Search

Fans of science fiction offer an unusual opportunity to study that rare bird, a “public” view of science in history. Of course science-fiction fans are by no means representative of a “general” public, but they are a coherent, interesting and significant group in their own right. In this paper we follow British fans from their phase of self-organisation just before WW2 and through their wartime experiences. We examine how they defined science and science fiction, and how they connected their interest in them with their personal ambitions and social concerns. Moreover, we show how WW2 clarified and altered these connections. Rather than being distracted from science fiction, fans redoubled their focus upon it during the years of conflict. The number of new fanzines published in the mid-century actually peaked during the War. In this article, we examine what science fiction fandom, developed over the previous half-dozen years, offered them in this time of national trial.

This thesis was digitised by the British Library from microfilm. You can acquire a single copy of this thesis for research purposes by clicking on the padlock icon on the thesis file. Please be aware that the text in the supplied thesis pdf file may not be as clear as text in a thesis that was born digital or digitised directly from paper due to the conversion in format. However, all of the theses in Apollo that were digitised from microfilm are readable and have been processed by optical character recognition (OCR) technology which means the reader can search and find text within the document. If you are the author of this thesis and would like to make your work openly available, please contact us: thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk

In this paper, E. C. Large’s 1956 novel Dawn in Andromeda is examined, using literary analysis, as a work of public history of science. The novel recounts how God places a pioneer population on a new planet, challenging them to work from nothing to the creation of a ‘seven-valve all-wave superhet wireless’ in a single generation. On a general level, this article presents Dawn in Andromeda as a history of science firmly rooted in the human and material efforts of engineering. As such, it is shown to chime more particularly with the hopeful definitions of science explored by wireless enthusiasts and the first generation of science fiction fans in Britain during the 1930s. However, the optimism of the 1930s is not borne out by the novel; ultimately, Dawn in Andromeda satirises the wireless as a form of corrupted science that did not deliver what the fans had hoped for.

This study challenges the primacy of consent in the history of human experimentation and argues that privileging the cultural frameworks adds nuance to our understanding of the construction of the volunteer in the period 1945 to 1970. Historians and bio-ethicists have argued that medical ethics codes have marked out the parameters of using people as subjects in medical scientific research and that the consent of the subjects was fundamental to their status as volunteers. However, the temporality of the creation of medical ethics codes means that they need to be understood within their historical context. That medical ethics codes arose from a specific historical context rather than a concerted and conscious determination to safeguard the well-being of subjects needs to be acknowledged. The British context of human experimentation is under-researched and there has been even less focus on the cultural frameworks within which experiments took place. This study demonstrates, through a close analysis of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) and the government's military research facility, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down (Porton), that the `volunteer' in human experiments was a subjective entity whose identity was specific to the institution which recruited and made use of the subject. By examining representations of volunteers in the British press, the rhetoric of the government's collectivist agenda becomes evident and this fed into the institutional construction of the volunteer at the CCRU. In contrast, discussions between Porton scientists, staff members, and government officials demonstrate that the use of military personnel in secret chemical warfare experiments was far more complex. Conflicting interests of the military, the government and the scientific imperative affected how the military volunteer was perceived.

This thesis uses The Strand Magazine and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to examine the different ways in which science and ideology interacted in popular culture between 1891 and 1930. It is interested in the relationship between high and low cultures and the different experiences of the fin-de-siecle and modernity that they betray. It attempts to reconstruct an epistemology of scientific knowledge from 'the artefacts of low culture' and challenges prevailing critical attitudes in periodical criticism and Holmesian criticism. The methodology is derived from a mixture of Marxist literary criticism, ideology theory and the history of science in the belief that attitudes from all three critical traditions are necessary to properly unpack the culturally-embedded nature of periodicals. It plots the relationship between scientific and popular discourses and examines the different ways in which fiction was able to ideologically commodify scientific knowledge and incorporate it into everyday representations of the real world. The thesis is split into four main sections that analyse, respectively, class relations in the 1890s, scientific articles after the turn of the century, depictions of the male body in the aftermath of the Second Boer War and the effect of the onset of a knowledge economy of traditional genre fiction between 1913 and 1930.

