As described elsewhere in this issue of BJHS, preliminary steps towards founding a society for the history of science in Britain were taken in 1946. A meeting was held at the Science Museum, London, on 22 November 1946, chaired by Herbert Dingle, at which Gavin de Beer formally proposed the foundation of a history of science society, seconded by Michael Roberts. A provisional committee was appointed to draw up rules and a constitution.

An interesting question arises in the context of the typically medieval description of the universe presented at the beginning of Maimonides' (1138–1204) great law code, the Mishneh Torah. What was Maimonides' own attitude towards that account? Was it meant only as a statement of the best description of nature available at the time (and thus radically distinct from the halakhic (i.e. Jewish legal) matters which make up the bulk of the Mishneh Torah) or was it meant to be a description of the true nature of the universe as it really is, not subject to revision in the light of new paradigms or new models (and thus essentially similar to the halakhic matters in the text)? Answering this question will lead us to a better understanding of Maimonides' understanding of the nature of science and of what I shall call, for lack of a better term, scientific progress. Maimonides will be shown to hold that while sublunar science can reach perfection and completion such is not possible for superlunar science and that to the extent that the scientific matters in the Mishneh Torah deal with the latter they could not have been presented as the final description of the universe as it truly is.

A recent note by lan Inkster observed that a Parliamentary Act of 1817 to suppress seditious meetings also posed a threat to scientific lecturers and societies between 1817 and 1820. Further evidence is presented here as to the intentions of the 1817 Act and its effects on science. It is particularly important to add to the observations of Inkster, first, that chartered societies were exempt, and second, that the Act expired on 14 July 1818, although further measures were introduced in December 1819. To explain the provisions of these Acts, especially the distinctions made between lectures held by chartered societies as opposed to independent associations, it is relevant to consider how legislation to prevent seditious meetings and societies in the wake of the French Revolution demarcated between seditious blasphemy and legitimate scientific inquiry. The Acts provide an opportunity of locating science in contreversies over the freedom of speech and association. The questions arise of the relation of the 1817 Act to legislation of 1795, 1799, 1801, and 1819 which imposed licensing on lectures, and of the extent to which repressive legislation inhibited the activities of lecturers and societies. The intellectual repercussions were of such magnitude that the mathematician de Morgan observed in retrospect, ‘From 1815 to 1830 the question of revolution or no revolution lurked in all our English discussions’.

Simon Bredon was one of a remarkable group of scientists who brought fame to Oxford by their achievements in the sphere of natural science, particularly in astronomy. Though his interests lay chiefly in the field of medicine, as indicated by the large collection of books on this subject which he bequeathed to his friends, he was also a mathematician and astronomer.

The manuscripts of his works, still preserved at Oxford, Cambridge and the British Museum, which include an arithmetic, a commentary on the Almagest, a theory of the planets and astronomical calculations, have never been properly examined and some kind of preliminary investigation seems necessary before his true position among the Merton school of scientists can be assessed.

William Hampson, classics graduate and barrister, burst into science with his patent for air-liquefaction in 1895. Its success provided the means of isolating the rarer permanent atmospheric gases, and it formed the basis for multi-tonnage gas liquefaction. The British Oxygen Company acquired Hampson's patent interests.

Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this article demonstrates, the collaboration between railway companies and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was far from harmonious. While railways did employ the accurate time the observatory provided, they were also more than happy to compromise the astronomical institution's ability to take the accurate celestial observations that such time depended on. Observing astronomical transits required the use of troughs of mercury to reflect images of stars, but the construction of a railway too near to the observatory threatened to cause vibrations which would make such readings impossible. Through debates over proposed railway lines near the observatory, it becomes clear how important government protection from private interests was to preserving astronomical standards. This article revises our understanding of the role of railway companies in the dissemination of standard time and argues that state intervention was essential to preserving Victorian British astronomical science.

