Messing with time

Cross-posted from The H Word blog, first posted on 31 March 2013, the first day of British Summer Time.

It’s hardly surprising that I’ve become very aware of time and how we measure it since beginning work at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. What has really struck me is how much we, on the one hand, are resentful at any suggestion that we alter the way we measure time and, on the other, have done just that many times over the course of history.

Although it’s useful publicity for the Observatory, I never cease to be amazed that the change of the clocks, which happens twice a year ever year like … err… clockwork, is always a news story. Suggestions that we might do away with British Summer Time, or shift to what is euphemistically called Double Summer Time (aka Central European Time) are huge debating points. The fact that we do, or the fact that we might cease to, add leap seconds are stories that both receive many column inches.

Although the introduction of BST was a very 1900s notion of making better – that is, more healthful and productive – use of our long summer days*, history suggests that it takes something like a world war to implement such seemingly radical changes. There is often a sense that diverting from whatever it is we are used to is, somehow, unnatural. It certainly seems unnatural when we are ripped untimely from our beds but, even before the arrival of this annual ritual, there was nothing natural about the way we measured time.

Take GMT, which traditionalists are keen to defend by rejecting summer time and by adding leap seconds to ensure that we do not drift too far from having the midday sun above the meridian at Greenwich at noon. In the scheme of things, it is almost as much of a novelty as BST. It only became official standard time in Britain in 1880, even if it had been used in specific contexts, like railway timetables or in navigation, some time before. Its use as a standard to which international time zones are aligned was a matter of slow adoption from the late 19th century onward.

The implementation of a national standard time, which might be some 20 minutes different from your local time, should you live in the west of the country, was seen by some as an unnecessary novelty. There were those who made a stand, and even today the chimes at Christ Church in Oxford still stick to local time. As can be imagined, the idea being floated at the end of the 19th century that there might be a universally-adopted International Time was much mocked, resented or worried about.

But the national or local times that seemed more meaningful to people are, of course, also artificial products. They are expressed as mean time, which is an averaging out of Sun’s the apparent motion that was adopted in deference to the introduction of a new technology – the clock. Clock time is produced by an artificial system that imperfectly mimics “real” time, which is a product of the Earth’s daily rotation and annual orbit.

The difference between mean time and “real” or apparent time is expressed by what’s called the Equation of Time. This was first calculated in the second half of the 17th century, when the introduction of pendulum clocks made the business of artificial timekeeping sufficiently precise. The fact is, the Sun is rarely at its highest point over the Greenwich meridian at the moment our watches show noon.

Things get even more complex when we start looking into how calendars have been calculated and established. These are fascinating histories that are intertwined with everything from the story of astronomy to how we live and order our lives. Our time has been messed with for centuries and it is not, forgive the pun, a clock that can be turned back.

* Personal gripe: many people seem to think that putting the clocks back in Winter is “daylight saving” and is designed, somehow, to give us more daylight. Guys: “daylight saving” is used in Summer and nothing, but nothing, will create more daylight in Winter.

School history: what worked for me

Much has already been said about the proposed new history curriculum. This piece by David Cannadine in the TLS is a good place to start, as is the Historical Association’s forum on the topic and, of course, Richard Evans in the FT. There is not much point in my adding to all this, but I did want to share something that looking at this contents-page of a curriculum made me recall.

As many of the critics of the proposed curriculum have pointed out, it all begins promisingly enough: it should allow children to “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”, and “how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed”. But what follows seems specifically-designed to undermine such aims, with a chronological list of names, abstract ideas and events that kids from as young as six are supposed to get through in just an hour a week.

There is much concern that this dry list, with often often age-inappropriate topics, will be a complete turn-off and that numbers taking history at GCSE will plummet. It will now be much harder for primary teachers to make history come alive by finding their local history, talking to people who remember past events, taking advantage of local museums, or discussing topics that fit the age of the children being taught – evacuation, for example, might be a powerful topic to discuss with children young enough not to be able to imagine leaving their parents. Instead, seven-year-olds will be discussing “concepts such as civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, and war and peace”.

Thinking about what I don’t like about this curriculum got me thinking about my own experience of history at school. It didn’t make much of an impression on me at primary school: I got most of my history at home and on family trips to museums, monuments and galleries. It is this kind of thing, which many children will not have had, that Gove claims his education reforms make up for but, of course, it is never presented as a chronological ‘island story’. It involved going to places, asking questions, haphazard connections.

