Whewell’s Gazette
Your weekly digest of all the best of
Internet history of science, technology and medicine
Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell
Volume #36
Monday 23 February 2015
EDITORIAL:
Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list comes around again for the thirty-sixth time; a packed full gateway to the best in the histories of science, technology and medicine in the Internet.
This week somebody drew our attention to a video, in the Huffington Post, of a Saudi Arabian Cleric explaining why we live in a geocentric cosmos and not a heliocentric one. Naturally our first reaction was to mock and poke fun, which we preceded to do with various friends on Twitter offering further arguments to support the our Saudi friend.
This caused us to briefly stop and take stock. The arguments bandied about, including the one used by the cleric (Ptolemaeus uses birds not planes!) can all be found in Ptolemaeus’ Syntaxis Mathematiké written in the second century CE. Moving on from there is the awareness that the history of seventeenth-century physics is acquisition of the knowledge necessary to refute those arguments. Maybe one shouldn’t be so quick to mock and instead take this video as an opportunity to teach people why it was scientifically so difficult for people in the Early Modern Period to accept the heliocentric hypothesis.
Quotes of the week:
“Books are Uniquely Portable Magic” ― Stephen King
Writing under deadline. (Courtesy of @john_overholt)
Birthdays of the week:
Ernst Haeckel born 16 February 1834
Haeckel (left) with Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, his assistant, in the Canaries, 1866
Letters from Gondwana: Ernst Haeckel, The Scientist As An Artist
Video: Proteus 2004 (The Life and Work of Ernst Haeckel)
Kunstformen der Natur (1900) 100 Tafeln mit Text Ernst Haeckel
Letters from Gondwana: Haeckel and the Legacy of Early Radiolarian Taxonomists
Embryo Project: Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel
Embryo Project: Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law
Alessandro Volta born 18 February 1745
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Guardian: Alessandro Volta: Google lights up for inventor of the battery
The Royal Institution: Alessandro Volta’s voltaic pile
The H-Word: Alessandro Volta. A welcome but misleading Google doodle
Science Museum: Galvani’s voltaic pile
Alessandro Volta demonstrating his battery (called the “Voltaic Pile”) to Napoleon, 1801 by Giuseppe Bertini
Nicolaus Copernicus born 19 February 1473
1580 portrait (artist unknown)
in the Old Town City Hall, Toruń
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Renaissance mathematicus: Nicky was an Ermländer
About Education: Copernicus the Geologist
The Copernicus Room in the Krakow Academy, where Copernicus studied between 1491 and 1495
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
Nature.com: In Retrospect: Book of Optics
Science 2.0: Neutrinos from an Atomic Bomb
Atomic Heritage Society: Trinity Site
National Academy of Science: Biographical Memoir of Albert Abraham Michelson 1852-1931
Lucid Thoughts: Romantic science’s electric moment: the speculative physics of Ørsted, Ampère and Faraday
Ørsted: Artist and Source unknown
Voices of the Manhattan Project: Patricia Hansard’s Interview:
Live science.com: The 11 most beautiful equations in mathematics [physics!]
Voices of the Manhattan Project: General Richard H. Groves’s Interview
Voices of the Manhattan Project: K-25 Plant
AIP: African Americans in Physics and Allied Sciences in ESVA
AHF: Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Voices of the Manhattan Project: Adrienne Lowry’s Interview
International Year of Light 2015 – Blog: Optics in Ancient China
Illustration of the reflection of light by multiple mirrors (the world’s first surveillance periscope!). Credits: Ling-An Wu, Gui-Gu Long, Quihuang Gong and Guang-Can Guo.
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
Bodleian Libraries: Scientific analysis helps team to explore mysteries of medieval Gough Map
Gough Map Close Scanning
British Library: Maps and views blog: Intelligence Mapping of British East Africa – digitisation begins
British Library; European Studies Blog: Overwintering: the Dutch search for the Northwest Passage
Volcanic Degassing: William Dampier and the Burning Islands of Melanesia
National Geographic: 100 Years of National Geographic Maps: The Art and Science of Where
Yovisto: Robert E. Peary’s Artic Expedition
MEDICINE:
Gorffennol: Swansea: To what extent has the concept of ‘deformity’ affected Richard III’s image and character
All Things Georgian: Sir Peter Lalonette and His Fumigation Machine
Fiction Reboot: Daily Dose: MedHum Monday: Vaccines and History
Remedia: Lost Places
Rejected Princesses: The Women Who Conquered Whooping Cough
Early Modern Medicine: Horrible Halitosis
Digital Stories: The Death Collector
U.S. National Library of Medicine: Gallery Dream Anatomy
From the Hands of Quacks: Galvanism & Deafness
The British Newspaper Archive: 19th-century medical fraudsters who got caught out
The Guardian: Beyond Bedlam: infamous mental hospital’s new museum opens
Asylum and Post-Asylum Spaces: Mental Health Geography?
