Urban Histories of Science: Making Knowledge in the City, 1820-1940 0415784174, 9780415784177

Citation preview

Urban Histories of Science

This book tells ten urban histories of science from nine cities—Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin (2 articles), Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples—situated on the geographical margins of Europe and beyond. Ranging from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the contents of this volume debate why and how we should study the scientific culture of cities, often considered “peripheral” in terms of their production of knowledge. How were scientific practices, debates, and innovations intertwined with the highly dynamic urban space around 1900? The authors analyze zoological gardens, research stations, observatories, and international exhibitions, along with hospitals, newspapers, backstreets, and private homes while also stressing the importance of concrete urban spaces for the production and appropriation of knowledge. They uncover the diversity of actors and urban publics ranging from engineers, scientists, architects, and physicians to journalists, tuberculosis patients, and fishermen. Looking at these nine cities is like glancing at a prism that produces different and even conflicting notions of modernity. In their totality, the ten case studies help to overcome an outdated center-periphery model. This volume is, thus, able to address far more intriguing historiographical questions. How do science, technology, and medicine shape the debates about modernity and national identity in the urban space? To what degree do cities and the heterogeneous elements they contain have agency? These urban histories show that science and the city are continuously co-constructing each other. Oliver Hochadel is a tenured historian of science at the IMF-CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) in Barcelona. Agustí Nieto-Galan is Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Edited by John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

29 Spatializing the History of Ecology Sites, Journeys, Mappings Edited by Raf de Bont and Jens Lachmund 30 Cancer, Radiation Therapy and the Market Barbara Bridgman Perkins 31 Science and Ideology A Comparative History Mark Walker 32 Closing the Door on Globalization Internationalism, Nationalism, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Fernando Clara and Cláudia Ninhos 33 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Race and Natural History, 1750–1850 Edited by Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer 34 Health Policies in Transnational Perspective Europe in the Interwar Years Josep-Lluís Barona-Vilar 35 Urban Histories of Science Making Knowledge in the City, 1820–1940 Edited by Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan 36 Pioneering Health in London, 1935–2000 The Peckham Experiment David Kuchenbuch

Urban Histories of Science Making Knowledge in the City, 1820–1940

Edited by Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hochadel, Oliver, 1968– editor. | Nieto-Galan, Agustâi, editor. Title: Urban histories of science / edited by Oliver Hochadel and Agustâi Nieto-Galan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in the history of science, technology and medicine; 35 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018018199 | ISBN 9780415784177 (hardback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315228549 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Science—Europe—History. | City and town life—Europe—History. | Science and civilization. Classification: LCC Q127.E85 U73 2019 | DDC 509.4/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018199 ISBN: 978-0-415-78417-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22854-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

Figures and Maps Contributors Preface Urban Histories of Science: How to Tell the Tale

vii ix xiii 1

Oli v er Hochadel and Agust í N ieto - Galan

1 Envisioning a New European Metropolis: Designing the National Observatory of Athens

16

M aria R entet z i and S piros F le varis

2 Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”: Philosophical Engineering in the City of Glasgow c. 1820–c. 1875

37

Ben M arsden

3 The Natural Sciences and Their Public at the Meetings of the Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science in Budapest and Beyond, 1841–1896

59

K atalin S tr á ner

4 Copepods and Fisherboys: Advanced Marine Biological Research and Street Poverty in Naples c. 1890

80

K atharina S teiner

5 Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether

102

Tanya O ’ Sulli van

6 Second City of Science? Dublin as a Center of Calculation in the British Imperial Context, 1886–1912 J uliana A delman

122

vi Contents 7 From Capital City to Scientific Capital: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Lisbon as Seen through the Press, 1900–1910

141

A na Simões

8 Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, Helsinki (c. 1915)

164

E milia K arppinen

9 On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City: Buenos Aires, 1870–1940

186

Diego A rmus

10 From Electricity to the Photo Archive: National Identity and the Planning of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition

208

Lucila M allart

Index

227

Figures and Maps

1.1 Map of Athens, 1864. 25 1.2 a/b The Athens observatory and its architectural plan. Illustrations 1.1, 1.2a, and 1.2b are from Theophil Hansen, “Die freiherrlich von v. Sina’sche Sternwarte bei Athen” in Christ. F. L. Forster, Allgemeine Bauzeitung, 11, Wien 1846, 126–131. All three illustrations are courtesy of the Danmarks Kunstbibliotek. 27 1.3 View of Athens with the Observatory and Acropolis. 1900. Romaidi Brothers. Neohellenic and Historic Collection of Konstantinos Tripos. With kind permission from the photographic collection of the Benaki Museum (no. 1.944). 29 3.1 Caricature from the journal Borsszem Jankó, September 7, 1879, p. 5. Image courtesy of the National Széchényi Library of Hungary. 70 4.1 “Giovanni Buono 3.7.90,” Historical Archives Stazione Zoologica di Anton Dohrn Napoli, La 120, 344. 84 4.2 “Steinheil 132–144, Neapel 16. Juli 1890,” Historical Archives Stazione Zoologica di Anton Dohrn Napoli, La 119, 132. Both images with kind permission of the Historical Archives Stazione Zoologica di Anton Dohrn, Naples. 87 5.1 Trinity College Dublin, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. 103 5.2 William Fletcher Barrett, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown. 107 5.3 George Francis Fitzgerald, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown. 112 6.1 Lithograph entitled “Queen’s cub’s, 1885,” MS 10608/2/4/2, Ephemera in the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland papers, Trinity College Dublin. Reproduced with the 132 permission of the trustees of Trinity College Dublin.

viii  Figures and Maps 7.1 Fialho de Almeida, “Monumental Lisbon.” Ilustração Portuguesa. 142 7.2 Map of Lisbon around 1900. 145 7.3 Melo de Matos, “Lisbon in the year 2000.” Ilustração Portuguesa. Figures 7.1–7.3 are in the public domain. 155 8.1 A detail of the Munkkiniemi and Haaga model. Picture of the model in Saarinen, Munkkiniemi– Haaga-suunnitelma, p. 116. 172 8.2 Detail of one of the many plan maps in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915). Both images are in the public domain. 176 9.1a Water cart, Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), c. 1880. 190 9.1b Filtered water tank, Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), c. 1876, attributed to Christiano Junior. 190 9.1c Drinking water plant, Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), c. 1875, attributed to Christiano Junior. 191 9.1d Palacio de Aguas Corrientes, Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), c. 1898. 191 9.2a Parque 3 de Febrero, Colección Dirección de Paseos. Museo de la Ciudad. 202 9.2b Parque Chacabuco, Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina), c. 1940. Images 9.1a–9.2b are in the public domain according to Argentine laws. 202 10.1 Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Exposició Barcelona MDCCCCXVII [1915]. Fons Puig i Cadafalch. Reproduced with permission from the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya. 215 10.2 Front and back of file no. 27.746 on Cornellà de Conflent. From Repertori iconogràfic d’Espanya. Exposició de Barcelona 1918. Courtesy of Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. 219 Photos by Hèctor Castro.

Contributors

Juliana Adelman is Lecturer in history at Dublin City University. She has published widely on the history of science, medicine, agriculture, and food. Her work has appeared in Social History of Medicine, BJHS, Irish Economic and Social History, and the Field Day Review. Her first mo­ nograph Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 2009, surveyed popular science and science education. She is working on her second monograph provisionally titled Civilized by beasts: animals and urban change in Dublin, 1830–1900. Diego Armus is Professor of Latin American History at Swarthmore ­College (USA). His current projects include a history of smoking in modern Buenos Aires and the preparation of The Buenos Aires Reader. One of his most recent books is The Ailing City. Health, Tuberculosis and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (2011), with 2007 and 2013 Spanish versions. He has also written or edited, among others, Cuidar, Controlar, Curar. Estudos de História da Saúde e da Doença na América Latina e Caribe (2004, 2009, 2014); Disease in the History of Modern Latin America. From Malaria to AIDS (2003); and Entre Médicos y Curanderos. Cultura, Historia y Enfermedad en la América Latina Moderna (2002). Spiros Flevaris  is an Austrian-Greek architect with extended experience in designing and managing a variety of architectural projects in both countries. Flevaris has designed a successful exhibition on oriental tobacco showcasing in several Greek cities and historical tobacco centers and has a long experience of working closely together with not only academics, museologists, and museum and library archivists, but also journalists, photo editors, and CEOs in order to meet the challenges of designing, financing, and managing traveling exhibitions. He has also an interest in the history of architecture and has coedited with Maria Rentetzi the Tobacco: 101 notes on oriental tobacco, Exhibition Catalogue (2014). Oliver Hochadel is a tenured historian of science at the IMF-CSIC, Barcelona. His research focuses on the relationship between science and its publics,

x Contributors for example, in the case of electricity in the German Enlightenment, the history of the zoo in the nineteenth century, and the history of human origins research. Book publications include Öffentliche ­Wissenschaft. Elektrizität in der deutschen Aufklärung (2003); El mito de Atapuerca. Orígenes, ­ciencia, divulgación (2013); and—edited with Agustí N ­ ieto-Galan—­Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (2016). Emilia Karppinen is a doctoral candidate in European and World History at the University of Turku. Her research focuses on the concepts of expertise, collaboration, and knowledge especially in the context of history of urban planning. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis focusing on the formation of urban planning as a profession of Finnish architects around the early twentieth century. She has also worked several years on a research project on the historical book collections of Turku City Library in its transnational and local contexts. Lucila Mallart holds a PhD in Modern European History from the University of Nottingham (2016). Her thesis examined the role of visual culture, urban planning, display mechanisms, and academic exchanges in the construction of a modern Catalan identity, in order to rethink the nature of nationalism in early twentieth-century Europe. It drew on the projects of Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956), a famous Catalan architect, politician, and art historian. Her article “Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation” appeared in Cultural History in 2015. She currently teaches Art History at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and Modern History at the Open University of Catalonia. Ben Marsden  is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and until recently edited Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. His research focuses on the cultural history of engineering and technology. His books include Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2005, with Crosbie Smith), Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800–1914 (2013, coedited with Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’Connor), and The Cultural History Reader (2014, coedited with Peter McCaffery). Agustí Nieto-Galan  is Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has written widely on the history of chemistry and natural dyestuffs, and on the history of science popularization (eighteenth to twentieth centuries). He is currently working on several aspects of popular science and urban history of science in ­Europe. His recent books include Science in the Public Sphere (2016) and— edited with Oliver Hochadel—Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (2016).

Contributors  xi Tanya O’Sullivan is an independent postdoc researcher based in Northern Ireland. Her research is primarily concerned with the geographies of nineteenth-century science in Ireland. She received her PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in 2014, with a thesis entitled “Keeping O ­ rigins in Site: Lives, Locations and Science in Dublin, 1870–1910.” She is currently working on a project, which situates nineteenth-­c entury earth debates in the contemporary intellectual culture of three Irish cities. This was launched on a US crowd-funding platform for science in February 2017. Her recent publications include “The Perception of Place and the ­‘Origins of Handedness’ Debate: Towards a Cognitive Cartography of Science in Late-Victorian Dublin,” Endeavour (2015). Maria Rentetzi  is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Technology at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Rentetzi is the author of Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices (2007) and Radium Economies (forthcoming). She has published widely on the history of radioactivity in Europe and in the United States, on the social history of nuclear science in Greece, on gender in the physical sciences and technology, on the architecture of scientific laboratories, and on the role of mundane objects in the sciences, among other things. Her current research project focuses on science diplomacy and the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ana Simões  is Professor of History of Science at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. She is founder and co-coordinator of the Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology, and founding member of the international group Science and Technology in the European Periphery and of the open access e-journal HoST. She has written extensively on the history of quantum chemistry and aspects of the history of science in Portugal from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and is working currently on the urban history of science in Lisbon (1870–1940). Her recent publications include Sciences in the Universities of Europe, 19th and 20th centuries. Academic Landscapes (2015), edited with Maria Paula Diogo and Kostas Gavroglu. Katharina Steiner defended her PhD thesis in May 2017 in the Department of History, University of Zurich. Between 2011 and 2013, she had a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship for research at Naples’ Stazione Zoologica. Her research uses images as historical sources and examines their social-, cultural- and scientific-historical interconnections. She is interested in the history of marine biology, visual culture, and know­ ledge transfers. She has published on Wilhelm Giesbrecht’s photography and zoological research and on the architectural photographer Max Krajewsky.

xii Contributors Katalin Stráner is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on the history of science and urban history, the study of translation and reception in the history of ideas, the effect of migration and exile on knowledge transfer, and Habsburg Central Europe. Her recent publications include articles on the reception of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Origin of Species in ­Hungary and on “Budapest and Hungarian Transatlantic Migration: Image and Agency in Public Discourse, 1881–1914,” in the Journal of Migration History (2016). She is currently working on a monograph on the translation and reception of Darwin’s work in Hungary.

Preface

Each book has its history. The idea for this book came up when another edited volume was nearing completion: Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929, eventually published in 2016. Already back in 2012 we had discovered a field that intrigued us both: the dynamic and dialectical relationship between science, technology, and medicine (STM) on the one hand and the urban space on the other, and the interplay of specific sites, practices, objects, and actors in the making of knowledge in the city around 1900. Having started with Barcelona, we wanted to learn more and thus widened our focus. Instead of one city, we wanted to explore the urban history of science more generally. Rather than working solely with our Spanish colleagues, we also sought to collaborate internationally. Instead of doing history of STM in a more narrow sense, we had to wise up about related fields, in particular the booming (and fascinating) field of urban history. For these reasons, we organized two events in 2014. In June, we hosted the “Third Watson Seminar in the Material and Visual History of Science” in Barcelona, asking “How to write an urban history of science: new approaches and case studies.” At a session at the STEP (Science and Technology on the European Periphery) congress in Lisbon in September, we asked: “Urban Peripheries? Science in ‘Second Cities’ around 1900.” Seven of the articles of this volume originate from these two events. In devising the book, we commissioned three more papers, enlarging its geographical as well as its disciplinary scope. The ten chronologically arranged urban histories of science are set in nine cities: Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin (2), Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. They can easily be read separately, yet put together they help to explore the important historiographical issues that go beyond individual case studies: (1) Why and how should we study cities located at the “periphery,” (2) how should we deal with the unavoidable but tricky concept of modernity, (3) how are STM and nationalism intertwined in the rise of the modern city, and (4) in how far do cities have agency?

xiv Preface We hope that this book will encourage historians of science and urban historians to tell other, unknown urban histories of science and thus to enrich our understanding of the co-construction of knowledge and urban space. And who knows? Maybe this book will mark the prehistory of yet another book: one that will deal with connections between urban spaces around 1900 going beyond the European perimeter. Our research on the urban history of science has been funded through three projects of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: (HAR2012–36204-C02-02) “Scientific Authority in the Public Sphere in Twentieth-Century Spain,” (HAR2015–66364-C2-1-P) “Natural vs. Artificial: Industrial Waste, Expertise and Social Responses in 20th-Century Spain,” and (HAR2013–48065-C2–1-P) “Science and the City. Natural History, Biology and Biopolitics in the Divided City: Barcelona and Buenos Aires (1868–1936).” We also benefited from the support of the Catalan Government throughout the project: (2014 SGR 1414) History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Modern Catalonia (18th–20th Century) and SGR (2017 SGR 1138) “Modern Science, Technology and Medicine”. The International workshop in June 2014 in Barcelona was made possible by Watson International Publishing (USA). Agustí Nieto-Galan also benefited from the “Icrea Acadèmia” Research Prize in the period 2009 to 2014. It allowed him to dedicate more time and resources to delve into the—back then—new field of urban history of science. In 2015/2016, Oliver Hochadel benefitted from a “Proyecto intramural especial” from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas entitled “¿Ciencia en la periferia? La cultura científica de ciudades en el Sur y el Este de Europa alrededor de 1900: paralelismos, contextos y redes” (201510I030). Support and input in different ways came from our colleagues Mitchell Ash, Dorothee Brantz, Bert De Munck, Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher, Jens Lachmund, José Pardo-Tomás, Kapil Raj, Neale Watson, and Alfons Zarzoso. Thank you all. The book proposal we had submitted to Routledge found two interested reviewers who were clearly sympathetic with the project. Yet both also made a number of most valuable observations and suggestions, which we tried to heed. An advanced draft of each article was sent to two reviewers. We would like to thank all 20 of them for their constructive criticism and numerous helpful suggestions. Our greatest thanks goes to our authors for bearing with us over the years, their enormous patience and unflagging dedication to working on the umpteenth version of their manuscripts. We are proud to have assembled all of these gifted historians—and story-tellers—in one volume. Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan Barcelona, October 2017

Urban Histories of Science How to Tell the Tale Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan

More often than not, finding the proper title for a book turns out to be quite a challenge. Yet this volume may be particular with respect to what term does not feature in the title (anymore). The project which eventually culminated in this book for several years went by the name “Urban Peripheries? Science and the City around 1900.” At first glance, “periphery” might sound like a perfect common denominator for the cities we picked for our case studies: Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples. Yet in the end we did not put that tricky term in the title. In this introduction, we discuss the common themes that bind our ten Urban Histories of Science together. In its first part, we will discuss the potential but also the limits of the concept “periphery.” In the three sections that follow, we will try to show how other categories of analysis such as modernities, nationalisms, and agencies may help to unfold the thematic richness of our case studies.

Peripheries As we said: initially, our approach to the field “Science and the City” was very much shaped by the category “periphery.” In the recent scholarship on science and the city, we have perceived a strong focus on (or even bias toward) the metropolis and the industrial town. Much of the research has centered on large cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and also Chicago.1 True, already several decades ago historians of science, technology, and medicine (STM) looked at the scientific culture of regional or provincial cities.2 Yet their attention was largely restricted to Great Britain where the relevance of cities, such as Manchester and even Bradford, is more than obvious due to their seminal role in the Industrial Revolution. Only in recent years have innovative studies on the urban history of science in nineteenth-century Germany appeared. Dresden and Frankfurt, for example, were marked by their bourgeois elites and their cultural and scientific institutions, not by industrialization.3 Nevertheless, the scarcity of studies on the urban history of science outside Great Britain, France, and Germany and, in particular, the lack of systematic studies seemed obvious to us. How could historians of STM overcome this shortcoming?

2  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan Founded in 1999, the network Science and Technology on the European Periphery (STEP) launched a historiographical agenda that has since materialized into a large number of congresses and publications.4 STEP asked the question what historians of science and technology located on the periphery should and could study. In other words: What can be learned by doing history of STM in Portugal, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Sweden, Ireland, and Turkey? And more precisely: Is there anything that can only be learned from studying STM on the periphery? After nearly 20 years of research, the answer is clearly yes. STEP has vindicated the genuine value of studying the “periphery” and formulated a research program of its own: Knowledge and expertise are not created exclusively in the center and then passed on to the “periphery.” Time and again historians of science not only from STEP have emphasized that knowledge is changed in the act of communication. In new contexts, historical actors appropriate and adapt ideas, practices, and material objects such as instruments in their own, often innovative ways. The STEP agenda, therefore, aims to articulate the significance of the processes of appropriation of scientific ideas, practices and techniques through the multifarious (local) cultural processes, to bring to surface the specificities of local sites which have had a decisive role in knowledge production and to underline the decisive active role of all those whose intellectual, professional and often political interventions shaped the processes of appropriation.5 Our original idea was to pursue the STEP agenda with respect to science in the city. And hence to ask: Is there something about the “Urban ­Peripheries” that allows us to learn something we cannot learn by studying the scientific culture of Paris, London, or Berlin?6 With a large number of colleagues, we launched a research project on Barcelona’s urban history of science around 1900 that resulted in an edited volume.7 We analyzed the production, communication, and appropriation of knowledge, its connection to the fabric of the city and the everyday life of its inhabitants around 1900. On the basis of its ten case studies, the collective volume tried to pursue the spatial approach, the focus on concrete sites in Barcelona: In which quarters, in which institutions and networks can specific practices in STM be identified? And what kind of experiences did the city dwellers make when interacting with scientists, engineers, and physicians around 1900? While working on the book on Barcelona, we realized that we did not need the concept of periphery to produce a rich account of the city’s urban culture of science. In a sense, the STEP agenda can be seen as part of a much larger change that not only the historical sciences but also the humanities at large have experienced in the last two or three decades: The postcolonial critique of a Eurocentric vision of the world as it was voiced in anthropology, history, literary criticism, and neighboring disciplines. The imperative was and is

Urban Histories of Science  3 not to reproduce the existing (and historical) power relations and cultural stereotypes in scholarly work. This requires us to explicitly “decenter” the perspective and to give voice to the disenfranchised, colonized, and discriminated actors in history.8 Although the theoretical debate on these issues is still in full swing, a return to traditional narratives is unthinkable. Therefore—more specifically— the agenda of STEP might be considered fulfilled. Clearly much more research needs to be done on the history of STM in regions formerly labeled peripheral. But no historian—even from regions formerly labeled central— would doubt the intrinsic value of such studies. The good-bye to center and periphery is not less due to a far-reaching consensus in history of science than to the character of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed in highly complex ways that involve a multitude of different actors, multidirectional exchanges (geographically and culturally), as well as the constant appropriation of information, practices, and objects. To put it starkly: The original STEP program has become mainstream. Given the evolving historiographical scenario, there appears to be a certain danger of remaining fixated on the term “periphery.” The use of such concepts incurs the danger of perpetuating stereotypes and colonial vistas. Are there conceptual alternatives to “urban peripheries”? A term used by historians (including, on occasion by us) has been “second cities.”9 Yet this expression entails the same problems, presupposing a hierarchy between “first” and “second” cities. A possible solution suggested by Eszter Gantner and Heidi Hein-Kircher working on the urban history of Eastern Europe has been “emerging cities.”10 “Emerging” is supposed to convey the sense that these cities had a dynamic of their own. We ourselves decided that the term “periphery” raises more questions than it can possible answer and deflects our attention from the much more interesting issues that are at stake. In the end, striking the word from the title felt like a liberation. Urban histories of science will do just fine. The only consistent approach with respect to the “periphery problematic” seems to be a stringent historization. In our time span (1820–1940), the historical actors hardly use the term as such but others that are from the same semantic field: They see their city “on the margins,” “backward,” and the like. These actors—urban reformers, journalists, writers, physicians, and engineers—tell us something about how they perceived themselves. Their mental map is divided into a center and a periphery. Very often “backwardness” is invoked as a rhetorical device, a call to act in order to cease to be “peripheral,” to modernize. In concrete terms, this might constitute a plea for financial and political support to reform the public health system and build a natural history museum or a bridge across a river. Spatial and temporal axes are conflated. Geographical distance from the center seems to imply for many historical actors to lag behind in time. This diagnosis provides the impulse for many of those cities to embark on the race to modernity11—another problematic term to put it mildly.

4  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan

Modernities The flip side of the reevaluation of the fringes, the periphery and the colonized is the questioning of the center and what it purports to represent: modernity. Postcolonial studies such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) have substantially questioned Western discourses of modernity. Their critique is directed against a dichotomous worldview juxtaposing the premodern versus the modern era, the primitive versus the civilized, oppressed versus emancipated, the First versus the Third World, the West versus the East, developed versus developing regions, among other binaries.12 The concrete place to formulate hegemonic ideas about modernity and progress and at the same time to physically represent these ideas has been the Western city. Scholars studying the urban space have understood this very well. As geographer Jennifer Robinson wrote in her book Ordinary Cities: “modernity can best be understood as the West’s self-definition of itself (although not without its internal critics) in opposition to both the past and other supposedly backward societies.”13 The production of this cultural bias inherent in the Western concept of modernity cannot only be located but also dated: It begins around the middle of the nineteenth century and continues well into the twentieth.14 David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of Modernity is a poignant critique of this myth of modernity. The cover of the book shows a run-down and gloomy-looking Parisian side street instead of a fashionable Haussmannian boulevard. Harvey describes how, in 1848, “hunger, unemployment, misery and discontent throughout the land … converged on Paris as people flooded into the city in search of sustenance.”15 At the same time, small workshops became big industries, family shops morphed into department stores, and water carriers were soon substituted by piped water. Harvey writes: One of the myths of modernity is that it constitutes a radical break with the past. The break is supposedly of such an order as to make it possible to see the world as a tabula rasa, upon which the new can be inscribed without reference to the past—or, if the past gets in the way, through its obliteration.16 STM in its numerous manifestations compose central components of this urban modernity, be it the natural history museum, the tramway, electric lighting, radio, sewage systems, or the tuberculosis clinic. For the technophilic discourses of the time, the city was the space where dreams of modernity unfolded.17 In spite of the sociological and cultural turns in recent decades, historians of science still often find it hard to escape their own positivist legacy, in which a tacit alliance between STM and Western modernity converge in teleological narratives of progress, not least because science is still understood as something specifically Western.18

Urban Histories of Science  5 A useful concept to counter the monolithic concept of modernity is the idea of “multiple modernities” formulated by sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt. He criticizes the notion in Western thought that there was only one “cultural program of modernity,” that was supposed to spread from Europe to the rest of the world. For Eisenstadt, modernity is rather a plural set of “multiple institutional and ideological patterns […] carried forward by specific social actors […] pursuing different programs of modernity, holding very different views on what makes societies modern.”19 If we apply this idea of “multiple modernities” to urban history, we might liberate our narratives from the straightjacket which equates urban modernity with the European metropolis.20 Following the historiography above, this collected volume presents a whole set of different urban modernities focusing on the urban history of STM. For this reason—and analogous to the concept “periphery”—we treat modernity primarily as an actor’s category. The contribution of this book to the current discussion consists in the sum of the case studies presented side by side. It aims to show that the meaning of modernity is highly contextdependent. Our aim is to reveal the plurality of modernities that STM and their interaction with the urban space generated between 1820 and 1940 in cities such as Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples. The city of Naples is not known as a standard bearer of urban modernity in the late nineteenth century. Yet the city hosted the innovative Stazione Zoologica dedicated to the research of marine life. Among its scientists was the German biologist Wilhelm Giesbrecht. At the same time as working in the laboratories of the Stazione, he documented the city’s everyday life with his camera, the misery and abysmal living conditions rampant at the time. Among Giesbrecht’s favorite photographic motifs were the fishermen. It is these poor and allegedly uneducated Napolitani that provide the link between the state-of-the-art research institute and the city. In different ways— providing specimens from the sea or as assistants in the laboratories—these fishermen fulfilled a vital role in the scientific activities of the Stazione Zoologica. In his photos, Giesbrecht renders visible a host of coworkers who had remained in the shadows (Steiner). Unlike Haussmann’s (and Harvey’s) Paris not every city attempted a complete break with the past. Philhellenic Europeans came to Athens from the 1830s to rebuild the city after Greece had become independent. One of their projects was the construction of a new astronomical observatory, constantly referring to the glorious past of Ancient Greek astro­ nomy. This evocation of antiquity paradoxically constituted a basic pillar of Athens’ “modernity” (Rentetzi, Flevaris). The case of Barcelona presents another example of the deployment of history in order to give the city the air of being modern. Catalan architect and politician Josep Puig i Cadafalch was the driving force in organizing the second Barcelonese international exhibition that eventually was hosted in 1929. While the

6  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan original plan was to concentrate on electricity, this focus shifted away in 1915 from technology to history, archaeology, and art. Electrification was not considered the dernier cri of progress and urban modernity anymore. Paradoxical as it may seem, archaeological remains and, most importantly, their study through a photographic inventory, served for the construction of Barcelona’s (and by extension Catalonia’s) individual brand of “modern” identity (Mallart).21 Just like the past, the future too may develop into an ally in the quest for urban modernity. In cities that consider themselves peripheral, utopian visions become a typical feature in the drive to overcome “backwardness.” The dreams of modernity we find in the writings of Portuguese engineer Melo de Matos are based on the belief in the power of STM. In late nineteenthcentury Lisbon, he imagined an underground tunnel which heralded the connection between political power and industry. What is more, both Melo de Matos and the writer Fialho de Almeida envisioned connections between established socio-professional groups such as those of engineers and physicians and the emerging groups of scientists and architects. Portuguese intellectuals conceded that Lisbon was a “backward” city by global standards. Yet they emphatically evoked their city as an agent of a genuinely “local” modernity within Portugal (Simões). The futuristic vision of the medical doctor Emilio Coni imagined an ideal Argentine city. In La ciudad argentina ideal o el Porvenir (1919), he espoused his utopian hygienic plans for Buenos Aires, in which the growth of the city was associated with the reform of public health. The promise was to protect the city dwellers from contagion and to control epidemics, in particular, tuberculosis (Armus). In constructing their own urban modernity, scientists, intellectuals, and urban planners on the alleged periphery looked at the past, the future but also at other cities. Our articles provide several examples from different fields for this transurban eclecticism. Argentine propagators of hygiene were well embedded in international networks. Best practice models—as we would say today—tested elsewhere were transferred to Buenos Aires and adapted to local conditions. This eclecticism made it possible at least in principle to benefit from foreign experiences while avoiding errors.22 The article on Helsinki focuses on “inter-urban” connections in urban planning suggesting that these relations are often anything but straightforward. The architectural bureau of Eliel Saarinen, which devised the plan for a greater Helsinki, was well connected with urban planners in many parts of Europe (Karppinen). In fact, transnational networks of experts emerged around 1900. The challenges of urban planning, devising systems of public health, water supplies, sewage systems, and public transport were similar.23 As historian Claus Møller Jørgensen put it: “European cities are seen as nodes in communication networks that created a transurban public sphere,” and this helps to question whether the emerging nation state of the late nineteenth century should be the main frame of historical analysis.24 To give

Urban Histories of Science  7 an entirely different example of this kind of eclecticism: The Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science (HAAS) found inspiration in both British and German models in terms of how a scientific society could achieve public visibility and political influence. Annual conferences held in different cities were key. Yet while the BAAS explicitly avoided London, the HAAS hosted quite a number of congresses in Budapest in order to have a stronger impact (Stráner). What “modernity” actually meant varied greatly in the period under study, if we look at the sum of our case studies. The reference could be a glorious past, a techno-utopia or an eclectic collection of ideas and best practice models from allegedly more advanced cities. Cities that perceived themselves as backward often invoked an idealized version of “Europe,” representing modern transport systems, public health services, and cultural institutions.25 At the same time, it is important to stress that the notion of modernity was not only diverse across cities but also within one urban space. Our case studies also provide examples of the manifold ways in which the historical actors—local elites, popular classes, and foreign experts— understood modernity. For its promoter and first director Georgios Bouris, the Athens observatory embodied European ideas of modernization, yet for many Greeks it remained an isolated research institution of little use to society. Different social groups constructed diverging images of the city. Modernity as a universal concept became locally varied and never homogeneous. What is more, the modernities were not only multiple but also “entangled,” interacting with each other, both within one urban space as well as with respect to the interurban space.26 In their “race to modernity,” many of the cities under study in this volume found themselves caught up between, on the one hand interurban networks of experts and homogenizing tendencies with respect to how to construct a city boasting high hygienic standards and technological innovations and, on the other hand, the increasing sensitivity for the individuality of their city, its unique historical character, and—what we would today call—its cultural heritage. Hence, we need to ask how these multiple urban modernities were related to the emergence of the modern nation state, one of the central features in our period of study.

Nationalisms In writing the history of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much depends on the spatial frame of reference. The seemingly “natural” frame has been the (future) nation state itself, but that perspective might actually limit the inquiry of the historian.27 For example, the impact of nationalist movements on the Austrian–Hungarian monarchy looks quite different if analyzed from the framework of the Empire itself, as Pieter J­ udson has recently shown in his revisionist—and outstanding—­ history of the Habsburg Empire.28

8  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan The inverse move would be to look at a frame smaller than the nation— the urban one. In 2005, Andreas Daum argued that “the specific roles of capital cities have not received much attention within the flourishing historical research on state formation, nation-building and independence movements or in the disciplines of geography and urban studies.”29 This might have changed in the meantime at least to some extent. The nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be characterized as an urban product. For example, Eastern European cities have been studied and their central role in the nation-building process identified.30 The approach of this book is different and new as many of the chapters try to show in a double movement that the cities under study were important sites for STM as well as for the nationalist agenda—and how these two movements were intrinsically connected. The chapters on these cities pursue the question as to what role architecture, astronomy, natural history, public health, engineering, and other scientific or technological practices played in the construction of national identity in Argentina, Catalonia, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Scotland. Most of the cities we are dealing with in this volume were capitals of “emerging” nations: ­Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Helsinki, and in a sense also Glasgow. Yet what the ensemble of our articles teaches us is that each case study requires a strict historization. The variation between the cities is enormous because the relationship between science, the urban space, and nationalism is much more complex than it may seem at first glance. The semantic field of city, science, and modernity seems to leave no space for the past apart from something that needs to be left behind and overcome. Yet, as we have already seen, some of our case studies show that the past may be an important resource in the way the city imagined itself. The new observatory built in the 1840s in Athens was supposed to evoke the ancient glory of Greek astronomy and Greek culture more generally and thus help build the new nation. In the Catalan case, the Late Middle Ages represent the age of glory for the nationalist movement around 1900. But the brand of nationalism pursued by the previously mentioned architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch in the 1910s did not aim at independence from Spain but rather at the regeneration of a decaying Spanish state using Catalonia’s modernity and its values as basis. In the end, the city of Barcelona would be the host of a large international exhibition in 1929 on Spanish art—something that other countries allegedly did not have, becoming Spain’s unique selling point, so to speak. “Second Cities” within the British Empire were caught in their own specific dynamic as our case studies on Dublin and Glasgow show. In the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, Dublin naturalists were eager to emphasize the peculiarities of the Irish fauna as opposed to the British. They conceived of Dublin as a scientific center and were eager to compete with London, to contrast the new scientific institutions around Merrion Square with South Kensington. Yet this competition was to be held

Urban Histories of Science  9 “within the ideals of British science.” Naturalists, such as Robert Lloyd Praeger and Robert Francis Scharff, sought to establish Dublin as second city (in science) within the United Kingdom and were not in favor of Irish independence. They were rather upset about the events of 1916—the Easter Rising—the ensuing armed conflicts and the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 (Adelman). The case was similar in physics: George Francis Fitzgerald, an internationally renowned researcher in electromagnetism, aimed at sharpening the profile of Irish science and technology. Yet he felt that the Irish—and explicitly Catholic—nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century was rather a threat to scientific progress (O’Sullivan). He might have been right: Historian Michael Gordin stated that in Ireland “scientific self-identification failed to take root in the national self-concept.”31 The case of Scottish engineers, mostly clustered in Glasgow and their foundation of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland in 1857, is to some degree similar to the case of the Dublin naturalists. Engineers such as W. J. M. Rankine saw themselves as representatives of Glasgow and of S ­ cotland, supporting their city in its attempt to become the “second city” of the ­British Empire. In short, competition with their English colleagues and quest for recognition, yes, separatist agenda no. Yet for Glaswegian engineers there was an added, inner-Scottish dimension: They were competing for reputation and influence with Edinburgh, the administrative capital of Scotland (Marsden). Quite different is the case of Lisbon, which had been for a long time the capital not only of a nation but of a large colonial empire. Yet the empire as such hardly figured in the discourse of the modernizers around 1900. They considered STM as vital to the nation’s regeneration. Lisbon, the city itself, became the national showcase for STM, the seat of many scientific and medical institutions in Portugal. For many intellectuals, this overhaul of the city also marked the regime change from monarchy to republic in 1910. The juxtaposition of the old university of Coimbra with the newly founded one in Lisbon (in 1911) is paradigmatic for a nation caught up in the desire to modernize itself as quickly as possible, in short to make the transition from capital city to scientific capital. This conflation of capital and nation—and STM in the middle of it all—is also characteristic of Buenos Aires. After a tortured history between the state and the city, Buenos Aires eventually became the capital of ­Argentina in 1880. In fact, the national and municipal levels are very often hard to distinguish, in particular with respect to urban health policies and the fight against tuberculosis. Politicians, physicians, and journalists advocated hygiene tout court. The health of the porteños (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires call themselves) represented the health of the nation. As we have seen, simple notions such as STM as the handmaiden of nationalism in the period 1820–1940 are rather useless. Nearly each case in this book tells a different story of this triangle between STM, the urban space, and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

10  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan often with the tension between the strong impulse to reform and the increasing awareness of the historical value of urban structures.32

Agencies In 2003, the editors of the Osiris volume on “Science and the City” conceived of the urban space as a creator and facilitator of knowledge production and circulation. In a dialectic movement, the urban space is also substantially transformed by these practices.33 Put differently, “knowledge” and “city” cannot be treated as separate entities but can only be understood in relation to one another. Yet we still lack a sufficient number of instructive and detailed cases studies on this “urban construction of knowledge.” This volume aims at enriching current discussions about the coproduction of science and the city.34 Knowledge production has been intimately linked to changes in the urban space in different historical periods. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem particularly relevant if we think of phenomena such as electrification and transport, urbanization, public works, hygiene reforms, the building of the nation state, and the rejection of tradition.35 This allows for the use of the Deleuzian concept of “assemblages” as heterogeneous compositions of objects and ideas that interact with one another in spatiotemporal contexts.36 The case studies of this volume may be able to shed more light on the processes of urbanizing knowledge. This approach includes spaces and objects37 and also draws inspiration from debates on the exact nature of actor-network theory.38 Our case studies suggest that actor-network theory might help to understand better the constantly changing nature of urban productions, the socio-natural relations in urban spaces and the ontological status of cities as urban assemblages. It challenges more traditional approaches in which human agency plays the main role.39 One example which might illustrate the potential of actor-network theory is the recent work on animals in the city. Rats, microbes, and livestock, for instance, may be understood as crucial agents in the shaping of public health policies. Dogs and horses but also exotic animals from zoos and itinerant menageries should be integrated into our new urban histories of science, in the same way that cars, tramways, wireless telegraphy, sewage, gas lighting, electric grids, telephones, and underground lines have their role in the making of the city.40 This book is also teeming with animals. Dublin’s Zoological ­Society excelled in breeding lions in their zoo outdoing their colleagues in L ­ ondon. The city’s scientific elite construed this project as the society’s unique contribution to zoological science. Germs and bacteria in Buenos Aires were understood as the materialization of contagious diseases and a serious challenge for scientific expertise and public health policies at the time. They became actors of the urban medical culture. In reaction physicians, politicians, city planners, and educators co-constructed expertise on

Urban Histories of Science  11 hygiene that included the creation of parks in Buenos Aires. Starting in the 1870s, this urban green project was supposed to provide healthy “lungs” for the city. Scientific fishing was a crucial practice for the research that was conducted at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. In the work and in the thousands of photos by Wilhelm Giesbrecht, the copepods and other marine creatures formed part of one large assemblage that included not only the researchers and their laboratories but also the fishermen, their boats, and their nets. But other “actors” also left their imprint on the urban fabric. In ­Dublin, ether was at the core of a scientific controversy that went far beyond an isolated intellectual discussion within the walls of academia. For the Irish physicists George Francis Fitzgerald and William Fletcher Barrett, the supposedly all-pervading ether was a flexible resource shaped by their specific research contexts—Trinity College and the Royal College of Science ­respectively—but also by their social status and religious convictions. With respect to their interpretation and later mobilization, it mattered where in Dublin experiments were performed or papers read. It was precisely the co-construction between ether and the urban context of the city that shaped scientific knowledge. Another example is the interaction of the Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science (HAAS) with the city of Budapest where it hosted a number of its annual conferences. As the nineteenth century wore on, the HAAS meetings became highly relevant urban events including public lectures, exhibitions, and animated debates in the daily press culminating in the Hungarian Millennial Exhibition in 1896. The meetings forged alliances between the scientific community and the urban elites in Budapest and other towns.41 Hungarian scientists did not only use the meetings to circulate their ideas among the general public. More and more—and in constant negotiation and exchange with the municipal power brokers—they took an active part in the urban planning of Budapest in offering their expertise. The engineering culture of nineteenth-century Glasgow offers a different example for the coproduction of knowledge and the city. Key industries flourished, in the city center offices of engineers clustered and communication between practitioners intensified, culminating in the foundation of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland in 1857. Thus, Glasgow’s engineering activities were recruited through a discursive construction of the “metro­ polis of mechanics.” In a similar way, urban planning and the material design and construction of the city converged in Eliel Saarinen’s projects for Greater Helsinki. In Saarinen’s team, architects acted as artists, constructors, developers, judicial assistants, and businessmen, and the making of urban planner as a profession in itself became a complex assemblage, a sort of collective expertise through networks of knowledge that led to the building of the new city quarters of Munkkiniemi and Haaga in 1909. In order to understand all these scientific, medical, and technological practices and initiatives and the

12  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan knowledge that was thus created, the urban space needs to be treated as a crucial actor. As we said at the beginning of this introduction, we decided to drop the term “periphery” from the title of our book. Instead, we opted for Urban Histories of Science. Thus, we would like to stress the diversity of cases presented in this volume. Taken together they should help to overcome peripherycenter models, to indicate the multiple urban modernities that unfolded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to show the large variety of possible interactions between the urban space, STM, and the emerging nation state and to overcome simplistic notions of science and the city by showing their continuous co-construction. The more urban histories of science we are able to glean from the past the richer our accounts will be.

Notes 1 Miriam R. Levin, Sophie Forgan, Martina Hessler, Robert H. Kargon, and Morris Low (eds.), Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2010). 2 Robert H. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester. Enterprise and Expertise (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978); Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds.), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Jack Morrell, “Wissenschaft in Worstedopolis: Public Science in Bradford, 1800–1850,” British Journal for the History of Science 18, 1 (1985): 1–23. 3 Denise Phillips, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770–1850 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ayako Sakurai, Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). 4 For example, Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí Nieto-Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero (eds.), Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). For a recent balance and outlook of the STEP agenda, see Maria Paula Diogo, Kostas Gavroglu, and Ana Simões (eds.), “Step Forum Special Issue,” Technology and Culture 56, 4 (2016): 926–997. 5 Kostas Gavroglu et al., “Science and Technology in the European Periphery. Some Historiographical Reflections,” History of Science 46, 2 (2008): 153–175, p. 154. 6 Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to Write an Urban History of STM on the ‘Periphery’,” Technology and Culture 56, 4 (2016): 978–988. 7 Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (eds.), Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London/New York: Routledge, 2016). 8 For history, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); for history of science Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 9 Maiken Umbach, “A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture, and the Law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Late Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 110, 3 (2005): 659–692; Shane Ewen, “Transnational Municipalism in a Europe of Second Cities. Rebuilding Birmingham with Municipal Networks,” in Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen (eds.), Another Global City: Historical

Urban Histories of Science  13 Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 101–117. 10 Eszter Gantner and Heidi Hein-Kircher, “‘Emerging Cities’: Knowledge and Urbanization in Europe’s Borderlands 1880–1945 – Introduction,” Special Issue of Journal of Urban History 43, 4 (2017): 1–12. 11 Martin Kohlrausch and Jan C. Behrends (eds.), Races to Modernity. Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2014). 12 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity. Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 13 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities. Between Modernity and Development ­(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 20; also see Pedram Dibazar et al., “Questioning Urban ­Modernity,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, 6 (2013): 643–658, p. 648. 14 Richard Dennis describes for instance the period 1840–1930 as considered as quintessentially “modern” by cultural historians. Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity. Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Chapter 5 “Urban Culture and Modernity” in Shane Ewen, What is Urban History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 92–113. 15 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 3. 16 Idem, p. 1. 17 Mikael Hård and Marcus Stippak, “Discourses on the modern city and urban technology, 1850–2000. A review of recent literature,” in The Urban Machine: Recent Literature on European Cities in the 20th Century, edited by Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, A “Tensions of Europe” electronic publication (July 2003), 35–56. www.iit.edu/~misa/toe20/urban-machine/ (last accessed, 30/10/2017). 18 Kapil Raj, “Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science,” Isis 114, 2 (2013): 337–347. 19 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 109, 1 (2000): 1–29, pp. 1–2. 20 Buenos Aires has often been described as the most European city of Latin America. So in a sense we treat the city as any other supposedly “peripheral” European city featuring in the volume. Yet we also included a case study on Buenos Aires because it strengthens our case with respect to the multiplicity of urban modernities. Already three decades ago historians such as Richard Morse suggested understanding the city of Buenos Aires as a “laboratory” of a different kind of modernity. Similarly, Beatriz Sarlo already launched the idea of Buenos Aires representing “a peripheral modernity”; Richard M. Morse, “Ciudades pe-­ riféricas como arenas culturales. (Rusia, Austria, América Latina),” in Richard M. Morse and Jorge Enrique Hardoy (eds.), Cultura urbana latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: Clacso, 1985), 39–62; Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1988). 21 For a discussion on the making of the nation-state, see Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm (eds.), Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). 22 This circulation of practical urban knowledge between cities has been called “transnational municipalism”; see Marjatta Hietala, Services and Urbanization at the Turn of the Century. The Diffusion of Innovations (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1987); Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen (eds.), Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin (eds.), Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 23 Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 84, 160, 283.

14  Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan 24 Claus Møller Jørgensen, “Nineteenth-Century Transnational Urban History,” Urban History 44, 3 (2017): 544–563, p. 558. 25 Nathaniel Wood, “Conclusion: Not Just the National: Modernity and the Myth of Europe in the Capital Cities of Central and Southeastern Europe,” in Emily Gunzburger Makas and Tanja Damljanovic Conley (eds.), Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires. Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2010), 258–269, p. 267. 26 For the concept of entangled modernities, see Göran Therborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, 3 (2003): 293–305. 27 Recently historians of different backgrounds have insisted on overcoming this “methodological nationalism”; see, for example, Michael G. Müller and ­Cornelius Torp, “Conceptualizing Transnational Spaces in History,” European Review of History 16, 5 (2009): 609–617, p. 614; Møller Jørgensen, “NineteenthCentury Transnational Urban History,” p. 558. 28 Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 29 Andreas Daum, “Capitals in Modern History. Inventing Urban Space for the Nation,” in Andreas Daum and Christoph Mauch (eds.), Berlin – Washington 1800–2000. Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–28, p. 8. 30 Gunzburger Makas/Damljanovic Conley, Capital Cities. 31 Michael Gordin, “Points Critical: Russia, Ireland, and Science at the Boundary,” Osiris 24 (2009): 99–119, p. 102. 32 Cate Giustino has shown this tension between the strong impulse to reform (i.e., flatten “old” and “unhygienic” parts of the urban fabric) and the increasing awareness of the historical value of urban structures in her work on finde-siècle Prague: Cathleen M. Giustino, “Prague,” in Gunzburger Makas/­ Damljanovic Conley, Capital Cities, 157–173. 33 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Toward an Urban History of Science,” Osiris 18 (2003), 1–19. 34 As Kapil Raj discussed in 2007 in Relocating Modern Science, the city provides urban sites of “heterogeneous sociability” for encounters, power resistance, negotiation, and reconfiguration of knowledge. It also contributes to what Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender have coined “urban assemblages” in which human and nonhuman agents construct nature, socio-technical networks, hybrid collectives, physical artefacts, historical legacies, and virtual, imagined cities. Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (eds.), Urban Assemblages: How ActorNetwork Theory Changes Urban Studies (London: Routledge 2010). 35 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities. Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 36 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 37 Pascal Schillings and Alexandre van Wickeren, “Towards a Material and Spatial History of Knowledge Production. An Introduction,” Historical Social Research 40, 1 (2015): 203–218. 38 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (London/New York: Routledge, 2007); Bert De Munck, “Disassembling the City: A Historical and an Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities,” Journal of Urban History 43, 5 (2017): 811–829. Nevertheless, as stressed by urban historians such as Dorothee Brantz and Peter Marcuse, undermining the role of specific human actors and the historical value of the reconstruction of very detailed case studies risks a growing depoliticization of urban discourses. Peter Marcuse, “Depoliticizing Urban Discourse: How ‘We’ Write,” Cities 44 (2014):

Urban Histories of Science  15 152–156; Dorothee Brantz, Sasha Disko, and Georg Wagner-Kyora (eds.), Thick Space: Approaches to Metropolitanism (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012). 39 Farías/Bender, Urban Assemblages. For a good summary of the application of ANT to urban history, see: Dorothee Brantz, “Assembling the Multitude: Questions about Agency in the Urban Environment,” Urban History 44, 1 (2017): 130–136. 40 Joel Tarr and Clay McShane, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ryan Hediger and Sarah MacFarland (eds.), Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Amsterdam: Brill, 2009); Peter Atkins, Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). 41 For the British case, see: Louise Miskell, Meeting Places. Scientific Congresses and Urban Identity in Victorian Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

1 Envisioning a New European Metropolis Designing the National Observatory of Athens Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris With the introduction of Greece to the ranks of civilized ­European countries and the ascent of His Excellency King Othon [Otto] to the Greek throne the sun of art and science has risen anew in this ­country … whose resurrected sunbeams now illuminate the ‘stages’ of past glories….1 This is how Theophil Hansen, the famous Danish architect and a representative of neoclassicism, introduced his architectural study of the Athens Observatory in 1842. Hansen was not the only architect coming to Athens— the newly pronounced capital of Greece—in the early nineteenth century. As soon as Greece was declared an independent nation-state and became a monarchy ruled by King Othon (1833–1862), several educated Europeans settled in the new capital aiming to modernize it. Othon himself, enthused by the idea of reviving the spirit of classical antiquity in Athens, commissioned a number of European architects, mainly Germans, Danish, and Greeks who had studied in Germany, to design the new capital around the ancient city’s most significant monuments. Hansen was among them, and the National Observatory was one of the first commissioned projects that stood at the crossroads of modern science and political power. Scholars of cultural and urban studies, among others, have already questioned the emphatic notion of modernity. The intense emphasis of historians on the urbanization and industrialization of western cultures during the nineteenth century established “modernity” as an almost global, monolithic category. Yet, for postcolonial thinkers, modernity implies a set of opposing concepts such as civilized and uncivilized, modern and developing, emancipated and suppressed— the same binaries implied by the idea of a metropolis. At the same time, both as a historical era and as a particular sociocultural condition, “modernity” has been extensively linked to particular urban contexts in the revival of the notion of the metropolis.2 The ancient meaning of metropolis is Mother City, and it refers to the relation between cities and colonies. Those who left the ancient polis to create an apoikia (colony) continued to refer to their original city and retained cultural and political connections. In this sense, early nineteenth-century

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  17 Athens had the potential of becoming the Metropolis for both the Greek Diaspora—who had risen to prominence, particularly in Europe—and the Greeks that were still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Although right after the Revolution of 1821, Athens was a small, deserted, and crumbling village, by the mid-nineteenth century, new wealth created an emerging upper class. Athens was burgeoning. In this new urban environment, to Bavarians modern meant adopting European customs, reforming the public educational system, and restructuring the administration of the state. It is in this space and time that science became intimately connected to the modernization of the state. Bavarians transferred directly to the newly established Greek state their three-tier educational system and founded an array of scientific institutions, among them a Botanical Garden and a Natural History Museum.3 Architecture was also called upon to incorporate modernity into buildings such as the University of Athens, the Ophthalmiatric Clinic, and the National Observatory, among others. While general historians have been long aware that cities can provide dynamic and revealing narratives about the relationship of living spaces and their people, historians of science have been hesitant to explore the architecture of science buildings and the city as a privileged site for the production of scientific knowledge.4 At the intersection of urban history, architectural studies, and history of science, this paper has the ambition to raise interest in the history of modern Greek science, among the leaststudied modern scientific cultures and to historicize the notion of metropolis, keeping in mind that the binaries it implies are always constructed by our own narratives. Focusing on the design and construction of the National Observatory of Athens during Othon’s reign, we argue that Bavarians’ idea of modernity and what that implied was a strange notion to the local Greek population. It found advocates, however, in a number of educated Greeks that belonged to the diaspora and acquired key positions in the new state. As an ideal symbol of the modern metropolis, the Athens Observatory (1842) played a significant role in modernizing the city and revealed the profound fascination of European royalty with classical antiquity. “Here in Athens there are the most perfect relics of ancient monuments” admitted Christian Hansen, Theophil’s brother, when he first arrived to Athens. “It is the first time that I see art in its perfection.”5 He was not the only one who was deeply fascinated by ancient Greek art and architecture. Again and again, Bavarian administrators glorified the ancient Greek ideal. A whole generation of European architects drew inspiration from the “classical” art and culture of ancient Greece and transformed Athens from “a completely destroyed city with its marvelous relics of antiquity laying in piles and ruins” to a metropolis. Despite the fact that in the mid-1830s the life in Athens was indeed monotonous without the pleasures that central European metropolises offered to their citizens, such as theaters and concerts, it was extremely rewarding to “experience the birth of a city.”6 But as the city was transformed from a small village into a metropolis for both

18  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris the “unredeemed” Greeks still under the Ottoman rule and the Greeks of the Diaspora, the observatory symbolized the orientation of the new state toward the classical past. This orientation was the result of a network of powers defined by the Bavarians who administered the newly independent country, the King’s visions of modernity, the political and social expectations of those Greeks who had been educated in Europe and made a fortune trading goods from east to west, and the resentment of the Greeks for the monarchy that was forced upon the country—which was to remain without a constitution until 1843. Othon’s Reign in the early nineteenth century, Greece, under the Ottoman Empire for almost 400 years, led a war against its conqueror and in 1833 finally emerged as an independent nation-state. Great Britain, France, and Russia, the “Three Protective Powers,” imposed Othon of the House of Wittelsbach and son of King Ludwig of Bavaria as King of Greece. As the young German prince aged 17 was unable to rule Greece, his father appointed a tripartite Regency to rule in his name. For Great Britain in particular, Othon and the new monarchy were a pretext for maintaining a firm grip over Greece and guiding national politics. During this period, Greece was confined to the south of the country which was less developed and poorer in relation to the areas that still remained under the Ottoman Empire, such as Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, and the island of Crete, among other islands. Most Greeks still lived under the Ottoman rule, and the liberated part in 1833 was a mere 47.516 square kilometers. The great success of the revolution, nonetheless, was the emergence of a homogeneous new state of about 719,000 inhabitants, mainly Greek Orthodox. The new state was the result of exhaustive diplomatic negotiations and fruitless attempts to establish an independent nation. Yet, instead of independence, the Greeks went from Ottoman domination to a European guardianship validated by international treaties. The shift from the Ottoman to a European center of influence was probably the key novelty for the Greek independent state. King Othon was to rule until October 1862. During this long period of his governance, a number of Bavarian military and civil officials came to implement a foreign model of state administration and social reconfiguration to a ravaged country with nonexistent institutional structures.7 “One of the reasons my stay in Greece makes special sense to me,” Christian Hansen explained to his family in ­Copenhagen in 1834 “is because new cities are going to be constructed with any kind of private and public buildings, aqueducts, bridges and so on. In short, there is a lot of work to be done because nothing exists.”8 In addition to foreign architects such as the Hansens, the Bavarians were assisted by Greek intellectuals and merchants with strong ties to major European centers but little knowledge of local social and political life. Centralized and highly bureaucratic, throughout the 1830s, the administrative system of the monarchy adopted German structures and tried to replace traditional centers of power such as the church, the local chieftains, and the notables.

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  19 Yet, because of their complex social, political, and cultural heritage, the Greeks did not easily adopt new patterns and modes of life. Let’s take a simple but illustrative example. Greek officials were not accustomed to take off their hats before the sultan. Instead, the European manner of presenting oneself to the King required appearing with bare head. Throughout the early period of Othon’s reign, greeting the King and his regents thus evolved into a thorny cultural issue.9 Despite the initial welcoming, the King with his court did not live up to the initial expectations and the Greeks saw them as arrogant intruders. The distance between the new political structure and the initial project of a Constitutional Republic combined with Othon’s reluctance to grant a constitution to the Greeks led to an uprising in 1843. Aware of the difficulty of his position, the King agreed to a fairly conservative document in 1844 that allowed the sharing of legislative power between the Bavarians and the elected government. In the following years, the development of a strong liberal movement led to two revolts in January and October 1862 that resulted in the election of a new King, forcing Othon to leave the country. The main and grandiose program during King Othon’s monarchy was the social and institutional modernization of the state, which was strongly related to education and the creation of a new national Greek identity. Already in 1833, a decree on the establishment of “higher educational institutions” became an opportunity to advance education in Greece. Based on the model of the nineteenth-century European nation-state, scientific and technical education was given a priority. Four institutions were crucial: a university, a school of engineers, a military school, and an observatory. The first to be established was the Military School of Cadets in 1828. Based on the German educational system, the University of Athens was founded in 1837. The Technical School was created the same year and later evolved into Greece’s first polytechnic school. The observatory followed in 1842 and the Academy of Sciences in 1858. The institutionalization of scientific activity went hand in hand with the formation of the state, the centralization of the administration, and the ideal of an educated Greek citizen. Obviously, the newly established state had an urgent need mostly for civil servants and school teachers, which the university was called upon to cover. At the same time, the King enforced the “royal manufacture” model and tried to facilitate the development of industry in Greece.10 For the Bavarian King and his court, modernization also meant the revival of the ancient glory of Greece. First and foremost, Othon had to decide on the location of the new capital. When he arrived in Greece in 1833, he disembarked at Nauplion, the country’s first capital. Yet, prompted by his brother Maximilian, who was enamored with the ancient glory of Greece, Othon finally moved the capital of the newborn state in Athens in 1835. Maximilian was so thrilled with the idea of locating the capital on the vestiges of this once-celebrated city that he proposed to build the King’s palace on the Acropolis. Their father, King Ludwig, proved wiser.

20  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris He advised his son to build his palace away from the sea in a safe location and made clear that “It is not allowed to build anything new on the Acropolis. It is totally forbidden to blend the holy monuments of antiquity with new buildings.”11 Following his father’s advice, Othon commissioned the Bavarian architect Friedrich von Gaertner to design the palace, which was finally located in the “Garden of the Nation,” today’s Syntagma square, Athens’s most central spot.12 In the years that followed, wealthy Greeks from abroad and those who lived outside of Athens moved into what gradually became a city. A stream of European and Greek architects who had studied in Europe returned to design mansions, private dwellings, and government buildings, in short, to design a new city based mainly on the rules of classicism. But the Greek infrastructure could not support such major projects. Christian Hansen constantly complained about the lack of trained craftsmen when constructing the Mint in 1835. The architect of the Royal Parliament, Friedrich von Gärtner, found the worksite of his project to be the most chaotic one in his career.13 Theophil Hansen expressed several times his own complaints about the site of the observatory and the delays in construction due to unreliable Greek contractors.14 The Architectural Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was responsible for city planning, was exclusively staffed with foreign architects and engineers. Among them were Christian Hansen and his brothers Theophil, Ernst Ziller, and François Boulanger, all of whom later dominated the architectural tradition of central Europe. Eduard Schaubert, the head architect of the Department, was highly influential because of his close connections to the King. Besides having generous salaries as civil sector officials, all the architects working for the Department received extra payment for designing and supervising the construction of public buildings. By 1840, Athens exuded the atmosphere of a lively city with an extensive social and economic life. It was the time that the European nobility, Othon’s court, and the rich Greek expatriates dreamt of Athens as a new European metropolis.

The Establishment of the Athens Observatory Among the architects who moved to Athens during Othon’s reign was the Danish Christian Hansen who settled in the city in 1833. Having studied architecture at the famous Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he won the Academy’s great gold metal and a travel scholarship. Historicism was the dominant architectural style at that time. Fascinated by the classical art and architecture, Christian decided to spend his scholarship in Italy and then Greece. Soon he gained Othon’s favor and a year later he became the court architect. He was commissioned to design a number of important government buildings in the new capital, including the University (1839) and the Ophthalmic Clinic (1847), as well as several private houses.

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  21 Christian’s brother Theophil, ten years younger, followed closely in his steps. He started his studies in architecture at the Academy in ­Copenhagen in 1829 and was taught early on by his brother. In 1832, Theophil received his first small silver medal for the design of a House of the Estates. In the meanwhile, Christian advised him “the first thing you have to do is to study, as much as you can, the Greek art.”15 Soon recognitions followed one after the other. Theophil received a financial award for the design of a small church, a silver medal for designing a hospital, and a small gold medal for designing a theater. In 1838, he was finally awarded the Academy’s great gold medal along with a travel scholarship similar to the one that Christian had received five years earlier. It was then that Theophil, just 24 years old but well recognized in his own country, decided to join his brother in Athens.16 It was a time of intense construction. Leo von Klenze, the neoclassicist architect at the court of Othon’s father, had already been invited to Athens in order to submit plans for the city’s reconstruction in the style of ancient Greece. Among his first suggestions was to free the area around the Parthenon from any other subsequent structures and to characterize Acropolis as a purely archeological site. “The reconstruction of Athens,” Klenze claimed, “is a European issue of aesthetics and one needs to justify one’s actions to the whole of Europe.”17 Although the Bavarians hold the most important administrative positions, the monarchy financed only the construction of King Othon’s palace, the botanical garden, a military hospital, a mint, and a printing house. Those who actually financed the reconstruction of the city were the Greeks of the Diaspora. Georgios Sinas, who financed the construction of the observatory, was one of them. Sinas, the son of a well-known tobacco and cotton merchant, belonged to those affluent Greeks who were members of the mercantile paroikia (community) of Vienna. At an early age, he became Director of the ­National Bank of Austria. Having an eye on the newly established independent Greek State, he also offered a generous endowment to the National Bank of Greece. By 1832, he and his brother had received the title of Baron by ­Emperor ­Francis I. Placed in such a powerful financial and political network, when Othon was enthroned in 1833, Sinas was the most obvious candidate to become the Consul of Greece in Vienna.18 His counterpart in Greece was the Austrian Anton von Prokesch, who in 1834 was appointed Ambassador of Austria in Athens. An expert in the Middle East, von Prokesch became Sinas’ strategic and close friend. The circle of those involved in the establishment of the Athens Observatory included also Georgios Bouris, an astronomer and mathematician born in Vienna (1802) and son of a Greek merchant. Bouris grew up in the Greek paroikia of Vienna and studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. He then turned to astronomy and mathematics when Andreas ­Freiherr von Ettingshausen, Professor of mathematics, and Joseph ­Johann von Littrow, Director of the Vienna Observatory, introduced him to astronomy. After

22  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris his university studies, Bouris taught for almost a decade at the prestigious Greek National School in Vienna. As early as 1834, he published his first work at the Annals of the Vienna Observatory on the Biela comet, a Jupiter family comet that fascinated the public during the nineteenth century. The Biela Comet was the only comet known to intersect the Earth’s orbit, a fact that excited the fantasies of the public and particularly interested the astronomers of the time. Bouris concentrated on the comet’s orbit and used the perturbation theory, a complex mathematical method to suggest an approximate solution in defining the comet’s orbit.19 Bouris signed his paper as the Director of the Greek National School in Vienna. When Prokesch moved to Athens, Bouris followed him and became his translator. In 1837, nonetheless, Bouris left the office to take a professorship at the newly created University of Athens teaching astronomy and mathematics. Having no infrastructure for astronomical observations at the University, in the beginning, Bouris conducted meteorological and astronomical observations from the roof of his house.20 Before the war of independence, Greek astronomy was not considered an autonomous field of study and was still characterized by the geocentric versus heliocentric debate. Chrysanthos Notaras (1663–1731) a scholar of the Greek Enlightenment, had spent six months at the Paris Observatory working under the astronomer Giovanni Cassini and was introduced to the heliocentric system. Yet, he advocated the geocentric system at a time that the heliocentric one had become the dominant cosmological model. Notaras was the first Greek scholar who advocated the use of astronomical instruments despite the fact that he remained a supporter of the Aristotelian cosmological system, and he was openly polemic to the Copernican model. After about the middle of the eighteenth century, the situation changed dramatically when several Greek scholars supported the heliocentric system based, however, on assumptions that originated in the ancient Greek thought.21 In the early nineteenth century, Greek scholars educated in Western Europe were more actively occupied with the transmission of knowledge through translations of important works by European physicists and astronomers. The Traité d’astronomie by Jérôme Lalande, the Director of the Paris Observatory, was the most important astronomical work translated in Greek in 1803. Daniel Philipides (1750–1832), a renowned scholar of the Greek diaspora in Vienna, traveled to Paris in the early 1790s and had the chance to attend some of Lalande’s lectures, yet his astronomical knowledge was that of an amateur. Philipides, fascinated by Lalande’s book, a voluminous collection of the important astronomical discoveries of the time, translated it and added—after having consulted Lalande—some additional discoveries. Anthimos Gazis (1758–1828), scholar and publisher of the periodical Hermes o Logios, edited the translation and the book appeared in Vienna under the Greek title Astronomic Epitomes (Epitomi Astronomias). Gazis, a known cartographer and rector of the Greek Church of Vienna,

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  23 became member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1813. Both Gazis and Philipides concentrated on their efforts to the development of a higher education system in Greece, but none of them had studied astronomy. Besides Gazis and Notaras, a number of other Greek scholars like Benzamin of Lesvos (1759–1824) studied astronomy as part of their general education in the natural sciences and had no experience in astronomical observations or in conducting astronomy in the modern sense of the word. When Bouris arrived in Athens, he was the first and only astronomer of the independent state where the scientific was and remained until the end of the century rather small.22 Bouris envisioned a more established setting for his astronomical observations and hoped to develop astronomy in the country for its practical uses. “The advantages of astronomy to the political human society are obvious” Bouris argued in 1842, “concerning the subdivision and understanding of time, navigation, the calculation of coordinates, and countless more.”23 Besides being useful, Bouris considered astronomy as a highly “respectable” science that the Greek state owed to develop and support. Taking advantage of his acquaintance with the powerful Austrian diplomat, Bouris used Prokesch to persuade Sinas to contribute to the foundation of an astronomical observatory. In a letter to the Royal Secretary, Bouris argued that the observatory, the first of its kind in the Near East, was “urgently needed for a seagoing country.” To him it represented the institutional embodiment of modern astronomy, a centralized site of experimental and observational practices, a technologically advanced site that could contribute to the nation’s renaissance, and a chance for reviving the country’s ancient glory in the sciences. He was even able to set up a Fund for Physics and Chemistry (Tameion Physikis kai Chimias) within the University of Athens hoping to attract funding from the rich Greeks of the Diaspora, in which he was successful “with the help of God and the unflagging synergy of his Excellency the Austrian Ambassador, the artistic and philhellene Mr Prokesch.”24 Indeed in 1840, Sinas, the Greek benefactor (Evergetis), donated 30,000 drachmas for the design and construction of the observatory, for equipping it with astronomical instruments, and for the maintenance of the building, of which 20,000 drachmas went to the architect. The donation also covered publication expenses.25 Bouris’ idea of an astronomical institution as a knowledge space that indeed transcended the boundaries of the observatory is in acquaintance with the modern idea of the observatory as it was developed in the course of the nineteenth century.26 It was the time that the number of astronomical ­observatories rose from less than three dozen to more than two hundreds while observatories became an important requirement to every modern state. ­Observatories served not only as research centers in the fields of ­astronomy, cartography, metrology, and geodesy, among others but also as public spaces for social gatherings with, often, political significance. As ­Fabien Locher explains, “the 1830s and 1840s witnessed a European movement to

24  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris accumulate data about the terrestrial environment, enterprises including the German and British geomagnetic crusades.”27 Although for over a century the Greenwich and Paris observatories had dominated developments in astronomical observations, in the early nineteenth century the center of astronomical practice had shifted to Germany.28 Leading astronomers of the time located in Berlin, Göttingen, Bremen, and elsewhere in Germany imposed their own astronomical practices and working methods. The shift of the center of scientific activity went hand in hand with the shift of the architectural structure of the observatories. From a family-oriented scientific enterprise, astronomy became a professional activity demanding several spaces for observation and study rooms in addition to living areas. ­Astronomers started to play an important consulting role in designing their scientific dwellings, but the decisive role was still in the hands of emperors and sponsors.29 In the case of the National Observatory of Athens, the site had been chosen with great care and reflected the political and ideological presuppositions of the royal court. Othon appointed a committee that included Bouris and his court architect, Eduard Schaubert, to decide on the location of the new institution. There was no point in discussing the possibility of building the observatory outside the city in the peace and isolation of the countryside, as was the case with several other European capitals around the same time.30 Athens was not yet heavily populated and still far from using electricity for lighting.31 The first proposed site was Lycabettus, the highest hill of the city. Schaubert was invited to submit the plans. But Othon was not happy either with the site or with Schaubert’s design. Lycabettus was a steep hill and access to the observatory would have been very difficult. In addition, Schaubert proposed a cruciform building of a medieval architectural style with direct references to German romanticism. Othon, on the other hand, was in favor of a classical style that established a direct connection to the glory of ancient Greece. He suggested that Schaubert collaborated with Bouris in order to work out a better solution. Locating the observatory in the city and close to the monarch allowed greater control by the royal court and increased convenience for Bouris. Thus, they soon agreed that the hill of the Nymphs in the southeast of the city and close to the Acropolis was the most appropriate site for the observatory. But the Munich Academy that was asked to approve of their proposal, as with every other architectural project in Athens, rejected it on the basis that the observatory was too close to the archeological site. Othon insisted. The hill of the Nymphs seemed perfect for several reasons. It was next to one of the famous observatories of the fifth century, where the first Athenian astronomer, Meto, placed his Heliotropion and carried out observations. It was also close to the Tower of the Winds, the ancient timepiece at the Athenian Agora, a kind of meteorological station on which the design of the Radcliff Observatory in Oxford and an observatory at Rutgers University were subsequently based. Most of all, it provided an unimpeded view of the horizon. Theophil Hansen

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  25 was asked to provide the plans and, in accordance with Othon’s instructions, he was supposed to ask Bouris’ opinion “whenever there was a need.” In keeping with a nineteenth-century tradition, architects and scientists had to collaborate closely in the construction of the new science institutions that flooded Europe (Figure 1.1). With his brother’s close connections to the court, Theophil had already gained the support of Schaubert. For example, despite the pending decision on the designs of the Athens’ Archeological Museum by architect Ludwig Lange, Schaubert tried to push Theophil’s vision of a museum. Although Hansen’s plans for the Museum were turned down, his drawings of the astronomical observatory impressed Schaubert. What Hansen proposed was certainly at the heart of Othon’s modernization project. As Theophil explained “the floor plan that Mr. Schaubert had worked out was essentially retained. The only thing that changed was the medieval architectural style, which according to his Excellency, the King’s request, is going to be Greek. The plans were approved and Baron Prokesch, representative of Baron ­Sinas, assigned me the project that started in 1842 and was completed in the spring of 1846.” Bouris approved the final plan concerning only the scientific part and did not have a say on its architectural style.32

Figure 1.1  Map of Athens, 1864. The hill of the Nymphs is shown on the northwest side of the Acropolis and the observatory is referred to as “Sternwarte.”

26  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris June 26, 1842, the day of a solar eclipse, was the great day. Early that morning the Danish King, Baron Prokesch, the government, the Holy Synod—that is a group of bishops, the highest authority in the Greek Orthodox Church—professors from the newly established University of Athens, and several other officials gathered in the presence of Othon for the cornerstone ceremony. In his opening speech, Bouris emphasized the role of the observatory as a force of revival not merely of science but of the whole nation that now had the chance to “reinstate its previous glory.”33 Addressing a monarch so enamored with ancient Greece, Bouris strategically underlined the importance of the observatory’s location close to the Acropolis, its proximity to Meto’s Heliotropion in Pnika, and the long ancient tradition and importance of Greek astronomy.34 In short, Bouris reclaimed the prestige of ancient Greek science in order to inspire modern Greeks. My heart skips when I think that the time will come when new discoveries on natural sciences will be made by Greeks in Greece, to bring even more glory to the glorious name of our country. Because it is fair and proper to become equal to the enlightened nations in the fields of science, we the descendants of the glorious men that gave the first principles and formed the foundations for all other nations.35 When the observatory was finally built, it faced the Acropolis and retained Schaubert’s original cross-shaped structure. In a neoclassical design, the building was situated at the top of the hill, which meant that there was a much-needed empty horizon stretching ahead for observation purposes. It was the exact same spot from which August Ferdinand Stademann, an administrative advisor to Othon’s regency, drew his famous “Panorama von Athen” in 1835 that depicts the entire Attica basin.36 Indeed, it was ideally situated in one of the best locations in Europe. The Athenian climate and clarity of the atmosphere were ideal for observations that could not be carried out from observatories in central Europe (Figure 1.2a and b).37 The four sides of the building were oriented toward the four directions of the horizon, with the main entrance facing the Acropolis. At the center of the cross right after the main entrance, Hansen placed Sinas’ bust to remind visitors of the benefactor of this impressive institution Semicircular stairs located at the center of the building led to the dome at the upper floor where the Ploessl telescope, the main instrument for observations, was placed. The movable dome, made of copper, was constructed by Rodner, a German living in Greece, and especially designed by Hansen in order to combine “the most functional with the most wonderful solution.”38 On top of it, Hansen placed a weathervane-like Triton, which indicated the direction of the wind, similar to the one that stood at the top of the Tower of Winds. The technology for opening and closing the dome resembled the one used at the Berlin Observatory (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.2  (a, b) The Athens Observatory and its architectural plan as it appeared in Hansen’s 1842 architectural study.

28  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris Along the long axis of the building, there were two symmetrical sides. Beyond the central foyer to the north lay a lecture hall where Bouris placed the smaller meridian telescope (b). On the opposite side lay the director’s apartment with two rooms and extra spaces on the second floor for domestic uses (d). In the east side of the building room (c) was housed the 94-mm meridian equatorial refracting telescope made by the Starke House. Some of the features that Hansen introduced to the Athens Observatory were absent in other similar buildings of this period. The windows for the smaller telescopes were made of wood and were oriented from west to east to avoid straining the external walls. A special mechanism was constructed to open and close the windows.39 Furthermore, unlike in other observatories, the semicircular stairs did not lean against the central column of the building. Because of the cross-like shape of the building, its fours sides acted as columns and supported the whole structure. The walls of the building were constructed by limestone from the hill of the Nymphs. The corners and pavements were made by grayish-blue ­Hymettus marble, while white Pentelikon marble was used for an entrance that was similar to that of the Acropolis.40 Indeed, the observatory entrance was designed to impress and convey the aura of the Parthenon. Five steps made by Pentelikon marble led to the entrance hall of the observatory, which was made with black-and-white marble from the island of Tinos, the same that covered the semicircular stairs that led to the dome. The building was colorful, but marble prevailed, and the whole structure consciously resembled an ancient Greek temple. For the design of the observatory, Hansen collaborated closely not only with Schaubert and Bouris but also with Heinrich Christian Schumacher, a well-known German-Danish astronomer who was director at the Altona Observatory near Hamburg. However, construction was disrupted because of the political upheavals of 1843. These gave greater power to local Greek engineers and architects, creating an adverse environment for foreigners such as Hansen. It was no coincidence that as soon as construction was completed, Hansen accepted the invitation of renowned Austrian architect Ludwig Förster to move to Vienna. Meanwhile, Sinas was forced to intervene once again to support financially the completion of the observatory. Along with building expenses, he covered Bouris’ salary and furnished the observatory with some of the most advanced astronomical instruments of its time: a Ploessl equatorial refractor of 6.2-inch aperture, a Starke meridian circle of 3.7-inch aperture, two clocks, Berthoud and Kessel, a K ­ essel ­chronometer, five small telescopes for comet hunting, two barometers Kapeller, and a series of other meteorological instruments.41 To Bouris, the observatory was clearly his own success. In his 1859 report, published in the prestigious Astronomische Nachrichten, he emphasized the fact that the Athens Observatory was equipped with instruments better than those at the University of Athens and several “luxurious scientific objects” thanks to his benefactor Sinas. Indeed, Bouris ordered the

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  29

Figure 1.3  View of Athens with the Observatory and Acropolis. 1900.

first instruments in 1845 in Vienna, and by 1852 he had made several other trips to central Europe in order to create his scientific network and supplement his collection of instruments. Sinas covered all his expenses. Although Bouris tried to make his way to the forefront of the astronomical network of his time, he downplayed the importance of the local scientific community and the political scenery. Soon it proved that the government was more a problem than an opportunity for Bouris. On October 11, 1848, he reported to the Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs the problems he faced with security. The permanent police officer of the observatory appointed by a Royal Decree informed him that he had to leave his post following higher orders. Bouris, although the director, had not been informed. Following a trickle of similar complaints, Bouris was promised to receive two police officers as late as January 21, 1849. The guards were ordered to start at sunset and remain until midnight in order to “secure the work of the professor and accompany him to the city on his departure from the observatory.” Nonetheless, what Bouris finally got were two elderly and retired officers.42 Scientifically active and with an internationally standing, Bouris attracted the envy of his colleagues at the University of Athens who denounced him to the Minister of Education, Stavros Vlachos.43 By way of punishment, with a letter to Othon on August 13, 1853, the Minister appointed the mathematician Ioannis Papadakis in Bouris’ position at the University of Athens. At the same time, Bouris pressed for more state funding for the observatory and demanded its total control. The tension between the two men escalated, and in 1855 Bouris withdrew from his position and decided to leave the country. Despite Sina’s attempts to dissuade him, Bouris remained and worked in Vienna until his death in 1860. Throughout his stay in Athens, Bouris remained the only astronomer without any students. He published extensively in the Astronomische Nachrichten,

30  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris the leading journal in astronomy at the time founded by Schumacher, but no publications appeared in the Greek newspapers of the time.44 A big part of his research on the position of more than a thousand stars, which were included neither in Johann Elert Bode’s Uranographia nor in Karl Ludwig Christian Rümker’s astronomical catalogue, remained unpublished. He remained known for calculating the coordinates of the Athens Observatory, since they served as the bases for the country’s cartography.

Questioning Modernity In 1866, Emmanuel Manitakis, the general in charge of public works in Greece, reported the progress of Athens’ reconstruction: its large and well-aligned streets, beautiful houses built according to Italian taste, the oldest of which dates to 1834, numerous public structures and its population which, in its manner of dressing, living, and thinking, is to such a degree similar with the great family of civilized nations of Europe.45 In a similar manner, Charles Tuckerman, the US ambassador to Greece from 1867 to 1874, was amazed by the fact that in Athens “in brilliant contrast to the generality of shops are a few, the show windows of which, be it the jeweler, tailor or silk mercer, almost rival those of the Palais Royal” and continued to argue that “Athens can boast of public edifices which rival many structures in the largest European Capitals.” The observatory was mentioned as one among them.46 By the end of the century, architecture and urban planning had indeed transformed Athens from a provisional Ottoman town to a modest E ­ uropean capital. But, as Eleni Bastea argues, despite the European facade the interior remained Ottoman. There had been a sharp contrast between outward appearances and personal habits.47 Similarly, although the observatory was one among several of the new science buildings that through their urban location and architectural style promised a modernized educational system and scientific advances, its history did not really reflect such a case. Bouris’s debate with the Ministry of Education actually brought to the fore the core issues of what “modern” meant to our different actors. To Bouris, a member of the powerful Greek diaspora himself, who was acquainted to strong political actors such as Prokesch and was favored by dominant financial players such as Sinas, modern meant establishing an astronomical institution as part of a wider network of observatories in central Europe. In this prestigious network of observers, he failed, however, to include his Greek colleagues, to introduce Greek students, and to create followers. Isolated in a forgotten scientific institution that throughout his directorship played no public role, Bouris went after an international recognition cutting his ties with the local scientific community and creating enemies within the Greek government. As

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  31 Othon’s power was limited after the 1843 uprising, Bouris’ demands for more control over the observatory were met with resentment by the Greek government. In addition, his work did not demonstrate any direct usefulness to the country. The situation did not even change when the German a­ stronomer Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt was named Director of the Athens Observatory in 1858. Schmidt scarcely participated in the Greek scientific community, did not train any other astronomers, and continued to lead a solitary career in Greece. Schmidt had been known for his topographical map of the moon drawn based on his observations with the Ploessl telescope of the observatory. This work was again published in German. The situation changed only when the state took over the institution on June 19, 1890. The Greek astronomer Dimitrios Eginitis was named its director, and it was renamed as the National Observatory of Athens. The observatory found eventually its place within the Greek scientific community. In sharp contrast to the previous work culture, the director made every effort to prove that the observatory was not only engaged in pure scientific research but developed also a number of useful activities for the Greek public. For example, Parnasos, a monthly journal published from 1877 to 1895, hosted a column on “Meteorological observations,” where appeared regularly statistical data generated by the observatory for parameters such as atmospheric pressure, temperature, rain, and wind.48 The journal Estia, a weekly magazine published from 1876 to 1895, included periodically international meteorological reports. Obviously, the modernization of Athens and the establishment of the observatory had different connotations to the local Greeks and to those that belonged to the westernized Diaspora. The local scientific community was cut off from resources important to astronomical observations. Although Bouris and Schmidt enjoyed a scientific institution furnished with some of the most important astronomical instruments of their time, the University of Athens lacked research facilities. The emphasis on the glories of the ancient Greek past as a vehicle of modernization and independence left little room for the development of the physical sciences based on either observation techniques or experimentation. By placing the observatory at the hill of the Nymphs, astronomy was called upon to preserve the continuity between the glorious ancient past and the newly formed modern independent state. Its neoclassical architectural style, its colorful external appearance that resembled the ancient temples, and the use of Pentelikon marble—a material that created a direct association between the new architecture and the Parthenon’s imposing ruins—placed nineteenth-century astronomy into a fifth century BC context conditioning its practice. After all, this case study has some general significance, for it sheds light on the relation science might have with its urban and architectural conditions. In our case, the architectural facade of the observatory, which embodied European ideas of modernization, in fact preserved an isolated research institution with little usefulness to the Greek society.

32  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the participants of the 2014 Watson Seminar organized by Agustí Nieto-Galan and Oliver Hochadel in which this paper was first presented. We are also grateful to Efthimios Nikolaidis and Georgios Vlachakis for suggesting sources and exchanging ideas while this paper was taking shape. Our special thanks go to Nikos Matshopoulos, an astronomer and an amateur historian of science, who has extensively documented the history of the Athens Observatory and shared with us his sources. To Spiros Petrounakos, we are indebted for editing our work and helping us to clarify our argument.

Notes 1 Hansen, Theophil. “Die freiherrlich von v. Sina‘sche Sternwarte bei Athen” in Christ. F. L. Forster, Allgemeine Bauzeitung, Jahrg. 11, Wien 1846, 126–131. 2 Dibazar, Pedram et al., “Questioning Urban Modernity” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2013, 16; Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). See also Dennis, Richard. Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 For a recent analysis of the role of science and science education in early modern Greece see Tambakis, Kostas. “Science Education and the Emergence of the Specialized Scientist in Nineteenth Century Greece” Science Education 2012, 22: 789–805. For an analysis of the education system see Kiprianos, Pantelis. Συγκριτική Ιστορία της Ελληνικής Εκπαίδευσης (Comparative History of Greek Education) (Athens: Vivliorama, 2004). For the Botanical Garden see Rizopoulou, Sofia. 2007. Βοτανικός κήπος Ιουλίας και Αλεξάνδρου Διομήδους (The Botanical Garden of Ioulia and Alexander Diomidis) Diavlos; See also Stefanidis, Michael. Ιστορία της Φυσικομαθηματικής σχολής (A history of the physics and mathematics school) vol. I. (Athens: National Typography, 1948); Stefanidis, Michael. Ιστορία της Φυσικομαθηματικής σχολής (A history of the physics and mathematics school) vol. II. (Athens: National Typography, 1952). 4 For an early discussion of architecture and science, see for example Ioulia and Alexander Diomidis. Kraeling, Carl and Adams Robert (eds). City Invincible. A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960); Shapin, Steven. “‘The Mind in Its own Place’: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth Century England” Science in Context 1991, 4: 191–218; Shapin, Steven. “Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science” ­Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 1998, 23: 5–12; Forgan, S ­ ophie. “Context, Image and Function: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Architecture of Scientific Societies.” British Journal for the History of Science, 1986, 19: 83–113. For Forgan’s most recent work see for example Forgan, Sophie. Building the Museum: Knowledge, Conflict, and the Power of Place. Isis, 2005, 96: 572–585; Forgan, Sophie. “From Modern Babylon to White City: Science, Technology and Urban Change in London, 1870–1914” in Miriam Levin, Sophie ­Forgan, Martina Hessler, Robert Kargon, Morris Low, Urban Modernity. Cultural Innovation in the 2nd industrial revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 75–132. Galison, Peter and Thomson, Emily The Architecture of Science. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999). Gieryn, Thomas. “What

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  33 Buildings Do.” Theory and Society 2002, 31: 35–74; Gieryn, Thomas. “City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban Studies.” Social Studies of Science, 2006, 36 (February): 5–38; Hoffmann, Christian. “The Design of Disturbance; Physics Institutes and Physics Research in Germany, 1870–1910.” Perspectives on Science, 2002, 9(2): 173–195; Latour, Bruno. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer” in Star, L. (ed.) Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology (New York: SUNY Press, 1995); Picone, Antoine and Ponte, Alessandra. Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003); Rentetzi, Maria. “Designing (for) a New Scientific Discipline: The Location and Architecture of the Institut für Radiumforschung in Early 20th Century Vienna” British Journal for the History of Science, 2005, 38(3): 275–306; Lafuente, Antonio and Saraiva, Tiago. “The Urban Scale of Science and the Enlargement of Madrid (1851–1936)” Social Studies of Science 2004, 34 (August): 531–569. Rentetzi, Maria “The City as a Context of Scientific Activity: Creating the Mediziner-Viertel in fin-de-siècle Vienna.” Endeavour, 2004, 28: 39–44. For an account of a modern version of interdisciplinary scientific exchanges facilitated by urban planning see Massey, D. Quintas, P. & Wield, D. High-Tech Fantasies: Science Parks in Society, Science and Space (New York: Routledge, 1992). Levin, Miriam, Forgan, Sophie, Hessler, Martina, Kargon, Robert and Low, Morris. Urban Modernity. Cultural Innovation in the 2nd industrial revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 5 Christian Hansen to Hermann Ernst Freund, September 4, 1833, in PapanikolaouChristensen, Aristea. Χριστιανός Χάνσεν: Γράμματα και Σχέδια από την Ελλάδα (Christian Hansen: Letters and Drawings from Greece) (Athens: Okeanida, 1993), p. 53. 6 Christian Hansen to Peter Hansen, October 1835, in Papanikolaou-Christensen, Aristea, 1993, p. 65. 7 Dertilis, G.B. Ιστορία του ελληνικού κράτους 1830–1920 (History of the Greek State), vol. A (Athens: Bookstore of Estia, 2005), on p. 399; Petmetzas, Sokratis. “History of Modern Greece” in Metaxas Giannis. About Greece (Athens, 2002), 7–41, p. 22. 8 Christian Hansen to the Academy of Fine Arts, Athens, July 8, 1834, in Papanikolaou-Christensen, Aristea, 1993, p. 61. 9 Maurer, Georg Ludwig von. Das Griechische Volk, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1835) II, 69–70 cited at Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 255. 10 Nikolaidis, Efthimios. “Scientific instruments, laboratories and the 19th century Greek State” in Nikolaidis Efthimios and Chatzis Kostas. Science, Technology and the 19th Century State (Athens: Institute for Hellenic Research, 2000), 79–88. Antoniou. Yiannis. Οι Έλληνες Μηχανικοί: Θεσμοί και Ιδέες 1900–1940 (The Greek Engineers: Institutions and Ideas 1900–1940,) (Athens: Vibliorama, 2006). Lappas Kostas. Πανεπιστήμιο και Φοιτητές στην Ελλάδα τον 19ο αιώνα (University and Students in 19th century Greece) (Athens: Historical Archive of Greek Youth, 2004); Agriantoni, Christina. Οι Απαρχές της Εκβιομηχάνισης στην Ελλάδα το 19ο αιώνα (The Beginnings of Industrialization in 19th century Greece) (Athens: Historical Archive Commercial Bank of Greece, 1986). 11 Biris, Kostas. Αι Αθήναι (Athens) (Athens: Melissa, 1966), on p. 24. For the decision to transfer the capital from Nauplion (the first capital chosen by Ioannis Kapodistrias right after the revolution) to Athens, see Biris, Athens, 1966; Biris, Manos. Athenian Architecture, 1875–1925 (Athens: Melissa, 2003). Fotopoulos, Dyonisis. Athenian Fashions at the Turn of the 19th Century (Athens: Benaki Museum, 1999).

34  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris 12 Kardamitsi-Adami, M. et al. (eds). Το κτίριο της Βουλής (The Building of the Greek Parliament) (Athens: Greek Parliament, 2009). 13 Rouben, Denis. “Construction Techniques in Nineteenth Century Greece and their Impact on Today’s Restoration Projects.” Journal of Architectural Conservation. 2014, 20(2): 91–107, p. 93. 14 See for example Theophil Hansen to the Royal Secretary, Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs, July 26, 1843; Theophil Hansen to the Royal Secretary, Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs, August 16, 1843, both in General State Archives, file 1168. 15 Christian Hansen to Peter Hansen, Athens, May 15, 1834, in PapanikolaouChristensen, Aristea, 1993, p. 60. 16 Bairaktaridis, Natalie. “Theophil Hansen: Die griechische-orthodox Kirche am Fleischmarkt in Wien” (Mag. Phil. University of Vienna, 2008), pp. 7–8. See also Wagner Rieger, Renate, and Reissberger, Mara. Theophil von Hansen (­Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1980). 17 Cited in Biris, Athens, 1966, p. 35. 18 On Sina, see Assimakopoulou Fotini. http://bfl.archivportal.hu/id-832-.html#fnt1; Bairaktaridis, “Die griechisch-Orthodoxe Kirche” 2008. 19 Bouris, Georg, “Elliptische Bahnberechnung des Biela’schen Cometen mit Berücksichtigung sämmtlicher Bahn-Elemente und unmittelbarer Benützung der beobachteten Rectascensionen und Declinationen, aus sechs und neunzig Beobachtungen des Jahres 1832,” Annalen der K.K. Sternwarte in Wien, 1834, vol. 14, xxxvii–liv. On Bouris see Matsopoulos, Nikolaos. «Η Συμβολή της Αστρονομίας στον Νεοελληνηκό Διαφωτισμό και η Ίδρυση του Αστεροσκοπείου Αθηνών» (The Contributions of Astronomy to the Greek Enlightenment and the Establishment of the Athens Observatory) Papyri, 2012, 1: 61–81. 20 Unfortunately, little has been written on the history of astronomy in Greece. See Matsopoulos, Nikolaos. Astronomy in Modern Greece (Athens, 2000). 21 Dialetis, Dimitris, Kostas Gavroglu, Manolis Patiniotis, “Sciences in the Greek Speaking Regions during the 17th and 18th Centuries. The process of appropriation and the dynamics of reception and resistance,” in Kostas Gavroglu (ed.) The Sciences in the European Periphery During the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers [Archimedes], 1999), 41–71. 22 According to Tampakis, at any given time from 1831 to 1895, in Greece there were fewer than 20 people who could qualify as scientific experts. Konstantinos Tampakis, “Science Education and the Emergence of the Specialized Scientist in Nineteenth Century Greece,” Science & Education. 2013, 22(4): 789–805. 23 Bouris speech delivered at the observatory’s founding ceremony on June 26, 1842 available online (in Greek) www.academy.edu.gr/files/Papyroi-2012/05_p12_ v1.pdf. 24 Bouris to the Royal Secretary, Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs, July 18, 1841, General State Archives, file 1197, http://arxeiomnimon. gak.gr/search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=10453. 25 Bouris to the Royal Secretary, Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs, July 18, 1841, General State Archives, file 1197, http://arxeiomnimon. gak.gr/search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=10453 Biris, Athens, 1966, on p. 131. According to Biris, the donation was given in 1842. However, with a letter to Sinas, Othon accepted and thanked him for his offer in 1840. Othon to Sinas July 15, 1840, General State Archives, file 1197, http://arxeiomnimon.gak.gr/search/ resource.html?tab=tab02&id=10453. 26 Aubin, David, Charlotte Bigg, and Otto Sibum (eds). The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth Century Science and Culture ­(London: Duke University Press, 2010).

Envisioning a New European Metropolis  35 27 Locher, Fabien. “The observatory, the land based ship and the crusades: earth sciences in European context.” British Journal for the History of Science, 2007, 40: 491–504. 28 Martin, Jean-Pierre and MacConnell Anita. “Joining the Observatories of Paris and Greenwich” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2008, 64(2): 355–372; Louw, Hentie. “The Windows of Perrault’s Observatory in Paris (1667–1683): The Legacy of a Proto-modern Architectural Inventor” Construction History, 2003, 19: 19–46; Williams, Mari, “Astronomical Observatories as Practical Spaces: The Case of Pulkowa” in Frank, The Development of the Laboratory, 1989, 118–136. Connor, Elizabeth. The Cassini Family and the Paris Observatory” Astronomical Society of the Pacific Leaflets, 1947, 5(218): 146–153. 29 A good example could be the establishment of the Pulkowa Observatory in imperial Russia which included both living and working facilities along with some of the most powerful astronomical instruments of that time. Williams, “Astronomical Observatories” 1989. In the early nineteenth century, observatories started to play a central role in advancing scientific research. Although in 1832 there was not a single observatory in the United States, 50 years later one could identify 144 observatories in the country. Mathias, Peter and Nikolay Todorov (eds). History of Humanity, The Nineteenth Century, vol. VI (New York: Routledge 2005), p. 161. In Europe with the rich tradition in astronomical research observatories played a central scientific and often sociopolitical role in local contexts. For a recent volume on astronomical observatories see Audin, David, Charlotte Bigg, and Otto Sibum (eds). The Heavens on Earth: Observations and Astronomy in 19th Century Science and Culture (London: Duke University Press, 2010). 30 Aubin, David. “The Fading Star of the Paris Observatory in the Nineteenth Century: Astronomers Urban Culture of Circulation and Observation.” In Science and the City, edited by Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn. Osiris (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 79–100. 31 Athens was being electrified in 1889. At least for the first decade a steam engine of only 150 kw power was located at the center of the city and provided electricity for lightening Athens’ three main streets. Pantelakis, Nikos. Ο Εξηλεκτρισμός της Ελλάδας: Από την Ιδιωτική Πρωτοβουλία στο Κρατικό Μονοπώλιο 1889–1956 (The Electrification of Greece: From a Private Initiative to a State Monopoly 1889–1956) (Athens: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, 1991). 32 Hansen, Theophil. “Freicherlich von Sinasche Sternwarte bei Athen” 1846. See also Othon, King of Greece, September 12, 1842, General State Archives, file 1197, http://arxeiomnimon.gak.gr/search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=10453& start=20Hansen, 155. Bouris to the Royal Secretary, Department of Religious and Public Education Affairs, 18 July 1841, General State Archives, file 1197, http://arxeiomnimon.gak.gr/search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=10453 See also Tsiganos, Kanaris et al., National Observatory of Athens, 170 Υears of Offering in Research and Society (Athens, 2016). 33 Bouris speech delivered at the observatory’s founding ceremony on June 26, 1842 available online (in Greek) www.academy.edu.gr/files/Papyroi-2012/05_p12_ v1.pdf. 34 For an excellent analysis of Bouris speech and the rhetoric of science in nineteenth-century Greece, see Tambakis, Kostas. “Onwards Facing Backwards: The Rhetoric of Science in Nineteenth Century Greece” The British Journal for History of Science, 2014, 47(2): 217–237. 35 Bouris speech delivered at the observatory’s founding ceremony on June 26, 1842 available online (in Greek) www.academy.edu.gr/files/Papyroi-2012/05_ p12_v1.pdf. Translated by Tampakis in Tampakis, K. “The once and future

36  Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris

36 37

38 39 40

41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

language: Communication, terminology and the practice of science in nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece” History of Science, 2015, 53(4): 438–455, p. 449. Stademann, August Ferdinand. Panorama von Athen. An Ort und Stelle aufgenommen und herausgegeben Munich 1841. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ stademann1841. Bouris was proud for being the only one to observe Canopus, the lightest star after Sirius and very far south in the sky, from an observatory located in Europe. Bouris, George. “Nachrichten von der Sternwarte Athen’s vormal. Director der Sternwarte und Professor an der Universität zu Athen,” Astronomische Nachrichten, 1859, 51(4): 49–56. Hansen, Theophil. “Freicherlich von Sinasche Sternwarte bei Athen” 1846. The famous Paris Observatory addressed a similar problem with its iron windows a century after it was constructed. Louw, “The Windows of Perrault’s Observatory.” The Pentelikon quarry opened up after Othon’s request and was extensively used in order to provide marble for the construction of the new buildings including the Athens Academy and the National Library. “The Penteliko quarry opened because the King of Bavaria wished to do so and now around 100 people are working.” Christian Hansen, report from Greece, July 17, 1836 in Papanikolaou-Christensen, Aristea. Χριστιανός Χάνσεν: Γράμματα και Σχέδια από την Ελλάδα (Christian Hansen: Letters and Drawings from Greece) (Athens: Okeanida, 1993), on p. 75. Nikolaidis, “Scientific Instruments,” 2000. G. Bouris to the Ministry of Religious and Public Education Affairs, October 11, 1848, General State Archives, file 256-xbxv, 13, http://arxeiomnimon.gak.gr/ search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=8057. The Ministry of Religious and Public Education Affairs, January 21, 1849, file 256-xbxv, 13, http://arxeiomnimon. gak.gr/search/resource.html?tab=tab02&id=8057. About the two gendarmes for the Athens Observatory, Ministry of Religious and Public Education Affairs, January 27, 1849, 13, General State Archives, file 256-xbxv. Matsopoulos, “The Contributions of Astronomy,” 2000, pp. 56–57. See for example Bouris, G. “Nachrichten von der Sternwarte Athen’s nebst ­Beobachtungen der Irene an derselben” Astronimische Nachrichten 1852, 33(13): 193–200; Bouris, G. “Die Opposition des Mars im Jahre 1849–50 nach Beobachtungen an der Sternwarte Athen’s, nebst Bemerkungen über den Durchmesser des Mars,” Astronomische Nachrichten 1854, 37(11): 153–168; Bouris, G. “Ueber die Sirius-Tage,” Astronomische Nachrichten 1854, 37(21): 311–316. Quoted in Bastea, Eleni. “Athens” in Emily Gunzburger Makas and Tanja Damljanovic Conley (eds), Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires (New York: Routledge, 2010), 29–44, p. 30. Tuckerman, Charles. The Greeks of To-day (London: G. P. Putnam & sons, 1886). https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_pOzBs01M1DoC/bub_gb_pOzBs01M1DoC_ djvu.txt. Bastea, “Athens.” Vlahakis, George. “Science and Society in the nineteenth century Greece: The Journals.” In Science, Technology and the 19th Century State: The Role of the Army, edited by Efthymios Nicolaidis and Konstantinos Chatzis (Athens: NHRF-LATTS/CNRS, 2003), 117–124.

2 Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics” Philosophical Engineering in the City of Glasgow c. 1820–c. 1875 Ben Marsden Introduction This chapter asks how the city of Glasgow, rather than the Scottish capital Edinburgh, became the home of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland (IES) in 1857. The IES encouraged mechanical and civil engineers, engineering students, industrialists, and shipbuilders to engage in philosophical (scientific) engineering, underpinned by large-scale engineering experiments. Angus Buchanan suggests that Glasgow was “well placed to become the base for a strong regional association of engineers,” that a visit from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) acted as a catalyst for the formation of the IES, and that W. J. M. Rankine was a key advocate.1 What was it, though, about Glasgow that made the city “well placed” to nurture an association that was more than “regional,” representing “engineers in Scotland”? Glasgow may have been dubbed the “Second City of the Empire”—and the “Sixth City of Europe”—from the later nineteenth century,2 but the spectacular growth of its industry and engineering community were insufficient to “determine” the emergence of a new association. After all, engineers in Scotland might have chosen to ally themselves to existing associations in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, London, and elsewhere—or to go about their business institutionally unattached. I begin by asking how historians of science have approached the relationship between British cities, whether metropolitan or provincial, and institutions purporting to represent scientific and engineering culture. I investigate what associations the engineers of Scotland could join, especially those based in Edinburgh, a city with a unique political status after the eighteenth-century union of Scotland with England. How did the institutions of England and Scotland represent civil and mechanical engineers? Narrowing the focus, I explore what Glasgow provided, pedagogically and institutionally, for its technical classes. I ask how the engineers prepared for and reacted to visitations by not just the IMechE but also the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). What “urban clusters” of engineers in and around Glasgow supported Rankine in the formation of a new body that, rather than filling a void, created a rival to preexisting

38  Ben Marsden associations? How did these engineers, in collaboration with civic authorities, publishers, and others, align the mission of the IES with the vision of Glasgow as the “metropolis of mechanics”?

Cities and Scientific Institutions in South and North Britain From the 1970s, historians of science and technology in Britain have turned, with some care, to the major town or city as a unit of analysis. Thackray’s seminal study of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (founded in 1781) helped to alert scholars to the many “Lit & Phil” societies which simultaneously constructed scientific communities, often in an industrial or medical context, while promoting literary and philosophical culture in the British provinces.3 Reports of the proceedings and projects of urban associations provided apparently unified “voices” for cities on matters philosophical, medical, and industrial—but historians, increasingly, have queried what lay behind such carefully manufactured surface consent. Inkster and Morrell have shown us the diverse relationships between local intellectual and commercial groups in the provinces, and the mixed attitudes of provincial scientific societies toward their metropolitan counterparts.4 Morrell’s cautionary tale of Wissenschaft in ­“Worstedopolis” reminds us that philosophical institutions might not take off even in apparently well-placed cities: Bradford’s successful textile industry was not in itself enough to sustain the vibrant scientific societies typical of Manchester’s “Cottonopolis.”5 What of Edinburgh and the collective opportunities this city provided for engineers? Edinburgh remained, post-Union, the centre of Scottish law, of a distinctive education, and of national commemoration.6 But viewed from London it was, if not exactly “provincial,” then secondary. Edinburgh’s secondary status had ramifications for associational engineering. Despite the Scottish origins of many prominent British engineers, not least James Watt, Edinburgh had no association exclusively for engineers. From 1783, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) did for Scotland what the Royal Society of London (founded in 1660) did for Britain—and more, since the RSE’s remit was broader.7 A Scottish Society of Arts (founded in 1821) was Edinburgh’s response to London’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (founded in 1754, chartered 1847, later the Royal Society of Arts).8 The Royal Society of Arts, with its metropolitan base, purported to represent its objects nationally, for Britain, even after incorporation of the Scottish Society of Arts as the “Royal Scottish Society of Arts” (RSSA) by Royal Charter in 1841. In fact, as a newcomer open to all, the Scottish body had a relatively low status—although it kept to its mission to examine, encourage, and reward practical industry. Apparently egalitarian, the RSSA actually observed a hierarchy of intellect in which science professors presided and assessed, civil engineers engaged, and artisan inventors genuflected.9

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  39 With no exclusive engineering association in Scotland, elite Scottish engineers had various options: remaining institutionally unattached, becoming somewhat marginal Fellows of the RSE, and participating in the RSSA meetings. Edinburgh’s civil engineers’ offices certainly did cluster together near the RSSA in a New Town district rich with insurance companies, accountants, banks, lawyers, and publishers. Indeed, in 1857, the Scottish capital had approximately 65 self-designated “engineers” spread across the city and its sporadic industrial locations; approximately 80% of the 25 self-designated “civil engineers” had offices on George Street (a major artery of the New Town’s grid), on roads parallel to and to the north of George Street, on roads cutting across it, or at St Andrew’s Square which terminated George Street to the east. Prominent lighthouse engineers David and Thomas Stevenson were near the epicenter of this engineering cluster at 84 George Street, just a short walk to 51 George Street—and the Hall of the RSSA.10 Despite the sense of professional community no doubt generated, in Edinburgh at least, by this clustering, most Scottish engineers would eventually join the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE, founded in 1818) as associate (for trainees), full member (for experienced engineers), or honorary member (for those interested in the science, rather than the practice, of engineering). But the London-based ICE catered best to engineers within easy reach of the southern metropolis. Nineteenth-century consulting engineers’ offices formed their own “urban cluster” around London’s Great George Street, where the ICE had its offices, close to Westminster’s corridors of political power.11 To get an institutional identity as a Scottish engineer, it was still advisable to seek ICE membership, despite the difficulty of traveling from Scotland to attend meetings.12

“An Industrious and Intelligent Body”: Philosophical Engineering in Glasgow Engineers situated in Glasgow dealt with similar associational angst against a backdrop of growing population and industry, while academies, publishers, statisticians, and societies grappled with urban change. In 1804, city historian James Denholm claimed Glasgow’s population had grown from approximately 24,000 in 1755 to a staggering 86,630 by 1801. Although Denholm documented Glasgow’s buildings, institutions, commerce, and manufactures, most impressive to him was the growth in human capital which made Glasgow the second most populous city in Britain, behind London, but ahead of the third (Manchester) and the fourth (Edinburgh).13 Recent scholars juxtapose this demographic and mechanical Glasgow with the “Glasgow of the imagination,” expressed in architecture, townscape (a New Town grid of streets extending westward from the medieval city)— and carefully crafted public utterance. Between 1851 and 1871, Glasgow’s population expanded from 329,097 to 477,732.14 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the city had become the center of a dense web of rail links

40  Ben Marsden extending to Stirling, Edinburgh, Ayr, and, via Carlisle, to Manchester, Birmingham, and London. Glasgow initially struggled, as we shall see, to establish itself as a center of railway manufacture and heavy engineering, but a powerful chemical industry worked with textile spinning and weaving and Glasgow’s shipbuilding and marine engineering expanded, with bespoke marine steam engines powering iron-hulled ships. These industries grew with active support from local government, who also ensured that the river Clyde, originally a natural boundary to the south of the city, was made navigable almost to the city’s center. This concentration of skill and industrial innovation was concurrent with a boost in the production and consumption of science classes. Collaboration and competition, in equal measure, helped to complicate the pedagogic culture afforded to artisans and technical professionals. The University of Glasgow (founded in 1450), or “College,” situated on the High Street to the east, had recruited James Watt as its instrument maker in the late 1750s.15 Yet in 1796, as a rebuke to the University for its preoccupation with traditional professional studies, natural philosophy professor John Anderson gave his money and his name to the Andersonian University, or “Andersonian”: with premises at 204 George Street, to the west of the College, the Andersonian served artisans, tradesmen, practical professionals, and popular audiences—even ladies.16 From 1823, the Glasgow Mechanics Institution at 57 North Hanover Street a few blocks west of the Andersonian, offered, for an annual fee of 10 shillings, lectures, often delivered by Andersonian staff, and an extensive library and museum. In the summer of 1839, Glaswegians hungry for natural philosophy, chemistry, or “mechanical philosophy” could also consider the Gorbals Popular Institution for the Diffusion of Science and the Calton, Mile-End and Bridgeton Mechanics’ Institution for Improvement in the Arts and Sciences.17 In 1840, against this backdrop, the Crown controversially imposed a chair of civil engineering and mechanics on the College, at a time when other British universities were also experimenting with academic courses for engineers. The Glasgow professor met with crushing opposition from within and beyond the College, despite having industry-friendly natural philosophy professor William Thomson as a neighbor from 1846.18 For the literary representation of artisanal skill and technical ambition, the city had various periodicals including the Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine; and Annals of Philosophy (sporadically published in Glasgow from 1824), an imitator of the London-based Mechanics’ Magazine (founded in 1823), and the Practical Mechanic and Engineers’ Magazine (1841–1847).19 The Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine noted in 1824 the laudable instruction of “working Mechanics” wherein Glasgow, “the second city of the Empire in wealth and population,” had led the way, far more so than Edinburgh.20 Mechanics would be Glasgow’s spokesmen. The editors enjoined the “numerous classes of Mechanics in Glasgow” to associate, to discuss, and

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  41 to publish so that their Magazine “may be considered as the philosophical transactions of such an industrious and intelligent body.” By so doing, they would “shed a halo of scientific glory round the name of their native city; and she that has stood so proudly pre-eminent among the cities of our land, for her commerce and manufactures, may also … rise so high in the scale of intellectual superiority, as even to emulate the most learned cities in Europe.”21 Yet the city already had its Glasgow Philosophical Society (GPS), founded in 1802, as a forum for local figures, among them professors, industrialists, political economists, and statisticians, to anatomize, document, and publicize, inter alia, the practical arts, industry, and invention.22 The GPS liaised with local industry effectively but sporadically and, in an echo of the Bradford case, its status was unstable. As a local philosophical society struggling to reach a critical mass of active members, it catered for diverse interest groups, offering Glasgow’s response to Edinburgh’s RSSA and Royal Society. The Society’s fortunes picked up in the 1840s allowing the GPS, through its publications, to contribute to the discursive construction of “Glasgow” as a place which, rather than being spoken for by its mechanics alone, valued scientific theory and practice working in harmony.23 From the session of 1841/1842, Proceedings of the GPS printed by local publisher and apparatus manufacturer Richard Griffin & Co. appeared, and the muchmaligned Glasgow College professor of civil engineering and mechanics, Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon, convened a section of “Physics, including mechanics and engineering” as part of the GPS program.24 In the mid-1840s, the GPS would meet at the Andersonian, a fact which again confirmed its openness to practice. Glasgow’s community of engineers had grown with the city’s population: self-designated “civil engineers” numbered approximately 3 [sic] in 1831, 20 in 1841, and 45 in 1861; there were approximately five times as many self-designated “engineers.”25 In the spring of 1857, Glasgow had more self-designated “civil engineers” than Edinburgh boasted, with perhaps 35. The newer parts of the city were characterized with a grid of streets, echoing Edinburgh’s New Town, and stretching to the west of the ceremonial George Square, the Andersonian, Glasgow College, and the High Street. Local political power was then focused in the City Chambers, at Wilson Street, east of George Square. Half of the civil engineers of the 1850s set up premises on four streets in the heart of Glasgow’s vibrant commercial center and close to railways approaching from Edinburgh: West George Street and St Vincent Street (running west in parallel from the north and south boundaries of George Square) and Renfield Street and Buchanan Street (running roughly north to south).26 From the early 1850s, the GPS had wooed Glasgow’s engineers anew. But the events that encouraged Glasgow’s engineers to congregate institutionally were carefully orchestrated visits to Glasgow by the BAAS in 1855 and the IMechE in 1856.

42  Ben Marsden

“Strangers May Learn Something from Us”: The BAAS and the IMechE The BAAS celebrated provincial urban culture, meeting for a festival of science in a different British town or city other than London each year.27 The host that combined an active philosophical society with educative and amusing industrial sites was ideal. A second Scottish meeting (after Edinburgh) took place in Scotland’s second city, Glasgow, in 1840. Local engineers jumped at the opportunity to perform, and to self-publicize, in the “Mechanical Science” Section.28 An exhibition of “models and manufactures” invaded the Monteith and Arcade Rooms, off Buchanan Street, venues more used to displays of fine art. That exhibition, open to BAAS visitors and later the paying public, repeated the message that Glasgow was, near enough, the birthplace of steam icon James Watt. Entering the Lower Monteith Room, visitors saw the University of Glasgow’s prized possession, the “Original MODEL with which the celebrated James Watt experimented while inventing the application of a separate Condenser to the Steam Engine,”29 an object which, according to an Edinburgh reviewer, “calls for something not much short of awe.”30 In the aftermath of Glasgow’s success, cities feverishly recruited local institutions, officials, dignitaries, and industrialists to persuade the BAAS to visit.31 Key figures within an emerging engineering faction of the BAAS, Joseph Whitworth and William Fairbairn, were prominent in the IMechE, which had been founded in 1847. The IMechE had broken away from the ICE, setting up offices and library in Birmingham, and arranging for Proceedings to be published annually by Benjamin Hunt, publisher of that city. Most meetings took place in Birmingham—although Manchester and, sometimes, London were venues as well. Contemporaries quibbled over the name, status, and urban affiliation of the IMechE: were not all engineers “mechanical,” asked the Mechanics’ Magazine (unsurprisingly)? Should the new Institution be regarded as “a rival or as an auxiliary to the London Institution of Civil Engineers”? One thing was clear: it had “Birmingham for its head quarters [sic].”32 In contemporary parlance, the IMechE, or “Mechanicals,” were the “Mechanical Engineers, Birmingham,” the “Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Birmingham,” or simply the “Birmingham Engineers.” These names undermined the IMechE’s pretense at national representation, making the body into a rebellious local branch of the ICE.33 To overturn such perceptions, the IMechE found ways of recruiting members from across Britain—including North Britain. In September 1855, Glasgow prepared to receive the BAAS, for a second time, and an extraordinary 2,140 delegates. Sectional meetings took place at Glasgow College. Working to ensure a warm welcome for the engineers was Lewis Gordon’s deputy and friend, W. J. M. Rankine. An experienced institutional operator at the ICE, the RSSA, the BAAS, the RSE, the Royal Society of London, and the GPS, Rankine had connections with Glasgow

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  43 lawyers, bankers, and city council officers.34 Engineers were present in record-breaking numbers at sectional meetings over which Rankine presided. Indeed, the 42 papers delivered might have filled an annual program.35 Trusted narratives concerning the city’s scientific history, Watt’s place as hero of invention, and the fruitful application of science to practice were redeployed.36 Addressing the “Mechanical Science” section, Rankine noted that the papers laid before the audience were such as might be expected at a place of meeting whose neighbourhood is well known to abound in striking instances of the successful application of mechanical science to practice … [A] more appropriate scene could not be found than this university, whose walls afforded shelter, and whose inmates, invaluable friendship, to the early days of obscurity and toil of him who afterwards showed to the world the brightest example of that combination of practice and science which it is our aim to promote—James Watt.37 In November 1855, following Gordon’s strategic resignation from his professorship, Rankine was formally appointed, unopposed, to the engineering chair by the Home Office. In January 1856, his inaugural lecture, delivered at the University, on the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics, made the Newcomen model into an object of worship, even pilgrimage, to the engineer: “ever since, in Reason’s eye, that small and uncouth mass of wood and metal shines with imperishable beauty, as the earliest embodiment of the genius of James Watt.”38 An address on the Science of the Engineer, delivered at the opening of the engineering class in the autumn of 1856, again extolled Watt’s virtues.39 These addresses were widely reported, in the local newspapers and in the Mechanics’ Magazine, edited by E. J. Reed, a noted enthusiast for scientific naval architecture.40 Rankine again told his students that Glasgow was the place to study, retelling the story of the steam engine’s improvement under enlightened hands: “Watt set to work scientifically from the first … (and you well know that near this spot he pursued his studies).”41 The GPS, too, built upon the momentum developed at the BAAS meeting. With a scientific library of 2,500 volumes and 40 scientific periodicals, and with more than 300 members, the Society was thriving.42 When anatomy professor Allen Thomson opened the GPS session in November 1855, he told the members who had gathered within the Andersonian: “science has prospered in the hospitable care of our city.” Thomson, like Rankine, attributed the success of the BAAS meeting, first, to “the attractions which Glasgow presents as one of the greatest seats of the successful application of scientific principles to important, useful, and practical objects.”43 Rankine was swiftly elected a Vice President of the GPS, and among the Members of Council appointed were two men who shared his enthusiasms: ­Rankine’s business partner, the iron shipbuilder James Robert Napier; and

44  Ben Marsden the Glasgow-apprenticed and Andersonian-schooled mechanical engineer and foundry owner, Walter Montgomerie Neilson. Neilson had joined the BAAS in 1855 to attend the meeting.44 The IMechE, too, appears to have learnt from Glasgow’s successful showcasing of its industry. The IMechE borrowed the idea of staging “Annual Provincial Meetings,” to facilitate “personal communication” and to take “opportunities of visiting … important Engineering Works.”45 In June 1856, the “Birmingham” Institution announced a summer meeting in Glasgow, designed to increase others’ interest in the IMechE. A local committee started to make arrangements.46 Rankine as chair and J. R. Napier as deputy-chair recruited 25 engineers and industrialists, among them Walter ­Neilson and William Tait (once Foreman at Neilson’s locomotive works). In July 1856, a “preliminary meeting” encouraged Glasgow’s engineers to speak “upon local subjects” before “eminent mechanical engineers from England.”47 Late in August, the Provost (or Mayor) of Glasgow spoke publicly at the Council Hall about what was now to be, rather than a one-off event, the first of a series of gatherings “to be held in Glasgow, by rotation, with … ­London, Manchester, and Birmingham.”48 Accompanied by local landowner Sir John Maxwell, lawyer Sheriff Bell, city statistician John Strang, various councilors, Rankine and Napier, the Provost spoke of the benefits to the “engineers of this city” and Rankine looked forward to “occasional visits [plural] in Glasgow of the members of the society.” Bell hyperbolized that half of the population of Glasgow “were interested in pursuits connected with mechanical engineering” and claimed: “Glasgow might be said to be a Newcastle, a Birmingham, a Liverpool, and a Manchester in one.”49 The Glasgow Herald, agreeing with Bell’s urban comparisons, nevertheless cautioned: “Strangers may learn something from us, and we are not so selfsufficient as to decline a hint from them.”50 The IMechE visitation spread over three days in September 1856.51 The business meetings took place at the Scottish Exhibition Rooms on Bath Street, north of West George Street, where many engineers had offices; walls were rehung with engineering drawings, and machines and models distributed about the passageways. President Joseph Whitworth (of Manchester) opened the meeting with signature calls for precision measurement, interchangeable parts, education for operatives, and a reduction of “legislative obstacles” to progress.52 He hoped to see “many valuable members” added; Robert Napier, father of J. R. Napier and future President of the IMechE, was one who joined at this time.53 Whitworth hinted at mutual support between an institution (the IMechE) and a city (Glasgow).54 William Fairbairn (also of Manchester) and naval architect John Scott Russell (then based in London, but Glasgow born) commented liberally on the papers delivered by local figures including the marine engineer Charles Randolph, the patent agent Edmund Hunt and Neilson (in absentia). An evening conversazione, open to ladies and convened in the Glasgow Gallery of Art and Corporation Halls at Sauchiehall Street, signaled the Town Council’s unequivocal

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  45 support. Pleasing examples of “models and machinery, tools, steam-ships, locomotives” were on view at this new venue, mixing local exhibits, including J. R. Napier’s patent coffee-pot from which coffee was indeed served, with IMechE totems like Whitworth’s machine for measuring a millionth of an inch.55 At the end of the formal proceedings, Rankine insisted that the “institution had resolved to meet annually in Glasgow in future.” Affluent delegates went on to an “excellent dinner, moistened by good port, sherry, claret, and champagne” at Carrick’s Royal Hotel on George Square. There the IMechE delegation mixed with local engineers as the guests of the Town Council. It was left to Fairbairn to toast the Town Council of “this great city” of Glasgow, dubbed, routinely, the “cradle of the first principles of the steamengine,” and to look forward to the “progress of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in this city.” The Provost quantified the city’s immense wealth; Scott Russell looked forward to the publication of papers delivered in the transactions of the IMechE and discoursed on the national value of sharing engineering knowledge.56 All that remained was the obligatory “excursion down the Clyde” and to Loch Lomond for a party of 300 in the fast steamer Vulcan kindly provided by Mr (probably Robert) Napier.57 A week later, the Glasgow Herald, though quibbling about the way in which such meetings might degenerate into competitive puffing of rival projects, noted that “many persons look forward with pleasure to the next annual meeting in Glasgow.”58 Original plans for a single summer meeting had morphed into the idea of a series of annual visits so that Glasgow might stand beside Birmingham, Manchester, and London.59

A “Meeting of Scotch Engineers”: The Institution of Engineers in Scotland A snapshot of Glasgow early in 1857 indicates a peak in the number of scientific and medical societies recently formed—although none exclusively for engineers to talk shop. Antiquarians and gardeners could meet at the Glasgow Archaeological Society (founded in 1856) and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Horticultural Society (1857). Physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons were generously provided for through the Glasgow Medical Society (1814), the Glasgow Southern Medical Society (1844), and the Medico-Chirurgical Society (1844). The Natural History Society (1851) was another newcomer, while the Glasgow Association of Natural Science (1856) aimed for “mutual improvement” by “all young men in Glasgow whose time and tastes permit them to study natural science.” The most likely place at which the engineers might congregate was the GPS which, in 1857, remained loyal to its original agenda of discussing both “arts and sciences,” anticipated a fruitful dialogue between theory and practice, and claimed to provide a venue suitable for “the exhibition of new models and inventions.”60

46  Ben Marsden Although the GPS had opened its doors to the engineers, in 1857 Glasgow could still not compete with the RSSA in engineering matters, quirky and particular to Edinburgh’s local culture though that Society’s remit remained—especially once the RSSA began to publish its Transactions in 1841. In the six sessions between 1850/1851 and 1855/1856, the RSSA had published papers by gunsmiths, chemists, photographers (among them the young James Clerk Maxwell), mathematics teachers, and instrument makers; but, at least in print, the RSSA was then dominated by Edinburgh’s professors (including George Wilson, the University’s professor of technology) and elite engineers (notably David and Thomas Stevenson): approximately half of those whose papers merited preservation in print styled themselves “Civil Engineer.”61 A society for engineers might have emerged in Glasgow as a local offshoot of the RSSA—and, indeed, the RSSA would later claim it had encouraged just such a thing. The IMechE also seemed to approve of the idea of a Glasgow branch society, meeting once a year. But such a move would have marginalized Glasgow’s civil engineers and made its mechanical engineers subservient to the Birmingham group. Walter Neilson’s diary illustrates, even in recollection, the frustration that might be felt about such matters. Neilson knew what it was to create industry in Glasgow against tough competition from England and what it was to use local societies to extol the mechanical virtues of the city. He had joined the GPS in the mid-1840s62 and managed a successful GPS exhibition in 1846 at the City Hall. A “statistical account” recorded that there had been an entire section on mechanics and engineering.63 During the 1840s’ railway boom, Neilson witnessed “the number of Railways that were being made in Scotland,” and seeing “every thing for them being made in England,” he “determined to try to get some of the work for Scotland.”64 Neilson shared Rankine’s concern to create steam engines that would realize the “economy” of high-pressure steam,65 and by the 1850s, he had added locomotive engines to his portfolio. But, procuring few orders, he was, he said: invariably told that Glasgow was not a place for locomotives, for steamers yes, they admitted that the Clyde was the place for steamers by birth right, and some of my friends seriously advised me, that if I intended to give myself up to Locomotive making, I ought to go to England, about Manchester, my reply to this always was, that if they could not be made in Glasgow and by Scotch workmen too, they never be made by one [a Scotchman] in England.66 Neilson complained: the “prejudice against me in England, was so strong, that I would never have succeeded had it not been for the orders for Scotch Railways.” Feelings ran high: “I intended to bring the Locomotive engine trade to Glasgow & what was worse, I did not intend to employ a single Englishman.”67

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  47 Neilson described the IMechE, despite its efforts at reform, to be “similar to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London—to which they [the mechanical engineers] were not admissible.”68 Some “friend,” without his knowledge, had proposed him and he was “elected a member” of the IMechE.69 The Mechanicals, he noted, had made “great efforts” to “obtain Scotch engineers as members,” but some of the key Glasgow engineers had objected to this further (English) show of domination. Neilson had been “extremely dissatisfied with the grasping and presumption of the English engineers and had always been an enemy to the centralization of everything in London, so determined to have an Institution of Engineers in Scotland.” He, therefore, resigned from the “Institution in England” (presumably the IMechE) and communicated with his friends “the engineers in Scotland” who offered warm support—but many had already joined the “English institution.” He tried to persuade his “most intimate friend” J. R. Napier to join him in promoting a Scottish institution, but Napier originally “stoutly opposed” the idea, since it ran against Napier’s successful efforts to open up the GPS to engineers.70 Neilson nevertheless accumulated “many good names”—and a meeting was called.71 Neilson somehow convinced Rankine and Napier to try for an independent society, and on March 17, 1857, he chaired a “General Meeting of Engineers” at the GPS Hall in the Andersonian University (where he had been an enthusiastic student of science). The discussion revolved around the formation of a “Society to promote the advancement of Engineering Science and Practice, in Scotland, and to enable the Engineers of Glasgow … to take the prominent and important position to which they are entitled by their labors.” Rankine, Neilson, and Napier prepared a description of such a “Society of Engineers” to be presented at a second meeting.72 These men had powerful and varied local credentials. Their fathers were, respectively, David Rankine, once Treasurer of the Caledonian Railway; Robert Napier, preeminent iron ship-builder and marine engineer73; and James Beaumont Neilson, inventor of the hot-blast furnace.74 The next generation had made their mark locally, as one of very few professors of engineering, as an innovative shipbuilder, and as the manager of a major Glasgow locomotive works. That these men had buried their differences and could work together is further indicated by their cowritten report on “the progress and state of applied mechanics” in Glasgow for the GPS.75 Neilson recalled: “the institution I proposed was to embrace mechanical, civil, mining, gas, and all other engineers.”76 Draft rules listed military engineers, shipbuilders, founders—and, crucially, all others qualified by their knowledge of “Mechanical Science or Practice.”77 The follow-up meeting of “Scotch engineers” took place in mid-April 1857 again at the GPS Hall. Neilson claimed that he proposed the provocative name “Institution of Engineers in Scotland,” forgetting any mention of “Glasgow”; and, “after considerable discussion,” that name was approved.78 Was it to be an institution not simply for Glasgow but for all “Engineers in

48  Ben Marsden Scotland”? The same meeting received the draft rules and objectives concocted by Neilson, Napier, and Rankine, and agreed to the enlargement of the committee to include local civil and mechanical engineers, millwrights, mining inspectors, iron founders, and (essential) an accountant: Messrs Neil Robson, Alexander More, William Alexander, David Rowan, John Downie, and Andrew McOnie.79 Neilson was, he claimed, “unanimously requested to be the president, but I declined and suggested Prof Macquorn Rankine.”80 Rankine accepted the position, serving as first president from May 1, 1857, until October 1859, after which Neilson took over. Originally the local engineers Napier, Neilson, and Robson were Vice-Presidents. Local too were the Treasurer and the Honorary Secretary. Among the council members were many of Glasgow’s railway engineers. The Secretary, who would receive a generous salary of £100 per annum, was the patent agent E. Hunt, whose premises were conveniently central at 28 St Enoch Square. These men ensured the rapid success of the IES, so that when Neilson took over the Presidency, he inherited a position of status. He recalled that he had been treated with “great kindness & hospitality” by the managers of railways he toured in America, “in consequence of my being at the time President of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland.”81 Between May and October 1857, the chief players in the nascent institution refined its objects and its constitution. The IES would be inclusive, avoiding the growing trend for new engineering associations to specialize.82 It would invert the ICE’s lukewarm attitude toward engineering science and academic training for engineers and instead acknowledge the growth, since the late 1830s, of university-based training in Durham, London, Dublin, and of course Glasgow.83 Rankine’s credentials, which from the 1850s were chiefly scientific, had proved insufficient ever to win him full membership of the ICE—a circumstance which may have grated. The IES explicitly welcomed a diverse range of individuals with different interests and experience. An advertisement in the Glasgow Herald in May 1857 proclaimed: This Institution was founded for the promotion of Engineering and ­Mechanical Science and Practice in Scotland. Engineers of all Classes, and other persons skilled in Mechanical Science or Practice, are eligible for admission as Members. Persons pursuing a course of study to qualify themselves for the Engineering Profession are eligible for admission as Graduates.84 In the early days of the IES, when it had no property or dedicated space, the inner core several times met at Rankine’s office in the commercial center of Glasgow, eschewing Glasgow College which, before the University moved into its imposing neo-Gothic buildings in the city’s West End, remained in insalubrious surroundings and was to the east of the city’s business center.85 Rankine had moved permanently to 59 St Vincent Street in the early 1850s

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  49 and his office lay, conveniently, within three or four blocks of the offices of many of Glasgow’s civil and mechanical engineers. He was so concerned that his name, business, and address were publicly known that in the summer of 1853 he had successfully sued the directors of Glasgow’s Post Office Directory for damages when his St Vincent Street address was accidentally garbled.86 A far from neutral space nevertheless become a privileged site for the early governance of an institution purporting to speak collectively, and impartially, for the “Engineers in Scotland.” Of course, the professional ethos of the consulting engineer favored impartiality, at least in theory; more than that, Rankine’s professorial role underwrote his performance of impartiality—and the St Vincent Street address was, for Rankine, as much professorial as professional: he rarely dated letters of any kind from the College.87 To Rankine’s allies, 59 St Vincent Street was a local node of scientifically informed, academically sanctioned, and professional engineering. What his detractors, and the detractors of the IES project, thought is another matter.

Puffing the IES in the “Metropolis of Mechanics” Ensuring the IES did not go the way of many short-lived Victorian societies required expert media management, utilizing Glasgow’s distinctive material and cultural resources.88 To supplement face-to-face approaches, the IES advertised in local newspapers and national periodicals. Ahead of the first general meeting in October 1857, the Secretary placed advertisements in one London-based professional magazine, the Engineer, which since its foundation in 1856 had strongly supported science-based engineering; and one Edinburgh-based newspaper, the Scotsman. But adverts went to no fewer than eight newspapers produced in Glasgow, including the Daily Bulletin and Daily Mail, the thrice-weekly Herald and Courier, the weekly Advertizer, Gazette and Citizen, and the advertisement-only North British Advertiser. The IES Council did not forget London and Edinburgh but its primary target, at the beginning, was clearly Glasgow.89 The IES also capitalized on preexisting connections with local and national publishers to distribute its manifesto. To Rankine, as founding President, fell the duty of crafting an address, to be delivered at the opening of the first full session, on the “nature and objects” of the IES. Rankine, far more than Napier or Neilson, was a well-known, prolific, and authoritative technical author—although his attempts at truly popular writing had fallen flat.90 Two often reproduced professorial addresses extolled the virtues of engineering science; Rankine was developing very fruitful links with the Glasgow printers and publishers William Mackenzie and with Charles Griffin, at Richard Griffin & Co., who would publish his “manuals” of engineering science. Rankine delivered his address at the GPS Hall on October 28, 1857, a date which strategically coincided with the opening of the ­Glasgow College session; using the GPS’s Hall (at first for free, later rented at

50  Ben Marsden £15 per year) meant the relationship between the IES, the GPS, the Andersonian, and, with Rankine in the Chair, the College could hardly be closer. A reporter received two guineas to take down the address and, thus, ensure Rankine’s words were faithfully and widely distributed. Neilson insisted that extra pamphlet copies were printed off, by Mackenzie, whose 45–47 Howard Street premises were just a stone’s throw from Secretary Hunt’s office at St Enoch Square.91 In November, the Engineer and Mechanics’ Magazine both published accounts of this “newly-formed scientific association.”92 How, though, would Rankine reimagine Glasgow as the right place for the IES? His readers were reminded of the IMechE’s visit to Glasgow, when the promoters of that meeting had “considered … that a Society of Engineers holding its meetings in Scotland—and in Glasgow as the best mechanical centre—would be successful, and highly advantageous.” The new society would combine mechanical and civil engineering “as both branches … were now closely united since the extensive and increasing use of iron in building.” Unlike properly scientific or merely diffusionist societies, the IES aimed at “the improvement of practice, by keeping practical men informed of the experiments and improvements in science effected elsewhere, and collecting the results of their experience.” The Institution would allow engineers to “record … whatever discoveries they might incidentally make in the pursuit of their business.” IES members were to replace reckless speculation with rational “economy,” taking care to “accomplish an end by means just sufficient to do so in the most scientific and serviceable manner”; they would favor experiments “tried upon a large scale.” A unified society voice could lobby government on standards of measure, patent law reform, and public safety. Playing to the local audience, Rankine concluded: the locality in which they had established their society was perhaps the very best that could be selected and … [to repeat Glasgow lawyer Sheriff Bell’s words] Glasgow contained in itself the mineral, mechanical, and commercial properties possessed partly by Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle,—for it was a city that possessed the manufactures of Manchester, the shipping of Liverpool, the hardware of Birmingham, and the coal of Newcastle—(applause)—and considering the vast extent and the great perfection to which some branches of its practical mechanics had arrived—especially its skilful iron shipbuilding and engine making—it could fairly be called the “metropolis of mechanics.” (Loud applause.)93 Although Rankine cited Bell’s recent utterance, he might have alluded to a widely distributed report “On the progress of Glasgow, in population, wealth, manufactures, &c.” which John Strang had presented in 1850 to the BAAS at its Edinburgh meeting (which Rankine had attended). Strang too represented Glasgow as a city which was, unlike any other in Britain, rich in

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  51 all forms of industry simultaneously—as Crosbie Smith suggests, a place of economic cosmopolitanism: Glasgow unites within itself a portion of the cotton-spinning and weaving manufactures of Manchester, the printed calicoes of Lancashire, … the flax-spinning of Ireland, the carpets of Kidderminster, the iron and engineering works of Wolverhampton and Birmingham, the pottery and glass-making of Staffordshire and Newcastle, the ship-building of London, the coal trade of the Tyne and Wear ….94 If Manchester, for its cotton industry, was “Cottonopolis” and Bradford, for its preeminence in worsteds, “Worstedopolis,” then Glasgow was the very “metropolis of mechanics.” No wonder copies of Rankine’s address were soon available gratis “to persons serious of learning the nature of objects of the institution with the view of joining it.”95 The IES had a robust membership of 127 by the end of its first session in April 1858.96 Full membership cost three guineas so, rather than fostering inclusion, only the middle classes or better need apply. Glasgow-based engineers dominated. The local Government Inspector of Mines and engineers to the Glasgow City Gas Works and the Glasgow Corporation Water Works ensured a municipal presence. Engineers, industrialists, and shipbuilders from other parts of Scotland made up the numbers. Edinburgh city engineers were absent with one exception: Benjamin Blyth. There was just a single member from continental Europe (Hamburg); and the other member from abroad, John Thomson, had been Rankine’s professional partner before heading to India to build imperial railways. Railway engineers were common, as were shipbuilders (including Robert Napier) and those responsible for iron works, engine works, and foundries. Mining, gas, and canal engineers were present too. At least five of the eight student members passed through Rankine’s university class. Thus, the IES did not initially attract Edinburgh’s engineering community or even the scientific engineers with whom Rankine mixed.97 Rankine’s address, with its palatable vision of Glasgow, would also open the first volume of the IES Transactions which appeared around August 1858, after the conclusion of a session which had seen eight monthly meetings— with entertaining papers, discussions, and committees on topics ranging from Whitworth’s decimal division of the inch, through the virtues of using steam expansively, and on to a report by Neilson on “American locomotives.”98 The ICE had existed for 20 years before its Minutes of Proceedings appeared in annual volumes, relying in the 1820s and 1830s upon the Mechanics’ Magazine, the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal, and other periodicals to report meetings.99 The IES, in competition with the ICE, RSSA, IMechE, and other publishing societies, made good on early plans to publish an annual record of its meetings. Mackenzie published the Transactions, thus providing excellent publicity, a concrete benefit to members,

52  Ben Marsden and a good way to build up a library “by exchange” with other metropolitan and provincial societies.100 The Transactions also helped the IES to claim a national presence, as an institution for Scotland, not England, transcending key bodies based in London or Birmingham, despite the Glaswegian inflections of the IES project, publicly summarized in the summer of 1858 as “the encouragement and advancement of engineering science and practice,” while placing “on record the results of experience elicited in discussion.”101 On Neilson’s suggestion, a medallion profile of Watt appeared as the seal of the IES and also on the title page of the Transactions, as emblem of academic science applied to practice, lest anyone should doubt the connection between the society, the city, and the city’s famous son.102 Despite the best efforts of the Council of the IES to generate a discursive construction of their institution as representative of Glasgow’s distinctive— yet, in its allegiance to science, placeless—engineering ethos, prominent critics remained at best uncooperative and at worst dismissive. Neilson moaned: “Having been the former, or the founder of this institution I was looked to for the providing of papers, to be read at the meetings … I found considerable difficulty, & had the opposition of the London Institution & the Scotch Engineers who had joined it.”103 In November 1858, the “Scotchman” and steamboat engineer David Napier thoroughly exposed the “self-constituted self-elected” IES as just another of those associations which: originated with some vain self-conceited persons who had acquired a fluency of speech and a smattering of everything, without a practical knowledge of anything, and even sometimes used for discreditable purposes, such as puffing off [i.e., praising] the works of friends and favourites.104 David Napier’s chief target was Professor Rankine, a man, he said, of whom he had heard nothing during his “long career in Glasgow,” and yet who now made statements in a “bold and dictatorial manner” and “assumed the didactic.” Napier profoundly disagreed with Rankine’s protestation against experiments with small-scale models, claiming that his Rob Roy, once the fastest ship on the Clyde, had been produced by methods Rankine claimed were useless. Still: “it is much better for those who cannot find sufficient scope for their capacious minds at home teaching themselves and children, to meet as they do, if they should talk nonsense, rather than indulge in the pernicious habit of drinking.”105 Despite these detractors, the IES had a loyal paying membership and an impressive list of Honorary Members. Most of the latter were Rankine’s collaborators in academic engineering or the new science of thermodynamics (James Prescott Joule, William Thomson, and Rudolf Clausius).106 The largest boosts to membership came from a merger, in 1866, with the Scottish Shipbuilders’ Association, founded in Glasgow in 1860 as a regional rival to the London-based “Institution of Naval Architects” and the Royal School of

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  53 107

Naval Architecture. The merged “Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland” (IESS) pooled resources and membership, ensured financial stability and barely diluted the distinct scientific mission of the IES, especially because British naval architecture, in Glasgow and beyond, was then going through its own scientific reconstruction. J. R. Napier and Rankine produced their own vast Shipbuilding: theoretical and practical as but one contribution to the rebranding of Scottish iron shipbuilding as productively communicative with academia, mechanical engineering, and experimental science.108

Conclusion When the RSSA met in Edinburgh in 1871 for a “Jubilee Dinner,” the senior representative of the IESS was its Secretary, Rankine’s class assistant W. J. Millar who sat next to the RSSA President. There were tensions between the RSSA and the IESS. After Millar had commenced his journey back to Glasgow, science lecturer and chemist Dr Stevenson Macadam used his toast to “Kindred Societies” to settle some scores. In its first year, the Scottish Society of Arts had its main Council in Edinburgh, “but we arranged that there should also be a branch of our Society in Glasgow.” Some years had intervened between then and the formation of the “Glasgow Institution of Engineers” (sic), but it was surely “the impetus which we then gave … which ultimately gave birth to the Glasgow Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders” (sic). The RSSA first perceived the advantages of “the application of science to the arts and manufactures,” “must take credit” for this, and while wishing “such kindred societies every success, let us ask them at the same time to acknowledge us as the father of them all.”109 In a written reply, Millar conceded this paternity suit and geographical collapse, noting presumably without irony, the “honour done to our Glasgow Institution.” Civic rivalries bubbled away. In 1872, when Rankine’s chair fell vacant, a new generation of figures within the IESS seized the opportunity to consolidate the connections between institution, academia, and industry in Glasgow.110 Core IESS members assumed the authority to influence, if not to determine, who should occupy the Glasgow College chair, especially because of the close relationship between IES members, particularly graduate members, and students in the University’s engineering class. In a reciprocal but asymmetrical relationship, the IESS, created in part by a university academic, now sought to shape the university’s agenda. In a competition for the appointment, the IESS lobbied keenly to have its past President Lawrie, a shipbuilder and one-time partner of Neilson, appointed above James Thomson, brother of professor William Thomson.111 The victor, James Thomson, nevertheless ensured that the strong links between Glasgow’s university, its students, its institution, and its industry were sustained. This chapter explains some of the factors which made Glasgow, rather than Edinburgh, “well placed” to form an enduring association of engineers. In the early part of the century, with a growing population, burgeoning technical

54  Ben Marsden expertise, and enhanced communications, Glasgow had a complex associational culture. There were two very different universities, a philosophical society and a mechanics’ institution—all of which accumulated technical libraries and most of which provided paid work for a professoriate that thrived on institutional activity; there were spaces for industrial exhibitions and meetings; publishers churned out newspapers, distinctive technical periodicals, and post-office manuals grouping together professional specialists; the city boasted famous relics associated with icons like Watt. Visits by the BAAS and the IMechE, involving and testing the existing associational infrastructure, galvanized Glaswegian engineers and industrialists to create their own body. The new institution was in part a reaction, at a national level, to the perceived dominance of Scottish by English engineers—but also, at a civic level, of Glasgow’s engineers to those connected with London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh. In forming the institution, the city’s mechanical activity had been recruited, and the city had been reconstructed, discursively, as the “metropolis of mechanics,” a cosmopolitan city which encompassed most of the key industries for which other provincial cities were famed.

Acknowledgments I read an early version of this paper at the conference “Science and civic society in the nineteenth century” at the National University of Ireland, G ­ alway (2004). I am grateful to the editors, two referees, and Andrew Blaikie, Rebecca Duffield, and Andrew Mackillop for sharing their insights. I thank staff at Glasgow University Archive Services for their assistance.

Notes 1 R. Angus Buchanan, The engineers: a history of the engineering profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (Jessica Kingsley, London, 1989), 134–136. 2 C. A. Oakley, The second city (Blackie & Son, London and Glasgow, 1946), v. 3 Arnold Thackray, “Natural knowledge in cultural context: the Manchester model,” American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 672–709; Robert H. Kargon, Science in ­Victorian Manchester: enterprise and expertise (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1977); and J. R. R. Christie, “The origins and development of the S ­ cottish scientific community, 1680–1760,” History of Science, 12 (1974), 122–141. 4 Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds), Metropolis and province: science in British culture, 1780–1850 (Hutchinson, London, 1983); Iwan Rhys Morus, S. Schaffer, and J. Secord, “Scientific London,” in C. Fox (ed), London: World City, 1800–1840 (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1992), 129–142. 5 J. B. Morrell, “Wissenschaft in Worstedopolis: public science in Bradford, 1800–1850,” British Journal for the History of Science, 18 (1985), 1–23; J. V. Pickstone, “Ferrar’s fever and Kay’s cholera: disease and social structure in Cottonopolis,” Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin, 27 (1980), 19–22. 6 On the Scottish Union, see Christopher Whatley, The Scots and the Union: then and now (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2014). 7 Steven Shapin, “Property, patronage, and the politics of science: the founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,” British Journal for the History of Science, 7 (1974), 1–41.

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  55 8 Derek Hudson and Kenneth Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754–1954 (John Murray, London, 1954). 9 Ronald M. Birse, Engineering at Edinburgh University (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1983). 10 Information derived from Post Office Edinburgh and Leith Directory 1857–1858 (Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1857). For a map, see: W. H. Lizars, Plan of Edinburgh and Leith (1855–1856), at http://maps.nls.uk/towns/rec/5322. 11 Casper Andersen, British engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (Pickering & Chatto, London, 2011), 3–55 (“Engineers in Imperial London”). 12 Garth Watson, The Civils: the story of the Institution of Civil Engineers (Thomas Telford, London, 1988). 13 See, for example, James Denholm, The history of the city of Glasgow and suburbs (3rd ed., Chapman, Glasgow, 1804), v–vi (population). 14 Charles Withers, “The demographic history of the city, 1831–1911,” in W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver (eds), Glasgow. Volume II, 1830–1912 (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1996), 141–162, esp. 142. 15 J. Coutts, A history of the University of Glasgow, from its foundation in 1451 to 1909 (Maclehose and Sons, Glasgow, 1909). 16 James Muir, John Anderson: pioneer of technical education and the college he founded (John Smith, Glasgow, 1950); “Lectures on science for ladies. Andersonian University,” Glasgow Herald (November 11, 1844). 17 The Glasgow Post-Office Annual Directory for 1839–1840, 46–49. 18 James Small, “Engineering,” in Fortuna Domus (Glasgow University Press, Glasgow, 1952), 335–355; Ben Marsden, “‘A most important trespass’: Lewis Gordon and the Glasgow chair of civil engineering and mechanics, 1840–1855,” in Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (eds), Making space for science: territorial themes in the shaping of knowledge (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998), 87–117; Crosbie Smith, ‘“Nowhere but in a great town’: William Thomson’s spiral of classroom credibility,” in Smith and Agar, Making space for science, 118–146. 19 Iwan Rhys Morus, “Manufacturing nature: science, technology and Victorian consumer culture,” British Journal for the History of Science, 29 (1996), ­403–434; Christine MacLeod, Heroes of invention: technology, liberalism and British identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007). 20 Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine, preface to first volume, v. 21 Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine (January 3, 1824), 6. 22 See Oakley, Second city, 191; J. B. Morrell, “Reflections on the history of Scottish science,” History of Science, 12 (1974), 81–94. 23 M. Norton Wise (with the collaboration of Crosbie Smith), “Work and waste: political economy and natural philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain,” History of Science, 27 (1989), 263–301, 391–449 and 28 (1990), 221–261. 24 Proceedings of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, 1 (1841–1842), 1–2. 25 Figures inferred from contemporary postal directories for Glasgow. The categories “civil engineer” and “engineer” might overlap, but not all engineers were civil engineers. 26 Information derived from Post Office Glasgow Directory for 1857, 1858 (William Mackenzie, Glasgow, 1857). For a map, see: Joseph Swan, Plan of Glasgow and Suburbs (1857–1858), at http://maps.nls.uk/towns/rec/5001. 27 Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of science: early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981). 28 For the Glasgow meeting (1840), see Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of science, 202–222. 29 BAAS Report 1840; Anon, Catalogue of the exhibition of models and manufactures, &c. at the tenth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Robert Weir, Glasgow, 1840), esp. 4.