The little history I remember from primary school seemed equally haphazard, but that is no bad thing. You gain a sense of historical perspective not by slogging, over years, through a long chronology, but by thinking one day about Roman gladiators and then thinking about how different the world was when Henry VIII was on the throne, or when your house was built, or when aeroplanes were invented. The things that stick most in my mind had a connection to where I lived: the history of the city, the use of the buildings surrounding me. On one class visit to Edinburgh Castle, we dressed up as the French prisoners kept there during the Napoleonic Wars. We offered, as they had, our craftwork for sale and, of all things, sang the Marseillaise as we walked up to the gates.

At secondary school I started to really enjoy history, sometimes because of excellent teaching, sometimes in spite of it. Things were worst when we had to slog through a topic that covered a long period of history and when we were mostly obviously cramming in facts, people, dates and themes to prepare for exams. Things were best when we had discrete topics that we could cover in sufficient detail to get a feel for the period, the people involved and different perspectives.

Another post today from a fellow history of science curator – Charlie Connelly of the Science Museum – suggested one approach to counter that of Gove’s curriculum. This was to tell good stories, something with which many a watcher of TV documentaries and reader of popular histories would agree, not to mention many public historians and those who come to history outside the usual school and academic route. Charlie explains that it was good stories, even if ‘bad’ histories, like Sobel’s Longitude that got her to change her mind on history, having given up at 14 “finding it an unbelievably dry and tedious subject”.

I am a bit more doubtful, as readers of this blog will know, about using misleading stories as a hook. I also don’t recall “stories” being something that got me interested in history at school (although I do remember frequently getting a book called “100 Great Lives” out of the library over and again, undoubtedly a text Gove would have approved of). In fact, the thing that really excited me about history was that the more we know, the more we see that stories can be questioned. That was a powerful feeling.

Three lessons in my first year of secondary school stick out. For each of them the teacher prepared packs of images and texts and allowed us to go through them and draw our own conclusions, before class discussions and his conclusions. The first lesson was based on a fictional crime. We were given a range of evidence from the scene and about suspects and had to see if we could solve the crime. The next lesson did something similar, but with real images, newspaper reports, letters and statements, about the assassination of JFK. The final one looked at the assassination at Sarajevo.

For the real cases it became abundantly clear that the evidence we had was contradictory, that it could be very different in form and that different narratives could be created. This was exciting. We weren’t being taught facts, we were investigating, doing our own thinking and drawing our own conclusions or creating our own narratives based on the evidence we had. Aside from the fact that the evidence was given to us on coloured paper rather than our finding it ourselves in the archive, this really is a little bit like what real historians do.

It is also a little bit like what we all do, when we see the news, read newspapers, talk to friends and family and try to understand the world around us. These are the kinds of skills and the type of knowledge (not knowledge of facts but the knowledge that you are equipped to question or investigate) that school history can give to citizens and future voters. It goes without saying that they are also useful for many kinds of work. In what possible way can Gove’s curriculum compete with that?

Goldacre, Gove and evidence

Something about Ben Goldacre’s recent report on Building Evidence into Education has left me feeling concerned. This feeling is not just caused by the “I love teachers” and “I wrote this lovely paper about lovely teachers” tweets, or the sense of medical research approaches and the “gold standard” RCT [edit: corrected from RTC, when it is, of course, Randomised Controlled Trial.]  coming to the rescue of the floundering field of education research, or the suggestion that there is no quantitative research expertise within existing academic education departments. It wasn’t even the fact that his report fails to mention things like Ofsted, teaching unions, teacher training, curriculums or do more than nod to the huge changes to the profession that would be required.

The thing that really worried me, I suppose, was that this report was commissioned by and launched while sharing a stage with Michael Gove. This is the same Gove who has consistently ignored evidence and expert advice in education policy on a whole host of issues, including, of course, the writing of a ludicrous history curriculum. As David Cannadine, who led a research project on the history of history teaching, wrote in the TLS a few days ago, Gove has in this case taken a course that is “the exact opposite of what has been repeatedly recommended by people who know what they are talking about”.

Is it simply that Gove has a greater respect for the evidence revealed by RCTs than he has for that produced through historical and sociological research? I am not wholly convinced. Does it seem likely that this government will start supporting state schools sufficiently to allow them time and resources to engage in research trials, not to mention the kind of pay scales that might be commensurate with a profession that undertakes such work and is listened to? Again, not convinced.