British Library: Untold lives blog: Sage advice regarding snakes
The National Archives: First World War hearing aids
Royal College of Physicians: Irascible Radcliffe
John Radcliffe (1652–1714)
Oil on canvas by Godfrey Kneller, early 18th century
Men’s Journal: Lessons from the World’s Largest Contraception Collection
BBC News: Cambridgeshire church graffiti reveals ‘heartbreaking’ find
Wellcome Library: Prevent and survive: medical activism in 1980s Britain
Smithsonian.com: The Frightening Legacy of Typhoid Mary
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
Strata Smith: Lecture by Hugh Torrens
Wellcome Library: Sex tourism in 18th century London
Embryo Project: The Discovery of the Dikika Baby Fossil as Evidence for Australopithecine Growth and Development
Embryo Project: Francis Galton (1822–1911)
Embryo Project: Ovirator philoceratops Dinosaurs
Notches: “In My Bed”: Sexual Violence Over Fifty Years on One College Campus
The New York Times: ‘Animated Life: Pangea’
University of Minnesota HSTM: The Objective Evaluation of Pig Breeds in the Netherlands
BBC News: Forgotten fossil found to be new species of ichthyosaur
The H-Word: Nature and sex redefined – we have never been binary
Origins: The West without Water: What Can Past Droughts Tell Us About Tomorrow?
Brit Geo People: The historic role of women scientists at BGS and a look at what is happening today
Dr Emily Dix of the University of Wales and her assistant Miss Elsie White.
Pioneering women geologists: a rarity of their time.
Strange Science: Rodney Impey Murchison
Fossil History: Lyell & the First Neanderthal
The Friends of Charles Darwin: 20-Feb-1835: Darwin witnesses an earthquake
The Atlantic: Solving a Museum’s Bug Problem With Lego
Dangerous Minds: Keep it Prim and Proper in the Bedroom with this Victorian Era Sex Guide
The Guardian: Piltdown Man, Beringer’s lying stones, dinosaurs… are they all hoaxes
CHEMISTRY:
Nobelprize.org: Frederick Soddy – Biographical
TECHNOLOGY:
Yovisto: The Letters of Giambattista Bodoni
Homunculus: Holding Rome Together
Mashable: 1920s–1930s “War Tubas”
1930s
Three Japanese acoustic locators, colloquially known as “war tubas,” mounted on four-wheel carriages, being inspected by Japanese Emperor Shōwa.
IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN
Yovisto: Frederick Eugene Ives and the Halftone Printing Process
HNN: Welcome to Infinity, Limited
Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: Ada the Amplifier
My Medieval Foundry: The rather important use of lathes by foundrymen
distillatio: Touchstones and streak testing
Yovisto: Ovtave Chanute – One of the Fathers of Aviation
IEEE Spectrum: When the Past Is Not a Preview
Conciatore: Incalmo
Tycho’s Nose: The Shiny Bits of Science: Were these Victorian train lines just a load of hot air?
Air pressure train
The New York Times: Photoshop at 25: A Thriving Chameleon Adapts to an Instagram World
META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Wellcome Trust: How the Wellcome Trust Spends its Money
Business Insider: The First 500 Books From The Vatican Library’s Massive Digitisation Project Are Now Online
Conciatore: Saint Philip Neri
Genoptopia: Tweeting the life of the mind
Oxford Brookes University: Paula Kennelly MA History of Medicine 2014
Sideways Look at Science: Using Acting to Convince People You’re Better at Speaking
University of Glasgow Library: Glasgow Incunabula Project and Exhibition Update
Storify: Long Literary Centuries to Poets and Plowmen
Wellcome Collections Blog: Why the World Needs Collectors
The Sloane Letters Blog: A Peculiar Postscript
Two mothers with crying babies and one in a walking frame; comparing the human infant’s helplessness with the self-sufficiency of newborn animals. Engraving by P. Galle, c. 1563. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Nature: Museums: The endangered dead
The Jenks Society Presents The Lost Museum: Lost Museum at Brown University Gets Second Life
Rebecca Onion: Defining the History Beat
The Recipes Project: Translating Recipes 9: Recipes in Time and Space, Part 3 – IF
History of Psychiatry: Table of Contents March 2015 Vol. 26 (1)
Othmeralia: Gloves and rare-books?
Scroll.in: A seminar on Ancient Indian knowledge that didn’t involve jingoism and flights of fantasy
Lady Science: Issue 5. Rethinking the Makers of the Manhattan Project
CHF: Introducing Distillations Magazine
Digital Stories: The Collectors
The New York Review of Books: Scrawled Insults and Epiphanies
Ether Wave Propaganda: The Culture of Mechanism: Margaret Jacob versus “Proto-Industrialization”.
Historical Medical Library: Online Exhibition: Under the Influence of the Heavens: Astrology in Medicine in the 15th and 16th Centuries
Viridarium Mathematicorum, 1563
The Scholarly Kitchen: Loaded Dice – The New Research Conundrums Posed by Mechanical Turk
Nuncius: Vol. 30 Issue 1 Table of Contents
The New York Times Books: The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of thee British Enlightenment by Roy Porter Excerpt
Bluestreak Science: Episode 0.9: The Arts and Sciences
ESOTERIC:
Corpus Newtonicum: It’s magic!
The Recipes Project: The recipes of an eighteenth-century Amsterdam alchemist(?)