This thesis uses archived oral history interviews to trace the identities of scientists in narratives that capture their lived experiences of science. It draws upon fifty-four life history interviews with both men and women scientists from the British Library's 'An Oral History of British Science' (OHBS) archive. The OHBS was first established in 2009 to address the lack of comprehensive oral history archives devoted to documenting the personal experiences and memories of professionals involved in contemporary British science. In this thesis, however, the in-depth nature of these interviews are used to explore scientists' childhoods, careers and eventual retirement. This thesis therefore provides one of the first systematic attempts to draw together the personal accounts of professional scientists from a major public archive dedicated to science. \ud \ud In order to situate the study of scientists' lives, two fields of research are placed under scrutiny - oral history and history of science. In doing so, this thesis traces a longer tension between the 'history from below' approach of oral history and the 'great men' foundations of history of science when the two fields were still in their infancy. The different levels of emphasis that oral historians have placed on exploring issues such as trust, empathy and subjectivity have also been accompanied by a persistent scepticism found in history and associated studies in the sociology of science. Firstly, this thesis draws upon the democratic ethos of oral history in order to reconcile the trust and suspicion surrounding scientists' accounts of their lives. Secondly, the life history methodology of the OHBS interviews, which typically documents a whole person's life, draws attention to the importance of childhood and retirement for establishing scientists' identities as they sought to construct and reconstruct their lives in science. Lastly, it concludes with the implications of adopting an oral history approach to illuminate the contingent nature of scientists' identities.

The work of psychiatrists affiliated with the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute has been credited with reshaping how workplaces were managed and with psychologising British society, providing British people with a new psychological language for thinking about problems. This thesis provides a history of the Second World War roots of this work. It examines two projects which emerged from a remarkable collaboration between the Tavistock group and the British Army: the War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) and Civil Resettlement Units (CRUs). These projects, whose scale was vast and unprecedented in British human science, involved the creation and management of processes to choose leaders and to help communities disrupted by war to return to peace. \ud \ud As well as exploring how particular psychological programmes, theories, methods and technologies were devised, this work considers the implications of this work for those who were involved in the wartime work. It provides a history of the co-constitution of psychological expertise, military management strategies, technologies of assessment, and therapeutic intervention. This is achieved by reconstructing the complex negotiations that surrounded the WOSBs and CRUs, by tracing the macro-scale social concerns and the micro-scale personal relationships of individuals that shaped the WOSBs and the CRUs. Historiographical approaches such as actor-network theory and S.L. Star’s work on “boundary objects” are used to examine how psychological theories were balanced with military expectations and demands. The thesis highlights the importance of communication strategies, the negotiation of networks, and administrative structures in the production of science and expertise.

In 1934, a child's construction toy - Meccano - was used to build the first differential analyser in the UK. Initially intended as a proof-of-concept model, the original Meccano differential analyser proved so successful at resolving equations that many subsequent Meccano and non-Meccano analogue computers were built in the UK. These machines were used before, during, and after the Second World War as research instruments and teaching devices. Despite this, the part of the original Meccano differential analyser that has sat in the Science Museum since 1949 has been used to tell a Whiggish history of computers that focuses on digital machines at the expense of analogue mechanisms. While historians of computing today define their work in opposition to this linear-progressive account of computing, this approach featured prominently in academic literature until the turn of the millennium.\ud This thesis explores Hartree and Porter's original Meccano differential analyser as an analogue computer, using it as a case study to explore the complex relationships between Meccano, play, science, and engineering. In doing so, it considers the object as an assemblage of its Meccano materiality, its instrumentality as an analogue computer, and its career as a collected object in the Science Museum. It deconstructs these different elements of the assemblage and explores how they are part of wider, external assemblages that have their own public histories. The thesis considers the changing materiality of Meccano as an object from 1901 to the present day, analysing marketing materials, the Meccano Magazine, and the voices of the Meccanomen to challenge the conventional, synchronic history of the toy as an unchanged engineering tool. It uses the Meccanomen's popular publications together with archival sources and interviews to historicise the 'alternative' version of the Meccanomen's movement, making it possible to see how individuals attached a variety of personalised meanings to their Meccano hobby. \ud It also explores the object's instrumentality as an analogue computer, beginning with a detailed 'nuts and bolts' comparison of how the original Meccano differential analyser worked with how it was presented in academic and popular publications in 1934. It then brings together the stories and applications of other differential analysers constructed in Britain during this period, to provide further case studies about the role of these computers during the Second World War, and how they have been displayed in museums. The thesis then draws on these analyses by telling the story of the 'Trainbox' object that was collected by the Science Museum in 1949. The 'Trainbox' was comprised of parts of the original Meccano differential analyser that Hartree used to teach the principles of differential equations and integration after the Second World War. Through exploring how the public history and voices of the object have been changed in different exhibits in the museum, this thesis demonstrates the complex relationship between different parts of object's assemblage in a variety of contexts over time. The final part of the thesis builds on these deconstructed elements by reconstructing the original object as the Kent machine, a historical reproduction designed to recover elements of the tacit knowledge used to build it in 1934. It finishes by exploring how these new understandings of Meccano and analogue computers were used to co-curate a new public history for this curious object, using the 'shared authority' of myself, the Meccanomen, and audiences we engaged with the Kent machine.