In this paper, we dissect how different regimes of labour were crucial to the success of the British and Brazilian expeditions which observed the 1919 total solar eclipse in Príncipe and Sobral. We connect regimes of labour with degrees of invisibility and discuss plausible justifications for various absences/presences in the written records. We discuss reasons for the inclusion of Cottingham, the artisan–technician expert on clockwork mechanisms, into the teams; the entanglements of forced labour with scientific and technical work in Príncipe; and the various regimes of labour in place at Sobral. We argue that the impact of various regimes of labour in Príncipe and Sobral cannot be confined to the provision of infrastructural support, but include critical location choices, the possibility of scientific success during the observations themselves, and the processing of plates following observations.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, British civil engineers strove to enhance their status and assert the identity of their developing profession. Alongside associational and visual cultures, one means of achieving a sense of community was through the formation of a shared literary culture. As a profession notorious for what Torrens described as ‘papyrophobia’, it is perhaps surprising that many engineers, in this period, read widely and wrote extensively. John Smeaton (1724–92), for example, valued good authorship and experimented widely with literary form. James Brindley (1716–72), his contemporary, wrote sparingly, but nevertheless generated a literary strategy in support of his projects. Other engineers, such as John Phillips (fl. 1785–1813), made use of their engineering background and of engineering literature to create alternative careers. By exploring how mid- to late eighteenth-century engineers wrote, in order to persuade and to educate others as well as to publicize, record and defend their professional decisions, this paper will show how their reputations were dependent on literary constructions as much as on physical ones.

Of all the many instruments that symbolized scientific endeavour in British India by the end of the nineteenth century, microscopes were among the most iconic, and yet, for both empirical and ideological reasons, their rise to scientific authority was slow and often contested. Moving from recreational use and marginal scientific status in the 1830s, by the 1870s microscopes were becoming integral to colonial education and governance and deployed across a wide scientific spectrum, their expanding use and heightened public presence facilitated by a rich and diverse visual culture. The eventual triumph of the microscope in India cannot be detached from its ongoing entanglement with local issues and agencies, its ascent to medical authority in particular constrained by scepticism about its utility. In this battle of instruments and imaginaries, microscopes – political emblems as well as material objects and scientific tools – pose critical questions about the visibility of science in a colonial context, about evolving techniques of seeing and representation, about the racialization of science and about the individual or collective authority of those who sought empowerment through the lens.

East German Sigmund Jähn and West German Ulf Merbold were Germany’s first spacefarers. While their rivalry mirrored the superpowers’ space race in many ways, it differed in a significant aspect: Jähn and Merbold shared a common cultural and historical background. Going where no German had gone before, therefore, was as much a competition of democracy versus dictatorship, and/or capitalism versus communism, as it was about which state represented the ‘better’ Germany. Moreover, this rivalry did not end with the Cold War but reappeared with renewed vigour in the country’s eventual reunification process after 1990. Drawing on national archival and printed sources from all around the world, this article analyses collective projections and competing performances in the making of Germany’s most famous rocket stars, both before and beyond 1990. Discussing individual characteristics, cultural traditions and techno-scientific ambitions, it argues that descent rather than socio-technical prospect proved crucial in designating the progenitor of German space flight.

This article explores the emergence of nuclear medicine as a clinical research field in post-war Europe, focusing on the shaping of its disciplinary boundaries in the context of geopolitical divisions. It examines how this speciality was negotiated and established, highlighting the role of international exchanges involving researchers, radioisotopes and technologies. By bringing together physicists, radiologists and internists, nuclear medicine gained momentum in the 1950s, leading to the formation of first dedicated scientific societies, conferences and journals. Physicians working in Austria played an influential role in this identity-building process on the European level. They benefited from the networks of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, the country’s political neutrality and their early emphasis on thyroid diseases. We argue that nuclear medicine emerged out of scientific-diplomatic practices that unified this diverse field of research while also setting it apart from more established clinical specialities. We will trace how physicians and medical facilities in Austria came into play as partners on both sides of the Iron Curtain and navigated these intertwined diplomatic and disciplinary dynamics, facilitating intra-European cooperation on epistemic, political and social levels.

This article analyses the development of Arthur C. Clarke’s (1918–2008) persona as the ‘prophet of the Space Age’, focusing on its relation with his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. Unlike many space personas, Clarke was not an astronaut or a political leader, but a writer and advocate for space technology who developed a global reputation as an authority on the future. In 1956, Clarke relocated from his native England to the former British colony of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This article examines how both Clarke himself and a wide range of organizations, nations and individuals, including many from Sri Lanka, contributed to the creation of a global ‘prophet’ persona. This includes Clarke’s public life in Sri Lanka, which came to embody the earthbound, satellite-focused space future he promoted. This persona was in turn used to project commercial and moral justifications for space technologies, especially through Western lenses and for Western audiences, but in numerous ways gave Sri Lanka an active role in the global Space Age.

