Seeing the Invisible: The Introduction and Development of Electron Microscopy in Britain, 1935–1945
INTRODUCTIONSpring, 1941. The German campaigns in the Balkans are strengthening the Nazi domination of continental Europe. The Lend-Lease bill signed by Roosevelt on 1 1 March has broken any neutrality pretence of the USA. War material is being sold, transferred or leased to the Allied nations in the name of assisting US defence. The war is about to become global and US and British leaders discuss strategy in the event that the USA finally enters actively into the war. In this context, the British physicist Charles Galton Darwin (1887-1962) is appointed Director of the British Central Scientific Office in Washington - an institution conceived to promote closer contact and exchange of inform…
Making Telescopes and Partying with the Stars: Amateur Astronomy in Spain during Franco’s Dictatorship
Franco’s dictatorship was characterized by an official narrative that criminalized the liberal tradition of previous periods. Such a discourse defined an ideologically correct science that censured the subordination of Spanish science to foreign influence and sought to create a new scientific tradition. However, recent studies have revised these aims and suggest that there was a continuity of scientific and technological programmes and practices before and after the Spanish Civil War. This paper contributes to these investigations with further evidence, focusing on several practices that characterized the development of amateur astronomy during this period. Special attention is paid to the…
Scientific Instruments on Display
Why and where are scientific instruments displayed? As this collective work convincingly demonstrates, the exhibition and representation of instruments depends on considerations that are shaped by ...
El cometa de Halley y la imagen pública de la astronomía en la prensa diaria española de principios del siglo XX
Este texto pretende mostrar algunos aspectos de las representaciones formadas en la opinión pública española acerca de la astronomía y la astrofísica, a partir del análisis de las noticias publicadas en algunas de las cabeceras más destacadas con motivo de la aparición del cometa de Halley en 1910. El interés despertado por la llegada de este cometa estuvo íntimamente ligado a su asociación con diferentes desastres y calamidades, representado en este caso por el equipaje de gases mortíferos que portaba y que desató una inquietud generalizada entre una parte importante de la población. Esta preocupación sirvió para reforzar y legitimar frente a la opinión pública la actividad desarrollada po…
Priority claims and public disputes in astronomy: E.M. Antoniadi, J. Comas i Solà and the search for authority and social prestige in the early twentieth century
AbstractThe reorganization of the astronomical community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due to the rise of astrophysics, was seen by some scientists as an opportunity to join an international community of prestigious researchers. This was the case of astronomers such as Josep Comas i Solà, who publicly argued with Eugène Michel Antoniadi during the first decades of the twentieth century about the veracity of astronomical observations and theoretical conclusions on Mars and Jupiter. Their priority claims and public disputes have to be understood in a new context that provided an exceptional opportunity for amateur and professional astronomers both to play an active…