History of Science最新文献

{"title":"\"For the services of shipwrights, coopers, and grumettas\": Freetown's ship repair cluster in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone.","authors":"Bronwen Everill","doi":"10.1177/0073275320945117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320945117","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article looks at the development of Sierra Leone's ship repair cluster, particularly focusing on the period 1780 to 1860. It argues that several factors contributed to the colony's ability to develop a ship repair cluster. The first was the local environment, which provided both a safe harbor for ships and boats, and local materials that could be used on European and American ships. Secondly, the port's increasing commercial role and its unique position as the site of the Courts of Mixed Commission for the adjudication of condemned slaving ships after the abolition of the slave trade gave ship's carpenters access to a wide and varied range of both customers and supplies. Finally, these material effects were enhanced by the cluster's effect on knowledge spillover and on-the-spot tacit knowledge creation as disruptions in the supply chain, competition with slave traders, and other local circumstances fostered innovation in Freetown's repair cluster.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"60-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320945117","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9572931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nodes of knowledge, managing transfer: Shipbuilding and repair during the transformation from sail to steam.","authors":"Pepijn Brandon,&nbsp;Marten Dondorp","doi":"10.1177/0073275320971100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320971100","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The core theme of the special issue in which this article appears is the inherent impossibility of confining the knowledge required to build and sustain the instruments of travel to a single space or institution. This is certainly true for the ships that built empires - the large sailing and later steam ships produced by navies and companies in the process of European expansion. Ships traveled between polities and required repairs overseas, taking the construction knowledge and practices with them. Skilled laborers - experienced shipwrights and increasingly also trained engineers - helped to transfer shipbuilding practices across oceans, and to adapt these practices to local conditions based on forms of \"blended know-how.\" This article explores how the circulation of shipbuilding knowledge and practices within and between maritime empires changed with the increasing pace of industrialization. It does so on the basis of three moments: the Dutch East India Company's shipbuilding activities in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the interaction between private industry and the Dutch state in advancing machine-manufacturing in both the Netherlands and on Java in the 1830s and 1840s; and the aid provided by Dutch engineers in laying the groundwork for Japanese industrial warship-construction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such transfers put high demands on the capacities of states and naval administrators in controlling the flows of necessary resources and skilled labor, requiring complex arrangements between states and private capital. Industrialization did not change this basic fact, but it did change the nature of these arrangements. Although shipbuilding knowledge always remained practice-driven, highly mobile and susceptible to local adaptation, the increasing technological demands created by the transition from sail to steam and wood to iron, combined with the extension of the power of states and transnationally operating manufacturing companies, considerably changed the institutional embeddings and societal consequences of its circulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"19-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320971100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9567612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aviation infrastructures in the Republic of China, 1920-37.","authors":"Mary Augusta Brazelton","doi":"10.1177/0073275321995638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275321995638","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay investigates technical aspects of the history of aviation in the Republic of China, focusing on the period between 1920 and 1937. It suggests that Chinese authors and administrators came to see the establishment of technical infrastructure as dependent on the education of personnel who could assume responsibility for maintaining and expanding Chinese aviation ventures, rather than on specific technologies or practices. Magazines and journals in the 1920s reflected concerns with the establishment of weather observation and reporting, radio communications, and technical education in service of aviation; the last of these was critical for the first two. Provisions for technical work and training were reflected in contracts that were drawn up in the years around 1930 to establish three aviation projects in the Republic: the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), the Eurasia Aviation Corporation, and Southwest Airlines. Subsequent contracts and reports for CNAC and Eurasia in the years before the 1937 outbreak of war with Japan suggested a particular emphasis on the technical education of personnel as an important step in building Chinese aviation infrastructures.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"102-120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275321995638","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9930118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Subjective practices of war: The Prussian army and the Zorndorf campaign, 1758.","authors":"Adam L Storring","doi":"10.1177/0073275320958950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320958950","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article integrates the history of military theory - and the practical history of military campaigns and battles - within the broader history of knowledge. Challenging ideas that the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called Scientific Revolution) fostered attempts to make warfare mathematically calculated, it builds on work showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy was itself much more subjective than previously thought. It uses the figure of King Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740-1786) to link theoretical with practical military knowledge, placing the military treatises read and written by the king alongside the practical example of the Prussian army's campaign against the Russians in summer 1758 at the height of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), which culminated in the battle of Zorndorf. This article shows that both the theory and practice of war - like other branches of knowledge in the long eighteenth century - were fundamentally shaped by the contemporary search for intellectual order. The inability to achieve this in practice led to a reliance on subjective judgment and individual, local knowledge. Whereas historians have noted attempts in the eighteenth century to calculate probabilities mathematically, this article shows that war continued to be conceived as the domain of fortune, subject to incalculable chance. Answering Steven Shapin's call to define concretely \"the subjective element in knowledge-making,\" the examples of Frederick and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Count Christoph zu Dohna, reveal sharply different contemporary ideas about how to respond to uncertainty in war. Whereas Dohna sought to be ready for chance events and react to them, Frederick actively embraced uncertainty and risk-taking, making chance both a rhetorical argument and a positive choice guiding strategy and tactics.