Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T03:12:13.004Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Popular Science Magazines in Interwar Britain: Authors and Readerships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2013

Peter J. Bowler*
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Belfast E-mail: [email protected]

Argument

This article is based on a detailed survey of three British popular science magazines published during the interwar years. It focuses on the authors who wrote for the magazines, using the information to analyze the ways in which scientists and popular writers contributed to the dissemination of information about science and technology. It shows how the different readerships toward which the magazines were directed (serious or more popular) determined the proportion of trained scientists who provided material for publication. The most serious magazine, Discovery, featured almost exclusively material written by professional scientists, while the most popular, Armchair Science, favored writers who were not professional scientists, but who probably had some technical knowledge. Another magazine, Conquest, tried to provide a balance between authoritative and popular articles; however, it survived for only a few years.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anon. 1926. “Write for Modern Science.” Modern Science 7:399.Google Scholar
Anon. 1929. “‘Ourselves’: What We Are and What We Hope to Be.” Armchair Science 1:11.Google Scholar
Bloom, Ursula. 1959. He Lit the Lamp: A Biography of Professor A. M. Low. London: Burke.Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter. 2009. Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broks, Peter. 1996. Media Science before the Great War. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broks, Peter. 2006. Understanding Popular Science. Maidenhead UK: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Burnham, John C. 1987. How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Medicine in the United States. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Cooter, Roger, and Pumphrey, Stephen. 1994. “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and on Science in Popular Culture.” History of Science 32:232–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilgartner, Stephen. 1990. “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science 20:519–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaFollette, Marcel. 1990. Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Morus, Iwan R. 1998. Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepstone, Harold J. 1931. Wild Beasts To-Day: Being an Account of the World's Leading Zoological Gardens, the Catching, Transportation and Doctoring of Wild Animals, the Rearing of them on Farms, and the Work of Conserving the Rarer Species in Parks and Reservations. London: Sampson, Low, Marston.Google Scholar
Snow, Charles Percy. 1940. “The End of Discovery.” Discovery, New Series 3:117118.Google Scholar
Wells, Herbert G., Huxley, Julian, and Wells, George P.. 1929–30. The Science of Life. 31 parts. London: Amalgamated Press. [Reprint 1931. London: Newnes.]Google Scholar
Whitley, Richard. 1985. “Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Acquirers: Popularization and a Relation between Scientific Fields and Their Publics.” In Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularization, edited by Shin, Terry and Whitley, Richard, 328. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar