(Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History) Crosbie Smith, Jon Agar (Eds.) - Making Space For Science - Territorial Themes in The Shaping of Knowledge-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1998)

MAKING SPACE FOR SCIENCE
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE IN MODERN HISTORY
General Editor: John V. Pickstone, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and
Medicine, University of Manchester, England
One purpose of historical writing is to illuminate the present. In the late twentieth century,
science, technology and medicine are enormously important, yet their development is little
studied. Histories of politics and literature abound, and historical biography is established
as an effective way of setting individuals in context. But the historical literature on science,
technology and medicine is relatively small, and the better studies are rarely accessible to
the general reader. Too often one finds mere chronicles of progress, or scientific
biographies which do little to illuminate either the science or the society in which it was
produced, let alone their interactions.
The reasons for this failure are as obvious as they are regrettable. Education in many
countries, not least in Britain, draws deep divisions between the sciences and the
humanities. Men and women who have been trained in science have too often been trained
away from history, or from any sustained reflection on how societies work. Those educated
in historical or social studies have usually learned so little of science that they remain
thereafter suspicious, overawed, or both.
Such a diagnosis is by no means novel, nor is it particularly original to suggest that good
historical studies of science may be peculiarly important for understanding our present.
Indeed this series could be seen as extending research undertaken over the last half-century,
especially by American historians. But much of that work has treated science, technology
and medicine separately; this series aims to draw them together, partly because the three
activities have become ever more intertwined. This breadth of focus and the stress on the
relationships of knowledge and practice are particularly appropriate in a series which will
concentrate on modem history and on industrial societies. Furthermore, while much of the
existing historical scholarship is on American topics, this series aims to be international,
encouraging studies on European material. The intention is to present science, technology
and medicine as aspects of modem culture, analysing their economic, social and political
aspects, but not neglecting the expert content which tends to distance them from other
aspects of history. The books will investigate the uses and consequences of technical
knowledge, and how it was shaped within particular economic, social and political
structures.
Such analyses should contribute to discussions of present dilemmas and to assessments
of policy. 'Science' no longer appears to us as a triumphant agent of Enlightenment,
breaking the shackles of tradition, enabling command over nature. But neither is it to be
seen as merely oppressive and dangerous. Judgement requires information and careful
analysis, just as intelligent policy-making requires a community of discourse between men
and women trained in technical specialities and those who are not.
This series is intended to supply analysis and to stimulate debate. Opinions will vary
between authors; we claim only that the books are based on searching historical study of
topics which are important, not least because they cut across conventional academic
boundaries. They should appeal not just to historians, nor just to scientists, engineers and
doctors, but to all who share the view that science, technology and medicine are far too
important to be left out of history.
Making Space
for Science
Territorial Themes in the
Shaping of Knowledge
Edited by
Crosbie Smith
Reader in History and Cultural Studies of Science
University of Kent at Canterbury
and
Jon Agar
Lecturer in the History ofTechnology
University of Manchester
with the assistance of Gerald Schmidt
in association with
CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-26326-4 ISBN 978-1-349-26324-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26324-0
First published in the United States of America 1998 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21053-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Making space for science : territorial themes in the shaping of
knowledge I edited by Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21 053-3( cloth)
I. Science-History. 2. Technology-History. 3. Science-Social
aspects-History. 4. Technology-Social aspects-History.
I. Smith, Crosbie. II. Agar, Jon.
Q125.M314 1997
306.4'5---dc21 97-28072
CIP
Selection and editorial matter© Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar 1998
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1998
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with

written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency. 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
07 06 05 04 03 02 0 I 00 99 98
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Introduction: Making Space for Science
Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar
Part I or the Territory 25

1 Projection and the Ubiquitous Virtue of Geometry in the
Renaissance
Jim Bennett 27
2 From the Alps to Egypt (and Back Again): Dolomieu,
Scientific Voyaging, and the Construction of the Field
in Eighteenth-Century Natural History
A!ix Cooper 39
3 'I Do Know the Machinery of the Universe': System and
Individuality in Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka
Ian Higginson 64
Part II or Working Classes 85

4 'A Most Important Trespass': Lewis Gordon and the
Glasgow Chair of Civil Engineering and Mechanics, 1840-55
Ben Marsden 87
5 'Nowhere But in a Great Town': William Thomson's Spiml
of Classroom Credibility
Crosbie Smith 118
Part III or Pastoral Privileges 147

6 Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House
Simon Schaffer 149
7 Spatial Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Representations of
Science: Faraday and Tyndall
Alice Jenkins 181
Part IV or Metropolitan Spaces 193

8 'But Indifferently Lodged ... ':Perception and Place in
Building for Science in Victorian London
Sophie Forgan 195
v
vi Contents
9 The Premisses of Premises: Spatial Issues in the Historical

Construction of Laboratory Credibility
Graeme Gooday 216
10 Easy Transit: Crossing Boundaries Between Physics and
Chemistry in mid-Nineteenth-Century France
Mathhias Dorries 246
Part V Of Research Sites 263

11 Screening Science: Spatial Organization and Valuation at
Jodrell Bank
Jon Agar 265
12 Biotechnology's Private Parts (and Some Public Ones)
Thomas F. Gieryn 281
13 'Nobody Can Force You When You are Across the Ocean'-
Face to Face and E-mail Exchanges Between Theoretical
Physicists
Martina Merz 313
Afterword: Scientific Knowledge, Power and Space

Alex Dolby 330
Bibliography 338
Index 362
List of Illustrations
1.1 The triangulation instrument of Joost BUrgi for
range-finding 33
1.2 A sixteenth-century Flemish astrolabe 34
1.3 The projection of an astrolabe plate 35
3.1 Schematic version of Poe's analogy between divine and
mortal plots 81
6.1 Maxwell's sketches for the Cavendish Laboratory 161
6.2 Maxwell instructs Rayleigh on the construction of stable
supports for electrical instruments 165
6.3 Cragside lit by electricity, 1881 171
6.4 Siemens' house at Sherwood 175
8.1 South Kensington Museum and neighbourhood 211
8.2 Comparison of the space available for science buildings 212
9.1 Map of the principal electrical institutions and
undertakings in London, 1906 223
9.2 Engraving of electric motor testing room at the Central
Institution, 1888 235
9.3 Advertisement for Ransome's trial shop, Chelsea, 1888 236
12.1 Cornell University Biotechnology Building (CUBB) 283
12.2 Programme and project concept: 'the Bubble Diagram' 287
12.3 Early sketch showing 'public' 289
12.4 CUBB: ground floor plan 294
12.5 CUBB: first floor plan 295
12.6 CUBB: third floor plan 296
12.7 Maginot Line in the Upper Lobby 298
12.8 Maginot Line in the Lower Lobby 298
12.9 Early sketch showing 'common rooms' 299
12.10 Communal room showing space dedicated to individual
scientists 307
12.11 Masking tape demarcation between public (right) and
private (left) 308
vii
Preface
Making Space for Science brings together contributors with diverse interests in
the history. sociology and cultural studies of science and technology since the
Renaissance. In recent years there has been a growing recognition that a mature
analysis of scientific and technological activity requires an understanding of its
spatial contexts. Without these contexts, indeed, scientific practice as such is
scarcely conceivable. This volume therefore aims to provide a series of studies,
drawn from the history of science and engineering, from sociology and sociology
of science, from literature and science, and from architecture and design history.
which examines the spatial foundations of the sciences from a number of comple-
mentary perspectives. These studies, however, are framed within an introduction
and an afterword which seek to draw out the significant connections between
knowledge, power and space common to all the chapters.
Each of the contributors to this volume participated in the British Society for
the History of Science's meeting 'Making Space: Territorial Themes in the
History of Science' held at the University of Kent at Canterbury in March 1994.
The book, however, does not constitute the proceedings of the conference because
only 13 of the 50 papers presented at the meeting are included. The selected
papers have been substantially revised and, in most cases, entirely rewritten for
the purposes of this volume.
The editors owe a debt of thanks to the very many scholars who, in various
ways, have contributed to the shaping of this book. We are especially grateful to
Ben Marsden and Alex Dolby for their invaluable comments and criticisms of
draft chapters, and we thank one anonymous referee in particular for incisive and
constructive remarks on the presuppositional nature of making space for science,
suggestions which we have attempted to incorporate into the 'Introduction'.
Above all, the editors would like to express their gratitude to Gerald Schmidt
whose computing expertise, linguistic and indexing skills, and meticulous editing
ensured the rapid emergence of an orderly whole from the chaotic sum of indi-
vidual contributions. We also thank John Pickstone and, at Macmillan Press,
Aruna Vasudevan and John Smith.
CROSBIE SMITH
Canterbury
JoN AGAR
Manchester
viii
Notes on the Contributors
Jon Agar is Lecturer in the history of technology in the Centre for the History
of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester where
he is also Associate Director of the National Archive for the History of
Computing. In 1993 he was awarded the British Society for the History of
Science's Singer Prize for an essay on Jodrell Bank Radioastronomy
Observatory and in 1994 he co-organized (with Crosbie Smith) the international
conference on 'Making space' at the University of Kent.
Jim Bennett is Keeper of the Museum of the History of Science in the University
of Oxford. He was formerly Curator of the Whipple Science Museum in the
University of Cambridge. His recent books include The Geometry of War
1500-1750 (with Stephen Johnston) and Church, State and Astronomy in Ireland.
Current research focuses on the relationship between practical mathematics and
natural philosophy in the Renaissance.
Alix Cooper is a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Science at

Harvard University and is completing a dissertation entitled 'Inventing the
indigenous: local knowledge and natural history in early modern Germany,
1580-1720'. Her research concerns early modem understandings of place and
territory as seen through the natural world. Her other interests include the history
of environmental and occupational medicine during this period.
Alex Dolby taught at the University of Leeds before moving iu 1974 to his
present position as Senior Lecturer in the Centre for History & Cultural Studies
of Science at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published on the
history of chemistry and psychology, on sociology of scientific knowledge, and
on marginal science. He has recently published Uncenain Knowledge: an Image
of Science for a Changing World (1996).
Matthias Dorries is a research fellow at the Forschungsinstitut fur Technik- und

Wissenschaftgeschichte (Deutsches Museum, Munich). He is co-editor of
Restaging Coulomb and Heinrich Kayser: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. His
publications and forthcoming book focus on the history of the physical sciences
in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly France.
Sophie Forgan combines the teaching of the history of architecture in the

Institute of Design at the University of Teeside with a strong research interest in
the history of science. She has published extensively on the history and architec-
tural planning of learned societies, universities, museums and exhibitions.
ix
x Notes on the Contributors
Thomas F. Gieryn is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University

(Bloomington) and Director of the Program on Scientific Dimensions of Society.
His book, Cultural Cartography of Science: Episodes of Boundary-Work, is due
for publication in 1998. As a member of the School of Social Science at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1996-97); he has been continuing his
investigations into the relationship between place and truth-making.
Graeme Gooday is Lecturer in the Division of History and Philosophy of

Science (Philosophy Department) at the University of Leeds. He was formerly
Royal Society-British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History
of Science at the University of Oxford. He has published on the history of
physics, biology and engineering laboratories, and is currently preparing a
monograph on the cultural history of electrical measurement in the nineteenth
century.
Ian Higginson is Leverhulme Special Research Fellow in the Centre for History
and Cultural Studies of Science, at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He also
has close links with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. His research
in literature and science and polar studies, includes publications on Edgar Allan
Poe, Jack London and Bret Harte. He is currently researching a monograph on
'Thermodynamics in twentieth-century culture' with Crosbie Smith.
Alice Jenkins is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the

University of Glasgow. She has held research fellowships at the Universities of
Cambridge and Liverpool. She is currently completing a book on the relations of
British physics, geography and poetry during the early nineteenth century.
Ben Marsden is Royal Society-British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

in the Centre for History & Cultural Studies of Science at the University of Kent
at Canterbury. He has published on academic engineering in Victorian Britain
and on the air engine in the nineteenth century. He is also interested in issues of
technological 'failure', heat engine science and practice, artisan cultures in
Scotland and the historical relations between science and religion.
Martina Merz is a researcher affiliated to the University of Bielefeld's Sociology

Department. She is based at CERN, the European Institute for Particle Physics in
Geneva where she conducts a 'laboratory study'. Trained as a physicist, her main
research interests are the epistemic practices of theoretical and experimental
physicists.
Simon Schaffer is Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University

of Cambridge. He is co-author (with Steven Shapin) of Leviathan and the
Air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985) and has recently
Notes on the Contributors xi
published several essays on the early history of the Cavendish Laboratory and the
electromagnetic researches of Maxwell and Rayleigh.
Gerald Schmidt is a graduate in English and American Literature from the

University of Kent at Canterbury. He has a strong interest in the relations
between literature and science in historical contexts.
Crosbie Smith is Reader in History & Cultural Studies of Science at the

University of Kent at Canterbury and has been Director of the Centre for
History & Cultural Studies of Science there since 1994. He is co-author (with
M. Norton Wise) of Energy and Empire: a Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin
(1989) which won the History of Science Society's Pfizer Award (1990). He is
currently completing The Science of Energy.
Introduction: Making Space for
Science
Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was ... history: with its themes
of development and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-
accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the
menacing glaciation [heat-death) of the world. The nineteenth century found its
essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics
[expressing an irreversible accumulation of degraded energy unavailable to
human beings for useful work]. The present epoch will perhaps be above all
the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch
of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dis-
persed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is
less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that
connects points and intersects with its own skein... (Foucault, 1986: 22-3)
Spatiality: spatial character, quality, or property.

Spatialization: the fact of making spatial or investing with spatial qualities or
relations. (Oxford English Dictionary)
1. THE EPOCH OF SPACE
With a characteristic flair for grand epochal sweeps, Michel Foucault divided the
cultural history of space into three broad categories. First, a hierarchical ensemble
of sacred and profane places, of celestial and terrestrial spaces, characterized the
Middle Ages in Western Europe. Second, Galileo Galilei in the early seventeenth
century opened up the enclosed spaces of the Medieval world into 'an infinite,
and infinitely open space' whereby localization gave way to extension. Finally, in
the twentieth century extension itself had been displaced by the site, defined 'by
the relations of proximity between points or elements' (Foucault, 1986: 22-3).
Whatever the historical merits of such generalizations, Foucault's remarks serve
to remind us not only of the cultural contingency of spatiality but also of a shift
from universalist, unified and coherent conceptions of cosmic order to local,
diverse and often contested orders embodied in competing 'sites'.
2 Making Space for Science
In his celebrated lA production de l'espace (1974) Henri Lefebvre asked: 'If

the search for a unitary theory of physical, mental and social space was adum-
brated several decades ago, why and how was it abandoned?' (Lefebvre, 1991:
21). His answers bear witness to the fragmentation of spatiality in post-modernist
culture. Not only do the 'classic texts' by Foucault, Lefebvre, Bourdieu, de
Certeau, Harvey and others present often subtly, sometimes radically, different
analyses of spatiality but also the various scholarly disciplines, which have in
recent times appropriated much of value from such sources, do not in any sense
offer a monolithic, still less universally applicable, framework. Such diversity
evokes a vision in which the notion of 'space' is breaking down before our eyes.
At first sight, then, the multiple meanings attached to 'space' might be thought to
militate against a successfully focused volume on spatial and territorial themes in
the shaping of knowledge.
Accepting the demise of universalist conceptions of spatiality, however, this
introductory essay begins with the premiss that the use of 'space' is contingent
upon the mode of analysis adopted. Different spatial representations will therefore
arise from each form of analytical treatment. For example, many of our contribu-
tors emphasize the primacy of categories deployed by the historical actors them-
selves over the imposition of present-day categories. Other modes of analysis
exemplified in the chapters include varieties of cultural geography, sociology,
anthropology and textual analysis as well as various adaptations of Foucault,
Lefebvre and the other 'classics of space'.
Historians of the sciences nowadays study the shaping of scientific knowledge
in context. Tracing the development of abstract scientific and philosophical ideas
over long periods no longer carries much conviction within historical communi-
ties. By challenging traditional views of the automatic universality of scientific
knowledge, historians of the sciences have increasingly looked to social and cul-
tural contexts for explanations of scientific change and practice. And as their dis-
cipline has moved away from free-floating ideas and philosophical abstractions,
including 'big picture' generalization, so the historical focus has shifted to 'local'
contexts (see Christie, 1991).
These comparatively recent trends in the historiography of the sciences,
drawing especially on the insights of sociologists, have shown that the making
and maintaining of scientific knowledge is dependent upon a number of presuppo-
sitions: that the construction and communication of science involves a complex
set of social practices, that a science has to be credible and embodied if it is to be
produced and sustained, and that it has to be spatially located. Unlike traditional
historical discourses in terms of economic, political and other merely 'contribu-
tory' factors, such presuppositions have effectively become sine qua non to the
history and sociology of knowledge, whether scientific, technological or medical.
Although each of these presuppositions continues to direct scholars to new and
fruitful objects of enquiry, it is the last of these that forms the principal subject of
this volume. Our pragmatic claim is that spatialized approaches enable us to gain
Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar 3
insights and understand relationships not otherwise obtainable. Each of our con-
tributors demonstrates the fruitfulness of spatial analyses in specific cases. The
purpose of this introduction, then, will be to draw out the nature of that fruitful-
ness not only with respect to individual chapters, but also to highlight the connec-
tions between those contributions and current academic debates focused on
knowledge, power and space.
In order to attain these goals, we divide the remainder of this introduction into
two principal sections. Our first thematic group of chapters is concerned with
knowledge 'Of the Territory'. Prior to the nineteenth century, acquiring knowl-
edge of the territory followed diverse paths as individual practitioners devised
their own means of mapping and systematizing their 'fields' of knowledge. By
the early nineteenth century, however, 'field work' had become much more sys-
tematic as surveyors charted the states of nature. At the same time, individual
practitioners became increasingly marginalized by the establishment of privileged
sites for scientific practice and pedagogy.
Our second principal section, 'Of Privileged Sites', opens with a general dis-
cussion of the key characteristics of such spaces for the shaping of knowledge.
We then consider in tum the four remaining thematic groups of chapters, the first
three of which focus upon very different locations - industrial, pastoral, and met-
ropolitan - for nineteenth-century scientific sites. Our fifth group carries the
analysis into the twentieth century when large budgets and specialized instrumen-
tation opened up new possibilities and fresh problems for scientific research. A
final section of this introduction briefly points up the fruitfulness of examining
processes of knowledge transfer.
2. OF THE TERRITORY
. . . [The Company official] became darkly menacing at last, and with much
heat argued that the Company had the right to every bit of information about its
'territories'. And said he, 'Mr Kurtz's knowledge of unexplored regions must
have been necessarily extensive and peculiar ... '. I assured him Mr Kurtz's
knowledge, however extensive, did not bear upon the problems of commerce
or administration. He then invoked the name of science. 'It would be an incal-
culable loss ir, etc., etc. (Conrad, 1984: 153)
Marlow's description of his encounter with the suave trading company official
towards the close of Joseph Conrad's celebrated 1899 story Heart of Darkness
fully encapsulates the major themes of this section. As cultural geographers have
well shown, geographical territories are complex spaces simultaneously physi-
cal, economic, political, cultural and scientific (for introductory examples see
Jackson, 1989; McDowell, 1994). 'Of the territory' is therefore concerned with
interrelated themes centred on the relations of knowledge to authority, power and
control, and on the means by which such knowledge is acquired, legitimated,

deployed and marketed.
Confessing to an obsession with spatial metaphors ('territory', 'domain',
'field') laden with geographical and political meaning, Foucault claimed that
spatial analysis provided a key to the relations that were possible between power
and knowledge:
Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, dis-

placement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowl-
edge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power....
And the politico-strategic term is an indication of how the military and the
administration actually come to inscribe themselves both on a material soil and
within forms of discourse. (Foucault, 1980: 69)
'Discourse' was the fundamental analytical tool for Foucault: the directed set of
epistemic, textual and linguistic practices within which questions are formulated,
objects classified, and through which power operates. Cultural geographers point
to prevailing 'discourses of space', clusters of largely unchallenged knowledge
practices. At one level, the rationalistic discourse of town planning and regional
development for instance, space is presented as empty, divisible and Cartesian. At
another level, space is imbued with cultural meaning and significance. Far from
being seen as empty, rational and neutral, space at this level of discourse often
expresses deep cultural and community conflict (for example, Shields, 1991: 7;
Agnew, 1993: 251-71).
Contemporary illustrations are not difficult to find. For Irish nationalist groups,
for example, the 'island' of Ireland constitutes the national 'Gaelic' territory
encompassing not merely soil but language, leisure, religion and even race. In
this defined space resides the power and independence of a state free from British
rule. Ulster unionist groups, on the other hand, recognize no such 'unified island
space'. 'Northern Ireland' constitutes a separate cultural and political space,
enclosing values of protestantism ('civil and religious liberty') in opposition to
the perceived authoritarianism of a separate southern theocratic state. 'Freedom',
it should be emphasized, has no 'objective' and abstract meaning applicable to
both communities, but possesses meaning only in relation to specific cultural and
political territories.
Foucault's approach explicitly countered what he saw as out-moded forms of
developmental history, 'schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic develop-
ment, the progress of consciousness'. Far from being anti-historical, however,
such spatial approaches do not imply a hostility to time. Rather, tracing 'the forms
of implantation, delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation,
the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief of processes - histor-
ical ones, needless to say - of power'. That is to say, the endeavour 'to decipher
discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp
precisely the poin~ at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the
basis of relations of power' (Foucault, 1980: 69-70).
Jacques Revel's work on the national territory of France offers an excellent
case study of know lege of the territory in relation to political power and control.
Compared to Foucault's somewhat disembodied spatial discourses, Revel's
account is firmly embodied in the changing political history of France. By 1300,
Revel argues, France had become associated with a specific geographical area to
be invoked as 'a garden of perfection', an 'intangible territory' and 'a homeland
in defense of which its inhabitants would soon learn to die' (Revel, 1991: 133;
Beaune, 1985). But control over the national domain was far from permanent and
assured. Over the next five centuries, therefore, the public authorities sought to
acquire knowledge of, establish control over, and lend homogeneity to the diverse
regions within the national borders.
With respect to statistical surveys, Revel drew attention to two distinctive
approaches widely deployed during the last century of the ancien regime. The
first recorded data (such as population, yields, and prices) temporally in order to
guage developments and tendencies. Such surveys were often promoted on a
national scale by the state. The second approach attempted to reflect nature as
closely as possible, was descriptive and inclusive of all aspects of a locality, and
sought to reconstruct the relations among these variables. Spatial in character,
the particular 'natural history' of a region could be juxtaposed with the natural
history of other regions to produce a collage. Here the promoters were often
Enlightenment figures, acting in the public interest and claiming unique 'field
experience': 'a spontaneous network of travelers, geographers, economists,
agronomists, doctors, low-ranking administrators, and notables of the area'
(Revel, 1991: 139-40).
In the aftermath of the Revolution, the new regime initially utilized both
approaches. On the one hand censuses provided the Republic with statistical
information on the nation's material and human resources for rapid decision-
making in a time of crisis. On the other hand the ideology of the new order
aspired to transform into unity the diversity of the people throughout the territory.
Descriptive surveys, 'systematic and even encyclopedic' in character, were thus
'centrally initiated and locally implemented'. These public surveys, in contrast to
earlier and later state statistics, were to have encouraged the transition from
regional diversity to national unity. With the increasingly centralized and authori-
tarian regime, however, local cooperation soon yielded to state power and privi-
lege (Revel, 1991: 141-3). Ken Alder has also shown the ways in which the
French state introduced the metric system and thereby attempted to replace local
custom and tradition by uniformity (Alder, 1995: 39-71).
Turning to another representation of the territory, Revel notes that the map was a
relatively late development in the geographical knowledge of France, emerging
around the early sixteenth century. Maps combined practical and symbolic value:
they were a form of power and as such became 'the preferred means of transmitting
political intentions'. Cartography thus 'became inseparable from the affirmation

of monarchic power; delineation of the territory was first and foremost the king' s
business'. Indeed, the king need no longer travel in order to survey his territory. It
was rather the role of official surveyors, engineers and royal geographers to
provide 'a new visual support for the monarchy's ambitions' in war or peace
(Revel, 1991: 150-3; see also Harley, 1988 for cartography and power).
Revel's analysis offers an effective gateway to our first group of chapters. In
Chapter 1 Jim Bennett examines a Renaissance programme centred on the power-
ful practical technique of geometrical projection, that is, the translation of figures
and shapes on to surfaces through geometrical construction. The technique not
only permitted manipulation and representation of space in practices such as per-
spective painting, cartography and surveying but also was extended into matters
of astrolabe design, gnomonics and architecture. Practitioners of the new tech-
nique constructed for themselves formidable authority: 'They could condense
estates, provinces, countries, empires to sheets of paper' and 'could present the
whole earth and even the heavens to a single view'. Skill in projection was,
Bennett suggests, especially suited to the European culture of the age, 'concerned
with exploration and expansion in addition to the more traditional territorial
definition and representation' (Bennett, Chapter I, this volume).
Along with the new technology of spatial representation went the creation of a
mathematical discipline laying universal claim to a range of formerly distinct
areas of craft practice. As a result of this 'doubly' creative mobilization of spaces
(geometrical and disciplinary), the new disciplinary map and new presentation of
disciplinary relationships changed the professional status and range of activity
adopted by practitioners. Indeed, although initially separate from the domain and
competence of natural philosophy, the burgeoning ambitions and enhanced
authority of the geometers would eventually impinge upon that territory also.
Furthermore, Bennett notes the significance of cultural geography in any
approach to the topic: 'There are geographical clusters as well as technical ones
. . . associated with groups of established resources, such as printing presses,
instrument workshops, universities, or centres of commerce, trade or navigation'
(Bennett, Chapter I, this volume).
Expansion and exploration beyond the traditional homeland was consequential
in ways other than mapping new territories. As Steven Shapin has recently shown,
seventeenth-century English travellers' tales raised problems of trust and credibil-
ity: 'travel across the globe was a major means for extending experience and for
testing the adequacy of scientific generalizations, and all versions of scientific
culture came to practical terms with travelers' tales, finding adequate means to
take some portion of them into the stock of warranted natural knowledge'. As
Fellows of the Royal Society, for example, could not witness and judge the phe-
nomenon in question, they either had to reject its existence or take it on trust from
the traveller's report. Such trust, Shapin argues, involved both judgement of
matters and judgement of the persons testifying to those matters (Shapin, 1994:
245). Yet if competent sea captains and physicians were among Robert Boyle's
trusted travellers, the credibility of one Lemuel Gulliver, 'first a surgeon and then
a captain of several ships', was a target of Jonathan Swift's celebrated satire
(Swift, 1726: title page).
In contrast, eighteenth-century voyages were no longer the preserve of trav-
ellers who 'may tell Romances or untruths by authority' (Shapin, 1994: 246
quoting seventeenth-century proverb). As Alix Cooper notes in Chapter 2,
eighteenth-century scientific voyages ranged from grand global expeditions to
'modest daily rambles of country gentry right outside their own doorsteps'.
Cooper follows the fascinating career trajectory of the late eighteenth-century
naturalist, collector and scientific voyager DOOdat de Dolomieu whose various
voyages provides a striking contrast to earlier, contemporary and subsequent
styles of travel. Defining his 'field' in ways simultaneously geographical and dis-
ciplinary (compare Bennett, this volume), Dolomieu was a scientific voyager or
voyageur-naturaliste who self-consciously limited the geographical extent of his
fieldwork by directing his travels to the intensive scrutiny of his own 'local' sur-
rounds and domestic spaces. In this way he converted actual fields into possible
fields of disciplinary specialization (Cooper, Chapter 2, this volume).
After the Revolution Dolomieu became a salaried functionary charged with
specific duties in the service of the central government. As Inspector of Mines
from 1795 he was required to conduct the economic and military inspection of a
nationally defined territory. But he also effected a redefinition of his field as a
voyage-based geology to permit for a time a compromise between these public
duties and his previous interests. But in 1798 he found himself part of a vast state
survey of Egypt in which the terrain and scale were alien and in which his cher-
ished independence disappeared in the face of military direction and protection.
Departing for home he was made captive in an Italian prison, a restricted and
confined space which stood as the antithesis of that cherished personal liberty to
practise his science as he voyaged freely through nature's fields (Cooper, Chapter
2, this volume).
In our third chapter Ian Higginson considers the work of the nineteenth-century
American writer Edgar Allan Poe who, in his aptly entitled 'Eureka', proclaimed
his knowledge of the whole universe. Acting in opposition to scientific and liter-
ary elites, Poe invoked the imagination as the road to true knowledge of God and
nature. Poe's knowledge of the territory was based on the authority, not of field
work or observatory, but of individual imaginative 'genius' exemplified, as for
his mentor Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the cosmological system-building of the
astronomer Kepler.
Higginson argues that 'Eureka' should be understood contextually as the cre-
ation of a cosmos which not only made space for the 'individual' (as creative
artist and writer) but which also provided a model, based on a reworking of
popular cosmology, for the construction of literature itself. The chapter begins by
showing the way in which Poe had earlier represented himself as an isolated and
highly individualistic literary practitioner in opposition to literary and philosoph-

ical elites, the 'high priesthoods' of American literati. Higginson then examines
the construction of Poe's cosmos in 'Eureka'. Poe's universe originated from an
individual 'God', a point in space from which the cosmos diffused progressively
outwards, creating in the process individual microcosmic souls such as Poe
himself. Eventually reconcentrating all matter into Unity, the cycle of creation
would then recommence. But, like Poe's ideal art, none of these cycles was a
simple repetition. The patterns of change were always unique and manifested
perfect economy: 'The plots of God are perfect. The universe is a plot of God'.
Building on this analysis, Higginson argues that Poe's spatial analogies between
divine and human author, and between divine and literary texts, underpinned
his authority and endurance as an individual writer independent of a society of
mutually-admiring literati (Higginson, Chapter 3, this volume).
By the time 'Eureka' was published in mid-century, scientific elites were well
established on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, the geologist Roderick
Murchison had effected the transition from independent gentleman of science,
celebrated for his military-style field work, to Director-General of the British
Geological Survey, poised to map the mineral resources of Empire (Secord,
1986a,b; Stafford, 1989). More generally, Dorinda Outram has highlighted the
transformation of natural history in the period 1780-1830 with the rise of separate
sub-disciplines such as physiology or palaeontology, 'each with their own
methods, agendas, and subject-matter' (Outram, 1996: 249).
The establishment of new elites, however, did not entail the disappearance of
the lone scholar. In the case of the United States Alexis de Toqueville pointed to
the rejection of the authority of learned elites by a public imbued with an egalitar-
ian ideology (cited in Yeo, 1989: 2-3). What Poe, as individual writer, was
attempting to do was to challenge the authority of elite men of science by direct
appeal to a public, popular readership. Similarly, Richard Yeo has well argued
that Robert Chambers' controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), appealing directly to a British middle class readership, proved extremely
unsettling to the scientific establishment represented by the British Association
for the Advancement of Science (Yeo, 1989: 1-27).
The rise to power and prominence of scientific elites, and the concomitant tribu-
lations of lone scholars now driven to the margins of scientific respectability, is his-
torically inseparable from the establishment of privileged scientific sites. With
regard to natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
Outram has noted that the subject was increasingly backed by new state-funded and
state-controlled institutions staffed by paid full-time expert researchers. As exam-
ples she cites the Natural History Department of the British Museum, the
Zoological Gardens in London, natural history museums such as that in
Philadelphia, the geological and zoological museums of the new University of
Berlin and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (Outram, 1996:
249-50). Our introductory essay therefore shifts from 'knowledge of the territory'
to those locations where scientific and technological knowledge was manufac-

tured, displayed, communicated and marketed to nineteenth- and twentieth-
century consumers.
3. OF PRIVILEGED SITES
Regarding the insights of Foucault on space and power as basic to any account of
making space for science, we now consider a framework of spatiality in which
the fundamental unit of analysis is the privileged scientific site, whether for
knowledge production, public display, or pedagogy. Here we align ourselves with
recent historiography of science which emphasizes local cultural context. And
we argue that what emerges most strikingly from such historiography are issues
of scientific and technological authority, embodied spatially in sites.
As is well known, elsewhere in his works Foucault examined the formation of
several key institutional sites of power, most notably the clinic, the prison and
the asylum: 'psychiatric internment, the mental normalisation of individuals,
and penal institutions ... are undoubtedly essential to the general functioning of
power' (Foucault, 1980: 109-33). Thus the institutional arrangements in
nineteenth-century prisons (exemplified by the 'panoptical' designs of Jeremy
Bentham) owed their disciplinary power to the placement of the internees in such
a way that they could be observed but could not themselves observe their
observer. Crucially, power relations were also spatial relations.
Foucault also offered an idiosyncratic framework for looking at sites through
what he termed heterotopias. Heterotopias, sites with a real existence, are 'some-
thing like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which ... all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously repre-
sented, contested, and inverted'. Heterotopias are thus wholly different 'from all
the sites that they reflect and speak about'. As examples, Foucault cited theatres,
cinemas, cemeteries and ships. A theatre, for instance, is a real site in which a
domestic drama might represent features of everyday life or a satirical play invert
as in a mirror image aspects of contemporary politics. In contrast, utopias are
sites with no real place, having 'a general relation of direct or inverted analogy
with the real space of Society'. Thus utopias either portray society in perfected or
inverted form. Among several characteristics of a heterotopia was a capacity to
juxtapose 'in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves
incompatible' (Foucault, 1986: 23-7).
Heterotopias have provided a suggestive, if somewhat over-elastic, analytical
tool in the history and cultural studies of science. Adi Ophir has mobilized the
heterotopic boundary to describe the means by which Montaigne produced the
self as an object of study. Ophir argues that the library was 'a place of solitude as
well as a place of knowledge, a kind of heterotopia in which two sets of spatial
relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic'. But as a place of
knowledge the library was 'unique and ephemeral': it could not be reproduced.
Thus it 'dies with its solitary reader .... Unlike the monastery cell, the university
campus, or the alchemist's "laboratory", the private library was never involved in
that network of relations through which sixteenth-century French intellectual
elites disseminated knowledge across space' (Ophir, 1991: 163-6, 184).
Unlike Montaigne's library in which 'no position is available for an authorized
observer', Ophir claims that in both the modern laboratory and modern institu-
tions of discipline 'the heterotopic place contains the space in which the object of
knowledge appears to the gaze of an authorized observer' (Ophir, 1991: 173).
Ophir and Shapin develop the connection between place and authority within het-
erotopic space: the '"doubling" of space in the places of knowledge means that
two people looking at the same spot ... might construe two different objects. And
this "double-vision" would flow from the fact that one person is an officially com-
petent and authorized inhabitant of the space while the other is a visitor or a
support worker' (Ophir and Shapin, 1991: 14). Thus the heterotopic character
of the laboratory also flows from its dual set of spatial relations: the social
(connected to the visitor) and the epistemic (connected to the expert inhabitant).
Ophir's distinction between 'social spaces' and 'epistemic spaces' has to be
treated with caution. The former, he claims, are peopled by 'social actors' and the
latter by 'agents of discourse'. Considerations relevant to 'social spaces' include
distinctions between private and public, questions of access and control, and
issues of autonomy and dependence, while matters relating to 'epistemic spaces'
might include 'the self and others', 'identity and difference' and 'knowledge and
ignorance'. Examples of social spaces might be observatories, books, libraries,
museums or laboratories. The corresponding epistemic spaces might be 'the sky'
(the object of study for the observatory), 'the story' (the fiction told within the
pages of the book), 'the setr (the object of study within Montaigne's private
library), the artefacts (in the museum's display cabinets) or 'animals' and 'mater-
ials' (brought into the laboratory for analysis) (Ophir, 1991: 164-5). Yet in each
of these cases 'social spaces' and 'epistemic spaces' are interdependent, even
inseparable spheres, rather than (as in Foucault's original characterization of het-
erotopias) incompatible sites juxtaposed in the same space.
Heterotopic models, if they are not to be applied to every conceivable site,
need to retain this latter feature. Recognition of the often contested and heteroge-
neous character of knowledge spaces can indeed lead to important insights into
the changing nature of scientific practice at a given site. Outram has shown that
the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle 'enclosed a highly complex space
which contained many ambiguous and contested elements'. It was, for example,
an open, public, park-like space within a large metropolis. Yet existing within
that public space, she argues, were domestic spaces inhabited by both genders
and all age groups. The site was officially dedicated to professional men like
Georges Cuvier and Antoine Fourcroy and yet despatched field naturalists to wild
and inaccessible parts of the world. Open spaces such as gardens and zoos were
juxtaposed to closed spaces of galleries and lecture theatres. As a result the

Mus~um was 'a microcosm which mirrored the debates over the different uses of
space which were crucial, in this period of transition, for the future direction of
the discipline' (Outram, 1996: 250-1).
Outram's analysis should alert us to two issues which appear in various guises
in this volume. First, that heterogeneous characteristics tend to feature in periods
of disciplinary transformation or indeed in the earlier and more fluid stages of
scientific sites such as laboratories. And second, that such privileged scientific
sites as the Mus~um should not be treated as monolithic institutions without
attention to the complex of interacting spaces within. Indeed, Ophir and Shapin
have suggested that in most earlier localist genres 'there was no particular
justification ... for attending to the shape and distribution of rooms, houses, lab-
oratories, libraries, clinics, or prisons, or the siting of knowledge-making acti-
vities within those places'. Yet for a long time, as they show, sociology and
social anthropology have had on offer the resources for such an approach. From
Durkheimian sociology comes the claim that different societies divide, mark and
bound space differently. Physical spaces are modelled upon social spaces in such
a way that physical spaces then express and sustain the social order (Bourdieu,
1989: 14-25; Ophir and Shapin, 1991: 7).
Social anthropologists have likewise stressed the mutual interaction of spatial
arrangements and social practices: they evolve together; 'each is used to reinforce
the rightness of the other; and 'they develop a "fit" particular to the culture, a
network of norms and sanctions holding them in place'. For example, L~vi
Strauss highlighted the European missionary strategy of destroying the culture of
the Bororo village by making the inhabitants move into new settlements with rad-
ically different geometry from the traditional circular arrangement. Other work in
sociology and cultural geography similarly emphasized the importance of spatial
parameters in shaping social interaction and vice versa (Ophir and Shapin, 1991:
7-9 provide a relevant literature survey).
These spatially sensitive studies, Ophir and Shapin claim, lack 'systematic
focus on the relationships between thought and its social setting'. The deficiency
can be countered, they argue, by those approaches which examine the manner in
which the 'conditions of our knowledge vary according to our placement in social
and physical space'. The 'physicalist' approach studies this placement in a highly
literal way by analysing how physical divisions, walls, relative openness or
closure are implicated in knowledge production. But Ophir and Shapin emphasize
that such access is as much a matter of culture as of concrete. They are therefore
concerned with codes that regulate behaviour, that is, with the 'social relations
and constellations of value that render the knowledge in question either authentic,
safe, and valuable, or fraudulent, dangerous, and worthless' (Ophir and Shapin,
1991: 9-12). Shapin has also shown that the management of audience through
careful mobilization of public and private areas was vital in order to command
assent in restoration English science (Shapin, 1988: 373-404).
Although Shapin has rightly directed attention towards the use of settings in
knowledge production, another mode of history of science has stressed the multi-
ple deployments of 'display'. Simon Schaffer has shown how 'privileged'
eighteenth-century natural philosophers produced a 'theatre' of electrical phe-
nomena in which active and hidden powers were visibly and publicly dramatized:
their 'task was to exploit control over these powers to draw out and make mani-
fest the theological and moral implications for the audience' (Schaffer, 1983:
1-43). Authority could be constructed by a demonstration of control over the
powers of nature. In radical cases, natural philosophers took on the role of reli-
gious and political 'enthusiasts' who commanded immense authority over their
immediate followers but who quickly attracted critical accusations of blasphemy.
Similarly, with respect to electrical science in early nineteenth-century London,
Iwan Morus has drawn distinctions between two groups of practitioners. The
commercial 'electricians' differed from the gentlemanly professoriate by the use
of 'technologies of display', by their instruments, and by their attitudes towards
quantification: 'one culture ... regarded experiment as theater and the experimen-
tal apparatus as constituting nature and one regarded the apparatus as a set of
tools for interrogating an external nature'. These differences were embodied spa-
tially in the different sites in which they practised. As a member of the professori-
ate, Faraday 'notoriously maintained his laboratory as a very private space' at the
Royal Institution and allowed no audience participation in his lectures. These
spatial arrangements constituted his professorial authority, his status as an elite
natural philosopher. In contrast, the electricians' Adelaide Gallery, in appearance
at least, placed the electrical apparatus not merely centre-stage, but allowed the
members of the audience to feel themselves participants in the drama itself as
they engaged with one spectacle after another (Moros, 1993: 50--69).
Privileged scientific sites, whether for knowledge production, pedagogy or
display are thus intimately bound up with issues of authority. External symbols at
scientific sites often proclaim such privilege in a highly visual manner. Sophie
Forgan has shown how architecture advertizes the intended place of science
within the culture of the city. The Oxford science buildings were decorated, under
the influence of Ruskin, in the Gothic style to give the chemistry practised within
'appropriate form and style' (Forgan, 1989: 415-17). Again, Marl Williams has
noted that the winning design for the Pulkowa observatory was the one that exter-
nally and internally, in the judges' words, 'clearly indicated the special character,
the scientific role of the building' (Williams, 1989: 118-36).
Forgan makes use of the 'space-as-text' metaphor by interpreting buildings as
'statements'. Textuality indeed provides a rich analytical metaphor: the physical
design and material formation yield categories such as style, rhetoric, claims of
authorship, cultural repertoires and symbolism. Furthermore, the investigation of
'design-as-text' points us towards questions both of audience and of the cultural
authority and competence of inhabitants. Forgan claims that the architectural
symbolism of nineteenth-century British scientific societies presented 'claims to a
territory both physically and metaphorically, and in a concrete sense embodied

that claim and clothed it with institutional respectability'. The internal designs of
these societies were chosen from a common repertoire to shape and guide the
behaviour of the inhabitants. The lecture theatre, for example, was modelled on
the semi-circular anatomical theatre, but had a problematic relation to the play-
house: the lectures, although initially dramatic, became increasingly subject to
the 'rule-obedient, controlled theatre of nineteenth century science' (Forgan,
1986: 89-113).
Physical arrangements often reinforce the internal social relations of a privi-
leged scientific site. In one of her earlier studies, Forgan has shown how the
Royal Society meeting room, its 'immediate architectural analogy . . . with the
layout of a[n Anglican] church', had the intended effect of stifling debate,
whereas the 'parliamentary' design of the Geological Society facilitated that
society's lively discussions (Forgan, 1986: 106-13). Gooday has likewise argued
that the nineteenth-century teaching laboratory functioned through the 'rigid
spatial structuring of laboratory life: pre-constructed equipment was rigidly fixed
to boards to prevent subversive tinkering; students were closely grouped in twos
and threes to exert normalising peer group pressure to conform; students were
placed at benches to allow demonstrators convenient access to monitor their
experiments and thus enforce orthodox conduct of measurements' (Gooday,
1991b).
Gooday's case study reminds us that privileged sites of scientific activity could
be patterned in ways which not merely reinforce but which impose coercive and
disciplinary relations upon the behaviour of internees. Forgan in particular has
argued that the seating arrangement within late nineteenth-century lecture the-
atres gave an almost panoptical power to the lecturer whose view included every
occupant of the steeply-inclined rows of seats (Forgan, 1989: 404-34). Forgan
and Gooday have further argued that laboratory professors within the South
Kensington 'assemblage' of scientific and educational buildings were concerned
about issues of 'control'. This control, mediated through locks, signs and regula-
tions, was pursued with varying degrees of success at the City & Guilds Central
Institution and Royal College of Science (Forgan and Gooday, 1994). Again,
Simon Schaffer has discussed George Biddell Airy's factory-like regime at the
Royal Greenwich Observatory whereby the duties of the young calculators came
under rigorous scrutiny. Here the nineteenth-century demand for accurate meas-
urement and calculation was associated with bodily and spatial control (Schaffer,
1988: 115-45).
More generally, T. A. Marlcus has shown that building types developed between
1780 and 1850 have institutionalized relations of 'power' (operationalized as
coercive) in contrast to 'bonds' (such as those of friendship or honour). Markus
claims that the topological design of buildings strongly guides the relations of
authoritative interaction between users. For example, such interaction will be
altered by the interfaces between spaces for visitors and spaces for inhabitants or by
whether rooms are connected in a dispersed or compact manner. Thus 'besides

materialising through the life of the body, the chief way in which power and bond
relations are made concrete is through bodies in space, in the space of buildings and
towns' (Markus, 1993: esp. 10).
The use of particular spaces and the appearance of new spaces within buildings,
however, reveal that sites do not merely force restraints upon historical actors.
Interpreted through their cultural and architectural symbols, such spaces of-
ten function creatively as a resource for cultural, institutional and (especially in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) disciplinary projects. Recent studies of
twentieth-century hospital medicine have shown close relations between the con-
struction of disciplinary authority and the creative annexation of space. Roger
Cooter has argued that the appearance of fracture clinics in the interwar British
hospital was 'first and foremost ... an achievement in organization and manage-
ment, involving a seizure of therapeutic space by a specialist group for the exercise
and control over a particular patient population'. This seizure 'by which
orthopaedic surgeons sought to acquire status and authority' was both of physical
space (the fracture clinic) and disciplinary space. The orthopaedic surgeons cre-
atively and collectively called upon a repertoire of modem medical institutions
such as the organizationally-novel Vienna Accident Hospital which was rigorously
divided into specialities and paid for by insurance firms (Cooter, 1992: 14fr64).
Michael Kelly and Ricardo Sanchez have similarly presented a case of medical
territoriality in their study of emergency medicine. They contend that doctors spe-
cializing in emergency medicine took advantage of increased loads on health care
to establish themselves 'spatially' as a 'gateway' to the hospital and 'socially' as
a new speciality. Having thus positioned themselves to advantage in the hospital
topography, the doctors of emergency medicine could act 'as advocates for the
patients who need entry into the deeper spaces of the hospital', while also func-
tioning as the 'organising hub of the emergency medical system' (Kelly and
Sanchez, 1991: 79-100).
Scientific actors frequently make 'protective' or 'defensive' interventions
which are extrinsic to the physical site and which seek to impose external disci-
pline upon some perceived threat to the stability of that site. David Cahan, for
example, has shown how Helmholtz's Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt had
to be separated from 'potentially disturbing features of its physical (including
geological) environment and location', from 'the expected behaviour of the sur-
rounding population', and from 'nearby institutions or facilities' by a 'buffer
zone'. One 'geopolitical' consequence was a 'fierce fight' with neighbouring
streetcar companies (Cahan, 1989a: 137-54). Graeme Gooday has similarly
argued that South Kensington professors exerted much political leverage to
prevent an electric railway line compromising 'the identity of the subject under
measurement'. Thus Joseph Lockyer invoked explicitly territorial discourse: 'the
hosts of Mammon now threaten the domain of science in Exhibition Road'
(Gooday, 199lc).
As with internal spaces, however, site boundaries may be discursive, represen-

tational and disciplinary rather than physical. Shapin in particular has argued that
'the physical and symbolic siting of experimental work was a way of bounding
and disciplining the community of practitioners, it was a way of policing experi-
mental discourse, and it was a way of publicly warranting that the knowledge
produced in such places was reliable and authentic' (Shapin, 1988: 373-4). He
has further developed his views on the nature of boundaries: historians should
treat them as 'institutions', 'a set of constructed and maintained marks in cultural
space which allow collectivities effectively to tell members where they are, where
they may and may not go, how permissibly to behave in [a] place', and 'as
resources for coordinating activity' (Shapin, 1990: 990-1007). The first three
uses enforce order and discipline, but the fourth usage suggests a more informal
and creative role.
Star and Griesemer have presented an analysis of this kind of coordinating
function of boundaries. Their case-study involves the management of the 'diver-
gent viewpoints' of collectors, trappers and university staff attached to a zoology
museum. They introduce the analytical category of a 'boundary object': 'plastic
enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties using
them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites' (Star and
Griesemer, 1989: 387-420). Boundary objects, like standardized forms, ideal
types (such as species) or common areas of concern (in this case 'California')
allowed the disparate groups to work together. As simplified, shared, but privi-
leged cultural marks, boundary objects are a good example of Shapin's 'institu-
tions' and bear comparison with Peter Galison's 'pidgin language' of trading
zones (Galison, 1989).
Pnina Abir-Am also makes the link between the loose trans-disciplinary
character of the project of the 'scientific Bloomsbury' 'Biotheoretical Gathering'
to set up an institute, and the 'new decentralized and participatory authority'
they hoped to institutionalize. Claiming that the historical importance of transit-
ory groups has been overlooked, her case is that the discursive relaxation of
disciplinary boundaries 'enabled a constitution of a new epistemological space'
eventually 'filled' by molecular biology. Her study suggests that an actor's
topology of a discipline (what is in, what is excluded, what other disciplines are
connected) is strongly correlated with the form and character of disciplinary
authority (Abir-Am, 1987: 1-70).
Thomas Gieryn has examined in depth 'boundary work', that is, how and why
boundaries are used and maintained. Boundary work is the 'demarcation of
science accomplished in ... practical settings' by actors for reasons that Gieryn
lists: 'expansion of authority', monopolization of professional authority and
resources', or 'protection of autonomy' (Gieryn, 1983: 781-95). Boundary work
also occurs in Alex Dolby's discussion of strategies of constructing 'intellectual
distance between the forms of discourse prevailing on two sides of a dispute'
(Dolby, 1982: 267-92) and in Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch's study of the
repertoires of argumentative strategies possessed by parapsychologists and their

opponents as used within constitutive ('scientific') and contingent ('public')
forums (Collins and Pinch, 1979: 237-70).
3a. Of Working Classes
In our second group of chapters, Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith offer two very
different analyses of pedagogical practice in mid-nineteenth century Glasgow.
Focusing respectively on Lewis Gordon (Glasgow University's first professor of
engineering) and William Thomson (professor of natural philosophy), these chap-
ters are concerned with the place of science and engineering classes both inside
the ancient and privileged site of Glasgow College and in relation to the city's
unbridled passion for industrial capitalism.
How to make engineering classes work in the face of resistance from within the
College, how to bridge the perceived gulfs between traditional College students and
prospective clients from the artisan classes outside the College, and how to formu-
late an engineering curriculum centred on practically embodied concepts such as
that of 'work' were all issues of central concern to Gordon. Marsden shows how the
process of institutionalizing an autonomous discipline of academic engineering
depended not only upon the forces of fraught local circumstances but also upon the
creative uses of academic and textual space. Debates over curricular and disciplin-
ary boundaries meshed with notions of authority and privilege in the allocation of
classroom space. During this sustained and bitter dispute between Gordon and the
university authorities, displays of personal animosity, divided loyalty and vested
interests pointed to the advantages of strong internal support and expert diplomacy.
Both advantages were conspicuously absent in the case of Professor Gordon and for
a time engineering science seemed unlikely to survive Gordon's increasingly
tenuous links with the University. Marsden's account of Gordon's 'failure' to make
space thus provides a striking counterbalance to stories of 'successful' spatial
expansion or consolidation (Marsden, Chapter 4, this volume).
William Thomson, on the other hand, began from a position of comparative
strength. Yet while strong internal support made possible his appointment and his
subsequent reform of the natural philosophy classroom within the College, his
subsequent territorial expansion and upward spiral of credibility was by no means
guaranteed. A clientele of students for the most part destined for ministry in the
Scottish Kirk and a Faculty of professors steeped in the traditions of presbyterian
scholarship scarcely augured well for Thomson's laboratory culture and its con-
nections with the Second City of the Empire. But as Crosbie Smith shows in
Chapter 5, Thomson was able to represent his laboratory as an integral part of his
increasingly large and complex classroom territory in such a way that his fellow-
professors would willingly support it as a necessary component in the preparation
of lecture-demonstrations. At the same time, however, Thomson was developing
the laboratory for a series of other, rather different functions, including personal
research, laboratory teaching, instrumentation and standardization, and commer-

cial patents (Smith, Chapter 5, this volume).
3b. Of Pastoral Privileges
Opening the theme of our third group of chapters, Simon Schaffer reminds us of
the complex history of what he aptly terms 'scholarly pastoralism'. In the modem
world, cultures of 'science parks', 'green field sites of sunrise industries', univer-
sity campuses in the vicinity of ancient English ecclesiastical sites, high energy
physics laboratories in 'lovely settings' and observatories basking under cloud-
less skies all point towards 'the view that 'bucolic epistemology' and 'social
withdrawal' are somehow 'preconditions of access to universal truths'.
Knowledge, then, often seems to be constructed 'in production utopias, where
"unity, order and harmony" secure a peculiarly invulnerable social order'
(Schaffer, Chapter 6, this volume).
Victorian physics laboratories, as Schaffer argues, were a novel social forma-
tion. Only with the benefit of hindsight did they acquire the characteristics of per-
manence and stability. But the privileged inhabitants of Cambridge's Colleges
and University, far from welcoming the establishment of a highly privileged
space in the form of the new physics laboratory, were at best indifferent and at
worst hostile. Schaffer therefore shows that, with no obvious precedents, the priv-
ilege of the physics laboratory was not self-evident. Instead, the privileged status
of the new laboratory had to be created within the existing architectural, moral,
educational and scientific contexts of the University. Schaffer focuses on the con-
nections between the new physics laboratories and the English country house,
those 'salient Victorian sites of apparently effortless privilege'. By analysing the
culture that made country houses meaningful places of knowledge, organization
and technology, Schaffer shows how such sites functioned as traditional
local precedents which helped make physical laboratories 'seem effortlessly
authoritative' (Schaffer, Chapter 6, this volume).
Alice Jenkins, on the other hand, focuses on spatial imagery of a pastoral
nature in the textual representation of Victorian science. Drawing on the writings
of two celebrated professors at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday and John
Tyndall, she illustrates the considerable range of allusions and emphases that
spatial rhetoric could make during the period. Tyndall, for example, drew on
'Romantic' images based on elements of the sublime landscape, especially the
particular Alpine landscapes with which he had direct personal experience as
mountaineer, to reshape the public image of Faraday. In contrast, Faraday himself
often used elements of picturesque landscape painting or invoked pre-Romantic,
almost medieval conceptions of landscape (Jenkins, Chapter 7, this volume).
Either way, such representations of science and the scientist enhanced textual
authority by deploying those spatial metaphors of landscape so much cherished in
Victorian middle class drawing rooms.
3c. Of Metropolitan Spaces
Our fourth group of chapters focuses on making space for science in nineteenth
century London and Paris. In the case of London the construction or reconstruc-
tion of sites for science are interesting on account of the sheer diversity and
special complexity of the metropolitan cultural geography. The resticted nature
and limited availability of central sites, the existence of long-established scientific
institutions, the matching or mismatching of new institutions to their local envir-
onments, the cultural values and social ambitions of the scientists and engineers
themselves and the urgent need to establish credibility in a highly competitive
market place for students and audiences all feature prominently in these chapters.
Sophie Forgan examines South Kensington and University College during the
later century, the first great period of British university expansion. She investi-
gates spatial and architectural tensions which surfaced in urban universities: ques-
tions related to the use and designation of spaces, to notions of proximity,
division and scale, and to the problems of teaching and practice of science in a
large city. New scientific buildings, as well as the adaptation of older ones, both
reflected and prescribed the place of science as part of the changing British higher
education system.
Arguing that Foucauldian analyses may be more appropriate at the moment of
planning or initial construction, Forgan urges that most sites are heterogeneous in
character, 'never more so than in Victorian London'. We should therefore
examine the particularity of each site, including the local or regional geography,
the politics of location, and the perceptions of the users of these spaces. Not only
are buildings rarely constructed exactly as planned, but also 'there is a multitude
of intangible ways in which perceptions about particular places are modified, not
only through use, but by the fabric of the building itself, its texture and durability,
its decoration, the passage of time, as well as the varied careers and reputations of
people associated with them'.
Within this framework, Forgan's chapter considers three fundamental concerns
for metropolitan science and its promoters. First, she looks at the changing vocab-
ulary of spatial location in which the desirability of 'juxtaposition' eventually.
yields to 'separation' and 'specialization'. Second, she examines the quest for
'architectural appropriateness' involving such matters as the proclaiming of
status, the gaining of legitimacy, and the provision of suitably genteel access.
Finally, she analyses some of the ways in which historical actors represented
spaces for science on maps and in plans, often with territorial ambitions in mind
(Forgan, Chapter 8, this volume).
In his contribution Graeme Gooday takes the case of the City & Guilds'
Central Institution in South Kensington, a new. urban site for laboratory research
and training for engineers in late Victorian London. The decision to place the
'Central' Institution in a location remote from established industrial sites pro-
voked criticism from various quarters. Unlike Finsbury Technical College with its
neighbourhood of workshops, the Central's promoters were unable to draw upon

any congruity between the Institution and its immediate environs. But as Gooday
shows, they attempted to meet the challenge by constructing credibility for the
Institution in other ways.
First, the Central's propagandists ensured selective representations of its prac-
tices at conversaziones and in sympathetic engineering journals. Second, Professor
William Ayrton attempted to establish a demarcation between the work of his lab-
oratory and the labour of the industrial site by displaying the laboratory-produced
instruments through electrical engineering societies, journals and practitioners.
And third, Ayrton's pupils themselves translated practices from the laboratory to
electrical industry. Gooday concludes that the credibility of such a privileged site,
in contrast to Finsbury Technical College, depended much less upon its locale than
upon judgements made in other sites (Gooday, Chapter 10, this volume).
Mid-nineteenth century Paris is the setting for Matthias Dorries's chapter
which focuses on the experimental work of Henri-Victor Regnault. Dorries
argues that a tradition of classification, inspired by Enlightenment goals of clarity
and order, played a prominent role in the organization and administration of
French scientific institutions. The endurance and authority of these rational
classifications was further reinforced by textbooks. Yet such disciplinary
classification broke down in everyday scientific practice. As the career of
Regnault shows, the restraints upon academic space (notably in the lecture room)
could be replaced by much freer transits between physics and chemistry (espe-
cially within Regnault's laboratory space). Dorries thus claims that Regnault's
career trajectory testified to the non-existence of the boundary between chemistry
and physics in mid-nineteenth century France. Moving through several of Paris's
elite scientific sites (the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole des Mines, the College de
France and the Academie des Sciences), Regnault's focus on experimental work,
based on exact measurement and laboratory practice, enabled him to make easy
transits between malleable disciplines (Dorries, Chapter 10, this volume).
3d. Of Research Sites
In our fifth and final group of chapters we tum to historical and ethnographic
analyses centred on three twentieth century sites for scientific research: Jodrell
Bank near Manchester; the Biotechnology Building at Cornell University, New
York State; and the Theoretical Studies Division of CERN, the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Although our contributors draw out
very different conclusions from their discussions of these highly privileged
research sites, the contributions by Jon Agar and Thomas Gieryn share a common
concern with analysing the boundaries between public and private spaces within
and around such sites. Martina Merz, on the other hand, shifts our attention to the
interactions among theoretical physicists in part located in different sites around
the world and meeting face to face only occasionally.
Agar provides a case study where the cultural politics of boundaries grounded
the definitions of a scientific site. He examines a key place of postwar British
science, the Jodrell Bank radio astronomy observatory. The central instrument at
the observatory, a herculean radio telescope, was fashioned by its government
sponsors as an object of national prestige that signified leadership and progress-
iveness in British science. Agar's study is in part an account of the creation of the
spatiality of spectacle and of spectators. The central argument, however, focuses
on the management of boundaries and the means by which visitors were screened.
A parallel kind of screening was also deployed to distinguish and define natural
(and thus valued) inscriptions of phenomena from those of human (and thus val-
ueless) origin in the work of the observatory. The operation of Jodrell Bank as a
privileged research site for science was therefore intimately linked to the spatial
organization of social relations.
The design of new science buildings, Gieryn argues, is an archaeological site
for examining struggles over the definition of science: its audiences, purposes,
beneficiaries and culture. Aligning himself with pragmatic analysts who prefer
malleable historical actors' categories over neat and absolute definitions of public
and private science, Gieryn's chapter draws attention to four phases of the design
process of science buildings which, he argues, are important for understanding
how the distinctions between public and private become pertinent.
First, he emphasizes the collective nature of design as a complex negotiation
between architects and engineers, 'end-users' (the scientists) and the university
administrators. Second, he explains that design is a process of representation of
space in which the representation tends at certain stages to become less, and at
other times more, malleable. For example, once built into physical structures the
design becomes less flexible, though never completely so. Third, there are con-
stant interactions in the design process between the representation of physical
space and the needs of the scientists. Thus what is being designed is both a build-
ing and a set of social practices shaped to operate effectively within it. And
fourth, the design remains pragmatic and performative. Design decisions are thus
not determined by abstract principles but by negotiated concerns for that repre-
sentation 'with the highest odds of eventually assuming a stable and enduring
existence' (Gieryn, Chapter 12, this volume).
In our final chapter Martina Merz offers a very novel analysis of the work of
theoretical physicists and in particular of their face to face and e-mail exchanges.
Observing that theoretical particle physicists often co-operate closely with col-
leagues far away, she discusses 'disembedded collaborations' as collaborations
detached from a single local context. Her analysis of how these collaborations
are sustained by electronic connections and by travel leads her to reconsider
the notion of the laboratory developed in laboratory studies which centres around
the local context of scientific work. Her account also develops important spatial
categories which add to the analyst's historiographical toolkit (Merz, Chapter 13,
this volume).
4. OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
We now move full circle by considering briefly some of the ways in which
analysts have approached the problems of knowledge transfer not only between
privileged sites but from such sites back to the field. Several of the pre-
ceding contributions (esp. Smith, Schaffer, Gooday and Merz) remind us of two
principal characteristics of privileged scientific sites. As Schaffer notes with
respect to physical laboratories, localized sites bring together a wide range of
technical, material and human resources. On the other hand, their authority and
credibility is often enormously enhanced by their place within networks which
facilitate the translation of techniques, hardware and personnel.
One bodily way in which communication of scientific activity is achieved
through space is via a 'research school'. Jack Morrell has cogently argued how
such bodies were bred in Liebig's laboratory and research school at the
University of Giessen. Morrell provides characteristics of an 'ideal' model of a
research school: a credible director with a high reputation possessing internal
power and 'charisma'; a regular supply of 'manpower'; 'relatively simple, fast
and reliable experimental techniques' in a new field of enquiry; easy access to
publication; and institutional support. He contrasts especially the assured per-
sonal status of Liebig with the problematic position of Thomas Thomson in
Glasgow (Morrell, 1972a: 1-46). Spatial issues are at the core of this analysis: the
specific site of the research school and its accompanying status and credibility;
the formation of authoritative disciplinary spaces characterized by practices,
skills and textbooks, for example; the deflection of movements of aspiring
chemists distributed across Europe to pass through the site; and the problems
involved in transference as the now-credible chemists move on to other scientific
sites.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science, on the other hand,
functioned as an organization for the promotion and diffusion of scientific knowl-
edge without permanent location at any particular site. By choosing to appear at a
different local site each year outside the capital, the British Association managers
contested traditional claims of the London-based Royal Society (Morrell and
Thackray, 1981 ). At the same time, the Association promoted an image of
national (and later Imperial) integration, beginning in a period when the survival
of Britain as a relatively recent invention was in serious doubt (Colley, 1992).
Historical actors have facilitated scientific communication by embedding
knowledge in material forms such as books. But the authority of books and their
authors was also problematic and contestable. In answer to his own rhetorical
question of 'just how did results producible only in very restricted cultural spaces
[sites of experimental knowledge production], and maintained there only with
much effort, successfully lay claim to others' allegiances?', Johns follows Shapin
in pointing to the importance of 'conventions of polite communication and intel-
lectual property' that were constructed in early modem Europe. But he also
follows Latour and others in arguing that authority depended upon a replication of
textual spaces: the Royal Society 'extended itself into the space of the booktrade'
by starting a press (Johns, 1991: 5-30; also Johns, forthcoming).
The production and distribution of physical standards also raises problems of
communication and questions of authority. Smith and Wise have discussed the
work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Committee on
Electrical Standards. The Committee, consisting of William Thomson, Fleeming
Jenkin and others, promoted an absolute system of electrical units in terms of
mass, length and time only, units which contrasted with those dependent upon
locality. Concomitantly, they constructed standards of electrical resistance which
were distributed to competent users in the electric telegraph industry throughout
Europe and the British Empire. As Jenkin put the point in 1861, these standards
required 'permanency of wire and its reproductibility [sic]'. Such standards
became an integral tool in the extension of a vast telegraph network linking
together most of the disparate lands of Britain's island empire in the late-
nineteenth century (Headrick, 1981: ch. 11, 1988: ch. 4; Smith and Wise, 1989:
684-712). More generally, technological systems, whose growth frequently
depends on the replication of standards, create their own configurations of spatial-
ity and power (Hughes, 1983, 1987).
In a study of the early Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Schaffer has
stressed the effort spent in embedding standards in 'networks ... constructed to
distribute instruments and values' to overcome 'the extreme localisation of
scientific practice'. Furthermore, it was crucial that all traces of local practice
were then effaced from the units to secure their authority (Schaffer, 1992: 23-56).
Similarly, O'Connell has shown the tension between claims for universality and
place: in the case of contested authority 'metrologists in the United States would
grant the highest authority' to a standard located at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (O'Connell, 1993: 129-73).
These recent studies of the problematic production and circulation of scientific
knowledge characterize cultural difference, manifested in local spaces, as an
obstacle to the replication of practice. Significantly, both the products of Liebig's
research school and the bearers and interpreters of standards were competent
within different settings. 'At home' in more than one place, the trajectories of
these special actors were therefore vital to the processes of replication and repro-
duction. It also follows that the reception of scientific and technological culture
would be often linked to contests of authority. Marsden's chapter comments on
these issues of translation with respect to Lewis Gordon. On the one hand,
Gordon's links with powerful engineering networks across Europe worked to his
career advantage. Yet Gordon himself secured no privileged site, no central hub
from which the products of his academic engineering could be translated to other
sites (Marsden, Chapter 4, this volume).
In his discussions of Pasteur's laboratory strategy, Latour has pursued the
argument that replication of practice was achieved through replication of place.
In Latour's account, Pasteur made three moves. First, he transferred himself (and
assistants) to the agricultural fields where, as the statistics showed, anthrax was
rife. Second, he moved back to his Paris laboratory with ('translating') the
anthrax bacillus. There he grew and manipulated the bacillus culture until it was
visible and demonstrable through simplifying 'inscriptions'. At this point the
farmers became sufficiently interested to visit the laboratory to see Pasteur's
fulfilment of his promise to prevent anthrax. But because their interest might be
transient, something more was required. As the third move, therefore, the agricul-
tural and veterinary groups are persuaded by the 'staging' of a 'public showing of
what has been rehearsed many times before'. The laboratory itself is replicated in
the field: for the vaccines to work, the practices of the laboratory had to be re-
enacted (Latour, 1983: 141-70).
In this Introduction we began with voyages, natural history, mapping, surveys

and other styles of field work. We then travelled to those privileged sites which,
in so many diverse forrns, have become such prominent landmarks of modern
scientific practices. Finally, just as nineteenth-century imperial powers were espe-
cially adept at employing technical and scientific knowledge - embodied in the
railroad, steamship and electric telegraph - to impose order upon their territories
at home and abroad, so have modern scientific cultures moved outwards from
their privileged sites to claim authority over those territories which constitute the
latter-day empires of knowledge. Few other cultures, to adapt Lefebvre, have so
effectively made their mark on space. Yet in a post-modern world the sciences
are no more exempt than other cultural practices from fragmentation and disunity.
Thus do they continue to engage with one another, as well as with rival claimants
to knowledge, in those trials by space which decide the fate of cultures every-
where (Lefebvre, 1991: 416-17).
Part I Of the Territory
1 Projection and the
Ubiquitous Virtue of
Geometry in the Renaissance
Jim Bennett
The role of mathematics, of geometry in particular, has been a traditional focus of

interest for historians of Renaissance and early-modern science. The acceptance
of the explanatory power of geometry in natural philosophy, and its accommoda-
tion to both an experimental methodology and a mechanistic narrative of causal-
ity. are issues that continue to be addressed, even though greater emphasis is
placed nowadays on historicist accounts of practice than on recovering grand
conceptual congruences between philosophical traditions. A shift of attention on
to practice will bring to notice one of the most curiously neglected aspects of the
mathematics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe- a period where it would
be natural to look for the roots of the application of geometry to natural philoso-
phy in the seventeenth century. Before it laid claim to a central role in natural
philosophy. geometry had been conspicuous in the reform of a range of practical
arts and sciences, from painting and architecture to surveying, fortification and
navigation, and this record became part of the authority for extending the proven
virtue of geometry to accounting for the natural world.
In traditional accounts of the widening application of mathematics characteris-
tic of the scientific revolution, astronomy has been set in the vanguard of change.
According to these accounts, rapid developments in astronomy's long history of
geometrical theory provide an influential model for mathematical natural philoso-
phy. A broader picture of Renaissance mathematics, a less selective reflection of
the practice of geometry in the period, will not lose these well-established
insights. Rather, it will have astronomy as one of its most conspicuous compo-
nents. The natural philosophical status of geometrical astronomy was a troubled
issue in the Renaissance, brought to a head by the assertions Kepler made on
behalf of his 'new astronomy'. but astronomy was part of the wider domain of
mathematical science, where there are other important sites of ambiguity and
conflict over the claims mathematics might make on natural philosophy.
Space can be made the theme for an introduction to this practical geometrical
tradition in at least two respects. First, one of its characteristic techniques, one
of the shared tools that held its different areas of application together as a
domain of practice, was projection - the rectilinear translation of figures and
27
shapes on to surfaces of various forms and orientations. The manipulation and

representation of three-dimensional spatial properties proved to be a powerful
technique - not only in the usual mathematical sense that it had applications to
many different problems, but also because it gave practitioners an impressive
ability. They could condense estates, provinces, countries, empires to sheets
of paper. These could be handled and reviewed immediately and directly,
yet encoded in their geometry were the spatial relationships of the originals,
and the consequences of these relationships could be extracted by the practi-
tioner. He could present the whole earth and even the heavens to a single view,
and could form and reform the representation of the terrestrial or celestial
sphere through alternative projections. It was a skill appropriate to the European
culture of the age, concerned with exploration and expansion in addition to more
traditional territorial definition and representation.
The second kind of space being reconstructed in this process was disciplin-
ary. The mathematicians developed a programme of refounding a range of prac-
tical arts on the science of geometry. These would, it was claimed, then become
mathematical arts, secured by the sllttus, permanence and certainty of a mathe-
matical science, but at the same time active, useful and progressive. The pro-
gramme adopted characteristic intellectual and material technologies, such as
projective constructions and mathematical instruments adapted to particular
areas of work. It had an agreed overall goal in drawing successive realms of
practice into the mathematical arts. In arguing for the improvement in reliabil-
ity, efficacy and authority delivered by the science of geometry, the programme
achieved a common rhetoric and a coherence in its persuasive technique.
It created a disciplinary space distinct, though not always wholly separate,
from natural philosophy and requiring just as careful differentiation from
modem science as historians have learned to accord the natural philosophy of
the Renaissance.
The science historian's unease with active as against contemplative skill can be
illustrated by the account in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography of even so
cerebral a practitioner as Leon Battista Alberti. His biographer clearly had the
feeling that Alberti and many of his contemporaries had somehow misunderstood
the nature of mathematics:
he shared the preoccupation of a great number of fifteenth-century scholars,

considering mathematics as a tool rather than an independent science ... Thus,
geometry was used to calculate the height of a tower, the depth of a well, the
area of a field .... In all of this work [machines, instruments, surveying, naviga-
tion, hydrography] he manifested more interest in manual crafts than in true
science ... he seems to have regarded science as a means for action rather than
as a system of organized knowledge. On many occasions he admitted his inter-
est in knowledge, but more for reasons of efficiency than as an abstract science,
as power rather than as intellectuality. (Gille, 1970: 97)
Jim Bennett 29
The tone of this biography gives the definite impression that these fundamental
characteristics of Alberti's work are regarded as flaws and shortcomings. It is an
example of the mis-match between the critical perspectives of different disciplines
that in the history of art Alberti is regarded as one of the great theorists of his day.
What we have already seen of Alberti's biography illustrates another important
feature of the practical mathematical programme, one that could be reinforced by
any number of mathematical lives. Geometry was understood to be the common
foundation for a variety of arts, so that its application over a range of disciplines
was a characteristic feature of the activities of individual practitioners. Many
were engaged in work across a cluster of related activities and historians risk
losing sight of this essential feature through too exclusive a focus on any particu-
lar aspect or set of problems. Perspective, for example, has received much atten-
tion, perhaps partly because of its links to a topic with a large public following,
namely Renaissance painting. But the contemporary understanding of boundaries
and relationships operating in this domain of practice, not defined and constrained
by the conventional hierarchies of learning or the statutes of universities, can be
discovered only from the activities of those involved. The result of such a study
will show that there is a shared, though developing, appreciation of the extent of
the discipline and that within this range practitioners are often catholic in their
work and interests. Further, moves to extend the range could be dynamic and
opportunistic. That those engaged in a discipline characterized by movement and
development maintained a common identity should direct our attention to their
shared intellectual and practical technologies.
In fact, space enters this story in a third way. There are geographical clusters as
well as technical ones. They are linked by the movements of people, of books and
of instruments, and while these clusters share the same range of activities, there
are also characteristic emphases and the pattern of their prominence varies over
time. Such geographical nodes are associated with groups of established
resources, such as printing presses, instrument workshops, universities, or centres
for commerce, trade or navigation. Those with strong profiles in an account of
practical geometry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would include - in a
very rough chronological sequence - Florence, Nuremberg, Louvain, Paris,
Antwerp and London. To a first approximation Florence might be particularly
associated with cartography and perspective, Nuremberg with astronomy, dialling
and instrument making, Louvain with surveying and instrument design, London
with surveying and navigation. Such characterisations will not stand close
scrutiny, but what is well established are shared technologies and common disci-
plinary identities.
The focus in this chapter will be on technologies for representing space - car-
tography, perspective, surveying and aspects of instrument design. Their stories
cannot properly be disentangled but will be introduced and outlined sequentially
for the sake of clarity. It must be remembered not only that they are closely
linked in practice, but also that they represent a smaller set of the whole range of
mathematical sciences. From these individual aspects of representation we can

then return to the management of disciplinary space and to the importance for the
history of science of recognizing this broad discipline of Renaissance geometry.
It was in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century that the recovery of
Ptolemy's Geographia began a reform in European cartography. In the history of
science Almagest has traditionally been prioritized as a resource for early modem
mathematics, presumably on account of historians' interest in what seem to be the
large issues represented by cosmology. In the period, however, the work creating
much more interest and excitement was undoubtedly Geographia, with many
more editions, at least 12 of them published before the earliest printed Almagest
of 1515 (Windsor, 1884). Further, the characters and histories of the two books,
as seen particularly in the succession of editions, were very different: the story of
Geographia is notable for change and development, while that of Almagest by
comparison is much more static.
The basic text of Geographia was an instruction manual in cartography. There
is an explanation of how to order and codify the earth through the co-ordinate
system of latitude and longitude and three examples of how to represent the
pattern of the globe on a flat surface, of what would now be called projections,
though precisely that geometrical concept is not necessarily present in the text of
Geographia. The provenance of the different collections of maps in the surviving
manuscripts was unclear, and this diversity was reflected in the succession of
printed editions, which generally tried to include new maps and innovative pro-
jections. As early as the Venice edition of 1511, before any printed Almagest was
available, Geographia began to include two world maps - one of the Ptolemaic
world, increasingly included only for antiquarian interest, and one of the known
world enlarged by voyages of exploration and enlarged too in representation by
an extended projection. Ptolemaic authority had already been overtaken by the
projective techniques of the practical mathematicians and by what would have
been known at the time as the 'experiments' of the adventurers (Bennett, 1991b).
Cartography was closely associated, both in its content and in the use it made
of geometry, with astronomy, surveying and navigation. Map production, through
the techniques of engraving and the application of projective geometry, was
linked to the production of mathematical instruments. The same people were
involved with the different aspects of the domain or, it would be better to say,
they were practising in an inclusive domain which has since been divided by dis-
ciplinary evolution. As more northerly centres of cartographic activity became
more prominent, the same pattern of interests can be seen in the notable practical
geometers, such as Mercator, Waldsemiiller, Regiomontanus, Werner, Orontius,
Hartmann, Apianus and Schoner. The association of Geographia with the practi-
cal mathematical tradition meant that its editions could provide platforms for
other related texts. Werner, for example, used his new translation of Book l, pub-
lished in Nuremberg in 1514, in this way, and Apianus in his lntroductio geo-
graphia of 1533 added to Werner's tracts accounts of the cross-staff and
Jim Bennett 31
torquetum. Other, derivative initiatives were begun. Apianus, for example, taking
Ptolemy as his point of departure, first published his popular Cosmographia in
1524 and, as a new centre of activity emerged in Louvain, the many successive
editions prepared by Gemma Frisius made this the most popular work of practical
mathematics in the sixteenth century.
While the historians of cartography have taken for granted the link between
cartography and the wider programme of practical mathematics, the need remains
to integrate this appreciation and its implications into histories of science. One
consequence is that Geographia provided the domain with a classical text that
was a vehicle for change and development, and in the succession of editions a
source for the notion of progress and of the power and virtue of practical mathe-
matics - in this case to represent, to form and reform the globe and to present
contemporary man's growing knowledge and mastery of it. It is particularly strik-
ing that Ptolemy's Geographia was introduced to the Latin West through the
agency of the Florentine humanists at the beginning of the fifteenth century and at
the very beginnings of the geometrical programme, and that it continued to have a
profound influence on the development of Florence as a centre of cartography in
the fifteenth century.
Florentine geometers were concerned also with new methods of geometrical
survey. Brunelleschi's celebrated reform of representational painting through pro-
jective techniques was founded on his geometrical practice of surveying, which
we know he had applied to surveying classical remains in Rome with Donatello.
Alberti, while in Florence, worked to systematize a reformed surveying based on
projective geometry and also provided the codification of perspective painting as
a particular application of geometrical survey (Gadol, 1969: 70-80, 167-99).
Alberti's methods involved such techniques as were embodied in the geometrical
quadrant, a traditional instrument included on the back of an astrolabe and later
promoted as an astronomical instrument by the astronomer Peurbach. This was an
instrument for measuring scaling ratios directly and so offered the practitioner a
more immediately applicable tool than one using degrees; appropriately enough,
it became generally associated with surveying. Geometrical surveying and per-
spectival painting as techniques for representing space are similarly linked in
other early accounts -by Piero della Francesca, Martini, Pacioli and Leonardo.
In the development of geometrical surveying, issues concerning the legitimate
manipulation and representation of space become central to a debate about the
reform of surveying practice. A deliberate campaign to geometrize surveying
took as its agenda the replacement of direct linear measurement, taken while tra-
versing the space to be measured, by angle measurement, involving specialized
sighting instruments and triangulation from a single measured base line. This
could be presented as a spectacular improvement in performance. Instead of
tramping all over a site measuring every distance, the geometrical surveyor could
construct the entire map from two stations. Where surveyors formerly used ropes
or poles, they were offered theodolites and circumferentors (Bennett, 1991 a).
The back of the astrolabe typically carried the kind of scales required for the
new geometrical survey - a circular degree scale or a geometrical quadrant - and
early writers on the astrolabe, in published accounts from that of Stoeffler on,
dealt with the instrument's application to surveying. The relevant scales were
transferred over to more specialized instruments, such as theodolites, either for
azimuth measurement only or for altitudes and azimuths, and these were more
commonly produced in northern centres of manufacture. While the general
methodology appeared among the early Italian practitioners, it was in the German
region, in Louvain and in London that these new specialized instruments were
more popular and where books explaining them commonly appeared. One form
was the triangulation instrument, where pivoted arms with scales were arranged
into a triangle similar to that on the ground, including the baseline (see Figure.
1.1 ). Sebastian Miinster, more famous as a cartographer, explained such an instru-
ment, while similar designs were associated with Joost Biirgi, Erasmus Habermel
and Leonhard Zubler.
The bid to intrude a reformed methodology into the craft practice of surveying
began to have a significant impact at the practical level in the later sixteenth
century. Around the same time the craft responded with a reformation of its own,
represented by the technology of the plane table. By setting up a level plane
surface with an attached sheet of paper, orientated by a compass and provided
with a free sighting rule or alidade, the surveyor could mark lines of sight on the
paper, move a measured distance, which would be transferred to scale on to the
paper, and draw other intersecting sight lines. In the process of such a survey he
was producing a map as he went along.
The method imposed by the theodolite involved angle measurement and the
hated 'protraction', when later the measurements had to be converted into a plan
or map drawn to scale. The plane table rested on the same geometrical theory but
did not conceal it in mathematical mystification; no angles were measured in
degrees, rather they were transferred directly to paper, and the map emerged
immediately as the survey proceeded. This mathematical technology was open
and direct, and so -disastrously as it seemed to the promoters of the geometrical
programme - was available to all practitioners. There ensued a contest between
these two technologies for representing space- a contest valuable to the historian
because it lays bare underlying disciplinary tensions.
In fact a compromise emerged in which the plane table continued to be used for
everyday work, while the rhetorical value of mastery of the theodolite was not
lost on the more ambitious surveyors. Even if most surveyors were not prepared
to go all the way with the geometers, practice was significantly altered and the
space managed and represented by the surveyors was now more fully character-
ized by geometry and more efficiently handled by angles and triangulation.
Projective geometry informed other areas of the mathematical arts and sciences
and, as a characteristic technical resource, can be used to guide the historian of
mathematical practice around the territory of this emerging discipline. It points to
!::-!
;:!
txl
~
~
Figure l . l The triangulation instrument of Joost BUrgi for range-finding. From Benjamin Bremer, Bericht zu M.
Jobsten Burgi seligen Geometrischen Triangular Instruments (Kassel, 1648). Source: Museum of the History of
Science, Oxford. ...,
...,
connections not usually made in histories of science - for example, between

paintings and astrolabes or maps and sundials - but which are corroborated by the
biographies of mathematicians. The juxtaposition of Ptolemy and projection
encountered through Geographia is found also in his Planisphere (first published
in Commandino's Venice edition of 1558) and the astrolabe was the chief appli-
cation of this instance of projective geometry. More specialist designs derived
from the astrolabe led to a range of other astronomical and horological instru-
ments. The design and production of new mathematical instruments and the prac-
tical mediation of mathematical methods through such instruments were central
elements in the contemporary image as well as in the practice of geometry in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The astrolabe - now focusing on the front of the instrument - was based on a
projection of the celestial sphere (a selection of prominent stars and the ecliptic)
on to the equatorial plane, to form a circular planisphere, and on the rotation of
this planisphere over a similar projection of the co-ordinate grid of altitude and
azimuth appropriate to the horizon for the location in question (see Figure 1.2).
The point of projection was the south celestial pole and with the north pole at the
centre of the planisphere (or 'rete') its rotation represented that of the heavens
around the stationary earth. The rising of the sun and of individual stars, their
passage through the degrees of altitude and azimuth, their crossing of the
observer's meridian and their setting could all be represented, and calculations
Figure 1.2 A sixteenth-century Flemish astrolabe, unsigned, in the collection of the

Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge. The upper, fretted plate is a
projection of the celestial sphere which, in imitation of the daily apparent motion of the
heavens, rotates over the plate beneath, engraved with projected co-ordinate lines based on
the local horizon.
Jim Bennett 35
depending on these appearances be performed instrumentally. Renaissance math-

ematicians generated an impressive literature on the astrolabe and developed new
types, notably universal astrolabes to work anywhere without the need for plates
appropriate to the horizons of different latitudes. The links to cartography are
seen not only in the interests of the geometers involved, but also in the design by
Apianus of an astrolabic device for the sphere of the earth instead of the heavens,
and in the association between the new projections of the earth and those of the
heavens used on the universal astrolabe designs (see Figure 1.3).
Many other mathematical instruments depend on projection. Some of the most
popular in the Renaissance were sundials and horary quadrants. The ingenuity
devoted to dialling has received very little regard outside enthusiasts for the tech-
nicalities of dial construction; there has been little effort to approach from an his-
torical perspective a subject with an enormous primary literature. Seen as a
challenging application of the techniques of projective geometry in relation to
the geometrical theory of astronomy, the enthusiasm for dialling begins to fall
into a pattern of disciplinary development in practical mathematics. Here was
another area of application for projection, in this case the projection of the sun's
path on to surfaces with a variety of forms and orientations. The essential task of
the horologist or dialist was to predict, by geometrical modelling, the projection
of the sun's position through a given point or line, on to a given plane. Again the
same practitioners were involved. In Toscanelli's great sundial in the Duomo in
Figure 1.3 The projection of an astrolabe plate explained in a book on perspective,

D. Barbaro, La practica della perspettiva (Venice, 1568). Source: Museum of the History
of Science, Oxford.
Florence, for example, the sun's light was projected through an aperture in the
base ofBrunelleschi's cupola on to a meridian set in the floor. Having mentioned
Commandino's edition of Ptolemy's Planisphere, dealing with the projection of
celestial circles, we can note also that he later edited Ptolemy's Ana/emma, on the
projection of the solar position, adding his own treatise on sundials.
Left to the close of this review, though usually taken as the first and most
prominent example of geometrical representation, there is linear perspective. It
invoked the same projective technique as that of the astrolabe, with the eye
replacing the south celestial pole and the picture plane replacing that of the
equator. Perspective construction was an application of the techniques of geomet-
rical survey to the problem of locating particular points in space by the intersec-
tions of locatable lines. These locations need not be codified in degrees: as with
the geometrical square or the plane table, this might be achieved through ratios or
simply through lines reproduced directly on paper. The connections between per-
spective and the astrolabe are explicit in the writings of Commandino, Barbaro
and Guidobaldo del Monte -geometers who wrote on perspective and on the
astrolabe - and it was a fairly common practice for practical mathematicians to
write on perspective. Examples include Alberti, Leonardo, Piero, Francesco
(Martini), Pacioli, Guidobaldo, Egnatio Danti, Durer, Hartmann and Stevin
(Veltman 1986; Borsi, 1989; Kemp, 1990).
A wider view of the interests and activities of the practitioners fully corrobo-
rates and secures these interconnections and this disciplinary unity. It is evident
first in Italy, where Alberti is perhaps the most prominent representative of this
intersection of activities, through his work on perspective, surveying, cartogra-
phy, mechanics and architecture. The mathematician and cartographer Toscanelli
was close to both Alberti and Brunelleschi, the latter of course an architect and
pioneer perspectivist with an interest in the new geometrical surveying. Leonardo
is, of course, another example of a practical geometer and perspectivist much
involved with surveying and cartography. Again, Egnatio Danti's interests were
those of the whole geometrical programme: he was involved with surveying and
cartography, and he published accounts of the astrolabe and of other mathematical
instruments as well as of perspective. A picture emerges of a common profile of
interests among the practitioners. Much has been written on perspective, but it is
important to broaden the perception of geometrical practice in the Renaissance to
relate this to cartography, surveying, instrument design and making, etc. and not
to bracket off linear perspective (Rose, 1975; Edgerton, 1976).
Hartmann, who has been mentioned as an astrolabist and perspectivist, is a link
with the northern centre of practical geometry in Nuremberg, founded effectively by
Regiomontanus, who introduced the mathematical programme to an already thriv-
ing centre of technical crafts. The same intersection of interests is found here -
astronomical practice, instrument making, dialling, cartography. The perceived
importance of Geographia is evident in the publication programme of
Regiomontanus's printing press and subsequently in the work of his followers, such
Jim Bennett 37
as Johannes Werner. The intersection of geometry, surveying, perspective, carto-

graphy and instruments is clear in the work of Hartmann and Durer. Through the
travels and personal contacts of Regiomontanus and Durer with Italian geometers,
the Florentine initiatives were influential here. Regiomontanus knew both Alberti
and Toscanelli, and knew of their work on astronomical measurement, which
became an enduring feature of practical geometry at Nuremberg, through the
observational astronomy of Regiomontanus himself and following him of Walther,
Werner and Durer. Regiomontanus also had a fully developed vision of the grand
domain of geometrical practice, explained at length and historically grounded in his
famous Oration on the mathematical sciences (Zinner, 1968; Rossi, 1970).
Two material resources have appeared with particular prominence in this narra-
tive. One is a book, Geographia, whose publishing history seems to reflect char-
acteristics of the whole ethos of practical geometry. The other is an instrument,
the astrolabe, which embodied the fundamental technologies of distant measure-
ment and rectilinear projection. Both these resources, and their many derivative
texts and instruments, were important to maintaining a coherent identity for the
discipline across a range of different activities and both were vital to securing
links between dispersed centres of practice.
If we are sensitive to the contemporary disciplinary extent of the mathematical
programme, it is no wonder by the late sixteenth century to find confidence in the
ubiquitous virtue of geometry. Its authority was an impressive practical record.
There was by then a confidence, even stridency in the movement for reform - an
expansive assertiveness in the practical geometrical enterprise. The programme
remained one of reforming and annexing other areas of practice by refounding
them on geometry, turning crafts into mathematical arts underpinned by mathe-
matical sciences. The mathematical prospectus was characterized by assumptions
of expansion, development, reform and intellectual colonization by the time the
politics of Elizabethan England made this very worldly programme of learning
attractive and credible.
Historians of science have yet to come to terms with the rise of practical math-
ematics in the Renaissance and to integrate it, as they must, into an account of the
eventual reform of natural philosophy. This chapter has said nothing about that
question, but it has drawn attention to one instance of the building of disciplinary
space, even if the example in question was more a discipline of action than of
contemplation. Common intellectual and material technologies, such as geomet-
rical projection and the design of instruments, were employed across a range of
arts and became constitutive of disciplinary identity. There has been a tendency
among historians to think of the use of instruments, for example, as a secondary
mathematical technology: instruments are seen as by-products of developments
in geometry. It would be more consistent with the attitudes of the time to see
instruments as part of the regulative management of the discipline. Rendering a
geometrical technique amenable to instrumental application was an important
part of what it was to be a geometer.
Finally, integrating geometria practica into the history of science will help to
explain the authority of mathematics, and at the same time may forge important
explanatory links between European political agendas, successful technologies of
exploration and expansion, and privileged explanations of the natural world. One
of the claims from this disciplinary space was that its geometry delivered a
species of power over topographical, geographical, celestial and pictorial space.
At first it offered tools of action and representation, but they were sufficiently
successful to establish a disciplinary bridgehead. The geometry of the map, the
chart, the survey, the painting or the planisphere might then do more than display:
it might begin to explain, to move from action to organized knowledge.
2 From the Alps to Egypt (and
Back Again): Dolomieu,
Scientific Voyaging, and the
Construction of the Field in
Eighteenth-Century Natural
History
Alix Cooper
What is the/a field? A juxtaposition of particular natural objects, a space to be

moved through, a realm of focused attention? This chapter explores the creation
of one - or, rather, many - such 'field'(s) by the naturalist, collector, and
scientific voyager Deodat de Dolomieu during the crucial decades surrounding
the French Revolution. I propose to follow the rambling and circuitous career of
this one individual, not so much for its own sake, as rather for the insights it may
offer into how eighteenth-century naturalists envisioned, and shaped, the fields
they pursued. Practitioners of natural history in the late Enlightenment, I will
argue, came to define for themselves a set of 'fields' simultaneously geographical
and disciplinary in their articulation. They marked these fields not only by the
possessive evocation of certain natural objects (such as rocks, in Dolomieu's
case) and of the larger terrestrial formations whence they originated (such as
mountains, islands, volcanoes) but also by appeals to the locality and particularity
of terrain. Voyaging thus became crucial to the scientific enterprise, as the forms
of a naturalist's contact with the field- for Dolomieu, a local and hospitable
European field, far removed from that experienced by more famous contempo-
rary voyagers to the South Seas and other exotic locales - generated the matter of
the field itself. This chapter investigates Dolomieu's successive reformulations of
his own 'field' over the course of a career that took him from volcanic isles near
Malta to the salons of Paris and the slopes of the Alps; to the shores of Egypt, as
a member of Napoleon's ill-fated expedition; and finally back to his beloved Alps
again. Amidst these shifting conditions of encounter with the natural world,
Dolomieu's revisions of his own disciplinary allegiances, from natural history to
mineralogy to the emerging discipline of 'geology', reflect the transformations of
the particular and local 'fields' he travelled in}
39
In his return to familiar terrain, and his use of scientific voyaging to retrace the
outlines of a fundamentally local landscape, Dolomieu was not alone. The eigh-
teenth century had witnessed a proliferation of styles of scientific voyaging, 2 from
the grand maritime expeditions, transporting the voyageur-naturaliste around the
globe, to the modest daily rambles of country gentry right outside their own
doorsteps. At the time Dolomieu travelled, notions of Enlightenment utility,
natural beauty, elite tourism, and the exchange of natural objects had combined to
produce not one but many different options for the pursuit of natural-historical
fieldwork. One of the most famous of these was the scientific expedition itself,
which, backed by state funding and the technical support of national scientific
societies, shipped entire groups of researchers off to colonial outposts to bring
back new imperial knowledges (Woolf, 1959; Stafford, 1984; Mackay, 1985;
Smith, 1985). In actual fact, the life of the voyageur-naturaliste was seldom so
glamorous; most long-distance travellers ended up venturing forth individually
rather than in groups. experiencing little logistical support and suffering isolation
and numerous perceived indignities as they attempted to carry out Linnaean or
other programs of data-collection (Laissus, 1981; Koerner, 1993; 1995; for the
subsequent rise of 'Humboldtian science' in the early nineteenth century, see
Cannon, 1978). The number of these emissaries of European science were.
however, small in proportion to the numbers of those who participated in that
other eighteenth-century cultural phenomenon: the Grand Tour. providing a quite
different model of voyaging for the sake of knowledge. Emerging out of the acad-
emic peregrination. with the aim of polishing off the education of aristocratic
youth, the Grand Tour was structured around the accumulation of 'experience'
and the exchange of information, whether through chats with scholars in other
cities, or visits to their collections of natural and artificial rarities (Hibbert 1987).
Perhaps the most prevalent form of scientific voyaging that actually took place in
the eighteenth century, however, was that which involved the least displacement
of all: namely the traversing of 'local' terrains close to naturalists' own homes.
The genres of local flora and mineralogical reconnaissance flourished in the
Enlightenment as never before, reflecting the efforts of thousands upon thousands
of relatively sedentary naturalists 'in the provinces' ,3 who self-consciously limited
the geographical extent of their fieldwork, directing their travels to the intensive
scrutiny of their own 'local' surrounds imd domestic spaces.
In short, scientific voyaging in the eighteenth century was not an activity
pursued only by 'heroic' travellers to foreign shores. In its local, European form,
it was central to Dolomieu's identity, both as an individual and as a naturalist; it
was central to the identities of a growing number of his naturalist contemporaries;
and, as this chapter will argue, it was central to the ways in which he and others
came to define the fields of study in which they moved. As recent work has
shown, Enlightenment Europe saw not only the development within multiple dis-
courses of new ideas about time but also of new ideas about space, linking the
arenas of science, technology and medicine (cf. Jordanova, 1979; Porter, 1980;
Alix Cooper 41
Browne, 1983; Lepetit, 1984; Revel, 1991; Sahlins, 1989). The Revolutionary
era, however, was to initiate an extended moment of crisis within natural history,
as patterns developed over the course of the early modern period ceased to corre-
spond with modern realities. When Dolomieu left Europe, and the Alps, for the
unfamiliar terrain of Egypt, several divergent notions of scientific voyaging and
fieldwork collided; and I intend to spend the remainder of this chapter exploring
this collision.
Dolomieu's travels furnish one of the few common elements in his lengthy and
varied career. This career started out not in France, but on the Mediterranean
island of Malta, where his French parents had sent him off to join the noble quasi-
military order of the Knights of Malta. As early as the 1770s, he had already
commenced a pattern of repeated shuttling back and forth between his scattered
residences in Malta, Italy and France. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, when
Dolomieu first began to discover and to test his scientific interests, he embarked
on a series of voyages as a means of doing so, touring Anjou, Brittany, the Alps,
Portugal, Italy, Sicily and the Pyrenees in rapid succession and publishing his
observations on these places. The remaining years of the ancien regime saw
frequent return visits on the part of Dolomieu to many of these sites, and simulta-
neously the establishment of a scientific reputation, based on these travels, as an
astute observationalist, a passionate aficionado of Europe's mountains and volca-
noes, and as the possessor of considerable geological and geographical expertise.
During the Revolutionary period, however, the ways in which Dolomieu
voyaged were altered, as the experience of the Terror sequestered him in a French
rural retreat, and as his subsequent appointment to the Corps des Mines (in 1795)
focused his journeys on the investigation and exploitation of mines and of moun-
tains within the confines of French national territory. In 1798, Napoleon's expedi-
tion to Egypt initiated an even more radical transformation in the patterns of
Dolomieu's scientific voyaging. Arriving in Egypt, Dolomieu found himself
almost utterly estranged from the terrains and techniques of his earlier travels,
and unable to practise his science as he knew it. Following his early departure
from Egypt, his miserable captivity in an Italian prison, and his eventual release,
Dolomieu's final triumphant trip in 1801 to his beloved Alps was to mark,
however, not the resumption but the conclusion of his travels. Within several
months of recommencing his scientific fieldwork, Dolomieu died, worn out by his
prison stay, and bringing an era of intense change in the practices of science -
and in the practices of scientific fieldwork- to a close.
What is one to make of the seemingly random sequence of Dolomieu's move-
ments? As this paper will attempt to argue, the episodes narrated above can, and
should, be interpreted within a wider framework: that of the significance of
fieldwork for the scientific enterprise as a whole. Between Dolomieu's first
voyage and his last, a series of transformations in the organization and conduct of
science created new opportunities, and new dilemmas, for the scientific traveller.
During this period, scientists struggled to reconcile a great number of conflicts
and tensions arising from their changing activities: tensions between the natural
sciences and the physical sciences, between laboratory and field, urban and rural,
centre and periphery, public and private, social and solitary, work and family,
pleasure and duty, to name only a few. Fieldwork- which seemed to offer the
enterprising scientist access to the very source of scientific knowledge, namely
nature - provided a highly potent means of mediating between these conflicting
poles, and of generating workable, if temporary solutions to problems faced by
scientists. By the very act of travelling, as well as by the multiple negotiations
involved in deciding how, where, when, and why to travel, scientists in this
period thus inevitably found themselves engaged in some of the most highly
charged debates of the time, not only over the rapidly shifting definitions of par-
ticular scientific fields but also over the origin and location of scientific knowl-
edge itself. Dolomieu's journeys were not mere physical displacements of his
person; they were attempts to define a territory, both geographical and intellec-
tual, within which he could practise science. As Dolomieu's mobile career
reveals, eighteenth-century scientists found many ways of voyaging; and they
found many fields within which to voyage. This chapter will attempt to discover
some of these.
I. TO THE MOUNTAINS
Over the course of the 1780s, as his interests in natural history emerged,
Dolomieu developed a highly flexible and individualized style of scientific voy-
aging and fieldwork. The values and practices emblematic of this phase in
Dolomieu's career are, perhaps, captured best in a much later document, which
throws them into sharp relief. Written during the long months of Dolomieu's
imprisonment in Italy following his abortive attempt to return from Egypt to
France in 1799, the 'Book of my captivity' (Livre de ma captivite), which he
painstakingly inscribed between the lines of the one book his jailers permitted
him, presents a highly nostalgic, idealized and rhetorical, but revealing, image of
Dolomieu's former life. A section which Dolomieu entitled 'Contrast of my
current situation with my tastes and habits' offers a particularly suggestive start-
ing point from which to explore the importance of voyaging for Dolomieu and
other ancien regime naturalists.
In this section, Dolomieu drew on a series of Romantic oppositions and
antitheses to present a stark contrast between his current state of captivity and
imprisonment, and what he claimed to have been the liberty and independence of
his former life. He represented the ability to voyage as the essence of that liberty
and independence. In commencing his account, Dolomieu evoked the cruel irony
that, through his very passion for these ideals, he had been deprived of them: 'I
put such a price on my freedom. I was so jealous of my independence, that the
fear of having compromised these dear idols was what hastened my return from
Alix Cooper 43
Egypt .. .' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 3). Whereas previously, lamented Dolomieu, he
had been able to escape to the mountains whenever conditions elsewhere seemed
too restrictive or confining, and to partake of the infinite extent of space visible
from their peaks, circumstances now confined him to 'a space of twelve feet in
length, ten in width and height', limiting his freedom of movement to the ability
to walk from one end of his cell to the other: 'Right now, the only space I have to
traverse - le seul espace que j'aie a parcourir- is the diagonal of my prison'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 4, 5). And whereas previously, while voyaging, he had
experienced 'liberty in all of its plenitude', as he put it, Dolomieu now found
himself 'under the most direct and the most absolute dependence of a jailer'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 89, 3), stripped of the most basic liberty his voyages had
granted him: the ability to move freely, to voyage. The guarantee of his personal
autonomy, independence, and knowledge of the outside world, voyaging had
provided him with the freedom of movement essential to his identity both as a
scientist and as an individual; kept in one place, he felt lost.
A related theme dominating Dolomieu's prison journal is that of his utter
removal, while jailed, from the direct contact with nature he claimed to have for-
merly enjoyed. 'Separated from all of nature' (Dolomieu, 1801: 3), as he later put
it, by 'the double doors which isolate me from all of nature' (Lacroix, 1921, vol.
1: 5), Dolomieu complained again and again about two of the privations that most
symbolized his loss of direct access to the natural world: the lack of fresh air and
of natural light. Bitterly decrying the fetid air he had to breathe and the 'frequent
suffocations' he had to undergo during his confinement in what he called,
tellingly, 'a sort of pneumatic machine', or air-pump, Dolomieu wistfully recalled
the abundance of fresh air encountered on his mountain rambles:
My voyages in the mountains had accustomed my lungs to such an extent to

