Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Volume: 76
Issue: 1
Pages: 49-66
In 2019 a collection of letters from the nineteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Were Fox was discovered in his home at Penjerrick in Cornwall. Fox came to the attention of scientific audiences for experimentally establishing that temperature increases with depth beneath the Earth's surface, and later secured fame for his magnetic dipping needle, developed to measure terrestrial magnetic phenomena. The newly uncovered Penjerrick letters constitute a valuable archival discovery with important historical ramifications for our understanding of Fox's work and its place within nineteenth-century science. As well as highlighting the central role of networking in promoting provincial science, the letters reveal the prominence of the Cornish mine as a site of experiment within British scientific culture. These venues presented Fox with unique spaces in which to scrutinize nature, but such philosophical investigations were unverifiable within a laboratory and appeared susceptible to inaccuracies arising from the working conditions of this uncontrollable environment. Nevertheless, the Cornish mine was crucial to the development of Fox's dipping needle, which became the premier device for making magnetic observations at sea in the 1840s. In this article, I demonstrate the epistemologically problematic nature of the mine as an experimental space that was to take on a central role in the worldwide magnetic survey that historians have described as the ‘Magnetic Crusade’.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Edward J. Gillin;
(2024)
Mining knowledge: Nineteenth-century Cornish electrical science and the controversies of clay
(/isis/citation/CBB731794178/)
Article
Hilary Orange;
(2017)
Humor in the Industrial Workplace: Laughter in the Dry, Geevor Mine, Cornwall
(/isis/citation/CBB708823208/)
Book
Fournier, Marcel;
Macey, David;
(2013)
Émile Durkheim: A Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB001421115/)
Article
Stamhuis, Ida H.;
(2007)
Discovery of the Correspondence of Hugo de Vries with His Friend and Colleague Jan Willem Moll
(/isis/citation/CBB001251980/)
Article
Renata Saponara-Boni;
(2022)
Alessandro Volta correspondences: contributions to science in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB424378740/)
Article
S. Mesquita;
M. Menezes De Sequeira;
C. Castel-Branco;
(2021)
Richard Thomas Lowe (1802–1874) and his correspondence networks: Botanical exchanges from Madeira
(/isis/citation/CBB554291675/)
Article
Michael Wiescher;
(2023)
A German physicist’s travels in Great Britain: Julius Plücker’s visits from 1853 to 1866
(/isis/citation/CBB463128936/)
Article
Anna Simmons;
William H. Brock;
(2022)
Robert Warington and Heinrich Will: Friendship and Co-operation in Chemistry in Nineteenth Century Britain and Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB742019628/)
Book
Christa Riedl-Dorn;
(2019)
Ein uomo universale des 19. Jahrhunderts und sein wissenschaftliches Netzwerk
(/isis/citation/CBB075868892/)
Book
Einstein, Albert;
Buchwald, Diana Kormos;
(2012)
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: Writings and Correspondence, January 1922--March 1923
(/isis/citation/CBB001252282/)
Article
Federica Favino;
(2022)
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s Last Will (1679, December 31st): The Graph of an Ego-Network
(/isis/citation/CBB234289719/)
Article
Johnson, Kristin;
(2005)
The Correspondence of the Tring Museum at the Natural History Museum, London
(/isis/citation/CBB001251973/)
Article
Silva, Maria Celina Soares de Mello e;
Trancoso, Márcia Cristina Duarte;
(2015)
Information Production by Scientists and the History of Science: Typological Study of Personal Archives
(/isis/citation/CBB001552753/)
Article
Santos, Gildo Magalhães;
(2011)
A Debate on Magnetic Current: The Troubled Einstein--Ehrenhaft Correspondence
(/isis/citation/CBB001024707/)
Article
Altshuler, N. S.;
Larionov, A. L.;
(2011)
Biography of S. A. Altshuler, Correspondent Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as Told by Himself
(/isis/citation/CBB001211399/)
Article
Katarina Mihaljević;
(2023)
Breaking into British Academic Life in Second World War Britain: The Story of Rose Rand
(/isis/citation/CBB137699334/)
Article
Mark Häberlein;
Tilmann Walter;
(2022)
Sigismund Schnitzer (ca. 1560/65–1622): Ärztliche Praxis, Heilkunst und Naturaneignung in einer süddeutschen Bischofsstadt
(/isis/citation/CBB180009696/)
Article
Delia Gavrus;
(2021)
Wilder Penfield dreams of the Nobel Prize
(/isis/citation/CBB646143625/)
Article
Annmarie Adams;
(2022)
Friendship archaeology: How Maude Abbott occupied overlapping spaces of excellence
(/isis/citation/CBB701414649/)
Chapter
Pietro Daniel Omodeo;
Anna Marie Roos;
Gideon Manning;
(2023)
Daniel Sennert and the University of Padua: Circulation of Medical Knowledge and Scholars Across the Confessional Divide in the Seventeenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB937564911/)
Be the first to comment!