Victorian Science Spectacular

Science and technology play prominent roles in our predictions of the future, whether we are imagining cures for disease, liberation from household chores, or interplanetary tourism. This was equally true in the late nineteenth century, when Victorians noted the significant technological and scientific advances since their grandparents’ days: they were proud of bicycles and typewriters; of railways, steamships and electric telegraphs; of photography and electric lighting. Science fiction writers began to wonder what the world of the future would look like, while popularisers poured their energies into explicating the wonders of science and the workings of technology.

The demonstrations, lectures and shows that were part of late Victorian entertainment culture incorporated these innovations into their programmes. Scientific shows were crucial to the process of selling the future to Victorian publics. They were highly skilled and often technologically sophisticated affairs that required careful management and meticulous choreography of performers’ bodies and scientific apparatus. The ‘Victorian Science Spectacular’ project recreated one such show. It involved a team of academics from around the country, and was led by Dr Aileen Fyfe of the St Andrews School of History.

The show has been performed across the country, from Aberdeen to Cambridge. It has also been recorded – watch below!

The above text and video are reproduced with the kind permission of the Victorian Science Spectacular Project. Cross-posted from the St Andrews School of History blog.

Victorian Outreach at MUSA

Students on Dr Aileen Fyfe’s special subject (MO4930: Technologies of the Victorians) took their work to a public audience as part of the Fife Science Festival. The ‘Science Snapshot’ event was organised by MUSA on Friday March 14. All the exhibits were linked to photography or visualisation techniques. Alongside displays of virtual reality reconstructions of St Andrews cathedral, and a showing of early (1890s) film footage, the students demonstrated and explained a Victorian camera and magic lantern.

The magic lantern (above) was a great success, and the younger visitors particularly loved being able to draw their own picture (on acetate) and then have it displayed on the big screen. They also enjoyed spotting everyday objects in Victorian photographs, and a few of them were persuaded to dress up for their very own ‘Victorian’ photograph! (Below).

This project was one of the assessed pieces of work for the module, and was funded under the Enhancement Themes for enhancing students’ transferable skills.  The students had to work in groups to research their artefact, to prepare visual material and interactive activities, and to talk to visitors (young and old!) on the evening itself. They learned a lot about teamwork, and about communicating history to public audiences. Reflecting on the event afterwards, the students commented:

‘I gained useful insight into the reality of demonstrating history for public consumption, as well as developing a number of interchangeable skills’

‘I learned a lot about working with others throughout this project…  This exercise highlighted to me that I need to be open to different ways of working’

‘The simple technical skills I gained from poster design and other aspects of the project have already proved useful in job interviews, and learning to structure historical research for a popular audience was also a valuable exercise. I think the outreach project was a thoroughly modern assignment, and allowed those like myself who are not going on to further academic study to see the relevance of historical scholarship in popular contexts.’

The event also impressed representatives of Fife Science Festival, who have asked if the class would like to run it again at the Dundee Science Festival in November. Unfortunately, they’ll all have graduated by then!

Edelstein Prize

Dr Aileen Fyfe‘s book Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 has won the Edelstein Prize, an award given by the Society for the History of Technology. The prize was awarded at the Society’s annual meeting in Portland, Maine, where the book was honoured with a roundtable discussion. Panelists praised Steam-Powered Knowledge for its impeccable research, its lucidity and its production values. Dr Fyfe participated by video-conference, and remarked that “it was wonderful to listen to such esteemed colleagues saying such generous things about my book; and truly humbling to be held up as a model for a new direction in the history of technology – one that would make the history of technology more central to general history.”

Steam-Powered Knowledge has also won the Colby Prize, awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for the book which most advances the understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper or periodical press; and the book was nominated for the North American Victorian Studies Association Book Prize.

Cross-posted from St Andrews School of History blog.

The British History of Science Community in 2011

I have made available the text and statistics of my investigation into the British history of science community.

Over a hundred historians of science responded to my online survey in 2011, asking about their sense of academic identity as historians of science. I wrote two papers based on their responses. One has been revised and resubmitted to Arts & Humanities in Higher Education. The other – with fuller statistics, and with a more reflective/polemical angle – was offered to journals in the history of science, on the grounds that it would be of most interest to the readers of those journals; but it was rejected for not being about the history of actual science… I entirely sympathise with this editorial position, but still feel that there will be historians of science who would like to see the full statistics. Thus, the paper, ‘Pride, and a little bit of prejudice? The British history of science community and its relations with historians‘ is now available online for anybody who’s interested.

Praise for our Science Week event!

My colleague, Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith, and I thought that dressing up in Georgian costume might be a way to engage visitors with historic artefacts relating to the voyages of discovery to the South Seas, in the late eighteenth century. Our event, which was part of Fife Science Week 2013, and hosted at MUSA (Museum of the University of St Andrews) went down well with at least one visitor: see Adrian Wale’s blog post, with pictures! (Adrian also reviewed the 2012 event, in which my final-year students participated.)

