The test tank broadly embodied the late nineteenth-century endeavour to ‘use science’ in industry, but the meaning given to the tank differed depending on the experienced communities that made it part of their experimental and engineering practices. This paper explores the local politics surrounding three tanks: William Froude's test tank located on his private estate in Torquay , the Denny tank in Dumbarton and the University of Michigan test tank . The similarities and peculiarities of test tank use and interpretation (...) identified in this paper reveal the complexities of naval science and contribute to the shaping of an alternative model of replication. This model places the emphasis on actors at sites of replication that renegotiated the meaning of the original Froude tank, and re-placed the local values and conditions which made it a functional instrument of scientific investigation. (shrink)

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Engineer was only one of many British and American publications that took an avid interest in the rapid rise of Japan to the status of a fully industrialized imperial power on a par with major European nations. In December 1897 this journal published a photographic montage of "Pioneers of Modem Engineering Education in Japan" (Figure I), showing a selection of the Japanese and Western teachers who had worked to bring (...) about this singular transformation.' The predominance of Japanese figures in this representation is highly significant: it is an acknowledgment by British observers that the industrialization of Japan-the "Britain of the East"-was not a feat accomplished solely by Western experts who transferred their science and technology to passive Japanese recipients. Yet in focusing primarily on native teachers active in Japan after 1880, this image excludes several of the very foreigners who had trained this indigenous workforce in the preceding decade. Rather than attempting to assess the careers of each of the many international experts involved in Western encounters with Japan before and after the Meiji restoration in 1868, we will focus on disaggregating the highly individualized responses of just some of the Englishspeaking characters. In documenting their diverse encounters with Japanese people and technologies, we will look at the complex phenomena of cultural exchange in which they participated, not always without chauvinism or resistance. (shrink)