December’s host Michelle Ziegler, the history of science Santa, has put together a massive sleigh load of #histsci goodies at her blog Contagions in Giants’ Shoulders #54 to see you through the holiday season. So when you’ve polished off the goose and the plum pudding settle back with that box of pralines and enjoy the fruits of the best history of science bloggage from the last month. By the way Michelle is celebrating her third bloggaversary with this edition of Giants’ Shoulders so go on over and congratulate her on three years of excellent #histmed blogging.

Lisa Smith (@historybeagle) will take the history of science blog carnival into the New Year with Giants’ Shoulders #55 hosted on her The Sloane Letters Blog (that’s Sir Hans Sloane founder of the British Museum) on 16^th January 2013. Always assuming that the apocalypse doesn’t take place next Friday. Submissions as always either direct to the host, or to Dr SkySkull at Skulls in the Stars or to me here at RM.

Having posted my recent article on the history of pseudo-science and science I went off to bed. Whilst I was wrapped in the arms of Morpheus an interesting little debate was taking place on my twitter stream. One of the participants thought that astrology and alchemy in the Early Modern Period should be considered as proto-sciences and not pseudo-sciences whereas his companion preferred the term pre-sciences. Their objection to the use of the term pseudo-science certainly has historical validity but if we are searching for a non-anachronistic substitute then as I answered in the morning, when I read their little debate, one should simply refer to them both as sciences. This discussion actually has a deeper meaning and I thought it might be of interest to take a closer look at the objections to the use of pseudo-science and my, for many people provocative, suggested solution.

Isaac Newton was not a nice man. When he was holding court in a London coffee house dispensing wisdom and his mathematical manuscripts to his acolytes he was probably friendly and magnanimous. Also, when he was chatting over breakfast with his housekeeper niece the society beauty, Catherine Barton, of whom he was very fond he was probably very charming. However when it came to defending his mathematical and philosophical theories against his scientific rivals he had the manners of a rabid wolverine on steroids. His intellectual wars with Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz and John Flamsteed have become the stuff of history of science legends known, at least in outline, even to those only mildly interested in the subject. Frank Manuel in his psychological study of Newton described it thus. Newton regarded the natural world as his garden and it was his privilege and God given duty to uncover its secrets. Others who dared to do so were poachers infringing on his private property. However was Stephen Gray really one of his victims? David H. Clarke and Stephen P. H. Clarke (henceforth referred to as C²) thought so and wrote a whole book about it with the provocative title Newton’s Tyranny: The Suppressed Scientific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed. [Were they right?]

This year Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fuelled by the Finding Ada website and twitter account took off big time. Now I have nothing against this celebration and have actively supported it on this blog for the last three years; writing about Emmy Noether in 2010, a quartet of lady astronomers in 2011 and the first female professor at a European university, Laura Brassi, in 2012. I have also posted on other women in the history of science on other occasions. This year I, by chance, also attended, but did not participate in, the edit-thron for STEM women on Wikipedia held at the Royal Society. As I have already said I have nothing against this celebration but as a historian of mathematics and computing each time I do so I have very major misgivings about the organisers choice of figurehead, Ada Lovelace. These qualms were strengthened this month on the tenth, Ada’s birthday, as an echo of Ada Lovelace Day set off a flurry of biographical posts throughout the Intertubes, some of them old and merely linked, others freshly written for the occasion. All of them however had one thing in common, they were not written from original or even well researched secondary sources but simply regurgitated older fundamentally flawed largely mythical short biographies. There is nothing new in what I’m going to say now, in fact I’ve blogged about it before as has one of The Guardian’s excellent lady historians of science Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt. Even the much-maligned Wikipedia gets it largely right in its Ada Lovelace article. All of the short biographies state clearly that Ada was a mathematician and “the first computer programmer”.  Both statements are wrong. So what is the truth?

Johannes Kepler certainly lived in interesting times in the sense of the old Chinese curse.  Born 27^th December 1571 he lived through the most intensive phase of the Counter-Reformation being forced, as a Protestant living and working in Catholic territory, to abandoned his home and livelihood more than once. Trained as a Luther priest he served three Catholic Holy Roman Kaisers as mathematicus and the supreme commander of the Catholic forces in the thirty years war as an astrologus. Always walking along a knife-edge. The last twelve years of his life were dominated by that most devastating of European wars. He played a very central role in one of the greatest upheavals in the history of astronomy as well as redefining the science of physical optics. He lost his first wife and several of his children to sickness and was chronically and oft acutely ill all of his life. Paid at best on an irregular basis by his various employers he was often in desperate need of money. He also lived during the highpoint of the European witch craze in which tens of thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were persecuted, tortured and murdered and must experience how his own mother was tried for practicing witchcraft. [want to know more?]

You have just three days to submit those #histsci, #histmed and #histtech blog posts to the history of science blog carnival Giants Shoulders’ #55 which will be hosted by Lisa Smith (@historybeagle) at The Sloane Letters Blog on 16^th January.

You can make your submission either directly to the host or to me here at the Renaissance Mathematicus.

Giants Shoulders’, as always needs future hosts. If you desire to host the world’s one and only history of science blog carnival then contact me here.

The 55^th edition of the history of science blog carnival Giants’ Shoulders, “Curiosities, Utilities and Authority”, has been posted by this month’s host Lisa Smith (@historybeagle) at The Sloanes Letters Blog. So mosey on over and read Lisa’s selection of the last month’s best history of science, history of medicine and history of technology bloggage. It’s really worth your while.

Next month’s Giants’ Shoulders #56 will be hosted by Michael Barton (@darwinsbulldog) at his The Dispersal of Darwin blog on 16 February. Submissions as usual either direct to the host or to me here at RM by 15 February.

As always Giants’ Shoulders NEEDS YOU! If you would like the honour of hosting a future edition of the universe’s numero uno history of science blog carnival then please contact me here at RM.

This has been a good week for people getting the history of astronomy in the seventeenth century wrong. [to find out what they got wrong go here]

Giants’ Shoulders #56 the history of science blog carnival is being hosted by Michael Barton @darwinsbulldog at The Dispersal of Darwin on 16^th February. Submit your favourite #histsci, #histtech & #histmed post to the host or @drskyskull or to me here at RM by the 15^th February.

As always Giants’ Shoulders needs new hosts. If you have a blog and want to host the best history of science blog carnival since the beginning of time then contact me here at RM.

I’m stepping out of my self-imposed boundaries on March 9^th and am hosting Carnivalesque the interdisciplinary blog carnival dedicated to pre-modern history (to c. 1800 C.E.) here at The Renaissance Mathematicus. If you have an interesting history post for Carnivalesque then you can submit it here.

Michael Barton (@darwinsbulldog) has posted a positively gigantic edition of Giants’ Shoulders the history of science blog carnival on his blog The Dispersal of Darwin. It contains enough good bloggage to keep you reading until the next Giants’ Shoulders appears in a month’s time.

Giants’ Shoulders #57 will be hosted by Alison Boyle (@ali_boyle) on the Science Museum Blog on 16^th March. Submission should as always be made direct to the host or to me here at The Renaissance Mathematicus or to Dr SkySkull at Skull in the Stars by 15^th March at the latest.

We have a host for April but after that Giants’ Shoulders will again be an orphan searching for a kindly host on a friendly blog. If you can offer the best history of science blog carnival a home for a month then please contact me here.

