Whewell's Ghost

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #07

Monday 31 August 2015

EDITORIAL:

Like the proverbial bad penny Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM links list keeps turning up and we’re back again with another week of the best of the histories of science, technology and medicine gathered up over the last seven days from the Internet.

In my youth I had a polymathic interest in all things scientific and there was no way that I could take up a serious study of all the areas that interested me. I could however, like many, many others, at least teach myself the basic of the various sciences by reading popular science magazines. One of the main ones that I read almost religiously for many years was Scientific American. My memories of Scientific American is of a modern journal bringing me understandable synopsises of the latest developments in the sciences and also of the history of science. From time to time I get reminded that Scientific America is in the meantime a part of the history of science itself.

The first edition of Scientific American appeared 170 years ago on 28 August 1845, as the journal has reminded us this week.

From Volume 1, Number 1 of Scientific American, August 28, 1845.

Scientific American: On Scientific American’s 170^th Anniversary, a Nod to Founder Rufus Porter

Scientific American: Celebrating 170 Years of Scientific American

I no longer read Scientific American but I do hope that other young science fans are still getting a view of the larger picture of the sciences from America’s oldest continuously published magazine.

Quotes of the week:

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“Academics: is there a verb for “struggling to pull research notes and thoughts into article form”?” – Katrina Gulliver (@katrinagulliver)

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost, but people who vehemently believe in the paranormal scare me a little”. – Brian Switek (@Laelaps)

“Fortunately there is no encouragement of beatnik behaviour by ordinary people in Britain” – The People, 1960. h/t @matthewcobb

“The task is to understand how reliable knowledge and scientific progress can and do result from a flawed, profoundly contingent, culturally relative, all-too-human process.” – David Wootton h/t @philipcball & @matthewcobb

“A mission statement is no substitute for a mission”. – John D. Cook (@JohnDCook)

“Every time someone gets made a peer in the House of Lords a democracy fairy dies”. – Lily Bailey (@LilyBaileyUK)

Me: What did the professor call the reading list that got out of control?

Library college: I don’t care

Me: Godzyllabus.

Her: Groan. – @librarianshipwreck

“How to write a book pitch: Step 1, order a coffee. Step 2, open blank page and hold pen. Step 3, write tweet about Steps 1 and 2. Ok, done”. – Mike McRae (@tribalscientist)

“The role of the historian is to move the debate forward, no more, no less”. – Frank McDonough (@FMXC1957)

Birthday of the Week:

Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier born 26 August 1743

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife and assistant Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze by Jacques-Louis David, ca. 1788

Yovisto: Modern Chemistry started with Lavoisier

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 26 – Antoine Lavoisier

The Renaissance Mathematicus: The father of…

Madame Lavoisier while assisting her husband on his scientific research of human respiration; she is visible at the table on the far right.

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 24 – Louis Essen

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Alexander Langsdorf’s Interview

Yovisto: The Exploration of Saturn

Scientific American: Was Einstein the First to Invent E=mc²?

Corpus Newtonicum: All was light – but was it?

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathemica, Titlepage and frontispiece of the third edition, London, 1726 (John Rylands Library)

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage: Follow the Information: Comets, Communicative Practices and Swedish Amateur Astronomers in the Twentieth Century (pdf)

Trinity College Library, Cambridge: Navigating Newton’s Novels: Exhibiting the Value of Personal Libraries

Irish Philosophy: Truth above all things: G.G: Stokes

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 27 – Ernest Lawrence

Sydney Morning Herald: From Betelguese to Vega, who named the stars?

Harvard Magazine: William Cranch Bond: Brief life of Harvard’s first astronomer 1789–1859

Ptak Science Books: The Preliminary Tower at Trinity, 1945

Trinity Tower
Source: Grove Archive

The National: Look at the stars, there’s still a lot of wisdom there

Atlas Obscura: See Fascinating Relics from the Secret Soviet Space Program

AHF: Francis Birch

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 30 – Ernest Rutherford

AIP: Rutherford’s Nuclear World

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

The Conversation: Here’s why the Greenwich Prime Meridian is actually in the wrong place

The Hakluyt Society Blog: Matthew Flinders and the Circumnavigation of Australia, 1801–1803

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yovisto: James Weddell and the Southern Ocean

James Weddell´s second expedition, depicting the brig “Jane” and the cutter “Beaufoy”.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Advances in the History of Psychology: Hermann Helmholtz’s Graphical Recordings of the Speed of Nervous Stimulations

Our Roots: White Caps and Red Roses: History of the Galt School of Nursing, Lethbridge, Alberta 1910–1979

Duke University Libraries: The Devil’s Tale: Promising Cures for Hearing Loss in Early 20^th Century America

Motherboard: How Viking 1 Won the Martian Space Race

Migraine Histories: On Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (c.1900) via Wikipedia

Advances in the History of Psychology: The Role of Heredity in George Combe’s Phrenology Work

BuzzFeed: How Oliver Sacks Helped Introduce the World to Autism

Yovisto: Charles Richet and Anaphylaxis

From the Hands of Quacks: Actina: A Wonder of the 19^th Century

NYAM: Dr. William Edmund Aughinbaugh, Medical Adventurer

Embryo Project: The Marine Biology Laboratory

The Wall Street Journal: The Man Who Invented Psychopathy

academia.edu: A Museum of Wonders or a Cemetery of Corpses? The Commercial Exchange of Anatomical Collections in Early Modern Collections (pdf)

Science Notes: Today in Science History August 29 – Werner Forssmann

Brumpic: ‘Birmingham Innovations: The Steam Engine, Electroplating… and the Airbag’ by Jonathan Reinarz

First Southern Birmingham 3

Diseases of Modern Life: ‘Sweet oblivious antidotes’? Lady perfume drinkers of the late 19^th century

TECHNOLOGY:

The Guardian: Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data

Atlas Obscura: The Weird History of Hand Dryers Will Blow You Away

Atlas Obscura: Take a Ride with the Country’s Most Dedicated Elevator Tourist

Thick Objects: Chakhotin’s Microsurgery Device (1912)

Ptak Science Books: A Map of Fordlandia: the “Drama of Transportation”, 1932

io9: No, Da Vinci Wasn’t the First to Dream About Human Flight

Yovisto: Lee De Forest and the Audion

Conciatore: Lime

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Printing mistakes

Johannes Gutenberg in a 16th century copper engraving
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Viewpoints: Innovators Assemble: Ada Lovelace, Walter Isaacson, and the Superheroines of Computing

academia.edu: Antipocras. A Medieval Treatise on Magical Medicine. By Brother Nicholas of the Preacing Friars (c. 1270) Translated by William Eamon (pdf)

Yovisto: The Hyperbolic World of Vladimir Shukhov

Capitalism’s Cradle: Not-so-Anonymous Tinkerers and the Industrial Revolution

Capitalism’s Cradle: Who will watch the Watch-Men? – Celebrating the Watch-Makers of the British Industrial Revolution

AIP: John Mauchly

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

The New York Times: How a Volcanic Eruption in 1815 Darkened the World but Colored the Arts

The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 – the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history. Credit Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press

TrowellBlazers: Gertrude Caton Thompson

Partners of convenience: The Met Office and the BBC

The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks: Spinach and iron fallacy

Ptak Science Books: Early Map of Elevations of Plants and Trees, 1873

“Chart of Principal Vegetable Growths and Chief Staples” from Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography,

Twilight Beasts: The last squawk of the dodo

New York Times: Eric Betzig’s Life Over the Microscope

Archaeology: Rethinking the Form and Structure of Hominid Fossils

CHEMISTRY:

Conciatore: Saltpeter

Conciatore: Sulfur

Chemistry World: Agatha Christie, the queen of crime chemistry

As a young woman, Christie worked in a hospital dispensary and gained a first-hand knowledge of drugs of poisons © Bettmann/Corbis

The Vaults of Erowid: The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide by William James

Yovisto: Carl Bosch and the IG Farben

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Scientific American: Cross Check: Why There Will Never Be Another Einstein

“I am no Einstein,” Einstein once said. On top of all his other qualities, the man was modest. Photo by Oren Jack Turner courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

the many-headed monster: VoxPop2015: The People’s Conclusion

G.C. Gosling: In Memoriam; or, Getting Personal

Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin: The Church of England and Creationism

RBSC Manuscripts Division News: Expanded Digitization of Islamic Manuscripts

Harvard University: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

Crova registering actinometer

The New York Times: The Case for Teaching Scientific Ignorance

Science Insider: How the Franco dictatorship destroyed Spanish science

The Last Word on Nothing: Story, History, Story

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Misusing Galileo to criticise the Galileo Gambit

Galileo demonstrating his astronomical theories. Climate contrarians have virtually nothing in common with Galileo. Photograph: Tarker/Tarker/Corbis

The Ordered Universe Project: AHRC Funding: Ordered Universe

Anzamems Inc: Free Online Courses on the History of the Book

The Recipes Project: Exploring CPP 10a214: Anne Layfield Reading Bishop Andrewes

Roots of Unity: Gauss and Germain on Pleasure and Passion

Marie-Sophie Germain

Making Science Public: Snapshots of the unknown – some holiday souvenirs

University of Oxford: Research: The randomness of archives

Medieval Sicily: Islamic Education and the Transmission of Knowledge in Muslim Society (pdf)

The New Yorker: What is Elegance in Science

AEON: Future Perfect: Social progress, high-speed transport and electricity everywhere – how the Victorians invented the future

ESOTERIC:

MIT Library Special Collections: Faraday and Table-Talk

J. Prichard. A Few Sober Words of Table-Talk About Table-Spirits, and the Rev. N.S. Godfrey’s Incantations. 2nd ed., 1853

alphr: Parapsychology: The rise and fall of paranormal experimentation

Chemistry World: A shared secret?

academia.edu: Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as “practical Exegesis” in Early Modern England (pdf)

BOOK REVIEWS:

The Guardian: Heroes, monsters and people: When it comes to moral choices, outstanding physicists are very ordinary

THE: Temptations in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture, by Lisa Jardine

The Atlantic: Before Autism Had a Name

Refinary 29: What You Need to Know About The Hidden History of Autism

PLOS Blogs: NeuroTribes: Steve Silberman on a haunting history and new hopes for autistic people

SFARI: “Neurotribes” recovers lost history of autism

Maclean’s: Steve Siberman on autism and ‘neurodiversity’

San Francisco Chronicle: ‘NeuroTribes’ by Steve Silberman

Boston Globe: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

Financial Review: From wild to domesticated: a history of garden evolution

A rare 18th century book containing nature prints.
Getty Images

Big Think: Scientific Revolutions in Optics Made Vermeer a Revolutionary Painter

Science Book a Day: The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past

Inside Higher Ed: An End of Era?

SomeBeans: Stargazers – Copernicus, Galileo, the Telescope and the Church by Allan Chapman

Forbes: Recalling The History of Time and Navigation In The Age of GPS

The Guardian: The Meaning of Science by Tim Lewens review – can scientific knowledge be objective

Science Book a Day: Magnificent Principia: Exploring Isaac Newton’s Masterpiece

H-Environment: Drake, ‘Loving Nature, Fearing the State,’ Roundtable Review

big think: The Science of Why Nature is Beautiful to Us

Open Letters Monthly: After Nature

Financial Times: ‘The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution’, by David Wootton

The Guardian: Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science by Richard Dawkins

The Dispersal of Darwin: Book Review, Guest Post & Giveaway: Ancient Earth Journal: The Early Cretaceous

The New York Times: ‘The Butterflies of North America; Titian Peale’s Lost Manuscript’

NEW BOOKS:

Royal Society: Winton Prize for Science Books

University of Chicago Press: Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages

OUP: The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700

ART & EXHIBITIONS

University of Oklahoma: Galileo’s World: An exhibition without walls

dna india: A cartographer’s horde

Prashant Lahoti with a pilgrimage route map of Shatrunjaya, a holy site for Jains located in Palitana, Gujarat; c. 1750. The map is on display at the National Museum in Delhi Manit Balmiki dna

Science Museum: Revelations: Experiments in Photography Closing Soon!

Herschel Museum of Astronomy: Waterloo and the March of Science 18 June–13 December 2015

THEATRE AND OPERA:

broadwayworld.com: Linda Purl, Brett Rickaby and Peter van Norden to lead Rubicon Theatre’s COPENHAGEN; Sets Sept Opening

Putney Theatre Company: The Effect

The Place: Touch Wood 2015: Programme 1: Goethe’s Faust from a contemporary female perspective

Noël Coward Theatre: Photograph 51

FILMS AND EVENTS:

CHF & Lantern Theatre Company: Women in Science – Science on Stage 19 September 2015

The Ordered Universe Project: Ordered Universe at the Royal Society Public Lectures: Open House 19 September 2015

Walking Tour: Robert Hooke’s 17^th Century City of London 17 September 2015

The Monument depicted in a picture by Sutton Nicholls, c. 1753.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Science Museum: Time Travelling Operating Theatre 13 September

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour: Homes for Healing

Wellcome Collection: STT Talk: Infectious Diseases 3 September 2015

Bethlem Museum of the Mind: A Diseased Cerebellum, or a Wildness in the Face 5 September 2015

Florence Nightingale Museum: ‘Design for Living’: Life Inside the Tuberculosis Sanatorium 10 September 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Carl Spitzweg – The Geologist 1860

TELEVISION:

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

George Boole 200: The Genius of Georg Boole

George Boole
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Vimeo: Countway Objects: Dominic Hall

Ed TED: Quantum mechanics 101: Demystifying tough physics in 4 easy lessons

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: Forty History of Ideas Animations

ARD Mediathek: Alfred Russel Wallace – Pionier in Darwins Schatten

PODCASTS:

Modern Notion: What Computers Taught Us about Genetics

Ben Franklin’s World: Adam D. Shprintzen, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of the American Reform Movement

Science Friday: Writing Women Back Into Science History

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Notches: CfP: Histories of Sexuality and Religion

University of Pennsylvania: Literary Histories of Science: Race, Gender, and Class 12–15 November 2015

Université Paris Diderot: CfP: Becoming Animal with the Victorians SFEVE Annual Conference 4–5 February 2016

BSHS: CfP: BSHS Postgraduate Conference 6–8 January 2016

University of Notre Dame: CfP: Beyond Tradition: Rethinking Early Modern Europe

The History of Emotions Blog: Conference: ‘Tears and Smiles: Medieval to Early Modern’ 7 October 2015

Medical History Workshop: Workshop: Images and Texts in Medical History National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda Maryland April 11–13 2016

University of Sussex: International Workshop for ECRs: Call for Participants: Science, Technology and Innovation in Neglected Diseases: Policies, Funding and Knowledge Creation 17–20 November 2015

h-madness: CfP: History 6 Philosophy of Psychology Section & UK Critical Psychiatry Network Joint Conference Leeds Trinity University 22–23 March 2016

Wellcome Library: CfP: Religion and medicine Birkbeck University of London 15–16 July 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

Academic Jobs Wiki: History of Science, Technology, and Medicine 2015–2016

University of Toronto: Assistant Professor – History of Technology

BSHS: Special Project Grants

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #08

Monday 07 September 2015

EDITORIAL:

We’re back again, one day late, but as the old cliché goes, better late than never. So here you have the latest edition of Whewell’s Gazette you weekly links list for all things #histSTM, bringing all we could scrape together from the outer reaches of cyberspace of the histories of science, technology and medicine.

Our rubric Birthday of the Week, of course, features big name scholars when there is some sort of major anniversary, which generates much Internet activity. However there are always several scholars who have birthdays in any given week and not all of them get featured in this rubric but we try to pick out ones who might not be household names but who we think deserve more public awareness.

This week’s birthday boy, John Dalton, is a perfect example of this. If one were to ask the proverbial average person on the street who Dalton was they would probably come up with something like, “didn’t he used to play for Manchester United?” Dalton was one of the founders of the modern atomic theory of matter but he also made significant contributions to a wide range of other scientific disciplines, including founding the scientific investigation of colour blindness from which he suffered himself.

Dalton remains largely unknown to the public at large but we are of the opinion that he deserves to be up there with Newton and Darwin in public awareness, as a great British scientist.

Quotes of the week:

Don’t poo on science
Caption courtesy of Jack Stilgoe (@Jackstilgoe)

“BoreVore: A predatory creature that paralyzes its prey by going on and on about its specialized diet. Mostly found in Industrialized West”. – @wetbinkt

“Why didn’t you eat your greens? Tell me. Why? Why?”

“Calm down. I wasn’t expecting the spinach inquisition” – Peter Broks (@peterbroks)

“You can’t go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.” – C. S. Lewis

Archive quote of the day: “…may the Lord deliver me from the Teutonic cult of pedestrian technocracy.” @librarycongress – Patrick McCray (@LeapingRobot)

“The imperfection of all our records of the past is too well known to geologists.” – A R Wallace (1879) h/t @Jamie_Woodward

Birthday of the Week:

Dalton by Charles Turner
after James Lonsdale
(1834, mezzotint)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

John Dalton born 6 September 1766

Yovisto: John Dalton and the Atomic Theory

CHF: John Dalton

From Alchemy to Chemistry: Five Hundred Years of Rare and Interesting Books: Dalton, John (1766–1844) A New System of Chemical Philosophy

In the Dark: The Day of Daltonism

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

io9: Every Place We Used to Think Was a Planet (until We Knew Better)

Yovisto: Sir Bernard Lovell and the Radioastronomy

Yovisto: Hermann von Helmholtz and his Theory of Vision

Mental Floss: Meet the Woman Who Discovered the Composition of the Stars

Cecelia Payne
Image Credit: Smithsonian Institution, Wikimedia Commons

Physics Today: Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 2 – Franz Xaver von Zach

History Physics: Carrington Event 1859

The Telegraph: The man who proved Stephen Hawking wrong

Leaping Robot: Astronomy’s History Trap

The Mountain Mystery: Newton and the Speed of Sound

Newton’s speed of sound experiment re-enacted at Trinity College, Cambridge

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 3 – Carl David Anderson

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: Did Lawrence doubt the bomb?

AHF: Richard Tolman

AIP: Edoardo Amaldi

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Georgian Gentleman: Let’s hear it for Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, who died on 31 August 1811

Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville

io9: Archaeologists Tracked Lewis and Clark by Following Their Trail of Laxatives

British Library: Maps and views blog: A Rare View of the Siege of Boston (1775–1776)

The Hakluyt Society Blog: Essay Prize Series Part 2: The Manuscript Circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring’s ‘A Brief Extract’

Vox: All those, confusing geography terms, explained in a gorgeous antique map

Jstor: Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition

Halley’s Log: Instructions for Halley’s third voyage

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 31 – Hermann von Helmholtz

William Savage: Pen and Pension: Eighteenth-Century Paten Medicines: Kill or Cure?

