This leading international journal publishes scholarly papers and review articles on all aspects of the history of science. History of science is interpreted widely to include medicine, technology and social studies of science. BJHS papers make important and lively contributions to scholarship and the journal has been an essential library resource for more than thirty years. It is also used extensively by historians and scholars in related fields. A substantial book review section is a central feature. There are four issues a year, comprising an annual volume of over 600 pages.
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Wandering anatomists and itinerant anthropologists: the antipodean sciences of race in Britain between the wars ROSS L. JONES, WARWICK ANDERSON The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 1 – 16 doi: 10.1017/S0007087413000939 (About doi) Published Online on 07th November 2013
While the British Empire conventionally is recognized as a source of research subjects and objects in anthropology, and a site where anthropological expertise might inform public administration, the settler-colonial affiliations and experiences of many leading physical anthropologists could also directly shape theories of human variation, both physical and cultural. Antipodean anthropologists like Grafton Elliot Smith were pre-adapted to diffusionist models that explained cultural achievement in terms of the migration, contact and mixing of peoples. Trained in comparative methods, these fractious cosmopolitans also favoured a dynamic human biology, often emphasizing the heterogeneity and environmental plasticity of body form and function, and viewing fixed, static racial typologies and hierarchies sceptically. By following leading representatives of empire anatomy and physical anthropology, such as Elliot Smith and Frederic Wood Jones, around the globe, it is possible to recover the colonial entanglements and biases of interwar British anthropology, moving beyond a simple inventory of imperial sources, and crediting human biology and social anthropology not just as colonial sciences but as the sciences of itinerant colonials.
John Flamsteed and the turn of the screw: mechanical uncertainty, the skilful astronomer and the burden of seeing correctly at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich RICHARD J. SPIEGEL The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 17 – 51 doi: 10.1017/S0007087413000952 (About doi) Published Online on 05th March 2014
Centring on John Flamsteed (1646–1719), the first Astronomer Royal, this paper investigates the ways in which astronomers of the late seventeenth century worked to build and maintain their reputations by demonstrating, for their peers and for posterity, their proficiency in managing visual technologies. By looking at his correspondence and by offering a graphic and textual analysis of the preface to his posthumous Historia Coelestis Britannica (1725), I argue that Flamsteed based the legitimacy of his life's work on his capacity to serve as a skilful astronomer who could coordinate the production and proper use of astronomical sighting instruments. Technological advances in astrometry were, for Flamsteed, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the advancement of astronomy. Technological resources needed to be used by the right person. The work of the skilful astronomer was a necessary precondition for the mobilization and proper management of astronomical technologies. Flamsteed's understanding of the astronomer as a skilled actor importantly shifted the emphasis in precision astronomical work away from the individual observer's ability to see well and toward the astronomer's ability to ensure that instruments guaranteed accurate vision.
‘Most rare workmen’: optical practitioners in early seventeenth-century Delft HUIB J. ZUIDERVAART, MARLISE RIJKS The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 53 – 85 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000181 (About doi) Published Online on 12th March 2014
A special interest in optics among various seventeenth-century painters living in the Dutch city of Delft has intrigued historians, including art historians, for a long time. Equally, the impressive career of the Delft microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek has been studied by many historians of science. However, it has never been investigated who, at that time, had access to the mathematical and optical knowledge necessary for the impressive achievements of these Delft practitioners. We have tried to gain insight into Delft as a ‘node’ of optical knowledge by following the careers of three minor local figures in early seventeenth-century Delft. We argue that through their work, products, discussions in the vernacular and exchange of skills, rather than via learned publications, these practitioners constituted a foundation on which the later scientific and artistic achievements of other Delft citizens were built. Our Delft case demonstrates that these practitioners were not simple and isolated craftsmen; rather they were crucial components in a network of scholars, savants, painters and rich virtuosi. Decades before Vermeer made his masterworks, or Van Leeuwenhoek started his famous microscopic investigations, the intellectual atmosphere and artisanal knowledge in this city centred on optical topics.
‘The televising of science is a process of television’: establishing Horizon, 1962–1967 TIMOTHY BOON The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 87 – 121 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000405 (About doi) Published Online on 06th May 2014
BBC Television's Horizon series, fifty years old on 2 May 2014, despite its significance to the history of the public culture of science, has been little studied. This microhistorical account follows the gestation and early years of the programme, demonstrating how it established a social and cultural account of science. This was a result of televisual factors, notably the determination to follow the format of the successful arts television programme Monitor. It illuminates how the processes of television production, with a handful of key participants – Aubrey Singer, Gerald Leach, Philip Daly, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Ramsay Short, Michael Peacock and Robert Reid – established the format of the programme. This occurred over seventeen months of prior preparation followed by three troubled years of seeking to establish a stable form. This was finally achieved in 1967 when the programme adopted a film documentary approach after extended attempts at making it as a studio-based magazine programme. The story has implications for understanding the social accounts of science that were circulating in the key decade of the 1960s.
