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. 2010 Dec;48(161):251-285.
doi: 10.1177/007327531004800301.

SERIALITY AND SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer, Jim Secord

SERIALITY AND SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Nick Hopwood et al. Hist Sci. 2010 Dec.
No abstract available

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The great chain of being. The Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet posited an infinitely graded and all-encompassing chain that appeared only imperfectly to human understanding. In this header to his book on the contemplation of nature, the clouds have cleared to reveal a few representatives of the middle part, while the upper and lower reaches remain entirely obscured. From Bonnet, Œuvres d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie, iv/1: Contemplation de la nature (Neuchatel, 1781), 1, by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The four types of development. While the first two plates in Karl Ernst von Baer’s celebrated treatise give series of cross- and longitudinal sections through chick development, the complex third plate uses more schematic figures to illustrate his general propositions. There was no single series, he insisted, but the animal kingdom was rather divided into four fundamentally different types with different modes of development. Figure 4 is the much-reproduced “ideal vertical cross-section of the embryo of a vertebrate”, while Figure 5 indicates the transformation of the embryo and Figure 6 its movements. Figures 7 and 8 compare vertebrate and ‘articulate’ (annelid and arthropod) extremities respectively, while Figure 9 shows a jellyfish embryo, and Figure 10 the articulate scheme of development. The last four figures represent the modes of development in the four types: (11) radiates, (12) molluscs, (13) articulates and (14) vertebrates. Coloured copper engravings from von Baer, Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere: Beobachtung und Reflexion, part 1 (Königsberg, 1828), Plate III (detail), by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
To support his argument for progress in the heavens, the Glasgow astronomer John Pringle Nichol reorganized William Herschel’s images of nebulae to produce a series of successively condensed forms culminating in stars. By the juxtaposition of figures standing for entire nebular classes, the reader was encouraged to trace “a series so well marked” stretching “from absolute vagueness to distinct structure and then on to the formation of a defined central nucleus” and finally “a STAR thoroughly organized with a mere bur around it”. Lithographs from Nichol, Views of the architecture of the heavens: In a series of letters to a lady (Edinburgh, 1837), Figures 18 and 19 on pp. 137 and 139.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
In late 1831 Michael Faraday started to publish a long series of experiments on electricity and magnetism, accompanied by images extracted from his laboratory diary showing series of set-ups with a copper disc rotating between the poles of a magnet to generate a detectable current in the disc (Figures 7–15) and what he called the “magnetic curves” (Figure 25) in the neighbourhood of the magnet. Engraving from Faraday, “Experimental researches in electricity”, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, cxxii (1832), 125–62, p. 131, Plate 3.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
By the mid-nineteenth century, the distribution and manufacture of serially published journals of all kinds was a large-scale international business, shown here in an idealized view of readers flocking to the counters at Fetridge & Co.’s periodical arcade in Boston, Massachussetts. From Gleason’s pictorial drawing room companion, iv, issue of 31 July 1852, 80.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
The experience of seriality in exhibitions. In this wood-engraving, a group of onlookers in London’s Hyde Park marvel at the pioneering use of modular construction in building the gigantic iron and glass structure that would become known as the ‘Crystal Palace’. The Illustrated London news, with its large format pictures, offered middle-class families a sense of direct participation. From Illustrated London news, xvii, issue of 14 Dec. 1850, 453.
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Graptolites from the Lower Palaeozoic of Scotland, as illustrated by the geologist Charles Lapworth. Close study of slightly varying forms of these obscure fossils made it possible to trace sequences of strata with great precision during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Later work attempted to order the forms in evolutionary series. From Charles Lapworth, “On Scottish Monograptidae”, Geological magazine, 2nd decade, iii (1876), Plate 13, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
“Development according to Darwin’s theory” in the Fliegende Blätter, the Bavarian equivalent of Punch, in the early 1870s. In the progressive evolution of social types from everyday objects, additional humour comes from the simultaneous evolution, for example, of the lady from a coffee pot, her parasol from a carefully placed spoon and her small dog from a pair of balls. Four pseudo-evolutionary series are aligned in a comparative array. This highlights an increasingly standard visual strategy of Darwinism, as well as the commonness of both evolutionary series and spoofs thereof. “Entwickelungen nach Darwin’s Theorie”, wood-engraving from Fliegende Blätter, lvi (1872), 160. Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.
Fig. 9
Fig. 9
The military officer, archaeologist and museum entrepreneur Augustus Pitt Rivers arranged contemporary Aboriginal Australian and Melanesian weapons in series to argue for their development from a single primordial form. Augustus Henry Lane Fox [Pitt Rivers], “On the evolution of culture”, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vii (1875), 496-520, Plate 3.
Fig. 10
Fig. 10
The chemical journalist and consultant William Crookes told the British Association in 1886 that the periodic order of the elements was analogous to the evolutionary series of animals and plants. In 1888 he made a spiral model to show how successive elements were arranged in an evolutionary series generated through secular cooling marked by cycles when elements were formed. Model in wood and metal, just over 30 cm tall, courtesy of Science Museum / SSPL.
Fig. 11
Fig. 11
Nineteenth-century political economists debated how serial organization defined the character of the factory system through the division of labour into minutely distinct tasks and their recomposition in continuous flow production governed by systematic mechanization. At George Hinks’s and John Wells’s Buckingham Street factory in Birmingham, where almost one million pens were made each day, more than a dozen different processes were sequenced to accelerate output. In the slitting room rows of young women worked at cutting machines to make a slit in each steel nib. Wood-engraving from Illustrated London news, xviii, issue of 22 Feb. 1851, 149.
Fig. 12
Fig. 12
To illustrate the method of differences used in Charles Babbage’s calculating engines, the Edinburgh review printed a series of diagrams to represent the serial addition of a number expressed on a row of dials to the number represented by the row below it when computing a table of the fifth powers of the natural numbers. For example, to add the first difference line D1 to the top line T, each dial in T would move through as many dial divisions as the index number beneath it in D1, and so on. In one iteration of a quarter-turn of the engine’s axis the dials would advance from the set-up in Figure 2 to that in Figure 3. [Dionysius Lardner], “Babbage’s calculating engine”, Edinburgh review, lix (1834), 263–327, Figures 2 and 3 on pp. 292-3.
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References