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #1                                   Monday 23 June 2014

Appearing weekly on Whewell’s Ghost

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #1

Monday 23 June 2014

EDITORIAL:

After six years the history of science blog carnival On The Shoulders of Giants ceased to exist, going out with style in a superb final edition put together by its founder Dr SkySkull. The reasons for this termination were explained in advance here. However it was obvious from the reception of each edition and the reaction to the news of its demise that quite a few people enjoyed having their Internet history of science, technology and medicine links served up in one big chunk, saving them, as it did, from having to daily check cyberspace for anything new in those fields. As the apparatus for collecting and collating those links was firmly established for Giants Shoulders it has been decided to offer them here in the form of a weekly Gazette under the general editorship of the Ghost of William Whewell, that great Victorian polymath, and historian and philosopher of science.

The format of our Gazette will almost certainly evolve with time and critique and feedback are welcome at all times. If you feel that are highly professional editorial team are consistently overseeing some excellent source of STEM history then please contact our chief sub-editor here. Items for inclusion in the Gazette can also be submitted to the same address or to the chief sub on Twitter. We hope that you, the readers, will enjoy our weekly digest of all the best in Internet STEM history and will continue to return to this well of historical knowledge on a regular basis.

Your Whewell’s Gazette Editorial Team

ON THE BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

At The History Vault Felicity Henderson writes about Hooke, Newton and the ‘Missing’ Portrait

Jon Ptak has collected some Quantum Mechanics and Physics Timelines and James Clerk Maxwell’s Library 

History of Science Society: An Iconic Image Not so Newtonian After All by Liba Taub

Daily Breeze News: My Turn: Albert Einstein: Just a neighbour to this little girl

Halley’s Log: Halley’s maritime experience, part 1: Hally a Sayling

MEDICINE:

From the Hands of Quacks: On Sharing #histmed Images

The New York Academy of Medicine: A History of Blood Transfusion

Open Culture: The Famous Letter Where Freud Breaks His Relationship with Jung

Dittrick Museum Blog: Morbid Matter: Public Health and Public Opinion

Smithsonian.com: The Glory New York City Riot that Shaped American Medicine

Chirugeon’s Apprentice: Public Health & Victorian Cemetery Reform

Early Modern Medicine: Pregnancy and Prostitution

Social History of Science: Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England

The Public Domain Review: A Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820)

DNAinfo New York: ‘Elixir of Long Life’ Recreated from 1800s Bottle Unearthed on Bowery

Dr Alun Withey: ‘Worems in the teeth’: Toothache, dentistry and remedies in the early modern period

Jess Clark: Pimples, Corns, and Correspondence: Remedying Victorian Beauty Dilemma

“A very secure recipe for the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers”: Medicine and Malaria in Late-Colonial Lima

THE LIFE & EARTH SCIENCES:

Letters from Gondwana offers The Late Quaternary Megafauna Extinction: The Human Factor

Yovisto: Barbara McClintock and Cytogenetics

TrowelBlazers: Maria Graham

Welcome Library: Francis Galton: a Victorian polymath

The H-Word: Public engagement with science, Victorian style

TECHNOLOGY:

Fiction Reboot: Daily Dose On The Invention of Writing

Bletchley Park: No longer the world’s best kept secret

Letters of Note: To a Top Scientist: A schoolboy designs a rocket

Messynessy: The Forgotten Firsts: 10 Vintage Versions of Modern Technology

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY and OTHER:

At least get the facts right says Darin Hayton

Inside the Science Museum: Copenhagen: at the nexus of drama, science and history Interview with Michael Frayn

Imperial College London: Imperial scientists share their life stories in oral history project

Salon: “Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?” : Meet the woman behind Neil deGasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”

On Finding the Grave of Descartes’ Lover, Helena Jans:

Scientific Instrument Makers in the Netherlands: Directory

ESOTERIC:

Forbidden Histories: William James on Exceptional Mental States

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

23rd June is Women in Engineering day! Stay tuned for our participation. Folllow ‪@WES1919‪@thewisecampaign for more!

Adventures With Technology: A Call for Pitches Historians may also apply!

Radical a history of medicine play in Toronto

One day symposium: White Heat: art, science and social responsibility in 1960s Britain

Freud Museum London: 20 Years of Archive Fever

New Book: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude Rebekah Higgitt and Richard Dunn

Registration open for New Directions in Early Modern British History Conference Hull

5-7 September 2014

From Egypt to Manchester: Unravelling the John Rylands Papyrus Collection Manchester 4-6 September 2014

Robert Hooke’s Diary added to UNESCO Memory of the World Register

University of Manchester: Book prize launched to honour world renowned historian of science and medicine

Rebekah Higgitt on Longitude in BBC History Magazine

The 3^rd Annual Robert Boyle Summer School: Full programme

British Society for the History of Mathematics: Non-Western Mathematics Day Oxford 27 June 2014

John Thelwell Society: John Thelwall at 250: Medicine, Literature, and Reform in London, ca. 1764-1834 Notre Dame University July 24-27

BOOK REVIEWS:

New Scientist: The war on pain and why we can’t win it

Brain Pickings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Life and Legacy, in a Vintage Pop-Up Book

The Economist: Magician’s Brain: The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts by Sarah Dry

Times Higher Education: Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, by Richard Yeo

LOOKING FOR WORK?

History Of Science at Work Another Jobs Roundup

Department of the History of Science at Harvard University: Tenure track assistant professor in the history of technology sought

That’s all for this week. Come back next Monday for another seven days of Internet history of science, technology and medicine.

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #2

Monday 30 June 2014

EDITORIAL:

Well our journal didn’t fold after one issue and we are back for a second round. Judging by the reception on Twitter we have found favour with some and this encourages us to continue. We return with bumper crop of history of science, medicine and technology harvested over the last seven days in cyberspace.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Scientific research papers by native Bengali authors during the nineteenth century (PDF)

Los Angeles Review of Books: Faking Galileo by Massimo Mazzotti

London Street Views: Francesco Amadio, Optician

Yovisto: Lyman Spitzer and the Space Telescope

American Institute of Physics: New Valentine Telegdi Photo Collection

MEDICINE:

E.R. McKean’s Improved Ambulance 10/11/1864

Top of the heap: Elizabeth Watkins recommends books on #histmed

NYAM Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health: Female moveable manikin 1599

CNN belief blog: How an apocalyptic plague helped spread Christianity 

Nursing Clio: Sunday Morning Medicine: A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history

Early Modern Medicine: An Overabundance of Advice

GIZMODO: 29 Anatomical Models that Will Haunt Your Dreams Tonight

armsandthemedicalman: ‘Men whose minds the dead have ravished’

BBC: Did disabled workers enjoy greater rights in centuries past?

Wellcome Library: A fresh perspective on the Great Stink?

