Whewell’s Gazette: Year 2, Vol. #14

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

Year 2, Volume #14

Monday 19 October 2015

EDITORIAL:

It’s that time again, time for the next edition of your weekly #histSTM links list, Whewell’s Gazette bringing you all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be scooped up from the depths of cyberspace over the last seven days.

Last Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in STEM, so naturally this week’s Whewell’s Gazette has the same theme. The first section of links deals with women in STEM in general.

FIVE: An interview with… Athene Donald on Women in Science

The Guardian: Why Ada Lovelace Day Matters

Churchill College Cambridge: Professor Dame Carol Robinson

BuzzFeed: 100 Inspiring Women Who Made History

New Statesman: This Ada Lovelace Day, Let’s celebrate women in tech while confronting its sexist culture

The next section is a collection of links about Ada Lovelace that mostly concentrate on the real history and less on the hagiography.

“If Ada Lovelace did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her”. –Christopher Burd (@christopherburd)

“Ada Lovelace exhibition at the Science Museum seemed to me like a nice, balanced, modest display, and well worth a visit”. – Philip Ball (@philipcball)

Royal Museums Greenwich: Ada Lovelace and female computers

Inside the Science Museum: Ada Lovelace: A visionary of the computer age

Gallery View of “Ada Lovelace Enchantress of numbers. An exhibition about the remarkable story of Ada Lovelace, a Victorian pioneer of the computer age, celebrating the bicentenary of her birth.

ODNB: Ada Lovelace

BBC Four: Calculating Ada: Not your typical role model: Ada Lovelace the 19^th century programmer

BBC Radio 4: The Letters of Ada Lovelace

BBC News: Ada Lovelace’s letters and work on display at Oxford Library

CHF: the French Connection

An 1839 woven silk portrait of French textile merchant and inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard, recently added to CHF’s collections. The portrait, made on a Jacquard loom, required more than 24,000 cards to create the pattern. (CHF Collections/Jesse Olanday)

We then have a section of links on the stories of individual or groups of women in #histSTM.

Atlas Obscura: The Daredevil Girl Pals Who Conquered the Sky

A signed photograph of Harriet Quimby and Matilde Moisant. (Photo: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives/flickr)

Google Cultural Institute: 1944: Women in Computing: A British Perspective

The Renaissance Mathematicus: A bewitching lady astronomer

Aglaonice
Source: unknown

ODNB: Squire, Jane (bap. 1686, d. 1743)

Scientific American: 15 Works of Art Depicting Women in Science

“Portrait of Gabrielle-Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet” – Nicolas de Largillière
(oil on canvas)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian: On Ada Lovelace Day, here are seven other pioneering women in tech

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Isabella Karle’s Interview

Open Culture: Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)

Delia Derbyshire

Government Equalities Office: Women in Engineering

Wellcome Library: Women pharmacists demand the vote

Wired: Her Code Got Humans on the Moon – And Invented Software Itself

Margaret Hamilton at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA.
Photo: HARRY GOULD HARVEY IV FOR WIRED

Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist: In Honour of Ada Lovelace – Female Palaeontologists

Letters From Gondwana: Marie Stopes and Her Legacy as Plaeobotanist

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) photographed by George Bernard Shaw. (LSE Archives Image Record, 1921).

Embryo Project: Marie Stopes International

TrowelBlazers: Veronica Seton-Williams

Veronica Seton-WIlliams, image courtesy of the EES.

Brain Pickings: Trailblazing Astronomer Vera Rubin on Obsessiveness, Minimizing Obstacles, and How the Trill of Accidental Discovery Redeems the Terror of Uncertainty

Mental Floss: 8 Stellar Facts About the Most accomplished Female Astronomer You’ve Never Heard Of

Caroline Herschel
IMAGE CREDIT:
MRS. JOHN HERSCHEL, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

A lot of the articles in the Internet on the #histSTM of women are unfortunately historically not very accurate and mythologizing. A great exception is Lady Science, which celebrated its first anniversary last Friday. Lady science is well researched, well written and historically accurate and if you don’t already subscribe to their monthly newsletter you should.

Lady Science 1 Year Anniversary

We close our women in #histSTM on a sombre note. 12 October was the one hundredth anniversary of the English nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium in WW I.

Edith Cavell executed 12 October 1915

The Conversation: Edith Cavell: the British nurse who taught women the way of the stiff upper lip

The H-Word: Edith Cavell: nurse, martyr, and spy?

British Pathé: Service at Westminster Abbey – Nurse Cavell 1915

ODNB: Cavell, Edith Louisa (1865–1915)

Quotes of the week:

“People laugh about children who ask “why?” all the time but not about the adults who never do”. – Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak)

‘Science in itself’ is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. –Virchow h/t @embryoprojct

“Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

“Why do you think I wear them?” – Jennifer Wallis (@harbottlestores)

“Hard work is for people who have nothing better to do”–

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”. – Oscar Wilde

“My take on scientists saying that we might have MAYBE! detected an alien civilization? Crying in my beer over the stupidization of astronomy” – Mike Brown (@plutokiller)

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike” – John Ball 1338-1381

“I think I cracked the Gödel Code. It’s like God but this heavy metal version with the Nazi dots”. – Casmilus (@Casmilus)

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

New Scientist: Explore 100 years of general relativity

moonandback.com: Ninth Planet Named For God of Dark, Dank, Distant Underworld

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Henry Frisch and Andrew Hanson’s Interview

Physics Central: Buzz Blog: Christopher Columbus Steals the Moon

The Space Review: Declassified documents offer a new perspective on Yuri Gagarin’s flight

Gagarin being led to his spaceship at the top of the gantry by Oleg Ivanovsky who was the “lead” (production) designer of the Vostok spaceship.

