The growth of modern science has been accompanied by the growth of professionalization. We can unquestionably speak of professional science since the nineteenth century, although historians dispute about where, when and how much. It is much more problematic and anachronistic to do so of the late seventeenth century, despite the familiar view that the period saw the origin of modern experimental science. This paper explores the broad implications of that problem.

At the end of the sixteenth century astronomers and others felt compelled to choose among different cosmologies. For Tycho Brahe, who played a central role in these debates, the intersection of the spheres of Mars and the Sun was an outstanding problem that had to be resolved before he made his choice. His ultimate solution was to eliminate celestial spheres in favour of fluid heavens, a crucial step in the abandonment of the Ptolemaic system and the demise of Aristotelian celestial physics. These debates involved issues that had not previously been part of astronomy, and had the effect of undermining the traditional hierarchy of the sciences. While this complicated story involves many scientific personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the present paper we will concentrate on one figure who has been assigned an unnecessarily minor role in most histories of science: Christoph Rothmann. In the present paper we show that ‘the dissolution of the celestial spheres’ depends on arguments about the substance of the heavens, following a mistaken argument of Gemma Frisius, elaborated by Joannes Pena and appropriated by Rothmann. We next consider the status and origin of the doctrine, as presented by Brahe, that the heavenly spheres are solid, and the impact on Brahe of Rothmann's treatise on the comet of 1585. Rothmann provided several key ideas that enabled Brahe to develop his system, and we suggest in passing that Rothmann may also have precipitated Brahe's re-evaluation of his attempt to detect the parallax of Mars during the opposition of 1582–83. We offer a new account of this central piece of evidence for the Tychonic system.

During high summer 1721, while rioters and bankrupts gathered outside Parliament, Robert Walpole's new ministry forced through a bill to clear up the wreckage left by the stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the visionary projects swept away when it burst. In early August the President of the Royal Society Isaac Newton, a major investor in South Sea stock, and the Society's projectors, learned of a new commercial scheme promising apparently automatic profits, a project for a perpetual motion. Their informants were a young Viennese courtier Joseph Emmanuel Fischer von Erlach, a contact of Desaguliers recently engaged in industrial espionage in northern England, and the Leiden physics professor Willem 'sGravesande, who had visited London five years earlier. They reported that they had been summoned to a remarkable series of demonstrations in the castle of Weissenstein, the seat of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. In a carefully guarded room of the castle there was set up a hollow wooden wheel covered in oilcloth, about 12 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick on an axle 6 feet in length. Its designer, a Saxon engineer and clockmaker Johann Bessler, who travelled Germany under the name Orffyreus, had been in Kassel for four years, published schemes for perpetual motion and been appointed commercial councillor. The Landgrave, well-known as a patron of advanced engineering schemes, commissioned him to build a new machine and put it on show before expert witnesses (Figure 1).

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.

With the coming of the French Revolution in 1789 and its attack on monarchy, the landed aristocracy, the religious establishment and religion itself, and especially with the coming of the sans culottes and the First French Republic and its ‘Terror’ in 1793–94, fear of revolution swept the British establishment. Sensing revolution everywhere, successive Tory governments, rooted in the alliance of the Church of England, the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, practised a consistent and harsh policy of repression. Neither the fear nor the repression eased with the arrival of, or indeed, with the departure of, Napoleon who, as Emperor from 1804 to 1815, seemed determined to conquer Britain by means of revolutionary propaganda, economic blockade and/or military invasion.

When customers like Samuel Pepys visited the shop of Thomas Tuttell, instrument maker to the king, they could purchase a pack of mathematical playing-cards. The seven of spades, reproduced as Figure 1, depicted the diverse connotations of magnets, or loadstones. These cards cost a shilling, and were too expensive for many of the surveyors, navigators and other practitioners shown using Tuttell's instruments. They provide an early example of the products promising both diversion and improvement which were increasingly marketed to polite audiences. Tuttell's description of loadstone as ‘a treasure of hidden vertues’ encapsulated many contemporary perceptions of these naturally occurring magnets which were to endure throughout the century. This phrase, with its hints of concealed financial and epistemological benefits, resonates with major eighteenth-century analytical themes, such as commercialization, the opposition between vice and virtue, and the fascination with the occult in the face of Enlightenment rationality. This card is emblematic of the multiple interpretations and utilizations of magnetic phenomena during the eighteenth century. It thus provides a useful starting-point for exploring some of the disputes which arose as enterprising individuals concerned with natural philosophy promoted themselves, their activities and their products.