The report was launched at the Bethnal Green Academy, and it is interesting to put this report alongside Gove’s commitment to academies and free schools. It is surely schools of this sort, along with private and independent, rather than state primaries and secondaries – tied to government-defined curricula and competing  on the most unlevel of playing fields – that would be in the best position to attract and support the kind of teachers who could undertake research. This would only exacerbate the divergence in provision, with teachers in different kinds of schools working in increasingly different circumstances. In addition, it seems likely that evidence more likely be produced from particular kinds of schools, lacking any real randomness in the trials.

If the model is medicine, these schools are, like general practice surgeries, businesses. They too will be testing products and techniques offered by private companies, which, like pharmaceuticals, are in the business of finding ever-more conditions that require intervention. Meanwhile, Goldacre’s urging of teachers to take the initiative and ape they betters is as get-on-your-bike, pull-your-socks-up and self-help as any Thatcherite would like.

I’ll admit that this is not a topic I know enough about, and the foregoing may be complete twaddle. If so, I apologise, but would be interested to hear other views. I know that the schools I went to (long, long ago) and the school my son goes to today would not be capable of adding research – quantitative or qualitative – to what they already, just about, manage to deliver. I also know that much of education and education research is already a commercial business. Goldacre’s report won’t shift policy, but it is sobering to think about where it might sit in Gove’s world view.

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Postscript [18/3/13 20:58]: Ben Goldacre has today published a piece in the Guardian on his report, which, despite a tweet that stated “People keep asking what I think about [Gove] and evidence. Here:”, did absolutely nothing to suggest he has thought deeply about the politics, about Gove or, indeed, about the school-based, education-focused context of his topic.

Since publishing this post, I’ve had some interesting discussions on twitter and been pointed to some useful posts and articles. Here is some further reading:

Behavioural Insights Team, published in collaboration with Ben Goldacre and David Torgerson, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials – a policy paper from June 2012 that is fairly similar to the education piece, arguing that RCTs should be used widely in public policy, debunking some ‘myths’ about them then explaining how they should work in an ideal world.

Tom Bennett, ‘Thinking in the right direction; just don’t put all your faith in RCTs. Ben Goldacre’s vision for evidence based learning‘ – a post from an education blog that highlights the problems and impossibilities of the Goldacre vision. His description of Bethnal Green Academy – “Nice looking school; it’s got BSF written all over every plane and pane. The livery outside the school shouted every second sentence of the latest Oftsed report.” – was one of the things that got me thinking about the positioning of Goldacre’s report for Gove, although he also felt that Gove’s very presence was a positive sign for research and evidence in education.

Paul Cotterill, ‘The dangerous Dr Goldacre: Cohranian hero or just peddling garbage‘ – a post that points out the politics always and inevitably (and rightly) inherent in education and social policy, and that “a worthy aspiration can all too easily be hijacked by … governments (not just the current one) very keen on the idea of using research evidence to impose their own views of what success in education looks like, and less, but much less keen on the development of the kind of ambitious, democratically oriented research governance infrastructure that he advocates”. It also quotes from the following:

Will Davies, ‘The problem of evidence centres‘ – a post looking at the recently-announced evidence centres and the “somewhat naively optimistic view” that RCTs are a universal solution. But what are, and how do we define, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes in the many facets of educational experience?

Warren Pearce and Sujatha Raman, ‘Evidence: a means of making expertise public? The RCT movement in public policy‘ – outline of paper forthcoming at the  International Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference that will be asking “How can RCTs deal with the problem of expertise if experts are still needed to produce, interpret and apply evidence in particular circumstances? What sorts of institutions of epistemic governance might berequired to ‘open up’ RCTs vis-à-vis other forms of evidence for policymaking? To what extent have classical concerns about the ethical challenges posed by RCTs in social context been addressed in therecent literature?”

Dave O’Brien, ‘Drowning the deadweight in the rhetoric of economism: what sports policy, free swimming, and EMA tell us about public services after the crash‘ (Jan 2012 £) – an article that, exploring the Coalition government’s plans and decision-making processes in public service provision, notes “a specific rhetorical use of economic evidence to present controversial decisions as technical exercises”.

Skeptics and scepticism

Cross-posted from The H Word.