Discover: A Weapon in the Soil

Cardhouse.com: Vintage condom package design

io9: Strychnine: A Brief History of the World’s Least Subtle Poison

Thomas Morris: Worms on the pillow

The Daily Telegraph: Bubonic plague Sydney: How a city survived the black death in 1900

Rat catchers with a pile of dead vermin in Sydney in 1900. Rats were fetching up to six pence a head during the outbreak.
Picture: State Library of NSW

Surgeons’ Hall Museums: Key Object Page

Royal College of Physicians: ‘My case’: Sir Augusts Frederick D’Esté

The New York Times: Endre A. Balazs, Doctor Who Found a Lubricant for Arthritic Knees, Dies at 95

John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog: Manchester Medical Manuscripts Collection

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 6 – John James Richard Macleod

TECHNOLOGY:

Conciatore: Glass Salt

Teyler’s Museum: Electric lighter with lamp

The Atlantic: The $1 Pocket Microscope

The Conversation: LOL in the age of the telegraph

An 1809 drawing of the electric telegraph.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ptak Science Books: A Lot of Computer Data on One Sheet of Paper (1956)

Capitalism’s Cradle: The Great British (Industrial) Bake-Off

Yovisto: Ferdinand Porsche – Innovation as a Principle

Capitalism’s Cradle: How Norway Conquered Leviathan

Abraham Staghold, a blacksmith, won a £20 premium from the Society of Arts in 1772 for a whale harpoon to be fired from a swivel gun

The Recipes Project: Cooking (Over an Open Fire) In Class

Yovisto: John McCarthy and the Raise of Artificial Intelligence

itv News: Oldest chain bridge in the world’ to re-open in Llangollen

Capitalism’s Cradle: What have Asylum Seekers invented for Us?

Technology’s Stories: Speed!

Early Visual Media: The Stereoscope, Stereo-photography & 3D-Film

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Letters from Gondwana: “Kunstformen der Natur” (Art Forms of Nature)

Yovisto: Sergei Winogradsky and the Science of Bacteriology

Notches: Her Virginal Members: Chastity and Sexual Desire in the Middle Ages

Aelred of Rievaulx
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Atlas Obscura: Object of Intrigue: Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon

Historian of Biology William Provine has passed away

NCSE: William B. Provine dies

Natural History Apostilles: The first source for the spinach-iron myth

UCL Museums & Collections Blog: Behind the Mask – Research in the Noel Collection

Public Domain Review: Tribal Life in Old Lyme: Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile

Science League of America: Huxley’s Paley, Part 1

Yovisto: Max Delbrück and the Genes

Notches: Race, Class, and Sex Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Royal Historical Society: Joanne Baily ‘Manly bodies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England’

Forbes: What Archaeologists Really Think About Ancient Aliens, Lost Colonies, and Fingerprints of God

Native American pictograph (painted rock art) from a panel of images found in Horseshoe/Barrier Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. (Image via wikimedia commons user Scott Catron, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)

NCSE: Eric Davidson dies

Bodleian: Marks of Genius: Micrographia

Latintos: Connecting with Alfred Russel Wallace

Mammoth Tales: Mammoths in the News

Making Science Public: Climate wars

Medievalist.net: Pets in the Middle Ages: Evidence from Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

Skulls in the Stars: Spiders and the electric light (1887)

Embryo Project: “The Origin and Behavior of Mutable Loci in Maize” (1950), By Barbara McClintock

CHEMISTRY:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 1 – Carl Auer von Welsbach

The University of Glasgow Story: Frederick Soddy

Yovisto: Wilhelm Ostwald and Modern Physical Chemistry

The Guardian: Toxic Shock: Agatha Christie’s poisons

Christie’s toxic tally tops 30 killer compounds, which she uses in a staggering array of creative methods for murder. Photograph: Alamy

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

JHI Blog: Is There a Philosophy of History Today?

The Recipes Project: Teaching Recipes: A September Series (Vol. II)

Londonis.com: The Geek Goddess of London

Dr Sue Black (photo shared via creative commons).

Scientific American: Cross-Check: Copernicus, Darwin and Freud: A Tale of Science and Narcissism

John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog: Manchester Medical Manuscripts Collection

the many-headed monster: The job market for historians: some data, 1995–2014

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Aristocrats and paupers, farmers and tradesmen –

Where do the scientists come from?

The Atlantic: Introducing the Archive Corps

Countway Library of Medicine: The Archives for Women in Science

University of Leiden: Free Academic Images

MPIHOS: Records of Reception: Framing Knowledge on Asian Art in Early Modern Inventories

MPIHOS: Cabinetizing Art and Knowledge in Early Modern Northern Europe

The #EnvHist Weekly

Medieval Books: Medieval Posters

The H-Word: Britain’s most important historic laboratory is under threat

An early photograph of James Clerk Maxwell’s original Cavendish Laboratory (built 1874). A large archway is due to be knocked through the ground floor of the right-hand wing. From: A History of the Cavendish Laboratory (1910). Photograph: A History of the Cavendish Laboratory (1910)

The Renaissance Mathematicus: The Internet and the history of science community

NYAM: Do You Recognize These Men? Help Us Identify 19^th-century Carte de Visite Photographs

Doc Searls Weblog: Everything we know is provisional

ESOTERIC:

Conciatore: The Dregs

Conciatore: Alchemy in the Kitchen

Tesoro del Mondo, “Ars Preparatio Animalium”
Antonio Neri 1598-1600, f. 10r (MS Ferguson 67).

BOOK REVIEWS:

Forbes: God as Ultimate Artist: Frank Wilczek’s Beautiful Question

Bryn Mawr Classical Review: Emily Albu, The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire

Tabula Peutingeriana (section)—top to bottom: Dalmatian coast, Adriatic Sea, southern Italy, Sicily, African Mediterranean coast
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Financial Times: ‘The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution’, by David Wootton

Phys Org: What has science ever done for us?

Biographile: Interconnected Worldview Traced to Source in The Invention of Nature

New Scientist: The Invention of Nature find’s science’s lost hero

Humboldt’s trip to South America inspired Darwin to join the Beagle (Image: BPK/SPSG, Berlin-Brandenburg/Hermann Buresch)

Kirkus: The Hunt for Vulcan …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

Kirkus: The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

homunculus: Nature: the biography

NEW BOOKS:

University of Chicago Press: The Territories of Science and Religion

Harvard University Press: The Global Transformation of Time

M Libraries: Digital Conservancy: ‘Many paths to partial truth:’ archives, anthropology, and the power of representation

Armand Colin: Paul Bert… L’inventeur de l’école laïque

Springer: Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Royal College of Physicians: Exhibition: Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee January–July 2016

The British Museum: A Walk on the Wild Side Tunbridge Wells Museum 12 June–20 September 2015 Last Chance!

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics

Museum of the Mind: The Maudsley at War: The Story of the Hospital During the Great War Closes 24 September!

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Wallifaction: Alchemy and Avarice: Scientific and Religious Fraud in Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist” (1610)

Stephen Ouimette at Subtle, the pseudo-alchemist, in the 2015 production at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Stratford Festival: The Alchemist 1 August–3 October

The Guardian: Nicole Kidman: ‘You’re still fighting for your voice in a world that can be male-dominated’

Noël Coward Theatre: Photo 51 Bookings to 21 November 2015

National Theatre: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 7 September 2015–13 February 2016

FILMS AND EVENTS:

The Genius of George Boole

Public Domain Review: Jacob Sarnoff and the Strange World of Anatomical Filmmaking

A still from the film showing the day old infant’s veins mounted on a board.

Discover Medical London: Walking Tours: London’s Plagues

The Royal Society: Event: Dating species divergence using rocks and clocks 9–10 November 2015

The Royal Society: Where were the women boffins? 20 September 2015

APS Museum: Event: The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World 17 September 2015

British Photographic History: Symposium: Beyond Vision: Art, Photography and Science 12 September 2015

British Science Festival: How chemistry saved the Caribbean after WWII 10 September 2015

University of Bradford: Love and War: The Mathematical Way 10 September 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

L0007159 Dispensing of medical electricity. Oil painting by Edmund Br
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Dispensing of medical electricity. Oil painting by Edmund Bristow, 1824.
Oil
1824 By: Edmund BristowPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

TELEVISION:

BBC Four: Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

Museo Galileo: Galileo’s trial

Vimeo: Genius of George Boole – Graphics Reel

Youtube: Durham University: The Importance of our own Past: Research at Durham University

Youtube: Royal Society: Objectivity #34 – Pearl of Wisdom

Center for the History of Medicine: Voices from the Archives

Synthtopia: An Introduction to the Mellotron (1965)

RADIO:

Radio New Zealand: National: Cracking the Genetic Code

PODCASTS:

History of Alchemy: First 3 minutes of History of Alchemy E01

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

History of Emotions: CfP: Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 11001800 Freie Universität Berlin 30 June–2 July 2016

Medical History Workshop: Images and Texts in Medical History National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda Maryland 11–13 April 2016

University of Glasgow Dissecting the Page: Medical Paratexts Schedule 11 September 2015

History of Medicine in Ireland: CHOMI Seminar Series Semester One 2015–2016

St Anne’s College Oxford: CfP: Scientiae Oxford 2016 Disciplines of knowing in the early modern world (roughly 1400-1800) 5–7 July 2016

British Library: Lecture: A 17^th Century Revolution 2 November 2015

University of London, Birkbeck: CfP: Religion and Medicine: Healing the Body and Soul from the Middle Ages to the Modern Day 15–16 July 2016

American Association for the History of Medicine: CfP: AAHM Annual Meeting Minneapolis, Minnesota 28 April–1 May 2016

University of London: Institute of Historical Research: Trade, Discovery and Influences in the History of Herbal Medicine 14 October 2015

The British Society for Literature and Science: CfP: BLSL Winter Symposium: Science in the Archives Museum of English Rural Life and University of Reading’s Special Collections, 14 November 2015

University of Plymouth: CfP: 3-day Conference: Gender, Power, and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 7–9 April 2016

Notches: CfP: Histories of Asian/Asian American Sexualities

the daily: How has midwifery, child birth changed throughout history? Find out at Dittrick Museum of Medical History event 24 September 2015

Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan: Scientific Heritage at World Exhibitions and Beyond. The Long XXth Century 20-22 September 2015

Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis: CfP: The History of Science and Contemporary Scientific Realism 19-21 February 2016

British Library: Lecture: The Mapping of Cyprus 1485–1885 25 September 2015

SocPhilSciPract: CfP Metasciences: New Trends in Metaphysics of Science Paris 16–18 December 2015

SHARP 2016 Panel: CfP: The Languages of the Medical Book Paris 18-21 July

University of Cambridge: CRASSH: The Matter of Mimesis 17–18 December 2015

Notches: CfP: Histories of Sexuality and Religion

Leopoldina: Die Ordnungen der Dinge 5–7 October 2015

Canadian Journal of History Special Issue: CfP: The Early Modern Military-Medical Complex

Historiens de la santé: CfP: Medicine and Manuscripts 900–1150 Kalamazoo 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

Aarhus University: Postdoc position (2 years): Histories of thought experiments

HSS: NSF-Funded Travel Grants for 2015 HSS Meeting Deadline 30 September!

University of Edinburgh: European Research Council PhD Studentship: Philosophy of Science

Natual Reserve System: University of California: ISEECI Postdoctoral Fellowship in California Ecological and/or Environmental History

Danish Council for Independent Research: Intuitions in Science and Philosophy 2 Postdocs and I PhD Student

Yale University: Senior Tenured Appointment History of Science

Washington University: Assistant Professor History of Medicine

Purdue University: R. Mark Lubbers Chair in the History of Science

Society for Renaissance Studies: Conference Grants

SocPhilSciPract: University of Geneva: PhD Position in Philosophy of Physics or Philosophy of Science

AHF: Fall 2015 Intern

University of Pittsburgh: Associate/Full Professor of History and Philosophy of Science

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #09

Monday 14 September 2015

EDITORIAL:

It seems that we have just finished posting one edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list when another one comes steaming full tilt around the corner carrying with it the best of the histories of science, technology and medicine that it could pick up in the last seven days in the Internet.

In recent times there has been much news in the science journals about the reproducibility of experimental results or rather the failure to reproduce them. A lot of these reports seem to think that this is a modern phenomenon caused by whatever bogey man that the writer has chosen to hang the blame on. However if these science writers had a better grounding in the history of science they would realise that this problem has been around since people have been doing science.

There have been both cases of genuine discoveries that contemporaries failed to confirm in their attempts to repeat the experiments and cases of discoveries that weren’t discoveries at all.

Just to take a couple of cases from the seventeenth century. Newton was attacked from all sides when he first announced his discovery that white light was actually a mixture of the whole colour spectrum. Much of that criticism was based on theoretical grounds but some of it was that others failed to obtain his results when repeating his prism experiments. In this case the blame lay on the poor quality of the glass prisms available but it did delay the acceptance of his theory considerably.

Earlier in the century many ‘discoveries’ were made and published with the new telescope that other observers were completely unable to confirm. This missing confirmation was because the discoveries weren’t discoveries at all but optical illusions caused by various factors. Francesco Fontana, a noted constructor of telescopes, even published a whole book of such discoveries, his Novae coelestium terrestriumq[ue] rerum observationes, et fortasse hactenus non vulgatae from 1645.

The progress of science is never smooth but proceeds by fits and starts.

Quotes of the week:

“In other words, don’t continually re-invent the wheel, use the tools that are already out there…” – Sophia Collins (@sophiacol)

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.” – Mary Wollstonecraft

“Striking that in her 1953 Nature article, Franklin thanks Crick, Wilkins and Stokes “for discussion”, but *not* Watson”. – Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb)

“’I’ve been a very bad girl,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I need to be punished.’

‘Very well,’ he said and installed Windows 10 on her laptop”. – @50NerdsofGrey

“The duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” – Oscar Wilde

“Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” – Guindon

“Math is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your writing is.” – Leslie Lamport

“Formal math is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your math is.” – Leslie Lamport h/t @JohnDCook

“Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine”. —Sir Michael Atiyah, 2002 h/t @divbyzero

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted”. – Ralph Waldo Emerson h/@Fayway

Birthdays of the Week:

Jacque Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Parthes born 10 September 1788

Boucher de Perthes
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yovisto: Jacques de Perthes and European Archaeology

Encyclopaedia Britannica: Jacque Boucher de Perthes

August Kekulé born 7 September 1829

Science Notes: Today in Science Histoy –September 7 – August Kekulé

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Yovisto: James van Allen and the Weather in Space

Yovisto: Edward Appleton and the Ionosphere

The Washington Post: Richard G. Hewlett

Verso: Women Computing the Stars

Unidentified women and men standing outside the Mount Wilson Observatory’s Pasadena office, where women computers made the calculations necessary to answer some of the most profound questions in the field of astronomy during the early part of the 20th century. Detail from a photo taken on April 14, 1917, by an unknown photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Leroy Jackson and Ernest Wende’s Interview

Astronomical Society of the Pacific: Women in Astronomy: An Introductory Resource Guide

Voices of the Manhattan Project: David Hall’s Interview

ABC News: The old Perth observatory: From isolated weather station to centre of history

AIP: Arthur Holly Compton 1892–1962

AIP: Betty Compton – Session I

Corpus Newtonicum: Newton, the Man or: of valuable lists and juicy quotes

about education: J.J. Thomson Biography

Voices of the Manhattan Project: John W. Healy’s Interview

History NASA: Emblems of Exploration (pdf)

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 11 – Harvey Fletcher

Yovisto: Irène Joliot-Curie and Artificial Radioactivity

Irène and Marie Curie
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Highbrow: Leó Szilárd

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 12 – Moon

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Royal Museums Greenwich: Looking across the Atlantic in 18^th-century maps

in propria persona: On the legal basis for English possession of North America

Halley’s Log: Halley writes from Dartmouth

Halley’s Log: Paramore pink at Spithead

Chart of Spithead by William Heather, 1797; Spithead is the channel north-east of the Isle of Wight (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Yovisto: Henry Hudson’s Voyages in North America

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Public Health: Worldly approaches to global health: 1851 to the present

Remedia: Showing the Instruments: Vesalius and the Tools of Surgery and Anatomy

Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, Instruments (© National Library of Medicine).

University of Glasgow Library: Pox, pustules and pestilence A history of syphilis treatment

BBC: Silicon Valley’s 91-year-old designer

Thomas Morris: A 19^th-century doctor’s guide to etiquette

Thomas Morris: Do no harm – unless it’s a criminal

Center for the History of Medicine: On View: Post-mortem set in wooden case, 1860–1880

Yovisto: Marthe Louise Vogt and the Neurotransmitters

Marthe Louise Vogt

Yovisto: Bernard Siegfried Albinus and his Anatomic Works

Slate: Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient

Yovisto: Thomas Sydenham – the English Hippocrates

Thomas Morris: The self-inflicted lithotomy

Academia: When foods became remedies in ancient Greece: The curious case of garlic and other substances

Center for the History of Medicine: Oral History: Carola Eisenberg

Center for the History of Medicine: Anne Pappenheimer Forbes

Photograph of Anne Pappenheimer Forbes, M.D.
1962

io9: Early Forensics Helped Solve England’s Gruesome “Jigsaw Murders” Case

A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life: A Gruesome Tale of Self-Surgery

Yovisto: Phineas Gage’s Accident and the Science of the Mind and the Brain

TECHNOLOGY:

Science & Society: Picture Library: Johnson the First Rider on the Pedestrian Hobbyhorse, 1819

Visualising Late Antiquity: Going Down the Drain in Late Antiquity

Trans Newcomen Soc: Humphrey Gainsborough (1718–1776) Cleric Engineer and Inventor (pdf)

Medium: Close at Hand: A Pocket History of Technology

Georgian Gentleman: When cotton was king… a visit to Quarry Bank Mill

Conciatore: A Very Good Run

James S. Huggins’ Refrigerator Door: First Computer Bug

Science Notes: September 9 – Today in Science History – First Computer Bug

Dark Roasted Blend: Antique Digital Calculators & Other Steampunk Gear

Yovisto: Émile Baudot and his Telegraph

Yovisto:Harvey Fletcher – the Father of Stereophonic Sound

Zen Pencils: Robert Goddard

Jalopnik: That Victorian-Living Couple is Just Playing Dress-up Until They Get A Real Victorian Car

Nautilus: This Used To Be the Future

Science Notes: Storm Glass Barometer Pendant Instructions

The Guardian: Battle to save historic rail line that heralded the age of science

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Yovisto: Comte de Buffon and his Histoire Naturelle

Notches: Women’s Experiences in Fornication and Paternity Suits in Massachusetts, 1740–1800

Archaeodeath: The Dead at the Hunterian

Medievalist.net: Ten Strange Medieval Ideas about Animals

University of Cambridge: Research: What is a monster?

