Papers by Giuliano Pancaldi
Cambridge History of Science vol. 8, 2020
The educated classes of the Italian peninsula developed an independent language from the thirteen... more The educated classes of the Italian peninsula developed an independent language from the thirteenth century, a scientific and technical language from about 1500, a single government and a national science policy after 1861. From the 1950s, they took part in efforts to create a European science policy. Some long-term relationships among science, culture, and society will be employed in the present chapter to introduce the reader to some turning points relevant to an understanding of the place and uses of modern science south of the Alps.
Italian science will be approached as a sort of “natural experiment”, enabling the historian to put to test some of the factors that intertwine with the development of science. The conclusions will focus on what will be presented as the long-term persistence of the attitude displayed by early modern virtuosi and Italian elites vis-à-vis the prince. An attitude that managed to survive through the subsequent patterns of research institutions that were adopted. Combining, finally, with the pitfalls of an imagined national scientific community that continued to backfire.
ABSTRACT The paper concerns the early age of electricity and addresses the the questions: 1) Why ... more ABSTRACT The paper concerns the early age of electricity and addresses the the questions: 1) Why did it take so long for the steady current of the battery to transform our civilization? and, 2) What else was needed, beyond the current of the battery, for the age of electricity finally to take off?
The American Historical Review, 2007
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1990
This paper offers a reconstruction of some three years of Alessandro Volta's investigation t... more This paper offers a reconstruction of some three years of Alessandro Volta's investigation that culminated in his epoch-making discovery of the electric battery late in 1799. Among the materials used are labora tory notebooks and unpublished writings, including drafts of ...
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2007
When analyzing scientific texts, historians of medicine and historians of science have rarely ava... more When analyzing scientific texts, historians of medicine and historians of science have rarely availed themselves of the tools provided by computational linguistics. The present book is a welcome exception. It comes from a series edited by Mauro Di Giandomenico at the University of Bari, which was inaugurated a few years ago with a brilliant contribution to the same little-explored field of study: the monograph Jean Martin Charcot e la lingua della neurologia by Liborio Dibattista.1 Dibattista and Lucia di Palo are also at the University of Bari. The main goal pursued by di Palo is an analysis of Bichat’s classic Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1802), based on computational linguistics. She seeks to address two main, related questions (p. 85). First: How were the renewal and the autonomy of physiology from other branches of science, advocated by Bichat, substantiated in the vocabulary he used in the Recherches? And second: Did his efforts aimed at establishing a special language for physiology succeed? The discussion of the technical and interpretive issues at stake occupy about two thirds of the book, the rest being devoted to a biographical profile of Bichat based on secondary literature. The main software used by di Palo was INTEX, originally developed by Max Silberztein, a linguistic development environment including dictionaries and grammars that are applied to texts in order to locate morphological, lexical, and syntactic patterns, as well as to remove ambiguities and to tag simple and compound words. Di Palo combined INTEX with T-Lab, a software developed by Franco Lancia offering a set of additional tools for extracting, comparing, and mapping content. When applied to Bichat’s text, these tools call the historian’s attention to some obvious, as well as some less-obvious, and intriguing data. A (relatively) simple frequency analysis, for example (pp. 89–90), reveals that Bichat’s most often used noun in the Recherches was sang (blood, 599 occurrences), followed by organes/organe (organs/organ), followed at some distance by vie (life) and cerveau (brain), followed at more distance by coeur (heart), fonctions/fonction (functions), mort (death), and poumon (lung, 228 occurrences). If you wonder what happened in the Recherches to Bichat’s best-known notions of membrane and tissue—to which his interpreters have more often called attention—the CD-ROM accompanying di Palo’s book will tell you at a glance that the two corresponding nouns come much lower in the frequency list, with tissu at 46 occurrences and membrane at 35. Shifting to a more sophisticated exercise, in part 2 di Palo applies computational tools to an analysis of the arguments deployed by Bichat to convey his notion of experimental physiology. In this context, frequency lists (p. 152) tell that the accounts of Bichat’s experiments found their place overwhelmingly in
Nature Engaged. Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, 2012
In the dozen years following 1846, Thomson with his apparatus room at the University of Glasgow s... more In the dozen years following 1846, Thomson with his apparatus room at the University of Glasgow showed that it was possible to move from the kind of "physical mathematics" in which he had been trained as a student in Cambridge, to experimental physics and teaching, to industrial consultancy and patenting, and back again. The novelty the present discussion can claim rests on the perusal of the wealth of manuscript resources available on the daily life of Thomson's apparatus room and on some broader interpretive issues associated with the notion of an early age of electricity.