breathing in an atmosphere always pure, always renewed, that I never slept
except in a bed without curtains, and in rooms where open doors permitted the
free circulation of air... (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 5; cf. Corbin, 1986)
Like air, light too now came to the captive Dolomieu, 'entirely and constantly
deprived of the view of the sky', at second- or third-hand remove, 'slow and
feeble'. Cut off entirely from nature and thus from the source of both his science
and his voyaging, Dolomieu thus declared himself, in prison, 'dead for science
and forthe world' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 4, 7).
Voyaging itself thus emerges from Dolomieu's 'Livre de ma captivite' as
central to his conception of his 'gouts' and 'habitudes', that is to say, the values
on which he claimed to base his life and his career, in science and out.
Dolomieu's correspondence during this period, and the travel accounts he pub-
lished at the time, tell the same story. As these sources make clear, those values
which Dolomieu attached to the experience of voyaging and those which he
attached to the experience of science are virtually inseparable. Both activities, for
Dolomieu, provided privileged access to nature, to reality, and to knowledge;

both also offered means of pursuing personal autonomy, freedom and indepen-
dence. In contemporary debates over the laboratory and the field as contending
sites for science, Dolomieu thus came down squarely on the latter side. 'Those
who haven't observed nature except in the observations of their laboratory'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 74 ), he mocked, could not possibly hope to understand
nature's true workings. For Dolomieu, as for Rousseau's Emile, voyaging offered
an opportunity to escape, not only from civilization but also from the ignorance
of nature's true forms imposed by the limitations of modem urban-based science:
Your philosophers of narrow alcoves study natural history in cabinets; they

have knick-knacks; they know names, and don't have any idea of nature. But
the cabinet of Emile is richer than those of kings; this cabinet is the entire
earth. Every thing there is in its place: the naturalist who cares for it has
arranged the whole in very good order; Daubenton couldn't do better.
(Rousseau, 1826: 134)4
Though Dolomieu was a constructor of cabinets himself, their worth for him
resided crucially in the initial field encounters which had made them possible.
Nothing substituted for the experience of voyaging, with the opportunities it offered
to investigate natural phenomena in their own places, 'sur les lieux memes'.
But travel, according to Dolomieu, possessed in itself no intrinsically scientific
qualities; in order to acquire these, it had to be performed properly. 'It is not
granted to the entire world to observe nature,' remarked Dolomieu disparagingly
about the inadequate performance, as he saw it, of a group of Italian voyagers to
Sicily (Lacroix, 1921, vol. I: II 0). Although manuals in increasing numbers
taught eighteenth-century travellers how to voyage in a manner productive for
science (cf. Frantz, 1934; Broc, 1969b: 144; Laissus, 1981: 272-7), little consen-
sus had in fact been forged by century's end on how to distinguish the truly
scientific fieldworker from the dilettante, let alone on what the proper methods
for voyaging- beyond the standard injunction to 'observe nature' -might actu-
ally be. As a result, voyaging scientists, including Dolomieu, found themselves
forced to outline and defend their travelling styles, their modes of encounter with
the field, in order to maintain their credibility as scientific witnesses.
Each of Dolomieu's travel accounts from this period, accordingly, is intro-
duced, and periodically interrupted, by sections describing the circumstantial
details of his trip to the territory in question and the techniques he deployed upon
arrival. In Dolomieu's Voyage aux 'iles de Lipari fait en 1781, for example, one of
his first published works, he painstakingly recounted the incidents of his progress
step-by-step, from first setting foot on each island ('Despite the excessive heat, I
disembarked with an eagerness known only to a Naturalist, and I set myself to tra-
versing the isle ... '), to first striking geological hammer against rock (Dolomieu,
1783: 10). 5 Here as in his other relations de voyages, Dolomieu took particular
Alix Cooper 45
pains to establish the care and exactitude with which he had traversed
('parcouru') each leg of his journey, from the island's edge to the volcano's base
and up to its summit, concluding with a 'tour du crater' (Dolomieu, 1783: 19).
Proceeding on foot, with the occasional lapse, 6 and carrying his rock hammer
everywhere as his primary tool, Dolomieu traced and retraced his steps with
almost obsessive rigour, taking possession of each rock, as it were, and thus of
each field over which he voyaged, in the name of science.
As is well known, eighteenth-century empiricist concepts of scientific
fieldwork accorded a primary role to 'observation', an assessment which
Dolomieu shared fully. Observation, like the traversing of terrain, was not, for the
scientist, an inherent faculty, but rather a skill that had to be learned. The act of
seeing, uniting the scientist with the field under observation, was, though full of
rewards, a treacherously difficult one, only capable of being performed by those
with adequate training. The network of scientific activities that we variously
know as the natural sciences, the field sciences and the 'observational' sciences
converged on this point: the necessity of properly seeing the objects of the natural
world. 7 What the concept of 'observation' really meant for Dolomieu, though,
comes out in the way he chose to express his admiration for Horace-Benedict de
Saussure, doyen of scientific mountain-climbers and quintessential observational-
ist. Saussure, Dolomieu opined, had 'fixed the attention of naturalists upon an
infinity of objects' and had 'carried the torch of observation to the summit of
Mont Blanc, he who, from this central point, interrogated nature ... .' (Lacroix,
1921, vol. 2: 116, 40) Saussure' s achievement, for Dolomieu, lay then in his
development of an original 'point of view', a unique vantage point from which he
could claim to observe the natural objects he studied. In an increasingly well-
travelled eighteenth-century Europe, few locales existed which remained utterly
undescribed. In these increasingly populated terrains, the originality of one's
observations could depend no longer on mere access to the sites in question, but
rather on the precision of a particular scientific object, end, or angle, guiding
one's observations into productive and meaningful new directions. 8
Dolomieu's own scientific ventures can be seen to reflect these principles.
Among his earliest published works, scientized travel accounts of various small
volcanic islands near Malta predominated. Parlaying his continuing association
with this isolated and peripheral outpost into a source of access to new points of
view, new ways of contributing to the scientific community, Dolomieu made use
of his voyaging to define his expertise in a set of fields, which we might term
simultaneously geographical and intellectual. First, he laid claim to these vol-
canic islands themselves, stressing the ways in which his unique personal history
had granted him a privileged connection to these particular out-of-the-way out-
crops of land, scattered offshore, which few other naturalists had had the tenacity
even to visit. In his early Voyage aux lies de Lipari fait en 1781, for example, he
insisted on the rigorous method with which he had traversed the island step by
step, taking possession of each rock, and of the giant rock that the island formed,
in the name of science. As he moved from island to island, revisiting them occa-
sionally, and making forays from his offshore-Italian sites of expertise into
various French territories, Dolomieu extended his geographical base, that set of
natural objects which his mere location gave him particular claims to be able to
describe. And Dolomieu used this flexible geographical base to integrate his
fieldwork into contemporary networks of scientific sociability. For despite
Dolomieu's individualist evocations of the freedom, independence, and solitude
involved in travelling, his voyaging was in fact a quintessentially social and
sociable activity, centred around the visiting of naturalist friends in their home
territories, the choice of travelling companions (almost invariably other aristo-
cratic amateurs, of similar social status and with complementary interests in
natural history), 9 and the naturalist's careful gifts to his colleagues of specimens
representing his own territory, to help them fill out their own collections. 10
Through his voyaging, Dolomieu thus built up a network of scientific associates
and correspondents all over Europe, a network of people who, by their own terri-
torial specializations, made his own land-claims even more necessary. A snapshot
of this network survives, in the form of a Jist of 'Mes principaux amis' which
Dolomieu drew up in his prison notebook (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 45-62).
Organized by geographical location, the list reveals the degree to which the
western European continent, with friends and acquaintances of Dolomieu's sta-
tioned in most major cities and many minor ones, had become a thoroughly
familiar place for him, and therefore one in which he needed to struggle to estab-
lish his own perspective all the more.
Dolomieu' s relationship with one of his earliest scientific patrons, La
Rochefoucauld, who introduced him to the salon of the Duchess d'Enville and
thus to many future scientific contacts, illustrates the ways in which eighteenth-
century naturalists were able to marshal and utilize the techniques of scientific
voyaging to acquire territorially based expertise. In his correspondence with La
Rochefoucauld, Dolomieu did his utmost to identify what he could do for his
patron, volunteering again and again to send him specimens and entire collect-
ions from Malta and from neighbouring islands, sites that the French aristocrat
would almost certainly never have had occasion to visit in person. Dolomieu's
growing reputation as a specialist in matters relating to his particular region is
also demonstrated, for example, in the way in which the French astronomer
Lalande turned to Dolomieu in 1782 for information about Sicily, sending him a
list of queries, to each of which Dolomieu responded punctiliously. Dolomieu's
subsequent advice to the Sicilian naturalist Gioeni to limit his scientific fieldwork
to one carefully selected geographical area ('You have reason to limit yourself to
the productions of your country') can be seen as conditioned by this same ten-
dency towards territorial specialization (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 80, 92-6, 111 ).
The grand maritime expeditions, with their sweeping geographical goals, were
thus alien to Dolomieu, drawing on a very different Enlightenment tradition of
travel. Instead of the long-distance voyagers' extensive and global information-
Alix Cooper 47
gathering, the knowledge Dolomieu wanted was an intensive one, of small and
rigorously defined sites. No naturalist, he insisted, could hope to understand large
regions, let alone the entire globe; rather, 'exact knowledge' of 'local conditions'
(les circonstances locales; Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 11 0) were all that the naturalist,
armed with the exhaustive and exhausting techniques of Dolomieu's style of
scientific voyaging, could hope for.
Amidst the growing popularity of the scientific voyage, however, and the
increasing tendency of famous naturalists to pop up in the most out-of-the-way
parts of Europe, even geographical access in itself gave no sure claim to scientific
territory. The Englishman Sir William Hamilton, for example, had left his foot-
prints all over Italy, making Dolomieu labour, in his Memoire sur les iles Ponces,
a description of a set of islands Hamilton had just visited, to articulate the ways in
which his description could possibly be different from Hamilton's, could fit some
viable niche in the wake of another's scientific attention to the same territory
(Dolomieu, 1788). We thus see Dolomieu over the course of the 1780s develop-
ing a language in which he drew on his sense of geographical expertise in particu-
lar areas, to lay claim to entire categories of natural objects and phenomena. In
this way, Dolomieu converted the actual fields in which he voyaged into possible
fields of disciplinary specialization, granting him not only new objects of study
but also new scientific points of view which would presumably arise from con-
centrated attention to these objects.
The natural objects Dolomieu evoked as his objects of study were many and
varied, matching the shifting patterns of his voyages themselves. At the most
general level, for example, he declared himself a student of rocks - and this in
itself automatically shaped his disciplinary options, at a time when the old model
of natural history as the study of the three kingdoms of nature was beginning to
fragment, and no unified 'geology' per se had as yet emerged as a focus. 11 On a
more specific level, Dolomieu came to interest himself in several more limited
classes of rocks. mainly those of igneous and volcanic origin, joining in miner-
alogical debates concerning the structure and composition of these rocks, and,
in the process, calling attention to his privileged access to the sites where he had
located his specimens: namely the larger terrestrial formations where these
natural objects had originated: islands, volcanoes, mountains. He set himself
up as an enthusiast of volcanic islands in particular, and this was in itself a
geographically charged move, as volcanic islands were, of course, those natural
productions in which the neighbourhood surrounding Malta particularly excelled
(cf. Chevallier, 1981).
Similarly. when Dolomieu in the later 1780s began for personal and political
reasons - involving a complex set of law-suits - to attempt to distance himself
from Malta, he did this by shifting his interests and expertise definitively towards
the one natural phenomenon which had been common to almost all of the areas of
his travels so far: the mountain itself. Much has been written concerning the
reasons for the increasing popularity of mountains - frequented by Alpinists,
declared by Saussure 'the laboratory of Nature', and increasingly recognized as

central to the earth's controversial history- during this period (Nicolson, I959;
Broc, I969a: I8). Dolomieu's patterns of scientific voyaging, however, made
mountains as it were a 'natural' field for him, in that they were conveniently to be
found in each of the European countries in which he had some claim to residence.
Dolomieu set about making them his - and he succeeded, in that colleagues at the
time, and a handful of subsequent eulogists, came to acknowledge him as having
a special emotional bond with what he pointedly called 'mes cheres montagnes'-
his dear mountains. 12 Every time he set off on a summer excursion into mountain-
ous terrain, whether Alpine, Italian, or other, he reaffirmed this special connec-
tion to a field both geographical and disciplinary in its articulation.
Dolomieu's patterns of scientific voyaging were thus crucial in shaping the
way he sorted out his options as a scientist, during a period marked by debates
about the meaning of the field, and by the often confusing proliferation of actual
scientific fields. The ways in which he voyaged enabled Dolomieu to hold multi-
ple and flexible commitments within science, to an extent that created problems
for his last travelling companion, the Danish naturalist T. C. Bruun-Neergaard,
when he had to announce his death, and attempted to define his professional
affiliations: 'Dolomieu is no more! What a blow for natural history, for miner-
alogical philosophy, for geognosy, and above all for the science of volcanoes!'
(Bruun-Neergaard, I802: 1). Dolomieu ultimately laid claim to no one field- or
rather, it might be said that for him as for others, the scientific voyage, with all of
its flexibility, came to form a field in itself.
Dolomieu's scientific voyaging can thus be seen as a powerful tool through
which he constructed his career, and his life. Voyaging enabled Dolomieu to
divide his time among the many different parts of his affairs competing for his
attention, such as family responsibilities, financial matters, the status of his
Maltese lawsuits, his many friendships, his similarly varied leisure pursuits, and,
last but not least, his multiple scientific affiliations. By allowing him excuses to
shift himself from place to place and thus from situation to situation as his needs
demanded it, Dolomieu's voyages enabled him to generate a precarious balance
between the many interests, fields, and locations of importance in his career. 13
Dolomieu in the I 780s was in constant motion, moving away from aspects of his
life from which he wished to distance himself, such as his Maltese enemies ('I am
determined to put the greatest possible distance (eloignement) between them and
me ... '; Lacroix, 1921, vol. I: 10 I) and moving towards those aspects of his life
which furthered his personal and scientific goals. Shuttling back and forth
between Paris, Rome, Malta, the homes of various family members in France, the
homes of his c6terie of friends, and practically every mountain chain in western
Europe, Dolomieu seems to have experienced what might be termed both cen-
tripetal and centrifugal forces, driving him both towards and away from metropo-
lis and periphery, city and country, and the various other polarities of his
existence. Mediating between these poles and thus holding them together,
Alix Cooper 49
Dolomieu's scientific voyaging allowed him to survive- in style- the tensions

and ambiguities of a late eighteenth-century naturalist's career.
2. TO THE MINES
In the 1790s, with the arrival of the French Revolution and the tumultuous events
which accompanied it, the patterns of scientific voyaging which Dolomieu had
developed over the previous decade were to undergo drastic changes. Following a
period of relative immobility in the earlier part of the decade, during which he,
like so many of his scientific contemporaries, escaped the Terror by retreating
into rural quietude (cf. Outram, 1983). when Dolomieu resumed his voyages to
the Alps once more in 1795 it was through an official appointment to the position
of 'ingenieur', or inspector of mines, at the Corps des Mines. Now employed by
an official agency with its own agenda, relying on funds that (though often not
forthcoming) issued at least in theory from the central government, Dolomieu's
duties came to consist in the economic and military inspection of a nationally
defined territory. With this came an enforced attention to a new territorial field:
not mountains per se, but mines. Accommodating himself to his new status and
responsibilities, Dolomieu correspondingly shifted the ways in which he voyaged
to those more congruent with his altered circumstances. In the process, Dolomieu
engineered strategic compromises enabling him not only to resume key compo-
nents of his former scientific voyaging but also to argue for voyaging itself as an
essential feature of the new field of 'geology', then gaining recognition in the
atmosphere of disciplinary reorganization urged on by the accelerated pace of
events. The 1790s thus inaugurated a series of redefinitions of Dolomieu •s
scientific voyaging and of the field of that voyaging, redefinitions whose real con-
sequences were to emerge only later in the decade.
In 1791, Dolomieu had arrived in Paris eager to take part in Revolutionary pol-
itics. Full of enthusiasm and ambitions, he joined the Club des Feuillants,
attended legislative sessions almost daily, and attempted to maintain a constitu-
tional monarchist position in the face of political developments. Busying himself
with these activities, Dolomieu chose to remain in Paris, abandoning any hope of
voyaging for the near future (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: l 0). He apologized to
Saussure at one point for his lack of desire to undertake any new scientific jour-
neys: 'The political circumstances of France have pushed back to another time the
project of visiting your beautiful mountains ... As for us, political affairs occupy
everyone to such an extent, that the sciences have almost become strangers to
us'. Claiming an inherent conflict between politics and science, Dolomieu clung
close to the Parisian 'centre of events' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 29, 10). 14
Dolomieu's involvement in Paris politics was, however, soon cut short by the
murder in 1792, in Dolomieu's presence, of his old patron La Rochefoucauld,
'massacred before my eyes, almost within my arms' by a revolutionary mob.
Following this horrific incident, Dolomieu, 'struck with a sentiment of terror'.

chose to remain for the next two years at the Roche-Guyon country estate, in the
company of La Rochefoucauld's grieving sisters (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 53, 55).
Though Dolomieu travelled little during this period, apart from sporadic forays
into Paris, these years were several of his most prolific in the production of
scientific articles and memoirs (see Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: xxviii). 15 From the little
direct evidence about this period, it appears that Dolomieu's experience of rural
retreat, like that of his fellow-naturalists Bose and Ramond (cf. Perroud, 1905;
Ramond de Carbonnieres, 1905), led him to a similarly sentimental revalidation
of the natural world, in the wake of the social world's apparently utter collapse.
Later, in 1795, after he had returned to voyaging, Dolomieu was to declare:
If the contemplation of nature had not come to provide some diversions from
my gloomy thoughts and my afflictions, I wouldn't have been able to bear
them ... It's to tear myself away from the dismal spectacle that my country pre-
sents me with that I have just been visiting the glaciers which surround Mont
Blanc; and in seeing these majestic heights, these enormous rocks, these
eternal snows, I've been able to forget, for several moments, the crimes of men
and the vile passions which move them. (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 82)
Whereas previously Dolomieu had escaped to the mountains to flee the frivolity
and excessive sociability of urban life, the events of the French Revolution now
redoubled Dolomieu's reasons for voyaging. Seriously disappointed by the failure
of his political dreams, Dolomieu found renewed consolation in the thought of his
beloved mountains.
But the new phase of scientific voyaging which Dolomieu at last commenced
in 1795, when he finally ventured forth from the shelter of Roche-Guyon, was to
be marked by several abrupt breaks with the practices of his previous travels.
Once 'summoned into that important school of mines' (LacepMe, 1802: 231),
Dolomieu became a salaried functionary, employed by the government in the
service of 'Ia chose publique' and charged with specific duties. These duties,
while drawing on the scientific expertise Dolomieu had acquired over the previ-
ous two decades, and while requiring voyaging for their completion, directed
that voyaging towards a significantly altered target. Dolomieu's commission to
inspect French mines, together with the uncertainties of the Revolutionary wars,
offered him few opportunities for the cosmopolitan, aristocratic travelling with
which he had been familiar. Though Dolomieu had indeed, like many other early
modern naturalists interested in the mineral world. visited and even written
memoirs about mines at the very start of his career, in subsequent years it
was a 'wilder'. less exploited nature that had come to consume his attention
(cf. Charlton, 1984 on French attractions to wild nature). Thus the redefinition of
his field of movement posed a significant challenge. Dolomieu's sole biographer
has described this period (from 1794 on) as one in which Dolomieu' s new
Alix Cooper 51
full-time employment freed his energies from other distractions, so that he could
devote himself fully to 'science' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: xxix). This 'science' in
which Dolomieu now engaged, however, was not quite the same science he had
practised before the Revolution, and his altered patterns of movement had much
to do with this.
From the moment when he first began to travel for the Corps des Mines,
Dolomieu began to attempt to arrange ways in which he could combine his
official inspections of mines with visits to sites, such as mountain peaks, highly
reminiscent of those of his former scientific voyaging. In several surviving letters,
Dolomieu discussed these arrangements with Alexandre Brongniart, a younger
man who, also appointed ingenieur to the Corps des Mines, had become
Dolomieu's friend and colleague. Taking advantage of the fact that many of the
mines he was scheduled to inspect did indeed lie in highly mountainous terrains,
such as that of Savoie which contained much of the French Alps, Dolomieu
devised with Brongniart a division of their mutual territory which would allow
Dolomieu, while carrying out government inspections, to revisit his former
Alpine haunts. Thus, for example, Dolomieu was able to report, in a letter to
Brongniart in 1795, that the 'petit voyage' he was about to undertake 'to go visit
several mines and factories within the departement of Mont Blanc' would serve
as 'an essential preliminary to the usefulness of the greater voyage', that is to
say, as a mere pretext for a project much dearer to Dolomieu's heart: a much-
anticipated journey to the glaciers of Mont Blanc in the course of which he
planned to •rendez-vous' with several Swiss naturalist friends. Urging Brongniart
to accompany him on this mineralogical expedition, which, he promised, would
be immensely educational, Dolomieu warned him to make use of the opportunity
his governmental duties offered him, while he still could:
Moreover you don't have to visit every single sign of a mine that may exist in
the areas you're traversing this year; you can save several for next year ... we
can always exercise the right of inspection, and it is not entirely sure that we
will be keeping this right of inspection for the departement of Mont Blanc.
The peace with the powers of Italy could well render it to its ancient master,
and it is very possible that then we wouldn't have the same opportunities to
travel there. Let's take advantage then of the present circumstances
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 74-5, 77-8).
And on other occasions as well, Dolomieu advised Brongniart not to take the
excessive demands of 'administrateurs' too seriously, but rather to journey at his
own pace and in his own style, furnishing excuses for slowness only when needed
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 86). Travelling as a civil servant rather than as a Knight of
Malta obviously had some disadvantages; but Dolomieu's comments reveal the
extent to which he was able to adapt and manipulate his official responsibilities to
the very real furthering of his own ends.
In this way Dolomieu forged a new routine of scientific travel: a bureaucratic

one, but one in some respects surprisingly similar to that of a decade earlier. With
his 1796 appointment at the Ecole des Mines to teach classes in Paris during the
winter months, for example, Dolomieu was now able to resume his previous sea-
sonal pattern of urban residence in the winter and mountain fieldwork in the
summer. 16 Amidst the re-establishment of a schedule approximating his former
one, however, Dolomieu fully recognized the alteration that had taken place in his
situation and that now severed him from the world of the 1780s: 'The sciences
which, at another time, were for me a relaxation have become the trade (le
metier) which gives me something to live on; and yet I'm doing it with pleasure'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 138). In the restructuring of science that culminated in the
founding of the lnstitut in 1795, Dolomieu had gone from being a wealthy
amateur of science whose sole scientific post was the relatively undemanding one
of correspondent to the Academie des Sciences, to being a fully-fledged Institut
member and the salaried employee of organizations, the Corps and Ecole des
Mines, that were beginning to win substantial respect. The double set of duties
Dolomieu had to perform for the latter post- as he put it, 'my duties of miner and
of professor' -were now, in fact, practically his only source of monetary support,
following the disintegration of his family fortune during the Revolution (Lacroix,
1921, vol. 2: 152, 100). Thoroughly dependent on the government for his new
institutional and professional affiliations, as well as the financial reimbursements
which sometimes actually did arrive, Dolomieu now took care to maintain, when
writing to government officials, that his voyaging not only served scientific ends,
but, in the process of fulfilling those ends, also served the Republic: 'the object of
his voyages has always been the hope of making himself useful to his country'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 11 0). In order to ensure his continued ability to voyage,
and sponsorship for doing so, Dolomieu positioned the very activity of scientific
voyaging in which he engaged as one essential to the interests of the new
Revolutionary government.
Simultaneously, however, Dolomieu argued, in two influential articles (his
'Discours sur I' etude de Ia geologie' and his 'Rapport fait a l'lnstitut National
sur ses voyages de /'an cinquieme et sixieme') for the importance of scientific
voyaging in another very specific context: the pursuit of the emerging science of
'geology'. While Dolomieu had, in the 1780s, repeatedly alluded to the benefits
of voyaging for the sciences in general, he now used these two articles as a direct
forum for articulating his conviction that the new science of geology, in particu-
lar, should be founded on the methods of scientific voyaging. He wrote at a time
when it was not yet entirely clear that this would be the case. Among the attrac-
tions of the new geology was its stance as a potentially general and theoretical
science, offering the observer broad panoramas of the earth's structures and
processes, and thereby liberating him from the limits of his own parochial per-
spective. In the 'Discours', however, Dolomieu argued that it was geology which
needed to be studied in the field, while mineralogy was an affair of the cabinet.
Alix Cooper 53
Subordinating the latter to the former, Dolomieu then argued that 'all of the
knowledge' of the 'geologue ... has then, in some way, as its end the voyages for
which you destine yourself (Dolomieu, 1794: 259). Similarly, the second of
these two articles, an extended description of a later voyage, presented in its
lengthy preamble a veritable manifesto for a voyaging-based science of geology
(Dolomieu 1798a: )P By thus defining geology, still in its chrysalis ('une science
presque nouvelle'; Dolomieu, 1798a: 388), 18 as what we might today call a field
science, Dolomieu can be seen as not only adding yet another argument for the
importance of scientific travel in the 1790s to his arsenal, but as attempting to
establish himself, as a scientific voyager par excellence, at the centre of the new
discipline under formation.
By the time the 1790s began to draw to a close, Dolomieu had parlayed his
travel skills into the acquisition of a full-time job and of an enviable status as one
of the pioneers in a new field still in the process of being defined. Having resumed
many of his voyaging patterns of the 1780s, Dolomieu had cheerfully accepted
those minor restrictions on his personal autonomy and freedom of movement
entailed by his government employment, seemingly unimportant sacrifices to
make in light of the much greater benefits which the new systems of scientific
organization had procured for Dolomieu. Yet again, his voyages had let him forge
a strategic compromise, one which seemed to work. But the sorts of pressures
Dolomieu had confronted and mastered during the revolutionary years were to
resurface- in a form with serious consequences for his 'field' and 'fields'.
3. TOEGYPT
When Dolomieu embarked on Napoleon Bonaparte's great and ill-fated expedi-

tion to Egypt in the summer of 1798, he was, without knowing it, embarking on a
new phase of scientific voyaging, one which, though much of its groundwork had
been laid in the preceding period, would enforce a radically different conception
of the scientific voyage. In many if not all of its features, the style of travel
imposed by the Egyptian expedition would be completely antithetical to the styles
of travel which Dolomieu had patiently developed over the previous decades. In
the extent of its goals, in the number of people it involved, in the time it took, and
in the cultural distance it crossed, the Egyptian expedition vastly exceeded any
journey of Dolomieu's. Abandoning the safe haven of Europe, the expedition
plunged Dolomieu and his fellow savants into a strange and unfamiliar world,
severed from the networks of sociability they had so laboriously devised, and
even from the very fields in which they had become accustomed to voyage. 19
Now completely dependent on military protection and subservient to military
command, the voyaging scientists found their mission to be little more than the
promotion of the general-in-chiefs grandiose dreams. The style of scientific voy-
aging thus created was, in the end, fundamentally incompatible with the purposes
of Dolomieu' s previous travel. Dolomieu' s ultimately disastrous decision to leave

Egypt early, resulting first in his capture and then in his death, may be seen as a
wordless, but equally final rejection of the Egyptian expedition's structures of
scientific voyaging.
When Dolomieu first agreed to participate in the expedition, he seems to have
done so out of the belief that, just as he had turned previous travels to his advan-
tage, so too could he strategically make the new expedition fit his own scientific
and personal goals. Dolomieu, upon first hearing from his colleague Berthollet in
January 1798 about the proposed expedition, immediately assumed that its
destination would be Germany, a place whose mountains he had wanted to visit
for some time: 'For some time the talk had been of Bonaparte's return to Rastadt
to conclude there the peace of the empire, and I doubted so little that the voyage
would take me with him to Germany, that the next day I bought geographical
maps of Swabia and the Breisgau' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 15-16). 20 In letters
written in I 797, Dolomieu had already begun to display a restlessness with his
restriction, enforced by war conditions and the needs of the French government,
to the exploration of French territory, and he had begun to express the anticipa-
tion that eventual peace would permit him to voyage farther afield (Lacroix,
I 921, vol. 2: 154, I 63-4 ). Dolomieu thus seems to have hoped that, by accepting
Berthollet's offer and thus accommodating himself to external opportunity once
more, he could generate a workable compromise which would once again allow
him to pursue his personal style of scientific voyaging under new circumstances.
But a close examination of the text of Dolomieu's supposed conversation with
Berthollet about the expedition, as Dolomieu reports it in his prison journaJ,2 1
reveals several fundamental differences between the type of voyaging Dolomieu
had in mind, and that which Berthollet was really proposing. The text is worth
quoting in full:
It was around the 15th of nivose that Berthollet, my colleague, in a meeting of

the lnstitut, proposed to me that I undertake a great voyage with him (un grand
voyage), while saying to me that he couldn't tell me the country where we
would be going, because it was a great secret. I inquired of him whether in that
country, wherever it was, whether there were mountains and rocks.- Lots, he
answered me.- In that case, I'm going with you, I told him, laughing.
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. I: 15)
The first point that emerges from this passage relates to the scale of the expedi-
tion. 'A great voyage', according to Berthollet, the expedition was to assume
dimensions utterly alien to those of the voyages within Dolomieu's experience,
which had been characterized by the relative proximity of their destinations, the
modest amount of time consumed in their execution, and the small number of
participants involved. The Egyptian expedition, however, was big from the start,
not only in the great expectations it embodied, 22 but in its very organization of
Alix Cooper 55
time, space, and scientific personnel. Waiting to travel to the French coast for the
final embarkation, Dolomieu enthused to a friend that the expedition would be
'grande, tres grande'. On reaching Marseilles, however, his enthusiasm began to
sour as he became aware, with some distaste, of several of the potential draw-
backs of this very grandiosity. He complained, 'The crowd is enormous, and you
could not imagine how many people of all stations are taking part in the enter-
prise ... ' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 173-4). In its scale, the Egyptian expedition was
to exceed even the most famous of the eighteenth-century grand maritime expedi-
tions, like Cook's. In such a large expedition, however, Dolomieu could only
play a tiny part. Used to starring in his own voyages, Dolomieu would now have
to abandon centre stage; in an expedition of this size, as Dolomieu gradually
came with chagrin to realize, the role of the individual scientist, not to mention
his personal autonomy, were inevitably both greatly diminished.
A second theme that emerges from Dolomieu's conversation with Berthollet
relates to the problem of secrecy. By telling Dolomieu that 'he couldn't tell me
the country where we would be going, because it was a great secret', Berthollet
effectively dispensed with another key feature of Dolomieu's previous scientific
voyaging as he had developed it, namely his freedom to move, and to develop his
own point of view. The Egyptian expedition presented Dolomieu with a situation
in which not only was his voyage's destination predefined by others (as had
indeed been the case throughout the 1790s), but the very knowledge of what this
destination might be, and of the expedition's ultimate aim, was kept from him.
Dolomieu's later laments for having 'associated myself with that grand and
unhappy enterprise, whose true goal I didn't even know' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1:
II), 'an enterprise of which I didn't even know the object' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. I:
185), 23 suggests the tensions posed by such a 'secret expedition' for the voyaging
scientist accustomed either to setting his own goals, or at the very least accommo-
dating himself to the openly stated agendas of others. Where knowledge was
lacking, so too would be control.
Dolomieu's voyages undertaken for the Corps des Mines had acquainted him
with the experience of working under others' orders, for the 'chose publique'
and, by assisting in the mobilization of France's mineral resources, for the pre-
sumably greater military glory of France. But the supervision he had thereby
undergone had been sufficiently lax as to allow him to voyage, in essence, in
almost any way he wanted. In the Egyptian expedition, however, the very power
of voyaging in a scientific fashion, the ability to traverse (parcourir) the terrain in
question, was to be granted by the military. Reporting on Geoffroy's collections
of specimens brought back from Egypt, Lacepede, Cuvier, and Lamarck ascribed
Geoffroy's successful voyaging to military protection:
He traversed the country in every sense, with the greatest means, protected
by our victorious arms, and by generals friendly to the sciences and the arts:
judge this by what he was able to do, in comparison with the naturalists who
preceded him, and who, under the tyrannical empire of the most brutal
ignorance, lacked even the power to freely traverse the fields ...
(Lacepede, I802b: 234-5)
Dolomieu, however, was to despise the very military custody, with the indignities
of its impersonal demands for secrecy, that was to allow him to travel through an
unfamiliar, and frequently hostile, Egyptian landscape: 'My association with a
military enterprise, which put me (even in an indirect fashion) under the orders of
a general, was tiresome to my imagination, even if the general was Bonaparte'
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 23). 24 Deprived by the expedition's secrecy of the very
condition of knowledge upon which they had supposedly founded their careers,
the scientists of the Egyptian expedition, even after their arrival in Egypt, would
be left floating in a sea of doubt about their ultimate destiny. This was the situ-
ation in which Dolomieu, deeply frustrated with his Egyptian experience, chose
to set sail for home.
What were the reasons that might have led Dolomieu to take such a step, one
which few of his colleagues were to attempt, and the potential perils of which
were well known? Several of these have already been explored: his disillusion-
ment with Egypt itself, his dislike of the constant military presence, his deterio-
rating relationship with Napoleon, his desire to return to his friends and
colleagues in Europe, and so forth. In addition, Dolomieu's recent illness and
the existence of an apparent love interest, coyly hinted at by his biographer
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. I: xxxiii), seem to have been major factors. But what I
would like to suggest is that, influential as factors such as size and secrecy may
have been, much of Dolomieu's eventual disillusionment with his Egyptian
voyage, and his determination to leave after only a few months, can be attributed
to a very simple fact. This is the fact that in Egypt, the fields to which he had
devoted the greater part of his life in science, and around which he had con-
structed his scientific voyaging, barely even existed as options. He had asked
Berthollet if there would be mountains and rocks, and Berthollet had told him
there would. But as even the resolutely cheerful Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, whose
pronouncements regarding the expedition tended towards the propagandistic,
admitted, the mineralogists as well as botanists of the expedition found Egypt to
be a resounding disappointment, with little at all of interest in their fields of
study: 'P.S. The botanists are very unhappy here with regards to science: Egypt
has furnished them with barely 20 different species .... The mineralogists have
collected next to nothing. One doesn't find anything here except sand .. .' (Hamy,
1901: 67, 101). In Europe, the science of geology was in the process of being
founded; but in Egypt, Dolomieu was at a loss for even the most basic sense of a
'field' in which to voyage.
No longer able to pursue geology and mineralogy, the scientific fields in
which he had by now invested the most, to any meaningful extent in Egypt,
Dolomieu now turned to the exploration of a wide range of other activities, such
Alix Cooper 57
as archaeology and agronomy, which, while they had been closely associated in
the early modem period with the predecessors of geology and mineralogy, had
by now come to be linked only much more tangentially with them. Many of
these activities were ones with which Dolomieu had previously had some
involvement; but they had almost always been overshadowed, in Dolomieu's
correspondence, articles, and published books, by the sheer bulk of material
relating to the study of mountains and rocks per se and hence to geology and
mineralogy. Now, however, the ways in which Dolomieu had integrated his
interests, by focusing them around the definition of a field in which he could
voyage scientifically, were breaking down, and submerged interests were thus
able to spring to the surface. As the notes he took in Egypt reveal, Dolomieu was
to spend his months there investigating such topics as the physical decompos-
ition of Egyptian antiquities, the current state of Nilotic agriculture, the ancient
site of Alexandria, the deficiencies of the Egyptian climate, the height of the
'Nilometre' (a monumental column), and, in conjunction with a small committee
of equally perplexed savants, the intricacies of, among other things, 'mouture'
(milling) and 'panification' (bread-baking) for the army. 25 The chaotic variety of
Dolomieu's Egyptian activities can thus be seen as reflecting his loss of the
fields upon which he had depended to guide his scientific voyaging. Deprived of
his beloved mountains by Berthollet's mendacity, Dolomieu could no longer
practise his science as he had known it.
With Dolomieu's favourite fields removed from the picture, little remained of
his former style of scientific voyaging but the injunction to 'parcourir' the ter-
ritory, and to attempt to apply what remaining methods of exhaustive observa-
tion he could. This Dolomieu attempted with a vengeance. Disembarking in
Alexandria, he set himself immediately to the task of getting to know the
Egyptian city step by step: 'I then visited, I could almost say foot by foot, all
the terrain over which the ancient city and its districts stretched.' Even when
most of the other savants set off for Rosetta, Dolomieu chose to remain in
Alexandria, intent on his project of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the
city's present and past situation by applying his methods of scientific voyaging;
on learning that other members of the expedition had been assigned the same
project, though, he ended up dropping the idea (Daressy, 1922: 55, 7). Shortly
afterwards, Dolomieu headed off to study agriculture on the banks of the
Nile, where, spending a mere five weeks on a much larger territory, he
traversed it much less exhaustively, concentrating instead in his notes on
issuing denunciations of the inadequate efforts of previous travellers on
this score. Deluded by 'enthusiasm' and 'vague expressions', complained
Dolomieu, previous European visitors to Egypt had delivered extremely unsci-
entific and thus deceptive reports about Egypt's riches and agricultural bounty.
Too lazy properly to traverse the terrain, these voyagers had assumed from
merely seeing the banks of the Nile that all of Egypt was similarly fertile: 'The
voyagers who have preceded us have never penetrated into the interior of the
provinces and have never been able to appreciate the situation there .... They
could not suspect that often the palm-trees were like curtains that hid from them
a tableau of absolute sterility ... ' (Daressy, 1922: 78, 80, 118). Five years previ-
ously, while holed up in the Roche-Guyon chateau waiting out the Terror,
Dolomieu had himself written a curious 'Memoire sur Ia constitution physique
de l'Egypte' in which, relying entirely on second-hand information and thus
seemingly violating his own tenets of scientific voyaging, he had theorized
about the physical structure of a land he had never actually seen (Dolomieu,
I 793). Now in Egypt at last, however, with plentiful opportunities to rectify his
earlier ignorance, Dolomieu soon chose not even to try. Unable to practise his
scientific voyaging in the ways to which he had become accustomed over the
course of his previous career, Dolomieu requested permission to depart and, in
March of I 799, only months after having left Europe, abandoned his Egyptian
adventure.
The Egyptian expedition can be seen as an attempt, on the part of its creators,
to impose a new model of scientific voyaging which would, by reorganizing
space, time, and the Jives of the human actors involved, apply the ultimate in
scientific investigation to territories which, it was claimed, had never before truly
experienced such investigation. By shipping the intellects of Paris off to Egypt,
and creating the /nstitut d'Egypte as, in the apt phrase of a recent historian, a
'clone of French science on the banks of the Nile' (Gillispie, I 989: 473),
Napoleon and his administrative strategists sought a radical revision of the notion
of scientific voyaging for the modem age, one reversing traditional concepts of
centre and periphery. And indeed this is how Geoffroy chose to portray the
lnstitut d'Egypte, in his letters home to his Parisian colleagues:
I enjoy more comfort than I ever had at Paris; I am located amidst a concentra-
tion of intellects (un foyer de lumieres), from which I'm trying to profit. ... I
find here a vast garden, a menagerie, cabinets of physics and of natural
history .... I feel as if I were in Paris .... I find men who think about nothing
except the sciences, I Jive at the centre of an ardent concentration of intellects;
we are all much more busy than in Paris, and we are working much more use-
fully, being free of all the tumult of affairs and of general movement which
draws one in despite oneself in the metropolis... (Hamy, I90I: 87, 92, 93)
Even as the lnstitut's founders bustled about devising new activities to occupy the
resident scientists, however, the instability of the lnstitut's attraction, and the true
seriousness of its conflicts as a replacement for previous models of scientific voy-
aging, can be witnessed in the restlessness of the savants, and in their unwilling-
ness to remain in their new base in Cairo. While some, like Geoffroy, headed off
to Upper Egypt to explore the further reaches of the Nile, others, like Dolomieu,
chose to retreat back to the safer terrain of Lower Egypt. And, ultimately, to
voyage home.
Alix Cooper 59
4. . .. AND BACK AGAIN
With Dolomieu's final arrival in Paris, after his Italian prison interlude, and his
decision, 'returned to the sciences and to friendship' (LacepMe, l802a: 221), 'to
recover himself in the view of his dear mountains, from which he had been
severed so long' (Bruun-Neergaard, 1802: 3), we now come full circle. Dolomieu
was back in familiar territory, and, tiring within weeks of the constant attention
with which he was feted upon his return to Paris, he longed to set forth once more
and to see once again his beloved Alps:
I am so fatigued of this concourse of people ... that I would love to be able to

flee Paris, and that I yearn for the moment which will permit me to voyage ... I
need very much to distance myself for some time from Paris .... I need rest, and
I'm going to look for it in the mountains.
(Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2:209, 211).
The details and itinerary of this final voyage have fortunately been preserved in
a remarkable document, entitled Journal du dernier voyage du c•n Dolomieu
dans les Alpes and written by the Danish naturalist T. C. Bruun-Neergaard,
whom Dolomieu chose as his travelling companion for the journey, and it is to
this document that we will now finally turn. Once in the mountains of the Alps,
where he had voyaged so many times previously, Dolomieu seems to have shed
the burden of his Egyptian misadventures and to have given himself over to an
attempt to recreate the styles of scientific voyaging he had practised at the very
start of his career. Travelling on foot whenever possible, amassing vast heaps of
specimens, revisiting old friends and colleagues along the way, and dazzling his
impressionable travelling-companion with his enthusiasm and energy,
Dolomieu retraced the familiar territory of his previous journeys. Revelling in
his newly recovered freedom of movement, Dolomieu appears to have lost few
opportunities to add new destinations at will, to change his plans on the spur of
the minute, and otherwise to demonstrate his ability to set his own agenda once
again. To cite just one example, on Bruun-Neergaard's arrival in the town
where Dolomieu was supposed to be staying and where they had planned to
rendezvous before ascending a mountain together, he was somewhat taken
aback to find that Dolomieu had already set off alone; he then climbed labor-
iously to the summit and found Dolomieu already there, who then cheerfully
and unapologetically shouted 'You're finally here!'. The mutual progress of the
two through the Alps was delayed by Dolomieu's apparent delight in his new
freedom, which resulted in frequent detours to perform such activities as taking
mineral baths, tasting Alpine cream, observing sheep, collecting mountain
strawberries, and observing Swiss cretins (Bruun-Neergaard, 1902: 14, 23, 26,
49, 11 ). Bruun-Neergaard recounts the almost astonishing degree to which
Dolomieu, reestablishing his networks of scientific sociability, found friends
and colleagues in almost every village and town. Chipping specimens from
rock ledges as he passed, or, more often than not, simply buying them from the
ubiquitous mineral merchants in the towns, Dolomieu thus resumed many if not
all of the patterns of the scientific voyaging he had undertaken in the 1780s,
when first he had settled on mountains as the field within which he would
primarily voyage.
But not everything was as it had been before. In addition to the appearance of
mineral merchants within the Alpine towns to cater to the whims of collectors,
scientists like himself, and, increasingly, tourists (cf. Buzard, 1993; Pang, 1993),
other things had changed. Though the activities in which Dolomieu participated
during this voyage seem scarcely different from those of 20 years earlier, the
government which had first employed him as a mining inspector in the 1790s,
and which had packed him off to Egypt with Napoleon, had a role in this expedi-
tion as well, assigning him the mission of investigating a road across the Alps
(Bruun-Neergaard, 1802: 3). The image of the road here is appropriate.
Dolomieu, throughout his career, never once truly did stray off the beaten track.
Rather, he sought to convert familiar terrains into natural knowledge, and to
cope with the dilemmas created by the fact that he was not alone in this, and that
Europe was becoming increasingly crowded with naturalists doing much the
same thing. The transformations wrought by the events of the Revolutionary era,
as seen in the new and disorienting form of scientific travel mandated by the
Egyptian expedition, would, however, ultimately lead to the demise of
Dolomieu's particular style of scientific voyaging, with its focus on the aristo-
cratic and on an ethic of personal liberty ultimately incompatible with modern
forms of scientific employment. Dolomieu's career, as we see it in these final
moments, illustrates the contradictions at the heart of late eighteenth-century
notions of the 'scientific voyage', and what might happen when these contradic-
tions met in one person's career.
Lacepede's eloge of Dolomieu following his death, read aloud at the Institut in
1802, provides a fitting note on which to close. Lamenting Dolomieu's loss,
Lacepede launched into a breathless exposition of Dolomieu's many voyages,
applauding the 'adventurous' qualities of these voyages with more than a hint of
hyperbole. Yet in Lacepede's shocked recitation of the 'extraordinary misfor-
tunes' can be read a tone of ambivalence and doubt amidst all the mythmaking
(Lacepede, 1802a: 222). Dolomieu simply did not fit the myth of the 'heroic'
voyager. He was, rather, a person who had parlayed a form of local knowledge
into membership in an expanding set of disciplines concerning themselves with
the scientific study of localities. In this enterprise, the forms of a naturalist's
contact with the field - the ways he walked over rocks, the natural objects he
chose to pick up and to comment on, in short the ways he practised science
through the voyage - generated the matter of the field itself. When Dolomieu
then journeyed from the Alps to Egypt, and back again, the field to which he
returned was not the one he had been in before.
Alix Cooper 61
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Warwick Anderson, Lisbet Koerner, Dorinda Outram,

James Secord, Michael Shortland, Emma Spary, and Peter Stevens for their com-
ments on this chapter. Daniel Schwartz, Marcus Hellyer and my parents helped at
various critical moments. I would also like to thank Marie-Noelle Bourguet for
having kept me in contact with the project 'L'invention scientifique de Ia
Mediterranee: Egypte, Algerie, Moree'.
NOTES
I. The terms 'field' and 'fieldwork' have tangled and overlapping histories. One of the
most thoughtful discussions of the latter concept remains Rudwick (1985). The
intellectual, rather than spatial, dimensions of the 'field' as 'discipline' are discussed
with particular reference to the branches of natural history in: Porter (1977, 1978);
Guntau (1978); Farber (1982). Ophir and Shapin (1991) provide an essential
introduction to the use of spatial metaphors in the history of science. One of the
goals of this chapter will be to show the integration of 'field' and 'fieldwork' within
eighteenth-century natural history.
2. I use the word 'voyage' rather than 'travel' here because it (or its French cognate)
was the term of choice for Dolomieu, as for many other eighteenth-century natural-
ists. Contrary to our twentieth-century perceptions, earlier usages encompassed trips
by land as well as by sea, and shorter trips as well as longer ones, i.e. a quite broad
spectrum of potential journeys. For general treatments of travel during this period,
see Broc (1975); Carter (1987); Porter (1991); Pratt (1992); Van Den Abbeele
(1992).
3. For a survey of eighteenth-century French provincial science as carried out within
local scientific societies, see Roche (1978); for a discussion of the prevailing theme
of metropolis and province in France (albeit in a later period) see Nye ( 1986).
4. For a broad survey of French Enlightened and Romantic views on 'nature', see
Charlton (1984).
5. Cf. Dolomieu (1783: 12): 'The first blow of the hammer I gave to the rocks I
encountered in that valley, resounded with a muffled clang ... '. Similar references to
and images of Dolomieu's 'marteau' recur throughout his own travel narratives, as
well as others' descriptions of him. As the symbol of the geologist's physical inter-
action with the objects he studied, the rock hammer possessed iconic significance
for Dolomieu as well as for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geologists in general
(see Rudwick, 1985; Shortland, 1994).
6. On several occasions during this journey, Dolomieu admitted to using horses as a
means of transportation, on the grounds that, by enabling him to travel farther, they
in fact enabled him to see more: 'Then I went on horseback, to penetrate into the
interior of the island' (Dolomieu, 1783: 45).
7. Describing his decision not to undertake a projected summer voyage to Spain in
1782, Dolomieu commented that owing to the heat, he would not have been able to
'make good observations, I would have been too rushed and I would have seen
badly' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. I: 89).
62 Making SpaceforScience
8. Thus Dolomieu, after visiting the well-known 'grotte de Ia Balme' in the province of
his birth, revelled in his perception that 'the observation I've made is absolutely
new' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 1: 81).
9. Dolomieu's voyages frequently occasioned the formation of close friendships,
laying the foundation for years of correspondence and mutual scientific interchange.
It was by such companionable voyaging that Dolomieu formed several of his most
enduring connections with other scientists, i.e. with the Italian and French naturalists
Gioeni and Picot de Lapeyrouse.
10. Dolomieu often sent entire cases of 'the productions of our islands' as gifts;
compare Findlen (1991) here on early modern collecting and exchange. Although
the activity of collecting is often seen as a quintessentially sedentary one, it is worth
pointing out here that it usually relies on someone's travels, that is to say, on the
bridging of distances, by whatever means. See Secord (1994) for an illuminating
account of Victorian natural history as bridging class as well as geographical gaps.
II. For the relations between natural history and geology, see Allen (1979) and Sloan
(1990). For the emergence of 'geology' itself, see Rudwick (1976); Albury and
Oldroyd ( 1977); Porter ( 1977, 1978); Laudan ( 1987).
12. Dolomieu's varying commitments and attachments to natural phenomena may also
be seen in the way his name was applied to the naming of these phenomena after his
death: as Taylor ( 1973: 150) has pointed out, 'it is fitting that he is the eponym of a
substance- dolomite- and of the Alpine regions largely composed of it, rather than
of a geological principle'. Thus the name 'Dolomieu', originally derived from
the place of Dolomieu's birth and subsequently converted into his own personal
name by noble custom, ended up reverting back- thanks to Dolomieu's territorial
preoccupations - to a geographical use.
13. Despite this chapter's focus on the spatial aspects of Dolomieu's career, a temporal
dimension also deserves to be pointed out; a crucial element of the above mentioned
balance was the way in which Dolomieu, accommodating his travelling to tradi-
tional alternations of seasonality, frequently based his voyaging on the cycles and
rhythms of nature, thus giving a seemingly natural grounding to the patterns of his
scientific career. Summer, 'Ia belle sai:mn', granted Dolomieu a guaranteed respite
from the obligations of city life, enabling him to carry out his scientific voyaging
under the most auspicious circumstances and with a minimum of social inconve-
nience. And winter had its functions as well; during the winter, Dolomieu could
refresh and renew his urban social contacts while pursuing those aspects of science
less suited to his summer field studies, such as the careful arrangement and
rearrangement of his cabinet, and the chemical analysis of minerals.
14. For a contemporary narrative of science during the Revolutionary period, see Biot
(1805). The argument, most commonly found in introductory surveys of the history
of science, that war and/or revolution are antithetical to the practice of science
clearly does not hold water in this instance; for recent works that have contributed to
building up a more complex picture of science during the French Revolution, see
Outram (1983, 1984); Dhombres (1989).
15. In writing these articles Dolomieu seems to have relied for the most part not only on
observations and materials gathered from his previous travels but also on forms of
armchair analysis which required little external input. The fact that one of the
periods of Dolomieu's greatest productivity (in writing, not in voyaging, it must be
pointed out) coincided with a period of the greatest social and political chaos may,
of course, be taken as yet another argument against the view of revolutionary times
as intrinsically hostile to science.
16. In a letter to an infrequent correspondent, who had enquired how Dolomieu was
doing, Dolomieu set forth the basics of this new arrangement, tactfully omitting the
Alix Cooper 63
details and extent of the various types of strategic negotiations that had gone into it:
'It's mainly mineralogy and geology that occupy my time, and I give lessons in
them at the Ecole des Mines during the winter; during the summer I voyage to
inspect the extraction sites' (Lacroix, 1921, vol. 2: 138).
17. 'Geology cannot attain its end except through innumerable observations. They are
the true founders of geology who ... braving a\1 dangers and devoting themselves to
the hardest life, seek out the secrets of nature, as much within subterranean dig-
gings, as on top of the highest summits; which only the ardour of the naturalist could
make accessible.'
18. It must be recalled here that, though well-respected among advocates of 'geologie',
Dolomieu continued to hold strong commitments to other previously existing forms
of earth science, such as 'mineralogie', and that the eventual triumph of 'geology'
as a concept and a discipline was by no means yet secure; many alternatives, such
as Wernerian geognusy, still strongly competed against each other for recognition
and status.
19. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, for example, would describe the experience of the voyage
as being 'transported into a sphere so foreign to my habits' (Hamy, 1901: 42).
A general account of the Egyptian expedition is provided in Gillispie ( 1989). For a
longer view of European encounters with Egypt, see Carre ( 1956) and Said ( 1978).
I would like to thank Emma Spary for providing me with a copy of her paper, 'The
Invention of the Scientific "Expedition": Napoleon, the Naturalists, and Egypt'. The
literature on imperialism and science is large and growing; see, for example,
MacLeod (1982); Secord (1989c); Stafford (1989) and, in the French context,
Pyenson (1993) and Osborne (1994). For nineteenth-century scientific expeditions,
in particular, see Cannon (1978); Pang (1993).
20. Even before the Revolution, Dolomieu had begun to build up international
scientific connections, exchanging specimens with Germans among others
(see Nose, 1797; Taylor, 1973: 152), but the events of the 1790s had focused his
attention again on France.
21. Or imaginatively reconstructs it, or even invents it; in any case the usefulness of this
passage lies in what it discloses about how Dolomieu subsequently conceptualized
the Egyptian expedition, while rationalizing his initial decision to take part in it.
22. In letters written from Marseilles while aboard the expeditionary fleet and waiting
for it to sail, Dolomieu alluded with delightful hyperbole to the expedition as a
second French Revolution ('If our expedition succeeds, it will serve to complete the
great Revolution .. .'), as a reprise of the myth of Alexander the Great ('Alexander
didn't commence his conquests with such backing'), and even as a competitor to the
expedition of the ancient Argonauts ('If the [expedition's] success corresponds to
our preparations and our hopes, no expedition will have ever been so famous, and
we will make the Argonauts' [expedition] forgotten.') See Lacroix (1921, vol. 2:
174-5, 177-8).
23. Lacroix (1921, vol. 2: 185). Dolomieu's insistence here on the degree of his ignorance
of the expedition's destination must be taken with a grain of salt; at the time when he
wrote these lines he was attempting to secure his release from prison by disavowing
any and all connections with the military or political purposes of the Egyptian
expedition. Nonetheless, his frustration appears in this passage to be genuine.
24. See Dhombres (1989: 97-8, 109-10), for discussions, respectively, of the secrecy
surrounding the expedition and of the friction between soldiers and savants.
25. For the last of these items, see Lacroix (1921, vol. 2: 182). For the rest, see
Daressy (1922).
3 'I Do Know the Machinery
of the Universe': System and
Individuality in Edgar Allan
Poe's Eureka
Ian Higginson
Systems in many respects resemble machines. A machine is a little system,

created to perform, as well as to connect together, in reality, those different
movements and effects which the artist has occasion for. A system is an
imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy those different
movements and effects which are already in reality performed.
(From Adam Smith's 1795 History of Astronomy in Smith, 1980: 66)
The problems of authority, power and control expressed and embodied spatially
by practitioners of the sciences and examined by other contributors to this volume
were not exclusive to those savants. Strategies of negotiating authority for one's
views and the power to express them credibly, both to elite and popular audi-
ences, were common to cultivators of other fields. Such problems, I argue, were
faced by the nineteenth century American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
For some twentieth-century interpreters the 'space as text' metaphor has
become a useful analytical tool. This chapter, however, examines the deployment
of the metaphor as an historical actor's, rather than simply as a modem analyst's,
category. I argue that Poe himself exploited the metaphor to its fullest extent. In a
letter to the magazine editor Nathaniel Parker Willis, he described 'The Universe'
as 'a broad text' (Ostrom, 1966, vol. 2: 359). The 'broad text' was a reference
both to the title of the lecture that was later published as Eureka and to the exter-
nal universe itself.
Characterized on the first page as 'A Prose Poem', Eureka was a model cosmos
of eternal perpetual renewal, not dissimilar in nature to Jefferson's agrarian
model of a 'regenerating nature' (Clark, 1984: 4). The 'cycles of the Universe',
Poe argued, 'are perpetual - the Universe has no conceivable end' (Harrison,
1902, vol. 16: 306). His universe was a cyclical system that underpinned a life-
long search for authority to express his interlinked principles concerning the cre-
ation of literature and the presentation of the literary artist as an individual. The
64
Jan Higginson 65
universe of Eureka was a finite macrocosmic system that was originated accord-
ing to the same basic rules of brevity, unity of effect, originality and economy of
words and ideas as the theory of literature articulated in his 1842 review of
Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales.
Although developed in a quite different context of large-scale electrical engin-
eering, Thomas P. Hughes' historiography of technological systems provides a
valuable tool to assist our understanding of Poe's universe. Hughes argues that
each component of a technological system has a function in relation to every
other component (Hughes, 1987: 51). For Poe a literary work of art formed a
textual system. Although unattainable by human authors, a perfect textual system
would be one in which every word was linked simultaneously to every other
word and had its existence because of its relation to those words. Poe likened the
role of words and ideas in the plot of a tale to the role of bricks in the construc-
tion of a building 'so dependently constructed, that to change the position of a
single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric' (Thompson, 1984: 148). Unlike a
human work of art, however, the Creator's universe (as Poe construed it) stood as
a spatial embodiment of perfection with every particle of material substance
related to every other particle in exactly the same way.
Poe's universe was an ideal, finite, totally closed system without any recalcitrant
elements, those features external to it that could challenge its symmetry, consist-
ency and perfection. Hughes has stressed the ways in which a technological system
strives 'to increase the size of the system under [its] control and to reduce the size
of the environment that [was] not', thus incorporating 'environment' into the
system (Hughes, 1987: 66). In the limit, mastery of environment would produce a
totally closed system. Eureka represented just such a closed and unified system.
Above all, Poe's universe promoted a place for the creative, intuitive individ-
ual, especially for Poe himself. His universe is viewed from his singular perspec-
tive and according to his own artistic vision. The ideal individual that Poe invites
into this system has a powerful artistic vision because he/she is insightful and
uses that intuitive control to make scientific methods serve him/her. Conversely,
the masses have only a very limited vision because they serve science.
Aristotelian and Baconian scientific methods are disparaged in Eureka as the
obscurantist 'creeping' and 'crawling' 'roads to Truth' pandered to by Poe's
'inter-Tritonic minnows, the microscopical savans' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16:
191-5). Unlike Keats who toasted 'confusion to mathematics', Poe upheld the
value of science as a tool for discovery if controlled and made to serve the artistic
faculty of 'intuition' (see Higginson, 1994: 287-98).
The epistemic function of his universe was as an ideal space for creative thought.
Although supposedly grounded in the science of his day (Newtonian, Laplacian,
Humboldtian, etc), Poe's universe was entirely driven by artistic intuition, defined in
Eureka as: 'the conviction resulting from deductions or inductions of which the
processes were so shadowy as to have escaped [our] consciousness, eluded [our]
reason, or bidden defiance to [our] capacity of expression' (Harrison, 1902, 16: 197).
To these ends Poe offered his essay as a 'Book of Truths, not in its character of
Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true'
(Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 183 ). That is, the author would not present himself
through the text as an authoritative figure, preacher or philosopher who would
compel his audiences to accept certain truths about the universe. Armed not with
an authority embodied in the institutions of theology or science, Poe prepared 'to
challenge the conclusions, and thus, in effect, to question the sagacity, of many of
the greatest and most justly reverenced of men' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 185).
If Poe denied his claims as authoritarian 'Truth-teller', he certainly wished his
readers to attain 'Truth'. He thus offered Eureka to his audiences as 'a Book of
Truths' whose beauty constituted it true. Here his proclamation of beauty as a
measure of truth suggests the closing lines of John Keats's celebrated 'Ode on a
Grecian Urn' (published along with 'Lamia' in 1820):
When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty',- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Keats, 1970: 209-10)
Eureka, then, would stand as an artefact, an 'Art-Product' in Poe's words, like

Keats's Grecian urn, a veritable poem whose 'truth' lay in its incorruptible
beauty: 'What I here propound is true: -therefore it cannot die: -or if by any
means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will "rise again to the Life
Everlasting" (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 183). Poe's strategy thus emerges as an
appeal to his readers to see for themselves the 'Truth' of Eureka through the
spatialized beauty of the text, through the patterns of harmony, coherence and
symmetry of its design, and by its internal consistency, rather than by the didactic
position of the author. Poe's seemingly anti-authoritarian stance derived,
however, not from any commitment to egalitarian and democratic principles but
from an intense antipathy towards cultural, especially literary, cliques.
I. SLAVERY, SECTIONALISM AND 'SETS': THE RHETORICS OF

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
The historian Hugh Brogan has argued that ante-bellum Americans 'were
becoming increasingly conscious of their identity as inhabitants of the various
sections (principally North, South and West)' (Brogan, 1990: 271). Spatial
stereotyping, in the contemporary mutual perception of Northern and Southern
ideologies, was perpetuated and promoted in the rhetoric of the period.
'Sectionalism' was the result of the generation of self-declared, diametrically
opposed cultural spaces. It was a time when the disparity between North and
Ian Higginson 67
South in economic affairs and politics, coupled with the fundamental disagree-
ment over the abolition of slavery, was engendering two mutually hostile
American identities, one Northern and one Southern. In a little over a decade
the ideological opposition of cultural spaces was to manifest itself on the
ground as the opposition of two armies fighting for the right to express their
views in each others' social space. Already in Poe's time, however, North and
South were socially, culturally and politically drifting apart.
To Edgar Allan Poe fell the dubious distinction of being culturally displaced
from the local context of his childhood. Although born a Northerner in Boston he
was brought up as a Southerner in Richmond, Virginia. He wrote in the ante-
bellum America of the 1830s and 1840s, an era of intense reforming zeal in the
Northern states. Spending most of his career in the more literary active northern
cities of Boston, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, he found himself cul-
turally alienated. Poe always identified himself (albeit uneasily at times) with the
South, describing himself simply as a 'Virginian' (Ostrom, 1966, vol. 2: 170).
By 1848, the year that Poe wrote Eureka, the slavery question hung like a dark
cloud over the Union. More than 40 years had passed since the last Northern
state, New Jersey, had abolished slavery. Now it was considered high time in the
minds of Northern abolitionists that the South should follow suit.
Emancipation rhetoric, however, was not a guarantor of equality. Northern atti-
tudes to the negro were still largely that of a superior to an inferior in which, as
Edgar J. McManus argues, 'Upper-class whites were motivated by idealism, and
their attitude towards the Negro was philanthropic and paternalistic' (McManus,
1966: 182). 'Upper-class' attitudes, however, have often blurred the whole
picture, as this 'idealism had no counterpart in the lower classes .... On the one
hand, the slave system excluded whites from jobs pre-empted by slaves; on the
other, it often degraded them socially to the level of the slaves' (McManus, 1966:
183). Typical of the more extreme 'Upper-class' Northern attitude is the 1845
correspondence of Samuel May, a key figure in the anti-slavery lobby, who
wrote: 'Would to God New England was forever separated from all connexion
[sic] with them! With the slave holding states I mean. If we do not cut asunder
the tie which binds us, Slavery will be the millstone which will drag us to
destruction' (quoted in Taylor, 1974: 247).
Conversely, Southerners such as Mary Chesnut, daughter of a prominent South
Carolina political leader and author of the posthumous A Diary from Dixie
( 1905), articulated the grassroots concerns of the majority of Southerners when
faced with the derogatory views of elite Northern reformers:
On one side Mrs Stowe, Greeley, Thoreau, Emerson, Sumner. They live in nice
New England homes, clean, sweet-smelling, shut up in libraries, writing books
which ease their hearts of their bitterness against us. What self-denial they do
practice [sic] is to tell John Brown to come down here and cut our throats in
Christ's name. (Chesnut, 1980: 163)
Sectional animosity overspilled into all levels of American culture, including

literature where Southern works were regularly disparaged in the North as the
product of a slave society. Southern authors were quick to respond in print to any
slight, real or imagined. Reviewing James Russell Lowell's doggerel verse
production, 'A Fable for Critics', in his own Broadway Journal, Poe complained
that 'with the exception of Mr Poe no Southerner is mentioned at all in this
"Fable" .... lt is a fashion among Mr. Lowell's set to effect a belief that there is no
such thing as Southern Literature'. He then branded Lowell himself as 'one of the
most rabid of the Abolition fanatics', guilty of 'a bigotry the most obstinately
blind and deaf, and incapable of speaking well 'even in a literary sense, of any
man who is not a ranting abolitionist' (The Broadway Journa/1845, vol. 1: 139).
But if Southern writers in general had been ignored by Lowell, Poe certainly
had not:
There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.
(Lowell, 1972: 78)
Although Poe himself was scarcely amused by the caricature, Lowell also
directed criticism at a host of other contemporary authors, including his own
propensity to preach.
Perceived sectional differences, however, were a potential touchpaper that was
ultimately to ignite the Civil War powder keg 12 years after Poe's death. In 1856,
one time slave owner Senator Thomas Hart Benton wrote perceptively: 'The abo-
litionists and the slave holders are two blades of a pair of Scissors. Alone neither
can harm the Union; together if unchecked, they will cut it in half' (Benton, 1856).
Sectionalism in the North defined an ideologically and politically correct
Northern 'cultural space' in which literature should be practised and from which
Southerners could be effectively excluded. Northern attitudes, like those of
Samuel May, seemed to presume that sectional affiliation to the Southern locale
implied the adoption of a series of anti-democratic values in relation to politics,
economics and the slavery question. Such Northern attitudes did have the effect
of stifling the careers of some Southern writers because the North, the home
of the only truly successful publishing houses, would not (could not indeed)
recognize the talent of Southern writers. To do so would have been to forfeit their
stance of moral authority in defining the political and ideological agenda of the
fledgling and fragile Union.
Poe's strategy, however, was to present his work as the product of the individ-
ual par excellence. Even in the brief period that he was part owner of a popular
Ian Higginson 69
monthly, The Broadway Journal, he announced in the preface to the first edition
that the name was 'chosen ... for the sake of individuality' (The Broadway
Journal, 1845, vol. 1: 139). This rhetoric he complemented by manipulating and
presenting his own image through continual self-advertising. He dressed oddly,
often all in black, was intoxicated when about to meet President Tyler and did
little to discourage his reputation as a philanderer. For his literary executor he
appointed the Rev. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a man guaranteed to vilify him in
public, which he obligingly did in his anonymous 'Ludwig Article', bequeathing
Poe's infamy to posterity (New York Tribune, 9 October I849).
In the medium of the magazine, the sole means of 'cheap mass-media commu-
nication' (Clarke, I977: I 55) of the early nineteenth century, Poe was a merciless
critic, so much so that his friend Dr Thomas Holley Chivers complained that he
'Tomahawk[ed] people' (Chivers to Poe, I5 May I844, Oris MSS I7I, BPL). He
conducted a highly publicized contretemps with the writer Thomas Dunn English,
pursued the 'Longfellow War', and accused all and sundry of plagiarism, includ-
ing Lowell who concluded in a letter to the magazine editor Charles F. Briggs:
In the last Broadway Journal he has accused me of plagiarism, and misquoted

Wordsworth to sustain his charge .... He probably cannot conceive of any body's
writing for anything but a newspaper reputation, or for posthumous fame, which
is but the same thing magnified by a distance.
(Norton, I894, vol. I: 99-I 00)
Others like Poe's friend George Washington Eveleth recognized his ploy. Eveleth
addressed the following ironic letter to the Rev. Griswold after Poe's death:
The nose of the mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly
led ... no one was accustomed to handle it more oftener than he [Poe], and no
one knew better just which way to aim it, so that the mob would follow in its
wake. He led the populace in his 'Valdemar case', in his 'Balloon Hoax', in his
quarrel with Thomas Dunn English, in his drunken habits, in his Death, and in
his 'Memoir by Griswold'; and he hasn't let go even yet but is managing it at
his pleasure, through the medium of the Spirit telegraph with Mrs Whitman
[Poe's one time fiancee] at the other end of the wire.
(Eveleth to Griswold, 3 Apri!I852, Oris MSS 3I6, BPL)
Poe's self-cultivation as an individual was a means of defining for himself a

platform from which he could 'make war to the knife against' what he perceived
as 'the New-England assumption of "all the decency and all the talent"' (Ostrom,
1966, vol. I: 206). He repeatedly complained that Southern authors were unfairly
ignored simply because they were Southern: 'the misfortune of [the Southern
author] Pinkney [was] to have been born too far south. Had he been born a New
Englander, it is probable that he would have been ranked as the first of American
lyricists'. Again, Poe wrote of William Gilmore Simms: 'Had he been even a
Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his coun-
trymen'. And Beverley Tucker's sin was not to have been 'born North of Mason
and Dixon's line' (Thompson, 1984: 83,904, 1439).
Poe's complaints, public and private, were consistently expressed in language
which suggested the plight of the individual pitted against elite groups. He referred
to the 'arrogance of ... organised cliques' and 'the cabal [of] "The North American
Review'" (Thompson, 1984: 1025, 1439), 'that conceited body, the East' (Ostrom,
1966, vol. 2: 427) and 'MrLowell's set' (Thompson, 1984: 819). The key words:
'clique,' 'cabal,' 'body' and 'set' each suggested cohesive elites in control of cul-
tural territory inaccessible to isolated Southerners, like Poe. His correspondence
suggests that he thought himself to live in a society whose democratic principles
expressly denied his right to individual intellectual expression. 'I cannot agree to
lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass' he told James Russell Lowell
politely (Ostrom, 1966, vol. 2: 256-7). His narrators were less subtle: 'democracy
is a very admirable form of government- for dogs', commented the narrator of his
1848 tale 'Mellonta Tauta' (Mabbott, 1978, vol. 3: 1300).
Poe's ridicule of the democratic ethos and the rule of the people in America
increasingly found vent in his tales from the mid-1840s onwards. In Eureka, Poe
was to develop the idea which he had advanced in 'Some Words With a Mummy'
(1844) and 'Mellonta Tauta' (1848) that the concept of equality and democracy were
'directly contrary to the natural analogies' of the universe, notably dedmocracy of
gradation so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical uni-
verse' (Mabbott, 1978, vol. 3: 1299-300). In Eureka, Poe forwarded a cosmological
vision which found a place for the individual and individuality in the universe and
reinforced the authority of his critical opinions concerning a universal form of art.
2. EUREKA AS LITERARY COSMOGONY
As early as 1831 Poe had offered a theory of literature of sorts in his 'Letter to
Mr - ', albeit heavily influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria. By 1842 though, Poe had largely rejected his Coleridgean model and
offered a coherent, theoretical system for the construction of literature in his review
of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Here he had set out a theoretical
desiderata for constructing the plot of a tale. Keynotes included: brevity, totality,
unity of effect, economy of words and ideas, originality and the prerequisite that not
one word should be included in the story unless it contributed to what he termed the
author's 'preconceived effect'. In a (now famous) passage he wrote:
A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his
thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate
care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such
Ian Higginson 71
incidents - he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this
preconceived effect. ... In the whole composition there should be no word written,
of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.
(Thompson, 1984: 572)
Rigid economy of plot construction stipulated an approach to tale writing in

which each word and phrase in the tale were indispensable parts of a synthetic
whole. The end result, an interdependent textual system, was a product of literary
technology (see Shapin and S~affer, 1985: 60-9). As Hughes has written of
technological systems in general: 'An artifact - either physical or nonphysical -
[functions] as a component in a system interact[ing] with other artifacts, all of
which contribute directly or through other components to the common system
goal' (Hughes, 1987: 51).
As a writer and critic, Poe's theory dictated that the tale should be written back
to front. Moreover, the end of the tale (the 'preconceived effect') was to be con-
sistent with the parts of the tale (the 'incidents' of the plot). Thus his ideal author
began with a 'preconceived effect', which he then analysed, working backwards
and inventing the causal 'incidents' of plot which would have led up to that 'pre-
conceived effect'. When no further 'incidents' were required to establish the 'pre-
conceived effect', the reciprocal, symmetrical, synthetic part of Poe's theory
came into play. Now the author, reader and critic could read the plot from begin-
ning to end as a synthesis of perfectly harmonized plot events which would be
wholly consistent with the 'preconceived effect' of the tale. As Poe explained in
his 'Philosophy of Composition' (1846):
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated
to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the
dbwuement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of
consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at
all points, tend to the development of the intention. (Thompson, 1984: 13)
Poe's literary technology exploited Enlightenment epistemology. As Thomas

Hankins has explained: 'Analysis, or "resolution", was a method of discovery,
whereas synthesis, or "composition", was a method of proof' (Hankins, 1985: 20).
In the 1841 tale 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', POe's narrator reflected on the
method by which C. Auguste Dupin discovers the perpetrator of a crime and is
'amused ... with the fancy of a double Dupin- the creative and the resolvent' (that
is the synthetic and the analytic) (Mabbott, 1978, vol. 2: 533). When presented with
a crime (that is a 'preconceived effect' similar to that which the literary critic
encounters), Dupin subjects the effect to 'analysis', reducing its complexity to a
series of events (for the literary critic 'incidents' of plot) which were the cause of the
crime. Proof of the correctness of Dupin's hypothesis is then provided by reversing
the process, synthesizing the information as a logical chain of cause and effect.
Poe's literary technologies, and his concomitant construction of textual systems,

were designed to enhance his authority as a literary critic and writer. Through the
imposition of rigorous methods he could claim impartially to determine the worth
of any literary work whether Northern or Southern in origin. Furthermore, he
likened his theory of plot construction to a science. Discussing literary criticism in
America, he wrote in his 1841 review of Edward Lytton Bulwer:
There is no criticism in this country - considering that word as the name of a

science. A book comes out - it is capital, says one - it is detestable, says
another .... On both sides there is affirmation, on neither proof. In fact no
science requires such elaborate study as criticism. It is the most analytical of
our mental operations- to pause- to examine- to say why.
(Thompson, 1984: 161-2)
Poe's review suggests that the establishing of sound criteria by which to judge the
value of literature in general, and the tale in particular, was of paramount import-
ance to him as it had been to his erstwhile 'mentor' Coleridge. Gaining credibility
for the impartial, yet individualistic validity of his argument became a matter of
central importance. It was this aim that he was to pursue in Eureka.
In the competitive market place of nineteenth century American literature
Eureka, as an essay on the spiritual and material universe, was not unique. Ralph
Waldo Emerson's 'Nature' (1836) had offered a personal vision of mankind's
relationship with nature and Walt Whitman was to offer his own doctrine of the
self in a cosmological context in 1855 ('Song of Myself', 1855). Eureka cannot
be seen in isolation from the popular fashion for theorising about the self, the
universe and man's place therein in this period. In the pages of Poe's Broadway
Journal, one wry contributor, Rudolph Hertzmann, had commented on how:
The habit of theorising upon every discovery has given to the faculty of
imagination a much higher rank in the scale of mental power than philosophers
of former times were willing to allow .... Formerly men of imagination were
poets, novelists, or painters, now we find them philosophers, metaphysicians
and mechanicians. (The Broadway Journal, 1845, vol. 1: 163-4)
Hertzmann had been reviewing - and criticizing for its 'materialistic' tenden-
cies - Robert Chambers' anonymous and immensely popular Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation (1844) which offered a developmental theory of the
progressive advancement of the solar system from nebular beginnings to man and
beyond (Millhauser, 1959; Secord, 1989b; Yeo, 1989). Like Eureka, Chambers'
Vestiges drew extensively on John Pringle Nichol's Views of the Architecture of
the Heavens (1837), especially for the nebular hypothesis as a cosmological
exemplar of progressive, temporal development (Schaffer, 1989: 154-6).
Nichol's books and lectures indeed did much to promote a public awareness of
the nebular hypothesis on both sides of the Atlantic and in the week or so before
Ian Higginson 73
Poe began his lectures on 'The Universe', 'Nichol began a series of lectures on
astronomy at the New York Mercantile Library, heavily attended and widely
praised as eloquent and masterful' (Silverman, 1991: 532).
Eureka's dedication, one of 'Very Profound Respect', was to the celebrated
German man of science Alexander von Humboldt, yet Humboldt's Kosmos
(1845-62) early on provided the contrast which Poe required to establish his own
position. Poe resorted to the tactic of praising Humboldt's work, but at the same
time claimed that Humboldt's cosmos was merely concerned with the 'physical
Universe' in its generality rather than its individuality and wholeness as a unified
system. He wrote:
He [Humboldt] presents the subject, however, not in its individuality but in its
generality. His theme, in its last result, is the law of each portion of the merely
physical Universe, as this law is related to the laws of every other portion of
this merely physical Universe. (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 187)
In this way Poe lauded the efforts of the German man of science, acknowledg-
ing the quality of his work, but at the same time found a lacuna which he planned
to fill with his own essay: 'But however admirable be the succinctness with which
he has treated each particular point of his topic, the mere multiplicity of these
points occasions, necessarily, an amount of detail, and thus an involution of idea,
which preclude all individuality of impression' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 187).
3. EUREKA: INDIVIDUAL AND SYMMETRICAL SPACES
It was through intuition that Poe hoped to find his 'conception of the individual
Universe' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 199). He proposed Kepler as his exemplar of
the qualities which he believed an ideal man of science ought to possess. Kepler,
Poe stated, possessed 'the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those
regions of illimitable intuition ... utterly incognizant of path':
[His] vital laws Kepler guessed - that is to say, he imagined them. Had he
been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he
attained them, his reply might have been- 'I know nothing about routes- but I
do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul- I
reached it through mere dint of intuition'.
'Intuition' in Poe's scheme was complemented by the criterion of 'consistency' and

in combination the two became his 'majestic highway of the consistent', his own
individual road to truth. 'Is it not wonderful', he asked, 'that a perfect consistency
can be nothing but an absolute truth?' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 195-7). Truth for
Poe would ultimately be grounded not upon the evidence of the senses or upon the
authority of scientific or literary elites, but upon textual and spatial consistency.
Once he had defined his literary technology, the first consideration he enter-
tained in forming his model universe was one of extent: '"the utmost conceivable
expanse of space" ... fluctuating ... with the vacillating energies of the imagina-
tion' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 204). By limiting the universe to a finite status,
Poe simultaneously created the conditions which enabled him to demonstrate the
universe as an intelligible closed system and conferred upon it the status of
oneness or unity. In the context of his own field Hughes observes that one 'of the
primary characteristics of a system builder is the ability to construct or to force
unity from diversity' (Hughes, 1987: 52). In Eureka the emphasis on unity rather
than heterogeneity strongly echoed Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens:
We are all too easily inclined to look on creation as made up of isolated parts
... and to regard Nature as we do a case of botanical or mineralogical boxes ...
the unity of things - their interdependence - their adjusted relationships, are
proclaimed by every department of the Universe. (Nichol, 1837: 166-7)
Poe's view enabled him to emphasize the coherence and unity of all things,
'material' and 'spiritual'.
In the beginning all matter emanated from the 'Godhead'. In its original state
matter was characterized by unity and individuality:
Let us now endeavor to conceive what Matter must be, when, or if, in its
absolute extreme of Simplicity. Here the Reason flies at once to lmparticularity
- to a particle - to one particle - a particle of one kind - of one character - of
one nature -of one size -of one form. (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 206-7)
Poe then conceived his universe as an 'irradiation' of matter by the Creator from this
single particle: 'He who created it, by dint of his Will, can by an infinitely less ener-
getic exercise of the same Will, as a matter of course, divide it. ... We now proceed
to the ultimate purpose for which we are to suppose the Particle created - that is to
say, the ultimate purpose so far as our considerations yet enable us to see it - the
constitution of the Universe from it, the Particle' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 207).
With the substance of his Universe established by intuition, Poe next postu-
lated the way in which the 'individual' particle formed the known present condi-
tion of the universe. The particle, he argued, was 'irradiated' into space according
to Divine volition:
From the one Particle, as a centre, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -

in all directions - to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previ-
ously vacant space - a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of
unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.
(Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 207-8)
/an Higginson 75
Because of its finite limitations, the universal irradiation of matter could not
diffuse forever. When this 'definite distance' was achieved the diffusive energy
became exhausted, allowing coalescence into unity to take place once more. Poe
accounted for this 'exhaustion' as the purpose for which the Deity intended
matter in the first place. Matter demonstrated the symmetry of the universe: as the
original particle was both the beginning particle and its own end product, the dif-
fused universe, it was both the initial cause and ultimate effect. At the maximum
point of preconceived 'irradiation' matter initialized its own return to unity:
In this view, we are enabled to perceive Matter as a Means- not as an End. Its
purposes are thus seen to have been comprehended in its diffusion; and with
the return into Unity these purposes cease .... That every work of Divine con-
ception must coexist and coexpire with its particular design, seems to me espe-
cially obvious. (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 309)
At this juncture Poe encountered the first problem of his thesis of multiplicity,
namely, what was to prevent the atoms so gradually diffused into space from
seeking their original unity at once as soon as the diffusive tendency had been
withdrawn? Any such possibility of the destruction of a gradual 'reaction' from
multiplicity to unity would seriously jeopardize any claim of symmetry (so
important to his theory of literature) he would try to make, in which an effect was
the measure of its cause and vice versa:
Although the immediate and perpetual tendency of the disunited atoms to

return into their normal Unity, is implied, as I have said, in their abnormal dif-
fusion; still it is clear that this tendency will be without consequence - a ten-
dency and no more - until the diffusive energy, in ceasing to be exerted, shall
leave it, the tendency, free to seek its satisfaction ... Multiplicity is the object;
but there is nothing to prevent proximate atoms, from lapsing at once, through
the now satisfiable tendency - before the fulfilment of any ends proposed in
multiplicity - into absolute oneness among themselves.
(Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 210)
Poe, however, neatly circumvented the problem by an appropriation to his pur-
poses of a system of attractive and repulsive forces commonly found in the litera-
ture of post-Newtonian natural philosophy. First he explained the tendency to
return to unity as the result of Newtonian gravity: ' ... the tendency of the diffused
atoms to return into Unity, will be recognized, at once, as the principle of the
Newtonian Gravity .. .' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 212). At this point, Poe was most
probably drawing on the famous 'nebular hypothesis' of the origin of the solar
system, usually attributed to Kant and Laplace, but extensively promoted, espe-
cially in the United States during the 1840s, by J. P. Nichol (Conner, 1965:
190-208).
Second, Poe required 'repulsive' forces to prevent the immediate coalescence

of atoms into unity following the cessation of the diffusive force. These forces
were manifested as heat, magnetism and above all electricity: ' ... what I have
spoken of as a repulsive influence prescribing limits to the (immediate) satisfac-
tion of the tendency, will be understood as that which we have been in the prac-
tice of designating now as heat, now as magnetism, now as electricity ... '. Very
quickly, however, he discarded 'equivocal terms' such as electricity and gravita-
tion in favour of 'the more definite expressions, "attraction" and "repulsion"'
(Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 212-13 ).
Unity, however, was not expressed as specific spatial locality in Poe's uni-
verse. Each individual atom did not seek the point from which it originally
emanated but only unity in general:
The atoms, now, having been diffused from their normal condition of Unity,
seek to return to - what? Not to any particular point, certainly; ... the atoms
would not have sought the point in absolute space from which they were
originally impelled. It is merely the condition, and not the point or locality at
which this condition took its rise, that these atoms seek to re-establish ... To be
brief, the condition, Unity, is all that is really sought. ..
(Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 234-5)
This different arrangement of atoms enabled Poe to claim that from unity also
came variety, because each time the universe coalesced into its original parti-
cle it was a different universe, a different arrangement of atoms. This under-
lined Poe's earlier critical contention that all novel artistic productions were
made from the same existing materials: 'What man imagines, is, but was also',
he had previously stated in the 'Drake-Halleck' review of 1836 (Thompson,
1984:511).
Subject to these attractive and repulsive principles, Poe's universe had both a
definite ending and a regenerative beginning:
Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the Jaw of period-
icity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief- let us
say, rather, in indulging a hope - that the process we have here ventured to
contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel
Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every
throb of the Heart Divine? (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 311)
Poe's argument betrayed strong echoes of Nichol here. The Scottish professor of
astronomy had written of the universe's progressive growth and decay as analo-
gous to 'the periodic death of a plant ... [which was] perhaps the essential to its
prolonged life, and when the individual dies and disappears, fresh and vigorous
forms spring from the elements which composed it' (Nichol, 1837: 190).
Jan Higginson 77
Crucially, each time the universe was reborn it was different. The Divine
Artist's 'plot' had changed: it was novel, it was a new art product, and a new arte-
fact. In Poe's cosmos, the individualistic cycles of the universe, initiated by
divine impulses, would continue to create such original art products. It was as
though Poe had heard the pleas of poets such as Percy Shelley voicing artistic
entrapment in his poem 'Hellas', and as though Eureka had been formulated as an
antidote to rescue the artist from the repetitive monotony of an unchanging cycli-
cal existence. In 'Hellas', Shelley had begun with the apparent optimism of the
world's re-birth:
The world's great age begin anew,

The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
By the end of the poem, however, the poet had realized that such rebirth without
change was nothing more than a monotonous curse:
Oh cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last! (Shelley, 1970: 4 77-8)
Of more contextual immediacy to Poe, Rudolph Hertzman's review of

Chambers' Vestiges in The Broadway Journal included a sonnet 'To the
Author of the Vestiges of Creation' in which Hertzman expressed the 'secret
hope' that 'some strong truth would rend the bond of pain' which fixed man
'to Progression's iron wheel'. Hertzman's fear of Vestiges seemed to derive
from the feeling that there 'is something frightful to feeble human nature, in
the idea of necessity ruling with iron rod over earth's helpless children. How
can we imagine heaven filled only by an infinite Intelligence to which we are
but as atoms of dust on the rolling wheel of progression?' (Hertzman, 1845:
163-4).
In Eureka, Poe offered an alternative system of nature which would allow a
place for the individual human being as creative artist. So far he had provided an
account of the way in which individuality permeated all levels of his cosmolo-
gical system - from atoms through solar systems to universes. Nevertheless he
had still to forge a link between physical systems and living (human) beings.
Much of the groundwork had been prepared already. There was in particular no
dualistic gap to bridge between matter and mind (or spirit) since Poe had already
concluded that the difference between matter and spirit was merely one of lan-
guage. In a letter to Chivers he had written that there was 'no such thing as spiri-
tuality. God is material. All things are material; yet the matter of God has all the
qualities which we attribute to spirit: thus the difference is scarcely more than of
words' (Ostrom, 1966, vol. 1: 260). There was thus no fundamental difference of
kind between things physical and things spiritual. Metaphors of machinery
(Kepler) or of organism (Nichol) were interchangeable. Both living and non-
living things also shared common origins (the primordial particle) and common
characteristics (individuality and relation). Towards the end of his essay on the
material and spiritual universe the author nevertheless presented his readers with
a startling inference concerning the nature of man:
each soul is, in part, its own God - its own Creator: - in a word, that God - the
material and spiritual God - now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit
of the Universe; and that. .. regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will
be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God .... think
that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general
consciousness - that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself
Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recog-
nize his existence as that of Jehovah. (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 313-15)
Such a radical position was certain to raise a critical cry of 'pantheism' (identify-
ing all things with God and God with all things) and threaten to undermine the
very cosmological individualism that he had fought so hard to establish.
One such criticism came from John Henry Hopkins Jr, eldest son of the first
Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Vermont and at the time a student of the General
Theological Seminary in New York. Having been present at the original lecture
and having now seen the manuscript at Putnams (Poe's publisher), Hopkins told
Poe that 'in my humble judgement' the essay should have ended after the
'magnificent and sublime thought of a new universe springing into existence at
every throb of the Divine heart'. Instead Poe had added 'a new development'
explaining 'the Divine heart as being our own, and then lay[ing] down a system
of complete and pure pantheism'. At first complaining without elaboration that
'you will see that scientifically it is contradictory of other parts of your theory',
Hopkins later in his letter vehemently protested on theological grounds:
You know well that the great body of Christians regard pantheism as a
damnable heresy, if not worse. Such a brand would be a blight upon your book,
Ian Higginson 79
which not even your genius could efface, and your discovery would at once be
ranked by the majority among the vain dreams of skepticism and the empty
chimreras of infidelity. If published as it now stands, I should myself be com-
pelled to attack that part of it, for I could not in conscience do otherwise.
(Hopkins to Poe, 15 May 1848, Gris Mss 578, BPL)
An 'heretical' Poe nevertheless published Eureka without amending the con-

troversial inferences and the attack from Hopkins appeared in the weekly Literary
World. In his reply to the editor, Poe acccused his critic of failing to read or
understand the text. Replying therefore to Hopkins' claim that Poe 'asserts that
each soul is its own God - its own Creator', the author stated that 'What I do
assert, is that "each soul is, in part, its own God - its own Creator"' (Ostrom,
1966, vol. 2: 381). The subtle distinction differentiated Poe's system from any
straightforward pantheism in which human souls existed not as individuals but as
permanently integral parts of God.
In earlier letters to Lowell and Chivers Poe had explicitly identified God with
an unparticled ether, the ultimate material substance. In 'The Power of Words',
however, Poe appeared to ascribe to God the power of primary creation. In
private, therefore, Poe seemed to identify God and ether while in public he
ascribed to God a transcendent role as creator of the primary matter and its Jaws.
With the later Eureka I suggest that Poe effected a reconciliation of these ten-
sions. God, conceived as ultimate Oneness, acts to diffuse the primordial particle
in the first stage of the great cosmic cycle of expansion and contraction. Retaining
His transcendent role at this stage, God is Individual, the cosmic Artist with the
ultimate imaginative power to create. But in the second, expansive stage God
loses his Individuality as unity gives way to diversity. Thus the 'Concentrated
Self yields to 'almost Infinite Self-Diffusion'. Only during this stage do Jesser
individuals, some with the power of secondary creation, emerge as 'individualiza-
tions of Himself' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 314). Finally, the return to Unity
ensures the merging of individual identity into Divine Individuality once more.
Temporality plays a key role throughout, ensuring that no single phase can be
taken as representative of the whole system.
Hopkins later described a meeting with Poe on the subject:
I did all I could to persuade him to omit the bold declaration of Pantheism at
the close ... But I soon found that that was the dearest part of the whole to him;
and we got into quite a discussion on the subject ... until at last, a look of
scornful pride worthy of Milton's Satan flashed over his pale, delicate face &
broad brow and a strange thrill nerved and dilated for an instant his slight
figure, as he exclaimed, 'My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there
is any Being in the Universe superior to myself!'
(Hopkins to Marie L. Houghton, 9 February 1875, Barrett-Poe MSS,
University of Virginia)
Just why the 'pantheistic' addition to Eureka was so dear to Poe emerges when
we analyse his central analogy between the Divine artist and human author,
between the Universe as a plot of God and the literary tale as a microcosmal plot
of man created by an individual mortal author.
The analogy between divine and mortal plot had long been in Poe's mind. It
figured in a review of Edward Lytton Bulwer's Night and Morning (1841) and it
reappeared in exactly the same form in Eureka. In between the two works, more-
over, the same passage appeared in a 'Marginalia' article (1844) and again in his
August 1845 version of the same passage in his article on 'The American Drama':
In this sense, of course, perfection of plot is unattainable in fact- because Man

is the constructor. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
The pleasure derived from the contemplation of the unity resulting from plot, is
far more intense than is ordinarily supposed, and, as in Nature we meet with no
such combination of incident, [that] appertains to a very lofty region of the
ideal. (Thompson, 1984: 366-7)
Repetition of this same statement in his work confirms its importance for Poe. In
the tale, as indeed in the poem, he believed absolutely in the contribution of each
facet of the story to an harmonious unified effect. The Universe, he argued, dis-
played a perfect working of the same model.
The key analogy between divine and mortal plots, between God as the 'author
of nature' and Poe as the 'author of tales' may be fruitfully expressed as a
schematic diagram (see Figure 3.1 ). With respect to the schema, two points need
to be emphasized. First, each diagram expresses one complete cycle only, corre-
sponding to the production of a single 'text'. Second, each cycle comprises three
principal stages. (1) In the first stage, the author (God or human) commences
with a preconceived, single effect. (2) During the second stage, the author acts to
divide the preconceived effect into parts. For the universe, this stage corresponds
to the divine volition diffusing the original particle into constituent atoms. For the
writer, this stage is the process of analysis where the author works out his
economy of plot, working from the preconceived effect to its 'origin' or first
cause. (3) In the third (synthetic) stage, the text itself emerges as a 'natural'
sequence of cause and effect, operating under 'natural laws' (such as the laws of
attractive and repulsive forces) from parts to whole, or from apparent 'origin' or
'cause' to preconceived effect.
Within this third stage, of course, human actors (Poe and Kepler in the case of
the universe; the reader or critic in the case of the tale, for example) could repli-
cate the authorial role by a process of analysis. In the case of the plots of man and
the plots of God, though, the 'reader' of the text would in general only have
access to the third stage, except where an intuitive individual like Poe might
reveal something of the second (analytical stage) as he did in his 1846 work 'The
Philosophy of Composition'. Thus the reader would follow through a 'logical',
/an Higginson 81
THE DIVINE AUTHOR
Divine Volition
ORIGINAL PARTICLE --------------~ DIVISION INTO PARTS
(PRECONCEIVED EFFECT) Diffusive Energy (IRRADIATION INTO SPACE)
I I
I Laws of Nature I
RETURN TO UNITY ~-------------- STARTING POINT ORIGIN
(EFFECT) (Attraction and Repulsion) (CAUSE)
TEXT
THE HUMAN AUTHOR
Analysis (intuition)
PRECONCEIVED EFFECT --------------~ BREAKDOWN INTO PARTS
(TEMPORAL ORIGIN)
I I
I
Natural Sequence I
EFFECT ~-------------- STARTING POINT ORIGIN

(of cause, synthesis and effect) (CAUSE)
TEXT
Figure 3.1 Schematic version of Poe's analogy between divine and mortal plots.
'natural' sequence of cause and effect in which there was nothing extraneous or
superfluous to the perfect economy of plot. Poe had in effect created a spatially
finite system with infinite creative possibilities.
4. POSTSCRIPT: EUREKA AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY

AMERICA
Unable either to join the elites of Northern writers or to redress the balance of
power as he perceived it between himself and elite groups of Northern writers, Poe
had originated by the end of his life a highly sophisticated spatial strategy that trans-
cended geographical, cultural and philosophical boundaries. Poe's transcendent
vision in Eureka conferred, he believed, the authority to validate his conception of
the literary artist. Rather than bemoaning his literary isolation, he celebrated it posi-
tively in terms of his individuality and his role in a self-sustaining cosmological
system that affirmed his status as an individual within the macrocosm.
In a wider literary context Eureka bears comparison with the work of another
self-styled individual. In his poem 'Song of Myself (part of the 1855 collection
Leaves of Grass) Walt Whitman was to 'CELEBRATE [him]self (Whitman,
1959: 25) and his own universality declaring himself 'Walt Whitman, an
American, one of the roughs, a kosmos' (Whitman, 1959: 48). Moreover,
Whitman's personal artistic manifesto was to parallel the construction of Poe's
Eureka in another significant sense. Poe's stated intention in Eureka was to
centralize the role of the individual and to take 'such a survey of the Universe
that the mind may be able really to receive and to perceive an individual impres-
sion' (Harrison, 1902, vol. 16: 186). In similar fashion the persona of 'Walt' in
'Song of Myself sees himself as the centre of his own universe drawing in expe-
rience centripetally, filtering that experience through himself and disgorging it
again centrifugally:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all
poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun ... there are millions of suns
left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand ... nor look through
the eyes of the dead ... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
(Whitman, 1959: 26)
Poe and Whitman employed similar strategies to displace existing authority struc-
tures, casting their own literary theories and selves in cosmological contexts that
confirmed the power of individuality as the overriding principle that made their
respective universes cohere. A strong element of self-sufficiency pervades the uni-
verses of Poe and Whitman, and in Whitman's case this was the result of reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson's announcement of self-reliance in his Nature.
In essentials, Poe and Whitman differed from Emerson because of their empha-
sis on the physical matter of the body and the universe. Emerson's conception of
the relationship between body and spirit was something that neither Poe nor
Whitman embraced, Emerson believing that the spiritual world was clothed with
a language of nature and in analogous fashion that man's spirit was similarly
clothed by his body which was emblematic of his spirit: 'Nature is a language &
every new fact that we learn is a new word; but rightly seen, taken altogether it is
not merely a language, but a scripture which contains the whole truth' (Gilman,
1960, vol. 4, 95). In 'Song of Myself, however, the relationship between body
and soul was symbiotic, each needing the other and each being accorded equal
status: 'I am the poet of the Body, And I am the poet of the soul' wrote Whitman
(Whitman, 1959: 44). For Whitman nature did not necessarily provide a window
on the soul, rather:
Or I guess the grass is itself a child ... the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic ... (Whitman, 1959: 29)
Jan Higginson 83
As Joseph Beaver has remarked: 'To Emerson, the universe is the "externalisation
of the soul", but to Whitman. man is the condensation of the universe' (Beaver,
1951: 124-5).
Eureka was to be Poe's final drawing together of the various threads of his life.
It was to be an artistic treatise described on the title page as 'Eureka a Prose Poem'
much as Emerson's Nature had in its time also been referred to as 'A Prose Poem'
(Silverman, 1991: 533). It was to substantiate his belief in the individual while
also functioning as the formulation of a set of principles governing art. To under-
line the analogy between his search for rules of composition in literature and his
search for the same in the universe he desired that Eureka be judged, after he was
dead, like a literary piece or, in his own words, as a 'poem' in terms of the
harmony of its construction. In the preface therefore he wrote: 'it is only as a
Poem that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead' (Harrison, I 902, vol. I 6:
I83).
Indeed upon completion of Eureka he wrote to his aunt Maria Clemm, 'I have
no desire to live since I have done "Eureka". I could accomplish nothing more'
(Ostrom, I 966, vol. 2: 452). These words and the suggestion of his own death in
the preface may well have been a melodramatic gesture typical of Poe's histrionic
vein rather than the expression of a personal conviction. Perhaps though they
were spoken by a man in failing mental and physical health, who sensed that he
had completed his last major piece of work. Nevertheless, they turned out to be
strangely prophetic when Poe died a little over two months later and was laid
quietly to rest, without tombstone, in an anonymous plot in the corner of an
equally unassuming field in Baltimore.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the archivists responsible for the Merrill-Griswold Collection,

