History of Science Society

2007 Annual Meeting

Abstracts G-L

Jean-Francois Gauvin ( Harvard University)

Music, Machines, and Theology: Mersenne's Organ as a Christian Symbol of Natural Philosophy

This talk centers around Marin Mersenne and one of the most complex machines ever built in early modern Europe, the organ. In Catholic countries the organ epitomized liturgical music. In general, no other musical instruments was allowed during mass--since, theologians believed, it distracted the mind of churchgoers away from devotional matters and towards sin. Only organ music possessed an aura of piety and sanctity within the confine of the church. During the Wars of Religion, organs were destroyed in great numbers by the reformists and Huguenots alike as the ultimate symbol of past superstition. And to someone like Athanasius Kircher, a divine organ symbolized God's creation, each of the six days of creation corresponding to an organ register. The organ was thus more than a musical instrument: it symbolized Christianity in all its excellence and imperfections. Marin Mersenne was obviously aware of the organ's highly religious connotations. It is why, I will argue in this presentation, Mersenne used it as the perfect rhetorical and material representation of natural philosophy. In his detailed description of the organ--found in the "Harmonie universelle" books of instruments--Mersenne tackled the role and importance of experiments (for the design of organ pipes), musical theory (for the design of a perfect clavier) and workshop knowledge (for understanding how materials influenced the production of sounds). In Mersenne's hands, the organ became more than a Church's devotional symbol: it became as well the best representation of natural philosophical knowledge. The organ, I claim, was as much an instrument, or "organum," of Christianity as it was of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy and theology, thanks to Mersenne's effort, naturally and figuratively coalesced within the complex mechanical structure of the organ.

 

Delia Gavrus (University of Toronto)

“Springing Minerva-like from the Head of Cushing:” Neurosurgery and the Rhetoric of Therapeutic Superiority

In a 1931 letter to the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, the British neurologist Sir Francis Walshe criticized the lack of neurological education of neurosurgeons, who expect “with no preliminary training to spring Minerva-like from the head of [American neurosurgeon Harvey] Cushing, full-armed and with nothing to learn, after a single year’s gestation.” Walshe’s distrust of the emerging profession of neurosurgery only fueled the enthusiasm and ambition of neurosurgeons such as Penfield, who replied with equal confidence: “The farther neurology divorces itself from therapy, the more certain will be the disappearance of this specialty.” The neurosurgeons sought to define their professional identity, in part, by attacking neurology’s scope and lack of therapeutic success. Therapeutics thus emerged as a significant feature in the disciplinary debate between neurologists and neurosurgeons during a period when these disciplines were still negotiating their boundaries. I draw on both archival and published material to examine this rhetoric of therapeutic superiority, and I show that it constituted an important tool in the process of discipline building and boundary policing. Neurosurgery emerged as an independent medical specialty in the 1920s, and neurosurgeons gradually sought to articulate their identity with respect to the illnesses that fell under their purview, the techniques they were employing, and the therapies they sanctioned (epilepsy, for instance, became increasingly surgicalized). This process inevitably brought neurosurgeons into conflict with other branches of medicine, and I show how these conflicts informed the professionalization of neurosurgery in the interwar period.

 

Oliver Gaycken (Temple University)

A Modern Cabinet of Curiosities: George Kleine and the Educational Film

The United States lagged behind other national cinemas in the creation of films for an educational market. As early as 1910, however, George Kleine issued a catalogue of “educational motion picture films” consisting of titles that he had collected from a number of European companies, notably Pathé, Gaumont, and Urban. This paper will argue that Kleine’s role as a collector and distributor of educational films places him in an unusual position. On the one hand, his project was aligned with modern pedagogical research that argued for education via visual means as the most efficient form of instruction. Simultaneously, however, his film collection recalls the miscellaneous collections of natural artifacts that were called cabinets of curiosities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand the collection was described generally as part of a modern plan for the rational deployment of the cinema. But on the other hand the description and content of individual films frequently displayed powerful contiguities with the wonders and marvels associated with an earlier era, where rationality and enchantment had not yet become antithetical. The Kleine educational film catalogue embodies a number of the contradictions often associated with visual education, such as the ineradicable presence of the image’s sensual and sometimes sensational dimension.

 

C. Stewart Gillmor (Wesleyan University)

 “Eclosion, Synthesis, Conjugacy and Symmetry: Lessons from the History of Polar Research”

This paper comments on similarities and differences in the ways the Polar Regions have been considered as a function of scientific field; on the public taste; on particular fields and their ripeness for exploitation; and on the advantages of international cooperation and competition in polar research. Some remarks are reflections on the author's fifty years of interest and participation in northern and southern polar research.

 

Megan Glick (Yale University)

White Chimpanzees: Primatology as Eugenic Practice in the Work of Robert Mearns Yerkes

This paper examines the explosion of interest in nonhuman primates during the early decades of the twentieth century, within both the scientific community and the popular cultural sphere, focusing on the transnational photographic and written records of early primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes. In doing so, this paper examines the rise of primatology during the years prior to its formal institutionalization, considering it in relation to the historical trajectory of eugenic thought. Yerkes first began his work with nonhuman primates in the 1920s – a “pet project” which would come to require layer upon layer of colonial organization – from the observation of (primate) colonial practice in Havana, Cuba, to the establishment of an American scientific presence in the French African colonies, to the making of a “subtropical breeding facility” in the rural outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida, and finally, to the creation of a research metropole in New Haven, Connecticut. Ultimately, it was a venture that rode the coattails of Yerkes’ earlier work, as it was not until after he had made a name for himself in the field of eugenic intelligence testing that he was able to receive the funding necessary to pursue his long-held interest in primates. By literally fashioning a new discipline out of the monetary and celebratory remains of an old, Yerkes began to build an empire on the back of eugenic science that would reinscribe the terms of race upon on the bodies of a population whom he called “almost human.”

 

Daniel Goldstein (University of California, Davis)

Do Animals Have Souls and Other Darwinian Dilemmas: Midwesterners React to the Origin of Species

The historical literature documents a vigorous debate in the American reception of the Origin of Species and especially its relationship with revealed religion. But the responses to Darwin expressed in the records of Midwestern scientific societies were of a significantly different tone than is reflected in the literature. There were two principal types of Midwestern responses, neither of which lent itself to debate or controversy. Many Midwestern naturalists apparently felt that it made little difference to the work they were doing whether Darwin's theories were true or not. Others accepted them, taking for granted that evolution and revealed religion reflected the same truth. Thus the focus in the Middle Western societies was on how Darwinian evolution complemented Christian doctrine, not whether or not there might be a conflict. From their perspective, first Newton, and then, more recently Charles Lyell had developed scientific theories that at appeared to conflict with Christianity until further elaboration and interpretation had shown that there they were not at odds. Midwesterners were confident that the same was true of Darwin. As a result, in both scientific and popular scientific realms, Midwesterners sought to answer different types of questions than were frequently addressed elsewhere. For example: a) assuming humans evolved, did this mean that human souls evolved as well, and if so, did animals have souls? and b) would angels be the next branch in the evolutionary tree? This paper will explore these ideas and the varied contexts in which they were presented.

