The chapter seeks to lay out the conceptual and practical foundations of information warfare in the twenty-first century. Different concepts are identified and defined, together with how they affect and influence the information and cognitive realms of global audiences. The evolution and development of information warfare is identified and analysed. In addition to establishing why the problem of information warfare exists, and at this point in time, some proposals are explored as to how to set about addressing the problem.

This chapter explores the early history of scientific instrument collecting through an assessment of the practices of two key collectors working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Lewis Evans and Robert Whipple. The chapter focusses, in particular, on the presence of fake scientific instruments in the early trade in antique instruments. By using a data-driven analysis of the buying and selling of antique scientific instruments in the early years of the trade, a general picture of the preferences exhibited by different buyers and the features that added value to antique scientific instruments is presented. These factors and how they may have influenced the types of forgery that emerged are then considered. It is shown that fake scientific instruments were being sold at public auction as early as the 1890s, with at least one collector actively taking measures to spot them and avoid buying them.

The mid-1950s saw the unmasking of two scientific forgeries: the well-known Piltdown skull was shown to be a fake by J. S. Weiner, and Derek Price, a researcher in the newly opened Whipple Museum, demonstrated that a number of ‘early’ scientific instruments were in fact no more than half a century old. When Price announced his findings, he invoked the Piltdown story, urging historians to be as careful as their scientific colleagues. In this paper I use the Piltdown case and Derek Price’s work identifying five forgeries in the Whipple Museum’s collection to argue that the detection of forgeries was as much a matter of the changing nature of collections as it was a result of new scientific techniques or a more discerning eye. I characterize the change in attitudes towards the Piltdown skull as a move from visibility to legibility, and show that the same holds for Price’s own research into antique scientific instruments, which moved from the collector’s cabinet to the museum card-catalogue and, again, from visibility to legibility.