Science in the 20th Century and Beyond E-Book

Jon Agar

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: PHSS - Polity History of Science series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1216

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A compelling history of science from 1900 to the present day, this is the first book to survey modern developments in science during a century of unprecedented change, conflict and uncertainty. The scope is global. Science's claim to access universal truths about the natural world made it an irresistible resource for industrial empires, ideological programs, and environmental campaigners during this period. Science has been at the heart of twentieth century history - from Einstein's new physics to the Manhattan Project, from eugenics to the Human Genome Project, or from the wonders of penicillin to the promises of biotechnology. For some science would only thrive if autonomous and kept separate from the political world, while for others science was the best guide to a planned and better future. Science was both a routine, if essential, part of an orderly society, and the disruptive source of bewildering transformation. Jon Agar draws on a wave of recent scholarship that explores science from interdisciplinary perspectives to offer a readable synthesis that will be ideal for anyone curious about the profound place of science in the modern world.

Leseprobe

SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

History of Science

Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond David Knight, The Making of Modern Science

SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

JON AGAR

Copyright © Jon Agar 2012

The right of Jon Agar to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6049-3

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For Kathryn, Hal and Max

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1

Introduction

Part I: Science after 1900

2

New Physics

3

New Sciences of Life

4

New Sciences of the Self

Part II: Sciences in a World of Conflict

5

Science and the First World War

6

Crisis: Quantum Theories and Other Weimar Sciences

7

Science and Imperial Order

8

Expanding Universes: Private Wealth and American Science

9

Revolutions and Materialism

10

Nazi Science

11

Scaling Up, Scaling Down

Part III: Second World War and Cold War

12

Science and the Second World War

13

Trials of Science in the Atomic Age

14

Cold War Spaces

15

Cold War Sciences (1): Sciences from the Working World of Atomic Projects

16

Cold War Sciences (2): Sciences from Information Systems

Part IV: Sciences of our World

17

Transition: Sea Change in the Long 1960s

18

Networks

19

Connecting Ends

Part V: Conclusions

20

Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been on my mind for over a decade. It has benefited immensely from my efforts to explain the subject to undergraduates at Manchester, Cambridge, Harvard and University College London. I also thank the staff at those institutions. There are many individuals who have helped. I would like particularly to thank John Pickstone and Peter Bowler, the anonymous referees, and Andrea Drugan at Polity Press.

—— 1 ——

INTRODUCTION

This is a history of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are weaknesses as well as strengths in such a project. By necessity, this history is a work of synthesis. It draws extensively on a wealth of secondary literature, to which I am indebted, but which has addressed twentieth- and twenty-first-century science in an uneven fashion. Where good secondary literature is scarce I have been dependent on received histories to an uncomfortable extent. Furthermore, to borrow Kuhnian terminology, the ‘normal’ strategy of recent history of science has been to take a received account and to show, through documentary and other methods, that an alternative narrative is more plausible. This is good historiographical practice, and where it works it has led to the recognition of missing actors, themes and events as well as the questioning of assumptions and the encouragement of scepticism towards the uses of history in the support of ingrained power. But, just as in normal science, the projects tend to be devised to be at the scale of the doable, which leads to a narrowing in scope. This tendency can lead to the generation of accounts that are mere tweaks of received stories.

On the positive side, I have found that forcing myself to think on the scale of all science in the twentieth century has made the asking of certain research questions unavoidable, in ways I feel that the traditional focused, case-study-led history of science has avoided. I was determined, for example, not to break the subject down into disciplinary strands, since that would replicate existing histories. Instead I have been forced to look out for patterns that were held in common across scientific projects in the twentieth century, across disciplines, across nations. That is not to say that the national stories drop away. Indeed, comparative assessments of national science become particularly important, and again lead to new questions being asked. I think the most important of these, for a history of twentieth-century science, concerns why the United States rose to become the predominant scientific superpower. I will return to this question later.