The Recipes Project: Monastic Domestic Medicine in Italy

Erik Kwakkel: Pictures from a medieval surgery book

Wellcome Library: ‘Beds not Bombs’: the archive of the Medical Campaign against Nuclear Weapons

The Appendix: Fever to Tell: Interactive Storytelling Online and the History of Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever Outbreak, 1793

University College Dublin: The ‘hospital and cemetery of Ireland’: The Irish and Disease in Nineteenth-Century Liverpool by Stephen Bance

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Ichthyosaurs: a day in the life …

Fossil History: Busk and the Neandertals Intro

Ask the Past: How to Reanimate a Frog, 1906

The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768-1771 (PDF)

Kew Royal Botanic Garden: Floreat Kew. In remembrance of the fallen

Phenomena: The Loom: The Zoo In The Mouth

medpage today: Gross Anatomy: 19^th C Gyno Tools Save Famous Italian Foot

Paris Review: a dream of toasted cheese

Johns Hopkins Magazine: The sex manual in the sock drawer

Trowelblazers: Amelia Edwards: The Godmother of Egyptology

What’s in John’s Freezer: Just-So Science: revisiting Kipling’s kangaroos and elephants

io9: The Ornithologist Who Created Our Color Names

The Embryo Project: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)

TECHNOLOGY:

Swansea code breaker welcomes Bletchley Park restoration work

Board of Longitude project: Looking for a new John Harrison

The Bubble Chamber: Can Machines Think Yet? A Brief History of the Turing Test

Ptak Science Books: On the Continued Rediscovery of the Horizontal Pendulum

The Public Domain Review: Picturing Pyrotechnics

Conciatore: Galleria dei Lavori

Yovisto: Hermann Oberth’s Dream of Space Travel

Houghton Library: Illustration from the first book about calculating machines

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY and OTHER:

Aeon Magazine: The sun does not rise

School of Wisdom: Tagore and Einstein

Book announcement: Culture Histories of the Material World

The New Yorker: The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong

George Campbell Gosling: Teaching Medical History

TED: Video: Historian of science Naomi Oreskes: Why we should trust scientists

Inside the Science Museum: Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Science Museum

Video: XXXVIE CONFÉRENCE MARC BLOCH. SIMON SCHAFFER, LES MESURES ET LEURS RITUELS. POUR UNE HISTOIRE MONDIALE DES SCIENCES

Sound Cloud: Lisa Jardine on Jacob Bronowski (and why she wrote 3 ‘boring’ books)

THEATRE:

h-madnes: A Malady of Migration: a theatrical examination of diaspora, displacement and mental disorder in the 19^th century.

ESOTERIC:

Forbidden Histories: Amateurs, Empiricism, and the Tedium of Psychical Research. Guest Post by Alicia Puglionesi

Mysterious Planchette: A survey of curious devices for speaking to the dead. London Artifacts, Part 1: The CPS Spirit Trumpet

BOOK REVIEWS:

New York Times: ‘The Remedy’: A 19^th –Century Bid to Cure TB

Scientific American: DIY Alchemy: How to “Transmute” Copper into Brass [Excerpt]

The New York Review of Books: The Bleeding Founders: Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health

Science League of America: End Times: Orekes and Conway’s Collapse of Western Civilization

Science, Technology, Medicine – and the State: The Science-State Nexus in Scandinavia, 1850–1980 — A special issue of Science in Context

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Ada Lovelace Day for Schools 2014

Ada Lovelace Day Live 2014

Society for the History of Medicine AGM 12 July 2014

Radio 4 and Kew Gardens join forces to explore history of plant science

Academics, Darin Hayton wants to know why you blog.

CfP: The Marginalisation of Astrology (Utrecht, 19-20 March 2015)

NEW: Max Planck Institute for History and the Sciences

LOOKING FOR WORK?

Durham: Fully funded PhD studentship in integrated history and philosophy of science

Postdoc in the History of Emotion – University of Melbourne

PhD Studentship The History of the Metals Industry in Birmingham and the Black Country c. 1700 to c. 1850

Historiens de la santé: 3-­year Doctoral Fellowship on “Globalizing schizophrenia”

Postdoctoral research fellow in the history of emotions (Europe, 1100-1800)

Doctoral Student for 12 months in Philosophy of History and Historiography (incl. ‪#Histsci)

Science Museum: We’re looking for two brilliant Assistant Curators to help work on our new medical gallery.

Canada: Philosophy of Science PHIL / ASCI 2780H, Course Instructor

That’s all for this week posted just under the wire. Come back next week for Vol.3.

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #3

Monday 7 July 2014

EDITORIAL:

The last seven days has raced by like the Tour de France cyclists currently pedalling their way furiously through God’s own Country and like the proverbial bad penny Whewell’s Gazette has turned up for a third time bringing you the best of the histories of science, medicine and technology that our doughty editorial team have scooped up out of the Internet during the last week.

The majority of the British historians of Science have been at the British Society for the History of Science annual conference in St. Andrews this last week making the editorial staff of Whewell’s Gazette very envious with their flood of tweets extolling the wonderful lectures on offer.

POLITICS AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE:

The 10 August this year sees the first round of the first ever direct presidential election in Turkey. One of the candidates is

Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu

who as well as being a diplomatis also a chemist and a historian of science.

Ihsanoğlu is the founder and was first chair (1984–2000) of the first Department of History of Science in Turkey, which he established at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Istanbul. As far as Whewell’s Gazette is aware this is the first time that a historian of science has campaigned to be elected head of state of a country.

We would like to thank Ahmet Yükseltürk for drawing our attention to this fascinating piece history of science history.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Retronaut: 1836: Life on the Moon

Life on the Moon

Ciclops: Captain’s Log: Reflections on ten years of Cassini

Uncertain Principles: The Mumbling Philosopher (Niels Bohr)

Yovisto: Hans Bethe and the Energy of the Stars

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Planetary Tables and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide

New York Time: Obituary: Bruno Zumino Dies at 91, Sought to Tie Together Laws of Universe

Zoonomian: Virtual Recreation of Newton’s ‘Experimentum Crucis’ Two Prism Experiment

OUP blog: True or False? Ten myths about Isaac Newton

MEDICINE:

Board of Longitude Project: Making Progress: Hogarth and the Foundling Hospital

BBC: What Leonardo taught us about the heart

Medical Museion: Scale in Medicine as an Exhibition Principle

Yovisto: Ignaz Semmelweis and the Importance of Washing Your Hands as a Doctor

Remedia: A Botched Job: Surgery and the Politics of Pain

Neatorama: Anatomical Venus: Medical Models from 18^th Century Europe

Anatomical Venus

Dittrick Museum Blog: Arguing Insanity: The Trial of President Garfield’s Assassin

JOE.MY.GOD: 33 Years Ago Today: The first report on AIDS

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2014/07/33-years-ago-today.html

Hyperallergic: Fatal Victorian Fashion and the Allure of the Poison Garment

Scientific American Guest Blog: When Scientists Experiment on Themselves: H. pylori and Ulcers

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Futility Closet: Advice to Darwin

Geology and Generals: How Geology influenced the Gettysburg Campaign (Part I.) Part II:

Kestrels and Cerevisae: “Experimental Evolution Amongst Plants” (1895)

The Embryo Project: Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) and Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (1845–1916)

Leaping Robot Blog: Big Science, Bigger Data: International Geophysics Year 1957

Wired: Fantastically Wrong: The Legendary Scientist Who Swore Our Planet Is Hollow

Twilight Beasts: The bear necessities

Società Geologica Italiana: Galileo as Gemmologist: The First Attempt in Europe at Scientifically Testing Gemstones – (PDF)

Rosetta Stones: Why Fireworks Depend on Geology

TECHNOLOGY:

The Quack Doctor: ‘A new sensation’ – hair-brushing by machinery

Conciatore: On The Path of Antonio Neri

History Today: Alternative Designs for Tower Bridge

Proposal by W.F.C. Holden to encase the bridge in glass to protect it during the Second World War.

University of Galsgow Library: Professor Archibald Barr and the optical rangefinder

Halley’s Log: Halley’s Maritime Experience Part 2: His Diving Bell

Board of Longitude Project: Decoding Harrison

TIME: As Sony’s Walkman Turns 35, a Look Back at Its Inception

The Spinning Sheep: 16^th Century Textile Cleaning and Stain removing Techniques

Popular Mechanics: When Irreplaceable History Lives on Obsolete Tech

The History of Parliament: Finding latitude in longitude: Parliamentary funding of early modern science and technology

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY and OTHER:

Fiction Reboot Daily Dose: MedHum Mondays: NYAM on Public Outreach

Chronologia Universalis: My life as a scribe

Persistent Enlightenment: Foucault, the “History of Thought” and the Question of Enlightenment

Video: Prof Jon Agar: Science and the First World War (26 June 2014)

Notes & Records of the Royal Society: Philomaths, Herschel, and the myth of the self-taught man by Emily Winterburn (PDF)

Astrolabes and Stuff: Arabic in Amman: Immersion?

