This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.

Between 1814 and 1826 four members of the family of Jane Talbot and her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot had an active and varied interest in the study of mosses, which included the collecting, drawing and naming of specimens. This article explores the textures of their developing practice of learning natural history, and considers their activities within the framework of the circulation of knowledge, their reading and skill development, and the networks that supported them. Their social status and connections provided access to the expertise of numerous British botanists, including Lewis Weston Dillwyn, William Jackson Hooker, and James Dalton, placing the family as a locus of knowledge (re)production and transmission. This work illustrates the pedagogical practices of an elite group as they engaged with botany in a domestic setting, and makes suggestions as to their motivations and stimulations, as well as the conditions that maintained or diminished their interest. At a time when mosses were little-studied even by professed botanists, it demonstrates how a family group including many young women filled their leisure pursuits with these small plants, and reveals how an extended family with no previous expertise in formal botany could be actors in early nineteenth-century knowledge exchange.

Historical accounts of the Indian space programme inevitably invoke the figure of Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), credited as the father of its early development in the 1960s. A physicist by training, Sarabhai was best known for his ‘leapfrogging’ vision, into which social applications of space technology would catapult developing countries out of poverty. By interrogating official and unofficial records, speeches, cinematic productions and obituaries, this article examines how Indian leadership utilized Sarabhai’s persona to substantiate the role of space flight in the nation’s domestic modernization and geopolitical leverage. Especially after his death in 1971, the making of Sarabhai into the pioneer of Indian space flight allowed India to fashion a geocentric appeal specific to its space programme, which construed the benefits of low-earth-orbit satellite communication to tackle unequal development. In the 1990s, Sarabhai’s image was further appropriated by international powers and actors to propagate the commercialization of satellite systems. Despite its elitist outlook and subscription to received notions of nationhood and modernity, a closer look into the public resonance of Sarabhai’s persona reveals how the geocentric promise of space flight in the Indian context contributed to the formation of post-1960s astroculture globally.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

Built in Gif-sur-Yvette in the 1950s, the phytotron of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique provided plant physiologists with a set of enclosed growth rooms in which several climatic constituents of the environment could be simultaneously and separately controlled. This article examines the polyvalence of the French phytotron to explore the economic and political entanglements of experimental reasoning in mid-twentieth-century plant physiology. As Gif scientists embraced phytotrons as a means for developing an ‘experimental bioclimatology’, not only did they introduce into the laboratory an understanding of climate as a complex of agents likely to affect plant life, but also they sought to map scientific findings on productive pursuits during a period of intense agricultural modernization. The horticultural and agronomic applications envisaged were aimed at the timing of climate-sensitive biological events, but also at the expansion of productive areas within and outside metropolitan France, particularly in the context of late colonial and international dry-land development agendas. This case study of phytotronists’ agricultural imagination highlights a techno-scientific conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of plant life in time and space, and regarded as either a deficiency to be corrected or a resource to be harnessed.

In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm’s eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon’s thought. Sturm’s reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm’s salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating ‘Eastern’ practice into ‘Western’ science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies – organic versus chemical – is based largely on Howard's opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard's contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard's historiography by examining three topics related to his life's work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard's ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.

This essay examines the working relationship between Charles Darwin and the Edinburgh gardener John Scott that developed in the wake of the publishing of the Origin of Species (1859). As the essay shows, Darwin sought to utilize Scott’s horticultural knowledge and experimental expertise in order to provide some of the specialized botanical evidence that the Origin was not intended to provide. Scott, meanwhile, sought to use Darwin’s patronage and tutelage in order to overcome his modest status as a gardener while making contributions to scientific knowledge. And for an intense two-year period (1862–4), Darwin and Scott’s relationship was productive and mutually beneficial: not only did Scott’s work supplement Darwin’s ongoing botanical research on sexual development and fertility, but also his Primula experiments appeared to provide ‘physiological’ evidence of speciation via selective breeding. What the essay argues, however, is that there were limits to what Scott was able to achieve due in part to his social standing and perceived character that ultimately cast a shadow over his findings.

