Tag Archives: history of science

Alice Everett, 1865-1949

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Reading Forrest Reid’s autobiography, I was intrigued by his mention of his early education at “Miss Grant’s School” in Belfast, before he went on to Inst. Miss Grant was based at 9 Fitzwilliam St, opposite the location of the Institute of Irish Studies when I was a Fellow there in the mid 1990s.

The only other person I could find who had been a pupil at Miss Hardy’s was someone I had never heard of, Alice Everett, daughter of the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen’s College Belfast (as it then was). Her story is fascinating. She started studying at Queen’s too, and got first place in her first-year examinations in 1884, but did not get the prize because the university would not award it to a woman. She then studied maths at Cambridge from 1886 to 1889 and passed the Tripos, but was not awarded a degree, because Cambridge did not award degrees to women until 1928.

She was the first woman to work at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and then moved to Potsdam where she became the first woman to work at an observatory in Germany. After a year in Vassar College, she became fed up with the lack of career prospects for a woman in astronomy and moved back to London to help her retired father with his research on optics.

Thanks to the First World War, she got hired by the National Physical Laboratory’s optics section in 1917 and worked there until she retired in 1925. She was probably present at the demonstration of the first television image by John Logie Baird in January 1926, and applied jointly with him for a relating to television optics in 1933. She was one of the founders of the Television Society, now the Royal Television Society. She was granted a £100 civil list pension in recognition of her work on television in 1938 – better late than never, I suppose – and died in 1949.

I literally wrote my PhD thesis on Irish science at the time she was active, and I cannot remember having heard of her.

There is a brilliant interview with her from The Sketch in 1893, published on the RGO website and well worth a look.

“Observing is, then, the part of the work you like best?” said I.

“Oh, yes,” responded Miss Everett with enthusiasm. “You feel that you really are an astronomer then, doing practical business. Besides, there is a certain charm about having the handling of a fine and powerful instrument. I scarcely know why it is, but I find the hours fly when I am observing, though the old hands say it grows very monotonous in the course of years. In winter, though the roof is partly open and the dome kept at the temperature of the outer air, we are too actively employed to feel the cold much, unless it be windy. In summer, though, perhaps, the irregular hours may prove trying in time, the quiet, fresh night is much pleasanter than the hot and dusty London day. Towards dawn it is quite interesting to observe what a difference the dim light makes in the aspect of the earth.”

When I posted this on social media, QUB were kind enough to get back to me with an article by Shannon Devlin about the first women students at Queen’s, looking at the ten women in this photograph and exploring what is known about them.

Alice Everett is labelled as being second from the left on the back row. Only two of the women in the middle row are named. For some reason, the one on the left is not, but the evidence is clear – she was Florence “Flora” Hamilton (1862-1908), who did not live to an old age but is remembered as being the mother of C.S. Lewis.

Inside the Stargazers’ Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe, by Violet Moller

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one):

John Dee was a unique figure in his own time, but in the breadth of his interests, which are expressed in his writings and the library he amassed, he epitomises the dizzying scope of intellectual knowledge in this period. The most important autobiographical source we have is the Compendius Rehearsall, a wordy (brevity was not one of Dee’s strengths) curriculum vitae describing his ‘studious life, for the space of halfe an hundred yeeres’, along with extracts of his diaries and two manuscript copies of his library catalogue made in 1583 before he left for Poland.¹ This is an unusually rich amount of source material for someone in this period, especially the diaries, which give us a rare view into the private life of this intensely confounding man. The personal nature of some of the entries – he described his children’s injuries and maladies in detail, he was interested in his wife’s menstrual cycle and noted when she got her periods,* and he recorded their involvement in a wife-swapping incident in Bohemia – were distasteful and confusing to many historians, especially those viewing him through the prism of traditional science. Added to this, Dee spent the last decades of his life pursuing knowledge by talking to angels through a medium or ‘scryer’. This was a problematic, marginal activity that caused him serious difficulties; it has only become more problematic over time, as science has moved away from religion. It condemned Dee in the eyes of many historians of science and made him vulnerable to all sorts of interpretations – in the early twentieth century, he was taken up by the occultist poet-mountaineer Aleister Crowley, which did nothing to enhance his credentials.
* He also recorded her pregnancies and miscarriages. Serious study of the female body and its workings is a relatively recent phenomenon; today, Dee’s interest appears far-sighted rather than strange. (See Angela Saini, Inferior. London: 4th Estate, 2017.)
¹ CR, p. vii.