56  Ben Marsden 30 “Exhibition of models and manufactures at Glasgow,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (November 7, 1840), 333. 31 Ben Marsden, “The administration of the ‘engineering science’ of naval architecture at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1872,” Yearbook of European Administrative History, 20 (2008), 67–94. 32 Mechanics’ Magazine (May 29, 1847), 520. 33 See, for example, Morning Post (May 20, 1847); The Standard (October 29, 1847). 34 Ben Marsden, “Ranking Rankine: W. J. M. Rankine (1820–1872) and the making of ‘engineering science’ revisited,” History of Science, li (2013), 434–456. 35 See BAAS Report 1855 passim and Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 4 (1) (1855–1856), 1. 36 On Watt and other icons of ingenuity, see MacLeod, Heroes of invention. 37 “British Association for the Advancement of Science,” Mechanics’ Magazine (September 29, 1855), 293–294, on 294. 38 W. J. Macquorn Rankine, Introductory lecture on the harmony of theory and practice in mechanics (Richard Griffin, London and Glasgow, 1856), 22; “On the harmony of theory and practice in mechanics,” Mechanics’ Magazine (February 23, 1856), 175–177. 39 Introductory lecture on the science of the engineer (Richard Griffin, London and Glasgow, 1856); “The science of the engineer,” Mechanics’ Magazine (January 3 and 24, 1857), 2–4, 75–77. 40 On Reed, see Don Leggett, Shaping the Royal Navy: technology, authority and naval architecture, c. 1830–1906 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2015), esp. 87, 117. 41 Rankine, Science of the engineer, 7; and “The science of the engineer,” Mechanics’ Magazine (January 3, 1857), 2–4, on 3. 42 See, for example, Post-Office Directory Glasgow 1857, 58, 74. 43 Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 4 (1) (1855–1856), 2 (­T homson’s Presidential Address). The GPS used space within the ­A ndersonian from about 1847. 44 Ibid., 5; BAAS Report (1855), list of “Annual Subscribers.” Walter Neilson, “Diary & Notes of the principal occurrences of my life,” UGD 10/5/1, Glasgow University Archive Services (hereafter Neilson’s Diary). 45 “Annual report,” Proceedings. Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1861), 5 (reporting activities of 1860). 46 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Caledonian Mercury (June 19, 1856). 47 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Caledonian Mercury (July 7, 1856). 48 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Glasgow Herald (August 22, 1856). 49 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Glasgow Herald (August 27, 1856); and Caledonian Mercury (August 27, 1856). 50 “Approaching meeting of Mechanical Engineers in Glasgow,” Glasgow Herald (September 12, 1856). 51 See, for example, “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Mechanics’ Magazine (September 27, 1856), 299; the fullest report is in Proceedings. Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1856). 52 See, for example, “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Mechanics’ Magazine (September 27, 1856), 299. 53 Proceedings. Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1856), 126. 54 Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science. 55 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Glasgow Herald (September 10 and 12, 1856) (program); “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Glasgow Herald (September 19, 1856) (conversazione). 56 “Institution of Mechanical Engineers,” Glasgow Herald (September 19, 1856) (the dinner).

Institutionalizing the “Metropolis of Mechanics”  57 57 “Institution of Engineers. Trip down the Clyde,” Glasgow Herald (September 22, 1856). 58 Editorial, Glasgow Herald (September 26, 1856). 59 The rivalry between Manchester and Glasgow showed up again when Manchester tried with less success than Glasgow to upgrade its university provision in the 1860s and 1870s. See Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and empire: a biographical study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), 134–135. 60 Post Office Glasgow Directory for 1857/8 (on 74–75) and 1858/9 (on 72) respectively. 61 Information derived from Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, 4 (1856). 62 See Proceedings of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, 2 (1844–1848), 301. Walter Neilson joined after 1841. 63 Andrew Liddell, “Statistical Account of the Philosophical Society’s Exhibition, during the Christmas Holidays,” Proceedings of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, 2 (1844–1848), 145–153. 64 Neilson’s Diary, 17. 65 Neilson’s Diary, 18. 66 Neilson’s Diary, 21. 67 Neilson’s Diary, 47–48. 68 Neilson’s Diary, 22. 69 Neilson’s Diary, 22–23. 70 Neilson’s Diary, 23. 71 Neilson’s Diary, 23. 72 See p. 1, General Minute Book 1857, UGD 168 / 1/1. 73 “Napier, Robert (1791–1876),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 74 “Neilson, James Beaumont (1792–1865),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 75 J. R. Napier, Walter Neilson, and W. J. M. Rankine, “Report on the progress and state of applied mechanics,” Proceedings of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, 4 (1855–1860), 207–230. It was published in 1858; for a discussion, see Smith and Wise, Energy and empire, 655–657. 76 Neilson’s Diary, 23. 77 See p. 2, General Minute Book 1857, UGD 168 / 1/. 78 Neilson’s Diary, 23; but see p. 2, General Minute Book 1857, UGD 168 / 1/1 (which notes that David Rowan had proposed the motion to approve that name. 79 Caledonian Mercury (April 20, 1857); and “Meeting of Scotch engineers,” Morning Post (April 20, 1857). Among these figures were Neil Robson, a civil engineer resident in Glasgow since 1834, then at 95 Wellington Street; Alexander More, engineer and millwright, 33 Montrose Street; William Alexander, government inspector of mines, 421 St Vincent Street; David Rowan of Rowan & Co. at the Atlas Works (iron foundry) on 120 East Milton Street; John Downie, ironfounder, with an office at 112 West George Street; Andrew McOnie of W. & A. McOnie, engineers, millwrights, and iron-founders at Tradeston. 80 Neilson’s Diary, 23. 81 Neilson’s Diary, 25. 82 For the proliferation of specialist engineering societies, see Buchanan, Engineers, 106–145. 83 See, for example, Anna Guagnini, “World apart: academic instruction and professional qualifications in the training of mechanical engineers in England, 1850–1914,” in Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini (eds), Education, technology and industrial performance in Europe, 1850–1939 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993), 16–41. 84 Glasgow Herald (May 4, 1857).

58  Ben Marsden 85 See, for example, May 1, 1857, UGD 168 / 2/1 Council Minute Book. 86 See, for example, Glasgow Herald (June 17, 1853) (correcting the omission from the 1853/4 directory). 87 Ben Marsden, “Engineering science in Glasgow: economy, efficiency and measurement as prime movers in the differentiation of an academic discipline,” British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 319–346. 88 See, for example, Iwan Rhys Morus, “Currents from the underworld: electricity and the technology of display in early Victorian England,” Isis, 84 (1993), 50–60 (the rise and fall of the London Electrical Society). 89 IES Council Minutes, August 19, 1857, p. 7, UGD 168/2/1, papers of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, Glasgow University Archive Services. 90 For an abortive attempt at popular writing, see Rankine’s “Comparative powers of large and small animals,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal no. 489 (May 14, 1853), 316–317. 91 W. J. M. Rankine, Institution of Engineers in Scotland … On the Nature and Objects of the Institution. An Introductory Address (W. Mackenzie, Glasgow, 1857). For Neilson’s request, see November 11, 1857, Council Minutes, UGD 168/2/1. 92 “Institution of Engineers in Scotland,” Mechanics’ Magazine (November 7, 1857), 436–437. 93 “Institution of Engineers in Scotland,” Engineer (November 6, 1857), 338. 94 John Strang, “On the progress of Glasgow, in population, wealth, manufactures, &c,” BAAS Report 1850, 162–169, quoted in Smith, “Nowhere but in a great town,” 119. 95 Mechanics’ Magazine (January 16, 1858), 62. 96 Buchanan, Engineers, 135. 97 Information derived from list of members in Transactions of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, 1 (1857–1858), 135–137. 98 W. J. M. Rankine, “On the nature and objects of the institution,” Transactions of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, 1 (1857–1858), 1–12. 99 See Ben Marsden, “Re-reading Isambard Kingdom Brunel: engineering literature in the early nineteenth century,” in Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchison, and Ralph O’Connor (eds), Uncommon contexts: encounters between science and literature, 1800–1914 (Pickering & Chatto, London, 2013), 83–109, esp. 88–90 (ICE’s early publishing and attitudes to engineering literature). 100 See, for example, Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts 5 (1861), 92 (annual donation of IES Transactions). 101 Post-Office Glasgow Directory for 1858, 59, 72. 102 Title page, Transactions of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, 1 (1857–1858); and see Neilson’s Diary, 23. 103 Neilson’s Diary, 24. 104 “From Mr. David Napier,” Glasgow Herald (November 10, 1858). 105 “From Mr. David Napier,” Glasgow Herald (November 10, 1858). 106 Buchanan, Engineers, 135. 107 Buchanan, Engineers, 135. 108 On attitudes toward scientific education in naval architecture, see Leggett, Shaping the Royal Navy, esp. 113–125. 109 “Jubilee dinner,” Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts (1873), 441–465, on 459–460. 110 Marsden, “Ranking Rankine.” 111 See January 7, 1873, General Minute Book, UGD 168/1/2, Glasgow University Archive Services; on Neilson and Lawrie, see Neilson’s Diary, 39.

3 The Natural Sciences and Their Public at the Meetings of the Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science in Budapest and Beyond, 1841–1896 Katalin Stráner Introduction In an overview of the history of the Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science (HAAS) in 1890, HAAS President, geologist József Szabó, compared it to the British and German Associations. Though he admitted that in structural terms as well as disciplinary approaches, the HAAS was somewhat closer to the German example, he praised the British model for its successful efforts at the popularization of science, and advocated following their example, since “[t]he participation of an audience is an [important] condition of the flourishing of these meetings.”1 These national Associations for the Advancement of Science, irrespective of whether we consider them parliaments or traveling circuses of science, were organizations made possible by the development of railway networks in the nineteenth century; meeting every year or two in a different town, these meetings were used as “their favoured means of communicating their ideas to their members and to the public.”2 The choice of location had an important role in attracting an audience for such scientific events, drawing Association members and visitors, including reporters, to the scientific program of the meetings as well as to social events. Increased interest and reporting on both aspects of the program brought even more visibility to the meetings and to the HAAS’ aims to disseminate scientific knowledge. As it turns out, however, the host towns were to benefit just as much as the scientific community: the latter through the exchange and circulation of scientific ideas among themselves and with the local public, and the former through an opportunity for self-promotion through “conference tourism.” This study is concerned mainly with scientific events taking place in the Hungarian capital from the early 1840s, a period of liberal reform focused on national progress and refinement in Central Europe, to the fin de siècle, when Budapest was a symbol and showcase of metropolitan modernity in Central Europe. The changing political situation in this period—the effects of the 1848 Revolution and the failure of the War of Independence in 1849,

60  Katalin Stráner the years of Neoabsolutism marked by political repression and censorship, leading up to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, followed by political consolidation, as well as, very importantly, the creation of the capital city of Budapest in 1873—affected the development of the natural sciences and its institutions. I concentrate on five meetings of the HAAS that took place in Budapest between 1841 and 1896. A national organization of physicians and natural scientists, it met every year or two in a different town to exchange ideas and socialize, as one is wont to do at academic conferences. The article illustrates the interconnectedness of scientific knowledge and the city through the relationships of the scientific societies with urban governance, of the scientific community and the urban public, and of the separate and common spaces of science and the city. Histories and sources of the HAAS reveal that its leaders and membership intended to bring scientific and medical knowledge and developments to Hungarian towns and their inhabitants; moreover, the HAAS aimed to leave marks of its agenda in all the towns it visited, and these were often manifested in physical form. The connection of the HAAS to the capital city went beyond the role of the city as an organizational basis; the fact that it served as a meeting venue highlights an important difference from other European Associations for the Advancement of Science, especially the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which showed much less centralization, in terms of not hosting meetings in capital cities. Budapest, which hosted the meetings for reasons of convenience in the early years of the history of the HAAS, became increasingly aware of the benefit of welcoming hundreds of scientists to the town and made use of the opportunity to showcase the city and its attractions to visitors from across the country and the Habsburg Empire. The city and its leaders— the mayor, the municipality, and other stakeholders—were just as aware of the power of scientific knowledge and of the importance of its circulation to the widest possible public. The convergence of these agendas of popularization (of new scientific knowledge and of a city in transformation and renewal) culminated in 1896, when the meeting of the HAAS took place within the context of the Millennial Exhibition that celebrated the thousandth anniversary of Hungary.3 Here the natural sciences—and scientists—were firmly, physically, embedded in the exhibition space celebrating the past, present, and future Hungary. This chapter is concerned as much with the “urban turn” in the history of science,4 as with attempts by urban historians to engage with science and knowledge as a form of urban agency.5 Of particular importance, from a comparative perspective, is the work of Louise Miskell on the meetings of the BAAS, as well as other associations, that took place every few years in a different British town, attended by scientists, their families, and the local public.6 There are a number of directions from which to study academic events in a historical perspective, individually as well as in various combinations. The point of view of the organizers or participants, or both, can provide new

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  61 insights into the circulation and reception of knowledge. Contextualizing the meetings as spaces of intellectual exchange can be similarly productive. As the example of HAAS meetings in Budapest in 1841 (twice), 1863, 1879, and 1896 shows the meetings expanded spatially, covering increasingly more locations in a city that is growing and has more buildings, more districts, more spaces to display. This article takes a spatial perspective, reflecting on scientists’ attempts to circulate and popularize science and scientific knowledge in urban space, balancing their agendas against those of the host towns. At the same time, we must also consider the public representation of the municipality and its aim to legitimize itself in the eyes of the public by affiliating itself with supposedly progressive scientists, thus upholding ideas of progress. The relationship that developed between the Hungarian scientific community—and HAAS specifically—and certain urban elites shows that the knowledge dissemination agendas of the former were acknowledged and even encouraged by the host towns. Not only did urban governments welcome these agendas and benefit from them, but they endorsed and authenticated the value of scientific expertise brought by natural scientists and medical practitioners that could be translated into urban development. With the passage of time, municipalities and various urban actors gradually realized that there was a benefit—and profit to be made—from such events. “Nineteenth-century Budapest had no equal when measured by its booming population, political power, economic activity, and cultural influence; it held the same position in the Kingdom of Hungary that Paris did in France and London did in England,”7 writes Robert Nemes in his recent book, this time not on Budapest, but on the Hungarian provinces, provincial towns, and the people who lived in and embodied these spaces. In fact, Budapest, in a sense the second city of the Habsburg Empire as well as the capital city of the Kingdom of Hungary, successfully rivaled Vienna in a number of respects in the late nineteenth century. Maciej Janowski has recently characterized turn-of-the-century Budapest as an “excellent example of peripheral modernization, the course of which represents a number of elements specific of the Central European region, […] designed by people who were aware of Hungary’s civilizational backwardness and declared struggle against it.”8 Janowski’s discussion of the specificities of Central European modernization notwithstanding, the backwardness paradigm—together with the center-periphery paradigm—has certain limitations in the study of scientific cultures in the Habsburg Empire, or more generally in nineteenth-century European empires. This article considers not only how scientists aimed to use urban space to promote and circulate science and scientific knowledge, but also ways in which they believed they could contribute to the development of urban space; and not only how these agendas were acknowledged by the host towns, but also how these towns—and urban governance—used the scientific expertise offered to further solidify the position of the city. The benefit

62  Katalin Stráner of studying Hungarian science and Hungarian cities, together and apart, or in fact any national case study in the long run is what it can contribute to our understanding of the European and global development of scientific knowledge and urban space in in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Science as Event: The Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science in Nineteenth-Century Hungary In 1841, motivated by “the need for national and social progress,”9 physicians Ferenc Bene and Pál Bugát founded the Royal Hungarian Society for Natural Science (Királyi Magyar Természettudományi Társulat) and in the same year, the Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science (Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Vándorgyűlése).10 In the period covered by this article, 1841–1896, this is an extremely significant moment.11 The HAAS, despite a similar agenda—to make the natural sciences more popular with wider audiences—was based on a rather different model than the Pest (later Budapest)-based model of the Society for Natural Science. Instead of focusing its public outreach activities in Budapest, it held meetings in different towns, aiming to reach as many cities in Hungary as it could, in order to get to know the scientific and social institutions of those towns, and also to make these regions known to a wider public.12 The HAAS followed quite closely in the footsteps of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (founded in 1822 by Lorenz Oken) and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded, following the German model, in 1833).13 According to the plan of its founders, the aim of the HAAS was to combine scientific activity with getting to know various regions of the country: the scientific community was to bring science, as well as scientists, to the country. The original idea was to divide the country into more or less five sections: North, East, South, West and Transylvania, with a town in each region hosting a meeting every five years.14 Though this system did not work out in the long run, there was always a conscious attempt made to choose a location (often from as many as three invitations) where the Association had not yet met, as well as a town that had a well-organized society of natural history and medicine. Toward the end of the century, one more curious selection criterion was added: to serve the interest of the nation’s spa towns and bathing culture.15 The meetings were held annually until 1848. After the 1848–1849 Revolution and War of Independence, under the restrictive political regime of the 1850s, scientific life was forced into inactivity; this affected, among other institutions, the Academy of Sciences, the Society for Natural Science, as well as the HAAS, which did not officially and publicly reopen and reemerge until 1863. The HAAS petitioned to be allowed to meet again in

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  63 1863,  and  thanks  to the efforts of several prominent Hungarian political public figures, including József Eötvös and future director of the Hungarian National ­Museum Ágoston Kubinyi, it held its first post-1848 event in September 1863.16 The location of this meeting mirrored that of the very first gathering in 1841, which had also taken place in Pest. After 1863, meetings usually took place every second year or thereabouts, usually in late August, to accommodate doctors’ summer holidays (and the occasional cholera outbreak). The ­Association was originally meant to include doctors alone, but every man with an interest in  the natural sciences was invited to the first meeting in Spring 1841 in Pest.17 Altogether 29 Hungarian cities hosted meetings, some more than once.18 Out of the 40 meetings that actually took place, 6 were held in the capital: the first 2 in 1841; the first after the long hiatus in Pest in 1863; a young Budapest (the municipalities of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda had been unified in 1873) welcomed the HAAS in 1879; a special, one-day meeting took place within the confines of the Millennial Exhibition in 1896; and the last meeting in 1933. The scientific part of the meetings was structured not unlike a scientific conference of today; plenary meetings alternated with specialist panels organized around various disciplines and scientific fields. In the beginning, there were five main sections: medicine, physics (including geography and astronomy), chemistry (including mineralogy and pharmacy), zoologybotany, and agriculture (including veterinary medicine).19 This list was gradually broadened as the century progressed, to a point where certain members of the scientific community voiced complaints about the inclusion of archaeology and the social sciences into the program20; this did not go unnoticed in the satirical press, which proposed including “fashion magazine editing, tailoring, and textile dying” into the scientific program, besides archaeology and philology.21 As participant numbers grew, disciplinary sections were split into subsections, which often took place in parallel panels in different locations in the city. The dominance of the Hungarian language was noted from the start, openness to speakers of “civilized languages”—German and Latin mainly— notwithstanding22; this shows that the meetings, while conceived in a Hungarian patriotic discourse, were also embedded in the Habsburg imperial project.23 According to the newspaper Hírnök, apart from four gentleman who spoke in Latin, “no other foreign voice was heard” at the first meeting in May 184124; however, a look at the lists of participants, lectures, session presentations, and scientific exhibitions in subsequent years shows that German-speaking participants came not only from within the borders of historic Hungary, but from the entire Monarchy, and even beyond. The HAAS had strong links to the capital city, which became especially focal in the late nineteenth century when a number of meetings were held there, concurring not only with the establishment of Budapest as a capital city in 1873 (with the unification of three formerly separate municipalities) and the Millennial Exhibition in 1896, but also with the rapid growth of

64  Katalin Stráner associational life in Hungary.25 This is an important difference from the British and German Associations, which consciously avoided even the semblance of centralization. In a sense, the greater presence of HAAS reveals something not only about the limitations of trying to follow models developed in another country, but also about the difference of the Hungarian political context. The question of centralization had been present on the agenda of the HAAS from the beginning and was brought up regularly. The location of the meeting place was a central question, and the press did pick up on the fact that members of the Association were far from being in agreement about the way the HAAS had been conceived and organized.26 This was clear from reports of the first, “test meeting” (próbaülés)27 in Pest at the end of May 1841,28 where Mr. Bene in his opening address proposed a meeting of Hungarian natural scientists and physicians like the one held upon Oken’s initiative in Germany and following on that example in England and Italy, etc., suggesting […] that [in Hungary] as well a different town would be chosen as the location of the gathering. Some saw in this point of the proposal pure mimicry […], and there were those who wished to proclaim the principle of centralisation, […]; we can happily say, however, that this gained no support […].29 The second meeting, to follow the first in four months in September 1841, was nonetheless set in Pest, though with the caveat that the third would be held in another town.30 The newspaper added the opinion of Ferenc Sáy, who colourfully argued that while he was no friend of centralisation, considering the manifold obstacles that only a physician with a normal job can experience while travelling in the autumn, when cattle disease [marhadög, cattle’s carrion] breaks out; and considering furthermore that the travel costs of the German society are covered by the government, be they in A ­ lexandria or Philadelphia, which is not the case with our little association; and considering finally the poor freshly graduated young doctors, it would be much easier for the radiuses to be centralized, rather than pushed forwards or backwards towards the poles.31 The agency of choosing the meeting place seems to have been entirely with the association at the outset; it was also suggested that the chosen meeting place should be informed prior to the meeting, not to be surprised by the sudden descent of the company of scientists.32 In connection to the first two meetings, in Spring and Autumn 1841, the newspaper Pesti Hírlap published a few rather negative articles by the renowned pediatrician Ágost Schöpf-Mérei,33 who was quite critical of the

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  65 meetings as well as of Pest as a location, drawing attention to problems of centralization, and the difficulties faced by the capital city: [W]hy are we dreaming of Pest as a center of our disciplines? It is all very well for the patriot to observe the annual growth of the capital city in all respects, for the politician to be enthused by the enlightened deliberations of Pest county, but our crippled—and thus mostly closed— institutions, as almost all of us know, can as little attract someone from the countryside as the dry Pest climate! And the dissertations written in Pest can be read anywhere.34 He returned to this theme again a few days later, reporting that the town of Beszterce [Bistrița/Bistritz, today Romania] would be hosting the next meeting, and remarked that he would not be surprised if the Hungarian physicians and natural scientists never again hold a meeting in Pest; ever since meetings like this have been held, there has been no other city in the whole of Europe, which, upon being selected as a meeting place, has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to show even the smallest shadow of hospitality, or any sign that they are participating in scientific endeavour.35 As it happens, the audience of the capital city would have to wait over two decades for the next meeting in Pest.36 It has often been remarked by members of the HAAS, the press, as well by Hungarian historians of science, that these events were not only important for their successful agenda of making the latest results in medicine and the natural sciences available, accessible, and popular for an increasing nation- and countrywide audience, but they also brought a growing number of visitors, mostly physicians, scientists, and their families, to formerly unknown or unvisited parts of Hungary. A number of press reports of HAAS meetings reflect this, in particular in the illustrated weekly ­magazine Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Journal), which published long, informative reports of meeting locations, often accompanied by images of important local and regional sites that conference participants visited during the event. The meetings in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg, today Slovakia) (1867), Eger (1868), Fiume (Rijeka, today Croatia) (1869), Győr (1874), or Máramarossziget (Sighetu Marmației, today Romania) (1876) were just a few towns among the many to appear in the context of a HAAS meeting in the journal. Thus, the work of the HAAS not only raised the visibility of the towns, but also contributed to urban development and tourism by creating profits for local businesses and generating the growth of urban infrastructure. The aspect of conference tourism, of course, was definitely not hindered by the arrangement of the HAAS that meetings would take place in late summer and toward the late nineteenth century, progressively more often in towns

66  Katalin Stráner with hot springs and spas.37 Invitations to host meetings most often arrived from the towns themselves (the mayor or the city council), but in the late nineteenth century more and more often from owners/managers of baths as well, who could see the business opportunity in hosting the meetings. Some of them were successful in their bid, especially if they issued the invitation together with the municipality. Given their popularity, it is not surprising that, especially in the heyday of the Association in the late nineteenth century, its meetings gained the attention of the press. Illustrated weeklies like Vasárnapi Újság or political satirical magazines such as Borsszem Jankó quite often focused more on descriptions of the towns and locations as well as on social events and political commentary, leaving true scientific reporting to the periodicals of the scientific societies. The press often focused on social events organized by the host towns: excursions, exhibitions, dinners, balls, and general entertainment. The representation of the meetings in the press, presenting them as social (and sociable) events in which members of the urban public could also participate, echoed the (perceived) interests of the reading public; at the same time, press publications also reflected an agenda to make science more understood and appreciated by the reading audience, treating science and scientific knowledge as elements of “modernity” on the cultural horizons of the public. Press reports addressed scholarly activities and outputs as well as the quality and quantity of entertainment offered by the city during the meetings, and not always in positive terms. Some felt that there was too much emphasis on socializing rather than “science.” As a reporter of Vasárnapi Újság pointed out in connection to an excursion during the 1871 meeting in Arad, [T]he money from the generous supporters of the excursion and the lunch could have been spent on the dissemination of the sciences, and that would have been a goal of greater significance than feeding French food to stomachs that, not being used to it, would only get indigestion. […] Let eating and drinking stop being a constant companion to these meetings. The meeting should be open to everyone, […] but only those whose primary aim is not to party, eat, or drink to excess at another’s table. This goes against the aims of the meeting and is in conflict with its dignity.38 At the same time, excursions (one day or shorter) presented valuable opportunities for participants to learn more about the host town and its various archaeological, geological, or other points of interest in the vicinity, such as mines, factories, and agricultural sites. For instance, in 1879, over 200 HAAS members signed up to visit the public slaughterhouse in Budapest, where they were given a tour by deputy mayor Károly Gerlóczy and the director of the slaughterhouse himself. They also had the possibility to observe the “thoroughly modern way of slaughtering cattle with electric shock.”

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  67 The physicians present were also “quite surprised by the practical anatomical knowledge” displayed by the workers of the slaughterhouse. Around 150 attendees signed up for another excursion organized during the same meeting to the beer brewery in Kőbánya, an industrial district of Pest, where they were also received by Gerlóczy, as well as the board of directors of the brewery. The company, which also included a number of ladies according to the report, walked through the factory site of the brewery and the cellars, and then sat down for a rich meal provided by the board of directors, accompanied by music.39 Activities like this, as well as exhibitions, gave opportunities to manufacturers to present their products, to local museums to show their collections, and to the city of Budapest to show off its impressive industrial development to visitors from across the entire country. The meetings of the HAAS were not only among the most important and best attended scientific events in the country, bringing the biggest names in Hungarian medicine and natural science as well as a wide audience to one place, but they also became popular social events in the city, accompanied by exhibitions, excursions, banquets, balls, theatrical performances, and all sorts and genres of urban entertainment. Many scientists and physicians participating in the scientific programs brought their families, which meant that events like this were experienced by an audience far beyond the academic community, as argued by Louise Miskell when discussing the relationship of host towns and scientific associations in Victorian Britain.40 This can certainly be applied to the Hungarian meetings. The scientific and local organizing committees could exert a certain measure of control over who could attend the scientific and social events (e.g., through the pricing and availability of tickets), but both attracted the local elites (including landowners from the countryside) and the middle class, who could then mingle with the visiting scholars—and their families. For instance, the theater was an important gathering place in the evening: theatrical performances were even advertised in the official program of the meetings (together with scientific sessions).41 Importantly, these events also attracted a number of women: not only wives and daughters, for whom the meetings were presumably a space of entertainment, socializing, and even matchmaking, but an increasing number of women attended the scientific program for its own sake.42 The paper Hölgyfutár (Ladies’ Messenger) published regular updates and short pieces on the 1863 meeting. This is a useful source on the social program that accompanied the scientific activities, presumably because women were thought of as being more interested in who would play the violin at a HAAS soiree (virtuoso Ede Reményi), what play would be on the theatrical program (Faust), or whether ticket prices would be lowered.43 These short pieces of news, often consisting of only a few lines (unlike the long reports of scientific goings-on published in scholarly periodicals), provided a fascinating insight into the social life of the capital. As many attendees at the meeting had come from the countryside, their stay in Budapest was not long, and thus, the program offered by the local organizers also gave an idea of what they thought

68  Katalin Stráner would be of interest to short-term visitors. We can learn that there was gipsy music at the opening soirée at the National Museum, but many of the guests from the countryside were disappointed with the refreshments, which only included “sweet pastries, tea, lemonade, and other drinks after the fashion of civilized countries.”44 The host cities were in a prime position to showcase their (scientific and other) attractions to a diverse and numerous crowd, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. This was also true of the capital city, which underwent tremendous transformations in the course of the nineteenth century but never gave up a wish to impress a scientist a little bit more.45

The HAAS in Pest, Buda, and Budapest Looking at the five meetings held in the Hungarian capital in the nineteenth century—1841 (twice), 1863, 1879, and 1896—it becomes clear that it was not only the meetings that transformed and expanded in terms of the number of participants, but also the city (parallel to its interest in hosting and benefitting from these events). The city grew and expanded over these decades and through the end of the century, and so did the meetings of the HAAS: the expansion can actually be traced topographically on the map of the city, with an initially small event, contained within the Medical School, spreading gradually around Pest, across the Danube to Buda, and from the city center toward the suburbs and the industrial areas in the outskirts. The first two meetings in May and September 1841 took place during the Hungarian Reform Age, when the advancement of science and scientific knowledge was closely tied to the cause of national progress.46 These first meetings were relatively small, with 269 and 212 participants registered, respectively.47 They were held at the Medical School in the city center of Pest. The second meeting already began to expand to a few other neighboring spaces: registration and the opening and closing general sessions were held at the main building of the University; physicians held their specialist sessions at the Medical School; physicians, geographers, and astronomers at the Physics Department of the University; pharmacists at the Golden Lion Pharmacy; and veterinarians and economists in the “Logics” lecture hall at the Humanities Faculty building of the University.48 The meetings were conveniently confined to a rather small area, making it possible to reach various locations within a few minutes’ walk. When permission was given for the meetings to resume in 1863, the 438 participants were clearly in need of more space than what had been required previously. Instead of the University, which lacked lecture rooms that were large enough at the time, the Hungarian National Museum became the location of the plenary sessions as well as of registration. Specialist panels took place at the (relocated) Medical School, the National Museum, which at the time still included departments of zoology, botany, and mineralogy, and the socalled Köztelek (the building of the Economic Society). Moreover, there was

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  69 also an exhibition of scientific instruments and objects in the main building of the University as well as lunches held at the indoor municipal shooting range (which consisted of two buildings, one of them containing restaurants and the other with shooting space to be used by citizens to practice).49 Compared topographically to earlier meetings, this area, while still compact, covered a much larger section of Pest. The social program put together by the local organizers also made suggestions to participants for visits to certain scientific, charitable, public health, and industrial locations. These included not only the more “conventionally scientific” attractions such as the University, the National Museum, the Veterinary School, and various hospitals, but also diverse locales in both Pest and Buda only indirectly (if at all) related to hard science: the list included, in Pest, the Institute of the Blind, the Home for the Elderly, orphanages, a steam bath, factories (of mechanics, vinegar, alcohol, and yeast), a mill, the Dreher Brewery; and, in Buda, the Polytechnic, hospitals, more thermal baths, a shipyard, breweries, and the Ganz Iron Foundry.50 An opening soirée was held in the rooms of the National Museum, and public lunches were served in the Shooting Range and in the Emperor’s Bath (Császárfürdő) in Buda, which no doubt delighted visitors. Gradually, a larger topography of the society’s public outreach within the Hungarian capital seems to have emerged. The expansion, geographically and socially, continued in 1879, when participants were welcomed by the (literally) new city of Budapest. The local organizing committee of the conference, now consisting of members of the city council and private citizens (not only physicians and scientists, but also industrialists, artists, academics, members of the aristocracy and the middle class) made sure that the close to 600 registered conference participants (including 16 women, none of whom were residents of Budapest) could explore the city and see as many sights as possible.51 Section meetings, as previously, took place in the buildings of the university, which by this time had a newly built chemistry building,52 where, on the last day, a scientific soirée (accompanied by experiments and electrical demonstrations) also took place.53 The social program was also suitably varied and took place at several new locations in the city: a welcome party at the Redoute Hall, a lunch in Hotel Hungaria, a special performance in the National Theatre, excursions to the slaughterhouse and the brewery in Kőbánya district, as well as to the City Park and the Zoo, a ball at Margaret Island, a farewell luncheon at the Zoo, and many more.54 In order to make the meeting even more interesting and educational—especially in relation to the medical sections—a medical-pharmaceutical exhibition was also on display in Budapest during this meeting. The meetings, at least in the form of excursions, also moved beyond the city limits: attendees were welcome to join excursions to the imperial village of Gödöllő (by train) and the town of Visegrád (by boat). Social events at locations associated with natural science research such as the zoo were very popular, and for the same reason picked up by the satirical press: lunching at the zoo was specifically mocked by Borsszem Jankó in a

70  Katalin Stráner

Figure 3.1  Budapest zoo animals watch HAAS congress participants enjoy their luncheon. The title and text of the caricature from 1879 reads: “From the zoo. Composed by B.J. [Borsszem Jankó] in honour of the physicians and natural scientists. Chorus of animals. Only once was there plenty in the zoo, but even then it was others that ate well.”

caricature that shows a group of oblivious scientists having lunch in the zoo surrounded by animals quietly observing them as they were, well, in the zoo. To make matters worse, the animals remark that the one time there is enough food served in the zoo, it is not for them (Figure 5.1).55 The mayor of Budapest, Károly Ráth, and the city leaders were, overall, very supportive of hosting the congress, and this was reflected in the fact that they offered municipal buildings as important locations for the Congress: now registration took place at the council room of the Old City Hall on the Castle Hill in Buda and the opening plenary meeting was held at the (then so called) New City Hall building in Pest.56 The mayor and the city attached great value to the congress and made sure that the scientific community of the country, especially visitors and their families from the countryside (and even abroad) had a good time and gained an even better impression of the capital. These visitors from across Hungary and the Habsburg Empire were tourists, in the best sense of the word, who could further advertise ­Budapest, the “new” metropolis; hosting important conference events at central municipal buildings was a clear statement that science and knowledge were part of the city government’s agenda of urban development. The 1896 meeting, the last to take place in Budapest in the nineteenth century (since the next, and the last one to be hosted by the capital, would be in 1933),

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  71 took place within the Millennial Exhibition, a symbolic space celebrating not only the thousand years of Hungarian history and identity, its place in the Habsburg Empire and the world, but also the city’s growing outreach to a national and international public. As the public invitation to the HAAS events, signed by the mayor of Budapest and the president of the Association (who were co-chairs of the 1896 meeting) phrased it, this year, when we celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the existence of our country, the twenty-eighth meeting [of the HAAS] will be held in Budapest, the heart of the country and the centre of the festivities. We want to participate in the general joy of the nation and to vouch for the fast progress of our country, to which [the HAAS] has also contributed.57 Instead of the usual several days, this year’s conference was limited to a oneday meeting attended by several government ministers, rectors of the University of Budapest and the Technical University, several city councilors, and representatives of science and industry located in the city, where mayor Ráth gave both the opening and closing speeches.58 As many as over 500 registered participants attended this meeting in the Millennial Exhibition area,59 where they could also visit the entire exhibition.60 The decision to have the meeting take place during (and physically within) the exhibition was not taken lightly, and, following the old tradition, the Society’s general council also considered having it in the traditional format in a spa town instead.61 However, it was felt that, since the Association was among the oldest scientific institutions of the country, it had a responsibility to be present in Budapest at this important moment; to make their commitment appear even stronger, the Association invited the mayor of the capital to be a member of the board of the Association for the duration of this event. The increasing visibility and prominence of the mayor during the meetings signals that the connection between science and the city was recognized not only by members of the HAAS, but also by urban leaders, and that during the nineteenth century the relationship was gradually renegotiated to the city’s advantage. The significance that the city attributed to hosting and accommodating so many physicians and scientists comes not only from the revenue produced by them as well as by their families, but is also, and even more so, connected to the public status of scientific knowledge, associated with urban and national progress in the mind of a municipal functionary. As Mayor Ráth summarized in his farewell address to the 1896 meeting, The public of the capital city received this year’s meeting of the ­ ungarian Association for the Advancement of Science with patriotic H zeal, and is happy to seize the occasion to pay homage to science and

72  Katalin Stráner express its honest respect for the men whose work for the important cause of public health and their intellectual output for the public good spreads across the entire country […].62 Scientific and medical expertise did have a utilitarian purpose for cities and urban life, but knowledge also had a symbolic power that the leaders, movers, and shakers of the capital city were very much aware of and keen to exploit. Beyond the link between local patriotism and the discourse of national patriotism, the emphasis placed on the power of knowledge and the city can also be linked to growing Hungarian nationalism, contributing to the increasingly aggressive assertion of an independent and progressive Transleithania within the Dual Monarchy.

The City and the Power of Science Throughout the history of the HAAS, its members often remarked how the meetings actually improved urban life. Public health was among the most visible causes that the Association actively championed: for instance, the establishment of an increasing number of hospitals in more and more ­Hungarian towns and the prevention of disease were considered crucial. One of the founders of the Association, the physician Pál Bugát, even initiated the establishment of a special teaching hospital (from the already existing Rókus Hospital in Pest) in 1841.63 Another realization of the aspirations and sensibilities of science in the city is a public health initiative: after some HAAS members at the 1843 meeting in Temesvár (Timișoara, today Romania) criticized the amount of water found in wells and claimed they were causing “fever” among the population, this was remedied by the army cleaning up, bringing vast improvement to public health, which was then proudly noted by in 1886 József Szabó, President of the HAAS, as the Association’s achievement.64 This also shows that scientists (and the Association) pursued the point that what they do is indispensable specifically for the city, not only in terms of health, but also infrastructure, transport (technology as well as logistics), construction and planning, power supply, industries, etc. This aspect also broadens the discussion of the relationship of science, knowledge, and the city: for scientists as well as for the municipality and urban dwellers, the “travelling circus” of the HAAS was not only a matter of “science in the city” but also “science of the city.” We have seen how, especially from the 1860s onward, the host town became more prominently involved and publicly visible during the congresses held there, by inviting participants and their families to visit as many sites and sights in and around the meeting location, and promoting themselves on the occasion. This complemented the Association’s agenda of making the host towns better known across the country. Municipal leaders, as well as local elites, also came to realize that they could also benefit from the expert knowledge (e.g., in public health) brought to towns by the conference attendees.

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  73 This enthusiasm was often expressed on public occasions. In 1863, both Pest and Buda were glad to welcome the congress back (and back to existence, one can assume). The city council of Pest, in a letter signed by the mayor, a city councilor, a magistrate, a notary, and the scribe, was happy to note that the thread that was broken by the revolution and its consequences was being repaired. At the same time, they made sure to inform the scientists of the significance of their commitment: We cannot, however, keep quiet—and at the same time we convey our deep sorrow—over the fact that, because of the heavy burden of this year’s extraordinary poverty, which has meant the city council taking into their care several families with uncertain futures, we have been unable to make the kind of preparations to welcome the meeting that we would have made in other, more fortunate, circumstances.65 Despite these circumstances, the Pest municipality decided to donate a thousand forints from its discretionary fund to the urban poor to commemorate the conference. The city council of Buda also sent a letter, in which it thanked the organizers for the invitation to attend the meeting and nonchalantly advised the participants to consider “the natural sights—excellent mineral baths, notable thermal springs, educational institutions, etc.—of Buda, our country’s capital city, and having observed them, to make them the subject of your scientific conference.”66 Promoting tourism clearly was on the agenda of the city leadership, though perhaps in a less socially conscious way than in the twin city of Pest. Like in many other congress towns, the way the meetings (the locations of scientific as well as social events) expanded all over Budapest shows that the city wanted to showcase its attractions, promote itself in front of what it understood as a respectable scientific audience and, at the same time, call upon the scientists’ expertise to further improve city life. The surgeon general of Budapest, for example, used the 1879 meeting to give a brief history of public health institutions and initiatives in the city since the unification of 1873, no doubt to inform on recent developments but also with the purpose of receiving feedback from the assembled specialists.67 The 1879 congress was especially important as the first meeting to take place in the new, metropolitan Budapest. Beyond the multitude of locations intended to showcase urban development and life in the capital, the city opened the royal family rooms in the Buda Palace to the conference participants, the collections of the National Museum could be freely visited, and the Lukács Bath offered a hundred (and upon request, a hundred more) complimentary tickets.68 The railways often offered discounts: in 1879, the national transportation companies provided a 33% discount for HAAS members between August 15 and September 15,69 and in 1896, HAAS members attending the meeting received a railway concession as well as a special

74  Katalin Stráner deal on a set of tickets to the Millennial Exhibition.70 All in all, the mayor and the city council aimed to make sure that the meeting turned out to be a memorable event as far as the social program was concerned. The Association was also presented with the first volume of the newly published History of Budapest.71 In his welcome speech, opening the meeting at a festive reception held at City Hall in 1879, Mayor Ráth made a clear connection between urban development and the progress of scientific culture (and culture in general): Budapest, the capital city of our sweet country unified by law, is honoured to host [the HAAS] for the first time in its new form […] and express its reverence of scientists and of those furthering the dissemination of science. […] The audience of the capital city bows in readiness in front of the great power of science, and is deeply affected by the importance of developing this power in all directions. […] It is well known that the great work of unifying the capital city is not only in the unification of land, and not only in creating a mass of citizens, but in concentrating and developing intellectual forces, and in raising the power of science.72 Ráth, still the mayor of Budapest when the HAAS returned to celebrate the Millennium in 1896, reiterated (or recycled) the points of his 1879 speech, stressing that in its goal of raising the city among the greater capitals of the world, it had to become the center of science and the arts, which seems to reflect a consistent agenda on behalf of the city or at least in the way it liked to present itself to the public.73 In this discourse, the capital city of Budapest is a symbolic body, where scientific progress is closely intertwined with material progress and urban development. The city and its dwellers had an increasing importance for the HAAS as a growing audience in the circulation and dissemination of scientific knowledge, and at the same time, the city benefitted from the increased presence of the scientific community, not only as an audience to admire and enjoy urban life, but also as a source of expert knowledge for further development and of gaining legitimacy among the public. Scientific development was closely and increasingly connected to urban development and local politics, and science practitioners—providers of expert knowledge as individuals and as part of institutions—also increasingly became part of urban governance, where their knowledge was power—or at least a powerful tool in realizing certain agendas.

Conclusions Like all urban scientific events, associational meetings like that of the HAAS—and the BAAS as well as the German and other national Associations in nineteenth-century Europe—are valuable case studies that make it

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  75 possible to constructively engage with certain aspects of the “urban turn” in the history of science. Placing our focus on cases when science leaves the institutional boundaries of “traditional” places of knowledge, such as the laboratory, the academy, or the university, is a helpful tool in negotiating knowledge about science and urban space and their networks and interconnectedness that operate in an expanding public space with a socially and culturally diverse audience. The examination of science as an event, a social as well as scholarly occasion, makes it possible to examine the interactions of the scientific community and urban society; having it take place in the changing places of small worlds leads to different expectations, perceptions, and concerns about the role of science in urban society. The aim of the HAAS, following in the footsteps of its West European models, but with its own patriotic agendas as well, was at the same time to create a forum for scientists to exchange ideas among themselves, as well as to disseminate science. Not unlike in the case of public lecturing, scientific events such as the meetings of the HAAS in Budapest in the nineteenth century are more than the events themselves: we need to think about them spatially, in an expanded sense, as more than just physicians and natural scientists coming together and discussing their work. The experience of the scientific meeting is much more than that: it is an “excitement, spectacle and civic ritual”74 that brings potentially immense benefits to the host town. Moreover, importantly for a new metropolis such as Budapest, the host town is provided with an opportunity to display its best qualities and thus to form crucial opinions of a middle-class audience that has the power to legitimize its own local government as well as to bring more visitors, and hence more profit to the municipal budget. Acting as a host to five HAAS meetings in the nineteenth century helped Budapest to demonstrate that it had the infrastructure of a capital city and to reinforce its claims to its status as one of the most important cities in the Habsburg Empire. By setting an agenda to educate and create a wider public for their events in Hungary, and at the same time providing the urban expertise of the scientific community to the improvement of city life, HAAS created a platform for Hungarian cities to shine, and by the end of the nineteenth century there was no doubt that Budapest was the brightest.

Notes 1 József Szabó, “Pillantás a magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók vándorgyűlésének multjába és jövőjébe,” Természettudományi Közlöny 1890: 538–543, here 541. 2 Louise Miskell, Meeting Places: Scientific Congresses and Urban Identity in Victorian Britain, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, 4. 3 Or more precisely, the putative one thousandth anniversary of the influx of Hungarian tribes into the Carpathian Basin. On the Exhibition see, for instance, Dorothy Barenscott, “Articulating Identity through the Technological Rearticulation of Space: The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition as World’s Fair and the Disordering of Fin-de-Siècle Budapest,” Slavic Review 69 (2010): 571–590.

76  Katalin Stráner 4 For more on the rich literature on the role(s) cities play in scientific knowledge and practice, and how cities are shaped by science, see the excellent introduction to this volume. 5 Among them recently, and very importantly, Bert de Munck’s “Disassembling the City: A Historical and an Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities,” Journal of Urban History (2016). doi:10.1177/0096144215621737. 6 Miskell, 2013. The BAAS has received attention in British historical scholarship, from Asa Briggs in the Age of Improvement to more specialized studies by Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins (eds.), The Parliament of Science. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1981, Northwood, 1981; Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981; Rebekah Higgitt and Charles W. J. Withers, “Science and Sociability: Women and Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1901,” Isis 99 (2008): 1–27; or Charles Withers, Rebekah Higgitt, and Diarmid Finnegan, “Historical Geographies of Provincial Science: Themes in the Setting and Reception of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Britain and Ireland, 1831–1939,” British Journal of the History of Science 41 (2008): 385–415. On the history of scientific events and public science, see, for instance, David Knight, “Scientific Lectures: A History of Performance,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 27 no. 3 (2002): 217–224; Agustí Nieto-Galan, Science in the Public Sphere, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. 7 Robert Nemes, Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 1 Dec. 2016 (last accessed). See also, Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 8 Maciej Janowski, “A Capital in the Periphery. The Developmental Specificity of Budapest (As a Big East European City),” Acta Poloniae Historica 111 (2015): 141–161, here 141 and 160, respectively. 9 Pál Bugát, “Tudományosságunk előmozdítása ügyében indítvány,” Orvosi Tár 2 (1840): 185–192 and 202–206. 10 The Hungarian name of the HAAS, Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Vándorgyűlése—literally translated, the Travelling Meeting of Hungarian Physicians and Researchers of Nature—is based on the title of the German association, Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte. For reasons of convenience in an English-language article, I have chosen to use the British version as a model in adapting the name of the Association. At the same time, it is important to note that while the Hungarian name was a mirror translation of the German version, this does not necessarily mean that German cultural influence in naming the Association meant that the HAAS persistently and consistently identified more with the German model than the British. 11 It is important to note, however, that the roots of scientific associational life in Hungary go back much further. Not unlike other European countries, the “antecedents of cultural and scientific associations […] can be traced back to the Enlightenment,” even if early—often unsuccessful—attempts at the establishment of scientific associations took place in Pozsony (Pressburg/Bratislava, today Slovakia), and even Vienna, rather than Pest (Budapest). However, as various branches of political power, as well as the university, moved to Buda in 1777, and then Pest in 1784, Pest increasingly became the center of scientific activity. This process was solidified with the foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1825. See Árpád Tóth, Önszervező polgárok: A pesti egyesületek társadalomtörténete a reformkorban, Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2005: 171–174. 12 As proposed by founder Pál Bugát, 185–192 and 202–206.

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  77 13 For a history of the Association and the meetings, see Kornél Chyzer, A ma­ gyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók vándorgyűlésének története 1840-től 1890-ig, Sátoraljaújhely: Zemplén, 1890; Zoltán Szőkefalvi-Nagy “A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók vándorgyűlései (1841–1933),” Orvostörténeti Közlemények 50 (1969): 45–56; Miksa Schächter, Ferenc Lakits, József Prochnov and Pál Kerekes, A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók vándorgyűlésének története 1980-től 1920-ig, Budapest, 1910; Emil Grósz, “A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók vándorgyűlésének száz éve,” Természettudományi Közlöny 71 (1941): 359–361. The archives of the meetings between 1841 and 1912 are held at the S ­ emmelweis ­Museum, Library and Archives in Budapest (Semmelweis ­Orvostörténeti Múzeum, Könyvtár és Levéltár [SOMKL]). 14 Bugát 189; Szőkefalvi-Nagy 46. 15 Gombocz 18; SOMKL XXVIII/2 (Budapest 1896), Minutes of the general meeting of the HAAS, April 18, 1895. 16 Hölgyfutár (Ladies’ Messenger), a daily literary paper primarily aimed at a female audience, informed its readers about the relaunch of the HAAS as early in 1861, but this proved to be somewhat premature. Hölgyfutár, September 26, 1861. 302. 17 At this point, the statutes explicitly specified men; however, as we will see later, women became increasingly involved and included as the century progressed. Szabó (1864), 4. 18 For a full list with the number of visitors, see Szőkefalvi-Nagy 54. 19 Bugát and Fór 1841, 2. 20 See, for instance, Herman, “Az orvosok és természetvizsgálók nagygyűlése alkalmából,” Természettudományi Közlöny, 9 (August 1879): 311–314. 21 Bolond Miska, September 17, 1863. 22 Statute 17 of the HAAS stated that presentations could be held in “any civilized language.” SOMKL IX/a/5–7 (Pest 1863). 23 It was stressed early on that Latin and German could not be excluded from the languages used at the meetings, not only because Latin was widespread in medicine and a great number of German speakers worked especially in mineralogy, but also because it could be hoped that “our meetings would be graced by the presence of Austrian, Czech, Moravian, Italian, German, and Moldovan natural scientists and physicians.” Kubinyi, March 22, 1841, 342. An initiative by Pál Bugát to have foreign papers translated and then presented in Hungarian was not received great enthusiasm. Hírnök, May 31, 1841. 24 Hírnök, June 10, 1841. 25 Tóth 20. 26 These early meetings did receive quite a lot of coverage in the emerging political press of the Reform Age. Among the most important political newspapers to cover the preparations as well as some of the events of the two HAAS meeting in 1841 were Jelenkor (Current Age), connected to Count István Széchényi; the paper of his political opponent, Lajos Kossuth, Pesti Hírlap (Pest Newspaper); and Hírnök (Messenger). The latter was rather unlike the first to in the sense that it was published in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg) and, while modern in format, subtly supported the government. 27 Hírnök, June 7, 1841. 28 The reports in Hírnök were published in the issues of May 31, 1841 (second day), June 7 (third day), and June 10 (first day). The reason for the first day being last was that the “first report of the Pest correspondent of the newspaper had been lost.” Jelenkor published reports in three consecutive issues, on September 8, 11, and 15, 1841. 29 Hírnök, June 10, 1841. 30 Ágoston Kubinyi’s preliminary proposal for the organization of the HAAS, as published in the 22 March 1841 issue of the newspaper Pesti Hírlap, included a point

78  Katalin Stráner

31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42

43

44 45

suggesting that following two meetings in Pest, every third meeting would take place in a “more populous town or one that is adorned by a higher school.” 342. Hírnök, 31 May 1841. Ibid. Ágost Schöpf-Mérei was a pioneering surgeon, who after the Revolution emigrated with Kossuth and died in Manchester. He wrote the first Hungarian textbook of pediatrics and started a journal of pediatrics; one of Budapest’s pediatric hospitals, founded in 1884, is named after him. See József Szinnyei, Magyar írók élete és munkái, Budapest: Hornyánszky Viktor, 1891, http://mek. oszk.hu/03600/03630/html/m/m15891.htm. Schöpff, “A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók második közgyűlése,” Pesti Hírlap, September 8, 1841, 606–607. Dr. Schöpff, “A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók második közgyűl. ­Pesten,” Pesti Hírlap, October 13, 1841, 689. Critical voices regarding the question of location continued to be raised. In 1879, in a series of critical opinion pieces published in Természettudományi Közlöny, the gazette of the Society for Natural Science, polymath Ottó Herman wrote about attempts made to return the meetings to Budapest in the 1870s; the centrality of Budapest (in terms of geography, scientific institutions, and the railway network), Herman opined, would have guaranteed a larger and more motivated body of participants than a remote location, for instance, in Transylvania. Ottó Herman, “Az orvosok és természetvizsgálók nagygyűlése alkalmából,” Természettudományi Közlöny, 9 (August 1879): 311–314. The best attended meeting took place in Fiume in 1869, which was among the most remote locations in the history of the HAAS. The Adriatic Sea apparently served as a major draw despite the relative distance for many of the participants. September 6, 1874, 572. Fővárosi Lapok, September 2, 1879, 964. See Chapter 4 (“Experiencing the Meeting”) in Meeting Places, 103–128. For instance, the program of the 1879 Budapest meeting offered a musical performance in the National Theatre and a play in the People’s Theatre. See Gyula Gerlóczy, Géza Dulácska and Gusztáv Kurtz (eds.), A Magyar ­Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Országos Vándorgyűlésének 1879. augusztus 29-től egész szeptember 2-ig Budapesten tartott XX. nagygyűlésének történeti vázlata és munkálatai, Budapest: Magyar Királyi Egyetemi Könyvnyomda, 1880. Although the illustrated weekly Vasárnapi Újság made note of the changed statutes in 1880 and noted that from that year women could become full members with a right to vote at meetings, the satirical Borsszem Jankó, normally quite adept at mocking “scientific women” and bluestockings, did not pick up on this development. On the other hand, only one of the 33 responses from membership requested to give feedback on the planned changes had a problem with women becoming full members of HAAS. See SOMKL XXI/16 and XXI/38 ­(Szombathely 1880), “Documents regarding the new statutes and Proceedings.” Hölgyfutár, July 25, 1863 and September 24, 1863. The satirical weekly Bolond Miska (Foolish Mike) on one occasion remarked on the subject of integrating a theatrical performance into the program of the 1863 meeting: “there is a paper that sees no problem with playing ‘Faust’ in honour of the natural scientists and physicians. After all, ‘Faust’ was a doctor, too.” Bolond Miska, September 27, 1863. Vol. 4. No. 37, 1. Hölgyfutár, September 26, 1861, 302. There is a rich literature on the history of Budapest that is impossible to list here. Some of the most important English-language works regarding the developments of the nineteenth century are Gábor Gyáni, Identity and Urban Experience: Fin-de-siècle Budapest, New York: East European Monographs, 2004;

The Natural Sciences and Their Public  79

46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

András Gerő and János Poór (eds.), Budapest: A History from Its Beginnings to 1998, trans. Judit Zinner, Boulder, Colorado, 1997; Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998; Nemes 2005. In his study of Pest associations in the Reform Age, Árpád Tóth argues that the diversity of associational culture can be tied to the unprecedented dynamism of the development of the city in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Tóth 217–225. Szőkefalvi-Nagy 54 and Gombocz 28–29. Pál Bugát and Ferenc Fór (eds.), A Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Országos Vándorgyűlésének Pesten tartott második nagy gyűlésének munkálatai, Pest: Trattner-Károlyi, 1842, 1–2. Szabó (1864), 4–7. Ibid., 9. Gerlóczy et al., 12–22. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 11–12. “Az állatkertből,” Borsszem Jankó, September 7, 1879, 5. Gerlóczy et al., 9–10. Ferenc Lakits and József Prochnov (eds.), A Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Országos Vándorgyűlésének 1896. szeptember 12-én Budapesten tartott Vándorgyűléseinek történeti vázlata és munkálatai, Budapest: Boruth E., 1896, 9. Ibid., 23. According to Szőkefalvi-Nagy, 535 registered (54). SOMKL XXVIII/5 [Budapest 1896], Minutes of the general meeting on ­February 29, 1896. SOMKL XXVIII/2 [Budapest 1896], Minutes of the general meeting on April 18, 1895. Pesti Hírlap, September 13, 1896, 5. Pál Bugát, “A pesti Rókuskórház gyakorló orvos-tanintézetté való átalakítása,” in Pál Bugát and Ferenc Flór (eds.), A Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Országos Vándorgyűlésének Pesten tartott második nagy gyűlésének munkálatai, Pest: Trattner-Károlyi, 1842, 10–19. See also Dr. Schöpff, “A magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók második közgyűlése, Pesten,” September 22, 1841, 638, which also refers to an ongoing conflict between the medical community and the newspaper on the subject of the children’s hospital and the training of freshly graduated physicians. Szabó (1886), 541. Szabó (1864), 10. Ibid., 11. Gergely Patrubány, Budapest főváros közegészségügyi közigazgatása. Különlenyomat a magyar orvosok és természetvizsgálók 1879. évi vándorgyűlésének munkálataiból, Budapest, Királyi magyar egyetemi könyvnyomda, 1879. Gerlóczy et al., 11. Fővárosi Lapok, August 14, 1879, 901. Vasárnapi Újság, 43 no. 33 (1896): 551. Gerlóczy et al., 86. Gerlóczy et al., 28–29. Lakits and Prochnov, 30. Miskell, 130.

4 Copepods and Fisherboys Advanced Marine Biological Research and Street Poverty in Naples c. 18901 Katharina Steiner Introduction In 1881, thanks to the recommendation of his doctoral advisor Karl A. Möbius, Wilhelm Giesbrecht had arrived at Naples’ renowned Stazione Zoologica to begin his work as a marine zoologist in Southern Italy.2 Initially as a guest researcher, then as a permanently employed researcher, he dedicated himself until his death in 1913 to studying the pelagic copepods, small crustaceans. His key study of these planktonic animals3 —appearing in 1892—continues to be a standard text for researchers; its zoological illustrations have iconic status.4 Alongside his research on copepods, Giesbrecht pursued an elaborate and, as it happens, very expensive passion: between 1889 and 1893, he produced a corpus of 1,800 photographs,5 one of their central themes being labor. Strolling through Naples’ streets, he took shots of street trade, handworkers, beggars, passersby—extraordinary scenes of Neapolitan everyday life. A central focus of this amateur photographic enterprise was the activity of the city’s commercial fishermen. Because of their employment at the Stazione Zoologica, these fishermen were de facto the social connection between a central representative of modern scientific practice within the city and an urban environment that was marked by considerable poverty and catastrophic hygienic conditions. Opened in 1873, the Stazione would be directed by its founder ­Anton Dohrn until 1907. When Giesbrecht began his work at the S ­ tazione, the institute had already gained prominence in marine-biological research: despite not being close to urban centers of scientific-political power, its location on the Gulf of Naples was ideal; the geological-ecological conditions of the Tyrrhenian Sea, including the clarity and depths of its water and the scarcely researched biodiversity of its marine invertebrates, played a determining role in Dohrn’s decision to establish such an institute in Southern Italy. The Stazione was above all known for its laboratories devoted to anatomical-histological, physiological, and experimental research.6 Looking at late-nineteenth-century Naples as a kind of “second city,” one that, lying outside the centers of scientific politics, nevertheless was an important locus for research in marine biology, we can understand the history of its early decades as constituting a chapter in the history of

Copepods and Fisherboys  81 science, with notable social-historical and cultural-historical resonance: a chapter, with Giesbrecht’s work and Neapolitan employees very much at its heart, that until now has been largely unwritten. In his photos, Giesbrecht rendered visible a staff of fishermen, technicians, and lab assistants that has been neglected in the relevant historiography, although they constitute a distinct presence in both administrative documents and publications serving a representative purpose.7 But the “lower personnel” is clearly distinguished from the employed researchers and guest researchers in the existing accounts of the Stazione.8 Historians have approached the research done there by looking at certain types of sources, especially official documents produced by Dohrn to promote the Stazione within the larger community, have come to see the institution as engaged in innovative laboratory research carried out by a homogeneous group of researchers. In this paper, I argue that in fact, the institution’s research activities were carried out by a heterogeneous group of interacting persons from different nationalities, social milieus, and vocations: they were distinguished by areas of knowledge and competency, degree of education, and income. This group contributed to the Stazione’s innovative research program, which spanned both lab and field in a spatial and practical sense.9 I argue this on the basis of new sources and rereading old sources, in light of a focus on social organization and working culture. In my view then, there is a connection between the neglect of field research and that of the role of fishermen in the Stazione’s history. On the basis of a range of documentary material, including photos, letters, specimens, correspondence, journalistic and scientific articles, and administrative and official records, I illuminate previously invisible areas of this institution. In this respect, Giesbrecht’s photographic collection, a nexus between his research institute and its urban and marine environments, serves as a source for both raising questions and rendering visible practices and actors. I, thus, give texts and images equal standing as sources, using them to develop new perspectives on the cultural, social, and scientific contexts they were produced in and referred to. In this way, we gain a sense not only of how the Stazione’s staff and administration carried out their work but also of the ways in which a German-led first-rank research institution was tied to Naples, a great and impoverished second city.

Naples c. 1900, the Stazione, and Giesbrecht’s Urban Photos To begin, let us note that the caesuras in Giesbrecht’s working life in Naples correspond with ferocious cholera outbreaks in 1884 and 1910/1911. In the first outbreak, over 7,000 Neapolitans died in the area located in immediate proximity to the harbor, adjacent to the districts of Pendino, Mercato, and Porto. Referring to the rhetoric of the communal anticholera campaigns, Frank M. Snowden has described the period between the two outbreaks as nothing less than an “inter-war period.”10 We need to understand the history of Naples in the period extending from the first Cholera outbreak

82  Katharina Steiner to 1914 and the Great War in this crisis-fraught framework. But although Naples was a city stamped by setback, it also benefited economically and otherwise from the considerable presence of industry, universities, tourism, and the arrival of dynamic international research structures. The city thus and so encapsulated prototypical contradictions of modernity. The city, which had lost the competition for the Italian capital to Rome in 1871, had become a key symbol in the discourse of political-publicistic agitation of the Mezzogiorno. The loss of political power was reflected in both the municipality’s political structures and in the reality of a great deal of poverty and correspondingly difficult living conditions for a large portion of the population; tied to this, disastrous sanitary conditions stemming from overpopulation (again in 1871, the earlier-cited districts had 128,920 registered residents); and both a defective canal system—actually still ­stemming from the Middle Ages—and contaminated drinking water. For years, corrupt renovation projects had played their part in producing terrible epidemics and sometimes sordid conditions, a scenario described by the writer Matilde Serao in her realist novels. In the face of such poverty, journalists from Italy’s northern industrial cities tended toward offering caricatures of Naples’ population, making use of the argumentative figure of the bestia.11 Awareness of the presence of widespread child labor in Italy, and particularly in Southern Italy, led to passage of several laws meant to suppress that evil between 1873 and 191412; and both of the cholera epidemics would be tied by journalists such as Serao to the political losses vis-à-vis Rome.13 The broader backdrop to this emergency situation, the isolation and underdevelopment of Southern Italy, led to that region contributing its considerable share to a mass migration of Italians to the United States. Nevertheless, in a manner that is important for understanding the social-historical locus of both the Stazione and Wilhelm Giesbrecht, despite much poverty and the outbreak of disease—in the latter respect, we should not forget that Hamburg, for example, was itself struck by a fearful cholera outbreak in 1892—Naples, having been visited by “grand tour” travelers since the Renaissance, had more recently developed into a favored travel destination for increasing masses of tourists; evidently they were drawn by a porous, culturally diverse urban landscape whose outer edges extended into the Campanian countryside. The excavations in Pompeii, and the broader extraordinarily rich cultural-historical environment, were not only a source of fascination for scholars.14 The hotel industry began to burgeon along the Lungomare, with fast train connections now offering comfortable traveling to the city from, for instance, Berlin. Furthermore, Naples had begun to modernize its infrastructure. There was also an urgent focus on renovating the bassi in the impoverished fishing quarters near the harbor. At the same time, the funicular was used to connect the “lower city” of the popules with the growing bourgeois neighborhood of Vomero15; and a combination of through and access roads was being installed along Parisian lines in Haussmannian style.16 Furthermore, even Vesuvius could now (in 1880) be

Copepods and Fisherboys  83 ascended by cable car, the geological station that had been established there representing an additional attraction. Finally, the Stazione’s public aquario, built on the model of a counterpart in Hamburg and thus the second such structure in Europe, would increase the city’s tourist draw even further, the Stazione hoping to cover most of its costs through the entrance fee—a hope that soon would be recognized as unrealistic. Giesbrecht’s photographic collection emerged in this period, the photos thus reflecting a situation marked by great tension between extant archaic structures and poverty on the one hand, a process of industrialization and scientific-technical advance beginning to transform the city in the direction of modernization on the other hand. Arguably, the ambivalences at work here were reflected, in turn, in an inevitable space between the lifeworld of a successful Wilhelminian German scientist and the dramatic poverty of those individuals living near the Stazione—and repeatedly appearing in Giesbrecht’s photos. Photography, understood in the sense of a cultural practice, runs like a unifying thread through Giesbrecht’s work and life in Naples. Collected by their creator in six albums, the photographs are an expression of his lifeworld: cityscapes, street scenes, landscapes, and photos taken in Stazione here intermingle. As I read them, these refer, on the one hand, to both the scientific and humanistic cultures prevailing in Wilhelminian Germany and, on the other hand, to a range of activities tied to his specific marine zoological work in laboratory and field. It is the case that photographic technique clearly had limited added value for Giesbrecht’s marine zoological work, which took its starting point from a biological approach bringing together systematics, anatomy, histology, embryology, and ecological data concerning a species; his analytical and descriptive needs were already fulfilled through drawing with the aid of a microscope, preservation methods, and camera lucida—we can only assume that he used microphotography in the course of research activity that included producing drawings and illustrations.17 The situation was different when it came to fieldwork. Here Giesbrecht profited from photography’s technical advantages, taking his camera with him at sea and documenting research as well as everyday life from the perspective of a foreign academic living and working in Naples. His photographs constitute a precious record of his sampling expeditions and his various scientific activities. Photos taken in the laboratory are mixed with those taken on research vessels. Where the former involve scenes from daily research life staged for the camera, which is to say a visual transporting of habitual characteristics and status symbols, the latter can be read as spontaneous and momentary. In the lab photos, we can observe the employed researcher Paulus Schiemenz reading at his desk, against the backdrop of a shelf full of preserved specimens—the biologist’s basic tool.18 Or we see the in-house artist Comingio Merculiano drawing19 and the marine zoologist J. Rioja y Martin with an injection apparatus designed by his colleague Paul Mayer,20 but the lower personnel, in their everyday activities

84  Katharina Steiner in both laboratory and field, also play a major role in Giesbrecht’s visual documentation of the Stazione’s working culture. At the same time, we observe, repeatedly, the process of pulling in dredges and nets by, for example, the fishermen Giovanino Buono and Luigi di Gennaro’s son (Figure 4.1), and Aniello Fortanosa, all portrayed on sampling cruises.21 In addition, we have photographic motifs related to ecological factors: both the swell and the water’s smooth surface could point to schools of fish and to plankton. We also find a great many photos of stone and rock formations that must have been located close to the sampling station. Together with the maps, photos of such formations, for instance, on coastal strips or the Island of the Sirens near Sorrento,22 served as aids to orientation.23 But they helped the researchers in another way as well: as a sort of notepad, as Kohler has already observed for photos taken in the context of research on land.24 Together with the field-notebook sketches, the photographs constituted detailed minutes offering information on the ecological conditions. Not only work life at Stazione caught Giesbrecht’s attention. He also put together an impressive record of the Naples street life surrounding the Stazione: a corpus of street scenes forming a dramatic contrast with the postcards, souvenir photos, and press shots being distributed in the city c. 1890. This

Figure 4.1  G  iovanino Buono and Luigi di Gennaro’s son conducting field work photographed by Wilhelm Giesbrecht in July 1890.

Copepods and Fisherboys  85 latter, typical material, produced under a sentimentalizing sign, was intended to package the impoverished city’s diversity into a homogenized, politicalmedial cliché. Southern Italy was here stylized into a nostalgic counterpart to the North’s industrial capitalism, in the process presenting certain visual requirements25: the commercialized photographic canon was stamped by a beautiful natural landscape distinguished by scattered antique ruins; thematically there was great emphasis on the historical continuity between ancient, medieval, and modern scenic attractions. Such historicizing nostalgia is entirely absent from the six volumes in which Giesbrecht collected his photos. He had begun producing them in 1889, a process, continuing into 1893, that would require an enormous expenditure of time and material. Over the initial years following his move to Naples, he had developed a reputation for spending his free time taking extended walks in the Gulf of Naples area and in the coastal Naples neighborhoods of Santa Lucia and the Mergellina26; in the process, with the trained eye of a zoologist, he had closely observed the natural and human landscape before beginning to photograph what he saw. The attentiveness Giesbrecht displayed in his zoological illustrations to the plenitude of colors and forms manifests in the copepods of the Bay of Naples is, thus, clearly evident in his photographic observation of the city as well. In this respect, we can understand his sharp photographer’s gaze as stemming both “from the outside,” as the gaze of a migrant, and “from the inside,” as the gaze of someone who had made Naples his second home and had an intimate knowledge of the surrounding urban landscape. Instead, then, of centering his interest on Naples’ architectonically developed history-landscape, Giesbrecht became familiar with the city as a public and social urban space—with the life of the streets, the loci of their protagonists’ action, and the speed of the street-movement. Hence, the stance he took in his photographic peregrinations was that of a participating observer, a stance he eloquently described in, as it happens, the only newspaper article he wrote containing a photo of a Naples fisherman: None of that which otherwise fills recollecting or longing fantasy with the word ‘Naples,’ none of the ‘…marble statues, gardens growing wild over the stones in dusky bowers, palaces in moonlight,’ and especially none of the famous dolce far niente—to the contrary, the theme is work.27 Nevertheless, despite the ethos clearly stated in this pronouncement, ­Giesbrecht’s photographic protagonists remain embedded in Naples’ artisticarchitectonic, Christian and clerical, mythic-symbolic urban landscape. But in sharp distinction to Naples’ ongoing sales-oriented photo production, in this amateur work, these urban street scenes, Giesbrecht’s protagonists— along with fishermen, these included simple handworkers, cloth sellers, and construction workers—are not presented in predetermined poses, stylized in postcard fashion, but as acting subjects, hauling their nets or with ware in their hands, selling water in the dusty streets, standing in the tram with

86  Katharina Steiner sweaty faces. Correspondingly, the locus of encounter is always the street or the sea, never an atelier.28 Likewise, the urban photos clearly were not meant to serve ethnographic research purposes, nor to document the disastrous hygienic and general living circumstances Giesbrecht would encounter in the streets. To be sure, not only the theme of work—as presented between 1890 and 1893 in roughly 600 images, around half showing the local fishermen and fisherboys—but with it, lack of work and abject poverty inevitably play a role in the photos. They present a domain in which personal biography, including the experience of migration, scientific and technical activity, problems centered on materiality, urban life and the poverty that stamps it, and manifestations of myth and superstition in a context of urban modernization, all come into mutual contact. In this manner, the photo collection offers a record of the sociohistorical context in which the photos were taken: as indicated, a situation marked by great tension between extant archaic structures and poverty on the one hand, and a process of industrialization and scientific-technical advance beginning to transform the city in the direction of modernization on the other hand. Exemplary in this respect are the aforementioned photos recording the intense fishing activities at the heart of Naples’ life, the nameless fishermen assorting fish and drawing in their nets. Together with his work with the Stazione’s regular fishermen, Giesbrecht was also in contact with some of the thousand others working in Santa Lucia, in the western suburbs of Marecchiaro and Pozzouli, and along the coast to the east. We can, thus, assume that as a curator of the scientific collection and as the man responsible for the Stazione’s research-related fishing, he knew the local fisherboys, at least from sight. In any event, on July 16, 1890, he took a striking photo of one of them.29 The boy is shown in action (Figure 4.2), fishing, not in a pose; he is naked—which was, according to other sources, a common appearance for children at seaside— and standing on a stone, his body bent, seemingly undernourished. Giesbrecht took the image from an extremely steep perspective, looking down on the boy from the roughly three meters higher seaside road (the lungomare next to the Castel dell’Ovo); this perspective offers a sharp contrast with his visual documentation of the Stazione’s professional fishermen, taken at eye level. This boy, name unknown, can stand for the numerous children who spent their time in Naples’ streets at the time, playing, begging, and working, thus coming into the focus of travelers to Naples. In our mind’s eye, we can see Giesbrecht well clothed and of considerable stature, equipped with his expensive camera; the boy, the object of the man’s gaze, is small and thin and has no clothing on whatsoever. The naked children ­Giesbrecht photographed appear to present an image of dire poverty and indeed malnourishment. But are we indeed being presented with the difference between a prosperous Bürger’s nourishment and an Italian child-worker’s malnourishment, or does such a conclusion merely reflect our own interpretive preconditioning? Unavoidably, our impression is filtered through our own knowledge of the social conditions in Southern Italy at the time—conditions that led, as said,

Copepods and Fisherboys  87

Figure 4.2  A  young unidentified boy presumably collecting creatures from the sea. Wilhelm Giesbrecht took this photograph adjacent to the Stazione Zoologica.

to the migration of millions of Italians to the United States starting in that very same period. And what do the photos actually tell us about the attitude of Giesbrecht to the subjects he was photographing? Is there a trace of indignation in his inquisitive gaze? Or rather, do the shots ultimately convey the moral complaisance of a prosperous Wilhelminian Bürger, an enthusiastic member of a leading local scientific institute—in face, in the end, of the ways of the world? With our eyes today, it would be easy to be struck by a homoerotic, colonial, or tourist gaze behind the fisherboy photo. But I prefer to approach it as an invitation to examine such questions, encapsulated in an encounter between two very different life-worlds. These worlds were both framed by the unique sociocultural environment in which the photo was taken: an environment that itself is illuminated by consideration of the photographer’s research institute, the Stazione Zoologica, both in its scientificresearch context and in that of its social interconnection with Naples.

