Robert Fox

University of Oxford | OX · Museum of the History of Science

The date of 28 July 1919 is a familiar landmark in the history of the International Astronomical Union. This chapter sets the foundation of the Union in Brussels on that day in the context of the major reordering of both science and international politics that took place after the Great War. Mindful of the powerful position of German science before...

The Cambridge History of Science - edited by Hugh Richard Slotten April 2020

The grandeur of the celebration to mark the centenary of Marcellin Berthelot's birth in 1927 surpassed even that of the Pasteur centenary 4 years earlier. The explanation lies in the contemporary state of international relations in science, following the exclusion since 1919 of Germany and the other Central Powers from the International Research Co...

IUPAC was a product of a restructuring of world science that took place immediately after the Great War. In a series of three conferences in London, Paris, and Brussels between October 1918 and July 1919, delegations from twelve allied nations established a new body, the International Research Council (IRC), that was to control international relati...

In the half-century before the Great War, collaborative international ventures in science became increasingly common. The trend, manifested in scientific congresses and attempts to establish agreement on physical units and systems of nomenclature, had important consequences. One was the fear of information overload. How were scientists to keep abr...

In the half-century before the Great War, collaborative international ventures in science became increasingly common. The trend, manifested in scientific congresses and attempts to establish agreement on physical units and systems of nomenclature, had important consequences. One was the fear of information overload. How were scientists to keep abr...

Albert Einstein made three visits to Oxford between 1931 and 1933, staying for a month in the spring of each year. For our understanding of Einstein's work, the Rhodes Memorial Lectures that he delivered during his first visit are of special interest. They showhim in a period of intense rethinking of his cosmological views in the light of Edwin Hub...

The article is an extended discussion with a laureate of numerous international distinctions, Professor Robert Fox, about his career, intellectual fascinations, as well as changing methods, styles, approaches and themes in the historiography of science and technology. Licensed under a Creative Commons Atribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Inte...

This article focuses on Pierre Simon Laplace’s contributions to the physics of short-range forces. Laplacian physics can be interpreted as an attempt to realize a supposedly Newtonian ideal of a science that would account for all phenomena in terms of attractive or repulsive central forces acting between the particles of matter. Laplace formulated...

This Handbook traces the history of physics, bringing together chapters on major advances in the field from the seventeenth century to the present day. It is organized into four sections, following a broadly chronological structure. Part I explores the place of reason, mathematics, and experiment in the age of what we know as the scientific revolut...

The centenary of the birth of Marcellin Berthelot was celebrated in 1927 with an extravagance that reflected the importance and multiplicity of the interests at work. For Jean Gérard, who master-minded the event in his capacity as general secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the French Société de chimie industriell...

Albert Einstein’s friendship with Oxford’s professor of experimental philosophy Frederick Lindemann resulted in three annual visits that he made to the university, beginning in 1931. The visits, each of about a month, helped to promote Lindemann’s ambitions for Oxford physics, then struggling for recognition in what was still predominantly an arts...

Every two years Notes and Records has the privilege of publishing the winning entry in its Essay Award competition. The award for 2014 went to Emily Winterburn, and we begin this issue with her essay, a nuanced account of the educational resources available to the eighteenth-century astronomer and

The varied contents of this issue convey the diversity of the materials on which the work of historians rests. Correspondence, a staple for historical enquiry, allows us to answer many questions, although Charles H. Smith's return to the long-standing debate about the propriety of Charles Darwin's

The gradual abandonment of Latin as the universal language of the world of learning was a long process. Felicity Henderson's ‘Faithful interpreters?’ in this issue examines a stage in the process, during the early years of the Royal Society, in which correspondents' relatively novel use of

George Sarton, often regarded as the founder of the discipline of the history of science, appears to have first seen Notes and Records of the Royal Society in 1942. His letter of acknowledgement to A. V. Hill conveys both his pleasure at the publication (which the Royal Society had launched in 1938) and his frustration in trying to persuade scienti...

The first issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London appeared almost exactly 75 years ago, in April 1938. The original aims of the journal were modest: in the words of the first editorial, they were to keep Fellows ‘more fully informed of the activities of the Society’.[1][1] But

To say that science has many faces is a trite statement of the obvious. But it is that multiplicity of faces that makes science's past such a rich resource for historical research. The contributions to this issue reinforce the point, underlining the diversity both of the activities that go to make

There has been a tendency to view science in nineteenth-century France as the exclusive territory of the nation's leading academic centers and the powerful Paris-based administrators who controlled them. Ministries and the great savants and institutions of the capital seem to have defined the field, while historians have ignored or glossed over tra...

There is good reason to believe that Sadi Carnot took almost as keen an interest in political economy as he did in the theory of the heat engine. His brother Hippolyte implied as much in his Mémoires sur Carnot par son fils (1863), where he referred to Sadi as having devoted himself to economics “with remarkable penetration”, especially after a vis...