Boston Public Library (Oris Mss, BPL) and the Barrett-Poe Collection,
University of Virginia. Research for this paper was funded through the generosity
of the Royal Society. I thank Crosbie Smith for his invaluable advice and for
working like a Trojan to bring this volume to fruition. Thanks are also due to
Alex Dolby for critical reading of an earlier draft, to William Ashworth for the
Adam Smith reference, and to Celia and the Bear.
Part II Of Working Classes
4 'A Most Important Trespass' :
Lewis Gordon and the
Glasgow Chair of Civil
Engineering and Mechanics,
1840-55
Ben Marsden
I. TERRITORIAL READINGS AND SPATIAL PLEADINGS
In this chapter I show how Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon worked to make space
for engineering as academic practice in the cramped medieval buildings of the
Old College of Glasgow (Constable, 1877: esp. 1-45). In the autumn of 1840
Gordon was appointed as the University's founding regius professor of civil
engineering and mechanics. Historians have pondered Glasgow's claim to have
the oldest engineering professorship in Britain but they have paid surprisingly
little attention to the in situ career of the chair's first occupant (Oakley, 1973:
2-8; Channell, 1982: 43-4; Marsden, 1992: 323-6). Gordon's portfolio of cameo
roles in the history of science includes the hapless or ineffectual precursor to
Macquom Rankine (professor from 1855 to 1872); the sounding board for
William Thomson's cogitations on the mechanical action of heat; the catapult
sending the fledgling Henry Dyer to the Principalship of an experimental Imperial
College of Engineering in Tokyo; or the heroic telegraphic explorer, shipwrecked
and tragically disabled in 1859 (all without poetic licence) (Constable, 1871: 91;
Brock, 1981: 231; Smith and Wise, 1989: passim; Pacey, 1992: 226).
Since Gordon's death in 1876, however, analysts have preferred to move swiftly
on from the lecturing years, implying that this was a time of digression from a more
conventional career. These years were curious, prestigious even, but of marginal
interest: they were uneventful. Engineering in Glasgow University was, apparently,
'happily free from controversy': 'almost automatically, and without serious opposi-
tion, it combined academic research with the promotion of enterprise in the life of
the community' (Mackie, 1954: 266). In fact, Lewis Gordon's entry into the College
was anything but automatic. Solutions to the new social, intellectual, practical and
logistical problems of placing an ordered engineering colony within an ancient
university were far from simple, even in a city synonymous with practical science.
87
In this re-examination of Gordon's assault on the College I draw upon a reser-

voir of territorial heuristics used independently elsewhere: the privileging of sites
(Latour, 1983; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Hannaway,
1986; Shapin, 1988; James, 1989; Shackelford, 1993); the translation of knowl-
edge and practice (Collins, 1985); the architecture of science (Forgan, 1986,
1989; Forgan and Gooday, 1994); display (Schaffer, 1983; Morus, 1994); disci-
plinary definition (Gooday, 1991a, b; Marsden, 1992); itineracy (Torrens, 1993);
and the spatial configuration of authority (Christie, 1993). My multiply-territori-
alized analysis delivers a re-interpretation of Lewis Gordon's actions: recipro-
cally, it explains the stunningly hostile reactions provoked by his unexpected
appearance at Glasgow College in September 1840. I consider how Gordon's bor-
rowed or grudgingly lent classrooms acquired, changed, lost or lacked status as
viable pedagogic centres for legitimating engineering knowledge. I chart
Gordon's travels abroad, trawling Europe for engineering pedagogy and practice,
then watch his attempts to translate texts, techniques and skills to give them local
purchase in Glasgow College. In examining Gordon's attempts to establish a pro-
fessorial practice I investigate the mechanisms of housing a class, when the form
and function of College architecture, if not absolutely fixed, certainly lacked
unlimited malleability. In this case, such mechanisms (as invoked by human
agents) denied rather than apportioned appropriately placed space. I consider,
then, the pre-architectural angst verbalized by historical actors as they nervously
pondered the creation of museological show-spaces for engineering pedagogy
and as they employed spatial prophecy to pre-judge and thereby to exclude.
Architectural studies can begin after the fact, with purpose built, or purposively
modified laboratories, show-spaces, museums, and lecture theatres, in place
within an institution or academy. This study shows how even a humble class-
room might not easily be delivered up to novel practices like academic engineer-
ing. It shows how arguments were mobilized against the use of, or in order to
re-define, space before that space was established in material or social senses.
For civil engineering and mechanics in Glasgow in 1840, issues of space were
integral to day-to-day pedagogic practices and to choices made in attempting to
concretize workable disciplinary definitions. In general, and in all but the most
carefully stage-managed situations, unfocused scientific itineracy signalled low
status (Morrell and Thackray, 1981). Here I document Gordon's dwindling aspi-
rations to the high status conferred by immobility, examining his resistance to an
extra-mural academic existence, his grudging itineracy within the College, and
his eventual evacuation to London. Invocations of authority and enactments of
power by College authorities shaped spatial allocation, in physical and discipli-
nary senses. Similar invocations and enactments had massively disruptive spatial
ramifications when heavyweight politicians intervened in College affairs, first by
imposing an unwanted engineering chair, and then by threatening to dismantle
existing structures through which spatial authority was then exercised in order
that Gordon might be properly installed.
Ben Marsden 89
Were Gordon's tribulations focused upon matters of disciplinary 'spaces' and

their complementary 'boundaries'? These metaphors of space and of boundary
can certainly be attached to academic disciplines, and profitably utilized in
studies of disciplinary differentiation. Yet it is rare that a rigid distinction is made
between actors' and analysts' spatial categories, and perhaps unlikely that such a
distinction is possible. Imaginative narrators can easily reconstruct histories in
spatial terms; they might find it less easy to delineate a corpus of historical
objects resistant to all spatial re-categorization. Before embarking on analyses
couched in spatial terms authors would do well to reflect upon their choice of
spatial discourse (as analysts, narrators, historians and sociologists) and the
choices made by their historical actors. In this chapter, 'space' is rarely if ever an
actors' category; but the territorial gloss often given to the partitioning of acade-
mic disciplines is nevertheless singularly appropriate for the occupants and sup-
plicants of Glasgow College: protagonists' language was indeed riddled with
injunctions against encroachment, complaints of interference, accusations of tres-
pass or intrusion, and proscriptions of invasion.
To combine active narrative with sensitivity to the locutions of place, I keep in
mind the conveniently bivalent term 'occupation'. Occupation can be both activ-
ity, as in a trade or profession (here the creation and continuance of a university
regime), and an opposed taking possession of space. Occupation, as an activity
within a space and designed or perceived as a challenge to authority within that
space, encapsulates Lewis Gordon's actions in relation to his environment.
'Occupational rights' doubly signifies the perceived right to take possession of
space within the Old College of Glasgow and the right to assert the integrity of
physical, practical, intellectual, and disciplinary occupation within that space. I
suggest, finally, that my analysis gains rather than loses interest as a discussion of
prolonged trial, made visible by active resistance, and resulting in outcomes oth-
erwise collectively construed (or dismissed) as failure (Lefebvre, 1991: 416-17).
2. A 'CHIN RATHER IMPRACTICABLE': THAMES TUNNELLING,

TECHNOLOGICAL TOURISM, AND THE MECHANICS OF TRANSLATION
In June 1834 Edinburgh lawyer Joseph Gordon petitioned the elevated expatriate
engineer Marc lsambard Brunei to take his ambitious son Lewis 'as a Pupil'.
Brunei was non-committal (Brunei: 11/6/34). Later that year the British
Association for the Advancement of Science visited Edinburgh. The University's
natural philosophy professor James David Forbes had worked hyperactively to
bring the Association to the Athens of the north: in doing so he effectively boot-
strapped the career of his student Lewis Gordon (Morrell and Thackray, 1981:
103-4, 128). Days before the start of the BAAS proceedings Marc Brunei
disembarked at New haven after a rough voyage and was strategically lodged chez
Gordon at no.ll Bellevue Crescent. During the meeting Brunet fraternized with
Lewis and his friend Thomas, son of the Edinburgh publisher Archibald
Constable (Brunei: 6-8/9/34). Within months Gordon was working with Brunei
and the phrenologically adept Richard Beamish on the ill-fated Thames Tunnel
between Rotherhithe and Wapping. This noxious excavation swarmed with
tourists but, after a decade of digging, it was increasingly disparaged as the Great
Bore (Beamish, 1862: 202-304; Chrimes et al. (n.d.)).
Although Richard Beamish discerned in his inexperienced charge a 'Chin rather
impracticable' he took time to show him the use of the sextant and taught him to
draw. Within a year the high-profile job levered Gordon into the Institution of Civil
Engineers, thus certifying his precocious professional competence (Beamish:
30/1/35 and 11-13/2/35; ICE Admission certificate: 25/1/36). Gordon had made it,
or so it seemed, but disaster loomed. Beamish wanted to leave. Gordon composed a
testimonial of loyalty to Beamish and impoliticly harnessed it to statements imply-
ing his own indispensability, overstating his independence, grumbling about loss of
professional 'credit' for difficult work done, and intimating departure. The Tunnel's
Directors construed a 'strike'. As the progress of the Tunnel 'no longer depend[ed]
upon the assistance of particular Individuals', Gordon was warmly encouraged to
resign. He left Rotherhithe in late September 1836, feigning ill-health but with his
gentlemanly honour seriously impugned (Benjamin Hawes to Beamish, 6/4/36,
BPSML; E304 (24/8/36), Thames Tunnel Chief Engineer's Reports, ICE;
Clements, 1970: 219; Beamish to Brunei, 2/9/36, BPSML; Brunei: 28/9/36).
Failing to find alternative employment during the late 1830s' recession,
Gordon marshalled his middle-class resources to finance a grand European tour.
His Edinburgh professors were avid regurgitators of continental spectacle and
pedagogy. The natural historian Jameson returned from the Freiberg School of
Mines in Saxony to propound 'plutonist' doctrines from a Wernerian Natural
History Society. Forbes capitalized upon his holiday excursions to the Alps by
brushing up verbal snapshots from voluminous travel journals. The seasoned
traveller Brunei had given Gordon practical help in crossing the channel late in
1835 (Brunei: 16/12/35). Fortified with introductions from Brunei and the
octopian Forbes, Gordon set out in January 1838 (Brunei: 30/12/37, 211/38).
Recently Forbes had met the Freiberg professor of Physik, Ferdinand Reich. The
'intelligent young boy' Lewis Gordon dutifully carried Forbes's experimental tips
across Europe: 'He wishes to study mining in your excellent School', Forbes
explained, 'I would engage for him your favourable notice' (Reich, 1838; Forbes
to Reich (copy), 26/1138, FP). Gordon entered a school which was centrally
funded and geared to create technical civil servants for the national metallurgical
and mining industries ([Freiberg School of Mines] 1965). Reich assumed respon-
sibility for Gordon's supplementary education in natural philosophy. Meanwhile,
Lewis studied mineralogy with the taxonomist and Wernerian disciple Breithaupt,
geology with Naumann, chemistry and mineralogy with Lampadius, mining oper-
ations with Gatschmann, assaying of minerals with the blowpipe virtuoso
Plattner, and mathematics and mechanics with Weisbach.
Ben Marsden 91
Gordon was still in Freiberg in the autumn of 1838 but he would not be
confined to the classroom. During Easter 1839 he visited Vienna and Prague,
hunted for nickel (and found cobalt) in Hungary with his friend Evans, and
stopped off at the venerable Schemnitz mining school. Later that summer he was
in Berlin. A student at Heinrich Rose's Berlin laboratory carried details of
Gordon's exhausting itinerary back to Forbes. That day he was off on a tour of
Silesia and Poland to learn about the indigenous lead, zinc and iron works; he
planned visits to the government mines at the Harz; he contemplated a six month
stint in Rose's lab during the winter, but failing that a triumphant return to
Scotland was scheduled for November 1839. During these months abroad Gordon
saw Morin's new dynamometers at work at Metz (1839). Later, he modestly
claimed to have inspected mines 'in nearly every mining district in England,
Wales, and Scotland, as well as those of Belgium, Hanover, Prussia, Saxony,
Silesia, Bohemia, and Hungary, as a student of the art of mining, or as a professor
of its science' (Shairp et al., 1873: 139; Constable, 1877: 32-3 and 41; Gordon to
Forbes, [3?]n/39, FP; Gordon, l847b: 4).
Gordon set about generating a stock of 'valuable acquaintances' (Constable,
1877: 39): in Vienna he cornered the ageing mineralogist Mohs for two hours; if
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, professor of physics at the University of Berlin, was
absent when Gordon passed through, the young traveller had certainly followed
Forbes's advice and sought him out; thanks again to Forbes he had seen Magnus
(professor of physics at the Berlin Artillery and Engineering School) frequently and
received from him 'much kindness'. Gordon candidly acknowledged 'the advan-
tage derived from Professor Weisbach's friendship' while still a Freiberg student
(Gordon to Forbes, [3?]n/39, FP; Weisbach, 1847-48, vol. 2: vii). Then he took
time to make himself 'useful to others - I may say very useful'. Upon this local
basis of confidence, Gordon made himself a conduit for the literary and spatial
translation of science: he had, apparently, 'already done a great deal of the most
essential translation' of Weisbach's textbooks of mechanics by the spring of 1839;
in July the same year he delivered Reich's paper on currents in metalliferous veins
to the safe-keeping of Forhes and Jameson, 'hurriedly but too literally not to be
correctly translated'; later he transmitted papers for Jameson's Edinburgh New
Philosophical Journal by the geologist Bischof, who continued to stoke up debates
on the nature of the earth's interior (Constable, 1877: 39, 41; Gordon to Forbes,
[3?]nt39, FP; Crook, 1990: 180-247; Reich, 1839, 1840; Rupke, 1983: 149-57).
By the time he headed for home, Gordon was bolstered with five interrelated
species of potentially transferable credit of a richness and variety unattainable
without travel. All were developed within and initially tied to specific venues. He
had technical skills: mechanics and engine-fitting at Stirling's foundry in Dundee
(1832); construction and management at the Rotherhithe works; assaying and other
metallurgical skills at Freiberg; and, not least, European languages which he had
taken great pains to learn. Practical experience delivered professional legitimacy
(of which ICE membership was only the most visible attribute) and commercial
leverage. Second, Gordon had absorbed as student the practical and philosophical
science for sale at Edinburgh (both in the College and its dynamic extra-mural ped-
agogic marketplace), Paris (the Ecole Polytechnique), Berlin and Freiberg. Third,
Gordon had sampled or been subjected to the pedagogic regimes, techniques and
practices of instruction at these institutions and in their industrial surroundings in a
social environment favourably engineered by mentors like Forbes. Fourth, Gordon
had drawn up a lengthy catalogue of social, intellectual, and commercial allies in
Edinburgh, Dundee, London, Berlin, Paris, Freiberg and other European centres of
technical endeavour.
Finally, during his holiday excursions Gordon had accumulated a stock of
commercially valuable information on industrial practices. At Clausthal, the Harz
mining official Wilhelm August Julius Albert showed him the wire-ropes which
were then transforming pit practice in Saxony (but had yet to be advertised in
England). When Gordon reached Paris in November 1839, the manufacturer A.
De Vegni gave him samples of similar rope and, as a gesture of friendship ('j'ai
voulu donner une preuve demon amitie') a serviceable description of their manu-
facture according to a Brussels patent. Gordon was enjoined to repay this act by
introducing cordes enfil defer to English markets. By the spring of 1840 he had
returned belatedly to family and friends in Edinburgh and London. With Albert's
antipathy to patents and his views on the free trade of invention largely forgotten,
Gordon quickly set about interesting British mining engineers and shipwrights in
this new import (Dickinson, 1942-3; De Vegni, 28/6/52, NPSML).
During the economically bleak summer of 1840 Gordon was looking for work.
His curriculum vitae boasted a peculiar, perhaps unique, repertoire of technical,
intellectual and social resources but he had yet to bank this polyglot credit in
Britain. In March Gordon's old ally Beamish proposed to James Walker, President
of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the creation of a new officer embodying a
novel division of technological labour. Beamish's 'foreign Secretary' was to
monitor, collect, and translate to the Civils engineering news from abroad. If, as
Beamish insisted, the ICE was guilty of insularity and negligence by failing to
carry reports of foreign technical literature adequately supplementing the valiant
scientific translations of Richard Taylor, then Lewis Gordon (or an identically
qualified clone) was the man to right that wrong: situated within the ICE as the
major British hub of an international network of technical authors, pedagogues
and correspondents, Gordon could 'spread the light of other lands on our own' as
he translated clusters of engineering culture (Beamish to Walker, n.d./3/1840,
BPSML; Morrell and Thackray, 1981: 141 and 320). Beamish had reason to be
sanguine. Walker had recently appointed the Institution's first full-time secretary
and the first Minutes of Proceedings were in press (Buchanan, 1989: 70-1). But
the value of such institutionalized cultural exchange, and the status afforded
Gordon as prospective broker of it, was, on this occasion, minimal. The Civils
chose not to sanction this imported internationalism by paying for activities
hitherto undertaken ad hoc without expectation of regular remuneration.
Ben Marsden 93
3. MANOEUVRING FOR PROFESSORIAL POSITION
All was not lost By July 1840 the Glasgow chair of engineering was a reality, at
least on paper. By August the 24 year-old Lewis Gordon held the Royal
Commission in his hands. In the 1870s, Gordon's Edinburgh High School friend
David Stevenson, baldly described a gift from Government to Glasgow, gown and
town (Stevenson, 1877: 213). He did not explain why this gift was perceived as a
Trojan horse. Recovering the spatially focused reactions of College incumbents
illuminates the local significance of the chair. These reactions can, in tum, best be
understood by referring to the curious circumstances of the chair's foundation.
Historians have suggested that Peel, Victoria, or even Gordon, promoted an
engineering chair in Glasgow as a belated centenary monument to James Watt
(Barr, 1920-2: 174; Oakley, 1973: 4-5). Peel's popularity in Glasgow was tangi-
ble but his Tory party was in opposition throughout 1840 and he was powerless to
appoint. Certainly, Victoria had already sanctioned other schemes of technical
education, like Sir George Cayley's Regent Street's Polytechnic Institution (his
'baby Polly') which, even before it was chartered, boasted outrageously 'many of
the advantages' of the Parisian Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (Fairlie
and Cayley, 1965: 125-6). If there is no trace of personal beneficence towards
Glasgow from Victoria or her industrially astute consort Prince Albert, it should
nevertheless be remembered that in the summer of 1839 Melbourne's rickety
Whig government had been prolonged by the Bedchamber crisis, much to the
delight of the Queen who was enamoured of her Prime Minister, supported his
party, and loathed Peel. In 1840 Melbourne's administration was in a very special
sense 'The Queen's Government' (Newbould, 1990: 236-66). Action for the
establishment of the chair concentrated in the Home Office, the seat of patronage
for Crown appointments. Decisions from that office dealing with public order and
civic administration north of the border were guided by two competent and active
Scottish MPs: the Lord Advocate (Andrew Rutherfurd), and a Parliamentary
Under Secretary of State (Fox Maule). Financial support would come from the
coffers of the Treasury: that body's officers leapt into action to tackle questions
of professorial salary.
The relationship between the Westminster parliament, the Scottish administra-
tion, and Glasgwegian socio-political culture was of course complex. The supreme
patroness Victoria had an almost sentimental attachment to Scotland; Melbourne,
like many of his contemporaries, had taken in the Scottish universities as a substi-
tute for the European tour (Colley, 1992: 364 ). Now, at the commencement of the
hungry forties, Glasgow was resisting economic depression but the city remained
a centre of radical reform and Chartism. The mercantile liberals of Glasgow regis-
tered electoral threats from the democratic left and, increasingly, from a moderate
right. Peel snubbed the Scottish High Tories and in 1836 found himself Rector of
the traditionally Whig Glasgow College: simultaneously he was denied the
freedom of the city by a Town Council which, nevertheless, found itself the next
year with a Conservative Lord Provost (Saunders, 1950: 97-1 17; Hutchison, 1986:
1-58). Glasgow remained a city with a hugely expanded population of 280 000,
struggling with the problems and rejoicing in the advantages attending that growth:
it was a centre of commerce, engine construction, chemical industry, cotton mills,
and seaborne trade. As such it was a prime target for a pragmatic Whig administra-
tion courting favour with estranged voters from the middling classes by signalling
moderate reform and progressive improvement powered by manufacturing might.
From the 1820s the Mechanics' Institute movement had been piloted by middle
class reformers seeking to purvey social order amongst the working classes
through the self-administered discipline of scientific education. Through the 1830s
national state-sponsored education for working class children had shot up the
political agenda of Whig-Radical pressure groups. Educational 'experts' dismissed
the action of a laissezfaire market: education should be 'reformed' to effect social
control. By the early months of 1839 an Education Department, with its legislative
arm the Committee of Council on Education, was considering all educational
matters (Johnson, 1977). A government-sponsored chair of engineering could still
represent, for the merchant and commercial classes of Glasgow, the intervention
of a watchful and benevolent state apparatus, as harbinger of increased social
provision through the agency of the scientific expert (Berman, 1978).
The years from 1837 to 1839 were punctuated with new study programmes for
engineers and miners at Durham College, Cambridge University, King's College
London, University College London and a College for Engineers centrally posi-
tioned in the metropolis (Bellot, 1929: 135-6). In the autumn of I 839 answering
calls issued from the Whig Edinburgh Review: the experimental philosopher
David Brewster had only recently been installed, with Crown patronage, at St
Andrews University; he was on good terms with that most visible educational
entrepreneur Henry Brougham. Ever ready to push the pen for science, Brewster
hijacked his review of a life of the theory-shy engineer Telford to ask why (pace
Robert Willis in Cambridge) nothing had been done in the ancient universities to
rigorize the scientific practice of British engineering. The professorial education
essential for medical, clerical and legal professionals must, Brewster believed, be
extended to engineers. Money should come from the centre even if the subse-
quent meddling of Visitors in the affairs of independent corporations (like the
universities) was best avoided (Brewster, 1839: 4-5; Clive, 1957; Becher, 1986).
As Brewster wrote, old Glasgow money had become available in new form.
The College had traditionally pocketed the rents of the Archbishopric of Glasgow.
The subsequent distribution of this money was a matter of concern: it magnified
the anomalous structure of the College. The University administration consisted
of a Senate and a more select Faculty. Since the early nineteenth century regius
professorships had been established, predominantly in scientific and medical sub-
jects: they had repeatedly been filled with supporters of Whig reform. All new
regius professors were admitted to Senate, even as they were rigorously excluded
from Faculty, denied its privileges, and denied control of its funds. Yet, since
Ben Marsden 95
1825, £800 per annum had been delivered up to the Faculty from Westminster in
lieu of the Archbishopric rents. The annual payment was repeatedly scrutinized.
The inquisitorial University Visitors appointed by Melbourne in 1836 recom-
mended that the money be redirected to a new University Court: this body would
supersede the Faculty and, from its broader composition, ensure the even distrib-
ution of funds by and for the University as a whole (Coutts, 1909: 363, 414, 423 ).
Trenchant resistance grounded upon the College's corporate independence
blocked the Court's formation.
In May 1839 the annual payment abruptly ceased. The Whigs had a new card
to play in the game of reform. They met the demands of Brewster, wooed the
Glaswegian voters, empowered the University's regius professoriate, and sent a
shot across the bows of the Faculty. They channelled the cash into professorial
salaries. With only two exceptions the beneficiaries were existing regius profes-
sors. The moderate reformist Faculty professor of humanity William Ramsay
received an annual pay rise of £150. Smaller sums went to regius professors of
botany (£50), natural history (£50), materia medica (£100) and surgery (£25}, and
to the professors of forensic medicine (£75) and theory of physic (£75) created by
the Whigs in 1839 on the recommendation of the Visitors. Only the new regius
chairs of midwifery and the more venerable regius chair of chemistry did not
benefit. (The professor of chemistry received government money from other
sources.) But there was a hefty slice of cake for a complete newcomer: a regius
professor of civil engineering and mechanics would carry with him more than
one third of the £800 total (£275) (230 13 (3 and 6/11/40), T1 4333 Part 2, PRO;
Morrell, 1969b: 261-2). Serendipitous funding was an essential contingency
facilitating the foundation of Glasgow's engineering chair, but in light of the
peculiar nature of this bounty, the position of the new professor within the
College was politically sensitive.
With the money secured by June 1840, Fox Maule lobbied Hugh Fortescue,
Melbourne's Private Secretary at the Treasury, to ensure that the right individuals
(himself and Rutherfurd) vetted the candidates for a chair 'the Establishment of
which has proved no little credit for the govt. in Glasgow'. It 'should be filled by
one of known and acknowledged acquirements & the power of conveying his
information simply & intelligently to his hearers, many of whom will be of the
humbler classes of life'. Fox Maule's rider- that the professor's fees be regulated-
raises the possibility that the salary was so high not because few students were
expected: rather, government officials were encouraging the admission to the class
of large numbers of 'humble' (for which read impoverished and potentially radical)
mechanics (Fox Maule to Fortescue, 16/6/40, MPRA; Sutherland, 1973: 4).
Gordon's credentials were good. Politics helped: Joseph Gordon had been a
tenacious Whig during the Gallophobic Napoleonic era and Lewis inherited
similar convictions. Furthermore, Gordon's portfolio was full to bursting with
signs and symbols of academic endeavour. By the summer of 1840 travel ren-
dered him au fait with an unusually wide variety of pedagogic cultures. He was
known to networked engineers like Stevenson (Mair, 1978), Brunei and, better
still. Walker, whose support for academic engineering was real, if qualified. Only
in February the 'improver' of the Clyde had been rewarded with an honorary
LLD from his alma mater, Glasgow University and he was soon examining the
Durham academical engineers (Buchanan, 1989: 165; Senate: 28/1140 and 7/2/40;
Coutts, 1909: 392). The prospective candidate had access to a fistful of academic
mentors and to a pool of family acquaintances well versed in the politicking of
professorial elections. His mother Anne Gordon was intimate with the wife of the
Edinburgh professor of surgery and philosophical whig John Thomson. The poly-
mathic conveyancing professor Macvey Napier shared with Joseph Gordon mem-
bership of the senior corporation of solicitors, the Society of Writers to the Signet
(Haldane, 1970). As the Writers' librarian and editor of the campaigning
Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then lumbering towards its
seventh edition (1842), Napier had already commissioned Lewis Gordon to write
on Werner (Lewis Gordon to Joseph Gordon, 27/4/39, in Constable, 1877: 41).
Gordon's integration within Whig, literary, legal, professional, academic and
familial networks in Edinburgh was absolute.
More valuable still, I suggest, was Gordon's partnership with Charles Liddell.
Charles's aristocratic cousin Maria was married to Constantine Henry Phipps,
Lord Normanby, Melbourne's Home Secretary. Normanby was particularly close
to Victoria, as Cabinet member and as husband of one of her cherished Ladies of
the Bedchamber. The Prime Minister had quietly surrounded Victoria with eight
such intimates, all wives of Whig ministers. During the Bedchamber crisis of
May 1839 Peel insisted that certain unsympathetic Whig figures in the Royal
Household - prominent amongst them Lady Normanby - were removed from
their positions of alleged political influence at the Queen's side. Victoria stub-
bornly (or perhaps strategically) refused to part with her Ladies and Melbourne
resumed power. Lobbyists for the Antarctic expedition of James Clark Ross were
convinced that this timely prolongation of the Whigs' death throes secured gov-
ernment finance for their magnetic crusade (Cannon, 1964: 33-4; Cawood, 1979:
511). Melbourne immediately strengthened the government bench, removing
Normanby from the embattled Colonial Office and placing him out of harm's
way in the Home Office (Newbould, 1990: 236-41 and 248-50; Charlot, 1991:
Ill and 140-6). Thus in the summer of 1840 Charles Liddell had special access
to a Home Secretary who would certainly not otherwise :.ave been in office, and,
perhaps, to the Queen through cousin Maria. In June 1840 Lady Normanby was
throwing musical parties for Victoria and her new spouse. Unimpressed, Albert
would doze by Lady Normanby's side (Charlot, 1991: 188-9). Lord Normanby
had already exercised influence to procure administrative positions for relations
(Newbould, 1990: 250). It seems unlikely that Lewis Gordon failed to capitalize
on these routes to Home Office patronage.
Nevertheless, if Gordon was not altogether a stranger to the Second City he
had established no secure connection with the College through education, family,
Ben Marsden 97
or business. The external nature of his appointment to a chair designed to woo the
Glaswegian electorate contrasted markedly with the local bargaining from Town
Council and Faculty central to so many professorial creations and elections in
Edinburgh. This external quality allowed Gordon and his sponsors to concentrate
upon the channels of bureaucracy converging, not upon Glasgow, but upon the
Home Office; they sought to elevate pedagogic eclecticism above local accept-
ability. Joseph Gordon was well placed (socially and geographically) in the north-
ern administrative capital to co-ordinate advances to Rutherfurd, Fox Maule and
Normanby's minions. Early in July Gordon was in London, ideally situated for
this special parliamentary work. Father and son extracted testimonials from two
men with weight in different but complementary walks of life. Both emphasized
the benefits of extensive foreign experience. Neither had strong Glaswegian
affinities.
Beamish, whose younger brother was MP for Cork, lauded Gordon's 'moral
Character and Professional ability', and catalogued his well taken opportunities
in Britain and 'on the Continent of Europe'. With such an example before them,
Beamish claimed, 'the public would have no longer to lament the want of those
Scientific principles by which alone stability is secured' (Beamish to Gordon,
6/7/40, BPSML). James David Forbes was the ideal referee. He spent the last
weeks of June 1840 examining the first cohort of finalists aiming for the
Academical Rank of Civil Engineer at Durham. He dispatched copies of the
papers to the Astronomer Royal G. B. Airy, then returned to Edinburgh where
he dashed off a testimonial emphasizing Gordon's distinguishing international-
ist features. Forbes played up the potential of an 'assiduous' and 'accomplished
Engineer' who had never taught, certainly, but possessed such 'excellent
talents' that he could not fail to be 'well acquainted with the details & methods
of Instruction in some of the principal European Schools' (Forbes to Airy,
26/6/40, APCUL; [Durham University], 1840; Forbes to Joseph Gordon,
617/40, FP).
Youthful inexperience was not an advantage. Even the optimistic David
Stevenson emphasized the unusual pressures Gordon met in 'organizing the new
chair ... at so young an age' (Stevenson, 1877: 213). The spatial experience of
travel repaired this deficiency. Few prospective candidates could boast such a
rounded and single-minded technical education. None could compete on these
grounds who had remained in Britain. But as the ICE's impassive response in
March demonstrated, neither Beamish nor Forbes could ensure the value of a
portfolio of European engineering pedagogy drawn from culturally distinct- and
in many senses alien - schools and polytechnics. The value placed upon this
knowledge was inescapably dependent on the attitudes of metropolitan adminis-
trators (including educationalists fascinated with systematic Prussian models),
Glaswegian colleagues, and Scottish students. As the Edinburgh engineering pro-
fessor Fleeming Jenkin admitted decades later, neither novelty nor foreign exper-
tise guaranteed success (Jenkin, 1868). Nevertheless, as Gordon's position as
front-runner became clear, he told his sister Mary of 'a chance that I may have
the honour of professing Engineering and Mechanics to the Glasgow students,
and that they may have the honour and advantage of hearing me profess to them!
... how excellently content I shall be!'(Constable, 1877: 42-3).
The dual remit of the chair - engineering and mechanics - was clear.
Normanby signed the Commission recommending Gordon's appointment at
the Court of StJames on 5 August 1840. Within days Gordon knew the job
was his. Within a week the reformist Scotsman speedily and succinctly noted
the appointment of an Edinburgh man. A second-hand announcement followed
sluggishly in the Glasgow Herald (14 August). The professor in waiting was
still at his London lobbying post on Parliament Street, thanking Beamish, and
hoping 'in some degree' to repay his obligations (Gordon to Beamish, 14/8/40,
BPSML). Gordon sketched his immediate itinerary: 'to Dundee and thence to
Edinburgh - thence to Glasgow to be installed'. In Dundee, Robert Stirling
Newall was ready and waiting with the wire-rope patent (17 August 1840)
upon which the partnership of R. S. Newall & Co. (Newall, Liddell and
Gordon) was founded. Gordon had no plans for a cloistered scholarly exis-
tence untainted by trade (Gordon, 1841 a; Dickinson, 1942-43 ). From his
parents' Royal Terrace home in Edinburgh Gordon transmitted his well-
travelled Commission to Whitehall to make certain of a Scottish Civil List
salary (19546, T1 4333 Part 2, PRO).
Reaching Glasgow at last in mid September Gordon made his presence felt at
the British Association meeting. This event overwhelmingly testified to the city's
saturation with industrial activity and to the power of advance planning (Morrell
and Thackray, 1981: 202-22). Yet Gordon had little or nothing to do with the
administration of an event central to the civic, technological and scientific culture
of his adopted city. When he mounted the stage to discourse upon the turbine
water-wheel for the phenomenally busy Section G (Mechanical Science), he
employed an analytic vocabulary of 'useful', 'mechanical' and 'theoretical effect'
translated from Freiberg and borrowed from his hydraulically-inclined tutor
Weisbach. At close of proceedings he found himself beside that pinnacle of
engineering prowess William Fairbairn on a committee comparing the efficiency
of the turbine with the common water wheel. By then the BAAS General
Secretaries had identified progressive engineering (typified by the proceedings of
Section G) with Glasgow, and Glasgow with James Watt,
the man whose genius has changed the tide of human interests, by carrying
into active energy a power which ... in abridging time and space, has doubled
the value of human life, and has established for his memory a lasting claim on
the gratitude of the civilized world.
(BAAS Report, vol. 10 (1840): 191-2 (part 2}, XXV and XXXV)
Gordon had made it: or so it seemed.

Ben Marsden 99
4. PROFESSORIAL STALLING: MACHINATIONS OF MECHANICS
As the din of the BAAS subsided and the College reawakened from its summer
slumbers, the practical status of the engineering professorship remained in doubt.
Gordon's position was anomalous. There had been no visible collective repre-
sentation in favour of an engineering chair. Elsewhere in Britain engineering had
been (or would be) deemed a necessary addition to the university curriculum:
moves to establish courses and chairs had come (or would come) from within,
motivated by student-hungry science professors. Young middle class Glasgow
students traditionally feasted upon a broad, humanistic and democratic diet of the
literary and philosophical arts (notably divinity, humanity,logic, natural philoso-
phy and moral philosophy); only later a minority might advance to training in
divinity or the legal and medical professions (Davie, 1964; Mathew, 1966). In
Glasgow there had been no internal campaign to extend professional, liberal, or
gentlemanly education towards engineering.
Gordon was a pioneer: a stranger entering unknown territory. He could become
coherently assimilated as part of the College, arranging classroom, curriculum,
and professorial position, only by negotiating, from scratch: he must engage with
the University's administrative structures (Faculty and Senate) as they were
defined, invoked or tolerated by alliances of individuals. As a regius professor
Gordon began at a disadvantage. The division between Faculty and regius profes-
sorships was rigorously policed, even when regius chairs had originated with
College approval through the 'elevation' of an existing lectureship. The Faculty
collectively controlled most of the income of the College and much of the prop-
erty: Faculty professors allocated classrooms. They were the managers of space,
even as their right to manage was questioned. Furthermore, control of funds and
property translated into disciplinary control in two senses: class conduct and
class content.
Neither Faculty nor Senate were inanimate: amongst their active constituent
voices perhaps the most powerful was Principal Macfarlan. By January 1841 he
was openly aggrieved that a new professorship had been instituted without the
College's previous knowledge and embracing practical objects hitherto uncontem-
plated by the Faculty (479 MGUA). Others had speculated more broadly. In prin-
ciple, James Thomson (professor of mathematics) and John Pringle Nichol
(professor of practical astronomy) favoured institutionalized education for engin-
eers. James Thomson junior had been the organizational lynchpin behind the
Glasgow BAAS meeting's exhibition of industry and manufacture (Morrell and
Thackray, 1981: 212-13). In 1835 the radical scientific diffusionist Nichol had
envisioned 'the consolidation of an Institution for practical Science' in Edinburgh,
with civil engineers in mind (Shapin, 1983: 161; Schaffer, 1989). Thomson and
Nichol formed the nucleus of a small but increasingly confident Whig-Radical
alliance, rivalling Marfarlan's Tory group in the Faculty. But for Thomson and
Nichol general acquiescence in the benefits of classroom engineering did not entail
unqualified acceptance of a chair of engineering competing on their own patch for

limited physical resources and curricular capital.
In the ensuing spatial conflicts three central issues emerged. The first con-
cerned apparently local arguments about the allocation of teaching space within
the cramped buildings of Glasgow College; secondly, arguments flared as actors
sought to impose, extend, or limit, the disciplinary boundaries of a course defined
solely in terms of the broad and indefinite conjunction 'civil engineering and
mechanics'; thirdly, the scope of the disputes expanded to take in the sensitive
issue of the status of the regius professors. While the Faculty wished to exercise
its hierarchical authority over Gordon, it became increasingly unwilling to see an
escalation into legally alarming debates over the status of the regius professors.
Yet by exercising that authority in disciplinary and spatial terms it could only
emphasize the hierarchical distinction between regius and Faculty professoriates.
When the new regius professor of midwifery John Pagan presented his
Commission to Senate he was received without opposition. He fulfilled the usual
formal conditions (Latin address, confession of faith, swearing allegiance to the
Crown) and was admitted (Senate: 5/8/40-27/10/40 (transcribing Commission of
2017/40) and 27/10/40). Pagan filled a vacancy in an established chair, in the
strong faculty of medicine, with existing accommodation, and, after 25 years, tra-
ditional privileges. Lewis Gordon embodied a new professorship, outside any
faculty (but soon to be lumped with arts), with no provision for accommodation
and negligible internal support. Gordon too delivered up his Royal Commission
which recorded blandly Victoria's desire to give 'all suitable Encouragement to
Public Seminaries of Learning'. He too was granted the paper 'Rights and
Privileges which belong to any other Professor' in terms studiously oblivious of
the Faculty oligarchy. Thereafter, two ardent supporters of the Macfarlan faction,
'Moral Will' Fleming and 'Logic Bob' Buchanan ensured that Gordon's pass-
port into the College 'should lye on the Table till next meeting'. Gordon was
summoned by the College Clerk to explain himself (Senate: 5/8/40-27/1 0/40;
Coutts, 1909: 349 and 383; Smith and Wise, 1989: 28).
At the end of October he appeared. Exercizing his Edinburgh High School
Latin on 'de relatione Scientiae ad artes industriae' for the Senate's benefit,
Gordon tapped into the common currency of science and art dichotomized, posi-
tioned himself as sanctioned expositor of their interrelations, and rehearsed the
introductory lecture of his proposed 'Mechanics' class (Senate: 27/10/40;
Gordon, 1841b: 3). Were he now to confess and swear, as Pagan had done, all
would be well. But the challenge of the previous meeting had not been forgotten.
Vice-Rector Ramsay explained that Gordon had been hauled up before the Senate
'in reference to his not encroaching or interfering with any of the present classes
in the University'(Senate: 27/10/40; my emphasis). Whatever conception Gordon
had been forming since August of his future teaching, drawing on the models of
those 'European Schools' he had so recently visited, installation meant mutual
accommodation within the disciplinary and spatial microcosm of the College.
Ben Marsden 101
Eclectic pedagogical knowledge and technological tourism reinforced Gordon's

status as College alien. Moreover, the ungainly title 'Civil engineering and
mechanics' threatened to disrupt the status quo (Compare Hilken, 1967: 63).
'Civil engineering' was a new admission to the College confines. In catering
for the ancient professions university pedagogues in divinity, law and medicine
reached outwards to established practitioners external to the College. The civil
engineering professor had yet to create analogous allegiances, or to convince
others that his classroom was a desirable passage point in the path to profession-
alism. If engineers needed scientific training, it was entirely plausible that science
(not engineering) professors were ready for and up to the task. Latin essays could
not alone convince students, colleagues and industrialists that a College-bound
engineering professor, strangely insulated from the commerce of manufacture,
held the key to other essential knowledge and practice. Civil engineering was a
configuration of actions, products and social relations situated as much in the
great outdoors as in the drawing office, the patent office, the workshop, the parlia-
mentary committee room- and the privileged internal space of the College class-
room. If Gordon planned, like colleagues in Durham and London, to supplement
under cover teaching with day trips to factories and other works, he planned an
extension of College space, socially and practically conceived, beyond the physi-
cal environs of its buildings (Vignoles, 1992: 98-100). Such an innovative spatial
extension, and the concomitant intrusion of practical civil engineering inside the
College, could not pass without debate. Gordon embodied the thesis that civil
engineering was a respectable career choice for the son of a professional gentle-
man. The College was open, in principle, as a training ground for gentlemen and
thus, perhaps, for aspirant professional engineers. It was more circumspect in its
admission of those ubiquitous adult operative artisans consigned by Fox Maule to
the 'humbler classes'.
'Mechanics' was no less problematic: the word might invoke a section of
natural philosophy, an economically planned train of mathematical reasoning
mimicking Euclid and excluding 'mechanical powers', a subspecies of 'mixed
mathematics', an analytical taxonomy of machines, or the manual skill of
machine-building (Whewell, 1841; Becher, 1980; Brown, 1991). Even then, the
Glasgow Senate's semantic quibbling contrasted with the constitutional fixity of
the nearby Mechanics' Institution, where 'mechanics' was enshrined in adminis-
trative function: time-tabling, access, membership, and the very existence of the
Institution were defined in relation to the regular annual delivery of courses on
the principal subjects of mechanics and chemistry. These lectures were permitted
to vary but only so 'as to place instruction within reach of the operative
mechanic'. Sporadic science lectures should 'in no way interfere with, or injure'
these principal courses (Glasgow Mechanics Institution 1848: viii). Where the
Institution suspended the free market of the lecture circuit and excluded academic
poachers, the College concurred: Gordon's 'mechanics' was acceptable only in so
far as it did not encroach or interfere.
In a competitive environment primed with College professors of natural philos-

ophy, mathematics and practical astronomy the incorporation of 'mechanics' into
a new professorial title did not augur well. Disciplinary politics were more than
usually sensitive because the aged natural philosophy professor William
Meikleham was ill but reluctant to relinquish job and salary. Meikleham's tena-
cious grip on life left a key Faculty chair essentially vacant: with that vacancy
came a power vacuum. Flux within the natural philosophy curriculum and sensi-
tivity over the meaning of mechanics remained persistent symptoms of
Meikleham's failing health (Smith and Wise, 1989: 83-4, 113-17). In October
1840, David Thomson was drafted in: as James Thomson's protege and
Meikleham's favourite, David Thomson had convincing local credentials and
firm College support but in his first session he barely managed to keep his head
above water. Even in later years, as he groomed bright students for an assault on
Poisson's Mecanique and Earnshaw's Mechanics, his assistantship was no more
than temporary ([Glasgow University] 1844: 2; Low, 1894: 8-9 and 12; Coutts,
1909: 384; Wilson, 1985: 29-30; Smith and Wise, 1989: I 08-9). Thomson
lacked professorial status and a Faculty voice.
Throughout this academic regency speculation was rife over who Meikleham's
successor might be and what consortium of Faculty professors could ensure an
election (Smith and Wise, 1989: 10 1-16). In mid-October 1840 Forbes confided
to Airy that he had received an offer which would double his professorial income
to £700. Forbes's anglicizing tendencies and Whewellian bent qualified him as an
'independent' candidate targeted by Oxbridge educated moderate reformers of
the Faculty (Ramsay and the professor of Greek, Lushington) supponed by
Nichol and James Thomson. Other voices whispered that Forbes might be paid to
stay put. Airy, meanwhile, looked covetously at Nichol's Observatory in
Glasgow, saw it generously endowed by government with 'the best foreign
instrument', and discerned a 'desire to raise the University'. Forbes trumped
Airy's gossip with talk of the engineering chair, exaggerating its '£300 of fixed
salary', and revealed that he had been approached to 'work double tides & lecture
on Engineering as well' for a suitable fee. He had already decided that lecturing
was 'killing work' and time was far better spent in experimental investigation
(Forbes to Airy, 15110/40, Airy to Forbes, 19110/40, Forbes to Airy, 20/10/40,
APCUL). Nevertheless, the prospect of moving to the Glasgow natural philoso-
phy chair was tantalizing.
In launching a strategic Senate challenge to Gordon weeks after Forbes sounded
Airy out, the one-time candidate for the Glasgow mathematics chair William
Ramsay was engaged in curricular policing for the voiceless David Thomson and
William Meikleham. Weakness in natural philosophy united the allies of
Meikleham and of his putative successors. The lure of a substantial fixed salary
dangled before Forbes and his co-competitors, but supplementary class fees could
not be guaranteed in the face of unregulated curricular encroachment. Even for
Faculty professors James Thomson and J. P. Nichol, a chair of natural philosophy
Ben Marsden 103
with duties, authority and fees diminished by the opportunism of a newcomer was a
position less attractive to their favoured reforming candidates, and even, perhaps, to
Nichol himself whose chair of practical astronomy brought minimal income from
students. Creating a chair of mechanics threatened a re-apportioning of curricular
matter from old Faculty chair to new regius chair. Buchanan, Fleming and Ramsay
took decisive steps.
The mathematics and natural philosophy classes were due to begin. David
Thomson advertised his class beside James Thomson and advised students to call
for tickets at his lodgings (Glasgow Herald: 30110/40). The night before the
classes began Gordon was still seeking to allay fears of disciplinary trespass. He
eclectically 'translated' mechanics as the 'Doctrine of machines' (Weisbach),
drew upon fashionable assertions of 'The Intimate Connexion of the Physical
Sciences' (Somerville), and promised to show the application of the fundamental
principles of Mechanical Science to the physical and material objects of the
workshop and the factory (BAAS). The necessary 'recurrence to fundamental
principles' would not, he insisted, constitute 'an encroachment on or interference
with the chairs entrusted with the Mathematical mechanical and analytical
Sciences'. Moreover, this independent definition of mechanics was not an admis-
sion that his reception was 'contingent on ... such an explanation'. As Gordon
was finally admitted to the College, Senate deliberated upon its response
(Somerville, 1834; Senate: 10111/40, my emphasis; Gordon, 1841b).
5. ACCOMMODATING ENGINEERING: GLASGOW'S CULTURAL

GEOGRAPHY
Gordon could now pause to consider the cramped nature of Glaswegian peda-
gogic commerce. A glance at the Glasgow Herald made plain the immense
flux of material commodity (from 'Economic Hats' to 'Mcintyre's Famed
Gingerbread'), spectacular entertainment (from Liszt to Thalberg), and intel-
lectual fodder. Educators and entertainers alike might be mediocre or virtu-
osic, ensconced or extra-mural, and fixed or itinerant. Leisured Glaswegians
could sup on callisthenics, deportment, book-binding and elocution.
Meanwhile, from variously tame, durable, and morally secure premises the
elite High School and Mrs Dick's Blythswood Square Seminary promised
intellectual elevation through science: radical, orthodox, popular or polite.
Providing for a student body of both sexes, most ages, and all classes institu-
tions like the Blythswood Hill Mathematical Academy 'taught upon the most
approved modern plans'; the Mathematical and Nautical Academy on 239
George Street earned the endorsement of professors James Thomson and
William Meikleham; and at his home on 290 George Street, the extra-mural
Mr Mackie offered courses in Mechanical Philosophy qualifying for the
Edinburgh Royal College of Surgeons.
Anderson's University, in North Hanover Street, persistently rivalled the

College in scientific and technical provisions. When not advertising its fascinat-
ing 'Anatomical Hercules', Glasgow's other University flagged Wilson's evening
courses of Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Mechanics (Glasgow Herald:
2111140). Near the High Street the Mechanics' Institution furnished classes in
Natural Philosophy, Practical Mathematics, and Chemistry, attracting healthy
annual attendances to the centre of a city sprawling westwards and away from the
insalubrious environs of the old College. The Mechanics Institution boasted a
hall, a library (which by 1848 stocked 54 phrenological handbooks), and a
museum with substantial collections of models, apparatus and natural curiosities.
Not everyone could raise the five shillings for a course of lectures: free tickets
went to limited numbers of deserving apprentices 'certified ... to be of good char-
acter' (Glasgow Mechanics Institution, 1848).
The Edinburgh of the 1830s provided a salutary reminder of the cut and thrust
of the extra-mural scientific lecture circuit in Scotland's major cities (Shapin,
1983: l'i6-7). While Thomas Charles Hope drew massive crowds with extrava-
gant displays as professor of chemistry within Edinburgh College, extra-murality
afforded lower status, and greater unreliability of income, even for the most ener-
getic practical chemistry lecturers like David Boswell Reid (Morrell, 1969a).
Reid desperately lobbied for a chair which would place him inside the University.
Gordon knew Reid, his struggles for university reform, and the dissipative conse-
quences of extra-murality (Beamish to Reid, 8/9/35, BPSML). In J. P. Nichol,
Gordon could see the much-coveted endpoint of another extra-mural career: a
College chair and University ensconcement. As regius professor Gordon could
expect, like Nichol, to be elevated above the extra-mural fray.
Certainly the new professor's salary diminished the short-term need to please
felt by Scotland's scientific itinerants and even by the managers of Anderson's
and the Mechanics' Institution. Gordon's class lacked the student-grabbing poten-
tial of a compulsory degree or professional qualifying course, but a tradition of
Lernfreiheit favoured him. Any matriculated student (and the occasional rule-
bending non-matriculant) could study with him, and he could look to a healthy
annual intake of merchants' sons and scions of industrialists from which to recruit
(Davie, 1964; Mathew, 1966). If, on the other hand, he sought to expand his class
by teaching artisans (of good character or bad) who were not otherwise students,
he was competing beyond the College walls and, potentially, corrupting the order
of the College, by importing radicalism from the streets.
A nominal university connection was concretized with physical space. Faculty
professors customarily apportioned themselves College teaching rooms and
houses in College Close. Their regius professorial counterparts could at least
expect the use of a classroom. A room in the overcrowded medieval College
grounds on the High Street offered shelter. prestige, and the permanence to
develop a regime of teaching. It carried with it intellectual sanction and sanctuary
for the professor licensed to teach therein: the decision to admit students and
Ben Marsden 105
professors was a practical, social and intellectual judgement from the College
authorities. But the commencement of engineering pedagogy within the precincts
of a University was innovative (Oakley, 1973: 4): like many innovations, it raised
contentious issues.
The Ecole Polytechnique had planned 20 laboratories in the 1790s. For
Gordon, two College rooms would suffice: a lecture room, certainly, and ('very
convenient- perhaps necessary') a room for depositing apparatus doubling as an
'anteroom for the private use of the Professor' (Gordon to Macfarlan, 13/11140,
in Faculty: 13/11/40). Gordon aspired to assemble a collection of models, appa-
ratus, drawings, plans and material samples. He aped his better-resourced
mentors in Freiberg, Schemnitz (where lectures were routinely illustrated with
experiments), Berlin, Paris, and Edinburgh (where Jameson had some forty thou-
sand geological specimens). He looked nearby to the Mechanics' Institution; and
he copied colleagues in scientific chairs for whom personal collections of appa-
ratus were essential pedagogic investments. In Durham, academical engineers
were 'admitted as practical pupils into the Laboratory'. King's College courted
student engineers with models and materials in a small workshop. Willis in
Cambridge had created an elaborate system of kinematical apparatus ([Durham
University]l840: xii; Smeaton, 1954; Skeat, 1957: 14; Hilken, 1967; Smith (this
volume)). Space offered the new Glaswegian professor the opportunity to
compete on equal terms.
Yet Faculty dictated that there was no 'accommodation within the walls of the
College' for engineering and no 'means of providing such accommodation'.
Gordon could use 'the Chemistry Class Room at such times, and to such an
extent, as may not interfere with the convenience of the Professor of Chemistry'
(Faculty: 24111140 (my emphasis) and 22/1/41). Neither James Thomson nor
Nichol sanctioned the disruption necessary to meet Gordon's request. Refusing
to house the new professor would have been a rebuff to the sovereign.
Allocating a corner of Thomas Thomson's classroom was a pragmatic, and
perhaps a strategic compromise. But Thomson had not been consulted: two
regius professors were forced to compete for space - and for students, because
Gordon undoubtedly had mineralogical and metallurgical ambitions similar to
Thomson's. This exercise of spatial authority countered Gordon's occupation,
but it resurrected two conftictual issues: the significance of being inside; and the
politics of divide and rule.
A spatial slur had been visited upon the irascible University reformer Thomas
Thomson, by the erection of the chemistry laboratory in Shuttle Street: Thomson
and his class had been deposited outside the College perimeter (Morrell, 1969b:
254-61 ). After struggling for 20 years with Macfarlan, Thomson was reluctant to
relinquish any part of a building that constituted his most tangible success. At the
end of November bitter notes passed between the antagonists. Macfarlan insisted
the Faculty was alone empowered to allocate rooms and spoke of the limited
'permission granted' Gordon. Thomson demanded the Faculty safeguard the
apparatus and materials in his laboratory. Macfarlan deemed impossible any such
Faculty guarantee 'for the conduct of pupils over whom they have no control'
(Macfarlan to Thomson (copies), 25 and 28/11140, 469 and 470 MGUA). Already
two protagonists in this spatial trial predicted a disruptive alien student body,
perhaps of mechanics or civil engineering pupils, dissimilar in age and social
status to the common matriculant, and upon such prophecies manufactured
defences against spatial trespass.
By 2 December, Gordon had been welcomed into the pragmatic Glasgow
Philosophical Society (President: Thomas Thomson) but when Senate met soon
afterwards his reception was cool. A month of deliberations culminated in a
counter to academic autonomy. Senate recorded its right and duty to 'superintend
the teaching of all the Classes in the University'. Again it outlawed interference
with the 'appropriate duties' and encroachment on the 'just privileges' of existing
professorships (Senate: 4112/40, my emphasis; Proceedings of the Glasgow
Philosophical Society, vol. 1 (1841-4): 3). When Gordon and Thomas Thomson
assailed the Clerk of Senate and Principal Macfarlan days later on the apportion-
ment of physical space, Faculty unmovingly insisted that Thomson's room was
free after noon: lecturing there would not (whatever Thomson said) interfere with
his fabled convenience (Faculty: 8112/40; Macfarlan to Gordon, 9/12/40 (copy) in
Faculty: 10/12/40).
Curricular control, the epistemic privileging of accommodation, and the preser-
vation of professorial incomes became entangled. Just privileges included room
allocations. The Faculty clipped Gordon's professorial wings by choosing not to
sanction the disruption of existing spatial privilege necessary to create, or re-
create, the College rooms deemed 'very convenient - perhaps necessary'.
Quickly arguments about accommodation and curriculum were linked with
Gordon's occupational rights as regius professor. The rights to demand space and
curricular independence equalled (and were arguably superior to) the rights of
Faculty professors. But to allow room space as a right, not a favour, surrendered
Faculty dominance. Gordon's problems became emblematic of the struggles of
the regius professoriate.
Gordon's support within the College had never been strong but his appoint-
ment by the Home Office signified extended networks of allies. The Lord
Advocate was uniquely well qualified as a lawyer, a government minister, and a
figure of massive authority in Scotland (Omond, 1914: 47-125). He was central
to the Whig administration which brought Gordon to the College gates.
Rutherfurd was all too familiar with the scuffles fuelled by regius professorial
discontent, not least because he had been petitioned by his teacher Thomas
Thomson in November 1839 (Morrell, 1969b: 261 ). In his support for
Thomson, Gordon and the other regius professors, Rutherfurd elaborated the
Whigs' long campaign to reform the College. These wider political ends made
it worthwhile for a busy man to investigate the nitty-gritty of College
timetabling. Rutherfurd was surprised that Gordon had been refused the College
Ben Marsden 107
accommodation 'necessary for the discharge of his important duties'; he

shielded Thomson, agreeing that the presence of apparatus was reason enough
to exclude any other teacher from the laboratory; he hinted darkly at the churl-
ishness of the College's spatial managers failing to do 'every thing in their
power for the accommodation and convenience' of Her Majesty's gracious gift;
and he echoed the BAAS managers: Macfarlan was out of touch if he could not
comprehend the 'vast importance' of the engineering chair in a city dependent
for 'prosperity and affluence' on 'progress in the Arts' (Rutherfurd to
Macfarlan, 8112/40, 474 MGUA).
Macfarlan's feathers were ruffled. He hastily assembled the Faculty: its
members approved his conduct, desperately testified 'high respect for the per-
sonal character and public station of the Lord Advocate', and instructed the
Principal to keep Rutherfurd informed (Macfarlan to Rutherfurd, 9112/40, in
Faculty: 10/12140; Faculty: 10/12/40). In the New Year, as Gordon and Thomson
began to act together, Macfarlan decried what he saw as their inability to co-
operate, belittled Thomson's worries about material possessions, and, contrarily,
pronounced that Gordon (not the Faculty) should provide 'a Guarantee'
(Macfarlan to Gordon (draft), 1111141,480 MGUA). Thomson wanted this insur-
ance from the Faculty (not Gordon) before he would yield to 'any Lecturer or
Body of students' not his own. Gordon stoutly refused this 'extraneous responsi-
bility'. If this dispute was not resolved in his favour he was unlikely to occupy
anything but an anomalous position within the University. With Rutherfurd
waiting in the wings he demanded his occupational rights ('accommodation
within the walls of the College'), and threatened legal action against any or all of
the Rector, Principal, Masters and Professors of the University who conspired to
refuse him his 'just rights' (Faculty: 15/1/41).
Gordon and Thomson had been busy during the Christmas recess, surveying
the College to find suitable accommodation within it for the engineering class.
Rutherfurd was minutely briefed. He re-construed space and disputed
Macfarlan's claim that all had been done that could be done. Rutherfurd knew
that the law classroom was appropriated for only one hour daily and there were
no students this session; the mathematics classroom was used for only three or
four hours; the classrooms of logic and moral philosophy for only two each;
and had there been any students of practical astronomy (there were not) they
would have required only one more hour in the moral philosophy classroom
each day. He picked off Faculty classes exclusively. Finally, he admitted he
had been asked to consider 'the propriety of instituting ... the proceedings that
may be necessary for ascertaining the rights and privileges of the Regius
Professors'. Did the Faculty lack the 'means' of accommodating the regius
professor of civil engineering and mechanics? Or did its members consider
themselves 'entitled to withhold such accommodation which he might occupy
without inconvenience' to others? (Rutherfurd to Macfarlan, 1611/41 in Faculty:
2211/41). This was war.
6. THE COLLEGE IN CORPORATED
During the 1830s two Whig measures had brought moderate change to British
government, locally and nationally. The electoral Reform Act of 1832 disap-
pointed the Radicals but satisfied the Whigs, curtailing Tory Old Corruption and
enlarging the franchise. The Municipal Corporation Act of 1835 swept away
some 200 self-perpetuating oligarchic Tory-dominated borough corporations
which had monopolized local patronage, and safeguarded privilege, property,
lifetime office and the nominative principle. Corporations were replaced with
Councils, regularly elected by rate-payers and routinely Whig in complexion. The
Radical Joseph Parkes rejoiced in a new 'poison to Toryism', recognizing munic-
ipal reform as the 'the steam engine for the Mill built by "Parliamentary
Reform"' (Finlayson, 1966).
Politically, the College was a nation in microcosm. Macfarlan greeted
Gordon's intrusion as the external provocation of the Crown infringing local
rights, and limiting where it did not prescribe the internal action of an indepen-
dent corporation. The Principal reacted to Gordon as to a Trojan horse: this disin-
genuous gift of a besieging power brought into the College forces (marshalled by
Rutherfurd) of immense destructive power. Had Gordon been despatched to
Glasgow with reformist intentions? He may easily have speculated that entering
the politically charged College with a string of demands might provoke a defen-
sive reaction: if sufficiently extreme and underpinned by assertions of Faculty
rights, this reaction could form a focus for renewed intervention from the Whigs
who, egged on by Thomas Thomson, had repeatedly probed the managerial activ-
ities of the Scottish universities ([Edinburgh University], 1837). Gordon's
absolute intransigence in demanding occupational rights was significant. If
Rutherfurd wished to see the chair in action, he might have advised Gordon to
swallow his pride, work with Thomson, and make small beginnings. Instead he
waded in with measures aimed at hastening the administrative reform of the
College corporation, at exploding the oligarchic Tory dominated Faculty power-
base, and at broadening the professorial franchise in an act of moderate reform.
Macfarlan cowered behind the collective shield of the Faculty and played for
time. Faculty met, deliberated - and failed to reach consensus. After a weekend
and a gathering scheduled for the next Monday (25 January) still no decision was
reached. Again the Faculty adjourned (Macfarlan to Rutherfurd 18/1/41, RPSRO;
Faculty: 22/1/41 and 25/1/41). It was a full nine days before the Faculty agreed a
united response. Macfarlan's extensive first draft had been acrimonious and polit-
ically inept. His harmonious beginnings recorded gradual change as
College-sponsored lectureships were elevated to regius professorships and 'cheer-
fully' accommodated thereafter. Soon he was sniping at the Whigs, complaining
of finances 'crippled ... by the Crown', and flabbergasted by a new unasked for
chair encompassing previously uncontemplated practical objects: how was the
professor's 'alleged claim' to 'extensive and costly accommodation' to be met
Ben Marsden 109
without 'inconvenience or injury to the business [sic] of the College'? Macfarlan

warned of the moral and physical degeneracy augured by the multiple occupancy
of College rooms with immiscible students, 'drawings, models and various
memorials'. Finally, Macfarlan fulminated:
the supposition that a corporation such as the College ... is bound to incur
expense to an indefinite amount in order to provide accommodation to an
indefinite extent for each of the indefinite number of Professors whom the
Sovereign may be advised to appoint, appears to them too monstrous to be
entertained for a moment. (Rejected Macfarlan draft, 479 MGUA)
Macfarlan had offered the Faculty a rope to hang itself by. Little of his polemic
found any place in the diplomatically worded defence of six foolscap pages Mac-
farlan finally despatched to Rutherfurd (Faculty: 271111841; Macfarlan to Ruther-
Curd, 28/1/41, RPSRO; Faculty minute transmitted to Rutherfurd, 28/1/41, RPSRO).
Instead the Faculty insisted there were two subjects, distinct in character and
unequal in importance. Macfarlan had asserted rights of domination over Gordon.
The moderate line side-stepped the question of rights denied and suggested that
Rutherfurd confused the allocation of space to an individual, and the idiosyn-
cratic exercise of power relations within an incorporated College. Faculty now
claimed speedy action to find space (space which Macfarlan insisted did not
exist) where the professor 'might best enjoy the facilities' he requested, and
thereafter 'authorized' Gordon to teach in their 'best room': others were not fitted
to his 'desires'; the much-discussed law class room could only be reached by two
narrow winding stairs and this ruled out Gordon because it ruled out his 'models
or large apparatus'. Nowhere in the College was there 'a place for depositing
such apparatus permanently'. Gordon, they implied, had excluded himself from
the College by indicating a material pedagogic practice; his failure to 'avail
himself of ... his undoubted right' to teach in the chemistry laboratory, once
authorized so to do, was incomprehensible.
None of this, they insisted, reflected regius professorial status: stressing that all
his 'applications were as frankly received and carefully considered, as if he had
possessed full and acknowledged title to demand all that was so readily granted
him' (and thereby refusing to admit the assertion of any right to withhold accom-
modation) nimbly sidestepped the issue of the Facultylregius professor hierarchy.
There was a sting in the tail:
... should Mr. Gordon's application, be converted into [an] occasion for ques-
tioning the validity of rights which have hitherto been considered inherent in
them as an independent corporation, or should any other circumstance give rise
to an invasion of their privileges, they will not shrink from ... defending a con-
stitution ... which in so far as it was ever impugned, has been ratified by the
Supreme Judicatory of the Land. (Faculty: 27/1/1841, my emphasis)
The Faculty had had years to prepare its defence. Decisions of the Supreme Civil
Court of 1772 and 1810 laid down the rights of regius professors, whilst reform-
ing Commissioners of Visitation in 1826-30 (appointed by George IV and reap-
pointed by William IV) had been subjected to elaborate (and successful) Faculty
dissent. Nevertheless, now its members were worried. The legislatively fecund
Rutherfurd was admired and feared for his perspicacity in drafting reforming leg-
islation. Macfarlan headed for Edinburgh to seek legal advice (Omond, 1914:
116; Faculty: 27/1/41; Mackie, 1954: 246 and 255-8).
These attempts to escalate the matter of Gordon's occupational rights into one
of regius professorial privilege had tangible results. Soon the regius professors
submitted to the Faculty a lengthy memorial deploring their administrative inferi-
ority. The Faculty moved not, but, for the first time, James Thomson indicated
dissent. Subsequently Thomson began consistently to act in consort with the
regius professors against the Faculty. The vitriolic disapprobation he attracted for
this traitorous activity is documented in a trail of Faculty blast and counterblast.
Despite such actions and continued pressure, periodically muted with changes of
government, the administrative structures only underwent radical re-formulation
with the establishment of the University Court and the abolition of the Faculty
during 1857 and 1858.
7. PUBLIC NEGLECT, PERSONAL INTEREST AND THE MOTIVE

POWER OF HEAT
Early in 1841 Thomas Constable printed Gordon's hastily assembled syllabus

defining Mechanics (Gordon, 184lb). This pocket theatre of machines bulged
with the natural history of the mechanical engineer (from capstans to treadmills)
and the elements of mechanism (from spiral gear to endless screw). Sections on
'machinery and tools or operators' had arrived too late for Constable's press; civil
engineering was absent but planned, as were sections on machinery for changing
the form of materials (by spinning and carding): these would constitute a third
course of 'manufactures' (never to materialize). Gordon aspired to the museolo-
gical exegesis which Thomson, Jr had stage-managed for the BAAS, which had
been the fortnightly forte of the Scottish Society of Arts, and which was a pro-
gressive tool of the Highland Society then stocking its new museum in
Edinburgh. Yet Gordon had been manoeuvred into a comer: workshop practice,
mechanical demonstration, and experimental inquiry had been all but ruled out by
his failure to win accessible, permanent and secure storage space.
The stage for Gordon's (virtual) theatre was set with recent practico-theoretical
imports translated from the European stamping grounds of Weisbach, Poncelet,
Morin, and Pambour. A skeletal syllabus offered up to Macfarlan in November
1840 had commenced with Weisbach's 'Mechanical Effect produced by Forces,
and its Measure' (Faculty: 13/11/40; Constable, 1877: 43). Now and in the future
Ben Marsden 111
Gordon hoped to expound staples of British mechanics (gravitation, forces,

impact or shock, resistance, friction) beside elaborations of a 'mechanical effect'
curriculum, including the 'doctrine of machines' (wherein the object of machines
is the transformation of mechanical effect), dynamometers (measuring mechan-
ical effect), and the conditions of the maximum effect of machines. Yet if Gordon
had been unable to win space for mechanical practice, he had also been warned
off encroachments upon mechanics in its mathematical and analytical manifesta-
tions. Despite threatening legal action to secure space and curricular autonomy,
when the 1841/42 session began Gordon was responsible for a class of 'practical
mechanics' (Glasgow Herald, 15/10/41 and 14/10/42; Edinburgh Evening
Courant, 9/10/43; [Glasgow University], 1844: 2 and 21).
Much had happened over the summer. In May Gordon had survived a hostile
application of the religious tests by opponents wishing to eject him (Smith and
Wise, 1989: 44); more recently he had gained an ally in John Thomson's son, his
'cousin' Dr William Thomson who ingratiated himself with Rutherford as pro-
reform candidate and secured the Faculty chair of medicine (Jacyna, 1994:
150-3). If the College was changing, the country was chaotic. Melbourne was
ousted and in September 1841 Rutherford resigned his post as Lord Advocate.
Threats to level the Glasgow professoriate evaporated. Early in October 1841,
his best ally gone, Gordon resorted forlornly to the Glasgow Herald:
LECI'URE ROOM WANTED

WANTED, from 1st Nov., to 1st May next, in the Vicinity
of the College, the use of a Room, as a Lecture Room,
Convenient Sittings for 40 or 50 persons, with good light,
and efficient means of warming are requisite.
A Room with an Ante-room would be preferred.
Apply in writing, stating particulars, to G. L. [sic],
133, West George Street.
G.[ordon], L.[ewis] was still trying to get in. Dr Thomson helped to win his
friend an hour in the law classroom (recently declared useless by dint of its
quaint staircase architecture) but only at the cost of a denial of rights and an
amplification of responsibilities categorically rejected by Gordon in January: the
room was a temporary 'favour' to one with no 'right ... to demand' it; pupils,
especially those 'not otherwise Students', could be tolerated only if Gordon took
responsibility for their conduct within the College. Next year (1842) he was
granted the same favour under identically humbling conditions (Faculty:
20/10/41, 29/10/41 and 20/11/42; Glasgow Herald: 15/10/42). When a new pro-
fessor of civil law arrived in 1843, he construed cohabitation with Gordon as the
birth of spatial tradition and the stealthy redistribution of professorial privilege.
Against all the odds, Gordon had shipped 'boxes of stones and machinery' into
the remote room. Now Maconochie demanded the removal of these patently
non-legal artifacts. The Faculty had 'no more right to intrude another Teacher
into my chair than it has to authorize the Professor of Anatomy to hang his
supernumerary Horrors or carry on particular dissections in the Divinity Hall'.
The Faculty returned the law class room to Maconochie's session papers, in the
erroneous conviction that, boxes notwithstanding, Gordon had failed to avail
himself of the spatial permits previously granted and had delivered no lectures
(Faculty: 24/10/43 (my emphasis) and 27110/43).
Miraculously, by 1843 he had coached a coterie of students from the environs
of Glasgow (among them the convalescent James Thomson, Jr) on pugnaciously
analytical topics like 'the Principle of Vis Viva and its relation to Mechanical
Effect', and on hydraulics (a Weisbach speciality) (Prize and Degree List of
Glasgow College 1833-63: 90 and 103, GUA; Larmor and Thomson, 1912:
xix-xxi, xxxix-xl). Later Gordon experimented with time to increase class
numbers. A 3.30 p.m. weekday slot was fine for leisured professorial progeny
but useless to the working men attracted into the Edinburgh School of Arts for
practical mechanics 'at hours suited to the convenience of pupils' (Edinburgh
Evening Courant: 26/10/43). Gordon lectured at 7 p.m. in 1843 (and in subse-
quent years later still), thus competing with Anderson's and the Mechanics'
Institution for night class self-improvers, courting Fox Maule's 'humbler classes',
and ensuring that 'civil engineers' assistants ... [and] young men engaged in
mechanical engineering works and in workshops' could attend ([Devonshire],
1872: 23/2172 (W. J. M. Rankine), question 9509; Cage, 1987). The Whigs had
repeatedly sought to administer the reforming (and controlling) discipline of edu-
cation low on the social scale, only to find that orderly science was far more
palatable to the affluent middling classes. The ad hoc educational intervention of
Gordon's chair reversed this local chronology - and Marfarlan's intuitions of
social swamping from below were incrementally realized.
Dr William Thomson remained Gordon's academic lifeline: now expelled from
law, engineering found refuge in Thomson's practice of medicine room; later it
moved on to the natural history class room. In 1848 Allen Thomson (William's
half brother) became Faculty professor of anatomy and thereafter family duty,
translated as College patronage, guaranteed Gordon the status of tolerated
College vagrant, even if it could not deliver him a permanent classroom. An
informal arrangement eventually gave him storage (but not teaching) space in a
College attic (Faculty: 27/10/43; 617 MGUA; Oakley, 1973: 7 and plate facing
46; Accession 12721, GUA). It was less than ideally placed. The engineering pro-
fessor was not happy. Increasingly, he was not there. From his consulting office
at 24 Abingdon Street in London he scotched rumours that he had 'left Glasgow
& its Professorship of Engineering' but admitted privately he was 'most willing'
to give up his charge (Gordon to William Thomson, 27/4/47, Gl18, KPCUL).
As re-scheduling had failed to kindle the enthusiasm of the student hordes,
Gordon tried another strategy. He issued a compendium of lectures which organ-
ized a corpus of literate engineering: this response to his colleagues' distaste for
Ben Marsden 113
the College pollution of stones, models and unruly rabbles emphasized, if not the
cerebral, independent and manual, then the collected and the bookish (Gordon,
1847a; compare Layton, 1971). The margins of this half-heartedly Baconian
syllabus of (mainly civil) 'engineering aphorisms' were littered with fingerposts
to papers, reports and books on science, engineering, and political economy in
English, French, German, Italian and Dutch. The budding engineering student
needed a fistful of foreign languages and easy access to a cosmopolitan library:
luckily, by the mid-1840s Gordon was on the College's library committee.
Better still, as a major operator in the Glasgow Philosophical Society from 1841,
Gordon lobbied for the transformation of a provincial grouping into a publishing
concern. If his pregnant January 1846 discussion of the 'theoretical mechanical
effect of steam' (probably drawn from Clapeyron) unaccountably failed to
appear in print, Gordon had, at least, created an outlet for translations of foreign
practical science from Plattner and Reich in Freiberg, to Morin in Metz (GPS
Minutes: passim; Gordon 1841-4; Morrell, 1974; Wise and Smith, 1986: 152;
Smith and Wise, 1989: 291). By these means Gordon fulfilled Beamish's foreign
secretarial role: but his bases were the book and the Philosophical Society, not
the University.
There, students were unforthcoming. Gordon's strategy had failed. By
December 1847 he was again in London (Thomson to Gordon, 20/12/47, 0124
(copy), KPCUL). Months later, efforts to explain his continued absence were
drowned by acrimonious Senate debate as William Thomson reasserted the vastly
eroded rights of natural philosophy in the BA curriculum (Senate: 19/2/48,
20/3/48 and 10/1/48 to 26/4/48). Thomson's appointment to the chair of natural
philosophy had not brought about the dramatic reversal in Gordon's fortunes
which some have claimed, despite politics and intellectual commitments shared,
and despite (or because of) a common interest in the scientific practice of heat-
engines (Oakley, 1973: 8). Gordon claimed that he had devoted his time exclu-
sively to the chair's duties for six years: that is, until 1846 and Thomson's
professorial appointment. In response to a request in the 1870s for guidance on a
new Tokyo engineering curriculum, Gordon interrupted his otherwise sober
advice with complaints of 'much jealousy' from 'Professors of Natural Philosophy
and Mathematics' at Glasgow College. For evidence of his coerced emphasis on
the 'collected experience' of contemporary engineering practice he referred to a
syllabus of 1848 (Constable, 1877: 227). In that year James and William
Thomson, father and son, occupied the maths and natural philosophy chairs.
There certainly had been pressure. A few years earlier, Gordon's timely
observations of the slow flow of Stockholm pitch at the Gateshead wire-rope
works provided Forbes with welcome ammunition in glacial disputes (Gordon,
1845): but Forbes was not one to let friendship stand in the way of duty. At
the end of November 1848 he looked over 'the new part of Gordon's Syllabus'
and detected 'a most important trespass on the subject of Natural Philosophy'.
He told Thomson:
ll4 Making Space for Science
His class may be unimportant just now: but a principle so important is

involved, that I think you ought to make a mild but decided remonstrance
against the Invasion which would confine Natural Philosophy to Physical
Astronomy, Optics, & Electromagnetism.
(Forbes to Thomson, 27/11/48, F198, KPCUL (my emphasis);
compare Wilson, 1985: 21, fn 25).
Forbes apparently discerned moves to annex mechanics, hydrodynamics, and

pneumatics. Gordon was definitely expanding, too, into the science of heat.
Weisbach's Principles of the mechanics of machinery and engineering finally
c&me out in English in October 1848. Even as Forbes wrote, Gordon was using
his translation of the second volume to plug his own treatise on the steam
engine 'or what more exactly expresses the subject matter, "On the Motive
Power of Heat'". This audaciously subtitled 'vol. III. of Weisbach's Mechanics'
completed a systematic course designed for engineers. In May 1849 Gordon
made up his mind 'to let the printing of my work proceed', complete with
commentaries on Carnot (Gordon to Thomson, 24/5/49, G129, KPCUL). Yet
Gordon's treatise did not appear. Neither did Carnot find a place in the only
other extant lecture syllabus (Gordon, 1849). Apathy, rapid theoretical flux,
student scarcity, or the enticements of a burgeoning engineering career may
explain this last minute volte face. Forbes's attempts at vicarious curricular
veto, however, were certain.
As cholera decimated Glasgow in January 1849 the professor was in no hurry
to return from London (Gordon to Thomson, 13/1/49, G127, KPCUL). His atten-
dances at Senate ceased in 1850. His involvement with the Philosophical Society
dwindled. Like Vignoles and MacNeill, Gordon had been lured away from the
cloisters of academia by the lucre of dispersed engineering practice: first by the
offers of Glasgow industrialists for whom he erected a huge chimney (Tennant's
Stalk) to spew elsewhere the waste of the St Rollox chemical works (Gordon and
Hill, 1851); later by northerly Whigs like Breadalbane and Normanby who
wanted managers for lead mines in Perth and alum works in Whitby (Gordon to
Normanby, 24110/42, L/727, NPMC; Constable, 1877: 46); and later still by
railway and drainage work throughout Britain. In mid November 1851 Gordon
was 'in considerable doubt about going to Glasgow at all' (Constable, 1877: 53).
The ultimate opportunity for engineering networking had arrived. In the summer
of 1850 Newall had floated the idea of cladding telegraphic lines with wire-rope
to make them strong enough for submarine survival (McCalmont, 1850). A year
later Newall and Co. were submerging a cable between England and France
(Gordon to Forbes, 15/10/51, FP; Newall, 1882). As Gordon basked in the current
glory and contemplated the heady future of telegraphic venture he finally eased
himself out of his uncomfortable Glasgow station. Space served now as excuse. A
'total want of accommodation' had made it impossible to exhibit and pointless to
collect fragile models, drawings or experimental apparatus. In consequence, he
Ben Marsden 115
attributed 'the neglect by the Public of the advantages held out by the Crown in
instituting the Professorship in great measure to this want of accommodation'.
(Accession 3409 dated 6/2152, GUA)
8. CONCLUSIONS: MAKING SPACE TAKING PLACE
This has not been a tale of cathedrals of science or purpose-built laboratories.

The classrooms and attics Lewis Gordon eventually and temporarily occupied as
itinerant within and outwith the College were second-hand, borrowed from reluc-
tant colleagues, lent by professorial relatives, or rented from Glaswegian property
agents. There was little chance for Gordon's spaces to represent, enclose, under-
pin, or embody his disciplinary academic practice. Discussions of the practices
within the physical spaces of science (including laboratories and museums) tend
to presuppose established structural markers. Here we have seen a discussion less
of the architecture of science and more of pre-architectural angst.
Gordon's eventual and grudging occupation- annually renegotiated as favour
and never transmuted to regius professorial right - was within the crowded
medieval Old College, situated in the unsavoury, insanitary and, as the city grew,
increasingly eastern quarter of the growing metropolis of Glasgow. That city
manufactured a cathedral of science high on the hill and to the west, part paid for
by the sale of the College grounds, designed by George Gilbert Scott, in the late
1860s and early 1870s and providing ample laboratory space for those equipped
to fight for it (Smith, this volume). The Old College and much of medieval
Glasgow was subsequently demolished in the name of civic improvement. Lewis
Gordon, who had little reason to be enamoured of these buildings, proposed a
new railway route connecting the east and west of Scotland in the late 1840s with
its central terminus, naturally enough, in the College grounds (Ace 12713, GUA).
What had gone wrong? In August 1840, Gordon was short on local knowledge
and local support. None of his upbringing, education, professional experience and
technological tourism allied him unmistakably to Glasgow. Such geographical
dislocation was not unknown for professorial candidates. But the micro-politics
of Glasgow College were extremely, perhaps uniquely, tense. Gordon was the
focus of antipathy from the College professoriate to the latest aggressive, ad hoc,
and unasked for intervention of a Whig administration which for years had been
seeking to emasculate the Faculty. At a time of uncommon weakness in natural
philosophy he threatened curricular encroachment and interference. He was a
financially and spatially demanding outsider who had not been elevated to his
chair from within. College finances had been crippled by the Crown yet Gordon
carried with him Crown sponsorship and tainted money. In such circumstances
local alienation was more likely than support; but local support was nevertheless
essential to win Gordon access and to mitigate the diplomatic inadequacies
exhibited by him repeatedly in a disputatious career.
The new professor had trawled Europe for commercial opportunities to exploit
in Britain. He had worked to place himself at the hub of diverse, large-scale net-
works of friends, colleagues, and industrialists. But that place which might have
functioned as the central node of these networks of translation - Glasgow College
- was environmentally uncongenial. Gordon refashioned the Philosophical
Society as a publishing outlet for his foreign secretarial programme. The College
manifested greater constitutional rigidity and remained at best an unstable base
during Gordon's itinerant tenure of the chair: a fixed College site privileged for
the pedagogy of 'civil engineering and mechanics' thus remained an unrealized
aspiration. Far ftung allegiances could not effectively neutralize the hostility man-
ifested within the College, however quickly Gordon made friends and won
influence in nearby practico-intellectual forums, or attached his name to monu-
ments of industrial might like Tennant's Stalk. Gordon's oddly de-centred social
knowledge antagonized: it was not power enough to guarantee spatial conquest.
Gordon's spatial trials were simultaneously physical and curricular as he sought
to assert occupational rights for himself and for classes of civil engineering and
mechanics. Even before any tradition of academic engineering practice was in
place, prophetic territorially framed appraisals - of access, invasion, trespass,
encroachment. interference and intrusion by rogue material culture or unruly human
elements within or beyond the walls of the College - provided actors with the
grounds to exclude, to modify, or to curtail. Guarantees were sought against the
intrusions of an imaginary college of practical mechanics, and pupils not otherwise
students immune to Faculty strictures. Models could not pass freely along winding
staircases, or be stored in rooms otherwise dedicated without disturbing a fragile
pedagogic equilibrium. In asking for an apparatus room Gordon had found himself
outside the College in the new chemistry building and in danger of coming to blows
with the irascible chemistry professor. Gordon signally failed to balance personal
independence with external collegiate constraint to make disciplinary space.
Only by appealing to more spatially diffuse authorities (notably Rutherford)
did he recruit strength enough convincingly to demand in the locality of Glasgow
that which he deemed his right - a thorough re-evaluation of architectural con-
straints - and the Faculty insisted was its favour as a corporation independent of
governmental intervention and impervious to legal challenge. Yet this appeal to
the Lord Advocate merely, perhaps deliberately, re-opened older and wider
debates regarding the relationship between College (as independent corporation)
and government (as intervening body sanctioning trespass). Thus threatened, the
College eventually reacted with a rare, albeit temporary, unanimity. Disputes
over Gordon's claimed curricular and physical space became fights for corporate
survival and for the retention of privileged autonomy. The escalation of this
spatial trial into a legal trial of Faculty against the Crown foundered with the
change of government. Ultimately, Gordon's success in consolidating parallel
careers in broader spaces encouraged and facilitated his evacuation from the
vitiated environment of the College.
Bell Marsde11 117
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For helpful advice and criticism during the gestation of this paper I thank
Crosbie Smith, Amalia Hatjievgeniadu, Jon Agar, Jack Morrell, Alex Dolby and
Graeme Gooday. Financial support has come from the Royal Society (History of
Science Grants), the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme) and
from a jointly funded Royal Society-British Academy Postdoctoral Research
Fellowship. I am grateful for permission to quote from manuscript sources
(abbreviated thus): James David Forbes Papers, St Andrews University Library
(FP); Airy Papers, in RGO 6/368, Royal Greenwich Observatory Papers,
Cambridge University Library (APCUL); Kelvin Papers, Cambridge University
Library (KPCUL); Beamish Papers, Science Museum Library (BPSML); Newall
Papers, MSP 32, Science Museum Library, London (NPSML); Marc Isambard
Brunei's Diary. Institution of Civil Engineers (Brunei); Richard Beamish's
Diary, Institution of Civil Engineers (Beamish); Melbourne Papers, Box
104/105, Royal Archives (MPRA); Normanby Papers, Mulgrave Castle, Whitby
(NPMC); Rutherfurd Papers, AD 581179, Scottish Record Office (RPSRO);
manuscripts in the Public Record Office (PRO); manuscripts in the Glasgow
University Archives including Minutes of Senate/Faculty (Senate/Faculty)
and Macfarlan Papers, P/CN/Macfarlan (MGUA); Minutes of the Glasgow
Philosphical Society in Glasgow University Special Collections (GPS Minutes).
I am grateful for the kind assistance of the late John Lenihan with the GPS Minutes
and to Lord Normanby and Jean E. Mortimer for help with the Normanby Papers.
5 'Nowhere But in a Great
Town' : William Thomson's
Spiral of Classroom
Credibility
Crosbie Smith
When I have found myself occasionally among the cold-blooded, money-

making, punch-drinking merchants and manufacturers of Glasgow, and when I
have thrown a glance over her now very mediocre priesthood, her lower than
mediocre practitioners of medicine, and her host of rapacious attomies .... I
have asked myself, as was done of old, 'Can any good thing come out of
Glasgow?' (Edinburgh Magazine, 1825: 516)
1. . A SPIRAL OF CREDIBILITY
In their Laboratory Life Latour and Woolgar argue that scientists are engaged
in a quest for 'credibility'. Rather than suppose that scientists are motivated
merely by a search for reward ('credit' as 'recognition of merit'), they develop
an economic model of scientific activity in terms of 'credit as credibility'.
The model crucially integrates three meanings of credibility as believability,
personal power based on the confidence of others, and business trust. 'Credit as
credibility' here functions as an exchangeable commodity: credit can be shared,
stolen, accumulated or wasted. When, for example, a scientist embarks on a
project, she becomes an investor of credibility. If the knowledge produced
proves valuable to another scientist, the credibility of the producer is raised.
Credit as credibility is thus to be understood not simply as monetary capital but
(following Bourdieu) as symbolic capital. A 'cycle of credibility' is created by
the investment of symbolic capital in a project. This in tum attracts investment
in the form of grants to fund equipment and it is this equipment that in turn
produces data, arguments and publications. If marketable, these results raise
the value of the original stock of capital and so the cycle can begin anew
(Latour and Woolgar, 1986: 187-208).
In this chapter I deploy this model in the form of an upward and outward spiral
of credibility to analyse the story of William Thomson's classroom and physical
118
Crosbie Smith 119
laboratory in Glasgow College. While not claiming universal applicability for

the model, I suggest that the market economy of Victorian Glasgow makes it
especially apt in this case. For a fuller appreciation of the historical issues,
however, I widen the original model beyond any closed community of scientists
to take into account the very permeable boundaries of Thomson's College
activities. Indeed, not only does 'a spiral of credibility' more accurately capture
the territorial expansion of his work within the walls of the old College, but it
helps us to understand the ways in which his accumulation of credit as credibil-
ity is not simply a matter of personal gain in authority and status. The process
also aided a vast increase in the credibility of the University, facilitating by
1870 a complete removal from decaying medieval College to a grand cathedral
of knowledge.
2. COMPETING SPACES: THE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY OF

INDUSTRIAL GLASGOW
By the 1830s, Glasgow was being transformed into one of Britain's leading
industrial cities. The statistician James Cleland reported to the 1840 meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) that the city's
population had risen from almost 84 000 at the turn of the century to over
270 000 (Cleland, 1840: 174-5). John Strang's estimate a decade later
approached 370 000 (Strang, 1850: 162-9). The New Statistical Account of
Scotland ( 1845) cited cotton as the staple trade of the city, with 123 mills in the
area. but also noted that some 75 000 tons of iron, a tenth of the British supply,
had been produced in the Clyde region in 1835 (Lanark, 1845: 101-241).
Strang, however, pointed to economic 'cosmopolitanism' as Glasgow's princi-
pal strength by mid-century:
Glasgow unites within itself a portion of the cotton-spinning and weaving man-
ufactures of Manchester, the printed calicoes of Lancashire, ... the flax-
spinning of Ireland, the carpets of Kidderminster, the iron and engineering
works of Wolverhampton and Birmingham, the pottery and glass-making of
Staffordshire and Newcastle, the ship-building of London, the coal trade of the
Tyne and Wear, and all the handicrafts connected with ... these. Glasgow also
has its distilleries, breweries, chemical works, tan-works, dye-works,
bleachfields, and paper manufactories .... Glasgow also, in its commercial rela-
tions, trades with every quarter of the globe, and its merchants deal in the
various products of every country. It hence appears, that one branch of manu-
facture or trade may be dull while another may be prosperous; and, accord-
ingly, Glasgow does not feel any of those universal depressions which so
frequently occur in places limited to one or two branches of manufacture or
commerce. (Strang, 1850: 162) 1
Between the 1770s and the 1830s the shallow River Clyde, fit only for barges, had
been deepened to allow sea-going vessels with a draft of about 14 feet to reach the
heart of Glasgow. As Strang expressed the point: 'she possesses a river and harbour
which art and capital have, within a very few years, made perfectly safe and navi-
gable'. By 1850, Glasgow harbour was handling annually nearly 400 000 tons of
sailing vessels and 900 000 tons of steam-powered ships (Stmng, 1850: 163-4).
Integral to this economic transformation were changes to the architectural land-
scape of the commercial heart of the city. The Trongate and Argyle-Street
together formed, according to one sympathetic observer in 1829, 'the principal
scene on which is displayed that restless spirit of enterprise and industry which
has raised Glasgow to the rank of the second city in the empire'. The same
observer also commented on the absence of public buildings and on the scarcity
of any architectural ornament in general. But from the individual irregularity and
lack of imposed order, there had emerged 'a very grand and imposing effect'
expressing 'the variety and contmsts which prevail among the restless and eager
multitude, whose little interests and schemes they circumscribe and protect'. Thus
the architecture, not the extmvagent and systematic architecture constructed at
the command of an authoritarian ruler in Paris or Vienna or Berlin, was that of
the free enterprise economy: individual enterprise and variation would produce
that democratic order most conducive to the public good. The result was 'unques-
tionably one of the finest [streets] in Europe' (Swan, 1983). 2
In such surroundings stood the venemble and unpretentious Glasgow College,
one of five medieval university colleges in Scotland. A contemporary commenta-
tor might, as in the epigmph above, pour scorn upon the values of Glasgow's citi-
zens but two of the 'good things' to come out of this town had both been
associated with the College: James Watt and Adam Smith. Indeed, the same critic
contrasted the College's celebmted eighteenth-century alumni with those monkish
scholars of Oxford and Cambridge who did not realize that 'the mass of society is
making daily approximations towards the great goal of universal power over the
elements of Nature, and the means of personal and social happiness' (Edinburgh
Magazine, 1825: 516-16, 523). Edinburgh readers could be left in little doubt that
Glasgow and her two famous sons embodied the most 'progressive' elements in all
of British society, through the steam engine and political economy. 3
The commercial town of Watt and Smith, however, had been very different
from the rising industrial city to which Professor James Thomson brought his six
surviving children in 1832, year of the Great Reform Bill and the first major
cholera epidemic to strike British populations. Contrary to the Scottish
Enlightenment that had inspired his youthful academic aspirations, James
Thomson now found his old College in the hands of tory professors opposed to
all change and reform (Smith and Wise, 1989: 25-32).
Meanwhile, the seething, crowded labouring poor, who Hocked by steamship
from the West Highlands and from Ireland in search of a better life, pressed in
upon the College walls. The rear windows of the Thomsons' College house over-
Crosbie Smith 121
looked 'a congested mass of gloomy tenements, narrow lanes, squalid courts, in
which day and night might be heard shrill cries and foul and blasphemous words'
(Principal Lang of Aberdeen, quoted in Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 200n). Small
wonder the tory old guard of College professors retreated to their vision of a more
comfortable, more tranquil, more scholarly and aristocratic Scotland. Indeed, the
annual revenue of around £8000, deriving principally from rents and tithes of
lands dating from Reformation times (Coutts, 1909: 362), made the College
appear as a landowner whose professorial elite had more in common with aristo-
cratic culture than with the merchants and manufacturers of the city .4
Yet for all their fear of the new industrial culture, the College professors -
including professors of theology - were perceived to be almost as cold-blooded
and rapacious as the merchants of Glasgow. Whereas nothing would tempt the
monks of Oxford or Cambridge to abandon their howl of 'No Popery, no son of
the Babylonian harlot enters here', Glasgow College imposed no religious test
upon prospective students. Indeed, it seemed probable that the professors, 'who
fill their pockets with fees derived from the believers in every system of faith
under the sun, would mordicus resist such an encroachment on their vested
rights' (Edinburgh Magazine, 1825: 514-15). 5
Glasgow College professors derived their income from two sources: first, from
a salary of around £300 per annum paid out of the College's revenue from land
and other endowments; and second, from fees paid directly by each student.
Though the amount paid per student per class might not exceed two or three
guineas, the total could easily lead to a doubling of the professor's income to
£600 or even £800. This two-part income distinguished Glasgow from Edinburgh
professors (who depended more heavily upon fees) and Oxford and Cambridge
professors (who did not derive their income from fees) (Morrell, l969b: 252;
1972; Marsden, this volume).
Prospective students and their parental patrons, however, did not owe the
Glasgow College professors a living. While the West of Scotland population
clearly had some loyalties towards its University, there had been indications that
the once-prestigious medical faculty was in decline in the 1830s (Dow and Moss,
1988: 227-57). Although overall student numbers are difficult to verify, the
figures given in the University calendars for 1826-27, 1829-30 and 1844-45
suggest a more general decline in student numbers from around 1200 in the late
1820s to around 800 in the mid-1840s. 6 Within the College, protracted uncertain-
ties over the teaching of natural philosophy in the early 1840s, combined with
intensified political and religious wranglings, threatened to undermine the public
image of the arts faculty, the traditional core of the University's teaching, in the
student market place (Smith and Wise, 1989: 41-7; Marsden, this volume).
In the 1830s, ultra-tory theology professors commanded a majority in the
College. The Principal opposed all reform. Regius professors such as the radical
chemistry professor Thomas Thomson were virtually excluded from decision-
making (Morrell, 1969b: 250-62). The anatomy professor, James Jeffray, had
been in the chair since 1790, the law professor, Robert Davidson, since 1801, and
the natural philosophy professor, William Meikleham, since 1803. Attempts to
reform the College along more elite and specialized Oxbridge lines and away from
its traditionally 'democratic' and popular traditions (characterized by low fees, an
absence of matriculation criteria, and a broad philosophical Bachelor of Arts
curriculum) met with criticism and hostility, for Oxbridge-trained professors
proved ill-matched to Scottish student audiences (Smith and Wise, 1989: 114). 7
Recognizing that the College could in no sense remain distant from the
industrializing city, a group of radical College professors acted to reform the
University. James Thomson (mathematics), J. P. Nichol (astronomy), and
William Thomson (medicine) had youth on their side. But they also operated
with consummate political skill to recruit like-minded academic reformers into a
succession of vacant chairs. One such chair was natural philosophy, filled in
1846 by another William Thomson, son of the mathematics professor and
recently graduated in mathematics himself from the University of Cambridge
(Smith and Wise, 1989: 99-116). But the initial credibility provided by his
status as Second Wrangler and First Smith's Prizeman in the Cambridge
Mathematics Tripos (1845) was never likely to be enough to establish and
maintain the authority of the 22-year-old Glasgow professor.
3. 'ON THE BEST POSSIBLE SCALE FOR A LECTURE ROOM':