 

Catherine Goldstein (CNRS- Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu)

Unity and Reality According to A. N. Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead, best known as the logicist coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica or as the philosopher of Process and Reality was also (and perhaps mainly) an applied mathematician, who, in the early nineteen-twenties, created a unified theory, integrating electromagnetism and gravitation. His theory, giving identical predictions to Einstein's for the three classical tests, was for many years considered one of the best alternatives to general relativity. But for Whitehead, unlike Einstein and others, fundamental physical concepts were neither variables in mathematical equations nor the results of measurement procedures. Two different geometries played central roles, one corresponding to space-time and the other to a contingent dynamics. In his own terms, Whitehead's mathematics should paradoxically provide "the greater freedom to experimental inquiry" --- the mathematician having to take great pains to avoid any possible ontologization of the mathematical tools he uses (e.g., tensors), as "cramping the imagination" --- while sharply delineating a demarcation line between geometry and physics. How such a proposal for unification can avoid both the geometrization of the world picture and a banal phenomenological outlook will be the focus of the talk.

 

Michael Gordin (Princeton University)

Second Time Tragedy: Germans as Russian Chemists from Alexander's Petersburg to Stalin's Gulag

The migration of German technical experts to Russia was quite an established pattern by the advent of Tsar Alexander II's Great Reforms in 1861, which initiated a further modernization of Imperial Russian institutions, including technical education. Peter the Great had famously stocked his newly founded St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences with specialists from Central Europe, and German-speaking engineers had even earlier been a staple of the Muscovite economic system. With the advent of native-born, domestically-educated, and Russian-speaking scientists and technicians in the second half of the nineteenth century (and the rise of a unified German nation-state), however, the cultural position of these German scholars in Russian space moved from subterranean animosity to open hostility. A combination of resentment of and competition with a Russian-constituted conception of "German science" emerged in the late nineteenth century that proved to be surprisingly durable across the chasms of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the consolidation of Stalinism, and World War II. This paper explores two cases of German émigré scientists in Russia (and later the Soviet Union) to explore the degrees of continuity and discontinuity in this Russian construction of the position and importance of Germans as scientists. The first case comes from the diminishing embattled ranks of German nationals within the Russian Chemical Society in the 1870s, and the second from the few German scientists induced to work on atomic weaponry for the Soviets in the late 1940s in Russian culture.

 

Robin Gordon (Mount St. Mary's College)

Searching for the Soror Mystica: Women Alchemists As Scientists, Theologians, and Healers

The term soror mystica refers to the female helper of the alchemist; however, besides the woman pictured in the Mutus Liber and the references to the work of Maria Prophitissa by Jung and a few science historians, I had found little evidence of female alchemists. Having some familiarity with women in science, I was sure that there must have been more women practicing alchemy than the few I was stumbling upon in the traditional alchemical literature. Thus, I began noting the names of women who associated with known alchemists or were rumored to have studied alchemy, yet were not given much recognition for their work. Names emerged in my research such as Lady Katherine Ranelagh (sister of Robert Boyle), Dorothy Moore (close associate of Katherine’s), and Susanne Katharina von Klettendon (mentored Goethe). Some of these women sought to produce the Philosopher's Stone in their laboratories; however, many others had goals tied to their theology or to producing healing medicines. Their alchemy has been disparaged as something other than "true" alchemy. My presentation focuses on the stories of a few of these women and how their work is also a necessary contribution to the history of Western science.

 

Robert Goulding (University of Notre Dame)

Tearing Hypatia: The Beginnings of Euclidean Criticism

Throughout the sixteenth century, there was vigorous debate among mathematicians and humanists over the Elements of geometry: when it was compiled, by whom and to what end. At one extreme, Jean Borrel (writing in 1559) insisted that the Elements were written by Euclid in essentially the form they were still known; at the other, Petrus Ramus (in his 1569 Scholae mathematicae) argued that the Elements were the end result of a long, historical process of compilation, editing and reordering, in which Euclid himself played only a minor role. Ramus bolstered his radical position through a mistaken (though surprisingly widespread) dating of the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus, whose Commentary on Euclid he believed to preserve a much more primitive version of the Elements than it in fact did. His error proved to be fruitful, however, as it led him to attempt the first modern source-critical analysis of the text of the Elements. Ramus's opponent, the mathematician Henry Savile, compared his dismemberment of the text to the tearing apart of Hypatia, daughter of Theon, mathematician and pagan martyr. Savile himself, on the other hand, sought to preserve whole the "beautiful body" of the Elements on which he famously could find only two blemishes. Ramus's critical attack on the text, and Savile's defense of it, opened up the possibility of an "internalist" history of mathematics, which went beyond the traditional anecdotal and rhetorical histories that preceded it.

 

Christopher Green (York University)

Why Ada?: Selecting Someone to Promote Babbage's Analytical Engine in Great Britain.

Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is well-known today for having published an extensive series of penetrating footnotes to her 1843 translation of a French-language article about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. It was long assumed that she had done so essentially on her own initiative, carried forward by her own particular genius for seeing the implications of Babbage's computing machine. In recent years, however, it has become clear (1) that Lady Lovelace had only learned basic calculus and logic just prior to writing the notes, (2) that she did so with the extensive assistance of Babbage in the more technical passages, and (3) that she was explicitly recruited to write the translation by Babbage's close friend, Charles Wheatstone. With these facts in mind, the nature of the question about the origin of the Lovelace's notes changes to "Why would Wheatstone (and probably Babbage, though he denied it in his autobiography) have selected Lovelace, of all people, to author the publication that was to serve as the primary promotional document for Babbage's Analytical Engine in Great Britain. The answer appears to be that Wheatstone and Babbage were attempting to generate for Lovelace public authority as a scientific writer so that they could then use her noble connections to the royal family to place her as a scientific adviser to Prince Albert cum "lobbyist" on Babbage's behalf. Why did Babbage require royal funding for his project? Because it was beyond Babbage's means to fund himself, but he had used up his welcome with the government by having never completed his earlier Difference Engine, despite having received 17,000 pounds in Parliamentary funds. Thus, the royal family appeared to be a possible option, and Lovelace represented his best chance at currying their favor.

 

Susan Groppi (University of California, Berkeley)

Institution and Location: The Science of Psychology at State Universities in the American West, 1880-1910.

The period between 1880 and 1910 was a transitional period in the history of American psychology, as the science moved between its initial development and professionalization and its later maturity and consolidation, and in many ways it bears little relation to the subsequent history of the field. The rapidity of the changes in this period, both the spread of applied psychology outside of the university and the spread of behaviorism within, is something of a curiosity (bordering on a discontinuity) in the history of the discipline. This paper is an attempt to address the role played by American institutions of higher education, particularly the state colleges of the Midwest and West, in influencing these changes. The American educational landscape in this period was enormously rich and diverse, but the existing explorations of psychology's relationship to the university have largely focused on narrow band of high-profile (and high-prestige) research universities. Psychology programs at the publicly-funded state colleges in the Midwest and West, in contrast to their elite counterparts, generally incorporated a very diverse range of topics, including early forays into not only therapeutic and business psychology, but also the animal behavior studies that formed the early foundations for behaviorism. It encompassed the study of individuals as well as groups, adults as well as children, and even the brains and behaviors of animal species. Most important of all, though, these instructional programs depict a field that incorporated a plurality and methodological approaches, theoretical frameworks, and relationships to other disciplines. Viewing psychology from this perspective allows us to see this early period in its history as the fertile ground from which the mature forms of the science developed.