Scientific Fishing in the Gulf of Naples The Stazione Zoologica emerged in a period stamped by differentiation processes in the discipline of zoology. During the previous decades, its departmental affiliation shifted within the German-language university

88  Katharina Steiner system from the medical to the philosophical faculty.30 At the same time, newly founded non university-based institutes for research in marine biology emerged to occupy an area between the universities and various amateur organizations, the Stazione here playing a pioneering role. Its program was not centered on teaching but exclusively on generating knowledge through research in a professional framework. The absence of seminars and lectures was, thus, anchored in the statutes.31 “Faunistic research through the bay seemed…the most suitable framework to me for describing the productive strength of the Zoological Station,”32 was Dohrn’s formulation at the opening of the series of monographs on the Fauna and Flora of the Gulf of Naples and its Adjacent Maritime Regions, meant in his words to represent the research activities of the Stazione in published form. The in total 37 volumes, including about 700 plates, published by the Stazione Zoologica between 1880 and 1926, represent a cross section of the biological disciplines and illustrate the research practices lying behind them.33 The group of authors was initially composed of permanently or temporarily employed researchers, commissioned to work on families and individual species. But guest researchers were also drawn on, arriving in Naples for several months or years with a state fellowship. The volumes were written by the researchers, and, for the most part, they were also responsible for the accompanying illustrations. But when the talent or time was lacking, the permanently employed illustrators Comingio Merculiano, Vincenzo and Alfonso Serino, and Max Heinze stepped in. We find thanks being offered by guest researcher Carl Chun to the two sailors “Salvatore” and “Giongi” for their contribution34: an acknowledgment of the Neapolitan fishermen who supported the Stazione’s activities in an essential way by supplying sufficient material for preparing the studies. These fishermen were, despite a common misconception, not day laborers, but rather permanent employees with a monthly income and social security provided by the German state. The transformative steps from the materia prima—the term at the Stazione for freshly dredged material35 —to the research object, culminating in the published illustration, were taken by a range of groups active in research at the Stazione: along with marine zoologists at the institute for limited research stays, in the framework of various research projects, an internal program offered positions to younger scientists such as Giesbrecht so that they could pursue research and take institutional responsibilities removed from standard university structures—this marking an important institutional development.36 At the same time, a staff of technicians, fishermen, and laboratory assistants was brought together. Dohrn had already spoken of installing a staff of “zoologically trained fishermen” in 1876.37 “Giongi” Franzese was administratively classified as lower personnel. He was at the Stazione between 1876 and 1888, belonging to the group trained at the scientific fishery. Together with “Torillo,” Giongi was first trained in laboratory work according to zoological standards: “Both youths,” we read in the annual report published in the Stazione’s Mittheilungen,

Copepods and Fisherboys  89 are already suited for a great deal of oversight over the marine animals and know many of them by scientific name. They rarely do not notice when an animal lays eggs in the basin, and they also have enough practice in searching out larva and transparent animals that are hard for zoologists to discover at the beginning.38 On this basis, the laboratory assistants were, Dohrn indicates, “generally drawn into other functions…one of them to fishing, another to conservation and preservation.”39 Starting in 1881 Torillo, which is to say Salvatore Lo Bianco,40 would take over management of the preservation department, one of his important areas of innovation being the—then only developing— preservation of bioluminescent jellyfish siphonophores, difficult to preserve due to its fragile corpus.41 His techniques for specimen-preparation not only increased the exporting of conserved marine animals but also sparked international academic interest.42 Materia prima had to be already sorted at sea and, as Chun points out in a sampling tour report he conducted with the staff of the Stazione, kept alive or preserved.43 In the chain of transforming materia prima into zoological illustrations, historians have focused on the situation in the lab. The importance of the institute’s research on systematics, ecology, and behavior of marine invertebrates, and their embryology, anatomy, and physiology, as presented in the Fauna and Flora, is a facet of the Stazione’s history that has received little attention. The goal of Fauna and Flora was a systematic study of Neapolitan marine species and their comparison to species and ecological communities in other world regions. Dohrn saw the series as analogous to prominent humanistic sources such as the Monumenta Germania and the Grimm brothers’ dictionary.44 In addition, from our present perspective, the series can be included in the vast literature offering sampling reports.45 It comprised meteorological, geological, and biological data on the Gulf of Naples and adjacent marine areas, with a focus on lower animals— annelides, crustaceans, sponges, and so forth. These organisms were not meant to be examined according to the “old systematics,”46 but with the inclusion of ecological and zoogeographical data.47 “Scientific fishing” formed the foundation of the Naples institute’s research. This term was first used in 188148 and referred to catching and processing of materia prima. Scientific fishing connected, supported, and integrated laboratory and field research. Scientific fishing brought in the capture of materia prima and recorded its environmental conditions. Fishermen, laboratory assistants, and researchers examined, selected, and preserved specimens to be studied later, leading to, for instance, the organisms’ visual representation in the Fauna and Flora. Although the concept of “field research” is not explicitly cited in the administrative documents,49 Dohrn built up both field and laboratory research structures. He considered quantitative-qualitative research strategies as necessary and, sensibly, sought to create structures for one of the Stazione’s central purposes, the

90  Katharina Steiner “statistical investigation of the life of marine animals.”50 In this light, it seems appropriate to approach the Stazione’s scientific fishing as an institutional research program connecting field work with laboratory work, rather than, as Raf de Bont argues, widening “the gap between the laboratory and the field.”51 The institutional research involved here intertwined biological research programs. The institute’s technical, employment, and publishing structure, as developed until 1907, served as a foundation for an envisioned department focusing exclusively on “exploring the coastal and deep-sea fauna.”52 Independent research was now meant to be separated from the services at the Stazione. The institute’s team was responsible for both preparing the Fauna and Flora and supporting the visiting researchers. Eventually, the knowledge gained as a laboratory assistant would end up in the field in the collecting and sorting process. As Dohrn put it, in the same spirit as the earlier citation: “But the advanced personnel are already capable of identifying those animals of value for individual researchers or the entire institute from the fishery’s total results, even the fishery’s daily surface- and deep-water fishing.”53 Michele Franzese, responsible for the aquarium, had, we read, “sharpened his eye to the extent that he could furnish a great deal of useful information on the economy and life of animals.”54 His observations made their way into Richard Schmidtlein’s statistical notes, which were taken both at the aquarium and at sea.55 Schmidtlein, likewise a researcher at the Stazione, was responsible for “collecting noted about the habitat and appearance of the bay’s different animals and keep a daily journal concerning all these things.”56 In 1886, these notes would be taken up in the research project of Carl Chun (who would be awarded a chair for zoology in Leipzig in 1886). The recognition and preparing specimens of the invertebrates had to be learned. Also in 1881, “three young people, employed to prepare specimens in this department, completely mastered the technique of microscopic preparation and now will be enlisted to assist in the individual scientists’ huge accumulation of research.”57 The concrete form the laboratory training took is unclear from the sources, but we know that, “two smaller microscopes and three microtomes” were purchased for the laboratory assistants—they were meant to “know how to prepare almost all [microscopic] specimens.”58 Even without documentary evidence to this effect, we can be certain that visual sources were drawn on alongside the living and prepared animals for studying a species’ morphological, anatomical, and histological constitution— in this respect, illustrated plates were part of the scientific knowledge produced and a central tool for the zoological training of both academic researchers and fishermen working at the Stazione. In the framework of the responsibilities given to lower personnel referred to earlier, in the administration’s approach to division of labor, their full integration into both field and laboratory was considered an essential element of knowledge production; in the extant records, we thus read of a certain de Barbak, and a Casalina, together with Salvatore Travola,

Copepods and Fisherboys  91 Carlo Agnellini, Luigi Senesi, Torillo Snedile, Alberto Pannone, and Joseph Riegel (known as “Beppino,” one of the few Germans among the lower personnel) all active as laboratory assistants,59 working on the side of various guest researchers, not only cleaning the working areas and equipment but also inspecting the research aquariums and exchanging ideas with the laboratory management.60 Likewise, the fishers Aniello Fortanosa, Michele Franzese, Aniello Pinto, Guiseppe Franzese, Alfonso Caryanelle, Aniello di Giranni, and Cicillo d’Aniello61 had a range of other responsibilities— where Michele Franzese saw to the display aquariums, Aniello Fortanosa prepared the “nets and fishing baskets through which first food was caught for the animals in the large aquarium, but then also the fish, cephalopods, and crabs for this aquarium and the laboratories.”62 The development of catching methods was here naturally important; it was seen to by a team of researchers, fishermen, and technicians: between 1884 and 1892, Giesbrecht constructed two special nets, manufactured in Karlsruhe, with the technician Winterthaler and the fisherman Aniello Fortanosa participating in the development. The actual role fishermen played within this process is again not well documented in the sources we have. We do have Giesbrecht’s photograph of Fortanosa assembling a new net on a self-constructed crane for a ship.63 In his function, as head fisherman, Fortanosa was familiar with all the dredging functions on board,64 consequently an interlocutor in questions of production and assembly. It seems reasonable to assume that exploration of the fishing areas would have been far more limited without the established knowledge of fishing personnel, much of the local fishing knowledge being conveyed orally. But, in distinction to matters of payment and areas of activity, we have no concrete examples showing where and how concrete knowledge of the local fishermen was assimilated into the work of the technicians and zoologists. Usually published scientific papers did not refer to the entire team involved in the research, but only to the leading authors. Hence, authorship of the article on the special nets was attributed to Giesbrecht, who only mentioned Winterthaler’s improvements.65 Chun’s research stay in Naples, undertaken in the summer 1886, was strongly informed by Schmidtlein’s findings (and so to say by those of fisherman Michele Franzese), as well as by unpublished results of other researchers such as Giesbrecht to whom he also gives credit. As pointed out earlier, Chun is an inspiring example of a researcher acknowledging the team as a whole: both in his introduction to his contribution to the Fauna and Flora and in his 1886 research report, he refers to the Stazione’s scientifically trained fisherman and to the technicians. This acknowledgment corresponds to that consistently offered by Dohrn. The knowledge produced by the Stazione was the outcome of these complexly interacting actors and practices. The older reading of the Stazione’s praxis, as recently put forth by Raf de Bont, results, on the one hand, from a perspective focusing on guest researchers working for a limited period

92  Katharina Steiner in Naples and, on the other hand, from a selective approach to published sources. The question that now arises is that of how the Stazione institutionally integrated and supported these various practices and workers.

Hierarchies at the Stazione Zoologica The Stazione’s institutional program included carefully executed technical development and the professionalization of fishing activities. The organizational structure and networks involved here extended far past the Stazione itself, taking in the institution’s Prussian and Italian administrative and funding matrix on the one hand, the indispensable local, Southern Italian technical and craftsmanship resources on the other hand; in this manner, knowledge-production was intimately tied to the extant social— and indeed cultural—order in both rapidly industrializing Germany and a relatively poor area of Italy that, as indicated, was at the time itself undergoing the shock of modernization. The relationship between these two orders was mirrored, more or less, in the responsibilities and income of those using and disseminating academic, technical, and local knowledge at the Stazione. Between 1879 and 1909, we find a group of approximately 50 individuals responsible for running three steamers, four large laboratories, an aquarium, and a preservation division.66 It is striking that just like the researchers, the employees counting as lower personnel enjoyed the status of Prussian officials. All the Stazione’s employees were remunerated through funds from the German Foreign Office. As documented in income tables, preparatory documents for setting up a pension fund for the Stazione’s employees, physicians’ bills and attestations of illness, and various work reports, Anton Dohrn saw to it that the Neapolitan branch of the institute’s working structure was decently paid and had social insurance.67 By registering the names, skills, and functions of the fishermen, technicians, and laboratory assistants in relevant official unpublished and published reports and articles, Dohrn renders their crucial role within the Stazione’s knowledge production visible.68 The precise listing we have of all the employees allows us to know the names of approximately 20 of 10,000 fishermen who in 1884 were living in Santa Lucia alone—and to possess information about their age, family circumstances, and state of health, together with their assessed potential and drawbacks as employees of the institute. Still, aside from such information, we basically do not know much about these individuals, a famous observation made by Carlo Ginzburg at the end of The Cheese and the Worms concerning an earlier time and place thus still being highly apposite: “About Menocchio we know many things. About this Marcato, or Marco—and so many others like him who lived and died without trace— we know nothing.”69 With few exceptions, the Stazione’s employed researchers were recruited from German-speaking countries, while lower personnel were mainly,

Copepods and Fisherboys  93 but as we have seen not entirely, of Neapolitan origin. But despite this general pattern of employees’ geographic origins, the Stazione’s special status was not merely a question of extra-university status, rather reflecting the idealistic program of the institute’s founder and a discursive tenor developed in the context of the establishment of scientific research institutes in Germany, Italy, and other states.70 Research at the Stazione was meant not to be dictated by state bureaucrats and policy: “I think the time has come,” Dohrn indicated, when one must raise one’s voice most distinctly against national prejudice, which nowadays has grown to almost overwhelming and even pernicious importance in many provinces of material—and I am sorry to say—also moral and intellectual existence. Science at any rate ought to be exempt from that morbid exclusiveness which refuses to act in rational community regardless of political or ethnographical boundaries.71 With its everyday activities carried out by an international team consisting of regular employees, the Stazione thus served as a transnational space for research supported by Germany, Italy, and other countries and institutions paying fees for guest researchers’ working places72; it was what Josef Partsch has termed a “model of an early international scientific organization,”73 although not in a statutory sense. That said, its financial structuring was novel and complex. Although not institutionally tied to the German university system with its research facilities and laboratories, there was economic dependence on such academic facilities, a dependence with its positive side in that it promoted scientific exchange. Academic scientists could apply to one or another state government for a temporary working place in ­Naples, the financing coming from either the state or the home university, or else from another institution that had rented a “desk” at the Stazione. The figures reflect a strong interest in acquiring a temporary working place in the Naples institute. By 1914, some 2,500 guest researchers had been active in connection with 84 working spaces, with one desk reserved from 1874 onward for scientists from Italian universities. Alongside contracts with various ministries of education, we have others with the German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish navies, and with science museums such as the Smithsonian.74 The designated group of guest researchers was made up of professors and research fellows, together with researchers at an intermediate stage in their careers. Material expenditures for this research were booked in accounts for the fishery and fleet. Increasing the number of personnel and the size of the laboratories, as well as expanding the available technical equipment, was initially based on a formal financial agreement with the German Foreign Office, signed in 1878.75 But examining the available documentation, we can see that Dohrn soon instrumentalized the Italian government’s interest in the fishing industry for his own purposes: Between 1884 and 1888, setting up a physiological laboratory was accomplished

94  Katharina Steiner exclusively with funds from the Italian ministries of education and agriculture, Naples’ provincial administration, and a consortium of Southern Italian marine provinces.76 In any case, although the Stazione received, in addition to the funding for guest researchers’ working space, subventions from both Italy and Germany,77 the construction ground for its building in the Villa Communale was provided by the Naples municipality for free78; the Stazione’s management alone was responsible for decisions regarding personnel.79 Dohrn himself viewed this as a crucial feature of the young institute’s research structure, predicting that through its own scientific officials, the station will soon find itself in a position to be directly active scientifically in an all the more important and influential way considering that with the present direction of zoological work, systematics only has narrow prospects of continuing in the old and nonetheless thoroughly indispensable manner.80 Beginning in 1876, the Stazione’s research was no longer dependent on the so-called external fishermen selling their daily catches,81 a trading relationship with Neapolitan fishermen that had existed since 1872 now developing into a relationship with employees. More precisely: where in the early years the relationship was that between a merchant and client, the goods being correspondingly tied to market prices, a contractual framework now emerged in the course of the institute’s consolidation process. Steadily developed since the 1880s and also used for purposes of public presentation, the Stazione’s role as employer in the framework of scientific fishing activities was not only manifest through employment of fishermen. It is here worth underscoring that with the long-term employment of lower personnel, meaning, as already touched on, that social costs such as medical visits and widow’s pensions were covered by the Stazione, the institute emerged as one of the centers of economic gravity for Naples; the institute’s economic role still needs detailed research. While all those on board one of the Stazione’s research vessels contributed to testing new fishing and preservation methods, the differences in income between employed researchers and lower personnel are evident throughout the institution’s staff listing. For example, while the ­G iesbrecht’s starting salary would triple during the 30 years of his employment, that of first sailor Aniello Fortanosa would end up increasing by roughly one and a third. After being hired by the Stazione in 1880, Fortanosa received 960 lire annually, in contrast to Giesbrecht’s 2,000.82 According to the US State Department, the annual income of a Southern Italian worker was around 324 lire, that of the director of an Italian institute around 1,117.83 (The salaries that the Stazione could offer its research employees were comparable to those at various natural-science departments in Naples’ universities.)84

Copepods and Fisherboys  95 The differences in income largely reflected differences in education, training, and academically imparted knowledge. While the amount of training was the initial basis for payment offered to employees, the standard factors of age, civil status, and length of employment were also considered. More significantly in our context, as we have seen, actual function and capacities were taken into account in employment decisions, and not simply academic qualifications. In this respect, while, as noted, Salvatore Lo Bianco could transition to a scientific career because of increasingly formidable morphological, histological, and physiological knowledge gained through sorting and preserving plankton,85 his former coworker Giongi would be dismissed in 1889, Aniello di Giovanni (then 18 years old) taking over his position in the fishery.86 We can note two more examples of “upward mobility”: “Beppino” Riegel would be elevated from laboratory assistant to managing supplies and accounts, his salary climbing from 540 lire in 1880 to 2,400 in 189987; and Aniello Fortanosa would eventually be moved between different, extended responsibilities within the fisheries.88 All told, from the Stazione’s extant documents and records, the importance placed on the careful training of fishing youths and laboratory assistants to fulfill the institute’s needs is amply evident.89 On the one hand, with the capacity to see, the eye’s schooling, constituting a key tool in marine biology, observational capacities and handwork for proper preparation had to be learned. Training in zoological field and laboratory practices naturally made it possible for fishermen and laboratory assistants at the Stazione to expand their areas of responsibility and take on new functions. The institutional organization allowed lower personnel to rise to these positions. For example, in 1876, Diongi Franzese had begun work as a laboratory assistant.90 Together with other workers referred to in the records by their first names, Francesco, Peppino, and Luigi proceeded to do nothing less than enter into and rise in the institute’s research hierarchy. Franzese proved extraordinarily gifted when it came to working with and recognizing different forms of marine animal life; he, thus, regularly went out to sea on research forays to sort the fresh catch—a crucial step in bringing together the most precise possible samples for scientific study.91 The basis for the promotion of both these men was their capacity to assimilate knowledge of the appearance and behavior of marine animals, together with a mastery of a large corpus of scientific names.92

Conclusion While historians have recognized the Stazione mainly as a laboratorycentered research locus for marine biology, thus looking at the institute from the “outside” and taking up the perspective of guest researchers, the institute’s employees are rather invisible in these accounts. In line with this approach, although the lower personnel, including zoological trained ­fishermen, technicians, and laboratory assistants, are present in official

96  Katharina Steiner reports, they have been broadly neglected within historical discourse. I wish to offer a corrective to this lacuna, my entré in this respect being Wilhelm Giesbrecht’s photographic collection, which offers an “inside” perspective registering the reality of both research practices and social organization. This photographic documentation, I wish to argue, does nothing less than render visible a blind spot in the Stazione Zoologica’s history. By documenting individuals, instruments, and venues, Giesbrecht furnished insight into the Stazione’s working culture and ethos of knowledge production. But the photographs also serve as tools for examining the specific social and cultural context that the Stazione was embedded in. Using G ­ iesbrecht’s series of photos of fishermen as a starting point, we can observe how “scientific fishing”—the Stazione’s institutional program—­operated within a porous area located between the field and laboratories. Turning to the Stazione’s archives, we can then gain a broader sense of the complexity of research practices supported by the institute’s social organization. The process of scientific fishing at the Stazione involved a striking degree of close interaction between actors from widely different social milieus. ­A lthough we cannot know a great deal about the lower personnel as individuals, what we can learn illuminates a dynamic social and institutional milieu, and its broader social-historical context. It points to the Stazione Zoologica as anything but a sealed laboratory—as an institute interacting in historically important ways with Naples’ social and ecological worlds, and beyond.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the following people for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this material: William Bausman, Ariane Dröscher, Nils Güttler, Sophie Junge, Lynn Nyhart, and Stephan Sander-Faes; many thanks also to the editors and the two peer-reviewers. Earlier versions were presented at the Biological Interest Group at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, in the Session on “Urban Peripheries? Science in ‘Second Cities’ around 1900” at STEP 2014, HSS 2016, and the Doktoranden Kolloquium at the University of Zurich. Within my PhD-project, the photo collection of Wilhelm Giesbrecht was systematically evaluated for the first time in the context of the history of science, visual history, and urban history. I would also like to extend heartfelt thanks to Christiane Groeben for supporting this research as an archivist and friend. 2 Karl A. Möbius to Anton Dohrn, October 20, 1880, ASZN A 1880 M. 3 In 1887, Victor Hensen introduced “plankton” as an official scientific term. Victor Hensen, “Über die Bestimmung des Planktons oder des im Meere treibenden Materials an Pflanzen und Thieren,” in: 5. Bericht der Kommission zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung der Deutschen Meere bei Kiel 1–8 (Berlin: Paray, 1887). Ariane Tanner, “Utopien aus Biomasse: Plankton als wissenschaftliches und gesellschaftspolitisches Projektionsobjekt,” in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40 (2014): 323–353. 4 Wilhelm Giesbrecht, Systematik und Faunistik der pelagischen Copepoden des Golfes von Neapel und der angrenzenden Meeres-Abschnitte (Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel, Vol. 19), (Berlin: Friedländer und Sohn, 1892). Giesbrecht’s first study of plankton focused on the copepods of the Kiel Fjord; it was undertaken

Copepods and Fisherboys  97 in 1879 at the urging of Möbius and published in 1884 under the title: “Die freilebenden Copepoden der Kieler Föhrde (mit 12 lithographierten Tafeln),” in: H. A. Meyer, K. Möbius, V. Hensen, A. Engler (eds.), Vierter Bericht der Commission zur Untersuchung der deutschen Meere in Kiel für die Jahre 1877 bis 1881 (Berlin: Paray, 1884): 87–168. Led by Möbius in zoology and Victor Hensen in physiology, the University of Kiel had emerged as a guiding institution in basic marine research—the two professors served as project heads in the so-called Commission for the Scientific Study of the German Seas. See Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography. An Early History (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press), 9–188. 5 Photo albums of Wilhelm Giesbrecht, ASZN La 119-La 124. Katharina Steiner, “Die Alben von Wilhelm Giesbrecht. Private Fotosammlung und Institutionsarchiv—Ein Blinder Fleck im neapolitanischen Bilderkanon,” in: Ulrich Hägele/Irene Ziehe (eds.): Fotografie und Film im Archiv: Sammeln, Bewahren und Erforschen (Münster: Waxmann, 2013): 163–178. Gennaro Matacena (ed.): La riscoperta del golfo incantato. Il reportage di un biologo della Stazione ­Zoologica‚Anton Dohrn’ (Naples: Eclecta, 1996). 6 Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field: A History of Place-based Animal Research 1870–1930 (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 51–69. Christiane Groeben, “Sotto sarà una pescaria, sopra una piccola università,”In: Pietro Redondi (eds.): L’acqua e la sua vita (Milano: Edizioni Angelo Guerini, 2010): 151-202. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 43. Raf de Bont, “Between the Laboratory and the Deep Blue Sea: Space Issues in the Marine Stations of Naples and Wimereux,” in: Social Studies of Science, 39, 2 (2009): 199–227. Jane Maienschein, Transforming Traditions in American Biology 1880–1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 98–104. Irmgard Müller, Die Geschichte der Zoologischen Station in Neapel von der Gründung durch Anton Dohrn (1872) bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der modernen biologischen Wissenschaften (Düsseldorf: Habilitationsschrift Universität Düsseldorf, 1976). Christiane Groeben (ed.) in collaboration with Irmgard Müller, The Naples Zoological Station at the time of Anton Dohrn (Naples: Stazione Zoologica di Napoli, 1975). 7 Christina Wessely notes the integrated role of fishermen at the Austrian zoological station in Triest in a paper pointing to the role of aquariums in modern ecology. Christina Wessely, “Wässrige Milieus. Ökologische Perspektiven in Meeresbiologie und Aquarienkunde um 1900,” in: Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 36, (2013): 128–147, 134. 8 I follow the tripartite distinction of actors working at Stazione as given in sources: guest researchers, employed researchers, and lower personnel. They are distinguished by institutional status, the source of the salary and functions. However, for each of these categories a variety of terms is used. For example Dohrn calls employed researchers: higher personnel, station officals, scientific officials, and Naturforscher. Lower personnel (this includes fishermen, laboratory assistants, and technicians) are also referred to as lower officials. 9 While I thus share the emphasis of de Bont and Kohler on the general porosity of “lab” and “field,” I disagree with them when they claim lab and field research at the Naples Stazione Zoologica was not porous. Kohler, 43; de Bont (2015), 68–69; de Bont (2009). 10 Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of the Cholera, 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 251. With his description of Naples as a “war zone,” Snowden is criticizing the sort of Neapolitan social history pursued by Giuseppe Galasso. See ibid., 252–253. 11 John Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno 1860–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

98  Katharina Steiner 12 See Carl Ipsen, Italy in the Age of Pinocchio. Children and Danger in the Liberal Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 13 Snowden, 181–233, here 195. 14 Christiane Groeben, “Briefe aus Neapel: Der Blickwinkel der Gastforscher,” in: Krauße Erika (ed.): Der Brief als wissenschaftshistorische Quelle (Berlin: VWB 2005): 103–124. For further reading from a cultural historical perspective, see Dieter Richter, Neapel. Biographie einer Stadt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2005). 15 In his medical-historical account, Snowden speaks of an “upper” and “lower” city according to mortality caused by the cholera outbreaks. 16 See Fabio Mangone: Chiaja, Monte Ecchia e Santa Lucia. La Napoli mancata in un secolo di progetti urbanistici. 1860–1958 (Naples: Grimaldi, 2009) and Giancarlo Alisio, Napoli e il risanamento. Recupero di una struttura urbana (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1982). 17 Photography was a fixed element in the institute’s multidimensionally oriented research program. The qualitative particularities of the Gulf of Naples and the Stazione’s technical facilities and infrastructure encouraged a testing of various photographic methods. Two examples are the underwater studies of Johannes Sobotta and Eugen von Petersen. 18 “Neapel, St[azione] Z[oologica], Dr. P. Schiemenz in seinem Arbeitszimmer, Nov[ember] 1889,” ASZN La 119, 65. 19 “St[azione] Z[oologica] Merculiano in seinem Arbeitszimmer, Nov[ember] [18]89,” ASZN La 119, 32. 20 “Napoli St[azione] Z[oologica] Injektionsapparat Dr. P[aul] Mayer, Nov[ember] [18]89,” ASZN La 119, 60. 21 To give few examples: “Giovanino Buono,” ASZN La 120, 344. “Filio del Luigi di Gennaro,” ASZN La 120, 345. “Stockung beim Aufholen des Schleppnetzes,” ASZN La 120, 346. Untitled, ASZN La 122, 1974. 22 “Sirenen 19.5.1890,” ASZN La 120, 128–131. 23 Reichsberichte 1881, ASZN O, II, p. 42. 24 Kohler, 124–127. 25 Dickie, 100–111. 26 Anton Dohrn to Marie Dohrn April 4, 1890, Naples, ASZN Bd 668. 27 Wilhelm Giesbrecht, “Die Zoologische Station in Neapel,” in: Universum, 1, 3 (1897): 1367–1384, here 1367. 28 Katharina Steiner, “Stadtfotografie als historische Quelle. Wilhelm Giesbrechts Neapel-Erkundungen mit der Kamera,” in: Fotogeschichte, 34, 131 (2014): 5–12. 29 “Neapel 16.7. [18]90. Steinheil 132–144,” ASZN La 119, 132. 30 Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form. Animal Morphology and the German Universities 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65–104. 31 Although individuals belonging to the group of lower personnel were taught at the Stazione, there were no lectures or seminars to train researchers and students, Wilhelm Giesbrecht, “Altes und Neues von der Zoologischen Station in Neapel,” in: Deutsche Rundschau 33 (1907): 14–15. 32 Anton Dohrn, in: Carl Chun, Die Ctenophoren des Golfes von Neapel und der angrenzenden Meeres-Abschnitte (Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel, 1), (Leipzig: Friedländer: Engelmann, 1880), V. 33 Zoologische Station (ed.), Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel und seiner angrenzenden Meeres-Abschnitte, 1880–1970. 34 Chun (1880), XVIII. 35 Giesbrecht (1907): 8–9. 36 Nyhart (1995), 346 has pointed to the function of non-university institutions as transitional loci between PhD and professorship for Giesbrecht’s generation of German zoologists, which for the first time saw itself confronted with a paucity of open positions in the stretch of the 1880s to 1901: a situation I have seen

Copepods and Fisherboys  99 reflected in the Stazione’s archives. Not only Giesbrecht but also his colleagues Arnold Lang, Hans Driesch, Karl Brandt, Gottfried Berthold, Angelo Andres, Richard Kleinenberg, Johann Wilhelm Spengel, Paulus Schiemenz, Antonio Della Valle, and Frederico Raffaele profited from the institution’s integrative potential: where some of these scientists returned to universities—either to continuing or new positions—others remained working for the Stazione. In line with Paul Mayer and Hugo Eisig Giesbrecht’s permanent appointment in Naples, which only ended with his death in 1913, was unique. 37 Anton Dohrn, Erster Jahresbericht der Zoologischen Station in Neapel (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1876), 40. 38 Dohrn (1876): 10–11. 39 Dohrn (1876): 11. 40 Müller, 213–215. Christiane Groeben, “The Stazione Zoologica: A Clearing House for Marine Organisms,” in: Keith Benson/Philip F. Rehbock (eds.), Oceanographic History: The Pacific and Beyond (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2002), 537–548. 41 Reichsberichte, 1881, ASZN O, II, p. 51. 42 Reichsberichte, 1885/1886, ASZN O, II, p. 111. 43 Carl Chun, Die pelagische Thierwelt in grösseren Tiefen und ihre Beziehungen zu der Oberflächenfauna (Cassel: Fischer, 1887), 57. 44 Anton Dohrn, “Promemoria zum Plan eines grossen Dampfers, November 1883,” unit 22, p. 4. ASZN, G I. Unterrichtsministerium Berlin Correspondenz, 1873–1891. 45 Lynn K. Nyhart, “Voyaging and the Scientific Expedition Report, 1800–1940,” in: Rima D. Apple, Gregory J. Downey, and Stephen L. Vaughn (eds.): Science in Print. Essays on the History of Science and the Culture of Print (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012): 65–86. Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge: Belknap Press of University of Harvard Press, 2005). 46 Dohrn (1880): VIII. 47 The Stazione is an innovative research locus developing ecology-driven approaches to systematic marine research, and is an example of non-university based research institutions shaping what Nyhart calls the “biological perspective” See Lynn K. Nyhart: Modern Nature. The Rise of the Biological Perspective, Chicago and London 2009, pp. 323–354. 48 Reichsberichte 1881, ASZN O, II, S. 48. Irmgard Müller has already pointed to the efforts of Hugo Eisig, a founding member and vice director of the Stazione, at the start of the 1880s to develop the fishing sector and have it placed on the same scientific level as microscopy. This project, which initially failed, was oriented mainly toward the new industrial demand for fishing. See Müller (1976), 138–140. 49 The cultural historian Peter Burke has tied the introduction of the term “field research” in anthropology to Alfred Haddon while at the Stazione; see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. From the Encyclopédie bis Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 31. 50 Anton Dohrn, “Bericht über die Zoologische Station während des Jahres 1882–1884,” in: Mittheilungen aus der Zoologischen Station zu Neapel, 6 (1886): 93–148, here 102. 51 De Bont, 67. 52 “Entwurf Manuskript, Copiert von Elisabeth Giesbrecht April 1913,” Familiennachlass Anton Dohrn Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München Box 12. 53 Anton Dohrn, “Bericht über die Zoologische Station während 1876–1878,” in: Mittheilungen an der Zoologischen Station zu Neapel, 1 (1879): 137–164, here 151. 54 Dohrn (1876): 11. 55 Dohrn (1876): 10. At present we have only one original book of Schmidtlein’s notes, Fishing diary, 1876–1877, ASZN M.VI. a 1. Dohrn published data sets

100  Katharina Steiner in the various volumes of the Jahresbericht. Another set of fishing journals 1885/1886; 1887; 1901/1902; 1910; 1911; 1912; und 1910–1913 (without archival calling numbers) is located in the Stazione’s museum. 56 Dohrn (1876): 10. 57 Reichsbericht 1881, ASZN O, II, p. 40. 58 Ibid., 1880/1881, ASZN O, II, p. 52. 59 Ibid. 60 Dohrn (1876): 10–11; Dohrn (1879): 151; Reichsbericht 1888/1889, ASZN O II, p. 139. 61 Payment roll, ASZN M. XVII staff, a 6–7. In the 1878, Reichsbericht five “fisher youths” and two “sea people” are referred to without names. 62 Dohrn (1876): 11. 63 “August 1892,” ASZN La 122, 2016–2040. 64 Dohrn (1876): 11. 65 Wilhelm Giesbrecht, “Zur Entwicklung des Schliessnetz,” in: Mittheilungen der Zoologischen Station, 11, (1893–1895): 306–324, here 319. 66 The “payment rolls” (1879–1909) offer a tabular overview of the staff of officials by name; this document includes only the name and yearly income of employees who are entitled to a pension from Prussian; details and payment conditions are registered separately, Cassa Cladde, ASZN M.II.c and Salaries Account, ASZN M.XII. 67 Konto Krankenkasse 1895–1915, ASZN M.XVII. b, 1–2. Pensionsfonds, ASZN M.XVII.b.3. Versorgungsfonds für niederes Personal, ASZN M.XVII.b.4. Dohrn was here making use of a pioneering German social-insurance system established in the 1880s, transferring it to Southern Italy. Beginning in 1895 at the latest, he did his utmost to see to integration of the Stazione’s lower personnel into this system. The negotiations concerning this matter between Dohrn and the German Foreign Office have not been researched; I will address the topic in more detail in my book. 68 This brings to mind Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” in: American Scientist, 77, 6 (1989): 554–563. In his unpublished “Reichsberichte,” Dohrn speaks of both groups of employees, referring to individuals by name. Excerpted passages were published in the Jahresberichten and were also communicated outside the scientific community; see “Die Zoologische Station in Neapel und das wissenschaftliche Fischen,” in: Berliner Tagblatt, Weltspiegel, December 8, 1906, ASZN K 219; “La Stazione Zoologica di Napoli,” in La tribuna Illustrata, Rome, December 16, 1906, ASZN K 220; “La pesca scientifica nel golfo di Napoli,” in Pro familia, December 23, 1906, no. 51, ASZN K 222. 69 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 128. 70 See the series on “Italy and Science” starting in 1873 in Nature number 169, p.  234. Often the tenor of short essays published as pamphlets is nationalist, evoking the shared Italian language for documenting research achievements or Italy’s scientific preeminence vis-à-vis other European countries. 71 Cited in C. O. Whitman, “The Question of a Table in Naples,” in Nature 450 (September 18, 1891): 160. 72 In the context of research on transnational history, models have been developed that appear highly pertinent to the Stazione; see e.g. Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad (eds.), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). The Stazione’s absence from these discussions is striking. 73 Karl Josef Partsch, Die Zoologische Station in Neapel. Modell internationaler Wissenschaftszusammenarbeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980). The institute’s research-structure would serve as a model for similar institutions

Copepods and Fisherboys  101 founded elsewhere from the 1880s onward. See Partsch and Müller, 426–437. Dohrn already suggested as much in 1885/1888, ASZN Reichsberichte O, II, S. 102—an assessment supported by the first comparison of marine-biological institutes, Charles Attwood Kofoid, The Biological Stations of Europe (Bulletin of United States Bureau of Education, 4), Washington 1910. 74 For a list of working places and guest researchers, see Müller, appendix 1–84. 75 Partsch, 99–110. 76 Dohrn (1886): 99–100. See also Müller, 114. On knowledge production in agriculture, see Jonathan Harwood, “Biology and Agriculture,” special issue of the Journal of the History of Biology, 39 (2006): 2. Curiously, the fishing trade is omitted from these studies, despite its being a branch of agriculture. 77 Partsch, 15. At the same time, Italian subsidies and fees paid for working space represented 13.5% of the Stazione’s expenditures between 1879 and 1914. ­Germany: 31.9%, other states: 16.5%, revenue from the aquarium, exports, publications, interest: 38.8%. In this respect it is important to note that the Stazione was not one of the institutions established by the German Foreign Office such as the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. 78 Partsch, 31–35. 79 The vaguely formulated specifications in the agreement between the Stazione and the city included upkeep by the owners, free access to the sea, pursuit of marine-­ biological research, and public visiting rights to the aquarium. No requirements were set by the commune regarding employment advantages for Neapolitans. 80 Dohrn (1876): 36. 81 De Bont (2015), 67, concludes the opposite: “In the Stazione, the specimens were brought in by ‘rugged Neapolitan fishermen’ and selected by staff at the station, and only then were they delivered to the researcher.” 82 Payment roll, ASZN M. XVII staff, a 6–7. 83 Snowden, 33. 84 See Ariane Dröscher, Le facoltà scienze fisiche, matematiche e naturali italiane (1860–1915). Repertorio delle cattedre e degli stabilimenti annessi, dei docent, dei liberi docent e del personale assistente e tecnico (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 2013): 48. 85 Between 1879 and 1909, Lo Bianco’s income increased from 720 to 5,400 lire; payment roll, ASZN M. XVII staff, a 6–7. 86 Reichsberichte 1888/1889, ASZN O, II, p. 139. 87 “Hilfsjournal Beppino Riegel,” ASZN M. IV.b.3, January 1882–1902; secondary journal, Peppino Riegel, 1882–1893 and 1893–1902, ASZN M.IV. b. 3. 88 Ibid. 89 Dohrn (1879): 151. 90 Dohrn (1876): 11. 91 Dohrn (1879): 151. 92 Dohrn (1876): 11.

References Unpublished Sources ASZN=Historical Archives Stazione Zoologica di Anton Dohrn Napoli. Familiennachlass Anton Dohrn Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

5 Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether Tanya O’Sullivan

Science and the City This chapter investigates the role of “Dublin” on the development of the late Victorian ethereal preoccupations of George Francis Fitzgerald (1851–1901), Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, and William Fletcher Barrett (1844–1925), Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal College of Science, Dublin. It also explores how the location of these men in regard to ether research—whether inside or outside the city’s established protestant parameters—influenced scientific debate (see Figure 5.1). The suggestion that science and the city are not merely two complex historical and cultural configurations, but are two continually interacting entities has featured prominently in recent urban studies.1 This idea also resonates with a growing emphasis in geography on the active agency of space that has characterized cultural analyses of urban life,2 in particular, Edward Soja’s work, which probes the intrinsic “processual or dynamic” aspects of cityspace, as well as its formal and morphological features.3 By attending to the multitude of spatial zones, which emerge from these conceptions of a cityscape, and being aware of the active role cities play in shaping both scientific knowledge and scientific practice as Dierig, Lachmund, and ­Mendelsohn outline, we can begin to grasp some of the ways in which “the city” might be viewed as a fertile site for understanding the locatedness of scientific endeavor. Dublin, in this chapter, is, therefore, understood as a series of socio-spatial cityscapes which coacted with scientific knowledge in various ways. The thriving scientific culture that existed at the turn of the century has only relatively recently been brought into the public domain by new publications on Irish science, and as a result, we are beginning to see a more complete picture of the scientific output of Dublin and its societal impact at the time. But my intention in this chapter is to put the spotlight on the city itself, and ask, to what extent can we locate the imprint of “Dublin” on late nineteenth-century science? To date, the spatiality of scientific culture in Ireland has been explored in relation to the reception of Darwinism in Belfast,4 and particular Dublin institutional spaces have served as comparators for wider debates on the spatiality of scientific knowledge.5 But questions around place and space,

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  103

Figure 5.1  F  ront entrance of Trinity College, as viewed from Dame Street, Dublin, in the late nineteenth century.

territory and topography, cartography and scale, have been less audible from historians of science who have in the past made Dublin the focus of their inquiries. Studies of scientific lives in particular, have tended to foreground individual brilliance and scientific achievement. We are accustomed to biographical accounts of Barrett and Fitzgerald that have focused on their significant contributions to the progress of physics internationally. Barrett was renowned for his work on the electrical, magnetic, and thermal properties of metals, for his studies of sensitive flames and their uses in acoustic demonstrations, and was also known for his psychical research and experiments in telepathy. Fitzgerald played a crucial role in the development of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, and for instituting the Fitzgerald–Lorentz contraction, which later became an essential part of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.6 However, in accepting the maxim of Dierig et al., that space is an active ingredient in social and cultural life which has made its mark on science in different ways—and as a consequence view scientific theories as forms of work in the context of everyday lives—how does that now impact on how we view the traditional genre of scientific biography? In particular, what can urban living tell us about the way science is done? The chapter will attempt to answer this question, first, by investigating some of the ways in which scientific lives intersected with urban spaces,7 and second, by assessing the impact of this on nineteenth-century ether debates. It will heed the advice of Green that biographical treatments of

104  Tanya O’Sullivan scientific lives “should situate their subjects in the institutions and networks that made their careers possible” in order to “balance the distortions created by traditional genre conventions.”8 We are reminded also by research in the historical geography of science that “local encounters with science were shaped by how the practitioners conceived of their local settings, by what they took their situation to be, as much as by the ontological realities of those venues.”9 As city dwellers, Fitzgerald and Barrett inhabited distinct Dublin spaces that at once enabled and constrained routine social relations in profound ways. Nicholas Whyte has already pointed to some of these spaces in his foundational critique of the cultural background to science in nineteenthcentury Ireland. He isolates specific strands of scientific endeavor in Dublin which he refers to as “Ascendency” and “Institutional.”10 The first was carried out mainly in Trinity College, the Royal Dublin Society, and the Royal Irish Academy, predominantly by scientists of the Church of Ireland or Anglican tradition. Their metropolis was to be found between Trinity ­College, Leinster House, and Dawson Street. The second strand involved institutional Irish science and the increasing influence of the south Kensington Department of Science on its activities during the nineteenth century. The employees of institutions such as the Dublin Museum of Science and Art comprised a mixture of English, Scottish, and Irish employees, and there were often conflicting perceptions of the location of scientific authority among these administrative scientists. Despite the proximity of these institutions and the shared metropolitan infrastructure, both strands encompassed exclusive intellectual communities. So, we shall see that the different spaces inhabited socially, politically, and intellectually by Fitzgerald and Barrett in Dublin brought to bear a significant influence on their conception of the “ether” because whether experiments were done, or texts read, in College Green or Stephen’s Green, mattered in terms of how they were interpreted and subsequently mobilized.11 The next section outlines Dublin engagements with the “ether” episode during its apotheosis and explores how this particular scientific debate was intertwined with a highly dynamic late Victorian urban space.

Mobilizing the Ether in Nineteenth-Century Dublin In spite of a few dissenting voices, the ether was generally regarded as indispensable throughout much of late nineteenth-century physics. Questions were raised not around its existence, but around the nature of the substance and its interaction with matter. The issue at stake, according to historian of physics, Helge Kragh, was whether the ether was seen as the fundamental substratum out of which matter was built, or whether matter was a more fundamental ontological category of which the ether was just a special instance.12 Whatever the belief, Iwan Morus observes, the “all pervasive medium contained the mechanism through which the grand doctrine of the

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  105 conservation of energy operated and became manifest.”13 As a result, the ether became a compelling and authoritative explanatory tool which pervaded the scientific culture of the day. Although the ether was one of the major success stories of nineteenthcentury science, by the early twentieth century, the all-pervading substance was vanquished to the sidelines of physics, having been “revealed as a baroque fantasy, better fitted for the condescension of a new generation, than for any serious consideration on their part.”14 Dublin’s ether story can be traced back to the Newtonian physics first taught at Trinity College Dublin in the early eighteenth century by Dr Richard Helsham, Dean Swift’s medical advisor and fellow of Trinity. Here, the course of lectures on Natural Philosophy presented by Helsham pondered on the problem of the stationary ether and the lack of any physical effect of the earth’s motion through it.15 Newton’s dictate, in accounting for the planetary orbits in terms of laws of gravitation, meant that the very existence of the ether would disturb and retard the motion of the planets and comets. This paradox had long played on the minds of natural philosophers. Over the next hundred years or so, Trinity scholars continued to address the issue. James McCullough (1809–1847), Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, developed mathematical models for the ether stating “one thing only I am persuaded of, that the constitution of the ether, if it ever be discovered, will be found to be quite different from anything that we are in the habit of conceiving, though at the same time very simple and very beautiful.”16 In order to comply with theoretical specifications, the mechanical qualities of the ether had to be fluid in order to fill space, but rigid enough to support the high frequency of light waves. It also had to be massless and without viscosity, otherwise it would visibly affect the orbits of planets. Additionally, it had to be completely transparent, nondispersive, incompressible, and continuous at a very small scale. Dublin mathematician Thomas Preston summed up the difficulties in 1895, when he claimed that the existence of the ether could be established only by the “intellect” rather than by direct sensory experience. Its connection with ordinary matter was “far from being settled by experiment” and there were “difficulties  … in forming a consistent idea of its constitution and function.”17 By the late nineteenth century, Trinity scientists such as George Francis Fitzgerald and Frederick Trouton along with their Cambridge colleagues had made such progress in describing elastic solids and fluids that they felt ready to construct a full theory of the ether, and the ensuing deliberations were intertwined with developments in the theory of heat and an understanding of light waves.18 What is more pertinent to the direction of this chapter, however, is the fact that in acknowledging the existence of the ether, physicists also had to acknowledge that it was unlike ordinary matter and would have to have extraordinary physical properties such as quasi-immateriality, universality, continuity, and unity. This made it a particularly flexible resource, which,

106  Tanya O’Sullivan once given scientific sustenance, could also then become a useful tool for physicists who engaged in political or religious discourse. In this analysis of Dublin’s ethereal science, the urban spaces of “Ascendency” science at Trinity College will be juxtaposed with those of “Institutional” science found at the Royal College of Science and viewed through the corporeal frames of George Francis Fitzgerald and William Fletcher Barrett. William Barrett’s city spaces generated a view of the ether that saw it more as a mode of sensitivity or susceptibility, a quasi-vital substance rather than a form of matter. For him, the ether could be deployed as a fundamental part of an argument for spiritualism. As Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal College of Science for Ireland, he also inspired an interest in psychical research among prominent members of the social and cultural elite in his adopted city. Despite his scientific and social standing, however, Barrett inhabited a peripheral location with respect to the conventional scientific community in Dublin. Unusually, there exists no Royal Society Obituary notice for him as a deceased Fellow.19 He is primarily known today only in connection with the Society for Psychical Research. The “Dublin” Barrett experienced, was a city in which urban poverty and social strife called out for salvation from the excesses of commercialism and materialism. He described in letters to colleagues “the bottomless misery and poverty of the infinite drinking classes.”20 This he attributed to the greed of brewers, distillers, and publicans whose commercial success won them seats in the House of Lords. He felt that the city was enfeebled by the sectarian nature of Irish politics, giving rise to situations that would be “incredible in England,”21 and found the city to be inhabited by “dogmatic Protestants and Catholics who condemned all communion with spirits.”22 As well as being from a nonconforming Congregational background, Barrett also diverged from established political views by being a Home Rule supporter. His liberal stance on the issue set him apart from the Dublin Unionist community. As a non-Dubliner in Dublin, he believed that the solution to sectarian conflict was for all parties to experience the “discipline of self-government” and to be “forced to collaborate in a local legislature.”23 He frequently contributed to religious pamphlets, claiming on one occasion “to have mixed with all classes and creeds and all sorts and conditions of Irish men … and have never experienced intolerance.”24 For Barrett, physics was the way to safeguard public morality and revitalize faith in Christian spirituality. His navigation of Dublin, which he described as “the most God forsaken spot on this earth,”25 provided him with space to embark on a personal mission to popularize physics. William Fletcher Barrett (see Figure 5.2) was born in Kingston, Jamaica where his father was a Congregationalist minister and member of a London missionary society who ran a station for saving the souls of emancipated African slaves. As Gauld tells us, his father, William Garland Barrett, seems to have been successful in instilling the virtues of Christian life in his children because two of his sons also became Congregational ministers

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  107

Figure 5.2  W  illiam Fletcher Barrett (1844–1925).

and William himself, unlike many scientific colleagues, never experienced a crisis of faith, remaining a devout and earnest Christian all his life.26 The family returned to England in 1848, and William attended Old Trafford Grammar School in Manchester before studying physics and chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry, London. From 1863 until 1867, he worked at the Royal Institution, London, as an assistant to John Tyndall and came under the guidance of Thomas Huxley and Michael Faraday. A frequent visitor to the Albemarle Street laboratory was Royal Institution member and Irish physician, John Wilson, father of astronomer Edward Wilson, who invited Barrett to spend summers at the family estate at Daramona Co. Westmeath, in Ireland. Barrett describes his astonishment in discovering Wilson to be an investigator of animal mesmerism and recounts some  early  attempts

108  Tanya O’Sullivan with the Wilsons to scientifically examine aspects of mesmerism on “a sensitive subject from the estate.”27 The results of these experiments had a profound effect on Barrett and heralded the beginning of his preoccupation with telepathy. Interests such as these were not encouraged by his mentors back in London. The majority of Royal Institution scientists had by this time developed entrenched antispiritualist attitudes and sought to exclude what was considered illegitimate and deviant from scientific investigation. Previously, an article in The Reader in 1864 by Tyndall had launched a scathing attack on spiritualism,28 deriding all associated practices, and in a series of lectures and publications in the years that followed he exploited the similarity of physics and spirituality to discredit the latter. This was not, however, the only area of contention between Barrett and Tyndall. In later years, Oliver Lodge reminisced that “Barrett had been associated [with Tyndall] as an assistant in his early days, where he made the discovery of sensitive flames, though there was some subsequent soreness between Barrett and Tyndall about this discovery.”29 Mollan has unraveled something of the souring of the relationship between the two physicists during 1865 and 1866, a considerable part of which revolved around the publication of experimental results on sensitive flames.30 After some further disagreements with Tyndall, Barrett eventually left the Royal Institution to teach at a number of other London Colleges including the Royal School of Naval Architecture. By 1867, the fledgling interest in sensitive flames31 developed by Barrett earlier at the Royal Institution had blossomed into substantive research on the phenomenon, and in 1868 he journeyed to Dublin to deliver a lecture to the Royal Dublin Society. Here, the Irish Times reported that Barrett captivated his audience with descriptions of a universe that was “ringing with noiseless music” and proceeded to conduct experiments and demonstrations of this effect for the gathered crowd. He went on to talk about “complex bodies capable of being thrown into an abnormal state,” which were “sensitive to the slightest stimuli if of the proper kind.” This, the report claimed was what Barrett believed to be “the foundation for whatever truth there might be in the startling facts of mesmerism.”32 Robert Ball, the Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanism, at the newly established Royal College of Science in Dublin writing in later years remembered the “arresting lecture which he [Barrett] gave on this subject at the Royal Dublin Society” where he “dazzled his audience by making the ‘wonderful’ flame bob up and down in exact synchrony to the ticking of a distant watch.”33 It was largely through Ball’s curiosity about the visiting lecturer’s innovative research that Barrett obtained his next appointment. In October 1873, Ball urged Barrett to apply for the Chair of Physics at the Royal College of Science for Ireland. The RCSI in Dublin, on the recommendations of a commission headed by Lord Rosse, had only recently opened its doors to students with the claim that “the object of the college should be to supply as far as practicable a complete course of instruction

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  109 in science applicable to the Industrial Arts especially those which may be classed broadly under mining engineering and manufactures and to aid in the instruction of teachers for the local school of science.”34 Tyndall and Huxley were particularly keen to place scientific men they regarded as allies in positions of influence at the new college to help spread the gospel of scientific reform and evolution.35 Tyndall, despite recent wrangles with Barrett, supported his former assistant’s move to the Royal College in a spirit of reforming zeal which aimed to establish the new scientific culture firmly in Dublin. As these maneuverings indicate, the foundation of this Technical College in Dublin came at a time of intense debate about the teaching of science in Ireland. While for Huxley, Tyndall, and their supporters in Dublin, Darwin’s theory of evolution outlined nearly a decade earlier had provided ample justification for the secularization of scientific education in the city; it was a different matter for the Irish Catholic hierarchy who viewed Darwinism as a threat to public morality. Calls to reform Irish university education in a way that was sensitive to Catholics rang alarm bells in the minds of Darwinists, and scientific naturalists used their influence wherever possible to limit the influence of the Catholic bishops on scientific education.36 Such was the evolutionary atmosphere which permeated the college building in St. Stephen’s Green when Barrett arrived in 1873. Darwin’s theory had generated fault lines through Ireland’s scientific community which initiated moves to define science once and for all. The varied doctrinal receptions of scientific naturalism in Ireland have been explored in detail elsewhere,37 but one pivotal event deserves a mention here, and this was John Tyndall’s Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast, which became an important nucleus around which debates on science, religion, and education spun in Ireland after 1874. Barrett was just a year into his new post in Dublin when Tyndall’s declarations were made. Although the Belfast Address was uncompromising in its defense of the independence of the scientific enterprise, the specific Irish context for the 1874 pronouncements and the careful qualifications of the kind of materialism he was promoting were lost in the furor which followed.38 The reverberations of Tyndall’s Address were felt all over the Island not just because of its inherently provocative aspects—the issues of Catholic restrictions on education, evolutionary biology, the promotion of materialism and determinism—but also because of misinterpretations of Tyndall’s motives. The Catholic clergy complained that Tyndall’s speech “had been carried by the periodical press into every town and village where there is a reading room or railway stall.”39 They saw Tyndall and Huxley influencing Irish minds in the guise of, as Luckhurst describes, “the Godless heads of a new intellectual order.”40 Wood has recently shown that the Catholic hierarchy held firmly to their belief in Tyndall’s “materialism” as a tool to secure a particular kind of scientific education for Catholic students.41 That, and

110  Tanya O’Sullivan their failure to secure an alternative system for many years, resulted in an educational vacuum for Catholic students. So, a number of pressing socio-religious cityscapes shaped Barrett’s science in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Here, on the one hand, technical education— which would have been economically beneficial to the country—was not available because of local politics. And in another arena, the university system filled the city with “young barristers, clerks and others of that class” because it was “deemed degrading to enter anything that smacks of trade or handiwork.”42 Thus, Barrett was convinced that promoting practical science in Ireland was “most important to the country.”43 He soon realized his mission as technical educator by mobilizing all the resources of the Royal College of Science for Ireland to superimpose ­Tyndall’s experimental culture of empire and industry onto an industrially underdeveloped Dublin.44 For him, the act of imparting useful technical skills was a wholesome pursuit, as it also served to inculcate moral values. Barrett’s religious upbringing in the nonconformist tradition with its belief that virtuous acts on earth would be rewarded in a future life, had found room for expression in Dublin’s urban spaces. Over the next few years, Barrett was responsible for launching Dublin’s first systematic classes in practical physics and constructing the Royal ­College of Science’s first physical laboratories. The college gained a reputation for the excellent equipment of its laboratories, and the emphasis on the practical teaching of science was deemed to be an inspiration to the rest of the country. Barrett’s quick assimilation of contemporary scientific developments also played a major role in the broadening of the college’s influence beyond teaching, to the world of commerce, industry, and medicine.45 It was at this stage that the concept of the ether became important to Barrett, for explaining how the universe could once more be seen as a unified whole following the advances of scientific naturalism. In 1875, two years into his Dublin post at the Royal College of Science in St. Stephens Green, he embarked on a review of three recently published books by well-known investigators of spiritualism, William Crookes, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Asa Mahan which was to appear in the Nonconformist. The book review proved so popular that he was compelled to write an expanded version three weeks later. Although this was ostensibly a critical review, it served also as the platform from which Barrett launched his own views on spiritualism and specifically targeted what he saw to be Tyndall’s materialistic message the year before. It was here that he mobilized the ether to bring together his disparate areas of physical and psychical research, in order to mount an attack on materialism. Barrett, like Oliver Lodge, sought to bring the spiritual within the realms of physical science by underlining how different ether was from ordinary matter. He felt disposed toward “alleviating the woes of those yearning for some deliverance from the meshes of materialism” and “groaning beneath a mechanical universe.”46 Because of Barrett’s conviction that by using the

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  111 latest techniques of experimental physics one could prove the independence of mind and body, the ether became a particularly useful tool for emphasizing the necessary connections between his physical and psychical research. As a consequence, he investigated links between telepathy and physical systems exhibiting resonance. In an article on “Sympathetic Vibrations,” published in the Christian publication Good Words, he documented resonant phenomena in acoustics and concluded with the observation that “sympathetic vibration” was a principle that held for the invisible vibrations of the ether and supported “many obvious spiritual analogies.”47 Barrett’s tangential position was further underlined by the siting of his home base in Kingstown where the physical distance from the coterie of scientists in the city left him beyond the bounds of the “cognitive topography” of Dublin’s scientific expertise.48 Here, his psychical interests were further ignited when James Wilson, brother of his old colleague from Westmeath, became a neighbor in the coastal suburb. All through the 1870s, he attended séances held in Wilson’s home. Barrett also engaged in experiments here with the Lauders’ family, who under the name Lafayette were spiritualists and leading photographers in late Victorian Dublin.49 On his summer vacations, he made extensive investigations of dowsing in neighboring County Wicklow and published two book-length articles on water divining in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1897 and 1900.50 Barrett’s circumvention of established publishing practices, and the appearance of many of his articles—advocating the Christian potential of the ether—in religious journals such as Light and Nonconformist, marginalized him in scientific circles. But his engaging lectures which “dazzled his audience” by making flames bob up and down “in exact synchrony to the ticking of a distant watch,”51 gained him popularity with Dublin crowds. While his mobilization of physics as a force for public good, ostensibly demonstrated Tyndall’s and Fitzgerald’s vision for the widespread communication of technological knowledge, Barrett’s particular brand of teaching entailed crowd-pleasing experiments in which mysterious phenomena were invoked, thus alienating his colleagues. But, it was by using physics in this way that he could argue for the independence of mind and body, and promote the idea— which challenged the prevailing climate of science—that the ether was a link between the scientific and the spiritual. So, we see that the “ether” was particularly useful to Barrett for illustrating the significance of the world beyond matter, and that it was the urban landscape of Dublin which enabled his scientific interpretations to flourish. The chapter turns now to Trinity College Dublin and focuses on a city life, which in marked contrast to Barrett’s, was disposed toward making connections between ether and matter.52 As a new man of science and ardent unionist, George Francis Fitzgerald’s “Dublin” was, first and foremost, the second city of the British Empire.53 Central to his vision for the advancement of science was the acknowledgment of this imperial status and the primacy of Trinity’s place in it (see Figure 5.3). The attempt by late Victorian

112  Tanya O’Sullivan

Figure 5.3  G  eorge Francis Fitzgerald (1851–1901).

Liberal Governments to grant Home Rule to Ireland was anathema to such views.54 The proposal was seen by many unionists as a potentially retrograde step which would undermine technological progress. For a start, Fitzgerald entertained the idea that the ether was a connecting link between the sciences themselves, thus blurring the spatial boundaries between empirical science and the workings of the “scientific system.” He believed that the ether demanded “elucidation and strength,” because without it, scientific disciplines were in danger of becoming too specialized and would suffer from “undernourishment” from other disciplines.55 But Fitzgerald took this notion further in a revealing account of his thoughts on the subject of science and society published five years before his death. Here, he made a striking analogy between the corporate life of animals, social states, and the organization of the sciences where he argued that science was progressing in the same way as civilized states. Here, he noted that the study of the “properties of each kind of matter as related to energy and the ether” was the most pressing aspect of this research because it had “bearings on every department of science and on every practice.”56

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  113 Connections such as this one made by Fitzgerald between the ether, scientific disciplines, and social states have led Richard Noakes to suggest that he represents one of the few “plausible cases of a late Victorian physicist implicitly teasing out the social implications of the unifying capacity of the ether.”57 Noakes’ observation that “corporate life” might have been a veiled reference to the union of Great Britain and Ireland that was the preserve of the conservative Cambridge elite of which he was a member, is intriguing. By the 1890s, we know that Fitzgerald was fiercely opposing Home Rule and was only too aware of what he considered to be an undermining of the progress of a “civilised state,” that is, the attempt by Nationalists to disengage with the British Empire. While ether—which was useful to Fitzgerald as a tool for supporting his belief in the unity of nature and the sciences—can be seen as a metaphor for his preferred polity as Noakes outlines,58 my aim here is to reveal the extent to which Fitzgerald’s Dublin spaces shaped his ideas about the ether. By investigating Fitzgerald as one of the new breed of late nineteenthcentury “scientific modernisers,” we can, by comparing his intellectual position with those of aggressively anti-Catholic “naturalist” colleagues such as Tyndall and Huxley, unearth something of the agency of his native city—particularly Trinity College—on certain tenets of natural philosophy which were fundamental to late Victorian ether theories, but which were grounded in a particular Dublin brand of Christian theology. Reflecting along these lines brings Fitzgerald’s fin de siècle ruminations on ether physics into sharper focus. Fitzgerald believed that Irish society was in need of social reform and improvement, but from a city perspective—in sharp contrast to Barrett’s peripheral status—Fitzgerald was a figure whose physical, intellectual, and social presence radiated from a central location. His was a position of social and scientific authority in a city which was central to his adult life and work. Fitzgerald remained at Trinity from the age of 16 until the end of his life, while others had left for posts abroad. He was immersed in a culture that was comfortable and familiar to him. The extended Fitzgerald family were embedded in the fabric of the College; his father and uncle were Trinity Professors; and Fitzgerald was married to Harriet Jellet, the daughter of the Provost of Trinity. Their home at No.7 Ely place was a short stroll away from the College. The grounds of the University were not simply the bounds of his workplace, on the greens of College park, Fitzgerald constructed, and was hauled skyward on a Lilienthal glider by his students. Nearby, he practiced pole-vaulting and hockey, and oversaw the affairs of the boat club. His evenings were spent with eminent local families, the Jellets, the Stokes, and the Jolys enjoying music and amateur dramatics in Dublin’s Georgian drawing rooms.59 In his college, Fitzgerald was regarded as the “idol of the undergraduates and the hope of the older men.”60 Here, he founded and became the most

114  Tanya O’Sullivan industrious member of the Dublin University Experimental Science Association which met once a month to discuss and present new work over tea. On one of these occasions, we are offered a rare contemporary glimpse of Fitzgerald’s authoritative persona. The young Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger reflecting on his time in Dublin in the early 1890s remembers his first encounters with Fitzgerald in a cafe near Trinity College. He describes a gathering of scientific men who met daily in Lincoln Place and draws attention to the central role of Fitzgerald at these meetings. Praeger writes, “Our leader and Chairperson was George Francis Fitzgerald and around him were grouped numerous Dublin scientists, occasionally up to eleven Fellows of the Royal Society would be taking tea and toast with him here… It was always a lively lunch table, the genial Fitzgerald essentially a product of Dublin and the Dublin University, was a big bearded man, and his resonant voice filled the little room as he poured out wisdom and nonsense in a delightful medley, for he was a brilliant talker … ”61 The elevation of physics as a scientific discipline and the widening of its authoritative jurisdiction were well under way at this time. Many practitioners viewed themselves as rational modernizers who drove the all-important advances in technology. But the negotiating grounds on which scientific expertise and authority were debated had been appropriated by the London “X” club members, resulting in a conflation of “scientific modernism” and “naturalism.”62 Ostensibly, Fitzgerald was an active member of this group. He joined with the new professionals in their attempts to promote science and technical instruction, but the “naturalism” associated with the new movement was not embraced by the Trinity-based Fitzgerald. His relationship with the new science and its main proponents—such as his Irish colleague John Tyndall—was therefore more nuanced. While scientific naturalists such as Huxley had chosen empiricism over idealism,63 Fitzgerald’s writings do reveal a position similar to that of Tyndall in which he sets scientific materialism in the larger context of natural supernaturalism.64 But, while Tyndall found inspiration in German Romantic writers such as Fichte and Goethe,65 Fitzgerald’s idealism emerged from the older mathematical and Divinity traditions of his University. The idealist philosophy of George Berkeley was one of the great influences of Trinity’s Anglican ethos on Fitzgerald. Berkeley’s writings had thoroughly permeated the Maths, Natural Philosophy, and Divinity Schools of the Dublin College. This philosophy sat well with the scholarly intention of the academics in these departments, many of whom were Anglican clergymen, to promote a nonmechanistic view of life and origins. A sense of this enduring admiration for George Berkeley, which circulated around the corridors of Trinity College, emerges from a foundational piece on idealism published in 1872, by Fitzgerald’s colleague, William Graham.66 In his essay, Graham claimed that the philosophy of Berkeley was the only hope for the future spiritual life of humanity because he offered the most complete antidote to these new “theoretical debasers of the human spirit” and he went

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  115 on to claim that “materialism debases the human spirit because it makes thought itself a function of the brain and treats the human being as nothing more than a highly elaborated physical organism.”67 In Graham’s view, Darwinism was the most pressing variety of materialism in 1870s, as it tried to “trace an unbroken continuity from protoplasm to man, from chemical action to the energy of the soul, even filling up the gap that was assumed to exist between vegetable and animal life.”68 It is evident too that friends of Fitzgerald in the Divinity School, such as Charles Frederick D’Arcy, were led toward these idealist philosophies as a bulwark against the materialistic interpretations of Huxley and Spencer. In his autobiography, D’Arcy revealed the impact of Tyndall’s challenge to established views in the College and underpinned the extent to which Berkeley’s philosophy had infiltrated the Trinity viewpoint: as I followed his [Spencer’s] efforts to exhibit the process of the universe as a great evolution, I began to discern the nature of the problem which had to be faced. Tyndall’s Belfast address was, however a more direct challenge; and I remember how I turned to Lange’s History of Materialism to get some light upon it. Then it was that there came back to me the vision of Berkeley’s philosophy which I had got in my early youth, and I was able to see how to meet materialism.69 D’Arcy was well acquainted with the physical scientists at Trinity and commented that “among the young men who impressed me were especially Fred Purser and George Fitzgerald, the researches of the latter it has proved led the way towards the new Doctrine of Relativity.”70 Murray also recalls how J. H. Bernard and George Fitzgerald had “mathematical and experimental science tastes in common, and they both manifested a life-long reverence for the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley.”71 It is clear from Fitzgerald that his interpretation of Berkeley provided fundamental metaphysical support for his contention that the physical world was reducible to pure motion. Bruce Hunt has suggested that although Fitzgerald did not specifically connect the ether to metaphysical or religious questions, his attempts to reduce it to a form of pure motion in an incompressible fluid owed much to his belief that, “following Bishop Berkeley, the cosmos reduced to forms of motion that were objective manifestations of a divine thought.”72 In 1885, Fitzgerald had devised his vortex sponge model of the ether, inspired by Thomson’s vortex mechanics,73 and discussions with his uncle and Trinity physicist George Johnstone Stoney.74 Stoney had shared Berkeley’s view that the world of phenomena, and the motion of the elemental ether in particular, was a manifestation of the thought of God. His belief that the “elemental ether was space itself, regarded as moveable,”75 had helped Fitzgerald formulate his theory and underpin his contention that atoms might be stable vortex rings in a perfect liquid ether, making matter itself simply “a mode of motion” of the

116  Tanya O’Sullivan all-pervading ether.76 Fitzgerald believed his model would be “the greatest step towards the comprehension of the intrinsic structure of the Universe which had been made since the time of Newton.”77 It was initially hailed as a triumph by fellow Maxwellians. The success of the model was important for Fitzgerald because of his belief that there was a more fundamental level of reality beneath the laws of phenomena outlined by Newton and Maxwell. Fitzgerald referred to Berkeleyan philosophy in his Helmholtz Memorial lecture published in 1896, but had already outlined his thoughts quite succinctly in an 1890 lecture to the Royal Institution, where he made a more explicit connection with his vortex sponge theory: “this hypothesis explains the difference in nature as differences of motion. If it be true, ether, matter, gold, air, wood, brains are but different motions… that all nature is the language of One in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”78 The fact that this strain of philosophy permeates Fitzgerald’s explanations of the ether can be attributed directly to his location at Trinity College Dublin. Fitzgerald’s well-known reluctance to be drawn into religious matters reflects the problematic space he inhabited between the mores of protestant theology and the pantheistic ideologies of scientific modernizers like Tyndall. Unlike these “quasi-secularists,” who were attempting to disengage from the church, Fitzgerald sought to strengthen connections between the Anglican establishment in Dublin and the “new science.” Apprehending the situation from a spatial perspective, we can appreciate more fully how the flexibility of the ether—in advancing idealistic viewpoints of varying shades—made it an important scientific refuge for Fitzgerald. In consequence, his vision of Dublin as a technological Utopia, generated by a merger of protestant culture and modern science, became synonymous with both his anti-Home Rule stance and the survival of the ether concept.79

Conclusion In this chapter, the city of Dublin has worked as both a bounded physical entity and as theoretical device. By focusing, as Shapin suggests, on “locally varying” modes of cultural interaction,80 traditional approaches to the history of science in the city have been queried and attention has instead been directed toward the manifold spaces of urban lives as a means of illuminating our knowledge of how science took its shape in the city. Exploring the negotiation of Victorian scientific debates from the perspective of the “where” has elucidated, in finer detail, the fin de siècle scientific panorama of the city. Both Barrett and Fitzgerald viewed the properties of ether from different standpoints, uncovered its potential in different ways, but were united in mobilizing the extraordinary complexity of the ether to underpin their respective doctrines. But, in both cases, whether the ethereal priorities or preoccupations were with the spiritual or the mechanical, the race for definitive accounts or explanatory frameworks, as we have seen, revolved around local urban considerations.

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  117 Barrett’s espousal of the Christian potential of ether can be seen as an attempt to bolster public morality in Dublin against the encroaching tide of materialism, while a short walk down Dawson Street to Trinity College, the same illusive substance was being mobilized by another scientist to shore up the city’s Anglican identity against the rising tide of Home Rule agitation. The search for a canonical explanation of the “ether” for Fitzgerald was an attempt to underpin protestant spaces in a time of precarious political geography—the very fabric of his life in Dublin was at stake, and his dream of advancing the profile of Irish science and technology was threatened by a nationalist post—Home Rule society. In Fitzgerald’s view, the progress and prosperity of Dublin were dependent on embracing the new science, and his solution to problems of politics and science was the same; the connecting links must be attended to and strengthened. Barrett, on the other hand, was driven by a need to protect society from the excesses of commercial life which he saw as a threat to the Christian values he cherished. But importantly, it was his location in the newly established Royal College of Science in Dublin, removed from the watchful eye of Tyndall and distanced from the natural philosophers at Trinity College, that his brand of science flourished, and his pedagogical mission to promote the spiritual and moral value of physics was uncurbed. The poverty and disharmony he encountered while working in Dublin provided him with the space to promulgate his spiritualistic theories of the ether, condemn the materialist position, and at the same time attend to the physical and moral education of the underprivileged. Steven Connor has recently observed that nineteenth-century writings about the ether depended on a kind of dynamic imagination “focussed not so much on how things appear as forms, as on how they worked and felt, as actions and stresses.”81 This resounds well with John Poynting’s declaration over a hundred years ago that “physicists looked to mechanical models to explain the universe because of the nature of minds, rather than the nature of the universe … [we are] able to think of ourselves as part of the connecting machinery, feeling the stresses and helping to make the strains.”82 These comments, a century apart, serve to underscore the contention of this chapter; that “the all-pervading ether” was more than a disembodied scientific conundrum for Barrett and Fitzgerald, it was a flexible resource being continually molded and reshaped by the contours of their city lives. The ether forged an important nineteenth-century space for science in Dublin, in which a discourse on, as Connor configures it, the “mentality of matter” and the “materiality of mind” could be played out.