Conciatore: The Duke’s Oil
The Public Domain Review: A Mongolian Manual of Astrology and Divination
“Basics of Mongolian Astrology”
Boing boing: John Dee was the 16th century’s real-life Gandalf
BOOK REVIEWS:
Science Book a Day: Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment
Many Headed Monster: Marooned on an Island Monographs: an Early modern Medical History Reading List:
Science Codex: Galileo’s Middle Finger
The New York Times: Disorder Rules the Universe
Science Book a Day: The 4 Per Cent Universe
Social History of Medicine: Pain and Emotion in Modern History
THE: Plucked: A History of Hair Removal
Science Book a Day: Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology
Brain Pickings: How 17 Equations Changed the World
Science Book a Day: Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema
NEW BOOKS:
Brill: The Correspondence of Dr. Martin Lister (1639–1712) Volume One: 1662–1677
Historiens e la santé: Healthcare in Early Medieval Northern Italy: More to Life than Leeches
Amazon: Four Works On Llull: On the Compendious Architecture of Ramon Lull, Lullian Lamps, Scrutiny of the Subjects, Animadversions (Collected Works of Giordano Bruno) (Volume 3)
Plagrave Macmillan: Pain and Emotion in Modern History
Historiens de la santé: Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire
THEATRE:
La Opera: Anatomy Theater
FILM:
Motherboard: More Scientists Who Deserve Their Own Biopics
How We Get To Next: Ten Stories of Science and Tech Hollywood Should Tell Next
The Nature of Reality: Presenting the Physics Oscars!
TELEVISION:
SLIDE SHARE:
VIDEOS:
Youtube: Is the Vinland Map a Fake?
The Vinland Map
Source: Wikimedia Commons
RADIO:
PODCASTS:
New Books in Science, Technology and Society: Adam S. Shapiro Trying Biology
Youtube: Historical Reader Podcast Ep. 02: “The Galileo Affair”
Evolution Talk: The Case of Patrick Matthew
Remedia: The Tablet: Tom Koch on Ebola and Disease Maps
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Manchester 1824: Exhibition: Merchants of Print From Venice to Manchester 29 January – 21 June 2015 John Rylands Library Manchester
University of Worcester: CfP: The Infirmary Conferences: History of Nursing Research Colloquium 9 July 2015
Medical Humanities Summer Course: Italian Perspectives Padua & Venice 6-11 September 2015
Making Waves: Workshop 4: Scientific Lives: Oliver Lodge and the History of Science in the Digital Age Leeds Art Gallery 6 March 2015
American Museum of Natural History: Lecture Opulent Oceans 11 March 2015
The Renaissance Diary: CfP: The Making of Measurement CRASSH University of Cambridge 23-24 July 2015
Science Comma: H G Wells Annual Lecture on WWI science and suffrage Universty of Kent 4 March 2015
Wells photographed by George Charles Beresford in 1920
ChoM News: Reconstructing Medieval Medical Libraries: Between the Codex and the Computer 24-26 February 2015
AAR: CfP: Western Esotericism Group Atlanta 21-24 November 2015
Commodities History: CfP: Environmental Histories of Commodities: University of London 11 September 2015
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin: Knowing Things: Circulations and Transitions of Objects in Natural History 23-24 March 2015
York University & Toronto University: CfP: Binocular Conference 5-6 June 2015
The Warburg Institute: Director’s Seminar on Work in Progress 2014–2015
The Warburg Institute: Seminar: Notebooks as Handwritten Library 25 February 2015
University of Stavanger: CfP: Animals in the Anthropocene: Human-animal relations in a changing semiosphere 17-19 September 2015
Bodleian Libraries: Exhibition: Remembering Radcliffe: 300 years of science and philanthropy 28 November–20 March 2015
The Royal Society: Women Writing Science 10 March 2015
Portrait of Caroline Lucretia Herschel
The Geological Society: Call for Abstracts: William Smith Meeting 2015 – 200 Years and Beyond: The Future of Geological Mapping
Dittrick Medical History Center: Upcoming Events
LOOKING FOR WORK:
Lancaster University: Lectureship in History (Digital Humanities)
CHoM News: 2015–2016 Women in Medicine Fellowships: Application Period Open
Johns Hopkins University: History of Medicine – Postdoctoral Fellowship
University of Edinburgh – National Maritime Museum: Collaborative PhD Research Studentship: Chronometry and Chronometers on British Voyages of Exploration c. 21815– c.1872
Scientific Instrument Society: Small Grants for research on scientific instruments
Swansea University: Lecturer in Medical History
Royal College of Physicians of Ireland: PhD Fellowships in the history of medicine in Ireland
Bodleian Library: Byrne-Bussy Marconi Fellowships
Glasgow University: The Leverhulme Trust: “Collections” Scholarships
Centre for the Study of the Book Bodleian Libraries: Fellowships & Prizes
Preserve Net: State of Vermont: Historical Resources Specialist
Five funded Collaborative Doctorates with the Science Museum Group
University of Oxford: Professorship of the History of Science
NMBU: Two Postdoctoral Fellowships in philosophy (Health Sciences)
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