Reinventing machines: the transmission history of the Leibniz calculator FLORIN-STEFAN MORAR The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 123 – 146 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000429 (About doi) Published Online on 14th July 2014
This paper argues that we should take into account the process of historical transmission to enrich our understanding of material culture. More specifically, I want to show how the rewriting of history and the invention of tradition impact material objects and our beliefs about them. I focus here on the transmission history of the mechanical calculator invented by the German savant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz repeatedly described his machine as functional and wonderfully useful, but in reality it was never finished and didn't fully work. Its internal structure also remained unknown. In 1879, however, the machine re-emerged and was reinvented as the origin of all later calculating machines based on the stepped drum, to protect the priority of the German Leibniz against the Frenchman Thomas de Colmar as the father of mechanical calculation. The calculator was later replicated to demonstrate that it could function ‘after all’, in an effort to deepen this narrative and further enhance Leibniz's computing acumen.
A history of the Allais paradox FLORIS HEUKELOM The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 147 – 169 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000570 (About doi) Published Online on 08th August 2014
This article documents the history of the Allais paradox, and shows that underneath the many discussions of the various protagonists lay different, irreconcilable epistemological positions. Savage, like his mentor von Neumann and similar to economist Friedman, worked from an epistemology of generalized characterizations. Allais, on the other hand, like economists Samuelson and Baumol, started from an epistemology of exact descriptions in which every axiom was an empirical claim that could be refuted directly by observations. As a result, the two sides failed to find a common ground. Only a few decades later was the now so-called Allais paradox rediscovered as an important precursor when a new behavioural economic subdiscipline started to adopt the epistemology of exact descriptions and its accompanying falsifications of rational choice theory.
ESSAY REVIEW
Far from depleted… Neeraja Sankaran The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 171 – 174 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000946 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
There's just no deleting Darwin, not really. Even Peter Bowler, the title to whose delightful book purports to do just that, is quick to add in the subtitle that he is only imagining the history of science without Darwin. The sixty-three essays written by a like number of scholars, Bowler among them (some articles are co-authored and a handful of authors have contributed to more than one essay) in the recently published Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought bear additional witness to the fact that Darwin's ideas continue to exert a powerful influence on historians, philosophers and biologists alike.
BOOK REVIEWS
Marion Endt-Jones (ed.), Coral: Something Rich and Strange. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Pp. 128. ISBN 978-1-84631-959-4. £19.99 (paperback). Katy Barrett The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 175 – 176 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000958 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp. xii + 181. ISBN 978-1-84893-364-4. £60.00 (hardback). Megha Rajaram The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 177 – 178 doi: 10.1017/S000708741400096X (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke and Martin Stuber (eds.), Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxx + 501 and x + 425. ISBN 978-90-04-24390-3. €229.00 (hardback). Alexi Baker The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 178 – 180 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000971 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Angela Byrne, Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. ixv + 265. ISBN 978-1-137-31131-3. £55.00 (hardback). Allison Ksiazkiewicz The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 180 – 181 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000983 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Hasok Chang, Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism. Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2012. Pp. xxi + 316. ISBN 978-94-007-3931-4. £126.00 (hardback). Victor Boantza The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 181 – 183 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000995 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (eds.), The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Pp. xv + 256. ISBN 978-1-84893-463-1. £60.00 (hardback). Roland Jackson The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 183 – 184 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001009 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 228. ISBN 978-0-226-92374-1. £35.00/$50.00 (hardback). Alice White The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 184 – 185 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001010 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Sharon M. Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 226. ISBN 978-0-2260-3898-8. £31.50 (hardback). Sarah Walsh The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 185 – 187 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001022 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 292. ISBN 978-1-4214-1022-7. £29.00 (hardback). Simone Turchetti The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 187 – 188 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001034 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Thomas Kaiserfeld and Tom O'Dell (eds.), Legitimizing ESS: Big Science as a Collaboration across Boundaries. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-91-87351-10-5. £30.95 (hardback). Camilla Mørk Røstvik The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 188 – 189 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001046 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Steven J. Dick, Discovery and Classification in Astronomy: Controversy and Consensus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 458. ISBN 978-1-107-03361-0. £30.00/$45.00 (hardback). Joshua Nall The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 189 – 191 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414001058 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015
Rob Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. xii + 284 ISBN: 978-1-137-37242-0. £65.00 (hardback).Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 396. ISBN: 978-0-19-968942-2. £20.00 (hardback). Ian Miller The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 01 , March 2015, pp 191 – 193 doi: 10.1017/S000708741400106X (About doi) Published Online on 03rd February 2015