Caro mostro. Duecento anni di Frankenstein, edited by Nicola Pasqualicchio (Fiorini Editore, Verona), pp. 3-20. ISBN: 9788896419625., 2022
In this essay I suggest reinterpreting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a thought experiment on iss... more In this essay I suggest reinterpreting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a thought experiment on issues of science and society, as they were raised by debates on the possibility of artificial life around 1818. A few comparisons will be drawn on the attempts we make today to find in Shelley’s work hints on how to regulate ourselves vis-à-vis the new biotechnologies.
2007 IEEE Conference on the History of Electric Power, 2007
ABSTRACT The paper concerns the early age of electricity and addresses the the questions: 1) Why ... more ABSTRACT The paper concerns the early age of electricity and addresses the the questions: 1) Why did it take so long for the steady current of the battery to transform our civilization? and, 2) What else was needed, beyond the current of the battery, for the age of electricity finally to take off?
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2020
Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century p... more Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy.
This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam. https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article/50/1-2/58/107195/Reframing-the-Sciences-of-the-Long-Eighteenth
Isis 110, no. 4 (December 2019): 680-700., 2019
Some of Darwin’s views on descent with modification were developed alongside his adoption of a nu... more Some of Darwin’s views on descent with modification were developed alongside his adoption of a number of concepts inspired by the domain that we would now call science and technology. Focusing on the period from Darwin’s circumnavigation journey to the publication of the Origin in 1859, this essay explores the rich manuscript and published documentation left by Darwin to trace in detail his exposure to contemporary technologies and notions of invention. It argues that the parallel Darwin established on several occasions between the history of life on earth and human inventions was more than a metaphor. According to Darwin’s radical evolutionary perspective, life and invention—including his own theory explaining descent with modification—belonged to the same domain. It further argues that Darwin’s technology of life approach allowed him to make room for a plurality of causes driving evolutionary change, while at the same time avoiding the question of the origin of life. This same approach helped him to mold his scientific persona, while marking his distance from a mixed population of naturalists that included materialists as well as exponents of speculative German natural philosophy, although these were all frequent sources of reflection during his most creative years.
Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 2020
By recalling his own career as an historian of science and technology , the author sketches the h... more By recalling his own career as an historian of science and technology , the author sketches the history of Science and Technology Studies in Italy from their early steps in the 1970s and 1980s. He highlights the ways in which the field has gained visibility and substance in the Italian context, but also pointing out the constraints and hurdles that still must be overcome to consolidate it. In particular, the author underlines how the traditionally rigid disciplinary partitions of Italian academia and the nationally centralized system of Italian universities have hindered, and still hinder, the institutionaliza-tion and the potential impact of STS south of the Alps.
Notes and Records of The Royal Society, 2009
In this article I follow the voltaic battery as it was appropriated by the network of people cent... more In this article I follow the voltaic battery as it was appropriated by the network of people centred on Thomas Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. I use the case to explore the vicissitudes of a quite special ‘hybrid object’: I consider what we can learn from the trajectories that objects such as the battery describe when they travel across expert communities.