Notes 1 See Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Toward an Urban History of Science,” Osiris (2003), second series, 18: 1–19. 2 For more on this subject, see Sallie Westwood and John Williams, “Imagining Cities,” in Westwood and Williams (eds.), Imagining Cities, Scripts, Signs, Memory (London: Routledge, 1997); Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of

118  Tanya O’Sullivan Cities and Regions (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2000); David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (London: Polity, 2001); Howard Rock and Deborah Dash Moore, Cityscapes. A History of New York in Images (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 3 Soja, Postmetropolis, p. 8. 4 See David Livingstone, “Darwinism and Calvinism: The Belfast Princeton connection.” Isis (1992), 83(3): 408–428; Livingstone, “Darwin in Belfast,” in Foster, J. W. (ed.), Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), pp. 387–408; Livingstone, “Science, Region and Religion: The Reception of Darwinism in Princeton, Belfast and Edinburgh,” in Numbers, R. L. and Stenhouse, J. (eds.), Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 7–38. 5 Nuala Johnson has included the Dublin Gardens in her comparative study of the historical geography of botanical gardens, see Nuala Johnson, Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed; Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), and Livingstone has examined the role of Dublin-based Alexander Macalister in “Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2005), 30: 391–401, and more recently in Dealing with Darwin (John Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 84–87. 6 Charles Mollan, “William Fletcher Barrett,” in Mollan, C. (ed.), “It’s Part of What We Are: Some Irish Contributions to the Development of the Chemical and Physical Sciences.” Science and Irish Culture 3. Vol. 1 & 2. (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 2007), pp. 1112–1131; & Ibid., “George Francis Fitzgerald,” pp. 1199–1224. 7 For more on this and a review of how scientific biography has responded to the spatial turn in the history of science, see Tanya O’Sullivan, Keeping Origins in Site: Lives, Locations and Science in Dublin 1870–1910, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Queens University Belfast, 2014, pp. 9–17. 8 Mott Green, “Writing Scientific Biography.” Journal of the History of Biology (2007), 40(4): 757. 9 David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 182. 10 A third strand encompassed the “Nationalist” tradition. See Nicholas Whyte, “Science and Nationality in Edwardian Ireland,” in Bowler, P. and Whyte, N. (eds.), Science and Society in Ireland 1800–1950 (QUB: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997), pp. 50–52. 11 This line of inquiry constitutes what Nicholaas Rupke terms a “geography of reception” and James Secord “a geography of reading.” See Nicolaas Rupke, “A Geography of Enlightenment: The Critical Reception of Alexander von Humbolt’s Mexico Work,” in Livingstone, D. N. and Withers, C. W. Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 12 Helen Kragh, A Sense of Crisis: Physics in the Fin de Siècle Era. Contribution to Michael Saler (ed.), The Fin De Siècle World (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 12, available [online] at http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.2016.pdf. 13 Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 275. 14 Ibid. 15 Denis Weaire, George Francis Fitzgerald (Pöllauberg: Living Edition, 2009), p. 131. 16 Charles Mollan, “James McCullagh”, in Mollan, C. (ed.), “It’s Part of What We Are: Some Irish Contributions to the Development of the Chemical and Physical Sciences.” Science and Irish Culture 3. Vol. 1 & 2. (Dublin: Royal ­Dublin Society, 2007), pp. 667–685. 17 Thomas Preston, The Theory of Light (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 30–31.

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  119 18 Studies of the development of ether theories in nineteenth-century physics abound. A good starting place is Kragh, A Sense of Crisis, pp. 11–14, Bruce Hunt, The Maxwellians (London: Ithaca, 1991), pp. 73–108, and the second half of Cantor and Hodge Conceptions of Ether, pp. 170–351. For discussion on the cultural context of this development, see Morus, When Physics Became King, pp.  261–287, and Brush, The Temperature of History, Phases of Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Burt Franklin and Company, 1978), pp. 15–29. 19 Mollan, “William Fletcher Barrett,” p. 1131. 20 Richard Noakes, “Ethers, Religion and Politics in Victorian Physics: Beyond the Wynne Thesis.” History of Science (2005), 43: 415–455, p. 435. 21 See Jerome MacVeagh, “Religious Intolerence Under Home Rule—Some Opinions of Leading Irish Protestants.” Irish Press Agency (1911), 22: 1–62, p. 10. 22 Irish hostility to spiritualism was widespread, see Anon, “A Psychic Night at the Author’s Club: Sir William Barrett on Psychical Research.” Light (1923), 43: 740–741, on p. 740. 23 See Noakes “Ethers, Religion and Politics,” p. 435. 24 McVeigh “Religious Intolerence Under Home Rule,” p. 10. 25 Quoted in a letter to Oliver Lodge, December 13, 1892, Oliver Lodge papers, Society for Psychical Research Archive, Cambridge University Library, SPR. MS.35/61. 26 Alan Gauld, “Barrett, Sir William Fletcher (1844–1925),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1. 27 William F. Barrett, “Some Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Psychical Research.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1924), 34: 275–95, p. 282 28 John Tyndall (ed.), “Science and Spirits,” Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures and Reviews (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), pp. 402–410. 29 Oliver Lodge, Past Years: An Autobiography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), p. 120. 30 Mollan, “William Fletcher Barrett,” p. 1114. 31 The term “sensitive flame” was christened by Tyndall and described by Barrett as “the dramatic effect of high-pitched notes on a tall and slender gas flame.” The flame’s behavior was comparable to that of a “sensitive nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise,” see Barrett, “Note on ‘Sensitive Flames’.” Philosophical Magazine (1867), 33: 219–220. 32 The Irish Times, January 4, 1908. 33 Robert Ball, Reminiscences and Letters of Sir Robert Ball (Cassell and Co., 1915), p. 86. 34 Brian Kelham, “The Royal College of Science for Ireland (1867–1926).” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review (1967), 56 (223): 297–309, p. 300. 35 William T. Thistleton Dyer, a former protégé of Huxley’s, became Professor of Botany at the Royal College in the early 1870s, and Alfred Cort Haddon was to be recommended by him for the chair in Zoology at the end of the decade. 36 Greta Jones, “Scientists against Home Rule,” in O’ Day, A., and Boyce, D. G., (eds.), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism Since 1801 (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 193–196. 37 See, for instance, Livingstone, “Darwinism and Calvinism”; & Ibid., “Darwin in Belfast”; Roy Foster, Recoveries: Neglected Episodes in Irish Cultural History (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002); Don O’Leary, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science, A History (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), pp. 36–37. 38 In a later effort to clarify, Tyndall rejected the label of pure materialist in his own addenda to the published address, but was nevertheless interpreted as having promoted a pure materialism. See Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticicm, Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Maryland: Baltimore, 1987).

120  Tanya O’Sullivan 39 Jones, “Scientists against Home Rule,” p. 193. 40 Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 15. 41 Mark Wood, “A Thunderbolt of Special Wrath.” Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queens University Belfast, 2011, pp. 34–69. 42 Cited in Kelham, “The Royal College of Science for Ireland (1867–1926),” p. 307. 43 Barrett, Parliamentary Papers, 1884, p. 75. 44 See Kelham, “The Royal College of Science for Ireland,” p. 300. 45 Kelham tells us that “as early as 1895, Barrett set up an apparatus to demonstrate X-rays to surgeons and visitors from the various hospitals, even though Wilhelm Röntgen had only made the discovery a few months previously.” See ‘The Royal College of Science for Ireland’, p. 306. 46 William Barrett, “The Phenomena of Spiritualism.” Nonconformist (1875), 36: 934–937, p. 937. 47 Ibid., “Sympathetic Vibrations.” Good Words (1891), 32: 46. 48 Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place, p. 182. 49 William F. Barrett, On the Threshold of the Unseen: An Examination of the Phenomena of Spiritualism and of the Evidence of Life after Death (London and New York: Kegan Paul and Company, 1917). 50 Gauld, Barrett, Sir William Fletcher, p. 2. 51 Ball, Reminiscences and Letters of Sir Robert Ball, p. 86. 52 Fitzgerald’s mechanical “wheel and band” and “paddle wheel” models demonstrated how “crude mechanisms could be used to represent the connection between ether and matter” and illustrate “how electrostatic attractions depend entirely on the way ether is connected with matter.” See Fitzgerald, “On a Model Illustrating Some Properties of the Ether.” Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society (1885), 4: 407–419, on p. 417. For further discussion, see Bruce Hunt, The Maxwellians (London: Ithaca, 1991), pp. 73–108. 53 This claim, made by the Irish Times on July 8, 1911 at the time of the ceremonial visit of King George V and Queen Mary, reiterated the view propounded in mid nineteenth-century guidebooks to the city, that Dublin ranked as the second city of the empire; see, for example, Fraser’s Hand Book for Dublin and its Environs (Dublin: Curry’s Handbooks, 1844), p. 20. Christopher points out that this could be vindicated in historical terms as Dublin was the capital of England’s first overseas colony; see A.J Christopher, “The Second City of the Empire: Colonial Dublin 1911.” Journal of Historical Geography (1997), 23 (2): 151–163, on p. 151. 54 The Liberals under the leadership of W. E Gladstone attempted unsuccessfully in both 1886 and 1893 to enact Home Rule Bills for Ireland. For further discussion, see George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1800 (London: Routledge, 2001); Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 55 See George Francis Fitzgerald, “Physical Science and its Connections.” Science Progress (1894), 1: 1–11, on pp. 1–2. 56 Ibid. 57 Noakes, “Ethers, Religion and Politics,” pp. 439–440. 58 Ibid. 59 Michel Purser, “As We Saw It, The Context of the Life of George Francis Fitzgerald.” European Review (2007), 15(4): 523–529, on pp. 527–528. 60 Nature, March 7, 1901, cited in Joseph Larmor, The Scientific Writings of George Francis Fitzgerald… Collected and Edited with a Historical Introduction by J. Larmor (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Company, 1902), p. xxii. 61 Robert Lloyd Praeger, A Populous Solitude (London: Methuen, 1941), pp. 192–193.

Locating Dublin in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ether  121 62 See Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 131. 63 Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 20. 64 The Doctrine of “Natural Supernaturalism” propounded in 1836 by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus holds that life contains elements of wonder that can never be defined or eradicated by physical science. It was an attractive concept for Victorians searching for a faith consistent with the discoveries of modern science. 65 Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Re-reading of the Belfast Address.” Osiris (1987), 2 (3): 111–134, on p. 111. 66 See William Graham, Idealism: An Essay Metaphysical and Critical (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1872). 67 Graham, Idealism, p. 17. 68 Ibid. 69 Charles F. D’Arcy, Adventures of a Bishop (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1934), p. 67. 70 D’Arcy, Adventures, p. 45. 71 R. H. Murray, Archbishop Bernard: Professor, Prelate, Provost (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1931), p. 59. 72 See Hunt, The Maxwellians, pp. 98–104. 73 According to the vortex atomic theory proposed by Thomson in 1867, atoms were simply vertical structures in the continuous ether. See William Thomson, “On Vortex Atoms” Proceedings of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (1867), 6: 94–105. In this sense, atoms were quasi-material rather than material bodies; see Kragh’s discussion in A Sense of Crisis, p. 12. 74 Stoney had conceived the electron as an ethereal singularity, rather than a charged point particle. 75 Hunt, The Maxwellians, p. 100. 76 Ibid., p. 97. 77 Ibid., p. 98. 78 George Francis Fitzgerald, “Electromagnetic Radiation,” cited in Joseph Larmor, The Scientific Writings of George Francis Fitzgerald… Collected and Edited with a Historical Introduction by J. Larmor (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Company, 1902), p. 276. 79 Fitzgerald’s reluctance to accept the demise of the ether may be seen in the context of an undermining of what he perceived to be the natural links between modern science and Dublin’s protestant culture. See discussion in Tanya O’Sullivan, Keeping Origins in Site: Lives, Locations and Science in Dublin 1870–1910, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Queens University Belfast, 2014, pp. 60–62. 80 Stephen Shapin, “Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1998), 23 (1): 5–12, on pp. 4–7. 81 Steven Connor, “Transported Shiver of Bodies: weighing the Victorian Ether” British Association of Victorian Studies (2004), [online] available at www. stevenconnor.com/ether/. 82 John H. Poynting, Collected Scientific Papers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 264.

6 Second City of Science? Dublin as a Center of Calculation in the British Imperial Context, 1886–1912 Juliana Adelman Introduction The naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger recalled Dublin of the 1890s as “a pleasant and placid place … vaguely concerned with the squibs and crackers of Ireland’s representatives at Westminster.” The pleasant veneer was “rudely shattered by the events of 1916.”1 During the Easter Rising, nationalist sentiment exploded into military action in Dublin. The rebellion came after decades of political wrangling had failed to achieve some kind of Irish independence from Britain. The rebellion was small, and the rebels were quickly defeated but when the British government executed their leaders the tide of public opinion began to turn. By 1922 Ireland, excepting six counties in the north, was a Free State with its own parliament. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that an individual living in Dublin during a period of such political tumult could have been oblivious to the coming storm. Praeger and his scientific contemporaries were no doubt aware of the potential for violent expressions of nationalism, but they were not alone in being surprised by the Easter Rising. The king, visiting in 1911 and 1913, had been greeted with enthusiasm.2 Thousands of Irish men volunteered for the British war effort.3 The political battle for Home Rule, led by the Irish Parliamentary Party, had repeatedly failed and the movement was grounded in the rights of rural tenant farmers rather than the concerns of Dublin intelligentsia. Throughout the nineteenth century, Dublin was commonly referred to as the “second city of the empire.”4 The idea of Dublin as a capital of Ireland was not irreconcilable with an identity as a second city within the United Kingdom or the empire. Even nationalists who sought a Dublin parliament had opposed the withdrawal of the Irish Lord Lieutenancy (the crown’s governing representative in Ireland), perceiving it as a demotion for capital and country.5 Rather than just missing the signs of coming trouble, I argue that a group of Dublin’s scientific elite had constructed their own city: a capital of Ireland but also a second city of the British Empire politically, culturally, and scientifically. Science was a key component in their construction of Dublin, imagined and real, while the city’s material advantages were crucial to their construction of science. They used science to define Dublin and its relationship to Britain.

Second City of Science?  123 It was easy for the naturalists and zoologists of my story to imagine Dublin as a scientific capital of some kind. All around them was the material evidence of its importance. Praeger’s job in the National Library physically placed him at the center of a cluster of institutions including the National Museum, the Royal Dublin Society, Trinity College Dublin, the Royal College of Science, and the Royal Irish Academy. Across other parts of the city were the offices of the Geological Survey, the Ordnance Survey, the Fisheries Board, and (from 1901) the Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction. Science in Dublin was increasingly government science. The Zoological Society received an annual government grant to maintain its gardens while the Natural History Museum had been transferred from a private body (the Royal Dublin Society) to the Department of Science and Art.6 In 1867, the government had endowed the Royal College of Science for Ireland, also an amalgamation of institutions begun under private initiative.7 Depending on your persuasion, the buildings were either nascent national institutions for a future independent state or a local imposition of London’s authority.8 The material spaces of the city must be placed in the context of imagined or intellectual spaces. Tanya O’Sullivan has demonstrated that Dublin scientists occupied almost overlapping physical spaces while they existed in opposing intellectual networks. The Dublin of George Sigerson (nationalist) was not the Dublin of Daniel John Cunningham (unionist), and their scientific outputs reflected widely different views of science and Ireland that were cultivated in widely different social circles. This chapter will extend this idea to look at how science was implicated in the construction of a real and imagined Dublin as the second city of the British Empire in scientific terms. Historians of science have challenged and modified Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory, arguing that peripheries can become “centers of calculation” and, more recently, that the process of circulation itself is critical to knowledge creation.9 This paper, while not denying the importance of circulation, argues that Irish science in the late nineteenth century was strongly centripetal: the creation of a national science was closely linked to the construction of Dublin as a scientific metropolis. Recent literature has pointed to the possibilities for a more fruitful integration of the history of science and urban history. Such integration would view the city as more than just a stage for science. Instead, as Dierig et al. have argued, the study of science in its urban context can be used to understand the process by which science and the city are mutually constituted.10 Over the last several decades, historians of science have become more interested in the spatial aspects of the production, legitimation, and circulation of scientific knowledge. In outlining the “spatial turn” in the history of science, Diarmid Finnegan has emphasized that “science depends on the manufacture and management of different spaces—real or imagined—to accomplish its objectives and establish its credentials.”11 This chapter takes as a point of departure that science in Dublin involved the manufacture of

124  Juliana Adelman Dublin as a scientific center. This manufacture was not separate from the creation of science within the city but was integrally related to that process. The Irish naturalists and zoologists that I will discuss were principally engaged in creating new natural history and zoology knowledge. However, the process of knowledge creation was affected by concerns about the status of the city of Dublin vis à vis the United Kingdom and the British Empire. In a self-reinforcing circle, science demanded that Dublin be treated as a metropolis and science demonstrated that Dublin was indeed a metropolis. I provide two examples of this cyclical co-construction of the city and science in the natural history community and the lion-breeding program of the Zoological Society. Irish natural history and lion breeding depended upon material urban spaces (the Natural History Museum, the Royal Irish Academy, the Zoological Gardens) and resources. However, the science conducted in and around these spaces also projected an imagined idea of Dublin as the home and center of a distinct scientific culture and the point of contact between that scientific culture and global science.

Naturalist Networks Converging in Dublin The scientific community that Praeger described in his two memoirs was not exclusive to Dublin, but nevertheless identified Dublin as its center. Praeger himself sought a move to Dublin in order to be in its midst. Never good at examinations, Praeger failed to obtain a post at the Dublin Natural ­History Museum when he was surpassed by the Englishman George Herbert ­Carpenter.12 Instead, prompted by Robert Francis Scharff, he successfully applied for a post at the new National Library of Ireland. Scharff, keeper of natural history at the museum and a friend of Praeger’s, argued that the position would allow Praeger to remain in Dublin and also to provide a bibliographic service to the capital’s growing group of naturalists. The museum in which Praeger sought employment was a key location for the construction of Dublin as the center of Irish science. Once the Dublin Natural History Museum became part of the London-based Department of Science and Art, disputes began to arise over the proper placement of specimens collected in Ireland.13 The staff of the Dublin museum attempted to assert their claim to these specimens as the national repository for Ireland. They challenged, in a small way, London’s role as the metropolitan center of authority in natural history. It was to London that all specimens identified as new species were sent for verification. When individual collectors wanted a specimen identified or wished to make a donation, they often sent their material to London. When collecting expeditions were organized in Ireland under government auspice, the specimens were sent to London. People like Scharff and Carpenter began to compete with London for collections and to see the museum as a metropolitan entity in its own right.14 Thus, the museum building and the objects within it demonstrated that Dublin was the center of its own web of collecting networks and a place of scientific authority.

Second City of Science?  125 Dublin’s status as a second city of science in the British Empire can be seen in the biographies of the museums’ staff, who are also key players in the stories of lion breeding and natural history that follow. With the creation of the Dublin Museum of Science and Art, natural history jobs became government jobs and attracted English as well as Irish candidates. Scharff, the keeper of natural history, had been born in England to parents of German extraction. Educated in the first BSc program in the British Isles (University College, London), he worked at the Naples marine biological station before being appointed assistant keeper of natural history in Dublin in 1887. He became keeper in 1890. Scharff immersed himself in local scientific societies, including the Zoological Society and the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club. He married two Irish women (Alice Hutton and then, after her death, Jane Stephens) who were part of the city’s community of naturalists. Dublin became the center of his scientific world and the place where he built his career and reputation. He left for England, however, when the Irish Free State was formed in 1922 and he was granted early retirement.15 Carpenter, mentioned earlier, also pursued a successful scientific career in Dublin where he worked in the museum and the Royal University. He too returned to England after 1922.16 Dublin also beckoned for returnees from imperial service. The Director of the Dublin Science and Art Museum from 1883 was a Dubliner recently returned from India. Valentine Ball had worked on the Geological Survey of India for about 15 years before returning to Dublin in 1881.17 His father, Robert Ball Sr, had been actively involved in the scientific life of mid-nineteenth-century Dublin including the Zoological Society. Valentine’s siblings included an eminent surgeon (Charles Bent Ball) and the Astronomer Royal for Ireland (Robert Stawell Ball). Having resigned an appointment in geology at Trinity College Dublin to direct the museum, Valentine immersed himself in promoting the museum and its collections.18 He engaged actively in scientific societies including the Geological Society and the Zoological Society. He dispersed his collection of Indian specimens to the Queen’s Colleges, the Dublin Natural History Museum, the Dublin Botanic Gardens, and other Irish institutions. He died in Dublin in 1895, his health apparently ruined by an excessive devotion to his work.19 Scharff, Carpenter, Praeger, and Ball all chose Dublin as the center for their scientific careers. They actively engaged in efforts to cement the city’s status as a scientific metropolis, second only to London. The passages that follow examine two of these efforts: lion breeding and Irish natural history.

Centering Dublin The Origins of the Irish Naturalist Natural history activities in Dublin sought to establish the city as a scientific center. One of the most important was the foundation of the journal the Irish Naturalist by Praeger and Carpenter. A Belfast man and an

126  Juliana Adelman English man drawn to Dublin for the sake of science, the journal that they founded reflected the vigor of the community of which they were a part. The Irish Naturalist claimed Ireland as a separate field of natural history inquiry to Britain. This new organ of natural history was a means of distinguishing Dublin as the capital of Irish science and of pointing to the uniqueness of the Irish flora and fauna. Rather than Britain writ small, the pages of the new publication and the activities of its contributors declared Ireland to be its own specific environment and sphere of investigation. The first issue of the journal suggested its potential to focus and express the energies of the Irish scientific world. The editors had sought the support of a wide range of scientific societies who would use the journal as the location to publicize their activities: the Zoological Society, scientific societies in Belfast, Dublin and Armagh, field clubs, the Royal Dublin Society, and the Royal Irish Academy had all offered support. The Irish Naturalist would, thus, serve as a kind of central coffee house for the scattered scientific resources of Ireland: “The regular publication of the Proceedings of these Societies in our pages will keep our readers well posted up as to what is doing in Irish scientific circles.”20 Carpenter and Praeger were well placed to provide this central coffee house as they were members of a large proportion of the societies named. Praeger, for example, was a member of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club as well as the field club and natural history society of his native Belfast. Although a journal could bring together a community of naturalists by providing a mode of circulating knowledge, the Irish Naturalist had a particular relationship to Dublin. Dublin was not just the principle location of the publisher (Eason & Son), which also had offices in London and Belfast. Dublin was the center of calculation for Irish natural history. The foundation of the journal reflected this status. In 1893, Praeger and Carpenter became founding members of the Royal Irish Academy’s “Flora and Fauna Committee,” which aimed to establish the state of knowledge in Ireland. Having decided on what lacunae required further investigation, the committee dispensed funds to support fieldwork. The importance of the Natural History Museum has already been alluded to. The committee acknowledge this importance by placing their bibliography in the museum as a central location for consultation by naturalists. Although Belfast had a vibrant community of naturalists, Praeger moved to Dublin to pursue his scientific career. From Dublin he could influence the direction of natural history projects through the “Flora and Fauna Committee,” later devising the Clare Island Survey.21 A Unique Flora and Fauna The Irish Naturalist also provided a forum for presenting a particular view of Ireland’s place in the understanding of natural history. For example, Robert Scharff’s many publications in the Irish Naturalist were concerned not just

Second City of Science?  127 with elucidating Irish natural history, but with distinguishing Ireland from Britain. One common perception was that Ireland’s flora and fauna were a kind of depleted version of the British flora and fauna. Some of the species in Ireland had been, many argued, introduced directly from Britain by human agency. One way to assert the importance of Ireland was to suggest that some of the species had not been introduced, but were native. In 1893, Scharff asked “Is the frog a native of Ireland?” and answered, tentatively, in the affirmative.22 Using both modern science and medieval manuscripts (the work of Geraldus Cambrensis) he refuted the story of the frog’s introduction into a pond at Trinity College Dublin. He further underscored the journal as the central place to decide on questions of Irish natural history, inviting readers “who possess further information on the subject” to write to the editors and continue the discussion. Native, local, unique species were of special interest both scientifically and for the way that they could distinguish the fauna of Ireland from that of Britain. The discussion of these matters in the pages of the Irish Naturalist and by the keeper of the Dublin Natural History Museum asserted Dublin’s importance in adjudicating matters of Irish species identification. Even mundane organisms could contribute to staking Dublin and Ireland’s claim. In 1892, Scharff opened an article on mollusca with this explanation of its interest: “The fact that Ireland possesses several species and many varieties of land and freshwater mollusca not found in Great Britain may justify my giving a more extended account of them than has hitherto been published.”23 In an 1894 paper on wood lice, Scharff again asserted the importance of Ireland because of the existence of species not found in Britain: “the fauna of Ireland, though poorer in many respects than that of Great Britain, is richer in wood lice by one species.”24 In both articles, Scharff encouraged the collection of specimens, with the location of their collection carefully recorded, and asked that those specimens be sent to him at the Dublin Natural History Museum. He also acknowledged the support and assistance of the Dublin-based “Flora and Fauna Committee.” The cover of the Irish Naturalist, altered in 1894, emphasized the same theme of finding what was unique in Irish natural history. In that year, the cover changed from a plain text listing of the contents to an ornate illustrated design. The design included a number of species of plants and animals that had a special connection to Ireland. The antlers of the “Irish Elk,” an extinct species common to Ireland but rarely found in Britain, were the most striking feature and had been drawn from a specimen found in the Dublin museum. The other species were a plant “in Britain confined to S. W. Ireland,” the Kerry slug and the Galway Burnet Moth, “found only in Galway and the Scottish Highlands.” The specimens had all been collected or drawn by Scharff, Praeger, and Carpenter.25 The identification of species unique to Ireland made Dublin into a center of calculation. Through the Irish Naturalist, Praeger, Carpenter, and Scharff declared Dublin to be the place of authority on Irish flora and fauna and the

128  Juliana Adelman Dublin museum’s collections to be the reference set for Irish natural history. Thus, the presentation of Dublin as the scientific metropolis of Ireland through publications and through personal networks was just as important as the real spaces of science in the material city itself. The two were interdependent just as the idea of Ireland having a unique natural history was co-constructed with the idea of Dublin as having authority over Irish natural history. Scharff’s interest in the geographical distribution of species provides another example of how Dublin and Irish natural history were co-constructed. By looking at the history of species and their likely migrations in the past, Scharff suggested an origin story for Irish flora and fauna as well as a relationship between the islands of Ireland and Britain and Dublin’s role in that relationship. He remade national borders, turned seas into lakes and brought unconnected land-masses into direct communication. In 1899, Scharff published The History of the European Fauna, a modified version of the lengthy essay he had published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1896. In the text, he asserted that Ireland held the key to understanding the geographical distribution of species for it held examples of flora and fauna that, he believed, had survived the last Ice Age. The species that Ireland shared with America might be older than that again. These characteristics he asserted as special and unique aspects of Irish flora and fauna, different from the history of animals on the island of Britain.26 Scharff did not agree with Charles Darwin and others that species might have circulated between continents by means of the ocean. Instead, he postulated a land bridge connecting Europe and North America in the distant past. Central to his argument was the existence of flora and fauna shared between the west coast of Ireland and the east coast of North America.27 Scharff argued for Ireland to be considered a unique natural environment with its own natural history in the fullest sense. The same larger geological forces that shaped the flora and fauna of the rest of Europe also affected arrivals and departures of species to Ireland. This point emphasized that Ireland was not simply repopulated from Britain. Yet Scharff’s biogeography also suggested a special relationship between the islands of Britain and Ireland and a place for Dublin within that. Maps dominated the illustrations of Scharff’s paper and its later form as a book. These maps completely remade the relationship between the islands of Ireland and Britain. During the Pliocene epoch, Scharff argued, Britain and Ireland were both part of an extensive land bridge connecting Europe and Greenland. They were a single landmass. A more detailed map of Ireland and Britain in preglacial times suggested a cozy intimacy between the two. No longer islands, Ireland and Britain are nestled into a larger piece of land, divided only by a lake. While remaking the land, Scharff curiously left in the present line of the River Liffey. This allowed one to find Dublin immediately. Dublin of Scharff’s preglacial period was no longer at the edge of an island, facing toward Britain. Instead, she was at the very center of a single landmass that included all of the then United Kingdom.28

Second City of Science?  129 Before the advent of the Irish Naturalist, the idea of using fauna to demonstrate the unique scientific position of Dublin and Ireland had already been pursued in a very different way. In the Royal Zoological Society, the development of a breed of Irish lions was also declaring Dublin to be a second city of science in the British Empire.

A Dublin Pedigree The Royal Zoological Society of Ireland and the Promotion of Dublin From its foundation, the Zoological Society of Ireland had been enmeshed with the promotion of Dublin. Founded as the Dublin Zoological Society in 1830 in the optimistic atmosphere created by the passing of Catholic Emancipation, the society was a self-conscious replica of the London society. This replication was in keeping with Dublin’s aspirations to metropolitan status.29 Two years later, the society opened the zoological gardens in the Phoenix Park to almost immediate success. The elite of Dublin and Ireland flocked to it as patrons and members. In 1835, the gardens were among the chief attractions during the visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Shortly afterward, in 1838, the society became the Royal Zoological Society when Queen Victoria agreed to become a patron. After the adoption of a Sunday one-penny admission in 1839, visitor numbers climbed. By 1840, the annual number of visitors was around 100,000. Elite members visited almost exclusively on weekdays, but on Sundays, the visitors came from a wide range of social groups. Admissions dropped by about half during the Great Famine (1845–1850), but they rebounded quickly afterward. In 1854, the public education role of the gardens was recognized by the provision of an annual parliamentary grant of £500, a privilege that had been bestowed on several Irish scientific bodies.30 The gardens and the society were evidence that Dublin, too, could draw on the resources of empire and present its products to her citizens. Although the Zoological Society maintained a series of scientific meetings and offered public lectures, the gardens became the society’s raison d’être. The public opening of the gardens every day of the week was one of the justifications for the annual Parliamentary grant. Then, as now, the government wanted science funded by the public purse to be accessible to the public. Such zoological research as was conducted in Dublin tended to make use of the animals from the gardens as subjects. For this purpose, the Zoological Society sold the carcasses of animals to individuals, schools of medicine, and local museums. Papers describing tuberculosis in monkeys, providing a theory of the animal mechanics of tigers and comparing the Zebu to domestic cattle appeared in local scientific journals.31 The garden’s former residents were immortalized as mounted specimens in the Dublin Natural History Museum and zoology museum at Trinity College Dublin.32

130  Juliana Adelman A combination of academic interest and family loyalty probably directed Valentine Ball to the embrace of the Zoological Society upon his return to Dublin. Valentine’s father had been the secretary of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland (RZSI) for many years. The Ball household was a smaller scale menagerie, housing the exotic animals headed for the zoological gardens when they arrived from abroad. Escaped snakes and mischievous monkeys provided diversions for the Ball children.33 Valentine and his brothers were all life members of the society.34 Robert Stawell served on the society’s council and as president from 1890 to 1892.35 Valentine served as secretary of the society for 11 years.36 In this capacity he developed an interest in the society’s lion-breeding program. Through his work, the gardens achieved a reputation not just for the commercial aspects of the breeding program but for the insights that lion breeding could provide into the natural history of lions. Ball construed the lion breeding project as the Dublin society’s unique contribution to zoological science. Even after his death, and in the face of competition from other zoological gardens and menageries, the Dublin society continued to use the lions as an argument for their uniqueness and importance. The zoological study of lions helped to manufacture Dublin as the second city of science in the British Empire just as the relationship between Dublin and empire influenced the zoological study of lions. We might easily write an account of the RZSI that sees the society and its gardens as nothing more than the local expression of an international trend for rational recreation in the form of zoological spectacle. The Dublin zoological gardens had few claims to uniqueness or Irishness. Decimus Burton, architect of the Regent’s Park zoo, designed the gardens and the early collections were mostly donations from the King’s menagerie and from the London Zoological Society.37 Even as the society developed its own networks for sourcing animals it continued to rely on the London Zoological Society for assistance. Despite a brief interest in using the gardens to display Irish natural history, the Dublin zoo evolved into a menagerie whose list of species differed little from similar collections across the British Isles and Europe.38 Such a description of the society would, however, fail to take account of its important role in the making of Dublin. Rather than bland imitation, members of the RZSI believed that the replication of the London model declared Dublin to be a significant city of science, on par with London or Paris. The gardens, like the natural history museum and local scientific societies, were used to demonstrate that Irish science and scientific culture fit into the British context. The lion-breeding program is a particularly good example of this process in action. Breeding Dublin Lions The breeding of animals in the gardens had probably begun out of financial necessity before it was translated into a project of international zoological significance. Maintaining the zoological gardens with a variety of animals

Second City of Science?  131 was expensive. Weather conditions in Ireland are often wet and cool, and the society had to balance the cost of erecting buildings (to preserve the specimens they had) with the cost of purchasing animals (to replace specimens or add to them). To replenish animals, the RZSI depended on animal dealers and on the generosity of its sister society in London.39 The first Dublin zoo lion had been a gift from the London Zoological Society in 1831.40 When the society purchased a pair of lions imported from Natal in 1855, they cost a substantial £285 (equivalent to more than £16,000 in today’s money).41 Exotic animals remained expensive and difficult to import despite the expanding commercial trade in exotic species.42 In 1868, The Times of London reported on the outcome of a recent collecting expedition in Nubia, Northern Africa which had been sponsored by the London-based animal dealer, Karl Jamrach. The enterprising collector had managed to capture 32 elephants, 8 giraffes, 20 antelopes, 16 buffaloes, 2 rhinoceroses, 1 hippo, 12 hyenas, and 4 lions. When he arrived in London he had only 11 elephants, 5 giraffes, 6 antelopes, 1 rhinoceros, and 12 hyenas. No buffaloes or lions survived.43 The animals which did survive such a journey could fetch high prices. At an auction of Edmonds’s menagerie in 1884, a forest-bred lion fetched £200.44 Thus, cost was an important factor in encouraging zoos to breed their own animals rather than continue purchasing animals to replace those that died. The breeding of lion cubs not only saved expense, it provided income. The exhibition of the cubs attracted visitors and thus admission payments. Then, as now, newspapers noted the arrival of a litter of cubs in the gardens and suggested that visitors might attend specifically to see them.45 The same newspapers then reported the excitement of these visitors upon seeing the new cubs.46 Such was the desire to see them that, on at least one occasion, a zoo attendant was reprimanded for accepting a tip to allow a visitor a sneak preview.47 The society initially exhibited cubs only on weekdays when the gardens were open to members and to visitors paying a higher admission price. Exhibiting the cubs on penny days was considered risky because of the large numbers of working-class visitors. The economic importance of the exhibition of the cubs is made clear by their exhibition on Sundays in 1862, when the society’s funds were suffering.48 A promenade in the previous month had failed to raise the expected funds and thus exhibiting the cubs may have been an attempt to fill this gap.49 The zoological society also profited from the sale of lion cubs. Dublin usually asked for £40 per cub from a dealer, but full-grown animals might sell for up to £100.50 The annual income to the society from the sale of cubs was between £100 and £120, making a total of over £3,000 by 1885.51 This income was small in comparison to the annual government grant that the society received (around £500 per annum) but covered the costs of employing the director.52 The lions also held symbolic value, particularly because of their relationship to the symbolism of the British Empire. The cover of the society’s annual reports carried the figure of the lion and the unicorn, symbols of the British crown. The lions and lion cubs featured prominently in the visual imagery of

132  Juliana Adelman the gardens. In the late 1880s, for example, the society commissioned a series of photographic postcards of the zoo. That the “Lion cubs born in the gardens” was a popular image is suggested by its survival in several collections.53 One such image from 1885, “Queen’s cubs,” is reproduced in ­Figure  6.1. Photographs of the caged lions are extant from the late 1860s, and a further series was completed in the early 1900s.54 The animal painter, Walter Osborne, exhibited and sold watercolors of the zoo’s lions.55 The value of the lions was also reflected in the hierarchy of the garden’s staff: The lion keeper was the most important and best paid animal keeper in the gardens. He was responsible for the largest and most expensive animals including the other big cats, the polar and black bears, and the dromedary.56 He was also awarded a bonus of half a sovereign for weaning the lion cubs.57 The popularity of the lions and especially the lion cubs is reflected in the number of images of them that were reproduced as souvenirs. This image was produced by a Welsh artist for the British weekly The Graphic. The lioness pictured (Queen) produced three litters and 11 cubs in total over two years. The Zoological Society was keen to emphasize how lion breeding marked their gardens out as unique. The gardens in London had failed to develop a breeding program. There the lion cubs were almost all born with cleft palate: unable to suckle, they soon died. Lions were star attractions, particularly for visitors representing the British state. For example, the Prince of Wales visited the Dublin gardens in 1871 and was reported to have “regarded with particular interest the fine collection of lions.”58 A new lord lieutenant’s rounds in the gardens often included a visit to the lions.59 During

Figure 6.1  A lithograph produced to mark the birth of a litter of cubs in the Dublin Zoo to the lioness ‘Queen’ in 1885.  Reproduced with permission from Trinity College Dublin. Found in the records of the Zoological Society of Ireland, TCD MS 106080/24/2 Item 16.

Second City of Science?  133 his obligatory visit in 1885, the Earl of Carnarvon (recently appointed Lord Lieutenant) joked that I know that the resources of Ireland are great. I had read in books issued by the Board of Trade and works by learned political economists before I came here of the industrial resources of this country, but I will frankly own that I was surprised when I found that lions were an article of export.60 The Zoological Society’s intrepid secretary, Samuel Haughton, suggested in 1872 that Dublin’s special success was due to the superior diet given to the animals. Dublin lions were provided with whole, and sometimes even live, animals in contrast to the cuts of meat provided in most other zoos.61 Others commentators suggested that an Irish diet, including potatoes, produced fecundity in lions as it was supposed to do in Irish women.62 Lions of the Second Scientific City Just as unique Irish mollusca helped to suggest that Dublin was the center of Irish natural history, Dublin-bred lions identified the Dublin gardens as unique and more than a poor replication of the London gardens. The lions were an intriguing anomaly, an imperial trophy turned Irish export product. In 1886, Valenting Ball brought a scientific dimension to the reputation of the Dublin lions by producing a detailed study of lion breeding at the gardens for the Royal Irish Academy. Through his paper, the lions helped to co-construct Irish zoological science and the image of Dublin as a center for that science. Ball began his paper by suggesting that lion breeding in Dublin was unique and had produced its own strain of lions. He claimed that “So far as I am aware there has not been in any other collection of animals any comparable experience of lion-breeding.”63 The Dublin gardens were the only menagerie that had been able “to produce, by careful selection of stock, a notable breed of lions.”64 Others had joked about the Irish lion industry, but Ball put that claim on scientific footing as he described 30 years of experience with lion breeding through statistical charts and genealogical trees. Ball produced a pedigree for 131 Dublin-born lions, using the records of the society and the recollections of its staff. Dublin’s success allowed it to claim status as a center for scientific knowledge of lion breeding. According to Ball, little was known about the familiar animal’s breeding habits: “indeed, the absence of well-authenticated information on the subject is quite remarkable.”65 Statistical tables, making use of the experience of many generations of lion cubs, provided a firm basis for understanding the breeding cycle. Ball’s tables suggested that lions in captivity bred twice a year, that the average litter contained four cubs, and that male cubs were more common than females. Although this information

134  Juliana Adelman had been gathered in captivity, Ball extrapolated to lions in the wild. For example, he argued that the two seasons of breeding might be triggered by different environmental conditions depending on the region where the lions lived or by temperature fluctuation.66 Ball did not limit himself to breeding and also speculated on issues of geographical distribution, coloration and markings, and the presence or absence of manes on male lions in India. The paper was a scientific study of the lion in the manner of natural history, with most of the information derived from the observation of captive lions. Ball’s paper came at a time of crisis for the Zoological Society and for Dublin. The city was riven with sectarian and political conflict. The society was taxed with high debts and low public interest. Membership flagged and even penny admissions, the mainstay of the society’s income, dropped. A few years later, at the annual general meeting in 1891, a member specifically pointed to the society’s disconnect from the political city. Abraham Shackleton “noted that the council was exclusive in its composition, that no person on the popular side in politics was on it, and that the Catholic on it was what was known as a Cawtholic [sic].”67 The lions became a bright spot in an otherwise relatively bleak picture. They proved that the gardens continued to be a success in one arena for which they had little competition. The lions continued to suggest that zoological science in Dublin held a special status. The status of lions became one of the most important gauges of the status of the gardens and the society. They also symbolized Dublin as the second city of science to a specific scientific community in the city and abroad. Specially produced images of the lions were included as the opening image of the reports for the years 1886, 1887, 1890, 1894, and 1899.68 An updated genealogical chart of all lions bred in the gardens was included in the report for 1891, and a further report by Ball on breeding was provided as an appendix to the 1893 report.69 When the society presented an address to a new Lord Lieutenant or to the Queen, as it often did, the address was sure to mention the successful lion-breeding project. The selected dignitary might oblige by a return address acknowledging their special lion expertise. In 1890, for example, they welcomed the Earl of Zetland as the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant and directed his attention to “one feature in the management of our collection for which we may claim pre-eminence over that of any other collection of animals in the world, and that is our success in breeding lions.” He replied that “I do not suppose that any collection in the world contains finer specimens of this noble animal than your Gardens.”70 In 1892, yet another Lord Lieutenant congratulated the society on lion breeding as a successful export industry remarking that “Ireland and the Empire generally is represented by Dublin lions in half the menageries of Europe.”71 On the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the council of the society took the opportunity to congratulate her for her sponsorship of science and exploration and to thank her for the gift of a lion. The lion, which they had named Victor in her honor, had “become one of the most handsome lions in the United Kingdom.”72

Second City of Science?  135 Although the RZSI struggled to increase local attendance and membership during the 1890s, the society’s imperial links multiplied. The society’s corresponding members hailed from Trinidad, Jamaica, Australia, India, and Africa.73 Imperial networks of the society’s own, not directed through London, had begun to reap benefits. In 1889, for example, a surgeon working in India shot a female tiger and he donated its cubs to the society. This act of patriotic generosity was “in spite of a very handsome offer which was made to him for the cubs before they left India.”74 A doctor in the N ­ iger Protectorate sent monitor lizards and crocodiles.75 A gentleman resident in India sent a leopard.76 The Attorney General of Sierra Leone sent a cat, monkeys, and a python.77 Purchases were also important, and these too indicated a strengthening of international networks and less reliance on London. To refresh their stock of breeding lions, for example, they purchased two cubs that had been captured in Somaliland by Captain Eustace.78 Cementing the society’s relationship with empire was the election of Field Marshal Lord Roberts as its new president in 1898. Lord Roberts was immediately active in using his imperial contacts to bring donations to the gardens. Soon after his election, he “communicated with a number of his friends in India, informing them of the animals that the Society stood most in need of, and the result has been that already many interesting specimens have been promised.”79 Even with all these imperial connections, the Dublin lions retained their central importance to the status of zoological science in Dublin. In 1899, the society became concerned about “whether it would be possible to save the splendid strain, which for so many years has been the distinguishing feature of the Dublin Lion House.” To do so, they purchased new lionesses from dealers to breed with the remaining male (Caesar) of the Dublin lion strain, but the lionesses failed to rear their cubs. They decided to establish a new strain by the purchase of a new male lion, but did not give up on the old strain. When Caesar’s cubs were born, they removed them from the mother to ensure their survival. First, the cubs were suckled by a goat: “by tying the goat down on its side, the cubs were kept fairly well nourished for three days.” The society then provided a foster mother in the form of an Irish Red Setter. The image of lion cubs, the offspring of an African-born lioness and a Dublin-born lion, being suckled by an Irish breed of dog is still slightly astonishing. In this one image appear all the complexities and interconnections between science, empire, and Dublin. The importance of preserving the cubs was emphasized in the triumphant report. The council could “now look forward confidently to being able, not only to maintain, but to greatly increase the reputation of the Dublin Zoological Gardens as a centre for lion-breeding.”80 Ball’s work had been the impetus for using lion breeding to co-­construct Dublin science and Dublin city as imperial. The presidency of Lord R ­ oberts continued the trend and demonstrated clearly that Dublin was its own center in a web of imperial connections. When Lord Roberts was called

136  Juliana Adelman into action in South Africa (tragically to replace his fallen son), the society’s address to him was a celebration of his importance to the Empire. The council declared that “they look forward with confidence to welcoming him ere long on his return from South Africa, having vindicated the honour of the Empire.”81 When he returned, having “earned to the fullest extent the gratitude of the Empire” by turning the tide of the Boer War, they decided that some means was required to “celebrate the achievements of one of our greatest soldiers.” What honor did the society choose to commemorate him? They built a splendid new home for the lions and named it Lord Roberts House.82

Conclusion In 1908, the British Association for the Advancement of Science made its third visit to Dublin. The occasion inspired the creation of a special guidebook to Dublin and the surrounding areas. Befitting of a guide for scientific visitors, the book contained information about the natural history of the city and the surrounding region. In the book, Carpenter acknowledged that “The fauna of Ireland is poor, when compared with the fauna of Britain” but argued that “it is no mere attenuated remnant of the British fauna.” From this point of view, Dublin was important “as the gateway into Ireland— a western outpost of the great Palearctic Region.” Carpenter continued, claiming that “Everywhere the naturalist finds evidence that Ireland is an older island than Great Britain, preserving for his study ancient elements of the great European fauna.”83 Carpenter was reiterating Scharff’s ideas as they had been explained in the Irish Naturalist and the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. For Scharff, Carpenter, and most of the Irish natural history community, Ireland was not simply a poor cousin of Britain but a natural history field with unique features. These unique features suggested the importance of attending to Irish natural history and of making Dublin into a center of calculation to collect and collate specimens and observations. The same guidebook also drew attention to the Zoological Gardens in the Phoenix Park, an important attraction for the visitors. Scharff, as Secretary of the RZSI, delivered a lecture on animal breeding in the gardens at a breakfast for BAAS members. The lecture celebrated the society’s success in breeding a wide range of animals in the gardens from rheas to lions. Scharff “explained to the guests that success had been attained by allowing the animals to resort as far as possible to natural conditions.”84 The importance of the lions was also underscored in the guidebook produced for the visit. In his entry, Scharff emphasized the novelty of the Irish breed of lions. The “Irish lion” he wrote, “has acquired quite a fame among connoisseurs. Lions have been exported from Ireland all over Europe; even Burma can boast of the possession of a Dublin lion.”85 He emphasized the scientific importance of lion breeding, arguing that “it may be safely asserted that

Second City of Science?  137 nowhere can the characteristic features and habits of the lion be studied to greater advantage than in Dublin.”86 Instead of a peripheral or a provincial city, Dublin’s men of science saw their city as a metropolis in its own right and the center of Irish scientific activity. This did not mean that they thought of Ireland as politically independent. Instead, they saw Irish science as following the same norms and practices as British science but with concerns and interests dictated by local circumstances. The Irish lions spoke of Dublin as the center of zoological science in Ireland and a rival to London. Only in Dublin, with its zoological gardens, could a breed of Irish lions be raised. The lions were the result of unique local knowledge but also Dublin’s imperial connections that provided access to breeding stock and a market for cubs. The lions suggested rivalry with London in knowledge and resources and argued for the inclusion of Dublin as a second city of science with its own discoveries that yet fell within the ideals of British science. In a similar way, the Irish Naturalist set up Dublin and the natural history museum as the center of natural history in Ireland. Its editors and contributors argued for Ireland as a separate sphere of natural history activity and for Dublin as a second capital within British science. During a troubled period in Irish political history, the Royal ­Zoological Society, the Irish Naturalist, and the Dublin Natural History Museum presented Dublin as a scientific center with a particular relationship to B ­ ritain. The physical spaces in which people like Ball, Scharff, Carpenter, and ­Praeger did their work contributed to the scientific identity of Dublin. Even when Dublin was surpassed by Belfast (and threatened by Cork) as the most populous city in Ireland, no Irish city rivaled its scientific infrastructure. The institutions and their buildings drew collections and staff from across the Empire. Other cities in the Empire developed similar metropolitan-like complexes of scientific institutions, but at the turn of the century only ­Dublin’s advantages rivaled those of London. Yet the way in which these spaces were imagined was also significant to staking a claim for D ­ ublin as the second city of science. The naturalists and zoologists in my story saw Dublin as the capital of Irish science, and this belief both shaped their scientific activity and was shaped by it.

Notes 1 Robert Lloyd Praeger, A populous solitude (London: Methuen & Co, 1941), 190. 2 See A. J. Christopher, “‘The Second City of the Empire’: colonial Dublin, 1911,” Journal of Historical Geography 23, 2 (1997): 151–163. 3 D. George Boyce, Nineteenth century Ireland: the search for stability (Dublin: Gill & McMillan, 2005), 285. 4 Christopher, “The Second City of the Empire.” 5 David Dickson, Dublin: the making of a capital city (London: Profile Books, 2014), 380. 6 Richard Jarrell, “The Department of Science and Art and the control of Irish science, 1853–1905,” Irish Historical Studies xxiii (1983): 330–347.

138  Juliana Adelman 7 Brian Kelham, “The Royal College of Science for Ireland (1867–1926),” Studies 56 (1967): 297–309. 8 Jarrell, “The Department of Science and Art.” 9 See for example Kapil Raj, “Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science,” British Journal for the History of Science 43, 4 (2010): 513–517; Mary Terrall, “Following insects around: tools and techniques of eighteenthcentury natural history,” British Journal for the History of Science 43, 4 (2010): 573–588. 10 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Towards an urban history of science,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 18 (2003): 1–19. 11 Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The spatial turn: geographical approaches in the history of science,” Journal of the History of Biology 41, 2 (2008): 369–388, 383. 12 Praeger, A populous solitude. 13 Nicholas Whyte, Science, Colonialism, and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). 14 See Whyte, Science, Colonialism, and Ireland and Juliana Adelman, “Evolution on display: promoting Irish natural history and Darwinism at the Dublin Science and Art Museum,” British Journal for the History of Science 38, 4 (2005): 411–436. 15 Enda Leaney, “Scharff, Robert Francis,” in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds.), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (article accessed online, dib.cambridge.org, February 15, 2016). 16 Adelman, “Evolution on display.” 17 Helen Andrews, “Ball, Robert”; Helen Andrews, “Ball, Sir Charles Bent”; Anne Dolan, “Ball, Sir Robert Stawell”; Patrick N. Wyse Jackson, “Ball, Valentine,” all in Dictionary of Irish Biography (articles accessed online, dib.cambridge.org, February 15, 2016). 18 See Jarrell, “The Department of Science and Art.” 19 Edward Percival Wright, “Valentine Ball,” Irish Naturalist 4 (1895): 169–171. 20 “Introductory,” Irish Naturalist 1, 1 (1892): 3–4, 4. 21 R. Lloyd Praeger, “Ten years’ work of the Flora and Fauna Committee,” Irish Naturalist 12, 5 (1903): 124–131. On Praeger and the Clare Island Survey, see Sean Lysaght, Robert Lloyd Praeger (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). 22 Robert Scharff, “Is the frog a native of Ireland?” Irish Naturalist 2, 1 (1893): 1–6. 23 Robert Scharff, “Irish land and freshwater mollusca,” Irish Naturalist 1, 3 (1892): 45–47. 24 Robert Scharff, “The Irish wood-lice,” Irish Naturalist 3, 1 (1894): 4–7, 6. 25 “Our new cover,” Irish Naturalist 3, 1 (1894): 7. 26 Robert Scharff, The history of the European fauna (London, 1899); G. H. Carpenter, “Review: the fauna of Europe,” Irish Naturalist 16, 7 (1907): 211–214. 27 Robert Scharff, “On the evidences of a former land bridge between Northern Europe and North America,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section B: Biological, Geological and Chemical Science 28 (1909/1910): 1–28. 28 Robert F. Scharff, “On the origin of the European fauna,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 4 (1896): 427–514. 29 Catholic Emancipation was a campaign to repeal legislation that had effectively barred Catholics from government positions by requiring that they take an oath to the Church of England. On the early years of the society, see Juliana Adelman, “Animal knowledge: zoology and classification in nineteenth-century Dublin,” Field Day Review 5 (2009): 109–121. 30 Daniel J. Cunningham, The origin and early history of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland (Dublin, 1901). 31 For example, Samuel Haughton, “Three lectures on the principle of least action in nature…part II,” British Medical Journal (10 June 1871): 603–605; Samuel

Second City of Science?  139

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Haughton, Notes on animal mechanics (Dublin, 1866); D. Houston, “Extract of a paper read by Dr. Houston at a meeting of the Zoological Society of Dublin on the disease of the animals which died in their collection,” Dublin Journal of Medical and Chemical Science V (1834): 285–258. Haughton, “Three lectures.” W. Valentine Ball, Reminiscences and letters of Sir Robert Stawell Ball (Dublin, 1915). The fifty-seventh annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1888 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1889). Catherine De Courcy, Dublin Zoo: a pictorial history (Cork: The Collins Press, 2009), “Appendix A,” 329. The sixty-fourth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1895 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1896), 9. De Courcy, Dublin Zoo, 8–10. W. T. Hamilton, A descriptive catalogue of the animals in the collection of the Zoological Society of Dublin, with preliminary observations on the natural groups of mammalia and birds (Dublin, 1833). See Adelman, “Animal knowledge.” Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, rough minutes, 1830–1840, December 30, 1831, MS 10608/2/1, Trinity College Dublin. Valentine Ball, “On lion-breeding in the Gardens of the Royal Zoological Society,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 28 (1886): 723–758, 724. Nigel Rothfels, Savages and beasts: the birth of the modern zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). “Arrival of wild animals,” The Times, July 27, 1868, 11. “Sale of a menagerie,” The Times, July 30, 1884, 11. Freeman’s Journal, November 30, 1857. “Accouchement extraordinary,” Freeman’s Journal, July 8, 1867. RZSI visitors’ book, May 20, 1864, MS 10608/8/1, Trinity College Dublin. RZSI rough minutes, 1860–1864, July 5, 1862. RZSI rough minutes, 1860–1864, June 18, 1862. RZSI animal committee notebooks, for example, October 14, 1869, MS 10608/6/1, Trinity College Dublin. Ball, “Observations on lion-breeding.” Cunningham, The origin and early history, 85. RZSI ephemera books, item 26, MS 10608/24/2, Trinity College Dublin. RZSI ephemera books, items 4 and 68, MS 10608/24/1; RZSI ephemera books, items 7, 8, and 29, MS 10608/24/2, Trinity College Dublin. Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts: Index of Exhibitions, 50–52. RZSI animal committee minute book, March 19, 1868, MS 10608/6/1, Trinity College Dublin. RZSI animal committee minute book, April 2, 1868. “The Royal Visit,” Freeman’s Journal, August 4, 1871. For example, “The Royal Zoological Gardens,” Freeman’s Journal, June 4, 1869. “Viceregal visit to the Zoological Gardens,” Freeman’s Journal, July 29, 1885. “Zoology,” The Academy, 3:40, June 1872, 232–233. DeCourcy, Dublin Zoo, 53. Ball, “Observations on lion-breeding,” 724. Ball, “Observations on lion-breeding,” 724. Ball, “Observations on lion-breeding,” 731. Ball, “Observations on lion-breeding,” 733. “Royal Zoological Society,” Freeman’s Journal, January 28, 1891. The fifty-fifth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1886 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1887); The fifty-sixth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended

140  Juliana Adelman

69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86

December 31, 1887 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1888); The fifty-ninth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1890 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1891); The sixty-third annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1894 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1895); The sixty-eighth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1899 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1900). The sixtieth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1891 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1892); The sixtysecond annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1893 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1894), 13. The fifty-ninth annual report, 12–13. The sixty-first annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1892 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1893), 14–15. The sixty-sixth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1897 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1898), 32. For example, “Corresponding members,” The fifty-ninth annual report. The fifty-eighth annual report, 11. The sixty-fifth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1896 (Dublin: Charles Chambers, 1897), 19. The sixty-sixth annual report, 16. The sixty-seventh annual report, 22–23. The sixty-sixth annual report, 17–18. The sixty-seventh annual report, 26. The sixty-eighth annual report, 19–21. The sixty-eighth annual report, 12. The sixty-ninth annual report of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, for the year ended December 31, 1900 (Dublin: Ponsonby and Weldrick, 1901), 10, 13. George Carpenter, “Zoology” in Cole and Praeger (eds.), Handbook, 108–109. “The breeding of animals in confinement,” British Medical Journal 2, 2490 (1908): 852. Robert Scharff, “The Royal Zoological Society of Ireland” in Grenville Cole and Robert Lloyd Praeger (eds.) Handbook to the city of Dublin and the surrounding district. Prepared for the meeting of the British Association, September, 1908 (Dublin, 1908), 375. Scharff, “The Royal Zoological Society of Ireland,” 375.

7 From Capital City to Scientific Capital Science, Technology, and Medicine in Lisbon as Seen through the Press, 1900–1910 Ana Simões Introduction In 1906, the Portuguese modernist writer and journalist of socialist leanings Fialho de Almeida published in the recently founded weekly magazine Ilustração Portuguesa (Portuguese Illustration), an article called “Monumental Lisbon.”1 Among his many suggestions, he described and pictured an imposing bridge crossing over the bottom of the new Avenida da Liberdade, the most representative addition to the city of Lisbon in the past decades, commanding its expansion toward the north and interior, away from the river Tagus. The bridge was planned to connect the hill of S. Pedro de Alcântara, on the west, to the hill of Santana, on the east (Figure 7.1). The bridge dreamt by Fialho de Almeida in the context of an urban utopia evoked projects elaborated by P.J. Pézerat, the French architect and drawing professor of the Polytechnic School, and the military engineer Miguel Correia Pais. Inspired by renovations taking place in European cities, such as Paris and London, they envisioned the transformation of Lisbon into a modern port city and the outmost western gateway of the old continent. Either in the form of underground tunnels, suspended viaducts or bridges, circumventing Lisbon’s seven hills, or uniting Lisbon to the other side of the river Tagus, projects and fictional works materialized the vision of a modern city able to respond to the pressing demand for faster transports and communications, healthier urban landscapes, and a growing population. Despite the emphasis on the locality of knowledge associated with “the spatial turn” and the “geographies of science” in the history of science, technology, and medicine (hereafter STM),2 it was just in the past decade that the intersection of STM history with urban history emerged as a fruitful cutting-edge topic, based on the assumption that cities play an active role in shaping both STM practice and knowledge, and, furthermore, that they should be viewed themselves as mediated by STM.3 After initial research focused mainly on major cities, such as Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Chicago, and Tokyo,4 the first steps have been taken to assess in what ways historical insights gathered from these specific urban contexts can be extended to other

142  Ana Simões

Figure 7.1   The imagined bridge uniting the hill of S. Pedro de Alcântara, on the west, which came to be known as the Hill of Sciences, to the hill of Santana, on the east, which came to be known as the Hill of Medicine.

cities, and in particular how the perspective of cities located in countries of the European Periphery will enrich, or even revise, extant historical production.5 In Portugal, urban history has been partitioned among the reflections of often noncommunicating scholarly communities, including cultural historians, historians of art, urban historians, geographers, architects, and engineers.6 Few works of uneven character have addressed the scientific urban history of Lisbon. Contributions have included internet projects, scientific tours, and historical reflections.7 Among this last group, Tiago Saraiva published a comparative assessment of the various ways STM shaped the cities of Madrid and Lisbon, in the second half of the nineteenth century. By unveiling the practices of engineers, physicians, and scientists in diverse sites and institutions, he showed how deeply STM affected their evolution, counteracting the invisibility of STM in these cities, and the persistent emphasis on the scientific backwardness of peripheral countries such as Spain and Portugal.8 In a forthcoming volume edited jointly with Marta Macedo, they look at a selection of STM institutions in three successive political regimes, in order to show that despite their purported inconspicuousness, STM institutions and experts were central for the construction of contemporary Lisbon.9 Joining the recent international move in the field of urban history of STM to enlarge the set of cities to be analyzed, this chapter looks at the city of Lisbon during the first decade of the twentieth century, which corresponded to the last troubled decade of the monarchy and the first months of the new Republican regime, established on October 5, 1910. It does so by exploring the methodological approach developed within Science and Technology and

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  143 the European Periphery on the role of appropriation and circulation of STM knowledge and expertise, and on the particularities of popularization of science, and on science in the press, as seen from the perspective of the European Periphery.10 From this perspective, the study of Lisbon promises to unveil its changing, dual, hybrid status as metropolis of an extended empire, and capital of a European peripheral country, linked to the outside world by a port expanding along the margins of the river Tagus, which became understandably the main focus of successive projects and utopian proposals. In this chapter, a survey of STM news about Lisbon published in two major press outlets—a daily generalist newspaper and a weekly magazine associated with another daily generalist newspaper—is offered in order to detect how the changes brought about by STM actors, institutions, and projects permeated city life as they were perceived by a considerable fraction of the population. In a country plagued by a high rate of illiteracy (around 80%),11 newspapers or amply illustrated magazines are a particularly helpful source to unravel the public images of STM and the perception of their role in the city, as they managed to reach out to the masses. The first newspaper— Diário de Notícias (Daily News)—was selected on the basis of its impressive longevity (created in 1865), substantial number of copies of accessible price, and wide circulation. Except for a special section called Scientific Chronicles, STM news about Lisbon was scattered throughout the newspaper. The second daily newspaper—O Século (The Century)—partook of similar characteristics of longevity (1881–1977), wide circulation, and low price. Associated with it, the Ilustração Portuguesa came out on a weekly basis, starting in 1903, and was selected for its popularity on account of the novelty of its copious illustrations, relying profusely on drawings and photography. Among the articles about Lisbon, two articles published in 1906 are particularly revealing as they conveyed utopic visions of the city, in between science fiction and urban reflections and proposals: the aforementioned article by Fialho de Almeida, and a piece defiantly called “Lisbon in the year 2000” authored by Melo de Matos,12 an engineer of Saint Simonian inclination and port expert. When compared with other articles addressing issues of urban planning, more often than not discussing projects just partially implemented or not implemented at all, mostly due to stringent financial conditions, these fictional visions share Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash’s view as stated in the introduction to the edited volume Utopias/Dystopias: They are not just “objects of study” per se but “historically grounded analytic categories” in the sense of futuristic projections which tell us a lot about the present agendas of visionaries, that is, “with which to understand how individuals and groups around the world have interpreted their present tense with an eye into the future.”13 Taking this perspective seriously, the unbuilt bridge uniting, what came to be known as the Hill of Sciences to the Hill of Medicine, is used in this chapter as a historiographical metaphor (from here onward called the “bridge

144  Ana Simões metaphor”) illustrating major conclusions taken from the analysis of STM news about Lisbon: the importance of looking jointly at STM in revisiting the urban history of Lisbon; the often invisible pervasiveness of news on STM in a city such as Lisbon, often considered by actors lagging behind major European cities in terms of the various ways STM shaped its evolution; the necessity to explore the connections and disconnections between established socio-professional groups such as those of engineers, physicians, the emerging groups of scientists and architects in molding Lisbon; the dual role of Lisbon as both center and periphery, in the sense of a “backward” city in terms of modernity in global standards, but as an agent of a genuinely “local” modernity; and finally to argue for the co-construction of STM and the city as crucial to understand the changes behind the transformation of Lisbon into a scientific capital.

Cityscapes: Lisbon at the Turn of the Century Following the famous 1755 earthquake and tsunami which destroyed a considerable part of Lisbon, the reconstruction of the city orchestrated by the Marquis of Pombal followed Enlightenment ideals, materialized in a geometrical reticular grid of streets along the waterfront with buildings structured according to new technical proposals.14 To cap this enlightened grid a green space—the Passeio Público (Public Promenade)—offered the aristocracy an opportunity to exercise new sociability protocols and participate in mundane events (Figure 7.2). A few grandiose additions to the city (Basílica da Estrela and Ópera de S. Carlos), new noble houses, and the project of a royal palace at Ajuda followed the demise of Pombal. From the earthquake’s time to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the city grew 40%, from around 670 ha to 947 ha, but the 1801 census registered just 237,000 inhabitants, below its mideighteenth-century value.15 Lisbon’s population continued to decrease, due to the cumulative effect of political events (French invasions, liberal revolution, and civil war) and ravaging epidemics (cholera morbus, diphtheria, and yellow fever): The 1878 census registered just 187,000 Lisboners.16 The liberal regime established in 1834 continued to change the face of the city through the reconversion of convents, following the extinction of religious orders, into buildings of various uses, from hospitals, asylums, hospices to courts, schools, academies, libraries, barracks, and even a Parliament,17 capped with the construction of the modern theater D. Maria II in the Plaza Rossio, which gave extra impetus to the renewal of the Public Promenade. The modernization agenda of the Regeneration period led by Fontes Pereira de Melo (known as Fontismo), starting in 1851, envisioned the country’s progress dependent on economic development sustained by technological feats, including an efficient railway network. From the 1870s onward, a process of urban requalification of the capital city was based on a renewal of infrastructures (water pipelines, gas, and then electric lighting,

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  145

Figure 7.2  Map of Lisbon around 1900. 1: Rotunda of Marquis of Pombal; 2:­ Hospital of Rilhafoles; 3: Mãe d’Água; 4: Avenida da Liberdade ­(Passeio Público); 5: Astronomical Observatory of the Polytechnic School; 6:  ­Polytechnic School; 7: Botanical Garden; 8: Medical School; 9: Basílica da Estrela; 10: Elevator of Lavra; 11: Society of Geography of Lisbon; 12: Elevator of Glória; 13: Plaza of Restauradores; 14: Academy of Sciences of Lisbon; 15: Rossio train station; 16: Theater D. Maria II; 17: Plaza of Rossio; 18: Industrial Institute; 19: S. Paulo spa; 20: Theater of S. Carlos; 21: H ­ eadquarters of National Assistance of those afflicted with ­tuberculosis; 22: Plaza of Comércio; 23: Cais do Sodré Station; 24: River Tagus; 25: Alcântara Wharf; 26: Park Eduardo VII; 27: Zoological Garden; 28: Nacional Palace of Ajuda.

improvements in the sewage system, new sanitary measures, and new transports and communications). Following trends in major European cities, this process was triggered by an increasing industrialization of urban facilities and everyday life, and the concomitant naturalization of technology, which aimed at bringing new comfort requirements to urban middle classes. Simultaneously, an overall urban and aesthetic transformation of the city took place, in which new large rectilinear avenues, inspired in the boulevards of the Haussmanian city of Paris, aimed at reconciling smooth circulation, proper sanitary conditions, and city’s embellishment.18 This ideal of the mid-nineteenth-century European city guided the development of ­Lisbon, more in theory than practice. In 1858, the French city council engineer and expert on public hygiene works Pézerat19 presented a proposal to face the sanitary crisis, based on knowledge gathered on a trip to Paris, which was published in 1865, but never implemented.20 It was a visionary project, which took seriously the specificities of Lisbon as the capital of the westernmost European country, and a port city with privileged geographical and navigational characteristics.21 It aimed at giving Lisbon the status of a modern nineteenth-century port city and “the biggest commercial entrepôt of Europe.”22 The relation

146  Ana Simões of the city to the river was re-equated by a plan to move most of the port equipment to Tagus’s south side, together with an extension of the waterfront to the west, until the Tower of Belém. Modern neighborhoods were also envisioned to populate the riverside. During the nineteenth century, the city’s area expanded by roughly 90%, occupying at the turn of the century an area of 8,224 ha. In 1890, the city’s population was nearly 300,000, around 10% of the population of Paris, half the population of Madrid, and roughly the same as Bordeaux and Stockholm. Additionally, during the first decade of the twentieth century, the city’s population grew from 356,000, in 1900, to 436,000, in 1911, increasing by around 45% from 1890 to 1910.23 By the late nineteenth century, under the active council engineer and politician Ressano Garcia inspired by technical and aesthetical reflections followed by Haussmann, urban renewal unfolded in two perpendicular directions, along the Tagus’s margins,24 and to the interior toward north. The secluded Pombalian promenade gave way to the boulevard-like Avenida da Liberdade, 1,276 m long and 90 m wide, whose construction began in 1879. Ornamented with several rows of trees, opened to people from all classes, it ended in a 200-m diameter rotunda which was to be embellished by a statue of the Marquis of Pombal, whom the liberals admired on political grounds and as pioneer of Lisbon’s modernization. A lavish green area, named after 1903 as the Park Eduardo VII, was to prolong it, based on landscape proposals submitted following the call launched by Ressano Garcia in 1887. The implemented project was authored by the architect Francisco Keil do Amaral in 1943. Several large streets diverged from the rotunda and headed the expansion of the city along various directions. Two neighborhoods blossomed west and east of the Avenida da Liberdade. At its bottom, two mechanical elevators—Glória (1885) on the west and Lavra (1884) on the east—connected it to the hills of S. Pedro de Alcântara and Santana, respectively. Further south, it led to the plaza of Restauradores (Restauration) ornamented by a commemorative obelisk (1886) recalling the independence from Spain in 1640, after 60 years of domination. Nearby buildings included the train station with its iron façade ornaments (Estação do Rossio, 1887) and the new building of the Lisbon Geographical Society (1897) with its imposing Portugal Room. Technological progress, materialized by iron, steel, and glass engineering, electric lighting, and electric transports guided urban renewal,25 in an attempt to obliterate the economic crisis and the defeat of Portuguese African policy following the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and British Ultimatum (1890) which established the rules for the division of Africa among European powers. New public gardens, starting with Estrela garden (1852), followed by the botanical garden of the Polytechnic School (1878) and a zoological garden (1884, 1905), together with amusement places such as theaters, cinemas, clubs, and cafés, invited Lisboners to socialize outdoors. However, the expanding city, which attracted progressively more workers, continued to be

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  147 vulnerable to all sorts of epidemics, due to deficient public and domestic sanitary conditions. For many, it continued to be “grim,” “melancholic,” “banal,” and no more than a “travestied Paris.”26 For others, including the inventive Miguel Pais, it provided the opportunity to dream high: often discussed in Diário de Notícias, his ideas included a metropolitan system of transportation, a bridge over the Tagus river, viaducts and tunnels, and megalomaniac riverside projects.27 During the first decade of the twentieth century, following developments in urban planning in major European cities,28 the city reinforced its dynamic of change under tough economic conditions and reduced budgets. Several general plans for Lisbon’s improvement (1883, 1888, 1901–1904) were put forward,29 the mounting appreciation of the expertise of architects materialized in the creation of the Prize Valmor (after 1902), and the professionalization of technical experts of the city council was recognized as a prerequisite for the solution of city problems (sanitation, transports, and communication) which called for expertise in chemistry, physics, engineering, hygiene, and bacteriology.30 Conditions were finally met to “elevate Lisbon to the category of Europe’s wharf,”31 a modern city port uniting the old to the new continent, and taking advantage of its privileged Atlantic situation.