As an engagement tool, we actually found that dressing up wasn’t quite such a good idea for us personally. Visitors seemed to assume that we were part of our exhibit, and didn’t tend to talk to us; they preferred to talk to the MUSA-badge-wearing curatorial assistants who were supporting us; and that meant that discussions tended to focus on ‘what’s that?’ (brain coral, bat skeleton etc) rather than on the historical questions we wanted to encourage. Still, you live and learn.

The author responds…

It’s gratifying to know that there are students and seminar groups reading my book. I recently received some questions from a class in North America, and took the opportunity to reflect on some of the structural and organisational decisions involved in the creation of _Steam-Powered Knowledge_, and the contrast between academic and trade books.

Prize for Steam-Powered Knowledge!

I just discovered that I’m sharing this year’s Colby Prize, awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, for my book Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 (Chicago, 2012).

The Colby Prize, established in 2006, is awarded to the book that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century British newspaper or periodical press. The winner receives a monetary award of up to $2,000, and is invited to speak at the following year’s RSVP conference.

The judges kindly described Steam-Powered Knowledge as ‘a brilliant book’, which was ‘wonderfully engaging’, and commended its ‘narrative thrust and lucidity of prose, coupled with the meticulous research and rich historical analysis’.

AHRC award for the history of the Philosophical Transactions (1665-2015)

Cross-Posted from the St Andrews School of History blog.

Frontispiece of the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions, ©The Royal Society

Dr Aileen Fyfe has been awarded a £790,000 research grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council for a four-year project telling the story of the world’s oldest surviving scientific journal.

The Philosophical Transactions has been published by the Royal Society in London since 1665, and will be celebrating its 350th anniversary in 2015. The funding will support two postdoctoral researchers, who will use the unrivalled resources of the Royal Society’s archives to investigate issues – such as the origins of peer review, and the relationship between profitability and the publication of scholarly knowledge – that are at the heart of the knowledge-based economy.

Dr Fyfe says: ‘Philosophical Transactions is the most famous scientific journal in the history of science, yet the details of the commercial, economic and editorial practices which lie behind the ground-breaking research published in its pages have barely been studied. Our project will build upon existing scholarship on the early years of the journal, but will pursue the story into the era of industrial printing, the professionalization of science, and ultimately, electronic publishing. We are particularly interested in the gradual development, adaptation and decline of editorial practices, commercial strategies and technological processes.’

Electrical apparatus 1778 ©The Royal Society

One postdoctoral researcher has been appointed to the project so far, Dr Noah Moxham, whose doctoral research was on the administrative and organisational structures of the early Royal Society. The second four-year postdoctoral research position will be advertised in January and is for a scholar with expertise in late nineteenth and twentieth century history of science and/or history of publishing. The postdoctoral researchers will be based at the Royal Society.

See also http://univstandrews-research.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/story-of-worlds-oldest-surviving.html

Plate accompanying a 1665 paper.©The Royal Society

Plate accompanying a 1724 paper. ©The Royal Society

The D’Arcy Thompson Typewriter

[Cross-posted from the standrewsschoolofhistory blog, with minor revisions]

Why would a professor of Natural History in 1920s St Andrews own a typewriter? When I originally agreed to give a lunchtime talk at MUSA, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was a problematic question. It is easy for us to see typewriters as the precursors to computers and word processors, and thus see nothing unusual about a university professor with a typewriter. But the more I thought about my talk, the more I realised the problem with this perspective.

The first commercially successful typewriter was the Remington 2, launched in 1874. Mark Twain bought one that very year, seduced (and misled) by its promise of speed – and hired a secretary to operate it. Twenty-five years later, Henry James bought a Remington 7 – and hired a secretary – to ease the burden on his over-used writing arm. What those examples disguise is the fact that typewriters were originally business machines, and were most commonly used in the offices of insurance companies and their like. The British civil service began using typewriters in the 1870s and 1880s to replace recalcitrant male hand-copyists who were demanding higher payment. The civil service initially used boys as typists, but later switched to respectable young ladies. Trained typists could get through more paperwork than the hand-copyists, and ladies were expected to make fewer demands on their employers (though by the early 1900s, the civil service had discovered this wasn’t true!)

The MUSA typewriter is a Remington 12 (launched 1923), and is believed to have belonged to Professor D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948), best known for his Growth and Form (1917) and, locally, for developing the Bell-Pettigrew Museum. His daughter’s memoir recalls him using a typewriter in the evenings, in the dining room of the family home on South Street, in the 1920s or 1930s. Here, we see a typewriter in a domestic setting, and we see a male scholar doing his own typing. Why? Thompson had survived most of his professional life without a typewriter, so why acquire a machine then? What did he do with it? If he wanted to send his work to his publisher in typescript, he could have sent it to a professional typist, as most people did.

I don’t know the answers to my questions, but they probably lie in a detailed study of Thompson’s personal papers, which are held in Special Collections. They might reveal when he began to use it, and what type of writing the machine was used for. But until someone does that research, the mystery remains…

Recreating Victorian popular science

We’re all supposed to be engaging in outreach, and extending our educational activities beyond the campus, but for me (and, I suspect, for most historians) this often takes the form of a public lecture. Public lectures are a familiar format, and easy for us to do – but given what we know about effective classroom teaching, are lectures the right format for public engagement?