In March 1911, Karl von Frisch visited the Zoological Station in Naples for the first time. During his stay, Frisch, who had just received his doctorate, was studying the color adaptation of marine fish. At the same time, as diary notes show, he also completed an extensive tourist program. Frisch was not alone in this; many scientists combined their time in Naples with excursions and other pleasures. Usually these activities are labelled—in Frisch's words—as „diversion“ and „relaxation“ from the activities in (...) the laboratory. Expanding this point, I will examine the various relationships between labour, recreation, research, and tourism based on Frisch's notes during his stay in Naples. Finally, I will take a look at the financial side of Frisch's stay in Naples. (shrink)

ArgumentGlass vessels such as flasks and test tubes play an ambiguous role in the historiography of modern laboratory research. In spite of the strong focus on the role of materiality in the last decades, the scientific glass vessel – while being symbolically omnipresent – has remained curiously neglected in regard to its materiality. The popular image ortoposof the transparent, neutral, and quasi-immaterial glass container obstructs the view of the physico-chemical functionality of this constitutive inner boundary in modern laboratory environments and (...) its material historicity. In order to understand how glass vessels were able to provide a stable epistemic containment of spatially enclosed experimental phenomena in the new laboratory ecologies emerging in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, I will focus on the history of thematerialstandardization of laboratory glassware. I will follow the rise of a new awareness for measurement errors due to the chemical agency of experimental glass vessels, then I will sketch the emergence of a whole techno-scientific infrastructure for the improvement of glass container quality in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the last part of my argument, I will return to the laboratory by looking at the implementation of this glass reform that created a newoikosfor the inner experimental milieus of modern laboratory research. (shrink)