paper argues that we should take into account the process of historical transmission to enrich our understanding of material culture. More specifically, I want to show how the rewriting of history and the invention of tradition impact material objects and our beliefs about them. I focus here on the transmission history of the mechanical calculator invented by the German savant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz repeatedly described his machine as functional and wonderfully useful, but in reality it was never finished and didn't fully work. Its internal structure also remained unknown. In 1879, however, the machine re-emerged and was reinvented as the origin of all later calculating machines based on the stepped drum, to protect the priority of the German Leibniz against the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar as the father of mechanical calculation. The calculator was later replicated to demonstrate that it could function ‘after all’, in an effort to deepen this narrative and further enhance Leibniz's computing acumen.

Thomas Salusbury's Life of Galileo (1664) was the first substantial biography of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in any language. All copies but one were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The surviving copy was lost in the library of the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle in the mid-nineteenth century. With the auction of the library in 2004–7, it temporarily re-emerged. This essay presents a preliminary description of the copy and its contents. It argues that to understand the existence and nature of the book we need to explore the social relations governing the control of information in early modern Europe. It is shown that Salusbury's project was launched in the face of social and political information blockades and in direct competition with other similar ventures. In particular, rumours of the future publication of an official biography by Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703) and continuing negotiations over the memory and reputation of Galileo in Italy presented insurmountable barriers to the successful completion of his project. Despite these problems Salusbury's biography, produced on the margins of the emerging Royal Society, presents a spirited portrait of Galileo. Moreover, nearly four hundred years after the event, it offers a new and provocative explanation of the famous trial.

By the late nineteenth century the submarine telegraph cable industry, which had blossomed in the 1850s, had reached what historians regard as technological maturity. For a host of commercial, cultural and technical reasons, the industry seems to have become conservative in its attitude towards technological development, which is reflected in the small scale of its staff and facilities for research and development. This paper argues that the attitude of the cable industry towards research and development was less conservative and altogether more complex than historians have suggested. Focusing on the crucial case of the Eastern Telegraph Company, the largest single operator of submarine cables, it shows how the company encouraged inventive activity among outside and in-house electricians and, in 1903, established a small research laboratory where staff and outside scientific advisers pursued new methods of cable signalling and cable designs. The scale of research and development at the Eastern Telegraph Company, however, was small by comparison with that of its nearest competitor, Western Union, and dwarfed by that of large electrical manufacturers. This paper explores the reasons for this comparatively weak provision but also suggests that this was not inappropriate for a service-sector firm.

While the impetus theory is often regarded as a non-Aristotelian theory that could not have emerged within the development of Aristotelianism, I argue that it is essentially Aristotelian. Given the state of the theories of body, movement and sexual reproduction and the development of the theory of the four elements in the Latin West at the end of the thirteenth century, the impetus theory was probably developed as an application to projectiles of Aristotle's theories of the male semen and of family resemblance. In addition, the impetus theory was even a convenient expedient to simplify the Aristotelian theory of movement and prevent it from drifting into non-Aristotelian territory.

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.

In order to formulate a fundamental quantum field theory of nuclear forces that explains their strength, range, and exchange character, while at the same time accounting for the weak β-decay interaction, Hideki Yukawa introduced a new kind of quantum field. In contrast to the real field of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which he took as his model, Yukawa's U-field was complex, and in contrast to the neutral massless photon of QED, the U-field's ‘heavy’ (i.e. massive) quanta were charged, carrying the electronic charge (positive and negative). The theory was proposed in November 1934 and published a few months later; however, its advantages were ignored, and for more than two years it went unnoticed, probably because there was no direct experimental evidence for the existence of U-quanta.

In a recent paper on the origin of G. N. Lewis's concept of the shared electron pair bond, I argued that the sources of Lewis's novel conception were certain ideas of J. J. Thomson and Alfred Parson. Yet the only influence that Lewis explicitly acknowledged was neither of these, but Alfred Werner's. The following statement appears in his book, Valence (1923):

I still have poignant remembrance of the distress which I and many others suffered some thirty years ago in a class in elementary chemistry, where we were obliged to memorize structural formulae of a great number of inorganic compounds. Even such substances as the ferricyanides and ferryocyanides were forced into the system, and bonds were drawn between the several atoms to comply with certain artificial rules, regardless of all chemical evidence. Such formulae are now believed to be almost, if not entirely devoid of scientific significance. Such abuse of the structural formula inevitably led to a reaction which found its best expression in the publications of Werner. His Neuere Anschauungen … (1905) marked a new epoch in chemistry; and in attempting to clarify the fundamental ideas of valence, there is no work to which I feel so much personal indebtedness as to this of Werner's.

In the second volume of the Principles of geology Lyell had occasion to speak of G. B. Brocchi, ‘whose untimely death in Egypt’, he said, ‘is deplored by all who have the progress of geology at heart’. Whatever he understood to be the debt of other geologists to that Italian fossil conchologist, Lyell himself owed him much for providing scientific data and interpretations integrated in his own geological synthesis, but especially for furnishing the escutcheon of the third chapter in the review of the history of geology which Lyell appended as a late but enthusiastic embellishment to the Principles of geology. The ‘Discorso sui progressi dello studio della conchiologia fossile in Italia’, an eighty-page essay on the history of his subject, was contained in the first volume of Brocchi's Conchiologia fossile subappennina and afforded Lyell succinct notices on Italian geologists from the sixteenth century to his own time, as well as cues for the introduction of other non-Italian sources.

