Illustrating the Tangle

This chapter illustrates the concept of a tangle using two episodes from the history of science. In the first episode, we examine how natural philosophes of the eighteenth century ‘fixed’ the boiling point of water. In the second, we shift to the twentieth century to analyse the development of the antibiotic penicillin. We argue that the virtuous features of the tangle—its richness, entanglement, and long tails—help to explain successes in both episodes.