The history of the Cavendish Laboratory is a fascinating subject to study, not just because this famous centre of experimental physics produced a large number of Nobel Laureates but also because it gives us an insight into the unique milieu of the Cambridge physics community. The evolution of the Cavendish Laboratory, however, was not as smooth as might be expected, and the prestige and reputation of its first directors – James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh, Joseph John Thomson and Ernest Rutherford – did not automatically guarantee a rosy future. Like other British physics laboratories in the late nineteenth century, the Cavendish Laboratory was a new species to meet the pressure and demand from society. Since it propagated new values and modes of doing science, a struggle with old traditions could not be avoided, and the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory illustrates how the ‘old’ and ‘new’ values fought and negotiated each other in late Victorian Cambridge.

In his Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, first published in 1911, Charles Paget Lapage, physician to the Manchester Children's Hospital, wrote that one ‘only has to watch a group of feebleminded children to see that most of them have some peculiarity’. These words appear towards the end of an extensive discussion of the physical characteristics that could be found in feeble-minded children and are accompanied by a plate comprising four photographs of ‘Feebleminded Children showing Defective Expression’ (Figure 1).

In the overwhelmingly public world of the twentieth century, science often seems simultaneously remote and ubiquitous. There are many complex reasons for this, of course, not the least being the capacity of technology for material transformation and the apparent inability of scientific discourse to communicate its practice to the unanointed. In some ways, our current predicament appears similar to that of the late eighteenth century when so many promises had already been made of what natural philosophy might accomplish, and when many clamoured for access to the power of natural philosophical practice. At that point, on the verge of the stunning dislocations of the industrial revolution, many of the literate and mechanical public took considerable steps to bridge the gap otherwise policed by social distinction.

By 1918, four years of total war had produced a complete mobilization of scientists, scholars and their institutions throughout Europe, the British Empire, and the United States. Public men spoke freely of the implications of a ‘technological war’ run by engineers and chemists. And in the years following the Armistice, historians were eager to record the achievements of the professions, and the effects of the war on their self-image. Memories of the First World War, as Paul Fussell reminds us, remain and shape the texture of our daily life. The parapet, wire and mud have become permanent features of human existence. In a similar way, the war of 1914–18 had enduring consequences for science and scientists, rarely appreciated until the end of the Second World War. Scholars and savants deserted their classrooms for the trenches, industries and war offices, while professional bodies turned themselves into useful extensions of military departments. By October 1914, the infamous Professors' Manifesto, with its Appeal to the Cultured Peoples of the World had identified German science with German war aims, and the natural sciences were fully at war. Scientific knowledge applied to the war was – at one and the same time – a fulfilment of the Enlightenment project of reason, and a violation of the Enlightenment ethos of humanism and internationalism.

How may scientific research contribute effectively to industrial development? This question has been debated for many years. However, a recent development in this discussion has come from a number of eminent scientists and others who have become concerned with what has become known as the public understanding of science. According to them, a greater understanding of science by members of the public would result in a higher value being placed on scientific research, which, eventually, would result in both increased social status for scientists and growing funding from government and industry for their work. Thus, in part, concern about the public understanding of science is an indirect way of influencing the outcome of discussions about the science budget.

Early in this century, only a few biologists accepted that natural selection was the chief cause of evolution, until the independent calculations of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher demonstrated that ideal populations subject to Mendel's laws could behave as Darwin had said they would. Evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, a student of Haldane's, has raised the question of why Haldane, who was no naturalist, took up the subject of evolution, and he suggests that the answer may have to do with Haldane's lively interest in religion. In fact Maynard Smith's answer has much more evidence in its favour than he knew.

A quotation from J. T. Desaguliers, one of the foremost scientific lecturers in England until his death in 1744, contrasts the use of demonstrations to show physical principles and those designed to imitate real situations:

I have indeed a Machine with brass wheels whose steel axes have very small pivots nicely made that any of the wheels set in motion will turn for the space of more than half an hour… but the use of my machine being chiefly to show how near these kinds of experiments may be brought to agree with a mathematical theory; we cannot expect that any carriage to bear weight can have so little friction. Therefore I choose to relate Monsieur De Camus's Experiments made on Models of Carriages of an inch to a Foot every way representing Carts and Waggons… because it shows us directly what is the real Friction in the carriages at present in use.