Smithsonian: NMNH: Unassuming Octocoral Collected over 55 Years Ago Found to be New Genus and Species

The Plate: Contrary to Popular Belief, the Modern Pig has Many Parents

ars technica uk: Scientific Method/Science & Exploration: Humans aren’t so special after all: The Fuzzy evolutionary boundaries of Homo Sapiens

Ellen Hutchins: Ireland’s First Female Botanist

Natural History Museum (2014). http://data.nhm.ac.uk/specimen/a47cd2ee-3c50-498e-be1b-bd2c941f4f61

AMNH: Green Frogs Mating & Frog Dissection

Penn Biographies: Joseph Leidy (1823–1891)

Letters from Gondwana: The Legacy of Ulisse Aldrovani

Yovisto: Luigi Galvani’s Discoveries in Bioelectricity

Mirror: Charles Darwin confessed his atheism in a private letter which has gone up for auction

NMNH: Human Family Tree

Trowelblazers: Rising Star Trowelblazers

Embryo Project: Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)

Audubon: Sketch: The Oilbird: Is This Thing Even a Bird

AMNH: Wonderful World of Wasp Nests

Smithsonian.com: Four Species of Homo You’ve Never Heard Of

The Atlantic: 6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing New Species of Ancient Human

Hyperallergic: A 17^th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey

Maria Sibylla Merian, Plate 49 from ‘Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium’ (1705) (courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt)

Anita Guerrini: History, animals, science, food: The biologist in the ashram (with a walk-on by Harpo Marx)

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 13 – Hans Christian Joachim Gram

CHEMISTRY:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 8 – Willard Frank Libby

CHF: Prototype for the Perkin-Elmer Model 12 Infrared Spectrophotometer

Science Notes: September 10 – Today in Science History – Waldo Semon

Waldo Semon – Discovered plasticized PVC or vinyl. Credit: Washington University Chemical Engineering Department

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Communication of the ACM: Innovators Assemble: Ada Lovelace, Walter Isaacson, and the Superheroines of Computing

Double Refraction: Histories of science as murder mysteries, or: Steven Weinberg as Henning Mankell

Inside the Science Museum: From Moscow to the Museum

The Recipes Project: First Monday Library Chat: National Library of Scotland

The #EnvHist Weekly

The Recipes Project: Giving Welsh Pupils a Flavour of Antiquity

Technologies of Daily Life: Schools Day. Image courtesy of Evelien Bracke.

Springer Link: History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Special Issue: Experimentation in Twentieth-Century Agricultural Science Contents Page

Niche: Cultivation

William Savage: Pen and Pension: Censoring History

Prospect: Science is fallible, just like us

JHI Blog: Global Microhistory: One or Two Things That I Know About It

CHoM News: Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @HarvardHistMed

Fiction Reboot: Daily Dose: The Act of Becoming: History and Process

The Newsstand: Clemson professor delving into the foundation of scientific philosophy

Stanford News: After 20 years, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thrives on the web

The Recipes Project: History Bound Up in Every Bite: Food, Environment, and Recipes in the Western Civ Survey

Double Refraction: Lorraine Daston on history as fiction – critical thoughts

Nautilus: Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot

Concocting History: A perfume of Syria

Second century Roman glass. Some of these bottles may have contained perfume. Source: Wikipedia.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Reassembling the early modern social network

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: Leibniz’s early reflections on natural history and experiment

ESOTERIC:

Conciatore: Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ Medici

Academia: Court Astrologers and Historical Writing in Early Abbasid Baghdad: An Appraisal (pdf)

Enchanted History: New Blog on Witchcraft in Early Modern England and Beyond

UCL: Museums & Collections Blog: Robert Noel and the ‘Science’ of Phrenology

Conciatore: Stonework

BOOK REVIEWS:

The New Rambler: Sleight of Hand

Nature: Genetics: Dawkins, redux

The History of Emotions Blog: History in British Tears

Popular Science: A is for Arsenic – Kathryn Harkup

THE: The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, by David Wootton

Review 31: Against Nature Sex Addiction: A Critical History

The Spectator: Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis – or sell them out?

homunculus: Nature: the biography

Forbes: Ancient Guides, Ancient Science, And A Virtual Academy For Idlers

NEW BOOKS:

Historiens de la santé: Mental health nursing: The working lives of paid carers, 1800s–1900s

Colossal: New Japanese Paper Notebooks Featuring Vintage Science Illustrations Merged with Hand-embroidery

University of Chicago Press: Making “Nature” The History of a Scientific Journal

Historiens de la santé: A History of Male Psychological Disorders in Britain, 1945–1980

Historiens de la santé: Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940: Contagions of Feeling

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Mystic Seaport – The Museum of America and the Sea: Ships Clocks & Stars 19 September 2015–28 March 2016

Captain James Cook (1728-1779), by William Hodges. Cook relied on chronometers in his later voyages. Image courtesy National Maritime Museum.

Science Museum: Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age Opens 18 September 2015

Royal Society: Seeing Closer: 350 years of microscopy 29 June–23 November 2015

Museum of the History of Science: Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War 4 Weeks Till Exhibition Closes!

THEATRE AND OPERA:

The Guardian: Nicole Kidman admits to nerves before stage return in Photograph 51

Buxton Opera House: The Trials of Galileo 21 September – International Tour: March 2014–December 2017

FILMS AND EVENTS:

ICCESS: The Time Travelling Operating Theatre

L0001839 A surgical operation being performed, circa 1900.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A surgical operation being performed by W.G. Spencer and others at the Westminster Hospital, London.
Photograph
circa 1900 Broadway
Published: 1900

Royal Asiatic Society: Brian Houghton Hodgson Study Day 26 September 2015

Philly Voice: Games & debate abound at Women in Science event 19 September 2015

BBC: Steve Wozniak: Shocked and amazed by Steve Jobs movie

Royal Society: Open House Weekend 2015 19–20 September

Oxford Playhouse: Charles Simonyi Lecture: Putting the Higgs Boson in its Place

Westminster Arts Library: London Plague: Sick City 24 September 2015

The Heritage Alliance: The H word: ‘heritage’ revisited

Royal Society: Hooke’s microscopic world 19 September 2015

Royal Society: Scientific conflict through the ages 20 September 2015

Royal Society: Darwin and the evolution of emotion 19 September 2015

Royal Society: A 13th century theory of everything 19 September 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Galileo before the Holy Office, by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

TELEVISION:

pbs: NOVA: Dawn of Humanity

AHF: Manhattan: Season One Recaps

SLIDE SHOW:

Scientific American: Good and Bad Inventions from 1865

Diving Mask An inventor in Braddock’s Field, Penn, added a simple valve to the mouthpiece for exhaling and inhaling air.

VIDEOS:

History of Alchemy Podcast Presents: Rudolf Two Trippin Cam

Youtube: Podcastnik: History of Alchemy Episode 1: Introduction

CHF: Making and Knowing (fake) Coral

Wikimedia Commons: How to edit Wikipedia – RSC series – Andy Mabbett

Youtube: BSHS Plenary Lecture: Iwan Morus Wales, science and Welsh science

Youtube: Anna Ziegler talks about writing Rosalind Franklin for ‘Photograph 51’

Vimeo: Train Journeys in to Manchester in 1850

Youtube: Berkeley Lab Founder Ernest O. Lawrence Demonstrates the Cyclotron Concept

RADIO:

BBC World Service: Discovery: Death of a Physicist

BBC Radio 4: An Eye for Pattern: The Letters of Dorothy Hodgkin

Molecular model of penicillin by Dorothy Hodgkin, c. 1945
Source: Wikimedia Commons

BBC Radio 4: Computing Britain

PODCASTS:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

University of Warwick: CfP: Shaping the Shelf: Print culture and the construction of collective identity (1460–1660) 5 March 2016

Royal Society: Open House: #histsci lectures 19-20 September 2015

University of Durham: Where Science and Society Meet 23–24 September 2015

CHF: Brown Bag Lectures Fall 2015

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Werkgroep 18e eeuw: CfP: Flavours of the Eighteenth Century Brussels 10-11 March 2016

SSHM: CfP: Religion and Medicine: Healing the Body and Soul from the Middle Ages to the Modern Day Birckbeck College 15-16 July 2016

St John’s College Oxford: Architecture and Experience in the Nineteenth Century 17–18 March 2016

Spinoza Research Newtwork: CfP: Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy Birckbeck College 14–16 April 2016

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: CfP: Eighth Joint Meeting BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS 22–25 June 2016

Durham University: CN-CS: CfP: One day Conference: Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines 12 March 2016

International Cartographical Association: Announcement of the 1^st International Workshop on the Origin and Evolution of Portolan Lisbon, Portugal Charts 5-6 June 2016

Wellcome Library Blog: History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series 2015–2016

National Maritime Museum Greenwich: CfP: From Sea to Sky: the Evolution of Air Navigation from the Ocean and Beyond 10 June 2016

Institute of Welsh Maritime Historical Studies: 7th Annual Conference of MOROL 31 October 2015

National Maritime Museum: Maritime History and Culture Seminars 2015–16

Leipzig & Hannover: Leibniz Summer School 7–16 July 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

University of Uppsala: 1-2 Ph.D. positions in History of Science and Ideas linked to the research programme “Medicine at the Borders of Life: Foetal Research and the Emergence of Ethical Controversy in Sweden”

University of Uppsala: 1-2 Postdoctoral positions in History of Science and Ideas linked to the research programme “Medicine at the Borders of Life: Foetal Research and the Emergence of Ethical Controversy in Sweden”

HSS: Dependent Care Grant Application – 2015 Meeting

Norwegian University of Science and Technology: PhD Positions at the NTNU, Faculty of Humanities

University of Vienna: 1 Doctoral Student Position & 6 Associate Positions The Sciences in Historical, Philosophical and Cultural Contexts

South East DTC: ESRC Postgraduate Funding

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #10

Monday 21 September 2015

EDITORIAL:

Another seven days have slipped by and once again it’s time for Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM links list bringing its eager readers the best from the last seven days of the histories of science, technology and medicine swept up from the distance corners of cyberspace for their perusal and delectation.

The history of science theatre event of the year is without any doubt Nicole Kidman making a rare appearance on the London stage as Rosalind Franklin in “Photograph 51”. Unfortunately the play, which is not new, perpetuates a major history of science myth in its very title. The myth says that Maurice Wilkins showed Franklin’s x-ray crystallography photograph 51 of DNA to James Watson without her permission and he was able to solve the structure of DNA upon seeing it.

As Matthew Cobb has clearly shown in his new book Life’s Great Secret nearly everything in this story is false. Photograph 51 was not made by Franklin but by Raymond Gosling who had been Wilkins’ doctoral student, was then transferred to Franklin and then back to Wilkins’ as Franklin decided to leave the King’s College laboratory. At the time Wilkins showed the photo to Watson he was Gosling’s doctoral supervisor and so was perfectly entitled to do so, although whether he was wise to do so is another question. More important despite the claims he made in his book, The Double Helix, Watson would not have been able to determine the structure of DNA from this photo.

More interestingly it was Crick who actually derived the structure of DNA using, amongst other things, data from Franklin’s work that she herself had made public in a lecture that Crick attended.

It is interesting to see how the critics reacted to this new historical information. In her review in the Telegraph Kate Mulcahy claims that “The debate rages on” whilst at the same time linking to Cobb’s earlier Guardian article laying out the true facts; in my opinion more than somewhat disingenuous. In his excellent review in the Guardian, Stephen Curry points out that “the real story is…more complex” (with reference to the use of Photograph 51) whilst linking in a footnote to the Cobb article with the comment. Matthew Cobb’s recent article gives an efficient summary of the facts of the matter”.

Whatever it would appear from the review that the piece is well worth going to see.

Noël Coward Theatre: Photograph 51 Till 21 November 2015

Nicole Kidman as Rosalind Franklin Photograph: Johan Persson/Johan Persson
Source: The Guardian

The New York Times: In ‘Photograph 51’, Nicole Kidman Is a Steely DNA Scientist

The Telegraph: Rosalind Franklin should be a feminist icon – we women in science need her more than ever

The Guardian: Photograph 51: how do you bring science to the stage?

New Scientist: Photograph 51: Inside the race to understand DNA

Quotes of the week:

“Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for men to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?” – Georges Cuvier h/t @hist_astro

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” – Iris Murdoch h/t @askpang

“In the UK we call them lifts but in the US they call them elevators, because we’re raised differently”. – Moose Allain (@MooseAllain)

“Does anyone know what the smallest number is that can’t be described in a single tweet?” – Guy Longworth (@GuyLongworth)

Ding dong dell

Pussy’s in the well

Who put her in?

Schrödinger, Erwin

What is her state?

Indeterminate – Matthew Hankins (@mc_hankins)

He was very careful during bondage sessions. He always used a safe word that contained upper and lower case letters and at least one number. – @50Nerds of Grey

[History] does not use induction or deduction, it does not demonstrate, it narrates. —Collingwood discussing Croce. h/t @gabridli

Birthday of the Week:

John Goodricke born 17 September 1764

Yovisto: John Goodricke and the Variable Star Persei

teleskopos: Sights and sounds: darkness and silence

Alexander von Humboldt born 14 September 1769

Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806
Source: Wikimedia Commons

New Scientist: The Invention of Nature finds science’s lost hero

National Geographic: Why Is the Man Who Predicted Climate Change Forgotten?

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Inside the Science Museum: Russia’s 19^th century cosmic pioneers

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 14 – Charles François de Cisternay du Fay

Charles François de Cisternay du Fay
Source: Wikimedia Commons

arXiv: 100 Years of General Relativity (pdf)

Scientific American: Guest Blog: Paris: City of lights and cosmic rays

AIP: Murray Gell-Mann

New Science Theory: William Gilbert On The Magnet (Full text English New Translation)

Forbes: New Evidence The Nazis Didn’t Come close to the Bomb

Starts with a Bang: Maxwell’s Unification Revolution

World Digital Library: Explanation of the Telescope

journals.cambridge.org: Connecting Heaven and Man: The role of astronomy in ancient Chinese society and culture

The Timaru Herald: Big telescope with an even bigger history to be restored in Fairlie

The historic Brashear telescope will be the centrepiece of the new Astronomy Centre built by Earth and Sky near the shore of Lake Tekapo.
Source: The Timaru Herald

In the Dark: A Botanic Garden of Planets

guff: Einstein’s Amazing Scientific Contemporaries That Changed the World

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

BuzzFeed News: The Wreck of HMS Erebus: How a Landmark Discovery Triggered a Fight for Canada’s History

Scientific Data: Roads and cities of 18^th century France

PBA Galleries: The Warren Heckrotte Collection of Rare Cartography

Miguel Costansó’s Carta Reducida Del Oceano Asiatico, Ó Mar Del Sur – See more at: http://www.pbagalleries.com/content/2015/09/14/the-warren-heckrotte-collection-of-rare-cartography/#sthash.KgAcxIEl.dpuf

globes.consciencebibliotek.be: Erfgoed Antwerpen, Blaeu Globes

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Dr Alun Withey: Medicine in a Vacuum – Practitioners in Early Modern Wales

Yovisto: William Budd and the Infectious Diseases

storify: Things I’m going to miss teaching my medical students

Embryo Project: Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879–1966)

Margaret Sanger in 1922
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Center for the History of Medicine: Barbara Barlow

Morbid Anatomy Museum: Anatomical Atlases Digitized

19^th Century-Disability Cultures and Contexts: Talking Gloves

Thomas Morris: The supernumerary leg

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 17 – Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne du Boulogne

Thomas Morris: Give that man a medal

Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow: Glasgow Surgical Instrument Makers

Newman’s cytoscope for examination of the bladder by John Trotter Ltd.

Thomas Morris: Nutmeg is the best spice for students

The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Field Hospital Unit Active in England

Academia: Typhoid Fever and Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, 1891

Remedia: Gossip, News and Manners: the Barber-Surgeon in 16^th Century Italy

Thomas Morris: The mystery of the poisonous cheese

The Medicine Chest: Mapping histories of medicine

TECHNOLOGY:

Conciatore: The Discovery of Glass

English Heritage: 5 Clocks Which Tell the Story of Time

The Grandfather Clock at Mount Grace Priory
Source: English Heritage

Capitalism’s Cradle: How many industrial Revolutions?