In January 1729 a paper written by James Bradley was read at two meetings of the Royal Society. On a newly discovered motion of the fixed stars, later described as the theory of the aberration of light, it was to transform the science of astrometry. The paper appeared as a narrative of a programme of observation first begun at Kew and finalized at Wanstead, but it was, in reality, a careful reconstruction devised to enhance his reputation in response to a recognition that the programme was initially conducted in terms that were inimical to what he conceived to be his interest. The planned attempt to repeat Robert Hooke's celebrated experiment by James Pound, Samuel Molyneux and George Graham was set up at Molyneux's residence in Kew with James Bradley replacing Pound after his untimely and sudden demise. The unexpected and counterintuitive behaviour of the object star γ Draconis and the eradication of any suspicion of instrumental or systemic error led to the abandonment of the attempt to measure annual parallax and the initiation of new conjectures. An annual nutation was proposed but after the observation of a control star, 35 Camelopardalis, this conjecture was abandoned. Unknown to Bradley and Graham a premature approach was made by Molyneux to Newton claiming that the ‘nutation’ negated the whole of Newton's system. In the abandonment of the nutation yet another conjecture opposed to Newtonian theory was proposed and abandoned. Bradley determined to use his own instrument designed on different principles by Graham to observe the phenomenon in Wanstead. At Wanstead Bradley observed many stars to determine the parameters of the phenomenon. With the law of the motion described, Bradley proposed a hypothesis to explain it. Drawn from his earlier work on the ephemerides of Jupiter's satellites his hypothesis of the ‘new-discovered motion’ was quickly presented to the Royal Society as Bradley was working on a later and more definitive version of his paper. It is this later, third, unpublished version that is commonly referred to throughout this essay. It issued a challenge to ‘anti-Copernicans’ to offer an explanation of the observed phenomenon in geostatic terms. One such astronomer, Eustachio Manfredi, had examined the phenomenon of ‘aberrations’ in detail, the term being his. It was Bradley who first applied the term to the ‘new-discovered motion’ and within a short time ‘aberration’ was being applied by astronomers in the reduction of their observations. Annual aberration was widely accepted as evidence of the motion of the Earth. The paper enhanced Bradley's reputation and projected him into the forefront of European astronomers.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

The origins of contemporary exclusion of surgical methods from patenting lie in the complexities of managing credit claims in operative surgery, recognized in the nineteenth century. While surgical methods were not deemed patentable, surgeons were nevertheless embedded within patent culture. In an atmosphere of heightened awareness about the importance of ‘inventors’, how surgeons should be recognized and rewarded for their inventions was an important question. I examine an episode during the 1840s which seemed to concretize the inapplicability of patents to surgical practice, before looking at alternatives to patenting, used by surgeons to gain social and financial credit for inventions.

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893–1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies’ programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation.

Today, the most powerful research technique available for assigning chronometric age to human cultural objects is radiocarbon dating. Developed in the United States in the late 1940s by an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, radiocarbon dating measures the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (C14) in organic material, and calculates the time elapsed since the materials were removed from the life cycle. This paper traces the interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and radiochemistry that led to the successful development of radiocarbon dating in the early 1950s, following the movement of people and ideas from Willard Libby's Chicago radiocarbon laboratory to museums, universities and government labs in the United States, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. I show how radiocarbon research built on existing technologies and networks in atomic chemistry and physics but was deeply shaped by its original private philanthropic funders and archaeologist users, and ultimately remained to the side of many contemporaneous Cold War scientific and military projects.

This paper examines the early years of decision making in the award of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, and shows how the prize became a tool in the boundary work which upheld the social demarcations between scientists and inventors, as well as promoting a particular normative view of individual scientific achievement. The Nobel committees were charged with rewarding scientific achievements that benefited humankind: their interpretation of that criterion, however, turned in the first instance on their assessment of the groundbreaking nature of the ‘science’, with the applied or practical ‘benefits’ of that discovery being treated as very much secondary factors in the award. Through an interrogation of the reports sent by the committees to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, this paper shows how committee members depended on a notion of ‘post-dated utilitarianism’ in reconciling potential tension between rewarding basic and applied science, and explores the ways in which the annual prize both shaped, and was shaped by, media perceptions of scientific virtue.

