The Popularisation of Science

  • Peter Broks
Chapter

Abstract

Two men in a pub, one has just come from a science lecture and talks of the world before Adam:

This yer radium, Charlie, is reely life. On’y life is raely a jelly, what you find in the sea. So this jelly is radium, you see, on’y they can’t find the jelly, an radium is scarce, so they invented electricity. And there’s radium in electricity, if they could on’y find the way to get it out. But there ain’t no jelly in it — see?1

This imaginary scene from the Clarion of 1905 is a neat vignette of the gulf between the science of the laboratory and the science of the street, home, factory or, indeed, pub. The mishmash of invention, electricity, radium and ‘jelly’ (protoplasm) exposes some of the more dominant themes in the popular imagination. The garbled account is what many have now come to expect from popularised science, and then was obviously common enough for it to be a source of humour. However, the science lecture, although still popular, was having to compete with other media as a source of perceptions and understanding of science, and not just the media but the very world in which people lived.

Keywords

British Museum Methyl Violet Science Writer Good Word Reading Room 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 2.
    See Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass consumption in late-nineteenth-century France (London, 1982);Google Scholar
  2. W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (London, 1981);Google Scholar
  3. John Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A social history, 1750–1914 (Leicester, 1983).Google Scholar
  4. 6.
    F.G. Aflalo, ‘The Naples aquarium’, Good Words, 1898, p. 757. See also W.L. Alden, ‘From China to Peru’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1900, vol. 2, pp. 342–3.Google Scholar
  5. 7.
    Rachel Low and Roger Manvell, The History of the British Film, 1896–1906 (London, 1948);Google Scholar
  6. Rachel Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London, 1948). For the ideological function of early cinema, seeGoogle Scholar
  7. Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London, 1978); andGoogle Scholar
  8. Michael Chanan, The Dream that Kicks: The prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain (London, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. 11.
    George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891), and see the introduction by Bernard Bergonzi in the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth, 1968).Google Scholar
  10. 18.
    James Nairn, ‘X-rays in the Edison laboratory’, Good Words, 1897, pp. 50–4; Robert Machray, ‘By cable, from shore to shore’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 323–8;Google Scholar
  11. Walter George Bell, ‘The greatest telescope on earth’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 210–13.Google Scholar
  12. 36.
    ‘Playing tricks with science’ aimed to ‘provide readers with simple and inexpensive means of providing an evening entertainment at once diverting and instructive’, and included how to make a simple harmonograph and how to lift a plate with a radish (Pearson’s Magazine, 1907, vol. 1, p. 158); Archibald Williams, ‘After-dinner science’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 33–40.Google Scholar
  13. 37.
    See, for example, A.J. Meadows, ‘Access to the results of scientific research: developments in Victorian Britain’, in A.J. Meadows (ed.), Development of Science Publishing in Britain (Oxford, 1980), pp. 61–2. There could, of course, be an ideological utility of science to meet the varying concerns of each magazine (the support of religion in Good Words, the undermining of religion in the Clarion, the spread of empire in Pearson’s Magazine). This should be made clear in other chapters but see also Emma Marie Caillard, ‘The fourth state of matter’, Good Words, 1894, p. 95; Harry Lowerison, ‘Knowledge is power’, Clarion, 19 January 1912, p. 3;Google Scholar
  14. Ray Stannard Baker, ‘The romance of Christmas Island’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1902, vol. 1, p. 266.Google Scholar
  15. 38.
    M. Griffith, ‘An electric eye’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1896, vol. 2, pp. 752–3.Google Scholar
  16. 39.
    Alfred T. Story, ‘Harnessing the stars’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1896, vol. 2, p. 585.Google Scholar
  17. 40.
    Richard Yeo, ‘Scientific method and image of science, 1831–1891’, in Roy Macleod and Peter Collins (eds), The Parliament of Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1981 (Northwood, 1981) p. 67.Google Scholar
  18. 45.
    J. Holt Schooling, ‘The divining rod’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1897, vol. 1, pp. 304–5.Google Scholar
  19. 46.
    Richard Yeo, ‘Scientific method and the rhetoric of science in Britain, 1830–1917’, in John A. Schuster and Richard R. Yeo (eds), The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method; Historical studies (Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 272–3. For professionalisation of science,Google Scholar
  20. see D.S.L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England (London, 1957);Google Scholar
  21. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and Society (Harmondsworth, 1969); and Morris Berman, ‘Hegemony and the amateur tradition in British science’, Journal of Social History, (1975), pp. 33–43.Google Scholar
  22. 47.
    Richard Yeo, ‘Science and intellectual authority in mid-century Britain: Robert Chambers and “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”’, Victorian Studies, 28 (1984), pp. 5–31. In 1913 Professor Bickerton praised the broad approach of Harry Lowerison at the Clarion: ‘We want to be in contact with nature and in tune with the infinite. Scientists have their faults, one is vicious specialisation. They lack the cosmic consciousness…’ (Professor Bickerton, ‘Science and socialism’, Clarion, 17 January 1913, p. 3).Google Scholar
  23. 48.
    Susan Sheets-Pyenson, ‘Popular science periodicals in Paris and London: the emergence of a low scientific culture’, Annals of Science, 42 (1985), p. 563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. 49.
    ibid., p. 555. Sheets-Pyenson borrows the terms from H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern British Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), p. 428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. 51.
    ‘Science a monopoly’, Science Gossip, 1897, p. 327. See David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A social history (London, 1976);Google Scholar
  26. A.G. Tansley, ‘The early history of modern plant ecology in Britain’, Journal of Ecology, 35 (1947), pp. 130–8; and W.H. Pearsall, ‘The development of ecology in Britain’, Journal of Ecology, supplement 1964, pp. 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Peter Broks 1996

Authors and Affiliations

  • Peter Broks
    • 1
  1. 1.University of the West of EnglandBristolUK

Personalised recommendations