Public Domain Review: Palacio’s Plan for Colossal Monument to Columbus (1890)

Yovisto: Adolf Furtwängler and Photographic Archaeology

American Institute of Physics: Busy week in the history programs

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Published on …

COMICS:

Comics Worth Reading: “Imitation Gamer” Biography of Alan Turing Online

ESOTERIC:

British Library Medieval manuscripts blog: Art and Alchemy

Conciatore: Strange Bedfellows: Alchemy and Catholicism

BOOK REVIEWS:

Brain Pickings: The Science of Mental Time Travel: Memory and How Our Ability to Imagine the Future Made Us Human

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Philosopher’s Eye: Open Access to Wittgenstein Nachlass

Elsevier: Postdoc free access program

National Maritime Museum: TALK 10 July 2014 The Design and Development of Sailing Ships

ISPC Annual Conference 2014 7-9 July 2014-07-06

Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies

Chronologia Universalis: Computus is Coming: 5^th Conference of the Science of Computus

CfP: Mathematical readers in the early modern world: 18-19 December 2014 All Souls College Oxford

Longitudes Examined: Tercentenary Conference on the History of the Board of Longitude and the Determination of Longitude at Sea Friday 25–Saturday 26 July 2014

New Book: Manchester University Press The neurologists A history of a medical specialty in modern Britain, c.1789–2000 Stephen T. Casper

University of Bonn: Conference Egyptian and Jewish Magic in Antiquity 6th-9th July, 2015.

Historians of science and medicine: fancy writing a guest post for ‘Forbidden Histories’? See ‪here for scope & topics

NYAM: Celebrate Andreas Vesalius’ 500^th Birthday with us on October 18

The Brewery History Society Blog: “Beer writing – past, present and future” Thursday, 23^rd October 2014

A Brown Bag Talk at ACP: John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues: Searching for a missing document at the height of the Cold War

Exhibition: National Maritime Museum: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude

Exhibition Cambridge University Library: The 500th Anniversary of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564)

CfP Technologies of Daily Life in Ancient Greece 3 July 2015 Swansea University

LOOKING FOR WORK?

The University of Leeds Centre for History and Philosophy of Science invites applications to its Non-Stipendiary Visiting Fellowships scheme

Wellcome Trust are looking for an Events Officer

Well that’s all for another week. Like the Tour de France Peleton Whewell’s Gazette rolls on and we’ll be back next Monday with another collection of #histsci, #histmed and #histtech goodies.

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #4

Monday 14 July 2014

EDITORIAL:

Our fourth volume starts with a special collection of post celebrating the 158^th birthday of the Serbia-American inventor engineer Nikola Tesla. In our Meta section you can find a post titled, “Beyond Tesla: History’s Most Overlooked Scientists”. This implies that Tesla has been overlooked and that others have suffered an even worse fate. Now, whilst it might be true that in an earlier age historians of science and/or technology have not paid enough attention to the life and work of this fascinating thinker but we feel the time is long past when this claim could or should be made. The last twenty to thirty years has seen a major boom in Tesla studies both popular and academic and one could now claim that he gets more attentions than he deserves at the cost of others. Put quite simply we think people should stop claiming that their hero Nikola Tesla has been overlooked, ignored, under researched or what ever and instead start addressing the myths that have been created by those pushing his historical claim to fame.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

BIRTHDAY OF THE WEEK: Nikola Tesla

Motherboard: Nikola Tesla’s Pro-Eugenics, Anti-Coffee Portrait of the Future

Nikola Tesla’s Earthquake Machine

Atlas Obscura: Belgrade Tesla Museum

Atlas Obscura: New Yorker Hotel

Atlas Obscura: Nikola Tesla Street Corner

Niagara Gazette: Long Island Tesla museum gets a boost

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Modern Physics: An Historical Overview of the Development of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, Relativity and Cosmology

The H-Word: The private lives of Isaac Newton

Corpus Newtonicum: Newton’s Working Practices (1) – Catchy Stuff…

The Newton Papers: Dirty Laundry

Yovisto: Samuel Goudsmit and the Electron Spin

MEDICINE:

The H-Word: Saving the bacon dutrng the First World War

Guardian Political Science: Beds not Bombs: The history of anti-nuclear medical campaigning and protest

Diseases of Modern Life – Nineteenth Century Perspectives: The Nausea of Noise

Nursing Clio: A history of Neglect

Atlas Obscura: Morbid Monday: Hazardous Dr Hazard, Whose Cure was Starvation

Culture 24: Search for 16^th and 17^th century plague victims ahead of London skeleton excavation

Circulating Now: Illustrating De Fabrica

The Recipes Project: A Medieval Russian Hangover Cure

Wellcome Library: Spotlight: the story of a medieval chapel over time

Neurorhetoric: Brain Stimulation: Why Now, But Not Then?

The Recipes Project: Testing Drugs and Trying Cures Workshop Summary

Wellcome Library: The Great War on Disfiguring Injuries

Vox: The 19^th-century health scare that told women to worry about “bicycle face”

DPLA: Wartime Mosquito Posters

Southern Cross University: An Australian history of the subordination of midwifery (eBook)

CHEMISTRY:

Chemical Heritage Foundation: Podcast: Intoxication & Civilisation: Beer’s Ancient Past

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Letters from Gondwanda: The Early History of Ammonite Studies in Italy

The New York Academy of Medicine: A Gallery of Gauzy Wings

Hill Rock Day Fly Watermark

Science: Ancient bird had wingspan longer than a stretch limo

DPLA: 14^th century bugs!

Trowel Blazers: Charlotte Murchison

A Glonk’s HPS Blog: Download my thesis – ‘Genetics, Statistics, and Regulations at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, 1919–1969’

The Friends of Charles Darwin: 11^th July, 1836: Darwin visits Napoleon

Embryo Project: Mitochondria

TECHNOLOGY:

Bridgeman Images: The Evolution of the Bicycle

Teleskopos: Longitude in Lisbon

The Appendix: The Invention of Wireless Cryptography

Board of Longitude Project: Why longitude mattered in 1714

Guardian: Exhibition Review: Maritime museum finds time for celebration of HarrisonS sea clocks

H-Word: Pictorial Exhibition Review: Ships, Clocks & Stars

The first Longitude Act, given royal assent by Queen Anne on 9 July 1714.