I was somewhat disconcerted to see something completely erroneous appear in Guardian Science’s own Notes & Theories blog. It was this:

A word about the distinction between sceptics and skeptics. A generic “sceptic” questions accepted beliefs. In this way, we have “man didn’t go to the moon” sceptics. (Some people won’t believe anything.) Skeptics are different: they espouse the evidence-based approach – and find the world wanting in many respects.

Yikes! As an early commenter rightly pointed out, the sceptic/skeptic spellings are simply UK and US variants, although later commenters denied this and continued to perpetuate the error. Somehow the British spelling now denotes “bad” scepticism (i.e. questioning scientific consensus on topics as varied as vaccination, lunar landings and climate change) and the US spelling is identified only with “the evidence-based approach” to … something-or-other.

It is true that the capital “S” Skeptic movement uses the US spelling even in the UK, but that is an extremely circumscribed use of the word. It is one that is not widely known or understood outside particular communities. Before about 2010, when I started blogging and using Twitter, it’s something I had never come across (and I say that as someone who has an interest in science, is an atheist and attempts to make decisions rationally and based on evidence).

To compound matters, this was written by Deborah Hyde, editor of The Skeptic magazine. To not understand the meaning and history of the title of your own publication is a worry.

Scepticism, or skepticism, is neither denialism nor a movement. Based on the Greek skeptomai, which means to think or consider, it usually means doubt or incredulity about particular ideas, or a wider view about the impossibility of having certain knowledge. This uncertainty is a philosophical position, and philosophical scepticism includes attempts to deal with it, through systematic doubt and testing of ideas.

So, let’s be clear. In the US you can be a climate skeptic. In the UK you might consider yourself a Skeptic and approach knowledge in a sceptical way. It also appears that it is possible to be a Skeptic and yet not be a sceptic. Hyde’s parenthetical “Some people won’t believe anything” dismissal of “bad” sceptics suggests very little understanding of what scepticism really means.

This goes to the heart of much recent criticism of Skeptics, often coming from within the movement itself. The charge is that many self-identified Skeptics are not properly sceptical (or skeptical) of the positions that they or their leading figures take up. Rather, a tribalism or group-mentality develops in which – unthinkingly – certain positions are condemned or approved.

It would be wrong to tar every self-identified Skeptic with the same brush. However, all too often what comes over to those on the outside is a rather narrow and repetitive focus on particular topics and, more importantly, a condescending, over-confident tone in engaging with those who disagree or who have given such things little thought.

These things matter if Skeptics are really interested in changing or opening minds rather than getting together and having a good laugh about whacky beliefs. Hyde’s article suggests it is the former that now takes precedence:

Many skeptics retain a hobbyist’s level of delight in debunking psychic powers or ghost stories, and that’s where the movement started. But the subject matter has become more serious and political. In the last decade, the most formidable opponents of alternative medicine have not been government regulators, but skeptics.

She adds vaccination, the teaching of evolution in schools, gay rights and abortion rights. Her claim is that Skeptics, or nerds (or geeks) are “the people with the best intellectual tools to rebut the traditional postulates”. I would query that, if her “nerdocracy” means the self-selected (and not necessarily experienced or qualified) group that might identify with the term. As it stands, they also may not be the best (and should certainly not the only) group to attempt to communicate the issues to the broader public.

I’ll end simply with a reminder that the etymology of scepticism implies enquiry and reflection, not dismissiveness.

Getting women into history and science is great, but where are the men?

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Now that Ada Lovelace day – which seeks to highlight inspirational stories about women in science – is safely over, I can mention something about it that concerns me. It is a broader concern than this one day, and is basically this: where were the men?

As I explained in an earlier post, I am all for seeking out women’s stories in history, because it gives us a different and equally important perspective on how science happens. I also showed, in the context of Wikipedia editing, that it is hugely important for women to be making and sharing knowledge. However, I am concerned by the fact that the two things seem so often to have to go together. Women should be writing about women.

In fact, men and women should be writing about men and women (and boys and girls, animals and instruments, seas and skies, or whatever). I think it would be hard to disagree with this point, and yet so often we find ourselves positioned against this.

I very happily went along last Tuesday to host an Ada Lovelace special for PubSci, to hear several women speaking about the women in history that helped provide inspiration in their scientific careers. But I would have loved it if there had been one or two men speaking about women too. (Though many thanks to the men who organised and attended the event!)

