Fertile substrate: The rise, fall, and succession of popular microscopy in Great Britain (2023)
Smith, Nathan (Author)
Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
Volume: 80
Issue: 3
Pages: 268-292
Publication date: 2023
Language: English
This paper examines the rise and fall of the British popular microscopy movement during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. It highlights that what is currently understood as microscopy was actually two inter-related but distinct communities and argues that the recognized collapse of microscopical societies in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was the result of amateur specialization. It finds the roots of popular microscopy in the Working Men’s College movement and highlights how microscopy adopted its Christian Socialist pedagogy of equality and fraternity, resulting in a radical scientific movement that both prized and encouraged publication by its amateur adherents, who often occupied the middle and working classes. It studies the taxonomic boundaries of this popular microscopy, particularly focusing on its relationship with the study of cryptogams or ‘lower plants’. It explores how its success combined with its radical approach to publication and self-sufficiency created the conditions for its collapse, as devotees established a range of successor communities that had tighter taxonomic bounds. Finally, it shows how the philosophy and practices of popular microscopy continued in these successor communities, focusing on the British expression of mycology, the study of fungi.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Ruiz-Castell, Pedro;
(2013)
Seeing the Invisible: The Introduction and Development of Electron Microscopy in Britain, 1935--1945
Article
Nathan E. C. Smith;
(2020)
Provincial mycology and the legacy of Henry Thomas Soppitt (1858–1899)
Article
Bowler, Peter J.;
(2013)
Popular Science Magazines in Interwar Britain: Authors and Readerships
Article
Alexandr Chvátal;
(2017)
Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787–1869) and His Instruments for Microscopic Research in the Field of Neuroscience
Book
Giuseppe Penso;
(1973)
La conquista del mondo invisibile. Parassiti e microbi nella storia della civiltà
Article
Fyfe, Aileen;
(2015)
Journals, Learned Societies and Money: Philosophical Transactions, ca. 1750--1900
Article
Despeaux, Sloan Evans;
(2011)
Fit to Print? Referee Reports on Mathematics for the Nineteenth-Century Journals of the Royal Society of London
Article
Csiszar, Alex;
(2010)
Seriality and the Search for Order: Scientific Print and Its Problems during the Late Nineteenth Century
Chapter
Basu, Paul;
(2012)
A Museum for Sierra Leone? Amateur Enthusiasms and Colonial Museum Policy in British West Africa
Article
Smith, S. D.;
(2001)
Coffee, Microscopy, and the Lancet's Analytical Sanitary Commission
Article
Douglas Anderson;
Huib J. Zuidervaart;
(2016)
Antony Van Leeuwenhoek's Microscopes and Other Scientific Instruments: New Information From the Delft Archives
Article
Andrietti, Francesco;
(2015)
Enquiries into Historical Microscopy. The Microscopes of Divini, of Needham, and of the 17th and 18th Century
Article
Peter J. F. Harris;
(2019)
Microscopy and Literature
Chapter
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg;
(2004)
Intersections: Some Thoughts on Instruments and Objects in the Experimental Context of the Life Sciences
Article
Olivier, Marc;
(2005)
Binding the Book of Nature: Microscopy as Literature
Chapter
Ford, Brian J.;
(2007)
Enlightening Neurosciences: Microscopes and Microscopy in the Eighteenth Century
Article
Szekely, Francisc;
(2011)
Unreliable Observers, Flawed Instruments, “Disciplined Viewings”: Handling Specimens in Early Modern Microscopy
Article
Gaycken, Oliver;
(2011)
“The Swarming of Life”: Moving Images, Education, and Views through the Microscope
Book
Bracegirdle, Brian;
(2010)
A History of Photography with the Light Microscope
Article
Zuidervaart, Huib J.;
Rijks, Marlise;
(2015)
“Most rare workmen”: Optical Practitioners in Early Seventeenth-Century Delft
Be the first to comment!