Chemical Heritage Foundation: Video: Two Tales of Ballooning

Ptak Science Books: 200,000,000 Pounds of Buttocks–Or–Putting the Color Back in the Black-and-White

Conciatore: The Material of All Enamel

Yovisto: The Airplanes of Claude Dornier

History Extra: London bridges through time

Science Notes: Today in Science History: George Eastman

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY and OTHER:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: ‘Epistemic amplification’ and Newton’s laws

Medicine, ancient and modern: Thoughts on the first “Galen Day” at Warwick

ISIS: OA Article: History and Neuroscience: An Integrative Legacy

The Recipes Project: First Monday Library Chat: Royal College of Physicians

University of Cambridge Museums: Every Boy & Girl a Scientist

Yovisto: Alfred Binet and the Intelligence Test

Online Guide to Huntington Collections in the History of Science

ISIS: Focus: (OA) Knowing the Oceans: A Role for the History of Science

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Guest Post: The history of “scientist” by Melinda Baldwin

Live Science: Beyond Tesla: History’s Most Overlooked Scientists

Video: Alan Turing

Sound Cloud: Siren FM: Science: Robert Hooke

BBC: Podcast: Dr Alun Withey looks back at medical history

ESOTERIC:

Conciatore: Flexible Glass Reprise

KATEANTIQUITY: OF MISOGYNY, LUST AND VIOLENCE – THE DISTURBING WORLDVIEW OF ANCIENT LOVE MAGIC

Conciatore: Exhibition Review: Art and Alchemy

History of Alchemy: Podcast: Bernard Trevisan

THEATRE:

Broadway World: Mark H Dold to star in Barrington Stage’s BREAKING THE CODE; 7/17–8/2 (Alan Turing)

BOOK REVIEWS:

CHoM News: Paul M. Zoll: Father of Cardiac Electrotherapy

Fiction Reboot : Daily Dose: MedHum Mondays: New Books You Should Be Reading!

H-Net: From Pathology to Public Sphere: The German Deaf Movement 1848–1914

Brain Pickings: Free Radicals: How Anarchy and Serendipity Fueled Science, from Newton to Tesla to Steve Jobs

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

International Conference on the 900^th Birth Anniversary of BHĀSKARĀCĀRYA

Royal Society Publishing: Free Trial

New Book: Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century

Forbidden Histories: Lecture: The Case of Glossolalia by Vincent Barras

New Book: Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma

Gravity Fields: Lecture: Dr Anna Marie Roos: Newton and the Apothecary

Gravity Fields: Lecture: Dr Philip Brohan: New Uses for Old Weather

Diseases Of Modern Life: Conference: Panel on Technology and Disease at the 41st Symposium of ICOHTEC, Braşov, Romania, 29 July-2 August 2014

New Book: Geology: Frederic W Harmer: A Scientific Biography

Finding Ada: Sign up for ALD Newsletter

Technology’s Stories: Call for Participants in SHOT’S Three minute Dissitation Video Contest

Society for the Social History of Medicine: SSHM Undergraduate Prize Competition, 2014

New Book: Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond

Royal Museums Greenwich:Longitudes Examined: Tercentenary Conference on the History of the Board of Longitude and the Determination of Longitude at Sea

http://www.rmg.co.uk/researchers/conferences-and-seminars/longitudes-examined

CfP: The Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS) Seventeenth Annual Meeting

Call for Manuscripts: Journal of Trauma Nursing

LOOKING FOR WORK?

The Royal Society: Four Vacancies!

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #5

Monday 21 July 2014

EDITORIAL:

We’re back for another week and a new edition of the best #histsci, #histtech and #histmed links list in the entire cosmos. This week saw the forth-fifth anniversary of the first moon landing. Although in reality, as a political propaganda exercise, this anniversary actually belongs to political history, however it also involved a lot of science and technology and is thus a suitable subject for our gazette. A comforting thought for a historian of science in the Early Modern Period, despite the twentieth century being the century of a new physics Apollo 11 was brought to the moon and back with the physics and mathematics of Isaac Newton.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

BIRTHDAY OF THE WEEK: The Moon Landing

Leaping Robot: “Sir, That’s Not a Footprint…”

Othmeralia: Meet Gus

The Atlantic: 45 Years Ago We Landed Men on the Moon

Discover: The Silent Centennial of Space Exploration

Library of Congress: Envisioning Earth from Space Before We Went There

T J Owens: Envisioning Earth from Space More than 100 years ago

It’s a Sphere

Video: Apollo 11 TV Broadcast – Neil Armstrong First Step on Moon

Smithsonian Com: Video: Rare Apollo 11 Footage, Remixed and in HD

Smithsonian: Slide Rule used on Apollo 11

The Onion: The Onion reports on Moon Landing

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

A map of Physics

Yovisto: A Wire to Connect the World – Stephen Gray’s Discovery

Atlas Obscura: The Last Original Standard Metre

Science Notes: Today in Science History July 15: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Royal Society: The Repository: Principia

EXPLORATION:

Matthew Flinder’s Cat Trim

Board of Longitude Project: Matthew Flinders – a celebration

Australian Times: Statue of Matthew Flinders, who put ‘Australia’ on the map, to be unveiled in London

The H-Word: Matthew Flinders bicentenary: statue unveiled to the most famous navigator you’ve probably never heard of.

MEDICINE:

Fiction Reboot: Daily Dose: MedHum Monday: The Becker Library and Increased Visibility

CHoM News: Peter Brent Brigham Hospital Records Open for Research

Popular Science: The Forgotten Women Who Made Microbiology Possible

The Recipes Project: How to Heal a Foreigner in Early Modern Russia:

Wellcome History: Boiled baby bees for tea

Panacea: Musings on the History of Medicine: Midwifery II: The Battle for Authority:

Wellcome Library: Welcome to Genomics History Week

Museum of Health Care: Mental Health: Tracing the history of stigma

Hyperallergic: What Did Disability Look Like in the 19^th Century

The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice: The Horrors of Pre-Anaesthetic Surgery

Not Even Past: Individual Rights vs. Medical Responsibility: Human Experimentation in the Name of Science

New York Academy of Medicine: Guest curator Riva Lehrer on Vesalius 500

Guardian: The Institute of Sexology exhibition – in pictures

PLOS Blog: Public Health Perspectives: 1 weird tip to not die of smallpox

BBC: The virus detective who discovered Ebola in 1976

Joanne Bailey Muses on History: ‘Breeding’ a ‘little stranger’: managing uncertainty in pregnancy c. 1660-1830

Science Daily: Tooth plaque provides insights into our prehistoric ancestors diet

CHEMISTRY:

Home Before the Leaves Fall: The Chemist’s War

Medical Historical Library: The Periodic Table in the Twentieth Century On View!

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Brain Pickings: Video: A Miraculous “Accident of Physics”: Carl Zimmer Explains How Feathers Evolved, Animated.

Trowel Blazers: Florence Bascom: a true pioneer in geoscience

BibliOdyssey: Erucarum Ortus

Phenomena: The Loom: The Old Old Earth

New York Times: The Skeleton Garden of Paris

Fossil History: Mary Leaky and Zinjanthropus boisei

History of Geology: Geologist’s Nightmares

Patrick F. Clarkin Ph. D: Darwin, Oversimplified

Fossil History: Happy Birthday Richard Owen

TECHNOLOGY:

New York Times: Who Made the Super Soaker?

