For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts–science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, “scientistic”, historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft. Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the (...) academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield’s generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Hessen; Bernal; Pagel; Needham; Butterfield; Cold War; Cambridge. (shrink)

While important research on the history of scientific commemorations has been published in recent years, relatively little attention has been paid to the commemoration of invention and inventors. A comparison of the centenaries of James Watt's death in 1919 and of Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1931 reveals how the image of the inventor was being refashioned in the early twentieth century. Although shortly after his death Watt had been acclaimed by the Royal Society as a great ‘natural (...) philosopher’, a century later his reputation had been appropriated by the engineering professions and trades. As the title of Dickinson's 1935 biography described him, he was seen primarily as a ‘craftsman and engineer’, not a scientist. With poor publicity, which failed in particular to make any connection between steam power and electricity, the 1919 centenary excited little interest outside engineering circles. Meanwhile, professional scientists, who were seeking financial recognition for the importance of their research in ‘pure’ science, had found a new icon in Michael Faraday. They seized the occasion of the 1931 centenary to reinforce the link between Faraday's scientific research and the wonders of modern electrical technology and thereby to elevate the role of ‘blue-sky’ research over its ‘mere’ application. (shrink)