Teyler’s Museum: Dompelbatterij

99% Invisible: Episode 180: Reefer Madness

Yovisto: Happy Birthday Linux

Tux the penguin, mascot of Linux
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Contributor: Decoding Alan’s apple

Leaping Robot: Frank Malina’s Cosmos

Still image of Malina’s Vortex and 3 Molecules (1965)
Source: Leaping Robot

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Why Evolution is True: The duck-faced lacewing, its baby and an ancient Egyptian inscription

York Daily Record: Dover Intelligent Design trial: 10 years later

3 Quarks Daily: The Scopes “Monkey Trial”, Part 1: Issues, Fact, and Fiction

Scopes in 1925
Source: Wikimedia Commons

3 Quarks Daily: The Scopes “Monkey Trial”, Part 2: Evidence, Confrontation, Resolution, Consequences

AMNH: Digitizing Darwin’s Work

Hakai Magazine: The Great Quake and the Great Drowning

Embryo Project: Wilhelm Roux (1850–1924)

Google Cultural Institute: Historic Moments: Beauty from Nature: Art of the Scott Sisters

Notches: Revisiting Loves Golden Age

Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience: Mechanical Neuroscience: Emil du Bois-Reymond’s Innovations in Theory and Practice

The Guardian: Revealed: how Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago

Indigenous rock art in Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory. Researchers say stories about sea level rises in Australia date back though more than 7,000 years of continuous oral tradition. Photograph: Helen Davidson for the Guardian

Jacob Darwin Hamblin: The Atom does not wait for favors from nature

The Raw Story: The ‘missing link’ in evolution is a myth that comes from medieval theology not modern science

Public Domain Review: Dr Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon

PNAS.org: Strong upslope shifts in Chimborazo’s vegetation over two centuries since Humboldt (pdf)

Notches: Out in the Open: Rural Life, Respectability, and the Nudist Park

NCSE: Huxley’s Paley, Part 3

News Works: How Old Faithful earned its name

Until Darwin: The “American School”: A brief timeline of the Monogenist/polygenist Debate

Until Darwin: Digital Biography for the Works Cited in Darwin’s “A Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species” (Updated)

Geschichte der Geologie: Von den Untiefen der Meere zu den Gipfeln der Welt

University of Cambridge: Research: The Magna Carta of scientific maps

Sigmund & Jocelyn: Fine Art: Birdman 1: George Edwards

Artist George Edwards
Source: Sigmund & Jocelyn

Embryo Project: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1890– )

Why Evolution is True: Another DNA anniversary, which ells a different story from the textbooks

Current Biology: Oswald Avery, DNA, and the transformation of biology

New Historian: Navy Drove Fishing Globalisation in 16^th Century England

CHEMISTRY:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 15 – Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Butlerov

Conciatore: Deadly Fumes

The Renaissance Mathematicus: A breath of fresh air

Stephen Hales
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 18 – Edwin Mattison McMillan

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Creator unknown

Lady Science: Issue 12: The Pill in America: Subscribe!

oral contraceptives, 1970s
Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of Glasgow Library: Themes from Smith and Rousseau: the best and the worst aspects of archival research

Now Appearing: On a Bacon Hunt

Double Refraction: Is it post-modern to be present-centred? Thoughts prompted by Nick Tosh

American Science: We’re Back, or, Monday on the Blog with George

Bookplate of George Sarton
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Recipes Project: Teaching High School American History With Cookbooks

the many-headed monster: What is to be done? Mending academic history

NHM: Digital Museum: Mobilising the world’s natural history collections for the benefit of human well-being

The Renaissance Mathematicus: When Living in the Past Distorts the Past; Or, Why I Study the Victorian Era

Forbes: History as Big Data: 500 Years of Book Images and Mapping Million of Books

The Recipes Project: Spicing up the Victorians: Teaching Mrs. Beeton’s Recipe for Mango Chutney

Niche: New Scholars New Links

History in Photographs: Vintage Harvard

Observatory group, ca. 1910

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Revolution contra Gradualism: Let the debate begin

International Commission on the History of Meteorology: History of Meteorology – Volume 7 (2015) Contents Page

Macro-Typography: Glory of Asia

Chronologia Universalis: On the Road: In Royal Prussia

The Washington Post: How publishing a 35,000-word manifesto led to the Unabomber

A view from the bridge: The undisciplinarian

Making Science Public: Naturel/artificial

ESOTERIC:

Forbidden Histories: Two Years of ‘Forbidden Histories’

Academia: Scientific rationalism, occult empiricism? Representations of the microphysical world, c. 1900

Hermetic.com: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (full text English)

Conciatore: A Network of Alchemists

“The Alchemist” 1558, Pieter Brugle the Elder.

British Library: Digitised Manuscripts: Alchemical Rolls (The Ripley Scrolls)

BOOK REVIEWS:

Science Book a Day: House Guests, House Pests: A Natural History of Animals in the Home

University of Glasgow Library: Glasgow Incunabula Project Update: The Nuremberg Chronicle

Academia: Women at the Edge of Science

Public Books: Speaking in Science

Elle Thinks: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

The Independent: The Royal Society Winton Prize: Top scientists and shortlisted authors share that have excited them

Science Book a Day: The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur

NEW BOOKS:

VRIN: Alzheimer La vie, la mort, la reconnaissance

Renaissance Mathematicus: The growing pile – too many good books not enough time

Historiens de la santé: Soigner le cancer au XVIIIe siècle. Triomphe et déclin de la thérapie par la ciguë dans le Journal de Médecine

Palgrave Macmillan: Psychiatry in Communist Europe

Academia: Dis/unity of Knowledge: Models for the Study of Modern Esotericism and Science

David Wootton: The Invention of Science Web Site

Museum Boerhaave: Stripboek: Ehrenfest!

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Science Museum: Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age Opens 18 September 2015

Galileo’s World: e-newsletter September

BBC: Tenby man who invented the equals sign remembered in exhibit

The first known equation, equivalent to 14x+15=71 in modern syntax.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Museum Boerhaave: Einstein & Friends 19 September 2015–3 January 2016

Science Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy 24 September 2015–28 March 2016

Painting of Julia Margaret Cameron by George Frederic Watts, c. 1850-1852
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics Till 25 October 2015

Science Museum: Cosmos and Culture Till 31 December 2015

The Old Operating Theatre, Museum & Herb Garret: The Operating Theatre

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Gielgud Theatre: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Till 18 June 2016

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Florence Nightingale Museum: Please, Matron! Dramatic reconstruction of a 1900 lecture to nursing students 22 October 2015

Florence Nightingale Museum: Meet the Florence Nightingale Museum Curator 28 September 2015

Victoria University in the University of Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies: Early Modern Interdisciplinary Graduate Forum I: Adam Richter Biblical History in the Natural Philosophy of John Wallis (plus other talks) 6 October

Bodleian Library: Women in Science: Wikipedia improve-a thon 14 October

Wellcome Library: A celebration of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and 150 years of medicine 29 September 2015

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

RGU Sport, Aberdeen: Journey to the Centre of the Earth 29 September 2015

Surgeon’s Hall Museum Edinburgh: Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man Lecture 28 September 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

The student of chemistry and pharmacy by Karl Joseph Litschaur
Source: Wikigallery.org

TELEVISION:

PBS America: 1,000 Days of Fear: The Deadly Race at Los Alamos

SLIDE SHOW:

Fadesingh: The Age of Games: Black Magic, Mathematics, Automata & Games

VIDEOS:

Youtube: The Einstein Theory of Relativity (Max Fleischer, 1923)

Youtube: Tidal predicting machine Part II

Youtube: How the Moon Affects the Ocean Tides – Tides and the Moon – CharlieDeanArchive / Archival Footage

Youtube: Visita do físico Albet Einstein ao Brasil completa 90 anos

RADIO:

BBC: Ada Lovelace: Letters shed light on tech visionary

BBC: Computing Britain

PODCASTS:

Nevada Public Radio: Even Einstein Made Mistakes

Physics Buzz Blog: A Time Capsule of the Universe

Science for the People: Eye of the Beholder

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

HaPoC 2015: 3^rd International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing Pisa Italy 8–11 October 2015

Advances in the History of Psychology: Workshop: Photography, Representation, and Therapy Villa Di Breme Oven, Via Martinelli 23 in Cinisello Balsamo 24 September

MPIWG: Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe” Colloquia 2015/16

BSECS: CfP: BSECS 45^th Annual Conference St Hugh’s College Oxford 6-8 January 2016

Athens: Workshop: Science Fiction. Jules Verne and 19^th Century Science 17–18 December 2015

Almagest: CfP: Special issues Science fiction in the framework of science and literature studies Deadline 15 December 2015

University of Cambridge: History of Medicine Seminars

University of Paderborn: International Workshop: Emilie du Châtelet – Laws of Nature/Laws of Morals 23–24 October 2015

Advances in the History of Psychology: Round up: Calls for Papers in Allied Fields

LOOKING FOR WORK:

H–Physical Sciences: American Physical Society StudTravel Grants

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering: Dibner Chair in History or Philosophy of Technology

Bern Dibner
Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of Queensland: 3 Research Fellows Harnessing Intellectual Property to Build Food Safety

University of Vienna: 1 Fully paid student position + 6 associate positions

University of Pittsburgh: Assistant Professor History and Philosophy of Science

University of Pittsburgh: Associate Professor History and Philosophy of Science

MIT: Program in Science, Technology, and Society Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #11

Monday 28 September 2015

EDITORIAL:

The world didn’t end on Sunday night so we are back again with your weekly #histSTM links list, Whewell’s Gazette, bringing you all that could be culled from cyberspace on the histories of science technology and medicine during the last seven days.

The reference to the end of the world is of course to Sundays so-called Super-Blood-Moon or to put it somewhat less sensationally and more scientifically the simultaneous occurrence of the moon at perigee in its elliptical orbit around the earth and a lunar eclipse caused by the earth passing between the moon and the sun.

Super Blood Moon

This double astronomical phenomenon illustrates two important developments in the long history of astronomy. The astronomers of Babylon were the first to realise that lunar eclipses follow a predictable arithmetical pattern and were thus able, using an algebraic algorithm, to predict the occurrence of this particular astronomical phenomenon. It would appear that the ancient Greeks were the first to realise that eclipses are the result of the earth casting its shadow onto the moon when both of them and the sun were in the right alignment.

The world would have to wait almost another couple of thousand years before the young English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks demonstrated in the seventeenth century that the moon also obeyed Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in its orbit around the earth, that is an elliptical orbit with the earth at one focus of the ellipse, thus processing a furthest point, apogee, and a nearest point, perigee, in its orbit.

Put these historical astronomical discoveries together and you have the correct scientific explanation of Sunday’s Super-Blood-Moon. The next one is in 2033 so don’t forget to set the alarm clock.

Quotes of the week:

“It’s time to say it again: I am an atheist but Richard Dawkins does not speak for me”. – Karen James (@kejames)

“Autocorrect just changed Winton Prize into Wino Prize! In vino veritas?” – Thony Christie (@rmathematicus)

“Ultimately the one goal appointed to science may be not to comprehend the nature of things, but to comprehend that it is incomprehensible.” – Emil du Bois-Reymond

“Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.” – G. H. Hardy h/t @AnalysisFact

“There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath”. – Jason Gay (@jasongay)

“There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world.” – Lobachevsky

“the natural scientist is the man [sic] to decide about wombats and unicorns.”—W. V. O. Quine h/t @GuyLongworth

The Old English word for ‘equinox’ is ’emniht’ (from efen + niht ‘even nights’); so today is the ‘hærfestlice emniht’, autumnal equinox.

After the equinox, as Byrhtferth of Ramsey says, ‘langað seo niht and wanað se dæg’ (the night lengthens and the day wanes). – Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford)

“Occupy yourselves with the study of mathematics. It is the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.” – Thomas Mann h/t @intmath

“Note to self- if you dig up graves you’re a criminal and creep but if you wait long enough you’re an archaeologist”. – Trver Noah (@Trevornoah)

“And when you read other people’s diaries and mail, you’re a historian”. – Adam Shapiro (@TryingBiology)

How, great,

to, be, a, comma,

and, separate,

one, word, fromma,

nother. – Brian Bilston (@brian_bilston)

“History just burps, and we taste again the raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.” – Julian Barnes h/t (@jondresner)

Birthday of the Week:

Michael Faraday born 22 September 1791

Michael Faraday delivering a Christmas Lecture at the Royal Institution in 1856.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yovisto: A Life of Discoveries – the Great Michael Faraday

Brain Pickings: Michael Faraday on Mental Discipline and How to Cure Our Propensity for Self-Deception

Mental Floss: 10 Electrifying Facts for Michael Faraday’s Birthday

Portrait of Faraday in his late thirties
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Skulls in the Stars: A Cornucopia of Faraday Posts!

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 21 – Donald Arthur

KAUST Museum: Explore the Museum > Astronomy and Navigation

Palamar Observatory: Searching the Sky for Dangerous Neighbors: Eleanor Helin and the 18-inch Telescope

Dr. Helin holding the discovery image for asteroid Ra-Shalom, circa 1979. (Helin Family Estate)

The Guardian: Building the Bomb (Multimedia)

Listverse: 10 Incredible Astronomical Instruments That Existed Before Galileo

Yovisto: Hippolyte Fizeau and the Speed of Light

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 23 – Neptune

The Asian Age: Relativity & comedy of errors

JSTOR Daily: Los Alamos had a Secret Library

Academia: Origins of the “Western” Constellations

A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life: From Augsburg to the Moon: Johann Matthias Hase

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Reaching for the stars

Dürer’s Star Map: Northern Hemisphere
Source: Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales

Nature: Archimedes’ legendary sphere brought to life

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Jane Yantis’s Interview

The Local: The German astronomer who found Neptune

Waffles at Noon: Classic Urban Legend: NASA Space Pen

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Crain’s. How the New York Public Library digitizes its vast map collection

PC Mag: 5 Digital Mapping Projects That Visualize History

The Public Domain Review: Amundsen’s South Pole expedition

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Remedia: Surgical Devices and Placebo Testing – A Rehearsal

Thomas Morris: Roger ‘two urinals’ Clerk

Center for the History of Medicine: Dawes, Lydia M. Gibson papers, 1926–1959

Yovisto: David Vetter, the Bubble Boy

The Atlantic: The ‘Noble Savage’ Diet

The Sloane Letters Blog: A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed

Embryo Project: Diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the USA

Ptak Science Books: A Mechanical Night Nurse, 1869

Source: Ptak Science Books

Nursing Clio: Placentophagy Isn’t New, But It Has Changed

Autistica: The Lessons of Autism Research

The Public Domain Review: Gynecological Gymnastics from Outer Space (1895)

Vox: 7 Terrifying medical “treatments” that never caught on

Thomas Morris: A fatal nose job

Yovisto: Typhoid Mary

Typhoid Mary in a 1909 newspaper illustration

The Public Domain Review: A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820)

Advances in the History of Psychology: Hall’s developmental theory and Haeckel’s recapitulationism

Atlas Obscura: How a Fake Typhus Epidemic Saved a Polish City from the Nazis

Chom News: Priscilla A. Schaffer Papers Now Open

PBS Newshour: Celebrating the life of Alice Hamilton, founding mother of occupational medicine

Thomas Morris: Heal thyself

Conciatore: Top Physician

Center for the History of Medicine: Oral history interview with Margaret Brenman-Gibson

Thomas Morris: The perils of toast

From the hands of quacks: Dieting Deafness Away

ph.ucla.edu: On the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether in Surgical Operations, 1847 (pdf)

Branch: Matthew Rowlinson, “On the First Medical Blood Transfusion Between Human Subjects 1818”

TECHNOLOGY:

The Verge: Museum of telephones burned to ground in California wildfire

The Guardian: A long history of toilets in Ukraine museum

Yovisto: What a Brick! – The World’s First Cell Phone

Ptak Science Books: The Straight Line Series: Looking Straight Through a Vickers Gun Sight, 1916

Medievalists.net: How to Make Ink in the Middle Ages

Pocket Change: The World’s Oldest Surviving Paper Money

The National Museum of American History: American Watch Company Prototype

Pocket watch. ME*334625.

Smithsonian.com: The History of the Bar Code

Yovisto: William F. Friedman and the Art of Cryptology

Atlas Obscura: Vacuum Cleaner Museum and Factory Outlet

Open Culture: How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned Life in the Year 2000: Drawing the Future

Conciatore: Stonework

Medievalists.net: Renaissance Robotics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Lost Knight and Enlivened Materiality

Model of Leonardo’s robot with inner workings, as displayed in Berlin. Photo by Erik Möller

Medievalists.net: Friction and Lubrication in Medieval Europe: The Emergence of Olive Oil as a Superior Agent

Smithsonian.com: Can You Guess the Invention Based on These Patent Illustrations?

distillatio: Making blue and green ink

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

BBC: The man who bought Stonehenge – and then gave it away

Embryo Project: Dizhou Tong (1902–1979)

Notches: Tempests and Teapots: Sexual Politics and Tea-Drinking in the Early Modern World

Yovisto: Peter Simon Pallas – A Pioneer in Zoography

Embryo Project: Paul Kammerer (1880–1926)

Embryo Project: The Inheritence of Acquired Characteristics (1924) by Paul Kammerer

Scientific American: Rosetta Stones: Darwin’s Encounter with a Chilean Earthquake

TrowelBlazers: Patty Jo Watson

Patty Jo Watson
Image used with permission from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).

Leaping Robot: DNA…From Blueprint to Brick

Science League of America: Dixon, Not Darwin

arXiv: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin’s Reading Notebooks

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 25 – Thomas Hunt Morgan

Embryo Project: Thomas Hunt Morgan’s Definition of Regeneration: Morphallaxis and Epimorphosis

BuzzFeed: Inside the Natural History Museum’s Wonderfully Creepy Room of Things in Jars

Hayley Campbell / BuzzFeed

The Molecular Ecologist: Measuring dispersal rate in Neotropical fishes in units of ‘wallace’

MBL History Project: People of the Lab: Happy Birthday Ivan Pavlov!

Ivan Pavlov
(Image MBL History Project)

Open Democracy: Bacteriology as conspiracy

Open Democracy: It’s the failure to admit failure that fuels conspiracy theories

CHEMISTRY:

Yovisto: James Dewar and the Liquefaction of Gases

Sir James Dewar (1842-1923)

Conciatore: Lixivitation

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 22 – Frederick Soddy

Academia: The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology (pdf)

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton: Experiments in Mineral Acids

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 27 – Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Alun Salt: I clearly don’t understand what an academic review is for

The History Woman’s Blog: Redefining the independent scholar

Thomas Morris: The bird and the bees

teleskopos: What are science museums for?

Social History: New Blog Site

Theos: So, what is science and what is religion and why do you think they clash?

Conciatore: Art and Science

Jacopo Ligozzi,1518, fanciful glass vessels,
ink and watercolor on paper.

American Science: Announcing the Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Comparison Watch!

Forbes: From Steve Jobs to Oliver Sacks : 12 Scientists and Techies Who Tinkered as Kids

Taming the American Idol: Taylor’s World Pt. 1: Training in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Social Networks

The Recipes Project: What Recipes Can Teach Us About Reading

Scientific American: Symbiartic: A Science Illustrator’s Legacy

Illustration of Pliciloricus enigmatus by Carolyn Gast, National Museum of Natural History. From a condensed Smithsonian report, New Loricifera from Southeastern United States Coastal Waters

The #EnvHist Weekly

Open Culture: The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy

Nautilus: Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them

ESOTERIC:

BOOK REVIEWS:

History Today: Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War

Some Beans: The Value of Precision edited by M. Norton Wise

Science Book a Day: 10 Great Books on the History of Medicine

Literary Hub: The Invention of Nature

NEW BOOKS:

Historiens de la santé: The Last Children’s Plague: Poliomyelitis, Disability, and Twentieth-Century American Culture

Historiens de la santé: Femme Médecin en Algérie – Journal de Dorothée Chellier (1895–1899)

NCSE: The Story of Life in 25 Fossils

ART & EXHIBITIONS

National Museum Cardiff: Reading the Rocks: the Remarkable Maps of William Smith

William Smith

Museum Boerhaave: Einstein & Friends 19 September 2015–3 January 2016

Slice: The Stars Align at OU for Galileo’s World

ars technica: Science Museum’s Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age reviewed

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics Till 25 October 2015

Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh: Surgeons Hall Museum: Casualties

The Hunterian: The Kangaroo and the Moose 1 October 2015–21 February 2016

George Stubbs, The Kongouro from New Holland, 1772 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Berkeley City Club: Ada and the Memory Machine 17 October–22 November 2015

Noël Coward Theatre: Photograph 51 Till 21 November 2015

$Photo 51, showing x-ray diffraction pattern of DNA Source: Wikimedia Commons$

Photo 51, showing x-ray diffraction pattern of DNA
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Royal Opera House: Raven Girl/Connectome

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Bodleian: Ada Lovelace: Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary 9–10 December 2015

Center for the History of Medicine: Celebrating 10 Years of the Archive for Women in Medicine 3 November 2015

Wellcome Collection: Fred Sanger Lecture: Angely Creager “EAT.DIE.” The Domestication of Carcinogens in the 1980s 4 November 2015

CHF: Brown Bag Lecture: “Making Money Circulate: Chemistry and ‘Governance’ in the Career of Coins in the Early 19^th-century Dutch Empire”

Knight Science Journalism at MIT: Book Night Talk with Victor McElheny: Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution 1 October 2015

Victor McElheny
Founding director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT

Wellcome Library: A celebration of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and 150 years of medicine 29 September 2015

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour: The Making of Thoroughly Modern Medicine

Bethlem Museum of the Mind: Brain Fag

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Newton Investigating Light from The Illustrated London News, June 4, 1870

TELEVISION:

Radio Times: Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

BBC Four: Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

The Public Domain Review: Gertie The Dinosaur (1914)

Center for the History of Medicine: Oral history interview with Pricilla Schaffer

Youtube: Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift: Book Trailer

Youtube: Albert Einstein (Stock footage/archival footage)

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: Natural History Heroes: Alfred Russel Wallace

BBC Radio 4: Book of the Week: The White Road

BBC Radio 4: Inside Science: Hiroshima radiation, Anthropocene, Bonobo noises, Physicist Henry Moseley

BBC Radio 4: Computing Britain

BBC Radio 4: In Our Time: Perpetual Motion

BBC Radio 3: Pohl Omniskop X-Ray Machine

PODCASTS:

The Guardian: Why is the scientific revolution still controversial?