This article interrogates the positioning of British colonial meteorology in Malaysia and Singapore from the 1940s to 1960. This period spanned a global conflict and an internecine war, effecting profound sociopolitical changes from which neither Malaysia nor Singapore would emerge the same. The meteorological services were essential to Britain’s armed conflicts, providing vital weather information to the army, navy and, especially, the air forces, as well as supporting the aviation and shipping industry often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. This article argues that British military policy in South East Asia and the specific concerns of the colonial government in Malaya directly commanded the meteorological agenda on the ground during this period, with a secondary but significant impact on tropical climate and weather research. It thus addresses the interplay of science, colonialism and military interest from the perspective of a region that has featured little in the history of science.

This article examines the scientific legacy of the first Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the part they played in the global circulation of botanical knowledge, from their creation in 1817 to their relocation to the West End of Glasgow in 1841. Located in a thriving industrial city with strong commercial ties to the British Caribbean, the gardens stood at an important crossroads of political and economic interests, scientific discovery, cultural innovation and imperial motives. They were managed by the talented English botanist William Jackson Hooker, who strove to transform them into a training ground for prospective botanists and a leading scientific institution. Yet, like many other botanical establishments of similar stature at the time, the gardens encountered many financial setbacks that hampered their success and threatened the scientific ambitions of Hooker and his peers. This article discusses the extent of the gardens’ scientific contribution within and beyond the borders of Britain and seeks to determine the degree to which science in these gardens was constrained by economic factors.

In 1820 two French scientists – Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou – discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the ‘wondrous’ fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases – plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward – would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was ‘a global scientific obsession’ with finding a ‘substitute’ for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.1

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949–53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey.

The role of editorial staff in shaping early climate change narratives has been underexplored and deserves more attention. During the 1970s, the epistemological underpinnings of the production of knowledge on climate change were contested between scientists who favoured computer-based atmospheric simulations and those who were more interested in investigating the long-term history of climatic changes. Although the former group later became predominant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the 1980s, the latter had a sizable influence over climate discourse during the 1970s. Of these, one of the key popularizers of climate discourse during the 1970s was the British climatologist Hubert Lamb (1913–97). The correspondence between Lamb and journal editors who gatekept and curated different audiences helped craft resonant messages about climate change and its potential effects, and we explore Lamb's interactions with editors of Nature, the UNESCO Courier, The Ecologist and Development Forum in the 1973–4 period. Through understanding how climate change discussion was influenced by editors, we gain an insight into how such narratives had to be adjusted to fit into pre-existing discourses before their importance was more widely established, and how these adjustments helped shape conceptualizations of climate change as a global, human-caused phenomenon and a source of universal threat.

Selenography was both a practice and a tool which developed through optical instrumentation in the seventeenth century. As a practice, it was the process of creating composite graphical depictions of the Moon through skill and sustained telescopic study. As a paper-based tool, the focus of this article, a selenography was a stabilized visualization and codified template for making, organizing and communicating lunar-based astronomical observations. The template's key observation and notation device was its system of named Moon spots, or lunar nomenclatures. Such systems varied significantly in different sites of knowledge making. Through the close study of two naming schemes produced and exchanged in Counter-Reformation contexts by Michael van Langren (1645) and Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Maria Francesco Grimaldi (1651), this essay argues that selenographies were conceived with an eye to ideals of universal standardization for collective and even global observation. In practice, however, different forms of universality, revealing distinct local agendas tied to political and religious priorities, were materialized in each competing scheme.

The inaugural lecture, or oration, delivered by Regiomontanus at the University of Padua in 1464 is deemed a document of remarkable significance in the history of science. Although it has attracted much scholarly attention, few efforts have been directed towards identifying the traces of Byzantine influence it might carry; that is to say, the extent to which Regiomontanus might have been influenced by the views of his patron, Bessarion. This paper responds to the need for such a study, arriving at the following conclusions. First, Regiomontanus's praise of astrology is in line with Bessarion's reaction to the official decisions taken against astrology in Constantinople at the Council of 1351 – decisions which were ultimately rooted in the hesychast controversy and in the confessional struggles between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome. Second, the legitimation of the Graeco-Arabic roots of astronomy in an institutional context, as undertaken by Regiomontanus, is in accordance with the intellectual influences Bessarion had absorbed in his youth in Constantinople. Third, contrary to some claims, it is likely that Regiomontanus does not adhere to a humanist anti-Arab agenda; rather, his views on the history of mathematics are a consequence of the Graeco-Arabic heritage of his patron, and of his lack of access to Arabic translations.