As a lapsed historian of science, especially astronomy, I always like to keep an eye on things in that domain; this book, published last year, looks at astronomy in the immediate aftermath of Copernicus, through the focus of seven northern European locations, telling a story which is unfamiliar to most people from a slightly different angle. The chosen locations include Leuven (here ‘Louvain’), so it was of particularly local interest to me; also Prague, which we visited last year, John Dee‘s house at Mortlake, Tycho Brahe’s observatory-statelet on the island of Hven, and the fictional Atlantis of Francis Bacon. (The other two are Nuremberg and Kassel in Germany.)

The Leuven chapter did give me some more insights into our local history – although the Mercator museum is in Sint-Niklaas, it was in Leuven that he did most of his best known work in the 1530s and 1540s, and collaborated closely with the astronomer Gemma Frisius (and John Dee came to visit).

But I wasn’t totally convinced that the organisation of the book around geography really helps the reader’s understanding all that much. In the end, the history of ideas is a history of people, and the stories are stories of humans rather than of places, and it gets a bit confusing when the same person pops up non-chronologically in different chapters.

Also for us locals, it would have been nice to be more specific about the street addresses where these various individuals lived and worked, in case there is anything left to see today.

But I can’t complain too much; it’s a clearly written book which takes us from point A to point B efficiently, and certainly fills in a lot of blanks which I had not even realised were blank. You can get it here.

The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

When [James] Watt was born on 19 January 1736, his father was a substantial figure, a general merchant, builder, shipwright, carpenter and cabinet-maker, and part owner of several vessels. He made the first crane in Greenock for unloading the heavy, scented bales of tobacco, and into his workshop the captains brought their instruments for repair. This was the trade Watt set his heart on. Instrument-makers were the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution. The sixteenth-century burst of exploration had fostered the mathematics of navigation and the improvement of astrolabes, quadrants and compasses, while on land surveying instruments were vital to map new territories.¹ Meanwhile the clock- and watchmakers were developing their craft, and the spectacle-makers and glass-grinders were working on new optical instruments, telescopes and microscopes. Yet the theoretical aspects of their work had little status: in Cambridge in the 163os, ‘Mathematicks … were scarce looked upon as Academical Studies, but rather mechanical, as the business of Traders, Seamen, Carpenters, Surveyors of Land, or the like.’²
¹ For a survey see Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Scientific Instruments’, in Pietro Corsi and Paul Weidling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (1983) 243-58.
² John Wallis, in Heilbron, 10; see her careful introductory survey.

A lovely in-depth look at the men behind the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-19th century West Midlands of England, focussing especially on Erasmus Darwin as the key figure, but also looking at Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Samuel Galton, and a number of others whose names I was less familiar with. They were all members of the Lunar Society, which met monthly in Birmingham from the 1760s to around the end of the century.

There is a lot of loving detail about their lives, with common threads including Methodism and other minority Protestant traditions (especially Quakers); pottery; lots of children (Darwin had fourteen with his two wives, and maybe more besides); investments; the abolition of slavery; and of course engineering. It could have been overwhelming, but it’s broken up with black-and-white illustrations and some lovely plates. I was particularly struck by Joseph Wright’s paintings of the orrery and the air pump.

A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766)
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)

I learned a lot from this; in particular I realised how well the author had managed to gain my sympathy when I found myself horrified by the 1791 Priestley Riots, where a right-wing mob targeted the local religious minorities in Birmingham, including especially the vulnerable and visible Joseph Priestley; the local authorities appear to have colluded in the outbreak of violence and then (as usual) blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves. Some things never change.

Anyway, this is a tremendously engaging book about a part of history that I should have known more about; and now I do. You can get it here.

Jim Bennett, 1947-2023

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I don’t intend for this blog to become a stream of obituaries, but I have just learned that Jim Bennett died last October. He was my supervisor and mentor for my Cambridge MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science, and helped me over the intellectual hurdle into the humanities; in fact he probably gave me some of the best advice on writing I have ever received. He recommended me to Peter Bowler for the Belfast research assistantship which became my PhD, and was then the external examiner who gave me that PhD several years later.

He was tough but fair as a teacher. I remember a couple of teaching moments with him vividly: his class on how to use an astrolabe was masterfully clear, and postgraduate seminars featured Babbage’s original notes for the Difference Engine, and a 17th-century prism “as would have been used by Newton” which, as he eventually revealed, was in fact the actual prism that had been used by Newton. My career took a very different path in the end, but I will always be grateful for the early encouragement that he offered at the point that I seemed to be heading down an academic track.

Here he is in 2010, with his gentle Belfast accent, introducing the Oxford Mueum of the History of Science, which he moved to in 1994. He had cropped the Einstein-like shock of hair that I remember him having in Cambridge.

Thanks, Jim.