Archimedes 52 New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Jed Buchwald Larry Stewart Editors The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere Archimedes NEW STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY VOLUME 52 EDITOR Jed Buchwald, Dreyfuss Professor of History, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Jeremy Gray, The Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University, UK Tilman Sauer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Sharon Kingsland, Department of History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University, USA ADVISORY BOARD FOR MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY Henk Bos, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands Mordechani Feingold, California Institute of Technology, USA Allan D. Franklin, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Kostas Gavroglu, National Technical University of Athens, Greece Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany Trevor Levere, University of Toronto, Canada Jesper Lützen, Copenhagen University, Denmark William Newman, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA Lawrence Principe, The Johns Hopkins University, USA Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany Alex Roland, Duke University, USA Alan Shapiro, University of Minnesota, USA Noel Swerdlow, California Institute of Technology, USA ADVISORY BOARD FOR BIOLOGY Michael Dietrich, Dartmouth College, USA Michel Morange, Centre Cavaillès, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany Nancy Siraisi, Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA Archimedes has three fundamental goals; to further the integration of the histories of science and technology with one another: to investigate the technical, social and practical histories of specific developments in sci- ence and technology; and finally, where possible and desirable, to bring the histories of science and technol- ogy into closer contact with the philosophy of science. To these ends, each volume will have its own theme and title and will be planned by one or more members of the Advisory Board in consultation with the editor. Although the volumes have specific themes, the series itself will not be limited to one or even to a few par- ticular areas. Its subjects include any of the sciences, ranging from biology through physics, all aspects of technology, broadly construed, as well as historically-engaged philosophy of science or technology. Taken as a whole, Archimedes will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and scientists, as well as to those in business and industry who seek to understand how science and industry have come to be so strongly linked. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5644 Jed Buchwald • Larry Stewart Editors The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere Editors Jed Buchwald Larry Stewart Caltech College of Arts & Science Pasadena, CA, USA University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada ISSN 1385-0180 ISSN 2215-0064 (electronic) Archimedes ISBN 978-3-319-58435-5 ISBN 978-3-319-58436-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944446 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents 1 Trevor Levere, Affinities That Matter ................................................... 1 Ernie Hamm 2 Elements, Instruments, and Menstruums: Boerhaave’s Imponderable Fire Between Chemical Masterpiece and Physical Axiom ................................................................................. 9 Victor D. Boantza 3 At the Medical Edge or, The Beddoes Effect ........................................ 47 Larry Stewart 4 “Men of Letters” and “Men of Press Copies”: The Cultures of James Watt’s Copying Machine ................................. 65 David Philip Miller 5 Poetry, Chemistry, and Wisdom ............................................................ 81 David Knight 6 Facts or Fantasies in the Chemistry Lecture Theatre? ........................ 95 Robert G.W. Anderson 7 Poetry in War and War in Nature. From Vauban to Naturphilosophie to Clausewitz ......................................................... 117 Janis Langins 8 John Herschel’s Geology: The Cape of Good Hope in the 1830s .............................................................................................. 135 Gregory A. Good 9 More Food for Thought: Mill, Coleridge and the Dismal Science of Economics .............................................................................. 151 Margaret Schabas v vi Contents 10 “These Can Not All Have an Interest for England”: Symmetry, Beauty and the Trouble with Romanticism in Britain .................................................................................................. 163 Gordon McOuat 11 Science Born of Poison, Fire and Smoke: Chemical Warfare and the Origins of Big Science ................................................ 181 Andrew Ede 12 Politics, Morality, Innovation, and Misrepresentation in Physical Science and Technology....................................................... 201 Jed Buchwald 13 Fishing an Extreme Environment: Science, Sovereignty and Hudson Bay ...................................................................................... 219 Jennifer Hubbard 14 Collectors, Displays and Replicas in Context: What We Can Learn from Provenance Research in Science Museums ................................................................................ 255 David Pantalony 15 Context, Connections and Culture: The History of Science in Canada as a Field of Study .............................................. 277 Suzanne Zeller Index ................................................................................................................. 301 List of Contributors Robert G.W. Anderson spent most of his career working in UK national museums, first as a history of science curator and then latterly as director: the Royal Scottish Museum (Edinburgh), the Science Museum (London), the National Museum of Scotland, and the British Museum. He has acted as president of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, and as chairman of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. His main interest is chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment. Victor D. Boantza is assistant professor in the Program for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He works on the history of the early modern physical sciences, with interests in the relations between theory and practice in physics and chemistry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution: Laws of Another Order (Ashgate, 2013) is his first book Jed Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of history at Caltech and is finishing a book on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most