Frontline and Factory. Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914-1924, 2006
On 31 May 1914, less than a month before the assassinations in Sarajevo, Italian chemists met in ... more On 31 May 1914, less than a month before the assassinations in Sarajevo, Italian chemists met in Turin for a conference, convened by the Associazione Chimica Industriale, to celebrate the life of Ascanio Sobrero (1812-1888). Sobrero was an early chemistry student of T.J. Pelouze in Paris and Justus von Liebig in Giessen, who had spent his life as a professor of chemistry at the University of Turin. In 1846-1847, he made his name with the development of nitroglycerine, and later acted as a consultant for the dynamite plant that Alfred Nobel established in Avigliana, a few kilometres from Turin. The timing of the 1914 celebrations was regarded as significant, although the participants could have anticipated neither the events of Sarajevo, nor their aftermath. Coming at a moment of uncertain `take-off' and structural weakness of Italian industries, the Great War acted as a powerful catalyst, and a tremendous test. It is a test we can use to assess the roles played by industry, the military, and the professors in the history of Italy's wartime chemistry.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics, 2013
Around 1800, several natural philosophers admitted the existence of `imponderable' (weightless) f... more Around 1800, several natural philosophers admitted the existence of `imponderable' (weightless) fluids: special fluids which, when added to ordinary, 'ponderable' matter were expected to explain a wide range of phenomena. Depending on the author and the theory, up to six such fluids had been introduced to account for the phenomena of cohesion, chemical affinity, heat, light, electricity, magnetism and, according to some, also life, or at least 'galvanism', or animal electricity. Considering that at about the same time many authors—including some who subscribed to imponderables—were striving to apply experimental, possibly quantitative methods to all branches of natural philosophy, and that chemists were presenting the balance as the key instrument of a new science of the micro-world, the appeal to `;imponderables already seemed puzzling to a number of contemporaries. However, imponderables prospered and they continued to flourish until well into the nine-teenth century—long enough to pose substantial interpretive problems for historians of science up to the present.
Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur ___ Yearbook for European Culture of Science 8 (2013-2015, 2016
The paper will compare and reflect on three different plots, all having to do with the history of... more The paper will compare and reflect on three different plots, all having to do with the history of electricity in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first plot is a classical history of science plot. It is the story of the world-wide-known discoveries concerning electricity that took place in Bologna from the times of Luigi Galvani (`animal electricity', 1791) to those of Guglielmo Marconi (`wireless telegraphy', 1895). This plot is an example of how the history of science could be bent to satisfy the needs of the professors and the public of an ancient university town like Bologna. The second plot is a history of technology plot, and also an economic his-tory and social history plot. It is the story of the slow take-off of electricity as an industry, paralleling the rise of the middle and working classes in a medium size, provincial town like Bologna. The third plot is the story of the collections of instruments illustrating the history of electricity that were assembled, dispersed, and reassembled in town to celebrate science and technology in the public sphere. Systematic comparisons among these three plots will be used to reflect on the different materialities in which science is involved, and on the pleasures and dangers of what has been called the `museification' of science.
Talks by Giuliano Pancaldi
"i Martedì", (vol. 46, 3), number 360, pp. 42-45, 2023
Focusing on the interaction between Charles Darwin and James Torbitt - a merchant and agriculturi... more Focusing on the interaction between Charles Darwin and James Torbitt - a merchant and agriculturist from Dublin - the paper explores the efforts in which both engaged in an attempt to select and commercialize potato varieties resistant to the attacks of Phytophthora infestans.
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Papers by Giuliano Pancaldi
Italian science will be approached as a sort of “natural experiment”, enabling the historian to put to test some of the factors that intertwine with the development of science. The conclusions will focus on what will be presented as the long-term persistence of the attitude displayed by early modern virtuosi and Italian elites vis-à-vis the prince. An attitude that managed to survive through the subsequent patterns of research institutions that were adopted. Combining, finally, with the pitfalls of an imagined national scientific community that continued to backfire.
This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam. https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article/50/1-2/58/107195/Reframing-the-Sciences-of-the-Long-Eighteenth
Talks by Giuliano Pancaldi
Italian science will be approached as a sort of “natural experiment”, enabling the historian to put to test some of the factors that intertwine with the development of science. The conclusions will focus on what will be presented as the long-term persistence of the attitude displayed by early modern virtuosi and Italian elites vis-à-vis the prince. An attitude that managed to survive through the subsequent patterns of research institutions that were adopted. Combining, finally, with the pitfalls of an imagined national scientific community that continued to backfire.
This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam. https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article/50/1-2/58/107195/Reframing-the-Sciences-of-the-Long-Eighteenth