Between 1814 and 1826 four members of the family of Jane Talbot and her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot had an active and varied interest in the study of mosses, which included the collecting, drawing and naming of specimens. This article explores the textures of their developing practice of learning natural history, and considers their activities within the framework of the circulation of knowledge, their reading and skill development, and the networks that supported them. Their social status and connections provided access to the expertise of numerous British botanists, including Lewis Weston Dillwyn, William Jackson Hooker, and James Dalton, placing the family as a locus of knowledge (re)production and transmission. This work illustrates the pedagogical practices of an elite group as they engaged with botany in a domestic setting, and makes suggestions as to their motivations and stimulations, as well as the conditions that maintained or diminished their interest. At a time when mosses were little-studied even by professed botanists, it demonstrates how a family group including many young women filled their leisure pursuits with these small plants, and reveals how an extended family with no previous expertise in formal botany could be actors in early nineteenth-century knowledge exchange.

Historical accounts of the Indian space programme inevitably invoke the figure of Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), credited as the father of its early development in the 1960s. A physicist by training, Sarabhai was best known for his ‘leapfrogging’ vision, into which social applications of space technology would catapult developing countries out of poverty. By interrogating official and unofficial records, speeches, cinematic productions and obituaries, this article examines how Indian leadership utilized Sarabhai’s persona to substantiate the role of space flight in the nation’s domestic modernization and geopolitical leverage. Especially after his death in 1971, the making of Sarabhai into the pioneer of Indian space flight allowed India to fashion a geocentric appeal specific to its space programme, which construed the benefits of low-earth-orbit satellite communication to tackle unequal development. In the 1990s, Sarabhai’s image was further appropriated by international powers and actors to propagate the commercialization of satellite systems. Despite its elitist outlook and subscription to received notions of nationhood and modernity, a closer look into the public resonance of Sarabhai’s persona reveals how the geocentric promise of space flight in the Indian context contributed to the formation of post-1960s astroculture globally.

The study of the history of science is widely understood to be undergoing a profound and much-needed transformation, from a subject focused on Europe to one encompassing the entire world. Yet the aims of the field have always been global. During the decades after the Second World War the inevitable progress of Western science was seen as the key to its role in world history. From the 1970s the rise of cultural history and laboratory ethnographies undermined this assumption. Indebted to colonial anthropology, these approaches revealed that the power of science was not inherent, but the result of local and contingent processes. Explanation needed to be symmetrical in analysing practices of all kinds wherever they were found, from economics and divination in West Africa to supernatural healing and particle physics in the American heartland. The geographical and conceptual broadening of the field is thus a long-delayed outcome of developments extending back many decades. It also means that references to the ‘global’ in history of science – even more than elsewhere in the humanities – continue to resonate with the universalizing aims of the natural and social sciences.

Built in Gif-sur-Yvette in the 1950s, the phytotron of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique provided plant physiologists with a set of enclosed growth rooms in which several climatic constituents of the environment could be simultaneously and separately controlled. This article examines the polyvalence of the French phytotron to explore the economic and political entanglements of experimental reasoning in mid-twentieth-century plant physiology. As Gif scientists embraced phytotrons as a means for developing an ‘experimental bioclimatology’, not only did they introduce into the laboratory an understanding of climate as a complex of agents likely to affect plant life, but also they sought to map scientific findings on productive pursuits during a period of intense agricultural modernization. The horticultural and agronomic applications envisaged were aimed at the timing of climate-sensitive biological events, but also at the expansion of productive areas within and outside metropolitan France, particularly in the context of late colonial and international dry-land development agendas. This case study of phytotronists’ agricultural imagination highlights a techno-scientific conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of plant life in time and space, and regarded as either a deficiency to be corrected or a resource to be harnessed.

In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm’s eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon’s thought. Sturm’s reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm’s salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating ‘Eastern’ practice into ‘Western’ science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies – organic versus chemical – is based largely on Howard's opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard's contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard's historiography by examining three topics related to his life's work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard's ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.

This essay examines the working relationship between Charles Darwin and the Edinburgh gardener John Scott that developed in the wake of the publishing of the Origin of Species (1859). As the essay shows, Darwin sought to utilize Scott’s horticultural knowledge and experimental expertise in order to provide some of the specialized botanical evidence that the Origin was not intended to provide. Scott, meanwhile, sought to use Darwin’s patronage and tutelage in order to overcome his modest status as a gardener while making contributions to scientific knowledge. And for an intense two-year period (1862–4), Darwin and Scott’s relationship was productive and mutually beneficial: not only did Scott’s work supplement Darwin’s ongoing botanical research on sexual development and fertility, but also his Primula experiments appeared to provide ‘physiological’ evidence of speciation via selective breeding. What the essay argues, however, is that there were limits to what Scott was able to achieve due in part to his social standing and perceived character that ultimately cast a shadow over his findings.