    1. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The life of James Clerk Maxwell, with selections from his correspondence and occasional writings, new edn (London, 1884), 354.

    1. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 242–87; William F. Bynum, “The great chain of being after 40 years: An appraisal”, History of science, xiii (1975), 1–28.

    1. E.g., Joseph O’Connell, “Metrology: The creation of universality by the circulation of particulars”, Social studies of science, xxiii (1993), 129–73; M. Norton Wise (ed.), The values of precision (Princeton, 1995); Theodore M. Porter, Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (Princeton, 1995); Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing science in a global empire: Cable telegraphy and electrical physics in Victorian Britain”, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian science in context (Chicago, 1997), 312–33; Simon Schaffer, “Metrology, metrication, and Victorian values”, ibid., 438–74; Volker Hess (ed.), Normierung der Gesundheit: Messende Verfahren der Medizin als kulturelle Praktik um 1900 (Husum, 1997); Graeme J. N. Gooday, The morals of measurement: Accuracy, irony and trust in late Victorian electrical practice (Cambridge, 2004); and (for literature reviews) Arne Hessenbruch, “Metrology” and “Standardization”, in idem (ed.), Reader’s guide to the history of science (London, 2000), 477–80 and 704–6.

    1. Oxford English dictionary, s.v. “series”; Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (4 vols, Paris, 1877), s.v. “série”; Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, viii (Leipzig, 1893), cols 636–55.

    1. Lovejoy, op. cit. (ref. 2), 236. On missing links in nineteenth-century culture see Gillian Beer, Open fields: Science in cultural encounter (Oxford, 1996), 115–45; and James W. Cook, The arts of deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

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