Lost and Found: The Cosmos in a Cabinet: Performance, Politics, and Mechanical Philosophy in Henry Bridges' 'Microcosm' (original) (raw)
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Science & Education, 2006
This essay details a public display of four steam engine models assembled in a Leiden orphanage courtyard in 1777. By examining the multiple purposes to which these engines were and could be put, alongside the various interests, goals and interpretations of their inventors, instructors and audience, the notion of a clear division between public and private as well as scientific research and popularization is questioned. In its place, the essay ends with a generalized image of modern science, its practitioners, users and audiences seen as a complex terrain in which relations and divisions are constantly asserted, contested and renegotiated.
Attached is the Introduction to *The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain* (Oxford UP:2016). For the full text, copies are available for sale via OUP website. You can message me for a discount code. The book is also available through Oxford Scholarship Online. The first book-length study of the relationship of science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores crucial role of spectacle and performance in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was “staged” in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the ways in which eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that reverberated across the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of science and scientists in eighteenth-century plays influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play in modern life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, what was then called natural philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Early Popular Visual Culture (special issue on Spectacular Astronomy), 2017
After an extensive tour throughout Europe, including venues such as Amsterdam, London and Brussels, the French entrepreneur and magician Henri Robin arrived in Paris in 1862, where he opened a new theatre on the legendary Boulevard du Temple. His arrival remarkably coincided with the destruction of this renowned hub of popular visual culture as it was cleared to make way for Hausmann’s far-reaching programme of urban modernisation. Nonetheless, Robin started providing scientific entertainment for audiences to be both beguiled and informed, and managed to do so very successfully throughout the following five years. His evening shows consisted of a mix of astronomical sciences, magic and the evocation of ghosts. This article addresses Robin’s career in relation to the changing ideas of theatricality and his remarkable persistence in commingling astronomy and magic within a theatrical context. It will show that Robin’s initial concept of theatricality is concretised in his explicit demonstration to the spectator that they were at the theatre, and that this was indeed the place where the wonders of the heavens could pry open the matter of their own understanding. Correspondingly, Robin’s career fizzled out during the Second Empire, when scientific activities were dispersing rapidly across different public sites, altering and re-reshaping the appeal of the physiques amusantes. The rise of professional conférences alongside the waning appeal of what the critic Théophile Gaultier termed ‘ocular spectacle’, eventually forced theatre and astronomy into fixed and discreet domains. As such, the story of Henri Robin and his science-based spectacles articulates major shifts in the various relationships between art and science, and theatre and astronomy.
Beyond Celestial Toys: Orreries and Public Astronomical Lectures in the Eighteenth Century
2013
This article introduces a selection of orreries collected in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich/National Maritime Museum, London. Eight items were investigated in this study. As important visual aids of astronomy developed in the eighteenth century and used in contemporary public philosophical lectures, the orreries provide a good case study through which to investigate the material culture in eighteenth-century Britain. A joint collaboration between instrument business and philosophical lecturing was formed in the eighteenth century marketplace, and this market was promoted by the politeness pursuit. This study shows how the orreries combined instruction with entertainment in eighteenth century polite culture context. Most of the orreries in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, are small portable types. Among the eight selected items, William Lacy’s orrery (AST1066) is the most unique and was designated to be used in specific demonstration of the Saturn system. Item AST1055 made by W. and S. Jones was also probably for public demonstration. Other items were most likely for domestic use or private possession.
Commercial excavators often find that their way back to the past runs through relatively recent structures. What should we do with them? Intellectually sensitive modern excavators, like our authors, are beginning to convince us that these recent constructions not only matter in themselves, but may have interesting links to what lies beneath. Here they introduce us to the foundations of an early telescope, a monument that takes its context both from the much-investigated lands of West Cambridge, and the more abstract landscape of early science. Forcing archaeology to ask fresh questions and make ambitious connections is only proper in a place heavy with the aroma of investigative scholarship.
History of Science, 2016
This paper highlights the significance of popular astronomy lectures in British theatres during the first half of the nineteenth century. The popular astronomy lecturing trade inherited from Enlightenment natural philosophy discourses. A ‘theatrical turn’ developed in the late eighteenth century and became extensive by the 1820s. Lecturers moved astronomy displays into theatres and used theatrical facilities, which resulted in a distinct type of show blending scientific instruction with sensational amusement. Lent was especially high season for this business in a metropolitan entertainment market. Pre–eminent cases of private entrepreneurs in this trade included William Walker, Deane Franklin Walker, George Bartley, and C. H. Adams. By exploring astronomy lectures in theatres, this paper also shows the spatial influence of the site on the format and style of the performance: the benefits and constraints of a theatre made a theatrical astronomy lecture distinct from others at a formal institution.
Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age
Annals of Science, 2017
We would like to begin by thanking our wonderful contributors for their exceptional scholarship, intellectual generosity, and unfailing good humor. They have all made this process a true pleasure throughout. We are also grateful to the editorial staff at the University of Michigan Press and the anonymous external readers for their helpful and detailed comments. Their insight and assistance has been instrumental in helping us revise the collection. Sincere thanks are due to Molly Walsh and Brittany Larson, who helped us to prepare the manuscript for publication. We would also be remiss if we did not thank Aaron McCollough for his enthusiastic support of the project in its early stages. We would finally like to thank our families and friends for their encouragement throughout this process. Lara Karpenko thanks her departmental chair, Deirdre Keenan, for her tireless support of her colleagues and for her boundless enthusiasm. Her mentorship and friendship is deeply appreciated. Lara would also like to thank her mother, Christine Karpenko, for instilling an early love of Victorian literature, her father, Leonard Karpenko, for showing her the wonders of science through a telescope, and her husband, William Phelps, for his unfailing love and support. Shalyn Claggett thanks her parents, Sam and Sherrie Claggett; her husband, Matt Lavine; and her best friend, Lucy Canessa. She sincerely appreciates their continual encouragement and moral support in this and all things.
Responding to Stories: The 1876 Loan Exhibition of Scientific Apparatus
This article argues that it is useful to see historical exhibitions as both responses and contributors to narratives about science that are circulating in the public sphere. It uses the example of the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus (which was the immediate predecessor of the Science Museum in London). The article demonstrates how, in promoting this huge exhibition and fighting for the necessary support and resources, leading scientific, cultural and political figures engaged with two rather different public interpretations of science's past, present and future. One dealt with science as a vigorous part of culture with a fascinating and under-appreciated past and a dynamic future coming, internationally, to the fore. The other concerned the threat to Britain's international economic ascendancy by countries with equal ingenuity and better education that could lead Britain into a decline reminiscent of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. According to this second narrative, science would be the vaccine that would prevent this disease afflicting Britain. In the aftermath of the exhibition, the narratives were drawn upon again to form and sustain a permanent display that was known from 1885 as the Science Museum. While the memory of the Loan Collection itself was obscured in the 1920s during the Museum's early life as a separate administrative body fighting for resources, the author suggests that continuity can be shown in the narrative arguments used by the creators of the two projects. A greater significance should therefore be given to this exhibition in the story of the development of the Science Museum.