Voyages of maintenance: Exploration, infrastructure, and modernity on the Krusenstern–Lisianskii circumnavigation between Russia and Japan from 1803 to 1806

Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803–7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure and repair work in enabling a voyage of exploration, and reveals the tensions and debates that considerations of maintenance evoked among ships’ officers, crews, and the peoples they encountered.

Affective geographies: Family and friendship in the production of scientific knowledge

Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the “affective geographies” of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life.

The Revista Ştiinţifică “Vasile Adamachi” and its role in forming national and international scientific awareness of Greater Romania, 1910–1933

The Revista Ştiinţifică “Vasile Adamachi” (1910–1948) had aimed since its first edition to disseminate the newest achievements of science to the interested general public with the explicit intention of building national consciousness and solidarity that would forward Romania’s natural powers through science. Even though the editors of the journal had complained constantly that their efforts to promote the national scientific movement were making slow progress, they maintained their openness toward the international state of research by publishing notes and reviews of the main scientific developments worldwide. Caught between those two ideals (that of a Romanian science and of keeping up with the international scientific scene), the journal reflects the struggles, the difficulties, but also the successes of the individual researchers, acting as a two-way communication channel between science producers and consumers. It provides us with a valuable insight into the Self versus Other perception in a time when contact between the Romanian and Western European cultures was beginning to consciously evolve from mere imitation of a dominant power to the incorporation of fragmented foreign categories. It is a perfect example of ‘patchwork’, in which the native and foreign elements coexisted in a continuous process of redefining and reshaping the newly formed national identity.

Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo’s rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor

The terms that Galileo’s contemporaries used for lenses ( cristallo/i, lente/i, and vetro/i) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo’s correspondence and letters, the term crystal had many uses and meanings. As a substance, crystal was a form of raw material, but crystal was also a substance that was central to scholastic cosmology and an explanatory device on which scholastics relied to explain first the appearance of the new star of 1604 and then Galileo’s new telescopic discoveries. When Galileo began using the word crystals as a synonym for lenses, he endowed the material of his instrument with cosmological arguments. Galileo’s choice of language was deliberate and polemical, serving as a joke at the expense of scholastics and as a linguistic marker of social proximity to Galileo and his intellectual agenda, especially among the members of the Academy of the Lincei. Rhetorically and linguistically, Galileo chose to refer to his lenses as crystals both because of the material from which they were made and because in so doing he signaled the epistemological work that the lenses would perform. Ultimately, the crystal lenses in Galileo’s telescope and writings shattered the crystalline spheres, replacing explanatory metaphors with a polemical emphasis on the material and empirical realities of objects.

Techniques of repair, the circulation of knowledge, and environmental transformation: Towards a new history of transportation

It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of repairing and maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology.

“The lungs of a ship”: Ventilation, acclimatization, and labor in the maritime environment, 1740–1800

This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard “ventilators” proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas about the ability of European bodies to acclimate, or “season,” to tropical environments. These ventilating machines appealed to British administrators because they represented an embodiment of providential and enlightened ideas that validated the expansion of overseas empire. In addition, they promised to increase labor efficiency by reducing the mortality and misery experienced by the sailors and enslaved people during long sea voyages. As skepticism about acclimatization grew in response to stubbornly high mortality rates in the West Indies, Hales’ ventilators fell out of favor – a development underscored by their dismissal as a potential solution for the appalling conditions found in the transatlantic slave trade. By examining ventilators’ nearly fifty-year career in naval and slave ships, this article will show the role of technology and the shipboard environment in the transition from enlightened optimism about acclimatization toward later attitudes of racial and environmental essentialism.

“Rusticall chymistry”: Alchemy, saltpeter projects, and experimental fertilizers in seventeenth-century English agriculture

As the primary ingredient in gunpowder, saltpeter was an extraordinarily important commodity in the early modern world. Historians of science and technology have long studied its military applications but have rarely focused on its uses outside of warfare. Due to its potential effectiveness as a fertilizer, saltpeter was also an integral component of experimental agricultural reform movements in the early modern period and particularly in seventeenth-century England. This became possible for several reasons: the creation of a thriving domestic saltpeter production industry in the second half of the sixteenth century; the development of vitalist alchemical theories that sought a unified explanation for the “growth” of minerals, metals, and plants; the rise of experimental natural philosophy; and the mid-seventeenth-century dominance of the English East India Company in the saltpeter trade, which allowed agricultural reformers to repurpose domestically produced saltpeter in agriculturally productive ways. This paper argues that the Hartlib Circle – a loose network of natural philosophers and social reformers – adopted vitalist matter theories and the practical, experimental techniques of alchemists to transform agriculture into a more productive enterprise. Though their grandiose plans never came to fruition, their experimental trials to develop artificial fertilizers played an early role in the origins and development of saline chemistry, agronomy, and the British Agricultural Revolution.

Risky migrations: Race, Latin eugenics, and Cold War development in the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru, 1930–60

Histories of economic development during the Cold War do not typically consider connections to race science and eugenics. By contrast, this article historicizes the debates sparked by the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru and demonstrates how Cold War development practice shared common epistemological terrain with racial and eugenic thought from the Andes. The International Labor Organization project’s goal of resettling indigenous groups from the Peruvian highlands to lower-lying tropical climates sparked heated debates about the biological specificity of Andean highlanders’ physiques and ability to survive in the tropics. Such concerns betrayed the antitypological consensus expressed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Race Statements and defended by one of the main proponents of the resettlement project, the Swiss–American anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The concern with Andean racial types was central to the research agenda of the acclaimed Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge, who endorsed modernization projects that did not entail moving highlanders outside of their traditional climate. The debates sparked by the Puno–Tambopata project demonstrate how Cold War development discourse grappled with racial and eugenic thought from Latin America and the Global South and thereby produced projects of indigenous “improvement.”

Magnifying the first points of life: Harvey and Descartes on generation and scale

In this essay, I study the contested role of magnification as an observational strategy in the generation theories of William Harvey and René Descartes. During the seventeenth century, the grounds under the discipline of anatomy were shifting as knowledge was increasingly based on autopsia and observation. Likewise, new theories of generation were established through observations of living beings in their smallest state. But the question formed: was it possible to extend vision all the way down to the first points of life? Arguing that the potential of magnification hinged on the metaphysics of living matter, I show that Harvey did not consider observational focus on the material composition of blood and embryos to be conducive to knowledge of living bodies. To Harvey, generation was caused by immaterial, and thus in principle invisible, forces that could not be magnified. Descartes, on the other hand, believed that access to the subvisible scale of natural bodies was crucial to knowledge about their nature. This access could be granted through rational introspection, but possibly also through powerful microscopes. The essay thus ends with a reflection on the importance of Cartesian corpuscularianism for the emergence of microscopical anatomy in seventeenth-century England.