 

Peter Guth (US Naval Academy)

Earth Science Research and the US Military in the Mid 19th Century

The mid 19th century saw significant development with the rise of a professional scientific establishment, and changing roles of civilian scientists relative to the military. Despite cultural differences, the Army and Navy went through similar changes from the 1830’s to 1880’s. On land during this period, the Corps of Topographical Engineers pioneered scientific exploration of the American West. Following disbanding of the Topographical Engineers during the Civil War, the Corps of Engineers funded two exploring expeditions during the late 1860’s and 1870’s. The Wheeler Survey renewed the model for pre-Civil War surveys, but the nascent scientific establishment much preferred the civilian-only model of the Army’s King Survey, adopted in the 1879 establishment of the US Geological Survey. At sea during this period, the Navy made several attempts at scientific research. The 1838-1842 Wilkes expedition never fully delivered on promised research objectives, in part due to friction between Naval leaders and civilian scientists. Maury did pioneering work that designated him “Father of Oceanography,” largely on his own, and when he joined the Confederate Navy, his work was not continued. Form 1879 to 1882, as the Army model for western exploration was being rejected, the Navy sent the <i>Jeannette</i> toward the North Pole. The expedition failed when ice crushed the ship and only a few survivors got to Russia, but the model for exploration might never have succeeded in a changing world. American earth science during this period mirrored developments elsewhere in the world, and military leadership and logistical support were no longer required.

 

Sherine Hamdy (Brown University)

Islam and Bioethics Debates in Egypt: Specificities of Practice in Moral Discourse

Why did organ transplantation set off a heated debate about religious permissibility in Egypt, while blood transfusion did not? Why do dialysis patients with kidney failure in Egypt avow that they would never seek a transplant, but hope instead for the day in which kidneys can be “cloned” from stem cells? Why did Egyptian women historically shun biomedical obstetric services, and yet eagerly seek biomedical infertility treatment? In this paper, I argue that rather than analyzing a relationship between “Islamic ethics” and “medical science,” we should remain attentive to the particularity of scientific practices and Muslim ethics. I reframe Islam and medicine as discursive traditions, with contested parameters of knowledge that are contingent on social, historical, and material conditions. Assessments of benefit and risk of techno-scientific treatment are necessarily contextual and contested, as are religious positions about permissibility. This analysis resists an opposition between religion and science by looking at both as social practices.

 

Elizabeth Hanson (Yale University)

Into the Woods: From Forestry to Forests at the American Museum of Natural History

The Hall of North American Forests at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City opened to the public on May 14, 1958. It took twenty years to plan and produce this hall, which has at its core a dozen dioramas that recreate forest ecosystems. The hall embodies a historical conflict between total preservation of wilderness and so-called rational use of forests and other natural resources. In the making of this exhibit hall, this conflict is filtered through discussions of the museum’s post-war mission, in particular about the appropriate role of the museum in conservation, and the vision of the director of the museum at the time, Albert Parr.

 

Helen Hattab (University of Houston)

Scholastic Interpretations of the Mechanical Problems and the Question of Method

In this paper I will examine how Ioannis De Guevara applies the Scholastic Aristotelian theory of demonstration to mechanical problems in his 1627 commentary on Pseudo-Aristotle’s Quaestiones Mechanicae. I will show that this background can help us understand what kinds of demonstrations Descartes was trying to present in the essays he appended to his Discourse on the Method, in particular, the Meteorology.

 

David Hecht (Bowdoin College)

Celebrating Carson: Silent Spring and Changing Notions of Popular Scientists in America

This paper uses the public image of Rachel Carson to explore Americans’ changing notions of what constituted an admirable scientist after World War II. It focuses particularly on placing Carson in the context of the nuclear age. Atomic imagery was prominent in her book, and fears of fallout greatly facilitated the popularity of her campaign against pesticides. Most historians who have noted the resonances between Carson’s environmental activism and nuclear fear have used that parallel to illuminate Carson’s environmentalism and emergence as a scientist-activist. The focus of this paper is different. It argues that Carson was part of an evolving tradition of scientists who received adulation for the way they spoke to the particular ambivalences that Americans harbored toward science after the advent of nuclear weapons. After 1945, Americans tended to revere scientists who modeled ways to come to terms with the inherent tensions of living in the atomic age, an age in which scientific advances were both celebrated and deplored. Rachel Carson’s image cannot be understood outside of the context of how the atomic bomb helped define which scientists Americans found admirable: those who showcased a particular kind of social responsibility. Further, Carson’s career also traces important changes in how and why Americans picked their scientific heroes. Her many supporters revered her, in large part, because she offered a means to dissent from the Cold War consensus without rejecting an appreciation for the scientific vocation that seemed to underlie much of that consensus.

 

Peter Heering (Carl-von-Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg)

The Solar Microscope: Between Education and Entertainment During the Enlightenment

Around 1740, English instrument makers started to sell solar microscopes. These devices were meant to project the images of microscopic specimen on a screen in a darkened chamber, thus enabling people to look at these images. Therefore, these devices can be seen in the context of the popularisation of science in this period. To this image fits also the aspect that solar microscopes became very popular throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet, such a monocausal explanation appears to be oversimplified. In a research project carried out at the Deutsches Museum Munich, I had the opportunity to work with two original eighteenth-century solar microscopes. Projecting microscopic images and demonstrating them to audiences gave me the opportunity to develop a different understanding of these devices. Consequently, it became possible to re-interpret historical sources. As a result, an interpretation resulted that differs from several accounts on popular eighteenth century public demonstrations and their ‘scientific’ relevance. My presentation will concentrate in particular on the images that could be produced with the devices and on their meaning with respect to the status that projections may have had during the eighteenth century. Moreover, I will also discuss the technical development of solar microscopes throughout the 18th century. In doing so, I will demonstrate that the later instruments required less skills due to technical changes.

 

Susanne Heim  (Editionsprojekt "Judenverfolgung 1933-1945," Berlin)

Nazi Agricultural Looting in Wartime Europe

In 1938 German scientists started to experiment with rubber plants on a low level. Growing such plants in Europe had long been regarded as hopeless. However in wartime the supply chain was jeopardized by the need to import natural rubber from the tropical regions in which it was cultivated. After German troops attacked the Soviet Union in summer 1941 rubber research boomed on the basis of scientific resources stolen in Eastern Europe. Various high ranking research institutes as well as parts of the German industry and certain departments of the SS cooperated in order to promote a project which promised to be extremely relevant in the context of autarky policy. The paper will scrutinize how German expansion policy shaped the development of the research programme in a strategically important field, the transfer of knowledge and resources under wartime condition and the relationship between scientists’ professional interests, their contribution to the war effort and the interest of Nazi politicians and agricultural planners in transforming Eastern Europe into a strategic part of the German “living space”.