In my academic career, writing about gender is something that has both had an appeal and something I have purposely avoided. After having written my undergraduate dissertation on women in 17th-century drama, I was keen not to find myself pigeonholed as a woman who only wrote about women and found myself for some time focusing fairly squarely on the men of science who formed the core of my postgraduate research.

Fairly or unfairly, my sense was that this reinforcement of the view that women’s history is by and for women can serve to trivialise both the makers and subjects of that research. It becomes a niche, when it should be an integral part.

The same danger can arise when all the work and publicity about bringing women into research/academia/politics/business is delivered by women. If we agree that it is important that female voices should be much better represented in a host of important and influential places, then that is a concern for everyone.

That it should be a shared concern is the reason why I do not agree with those (men) who complain about women-only shortlists, training sessions aimed at women, or the need to create “binders of women” that can be waved under the nose of politicians suffering female-selective blindness. But these things should be endorsed, created and delivered by men as well as women, until such future time that these particular distinctions cease to hold such significance in the workplace.

Preparing for the Three Societies (US, British, Canadian joint history of science meeting)

I have now reached Philadelphia, continuing research on Lewis and Clark (see previous post) and awaiting the Three Societies meeting, which starts on Wednesday. I am part of a session relating to the Longitude Project, called ‘Defining the Instrumental: Navigation, Longitude and Science at Sea in the 18th Century’. The full programme of the meeting can be found here, and I have posted the session and paper abstracts over on the Longitude Project Blog.

The Three Societies meeting is a quadrennial joint meeting of the History of Science Society, British Society for the History of Science and Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, hosted by each society in turn. There is a St Louis Cardinals baseball bat that is ceremonially handed over from one society president to the next, which must have started life at the HSS-hosted event of 2000, at the Hyatt Union Station, St Louis (it was hot then, too – the British delegates found it tough going!).

This was not, however, the first of these meetings. You’ll see from the list here that a joint HSS-BSHS meeting was held in Manchester in 1988 and that the three societies have met up since then in Toronto (1992), Edinburgh (1996), St Louis (2000), Halifax, Nova Scotia (2004), Oxford (2008) and now Philadelphia (2012).

I have been in this business long enough to have been to three of these meetings, which is a sobering thought. The previous two mark important junctures in my life. At Halifax (a lovely place, if you haven’t been, full of pubs, book shops and maritime history) I was in possession of a brand new doctorate and, although unemployed, happy to be presenting on new, spin-off research.

Before the Oxford meeting I got my postdoc job in Edinburgh, but by summer 2008 I was a (relatively) new mother and starting a brand new career as a curator. Apart from a talk at the NMM, this was my come-back gig. On the back of my research on the history of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, I joined a session organised by Aileen Fyfe on ‘Science and Victorian Tourism’.

Aileen was a much newer mother than I was at that meeting. There is a photograph in the relevant issue  of Viewpoint, the BSHS newsletter, recording the fact that three of us (me, Aileen and Emily Winterburn) were there at the meeting with babies. We were all recipients of the BSHS’s Care Grants, which allowed us to pay for childcare during the sessions themselves. Kudos to Emily, though, who gave her talk with her baby in a sling!

Not sure that this 2012 meeting marks such a transition point, unless it is the large amount of time I’ve been away sans little one. I’m certainly looking forward to the talks, tours and sociability. More anon.

Way out west, looking for Lewis and Clark

What better day to reach the heartland of America than 4th July? After my transatlantic crossing, I took a short hop from Chicago to St Louis, Missouri, taking off shortly after dusk at 9pm and landing at 9.40. The towns and cities, glittering in the darkness were given added life with an impressive number of fireworks going off, from down town to every suburb.

From the air the fireworks were small, silent and very much part of the city’s lights. As we came in to land, they appeared larger and higher, finally reaching up into the night sky. As we came over St Louis, there below was the dark strip of the Mississippi river and, coming into focus, the arch, gateway to the west, blooming and flourishing with colour and light.

I am here in Missouri looking for Lewis and Clark  – or, more precisely, looking at objects and manuscripts relating to Merriweather Lewis, William Clark and their 1804-06 expedition from St Louis, down the Missouri river and to the Pacific coast. Their aim was to see if a navigable river route could be found that connected the east and west coasts of the continent, providing access to the lucrative fur trade of the north Pacific. The expedition was also about staking a claim to and exploring lands that, with the Louisiana Purchase, were now part of the United States.

