This paper examines the crowded landscape of conferences and organizations within which the International Foundation for Science (IFS) was shaped in the early 1970s. The IFS aimed to support scientists from developing countries, circumventing the bureaucracy of established international organizations such as UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The new foundation was a potential rival to such institutions, which ironically provided the conditions essential to its emergence. Their conferences, board meetings and assemblies, where scientists and policy makers convened, provided key infrastructure for the development of the IFS. This infrastructure appears simultaneously both as an almost invisible feature of international science policy, and as a political problem. The solution to this problem was Stockholm: a geographical place that was also placeless, occupying both national and international status, desirable in its political, scientific and geographical neutrality. In an organizational context, academies and scientific societies who found their role circumscribed by existing international institutions used the IFS to argue for their particular role and expertise in funding and promoting scientific development. Geographically and politically, neutral Sweden provided a setting which was located between East and West, and which added to the country's own reputation for championing the causes of developing nations.

This paper examines the contest between Canadian American industrialist Cyrus Eaton and the Pugwash scientists’ leadership for influence over the early Pugwash scientists’ conferences. Eaton's activism has generally been dismissed in the historical literature as ineffective, naive and too uncritical of the Soviet Union. This paper argues that he was genuinely committed to international peace and security, that Eaton shared with Pugwash scientists a belief in the importance of intellectuals to global unity, and that he worked to bring about greater international peace and understanding through both his personal activism and his own conferences held in the town of Pugwash. Eaton, however, favoured a broader push for peace, which included participation by a wider range of intellectuals and a call for rapprochement with the Soviet Union. These differences between Eaton and the Pugwash scientists, I argue, were more than simply about approach: they represented different internationalist visions and manifested in different conceptualizations for the Pugwash scientists’ conferences. Eaton hoped to incorporate non-scientists and humanism into the conferences, and integrate them into his own broader conference programme at his Thinkers’ Lodge at Pugwash. The scientists, however, wanted to keep their conferences as distinctly scientists’ events, tied to science and its authority.

Elite conferences, such as the Nobel Symposia organized by the Nobel Foundation since 1965, have often put a premium on the uninhibited exchange of ideas rather than the broad exchange of information. Nobel Symposium 14, The Place of Value in a World of Fact (1969), combined this ethos with the ambition to engage with ‘world problems’ that were thought by many at the time to constitute a global crisis. This paper examines the relationship between the Nobel Foundation's ideal of scientific neutrality/objectivity and the ‘neutral activism’ in Swedish 1960s foreign policy. Furthermore, it investigates the social networking that preceded and followed the symposium, arguing that these processes were more important for the symposium's impact than the actual meeting. They formed channels through which it was able to influence other larger meetings, like the 1972 UN conference on the human environment, and contributed to the creation of international organizations, most importantly the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study. This suggests that the common historiographic focus on science meetings as events should be complemented by analytical perspectives that also view them as processes.

In the early and mid-twentieth century, scientific conferences were a popular tool to establish communication between scientists. Organisational efforts, research and funds were spent defining what makes a productive and successful scientific gathering. A unique example of this was the monitoring and evaluation system of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs), which conceptualized informal communication in small, specialized meetings as the best method of advancing cutting-edge research. Studying the detailed monitoring reports of the sessions and the evaluation forms filled by the participants, this paper explores how a concrete format of scientific knowledge production and identity formation was created and reproduced. The normative assessment of the participants’ interactions is examined in the contexts of (a) their professional affiliations, (b) the conference presentations and discussions and (c) activities related to play. The study of the GRCs exemplifies how scientists actively conceptualised characteristics like academic affiliation, manners, leisure practices and social categories such as gender as ways to understand, describe and measure how knowledge is best produced and transmitted, turning the conferences into a fertile ground for meta-scientific reflections.

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed ‘visible’ through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means.