FASHIONING AUTHORITY IN THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
CLASSROOM
The Glasgow College reformers recognized an urgent need to restore lustre to a

key chair whose fortunes had faded with the increasing infirmity of the old pro-
fessor. The rewards of a restored, perhaps even enhanced, credibility, were poten-
tially lucrative. The BAAS Glasgow meeting (1840) had already demonstrated
that natural philosophy, more than theology, Greek or Latin, could represent a
common cause of industrial town and 'progressive' gown: the advancement of
science for the benefit of the British nation and its citizens (Morrell and
Thackray, 1981: 202-22; Smith and Wise, 1989: 52-4). A reformed natural phi-
losophy classroom could work wonders for the entire College, threatened within
by a declining student population and besieged without by the labouring poor.
The immediate challenge facing Professor Thomson, however, was to fashion his
authority over a class of more than a hundred students whose disorderly predeces-
sors, in one celebrated episode, had pitched their unfortunate mathematics profes-
sor, James Millar, into the College burn (King, 1909: 94-7).
Long before the vacancy in the natural philosophy chair, the group of
reforming professors had agreed that a mere mathematician, unskilled in
lecture demonstrations, could not command the class. In order to remedy this
potential defect, William Thomson had been despatched to Paris after graduat-
ing from Cambridge. His brief was to observe, and if possible participate in, a
Crosbie Smith 123
full range of experimental practice, from lecture demonstrations by the finest

of the French experimentalists to the physical laboratory of Victor Regnault
(Smith and Wise, 1989: 104-8). But the reformers also recognized that skills
alone would not be enough. The stock of apparatus and instruments needed
radical reform. And so, just prior to the election of the new professor, Nichol
proposed to the Faculty the resolution that 'in consequence of the advance of
discovery in many important departments of Physical Science it is open to
serious question whether the arrangements that were adequate in former times
are now sufficient to exhibit so full an exposition of various branches of
Natural Philosophy during the Ordinary University Course as their position
and relative importance unquestionably demands' (MF 85: 277-8; Thompson,
1910, vol. 1: 161-2, 183-4).
The immediate result was the appointment of a committee consisting of the
Principal and Professors Ramsay, James Thomson and Nichol to examine the stock
of apparatus. They reported on 1 December 1846 that 'a large proportion of the
apparatus is so old that it can prove of hardly any service in illustrating the physical
sciences in their present advanced stage and those instruments which are of a more
recent date are in such bad order that they require a thorough repair'. The commit-
tee therefore recommended 'that the deficiencies should be supplied gradually and
in the first instance that the sum of £100 should be appropriated to this purpose'.
A new committee would monitor expenditure on behalf of the Faculty. In accepting
this recommendation, the Faculty constituted the 'Natural Philosophy Class-Room
and Instrument Committee' on II December (MF 85: 281-2, 296).
On 31 December, Professor Thomson placed his first substantial order (worth
over £33) for electrical apparatus with the London instrument makers, Watkins
and Hill, who were particularly noted for their electrical instruments. 8 This (prin-
cipally electromagnetic) apparatus formed the central focus of Professor
Thomson's experimental course of lectures in the latter part of his first session as
professor. From the point of view of lecture demonstrations, Thomson had
chosen his agenda with care. Few subjects could rival electricity and magnetism
in terms of its popular appeal (for example, Morus, 1993: 50-69). For the more
able students the subject had much more to offer than merely shocks and sparks.9
Thus John Nichol, son of the professor of astronomy, could later write of the
1848-49 session that he 'took careful notes, read, thought, and made experiments
on subjects which interested me intensely' (quoted in Knight, 1896: 93).
Thomson's stock of classroom credibility was rising fast.
Complementing the classroom was the space of the apparatus room, ostensibly
a private space for the professor and his assistant to store and prepare the physical
apparatus and instruments in readiness for public display before the classroom
audience. John Nichol's remarks, however, suggest that at least some students in
the late 1840s may have had privileged access to the apparatus room in order to
make experiments for themselves. Committee members too could witness the
effects of their investment, as Thomson recounted to the Edinburgh professor of
natural philosophy, J.D. Forbes:
By using stronger acid [in a Daniell's battery], according to your suggestion, I

have however got much better effect ... so much so that our professor of laws
[Allan Maconochie], who came up to see it, thought he had killed me, with the
inductive coil apparatus, which I got out today for the first time. This was with
the whole ten cells, and with the soft iron core, but to my surprise the shock
was nearly as intolerable with no core, & with single cell connected.
(Thomson to Forbes, 1 March 1847, FP)
The same letter provides direct evidence that the apparatus room was also being
mobilized as a space for research: 'I have made out, I think perfectly satisfacto-
rily, both by theory & experiment, that a single needle (a sewing needle) is unsta-
ble in the centre of a coil. ... I have made out to a mathematical certainty, that an
infinitely small ball of soft iron would be unstable in the centre of a coil. .. ' .10
At the end of the session, total expenditure came to just over £80, well short of
the £100 allocated. After the Watkins and Hill order, the rest of the expenditure
had involved capital improvements to the classroom itself and locally purchased
tools and materials for demonstration purposes. The Committee duly expressed to
the Faculty its satisfaction 'with the reasonable manner in which the professor of
Natural Philosophy has on all occasions readily modified his demands in accord-
ance with the economical suggestions of the Committee, who view his ardour
and anxiety in the prosecution of his profession with the greatest pleasure, and
who heartily concur in those anticipations of his future celebrity which Mons'
Liouville, the French mathematician, has recently thought fit to publish to the
scientific world' (4/2 & In TD85/67, SRO; Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 194-6).
Thomson's authority was now firmly rooted in well-defined professional and
epistemic spaces.
A favourable interim report from the Committee had already recommended
that Thomson 'make out a [further] list of instruments essential for conducting
the business of the Natural Philosophy class with efficiency' (MF 85: 331 ).
During the summer of 1847, Thomson visited London and Paris. He had written
to his brother James: 'On my way to or from Oxford I think I shall be able to see
the apparatus of the Royal Institution (where Faraday lectures) in London along
with the instrument maker who made it all [probably John Newman, instrument
maker to the Royal Institution], and as it seems to be on the best possible scale
for a lecture room it will be of great use to me.' Thomson and his friends attended
a lecture of Faraday's and after dinner 'went out to divers mathematical instru-
ment makers to look over all the new instruments which are being invented, and
to get some for the Glasgow College' (William to James Thomson, 11 June 1847,
T426, KCULC; Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 202-3).
By late July Thomson was in Paris with the astronomer U. J. J. Leverrier as
host. Leverrier got him admitted to the 'Cabinet de physique of the Polytechnic
[Ecole Polytechnique] ... and made engagements with Regnault the preparateur
at the Polytechnic'. Thomson wrote to his brother that he had been all day, and a
Crosbie Smith 125
good part of the previous day at Marloye's shop, where he ordered 'a quantity of
acoustical apparatus' (William to James Thomson, 22 July 1847, T432, KCULC).
He confessed privately to Forbes that 'I had determined to limit myself, for this
year, to one class of apparatus, as I do not yet know what I want and I must be
content with a slow improvement. I was quite delighted with what Marloye had to
show, & I spent the greater part of two days with him, & felt inclined to order
everything I saw, as I did very nearly' (Thomson to Forbes, 30 July 1847, FP).
The quantity amounted, with carriage and other extras, to over £50, the largest
single expenditure to date. 11
At the end of its second year, the Instrument Committee reported to the
Faculty that 'all the apartments connected with the Physic [sic] class are now in
excellent order; that the apparatus room has been cleared of the dilapidated and
ill-contrived structures by which it was encumbered, has been provided with a
heating apparatus which will effectively preclude damp, and has been fitted up
with a set of very commodious glass cases in every way well suited for preserv-
ing the most delicate instruments and at the same time rendering them readily
accessible'. The Committee expressed the hope that 'all the Members of the
Faculty will be induced to visit the room in question, and they [the members of
the Committee] have little doubt that what has been done will meet with their
approbation' (MF 86: 20-1).
Over the winter of 1848~9 Thomson's importation of French instruments
reached another peak. This series of imports culminated in a 660 franc (about
£26) order to Pixii, 'Fabriquent toutes sortes d'Jnstrumens de Physiquel, Chimie,
Optique, et Mathematiques'. The most expensive pieces 'for teaching electricity'
were described thus:
Oersted's apparatus for demonstrating the compressibility of water, with

piezometre (60fr)
Cylindrical Coulomb balance with test plan (70fr)
Hollow Coulomb sphere, insulated, with stand, and two insulated envelopes
(30fr)
One large condenser for the development of contact electricity, mounted on a
gold leaf electroscope with double glass cover, on a base which can hold lime
to dry the air (80fr)
Faraday apparatus, for the rotation of a magnet in mercury, with counter-
balance in platinum (90fr)
Large Biot ellipsoid, insulated, mounted on stand (90fr)
Ampere apparatus, to produce rotation of a circular current, in acidulated
water, with a bundle of small needles (49fr) (4/10 TD85/67, SRO)
By 1851, the first major cycle of credibility had been completed. The College had
invested in its new natural philosophy professor. He in tum had carried through a
radical modernization of the classroom spaces: the very finest acoustical, electrical
and other apparatus had been procured from the most prestigious instrument makers
of Paris. Thomson's classroom credibility and the place of natural philosophy had
been secured.
4. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE DIVISION OF CRAFT LABOUR
'There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be carried
on no where but in a great town', wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
Smith's Glasgow had been a 'great town' of some 12 000 people; but Thomson's
Glasgow was a teeming city of around a quarter of a million souls. Unlike those
Highland villages where 'every farmer must be butcher, baker and brewer for his
own family' and where we could not expect to find 'a smith, a carpenter, or a
mason within less than twenty miles of another of the same trade' (Smith, 1976,
vol. 1: 31 ), Glasgow flourished upon competition among practitioners of each
specialist division of craft labour eager to display their skills in ever more varied
products. Its economic cosmopolitanism thus offered unrivalled resources for
every variety of enterprising and energetic entrepreneur. We shall see just how
firmly Thomson's scientific practices were embedded in the industrial city.
At first, Robert Finlay, in business as optical, mathematical and philosophical
instrument maker at various Glasgow addresses between 1846 and 1850 (Bryden,
1972: 45), carried out maintenance on Thomson's existing stock. In April 1849,
for. instance, Finlay's account totalled almost £9 for various items including
supply of battery plates and repairs to a Stirling air engine which Thomson had
found in the College two years earlier. When Finlay ceased trading in 1850,
Thomson does not seem to have depended on any one firm for maintenance, but
to have contracted work with various artisans as and when required. In 1854, for
example, the Gorbals Brass Foundry repaired a model of a Brahmah press (8/4,
4/8,9/12, 17/14,9/23 TD85/67, SRO; Smith and Wise, 1989: 294-9).
For new instruments Thomson relied heavily on the technical skills of his
assistant Robert Mansell. But he could also sub-contract local workshops (such as
those of Finlay or James White) to do all or part of the construction. These arti-
sans supplied parts for new apparatus designed by Thomson, tools for the appara-
tus room, chemicals and fuel for the class-room 'economy', and often carried out
repairs to the considerable stock of delicate instruments already in action. Indeed,
one of the reasons Thomson gave for declining the offer of the new Cavendish
chair of experimental physics in 1870 was that 'the convenience of Glasgow for
getting mechanical work done' gave him 'means of action which I could not have
in any other place' (Thomson to H. W. Cookson, I December 1870, quoted in
Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 563).
Thomson frequently turned to Glasgow suppliers for metallic, glass, and timber
artefacts required as part of classroom capital. For example, in December 1846 he
ordered furnaces for glass blowing and iron working from Richard Griffin & Co.
Crosbie Smith 127
In the 1848-49 session, he required the edge tool manufacturer George Young,
Old Vennal, to grind and buff 23 pieces of iron. In the same session, plumbers and
lead merchants Archibald McWhannel & Co., supplied a set of battery plates and a
13! pound sheet of zinc. Similarly, the Crown & Sheet Glass & Bottle Works of
Borron, Price & Kidston at Port Dundas despatched a glass wheel and several
pieces of glass rod (1/5, 3/2, 3/4, 4/3 TD85/67, SRO). In connection with new
apparatus that he was constructing for experiments on the generation of heat by
fluid friction, he ordered various weights from the Cumberland Foundry, 168
Gallowgate, and contracted the tinsmith William Clark, 44 John Street, to carry
out alterations to a tin box (3/22-23 TD85/67, SRO). These examples, relating to
one session only, show the extent to which Professor Thomson exploited the craft
skills in the neighbourhood of the Old College.
The same diversity of supply held good for chemicals and fuel. In a typical
year, 1853-54, considerable quantities of chemicals found their way on to the
class-room accounts: 5! lb mercury and 4! lb 'metallic antimony' from the
Glasgow Apothecaries Company in Virginia Street, three carboys (glass contain-
ers with almost 200 lb of sulphuric acid each) of 'vitriol' and 56 lb 'Roman
vitriol' (copper sulphate) from Charles Tennant of the famous St Rollox chemical
works, and about 150 lb of nitric acid from the chemical supplier Caldwell,
Robertson, of Croy Place, Glasgow. These chemicals were principally for con-
sumption in the (mainly thermoelectric) experiments being undertaken at the
time. Supply was plentiful and relatively cheap - about 12 shillings for a carboy
of vitriol, for example. Equally, the two tons of coal required annually to heat the
classroom came from the Monkland Canal Basin at little more (sometimes less)
than 10 shillings per ton (8/13, 8119, 911, 9/3, 9/5, 9111, 9/19, 9/25, 1011-2
TD85/67, SRO).
From Professor Thomson's lectures for the experimental natural philosophy
course in 1849-50, however, we are able to recover one strategy which served to
differentiate the skills of the Glasgow experimental natural philosopher, located
in the privileged space of appamtus room, from that of instrument maker or other
workshop artisan. In this session, Thomson devoted three lectures to a thorough
discussion of the techniques of thermometer construction. The first technique was
familiar to experimental philosophers and artisans alike. It concerned the practi-
cal procedures, with attendant precautions, for filling the glass tube with spirit or
mercury and sealing it against the ingress of air and moisture (Lecture Xlll, 22
November 1849, MS Gen. 142, ULG).
The second technique, one of quality control rather than manufacture, formed an
essential prelude to the making of accurate instruments. Thomson noted 'the cau-
tions which must be attended to in graduating thermometers'. For very accurate
instruments, calibration required that a small portion of mercury- 'say about an
inch'- be put into the tube between A and A 1• The length of the mercury was then
accurately measured before being pushed along the tube to A 1A2• The new distance
was also accurately measured, 'and if it is not found to be equal with AA 1, the tube
is not considered as sufficient for the purpose'. Thus 'by pushing the mercury
forward & measuring it in the different parts of the tube it is found out when the
tube is a good one' before blowing the bulb. Here then was a distinct role for the
experimental natural philosopher. Accurate testing by precision measurement was
not available from the instrument makers to the extent required by scientific
researchers working in a laboratory context at the frontiers of knowledge. As
Thomson explained: 'Before blowing the bulbs Regnault tests them in this way &
then gives the instruments to Fastre to be made. This process is also done by Joule
of Manchester' (Lecture XVI, 27 November 1849, MS Gen. 142, ULG).
Further evidence of the role that Thomson was promoting for the experimental
philosopher in contrast to artisans may be found in subsequent lectures. He dis-
cussed the rationale of employing an air thermometer as the preferred standard
for graduating a mercury one on account of the insensible effect of the expansion
of glass on the former, unlike its very sensible effect on the latter thermometer. In
another lecture, he also noted that 'The freezing point of the ordinary thermome-
ter is apt to change in the course of usage on account of an alteration of the glass.
Thus it is necessary to test it sometimes and if any alteration of the freezing point
has taken place to make an allowance for it.' Standardizing and testing were
therefore key tasks for the experimental philosopher. In the same lecture,
Thomson pointed out the limitation on the use of glass set by its melting point
and necessitating the employment of pyrometers. Revealingly, he contrasted the
needs of the manufacturer with those of the scientific researcher: 'Wedgwood
made his from porcelain clay. It is found to contract when heated. It may do for
measuring the heat of a porcelain furnace but not for research' (Lectures XVIII &
XXII, 29 November & 4 December 1849, MS Gen. 142, ULG).
These thermometric concerns derived directly from Thomson's current thermo-
dynamic researches (Smith and Wise, 1989: 282, 294-9). In particular, he and his
assistant, Mansell, had just begun measuring the depression of the freezing point
of ice under pressure, for which they required a very accurate thermometer. An
ether thermometer had been constructed for this purpose by Mansell: 'This ther-
mometer is assuredly the most delicate that ever was made, there being 71 divi-
sions in a single degree of Fahr'.,' the professor told his class (Lecture XLV, 17
January 1850, MS Gen. 142, ULG). In a remarkable letter to Forbes, he recorded
the course of experimental work almost as it happened. At first, there appeared to
be problems with standardizing the new thermometer:
The ether thermometer wh Mansell has made for me is so sensitive that more
than 2 i[nches] (nearly three I think) correspond to 1o Fahr. We have divided the
tube very roughly, & we find that somewhere about 70 divisions correspond to
1o Fahr. I have found it quite impossible as yet however, & with the means I
have at my command to get anything but the rudest estimate of the value of my
divisions in Fahr. degrees. The estimate I mention was made by comparing our
ether thermt with one of Crichton's, but there are great difficulties, I find, in the
Crosbie Smith 129
way of making any comparison at all, & it will be impossible, without other
means of comparison, to attain to any satisfactory accuracy.
(Thomson to Forbes, 10 January 1850, FP)
Later in the letter, Thomson admitted that at this point he was not obtaining the
hoped-for agreement between James's theoretical prediction and the experimental
results: hence he attempted to cover himself with the option of explaining away the
discrepancies in terms of the problems of comparison. However, everything
changed in the course of penning the letter: 'As soon as we got the thermometer
(hermetically sealed in a glass tube) into Oersted's apparatus [for demonstrating the
compressibility of water, purchased from Pixii] everything was satisfactory. The
column of ether remained absolutely stationary until pressure was applied'. Then:
When 9 atmospheres of pressure was applied by the piston, the column of ether
sank very rapidly, and appeared to settle about 7f divisions lower than previ-
ously. After that we gave the mass of ice & water in the apparatus a pressure of
19 atmospheres, and the column of ether sank again very rapidly, until it
stopped as nearly as possible I7f divisions below the primitive position. If 70
of these divisions correspond to 1o Fahr., the temperature of the mixture of ice
& water would have been lowered by .250 of a Fahr. degree, or by .139 of a
degree cent. Now according to my brother's theory & calculations, 19 atmos-
pheres ought to lower the freezing point by .1425°, and therefore the agreement
is wonderfully satisfactory.
Thomson admitted 'The fact is when I commenced writing to you I was afraid the
agreement was not satisfactory, because the result of my brother's, wh I remem-
bered was, I thought, adapted to Fahrenheit's scale'. He thus confessed frankly
that he had only just 'become aware of the agreement wh really surprises me by
being so close'. Here indeed is a revealing private confession: only with the per-
ceived agreement are the doubts about the 'rudest estimate of the value of my
divisions' and the possibility of attaining 'to any satisfactory accuracy' suddenly
forgotten amid the desire 'as soon as possible to communicate a notice to the
Royal Society [of Edinburgh] and to have something published (a few Jines
would do) in the Philosophical Magazine, so that people may repeat the experi-
ment before the frost goes'.
This example serves to illustrate the ways by which Thomson accumulated
scientific credibility. Deploying his new stock of apparatus alongside purpose-
built instrumentation, he would conduct experimental trials in the apparatus room
in the presence of his assistant and perhaps one or two students or friends. He
would then communicate preliminary results in an informal or even private
manner to his classroom audience or to Forbes as his closest colleague in natural
philosophy. At this level, conflicts were identified, debated and perhaps resolved.
Given a positive response, private confidence quickly increased. Forbes, as
secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, would then typically arrange for
Thomson to go public at a meeting of the Society. Publication in the pages of the
Society's Transactions or in the Philosophical Magazine would follow.
In this section as a whole, I have shifted focus from Thomson's classroom to
his 'behind-the-scenes' apparatus room. Several issues emerge. Crucially, in this
phase of Glasgow natural philosophy, the apparatus room is not simply a passive
receptacle for the storage of pristine instruments and demonstration apparatus
imported from London or Paris. Rather, Thomson had now creatively mobilized
this College space both for the development of instruments of his own and for the
concomitant practice of his original experimental research. Significantly, 'the
great town' enabled him to utilize the craft skills available through a wide variety
of instrument makers, manufacturers and tradesmen. But, as Charles Babbage had
already recognized in his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
(1832), 'division of labour' often involved a hierarchy of skill, a division accord-
ing to degrees of skill rather than just manual work (Wise, 1989-90: 410-1 ).
Thomson's apparatus room thus became the place where experimental skills,
aiming at accuracies as yet unavailable elsewhere in the city, would be practised
and communicated. Imperceptibly, the space for experiment was being trans-
formed into the space of the physical laboratory.
5. THE PHYSICAL LABORATORY
While in Paris in the spring of 1845 to Jearn something of the art of lecturing to a
'popular' audience through demonstration experiments, the young Cambridge
graduate was introduced to the little-known territory of Victor Regnault's physi-
cal laboratory with its emphasis on accurate measurement of the properties of
matter (Dorries, this volume). In his letters to Glasgow, Thomson explained that
there were no pupils working with him, 'as in a chemical laboratory' (William to
Robert Thomson, 5 March 1845, T557, KCULC), while in his mathematical diary
he recorded his own privileged role as voluntary assistant: 'I am occupied the
whole day in Regnault's physical laboratory [de physique] at the College de
France' (published in Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 126-7). Thomson here used the
same title, 'physical laboratory', that was to designate his own research and
teaching space a few years later.
The first 'official' documentary reference to his laboratory qua laboratory
occurred in the 'Minutes of Faculty' in January 1857 (MF 87: 328). Yet labora-
tory-based research had been feeding into his lectures from the earliest sessions.
Why, then, had these research spaces apparently remained terra incognito to the
Faculty? 12 We may suppose that Thomson employed the apparatus room adjacent
to the classroom for these purposes rather than any additional private laboratory
space. It is probable, however, that Thomson chose to steer a delicate political
course Jest his research activities in the apparatus room be interpreted as an
Crosbie Smith 131
unofficial deployment of College capital for personal aggrandisement. Some

years earlier, Nichol had faced accusations of unauthorized use of the
Observatory's stock of astronomical instruments (James (father) to William
Thomson, 12 January 1842, Tl9l, KCULC; Knight, 1896: xi; Coutts, 1909:
388-9). On the other hand, Thomas Thomson's chemical laboratory had long
been officially funded, albeit outside the boundaries of the College itself (Morrell,
1969b; Marsden, this volume). William Thomson, by contrast, sought to mobilize
space for his physical laboratory within the College.
As the number of students assisting him increased, Professor Thomson began
to increase space for laboratory use. By 1855, the employment of student 'volun-
teers' had become a well-established practice. 'I have been keeping experimental
work going on with all the hands I can get applied, and have made out one or two
new results since the beginning of the session', he told his brother (William to
James Thomson, 12 January 1850, T444, KCULC). His capacity to enlist 'volun-
teers' went back to at least 1847 when he employed his assistant and 'another, for
relief to tum 'the machine' he had designed for the production of heat by fluid
friction through a rotating disc of tin plate with radial vanes on each side
(Thomson to Forbes, 5 December 1847, Fl90, KCULC).
Not only were an increasing number of 'volunteer' pupils engaged in experi-
mental research, but the prospect of expansion into telegraphic business was
firmly in his mind from the close of 1854. By the spring of 1855 he was ordering
quantities of gutta percha from local suppliers and was employing the Glasgow
wright (joiner) William McCall to begin a series of extensive alterations to the
classroom between March 1855 and December 1856. Thomson appears at this
time to have acquired additional space adjacent to his own classroom and above
the moral philosophy classroom (10/4, 1017, 10/9 TD85/67, SRO; MF 87: 220).
In April 1856 the professor of moral philosophy initiated what was probably
the very last battle fought by the tory old guard. In an eight-point paper laid
before the Faculty, Fleming opened his attack by stating with respect to the pro-
posed alterations that advance notice had not been given and that the matter had
only been raised after the chairman had vacated the chair at the Faculty meeting
on 23 November 1855. Fleming then strongly objected that the Committee had
'proceeded further to alter and appropriate to the use of the Professor of Natural
Philosophy a closet which had hitherto been used by the Professors of Natural
History and of Civil Engineering when they taught in the class-room adjoining'
(MF 87: 267-70; Gooday, 1990: 31).
Worse still, the moral philosophy professor 'was more than once annoyed and
interrupted by the noise made by the workmen employed insomuch that he was
under the necessity of stopping his Lecture and sending to see that the workmen
should desist which they were not very willing to do in consequence of the orders
they had got to urge on the work'. Here indeed was the clash of the old and the
new moral orders: the old, scholarly learning aimed at the preservation of the
status quo versus the new aggressive ethics of work, wealth and progress.
Furthermore, Fleming stressed that the disturbance to his class had continued
even after completion of the alterations.
Worst of all, however, Fleming complained that 'among the alterations made on
the room alluded to, water has been introduced and on one occasion it overflowed
or was spilt so as to damage and disfigure the ceiling of the Moral Philosophy
Class-room - an occurrence which is liable or likely to recur again'. The literal
disfigurement of the moral philosophy classroom symbolized for Professor
Fleming the insidious encroachment of the new natural philosophy upon the old
moral philosophy order. For the Principal and his most loyal henchman, the
College stood aloof from the new industrial culture. While it might draw its stu-
dents from the mercantile orders, the College would transform those students into
ministers of the established Kirk whose patrons were aristocrats and whose genteel
intellectual culture was far removed from the competitive struggles of a market
economy. Fleming's protests against Thomson, then, were as much an attempt to
prevent the intrusion and interference of a new and 'progressive' moral order
which threatened to change and perhaps ultimately destroy the hallowed medieval
spaces of Glasgow College. Fleming's resistance, however, failed to command
substantial support within the College. His protests apparently shelved, he had to
try again more than a year later in May 1857 by proposing the motion that 'the
room adjoining the Natural Philosophy Class be no longer occupied as it has been
during the last two years' and demanding that 'the accounts connected with the
fitting of this room be not paid till the inconvenience is rectified' (MF 87: 359-60).
In response, the Faculty appointed another committee consisting of Professors
Hill and Allen Thomson 'to report on the whole circumstances and advise the
College as to a course to be adopted'. Reporting in August on the 'Laboratory of
the Physic [sic] Class', the Committee deemed itself appointed 'to consider the
best means of forming a laboratory on the ground floor in connection with the
Natural Philosophy Class-room in place of one on the upper floor now in use'. It
then recommended that the space beneath the natural philosophy classroom
should 'be rendered available for a laboratory or supplemental room to be allo-
cated to the Professor of Natural Philosophy'. Various structural alterations,
including access to the classroom above, not to exceed £40 were authorized (MF
87: 366-8).
Early in November 1857, the Committee reported again on what was now
officially labelled 'physical laboratory': the apartments on the ground floor below
the classroom 'have been thrown into one and otherwise repaired so as to render
it suitable for a laboratory and experimental room .. .'. The expenses totalled
about £34, which the Faculty approved and authorized a further £43 'to have the
room fitted up'. The final total, presented to the Faculty in late March 1858, came
to just over £72, once again confirming the skill of the natural philosophy profes-
sor at operating well within his budget (MF 88: 3-4, 43). Meanwhile, in
December 1857 Thomson had assured the Faculty that the rooms, now referred to
as the 'former laboratory', above the moral philosophy classroom would 'not be
Crosbie Smith 133
used so as to annoy the Professor of Moral Philosophy in his teaching'. With this
assurance, 'Dr Fleming withdrew his protest ... and the Faculty ordered payment
of the thirteen pounds as recommended' (MF 88: 23-4).
As a result of these tactics, Thomson had achieved considerably more than the
wish expressed by Nichol in 1846 that natural philosophy might occupy as
important a role in the University as moral philosophy. By the early 1860s, his
'annexation' of the old ground-floor 'Blackstone' examination room beneath his
apparatus room gave him unrivalled territorial power at the heart of the College.
David Murray, student at this period, even noted that Professor Thomson had the
use of the College tower, 'which was approached through the Apparatus room
and was convenient for various experiments, particularly when a long perpendic-
ular drop was required, and he likewise had possession of certain of the rooms in
the tower'. Murray also commented that 'Students worked in the tower and tower
rooms and in the Apparatus room as well as in the laboratory' (Murray, 1924:
14). All of these moves constituted a deliberate entrepFeneurial strategy on the
part of the professor to promote and expand natural philosophy at Glasgow
College. The few remnants of opposition, such as Fleming, may well have
wondered whether even the College Chapel was safe from Professor Thomson's
territorial ambitions. 13
The creative transformation of apparatus room into physical laboratory has
here been presented in terms of a renegotiation of function with his College peers
and paymasters. Even as late as 1860, however, he acknowledged to his
Cambridge friend, the Lucasian professor of mathematics George Gabriel Stokes,
that the laboratory 'involves, as the primary and essential work, the preparation of
illustrations for my lectures during the winter six months'. This original and
official function therefore continued. What had changed was that Thomson could
now openly declare that:
The 'general experimental work of my laboratory' includes not only endeav-

ours to investigate new truth, for which alone ... I have asked assistance from
the Royal Society .... I have besides instituted a system of experimental exer-
cise for laboratory pupils .... During the winter session I have about 20 such
laboratory pupils (all volunteers and paying no laboratory fee) ...
(Thomson to Stokes, 7 February 1860, Kill, SCULC)
Substantial numbers of students were now permitted to cross the frontier between
classroom lectures and what had hitherto been largely private research space.
Their presence went some way to changing that private space into public space.
Yet the boundary was to remain very fluid. On the one hand, the 'volunteers'
paid no fees, and so their work could be construed as an extension of the profes-
sor's private researches rather than part of the official undergraduate curriculum.
On the other hand, he described them as 'laboratory pupils', implying a very dif-
ferent status from mere visitors or spectators. Nor were they there as witnesses,
competent to pronounce on the legitimacy of the experiments. Rather, they were

in the laboratory to acquire the skills of the experimental natural philosopher,
skills which alone guaranteed the proper investigation of truths about nature.
Professor Thomson, then, had persuaded his peers that the authority of the
natural philosopher was not limited to the classroom presence of the professor,
armed with chalk and demonstration apparatus. Communication of existing truths
had to be complemented by an engagement with the investigation of new truth.
The physical laboratory, rather than the classroom, had now become both the
privileged site and the spatial embodiment of Professor Thomson's authority. But
Thomson had been simultaneously constructing another function for these
research and teaching spaces, a function which would not only enhance his
credibility within the University but which would do more than any other
facet of his career to link his work spatially to the Second City of the Empire
and to the Empire itself.
Having attained a high level of classroom efficiency by the autumn of 1854,
ThomsQn had begun to look for fresh entrepreneurial initiatives. With the
prospect of a serious attempt at the laying of a transatlantic telegraph under dis-
cussion at the BAAS that year, he sought rapid publication of his mathematical
treatment of the electric telegraph (Smith and Wise, 1989: 445-53), noting in a
letter to G. G. Stokes: 'I should be much obliged if you would not mention to any
one what I wrote to you regarding the remedy for the anticipated difficulty in
telegraphic communication, at present, as Rankine has suggested that I should
join with him in applying for a patent for a way of putting it in practice ... '
(Thomson to Stokes, 1 December 1854, K75. SCULC). Early in 1855 he wrote to
his brother:
Did you see that I have applied for a patent, with Rankine [professor of
engineering] and John Thomson [son of Dr William Thomson], for an
improvement on telegraphic conductors! I accidentally got on to the theory of
the propagation of electricity by submarine wires, one day in October before
leaving Largs, which showed me at once what would be necessary to ensure
efficiency for great distances (300 miles or more) which led to this, Rankine
having suggested the plan of taking a patent, which I had no idea of at first. In
a few days I expect it will be secured to us: in the meantime don't say even as
much as I have said to you, on the subject. I am not very hopeful of making
anything of it, but it is possible that it may be profitable.
(William to James Thomson, 13 January 1855, T442, KCULC)
In the same year Thomson began his territorial expansion within the College, partly,
as we have seen, to accommodate a growing number of 'volunteer' pupils, but also
to prepare for the experimental work necessary for the development of his new tele-
graphic interests. Within three years, the professor was funding a substantial pro-
gramme of telegraphic instrument development which involved a growing (but still
Crosbie Smith 135
informal) partnership with the Glasgow instrument maker James White whose earli-
est business with Thomson probably dated from 1854 (9/12 TD85/67, SRO).
Following the failure of an initial attempt to lay an Atlantic telegraph cable in
the summer of 1857, Thomson designed his first telegraphic instrument, the
famous marine-mirror galvanometer. Patenting of the instrument in February
1858 coincided with completion of a major phase of laboratory expansion (Smith
and Wise, 1989: 667-9; Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 348-9; MF 88: 43). In the
months prior to the 1858 cable-laying expedition, Thomson's telegraphic instru-
ment work involved a significant investment of time and capital. Thus he wrote
to Forbes from Glasgow College in April 1858 of the intense activity under
way there and at Devonport where he could transfer and reproduce some of his
physical laboratory procedures (compare Latour, 1983: 141-70):
I am almost out of my depth in the Atlantic Telegraph. That is to say I am

attempting to complete working instruments for both ends, and have them
tested before the 14th of May when the Niagara will be removea from dock
with her half of the cable. It has turned out after all that the practical solution
of the problem of speaking at a tolerable rate through the cable [sic]. The esti-
mate I made before the Company existed is rather less than half what the pro-
jectors estimated, & just about three times what they have succeeded in
realizing. Three days ago at Devonport a fortnight ago sufficed to let me test
my plan, & get regularly a letter every three seconds through 2700 miles of
cable. Since that time I have commenced making instruments, in the first place
at my own expense, for actual work ... I should be very glad to show you all
that I have in progress, if you were to come here, but as you will believe, I am
in a state of sad confusion of preparation, and have very little of anything fit to
be seen, just now. (Thomson to Forbes, 24 Apri! 1858, FP)
Unlike the College funded classroom apparatus, capital investment now came ini-
tially from Thomson himself. On 13 April he had asked the company for £2000
to fund development of new signalling instruments, but had been refused. The
Company did, however, grant him £500 following a further request ten days later
(Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 353-4).
In the 'development' phase, that of instrument trials in April and May 1858
immediately following provisional protection of the patent, 'expenses' amounted
to £430. Between March and July, instrumentation work carried out by James
White added another £308. Allowing for the £500 granted by the Company, that
left £238 invested by Thomson. In the 'innovation' phase up to 1870, White
instruments supplied to Thomson under the patent of 1858 (following completion
of the patent) amounted to £799, with another £100 of estimated expenses
incurred by Thomson, an estimated £630 in salaries and payments to assistants
for testing the mirror and related instruments, £200 in travelling and personal
expenses 'to make the instruments known and to obtain agreements for working
them', and £261 for drawings and specification required for the patent. White
received over£ 1100 of business related to the development of telegraphic instru-
ments from Thomson between 1858 and 1870, much of it in the first three years.
Altogether, Thomson had spent some £2300 on telegraphic instrument develop-
ment up to 1871 (24/49, 13/24-5, 14110 TD85/67, SRO).I 4
Complementing the laboratory as the site for 'invention' was its function of
testing and calibrating instruments. A former student explained in 1870 that 'The
success of the Atlantic Cable is in great measure the result of years of patient
work in the Glasgow Laboratory,- experimenting on the strength of batteries, the
tenacity and electric conductivity of wires, and the capacity of different sub-
stances for resisting the action of water, and testing and perfecting the numerous
exquisite instruments of Sir William Thomson's invention.' Furthermore, 'the
excellent electrometers turned out by the Glasgow makers owe much of their
value to the fact that each one has been carefully tested and regulated in the
University Laboratory before it is sent out for service'. Yet another related func-
tion, indeed, was the training in Glasgow of students for home and foreign tele-
graph service: 'at the laying of the French Atlantic Cable two of the best practical
and scientific electricians were young men selected from the Glasgow class'
(Miller, 1870: 118-19).
Following the 'successful laying' but 'failed operation' of the 1858 transat-
lantic cable, Thomson's speech at a banquet given in his honour by Glasgow's
Lord Provost presented his own 'contribution' as part of a larger investment by
the second city of the Empire. His physical laboratory had supplied the marine
mirror galvanometer that would enhance the speed of working and hence the
profitability of such cables. But it was also to both 'the assistance of students of
the University of Glasgow, and to the high ability and energy of Glasgow instru-
ment makers, by whom scientific principles, novel in conception, were under-
stood and carried out with extraordinary promptitude, we are indebted for the
realisation of ideas which, without the aid of the practical element, must have
remained powerless to achieve material results' in support of 'an undertaking in
which all mankind are interested' (Glasgow Herald, 21 January, 1859:
Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 389-96).
'All mankind', in the guise of the Empire that demanded successful underwater
cables, conferred upon him a knighthood in the wake of the 1866 transatlantic
telegraph expedition. Glasgow, which now shared in the reflected glory of the tri-
umphant conclusion of the project, conferred upon its adopted son the freedom of
the city. According to its Lord Provost, 'Sir William Thomson has provided the
world of thought with the finest instruments of observation and research, and the
world of action with the means of carrying the messages of commerce and civiliza-
tion which have yet to cross the uncabled oceans that separate the families of the
earth'. Banquets held during the autumn of 1866 in the City of London, in Liverpool
and in Dublin brought Sir William into the circles of cabinet ministers, parliamentar-
ians, bankers and merchant princes (Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 502-6). 15
Crosbie Smith 137
6. FUNDING A NEW UNIVERSITY
From the 1840s, the Glasgow College reformers promoted a radical solution to
the growing problem of the neighbourhood poor. An Act of Parliament in the
autumn of 1846 sanctioned the sale of the College land off the High Street to the
Glasgow, Airdrie, and Monklands Junction Railway Company 'with a view of
their acquiring the College grounds and buildings for a station and other purposes
connected with bringing their intended line into the city' (Thomson, 1870: viii).
After unanimously electing William Thomson as the new natural philosophy pro-
fessor on 11 September 1846, the Faculty received a motion proposing a vote of
thanks to everyone who had contributed to the College removal scheme and
explaining the principal advantages which would accrue from leaving a site 'not
only unpleasant and unhealthy as a residence, but attended with serious danger to
the morals of the students' (MF 85: 282-3). The reform of the natural philosophy
classroom and the removal of the university to a new site were to become even
more closely entwined over the next two decades.
The financial deal with the railways entailed the transfer to the College of
about 22 acres of land at Woodlands (lying to the west of the old town) already
purchased by the railway companies for £30 000, together with a sum of up to
£100 000 for the new buildings. Negotiations over finance and planning delayed
the project until 1848, by which time the collapse of the railway boom wrecked
the initial scheme. But the College received handsome compensation of £10 000
which, by investment in land, increased over the next two decades to £17 500
(James (father) to William Thomson, 21 October 1845, T324, KCULC;
Thomson, 1870: viii; Coutts, 1909: 415-19).
Meanwhile, student numbers increased from about 800 in 1846 to over 1200 in
each of the years 1863 to 1867, of whom over 400 were from Lanarkshire (with
Glasgow at its heart) and about the same number from the neighbouring West of
Scotland. With a majority of whig professors now in control, these figures could
be deployed as a demonstration of a 50 per cent growth over the two decades up
to 1867, representing a dramatic reversal of previous decline and confirming the
progressively-increasing credibility of the institution in the eyes of its customers
(NCB 2202: 113). 16
A concomitant aura of prosperity also surrounded Sir William's natural philoso-
phy classes. During the session 1869-70 the final illness of Lady Thomson
entailed the employment of a substitute professor, R. Kalley Miller, who offered a
valuable synopsis of the classes to the Cambridge University Reporter (1870) at a
time when the new Cavendish chair of experimental physics was under discussion
(Schaffer, this volume). Glasgow natural philosophy divided into 'three entirely
distinct departments': popular experimental lectures; the higher mathematical
course; and the laboratory. The whole class, some 114 students, attended the first
department. About 30 of these students were engineering students, while most of
the others followed the traditional Arts curriculum. Many of these Arts students, of
course, were en route to the presbyterian ministry. In contrast, the second depart-
ment, involving a knowledge of the differential calculus and studying topics such
as the analytical theory of heat, consisted of only about a dozen students. Finally,
the laboratory attracted some fifteen volunteers who spent from three to six hours a
day in this privileged research and teaching space (Miller, 1870: 118).
Once the Report of the Scottish University Commissioners (published 1863)
recommended a modest grant from public funds for a revised removal proposal,
the City of Glasgow Union Railway Company offered to purchase the High Street
property. Agreement involved a purchase price of £100 000 for about 25 acres of
College land. The College was then free to purchase land further to the west of
the city than Woodlands, including the Gilmorehill site of about 21 acres, at a
combined cost of £63 000. The ambitious architectural scheme for the
Gilmorehill site far exceeded the remaining funds and so the 'citizens of
Glasgow, and some of the men of influence and station in the neighbouring coun-
ties, at once came forward to aid the enterprise' (Thomson, 1870: viii-xi). A
public meeting in 1865 to support the raising of public subscriptions declared:
its earnest desire that by means of large public subscriptions in supplement to

Government aid the new University, in the extent of its accommodation and
the style of its architecture, may be worthy of the past history, the present use-
fulness, and the future career of this great National Academic Institution;
worthy, too, of the magnificent site on which it is to be placed; worthy also of
the city of Glasgow, of which it will be a conspicuous ornament; and worthy,
in fine, of the intelligence, liberality, and foresight of the citizens of Glasgow
and the inhabitants of the West of Scotland, for whose sons and their descen-
dants for centuries to come the inestimable benefits of a comprehensive and
efficient University education are to be provided within its walls
(Thomson, 1870: xii).
From 1865, University professors spearheaded a series of campaigns to raise

public subscriptions and obtain government support for the 'New College
Buildings'. Typically, individual professors visited well-targeted potential sub-
scribers, notably local industrialists. But the ambitious Glasgow academics sought
to raise capital not simply on a local but on a national scale (NCB 2230: 348).
In January 1866 a University deputation arrived in Manchester, on the invita-
tion of the telegraph financier John Pender, with the explicit aim of meeting with
'certain influential Scotch gentlemen resident in that city, who may be expected
to subscribe to the New College Buildings and Hospital'. The deputation included
Professor Thomson, Professor W. J. M. Rankine and anatomy professor Allen
Thomson, as well as a small number of other eminent Glasgow citizens. A select
dinner at Mr Pender's house 'with several Scotch gentlemen' preceded a meeting
the next day in Mr Pender's office to which upwards of 70 'Scotch Gentlemen
and others resident in Manchester' had been invited (NCB 2230: 368, 461-3).
Crosbie Smith 139
One of Thomson's friends, the 'latitudinarian' Rev. Dr Norman Macleod,

addressed the meeting 'regarding the National importance and character of the
Glasgow University- the various countries and districts from which its students
were drawn and their great number - the Catholic nature of its usefulness and the
thoroughly unsectarian principles of the institution as establishing for it a claim
not only on the patriotism of Scotchmen, but on the liberality of all those who
were interested in the higher education'. Here the speaker expressed the essence_
of the ideology which had characterized the reform campaigns of Glasgow pro-
fessors such as James Thomson and J. P. Nichol: a dislike of religious 'sects'
with exclusive and specific doctrines (Roman Catholicism and Protestant funda-
mentalism, for example), a distaste for local nationalisms, and an appeal to reli-
gious and political values with universal (properly 'catholic') rather than merely
local validity (NCB 2230: 461-3).'7
These values were ultimately embodied in the Gothic architecture of the new
cathedral of knowledge which would express both the universality of those
British and Christian values in space as well as their permanence through time. In
a fierce critique of the choice of the celebrated English architect Sir George Scott,
however, Glasgow's own Alexander 'Greek' Thomson condemned such Gothic
revivalists in a lecture delivered in 1866:
[They] are fond of catching hold of people by their prejudices. They say theirs
is the national style, and this assertion has come to be admitted almost gener-
ally. Yet nobody seems to understand what it means. It certainly had not a
national origin, and, although it was practised in this country for some cen-
turies and assumed national and local peculiarities, the same may be claimed
for the Classic styles. But they tell us that it suits the national taste. Now this
argument, if it is worth anything at all, might be advanced after it had been
proved that Gothic is the best style, otherwise it is no compliment to the nation.
(MS Gen. 798, ULG)
Unshaken by such criticism the promoters too knew how to 'catch hold of
people by their prejudices'. Appealing directly to the values of the Manchester
Scots, Sheriff Bell of Glasgow revived another well-worked theme. He thus
impressed 'on the meeting the important aid rendered by the College of
Glasgow to the Commercial and manufacturing interests of the Country
through the teaching of Adam Smith and the labours of James Watt, in the
diffusion of the principles of Free Trade and in the development of applied
science'(NCB 2230: 461-3). The political significance of these remarks,
emphasizing the national importance of Glasgow College's contributions,
lies in the fact that the professors of Owens College, Manchester, were at
this very time anxious to promote the expansion of their own institution, espe-
cially in scientific and industrial terms (Thompson, 1886: 312-39; Gooday,
1989: ch. 7).
Glasgow's claims to national importance reached Downing Street in May 1867

when Professors William Thomson (natural philosophy), Allen Thomson (anatomy),
Rankine (engineering) and Hugh Blackburn (mathematics) formed a select deputa-
tion to the Earl of Derby (Prime Minister) and Benjamin Disraeli (Chancellor of the
Exchequer). One item in their 'Memorial' dated 7 May made the claim that 'Owing
to modem improvements and extensions in the modes of teaching, various addi-
tional appliances are required in several departments, such as Physics, Engineering,
Chemistry, Physiology and Anatomy; and in particular a Physical Laboratory requir-
ing considerable space is necessary, no provision for which was made in the plans of
1846' (NCB 2202: 113). At a time when political demands for an expansion of
science education were very much coming to the fore, it is clear that the quartet of
Glasgow science professors were determined to stake their claims in the strongest
possible manner. It was also noteworthy that none of the traditional subjects such as
Greek, Humanity, moral philosophy, or logic were represented in the deputation.
The four 'science' chairs embodied subjects of 'national importance', and as such
were more likely to persuade the Government of the wealth to be derived for the
Empire from the improvement of university education. 18
At the opening of the new University in 1870, Professor Allen Thomson pro-
claimed the 'extraordinary success' of all these efforts which showed 'that the
University possessed in an eminent degree the cordial sympathy of the public'
and 'bearing most honourable testimony to the value attached to the benefits of
learning by the inhabitants of our great commercial city and neighbourhood'
(Thomson, 1870: xiii). Remits had poured in from many sources, including large
sums from Clyde shipbuilders and engineers (£2000 from Messrs Robert Napier
in 1869, for example), from Manchester Scots (£1000 from Pender in 1866), and
from local aristocrats (£2000 from the Duke of Hamilton in 1866) (NCB 2229:
854; 2202: 22, 109). Over £130 000 had been raised to which the Government of
Lord Derby was persuaded to 'propose to Parliament a grant in aid of the build-
ing-fund'. Thus another £120 000 was added to the enterprise. These moves
brought from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Disraeli, the favourable statement
in 1868 'that the principle of supporting institutions for the promotion of learning
had always been recognized in this country ... and that in the case of Glasgow,
which had been examined by the Government, was that of a poor University with
a very spirited Committee, who wished to place the institution on a basis suitable
to the wants of the age, and who had subscribed in a very munificent manner'
(Thomson, 1870: xv).
Other speeches at the opening of the new buildings highlighted the perceived
connections between 'science' and 'wealth', embodied in the mythology of James
Watt. With unintended irony, the Duke of Montrose acclaimed Watt as 'a citizen
of their own ... lowly in origin, but strong in intellect and perseverence, with
small means to carry out his own inventions, but still becoming in later life the
father and practical inventor of the great machine which had brought fortune and
prosperity to this city, and was now the great means of ... universal locomotion
Crosbie Smith 141
by land and by sea'. He trusted that the example of Watt 'would stimulate them
all ... and that this day would be the first day of a new era of regeneration and
prosperity (loud cheers)' (Scotsman, 8 November 1870). Mr E. S. Gordon, MP
for the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, put the matter even more force-
fully in response to the rhetorical question 'To what are we to attribute the wealth
and extensive commerce of this country?':
.. .it was due mainly to the great inventions of our countryman Watt
(Applause). That noble man did not appear to have been a student at the
Glasgow College; but when he was excluded from following his occupation as
a mathematical instrument maker in the city, owing to his not having served his
apprenticeship with the trades there, he was taken under the shelter of the
University; and, if he did not attend classes, at all events he was indebted to the
scientific advice of those great men, Black and Robertson [Robison], in bring-
ing to perfection his invention of the steam engine (Applause). It would thus be
seen that science, as taught in our Universities, had much to do with the pro-
duction of the national wealth. In other words, science was the great promoter
of invention, and invention was the great promoter of national wealth.
(Scotsman, 8 November 1870)
No matter, then, that Watt had been neither student nor professor at the
University. No matter either that his days of prosperity had been in Birmingham
rather than Glasgow. Glasgow College and its reformers were too shrewd to
allow historical accuracy to stand in the way of their claim to the legends of Watt,
so useful in the promotion of their own goals in those heady days of Glasgow's
prosperity in the 1860s.
Seen in the context of this deliberate strategy to reform, reconstruct and promote
the University of Glasgow as a great national institution generating wealth in
return for the private and public capital invested, Thomson's activities in and
beyond the natural philosophy classroom appear in a fresh light. His appointment
was no mere filling of a vacant chair for the continuation of a traditional curri-
culum, unchanging through the centuries. Rather, he was promoted by his reform-
ing colleagues, and in tum promoted himself and the College, as carrying forward
the banner of scientific advancement in a national and international context and as
marketing the image of a university (in Disraeli's words) 'suitable to the wants of
the age' and especially to the demands of Glasgow citizens whose whig ideology
coincided with that of the zealous reformers themselves. Thus the professor of
Greek, Edmund Lushington, could say at the opening of the new University:
In the city of Watt, it may appear superfluous to dwell upon the benefits secured
and the triumphs achieved by physical science, and the manifold arts which it
renders possible .... The teacher of these sciences has a much-to-be-prized
advantage, which adds a high moral value to the study, that he can, by direct
appeal to nature and experiment, bring tangible evidence of the truths he under-
takes to set forth, and show that in framing our theories we are not cheated by
words and seeming logic, but stand upon realities .... Let me briefly allude to the
Atlantic Cable as a crowning manifestation of the power which, by stooping to
nature's laws, has learnt to regulate nature's processes, and as a hopeful sign
that our age is neither degenerate in scientific genius nor in the untiring devotion
to science which widens her empire. (Lushington, 1870: 4-5)
With Sir William as a moral embodiment of the usefulness of natural philosophy

to commerce and to mankind at least as potent as James Watt, the University's
return on capital was indeed substantial, visible evidence that the reformers had
reaped 'the best fruit that expanding knowledge and intelligence yield, and
show[n] that the wondrous faculties which God has bestowed on mankind are not
an idle embellishment of wealth, but a treasure and a blessing to endure for ever'
(Lushington, 1870: 12).
7. CONCLUSION
Thomson's scientific capitalism has here been represented as a series of invest-

ment decisions that began with the replacement of the original stock of class-
room apparatus. In the course of a subsequent 'upward and outward' 'spiral of
credibility', Thomson and his fellow-academics had reformed the moral goals
of the ancient Scottish university in a manner 'suitable to the wants of the age'.
The tory old guard had lost their struggle to resist the encroachment of the
industrial city and to preserve within the College walls the moral values of an
established Church threatened by disintegration into competing sects. Even
within the ancient College they had been largely dispossessed by the spatial
embodiment of the new moral order, by that 'direct appeal to nature and experi-
ment' which yielded truth, power and wealth of a moral as well as material kind
(Lushington, above). Crucially, this new moral order would be as well adapted
to the needs of future ministers of the kirk as to future engineers of the Empire
(Miller, 1870: 118).
When the Whig reformers ultimately sold out the medieval site to that symbol
of Victorian progress, the railway company, they translated to the new site those
spaces which they had fought long and hard to shape. In the 'trial by space' with
their tory opponents, they had emerged as the conquering and colonizing elite
which had made its mark on space (Lefebvre, 1991: 416-17). For the new genera-
tions of Glasgow University students it would not be the atmospheric walls of the
ancient High Street College that would shape their undergraduate lives. A mighty
edifice of Victorian Gothic now held sway over the prosperous western
approaches to the city, a visible and enduring embodiment of the remarkable
confidence that had characterized their nineteenth-century forebears.
Crosbie Smith 143
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the custodians of the following archival sources cited in the refer-
ences: Cambridge University Library's Kelvin (KCULC) and Stokes Collections
(SCULC); Glasgow University Archives' University Calendars, 'Minutes of
Faculty' (MF), and 'New College Buildings' records (NCB); Glasgow University
Library Special Collections' William Smith, 'Notes of the Glasgow College
Natural Philosophy class taken during the 1849-SO session' (MS Gen. 142, ULG)
and Alexander Thomson, 'Criticism of Sir George Scott's Design for the
Building for the University of Glasgow' (MS Gen. 798, ULG); Thomson class-
room and laboratory accounts housed in the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh
(SRO); and J. D. Forbes' Papers, St Andrews University Library (FP).
Abbreviations are in parentheses.
A skeletal version of this paper was presented at a workshop on 'Innovation
and transmission in the age of science-based industry' at Linacre College,
Oxford, in November 1989. I thank the organizers, Robert Fox and Anna
Guagnini, and other participants, especially Bruce Hunt, Marl Williams, and
Andrew Warwick, for critical discussion. Bruce Hunt also drew my attention to
the Kalley Miller account of Thomson's classes (Miller, 1870) while Sophie
Forgan alerted me to documents relating to the new Glasgow University build-
ings. I am much indebted to Norton Wise for many features of this paper which
relates closely to our joint work over the period 198~. I am also very grateful to
Graeme Gooday who as a graduate student undertook to fill some of the major
lacunae in the history of nineteenth-century physics laboratories, and to William
Ginn and Ben Marsden for their work on the history of nineteenth-century instru-
ment making and academic engineering respectively. Finally, I thank Jon Agar
and Alex Dolby for their very constructive comments.
NOTES
I. As City Chamberlain, Strang certainly knew how to market Glasgow as the embodi-
ment of economic progress, not least through his involvement with the British
Association. Morrell and Thackray ( 1981: 202-2) discuss his role in attracting the
Association to the city for the first time (1840).
2. A 'tron' was a place for weighing and measuring commodities. Wise ( 1989-90:
288) quotes the Scottish political economist J. R. McCulloch: 'as a society is
nothing more than an aggregate collection of individuals, it is plain that each, in
steadily pursuing his own aggrandisement, is following that precise line of conduct
which is most for the public advantage'. The Edinburgh natural philosophy profes-
sor John Leslie made a similar remark in a letter of 1823: 'In following out our
own plans, we most effectually contribute to the prosperity of the aggregate body.
The University of Edinburgh owes all its advantages to the unfettered exertions of
individuals.' Quoted in Morrell (1972b: 46).
3. The anonymous Edinburgh Magazine contributor was of course parodying John,

ch. 1, verse 46: 'Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?'. For a far-reach-
ing study of 'the steam-engine economy' in relation to political economy and natural
philosophy in the period, see Wise (1989-90: 391-434). The 'iconography' of James
Watt and Adam Smith is apparent in the Duke of Argyll's presidential address to the
1855 Glasgow meeting of the BAAS (Argyll, 1855: lxxiii-lxxiv): 'If the mechanical
arts owe to this district of Scotland the greatest impulse they have ever yet received,
it is not less true that our knowledge of the laws which regulate the pursuits of indus-
try, and determine the distribution of the "Wealth of Nations", has been almost
founded on the researches of one whose name is indissolubly associated with this
seat of learning.'
4. Following Adam Smith, political economists regarded landowning aristocrats as
employers of 'unproductive labour' (servants, for example) in contrast to manufac-
turers who employed 'productive labour'. See Smith (1976: 330-49) and Wise
(1989-90: 401, 420).
5. Adam Smith stated that 'The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily
diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers.' In the
University of Oxford 'the greater part of the publick professors have, for these many
years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching'. His preference was clearly
for a system where the pupils' fees made up a large part of the teacher's emolu-
ments (Smith, 1976: 759-61).
6. Edinburgh Magazine (1825: 513) estimated the total number of students as about
1500 in 1825. The difficulties of providing accurate estimates are discussed in
Dow and Moss (1988: 236-7). Matriculation records are a poor guide to student
numbers as many students, including medical students, did not go through the
formality.
7. The 'Faculty' or governing body of the College consisted of the Principal and 13
professors. The Principal and six professors (medicine, oriental languages, law,
church history, anatomy and astronomy) were appointed by the Crown; the other
seven (Greek, logic, humanity, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, mathemat-
ics and divinity) were elected by the Faculty itself. Regius professors outside the
Faculty (chemistry, for example) had no vote in these elections, and no share in
the College revenue to supplement their income from student fees or outside
sources such as medical practice. The Faculty was replaced by the University
Court in 1858, and the distinction between the College and regius professors
abolished. See Dow and Moss (1988: 250n); lAnark (1845: 173) and Marsden
(this volume).
8. See also Watkins ( 1828: 69-83). The work contains a description of the electrical
instruments and apparatus constructed and marketed by Watkins and Hill 'for
illustrating the most striking phamomena of electro-magnetism'. I am very
grateful to William Ginn for this information. See also Taylor (1966: 96, 378).
Taylor notes that Watkins and Hill were instrument-makers to the new University
of London.
9. Thomson's evolving strategy differed from electrical 'showmen' (such as William
Sturgeon) on the one hand and from the electrical elite (exemplified by Michael
Faraday) on the other. Although he quickly established himself as an international
authority on mathematical theories of electricity and magnetism (Smith and Wise,
1989: 203-81 ), the openness of his laboratory to 'volunteer' students (below) con-
trasted with the very private space that was Faraday's laboratory.
10. See especially Smith and Wise (1989: 237-81) for Norton Wise's in-depth analysis
of the formulation of Thomson's mathematical (field') theory of electricity and mag-
netism in the context of Faraday's experimental work.
Crosbie Smith 145
11. Acoustics formed one of four subjects proposed for the experimental course in
1849-50, for example (Lecture IV, 6 November 1849, MS Gen. 142, ULG). On
Thomson's role in the Cambridge University Music Society, see Thompson (1910,
vol. 1: 69-76).
12. Gooday (1989: ch. 2; 1990: 3ln) draws attention to the disagreement among sec-
ondary accounts over the actual date of Thomson's laboratory and to the need to
understand academic laboratories not as instantaneous creations but as evolving
through institutional negotiation. The dates 1850 and 1852 cited in Smith and Wise
(1989: 132), for the allocation and fitting out of the 'cellar' laboratory, derived from
Thompson (191 0, vol. l: 297), need correction in the light of the evidence from the
'Minutes of Faculty'. Coutts (1909: 385-6) offers a more reliable account than
Thompson.
13. Allen Thomson published data on class room dimensions in the old College as well
as on the proposed class rooms for the planned new Colleges (1846 and 1870). In
1864 Natural Philosophy possessed a classroom (38! x 19 feet) with seating for 160
students, library (20 x 19), apparatus room (41! x 17) and two laboratories (41 x 17
and 18! x 18~). Judging by dimensions, one laboratory was located below the class
room and the other (the former Blackstone Room) below the apparatus room. The
'library' was probably the former 'laboratory' to which Fleming had objected.
Overall, natural philosophy space far exceeded that of all other Arts subjects. No
other subject boasted a separate 'library'. Medical subjects, including chemistry,
had claim to larger spaces for practical work (Thomson, 1864). I thank Sophie
Forgan for this reference.
14. For convenience, I employ the terminology of Hughes (1987: 51-82), that is, that
the phases of the evolution of large technological systems are those of invention,
development. innovation, transfer, and consolidation. Clarke et al. ( 1989:
252-66) present a survey of the business relationship between James White and
Lord Kelvin, together with an account of the development of the business after
White's death in 1884. They draw attention to White's bankruptcy in 1861,
though there does not appear to be a connection between this event and the
fact that White was heavily involved in telegraphic business for Thomson at
this time. By the mid-l880s the business was rapidly becoming a large-scale
instrument factory, effectively under Thomson's control, devoted to the product-
ion of his electrical and navigational instruments, and (by 1900 when the
finn took the name Kelvin & James White Ltd) with a thorough implementation
of division of labour among the 400-strong work-force from drawing office to
polishing shop.
15. Thomson's personal rewards came largely after 1869 when the Atlantic telegraph
companies agreed to a financial settlement with Thomson, Fleeming Jenkin and
Cromwell Varley (£7000 with an annual payment of £2500). Royalties from other
telegraphic companies greatly increased this return on capital invested. See Smith
and Wise (1989: 684, 698-712).
16. Though the numbers may not be accurate in absolute terms, the relative increase in
student numbers suggests that the University was flourishing in this period. The
figures certainly provided powerful evidence to the Government in favour of the
construction of new buildings.
17. See Smith and Wise (1989: 9-l 0, 37-49), on the ideology of the Glasgow reform-
ers, and (754-5) on Macleod who edited the liberal Church of Scotland magazine
Good words to which Thomson contributed a number of anicles including two on
the magnetic compass. On Macleod's career see Macleod 1876. Typically,
Macleod wrote in 1863 of his hope in publishing Good words of 'emancipating
cheap religious literature from the narrowness and weakness to which it had come.
Good word.r has now risen to a circulation of one hundred and ten thousand
monthly .... Thus the experiment has so far succeeded'. Much opposition appar-
ently came from 'the so-called "Evangelical party'" which Macleod thanked God
were 'but a small clique'. Quoted in Macleod (1876, vol. 2: 136-7). He was
elected Moderator of the Church of Scotland for the year 1869-70. See Macleod
(1876, vol. 2: 296-334).
18. According to Allen Thomson (Thomson, 1870: xiv-xv), a large deputation, headed
by the Chancellor of the University (the Duke of Montrose) presented a memorial to
the Government on 2 May 1867, two days before the scientific deputation to Derby
and Disraeli. By June. the Government had agreed in principle to a grant in aid of
the building fund (later fixed at £120 000) largely on account of 'the national char-
acter of the institution •. Thompson ( 1886: 326-39), states that similar large deputa-
tions on behalf of Owens College to the Disraeli Government early in 1868 and to
the Gladstone Government early in 1869 met with negative responses. The speed of
Glasgow's moves appears to have paid handsome dividends.
Part III Of Pastoral
Privileges
6 Physics Laboratories and the
Victorian Country House
Simon Schaffer
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of

stability. (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958)
In a culture of science parks and the green field sites of sunrise industries, it
seems apt to consider laboratories' pastoral settings. Scholarly pastoralism has a
complex history. Historians have well charted the shift from the urban, urbane
scholars of medieval universities to the courtly, courteous humanists of the
Renaissance campagna (Le Goff, 1993: 161-6); analysed the imagery of solitude
in the architecture of the astronomical revolution and in the sociability of early
modem natural philosophy (Hannaway, 1986; Shapin, 1991); and pointed to the
well-populated retreats where savants secluded themselves during the Terror
(Outram, 1983). The tell-tale term 'campus' beloved of academic planners is, in
its scholarly sense, a relatively recent, eighteenth-century, coinage (Turner, 1984:
21). The putatively tranquil and remote sites of contemporary physics include
such places as the Marshall Islands atoll stocked with hydrophones, radar and
sensors where missile performance has been tested by US military scientists since
the early 1960s (Mackenzie, 1990: 347-8). Sharon Traweek observes that 'almost
all of the high energy physics national laboratories in the United States ... have
lovely settings'. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center incorporates 'a carefully
landscaped approximation of the surrounding natural environment. ... By creat-
ing an English green lawn in an environment of golden dry savannahs', she
claims, 'the lab demonstrates the authority of its own vision of nature' (Traweek,
1988: 18, 24).
No doubt bucolic epistemology accompanies the view that social withdrawal is a
precondition of access to universal truths. There is therefore a comparative history
to be written of the contrasts between urban and out-of-town sites, such as those
which Paul Weindling has found in the respective situations of the biomedical
institutes which Robert Koch (in central Berlin) and Louis Pasteur (in the Paris
suburbs) both set up around 1890 (Weindling, 1992: 178-9). In an incisive review
of Raymond Williams' indispensable history of such contrasts (Williams, 1973),
E. P. Thompson summarized 'the country/city opposition' and the insistence on
the natural as opposed to the cultural, a 'structure of feeling supported always by
illusion' and 'a ritual of assimilation and accommodation' (Thompson, 1994:
244-55). It is as though knowledge is made in production utopias, where 'unity,
149
order and harmony' secure a peculiarly invulnerable social order which can yet
represent itself apart from and against the existing culture (Markus, 1993: 298).
This chapter describes what was a novel social formation, the academic physics
laboratory of later nineteenth-century Britain. Work there was highly local,
involving the assemblage at a single site of widely distributed technical, material
and human resources. The apparently universal grip of matters of fact developed
at these privileged sites then hinged on the integrity of networks which allowed
the translation of techniques, hardware and personnel, the concern of many recent
studies of laboratory science (Latour, 1987: ch. 6; Rouse, 1987: ch. 4; Calion,
1988). With considerable labour, what worked in one place could be made to
work elsewhere and putatively everywhere. But in this chapter the concern is
rather with privilege than with networking and instead it treats some traditional
local precedents which helped make such sites seem effortlessly authoritative.
Plans and networks will not alone provide historians of science with the key to the
mysteries of science's local and spatial powers, any more than the layout of the
Panopticon and the surveys of Benthamite inspectors exhaust the meaning of
nineteenth-century utilitarianism (Foucault, 1984: 253-6). As Michael Baxandall
urges in his analysis of the design of the Forth Rail Bridge (completed 1889),
interpretation demands an account of the varying cultural narratives in which the
design acquires its meaning. The same is true of the interpretation of the spaces of
experimental life. Designs are stages in various conflicting processes and success-
ful interpretation recaptures the intricate enterprises through which these struc-
tures develop (Baxandall, 1985: 15-36). In what follows, contested accounts of
new physics laboratories are connected with one of the salient Victorian sites of
apparently effortless privilege, the country houses, and the culture which made
them meaningful places of knowledge, organisation and technology.
1. THE PHYSICS LABORATORY IN ITS PLACE
The establishment in many British universities of that important and rather new
site, the physics laboratory, coincided with the period of the second Reform Act
(1867) and the Education Act (1870), of Gladstone's first administration, the
Atlantic Cable and the Suez Canal. Historians now believe that this was not a
coincidence. They connect the new laboratories with the growth of submarine
telegraphy and its imperialist significance, the perceptions of emergent German
might dramatized at French science shows and on French battlefields, and the
challenge posed by an enfranchised urban populace in need of mass education
(Haines, 1958; Sviedrys, 1976; Phillips, 1983). At the end of the 1860s the
Devonshire Commission was established to report on public and private science
provision. The initially unlikely spaces represented by these physics laboratories
relied on, and helped maintain, an imperial geography. Values produced in labs
in Glasgow and Manchester could be applied to the bottom of the ocean and in
Simon Schaffer 151
deep space; the triumphs of military and civil communication systems could be
represented as evidence of those values' significance. From 1861 the British
Association sponsored a major programme to establish standards in electromag-
netism, a campaign reinforced after the success of the second Atlantic cable in
1866. At King's College London in the early 1860s James Clerk Maxwell col-
laborated with engineers, telegraphers and physicists to determine a good value
for electrical resistance. The network of physicists who founded and managed
the new laboratories was also most closely involved in the establishment of
precise electromagnetic standards (Gooday, 1990). These values were required
for the integrity of the international cable system and for the demonstration of
the worldwide grip of absolutist physics. They allowed the British to beat off
competition from German electrotechnologists and they promised new strength
in the struggle to re-establish the national instrument trade. In their inaugural
lectures and public utterances, the laboratory managers explained the central role
which their new workplaces would play in Victorian society and the transformed
political nation.
The connection between these novel institutions and the making of space can
be mapped in several related ways. Natural philosophers such as Maxwell refash-
ioned the account of physical space. In 1857, as he began discussions with
Michael Faraday on lines of force, Maxwell praised the London professor as 'the
first person in whom the idea of bodies acting at a distance by throwing the sur-
rounding medium into a state of constraint has arisen. . . . You seem to see the
lines of force curving round obstacles and driving plump at conductors and
swerving towards certain directions in crystals' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 1: 550).
Fifteen years of hard collaborative mathematical and experimental work culmi-
nated in the production of a new account of space and new vector techniques for
analysing displacements and rotations in that space. In a lecture at the Royal
Institution in early 1873, Maxwell, now head of Cambridge's new experimental
physics laboratory, summarized the implications of his innovative dynamics for
spatiality: 'the vast interplanetary and interstellar regions' were full of a 'wonder-
ful medium, so full that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion
of space or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity'. The space-filling
medium sustained the 'absolute unity of the metric system of the universe',
exhibited rotation and vibration and warranted the claim that light was an electro-
magnetic disturbance within the medium (Maxwell, 1890, vol. 2: 322). The para-
meters of this space were secured by the reorganization of the spaces of
experimental physics and the production of the spaces of international telegraphy.
In a review published in Nature just three months after his Royal Institution
lecture, Maxwell explained how 'the notion of electricity as a measurable com-
modity' had painfully connected academic mathematical physics with 'the
science of the testing office' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 842-3). Maxwell and his
colleagues emphasized during the 1870s that their novel laboratories would
produce uniquely reliable measures of the ether's properties and the fundamental
properties of telegraph cables, and that this reliability depended on the architec-
ture and technique of the laboratory regimes (Hunt, 1993).
The link between laboratory measures and layout is emphasized in the next
section of this chapter: in describing the foundation of the Cambridge physics
laboratory in 1871-4, we focus on what crossed its boundaries. Established in a
conservative institution theretofore almost completely devoid of comparable tech-
nical resources, it had urgently to attract artisans, hardware and students to bolster
viable scientific programmes within its walls. Yet, like other important fin-de-
siecle scientific institutions, it had to be insulated from outside disturbance to
make its measures count everywhere (Cahan, 1989; Forgan and Gooday, 1994),
and it had to be fitted into academic culture lest its workshop practice pollute
clerical life. It was hard to reconcile all these charges: its managers could not
easily appeal to past work in public teaching laboratories. Maxwell, characterist-
ically, had no experience of formal laboratory physics instruction either as
student or teacher. In the late 1840s at Edinburgh his professor James Forbes
granted him privileged access to his private lab to work on colour vision
(Campbell and Garnett, 1884: 87-8). In the vacations Maxwell built his own
workshop at the family estate at Glenlair, where an outhouse provided him with
space to work on telegraphy, chemistry and galvanism (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 1:
71-3). At Cambridge in the early 1850s, Maxwell and his father planned repeat-
ing George Stokes' lecture demonstrations of spectroscopy back home in their
Glenlair garret. There was no university training in experiment (Campbell and
Garnett, 1884: Ill). When he gained the Aberdeen natural philosophy chair later
that decade, Maxwell demonstrated variably successful experiments from the lec-
turer's bench. This was what he meant by 'the science of experimenting accu-
rately': 'it is better that you should sometimes see the failure of an experiment
than that you should think that ... scientific investigations are conducted in the
rude way adapted for exhibition to a class', he lectured (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 1:
506, 546-7). King's College London certainly possessed a basement engineering
workshop and, like many other institutions, a fine museum collection of machine
models, but not yet a teaching lab for physics students (Heamshaw, 1929: 148-9,
247-8, 260). Maxwell's crucial experiments of the 1860s on electromagnetism,
colour and gas viscosity were performed with private colleagues in improvised
rooms there or else in his own Kensington attic, and, after his retirement from
King's in 1864, using the major private resources of London electromagnetic
experts (Domb, 1980: 70, 91).
Several important precedents were to be used to transform a secluded and
improvised geography of laboratory physics into the training institutions of the
century's last decades. Protagonists appealed to burgeoning museums, isolated
observatories, industrious workshops and the sacred spaces of church and semi-
nary. Scottish civic humanism and the various responses to it in London and else-
where offered a range of possible models for metropolitan utilitarian sciences
(Heyck, 1982). Yet, as Sheldon Rothblatt has observed of the controversial plans
Simon Schaffer 153
for a London University, King's College in particular, one major academic ideal
remained 'fundamentally anti-urban. It rejected the laboratory of experiment that
is the city for the assurance of tradition' (Rothblatt, 1988: 141). Such assurance
could be found in the traditional paternalism of the country houses and their
estates. Again, Maxwell's experience illuminates the class experience of some of
these natural philosophers. His father, a Tory lawyer with a developed interest in
new engineering, inherited the 1500 acre Glenlair estate in the 1840s. Maxwell
recalled that his father 'was always fond of inventing plans for country houses ...
he wanted to build his house on a scale suited to what he thought he would
require as sheriff, and had so built a small part of it when he died. We afterwards
completed it as far as possible according to his idea', a task which occupied
Maxwell in the later 1860s just before he began his own work planning the
Cambridge physics laboratory (Campbell and Garnett, 1884: 325).
It is the contention of the balance of this chapter that a certain version of the
country house system provided some resources for making sense of the privi-
leged and carefully demarcated milieux of the physics laboratories, and that the
laboratories constructed in several such houses were important, if now neglected,
sites of physics work in this period. Though surely not the sole nor the most per-
vasive legitimation for the institutionalisation of physics teaching in the labora-
tory, yet the pastoral ideal which informs so much of contemporary academic and
scientific design deserves this historical examination. Stanford's high energy
physicists have recently changed 'an ecosystem to create both an eloquent tableau
vivant and a site for massive human enterprise' (Traweek, 1988: 24). If labora-
tory physics can claim to secure the 'view from nowhere' which allows its work
easily to escape the trammels of local context, this is in part because of its pecu-
liar connexion with the putatively tranquil fantasy and strenously engineered
reality of a place in the country.
2. THE CAVENDISH DESIGNED
Promoters of the new Cavendish (originally 'Devonshire') Laboratory established

at Cambridge in the early 1870s had to explain how an expensive and challenging
physics laboratory devoted to training in precise methods and research into physi-
cal standards could conceivably be reconciled with the values of the liberal
academy and its mathematical elite. The dons, including the sometime Vice-
Chancellor Edward Perowne and the pre-eminent mathematics tutor Isaac
Todhunter, suggested that the moral and physical presence of experimental train-
ing and technical enterprise would subvert the established order of mathematical
excellence and clerical submission. Mathematics and Anglicanism were best
absorbed in studies and chapels, not at the workshop bench (Sviedrys, 1970;
Schaffer, 1992: 32-4). Todhunter argued in 1873 that new experimental sciences
were 'mercenary', that 'the experimenter is born and not manufactured' and that
though private and 'constant intercourse with some teacher eminent for his ori-
ginal experimental power' might be worthwhile, public training and testing in
experimental sciences was worthless. He recalled the views of his mentor
William Whewell that such subjects as physics 'should not be made part of the
business of schools' (Todhunter, 1873: 6, 19, 21). A couple of years later, the
ultraconservative Robert Phelps, Master of Sidney Sussex, spoke in equally
forceful terms against a similar scheme to establish a new programme for training
engineers: pupils themselves, not the University, should provide scientific and
mechanical equipment, Phelps argued in the teeth of 'the whole force of
University Radicalism and the corps professorial' (Hilken, 1967: 31-2).
Metropolitan observers, such as Norman Lockyer, secretary to the Devonshire
Commission, countered that if Cambridge would not accept this archetypically
modem institution in its midst, then the University should simply be nationalized
(Lockyer, 1869). A rather fine symbol of the threat which many perceived in the
Cavendish was the challenge in 1871 mounted by Corpus Christi, Perowne's own
college, which argued that the new lab on the other side of Free School Lane
would infringe its rights of 'ancient lights'. The College unsuccessfully claimed
£600 as compensation and was ordered to abandon its claim (Cambridge
University Reporter 21/5/1873: 73).
One strategy, that favoured by Maxwell himself and by the radical new engin-
eering professor James Stuart, was to forge close and indispensable links with
extramural interests in commerce and engineering, while insisting inside
Cambridge that measurements of precise standards were just an imitation of the
God of number, weight and measure, the deity of the wranglers. In an 1873
lecture on the effects of steam technology, Maxwell noted that 'the development
of industry has introduced new modes of gaining a livelihood and abolished
others so that both employers and employed ... have new problems set before
them'. To solve these practical puzzles needed carefully secured institutions to
preserve 'the beauty and dignity of a well ordered life ... amid the rattle of
machinery and the press of business' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 790-1).
Maxwell told his academic colleagues that he would establish a 'school of
scientific criticism' - a phrase carefully designed to make the lab look safe by
appealing to the ideology of earlier nineteenth century pedagogues such as
Whewell (Becher, 1980; Williams, 1991). 'It will, I think, be a result worthy of
our University, and more likely to be accomplished here than in any private lab-
oratory' (Maxwell, 1890, vol. 2: 250). Maxwell's contrast with 'private' labs,
where almost all his own past trials had been performed, shows that the forging
of this new space for experiment within the university was to be seen as a
problem of precedent. Workshops did not fit the academy and other traditions
seemed ill-matched with new styles of labour. They had to define the ideal type
of a physics laboratory in the same process as building one. As Sophie Forgan
reminds us, the layout of such places is the layout of idealized disciplinary zones
(Forgan, 1989: 417).
Simon Schaffer 155
The Cavendish Laboratory was represented as a space of very local character-

istics which could therefore generate knowledge of universal space. One protag-
onist of absolute electromagnetic units, the Glasgow-trained laboratory manager
Andrew Gray, defended their use in 1884 because they were 'altogether inde-
pendent of the instruments, the surroundings and the locality of the investigator'
(Gray, 1889: 2). But textbooks and handbooks were stocked with instructions
showing how these units were indeed dependent on instrument design, labo-
ratory surroundings and personal conduct. Carefully organized locales could
thus produce values which were not merely local. The relation between these
local and universal values was simultaneously a puzzle for physics, engineering,
architecture and politics. Before the mid-century Cambridge sustained an
ethos of 'voluntary science·, privately sponsored practical demonstrations of the
kind the new Lucasian professor George Stokes continued after his lectures for
young students such as Maxwell (Becher, 1986: 70-1; Wilson, 1987: 42-9).
During the early 1850s, the Liberal government tried to push the University
into increased science provision, while a report of 1853 by Whewell's ally, the
engineer and architect Robert Willis, argued that the 'actual accommodation'
for the natural sciences 'is miserably deficient'. Mid-Victorian university sci-
ences were notably museological (Willis and Clark, 1886. vol. 3: 160). The rea-
soned display of collections of specimens and models, rather than the public
teaching laboratory, was as dominant in engineering and physical science as in
botany or anatomy. Many new science initiatives of the mid-century centred on
reorganized museum sites (Forgan, 1994: 142; Pickstone. 1994: 121). Willis was
a protagonist of the museum programme both in his Cambridge engineering
course and his influential metropolitan development of it at the Royal School of
Mines. Ultimately his celebrated collection of demonstration models, increas-
ingly ignored by mathematically obsessed Cambridge students, and damned by
critics such as Phelps, found a home in the Cavendish Laboratory (Hilken, 1967:
52-4, 65; Becher, 1986: 67).
So in the 1853 report Willis argued in terms of professorial privacy and
museums of science and certainly did not envisage a public labomtory of physics.
Each professor would 'require one or more private rooms, the workshops, so to
speak, of his own subject, wherein to perform private experiments, to arrange or
construct apparatus, to prepare specimens, make drawings for lectures or other
purposes, and keep portions of apparatus that are his own property'. Willis
assumed a private regime. Stokes would need 'a private room' in which to try his
lecture apparatus. Earlier in the century the chemistry professor James Cumming
had given private work, often involving electrical trials, to students such as John
Herschel and Charles Babbage (Becher, 1986: 66-7, 70). According to Willis,
only chemistry would now need a teaching lab, remote from the lecture rooms
and private stores of other scientists, because 'chemical processes produce corro-
sive vapours which are injurious to delicate appamtus and machinery' (Willis and
Clark, 1886, vol. 3: 158-64).
In 1854 the University Senate commissioned the architect Anthony Salvin to

plan the new buildings. A student of John Nash and master of the medieval pic-
turesque, a veteran of Cambridge college work, especially at Trinity, Salvin was
just then inaugurating the century's greatest programmes of aristocratic castle-
building, including the transformation of the Tower of London and of the Duke of
Northumberland's Alnwick Castle, where £320 000 was spent from 1852 until
1866. The choice of Salvin indicated the traditional architectural grammar which
Willis and his friends judged appropriate for an academic science building (Willis
and Clark, 1886, vol. 3: 565; Thompson, 1963: 91-2). Willis recommended that
'there be no unnecessary expenditure on architectural decoration'. Instead, he
stressed the need for disciplinary planning in consultation with the professors to
maximize student access and the division of public from private space. In accor-
dance with Willis' brief, Salvin placed greatest emphasis on large lecture rooms
and museum spaces for the display of apparatus and specimens. The only physics
experiments envisaged were those to be performed by Stokes and his few visitors.
Funding problems scotched the scheme. An attempted, more modest, revival in
1861-3 only just survived and was finished by 1866. Once again, Stokes' require-
ments revealed the delimited scope of physics. Most of Salvin's designs for him
concentrated on providing means to transmit light rays through his lecture room
and a private 'garret' for optical trials. The only other space Stokes needed was a
room for 'private study and delicate apparatus, the other for the storage of frames
and unwieldy Lecture apparatus' (Willis and Clark, 1886, vol. 3: 171-81).
Stokes was by far the most important lecturer in mathematical physics in
Cambridge from 1850 until the early 1880s. Each year his course on hydrody-
namics and undulatory optics drew about 20 students, including almost all the
high wranglers of the period. J. J. Thomson, who took Stokes' course in the later
1870s, admired its clarity and simplicity, recalling that Stokes 'had only the sim-
plest apparatus, no light but that of the Sun, no assistant to help him' (Wilson,
1987: 44-50). The combination of careful dynamical analysis of aether vibration
and dramatic experimental demonstration of such phenomena as fluorescence
was crucial. But this did not imply that the work of Stokes' private lab, any more
than Willis' eyecatching engine models, would be extended to the world of the
Mathematics Tripos. Senior wrangler and Smith's prizewinner in 1865, another
fan of Stokes' lecture demonstrations, John Strutt (later Lord Rayleigh) asked his
professor for information about getting his own apparatus, but Stokes simply
could not recall where he had obtained his optical equipment. As for such a pre-
eminent teaching lab as Glasgow, no-one told Rayleigh 'that you could work
there' (Strutt, 1968: 32,37-8, 406-7).
Salvin's new buildings had just risen over the Cambridge skyline when
Maxwell, Rayleigh, Stokes and Thomson discussed radical revisions of the
Mathematics Tripos. In the winter of 1868-69, the reformers' Syndicate demanded
for the first time that a laboratory be established for electromagnetism and thermo-
dynamics to be incorporated into the Mathematics Tripos, topics hitherto excluded
Simon Schaffer 157
on the Whewellian grounds that they had not reached the properly deductive stage
where they could be safely taught to Cambridge mathematicians. The reformers
recalled the Government's charge, issued almost two decades earlier, that 'much
more than material aid is requisite for conveying to Students a practical training in
the handling of scientific apparatus' (Crowther, 1974: 23-30). This change was
mainly prompted by Scottish culture of practical electrotechnology and heat
engines. In late November 1868 Thomson was asked for 'any advice you could
give us in relation to the expense of requisite instruments and machines' (GUL
Kelvin Papers W2), while a week later the Syndicate's chairman Cookson asked
him for a confidential 'account of the new rooms which you are to have at
Glasgow for this department. I suppose that you will have for yourself and your
classes Lecture Rooms (one or more) Apparatus rooms, Professor's laboratory and
private rooms and students' laboratories' (GUL Kelvin Papers C34). As Crosbie
Smith points out elsewhere in this book, 'Glasgow' stood for a link between
private professorial space and public teaching. It also stood for large state invest-
ment: between 1870 and 1872, following a grant from the Treasury of£ 120 000, a
new Glasgow University was built on Gilmorehill, with Thomson's physics labo-
ratory in pride of place (Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 568). The original government
reports on Cambridge in the 1850s had pointed out that a professor 'occupied in
original research ... is not likely to have much time at his disposal for the instruc-
tion of tyros in the use of their tools'. In Thomson's plans for Gilmorehill, these
requirements were crucial. He described strong floors and reliable apparatus fit to
provide the basis for an entire programme of training in accuracy and commercial
values (GUL Kelvin Papers Tl81 ).
So support staff, demonstrators and technicians. had to be hired to match the
layout of a new and complex space. This meant increased costs and an economy
of laboratory design. Thomson's Glasgow personified and incorporated the solu-
tion to these puzzles, and several dons decided the obvious course would be to
hire him for Cambridge. Thomson turned down the offer. Space and resources
were what counted: 'the great advantages I have here with the new College, the
apparatus and the assistance provided, the convenience of Glasgow for getting
mechanical work done, give me means of action which I could not have in any
other place' (Thompson, 1910, vol. 1: 563). Cookson and Stokes then asked him
to contact the boss of the only other successful teaching laboratory of which they
knew- Hermann von Helmholtz. At the end of January 1871, Thomson told the
German that his Cambridge allies would set up a 'school of experimental science,
not merely by a system of lectures with experimental iJiustrations, but by a physi-
cal laboratory in which students, under the professor and his assistants. would
perform experiments, and the professor would have all facilities for making
experimental investigations'. The request was as unsuccessful as that to Thomson
himself (Thompson. 1910, vol. 1: 564).
When Maxwell was successfully approached by the dons in mid-February
1871, therefore, he recalled his own work for the British Association resistance
project in King's College London in the early 1860s, in what was effectively a
private professorial space with almost no lab teaching. His work of the later
1860s on the determination of the ratio of electrostatic and electromagnetic units,
which relied on other domestic London resources, especially J. P. Gassiot's
superb private electrical laboratory in Clapham, brought out the importance of
personal networks in experimental physics. Because of the painstaking techniques
which these measures involved, the determination also indicated the need for
extremely careful discipline of experimenters' behaviour (Schaffer, 1994:
148-50). Other precedents were provided by two decades of Cambridge struggle
over the Salvin plans, fights which assumed the privacy of professorial life and
the limited need for a physics teaching laboratory. Maxwell knew the high status
which Thomson's Glasgow lab had achieved, its close link with submarine
telegraphy and with precision standards, and that his new Cambridge colleagues
had already tried to attract Thomson to the chair. Maxwell observed that
Thomson 'has had practical experience in teaching experimental work, and his
experimental corps has turned out very good work' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2:
612-13). These models might be resolved through the new laboratory. Stokes
told Maxwell that 'the principal duty of the new professor in the first instance will
be to give his advice as to the construction of the proposed physical laboratory
and museum' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 615 n.ll). For the Lucasian professor,
museological design was still dominant. Maxwell also picked up the museum
theme when, in February 1871, he asked the electors about the brief for this
building: 'are the pupils to have facilities for doing experimental work, that is
to say, is there to be a room where things may be kept as they are from one day
to another and not be required to be cleared off at the end of the day's work?' The
immediate assumption was that laboratory teaching's principal requirement was
stable storage (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 612). These were issues which remained
salient throughout the early 1870s.
Two kinds of resources help explain the brief and the execution of the Cavendish
Laboratory: a university ideology which resisted factory values and celebrated
wrangler life had to be reconciled with a laboratory which depended on workshop
culture in order to produce values which worked everywhere; and the traditional
voluntarist structures of museums, of private professorial labs, and of limited
access to laboratory instruction, had to be reconciled with the obviously high status
of the Glaswegian model (Sviedrys, 1976: 414; Smith and Wise, 1989: 135). The
resulting laboratory layout was not the simple expression of one scientist's vision.
Consider the rather careful enquiries mounted by Maxwell and Coutts Trotter in
1871. Trotter went to Oxford in April 1871 and made copies of the groundplans
for the new lab there. Clifton's rather generalized layout 'seems to me as far as I
can judge very convenient'. The problem, as Trotter saw it, was the conflicting
demands any insufficiently specialized design would pose: 'there is no doubt much
to be said for natural selection, but will not the struggle for existence between the
men who want their rooms darkened, and the men who want their rooms light, the
Simon Schaffer 159
men who want to move about the magnets and the men who want to observe
galvanometers, be unduly severe?' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 623 n.2). Maxwell
agreed and went to Oxford himself, drew his own pictures of the new Clarendon in
his notebook (ULC MSS ADD 7655N/nll), and observed that 'Clifton has had
terrible work and has done it well. Now he is a Plumber, now a Scene shifter and
Property man, now a Bricklayer &c.' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 636). In April 1871
he went to Glasgow and Edinburgh to discuss his plans for Cambridge. The
Edinburgh professor Peter Guthrie Tait was embarrassed by his own 'poor make
shift' in the Scottish capital (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 634). Maxwell already had
his own plans. He told Tait that it would be necessary to avoid smooth walls
and make sure there was enough wood to hold screwed apparatus. He planned
a 'spinning room' for repetitions of James Joule's paddle wheel trials and for
his own determinations of electric resistance. The layout was partly prompted by
his own sense of the requirements of specific experimental programmes and his
favoured notion of a gradation of skills (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 634).
Inevitably, Maxwell's fullest debate was with Thomson. Maxwell laid out the
requirements for his prized experiments. The resistance project would need gas
engines to drive spins. The two men spent some time discussing the state of the
BAAS apparatus. Other trials were envisaged: big batteries needed fume cup-
boards borrowed from the chemists; sensitive instruments needed to be set up on
steady masonry supports. Maxwell asked Tait and Thomson about the relative
advantages of magnetoelectric engines as opposed to Grove cells. Thomson
answered that a Daniell cell would be best. Other, more general, aspects were
drawn from the experience of the 1850s and 1860s: 'lecture room taken for
granted. Place to stow away apparatus ditto. Large room with tables etc. for
beginners at experiments. A similar place or places for advanced experimenters to
work at experiments which require to be left for days or weeks standing'
(Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 626-7). The need for peace and stability was much
stressed. Maxwell jotted down notes on the need for 'cast iron bricks built into
the walls at intervals', for deep ceiling joists, that no hot water pipes should be
near the magnetic room, and indeed that all pipes must therefore be 'exposed
everywhere' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 630-1). Maxwell remarked in 1873 that
electromagnetic values 'must be deduced from the results of a set of experiments
which require delicate and costly instruments and a laboratory free from vibration
and from magnetic disturbance, not to speak of an amount of skill and of leisure
of which few are possessed' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 866). These were simulta-
neously moral judgements about labour and design and physical requirements for
accuracy and security.
The Cavendish layout was designed to maintain accuracy by embodying the
continuum between practical and moral demands. Maxwell drew a sketch of his
plans on a postcard for Thomson at the end of March 1871 (Maxwell, 1990-5,
vol. 2: 632). He already wanted three floors with precision electromagnetic and
gravimetric apparatus at the base, a private professorial room and preparation
room backing a big lecture theatre on the first floor, and heat and optical trials in
the 'lofts' at the top. More or Jess this was what he got. There were some import-
ant gadgets, such as stone sills for heliostats on all the south and east facing
windows, a trick learnt from Stokes, and a water tank atop the fifty foot tower to
run a vacuum pump system to all the lab's rooms (see Figure 6.1). Trotter had
already warned him about overreliance on an expert architect. 'I hope it will not
be a great swell from London', such as Salvin. 'There is no one I take it who is
likely to have the faintest idea of what is wanted for a physical laboratory and the
only chance of a convenient building seems to be in getting some one who will
not be above taking hints as to the arrangement' (Maxwell, 1990-5, vol. 2: 623
n.2). Maxwell's former professorial colleague at King's College London, the
architect Robert Kerr, argued in his influential treatise on The Gentleman's House
(1864) that 'nothing seems more easy than planning ... to those who cannot do
it', insisting that architects monopolize design. 'Successful amateur-work is a
thing of amateur-romance' (Kerr, 1864: 473). But Trotter now reminded Maxwell
that Clifton had designed the Clarendon himself- Maxwell did much the same
for the Cavendish. Its architect, William Fawcett, finished a plan which followed
that of Maxwell by November 1871. Fawcett was a local, not a London swell-
his only Cambridge commission theretofore was alterations at St Catherine's in
1868. The lab was built between spring 1872 and autumn 1873 (Maxwell,
1990-5, vol. 2: 701; Cavendish Laboratory, 1910: 5-6). In the interim, Maxwell
exchanged advice with Fawcett based on his own plans, those at Oxford and else-
where, and complained about the 'laziness' of the gasmen who were installing the
lights and engines and that 'I have no place to erect my chair, but move about like
the cuckoo' between the chemistry, botany and anatomy theatres (Maxwell,
1990-5. vol. 2: 760).
The lab which opened amidst much varsity ceremonial in June 1874 bore the
marks of this history. The gateway was suitably Gothic, with oak doors bearing
an appropriate psalm, the arms of the Cavendish family and a statue of the Duke
of Devonshire himself with a model of the Laboratory in his arms. Division of
labour and status marks were clear. The porter's lodge and the professorial labo-
ratory on the first floor were suitably distinguished. The magnetic room occupied
the east end of the ground floor, a site of honour, with solidly based stands and a
relatively large space for ancillary equipment. These devices were central to the
rites of entrance to the laboratory. Many had been designed by Maxwell himself,
such as the apparatus for viscosity of air and the colour discs. The BAAS electro-
dynamometer was set up in the ground floor lab on a stone pedestal four foot
square above a brick pier on a concrete base driven five foot into the ground. In
the 1870s, the custom was to introduce tyros to the Cavendish by getting them to
work on the Kew magnetometer, secured on its pillar in the same room as it
'afforded practice not only in reading scales and making adjustments, but also in
time observations, counting the beats of a watch while observing the vibrating
magnet'. By far the largest provision was for the new Tripos topics: heat and
C'l
§"
g
~
::s-
(\
~
..,
Figure 6.1 In 1871 Clerk Maxwell sent William Thomson sketches for the Cavendish Laboratory including spaces
for electromagnetic research and practical teaching. Source: Postcard dated 30 March 1871, National Library of ....0"1
Scotland MS 1004 fol. 40.
magnetism on the ground floor, electricity in a large room under the roof. The
only comparable space was for the big new lecture room, the teaching laboratory
and the preparation rooms. There was space for far more students than ever used
the room in Maxwell's time and the apparatus was certainly for experiments of a
very elementary character. In the very centre of the new building, symbolically,
was the professor's private lab. Immediately underneath, significantly, was an
ancient Tudor doorWay, the sole relic of the original monastic buildings on the
site (Cavendish Laboratory, 1910: 34-5; Crowther, 1974: 49-57).
Built on such ancient foundations, the Cavendish of 1874 was a complex space
of several, potentially conflicting, functions: privacy and access, security and
teaching were not easily reconciled there. Maxwell's designs have typically been
read solely as expressions of his visionary purpose. Less attention has been paid
to the comparative failure of his laboratory regime. Arthur Schuster, who experi-
enced both Cambridge and Berlin laboratory styles, told the new professor
Rayleigh of these troubles in 1880, a few months after Maxwell's death. The
struggle for survival which Trotter had foreseen wrecked the possibility of simul-
taneous and conflicting class experiments; there was no surveillance of student
work; the work of the lecture room was not linked to that in the lab; above all,
'even a good man is, when he first comes into a Laboratory a very helpless being.
He has no idea of the time it takes to devise and fit up the details for experiment
and how unlooked for difficulties may often push back the final investigation
until it is almost eclipsed' (Schuster to Rayleigh, 8/1/1880, IC Rayleigh papers).
Schuster was writing to Maxwell's successor at the very start of a new regime, in
which student numbers rose to unprecedented heights, an internationally accepted
value of electric resistance was produced, and teaching changed into a system of
mechanized vigilance. New personnel, such as Richard Glazebrook, Napier
Shaw, George Gordon and Rayleigh himself, were crucial for this reorientation.
The lesson of Schuster's comments and of the success of Rayleigh's work is that
groundplans alone could not determine how a space of experiment worked
(Cavendish Laboratory, 1910: 43-9; Schaffer, 1992: 37-8). Neither physicists
nor historians effortlessly derive the conduct of laboratory work from even the
most carefully prepared layout. Realizing this conduct required the ingenious
deployment of a host of accounts of proper behaviour and appropriate precedents.
3. TERLING'S SCIENTIFIC GROUNDS
The problems which dominated the design of the early Cavendish Laboratory
were characteristic of rather wider issues in Victorian scientific culture in the
1860s and 1870s. The privacy of the traditional professorial milieu had to be rec-
onciled with the novel public role of their work as teachers and exemplary
researchers. Some of the precision values demanded by the growth of such engin-
eering networks as telegraphy and thermal machinery were manufactured in civic
Simon Schaffer 163
and clerical academies. The skilled workforce which experimental physics

required was hard to manage in a liberal regime of mathematical gymnastics.
These were certainly problems of geography. Professorial seclusion, networking
and engineers' shopwork all had their rightful places in a fragile set of privileged
places in late Victorian Britain. And these geographies were rapidly changing.
Telegraphy and rail dramatically transformed the arrangement of the world, while
the appearance of the physics lab in the varsity challenged the layout of the
liberal academy. But these spaces and their transformations were not utterly unfa-
miliar, nor were they the exclusive province of the physics managers. Rather, the
concerns of these men (privacy, technology, exercise, subordination) were shared
with, and drew some meaning from, more pervasive cultural forms. One was the
gentlemanly management of the landed estate and its country house. In the
balance of this chapter, I summarize the cultural economy of this politically
crucial milieu. I consider country houses as laboratories and the laboratories built
in country houses.
Apart from the fact that it had been privately funded by the Duke of
Devonshire, an even more obvious way in which the Cavendish interacted with
country house culture was through John Strutt, Baron Rayleigh. After his 1865
triumph in the Tripos, Strutt took the canonical path to a Trinity fellowship and
made early contacts with Maxwell, Thomson and Trotter on mathematics reform
and undulatory optical theory. He bought induction coils, Grove cells, a Ladd
galvanometer and a Thomson galvanometer. As we have seen, he had received
little if any encouragement from Stokes in his interest in private experimentation.
Maxwell's rapidly developing programme in dynamics immediately attracted the
young Essex gentleman (Strutt, 1968: 44-5). He was the heir to a very wealthy
landed family, his father the second Lord Rayleigh was a 'benevolent despot of
his parish' and a notable evangelical and reformist agriculturalist. During a disas-
trous typhoid epidemic in 1868 at the family seat, Terling, Strutt's father sent his
own family to another house at Tofts six miles away, then set out to engineer a
new water supply for Terling village. This was a characteristic mixture of pater-
nalist philanthropy and self-confident social power (Gavin, 1967: 21). The Strutt
circle was typical of the later Victorian landed class. They were cousins of the
absurdly rich Duke of Leinster and endorsed his Unionism. They were devoted to
whist, house parties and landscape gardening. In 1868, as Disraeli' s party faced
the critical general election in the wake of the Second Reform Act, Strutt was
abortively offered the Tory candidacy for Cambridge University (Strutt, 1968:
42-3). His closest family friends were the Salisbury-Balfour clan, nicknamed the
Hotel Cecil because of their nepotism, the strongest network in the Conservative
party in the years after 1870. In July 1871 Strutt became engaged to Balfour's
sister, Evelyn, whose musical interests prompted him thoughtfully to present her
with a copy of Helmholtz' Sensations of Tone (Strutt, 1968: 55). The same month
Rayleigh wrote to Maxwell with the news of the forthcoming marriage, the
enforced resignation from Trinity which this implied, and the couple's plans to
set up house at Tofts. Maxwell replied with congratulations and counsel on the
laboratory which the aristocratic wrangler wished to build there (Strutt, 1968: 59).
Maxwell's remarks are an eloquent indication of the practicalities of the typical
private laboratory (see Figure 6.2): 'With regard to the laboratory, the word
denotes a place to work at experiments and connotes a place full of articles not
wanted at present.' He recommended a fume cupboard and a neat wooden
support for a Thomson reflecting galvanometer ('This is Thomson's and a good
plan for securing one degree of freedom. No carpenter will believe this till he is
converted'). The key point was to set up the Glasgow instrument, chief element
of the resistance programme, so that a mirror, lamp and scale system could give
reliable and steady readings. 'The absence of carpenter's tight fittings will make
it easily adjustable'. Much improvisation seemed necessary - 'old style shop
shutters' to darken the optics room and mason's trestles for benches (Maxwell,
1990-5, vol. 2: 664-6). The remarks define a certain laboratory style: extreme
distrust either of expensive elegance or conventional skills, emphasis on the
improvised resources of woodwork and metalwork, an assumption that genuinely
novel contributions to optics and electromagnetism would be produced at such
sites. Rayleigh followed Maxwell's instructions rather closely. He set up two
adjoining rooms for optical experiments, one light and the other dark, and used
the space to copy diffraction gratings by contact printing from photographs. But
the workshop was abandoned after four months. In summer 1873 the second Lord
died, Strutt inherited the title and moved back to Terling. The rooms at Tofts
reverted to use as a billiard room. At the great house, meanwhile, Rayleigh set
out to convert the stable block into a laboratory which would eventually become
one of the largest private labs in Britain (Gavin, 1967: 26; Strutt, 1968: 60).
The site of Rayleigh's big new private lab had been, in the 1850s, a conserva-
tory and attached rooms. Three decades later, it was the site of a number of
crucial experimental projects, notably verifications of his mathematical theory of
resonance in the 1870s, the determination of the densities of atmospheric and
chemical nitrogen, which led to the discovery of argon in 1894, and the replica-
tion in a basement tunnel of Michelson's interferometry. During the argon trials
in the early 1890s Rayleigh installed a huge alternator in the brewhouse to gener-
ate big sparks in his lab on the other side of the house and also a vacuum pump
driven from the system pumping water to the kitchen garden (Strutt, 1968:
207-11 ). The cultural setting of this new laboratory shows what kinds of
resources and challenges were in play in this form of country house science. The
first need was support staff. Local smiths, for example, made tuning forks for
acoustics trials, the production of alternating currents and of droplets in charge
trials. Rayleigh found inore portentous support through his contacts with the
engineering network, notably with the brilliant marine engineer William Froude
and with William Armstrong's works at Elswick. In late 1875 Rayleigh per-
suaded the hydraulics expert Beauchamp Tower to stay at Terling. Tower helped
set up a hydraulics lab in the grounds, ran tests on water pressure and wave
Simon Schaffer 165
Figure 6.2 Maxwell instructs Rayleigh on the construction of stable supports