 

Jochen Hennig (Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany)

The epistemic status of digital image processing in scanning tunnelling microscopy

While the first scanning tunneling microscope, built by the Zurich IBM Laboratory in the early 1980s, was an analog instrument, its subsequent development coincided with the early use of computer graphics in microscopic experiments. This meant that the data recorded using the scanning tunnelling microscope could be digitally processed and displayed in manifold ways. The paper explores the epistemic status of the different steps involved in these investigations. I argue that both the experimenter’s interaction with the microscope and digital processing were constitutive of laboratory practice and shaped microscopic knowledge in important ways. Two case studies will be discussed, dealing with early scanning tunnelling microscopy respectively at the IBM laboratories in Zurich and in Yorktown Heights, NY. Based on the analysis of published and unpublished sources as well as on qualitative interviews with the protagonists, I explore the interaction between programmers, electrical engineers and experimenters, as well as the context in which the processed pictures were presented and communicated. With respect to processes and practices, the transformation from analog to digital microscopy appears as a complex composite of continuities and changes, undermining a common assumption in media theory about the distinction between analogue and digital media.

 

Mary Henninger-Voss (Independent Scholar)

Cannons and Cannonballs

This paper introduces an Italian world of texts, artillery, and the library that formed a site for the interaction of readers both with texts and people. Whether the cognitive categories by which historical actors made sense of their world divided it into a world of ideas (of reading, thinking, and understanding) and a world of gunnery trials, and yet again a world of untouchable comets (of arguing natural philosophy), the people themselves moved effortlessly among these and other activities. Gian Vincenzo Pinnelli’s Paduan library literally stood as a disciplined system of know-how, and one that Galileo among others knew how to operate -- including at its center the operation of texts.

 

Sandra Herbert (University of Maryland Baltimore Counrty)

Charles Darwin’s Reflections in 1850: “All young geologists have a great turn for speculation; I have burned my fingers pretty sharply in that way.”

During the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1831-1836) Charles Darwin read extensively in the geological literature, becoming persuaded of the superiority of the approach to geology presented by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-1833).   Among Lyell’s ideas that Darwin pursued was an emphasis on the rise (“elevation”) and fall (“subsidence”) of the earth’s crust. By the end of the voyage Darwin was sufficiently convinced of the adequacy of vertical motion as the primary chapter of the earth’s surface to write in his “Red Notebook” that the “Geology of whole world will turn out simple." Upon returning to England, Darwin carried forward his ideas, in part by offering a new elevation-based interpretation of the origin of the so-called “parallel roads” of Glen Roy in Scotland.  His interpretation, published in 1839 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was challenged the next year by Louis Agassiz who declared the roads former beaches of glacially-dammed lakes. Darwin responded to the new glacial views in a interesting and instructive manner: by doing new field work in North Wales and becoming, in part, a glacialist himself, by insisting that Glen Roy be restudied to decide the issue of conflicting interpretations (glacial theory won out), and by revising and enlarging his views regarding scientific method.

 

Katherine Hermes (Central Connecticut State University)

 “Some Preparations at Deptford: American Interest in the Voyages of Captain Cook, 1768-1783”

In August, 1768, the Connecticut Courant printed rumors that a ship was being outfitted at Deptford for a foreign voyage. The paper did not yet know the name of the ship or its captain, or even its exact mission, but by September the colonists knew The Endeavour was a bark headed for the South Seas to Tahiti. The paper was most interested in the astronomers and botanists who were to take part in the voyage. Thus began colonial Americans’ interest in the voyages of Captain Cook. Each voyage only increased the interests of the colonists, and indeed, Cook was given free passage during the American Revolution because of the importance of his scientific discoveries. Benjamin Franklin was only one of many colonists to recognize the potential of these voyages. While Franklin’s interest was scientific, for others the voyages offered the promise of financial gain. Depending on what Cook’s missions found, the voyages might discover new markets for colonial goods, a proposition of great importance once the colonies became independent. Always dependent upon the fur trade, Americans looked with interest as Cook searched for a Northwest Passage on his third voyage, and found seals in the southern most parts of South America. Not long after Cook’s death, Americans would be outfitting their own ships on sealing and whaling missions in the South Pacific. American colonists were a literate public as well as an enterprising one. Their interest in Cook’s voyages ranged from pure science to plain commercialism, but often the two were combined in pragmatic ways. In 1783 the publication of John Ledyard’s Journals about Cook’s third voyage were highly advertised in the colonies.

 

Hiro Hirai (Ghent University, Belgium)

Mechanical Spirits and Seminal Principles in Van Helmont and Gassendi

Petrus Severinus (1540/42-1602) relied on "mechanical spirits" and "seminal principles" to explain the generation of natural things. Adapted from the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino's (1433-1499) theory of the invisible "seeds" of nature, Severinus' seeds are the incorporeal vectors that inform future products (minerals, plants and animals) in natural generation. The "mechanical spirits," in turn, are conceived on the basis of Paracelsus' (1493-1541) idea of "archeus," the internal spirit-like worker and alchemist, who executes the task of generation according to the information contained in those seeds. Severinus' doctrine was received and developed among others by the Flemish mineralogist Anselmus Boetius De Boodt (1550-1632), ordinary physician to the emperor Rudolf II at Prague. De Boodt's theory of mineral generation, largely influenced by Severinus' ideas, was so influential that a number of leading natural philosophers of the first half of the seventeenth-century, including Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), accepted it without reservation. The Flemish chemist Jan Bapstita Van Helmont (1577-1644) and the French atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) subsequently incorporated these ideas in their matter theories, the former emphasizing their chemical dimension and the latter their corpuscular aspects. Their theories were the most influential models for the next generation of natural philosophers, which included Robert Boyle (1627-1691). The present paper analyzes how Severinus' notions of "mechanical spirits" and of "seeds" were incorporated into the very core of the matter theories of Van Helmont and Gassendi.

 

Lillian Hoddeson (University of Illinois)

Ideology, Imagery, Laboratory, and Science: The Frontier and the Rise of Megascience

Building on the growing literature on modern science and its institutions, and drawing inspiration from Frederick Jackson Turner and others who have pondered the connections between American history and the frontier, this paper explores how historians can employ the ideology that shapes the style of research at a laboratory in developing their analytic framework. The central case study is the high-energy physics laboratory known as Fermilab, where founding director Robert R. Wilson applied the ideology and imagery of pushing frontiers to shape a laboratory setting, complete with bison, that evokes the American frontier of the 19th century. The frontier imagery also included the notion of a simple and frugal pioneering style consistent with the serious funding constraints of the 1970s and 80s, as well as with Wilson’s aesthetics. Born of the tension between the expansive pull of the frontier and the limiting funding constraints was a style of research we call megascience, in which experiments could no longer truly end. Other cases discussed more briefly include: Bell Telephone Laboratories between 1925 and 1950, Energy Conversion Devices from 1960 to 1990, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1942 to 1970.

