The periodical History of Science opened auspiciously in 1962 with an article by L. Pearce Williams on ‘The physical sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century: problems and sources’. He criticized the nearly exclusive reliance on printed sources then quite common in studies of Victorian science, concluded that much remained to be discovered and closed his paper with these words: What papers exist in private hands can only be guessed. I know of a trunk in an attic containing unpublished letters from Darwin, Huxley, Kolbe, Pasteur and a host of others. They are, unfortunately, not available to the scholar and there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of such boxes scattered through America and Europe. As they are discovered, catalogued and made available to scholars, the shape of nineteenth-century science will gradually lose its blurred outlines and the origins of modern science will become clear.

In his 1551 Travagliata invenzione, the Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia described a device for raising sunken ships. Despite his claim of originality, his contemporary Girolamo Cardano had described a similar method in his famous work De subtilitate, which was published a year before. A comparison between these methods reveals the uniqueness of Tartaglia's approach, for he combines an explicit defence of the horror vacui principle with an implicit negation of rarefaction. In this article I show the complexities of this conception and stress the importance of keeping the personal argument between both authors in mind when interpreting their descriptions of wreck-salvage operations.

This paper examines the usefulness of the category ‘interest’ in the history of technology through a case study of the failed attempt to introduce atmospheric railway traction in Britain in the 1840s. It argues for a reflective deployment of the term in question, sensitive to contemporary usages. A schematic typology of railway ‘interests’ shows just how various these were. Financial interests, for example, were not the same as professional ones; or an investor might feel the pull of contrary interests, depending on whether she was checking her dividends or taking a train. The history of atmospheric traction demonstrates the interlocking of railway ‘interests’, and their utility in explaining the success or failure of railway technologies. As might be expected, determinism, whether technological or ‘social’, does not answer the case. ‘Interest’ relations are contingent, and so must be understood the failure of the atmospheric railway.