PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University. Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University. Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London. The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900 1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain By Lynn Zastoupil Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative By Jay Sherry Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire Edited by Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India By Jack Harrington
The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century Edited by Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism By K. Steven Vincent The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783 1840 By Julia Berest The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values By Lisa Szefel Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India Edited by Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity By Hephzibah Israel Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century By Kathrin Levitan Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment Edited by Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire By Peder Roberts Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal By Arie Dubnov Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780 1880 By Rama Sundari Mantena The French Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences By David Allen Harvey Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present Edited by Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past Edited by Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
Nature Engaged Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present Edited by Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin
NATURE ENGAGED Copyright Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-10276-7 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28717-8 ISBN 978-0-230-33802-9 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230338029 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013
This book is dedicated by all the authors to J. L. Heilbron, scholar, mentor, colleague, friend.
Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments ix xi Introduction: A Mingled Yarn 1 Jessica Riskin Part I Conventions 1 Scientific Conventions: International Assemblies and Technical Standards from the Republic of Letters to Global Science 19 Ken Alder 2 Practicing Eighteenth-Century Science Today 41 Hasok Chang 3 The Textbook Case of a Priority Dispute: D. I. Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, and the Periodic System 59 Michael D. Gordin 4 Complex Systems and Total War: British Operational Research and the PM Statistical Branch at the Beginning of World War II 83 Dominique Pestre Part II Laws 5 Witnessing Astronomy: Kepler on the Uses and Misuses of Testimony 103 Mario Biagioli 6 Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property 125 Matthew L. Jones 7 Genes, Railroads, and Regulations: Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 147 Daniel J. Kevles vii
viii Contents 8 Epidemiology, Tort, and the Relations between Science and Law in the Twentieth-Century American Courtroom 163 Tal Golan Part III Histories 9 Mercator Maps Time 187 Anthony Grafton 10 Rethinking 1633: Writing about Galileo after the Trial 205 Paula Findlen Part IV Things 11 Machines in the Garden 229 Jessica Riskin 12 Cosmography and the Meaning of Sundials 249 Jim Bennett 13 The Web of Knowing, Doing, and Patenting: William Thomson s Apparatus Room and the History of Electricity 263 Giuliano Pancaldi Notes on Contributors 287 Index 291
Figures 1.1 International scientific conferences by decade 20 3.1 Mendeleev s periodic system 64 3.2 Short-form periodic system 64 3.3 Lothar Meyer s table of elements 70 3.4 One of Lothar Meyer s 1872 periodic tables 72 3.5 Lothar Meyer s atomic-volume curve 73 11.1 Neptune grotto of Salomon De Caus 237 12.1 The Regiomontanus dial 250 12.2 The construction of the rectilinear altitude dial sometimes called the Capuchin dial 253 12.3 An horary quadrant 256 12.4 The construction of the Regiomontanus dial 257 13.1 William Thompson s sketch of a battery 277 ix
Acknowledgments We offer heartfelt thanks to Suzanne Marchand for her careful readings of the manuscript and incisive editorial suggestions. We also thank her and her two coeditors, Anthony La Vopa and Javed Majeed, for finding a place for our volume in such an excellent company in the Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. We are grateful to Nina Bell, Lori Kelley, and Linda Schneider for their expert assistance in putting together the manuscript; to Chris Chappell and Sarah Whalen for their stewardship of the manuscript through the editorial process; to the anonymous reviewers for their comments; to Rich Bellis and Deepa John for turning the edited manuscript into a book; to Sukanya Sai Satheesh for her skillful and thorough copyediting; and to Laura Bevir for the excellent index. xi