Download or read book The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain written by Jessica Ratcliff and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, the British Government spent money measuring the distance between the earth and the sun using observations of the transit of Venus. This book presents a narrative of the two Victorian transit programmes. It draws out their cultural significance and explores the nature of "big science" in late-Victorian Britain.
Download or read book Transit of Venus written by Nick Lomb and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the impact on astronomy and science of the six times that the planet Venus has passed in front of the Sun since the discovery of the telescope in the seventeenth century, and discusses the 2012 transit, the last in this century.
Download or read book An Empire of Magnetism written by Edward J. Gillin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an in-depth, global history of the British Magnetic Survey - the nineteenth-century, British-government-funded efforts to measure and understand the earth's magnetic field. These scientific efforts are situated within the context of the development of 'global science' and the ways they intersected with empire and colonialism.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth Century British Literature and Science written by John Holmes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.
Download or read book Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science 1840 1910 written by Lee T. Macdonald and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew. Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.
Download or read book The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain 1870 1914 written by Claire L. Jones and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the late nineteenth century, advances in medical knowledge, technology and pharmaceuticals led to the development of a thriving commercial industry. The medical trade catalogue became one of the most important means of promoting the latest tools and techniques to practitioners. Drawing on over 400 catalogues produced between 1870 and 1914, Jones presents a study of the changing nature of medical professionalism. She examines the use of the catalogue in connecting the previously separate worlds of medicine and commerce and discusses its importance to the study of print history more widely.
Download or read book Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain 1870 1910 written by Roger Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will - if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human agency and self-improvement? Smith takes an in-depth look at the problem of free will through the prism of different disciplines. Physiology, psychology, philosophy, evolutionary theory, ethics, history and sociology all played a part in the debates that took place. His subtly nuanced navigation through these arguments has much to contribute to our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian science and culture, as well as having relevance to current debates on the role of genes in determining behaviour.
Download or read book Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture written by Louise Penner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Dickens’s involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to medicine in crime fiction.
Download or read book The Making of British Anthropology 1813 1871 written by Efram Sera-Shriar and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian anthropology has been derided as an "armchair practice," distinct from the scientific discipline of the twentieth century. But the observational practices that characterized the study of human diversity developed from the established sciences of natural history, geography and medicine. Sera-Shriar argues that anthropology at this time went through a process of innovation which built on scientifically grounded observational study. Far from being an evolutionary dead end, nineteenth-century anthropology laid the foundations for the field-based science of anthropology today.
Download or read book Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable written by Sarah C Alexander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.
Download or read book Selene s Two Faces written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selene’s Two Faces sets out to look at the scientific purposes, the aesthetic expression, and the influence of early lunar drawings, maps and photographs, including spacecraft imaging.
Download or read book Globalizing Polar Science written by R. Launius and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Polar Years and the International Geophysical Year represented a remarkable international collaborative scientific effort that has been largely neglected by historians. This groundbreaking collection seeks to redress that neglect and illuminate critical aspects of the last 150 years of international scientific endeavour.
Download or read book Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland written by Diarmid A. Finnegan and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between science and civil society is essential to our understanding of cultural change during the Victorian era. Science was frequently packaged as an appropriate form of civic culture, inculcating virtues necessary for civic progress. In turn, civic culture was presented as an appropriate context for enabling and supporting scientific progress. Finnegan's study looks at the shifting nature of this process during the nineteenth century, using Scotland as the focus for his argument. Considerations of class, religion and gender are explored, illuminating changing social identities as public interest in science was allowed—even encouraged—beyond the environs of universities and elite metropolitan societies.
Download or read book The British Arboretum written by Paul A. Elliott and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the science and culture of nineteenth-century British arboretums, or tree collections. The development of arboretums was fostered by a variety of factors, each of which is explored in detail: global trade and exploration, the popularity of collecting, the significance to the British economy and society, developments in Enlightenment science, changes in landscape gardening aesthetics and agricultural and horticultural improvement. Arboretums were idealized as microcosms of nature, miniature encapsulations of the globe and as living museums. This book critically examines different kinds of arboretum in order to understand the changing practical, scientific, aesthetic and pedagogical principles that underpinned their design, display and the way in which they were viewed. It is the first study of its kind and fills a gap in the literature on Victorian science and culture.
Download or read book From a Photograph written by Geoffrey Belknap and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its early history, photography's authenticity was contested and challenged: how true a representation of reality can a photograph provide? Does the reproduction of a photograph affect its value as authentic or not? From a Photograph examines these questions in the light of the early scientific periodical press, exploring how the perceived veracity of a photograph, its use as scientific evidence and the technologies developed for printing it were intimately connected.Before photomechanical printing processes became widely used in the 1890s, scientific periodicals were unable to reproduce photographs and instead included these photographic images as engravings, with the label ‘from a photograph’. Consequently, every image was mediated by a human interlocutor, introducing the potential for error and misinterpretation. Rather than ‘reading’ photographs in the context of where or how they were taken, this book emphasises the importance of understanding how photographs are reproduced. It explores and compares the value of photography as authentic proof in both popular and scientific publications during this period of significant technological developments and a growing readership. Three case studies investigate different uses of photography in print: using pigeons to transport microphotographs during the Franco-Prussian War; the debate surrounding the development of instantaneous photography; and finally the photographs taken of the Transit of Venus in 1874, unseen by the human eye but captured on camera and made accessible to the public through the periodical.Addressing a largely overlooked area of photographic history, From a Photograph makes an important contribution to this interdisciplinary research and will be of interest to historians of photography, print culture and science.
Download or read book The Clocks Are Telling Lies written by Scott Alan Johnston and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the nineteenth century all time was local time. On foot or on horseback, it was impossible to travel fast enough to care that noon was a few minutes earlier or later from one town to the next. The invention of railways and telegraphs, however, created a newly interconnected world where suddenly the time differences between cities mattered. The Clocks Are Telling Lies is an exploration of why we tell time the way we do, demonstrating that organizing a new global time system was no simple task. Standard time, envisioned by railway engineers such as Sandford Fleming, clashed with universal time, promoted by astronomers. When both sides met in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, to debate the best way to organize time, disagreement abounded. If scientific and engineering experts could not agree, how would the public? Following some of the key players in the debate, Scott Johnston reveals how people dealt with the contradictions in global timekeeping in surprising ways – from zealots like Charles Piazzi Smyth, who campaigned for the Great Pyramid to serve as the prime meridian, to Maria Belville, who sold the time door to door in Victorian London, to Moraviantown and other Indigenous communities that used timekeeping to fight for autonomy. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, The Clocks Are Telling Lies offers a thought-provoking narrative that centres people and politics, rather than technology, in the vibrant story of global time telling.
Download or read book The Age of Scientific Naturalism written by Bernard Lightman and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.
