Placing or replacing the laboratory in the history of science?

ISIS

Volumn 99, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 783-795

  Gooday, Graeme ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61849131647     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/595772     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; new ed., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986);
2. Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World," in Science Observed, ed. Karin Knorr Cetina and Michael Mulkay (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983), pp. 141-170;
3. and Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985).
4. For attention to what went on outside the laboratory see Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Ress, 2007).
5. On the role of social networking with friendly journalists see Jeff Hughes, "Redefining the Context: Oxford and the Wider World of British Physics, 1900-40," in Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939: Laboratories, Learning, and College Life, ed. Robert Fox and Graeme Gooday (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 267-300;
6. and Martin Bauer and Massimiano Bucchi, eds., Journalism, Science, and Society: Science Communication between News and Public Relations (London: Routledge, 2007).
7. Roger Cooter and Steve Pumfrey, "Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture," History of Science, 1994, 52:237-267.
8. For examples of close links - both literal and metaphorical - between laboratories and technological manufacture see Robert Clayton and Joan Algar, The GEC Research Laboratories, 1919-1984 (London: Peregrinus in association with the Science Museum, 1989);
9. Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops, and Sites: Concepts and Practices of Research in Industrial Europe, 1800-1914 (Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. California, 1999);
10. Sally Horrocks, "A Promising Pioneer Rofession? Women in Industrial Chemistry in Inter-war Britain," British Journal for the History of Science, 2000, 55:351-367;
11. Agusti Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 217) (Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, 2001);
12. Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945-1950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2002);
13. Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov's Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002);
14. Andrew Cunningham, and Perry Williams, eds., The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Ress, 1992);
15. F. Kees Boersma, "Structural Ways to Embed a Research Laboratory into the Company: A Comparison between Philips and General Electric, 1900-1940," History and Technology, 2003, 19:109-126;
16. Boersma, "Tensions within an Indusdial Research Laboratory: The Philips Laboratory's X-ray Department between the Wars," Enterprise and Society, 2003, 4:65-98;
17. Joost Mertens, "The Annales de l'Industrie (1820-1827): A Technological Laboratory for the Indusdial Modernization of France," Hist. Technol., 2004, 20:135-163;
18. and Darwin H. Stapleton, "A Lost Chapter in the Early History of DDT: The Development of Anti-Typhus Technologies by the Rockefeller Foundation's Louse Laboratory, 1942-1944," Technology and Culture, 2005, 46:513-540.
19. See, e.g., Edward Pyatt, The National Physical Laboratory: A History (Bristol: Hilger, 1983);
20. Simon Schaffer, "Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms," in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science, ed. Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (Bellingham, Wash.: SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 1991), pp. 23-56;
21. Joseph O'Connell, "Metrology: The Creation of Universality by the Circulation of Particulars," Social Studies of Science, 1993, 25:129-173;
22. Eileen Magnello, A Century of Measurement: An Illustrated History of the National Physical Laboratory (Bath: Canopus, 2000);
23. and Amy Slaton, "As Near as Racticable: Precision, Ambiguity, and the Social Features of Industrial Quality Control," Technol. Cult., 2001, 42:51-80.
24. Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, eds., Education, Technology, and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1993);
25. Fox and Gooday, eds., Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 (cit. n. 2);
26. and David Kaiser, ed., Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2005).
27. For criticism of naive forms of biographical writing see Sophie Forgan and Graeme Gooday, "Constructing South Kensington: The Buildings and Politics of T. H. Huxley's Working Environments," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1996, 29:435-468.
28. I thank Rob Kohler for drawing my attention to the distinctively Latourian flavor of this thesis. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open Univ. Press, 1986);
29. and Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World" (cit. n. 1).
30. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm, eds., The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2004).
31. I thank Bernie Lightman for drawing this point to my attention.
32. For an elegant subversion of another celebrated historiographical icon, the Scientific Revolution, see Steven. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Ress, 1996).
33. Sophie Forgan, 'The Architecture of Display: Museums, Universities, and Objects in Nineteenth Century Britain," Hist. Sci., 1994, 52:139-162;
34. Alison Kraft and Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, '"Equal though Different': Laboratories, Museums, and the Institutional Development of Biology in Late-Victorian Northern England," Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2003, 54:203-236;
35. amd Alberti, "Amateurs and Rofessionals in One County: Biology and Natural History in Late Victorian Yorkshire," Journal of the History of Biology, 2001, 54:115-147.
36. Fox and Gooday, eds., Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 (cit. n. 2).
37. Anne Secord, "Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire," Hist. Sci., 1994, 52:269-315.
38. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. "Laboratory." For the Wittgensteinian imperative, "Let the use of words teach you their meaning,"
39. see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 2.12, 218.
40. For a study of the Victorian taxonomy of spaces for science see Sophie Forgan, '"But Indifferently Lodged ...': Perception and Place in Building for Science in Victorian London," in Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge, ed. Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 195-215, esp. pp. 198-200.
41. Graeme Gooday, "Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1990, 25:25-51.
42. Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture (Boston: Eastburn Kirk; New York: Ward & Lilly, 1815), p. 14. This was based on the earlier edition published in London in 1813 (2nd ed., 1814). The full quotation gives the context: "But though neither water, nor air, nor earth, supplies the whole of the food of plants, yet they all operate in the process of vegetation. The soil is the laboratory in which the food is prepared. No manure can be taken up by the roots of plants unless water is present; and water or its elements exists in all the products of vegetation."
43. Florists' Journal, 1845, 2
44. (cited in OED, s.v. both "Elaboratory" and "Laboratory");
45. and L. F. A. Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea (London: Sampson Low, 1855). Although the OED specifies Maury's as a "figurative" use, given the overlap with the organicist use of the term "elaboratory" as a domain productive of organic life, this does not seem to be a necessary inference.
46. For a sophisticated treatment of the twentieth-century relationship between nature and the laboratory see Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002).
47. William Thomson, "Scientific Laboratories," Nature, 1885, 31:409-413, on p. 409.
48. As Karin Knorr Cetina has emphasized, laboratories characteristically take experimental study beyond ordinarily achievable observation. See Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
49. Graeme Gooday, "'Nature' in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian. Life Science," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1991, 24:307-341;
50. and Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 3.
51. For a detailed and nuanced discussion of these issues see Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes (cit. n. 19).
52. For the suggestion that Archimedes used his bathroom to study hydrostatics see Thomson, "Scientific Laboratories" (cit. n. 20), p. 4.10.
53. On the Oxford chemistry building see Sophie Forgan, "The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1989, 20:405-434, esp. pp. 414-415;
54. and Maurice Crosland, "Difficult Beginnings in Experimental Science at Oxford: The Gothic Chemistry Laboratory," Annals of Science, 2003, 60:399-421.
55. On the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius's famous production of chemical laboratory life from kitchen utensils and kitchen space see Bernard Jaffe, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry (Mineola, N. Y.: Dover, 1976), pp. 103-104.1 do not, however, mean to assert any reductive generalization that all laboratories are at base little more than kitchens: merely that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and arguably perhaps later, at least some key laboratories could be indistinguishable from or coextensive with kitchens.
56. Bruno Latour, "The Costly Ghastly Kitchen," in Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, ed. Cunningham, and Williams (cit. n. 4), pp. 295-303, on p. 295. Latour does not tie his interpretation to the reduction of physiology laboratory to kitchen: "The physiology laboratory is not as striking as the furnace of chemistry, of course, or the big instruments of physics, but it is a very good place for torturing animals, for making chemicals react, for inducing bacteria to grow, for putting actors to the question" (p. 299).
57. T. Wemyss Reid, Memoirs and Correspondence of Lyon Playfair (London/New York: Cassell, 1899), p. 33;
58. and Mrs. J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity (London: Sampson Low, 1891), p. 156.
59. Alice acted as laboratory assistant to her spouse, but she took a major diplomatic role in placating the household cook, whenever Jim appropriated too many kitchen utensils for electrical experimentation. There was one particularly difficult crisis, deftly defused by Alice, in which the cook threatened to go on strike unless the rolling pin was returned from its position as the centerpiece of an electrical experiment to the kitchen shelf where it properly belonged. For more recent accounts of gender in the laboratory see Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).
60. For accounts of laboratory life in the country house see Soraya de Chadarevian, "Laboratory Science versus Country House Experiments: The Controversy between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin," Brit. J. Hist. Sxi., 1996, 29:417-441;
61. Simon Schaffer, "Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House," in Making Space for Science, ed. Smith and Agar (cit. n. 15), pp. 149-180;
62. and Donald Opitz, "This House Is a Temple of Research': Country House Research for Late Victorian Science," in Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth Century Scientific Thinking, ed. David Clifford et al. (London: Anthem, 2006), pp. 143-153.
63. For discussion of William Ayrton's laboratory at the City & Guilds College see Graeme Gooday, "The Remisses of Premisses: Spatial Issues in the Historical Construction of Laboratory Credibility," in Making Space for Science, ed. Smith and Agar, pp. 216-245.
64. On the opening of physics and biology teaching labs to women see Marsha Richmond, '"A Lab of One's Own': The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University, 1884-1914," Isis, 1997, 87:422-455;
65. and Paula Gould, "Women and the Culture of Physics in Late Nineteenth-Century Cambridge," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1997,50:127-149.
66. On the physics lab as a place for rigorous experimental training see Gooday, "Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories" (cit. n. 16); on the British engineering lab see Graeme Gooday, 'Teaching Telegraphy and Electrotechnics in the Physics Laboratory: William Ayrton and the Creation of an Academic Space for Elecdical Engineering, 1873-84," History of Technology, 1991, 13:73-114.
67. "The Training of Electrical Engineers" [editorial], Electrician, 1887, 19:55.
68. Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Ress, 1986).
69. For a contrasting view of the laboratory as an institution uniquely capable of transforming the world see Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World" (cit. n. 1).
70. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Gollancz, 1934), Vol. 1, pp. 212-213, 216-217;
71. and H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods (London: Unwin, 1925), p. 8.
72. For more discussion of Wells as a rebellious laboratory student see Graeme Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 70-7.1;
73. and Sophie Forgan and Gooday, '"A Fungoid Assemblage of Buildings': Diversity and Adversity in the Development of College Architecture and Scientific Education in Nineteenth-Century South Kensington," History of Universities, 1994, 13:153-192.
74. Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 8). In saying this, I do not wish to imply that all laboratory histories should be replaced by studies of the communication of laboratory work but, rather, that the study of laboratories cannot proceed effectively without a full appreciation of the means by which laboratory workers attempted to promulgate the results of their labors and the extent to which they succeeded in so doing-and to which audiences. For an example see Gooday, "Premisses of Premisses" (cit. n. 27).