The Children's Gallery in the Science Museum in London opened in December 1931. Conceived partly as a response to the overwhelming number of children visiting the Museum and partly as a way in which to advance its educational uses, the Gallery proved to be an immediate success in terms of attendances. In the Gallery, children and adults found historical dioramas and models, all of which aimed at presenting visitors with the social, material and moral impacts of science and technology on society throughout history. Also, there were numerous working models with plenty of buttons to press, handles to turn and ropes to pull. Controversial visitor studies carried out in the 1950s revealed that the historical didacticism was more or less lost on the children who came to the Gallery. Consequently, the New Children's Gallery that opened in 1969 had to some extent abandoned the historical perspective in favour of combining instruction with pleasure in order to make the children feel that ‘science is a wonderful thing’.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the elite world of institutional British science attempted to take control of the BBC's management of science broadcasting. Delegations of scientists met BBC managers to propose an increased role for scientists in planning science broadcasts to a degree that threatened to compromise the BBC's authority and autonomy. The culmination was a set of proposals to the Pilkington Committee in 1960, principally from the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, under which a scientist-manager was to be appointed head of a unified science division in the BBC. BBC managers resisted these proposals. The outcome, in 1964, was a compromise giving the scientists little of what they wanted, and proving practically and strategically useful for the BBC. The article frames the story as a contest of jurisdiction between elite science and the BBC, and draws on scholarship relating to the social nature of authority and professions, and to the popularization of science. It shows the fundamentally different beliefs held by the scientists and the BBC about the purpose of science broadcasts and about the nature of the audience. The historical narrative is based on unpublished archive documents, and it contributes to the small but growing body of work on the historical background to the presentation of science in the broadcast media.

By the late nineteenth century the submarine telegraph cable industry, which had blossomed in the 1850s, had reached what historians regard as technological maturity. For a host of commercial, cultural and technical reasons, the industry seems to have become conservative in its attitude towards technological development, which is reflected in the small scale of its staff and facilities for research and development. This paper argues that the attitude of the cable industry towards research and development was less conservative and altogether more complex than historians have suggested. Focusing on the crucial case of the Eastern Telegraph Company, the largest single operator of submarine cables, it shows how the company encouraged inventive activity among outside and in-house electricians and, in 1903, established a small research laboratory where staff and outside scientific advisers pursued new methods of cable signalling and cable designs. The scale of research and development at the Eastern Telegraph Company, however, was small by comparison with that of its nearest competitor, Western Union, and dwarfed by that of large electrical manufacturers. This paper explores the reasons for this comparatively weak provision but also suggests that this was not inappropriate for a service-sector firm.

This paper examines the successful campaign in Britain to develop canine distemper vaccine between 1922 and 1933. The campaign mobilized disparate groups around the common cause of using modern science to save the nation's dogs from a deadly disease. Spearheaded by landed patricians associated with the country journal The Field, and funded by dog owners and associations, it relied on collaborations with veterinary professionals, government scientists, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the commercial pharmaceutical house the Burroughs Wellcome Company (BWC). The social organization of the campaign reveals a number of important, yet previously unexplored, features of interwar science and medicine in Britain. It depended on a patronage system that drew upon a large base of influential benefactors and public subscriptions. Coordinated by the Field Distemper Fund, this system was characterized by close relationships between landed elites and their social networks with senior science administrators and researchers. Relations between experts and non-experts were crucial, with high levels of public engagement in all aspects of research and vaccine development. At the same time, experimental and commercial research supported under the campaign saw dynamic interactions between animal and human medicine, which shaped the organization of the MRC's research programme and demonstrated the value of close collaboration between veterinary and medical science, with the dog as a shared object and resource. Finally, the campaign made possible the translation of ‘laboratory’ findings into field conditions and commercial products. Rather than a unidirectional process, translation involved negotiations over the very boundaries of the ‘laboratory’ and the ‘field’, and what constituted a viable vaccine. This paper suggests that historians reconsider standard historical accounts of the nature of patronage, the role of animals, and the interests of landed elites in interwar British science and medicine.

William Bateson vigorously objected to the assumptions within the chromosome theory of heredity proposed by T. H. Morgan because he perceived inadequate experimental data that could substantiate the theory. Those objections were largely resolved by 1921, and Bateson reluctantly accepted the basic assumption that chromosomes carried the genetic factors from one generation to the next. Bateson's own research at that time on developmental genetics seemed out of touch with the general tone of the genetics field, and the chromosome theory did not provide illuminating mechanisms that elucidated phenomena such as plant variegations or chimeras. Bateson imagined a general theory of heredity and development based on vortices and waves, concepts he borrowed from contemporary physics. For decades he sought to devise an intellectually and aesthetically satisfying theory to eventually explain evolution in genetic terms, but his aspirations remained unfulfilled when he died in 1926.

In the 1940s and 1950s, British and American journals published a flood of papers by doctors, pathologists, geneticists and anthropologists debating the virtues of two competing nomenclatures used to denote the Rhesus blood groups. Accounts of this prolonged and often bitter episode have tended to focus on the main protagonists' personalities and theoretical commitments. Here I take a different approach and use the literature generated by the dispute to recover the practical and epistemic functions of nomenclatures in genetics. Drawing on recent work that views inscriptions as part of the material culture of science, I use the Rhesus controversy to think about the ways in which geneticists visualized and negotiated their objects of research, and how they communicated and collaborated with workers in other settings. Extending recent studies of relations between different media, I consider the material forms of nomenclatures, as they were jotted in notebooks, printed in journals, scribbled on blackboards and spoken out loud. The competing Rhesus nomenclatures had different virtues as they were expressed in different media and made to embody commitments to laboratory practices. In exploring the varied practical and epistemic qualities of nomenclatures I also suggest a new understanding of the Rhesus controversy itself.

This paper describes the activities of amateur plant breeders and their application of various methods and technologies derived from genetics research over the course of the twentieth century. These ranged from selection and hybridization to more interventionist approaches such as radiation treatment to induce genetic mutations and chemical manipulation of chromosomes. I argue that these activities share characteristics with twenty-first-century do-it-yourself (DIY) biology (a recent upswing in amateur experimental biology) as well as other amateur science and technology of the twentieth century. The characterization of amateur plant breeding as amateur experimental biology offers a corrective to a dominant narrative within the history of biology, in which the turn to experimental research in the early twentieth century is thought to have served as an obvious dividing line between amateur and professional activities. Considered alongside other better-known amateur efforts, it also suggests that we might gain something by taking a more unified approach to the study of amateur science and technology.