Medievalist Net: A Good Day for a Trebuchet

Conciatore: Glass Monks Reprise

The Appendix: The Case for Female Astronauts: Reproducing American in the Final Frontier:

Conciatore: The Portland Vase

Yovisto: Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc

Board of Longitude Project: Celebrating John Harrison

British Museum: Through time: the history behind your watch

Boing boing: Fanciful zeppelins and trains

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Doing Good Science: Heroes, human “foibles”, and science outreach

Chronologia Universalis: Explicit computes: Notes on 5^th Conference on the Science of Computus

Double Refraction: Should the history of science have relevance? Notes on the BSHS conference session

Voices of the Manhattan Project

Library of Congress: Understanding the Cosmos: Changing Models of the Solar System and the Universe

Yovisto: Cracking the Code – Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

Homunculus: A feeling for flow

The Appendix: Perchance to Dream: Science and the Future

The Point: Wonder and the Ends of Inquiry

Unquiet mind of a Transdisciplinary Scholar: Science Fiction as Science Studies on the History of Science

Conciatore: Hugger-mugger

Atlanta Arts: Q&A: Prof Deborah Harkness turned study of 16th-century science, magic into popular “All Souls Trilogy”

History of Love Blog: Why you shouldn’t marry a lady of learning, 1708

Smithsonian Com: The Cannibal Club: Racism and Rabble-Rousing in Victorian England

ESOTERIC:

Heterodoxology: Books from the Esoteric Brat Pack

Science Comma: Charles Fort, WWI and Science

BOOK REVIEWS:

Slate: Rebecca Onion: “Unclaimed Treasures of Science” Even during the Cold War, these women brought feminism to STEM

Robin’s Reviews: Finding Longitude by Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt

Brain-pickings: The Book of Trees: 800 Years of Visualizing Science, Religion, and Knowledge in Symbolic Diagrams

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

BBC WWI: Debate: The Psychology of War chaired by Amanda Vickery

The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: John Wheeler and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Talk 21 July at American Institute of Physics

CfP: 15th CONGRESS OF LOGIC, METHODOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (CLMPS 2015)

teleskopos: Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt’s public appearances for the Longitude Season:

CfP: Failure in the Archives CELL Conference 30 October 2014-07-20

History of Science Society: New HSS Website

New Book: The University of Chicago Press: Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity

BBC: Radio Series: Plants: From Roots to Riches

New Book: A new collection of writing on DARWIN only £1.25 ebook

Wellcome Trust: Director’s Update: Thinking about our grant schemes

Irish Network for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine: CfP: Science in the City 3 October 2014

Phys Org: New Book reveals student life of Charles Darwin

Far Beyond Reality: New Book: Lookin’ Good: Irregularity by Jared Shurin (Ed.)

The Royal Society: Lectures: Longitude: back and forth across the years Martin Rees and Rebekah Higgitt

h-madness: CfP: Psychopathological fringes. Historical and social science perspectives on category work in psychiatry

LOOKING FOR WORK?

University of Exeter: History of Medicine doctoral studentship in collaboration with Hong Kong University

Royal College of Physicians: Project Officer, oral history project:

Academic Jobs Wiki: History of Science, Technology and Medicine 2014–2015

University of Liverpool: PhD Studentships – Longitudinal studies of the health of the poor

The Eagle has landed and so has Whewell’s Gazette for another week. Come back next Monday for another seven days of the best the Internet has to offer in #HistSTEM

DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES ENTIRELY WITHIN OUR CONTROL THIS WEEK’S EDITION OF WHEWELL’S GAZETTE WILL APPEAR TOMORROW TUESDAY 29 JULY!

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #6

Monday 28 July 2014

EDITORIAL:

Another week and another edition of the history of science, medicine and technology weekly digest for your delectation. This weeks featured birthday is British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin who was born 25 July 1920 and gained fame chiefly for her picture of the DNA crystal. Now it might have been the case in earlier decades that Franklin did not receive the acknowledgement for her scientific achievements that she deserved but that is now history and Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the injustice that was possibly done to her has been written about, lectured on, broadcast in TV and radio and generally made very, very public, so could the Franklin fan club please stop moaning about it and instead maybe emphasise some of her other equally important scientific work; she wasn’t just a one trick pony.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: Rosalind Franklin

Hark a Vagrant:

Chemical Heritage Foundation: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin

The Primate Diaries: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of DNA

Yovisto: Rosalind Franklin and the Beauty of the DNA Structure

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

AEON: Cognitive celebrity: Albert Einstein was a genius, but he wasn’t the only one

Corpus Newtonicum: Newton’s Working Practices (2) – I did it my way …

Symmetry: Exploratorium exhibit reveals the invisible

Yovisto: Friedrich Bessel and the Distances of Stars

Blink: Newton on the Ganges

New York Times: TV preview: Testing the Big Kaboom Theory: ‘Manh(a)ttan’, Atomic Bomb Drama on WGN

Science News: Logarithms celebrate their 400^th birthday

Slate The Vault: A physicist eyewitness sketches the first atomic test

EXPLORATION:

NOAA Coast Survey: Whistler hints at artistic flair during Coast Survey stint

Yovisto: Joseph Nicollet and the Upper Mississippi River

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

MEDICINE:

Ask the Past: How to Improve Hearing, 1658

Nursing Clio: Desertion, Martial Manhood, and Mental Illness

Othmeralia: A Movable Atlas Showing the Mechanism of Vision

Circulating Now: The “Wound Man” in Two Recent Acquisitions

Boing boing: This is a 19^th-century breastpump

The Recipes Project: A Peculiar Late Babylonian Recipe for Fumigation Against Epilepsy

Science made Easy: What can we learn from the Liverpool Cholera Riots?

Social History of Medicine Virtual Issue: Disease, Health & the State

Conciatore: Francesco and Bianca: were they poisoned?

CHEMISTRY:

Chemical Heritage Society: Chemical Heritage Magazine

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

The Embryo Project: Edward B Lewis

The Embryo Project: Charles Darwin’s Theory of Pangenesis

Discover: Inkfish: How to Lose a Finger, and Other Things I Learned from Darwin’s Library

Yovisto: Thomas Say and his Love for Beetles

Scientific American: 250-Year-Old Eyewitness Accounts of Icier Arctic Attest to Loss of Sea Ice

Chemical Heritage Foundation: True Science, Fake History: Francesco Redi

Parks & Gardens UK: Elephants and the royal menagerie…

Trowel Blazers: Annie Pirie Quibell

Robert Hooke’s London: Micrographia inspires artists and creative writers

New York Academy of Medicine: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (Item of the Month)

TECHNOLOGY:

Go East London: Dr John C Taylor OBE Contributes to Greenwich ‘Ships, Clocks and Stars’ Exhibition

Conciatore: True Colour Reprise

Slate The Vault: 19^th-century Japanese prints showing the trials of Western inventors

Medieval manuscripts blog: Conservation in the 17^th Century

Video: Diana and Stag Automaton (c 1610) in Motion

Classically Inclined: The vexed question of the departmental photocopier, circa 1903

Epoch Times: 1600-Year-Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology

Yovisto: It’s a computer! – The fabulous Commodore Amiga

Yovisto: Isaac Singer and the Sewing Machine

Fornax Chimiae: Geared to the Stars

Retronaut: 1931: Airport on top of King’s Cross Station London

Laughing Squid: A Brief History of the Theremin, An Eerie-Sounding Early Electronic Instrument That Gave Rise to the Synthesizer

National Museum of American History: Are these John Wilkes Booth’s field glasses?