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 14 – Friedrich Kohlrausch

AHF: Norman Ramsey:

The H–Word: Frank Malina and an overlooked Space Age milestone

AIP: Jesse Greenstein I

AIP: Jesse Greenstein II

Martin J. Clemens: The Mysterious Celestial Spheres of the Ancient Mughal Empire

The famous celestial globe of Muhammad Salih Tahtawi is inscribed with Arabic and Persian inscriptions, completed in the year 1631.

AHF: The Alsos Mission

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 16 – China Goes Nuclear

Louvre: Roofed spherical sundial

Slate: The Vault: An Early-20^th-Century Globe Promoting the Fantasy of a Socialist Culture on Mars

The Royal Society: The Repository: Newton’s dog-ears

NASA: Remembering George Mueller, Leader of Early Human Spaceflight

Yovisto: Réaumur and the Réaumur Temperature Scale

BBC News: The First Spacewalk

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Atlas Obscura: Mariners Today Still Use a Math Genius’ 1802 Navigation Guide

Atlas Obscura: China’s Classroom Maps Put The Middle Kingdom at the Center of the World

Ptak Science Books: A Glorious if Not Accurate Map of Ocean Currents 1675

Source: Pirnceton University http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/thematic-maps/quantitative/hydrography/hydrography.html

Intelligent Life: Deleted Islands

Atlas Obscura: How Marshall Islanders Navigated the Sea Using Only Sticks and Shells

Cambridge University Library: Collections: Marshal Islands Sailing Charts

Sailing chart of Marshall Islands archipelago. Black & White photograph, taken in May 1928, from the Science Museum Photo Archive. Object on loan to the Science Museum from the Royal Empire Society

Atlas Obscura: Places You Can No Longer Go: The Navigation Trees

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

Business Insider: A relic of medieval history explains why glasses make people look smart

Thomas Morris: Stay of execution

The Atlantic: A Short History of Empathy

Mimi Matthews: Aphrodisiacs, Elixirs, and Dr, Brodum’s Restorative Nervous Cordial

V0016204 Two unorthodox medical practitioners, J. Graham and G. Kater
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Royal College of Physicians: Mark Edwin Silverman

The Cut: The First Legal Abortion Providers Tell Their Stories

Embryo Project: Rudolf Carl Virchow (1821–1902)

Museum of Health Care: Diphtheria

The History of Modern Biomedicine: History of Cervical Cancer and the Role of Human Papillomavirus, 1960–2000

Remedia: Crafting a (Written) Science of Surgery: The First European Surgical Texts

Atlas Obscura: The True Story of Dr. Voronoff’s Plan to Use Monkey Testicles to Make Us Immortal

L0003517 Caricature of Serge Samuel Voronoff (1866 – )
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Fugitive Leaves: Tracing Monsters Across Medicine

Thomas Morris: Brained by a bull

Conciatore: A Gift for the Innocent

Thomas Morris: A case of hiccups

NYAM: Cook Like a Roman: The New York Academy of Medicine’s Apicius Manuscript

The Recipes Project: Removing Arrowheads in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

History of Medicine in Ireland: AIDS and history

Conciatore: Alessandro Neri

Thomas Morris: Aleing all day, and oiling all night

Medium: Ralph M. Rosen: The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher: Galen on Science and the Humanities

Thomas Morris: Hemlock and millipedes

One to be taken three times a day

Center for the History of Medicine: On View: The Origins of Anesthesia

Smells Like Science: Ether and the Discovery of Anesthesia

TECHNOLOGY:

Conciatore: The Purse of Envy

A Thoroughly Anglophile Journal: Uncovering a History of Secrets

The Atlantic: The Sexism of American Kitchen Design

Mrs. H.M. Richardson, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) housewife is shown as she prepares a meal in her all-electric kitchen in Morris, Tenn., on January 15, 1936. (AP Photo)

Christie’s The Art People: The evolution of the modern PC in Eight objects

NPR: Turnspit Dogs: The Rise and Fall of the Vernepator Cur

AEON: The hand-held’s tale

Academia: Seeing the Invisible: The Introduction and Development of Electron Microscopy in Britain, 1935–1945

Leaping Robot Blog: Remembering Lines of Light

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

The Washington Post: A scientist found a bird that hadn’t been seen in half a century, then killed it. Here’s why

Embryo Project: Theodor Heinrich Boveri (1862–1915)

Royal Society: The Repository: Drawing under the Microscope

BHL: Fossils Under the Microscope: Hooke and Micrographia