for electrical instruments. Source: Imperial College London archives, Rayleigh
MSS, Maxwell to Rayleigh 8 July 1871 .
power, and recruited his colleague Arnulph Mallock from Froude's firm to
analyse the elimination of turbulence in vortex flow. Tower also designed lathes
and began to equip the stable block with metalworking machines. The relation
with these engineers was, in the event, a failure. Rayleigh complained that such
men as Mallock 'might as well have been doing the work by himself'. This was
not the labour force he needed (Strutt, 1968: 71-4).
As a major landlord, Rayleigh also had some other resources. But the collapse
of grain prices in the mid-1870s and the deep depression from 1879 drove tenants
from their farms and threw the estate into turmoil. Rayleigh persuaded his own
brother, Edward Strutt, a Cambridge graduate and trainee estate manager, to
take over management from 1876 (Gavin, 1967: 72-3; Strutt, 1968: 76-7). By the
end of the decade, therefore, both support staff and income were massively com-
promised. These factors persuaded Rayleigh to take the Cavendish chair in
succession to Maxwell in late 1879. 'Perhaps I ought to take it for 3 or 4 years',
he told his mother, 'it would fit pretty well with the agricultural depression'
(Strutt, 1968: 100). Rayleigh saw the Cavendish chair, and the university labora-
tory he now commanded, as in part a way of pursuing his private work by other
means. At the end of his Cambridge tenure back in Terling in early 1885 he told
the Cavendish veteran George Chrystal that 'I hope to continue scientific work,
although in a laboratory which though it can never compete with a public institu-
tion I hope to make effective' (ULC MSS ADD 8375 no. 33). He remarked to
Napier Shaw, his deputy in Cambridge, that 'it will take some while to overtake
the Cavendish Laboratory and of course in many ways I could not attempt it'
(Strutt, 1968: 416). These were the views of an ambitious private landlord. The
decisive resources, he reckoned, were the combination of a skilled support staff
and re-equipment. He reoriented the Cambridge laboratory towards discipline
both in the class-room and in research on electromagnetic standards. He used his
engineering connexions to forge new links with workshops in London and
Liverpool. His new demonstrator, Richard Glazebrook, recruited a Liverpool
shipwright, George Gordon, a man of some ambition (he matriculated as a non-
college student) who could not aspire to the autonomous status which had been
such a problem in the cases of Tower and Mallock (Cavendish Laboratory, 1910:
46). Social status affected both Gordon and his master. 'I shall talk as much slang
to him as possible', Rayleigh remarked in autumn 1880. Rayleigh had himself
been told by Balfour that there would be a problem finding a suitable house in
Cambridge, and by Lord Salisbury that 'if I failed with the Professorship I should
lose my scientific reputation with the world' (Strutt, 1968: 102-4).
These issues remained after 1884. Gordon was 'brought back' to Terling as
Rayleigh's scientific valet and given a house on the estate for himself, his parents,
his sister and his niece. He impressed the local carpenters and gave lectures in the
village on popular science (Strutt, 1968: 160). When Rayleigh became professor
at the Royal Institution in 1887, Gordon was hired there too. At Albemarle Street,
Rayleigh was simply pleased to have a laboratory available during his enforced
Simon Schaffer 167
presence in London during the 'season'. But his colleague and rival James
Dewar's heavy gas compression machinery in the Royal Institution's basement
disturbed efforts at precision measurement and both Gordon and Rayleigh com-
plained about Dewar's marauders and the lack of technical support and apparatus
there (Howard, 1964: 1097; Strutt, 1968: 231). Eventually, the liaison with
Gordon ended in tragedy. He attempted suicide, was confined to an asylum, and
died in 1904. Characteristically, his replacement J. C. Enock was recruited from
the staff of the family dairy where he was working as a refrigeration engineer
(Strutt, 1968: 301, 427).
The social relations involved in these scientific programmes are best under-
stood as an expression of the ideology of landed society. Rayleigh's Cavendish
programme was at least as much dependent on a paternalist ethos of land man-
agement as it is on the incorporation of factory values in the University. In exper-
imental spaces like these, we see the pastoralisation of the laboratory and the
scientific transformation of the estate. The scientific transformation is patent. The
stables, conservatory, brewery and wellhouse were all mobilized for experimental
purposes. The agricultural depression from 1879 was principally of relevance,
apparently, because it compromised the Baron's capacity to buy equipment and
hire assistants. Rayleigh was also committed to the scientific study of agricul-
tural improvement. He used his laboratory to perform experiments on artificial
fertilisers. The Terling gas works which he used to help run the electric genera-
tors for the laboratory also generated ammonia for these farming experiments. In
company with his brother Edward, Rayleigh led a regime of rational management
and economic exploitation (Gavin, 1967: 74-5; Strutt, 1968: 76-7). On the other
hand, the management of his laboratories in Terling and Cambridge drew on the
powerful resources of late Victorian aristocratic rule. A salient feature of this rule
was not merely the development of country house laboratories, but of models of
country house management as scientific systems.
4. THE COUNTRY HOUSE LABORATORY
If the decade after 1867 witnessed a remarkable growth in the numbers of univer-
sity physics laboratories, it also saw an even more dramatic boom in the con-
struction of new country houses on the landed estates. The boom lasted until the
agricultural crash of 1879 which drove Rayleigh to the Cavendish. These estates
still dominated a huge proportion of the national economy. Although the relative
proportion of the workforce employed on the land steadily fell throughout this
period, 80 per cent of food supply was still produced in Britain from land which
supported almost two million workers. In 1873 half the country was owned by
about seven thousand people. While the agricultural depression was a disaster for
the grain growers, it was less threatening to those for whom the estate was a sign
not a source of wealth: Lord Salisbury, for example, derived much of his income
from rents on his extensive urban, often slum, properties in London and
Liverpool rather than his Hertfordshire estates. The grain crisis eventually had
excellent implications for pastoralists such as his kinsmen in the Rayleigh clan,
whose income increasingly depended on dairy marketing (Perry, 1974;
Thompson, 1987: 256, 282). Gross profits on Lord Rayleigh's farms, in effect an
expanding agricultural-industrial enterprise, rose from under £500 in 1887 to
more than £3000 in 1895 (Gavin, 1967: 81-9). At the same time, grain prices fell
by over one-third. These changes were accompanied by what has been called a
'professional and managerial revolution on estates', in which self-consciously
'scientific' principles were applied to large-scale commercial enterprises
(Thompson, 1963: 158; Richards, 1981: 439-41 ). Salisbury had a distinct passion
for accountancy and domestic technology, of some importance as failings in his
estate management came under the scrutiny of energetic political opponents such
as 'Radical' Joe Chamberlain and his journalist ally T. H. S. Escott (Thompson.
1987: 261, 275-6). The debt crises of the Cavendish's patron were a result of his
over-active investments both in scientific estate management and, above all, in
his huge steel-works schemes at Barrow. Chatsworth's fate hinged on the care
with which the Cavendish family husbanded its rents and ran its estates both rural
and industrial (Crowther, 1966: 217-18; Cannadine, 1995: 171-82).
The country house system played a decisive role in the economics and ideolo-
gies of domestic harmony. Its modem historian opines that the mansion was 'at
its best a remarkable achievement of analysis and synthesis, a vast machine
running smoothly and with clockwork precision, a hieratic structure as complex
and delicately graduated as the British Constitution' (Girouard, 1979: 31 ). The
houses were designed to exclude personnel and activities which must not be
seen or met, to direct the conduct of social life along its appropriate paths. The
conduct of butlers, gardeners, valets and kitchen staff could suggest how acade-
mic 'gentlemen' might understand the behaviour of technicians and support staff
in workshops and laboratories (Shapin, 1989). Domestic servants were, after
farm workers, the second-largest occupational group in Britain in the mid-
nineteenth century; in the third quarter of the century their numbers grew twice as
fast as the whole population (Burnett, 1984: 136-7). Domestic layout helped
make masters and servants as mutually invisible as possible while ingeniously
reinforcing relations of subservience and dominance. Thus the London professor
Robert Kerr, an influential Victorian expositor of the country house system,
analysed the division between servants and family, 'so that what passes on either
side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other ... what-
ever may be their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof,
each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other, and be alone' (Kerr, 1864:
74-6). Neat class taxonomy was to be secured in the face of major class disloca-
tion: the railway system, for example, transformed the spaces of pastoral Britain,
accelerating linkage between the agriculture and metropolis, generating 'new
money' which in its turn would seek roots in English soil and wrecking maps of
Simon Schaffer 169
the 'principal seats' and the county set (Franklin, 1981: 26-34; Faith, 1990:
233-54). Instruction was supplied for middle-class readers keen to emulate ideal
economy by works such as Isabella Beeton's Household Management (1861),
which developed a 'philosophy of housekeeping' and devoted many pages to the
duties of each servant and the places where they should fulfil their carefully
defined tasks (Burnett, 1984: 147-52; Briggs, 1990: 215-23).
An ideologically loaded vision of order and rank was incorporated in the
increasingly complex design of the great house. The wealthiest could boast staffs
of up to fifty (Gerard, 1994: 146-7). A separate staircase would be provided for
each group: male servants, female servants, the owner's family, guests and bache-
lors. Stratification of class and of gender were built into the layout of the landed
mansion. As the principal theorist of the politics of space, Henri Lefebvre,
observes, spatial disposition within the house is connected with an aristocratic
ethic of withdrawal, and the simultaneous construction of an external world
devoid of troubling crowds: 'the aristocrat is concerned neither with seeing nor
with being seen. The essence of a mansion thus lies in its interior disposition'
(Lefebvre, 1991: 314 ). Large areas were now set apart for an increasingly special-
ized male domain: laboratories, conservatories and billiard rooms, as at Terling,
could be interchangeable there (Gerard, 1994: 157-9). Salisbury, for example,
spent much time at Hatfield House practising amateur photography before turning
to experiments on magnetism and gas discharge, eventually building a laboratory
in 1868 (McLeod, 1905: 319-20). When Rayleigh visited in November 1870 he
discovered that the Hatfield lab 'also serves as a dressing room' (Strutt, 1968:
56). One month later, Salisbury and the London chemist Herbert McLeod used
the dressing room to make hydrogen-filled balloons. While the Marquess' chil-
dren played with them in the marble hall, he showed McLeod 'his apparatus and
lab. He has an immense number of things', reported the deferential chemist
(James, 1987: 19/1211870). At picturesque Leys Wood, built in 1868--69 for the
shipping magnate James Temple by his cousin, the successful architect Richard
Norman Shaw, a photography room was placed next to the billiard room in a
remote and secluded tower of this exemplary country mansion (Franklin, 1981:
60, 192).
Country house physics could then take its place in a familiar range of modish
activities: photography and lathe turning, orchids and aquaria, the obviously valu-
able enterprises of accountancy and livestock breeding above all (Hudson, 1972;
Hamlin, 1986: 150-2; Ritvo, 1987: ch. 2). Jim Moore's insightful positioning of
Charles Darwin as 'squarson' of Down neatly points out how conflicts of seclu-
sion and status might there be reconciled. Exercising 'genteel and clerical prerog-
atives' in Kent, Darwin sought isolation from a wider public to cope with his
neighbours and his selected correspondents from behind the walls of his estate
(Moore, 1985: 461-5). Down became a noteworthy experimental centre, its spe-
cially extended hothouses used to study orchids and purple loosestrife, the
kitchen a 'chamber of horrors' where pigeons were scientifically stewed and
barnacle specimens privately shipped from the Natural History Museum carefully
sexed (Desmond and Moore, 1991: 342,427, 513-21). Sometimes such privately
sponsored activities then fulfilled explicitly public functions, as at the pleasure-
ground and ethnographic museum which the Tory evolutionist and archaeologist
Augustus Pitt-Rivers established in the 1880s on his Dorset estate at Cranbome
Chase (Van Keuren, 1989: 284). Pitt-Rivers reckoned that in the midst of the
agricultural depression this pastoral attempt to instruct the rural workforce in the
truths of continuous evolution would, like the sterner displays at his academic
museum in Oxford, teach 'how slow and gradual have been the steps by which all
stable institutions have advanced' (VanKeuren, 1989: 287).
The putatively stable institution of the country house was designed to sustain
an increasingly autonomous and secluded set of spaces. Robert Kerr's contempo-
rary guidebook for those building such estates explained how to lay out museums
and scientific studies as well as libraries and kitchens. It was sometimes hard to
distinguish them: Kerr reckoned that the modem kitchen possessed 'the character
of a complicated laboratory, surrounded by numerous accessories, specially con-
trived in respect of disposition, arrangement and fittings for the administration of
the culinary art in all its professional details' (Kerr 1864: 227). A key term is
'professional'. Larger country houses were widely seen as systems of efficient
and timetabled labour: Hippolyte Taine, keen observer of English landed mores,
wrote in 1872 of temporal regularity as a distinctive feature of that world (Gerard,
1994: 192). The relation between the public transformation of the support system
and the private milieu of the landed elite had its most visible manifestation in the
realm of domestic technology. Gas, electricity and hydraulics were deployed
extensively in the country house from the mid-century. When Salvin was building
the new Cambridge science museums in the 1860s, he was also installing at
Alnwick Castle an unprecedentedly complex layout of hydraulic presses for the
ducal kitchens. Inside a remarkable nco-Gothic baronial structure, water-powered
spits and coal-fired rams drove an aristocratic fantasy. The Cavendish family
houses at Chatsworth and Lismore were also supplied with gas light and
advanced engineering by Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace. As at
Terling, gas supplies demanded new technical staff and specialized installations
on the estates (Thompson, 1963: 92-3; Girouard, 1979: 24; Briggs, 1990: 403).
These innovations were especially marked amongst, though not confined to,
those houseowners most closely identified with the new technologies. Louis
Crossley, co-director of one of the West Riding's greatest textile firms, swiftly
introduced electricity on a massive scale to his house at Moorside near Halifax,
including a private laboratory for trials on light and telephony and a lighthouse on
the roof. Isaac Holden, owner of the world's largest wool-combing enterprise,
established at Oakworth House near Keighley a massive thermal and hydraulic
system including a winter garden costing £120 000: 'the sight is rendered tenfold
more delightful ... by the effulgence of the electric light which sheds its rays
from six large Brush lamps, lighting up the garden with beams brighter almost
Simon Schaffer 171
than those of the Sun' (Sheeran, 1993: 83-4, 101). When Conan Doyle wished to
show how modem science, analytic and technical, would affect a foggy Dartmoor
country house he had the hapless Sir Charles Baskerville restore Baskerville Hall
with income from South African goldfields and the Hall's rightful heir, the
Canadian emigre Sir Henry. propose the introduction of 'thousand candle-power
Swan and Edison' systems (Doyle, 1994: 805). It is scarcely surprising that one
of the first houses to be lit by electricity was Cragside, the rambling 'palace of a
modem magician' built in the Northumberland forest between 1869 and 1884 for
the Newcastle industrialist William Armstrong. Armstrong installed arc lighting
there as early as 1878. Two years later he inaugurated an electric light system
designed by his close friend Joseph Swan. More interestingly, perhaps, he was
immediately copied by Lord Salisbury at Hatfield House. Salisbury visited
Armstrong's Elswick works in autumn 1880, and installed the Swan system in
Hatfield by spring 1881. Both Cragside and Hatfield relied on new Siemens gen-
erators for their electric power. Armstrong, a master of hydraulic engineering,
designed a huge reservoir above the house to power hydraulic lifts there and to
run a vortex turbine for a Siemens dynamo. Cragside was the first hydroelectric
system on a domestic scale (Dougan, 1971: 122; Girouard, 1979: 306; Saint,
1992: 29-33). (see Figure 6.3.)
Figure 6.3 Cragside lit by electricity, 1881. Source: The Graphic, 2 Aprill881.
At Hatfield, Salisbury was also a fan of arc lighting. In late 1870 Herbert
McLeod had managed the installation of a lighting system for Hatfield dances.
'For a period [Salisbury's] family and guests were compelled to eat their dinners
under the vibrating glare of one of these lamps fixed in the centre of the dining
hall ceiling.' In June 1881 Salisbury ran experiments on his estate to test the
range of available electric generators: 'the Siemens worked very well from a
steam engine close by but the lamps are all parallel - none in series. Its driving
power seems small' (Cecil, 1921, vol. 3: 4-7). The system was erratic- on one
occasion a house party at Hatfield had to extinguish an electric fire with a barrage
of cushions. Much more disastrously, in late 1881 one of the gardeners, the
twenty-two year old William Dimmock, was killed when wiring the saw mills
where the generators were installed. By 1883, however, Hatfield had become a
showplace for William Siemens' engineers exhibiting the possibilities of domes-
tic power, while Salisbury himself planned the electrification of the estate's farms
(James, 1987: 21-3/12/1870; McLeod, 1905: 323; Cecil, 1987: 57).
These techniques were not the whims of a number of eccentric landed gentle-
men, but the outward and visible manifestation of a culture of country house
science. Owners as various as Salisbury, Siemens, Armstrong and Rayleigh all
established their own laboratories within these houses and they treated parts of
their houses as laboratories. They saw these sites both as witness to public tech-
nologies and as places secluded from public life. One contemporary observed that
when the great Manchester engineer Joseph Whitworth took over a country estate
at Darley Dale he applied the same industrial methods to pastoral management:
'he would standardize the whole area by owning and improving it to his own sat-
isfaction'. During the 1870s, Whitworth devoted as much energy to securing his
estate's privacy from outside disturbance as to raising its productivity, especially
its quarries (Kilburn, 1987: 40-2). Seclusion had its appropriate vocabulary.
When the British Association for the Advancement of Science visited Hatfield in
summer 1904, even the gentlemen of science were only told of the romantic and
the picturesque. 'There are curious passages and quaint rooms still in existence in
the old pile ... the interior of the house is singularly beautiful, a lavish wealth of
decoration in exquisite taste appearing on every hand: objects of great historical
interest, pictures of almost priceless value, abound in this wonderful museum'
(Ashdown, 1904: 2). Occasionally, the resolution of public knowledge and
private life was acknowledged. Hatfield and Terling both hosted frequent house-
parties of considerable significance in the discourse and policy of late Victorian
science. A late nineteenth-century guidebook to Cragside spoke of the house 'as a
romance in stone and mortar'. But it was a romance funded by industrial capital
rather than land, and a symbol of how engineering could master nature. As the
guide indicated, 'there is something more than romance about the solid, hand-
some structure ... or rather, above and beyond the romance of colour and form,
there is the romance of science, of hard struggle with nature, of power and deter-
mination overcoming seemingly insuperable difficulties' (Dougan, 1971: 119).
Simon Schaffer 173
The architect of Cragside, Norman Shaw, was the dominant figure in the move-
ment for picturesque and 'quaint' country houses from the moment he exhibited his
plans for Leys Woods in 1870. Norman Shaw's plans for Leys Wood and Cragside
have been widely seen as turning points in the construction of an artificial antique:
'to be up-to-date meant to look as old as possible' (Girouard, 1979: 73). The fact
that both houses were commissioned by industrial magnates is taken to underline
the fatality of this retreat from modernity and 'the decline of the industrial spirit'
(Wiener, 1982: 66). But, as the Cragside guidebook shows, this 'atmosphere' was
by no means a simple-minded rejection of late nineteenth century technological
culture. Armstrong celebrated the Cragside electric system because 'there is no
consumption of material in the process'. Guidebooks pointed to 'the romance of
science'; Cragside was 'the palace of a modern magician' (Dougan, 1971: 123;
Curl, 1990: 116-18; Saint et al., 1992: 22). In the country house world the indus-
trial spirit was not denied. Instead, technoscience was spiritualized.
5. THE SPIRIT OF COUNTRY HOUSE PHYSICS
This spiritualization had a political charge. Economic struggle was to be repre-

sented as class harmony. The analogy between the country house system and the
British Constitution was not coincidental. Salisbury's daughter and biographer
remarked that his estate policy was 'singularly reminiscent of the spirit embodied
in the constitutional polity of England' (Cecil, 1921, vol. 2: 2). Armstrong might
boast that his technology consumed no material. 'This method is wasteful of
power, but I can afford to waste that which costs me nothing and is always
sufficient in quantity.' But no one was more aware of the cost of power: the first
years of Cragside's construction were the same years as the ferocious strikes at
his works at Elswick, when his managers were forced to concede cuts in working
hours in one of the world's largest armaments factories and shipyards (McKenzie,
1983: 108-9). Furthermore, whether through the British Association and the
Royal Society, or through new academic and scientific institutions such as
the King's College London metallurgy laboratory patronized by Siemens or the
Newcastle College of Physical Science endowed by Armstrong, the laboratory
managers we have named actively intervened in British policy for science train-
ing and industrial development (Pole, 1888: 344-5; McKenzie, 1983: 119). They
were protagonists of these struggles, not insulated from them.
In 1874 William Siemens, head of the major steel and electrotechnology
conglomerate, decided to build his own country house at Sherwood in
Kent. The aim was to establish a rural retreat and scientific headquarters.
He used Sherwood to host meetings of the International Telegraphy Conference
in 1879. In the same year, Thomson stayed there for the summer. In summer
1882 Siemens visited Cragside to inspect Armstrong's comparable dynamos
(Pole, 1888: 277-9; Siemens, 1889, vol. 3: 363; Thompson, 1910: 690). On an
estate of 160 acres Siemens installed a steam engine and dynamo to light the
house and conduct electric power to a series of greenhouses for experiments on
electrohorticulture, in a fashion comparable with the dramatic electrified gardens
of Isaac Holden at Oakworth House. In the late 1870s Siemens' experiments were
used to urge the effect of electric light on plant growth and to back up his new
and controversial account of the conservation of solar energy (Schaffer, 1995:
293-8). The Sherwood laboratory was also used to try electric discharge phe-
nomena in rarified gases to illustrate the process Siemens reckoned was at work
in the solar atmosphere. His electric greenhouses were described as so many
'artificial suns' whose action could be taken as an analogue of the real Sun. 'This
artificial Sun enables me to grow fruit such as melons, peaches, strawberries and
the like in the depth of winter' (Siemens, 1889, vol. 2: 235). There were a series
of displacements involved here: inferences between the spectra of discharge
tubes, electric greenhouses, regenerative furnaces at the company's steelworks,
and the behaviour of light in interstellar space. Sherwood was a key element in
this new network (see Figure 6.4).
On the one hand, therefore, the estate was an emblem of Siemens' argument
against wastefulness in nature and society. He told popular science classes in
the early 1880s of Armstrong's Cragside system and his own Sherwood instal-
lations: 'the point which science and the arts should be directed to chiefly is
the prevention of waste. In doing so we should vastly increase not only our
national resources but our individual well being'. Armstrong agreed with
Siemens that solar power was the key to national energy use. On the other hand,
the Sherwood installations taught lessons about the implications of power and
light systems for workers' skill. Siemens reckoned that his 'experiments' with
the house dynamo 'furnish proof that no particular skill is required in the
management of the electrical apparatus, as the gas engine, dynamo machine
and regulator have been under the sole management of my head gardener,
Mr D. Buchanan, and of his son, an assistant gardener' (Siemens, 1889, vol. 3:
364-5; McKenzie, 1983: 118). Sites such as Sherwood and Cragside were thus
emblems of the possible extension of massive networks of electrotechnology
and of moral arguments about nature's conservation. 'To agriculture, electric
transmission of power seems well adapted for effecting the various operations
of the farm and fields from one centre. Having worked such a system myself in
combination with electric lighting and horticulture for upwards of two years',
Siemens told the BAAS in 1882, 'I can speak with confidence of its economy
and of the facility with which the work is accomplished in charge of untrained
persons' (Siemens, 1889, vol. 3: 330).
Lord Salisbury had presented Siemens with an honorary Oxford doctorate in
summer 1870. In 1887 he made Armstrong a peer and repeated the exercise for
William Thomson four years later. Both elevations were rewards for loyalty to
the Unionist cause (Dougan, 1971: 156-63; Smith and Wise, 1989: 807-9). The
aristocratic leader of the Tory party was also a theorist of the role of public
~
§"
c.
;:r
~
§
"'..,
Figure 6.4 Siemens' house at Sherwood, showing the glass houses and lighting system for electrohorticulture. Source:
-..)
William Pole, Life of Sir William Siemens (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 279. VI
science and a private experimenter of some distinction. He built his private labo-
ratory at Hatfield in 1868, the year his party was destroyed at the polls in the
wake of the Reform Act. Rayleigh visited to explain magnetic induction;
McLeod, much more frequently, acted as Salisbury's London agent for instru-
ment purchases and active collaborator (Cecil, 1921, vol. 2: 12; vol. 3: 8-10).
A penurious if conscientious worker at the Royal College of Chemistry and,
from 1871, experimental science professor at the Royal Indian Engineering
College, McLeod first showed Salisbury how Sprengel air pumps worked in
exhausting tubes for gas discharge trials, then supplied the Tory peer with
Apps' induction coils, Browning's spectroscopes, and began working on the
spectra of electric discharge through exhausted receivers. Salisbury published
a paper on low temperature spectroscopy in the Philosophical Magazine in 1873
(James, 1987: 19/5,27/5,21112,29112 1870).
Like Rayleigh and Siemens too, Salisbury was committed to a scientific and
managerial solution to the agricultural crisis of the later 1870s. These initiatives
were soon integrated into a global account of electrotechnology and science's
public role. In a portentous speech at the inaugural meeting of the Institution of
Electrical Engineers in 1889, Salisbury spelt out the meaning of the 'strange
and fascinating discovery' of electric telegraphy and the new power and light
distribution systems. He reckoned them more significant than the steam engine:
'we positively exist by virtue of the electric telegraph'. In particular, he told the
engineers that the new system was now integrated into the political world of the
European chancelleries, and he predicted an important spatial transformation
which the distribution systems such as those now installed at Hatfield would
generate. Since 'the nature of the steam engine was such that the force which it
produced could only act in its own neighbourhood', Salisbury explained the
origin of the urban factory system, 'unnnatural and often unwholesome aggre-
gation', as a direct result of the incommunicability of steam power. Electricity
would reverse the process. 'If ever it shall happen that in the house of the
artisan you can turn on power as you now can turn on gas ... you will then
see men and women able to pursue in their own houses many industries which
now require the aggregation of the factory' (Salisbury, 1889: 13). This was
an illustration of the link between technology and the country house system
in Salisbury's ideology (Thompson, 1987: 259). Disraeli and his Young
Englanders had in the 1840s forged a 'country house politics' directed against
the ills of utilitarianism. Salisbury, his erstwhile rival, colleague and successor,
neatly connected country house politics with electro-technology and pater-
nalism. Thomas Parke Hughes has pointed out the significant role that aristo-
cratic interests played in the early years of Ediswan and its rival British-based
networks of power. Two years before this speech Salisbury's government had
amended Chamberlain's 1882 Electric Lighting Act in order to stimulate private
investment in the failing power and light industry (Hughes, 1983: 53-65). Now,
in 1889, he told the electrical engineers that their systems would reverse urban-
Simon Schaffer 177
isation, undermine the factory system, and restore 'the integrity of the family
upon which rests the moral hopes of our race' (Salisbury, 1889: 13). Electro-
technology would restore spirit to the domestic nation.
This spiritual mood was also marked in some of the topics of country house
science. In the mid-1870s Salisbury and Rayleigh collaborated at Terling in
experiments in psychical research. 'In my laboratory', Rayleigh explained to his
brother-in-law Henry Sidgwick in summer 1874, 'I could invent better tests and
help the manifestation by using only red light etc. better than anywhere else.'
This justified the shift from London spiritualist seances via the country house
party to the country house laboratory. •A decision of the existence of mind inde-
pendent of ordinary matter must be far more important than any scientific dis-
covery could be, or rather would be the most important scientific discovery'
(Strutt, 1968: 66-7). Psychic research was an obvious programme for country
house experimenters, both because of its clear challenges to materialism and its
practical techniques. House parties where carefully selected groups could be
gathered for temporary if highly charged recreation could easily be turned
towards the communal search for spiritual phenomena: 'I have never thought
the materialist view possible', Rayleigh wrote at the end of his life (Oppenheim,
1985: 330-3).
The country house laboratories also hosted related forms of inquiry into
imponderable forms of matter, concentrated on the evanescent phenomena
of spectra, photography, discharge and ether perturbations (Wynne, 1979).
Inquiries included Rayleigh's mastery of precision photography, Siemens'
work on the effects of gas discharge on plant growth and solar energy, or
Salisbury's early work on low-temperature conductivity. These were some of
the themes which dominated advanced work in physics in the last fifteen years
of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, for example, William Armstrong used
his Cragside laboratory, in collaboration with the local photographer John
Worsnop, to produce a remarkable set of photographs of electric discharge
from a Wimshurst machine through dust plates. In his workshops atop Norman
Shaw's impressively designed Old English east tower, Armstrong produced
phenomena which he reckoned demonstrated that electricity was molecular
vortex motion, and that the essence of matter might be no more than these
electric vortices. Pursuing the immaterialist views associated with Balfour
Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, who were critics of spiritualism but enthusiasts
for an 'invisible universe' continuous with the order of energetics and ether
physics and populated by intelligent agents superior to humanity, Armstrong
urged that 'these views of the structural capacity of motion present Nature
under a more spiritual aspect than one of crude Materialism .... They make her
appear more akin to an Infinite Dominant Mind' (Armstrong, 1897; Dougan,
1971: 171; Smith and Wise, 1989: 630-2). The country house laboratory
helped sustain a symbolic universe in which material technology and spiritual
value could, temporarily and delusively, be reconciled.
As the new century dawned, country house laboratories just retained

their patrician aura, and an association with innovative disciplines such as
spectroscopy and radiation physics. An example is provided by the researches
of Archibald Campbell, Lord Blythswood, committed Tory and constructor of
an important private laboratory in his Renfrewshire country house where in
the mid-1890s he worked on photography with high-frequency radiation using
enormous Wimshurst machines to help generate the rays. Blythswood's
researches were used by his eulogist, the newly appointed Glasgow natural
philosophy professor Andrew Gray, as part of 'the strong plea which can be
put forward for the existence of a leisured and broadly cultured class' (Gray,
1908). A similarly impressive programme was maintained between 1898 and
1928 at his private gas osmosis laboratory at Foxcombe near Oxford by the
eighth Earl of Berkeley. His obituarist notes the importance of the Earl's
recruitment there of a team of physical chemists and engineers, and his rare
combination of a Fellowship of the Royal Society with a Mastership of
Foxhounds. Such labs were much in vogue among the Oxford group of what
Jack Morrell has called 'Clarendonian gentlemen'. Their chief, Frederick
Lindemann, the wealthy heir of an amateur astronomer, early maintained a
private physics laboratory at his house near Sidmouth. One colleague, Gordon
Dobson, an authority on ozone spectrophotometry, turned his country house at
Boar's Hill into a world meteorological centre in the 1920s; another, the
eminent (and moneyed) physicist Sir Thomas Merton, successfully pursued
salmon and spectroscopy on his Herefordshire estate until the late 1940s
(Hartley, 1975; Morrell, 1992: 275-8).
Alongside the maintenance of the pastoral home of such enterprises, the
country house continued (and continues) to function as a key site for imagina-
tive moral and political work. A guide of 1907, authored by Salisbury's old
critic Escott, mapped the houses by political allegiance of the sets who met
there, and both literary and intellectual projects continued to focus on that pas-
toral world (Escott, 1907). For late Victorian intellectuals, the tone was struck
by the engineer William Froude's waspish young nephew, W. H. Mallock, who
set his New Republic (1877) at a country-house party with a cast including cari-
catures of such eminent moralists as Matthew Arnold and materialists such as
John Tyndall. In explicit imitation of Mallock's staging, two years later Balfour
Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait set their own imaginative debate on Tyndall's
mistakes, on spiritualism and ether physics, in Strathkelpie Castle, a pile dating
back to the Conquest, where the German materialist Dr Herman Stoffkraft
was seduced from the fallacies of materialism to what Greg Myers has called
'the theology of his hosts and the social life of an English country-house
weekend' (Myers, 1989: 330). Maxwell reviewed the weekend's events in
Nature, summarized the authors' use of spirit-rapping and electrobiology in
scotching materialism, and noted how his colleagues Stewart and Tait had 'laid
down all the instruments of their art ... and locking up their laboratories, have
Simon Schaffer 179
betaken themselves to those blissful country seats where in more recent times
[Thomas Love] Peacock and [William Hurrell] Mallock have brought together
in larger groups the more picturesque of contemporary opinions' (Stewart and
Tait, 1879: 119-22; Maxwell, 1890: 756-7). The salience of the country house
for debates on social value was furthered in William Morris' 1890 utopia, News
from Nowhere, in which Morris' own Kelmscott became the best hope of
humanity's socialist future; and, more characteristically, as the symbol of
Britain's past and prospects in the Fabian visions of H. G. Wells' Tono-Bungay
(1909) and Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House (1917) (Kessel, 1993: 134-47).
In reminiscences of life at a Sussex country house in the early 1880s, Wells
insisted that 'out of such houses came the Royal Society, the Century of
Inventions, the first museums and laboratories and picture galleries, gentle
manners, good writing and nearly all that is worth while in our civilization
today'. Recognizing that the 'country houses that were so alive and germinal'
had by this century decayed into merely transient sites of leisure, Wells agreed
with many that their presence was crucial for the understanding of British social
and intellectual order (Wells. 1934: 136).
Raymond Williams described these idealized country houses of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries as defining 'knowable communities',
worlds which sought to match an immemorial and imaginary rural past with an
individualist, competitive and dangerous present. These houses were 'places
where events prepared elsewhere, continued elsewhere. transiently and intri-
cately occur'. The legacy of the country house narrative, he suggested, was
the classic English middle class detective story from Conan Doyle to Agatha
Christie: 'it was in its very quality of abstraction, and yet of superficially
impressive survival. that the country house could be made the place of isolated
assembly of a group of people whose immediate and transient relations were
decipherable by an abstract mode of detection' (Williams, 1973: 202, 299).
Much, too, has recently been made of the intriguing similarities between late
Victorian detection and the fundamental issues of scientific method, the virtues
of induction and abduction so much in question at the century's end (Eco and
Sebeok, 1983; Smith, 1994: ch. 7). These qualities of abstraction and survival
were also what made the country house laboratory a plausible if fragile space of
experiment, an enterprise which allowed events prepared and continued else-
where to occur transiently and intricately within a controlled locale. Managers
of the academic physics laboratories sought to reconcile in layout, personnel
and work-style these two systems of value, of immemorial tradition and
abstract detection.
On the Cavendish's gateway it is one of Britain's greatest landed aristocrats,
industrialist and wrangler, who holds the laboratory in his hands as any patron
saint would hold the city-state. New institutions could attach themselves to a
version of landed tradition to achieve this reconciliation of values, spiritual and
pastoral as much as industrial and scientific (Wright, 1985: 41-2, 78). Williams
reckoned that in country house tales 'all real questions of social and personal
relationship [were] left aside except in their capacity to instigate an instru-
mental deciphering'. This chapter began by describing physics laboratories
as production utopias, to highlight the labour performed there and their ideal
of exemplary seclusion uniquely at home in nature. They depended on social
relationships which apparently let members leave aside the role played by
social relationships in nature's instrumental deciphering. The chapter then set
out to map the social geography of these relationships. The country house,
Williams once reminded us, is 'a class England in which only certain histories
matter' (Williams, 1973: 220). That powerful political and historical restriction
is one reason why the country house played its role in the formation of the
sciences' viewpoint.
NOTE
Abbreviations: GUL- Glasgow University Library; ULC -Cambridge University Library;

IC - Imperial College London Archives.
7 Spatial Imagery in
Nineteenth-Century
Representations of Science:
Faraday and Tyndall
Alice Jenkins
Abstract thinking seems to draw substantiality from expression in the form of

fictional spaces. Spatial metaphors are common in writing dealing in the organ-
isation of knowledge, in categorization, and in abstractions. Many of these
metaphors, which might be thought of as cartographical impulses in language,
have become flush with the surface of the discourses in which they appear.
Formulations such as 'the kingdom of nature' or 'the domain of science' are
markers of concentrated metaphoric activity, but even by the start of the nine-
teenth century they had largely disappeared as markers, having become almost as
invisible as a cliche. Simon Schaffer, commenting on William Whewell's use of
geographical metaphors, has called these images 'commonplaces', noting that 'It
was unoriginal to use ... topographic imagery in the scientific culture of the
1830s .. .' (Schaffer, 1991: 21 0-12). The popularity of spatial images, and their
wide range of applications, demands some attention to their role in shaping the
rhetoric of early nineteenth century scientific writing. The fact that these terms
were partially concealed by their very pervasiveness means that when they are
isolated and examined, it is possible to uncover in them fresh indications of the
epistemological character of the argument they support.
Spatial metaphors produce a dual movement in texts. They act subtly to draw
language away from the objective or the external into fiction; but they are often
used in an endeavour to concretize the abstract. These two functions do not nec-
essarily clash: some abstractions can be firmly grounded only by translation into
the fictional. A common form such as 'the realm of the imagination', for instance,
acts to lend the speaker's concept of the imagination a definition and separation
from the speaking and listening selves; yet it also tends to fictionalize the entire
discourse. Only on an imaginary map could such a realm be marked. Spatial
metaphors thus perform a manoeuvre which pulls the discourse, as well as the
claims it makes on its audience, in diverging directions. This is a source of cre-
ative tension usefully available to literary writing, but also to writers in scientific
genres. This chapter focuses on uses of spatial metaphor in the rhetoric of
181
Michael Faraday and John Tyndall, and comments on its possibilities for writers
like Whewell, who, in his role as a reviewer, worked in a somewhat different
rhetorical milieu.
Metaphors based on spatiality are often used to construct conceptual methods,
defining and connecting parts of thought. They have been frequently and readily
assimilated into contemporary English livguistic practices since at least the
seventeenth century. As a result, they reflect and are often determined by social
and historical circumstances, so that the conceptual maps any individual writer
produces with them are themselves part of a larger cultural set of demarcations
and connections. For this reason, examination of spatial metaphors can helpfully
be based in multidisciplinary, crossgeneric examination.
While not suggesting that all spatial metaphors derive from features of land-
scape, this paper concentrates on those spatial metaphors which are based pri-
marily on elements of the visible environment. It might seem that the metaphors
discussed are not truly spatial at all, merely geographical or topographical; but in
most of the following examples the real power of the metaphor is generated by
the suggested dynamics of spatial relationships between features of these fictional
landscapes, or between the feature and a human figure also within the frame of
the imagined picture. The presence of this human figure is sometimes only
implied, sometimes quite explicit. In any case, although the geographical feature
is of course a large part of the metaphor's suggestion, the metaphor's force is
essentially spatial - concerned with relationships of distance, size and circum-
ference rather than solely with the associations raised by each particular element
of landscape.
Certain spatial tropes have had particularly long currencies; one such is
the cluster of metaphors based upon land enclosure. These metaphors play an
important role in structuring the argument of the Preface to Ephraim Chambers'
Cyclopaedia; or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, for instance,
which appeared early in the eighteenth century; and they were still sufficiently
powerful by the 1830s for William Whewell to make strikingly similar use of
them. Although Chambers' text made its first appearance about a century before
the early publications of Faraday and Whewell, many of its central rhetorical plays
are found to be similarly central in the spatial imagery of these later writers. In the
Preface to his Cyclopaedia, Chambers sets out his conception of the disciplines:
In the wide field of intelligibles, appear some parts which have been more cul-
tivated than the rest; chiefly on account of the richness of the soil, and its early
tillage; but partly too, by reason of the skilful and industrious hands under
which it has fallen. These spots, regularly laid out, and conveniently circum-
scribed, and fenced round, make what we call the Arts and Sciences; and to
these have the labours and endeavours of the men of curiosity and learning, in
all ages, been chiefly confined. Their bounds have been enlarged from time to
time, and new acquisitions made from the adjoining waste; but still the space
Alice Jenkins 183
of ground they possess is but narrow; and there is room to extend them vastly,
or to lay out new ones. (Chambers, 1728: ix)
After describing the arts and sciences in terms of plots of land, Chambers goes on
to put his spatial metaphors to more critical use, commenting on the sciences in
particular that:
They were divided, by their first discoverers, into a number of subordinate

provinces, under distinct names; and have thus remained for time immemorial,
with little alteration. And yet this distribution of the land of science, like that of
the face of the earth and heavens, is wholly arbitrary; and might be altered,
perhaps not without advantage. Had not Alexander, Caesar, and Gengiskan
lived, the division of the terraqueous globe had, doubtless, been very different
from what we now find it: and the case would have been the same with the
world of learning, had no such person been born as Aristotle. The first divi-
sions of knowledge, were as scanty and ill concerted, as those of the first geog-
raphers; and for the like reason: ... I do not know whether it might not be more
for the general interest of learning, to have the partitions thrown down, and the
whole laid in common again, under one undistinguished name.
(Chambers, 1738: ix)
Some interesting movements are played across the word 'field' in the passages
quoted from Chambers' Cyclopaedia. In the first passage, the word is largely
used for its associations with agriculture; in the second excerpt, however, the
dominant sense shifts to that of the field of battle, suggested by the references to
military conquerors. The sense returns in the final sentence to farming, adopting
the very frequently made distinction between metaphorical common and enclosed
land. Richard Yeo comments dryly ' ... Chambers was not enthusiastic about the
enclosure of knowledge in various categories, preferring that its common field be
left for free cultivation' (Yeo, 1991: 28). During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, of course, this distinction between enclosed and common land became
highly politicized and emotive in rhetoric as in practical application. It is perhaps
for this reason that those metaphors contrasting enclosed with common land are
among the most long-lived of spatial tropes. Compare Chambers' use of the
image of enclosure with a version written by Whewell about a hundred years
after, in a complimentary review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the
Physical Sciences. The thrust ofWhewell's argument, and the terms in which he
makes it, are remarkably similar to Chambers':
If a moralist, like Hobbes, ventures into the domain of mathematics, or a poet,

like Goethe, wanders into the fields of experimental science, he is received
with contradiction and contempt; and, in truth, he generally makes his incur-
sions with small advantage, for the separation of sympathies and intellectual
habits has ended in a destruction, on each side, of that mental discipline which
leads to success in the other province. But the disintegration goes on, like that
of a great empire falling to pieces; physical science itself is endlessly sub-
divided, and the subdivisions insulated.... The inconveniences of this division
of the soil of science into infinitely small allotments have been often felt and
complained of. ([Whewell], 1834: 59-60)
Here again tensions between agricultural and military senses of 'field' are
played out, with the whimsically pastoral wanderings of the poet quickly
changing into incursions or raiding parties. As with the passage from
Chambers, however, the metaphors return to the agricultural, referring once
more to the process of land enclosure which was largely completed but still a
highly contentious matter by the 1830s (Turner, 1980: 66). This section of the
review illustrates the interweaving of aesthetic and political aspects of spatial
rhetoric. In general, both the political and the aesthetic versions of land use
tend to be present in metaphors concerning enclosure and the physical land-
scape. In the particular case of Whewell's review, it is relevant that develop-
ments in both the agricultural and the picturesque modes of improving the
re-formed English countryside were during this period receiving extensive
coverage in the Quarterly Review, the journal in which Whewell's piece on
Somerville appeared. These developments represented part of a wider cultural
debate in which ideology and fashion acted upon each other.
The metaphor of the state of science, envisioned as a field undergoing constant
debilitating division and subdivision is, then, a long-running spatial metaphor
which suffered surprisingly little fundamental change over a period of a century
or so. Others of these spatial images, however, existed in several different ver-
sions during a much shorter period. One such is the metaphor of the discovery of
landscape. The diversity of forms of this trope can be exemplified by comparison
of two texts by Faraday and Tyndall.
As a piece of public rhetoric, Tyndall's memoir of Faraday, Faraday as a
Discoverer, was extremely effective and popular. It had its origin in two lec-
tures given by Tyndall at the Royal Institution a few months after Faraday's
death, and once in print, it reached many editions by the end of the century.
Intended as ' ... the able and loving memorial of a good and great man' as Lady
Tennyson put it (Eve and Creasey, 1945: 127) -though coloured by private
memory and admiration, it was yet a highly public memorial, and it duly
adopted a public rhetoric. Tyndall's memoir can in many ways be considered as
an item of iconography.
Another reason, related to its role in the representation of the ideal scientist, for
discussing this text of Tyndall's is that it makes claims of continuity and even of
legacy in the succession from the earlier to the later scientist's writing. This
theme of transmission can in itself be thought of as essentially spatial, perhaps in
a way analogous to the sense in which Faraday's field theory is spatial; but for the
Alice Jenkins 185
purposes of this chapter, I want to focus now on Tyndall's and Faraday's use of
the rhetorics of space in their representations of the scientist rather than of partic-
ular scientific theories.
The theme of transmission, from parent to son, from master to disciple, is made
explicit by Tyndall in the early pages and is developed throughout the book. It
plays a key role in establishing Tyndall's credibility and authority as a biographer
of Faraday. The memoir almost attempts to cast Tyndall as a 'son' of Faraday.
Some historians have concurred with this assessment of the relationship between
the two men; Eve and Creasey, for instance, comment that 'Tyndall's attitude to
the older man had been deep and sincere affection, filial rather than brotherly'
(Eve and Creasey, 1945: 124). There may, then, have been an element of the per-
sonal in Tyndall's interest in Faraday's parents. Early in the memoir, Tyndall
explains his reasons for asking Faraday about his family:
Believing, as I do, in the general truth of the doctrine of hereditary transmis-

sion - sharing the opinion of Mr. Carlyle, that 'a really able man never pro-
ceeded from entirely stupid parents'- I once used the privilege of my intimacy
with Mr. Faraday to ask him whether his parents showed any signs of unusual
ability. (Tyndall, 1961 [1893]: 3)
Faraday as a Discoverer implicitly claims that the success of this transmission or

succession from the older man to the younger is recorded in the involvement of
Tyndall's own feelings and experience in his descriptions of Faraday. In the above
quotation, for instance, Tyndall makes clear that his authority as biographer is a
product of his particular personal relationship with his subject. Tyndall, the reader
is asked to feel, has earned through affection and his own scientific and other
achievements the right to be personally present in statements another biographer
would have made impersonally. This is particularly evident in his uses of heroic,
even epic imagery in his representation of Faraday. Much of his imagery is based
on spatial metaphors, particularly those derived from the Alpine landscape with
which Tyndall himself was closely associated. For example:
When from an Alpine height the eye of the climber ranges over the mountains,
he finds that for the most part they resolve themselves into distinct groups,
each consisting of a dominant mass surrounded by peaks of lesser elevation.
The power which lifted the mightier eminences in nearly all cases lifted others
to an almost equal height. And so it is with the discoveries of Faraday. As a
general rule, the dominant result does not stand alone, but forms the culminat-
ing point of a vast and varied mass of inquiry. (Tyndall, 1961 [18931: 173)
Tyndall goes on to simplify the image, and to shift the balance of his metaphors
in favour of the emotional rather than the observational, remarking of Faraday
that:
His third great discovery is the magnetization of light, which I should liken to
the Weisshom among mountains- high, beautiful, alone.
(Tyndall, 1961 [1893]: 174)
A tone of quiet triumphalism, of personal authority, is detectable in Tyndall's use

of the first person here. I am, he seems to intimate, peculiarly qualified to judge in
this case. The very sublimity of the mountains helps to validate Tyndall's position
as a commentator; he might be thought by his readers to be especially competent
to assess the qualities of the Weisshom, since he was credited as the first climber
to ascend it. His intimacy with the Alps and his intimacy with Faraday are used
in similar ways to justify and buttress his authority. Tyndall's own achievements
are central to his comments on both subjects. For this reason, there is a tone of
personal grievance in Tyndall's complaint at an earlier stage in the book that:
The world knows little of the toil of the discoverer. It sees the climber jubilant
on the mountain top, but does not know the labour expended in reaching it.
(Tyndall, 1961 [1893]: 98)
Aside from its application to Tyndall's mountaineering experience, this is a more

conventional spatial image. Here, a positivist description of scientific discovery
operates: pre-existing discoveries are there to be reached by the diligent scientist.
Despite their inherent fictionality, the tendency of spatial metaphors is frequently
towards positivism and even determinism. Metaphors of paths and rivers, particu-
larly, can function in this way. Describing Faraday, Tyndall writes 'His momen-
tum was that of a river, which combines weight and directness with the ability to
yield to flexures of its bed' (Tyndall, 1961 [1893]: 22-3). The linearity of the
river image suggests a certain determinism in the narrative of Faraday's scientific
work; the course of given river is knowable, beginning at one point and ending at
another, whatever tributaries join it along the route. In Tyndall's use of the river
metaphor, the process of Faraday's life takes on a character of inevitability: the
route to scientific knowledge is implied to be as sure as the course of a river.
The tradition of associating mountains with greatness and great achievements
is of course very ancient in Western literature, dating from at least Greek mythol-
ogy, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson has shown (Nicolson, 1959: 38). But the literary
tradition of the sublimity of mountains, the ecstatic aesthetic response to seeing
them, which Tyndall alludes to regarding the Weisshom, is broadly of much more
recent origin. Wordsworth commented that before the mid-eighteenth century,
there was hardly:
... a single English traveller whose published writings would disprove the
assertion, that, where precipitous rocks and mountains are mentioned at all,
they are spoken of as objects of dislike and fear, and not of admiration.
(Wordsworth, 1906 [1844]: 149-50; quoted in Nicolson, 1959: 18)
Alice Jenkins 187
By contrast, Tyndall wrote during the heyday of the cult of the mountain. In his
use of the Alps as sources of spatial metaphors, he combines the ancient allegori-
cal and the newer quasi-empirical traditions in regard to writing about mountains.
It has been said of him that 'Tyndall's mountain writings, important as they were,
were marred by the poor prose of science .. .' (Clark, 1981: 67). Whatever the
accuracy of this judgement with regard to his directly descriptive writing, Tyndall
deserves much greater consideration for his use of mountain images as part of a
rhetoric in which to present science. His belief in the seriousness and importance
of the connection, in practice, between science and the mountains was sufficient
to cause him to resign his membership of the Alpine Club in 1861, in protest
against Leslie Stephen's mock-heroic spoof account of an imaginary ascent of
the Ober Gabelhom. It seems likely that the part of this joke to which Tyndall
objected was Stephen's remark on ' ... those fanatics who, by a reasoning process
to me utterly inscrutable, have somehow irrevocably associated alpine travelling
with science' (Schuster, 1945: 390; Clark, 1981: 65 gives a slightly different
version of the anecdote). The basis of Stephen's rather feeble joke reflects the
strength of Tyndall's Alpine metaphors when used in representing Faraday's
greatness; Tyndall is able to draw on a connection already established in the
public mind, not only the old connection between mountains and unusual power,
but between the Alps in particular and particularly scientific powers. In this he
departs from the ancient tradition of allegorical writing about mountains, which
can be seen at work in, for instance, the Psalms and through the Scriptures, in the
English religious allegories of which Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a prime
example.
By contrast, the rhetoric by which Faraday presented scientific experiences
and achievements tends much more towards this allegorical strand of spatial
metaphor. Despite his Continental and other travels, Faraday's sense of space is
expressed in a rhetoric that in many ways owes more to that allegorical, almost
medieval topography of the imagination than to the Romantic attitudes
of Tyndall. This allegorical tendency is particularly strong in Faraday's un-
published early writings. Describing, for the purposes of an exercise in essay-
writing, the experience of a person embarking on a course of self-education,
he wrote: 1
The mind wanders about as if lost in the extent of country to which it has been
so lately admitted strange to every thing around it has only the inclination to
become acquainted without the power to decide where to commence its system
of research. It is misled with the extended view in the distance it wanders
through the mazy valleys of knowledge and is thunderstruck at the towering
hills of science. Here many are lost their spirits fail them they believe it is only
for birds of stronger wing to attempt the boundless flight. But we must return
back to the door which admitted us and a shorter view with modest but perse-
vering exertions. ([Faraday], 1818a: 26) 2
This passage reverses the perspective adopted by more assured writers of

extended spatial metaphors. Where Chambers and many others like him regard
the landscape of the mind with the eye of the landowner, comprehending the
layout of the fields and areas they describe, Faraday's passage imagines the
topography of systematized knowledge as a scene of Alice in Wonderland plea-
sure and bewilderment. Unlike the enclosure images discussed earlier, this
extended metaphor of Faraday's is based on an uncultivated, unhistoricalland-
scape. It is one unaffected by human labour; indeed it daunts and defeats many
attempts at exploration. The images dehumanise the exploring mind, metamor-
phosing it into a bird, and later in the passage, perhaps, a butterfly:
It is easier to flutter from blossom to blossom inhaling the sweets and delight-
ing the sense with the odours of Fancy than to settle upon and find out by expe-
rience the intrinsic value of the more useful though not so obtrusive qualities of
the herbs of reason. ([Faraday], 1818a: 26)
Recent historians, most notably Geoffrey Cantor, have stressed the role of
Faraday's Sandemanian theology on his conception of science (Cantor, 1991),
and following them it might be tempting to read this metaphor as expressive of
Faraday's theology. The landscape would then figure the totality of knowledge
possible to man, rather than the constructions and divisions of contemporary
human knowledge figured in Whewell's and Chambers' enclosure metaphors.
Other aspects of Faraday's metaphor, however, suggest Pagan rather than
Christian echoes. The landscape described, for instance, is closer to the ideal of
the Golden Age than to an orthodox Christian Eden, particularly in the relation-
ship of human to land. Eden was tilled by Adam; but as Peter Knox-Shaw
reminds us, in the Ovidian Golden Age, the mastery of man over nature is much
less simple and direct (Knox-Shaw, 1987: 11). Perhaps the chief interest of this
passage from Faraday's early essay is in its reliance on single direct correspon-
dences between mental and disciplinary categories, as expressed through lan-
guage, and features of the imagined landscape. In other words, each element of
Faraday's description indicates and signifies a different aspect of the experience
of learning. This sense of language's power to correspond simply and univocally
to other structures has been stressed as crucial to allegorical form by some recent
writers on the genre, and has frequently been interpreted as deriving from a reli-
gious, particularly a Christian, worldview. Maureen Quilligan, for instance,
regards the belief in a ' ... potential sacralizing power in language ... ' as a prereq-
uisite for allegory. Along with Douglas Bush, she considers this belief to have
been lost during the scientific revolution (Bush, 1963: 25; Quilligan, 1979:
158-9, 172-6). Faraday's allegories would see.m to place him in what Bush and
Quilligan would regard as the pre-scientific tradition. Much more attention to
Faraday's early writings, particularly as they relate to questions of language and
representation, is necessary in order to explore the apparent tensions between
Alice Jenkins 189
some of his literary and aesthetic sensibilities, and his increasing induction into
the world of scientific research.
Elsewhere in these early essays, Faraday's strongest spatial metaphors belong
more clearly to the era of their composition, drawing their detail from the well-
used stocks in trade of eighteenth century landscape description and depiction.
Unlike Tyndall's spatial metaphors, Faraday's are rarely based on responses to
direct experience of natural landscapes themselves. Describing in another of these
exercises the mind of a person who has cultivated his imagination, Faraday 3
writes that:
... in viewing a landscape he will penetrate into the recesses of a wood, bathe
in the waters, explore the ruins of old castles, or disappear behind some heath
clad hill .. . ([Faraday], 1818b: 47)
Here Faraday resorts to the typical elements of picturesque landscape painting - hill,
waters, woods, ruins- for description. By 1818, the aesthetic values underlying
these images had made them so popular and well-used as to be cultural objects in
public ownership. Partly because of these generic elements and the qualities ascribed
by fashion to both real and imaginary landscapes, it is impossible without further
context to determine whether the scene described here is a real tract of country, or a
painting. In his accounts of real scenes, dating from his tour of Wales in 1819, the
year after the composition of these essays, Faraday adopts the same standards,
derived from picturesque art, in his appreciation of the physical landscape:
The scenery was at first moderately pretty being composed of high hills or
rather mountains with a small stream of water falling in a long succession of
cascades before us but wood was wanting and that is with difficulty replaced in
a landscape by any other feature. (Tomos [1972]: 54-5)
Of course, Faraday is by no means the only writer of his time to mediate experi-
ence of the landscape through idealized picturesque art. Raymond Williams,
among other critics, noted a tendency towards a similar pictorialization of visual
experience of landscape during the eighteenth century and interpreted it as a man-
ifestation of an aesthetic of separation and of possession, closely related to the
aesthetic driving the improvement of country estates into landscapes ' ... emptied
of rural labour and of labourers; a sylvan and watery prospect, with a hundred
analogies in neo-pastoral painting and poetry, from which the facts of production
had been banished ... ' (Williams, 1973: 125). Far from being exceptional, it is in
the participation of Faraday's landscapes in this facet of the cultural milieu of his
writing that the interest of these passages lies.
In his later use of spatial metaphors, particularly in public writing concerned
with self-presentation, the difference between Faraday's and Tyndall's style is
clear. To find in Faraday's own writing a case justly comparable with Tyndall's
rhetoric of scientific greatness in Faraday as a Discoverer, we must look for

instances of Faraday representing other scientists, since self-presentation
demands a rhetoric different from that of encomium to fulfil its different pur-
poses. Such a case is found at the beginning of Faraday's 1857 paper 'On the
Conservation of Force', where he refers to ' ... the high and piercing intellects
which move within the exalted regions of science .. .' (Faraday, 1991 [1857]:
443). The contrast with Tyndall's use of high spaces is evident. In Faraday's
phrase, the metaphor emphasizes architectonics, rather than details which could
be associated with a particular location, even a mythical one. It is space and
spatial relationships which dominate the thought - even the small sense of
specifiable, identifiable place in Tyndall's images is non-existent here.
In his self-presentation, as distinct from his descriptions of others, Faraday's
metaphors often cluster around the group of agricultural, horticultural images
noticed in Chambers' Preface to the Cyclopaedia and dating from at least the
seventeenth century. In the paper on the conservation of force, Faraday described,
in comparison to the 'high and piercing intellects',
... those persevering labourers (amongst whom I endeavour to class myseiO,

who, occupied in the comparison of physical ideas with fundamental princi-
ples, and continually sustaining and aiding themselves by experiment and
observation, delight to labour for the advance of natural knowledge, and strive
to follow it into undiscovered regions. (Faraday, 1991 [1857]: 443)
The agricultural labourer is one of his more common tropes in public self-
presentation. But it is not entirely stable: in this passage, for instance, the
metaphors drift into images of exploration. Like Tyndall's, Faraday's rhetoric
frequently made use of the momentum of geographical discovery. Later in the
same paper, indeed, stressing the importance of the principle of conservation of
force, he argues that it:
... should be the more earnestly employed and the more frequently resorted to
when we are labouring either to discover new regions of science, or to map out
and develop those which are known into one harmonious whole ...
(Faraday, 1991 [1857]: 459)
In this string of metaphors, the regions of science are mapped and subsumed into
an empire of knowledge. The process of mapping is part of the harmonization
of knowledge; 'cartography' creates order. The radical historian of cartography,
J. B. Harley, describes a similar phenomenon in his remarks on the role of carto-
graphy in imperial geography:
Surveyors marched alongside soldiers, initially mapping for reconnaissance, then

for general information, and eventually as a tool of pacification, civilisation, and
Alice Jenkins 191
exploitation in the defined colonies. But there is more to this than the drawing of
boundaries for practical political or military containment of subject populations.
Maps were used to legitimise the reality of conquest and empire. They helped
create myths which would assist in the maintenance of the territorial status quo.
(Harley, 1988: 282)
Here, again, the interweaving of aesthetic and political qualities in perception and
representation of spaces is evident. Maps of imaginary landscapes, landscapes of
epistemology, also create myths and legitimize realities. It is partly for this reason
that they can be so enticing a rhetorical tool.
I have tried to suggest some of the ways in which spatial metaphor has been
used to represent science. Whewell and, much earlier, Chambers, make explicit
comparisons between the classifications, and hence the practice of science and the
demarcations of land and landscape. Tyndall uses a more complex set of images,
some based on the particular landscapes of the Alps, as a means of asserting
his own authority and reshaping the public image of Faraday. Faraday himself
adopts a less specific, more generic spatial vocabulary, often drawing for detail
on picturesque models fashionable during his early adulthood, but relying for
deeper structural meaning on pre-Romantic, almost medieval conceptions of
landscape and writing. This outline of three rhetorical techniques based on spatial
imagery can only suggest a little of the range of purposes and methods to which
space was put in the languages of nineteenth century science. It is clear nonethe-
less that the powerful and pervasive presence of space and spatiality in the
rhetoric of science in this period indicates strong and complex links between
scientific language-user communities and the broader spectrum of English land-
scape writing.
NOTES
I. Pearce Williams attributes this essay to Faraday (Williams, 1965: 81,93 n. 64).
2. I follow Faraday's erratic punctuation.
3. This essay is described as being by the author of the essay on Imagination and
Judgement ([Faraday], 1818b: 39).
Part IV Of Metropolitan
Spaces
8 'But Indifferently
Lodged ... ': Perception and
Place in Building for Science
in Victorian London
Sophie Forgan
It was not unusual in the second half of the nineteenth century to hear scientists
claiming that they were shabbily accommodated and warranted more generous
provision from the public purse or from their university coffers. The inadequacies
of existing spaces loomed large in successive Select Committees of Enquiry.
Much of the time of course this was a highly debatable assertion. Certainly it
became a standard element of the rhetoric, both verbal and visual, which was
deployed in efforts to gain more space and prestige for scientific activities. By
contrast it is arguable that in the great expansion of university building which
took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, science was more privi-
leged than most in straightforward quantitative measures of space. Science build-
ings often took the lion's share of space in the new colleges and universities
which emerged in the industrial towns of the north and the midlands. In London
there were already two well established colleges, University College and King's,
though both of these had problems in terms of their sites as well as finance. A
third area began to emerge from the 1850s in South Kensington, where the whole
site appeared magnificently generous in spatial tenns, but development would be
plagued by competing interests, Treasury economies, changes of Government,
architectural argument, let alone the haphazard piling up of collections which
urgently needed to be housed. The general picture however painted by contem-
poraries was that there was not enough space, and indeed the acquisition of new
buildings and facilities was sometimes presented simply as a minor victory in an
on-going battle.
Certainly there were numerous problems facing scientists which ranged across
the geography and location of scientific activity in the decades following 1840.
Important issues for instance included the creation of new sites, in particular sites
for specialized activities; the trend towards site-specific activities and the negotia-
tion of space for such activities within larger sites; the juxtaposition of what were
considered to be appropriate activities, and how definitions of 'appropriateness'
might change; and finally, issues concerning the general image and location of
195
scientific buildings within the larger urban environment. Protestations about

shabby accommodation need to be set within a number of different contexts.
However, it may be argued that in confronting these issues that the ways that
Victorians debated and discussed notions of space and even the ways that they
depicted space changed. By examining what may be small and often subtle
changes, we can learn more about the world in which Victorian science evolved,
the mindset of contemporaries and how that mindset contributed to shaping the
environment in which science was practised.
To do so, this chapter attempts to bring together spatial with architectural
analysis. It does this by examining the language of spatial location, and by relat-
ing that language to real spaces and institutional sites. Language always provides
an indicator of change, as will be seen in the way that what may be termed the
'vocabulary of juxtaposition' was gradually supplanted by the 'vocabulary of sep-
aration'. 'Juxtaposition' here refers to the different senses in which certain activ-
ities or sites were brought together, as opposed to the development of specialized
activities in separate buildings or locations. But alongside the vocabulary of juxta-
position there was another language, which may be termed the language of 'archi-
tectural appropriateness'. By this I mean language which contained statements
and judgements about the type and style of architecture adopted for scientific
buildings, and how that architecture fitted, or did not fit as the case might be,
within the urban landscape. This would be for many people in the metropolis an
important question. Finally, one can examine the visual language employed by
scientists to enhance their arguments, for example the different ways that they
used maps and diagrams. While people always use the visual languages available
to them at the time, there were once again small but significant shifts in technique
and emphasis. This provides another type of evidence which brings together the
way that Victorian scientists talked about their professional and institutional
territories and the way that they represented them in visual terms.
It may however first be useful to make some historiographical observations, in
part to clarify some assumptions underlying my approach, and in part because
architectural analysis derives from a different discourse, one that relates primarily
to the study of architects. The techniques of architectural history are drawn upon,
although they are not sufficient for the sort of analysis envisaged here. The dom-
inant themes in architectural history have long tended to be concerned first and
foremost with ideas of taste and style, attribution and aesthetic quality, in other
words the artistic value of the work. This does not exclude questions of spatial
organization. An important part of architectural analysis necessarily concerns the
articulation of a building, in other words the relation of the various parts to the
whole, and the management of circulation, together with the relation of spatial
planning to the function of the building (for example Cunningham and
Waterhouse, 1992: 153-9). In addition, perhaps because it relates both to aes-
thetics and to planning, a number of architectural writers are concerned with how
the users of buildings experience them (Rasmussen, 1959: passim). In recent
Sophie Forgan 197
years the work of Foucault has of course had a considerable influence, though
perhaps this has been less evident in architectural history than in other branches
of history. Most architectural historians however will acknowledge that the
organization of space within building types embodies relationships about power
that may exist in society at large, though they may not wholly agree with
Foucault's insistence on precise correlations between physical spaces and politi-
cal and social structures of power. Thus in a Foucauldian analysis, one should
look at laboratories or museums in the same light as prisons or palaces, as con-
structs with distinctive purpose and meaning deriving ultimately from power rela-
tionships. Buildings organize people in space, or, to put it the other way round,
people are sorted within buildings by means of selective devices for access, circu-
lation and surveillance (Markus, 1993: 3-38).
In many ways this is a very illuminating exercise. Access, circulation and the
degree of possible surveillance will always tell one much about the purpose and
nature of the physical environment. However it has limits, principally because in
a Foucauldian analysis the spaces are occupied only by two categories of people,
those who control and those who are controlled. It implies too that buildings have
only one meaning, that which reflects the way that their spaces are 'coded'. But
life cannot always be so neatly categorized with individuals separated into dis-
creet boxes, especially as far as the lives of Victorian scientists are concerned. For
example, an individual might occupy different roles in different institutions, as
did Richard Owen, Curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons until
1856, who was regarded as the servant of the Council of the College, whereas
anywhere outside he was the celebrated comparative anatomist whom the crowds
flocked to hear (Rupke, 1994: 16ft). However tempting spatial metaphors may be,
as historians we should relate these to actual places at the relevant period.
Therefore one must examine the local or regional geography, the politics of loca-
tion, as well as the perceptions of those who used these spaces, in other words
the particularity of each site. Most sites, especially in large cities, are of necessity
heterogeneous, and never more so than in Victorian London. Not for nothing did
H. G. Wells call South Kensington a 'fungoid assemblage of buildings' (Wells,
1934, vol. I:.209). To give meaning to spatial analysis, I would argue that one
should examine particular places and particular sites. Then it is possible to
analyse such places as the focus of scientific activity, as places where a character-
istic network of people and activities evolved, and as sites where conflict and
contention may have been especially significant (Livingstone, 1994). A 'place' is
something more than merely a site; a place has a name - the Cavendish, the
Jermyn Street Museum, King's College, the Adelaide Gallery, the Greenwich
Observatory- and these names carry identifying features. Frequently indeed one
finds that the names of institutions refer to the places where they were located,
and that the addresses were sufficient in themselves to indicate the institution-
Burlington House for the Royal Society, or South Kensington for the schools and
museums of the Department of Science & Art. Such locations say much about the
contemporary geography of the scientific world, and have evocative, multi-

dimensional resonances which may be elusive to the present-day-reader.
Buildings too have complex histories. They are constantly subject to reuse,
adaptation and reinterpretation, both during their lifetime and by historians today.
A Foucauldian analysis may be appropriate at the moment of planning or initial
construction. But buildings are rarely constructed exactly as planned, and there is
a multitude of intangible ways in which perceptions about particular places are
modified, not only through use, but by the fabric of the building itself, its texture
and durability, its decoration, the passage of time, as well as the varied careers
and reputations of people associated with them. They carry multiple meanings
and can mean quite different things to people at the same time. Buildings may
remain in the same place, but they rarely stand still in terms of function, represen-
tation or in the ways that they are interpreted by historians. Bearing these caveats
in mind, and making no claims to be comprehensive, this chapter deals firstly
with the changing vocabulary of spatial location, insofar as it related to scientific
buildings; secondly, with the language of architectural appropriateness; and
finally, with some features of the representation of spaces as this evolved in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. London is the principal focus of the places
and spaces discussed.
I. THE VOCABULARY OF JUXTAPOSTION
The vocabulary and terminology used about places and activities are potentially
fruitful aids in evoking the sites one is concerned with. Vocabulary helps to
locate types of institution and place within contemporary classifications as well as
giving clues to how they were perceived. It is part of the 'discourse of place', of
how people refer to places and how they may mobifize vocabulary to frame their
views or forward particular ends. Clues can be obutined about the mindset of the
period, about the relationship of intellectual location to physical place, especially
as in the nineteenth century there was an attempt to put some 'scientific' shape on
the meanings that words were used to express. This is to be found in Peter Mark
Roget's famous Thesaurus, first published in 1852, a natural history of words and
the ideas that they express.
Why is Roget (1779-1869) and his Thesaurus significant in this context? Roget
has been somewhat neglected by scientific historians, but he was centrally placed
in the cultural geography of scientific London throughout most of the first half of
the nineteenth century. Astonishingly energetic, he was involved in a multitude of
scientific activities: a prolific writer, lecturer in several of the capital's medical
schools, author of one of the Bridgewater Treatises, a founder of the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, first nominated Fullerian Professor of Physiology
at the Royal Institution, a founder of London University (1837), to name but a few.
His most significant role however was his post as Secretary to the Royal Society
Sophie Forgan 199
for two decades (1827-48), an organization to which he gave his heart and ener-
gies (Boas Hall, 1984: 38). Sometimes controversial, and open to charges of haste
and tactlessness, Roget's role in the Royal Society located him physically in one of
the key spaces of nineteenth century scientific life, within the dominant agency
concerned with scientific knowledge in Britain. He was deeply familiar with the
Society's library, and saw Panizzi attempt to bring order to it in the 1830s, and his
vocabulary could be said to have emerged from this experience and location.
Certainly it was tried and tested in his work as editor of the Royal Society's
Proceedings, where he struggled to ensure that papers submitted to the Society
were written in comprehensible language. Furthermore, as his biographer has
pointed out, Roget's philosophy of language was derived from a system of
classification used in medicine and physiology, added to his extensive bibliograph-
ical knowledge from work in the Royal Society's library (Emblem, 1970: 255-85).
Roget divided his material into six major groups, and each group was further
divided into similar categories as in a natural history classification using sections
and sub-sections. 1 Words were thus organized in such a way so as to recognize
and render visible the relations between them, whether spatial or otherwise, and
SPACE indeed is the second of his six major groups. It was a 'vocabulary of
words for the purpose of finding the ideas they represent, [and] the Thesaurus
presents the ideas arranged in a way to reveal the words that can be used to
express them' (Emblem, 1970: 266). Its intellectual roots were the scientific tax-
onomies of the day. Furthermore Rogel assumed that the reader knew the appro-
priate taxonomies, just as the museum visitor 'knew' what were the main classes
applicable to the material he was looking at. As Rogel said, his purpose was
'simply to classify and arrange them [words] according to the sense in which they
are now used, and which I presume to be already known to the reader' without
entering into any enquiry as to change in meaning they may have undergone,
'content to accept them at the value of their present currency' (Roget, 1852:
xvi-xvii). However, from his vantage point as Secretary of the Royal Society and
with a lifetime's scientific work already behind him, Roget may have had certain
assumptions about the currency of contemporary meanings. Without probing
further the sources of Roget's philosophy of language, it is nonetheless a means
of seeing contemporary associations between particular words, and what sort of
semantic company such words and places kept.
The key institutional sites where science became established in the nine-
teenth century - university, college, museum, laboratory - reveal some
significant associations in Roget's first edition of 1852. 'University' and
'college' appear under Class IV: INTELLECT: Communication of Ideas: School
- in an expected list of associated words - academy, alma-mater, seminary,
nursery, institute- which then proceeds to a secondary group of 'family' asso-
ciations, as one would expect in a scientific classification. These included:
pulpit, chair, ambo, theatre, amphitheatre, forum, stage, rostrum, platform, hus-
tings, all words which are associated with every variety of site where speech is
uttered and words are listened to. Learning one assumes from such a vocabulary
was entirely verbal in character. 2 The word 'University' was not associated
with laboratory, lecture-theatre (other than amphitheatre), library or museum, in
other words with any of the major places where we might assume that knowl-
edge was made or transmitted in Victorian Britain (Roget, 1852: 542). Indeed
in 1852, the latter term, 'Museum', appeared in three places: firstly as a place of
meeting (as indeed it was), or a focus; secondly, as an assemblage, with a nice
set of synonyms which indicate its genealogy- miscellany, menagerie, Noah's
Ark, portfolio; and thirdly, among the terms associated with a store, or a collec-
tion, accummulation, heap, hoard, repository (Roget, 1852: 72, 7, 636). The
term 'Laboratory' by contrast appears among a generally unprivileged set of
sites within the sub-section Workshop: manufactory, mill, factory, mint, forge,
loom; the list then edges towards a devotee approach with cabinet, studio,
bureau, atelier and so on, with the paracelsian-sounding accompaniment of
crucible, alembic, caldron, and matrix (Roget, 1852: 691 ).
This may seem an overly broad associationist guide to meaning, but semantic
company together with the time-lag in including new meanings are important.
This was after all a book which despite critical reservations acquired instant pop-
ularity when first published, was widely and heavily used, and indeed still
remains today an indispensible reference work. But these are the sorts of associa-
tions about scientific sites that one would expect of 50 years or so earlier, which
to some degree must reflect Roget's advanced age- he was 73 in 1852- and his
long career which had started with a brief period working in 1800 with that great
organizer of ideas, Jeremy Bentham. However, in succeeding editions the lists of
these associations remained remarkably constant, a point which reinforces the
multiplicity of meanings that apparently straightforward words may carry.
From taxonomic association one may move through the semantic to the mater-
ial analysis of physical juxtaposition. Juxtaposition was one of the words the
Victorians worked hardest when they wanted to express what they thought about
the most logical or advantageous method of situating institutions. Roget himself
placed juxtaposition in the section concerned with 'general dimension', in a sub-
section labelled 'contiguity' (Roget, 1852: 199). However, over and above
straightforward contiguity, it is possible to distinguish three main uses of the term
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. There was firstly what can be termed
simple or 'direct juxtaposition', as when institutions or buildings literally
adjoined each other, for example in the case of the Royal College of Science and
the South Kensington Museum, or when museum collections and library were in
the same building, as in the British Museum. Secondly there was what was called
'proximate juxtaposition', which referred to general easy access to different insti-
tutions within a single district or area, as in the case of the museums and colleges
of South Kensington, rather than these institutions being scattered in different
parts of the town. Finally, there was 'suggestive juxtaposition', which related
rather to the intellectual domain, though it might also include the physical
Sophie Forgan 201
(Jenkins, 1992: 209). There were obvious virtues in juxtaposition, both institu-
tional (saving on space and costs), functional (ease of access) and intellectual (a
method of displaying objects in a meaningful way). The word was not confined to
scientists, but was widely used in the arts as well. For example, it was argued that
the sculpture galleries in the British Museum would be able, if reorganized with a
suggestive juxtaposition of the objects, to display a proper idea of the progress of
classical civilization from earliest times to its apogee as personified in the Elgin
marbles (Jenkins, 1992: 56-74). In a more general way, the juxtaposition of dif-
ferent fields of knowledge allowed people to realize the relationship of each
subject to each other in the general scheme of things, or allowed useful and fruit-
ful connections to be made in an educational sense. In this sense, museum dis-
plays might be organized so as to juxtapose raw material to finished product, as
was done by the Museum of Economic Geology. In this case, the story was told
as much by the juxtaposition of cases and specimens, as by any labels, though the
appropriate conclusions were often reinforced in the guidebooks. In other words,
beneficial consequences were perceived to flow from juxtaposition, whether
physical or intellectual, and such views fitted well within attitudes to knowledge
where collections were regarded as the primary resource for extending knowl-
edge, and moreover, where seeing was regarded as a way of knowing.
The importance of physical location to institutional juxtaposition may be seen
in the story of the Royal Society's move to a new site in the mid-century. In 1855
the Society formed a Juxta Position (of Societies) Committee (sic), which pro-
vides a mid-century microcosm of the meanings contained within the concept of
juxtaposition. What was the background to the Committee's formation, which
was indeed only one incident in the continuing and pressing question of where
and how to choose the most appropriate site for national institutions within the
metropolis. whether in the arts or the sciences (Port, 1995: 82-1 02)? The Royal
Society had co-existed with the Society of Antiquaries since 1778 in Somerset
House in rooms provided by the Government. The Geological Society joined
them in 1828 and the Astronomical in 1834. The Royal itself became desperately
short of space by the early 1850s, the Library was particularly cramped, and col-
laborative moves were made by the leading scientific societies to come together,
preferably under one roof (Boas Hall, 1984: 188 ff). Various possibilities
emerged: to persuade the Government to provide more space at Somerset House;
or to move to the remote suburb of Kensington where Prince Albert was attempt-
ing to create a quarter for the arts and sciences; or finally, to move to Burlington
House where there was room for extending the building. What is especially
notable about the many discussions and documents on the subject, is the key role
played by the concept of juxtaposition. In June 1852 the Council of the Royal
Society entered in the minutes a memorial which argued that it would materially
benefit science by bringing the various societies and their libraries under one
roof. The societies themselves would continue to conduct their affairs independ-
ently, 'but simply placing them in juxtaposition [original italics]' would be of
great advantage. 'By the proposed juxtaposition, the advantages derivable from
concentration would be combined with those derived from separate and indepen-
dent action.' (RS Minutes, 1852, vol. 2: 220-1). The perceived advantages were
largely organizational -access to and sharing of libraries (which never in effect
happened), keeping expenses down, arranging meetings so that they did not clash,
allowing members to get to meetings that they might not otherwise be able to
attend, and so forth (Boas Hall, 1984: 190-2).
However, these advantages were not so overwhelming if the geographical loca-
tion was not also right. When it was suggested that all the societies might be
accommodated in South Kensington, the societies drew back, and juxtaposition
was immediately linked to the necessity of being in a central and convenient
locality. This was in part on practical grounds, South Kensington in the 1850s
was considered to be too far away from the clubs and learned societies of central
London for convenience, and the Astronomicals claimed in particular that the
'heavy avocations' of most of their working members would result in their with-
drawal from the conduct of the society's affairs (RS Minutes, 1853, vol. 2: 241).
So strong were their feelings on the matter, and their opinion that the
Government's proposal was a poisoned chalice, that they insisted that members
would prefer to pay rather than accept a boon which they were sure would result
in the Society's ruin. After successive discussions, matters were eventually
moved forward with the formation of the Juxta Position (of Societies) Committee
in May 1855. The opening meeting summed up their aim to petition the Prime
Minister on 'the continued and earnest desire which exists for the juxtaposition of
the principal scientific societies in a central and convenient locality' (RS, 1855:
105). When it emerged that the Royal alone might move to Burlington House, it
then became a case of persuading the other societies that this was 'a step towards
carrying out the main design of juxtaposition', and asserting that the principle of
juxtaposition should continue to be strongly insisted on (RS, 1855: 107). When
the Royal finally accepted the Government's offer, together with temporary
accommodation for the Chemical and Linnaean Societies, it was agreed that this
did not prejudice the claims of the other societies (the Geological and
Astronomical) to appropriate accommodation in a central and convenient locality
in juxtaposition with the Royal (RS, 1855: 109; RS, 1856, vol. 2: 351). In this
case therefore physical juxtaposition, intellectual concentration and the precise
context of urban geography all feature as significant factors in deciding location.
Juxtaposition was invoked not only in relation to learned societies, but was
deployed as a guiding principle in debates about the planning of new scientific
sites. South Kensington was in one sense an exercise in the appropriate arrange-
ment of buildings, though the final result was far from that anticipated earlier in
the complex history of this site. Above all, it was widely believed that museums
and colleges should be placed close to each other, and the early growth of
museums on the site was an invitation to increase their value by placing colleges
alongside them. The frequent discussion in Select Committees on the value of
Sophie Forgan 203
lectures in museums was one testimony to this belief. South Kensington was seen
as a green field site where institutions could be sensibly and properly gathered
together in one location. As one of the 1851 Commissioners later put it:
The great advantage that would be derived from affording the means of placing
in juxtaposition the numerous scattered institutions in the metropolis, whether
governmental or private, which had in view the advancement of science and art
in their various branches. (Bowring, 1877: 566)
Such attitudes underlay Henry Cole's efforts to extend his Brompton base, using
first the idea of a School of Naval Architecture, and then a larger 'Science
School', which became the foundation for the Royal College of Science, and
eventually, Imperial College. Nor was it thought to be unusual for scientific men
to move into a building adjoining a museum, especially when half of them had
come from a school which was actually located within a museum, namely the
Royal School of Mines in the Museum of Economic Geology in Jermyn Street.
Questions of juxtaposition and proximity also affected the prolonged discus-
sion over moving the natural history collections from the British Museum to
South Kensington. On the one hand these concerned the question of the library -
would all the natural history books be left in Bloomsbury, and if so, it was argued
that the new building for the collections in South Kensington would be 'useless'
because isolated from one of its essential parts. 3 On the other there was the deli-
cate question of the relationship between Kew and its Botanical Museums,
herbarium and library, and the new Natural History Museum, which clearly
'should be in intimate relation with each other' despite their different masters.
Such debates can indicate when both the physical and intellectual topography of
the subject is undergoing change, and underlying concerns about the shape of the
discipline are reflected in debates about location. This was the case for example
in botany when the location of the practice of the discipline shifted from the field
to the laboratory (Gooday, 1991a: passim).
If juxtaposition was the key word from the mid-nineteenth century, it had
somewhat lost its force by the end of the century. It did not wholly disappear, and
a considerable degree of juxtaposition had in fact been achieved in terms of insti-
tutions, museums and learned societies. Burlington House had been extended to
include the two remaining major societies and there was a veritable accummula-
tion of institutions in South Kensington. However the concept was insufficient to
cope with the changing scientific landscape and the demands of new educational
practices by the latter part of the century. By this time the keynotes were separa-
tion and specialisation. The separation of the sciences from the arts was
inevitable in the British Museum, once it was decided in principle that the natural
history collections should go somewhere other than alongside the arts collections.
Indeed the prolonged struggles about the division of nature from art was referred
to by one contemporary as the 'contest for Attica', which nicely conftates the
intellectual and physical dominance of the collection of antiquities (Jenkins,

1992: 210). A similar separation and the sub-division of scientific spaces into
subject-specific areas was reflected in the development of South Kensington. The
site, heterogeneous from the start, became more so as time passed and questions
about demarcation between colleges and museums became more problematic
(Forgan and Gooday, 1994). However at South Kensington the museum was
physically, pedagogically and in institutional terms the dominant element, even in
the 1890s. Those involved in developing the site, Cole, Donelly, Huxley, Lockyer
and the other professors, used the museum in all its multifarious guises to obtain
territory, to build up a museological arts and scientific empire. The two could co-
t:xist reasonably well in the 1870s, but two decades later both departments were
bursting at the seams. The presence also of a huge educational department and its
staff (the Department of Science and Art had its offices on the same site),
together with a corps of Royal Engineers, emphasizes what a heterogeneous site
it was. Adjacent to the South Kensington Museum, and one of the most visible
buildings in this growing 'Museums' area, was the splendid Natural History
Museum (built 1873-81), organizationally distinct but architecturally dominat-
ing the southern end of the area. The South Kensington Museum (as it was
known before being renamed the Victoria & Albert) occupied extended galleries
both on the south-eastern section of the site, as well as in the area between the
Natural History Museum and the Imperial Institute (built 1887-93). Part of the
latter (the cross gallery) was even occupied by the Persian Collection of the
Museum. Museum and educational buildings seemed to jostle for space. The
Science School was mainly confined to one building, though physics, geology
and mining spread into other areas, and the Science Library was attached to the
end of the museum, adjacent to 'Casts from Antique Sculpture'. Close by up
Exhibition Road was the City & Guilds Institution with its well-furnished labora-
tories, though suitably distanced from more expensive land reserved for suburban
housing on the western side of the site.
In 1890 it was decided to authorize the construction of a new building for the
Museum, to provide for increased exhibition space and generally create a more
coherent treatment for a site which was irregular and already more than half filled
up. A competition was held, duly won by Aston Webb (Physick, 1982: 183-200).
There then ensued the endless delays, changes of Government and prevarication
by the Treasury so typical of the South Kensington story. By 1897 it was clear
that the museums were in need of thorough reorganization. A Select Committee
was set up to examine the Museums of the Science & Art Department, which
carried out a probing and critical enquiry, much to the discomfiture of many of
the Department's officials.
Among the various recommendations, a key one was the Committee's firm
direction that Art should be separated from Science and that the geography of the
site should reflect this division. Art should be concentrated on the east side
of Exhibition Road, and science on the west side. Subject and geographical
Sophie Forgan 205
divisions were thus for the first time precisely aligned. There remained one incon-
sistency: the Royal College of Science building was on the wrong side of the road,
on the eastern side, but it was allowed to remain there provided noxious fumes and
the risk of fire was not too great. Indeed, the 'subjects taught should be such as not
to cause the discharge of gases injurious to art objects' (SC, 1898: xxxvii).
There was indeed considerable concern that art should not suffer because of
science, and the functional justification for separation as opposed to juxtaposition
reflects a shift in attitudes as well as disciplinary terrain. The scientists were not
averse in principle to moving to the west side of Exhibition Road, 'We all wish to
be together', as one professor said, provided they could have new buildings, the
library, and a science museum (SC, 1898: 64). It was not in fact until the 1970s
that the scientists finally abandoned the east side of the road, but that road
acquired a new significance in 1897.4
2. APPROPRIATE ARCHITECTURE FOR SCIENCE
The architecture of purpose-built science buildings performed a number of func-

tions. Architecture was one way of proclaiming the status of science, its
respectability, and indeed its harmony with older institutional forms and building
types, notably university colleges. The urban environment was however import-
ant in other ways beyond simply providing a conveniently central location for
people to meet. This in itself was not unimportant as seen in the Royal Society
story, and the museum or the learned society meeting rooms functioned rather
like a latter-day assembly rooms for select groups of people, a sense reflected in
Roget's classification. Easy access to important cultural places was certainly con-
sidered important, especially in view of changing attitudes towards the role of
museums in general education, and the need to open up museums to the lower
orders, especially to artisans whom it was believed would particularly benefit
from study of models, designs, patterns and machines. Henry Cole was always
anxious to demonstrate that access to South Kensington was not difficult, and to
facilitate further provision of transport, for example by approving the extension to
the underground railway. Public museums from mid-century issued visitor
figures, a proof of their increasing usefulness and success. But in addition to
access, it is not surprising to find that colleges and museums were expected to be
pieces of good architecture in respectable locations. It appears that the choice of
Jermyn Street for the main entrance to the Museum of Economic Geology was
dictated by just such a consideration. In 1844 T. W. Phillips wrote to Henry de Ia
Beebe that the entrance should be in Jermyn Street 'which is a far more genteel
street than Piccadilly' .5 Phillips may have exaggerated the lack of gentility as
entrance off Piccadilly was not a problem in shifting the learned societies to
Burlington House ten years later. However, in that case the frontage of the house
was set back from the street and entered through a grand archway. By contrast the
Museum of Economic Geology extended between both streets, taking up every

inch of a rather confined site (Tyack, 1992: 179-91 ). It was not therefore possible
to set it back from the street or provide an arched entrance court as might befit a
national institution. Nor on the Piccadilly side could one provide steps up to a
main entrance because of the slope of the site down towards Jermyn Street. On
the latter street however it was possible to provide steps and a grand decorative
doorway using the various British granites, so that the visitor walked immediately
up a broad staircase into a spacious entrance hall. 6 It might not quite compare
with Smirke's British Museum, or Wilkins's steps up to the entrance of the
National Gallery, but it was an appropriate and ingenious solution given the
confines of the site.
Equally at South Kensington, Cole took enormous trouble with the new build-
ing for the Science Schools in the 1860s, in part because it was the first of the
group of buildings on the site to have a street frontage, and also because he
wanted the building itself to be a demonstration of the decorative arts on display
in the museum and the craft skills being taught in the art school. The journal
Nature, hardly surprisingly, was duly of the opinion that the new Science Schools
were 'one of the few buildings devoted to Science of which the country may be
justly proud' (Nature, 1873). The size of the building, its imposing nature, its
decoration so clearly visible from the street from which it was carefully divided
by a balustrade, all provided an advertisement for Cole and his Department as
well as for the scientists occupying the building. But as far as the rest of the site
was concerned, it was the 'discreditable appearance [of] the unfinished and tem-
porary buildings fronting Cromwell Road' on into the 1890s that aroused so
much dislike, not only among the members of the highly critical Select
Committee (Physick, 1982: 205).
Similar questions ~rose around the same time at the older and well-established
site of University College, when it was decided to close one side of the quadran-
gle in order to provide new laboratories for the engineering departments in the
early 1890s. The College turned to its own Professor of Architecture, T. Roger
Smith, to design the new laboratories which were duly approved to run along
Gower Street and enclose the college within a quadrangle. Up to that time
Wilkins's domed building, approached via twin flights of steps leading up to the
portico, was rightly regarded as an urbane building and an ornament to the city.
Roger Smith designed a fairly bland range fronting Gower street, but with two
more grandiose end pavilions with semi-circular porches forming the entrance
(Mordaunt Crook, 1990: 4). The engineering professors were happy, after persis-
tent and heated lobbying to get the facilities they badly needed, and the College
was well satisfied with the plans. The plans were published with detailed descrip-
tions by Roger Smith together with T. Hudson Beare, Professor of Engineering
and Mechanical Technology, and J. A. Fleming, Professor of Electrical
Engineering, in the journal Engineering (26 May 1893). This included a section
on the 'Scope and Methods of Teaching to be Carried Out at the Above-
Sophie Forgan 207
Described Laboratories and Lecture-Rooms', which was intended as a careful

piece of advertising to publicize as widely as possible the new laboratories as
being the best equipped and most up to date and thus able to attract the number
and calibre of student the professors wanted. 7 The College then reprinted the
article as a separate pamphlet, including a notice of the opening of the laborato-
ries by the Duke of Connaught and a list of the Council and Professoriate.
However when the publicity exercise was repeated in front of a different audi-
ence, the proposed building was received much more critically. Roger Smith was
also involved with the Royal Institute of British Architects, and proposed that the
building would be a suitable topic for discussion by the architects at their
monthly General Meeting, which duly occurred in February 1894. Talks were
given by T. Roger Smith, Hudson Beare, Fleming, with an additional one by
George Carey Foster on the new physical laboratory. Together with the ensuing
discussion, the talks were reprinted in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British
Architects (Smith, 1894: 281-308). A rather different picture emerges from the
discussion that took place at that meeting and later. Certainly the technical equip-
ment and adaptation of the building to the rigorous demands of the scientists were
applauded. These had in fact been the professors formerly 'but indifferently
lodged', a phrase used by T. Roger Smith (1894: 281). The quality of the internal
fittings was of the finest, the best quality teak for example being used for lecture
desk and benches.
However, whether the new range of buildings would enhance the urban scene
in that part of London was another question. A number from the architectural
profession regarded this as unlikely. The urban context and the nature of architec-
tural art were the underlying themes of the debate. The critics were led by Henry
Statham, editor of the well-known journal The Builder. He objected to the
College plans on aesthetic grounds, on the quality of the original design and lack
of faithfulness to the original architectural intention (Smith, 1894: 303). Another
architect, William Woodward, suggested that if Wilkins had been commissioned
to build labs in the late nineteenth century he would surely have put them else-
where (Smith, 1894: 304). In other words, as a functional type, the laboratory
was hardly regarded as suitable for maximum exposure in conjunction with a rec-
ognized architectural masterpiece. Labs were buildings which should properly be
discreetly hidden from public view. But, as well as considering the college build-
ing as an isolated edifice in terms of a work of art, Statham and some of the other
architects were also much concerned about the urban context. Would the cupola
still be seen from the street or the 'delightful view of the dome and the building'
be blocked out? (Smith, 1894: 305) How was the entrance aligned to that of the
new University College Hospital being built by Alfred Waterhouse across the
street? There was considerable dispute about the actual measurement of the street
frontage, and allegations that there were errors in calculating the actual breadth of
the entrance opening. The debate was reprinted in The Builder, a certain amount
of correspondence ensued, and University College went ahead with the building
anyway (Smith, 1894: 308; Builder 1894: 173-4). The fact that it was not com-
pleted precisely according to Roger Smith's designs was the result of a familiar
story of money running out, plans changing and completion being delayed over
several years.
As science buildings such as laboratories became substantial enough to warrant
separate housing and architectural treatment, their relationship to the larger urban
context came to be regarded critically, especially by those who did not have to
work in them. Such attitudes were reflected by C. R. Ashbee, the architect,
designer and Arts & Crafts writer, when he examined university architecture and
its context in the early years of the twentieth century (Ashbee, 1912: passim;
Forgan, 1989: 431-3). For him, university architecture should express the conti-
nuity of cultural life and relate cultural organization to the particular place in
which it was located. What he meant was that local architectural traditions ought
to be recognized, and that the arrangement of buildings should follow a logical
order appropriate to the subjects of study they contained. It was in Ashbee's view
perfectly possible to site a university in the middle of a metropolis, as had been
done in the case of Columbia University in New York, and he included plans for
the new University College science buildings in his exhibition. However, the
plans exhibited seem to have been the same as those shown in the mid-1890s,
rather than the half-finished porchless version that graced Gower Street for many
years. So while Ashbee was happy to compare university architecture across the
globe, it was the particularity of location and tradition which he emphasized as
most important.
3. REPRESENTATION AND SPACES FOR SCIENCE
Finally I would like to discuss some of the devices that scientists mobilized when
constructing or defending their professional territories. It should however be
noted that from the mid-century onwards scientists, especially those who worked
in London, developed what can only be described as an acute sense of dimension
with respect to their working quarters. To some extent this rested on a shared
experience of similar spaces, because within that shared experience academic
competitiveness was honed to a fine fighting fitness. Scientists could reel off sta-
tistics about their buildings, partly because so many of them were newly built or
adapted. For example, at the discussion on the UCL buildings, W. C. Unwin 'by
way of comparison' gave details of the precise square footage of the various
departments at the City & Guilds Central Institution, completed in 1884. Unwin's
remarks on technical education were supported by Professor David Capper of
King's College London, who agreed he had 'a very well-equipped laboratory,
which had about 2500 feet of superficial area, in addition to carpenters' shops and
workshops which took up over 3000 feet more'. However, in his case the build-
ings were only adapted rather than purpose built, and 'schemes were on foot to
Sophie Forgan 209
bring about what he hoped would be a counterpart to the laboratory [of UCL]
described', and the exhibition of plans at the meeting no doubt encouraged his
efforts to achieve parity with UCL (Smith, 1894: 302-5).
Plans were carefully marked with exact dimensions, so that such comparisons
were easy to make. Comparisons could also be made. with the best foreign
models, the key example being the widely publicized report by Augustus
Hofmann on The Chemical Laboratories in Course of Erection in the Universities
of Bonn and Berlin (1866). Increasingly the rhetoric of threatened decline and
foreign competition could be brought into play in pleas for better facilities.
Scientists themselves frequently spent summer vacations travelling round Europe,
visiting correspondents and famous laboratories and probably became more
familiar than before, in an age of railway travel, with European institutions.
Oliver Lodge for example was sent on a 'solitary pilgrimage' of Germany and
spent 'a profitable if lonely tour' in preparation for setting up the department of
physics at the new university college of Liverpool in 1881 (Lodge, 1931: 153).
Towards the end of the century, when committees of delegates made tours of
institutions, both in Britain and abroad, they brought back with them maps and
plans, as did the Deputation from the Manchester Technical School in 1891.
Their report was printed with eleven plans of technical schools and laboratories
including Charlottenburg, Chemnitz, The Technical High School at Stuttgart and
labs at the Federal Polytechnic School at Zurich (Manchester Technical School,
1891: 56ff). .
Plans and maps were increasingly used in Government documents, especially
after the great explosion of Parliamentary enquiries in the mid-century. Select
Committees and Royal Commissions frequently included plans in their reports,
including those submitted by witnesses. Furthermore, plans were sometimes
coloured, so that the device of the block plan, which was used to show future
development, was rendered even more effective. Different stages of development
or different departments could be clearly indicated, as for example in the plans
contained in the Reponfrom the Select Committee on the British Museum, 1860.
The Department of Science & Art was extremely innovative in this sense, and
included school plans as well as maps and comparative plans in all its Annual
Reports. The report of the Geological Survey, which was contained within the
DSA Annual Report, from 1858 included a map of the United Kingdom coloured
in different blocks (5th Report, 1858). The colour of each block indicated the
areas where the Survey was completed and published, the areas completed but
not yet published, and the areas still in progress. Those not yet begun were left
white. Nor were such practices confined to Government publications, but used by
writers and authors of guidebooks, university calendars, histories and textbooks
of many different kinds.
It was a logical extension of this familiarity with plans and a conscious
employment of dimension to find that people began to use comparative plans or
diagrams. This was a fairly common device across the arts as well. For example,
the dimensions of the proposed National Gallery in the 1850s were compared in
this visual way with block plans of other major galleries abroad (Port, 1995: 83).
Scientists on occasion used the comparative plan as a weapon in their territorial
battles, notably the ever-combative Norman Lockyer. In the Select Committee
on the Museums of the Department of Science & Art in 1898, he came to the
enquiry armed with maps and diagrams and pleaded the case for proper laborato-
ries and collections for the School of Science, because as he said:
We are in front of an industrial war, the result of which may be very much
more serious to us than a mere national war, which is certain not to last very
long. In this industrial war it is no longer a question of battleships and cruisers;
it is a question of schools, and these are the German battleships and cruisers,
and we have no battleships.... We cannot go into this struggle for existence
unless we have ironclads to meet ironclads, by which I mean thoroughly devel-
oped scholastic institutions. (SC, 1898: 72)
Deploying to the full the Darwinian argument of the survival of the fittest,
Lockyer was scathing about the long history of unfulfilled Government promises.
He agreed that it was 'unthinkable to separate the question of Museums and
Schools', but in a deft shift of focus, produced a plan showing where it was
believed the Government proposed to erect new buildings for science, if they
were indeed wise enough to put them adjacent to the existing Royal College of
Science (see Figure 8.1). He then proceeded to compare this space with the
spaces occupied by similar institutions on the Continent, reducing each to the
diagrammatic form most suited to support his argument, i.e. square footage of
buildings superimposed on square footage of site (see Figure 8.2). It was an
effective device especially when reproduced in the Minutes of Evidence. In
Committee it must have been even more so, as Lockyer simply gave in cards with
plans on them without dimensions, thus relying on the simple visual impact of
different shapes on small cards. In the printed plan, one may note that the irregu-
lar South Kensington shape correctly represents the actual shape of the site on the
corner of Exhibition and Cromwell Road. However, it does not include the actual
Science School building already there, and in any case it was highly unlikely
that any substantial portion of the site on that side of the road would be allotted to
the expansion of science, as indeed proved to be the case. Nevertheless, the
diagram of the space potentially available in South Kensington looked pretty
mean when compared to the 'ironclad' of Berlin. As the intention was clearly to
expand accommodation for science across the road, it was an effective way of
winning the local argument while representing this as a battle in Darwinian terms
for the national survival and economic dominance, dependent upon the adaptive
mechanism of a healthy educational system. It was a device he used again later
the same year in Nature when reporting Schuster's description of the proposed
new physics labs at Owens College, Manchester (Nature, 1898: 621-2).
Sophie Forgan 211
SOUTH KENSI NGTON MUSEU M