But, first, a prior question. This is a history of science in the twentieth century, and beyond. But what do I mean by ‘science’? The guidance offered by historian Robert Proctor that ‘science is what scientists do’ provides a good working definition, although it does downplay activities such as science teaching.1 I have tried to cover the range of activities that people who have been granted the role ‘scientist’ have pursued. Physical and life sciences are squarely within the scope of this book. In an extended treatment, social scientists would be present when they have considered their work to be within the sciences. The boundaries are both fuzzy and interesting – fuzzy in the sense that the category of ‘scientist’ can be contested, and different cultures have different senses, some broad, some narrow, of what counts as ‘science’. (It is a cliché at this point to contrast the broad German notion of Wissenschaft with the narrower English sense of ‘science’.) They are interesting because the label of science was a prized cultural attribute in the twentieth century, and the controversies sparked by efforts to police the boundary of the term, to separate insiders from outsiders, what sociologists of science call ‘boundary work’, are revelatory.2

I propose, however, a more substantial model of ‘what scientists did’ in the twentieth century. As a step towards this model, imagine that it is night, and you are in an airliner which has just taken off and is banking over a city at night. What you see is a glittering set of lights. You are impressed – it is a beautiful, sublime sight. After you rise above the clouds you see nothing but darkness. The flight is a long one. By the time you descend it is very early morning. On the approach to your destination you see a second city. This time you can see not only the lights but also the roads, the buildings, the parks and the factories. Even this early in the morning, there is a bustling sense of activity, of a world going to work. The pattern of lights now makes sense.

I think these two images – of a city at night and a city at dawn – provide a metaphor for how we can better make sense of science in the twentieth century. At first what we see is a dazzling and awesome array of isolated lights – quantum theory here, the sequencing of the human genome there, the detonation of atomic bombs in the middle, famous experiments, celebrated scientists, revolutionary theories. This image of history of science leads ultimately to ‘timeline histories’ which can be found on the web: history as isolated, bright moments. What we don’t see is why the lights of science form the pattern they do.

Working worlds

I argue that sciences solve the problems of ‘working worlds’. Working worlds are arenas of human projects that generate problems. Our lives, as were those of our ancestors, have been organized by our orientation towards working worlds. Working worlds can be distinguished and described, although they also overlap considerably. One set of working worlds are given structure and identity by the projects to build technological systems – there are working worlds of transport, electrical power and light, communication, agriculture, computer systems of various scales and types. The preparation, mobilization and maintenance of fighting forces form another working world of sometimes overwhelming importance for twentieth-century science. The two other contenders for the status of most significant working world for science have been civil administration and the maintenance of the human body, in sickness and in health. It is my contention that, just as we can make sense of a pattern of lights once we can see them as structured by the working movement of a city at dawn, so we can make sense of modern science once we see it as structured by working worlds. It is a historian of science’s task to reveal these ties and to describe these relations to working worlds.

One of my motivations for talking of ‘working worlds’ was the feeling that the use of the metaphor of ‘context’ by historians of science had become a cliché. Routinely we speak of understanding science in its social, cultural or political context. I think it is a cliché in George Orwell’s sense of clichés as worn ways of writing that were once alive and are now dead; a clichéd metaphor was a metaphor that was once startling and thought provoking and which now passes unnoticed.3 ‘Context’ originally made us think of ‘text’ and ‘context’, which in turn invited all kinds of associated questions of interpretation. While the term ‘working worlds’ is not a like-for-like replacement of ‘context’, I have deliberately chosen to avoid the word ‘context’, as far as possible, in order to force myself to reconsider science’s place.

