A01=David Philip Miller
air
Arago's Eloge
Aston Hall
Attributional Survey
Author_David Philip Miller
British Association
Category=PDX
Cavendish Camp
Cavendish Society
Cavendish's Character
Cavendish's Claim
Cavendish's Experiments
Cavendish's Paper
Cavendish's Work
chemical revolution
controversy
Dephlogisticated Air
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Glasgow University
Harcourt's Address
Henry Fox Talbot
inflammable
Inflammable Air
invention and innovation studies
James Watt
James Watt Jr
Mr Cavendish
Mr Watt
nationalism in scientific discovery
nineteenth-century British science debates
philosophy of science
Priestley's Experiment
question
scientific priority disputes
Victorian science history
Water Controversy
Water Question
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754631774
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 21 May 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The 'water controversy' concerns one of the central discoveries of modern science, that water is not an element but rather a compound. The allocation of priority in this discovery was contentious in the 1780s and has occupied a number of 20th century historians. The matter is tied up with the larger issues of the so-called chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. A case can be made for James Watt or Henry Cavendish or Antoine Lavoisier as having priority in the discovery depending upon precisely what the discovery is taken to consist of, however, neither the protagonists themselves in the 1780s nor modern historians qualify as those most fervently interested in the affair. In fact, the controversy attracted most attention in early Victorian Britain some fifty to seventy years after the actual work of Watt, Cavendish and Lavoisier. The central historical question to which the book addresses itself is why the priority claims of long dead natural philosophers so preoccupied a wide range of people in the later period. The answer to the question lies in understanding the enormous symbolic importance of James Watt and Henry Cavendish in nineteenth-century science and society. More than credit for a particular discovery was at stake here. When we examine the various agenda of the participants in the Victorian phase of the water controversy we find it driven by filial loyalty and nationalism but also, most importantly, by ideological struggles about the nature of science and its relation to technological invention and innovation in British society. At a more general, theoretical, level, this study also provides important insights into conceptions of the nature of discovery as they are debated by modern historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.
David Philip Miller is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