AND SURROUN DING NlillGHBOURHOOD.
PLAN C
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Figure 8.1 South Kensington Museum and neighbourhood. Source: Select Committee on
the Museums of the Department of Science & Art (1898).
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Figure 8.2 Comparison of the space available for science buildings on the east side of
Exhibition Road with the space allocated to laboratories and high schools in Germany,
Austria and Switzerland. Source: Select Committee of Science & Art (1898).
Sophie Forgan 213
By the end of the century, everyone believed that they were short of space,
nowhere more so than in the capital. One ought however to remember the greatly
increased scale of building in London towards the end of the century. Buildings
were taller, more substantial and grandiose than before, and Aston Webb's
Victoria & Albert Museum is a typical example of building on an 'imperial'
scale. Where scientists had established themselves, not surprisingly they were
unlikely to give any ground, and fought off competitors of all types, whether they
were promotors of potentially disturbing electric railways (Forgan and Gooday,
1994), or new art institutions desiring to intrude into space largely colonized by
science. Proposals to locate the gallery endowed by the sugar magnate Sir Henry
Tate in South Kensington were fought off in a campaign led by Lord Rayleigh.
The bequest was nearly lost before the site of the old panoptical prison at
Millbank was finally agreed upon (Port, 1995: 101-2). One is reminded by the
disappearance of the panopticon of the inappropriateness here of a Foucauldian
analysis, for the territorial battles involved many issues, and Foucault is silent
about how institutions disappear.
4. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, sites are amenable to many different angles of focus. The para-
meters within which spaces and places were described, represented and com-
peted for, not surprisingly differed greatly between different groups of people,
let alone between individuals. A study of semantic and physical juxtaposition
serves above all to reveal the changing and multiple meanings that particular
sites might have. Juxtaposition as a guiding principle was mobilized across a
spectrum of different situations and locations, and was never as simple as the
word itself might seem. It might invoke elements of physical contiguity, or be a
focus for intellectual meeting and discourse, or refer to the exhibition of objects
in a meaningful and ordered way, or involve contingent problems of urban loca-
tion. However by the end of the century juxtaposition was in the main sup-
planted by the vocabulary of separation and of specialization, which meant the
creation of separate purpose-built architectural spaces, with all the functional
differentiation in plan, construction and equipment which attended increasing
specialization in scientific research and education. But while such language
found ready understanding within the scientific community, it failed to carry
equal weight and meaning within the architectural community, which remained
primarily preoccupied with matters of aesthetic quality, the appropriate stylistic
language for these new buildings, and their qualitative impact upon the urban
environment in which they were built.
The means that scientists used to represent their sites, the use of quantitative
diagrams, would also seem alien to architects who viewed such devices as crude
and wholly lacking in any aesthetic judgement. But Lockyer's representations
were very effective, in part no doubt reflecting the obsession with comparative
statistics characteristic of the period, in part because scientists were acutely
aware of the actual dimensions of the spaces they occupied. Competition
between institutions fuelled such awareness, as well as ready recourse to
Darwinian rhetoric to support arguments for more generous support. There
were even in the latter part of the century references to the 'domain of
science', to rooms with a view over South Kensington, embodying perhaps
tacit assumptions or hopes about controlled and colonized territory (Becker,
1874: 183). This may be little more than a reflection of the growth of imperial
sentiments and the increasing use of such language, but it has been recently
argued that London was an imperial city with architecture to match (Port,
1995: 5-25).
If space in a Foucauldian sense has not figured very prominently in this
chapter, it is because the analysis of space in a strict Foucauldian manner does
not take sufficient account of the fact that buildings have multiple meanings at
any one time, and that the way they change and evolve is as important as the way
they are constructed. Some discipline however may be exercised upon concepts
of space and their coded meanings, if their analysis is located in actual places. It
is the analysis of the changing inter-relationship between spaces and places that is
always intriguing. What makes a place a place. what gives it a specific genius
loci, so that it is not just another space.8 And in urban locations, sites are more
often than not heterogeneous. There is an interplay between the context of loca-
tion, the activities contained within the building, the reputation of those associ-
ated with it, as well as the bricks and mortar from which it is constructed to a
particular plan with particular functional requirements. The features which give
each place its characteristic genius are many and varied, may change often, and
differ greatly between individuals at any one time. Aesthetic ideas about appro-
priate architecture and the notion of attractive urban vistas, may vie with the
atmosphere of a busy laboratory or by contrast of a deserted museum gallery, or
be simply created by the fugitive moment when a student meets the illustrious
professor and the importance of place is forever fixed in a personal biographical
narrative.
Let me return once again to Roget, who believed that language was an instru-
ment of thought to chart an ordered universe, and whose Thesaurus was derived
from experience and work in a uniquely authoritative scientific setting. In the
1894 edition of his Thesaurus, the entry under School, university and college
was vastly extended, and now included 'professorship, lectureship, readership,
chair'. Laboratory however was little changed, its undistinguished status taking
much longer to shake off. But museum became much more specific, bracketed
with 'gallery' and 'conservatory', and it disappeared entirely from the section
under focus or meeting place and with it all those influential mid-century ideas
of the appropriate juxtaposition of institutions and the suggestive inferences
that underlay them.
Sophie Forgan 215
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am most grateful to the editors, Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, and to those who
commented on an earlier version of this paper. Many people provided suggestions
and drew my attention to different sorts of evidence, notably Thomas A. Markus
and James Secord, and I owe a particular debt to Graeme Gooday and Stephen
Hayward for their constructive comments.
NOTES
l. The six groups were, and still are, Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect,
Volition and Affections.
2. There were only four words which referred to writing, 'horn-book, rudiments,
vade-mecum, abecedary', all of which seem distinctly elementary in character.
3. This was a long running debate, but see for example, Nature: 2 May 1878.
4. The Royal College of Science building, which was known from the 1930s as the
Huxley Building, was returned to the Museum in the mid-1970s, and renamed the
Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria & Albert Museum. The naming process neatly
reflects the changing 'ownership' of the building.
5. T. Vf. Philipps to H. T. de Ia Beebe, 8 September 1844; in box containing Philipps
letters in de Ia Beebe archive, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. I am most grate-
ful to Jim Secord for this reference.
6. The building also functioned as a 'lesson in stone', as did the Oxford University
Museum and the Natural History Museum, by incorporating the subject matter of
science into the building, both in a material sense in the fabric of the building, and in
terms of representing and depicting various aspects of the subject.
7. As T. Hudson Beare wrote to Chairman of Committee of Management after citing the
'splendid quarters' of half-a-dozen other colleges, 'we are I know for certain losing
students, because comparing our Laboratory with that of other Colleges, it fails to
stand the test', 8 October 1890, Archives of University College London, College
Correspondance A-C. See also the extremely forceful letter from J. A. Fleming, 6 June
1890, complaining that UCL was not only in arrear of third-rate German and
American Colleges, but even falling behind such places as the Regent Street
Polytechnic (Correspondence D-F).
8. This distinction between place and space was elegantly analysed by Sheldon
Rothblatt in his discussion of universities and colleges at the conference on 'The
University in its Urban Context', Aberdeen, July 1993.
9 The Premisses of Premises:
Spatial Issues in the
Historical Construction of
Laboratory Credibility
Graeme Gooday
. . . a system of spatial arrangements . . . is an important aspect of social rela-

tions. It enters into the differentiation of intimacy and anonymity, of strange-
ness and familiarity, of social proximity and distance.
(Schutz and Luckmann, 1974: 40-1)
Matters at South Kensington, it appears, are still a long way from being estab-
lished on a satisfactory footing; and the undefined suspicions, ill-concealed
ridicule, and outspoken disparagement with which any mention of its name
used to be met when the Brompton Boilers were a byword of mismanagement
continue to cling to the institution, notwithstanding the vast sums spent upon it
and the magnificent edifice they have called into being .... South Kensington,
as we all know, was intended for the advancement of Science and Art. Some
people deny that it has succeeded in advancing either; but we may safely assert
that if it has rendered some service to Science its services to Art have been far
greater.... (The Electrician, 1888, 20: 630)
Spatial practice regulates life - it does not create it. Space has no power in
itself nor does space as such determine spatial contradictions. These are contra-
dictions of society ... that simply emerge in space, at the level of space, and so
engender the contradictions of space. (Lefebvre, 1991: 358)
Until recently historians tended to treat science and technology as if all that really
mattered were their end-products, namely the knowledge and artefacts that
visibly passed into posterity. During the last two decades, however, ethnographic
studies on the more mundane daily activities of scientists have indicated that we
might profitably see things otherwise (Knorr Cetina, 1981 ). Particular forms of
localized human practice tum out to be crucially important in making theories,
experiments or devices not only reliable and meaningful, but also robust enough
to satisfy critics (Buchwald, 1995; Pickering, 1995): science and technology are
216
Graeme Gooday 217
activities that are thoroughly practice-laden. 1 Although widely studied in relation

to other human practices (Foucault, 1977; Hillier and Hanson, 1984; Markus,
1993), the spatiality of techno-scientific practice is still a fertile ground for histor-
ical study. In this chapter I address some of the spatial problems that arose for a
new urban site of laboratory research and training for engineers in 1880s London:
the City & Guilds 'Central' Institution in South Kensington (part of Imperial
College since 1907).
Before the Great Exhibition, South Kensington had been more closely
identified with the edible produce of market gardening than with the lofty prod-
ucts of science and art. After the excitement of 1851 died away, attempts to tum
the agrarian suburb into a centre for the nation's natural philosophy and engin-
eering met with considerable resistance. I will show how critics drew attention to
South Kensington's lack of a sustained territorial tradition of industrial practice;
its correlated remoteness from London's established sites of industry, notably
Clerkenwell (instrument-making) and eastern Thameside (heavy engineering)
(Hall, 1964; Martin, 1966); and the notoriety of South Kensington for the appro-
priative tendencies of the Department of Science and Art regarding enterprises
germane to its interests. Certainly a range of different constituencies had reasons
to challenge the wisdom of siting a technical college in this part of London. A
contrast with contemporary Glasgow will serve to bring out the specificity of
these problems in the British capital.
Smith and Wise have shown that late Victorian Glasgow enjoyed a centrally
placed and long established university that was well-attuned to the commercial
interests of the civic population, and especially to the entrepreneurial products of
Professor William Thomson's physical laboratories. Indeed his removal from the
dingy College in the older city to 'a grand cathedral of learning' at Gilmorehill in
1870 enabled Thomson to extend dramatically his programme of telegraphic,
instrumental and navigational researches, all the while enrolling volunteers from
an extraordinarily wide undergraduate clientele including both prospective cler-
gymen and engineers (Smith and Wise, 1989: 130-5). The daily activities of
Thomson's laboratories were habituated into the commercial routines of indus-
trial Glasgow (Smith, this volume), and well-understood by its population to be
so, the new central city area- like the old- being in close communication with a
ring of industrial satellite districts that virtually encompassed it (Morris, 1986:
169-70). But such was not the case with the new technical laboratories opened a
stone's throw from the bucolic gentility of Kensington Gardens in 1885. In order
to understand the spatial problematic specific to London's technoscientific prac-
tice, some analytical considerations are necessary.
As Schutz and Luckman suggest in the epigraph above, the important and per-
petually unresolved tensions of social existence are in an important sense spa-
tially constituted. Humans generally transact their relationships according to a
fairly well-defined routine of daily practices within a familiar configuration of
spaces. As such they identify themselves differentially as belonging to particular
spatially-specific social groups rather than to others which are 'strange' and
demarcated as such by various distancing techniques. In the case of late Victorian
London, to a much greater extent than contemporary Glasgow, the spatial demar-
cation of gentility and polite recreation from manufacturing and commerce was a
cultuml issue of great importance (Morris and Rodgers, 1993: 6-1 0). Thus when
the industrial forces of the City and the Eastern banks of the Thames threatened
to encroach upon upper middle class Kensington in the guise of a new technical
college in the 1880s, the frictions were conspicuous. It is such social conflicts that
are mediated through space, and as Lefebvre points out, appear as the 'contra-
dictions of space.'
Clearly, however, any account of such spatial friction and 'contradiction' must
explain how the spatiality of practice does undergo change, especially of rapid
and discontinuous alterations in the social fabric. This paper will examine the
particular contingent means by which the spatially-mediated problems of the City
& Guilds college in South Kensington were eventually (partially) resolved by the
early 1900s. Since the college was built and run in such a way that gave crucial
emphasis to laboratory endeavours, I shall discuss the various ways in which the
practices and products ofthis college's labomtories were strategically represented
to diverse contemporary audiences situated in premises elsewhere. I shall focus
this paper on the activities of Professor William Ayrton and his students on a.c.
electrical engineering in the Central's Department of Physics.
My account will commence with a brief summary of recent sociohistorical
scholarship on the laboratory in its social settings in order to show how spatiality
enters into the domain of laboratory work. I shall then provide a critique of the
applicability of Bourdieu 's theory of habitus to the development of new spaces of
technoscience. Finally I shall investigate how instruments and their users serve as
'envoys' of institutional practices into the world beyond the labomtory; in so
doing I shall draw upon Moros's arguments concerning the importance of strate-
gic display in the effective prosecution of technoscientific enterprises (Morus,
1991; 1993); I shall also utilize Bruno Latour's concepts of the 'indispensable
ally', the 'obligatory passage point' and the prepamtion 'of landing-strips' for
'facts and machines' to articulate the methodology of attempts to forge links
between the instrumental practices of academic laboratories and of industrial life
(Latour, 1987).
1. DEFETISHIZING THE LABORATORY
The laboratory is undeniably the spatial domain of technoscientific pmctice that

has received most attention from historians. Since the late 1970s we have wit-
nessed what Gooding has labelled the 'procedural turn' 2 (Gooding, 1990) in
science and technology studies (STS) in which the methodological sympathies of
history of science have moved from theory-centred philology to laboratory-
Graeme Gooday 219
centred anthropology. The ethnographic studies of late twentieth century labora-

tory life alluded to above have inspired many historians to delve into the com-
plexities of how facts come to be constructed in the laboratories of other periods.
Yet the researches of Harry Collins have shown us that the results of even the
most hi-tech modem laboratory do not travel unproblematically to other laborato-
ries: replication is usually not possible without a considerable social mediation of
skill and practice (Collins, 1985). While historians of experiment picked up this
sociologically informed approach with alacrity, they could not be satisfied for
long with parochial studies of what went on merely within the walls of individual
laboratories. Jan Golinski indeed notes that the methodological focus on the local
setting of 'where experimental facts first emerge[d)' has thus been complemented
more recently by historical studies of the contingent processes whereby 'such
knowledge is transformed in the course of its communication into more public
settings' (Golinski, 1990b).
Work on the latter topic has tended to resolve the ambiguous status of the labo-
ratory in both histories and ethnographies of experimental science. Whilst some
discourses have tended to fetishize the laboratory as a uniquely privileged space
of knowledge production, others have portrayed it as a social environment so
ordinary in character that its credibility as an arbiter of the natural world seems
extraordinary. This tense dialectic is clearly exemplified in Bruno Latour's writ-
ings on the subject. Collaborating with Steve Woolgar in the 1970s, Latour pre-
sented cogent ethnographic evidence that 'laboratory life' is not so very different
from other forms of human life. It can be methodologically untidy, prone to
human subjectivities, persistently corrigible, work to fulfil politically-freighted
agendas, and above all not guaranteed to win arguments about the nature of world
(Latour and Woolgar, 1986: 105-50, 235-58). In his study of Louis Pasteur's
fight against the anthrax bacillus in the 1880s, Latour similarly emphasizes that
the laboratory work was 'part of society' and 'never ceased to be so', hence there
could be no meaningful demarcation between the inside or outside of Pasteur's
laboratory (Latour, 1983; 1988).
Nevertheless, Latour also represents access to the spatially localized resources
of the laboratory as a sine qua non of Pasteur's authoritative practice.3 In a more
generalized form his thesis is that 'Laboratories convert chance to necessity'
(Latour, 1988). This thesis reappears in Science in Action in his account of the
'centre of calculation' - a centralized (laboratory-based) institution which has
the authority to ratify the results of all other laboratories (Latour, 1987: 215-87).
Yet Latour only gives one twentieth century example of such a 'centre', the US
National Bureau of Standards. Elsewhere in this work Latour persuasively por-
trays the more typical historical case in which different laboratories are engaged
in an unresolved battle about which of them is to become the hegemonic 'centre
of calculation'. In his nineteenth-century examples, laboratories are portrayed as
much more fragile sources of authority, their results only surviving in the outside
world insofar as external audiences can contingently be enrolled to carry them
there. On closer historical inspection, Latour's construal of the laboratory's social

credibility seems a uniquely twentieth century view.
It is significant in this respect that scholars of nineteenth-century cultures have
recently shown that other spaces of practice mattered at least as much as the labo-
ratory. Ann Secord has shown that the early Victorian public house was an import-
ant site of artisanal natural history in Lancashire (Secord, 1994). Moreover, we
know from Sophie Forgan's scholarship that, up to the middle of the last century,
the status of the laboratory was often subordinate to that of the museum in which it
was housed (Forgan, 1994). Indeed, when laboratories were constructed across the
spectrum of experimental sciences from the 1860s to 1890s, the acquiescence of
audiences to their epistemic power was hardly a smoothly linear or inexorable
process. As I have argued elsewhere, the cultural credibility that accrued to acade-
mic laboratories in physics and biology can only be understood by studying how
experimentalists harnessed the contextual contingencies of industrial competition,
reforms in school science teaching, and technical practices of established social
utility, namely measurement and microscopy. Yet these were not unresisted
processes: the constituency of field naturalists dissented from claims that the
necrological and artificial environment of the biology laboratory could be an
authoritative space in which to encounter 'Nature' (Gooday, 1990, 1991a).
The early development of telegraphic and electric engineering laboratories saw
similar challenges to the value of practices in newly contrived institutional envi-
ronments. A major complaint was against the authenticity of context: why should
an aspiring engineer study the behaviour of telegraph lines or lighting systems
in a laboratory in conditions that bore an indeterminate resemblance to the un-
predictable conditions of commercial practice? Insofar as electrical engineering
laboratories were accepted as new sites of practice in the 1880s and 1890s, it was
partly through being presented to their students (and prospective employers) as
fulfilling a role that complemented extant sites of engineering. At the City &
Guilds Finsbury Technical College in the early 1880s Professors William Ayrton
and John Perry explicitly fashioned their laboratories as sites for training in prac-
tices that received little attention in the busy world of commercial engineering:
measurement techniques, the construction and use of electrical instruments, and
efficiency trials on industrial machinery. In counterbalancing this 'strangeness'
and social 'distance' from the world of commerce, however, the pre-established
credentials of Ayrton and Perry in commercial engineering practice were essen-
tial to sustain a close linkage between the new space of laboratory activity and the
more familiar spaces of engineering practice (Gooday, 1991b). As we shall see
later, even here the 'trial shop' was often the name assigned to spaces for tech-
nological testing - not the laboratory so-designated.
A Victorian laboratory's credibility as any kind of authority in matters of prac-
tice did not necessarily arise simply in virtue of its being a laboratory - such
fetishization was a much later phenomenon of the twentieth century. The early
construction of the engineering laboratory's power in relation to other pre-
Graeme Gooday 221
existing sites of practice required careful and strategic mapping of its praxical
boundaries (Gieryn, 1995). The credibility of Finsbury Technical College's labs
was however rather more easily won than that of the City & Guilds laboratories
in South Kensington, and the differences between these two institutions will be
explored next.
2. FINSBURY TECHNICAL COLLEGE: LOCALITY AND THE

CREDIBILITY OF LABORATORY PRACTICE
Two points of similarity between the (junior level) Finsbury Technical College
and the (advanced) 'Central' College in South Kensington throw their differences
into useful relief. Both were funded and administrated by the ancient Guilds
Companies in the City of London which had been bullied by W. E. Gladstone in
the mid to late 1870s into financing a large practical scheme of industrial training
so as to meet their lapsed traditional obligations of maintaining London's appren-
tices (Lang, 1978: 14-18). Both institutions were also unusual in the early 1880s
for the predominance of laboratories both in the physical space of their buildings
and in the temporal space of their working days (vis-a-vis time spent in the
lecture theatre) of everyday institutional life (Brock, 1989). Early in Finsbury's
career the novel use of laboratory exercises for the mass technical education of
apprentices and young workmen threatened to turn into chaos as a result of the
(over)use of unreliable equipment in overcrowded classes. After some rancorous
controversy in the pages of The Electrical Review in spring 1883, textual and pic-
torial representations of a well-disciplined and well-equipped first year electrical
engineering laboratory at Finsbury were issued both in this journal and in The
Electrician of July 1884 to reassure the sceptical engineering community of the
merits ofFinsbury's laboratory practice (Gooday, 1991b: 103-4).
It seems unlikely, however, that such a picture of stable and well controlled
student practice in instrumental measurement could have been anything but a
hyperbolic representation of Finsbury's daily routines. From Foucault's analysis
of such spatial ordering in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977: 170-94), we
know that such stability and control could only be imposed upon prisoners, sol-
diers and schoolchildren in regimes of rigid punitive discipline. For other institu-
tional settings, however, spatial autonomy and its associated subversive conduct
were very difficult to suppress. Certainly the analogy of such punitive institutions
with the spaces of technoscientific practice is uncompelling. This is readily appar-
ent in H. G. Wells' testimony regarding his time at the Royal College of Science
(in South Kensington) in the late 1880s. Faced with the strictures of one espe-
cially coercive laboratory demonstrator, Wells had asked whether he was there as
a 'a student of physical science or a convict under discipline? Was I there to learn
or was I there to obey?' (Wells, 1934, vol. 1: 216-17). If historical contempo-
raries could be so sceptical on this point, so too perhaps should historians.
While the College's public relations were sometimes best served by distribut-
ing images of idealized laboratory order, a complementary technique for enhanc-
ing the college's credibility as a site of practical training was to focus on the
specific parochial relevance of its activities. Located near the heartland of indus-
trial London (see Figure 9.1 ), the Fins bury college was easily accessible to the
hundreds of artisans/apprentices who came there daily from nearby factories and
workshops to attend its evening classes (Brock, 1989). Indeed by foregrounding
one particular set of activities, the college could be represented to public audi-
ences as an institutional space well-attuned to the habitual routines of its sur-
roundings. For example in a well-informed article for the Daily News, we see a
close link being constructed between the work of the Department of Applied Art
and that of the local furniture-making industry (Martin, 1966: 8-10).
'In the heart of industrial London is a narrow thoroughfare known as

Tabernacle Row, which ... is identified with cabinet making .... Chairs, tables,
and cabinets of every shape and fashion are made in the immediate neighbour-
hood, much of the work being marked by the excellence of execution charac-
teristic of the English craftsman .... There could hardly have been a better spot
in which to develop technical education in its actual work ... the Applied Art
Department ... has commenced a valuable series of lectures on furniture, a
subject in which the vicinity of the college will be most interested. Under the
same teacher and Professor Perry [professor of mechanical engineering],
special courses of lessons extending over three years have been instituted for
the advantage of the cabinet making, building, and allied industries .... It will
be seen that these schemes of technical instruction have been distinctly planned
with reference to the wants of the populations surrounding the college.
(Daily News, 1 February 1883: 2)
The local specificity of practice in industrial training schemes was a recurrent

theme in contemporary debates on technical education. Before finalizing plans
for their technical training colleges, the City & Guilds asked T. H. Huxley to
provide his views of the hotly contested priorities. Answering their request in
November 1877, Huxley argued against those who upheld the virtues of central-
ized metropolitan academies: 'I do not believe in Trade Schools unless they are
established in direct communication with large factories ... [for] The persons
interested in the trade of a locality are best fitted to judge of its wants' (Huxley,
1877: 54). For technical colleges that were not to be located in an industrial
locale- as was the City & Guilds projection for the 'Central' -Huxley recom-
mended instead a more nationally-oriented programme of teacher-training.
Judging from the above testimony of the Daily News, in its early years Finsbury
Technical College did indeed benefit from the socio-geographical propinquity that
Huxley had recommended. During the later debates on the imminent Technical
Instruction Act that burgeoned throughout 1889, however, Finsbury's Professor
John Perry aroused hostility in his promotion of a uniform national scheme of
C)
i3
~
(1>
~
§-
~
Figure 9.1 Map of the principal electrical institutions and undertakings in London, 1906. Note the proximity of Finsbury
Technical College to the Clerk.enwell Road (instrument--making district) and to the City of London (Aldersgate, Moorgate, N
N
....,
Bishopsgate, etc.), and the comparative remoteness of the 'Central' - approximately four miles south-west. Note also, first,
the juxtaposition of the four telegraph undertakings on the eastern side of the dock., and, second, the pattern of railways
~rrn~~ thl' r~nit~l. I'IPrtrifif'.l! uncil'rotnuncl lin<"~ nnen or in the course of constmction heino markP.cl with a hellvv hlllc.k linl'.
engineering education. A character signing himself 'handicraftsman' in the pages

of the Art Journal considered that Perry's plan to have all engineers undergo
college training and only then undertake workshop practice was heading towards
failure since they were based largely on plans to bring in 'continental' methods.
The handicraftsman insisted that no 'universal formula' for technical education
'issued from a central office' could ever attain the desired end:
... it does not necessarily follow that because a certain system works well
somewhere on the continent, therefore its introduction here will produce
equally good results .... [L]ocal prejudices must be respected, if we wish to
enlist the sympathies of our workmen; each locality as well as each separate
trade must be treated on its own merits. It is not sufficient to say 'they do these
things better in France, therefore you must abandon your old methods and do
as we instruct you'. (Handicraftsman, 1888: 82-3)
Much of the subsequent development of technical education in working class dis-

tricts of London (such as New Cross, Deptford, Mile End, Lewisham) was local-
ized in its reference to the needs of the local population (Bourne and Latham,
1991 ). Ironically, though, localized 'prejudices' were a major problem in the con-
temporaneous efforts of the City & Guilds to launch the 'Central' in the non-
industrial district of South Kensington. To explicate this problem it will be useful
to contrast the foregoing with Shapin and Ophir's much-cited account of the labo-
ratory's social locations.
3. HABITUS AND HETEROTOPIA IN LABORATORY STORIES
In characterizing the laboratory as an historically important 'place of knowledge'

for the sciences, Shapin and Ophir critically deploy Foucault's notion of the 'het-
erotopia' (Foucault, 1986). The heterotopia is a temporally specific, heterogeneous
but above all socially privileged space that is well-differentiated from its contigu-
ous surroundings, and wholly different from all sites that it putatively analyses
and represents (Ophir and Shapin, 1991: 13). Shapin and Ophir consider whether
the laboratory, as a social and epistemic space much-mythologized as a special
'unworldly' site for creating knowledge of the material world, can meaningfully
be characterized as a heterotopia. To this end they attempt to apply to the labora-
tory the principles4 which, according to Foucault, maintain the 'specialness' or
'Otherness' of the heterotopic space against external forces tending towards level-
ling and disorder. Two of these principless can be applied with some cogency to
the history of laboratories: firstly, selective accessibility has been almost univer-
sally accomplished by the discretionary management of a laboratory's entrances
and exits, keeping students and staff inside and unwanted visitors outside during
normal working hours. Secondly, some laboratories have also been demarcated
Graeme Gooday 225
and externally managed so that proximate social spaces can be regulated to rein-
force their contrastingly heterotopic function (Forgan and Gooday, 1994).
Yet the latter principle has been a far less universal characteristic of laborato-
ries. The merging of Finsbury Technical College with its immediate civic sur-
roundings hardly made its laboratories distinctive spaces of privileged
'Otherness'. More than this, however, it is clear that human needs for urban trans-
portation have often been a major source of invasive disruption to laboratory
work, the intrusive side-effects of vehicular motion challenging the sequestered
character of knowledge-making. In the mid-1860s, for example, the effects of
iron-built maritime traffic on the adjacent River Thames compromised attempts
by the BAAS Electrical Standards Committee to make an absolute determination
of its unit of electrical resistance in the laboratories of Kings College, London
(Gooday, forthcoming). As David Cahan has shown of late 1890s Germany,
directors of physical laboratories battled hard and usually unsuccessfully to
prevent radiation from new electric tramlines laid adjacent to their institutional
walls from interfering with delicate electrical researches. As Kohlrausch later
wrote of his geopolitical battles over the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt
(PTR), this laboratory was 'still foreign to the spirit of Charlottenburg' (a leafy
Berlin suburb) and that 'the mayor, the city council, and the townspeople felt
themselves injured and insulted by th[is] intruder' (Cahan, 1989: 171). Whilst
Kohlrausch finally won compensation for this counter-heterotopic interference,
the remedy for the PTR's British counterpart, the National Physical Laboratory,
was to remove the whole enterprise into the countryside (Pyatt, 1983). Clearly for
this sort of high-precision laboratory, heterotopic status was not possible within
the urban landscape. 6
As Shapin and Ophir shrewdly observe of several diverse twentieth-century
disciplines, 'heterotopias have never characterized all forms of scientific activity'
(Ophir and Shapin, 1991: 15). Referring to William Thomson's strategic use and
representation of his spaces for natural philosophy in nineteenth-century Glasgow
College, Crosbie Smith extends this point to show that even the most highly suc-
cessful urban laboratory need not be a heterotopic space. Smith shows that far
from being aloof and distinct from civic life, Thomson's laboratory could hardly
have been more closely integrated into the political economy of contemporary
Glasgow. The highly privileged status of Thomson's laboratory derived from the
very strength and intimacy of this integration (Smith, this volume). The analogy
with Finsbury Technical College is clear: this institution of technical education
and research, and the laboratories embedded within it, drew credibility not by
heterotopic separation from contiguous civic spaces, but by synchronisation with
their social and commercial routines.
Following Ann Secord, I now draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus
to articulate the significance of the routinized relationship between local practices
and their spatial settings. Bourdieu defines habitus as the durable but mutable
shared 'dispositions' by which a spatially located body of humans generates and
organizes its daily practices. The routinisation of these practices make everyday
life 'regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience
to rules' (Bourdieu, 1980); 7 so in contrast to Foucault's analysis of punitive-
disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1977), the regularity of social practices need
not be attributed to (the fulfilment of) any agent's intention to manage or enforce
an ordered stability. Rather, according to Bourdieu, this habitual regularity of a
social space can arise unintentionally from the enmeshing of routinized practices
within it. It is this very congruity and homogeneity that makes practices 'immedi-
ately intelligible and forseeable' and hence 'taken for granted' by those denizens
of the space itself.
Secord deploys this concept to articulate the role of pub-life in early nineteenth-
century Lancashire as the socio-spatial context sustaining a strong artisanal culture
of botany - a culture hitherto overlooked by historians of science (Secord, 1994:
270). Although I will apply Bourdieu's analysis to the somewhat more familiar
issues of late nineteenth-century technical education and research, my goal in so
doing will be to examine the extent to which Bourdieu's concept is usefully applic-
able to the historical study of new spaces of technoscientific practice, namely those
less well established than the artisanal drinking house. Importantly for the histo-
rian, Bourdieu explicitly argues that while being 'durable', the routines and prac-
tices of a habitus arc sufficiently elastic to accommodate a certain amount of
change in response tu external social forces (Bourdieu and Warcquant, 1992: 133).
Although Bourdieu does not specify the degree of elasticity possible without major
rupture to a habitus, we can interpret the setting up of Finsbury Technical College
in the early 1880s as an example of how this mutability is important to the histor-
ically evident processes of spatial change. By rendering some of its routine activ-
ities, specifically its furniture-making classes, supportive augmentations of existing
practices in the local civic environment, the teaching undertaken at this new
technical institute could appear relatively 'intelligible and forseeable' to critical
audiences -as is discernible in the quotation from the Daily News above.
It is not clear, however, what account Bourdieu would give of how a radically
new social space and its habitus is constructed within a pre-established social
milieu, especially if this entails major discontinuities of routine and practice. Just
such was the problem precipitated by the creation of the Central Institution con-
temporaneously with Finsbury Technical College but in the significantly non-
industrial environment of South Kensington. Although this district was made
famous thirty years previously for its spectacular display of British science and art
at the Great Exhibition, I shall argue below that this did not make the area
amenable in any obvious Bourdieuian sense to the successful creation of a
complex of technical laboratories for the advanced training of engineers. It
remains to be explained, therefore, how it was that by 1900 the 'Central' acquired
a civic, national and even international reputation for industrially-relevant tech-
nical education despite the initial credibility problems that arose from its incongru-
ous siting in South Kensington. In what follows, I shall examine various strategies
Graeme Gooday 227
employed to overcome this spatially framed problem; co-extensively I shall eluci-

date the challenges to a Bourdieuian theory of habitus posed by radical change in
the spatiality of technoscientific practice.
4. INVENTING SOUTH KENSINGTON: CABBAGES, COMMISSIONERS

AND THE QUEEN'S CONSORT
Does the organisation of lhis vast metropolis, which is constantly changing,

justify an expenditure as is contemplated for a site which, twenty years hence,
may be the least. accessible part of town? Alas for the Royal Commission! ... I
mourn over the 150,0001, the shilling surplus of the masses, sunk in a cabbage
garden at Kensington Gore.
(Critic's response to the 1853 purchase of land using profits from the
Great Exhibition, Bowring, 1877: 563)
The title of Michael Argles' South Kensington to Robbins: an Account of English

Technical Education since /851 exemplifies how historians of English technical
education have often identified South Kensington, qua site of the Great
Exhibition, as an historiographically convenient starting point for their narratives.
To Argles, South Kensington seemed to sum up 'a whole era and attitude of
mind': it was not only the 'cradle' of technical education but also the 'final [sic]
home' of the Government's Department of Science and Art. Moreover, from the
chronological standpoint of 1964, Argles ventured that 'the spirit of South
Kensington' had in fact 'shone' over technical instruction for more than one
hundred years' (Argles, 1964: xii). Implicitly bequeathed by the Crystal Palace in
1851, this genius loci also seems to serve another role in Argles' account: it con-
stitutes, albeit tacitly, his explanation of why various institutions of science and
technology 'gradually gathered at South Kensington' during the subsequent half-
century (Argles, 1964: 18). From the epigraph immediately above, however, it
would seem that at least one contemporary critic did not see the future of this
suburb to be so clearly determined by the aftermath of the Exhibition. Indeed
recent sociological and historiographical perspectives on urban spatial develop-
ment leave Argles' portrayal of South Kensington as a 'natural' urban home for
technical instruction somewhat in need of reappraisal.
Following the Bourdieuian precepts outlined in the previous section, a useful
historical picture of this south-western district ought to focus not on the transient
spectacle of the Crystal Palace but on the routine life of its mid-nineteenth
century inhabitants. A valuable account of the largely agricultural habitus of this
outlying suburb, and the attendant controversy over its early development as a
locale for museums and learning, comes from Edgar Bowring, an erstwhile
Secretary to the Royal Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851. Writing in
1877 (that is just before the City & Guilds contemplated the siting of their
'Central' Institution), Bowring's aim was to vindicate the Commissioners' deci-
sion to spend over 80 per cent of the Exhibition profits on the 'cabbage patch in
Kensington Gore'. Far from being a wasted investment, he argued that the district
was now replete with 'spacious road, stately houses, and numerous public build-
ings (for example the Royal Albert Hall and the School of Mines),' In so doing he
carefully emphasized the gentle transformation that had taken place since the
Commissioner's purchase in 1853 when:
... the whole frontage of Hyde park consisted of a few old-fashioned houses, to
most of which large gardens in the rear were attached, the two best known
being Gore House and Grove House; a crooked footpath, bordered by high
poplars, called Gore Lane, traversed the whole estate in a diagonal direction
from Kensington to Brompton; two or three acres in the centre of the present
Horticultural Gardens were devoted to the purposes of beating the carpets of
the West-end aristocracy; the bulk of the property fulfilled the humble but
useful functions of market gardens ... ; the secluded region of Brompton Park,
with its fine old trees, and quaint dwellings which formed the favourite abodes
of leading actors, occupied the site of the now world-known South Kensington
Museum; and in short, silence and solitude reigned throughout. ... '
(Bowring, 1877: 563; Forgan and Gooday, 1994: 157-60)
In the absence of any lingering technological ambience from the Great Exhibition,
what prompted the Commissioners to acquire this sylvan domain for the further-
ance of science and art? Consultations in 1851-52 had revealed several germane
interests calling for open territory in which to extend this cause. Many representa-
tives of provincial towns had 'urged' the national importance of creating a new
'central College of Arts and Manufactures' in the capital for training the next
generation of industrial leaders. Closer to home, the Commissioners noted the
great expense and inconvenience felt by the existing national institutions of the
British Museum, the National Gallery, the Museum of Practical Geology and the
School of Design at Somerset House and (implicitly) the Department of Science
and Art in being 'scattered over the town.' Worse still, they were hemmed in by
the crush of adjacent developments, acted under no 'common plan' and laboured
under such a 'system of isolation' that they collectively produced comparatively
'little benefit' to industry. These two factors furnished the Commissioners with
the rationale to purchase- albeit after much complex negotiation involving Prince
Albert - a tract of ground, lying fortuitously in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.
As Bowring recalled, the 'large open spaces' here were judged by the
Commissioners to provide protection against the 'inconveniences' of overcrowd-
ing and pollution suffered particularly by the National Gallery, and were indeed
'the only grounds' in the capital which remain 'safe for future years' amidst the
'growth of the metropolis' (Bowring, 1877: 565-6).
Graeme Gooday 229
The 'South Kensington' epithet was then invented in 1854 as an explicit

attempt by Prince Albert's acolytes to popularize this peripheral suburb and
thereby overcome its 'cabbage-patch' legacy. In the following year this was,
however, countered by the many opponents of the scheme. They specifically tar-
geted the ungainly appearance of the new Department of Science and Art's
Museum, a temporary construction of corrugated iron, sited on the edge of the
Commissioners' land. Their cruel but long-lasting nickname for it of the
'Brompton Boilers' not only highlighted the contextual inappropriateness of
installing an industrially styled building in Kensington; it also rather archly asso-
ciated the Museum with the adjacent district of Brompton - supposed by London
cognoscenti to be 'unfashionable, unhealthy, and objectionable in other respects'
(Bowring, 1877: 571, 573). This 'much-abused' building was the first stage of a
tactical relocation by the Department of Science and Art (DSA) to South
Kensington. Yet almost immediately the Commissioners and DSA's plan for a
coherent 'Albertopolis' stalled when a very suspicious House of Commons
refused to vote funds to move the National Gallery to the area (Bowring, 1877:
574-7). Again in 1863-64, the South Kensington lobbyists were soon made more
notorious by failed Government-backed attempts to force all the Bloomsbury-
based scientific societies to transfer to the buildings of the 1862 Exhibition. One
aggravated parliamentarian received loud applause in the House of Commons for
his warnings about the dangerous self-interest of the 'craving, meddling, flatter-
ing, toadying. self-seeking clique that had established itself in Kensington.'
(Bowring, 1877: 66)
5. CONSTRUCTING THE 'CENTRAL' IN SOUTH KENSINGTON, 1877--85
Rather than attempting to appropriate existing sites of science and art for their
nascent empire in South Kensington, the Commissioners and DSA worked during
the next two decades to develop new institutions in the area, notably the Natural
History Museum and the Science Schools (later the Royal College of Science). As
Forgan points out, the work ofT. H. Huxley and fellow defectors from the School
of Mines in Jermyn Street in training the nation's science teachers at the Science
Schools was readily represented as appropriate to the South Kensington setting.
Apart from being the site of DSA headquarters, the district housed museums which
provided the crucial material resources for effective teacher-training, and by spatial
juxtaposition, moreover, lent the new college valuable contextual associations of
museological authority (Forgan, 1994; Forgan and Gooday, 1994: 157-65). So
when the City Guilds began to draw up plans for constructing their own Central
Institution in 1877, T. H. Huxley's (far from disinterested) advice was that it also
ought primarily to be a college devoted to training teachers of technology, not
engineers, and thus ought to be located in South Kensington. According to the plan
he laid before the Executive Committee late that year:
The class of students who are to be trained for masters and teachers and supe-
rior foremen, and so on will not be those who are carrying on handicraft indus-
tries in London, so as to make the difference between the West End and the
East End of material importance to them[;] while on the other hand, the imme-
diate [proximity] of the great scientific museums and other institutions which
are in the neighbourhood of South Kensington make that neighbourhood very
desirable. (Huxley, 1877)
Yet this was not what all of the City Guilds had envisaged as the main task of
the programme in technical education. As sponsors, many wished to see the insti-
tution that was to be 'central' to their investment in England's future produce
skilled workers who would be directly useful to industry as engineers. Moreover,
South Kensington's reputation for interference and civic imperialism was
still widespread, and this was one of the biggest worries in 1878. Hence several
of the City Companies, especially the Cloth workers and Drapers, wanted a demo-
graphically 'central' location for the Central Institution: close to the Guilds
Headquarters in Gresham College and to the prospective student clientele that
they envisaged for the new college - as was the Finsbury College then also being
planned. Significantly, several of the City Companies also expressed recurrent
doubts about whether such an extravagant building would be justified for small
numbers seeking an elite training - and indeed whether employers would find
any place for them (Lang, 1978: 28).
Unable to find the finances for expensive land in the City of London, however,
the Guilds were forced to consider a South Kensington site for the 'Central' - a
politically unattractive option notwithstanding that the Commissioners' original
aim of using the land to create a 'central' institution for training in the arts and
sciences! In fact, when a member of the Clothworkers Company approached the
1851 Commissioners about the use of their land for this purpose in 1878, he told
them that he wished their property was 'situated elsewhere' as it was 'thought by
his confreres that everybody who comes within the clutches of the ruling powers
in that neighbourhood received inceremonious treatment' .8 It was only after more
than two years of protracted and tortuous negotiations, that the Commissioners
finally agreed terms on which to grant the Guilds a lease for the construction of
the 'Central' at a ground rent of one shilling per year for 999 years (Lang, 1978:
29-30). 9 A number of the Guilds, especially the Drapers and Mercers, long
remained unreconciled to this choice of site. They regarded it as absurdly remote
from its prospective students, worryingly difficult to manage at such a distance,
and - as the Clothworkers deputy alluded - vulnerable to expropriation from
South Kensington's notoriously scheming cabals.
Nor was the South Kensington milieu of museums, mansions and moneyed
manners seen by the engineering press as an appropriate setting for a technical
institution. When plans for the City & Guilds' site were first made public in 1880,
one widely read electrical trades journal, The Electrician, was highly sceptical. So
Graeme Gooday 231
far removed would the 'Central' be from the all-important mechanical workshops
and cable factories in the East End and on the Banks of the Thames, that an edito-
rial suggested the whole enterprise was 'about as sensible as establishing a swim-
ming seminary on Salisbury plain' (The Electrician, 1880, vol. 4: 102). Even as
late as July 1884 when the Central Institution's plush new laboratories were not
far from opening, the same journal remarked rather archly - and drawing an
implicitly unfavourable contrast with the siting of Finsbury Technical College -
that 'South Kensington is not a neighbourhood where artificers or handicraft
flourishes, or is ever likely to flourish' (The Electrician, 1884, vol. 13: 204).
However, when it became known that the chair of electrical engineering would
be under the control of the Finsbury Professor, William Ayrton, this journal was
somewhat reassured. Surveying the training available in electrical engineering
in London and elsewhere in September 1884, an editorial in The Electrician
judged that insofar as the subject at Central would be 'in the hands of Professor
W. E. Ayrton', this was a 'sufficient guarantee' that 'the laboratory at the institu-
tion will run fairly with the factory' (The Electrician, 1884, vol. 13: 414). In
Bourdieuian terms, we might say that, for this audience at least, the habitus of the
new electrical engineering laboratory was rendered 'intelligible and foreseeable'
when operated by an agent with a 'taken-for-granted' status in the worlds of
industry and learning. This species of contextual familiarity was, in effect,
enough to overcome The Electrician's doubts about the credibility of a technical
institution located in such an incongruous geographical setting.
The Waterhouse architecture of the finished 'Central Building', at least, was
relatively congruent with its genteel environs. This dignified school-like exterior
housed a very much laboratory-dominated interior space - here it was that the
students would have extended opportunities to acquaint themselves with the prin-
ciples and technological practices of their intended professions (Forgan and
Gooday, 1994: 168-73). Even so, it soon became apparent that such favourable
publicity had not won over the more immediately pertinent constituencies: poten-
tial students and their parents or employers, as well as those sponsoring Livery
Companies who were not reconciled to the remoteness, expense or industrial
utility of the Institution. When its doors opened in 1885, even with subsidized
low fees of £25 a year and direct access to the area via the underground railway,
only seven full-time students enrolled: four in mechanical engineering and one
each in [Technical] Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Although this number
increased to 35 by the end of the first year (along with some occasional stu-
dents),10 only three 'associates' emerged from Ayrton's laboratory in 1887,
showing that the City's prospective electrical engineers had not been persuaded
to privilege Ayrton's distant technological spaces with their full-time attendance.
Early laboratory students found this much to their benefit, Sir Alfred
Chatterton recalling of October 1885 that in undertaking measurement experi-
ments, instrument building and machinery trials, each came into 'much closer
contact with the professors than was possible later on'. Yet a somewhat different
interpretation was placed on this arrangement by Daniel Watney, an ex-master of

the Mercer's Company long opposed to the siting and organization of the
'Central' scheme. Attacking the Professors' appeal for more funds to complete
the equipment of the laboratories, Watney wrote to all the Livery Companies in
January 1886 arguing rather plausibly that the chief beneficiaries could only be
the rather underworked professors (Lang, 1978: 46-8). Despite causing a major
frisson in the City & Guilds, Watney's campaign did not deter other companies
from contributing the funds for which Ayrton et al. appealed.
Yet this matter was picked up with alacrity by hostile sections of the press. In
July 1886, the Electrical Review reported the daily Echo's sarcastic comments on
the college's finances at the end of its second year:
Although the buildings and fittings cost £100 000, and £10 000 a year is
needed to carry on the work of the college, it last year secured the attendance
of only 145 students; and not more than 25 of these matriculated or took the
whole course. Each effective student, therefore, cost the [City & Guilds]
between £400 and £500 in that year for his technical 'education.' The choice of
a South Kensington site was a mistake to begin with, as most people knew; but
the offer of land rent free ... was a temptation .... For half the money expended
at South Kensington, or at any rate not more than £50 000, the Corporation [of
London] and City Guilds could put on the Blackfriars Embankment a building
much better adapted for its purpose than the present one.
In the circumstances the Echo correspondent suggested not just that technical educa-
tion belonged properly in the City of London, but that only concerns properly
belonging to South Kensington should be housed there: the Waterhouse-designed
building should be given over to the recent Colonial and Indian Exhibition in the
South Kensington Museum - for which more permanent accommodation was
sought and for which the Central building was 'well adapted'. The accompanying
commentary of the Electrical Review was more circumspect but equally hostile:
The result of the year's experience at the South Kensington college, as shown
by the above figures, must be [agreed] to be deplorable, and the first impulse is
to enquire as to the cause of such a result. We have heard one or two sugges-
tions, but should not care to make public what has been only vaguely men-
tioned in our presence'. (Electrical Review, 1886: 95)
6. 'TRUMPET, BLOW': DEFENSIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF

LABORATORY LIFE AT THE CENTRAL
In an apparent response to such dark murmurings in the press and elsewhere, the
City & Guilds held its first evening Conversazione 11 in the building in spring the
Graeme Gooday 233
following year. On Wednesday 16 March 1887 the Central Institution's still

under-populated laboratories and lecture theatres were temporarily transformed
into a kaleidoscopic display of musical diversion, experimental spectacle and
technological parade. Yet the invited members of the City companies, employers
and London's scientific circles who arrived around 8 p.m. that evening would not
see the institution's students in their everyday routines and practices, but a strate-
gic (mis)representation evidently designed to cultivate greater sympathy with the
college's operations and financ('S.
After being greeted in the Central's library by dignitaries of the City & Guilds
including its Chairman, the Earl of Selborne (F.R.S.), the highlight of their
evening's entertainment was a concert in the Large Central Hall, commencing
appropriately with Gounod's 'Trumpet, blow', and continuing with choruses from
HMS Pinafore and Pinsuti's 'In this hour of softened splendour'. While a recital
of pastoral glees was repeated hourly in the Chemical Lecture Theatre, 12 the
Central's professors took turns to impress guests with equal theatricality, notably
Professor Unwin with the 100-ton testing machine and experimental steam engine
and Professor Ayrton with his dynamos and alternators. In the meantime, visitors,
suitably refreshed with sherry, could wander around selected laboratories and
examine for themselves the splendid arrays of apparatus that had been purchased
with the munificence of the Livery Companies. The justification of past expend-
iture was clearly a major issue: the Conversazione programme emphasized that
the Central had been erected at less than a third of the cost of the Technische
Hochschule Berlin; it was nonetheless 'replete with all the appliances' required
for training technical teachers, mechanical, civil or electrical engineers, master
builders and chemists in a manner 'adapted to the special circumstances of home
industry'. 13
Yet this Conversazione was only a prelude to further efforts by the majority of
the City Companies to promote and defend their South Kensington site. Later in
the same year, the City & Guilds decided - at no little risk to their credibility -
henceforth to make the 'Central', rather than Finsbury, its main funding priority.
But this, combined with a collateral decision to move its administrative head-
quarters from the City site at Gresham College over to South Kensington, particu-
larly antagonized the very wealthy Drapers Company. The Drapers' primary
concern had hitherto been to promote Finsbury, which as the Company's histo-
rian points out, was virtually on its doorstep (Girtin, 1964: 345). After a year of
acrimony, following several previous years of strong opposition to developments
at South Kensington, the Drapers showed their disgust in November 1888 by can-
celling their £3000 annual maintenance grant to the Central, and withdrew from
the City & Guilds' educational plans altogether. They resolved instead to transfer
their substantial funds to a school built on Drapers-owned land in the Mile End
road. Aiming to 'place within reach of the dense population of the East End of
London, the means of technical education and rational enjoyment,' they thus
sponsored the creation of the 'Peoples' Palace' (later Queen Mary College) as a
geographically specific haven of working class training in science and engineer-

ing (Girtin, 1964: 345-9; Lang, 1978: 52-3 ). Although the Skinners and
Clothworkers now moved swiftly to meet the financial shortfall in the Central's
funding (Lang, 1978: 52-3), this well-publicized rift was deeply embarrassing
for the Guilds, hinging as it did on the college that had been so eponymously
'central' to its educational and industrial agenda. This was one of the factors that
prompted the Electrician's editorial polemic on 13 April 1888 to the effect that
'matters at South Kensington' were 'still a long way from being established on
a satisfactory footing' (Electrician, 1888, vol. 20: 630). Countermeasures were
thus introduced to dispel fears that the Central's facilities for technical training
might have been compromised by the Drapers' withdrawal. The allegiance of
Engineering was solicited to convey more positive images of the Central
Institution - 'advertising' as it was later derogatorily described by an anonymous
detractor. 14 Although this journal had earlier expressed reservations about the
practicability of ambitious programmes of technical education (Engineering,
1888, vol. 46: 389) from November to December of 1888 Engineering published
a lengthy and highly sympathetic series of articles and engravings of the Central's
laboratories and fittings. Following Greg Myers' insight that illustrations are
hardly ever gratuitous or merely incidental when added to a textual narrative
(Myers, 1990), it is important to analyse the mutual reinforcement of these fea-
tures. As such, the text and pictures emerge as being no more authentic or 'trans-
parent' representations of the Central's habitus than had been the stage-managed
delights of the Conversazione in the previous year.
In common with that event, the issues generally highlighted throughout all the
Engineering articles were the comprehensiveness, sophistication and careful
organization of the materials and technology available to students, and the effect-
ive laboratory supervision of their learning. Focusing on the Department of
Physics, readers learned how carefully the demonstrators monitored first year stu-
dents in the junior teaching laboratories in their handling of electrical measuring
instruments and their securing reliable results with them. Secondary level stu-
dents did much testing work - especially on the power and efficiency of motors
and also in learning the single-handed management of the Central Institution's
small dynamo room (see Figure 9.2) Yet significantly, as at the Conversazione,
there is a complete absence of examples or depictions of students in the practice
of actually using the equipment in trials or experiments. In regard to this point it
is useful to compare this propagandistic representation of the City and Guilds
laboratories with a more explicitly identifiable advertisement for engineering
machinery from the same volume of Engineering.
The trial shop for testing the wood-working machinery produced by Chelsea
manufacturer A. Ransome & Co serves as a striking contrast of representational
technique (see Figure 9.3) This engraving is densely packed with hardworking,
closely supervised workers engaged in their routine practices of the orderly
testing and demonstration of machinery for onlooking visitors and clients, and the
N
....,
Figure 9.2 Engraving of electric motor testing room at the Central institution. 1888. Source: Tunzelmann 1888: 560. Ul
N
...,
0\
Figure 9.3 Advertisement for Ransome's trial shop, Chelsea, 1888. Source: Engineering 1888.
Graeme Gooday 237
perspective construction draws the eye around the crowded room to see a contin-
uous line of efficient human and mechanical activity. From a critical Bourdieuian
perspective it is significant that this more direct representation of the habitus of
the workplace was not used in the engravings of the 'Central' laboratories.l 5 Far
from being a production line, the centre of attention is the educational equipment
surrounded by measurement devices - yet no human usage is pictorially re-
presented. Less direct means are employed instead to allude to characteristic
student activities, the narrative stress lying, nonetheless, on the generous pro-
vision of laboratory resources:
The completeness of the fittings of the various electrical laboratories may be

gathered from the fact that they contain in daily use 16 over twenty-five gal-
vanometers, including ammeters and voltmeters of different types and sensibil-
ity, some twenty six resistance boxes, five electrometers, not counting mere
electroscopes, six complete Wheatstones bridges, some eight or ten condensers
varying from one-third of a micro-farad to 20 microfarads each, &c.
(funzelmann, 1888: 560)
In addition to listing the unique array of equipment available to students,

another distinctive issue highlighted in the Engineering articles is the wider role
of the Central laboratories in filling the 'gap' in training between the school
and the workshop. This was in deliberate contrast to the still common view that
the historic 'triumphs' of unschooled engineers were 'proor that such interme-
diate training was 'unnecessary' or 'even useless' (funzelmann, 1888: 419). In
arguing for the technical college laboratory as a form of 'obligatory passage
point' (Latour, 1987: 150-62) to professional practice, von Tunzelmann argued
for a complementarity between the spaces of academic life and industrial
practice. Specifically he distanced the regular training activities of the laborato-
ries from the commercially productive activities of the workshops but at the
same time depicted them as 'indispensable allies' (Latour, 1987: 119-32) of
the workshop as places for equipment testing and technological research. As he
explained:
the object of . . . the Central Institution is not to make its students expert
workmen but to give a systematic training which is impossible in the best
managed workshop. [Here] everything is arranged with a view to giving
instruction, while in the workshop the object is to tum out the largest possible
number of machines at the lowest possible cost [a goal sorely compromised by
the obligation to teach apprentices!] The in.struction ... is intended ... to
precede and not to supersede training in the workshop or office, for it is only in
the latter that the engineering student can learn the commercial conditions
under which his work must be carried out in order to secure practical, in other
words, financial success. (funzelmann, 1888: 419)
However, the continuity between the practices of laboratory life and industry
was maintained by two commonalities. First, in material terms, the machines and
instruments employed in the Central's laboratory were full-sized commercial
forms, not scale models; for example, the coned shafting in the dynamo room
was made by Ransome of Chelsea to Ayrton's own designs. Second, a thematic
continuity with the issues of using industrial machinery sustained the work under-
taken by third-year students in the research laboratories. In Ayrton's department,
this work generally involved assisting him in the detailed investigation of para-
meters of contemporary interest in commercial practice - the well-publicized
results of which helped to make the practices of his students' laboratory work
'intelligible' and relevant to industrial audiences (see below).
Although the Central Institution had 'only been in existence a few years'
Tunzelmann proclaimed that a 'considerable number' of investigations, which
formed 'important contributions' to knowledge, had 'already been carried out in
its physical laboratories'. For example, his student-assisted work with John Perry
on the r.oefficients of mutual- and self-induction was read to the Society of
Telegraph Engineers and Electricians in 1887-88 and published in its journal
(Ayrton and Perry, 1888a); and in the same year, their work on the efficiency
of incandescent lamps with direct and alternate currents was read before the
Physical Society, and published in its Proceedings (Ayrton and Perry, 1888b). It
was on this very issue that Tunzelmann concluded his case for the status of the
Central's laboratories as a crucial adjunct to the spaces of industry: 'the fact that
so much original work has been done by the students of the Institution' was one
of the 'strongest proofs of the thoroughness and practical value of instruction
given' at the Central (Tunzelmann, 1888: 561).
7. LABORATORY ENVOYS: THE DISPLAY AND TRANSLATION OF

PRACTICE, PRACTITIONERS AND INSTRUMENTS
To understand how the credibility of at least the Physics Department of the

Central was forged from the experimental activities of Ayrton and his students, it
is important to see how observers outside South Kensington adjudicated the value
of its laboratories. Their judgements of the utility of the Central's practices, prac-
titioners and instruments were generally - if not exclusively - made in other
premises. The crucial spaces for Ayrton and his students were the meetings of the
Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians (STEE) I Institution of Electrical
Engineers (lEE), the Physical Society , 17 the workshops and factories of indus-
trial practice and the pages of technical journals. In the same contexts, a major
technique for winning over audiences to new instruments and practices emanating
from South Kensington was the stage-managed technological display (and associ-
ated publications) as discussed by Morus (compare Morus, 1991, 1993). In the
sites of industrial practice, this was complemented by a strategy described by
Graeme Gooday 239
Latour as preparing 'landing-strips everywhere for facts and machines' generated

in the laboratory (Latour, 1987: 253) that is the deployment of ex-Central stu-
dents and their instrumental practices throughout the industrial world in order to
promulgate the results and reputation of South Kensington's laboratories.
The secohmmeter was an instrument often displayed and deployed by Ayrton
in the years immediately following its first presentation at a meeting of the
STEE on 28 April 1887 (Ayrton and Perry, 1888a). This was a Wheatstone
bridge-based device transformed to give direct readings of a component's self-
induction in units of the second-ohm (hence 'secohm'). Ayrton's general plan
with collaborator John Perry was to use the South-Kensington-gestated secohm-
meter to quantify the self-induction of industrial machinery and thereby to
resolve several controversies over its often mysterious role in electromechan-
ical phenomena. To their display of the secohmmeter and its laboratory results
in spring 1887, members of the STEE responded very positively. President
David Hughes described it as a 'remarkable' attempt to solve the 'problem of
the commercial measurement of self-induction', and a 'distinct advance' on all
previous methods. As Ayrton's successor and Perry's colleague at Finsbury
Technical College, Professor S. P. Thompson remarked that the Society had to
'congratulate itself on a 'very important' addition to their 'practical knowl-
edge on the subject of self-induction', especially of its 'actual working values'
(Ayrton and Perry, 1888a: 383-4).
Ayrton moved to ensure the public visibility of the secohmmeter during the
next two years. When, for example, he and Perry were invited to give an
impromptu paper 'Laboratory notes on alternating circuits' at the (now renamed)
Institution of Electrical Engineers in June 1889, they introduced their paper rather
waggishly, saying 'it occurred to us that possibly some of the experiments that
some of the students of the Central Institution are at present engaged upon might
be of interest to the members'. Emphasizing that regular use of their instrument
would bring engineers the same everyday familiarity with self-induction as they
had long experienced of electrical resistance:
... for some time past, scarcely a coil has been allowed to remain peaceably at
rest in our laboratory, but it has been operated on, and its co-efficient of self-
induction measured. Hence our students are just beginning to acquire that
instinctive feeling of which we have spoken, regarding the magnitude of self-
induction ... , and it is our desire to go a little way this evening towards impart-
ing that feeling to you. (Ayrton and Perry, 1889: 284-5)
More than this, however, Ayrton and Perry presented a broad array of evidence
on various issues of contemporary engineering concern, all produced with the
assistance of the devoted corps of secohmmeter-wielding students at South
Kensington. (Ayrton and Perry, 1889: 284-8) These 'Laboratory notes' were
reproduced in The Electrician on 28 June and 5 July 1889, and on the latter date,
The Electrician published a note proclaiming the judicial efficacy of a pro-

gramme of secohmmeter measurement to resolve a much debated question. This
concerned the amount of self-induction required (if any) in the armature of alter-
nators in order that they could be run safely in parallel, that is without the
common-encountered consequences of destructive current surges or mechanical
breakdowns (Mordey, 1889). Of the results given in Ayrton et al.'s 'laboratory
notes' on species of alternator which were amenable to parallel running, The
Electrician commented:
The publication by Ayrton of the actual value of the self-induction coefficient

in the case of several such machines is singularly opportune. We trust that
either Prof. Ayrton himself or others interested will add considerably to the
number of such measurements.... [A]Ithough the secohmmeter is, no doubt a
rather expensive piece of apparatus, it ought to be regarded as indispensable for
all workers in alternating currents. (The Electrician, 1889, vol. 24: 211-12)
On 2 August the journal's house-writer again insisted that controversy might

be resolved if Ayrton and his assistants carried out extensive measurements of
armature resistance and inductance with their indispensable secohmmeters. Such
quantitative researches were the 'only stepping stones' likely to promote 'real
progress' (The Electrician, 1889, vol. 24: 325).
However, on 9 August The Electrician published a letter from the thoroughly
workshop-trained and ever-combative James Swinburne. Notwithstanding The
Electrician's favourable opinion of secohmmeter measurements, Swinburne con-
sidered that the accomplishment of parallel running required an understanding
rather of the complex dynamics of 'armature reaction'. He bluntly denied that
the behaviour of moving armatures could be captured by simplistic reference
to their supposedly constant self-induction, and a fortiori that there was any
practical relevance in making measurements upon static armatures:
I must say I do not think we will get much further if self-induction and arma-
ture reactions are sometimes mixed-up and sometimes separated, and I really
doubt whether an army of third-year students, glittering with secohmmeters
telling us how many of Ayrton and Perry's things there are in each stationary
armature, will get information fit for anything better than a paper.
(Swinburne, 1889: 360)
Swinburne thereby highlighted the dependency of secohmmeter operation upon

convenient but practically unrealizable laboratory assumptions about the con-
stancy of self-induction and of the equivalence of moving and stationary machin-
ery. In effect, Swinburne undermined Ayrton's implicit claim for the continuity
of practice between trials on alternators in the Central's laboratory and the power-
station environment in which alternators were used commercially. Although
Graeme Gooday 241
attacked by later editorials in The Electrician, Swinburne's case proved to be

unanswerable. Significantly, the programme of secohmmeter measurements on
alternator armatures in South Kensington fizzled out long before it became appar-
ent that armature self-induction was not the critical parameter in parallel running
(Mordey, 1893).
Another issue also rather sharply pinpointed by Swinburne was the underlying
agenda of Ayrton's programme of secohmmeter measurements: to gain useful
publicity for the activities of himself and his students at the Central Institution.
Throughout the following decade, Ayrton and the budding electrical engineers
of South Kensington continued to publicize their laboratory activities in 'applied
research' (Ayrton et al., 1891 a, 1891 b; Ayrton and Mather, 1896). Some trials of
a device for determining the frequency of alternating currents, undertaken by
students Charles Lamb and Edward Smith, was published in the 'laboratory
notes' of 1889 (Ayrton and Perry, 1889), and won some considerable attention
in the pages of The Electrician in July 1889. Among all the products of Ayrton's
laboratory
... perhaps the greatest of interest attaches to the simple and ingenious device
which Prof. Ayrton calls the Electric Frequency Meter, and which we have
lately had the pleasure of examining at the [Central's] laboratory in Exhibition
Road. It is unfortunate that the difficulty of providing a suitable alternating
current precluded an exhibition of these experiments before the Institution of
Electrical Engineers. Had this been possible we are sure that much interest and
enthusiasm would have been aroused.
The columnist suggested that with further development, this appealingly musical
device could become 'an appliance of great scientific interest', and 'perhaps also
of some practical value' (The Electrician, 1889, vol. 24: 212).
For contemporary electrical engineers working with alternating current,
however, more practical value was attached to knowledge of waveform than fre-
quency. The parallel running of alternators, of improving power station
efficiency, and the effective supply of a.c. power to arc lamps were all generally
held to rest upon an analysis of current and voltage waveforms. Many engineers
and physicists devoted themselves in the 1880s and 1890s to creating an instru-
ment that could quickly and efficiently trace out the form of the a.c. cycle.
Blondel produced and named the first self-registering 'oscillograph' in France in
1893: a light beam on a vibrating loop reflected on to a viewing surface to give a
complete and instantaneous view of the current wave form. This was, however, a
rather fragile device, needing much skill to operate, so Ayrton's South
Kensington laboratory soon became the scene of efforts to produce a model
robust enough to be used in commercial practice (Phillips, 1987: 130-43).
In 1895/96 Ayrton and Mather produced a rough prototype of an alternative
form which a 'Central' student- and experienced workshop engineer- William
Duddell adopted and developed in order to research the effects of the electric arc
on the waveform of a.c. current. His device was an adaptation of Blondel's to fit
it for the conditions of practical engineering, replacing the wire loop by a flat
phosphor bronze strip to secure better damping for the vibrations and hence a
more stable image of the waveform (Dunsheath, 1962: 312; Phillips, 1987:
143-5). While still a student Duddell demonstrated his new working form of
oscillograph at the Toronto meeting of the BAAS in 1897, explicitly acknowledg-
ing the support of Ayrton and Mather and the use of facilities at the (now
renamed) Central Technical College (Duddell, 1897: 638). And it was during this
year that Duddell negotiated with Horace Darwin of the Cambridge Scientific
Instrument Company for the manufacture of this instrument. After patenting in
1898, the Duddell oscillograph was sold by this Company in the following year-
its sales greatly assisted by a spectacular display of its utility at a meeting of the
Institution of Electrical Engineers in January 1899.
Duddell's presentation to the lEE (Duddell and Marchant, 1899) was an
exhaustive study of the dramatic and potentially damaging effect that arc-lamps
(with their apparently negative resistance) had on the various waveforms pro-
duced by commercial alternators. In Duddell's hands the new instrument eluci-
dated the complex and often bizarre phenomenon much to the satisfaction of the
assembled body of engineers. They were to be left in no doubt about the credit
which this device shed upon its place of origin. A former student of Ayrton's at
Finsbury, William Mordey, declared 'the authors have given us an excellent
instrument, beyond comparison superior to any apparatus previously introduced',
but then also went on to congratulate 'Professor Ayrton and the Central Technical
College on having turned out this excellent piece of work'. Silvanus Thompson
said 'Professor Ayrton in the first place, even more than the authors of the paper,
and the City and Guilds of London Institute as a whole, are to be congratulated on
such admirable work having been produced in the laboratories of the Central
College.' In the circumstances, Ayrton behaved with uncharacteristic modesty,
exclaiming that it would be 'out of place for me to add to the praise of the labora-
tory which I happen to look after' (Duddell and Marchant, 1899: 457-74).
Within a few years the South-Kensington-gestated-oscillograph- in marked con-
trast to the secohmmeter- was being deployed in sites of practice all over the United
Kingdom. In 1903 the City & Guilds college's alumni magazine carried a celebra-
tory article by one of Ayrton's former students, Maurice Solomon, that began:
A few years ago if you had asked an electrical engineer what he thought of the
oscillograph he would probably have said he had never heard of the instru-
ment. Today we may almost say that it is indispensable to the engineer who
has to deal with alternating currents. This change we owe so far as this country
is concerned to the ingenuity and perseverance of an old central Student
Mr W. Duddell. (Solomon, 1903: 13)
Graeme Gooday 243
That this was no mere parochial hyperbole is clear from the testimony of an
engineering commentator writing in the Electric Journal of 1906 on the ascen-
dancy of Duddell's instrument:
This very important piece of apparatus is being more generally used every day.
It is no longer looked upon as an interesting instrument fit for laboratory
service only. Engineers are rapidly finding uses for it that give them new
insights into the workings of their machines. Old theories are being checked or
disproved ... [and] it is very frequently called upon in the diagnosis of serious
cases of trouble and generally proves equal to the emergency.
(Phillips, 1987: ix)
The oscillograph's translation from esoteric laboratory experiment to indis-

pensable ally of the electrical industry was clearly supported by effective dis-
plays of the instrument's capabilities in the social and textual spaces of
engineering debate. The more direct role of Ayrton's former students as vectors
of Central-gestated technology and practice must not be underestimated in this
process: it was they who also helped to launch the oscillograph on the national
networks of electrical practice, reflecting, in the process, fresh credibility back
upon the premisses in which they were trained.
8. CONCLUSION
The laboratories of the 'Central lnstitutition' were not -pace Argles - made cred-
ible sites of technoscientific practice by any qualities that accrued to them in
virtue of being sited in South Kensington. Unlike the spatially located support
given by the habitus of early Victorian Lancashire pubs to an artisanal culture of
botany (Secord, 1994), the legacy of the 1851 Exhibition proved far less conge-
nial to the development of technical education in its vicinity. Far from nourishing
the new form of technoscientific habitus in the laboratories of the City & Guilds
college, the evolution of the area from market-gardening and rustic gentility into
site of DSA and 1851 Commissioners' machinations on behalf of science and art,
at first alienated many who generally sympathized with the goals of technical
education. Had the Central Institution been founded, like the Finsbury Technical
College, in or near the area of London's commerce and industry in the City and to
the East, the evidence above indicates that the College might perhaps have
enjoyed greater support from the sponsoring Livery Companies and the student
audiences that it was seeking; had it been so, its genesis in the context of praxi-
cally related urban activities might thereby have been as amenable to a
Bourdieuian analysis of its credibility as was the Finsbury Technical College. But
it started life instead as an incongruous technological gamble among genteel
244 Malcing Space for Science
museums and mansions - to some an enterprise that bespoke its origins as that of
an ungentlemanly compromise between City and South Kensington cliques.
The status of the 'Central' and its well-furnished laboratories was -pace
Bourdieu - forged by somewhat more contingent. means than reliance upon the
transparent intelligibility and 'taken-for grantedness' of its operations among a
contiguous social community. Instead, tactical and highly selective representa-
tions of its laboratories' working practices and spaces were promulgated at con-
versaziones and in sympathetic journalism from the engineering press. More
obviously consequential in this respect however was the effort to establish a
viable division of labour between the laboratory and the practical sites of indus-
tty. This was fulfilled with partial success by Professor William Ayrton's shrewd
efforts to display the visible utility of material instrumentation produced in the
Central's physical laboratory to the tribunals of electrical industry - its societies,
journals and practitioners. More than this, however, the credibility of the South
Kensington laboratories was made most palpable by the success of their former
habitu6s in translating elements of Ayrton's laboratories practices into the spaces
of industry.
In general terms, the historical development of a laboratory's credibility
may well be premissed on the judgements made in other premises upon strate-
gically constructed representations of that laboratory's practices and practical
products.
ACKNO~GEMENTS
I would like to thank Sophie Forgan for her invaluable support in our continuing
collaborative researches on the history of the South Kensington Area, and to
thank her, Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith for their constructive and helpful
remarks on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful to the archivists of
Imperial College, the 1851 Commissioners and the City & Guilds Archive for
their cooperation and advice in assisting my research, which was funded chiefly
by a Royal Society-British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship held at
the Modem History Faculty, University of Oxford, 1992-1994.
NOTES
1. For an overview of the literature see Turner ( 1994).

2. As distinct from the contemporaneous 'linguistic turn' often - although not
exclusively - associated with followers of Michel Foucault. See Golinski ( 1990a).
3. Latour presents no evidence of any opposition to the authority of Pasteur's labora-
tory and seems tacitly to infer from this that there was in fact no opposition to this
Graeme Gooday 245
authority. Recent sociological scholarship has, however, challenged the hegemony

of laboratory knowledge in studies of human health (Hart, 1985).
4. See Foucault 1986 for a full discussion of these principles.
5. These are the fifth and sixth principles of Foucault's heterotopias.
6. For a related discussion in the field of radioastronomy see Agar ( 1994).
7. In establishing the historical specificity of Bourdieu's categories, Craig Calhoun
argues that the 'habitus' is the most easily given transhistorical application: 'I think
that no-one could be without a habitus' (Calhoun, 1995: 137).
8. Reported in letter from General Scott to Lord Spencer, 31 October 1878 in item 135,
I (71) of City & Guilds of London Institute Correspondence, 1851 Commissioners
Archive, Imperial College.
9. For background to this see Forgan and Gooday (1994).
10. An early student recalled that as not all laboratories were ready for students in October
1884, the first year of the Central's classes in chemistry and physics had to be held in
Finsbury; accordingly the large figures cited by Lang for evening students at the
Central must refer to those enrolled in these subjects at Finsbury (Lang, 1978: 46-7).
11. I am grateful to Elizabeth Morse for allowing me to see her unpublished typescript
on this subject (Morse, 1993).
12. Numbers included 'The happiest land', '1 wish to tune my quivering lyre', 'Down
in a flow'ry vale', Tell me babbling echo', 'Nymphs of the forest' and 'Come,
gentle zephyr'.
13. General Programme of the Conversazione at the Central Institution on Wednesday
16 March 1887, MS 21906/1, City & Guilds Archive, Guildhall Library, London.
14. See comments in the pamphlet 'Is the Central college a failure?', 9-10, dated
23 April 1896, MS 21,906, Box 1, City & Guilds Archive, Guildhall Library,
London ..
15. This technique was, however, used in the public relations material for Finsbury in
1884 (see above).
16. Emphasis added.
17. See Gooday (1995) for an example of the Physical Society as the arena for the
adjudication of Ayrton's researches.
10 Easy Transit: Crossing
Boundaries Between Physics
and Chemistry in mid-
Nineteenth Century France
Matthias Dorries
Historians of science tend to think about disciplines in a geo-political sense,

attributing to disciplinary entities, like countries on a map, characteristics such
as shifting borderlines, various alliances, the birth of new states or the discovery
of previously unknown territory. According to Robert Kohler, for example, 'dis-
ciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory ....
They are the infrastructure of science ... ' Kohler's geo-political conception of dis-
ciplines derives from the analogy he draws between discipline and nation: 'If dis-
ciplines are to the political economy of science what nations are to the political
economy of production and commerce, then it is no surprise that their domestic
affairs may be profoundly influenced by a diverse traffic in ideas and problems
with neighbouring disciplines' (Kohler, 1982: 1, 7). More recently, Mary Jo Nyc
has suggested thinking about 'disciplinary identity as a variant of the constitution
of national identity', assimilating 'physical-chemical identity' to - for example -
'Irish-American'. Nye's focus on 'identity' continues to evoke the geo-political
picture: she speaks about 'perimeters of the discipline', 'immigrations and emi-
grations' and refers to Bourdieu's conception of an 'intellectual field' (Bourdieu,
1969:88-119, 1985: 195-220; Nye, 1993: 18, 28, 31).
The geo-political picture may be a useful metaphor for getting a first grip on
science as a whole, because it creates a scientific landscape, and then analyses its
structure. But historians hardly ever reflect on the limits of visual and spatial
metaphors. For the case of disciplines the metaphor tends to over-emphasize the
unity of scientific activity, because it deals primarily with science in its crystal-
lized forms of institutions, professorial chairs, libraries, standard procedures and
text-books. Disciplinary history tells us more about evolution of standards of
science than about scientists' daily activities. It disregards research practices,
which often evade any disciplinary classification and which are characterized by
instability.
In France the rhetoric of disciplinary spaces or boundaries was concocted by
administrators and savants of the eighteenth century, and became common during
246
Matthias Dorries 247
the nineteenth century. In spite of this demarcation constructed at the time, the
situation in mid-nineteenth century France provides a contradictory picture for
the two entities of physics and chemistry: rationally (and historically) scientists
distinguished between them, but practically there were neither two disciplines
occupying separate spaces, nor a simple borderline between two realms. Whether
there were disciplinary spaces or not was a matter of perspective. There was all
kinds of talk about boundaries and spaces that points to disorderly disciplinary
structures. Historians' appropriation and use of spatial metaphors as an analytical
tool to explore such large categories as disciplines tends to abstract from these
manifold confusions, and may therefore be of only limited usefulness in getting a
grip on this situation.
Historians and philosophers have a tool to avoid the rough geo-political picture
and to focus instead on scientists' practices: they look for scientific methods or-
to use the currently fashionable and slightly different term- styles (On style see:
Daston and Otte, 1991; Hacking, 1992: 1-20; for a discussion of the connection
between style and research schools, see Holmes and Geison, 1994). Style refers to
science in action, not to science in its fossilized forms. Style challenges discipli-
nary boundaries, and explores cross-disciplinary ways of scientific reasoning and
practices. It has the advantage that it is not primarily conceived in spatial terms as
is the case for disciplinary entities. Of course, style is an evasive term, pertaining
to the particular as well as to the general, and covering the wide range between
personal styles, national styles, styles of scientific reasoning and all other kinds of
styles. In this article I will nevertheless use the term, because it includes more
than method. Method tends to evoke primarily the usefulness of scientific prac-
tices, whereas style pertains more to characteristic features of practices which lie
beyond purely utilitarian purposes and is more closely linked to the personality of
a single person. Personal style is certainly a loose concept, implying an often-
messy assembly of preferences and practices, but it appears at the outset of what
may later turn into a common method. Style therefore adequately describes
processes typical for the nineteenth century, such as the transition from individual
to collective standards of scientific practices.
In this article I will confront disciplinary metaphor with stylistic analysis. A per-
sonal style faces spaces of disciplinary structures of various kinds, in particular
within well-established institutions. The article reverses the usual approach to dis-
ciplines, which concerns itself about what constitutes a discipline. I refuse to draw
circles around areas, but will follow instead a single actor's course around, and dis-
course about, spaces of disciplines and institutions. In Kohler's metaphor this
would entail following a scientist's vehicle through the infrastructure of science.
But contrary to Kohler, I would like to argue that the geo-political metaphor comes
grinding to a halt, as it assumes the existence of such an entity as a scientific land-
scape. This landscape provides in Kohler's view a solid stage, on which the actors
move, following mostly the paths that have been previously laid out. This picture
assumes too much stability. Scientific practices changed rapidly during the
nineteenth century, and a geo-political metaphor captures only insufficiently the

experiences of a prominent scientist in mid-nineteenth century France.
Henri-Victor Regnault, a leading physicist in the middle of the nineteenth
century, held strong convictions of what science was about and struggled to make
space for his own experimental style. As he was first and foremost an experimen-
talist, this style entailed not only use of paper and pencil but also required labora-
tory space, Parisian space. The need for real space will serve as an indicator in
this article while analysing how he moved through institutional and disciplinary
spaces, and dealt with their apparently rigid structures. To impose his style in
Paris, Regnauh played self-consciously with the metaphorical and practical limits
of disciplinary spaces, redefining himself as first a chemist, then a physicist, in
ways that had little to do with his actual work. Disciplinary borders, as between
chemistry and physics, were no hindrance. There were, however, a whole range
of other, different borders between him and other scientists and institutions whose
ways of doing science were not compatible with his own. Willing to compromise
momentarily for strategic reasons, Regnault went through several kinds of sym-
bioses with scientific institutions and their representatives.
Once he succeeded in obtaining a laboratory space, he could implement his
style, and though he did not create a research school, physicists of the twentieth
century have noticed his strong influence, for better or worse (usually worse), on
French physics. Experimental science was certainly nothing new in the mid-
nineteenth century, but Regnault went to the limits of precision and time and thus
set standards for future laboratory work. His personal style became a referent for
generations of physicists after him and was solidified in institutions and in the
understanding of what constituted the discipline of physics in France.
The first part of the chapter provides some elements of the history of
classification of science in France that led to a relatively rigid structure of disci-
plines. The second part traces in some detail Regnault's career and his discourse
about disciplines and research within these apparently well-defined spaces of
physics, chemistry, and various institutions. The conclusion analyses the way in
which this case-study might be useful for a more refined picture of the disciplines
of chemistry and physics in mid-nineteenth century France.
I. CLASSIFICATION
Classification in general, and classification of science into disciplines in particu-

lar, had a tradition in France, which the French revolution and Napoleonic admin-
istration would push even further (Rey, 1994). The classificatory spirit had
already excelled in the structure of France's most important scientific institution:
the French academy of sciences. Contrary to its British counterpart, the Royal
Society, it had six sections (geomerrie, mecanique, astronomie, chimie,
botanique, anatomie) as early as 1699 and separated physics (physique genera/e)
from chemistry in 1785, thereby putting physics in the division of the math-
ematical sciences, and chemistry in the division of the physical sciences. The
reasons for this division did not lie with scientists, but with the wish of the min-
istry to increase control over, and responsibility and productivity within, the
academy (Hahn. 1971: 19-20; Crosland, 1992: 125). During the Enlightenment,
classification - as for example d' Alembert's 'Systeme figure des connaissances
humaines' in the Encyclopedie was one means to achieve clarity and rational
order: it meant a division of knowledge, and provided the outline of the
Encyclopedia. Interest in classification by natural philosophers was partly
driven by a concern for completeness, and as well by the wish to have an all-
encompassing view of unexplored areas of nature that were worth studying.
Nineteenth-century textbooks further reinforced the classifications; they reflected
the structure of teaching institutions with their boundaries between different
chairs. In almost all mid-nineteenth century French textbooks scientists referred
to boundaries, and in particular the one between physics and chemistry. Here the
classificatory spirit erected disciplines and boundaries for the purpose of orienting
new students and simplifying their instruction, providing them with a 'map' of
the scientific landscape (Stichweh, 1984: 50).
This was also the case in Ampere's ambitious attempt at a 'natural
classification of all human knowledge' that he developed in his lecture courses on
experimental physics at the College de France and ultimately resulted in a book
(Ampere, 1834), although by the time of its publication in 1834 it was already
dated, suffering from its doctrinal character. Ampere had sought to avoid errors
of previous 'artificial classifications'. but his 'natural classification'. which he
had continuously rearranged and modified over a period of more than 15 years,
was finally closed to possible changes. He had hoped that his classification would
be useful for a 'society of savants' to devise sections and divisions of knowledge.
However, his rigid scheme was hardly useful for regulating the divisions of chairs
in scientific institutions. as his classification did not indicate the importance of the
subfields and was therefore not representative of the actual institutions and chairs
in France. This was especially true for chemistry, which played only a minor role
as part of general (inorganic) elementary physics in his scheme. The usefulness of
Ampere's classification was restricted to very practical purposes, such as how to
organize sections in a library, how to avoid redundancies of publications, and
how to balance different scientific fields in text-book and lecture courses
(Ampere, 1834: 17-24).
Ampere's attempt- along with Comte's classification- was the last major effort
of classification of the sciences in the nineteenth century. Stichweh has argued that
it is only 'as long as knowledge and science are disorderly and unstructured, that it
is rewarding and necessary to discover a system of order' (Stichweh, 1984: 12).
Fisher sees in it a 'loss of the market for those ever-different products as consensus
took hold' (Fisher, 1990: 866). The decrease of interest in classification accompa-
nied more elaborate disciplinary structures within French science.
The rigorous use of rational classification by governmental agents contrasted

sharply with the actual practice of science. The French physicist Jean-Baptiste
Biot, for example, remarked: 'The scientific divisions which we force upon
nature are completely artificial; none can be studied in isolation ... ' (Biot, 1848:
70). While scientists applied this rigid disciplinary scheme in their lectures, they
ignored it in their daily work, aware of the easy transit between disciplines; they
perceived problem-sets and simply were not interested in figuring out how to
categorize their object of research. Stichweh has seen in this development a tum
away from a plurality of 'Wissenschaften' towards one 'Wissenschaft' that started
in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century and then spread to England
and France during the century (Stichweh, 1984: 9).
The research and careers of chemists and physicists in the mid-nineteenth
century did not follow the lines of rational patterns. Many research-projects
touched upon both physical as well as chemical issues. Some research-topics also
switched disciplines, as, for example, 'heat' from chemistry (caloric theory) to
physics (kinetic theory). Furthermore; at an early stage of their career scientists
were often undecided about the direction of their research and their particular
interests. It also happened that academicians did important work in another field
than they had been elected to, as, for example, Ampere, Biot, Gay-Lussac and
Poisson (Crosland, 1992: 130-2).
Another reason for the fragility of the boundary between chemistry and physics
was the weakness of the physical community in mid-nineteenth century France. It
is extremely difficult to identify something like a physics community if we apply
standards such as the existence of common values or competitive relationships. A
symbolic sign of the weakness of the physics community was that the chemist
Gay-Lussac became the doyen of the physics section in the academy in 1829
(Crosland, 1992: 131). During the nineteenth century physics was rather an out-
growth of disciplines, like chemistry, physiology or astronomy, which shared
with physics an identical cognitive procedure. Physics provided a method, princi-
pally Ia mecanique and quantification, for a large variety of problems rather than
a discipline in and of itself. When a chemist like Jean-Baptiste Dumas attacked
physics in his lectures: 'Don't believe that mechanics and physics have always
been useful to chemistry. Chemistry had only little to win, but lots to lose ... '
(Dumas, 1839: 3), he thought of physics as a scientific method in chemistry rather
than as a community of physicists opposing chemists.
If even the entity of physics lacked coherence, how can we speak of a bound-
ary between chemistry and physics, as the geo-political picture implies? Is it a
solution to multiply the boundary and to speak of boundaries, taking into account
that there are many, conflicting criteria for distinguishing chemistry from
physics? I suggest that in mid-nineteenth century France the term boundary had
only a limited meaning. Though the academy, the university, and text-books
treated the disciplines as two entities, the rational picture of two close but distinct
empires is too simple once we leave the sphere ofteaching for the sphere of
research. Research chemistry and physics differed in the structure of their organ-
ization, and in their use of methods, that comparing chemistry with physics might
be like comparing apples with apple-trees.
The career of the physicist-chemist Henri-Victor Regnault (1810-78) is an
example both of the non-existence of the boundary between chemistry and
physics in mid-nineteenth century France and high individual mobility. First, his
career follows a pattern, which seems typical for a young scientist in the 1840s;
it shows the traditions and particularities of the Parisian institutional and educa-
tional system, in which strict disciplinary boundaries were actually highly perme-
able. Second, his research and publications were of a hybrid nature; they
extended not only to chemistry or to physics, but they also included problem-sets
of scientific research that today we would call cross-disciplinary.
2. HENRI-VICTOR REGNAULT AND THE FRENCH INSTITUTIONS
Regnault got a start typical of the career of a future savant: two years at the Ecole
Polytechnique. Afterwards, he completed his education at the Ecole des Mines,
accepted various teaching positions, and was eventually elected professor at the
College de France and the Ecole Polytechnique, and entered the Academie des
Sciences in 1840, its youngest member at 30.
The year 1840 marked yet another turning point in Regnault's steep career. He
started publishing on what would soon earn him his highest recognition by con-
temporary scientists, the determination of specific heats. Prior to 1840 there were
only a few indications that he would finish by doing experimental work which
came to be a part of physics. From 1835 to 1840, Regnault' s publications focused
almost exclusively on chemistry, mostly organic chemistry. Regnault apparently
switched disciplines. This switch was not a rupture, however. Switching disci-
plines was usual; in the 1840s specialisation was still no pre-condition for compe-
tent scientific work. Various circumstances provided opportunities for Le Verrier
to exchange disciplines, such as mathematics, astronomy and chemistry. Young
scientists eager to do research work always took care to be flexible in their
choices of topics; they were well aware that the apparently rigid boundaries of
disciplines need not be a barrier to rapidly changing intentions. Regnault's educa-
tion at the Ecole des Mines and Ecole Polytechnique and the various teaching
posts he held before obtaining a professorship put constraints on his career, but
ultimately did not determine at all where Regnault would end up. 1
Regnault studied from 1832 to 1834 at the Ecole des Mines, which prepared its
students to supervise the mines in the provinces. Students received a training in
docimasie (applied mineral chemistry), mineralogy, geology, exploitation of
mines, and drawing. The emphasis of the school clearly lay on inorganic chem-
istry and, in particular, on analytic chemistry. That was just what Regnault did
not want to do; instead, he preferred to work on the then fashionable organic
chemistry. This desire brought him into conflict with the institution. The conflict
ended in 1835 and 1836 with his defeat, and in 1838 with a compromise.
In 1835 Regnault intended to prepare a thesis in the chemical laboratory of the
Ecole des Mines under the supervision of the professor of applied chemistry,
Pierre Berthier (1782-1861). Their relationship soon became tense. When
Regnault entered Berthier's laboratory he planned to continue studies on organic
chemistry he had started in 1834. Berthier considered the work irrelevant for a
future ingenieur des mines, and wanted Regnault to do analytic chemistry of
metals and coal. Regnault admitted the usefulness of analytic work for practical
purposes, but he was not willing to enclose himself 'in the narrow circle of metal-
lurgical chemistry'. He refused routine work, argued that Berthier' s topic was
simply no object of 'pure scientific research', and wrote defiantly: 'I don't know
where that [work] might lead to ... instead I prefer to take a position as an engin-
eer of the mines in the provinces.' Going to the provinces, however, was what
Regnault wanted to avoid by all means. Regnault had received a letter from the
ministry that appointed him to the mines of Rive-de-Gier in the area of St.
Etienne; the work would have entailed inspecting more than one hundred very
deep and mostly humid coal mines (Regnault to Liebig, 9 November 1835, STM,
5). The fragile Regnault feared for his health, struggled to remain in Paris and
finally obtained ministerial permission in November 1835 to stay at the Ecole des
Mines for an additional year as adjoint of the laboratory (Regnault to Liebig,
December 1835/ January 1836 (STB, 21); Le Chatelier, 1911: 6fr8).
Meanwhile Regnault looked in vain for a job as a repetiteur in either chemistry
or physics at one of the public schools in Paris, especially at the Ecole
Polytechnique (Regnault to Liebig, December 1835/January 1836, STB, 21)
Since Regnault was completely dependent on Berthier for the use of the experi-
mental facilities in the Ecole des Mines, he had to give in and to accept 'hard con-
sequences'. Berthier forced him to abandon research on organic chemistry in the
laboratory of the Ecole des Mines as well as at home, where Regnault had also
done some experimental work. Regnault reluctantly started working on the pit-
coals, for Berthier 'one of the most beautiful questions, an engineer could work
on'. (Regnault to Liebig, 9 November 1835, STM, 5). At least Regnault had the
satisfaction of not doing exclusively analytic work; for the preparation of his
thesis Berthier gave him a more interesting inorganic topic: the oxidation of
metals and sulphonization of metals under steam, which also led Regnault to the
issue of the classification of metals (Regnault, 1836: 337-88). Meanwhile the
opinionated Regnault continued to do some work on organic chemistry at home,
despite rather unfavourable conditions.
Regnault took the first opportunity to leave Berthier's laboratory, when Jean-
Baptiste Boussingault, professor for chemistry at the university in Lyons, wished
to spend more time in Paris and suggested that Regnault replace him for a semes-
ter with the title of associate professor in March 1836. Regnault looked forward
to 'perfect' conditions: a reasonable salary of 3000 francs and, more importantly,
a laboratory, an assistant and 'lots of time', as he expected teaching duties to be

low (Regnault to Liebig, 21 February 1836 (STM, 7); McCosh, 1984: 66-9).
However, due to his inexperience in teaching, Regnault did less research than
expected, and finished just one paper (Regnault to Liebig, 10 August 1836, STM,
8). Though in his lecture courses he described the public as 'not very serious', he
nevertheless hoped that Boussingault would get a professorship in Paris, so that
he could succeed him in Lyons. Boussingault, however, changed his mind several
times, and Regnault started looking for a new job, as he was not willing to wait
for the professorship in Lyons and to be at the mercy of the 'intrigants
Boussingault, Dumas and co'. Briefly, following a suggestion of Berthier and
Dulong, he debated whether to accept a job as the repetiteur of geodesy and
astronomy at the Ecole Polytechnique, because it implied work 'on something
very different from chemistry'.
Regnault returned to the Ecole des Mines and surveyed students as adjoint of
the laboratory at the Ecole des Mines. Now he was once again in trouble with
Berthier, who wanted him to do routine work on the 'pitiless pit-coals'. Regnault
tried 'everything he could' to convince Berthier to give him more interesting
work on mineral combustibles, urged Liebig to put pressure on Berthier and
waited for better times to do 'serious' work (Regnault to Liebig, autumn 1836,
STM, 23).
Late in 1836 Regnault became associated with Gay-Lussac's laboratory at the
Ecole Polytechnique, and triumphed, 'Now I will become a chemist'. [I have a]
laboratory for myself [and am] 'completely free to work according to my ideas'
(Regnault to Liebig, 2 December 1836, STM, 9). In fact, the chemist Laurent had
been Gay-Lussac's favourite, but the Conseil d'instruction of the Ecole
Polytechnique unanimously preferred a former pupil of the school. Here Regnault
profited from the inbreeding of prestigious Parisian institutions.
Meanwhile Regnault continued to work in the Ecole des Mines, becoming
Ingenieur ordinaire de 2eme classe in October 1837 (Regnault to Liebig, 2
December 1836, STM, 9). After only one year Regnault left Gay-Lussac's labora-
tory and taught at the Ecole des Mines, substituting for Berthier in his lecture
courses. Berthier had asked the ministry early in 1837 to be relieved from teach-
ing duties on analytical chemistry and Regnault was to replace him. (Regnault to
Liebig, 1837, STM, 20). In 1839 Regnault obtained an apartment in the Ecole des
Mines, which facilitated laboratory work, but brought him even closer to Berthier
(Regnault to Liebig, 1839 (STM, 19); Le Chatelier, 1911: 49-82).
Once again Regnault came into conflict about his research with Berthier who
held organic chemistry 'more in horror than ever' (Regnault to Liebig, 1839,
STM, 19). The compromise this time was a success for Regnault and proved to be
decisive for his career: research on specific heat and the continuation of his exten-
sive chemical work on ethers (Regnault to Liebig, 1839 (STM, 19); Regnault,
1839: 353-430). Berthier accepted only reluctantly; early in 1839 Regnault wrote
to Liebig:
I put aside chemistry this winter and worked a lot in physics, - I have done
a considerable number of experiments on specific heat, but it is a subject that
is excessively difficult and delicate - I will still need some time to obtain a
complete picture - to obtain a general law ...
(Regnault to Liebig, winter 1839, STM, 17).
The work on specific heats had two advantages for Regnault: first, it fitted into
existing tasks of the Ecole des Mines. Second, Regnault could extend his study on
specific heats to organic compounds and realize some ambitions in organic chem-
istry within the framework of the Ecole des Mines.
The Ecole des Mines supervised the installation of steam engines in France,
and later of railways; in the late 1840s it introduced courses on the railways and
the construction of locomotives. Already in the 1820s the ministry of public work
had charged Dulong and Arago to provide the necessary data for steam engines,
and had created a Commission pour les machines a vapeur whose task was to dis-
tribute permissions for installing steam engines throughout France, and particu-
larly to study and prevent the numerous accidents, such as explosions, which
often killed workers close to the machine. In the early 1840s these issues became
more and more urgent and Regnault, who became a member of the commission in
1843, was charged to undertake the necessary measurements. It was on the basis
of this work that he received extensive funding for more than 25 years, which
resulted in three major volumes of 2500 pages of numerical data (Fox, 1971:
281-313). 2
Regnault's sudden interest in specific heats, which 'made him forget chem-
istry' had yet another cause: he was speculating on the possibility of a seat at the
Academy of Sciences, not, as one might suppose from his previous publications,
in the chemistry section, but in the physics section. Regnault followed a common
strategy of French scientists in search of a prestigious position: they did research
in the field for which a vacancy was soon to be expected. The physicist Poisson
was close to death, and Regnault had a good chance to obtain a seat in the physics
section, if he could present physical research. Regnault regarded his chances in
the competition for positions in physics as excellent: 'There is no single consci-
entious physicist' (Regnault to Liebig, April 1840, STM, 12) and 'In France the
lack of physicists is such that there have not been many competitors' (Regnault to
Liebig, late summer, autumn 1841, STM, 15).
Regnault's judgements point to the precarious situation of physics in mid-
nineteenth century France. The low number of physicists was in sharp contrast to
chemistry where many chemists, like Pelletier and Peligot, waited to obtain a
position in the Academy (Regnault to Liebig, April 1840 (STM, 12). The
influential academician and chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas had clever strategies to
place chemists in the academy. As the number in the chemistry section was
limited to six, he simply pushed them into other sections, such as agriculture or
mineralogy. Placing Regnault in the physics section was part of such a strategy.
Matthias DiJrries 255
Regnault's election to the physics section of the Academy looked promising,

since three academicians of the physics section, Dulong, Savart, and Poisson,
died between 1840 and 1841. However, it turned out that the health of the acade-
micians in the chemistry section also was precarious. When one of its members,
Robiquet, died, Regnault became a candidate for this place: 'I was forced to
decide- of course I chose the section of chemistry' (Regnault to Liebig, 19 July
1840, STM, 13). The election was not without difficulty, because there was
another candidate, the chemist Pelletier, who had also had some support within
the academy. However, he withdrew his candidature when he was offered one of
the rare positions as academicien libre.
Finally, everything seemed to be arranged according to Regnault's original
plan. The self-declared chemist Regnault got elected with an unanimous vote into
the chemistry section. However, by then Regnault no longer did work in organic
chemistry and by spring 1841 he hoped rather to provide a complete and
definitive account of specific heats of compounds, a physical topic. Furthermore,
Regnault had taught 'physique generate' at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et
Manufactures from 1839 to 1841 (Regnault, 1839-41, BN), and applied success-
fully for the professorship for experimental physics at the College de France to
succeed Savart in 1841. He had no problem getting elected to this job though he
had just published his first paper in physics the year before (Regnault to Monsieur
l'administrateur du College de France, 28 March 1841 (CF, Regnault C- Xll);
Regnault, 1840:5-72, 1840-41: 129-207). And to make the tum even more com-
plete, as one of the editors of the new series of the Annales de chimie et de
physique, he was no longer in charge of articles on chemistry, but on physics
(Regnault to Liebig, autumn 1841, STM, 15).
3. REGNAULT'S RESEARCH AND PUBUCATIONS
The reconstruction of Regnault' s career through various institutions shows that in

the early stage of his career Regnault easily moved between research topics. He
simultaneously worked on inorganic and organic topics within chemistry and on
specific heat that was useful to both physics and chemistry.
This ambivalence in his work was to continue, once he had achieved a promi-
nent position in French science. Regnault taught chemistry at the Ecole
Polytechnique, and physics at the College de France, which included the theory
of heat, optics, meteorology, molecular phenomena, general physics and
acoustics. His teaching at the Ecole Polytechnique resulted in two introductory
chemical text books, published between 1847 and 1849, which were also trans-
lated into German, Spanish and English (Regnault, 1847-9, 1850). They were
the most successful chemical text-books in France for the next 20 years; the
French editions alone sold over 50 000 copies, a unique success, according to
his editor, Masson (Le Chatelier, 1911: 74-5). Though Dumas criticized them
for not providing fruitful scientific methods and for lack of inspiration (Dumas,
1885: 161), the books were nevertheless seen as useful, because they included
up-to-date research in chemistry.
Furthermore, besides research and education Regnault worked on a large
variety of cross-disciplinary applications. He was like all other French academ-
icians deeply involved in government commissions. From 1840 to 1870 Regnault
published sporadically on such different topics as the detection of arsenic in legal
cases, the composition of air, the propagation of sound waves in gases, and the
respiration of different animals, issues that concerned analytic chemistry, meteo-
rology, physics, and physiology (Regnault and Reiset, 1849). Later, as the direc-
tor of the Manufacture de Porcelaine at Sevres, the president of the Societe
Fran~aise de Photographie or the scientific consultant for the Parisian Gas
Company, Regnault studied the quality of colours for porcelains, the improve-
ments of photographic procedures, and the economic production of gas, which
touched chemical as well as physical issues. Regnault's main focus, however,
was on specific heats and on the elastic forces of gases. This work ultimately
meant the end of his research in organic chemistry.
One of the reasons that made him leave organic chemistry was that it was a
crowded and controversial field. Regnault avoided conflicts and preferred inde-
pendence: he tended to abandon a research field. once others entered it. He often
said things like, 'As I noticed X was working on it, I abandoned this line of
research' (Regnault, 1840: 5). His ideal of contlictless science made him very
vulnerable to criticism. For example, Berzelius, a powerful figure in chemistry in
the first half of the nineteenth century, distrusted Regnault's data on organic
alkali. Regnault was deeply hurt by this criticism, as it touched the realm of preci-
sion where he felt himself especially competent and conscientious. His patient,
honest, introverted character was ideal for painstaking quantitative work, in short,
work of precision.
Regnault himself perceived his research on gases as a major change in his
career and formulated it in terms of a discipline change. For example, in 1841
after he had become professor of experimental physics at the College de France,
he wrote: 'I divorced completely from chemistry. My new work [on specific
heats] obliges me to deal almost exclusively with physics' (Regnault to Liebig,
autumn 1841, STM, 15).
Though Regnault now worked in the excellent physical laboratories of the
College de France, which Jean-Baptiste Biot had set up, the divorce from
chemistry was never total. By this I mean not only that applications and
teaching at the Ecole Polytechnique always brought him back to chemistry, but
more importantly that Regnault never transformed into a 'physicist'. He
worked in isolation from other Parisian physicists, like Arago, Lame or
Becquerel, and never treated other realms of physics, like electricity or optics,
nor was he ever interested in mathematical physics. Nevertheless, over the
years Regnault became an authority in the narrow field of specific heats on an

international scale, and numerous articles filled prominent foreign physical
journals, like the Annalen der Physik or the Philosophical Magazine. Regnault
was so well-respected that when his state funding was threatened as
a result of the 1848 revolution, the society of English engineers offered him
financial backing to assure the continuation of his research (Dumas, 1885:
185). Regnault furthermore corresponded extensively with foreign colleagues,
and received a large number of students and physicists from all over Europe in
his laboratory. This impressive list included physicists like William Thomson
from Britain, Pietro Blaserna and Francesco Rossetti from Italy, Leopold
Pfaundler from Austria, Jacques Louis Soret from Switzerland, Nicolai
Ljubimow from Russia, Emile Bede from Belgium, Hartvig Christie from
Norway, Robert Rubensen from Sweden, Conrad Bohn and Arthur von
Oettingen from Germany and others. In Paris, however, nobody would ever
seriously challenge Regnault's work, nor would Regnault challenge other
physicists' work.
On the other hand, Regnault never fully adopted chemistry either. He took care
to keep his distance from the chemistry community. To Liebig he stressed his
independence: 'You seem to think and with you the German chemists and
Monsieur Berzelius ... that we [the chemists] form an honour guard for [Monsieur
Dumas] which is always willing to march according to his orders. - It is not
exactly like this. I myself, I walk under nobody's banner, I keep my complete
independence .. .' (Regnaultto Liebig, autumn 1841, STM, 15).
But most importantly, ever since Regnault had started work in chemistry,
there was an ambivalence in his understanding of the discipline of chemistry.
Regnault's proud sentence when he entered Gay-Lussac's laboratory: 'Now
I will become a chemist' continued 'I am about to get (procure) instruments
of precision' (Regnault to Liebig, 2 December 1836, STM, 9). Chemists at
that time hardly thought of their work in terms of precision. Of course, they
used quantitative methods in their work as a means for chemical invest-
igation, but precision was not at the centre of their concerns; dealing with
organic chemistry required primarily other qualities, like imagination and
inventiveness. Instead Regnault tried to introduce precision into chemistry,
using exact quantitative methods as a means to order chemical substances.
He thus transferred methods that were common in physics and astronomy
to chemistry.
With the study of specific heats Regnault slowly moved away from chem-
istry to physics but without ever adopting any physical theory and conceiving
any hypothesis. It was only at the very beginning of his career that Regnault
dared to speculate and conceived his work in a broader framework. When
Regnault started publishing on specific heat, he optimistically expected to
find a general and definite law that would correct previous assumptions. He
explicitly stressed the importance of the determination of specific heats for

chemistry and chemical theories, pointing to Dulong and Petit's work and
its consequences for the determination of atomic weights. Regnault's work
followed from the need to order chemical substances, in particular in organic
chemistry, where the number of substances had increased considerably.
Regnault envisioned a classification of chemical substances not according to
weight, but to other physical properties. Dumas saw here the originality of
Regnault's work. Regnault hoped to generalize properties of certain types
of chemical compounds; he therefore distinguished physical from chemical
properties. Whereas chemical properties change with the substitution of an
atom, the absolute shape of the molecule, he claimed, does not. He assumed a
conservation of molecular arrangements, and a series of common characteris-
tics to which a basic equation would apply. Regnault compared the arrange-
ment of a molecule to a planetary system in equilibrium, which, within wide
limits, would remain stable if a planet is replaced by another of different size
(as in the contemporary theories of chemical type and inorganic substitution).
An equation useful for the first system would also apply to the second because
both planetary systems were basically analogous. These speculations, however,
were exceptional for Regnault (Regnault to Liebig, April 1840, STM, 12).
Hypothetical considerations were never to play any role in his work.
He also never followed up another line of research he had suggested when he
submitted a summary of scientific work to the Academy as an obligatory part of
the election process in 1840. Here Regnault still intended to study, beside specific
heats, and coefficients of dilatation, optical properties of chemical substance; a
promise he never fulfilled (Regnault, 1840: 15).
Regnault's results confirmed Dulong and Petit's law, though he showed that
the law was not rigorous. He also identified physical causes for the variation of
specific heats. Regnault's first paper on specific heats stood at the beginning of a
line of research lasting for more than thirty years. The results of this work were
extremely useful for the construction of steam engines throughout the nineteenth
century. However, Regnault's faith in definite results soon faded as he realized
that he was not able to eliminate all sources of errors. He fell victim to his 'genius
of precision' (Berthelot, 1886: 218) and to his isolation. It was practically impos-
sible to challenge Regnault's data, as other physicists did not receive Regnault's
extraordinary financial support and thus could not repeat his experiments. The
German scientist Wilhelm Ostwald pointed to the 'considerable dimensions' of
Regnault's apparatus that made repetition and improvement difficult (Ostwald,
1885-87, vol. I: 217). In fact, thanks to strong financial backing, Regnault was
able to obtain the best instruments of impressive dimensions, as for example a
manometer of a height of approximately 23 meters (Regnault to Liebig, summer
1844, STM, 26). But size and means were no guarantees of perfection, and thus
contributed to Regnault's endless fight with the imperfection of instruments (Fox,
1971: 281-313).
4. PERSONS
Institutions had a corrective influence on Regnault's career; persons proved to be

decisive. Regnault's hybrid research resulted from the strong and decisive
influence of two well-known scientists of his time: Justus von Liebig and Jean-
Baptiste Biot, the former a chemist, the latter a physicist.
As an obligatory part of the education at the Ecole des Mines, Regnault had
travelled through Belgium and Germany and visited Liebig's laboratory, which
left a strong and lasting influence on him (Regnault, 1834; on Liebig's research
school see: Fruton, 1988: 1-66; 1990: 16-71; Holmes, 1989: 121-64). Liebig
gave Regnault work on ethers and judged him favourably as a 'young student
full of talent' (Liebig to Berzelius, 25 March 1835, in Carriere, 1898, 103-4).
From 1834 to 1841, while Regnault still worked in organic chemistry, both regu-
larly exchanged letters and continued to do so until 1856. When Regnault was
elected to the Academie des Sciences in 1840, he wrote to Liebig: 'You are the
first who pushed me towards a scientific career and encouraged my first efforts'
(Regnault to Liebig, 19 July 1840, STM, 13). Liebig became a scientific father
figure, to whom Regnault reported frankly about his career strategies and
conflicts in the Parisian scientific scene, in particular, as shown above, his own
difficulties with Berthier or Dumas. Regnault tried to transfer Liebig's spirit of
laboratory research, and the idea of the complementarity of teaching and
research, to France, but with important modifications. Though Regnault accepted
numerous, mostly foreign students to work with him, he did not set up a research
school, as Liebig had done. This was partly due to the character of the institution:
the College de France provided lectures by France's leading scientists to the
public, but it was not a teaching institution and had no students. Regnault, who
was dependent on collaborators for his complex measurements, had either to
receive young students who just wished to spend some time in a famous labora-
tory, or to employ collaborators. Characteristically, most of these students came
from foreign countries; they acquired a sense of accuracy and a solid knowledge
of experimental skills, such as how to fabricate glass, to read measurements, and
so on. It seems that Regnault's routine work, his endless variations of experi-
ments and restrained character exasperated them quite rapidly.
Another person who strongly influenced Regnault was Jean-Baptiste Biot, the
last surviving representative of Napoleonic physics. Already, early in 1836,
Regnault reported that he had met Biot: 'He showed lots of interest in me, I will
follow up some of his experiments; he presses me strongly and wants me to tum
to physics' (Regnault to Liebig, 18 January 1836, STM, 6).
Biot stood for French experimental physics, though he was a member of the
mathematics section in the academy and held the chair of general and mathemat-
ical physics at the College de France for more than 60 years, 1801 to 1862
(Frankel, 1972, 1977: 33-72; Lefort, 1867: 955-95). Biot held Regnault in high
esteem, considered him to be 'the best physicist' (Smith and Wise, 1989: 107) in
Paris and paved his way to the College de France. Their mutual esteem derived
from a personal sympathy, based on similar (a)political and religious beliefs, and
a common interest in precise measurements. Biot was convinced that 'all experi-
mental sciences had to approximate to mathematical methods' which were 'the
only ones that would lead to precise measurements' (Biot, 1848: 70). Biot had
gone so far as to provide data of up to 13 decimals, a dubious procedure, when
even the first two decimals were in doubt (Le Chatelier, 1911: 55). Regnault now
went in the same direction, but modified Biot's method. Dumas has specified the
way in which Regnault laid new foundations of experimental physics: while
Biot had worked with simple apparatus on complex phenomena, calculating all
I>Ossible sources of error, Regnault worked with complex apparatus on simple
phenomena, trying through variations of the apparatus to avoid any corrections of
data. Regnault defined this procedure as the 'direct method', which aimed at the
'material realisation' of the phenomenon under study (Dumas, 1885: 169-170;
Langevin, 1911: 48-49; on precision see Wise, 1994).
Liebig and Biot both located Regnault's strength in physics. Liebig was quite
explicit about it. In 1855 he wrote a letter to his editor Vieweg: 'I think that
Regnault's chemistry is altogether not especially excellent, he is no chemist, but
his physics provides a master-piece, I am absolutely sure about that' (Justus von
Liebig to Vieweg, 10 July 1855; Liebig, 1986: 294).
But does this imply that Regnault was a physicist? I think that the answer to
the question, whether Regnault was a physicist or a chemist might best be
answered this way: he was first and foremost excellent as an experimentalist.
Regnault's innovation in the physical sciences was his insistence on system-
atic, continuous laboratory work using and developing first-rate instruments. He
belonged among the rare professionals of experimental practice, and set standards
for quantitative experimental work not only in France, but on an international
level until at least the beginning of the 1850s. While the immediate impact of his
work was considerable, he also affected future generations of French physicists,
not through direct teaching, but through his methods. Physicists at the beginning
of the twentieth century have stressed Regnault's lasting influence: Duhem spoke
of a 'veritable revolution in experimental physics' (Duhem, 1899: 392). Edmond
Bouty, professor for physics at the Sorbonne, attributed to Regnault the introduc-
tion of 'rigorous experimental criticism' and perfection of instruments in physics
(Bouty, 1915: 138). Paul Langevin wrote (critically):
The teaching of physics, especially in France, has felt Regnault's influence for
a long time. The perfection of his methods, which were rightly regarded as
models of precision of measurements, were given a considerable space in text-
books and programs; they have contributed to create a confusion between
physics and metrology, between aim and means.
(Langevin, 1932: 65; for further discussion Pestre,
1984: 142)
Regnault's exclusive focus on laboratory work distinguished him from other

experimentalists, like Dumas who ultimately abandoned laboratory research for a
political career. 'His character does not suit mine' Regnault remarked dryly
(Regnault to Liebig, autumn 1841, STM, 15). Regnault focused on 'serious
work', combining excellent laboratory facilities and first-rate instruments with
broad commercial and social usefulness. Henri Le Chatelier noticed Regnault's
universality: 'The savant did not give way to the industrialist, the chemist not to
the physicist, the expert on gas not to the manufacturer of porcelain' (Le
Chatelier, 1911: 49-82).
5. CONCLUSION
This case study shows that the metaphor of two distinct entities of physics and
chemistry misses the fine structure of scientific practices in mid-nineteenth
century France, which were characterized by a high malleability of disciplines
and institutions, and by a multitude of conflicting views on disciplines them-
selves. Regnault's exclusive focus on experimental work meant continuity across
scientific boundaries. His style, based on the two columns of exactitude and labo-
ratory work, was not linked to a specific research topic that belonged to a single
discipline. Of course, Regnault used disciplinary terms for self-fashioning pur-
poses, but this was a rather casual identification with one group or another;
Regnault constantly sought independence from both chemists and physicists. This
search was eased by the circumstance that the disciplines of chemistry and
physics were not narrowly defined, either by institutions which wished to keep up
with rapidly changing scientific landscapes, or by scientists who hardly cared
about how to classify their work.
For Regnault disciplines were not a matter of identification with a scientific
community, but of methods. He perceived the classification of disciplines rather
loosely as a methodological display, which he assimilated to his style: chemistry
represented for him laboratory research, physics concern over precision. Both had
crucial weaknesses in his eyes: chemistry suffered from inexactitude, and physics
from its lack of laboratories. But these disciplines were open to changes proposed
by Regnault. They could be easily shaped through personal efforts, new labora-
tory spaces and sources of funding. There was no problem with imposing a labo-
ratory style in physics, or precision in chemistry; the flexible character of
disciplines permitted easy transits.
Among the large variety of spaces and borders, disciplinary ones figured for
Regnault ouly among others. In fact, rational disciplinary spaces were less import-
ant to Regnault than spheres of personal and institutional influence. It was on this
level that Regnault encountered resistance. For example, in Liebig's laboratory
Regnault had learned to identify chemistry with organic chemistry, but then experi-
enced in Berthier's a strict dividing line between organic and inorganic chemistry.
Thus, erecting disciplinary boundaries was a matter of local preferences, of how

singular institutions and their representatives preferred to deal with them. The
margins of these choices were extremely large, as shown above for the case of the
Academie des Sciences with its apparently strict boundaries. Regnault made ample
use of these margins. He perceived physics primarily as a method (not as a discipli-
nary space), which he then incorporated into his personal style. The merger of both,
made material in Regnault's laboratory at the College de France, created a synthe-
sis integral to the discipline of modem physics in France.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following archives: Staatsbibliothek Miinchen (STM),