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"458-480"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320958950","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9183167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The hand of the connoisseur: Gems and hardness in Enlightenment mineralogy.","authors":"Michael Bycroft","doi":"10.1177/00732753221087558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221087558","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Historians of natural history have shown that the study of plants, animals, and minerals was a form of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century. Historians of early modern experiments have linked scientific knowledge to the manual skills of artisans. I combine these two insights, arguing that connoisseurship in the sciences meant learning to touch, not just learning to look. The focus is on gems and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France. I show, firstly, that the study of gems was linked to the connoisseurship (\"connoissance\") of paintings. Next, books on gems were closely related to the new mineralogical treatises that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. These treatises formalized a distinction between \"Oriental\" and \"Occidental\" gems that was also a distinction between hard and soft gems. The best judges of hardness were gem cutters, a group that participated in mineralogy through the culture of collecting. Finally, the knowledge of cutters contributed to the quantification of hardness in the form of the hardness scale and the scratch sclerometer.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"500-523"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9196138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Rusticall chymistry\": Alchemy, saltpeter projects, and experimental fertilizers in seventeenth-century English agriculture.","authors":"Justin Niermeier-Dohoney","doi":"10.1177/00732753211033159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211033159","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As the primary ingredient in gunpowder, saltpeter was an extraordinarily important commodity in the early modern world. Historians of science and technology have long studied its military applications but have rarely focused on its uses outside of warfare. Due to its potential effectiveness as a fertilizer, saltpeter was also an integral component of experimental agricultural reform movements in the early modern period and particularly in seventeenth-century England. This became possible for several reasons: the creation of a thriving domestic saltpeter production industry in the second half of the sixteenth century; the development of vitalist alchemical theories that sought a unified explanation for the \"growth\" of minerals, metals, and plants; the rise of experimental natural philosophy; and the mid-seventeenth-century dominance of the English East India Company in the saltpeter trade, which allowed agricultural reformers to repurpose domestically produced saltpeter in agriculturally productive ways. This paper argues that the Hartlib Circle - a loose network of natural philosophers and social reformers - adopted vitalist matter theories and the practical, experimental techniques of alchemists to transform agriculture into a more productive enterprise. Though their grandiose plans never came to fruition, their experimental trials to develop artificial fertilizers played an early role in the origins and development of saline chemistry, agronomy, and the British Agricultural Revolution.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"546-574"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9703379/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9935571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The spring of order: Robert Main's management of astronomical labor at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.","authors":"Daniel Belteki","doi":"10.1177/00732753211028434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211028434","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During the early nineteenth century the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, significantly increased the number of individuals it employed. One of the new roles created was the position of First Assistant, who oversaw the management of astronomical labor at the observatory. This article examines the contribution of Robert Main, who was the first person employed in this role. It shows that, through Robert Main's duties and tasks, the observatory appears as a hybrid site embodying aspects of the other institutions that formed part of its operational network. Moreover, it demonstrates that the transformation of the observatory during the nineteenth century was driven by his rigorous maintenance of discipline in relation to the daily operations of the site.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"575-593"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/00732753211028434","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10634383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medicine, connoisseurship, and the animal body.","authors":"Alexander Wragge-Morley","doi":"10.1177/0073275320949001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320949001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay reconsiders the links between medicine, connoisseurship, and aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. Taking a satire on the body of the physician and collector John Woodward as its starting point, I show that medicine and connoisseurship shared a deep preoccupation with the possibility that the animal body could excessively influence the workings of the mind. Pursuing this line of argument, moreover, I will reconsider the place of mind-body dualism in eighteenth-century British medicine and aesthetics. With the exception of materialists such as the philosopher-physician Bernard Mandeville, medics and aesthetic theorists tended to identify the exercise of judgment with the operations of a disembodied mind, unsullied by the embodied mechanisms of the lower body. In practice, however, the insistence that the most refined forms of judgment depended on the presence and activity of a disembodied, immaterial soul was less meaningful than it seems. When confronted by failures of judgment, medics and connoisseurs alike sought explanations in the mechanisms of the animal body. Whether or not they believed in the immateriality of the soul, they pictured the mind as a malfunctioning animal machine, to be cured through the material agency of medical therapeutics.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"481-499"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320949001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9194788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Science and connoisseurship in the European Enlightenment.","authors":"Michael Bycroft,&nbsp;Alexander Wragge-Morley","doi":"10.1177/00732753211049039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211049039","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship - the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice - as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"439-457"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9196136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Magnifying the first points of life: Harvey and Descartes on generation and scale.","authors":"Christoffer Basse Eriksen","doi":"10.1177/00732753211033476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211033476","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this essay, I study the contested role of magnification as an observational strategy in the generation theories of William Harvey and René Descartes. During the seventeenth century, the grounds under the discipline of anatomy were shifting as knowledge was increasingly based on <i>autopsia</i> and observation. Likewise, new theories of generation were established through observations of living beings in their smallest state. But the question formed: was it possible to extend vision all the way down to the first points of life? Arguing that the potential of magnification hinged on the metaphysics of living matter, I show that Harvey did not consider observational focus on the material composition of blood and embryos to be conducive to knowledge of living bodies. To Harvey, generation was caused by immaterial, and thus in principle invisible, forces that could not be magnified. Descartes, on the other hand, believed that access to the subvisible scale of natural bodies was crucial to knowledge about their nature. This access could be granted through rational introspection, but possibly also through powerful microscopes. The essay thus ends with a reflection on the importance of Cartesian corpuscularianism for the emergence of microscopical anatomy in seventeenth-century England.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"60 4","pages":"524-545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/39/9c/10.1177_00732753211033476.PMC9703378.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10626645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}