Jefferson Public Radio: DNA Decoded: “Life’s Greatest Secret”

Little Atoms: Matthew Cobb & Alex Bellos

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

The Warburg Institute: Rethinking Allegory 30 October 2015

University of Paderborn: International Workshop: Emilie du Châtelet – Laws of Nature/Laws of Morals 23-24 October 2015

Émilie du Châtelet Portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Source: Wikimedia Commons

IUHMSP: Lausanne: Thérapies dissonantes 30 October 2015

CHoM News: 2015 Fall Event Calendar

Royal Historical Society: Maritime History and Cultural Seminar Series 2015–16

University of Munich: Perspectives for the History of Life Sciences 30 October–1 November 2015

CHoSTM: Working Groups: Physical Sciences: Upcoming Meetings

HSTM Network Ireland: Inaugural Conference Maynooth University 13-14 November 2015

All Souls College, Oxford: Conference: Charles Hutton (1737–1823): being mathematical in the Georgian Period 17–18 December 2015

Charles Hutton
Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of London: Institute of Historical Research: History of Libraries Research Seminars

University of Leeds: CfP: Communication, Correspondence and Transmission in the Early Modern World 12–13 May 2016

University of Edinburgh: CfP: Sixth Integrated History and Philosophy of Science conference (&HPS6) 35 June 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

The Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), an independent research library in Philadelphia, PA: Beckman Fellowships in #histSTM

UCL STS: Part Time Teaching Fellow in STS

Michigan State University: Assistant Professor Philosophy of Science

The German Historical Institute Washington DC: 5 Doctoral Fellowships in the History of Knowledge, Race & Ethnicity, Religion & Religiosity, Family & Kinship, and Migrant Knowledge.

University of Alicante: DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS HISTÓRICOS Y SOCIALES SOBRE CIENCIA, MEDICINA Y COMUN

University Miguel Hernández: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Históricos y Sociales sobre Ciencia, Medicina y Comunicación Cient

University of Valencia: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Históricos y Sociales sobre Ciencia, Medicina y Comunicación Científica

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #12

Monday 05 October 2015

EDITORIAL:

Another week, another edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list, bringing you all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be scooped up from the distant reaches of cyberspace during the last seven days.

The week saw NASA announce that they had discovered mineral deposits on the surface of Mars that might have been made by flowing water. This announcement kicked off the expected hysteria of where there is water there will be life, as we know it. These reports set off alarm bells in my brain about Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percy Lowell and the canals of Mars.

1877 map of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Humanity has been obsessed with Mars and the possibility of there being Martians for a long time now and the NASA announcement didn’t just trigger memories in my brain and a number of people throughout the Internet wrote about the history of that obsession. So this edition of Whewell’s Gazette is dedicated to David Bowie’s famous musical question “Is there life on Mars?”

Martian channels depicted by Percival Lowell
Source: Wikimedia Commons

“This week in science: scientists broke the secret pact & talked about water on Mars, making the moon turn red. Now the great doom befalls us” – Ed Yong (@edyong209)

History Today: Roger Hennessy tells of a hundred years of investigation, imagination and speculation about live on Mars

Ptak Science Books: The Positively Enormous Skyscraper Plant Eyeballs of Mars, 1912

Source: via Chronicles of America series at the Library of Congress, here, and first seen via the interesting Pinterest collection of Trevor Owens, here.
Ptak Science Books

The Conversation: NASA: streaks of salt on Mars mean flowing water, and raises new hopes of finding life

BibliOdyssey: Channelling Martian Maps

Source: BilbliOdyssey

Scientific American: How Our View of Mars Has Changed from Lush Oasis to Arid Desert

News.com.au: My favourite Martian: behind the science is the story of why we love Mars

Not just little green men … a scene from the Mars film John Carter.

“Water, water everywhere

Nor any drop to drink

‘Cause it was all saturated with perchlorate salts” – Rime of the Ancient Rover – Matthew R. Francis (@DrMRFrancis)

Quotes of the week:

“People say history is written by the winners, but actually history is written by historians, and most of them are losers”. – @The TweetOfGod

“’The ohm is where the art is’ is a brilliant title for an article” – Steven Gray (@Sjgray86)

“Everything’s connected, but some things are more connected than others”. – Liam Heneghan (@DublinSoil)

“We need to figure out if Jonas Salk was on the spectrum. Only then can we definitely say whether autism cause vaccines” – @WardQNormal h/t @stevesilberman

“If you don’t feel guilty about using maps and satnavs, don’t feel guilty about using introductory philosophy books and study guides” – Nigel Warburton (@philosophybites)

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” – Albert Einstein

“Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced”. – A. N. Whitehead h/t @PeterSjostedtH

BEAUTY TIP: Read a book

EMPATHY TIP: Read a book

EDUCATION TIP: Read a book

LOVE TIP: Read a book

HEALTH TIP: Read a book – Matt Haig (@matthaig1)

Birth of the Week:

The Space Race Began 4 October 1957

Leaping Robot: Apprehending the Artifact

Yovisto: The Sputnik Shock

Princeton University Press: Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age

NASA: NASA’s First 5o Years Historical Perspectives

Youtube: Omnicron & the Sputnik

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Agenda.ge: Ancient astronomy manuscripts published in Georgia

Physics Today: Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser

Fermi.lib.uchicago.edu: Letter from Fermi to Szilard re: use of carbon to slow chain reaction

NASA: Alouette 1

The Alouette 1 satellite
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Outside Prague: The Astronomical Clock

AIP: Nobels of the Past

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 1 – NASA

Science News: The amateur who helped Einstein see the light

With some help from Science News Letter (the precursor to Science News), a restaurant dishwasher named Rudi Mandl persuaded Einstein to explore the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.

Radio Ne Zealand News: Rare telescope’s crucial lens survives quake

AIP: Otto Frisch

NASA: Dr. Robert H. Goddard, American Rocketry Pioneer

NASA: NASA “Hacks”: The Real Stories

El País: Un cura dio la “más bella explicación de la Creación”, según Einstein

The Atlantic: Standing the Test of Time (and Space)

WGBH News: Meet America’s First Woman Astronomer: Maria Mitchell

Maria Mitchell’s telescope, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Credit Dpbsmith / WGBH News

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Mary Rockwell’s Interview

flickr: Project Apollo Archive

Sky & Telescope: Beyond the Printed Page: Soviet Stamps and Astronomy

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: Niels Henrik David Bohr

Museum Victoria Collections: Astrographic Catalogue

AIP: Happy Birthday Enrico Fermi

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Atlas Obscura: The Maps That Helped The Citizens of a ‘Locked Country’ See The World

Half of “Screens of the Four Continents and People in 48 Countries in the World,” by an unknown Edo-era Japanese painter. (All images: Kobe City Museum/Google Cultural Institute)

D News: 1500-Year-Old Mosaic Map Found

Slate: A Bizarrely Complicated Late-19^th-Century Flat-Earth Map

The Hakluyt Society Blog: Australia Circumnavigated: The Story of the HMS Investigator

The Shakespeare Blog: Mapping Shakespeare’s world

The Sheldon tapestry map of Worcestershire

Halley’s Log: Back in the Thames

Halley’s Log: Halley’s third logbook

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

History Today: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson passed her medical exams on September 18^th 1865

Thomas Morris: Speaking in tongues

From the Hands of Quacks: Can Vitamin B Cure Deafness

Smithsonian.com: The Nose Job Dates Back to the 6^th Century B.C.

Wellcome Trust: A Brief History of Childbirth: Exploring the National Childbirth Trust Archives

Remedia: The Window Operation: Hope through Surgery

Cross-section of the inner ear, showing the ossicles–mallelus, incus, and stapes. Illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter for Henry Gray, “Anatomy of the Human Body ” (Philadelphia & New York: Lea & Febiger, 1918), plate 919.

Medium: Scurvy Dogs

Embryo Project: The Pasteur Institute (1887– )

Public Domain Review: Kaishi Hen, an 18^th Century Japanese anatomical atlas

Early Modern Medicine: Dog Danger

Thomas Morris: The child with Bonaparte in his eyes

Wellcome Collection: Hysteria

Gross Science: The Horrors of Ancient Cataract Surgery

Countway Library of Medicine: The Archives for Women in Medicine

Concocting History: Strong as a mountain

Forbes: Ancient Pompeiians Had Good Dental Health But Were Not Necessarily Vegetarians

This Intrepid Band: More Misdeeds of Military Nurses

Embryo Project: The Effects of Thalidomide on Embryonic Development

John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog: History of Midwifery

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 2 – Baruj Benacerraf

Science Museum: Brought to Life: Seishu Hanaoka (1760–1835)

Perspectives: The art of medicine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher

MBL History Project: “By living we learn.” Happy Birthday Sir Patrick Geddes!

Embryo Project: Marie Charlotte Stopes (1880–1958)

Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Morris: Electrical anaesthesia

Bustle: The Average Age Women Got Their First Period, Throughout History

Mosaic: How to mend a broken heart

Thomas Morris: The petrol cocktail: a cure for cholera

TECHNOLOGY:

Medievalists.net: Rapid Invention, Slow Industrialization, and the Absent Entrepreneur in Medieval China

Open Culture: The World’s Oldest Surviving Pair of Glasses (circa 1475)

Yale Books: Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 13 Deodorising and Flushing

Thomas Morris: Top Gear (steam edition)

Atlas Obscura: The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway

Inside the Lamson ball, from a 1912 Lamson catalogue. (Image: Tony Wolf)

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 29 – Rudolf Diesel Mystery

Airminded: The oscillation of R33

Conciatore: The Art of Metals

Conciatore: The Blue Tower

Medium: Backchannel: How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina

Quartz: Not Enough for Goodenough: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery at the age of 57 has an idea for a new one at 92

Yovisto: Tōkaidō Shinkansen – the Bullet Train

Tōkaidō Shinkansen passing tea fields between Shizuoka and Kakegawa

Yovisto: The Unfortunate Inventions of Charles Cros

IEEE Spectrum: When Engineers Had the Stars in Their Eyes

News Works: Sound it out: the (sometimes creepy) history of the talking machine

Slate: What Could Go Wrong?

Collectors Weekly: Rise of the Synthesizer: How an Electronics Whiz Kid Gave the 1980s Its Signature Sound

Paleofuture: Drunk Driving and The Pre-History of Breathalysers

BBC News: Drawings reveal Germans’ World War Two boobytrap bombs

One of Fish’s drawings shows an Army mess tin adapted for nefarious purposes
Picture: Anthony Thompson TWN

BBC News: Dorman Long: The Teesside firm that bridged the world

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 31 – Joseph Wilson Swan

United States Patent and Trademark Office: A. C. Reid Handset Telephone

BBC News: The lost rivers that lie beneath London

Ian Visits: Unbuilt London: Straightening the River Thames

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Making Science Public: The pause

Ptak Science Books: Charting the Winds: a Superb Anemographic Chart from 1598

ChoM News: New Acquisitions: Rose E. Frisch Papers

Slate: The Great September Gale of 1815

TrowelBlazers: Lucy Allen: Curator and Librarian

Lucy Allen Smart, 1955. This photo is reproduced here under the Central Library Consortium’s fair use policy; may not be used for commercial purposes without contacting copyright holder.

NYAM: Censoring Leonhart Fuchs: Examples from the New York Academy of Medicine

Notches: “A promiscuous class of females. All huddled together in a mass”: Sex and Food in the Nineteenth-Century American Metropolis

University of Cambridge Museums: The Next Big Leap at the Whipple

io9: Which Animals Did Nuclear Scientists Pick to Represent the Entire World?

Science League of America: Did Darwin Know “Acres of Diamonds”?

Circulating Now: A German Botanical Renaissance

Perspectives on History: An Environmental History of the Real Thing

The Guardian: Calling all palaeo bloggers! Do you ant to write for the Guardian science blog network

Forbes: How Geologists Determined The Way That Mountains Formed

The mountains around the Urnersee, from Scheuchzer´s “Helvetiae Stoicheiographia” published in 1716 (image in public domain).

Mommoth Tales: Mammoth in the News: Michigan Edition

Scientific American: Tetrapod Zoology: Piltdown Man and the Dualist Contention

Wired: The Battle Over Genome Editing Gets Science All Wrong

The Leakey Foundation: Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey

Science Insider: Q&A: Francis Crick’s granddaughter on her genomic sculpture

CHEMISTRY:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 28 – Henri Moissan

News Work: A Nobel Prize for noble gasses

William Ramsay in 1904 (Munn & Co./Appleton’s Magazine)

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 4 – Mole

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

History Matters: Voices from 1915: Public Engagement with the First World War

New HSS: Sleep Laboratories, Psychiatry in Penguin Books, & More

Mersenne: Heroic Journeys? Networks of women scientists in the late nineteenth and twentieth century: Conference Report

The Renaissance Mathematicus: The Penny Universities

Coffeehouse in London, 17th century
Source: Wikimedia Commons

ChoM News: Archivist attends “Women in Biotech” symposium at Radcliffe Institute

Chronologia Universalis: A Moment of Wonder: Overlapping Networks

Chronologia Universalis: Pervolvi totum librum…

JCOM: Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Impact

Deathplanation: Publishing with Integrity (Whilst Still Having Career Options)

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Political correctness and the history of science

The Conversation: Jesuits as science missionaries for the Catholic Church

BBC Culture: The places the world forgot (includes several #histSTM sites)

Flanders and Brabant power station, Belgium
Source: BBC

The Recipes Project: The Digital Humanities Turn

THE: What it’s like to work with the academic greats

MHS Oxford: Newsletter – October 2015

The Harvard Crimson: Gathering the Galleries

Medieval Books: The Incredible Expandable Book

Wired: The Nobel Committee Hasn’t Always Picked the Right Winners

THE: Progressive Science Institute challenges researcher ‘bias’

Nautilus: Why Science Needs Metaphysics

ESOTERIC:

Conciatore: Alchemy of Plants

Compasswallah: Annie Besant: The Occult Freedom Fighter

Annie Besant
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Academia: Physics in the Twelfth Century: The Porta Elementorum of Pseudo-Avicenna’s Alchemical De Anima and Marius’ De Elementis

Sociatas Magia: A Medieval Charm with Music

BOOK REVIEWS:

The Space Review: A Sky Wonderful with Stars: 50 Years of Modern Astronomy on Maunakea

Thinking Like a Mountain: Food, Inc: Mendel to Monsanto – The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest

Public Domain Review: Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880)

Front cover of Hay’s The Doom of the Great City
Source: The British Library

The New York Times: Sunday Book Review: ‘The Invention of Nature,’ by Andrea Wulf

Dissertation Reviews: Chemistry in Imperial and Weimar Germany

Geographical: Alfred Russel Wallace; Letters from the Malay Archipelago OUP

The Dispersal of Darwin: Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution

Los Angeles Review of Books: Paula Findlen on Galileo’s Telescope: A European Story

Archives of Natural History: Benton, Ted: Alfred Russel Wallace: explorer, evolutionist, public intellectual – a thinker for our own times?

Science News: Centennial books illuminate Einstein’s greatest triumph

NEW BOOKS:

Vrin: Psychologie et psychologisme

Enfilade: Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject

Historiens de la santé: Bretonneau: Correspondance d’un médicine

NCSE: The Story of Life in 25 Fossils

Emotions Blog: History in British Tears

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Nature: Space Travel: When Soviets ruled the great beyond

MHS Oxford: ‘Dear harry…’ – Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War Extended till 31 January 2016

CHF: Science at Play On view through September 2 2016

Skil-Craft No. 430 Microscope Chemistry Lab, ca. 1955. CHF Collections. Photo by Gregory Tobias.

Massachusetts Historical Society: Terra Firma: The Beginnings of the MHS Map Collection

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics Closes 25 October 2015

Hunterian Glasgow: The Kangaroo and the Moose 2 October 2015–21 February 2016

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Noel Coward Theatre: Photograph 51 Booking until 21 November 2015

Etcetera Theatre: LHF: The Devil Without 13–18 October 2015

Gielgud Theatre: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Wellcome Collection: ‘The Thing is …Beards!’ 15^th October 2015

World Health Organization Global Health Histories: Webinar: Ebolar: exploring the cultural contexts of an epidemic 8 October 2015

Royal Museums Greenwich: Plague takeover 21 November 2015

Royal Society: Cells: from Robert Hooke to Cell Therapy – a 350 year journey 5_6 October 2015

Royal Astronomical Society: Fred Hoyle Birth Centennial – his remarkable career and the impact of his science 9 October 2015

A statue of Fred Hoyle at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Providence Public Library: Exploring the Eye of History: NEA Symposium on 19^th Century Photography 7 November 2015

Dittrick Museum: Lecture: The Eye as Art: Anatomy and Vision in the 18^th Century 14 October 2015

CHoM News: Celebrating 10 Years of the Archive for Women in Medicine 7 November 2015

Musée Claude Bernard: Colloque: Claude Bernard et le diabète 10 Octobre 015

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour One for the Road!

Museum of the History of Science: Sacrifice of a Genius Tonight!