Academie des Sciences, Paris (AS), Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (BN), College
de France (CF), Ecole des Mines (EM).
NOTES
I. Compare Kohler: 'Disciplinary affiliation ... shapes scientific careers and discourse
.. .' (Kohler, 1982: 19).
2. · According to Fox, Regnault started work on specific heat at the initiative of Dumas.
I regard this choice rather to be in line with Regnault's employment at the Ecole des
Mines and his lasting wish to do laboratory work (Fox, 1971: 297).
Part V Of Research Sites
11 Screening Science: Spatial
Organization and Valuation
at Jodrell Bank
Jon Agar
Nationally we are now going into this thing [radio astronomy] in a big way ....
we shall look ridiculous politically if, this expensive apparatus having been
financed by the Government, we prevent its effective use by letting the ether in
its neighbourhood get hopelessly overcrowded. There is already . . . a certain
amount of public comment on this question.
('Bobbety', Marquess of Salisbury, Lord President of the Council, to 'Buck',
The Earl De La Warr, Post Master General, 22 December 1953, PRO)
Geographical location is a determining factor, of course, and unfortunately the

astronomers could hardly have chosen a worse site than Jodrell Bank from the
point of view of avoiding interference ....
('Buck' to 'Bobbety', 19 January 1954, PRO)
In this exchange, two aristocrats in Churchill's second administration discussed

the position of Jodrell Bank, a radio astronomy observatory run by Manchester
University. The observatory's centrepiece was the 'expensive apparatus': a colos-
sal steerable radio telescope, promoted and recognized as an object of national
prestige. The radio astronomy observatory, as well as being constructed as a icon
of national science, was also a sociotechnical organisation, in which components
were spatially organized to define and protect a central quiet productive space,
access to which was selective. In this chapter I offer an analysis of the invention
of Jodrell Bank's spatial dynamics. While holding back from arguing that spatial-
ity was a 'determining factor' in the workings of the observatory, I do suggest
that it was deeply implicated in the site's organization, in the constitution of the
authorities of key actors, in guiding the display of the instrument, and in the onto-
logical processes of radio astronomy.
To capture these dynamics I use the metaphor of screening in three senses, and
discuss each one it turn. First, the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope was crafted as an
object of national prestige, its display guided to express messages of national
leadership. So the first sense of a screen I take is as a vertical surface of display,
analogous to a cinema or television screen. I show that the Telescope was explic-
itly moulded and displayed as a spectacle of British science. However, a spectacle
265
must have spectators and the management of visitors is captured by my second

sense of screening: as a semi-permeable, protective but passable membrane.
Third, I tum from the social relations of radio astronomers with their public to
examine a fundamental part of their scientific practice: their handling of inscrip-
tions generated by the telescope. This handling involved screening in my final
sense: as a process of valuation involving decisions to keep some records and not
others, and to make use of them differently.
Although I separate the three meanings of screening for the purpose of organiz-
ing my account, it is their historical intermingling and operation together that is
central to the analytical claims of this paper. In conclusion I argue that screening
in all three senses, each involving the management and manipulation of certain
boundaries, was a central activity in radio astronomical practices. I finally suggest
that these selective processes of valuation make the observatory akin to a
'dynamic memory', shaping accounts of its development through systematic
retention or forgetting.
1. SCREEN ONE: DISPLAYING BRITAIN AND SCIENCE
Radio astronomy, the study of the universe through the radio waves which astro-
nomical objects emit or reflect, claims two ancestors in the 1930s:'Karl Jansky
and Grote Reber. Both were American radio engineers who, while investigating
radio interference, ascribed some signals as being of cosmic origin. By the early
1950s there were large groups of radio astronomers working in Australia, the
Netherlands and the United States, while in Britain there were three important
groups: one military (under James Hey at the Army Operational Research Group)
and two academic, at Cambridge and Manchester Universities.
Why did radio astronomy grow disproportionately fast in Britain? Three
reasons can be found. First, physicists were drafted into radar research during the
Second World War as part of the mobilization of scientific expertise. Out of this
recruitment were born networks of contacts between scientists, the military,
industry and Whitehall that were to shape post-war British science. At the war's
end the ex-radar teams, now keen to return to academia. represented a skilled,
well-connected but unemployed group (Sullivan, 1984: 191). These groups
invented radio astronomy. Second, expenditure on research grew massively
in Britain after 1945, and this growth was combined with an expansion of science
in higher education. Patrick Blackett, Langworthy Professor of Physics at
Manchester University, was a forceful advocate of both of these trends through
bodies such as the Barlow Committee, which drew up the plans for increased
output of trained scientists and engineers. With local allies such as Lord Simon of
Wythenshawe, Blackett was determined that Manchester should spearhead these
expansionary policies. He therefore keenly supported the growth of his junior
colleague Bernard Lovell's team when radar studies uncovered echoes in 1945,
Jon Agar 267
not from cosmic rays as expected, but from meteor trails in the ionosphere. A
research establishment was started on an almost greenfield site: a botanical group
was displaced, but this was tractable compared to the alternative of embedding an
observatory in central Manchester.
While the Cambridge Cavendish group began a research programme based
around many dishes combined through interferometric techniques, the Jodrell
Bank group had to distinguish themselves through different techniques: centring
around the use of large single dishes (Edge and Mulkay, 1976: 110-1). The first
of these, built in the late 1940s, was a wire bowl 218 feet in diameter fixed to the
ground. However, the next dish was quite a contrast: a towering steerable radio
telescope completed in 1957 and visible for miles around. Its visibility was
crucial to the third reason why radio astronomy prospered in Britain: radio astron-
omy was cultivated to express national significance. As the Lord President of the
Council expressed it in my opening quotation, Britain was into radio astronomy
'in a big way'.
Rhetoric of national prestige litter the memoranda written to support and promote
the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope. Via a sub-commitee set up purely for the
purpose of supporting the Cambridge and Manchester projects, the Royal
Astronomical Society first endorsed the Radio Telescope in these terms: 'by the
erection of this apparatus the prestige of science in Britain would be considerably
enhanced' (Minutes of Scientific Grants Committee, 1950, PRO). The Department
of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) agreed to fund the expensive project.
Its reasons, besides the criteria of 'timeliness and promise' demanded by the Civil
Service of any scientific project, were of prestige, both within Whitehall where
the department was losing ground as other departments expanded their research
programmes (Krige, 1987: 489), and externally. As the DSIR's Permanent
Secretary, Sir Ben Lockspeiser, stated when the project was later threatened:
Radio astronomy is a field in which the way has largely been pioneered by
Britain and it would be disastrous to the prestige of this country if we failed to
complete the instrument.
(Blount to Lord President, 11 April1956, PRO; my italics)
As early as the 1951 Festival of Britain, the exhibition that Roy Strong described
as having 'made visible a brave New World' for those 'wearied of war and its
aftermath, austerity', radio astronomy could be used to display messages of .
national achievement (Banham and Hillier, 1976: 8). The Festival's centrepiece
was the Dome of Discovery, designed around a 'narrative' so that a festival-goer
carried away a memory of 'creditable British exploration, invention and industrial
capacity' (Banham and Hillier, 1976: 84). A highlight of this narrative was a
radio telescope 'operated from the Dome of Discovery ... beamed on the
moon ... [so that] visitors could see on a cathode ray tube signals being transmitted
there and their reflection back' (Banham and Hillier, 1976: 69).
The DSIR could therefore build on a base of visibility and recognition to

present the radio telescope as an object of national prestige, or, in their terms, as
the 'great public spectacle' of British science (Hingston, JBA). Moreover this
potential for spectacle was not apparent in other key scientific projects in the
1950s such as the nuclear physics facilities at Harwell, the National Institute for
Research in Nuclear Science or CERN. Aside from associated security restric-
tions, these instruments were located indoors: particle detectors were hidden in
a superstructure of ancillary equipment, and did not possess the visible self-
evidence of purpose which radio telescopes possessed, with their analogy to
optical telescopes.
Films and an opening ceremony for the Radio Telescope were planned to
demonstrate the instrument as a spectacle. The Central Office of Information
(COl) made a film displaying 'the British way of life and its achievements' for
the Brussels Exhibition of 1958. After reassuring traditional images of technol-
ogy ('a farmer is driving his tractor ... hedges are white with May blossoms'),
suddenly the camera swings around to show the gaunt shape of the Jodrell
Bank radio telescope ... This is another Britain ... (Hardie Brown to Lovell,
23 April 1958, JBA).
The telescope represented Britain abroad. The Foreign Office paid for a quality
documentary, The Inquisitive Giant, to be made of the construction of the instru-
ment for screening abroad (it was later also shown at the observatory's visitors'
centre). The DSIR was enthusiastic, noting that it had 'already proved of greater
public interest than any other project', and that 'it would bring credit to
Britain .. .it should be more effective propaganda than the films on our social
system, housing [or] justice' (Hingston, JBA).
The completion of a large instrument or building, like a launch of a ship, is
usually marked by the ritual of an opening. The Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope
was intended to be no exception. In November 1956 the Duke of Edinburgh was
said to be 'favourably disposed' to be involved in the ceremony. The chair of the
Site Commitee, Sir Charles Renold, insisted that it was essential that the tele-
scope's efficacy be displayed: the 'main structure' must 'be capable of being
rotated by power' and set up so the 'reception of radio signals can be demon-
strated' in a 'dramatic and impressive' way (Renold, JBA). Lovell's suggestion
was that:
... on pressing the button ... the telescope [would] sweep over one or more of
the remote radio sources in the depths of the universe. The resulting signal
could be displayed on a number of pen-recording instruments, and these could
be used to initiate a local series of events such as the unfurling of flags ....
(Lovell to Husband, 13 December 1956, JBA)
Jon Agar 269
To guide interpretion of the display, the media, gathered on the edge of the obser-
vatory and onlooking the instrument, were given press releases which realigned
history of astronomy, tradition and cultural references to justify the project. With
its radar roots and messages of national progress, the telescope was portrayed,
like Olivier's Henry V, promising a Britain reborn from war and set to regain
Great Power status:
British astronomy achieved distinction in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, when the Earl of Rosse and Sir William Herschel pioneered the con-
struction of large telescopes. Unfortunately the country's leadership was
doomed to capitulation to those living in a more favourable climate .... Now
the devices of war have been transformed into a revolutionary method for the
exploration of space, independent of cloud or fog. In the study of the universe
and nearby space, with its important ramifications in more practical matters,
Britain can once more compete without handicap.
(DSIR Press release 26 June 1957, JBA)
The Radio Telescope displayed national and scientific progress: national leader-
ship in a post-Suez Britain, if only in one discipline.
I have shown that the telescope was promoted as a unique object of national
prestige. Importantly, these displays were made at a boundary: displaying the
Radio Telescope to an outside world.
Although prestige was for consumption outside Jodrell Bank, actors inside the
observatory realized that it could be mobilized in the pursuit of their particular
goals. Before discussing screening at Jodrell Bank in my second sense it is valu-
able to examine the contests over internal authority which raged as the spectacu-
lar Radio Telescope was finished. Public identification with the prestigious public
instrument could confer valuable credit. However, upon whom this should be
conferred was the subject of fierce conflicts within Jodrell Bank: both the
astronomer, Lovell, and the consultant engineer, H. C. Husband, could claim
legitimacy. The prime sites for these conflicts were the public displays of the
Telescope (press conferences and films) and internal spatial access.
The basis of the engineer's claim was that the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope
was qualitatively different in scale to past instruments built for academic scien-
tists. It was to take at least five years to build, and required skilled maintenance
and control after completion. This justified a formal and visibly accredited role
for the instrument builder (as indeed did happen with contemporary large-scale
projects such as the particle accelerators at CERN). In The Inquisitive Giant,
financed by the Foreign Office partially to promote British engineering abroad,
Husband succeeded in claiming 'credit where credit is due': equal status with
Lovell (Foreign Office specifications 1954, PRO). However, at the press confer-
ences he was excluded, mainly because a report of the parliamentary Public
Accounts Committee on the debts of the telescope was explicitly critical of the
engineer with respect to certain design changes (Agar, 1994).
The tensions came to a head in October 1957. The opening of the telescope had
originally been planned to be part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY)
events. It was part of IGY, but not in the manner imagined. On 4 October 1957,
the Soviet Sputnik satellite was launched, provoking a media riot in the West
(McDougall, 1982). With the Radio Telescope, potentially as sensitive a 'radar
scanner' as any, just completed but not yet under the University's control,
Husband wrote to Lovell insisting that 'for the sake of both our
reputations ... some joint action be taken'. Lovell resisted: he wanted to wait until
after the telescope had been 'handed over to the University' before converting the
telescope to track satellites (Husband to Lovell, 8 October 1957, JBA).
Immediately after this highly publicized tracking Husband began insisting on a
secure and formal position for a senior engineer within the observatory organiza-
tion (Husband to Renold, 8 October 1957, JBA). Under this engineer would be a
team of 'controllers': staff trained to run the 'control room'. the observatory's
central space from which the telescope was directed through servomechanisms.
Access to this key space was a matter of skill and discipline. The engineer con-
sidered both attributes to be absent from scientists. For example, one radio
astronomer (and designer of the telescope's control system) was described
by Husband as having 'not a very delicate touch on the hand controls - quite
possibly because his brain is working ahead of his fingers' (Husband to Lovell,
15 January 1958, JBA). Husband noted that without the 'discipline' of a senior
engineer in a position of authority there
would always be a grave danger with enthusiastic scientists who in order to

complete an experiment might take some risk, and such temptation must be
removed. (Husband to Lovell, 15 August 1957, JBA)
The engineers would 'run' the telescope, whereas the astronomers would merely
'use' it (Matheson to Lovell, 22 January 1958, JBA). Lovell angrily complained
to his Vice-Chancellor:
I cannot allow my position to be discussed in this way by outsiders. This

further interference by Husband in the private affairs of University organisa-
tion I must regard as personally insulting ... the imposition of any organisation
along the lines suggested by Husband would lead to my immediate resignation.
(Lovell to Mansfield Cooper, 16 October 1957, JBA; my emphasis)
Lovell refused to enter any "'free" kind of relationship' with a senior engineer,
which would be 'a serious disturbance in the workings of the technical staff at
Jodrell Bank' and demanded that he should have the final authority in the obser-
vatory's organization.
Jon Agar 271
The relations between astronomer and engineer are interesting for two
reasons. First, in the conflict over public credit for the 'great public spectacle'
of British science the engineer was effectively effaced (because of criticisms
from the PAC). This disappearance left the radio astronomer identified
with the prestigious instrument. The public authority of Lovell was grounded in
the presentation and management of the instrument as a spectacle of science.
Contemporaries noticed this grounding, as was said at a press conference:
'Lovell is the telescope, and the telescope is Lovell' (Hingston to Lovell,
15 May 1957, JBA). Lovell soon recycled this credit, arguing in the BBC's
Reith Lectures of 1958 for further government support for 'fundamental
science' in the interests of the nation (Lovell, 1959: 66-7). Second, the
exchange between radio astronomer and engineer illustrated that inside Jodrell
Bank there was a contest of organizational authority ('position'), centring
around spatial access and skills.
In Screen One I have shown that the Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank was pro-
moted and presented to the outside world as an instrument of national prestige.
Inside the observatory there was a conflict between the head engineer and radio
astronomer. Lovell described this threat to his authority in terms of interference
and disturbance. Importantly, this terminology reappears in the following discus-
sion on the management of visitors.
2. SCREEN TWO: CROWDS ON THE HORIZON
In an early draft of a script for The Inquisitive Giant the film was to end: 'at last
we see the finished telescope, towering, immense, dwarfing all the surrounding
buildings' and enclosed by 'the crowd, the celebration, like the launching of a big
ship' (Anvil Films, July 1954, PRO). But in the completed film the crowd scene
had, significantly, vanished.
The Great Public Spectacle was a display of British science, and, as a
display, it rested on the enforcement of certain spatial relations between per-
former and audience, the telescope and its public. The astronomers, engineers
and civil servants agreed that the presentation of the instrument should be
managed, and this, in particular, should mean spatial arrangements to manage
the bodily proximity of visitors. Walter Hingston, Chief Information Officer of
the DSIR, sought information about other sites of popular astronomical pilgrim-
age. Ira S. Bowen of CaiTech wrote that the Californian optical observatories
had a 'serious problem' of '150 000 visitors a year both at Palomar Mountain
and Mount Wilson' (Bowen to Hingston, 20 August 1953, JBA). There visitors
consisted of 'two classes' which required different management. The first class,
the 'general public', were provided with 'a visitors' gallery in the dome of the
I 00" on Mount Wilson and in the dome of the 200" on Palomar Mountain'.
Such a gallery was a:
glassed-in structure at the side of each dome and . . . provided with a stairway
and entrance completely separate from that used by scientific staff. Since it
[was] ... glassed-in all of the scientific operations [were] completely protected
from heat and dust and other disturbances created by visitors.
The public were carried up to within sight of scientific activity, but were barred
from the private site by the glass wall. The second class of visitor was made up of
'professional scientists, trustees of one of the supporting institutions or other
celebrities'. These people were 'given a special conducted tour' and were taken
'in the scientific area and allowed to see something of what goes on behind the
scenes' (my emphasis).
The experience of Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar provided a tem-
plate from which Hingston proposed a solution to the management of the
spectacle:
The entire site would be surrounded with a fence difficult to climb thus protect-
ing the research staff from interference. Outside the fence, but close to the tele-
scope an information or observation room would be built and staffed by
information officers. (Hingston, JBA; my emphasis)
Hingston expanded the Californian bifurcation of visitors into six categories each
requiring specific attention. 'Workers in the same or allied fields of research'
could be received by those employed at Jodrell Bank. Without 'organisation' no
other category of visitor could be left 'without interfering'. 'Distinguished per-
sonages' (benefactors and political contacts) were 'very time wasting' but could
not be refused, and likewise 'Overseas Visitors' on official visits. The 'Press,
Broadcasting and Film Personnel' required 'special handling': it would be 'essen-
tial for someone to be employed to deal with Press Relations'. Hingston's cate-
gory of 'People Interested in Science' consisted of 'local scientific societies',
'branches of the famous scientific and technical institutions', and 'numerous
scientific societies in Universities, schools and colleges'. Finally, there was 'the
general public', '"gawpers" asking to see the telescope' from the 'big centres of
population around Manchester and Liverpool and in the Potteries', and anywhere
within 'an easy car's journey'. Such numbers would 'provide a very real threat to
the work at the Experimental Station'.
Imported from California was the setting up of organizational structures, along
with concurrent spatial arrangements, to guide the display of science, and simul-
taneously mark off its privileged sites. This boundary around the observatory was
where the displays were given meaning, for example at the press conferences
held on site, and later when The Inquisitive Giant was shown to visitors. The
spatial arrangement enabled the instrument to be presented as an object of
national prestige, and therefore was implicated, as I argued above, in the public
authority of key actors such as Lovell.
Jon Agar 273
Furthermore, the boundary, a cultural and social artefact but also sometimes
reified physically, was where entry of people to the observatory was regulated. It is
profitable to examine further the relations between the observatory and the 'general
public'. The DSIR insisted that Jodrell Bank as a spectacle could not exclude all
unwelcome visitors or refuse to cooperate with the press. However, research at a
radio astronomy observatory entailed, in common with subject areas such as
metrology, sensitive measurement (Schaffer, 1992; Gooday, 1995). Such measure-
ments of radio field strength were 'disrupted' even 'destroyed' by stray terrestrial
signals which resulted in 'interference'. The 'threatening' general public were
bodily identified by the radio astronomers with such 'interference'. As the tele-
scope neared completion, the general public were pictured crowding and pressing at
the boundaries of the observatory: there was 'a great surge of weekend visitors and
trespassers to Jodrell Bank ... men who were posted at the entrances had to tum
hordes away' (Lovell to Mansfield Cooper, 3 July 1957, JBA). Lovell was less
enthusiastic than the DSIR in promoting the instrument, fearing that the telescope
'might attract nearly 100 000 visitors per annum' and 'Jodrell Bank is not
Blackpool' (Lovell, 1957, JBA). The 'general public' he argued 'must be restrained
by fences and gates'. If they were 'allowed to straddle the fences the interference
which this would bring into the neighbourhood would completely undermine the
efforts we have made over the past years to restrain the town planners and infiltra-
tion of grid lines'. The spectacle needed its spectators, but the public had to be held
back to be addressed. A key tool in achieving this distancing was this discourse of
interference: the identification of unwanted visitors as disturbing.
The discourse of interference not only kept unvalued visitors as spectators, it
was also deployed to argue for and enforce restrictions on activities around the
observatory. I have discussed elsewhere how radio astronomers attempted to
claim 'protected bands' in the radio spectrum (Agar, 1994). Since, roughly speak-
ing, radio sources with a common frequency higher than about 30 Mc/s have to
be over the horizon not to interfere, transmitters have to be separated by fre-
quency or distance. There is thus a reciprocal relation between spectrum space
and frequency space. It was therefore difficult, technically and politically, to
shoehorn the radio observatories into an 'exceedingly sophisticated and dense
electronic environment' of spatially-extended technological systems where 'noise
and signal levels are very high' (CDS Staff memorandum, 1959, RCA). For
example when the Gee navigation system threatened to 'obliterate nearly 50% of
the work done at Jodrell Bank' (Lovell to Smith-Rose, 1 April 1955, JBA), it
was said that there was:
no easy solution without jeopardising defence requirements, not only for the
UK but also of Western Europe; any change in the UK's plan for the use of the
equipment in question, be it geographical or frequency-wise will have a chain
effect throughout the whole of Western Europe.
(BNCSR meeting, 30 March 1955, RCA).
After a decade of alliance building and lobbying in the 1950s and 1960s, the radio
astronomers achieved bureaucratic protection: the allocation of radio frequencies
for their use in zones of 50-mile radius around Jodrell Bank and Cambridge.
These zones were effective against transmissions from other radio spectrum
users, but could not prevent the 'intrusive' noise from car ignitions and other
urban static sources. The radio astronomers therefore sought to restrict local
development of land near the observatories. Again the discourse of interference
was used to define a distance between the observatory and the urban public: a
group, seen as embodying destructive interference, made visible by encroaching
'overspill towns' that rehoused parts of Manchester's population. The outcomes
of conflicts between university authorities and local business over development of
land near Congleton, Mobberley and Lymm were codified as regulated zones to
'protect the instrument from the intrusion of sources of electrical interference'
(Lovell to Hosie, 6 August 1969, JBA). These zones were based on circles of
two and six miles radius. Falling just short of the nearby towns, the extent of
these negotiated zones expressed the balance of local power.
Local business and the local Rural District Councils always opposed the
restrictions on development, and in the late 1960s the regulations were challenged
in two court cases. One councillor and local businessman proclaimed: 'this is a
test case to the powers of Jodrell Bank ... neither [Lovell] nor anybody could
prove that it was straight over Brereton Heath where these marvellous things in
the sky are happening' (Sandbach Chronicle, 13 September 1968). The outcome
of the test cases was swung by the privileged position of the radio astronomers to
be able to interpret and speak for the produce of the telescope: pen-recordings.
After going through some simple calculations of signal power levels, Lovell
stated to the Court:
I have laboured these points because ... in this room I have heard speakers
deny that our researches with the radio telescope can be interfered with by
local sources of interference. In case anyone still doubts the validity of these
calculations ... I will .. . produce some practical examples of the disasters
which can occur in our research programmes.
These inscriptions, meaningless without interpretation, were held up by Lovell

(and verified by the 'independent Assessor') to demonstrate how 'sources of
interference ... could so easily and rapidly destroy the working of this telescope'
(Lovell, 1970, JBA). The link between the social activities of the telescope's
neighbours and the interference was therefore made visible through the discourse
of interference. These skills were not possessed by the telescope's local opposi-
tion, and the protective zones holding the urban public back were confirmed.
Both the frequency and local development conflicts were attempts to establish
the observatories as quiet and productive areas by means of intervention into the
observatories' environments, deflecting and displacing other local activities
Jon Agar 275
(Agar, 1994: 20). Internal discipline matched such external discipline. For
example, it was 'strictly forbidden for any member of Jodrell Bank to drive a car
or motor-cycle on the premises unless it is satisfactorily suppressed' from May
1950 (Notice, 18 April 1950, JBA). Within a few years 'interference during the
daytime from machines and other apparatus in use on the station has become so
serious that very urgent action' was taken: a 'systematic investigation of all
sources of interference, such as electrical drills, calculating machines, etc' was
carried out 'to suppress them' (Notice, 20 November 1953). The productivity of
Jodrell Bank as a site for science was grounded on regulated behaviour, within
and without.
In Screen One I showed that the telescope was used to display certain national
and political messages. In Screen Two I have shown that the creation of a specta-
cle was dependent on the establishment of particular spatialized social relations,
defining and holding spectators. The arrangements for managing visitors demon-
strated these relations and showed how a boundary around the telescope was
made and regulated. It was at this boundary that displays of the telescope's
meaning occurred: press conferences and the The Inquisitive Giant film, for
example. This boundary was sustained by reference to unwanted visitors as dis-
turbing, intrusive and as embodying interference. These portrayals, what I called
the discourse of interference, also underpinned other regulations around the
observatory: zones of restricted radio frequency transmission and local develop-
ment. Enclosed within these boundaries was defined a site that was said to be
quiet and scientifically productive.
3. SCREEN THREE: A PROCESS OF VALUATION
I now examine in more detail the scientific practices of the radio astronomers at
this quietened site, and argue that just as human visitors to the observatory were
categorized and valued differently, so, similarly, were pen-recording inscriptions.
References to interference very rarely appeared in the published articles of the
radio astronomers. In the studies involving highly sensitive measurement mention
was made of limitation by unrecognizable signals, for example the 'unidentified
signals' of Hanbury Brown and Hazard (Hanbury Brown and Hazard, 1951).
However interference was a problem for all radio astronomy measurements, even
radar work (Lovell and Davies, 1951 ). The interference would, if strong enough,
obliterate a pen-recording of an intensity measurement; if of the same order of
intensity as the astronomical signal, then confusion and ambiguity was possible.
Interference's rare appearances in public print were usually methodological: to
account for loss of records (Hanbury Brown et al., 1954), or constraints on
observed frequencies (Lamden and Lovell, 1956).
This public reticence contrasts with anxious private correspondence (compare
Hughes, 1993, 60-83). Radio astronomers when describing interference often
cast it as destructive: it 'completely obliterated' records, the cause of 'disasters in

our research programmes' (Lovell, JBA). However, I argue that it was even more
troublesome than just an external destructive agent. Radio astronomers at Jodrell
Bank were faced with an interpretative problem. A typical experiment on the
reception of radio waves involved the following arrangement of apparatus: the
signal received through the aerial (such as one placed at the focus of the 250 foot
Radio Telescope, or in combination with other antennae) was amplified and com-
pared to a known constant (a radio frequency noise generator). A pen-recorder
then produced an inscription of the resultant signal: the output was therefore a
pen-trace on a roll of paper. These inscriptions did not speak for themselves and
required interpretation, and it is at this point that the radio astronomer was pre-
sented with a fundamental dilemma: a 'spike' on the pen trace could either be
interpreted as an indication of an astronomical object in the telescope's beam, or
as a result of local interference. For example:
in the galactic noise experiments, the interference appears as a deflection on

the automatic pen record of much greater amplitude than the small sporadic
variations being looked for. In the meteor studies, the interference ... gives rise
to a false 'echo'. In addition ... there are numerous minor sources ... which cause
variations in the galactic noise records comparable with any true sporadic vari-
ations which may occur. (Minutes of discussion, 27 October 1948, PRO)
Comparable variations meant confusion, and confusion was worse than obliteration.
The acuity of this dilemma depended on the particular experimental set-up.
Aerials were frequently combined together as interferometers which mimicked
the resolution of larger single dish telescopes. When aerials were placed at
extremely large distances from each other, not only could resolution of astronom-
ical objects comparable to optical telescopes be achieved but also the instru-
ment's in-built selection of similarly phased signals meant that local interference
was somewhat negated as a source of interpretative trouble. However, this benefit
could be wiped out by sufficiently powerful interference. Thus, at Cambridge,
which adopted interferometer arrays as their core experimental set-up, interfer-
ence remained a severe problem: both as a disruptive problem and as an interpre-
tative one, of which the pulsar 'discovery' in the 1960s is a startling example
(Edge and Mulkay, 1976: 228-30; Woolgar, 1979).
The theory of the directional response of an aerial, or combination of aerials,
was available to the radio astronomers of the 1950s through earlier work by elec-
trical engineers. The astronomers measured, and developed the theory of, these
directional patterns (Jennison, 1966). A single dish gave a single 'beam' of sens-
itivity in the direction towards which it was pointed, whereas multiple aerial
interferometers gave a more complex 'multi-beam' response, in which 'side-
lobes' off the main direction could give an appreciable response. In neither case
did the response entirely fall to zero in any direction (Hazard and Walsh, 1959). It
Jon Agar 277
was this technical factor that could allow an interfering signal to merge with that
from the astronomical object.
The astronomers' response to their output was, at one important level, a matter
of skill: the accumulation of knowledge, often only expressible through manipu-
lation of the electrical equipment with which they had experience, that allowed
them to identify and 'read' the pen-recording traces. In several cases the expected
and differing properties of interfering signal and astronomical radio source
allowed 'filtering' circuits to automate these skills. However, as emerges from the
ongoing anxieties of the radio astronomers, the interpretative dilemma of interfer-
ence was always present, even when minimized by such strategies.
The discourse that interpreted pen-recordings separated the valued from the
worthless: the astronomical radio source from the local signal. The valued trace
underlay the data on top of which journal articles and symposium papers could be
written, and, once embedded in explanatory text and approved by peers, be pub-
lished. The valued traces therefore entered the economy of texts and credit whereby
scientific authority was constructed. The worthless trace was privately discarded.
The interpreting discourse expressed the trace in moral and spatial terms: 'interfer-
ence' was an 'intrusion' and a 'disturbance', and should be 'excluded'.
These interpretative actions, screening in my third sense, were prior to any
further discussions of the traces qua astronomical objects or interference
(Garfinkel et al., 1981). Screening was a crucial stage in defining the ontology of
radio astronomy, a stage at which the inscriptions to enter semi-public discussion
amongst radio astronomers were selected. Screening was an activity that regu-
lated transactions across the boundary: what was admitted to the quiet, productive
space and what was excluded. This separation was achieved by the discourse in
which the valued pen-recordings became astronomical objects, whereas the val-
ueless ones were des~ribed in terms of 'interference', which again was said to be
'intrusive' and 'destructive'. The screening achieved in this discourse about
inscriptions can be illustrated, crudely but usefully, in the following table:
Private Public
valued valueless
distant local
astronomical object interference
natural human
-- - -- --··- --- --
quiet noisy
productive destructive
As is immediately apparent, this separation of inscriptions was discursively very

similar to that which sustained the relations of the observatory with its visitors
and public. In both cases what was valued and not excluded was what defined and
was separated as 'scientific'. The spatial organization of the site in relation to its
environment was therefore essential to the site's definition and operation as an
observatory, that is to say as a privileged site for science.
More can be said about the spatial dynamics of the site in relation to defining it
as a site for science through examining further the connotations of 'interference'.
One explanation of the astronomers' use of the discourse of interference to
discuss both inscriptions and outsiders could be that they had inherited the terms
from radio engineers, and it was therefore a resource at hand when confronted
with troublesome relations with the public. However, even for radio engineers
'interference' described an unwanted signal, and more importantly carried conno-
tations of a threat to order, of 'chaos' (Aitken, 1994: 706).
I introduced this chapter saying that a radio astronomy observatory can be seen
as a sociotechnical organization or system, in which all its components from staff
to inscriptions were spatially structured to protect a central quiet productive
space, access to which was selective. 'Interference' was defined as what was to
be excluded from this system, which was spatially organized to manage this
exclusion. The spatial dynamic of the organization also located and legitimated
certain restricted people as being producers of astronomical knowledge (Screen
Two) and simultaneously separated productive records of astronomical objects
from local signals (Screen Three). Furthermore, it identified Lovell with the pres-
tigious Radio Telescope, grounding his public authority. The spatial dynamic pro-
duced order, difference, even uniqueness, by selection, and threats to it were seen
from inside as interfering and destructive.
4. DISCUSSION
... memory, so far from being merely a passive receptacle or storage system, an
image bank of the past, is rather an active shaping force; .. .it is dynamic -
what it contrives ... to forget is as important as what it remembers ...
(Samuel, 1994: x)
This has not been an account of the development of the objects and new descriptions
of the universe articulated by radio astronomers. Their cosmologies, indeed, had
stark differences from those of the pre-war optical astronomers: the 1950s and 1960s
universe was populated with violent objects such as colliding galaxies, compressed
pulsars and distant quasars. This universe was a product of negotiation within a com-
munity of astronomers, each of whom had to argue from a specific locality, embed-
ded as they were in the individual knowledge-making practices of observatories.
Jon Agar 279
I have not told the story of the construction of the radio universe here. Instead,
I have described a prior activity, probably common, with variations in practice, to
all radio astronomy observatories: the production of order through the manipula-
tion of inscriptions, involving (crucially) a process of valuation. Some inscrip-
tions were chosen to be kept, others were discarded I connected this process at
Jodrell Bank to the maintenance of the relations of the scientists with their envi-
ronment, in particular the classification and management of visitors. The same
discourse, what I called the discourse of interference, was mobilized to identify
and separate the astronomical object from a local 'intrusive' signal, as was used
to divide scientists from the 'general public'. The social and technical compo-
nents of the observatory were spatially organized, creating order by separating
out what its inhabitants valued. The key tool of the radio astronomers was discur-
sive: the ability of key actors to categorize visitors (human and non-human), and
describe and discuss unwanted actors as disturbing and interfering. The observa-
tory's definition and operation as a privileged site for science depended upon the
translation of this discourse into action by courts, universities and other actors:
the maintenance of the organization through securing exclusive radio frequency
allocations, persuading local and national government to introduce legal con-
straints on certain nearby activities, and so on.
These screening processes were accentuated because governmental support for
the project depended upon the presentation of the Radio Telescope as a spectacle
and symbol of national leadership. Spatial management of sources of interference
can be found at other locations of organized sensitive measurement (for example,
metrological sites such as the National Physical Laboratory). However at Jodrell
Bank, the 'Great Public Spectacle' of British science, the excluded were also
addressed: spectators on the boundary heard and saw inspirational messages about
the scientific activities within. The 'threat' of hordes of spectators amplified the
anxieties of the radio astronomers: the situation meant that the linked issues of
spatial access and good scientific practice were discussed and unpacked at length.
The dual application of the discourse of interference, categorizing people and
things, linked scientific practices to social relations. This linkage is subtly different
to that described by other authors. In our clearest (and now classical) model relating
science to context, the interest accounts, isomorphisms were sought between the
knowledge claims of scientists and interests ascribed to the social groupings in
which they were embedded. For example, Shapin argued that claims about brain
structure in nineteenth-century Edinburgh could be related to a historical actor's
location in the city's social and political landscape (Shapin, 1979). This search for
isomorphisms can be found behind many accounts of the 'shaping' of knowledge.
However, at Jodrell Bank I argue that both social relations and knowledge-making
practices were composed together, operating and sustaining the spatial organization
of the observatory. The embedding of science in social context is found, not at the
level of the publicly articulated knowledge claims (for example accounts of radio
stars), but at a prior level of order-defining valuating practices.
This stress on the importance of the process of valuation also has historio-
graphical consequences, since the spatial organization and operation of the obser-
vatory have also framed accounts of the development of radio astronomy over
time. The spatial organization of the observatory crucially embedded processes of
valuation, both of people and of inscriptions. It was on these processes that the
privileging of the scientific site, and therefore also the authorities of key actors,
depended. If the historian ignores this process then the history of radio astronomy
is condemned to reproduce its effects. Edge and Mulkay have, for exaq1ple, pro-
duced an excellent history of what was valued by the radio astronomers: the inter-
pretation of astronomical objects and the judgements based on this research by
the community of radio astronomers. These accounts miss what was screened out
by the spatial dynamics of the sites for radio astronomy. Thus the relations of
radio astronomers to the public, and the processes by which astronomical objects
were distinguished from interference, have been passed over in the histories.
Their disappearance can now be seen as an outcome of how the observatory,
organized as a 'dynamic memory' (in Samuel's terms), operated. In this sense it
can be said that accounts of the observatory over time have been shaped by its
essential spatial dynamics. Its history has been shaped by its geography. I have
shown that a history of an organization can be enriched by revaluating and
analysing the things that were screened out.
NOTE
I have used material from the following archives: Public Record Office (PRO),
Radiocommunications Agency (RCA), and the Jodrell Bank Archive (JBA) held at the
John Rylands Library Manchester University.
12 Biotechnology's Private
Parts (and Some Public
Ones)
Thomas F. Gieryn
To what extent is contemporary science - for instance, biotechnology - a public

or private thing? What does it mean for a science to be labelled public or private?
Where should the responsibility for making such judgements be lodged?
Perhaps the sociological analyst should take on the job, which seems straight-
forward at first: create two analytic spaces- 'private science' and 'public science'
-give them defining qualities, take a look at biotechnology, decide where it fits
best. Private biotechnology might be secluded science, intimate practices kept
away from public view or intrusion. Many sites of animal experimentation are,
for example, given the secured inaccessibility or invisibility ordinarily reserved
for bank vaults. Private biotechnology might be personal science, the work of
isolated individuals rather than a collective effort, each scientist alone with
pipettes, ultracentrifuges and PCR machines. Private biotechnology might be
owned science, the property of some but not all, belonging to them and shaped by
their private interests and values, and not necessarily pursued on behalf of the
common interest. Although these analytic distinctions between public and private
science rely on ordinary meanings of words like secluded, individual, or self-
interested, the sociologist extracts them from everyday usage and imposes them
on scientific practices as objective categories - precise, consistent and logical.
As an analytic tool, the public-private distinction is used on social life, though its
origins in those practices are obscured.
There is, of course. another way to decide whether biotechnology is public or
private science. It requires only that analysts extinguish their burning desire to
settle the matter definitively. I prefer to work within a long-standing sociological
tradition reaching back at least to the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz,
whose observation that the social world comes to analysts 'preselected and prein-
terpreted ... by a series of common sense constructs' implies that sociological
'constructs [are] of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made
by the actors on the social scene' (Schutz, 1971: 6). Sociologists confront a world
already carved up into public and private parts. Analytic attention shifts to how
those constructs are pragmatically deployed in everyday life. How do ordinary
people use the distinction between public and private in accounting for science or
281
for biotechnology? To answer that question, sociologists suspend a priori judge-

ments about what public or private means and about the referents to which that
distinction might reasonably be germane. They admit, in effect, that whether
biotechnology is public or private science is 'ultimately undecidable' (Lynch,
1993: 115). It is undecidable because actors use private-public in flexible,
ambiguous, inconsistent, asymmetrical, and even contradictory ways - public is
discursively reconfigured into private, as the situation changes. Nigel Gilbert and
Michael Mulkay recommend that sociologists 'become more sensitive to interpre-
tative variability among participants and ... understand why so many different
versions of events can be produced' (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984: 2). The goal is not
to improve upon disorderly usages of everyday language, as if the sociologist's
mandate were to clarify what is really meant by private science: 'Ordinary or lay
language cannot be just dismissed as corrigible in the light of sociological neolo-
gisms, since lay language enters into the very constitution of social activity itself
(Giddens, 1979: 246). 1 Instead, the task is to explore how one domain of social
activity - the science of biotechnology - is constituted in and through messy and
polysemic but practically potent constructs like public-private (and their syn-
onyms). The methodological strategy is to 'follow' public and private as indexical
textual signifiers (remaining agnostic or indifferent about their referents) inserted
by participants into their ongoing practices of making biotechnology. 2
But where is the distinction between public and private connected to science
and to biotechnology, not by analysts but by 'actors on the social scene?'.
1. BIOTECHNOLOGY IN ITS PLACE
The design of the new Biotechnology Building at Cornell University in Ithaca,

New York, is one occasion where the distinction between public and private is
discursively co-present with science.
Planning for the building began in 1983, shortly after the Biotechnology
Program was organized at Cornell; ground was broken in 1986, and the building
was first occupied in 1988. It has five levels with 98 000 usable square feet,
sheathed in white with many windows of swimming-pool blue (Figure. 12.1).3
Its footprint is triangular with a sawtooth hypotenuse, and it forms two sides
of a biology quadrangle. Most visitors enter into a two-storey lobby featuring
a prominent modernist doglegged staircase with vaguely nautical white-piped
railings. The lobby, sometimes decorated with straw mats by Alexander Calder,
is large and open, with natural light pouring in through a glass wall. From the
ground-floor lobby, one can enter a conference centre (really a large auditorium),
a smaller conference room or a vending area and lounge (for eating and,
uniquely, for smoking). On the first-floor landing just off the lobby are admin-
istrative offices for the three units occupying the building: the Biotechnology
Program and two Sections of the Division of Biological Sciences - Genetics
Figure 12.1 Cornell University Biotechnology Building (CUBB).
and Development; and Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology. The

Biotechnology Program's special research facilities are located on the ground and
first levels. The top four floors are connected by an atrium stairwell, with a small
sitting area, a secretaries' office and a small seminar room adjacent on each floor.
Faculty members' research labs and offices skirt the perimeter of the second
through fourth floors, while the windowless interior space is used for heavy
equipment, cold rooms, warm rooms, and dishwashing facilities. Davis, Brody
and Associates of New York City were selected as the architects for the building,
whose $34 million cost was shared by Cornell and the State of New York.
The spaces and places where science gets done have begun to attract the atten-
tion of historians and sociologists. 4 Most studies examine the effects of laboratory
design: as iconographic expressions that reproduce dominant values; as spatial
arrangements of social interactions that facilitate or retard the random exchange
of scientific ideas and levels of creativity; as walls and doors that discriminate
those allowed to participate in science from those who cannot. I take a different
approach to the Cornell University Biotechnology Building (CUBB) by examin-
ing it in design, in the process of its making, or to extend Latour, 'laboratory-
building in action' (Latour, 1987).5 Four aspects of the design process of science
buildings are important for understanding the contingent distinctions between
public and private.
First, design is not something accomplished by architects alone - that would
confuse a professional jurisdiction with the actual practices involved in deciding
what space is needed or how it should be arranged and outfitted.6 At Cornell

University, the Biotechnology Building was shaped by a design triad consisting
of architects and engineers at Davis, Brody; end users, that is, faculty scientists
and their various support staffs; and the Cornell central administration, ranging
from a budgetary vice president to the campus architect. Design is collective
work, vastly different from the common image of the 'marquee architect' as soli-
tary genius whose creativity is said to be the fount of wonderfully styled and
functionally efficient spaces. Building design is more like what Howard Becker
found in 'art worlds'. Works of art are made through the essential cooperation of
a network of people (for example, critics, paint suppliers and manufacturers.
gallery entrepreneurs, the museum employee who removes a painting from
storage and hangs it on the wall), though only one person usually gets credit as
'the artist' (Becker, 1982). The meanings and purposes of public and private are
negotiated among members of the design triad, who have diverse skills, dis-
courses and interests. Public-private is employed textually and graphically by
architects, scientists, Cornell administrators- even the governor of New York-
though in different ways and for different ends.
Second, design does not begin only when the architect begins to draft, nor does
it end when construction commences or even when the building is occupied. The
lament 'we need some new digs' is as much a part of the design process as a
CAD-rendered depiction of an intricate heating-ventilating-air conditioning
system. Design is the representation of space, which assumes diverse embodi-
ments, both prospective and retrospective: a rationale for a new building, a 'con-
ceptual program', an architect's phase report, brick-and-mortar, post-occupancy
evaluations, and critical reviews. Design is a process in which spaces move along
a gradient of stabilization, in both directions. The design is more malleable as talk
or as words and pictures on paper or in a computer than when it is built into walls
and doors, floors and ceilings. But built designs never completely lose their inter-
pretative flexibility. In its ongoing ordinary use and also in its manifest evalua-
tion, a building is forever becoming. 7 Private-public is itself more or less stable
as an element of the design of the CUBB. We shall watch it move first to the
'material' (obdurate, resistant, black boxed) and then back towards the 'social'
(negotiable, uncertain, pliable).
Third, design of a laboratory building is simultaneously the representation of
physical space and human occupants, of the material and the social, of science
and architecture. The design team is forced to shift from scientific to architectural
registers (and back again), talking and drawing about the genetics of xenopus and
about the temperature or lighting systems necessary to keep the beasts alive.
Science is rendered architecturally, just as the building is translated into antici-
pated scientific practices. with no privilege given consistently to one domain or
the other. The design of science-buildings is irreducibly heterogeneous. 8 Space is
represented in a way that fits the needs of scientists, their staff and equipment;
science and other elements of society are made to fit the equally imposing needs
of the building. What is being designed? A building, but also a set of practices
shaped to happen effectively within it, and even a society in which such situated
practices also fit comfortably. The design of the building is equivalent to the
design of who and what it will house and of the society in which it operates.
Public-private is routinely used by designers to indicate distinctions among archi-
tectural spaces and at the same time among people, machines and activities.
There is ubiquitous interreferencing of the spatial (material) and the social.
Fourth, design is pragmatic and performative. Its paramount purpose is to bring
into being a certain building. Design decisions are not determined by universal
abstract principles of aesthetics or functional efficiencies or even cost. They are
instead mediated by and through negotiated concerns for that representation most
likely to get realized, with the highest odds of eventually assuming a stable and
enduring existence. Design must satisfy the interests of those parties whose
support is essential for the translation of abstract space on paper into a concrete
place where science can happen. Evolving floor plans are representational devices
enabling the enlistment of allies who, when hooked, have the means to move a
project forward to obduracy: 'Every blueprint can be read as another Prince: tell
me your tolerances, your benchmarks, your calibrations, the patents you have
evaded and the equations you have chosen, and I will tell you who you are afraid
of, who you hope will come to your support, who you decided to avoid or to
ignore, and who you wish to dominate' (Latour, 1988: 200-1). 9 'Publics' and
'privates' are made up by designers to enrol possibly recalcitrant but needed
allies. As a pragmatic and performative construct at work on the social scene,
public-private should not be interpreted in terms of its referents but in terms of its
role in moving a certain plan closer to materialization.
The methodological chore of following private-public through the design of
the CUBB was made immeasurably easier by converting the pertinent documents
into a digitalized form that was then inserted into a hypermedia computer envi-
ronment. The raw materials included about 4000 pages (6 linear feet) of docu-
ments produced in the course of design (for example, correspondence, meeting
minutes, progress reports, technical reports from consultants, and speeches at cer-
emonial occasions); several sets of blueprints and sketches; about 600 video
images of the building in use; more than 40 transcripts of focussed interviews
conducted with scientists, architects, university administrators and others con-
nected to the design triad. An electronic search located the words public and
private as they occurred anywhere in the data set, as well as privacy, communal,
shared, and collective. 10
This electronic exploration of where (and how) public-private was deployed
by designers of the CUBB moves into two discrete strings of documents. That is,
the distinction between public and private helps constitute a pair of design issues
negotiated through a chained sequence of documents and, in the case of the inter-
view transcripts, their latterly reconstructions during post-occupancy evaluations.
First, 'the public' is constructed as something that becomes simultaneously the
beneficiary of and rationale for the building's existence and a risk or threat in
need of containment or exclusion. 'The public' is simultaneously inside the
CUBB and kept outside a nested set of spaces assigned ascending degrees of
'privacy'. Second, representations of 'communal spaces' ('common', 'collec-
tive') for 'shared equipment' figure prominently in the design process- before
and after occupancy - as a site where testy issues of access, ownership, and
control are played out among (mainly) faculty scientists seeking their 'turf'.
Public-private shapes the design of the CUBB as designers evoke and invoke the
distinction (in diverse, asymmetric, vague, heterogeneous ways) to win arguments,
seduce supporters, legitimate moves, control space, and anticipate the future.
2. 'THE' PUBLIC FOR AND IN CORNELL BIOTECHNOLOGY
One explicit representation of public-private appears in a 'bubble' diagram titled

'Building Programme,' included in Appendix A of the 'Programme and Project
Concept' phase report, prepared by Davis, Brody and Associates on 16 April
1985 (See Fig. 12.2).
For most large building projects, architects must provide their clients with peri-
odic updates (phase reports) summarizing provisionally agreed upon decisions
about the project as a whole. The 'programme' report is ordinarily followed by
the 'conceptual phase' report, although sometimes these two are combined (as at
the. CUBB). 11 After these reports are approved and changes are negotiated, the
architects then prepare a 'schematic phase report' (dated 16 July 1985), followed
by a 'design development phase report' (dated 14 November 1985). Then the
architects prepare 'construction documents' which provide the basis for 'bidding
the job'. As a final step architects are often asked to provide the client with 'as-
built drawings', which show all of the 'change orders' made during construction
itself. This sequence of reports organizes the flow of a building project, inform-
ally and legally. They are important for marking time. The project calendar is
organized in terms of when phase reports are expected from the architects and
when responses are due from the client-users. Each report is a provisional black
boxing of the project, gradually moving the plans towards more detailed
specification and stabilization. Each incorporates (as it modifies) not just earlier
phase reports but also the myriad informal agreements and piecemeal decisions
made in the interim. All parties involved, but especially the architects, have a
desire to 'reach closure' as early as possible to avoid wasting time and money.
The appearance of public-private in Davis, Brody's conceptual phase report
has a future and a past. How and why did the distinction ever enter into the
design? What becomes of public-private as plans move towards construction-
and then what happens after occupancy? The inscription in Figure 12.2 raises as
many questions as it answers about the pertinence of public-private for biotech-
nology at Cornell. Who is the 'public' and what is 'private?' What do the arrows
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Figure 12.2 Programme and project concept: 'the Bubble Diagram'.
(Source: Davis, Brody and Associates, Architects)
represent (access, functional adjacency, traffic flow)? What does the horizontal
bar separating public from private signify? Is everything above the bar 'public'
and everything below it 'private' -but what could this possibly mean?
The first mention of 'public' in the seven-year paper trail occurs in a two-page
memorandum (dated 21 May 1984) from the executive director of the
Biotechnology Programme (a non-scientist staff position) to a Cornell administra-
tor. The memo identifies possible sites on the Ithaca campus for a new biotech-
nology building. After considering research and teaching as two elements in the
selection of the best site, the memo goes on to talk about 'public service' as a
third factor: 'A critical part of the Biotechnology Program is the opportunity for
corporate scientists to be on campus and be involved with campus activities.' The
memo equates 'public' with 'corporate scientists', and sets in motion an odd
inversion: 'public' refers to what is often called the 'private sector' -that is, the
corporate sector as opposed to the public sector of state government. In effect,
public (as a constituency beyond Cornell scientists and a beneficiary of its pro-
posed biotechnology building) becomes private (as in corporate). This inversion-
a breach of logic maybe, but hardly ineffectual for getting this building off the
ground - turned up in a post-occupancy interview with a Davis, Brody architect:
They [Cornell] had a concept for the public function of the building ... they
wanted to have contact with similar organizations with similar work off-campus.
Primarily private sector. There are a lot of companies in New York State who
are interested in various aspects of high technology, they're doing it on a corpo-
rate scale. Cornell saw it as an opportunity to have shared appointments, shared
research, grant money coming into Cornell, patents being generated ....
This public-private inversion (or equivalence) proved to be strategic, as con-

stituents and financial backers for the CUBB were enlisted from corporations
such as Eastman Kodak and Coming Glass and from the State of New York.
Four months later, the public constituency for the CUBB is enlarged, as interest in
the proposed building is distributed further beyond the Cornell scientists who would
occupy it. In a planning document (dated 27 September 1984), Cornell students are
added to private sector corporations in constituting a public for biotechnology: 'Both
undergraduate and graduate students are now demanding more exposure to this
knowledge as part of their curriculum.' But if the CUBB is for students, not all of
them will have a place in it: 'undergraduate teaching functions are not programmed
into this building'. This early decision stuck. There are neither large classrooms nor
teaching laboratories in the CUBB (although considerable 'teaching' at all levels -
postdoc, graduate and undergraduate - goes on at lab benches and seminar rooms
throughout the building). 12 A sociologically interesting pattern starts here and turns
up repeatedly as the building process continues: the simultaneous expansion of
publics with a putative stake in the CUBB and their exclusion from the building
itself. At once, publics are multiplied outside the building as they disappear from
within its walls.
Later in the same planning document, 'public' is expanded again to include

'senior industry, State and University officials'. State officials are presumably
acting on behalf of those who are really being referenced here: New York taxpay-
ers and voters, who will in the end be asked to cover some of the $30 million
budget. The building is for them, but only at a distance: 'The public component
must receive special consideration ... due to the fact that biotechnology research
incorporates the use of organic solvents, radioisotopes and other hazardous sub-
stances which preclude casual exposure. Research areas must be clearly defined
and not positioned in such a way that visitors to the building face the potential of
accidental exposure to dangerous substances.' The tax-paying public of New York
is not just a constituency and beneficiary of the CUBB, but a threat and a risk. The
building is for the public, but it is not a public building in terms of accessibility
and use. The design challenge is to shape a building that has sufficient space inside
for those publics to see (and believe) that they are indeed part of it, but that
also keeps those same publics out - away from research practices, materials and
equipment that could bring harm to themselves or to science. 13
The stage is set for the horizontal bar between public and private in Figure
12.2, but not yet in such a neat form. The simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of
the public and the still-unclear definition of private require careful negotiation.
Figure 12.3 is an early sketch (probably drawn by the executive director of the
Biotechnology Program during Davis, Brody's presentation on 16 January 1985
Figure 12.3 Early sketch showing 'public'.

of a preliminary conceptual phase report) and a lovely example of heterogeneous

design (see Fig. 12.3).1t is by now clear who constitutes the public and why they
are an actant as important as 'scrubbers' or 'hoods'. The building is for them, but
not all of it is open to them. The two arrows in the figure route the public towards
administrative space on the left and towards 'central facilities' on the right
(seminar rooms)- places that emerge as 'trading zones' (Galison, 1989, 1996)
where the public comes into immediate contact with those below the bar
(denizens of 'bio labs', employees of 'support facilities'). 14 But, here at least,
there is no direct path for the public to get from a starting point outside the build-
ing into the recesses of 'steam' or 'condensed H20' deep inside it.
To solve the problem of bringing the public inside the building while keeping
them outside (most of it), designers pursue what I call the 'beachhead strategy'.
Allow the public a toehold on the coastline, but not a step further into the interior.
Create a place that allows and even invites students, representatives from indus-
try, New York tax-payers, state officials to get inside - but cordon it off from
private places where actual research goes on and where the public's presence is
demonstrably unwelcome. As a result of the promiscuous mix that makes up 'the
public', the beachhead turns out to be built on shifting sands- that is, location of
the bar between public and private spaces moves around depending on which
public seeks access. Layers of accessibility are created, showing where some
publics are allowed but other publics are not.
Several meetings of the building committee, leading up to the bubble
diagram of 16 April 1985 (Figure 12.2), consider the issue of public acces-
sibility. For example, under the heading 'public safety' in the minutes for
30 January 1985, the Davis, Brody scribe notes: 'Cornell will consider limited
access to certain areas (card access). Should be clarified later'; 'Avoid planning
building to encourage traffic to other buildings as shortcut'. In another prelimi-
nary draft of the conceptual phase report (dated 6 February 1985), the office of
the director of the Biotechnology Programme is described as 'accessible to
outside visitors', seminar rooms are 'accessible to all occupants; public' (which
makes the public into the residual 'anybody other than a building resident'), a
lounge and vending machine area is 'accessible to students', but a stockroom
for chemical stores and glassware is 'accessible to faculty and researchers'. The
meeting record for 11 February 1985 notes that 'public access from upper level
athletic field walk (2nd floor) was desirable' - a recommendation that contra-
dicted earlier wishes to prevent the building from becoming a cut-through for
cold and snowy students.
In a later but still not final conceptual phase report (dated 21 February 1985),
administrative spaces for the Divisions of Genetics and Development and of
Biochemistry are labelled 'accessible to faculty; students'; a P-3 containment
lab is described as 'accessible to all research groups and selected outside users'.
Finally, in a letter from two building committee members to the Cornell provost
(dated 3 April 1985), the initial idea for a conference centre (large seminar
room) is endorsed as 'an imaginative idea, and is just what we need for the pro-
gramme. It is the only large seminar room in the facility. Its location will allow
a more public access so it can be used by both occupants of our building and
our neighbors'. In these discussions public varies from a cold student to
someone in need of P-3 biohazard security, from occupants of nearby Cornell
buildings to those paying a visit to the Biotechnology Programme director.
Decisions about accessibility are simultaneously social and architectural.
Publics are defined by and through the spaces inside the building to which they
have access.
The bubble diagram (Figure 12.2) 'illustrates in general terms the desired func-
tional relationships between the various groups . . . and the degree of public
access'. So significant is this diagram that it is lifted from Appendix A and repro-
duced (in miniature) in the main body of the report, suggesting that public-private
demarcations fundamentally shaped the overall architectural design of the CUBB.
The horizontal bar between public and private is still conceptual rather than archi-
tectural, functional rather than spatial, ideational rather than material. Its transla-
tion into something built-in is not straightforward: public and private on the
bubble diagram do not correspond one-to-one to rooms in the building because,
simply put, it depends on which public you mean. The arrangement of spaces
inside the building depends in part on diverse publics who must variously be kept
outside.
'The public' starts outside of the functional boxes which describe what will go
on inside the building. Public entrances lead into a lobby, from which one should
easily reach administrative offices and seminar rooms (the bubble diagram does
not show people just passing through). Whether for a student checking availabil-
ity of a class or for a faculty member from outside Biology coming to attend a
lecture, these two spaces are public in a maximally inclusive way. From here
access is more restricted, and the public shrinks drastically. Follow the arrow
from the small and large seminar rooms down into the reading room and the
lounge. The bubble diagram does not discriminate between the accessibility of
these two areas, though the programme description of the reading room says:
'Locate on main circulation, near research labs, accessible to all occupants. Not a
public facility.' The lounge is described as a 'space for faculty, staff and students
to take breaks, lunch, meet informally .... Locate in a public area (near lobby)
easily accessed from all parts of the building'. Some public is welcome to eat in
the lounge but not to browse the journal collection in the reading room. Some
functions below the bar are completely private: 'The research groups [drosophila,
eukaryotes, etc.] should be located together on contiguous floors, preferably more
remote from public access.' But the 'biotechnology research unit' (still below the
bar) is more public, even though it presumably would pose the same risks to
'casual' visitors as faculty research labs. The plant tissue culture room is part of
the biotechnology research unit and 'should be accessible to public areas'. Which
public? Not students, lecture audiences, or passers-through who might happen to
be taxpayers - but consumers of those research services from public-private

biotechnology corporations outside Cornell. Moreover, this public gets its own
dedicated space inside the CUBB: a 'group of labs where industry users will have
space allocated for their use'. Corporate scientists are an outside public with a
place inside the research areas of the building.
The beachhead shifts from lobby to administrative space and seminar rooms
to lounges (not reading rooms) to biotechnology research service facilities
to labs for corporate scientists - at each layer, it sheds some of the publics
that began the assault just outside the building's walls. The further inside, the
smaller the public. The conceptual phase report summarizes the meaning of
'public access': 'The building functions are divided into two basic zones, the
grade [ground] and first floors containing more public and support uses; and
the second, third and fourth floors house the academic labs.' The concept
public-private is almost ready for rendering as architecture, first in floor plans,
then in brick and mortar.
There are few changes worth noting as public-private moves through
schematic and design development phases. 15 A better definition of the conference
centre comes in the meeting record of 21 June 1985: 'The conference room
remains attached to the lobby for good accessibility. The lobby provides space for
pre-function activities, and includes direct access to public toilets, building
lounge, kitchen and storage area. The lobby can be left open for evening events
without allowing unauthorized access into the rest of the Biotechnology Facility.'
This stereoscopic image of the building - one eye public, the other private - is
reinforced later in the same document: 'The [conference] room will be used at
times by groups other than Biotechnology, including evening events when the
Biotechnology building will otherwise be closed.' But the beachhead continues to
shift, letting some publics further and further inside. A letter from the Cornell
architect to the head of the Section on Genetics and Development (dated
2 December 1986) reads: 'Although I feel the tile floor would present a handsome
finish in the public spaces of the laboratory levels, I do not feel this should be
done with disregard to functionality.' This use of public would seem to violate
the upstairs:downstairs::private:public logic more or less secured 18 months
earlier in the conceptual phase report. But in design, logic is less vital than prag-
matics. In this case, the Cornell architect seeks to justify his choice of floor cover-
ing by inventing a very different sort of public: those who work in the
most-private spaces (faculty research laboratories, offices and equipment rooms)
but who must leave those spaces via corridors going to the stairs and elevators
and who, because of safety restrictions on eating in lab spaces, would want to
take lunch in the atrium sitting areas. In the CUBB, public spaces (and the publics
who are allowed in them) are consistently defined as outside of some private
space, although the latter telescopes from faculty labs and offices to all of the
upper three floors to the building as a whole.
Construction is at last set to begin, and what better occasion than a ground-
breaking ceremony to remind everyone that the public is inside the CUBB - and
why they are here. Governor Mario Cuomo of New York announces that: 'The
Cornell University Biotechnology Institute will bring together - in one hundred
thousand square feet of research space -scientists, farmers and scholars, members
of the business community, academicians and students- all working together to
make the promise of biotechnology a reality for the economy of our state.'
This public for biotechnology, continues Cuomo, has both public and private
parts: 'It is a special pleasure for me to join in sealing this union with the partici-
pation of the third partner - the public sector - the State of New York.... This
Institute will turn these future visions into practicality - and through technology
transfer will create the private sector jobs our people need.' 16 Why bother bring-
ing up and bringing in all those publics, especially when they did nothing but
create headaches for the designers who then had to work so hard at keeping them
outside private places? Bruno Latour notes that 'those who are really doing
science are not all at the bench; on the contrary, there are people at the bench
because many more are doing science elsewhere' (Latour, 1987: 162). Governor
Cuomo tells us who is doing science outside, so that there can be an inside to the
CUBB: 'Eastman Kodak, General Foods and Union Carbide have pledged a six-
year commitment of $2.5 million for the operation of the Institute, and Corning
Glass Works has made a substantial contribution to its establishment. ... And
now, on behalf of the people of New York, let me sign this check for $32.5
million and present it to President Rhodes.' The building would not exist if it
were merely private, with no public interest - neither Cornell scientists nor the
university itself have that kind of money. To get spanking new laboratories the
Cornell faculty scientists must only surrender a beachhead, a place for their
publics to get a toehold. With no beachhead some publics might suspect that the
building was not really designed for them at all and would lose interest. But the
beachhead cannot become a conquest, for that would require Cornell scientists to
give up their desperately desired sequestered research space. The public becomes
a constituency and beneficiary, then is treated as a threat and risk, so that it is
allowed a beachhead but denied full-scale assault.
The spatial - and then material - inscription of public-private is now finalized
(see Figs 12.4, 12.5 and 12.6). Rather than give my own account of the built
place, I continue to rely on 'actors on the social scene,' starting with this gushing
review in a background report (dated April 1989) prepared for the dedication
ceremony: 'The public spaces are magnificent, with an upper and lower lobby
connected by an open staircase. Excellent facilities for conferences, seminars and
workshops are present. ... the architects have done an outstanding job in separat-
ing the public spaces from the more private research space.' The head of the
Division of Biological Sciences breaks down the floor plan into three levels of
accessibility:
1 Lower Lobby
2 Lounge
3 Small Lecture Room
4 Conference Center
5 "Maginot Line"
4
Itl-~
Figure 12.4 CUBB: ground floor plan.

1 Upper Lobby
2 "Maginot Line"
3 Administration (two sections)
4 Biotech Program Administration
5 Biotech Program Research
Facilities (flow cytometry)
6 Corporate Scientist Lab
7 Reading Room
8 Atrium Stairwell
r1
1_1
r_l
Figure 12.5 CUBB: first floor plan.

1 Atrium Stairwell
2 Modular Faculty Lab
3 Faculty Office 11
i
4 Cold Room } .2!
5 Heavy Equipment Room ~
6 Tissue Culture Room
Figure 12.6 CUBB: third floor plan.

There's sort of the public-privates .... Really three levels of privacy, there-
fore: the most public is down in the conference room, lobby, small seminar
room, all that stuff, up to and open to ... the offices. And then the second level
was the biotech facilities, which are in this floor, which were still part of the
inner part with research but since they are at least on the first floor, they could
be more obviously get-toable. And then the top three floors, all of which ...
have a secretary where the stairs come up and the elevators so they could sort
of see what's happening, and meant to be much more private.
The executive director of the Biotechnology Programme constructs two Maginot

Lines separating public from private:
You'll be able to wander that area of the conference room and you can come
up these stairs, but you can't get anywhere else in the building. The doors out
here are locked that [would] allow you up in the labs, and the door downstairs
is locked. So that we could allow anybody to use it and feel reasonably sure
that the building wasn't going to be trashed, or we wouldn't have people wan-
dering around in labs where they shouldn't be.
Figure 12.7 shows the first checkpoint: a lockable door on the first level, sepa-
rating the upper lobby from corridors leading to the inner atrium, the reading
room, research facilities of the Biotechnology Programme, and via an immedi-
ately adjacent elevator the rest of the upstairs (see Fig. 12.7). Even when these
doors are unlocked, access is guarded by the Biotechnology Programme recep-
tionist. The second checkpoint is off the lower lobby on ground level (See Fig
12.8), which is also locked at night and during big public functions in the confer-
ence centre. During the day this entry (which leads directly into research facil-
ities) is protected by an absence of signage that would tell a casual public what is
on the other side, and even more by a decor that makes one feel that the door
leads to a basement-like place where only cognoscenti should be. The Calder
straw mats, indoor plants, and the upscale finishes of the (public) lobby contrast
palpably with the painted cinder-block walls and ordinary floor coverings of the
(private) research space behind the unmarked door.
Building occupants disagree on how well this separation of public-private is
accomplished. One faculty scientist told me that he liked the way 'the architect
separated the public spaces from the private research functions. You ... can have
a party with five hundred people going on down there and have no impact what-
soever on the functioning [upstairs]'. But another complained that 'the research
part of the building is poorly isolated ... from the public part of the building.
[P]eople ooz[e] through the building at large .... People ... take things like com-
puters, no matter how hard you try'. A third scientist told me that the lobby and
other downstairs public spaces were too large: 'It's a waste of money. It has no
function.'
Figure 12.7 Maginot Line in the Upper Lobby.
Figure 12.8 Maginot Line in the Lower Lobby.

The memories of some scientists, now content in their new laboratory building,
are too short to remember why the lobby is there and why it is so large. Still
another scientist commented that if the lobby space had been located in Wing
Hall (an older Cornell science building) it would have contained 500 centrifuges.
But the lobby in CUBB cannot be for centrifuges, for it already houses the public.
He continues: 'And when I mean public space, I mean space which is used by
people which have no connection with the building's normal function. And they
use it a lot for entertaining.' 17 No connection? How quickly he forgets.
3. MINE, YOURS, OURS, THEIRS AND ITS: COLONIZING COMMUNAL

SPACE
'Private' is also juxtaposed to shared. common, or communal. Like the distinction

between private-public, the private-shared distinction not only raises questions
about access but also about ownership and control. Handwritten notes from
21 February 1984 first introduce this distinction into the paper trail (Figure 12.9).
Although the sketch bears no resemblance to what the building would become
architecturally, its conceptual separation of personal laboratories and offices (for
individual faculty scientists and their research staffs) from common space (not
assigned to individual scientists) would last throughout the design process and
would eventually be built in. Two months after this sketch was made, we learn
what this common space is for. On a questionnaire sent to Cornell faculty biolo-
gists by the new Biotechnology Program (dated 12 April 1984), respondents were
asked to list their needs for 'shared equipment rooms' and 'shared lab services'.
Specifically, they were asked to provide 'design data' (footprint dimensions.
weight, power and plumbing needs) for 'auxiliary research space' such as 'dark
rooms, incubation rooms, tissue culture rooms, etc.'. Auxiliary here implies
_j ~------------U------------~
lta ft
Figure 12.9 Early sketch showing 'common rooms'.

separate and distant, and this question comes well after earlier ones about 'indi-
vidual laboratories' such as 'what services and other facilities should be provided
on laboratory benches and in hoods?' From the beginning, common rooms were
spaces to be shared by several faculty scientists to house equipment or specialized
research facilities not well located in private labs or offices.
As with the public beachhead, common spaces for shared equipment had to do
with the successful selling of the CUBB to those who required enrolment.
Reflecting on efforts to create an attractive package, the Cornell provost told me:
We had both departments [Sections of Biochemistry and of Genetics and

Development] in less than ideal situations, and Biochemistry in particular was
crowded to the point of not meeting program guidelines .... so we constructed
the idea of the Biotechnology Program with those two departments at the
core ... Now, if the State was interested in providing facilities that supported
this kind of thing, we should make use of this opportunity both to solve the
local problem and ... to provide the kind of facilities that needed to be devel-
oped as shared resources, things like the sequinator.
The CUBB was justified in part by the obvious advantages of gathering in one
spot faculty scientists and their expensive experimental equipment (which had
previously been scattered all around campus). By then making these research
facilities and equipment available to 'researchers from the corporations' in
biotechnology, Cornell also had New York State and its publics interested in
'common spaces'.
But to see common spaces merely as useful for enlisting vital allies misses
much of their significance in the design process. From the start, laboratory space
assigned to individual faculty scientists was treated as identical - in square
footage, configuration of benchwork and free wall space, and provided services
and utilities. After Davis, Brody came aboard, laboratory spaces were described
as 'modular', 'standardized', and 'generic', as if all 35 of them came from a
cookie-cutter. The modular lab idea took hold because it seemed to satisfy the
interests of all three comers of the design triad: the architects (unique
specifications for each lab were not needed); the administrators (modularity
would cut construction costs); and the faculty scientists (modularity meant
parity). Laboratory spaces are more than places for doing science; they are also
measures of rank in the local hierarchy. Modular labs were an attempt to nip 'turf
wars' in the bud and a means to prevent invidious spatial distinctions among
Cornell faculty scientists. 18
Unfortunately, the modular lab decision did not pre-empt struggles for more
room but merely displaced turf wars on to the common spaces. The promise of
additional communal space outside the private lab for heavy equipment and spe-
cialized research facilities was a means to cool out scientists who might resent
being denied the chance to customize their lab space, and who (in some cases)
were given less personal lab space in the new CUBB than they had had before.
Scientists denied the chance to shape their private space to fit the particularities of
their local lab culture and ongoing research were instead given the opportunity to
tailor selected common spaces to the peculiar instrumentational demands of their
science. The availability of additional tailored space outside private labs may
have mollified some Cornell faculty scientists, but raised its own troubling issues.
Who would share how much communal space with whom and for what purposes?
The struggle for more space did not cease; only the means to pursue it changed.
You could not argue as an individual scientist that you needed more bench space
for five postdocs or a special room for a personal-use laser. Instead, you could get
more space outside the private lab only through other scientists whose research
and facilities needs were sufficiently similar to yours (and sufficiently different
from others) to warrant a collective claim on communal spaces equipped to meet
those particular needs.
Thus, a crucial moment in the building's design was the formation of the six
research groups, each of which would be assigned common spaces customized
for their shared use. The written record of the design process (and subsequent
interviews) suggests that assignment of the 35 faculty scientists to these six
groups - prokaryotes, eukaryotes, drosophila and development, cell biology,
membranes, and biophysics- was accomplished, perhaps surprisingly, without
rancor. Though some minor jockeying occurred (one slot was moved from cell
biology to biophysics, another from prokaryotes to drosophila and development),
the constitution of the six groups was settled early on (in April 1985) by cluster-
ing scientists in terms of the big, expensive, and (from a utilities standpoint)
demanding machines they needed for research. One faculty scientist told me that
the formation of research groups was based on:
shared equipment, both equipment and space. It makes sense to put centrifuges
together in a room, but not computers and centrifuges maybe. And so bio-
physics types would have different shared needs than the molecular biologists,
for example .... There wasn't any difficulty that I encountered. There were
some shifts because people said:, 'well, I'm really doing this, or I'm going to
be doing that'. . .. The extremes were obvious. The biophysical group is the
other end from the amphibian development group. And the people in the
middle were located physically in the middle.
Biophysics ended up on level two, drosophila and development was on level four,
and the remaining groups were on level three with spillover up and down.
Formation of these groups shifted the 'space bargaining unit' from the individ-
ual faculty scientist to the research group seeking more communal space. I call
their stmtegy 'colonizing the communal': Relocate as much of your stuff as you
can from the private lab to the common rooms and other shared spaces to free up
square footage in your lab for activities and equipment that simply must take
place there. In effect, the more stuff you can distribute throughout the building,
the more space comes under your control and use- though not your private own-
ership, for it remains communal and shared. The six research groups used several
arguments to establish and expand communal colonies outside the private labs. A
given machine had to be exported because it did not fit into the modular shape of
the private lab, because it was too noisy and dirty, because it required unusual
utilities hook-ups, because it was used only sporadically, or because it was used
by more than one faculty scientist. These arguments were variously successful.
Although the building committee sought to remain true to its egalitarian impulses
by initially assigning communal space with a universalistic formula- 'number of
scientists in the group x -600 square feet' - in the end, some groups received
more communal space per capita than others.
Although the CUBB contained two other types of space outside the private
labs that could be colonized - rooms on the ground and first floors housing
specialized equipment that require tending by expert technicians (for example,
flow cytometry facility), and general support units on the upper three floors (for
example, dishwashing facilities) - I concentrate on the 'communal research
spaces' which take up most of the windowless interiors on the second, third and
fourth floors. Positioning for communal space began even before the six research
groups were formed. On I May 1984, just two months after the first rough sketch
showing 'common rooms' (Figure 12.9), a memo from the head of the Division
of Genetics and Development to the director of the Biotechnology Programme
outlined the division's anticipated needs for common space (recall that two
divisions would move into the CUBB). It proposed that each faculty member
get 1650 square feet, but their dishwashing, cold and incubator rooms would
be outside that assigned space. However, the memo continued, 'extra space [is]
made available by taxing each faculty unit by 150 square feet' to be used for
caesium source, film darkroom, photography darkroom and four heavy equipment
rooms. The memo does not detail why such activities are not well suited for
private lab space (caesium can be dangerous, darkrooms need light-omitting
enclosure, heavy equipment is loud and dirty); that is understood by all. About
two weeks later (but still well before Davis, Brody architects were hired), the
Cornell scientists assembled for the first time (in 'Conclusions of 5116/84
Building Committee Meeting') a list of 'Building Groups'. This document would
be repeatedly emended over the next six months. Faculty members of the six
groups are identified, but in the typed meeting minutes no mention is made of
communal or shared spaces. However, handwritten notes evidently added later
list special equipment or facilities beside each research group. For example,
prokaryotes need 'storage 300 feet, one warm room, one seminar', while the
developmental group (not yet merged with drosophila) needs 'one cold room, one
warm room and one cool room'.
The 12 July 1984 meeting minutes show the research space segmented by the
six groups; under each is a list of faculty scientists, including several unnamed
'new faculty', with the designation that each is to receive a lab of 1100 square
feet and an office of 150 square feet. Also under each research group is a category
appearing for the first time in these accountings: '*Communal'. The asterisk
points to the following note: 'Instrument rooms, heavy equipment, etc., to be used
by more than a single research group.' Though the space is allocated to a research
group and its square footage is a function of the number of faculty in the group
(550 square feet per scientist), it is evidently to be shared by a more inclusive
group of building occupants. This early ambiguity will haunt the communal
spaces even after occupancy as users struggle to understand what is theirs, ours,
yours, mine. Table 12.1 shows how communal space is assigned to each research
group at this meeting and at several subsequent key moments. Two patterns are
interesting to watch: the rise and fall of total communal space in the building, and
changes in the shares of communal space for each research group.
Apparently, at the 12 July meeting, word went out from the building committee
to each research group: Tell us what you intend to fit into the communal space.
Clearly, this request was an opportunity for colonizing as much of the communal
space as possible, and none of the groups were shy about indicating a crying need
for more. The drosophila and development group responded first, with a 23 July
1984 memo assigning specialized equipment to the 'proposed 3 850 square feet'
of common rooms for ultraviolet work, autoradiography, centrifuges, freezers,
incubators, shakers, sectioning, balances, electrophoresis (sequencing), 19 and
computers. The memo then becomes both creative and aggressive, seeking to
move equipment and facilities from the private labs into space that would not
count against the allotted 3850 square feet. The group suggests that the fly
medium prep, dishwashing rooms, cesium source, one constant temperature
room, and fly rooms 'should come from the common space designated for the
building in general'. The rationale is that other research groups are likely to get
space for their special facilities too: 'as you know, foodmaking, dishwashing and
bottle storage facility is an essential part of any drosophila operation, just like
growth chambers and animal rooms are to plant and mammalian geneticists
respectively'. Another rationale for locating equipment in non-group (building-
wide) communal space is that scientists from outside the group will also need it:
'The cesium source would be used by many people in the building and we feel it
should not come from our communal space.' Allies are enlisted from nature as
well: 'We felt it best that each lab has its own separate fly lab- to reduce the like-
lihood of a "global" mite epidemic.' The memo ends aggressively, pushing for
more communal territory: 'The additional space needed for the fly rooms may
have to come from the 1100 square feet allotted for biochemistry. This, we
believe, further strengthens our contention that rooms 2A-C [cesium source, etc.]
should come from the general common space allotment.'
Other research groups made similar kinds of pleas. For instance, the cell
biology group argued that 'a 37° room should be included in the Biotechnology
[Programme] Tissue Culture Facility'. But none was as elaborately justified as the
Vl
~
Table 12.1 Communal space assigned to each research group at key momenlS
12 July 1984 21 February· 1985 /6 April /985 2/ June /985 15 August /985 lU October /985
Davis, Brody: Conceptual Design-

Cornell Pre-Program Phase Schematics Development
----
Square Square Square Square Square Square
Number Total Feet Per Number Total Feet Per Number Total Feet Per Number Total feet Per Number Total Feet Per Number Total Feet Per
Ru~arch of Square Faculty or Square Faculty of Square Faculty of Square Faculty of Square Faculty of Square Faculty
Group Faculty Feet Member Faculty Feet Member Faculty Feet Member Faculty Feet Member Faculty Feet Member Faculty Feet Member
Prokaryotes 6 625 3750 6 704 4225 5 561 2805 5 555 2773 5 450 2252 5 381 1905
Eukaryotes 7 636 4450 7 751 5255 7 516 4030 7 580 4062 7 533 3729 7 608 4255
Drosophila
Development 7 657 4600 7 752 5265 8 560 4475 8 528 4178 8 514 4109 8 503 4025
Cell Biology 6 625 3750 5 780 3900 5 590 2950 5 561 2836 5 564 2822 5 535 2675
Membranes 4 625 25(X} 4 800 3200 4 525 2100 4 527 2109 4 538 2151 4 530 2120
Biophysics 5 &05 4025 6 853 5120 6 672 4030 6 668 4()()7 6 663 3980 6 672 4030
memo from the fly people. Did it work? In this first reckoning (Table 12.1) the
communal space per faculty scientist puts drosophila and development in second
place only to the biophysicists (who stay on top all the way through): however,
by the final accounting just before design development (4 October 1985), they
had slipped to fifth place.
Architects from Davis, Brody were hired in December 1984, and in early 1985
they sought to refine the earlier descriptions of the functions of common rooms.
For example, 'heavy equipment rooms' were described as 'communal group lab-
oratory space for housing shared equipment and/or equipment which need not be
kept within the assigned faculty lab modules'. The basic distinction of private
(faculty scientists' labs and offices) and shared space (for the research groups,
and maybe others) is maintained. Meeting minutes of the building committee for
19 January 1985 seek to clear up possible confusion about the proper use of
common rooms: 'Communal space assigned to each group must meet shared
facility needs for all members of the group. These spaces are to be used for activ-
ities common to the total group and not as an extension of assigned individual
faculty laboratory space. Such activities as thin sectioning must be included in
individual faculty member's assigned space.' Here the building committee is
trying to prevent intragroup turf wars: shared equipment space is ours, not mine
and yours. But it also seeks to contain colonization of the communal by indicat-
ing procedures which may and may not be farmed out. Glass-washing rooms are
here described as 'central', that is, included in building-wide space rather than
space allocated to each research group. In contrast, each group is told to make
room for a 120-square-foot cell culture transfer area in their assigned communal
space. This kind of back and forth continues for the next year or so with research
groups justifying the need for more communal square footage as they dump
equipment and activities into 'central' buildingwide spaces. Meanwhile the build-
ing committee tries to keep the overall building size within budget by forcing
equipment and functions back into the private labs and group communal spaces.
These are the 'space wars' at Cornell Biotech. Handwritten notes from a building
committee meeting of 24 January 1985 sound ominous: 'dynamics of sharing vs.
identity'.
As design moves toward the programme and conceptual phase report of 16
April 1985, the combined communal spaces claimed by the six research groups
balloon, as wish lists are not yet tempered by budgetary realities. Biophysicists
win some and lose some. One member of this group is told that an environmental
chamber for radioisotope research would 'have to be located in Dr. - - ' s
research space allocation'. But the group as a whole picks up space by having a
'high level instrument testing and repair shop' moved downstairs to the
Biotechnology Programme space, with the 275 square feet still made available to
them as a shared instrument room. Davis, Brody descriptions of common rooms
note why their functions cannot be housed in private faculty laboratories:
'Communal laboratory space for housing shared high quality instruments and/or
instruments which must be operated under a controlled environment'; 'area is

hazardous due to high qualities of electricity produced'; 'mammalian and plant
cell work must be carried out in separate facilities'; 'space must be kept clean,
uncontaminated and positive pressure to be considered'; 'shared facility for
experimentation involving levels of radioactivity higher than those permitted
in standard labs'. Each research group gave the architects descriptions of
their needs, interesting sociologically not for their accuracy but for their prag-
matic utility in efforts to colonize the communal. Budgetary constraints and
the inelasticity of the building's total square footage eventually intrude: 'The
autoclave/media prep, dishwashing and dark rooms should be assigned at a rate
of one per floor. This will mean consolidating the communal space reserved for
these purposes when more than one research group is located on the same floor.'
Now these facilities are shared by everyone on the floor, not just members of a
single research group. By the conceptual phase report, communal research space
has been reduced dramatically - 24 percent is gone.
From the programme through schematic and design development phases, the
communal space assigned to the six groups collectively declines but does so
unevenly. Prokaryotes loses big time (32 per cent lost), drosophila and develop-
ment and cell biology lose much less, eukaryotes and membranes gain a little,
and biophysics remains unchanged at the top. On 22 August 1985, prokaryotes
lost space for half of an overflow standard Jab module, half of a heavy equipment
room (given to eukaryotes), and a film-processing room (they were instead to
share one with drosophila and development). Later they lost one of two transillu-
minator rooms and the special space for electrophoresis. The paper trail provides
little evidence of why these spaces were lost or reassigned. Meeting minutes state
only that the changes are 'agreed to' by the users group.
The process takes a significant tum with a memo of 12 December 1985 from the
building committee to representatives from each of the groups, asking them to
provide complete lists of machines slated for shared equipment rooms - including
the name of the scientist who 'owns' each piece. Before this point equipment lists
were collective for each group. The new memo elicited a revised set of drawings
such as the one in Figure 12.1 0. Ambiguity about ownership arises again. The heavy
equipment room belongs to the research group, but space inside it is assigned to
pieces of equipment owned and tagged-as-theirs by individual faculty scientists. The
space is shared, but is the equipment? Realizing the potential for an all-out turf war
even before construction begins, the building committee tries to gloss over the
problem in its meeting minutes of 3~ February 1986: 'The faculty committee re-
cognizes the impossibility and inadvisability of custom designing each [heavy
equipment] room to its proposed equipment, two years in advance of occupancy.
The rooms will be designed generically.' So do not take too seriously those precise
locations of 'my centrifuge' and 'your freezer'. Fat chance! On 15 May 1986, the
eukaryotes group informed the executive director of the Biotechnology Programme
that 'this equipment room is already too crowded. The architects were not even able
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Figure 12.10 Communal room showing space dedicated to individual scientists. 8
to put in all of the equipment in the drawing. --tells me that all of--'s equip-
ment was supposed to go in the adjacent empty room'. The dilemma is obvious. To
identify each piece of equipment by the name of its owner raises questions about the
distribution of 'communal' space within the research group and invites a space war;
to fail to do so may result in too little space in the shared rooms- naming names
becomes a means to justify requests for still more common space.
Fast forward now to the completed and occupied building. Even within a
faculty scientist's laboratory there are demarcations of shared and private -
simply because of the dozen or so students, postdocs, and technicians who work
there (See Figure 12.11 ). Pointing to a benchtop to the left of a masking tape line,
a postdoc told me, 'That is public space; other people are using the centrifuges,
bunsen burners.' To the right is her space for her tools. But the lab as a whole is a
private place, shared by many but locked off from corridors, for several reasons.
As a Davis, Brody architect pointed out: 'I think it's out of a concern for privacy,
out of concern for contamination, out of just a little bit of secrecy. I mean, you
would know more than I do about what's involved in getting grants .... each
faculty researcher gets a boundary, to protect his interests, what he has at stake.'
What finally happens to the common rooms for shared equipment? For the most
part the Cornell scientists are happy to have them, as they seem to work according
to plan. A member of the biophysics group told me that 'it's nicer to have the
Figure 12.11 Masking-tape demarcation between public (right) and private (left).
centrifuge and noisy equipment in a big central room that's on this floor ... better
than having it right in the lab'. Someone from eukaryotes said: 'now here is a
perfect example of sharing because-- [a student] is in--'s lab, but that's my
hood'. And a prokaryote researcher admits that 'I haven't discerned any territori-
ality .... We have a little more shared equipment space than we had [before].'
There were some problems, however, when actual equipment was first moved into
the CUBB, and space for yours, mine, ours, theirs, and its suddenly lost its
abstract character. When asked about 'troubles', the building manager (who heads
up the custodial staff and is responsible for keeping equipment in working order)
told me, 'particularly when people move in ... you needed to figure out, prior to
bringing the stuff, where it was going to be set. This guy might have more power
than this other guy, and he's got a whole wall ... and I've got this comer'. Parity
is easier to maintain on paper. One scientist said, 'It wasn't ever really spelled out
exactly either, so people sort of started moving things into rooms, assuming this
was where they were going to go, and it wasn't all that clear.'
Moving in was just the start of troubles with common space. A cell biologist
noted that his communal spaces were farther from his lab than from other labs in his
research group: 'There's one odd thing about this building, which is the distribution
of all the common spaces, the common equipment rooms and the cold rooms and the
warm rooms. Because the building is not a rectangle, there isn't actually equal
access to all that stuff. It turns out that the labs on the diagonal [hypotenuse] tend to
be kind of farther away from things.' This problem is a trifle compared with what
has become a 'tmgedy of the commons'. As another scientist noted, 'the lyophilizer
had been used repeatedly by someone who, well, almost wrecked the pump by
pumping organic solvents into it. So people actually do this, when there's a common
room, and it's not their own labs, they'll abuse things in that room. And, so I feel
that doesn't work so well'. An extreme view comes from a biophysicist (who once
asked me: 'what would happen to our universities if they closed down all the sociol-
ogy departments?'): 'I simply don't believe in shared facilities .... somebody uses a
centrifuge and they spill something in the rotor. It's not their centrifuge. Do they
clean it up? Not on your life. They walk away and leave it, and the next guy finds
that the lining has been attacked by something or other or else there is powdered
glass in the bottom. That sort of thing goes on all the time.'
Perhaps because of such unpleasant experiences the definition of common has
become more restrictive at the CUBB. One scientist told me that certain common
rooms on her floor had been rekeyed to reduce user access. In biophysics,
common rooms have disappeared altogether: 'We didn't really want so many
truly common rooms. We each wanted another lab. I wanted one that I could
keep dark, and someone else wanted one for a laser, someone else for x-ray dif-
fraction equipment. So we're all in complete agreement that this is a fine way to
divide it up. So these are not common rooms at all.' It may be instructive that the
word communal - used throughout the design process before construction -
appears not at all in transcripts of interviews done after occupancy.
4. CONCLUSION
How far upstream should sociologists and historians take the beliefs and practices
of scientists? At least, I suggest, to the design of places where science gets done.
Knowledge-making projects are situated not just by the gender, race, class and
nationality of the knower, but also by the material and architectural surroundings
of inquiry. All knowledge begins as local knowledge. The questions asked, and
the answers permitted, are shaped by the machines and people specifically gath-
ered there. The design of new science buildings is an archaeological site for
examining struggles over the definition of science: its audiences, purposes,
beneficiaries, and culture. Among other places, it is where constructs of public
and private science are deployed, battled over, and resolved.
If you go to Ithaca and visit the Cornell University Biotechnology Building, you
will not see the words public or private, shared or communal on signs anywhere.
Yet so thoroughly is public-private inscribed in the building that -looking on it as
it emerged from years of design - it hardly makes sense without the distinction.
Almost invisible now, this distinction between public and private is everywhere
etched into walls, doors, windows, rooms, instruments, scientists, and science.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This chapter first appeared under the same title in Arnold Thackray (ed.), Private
Science: The Biotechnology Industry and the Rise of Molecular Biology
(Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, forthcoming). It is a report from
the Project on Laboratory Design in Biotechnology, which is housed at the
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, and funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
NOTES
1. I have written a series of articles on the episodic and pragmatic demarcation

between science and non-science, beginning with Gieryn (1983: 781-95) and syn-
thesized in Gieryn (1995: 393-443).
2. The strategy is akin to semiotic actant-network studies such as Calion (1987:
83-103) and Latour (1987).
3. The following description captures the building as I observed it on repeated visits to
Ithaca, starting in 1989 at the Dedication Ceremony and most recently in 1992.
4. A pioneer in historical studies of laboratory design is P. Thomas Carroll (recently
Carroll, 1994). Cf. Allen (1977); Owens (1985); Hannaway (1986); Laszlo (1987);
Shapin (1988, 1991); Forgan (1989); Stinchcombe (1990); Hillier and Penn (1991);
Lynch (1991); Qphir and Shapin (1991); and Shackelford (1993).
5. Among the rare studies of the design process for science buildings are Shoshkes
(1989: 96-123) on the Lewis Thomas Molecular Biology Laboratory at Princeton;
and - of the coffee-table variety - Watson ( 1991 ).
6. On the professionalization of tasks, cf. Abbott (1988: 50) for the observation that
'the architect becomes a broker negotiating a general design through a maze dictated
by others'. Cf. Gutman (1988); and Cuff (1991).
7. Michael Lynch sees lab places as incessantly 'made': 'This does not make floors
and walls irrelevant, but it suggests that when various practitioners construct and
tear down walls, assign equipment to places and practitioners to equipment, manage
computer files, set up precautions against contamination, and so forth, they are ...
effecting local arrangements within a specific topical field.... by trying to under-
stand the space of knowledge we confront an ecology of local spaces integrated with
disciplinary practices' (Lynch, 1991). The idea that design moves along a gradient
of stabilization comes from constructivist (often Callonian/Latourian) studies of
technology (in effect, I treat buildings as walk-through machines), such as Bijker
et al. (1987); and Bijker and Law (1992).
8. Building design is 'heterogeneous engineering' as John Law describes it: 'in expla-
nations of technological change the social should not be privileged .... Other factors
- natural, economic, or technical - may be more obdurate than the social and may
resist the best efforts of the system builder to reshape them. . . . the stability and
form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous
elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a network.' (Law 1987)
9. My discussion in this paragraph refers to prospective design - the representation of
space before its material construction.
10. The hypermedia version of the Cornell Biotechnology Building was built by Peter
C. Honebein, with assistance from Pai-Lin Chen and William Brescia. The project
was initially a portion of the 1991 Sociological Research Practicum, with funding
provided through the Institute of Social Research at Indiana University. A descrip-
tion of the goals and technical means of the hypermedia project is available from the
author.
The interviews were conducted between 1989 and 1992, after the initial occu-
pancy of the building. Interview transcripts were entered into the hypermedia envi-
ronment as 'text' files, and searched directly via the HyperKRS Search Application.
Other documents (the design paper trail, blueprints, photographs) were scanned in as
'graphic' files, and the search was conducted through keywords electronically
appended to each document.
11. DBA's 'Programme and Project Concept' phase report begins with the justification
for a new biotechnology building at Cornell, situates the project within the organiz-
ational context of the Division of Biological Sciences, lists members of the design
team, and outlines the basic criteria said to guide design decisions. Each 'functional
unit' (e.g. 'administration' or 'research space' at the highest level of aggregation,
'flexible environmental chamber' or 'fly rooms' at the lowest) is described in terms
of the activities and people who will occupy it, desired square footage, utilities
requirements (electrical, mechanical, HVAC) and its relationship to other functional
units (to resolve questions of 'adjacencies' and 'stacking'). These verbal and numer-
ical descriptions of spaces are accompanied by plans showing the architecture of the
proposed building - a two-dimensional graphic representation of spatial allocation
of functions and of utilities. As the project moves through schematics and design
development, verbal and numerical representations are refined and revised, and the
drawings assume sharper definition and detail.
12. A description of the 'Site Programme Requirements' prepared several months later
(10 December 1984) is even more explicit about the exclusion of this new public for
(from) the building: 'Corson-Mudd [an adjacent biology building] and Biotech are
research facilities, and do not include teaching laboratories or classrooms.
Undergraduate students are not normally expected to be in these buildings.'
13. A DBA architect told me that Cornell did not want people 'wandering through a lab-
oratory, potentially being exposed to stuff that he doesn't even know he's being
exposed to'. The idea was carried into the conceptual phase report of 16 April 1985:
'due to the potential of accidental exposure to dangerous substances, the building
design should clearly define research areas, with proper security and isolation'.
14. The minutes of a building committee meeting one week later (24 January 1985)
read: 'Visitors to be directed to contact points.' As we shall see in the case of labo-
ratories for 'visiting corporate scientists', some visitors get further inside the CUBB
-and stay there longer- than others.
15. One advantage in doing an electronic search for public and private is that the com-
puter works with no a priori assumptions about which appearances would be of
greater or lesser sociological interest - it looks for a defined character string any-
where, overlooking none of them. I was reminded of this when a search for
'privacy' took me to a meeting report of 18 December 1985, where the focus was on
telecommunications requirements. At first, I was excited, hoping to find some juicy
discussion of computer or phone security - but alas, the privacy in question
belonged not to humans but to non-humans. 'The "privacy" principle applies to all
Telecom (voice) wiring. The wiring is to be run in its own enclosures separated
from all other wiring. Separation is needed to assure system integrity.' Each wire
gets privacy from other wires. A later memo accused the architects of forgetting
this privacy principle, as they crammed several wires into the same conduit!
16. One scientist indicated (28 September 1990) that the public (taxpayers) and private
(corporate) parts arc not necessarily aligned: 'Companies are giving us money so we
could put up this building, and I assume if they are doing that, they figure ... that it's
worth it to them. Or they wouldn't be doing it anymore, giving us money. But, if
you are talking about to the public ... I don't know.'
17. The lobby has been used for weddings and ballroom dances, as well as scientific
meetings.
18. A faculty scientist in the eukaryotes research group told me: 'the common policy
here is that each faculty have the same space. Whether it is a junior faculty with five
students or a senior faculty with twenty students and post-docs. That was a sort of
general policy of this [building] committee' (28 September 1990). The origins and
implications of modular lab design at Cornell is discussed more fully in Gieryn,
'Building Social Structure: Laboratory Design and the Stabilization of a New
Science.'
19. Mainly because the technology of electrophoresis became cheaper, smaller, safer
and more often used, it was later decided to house it on wet benches in the private
labs, obviating the need for a special room in communal space. Is this a failure to
colonize the communal? Perhaps. But it points out a tradeoff inherent in the strat-
egy: successful colonization - locating equipment outside the lab - means more
steps needed to reach it (a loss of time so precious in the fast-paced world of
biotechnology).
13 'Nobody Can Force You
When You Are Across the
Ocean'- Face to Face and
E-Mail Exchanges Between
Theoretical Physicists
Martina Merz
SPACE- A logical conceptual form (or structure) serving as a medium in

which other forms and some structures are realized.
(Encyclopaedia of Mathematics)
1. INTRODUCTION
A physics laboratory is often seen as 'the place where an experiment is carried

out'. But what is a laboratory in theoretical physics or, more generally, in a theo-
retical science? Is it the desk, the office, the cafeteria, the institute's building? Not
really - let's transform the definition above into 'the place where something
happens'. Practices make 'something happen', they guide to the 'place where'.
Theoretical physicists 'closely' cooperate often with colleagues physically 'far
away'. This cooperation will be described in the following as 'disembedded col-
laborations', and the way these collaborations operate will lead us to their spaces:
the physical one and the electronic one.
Physical space is the space in which offices, research centres and institutes are
located and in which theoretical physicists move and travel. A physical place is
also where I am located as an ethnographic observer. 1 Since the autumn of 1991 I
have been conducting a 'laboratory study' 2 at the Theoretical Studies Division of
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva (Switzerland).
Electronic space, on the other hand, is the space through which e-mails, computer
files and programs are exchanged. In this chapter I will discuss how the theoret-
ical physicists' practices are rooted in the two spaces, and how - and for what
purpose - the observed physicists access both spaces, establish and exploit
various spatial configurations.
313
The notion of space used in the present paper is inspired by the one employed
in mathematics and physics. There, a space is specified by the number of its
dimensions, by its topology, and endowed with a metric. A metric determines
how distances between two space points are measured. The topology describes
the shape3 of a space, for example whether the space is connected or disconnected
(that is whether there exist paths from one region to another within the space). In
this chapter, the notions of metric and topology are - of course - used without
any claim to mathematical rigour. They guide the discussion: the concept of
metric is understood in terms of degrees of accessibility between physicists, the
concept of topology is connected with the (in)visibility of interactions and con-
tacts. The spaces will be distinguished along these lines. A similar concept of
space as defined by accessibility has been described by Giddens ( 1990: 18-19). 4
How are physical and electronic space related? Physical space is the underly-
ing, the reference space. It provides the coordinates on to which the physicists'
activities are mapped. It is the space from which 'travels' in electronic space are
undertaken. However, electronic space is a space in its own right, with a topology
and a metric distinct from those of physical space. These features impose, enable
and suggest practices of collaboration, of communication, of sharing and dividing
work, problems and objects between collaborators which may be different from
those in physical space. In practice, theoretical physicists only rarely place their
actions exclusively in one of the spaces and instead alternate between the two for
different collaborative and manipulative needs. They moreover alternate between
stays at home institutes and travels to other places, between interactive phases
and withdrawal to the desk, between talking and doing physics.
The structure of this chapter reflects the oscillations between physical places
and interaction in electronic space in the theorists' work. I will first introduce
disembedded collaborations (section 2) and then follow physicists to embedded
locales: I will discuss the preference for face to face interaction and its
significance for sustaining and enhancing non-personal, electronic interaction
(section 3). Next, I will discuss so-called centres and the extension of physical
space within them (section 4). I will then return to electronic space to specify
some characteristics of the work and interactions pursued in it (section 5). The
conclusions will lead back to the notion of a laboratory in a theoretical science
(section 6).
2. COMPUTERS, THEORETICAL OBJECTS AND DISEMBEDDED