Coll. Cahiers de logique et d'épistémologie, n° 7

Thomas Beddoes was made for the tumultuous times in which he lived. Born in 1760, he began to emerge as a public figure in the 1790s, when radical spirits in Britain were inflamed by the French Revolution and those of a more conservative disposition reeled in horror. He both witnessed and

HahnRoger, Pierre Simon Laplace 1749–1827:A Determined Scientist. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xii+310. ISBN 0-674-01892-3. £22.95, $35.00, €32.30 (hardback). - Volume 40 Issue 4 - Robert Fox

This paper offers personal reflections on the fashioning of the history of science in Europe. It presents the history of science as a discipline emerging in the twentieth century from an intellectual and political context of great complexity, and concludes with a plea for tolerance and pluralism in historiographical methods and approaches.

In recent years European societies or federations have been created in various areas of science and scholarship. Such bodies reflect a growing awareness of the benefits that international collaboration within Europe can bring. Those benefits have been fully recognized within the International

Physics in Oxford 1839-1939 offers a challenging new interpretation of pre-war physics at the University of Oxford, which was far more dynamic than most historians and physicists have been prepared to believe. It explains, on the one hand, how attempts to develop the University's Clarendon Laboratory by Robert Clifton, Professor of Experimental Phi...

This chapter begins with a discussion of the appointment of Robert Walker to the University's readership in experimental philosophy in 1839, which marked the beginning of four decades in which physics came to occupy an unprecedentedly prominent place among the disciplines represented within Oxford. It describes Walker's efforts towards the formal i...

This chapter begins with a brief description of the purpose of the book, which is to depict the complex trajectory by which physics evolved in Oxford from 1839, as well as the reasons why 1839 was chosen as the starting-point for the volume. It then discusses some assumptions about physics as a global enterprise united by consensus as to its nature...

Presenting innovation as the product of great pioneers or scientific laboratories oversimplifies reality. Numerous examples taken from all over Europe show that innovation, before 1914, came less from laboratories than from the workshop; it was the fruit of often anonymous engineers or technicians having performed long and minute observations and t...

Book InformationVictorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’. By James A. Secord. U. of Chicago P.. Chicago/London. 2000. Pp. xx + 624. £22.50.

Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 811-812 French science and technology between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were once analyzed with tiresome predictability in terms of decline and a failure to match the pace set by Germany. In the case of the chemical industry, weaknesses were seen to lie in the indifference of academic sc...

Throughout his long career, Henri Lecoq had a mixed reputation in the scientific community. On the one hand, his work on the hybridization of plants was cited by Mendel and Darwin. And yet Adolphe Brongniart was one of several French contemporaries who regarded Lecoq as unoriginal and superficial. To some extent, Lecoq suffered the fate of many pro...

Part 1 Science, technology, and the industrial economy: an uneasy courtship - rhetoric and reality in the relations between academic and industrial chemistry, 1770-1914 education for a new age - The Consevatoire des Arts et Metiers, 1815-30 les reflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu de Sadi Carnot et la lecon de leur edition critique l'attitude...

Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp was one of four that were displayed at the first international exhibition of electricity in Paris in 1881. By the end of the exhibition, most observers believed that Edison had taken a clear lead over his rivals: Maxim, Swan, and Lane-Fox. In reality, his victory was a narrow one that owed much to the skilful manag...

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This paper is a reflexion on an assumption that has run through studies of industrial technology ever since the First World War. The assumption, broadly stated, is that in the age of science-based industry a strong and preferably expensive commitment to research and development is an essential ingredient of a nation’s technological prowess. The cor...

The traditional roles of historic collections of instruments, machinery, and their curators and the recent changes in the priorities of national science museums are described. The importance of communication and interpretation in museology is discussed. (KR)

La tradition des conférences publiques remonte, en France, au XVIe siècle. Vers le milieu du XIXe siècle, cependant, les conférences sur des sujets littéraires, historiques ou scientifiques, connaissent un succès sans précédent. Elles ont alors un statut d'événements mondains, élégants, à Paris du moins, et sont une nouvelle occasion de s'illustrer...

Science in the Provinces: Scientific Communities and Provincial Leadership in France, 1860-1930. By Mary Jo Nye, University of California Press; 1986. Pp.328. 39.95, 33.95.

In recent years, cultural conservatism and the associated shortcomings of scientific and technical education have come to be widely regarded as important causes of Britain's industrial difficulties. But what hope is there that the educational reforms now being advocated by the British government will be any more effective than many similar ones tha...

From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France 1860–1939. By Harry W. Paul. Cambridge University Press:1986. Pp.415. 32.50, 49.50.

In an influential book published in 1981, Martin Wiener identified cultural conservatism as a long‐standing impediment to the development of science, technology, and industry in England. This approach to the analysis of the country's flagging industrial performance is, in reality, less original than the excited response to Wiener's book would sugge...

There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate th...

In this book, Weiss traces the rise of the professional class of ingenieurs civils - in France, engineers of whatever specialty who did not work for the state but were employed by industrial firms or operated on their own elsewhere in the private sector. In particular, his book is a study of the primary source of such engineers - the Ecole Centrale...

Instruments - TurnerGerard L'E., Antique scientific instruments. Poole: Blandford Press, 1980. Pp. 168. £3.95/£2.95 (paperback). - Volume 15 Issue 3 - Robert Fox

Introduction: The institutional basis of French science in the nineteenth century Robert Fox and George Weisz Part I. The University: 1. The emergence of the Ecole Normale Superieure as a centre of scientific education in the nineteenth century Craig Zwerling 2. Reform and conflict in French medical education, 1870-1914 George Weisz 3. Educational...

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.