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Manufacturing nature: science, technology and Victorian consumer culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Iwan Rhys Morus
Iwan Rhys Morus
Affiliation:
Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University, Belfast BT7 1NN.
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Extract

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group of aficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: the Philosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 403 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1996

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