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Joaquin Sorolla 1863- 1923 Doctors Laboratory, an investigation, Oil on canvas

TELEVISION:

BBC 2: Bletchley Park: Code-breaking’s Forgotten Genius

Gordon Welchman
Source: Wikimedia Commons

AHF: “Manhattan” Season One Recaps

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

Museo Galileo: Eudoxus’s system

Youtube: Royal Society: Science stories – Small

Youtube: Interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer

Youtube: The Royal Institution: Quantum Physics and Universal Beauty – with Frank Wilczek

Youtube: Polio Hero Frank Shimada

Youtube: Gilbert White: The Nature Man (2006) May Vision International

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: Natural History Heroes

PODCASTS:

The Diane Rehm Show: Andrea Wulf: “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies: Symposium: Early Modern Journeys: Practice and Everyday Experiences of Travel, 1450–1800 15-16 October 2015

University of Leeds: Centre for HPS: HPS Seminars, Semester 1, 2015-2016

Harnack House Berlin: The 100^th anniversary of Einstein’s field equations 30 November–2 December 2015

ChoM News: Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine: Madness and Mayhem in Maine: The Parkman-Portland Parley and a Mass Murder 12 November 2015

ChoM News: Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine: War and Human Nature in Modern America 17 December 2015

ChoM News: Studying Traumatic Wounds and Infectious Diseases in the Civil War Hospitals: The Medical Photography of the American Civil War 19 November 2015

Historiens de la santé: CfP: ISCHE 38 Education and the Body

University of Kent: CfP: Medicine in its Place: Situating Medicine in Historical Contexts 7-10 July 2016

IHPST: 1^st Regional IHPST Conference: Science as Culture in the European Context: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational Perspectives Flensburg Germany 22–25 August 2015

Oxford Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and technology: Michaelmas Term 2015

HSS: THATCamp: The History of Science Society hosts its second annual THATCamp on November 19 2015 San Francisco

The Haluyt Society: Conference: Maritime Trade, Travel and Cultural Encounter in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries 13–14 November 2015

University of Birmingham: History of Medicine and Health Seminars

UCL STS: Seminar Series

University of Vienna: CfP: Claiming authority, producing standards: The IAEA and the history of radiation protection 3–4 June 2016

Maynooth University: HSTM Network Ireland Inaugral Conference 13–14 November 2015

Birkbeck College University of London: CfP: After the End of Disease 26–27 May 2016

University of Edinburgh: CfP: Eighteenth–Century Research Seminars Series 2016

University of London: School of Advance Study EMPHASIS Seminar: Amateurs and Authorship: Oronce Fine’s Projection of a Republic of Mathematics 17 October 2015

Oronce Fine
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Res Philosophica: CfP: Res Philosophica Essay Prize: Philosophy of Disability

The Warburg Institute: Colloquia 2015–2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

University of Huddersfield: Research Assistant in History of Health or Medicine

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards in the Science Museums and Archives Consortium (SMAC) from October 2016

H-Sci-Med-Tech: Fully Funded PhD Studentship – Science and Religion in Society

Ohio State University Department of History: Assistant or Associate Professor in Environmental History and Sustainability

University of Harvard: Tenure–track Assistant Professor History of Pre-Modern or Early Modern Science or Medicine

University of Groningen: Netherlands Research School for Medieval Studies: 4 PhD Positions: Communication and Exploitation of Knowledge in the Middle Ages

Oxford Brookes University: PhD Studentships

University of Copenhagen: Professor of History and Philosophy of Science

Think Oxford: Over 1000 Scholarships

University of London: Research fellowships in cultural and intellectual history

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #13

Monday 12 October 2015

EDITORIAL:

If you’ve been holding your breath, you can breathe out now, as the thirteenth edition of the second year of the weekly #histSTM links list, Whewell’s Gazette, is finally here. Putting aside their triskaidekaphobia our editorial team has collected together all that they could find on the histories of science, technology and medicine in the vast reaches of cyberspace over the last seven days.

Whenever I write a blog post or research a lecture, sooner or later I will almost always make a pilgrimage to consult the volumes of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, a cornucopia of history of science information presented at the highest levels of scholarship. This invaluable tool of historical research was put together under the editorship of Charles Coulston Gillispie one of the giants of post Second World War history of science. Beyond the DSB Gillispie was a important historian of science writing mostly about eighteenth-century French science, whilst teaching and establishing the history of science department at Princeton University.

Charles Gillispie died on 6 October at the age of 97. In the DSB he left behind a monument in the history of science that others will struggle to equal and with this thought I would like to humbly dedicate this edition of Whewell’s Gazette to him.

Charles Coulston Gillispie
6 August 1918 – 6 October 2015
Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications

News at Princeton: Charles Gillispie, trailblazer in the history of science, dies at 97

NCSE: Charles Coulston Gillispie dies

facebook: Marco Berratta: Charles Gillispie Obituary

Quotes of the week:

The *Great Man of Science* is a myth. They all had collaborators that disappeared from history. – Andrew David Thaler (@SFriedScientist)

“Sir Humphrey Davy was asked to name the greatest discovery he’d ever made. He answered “Michael Faraday””. – Verity Burke (@VerityBurke)

“‘thank God! there is no drinking of coffee [in the next world], and consequently no waiting for it.’”—De Quincey, quoting Kant h/t @GuyLongworth

“I’m a scientist. I don’t want to people to accept that what I say is accurate. I want to give them the tools to find out for themselves”. – John Hawks (@johnhawks)

“We must labour to find out what things are in themselves by our owne experience … not what another sayes of them” – John Wilkins 1640 h/t @felicityhen

“Science doesn’t suffer fools, but it can make fools suffer.” – Richard Hammond

h/t @Pillownaut

“Nothing more ruins the world than a conceit that a little knowledge is sufficient.” – Thomas Traherne. h/t @telescoper

“50 yrs from now, people will see the discovery of exoplanets as a major development in #HistSTM” – Patrick McCray (@LeapingRobot)

“The only reason that christianity imagined hell as a pit of fire is because Christ was born too early to experience a bus full of teens”. – Marc Girard Alleyn (@StevenAlleyn)

“Is it too much to ask for conference coffee that isn’t brown pisswater? Where is my Black Ichor of Awakeness?” Ed Yong (@edyong209)

“I rather like “defy the facts”. Ignorance is strength”. – Guy Longworth (@GuyLongworth)

“Shit doesn’t just happen. Shits make it happen”. – Peter Coles (@telescoper)

6 October was National Badger Day

A badger, as illustrated in Histoire Naturelle des Mammiféres, 1824-57.
(1257.l.1-4)

Birthdays of the Week:

Robert Goddard born 5 October 1882

Robert Hutchings Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882. The phyicist determinedly pursued his spaceflight obsession.

Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery: Robert Hutchins Goddard

NASA: Goddard Space Flight Center: Dr. Robert H. Goddard, American Rocketry Pioneer

Niels Bohr born 7 October 1885

Niels Bohr on G. Gamow’s motorcycle, with his wife Margrethe sitting behind.
Photo credit Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
h/t Alex Wellerstein

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field”. – Niels Bohr h/t @ChemHeritage

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 7 – Niels Bohr

AIP: Niels Bohr – Session I

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Cambridge University Library Special Collections Blog: ‘It’s all in a day’s work’: the Royal Greenwich Observatory Audio-Visual Collection, Stories of Observatory Life

Cosmos: Émilie du Châtelet: the woman science forgot

Particle Decelerator: New Zealand recognised as major contributor to radio astronomy history

Physics Today: Seeing dark matter in the Andromeda galaxy

Vera Rubin
Source: Physics Today

Conciatore: A Fast Calendar

Collect Space: Astronaut Sally Ride’s personal items and papers acquired by Smithsonian

ahram online: Mars, the invincible planet

ethw.org: George Westinghouse AIEE membership application

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 6 – Ernest Walton

Atlas Obscura: These Atomic Tourists Have Visited 160 Forgotten Nuclear Sites Across the U.S.

NASA History: James E. Webb

Pasadena Star-News: Astronomy: These women were ‘human computers’ before they were allowed to be astronomers

AHF: Operation Plumbbob – 1957

AEON: Light dawns

Scientific American: 20 Years Later – a O&A with the first Astronomer to Detect a Planet Orbiting Another Sun

Independent: Prague Astronomical Clock: Three things you probably didn’t know about today’s Google Doodle

Prague astronomical clock
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Heavy: Prague Astronomical Clock: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Gizmodo: Prague Astronomical Clock Celebrated by Google Doodle on its 605^th Birthday

The Guardian: A Fife church minister first imagined space flight – beating Jules Verne

AHF: Britain’s Early Input – 1940–41

IET Blog: The Great Melbourne Telescope

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: Neglected Niigata

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 11 – James Prescott Joule

AHF: The Einstein Letter – 1939

Dannen.com: Einstein to Roosevelt, August 2, 1939

BLink: Mystery of the starry sphere

Too big for the palm: Emperor Jahangir is shown holding a globe in this Mughal-era painting. The globe is believed to have been made by metallurgist Muhammad Salih Tahtawi. Photo: Wikipedia

AIP: Robert Marshak

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Ptak Science Books: Blank and Missing Things: a Map of Missing people of Europe and Russia, 1881

University of Cambridge: Digital Library: Oppidium Cantebrigiae

British Library: Maps and views blog: Drawing Lines across Africa – from the War Office Archive

World Digital Library: Map of Louisiana, View of New Orleans

The French royal engineer, de Beauvilliers, drew this 1720 map of the entire hydrographic network of the Mississippi River
Source: World Digital Library

A Thoroughly Anglophile Journal: The Center of Space and Time, and History

Geographicus Rare Antique Maps: 1650 Jansoon Wind Rose, Anemographic Chart, or Map of the Winds

Factum Arte: Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime

Atlas Obscura: Found: 39 Maps from the Mid-1800s That ‘Show Chicago Being Born’

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Yovisto: James Lind and a Cure for Scurvy

Vice: How One Man Ran the World’s Only Menstruation Museum from his Basement

The first-ever Kotex advertisement, from January 1921

Thomas Morris: The case of the luminous patients

Remedia: Roaring Horses, Lame Dogs and the Re-framing of British Veterinary Surgery

Medievalists.net: Medieval Viagara [sic]

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: “Secta Empírica y Domáticos Racionales”: medicine and the ESD in early modern Spain II

BBC Future: It’s time we dispelled these myths about autism

Conciatore: The Duke’s Mouthwash

The Conversation: Could ancient textbooks be the source of the next medical breakthrough

Center for the History of Medicine: On View: Powered Air Purifying Respirator (PAPR). 1967-68

Circulating Now: Radam’s Microbe Killer: Advertising Cures for Tuberculosis

Advertisement in Roanoke Times, March 28, 1894

ph.ucla.edu: On The Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether in Surgical Operations (pdf)

Philly.com: Remember what ‘Aunt Sammy’ said … about babies and drafts?

The Recipes Project: From Bloodstone to Fish Soup: Iron Recipes

TECHNOLOGY:

Yovisto: John Atanasoff and the first Electronic Computer

Yovisto: Christiaan Huygens and the Pocket Watch

Atlas Obscura: The Simple, Elegant History of the Swiss Army Knife

Modell 1890, the first Swiss Soldier Knife produced by Wester & Co. Solingen. (Photo: Cutrofiano/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Engineering & Technology History Wiki: Reginald A. Fessenden Biography

BBC News: Forth Bridge ‘is Scotland’s favourite engineering work’

Atlas Obscura: Kansas Barbed Wire Museum

Conciatore: Antonio Who?

Yale Books Blog: Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 29: The Great Exhibition Toilet Myth

Pioneers of Flight: Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt flying from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore

Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt flying from Washington, DC to Baltimore in 1933

Ptak Science Books: A Massively Geared “Tricycle” of 1879

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Dispersal of Darwin: Article: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin’s Reading Notebooks

Dispersal of Darwin: Article: Flattening the World: Natural Theology and the Ecology of Darwin’s Orchids

Gizmodo: Here’s the Drawing That Proved the Earth has a Solid Core

Engineering Life: Putting synthetic biology in historical context: Becoming a Tralfamadorian

The Scientist: The First Neuron Drawings, 1870s

Notches: The Hunger of the Finnish Bachelor: Married Men, Desire and Domesticity in 20^th Century Finland

geoitaliani: Tacchi a spillo, capigliature corte alla garconne, continenti alla deriva: Federico Sacco contro tutti

Atlas Obscura: The Scrappy Female Paleontologist Whose Life Inspired a Tongue Twister

Ancient Origins: The Ancestral Myth of the Hollow Earth and Underground Civilizations

MBL History Project: Zoology in Color: Rudolf Leuckart

“It is not possible for man, as a thinking being, to close his mind to the knowledge that he is ruled by the same power as is the animal world.” –Rudolf Leuckart

Physics Buzz Blog: Meteorite Markings Offer Clues to Their Past

Science Magazine: Beyond the “Mendel-Fisher Controversy”

Notches: “This is Your Pasty”: The Performance of Queer Domesticity in Small-Town Wisconsin

Embryo Project: Study of Fossilized Massospondylus Dinosaur Embryos from South Africa (1978–2012)

Audubon: John J. Audubon’s Birds of America: The life’s work of both a lover and observer of birds and nature

Plate 1 of Birds of America by John James Audubon depicting a wild turkey.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

U.S: Immigration and Customs Enforcement: ICE returns stolen Charles Darwin book

Road to Paris: A very short history of climate change research

Fistful of Cinctans: The Well Worn Paths of Natural History

Macroevolution: Orangutan-human hybrids?

MBL History Project: People of the Lab: Calvin Bridges

CHEMISTRY:

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 8 – Henry-Louis Le Chatelier

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 9 – Max von Laue

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 10 – Henry Cavendish

Source: Wikimedia Commons

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

The H-Word: The Greenwich longitude exhibition on tour

Adam Matthew: To Publish 500 Years of Unique Materials on the History of Printing, Publishing and Bookselling (Stationers’ Company Archives)

Smithsonian.com: How Not to Win a Nobel Prize

3 Quarks Daily: How did the Nobel Prize become the biggest award on earth?

Washington Post: What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like

Air Canada enRoute: The World’s 14 Coolest New Museums

Shanghai Natural History Museum

Independent: Paintings reveal what people in 19oo thought the year 2000 would look like

AHA Today: The Past for the Present: the New Mock Briefings Program and Reasons to Study History

Wynken de Worde: questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects

INKUNABULA: New Blog (German)

The Recipes Project: Exploring Six Degrees of Francis Bacon in Beta

Portrait of Francis Bacon, by Frans Pourbus (1617), Palace on the Water in Warsaw.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

#EnvHist Weekly

Science Museum: Clockmaker’s Museum

Scroll.in: The history of science has been West-centric for too long – it’s time to think global

University of Cambridge: Research: A world of science

Richard Carter: Bacon and X

Tincture of Museum: The Crime Museum Uncovered, Museum of London, October 2015

Somatosphere: Summer Roundup: Forums – Books & Films

Academia: Science in the Everyday World: Why Perspectives from the History of Science Matter

h-madness: How I Became a Historian of Psychiatry: Andrew Scull

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society: First Issue: Table of Contents

The Atlantic: 12 Historical Gems From One of the Best Time Capsules Online

ESOTERIC:

University of Cambridge: Digital Library: Chinese Oracle Bones

distillatio: Alchemy and Magic, are they related

BOOK REVIEWS:

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Science contra Copernicus

sehepunkte: Audra J. Wolfe: Competing with the Soviets (German!)

Nature: Geology: The continental conundrum

NEW BOOKS:

Routledge: Ancient Botany

URSUS: World of Innovation: cartography in the time of Gerhard Mercator

Historiens de la santé: On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 & 1820

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Bletchley Park: Last Chance to see the Imitation Game, The Exhibition: Closes 1 November 2015

Alan Turing memorial statue in Sackville Park, Manchester.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Right Relevance: Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England

Musée d’Orsay: Splendours and Misery, Pictures of Prostitution, 1850–1910

Museum of the History of Science: ‘DEAR HARRY…’ – HENRY MOSELEY: A SCIENTIST LOST TO WAR Extended to 31 January 2016

Hunterian Glasgow: The Kangaroo and the Moose 2 October 2015–21 February 2016

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics Closes 25 October 2015

Science Museum: Cosmos & Culture

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Etcetera Theatre: LHF: The Devil Without 13–18 October 2015

Noel Coward Theatre: Photograph 51 Booking until 21 November 2015

Nicole Kidman as Rosalind Franklin Photograph: Johan Persson/Johan Persson
Source: The Guardian

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Dittrick Museum Blog: Conversations: Bodies Wanted – Anatomy and the Dissection Debate 4 November 2015

CHoM News: Celebrating 10 Years of the Archive for Women in Medicine 3 November 2015

Dittrick Museum: Lecture: Eye of the Artist 14 October 2015

Engraving of the eye in A Complete Physico-Medical and Churugical on the Human Eye and the Demonstration of Natural Vision (Degraver, 1780).

CHoM News: Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine “Remorse Without Regret: Experimentalism, Consent, Apology, and the Affective Economies of Biomedicine” 15 October 2015

The Royal Society: The Big Draw – Seeing Closer 17 October 2015

Dr John Dee Mortlake Society: Events: AGM 13 October 2015

Open Culture: Watch Breaking the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Turing (1996)

Wellcome Library: Talk: A history of health? Integrating food and drink into the history of medieval medicine 13 October 2015

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour: Women and Medicine

Wellcome Library: Joseph Banks: Lincolnshire botanist 12 October 2015

Sir Joseph Banks, as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1773
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Royal Society: A new visible world: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia 17 October 2015

Museum of the History of Science Oxford: Too Valuable to Die? 13 October 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Don Shank: Laboratory Still Life 1

TELEVISION:

Indiewire: Can WGN America’s Stellar ‘Manhattan’ Finally Break Through?