I will go further. Sciences solve the problems of working worlds in a distinctive way. Working worlds are far too complex to have their problems solved directly. Instead there are, typically, a series of steps. First, a problem has to be recognized as such – problematization is not a given but an achievement.4 Second, a manageable, manipulable, abstracted representative of this problem has to be made. Across disciplines, across the decades, science has sought such representatives – a quick list might include mouse models that are representatives of cancerous human bodies, census data as representative of national population to be governed, a computer-based General Circulation Model as a representative of the world’s climate, or the abstraction from the messy reality of Amazonian soil of data that can said to represent the Amazonian rainforest many thousands of miles away.5 These abstractions have been well named, given their origin in working worlds, ‘microworlds’. They are of a scale that can be manipulated in controlled manner, measured, compared and moved.6 The representatives are also, notice, human-made: science, even when talking about the natural world, talks about artificial worlds. Irving Langmuir’s study of electron emission and light bulbs for General Electric, an exemplary early twentieth-century piece of research, has been aptly called the ‘natural study of the artificial’.7

A special case of this abstractive effort concerns phenomena: natural effects that are deemed important and interesting but are difficult to manipulate in their wild state. The special place of laboratories, especially in the sciences since the mid-nineteenth century, can be explained because they have been places where ‘phenomenal micro-worlds’ are made.8 Sociological documentaries of science support this account of the power of the laboratory.9 But scientists, too, have offered strikingly similar descriptions. ‘What is a scientific laboratory?’ asked Ivan Pavlov in 1918. ‘It is a small world, a small corner of reality. And in this small corner man labours with his mind at the task of … knowing this reality in order correctly to predict what will happen … to even direct this reality according to his discretion, to command it, if this is within our technical means.’10

Once the model of the working world problem is in place, its use can move in two directions. First, it can become subject to one of the stock of developed techniques for manipulating, analysing and comparing. Second, the conclusions have to be moved back into the working world. (Like problematization, this is not a given: ‘solutionization’ is also an achievement.) Because we are now dealing with simplified versions, there are often commonalities of structures and features, which in turn lead to commonalities of techniques. These similarities are the reason, for example, for the ubiquity of statistics in modern science. The discipline of statistics is, at least partly, a meta-discipline; it is a science of science. But neither the particular abstraction made nor its meaning are isomorphically determined by the working world (borrowing the precise mathematical sense of isomorphism – of a one-to-one relationship between structure of working world problem and model or meaning). Different representatives can be made, and they can be made sense of in different ways. This leads us to theory building, rival data collection, and experiment – the stuff, of course, of science. Also this is where the agonistic social character of science matters: the active encouragement of challenge, scepticism and criticism – between possessors of representative models.11 The fact that the scientists are dealing with abstractions, and that the social organizations for framing challenge are distinguishable (although not separate) from others, encourages a sense of science’s autonomy, jealously guarded. But, crucially, there is an unbreakable thread that passes back to the working world – which may be ignored, often forgotten, but is never absent. My suspicion is that no meaningful science has been generated that cannot be identified with a working world origin.

I am arguing that science is the making, manipulation and contest of abstracted, simplified representatives of working world problems. Part of the outcome of this work was bodies of knowledge, but science should not be solely or even primarily identified with these. As philosopher John Dewey reminded his audience in his widely circulated essay ‘Method in science teaching’, science was ‘primarily the method of intelligence at work in observation, in inquiry and experimental testing; that, fundamentally, what science means and stands for is simply the best ways yet found out by which human intelligence can do the work it should do’ – solving working world problems.12 I should also clarify what I am not arguing. There have been attempts in recent decades to find a classification more helpful, and more realistic in its description of science to the world, than ‘basic science’ and ‘applied science’. Gibbons and colleagues offered a new mode of production of knowledge (‘mode 2’), in which ‘knowledge produced in the context of application’ has supposedly become more prominent since the Second World War. Historians (Shinn, Godin) have torn down the division, as I discuss in chapter 18.13 Motivated by a similar prompt to find policy-useful language, Donald Stokes added to the simplistic basic–applied dyad another axis and argued that ‘use-inspired basic research’ (‘Pasteur’s quadrant’) was most strategically important.14 I turn the notion of ‘applied science’ upside down. I am not arguing that human health, efficient administration, weapons or industry are merely (if at all) applied science. Rather, science is applied world.