The move online of almost all meetings in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief the taken-for-granted centrality of conferences within scientific culture. While its impact on science has yet to be fully grasped, for the authors of this special issue, this situation held heuristic power for understanding the meanings and functions, now and historically, of international scientific conferencing. Ongoing discussions in the academic world about the pros and cons of virtual meetings bring out the central place of presence in these events and its mediation across space and time by modern infrastructures and technologies. From their rise in the mid-nineteenth century to the experiences of the present day, as well as in imagined futures, international conferences have been about communication. Following James Carey, they can be considered both as places for sharing knowledge and as rituals aimed at fostering and performing communities.

The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the ‘ethological eye’ was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers.

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, geologists created the International Geological Congress (IGC) to achieve the methodological and terminological uniformity that they thought their science lacked. Their desire to standardize their practice and their use of the conference to do so was neither new nor unique. Although late nineteenth-century international conferences have been recognized as important arenas of standardization, relatively little is known of the ways in which conferences organized standardization negotiations. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how the IGC practically and socially organized standardization work. It appears that the session hall was not the sole and not even the main stage of geological standard-setting. The standardization process was also enacted through comparative study and informal exchanges that regular visits to purpose-built comparative geological exhibitions made possible. Relying on a sophisticated apparatus of commissions and subcommittees, the IGC also socially organized standards negotiation beyond the space and time of the triennial sessions. By tracing the material, spatial and social practices engineered through the IGC to serve geological standardization, this article unboxes the conference process and in so doing enriches our understanding of the period's wave of standardization.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, British colonists in Jamaica became increasingly exasperated by the damage caused to their sugar plantations by rats. In 1872, a British planter attempted to solve this problem by introducing the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata). The animals, however, turned on Jamaica's insectivorous birds and reptiles, leading to an explosion in the tick population. This paper situates the mongoose catastrophe as a closing chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century acclimatization movement. While foreign observers saw the introduction of the mongoose as a cautionary tale, caricaturing British Jamaica as overrun by a plague of weasels and ticks, British colonists, administrators and naturalists – identifying a gradual decline of both populations – argued that the ‘balance of nature’ would eventually reassert itself. As this paper argues, through this dubious claim they were attempting to retrospectively rationalize or justify the introductions and their disastrous aftermath. This strategy enabled them to gloss over the lasting ecological damage caused by the mongoose, and allowed its adherents to continue their uncritical support of both the Jamaican plantation economy and animal introductions in the British Empire.

Frank Sherwood Taylor was director of the Science Museum London for just over five years from October 1950. He was the only historian of science ever to have been director of this institution, which has always ridden a tightrope between advocacy of science and advocacy of its history, balancing differently at different points in its history. He was also president of the BSHS from 1951 to 1953. So what happened when a historian got his hands on the nation's pre-eminent public museum of science? To what extent did his historian's training and instincts affect his policies whilst director, and with what effect in the longer term? Taking this exceptional case, I suggest, enables us to consider how museum accounts of the past of science relate to historiographies of science otherwise available in the culture. In this discussion, drawing on new archival research, I consider the role of history within a key policy paper he wrote in 1951. I analyse and contextualize its main themes before considering, by way of conclusion, his legacy.

This special issue explores the power that images with a techno-scientific content can have in international relations. As we introduce the articles in the collection, we highlight how the study of this influence extends current research in the separate (but increasingly interacting) domains of history of science and technology, and political science. We then show how images of different types (photographs, cartoons and plots) can inform inter-state transactions through their public appeal alongside the better-studied dialogic practices of the diplomatic arena. Finally, we offer an analysis of the interlacing of different diplomatic tracks based on words and images and conclude that, in contrast with words, images conflate agency and argument, therefore creating opportunities to inform transactions and negotiations which their designers may not have even intended.

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first ‘modern’ effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the ‘universal’ scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology.

This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation – a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.

Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the ‘stacked plot’ of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic sabotage. In reconstructing the historical events associated with this subversive effort, this essay explores how, after its adoption as an imaging device utilized in radio astronomy, the stacked plot gave representation to the diplomacy agendas of two distinct groups. The post-punk reworking of the stacked plot exemplified the ambition of this artistic movement to attack the images associated with social conventions and norms by amplifying their ‘semantic noise’, and, in so doing, seeking to negotiate a social space for those sharing these subversive goals. Conversely, radio astronomers used the stacked plot to display the presence of interfering radio transmitters in the frequencies exclusively allocated to astronomical research, thus advocating the removal of this electronic noise in the context of international telecommunication negotiations. The article thus shows how the representation of different types of noise through similar images shaped contrasting ambitions in the separate domains of science diplomacy and everyday diplomacy.