recent publications are The Zodiac of Paris (Princeton, 2010, coauthor Diane Greco Josefowicz), Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2012, coauthor Mordechai Feingold), and “Kirchhoff’s theory for optical diffraction” (Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 70 (2016):464–511, coauthor Chen-Pang Yeang). Andrew Ede is a historian of science specializing in twentieth-century chemistry and physical sciences, teaching in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. He is also the director of the Science, Technology and Society Program. Along with Lesley B. Cormack, he is the coauthor of A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility. Gregory A. Good publishes mostly on the history of geophysics and other Earth sciences. He has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institution and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has received several grants from the National Science vii viii List of Contributors Foundation. He taught for 25 years at West Virginia University and has been direc- tor of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics since 2009. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, UK. He is currently writing a book titled John Herschel’s Planet: Earth in the Cosmos. Ernie Hamm is a historian of science and associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada. He works on the history of geology and on aspects of Enlightenment and Romantic science. Jennifer Hubbard is associate professor of the history of science and technology at Ryerson University and specializes in the political, environmental, institutional, and economic history of fisheries and ocean science. Through the University of Toronto Press, she published in 2006 A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology 1898–1939 and, in 2016, A Century of Maritime Science: The St. Andrews Biological Station 1908–2008, which includes chapters by scien- tists, technologists, and historians of science, which she coedited with Robert Stephenson and David Wildish. She has also published articles in ISIS, the ICES Journal of Marine Science, and Environmental History. She continues to find inspi- ration from the archives and influence of Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman, first director of the then-named Atlantic Biological Station. David Knight Reading chemistry at Oxford, David Knight was tempted into his- tory by Alistair Crombie and put to work on Humphry Davy with Sir Harold Hartley as my guide. Ignorantly supposing that the Romantics were hostile to science, he was astonished to find that Davy was a close friend of S. T. Coleridge and through him of William Wordsworth and Walter Scott: they all hoped for a dynamic science, especially chemistry. Coleridge and Davy had been brought together by the enthu- siast for chemical medicine, Thomas Beddoes, and Trevor’s researches and David’s were complementary; they met and made friends. In 1964, he was appointed to start history of science in the Philosophy Department at Durham University, while Trevor went to Canada; both settled happily and have kept in close contact ever since. Both have focused especially on the Revolutionary and Romantic periods, but ranged more widely as one thing led to another. David remarks, “I’m very grateful to have had so good a friend and helpful critic as Trevor right through my career.” Janis Langins is an emeritus professor of history of technology at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, where he also received his doctorate in the history of science and technology under Trevor Levere with a thesis on the early history of the Ecole Polytechnique during the French Revolution. Previously he graduated from McGill University with a master’s degree in chemical engineering. His research interests are in the social history of engineering, in the history of the military engineering corps of Old Regime France and engineers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. List of Contributors ix Gordon McOuat is Professor in the History of Science and Technology and the Contemporary Studies Programmes at the University of King’s College/Dalhousie University, the Director of the international partnership project, “Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature: East and West”, and the past Director of the Canadian national knowledge cluster, “Situating Science”. His research centres on the history and philosophy of the life sciences, classification and logic, including the formation of language rules and the origins of modern quantified logic. His recent publications include the Origins of Natural Kinds, Cataloguing Power, and Bentham’s Logic, along with the co-edited volumes, Circulation of Knowledge between England, India and China (Brill) and Narratives of Nature and Science: East and West (Routledge). David Philip Miller is an emeritus professor of history of science at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He continues to work and publish on the life of James Watt. He also investigates the nature of discovery and invention, concerning which a recent publication is “Of Patents, Principles and the Construction of Heroic Invention: The Case of Neilson’s Hot Blast in Iron Production,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160 (December 2016), 1–62. As coeditor of Annals of Science, he was proud to suc- ceed Trevor Levere. David Pantalony is curator of physical sciences and medicine at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, Canada. His main research interest is in the history of scientific instruments. As adjunct faculty at the University of Ottawa, he also teaches a collection-based seminar for history students. Margaret Schabas is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She works primarily in the history and philosophy of economics and has published over 40 articles or book chapters. She is the author of two monographs, A World Ruled by Number (Princeton, 1990) and The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005), both of which are in paperback. She is the recipient of a UBC Killam Research Prize (2015) and has given many keynote addresses, to the Hume Society, HOPOS, CPA, and as president of the HES (2013–2014). Larry Stewart is professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan and is cur- rently writing a study of experiment during the late Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. His most recent work, edited with Erika Dyck, is The Uses of Humans in Experiment. Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century (Brill/Rodopi, 2016). Suzanne Zeller is professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research focuses on the history of science and environmental history in Canada.