COLLABORATIONS
Few theoretical particle physicists publish alone. Instead, the majority opts for
joint work with one or two, sometimes three colleagues. Collaborations that
stretch out over physical space - in the sense that they involve collaborators
located at relatively distant places - are very frequent in theoretical physics.
Martina Merz 315
These collaborations will be called disembedded collaborations. The term 'dis-

embedded' refers to the fact that the collaborative practices are (at least temporar-
ily) 'taken out' of a local (physical) context. Disembedded collaborations rely on
electronic connections. They are enabled by the type of apparatus theorists use
and by the specific nature of the theoretical objects.
The computer is the only concrete apparatus theorists manipulate. While theo-
rists rely heavily on access to their own computer accounts, the computer term-
inal as concrete apparatus from which the accounts are accessed is (almost)
exchangeable: due to the electronic connections between most computer systems
today theorists can access their accounts from whatever location and irrespective
of the type of the terminal or the computer system at hand. While the workbench
of a biologist provides a unique setting (and biologists have to travel in order to
visit the singular bench arrangements of a colleague), theorists can 'reproduce'
their place of work at each location that provides computer access. In contrast to
experimental scientists who are tied to apparatus embedded in a physical locale,
theoretical physicists are much less constrained to work in one particular setting.
Furthermore, theoretical objects,5 such as physical quantities, models, theories
and techniques, are symbolic entities without 'roots' or anchorage in physical
space. They are the building blocks from which theoretical physicists construct
the problems they wish to solve and the tools to do so. These objects have no
roots in physical space in the sense that they are immaterial, can be 'copied' and
'multiplied', and are available at whatever location. Exceptions are, for example,
some extensive computer programs that run only on certain machines and whose
adaptation to a new environment would be problematic.
The nature of theoretical objects and the unspecificity of computer terminals
permit theoretical physicists to be less attached to specific physical locations.
While travelling, theorists can therefore continue to work on a current project. On
the other hand, theorists depend less on the actual physical presence of their col-
laborators. As an example consider two theorists - confined by teaching obliga-
tions to their respective universities on different continents- who collaborate on
doing a time-consuming computation. Despite their physical distance they can
share tools (for example computer programs), physical objects, ideas and results
across continents by transferring them via e-mail or ftp (file transfer). In their
frequent e-mail correspondence ideas and results 'travel'. Theorists can even
simultaneously edit the same draft of a paper on the computer.
In this chapter, the space of electronic exchanges is treated on an equal footing
with physical space. Selecting e-mail interaction rather than telephone calls or
fax exchange (the other two means of immediate disembedded interaction) can be
legitimated by the theoretical physicists' practices. Most theorists are continu-
ously logged into at least one of their computer accounts. When a new e-mail
message arrives the computer terminal beeps, the theorists tum towards the
screen, check who sent the mail (is it a collaborator?), decide whether to read the
message immediately, whether to think about it and reply directly or instead
return to the prior occupation and leave the message for later consideration. The
computer beeps, that is incoming messages, structure the working days in a way
the telephone and fax do not. 6 The telephone rings only rarely, phone calls with
collaborators located at distant places are infrequent, they are expensive and the
collaborators are not always accessible (see Section 5.1 for advantages of e-mail
interaction over phone use). Faxes are even more rare: a theorist in the Theory
Division' sends or receives on the average one fax per week. Telephone and fax
are only used as an extension of, or a supplement to, e-mail exchanges.
Today, computer-mediated interaction is widely used for the purpose of collab-
orating across distant places; it also promotes collaboration. In theoretical physics
this development started approximately in the mid-1980s. Earlier, telephone and
letters were used to communicate across distant places. The impact of a broadly
available electronic communication network on the increase of disembedded col-
laborations should, however, not be overestimated. Other changes have occurred
in the same period which encourage such collaborations. For example, the geo-
graphic mobility of theoretical physicists has increased. Today it is common for a
theorist to sequentially hold several postdoctoral positions at different places (and
frequently in different countries or continents) before obtaining a permanent posi-
tion.8 As a theorist put it, during these postdoc years physicists also 'accumulate
collaborators'.
The profusion and rise of disembedded collaborations in theoretical particle
physics research can be illustrated by some numbers: 41 per cent of all theory
papers published in 1993 in Nuclear Physics B are authored by theorists who did
not all work in the same town (at the time the paper was submitted to the journal),
compared to 18 per cent in 1980. This amounts to an increase of more than a
factor 2 between 1980 and 1993.9 In 1993, 56 per cent of all collaborative papers
(that is those with two or more authors) were authored by theorists affiliated with
institutes in different towns.
One might assume that this volume of computer-mediated interaction leads to a
detachment of theoretical research from physical locations. However, e-mail
interaction is not a substitute for travelling and face to face interaction, as will be
discussed in the following.
3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FACE TO FACE: INTERACTION IN

PHYSICAL SPACE
Theorists are not confined to work near particle detectors or at workbenches;

they do not have to worry about natural objects; their work does not have to be
aligned with the beam time of a particle physics experiment (Traweek, 1988)
or with the life span of cell cultures. Besides offering access to computer
accounts, the theorists' working place is mainly a social environment, a place
to meet colleagues:
Martina Merz 317
You are sitting at a coffee table, say, and you meet some colleague and you say
'oh, so what are you doing now' and so on. And we start talking physics, and at
some point we realize we have something in common.( ... ) Sometimes we go a
long way doing this thing until we have realized that we have a collaboration.
(19/11/93; A264)
Newcomers to the Theory Division are expected to define their own projects and
problems (in contrast to the stronger determination of research topics, machinery
and colleagues by the 'local context' of a biology lab). Theorists constantly
search for new ideas and challenges, seek acquaintance with new objects and
techniques, and try to enrol new collaborators. 10 Typically, they publish a paper
every couple of months. With every paper, a current collaboration may come to
an end, and a new one be started. Theorists consider themselves 'on the move',
hunting exciting physics ideas. To that end, it does not suffice to gather informa-
tion by reading preprints and publications. In addition, theorists seek to expose
themselves (for example by travelling) to changing environments and influences,
and casually to share their experiences and ideas with a variety of colleagues.
This interaction I will call 'talking physics', a notion physicists use themselves.
Talking physics does not necessarily lead to a new project, and in fact many
exchanges do not, but it can be a first step. If new ideas emerge from the interac-
tion, they can be set to work: 'talking physics' is then followed by 'doing
physics' (another participants' notion), the deskwork stage of the project, which
starts once the problem is clearly defined. The collaborative work on a project
alternates between phases of 'talking' and phases of 'doing physics', and there
may be several of each. These phases are not necessarily neatly separated: they
can merge, intersect, and it is often not clear when talking ends and doing physics
starts. An example: while talking physics it might be necessary to engage in a
short computation in order for one collaborator to show the other what is on
her/his mind. When collaborators are present at the same place, they will do such
a computation together on the blackboard, as part of 'talking physics'. Talking
physics is the more conceptual part of the work; it is necessary not only for
setting up a problem but also for deciding along the way what the aims of the
project are, what kind of results are sought, and finally, how the obtained results
can and should be interpreted and presented in a publication. It is also important
for finding ways out of 'being stuck' (as theorists put it) in the middle of a com-
putation (Merz and Knorr Celina, forthcoming).
While working on a common project, interaction with colleagues is crucial in
all phases, but different phases favour different modes of interaction: in phases
where talking physics is essential, collaborators preferably meet face to face; in
phases of doing physics the collaborators keep each other informed about the
progress made and agree on the tasks to be accomplished next. Thus, doing
physics relies less on abundant face to face interaction. If collaborators share the
physical location all through a common project, the different phases can blend
unnoticed, and the rhythm and sequencing of meeting, talking, withdrawing to the
desk is arranged in a spontaneous way. Theorists involved in disembedded col-
laborations, in contrast, have to coordinate the sequence of the phases more
explicitly. They aim to interspace phases of electronic interaction with meetings
in physical space in order to fill the interaction requirements of the different
phases in a project. For example, they attempt to meet face to face when writing
up the results.
The following 'story' illustrates how a first casual exchange of ideas leads into
doing physics. However, in this case the result was not a new collaborative enter-
prise. On a sunny summer day a small group of theorists and I had lunch at one of
the numerous round tables in front of the CERN cafeteria. Among the theorists
was D, on sabbatical leave from his American home institute, and the visitor of
one month R, based at a Spanish university. In addressing the entire tableD men-
tioned a problem he tried to tackle; R told me about the lunch discussion and its
continuation in an interview:
It was basically that he (D) asked me whether I knew something about a

specific problem in quantum mechanics. ( ... )For the zero modes of quantum
chromodynamics he has a potential which has some directions in which the
potential doesn't grow. ( ... )And then he asked me whether I knew anything
about these types of potentials. Now I told him that yes, that I knew something
about these potentials, and I mentioned to him a reference( ... )
. Then it was mainly him, he dropped in with some point. You know that he
always likes to discuss with people. So at some point he dropped in and men-
tioned to me some other problems related to this work he's doing within fact
with somebody in Barcelona.( ... ) And OK, so I started looking a little bit at
his work. ( ... )
And then at some point he asked me 'well, would you like to join this
project?'. Now at that stage then I told him 'well, that will force me to look a
little bit carefully through it', and that I did, and then I decided to tell him that I
was not ready to get into it. (26/05/94, A457)
As the preceding story illustrates, extending 'space' and opening it up for talking
physics face to face is deeply related to a particular mode of interacting, of
getting in touch. As theorists put it: interaction should not be forced, it should
just happen, talking physics should come naturally. One should allow it to be
casual, non-final, provisory, informal. One prerequisite for this to occur is the
theorists' visibility (see also Section 4.2) to one another, so that they meet
regularly without having to organize it. At the Theory Division, for example,
hardly anything is formally organized. An exception is its rich seminar pro-
gramme which features talks almost on a daily basis and provides a framework
for theorists to meet and chat. The informal, casual character of interaction is
extended to the theorists' means of communicating, for example to the way
Martina Me17. 319
notes are taken when talking physics: scribbling on the blackboard is provisional
in that the chalkmarks are not preserved, notes taken on a piece of paper while
discussing appear chaotic afterwards, formulae scattered all over the sheet. with
no traces of what was written first. (This is followed by a process of 'writing up'
afterwards.) Occasionally one observes theorists in the cafeteria eagerly scrib-
bling on paper napkins.
4. ON THE MOVE TO FACE TO FACE: TRAVELS AND EMBEDDED

LOCALES
Theoretical physicists seem to be among the most passionate travellers in science.

They travel in physical space, they occupy and appropriate it for their needs, they
'make space' in the sense of unfolding territories of co-operation and competi-
tion.l1 Theorists travel to attend conferences, workshops and schools; they gather
at physics centres and visit physics institutes other than their own in order to give
talks, discuss casually, work with collaborators or set up new collaborations and
projects (see Section 4.1); they spread out over geographical space during their
scientific careers; they move throughout office and institute space to enhance
communication with colleagues (see Section 4.2).
Conference settings constitute 'extra-ordinary' sites of scientific activity in that
scientists have to interrupt their daily research practices when attending meet-
ings. The interruption of the daily routine is aimed at and put to usage as a device
to encourage and intensify the exchange of ideas between physicists. For
example, many physics meetings are held in locations of 'great natural beauty'
such that the scientists can also join for recreational activities. Theorists take
advantage of conferences to talk physics with colleagues but new projects only
rarely arise from these interactions. Theorists involved in disembedded collabora-
tions may seize the opportunity of a conference to meet face to face with remote
collaborators.
Conferences and the theorists' exploitation of them exhibit some characteris-
tics which are similar to those exhibited by a different kind of embedded locales,
so-called research centres.
4.1 Privileged Locales: Theoretical Physics Research Centres
Research centres play an important role in theoretical particle physics. They consti-
tute environments which resemble conference settings in their ways of stimulating
the visitors' interaction with colleagues. Research centres are distinct from confer-
ence settings in that they create 'space' for doing physics in addition to (and pro-
longing) talking physics. The fact that visitors can engage in doing physics - either
by continuing projects that were initiated elsewhere or by starting new ones - is due
to the nature of the theorists' objects and tools (as discussed in Section 2).
Centres 12 constitute local contexts of physical space (next to the smaller units
in universities): they are privileged physical sites. One could say that the commu-
nity of particle physicists is constructed 'around' and tied up by centres. Some
more words about CERN and its Theory Division may illustrate this.
The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, has more than 6000
users, which amounts to about half of the world's particle physicists (Rubbia
1994). Its Theory Division, administratively distinct from the 'PPE Division'
(Particle Physics Experiments Division), plays host to several hundred physicists
every year. At a time, about 120 to 150 theorists (visitors of several days not
included) from all over Europe and many other countries are present. More than
70 per cent of them stay at CERN for two years or less. 13 The scientists are con-
ducting research in a wide spectrum of theoretical particle physics topics, ranging
from the construction of fundamental theories and models, which involves the
most modern mathematics (a field called 'formal theory' or 'mathematical
physics'), to work closely related to current and future experiments, concerning
the analysis and prediction of results (a field called 'phenomenology').
Centres like CERN and the theorists' travel activities connect particle physics
groups at university departments. Often such groups are small with colleagues
working on only loosely related topics. The physical 'isolation' of theorists in
such groups can be overcome by travels to a centre like CERN. Theorists visit
with the intention and desire to let themselves be influenced by the centre's liveli-
ness, and to indulge in a profusion of contacts. At the centre theorists pick up new
developments in a field (profiting from the numerous talks and from the presence
of experts in all fields of theoretical particle physics research), talk physics with
colleagues and engage in new projects. Most senior theorists have met before, for
example when spending time together as research fellows at the Theory Division
many years ago; most visit CERN not for the first time but repeat their stays at
regular time intervals. Some theorists appreciate the Theory Division as a place to
'hide' from the administrative and teaching obligations of their home institutes;
they come to CERN on sabbatical leave in order to devote their time entirely to
research. Young theorists, at CERN often present as research fellows or postdocs,
initiate contacts with colleagues for future use and set up new collaborations.
Centres are privileged sites for 'freshening up' existing contacts and initiating
new ones between theoretical physicists (and between phenomenologists and
experimental physicists). These contacts can last a lifetime. At CERN they are put
to work in joint efforts to define, attack and resolve physics problems. Thus, as
centres become important points of intersection of existing and future (most often)
disembedded collaborations, they catalyse new projects and collaborations.
The Theory Division is a meeting place for theorists from all over the world.
But also theorists based at CERN travel widely. For example, they visit the
'Aspen Center for Physics' (Colorado, USA), a location where each summer
mainly theoretical physicists - most of them affiliated with an American univer-
sity - gather for several weeks to work. The Aspen Center is mainly a 'summer
Martina Men; 321
centre' (with some conferences held in January as well). Unlike CERN, it has no
permanent physics staff, and all visitors come for several weeks only. The follow-
ing announcement of the Aspen Center's 1995 Programme illustrates how an
embedded locale is appropriated for doing physics.
PROGRAM: ( ... )The Center provides a place for physicists and astrophysi-
cists to work on their research with minimal distraction in a stimulating atmos-
phere, and in a location of great natural beauty. ( ... )
Individual research: The main Center program is unstructured and concen-
trates on individual research and the informal exchange of ideas. About 400
physicists and astrophysicists from about I 00 institutions participate in the
Center's summer program, with 80-85 in residence at any time.( ... )
Collaborations: The Center provides a location where physicists from distant
institutions can meet for intensive research collaboration. Small informal col-
laborations are encouraged and efforts will be made to accommodate people
wishing to work together.
Workshops: Equally important to the Aspen Summer Program are the informal
workshops that serve as focal points on topics of current interest. Workshops are
very informal, with an extremely limited number of talks so that participants have
ample time for informal discussion and to initiate new work.( ... )
The Aspen Center models the ideal research environment for theoretical physicists:
it is closed in that 'external' commitments of the participants are absent ('unfettered
by the normal responsibilities of classrooms and corporations'). Space is opened up
in the Center for talking as well as for doing physics. Emphasis is put on the
informal character of the gatherings. Collaborators and would-be collaborators are
drawn together in physical space, colleagues involved in disembedded collabora-
tions engage temporarily in embedded interaction. In a sense, space becomes
condensed in the centre in the form of new collaborative enterprises.
4.2 Extending Space: Posters, Doors and Corridors
Once theorists are present at an embedded locale (a physics institute or a centre),

they use further strategies (besides travelling) to promote and encourage face to face
interaction, to enhance, strengthen and multiply contact with one another. At the
Theory Division, all theorists are located in neighbouring offices on two different
floors. Some single offices are available mainly for staff members but most theorists
share offices with one or two colleagues. The secretaries scatter theorists over vacant
offices in such a way that clustering along nationalities and research specialities is
avoided. All theorists are located in the vicinity of one another but the Theory
Division as a physical location is not subdivided into smaller work units such as
laboratories are for experimental sciences. For example, collaborators only rarely
share an office.
Spatial arrangements can lead to the extension of openly accessible space

within an institute, and thus encourage talking physics. At the Theory Division,
office doors are typically open. Open doors not only create the impression of
accessibility to offices and colleagues but also cause an expansion of the physical
space which becomes within reach of the entire group. Passing theorists look in,
physicists in the office look out, watching passers-by. Life in the corridors is
busy, theorists leave their office to look for mail, get their print-outs, make photo-
copies, see the secretaries and colleagues, chat with people they meet in the corri-
dor. Some theorists walk up and down in front of their office, lost in thought.
Open office doors symbolize open space, and theorists express through it their
willingness to be interrupted, for example for talking physics, and they are. Two
or three discussing theorists then gather in front of the blackboard where they try
to record an idea, an image before it fades.
Office doors are not only open, they are also not stylized as entrances to a more
private place: the only reminders of the offices' occupants are the name tags on
the doors; some theorists put up announcements of upcoming conferences, old
ones are often not removed. The pervasiveness of conference announcements-
there are about 40 to be found on the floor walls and office doors - acts as a
strong reminder of a travel culture (like the posters of foreign sceneries exhibited
in travel agencies).
My personal frame of reference is a particular university's sociology depart-
ment, which might not be typical. To illustrate the contrast: in this department the
corridors were dark, most doors closed and only the secretaries were seen
passing, chatting once in a while with one of their colleagues. Theoretical physi-
cists are visible during all the stages of their work, while talking and while doing
physics. They do not hide from view and work in secrecy as sociologists in some
countries. The theorists' visibility symbolizes the accessibility of the colleagues,
it encourages them to make contact.
Although to me the Theory Division appears like a beehive when compared to
the above sociology department, some mainly young theorists find it hard to profit
from and plunge into the knowledge and communication 'pool' the Theory
Division provides. They blame this on the size of the Theory Division, combined
with the lack of a more formal structuring of the working days. As improvement
they suggest that a coffee machine be installed in the common room where theorists
could meet and while drinking coffee casually engage in one of the typical conver-
sations opening with the question: 'And what are you currently working on?'
5. RETURN TO ELECTRONIC SPACE
Theoretical physicists not only rely on the infrastructure available at physical

locales but also on a growing extent on tools, facilities and services which they
retrieve from 'the net'. An example: the actual CERN library is today often
Martina Merz 323
frequented as the location of a special printer on which the theorists print the
preprints received from one of the electronic archives. Theorists connect to com-
puter14 networks to access public accounts and e-print archives (for example the
'hep-ph' as theorists call it in short, that is the phenomenology section of the
'High Energy Physics E-print Archive') 15 in order to accelerate and facilitate
the acquisition and spread of software, computer codes and preprints (to mention
only some examples).
Theorists above all connect to computer networks to exchange e-mails with
collaborators and colleagues. 16 The remainder of the section will focus on these
interactions: first, in discussing how disembedded collaborations are sustained
and shaped by electronic connections and second, in discussing whether locales
in electronic space exist in which theorists socialize and which might be consid-
ered as 'new versions of the cafe'.
5.1 A Matter of Metric: 'Distances' in Disembedded Collaborations
Theorists involved in a disembedded collaboration rely on electronic connections

on a day to day basis, as a direct link between the collaborators. A theorist sends
out and receives e-mails from each collaborator; often the same mails are for-
warded to all collaborators. Exchanges of several e-mails per day are frequent. A
disembedded locale is thus spanned by the 'web' of electronic connections
between the collaborators.
In the process of doing physics, electronic interaction can be very efficient and
may even save time (see below). Talking physics is possible via e-mail too, but
theorists prefer to talk face to face. Occasionally collaborations start through
e-mail messages, sometimes between theorists who have not met before. 17 Most
projects of disembedded collaborations, however, are initiated face to face. Some
long-term collaborators meet only rarely, decide on new projects and write up old
results communicating exclusively by e-mail.
The e-mail connections open up electronic space by spanning disembedded
locales between collaborators. Electronic space has a metric different from that of
physical space, which manifests itself in the theorists' judgement of who (and
what) is considered to be close or distant. 'Closeness' in electronic space is
defined by the accessibility of the other by e-mail. Distant collaborators con-
nected to a computer network are accessible irrespective of their physical loca-
tion; their displacement in physical space (for example when travelling) is only
noticeable when they lose access to their computer accounts. In this sense elec-
tronic communication is entirely decoupled from the coordinate system of physi-
cal space. E-mail interaction allows for transforming distance in physical space
into 'closeness' (that is accessibility).
Degrees of accessibility vary: through e-mailing a 'real time' dialogue can be
carried on in which messages can reach the other without time delay and replies
may come in only moments later; a message can, however. also be saved for later
reading or a delayed response. Interacting through e-mail thus combines the

promptness of phone calls with the temporal flexibility of s-mail (snail mail). The
collaborators time the replies according to the status of the project. The more
(and the more often) the replies are delayed, the larger the distance between col-
laborators. The theorists exploit the different degrees of accessibility according to
their interactional needs and take advantage of external constraints. An example:
saving messages for later reading is of particular interest to those interacting
across time zones. Distance in physical space can then be transformed into a new
time organizational structure of the work: when separated by several time zones,
a collaboration can work 'around the clock'. Questions sent by a collaborator in
the evening here are answered 'during the night' by the distant colleague there so
that new problems can be attacked here the next morning. This is conceived by
the collaborators as an increase in efficiency.
Interacting via e-mail in the course of a project may speed up work because the
medium- enforcing written text- imposes that concrete statements be made, that
collaborators focus on the essential questions to be resolved without becoming
distracted by other interesting physics ideas. Also, physics questions can be posed
without preliminaries, without first informing 'How are your wife and kids?' -as
a (male) theorist might do on the phone. The e-mail partners seem reduced to
their roles as the performing scientists in the sense that they vanish as a person;
the social relations become reconfigured by the disembodied e-mail interactions
(at least in the course of the exchanges). 18
On the other hand, interacting via e-mail can slow down work because it
hinders the interactiveness and spontaneity 'talking physics' requires, because
'chatting' over e-mail is more difficult (or even impossible, as some theorists
claim), because in some phases (for example when the project is not yet well
defined) 'loose statements' are requ!red. Here, the personality of the physicists
forces itself back into the picture: between collaborators who do not know each
other well, misunderstandings are likely to occur. These misunderstandings are
hard to detect over e-mail because the 'nuances' of the messages get lost and the
questioning look of the other remains invisible.
The theorists can make the different metrics of physical and electronic space
interfere: the distance in physical space in combination with the collaborators'
electronic accessibility is put to creative usage by disembedded collaborations.
The combination 'physical distance- electronic closeness' matches the theorists'
attempted balance between the preference for independence and the wish not to
struggle alone (by opting for collaborative work). Theorists claim 'space' for
themselves, which they need for unfolding their creativity. They prefer not to be
continuously 'bothered', to follow their own tempo when doing a computation or
solving a technical problem without having somebody 'look over their shoulder';
they want to explore objects, techniques, problems without all too tight bounds.
The sought-for (temporary) 'distance' and independence is maintained by the col-
laborators' separation in physical space. In the words of a theorist: 'Nobody can
Martina Merz 325
force you when you are across the ocean'. In a disembedded collaboration, the
collaborators (and the work they perform) become partially invisible to each
other. This 'partial invisibility' is used as a tool.
The separation of collaborators (in physical space) safeguards against the isola-
tion of the collaboration from the rest of the scientific community and encourages
each collaborator to contact also other colleagues. The collaborators orient them-
selves towards others in some phases and draw close again later, as the following
interview quote exemplifies:
I think it is important that we [he and his two collaborators] don't see each
other for a while, and then come together with new ideas in a period where cal-
culations really have to be done, or where you really have to stimulate each
other in order to compute something specific. (20/06/93, B 183)
Last but not least, it is a strategy in theoretical physics to work out parts of a
problem in isolation in order to ensure the reliability and validity of the outcome.
Theorists extensively check and cross check, test, verify and compare their own
results and those obtained by the collaborators, final results as well as results
obtained at intermediate stages of the work. In the course of these procedures, the
other's work is consciously made invisible.
For the reasons mentioned theorists prefer collaborations which are not 'symbi-
otic', and a built-in 'device' to create distance is favourable. Shifting face to face
contact to disembodied e-mail contact is a possible means: isolation is achieved
without effort when collaborators are located at different physical places.
Theorists simulate and create closeness regardless of the actual physical distance
between them and their colleagues. The restrictions imposed by distance in physi-
cal space are softened, the priority of presence (over absence) in physical space is
loosened. In a similar way, distance can be simulated and created even among col-
laborators who share an office. The theorists' efficient collaborating draws on
accessing different spaces and metrics for different communicative needs.
5.2 The Invisibility of Disembedded Locales
One might wonder whether locales exist in electronic space which can be consid-
ered as a 'new version of the cafe' for particle theorists. The answer is no.
Extended e-mail discussions open to participation of many physicists as those
witnessed among the subscribers of some discussion groups do not exist. A news-
group for particle physics discussions exists but the theorists I met at CERN do
not subscribe. The theorists' e-mails typically have a few definite addressees. 19
Talking physics, both face to face and over e-mail, rarely involves more than
three or four theorists. Where it does, for example in spontaneously arising dis-
cussions triggered by a presentation, all participants gather around the same
blackboard in a physical locale. On the net, only collaborators engage in
extensive physics discussions and it is for interaction between collaborators that

e-mail is most intensely used.
Shorter exchanges of e-mail, however, are also effected between colleagues
who do not work together. Some interaction partners are close friends, some
know each other quite well because they have spent time together at a research
centre, others have not met face to face. The e-mail addresses are available from
various sources: for example they are listed with the authors' names on the front
pages of preprints and publications. Theorists engage in an e-mail exchange for
a variety of reasons, of which some examples are: an exchange may follow up
a physics discussion electronically which was started face to face; this discussion
will most probably lead either to a collaboration or be ended after a short
sequence of replies. An exchange between colleagues who know each other well
may be of the question-answer type, one theorist drawing on the expertise of
the other, for example when the latter is asked to provide ideas for existing
approaches to particular physics problems. Another exchange of the question-
answer type may start with a reader's enquiry about certain aspects of a public-
ation (for example concerning the origin and derivation of a formula) which
is first forwarded to and then answered by the author. E-mail exchanges also
occur in the struggle for recognition, for example, when theorists complain to a
colleague because the latter has omitted to reference one of their papers in a pub-
lication. E-mail exchanges of the mentioned types typically involve only two
interaction partners. Sometimes an e-mail is forwarded to third persons with a
request for further comments.
E-mail interaction is private and the interaction partners stay between them-
selves. Disembedded locales and what goes on in them- who communicates with
whom on what topic- remain therefore 'invisible' to the theorists not directly
involved. As a result of the lack of discussion groups and other open forums on
the net, the colleagues who are not in direct e-mail contact remain electronically
'invisible' to one another as well (in contrast to the high visibility of their
scientific output, the preprints they post to the electronic preprint systems). For
example, no third person can join in a discussion because of the joint presence at
a certain locale; situations as described (section 3) for theorists meeting around a
lunch table have no equivalent in electronic space. The invisibility of e-mail con-
tacts forms a contrast to the theorists' visibility at a centre. It defines a topology
which is clearly distinct from that of physical space: the disembedded locales of
interacting theorists correspond to disconnected regions ('islands of interaction')
in electronic space.
E-mail connections cut across geographic distances and allow close contact
between selected e-mail partners (of course, the theorists themselves make
these selections) at an expense: they do not allow for the contingencies, the
spontaneity and informality 20 which play such an important role in initiating
and maintaining the embodied contacts of face to face. As the casual chats wit-
nessed in a cafe heavily rely on the customers' visibility amongst each other,
Martina Merz 327
the only 'version of the cafe' for theorists at CERN is the actual cafeteria.
Disembedded locales do - at least today - not substitute for such 'cafes' in
theoretical particle physics.21
6. CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
What is a laboratory in a theoretical science? And what, then, is its 'place'? The
notion of laboratory developed in laboratory studies centres around the 'local
context' of scientific work (the 'local situatedness' of research practices, the
'local construction' of scientific facts). 22 This local context is often anchored in
physical space. I propose to extend the notion of laboratory by taking into
account that the joint work in numerous collaborations in theoretical physics is
(at least) temporarily detached from a single physical location and 'takes place' in
disembedded as well as embedded locales: A 'disembedded laboratory' -as I
will call it - is spanned by electronic connections and the theorists' travelling
activities. It is determined by the interactive and manipulative practices which
accumulate around a research project.
In this chapter, I have discussed the two spaces mainly as spaces of interaction.
I have described how theorists alternate between interaction in physical and elec-
tronic space, how electronic exchanges are an extension of face to face interaction
and a precursor, but no direct substitute. These observations lead to the conclu-
sion that travelling does not become obsolete when theorists are connected by
e-mail. On the contrary, the ease of e-mail interaction encourages theorists to join
in collaborations with physically distant colleagues, and thus perpetuates the need
for travelling in the future.
I have not given a detailed account of the theorists' object manipulations as
rooted in the two spaces. Such an account would have required more 'book space'
than available. Therefore, the following questions will - for the moment - remain
unanswered: how do theorists engaged in disembedded collaborations share,
exchange and divide problems and objects? How do the collaborators split up or
parallel the work between each other? Are the rhythm and sequencing of these
actions different when performed in an embedded or instead a disembedded locale?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research underlying this chapter was financially supported by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft and conducted with the help of the Institute for
Science and Technology Studies, University of Bielefeld. I want to thank
the theoretical physicists at CERN for their hospitality and cooperation, and
the sociologists Karin Knorr Cetina, Stefan Hirschauer and Luc Gauthier for
valuable comments.
NOTES
I. The ethnographic methods employed are direct observation and ethnographic inter-
views. In addition, e-mails exchanged between collaborating physicists are collected
and analysed. ·
2. See Knorr Cetina and Mullroy (1983) and Knorr Celina (1995) for reviews of labo-
ratory studies.
3. To be more precise, the topology describes those properties of shapes and figures
which remain invariant under certain transformations, as bending or stretching.
4. See Ophir and Shapin (1991) for a 'methodological survey' of research on spatial
settings and their relation to the production of knowledge. See Mol and Law ( 1994)
for a discussion of several kinds of space inspired by the notion of 'topology' in
mathematics.
S. A more detailed account of the ontology of theoretical objects will be given in a
subsequent paper.
6. The working days are of course also structured by other events, such as colleagues
knocking at the door, lunch and coffee breaks, seminar talks, etc.
7. 'Theory Division' will each time refer to the Theoretical Studies Division of CERN.
8. The situation varies from country to country but the trend seems to be universal.
9. Nuclear Physics B is one of the major journals in which particle theorists publish.
An analysis of all issues between 1980 and today would provide a more exact
picture about the dynamics of the increase of disembedded collaborations. This
analysis will be presented in a subsequent paper.
10. This does not hold for all particle theorists: some collaborate with the same
colleagues over a long stretch of time up to several years, some are involved in a
long-term project which can be defined long in advance.
11. Access to the Theory Division is considered a valuable good. Time spent at CERN
as a research fellow or a staff member constitutes an important asset in a young the-
orist's curriculum vitae. In the competition on the job market but also in the struggle
for recognition CERN is occupied as a territory.
12. CERN is not the only research centre in which theoretical particle physicists gather.
Further examples are DESY (Hamburg, FRG), ICTP (Trieste, Italy), Nordita
(Copenhagen, Denmark) in Europe; SLAC (near San Francisco), Fermilab (near
Chicago), ITP (Santa Barbara) and lAS (Princeton) in the US. Some centres of theo-
retical research coexist with experimental sites, near the accelerators and detectors
of high energy physics experiments (e.g. CERN). Others are devoted entirely to the-
oretical physics research (e.g. ICTP). The centres typically provide financial
support, a desk and computer facilities to visitors (the number varies from centre to
centre), staying various periods of time ranging from a couple of days to one or two
years.
13. Among the theoretical physicists at CERN 18 per cent are staff members; 52 per
cent are fellows, postdocs or other visitors staying one to two (occasionally three)
years; 22 per cent are visitors staying from one to eight months (very often senior
scientists on leave of absence or sabbatical leave); and 8 per cent are PhD students
staying variable periods of time. The numbers are approximate only. They refer to
April 1995. In the summer, the percentage of short-term visitors increases clearly.
14. Theoretical physicists perform many different tasks with the help of computers. In
addition to the above mentioned, computers are used for numerical or symbolic
computations and for text processing.
IS. Theorists often refer to the relevant e-print archives as 'the bulletin board'. Ginsparg
(1994), however, emphasizes the difference between the 'formal communication' -
Martina Merz 329
the exchange of abstracts and research papers- provided by an e-print archive and the
'informal (and unarchived) communication' provided by electronic bulletin boards.
16. For comparison with other fields, see Walsh and Bayma (forthcoming) who discuss
the incorporation of computer mediated communication across mathematics, chem-
istry, biology and (mostly experimental) physics, and Lewenstein (1995) who dis-
cusses the electronic bulletin boards active during the 'cold fusion saga'.
17. How the collaborative practices between theorists who never met face to face differ
from those of collaborations rooted in face to face contact is up to now an un-
resolved issue but will be studied in the future.
18. The concept of a reconfiguration of the social and natural order in a laboratory is
developed by Knorr Cetina ( 1992) and applied to the case of experimental particle
physics (Knorr Cetina, 1996).
19. An exception are e-mails sent out to spread information widely, as for example
conference announcements.
20. An element of informality pertains to practices of e-mail exchange as well, but it
occurs on a different level: e-mail 'letters' are most often written in a casual style,
mixing elements of written and spoken language.
21. One may contrast this observation with Wulfs 'vision' of 'a center without walls,
in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to
physical location' (Wulf, 1993), a centre which Wulf calls a 'collaboratory'.
22. See Knorr Cetina ( 1995: 156-7) for an overview and references.
Afterword: Scientific
Knowledge, Power and Space
Alex Dolby
It is hoped that the chapters in this volume will provide a stimulus to and a
resource for further research into the spatial character of scientific activity. This
afterword discusses one idea about how this might be done.
The fascination with making space for science is part of a wider interest,
typified by Foucault and Revel, in the role of space in the relationship of knowl-
edge and power. Foucault was especially concerned with the intimate links of
knowledge and power, and in particular with the way knowledge is shaped and
used as a resource for the exercise of power. The different chapters in this book
pay attention to spatial aspects of power in the creation of knowledge and other
scientific activities. In this afterword, I offer the idea that the spatialisation of
processes that use knowledge as a means to power are very often distinct from
those which regard power as a means to knowledge. Revel looked mainly at the
spaces involved when powerful patrons commissioned and then used knowledge
so as to advance their interests. In contrast, the historical actors studied in this
volume are the often less worldly people who actually create the knowledge. For
them, power mainly relates to gaining control of spatial and other resources
within which knowledge may be created with minimal interference.
I will set out the essence of my idea in terms of two idealizations of scientific
activity. In their simplest, most traditional form, these idealisations would abstract
science from context. In the papers of this volume, which I will use for illustrative
material, scientific and non-scientific factors are seen to be inseparable.
1. THE KNOWLEDGE-POWER RELATIONSHIP IN THE VARlOUS

SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE CREATION
There is a widespread ideological urge within the sciences to separate the episte-
mologically important processes of knowledge creation from any other activity
which might unduly interfere with them. Where such a separation can be made,
the spatial aspects of the power-knowledge relationship might be seen in terms of
a four-phase cycle of activity.
In phase one, patronage, power relates to the formation of alliances between those
who, already having power, seek knowledge in order to use it more effectively
330
Alex Dolby 331
and those who, hoping to be able to create knowledge, seek the resources to do it.
The patrons need ways of advancing their aims in the struggles of the social elite.
They are tempted to listen to the promises of the creators of knowledge, who need
money, manpower and materials. The knowledge creators in seeking to control
resources for their science, measure their interim success in terms of being able to
defend a territory sufficient to carry out the intended activities. The rhetorics
employed and the alliances formed in the search for social support operate within
physical and conceptual spaces accessed by both the patrons and the scientific prac-
titioners. These spaces can be viewed from the perspective of either group. In phase
two of the cycle of scientific activity, the performance of scientific research, the
power-knowledge relationship most often relates to the scientific practitioners'
desire for freedom to do research as they wish with as little disturbing interference as
possible. Power becomes the ability to control the circumstances of one's own life,
while using the resources made available in phase one. The spaces involved are
often given boundaries to protect individual or group privacy, and efforts may be
made to limit access by patrons and others.
Phase three of the cycle of scientific activity is that of the negotiation of knowl-
edge within the scientific community. Critical acceptance of knowledge-claims
culminates in their active use by other practitioners. Initial recognition of the
significance of a new claim may require the formation of allegiances between
factions, especially if it is at all controversial. The processes by which new
knowledge comes to be taken seriously and to be used constructively, involve
informal communication, the movement of individuals and formal communica-
tion within disciplinary structures. All these processes involve another special set
of spaces, the geographically extended social spaces of scientific communication.
These spaces are made up by the relationships of the actions and interactions of
individuals in scientific communities. The role of power in such relationships can
be quite different from that of the other phases.
Finally, in phase four, knowledge used, knowledge which has at least some
credibility becomes a resource in the power games of the patrons who commis-
sioned it, of the practitioners who created it, of subsequent science and of wider
society. Knowledge can be used for such purposes as a foundation for new
scientific arguments, a source of scientific authority, for public display, to give
support to wider knowledge claims as in ideology, or for such practical purposes
as the creation or improvement of technology. The spaces involved in the use of
knowledge are often more socially engaged than those of the second and third
phases. A sign of the different kinds of power involved is the awareness that there
can be a conflict between motivations linked to the creation and to the use of
knowledge. The doctrine that scientific practice should be disinterested is a
device for the avoidance of such conflict.
Some insight into the first of these phases can be gained by considering the
interesting relationship between the approach of Revel to knowledge of the terri-
tory, discussed in the introduction to this volume, which concentrates on the
patrons and their interest in constructing knowledge to exercise power, and Jim
Bennett's study in this volume of the practitioners of the new practical geometry
of the Renaissance. Bennett's chapter takes the viewpoint of knowledge construc-
tors. The geometers had different interests from their patrons. They needed
freedom to advance knowledge the way they wanted, and they also required
recognition from the wider society - appreciation of the value of what they were
doing and of how well they had done it. Understanding of the relationship of
power to potential knowledge should, ideally, study both points of view as we
look at the spatial nature of such political allegiances.
The historical actor's perception of tension between the context of patronage
and the context of performance of scientific research is nicely documented in Alix
Cooper's study of Dolomieu. Throughout his life, Dolomieu had clear but chang-
ing conceptions of the ideal way to do his kind of scientific voyaging. When,
after the revolution, he worked as an inspector of mines for the corps de mines,
he thought he had found a satisfactory compromise with the requirements of his
employers by voyaging through mountainous parts of France and inspecting the
mines to be found there. But when called up for Napoleon's expedition to Egypt,
the constraints imposed by his new duties were too severe for him. There was too
much sand and too few rocks or mountains. He abandoned the regimentation of
life in Egypt, in the hope of recovering the freedom to voyage in his own way. To
find himself in an Italian prison was the precise opposite of what he wanted.
The conditions imposed by patrons upon the performance of science is espe-
cially obvious in the larger scale projects of the twentieth century. For example, in
Jon Agar's study of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the elite of Government
science, who were the key patrons of the new instrument, sought to make the tele-
scope a privileged site, an object of national display. It was important to Lovell to
control a physical space around the telescope, free of public activity, along with
partial control over a much larger area in order to keep interfering sources of radio
noise at bay. The display function of the telescope obliged Lovell to allow access
to various classes of interested public. To keep the cherished research freedom
of his research team, the eventual compromise followed the model of the big
Californian telescopes, in which the visiting general public were kept behind bar-
riers. It was just as important to Lovell to seek control of astronomically interest-
ing parts of the spectrum of radio frequencies, excluding all interfering activities
from this conceptual space. Lovell was also prepared to sacrifice a potential
alliance with Husband, the engineer in charge of building the radio telescope, in
order to keep the day-to-day operation of the telescope out of the control of engin-
eers, as Husband proposed. All this territorial activity was intended to optimize
the ability of his research team to seek knowledge with its radio telescope.
Thomas Gieryn's study of the new biotechnology building at Cornell focuses
upon the construction of a hierarchy of separated public and private spaces within
the building. Among the publics who had to be allowed into substantial spaces in
the building were the industrial and other patrons of the building. The large foyer
Alex Dolby 333
and open access meeting places were, in part, for their benefit. The students of the
university, another kind of public, had their access limited in rather different
ways. Gieryn's chapter shows clearly how, in the various stages of the planning
process, the uneasy political allegiances within and between groups responsible
for creating and using the building, were translated into negotiations over the
control of the spaces of the building.
Several chapters tell us of ideals of research space in particular cases. Martina
Merz, for example, tells us that the Aspen centre for physics in Colorado, which
is mainly a summer centre, is regarded by many as 'the ideal research environ-
ment for theoretical physicists'. She also explains that different kinds of asso-
ciation are required by theoretical physicists for 'talking physics' and for 'doing
physics'. Once a discussion has set up a collaborative project, it is not so import-
ant for the collaborators to associate in person, and frequent exchange of material
by e-mail can serve just as well for collaborators who teach in widely separated
institutions. For theoretical physics, the ideal of the researchers is to shape their
circumstances so as to optimize research freedom.
An earlier ideal of research space for experimental physicists may have been
the Victorian country houses in which gentlemen sometimes did research. As
Simon Schaffer's chapter shows in the case of Rayleigh, the connection was very
close between research in such a country house setting and his successful
modification of the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge.
Several chapters in this volume examine research which is intimately con-
nected to teaching and to technical practice. In the chapters by Ben Marsden and
by Crosbie Smith, the central concern is with teaching spaces at Glasgow
University. In the early 1840s, Lewis Gordon failed to win a power base within
the university with the aid of which he could gain control of the spaces he
thought he needed to teach civil engineering in the manner of best continental
practice. Later in the same decade, as changes to the Glasgow professoriate made
it less conservative, William Thomson had the help of his father and other allies
to command space suitable for teaching natural philosophy. Thomson used some
of these teaching spaces not merely to display and store instruments in the
manner of a museum, but also to do research for scientific and commercial, as
well as pedogogical, purposes.
In the chapters by Sophie Forgan and by Graeme Gooday, the spaces intended
for technical teaching were subject to additional constraints because they were
sited in London. The buildings were to be inserted into a large city with many
competing activities and values. City spaces are heterogeneous. In choosing sites
and designs, the contrasting rhetorics of architects, scientists and others had to be
reconciled. A crowded place like London obviously requires difficult compro-
mises. Graeme Gooday's chapter focuses upon one of these compromises, the
relative merits of placing a new institution for technical training in South
Kensington rather than near the factories, whose workers it was intended that it
should train.
The relationship of power and knowledge is different in the third phase of

scientific activity, the negotiation of knowledge claims. Two chapters in this
volume serve to illustrate such spaces. Cooper's study of Dolomieu tells us that
he seemed to be trying to construct disciplinary spaces that matched his own ideal
form of voyaging. But he does not seem to have succeeded. Dolomieu would
have made where a plant or a mineral or a geological formation is found as
important in the construction of disciplines as what it is and how it is to be
studied. However, the disciplinary structures which actually emerged in this
context related more closely to the planned spaces of museums than to the natural
spaces of the countryside.
In D6rries' study, the conceptual space of Regnault's research is discussed in
relation to the subject space of the disciplines of physics and chemistry in mid-
nineteenth century France. OOrries makes it clear that the disciplinary subject
spaces dedicated to knowledge classification, scientific communication, knowl-
edge negotiation and teaching are only secondarily spaces which shape the
pattern of research of an individual like Regnault. Someone who has indepen-
dence and opportunity can do research which notices disciplinary boundaries only
in the audiences to which it is finally directed. Hermann Helmholtz and Linus
Pauling were fairly extreme examples of individuals who moved successfully
through a wide gamut of disciplines. Regnault, as this study shows, was free
to range in his researches between chemistry and physics, as he responded to
practical pressures. In one respect, his Paris context actually encouraged research
careers which crossed disciplines. The way young men set out to become acade-
micians facilitated career strategies in which an aspirant, who considered himself
to be ready, would take up research in a field in which an academician was about
to die, even if it meant quite a jump between research topics.
In the final section of the introduction to this volume, on knowledge transfer,
there is a discussion of the role of scientific sites in this process. The more closely
scientific knowledge is thought to be anchored in the practices of a particular
place, the more problematic it becomes to see how it can transfer to another
somewhat different locality. In terms of the model offered in this afterword,
knowledge transfer is linked to the processes of negotiation in another kind of
space. The power relationship between the source, the recipient and any interme-
diates is crucial to understanding the nature of the spaces involved. This is true,
whether informal craft knowledge is being transferred by the movement of an
individual, information is being communicated informally, or a formal publica-
tion is involved. For example, people with low credibility have much more
trouble in passing on knowledge claims, however they try to do it. The spaces
through which knowledge moves are social spaces dynamically sustained by
human actions and interactions.
Finally, in phase four, the power that comes from the use of knowledge is not
always sought by scientists themselves, but sometimes by their patrons and some-
times by others taking advantage of the ready availability of public scientific
Alex Dolby 335
knowledge. In at least some historical settings, there can be tension between

motivations internal to scientific practice, such as seeking control of the
resources, and motivations related to the use of recent science as a resource in
power games in the wider world. However, in other historical cases, such as that
of William Thomson, discussed in this volume by Crosbie Smith, the idea of
using knowledge gained in the laboratory to develop, patent and standardise
instruments was combined in a single scientific career. For Thomson, scientific
knowledge was, in part, a route to economic power. Although Thomson's com-
mercial projects grew out of work done in the spaces he had established for
himself at the university, it was not ideal to concentrate all the work there. In the
later part of his career, manufacture and standardization of his instruments was
done at a separate factory site.
2. THE KNOWLEDGE-POWER RELATION IN THE VARIOUS SPACES

OF SCIENTIFIC CAREERS
The model I have been discussing, of phases of knowledge creation, is not the
only way to argue for the separation of two kinds of spaces, those of knowledge
as a means to power, and those of power as a means to knowledge. It is quite easy
to demonstrate the same contrast in other ways. I now offer a second idealized
model, which uses as its central thread a common kind of successful scientific
career. Many of the scientific practitioners studied by historians of science had
modest origins and eventually became socially prominent, through science. For
such individuals, science functioned as one of the avenues of self-advancement.
Science was attractive to those who prided themselves on their intellectual
powers but who were initially constrained by lack of access to the material
resources and the power structures of established society. For centuries, science
has provided opportunities for the upwardly socially mobile. The initial goals of
such individuals are to create and communicate knowledge, and perhaps also to
gain the appreciation of whoever is important to the intellectually ambitious. In
the early phases of such a career, life is a struggle to gain the resources and the
freedom needed to do the valued scientific activities effectively and then, when
that has been done, to have one's work taken seriously. The spaces involved in
such activities are the research spaces of privileged sites and the social spaces
within which knowledge claims are negotiated. As in the early phases of the pre-
vious model, power is valued as a means of creating knowledge rather than as a
means of controlling others. By convincing others of the credibility of the knowl-
edge created, successful practitioners may gain further access to desired
resources.
The careers of accomplished practitioners need not rest with such a cycle of
activity. A high scientific reputation may facilitate the construction of a different
kind of reputation. As it gets harder to turn concentrated work into creative
output, the grander stages of social life become more accessible to the ambitious
intellect. Many successful scientists moved into a mode of life in which access to
new knowledge and a reputation for having created knowledge became a resource
in wider power games played in other spaces.
In Smith's account of the life of William Thomson in this volume, Latour and
Woolgar's model of rising credibility is used to organize the account of the par-
ticular type of spaces for teaching, research and technological development that
Thomson came to dominate. In terms of the model offered here, additional
avenues of possibility opened up to the scientist as he became more highly
regarded. In the early stages of his teaching career, Thomson's students were not
usually destined for technical pursuits, but for such careers as the church.
Commercial motives may therefore have played a minor role in Thomson's early
years. The College spaces he controlled were almost entirely for teaching and
research. By the mid 1850s, Thomson was working on the development of
patents, especially for instruments. Thomson exploited his power base to blend
into his teaching and research spaces an increasing proportion of product devel-
opment. Students could be taught the principles of precision measurement by
assisting in the calibration of new instruments.
With the move to the new university site in 1870, Thomson was able to use his
high credibility to appropriate and control a larger amount of space for teaching
and research. When, soon after, Thomson began manufacturing his own instru-
ments, the spaces in the College were not suitable. He found it appropriate to
acquire new spaces, most notably a factory. And having such a space it was more
convenient to standardize his instruments there, rather than at the university, as
previously. At this phase of his life, the division between teaching, research,
product development, and manufacture was distributed differently among the
spaces over which he had control.
Thomson was exceptional in the way he exploited his cumulated credibility to
take industrial initiatives. In DHrries' account of Regnault, it is made clear that as
the French experimentalist became more successful, he chose to stay in research,
unlike his contemporary, Dumas, who moved on to a political career. Such
options as industrial manufacture, further research, and politics, open up for the
accomplished scientist. But none of them is the automatic or inevitable climax of
a scientific career.
The career model described is intended to show that with the rise in credibility
of a scientist goes increasing access, with a measure of power, to a growing range
of different spaces. The initial spaces of the relatively powerless are not always
the same as the spaces of the powerful, and the power that is initially sought is of
a different kind.
Of course, not every scientific career is successful. Some tum from science to
take up other activities. They too move into new kinds of space. However, they
are unable to transfer the power of accredited knowledge creation to subsequent
activities.
Alex Dolby 337
I have tried to show, with the aid of these two models of scientific activity, that
the idea of analysing scientific knowledge-power relations in terms of spaces can
be made even more fruitful. In specific historical cases, we should see how the
spaces involved may vary with phases of knowledge-creating activity, and, for an
individual, with different stages of his or her career. Spatial analyses of science
do not, it seems, force us into narrow conceptual channels, but allow us to iden-
tify and explicate nuances of scientific activity that might otherwise have missed
our attention.
The force of my analysis has been to draw apart a wide range of different kinds
of scientific space, the ideal form of which diverges for each type of activity asso-
ciated with science. I have not seen any difficulty in assuming that individuals
move freely between different kinds of space, just as the modem technophile can
move in both physical space and the cyberspace of computer networks. Perhaps
others will resist the trend to multiply the number of spaces we move in. They
may try to show that there are distinctive and unified key spaces of science,
perhaps key localities in which all the issues I have discussed come together.
Long may our discussions continue.
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Index
Abir-Am, Pnina 15 Armstrong, William 164, 171-2,
Academie des Sciences 19, 52, 248, 173-4, 177
251,254-5,258-9,262 Arnold, Matthew 178
Accountancy 168, 169 Ashbee, C. R. 208
Acoustics 255 Aspen Center for Physics 320-1, 333
Adelaide Gallery 197 Astrolabe 6, 31-2,34,35, 36-7
Agriculture 163, 166, 167-9, 170, 174, Astronomical revolution 149
183-4,190,227,254 Astronomical Society 201-2
Agronomy 57 Astronomy 7-8,27,29-31,35,36-7,
Airy, George Biddell 13, 97, 102 46,64, 72-3, 76,97,99,102-3,
Albert, Prince 93, 201, 228-9 107, 114, 122, 123, 131, 144n.,
Albert, Wilhelm August Julius 92 178,201-2,248,250,251,253,
Alberti, Leon Battista 28-9, 31,36-7 257, 265-80 passim
Alder, Ken 5 see also optical astronomy, radio
Alexander the Great 63n., 183 astronomy
Allegory 187-9 Astrophysics 321
Almagest (Ptolemy) 30 Authoritarianism 4, 5, 120
Ampere, Andre-Marie 125, 249-50 Authority
Ana/emma (Ptolemy) 36 and knowledge 3-4
Analysis 168, 171, 281 divine 8
in Poe 71-2, 81 scientific 9, 12, 38, 66
Anatomy 112, 121, 138, 140, 144n., theological 66
155,160,197,248 Ayrton, William 19, 218,220, 231,
Ancien regime 5, 41-2 233,237-44
Anglicanism 153
Annalen der Physik 257 Babbage, Charles 130, 155
Anthropology 2, 11,219 Bachelard, Gaston 149
Apianus, Peter 30-1, 35 Bacon, Francis 65, 113
Apps induction coils 176 Balfour, Arthur 163, 166
Arago, Fran~ois 254, 256 Balfour, Evelyn 163
Archaeology 20, 57, 170 Barbaro, D. 36
Architecture viii, 6, 11-13, 14, 20, 27, Baxandall, Michael 150
36, 88, 116, 120, 138, 149, 152, Beamish, Richard 90, 92, 97-8, 113
155-6, 159-60, 169, 172-3, 190, Beare, T. Hudson 206-7
195-7,198,204,205-8,213-14, Beaver, Joseph 83
231,283-6,290-3,297,300, Becker, Howard 284
305-6,306-8,301,333 Becquerel, A. C. 256
Gothic 12, 139, 142, 160, 170 BMe, Emile 257
imperial 213 Bell, Sheriff 139
medieval 87, 115, 120, 132, 142, Bentham, Jeremy 9, 150,200
156 Benton, Thomas Hart 68
of science 88, 115 Berkeley, eighth Earl of 178
Argles, Michael 227, 243 Berlin Artillery and Engineering School
Argyll, Duke of 144n. 91
Aristotle 65, 183 Berthier, Pierre 252-3, 259, 261
362
Index 363
Berthollet, C. L. 54, 56 Buchanan, D. 174

Berzelius, J. J. 256-7 Buchanan, Robert 100, 103
'Big picture' 2-3 Builder 207
Biochemistry 290-l, 300,303 Bulwer, Edward Lytton 72, 80
Biology 220,315,317 Bunyan, John 187
Biomedicine 149, 199, 219 BUrgi, Joost 32
Biophysics 301, 305-9 passim Bush, Douglas 188
Biot, Jean-Baptiste 125, 250, 256,
259-60 Cahan, David 14, 225
Biotechnology 281-312 passim Calder, Alexander 282, 297
Bischof, Carl Gustav Christoph 91 Cambridge Scientific Instrument
Black, Joseph 141 Company 242
Blackburn, Hugh 140 Cambridge University Reporter 137
Blackett, Patrick 266 Cantor, Geoffrey 188
Blasema, Pietro 257 Capital 118-20, 126, 130-1, 135, 138,
Blythswood, Lord 178 141-2, 145n., 172
Bohn, Conrad 257 Capitalism 16, 142
Bonaparte, Napoleon 39, 41,53-4, Capper, David 208
55-6,58,60,95,248,259,332 Carlyle, Thomas 185
Bose, L. A. G. 50 Camot, Sadi 114
Botany 74, 95, 155, 160, 169, 177, 203, Cartography see mapping
225-6,243,248,267 Catholicism (Roman) 29, 138
Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 118, 218, 225-7, Causality 27, 71, 81
231,237,244,246 Cavendish Laboratory 22, 126, 137,
Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste 252-3 152, 153-5, 158, 159-63, 166-8,
Bouty, Edmond 260 179,197,333
Bowen, Ira S. 271 Cavendish radio astronomy group 267
Bowring, Edgar 227-8 Cayley, Sir George 93
Boyle, Robert 7 Cell biology 283, 301, 303-6, 309
Breadalbane, John Campbell, Marquis CERN (European Laboratory for
of 114 Particle Physics) 19, 268, 269,
Breithaupt, Johann Friedrich August 90 313-29 passim
Brewster, David 94 Chamberlain, Joseph 168, 176
Briggs, Charles F. 69 Chambers, Ephraim 182-4, 188,
British Association for the 190-1
Advancement of Science (BAAS) Chambers, Robert 8, 72, 77
8, 21, 89,98-9, 103, 107, 110, Chartism 93
119, 122, 134, l44n., 151, 157-8, Chatterton, Sir Alfred 231
159,160,172-3,174,225,242 Chemical Society 202
British Museum 8, 200-1,203,206, Chemistry 21, 90, 94, 95, 101, 104,
209,228 105, 109, 114, 116, 121, 125, 127,
Broadway Journal 68-9, 72, 77 140, 144n., 145n., 152, 155, 159,
Brogan, Hugh 66 160, 164, 169,176,178,231,233,
Brongniart, Alexandre 51 245n.,246-7,248-50,334
Brougham, Henry 94 see also laboratories (chemical)
Brown, Hanbury 275 Chesnut, Mary 67
Browning's spectroscopes 176 Chivers, Dr Thomas Holley 69, 78, 79
Brunei, Marc lsambard 89-90 Christian values 139
Brunelleschi, Filippo 31, 36 Christie, Agatha 179
Bruun-Neergard, T. C. 48, 59-60 Christie, Hartvig 257
364 Index
Chrystal, George 166 Nichol 72-3

Church of Scotland 145n. Poe 70,72-3,77-8,81-2
Churchill, Winston 265 Ptolemy 30
City & Guilds Central Institution 13, Cosmographia (Apianus) 31
204,208,221,222,224,228, Coulomb, C. A. 125
229-39,235,241-3,243-4, Craftlabour 119,126-7,130,221-2,
245n. 224,229-31
City & Guilds Finsbury Technical Credibility 2, 5-7 passim, 16, 18-19,
College 18-19,221-6,223, 230, 21,41,44, 72,90,118-19,122-3,
231,233,239,243,245n. 125-6, 129-30, 137, 142, 185,
Civil War, American 68 216,218-20,221,225,231,
Civilization 44, 136, 179, 190 243-4,331,334-6
classical 200-1 Crossley, Louis 170
Clapeyron, Emile 113 Crystal Palace 170, 227
Class 167-9,173,224,310 Cultural geography 2, 4, 6, 11, 18,
Classification 248-51, 257-8, 261, 66-7,103,119,198
334 Cultural Studies
Cleland, James 119 of science viii, 9
Clifton, Robert Bellamy 158, 160 of technology viii
Club de Feuillants 49 Cumming, James 155
Cole, Henry 203-4, 205-6, 215n Cuomo, Mario 293
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor .7, 70, 72 Cuvier, Georges 10,55
College de France 19,249, 251,255-6,
259-60,262 D' Alembert, Jean 249
Collins, Harry 15-16, 219 D'Enville, Duchess 46
Colonialism 4, 8, 11, 23, 37, 40, 63n, Daily News 222, 226
142, 191,214,299,301-6,312n. Daniell, J. F. 159
Commandino, Federico 34-6 Danti, Egnatio 36
Commerce 3, 6, 9, 29, 72,91-2, 93-4, Darwin, Charles 169-70
103,119-20, 136,139-42,154, Darwin, Horace 242
157,167-8,217-18,220,237-8, Darwinism 210, 214
246,333 Davidson, Robert 122
Commodity culture 118-19, 143-4n. Davis, Brody (Architects) 282-4,
Computer Added Design 284 286-8,289,300,302,305,308
Comte, Auguste 249 De Certeau, Michel 2
Conan Doyle, Arthur 171, 179 De Ia Beebe, Henry 205
Connaught, Duke of 207 De La Warr, Earl 265
Conrad, Joseph 3 De Lapeyrouse, Picot 62n
Constable, Archibald 90 De Saussure, Horace-Benedict 45, 48,
Constable, Thomas 90, 11 0 49
Cookson, H. W. 157 De Vegni, A. 92
Cooter, Roger 14 Del Monte, Guidobaldo 36
Cornell University Biotechnology Democracy 66, 68, 70, 122
Building (CUBB) 19, 281-312, Department of Science and Art (DSA)
283,287,289,294,295,296,298, 229,243
299,307,308,332-3 Department of Scientific and Industrial
Corps des Mines 49, 51, 52, 55, 332 Research (DSIR) 267-9, 273
Cosmogony Derby, Earl of 140, 146n.
Humboldt 73 'Design-as-text' 12-13
Kepler 7 Determinism 186
Index 365
Devonshire, Duke of 160, 163 Egalitarianism 8, 66

Dewar, James 167 Electric Journal 243
Dictionary of Scientific Biography Electrical engineering 216-45 passim,
28-9 276-7
Dimmock, William 172 Electrical Review 221,232
Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 221 Electrician 216,221,230-1,234,
Discourse, Foucault on 4-5 239-41
Disembedded collaboration 313-29 Electricity 76, 123-4, 125, 134-6,
passim 144n., 159, 162, 167, 170-2,
Disembedded locales 20,313,323, 173-7,225,238-40,256,306
325-7 Electromagnetism 151-2, 155, 156,
Display 88, 156,218,238,242,265-9, 158, 159, 164, 166
271,272,275,332 Electronic networks 322-3
Disraeli, Benjamin 140, 141, 146n., Emerson, Ralph Waldo 67, 72, 82-3
163, 176 Empire 8, 16,21-2, 23, 120, 134, 140,
Divinity see theology 142,150,190-1,214
Dobson, Gordon 178 of knowledge 190
Dolomieu, Deodat de 7, 39-63,332, of science 142, 203-4
333-4 see also colonialism
Donatello 31 Empiricism 45
Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm 91 Encyclopaedia Britannica 96
Dualism 78 Encyclopaedia of Mathematics 313
Duddell, William 241-3 Encyclopidie 249
Duhem, Pierre 260 Engineering 206-7,234,237,252
Dulong, P. L. 253, 254-5, 258 Engineering 16, 87-116 passim, 131,
Dumas, Jean-Baptiste 250, 253, 254-6, 134, 137, 140, 151, 152-4, 155,
257-8,259-60,262n.,336 162-3, 164, 166-7, 170-2, 174,
DUrer, Albrecht 36 176-7,206,231,234,237-8,
Durkheim, Emile 11 241-2,243-4,266,269-71,278,
Dyer, Henry 87 284,332
English, Thomas Dunn 69
E-mail 313-14,315-16,322-7, 328n., Enlightenment 5, 19, 39-40,46, 61n.,
333 71,120,249
Earnshaw, Samuel 102 Enock, J. C. 167
Echo 232 Epistemology 71, 149,181, 191,330
Ecole Centrale des Arts et Escott, T. H. S. 168, 178
Manufactures 93 Ethnography 216,219, 313, 328n.
Ecole des Mines 19, 52, 63n., 251-4, Euclid 101
259, 262n. Eureka (Poe) 7-8, 64-7, 70-82
Ecole Polytechnique 19, 92, 105, 124, passim
251-3,255-6 Evangelicals 163
Edge, David 280 Eveleth, George Washington 69
Edinburgh Magazine 118, 120-1, Evolution 4, 170
144n. Expeditions
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal Argonauts 63n.
91 Cook 55
Edinburgh Review 94, 96 James Clark Ross 96
Edinburgh, Duke of 268 Napoleon 40, 56, 58, 60, 63n.,
Edison, Thomas 171 332
Education Act (1870) 150 Exploration 6, 30, 37
366 Index
Faraday, Michael 12, 17, 124, 125, Geological Society 13,201

144n., 151, 181-2, 184-91 Geological Survey 8, 209
Fawcett, William 160 Geology 7, 8, 39, 41,44-5,47, 49,
Field 3, 5, 7, 22-3, 39-54,56-7,60, 52-3,56-7, 61-3n., 90-1, 105,
6ln., 62n., 64, 183-4, 220, 246, 201,204-5,228,251,334
256,320,334 Geometry 6, 11, 27-38 passim, 248,
File transfer 315 332
Finlay, Robert 126 Geopolitics 14, 225, 246-8, 250
Finsbury Technical College see City & Giddens, Anthony 314
Guilds, Finsbury Technical College Gilbert, Nigel 282
Fleming, J. A. 206-7 Gioeni, Giuseppe 46, 62
Fleming, William 100, 103, 132-3, Gladstone, W. E. 146n., 150,221
l45n. Glasgow Herald 98, 103-4, 111, 136
Forbes, James David 89-92,97, 102, Glasgow Mechanics Institution 101,
113-14,123-4,125,128-9, 104-5,112
129-30, 135, 152 Glazebrook, Richard 162, 166
Fortescue, Hugh 95 Gnomonics 6
Foster, George Carey 207 Golden Age 188
Foucault, Michel 1-2,4-5, 9, 18, Golinski, Jan 219
196-8, 213-14,221,226, 224-Sn., Gooding, David 218
244-Sn., 330 Gordon, E. S. 141
Fourcroy, Antoine 10 Gordon, George 162, 166-7
Francesco (Martini) 36 Gordon, Joseph 89, 95-6
Free trade 139 Gordon, Lewis 16, 22, 87-116, 333
Freiburg School of Mines 90-1 Grand Tour 40, 90
French Revolution 7, 39, 41,49-51, Gray, Andrew 155, 178
· 52-3,60,62-3n,l49,248,332 Great Exhibition (1851) 217, 226,
Frisius, Gemma 31 227-8,243
Froude, William 164, 178 Greeley, Horace 67
Griesemer, J. R. 15
Galileo Galilei I Griswold, Reverend Rufus Wilmot 69
Galison, Peter 15 Grove, William Robert 159, 163
Galvanism 152
Galvanometer (Thomson's) 135-6, Habermel, Erasmus 32
159,163-4,237 Habitus 218,224, 225-7,244
Gassiot, J. P. 158 Hamilton, Sir William 47
Gay-Lussac, J. L. 250, 253, 257 Hankins, Thomas 71
Gender 169,310 Harley, J. B. 190-1
Genetics 282-3, 290, 292, 300, 302 Hartmann, Georg 30, 36-7
Genius, Coleridge on 7 Harvey, David 2
Genius loci 227 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 65
Gentlemanly values 90, 99, 101, 162-4, Helmholtz, Hermann von 14, 157, 163,
168-9,172,205,243-4,333 334
Geographia (Ptolemy) 29-31,34-5, Herschel, SirJohn 155
36-7 Herschel, Sir William 269
Geography 5-6, 7, 18, 29, 39,40-2, Hertzmann, Rudolph 72, 77
45-7,54, 62n., 81, 152, 163, Heterotopias 9-10,224-5, 245n.
181-2,190,195,197-8,202,204, Hey, James 266
231,265,274,280 Hierarchies of space 1, 168, 300,
imperial 150, 190 332-3
Index 367
Hill, Alexander 132 Jeffrey, James 121-2

Historiography 2, 196-7, 227, 280 Jenkin, Fleeming 22, 97, 145n.
History Jodrell Bank Observatory 19-20,
of architecture 196-7 265-80,332
of design viii Johns, Adrian 21-2
of engineering viii Joule, James Prescott 128, 159
of science viii, 2, 12, 27, 28, 30, 31,
32, 34, 6ln., 62n., 87, 149, 198, Kant, Immanuel 75
218-19,226,335 Keats, John 66
History of Astronomy (Adam Smith) 64 Kelly, Michael 14
Hobbes, Thomas 183 Kelvin, Lord see Thomson, William
Hofmann, Augustus 209 Kepler, Johannes 7, 73, 78, 80
Holden, Isaac 170, 174 Kerr, Robert 160,168,170
Hope, Thomas Charles I 04 Kew magnetometer 160
Hopkins, John Henry Jr 78-9 Knowledge transfer 3, 21,334, 336
Hughes, David 239 Koch, Robert 149
Hughes, Thomas Parke 22, 65, 71, 74, Kohler, Robert 246,247
176 Kohlrausch, F. W. G. 225
Humanism 31, 149, 152 Kosmos (Humboldt) 73
Humboldt, Alexander von 40, 65, 73
Husband, H. C. 269-71,332 La Production de l'Espace (Lefebvre)
Huxley, Thomas Henry 204,222, 2, 216
229-30 Laboratories
Hydraulics 164, 166, 170-1 alchemical 10
Hydrodynamics 156 and the field 23,41-2,43-4, 203
Hydroelectricity 171 as heterotopias 10-11, 224-5
as privileged sites 12-13, 197,
Iconography 114n., 184 199-200,204,218-20,2 83
Imagination 181 biological 220, 317
in Poe 7, 72-3 biomedical 219, 244-5n.
Imperial College 203,217 chemical 105, 109, 130-1, 155,209,
Imperial College of Engineering 252-3,259,261
(Tokyo) 87 disembedded 327
Imperial Institute 204 electrical 158, 237
Imperialism see colonialism electrical engineering 220-1,231-2,
Individuality, in Poe 7-8, 65, 68-70, 238-9,241-2
72-3,78-80,81-2,83 engineering 206-7
Jnstitut d'Egypte 58 mechanical 88, 105, 115
/nstitut Nationale 52, 60 metallurgy 173
Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) 90, physical 17, 118-19, 123, 130-1,
92,97 132-4, 135-6, 138, 140, 145n.,
Institution of Electrical Engineers (lEE) 149-67,178,180,207,2 17-18,
176,239,241,242 220,225,238,244,261 ,313
International Geophysical Year (IGY) privacy of, 301-3,305,308, 312n.
270 private 158, 162, 167, 176-8
Intuition, in Poe 65, 73-4 research 127-8, 130, 133-4, 138,
144-5n., 217,260-1,300-1
Jameson, Robert 90-l, 105 theoretical physics and 313, 314-15,
Jansky, Karl 266 327
Jefferson, Thomas 64 Lacc5pede, Comte de 55-6, 60
368 Index
Ladd galvanometer 163 MacNeill, John 144

lAissez-faire 94 Maconochie, Allen 111-12, 124
Lalande, J. J. de 46 Magi not lines 297, 298
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 55 Magnetism 76, 123-4, 144n., 145n.,
Lamb, Charles 241 158-60, 162, 169, 176
Lame, Gabriel 256 Magnetometer 160
Lampadius, Wilhelm August 90 Magnus, Heinrich Gustav 91
Langevin, Paul 260 Mallock, Arnulph 166
Laplace, Pierre Simon de 65, 15 Mallock, William Hurrell 178-9
Latour, Bruno 22-3, 118,218-20, Manometer 258
238-9,283,293,336 Mansell, Robert 126, 128
Laurent, Auguste 253 Mapping 3,5-6, 18,23,30-4,36-8,
Le Chatelier, Henri 261 181-2,190-1,209-10,246,249
Le Verrier, U. J. J. 124,251 Markus, T. A. 13--14
Lefebvre, Henri 2, 23, 169, 216,218 Marloye (Paris instrument-maker) 125
Legitimation Materialism 74, 78-9, 82, 177-8
of knowledge 3-4, 88 Mathematics 6, 27-31, 32-6, 37-8,65,
ofpower 191 90, 99, 101-4 passim, 113, 122,
Leinster, Duke of 163 124, 126, 133, 134, 137-8, 140,
Leonardo da Vinci 36 141, 144n., 151, 153-4, 155,
Lemfreiheit 104 156-7,163,164,231,251,256,
Leslie, John 143n. 259,314,320
Levi-Strauss, Claude 11 Mathematics Tripos 156, 163
Liddell, Charles 96, 98 Maule, Fox 93, 95, 97, 101, 112
Liebig, Justus von 21, 22, 253-4,257, Maxwell, James Clerk 151-66, 178-9
259-60,261 May, Samuel 67,68
Lindemann, Frederick 178 McCall, William 131
Linguistics 4 McCulloch, J. R. 143n.
Linnaean Society 202 McLeod, Herbert 169, 172, 176
Liouville, Joseph 124 McManus, Edgar J. 67
Liszt, Franz 103 Measurement 13, 19, 31, 37, 127-9,
Literary criticism 68, 72 154-5,157,162-3,166-7,220,
Literary technology 65, 71-2, 74 231-2,234,239-41,254,259-60,
Ljubimow, Nicolai 257 273,275,276-7,336
Local contexts 2, 7, 9, 39-40,46-7, Mechanics 87-116 passim, 157, 222,
150,153,155,197,221,222,327 248,250
Lockspeiser, Sir Ben 267 quantum 318
Lockyer, Joseph Norman 14, 154,204, Medicine 2, 14, 22-3, 94-5, 100, 111,
210, 213-14 112, 121, 144n., 145n.
Lodge, Oliver 209 Meikleham, William 102-3
Logic (Glasgow professor ot) 99, 107, Melbourne, William Lamb, Viscount
140, l44n. 93 passim, 111
Lovell, Bernard 266, 268-75,278,332 Mercator, Gerhard 30
Lowell, James Russell 68, 79 Merton, Sir Thomas 178
Lushington, Edmund 102, 141-2 Meteorology 178, 255
Metric system 5, 151
Macfarlan, Duncan 99-100, 105-10 Michelson, A. A. 164
passim, 112 Microscopy 220
Machiavelli 285 Middle Ages 1, 120
Macleod, Rev. Norman 139, 145-6n. see also architecture (medieval)
Index 369
Millar, James 122 115, 122-46, 149, 151,152-3,

Miller, R. Kalley 137-8 178,217,225,249,333
Milton, John 79 Natural selection 158-9
Mineralogy 39-40,47-8, 50, 52, 56-7, Nature (Emerson) 72, 82-3
62-3n., 74,90-1, 105,251,254, Nature 151, 178, 206, 210, 215n.
334 Naumann, Carl Friedrich 90
Modernity 173 Navigation 6, 27,29-30,217,273
Mobs, Friedrich 91 Newall, Robert Stirling 98, 114
Molecular Biology 15,283,301 Newman, John 124
Monarchy 6,49,93,115-16 Newton, Sir Isaac 65, 75
Montaigne, Michel de 9-10 Nichol, John Pringle 72-4, 75-6, 78,
Montrose, Duke of 140-1, 146n. 99, 102-3, 104, 105, 122-3, 131,
Moore, James R. 169 133, 139
Mordey, William 242 Nichol, John, Jnr 123
Morin, Arthur Jules 91, 110, 113 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 186
Morrell, Jack 21, 178 Normanby, Lord 96, 114
Morris, William 179 Nuclear Physics B 316, 328n.
Morus, Iwan 12,238 Nye, Mary Jo 246
Mulkay, Michael 280,282
Municipal Corporation Act (1835) 108 O'Connell, J. 22
Monster, Sebastian 32 Oersted, H. C. 125, 129
Murchison, Roderick 8 Oettingen, Arthur von 257
Murray, David 133 Oligarchy 100, 108
Museology 155, 158,200, 20~. Olivier, Laurence 269
229-30 On the &onomy of Machinery and
Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle Manufactures (Babbage) 130
8, 10-11 Ontology 265, 277
Museum of Economic Geology 201, Ophir, Adi 9-10,224-5
203,205-6 Optical astronomy 268,271,276,278
Museum of Practical Geology 228 Optics 125. 126, 156, 163, 164,255-6,
Myers, Greg 178, 234 258
Mythology Oscillograph 241-2
Greek 186 Ostwald, Wilhelm 258
of James Watt 140-1 Outram, Dorinda 8, 10-11
Ovid 188
Napier, Macvey 96 Owen, Richard 197
Nash, John 156
National Gallery 206,210,228-9 Pacioli, Luca 36
National Institute for Research in Pagan, John 100
Nuclear Science 268,271 Paganism 188
National Physics Laboratory 225, 279 Painting
Nationalism 4, 139 Florentine 6, 27, 29, 31,38
Natural history 5, 8, 23,39-41,42, landscape 189
44, 46,47-8,58, 6ln., 62n., 90, Palaeontology 8
95,110,112,131,198-9,213-14, Pambour, Count de 110
220 Panopticon (Bentham) 9, 13, 150, 213
Natural History Museum 170,203-4, Pantheism 78-80
215n., 229 Paracelsus 200
Natural philosophy 6, 12, 16,27-8, Parapsychology 16
37-8. 75,89,90,99, 101-4,113, Parkes, Joseph 108
370 Index
Pasteur, Louis 22-3, 149,219, 244-5n. Postmodernism 2, 23

Patronage 330-2 Presbyterianism 137-9
Pauling, Linus 334 Privileged sites see sites
Paxton, Joseph 170 Production
Peacock, Thomas Love 179 of knowledge 9, 11-12,22, 118,
Pedagogy 3,9, 12, 16,88,90-1,92, 218-19, 225, 278-9, 328n.,
95-7,101,103-4,109,116,154, 330-l
203-4 ofspace 2,87-8,115-16,150-1,
Peel, Robert 93, 96 318-19,330,334-6
Peligot, E. M. 254 Productive and unproductive labour
Pelletier, P. J. 254-5 (Adam Smith) 144n.
Pender, John 138 Progress 28, 31, 120, 122,132, 142,
Perowne, Edward 154 143n., 269
Perry,John 220,222,224,238-40 Projection 6, 28, 30-1,32, 34
Petit, A. T. 258 Protestantism 4, 78, 139
Peurbach, Georg von 31 Psychical research I77
Pfaundler, Leopold 257 Ptolemy, Claudius 29-31,34-6, 36-7
Phelps, Robert 154, 155
Phenomenology 281, 320 Quarterly Review 184
Phillips, T. W. 205 Quilligan, Maureen 188
Philology 218
Philosophical Magazine 129, 176,257 Radio astronomy 20, 265-80, 332
Photography 164,169,177,302 Railways 23, 137, 142, 163, 168-9,
Physical Society 238, 245n. 205,209,213,231,254
Physics 125, 137, 140, 149-80, 204, Ramond de Carbonnieres 50
209,218,231,234,238,241, Ramsay, William 95, 100, 102-3, 123
245n., 246-62 passim, 266, Rankine, Macquorn 87, 134, 138, 140
313-29 passim, 334 Ransome (machinery maker) 238
absolutist 151 Rayleigh, John Struut, second Baron
high energy 149, 153, 328-9n. 156,162-8,169,172,176-7,213,
nuclear 268,316 333
particle 314-16, 320,327 Reber, Grote 266
theoretical 313-29 passim, 333 Reform Act (1832) 108, 120
see also astrophysics, natural Reformation 121
philosophy Regiomontanus, Johannes 30,36-7
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt Regnault, Henri-Victor 19, 123, 124,
14,225 128,130,246-62,334
Physiology 8, 140, 199, 250,-256 Reich, Ferdinand 90, 113
Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) 187 Reid, David Boswell I04
Pinch, Trevor 15-16 Renaissance 6, 27, 28-30, 35-6, 37,
Pitt-Rivers, Augustus 170 149,332
Pixii (instrument maker), 125, 129 Renold, Sir Charles 268, 270
Plattner, Carl Friedrich 90, 113 Revel, Jacques 5-6,330,331-2
Poe, Edgar Allan 7-8, 64-83 Robison, John 141
Poetics of Space (Bachelard) 149 Roget, Peter Mark 198-200,205, 214
Poisson, S. D. 102, 250, 254-5 Romanticism 17,42...:3,6ln., 187,191
Political economy 113, 120, 143-4n., Rose, Heinrich 91
246 Rosse, Earl of 269
Poncele.t.l V. 110 Rossetti, Francesco 257
Positivism 186 Rothblatt, Sheldon 152-3
Index 371
Rousseau, J. J. 44 Shaw, Bernard 179

Royal Astronomical Society 267 Shaw, Napier 162, 166
Royal College of Chemistry 176 Shaw, Richard Norman 169, 173, 177
Royal College of Science 13, 200, 203, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 77
205, 210, 215n., 221-2, 229 Sidgwick, Henry 177
Royal College of Surgeons 197 Siemens, William 172, 173-6, 175, 177
Royal Greenwich Observatory 13, 197 Simms, William Gilmore 70
Royal Indian Engineering College 176 Sites 1, 8-9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18-20,
Royal Institute of British Architects 207 22-3,45-8,88,133-4,136,138,
Royal Institution 12, 17, 124, 151, 142, 149, 150, 153, 155, 162, 172,
166-7, 184, 198 174, 195-215 passim, 219-20,
Royal School of Mines 155,203,228, 230,232-3,238,242-3,269,
229 272-3,275,278-80,281,288,
Royal Society 6, 13, 21-2, 133, 173, 310,319-21,332,334,335-6
178-9,197-9,201-2,205,248 industrial 3, 18-19, 118-19, 126,
Royal Society of Edinburgh 129-30 142,244
Rubensen, Robert 257 institutional 9, 10-11, 88, 116, 149,
Ruskin, John 12 153,195-7,199-200,212
Rutherfurd, Andrew 93, 97, 106-10, Slavery 66-8
111,116 Smith, Adam 64, 120, 126, 139,
143-4n.
Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy 55, 58, 63n. Smith, Edward 241
Salisbury, third Marquess of (Prime Smith, T. Roger 206-8
Minister) 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, Snail mail 324
174, 176-8 Social anthropology see anthropology
Salisbury, fifth Marquess of 265 Socialism 179
Salvin, Anthony 156, 158, 160, 170 Societe Franfaise de Photographie 256
Samuel, Raphael 278, 280 Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Sanchez, Ricardo 14 Knowledge 198
Sandemanians 188 Society of Antiquaries 201
Savart, F6Iix 255 Society of Telegraph Engineers and
Sch6ner, Johann 30 Electricians (STEE) 238-9
Schuster, Arthur 162 Sociology viii, 2, 11, 89, 219,227,
Schutz, Alfred 281 281-2,283,288,309-10,321-2
Science Schools 229 Solar energy 173-4, 175, 177
Scientific Revolution 27, 188 Solomon, Maurice 242
Scientific voyaging 7, 39-63,332, 334 Somerville, Mary 103, 183-4
Scotsman 98, 141 Sorbonne 260
Scott, George Gilbert 115, 139 Soret, Jacques Louis 257
Scottish Society of Arts 11 0 South Kensington Museum 203-4,
Screening 20, 265-80 211,228-9,232
Secohmmeter 239-41, 242 Space
Second Reform Act (1867) 150, 163, 'codes' of 197,214
176 and power viii, 3, 5-6, 9, 64, 197,
Secord, Ann 220, 225 330-1,334-5
Sectionalism 66-8 Cartesian 4
Selbome, Earl of 233 communal 285-6, 299, 300-9,
Semiotics 282 312n.
Shapin, Steven 6, 10-11, 15, 21, contradictory (Lefebvre) 216, 218
224-5,279 cultural 66, 68, 70
372 Index
Space (Cont.) Stephen, Leslie 187

disciplinary 6-7, 11, 14, 15, 19, 28, Stevenson, David 97
30,32,34,37,39,47,48,88-9, Stewart, Balfour 177-9
99-100,116,154-5,182,205, Stichweh, Rudolf 249-50
208-9,246-51,255-7,261-2, Stirling air-engine 126
334 Stoeffter, Johann 32
electronic 313-15,322-7,332 Stokes, George Gabriel 133, 134, 152,
fictional 181-2 155-7, 160, 163
frequency 273-5,279,332 Strang, John 119
geographical 319,326,331-2 Strong, Roy 267
industrial 3, 18-19, 118-19, 126, Strutt, Edward 166, 167
142,244 Strutt, John see Rayleigh, second Baron
metropolitan 3, 10-11, 18-19, 115, Stuart, James 154
149-50, 168, 195-215 passim, Sturgeon, William 144n.
216-45 passim, 216-45 passim, Suez Canal 150
333 Sumner, Charles 67
national 246 Surveillance 162, 197
pastoral 3, 17,22-3, 149-50, 152-3, see also panopticon (Bentham)
168,178,225 Surveying 5-6,27,29-31,36-7
physical 284-5,313-29,330-1 Swan, Joseph 170-1
private 281-312, 332-3 Swift, Jonathan 7
productive 19-20,274-5 Swinburne, James 240-1
public 281-312,332-3 Synthesis 168
sacred 152 in Poe 1, 11-12
social 10-11, 168, 243, 284-5, Systems
290-1,317,331,334-40 Adam Smith 64
textual 243 electric 167, 172, 173, 176
universal ISS equilibrium 258
see also geometry, habitus, planetary 258
heterotopias, mapping, sites, Poe 65, 74, 77-81
spatiality, spatial metaphors, technological 65, 71, 145n., 273,
territory 278
'Space-as-text' 12-13,64,87
Spatial metaphors 4, 17, 6ln., 89, Taine, Hyppolyte 170
181-91,197,246-8,261 Tait, Peter Guthrie 159, 177-9
Spatiality 1, 9, 191,217,265 Tate Gallery 213
Spectrophotometry 178 Tate, Sir Henry 213
Spectroscopy 152, 176-8 Taxonomy 90,101,199,200-1
Spiritualism 177-9 Taylor, Richard 92
Sputnik satellite 270 Technische Hochschule Berlin 233
Stafford, R. A. 8 Technology see engineering, laborato-
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center ries, literary technology
149, 153 Telegraphy 22, 87, 114, 131, 134-6,
Star, S. L. 15 138, 142, 145n., 150-2, 158, 162,
Statham, Henry 207 173,176,217,220,238
Statistical surveys 5, 23 Telford, Thomas 94
Statistics 119 Temple, James 169
Steam engine 120, 140-1, 144n., 154, Tennyson, Lady 184
172,174,176,254,258 Territory, knowledge of the 3-4, S, 7,
Steamships 23, 120-1, 140,225 23,39-63,331-2
Index 373
Textual analysis 2, 16, 64-5, 282 Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley 70

see also 'design-as-text' and 'space- Tudor Britain 162
as-text' Tyler, President John 69
Thalberg, Sigismond 103 Tyndall, John 17, 178, 181-2, 184-7,
Theology 66, 78, 99, 101, 121-2, 189-91
144n.• I88
Thermodynamics I, I28-9, I56 Unionism 163, 174
see also Thomson, William (Lord Universalism 1-2, 155
Kelvin) University College London (UCL)
Thermoelectricity I27 206-9
Thermometer I27-9 Unwin, W. C. 208, 233
Thesaurus (Rogel) I98-200, 2I4 Utilitarianism 150, 152, 176
Thompson, E. P. I49 Utopias 9, 180
Thompson, Silvanus P. 239, 242
Thomson, Alexander 'Greek' 139 Varley, Cromwell 145n.
Thomson, Allen II2, 132, 138, I40, Vestiges of the Natural History of
I45-6n. Creation (Chambers) 8, 72,77
Thomson, David 102 Victoria & Albert Museum 209, 215n.
Thomson, J. J. I 56 Victoria, Queen 93, 96, 100
Thomson, James 99, 102-3, 105, I10, Victorian Britain 119, 142, 151, 155,
I13, I20, I22, I23, 139, 333 I62-4, 167, 168-9, 172-3, 178,
Thomson, James Jnr 112, I24-5, 129, 179-80,195-7,199-201,217,
131, 134 22~1.243-4,333
Thomson, John (Edinburgh professor of 'View from nowhere' 153
surgery) 96 Vignoles, Charles Blacker 114
Thomson, John Ill Voyageur-naturaliste see scientific
Thomson, Lady 137 voyaging
Thomson, Robert 130
Thomson, Thomas 21, 105-8, 12I Walker, James 92,96
Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) 16, Walther, Bernhard 37
22,87, II8-46, 156-7, I59, I63, Waterhouse, Alfred 207
I73-4,217,225,257,333 Watkins and Hill (instrument makers)
Thomson, Dr William 111-13, 122 123, 124, I44n.
Todhunter, Isaac 153 Watney, Daniel 232
Topography 181-2 Watt, James 93, 98, 120, 139-42,
Topology 314, 326, 328n. 143-4n.
Toqueville, Alexis de 8 Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) 126,
Tories 142, 153, 163, 170, 174, 175, 144n.
178 Webb, Aston 204,213
Toscanelli, Paolo 35-7 passim Weisbach, Julius 9~1. 98, 103,
Tower, Beauchamp 164, 166 11~12, 114
Transactions of the Royal Society of Wells, H. G. 179, 197
Edinburgh 130 Werner, Abraham 90
Travellers' tales 5, 6-7,44 Werner,Johannes 30,37
Traweek, Sharon 149 Whewell, William 102, 154, 157,
'Trial by space' (Lefebvre) 23, 89, 181-2, 183-4, 188, 191
105-6, 116, 142 Whigs 142
Triangulation instruments 33 White, James 126, 134-6, 145n.
Trotter, Coutts 158, 160, 162-3 Whitehall 266-7
Truth 133-4, 141-2, 149 Whitman, Walt 72, 81-2
374 Index
Whitworth, Joseph 172 Woolgar, Steve 118,219,336

Williams, Marl 12 Wordsworth, William 186
Williams, Raymond 149, 179, 189 Work-ethics 131-2
Willis, Nathaniel Parker 64 Worsnop, John 177
Willis, Robert 94, 105, 155-6 Wythenshawe, Lord Simon of 266
Wimshurst machine 177
Wise, M. Norton 22 Yeo, Richard 8, 183
~usenschaft 250
Wood-working shop 236 Zoology 8, 10, 15
Woodward, William 207 Zubler, Leonhard 32

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MAKING SPACE FOR SCIENCE

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE IN MODERN HISTORY

with the assistance of Gerald Schmidt

First published in the United States of America 1998 by

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with

Part I or the Territory 25

Part II or Working Classes 85

Part III or Pastoral Privileges 147

Part IV or Metropolitan Spaces 193

9 The Premisses of Premises: Spatial Issues in the Historical

Part V Of Research Sites 263

Afterword: Scientific Knowledge, Power and Space

Alix Cooper is a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Science at

Matthias Dorries is a research fellow at the Forschungsinstitut fur Technik- und

Sophie Forgan combines the teaching of the history of architecture in the

Thomas F. Gieryn is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University

Graeme Gooday is Lecturer in the Division of History and Philosophy of

Alice Jenkins is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the

Ben Marsden is Royal Society-British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Martina Merz is a researcher affiliated to the University of Bielefeld's Sociology

Simon Schaffer is Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the University

Gerald Schmidt is a graduate in English and American Literature from the

Crosbie Smith is Reader in History & Cultural Studies of Science at the

Spatiality: spatial character, quality, or property.

1. THE EPOCH OF SPACE

In his celebrated lA production de l'espace (1974) Henri Lefebvre asked: 'If

control, and on the means by which such knowledge is acquired, legitimated,

Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, dis-

political intentions'. Cartography thus 'became inseparable from the affirmation

highly individualistic literary practitioner in opposition to literary and philosoph-

to those locations where scientific and technological knowledge was manufac-

juxtaposed to closed spaces of galleries and lecture theatres. As a result the

territory both physically and metaphorically, and in a concrete sense embodied

whether rooms are connected in a dispersed or compact manner. Thus 'besides

As with internal spaces, however, site boundaries may be discursive, represen-

repertoires of argumentative strategies possessed by parapsychologists and their

3a. Of Working Classes

research, laboratory teaching, instrumentation and standardization, and commer-

3b. Of Pastoral Privileges

3c. Of Metropolitan Spaces

neighbourhood of workshops, the Central's promoters were unable to draw upon

3d. Of Research Sites

In this Introduction we began with voyages, natural history, mapping, surveys

The role of mathematics, of geometry in particular, has been a traditional focus of

shapes on to surfaces of various forms and orientations. The manipulation and

he shared the preoccupation of a great number of fifteenth-century scholars,

mathematical sciences. From these individual aspects of representation we can

connections not usually made in histories of science - for example, between

Figure 1.2 A sixteenth-century Flemish astrolabe, unsigned, in the collection of the

depending on these appearances be performed instrumentally. Renaissance math-

Figure 1.3 The projection of an astrolabe plate explained in a book on perspective,

as Johannes Werner. The intersection of geometry, surveying, perspective, carto-

What is the/a field? A juxtaposition of particular natural objects, a space to be

My voyages in the mountains had accustomed my lungs to such an extent to

Dolomieu, provided privileged access to nature, to reality, and to knowledge;

Your philosophers of narrow alcoves study natural history in cabinets; they

declared by Saussure 'the laboratory of Nature', and increasingly recognized as

Dolomieu's scientific voyaging allowed him to survive- in style- the tensions

Following this horrific incident, Dolomieu, 'struck with a sentiment of terror'.

In this way Dolomieu forged a new routine of scientific travel: a bureaucratic

When Dolomieu embarked on Napoleon Bonaparte's great and ill-fated expedi-

of Dolomieu' s previous travel. Dolomieu' s ultimately disastrous decision to leave

It was around the 15th of nivose that Berthollet, my colleague, in a meeting of