 

Sabine Hoehler (University of Hamburg)

"Spaceship Earth": Imagining Environment in the Age of Ecology

In the "environmental age" of the 1960s and 1970s, the figure of "Spaceship Earth" became prominent to express the fears and hopes for the planet. Spaceship Earth presented the earth as a singular place of life in the universe, and it denoted the increasing scientific and technological fascination with "environments" on earth and beyond. This paper explores how the figure of the spaceship reformulated Western cultural narratives of fragility and transience as well as exploration and expansion for environmental discourse. With the end of the "World Frontier" in the 20th century, the spaceship symbolized scientific progress and promised a technology to escape from earthly limits. Within the discourse of limited ecological "capacity", so the argument of the paper, the spaceship took the place of the biblical ark: Spaceship Earth marked the planet as a temporary environment and projected a survival of human life elsewhere, based on rational stewardship and on the optimum combination of human lives and natural parts. To pursue this claim the paper will explore into the sciences of ecology and human ecology, asking how the images of the earth as a metabolism transformed the earth’s biosphere into a "life support system" and how the earth’s "overpopulation" was accounted for in terms of the ship and the "lifeboat". This inquiry of how Spaceship Earth gave meaning to environmental problems and directed the search for solutions aims at assessing how cultural narrative enabled and directed the knowledge production about the environment.

 

Veronika Hofer (Medical University of Vienna)

Constitutional Pathology - Eugenics – Human Genetics: Julius Bauer and Vienna’s Medical Culture 1900-1945

While there already exists a considerable body of scholarly work on the history of constitutional pathology in Germany, which emerged as a reaction against Robert Koch’s bacteriology, our knowledge of the Viennese tradition is still poor. This is rather surprising given the recent research into neighboring fields, such as hygienics, the beginnings of biomedicine and medical chemistry, the tradition of social medicine, and psychology. My paper reconstructs the specificity of the local Viennese tradition of constitutional pathology, initially by comparing it to the German tradition. The Viennese as well as the Germans opposed the „mechanistic medicine“ expressed in bacteriology and advocated a more holistic and multi-causal conception of biomedical explanation. This approach enabled manifold interdisciplinary connections and cross-fertilizations of the Viennese constitutional pathology with other local traditions, among them Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, Julius Tandler’s anatomy, and the socialist eugenics movement of Red Vienna. But my main thesis is that, in the Viennese context, constitutional pathology marked the beginning of human genetics. In order to exemplify this claim I will focus on the clinician and pathologist Julius Bauer and his research group, on their main research agendas as well as on their professional careers, both in Vienna and, after their forced emigration in 1938, as human geneticists in the U.S. Bauer’s group worked mainly in the Policlinic, where they created a robust research program in human genetics which led to a large body of internationally well-received and oft-cited scientific papers.

 

Michelle Hoffman (University of Toronto)

School Science and the Campaign for Technical Education in Ontario, 1890-1911

The campaign for technical education in Ontario (~1890-1911) mirrored similar campaigns in other Canadian provinces and American states as educators moved to respond to the pressures of industrialization. Manufacturers, trade workers and concerned citizens increasingly questioned the high schools’ ability to meet the needs of the changing times. These groups pressured the provincial and federal governments to promote technical schools, where young men and women could acquire manual skills and – in the words of one commissioner – begin to “grasp and turn to account those scientific principles upon which industries depend.” Though advocates of technical education frequently appealed to the scientific underpinnings of technical education, science had only recently secured its place within Ontario’s high schools. Some historians have argued that the campaign for more school science during the 1880s and early 1890s paved the way for technical education. However, the reciprocal influence of the technical education movement on the school science curriculum has not been duly acknowledged. While the campaign for technical education put high school science in the spotlight, it also helped to define the content and purpose of science instruction. This paper shows how academic high schools responded to the rhetoric of the campaign for technical education and increasingly championed the relevance and utility of science over its supposed ability to foster ‘mental discipline.’ Science, when first introduced into Ontario schools, had been both heralded and maligned as a utilitarian subject. I argue, however, that it was the ensuing campaign for technical education that cemented the technology-laden, applied orientation of high school science – an orientation that would remain generally unchallenged until mid-century.

 

Kathryn Hoffmann (University of Hawaii at Manoa)

The Spectacular Cadaver: Lessons from the History of Popular Anatomy Shows and Directions for the Future

Gunther Von Hagens’s Body Worlds Exhibit has already been seen by over 20 million people (his count) around the world. Shows in the past year have occurred in Philadelphia, St. Paul, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, and Vancouver. Billed as “Anatomy for Everyone” Body Worlds was sometimes deeply controversial in Europe but merged far more easily into the American cultural landscape. Much of what Body Worlds does is not new. Its plastinated cadavers descend from highly popular anatomy displays in the late 17th century using partially wax-filled cadavers. Many of the poses in Body Worlds imitate famous anatomical engravings, and the display techniques pull heavily from 19th and early 20th-century anatomy museums that followed the great European fairground routes. Using images from the great anatomical museums (Florence, Vienna, Paris, Turin, and the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.), 19th century popular museums (Spitzner and Chemisé), and the author’s recent interview with Von Hagens, the paper will look at ways in which Body Worlds draws from the history of anatomical display. Part of a book in progess on the history of anatomical displays, it will ask some hard questions about the directions that popular anatomical instruction is taking. It will suggest that universities, science museums, and medical professionals need to rapidly evaluate the renewed taste for anatomical displays, understand the history of such displays, and develop coherent methodologies and institutional frameworks for transmitting medical knowledge to the general public.

 

Marijn Hollestelle (Leiden Institute of Physics)

Birds of a Feather? Paul Ehrenfest and Philip Kohnstamm as Sign of the Times.

Ehrenfest and Kohnstamm – physics professors in Leiden (1912) and Amsterdam (1908) – were best friends. Together they discussed a wide range of topics, like: the role universities played in society, philosophy, causality, free will, law, democracy, and education. They agreed on the weight of the problems, but seldom on the potential solution. Of paramount importance were their discussions about causality, and their striving to obtain a unifying (synthetic) view of science and society.
Kohnstamm’s wish to unify science and society even made him resign his chair in 1928 to become a full time professor in pedagogy. Ehrenfest – a firm believer in the power of science – strove to obtain this ‘unification’ in his work on quantum mechanics and developed a technocratic outlook in the 1930s.
The conflicting opinions of these physicists indicate the problems in which Dutch scientists were involved in general. Especially during the interwar period, discussions flared concerning science and its role in society, industry, and education. Kohnstamm and Ehrenfests fellow scientists – like Lorentz, Van der Waals jr., Ornstein, Fokker, Clay and Jordan – discussed the same topics with comparable vigor. Interesting enough, discussions pivoted on the role of causality in science, e.g. in the theory of relativity, and on educational reform. With Ehrenfest and Kohnstamm as a case study, I will shed new light on the way the multitude of apparent widely different problems and discussions were interdependent and can be seen as symptoms of the way Dutch scientists responded to the problems of the interaction between science and society.