This essay deals with the cultural-political motivations behind the cosmological conceptions of the Padua Aristotelian Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631). A defender of the interests of the university against Jesuit teachings, and one of the philosophers who was most frequently scrutinized by the Inquisition, he was an important actor in Venetian cultural politics during the years of European religious conflict that culminated in the Thirty Years War. In those years, he was officially titled ‘protector’ of the multi-confessional German Nation of Artists, one of the largest groups of foreign students at the University of Padua, and had to act as mediator in cases of conflict. His efforts to keep teaching free from religious concerns is reflected by his commitment to pursue philosophical and cosmological inquiries without engaging in revealed theology. In particular, his strict adherence to Aristotelian cosmology proved to be at odds with central Christian dogmas as it relinquished, among other concepts, the ideas of Creation and divine Providence. I argue that this position of Cremonini's fostered a tolerant and universalistic attitude in line with a secular programme that could enable cross-confessional coexistence in a cosmopolitan institution like Padua.

Joseph Needham occupies a central position in the historical narrative underpinning the most influential practitioner-derived definition of ‘science diplomacy’. The brief biographical sketch produced by the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science sets Needham's activities in the Second World War as an exemplar of a science diplomacy. This article critically reconsiders Needham's wartime activities, shedding light on the roles played by photographs in those diplomatic activities and his onward dissemination of them as part of his self-fashioning. Images were important to the British biochemist, and he was an avid amateur photographer himself, amassing a unique collection of hundreds of images relating to science, technology and medicine in wartime China during his time working as director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office. These included ones produced by China's Nationalist Party-led government, and by the Chinese Communist Party. Focusing on these photographs, this article examines the way Joseph Needham used his experiences to underpin claims to authority which, together with the breadth of his networks, enabled him to establish himself as an international interlocutor. All three aspects formed essential parts of his science diplomacy.

The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for popularizing the term ‘Anthropozoic’, which he used to describe and characterize the latest ‘era’ of Earth's geological time. His writings, largely unknown to an international audience before the ‘Anthropocene saga’, have been particularly in the spotlight after Valeria Federighi translated excerpts of his main geological work, Corso di Geologia, originally published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873. In the first edition of Corso di Geologia, namely Note ad un Corso Annual di Geologia, or simply Note, published between 1865 and 1870, Stoppani characterized the Anthropozoic in stratigraphic terms. In particular, Chapter 15 of the second volume of Note (1867) represents the first stratigraphic characterization that the author provides of the Anthropozoic. Our contribution here brings, for the first time, a translation of Chapter 15 to a broader international audience, accompanied by a critical commentary elucidating the broader social, political, religious and scientific context wherein the notion of Anthropozoic emerged in Stoppani's writings. The text of the original document and its translation can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000590.

This article examines the early modern household's importance for producing experimental knowledge through an examination of the Halifax household of Margery and Henry Power. While Henry Power has been studied as a natural philosopher within the male-dominated intellectual circles of Cambridge and London, the epistemic labour of his wife, Margery Power, has hitherto been overlooked. From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy.

A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor–authors had only a brief moment of authoritative legitimacy before their ideas were repackaged and promoted by land-bound authors and naval officers, and the progenitors of the ‘science of seamanship’ were deemed unfit participants in its ongoing practice. This article explores this brief moment, taking seriously the ideas and influences of the maritime milieu which spawned it, and arguing that the codification and circulation of ‘useful knowledge’ in eighteenth-century Britain often hardened social hierarchies. Examining seamanship forces us to question the progressivist linear trajectory of an increasingly open scientific culture during this period, and to focus instead on a repeating pattern in which the working knowledge of labourers and artisans was appropriated and its original practitioners denigrated.