STM Cityscapes: Lisbon through the Daily Press At the turn of the twentieth century, debates about Lisbon were mirrored in the press (daily or weekly), an increasingly compelling media for the formation of public opinion. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a vertiginous number of periodicals appeared yearly in Portugal, increasing from 35 in the 1850s to 184 in the 1880s and 389 in 1894. With an uneven geographical distribution with a peak in Lisbon,32 it placed Portugal above France and Great Britain regarding the rate of newspapers per inhabitant,33 but not concerning the total number of copies in circulation, which was below 800 copies for around 67% periodicals. Diário de Notícias, a generalist newspaper issued in Lisbon since 1865, released 70,000 copies in 190634 and was, thus, among a limited group of approximately 20 newspapers printed consistently for more than 30 years by 1900. Technical modifications introduced by 190435 accounted for the increase in the number of copies per issue and decrease in copy price (10 réis).36 Ideologically, the newspaper was committed to a new style of journalism based on descriptive news, the eradication of long opinion articles, political discussions, and polemic issues. It assumed itself as a popular newspaper, in which purported political neutrality combined with trivial news. Lisbon Signposts in the Diário de Notícias The Diário de Notícias exerted a considerable influence in Portuguese society, and specifically in the microcosm of Lisboners. Understandably, a

148  Ana Simões considerable fraction of STM news related to Lisbon were often scattered along its pages, and seldom included in special sections. Among them, a few addressed specifically how STM was reshaping the urban landscape. This set of news is particularly interesting as they take Lisbon not simply as a container in which STM events take place, but as a city permeable to STM events. In this chapter, considerations on the contents of STM news in Diário de Notícias rely on the systematic analysis of its contents in the years 1900, 1905, and 1910.37 They provide a privileged starting point to address the subset of STM news impinging on urban planning and renewal and framed by two particularly revealing articles. The first was published on January 15, 1900, and was called “What is missing in Lisbon”; the other was published on December 13, 1910, with the title “The University of Lisbon.” The anonymous author of the first article acknowledged the various improvements undergone by Lisbon in the past 20 years, especially in transportation, and recalled especially the visionary plans of the engineer Miguel Pais voiced in successive issues of the Diário de Notícias, and aimed at turning Lisbon into “one of the most attractive and comfortable meeting points in the world.”38 He regretted that past proposals did not materialize. For example, he criticized both government and city council for their inability to provide government offices, administrative and justice bureaus with adequate building spaces and proper sanitary, hygiene, and security conditions. Despite Lisbon’s natural beauty, privileged geographical situation, and recent transformations, the author pointed that Lisbon still lacked the minimum infrastructural and architectural conditions to be a truly modern city, comparable to Paris. While the former article criticized the inability of political and administrative power to modernize Lisbon, keeping up with recent urban trends, the other article conveyed a positive message, possibly reinforced by expectations associated with the onset of the Republic. It was authored by Bettencourt Ferreira, physician, naturalist, science popularizer, and advocate of educational and medical reforms on hygiene, and the treatment of mentally disabled children.39 A regular contributor to the section Scientific Chronicles, Bettencourt Ferreira had offered in the past reflections on the reform of higher education, and specifically of the University of Coimbra, the importance of democratization of science and of public education, and the necessity to bring education and science to the working class by means of outreach activities.40 In this article, he addressed the reform of higher education institutions and prophetically associated the establishment of a university in Lisbon with the transformation of Lisbon from a capital city into a scientific capital. For him, a modern university should integrate or substitute former institutions of higher learning located in the city, reform programs of study, teaching methods, and be housed preferably in new buildings constructed purposefully for this effect, especially having in mind that laboratories,

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  149 technicians’ workshops, and office spaces were essential sites for the experimental sciences. The new university was to counteract the hegemonic role in training ruling elites played by the University of Coimbra, which by the twentieth century had become “backward, incomplete, and deplorably decadent,” lacking “material means, professors, laboratories, and so on.”41 In sum, the modernity of Lisbon should become indelibly associated with its transformation into a scientific capital, housing new scientific institutions, and capped by a new university aimed at educating the country’s ruling elite. Furthermore, such institutional reform should be part of a network of local higher education institutions administering both scientific and technical education in areas adapted to the specificities of each region and contributing effectively to its commercial and industrial development. Four months after the publication of this article, Bettencourt Ferreira’s prophecy was materialized: The University of Lisbon was created as part and parcel of the reform of all levels of education brought about by the Republic. Anchored in a new concept of citizenship, in which STM was embedded, the republican citizen stood for the values of positivism and believed that education was the main tool to achieve responsible freedom and empowerment. In Lisbon, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon occupied the new building erected in 1906 for the Medical School in the Hill of Santana, and the Faculty of Sciences occupied the building of the former Polytechnic School, close to the Rectory. In a city known by its seven hills, the location of the two schools gave way to the designations Hill of Medicine and Hill of Sciences, respectively, and Bettencourt Ferreira continued his proselytizing activities in the context of outreach activities of the University of Lisbon, which established close ties with the Free and Popular universities, bringing STM topics to the less educated classes and imprinting a mark in the capital’s landscape.42 STM Cityscapes: Lisbon in the Diário de Notícias Framed by the two articles discussed earlier, news on STM events taking place in Lisbon was a constant presence in Diário de Notícias, conveying a dynamic vision of Lisbon shaped by STM actors, institutions, and events, and at the same time (often) responding to city’s aspirations. As common in newspapers around the world, they registered systematically meetings of scientific, medical, and educational institutions, as well as of professional organizations (engineers, architects, commerce employees, and so on), and reported attendances, specific activities, including exams, and conferences. Recurrent institutions included the National Assistance to those afflicted by tuberculosis, by far the more prominent institutional presence of all, Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, Geographical Society of Lisbon at times in association with colonial affairs, Society of Medical Sciences and the Medical School, Royal Astronomic Observatory, ­Polytechnic School of Lisbon, Society of Portuguese Civil Engineers, the new Society

150  Ana Simões of Portuguese Architects, a professional group which was striving for professional recognition in Portugal,43 and the Commercial Athenaeum, a cultural association of employees of commerce. Among recent institutions of republican orientation was the Academy of Sciences of Portugal, associated with the monarchic turned republican António Cabreira,44 and the Academy of Free Studies, which preceded the foundation of the Popular University. STM news was often linked to reflections on educational reform, including the creation of new educational institutions, as fundamental to build the new citizen. Concurrently, the city council aimed at changing Lisbon’s landscape at the pace of technoscientific progress embellished by aesthetic choices, at the same time solving its pressing health and sanitary problems, to such an extent that as it happened in other European cities, urban technology, planning, and hygiene took precedence over science.45 Among them public health, especially infectious diseases with particular emphasis on tuberculosis, took the lead, with a high frequency of appearance in the newspaper. Articles were written as either straightforward news or mixing characteristics of popularization of science and pedagogically motivated articles.46 Articles’ credibility stemmed from the authority of their authors, often reputed physicians. A pervasive presence in the daily was the republican Lisboner Miguel Bombarda,47 physician of mental illnesses, writer of books and papers, polemicist, Director of the Hospital of Rilhafoles, and professor at the Medical School, dubbed a “major scientific pontiff.”48 News registered his tireless activity across the capital as proselyte for scientifically based medicine,49 a modern public health system, and the fight against tuberculosis.50 News discussing measures taken by the recently created National Assistance to those afflicted by tuberculosis were addressed as having nationwide impact or only local relevance, with incidence on poor capital neighborhoods.51 News’ credibility was often supported by statistical comparisons with foreign cities, offering a picture of Lisbon as “one of the few cities in the world in which mortality was still superior to birth rate,”52 and therefore asserting its comparative peripheral status. Deficient sanitary conditions in dwellings, especially those of the working class, streets, and neighborhoods, and bad food quality were highlighted: “in any other European capital, nor maybe in any capital of the world, do inhabitants eat such expensive bread as in Lisbon. Expensive and bad.”53 The diffusion of norms of hygiene and the promotion of public health, including body care, healthy eating habits, and physical exercise, were addressed from complementary perspectives, ranging from scientific and clinical topics, to preventive and therapeutic strategies, and the regulation of social behaviors inhibiting the propagation of the disease. News about technology focused mainly on electricity-based transports and communications, including fast vehicles, electrical, and leisure technology (photography, film, and the phonograph). Articles often associated technology with the ideology of progress and high standards of living, in

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  151 their dual dimension of a collective and individual enterprise. A major issue at stake concerned water quality in Lisbon, chemical properties of the water of S. Paulo spa, improvements in the supply system of potable water, construction of a dam in a Tagus’s affluent, and a big water reservoir in the new neighborhood of Campo de Ourique.54 As to science, the new premises of the zoological garden at the Park of Laranjeiras were announced, together with visits paid by reputed specialists particularly impressed by its primates. Besides contributing to urban embellishment and people’s amusement, the zoological garden played a dual function of auxiliary site for the development of biological sciences, especially in animal psychology and ethology, and for scientific education. Following a trend at work elsewhere, it became a polyvalent space where science, popularization, leisureliness, and aesthetic fruition mingled together.55 The status of Lisbon as the capital of a vast colonial empire did not play a prominent role in what concerns STM news in the period under consideration. Besides providing primates for the zoological garden, conferences on colonial matters took place at the Society of Geography of Lisbon, and matters of colonial hygiene were discussed.56 A long article on the colonial botanical garden in Victoria, in the German colony of Cameroon, set the stage for a vehement plea for a colonial botanical garden in Lisbon, and for a harsh criticism toward its present predicaments: “Lisbon, the capital of a vast colonial empire, does not have a colonial botanical garden. (…) the port of Lisbon, an obligatory passage for all colonial commerce in the past, is presently devoid of such function, as it is not associated with industries able to transform and deliver to consumers the best colonial products, at the same time securing their maximum development.”57 Natural events marked the city’s landscape momentarily. The solar eclipses of 1900 and 1905, and the return of Halley’s comet in 1910 were amply discussed in news, often close to the popularization genre.58 Besides reports on social events, and various activities, including lectures attended by the political and scientific elite, and middle-class people, citizens were stimulated to make observations and register them in drawings or pictures. As it occurred in cities around the world,59 citizens metamorphosed into amateur astronomers and the city into an improvised observatory: “the capital city offered Lisboners an interesting spectacle. Each of its inhabitants became an astronomer, each window, roof, and street became an observatory.”60 Thus, momentarily the city altered its normal rhythm to take possession of such grandiose astronomical events. Scientists such as the astronomers Campos Rodrigues, Frederico Oom, and Melo e Simas, from the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon, the chemist Achiles Machado or Bettencourt Ferreira, from the Polytechnic School, or the physician Ricardo Jorge became public figures due to their scientific proselytism and popularization of science activities using the daily press as one of its vehicles. And the scientific institutions they were associated with or in which they delivered speeches gained extra visibility in the process of shaping the city’s landscape.

152  Ana Simões Generally, in what relates to urban renewal science acts as a handmaiden of medical and technological matters. This was the case for 190061; however, the presence of astronomical events of great appeal to the press as the 1905 total solar eclipse and the 1910 visit of Halley’s comet accounts for the prominence of science over technological issues in STM news about Lisbon in the period under consideration. On the one hand, the presence of physicians dominated over that of scientists in a city still afflicted by epidemics. On the other, in what concerns urban renewal the role of engineers surpassed by far that of civil architects, still an emerging professional class, although their presence in the Diário de Notícias is mostly inferred from the news’ topics more than from articles specifically dedicated to them. Surprisingly, the role of Lisbon as a port city and metropolis of an extended empire was seldom addressed. Despite recurrent criticisms by articles’ authors as to unhealthy living conditions in Lisbon, often pointing to shortcomings of recent urban renovations, the profusion of STM news about Lisbon signals a vision for the city’s progress dependent on the establishment of dynamic connections between STM and the city.

Utopian Cityscapes: Lisbon Between Reality and Fiction Through its buildings, neighborhoods, gardens, institutions, personalities, and events, the city of Lisbon profusely filled the pages of the recent magazine Ilustração Portuguesa. Issued on a weekly basis, it started in 1903, lasting until 1993, although after 1931 its periodicity diminished dramatically, publishing at most two short issues per year. Ilustração Portuguesa was associated with the daily of republican leanings O Século, issued in Lisbon and sharing with Diário de Notícias a wide circulation, numerous copies per issue and great longevity (1881–1977). As a complement of O Século, the magazine used a universal language to reach out to as many people as possible, documenting all aspects of contemporary Portuguese life as an illustrated dictionary, relying on active readers to send ideas and images, and producing an iconographic map for future generations to enjoy. While drawing was initially its identifying trait, due to its capacity to make events visible in a faithful and reproducible way, the magazine’s second series, issued after 1906, turned to photography as the outmost technique, together with drawing, interviews, and reportages.62 Although most articles relied on images, authored by wellknown illustrators or photographers, a few relied on the expertise of literary collaborators, often reputed historians or writers. In 1906, its number of copies amounted to 15,000 and its price was 100 réis per issue.63 From 1903 to 1910, a systematic survey of news related to Lisbon identified 158 news, of which roughly 40% addressed STM topics, often presenting exclusively pictures of scientific institutions and spaces, including laboratories, instruments, and experiments, as well as botanical or zoological gardens, visits of the King to scientific institutions, including higher education ones, scientific congresses presided by the King, deficient nutrition

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  153 and water supply, pictures and reflections on Halley’s visit, and considerations on an aeroplane invented by a Portuguese inspired by Jules Verne.64 Few referred to the port of Lisbon and even fewer to events related to the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Concerning the port of Lisbon, one depicted the wharf of Alcântara, another works on the port, and still other discussed how the port of Lisbon had become an efficient port for the fast delivery of mail sent from South America to countries in Europe.65 Among articles presenting significant considerations, the technoscientific utopias put forward by Fialho de Almeida and Melo de Matos stand out. Like science-fiction authors such as Verne, whose recent death was behind a long article in Diário de Notícias by Bettencourt Ferreira,66 they firmly grounded their visions on recent scientific and technological breakthroughs.67 Both envisioned Lisbon as a metropolis deeply shaped by a growing industrial economy, with a new geographical profile anchored in the river Tagus and marked by the rhythm of the new technologies of transports and communications. The awareness of present major urban problems guided the quest for their solution, at times appropriating ideas from past urban planners such as Pézerat or Pais, and often aired in the daily press. The coincidence of the publication date of both articles may have been associated with a series of contingent events, all taking place in Lisbon during 1906: The reorganization of the city council directed toward providing better conditions for the elaboration of a plan for improvements in the city68; the foundation of the Touring Club of Portugal aiming at the intellectual, moral, and material development of the country, and at propagandizing abroad its natural and urban landscapes with a view to attract tourists69; the inauguration of new buildings signaling the modernization of the city and its response to hygiene and medical problems (Medical School, National Assistance to those afflicted with tuberculosis), and the organization of the international congress of medicine on the premises of the new building, aimed at boosting the aspirations of physicians who were pushing forward an experimentally based medicine able to legitimize their socio-professional group, and enhance their credibility both indoors and abroad. Melo de Matos’ High-Tech City Port Melo de Matos was an engineer specialist on ports and lighthouses who projected modifications to the port of Aveiro.70 Member of the Touring Club of Portugal, he was Director of Construção Moderna (Modern Construction), founded in 1900, object of articles in Diário de Notícias,71 and the first Portuguese journal addressed to construction works, and specifically to new modern family houses, including dwellings for the working class.72 In four successive instalments, he depicted Lisbon in the year 2000 centered on the future port, the neuralgic site uniting a cosmopolitan Lisbon to the world, the wharf of Alcântara and its warehouses, and the station and the tunnel uniting Lisbon to the south margin of the river.

154  Ana Simões By 2000, the Lisbon port had become an obligatory passage for international naval traffic and the central node for commercial transactions with Argentina, Cape Town, Australia, and Canada, competing for supremacy with the United Kingdom. In its shipyard filled with high-precision instruments, high-tech vessels incorporating innovations by Portuguese experts (engineers, chemists, and electricians) were built. Connections to the railway network were established by means of an aerial metropolitan electric system of aerodynamic features, a German invention appropriated by a Portuguese engineer responsible for introducing “exceedingly relevant and practical modifications,” endowed with carriages moving periodically “as bright meteors” in the same direction, every five minutes.73 Aerial high-speed transport lines secured the connections to its various wharfs, where commercial transactions were orchestrated by the most sophisticated electric systems, and supervised from the height of a 350 m Eiffel-like steel tower, endowed with various elevators and panoramic restaurants.74 Bridges and viaducts, the metro, aircrafts, and cars completed the circulation network. The architecture of the highly ornamented central station was impressive, as was the commandeering position of a huge and very precise clock, simultaneously “the brain and the heart” of the station (Figure 7.3). Ministries of commerce, industry, and communications as well the main banks of capitalist Lisbon surrounded the station. Special attention was paid to the Agricultural Bank (Caixa Geral Agrícola), whose imposing reliefs symbolized the growing importance of chemistry and meteorology for scientific agriculture. Medallions paid homage to Liebig, Chaptal, Pasteur, and F ­ erreira Lapa, the Portuguese promoter of scientific agronomy; a marble relief depicted Ceres and modern Science “tightly embraced and encircled by laboratory instruments, retorts, mechanical harvesters, farm animals and huge stacks.”75 The political role of STM was asserted in such way, revealing Melo de Matos’ ideological stance toward the empowerment of engineers in urban contexts and the rising ascendancy of scientists as a professional group and artisans of urban progress. In the first and last instalment, Modern Lisbon blossomed together with its industrialized counterpart, at the south side of the river Tagus. An imposing industrial complex with 25 factories for processing canned fish and various buildings capped with tower chimneys expelling heavy fumes composed the highly industrialized background to the renewed capital city.76 An underground tunnel connected the port to the industrialized south side. It was a technoscientific prowess convening the expertise of foreign and ­Portuguese scientists who were raised to the status of heroes (Figure 7.3). The solution of obstacles faced during underwater construction was immediately announced by phone, telegraph, and the press. The trepidation-free aerodynamic tunnel and trains connected Lisbon to the village of Seixal in just three minutes. Electric lighting and luxurious bathrooms “with all the commodities of civilization” secured an unforgettable trip.77

(a)

(b)

Figure 7.3  (a) Central station and its clock. (b) Underground tunnel connecting Lisbon to the south margin.

156  Ana Simões Three years later, Melo de Matos conceded that his vision for industrial Lisbon could be closer to reality than expected, when he reported on the transformation of the old train station in the village of Barreiro into modern workshops, materializing the vision of an engineer who had nonetheless voiced severe criticisms to his utopia.78 Filled with scientific instruments and the siege of various experimental precision tests, in these workshops the modernization of various components of the train system and carriages used in the south of Portugal were taking place. By linking the two cities by an imagined underground tunnel, the utopian vision of Melo de Matos heralded the connection between political power and industry, carrying with it the support of a bourgeois-industrial political order. Fialho de Almeida’s Two Monumental Cities Fialho de Almeida attended the Polytechnic School and the Medical School, having graduated in medicine in 1895, but his professional life centered on journalistic and writing activities. He wrote for newspapers and magazines, published chronicles, fictional tales, and short stories about various aspects of contemporary life, mores, and politics, often of a critical, pamphlet-like, and satirical bent. In his chronicle Os Gatos (The Cats), Fialho de Almeida often criticized urban choices for the capital, still far from major European cities. The new palaces looked like “cattle sheds,” the new buildings like “dressers,” all suited for the “lodgings of idiotic Lisboners.” The new Avenida da Liberdade was full of “hillbilly mansions burping on the avenue, boring and very tall.”79 In “Monumental Lisbon,” Fialho de Almeida depicted a socialist, republican, and cosmopolitan Lisbon commanded not only by technology, like the bright and electric city of Melo de Matos, but also by aesthetic choices. Criticisms on the ways “Lisbon resisted to progress” and emphasis on the role of architects in “future Lisbon” were also voiced in articles in Ilustração Portuguesa,80 following Fialho de Almeida’s publication. For him, the expertise of architects in comparison to artisans and amateurs, the educational role of the Fine Arts School and the National Society of Fine Arts, the necessity of affirming a specific architectural urban style and a plea for creating a “Portuguese house” were considered fundamental to secure the right balance between modernity, beauty, and commodity. The new building of the Medical School, of monumental proportions, was conceived as an integral part of a complex of neighborhoods stretching along the four cardinal points, and representing the medical and health sciences, industry and commerce, culture and leisure time, and finally residential areas, which are the four fundamental vectors for the development of any modern city.81 Like others before,82 a technological artwork—the imposing bridge behind the “bridge metaphor”—was envisioned to unite the Hill of Medicine, capped by the Medical School, to the Hill of Sciences,

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  157 where the Polytechnic School was located, enriched by a beautiful new gate at the bottom of its Botanical garden. Improvements in the city port associated with an imposing marginal avenue stretching along the river completed Fialho de Almeida’s vision of monumental Lisbon, which he dubbed as a “court city filled with rolling orgies, gasps of gas and festivities.”83 But like Melo de Matos he also envisioned the creation of a sister city, an “industrial and commercial Lisbon,” at the south side of the river, whose monumentality derived from its “furnaces and hammers,” factories and chimneys, emanating heavy smoke exactly like industrial London, the model for Fialho de Almeida’s utopian industrial city. Housing factories and industrial sites previously located in the capital, the new “industrial city” also accommodated “modern and airy”84 ­proletariat neighborhoods surrounded by gardens and green spaces where workers could spend their leisure times. Routinely visited by a “labyrinth of steamers,”85 another monumental bridge with two platforms, one for people and the other for trains, connected the two cities of Lisbon.86 The imagined scenarios presented earlier reflected pressing problems at the beginning of the twentieth century. Therefore, following arguments conveyed in the edited volume Utopias/Dystopias,87 already referred to in the introduction, I argue that the boundaries between reality and prophecy were purposefully blurred, and the vivid style of copiously illustrated fictional narratives was convened to captivate the attention of the audience for urgent contemporary issues. For Melo de Matos and Fialho de Almeida, urban planning and modernity were strictly dependent on the recognition of the professional status of experts, including architects, engineers, physicians, and scientists. Additionally, their socialist, republican, and Saint-Simonian inclinations account for their technoscientific visions of the metamorphosed capital and “industrial and commercial Lisbon,” which was materialized in the mid-twentieth century. For them, in contrast with Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the garden cities in the context of the so-called Victorian utopias,88 progress and modernity depended centrally on industrialization, to such an extent that they were not concerned with a change in the regime of exploration of natural resources, but with the improvement of living conditions of the working class. Their utopian visions depended on steam, industry, infrastructures of mobility, and global scales.

Conclusion In this chapter, I explored the press as a privileged source to look at the interactions of STM and the city. In countries with high illiteracy rates, such as Portugal, at the turn of the twentieth century, newspapers and illustrated magazines offer a kaleidoscopic view of the city meant to reach out to a wide audience and build the public opinion on urban matters. Additionally, the city provides a privileged scenario to highlight the limits of the single

158  Ana Simões science model, as claimed by John Pickstone, and to look for the interconnections between science, technology and medicine.89 Among the news related to the city, a considerable fraction involved STM matters, showing how misleading is the pervasive view advocating the irrelevance of STM in the modernization Lisbon. Often dubbed as backward by actors, and always under stringent financial conditions, the city evolved under two opposing forces, a backward looking one, assessing its past and present retrograde predicaments, and a forward looking one, investing future developments of the sheer capacity to finally change it into a modern city. By connecting the Hill of Sciences and the Hill of Medicine, the “bridge metaphor” introduced in the beginning of this chapter symbolizes the interconnections between medicine, science, technology, and architecture, as well as the empowerment of professional groups of STM experts and their ability to play a political role as decision makers and urban actors. They often worked jointly in order to fulfill their technoscientific visions, which responded to urban challenges at the same time reshaping Lisbon’s landscape. While many architectural and engineering projects were never implemented, a great amount materialized in physical structures. Together, they represent utopian cityscapes, in the sense of their broader social, political, economic, and cultural ambitions and agendas. STM experts, working from and about Lisbon, sorted the difficult equation between the city’s local dynamics and resources, and the references appropriated from other capital cities, especially Paris. The multifarious visions of Lisbon often tying its modernization with the interests of STM experts were behind the transformation of Lisbon into the scientific capital of Portugal.

Acknowledgments I thank my father, the architect Duarte Nuno Simões, who since my early childhood took me for many tours around Lisbon and for conversations while preparing the talk delivered at the Third Watson Seminar in the History of Material and Visual Science “How to write an urban history of science: New approaches and case studies,” Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, June 6, 2014, which is behind this chapter. It was through his eyes that I came to know and love “my” city. I thank José Avelãs Nunes for his help on the survey of news published in Ilustração Portuguesa and for adapting the map c.1900 to the purposes of this chapter. I also thank referees and editors for their insightful comments. This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the research project VISLIS - PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014 and under PEst-OE/HIS/UI0286/2014.

Abbreviations DN—Diário de Notícias IP—Ilustração Portuguesa

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  159

Notes 1 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I e II,” IP, 36 (1906): 396–405; 39 (1906): 497–509. 2 John Agar, Crosbie Smith, Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1998); David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place. Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2003); Charles W. J. Withers, David N. Livingstone (eds.), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 3 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, J. Andrew Mendelsohn, (eds.), Science and the City, Osiris, 18 (2003). 4 Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty. Science, Liberalism and Private Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); Miriam Levin, Sophie Forgan, Martina Hessler, Robert Kargon, Morris Low, Urban Modernity. Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 5 Oliver Hochadel, Agustí Nieto-Galan (eds.), Barcelona. An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London: Routledge, 2016); Agustí NietoGalan, “Scientific ‘marvels’ in the public sphere: Barcelona and its 1888 International Exhibition,” HoST 6 (2012): 33–63; Antonio Lafuente, Tiago Saraiva, “The Urban Scale of Science and the Enlargement of Madrid (1851–1936),” Social Studies of Science, 34, 4 (2004): 531–569. 6 Manuel C. Teixeira, “A história urbana em Portugal. Desenvolvimentos recentes,” Análise Social 28 (1993): 371–90. 7 In relation to the internet database project, see Ana Luísa Janeira, “Projecto: ‘Marcas das ciências e das técnicas pelas ruas de Lisboa com Cesário Verde à descoberta de Lisboa,” Circumscribere, 3 (2007): 43–53. In what relates to scientific tours, see Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Carneiro, “Physical Sciences in Lisbon,” Physics in Perspective, 14, 3 (2012): 335–367, and visit the site www. google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1xAE021k4esfDqgYFbn-ntJtsjTo. 8 Tiago Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de Gobierno de las Artes, 2005). 9 Tiago Saraiva, Marta Macedo (eds.), Capital Científica: A Ciência Lisboeta e a Construção do Portugal Contemporâneo, forthcoming. 10 Kostas Gavroglu, Manolis Patiniotis, Faidra Papanelopoulou, Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, Jose Ramon Bertomeu-Sánchez, ­A ntonio Garcia Belmar, Agusti Nieto-Galan, “Science and technology in the E ­ uropean periphery. Some historiographical reflections,” History of Science, 46 (2008): 153–175; STEP FORUM, Technology & Culture, 57 (2016), 926-997, and especially Oliver Hochadel, Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to Write an Urban History of STM on the ‘Periphery’,” 978–988; On science in the press, see Centaurus, 51, 2 (2009). 11 A. H. Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal. Das Revoluções Liberais aos nossos (Lisboa: Palas Editores, 1976), vol.II, 46, 32–33. 12 José Maria Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000, I, II, III, IV” IP, 5 (1906): 129–133; 6 (1906): 188–192; 7 (1906): 220–223; 8 (1906): 249–252. 13 Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, Gyan Prakash, “Introduction. Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time,” in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia and Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility ­(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–17, 3. 14 José-Augusto França, Lisboa. História Física e Moral (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2008); Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura (Livros Horizonte, 2005), 44–45. 15 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 37, 48.

160  Ana Simões 16 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 48. Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida, Saúde Pública e Higiene na Imprensa Diária em Anos de Epidemias, 1854–1918 (Lisboa: Colibri, 1913). 17 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 51. 18 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Urbanismo e Modernização das Cidades: o ‘Embellezamento’ como ideal, Lisboa, 1858–1891,” Scripta Nova, 69,30 (2000), www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn-69-30.htm, accessed April 27, 2014. 19 Pézarat was also one of the architects of the new building of the Polytechnic School, built from 1843 to 1878, and the author of the S. Paulo Spa and of the slaughterhouse. 20 P.J. Pézarat, Mémoire sur les Études d’Améliorations et Embellissements de Lisbonne (Lisboa, 1865). 21 Carola Hein (ed.), Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (London: Routledge, 2011); A. Mah, Port Cities and Global Legacies. Urban Identity, Waterfront Work, and Radicalism (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2014). 22 Ana Barata, “Caes da Europa.” Realidades, desejos e ficções para a cidade ­(1860–1930) (Lisboa, Colibri, 2010). 23 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 63, 68, 72, 83. 24 Barata, “Caes da Europa.” 25 The electrification of the city began in 1878 in Chiado. The Avenida da Liberdade was electrified in the 1890s. França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 71; Ana Cardoso de Matos, Fátima Mendes, Fernando Faria, Luís Cruz, A Electricidade em Portugal. Dos Primórdios à Segunda Guerra Mundial (Lisboa: EDP, 2004), 155–166. 26 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 67–68. 27 See Miguel Pais, Melhoramentos de Lisboa (Lisboa, 1882): the term utopia is used recurrently to dub his visionary proposals. 28 See, for example, Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, first published in 1988); Nicolas Kenny, Rebecca Madgin (eds.), Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 29 França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 71–81; I. Morais Viegas, A. A. Maia Tojal (eds.), “Lisboa, entre a monarquia e a República, no seu contexto urbanístico– administrativo,” Levantamento das Plantas da Cidade de Lisboa, 1904–1911 (Lisboa: CML, 2005), 13–18. 30 Viegas, Tojal, “Lisboa, entre a monarquia e a República,” 9. 31 DN, “Lisboa cais da Europa,” June 19, 1906. 32 Examples of number of newspapers in representative cities are: Lisbon: 188, Oporto: 91; Coimbra: 32, Ponta Delgada, Azores: 23. Conceição Tavares, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Simões, “A Imagem Pública da Ciência na Imprensa Portuguesa (1900–1901),” in Carlos Cordeiro, Susana Serpa Silva (eds.), A História da Imprensa e a Imprensa na História. O contributo dos Açores (Ponta Delgada: Centro de Estudos Gaspar Frutuoso, CEIS 20, 2009), 519–536. 33 P.V. Brito Aranha, Mouvement da la Presse Périodique au Portugal (Lisboa, 1900). Examples of number of inhabitants per periodical are: Portugal: 6,500; USA: 7,000; Switzerland: 8,000; Belgium: 15,000; Holland: 16,000; France and UK: 23,000; Germany: 26,000; Italy: 44,000; Austria: 105,000; Turkey: 300,000. 34 See José Tengarrinha, História da Imprensa Periódica Portuguesa (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1989), 231; Rui Ramos, História de Portugal: a Segunda Fundação, in José Mattoso (ed.), História de Portugal, vol. 6 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 2001), 53. 35 In 1904, manual setting-up type was replaced by Lynotipe, whose work was equivalent to five typesetters. See Tavares et al., “A Imagem Pública da Ciência.”

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  161 36 Alfredo da Cunha, Eduardo Coelho: a sua vida e a sua obra, 2nd ed. (Lisboa: Tipografia Universal, 1904); Ramos, História de Portugal, 52–53. 37 I relied on the database built in the context of the research project I headed on “An open window to representations of Science and Technology in the Portuguese Press (1900–1926),” funded by the Portuguese Research Council, which systematically surveyed STM news in the years 1900, 1905, 1910, 1915, 1920, and 1925. 38 DN, January 15, 1900. 39 “Ferreira, Bettencourt,” in A. Nóvoa (ed.), Dicionário dos Educadores (Lisboa: Edições ASA, 2003), 550–551. 40 DN, June 8, 1905; November 1, 1910. 41 DN, December 13, 1900. 42 Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, Luís Miguel Carolino, Teresa Salomé Mota, Uma história da Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa (1911–1974), (2013); Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, “Political entanglements and scientific hegemony. Rectors-Scientists at the University of Lisbon under the I Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–1974),” in Badino, Massimiliano, Pietro Daniel Omodeo (eds.), Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science, vol 2: Civil Society and Scientific Culture (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 43 DN, March 20, 1900 discusses the diploma for the course of civil architects, the most attended course at the School of Fine Arts, and pleads for the recognition of the role of architects vis-à-vis foremen, and for government’s approval of their program of studies. 44 DN, May 1, 1905. 45 Tavares et al., “A Imagem Pública da Ciência.” 46 Examples are DN, April 16, 20, and 23, 1900; May 11, 21, and 28, 1900; June 1 and 11, 1900; September 11, 1900; and generally, articles of the section Scientific Chronicles authored by Bettencourt Ferreira. 47 DN, January 29, June 16, October 1, 24, and 31, November 11, 16, and 17, December 30, 1900, June 14, 1905 (interview), October 4, 15, 16, and 17, 1910. In 1910, news concerned the murder of Bombarda by a patient on Republic’s eve and funeral. 48 DN, June 14, 1905. 49 DN, January 29, 1900: “at present, in the bacteriological laboratories one manipulates the agent of tuberculosis as chemists manipulate a chemical preparation.” In DN, November 19, 1905, in the inaugural address of Alfredo da Costa, president of the Medical Sciences Society, a plea for scientific medicine in which “speculative theorizing was substituted by rigorous observation and meticulous experiment” was put forward. 50 DN, January 29, 1900: Bombarda used a plain language and the power of statistics to educate citizens: “if we popularize science we will witness a decrease of mortality in Portugal as it occurred in New York.” 51 DN, March 24, April 20, May 11, July 1, September 10, 1900; DN, July 18, 1905, August 7, 1910. 52 DN, February 21, 1900. In DN, July 1, 1910 a comparison of mortality rates (per 1,000 inhabitants) in various cities was presented: Amsterdam, 13.8; Brussels, 14.5; London, 15.6; Hamburg, 15.6; Buenos Aires, 15.9, and Lisbon, 24.0. 53 DN, February 21, 1900. 54 DN, April 19, May 12, November 16, 1900, January 17, 1905, February 17, 1910. 55 DN, August 21, 1900; DN, May 25, 1905; DN, July 18, 1905; DN, July 24, 1910. The same issues were behind the establishment or renovation of zoological parks in other countries. See, for example, Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Takashi Ito, London Zoo and the Victorians,

162  Ana Simões

56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72

73

1828–1859. Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014). DN, March 27, 1910; DN, November 4 and 5, 1900. DN, July 21, 1905. Luís Miguel Carolino, Ana Simões, “The Eclipse, the Astronomer and His Audience: Frederico Oom and the Total Solar Eclipse of 28 May 1900 in Portugal,” Annals of Science, 69, 2 (2012): 215–238; Ana Simões, Isabel Zilhão, Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Carneiro, “Halley Turns Republican. How the Portuguese Press Perceived the 1910 Return of Halley’s Comet,” History of Science, li (2013): ­199–219; Ana Simões, Luís Miguel Carolino, “The Portuguese astronomer Melo e Simas (1870–1934). Republican Ideals and Popularization of Science,” Science in Context, 27, 1 (2014): 49–77. For Barcelona, see Antoni Roca-Rosell, Pedro Ruiz-Castell. “The sky above the city. Observatories, amateurs and urban astronomy,” in Hochadel, Nieto-Galan, Barcelona, 181–199. DN, “The eclipse in Lisbon,” 31 August 1905. Tavares et al., “A Imagem Pública da Ciência.” Rocha Martins, “Chronica,” IP, 1 (1903): 2–9, “Uma nova Ilustração Portuguesa,” IP, 118 (1906): 93; See also José António Leitão, “Ilustração fotográfica: a fotografia e a revista Ilustração Portuguesa (1903–1924),” accessed on-line on April 2, 2014. Advertisement included in the last page of IP (1906). See “Instituto Bacteriológico Câmara Pestana,” IP, 84 (1905): 498, 502–503; 85 (1905): 518–519; “Instituto de Agronomia e Veterinária,” IP, 76 (1905): 370, ­374–375; “O novo Jardim Zoológico,” IP, 83 (1905): 482, 486, 487; “Congresso de Medicina em Lisboa,” IP, 10 (1906): 289–291; “Um flagelo desvastador: a raiva,” IP, 8 (1906): 227; “Da Luz do sol à luz electrica, IP, 45 (1906): 709–712; ­“Lisboa com sede,” IP, 57 (1907): 356–359; “Astronomia (como se tem estudado) em Portugal,” IP, 92 (1907): 692–696; “Um inventor portuguêz: o aeroplano Gouveia,” IP, 171 (1909): 673–679; “O Ventre de Lisboa,” IP, 220 (1910): 601–606; “O Cometa de Halley,” IP, 221 (1910): 630; 222 (1910): 671–672; “O fim do mundo e os cometas,” IP, 207 (1910): 169–175. “Aspecto das obras do porto de Lisboa,” IP, 48 (1904): 757; “Doca de Alcantara,” IP, 216 (1910): 472; “Lisboa Porto Postal,” IP 241 (1910): 436–439. DN, March 28, 1905. IP, 171 (1909): 670, depicts the statue of Jules Verne in Amiens. Paul Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination discovers technology (University of Michigan: Twayne, 1994); Mark Bold, A. M. Butler, Adam ­Roberts, Sherryl Vint (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2009). Viegas, Tojal, “Lisboa, entre a monarquia e a República,” 13–15. Ana Cardoso de Matos, Maria Luísa F. N. dos Santos, “Os Guias de Turismo e a emergência do turismo contemporâneo em Portugal (dos finais do século XIX às primeiras décadas do século XX),” Scripta Nova, 8, 167 (2004), www.ub.edu/ geocrit/sn/sn-167.htm, accessed on April 2, 2014. José Maria Melo de Matos, “Memória sobre a arborização das Dunas de Aveiro,” Revista de Obras Públicas e Minas, 23, 268–270 (1892). DN, January 30, 1900, February 17, 1905. Paulo Manuel Simões Nunes, A Construção Moderna e a cultura arquitectónica no início de Novecentos em Portugal, Mestrado em Teorias da Arte, FBAUL, 2000; Nuno Teotónio Pereira, “Pátios e vilas de Lisboa, 1870–1930. A promoção privada do alojamento operário,” Análise Social, 29, 127 (1999): 509–524. Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. I. O Porto de Lisboa,” IP, 5 (1906): 129–133, 133.

From Capital City to Scientific Capital  163 74 Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. II. Os cais de Alcântara e os armazéns de Lisboa,” IP, 6 (1906): 188–192. 75 Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. III. A estação de Lisboa-Mar,” IP, 7 (1906): 220–223, 221. 76 Melo de Matos, “O Porto de Lisboa,” 133. 77 Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. IV. O tunel para a outra banda,” IP, 8 (1906): 249–252, 252. 78 Melo de Matos, “Os caminhos de ferro do Estado. As oficinas de Sul e Sueste no Barreiro,” IP, 157 (1909): 249–256. 79 Fialho de Almeida, Os Gatos (Lisboa: Livraria Clássica Editora, 1927, first published 1889–1894). 80 “Como Lisboa resiste ao progresso,” IP, 153 (1909): 121–123; “Lisboa futura. A projectada Avenida de Santos ao Caes do Sodré,” IP, 213 (1910): 367–372, “Lisboa nova. Premio Valmor de 1908,” IP, 167 (1909): 552; “Premio Valmor de 1909,” IP, 223 (1910): 704. 81 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I,” 400. 82 DN, July 29, 1905. In this article, the author exhorted the city council to support firms able to build such a huge bridge. 83 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II,” 498. 84 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II,” 501. 85 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II,” 498. 86 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II,” 499. 87 Gordin, Tilley, Prakash, “Utopia and Dystopia,” 3. 88 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow. Reprinted, edited with a Preface by F. J. Osborn and an Introductory Essay by Lewis Mumford (London: Faber and Faber, 1946, first published in 1902). Howard shared the agrarian and pastoral visions behind the anarchist ideal of Proudhonism, and the theories of autosufficiency defended by Kropotkin, based on small-scale organizations and the imbalance between urban and rural landscapes, that is, between industry and agriculture, nature and the city. 89 John Pickstone, “Working knowledges before and after circa 1800. Practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology and medicine,” ISIS, 98 (2007): 489–516.

8 Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, Helsinki (c. 1915) Emilia Karppinen

Munkkiniemi-Haaga and Greater Helsinki. Studies and proposals concerning the planning of the area. Under this title Eliel Saarinen issued a notable book, the first work published in Finland dealing with urban planning. […] Who could have thought that an architect in our poor country would have found money enough for creating this kind of a project for realizing the beautiful future visions revealed for the artist, when he for the first time dreamed about drawing a whole city!1 This is how the Finnish architect Bertel Jung (1872–1946) begins his book review in September’s issue of the trade journal for Finnish architects, called Arkitekten—Tidskrift för arkitektur och dekorativ konst, in 1915. The book under review, Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915), was published in the same month together with the grand opening of a related exhibition held in Helsinki. Both the book and the exhibition, funded by M. G. Stenius Corporation Ltd, functioned as advertisements for the newly planned neighborhood, Munkkiniemi and Haaga, located outside the City of Helsinki’s borders. The 165-page-long publication was, though, more than a book. It not only contained the guidelines and detailed plans for the future development of a specific area, Munkkiniemi and Haaga, but also a broader context on the essence of the planning. The ideas were presented in various forms: texts, pictures, photographs, charts, and maps. The book was published under the name of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), who had already achieved international fame with his plans for capital cities Canberra, ­Australia (1912), and Tallinn, Estonia (1913).2 The roots of his reputation can be traced back to the year 1900, when Eliel Saarinen and his colleagues were celebrated for designing the Finnish Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Paris. Despite their geographical remoteness from the core areas of Europe and although few in number, the architects in Finland, the autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, were strong participants in the assembling of the new concept of urban planning. Even though Helsinki, the capital of Finland, was still a small city with approximately 100,000 inhabitants in 1910, it was gladly compared with other capitals. This was partly due to the exponential

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  165 population growth. During the previous 40 years, Helsinki had tripled is population, and almost in the same period the population of whole Finland had increased from 2 to 3 million, thus accelerating the recently begun urbanization. The problems other growing capitals had faced, especially the metropolises, were seen as plausible problems for the future Greater Helsinki.3 As Finland was a centrally governed part of the Russian Empire until the end of 1917, the right to make urban plans was monopolized. However, a gradual shift transferring the planning from the central power to the local level occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, thus allowing the development of the former bureaucratic planning toward a more modern European structure.4 Internationally, the era before the First World War was the time when urban planning reasserted itself as a profession, being characterized by the collaboration of specialized experts who had a mutual aim: to manage the city as a whole.5 This era also marked the beginning of a formation phase of a new discipline: Urban planning is an excellent example demonstrating how a new discipline can start as a multidisciplinary project of three established disciplines: architecture, engineering, and surveying.6

Premises for the Study Collaboration as an integral part of planning is especially highlighted by the researchers concentrating on urban planning and design in present-day settings.7 The older research tradition on planning history concentrated more on individuals, mostly an architect or an engineer, as the core of the research.8 The newer tradition recognizes the need for diverse expertise in urban planning, but it is, nevertheless, only rarely included as an explicit part of the research. The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915) has been referred to in several studies, especially when the research concerned the architect Eliel Saarinen or the planning history of the City of Helsinki.9 Even though the planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga was only one project among several contemporary planning initiatives in the Greater Helsinki area around the time, it was even then very special because of its size. It was estimated that the population of the area would exceed 169,000 inhabitants over the following 30 years, thus multiplying the current population of Helsinki.10 However, the actors behind this grand plan have not previously been broadly, or explicitly, researched. Hence, by having The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan as its focus, this chapter addresses the need to acknowledge the diverse expertise behind urban planning during its formative period, before World War I. The aim of this chapter is not to neglect the importance of Eliel Saarinen as a planner, but to discover who the other actors behind the planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga were, and an overall understanding of how each of their work contributions was connected. The need to understand expertise as something more than an individual property and to bring the actual work practices into the focus of the

166  Emilia Karppinen research are the main features of the theoretical concept of collective expertise. This concept is used loosely as a tool to explore The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan and to reach a deeper understanding of expertise behind it. In this article, I use management researcher Niina Koivunen’s definition of the concept. According to her, collective expertise is “an ongoing processual ability to function together with other experts and create new knowledge.”11 How then can we recognize these experts and interactions behind a historical, published plan? The key is to move the focus from acts to action, in other words, from plans to planning. The understanding of planning as a social process is highlighted, in contemporary settings, by urban planning researcher Orly Linovski. She notes how urban “[d]esign can be understood as a fundamentally social process, formed by interactions between actors—not only other designers, but also planners, politicians, clients, the public, and other participants—that create, modify, and refine design ideas.”12 Hence, this chapter addresses the need to unravel the published and printed Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan into planning as a process. By doing so, the many experts and the encounters between them become visible. Instead of being a product of a planner, the plan was, in reality, the result of collective action, as the American architect Frederick Law Olmstedt Jr. had already emphasized in 1911.13 The main source material for the chapter is the published Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915), as we may call the work. Even though the book was published with the architect Eliel Saarinen’s name on the cover, it was not written solely by him. In addition to the chapters concerning the planning of the area and written by Saarinen, the publication includes writings of three other individuals, namely judge Johan Rafael Uggla; the director of the ­Stenius Corporation, Sigurd Stenius; and the architect Gustaf Strengell.14 Even though The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan broadly presents the various aspects of planning, it does not explicate the processes behind it. Thus, to reveal the social nature of planning, the source material is broadened from the mere published Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan by including archival material. The archive of the M. G. Stenius Corporation, the company that financed the planning, contains, for example, correspondence and the annual reports of the corporation. As these materials are, nevertheless, fragmented, a complete history of the planning as a process cannot be reconstructed. The picture is also extended by the use of contemporary journals, mainly the Finnish trade journal for architects, Arkitekten. The latest news on international urban planning was very quickly reported in Arkitekten. In addition, the most recent foreign trade journals were available in Finnish bookstores.15 Because of the restrictions caused by the source material and the breadth of the concept of collective expertise, it is not possible to entirely cover either the project or the concept. Thus, this article will focus on demonstrating the existence of specific experts—architects, engineers, and businessmen—and their participation in the planning process of Munkkiniemi and Haaga.16

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  167 The participation in planning may be understood broadly. As researchers Kai Hakkarainen, Jiri Lallimo, and Seppo Toikka note, the concept of collective expertise allows the recognition of several kinds of connections and encounters, such as concrete collaborations, as well as participation in a specific expertise culture, or in networks of knowledge.17 Even though the experts might not have met each other in person, being part of the same network of knowledge brought them together. These encounters might also span time, for example, in the form of literature: A book or an article might function as a fellow-expert. Hence, in this article, the diverse sides of collective expertise behind the planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga are approached by taking a closer look at three intertwined moments. The article is divided into three parts following a specific aspect of the planning process. The first part briefly presents the premises for the planning, most importantly why the area of Munkkiniemi and Haaga was acquired by the Stenius Corporation. The second part highlights the preparation of the acquired land for the next steps to be taken in the process; the topic being especially approached from the point of view of technical expertise. The third section attempts a closer study of the different types of plans and architectural expertise used in making the plans. Last, the conclusion provides some comments on the collective expertise behind urban planning.

Acquiring the Land The areas under discussion in the publication, Munkkiniemi and Haaga, were situated next to each other just beyond the limits of the City of Helsinki, in the future Greater Helsinki area. In the fall of 1910, both of these land ­areas were bought by a Helsinki-based company, M. G. Stenius Corporation. The company, initially established as a gardening business in the 1870s, had slowly broadened its field and had increasingly become involved in the property business. The company had bought numerous areas outside the city to develop them as new suburbs, following the national and also the European trend at that time. Helsinki had faced a boom in private land corporations in the early ­twentieth century; in 1911, eight land companies had housing projects underway in the surrounding areas of Helsinki.18 This expansion of land companies was mainly due to inexpensive land, inadequate legislation, and, according to contemporaries, the inaction of the city.19 The models for the land companies were from international examples. For example, in Britain and Germany, the private corporations had built suburbs and communities since the 1870s. In Britain, this had caused substantial problems; the great land owners had speculated by buying the land at a low price and building expensive apartments, leaving a large number of people homeless.20 In Britain, the garden city ideology was one of the most famous responses to the speculative private land corporations.21 The ideology was presented

168  Emilia Karppinen in a pamphlet written by an English parliamentary record keeper and later social reformer Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) in 1898. As all the problems faced in cities, he stated, were based on the mass movement from the countryside to the cities, the solution was to invert the movement: From now on people should migrate from cities back to the land, to garden cities combining the best sides of both cities and the countryside.22 Howard’s visions did not materialize in their original form, but as garden suburbs, which in Europe became a widely used application of Howard’s original idea of independent garden cities.23 The difference between these two, as for example, the architect Gustaf Strengell (1878–1937) noticed, is crucial: While the garden cities were to be independent entities, garden suburbs were always related to a larger city.24 As the name of the publication (Munkkiniemi-Haaga and Greater Helsinki. Studies and proposals concerning the planning of the area (1915)) already reveals, the areas of Munkkiniemi and Haaga were not planned as separate entities, but as a part of a future Greater Helsinki area. The prefix Greater could, according to Eliel Saarinen, be applied, when a metropolis was developing together with its surrounding areas, as was often the tendency.25 This gradual move from planning smaller areas toward an understanding of the city and its surroundings as a regional entity was distinctive for early twentieth-century urban planning. One of the earliest and most reputed examples is the competition to make a plan for Greater Berlin, dating back to 1905. The results were presented in the international Berlin exhibition for urban planning five years later.26 The exhibition was visited by numerous international guests, including Finnish members, interested in planning questions. The idea of planning regional entities was popular at the time with demands being made for the planning of, for example, Greater Boston and Greater New York.27 Nevertheless, planning such large entities and defining the relationship between the parent city and the surrounding residential areas or municipals was not easy. This can also be seen in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan which includes a chapter written by Sigurd Stenius (1879–1969), the Director of the Stenius Corporation. His chapter is dealing with various communal questions and also raising concerns about the relationship of Munkkiniemi and Haaga to the City of Helsinki. According to Stenius, the aim was that Munkkiniemi and Haaga would form an independent rural municipality, nevertheless, collaborating closely with the City of Helsinki.28 As a consequence of the rapid boom in the development of the surrounding areas of the cities, the laws did not always resolve the newly arisen problems. In contrast to Sweden, where the planning activities were guided by new laws, the laws in Finland were outdated. The only act guiding the building of towns in Finland dated from 1856 and mainly concerned fire safety and building inside the towns.29 The newer, international laws did not only guide the building practices, but they had also an effect on who could plan and build. Great Britain passed its first town planning act in 1909; the act shifted urban planning away from private operators in order to become a local

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  169 governmental function. This was also the case in Sweden, which had already passed a new law two years ago. However, in Finland and in Germany and in the United States, the situation remained different: In several cases, it was the businessmen who had the initiative in the planning processes, with inadequate legislation allowing private operators to operate outside cities.30 This was also the case in the planning project of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, which was led by the Stenius Corporation, headed by the businessmen L ­ eopold Lerche (1877–1927), Sigurd Stenius, and Julius Tallberg (1857–1921). The aim of the company was to make a profit by selling plots from the areas it owned. Hence, choosing the area to be developed was crucial for the company’s success and thus preceded the planning and hiring of Eliel Saarinen in the fall 1910. According to the Stenius Corporation, the opening of a new railway from Helsinki to Karjaa in 1903 was a crucial moment for the company’s future. The railway passed by areas already owned by the corporation, areas which were originally bought for gardening, the main function of the company before it was turned into corporation in the late 1890s. From then on, the corporation became increasingly involved in the field of land business, and the areas of Haaga and Munkkiniemi, situated near the railway, were bought.31 Following the situation in German cities especially, the architect Bertel Jung noted in 1911, how the fast development of the railways had removed the limits to the expansion of cities by changing the meaning of distance. A main factor in organizing the relationship between the parent city and the surrounding areas was formed by the connecting transportation from the new suburbs to the existing city center.32 The importance of this connection to the city center of Helsinki was understood by the Stenius Corporation even before the planning had begun, as the annual reports of the company indicate. After acquiring the land, the next phase was to map the terrain as quickly as possible. This was to be done in order to define the most suitable areas for building the new tram lines from Munkkiniemi and Haaga to Helsinki.33

Mapping the Terrain The areas of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, acquired by the Stenius Corporation, were mainly unbuilt areas, which was, according to Eliel Saarinen, the optimal situation for planning. The planners did not need to be concerned about existing structures and their possible demolition, in contrast to the opposite situation when planning the existing cities.34 The situation was more reminiscent of the English garden cities, which one of The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan writers, the architect Gustaf Strengell, described as “fully new cities, built according to accurate plans from the very start.”35 Even though the areas were mostly unbuilt, the planning was not done on a blank canvas. Preinformation about the area was needed. Hence, this subchapter is concerned with what kind of expertise was needed to gain this information and by whom it was collected.

170  Emilia Karppinen According to several texts of Eliel Saarinen, every city and each suburb needed to have its own character.36 This character was to be determined by its function, such as being the capital city, but also by the location and the local conditions; the latter, according to Bertel Jung, also being highlighted in the competition rules for planning Greater Berlin in 1908.37 In 1911, Saarinen had been invited as a planning expert to give his opinion on the future development of Budapest. In his statement for the planning of Budapest (1912), Saarinen described how “the city as a whole must develop itself according to the preconditions the terrain has set.”38 The Scottish biologist and sociologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) is well known for his work on understanding the city in the context of its surrounding region. Geddes underlined the importance of surveying all the aspects concerning the past and the present of this regional entity before making plans for it.39 The idea of making surveys before planning was used, for example, in the famous project for planning Chicago, as a planning memo by the head planner, architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) reveals. The plans were completed in 1909 and presented for Finnish readers three years later in Arkitekten.40 As Saarinen noted in the description on the Greater Tallinn project, “the absence of precise cartographic and geodesic material” would forbid detailed planning of certain areas.41 Several kinds of surveys focusing on the ground were made in M ­ unkkiniemi and Haaga areas during the planning project. These included, for example, surveys for finding groundwater and, more importantly for the planning, the topographic of the area needed to be mapped.42 In the Greater Helsinki area, this was particularly important because the height of the ground varied considerably. However, the topographic material concerning Helsinki and its surroundings was at the time very scattered and heterogeneous.43 This was partly due to the fact that the measuring of height differences was still quite new at the turn of the century in Finland and also internationally, and was previously done mainly for military purposes.44 As Finland was under the Russian regime, the only maps of the area extensively showing height differences were made for the Ministry of War of the Russian Empire, around 1870–1907. According to the architect Bertel Jung, these maps were, however, “in details extremely insufficient.”45 It was also around this time, in 1892–1910, when the first nationwide leveling of the ground, that is, measuring of height differences, was conducted in Finland. However, it was too sparse for making maps accurate enough for practical needs.46 As neither of the aforementioned mappings was detailed enough for the needs of making plans for the new suburb, new surveys were needed. Traditionally, the leveling with relating tasks was done by land surveyors, who had for decades been educated in the same Polytechnical Institute with the architects and engineers in Helsinki. As the land companies began to buy and develop privately owned areas in the surroundings of Helsinki, the demand for surveys increased rapidly. In Finland, these jobs were often

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  171 done by the land surveying officials in their spare time; in 1911, there were only two full-time privately operating land surveyors working as consultants.47 As the areas of Munkkiniemi and Haaga formed a large entity, in total 860 hectares, the leveling would take a considerable amount of time. It is possible that the company was, thus, obligated to hire other technicians rather than overemployed land surveyors for the job. As the Haaga area had been bought by the Stenius Corporation before Munkkiniemi, the surveys and other preliminary works were carried out there earlier. The leveling of the Haaga area had already been started in 1908 by two master builders, Lindman and Staaff.48 Concerning the leveling work, the Stenius Corporation also made inquiries of a possible cooperation with the City of Helsinki. According to the Stenius Corporation’s Annual Report for 1909, the leveling was, at least, “done after the same method which the City of Helsinki uses for its areas.”49 The fall of 1910 was in many ways meaningful for the Stenius Corporation as from then on it concentrated its efforts mainly on the Munkkiniemi and Haaga project.50 In addition to securing the whole of the Munkkiniemi area into the company’s hands, the company hired two new experts: the architect Eliel Saarinen and the engineer Edvin Hedengren (1877–1937), the former was also the newest shareholder in the corporation. Edvin ­Hedengren, a former employee of the City of Helsinki’s construction office, was appointed to the Stenius Corporation as its head of technical works.51 The first major work of Hedengren was to make the necessary surveys on the newly acquired Munkkiniemi area. The work to level Munkkiniemi began in ­January 1911 and continued for almost the whole year.52 Making the surveys was not usually only a matter of measuring, but also converting the numeric knowledge into a more illustrative form. According to Patrick Geddes, the best way to display a myriad of information was by converting the knowledge into a map.53 The data gathered in the field, using chains to measure the lengths and various kinds of precisions instruments to measure the vertical and horizontal angles, were taken to the drawing tables in the offices. Here, the surveyor with the possible help of assistants converted the data into maps and contour lines.54 This was also the case in Munkkiniemi, which Edvin Hedengren had surveyed in great detail: The topographic variation of the area is presented in contour lines, each showing a meters elevation.55 Converting the knowledge into a more illustrative form was important for the planning project as every expert participating in the project was not familiar with surveying. As architects, however, were educated in the same Polytechnical Institute with engineers and land surveyors in Finland, they shared several compulsory courses; thus, sharing the basic knowledge of each other’s disciplines.56 This was important for understanding their coworkers’ tasks and efforts in the project: A person did not need to be an expert in every field but having an understanding of the knowledge and know-how of other disciplines helped the collaboration.57

172  Emilia Karppinen The topographic maps made by Hedengren, Lindman, and Staaff were used for years by Eliel Saarinen’s architecture bureau.58 They were used both as the bases for the plans and for creating a huge plastic model of the whole Munkkiniemi and Haaga area. The need for similar models was highlighted in several texts by Saarinen, as well as by Bertel Jung.59 While visiting the urban planning exhibition in Berlin in 1910, Jung took notice on the many plastic models presented there.60 Later Jung noted the models to be “the sign of the time, a proof that the studies and preliminary works” are done more thoroughly and seriously than before (Figure 8.1).61

Figure 8.1  A detail of the Munkkiniemi and Haaga model. The model is a result of work done by several individuals.The artist Loja Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen’s wife, made the base of the model according to the engineer Edvin Hedengren’s surveys. The public buildings were made by Eliel Saarinen and the dwelling houses by the assisting architects working in Saarinen’s bureau. The trees and other plantings were made by several of the aforementioned; the children of Saarinens, Eero and Pipsan, also helped.62

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  173 According to Kai Hakkarainen and his coauthors, the material dimension of the collective expertise stands out especially when the social dimension, for example, concrete encounters with other experts, was not possible. As they note, even though “the engineers worked and negotiated face-to-face, a considerable part of their work focused on various knowledge artefacts, as drawings, plans, and other documents.”63 This is true also in the historical context of Munkkiniemi and Haaga planning project. The experts working for the project did not meet daily, as the company did not even have its own office before June 1912.64 Eliel Saarinen, for example, had his own architecture bureau in Kirkkonummi, an hour’s train journey from the center of Helsinki. In addition to the meetings of the Stenius Corporation, the experts were in contact with each other at least by mail, as the substantial correspondence of Sigurd Stenius indicates. Even though the importance of the topographic information is not highlighted explicitly in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, its significance for Eliel Saarinen’s work was crucial. The plans were based on these surveys, and thus the understanding and knowledge of the topographic of the area could be read from the completed plan maps. The topographic maps and the model functioned as conveying artifacts, retaining and furthering the gained knowledge of the topographical variations in the Munkkiniemi and Haaga area. Even though the actual leveling work was only in a few hands, its success demanded understanding and support from the company. The work would not have been done if it had not been understood as crucial for the following phases of the planning process. As the annual report of the Stenius Corporation reveals, the company understood very well the importance of topographic surveys. The next step, the planning of the road network, could not be taken before the surveys and maps based on them were ready.65

Planning the Area When the topographic surveys were ready, the baton was passed on more firmly to Eliel Saarinen and his architecture bureau. An interesting and visionary plan for developing the area induced people to invest in the land and move to the area, thus providing proceeds for the land company originally owning the areas.66 It was not a coincidence that the Stenius Corporation hired Eliel Saarinen for the job, as the great businessmen Leopold Lerche and Julius Tallberg were both personally acquainted with Saarinen and his previous work.67 The aim of this subchapter is to show how the necessary knowledge for making the plans was gained collectively and how the concrete planning was the collective action of various individuals. Even though the land surveyors and engineers had produced the knowledge about Munkkiniemi and Haaga area in the form of topography maps, the work to convert this knowledge into a road network was executed by the architects. Arguing for architectural expertise in urban planning was strongly intertwined with the prevailing situation in the whole planning field at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe.68 During the nineteenth

174  Emilia Karppinen century, the responsibility for planning had altered from one profession to another in Finland, and being seen as a job for land surveyors, engineers, or architects. However, after the 1870s, the planning mostly became the responsibility of the surveyors and engineers.69 The reason the architects regained their position in planning in Finland as well as internationally is often seen to be thanks to the Austrian architect Camillo Sitte (1843–1903) who criticized, in the late nineteenth century, the current planners for building cities with only a straight ruler. According to Bertel Jung, it was the task of architects to bring an understanding of aesthetics into planning.70 From then on, aesthetics was not seen only as a beautification, something glued onto the city, but it was also an important element in defining the structure of the city. According to Saarinen, it was the road network which formed this structure, a sort of a framework, on which the rest of the area’s plan should be based on.71 Even though the architects had taken their place in the field of planning by arguing for their expertise in aesthetics, this view was soon seen as too narrow. It was understood that not only the aesthetics of the city’s form was important but, above all, the contents and the meaning of that form.72 The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915) begins with a long introduction to the histories of cities and urban planning, thus placing the plan as a part of a centuries-long history of an international, mainly European, planning tradition. Making grand overviews for the development of urban planning was characteristic for the contemporary planning field as the aim was to show the deep roots of this new profession.73 This introductory part is written by a friend of Eliel Saarinen, the architect Gustaf Strengell, a keen follower of British urban planning. In his introduction to the historical and contemporary urban planning section, considerable attention is paid to various kinds of plans, which Strengell divides according to the shape their road networks form: geometrical or organic.74 Strengell gives the latest, rivaling examples of both of these: straight and wide boulevards versus narrow, twisty roads. Even though they had a centuries-long history, the boulevards are attributed most often to the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who was the leader of the Paris renovations in 1853–1870.75 This was also the case in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, in which these Parisian boulevards were pictured as examples of successful aesthetics.76 However, opposite opinions also existed. These are most often accredited to the architect Camillo Sitte, who criticized Paris for the standardization and regularity it represented, emphasizing the importance of diversity and irregularity in cityscapes.77 In The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, Gustaf Strengell criticized the planners, who had followed the ideas of either Haussmann or Sitte without an understanding of scale. According to him, the character of the planned area should be noted: Grand boulevards are more suitable for metropolises than serpentine alleys and picturesque views. According to Strengell, the ­English planner Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) had most successfully combined

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  175 78

these two in his plans. Strengell had visited Hampstead Garden Suburb, planned by Unwin, in 1910; only a year after Unwin had published his famous book Town Planning in Practice. Several drawings and a map from this book were also printed in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan. Moreover, in the road plan of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, both of these elements were used: Picturesque narrow alleys were planned between the dwelling houses and straight boulevards for vehicles. Indeed, according to Saarinen, sharing an opinion of Unwin’s, the shape of the roads was determined, firstly, by their function: The main roads were to carry the majority of the traffic, and hence were planned to be wide and straight.79 On the secondary roads, the traffic would be lower, thus allowing the roads to be formed in a more variable ways. As German architect Joseph Stübben (1845–1936) saw the case, the needs were different; the traffic needed safety and straight roads while the walkers needed interesting views.80 Second, the form of a road was dependent on the topography of the area. Camillo Sitte had criticized the surveyors for making plans that did not take into account the variation of the terrain.81 As Strengell notes, Sitte’s ideas had an important practical application especially when planning an area with high topographical variation: Serpentine alleys fit much better into uneven terrain than straight roads.82 The importance of topography particularly for the planning of the road network is illustrated by the fact that the only map explicating the topography of Munkkiniemi and Haaga also shows the road network. The aim of the map is to argue that the chosen structure is based on facts gained from the surveys, as Geddes also underlined (Figure 8.2).83 When the traffic plan prepared by Saarinen’s bureau was completed, and thus the structure of the area defined, the making of the master plan covering the whole area could start. The primacy of the traffic plan was also an idea emphasized, for example, by the German urban planner Theodor Goecke (1850–1919), who had established the internationally recognized planning journal Der Städtebau in 1904.84 As the surveys on the topographic features functioned as the ground work for the planning of the road network, they together now formed an important, firm foundation for the master plan. The master plan for Munkkiniemi and Haaga was prepared by Saarinen’s architecture bureau. The first proposal was finished in 1912.85 The master plan filled in the gaps left by the road network. The areas demarcated by the roads were converted into housing areas, parks, gardens, and areas for public buildings. The aim of the master plan was similar to Saarinen’s description of the aim of the whole Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan: The aim was to present the guidelines for the future development of the area.86 The final version of the master plan was years in the making, as the letters of Otto-Iivari Meurman (1890–1994), an assisting architect in Saarinen’s bureau, verify. According to Meurman, the master plan was in constant change, which caused problems for the assisting architects drawing the bird’s-eye view, a popular illustration of the contemporary planning projects, and the details for the publication concerning the area.87 When something was changed in

176  Emilia Karppinen

Figure 8.2  A detail of one of the many plan maps in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan (1915). The map shows the topographical variation of the area and the road network based on it. The topography of the area was important not only for traffic plans but also for building massing. The most important official buildings were placed on the highest hills, thus creating a “crown” for the area.

the plan map, similar changes also needed to be done in the illustrative pictures based on the map. The changes were made according to comments presented by external experts, such as the architect Gustaf Strengell, who visited Saarinen’s bureau in September 1914, in order to obtain background information for writing his

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  177 chapters in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan. He did, however, also offer to contribute amendments concerning the master plan.88 Notions as to which elements were actually to be drawn on the final plan were given by Sigurd Stenius.89 Thus, the planning did not proceed straightforwardly but required multiple repetitions. According to Niina Koivunen, acquiring comments on the work and repeating a part of the process according to those comments is not only a way to use feedback but also a way to acquire new knowledge.90 Thus, what needs to be remembered is that the plans were made for future needs using contemporary knowledge. How could the plan, therefore, fulfil the needs an area might have 15 years after the plan was made? In The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, this was solved by having different types of plans in a hierarchical relation to each other, as explained by John Uggla (1870–1954), a judge hired by the Stenius Corporation.91 The idea presented in the publication soon awoke interest also in Sweden, when a local architect Olof Holmberg described it in a Swedish architecture journal: Exactly this separation of a master plan, to be ratified by the city officials, from detailed plans is definitely a good proposal, because this conduct gives the city plan the possibility to always meet the needs and desires of the time.92 Hence, such detailed planning allowed the newest knowledge of the time to be acquired and acknowledged. Thus, the planning of the area did not end when the publication was finished in the fall of 1915. The idea was that the planning would then move on to a more concrete level, a detailed planning, following the guidelines set in the master plan. The detailed plans were to be carried out in a dialogue with both the framework the master plan had set as well as with the current society. These detailed plans were not necessary made in Eliel Saarinen’s bureau or even by an architect. Hence, the master plan functioned as a knowledge artifact, conveying the information from Eliel Saarinen’s architecture bureau to the other possible planners. The knowledge was no longer confined to Saarinen’s head, but could be used by other planners to carry on with the planning of the same area. Agreeing with Swedish architect Hakon Ahlberg, Bertel Jung noted later in the 1910s, that the master planning should be a visionary work done by the planner-architects, then the more practical detailed plans, based on the guidelines given in the master plan, could be done by the engineers and surveyors.93 This was also the case in the detailed planning of the areas of Munkkiniemi and Haaga during the next decades: The detailed plans were made by various experts including engineer Edvin Hedengren and the City of Helsinki’s assisting planner-architect Berndt H. Aminoff (1886–1972), who had worked in Saarinen’s bureau during the master planning of the area.94 Nevertheless, at the time the issue was not only about arguing for architectural expertise in urban planning, but also for a change of view in the

178  Emilia Karppinen understanding of the essence of planning. According to Saarinen, the problem was that the city had not been developed as a whole but rather piece by piece. These pieces, that is, city blocks or districts, did not necessarily work together practically or aesthetically.95 The turn of the twentieth century was a time when the city as a whole came under close scrutiny, and the need to redefine the meaning of urban planning intensified.96 Architect Otto-Iivari Meurman described the multilayered understanding of planning in 1917: A city plan should not only be a road network for the needs of traffic, nor should it be a structure chart made according to the principles of land surveying, neither only an artistic problem; instead, it should be a sum of this all and even more.97

Conclusions The planning of the Munkkiniemi and Haaga areas was, from the very start, a part of a larger business plan of the Stenius Corporation. As is noted in the Stenius Corporation’s Annual Report for 1915, the publication was only the end of the preparatory work. Hence, it should be remembered that the planning of the area was not the aim of the Stenius Corporation, their aim was the implementation of these plans, as Eliel Saarinen also noted in the preface of the published plan.98 The planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga was, therefore, something more than solely Eliel Saarinen’s plan. It was first and foremost a part of a decade-long project of the Stenius Corporation. Being successful in managing such a huge project needed a sense of priorities, as Niina Koivunen notes and continues, “an understanding of what needs to be accomplished before something else can be done.”99 As planning projects of this large scale were something very new in Finland, there was no certainty as regards the process and its progress; therefore, the knowledge needed was gathered and formed together from pieces to form the whole. The knowledge was gathered from Finnish and also transnational expert networks. Hence, it is not surprising that the planning process is reminiscent, in outline, of the Chicago planning project, finished six years earlier in 1909. According to the architect Daniel Burnham, the general studies for the leveling should be done before the master plan. The details would follow in a later phase, and “finally, the whole thing should be printed with complete illustrations.”100 With The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, the planning of Greater Helsinki aroused interest among contemporary European and North American urban planning and also awakened a broad interest globally. Art historian Juhana Lahti has studied the professional roles of PostWorld War II Finnish architects also including the notion of the profession as teamwork. According to him, the period is characterized by architects broadening their aesthetically focused expert roles toward comprehensive planning conducted in collaboration with various expertise groups.101 As this chapter has shown, the roots for this cooperation were deeper at the

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  179 turn of the twentieth century. As the Finnish architect Birger Brunila noted in 1910, architects had several simultaneous roles such as artists, constructors, thinkers, developer’s technical and juridical assistants, and businessmen.102 These roles also overlapped as Eliel Saarinen demonstrates, he participated in the planning project simultaneously as a planner, as an architect, and as a shareholder. Each of the individuals participating in the process had their own strong areas, which were not necessary restricted by their educational background.103 Sigurd Stenius, for instance, had expertise in communal questions, groundwater surveys, and running a business. The understanding of the area and its future was formed layer by layer, as a result of collective actions. According to Niina Koivunen’s definition, collective expertise is “an ongoing processual ability to function together with other experts and create new knowledge.”104 As urban planning was something new for all the individuals participating in the planning process, the required knowledge needed to be both gathered individually and formed together, not forgetting the transnational expert networks.105 This need of specific knowledge also shaped the experts, and gradually, the profession of urban planning differed from architecture, engineering, and surveying.106 In the first decades of the twentieth century, the profession of urban planner was formatted in similar, collective planning projects around the world.107 Urban planning was seen as a universal concern, requiring boundary crossing dialogue and teamwork.108 As the Finnish architect Sigurd Frosterus noted in 1909, “new ideas do not arise in a single brain. […] Accomplishments in various fields complete each other.”109

Acknowledgments This chapter is a part of my Doctoral thesis concerning more broadly the questions of urban planning as a profession of early twentieth C. Finnish architects. In my M.A. thesis, I had already studied The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan; see Emilia Karppinen, “Harmonisia rivitaloja ja väestödiagrammeja. Munkkiniemi-Haagan suunnitelma osana ylirajaista ­eurooppalaista kaupunkisuunnittelukenttää” (M.A. thesis, University of Turku, 2013). For the help to formulate this chapter, I want to thank my supervisors, Taina Syrjämaa and Leila Koivunen. I also want to thank my colleague Mari T. Tanninen and the reviewers of this chapter for their insightful and encouraging comments. The biggest thanks to the two editors of this book.