The possession of skills to manipulate representatives of working world problems granted scientists considerable authority and power in the modern world. The powerful intervention back into the world, justified by this possession, was neither straightforward nor uncon-tested. Such interventions occurred at different scales. The possession of demographic representations – such as census data – worked at national and municipal scales and reformed power relations at these levels. ‘Yet today’, for example, wrote Don K. Price in the middle of the century, ‘the most significant redistribution of political power in America is accomplished by the clerks of the Bureau of Census.’15 The intervention could be as local as the enforcement of an individual’s dietary regime. Or the ambitions could be global in scope. The X-ray crystallographer and would-be planner J. D. Bernal wrote in 1929, for example, of his hopes that, soon, the whole world would be ‘transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment’.16

Overview

If the existence of working worlds, and their crucial relationship to the sciences, is my primary finding, what are the other headlines from this history of twentieth-century science and beyond? I identify four: the extraordinary and unambiguous importance of the working world of warfare in shaping the sciences, the emergence of the United States as the leading scientific power, the missing stories, and the swing from physical to life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. Each of these four themes is to be found in the following history. I will also address them again directly in the conclusion. However, this history is written chronologically, and the following is a brief synopsis of the contents.

Send out the clones

The first question we might ask is what the relationships were between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why should the twentieth century be like the nineteenth century? Did like beget like? Or, if not, where have the centuries differed, then why? Of course 1900 is an arbitrary date. But picture in your mind another guiding image: the river of history, temporarily frozen. If we slice this river at 1900, then we can ask what was being carried forward from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The great distinctive achievement of the nineteenth century was the invention of methods of exporting similarity. Similar things were created by the methods of mass production. Similar ways of conducting research were invented in Paris – think of the modern hospital and the museum – and in the German states – think of the research universities and the research-based industries. These models were exported across the globe. Similar scientists were made at institutional innovations such as the teaching laboratory, the research school and the professional society. They, too, exported similarity as the similar scientists travelled. Laboratories were places where entities of interest to working worlds, such as pathological bacteria, could be made visible and manipulable – or, in the case of standard units, stable and exportable. This mass export of similarity – which makes the river of our image a vast floodtide – made the continuity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a social achievement.

Science 1900

Chapter 2, ‘New Physics’, begins the story of science as it emerged from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. I survey the remarkable decades from the 1890s to the 1910s, which witnessed the observation of new phenomena of rays and corpuscles, the articulation and challenge of new theories, and the development of new instruments and experimental procedures in physics. Topics include Röntgen’s X-rays, Curie’s radioactivity, Planck and Einstein’s quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Drawing on the recent insights of historians of physics, I relate these extraordinary developments to the working worlds of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industry.

Chapter 3, ‘New Sciences of Life’, begins with another turn-ofthe-century event present in any simplistic timeline history of science – the rediscovery of Mendel’s theory of inheritance – and summarizes how historians have shown that the ‘rediscovery’ was constructed as part of disciplinary manoeuvres by interested scientists. The working world of relevance here was that of ‘breeding’ in two closely intertwined senses: of eugenic good breeding and in practical agricultural improvement. The power of science, I have argued above, lies in its ability to abstract and manipulate representations relevant to working world problems. At this abstracted level a science of genetics, typified by the work of Morgan’s fruit fly research school, was articulated. Biochemistry and plant physiology were also sciences of these working worlds.

Chapter 4, ‘New Sciences of the Self’, looks at the sciences of development, including anthropology and child study, but particularly psychology and psychoanalysis. The Freud I describe is a scientist by training. The working worlds of human science were the administration of institutions – the classic Foucauldian sites of the asylum, the school and the army. The representatives of working world problems included the Pavlovian dog and the behaviourist rat. I also survey the early twentieth-century disputes in immunology as the science emerged from nineteenth-century bacteriology and offered solutions, if perhaps not ‘magic bullets’, that could move out of laboratories to address the problems identified by the working worlds struggling with infectious disease.