Two hundred years ago the founder members of the Linnean Society of London decided that by forming a Library for use of the Fellows, and thus by owning books jointly, they could have access to a far wider range of publications than they could hope to as individuals. The Library was thus conceived as an integral part of the Society and its functions and on 15 April 1788 the first records in the Donation Book (‘one folio for entering Presents and Benefactions’ 26 January 1788) show that Thomas Marsham, the Treasurer, J. Dickson and Jonas Dryander all presented the Society with books ranging from Gerard's Herbal of 1597 to various works by Linnaeus. These fifteen books were soon joined by others, notably from Sir Joseph Banks whose donation of ‘duplicates’ from his own library occupies some four pages in the record of donations for 3 March 1789. The need to house these acquisitions is reflected in the decision of the Fourth Meeting to provide ‘a room or library appropriated to the reception of their books…’ and the purchase of a deal bookcase in February 1790.

The change in the physiological conception of body fluid during the Seventeenth Century exemplifies the beginning of changes in chemical ideas away from humours as irreducible components of fluid systems towards water as the common solvent of an indefinitely large range of solutions. Against the Galenic humoral view of body fluids J.-B. van Helmont (1579–1644) postulated ‘latex’, a humour distributed through the body and common to several body fluids. The theory of latex explained experimental findings and provided a basis for Helmont's introduction of diuretics into the treatment of dropsy. Francis Glisson (1597–1677) adopted the theory of latex. In this paper it is shown that Helmont contradicted, in part at least, the distinctness of humours by a doctrine of a common reservoir from which various body fluids are drawn. It is further argued that, on the available evidence, Helmont is the originator of this idea of a common reservoir. Through hitherto unremarked and unpublished manuscript evidence, it is shown that Glisson, in adopting the theory of latex, and its therapeutic application, modifies and extends it. In the manuscripts Glisson expresses himself in the language of Helmontian philosophy. Given Glisson's known influence (in, for example, spreading Harvey's doctrine of the circulation), the question arises what part, if any, is attributable to him in the transmission of the doctrine of the common reservoir. From the point of view of experimental science, that doctrine makes a break with the past no less radical than does, say, that of the circulation. It appears that we have here yet another major contribution of Helmont to the scientific revolution with, through Glisson, a possible channel of transmission of this contribution.

When Michael Hunter first publicized the idea of ‘Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle’ I understood that his main aim was to test three competing psychoanalytical theories against the historical evidence provided by the life and work of Robert Boyle. Although this would have been a valuable exercise, and one that the British Society for the History of Science meeting partly engaged, the papers by Brett Kahr, John Clay and Karl Figlio published here raise some far more compelling issues which I shall explore in the ensuing discussion. Before turning to this discussion I offer a few introductory remarks.

Kepler saw it as one of the chief advantages of the Copernican system that it put order into the planetary motions. Although Copernicus had indeed noted that the planetary periods increase with their distance from the sun, he did not, as far as we know, attempt to find a relationship between the two. Believing that God would not have failed to establish some mathematically precise ratio, Kepler sought from the very first to find it. Thus we see, in some of his earliest surviving letters, his attempts to relate planetary periods to the radii of their orbits using circular quadrants intersected by straight lines. Right from the beginning, Kepler gave the sun that dynamic role that was to characterize his ‘new astronomy based upon physics’. Immediately after describing the nested polyhedra that he believed determined the number and distances of the planets, he wrote:

Next, there is a moving soul and an infinite motion in the sun, and a double decrement of motion in the movables. In the first place, there is the inequality of their circuits, caused by the unequal amplitude of the orbs, which would occur even were the moving power the same in all orbs. But (2) actually this moving power (like light, in optics) is weaker the further it is from the source.