Notes 1 Bertel Jung, “Munksnäs-Haga och Stor-Helsingfors. I.,” Arkitekten. Tidskrift för arkitektur och dekorativ konst (ARK) 13 (1915): 73. 2 For the planning competition for Canberra, Australia, see, for example, Wolfgang Sonne, Representing the State. Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel, 2003), 149–188; for the

180  Emilia Karppinen planning of Tallinn, Estonia, see Karin Hallas-Murula, Greater Tallinn. Eliel Saarinen’s Greater-Tallinn 1913 (Tallinn: Museum of Estonian Architecture & Finnish Embassy in Estonia, 2005). 3 According to Nikula, the problems of metropolises were carefully analyzed especially in Germany. As a result, all the Nordic capitals started to prepare for, for example, slums, even though such problems were not yet present in these small capitals, Riitta Nikula, “Bertel Jung modernin kaupunkisuunnittelun käynnistäjänä,” in Bertel Jung suurkaupungin hahmottajana, eds. Mikal Sundman and Mona Schalin (Helsinki: Helsingin kaupunkisuunnitteluvirasto, 1988), 9–41, 27; Kolbe, in turn, sees that when the population of Helsinki exceeded 100 000 inhabitants, Helsinki was joined to the metropolis category, Laura Kolbe, “Helsinki. From Provincial to National Centre,” in Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities, ed. David L. A. Gordon (London, New York: Routledge, 2006), 73–86, 76. 4 Kolbe, “Provincial to National,” 73–75. 5 Helen Meller, “Philanthropy and public enterprise: international exhibitions and the modern town planning movement, 1889–1913,” Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 295–310, 295–296; Stephen V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City. The Advanced Capitalist World (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 51. 6 Simin Davoudi and John Pendlebury, “The evolution of planning as an academic discipline,” Town Planning Review 81 (2010): 613–645, 618. 7 See, for example, Lieselot Vandenbussche, Jurian Edelenbos, and Jasper Eshuis, “Pathways of stakeholders’ relations and frames in collaborative planning practices: A framework to analyse relating and framing dynamics,” Planning Theory 16, 3 (2017): 233–254, 233–234. 8 The tradition of “a hero planner” is long, but often criticized; see especially Stephen V. Ward, Robert Freestone, and Christopher Silver, “The ‘new’ planning history: Reflections, issues and directions,” Town Planning Review 82 (2011): 231–261, 246. 9 For Eliel Saarinen as a planner in Finland, see especially Kirmo Mikkola, “Eliel Saarinen ja kaupunkisuunnittelu,” in Eliel Saarinen, Suomen aika, eds. Marika Hausen, Kirmo Mikkola, Anna-Liisa Amberg, and Tytti Valto. (Helsinki: Otava, 1984), 187–220; for Eliel Saarinen as a planner in the United States, see especially Minna Chudoba, Kaupunkia etsimässä. Eliel Saarinen Amerikassa 1923–1950 (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 2011). For research on planning Helsinki and its environs, see, for example, Laura Kolbe, Kulosaari. Unelma paremmasta tulevaisuudesta (Helsinki: Kulosaaren kotiseuturahaston säätiö, 1988); Kolbe, “Provincial to National”; Riitta Nikula, Yhtenäinen kaupunkikuva 1900–1930. Suomalaisen kaupunkirakentamisen ihanteista ja päämääristä, esimerkkeinä Helsingin Etu-Töölö ja Uusi Vallila (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1981); Riitta Nikula, Focus on Finnish 20th century architecture and town planning (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2006); Mikael Sundman, “Urban Planning in Finland after 1850,” in Planning and Urban Growth in the Nordic Countries, ed. Thomas Hall (London: Chapman & Hall, 1991), 60–115. 10 Tytti Valto, “Työluettelo – Arkkitehtuuri ja kaupunkisuunnittelu,” in Eliel Saarinen, 157. 11 Niina Koivunen, “Collective expertise: Ways of organizing expert work in collective settings,” Journal of Management & Organization 13 (2007): 258–276, 259 and passim. The concept is used mainly in studies researching working in teams. Besides Koivunen’s managerial view, the concept is approached also, for example, from the viewpoints of educational and behavioral sciences; see especially Kai Hakkarainen, Jiri Lallimo, Seppo Toikka, “Kollektiivinen asiantuntijuus ja jaetut tietokäytännöt,” Aikuiskasvatus 32 (2012): 246–256. 12 Orly Linovski, “Politics of Expertise: Constructing Professional Design Knowledge in the Public and Private Sectors,” Journal of Planning Education and

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  181 Research (publ. online before print, Dec. 2015): 451–464, 2, accessed April 26, 2016, doi: 10.1177/0739456X15620656. See also Ernest R. Alexander, “There is no planning – only planning practices: Notes for spatial planning theories,” Planning Theory 15 (2016): 91–103; Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Vandenbussche et al., “Collaborative planning practices,” 4. Alexander’s ideas concerning co-construction of knowledge comes close to Koivunen’s definition of collective expertise; see especially A ­ lexander,” Spatial planning theories,” 95. 13 Jon A. Peterson, “The Birth of Organized City Planning in the United States, 1909–1910,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (2009): 123–133, 127, 131. 14 The book under discussion was published only in Finnish and Swedish. In this article, I have used the Finnish version, Munkkiniemi-Haaga ja Suur-Helsinki. Tutkimuksia ja ehdotuksia kaupunkijärjestelyn alalta, ed. Eliel Saarinen (Helsinki: Oy M. G. Stenius, 1915). In the main body of the text, the publication will be called Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan, and in the endnotes abbreviation MHS will be used. 15 Every citation from Arkitekten. Tidskrift för arkitektur och dekorativ konst translated by the author. In the endnotes, an abbreviation ARK will be used. 16 According to Stephen V. Ward et al., the roles of business networks in planning history have been studied in much lesser extent than those of political networks, Ward et al., “New planning history,” 247. Partly thus, this chapter focuses on the persons most actively working for Stenius Corporation. The role of politics has been, nevertheless, important, for example, for the implementation of the made plans and would thus be an interesting topic for further studies. 17 Hakkarainen et al., “Kollektiivinen asiantuntijuus,” 246–247. 18 Sigurd Stenius, “Byggnadsverksamhetens ordnande enligt N. Förordningen av den 15 juni 1898 angående ordnande i särskilda fall av samhällen på landsbygden med sammanträngd befolkning,” ARK 9 (1911): 12. For the land corporations operating outside Helsinki, see especially Kolbe, Kulosaari. 19 Also Saarinen blamed the city for its inactions, Eliel Saarinen, “Helsingin kehitys,” in Saarinen, MHS, 48, 55. It is to be noted, though, that this was also a way to argue for the importance of Corporation’s actions. 20 Even though Helsinki had faced a shortage of affordable housing the situation could not be compared with the problems, for example, London had. As Kolbe notes, the land surrounding Helsinki was extremely sensitive to economic fluctuations, which made it a risky investment, see, for example, Kolbe, Kulosaari, 34–35, Liza Picard, Victorian London. The Life of a City 1840–1870 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 50. 21 John R. Short, The Humane City. Cities as if People Matter (Oxford, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 46. 22 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London: Swan Sonneschein & Co, 1902), 12–19. 23 Ward, Capitalist World, 45–46, 48. 24 Gustaf Strengell, “Kaupungin järjestelytaide. Historiallinen katsaus,” in Saarinen, MHS, 15. Jung had emphasized the importance of similar suburbian areas already in 1901, following especially a German tradition, Ritva Wäre, “Bertel Jungin näkemys kaupungista,” in Bertel Jung, suurkaupungin hahmottaja, eds. Mikael Sundman and Mona Schalin (Helsinki: Helsingin kaupunkisuunnitteluvirasto, 1988), 43–73, 58–59. 25 Saarinen, “Helsingin kehitys,” 41. This was an idea presented already four years earlier by Bertel Jung in his article “Greater Helsinki,” Bertel Jung, “StorHelsingfors,” ARK 9 (1911), 90–100. 26 Ward, Capitalist World, 56; Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism (London, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 32–34.

182  Emilia Karppinen 27 Christiane Crasemann Collins, “City Planning Exhibitions and Civic Museums: Werner Hegemann and Others,” in The City after Patrick Geddes, eds. Volker M. Welter and James Lawson (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 2000), 113–132, 119–120; Peterson, “Planning in US,” 125. 28 Sigurd Stenius, “Munkkiniemen ja Haagan kunnallisia kysymyksiä,” in Saarinen, MHS, 118. 29 Peter Lundevall, Den planerade staden (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2006, 101); Nikula, Yhtenäinen kaupunkikuva, 150–151. 30 Crasemann Collins, Universal Urbanism, 34; Eva Eriksson, Den moderna staden tar form. Arkitektur och debatt 1910–1935 (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2001), 256–258; Michael Honhart, “Company Housing as Urban Planning in Germany, 1870–1940,” Central European History 23 (1990): 3–21, 4; Stephen Ward, Planning and Urban Change (London: Sage, 2004), 29. 31 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1915, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in March 1916, Ca:22, M. G. Stenius OY, City Archives of Helsinki, Finland (Stenius/CAH). The nature of this report as a memoir, looking back for the 20-years long history of the corporation, needs to be noted. 32 Jung, “Stor-Helsingfors,” 94. The role of Jung for organizing the connecting transportation between Munkkiniemi-Haaga and Helsinki has been important, Eliel Saarinen, “[Preface],” in Saarinen, MHS, [i]. 33 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1909, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in March 1910, Ca:16/Stenius/CAH. 34 Only a smaller part of the areas under planning was already built. According to Saarinen, it had caused some difficulties in planning, and compromises were done, Eliel Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” in Saarinen, MHS, 77. 35 Strengell, “Kaupungin järjestelytaide,” 14. 36 See, for example, international competition for design of Federal Capital. Report accompanying design submitted by Eliel Saarinen, 1912, Series CP487/6 (personal papers of Mr. C. S. Daley referring to the development of Canberra), Item 16, National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra, 2–3, 14; Saarinen, “Budapest,” 79. 37 Jung, “Stor-Helsingfors,” 99. 38 Saarinen, “Budapest,” 79; Albert Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen (Helsinki: Otava, 1951), 153; Mikkola, “Eliel Saarinen,” 196. Christ-Janer’s biography on Saarinen published also in English, but it differs by its contents, Albert Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen. Finnish-American architect and educator (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1948/1979). 39 Ward, Capitalist World, 51; for regional survey, see especially Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes. Social evolutionist and city planner (London: Routledge, 1990), 292–299. 40 Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago. Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69; Birger Brunila, “Den nya stadsplanen för Chicago,” in ARK 10 (1912): 151–155. 41 Eliel Saarinen, “Description of the Greater-Tallinn Project,” in Hallas-Murula, Greater-Tallinn, 152. Orig. German version in Deutsche Bauzeitung, 1921. 42 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1911, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in April 1912, Ca:18/Stenius/CAH. 43 Gustaf Nyström, “Bostadsfrågan och Helsingfors stadsplan,” ARK 4 (1906), 5. 44 Mikko Huhtamies, Maan mitta. Maanmittauksen historia Suomessa 1633–2008 (Helsinki: Maanmittauslaitos & Edita Publishing Oy, 2008), 262, 289–290. 45 Bertel Jung, “Suur-Helsingin” asemakaavan ehdotus (Helsinki: Pro Helsingfors -säätiö, 1918), 18. 46 Matti Jaakkola, “Valtakunnalliset runkomittaukset,” in Maanmittaus Suomessa 1633–1983 (Helsinki: Maanmittaushallitus, 1983), 400–427, 420–421.

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  183 47 Huhtamies, Maan mitta, 346; Panu Nykänen, Kortteli sataman laidalla. Suomen Teknillinen Korkeakoulu 1908–1941 (Helsinki: WSOY, 2007, 147); Jaakko Ollila, “Maanmittausalan konsulttitoimi,” in Maanmittaus Suomessa, 691. For the education of land surveyors in Finland, see Jutta Julkunen, Sadan vuoden mitat. Maanmittauksen ylin opetus Suomessa 1861–2008 (Espoo: TKK, 2008). 48 Letter from Leopold Lerche to Bertel Jung, November 18, 1910, Da:1/Stenius/ CAH; letter from Sigurd Stenius to Eliel Saarinen, March 7, 1916, Fe:6/Stenius/ CAH. 49 Letter from Stenius Corporation to Bertel Jung, December 2, 1908, Da:1/ Stenius/CAH; Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1909, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in March 1910, Ca:16/Stenius/CAH. 50 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1911, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in April 1912, Ca:18/Stenius/CAH. 51 When Saarinen exactly was hired, is not certain. However, Tallberg had sold a few shares to Saarinen, who participated for the first time as a shareholder in a board meeting of the Stenius Corporation on October 17, 1910, see Cb:7/ Stenius/CAH. In March 1913, Saarinen participated for the first time in the general meetings as a board member, see: Ca:19/Stenius/CAH. For hiring Hedengren, see Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1910, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in March 1911, Ca:16/Stenius/CAH. 52 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1911, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in April 1912, Ca:18/Stenius/CAH; Nyström, Munkkiniemen vaiheita, 89. 53 Helen Meller, “Cities and evolution: Patrick Geddes as an international prophet of town planning before 1914,” in The Rise of Modern Urban Planning ­1800–1914, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Mansell, 1980), 199–223, 208. 54 Huhtamies, Maan mitta, 289–291. 55 See a map showing the contour lines, “Munkkiniemi-Hagan korkeussuhteet” in Saarinen, MHS, [76B]. 56 See the syllabi of the Finnish Polytechnic School, for example, Polytekniska institutet I Finland. Program för läsåret 1884–1885 (Helsinki, 1884), 36–40 and passim. 57 On this topic in present-day urban planning, see Daniel Pinson, “Urban planning: an ‘undisciplined’ discipline?” Futures 36 (2004): 503–513, 507. ­Kohlrausch and Trischler note that the idea of an academically trained engineer being able “to think about the broader picture was an essential” in French engineering education around the turn of the twentieth century, Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise. Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 50. 58 Letter from Sigurd Stenius to Eliel Saarinen, March 7, 1916, Fe:6/Stenius/CAH. 59 Saarinen, “Budapest,” 79–80. Saarinen, International competition (NAA), 15–16. 60 Bertel Jung, “Allgemeine Städtebau-Ausstellung in Berlin 1910,” ARK 8 (1910): 91. For the diverse benefits of the models, see Saarinen, “Greater Tallinn,” 159. 61 Birger Brunila, “II Finska arkitekturutställningen,” ARK XII (1914), 46–47. 62 Picture of the model in Saarinen, MHS, 116. 63 Hakkarainen et al., “Kollektiivinen asiantuntijuus,” 255. 64 A Minute of General Meeting April 30, 1912, Ca:18/Stenius/CAH. 65 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1911, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in April 1912, Ca:18/Stenius/CAH. 66 According to Saarinen, people’s interest on the area was crucial for its development, Saarinen, “[Preface],” [ii]. Similar ideas presented by Burnham on the importance of a concrete plan while planning Chicago, Rebecca Ross, “Picturing the Profession: The View from Above and the Civic Imaginary in Burnham’s Plans,” Journal of Planning History 12 (2013): 269–281, 272–273.

184  Emilia Karppinen 67 Saarinen had planned several buildings for Tallberg, the first one already in 1898 together with his colleagues architects Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren. Leopold Lerche visited Saarinen’s home and bureau often, as his relatives were living next to Saarinen in Kirkkonummi. 68 The roots for this are deeper in the change of the whole technical field. According to Kohlman and Trischler, “growing scientification and specialization of engineering separated engineering, construction and architecture into distinctive fields,” leading to a “sibling rivalry” of engineers and architects extending “far beyond the question of which profession should be in charge of” what, Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe, 47 & passim. For the long roots of the “sibling rivalry,” see especially Andrew Saint, Architect and Engineer. A Study in Sibling rivalry (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2007). 69 Henrik Lilius, “Kaupunkirakennustaide 1800-luvun jälkipuoliskolla,” in Suomen kaupunkirakentamisen historia II, eds. Henrik Lilius and Pekka Kärki (Helsinki: SKS, 2014), 307–341, 308. 70 Nikula, Yhtenäinen kaupunkikuva, 92–94; Nikula, Bertel Jung, 10. More for Sitte and his importance on planning, see especially George R. Collins, Christiane Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Births of Modern City Planning (New York: Rizzoli, 1986). 71 Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” 80, 82. 72 Ritva Wäre, “Bertel Jungin näkemys kaupungista,” in Sundman and Schalin, Bertel Jung, 43. 73 Ward, Capitalist World, 11. 74 See Strengell, “Kaupungin järjestelytaide.” Strengell wrote also another chapter for the plan, dealing with the past development of Helsinki. The importance of making the surveys on the past was very Geddesian idea, Meller, “Cities and evolution,” 203. 75 For example, Henry W. Lawrence, “The greening of the squares of London: Transformation of urban landscapes and ideals,” Annals of Association of American Geographers 83 (1993), 91, 113–114. According to Ward, there was no master plan behind the renovations, but Haussmann improvised the street lines while building, Ward, Capitalist World, 15. 76 See, for example, Ruoe de Rivoli, Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” 101. 77 Ward, Capitalist World, 29; Sitte (1889) Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. The first English-version of Sitte’s book was published as late as in 1945. Eliel Saarinen, who had lived now 20 years in the United States, wrote the preface on the book, City Planning According to Artistic Principles. 78 Strengell, “Kaupungin järjestelytaide,” 23–24. As also Mikkola notes, as a result of misunderstanding and taking Sitte too literally, several inappropriate plans were made for Finnish towns, Mikkola, “Eliel Saarinen,” 190–191. 79 Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” 80, 82; Unwin 1909, 97–98, 104, 235–236. The primacy of traffic and planning squares, see, for example, Hallas-Murula, Greater Tallinn, 55. 80 Hallas-Murula, Greater Tallinn, 23; Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” 81. The traffic safety concerned also Saarinen. As different vehicles had different speed, they were to be separated, see Saarinen, “Munkkiniemi-Haaga,” 78. An idea emphasized also by French architect and engineer Eugène Hénard, see Ward, Capitalist World, 62. 81 Collins and Collins, Camillo Sitte, 35–36. 82 Strengell, “Kaupungin järjestelytaide,” 24. Also Jung emphasized, how there were no models for road networks and underlined the understanding of the area and its needs, Wäre, “Bertel Jung,” 56.

Collective Expertise behind the Urban Planning  185 83 Meller, “Cities and evolution,” 208. 84 Crasemann Collins, Universal Urbanism, 63; Hallas-Murula, Greater Tallinn, 26. 85 Annual Report of Stenius Corporation for 1912, attached to the Minute of General Meeting in March 1913, Ca:19/Stenius/CAH.913 86 Saarinen, “[Preface],” [ii]. 87 Otto-Iivari Meurman’s letter to his parents September 13, 1914, The Archives of Otto-Iivari Meurman (Otto and Aina Meurman, letters from the children 1913– 1922, box 24), The Finnish National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. For planning, Chicago and how the bird’s-eye view constructed the profession of planners, see Ross, “Picturing the Profession.” 88 Meurman’s letter to his parents September 13 1914/NARC. 89 Letter from Sigurd Stenius to Eleil Saarinen October 27, 1916, Fe:6/Stenius/ CAH. 90 Koivunen, “Collective expertise,” 266. 91 Uggla, “Rakennusjärjestys,” 105. 92 Olof Holmberg, “Munksnäs-Haga och Stor-Helsingfors. Stadsplanestudier och förlag. Av Eliel Saarinen,” Arkitektur (1916), 60. 93 Hakon Ahlberg, “Våra Stockholmsgators vanprydande,” Arkitektur (1917), 50–54; Emilia Karppinen, “Satamakysymys ja sadan vuoden takainen haave Turusta kansainvälisen kaupan keskuksena,” in Research Briefings (Turku: The City of Turku Administration, 2015), 6. 94 Annual Report 1912, Ca:19/CAH; letter from Sigurd Stenius to Eliel Saarinen, July 3, 1913, Fe:3/Stenius/CAH; letter from Sigurd Stenius to Berndt Aminoff, August 23, 1923, Fe:13/Stenius/CAH; letter from Sigurd Stenius to Bertel Jung, November 19, 1924, Fe:14/Stenius/CAH. 95 Saarinen, Report for Canberra, NAA, 15. 96 Crasemann Collins, Universal Urbanism, 34; Meller, “Philanthropy,” 295–296. 97 Meurman’s ideas cited in: Alarik Tavastjerna, “Första allmänna finska bostadskongressen,” ARK 15 (1917), 114. 98 Saarinen 1915a, [ii]; Annual Report 1915, Ca:22/CAH. 99 Koivunen, “Collective expertise,” 266. 100 Smith, Plan of Chicago, 69. 101 Juhana Lahti, Arkkitehti Aarne Ervin moderni. Kaupunkisuunnittelu pääkaupunkiseudulla. Suomalaisen suurkaupungin kaavoitus toisen maailmansodan jälkeen (Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 2006), 23–24. 102 Birger Brunila, “Om arkitekternas yrkesintressen,” ARK 8 (1910), 31. 103 According to sociologist Thomas Brante, the formal education should not be underlined too much in defining the professions, as a significant part of the expertise is obtained after acquiring the degree, Thomas Brante, “Professional types as strategy analysis,” in Professions in theory and history. Rethinking the Study of the Professions, eds. Michael Burrage and Rolf Torstendahl (London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage, 1990), 75–93, 83; Brante’s ideas noted by Puustinen, who has studied broadly the current Finnish planner profession, Sari Puustinen, Suomalainen kaavoittajaprofessio ja suunnittelun kommunikatiivinen käänne. Vuorovaikutukseen liittyvät ongelmat ja mahdollisuudet suurten kaupunkien kaavoittajien näkökulmasta (Espoo: TKK, 2006), 39–40. 104 Koivunen, “Collective expertise,” 259. 105 Hakkarainen et al., “Kollektiivinen asiantuntijuus,” 246. 106 Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe, 8; Ward, Capitalist World, 51. 107 Pinson, “Urban planning,” 511. 108 Crasemann Collins, Universal Urbanism, 43. 109 Sigurd Frosterus, “Henry van de Velde, tänkaren och teoretikern,” ARK 7 (1909), 41.

9 On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City Buenos Aires, 1870–1940 Diego Armus

Hygiene concerns in Buenos Aires have been present since the eighteenth century or even earlier. However, it was with the arrival of modern bacteriology around the 1880s and the making and consolidation of the modern city that the tension between urban spaces and hygiene gained a new relevance and new meanings. The process was less drastic than the one usually depicted in celebratory readings of the role of modern biomedicine and sanitation. Rather than an almost sudden and conclusive triumph, for quite some time miasmatic and bacteriological approaches coexisted and competed with each other. In any case, the array of novelties related to the efforts aiming at controlling contagious diseases—in the first place sanitary infrastructure—were a harbinger of the beginning of a new era in the history of hygiene in the Argentine capital. Hygiene was not original to Buenos Aires. The flows of germs, ideas, laypeople, professional networks, and metaphors frame the global dimension of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban hygiene. These flows were present wherever modernities made an impact. Featuring a core of biomedical, cultural, and political dimensions—disease carriers, milestones in the search for an effective cure, basic public health initiatives—these flows molded the making of the modern city. The problem arises when these features are used as evidence enough of a unified, quite monolithic, even global history of hygiene. In fact, and more often than not, these narratives have been quite modest in their geographical scope, mostly encompassing the North Atlantic world and also, at times, some of its former colonies.1 The global dimensions of modern hygiene should not invite us to neglect adjustments and contestations present at the local level in specific historical contexts and situated structures. Whatever the definition of the local level— a neighborhood, a city, a region, a nation (themselves problematic categories in biomedical history and history of science)—those flows of germs, knowledge, expertise, and responses run neither as free agents nor in one direction, from metropolitan centers to peripheries.2 With the abovementioned points of departure, this chapter discusses hygiene in the making of modern Buenos Aires focusing on the hygienic imagination, the construction of a hygienic consensus, and the limits of hygiene discourses in daily life.

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   187

Modern Buenos Aires The arrival of modern hygiene in Buenos Aires took place during a time of profound, rapid changes that were evident in almost every aspect of urban life, from social geography to politics to culture. The city’s demographics are eloquent indicators of this process. By the early 1870s, 200,000 people lived in Buenos Aires. By 1914, and with more than 1.5 million inhabitants, the Argentine capital had become the largest city in Latin America, second only to New York among cities on the Atlantic seaboard. In 1936, its population reached 2.5 million. For decades, transatlantic migration—mainly but not only Italians and Spaniards—was largely responsible for this rapid expansion. By 1910, three out of every four members of the adult population in Buenos Aires were foreign-born. During the 1930s, however, this began to change: In 1936, a third of the population was foreign; domestic migration was becoming the real engine of Buenos Aires’ demographic growth, and most of the new immigrants were from neighboring South American countries. By the last third of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires was a rather dense port-city, its center located by the banks of the river and a few blocks to the north, west, and south. It was a walking city, with one-story houses with colonial courtyards, large and Frenchified mansions for the rich, more modest Italianate houses, several government buildings, and a great number of precarious, poorly equipped tenements, shacks, and hovels. During the 1910s, while new and quite impressive buildings were changing the city center, a major expansion outward was taking place. Tramways, first horse-drawn and later electric, as well as the possibility of renting a home or buying in installments a piece of land on which eventually to build a simple house, facilitated the physical growth of the city and the making of new neighborhoods. A fast-transformed city no doubt, but also a city, especially outside the center, that many visitors depicted as surrounded by campgrounds of makeshift houses, dirty roads, and scarce population. In the 1920s, most of these new neighborhoods would get consolidated both in terms of their urban infrastructure and their distinctive sociocultural spaces for working and emerging middle-class sectors. By the end of the 1930s and during the 1940s, the city underwent a second period of physical expansion, this time no longer contained by its legal borders. Large and very popular metropolitan suburban rings had been in the making, with more than 2 million inhabitants living on interstitial and outlying lands barely integrated into the urban grid by railroad and bus networks.3 In 1880, Buenos Aires became the nation’s capital and from then onward local and national politics in the city were quite often indistinguishable. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the only major metropolis in the country. Along with its port, commercial, and bureaucratic activities, Buenos Aires was developing a manufacturing sector with hundreds of workshops and a few huge industrial factories; however, it was not an industrial city but a city with industries, initially spread over several neighborhoods

188  Diego Armus and later, by the 1930s and 1940s, firmly installed on the first ring of the metropolitan area.4 Buenos Aires’ downtown, inhabited between the 1880s and the 1940s by the elite, had by 1930 a relatively high population density, with three- to four-story modern apartment buildings and few skyscrapers. Beyond the downtown, in the neighborhoods, Buenos Aires looked like a sea of onestory houses, a horizontal city that dissolved into the open spaces of the Pampa plains. In the early 1940s, most of the city dwellings were of brick, and only 10% of its residential houses were makeshift ones located near its borders. By then, the ephemeral city of the beginning of the century, especially in its emerging neighborhoods, was clearly finished and now the campground-like landscape became a feature in many zones of the metropolitan area. The speed and magnitude of these modern urban transformations were apparent in many realms of city life. They did away with a mid- nineteenthcentury distinction between the northern and southern areas, the f­ ormer better serviced and wealthier, the latter often associated with epidemics and lower standards of living. By the 1900s and for the following three or four decades, another distinction was coming into focus: the difference between the city’s downtown and its outlying neighborhoods where immigrant and native-born criollo workers and craftspeople as well as small merchants and public employees formed very cosmopolitan yet locally oriented societies. These neighborhoods featured a remarkable social integration, cultural mixing, and Argentinization, as well as various efforts to live respectable lives that tried to somewhat replicate those of the downtown elite but in a popular fashion. Mostly without major social conflicts, in a sort of silent but steady manner, the identities of these neighborhoods were built around the inhabitants’ wish to be connected to the rest of the city; availability of spaces for socialization, from public libraries to soccer clubs, from local movie theaters and cafes to neighborhood associations and the pursuit of basic urban infrastructure, such as sewage, drinking water, trash collection, public schools, and health institutions. In spite of its inner stratification, neighbors tended to think of their local social world as largely equalitarian; they believed it could be improved through social reform and collective progress as well as individual thrift and industriousness. Neighborhood life both accelerated and softened the modernization of the urban experience by including the barrio in the city as well as offering a strong sense of identity in a context of increasingly impersonal social relations and fast-paced downtown lifestyles. By the 1920s, limited but real and reachable upward social mobility was possible in Buenos Aires. Previously, when only the elite had political rights, a vibrant workers’ movement with strong anarchist tendencies confronted the status quo with a language and actions meant to radically transform society. But in the 1920s and 1930s, labor demands voiced by socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, and communists had more moderate tones, quite

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   189 similar—although more focused on the world of work—to those of neighborhood organizers dealing with their constituents’ needs as consumers. In those years, the political life of the city also became more active and inclusive, with periodic national and municipal elections. Though the president of the nation named the city’s mayor, citizens of Buenos Aires elected representatives to the municipal council. This peculiar arrangement was the result of the existence of federal and municipal spheres of city government, each producing and managing its own discourses, urban policies, and public expenditure priorities. These agendas of intervention were shaped by new state agencies whose officials had very specific professional skills, including some engineers and medical doctors who’d had overseas, of-the-moment training. At times, sectors of civil society and neighborhood organizations were also involved and proactive. Modern infrastructure was strongly associated with urban hygiene. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, garbage collection, green spaces, health care institutions, and paving projects were gaining presence in the list of urban urgencies. But the construction of networks for drinking water and sewers were by far the most recognizable priorities. Rainwater cisterns, shallow, often polluted wells, and daily purchases from water carts filled in the muddy estuary of the Río de la Plata have been the traditional and only available sources of drinking water. Privies discharged human waste into cesspools. And contamination of wells located nearby the cesspools was frequent. Both the provision of water and the disposal of detritus were not state matters. A private railway company built canals and water deposits to run its business and provided water to only a few households. The 1871 yellow fever epidemic—perhaps the most shocking in years of recurrent outbreaks cycles—generated a wave of demands for access to drinkable water, but the 1873 economic crisis impeded the materialization of any initiative. During the second half of the 1870s, some improvements were made but only when Buenos Aires became the national capital, in 1880, did the construction of drinking water and sewage networks begun a process of consistent and rapid expansion. Primary attention was given to the water supply. The national state managed the project, but English companies, jointly with Swedish, Norwegian, Belgian, and French technicians were in charge. By 1895, the first water network was already built. It served only some areas of the city. Water was taken from the river’s upstream via a tunnel to a deposit in the city center. Direct pumping elevated the water to pools where sand filtration took place. The filtered water was then pumped to a large deposit located in one of the highest points of the city, just a few meters over the sea level. From that deposit, pipes distributed water to private residences according to the urban grid. By 1887, only 21.2% of the population had access to the water network; in 1909 it was 53.6% (Figures 9.1a–9.1d).

(a)

(b)

Figure 9.1  (a) Water cart filled in the River Plate, (b) Filtered water tank and water pump station in (then) Plaza Lorea, (c) First drinking water plant in (then) Low Recoleta, inaugurated in 1874 and enlarged in 1878. In the photo, the extension is almost finished, (d) Designed in 1877 and completed in 1894 with local and imported materials, the French renaissance Palacio de Aguas Corrientes (Palace of Flowing Waters) is both an example of turn-of-the-century eclectic architecture and an evidence of the cultural relevance drinking water had in the making of modern Buenos Aires.

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   191 (c)

(d)

Figure 9.1  (Continued)

The sewage network also followed the urban grid. It was built and came into use after the water network. In 1887, its relevance was still negligible; by 1904, it served 39.8% of the households and by 1909, 41.8%. Pipes converged in deposits connected to the main drain that discharged waste in the river, away from the city. It was the easiest and cheapest form of sewage disposal. Both networks were thought out for a concentrated city. But the growth of new neighborhoods was fast, and quite soon both national and municipal officials understood there was a need to expand the networks in order

192  Diego Armus to serve areas off the center. Work started in 1910. World War I stopped them, but by the 1920s the project had already reached its goal of covering 12,000 hectares of urban land. It was an expansion with no technological novelties, just an extension of the previous networks. Again, the drinking water system took the lead and water consumption from 5 million cubic meters in 1870 to 35 million in 1885, 40 million in 1904, 140 million in 1918, and eventually 200 million in 1923. This was a faster growth than the city’s demographics. Per capita consumption per day jumped from 15 liters in 1887 to 307 liters in 1923. The massive increases in piped-in water proved to be the major stimulus to speed up the construction of the sewage network. The older cesspool-privy vault methods were simply incapable of handling the load. But by the late 1930s and early 1940s, water and sewage systems covered most of the urban grid. In the metropolitan area, the situation was quite different, somewhat similar to the city neighborhoods in the early twentieth century. The waterworks of Buenos Aires were a very successful project, and not only in terms of controlling most of the infectious diseases, managing the urban environment, or the rapid completion of its construction. Efficient water and sewage networks gave respectability to the city and were fundamental pillars of a progressive urban ideology that prized efficiency, organization, and cohesiveness, while elevating standards of community health and hygiene by focusing the attention on the city as a whole, not on specific neighborhoods or individuals. A number of reasons could explain this success. It was a priority in the agenda of the national government. International networks facilitated the transfer of knowledge already tested elsewhere. Argentine engineers and public health doctors collaborated in the development of these projects alongside with foreign technicians and experts. Practice models—from design to know-how to technologies—were received, adapted, localized, and further developed in Buenos Aires. Very concrete and diverse construction and performance experiences that had already taken place after long periods of trial and error throughout the nineteenth century in old cities at the core of the Atlantic economy were key references on which Buenos Aires waterworks were able to capitalize. This comparatively delayed process of becoming a networked city facilitated a rapid catchup, producing notable results for peripheral Buenos Aires in a shorter time span than those of old central cities in Europe.5 Two are particularly relevant: the very successful decline of mortality and morbidity trends of some infectious diseases as well as the fast spread of hygiene habits among vast sectors of the population.

The Hygienic Urban Imagination Progress, crowds, order, and welfare were relevant concerns of an urban ideology that, starting in the last third of the nineteenth century, had a major impact on Argentine sociological thought. In the context of a future

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   193 challenged by the problems inherent to the modern metropolis and (to a much lesser extent) industrial growth, the discourses on degeneration and regeneration, as well as both deep and cosmetic social changes, were defining their scope, priorities, and limitations. From the beginning, urban hygiene was at the core of these discourses, whether as an exercise of power, a way to deal with recurrent epidemics, or a technology to be used in family homes, neighborhoods, schools, factories, and workshops. Hygiene was also instrumental in imagining alternative urban scenarios in which progress and science would facilitate the envisioning of reformed or radically different worlds. La Ciudad Argentina Ideal o del Porvenir, written by Emilio Coni in 1919, is one of these imagined cities.6 Although Benjamin Richardson’s Hygeia: A City of Health influenced Coni’s ideal city, La ­Ciudad Argentina Ideal deals with issues that only partly coincide with Richardson’s concerns or Coni’s hygienic agenda of the late 1870s. In Hygeia, published in England and Buenos Aires in 1876 (an early evidence of the intense circulation of ideas between Buenos Aires and Europe), social problems related to urban and industrial growth were reduced to sanitary problems. In Progrès de l’Hygiene dans la République Argentine, written in 1887, Coni’s main focus is urban hygiene and sanitary infrastructure.7 But, by the 1920s, Coni’s imagined city articulates a broad, ambitious, welfare-oriented agenda. In other words, if in the 1870s and 1880s Coni was a tenacious advocate of the expansion of drinking water and sewerage networks, by the early 1920s, he had become an unfaltering organizer of public health institutions dedicated to prevention, moralization, and individual improvement.8 Welfarism is the most peculiar issue of Coni’s city. It is not merely a discourse aimed at guaranteeing basic living conditions in the city; it is also a tight grid of institutions—hospitals, neighborhoods’ centers, schools, municipal restaurants—managed and coordinated by doctors, architects, and sanitary engineers, all of them urban professionals increasingly legitimized as experts by the urban modernization process.9 Coni rendered the city as a sanitary unit in which prevention, surveillance, and fair compensation for individual efforts reigned. Production and productivity issues were absent. His main concern was to regulate an urban world that had burgeoned astoundingly quickly, to control not only its geographical expansion but also to reaffirm and celebrate a pace of urban life that mirrored that of the emerging neighborhoods in the Buenos Aires Coni has seen and lived firsthand. La Ciudad Argentina Ideal was not free of disease. Thanks to a biological and social equilibrium ensured by welfarism, state philanthropy, and prevention, most contagious diseases were under control. Coni’s city reveals a hygienic realism born both of a recognition of the medical impotence of his time when it came to controlling certain diseases as well as his acceptance of disease as a fact of human experience. Coni’s approach superseded the classical and repressive criteria with which disease, abnormality, indigence, and criminality had been discussed

194  Diego Armus and confronted. In his city, hospitals and asylums were no longer places of banishment. By intervening in both public and private spheres, with social sensibility, paternalism, and sometimes rigor, the state was supposed to be the great social agent in the effort to keep the population from physical and moral deterioration. Hygienist doctors, acting as social engineers, were responsible for governing and handling the conflicts and difficulties resulting from fast urban and demographic growth. Coni’s city seems to be in conversation with Plato’s “guardians of order” or Bacon, Condorcet and Wells’ urban utopias where scientific and technical elites control everything. But it is Hertzka’s Freiland, which depicts a city with powerful doctors strategically positioned in many state agencies, where Coni’s urban imagination finds plenty of similarities.10 La Ciudad Argentina Ideal unveils the strength of an urban public reformism embodied by professionals and experts—Coni among them—who work from key positions in state bureaucracies. They are professionals advocating for philanthropy and for welfare initiatives aimed at guaranteeing progress and social harmony, transforming people’s habits at home, and broadening social citizenship to a point in which none, or almost none, will be left out.11

Urban Hygiene Consensus The triumph of hygiene culture as a catalog of detailed indications for people’s daily behavior was part and parcel of the medicalization process that gave shape to a new consensus about normalized urban manners. Hygiene entailed not only a preventive and prescriptive discourse emphasizing individual responsibility, but also the notion that if everyone acted properly contagious diseases could be avoided. The spread of the hygiene catalog occurred via many means, from rational appeals to social learning to coercion, intimidation, and propaganda. In the end, the habits of common people, it was expected, would gradually become altered as a result of a diverse set recommendations: defensive, involving prohibitions and punishments; informative, emphasizing instruction; and educational, aiming to develop, especially from the 1920s onward, behaviors and values where health and hygiene intermingled with ideals of beauty and modernity. Common people internalized many of those hygienic practices to different degrees. Such internalization was due not necessarily or exclusively to a resigned acceptance of the disciplinary initiatives of the modern state but in recognition of the apparent material benefits and improvements some of those recommended practices could provide. Regardless of their political or ideological inclination, hygiene was a set of postulates that used technical language to articulate highly diverse political concerns as well as a value that, in a relatively short period of time, was celebrated by both the elite and the working classes. Beyond the meaning each person or social group bestowed upon it, personal and collective

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   195 hygiene turned into both civilizing and socializing practices. From the 1870s to the 1940s, hygiene became not only a sort of obligation for people who wanted to feel they belonged to society, but also a new right, an entitlement which more and more social sectors demanded. By the end of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth plenty of voices, some sophisticated and others less so, from a variety of ideological and political positions, contributed to a discourse attentive to the reformation of daily habits. In 1899, for instance, a pamphlet written by an anarchist physician harshly criticized the capitalist system but exalted the benefits of and need for personal hygiene.12 In 1911, the Buenos Aires city government distributed thousands of flyers in seven languages free of charge instructing how to raise children in accordance with modern hygiene.13 In the late 1920s, La Semana Médica, a weekly medical journal, stated that key factors in the struggle against urban diseases included not only improving standards of living, particularly in nutrition, housing, and income, but also teaching hygiene to the common people.14 In 1935, both social Catholics and socialists wanted to instruct not only the poor but everyone, regardless of social status, on how to keep their homes hygienic.15 And in 1943, a magazine financed by the owners of one of the largest textile factories in Buenos Aires included a section on personal hygiene aimed at its readership of female workers.16 Its contents were similar to those in the women’s column of CGT, a weekly publication of the national confederation of unions.17 In these examples, hygiene appears as a universal value that went beyond social differences and could be an instrument of social inclusion and social change. Regardless of its disciplinary content, it meant to provide respectability, social integration, and recognition. It articulated normative and edifying endeavors in which consensus seems to have been more prevalent than ideological and political differences. Spurred by concerns about the mortality and morbidity produced first by infectious diseases and later by the so-called social ills such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism, the culture of hygiene began to emerge in the last third of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century and as a result of a stubborn attempt to bring together medicine, social sciences, and politics, social hygiene emerged as a new discipline, a corpus on which, later on, public health would be based. Driven in large part by professional and political sectors strongly influenced by positivism, social hygiene brought together a range of strategies and objectives. Among them were providing the elite with a safe urban environment in which epidemics were under control; protecting vast sectors of society from the risk of contagion in the broadest sense; defining normal and abnormal behaviors; and shaping respectable, efficient and productive urbanites. Over time ideas of collective and personal hygiene became more sophisticated. The development of modern bacteriology was decisive to their social

196  Diego Armus and cultural acceptance. By the turn of the century, the catalog of hygienic behavior demanded not only be free of microbes, germs, and bacteria, but also to believe that these agents, no matter their inconspicuousness, were the materialization of disease. In a relatively short period of time, the hygienic code had worked its way into plenty of social and personal realms: the world of the hospital, where hygiene was supposed to be asepsis; the world of the home, where hygiene was associated with cleanliness and ventilation; the world of work, where hygiene was linked to labor conditions and overwork; the world of the street, where hygiene insinuated the risk of indiscriminate contact with other people and with any kind of trash; the world of the school, where the future of the nation was supposed to be shaped; and the world of each individual, where not only hygienic daily rituals but also vaccinations were increasingly thought to be crucial to boosting immunity. Hygiene became a complex field of intersecting values. In addition to the specific task of fighting disease, hygiene was steeped in ideas of morality and respectability, as well as in psychosocial phenomena that involved questions of self-approval, individual responsibility, self-discipline, narcissism, ideas about enjoying life, and the consumption of new symbolic and material goods that were thought to promote health. By the end of the nineteenth century and especially during the first half of the twentieth, changes in the health care infrastructure as well as in contagious diseases’ morbidity and mortality rates were accompanied by an emergent secular catechism of hygiene.18 Books, brochures, pamphlets, and (starting in the 1920s) radio broadcasts prescribed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, how to live a healthy life. Many of these prescriptions became fundamental to material and moral life in the contemporary city. And their scope was broad: sports and free time, sexuality and child rearing, dress codes and eating habits, school and workplace routines, household management, and the use of public spaces. At the turn of the century, when the discourse of fear and defensive hygiene dominated a social agenda designed to fight epidemics, hygienic behaviors were associated to contagion prevention. These communication strategies had also been used in the 1920s, when modern advertising celebrated the discourses of a healthy life and positive hygiene in order to introduce other and more general ideas of social harmony, justice, and citizenship. Building the hygienic consensus demanded dealing with persistent and resilient habits and beliefs. In the long run, it was a very successful project. However, not few doctors and hygienists complained about the slow pace of the changes. Some suggested the need to “impose, by law, preventive rules and practices, to suppress or alter peoples’ habits, customs, and tradition which—though they will deny it—cannot be changed without coming up against deeply ingrained concepts and modalities.”19 In the last third of the nineteenth century, contagious diseases were seen as problems that had to be controlled through improved urban sanitary

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   197 infrastructure, the spread of a sense of emergency, fear of contagion, and the need to disinfect almost everything, from mattresses to clothing, furniture, household appliances, and so on. Although there were concerns with disorder, degeneration, instability, and even a certain alarmism owing to a relatively recent history of devastating epidemics, by the early twentieth century a much more optimistic vision of the future had emerged. Based on the beneficial expansion of the drinking water and sewage systems, this discourse insisted on the need to strengthen peoples’ bodies and to forge the “national race.” There was still talk of diseases—especially of tuberculosis and syphilis, much less so of other infectious diseases that were becoming part of the past—but what was new was a focus on health, not only its preservation but also its improvement. Concerns with physical wellness, morality, family, and social harmony were important to the agendas of all reformists, regardless of their ideology. The 1916 Primer Congreso Nacional de Medicina heralded “the ideal of bestowing each organism with the aid of a perfectly hygienic life, enough resistance to triumph against contagion.”20 This ideal of integral individual health, as opposed to the collective emphasis that characterized the struggle against infectious diseases, got more and more sophisticated. In 1940, “physical robustness” was associated with “correct moral attitudes,” “spiritual serenity,” and “immunization against the attack of foreign germs.”21 It is very difficult to assess the impact of the hygienic code on mortality and morbidity trends. Hygiene preaching, however, had an undeniable impact on daily life in Buenos Aires. The informal group of doctors who articulated it, in their capacity as members of state agencies or civil associations, succeeded in designing an ambitious agenda that was supported, if dispassionately, by people of very different political persuasions. They emphasized certain aspects of the hygiene agenda and downplayed others. Their explanations of the deep social causes of the so-called modern city maladies differed, but they all tended to agree that hygiene was necessary to improve living conditions, that hygiene education had to gain ground rapidly, and that the supply of and access to health care services had to expand. It’s true that there were not unexpected tensions and conflicts owing to differing perspectives on certain issues, especially when they were framed in broad ideological outlooks. But when dealing with more specific problems, these differences tended to lose relevance, getting dissolved in or contained by the actions and discourses of a medical group who, though ideologically heterogeneous, shared an agenda of professional intervention with more coincidences than discrepancies. Like many other processes that marked modern life, the spread of this hygienic culture involved social mimicry, learning, novelty, tradition, and coercion. It defined not only behaviors that were believed to be clean and healthy, but also those regarded as filthy and antihygienic. The reception of those recommendations—some moralizing, some associated with good

198  Diego Armus taste, some clearly disciplinary, some simply in keeping with the new hygiene rationale—bore meanings that were not necessarily in line with the intentions of professional groups animating the hygienic campaign. Occasionally, efforts encouraged by other groups—Catholics, socialists, anarchists, and communists—sought to connect hygiene and ideology. Depending on the case, these efforts could result in further moralizing of the disciplinary contents of the hygienic code or questioning the habits it advocated as their being instruments used to perpetuate an unjust social system. Nevertheless, the daily habits of common people vis-à-vis their hygiene seem not to have been much informed by ideology. Instead, material limitations and domestic and popular translations of modern bacteriology had a more decisive role. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, some doctors warned about the limitations of spreading the hygienic code and suggested discarding spectacular and sporadic campaigns which, though well intended, had a limited impact on common people’s hygienic education. They thought that such strategies were as ineffective as the “hygiene sermons one hears on the radio, which are invitations to change the radio station as fast as you can,” or the “amazingly tedious conferences of major figures” whose impact on the audience was negligible. These doctors encouraged going after a targeted audience. They said hygiene had to be accepted “just as the brand of a product is imposed on the market.”22 Starting in the 1940s, and more intensely during the first Peronist administration (1946–1955), most urbanites entwined themselves around some aspects of the hygiene culture as part of a newly established right to health and health care, a right in which individual and state responsibility largely complemented each other. It was an urban hygiene consensus not only encouraged—and at times imposed—from above, but also strongly embraced from below. By then, no doubt, hygiene in the city had achieved a civilizing status.

Hygiene and Common Sense The vehement fervor aimed at spreading the hygienic code also motivated reactive distrust. For some, this distrust was predicated on the conviction that certain diseases were products of the injustices of the prevailing social system that clearly went beyond hygienic issues. Alternately, distrust stemmed from the belief that the obsessive efforts to normalize daily habits of the healthy and the sick, adults and children, men and women were out of all proportion. These perspectives had been in the making for quite some time. In 1870, a hygienist wrote, When there is poverty, hygiene is impossible [and even] the wealthiest man necessarily commits a hundred thousand hygiene sins per day. There is insufficient time and resources to verify the demands of

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   199 hygiene, [and anyone who sets out to follow all hygienic advice will become] a tormented and miserable victim of its exacting cares. [Hence], and due to its impossibility, hygiene has been expressly put together in order not to be obeyed on the whole.23 Years later, in 1905, an article published in a magazine with a huge circulation wondered if “the respected hygienists believe in the positive usefulness and undeniable efficacy of their advice. Do they want us to duly heed their high knowledge?”24 In the early 1920s and into the 1930s, some doctors wrote about the mental plague of contagion, […] the absurd contagionist aberrations that have led some to adopt precautions so excessive that they seem victims of blind panic, [and] the practices inspired by physicians who dream of quarantines, making use of old systems of terror. They listed individual and group reactions that could be explained only as the result of “atavisms,” “mad fears,” “false medical legends,” and “groundless beliefs.”25 Printed media contributed both to the wide spread of contagious fears as well as some very critical interpretations of it. A magazine’s page-length comic strip published in 1906 entitled “The model street” made fun of the detailed catalog of hygienic manners, citing “spittoons, like works of art designed to help passersby not spit on the sidewalk”; […] “antiseptic deposits every thirty paces where the city’s inhabitants could exterminate the microbes that infested their hands and, hence, offer their hand to others without fear of contagion”; […] “monetary disinfectants that cleaned the paper money and coins in circulation”; [,…] “special pavements that combated the homicidal dust, and globes of oxygen that renewed the air when many people converged on sidewalks.” The main characters in the strip were not impoverished people but dressed up men and women who had probably already internalized the anticontagion message, though they still needed “the watchful eye of a policeman in charge of making them comply with the hygienic habits” to make this street a “model street.”26 In the 1920s, an article signed by Doctor B. A. Cterio (read as Doctor Bacterium) in the science column of a popular newspaper focused on the anti-spitting campaign, calling for a sensible, not moralizing use of science in daily life: “passerby [should be encouraged] to spit anywhere because spit left on the street is the least dangerous [since] the bacillus cannot survive in direct sunlight; [citizens should not aspire] to live under a crystal ball that was always being sterilized; [and should attempt] to increase their defenses, producing enough antibodies, the true barriers that the organism uses to oppose the invasion of bacillus.”27 Opposition to the contagion obsession was grounded both in science and common sense. Along with doctors and journalists, there were also anarchist

200  Diego Armus critics of the hygienic excesses. For them, the debate around hygiene facilitated an ideological criticism of customs and capitalist society. With a fatalism that denied any possible cure or prevention, some stated that what we see everyday in the newspapers is a brand of sarcasm. These doctors are either dumb or they act dumb. To combat disease they call on hygiene. But under a regime of lies, social injustice, and exploitation, hygiene is like cutting off the branches of a tree that is infected at its roots and leaving the trunk, which will later reproduce even sicker branches.28 Workers’ newspapers of the 1920s used the same tone, criticizing those who “consider themselves protectors of the poor” and pretend to explain the lack of hygiene as a consequence of people’s ignorance. Instead, the workers’ newspapers claimed “human beings were hygienic by nature,” but that the difficulties of the material environment in which they lived prevented them from practicing what they already knew.29 Nonetheless, when it came to dealing with the more concrete and daily aspects of contagion—that is, when the discourse was removed from the undisguised ideological—many of the same anarchist publications revealed not only a less radical reading of the problem but also the fact that the hygienic consensus was not foreign to anarchist perspectives. Though criticizing the “hygienic impositions” of the powerful, they recognized hygiene as a resource that, if well implemented, could promote some of the social harmony promised in the new libertarian age: “In the name of hygiene, the spread of right habits would prevent contagion.” Thus, they supported educational campaigns geared toward avoiding contagion, but emphasizing that “hygienic measures should be kept within practical and rational limits, complementing the true prophylaxis of improving the human environment to make it resistant to evil.”30 They also believed that social innovation might be possible if “hygienic, rational, and delicate ways were put into practice among workers.”31 Not surprisingly, the anarchist press published handbooks on child hygiene and disease prevention and promoted guides—also recommended in mainstream media—on how to be a “good mother.”32 Even more, they deemed hygiene a means to emancipation since, without it, there could be neither progress nor health. Hygiene is born of the same consciousness as man, so it cannot be regulated. Everything that has been done, ordinances and laws, has failed in the face of the workers’ unconsciousness. The blame for this regrettable situation lay not with the men whose natural right to health was curtailed but with the degraded social environment in which “a poverty of spirit and anti-hygienic ways of living” prevailed. The

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   201 solution was in the hands of “workers’ societies, [in charge of] sowing this love of hygiene, morality, and education.”33

The Hygienic Urban Green Starting in 1870 doctors, hygienists, politicians, city planners, and educators regarded parks and plazas as valuable resources to deal with the problems caused by quick urbanization. Picking up on European and American reformist urbanism, the pragmatism of local reformers, and the ways people were using open spaces, ideas about the urban green entailed rethinking about how the modern city was breathing. They brought together a concern with urban diseases and living conditions; neighborhood life; the unequal distribution of services in the city’s northern, western, and southern areas; efforts to control urban expansion; the real estate business; the illusion of developing bucolic rural enclaves in the city; and the political will of furthering the moralization and nationalization of the urban masses. Three recurrent images of green urban spaces appeared throughout the late nineteenth century and into the 1940s: green spaces as the city’s lungs, green spaces as civilizing agents, green spaces as recreational areas. These representations were part of a regeneration program in which the metaphor of the green city converged with the enduring goal of equipping the urban grid with more open spaces. Already in 1869 an article published in Revista Médico Quirúrgica affirmed that “city squares ought to be large warehouses where the air is purified and then spread through the arteries we call streets, bringing life or death to the people, depending on whether the air is pure or foul.” Plazas were places for “laborers, craftsmen, employees, and merchants to go during their spare time to receive the benefits of sunlight, thus enlarging their lungs, which were often sick from breathing harmful air.”34 Images of urban green spaces as “city lungs” or the city as “a patient with asphyxia, who needs sunlight and air to revitalize its lungs” were recurrent.35 With changing intensities over time they carried some of the meanings of the civilizing and recreational greens (Figures 9.2a and 9.2b). In 1882, the hygienic virtues of parks and plazas providing the chance to “breathe fresh air” were highlighted.36 By the turn of the century, the socialist newspaper La Vanguardia defended the right of “penniless girls and shoeshine boys to a bit of oxygen.”37 And in 1902, while inaugurating a new park, the mayor of Buenos Aires explained his initiative as one of the city’s many efforts to “avoid diseases.”38 The metaphor of the urban green as lungs and the city as a human body led to outdoor spaces being seen increasingly as “appendixes to the modern houses in need of the necessary sunlight.”39 The 1925 urban plan for B ­ uenos Aires referred to the riverside bathing areas as “one of the few lungs this city has” and recommended creating a woodsy greenbelt “which would benefit

202  Diego Armus (a)

(b)

Figure 9.2  (a) The urban elite enjoying civilizing green space, a “lung” for the city. Parque 3 de Febrero, Avenida de los Lagos, c. 1916 and (b) A more democratic and recreational green space, another “lung” for the city. Area de Juegos Infantiles. Parque Chacabuco.

the city’s atmosphere while saving a great deal of money on hospital expenses.”40 In 1946, a pessimistic reading of the making of modern Buenos Aires underlined that “the metropolis’s lungs lay outside its body […], the city only breathes on its edges.”41 The lung image was closely associated with individual and collective health. In the 1920s, summer camps in several city parks received much praise

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   203 for giving children “a rural experience for at least one month”; also, outdoor spaces in the neighborhoods were celebrated as a way to “breathe fresh air and take a rest from the suffocating atmosphere of unhealthy households and menacing traffic.”42 In fact, turn-of-the-century urban r­ eformism had been addressing the need for “city lungs.” After resignedly accepting the absence of parks in the city’s downtown, hygienists began to work on the idea of a network of peripheral parks that would surround Buenos Aires with a greenbelt and limit its growth. Starting in the 1890s, mayors sought to define the boundaries of a dense city and the parks they designed by the 1900s aimed to limit any urban expansion. Nonetheless, at that time as well as during the 1920s urban expansion totally overran the green obstacles placed in its path. Fostered by real estate speculation, the possibility of buying lots on installments, and the growth of transportation systems, expansion advanced steadily, turning the closest and most precarious settlements into well-consolidated neighborhoods inhabited by masses of working families interested in leaving the city’s most central areas. A vertical expansion, less dramatic than the horizontal, also took place. Many high-rise buildings and some skyscrapers transformed the city’s downtown. In 1940, the newspaper La Nación bemoaned “a regime of shadows that is invading entire areas of the city; small squares are becoming anti-hygienic places where the benefits of green urban areas are undermined by these urban curtains.”43 Off the downtown, “the overcrowding of houses” led some to consider Buenos Aires neighborhoods as “conglomerates without empty spaces, [parts of] a city with a terrible pulmonary problem.”44 Articulated in this way, the concern was nothing new. In 1891, and grounded on ideas of hygiene, accessibility and urban concentration, politician and hygienist Guillermo Rawson had advocated building small squares away from the coast.45 But in 1908, an assessment of the city’s growth by Benito Carrasco concluded that it was pointless to keep on thinking about Buenos Aires as a concentrated city. Both inventive and realistic, he accepted urban expansion and sought to provide emerging neighborhoods with well-equipped parks and plazas that that would serve as civic centers.46 By then, it was apparent that parks and plazas had failed to limit urban growth as the city’s mayors had wanted. Instead, they had facilitated the creation and consolidation of new neighborhoods and their very localized identities. However, during those years and well into the 1940s, city planners claimed time and again that this type of urbanization had led to very intensive occupation of urban land, high residential density, and a lack of green spaces. In 1927, Eduardo Schiaffino indicated that the practice of joining one house to another, without leaving “a single gap to breathe in,” as well as the scarcity of open spaces made it urgent to create a “central network of avenues and greenways” to connect medium-sized and large parks.47 And in 1946 Carlos Della Paolera stated that city officials as well as neighborhood associations had a paradoxical “notion of what green space means”: On the one hand, they deemed parks and plazas great weapons against “urban

204  Diego Armus suffocation,” and, on the other, they celebrated “neighborhood progress” in terms of building on almost any vacant lot.48 In the 1940s, the image of green spaces as lungs was as in vogue as it had been in the 1880s. This time, though, the aim was not to design a modern city, concentrated and self-contained in accordance with the tastes of its ruling elites, but to create parks and plazas throughout the urban and metropolitan grids. The language of green spaces as the city’s lungs accompanied the arrival of modernity in Buenos Aires, both when the city was a kind of large village and when it was becoming a metropolis. With local adjustments this discourse echoed some tenets of European and North-American urban reformism. Absent, however, was the discourse of the lungs both in the industrial city of the 1880s, when Buenos Aires was still relatively small and surrounded by open fields, as well as in the early 1940s, when it had just begun its first phase of metropolization. This absence should not surprise. After all, Buenos Aires was a city with industries, not an industrial city.

Concluding Remarks Urban hygiene was discussed in the broader context of an imprecise public ideology which sought to lay the groundwork for the protection and well-being of Buenos Aires’ population. Ambitious and reformist, this ideology invoked to varying degrees the figures of social solidarity, order, and the advancement of social rights. It also created and consolidated state agencies staffed by experts who would produce an array of specific policies geared toward moving beyond private charity by civil or religious organizations. As a public and private issue, hygiene was part of this ideology of the public. Although clearly shaped by biopolitics, its history between 1870 and 1940 does not unfold in tandem with the milestones of political history. The 1890 revolution, World War I, and 1930 military coup d’état were not particularly decisive in terms of social or health policy novelties, biomedical advances, urban infrastructure, changes in morbidity and mortality patterns, or people’s habits vis-à-vis their health care. Other factors seem to have been more relevant: fast physical and demographic growth, advances in modern bacteriology, the use of statistics, efficient state agencies executing public health initiatives or supervising private companies’ undertakings, and the increasingly relevant role of professional experts—primarily medical doctors—in public affairs as well as in individuals’ private lives. And as a central tenet of this ideology, modern hygiene came into being as a biopolitical endeavor with utopian, prescriptive, scientific, moralizing, and practical dimensions. The hygienist urban imagination, the urban hygiene consensus, and the idea of the urban green were constitutive discourses of the arrival of modernity in Buenos Aires. Common sense reactions vis-à-vis hygiene’s catalog of norms underscore, on the other hand, that such discourses were not and are not enough to understand the making of the modern hygienic city. Tensions that crisscrossed not only those discourses but also policies and

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   205 experiences were at the very core of a historical process that took place in times of changing patterns of morbidity and mortality, from decades dominated by infectious diseases to decades when the weight of the so-called diseases of civilization was becoming paramount. Marked by biomedical uncertainties, those were times when the limitations of science, medicine, and human agency were apparent. And so was the quest to successfully spread hygiene. In discussing these issues, both sociocultural histories of diseases and historical studies of public health have strongly focused their attention on metaphors and public health initiatives, but only occasionally on people’s experiences with diseases, and only very seldom on the complicated relationships between culture, society, microorganisms, and history. This last disengagement could be quite problematic. An insufficient recognition of the reciprocal relationships between humans and germs implies the risk of overestimating what public health can achieve without taking into account the natural history of certain diseases. While it is true that socially and culturally constructed diseases and public health initiatives have served to advance diverse social and political agendas, sometimes with notable success, it is also true that a wider and complex epidemiological universe could seriously limit the performances of biomedicine and public health. That universe is always in flux and can change as a result of human actions, both intentional and unintentional, and at times simply by itself. Human agency cannot always effectively modify those epidemiological scenarios. When it does, it is because of the interwoven influences produced not only by science, culture, power relations, society, technology, and the economy, but also by nature. This is also a crucial and necessary dimension to be taken into account in the history of successes and failures of hygiene in the modern city.

Notes 1 Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times, (London: Routledge, 1999); Virginia Smith, Clean. A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City. Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity. Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty– Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 3 About different aspects of these transformations see, James Scobie, Buenos Aires, Plaza to Suburbs. 1870–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Charles Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires. Argentina, 1870–1930 (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1974); Richard Walter, Politics and Urban Growth in Buenos Aires: 1910–1942 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Fernando Rocchi, Chimneys in the Desert. Industrialization in Argentina ­during the Export Boom Years, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Diego Armus, The Ailing City. Health, Tuberculosis and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). In Spanish, see Guy Bourdé, Buenos Aires: Urbanización e inmigración (Buenos Aires: Huemul 1977);

206  Diego Armus José Luis Romero and Luis Alberto Romero, eds., Buenos Aires. Una historia de cuatro siglos (Buenos Aires: Abril, 1983); Jorge Liernur and Graciela Silvestri, El umbral de la metrópolis. Transformaciones técnicas y cultura en la modernización de Buenos Aires (1870–1930) (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1993); Adrián Gorelick, La grilla y el parque. Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1998). 4 This article focuses on the city itself. On the history of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, a scarcely discussed topic, see Diego Armus and Ernesto ­Bohoslavsky, “Vivienda Popular y Asociacionismo en el Gran Buenos Aires (1900–1976),” in Gabriel Kessler, ed., El Gran Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Unipe/Edhasa, 2015). 5 A detailed discussion of these different tempos in the incorporation of novel technologies—for what I know a topic barely addressed in the historiography— exceeds the scope of this article. 6 Emilio Coni, “La ciudad argentina ideal o del porvenir,” La Semana Médica, April 14, 1919; Higiene social, asistencia y previsión social. Buenos Aires caritativo y previsor (Buenos Aires: Spinelli, 1918). 7 Benjamin Richardson, “Hygeia, la ciudad de la salud,” Revista Médico Quirúrgica, Publicación Quincenal. Órgano de los Intereses Médicos Argentinos, 12, 1876, pp. 113, 117, 142, 166, 186; Emilio Coni, Progrès de l’hygiene dans la République Argentine (París: Bailliere, 1887). 8 Emilio Coni, Memorias de un médico higienista (Contribución a la historia de la higiene pública y social) (Buenos Aires: A. Flaiban, 1918). 9 Emilio Coni, “La ciudad argentina ideal o del porvenir.” 10 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922); F. E. Manuel y F. P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Belknap, 1979). 11 Diego Armus, “La ciudad higiénica entre Europa y Latinoamérica,” Antonio Lafuente ed., Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993). 12 Emilio de Arana, La medicina y el proletariado (Rosario: Tipografía El Comercio, 1899). 13 Municipalidad de Buenos Aires, Memoria del Departamento Ejecutivo Municipal de la Capital Federal presentada al Honorable Concejo Deliberante por el intendente municipal Dr. Joaquín S. de Anchorena, 1912 (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería, 1913), p. 150. 14 La Semana Médica, November 22, 1928. 15 La Habitación Popular, March, 1935. 16 Revista Grafa, 1943–1944. 17 CGT, 1942–1944. 18 Roque Izzo and Florencio Escardó, Una campaña de propaganda sanitaria (Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Tisiológicas, 1940), pp. 16, 25. 19 Archivos Argentinos de Tisiología, 1947, XXIII, April–June, p. 169. 20 Primer Congreso Nacional de Medicina, 1916. 21 Viva Cien Años, June 6 1940, pp. 363–364. 22 Roque Izzo and Florencio Escardó, Una campaña de propaganda sanitaria, p. 25. 23 Eduardo Wilde, “El hipo,” Tesis doctoral, Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1870, pp. 7–8. 24 PBT, II, 26, 1905, p. 62. 25 Francisco Súnico, La tuberculosis en las sierras de Córdoba (Buenos Aires: E. de Martino, 1922), pp. 253, 385; Telémaco Susini, “Prólogo al trabajo de Francisco Súnico,” Francisco Súnico, La tuberculosis en las sierras de Córdoba, p. 14; La Semana Médica, June 24, 1918; La Doble Cruz, I, 1, 1936; II, 7, 1937. 26 PBT, III, 85, 1906, p. 87.

On Hygiene in a Modern Peripheral City   207 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

La Razón, February 10, 1921. Ciencia Social, 2, 1900. El Obrero en Madera, October 1906; Acción Obrera, June 1927; October 1928. Acción Obrera, May 1928; October 1928. Ideas, July 1923. Nuestra Tribuna. Quincenario Femenino de Ideas, Crítica, Arte y Literatura, September 1923. Also in La Protesta, October 24, 1903; El Azote, October 1911; El Rebelde, September 1901. El Obrero en Dulce, July 1921. Revista Médico Quirúrgica. Publicación Quincenal. Órgano de los Intereses Médicos Argentinos, 1869, p. 350. Municipalidad de Buenos Aires, Memoria de la Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Año 1873 (Buenos Aires: Jorge E. Cook, 1873), p. 6. Vicente Quesada, Memorias de un viejo. Escenas de costumbres de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1888), pp. 64–65. La Vanguardia, December 21, 1901. El Diario, September 11, 1902. Municipalidad de la Capital, Memoria presentada al Honorable Concejo Deliberante, Año 1896 (Buenos Aires, 1897), p. 56. Intendencia Municipal, Comisión de Estética Edilicia, Proyecto orgánico para la urbanización del municipio. El plano regulador y de reforma de la Capital Federal (Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1925), p. 395. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, La cabeza de Goliat (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1946), p. 135. La Vanguardia, December 12, 1922; Vida Comunal, September 1, 1929. La Nación, April 10, 1940. La Nación, January 20, 1936. Guillermo Rawson, Escritos y discursos, t. II (Buenos Aires: Compañía Sudamericana de Billetes, 1891), p. 123. Benito Carrasco, “Evolución de los espacios verdes,” Boletín del Honorable Concejo Deliberante, 33/34, Buenos Aires, 1942, p. 497. Eduardo Schiaffino, Urbanización de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1927), p. 50. Carlos Della Paolera, Buenos Aires y sus problemas urbanos, Buenos Aires, Oikos, 1997 (1946), pp. 39, 48–49.

10 From Electricity to the Photo Archive National Identity and the Planning of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition Lucila Mallart Introduction In the mid-1910s, Barcelona’s elites were planning a second world fair after the success of the 1888 Universal Exhibition. The leading architect, politician, and art historian Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956) was commissioned with the full architectural and display design of the future Exhibition. Puig was a renowned Modernista architect that would soon become President of a Catalan Commonwealth known as Mancomunitat.1 In 1915, the first design showcased a grandiose “Palace of Light,” a huge lantern that was to preside over the whole site while showcasing electricity as a spectacle. Only one year later, in 1916, this “Palace of Light” was replaced by a “Palace of Ancient Art.” This “Palace of Ancient Art” was meant to host a grand exhibition of Spanish historical art and archaeology, based on an extensive research programme that would eventually produce over 80,000 photographic records. Despite the initial appearance of turning backward to a Spain-oriented choice, Puig would later argue that his display of “all of Spain’s art” was an eminently modern and Catalanista project.2 How could art and archaeology be perceived as a produce of Modernity side to side with electricity? How could an exhibition of Spanish art display Catalonia’s identity? What provoked the shift from the “Palace of Light” to the photo archive? And, more importantly, what can it tell us about world fairs as mechanisms for the display of cultural and political identities? These are the questions addressed in the present chapter. Following the rise of material culture studies, world fairs have become a particularly popular subject among historians of Modernity. They have long been regarded as powerful mechanisms for the dissemination of narratives of the nations that hosted them. According to Paul Greenhalgh, “it was the French who first exploited the potential of Exhibitions as carriers of nationalist ideas.” After the Revolution, display events “were amongst the first manifestations of a new era,” he says, “in which ‘Frenchness’ had to be redefined and then collectively loved by the population.”3 Complementing this view, Tony Bennett has looked at the creation and dissemination

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   209 of “messages of power” in the context of the expansion of modern display spaces such as world fairs but also museums, and has identified the “exhibitionary complex” as the tool with which national and other narratives of power permeated people’s hearts and minds.4 Such national narratives were initially searched in the grand fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the ones held in Paris, London, and the new North-American cities. In recent years, however, attention has shifted toward Exhibitions held in more peripheral locations and with more complex identity politics dynamics.5 This chapter builds on this trend of research, using the preliminary discussions for a new Universal Exhibition to be held in Barcelona in the early 1900s to elaborate an argument on the interplay between the construction of substate national identities and the reception of technology. In doing so, it provides new insights on the long-standing debate on the relationship between Modernity and regional identities. The classic modernization theory that considered Modernity inseparable from nation-state building has been thoroughly challenged in the last decades.6 Such approaches are underpinned by methods that accord a particular role to culture in the constitution of modern identities. According to Núñez-Seixas, this perspective reveals the “multiple” and “hybrid” nature of cultural and political identities,7 moving beyond approaches that linked modern nationalisms directly to a process of modernization that could only be understood in centralist, unifying terms.8 But “becoming national did not necessarily mean ceasing to be local,” and in Spain and elsewhere, Modernity could also be articulated in a vernacular idiom. Umbach and Hüppauf coined the term “vernacular modernism” to describe the process by which, “in spite of its virtual absence from theories of the modern, the vernacular lived on as a strong subcurrent of modern praxis.”9 And yet, regional or substate identities are still often regarded, especially in southern Europe, as antimodernizing forces. In fact, in Spanish historiography, and particularly in the case of the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition, “regionalism” is still most typically associated with tradition, folklore, and a sense of nostalgia for the ancien régime.10 This article challenges this view by placing Modernity at the center of the discussions and projects elaborated during the 1910s in preparation for that Exhibition. Why look at the preparatory works instead of the Exhibition itself? The fair celebrated in 1929 differed notably from the original plans. The event was crucial both to the remaking of Barcelona’s urban layout and to the cultural representation of General Primo de Rivera’s régime, who governed over Spain after a coup between 1923 and 1930.11 However, what ended up being a celebration of Primo’s Spain had originally been designed, in the 1910s, as a major “exhibitionary complex”—to use Bennett’s words—in the hands of Catalonia’s nationalist elite. The tension in the differing identity politics embedded in each version of the project, thus, invites for a reconsideration of the role of the Exhibition in Barcelona’s cultural and political memories. And yet this tension has been scarcely explored by historians. New

210  Lucila Mallart materials recently found in the personal archive of Puig i Cadafalch, one of the key figures behind the project, cast new light onto this discussion.12 On the one hand, they offer an unprecedented insight into the role of electricity in the architect’s original project, and how it interacted with Catalonia’s and Spain’s identity politics. And on the other hand, it reveals the centrality of the photo archive in the display of Spanish art and architecture. In doing so, the present chapter contributes to the growing and glowing interest on archives as cultural devices.13 And more specifically, it brings a new dimension to the discussion around visual repositories and the role that they had and continue to have in the configuration of today’s world. Photo archives were and are instrumental to the construction of cultural and political identities, from Tsarist Russia to present-day Kurdistan.14 And yet, it has been almost taken for granted that, when “giving visual substance to national identity”—to use Tiziana Serena and Costanza Caraffa’s words—there was always a continuum between the subject and the object of the visual record. Thus, it is easy to understand why photographic missions across France and Russia contributed to the French and Russian nation-building effort, connecting a diversity of regions to their “fatherland.”15 But, how could a visual archive of Spain’s art and archaeology contribute to build Catalonia’s differentiated identity?16

An Exhibition of Electric Industries? Barcelona hosted its first world fair in 1888. The city went through major urban renovations to hold an event that was key to the construction of both the city’s modern identity and the showcasing of late nineteenth-century Imperial Spain.17 At the time Spain was immersed in a period of political stability, known as the Bourbon Restoration, that had begun in 1874 and was characterized by the turno pacífico: the rotation of the conservative and the liberal parties in the government.18 Prior to that, the country had seen decades of civil wars, a disputed Queen, and a revolution that was followed by the establishment of the brief First Spanish Republic from 1873 to 1874. Thus, the 1888 Universal Exhibition celebrated this untroubled moment, while also setting the bases for the mobilization of a differentiated Catalanista imagination.19 However, things had changed by the turn of the century. With the loss of Spain’s remaining oversees colonies in 1898, a series of intellectuals and incipient politicians challenged the ability of the Restoration system to modernize the country and pledged for a change. This came to be known as the regenerationist movement.20 The emergence of new regionalist parties, such as the Catalanista Lliga Regionalista—founded in 1901—was part of this process.21 It was in this context that voices were raised to hold a second world fair in Barcelona, and from very early on, the celebration of the event was linked to the electoral success of the Lliga Regionalista, as Puig i Cadafalch claimed in 1905.22 Puig took the lead from a group of electricity businessmen led

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   211 by Joan Pich i Pon (1878–1937), who initially came up with the idea.23 These entrepreneurs were involved in the instalment of electric plants along the Llobregat river and in Barcelona, which has led historians to argue that the project of an exhibition of electrical industries emerged as a strategy to gain new markets for these industries.24 This was linked to the already initiated projects of the electrification of Catalonia and the construction of an electricity-powered railway network. From 1907 onward, this group gathered around the Asociación de Industriales Electricistas de Cataluña (Association of Catalan Electricity Industrials), which had Pich i Pon as its first president. He was also one of the members of the executive board (“Junta directiva”) created in 1913 to promote an “Exposición Internacional de Industrias Eléctricas y sus aplicaciones” (“International Exhibition of Electric Industries and Their Applications”). However, after 1913, the core topic of the Exhibition shifted quickly from electricity to Spanish art and industry. In 1914, a “General Spanish Exhibition” was added to the project, and by 1915 it occupied the central position in Puig i Cadafalch’s architectural design for the site. The “Exhibition of Electric Industries” was relegated to the back of the scene, behind the Exhibition’s main building and up in the mountain of Montjuïc. By 1916, the detachment of the Junta from the initial electricity project was made evident by the need of the Association of Catalan Electricity Industrials to “recall” that “the idea of celebrating an Exhibition of Electrical Industries in Barcelona had been born” in one of their assemblies. Next to this recall, the association filed a complaint in which their members claimed to be reimbursed for the expenses of the trip they had made to Madrid in 1914 in order to present the project to the central government. Further to this, the Junta acknowledged that the original idea for the Exhibition came from this society, as well as the “importance of the works carried out by that Association,”25 in which can be read as a polite gesture toward an organization, and a project, that had by then been dismissed. In addition to this, the planned architectures for the “Exhibition of Electric Industries” were never built, as works started slowly in the Spanish section and, by 1923, when Puig resigned as architect in chief of the Exhibition after General Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état, not even that part had been completed. The project was continued during Primo’s dictatorship and, as it is known, the event finally took place between May 1929 and ­January 1930. Although electric industries were displayed in the final event, they lost the centrality they originally had, as they shared their prominence with, among others, metallurgical and textile industries, applied and graphic arts, agriculture, and sports.26 Local—and some international—historians have commonly argued that the shift from electricity to Spanish art and industry was the consequence of an imposition by the Spanish government, which the Catalan promoters accepted as a lesser evil.27 However, archival evidence suggests otherwise. Not only was the centrality of the Spanish display conceived in Barcelona, there was also a crucial lack of support to the “electricity project” by a

212  Lucila Mallart series of key Catalan personalities, due to several cultural, political, and economic circumstances. The visible leader of this drive was Francesc Cambó (1876–1947), a crucial figure in the Catalan political, economic, and cultural scene during the 1910s and the 1920s. In 1914, he was designated as general curator of the Exhibition together with Pich i Pon. Like Puig, Cambó was a prominent member of the Lliga Regionalista and, in alliance with the Spanish Conservative Party, he eventually became a Minister of the Spanish government twice, in 1918 and in 1921.28 Cambó was also a very successful businessman, who would later have strong interests in the Hispano–American Electricity Company (CHADE), based in Buenos Aires.29 It may be argued that his relationship with this electricity company underpinned his promoting of an Exhibition of Electrical Industries in Barcelona; however, he only became involved with Hispano–American Electricity Company in 1920, and the Junta’s meeting records reveal that he did not sponsor electricity as the core subject of the Exhibition, but on the contrary discouraged it. Cambó casted doubts on the benefits of an Exhibition focused exclusively on electricity and its applications from the very beginning. In the very first official meeting of the Junta, in December 1913, he suggested that this were complemented by a display of “national or regional products.”30 Following this proposal, two separate commissions were created, one for the planning and budgeting of the “Exposición de Industrias Eléctricas” (“Exhibition of Electric Industries”) and another for the “Exposición de Industrias y Productos Nacionales” (“Exhibition of National Industries and Products”).31 The project for a dual Exhibition was then presented to the King Alphonse XIII and President Eduardo Dato at a meeting in Seville that took place from February 9 to 11, 1914. This meeting was accurately showcased as very successful: The members of the Exhibition’s Junta telegraphed daily the Barcelona press about it, and on their arrival from Seville they expressed their satisfaction on their stay, as “in the audience granted by the King they received from Alphonse’s lips expressions of enthusiastic encouragement and of sincere empathy towards the great project that Barcelona prepares.” President Dato also offered to discuss the granting of a 10 million pesetas subvention in the Spanish Parliament.32 The extent of the press coverage is shown by the fact that Cambó considered it unnecessary to debrief his colleagues during the following meeting of the Junta, as, he said, the trip had been sufficiently described in the media.33 Shortly afterward, the first tentative dates for the event were fixed: April to October 1917.34 The subvention was confirmed a few months later after a second trip to Madrid, in May 1914,35 and in July the Spanish Parliament passed the Act which granted the Exhibition an official status.36 Thus, what eventually came to be known as the Spanish Section was not alien in any way to the project of the Catalan bourgeoisie for the Exhibition, let alone that it was imposed by the Madrid government. A purely economic analysis of this same evidence may suggest that granting the financial

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   213 support of the central government was a pivotal motive for the incorporation of the Spanish Section to the project of the Exhibition, especially when considering Cambó’s insistence on the importance of the government’s support. “An Exhibition of this kind,” he said, “is the magnum opus of a generation (…) and to accomplish it, it is necessary to have a combination of several elements and especially the cooperation of the State, particularly with regards to the economic aspect.” Without this economic support, he argued, it would be “impossible” to host the Exhibition.37 Nevertheless, even if finances played a role in Cambó’s decision of including a display of Spain in the Exhibition, the significance that this display acquired certainly surpassed that of a financial compromise. There were a number of reasons behind the drive from electricity to a display of Spain as the core topic of the Exhibition. Adding on to a general perception of electricity as an “outfashioned” topic for world fairs, there was also a consideration of this element as a “foreign” product, and also the idea that Spain should display what other countries did not have: history. There were also other, more tangible, realities, having to do with the evolving role of electricity as an industry in Catalonia throughout the early 1900s. Each of these factors will be discussed later. During the early 1900s, several commercial and industrial organizations in Barcelona investigated the possibility of a new Exhibition in the city. A  number of personalities such as the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch ­(1867–1956)—who would later have a crucial role in the design of the ­Exhibition—visited or requested information on contemporaneous world fairs, such as Liège 1905,38 Brussels 1910,39 Gent 1913,40 or Lyon 1913.41 However, none of these events included electricity displays. In fact, by 1913 electricity Exhibitions were about to become out of fashion. As Ferran Boleda has shown, displays of technological developments like electricity were present in World Fairs since London’s 1851 Great Exhibition. After the presentation of Edison’s bulbs and Bell’s telephone in Philadelphia 1876, electricity exhibits became especially popular during the 1880s, particularly in the United States. Nevertheless, their popularity decreased throughout the 1890s and the early 1900s, with the last World Fairs to give electricity a central role being Saint Louis 1904 and San Francisco 1915.42 Perhaps responding to this reality, Puig argued in one of his earliest drafts for the Barcelona Exhibition that the event’s central building should have colossal dimensions and great interiors to attract visitors, as pretending that electricity would cause a great effect would lead to failure since “electricity is not a novelty anymore, not even an exception, but [something] common.”43 The need to accompany the display of electricity with a “General Spanish Exhibition” was based on the fact that, according to Cambó, electricity and its applications were “foreign products.”44 This idea is later reinforced in a letter written by Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot i Tetas (1883–1968), a Catalan painter and decorator based in Paris.45 The missive has no date and exists in the form of a typescript held at the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya.