 

Julie Homchick (University of Washington)

Objects and Objectivity: The Contestation over Evolutionary Theory at the American Museum of Natural History, 1915-1928

For the purposes of this essay, I look at how evolutionary theory was treated and responded to in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of the Age of Man during the early 1900s. Specifically, I examine how the curatorial work of the museum’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, relied on the purported use of objectivity as a means by which to communicate the validity of evolutionary theory. But objectivity represented a resource for anti-evolution critics as well. To show this, I likewise examine how the Baptist pastor, John Roach Straton, responded to Osborn’s purported use of objectivity in the Hall of the Age of Man and how he himself attempted to establish a different type of objectivity through pluralistic approaches to theories of origins. Established as a common value, objectivity ceased to be a simple discriminator between scientists and non-scientists within the debate over evolution. While issues over the teaching of evolutionary theory during this period are already well known, I show here that the controversy over evolutionary theory was not only an issue within public schools during the early 1900s, but also within the museum as an institute of public education. By looking at Osborn’s Hall of the Age of Man in the American Museum of Natural History and Straton’s reaction to it with respect to objectivity’s contested and value-laden meanings, we can see how the controversy over evolutionary theory was manifested in this museum.

 

Roderick Home (University of Melbourne)

German Scientists in Nineteenth-century Australia

In the century following the first European settlement in Australia in 1788, most of those who emigrated there were from Britain and Ireland. However, a significant number of settlers were from the German-speaking lands, and among them were some who practised science. In this paper I argue that there were, in fact, disproportionately large numbers of Germans in the emerging scientific community of nineteenth-century Australia, and especially among the leaders of that community; and I point to developments within German science at the time that might provide possible explanations for this.

 

Sungook Hong (Seoul National University)

Semon’s Meme and Schrödinger’s Gene: An Intellectual Influence

Erwin Schrödinger’s highly influential booklet, What is Life (1944), discussed the mystery of life and heredity in terms of molecular structure, atomic bonds, and the concept of “negative entropy.” The most important and influential part of this book was, however, his informational theory of genetic heredity. In his view, a gene’s action essentially consisted in storing and passing information. Schrödinger compared the role of chromosomes with that of code script, and described chromosome structures as "law-code and executive power" or as "architect's plan and builder's craft" combined together. He also used a metaphor of the Morse code in telegraphy to explain how aperiodic crystals that consist in genes could store and then pass a great deal of information. Historians, as well as biologists, have discussed the influence of Schrödinger’s concept of genetic information upon the next generation of molecular biologists. However, it has scarcely been explored how he came up with this idea. His previous works on quantum physics, as well as his life and works in Ireland in the 1940s, was not apparently linked to the idea of “information” of any kind. In this paper, I will propose that Schrödinger was immensely influenced by the nineteenth-century German biologist Richard Semon’s works and ideas. In particular, Semon’s theory of “meme” (mneme), with which Schrödinger had become acquainted in his youth, directly influenced him to devise the informational theory of gene. Today, the concept of a meme is usually considered to be born out of that of a gene. By showing Semon’s influence on Schrödinger, I will maintain that the concept of gene was made out of that of a meme, in effect reversing their relationship.

 

John Horgan (Stevens Institute of Technology)

"The End of Science: A Retrospective after Ten Years"

A decade ago, John Horgan argued in his book "The End of Science" that "the great era of scientific discovery is over... Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions but only incremental, diminishing returns." The book became a bestseller, provoking widespread controversy among scientists and non-scientists alike, including historians of science. In this session, Horgan will talk about the reaction to his book, then and now, and about how his views of the limits of science have evolved in recent years.

 

Judith Houck (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Lay Women Health Workers: Balancing Feminist Principles, State Policies, and Medical Pressures, 1971-1981

Spurred on by the self-help gynecology movement and the belief that the care of healthy women’s bodies belonged in women’s hands, feminist health clinics around the country relied heavily on lay women to provide much of the healthy-women care. Lay women, with no medical or nursing training beyond what they acquired through the clinics, routinely performed pelvic exams, fitted diaphragms, “diagnosed” conditions, and advised treatments. Much of this work occurred in a medico-legal grey area. To some physicians and regulators, these women practiced medicine without a license. To feminist health activists, the actions of the lay workers fell within women’s legitimate right to learn about and control the normal functioning of their bodies. These interests frequently clashed. This paper examines three feminist health clinics in California between 1971 and 1981 and their responses to state demands and medical pressures that they stop practicing medicine without a license. Their different solutions and ultimate capitulation reflected their particular feminist allegiances, their geographical positions, and their financial resources.

 

Danain Hu (The City College of New York)

William Band and Modern Physics at Yenching University

In the summer of 1927, William Band, a 20-year old Oliver J. Lodge Prize winner, graduated from the University of Liverpool with a Master’s degree in physics. He then made an unusual decision: instead of taking an opportunity to pursue his Ph.D. at Cambridge, he chose to travel thousands of miles to teach physics at Yenching University, an important Christian institution, in Beijing, China. Arriving in 1929, Band established his career at Yenching, where he taught and studied the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics and pioneered the research on low-temperature superconductivity in China. Band also chaired the Physics Department for 10 years and founded China’s first graduate studies in physics. Among Band’s students at Yenching were W.Y. Chang (1931) and K. Huang (1941), who later ranked among China’s most prominent physicists in the 20th century. Chang was a leading high-energy physicist and founder of the famous Beijing Electron Positron Collider, while Huang co-authored with Max Born the classic book Dynamic Theory of Crystal Lattices and made remarkable contributions to solid-state physics. As a pioneer of modern physics education and research in China, William Band made significant contributions, which have so far yet been studied. In this paper, I would like to explore Band’s early career in order to identify his motivation, achievements, and influence in the development of modern Chinese physics.

 

Ben Hurlbut (Harvard University)

Term of ART? Human Cloning ,Democratic Engagement and the Importance of Careful Use of Names

This paper will examine a set of efforts to shift the terminology of public deliberations over human cloning away from the term "cloning" between 2002 and 2005. In tracing these shifts in language, it will explore the conditions under which these ontological redescriptions were framed as legitimate and value-free or, conversely, were challenged as “political.” These conditions directly effected the sorts of normative arguments that have subsequently been made. Disputes which have attempted to differentiate real entity from political construct have tended to tacitly reaffirm the notion that normative deliberation can only take place once an ontology has been stabilized. Because ontological accounts have generally served as the gatekeepers which determine whether an embryonic being can be described in the vocabularies that confer normative significance (the language of rights, of personhood, etc), these accounts and their foundations have been highly contested. In order to understand the historical development of deliberations over cloning, this paper will look to the efforts to establish control over the power to name.