The expedition was created by Thomas Jefferson who, a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and inspired by the legacy of Cook’s voyages, ensured that this expedition was, as far as possible, also one of scientific exploration. Lewis, his personal secretary, was prepared with personal tuition from acknowledged experts, that included training in astronomical observation for ascertaining latitudes and longitudes, local time and magnetic variation. Clark, an army friend of Lewis’s, carried out the bulk of cartographic work through dead-reckoning. Records of weather, geography, flora, fauna, local people and their manufactures were also duly recorded, collected and sent home.

While largely unfamiliar to British audiences, Lewis and Clark are what every schoolchild knows in Missouri and beyond. Trails, exhibits and place names recall their expedition and longer presence in the region (both were to play roles in the further development, or exploitation, of the lands they had explored). There are also some wonderful artefacts and manuscripts relating to the expedition, many of which you can explore in this online version of the 2004 bicentenary exhibition.

This started life at the Missouri History Museum, where I was this afternoon, seeing material that had belonged to the Clark family. Yesterday I was Columbia, Missouri, at the State Historical Society of Missouri, where a great manuscript has survived – a notebook of step-by-step, how-to instructions for astronomical navigation, prepared for Lewis by the University of Pennsylvania’s professor of mathematics, Robert Patterson. Many thanks to all the curators, archivists and librarians in both institutions, who were extremely helpful and welcoming to a slightly disorientated and very hot traveller.

Travelling in Missouri, for those without a car, seems hardly easier than it was for Lewis and Clark. Despite Columbia MO being a university town, there is no train station and – as I discovered this morning – getting a seat on the twice-daily Greyhound buses to St Louis is something of a lottery. This led to a great deal of waiting around, a certain amount of discomfort and some hefty taxi fares.

On the plus side, I did enjoy my initial foray from St Louis by Amtrak, and couldn’t resist taking a picture showing a view that you just don’t get travelling on British trains (I swear there’s a stagecoach chasing in the distance…)

The line runs alongside the Missouri river, and it was nice to think that I was following the direction of Lewis and Clark, just briefly.

Apologies that this is a little fuzzy, but it was taken through the train window, and hastily as a gap in the trees appeared. I also can’t resist adding this one, with a genuine UFO captured:

(Actually, later identified as one of a number of spheres placed on the power cables strung across the river…… I think.)

Amtrak got me as far as Jefferson City – which was somewhat less metropolitan than the name had led me to expect. The train station was staffed entirely by volunteers. Nevertheless, it is home to the State Capitol, an impressively large building with some interesting decorations. Those on the interior I didn’t have time to see (though more, perhaps, anon), but I caught a glimpse of those on the outside, as a taxi whisked me past, which included a bronze group celebrating the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

And yes, whatever inaccuracies here, there was a dog, a sextant, a female native American interpreter – and her newborn baby. Sacagawea, local guides and those who drew or described maps for Clark were as essential to their enterprise as the scientific instruments they took with them. It led to the first published map of the interior of the American west, recording local names, adding not a few ‘Lewis’ and ‘Clark’ rivers and hills, and removing all trace of the villages and significant sites described by the locals.

What history says on science, innovation and growth

The experience of being on the Science Question Time panel on ‘Science and growth’ was a great deal more pleasurable than I had feared in my dark moments of imagining delusioned scientists throwing cabbages, and economists and policy experts laughing at me. While it wasn’t necessarily easy to bring history into a conversation that was, naturally, focused on the present and near future, I found the conversation fascinating and managed to throw in a couple of points by way of perspective.

You can read the tweets from the evening here, and you can check back at the main page linked above for details of the podcast or any other comments.

It is a topic that I will undoubtedly come back to, but I thought it might be interesting to say a little on how I prepared myself for the event. Here is some reading, focusing on the 20th century rather than my 18th-19th-century comfort zone, and a handful of axioms that armed me for the fray. Because the rest of the panel and most of the questions were extremely well-informed, there wasn’t much need to spend my time puncturing traditional myths, but it may be interesting to see their opposites in black and white, and bear them in mind when I come back to the theme.

Reading

The introduction to Jon Agar’s new Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond and his framework of ‘working worlds’ was very useful in thinking about the relationship between science, technology, innovation and government without getting bogged down in discussions about ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science.

John Krige, ‘Critical reflections on the science-technology relationship‘, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 76 (2006), 259-69 [thanks @ali_boyle for the suggestion] is a very useful introductory outline to the issues and previous approaches.

