Iwan Rhys Morus

This is an exploration of how Victorian innovations, development and men (I use the term intentionally) laid the foundation for ongoing science and technology.

I admit I found the first half slow going. The events and personalities came across as facts and lists rather than the (I would imagine) exciting, maybe even scandalous, clashes that would have played out at the time. No doubt The Royal Society played a hugely important role in fostering and challenging ideas, but its internal politics make dry reading from this vantage point. I found myself dipping in and out rather than reading from start to finish. This was easy enough to do with each chapter’s focus being on a different technology.

I enjoyed the later chapters more, especially about telegraphy and attempts to fly.

Each chapter ends with a list of cited references, which will be a useful resource for further perusal.… (mer)

This book is a good summary of how science and technology developed in 19th-century (especially in England), and how its development was shared with the wider world (e.g. at special buildings exhibiting new inventions, or at grand short-term public exhibitions). I was particularly interested in its coverage of new scientific socieites and how they clashed with the Royal Society. This book is good for someone wanting an overview, e.g. a historian or a layperson. If you want a detailed technical history of some particular Victorian science or technology (e.g. electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, or telegraph design), then find another book.… (mer)

Having read "I Am Radar" (a story initially set in New Jersey), I wanted to know more about Tesla. Perhaps this was not the best biography, but it did give a good overview of the events around the advance of electric uses including the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851, Tesla's failed Wardenclyffe Tower in New Jersey, and his struggle to get funding for new ventures. It had little in tales of his personal life, I guess the author assumed the reader had read about these in one of Tesla's previous numerous biographies, but I haven't read these, so was a little disappointed. I wonder which biography I should have read to find out about his relationship with a Pidgeon, for example?… (mer)

I can read and I can listen, but listening to complex arguments read aloud is hard for me, man. Must be the synaesthesia: in Morus's case, I'm all zeroing in on the timbre of his voice and the timing of his stutters and the lankness of his hair and the crosshatching in the woodcuts he's showing on his powerpoint ... makes it hard to keep up.

Anyway, this was interesting--the movement of science from a private pursuit bounded by clubhouses and workshops to the obsession of an age, performative, imposed upon, feared. The interaction of the two discourses in the Victorian era--"electricians" (meaning scientists studying electricity) stealing doctors' patients, because a little shock treatment'll fix everything, right? Early attempts to invent a telegraph with a human operator feeling shocks of different sizes on different fingers to represent different letters, because somebody somewhere thought that would be more sensical than the ouija-board style that eventually was established (something else I didn't know! I guess I always thought it was like Morse Code kinda). The crazy interaction between ocular proof and empirical knowledge and spectacle, the eye as the nexus between the physical world that is and the knowledge that we create. The things that that made 19th-century people consider science, like illusions and kaleidoscopes and making a dog's eyes open and shut and his legs move with a battery (because we're all just machines, man! but the head and legs are in separate rooms and that is no machine we Victorian burghers can go home happy about! hey, it's electrical magic!) and circuits where they proved you could hold hands and poke frogs' legs into a cow's corpse and push electricity through that (without bringing the cow to life, which was evidently the main thing that worried your Tory Royal Academy types*). The possibility that that last thing might actually be science!


Phew! Morus said lots of stuff in his reedy voice! He ended on a cute note too: the difference between Frankenstein and Dracula, at opposite ends of the 19th c., being the difference between people terrified of the untrammeled possibilities of science (could they take away our uniqueness? Might they still?) and people terrified of its limits (all their Victorian smartness can't save Mina? Are there possibly enough stakes and garlic for all the staph infections we've come to believe are not our lot?). And there was a buffet. And my own little experiment, to write about a plenary talk like it was a conference paper, which in turn I will write about like a book and add to my librarything, has resounded with success. It's all just knowledge production in the humanities, man. Only this time the word "zincifying" was used.


*Oh, and ha ha! Check it! The members of the 'Pneumatic Society' were a bunch of suburban teens who spent embarrassing months and years just investigating the effects of nitrous oxide on the British human body, mind, and moral hygiene, by which of course I mean huffing a bunch of whipits and laughing at how scientific you were all being. That's the kind of thing that didn't go over at the Royal Soc. Scientists as the real Bohemians, at least in a brief pre-discipline(d)ary wild age. But then you hear that William Davy said something like "we have discovered a new pleasure" and you get solemn and think, why not? What new pleasures has science brought us lately? Put the sporting 'crats in charge of our techne and our entertainment both--you'd probably end up with CERN trying to identify new subatomic particles produced by, like .................. sack tapping. NASSR 2010.… (mer)