Katherine McAlpine | Queen Mary, University of London (original) (raw)

Papers by Katherine McAlpine

Journal of Science Communication

Between 2010 and July 2015, a group of researchers at the Department of History and Philosophy of... more Between 2010 and July 2015, a group of researchers at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and the National Maritime Museum were engaged in an Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project “The Board of Longitude 1714–1828: Science, innovation and empire in the Georgian world”. The project team included a dedicated Public Engagement Officer whose role was to engage audiences with the outputs of the research project.
The National Maritime Museum celebrated the 300 th anniversary of the 1714 Longitude Act with a major exhibition, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude, which told the story of the 18th century quest for longitude, alongside a series of longitude-themed events. To commemorate the same anniversary, NESTA launched the 2014 Longitude Prize, a challenge to find a solution to today’s equivalent of the longitude problem, with the problem chosen by a public vote. Using these two examples as a case study, I explore how history of science helps science communication organisations engage people with science, and vice versa.

Book Reviews by Katherine McAlpine

Drafts by Katherine McAlpine

Despite their presence in stores and on display in national museums in the United Kingdom and C... more Despite their presence in stores and on display in national museums in the United Kingdom and Canada, few histories of the electromechanical vibrator exist. Apart from Rachel Maines’ contested account of how vibrators were used to treat hysteria, little research has been completed on the uses of vibrator technology in the early twentieth century. In this dissertation, I adopt a material culture approach to highlight the many uses of the electromechanical vibrator. The vibrators on display at the London Science Museum and the CSTM, and similar models, form the basis of this dissertation, and the artefacts are introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses how vibrators were used in the treatment of neurasthenia and their cooption by the emerging discipline of physiotherapists. In Chapter Three I explore the technological developments that allowed for the electrification of the vibrator, and its development into a beauty product for both home and professional use. This dissertation seeks to emphasise the continuity between early twentieth century vibrators and mid-twentieth-century massagers, through an investigation of the use
of vibrators in the treatment of neurasthenia, the adoption of the technology by the emerging physiotherapy community, and their transformation into beauty products from 1910 onwards. I argue that by drawing distinctions between vibrators and massagers, Maines has only given a narrow view of the history of the vibrator, which obscures these other users. Through artifact study, I show that there are more similarities than differences between early twentieth-century vibrators and midcentury massagers, rendering moot Maines’ distinction between the two. By maintaining this distinction, Maines erroneously argues that the vibrator disappeared in the 1920s, only to reemerge as an explicitly sexual device in the 1960s. I show that, instead, American and British physiotherapists continued to use
and recommend the use of vibrators for general massage until 1930s and 1940s.

Journal of Science Communication