Edwin Layton, ‘Mirror-image twins: the communities of science and technology in 19th-century America’, Technology and Culture 12 (1971), 562-80 [thanks to @thrustvector for the suggestion] has a nice case-study of the separate spheres in which science and technology develop.

David Edgerton, ‘The linear model’ did not exist: Reflections on the history and historiography of science and research in industry in the twentieth century‘ gets beyond the obvious point that there is no linear model (science->technology->growth, or variants) and points out that earlier commentators could be a lot more sophisticated, and that too much history of science and policy discussion gets fixated on the tiny world of academic research.

Axioms

• All science is not academic science
• Most science is not publicly-funded
• Most research is not academic
• Most science is not research
• Technology builds on technology, science builds on science
• Science benefits more from new technologies than vice versa
• Science was never pure

While there may be counter-examples, and differences across time and nations, I think that most of these stand up, and are helpful when thinking about science in the past and the present and, more than likely, the future too.

Cutting a dash: men of science as ‘historical hotties’

I had a bit of fun this week tweeting links to portraits of some 19th-century men of science, suggesting that they were ’19thC scientific hotties’. Such a phrase is not, I should add, my usual vocabulary, and nor is a focus on people’s looks. And thus explanation is in order. My tweets brought a response from Vanessa Heggie - “trying to tell myself this ‘historical hotties’ thing is OK, as is clearly subversion of patriarchal power” – and linking to Bangable Dudes in History.  Was I making a feminist point? Or was I objectifying these men in a way that I would naturally find uncomfortable if it were living women? Was I, perhaps, attempting to claim that men of science can be attractive, in some sort of historical, masculine version of the (for me) dubious Cheerleaders for Science.

I was, in fact, playing with a few ideas that I didn’t want to develop in 140-character chunks on Twitter. One was exploring this as a hook for introducing less-well-known scientific figures to an unsuspecting public, another was thinking about how such men chose to be portrayed in their lifetimes, and the third was my own response to these portraits, and how they may have coloured views of these historical characters.

The whole thing started in response to this post by Beth Dunn on Thomas Say and the utopian project that had Robert Owen sending a ‘Boatload of Knowledge‘ – in the form of men of science, writers and artists – to New Harmony in the mid-West. It was not Beth’s contention, but someone had suggested that Say was a “19th century hottie”. I retweeted the post, but also suggested that I had another favourite portrait of a man of science and adventurer, the NMM’s portrait of James Clark Ross by John R. Wildman.

Ross, who travelled to both the Arctic and Antarctic, located the north magnetic pole and carried out a huge range of scientific observations, was reckoned by Jane Franklin ”the handsomest man in the navy”. He was the “scientific serviceman” par excellance: a heroic naval figure who could cut a dash and demonstrate his manly devotion to nation in time of peace. He’s fascinating, but I don’t fancy him (he’s dead, for a start), I just love the portrait: a Romantic shock of dark hair, passionate glance, icebergs, polar bearskin, Pole Star and, beautifully delineated in the foreground, an instrument known as a dip circle, used to measure variation in magnetic inclination.

As my tweet got a reasonable response, I followed it up over the next couple of days with links to Thomas Phillips’ portrait of Michael Faraday and Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Henry Brougham. Again, these are Romanticised images of men who, in very different ways, took on public roles that were undoubtedly enhanced by their intelligence and charismatic personalities. Faraday was, of course, a star public lecturer (the Brian Cox of his day, dare I say?) as well as a hugely important figure in the history of chemistry and physics. Although modest and discrete, he certainly knew – or learned – how to capture his audiences through look, voice and gesture as well as knowledge and dexterity. Brougham, in reality, was probably no looker but I was captured by his portrait when it was displayed in a NPG exhibition, The British Portrait 1660-1960, way back in 1991 (when I just about knew of the Great Reform Act, but had never heard of history of science). It is Lawrence at his best: capturing a light of fierce intelligence in the eye of this young, ambitious, passionate lawyer.

I think I would have to admit, if challenged, that my knowledge of these portraits probably pre-disposed me to some level of sympathy for the sitters. Quite probably it was more than I might have felt had I first seen their much later photographic portraits. It’s never nice to admit, but looks and first impressions inevitably colour our impressions of people and, I think, the same can be true of those we meet through paintings and archives, although better acquaintance can often override early opinions. Other times, an interest, familiarity or admiration can build up from knowledge of the archive, only to be challenged when finally seeing a portrait that misses by a country mile the mental image built up.