Science of a world of conflict

Part II surveys the sciences of a world torn by conflict. Chapter 5 examines the sciences called forth by the working world of military mobilization during the First World War. The career of Fritz Haber demonstrates how the skills and knowledge developed to provide mass nutrition could be so easily transferred to the provision of new methods of mass killing. The mass destruction offered by the machine gun also illustrates how a world geared to the export of similarity was structurally prepared for mass death. The cult of the individual was encouraged by the contrast it drew with the realities of organization and mobilization. Henry Gwyn Jefferys Moseley is my case study. The mobilization of civil scientists, complementing an already deep commitment to organization for war, is traced in Britain, the United States and Germany. The success of American psychology shows how a discipline could benefit from the ratchet of war.

Chapter 6 surveys how Germany, the leading pre-war scientific nation, responded to the widespread sense of cultural, political and social crisis in the post-war decades. Paul Forman called historians’ attention to the fact that crisis talk seemed to inflect physical theory, including one of the most profound intellectual developments of the twentieth century, the recognition of the depths and strangeness of quantum theory in the 1920s. Forman’s claim for the causal effect of the intellectual milieu has proved controversial but also productive. Among other responses to crisis were the later shaping of Gestalt theory in psychology, parasitology, embryology, genetics and, with the Vienna Circle’s project to establish the ‘unity of science’, philosophy.

The working world of imperial administration continued to be an important one for science. In chapter 7, ‘Science and Imperial Order’, I examine the contributions of preventative and tropical medicine and ecology as sciences that could address imperial and colonial working world problems. The notion of an ‘ecosystem’, for example, was proposed as an intervention in a dispute between rival British and South African imperial visions. Likewise, food chains and models of population fluctuations were of great interest to those who wanted to manage diverse parts of the world to maximize the extraction of resources. Conservation has always been a technocratic project.

The recycling of industrial wealth as philanthropy is of crucial importance to understanding science in the United States in the twentieth century. Chapter 8, ‘Expanding Universes: Private Wealth and American Science’, focuses on the tapping of the fortunes of Carnegie and Rockefeller by scientist-entrepreneurs. George Ellery Hale persuaded philanthropists to build new peaks of science, not least great reflecting telescopes that shifted leadership in optical astronomy from Europe to the United States and made Edwin Hubble’s observations possible. Second, I emphasize the importance of private science, not least in the under-appreciated significance of petroleum science – even in such matters as the fate of Wegener’s theory of continental drift. Finally, I argue that the working world of industry generated its own sciences – sciences that took the working world as its subject. Scientific management is perhaps the best-known example.

Chapter 9, ‘Revolutions and Materialism’, visits the extraordinarily fraught position of the sciences in the Soviet Union as communism emerged from civil breakdown, struck out in new directions in the 1920s, and was bloodied by Stalinism from the end of the decade. Scholarship from before and after the end of the Cold War is brought together. The Soviet Union is fascinating for historians of science, not least because the state philosophy was a philosophy of science: dialectical materialism. What ‘materialism’ might be made to mean had sometimes lethal implications for physicists interested in quantum mechanics or relativity, or for biologists interested in genetics. Just as the working worlds of private industry shaped American science, so the demands from the working world of Soviet administration conjured new directions and made certain research questions of overriding importance. I discuss the distinctive work of the psychologist Vygotsky, the biologist Oparin, the biogeochemist Vernadsky, the plant geneticist Vavilov, and the agronomist Lysenko. Finally, I raise, as a case of both continuity and contrast, a second revolutionary and materialist project: the extension of the range of Darwinian explanation that carries the label the ‘Evolutionary Synthesis’.

Chapter 10, ‘Nazi Science’, explores the sciences in Germany after the seizure of power by Hitler’s National Socialist Party. In common with the conclusions of our best historians of Nazi science, I reject the simple but consoling argument that Nazi power was purely destructive of science. The destruction of careers and lives for some created opportunities for others. And, among those who seized the opportunity to promote their sciences, not all were self-serving ideologues, such as the proponents of ‘Aryan physics’. Some sciences were fundamental to Nazism: ‘National Socialism without a scientific knowledge of genetics’, one German said, ‘is like a house without an important part of its foundation.’17

Chapter 11, ‘Scaling Up, Scaling Down’, surveys the increasing scale of instrumentation in the 1920s and 1930s and asks where the skills and ambitions of scaled-up science came from. The sciences include cyclotron physics, macromolecular chemistry and molecular biology. While we will visit sites as diverse as Cambridge’s Cavendish laboratory, Eli Lilly’s factories and the workshops of IG Farben, the geographical focus is distinctively Californian. The scientific actors are Ernest Lawrence, Linus Pauling and Robert Oppenheimer, who appears on the stage for the first time.