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Leila Write Stuff: Creating an Inderdisciplinary Syllabus: The Moon as a Cultural Phenomena

The Appendix: Honey, You’re Scaring the Kids

Brain Flapping: Great moments in science (if Twitter had existed)

Guardian: From Roots to Riches: the power of plants – podcast

Books and Culture: The Two Cultures, Then and Now

Conciatore: Don Giovanni in Flanders

Ptak Science Books: On Historical Equalities of Garbage

The Daily Beast: The Scopes Monkey Trial 2.0: It’s Not About the Stupid Science-Deniers

The Royal Institution: Spotlight on Harriet Jane Moore

The Royal Society: Podcast: Cultivating Eureka

Social Minds: Cultivating Eureka written summary

Brain Pickings: Amelia Earhart on Marriage

io9: Einstein’s Advice to Women in Science Still Relevant More Than 60 Years Later

Uncertain Principles: Ten Inessential Papers in Quantum Physics

Ether Wave Propaganda: From Biosocial Anthropology to Social Biology: Some Thoughts on Intellectual Communities in the Post-war Sciences

Compass Wallah: Reading list: A Garden of Stars

ESOTERIC:

The Phrenological Journal

Leaping Robot: Timothy Leary SMI²Les at Carl Sagan

‪Medievalists Net: Murder, Alchemy and the War of the Roses

BOOK REVIEWS:

OSWEGO State University of New York: New book traces science advances to ancient Asian culture

NPR Books: How Scientists Created a Typhus Vaccine In a ‘Fantastic Laboratory

The Lancet: We are the dead: The Sick Rose: Or, Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

Social History of Medicine: Hilary Marland, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

New Book: UBC Press: Daniel Macfarlane ‘Negotiating a River

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: Colloquium: Principles in Early< Modern Thought

Darwin Correspondence Project: Letters Course: Letters as a Primary Source

Television: WGN’s “Manhattan” series premiere to scintillate viewers with science, secrets & sex

American Museum of Natural History: Exhibition: Natural Histories: 400 Years of Scientific Illustrations from the Museum Library

Heterodoxology: Lecture: August 6th: Andreas Kilcher lectures on “Materialization: Occult Research on the Soul”.

Jurassic London: New Book: “Irregularity” is about the tension between order and chaos in the 17th and 18th centuries

Gravity Fields: 17^th Century Masterchef 28 September

British Society for the History of Science: International conference on the History of Physics 4-5 Sept 2014 Trinity College Cambridge DEADLINES!!

LOOKING FOR WORK?

British Science Association: New vision, new structure, new opportunities:- New Jobs!

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science: Head Librarian

Lancaster University: Part-time Senior Research Associate Working on the MHRA funded Davy Letters Project

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #7

Monday 04 August 2014

EDITORIAL:

We are already up to the seventh edition of our little Internet journal, which seeks to anthologise all the best of the histories of science, medicine and technology to be found in cyberspace in the last seven days. Seven was also the number of the wandering stars or planets counted in the astronomy of the ancients a fact reflected in the names of our astrological week: Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars-day (Tuesday is Mardi in French), Mercury-day (Wednesday is Mercredi in French), Jupiter-day (Thursday is Jeudi in French) Venus-day (Friday is Vendredi in French) and Saturn-day.

Wheel of properties of the seven planets Bohme 1682

Astronomy, but not astrology, was just one of the multitudinous interests of the extraordinary seventeenth-century polymath Robert Hooke (28.07.1635-3.03.1703 ns) who is our birthday boy for this edition. Our favourite Hooke expert Dr Felicity Henderson (@felicityhen) has sent off a Google Doodle proposal for Hooke’s Micrographia, which celebrates its 350^th anniversary in 2015. We hope her endeavours will be crowned with success.

This Week’s Featured Tweet: A series of thought provoking tweets from Nicholas Evans (@neva9257) on the use of the word science:

Pro-tip: things get weird immediately after you start the sentence “science is…” “Science” variously describes 1) a collection of facts; 2) a series of criteria for confirming those facts; 3) a set of methods for pursuing those criteria;4) an institution housing those methods; 5) a collection of agents that inhabit, guide and modify that institution; 6) all of the above;7) none of the above;8) some combination 1-7. So the second you start with “science is good/bad/awesome/evil/neutral/bunnies/etc.” I’d love to know about which “science” you are talking.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: Robert Hooke

British Library: Fleas, moulds and plant cells: under a 17^th century microscope with Robert Hooke

History of Geology: July 18, 1635(os): Robert Hooke

The Royal Society: Microscopic views of a spider (spot the error!)

It’s not a spider it’s a harvestman! h/t Matthew Cobb

Robert Hooke’s London: Micrographia inspires artists and creative writers

New York Academy of Medicine: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (Item of the Month)

Renaissance Mathematicus: Making the indiscernible visible: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

Wallification: Happy Birthday to Robert Hooke

Science Museum: Brought to Life: Robert Hooke (1635-1703)

Hooke’s London: A mackerel sky

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Guardian: Smashing Physics: How we discovered the Higgs boson (podcast)

Uncertain Principles: The Fermi Alternative

Forbes: Launching today: The Georges Lemaître: Last of the European ATV Space Vehicles

Guardian: The dreams of invisibility

Medievalists Net: A New Set of Fourteenth Century Planetary Observations

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium and Katharina Kepler’s Trial for Witchcraft: The emergence of a myth

The Renaissance Mathematicus: How much can you get wrong in an eight hundred word biographical sketch of a very famous sixteenth and seventeenth-century mathematicus and philosophicus? – One helluva lot it seems?

Youtube: Video: Carl Anderson’s Positron Photograph made 2 August 1932

The Curious Wavefunction: Celebrating the 1939 Leo Szilard letter to FDR and setting the record straight

Yovisto: John Tyndall and the Physics of Air

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Board of Longitude Project: A pirate map

University Library of Utrecht: Cuba or Cyprus? : a remarkable copy of the Mercator-Hondius atlas from 1606

MEDICINE:

BBC: When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine

Fiction Reboot Daily Dose: MedHum Monday: Getting the Word Out with the Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Collection

Circulating Now: The Question of Rest for Women

OUP Blog: Video: Does Pain Have a History?

New York Academy of Medicine: Naissance Macabre: Birth, Death, and Female Anatomy

CHoM News: Medical Heritage Library Digitizes Ida Cannon’s “Social Work in Hospitals”

The Recipes Project: Sweet as Honey

NPR: Why Somebody’s Mummy Can Teach You About Heart Disease

Irish Examiner: The Anatomy of a Lie – The Irish woman who lived as a man to practice medicine

BBC: The man who helped save 50 million lives

Guardian: Influenza: How the Great War helped create the greatest pandemic ever know

CHEMISTRY:

Yovisto: Stephanie Kwolek and the Bulletproof Vest

Kim Renfield: Rivalry over the First Periodic Table

Science Notes: August 3 marks the passing of Richard Willstätter

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

3 Quarks Daily: Killing Things

Darin Hayton: Ernst Haeckel’s Letter to E.D. Cope

Youtube: Video: German Bone Wars Musical! Harald Rosenberger “Der Kampf um die Knochen”

The Boston Globe: Blaschka’s sea creatures surface anew at Harvard

Motherboard: What Wiped Out the Dinosaurs? Very, Very Bad Luck

New Website: William Smith Online

The Sloane Letters Blog: Strange Pigs

The Embryo Project: Leonard Hayflick (1928-)

The Public Domain Review: Adriaen Coenen’s Fish Book (1580)

Sandwalk: Obituary: Walter Gehring (1939-2014)

Science Notes: August 1 is Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck’s birthday

TECHNOLOGY:

The Atlantic: In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was ‘Too Fast for the Truth’

Science Notes: July 30 is Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin’s birthday

Atlas Obscura: Electrum: The World’s Largest Tesla Coil

Retronaut: 1933: Proposed tower for the 1937 Paris Exposition

Popular Science: Behind the Scenes of “The Whole Brilliant Enterprise”

Computer History Museum: The Cryotron: Extremely Rare Superconducting Digital Circuits Come to CHM

IEEE Spectrum: Frank Malina: America’s Forgotten Rocketeer

Ptak Books: A finely designed microscope ad, 1890

Renaissance Utterances: Jost Amman and the Wire Drawing Bench

Andrea M: Adolfo Wildtat’s Ear Shaped Entry Phone 1927

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Conciatore: The Neighbors Reprise

Literacy of the Present: How Do You Like Your Science? Rare, Medium or Well-Done?

