The weather and diseases : some eighteenth-century contributions to observational meteorology

1952 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-307 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Meteorological Observation ◽  
Instrumental Observations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Instrumental Records

Students of the history of science are well aware how rapidly ideas were exchanged, remembering the available means of communication, during the years immediately preceding and following the foundation of the Royal Society. This is very evident in regard to meteorological observation and measurement. Robert Hooke’s daily readings of temperature and rainfall in 1664 are well known and he, with Locke soon afterwards, was quick to stress the need for comparable observations in different places. Accordingly, we in England possess some remarkably early series of records ; of temperature, for example, at Wrentham in Suffolk (1673-1674), and, of course, Towneley’s well-known rainfall record near Burnley (1677-1704). Gadbury kept a very useful diary in London (1669-1689) and while his instrumental observations were few, there is a consistency about his daily recording which accords well with the spirit of the age and that consciousness of time which became so evident not only in the social diarists but among the craftsmen such as Tompion with his clocks. Zeal with regard to maintenance of consistent daily observations has always been very variable. For example, in 1694, Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., while on one of his journeys visited Towneley and much admired his work ; but in his diary he enters that he ‘ had a mind to do likewise, but bethought myself of the tediousness of it ’. Thomas Short of Sheffield in 1749 also commented on the many who began a record but were prone to let it lapse. Prolonged maintenance of daily observations demands an odd and uncommon type of enthusiasm which at intervals has been roused into activity. Perusal of our older records leads one to think that the initial impetus died down about 1710 ; for no English instrumental records of a continuous kind survive, as far as we know, for the period 1716-1722.

George Gabriel Stokes

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Dynamics ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Mathematical Analysis ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Natural Philosophers

George Gabriel Stokes was one of the most significant mathematicians and natural philosophers of the nineteenth century. Serving as Lucasian professor at Cambridge he made wide-ranging contributions to optics, fluid dynamics and mathematical analysis. As Secretary of the Royal Society he played a major role in the direction of British science acting as both a sounding board and a gatekeeper. Outside his own area he was a distinguished public servant and MP for Cambridge University. He was keenly interested in the relation between science and religion and wrote extensively on the matter. This edited collection of essays brings together experts in mathematics, physics and the history of science to cover the many facets of Stokes’s life in a scholarly but accessible way.

Welcome and introduction

1989 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-96
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Committee ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Imperial College ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The University

It is my pleasant duty to welcome you all most warmly to this meeting, which is one of the many events stimulated by the advisory committee of the William and Mary Trust on Science and Technology and Medicine, under the Chairmanship of Sir Arnold Burgen, the immediate past Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. This is a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the British Academy, whose President, Sir Randolph Quirk, will be Chairman this afternoon, and it covers Science and Civilization under William and Mary, presumably with the intention that the Society would cover Science if the Academy would cover Civilization. The meeting has been organized by Professor Rupert Hall, a Fellow of the Academy and also well known to the Society, who is now Emeritus Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Imperial College in the University of London; and Mr Norman Robinson, who retired in 1988 as Librarian to the Royal Society after 40 years service to the Society.

scholarly journals The diary of Sir Charles Blagden

1950 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-89 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Considerable Portion ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of

Among the Blagden papers recently acquired by the Royal Society is a considerable portion of the diary of Sir Charles Blagden himself, closely written in difficult handwriting from edge to edge of the paper on hundreds of small sheets. The complete decipherment and transcription of this diary may take a long time, if it is ever done. But it was thought that the Fellows and those engaged in the history of science at the close of the eighteenth century might be interested in a sample of the diary of this man, Secretary of the Royal Society from 1784 to 1797, who was closely associated with many of the persons and events which made those days memorable in the history of science. Even before his appointment to the Secretaryship of the Royal Society, when he was acting as Secretary to Henry Cavendish, it was he who informed Lavoisier in June 1783 that Cavendish had burned inflammable air and obtained water. On this information Lavoisier repeated the experiment and solved the problem of the composition of water.

Henry William Robinson

1961 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-246
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Memory ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

For frequenters of the library of the Royal Society it is still hard to get accustomed to the absence o f M r H. W . Robinson, who was for so long not only a familiar and friendly figure to all readers, but was a man to whom seekers turned instinctively for information about less familiar records bearing on the history of science, especially those in which the Royal Society was concerned. He was an unrivalled expert on matters contained in the Society’s extensive archives, which were within recent memory not so well catalogued and classified as they are today, thanks to the labours o f Mr Kaye and his collaborators. He had a rare knowledge, the fruit of years o f study, o f the whereabouts of scarce books, documents and manuscripts bearing on particular aspects o f the science of the past, o f delineations of scientific instruments and of portraits of men o f science, and this knowledge he was always delighted to place at the disposal of serious enquirers. Scholars in all parts of the world have in their publications acknowledged with gratitude their indebtedness to him for recondite information gladly furnished. Henry William Robinson was born on 23 March 1888, in W ood Green, a pleasant suburb in the north of London, and throughout his life he was closely associated with the social life of the neighbourhood.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Between History and Nature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hermeneutic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

Characters Before Copyright

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Consumer Habits ◽  
Archival Work

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

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