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

Youtube: Turkey

Youtube: Invention of Radio – Reginald A. Fessenden Part 1

The Excavator: Bill Bailey on Alfred Russel Wallace

Youtube: Gresham College: Was the Great Plague of 1665 London’s Problem? – Professor Vanessa Harding

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: Great Lives: Andrew Adonis on Joseph Bazalgette

BBC Radio 4: Natural History Heroes

BBC Radio 4: Natural Histories: Anemone

PODCASTS:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

University of Winchester: CfP: Death, Art and Anatomy 3–6 June 2016

Anita Guerrini: Notes and Records – Essay Prize – deadline 31-01-16

University of Flensburg: 1^st European IHPST Regional Conference: Science as Culture in the European Context: Historical, Philosophical, and Educational Perspectives 22–25 August 2016

Notches: CfP: Histories of Sexuality and Religion

British Society for the History of Mathematics: Christmas Meeting Birmingham 5 December 2015

St Anne’s College Oxford: CfP: Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits – Scientiae 2016 5–7 July

University of Exeter: Online Store: One day workshop: Framing the Face: New perspectives on the history of facial hair Friends Meeting House London 28 November 2015

H–Material–Culture: CfP: American Material and Visual Culture in the “Long” Nineteenth Century

Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Oxford: Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Michaelmas Term 2015

Cleveland.com: Dittrick Medical Museum to host series of ‘Conversations’ on hot-button medical topics

HSTM Network Ireland: Inaugural Conference Maynooth University 13-14 November 2015

University of Groningen: CfP: Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Religion and Science 21–23 March 2016

The Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association Marburg: Entangled Science? Relocating German-Polish Scientific Relations 28–30 October 2015

Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of Lancaster: Culture, Society and Medicine Seminars

eä: Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science & Technology CfP: Information for Authors

University of Lyon: Séminaire de l’Institut d’histoire de la médecine de Lyon Cycle 2015-2016

Rowan University, NJ: CfP: Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice Sixth Biennial Conference 17–19 June 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

University of Stirling: Chair in Environmental History and Heritage

University of Harvard: History of Pre-Modern or Early Modern Science or Medicine Tenure Track

University of Hull: PhD Studentships in Visual Culture

British Library: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships

Academic Jobs Wiki: History of Science, Technology, and Medicine 2015–2016

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Wellcome Trust History of Medicine PhD Studentship: Health Systems in History: the case of Nigeria 1946–c. 2000

Telegraph Museum Porthcurno: Director

n the 19th century Porthcurno was connected to the rest of the world by submarine cables
Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of Hertfordshire: PhD Studentship in Early Modern History

California Institute of Technology: Postdoctoral Instructor Position in Philosophy of Science

Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy: Postdoc

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #14

Monday 19 October 2015

EDITORIAL:

It’s that time again, time for the next edition of your weekly #histSTM links list, Whewell’s Gazette bringing you all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be scooped up from the depths of cyberspace over the last seven days.

Last Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in STEM, so naturally this week’s Whewell’s Gazette has the same theme. The first section of links deals with women in STEM in general.

FIVE: An interview with… Athene Donald on Women in Science

The Guardian: Why Ada Lovelace Day Matters

Churchill College Cambridge: Professor Dame Carol Robinson

BuzzFeed: 100 Inspiring Women Who Made History

New Statesman: This Ada Lovelace Day, Let’s celebrate women in tech while confronting its sexist culture

The next section is a collection of links about Ada Lovelace that mostly concentrate on the real history and less on the hagiography.

“If Ada Lovelace did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her”. –Christopher Burd (@christopherburd)

“Ada Lovelace exhibition at the Science Museum seemed to me like a nice, balanced, modest display, and well worth a visit”. – Philip Ball (@philipcball)

Royal Museums Greenwich: Ada Lovelace and female computers

Inside the Science Museum: Ada Lovelace: A visionary of the computer age

Gallery View of “Ada Lovelace Enchantress of numbers. An exhibition about the remarkable story of Ada Lovelace, a Victorian pioneer of the computer age, celebrating the bicentenary of her birth.

ODNB: Ada Lovelace

BBC Four: Calculating Ada: Not your typical role model: Ada Lovelace the 19^th century programmer

BBC Radio 4: The Letters of Ada Lovelace

BBC News: Ada Lovelace’s letters and work on display at Oxford Library

CHF: the French Connection

An 1839 woven silk portrait of French textile merchant and inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard, recently added to CHF’s collections. The portrait, made on a Jacquard loom, required more than 24,000 cards to create the pattern. (CHF Collections/Jesse Olanday)

We then have a section of links on the stories of individual or groups of women in #histSTM.

Atlas Obscura: The Daredevil Girl Pals Who Conquered the Sky

A signed photograph of Harriet Quimby and Matilde Moisant. (Photo: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives/flickr)

Google Cultural Institute: 1944: Women in Computing: A British Perspective

The Renaissance Mathematicus: A bewitching lady astronomer

Aglaonice
Source: unknown

ODNB: Squire, Jane (bap. 1686, d. 1743)

Scientific American: 15 Works of Art Depicting Women in Science

“Portrait of Gabrielle-Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet” – Nicolas de Largillière
(oil on canvas)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian: On Ada Lovelace Day, here are seven other pioneering women in tech

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Isabella Karle’s Interview

Open Culture: Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)

Delia Derbyshire

Government Equalities Office: Women in Engineering

Wellcome Library: Women pharmacists demand the vote

Wired: Her Code Got Humans on the Moon – And Invented Software Itself

Margaret Hamilton at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA.
Photo: HARRY GOULD HARVEY IV FOR WIRED

Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist: In Honour of Ada Lovelace – Female Palaeontologists

Letters From Gondwana: Marie Stopes and Her Legacy as Plaeobotanist

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) photographed by George Bernard Shaw. (LSE Archives Image Record, 1921).

Embryo Project: Marie Stopes International

TrowelBlazers: Veronica Seton-Williams

Veronica Seton-WIlliams, image courtesy of the EES.

Brain Pickings: Trailblazing Astronomer Vera Rubin on Obsessiveness, Minimizing Obstacles, and How the Trill of Accidental Discovery Redeems the Terror of Uncertainty

Mental Floss: 8 Stellar Facts About the Most accomplished Female Astronomer You’ve Never Heard Of

Caroline Herschel
IMAGE CREDIT:
MRS. JOHN HERSCHEL, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

A lot of the articles in the Internet on the #histSTM of women are unfortunately historically not very accurate and mythologizing. A great exception is Lady Science, which celebrated its first anniversary last Friday. Lady science is well researched, well written and historically accurate and if you don’t already subscribe to their monthly newsletter you should.

Lady Science 1 Year Anniversary

We close our women in #histSTM on a sombre note. 12 October was the one hundredth anniversary of the English nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium in WW I.

Edith Cavell executed 12 October 1915

The Conversation: Edith Cavell: the British nurse who taught women the way of the stiff upper lip

The H-Word: Edith Cavell: nurse, martyr, and spy?

British Pathé: Service at Westminster Abbey – Nurse Cavell 1915

ODNB: Cavell, Edith Louisa (1865–1915)

Quotes of the week:

“People laugh about children who ask “why?” all the time but not about the adults who never do”. – Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak)

‘Science in itself’ is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. –Virchow h/t @embryoprojct

“Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

“Why do you think I wear them?” – Jennifer Wallis (@harbottlestores)

“Hard work is for people who have nothing better to do”–

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”. – Oscar Wilde

“My take on scientists saying that we might have MAYBE! detected an alien civilization? Crying in my beer over the stupidization of astronomy” – Mike Brown (@plutokiller)

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike” – John Ball 1338-1381

“I think I cracked the Gödel Code. It’s like God but this heavy metal version with the Nazi dots”. – Casmilus (@Casmilus)

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

New Scientist: Explore 100 years of general relativity

moonandback.com: Ninth Planet Named For God of Dark, Dank, Distant Underworld

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Henry Frisch and Andrew Hanson’s Interview

Physics Central: Buzz Blog: Christopher Columbus Steals the Moon

The Space Review: Declassified documents offer a new perspective on Yuri Gagarin’s flight

Gagarin being led to his spaceship at the top of the gantry by Oleg Ivanovsky who was the “lead” (production) designer of the Vostok spaceship.

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 14 – Friedrich Kohlrausch

AHF: Norman Ramsey:

The H–Word: Frank Malina and an overlooked Space Age milestone

AIP: Jesse Greenstein I

AIP: Jesse Greenstein II

Martin J. Clemens: The Mysterious Celestial Spheres of the Ancient Mughal Empire

The famous celestial globe of Muhammad Salih Tahtawi is inscribed with Arabic and Persian inscriptions, completed in the year 1631.

AHF: The Alsos Mission

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 16 – China Goes Nuclear

Louvre: Roofed spherical sundial

Slate: The Vault: An Early-20^th-Century Globe Promoting the Fantasy of a Socialist Culture on Mars

The Royal Society: The Repository: Newton’s dog-ears

NASA: Remembering George Mueller, Leader of Early Human Spaceflight

Yovisto: Réaumur and the Réaumur Temperature Scale

BBC News: The First Spacewalk

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Atlas Obscura: Mariners Today Still Use a Math Genius’ 1802 Navigation Guide

Atlas Obscura: China’s Classroom Maps Put The Middle Kingdom at the Center of the World

Ptak Science Books: A Glorious if Not Accurate Map of Ocean Currents 1675

Source: Pirnceton University http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/thematic-maps/quantitative/hydrography/hydrography.html

Intelligent Life: Deleted Islands

Atlas Obscura: How Marshall Islanders Navigated the Sea Using Only Sticks and Shells

Cambridge University Library: Collections: Marshal Islands Sailing Charts

Sailing chart of Marshall Islands archipelago. Black & White photograph, taken in May 1928, from the Science Museum Photo Archive. Object on loan to the Science Museum from the Royal Empire Society

Atlas Obscura: Places You Can No Longer Go: The Navigation Trees

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Business Insider: A relic of medieval history explains why glasses make people look smart

Thomas Morris: Stay of execution

The Atlantic: A Short History of Empathy

Mimi Matthews: Aphrodisiacs, Elixirs, and Dr, Brodum’s Restorative Nervous Cordial

V0016204 Two unorthodox medical practitioners, J. Graham and G. Kater
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Royal College of Physicians: Mark Edwin Silverman

The Cut: The First Legal Abortion Providers Tell Their Stories

Embryo Project: Rudolf Carl Virchow (1821–1902)

Museum of Health Care: Diphtheria

The History of Modern Biomedicine: History of Cervical Cancer and the Role of Human Papillomavirus, 1960–2000

Remedia: Crafting a (Written) Science of Surgery: The First European Surgical Texts

Atlas Obscura: The True Story of Dr. Voronoff’s Plan to Use Monkey Testicles to Make Us Immortal

L0003517 Caricature of Serge Samuel Voronoff (1866 – )
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Fugitive Leaves: Tracing Monsters Across Medicine

Thomas Morris: Brained by a bull

Conciatore: A Gift for the Innocent

Thomas Morris: A case of hiccups

NYAM: Cook Like a Roman: The New York Academy of Medicine’s Apicius Manuscript

The Recipes Project: Removing Arrowheads in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

History of Medicine in Ireland: AIDS and history

Conciatore: Alessandro Neri

Thomas Morris: Aleing all day, and oiling all night

Medium: Ralph M. Rosen: The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher: Galen on Science and the Humanities

Thomas Morris: Hemlock and millipedes

One to be taken three times a day

Center for the History of Medicine: On View: The Origins of Anesthesia

Smells Like Science: Ether and the Discovery of Anesthesia

TECHNOLOGY:

Conciatore: The Purse of Envy

A Thoroughly Anglophile Journal: Uncovering a History of Secrets

The Atlantic: The Sexism of American Kitchen Design

Mrs. H.M. Richardson, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) housewife is shown as she prepares a meal in her all-electric kitchen in Morris, Tenn., on January 15, 1936. (AP Photo)

Christie’s The Art People: The evolution of the modern PC in Eight objects

NPR: Turnspit Dogs: The Rise and Fall of the Vernepator Cur

AEON: The hand-held’s tale

Academia: Seeing the Invisible: The Introduction and Development of Electron Microscopy in Britain, 1935–1945

Leaping Robot Blog: Remembering Lines of Light

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

The Washington Post: A scientist found a bird that hadn’t been seen in half a century, then killed it. Here’s why

Embryo Project: Theodor Heinrich Boveri (1862–1915)

Royal Society: The Repository: Drawing under the Microscope

BHL: Fossils Under the Microscope: Hooke and Micrographia

Robert Hooke’s microscope. Micrographia, 1665. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/786364. Digitized by: Missouri Botanical Garden.

BHL: Proving Extinction: Cuvier and the Elephantimorpha

BHL: Early Innovations in Paleontology: Gessner and Fossils

BHL: The Roots of Paleontology: Brongniart and Fossil Plants

BHL: A Sinner Killed During the Great Flood or a Fossil Reptile? Discovering a Plesiosaur

World of Phylogenetic Networks: Buffon and the origin of the tree and network metaphors

Brain Pickings: Gorgeous 19^th-Century Illustrations of Owls and Ospreys

Royal Natural History Lydekker 6

BHL: Fact or Fiction? Discovering the Mosasaur

Hyperaallergic: The 16^th–Century Fossil Book that First Depicted the Pencil

BHL: The First Described and Validly Named Dinosaur

BHL: Uncovering the “Fish Lizard”: Ichthyosaurs and Home

BHL: Naming the Second Dinosaur: Mantell and Iguanodon

BioInteractive: Reading Primary Sources: Darwin and Wallace

Public Domain Review: Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

Map showing Spruce’s route through the Andes from Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes (1908), edited by Alfred Russel Wallace – Source.

American Museum of Natural History: Invertebrate Zoology: Amber

Mammoth Tales: The First Trilobite

Embryo Project: The Meckel-Serres Conception of Recapitulation

CHEMISTRY:

io9: How Pee Led to One of the 17^th Century’s Most Important Chemistry Breakthroughs

The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, by Joseph Wright, 1771
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Gizmodo: How One Man’s Love of Urine Led to the Discovery of Phosphorus

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 12 – Ascanio Sobrero

Science at Play: Periodic Round Table

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 13 – Margaret Thatcher

Chemistry World: Chemistry Nobel laureate Richard Heck dies

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Factually: The patron saint of the internet is Isidore of Seville, who tried to record everything ever known

Culture 24: The Crime Museum Uncovered: Museum of London’s show merges morbid curiosity and real stories

The Recipes Project: Categories in a Database of Eighteenth-Century Medical Recipes

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Future of History

The Guardian: History v historical fiction

Willing to suspend disbelief … Jane Smiley. Photograph: Rex

#EnvHist Weekly

In Useful: Nathaniel Comfort Begins as Third NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology

CHF: Merger Announced

CHF: CHF and LSF Announce Merger

The Return of Native Nordic Fauna: Change, history, and a talk before Parliament

EurekaAlert!: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon launches

Smithsonian.com: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Is Your New Favourite Trivia Game

Corpus Newtonicum: Isaac Newton Library Online

The Newton Project: Books in Newton’s Library

Londonist: Pie Charts of the Life of the Londoner Who Invented Pie Charts

William Payfair’s pie chart. Much better and less frivolous than our own examples.

Priceonomics: Should You Ever Use a Pie Chart?

The Bookseller: Knowledge Unlatched moves into second phase

the many-headed monster: Sources, Empathy and Politics in History from Below

ESOTERIC:

Open Culture: In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicts the World Will End in 2060

Modern Mechanix: Machine Reads Your Head Bumps (Jul, 1931)

BOOK REVIEWS:

The New York Review of Books: The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt

Forbes Tech: Pre-Digital Cartography is Still Key to “Mapping” Human History

Notches: “The Gay Revolution”: An Interview with Lillian Faderman

Science Book a Day: Imagination and a Pile of Junk: A Droll History of Inventors and Inventions

Thinking Like a Mountain: Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914

NEW BOOKS:

Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine: A History of Bovine TB c.1965–c.2000 Free download

W.W. Norton: Lady Byron and Her Daughters

University of Toronto Press: The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century

Bloomsbury Publishing: Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain

Jim Baggott: Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation

Science Book a Day: Epidemics (eyewitness Guides)

ART & EXHIBITIONS

Science Museum: Ada Lovelace

BBC News: Ada Lovelace: Opium, maths and the Victorian programmer

Wellington.scoop: History of maps of charts – new exhibition opening at National Library

Academia: #ColeEx – Twitter Exhibition of Twentieth-Century Natural History and Zoology at the Cole Museum of Zoology, UK

Journal of Art in Society: Science Becomes Art

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery (1766) Derby Museums (detail)

University of Dundee: A History of Nearly Everything 10 October–28 November 2015

The Huntarian: ‌The Kangaroo and the Moose Runs till 21 February 2016

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations: D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics Closes 25 October 2015

Science Museum: Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age Runs till 13 March 2016

Museum of the History of Science: Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War Extended to 31 January 2016

CLOSING SOON: Florence Nightingale Museum: The Kiss of Light 23 October 2015!

Royal Society: Seeing closer: 350 years of microscopy Runs till 23 November 2015

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Early Modern Medicine: Review: Jane Wenham the Witch of Walkern

The Conversation: Good year for science on stage as Nicole Kidman discovers the double helix in Photograph 51

Photograph 51, , Credit Johan Persson

Noel Coward Theatre: Photograph51 Bookings until 21 November 2015

Gielgud Theatre: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Science Museum: Evening Exchange: Ada Lovelace

University of York: Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia 2015 Editathon at YorkU 29 October

Youtube: Experimenter – Official Trailer 1 (2015)

Barts Pathology Museum: Contraception & Consent: a 19thC Sex Education 25 November 2015

Youtube: The Forgotten Voyage: Alfred Russel Wallace and his discovery of evolution by natural selection

Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Sorting Out a World of Wonders: Science in the Dutch Golden Age 4 November 2015

Johns Hopkins University: History of Medicine Department: Colloquium with Harold Cook: Descartes’ Early Medical Interests: Some Conjectures 22 October 2015

University of Strathclyde: James Watt’s heat engine: energy transitions past, present, and future 21 October 2015

Royal College of Physicians: Walking Tour: Fit to rule?