 

Anja Jacobsen (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)

Quantum Measurement and Consistency: The “Small War” Between Bohr-Rosenfeld and Landau-Peierls in the Early Thirties

In 1931 a debate arose between Bohr, the grand old man in quantum theory as well as the most influential interpreter of quantum mechanics, and the young and bold physicists of the next generation Landau and Peierls. The background was a paper in which Landau and Peierls claimed to have proved the inconsistency of the new quantum electrodynamics. Heated discussions of the issues raised in this paper took place the following years, in which also Heisenberg, Pauli, Rosenfeld, and Klein participated. In 1933 Bohr and Rosenfeld eventually published their long and famous treatise which, according to them (and many others) settled the debate, even though neither Landau nor Peierls were ever to acknowledge that they had been proved wrong. The debate took place parallel to the Bohr-Einstein discussion, and like that, Bohr’s discussion with Landau and Peierls played an important role in consolidating Bohr’s quantum epistemology in the early thirties. Nevertheless, the discussion with Landau and Peierls and the outcome of it are rarely mentioned in connection with the more general epistemological controversy. In my paper I analyse the course of the dispute and some of the issues discussed. A full apprehension of this early debate shed more light on Bohr’s ideas as well as on the position of the other physicists involved and constitutes an important platform for understanding how Bohr was often misunderstood and challenged later in the century.

 

Kathryn James (Beinecke Library, Yale University)

Reading Instruments: the Print Culture of Mathematical Instruments in Early Modern Britain

Practical mathematics, as a literary genre in early seventeenth-century London, was a field which had been merchandised. Mathematical works, whether by surveyors, navigators, engineers, or cartographers, were regularly published accompanied by printed illustrations of mathematics—and mathematicians—in action, using instruments to measure the depth of gorges, the height of towers, the trajectories of cannons.  These works were as frequently accompanied by illustrations of the instruments, for those readers who wished to construct a version of the instrument, and advertisements for the instrument-maker, for those readers who would rather not build the instrument themselves. Building on the work in this field by Stephen Johnston and Jim Bennett, this paper offers an examination of the print culture of practical mathematical instruments in seventeenth-century Britain. It looks at the development, over the course of the seventeenth century, of instruments as illustration in practical mathematical literature, focusing both on the variation in print formats of printed instruments and on the manuscript culture accompanying printed instruments in this period.  At issue is the question of audience: how were these instruments meant to be used, and did this usage differ from the presentation of the instrument in the practical mathematical text? Were readers of practical mathematical literature understood by the authors and printers of these works to be active practitioners or simply enthusiastic readers and potential consumers? What, ultimately, can the print culture of early modern instruments tell us about the cultural status of practical mathematics?

 

Christian Jennings (University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point)

Colonial Institution as Field Site: The East African Marine Fisheries Research Organization

This paper will explore the expectations and attitudes of the scientists who worked at the East African Marine Fisheries Research Organization, based in Zanzibar, during the 1950s and 1960s. Charged with investigating a very large area (the entire coastal zone of East Africa), plus identifying areas of potential economic value, EAMFRO struggled to make effective use of its limited manpower and rudimentary equipment. The scientists who worked at the organization tended to view the assignment as a temporary adventure, one that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to post-colonial “scientific tourism.” The paper will examine these continuities as well as the efforts of recent researchers to transcend them.

 

Derek Jensen (Brigham Young University – Idaho)

Hevelius's Baroque Map of the Moon

According to Mary Winkler and Albert Van Helden, Hevelius's <i>Selenographia</i> (1647) portrayed a novel concern for faithful representations of telescopic observations. However, Hevelius’s book and his system of nomenclature for names of lunar features are now largely forgotten. Why? I will argue that Hevelius’s artistic representations of the moon were coupled with the concerns of seventeenth-century terrestrial geographers and Hevelius’s own partiality to the ideals of the classical past making his map of the moon a two-edged sword. On the one hand, his detailed representations of the moon impressed his readers, even leading one of them (the Englishman Peter Mundy) to speculate about life on the moon and representing such life pictorially in his diaries. On the other hand, Hevelius’s use of archaic classical terms to describe features on the moon caused his map to become outdated in a few short years. Hevelius succeeded in making an impact with his visuals, but failed in attracting a following of his text. The historical example of Hevelius’s map of the moon serves as a springboard for conversations about the desirability, yet difficulty in fusing art and science successfully.

 

Andrew Jewett (New York University)

American Social Scientists and the Rise of Consensus Liberalism

In the 1950s, mainstream American social scientists embraced a “consensus liberalism” that described American political culture as dominated by a longstanding “liberal tradition” and held that scholars could serve the nation by translating the values of that liberal tradition into public policy. Historians usually describe the consensus outlook as an ideological product of centrists (Daniel Boorstin, David M. Potter, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) celebrating American institutions and disaffected Marxists (Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter) adjusting themselves to the limits of American politics. Yet as Edward A. Purcell Jr. pointed out long ago, consensus liberalism also spoke powerfully to the problem of value-neutrality. By viewing themselves as implementing a liberal tradition found empirically within the polity, social scientists could square political activism with objectivity. In fact, I argue, that strategy appeared fully formed back in the 1920s, in the writings of John Dewey and others. My paper will trace the interplay of that impulse with another motive I identify as central to consensus liberalism--the desire to protect the New Deal against conservative critics by portraying it as the outcome of a “natural” process of social evolution--in a series of semi-popular texts ignored by Purcell, including Dewey’s <i>Freedom and Culture</i> (1939), Margaret Mead’s <i>And Keep Your Powder Dry</i> (1942), Gunnar Myrdal’s <i>An American Dilemma</i> (1944), and Ruth Benedict’s <i>The Chrysanthemum and the Sword</i> (1946). Such World War Two-era texts, I will argue, prefigured the tendency of 1950s social scientists to describe critics of Cold War liberalism as un-American, even mentally imbalanced.

 

Adrian Johns  (University of Chicago)

Pirate Listeners and the Political Economy of Broadcasting, 1920-1950

The advent of broadcasting incurred the invention of a new kind of intellectual piracy – a piracy not of production, but of reception. Prior to the 1920s, all so-called piracy had been illicit reproduction, most notably the reprinting of books. Broadcasting changed that. In Britain, most notably, the allocation of the medium to a public corporation financed largely by license fees meant that citizens who did not pay for a license – or who paid for the wrong kind of license – became “pirate” listeners. These pirates multiplied at a stupendous rate, such that the very survival of the broadcasting system was soon cast into doubt. Their most contentious strategy was to buy a so-called “experimenter’s” license, which made listening much cheaper than the conventional “broadcast” license. As a result, the enterprise of broadcasting came to depend on answering the simple but resounding question: what qualifies citizens as potential experimenters – and what, if anything, disqualifies them? This paper will explore how convictions about the character of the scientific experimenter clashed with the politics, economy, and culture of early broadcasting, in a contest that had lasting impacts on both science and the media.