The Second World War and Cold War

Part III traces the consequences of this scaling up for a world in conflict in the Second World War and the Cold War. Scaling up is the common feature of the stories of penicillin, radar and the atomic bomb, as well as of the less well-known development of biological weapons, traced in chapter 12. The sciences were placed on a permanent war footing in the Cold War. I treat the subject across two chapters. Chapters 13 to 16 examine the Cold War reconstruction of the sciences in broad thematic terms: the sustained increase in funding, the expansion of rival atomic programmes, the consequences of secrecy and national security, and the formation of Cold War problems as a working world for post-war sciences. The Cold War framed competition and collaboration in space research and geophysics, as illustrated, in particular, by the International Geophysical Year of 1957–8. I examine what I call the ‘Cold War sciences’: human genetic health, systems ecology, fundamental particle physics, cosmology (the last two share the ‘standard model’, another highpoint of twentieth-century science), radio astronomy, cybernetics, and digital electronic computing, information theory and post-war molecular biology. Many of these shared a distinctive language of information and codes, a commonality that makes sense only when the shared working world of the Cold War is brought into their historical analysis.

Sciences in our world

Part IV offers an account of transition. While the Cold War remained a frame, freezing some relations, others were in movement as working worlds structured by late capitalism came to the fore. Markets were deregulated, entrepreneurial activity was increasingly valorized, and a preference for networks of entities reconfigurable in the name of profit was pronounced. Chapter 17 asks whether the long 1960s, a period lasting from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, is a useful category for historians of science. I support arguments that identify a dynamic that led to a proliferation of experts, which could increasingly be heard offering conflicting testimonies in the public sphere. The existence of conflicting public expert testimony led to the question being asked (a revival from the 1930s) of what were the grounds for belief in knowledge claims. Social movements provided the institutional support for the questioning of authority. My examples include pesticide chemistry and psychopharmacology. Meanwhile what I call ‘neo-catastrophism’ flourished in population science, paleontology, evolutionary biology, astronomy and climate science.

Chapter 18 examines the capitalization of the sciences. Trends towards the re-engineering of life in the name of visions of new economies, vast increases in biomedical funding, and the continuing and deepening informatization of the sciences were punctuated by events such as the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new diseases such as AIDS. Networks of various kinds provided the infrastructure and the subject of sciences. Giant programmes, such as the Human Genome Project, one of many organism sequencing projects, were both organized as networks and revealed networks. Chapter 19 begins by accounting for how one of the ubiquitous networks of twenty-first-century life, the World Wide Web, was prompted by the managerial need to coordinate the documents of networks of physicists. Networks of science reporting had diversified in the last third of the twentieth century. Scientific disciplines were reconfigurable, as the vogue for interdisciplinarity encouraged. Nanoscience provides an example. Finally, in chapter 20, I offer two surveys. One looks backwards and analyses the four major thematic findings of this book. The other looks forward, reviewing the sciences of the twenty-first century.

Part I

Science after 1900

—— 2 ——

NEW PHYSICS

Waves, rays and radioactivities

Around 1900, physicists were confronted with a bewildering array of new phenomena. Understanding these waves, rays and forms of radioactivity would transform physics. However, they did not spring from nowhere. Crucially, the new physics was a response to the working worlds of nineteenth-century industry and global networks of communication.

From the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain and Germany, but especially Germany, physics laboratories, within universities dedicated to research, emphasized the value of precision measurement of physical quantities. Very little of this work was what in the twentieth century would be considered theoretical physics. Instead it was intimately connected with the industrial and commercial projects of the day. Under a gathering second industrial revolution, science-based industries exploited electrical phenomena and new chemistry. The German synthetic dye industry expanded hand in glove with organic chemistry. In William Thomson’s physics laboratory at Glasgow University, the design of instruments capable of precision measurement responded to the projecting of submarine telegraph cables that spanned the world. In Germany, Britain and the United States, measurement of ohms, amperes and volts was essential to new electrical systems of electrical power and electric light. Science, industry, economy, and national and international competition were ever more intertwined.