Oxford University Museum of Natural History: Handwritten in Stone: How William Smith and his maps changed geology

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities: Inaugural Annual Ada Lovelace Lecture 27 October 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek by Jan Verkolje, c.1680

TELEVISION:

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: Manhattan noir

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

Youtube: Damon Albarn’s Dr Dee live session

Youtube: Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt: POPSCI 2015

Youtube: Continental Drift Alfred Wegener Song by The Amoeba People

Nature Documentaries.org: The Making of a Theory: Darwin, Wallace, and Natural Selection

BSHS: BSHS Annual Conference in Swansea

Vimeo: Jim Endersby: Darwin, Hooker, and Empire

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: In Our Time: Perpetual Motion

PODCASTS:

New Books in Medicine: EUGENE RAIKHEL, EDITOR; TODD MEYERS, ASSOCIATE EDITOR; EMILY YATES-DOERR, MEMBER Somatosphere.net

Soundcloud: Poem: On the Publishing of Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist, 1661

abc.net: RN Drive: Twitterati: @brennawalks

The Royal Society: Hooke’s microscopic world

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

University of Leeds: Call for Participants: Workshops: Pasts, Presents and Futures of Medical Regeneration January, April and June 2016

University of Oxford: Bodleian Libraries: Gough Map Symposium 2015: 2 November

St Anne’s College Oxford: CfP. Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century 10–11 September 2016

UCL: CfP: Workshop: Technology, Environment and Modern Britain during April 2016

H–SCi–Med–Tech: CfP: Technology, Innovation, and Sustainability: Historical and Contemporary Narratives 25 January 2016

The Linnaean Society of New York: Programs 2015–2016 Seasons

University of Lancaster: CfP: Panel on Photographic History at SHS Conference 21–23 March 2016

UCL: Conference: Europe From The Outside in? Imagining Civilization through Collecting the Exotic

The Wagner Free Institute of Science: Chemistry Series: The Periodic Table of Elements: How We Got It and How We Can Use It Mondays Begins 19 October 2015

University of Alberta: Three Societies Meeting: BSHS–CSHPS–HSS 22-25 June 2016

ICHST 2017: 25^th International Congress of History of Science and Technology Rio de Janeiro Brazil 23-29 July 2017

University of Minneapolis: CfP: The International Society for History and Philosophy of Science 11^th International Congress 22–25 July 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

University of Harvard: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the History of Modern or Contemporary Physics

The Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences: Professor for Science Communications

University of Ghent: Three Fully Funded PhD Scholarships in European Periodical Studies

University of Basel: Postdoc: The Effects of Glass Making in Venetian Self-Perception and Identity

APS: Long-Term Pre-Doctoral Fellowships

UC Irvine: Assistant, Associate or Full Professor: History and Philosophy of Science preference

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Year 2, Volume #06

Monday 24 August 2015

EDITORIAL:

After a brief surgical break Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM is back bringing you all that the Internet has to offer in the histories of science, technology and medicine or at least all that we could find of it.

I entered the Internet #histsci community somewhat more than seven years ago. Five years ago one of my, by then, good #histsci colleagues, Rebekah Higgitt, announced that she would be co-leading a major research project into the activities of the British Board of Longitude in the long eighteenth century.

Over the last five years this research project carried out by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and Cambridge University has been incredibly active and I have got to know most of those involved through their diverse activities. These include Richard Dunn, Alexi Baker, Katy Barrett, Sophie Waring, Katherine McAlpine and Nicky Reeves. The project has finally come to an end and the results have been quite stunning. This small group of dedicated scholars have produced an amazing amount of absolutely first class history of science material.

If you don’t know it already you can spend many a happy hour reading the contributions to the project’s blog, an exemplary use of Internet communication. The latest contribution to the blog is a farewell to the project written by Maritime Museum team co-leader Richard Dunn.

If you want to know what the participants have been doing for the last five years then go to the Board of Longitude Project: Project Outcomes Page, you will knocked out by their productivity.

This project has set standards for anybody contemplation research into a #histSTM subject and can be held up as a role model for all such researchers. We at Whewell’s Gazette wish to congratulate all those involved and wish them well in their future endeavours.

Quotes of the week:

“The only qualification for being a writer is actually writing. All else is angst and bullshit.” – Henry Rollins h/t @cultauthor

“Hellenologophobia is a fear of Greek terms”. – @weird_hist

“Yet again twttr reminds me how many scientists think that all science works the same way their sub sub field of science does”. – Justin Kiggins (@neuromusic)

“Old math teachers never die, they just lose control of their functions.” – @intmath

“autocorrect, can you please stop changing ‘scicomm’ to ‘sickroom’? thank you” – Tori Herridge (@ToriHerridge)

“Shelf-righteous adj: a feeling of superiority about one’s bookshelf” – Powell’s Compendium of Readerly Terms

“Dear Apple, if I change back something you’ve autocorrected, Don’t. Autocorrect. It. Again.” – Eric Marcoullier (@bpm140)

“I’m starting a new band called Terrifying German Bibliography. Our first album will be called Intimidating Footnotes” – Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears)

“logic is like a secret society in this country. Hardly anyone knows how to use it.” –‪@Goethelover h/t @jondresner

“Ask a man his philosophy and he’ll be annoying for an hour; teach a man to do philosophy and he’ll be annoying for life”. – Keith Frankish (@keithfrankish)

“I quite realized,” said Columbus,

“That the earth was not a rhombus,

But I am a little annoyed

To find it an oblate spheroid.”

E. Bentley h/t @JohnDCook

Birthday of the Week:

Denis Papin baptised (born?) 22 August 1642

Denis Papin holding the plans for his steam engine.
Unknown artist 1689
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 22 – Denis Papin

Yovisto: Denis Papin and the Pressure Cooker

Papin’s steam digester 1679
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Renaissance Mathematicus: A household name

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric (Georges) Cuvier born 23 August 1769

Georges Cuvier Portrait by François-André Vincent, 1795
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Embryo Project: Georges Cuvier (1769–1832)

Embryo Project: Essay: The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate

Letters From Gondwana: Mary Anning’s Contribution to French Paleontology

Yovisto: Georges Cuvier and the Fossils

Forbes: How do we know what extinct species looked like?

Cuvier´s secret reconstruction of the Anoplotherium commune, shown in lifelike pose with its skeleton, musculature, and body-outline.
Source: Forbes

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE :

Corpus Newtonicum: Newton in Atlantis

arXiv.org: Greek Astronomy PhDs: The last 200 years (pdf)

Inside the Science Museum: How to land on Venus

Scientific American: Cocktail Party Physics: In Memoriam: Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) and Black Hole Entropy

Jacob Bekenstein
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Shtetl–Optimized: Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015)

ESA: The History of Sounding Rockets and Their Contribution to European Space Research (pdf)

Berkeley News: Pursuing charm in a singularly unfeminine profession

A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life: A Watercolour Meteor

Paul Sandby The Meteor of August 18, 1783, as seen from the East Angle of the North Terrace, Windsor Castle.

History Extra: Life of the Week: Marie Curie

The Columbian: Vancouver woman’s Manhattan Project memories

The Local: Seven brainteasers to honour Schrödinger

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 20 – Fred Hoyle

National Radio Astronomy Observatory: Pre-History of Radio Astronomy

Yovisto: Viking 1 and the Mission to Mars

Restrcted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 70

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 23 – Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Slate Vault: The Roads Around Late–18^th–Century London. Mapped in Close-Up Detail

Atlas Obscura: John Harrison’s Marine Chronometers

Harrison’s first sea clock (H1)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yovisto: How High/Low Can You Go? – The Explorer Auguste Picard

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Der Erdapfel

Behaim’s Erdapfel
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A Covent Garden Gilflurt’s Guide to Life: Captain Cook Lands on Possession Island

NOAA: Who first charted the Gulf Stream?

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

History Matters: Donald Trump: Galenic Enthusiast?

Yovisto: Thomas Hodgekin – a Pioneer in Preventive Medicine

Yovisto: The Contraceptive Pill – One of the Most Influential Inventions of the 20^th Century

The Recipes Project: Valuing “Caesar’s and Sampson’s Cures”

Rattle-snake with section of rattle and tooth, from Mark Catsby, (1731) The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

The Recipes Project: Adjudicating “Caesar’s Cure for Poison”

Ptak Science Books: Electropathic Pathology: the Invisible Quackhood of the Electric Brush (1884)

drive.google.com: Quistorp and ‘Anaesthesia” in 1718

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: From the Archive: Witchcraft and Healing in the Colonial Andes, 16^th-17^th Centuries

Journal of the American Revolution: For to Cure for the Etch

Thomas Morris: Brain of hare and turd of dog

Pinterest: Inside the Vintage Medicine Cabinet

Thomas Morris: Wine, the great healer

Wellcome Library Blog: Diary of an Asylum Superintendent

Thomas Morris: Leeches: for external and internal use

TECHNOLOGY:

Yovisto: Gabriel Lipmann and the Colour Photography

Yovisto: Pierre Vernier and the Vernier Scale

Ptak Science Blog: An Automatic Page Turner, 1887

Yovisto: Making Photography Really Operational – Louis Daguerre

Christie’s The Art People: Mechanical miracles: The rise of the automaton

Engines of Our Imagination: No. 1703: IBM 360 Computer

Motherboard: The Soviet Architect Who Drafted the Space Race

Design for the technology module of the Mir space station (1980). Image: Galina Balashova Archives

Slate: The Mechanical Chess Player That Unsettled the World

The chess-playing Turk baffled and amazed Europe until it was revealed to be a hoax: the figure was actually controlled by a man hidden inside the box. Photographs: Bridgeman Images; AKG-Images

Yovisto: William Murdock ‘enlights’ the 19th century

C&EN: Timeline: A Brief History of the Internet and Chemistry

The New York Review of Books: They Began a New Era

Yovisto: Paul Nipkow and the Picture Scanning Technology

The Guardian: Letters reveal Alan Turing’s battle with his sexuality

Yovisto: E.F. Codd and the Relational Database Model

The Telegraph: England’s last master cooper seeks apprentice

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Niche: The Herbarium: An Interior Landscape of Science

Der Beutelwolf–Blog: Alfred Russel Wallace

Letters from Gondwana: Climate Change and the Evolution of Mammals

Jonathan Saha: Animals in the Asylum

The Telegraph: Anger over Natural History Museum plans to bulldoze wildlife garden

Mental Floss: The Adventurous Life of Jane Dieulafoy, Pioneering Archaeologist, Artist, and Feminist

Jane Dieulafoy
Image: Eugène L. Pirou

Notches: “What can I do to be normal?” Queer Female Desires in Letters to Dr. Alfred Kinsey

The Victor Mourning Blog: Mary Vaux Walcott

Culture 24: The starfishes, octopuses and squid of scientists’ 70,00-mile 19^th century journey to the deep sea

Public Domain Review: When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle’s Masterpiece

Embryo Project: George McDonald Church (1954)

Embryo Project: Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (1922), by Harry H. Laughlin

Paige Fossil History: Fossils vs Marine Biology: Which History of Science is More Fun

New York Times: John Henry Holland, Who Computerized Evolution, Dies at 86

Expedition Live: A Marvel of Unpreparedness

Forbes: Geology and Ancient Fossil’s Inspired H.P. Lovecraft to Write His Best Horror Story

Londoner Culture: The man who brought us drinking chocolate and his Chelsea past

Sir Hans Sloane

Darwin Live: Celebrating the Life of Alfred Russel Wallace

Public Domain Review: Tempest Anderson: Pioneer of Volcano Photography

National Geographic: Phenomena: The Rise and Fall of America’s Fossil Dogs

AMNH: Shelf Life: Kinsey’s Wasps

CHEMISTRY:

Conciatore: Vitriol of Venus

Conciatore: Tartar Salt

Conciatore: Sulfur of Saturn

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 21 – Jean Servais Stas

Jean Servais Stas (1813-1891) Belgian Chemist Credit: OEuvres Complètes, Jean Baptiste Depaire, 1894

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 17 – Walter Noddack

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 19 – Helium

Yovisto: Jules Janssen and the Discovery of Helium

1868 Pierre Jannsen observes new spectral line during a solar eclipse-later linked w:new element (He)

The Conversation: How science lost one of its greatest minds in the trenches of Gallipoli

Othmeralia: Lavoisier

Yovisto: Jöns Jacob Berzelius – One of the Founders of Modern Chemistry

META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Royal Society: Notes and Records: Fit for print: developing an institutional model of scientific publishing in England, 1655–ca. 1714

Historical Reflections: Appetite for Discovery: Sense and Sentiment in the Early Modern World

The Newyorker: What is Elegance in Science?

in propria persona: law, tech, history: Historians need to stop obsessing over writing books

Smithsonian Libraries: Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology

The Huntingdon: The Dibner History of Science Program

OHSU: Oral History Program

Brill: Journal of the Philosophy of History Contents

Lady Science: Subscribe to email newsletter

Centre for the History of Emotions: Major new grant to explore emotional health

academia.edu: The Catholic Cosmos Made Small: Athanasius Kircher and His Museum in Rome

Portrait of Kircher at age 53
from Mundus Subterraneus (1664)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Wolfram Alpha: Timeline of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge

Oxford Today: From Hindu Paintings to Hebrew Manuscripts – the Digital Treasures of the Bodleian Library

New @ Northeastern: In Italy, students get a history lesson in science

Leaping Robot: Shifting Gears and Changing Rooms

University of London, Institute of Historical Research: Research Seminar: Questioning Theories of History Autumn Term 2015

Capitalism’s Cradle: “And it all started here in the US of A”

Long Reads: Our Sex Education: A Reading List

ESOTERIC:

Yovisto: Johann Valentin Andreae and the Legend of the Rosicrucians

Johannes Valentinus Andreae
Source: Wikimedia Commons

BOOK REVIEWS:

The Atlantic: Rewriting Autism History

New York Times: ‘Neuro Tribes’ by Steve Silberman

New York Times Book Reviews Podcast

John Elder Robinson: Neurotribes – Steve Silberman’s new book on the history of autism

Nature: Autism: Seeing the spectrum entire

The Economist: Horrible history: The treatment of autistic children in the 20^th century was shocking

Wired: How Autistic People Helped Shape the Modern World

Science Book a Day: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

The Guardian: Neurotribes review – the evolution of our understanding of autism

Science Book a Day: Einstein’s Masterwork: 1915 and the General Theory of Relativity

The Renaissance Mathematicus: To Explain the Weinberg: The discovery of a Nobel Laureate’s view of the history of science

Alembic Rare Books: How Men (and Women) Fly: Gertrude Bacon & Early Aviation

Science Book a Day: The Art of Medicine

Brain Pickings: Wheels of Change: How the Bicycle Empowered Women

Scientific American: Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat

Forbes: New Book Explores Biogeography and the Human Adventure

NEW BOOKS:

Ashgate: Australia Circumnavigated: The Voyages of Matthew Flinders in HMS Investigator, 1801–1803

Juxtapost: Eva Wirtén Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebraty Culture in an Age of Information

University of Pennsylvania Press: Early Modern Cultures of Translation

ART & EXHIBITIONS

The Sydney Morning Herald: The League of Remarkable Women exhibition aims to break down barriers for women in science

JHI Blog: Reflections on “Treasured Possessions” and Material Culture

University of Lincoln: The Life and Legacy of George Boole

Union Station: Da Vinci The Exhibition Opens October 23

Dundee Science Centre: Nature’s Equations – D’Arcy Thompson and the Beauty of Mathematics 21 August–25 October

Museum of Science and Industry: Meet Baby Every Tuesday and Wednesday

Royal Society: Seeing Closer: 350 years of microscopy 29 June–23 November

Wellcome Library: Kiss of Light 12 May–23 October

Museum of the Mind: The Maudsley at War: The Story of the Hospital During the Great War 6 July– 24 September 2015

THEATRE AND OPERA:

Pleasance Courtyard Edinburgh: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Survival of (R)Evolutionary Theories in the Face of Scientific and Ecclesiastical Objections: Being a Musical Comedy About Charles Darwin 26 August

Bedlam Theatre Edinburgh: Ada Runs until 30 August 2015

National Theatre: The Hard Problem

FILMS AND EVENTS:

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour: Women and Medicine

Lady Mary Wortley Montague

Discover Medical London: Walking Tour: Sex and the City

U.S. National Library of Medicine: The Movies: The Human Body in Pictures: The Blood Vessels and Their Function

Science Museum: Beyond Vision: Photography, Art and Science symposium 12 September 2015

Wellcome Collection: Discussion: The Blue Corpse 27 August 2015

MHS Oxford: Lecture: Harry’s Nobel Prize 25 August 2015

Royal Observatory Greenwich: The Great Eclipse Expedition Mystery 27 August 2015

Oxford Biomedical Research Group: Open Doors – How blood flows to and around the brain Tour: 11 September 2015

PAINTING OF THE WEEK:

John Cooke’s 1915 painting of the ‘Piltdown Gang’

TELEVISION:

BBC Four: The Secret of Quantum Physics

PBS: The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

Forbes: PBS’s The Mystery of Matter and its Message for Chemistry

Youtube: Manhattan Season Two Trailer

BBC Four: Genius of the Ancient World: Socrates

SLIDE SHOW:

VIDEOS:

Youtube: Ri: Cloud Chamber: The Birth of Helium Atoms

Youtube: The Hereford World Map – Mappa Mundi

Youtube: The Man Who Saved Geometry (excerpt)

Vimeo: The Man Who Saved Geometry (complete)

Youtube: Ri: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code with Matthew Cobb

Two Nerdy History Girls: Friday Video: The Clock That Changed the World

Gresham College: Cannabis Britannica: The rise and demise of a Victorian wonder-drug

Youtube: Royal Society: Field Microscope – Objectivity #30

History Physics: Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

Youtube: Scream – The History of Anaesthetics

Youtube: Betrand Russell – Man’s Peril

RADIO:

BBC Radio 4: Inside Science Matthew Cobb on Life’s Greatest Secret (14m39)

BBC Radio 4: Book of the Week: Spirals in Time

PODCASTS:

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Peter Galison’s Interview

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

University of York: Centre for Global Health Histories: Public Lectures 22 September–12 November 2015

University of Paderborn, International Workshop: The Self-Determined Individual in the Enlightenment 14 September 2015

Historiens de la santé: CfP: The Animal Turn in Medieval Health Studies International Medieval Congress University of Leeds 3–7 July 2016

Manchester Medieval Society: CfP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference University of Hull: 6–8 January 2016

University of the Pacific: The Invention of Nature – Talk and Book Signing with Andrea Wulf

Royal Society: Open House Weekend – History of Science Lecture Series 19 September 2015

Royal Historical Society: Public History Prize

Bucharest Colloquium in Early Modern Science: CfP: 6–7 November 2015

University of Klagenfurt: International Conference on Science, Research and Popular Culture Programme 17–18 September 2015

University of London, Birkbeck: CfP: Religion and Medicine: Healing the Body and Soul from the Middle Ages to the Modern Day 15–16 July 2016

SocPhiSciPract: CfP: 2^nd Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Group in India 19–21 December 2015

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering: CfP: History of Computing – International Communities of Invention and Innovation 25–29 May 2016

History of Science Society: Call for Posters: HSS Meeting San Francisco 17 August 2015

IRH–UNIBUC: Master-class on Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Projects

Amherst College: Books and Prints between Cultures, 1500–1900 18–19 September 2015

The Royal Society: Lecture: A 13^th century theory of everything

ADAPT: CfP: Hands on History: Exploring New Methodologies for Media History Research Geological Society London 8–10 February 2016

LOOKING FOR WORK:

Princeton University: Call for Applications: Fellowships at Davis Center 2016–17 Risk and Fortune

University of Utrecht: PhD Candidate History of Art, Science and Technology

University of Utrecht: Postdoc History of Art, Science and Technology

USA Jobs: Department of the Air Force: Historian

The Royal Society: Newton International Fellowship

Aarhus University: Intuitions in Science and Philosophy: 2 Postdocs & 1 PhD Studentship