In the nineteenth century, Ernst Chladni's acoustic figures provided productive new experimental techniques for investigating natural phenomena. The movement of invisible forces, such as light, electricity, magnetism, and heat, were hard for natural philosophers to examine. But Chladni's use of vibrating glass plates and sand to reveal the wave motions of sound offered an experimental framework through which to make natural phenomena visible. In Britain, it was Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone in the 1820s and 1830s who made best use of these practices and apparatus. Sound waves also provided new ways of thinking about earthquakes and seismic phenomena. This article explores how Robert Mallet, the first self-styled "seismologist", examined earthquakes, drawing on broader philosophical work surrounding vibrations and acoustic waves. Mallet was keen to draw parallels between the movement of seismic shock waves and the movement of musical sounds, including those from a piano moving through a room. He was not alone in this respect. Charles Darwin, among others, noticed comparisons between the sonorous and the seismic. By contextualising Victorian seismology within the context of Victorian acoustic science, this article argues that the two disciplines were deeply connected.
Science on the Niger: ventilation and tropical disease during the 1841 Niger Expedition. This article explores the relationship between technology, disease, and imperialism in the midnineteenth century. 1 To understand how this relationship was played out in terms of the medical and mechanical solutions to tropical disease, we should not confine our historical investigation to technologies that in hindsight are celebrated as successes. Nowhere was this more apparent, than on the British expedition to the River Niger in 1841. Facing the immense challenge of tropical disease, this endeavour marked the high point of a period in which humanitarian considerations, including a moral urgency to extinguish African slavery, shaped British colonial policy. 2 To overcome the perceived disease-ridden airs of the Niger basin, the three iron steam-ships which comprised the expedition were each equipped with an elaborate system of ventilation apparatus with which to purify their atmospheres. Although on the face of it, these systems of on-board ventilation, which the Edinburgh chemist David Boswell Reid designed and implemented, did not prevent the spread of disease, the role this technology played in the expedition was extensive. The question of how Reid's ventilation had performed was highly political and was conscripted within contrasting programmes in favour of, and opposed to, future intervention in West Africa. While the expedition's promoters believed Britain had an obligation to take action against the Niger's slave trade, detractors argued that such territories should be left alone and remain the domain of private commercial interest. Within these debates was a concern over whether Britain was even able to adopt a more active colonial policy 1 Rather than technology, contemporaries would have understood Reid's ventilation as a work of applied science, however the term 'technology' is employed in order to engage with histories of technology and imperialism, see Ben Marsden and
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Naval architect John Scott Russell heralded the Great Eastern steamship as a beacon of modern science and used it to promote his own approaches to shipbuilding among Britain's science elites. While Russell defined the project through a rhetoric of science, to popular audiences the ship was analogous to biblical teachings, embodying profound moral lessons. This article places Russell's projections within this wider cultural context of religious interpretation and argues that in Victorian Britain the right to define the meaning of engineering spectacles was not the exclusive privilege of men of science, but open to broader cultural understandings. Religious, as much as scientific, values shaped social constructions of the project.
This article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians should tune their instruments. The following year, Britain's Society of Arts attempted to emulate this standard. Amid tense Anglo-French relations, British audiences interpreted the French pitch as a measure of the country's autocracy, and these political anxieties materialized through a redefinition of the standard. The challenges of introducing a musical pitch within a liberal political framework encountered in 1859 were subsequently echoed in debates over the reform of weights and measures following the 1860 free trade treaty between Britain and France. Both the economic and artistic integration of these countries involved the problem of how to regulate society within a laissez-faire state. Musical standardization has received little historiographical attention, but the regulation of this art offers insights into mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French political culture. Entangled within complex network of industrial, institutional, and social structures, musical pitch demonstrates how problems of economic and social integration were inseparable from international and socio-political contexts.
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