 

Ann Johnson  (University of South Carolina)

Intellectual and Geographical Borderlands: Competing Mathematical and Political Ideals in the US Rectangular Survey, 1789-1820

In 1790, the newly constituted United States government authorized a survey of all land outside the borders of original colonies. In becoming part of the United States, individual states had to cede territory to the federal government (depending on the state, this was often a highly negotiated, non-trivial process). That land became the property of the federal government however, in order to raise capital and put Euro-American settlers on the frontiers for national security reasons, the federal government wanted to sell this land as quickly as possible. From those desires to move settlers west and simultaneously raise money was borne the Federal Rectangular Survey, which laid a rectangular grid over all land west of the 13 colonies (although in 1802, the Louisiana territory with particular difficulties, since it was already surveyed and owned). From the perspective of the federal government this was a mathematically simple and elegant solution; i.e., it looked good on a map. However, from the perspective of the surveyors laying a rectangular grid across undulating, forested land without regard to natural boundaries and complicated by a shifting magnetic north and converging lines of longitude, this project was far from elegant and simple. In fact, it was a topographical nightmare, challenging the highest tier of American mathematicians at the turn of the 19th century. This paper examines the struggle between Washington and the frontier as it was played out by a series of surveyors in Ohio and Indiana, some with very high levels of mathematical literacy and others barely literate. These surveyors, who were sent to lay down the rectangular grid and who often failed in Washington's eyes since the grid was not truly rectangular, successfully produced a geodetic picture of the earth. In addition to showing 'science in action' this narrative also highlights the complicated mixing of knowledge for knowledge sake and practical science, represented by both the political justification for this scientific project and as represented by the astronomical and geodetic maps the surveyors produced, which had both important purposes in surveying and navigation and were in fact reproduced in the important European scientific publications. As many science policy scholars (finally) question the legitimacy of the linear model, it is useful to revisit another historical episode in which the so-called 'linear model' was inverted and practical science led to 'pure' knowledge.

 

Susan Johnson-Roehr (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Marking Mughal Time: Power and Politics at the Astronomical Observatory of Sawai Jai Singh II, 1721-1743

Just south of Connaught Place in New Delhi, separated from the high-rise buildings of Parliament Street by a simple iron fence, stands the eighteenth-century astronomical observatory of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Amber and Jaipur. While the extant masonry instruments reveal something of the Rajput king’s interest in observational astronomy, a fuller understanding of the site can only be gained through a consideration of the historical context within which observatory was built. The observatory was designed deliberately to function within contemporary political and scientific discourses extending between the metropolitan Mughal seat in Shajahanabad and Jai Singh’s own hereditary state of Amber. This deliberate incursion into Mughal space by Jai Singh is often ignored in analyses of the Delhi observatory. The Maharaja’s astronomical endeavors as a whole are typically styled by historians as derivative of local Hindu (Vaishnava) religious practices in Jaipur. Not only does this over-determined relationship between Hinduism and the observatories fail to recognize that the Delhi observatory predated similar structures erected in Jaipur by some seven years, it also precludes any interpretation of the sites independent of religion. An examination of both the textual and architectural record left behind by Jai Singh indicates that the observatories cannot be explained exclusively in terms of Hinduism. Without a consideration of the Rajput king’s investment in both the Mughal Empire and Islamic science, only a partial and somewhat deceptive story of astronomy as practiced by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II can be told.

 

Matthew Jones (Columbia University)

Natural Hierarchy, Artisans, and Early Modern Calculating Machines

The history of early modern calculating machines is one of collaboration and protracted struggle between "philosophical" inventors and the skilled artisans essential for realizing the machines. These inventors--most famously Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz--were surprised and frustrated by the autonomy of their laborers, but dependent upon that autonomy. This paper briefly recounts their financial and intellectual relations with artisans, before turning to the second-order philosophical speculation prompted by their experiences in realizing the machines. Their experiences figured, first, in their accounts of the different sorts of human knowledge and skill and, second, in their accounts of the hierarchy of beings and the places of angels, philosophers, artisans and calculating machines within that hierarchy.

 

Chin Jou  (Princeton University)

"Milking It’: Home Economists and World War I Era Dairy Consumption Campaigns

At the start of World War I, the dairy industry observed that American homemakers balked at higher prices for fluid milk and opted for butter substitutes instead of the real thing. Dairy farmers and distributors feared that a decline in milk consumption would result in a milk surplus and drive down prices for the commodity. The Food Administration also had a stake in encouraging milk consumption, as it sought to conserve meat for the war effort, and seized upon milk and dairy products as substitutes for meat protein. Both groups turned to practitioners of home economists—a fledging, overwhelmingly female profession led by acolytes of the progressive-era cult of empirical efficiency--because they believed that home economists could reach homemakers responsible for the family diet. Home economists undertook this assignment with alacrity, aiming not just to raise dairy consumption and to promote milk as a nutritious food, but also to bolster their own professional status
and to recast homemaking as an enterprise vital to ensuring the physical health and development of the family.

 

Despina Kakoudaki (Harvard University)

The Robot as an Object of Study: Imagination, Fiction and Reality

In this paper I explore the figure of the robot as an object of study, and one that specifically requires an integration of methodologies from both the humanities and the sciences. Traditionally, the figure of the robot has been regarded very differently in these two realms: in the sciences, it is related to the promises of scientific inquiry, and motivates research and innovation in actual technological applications, or the future possibility for such applications. In the humanities, however, the robot is a figure of fiction and science fiction, which, despite its un-reality channels feelings about culture and technology, difference and justice, often in indirect ways. After exploring the implications and fundamental trends of the two modes, the paper proposes that an integrated interdisciplinary methodology would allow us to better understand the attraction and meaning of the robot as a figure, without resorting to the binary opposition between fantasy and reality. Using examples from fiction, popular culture, recent scientific applications and research in robotics, I argue that the two approaches fuel each other: as cultural figures, robots are both real and imaginary, and indeed it is often their imaginary qualities that fuel and inspire actual research.

 

Gwen Kay (SUNY Oswego)

Murder, Patient Privilege and other Bioethical Questions in 19th Century Medicine

In 1872, a seemingly innocuous question about whether a member could withdraw from a county medical society to "deal with a personal situation" escalated into an emergency daylong meeting with a series of witnesses and evidence "entered into the record" to determine whether or not an abortion, and/or an extramarital affair, and/or a murder occurred. This case provided grist for the gossip mill, but also hinted at larger questions facing physicians in New York state surrounding newly passed laws criminalizing abortion. In an age when few women sought prenatal care, and when women did not seek medical attention for abortion unless something went awry, doctors faced ethical questions about upholding a new law, caring for their patients, and reporting other physicians who may have broken the law. These bioethical questions haunted the medical community as they struggled to find their footing in this new terrain. This paper will explore how one county in Upstate New York grappled with new realities in the intersection of medicine, science and law, and whether their conclusions and reactions were indicative of the larger trends in bioethics.

 

Melanie Keene (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)

Making Chemistry Your Cup of Tea: Nineteenth-century Object Lessons

In one popular nineteenth-century scientific object lesson, the household ritual of making a cup of tea was converted into an illuminating illustration of elementary chemistry. Theories of evaporation, solution, infusion, and even steam power were explained through a closer examination of the teapot and its contents with eyes, nose, hand and tongue, assisted by a knowledgeable written guide. Identifying these household experiments as ‘chemical’ connected the potentially unreachable realms of science with the home, as the domestic refuge was used to overcome fears of this potentially ‘deep’ subject. The cup of tea was a doubly appropriate vehicle for these lessons, as it was also the constituent parts of tea-leaves, sugar and water themselves of which drinkers could be afraid, due to widely-propagated scares about adulterated foodstuffs and fluvial pollution. Learning about chemistry was thus promoted as one way of overcoming these fears, and tests for adulterated commodities resembled introductory experiments. Other contemporary writers used the home to traverse the further reaches of the globe, telling a