What interests me particularly about these portraits, and others of the period like Humphry Davy or William Whewell, is that they depict relatively young men, in a period when youth, imagination, intellect and genius were unabashedly romanticised and celebrated. Although there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, before this date portraits often appear more formal, and later the dominance of photography brings a distinctly unflattering stiffness or realism to our heroes. By and large, too, men of science tended not to have portraits done until they had reached rich or honoured old age, usually long after their best work was behind them. And how much do they affect our assumptions? Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal is usually thought of as dull, plodding, uptight and downright grumpy. There is certainly plenty of this in what his wrote in old age, and it is underlined by our best-known image of him, a frontispiece to a posthumous volume, but do we think a little more kindly of him when presented with his more youthful image?

These themes are particularly pertinent in a museum setting. People and the personal are very often dominant in our displays, either reflecting the kind of material that has been collected (relics, provenances) or assumptions about how audiences best respond to the themes we are treating. If you want people to care about the bunch of stuff (scientific instruments, documents, tools, trinkets, whatever) we are showing, the usual tactic is to provide a name, some biography and a portrait. If those portraits evoke sympathy and interest, all the better. Thus, while I have concluded that my ’19thC scientific hotties’ are not the answer to eschewing anniversaries as a hook for introducing my historic characters, I nevertheless found it helpful to think about personal reactions to these images, with their ability – part of their original intention – to inspire the viewer with a whole range of emotions.

My Royal Society talk: Maskleyne’s reputation

[Cross-posted from the Longitude Project blog]

Readers of this blog may be interested to listen to a talk I gave at the Royal Society last week. Audio and slideshow versions are available here. The talk was entitled “Hero or villain? Nevil Maskelyne’s posthumous reputation” and, while pointing out that ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are hardly historiographically useful categories I discussed how Maskelyne has come to be most commonly known as the villain of the story of longitude.

I began by briefly introducing the man and his life, before discussing the two early and influential accounts of his life, which demonstrate the range of Maskleyne work and his high international reputation. These were a 1812 article inRees’s Cyclopaedia by Patrick Kelly, who was master of Finsbury Square Academy and an author on nautical astronomy, and the Eloge produced for the French Institute in 1813 by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, permanent secretary for mathematical sciences, director of the Paris Observatory.

Kelly was one of Maskelyne’s close acquaintances and Delambre, according to Lalande in a letter to Maskelyne held in the NMM’s Caird Library, once considered Nevil “le dieu de l’astronomie”. It’s unsurprising that Maskelyne comes out well of these accounts, but it is typical that early 19th-century biography should be sympathetic to its subject and that it should be produced by friends, family or colleagues. They are the sources that were taken up, and thus my talk explored why and at what point the image of this significant figure of British science, who was acclaimed for his dedicated hard work and for making the Royal Observatory useful to the public, became one of elitism and obstructiveness.

As I hope I show, it can’t all be blamed on Sobel’s Longitude but, rather, dates back to earlier rediscoveries of John Harrison, and to horological histories that have tended to ignore significant aspects of the contemporary context.

My talk also dwells a little on my dual response to this. On the one hand there is an academic one that seeks to avoid historical goodies and baddies, to explore fully contexts and motivations and to replace simplistic accounts with more nuanced ones. On the other, there is a sense of injustice which, of course, must mirror that felt by those championing Harrison. There seems to be ample evidence that Maskelyne was a pretty nice, and fair, man but it’s difficult to know what to do with this knowledge! I hope, at least, that future displays at the Royal Observatory – Maskelyne’s home – can take advantage of the objects, manuscripts and accounts that the Museum has to reflect something of Maskelyne’s significance in his own time and his life with friends, colleagues and family as well as antagonists.

While over at the Royal Society’s list of history of science podcasts, do take a look at some of the others on offer. 18th-century enthusiasts will enjoy James Sumner’s ”‘How should a chemist understand brewing?’ Beer and theory around 1800″; material culture/materials folk should listen to Susan Mossman on plastics; more on someone closely connected to the history of the Royal Observatory can be found in Frances Willmoth’s talk on Jonas Moore; early 17th-century instruments and clocks are discussed by Rebecca Pohancenik. And much, much more. Many thanks to Felicity Henderson at the Royal Society for inviting me to join them.