The laboratories isolated and reproduced, controlled and manipulated phenomena that outside, ‘in the real world’, were compounded or transient, undomesticated or invisible. These abilities, which could only be achieved with considerable discipline and skill, were the sources of the power of the laboratory, and they were what made laboratories highly valued, even essential, by the second half of the nineteenth century. If the skills and laboratory discipline could be replicated – possible only once teaching laboratories and research schools had inculcated the often highly tacit knowledge in students who could travel, and once metrological networks had made standard scientific units mobile – then there existed one of the necessary conditions for the worldwide replication of new physical phenomena. In addition, the globalization of the world economy in the nineteenth century confirmed and expanded trade routes whereby people and materials could move around the world.

For example, the development of electromagnetic theory was intimately connected to changing industrial practices and concerns. James Clerk Maxwell, a young Cambridge graduate in the mid-nineteenth century, had written to William Thomson for advice on what paper of Faraday’s to read; the advice was direct: read Faraday on retardation, the great bane of telegraph transmission.1 Nor were industrial problems merely prompts for kick-starting theoretical investigations. Maxwell’s mathematical version of Faraday’s fields required much fine-tuning of constants, such as the ratio of electromagnetic and electrostatic units, which led Maxwell into the practical, and industrial, science of metrology. Even when he retreated from academia to his Scottish estate to write his magnum opus, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1873, Maxwell would record the relevance his theory had to the working world: the ‘important applications of electromagnetism to telegraphy have … reacted on pure science by giving commercial value to accurate electrical measurements, and by affording to electricians the use of apparatus on a scale which greatly transcends that of any ordinary laboratory. The consequences of this demand for electrical knowledge, and of the experimental opportunities for acquiring it, have already been very great.’2

James Clerk Maxwell is a name known to generations of physics students primarily for ‘Maxwell’s equations’, which express in mathematical language the relationships between the changing quantities of electric and magnetic fields. Yet the form in which they are universally taught was not that given by Maxwell in 1873, but one by a group historians label the ‘Maxwellians’: Oliver Lodge, George F. FitzGerald, to some extent Heinrich Hertz and, most centrally, Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside had been so successful as a telegraph cable engineer that he had retired at the age of twenty-four to devote his life to electrical theory. It was Heaviside who wrote out Maxwell’s equations in their familiar and compact four-line form. Just as importantly, the Maxwellians in the 1880s interpreted the equations as permitting wave solutions and deduced some properties of these ‘electromagnetic waves’. Lodge, in his laboratory in Liverpool, began a series of experiments, discharging currents from Leiden jars. In Germany, Hermann von Helmholtz, who had identified the wave solutions, urged two junior physicists, Heinrich Hertz and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, to test Maxwellian theory. Hertz was successful, producing in 1887 at the University of Bonn electric spark discharges that indicated that an electromagnetic wave had propagated across space. He was using old instruments (Riess coils, used for producing impressive sparks) for new purposes: the production, control and manipulation of electromagnetic waves. ‘Electromagnetic waves had existed before their artificial production’, notes historian Sungook Hong, ‘but with Hertz, these waves became the subject and the instrument of research in physicists’ laboratories.’ The waves could be made to reappear in other laboratories, and replication of Hertz’s success encouraged continental physicists to take up Maxwell’s theory. Indeed the export of similar laboratory spaces had spread to such a degree that, before 1895, J. Chandra Bose could not only re-create Hertzian waves in his lab at Presidency College, Calcutta, he could also generate them at much shorter wavelengths. Indeed, Bose then turned the town hall of Calcutta into an extension of his laboratory practices with a spectacular public demonstration, using Hertzian waves to ignite gunpowder and trigger the ringing of a bell.