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This essay relocates Alexander J. Ellis’s translation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s book Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863) in a broader context. It discusses Ellis’s various endeavors to make knowledge available to those with limited access to it and, more specifically, his attempts at making the sound of speech accessible to readers of printed text. Against this background, the essay then compares the central notion of tone sensation in Helmholtz’s book to Ellis’s rendition thereof. As will be seen, Ellis preferred familiarity to literal translation, but he also made great efforts to convey the quality of speech sounds where these became the object of investigation. This double strategy—which was not in line with Helmholtz’s forging of anew theory of perception through defamiliarizing common terms—forced Ellis into exuberant explanations that eventually overgrew the carefully transmitted original, resulting in what amounted to a book of his own.

This essay investigates a hitherto-unexamined collaboration between two of the founders of modern history of science, Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, and two economists, Paul Samuelson and Rupert Maclaurin. The arena in which these two disciplines came together was the Bowman Committee, one of the committees that prepared material for Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier. The essay shows how their collaboration helped to shape the committee’s recommendations, in which different models of science confronted each other. It then shows how, despite this success, the basis for long-term collaboration of economists and historians of science disappeared, because the resulting linear model of science and technology separated the study of scientific and economic progress into noncommunicating boxes .

While the humanities and the sciences have a closely connected history, there are no general histories that bring the two fields together on an equal footing. This paper argues that there is a level at which some humanistic and scientific disciplines can be brought under a common denominator and compared. This is at the level of underlying methods, especially at the level of formalisms and rule systems used by different disciplines. The essay formally compares linguistics and computer science by noting that the same grammar formalism was used in the 1950s for describing both human and. programming languages. Additionally, it examines the influence of philology on molecular biology, and vice versa, by recognizing that the tree-formalism and rule system used for text reconstruction was also employed in DNA genetics. It also shows that rule systems for source criticism in history are used in forensic science, evidence-based medicine, and jurisprudence. This paper thus opens up a new comparative approach within which the histories of the humanities and the sciences can be examined on a common level.