214  Lucila Mallart It has not been possible, for the moment, to assert the context and the aims with which it was written, but the content suggests that it was produced shortly after the opening of the Exhibition in 1929, as Puig compares his original project with its final realization under the Primo de Rivera regime. Reflecting on the original planning for the Exhibition, he retrospectively explains that “it was soon understood” that an exhibition on electricity would be “foreign,” and that local technicians would not have the knowledge necessary to make it attractive to the general public.46 The labeling of electricity as “foreign” by both Cambó and Puig seems paradoxical, if we take into account that Catalonia had an emergent electric industry and that it was the professional association of businessmen in this sector who promoted the celebration of the Exhibition. Their words may in fact echo a concomitant shift that would vastly reformulate the role of those Catalan entrepreneurs in the development of electric industry in the country. In the early 1910s, two companies funded with foreign capital— the Canadian Barcelona Traction, Light and Power, and the French–Swiss Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña—had started the electrification of the northern half of Catalonia, which aimed at providing Barcelona’s factories with large-scale and affordable electric energy using hydraulic resources in the Pyrenees.47 The use of hydroelectric energy, coupled with technological improvements such as the introduction of alternating current, marked a turning point in the amount of energy available and its cost, and it also had an impact on redefining the agents and markets of the sector. Until then, energy for Barcelona-based factories had been produced locally in the city, in small and independent thermoelectric plants,48 but from 1914 onward electricity would be provided exclusively by those two aforementioned foreign companies. Since the early 1900s, small-scale Catalan electricity producers had been in constant need of new markets for the modest and expensive energy they produced and had repeatedly failed to make electricity widely used in public lighting and private homes.49 In contrast, Barcelona Traction and Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña focused on one single but expanding market—industry—which could largely benefit from the more affordable and powerful energy they provided. To put it in other words, the local entrepreneurs who had been leading the development of electricity in Catalonia during the first years of the century, and who had envisaged an Exhibition of Electric Industries as a way of expanding their market, were by 1914 no longer guiding the development of the sector. This role had been taken over by the aforementioned international companies, which counted on new instruments and had new objectives. Their focus on industry as a market for electricity, together with the—temporary— abandoning of the former project of extending the use of electricity into the public and private sectors, may explain why, in 1914, a large Exhibition of Electric Industries was no longer considered a priority. At that time, there was no longer a need to expand markets, but rather an interest in focusing on a single one: industry.

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   215 This tension between the old and the new targets of the electricity industry in Catalonia permeated Puig’s first draft for the Exhibition. In a largely unknown floor plan dated 1915, the central position of the site is occupied by a “Gran Saló—Palau de la Llum” (“Great Hall—Palace of Light”).50 The Palace of Light is also visible in a much better-known perspective of the same project, where it appears as a big and central cupola (Figure 10.1). A very detailed description of the Palace of Light is held in Puig’s archive. The text indicates that the building will be dedicated to the “usual applications of electricity,” that is, “public lighting,” discarding “technical” and “industrial” uses.51 This obviously misrepresents electricity’s actual uses and business dynamics around 1915. The pretension that the “public lighting” is one of the “usual applications of electricity” is actually reminiscent of a by then long-time failed project. In the late 1800s, the Sociedad Española de Electricidad became a world pioneer in attempting to spread the use of electricity in Barcelona’s public lighting, but the company had to close down before the advent of the new century due to shortages in demand. By the mid-1910s, the use of electric energy in public transport was very marginal, with 70% of the market focusing on industrial uses, and the other 30% corresponding to theatres, restaurants, and other venues using electricity as an attraction.52 Puig’s misrepresentative and anachronistic account of the situation of the electricity sector in Catalonia conveys a direct dissociation from the route taken by the two leading companies in the sector, Barcelona Traction and Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña, from the early 1910s onward. Arguably, this does not indicate a real lack of knowledge but rather an ideological take; after all, public lighting represented a meeting point between

Figure 10.1  Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Exposició Barcelona MDCCCCXVII (1915). This view illustrates Puig’s plans for the Montjuïc exhibition and shows, in the middle, the giant cupola that was meant to host the Palace of Light.

216  Lucila Mallart the electrical revolution and the modernization of the city, something Puig was closely involved in. In the early 1900s, he had promoted the Jaussely Plan, aimed at connecting Barcelona with its adjacent towns, and, with a specifically technological insight, he carried out, during the late 1890s, the modernization of the sewage system of the city of Mataró.53 Perhaps Puig’s aim was to explicitly detach himself—and with him, the project of the Exhibition as a whole—from the agenda of those two “foreign” companies. In fact, his project for the Palace of Light does not actually call for an effective implementation of electricity in Barcelona’s public lighting, but rather understands and presents it as a spectacle. This also allows understanding why, 15 years later, electricity did eventually find a place in the final layout of the Exhibition celebrated in Barcelona in 1929: Then, the displays were used to foster the domestic uses of this energy, following the appearance of appliances such as electric refrigerators, cookers, irons, and the like.54 Similarly, the existence, in 1914, of these two foreign-funded companies had come to resolve the long-standing problem of limited financial resources in Catalan industry, something that, since the early 1900s, had been consistently perceived as a burden for the development of the sector. If during the early years of the twentieth century the project of the Exhibition may have responded to a strategy to attract foreign capital, by 1914 the participation of foreign investors in the establishment of the Pyrenees hydroelectric plants had already neutralized this need. In short, by 1914, a series of symbolic, cultural, and economic circumstances had placed electricity in a disadvantageous position to continue to be the core topic of Barcelona’s second International Exhibition. Not only were the days of ground-breaking inventions gone, but electricity was also increasingly perceived as “foreign” by local elites as international companies took over the development of electrical industries in Catalonia. From an economic point of view, the changes brought about by these companies also decreased the need to search for new publics and new inversions within the framework of a world fair.

From Light to Ancient Art There was, however, another reason why electricity seemed suddenly inappropriate as the main topic for the Exhibition. Indeed, while a colossal “Palace of Light” (Palacio de la Luz) dedicated to the display of electric artefacts and fantasies occupied the central space of the layout designed by Puig in 1915, by the next year that “Palace of Light” had been substituted by a “Palace of Ancient Art.”55 How did art come to substitute electricity? And, more importantly, what can this shift tell us about the relationship between the culture of representation of world fairs and Catalonia’s emerging national identity? At first sight, it may seem that this shift toward art—and also archaeology— responded to the common use of these disciplines in contemporaneous

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   217 56

nation-building processes. While this must certainly be acknowledged, the case discussed here presents an especially complex national dynamics as Cambó and Puig did not conceive an Exhibition of Catalonia’s artistic past, but—in Puig’s own words—one of “all of Spain’s art.”57 Thus, the present case does not fit within ordinary interpretations of the use of archaeological displays in world fairs for nation-building purposes,58 as this was a project conceived at the core of cultural and political Catalanism that did not intend to display Catalonia’s artistic tradition, but Spain’s. Cambó’s and Puig’s displays were not intended to be, however, just a “simple” exhibition of Spain’s art history. They aimed at nothing less than displaying “all of Spain’s art” carefully “classified” and “theorized.”59 Thus, in order to “catalogue the artistic wealth of Spain,” 50,000 pesetas of the Exhibition’s budget were consigned in 1915 for the “formation of the graphic inventory and for obtaining reproductions.”60 The inventory was soon known as the Repertori Iconogràfic d’Espanya (“Iconographic Repertoire of Spain”). In charge of it were Puig and Jeroni Martorell (1877–1951), an architect and restorer of historical monuments, and Puig’s close collaborator. As a matter of fact, Martorell had proposed just a few years earlier, in 1909, to create a “graphic inventory of Catalonia” with the argument that civilized nations form graphic inventories of works of art. Catalogues, negatives archives and photographs, museums of reproductions, national museums, these are the means used by cultured nations to inventory their artistic wealth and make history out of them.61 Graphic inventories had indeed become commonplace throughout Europe by the early 1900s. As Constanza Caraffa has shown, the potential of photography to record works of art was recognized almost immediately after its invention in the mid-nineteenth century. It became crucial to the development of comparative art historical studies, but also for the formation of modern nations, as photographic collections allowed to visualize the nation’s past.62 From the famous Mission Héliographique, which documented France’s historical monuments in 1851, to the rise of amateur “photographic surveys” in Britain around 1900,63 photo archives, both public and private, sparkled Europe from West to East.64 Puig’s alleged model were “the ones held [in Paris] at the Trocadero Library and at the Direction générale des Beaux-Arts in the rue Valois.”65 The “Trocadero Library” may be the library of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878 on the occasion of the Paris Universal Exposition and a precedent of today’s Musée de l’homme. The museum’s library gathered mainly ethnographical and archaeological collections and has been considered one of the axial sites for the development of French anthropology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.66 On the other hand, Rue Valois was the site of the headquarters of the Direction générale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the equivalent of today’s Ministry of culture. Both were formed at the beginning of the

218  Lucila Mallart Third Republic (1870–1940), a moment which, like the Catalan Mancomunitat, was characterized by a major effort in the creation of public cultural and educational institutions.67 In fact, Paris was often taken as a model by Catalan urbanists and cultural developers, and in particular in Puig’s work. As early as 1905, he claimed that a new world fair would give Barcelona the “resemblance of Paris” and that, in doing so, it would also “bring Catalonia to the world market and its thought to the stream of world ideas.”68 But the urge to inventory and display “all of Spain’s art” through photographic reproductions had also other, more intangible, influences. P ­ uig’s words echo Oliver Wendell Holmes’ vision of a “total photo archive,” dated 1859.69 This “utopia” has been described by Greg Mitman and K ­ elley Wilder as a “documentary impulse” that emerged in the late nineteenth century following the belief that photography and film had the capacity “to visually capture and order the world.”70 The Repertori may indeed be understood as the outcome of an impulse. Thirty years later, in 1943, Cambó would use the Catalan term dèria to refer to his project of gathering “the documented photographic reproductions of all the works of art in Spain.”71 A dèria is a personal obsession or mania, passionate, and irrational. It was indeed an epic task. In the letter to Miquel Massot, Puig recalled that the display of Spain “demanded a long, large and extensive preparation.”72 In line with Martorell’s original conception, early plans for the inventory of “all of Spain’s art” included, together with photographs, plaster reproductions of monuments, watercolors executed by art school students, dioramas of disappeared cities, and real pieces of art.73 In the end, and even though only photographic reproductions were produced, the project acquired “gargantuan” dimensions—to use Mitman and Wilder’s term—as it gathered over 80,000 photographic records. The sediment of Britain’s photographic survey movement (1885–1918) amounts to “only” 55,000 images, while also the contemporaneous Archaeological Survey of India reached 30,000.74 The archive was split in two in the 1930s. The art files were moved to the newly created National Museum of Art, while the archaeological ones were gathered in the Museum of Archaeology, where they remain today.75 Figure 10.2 shows an example of the archive files. The “gargantuan” enterprise of the visual inventory was disrupted by Primo’s coup and the change in the direction of the Exposition. The 1929 event did have an exhibition of Spanish art, but Puig was notoriously disappointed by it. His reaction to the display shows that the Catalan character of such a seemingly Spanish-looking project as a display of “all of Spain’s art” lay beneath the surface, in the way the knowledge of that art was to be organized and displayed. And this was not only because artistic inventories were deeply embedded in the Noucentista approach to research. In a review of the exhibition, Puig regretted the removal of “the scientific element of our country”—the expression he uses for “country” in Catalan is “de casa nostra.” He complained that the final display lacked “method” and “order,” and that instead of the “scientific method the initiators had dreamt of,” the

(a)

(b)

Figure 10.2  (a) The church of Cornellà de Conflent, in a historically Catalan region of the south of France, is one of the examples of Catalan architecture located beyond the administrative borders of Catalonia that was included in the Repertori. (b) Front and back of the file no. 27.746 on Cornellà de Conflent. Repertori iconogràfic d’Espanya. Exposició de Barcelona 1918. 

220  Lucila Mallart display resulted in a “rich and colossal exhibition of antiquities in the house of a sumptuous merchant.”76 On the basis of contemporaneous accounts, Enric Granell argues that “El arte en España” was indeed a chaotic mixture of pieces with different formats and time periods, in which “it was impossible to understanding anything.”77 In contrast to this, Puig explained that the “initiators” had prepared “a vast graphic inventory of Spanish art, classified by subjects, which included more than 150,000 documents,” and on the basis of that a “plan” had been “deduced” that would “lead to an orderly display of the history of art in Spain in all its complex periods and in all its areas of expansion.”78

Conclusions Discussing electricity and the photo archive during the planning for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition allows a rethinking of the dynamics of representation of art, archaeology, and other related disciplines visà-vis more explicitly technological improvements such as electricity. The nonlinear reception of electricity in Catalonia, being promoted as an object for mass consumption when local entrepreneurs were seeking new markets, but discarded as nonfashionable once the sector had shifted toward less public uses of electricity, also provides information on the contextual character of the configuration as “modern” of technological developments. As Jordi Ferran and Agustí Nieto-Galan have pointed out, the transformation of Western cities by electricity “was seldom a process of linear, uncritical progress and “modernity.”79 As we have seen, this context was not only shaped by business dynamics, but also by the logics of world fairs—by 1914, the once very novel subject of electricity was already in decline as a display topic—and by identity politics. In this sense, the creation, in 1914, of the Catalan Commonwealth—the Mancomunitat—certainly had an impact on the configuration of the Exhibition. Both Puig and Cambó, the main figures behind the project, were leading members of the Lliga Regionalista, the party that dominated the Catalan political scene from the early 1900s to the mid-1920s. The complex national dynamics in lieu between Barcelona and the Spanish government were reflected in the display design of the Exhibition, an ambitious overview of Spain’s art historical past based on an extensive visual repository. The “Repertori iconogràfic” engages with many other photo archives that, in early twentieth-century Europe, visualized national and regional identities. It also echoes other enterprises that, from France to Russia and from Britain to India, aimed at visually gathering all the available knowledge on one specific topic in photo archives. This potential was especially recognized by historians of art, and in doing so, Puig was aligning with his Europeans and American colleagues—hence his fear that Primo’s display of Spanish art in 1929 would disappoint foreign visitors. Unlike other cases in Europe and beyond, however, in this case the photo archive was used to negotiate difference in a rather peculiar way:

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   221 Even though it showed Spain’s artistic heritage, its promoters regarded it as an essentially Catalanista project. According to Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the “scientific” organization of the archive, and not its contents, conveyed its national character. The “Repertori iconogràfic,” thus, appears as a dissonance in early twentieth-century “national” photo archives, subverting the relationship between the regional and the national, and opening new paths for research on the interplay between visual repositories and identity politics.

Acknowledgments This chapter is based on a paper presented at the 9th STEP Meeting: Science and Technology in the European Periphery, Lisbon, Portugal, September 1–3, 2014, as part of a panel on “Urban peripheries? Science in ‘Second Cities’ around 1900.” I am most grateful to the panel and conference organizers for giving me the chance to learn from an incredibly rich program and to discuss my work with a very stimulating audience. I am also grateful to the archivists at the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and the Arxiu Municipal Contemporani de Barcelona for their excellent assistance while gathering archive materials for this research, and to Antoni Malet, Maiken Umbach, Ross Balzaretti and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the original drafts.

Notes 1 Created in 1914, the Mancomunitat was a federation of Catalan provinces that “re-united” the Catalan territory for the first time since the 1714 War of Spanish Succession and has been regarded as a precedent to the present day autonomous government of the Generalitat. See, among others, Albert Balcells, ed., La Mancomunitat de Catalunya i l’autonomia (Barcelona: Proa, 1996). One of the few English-language approaches to the period can be found in Joseph Harrison, “An Espanya Catalana: Catalanist Plans to Transform Spain into a Modern Capitalist Economy, 1898–1923,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 143–156. 2 Josep Puig i Cadafalch, “L’exhibició de l’Art d’Espanya a l’Exposició de Barcelona” Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Anuari MCMXXVII-XXXI VIII (1936): 2–3. 3 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 114. This monograph was recently expanded in Paul Greenhalgh, Fair World: A History of World’s Fairs and Exhibitions from London to Shanghai 1851–2010 (Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK: Papadakis Dist A C, 2011). 4 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 60–61. 5 In the case of Spain, see Stephen Jacobson, “Interpreting Municipal Celebrations of Nation and Empire: The Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1888,” in Nationalism and the Reshaping of Urban Communities, 1848–1914, ed. William Whyte and Oliver Zimmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 74–109; Jordana Mendelson, “El Poble Espanyol / El Pueblo Español (1929),” in Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and The Modern Nation, 1929–1939 (Penn State Press, 2005), 1–37.

222  Lucila Mallart 6 This debate has been particularly dynamic among historians of modern Germany. See David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), especially the introduction. 7 Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, “Historiographical Approaches to Sub-National Identities in Europe,” in Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13. 8 The classical advocate of this view is found in Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965); and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 9 See Maiken Umbach and Berndt-Rüdiger Hüppauf, Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 10 See, for instance, Eric Storm, The Culture of Regionalism: Art, Architecture and International Exhibitions in France, Germany and Spain, 1890–1939 ­(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 11 From an architectural point of view, the most complete study to this date is Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Exposició Internacional de Barcelona 1914–1929: arquitectura i ciutat (Barcelona: Fira de Barcelona, 1985). In addition to that, in recent years there have been a number of approaches to several aspects of the event such as its propagandistic use: Juan Antonio Simón, “La Exposición Internacional de Barcelona en 1929 y su utilización propagandística” Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea 18, no. 2 (2014); Carles Buïgas’ light and water spectacle: David Caralt, “Painting with light in Barcelona (ca. 1929). La difusión de la imagen nocturna de la exposición internacional en las revistas científicas y de ciencia popular norteamericanas” in Las revistas de arquitectura (1900–1975): crónicas, manifiestos, propaganda (Pamplona: T6) Ediciones, 2012), 395–402; David Caralt, Agualuz: de pirotecnias a mundos flotantes: visiones de Carles Buïgas (Madrid: Siruela, 2010); the urbanization of the area: Guillem Fernàndez Gonzàlez, “La urbanització de la plaça d’Espanya de Barcelona entre els anys 1920 i 1926 (projectes i plànols),” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, 2010, 231–249; or its reception in the local press: Robert A. Davidson, “Observing the City, Mediating the Mountain: Mirador and the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona” in Visualizing Spanish Modernity, ed. S. Larson and E. Woods (­Oxford; New York: Berg, 2005), 228–243. The “Pueblo Español,” a conglomerate of Spanish vernacular architectures that still stands today, has received a significant amount of attention on its own. See Brad Epps, “Modern Spaces: Building Barcelona” in Iberian Cities, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (London: Routledge, 2001), 148–197; Mendelson, “El Poble Espanyol/El Pueblo Español (1929).” Parallel to Mendelson’s contribution there was a revival of interest on the Pueblo among local authors as well, most notably Soledad Bengoechea, Els secrets del Poble Espanyol: 1929–2004 (Barcelona: Poble Espanyol de Montjuïc, 2004). 12 Archive locations are abridged as follows: Arxiu Municipal Contemporari de Barcelona. Fons Institucionals: Exposició Internacional de Barcelona de 1929— AMCB. FI:EIB1929; Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya. Fons Puig i Cadafalch— ANC. FPiC. 13 During the last decade, debates have focused on the role of archives in the formation of contemporary forms of knowledge and on the shaping of our collective and historical memories. See Lorraine J. Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive” Osiris, no. 27 (2012): 156–187; and Ann Blair and Jennifer Mulligan, eds., “Toward a Cultural History of the Archives, Special Issue” Archival Science 7, no. 4 (2007).

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   223 14 Tiziana Serena and Costanza Caraffa, “Introduction: Photographs, Archives and the Discourse of Nation,” in Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation, ed. Tiziana Serena and Costanza Caraffa (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). 15 On the discussion of the interplay between regionalism and nation-state building, see Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, “The Region as Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (1840–1936),” European History Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2001): 483–518. 16 On the interplay between cultural difference and nation-state building in modern Spain, see Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes, eds., Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005). 17 See, among others, Albert Garcia Espuche et al., “Modernization and Urban Beautification: The 1888 Barcelona World Fair,” Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 139–159; and Jacobson, “Interpreting Municipal Celebrations of Nation and Empire: The Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1888.” 18 See Stephen Jacobson and Javier Moreno Luzón, “The Political System of the Restoration, 1875–1914: Political and Social Elites,” in Spanish History Since 1808, ed. Adrian Shubert and José Alvarez Junco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 93–109. 19 In this regard, see Lucila Mallart, “Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation” Cultural History 4, no. 2 (2015): 113–135. 20 See, for example, Helen Eve Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., “The Loss of Empire, Regenerationism, and the Forging of a Myth of National Identity,” in Spanish Cultural Studies—An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 21 Jordi Casassas, “Francesc Cambó: el discurs polític del regeneracionisme català,” in El Pensament polític català: del segle XVIII a mitjan segle XX, ed. Francesc Artal and Albert Balcells (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 205–247. 22 Josep Puig i Cadafalch, “A votar per l’Exposició Universal,” La Veu de Catalunya, November 11, 1905. 23 Pich i Pon was a self-made man and a foundational member of the Radical Republican Party, with which he would become deputy of the Barcelona City Council, of the Barcelona Provincial Government, and later a Senator and a member of the Spanish Parliament (‘Cortes’). 24 See Jordi Ferran Boleda, “Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929–1936): De la Font Màgica de Montjuïc a la difusió dels electrodomèstics” (Doctoral Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2013), 42. 25 Actes de la Junta directiva, July 28, 1916, (16–17), Z103-47034, AMCB. FI: EIB1929. This and all translations mine. 26 For a complete overview of Barcelona 1929, see Solà-Morales, Exposició Internacional de Barcelona 1914–1929. 27 Josep Emili Hernández-Cros and Miguel Usandizaga Calparsoro, “L’Exposició de la muntanya perduda. Precisions sobre la urbanització de Montjuic: 1859–1929,” in L’Exposició internacional de Barcelona del 1929: arquitectura i arts decoratives (Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1980), 21; see also Davidson, “Observing the City, Mediating the Mountain: Mirador and the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona.” 28 On Cambó, see Borja de Riquer i Permanyer, Alfonso XIII y Cambó: la monarquía y el catalanismo político (Barcelona: RBA, 2013); Borja de Riquer i Permanyer, Francesc Cambó: home de negocis i empresari cultural (Mataró: Caixa ­Laietana), 2005: and Enric Ucelay-Da Cal, El Imperialismo catalán: Prat de la Riba, Cambó, D’Ors y la conquista moral de España (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2003). 29 Rafael Alcalde, “Cambó a la CHADE: l’inici dolç i el final amarg,” Recerques: Història, economia i cultura, no. 52 (2006): 211–230; Gabriela Dalla-Corte

224  Lucila Mallart

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52

­ aballero, “Empresas, instituciones y red social: la Compañía HispanoamerC icana de Electricidad (CHADE) entre Buenos Aires y Barcelona,” Revista de Indias LXVI, no. 237 (2005): 519–544; Enric Ucelay Da-Cal, “La dimensión desconocida: Cambó en Buenos Aires, entre Franco y Perón, 1941–1946,” Historia social, no. 48 (2004): 87–109. Actes de la Junta directiva, December 20, 1913, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. Actes de la Junta directiva, January 17, 1914, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. “L’Exposició de Barcelona,” La Veu de Catalunya, February 12, 1914. “Actes de la Junta directiva,” February 27, 1914, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. “Actes de la Junta directiva,” March 14, 1914, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. “Actes de la Junta directiva,” May 16, 1914, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. “Actes de la Junta directiva,” July 10, 1914, Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. “Actes de la Junta directiva,” April 25, 1914, [5–7], Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. Francesc d’Assís Mas’ visit to Liège 1905 and subsequent activities in favor of a future Barcelona Exhibition have been described in Ferran Boleda, “Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929–1936),” 42. Josep Puig i Cadafalch received postcards and urban plans from Brussels 1910 from H. Cañellas so that he could “get an idea of the situation of the pavilions and the distribution of the Exhibition.” “[Postcards from H. Cañellas to Josep Puig i Cadafalch],” 1910, UC 1192, ANC. FPiC. Puig’s involvement with Gent 1913 can be seen in his correspondence with Paul Lambotte, the event’s curator of Fine Arts. See “[Correspondence between Paul Lambotte and Josep Puig i Cadafalch],” 1913, UC 1451, ANC. FPiC. Puig’s correspondence with Georges Benoît–Lévy illustrates his participation in the Lyon International Urban Exhibition, also held in 1913. See “[Letter from Georges Benoît-Lévy to Josep Puig i Cadafalch],” July 21, 1913, UC 1129, ANC. FPiC. Based on a chart by Ferran Boleda, “Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929-1936),” 40. “Palacio de la Luz. Grupo IV del Programa,” 1915, [1], UC 253, ANC. FPiC. Actes de la Junta directiva, December 20, 1913. I am grateful to Xavier Nubiola for the information regarding Miquel Massot. “[Letter from Josep Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot],” [1929], UC 249, ANC. FPiC, [1]. Luis Urteaga, “El proceso de electrificación en Cataluña (1881–2000),” in Obras Públicas en Cataluña. Presente, pasado y futuro (Barcelona: Real Academia de Ingeniería, 2003), 355–376. See also Horacio Capel, “Innovación técnica, gestión empresarial y financiación en el capitalismo global de comienzos del siglo XX. Los casos de Brazilian Traction y Barcelona Traction” (Globalización, innovación y construcción de redes técnicas urbanas en América y Europa: Brazilian Traction-Barcelona Traction y otros conglomerados financieros y técnicos, 1890–1930, Barcelona, 2012). There were also industrial colonies along the Llobregat river, extending from Barcelona to the Pyrenees, and which used mostly hydraulic energy. See Gràcia Dorel-Ferré, “La qüestió de les colònies industrials: un fenomen discutit de la història industrial de la Catalunya dels segles XIX i XX,” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, no. 14 (2003): 97–112. Urteaga, “El proceso de electrificación en Cataluña (1881–2000).” Josep Puig i Cadafalch, [Plànol de l’Exposició Internacional de Barcelona], 1915, UC 252, ANC. FPiC. “Palacio de la Luz. Grupo IV del Programa,” [1]. Urteaga, “El proceso de electrificación en Cataluña (1881–2000).”

From Electricity to the Photo Archive   225 53 The original project can be found in Luis Viladevall y Malgá and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Memoria sobre el estado sanitario de la ciudad de Mataró (Mataró: Tip. de Pedro Vilá y Font, 1895). 54 On the dissemination of domestic uses of electricity in Catalonia in and after the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition, see Jordi Ferran Boleda, “Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929–1936),” 115–168 and also Jordi Ferran Boleda and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “The City of Electric Light: Experts and Users at the 1929 International Exhibition and beyond,” in Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929, ed. Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 223–224. 55 Cf. Puig i Cadafalch, [Plànol de l’Exposició Internacional de Barcelona] and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Exposició de Barcelona. Secció Espanyola [1916], UC 229/230, ANC. FPiC. 56 On the particular cases of Spain and Catalonia, see Margarita Díaz-Andreu García, “Archaeology and Nationalism in Spain,” in Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, ed. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 57 “[Letter from Josep Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot],” [3]. 58 A recent example can be found in Bastien Noël, “Exhibition universelle de 1878. L’archéologie au service des contestations contemporaines,” Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea 18, no. 2 (2014). 59 “[Letter from Josep Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot],” [3]. 60 “Actes de la Junta directiva,” April 17, 1915, [3]; May 19, 1915, [2]; and June 21, 1915, [5], Z103-47034, AMCB. FI:EIB1929. 61 Jeroni Martorell, “L’inventari gràfic de Catalunya,” Butlletí del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya XIX, no. 169 (February 1909): 48–49. 62 See Costanza Caraffa, “From Photo Libraries to Photo Archives. On the Epistemological Potential of Art-Historical Photo Collections,” in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Costanza Caraffa (MunichBerlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 11–44; Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana ­S erena, Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). 63 See, among others, Anne de Mondenard, La mission héliographique: cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851 (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 2002); Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2012). 64 One example of the latter is the Prokudin-Gorskii collection of “colour” images of early twentieth-century Russia, which can now be found at the Library of Congress in Washington and went viral after a public exhibition in 2014. See, among others, Véronique Koehler, Voyage dans l’ancienne Russie: Les photographies en couleurs de Serguei Proukoudine-Gorsky (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013). 65 “[Letter from Josep Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot],” 1929, [3], UC 249, ANC. FPiC. 66 See Emmanuelle Sibeud, “La bibliothèque du Musée de l’homme: un corpus menacé,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 3, no. 2 (2000): 185. 67 See James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001). 68 Puig i Cadafalch, “A votar per l’Exposició Universal.” 69 Caraffa, “From Photo Libraries to Photo Archives. On the Epistemological ­Potential of Art-Historical Photo Collections,” 21. 70 Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, “Introduction,” in Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, ed. Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1.

226  Lucila Mallart 71 “[Letter from Francesc Cambó to Josep Puig i Cadafalch],” December 31, 1943, UC 1184, ANC. FPiC. 72 “[Letter from Josep Puig i Cadafalch to Miquel Massot],” [3]. 73 Àngels Casanovas i Romeu, “L’exposició de Barcelona del 1929 i el IV Congrés Internacional d’Arqueologia,” in Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya: 75 anys, 1935–2010: miscel·lània commemorativa, ed. Jordi Rovira i Port (Barcelona: Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicació, 2010), 122–123. 74 Mitman and Wilder, “Introduction,” 8. 75 See Casanovas i Romeu, “L’Institut d’Estudis Catalans i el Museu d’Arqueologia,” 122–123. On the Repertori, see also Pilar Blesa and Alicia Cornet, “El Repertorio Iconográfico de Arte Español: análisis de las imágenes de Salamanca,” Culturas de archivo: Fondos y nuevos documentos 2 (2003); and Pilar Blesca and Alícia Cornet, “El Repertori Iconogràfic del MNAC: evolució i tractaments ar­ xivístic,” Butlletí del Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya 5 (2001): 161–170. 76 Puig i Cadafalch, “L’exhibició de l’Art d’Espanya a l’Exposició de Barcelona,” 2. 77 Enric Granell, “L’Exposició com a interior: ‘El Arte en España’ i els jocs d’aigua-llum,” in L’Exposició internacional de Barcelona del 1929: arquitectura i arts decoratives (Barcelona: L’Avenç, 1980), 52. 78 Puig i Cadafalch, “L’exhibició de l’Art d’Espanya a l’Exposició de Barcelona,” 2. 79 Ferran and Nieto-Galan, “The City of Electric Light: Experts and Users at the 1929 International Exhibition and beyond,” 224.

Index

Acropolis 19–21, 24–6, 28 actor-network theory (ANT) 10, 123 advertisement 49, 164 aesthetics 21, 174 agency xiii, 10, 60, 64, 102, 113, 127, 205 Agnellini, Carlo 90–1 Ahlberg, Hakon 177 Alcântara, wharf of 145,153 Alcântara, San Pedro de 141–2, 146 Alexander, William 48 Almeida, José Valentim Fialho de 6, 141, 143, 153, 156–7 Alphonse XIII of Spain 212 Aminoff, Berndt H. 177 anarchist/anarchism 163n, 188, 198; anarcho-syndicalists 188; critics of 199–200; physicians 195; Proudhonism 163n; publications 200 anatomy 43, 83, 89 Ancient Greece 5, 17, 21–2, 24, 26, 28, 31 Anderson, John 40 Andersonian University (Glasgow) 40–1, 43–4, 47, 50 animals (and the city) 10, 70, 89, 90–1, 95, 112, 127–36, 154; exotic 10, 130–1 Annals of Philosophy (journal) 40 appropriation 2–3, 143 aquarium/aquario 90–2 Arad 66 archaeology 6, 63, 208, 210, 218, 220 architecture 8, 17, 20–1, 30–1, 39, 43, 53, 108, 154, 158, 165, 172–3, 175, 177, 179, 190, 210–11, 219 Argentina 6, 8–9, 184, 186, 187, 192–4 Arkitekten – Tidskrift för arkitektur och dekorativ konst (Journal for Architecture and Decorative Arts) 164, 166, 170

Armagh 126 association, scientific 7, 38, 50, 59–75, 125–6, 130 Asociación de Industriales Electricistas de Cataluña [Association of Catalan Electricity Industrials] 211 assemblages (see Deleuze, Gilles) 10–11 astronomical observatory (Athens) 5, 23, 35 astronomical observatory (Lisbon) 145, 151 astronomy 8, 21–4, 26, 30–1, 63 Ancient Greek 5, 8 Athens 1, 5, 7–8, 16–32 Avenida da Liberdade (Lisbon) 141, 145–6, 156 backwardness 3–4, 6–7, 61, 144, 149, 158; scientific 142 bacteriology 147, 186, 195, 198, 204 Ball, Charles Bent 125 Ball, Robert 108 Ball, Robert Stawell 125 Ball, Valentine 125, 130, 133–5, 137 Barcelona xiii–xiv, 1–2, 5–6, 8, 158, 208–21; Exposición internacional de Barcelona (1929) see exhibition; urban history of science, xiii, 2, 158 Barcelona Traction, Light and Power 214–5 Barrett, William Fletcher 11, 102–4, 106–11, 113, 116–7 Bastea, Eleni 30 Bavarians 17–19, 21 Belfast 102, 109, 115, 125–6, 137 Bell, Sheriff 44, 50 Bene, Ferenc 62, 64 Bennett, Tony 208–9 Benzamin of Lesvos 23

228 Index Berkeley, George 114–6 Berlin 1–2, 24, 82, 141; Conference (1884–1885) 146; Greater Berlin 168, 170; observatory 26; urban planning exhibition (1910) see exhibition Beszterce 65 Bhabha, Homi 4 Biela comet 22 biodiversity 80 biography 86, 115; scientific 103, 118n biology; behavior (animals) 89, 95, 150; evolutionary 109; marine 5, 11, 80, 83, 88–9, 95; systematics 83, 89, 94 biomedical uncertainties 205 Birmingham 37, 40, 42, 44–6, 50–2, 54; also see Institution of Mechanical Engineers Blyth, Benjamin 51 Bode, Johann Elert 30 Bont, Raf de 90–1, 97n Borsszem Jankó (satirical magazine) 66, 69–70 Boston 168 Botanical Gardens; Athens 17, 21, 32n; Dublin 118n, 125; Lisbon 145–6, 151, 157; Victoria (German colony of Cameroon) 151 botany 63, 68 Boulanger, François 20 Bouris, Georgios 7, 21, 26, 28–31 Bradford 1, 38, 41, 51 breeding 10, 124–5, 130–7 Bremen 24 brewery 67, 69 bridge metaphor 156, 158 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) 7, 27, 60, 62, 109, 129, 136 British Empire 8–9, 111, 113, 122–5, 129–31 Brunila, Birger 179 Buchanan, Angus 37 Buda 63, 68–70, 73 Budapest xiii, 1, 5, 7–8, 11, 59–63, 66–71, 73–75; city hall 70, 74 Buenos Aires (see also hygiene, public health) xiii–xiv, 1, 5–6, 8–11, 186–93, 195, 197, 201–4; most European city of Latin America 13n Bürger, Wilhelminian 87 Bugát, Pál 62, 72

Buono, Giovanni 84 Burnham, Daniel 170, 178 Burton, Decimus 130 Caledonian Railway 47 Cambó, Francesc 212–4, 217–8, 220 Cambridge 105, 113 Camera lucida 83 Campos Rodrigues, César Augusto de 151 Canberra 164, 179n capital 8, 16, 19–20, 24, 30, 33n, 37, 39, 59–61, 63, 65, 67–75, 82, 120n, 122, 124, 143–5, 148–51, 154, 156–8, 164–5, 170, 180n, 186–7, 189; of modernity see Paris; scientific 9, 123, 126, 141, 144, 148–9, 158; and nation 9, 187 capitalism/capitalist 85, 154, 195, 200 Carpenter, George Herbert 124–7, 136–7 Carrasco, Benito 203 car 10, 154 Carlyle, Thomas 121n cartography 23, 30, 103 Caryanelle, Alfonso 91 Cassini, Giovanni 22 Catalonia xiv, 6, 8, 208–11, 213–8 Catholic/Catholicism 9, 106, 109–10, 113, 129, 134, 195, 198; Emancipation 129, 138n cesspool 189 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine 154 chemistry 34, 40, 63, 69, 107, 147, 154 Chicago 1, 141; planning project 170, 178, 185n child labor 82 cholera 63, 81–2, 144; also see contagion Chun, Carl 88–91 city; imagined 6, 8, 122–4, 137, 142, 156–7, 193; lungs of 11, 201–4; industry 6, 9, 37–41, 44, 46, 51, 53, 72, 82, 93, 110, 133–4, 154, 156–7, 211, 213–6; second cities xiii, 3, 8, 42, 80–1, 134, 137; second city of the Empire 9, 37, 40, 61, 111, 120n, 122–3, 125, 129–30 cityscapes 83, 102, 110, 144, 147, 149, 152, 158, 174 Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal 151 Clare Island 126 Clausius, Rudolf 52 Clyde (river) 40, 45–6, 52 coercion 194, 197

Index  229 cognitive topography 111 collection 67, 73, 124–5, 137; photographic 81, 83, 86, 96, 217, 225n; scientific 86; of animals 130, 132–4; of images 132; of instruments 29; of specimens 127–8 College Green (Dublin) 104 Compromise, Austro-Hungarian (1867) 60 Coni, Emilio 6, 193–4 Connor, Steven 117 contagion 6, 195–200; contagious disease 10, 64, 72, 82, 150, 186, 192–7, 205; also see cholera Cornellà de Conflent, Roussillon 219 ‘Cottonopolis’ (Manchester) 39, 51 Correia Pais, Miguel 141 coup d’état 204, 211 Crookes, William 110 Cunningham, Daniel John 123 d’Aniello, Cicillo 91 D’Arcy, Charles 115 Danube 68 Daramona, Co. Westmeath 107 Darwin, Charles 109, 128 darwinism; reception of 102; and Catholic hierarchy 109; and Tyndall’s Belfast Address 115 data; biology 83, 89; meteorology 31; zoogeography 83, 89 Dato, Eduardo 212 Daum, Andreas 8 Dawson Street (Dublin) 104, 117 Deleuze, Gilles 10 Della Paolera, Carlos 203 Denholm, James 39 Der Städtebau (journal) 175 Di Gennaro, Luigi 85 Di Gennaro, Luigi, son of 84 Di Giranni, Aniello 91 Diário de Notícias (newspaper) 143, 147–9, 152–3, 158; Scientific Chronicles 143, 148 diaspora 17–18, 21–3, 30–1 Dierig, Sven 102–3, 123 disease see contagion Divinity School, Trinity College 114–5 dogs 10 Dohrn, Anton 80–1, 88–94, 100n Downie, John 48 dowsing 111

drawings 143, 152; architectural 171, 173, 175; astronomical 25, 151; engineering 44; zoological 83 Dresden 1 Dual Monarchy see Habsburg Empire Dublin xiii, 1, 5, 8–11, 48, 102–17, 122–37; Museum of Science and Art 104, 125; Naturalists’ Field Club 125–6; second city of the Empire 120n, 122–3, 125, 129–30; scientific capital 123; University Experimental Science Association 114; Zoological Society 10, 123–6, 129–34, 137 Durham 48 Easter Rising 9, 122 ecology 89, 99n Edinburgh 9, 37–8, 39–42, 46, 49, 50–1, 53–4; New Town of 39; also see Royal Society of Edinburgh education/educational system 17, 38, 81, 95, 185n, 218; Budapest 69, 73; Buenos Aires (hygiene) 197–8, 200–1; Dublin 109–10, 117, 129; Glasgow 44; Greece 17, 19, 23, 29–30; Lisbon 148–52 Eger 65 Eginitis, Dimitrios 31 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 5 Eisig, Hugo 99n electric grids 10 electrification 6, 10, 211, 214 electromagnetism, theory of 9, 103 embryology 83, 89 emerging cities 3 Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña 214 engineer 2–3, 6, 9, 19–20, 29; civil 37–42, 46–51, 55n; marine 40, 44, 47; mechanical 37, 44–8; military 47, 141 engineering 8, 11, 37–53; philosophical 37–54 England 37, 44, 46–7, 52, 61, 64, 106–7, 125, 193 environment/ environmental 89; human 200; marine 81, 126, 128, 134; sociocultural 82, 87; terrestrial 24; urban 17, 80, 192, 195 Eötvös, József 63 epitomes, astronomic 22 ether 11, 102–17; theories 105, 113; argument for spiritualism 106, 108, 110; connections with matter 104–5; paradox of planetary orbits 105; vortex sponge model 115–6

230 Index Ettingshausen, Andreas Freiherr von 21 Europe 5–7, 17–18, 20, 22, 25–6, 29–30, 37, 41, 51, 65, 74, 83, 128, 130, 134, 136, 145, 153, 164, 168, 192–3, 209, 217, 220; Central 17, 20, 26, 29–30, 59, 61; Eastern 3, 8; idealized version of 7; planning tradition 173; reformist urbanism 201 everyday life 2, 5, 80, 83, 145 exhibition 11, 54, 63, 66–7, 208–9, 213; Exposición internacional de Barcelona (1929) 5, 8, 208–21; Exposición universal de Barcelona (1888) 208, 210; Exposition universelle de Bruxelles (1910) 213; Exposition universelle de Gand, (1913), 213; Exposition universelle de Lyon (1915) 213; Exposition universelle et internationale de Liège (1905) 213; Exposition universelle de Paris (1878) 217; Hungarian Millennial Exhibition Budapest (1896) 11, 60, 63, 74; Urban planning exhibition Berlin (1910) 168, 172 expertise xiv, 2, 10–11, 54, 61, 72–3, 75, 111, 114, 134, 147, 152, 154, 156, 164–79, 186 Exposición internacional de Barcelona (1929) see exhibition Exposición universal de Barcelona (1888) see exhibition Exposition universelle de Bruxelles (1910) see exhibition Exposition universelle de Gand (1913) see exhibition Exposition universelle de Lyon (1915) see exhibition Exposition universelle et internationale de Liège (1905) see exhibition Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon 149 Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon 149 Fairbairn, William 42, 44–5 Fauna and Flora of the Gulf of Naples and its Adjacent Maritime Regions (series) 88–91 Faraday, Michael 107 Ferran Boleda, Jordi 220 Ferreira, Júlio Guilherme Bettencourt 148–9, 151, 153–4, 161n

fieldwork 83, 126 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 114 Finland 164–5, 168, 170–1, 174, 178 Fisheries Board of Ireland 123 fishermen/fisherboys 5, 11, 80–1, 84–5, 95; Neapolitan 86, 88, 94; scientifically trained 88–92, 94 fishing, scientific 11, 87, 89–90, 94, 96 Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction 103 Fitzgerald, George Francis 102–6, 111–18 Fiume 65 flames, sensitive 103, 108, 119n Förster, Ludwig 29 Fortanosa, Aniello 84, 91, 94–5 Frosterus, Sigurd 179 France 1, 18, 61, 147, 210, 217, 220 Francis I (Emperor) 21 Frankfurt 1 Franzese, Guiseppe (“Giongi”) 88, 91, 95 Franzese, Michele 90–1 Fund for Physics and Chemistry (Athens) 23 Gaertner, Friedrich von (also as Friedrich von Gärtner) 20 Galway Burnet moth 123 Gantner, Eszter xiv, 3 Garcia, Ressano Frederico 146 Garden of the Nation (Athens) 20 garden city 157, 167–9 gas 10, 47, 51, 144 Gazis, Anthimos 22–3 Geddes, Patrick 170–1, 175 Geological Survey 123, 125 George V (king) 121n German Foreign Office 92–3, 100n, 101n German Archaeological Institute (Rome) 101n Germany 1, 16, 24, 64, 83, 92–4, 167, 169 Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (Association of German Naturalists and Physicians) 59, 62, 64, 74, 76n Giesbrecht, Wilhelm 5, 11, 80–8, 91, 94, 96 Ginzburg, Carlo 92 Gladstone, William Ewart 120n Glasgow xiv, 1, 5, 8–9, 11, 37–54; Archaeological Society 45; Association of Natural Science 45; city hall 46; College see University of Glasgow, also see Andersonian University; Mechanics Institution

Index  231 40, 54; Medical Society 45; MedicoChirurgical Society 45; Natural History Society 45; Philosophical Society (GPS) 41–2, 54; rivalry with Manchester 46, 57n; second city of the Empire 37, 40; Southern Medical Society 45; West of Scotland Horticultural Society 45 Glasgow Herald 44–5, 48 Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine 40 Goecke, Theodor 175 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 114 Göttingen 24 Good Words 111 Gorbals Popular Institution for the Diffusion of Science 40 Gordin, Michael 9, 143 Gordon, Lewis Dunbar Brodie 41–3 Graham, William 114–5 Grand Tour 82 Great Britain 1, 18, 38–9, 42, 50, 67, 113, 122, 126–8, 136–7, 147, 156, 158, 167–8, 220; ‘photographic surveys’, ca. 1900, 217–8; see also United Kingdom Great Famine (Ireland) 129 Great War 82 Greece 2, 5, 8, 16–32 Green, Mott 103 Greenhalgh, Paul 208 Greenland 128 Griffin, Charles and Richard (publishers) 41, 49 Győr 65 Haaga, Helsinki 11, 164–79 Habsburg Empire 7, 60–1, 70–2, 75 Hakkarainen, Kai 167, 173 Halley’s comet 151–3 Hamburg 28, 51, 82–3 Hansen, Christian 17–18, 20 Hansen, Theophil 16, 20, 24–9 Harvey, David 4–5 Haughton, Samuel 133 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 5, 146, 174, 184n; Haussmannian 4, 82; also see Paris Hedengren, Edvin 171–2, 177 Hein-Kircher, Heidi xiv, 3 Heinze, Max 88 Heliotropion 24, 26 Helmholtz Memorial lecture 116 Helsham, Richard 105 Helsinki xiii, 1, 5–6, 8, 11, 164–79

Helsinki Polytechnical Institute 170–1 Hensen, Victor 96n, 97n Hermes o Logios 22 Hill of Medicine (Lisbon) 142–3, 149, 156, 158 Hill of Santana (Lisbon) 141–2, 149 Hill of Sciences (Lisbon) 142–3, 149, 156, 158 Hill of S. Pedro de Alcântara (Lisbon) 141–2 Hispano–American Electricity Company (CHADE) 212 histology 83 Home Rule (Ireland) 106, 112–3, 116–7, 120n, 122 horses 10 hospital 21, 69, 72, 144–5, 150, 193–4, 196, 202; military 21 House of Lords 106 Howard, Ebenezer 157, 168 Hüppauf, Berndt-Rüdiger 209 Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science (HAAS) 7, 11, 59–75 Hungarian Millennial Exhibition Budapest (1896) see exhibition Hungary 2, 8, 60, 59–75 Hunt, Benjamin 42 Hunt, Bruce 115 Hunt, Edmund 44, 48, 50 Hutton, Alice 125 Huxley, Thomas 107, 109, 113–5 hygiene/hygienic 6, 9, 10–11, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 153, 186–205; behavior 150, 194–7; Buenos Aires 186–205; code 196–8; consensus 186, 196, 200; daily habits 195, 198; defensive 196; imagination 186; plans 6 ice age 128 idealism 114 ideologies (pantheistic) 116 illustration, zoological 80, 83, 85, 88–9 Ilustração Portuguesa 141, 143, 152, 156, 158 independence movement 8, 16, 18, 21, 23, 31, 72, 122–3, 137, 146 India 51, 125, 134–5, 218, 220 industrialization 1, 16, 83, 86, 145, 157 industry 6, 19, 37–41, 44, 46, 51, 53 Inkster, Ian 38 Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) 39, 42, 47; Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 51

232 Index Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland (also see Institution of Engineers in Scotland) 9, 11, 37, 53 Institution of Engineers in Scotland (IES) 45–9 Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) 37, 42, 45 Institution of Naval Architects (Glasgow) 52 intellectuals 6, 9, 18, 38, 104, 210 interurban 7 Ireland 2, 8–9, 51, 102, 140 Irish; Free State 9, 125; Lord Lieutenant 132–4; Parliamentary Party 122; politics (sectarian nature of) 106 Island of the Sirens 84 Jamaica 106, 135 Jamrach, Karl 131 Janowski, Maciej 61 Jaussely Plan 216 Jellet, Harriet 113 Johnson, Nuala 118n Joule, James Prescott 52 Judson, Pieter 7 Jung, Bertel 164, 169–70, 172, 174, 177 Keil do Amaral, Francisco 146 Kerry slug 127 Kingston (Jamaica) 106 Kingstown (Dublin) 111 Klenze, Leo von 21 knowledge xiii–xiv, 2–3, 10–12, 17–18, 88, 90, 96, 123–4; anatomical 67; astronomical 22; collective 164; engineering 45, 47; expert (scientific) 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 164, 186; fishing 91–2; medical 60; networks 11, 167; practical 52; production xiii–xiv, 2–3, 10–12; scientific 11, 17, 59–62, 66, 68, 71, 74, 90, 102, 123, 133; space 23, 74, 81, 141; transmission 22, 59–61, 74, 123, 126, 143, 192; urban 10, 60–1, 72, 102 Kohler, Robert 84, 97n Koivunen, Niina 166, 177–9 Kragh, Helge 104 Kropotkin, Piotr 163n Kubinyi, Ágoston 63 laboratory assistants 88–92, 95 Lachmund, Jens xiv, 102

Lafayette photographers 111 Lahti, Juhana 178 Lalande, Jérôme 22 Lallimo, Jiri 167 land surveying 171–8 landscape 83, 146, 149–50, 158; human 85; natural 85; urban 82, 85, 111, 114, 148, 151, 153, 188 Lapa, João Inácio Ferreira 154 Leinster House 104 Leipzig 90 Lerche, Leopold 169, 173 libraries 54, 144, 188 Liebig, Justus von 154 Light (journal) 111 lighting; electric 4, 24, 144, 146, 154; public 214–6 Lilienthal glider 113 Lincoln Place (Dublin) 114 lions 10, 129–37 Lisbon xiii, 1, 5–6, 9, 141–58; scientific capital 9, 141, 144, 148–9, 158; dual role 144; hybrid status 143; modernity 149; monumental 156–7; port 151, 153; in the year 2000 143, 153 Literary and Philosophical Society (Manchester) 38 Littrow, Joseph Johann von 21 Liverpool 44, 50 Lliga Regionalista 210, 212, 220 Llobregat (river) 211 Lo Bianco, Salvatore 89, 95 Lodge, Oliver 108, 110 London 1–2, 7–8, 10, 37–40, 42, 44–5, 47–9, 51–2, 54, 61, 106–8, 117, 123–6, 129–33, 135, 137–8, 141, 157, 209, 213 Luckhurst, Roger 109 Ludwig of Bavaria 18–19 Lungomare 82, 86 Macadam, Stevenson 53 Machado, Achilles 151 Mackenzie, William (publisher) 49–51 Magyar Orvosok és Természetvizsgálók Országos Vándorgyűlése (see Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science) Mahan, Asa 110 Manchester 1, 38–40, 42, 44–6, 50–1, 54, 107 Mancomunitat de Catalunya 218, 220 Manitakis, Emmanuel 30 maps 25, 31, 68, 84, 128, 145, 152, 164, 169–73, 175–6

Index  233 Máramarossziget 65 marine 5, 80, 125; animals 11, 89; biology 80, 88, 95, 125; zoology 80, 83 Martorell, Jeroni 217–8 Massot i Tetas, Miquel 213–8 Mataró 216 Materia prima 88–9 materialism 106, 109–10, 114–5, 117 Matos, José Manuel Melo de 6, 143, 153–7 Maxwell, James Clerk 46, 103, 116 Maxwell, Sir John 44 Mayer, Paul 83 McCullough, James 105 McOnie, Andrew 48 mechanical 47 mechanical institutes (Glasgow) 39–40 mechanical philosophy 40 mechanics/mechanical science 42–3, 47–8 Mechanics’ Magazine 40, 42–3 medicine xiii–xiv, 1, 62–3, 65, 67, 110, 129, 141–3, 149–50, 153, 156, 158, 195, 205 meetings, scientific 11, 39, 42–5, 50–52, 54, 59–75, 114, 129, 149, 173 Melo e Simas, Manuel Soares de 151 menageries, itinerant 10, 130, 134 Mendelsohn, Andrew 102 Mercato 81 Merculiano, Comingio 83, 88 mesmerism 107–8 metals (electrical, magnetic and thermal properties) 103 Meto (astronomer) 24, 26 metropolis 1, 5, 16–17, 20, 70, 75, 104, 124, 137, 143, 152–3, 165, 168, 174, 180n, 187, 193, 202, 204; scientific 123, 125, 128; of mechanics (Glasgow) 11, 37–8, 49–53 Meurman, Otto-Iivari 175, 178 miasmas 186 microbe 10, 196, 199 microscope 83, 90 microtome 90 migration 82, 86–7, 128, 187 Military School of Cadets (Athens) 19 Millar, W. J. 53 Miskell, Louise 60, 67 Mission Héliographique (1851) 217 Mitman, Greg 218 modernism 141, 208–9; vernacular 209

modernity xiii, 1, 3–9, 16–18, 30–2, 66, 82, 144, 149, 157, 186, 194, 204, 208–9, 220; urban 12, 13n, 59, 86, 157, 188, 193, 216; modernities 1, 4–7, 12, 186 modernization 17, 19, 25, 61, 82–3, 86, 92, 144, 146, 148, 153, 156, 158, 188, 193, 209–10, 216 modernizer 113–4, 116 Möbius, Karl A. 80 Mollan, Charles 108 Møller Jørgensen, Claus 6 monarchy 7, 9, 16, 18–19, 21, 63, 72, 142 Montjuïc, mountain of 211 Monumenta Germania 89 moralization 193, 201 More, Alexander 48 Morrell, Jack 38 Morus, Iwan Rhys 104 municipalism, transnational 13 Munkkiniemi (Helsinki) 11, 164–79 Murray, R. H. 115 Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, Paris 217 Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya, Barcelona 218 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona 218 Napier, David 52 Napier, James Robert 43–5, 47–9, 53 Napier, Robert 44–5, 49 Naples xiii, 1, 5, 11, 80–96; Gulf of 80, 85, 87–9; harbor 81–2; Stazione Zoologica 5, 11, 80–4, 86–96 nationalism xiii, 1, 7–10, 72, 122, 209 nation-building 8, 210, 217 National Bank; Austria 21; Greece 21 National Library (Ireland) 123–4 National Museum 217; Hungarian 63, 68–9, 73; Irish 123 National Museum of Art (Barcelona) see Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya National Observatory of Athens 16–17, 31 natural history xiv, 3–4, 8, 62, 124–8, 130, 133–4, 136–7, 205 Natural History Museum 3–4; Athens 17; Dublin 123–7, 129–30, 137 Natural History Society (Belfast) 126 Natural History Society (Glasgow) 45 natural philosophy 40, 105, 113–4 Nauplion 19, 33n Neapolitans 81, 92–3

234 Index neighborhoods 146, 150–2, 156–7, 164, 186–9, 191–3, 201, 203–4 Neilson, James Beaumont 47 Neilson, Walter Montgomerie 44, 46–53 Nemes, Robert 61 nets 84–6 New York 187; Greater New York 168 Newcastle 44, 50–1 Newcomen engine 43 newspapers see press Newton, Isaac 105, 116 Newtonian physics 105 Nieto-Galan, Agustí 220 Niger Protectorate 135 Noakes, Richard 113 North America 128, 204, 209 Notaras, Chrysantho 22–3 Noucentisme 218 Nubia 131 Nyhart, Lynn 98n Nymphs, Hill of (Athens), 24–5, 28, 31 observatory (see also astronomy) 5; Athens 7–8, 16–32; Lisbon 145, 149, 151; Paris 22, 24 Óbuda 63 Oken, Lorenz 62, 64 Oom, Frederico 151 Ophthalmiatric Clinic (also as Ophthalmic) 17, 20 Ordnance Survey of Ireland 123 Osborne, Walter 132 Othon of Greece 16–21, 24–6, 29, 31 Ottoman Empire 17–18, 30 Palace of Ancient Art (project, Barcelona) 208 Palace of Light (project, Barcelona) 208 Pannone, Alberto 91 Papadakis, Ioannis 29 Paris 1–2, 4–5, 61, 82, 130, 141, 145, 146–8, 158, 164, 174, 209, 213, 217–8; as a model 218; capital of modernity 4; observatory 22, 24; urban reform 173; also see Haussmann Partsch, Josef 93 Pasteur, Louis 154 periphery xiii, 1–5, 12, 61, 106, 113, 123, 137, 142–4, 150, 186, 192, 203, 209 perturbation theory 22 Pest 62–5, 67–70, 72–3 Pesti Hírlap 64 Petersen, Eugen von 98n Pézerat, P.J. 141, 160n

pharmacy 63, 68–9 Philadelphia 64, 213 Philipides, Daniel 22–3 Phoenix Park (Dublin) 129, 136 photography 83, 98n, 143, 150, 152, 217–8; astronomical 151; microphotography 83; also see Lafayette photographers physician 2–3, 6, 9–10, 45, 60, 62, 64–5, 67–72, 75, 92, 144, 148, 150–3, 157, 195, 199 physicist 11, 22, 105–8, 113, 115, 117, 142 physics 9, 23, 41, 63, 68, 102–14, 117, 147 physiology 89, 97n Pich i Pon, Joan 211–2 Pinto, Aniello 91 plankton 80, 84, 95, 96n planning 72, 164–79; exhibition (Barcelona) 208–26; urban 6, 11, 20, 30, 143, 147–8, 150, 157, 164–79 Ploessl telescope 26, 31 Polytechnic School of Lisbon 149 Pompeii 82 popularization 59–61, 66, 106, 143, 148, 150–1 population 17, 30, 39, 40–1, 44, 50, 61, 72, 82, 141, 143–4, 146, 165, 187–9, 192, 194, 204, 208 porteños 9 Portugal 2, 6, 8–9, 142, 146–7, 150, 153, 156–8 postcolonialism 2, 4, 16 poverty 73, 80, 82–3, 86, 106, 117, 198, 200 Poynting, John 117 Pozsony 65 Practical Mechanic and Engineers’ Magazine 40 Praeger, Robert Lloyd 114, 122–7, 137 press 30, 43, 49, 54, 64, 85, 131, 143, 147–52, 156–7, 199–203; satirical 63, 66, 69, 78n, 156 Preston, Thomas 105 prevention 72, 193, 196, 200 primates 129–30, 135, 151 Primer Congreso Nacional de Medicina 197 Primo de Rivera, Miguel 209, 211, 214 professionalisation 6, 24, 39–40, 49, 51, 52, 86, 88, 92, 114, 144, 147, 149–50, 152–8, 178, 186, 189, 193–8, 204, 214 Prokesch, Anton von 21–3, 25–6, 30 protestantism 102, 106, 116–7 Proudhonism see anarchist/anarchism

Index  235 public health 3, 6–8, 10, 69, 72–3, 150, 186, 192–3, 195, 204–5 publisher/publishing 22, 38–42, 49, 54, 126 Puig i Cadafalch, Josep 5, 8, 208, 210–8, 220–1 Purser, Frederick 115 Pyrenees 214–6 Queen’s Colleges 125 railway 41, 46, 48, 51, 73, 169 Randolph, Charles 44 Rankine, David 47 Rankine, William John Macquorn 9, 37, 42–53 Ráth, Károly 70–1, 74 rats 10 Rawson, Guillermo 203 Reed, E. J. 43 relativity 115 Republican regime (Portugal) 142, 149–50, 152, 156–7 research 1–3, 11, 30–1, 96, 108, 112, 115, 208; centers (institutes) 5, 7, 23, 31; electromagnetic 9; ether 102; historical 8, 104, 141; marinebiological 5, 80–96, 129; natural science 69; psychical 103, 106, 110; zoological 129 resonance 111 Richardson, Benjamin 193 Riegel, Joseph (“Beppino”) 91, 95 Rioja y Martin, J. 83 Roberts, Frederick (Lord Roberts) 135–6 Robinson, Jennifer 4 Robson, Neil 48 Romania 65, 72 Rome 82, 101n Rosse, Lord 108 Rowan, David 48 Royal College of Chemistry London 107 Royal College of Science (Dublin) 11, 102, 106, 108, 110, 117, 123 Royal Dublin Society 104, 108, 123, 126 Royal Institution (London) 107–8, 116 Royal Irish Academy 104, 123–4, 126, 133, 136 Royal School of Naval Architecture 52–3, 108 Royal Scottish Society of Arts 38, 53 Royal Society of Arts (RSA) 38 Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) 38 Royal Society of London (RSL) 38, 42

Royal University (Dublin) 125 Royal Zoological Society of Ireland 129–30, 137 Rümker, Karl Ludwig Christian 30 Rupke, Nicolaas 118n Russell, John Scott 44–5 Saarinen, Eero 172 Saarinen, Eliel 6, 11, 164–6, 168–79 Saarinen, Loja 172 Saarinen, Pipsan 172 Said, Edward 4 Saint-Simonianism 143, 157 Sáy, Ferenc 64 Scharff, Robert Francis 124–8, 136–7 Schaubert, Eduard 20, 24–6, 28 Schiaffino, Eduardo 203 Schmidt, Johann Friedrich Julius 31 Schmidtlein, Richard 90–1 Schöpf-Mérei, Ágoston 64 Schumacher, Heinrich Christian 28, 30 Science and Technology on the European Periphery (STEP) xiii, 2–3 Science and the City (see also urban space) xiv, 1, 10, 12, 60, 71, 102, 123 scientific naturalism 109–10 scientist 2, 5–6, 11, 25, 60–2, 64–5, 67–75, 83, 88, 90, 93, 104–5, 108, 111, 114–15, 123, 142, 144, 151–2, 154, 157 Scotland 8–9, 11, 37–53 Scotsman (newspaper) 49 Scottish Shipbuilders’ Association 52–3 Scottish Society of Arts see Royal Scottish Society of Arts second cities see city Secord, James 118n Senesi, Luigi 91 Serao, Matilde 82 Serino, Alfonso 88 Serino, Vincenzo 88 sewage 4, 6, 10, 145, 188–92, 197, 216 Shackleton, Abraham 134 Shapin, Steven 116 shipbuilding 40, 50, 53 Sierra Leone 135 Sigerson, George 123 Sinas, Georgios 21, 23, 25–6, 29, 30 Sitte, Camillo 174–5, 184n slaughterhouse 66–7, 69 Smith, Crosbie 51 Smithsonian Institution 93 Snedile, Torillo 91 Snowden, Frank M. 81 Sobotta, Johannes 98n

236 Index Sociedad Española de Electricidad 215 Society for Natural Science (Hungarian) 62 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce see Royal Society of Arts 38 Society of Psychical Research 106, 111 soirée (scientific) 67–9 Soja, Edward 102 Somaliland 115 South Africa 136 South Kensington 8; Department of Science 104 Spanish Conservative Party 212 species 83, 88–90; marine 89 specimen 5, 81, 83, 89–90 spiritualism 106, 108, 110–11, 116–17 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 104, 109–10 Stademann, August Ferdinand 26 Stazione Zoologica (Naples) 5, 11, 80, 87, 92–6 Stenius Corporation 164, 166–9, 171, 173, 177–8, 181n, 183n Stenius, Sigurd 164, 166–7, 169 Stephens, Jane 125 Stevenson, David 39, 46 Stevenson, Thomas 39, 46 Stoney, George Johnstone 115, 121n Strang, John 44, 50 Strengell, Gustaf 166, 168–9, 174–6 Stübben, Joseph 175 Syntagma Square (Athens) 20 syphilis 195, 197 Szabó, József 59, 72 Tait, William 44 Tallberg, Julius 169, 173 Tallinn 164; Greater Tallinn (plan) 164, 170, 180n Technical School (Athens) 19 technicians 81, 88, 91–2, 95, 97n, 149, 171, 189, 192, 214 technology xiii–xiv, 1–2, 6–9, 11, 23, 26, 38, 46, 72, 117, 141–2, 145, 150, 152–3, 156, 158, 192–3, 205, 216; progress 111–2, 146, 213–4, 220; reception 209; transport 153; urban 150; utopia 116 telegraphy, wireless 10 telepathy 103, 108, 111 telephone 10, 213 telescope 26, 28, 31 Temesvár 72 Thackray, Arnold 38

The Irish Times 108 The Nonconformist 110 The Reader 108 thermodynamics 52 Thomson, Allen 43 Thomson, James 53 Thomson, John 51 Thomson, William 40, 52–3, 121n Toikka, Seppo 167 Tokyo 141 tourism 65, 70, 73, 82–3, 153; conference 59, 65; tourist gaze 87 Tower of Belém (Lisbon) 146 Tower of the Winds (Athens) 24, 36 Town Planning in Practice (Unwin) 175 tramway 4, 10, 187 Transleithania 72 Transylvania 62 Travola, Salvatore 90 Trinidad 135 Trinity College Dublin 103–6, 111, 113–7, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132 Trouton, Frederick 105 tuberculosis 6, 9, 145, 149–50, 153, 161n, 195, 197; clinic 4; in monkeys 129 Tuckerman, Charles 30 Tyndall, John 107–10, 113–7, 119n Tyrrhenian Sea 80 Uggla, John Rafael 166, 177 Umbach. Maiken 209 Unionism (see also Home Rule) 106, 111–2, 123 United Kingdom 9, 122, 124, 128, 134, 154; also see Great Britain university 19; University College London 125; of Athens 17, 19, 22–3, 26, 29, 31; of Budapest 71; of Coimbra 9, 148–9; of Glasgow (Glasgow College) 40, 42; of Lisbon 9, 148–9; of Vienna 21 Unwin, Raymond 174–5 urban; cluster 37, 39; construction of knowledge 10; expansion 201, 203; green spaces 11, 201–5; peripheries xiii, 1–3; planning 6, 11, 30, 143, 147–8, 153, 157, 164–79; sanitation 196–7; space xiii–xiv, 4–5, 7–10, 12, 61–2, 75, 85, 103–6, 110, 124, 186, 201; utopia 6–7, 116, 141, 143, 152–3, 156–8, 194, 204, 218 Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday journal) 65–6 Verne, Jules 153, 162n

Index  237 Vesuvius 82 Victoria (German colony of Cameroon) 151 Victoria (Queen) 129 Victorian 49, 102, 111; Britain, 67; Dublin, 111; ether theory 113; physics 113; science 116; urban space 104; utopia 157 Vienna 21–2, 29, 61, 76n, 141; Greek diaspora in 22 vortex sponge model see ether Wallace, Alfred Russel 110 waterworks 192 Watt, James 38, 40, 42–3, 52, 54, 56n West Scotland Horticultural Society 45 Whitworth, Joseph 42, 44–5, 51 Whyte, Nicholas 104 Wilder, Kelley 218

Wilson Edward 107–8 Wilson, George 46 Wilson, James 111 Wilson, John 107–8, 111 women 67, 69, 125, 133, 195, 198–9 ‘Worstedopolis’ (Bradford) 38 Ziller, Ernst 20 zoogeography 89 Zoological Gardens 10, 130, 161–2n; Budapest 69–70; Dublin 10, 124, 129–32, 134–7; Lisbon 145–6, 151–2 Zoological Society of Dublin 10, 123, 126, 129–34 Zoological Society of London 132 zoology 63, 68, 90, 124 Zoological Station see Stazione Zoologica