Traditionally, historians have taken it for granted that Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was created as the result of demands from a “professional” body of university-based physicists for a state-funded scientific institution. Yet paying detailed attention to the history of the NPL’s originating institution, Kew Observatory, shows that the story is not so clear-cut. Starting in the 1850s, Kew Observatory was partly a center for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment in return for fees. Long after the 1850s, the observatory was run by self-funded devotees of science. Paid university physicists only assumed a dominant role on its governing committee in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, by which time instrument-testing was already the observatory’s main role. This paper argues that the rise of the university physicists – together with the desire of some of these physicists for a national institution that tested electrical standards – can only partially explain the origins of the NPL, and that Kew was in some ways a national physical laboratory before there were many physics teaching posts in British universities. This paper is a case study that illustrates a need to reassess the importance of university physicists in shaping British science at the end of the nineteenth century.
...More
Article
Bennett, Tony;
(2014)
Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001201582/)
Article
Audric, Brian;
(2000)
The Meteorological Office Dunstable and the IDA Unit in World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB001321063/)
Thesis
Azadeh Achbari;
(2017)
Rulers of the Winds: How Academics Came to Dominate the Science of the Weather, 1830-1870
(/isis/citation/CBB183281724/)
Article
Crosland, Maurice;
(2010)
Pensions for “Cultivators of Science”
(/isis/citation/CBB001031489/)
Article
Kenworthy, Joan M.;
(2003)
“Air, Earth, and Skies...and Man's Unconquerable Mind”: Relationships Between the Royal Meteorological Society and the Royal Geographical Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001321067/)
Article
Cook, Alan;
(2001)
Centenary of the NPL
(/isis/citation/CBB000101341/)
Book
Weeden, Brenda;
(2008)
The Education of the Eye: History of the Royal Polytechinic Institution 1838--1881
(/isis/citation/CBB000951142/)
Article
White, Robert M.;
(2006)
The Making of NOAA, 1963--2005
(/isis/citation/CBB000931785/)
Article
Dibley, Ben;
(2014)
Assembling an Anthropological Actor: Anthropological Assemblage and Colonial Government in Papua
(/isis/citation/CBB001201588/)
Article
Horrocks, Sally M.;
(2007)
Industrial Chemistry and Its Changing Patrons at the University of Liverpool, 1926--1951
(/isis/citation/CBB000700502/)
Chapter
Basu, Paul;
(2012)
A Museum for Sierra Leone? Amateur Enthusiasms and Colonial Museum Policy in British West Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB001201472/)
Article
Ishibashi, Yuto;
(2008)
Science and the State in the Eighteenth Century Britain: Institutional Characters of the Board of Longitude
(/isis/citation/CBB000930013/)
Article
Collins, Peter;
(2010)
A Role in Running UK Science?
(/isis/citation/CBB001022758/)
Article
Hemmen, George E.;
(2010)
Royal Society Expeditions in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001022756/)
Article
Booth, Brian J.;
(2009)
“An Experimental Measure”: The First Meteorological Office at South Farnborough and the Meteorological Office Radio Station Aldershot January 1911 to December 1918
(/isis/citation/CBB001321070/)
Article
Hughes, Jeff;
(2010)
“Divine Right” or Democracy? The Royal Society “Revolt” of 1935
(/isis/citation/CBB001022757/)
Article
Willis, Edmund P.;
Hooke, William H.;
(2004)
Cleveland Abbe and the Birth of the National Weather Service, 1870--1891
(/isis/citation/CBB000931762/)
Chapter
Anker, Peder;
(2011)
Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute
(/isis/citation/CBB001221388/)
Article
Kevles, Daniel J.;
(2013)
Not a Hundred Millionaires
(/isis/citation/CBB001201239/)
Book
Bright, Kevin;
(2004)
The Royal Dublin Society, 1815--45
(/isis/citation/CBB000500279/)
Be the first to comment!