Irish mechanics' institutes have received little attention from historians of science, but their history presents intriguing questions. Whereas industrialization, Protestant dissent and the politics of liberal social reformers have been identified as crucial for the development of mechanics' institutes in Britain, their influence in Ireland was regionally limited. Nonetheless, many unindustrialized, provincial, largely Catholic Irish towns had mechanics' institutes in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper investigates the history of the two mechanics' institutes of Galway, founded in 1826 and 1840, and analyses how local and national contexts affected the establishment, function and development of a provincial Irish mechanics' institute. Situating these institutes within the changing social and political constellations of early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, it shows how Catholic emancipation, the temperance movement and different strands of Irish nationalism affected approaches to the uses of science and science education in Ireland.

The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises a constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks.

In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked entirely within ordinary scientific practice, the paper focuses on how he managed to create an institutional and conceptual space for his geology at one of the centres for the education of the Anglican clergy, and on the impact the sometimes paradoxical demands had on his interpretation of prehistoric human relics, the Red Lady in particular. Buckland was famous if not notorious for his peculiar humour, the distracting and cathartic qualities of which, it will be argued, served as strategy in the advancement of unorthodox ideas or for glossing over inconsistencies.

Reproduction is one of the most persistently generative themes in the history of science and cinema. Cabbage fairies, clones and monstrous creations have fascinated filmmakers and audiences for more than a century. Today we have grown accustomed not only to the once controversial portrayals of sperm, eggs and embryos in biology and medicine, but also to the artificial wombs and dystopian futures of science fiction and fantasy. Yet, while scholars have examined key films and genres, especially in response to the recent cycle of Hollywood ‘mom coms’, the analytic potential of reproduction on film as a larger theme remains largely untapped. This introduction to a special issue aims to consolidate a disparate literature by exploring diverse strands of film studies that are rarely considered in the same frame. It traces the contours of a little-studied history, pauses to consider in greater detail a few particularly instructive examples, and underscores some promising lines of inquiry. Along the way, it introduces the six original articles that constitute Reproduction on Film.

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1919–33) and its sequel Secrets of Life (1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces the Secrets using an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines the Secrets series through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues that Secrets developed a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by the Secrets films.

In the 1940s the Marxist mathematician and historian of science Samuel Lilley (1914–87) made a substantial contribution to British history of science both intellectually and institutionally. His role, however, has largely gone unnoticed. Lilley is otherwise portrayed either as exemplifying the immaturity of Marxism, most famously by Rupert Hall in ‘Merton revisited’ (1963), or as a tragic figure marginalized during the Cold War because of his communist commitment. But both themes of exclusion and victimization keep Lilley's legacy hidden. By revisiting Lilley and his long-standing commitment to developing our discipline, this essay challenges the notion of radical discontinuity with respect to Lilley's legacy and argues for a more sustained contribution by Marxist historiography of science. This, in turn, requires a more appreciative understanding of the moderate Marxist model developed by Lilley in his popular, political and professional publications on the history of the social relations of science.

The Scopes trial (1925) fuelled discussion in the United States on the social and political implications of Darwinism. For the defenders of the 1925 Tennessee law – which prohibited the teaching of Darwinism in schools – Darwinism was, amongst other things, responsible for the German militarism which eventually led to the First World War. This view was supported by İsmail Fennî, a late Ottoman intellectual, who authored a book immediately after the trial which aimed to debunk scientific materialism. In it, he claimed that Darwinism blurred the distinction between man and beast and thus destroyed the foundations of morality. However, despite his anti-Darwinist stance, İsmail Fennî argued against laws forbidding the teaching of Darwinism in schools, and emphasized that even false theories contributed to scientific improvement. Indeed, because of his belief in science he claimed that Muslims should not reject Darwinism if it were supported by future scientific evidence. If this turned out to be the case, then religious interpretations should be revised accordingly. This article contributes to the literature on early Muslim reactions to Darwinism by examining the views of İsmail Fennî, which were notably sophisticated when compared with those of the anti-religious Darwinist and anti-Darwinist religious camps that dominated late Ottoman intellectual life.

This article presents evidence that an anonymous publication of 1573, a Letter sent by a gentleman of England [concerning …] the myraculous starre nowe shyning, was written by Thomas Digges, England's first Copernican. It tells the story of how it arose out of research commissioned by Elizabeth I's privy counsellors in response to the conventional argument of Jean Gosselin, librarian to Henri III of France, that the star was a comet which presaged wars. The text is significant because it seems to contain the observations and opinions that Digges held before he completed his other astronomical treatise, the groundbreaking Alae seu scalae mathematicae. It also casts some light on the development of Digges's radical and puritan views about the star, Copernican astronomy, the infinity of the universe and a belief that the ‘latter days’ of the world had arrived.