Published in History of science
In the early twentieth century, scientific innovations permanently changed international warfare. As chemicals traveled out of laboratories into factories and military locations, war became waged at home as well as overseas. Large numbers of women were employed in munitions factories during the First World War, but their public memories have been o...
Published in History of science
Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Li...
Published in History of science
Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on "popular errors," a genre where lea...
Published in History of science
In my paper I follow the emergence of the science of electricity in Poland. I believe that the science of electricity established in 1777 served as a new social program. Through the introduced translations, this science was intended to create a new social imaginary and social relations. I describe two interrelated processes: the social construction...
Published in History of science
What did science make possible for colonial rule? How was science in turn marked by the knowledge and practices of those under colonial rule? Here I approach these questions via the social history of Madras Observatory. Constructed in 1791 by the East India Company, the observatory was to provide local time to mariners and served as a clearinghouse...
Published in History of science
The history of computing usually focuses on achievements in Western universities and research centers and is mostly about what happened in the United States and Great Britain. However, in Eastern Europe, particularly in war-torn Poland, where there was very little state funding, many highly original hardware and software projects were initiated. Th...
Published in History of science
Spatial and temporal scales are essential components of geological sciences; both are almost always imbricated in complex ways, challenging geoscientific knowledge among nonspecialists and students. The present paper focuses on the efforts made by the French naturalist Simon-Suzanne Nérée Boubée (1806-62) regarding popular education on geology. Tho...
Published in History of science
The terms that Galileo's contemporaries used for lenses (cristallo/i, lente/i, and vetro/i) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo's correspo...
Published in History of science
This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard "ventilators" proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas ab...
Published in History of science
The Revista Ştiinţifică "Vasile Adamachi" (1910-1948) had aimed since its first edition to disseminate the newest achievements of science to the interested general public with the explicit intention of building national consciousness and solidarity that would forward Romania's natural powers through science. Even though the editors of the journal h...
