The appearance and proliferation of physics laboratories in the academic institutions of Britain between 1865 and 1885 is an established feature of Victorian science. However, neither of the two existing modern accounts of this development have adequately documented the predominant function of these early physics laboratories as centres for theteachingof physics, characteristically stressing instead the exceptional cases of the research laboratories at Glasgow and Cambridge. Hence these accounts have attempted to explain, somewhat misleadingly, the genesis of these laboratories purely by (...) reference to the stimuli of professionalizedresearchprogrammes, instead of considering the contemporary growth in demand for the professional laboratory teaching of physics. In failing to consider such physics laboratories in terms of the political economy of British education, these accounts have also faileda fortiorito correlate this development with the contemporaneous extension of laboratory teaching methods to other scientific disciplines, a movement dubbed as a laboratory ‘revolution’ by later nineteenth-century commentators. (shrink)

That the export of Scottish engineers and engineering teachers to Japan in the 1870s aided that country's astonishingly rapid process of modernization from a feudal to a capitalist, industrialized society will not occasion surprise or dissent. As the Japan weekly mail editorialized in 1878: In no direction has Japan symbolised her advance towards assimilation of the civilisation of the Western world more emphatically than in that of applied science.

In the history of thermodynamics, two dates stand out as especially important: 1824, when Sadi Carnot's brilliant memoirRéflexions sur la puissance motrice du feuappeared in print; and 1850, when Rudolf Clausius published his similarly titled paper ‘Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme’. In this paper Clausius narrowly beat the Scottish physicist William Thomson to the solution of a puzzle which had been highlighted in the latter's recent publications: how could Carnot's theory, with all its intellectual attractions, be reconciled with the (...) newly discovered principle of the inter-convertibility of heat and work? Clausius's solution (as is well known) was to replace Carnot's axiom of heat conservation, with the axiom now known as the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth century, which was for Scotland in many ways an ‘Age of Improvement’, the University of Edinburgh enjoyed a golden age. Under the enlightened principalship of the Reverend William Robertson, the University offered wide, flexible, and mainly secular courses of study which were taught by conspicuously able professors. If we restrict ourselves to scientific chairs, a roll-call of their occupants is distinctly impressive: John Robison ; John Playfair ; John Walker ; Daniel Rutherford ; James Gregory ; (...) William Cullen ; Alexander Monro secundus ; and their doyen Joseph Black , ‘so pale, so gentle, so elegant, and so illustrious’. The scientific eminence of the University at that time is, of course, widely acknowledged. (shrink)

Thomas Thomson (177–1852) is primarily remembered as the author of the textbookA System of Chemistrywhich dominated the British field for about 30 years. In his chosen subject of chemistry his enthusiastic support of Daltonian chemical atomism and his zealous support of Prout's hypothesis have been recently recognized. Yet his activities were not as restricted as received opinion suggests. When Thomson assumed in 1818 the newly created Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, the prospects for him as teacher (...) and researcher were apparently encouraging. But he met difficulties in his attempts to elevate the status of the Regius Professors at Glasgow and in his concurrent endeavours to develop chemistry as an autonomous science. The ensuing controversy, first private and then public, spanned more than 20 rancorous years. Only one of Thomson's obituarists, however, even briefly mentions this debate; and recent writers on Thomson either ignore it completely or skim over it lightly. The main purpose of this paper is therefore to redress the balance of previous work on Thomson by outlining the chief features of his professorial period, paying particular attention to his style of teaching and attitude to his subject. For Thomson the development of his discipline was inseparable from the question of his status as a Regius Professor. Accordingly I also try to show that he played an important role in the movement for reform of the Scottish Universities and I discuss the structure of power at the University of Glasgow. Such analysis is necessary for understanding Thomson's appraisal of his situation as Regius Professor of Chemistry. In order to put his professorial period into the context of his earlier work I introduce the main body of the article with a short reconsideration of the form and significance of his career before 1817, when he moved to Glasgow. (shrink)

During the first half of the nineteenth century the Stirling brothers and John Ericsson made significant attempts to design hot air engines which could provide an economical alternative to high-pressure steam. They believed that it would be possible to gain fuel efficiencies superior to those obtained with steam by employing a heat exchanger within the air engine cycle, erroneously supposing that such a heat exchanger could eliminate the large loss of heat incurred in the condenser of the steam engine. The (...) Stirling brothers called their heat exchanger an economizer because it prevented the waste of heat, but Ericsson coined the term regenerator because he imagined that the power of the heat (caloric) could actually be regenerated, i.e. re-used in the engine to generate mechanical work. Ericsson's term became commonly accepted, so that Stirling's economizer is now also referred to as a generator. These attempts to attain high horsepower outputs with hot air engines were abandoned after the dramatic failure of Ericsson's notorious paddle steamer in the early 1850s. Further ventures were aimed at the more limited goal of low horsepowers and generally ignored the regenerator principle. (shrink)