The Accademia del Cimento in seventeenth-century Florence has traditionally been seen as the first European organization to employ an experimental programme, thus becoming a major participant in the so-called ‘birth of modern experimental science’. Such traditional accounts have also detailed the cultural, political and religious environment of the period that contributed to the Accademia's use of a supposedly atheoretical experimental method. However, despite the merits of such cultural histories, these stories do not portray the full details behind the Accademia's intellectual workings – how knowledge claims were constructed, interpreted and presented by the academicians according to their natural philosophical concerns. It is argued here that such an analysis will provide a more accurate account of the Accademia's activities than existing stories about the birth of an experimental programme or method. By looking past the experimental rhetoric produced by the academicians in their only publication, Saggi di naturali esperienze, we begin to see at play one of the major issues which made up the Accademia's knowledge-making process: the natural philosophical interests of this institution's participants, particularly Borelli, Viviani, Rinaldini and Marsili. Those interests are represented in the Accademia's experiments, including their work concerned with air pressure and the void.

The Rev. Dr John Walker was the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1779 to 1803. Although his time in this position has been addressed by several studies, the previous thirty years that he spent ‘mineralizing’ have been virtually ignored. The situation is similar for many of the well-known mineralogists of the eighteenth century and there is a lack of studies that address how a mineralogist actually became a mineralogist. Using Walker's early career as a guide, this essay seeks to detail the making of an eighteenth-century Scottish mineralogist. The time frame under examination begins with Walker's matriculation at the University of Edinburgh in 1746 and it ends with his being appointed professor in 1779. The first section demonstrates that Walker's early mineralogical education at the Medical School and under William Cullen was closely linked to chemistry. The second section shows how he used chemical characters to classify minerals and to criticize the systems of Linnaeus, Da Costa, Wallerius and Cronstedt. Because Walker needed many ‘fossil’ samples to test the viability of his chemical mineralogy, the final section details how he used tours, patrons and correspondents to build his mineral collection.

A patriot fiddler-composer of Luton

Wrote a funeral march which he played with the mute on,

To record, as he said, that a Jewish-Swiss-Teuton

Had partially scrapped the Principia of Newton.

Punch, 19 November 1919, p. 422

When the results of experiments performed during the British solar eclipse expeditions of 1919 were announced at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, they were celebrated in the next day's Times of London with the famous headline ‘Revolution in science’. This exemplified the general approbation with which A. S. Eddington and F. W. Dyson's results were received, the upshot of which was widespread approval for general relativity and worldwide fame for Albert Einstein. Perhaps because of Einstein's present reputation, there has been little historical analysis of why his theory should have been so celebrated on the basis of a single announcement of the results of one group's experiments. In this paper I argue that the remarkable public and professional success of the eclipse experiments was the direct result of a systematic and extended campaign by Eddington and Dyson and their associates to create interest in relativity theory, build an audience for the experiments, promote a favourable reception for the results and establish their work as a crucial experiment that would distinguish between the gravitation theories of Newton and Einstein. The campaign was motivated by Eddington's affection for Einstein's theory, and was successful largely because of Eddington's substantial credibility.