Refrigeration has become so well established over the last 125 years that today a crude ice maker becomes a boon for primitive people in the jungle or desert. Only a total dislocation in energy sources will quickly loosen the connections between people and cooling. A few centuries ago, Hippocrates (460–377? B.C.) observed: ‘most men would rather run the hazards of their lives or health than be deprived of the pleasure of drinking out of ice’ … In the U.S.A. [today], 750 million frozen Eskimo Pies are sold annually and seven ice cream plants are said to be operating in Moscow … Like the men of Hippocrates, a lot of people will resist any curtailment in food and freezing operations. They have come to expect these for survival in our present social and industrial orders.

These remarks, asserting the extent to which the people of the United States of America regarded refrigeration not as an optional luxury but as a necessity for survival even at the height of the energy crisis of the late 1970s, formed part of a contribution to a massive 11-volume international compendium, Alternative Energy Sources, produced in 1978 in response to Western concerns about rising oil prices and falling reserves. An enthusiastic advocate for geothermal energy, the contributor's perception provides a vivid contextual starting point for our study of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (1981). In this novel the central narrative focuses upon a New England family's rejection of post-war American consumer society with its imperative to ‘build automobiles that would fail within five years and refrigerators that would fail in ten’. The novel indeed explores some of those very kinds of alternative energy sources which had been exciting scientists and inventors (often on or beyond the fringes of scientific orthodoxy) since the early 1970s when journals such as The Ecologist had begun to prophesy an end to energy-driven economic growth in the western world.

‘Recent studies of Babylonian sources have shown that we must revise former estimates of the extent to which the Greeks were indebted for the details of their astronomy to the Babylonians; the debt proves to have been much greater than had been imagined, and further researches may prove it to have been greater still.’ So wrote Sir Thomas Heath in 1932; in the previous year, Professor Filon had written, ‘It is gradually beginning to be realized that many of the achievements of Greek culture in the fields of astronomy and mathematics did not spring, fully armed, from the Hellenic brain, but had their more remote origins in the civilizations of the ancient East.’

There is available now sufficient evidence to show that a great deal of the astronomical knowledge which has come down to us from the Hellenistic period (c. 500 b.c. to a.d. 150) was not initially discovered during that period; and such new empiric discoveries as were made in that time were not all due to Greeks, for important contributions were still being made by Babylonians during the Seleucid Era.

To a large extent it seems that the Greeks kept very closely, even in astronomy, to the mode of research advocated by Plato, who said in The Republic, ‘Which things (i.e. “the variegated bodies in the heavens”) truly are to be comprehended by reason and intellect, but not by sight’. The Greeks founded a ‘school’ of theoretical astronomy and, with their highly developed mathematics, were able to go far with it; but their source-material was in very many cases not Greek.

The author of Epinomis states, ‘We may assume that whatever the Greeks take from the barbarians, they bring it to a finer perfection’. Adrastus (second century a.d.) wrote that the methods used by the Chaldeans and Egyptians in astronomy were imperfect because these people lacked physiologia; no doubt this was true, but it was people of these races who had done, and continued to do, most of the equivalent of modern observatory routine work.

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development.

In 1839 the working hours of the computers employed on the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich were reduced from eleven hours to eight hours. Previous historians have explained this decrease by reference to the generally benevolent nature of the manager of the reductions, George Biddell Airy. By contrast, this article uses the letters and notes exchanged between Airy and the computers to demonstrate that the change in the working hours originated from the computers as a reaction to their poor working conditions. Through the exploration of these archival materials, the article shifts the focus of the analysis to the working experience of the computers, rather than to the administrative history of the project that inevitably tends to highlight Airy's actions. By doing so, the article shows how the computers were treated as a disposable low-skilled workforce, as opposed to aspiring astronomers with considerable mathematical talent. Through this reframing, the article takes a step towards a working history of the observatory.

The 1950 Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon is one of the earliest British films to engage with the atomic bomb and uses a number of strategies to contain the public fears of the super-weapon. When an atomic scientist steals one such device and threatens to detonate it in central London, an elaborate but efficient security system swings into action. Drawing on the imagery and practices of civil defence during the Second World War, central London is evacuated while the army hunts down the scientist, who is presented as undergoing a psychological crisis as a result of his work. Although he is finally located and the bomb disarmed, the film only achieves its reassuring message by suppressing the Communist threat from within (which would become the subject of Roy Boulting's 1951 film High Treason) and from abroad, which differentiates Seven Days from comparable American films of the period. Presenting an idealized version of Londoners' stoicism, the film actually shows the disproportion between the specifics of daily life in the city and the massive destruction the new weapon could wreak. The acquiescence of Londoners in their orderly evacuation is only possible because of their virtually total ignorance of the true nature of the bomb.

Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.