Download or read book John Herschel s Cape Voyage written by Steven Ruskin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1833 John Herschel sailed from London to Cape Town, southern Africa, to undertake (at his own expense) an astronomical exploration of the southern heavens, as well as a terrestrial exploration of the area around Cape Town. After his return to England in 1838, and as a result of his voyage, he was highly esteemed and became Britain's most recognized man of science. In 1847 his southern hemisphere astronomical observations were published as the Cape Results. The main argument of Ruskin's book is that Herschel's voyage and the publication of the Cape Results, in addition to their contemporary scientific importance, were also significant for nineteenth-century culture and politics. In this book it is demonstrated that the reason for Herschel's widespread cultural renown was the popular notion that his voyage to the Cape was a project aligned with the imperial ambitions of the British government. By leaving England for one of its colonies, and pursuing there a significant scientific project, Herschel was seen in the same light as other British men of science (like James Cook and Richard Lander) who had also undertaken voyages of exploration and discovery at the behest of their nation. It is then demonstrated that the production of the Cape Results, in part because of Herschel's status as Britain's scientific figurehead, was a significant political event. Herschel's decision to journey to the Cape for the purpose of surveying the southern heavens was of great significance to almost all of Britain and much of the continent. It is the purpose of this book to make a case for the scientific, cultural, and political significance of Herschel's Cape voyage and astronomical observations, as a means of demonstrating the relationship of scientific practice to broader aspects of imperial culture and politics in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book John Herschel s Cape Voyage written by Steven Ruskin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In John Herschel's Cape Voyage Steven Ruskin demonstrates that the reason for Herschel's widespread cultural renown was the popular notion that his voyage to the Cape was not simply an objective scientific expedition, but was a project closely aligned with the imperial ambitions of the British government.In 1833 Herschel sailed from London to Cape Town, southern Africa, to undertake an astronomical exploration of the southern heavens, as well as a terrestrial exploration of the area around Cape Town. As a result of his voyage, after his return to England in 1838 he was highly esteemed and became Britain's most recognized man of science.In this new examination of Herschel's voyage, Ruskin reaches a better understanding of the relationship of scientific practice to the broader aspects of imperial culture and politics in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Cape Landscapes written by Brian Warner and published by Juta and Company Ltd. This book was released on 2006 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir John Herschel, one of the most noted astronomers of his time, arrived at the Cape in 1834 to spend four years observing the southern sky. During this time he produced over 100 exquisite landscape sketches. They are reproduced in this book, together with a narrative text which provides background to Herschel's life and work and sets the illustrations in their historical and geographical context.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to John Herschel written by Stephen Case and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever comprehensive account of John Herschel's life, work and legacy, shedding new light on the history of Victorian science.
Download or read book Victorians and Numbers written by Lawrence Goldman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. This is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.
Download or read book A Commonwealth of Knowledge written by Saul Dubow and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full study of the relationship of knowledge to national identity formation in modern South Africa. It explores how the cultivation of knowledge served to support white political ascendancy and claims to nationhood. Elegantly written and wide ranging, the book addresses major themes in both South African and comparative imperial historiography.
Download or read book The Quest for the True Figure of the Earth written by Michael Rand Hoare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1730s two expeditions set out from Paris on extraordinary journeys; the first was destined for the equatorial region of Peru, the second headed north towards the Arctic Circle. Although the eighteenth century witnessed numerous such adventures, these expeditions were different. Rather than seeking new lands to conquer or mineral wealth to exploit, their primary objectives were scientific: to determine the Earth's precise shape by measuring the variation of a degree of latitude at points separated as nearly as possible by a whole quadrant of the globe between Equator and North Pole. Although such information had consequences for navigation and cartography, the motivation was not simply utilitarian. Rather it was one theme among many in an intellectual revolution in which advances in mathematics paralleled philosophical strife, and reputations of the living and the dead stood to be elevated or destroyed. In particular the two expeditions hoped to prove the correctness of Isaac Newton's prediction that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, but flattened at the poles. In this study, the 'Figure of the Earth' controversy is for the first time comprehensively explored in all its several dimensions. It shows how a largely neglected episode of European science, that produced no spectacular process or artefact - beyond a relatively minor improvement in maps - nevertheless represents an almost unique combination of theoretical prediction and empirical method. It also details the suffering of the two teams of scientists in very different extremes of climate, whose sacrifices for the sake of knowledge rather than colonial gain, caught the imagination of the literary world of the time.