Yovisto: Karl Popper and the Philosophy of Science

Atomic Heritage Foundation: B Reactor Tours

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics: What Great Scientists Did When They Weren’t Doing Great Science

Cyborgology: An Extremely Brief History of Science and Technology Studies

Compass Wallah: East India Company & The Scientific Revolution

India House: The Sale Room

Conciatore: Celebrates his one-year bloggiversary: Gratitude

ESOTERIC:

Astrologie in der Frühen Neuzeit: Astrology textbooks in different movements in the 16^th century

Parapsychology: On the Antiquity of Psychic Phenomena

Nancy Marguerite Anderson: The Sasquatch Story

Heterodoxology: Launching “Occult Minds”: official website of my postdoctoral research project

History of Alchemy: Podcast: Christina of Sweden

BOOK REVIEWS:

Cambridge Journals: Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Live after Death

Times Higher Education: Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, by Piers J. Hale

Chemical Heritage Foundation: Down, but Not Out Edward Shorter. How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown.

LSE: Are We All Scientific Experts Now? By Harry Collins

Brain Pickings: Magnificent Maps: Cartography as Power, Propaganda, and Art

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

National Life Stories invites applications for the Goodison Fellowship to increase public knowledge and awareness of oral history (includes oral history of science)

Queen Mary University of London: CfP Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20^th century.

The Sloane Letters Blog: An explanation for absence: Shark Bites and Sloane Bobs

Scientific American: Nature at War: A special collection of articles originally published between 1914 and 1918

Somatosphere: Foreign Correspondents: call for reviewers and books to be reviewed

New Website: William Smith Online

Royal College of Physicians: Exhibition: The Anatomy of a Building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians 8 Sept 2014-13 Feb 2015

The Wellcome Library: The UK Medical Heritage Library: uniting digitised collections

Veterinary History London: The 41st Congress of the World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine (WAHVM) 10-13 September 2014

Wharf.co.uk: What’s on: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest For Longitude at National Maritime Museum

Gravity Fields: Lecture: Newton and the Apothecary Dr Anna Marie Roos 25 September 2014

LOOKING FOR WORK?

University of Kent: Grading Evidence of mechanisms in physics and biology PhD Studentship and Postdoc Research Associate (philosophy of science)

Princeton University Press Editorial Assistant

Science Museum Group Explainer

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

The editorial staff of Whewell’s Gazette are going on holiday tomorrow and will have little time and possibly very little Internet access so there will probably not be an edition of your favourite history of science, technology and medicine link aggregator next week or if there is it will be severely curtailed.

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #8

Monday 11 August 2014

EDITORIAL:

Our editorial-staff is back from the first part of their holiday and managed to scrape together a somewhat deficient new edition of our links aggregator for the last seven days of Internet history of science, technology and medicine. If they missed your brilliant definitive blog post, sorry!   WE missed slightly less than we might have done because the spirit of seventeenth-century alchemist and glassmaker Antonio Neri popped over to help Mr Whewell in the absence of those who are supposed to do the job, for which we are very grateful

Next weeks edition will also be somewhat curtailed as the editorial-staff are going away again for the weekend. You just can’t get good workers these days! As a result next weeks edition will appear on Tuesday and not our regular Monday.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: William Hamilton and John Venn

Aperiodical: John Venn is 180

Irish Philosophy: What has Hamilton to do with philosophy?

Ernst Haeckel

Letters from Gowana: Ernst Haeckel, The Scientist as an Artist

Embryo Project: Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel

Youtube: Video: Proteus 2004

“Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of being and becoming!”

Shells and Pebbles: “Illegal Science” – The Case of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and German Biology Education

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

The Renaissance Mathematicus: “…realigning the heavens with a single stroke of the brush.” – Really?

Perimeter Institute: 10 Great Quotes from Richard Feynman

APS: Focus: Landmarks – Discovery of Particles inside the Proton

Science Notes: August 8 is Paul Dirac’s birthday

Leaping Robot: Remembering Dr Comet

The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: The Kyoto misconception

BBC: Will the Rosetta mission finally end our fear of comets?

Comets in History

Science Notes: August 10 marks the passing of Henry Moseley.

Starts With A Bang: The Man Who Invented the 26^th Dimension

Physics Today: Navier-Stokes equations remain elusive

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

CBC News: Franklin search: Jim Balsillie, warship all part of largest effort yet to find lost ships

National Maritime Museum: The Art and Science of Exploration

MEDICINE:

The Triangle: The Graduates

Early Modern Medicine: Wounded at War

Wonders and Marvels: Poisoning Enemies in the Ancient Mideast

From The Hands of Quacks: Surgeons & Surgical Kits

Thought Catalog: Sick Roses: Disease And The Art of Medical Illustration

Boing boing: Dery on Disease and Art

CHEMISTRY:

The Public Domain Review: “O, Excellent Air Bag”: Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide

Shells and Pebbles: The Chemical Skeleton: Why Chemistry Mattered to 18^th-century Medicine

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

A Medley of Potpourri: Alfred Russel Wallace

Letters from Gonwana: African Paleoclimate and Early Hominin Evolution

TECHNOLOGY:

Yovisto: Nicolas-Jacques Conté and the Pencil

Science Notes: August 5 is Neil Armstrong’s birthday

Ptak Books: Digital “Computers” 1450-1750: Memory and Calculating on the Fingers and Hands

Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Alexi Baker on science, sales and spectacles in 18^th-century London

Ri Science: One of the first ever drawings of a fuel cell (1842)

Yovisto: Marvin Minsky and Artificial Neural Networks

The Atlantic: The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Cross-Check: A Brief Correspondence on Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, Darwin, Freud, George Ellis and Thomas Nagel (among Others)

The Recipes Project: First Monday Library Chat: Rijksmuseum

Guardian: Academics fear for Warburg Institute’s London Library, saved from the Nazis

Somatosphere: In the Journals, July 2014 – Part 1

John Stewart: Wikipedia in the Classroom

The H–Word Blog: Not moribund at all! An historian of medicine’s response to Richard Horton

Wellcome Library: Is Medical History Dead?

The Chirugeon’s Apprentice: Being a Medical History Blogger

ESOTERIC:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: Astrology and the novatores

The Appendix: Divine Reverie: Revelation, Dream Interpretation, and Teeth in Antiquity

homunculus: On the side of the angels

Yovisto: Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi – The Prince of Astrologers

Nautilus: Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot

Conciatore: Report from Parnassus

Conciatore: The Curious Reader

BOOK REVIEWS:

Chemical Heritage Society: Peter J. Bowler. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 328 pp.

Academia.edu: Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Archaeologist…

TELEVISION:

Slate: How Accurate Is The Knick’s Take on Medical History?

Dr. William Halsted, inspiration for Clive Owen’s character in AtTheKnick, operating in 1904

NYAM: Bare-knuckle surgery? Why no gloves on The Knick

NYAM: It’s All in the Details

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

New Book: Piers Hale: Political Descent. Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution

Hyperallergic: 15 Million Pages of Medical History are Going Online

Drawing of an embryo from “Hand-book of Physiology” by William Senhouse Kirkes (1860) via Wellcome Library

New Book: Russian California, 1806-1860: A History in Documents

History of Science Society: HSS 2014 –– Preliminary Program

LOOKING FOR WORK?

Jonathan Eisen’s Lab: Director of Charles Darwin research Station in Galapagos

Saxton Bampfylde: Director The Warburg Institute, University of London

Call for John Rylands Research Institute Visiting Fellowships: Applications in the areas of Revolutions in Print, Religions and Science and Medicine are especially welcome