Commander Derek Howse, who has died aged 78, was a man of many talents which he used unstintingly in time of war, and in times of peace for the public benefit. After a distinguished career in the Royal Navy he joined the Museum service, and rose in it to become the leading authority on the history of the buildings, instruments and astronomical timekeepers of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, on the solution in the eighteenth century of the problem of determining the longitude at sea by lunar distance and by chronometer, and on the development and use of radar at sea.

Derek was the son of a Captain of the Royal Navy, and at the age of thirteen and a half years followed his father into the Navy as a Naval Cadet. In HMS Britannia (then the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth) for the next three and a half years Derek was given a very broad – for those, even more for present times – education, for it was in the sciences and the humanities, in marine engineering and in seamanship, before going to sea as a midshipman in the 16″-gun battleship HMS Rodney for some two years. He then completed his sub-lieutenant's qualifying courses in navigation, gunnery, torpedoes, anti-submarine warfare and signals in 1939, as the Second World War broke out, when he again went to sea.

Intellectual and professional reforms in evolutionary studies between 1935 and 1950 included substantial expansion, diversification, and realignment of community infrastructure. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley and Alfred Emerson organized the Society for the Study of Speciation at the 1939 AAAS Columbus meeting as one response (among many coming into place) to concerns about ‘isolation’ and ‘lack of contact’ among speciation workers worried about ‘dispersed’ and ‘scattered’ resources in this newly robust ‘borderline’ domain. Simply constructed, the SSS sought neither the radical reorganization of specialities nor the creation of some new discipline. Instead, it was designed to facilitate: to simplify exchange of information and to provide a minimally invasive avenue for connecting disparate researchers. Emerson served as SSS secretary and was its principal agent. After publishing one block of publications, however, the SSS became ‘quiescent’. Anxious to promote his own agenda, Ernst Mayr tried to manoeuvre around Emerson in an effort to revitalize the project. After meeting impediments, he moved his efforts elsewhere. The SSS was too short-lived to merit a claim for major impact within the community; however, it reveals important features of community activity during the synthesis period and stands in contrast to later efforts by George Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Mayr.

In the late 1960s teams of engineers working independently in Japan, Switzerland and the United States used newly created electronic components to completely reinvent the wristwatch. The products these groups developed instigated a global revolution in the watch industry and gave everyone, whether they needed it or not, access to the split-second accuracy once available only to scientists and technicians. This radical change in timekeeping technology was in the vanguard of a dramatic shift from a mechanical to an electronic world and raises important issues about technological change for scholars interested in late twentieth-century history. Examining the work of three teams of engineers, this paper offers a comparative approach to understanding how local differences in culture, economy, business structure and access to technological knowledge shaped the design of finished products and their acceptance by users.

In selecting among the many statements that were made in the ‘War of Words’, it is important to choose only those that contained practical proposals for administrative reform and redirection of Government policy. Only then can we assess the extent to which they were in tune with or diverged from the plans being developed within the Board of Education. These were the ones that, because of their focused nature, draftspersons in the Board of Education might conceivably have felt constrained to take into account, and either to incorporate in, or exclude from, their own designs. In this way it is possible to be precise about what scientists wanted in 1914–17, and to estimate their degree of realism and the likely scope of their influence.

The Fellows of the Royal Society and the Chemical and Engineering societies must, Sir William Ramsay (FRS, chemist) urged in October 1914, be co-ordinated. They need, he said, to ‘work together at what for us is the supreme problem of all – how to conquer the Germans?’. The British Science Guild was to be included and the Royal Society was to ‘set the example’. Committees should be created; experts from other societies were to be added.

In March 1915 Ramsay prepared a ‘Draft Scheme for a Chemical Council of State’. It was to comprise twenty-four members, one-third technical chemists, one-third scientific investigators and one-third analytical and consulting chemists. It was to collect information on all aspects of the industry; to bring universities into contact with manufacturers; and to advise Government. Members were to be paid a small retainer. Agents were to be employed to visit factories and colleges. Eight members were to retire each year. The proposed Council was ‘to resemble to some extent a Royal Commission’. It would be appointed for ten years in the first instance. It would report annually to the Crown, but would not be attached to any Government department, although it would be associated with several. Non-political, it would be appointed by and directly responsible to the Crown. The president of the Royal Society would initially nominate two technical chemists and two scientific chemists. They, chaired by him, would choose twenty others.

Dominated by its medieval moated castle, the small Dutch market town of ’s-Heerenberg stands a few miles from Arnhem close to the German border. Casper Hakfoort was born into this rural community on 6 January 1955 and he returned to it to be buried shortly after his death on 4 March 1999. In the intervening forty-five years Casper had travelled far from his roots in this small agricultural town and played a significant – but tragically curtailed – role in the international history of science community.

As a bright pupil at school in ’s-Heerenberg he was attracted to the study of physics. Deciding to pursue further studies in this area he registered at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in 1973, transferring to the University of Utrecht two years later and obtaining his first degree in 1980. However, physics did not fully satisfy his intellectual strivings and he sought answers to fundamental questions that are not engaged in most physics courses. This dissatisfaction prompted him to forsake the study of physics and instead to register for a Ph.D. in the history of science under the supervision of Professor H. A. M. Snelders at the University of Utrecht, where he studied from 1980 to 1985. In the following year he successfully defended his dissertation, entitled ‘Optica in de eeuw van Euler’, later published in Amsterdam, in 1986.