Download or read book Public Understanding of Science written by David Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Observing by Hand written by Omar W. Nasim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.
Download or read book The Romance of Science Essays in Honour of Trevor H Levere written by Jed Buchwald and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere’s many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the “dismal science” of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature.
Download or read book The Scientific Imagination in South Africa written by William Beinart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative three hundred year exploration of the social and political contexts of science and the scientific imagination in South Africa.
Download or read book Victorian Glassworlds written by Isobel Armstrong and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.
Download or read book The Gates of Hell written by Andrew D. Lambert and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our foremost naval historians, the compelling story of the doomed Arctic voyage of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, commanded by Captain Sir John Franklin. Andrew Lambert, a leading authority on naval history, reexamines the life of Sir John Franklin and his final, doomed Arctic voyage. Franklin was a man of his time, fascinated, even obsessed with, the need to explore the world; he had already mapped nearly two-thirds of the northern coastline of North America when he undertook his third Arctic voyage in 1845, at the age of fifty-nine. His two ships were fitted with the latest equipment; steam engines enabled them to navigate the pack ice, and he and his crew had a three-year supply of preserved and tinned food and more than one thousand books. Despite these preparations, the voyage ended in catastrophe: the ships became imprisoned in the ice, and the men were wracked by disease and ultimately wiped out by hypothermia, scurvy, and cannibalism. Franklin's mission was ostensibly to find the elusive North West Passage, a viable sea route between Europe and Asia reputed to lie north of the American continent. Lambert shows for the first time that there were other scientific goals for the voyage and that the disaster can only be understood by reconsidering the original objectives of the mission. Franklin, commonly dismissed as a bumbling fool, emerges as a more important and impressive figure, in fact, a hero of navigational science.
Download or read book The Making of Modern Science written by David Knight and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word 'scientist' was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. Bringing together the people, events, and discoveries of this exciting period into a lively narrative, this book will be essential reading both for students of the history of science and for anyone interested in the foundations of the world as we know it today.
Download or read book Geographies of the Romantic North written by A. Byrne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines British scientific and antiquarian travels in the "North," circa 1790–1830. British perceptions, representations and imaginings of the North are considered part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of British self-fashioning as a Northern nation, and key in unifying the expanding North Atlantic empire.
Download or read book The Story of the Herschels a Family of Astronomers written by and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Hardy s Novel Universe written by Pamela Gossin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the first book-length study of astronomy in Hardy's writing, historian of science and literary scholar Pamela Gossin brings the analytical tools of both disciplines to bear as she offers unexpected and sophisticated readings of seven novels that enrich Darwinian and feminist perspectives on his work, extend formalist evaluations of his achievement as a writer, and provide fresh interpretations of enigmatic passages and scenes. In an elegantly crafted introduction, Gossin draws together the shared critical values and methods of literary studies and the history of science to articulate a hybrid model of scholarly interpretation and analysis that promotes cross-disciplinary compassion and understanding within the current contention of the science/culture wars. She then situates Hardy's own deeply interdisciplinary knowledge of astronomy and cosmology within both literary and scientific traditions, from the ancient world through the Victorian era. Gossin offers insightful new assessments of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, arguing that Hardy's personal synthesis of ancient and modern astronomy with mythopoetic and scientific cosmologies enabled him to write as a literary cosmologist for the post-Darwinian world. The profound new myths that comprise Hardy's novel universe can be read as a sustained set of literary thought-experiments by which he critiques the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of living out the storylines that such imaginative cosmologies project for his time - and ours.
