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Until Queen Victoria instituted the Postal Reform Act of 1839, mail was a luxury affordable only by the rich. Golden demonstrates how cheap postage--which was quickly adopted in other countries--led to a postal \"network\" that can be viewed as a forerunner of computer-mediated communications. Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail--problems that remain with us today. --from publisher description

Written by literary scholars, historians of science, and cultural historians, the twenty-two original essays in this collection explore the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships between science and culture through the periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging across the spectrum of periodical titles, the six sections comprise: 'Women, Children, and Gender', 'Religious Audiences', 'Naturalizing the Supernatural', 'Contesting New Technologies', 'Professionalization and Journalism', and 'Evolution, Psychology, and Culture'. The essays offer some of the first 'samplings and soundings' from the emergent and richly interdisciplinary field of scholarship on the relations between science and the nineteenth-century media.

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in schools. Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of two of Ganot's books. The study is novel for its international comparison of 19th-century physics and for its emphasis on the communication of science rather than on the science itself.

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.

From October 6 through 14, 1829, in a small village just outside Liverpool, England, ten thousand spectators gathered to witness one of the most remarkable events of the Industrial Age: a battle among locomotives that became known as the Rainhill Trials. Five machines were entered in the competition: the horse-powered Cycloped attained a top speed of only five miles per hour, while Perseverence—which looked like a giant iron bottle standing upright atop four wagon wheels—creaked along at a walking pace. But the three-way race between Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, Timothy Harworth’s Sans Pareil, and the crowd favorite, John Braithwaite and John Ericson’s Novelty, astonished the gathered crowds. The unfamiliar clank of machinery, huge billows of steam, and unprecedented speeds of thirty miles per hour thrilled the crowds during the trials'carnival-like atmosphere. The Rocket won the competition, though it had been claimed that the machine was not the superior locomotive. Rail, Steam, and Speed explains why and offers an absorbing account of the trials, people, and science that gave birth to steam locomotion. The purpose of the trials had been to find a locomotive that could maintain a speed of ten miles per hour for a round trip totaling thirty-five miles, the distance separating Liverpool and Manchester, which were soon to be linked by the world’s first passenger railway. But what was achieved during those nine days became a benchmark of the Industrial Revolution. Bringing the excitement of this great drama to life, Christopher McGowan introduces us to such pioneers as George Stephenson, who started as a colliery boy and finished as the father of the railways; John Ericsson, a Swedish Army officer who invented a new kind of locomotive in England but spent most of his life in the United States, where he built the Monitor for the Union Navy; and Richard Trevithick, whose eleven-year adventure in South America included winning and losing several fortunes, deserting Bolivar’s army, and escaping the jaws of a crocodile. He encountered George Stephenson’s son Robert in a Colombian hotel in one of the most bizarre meetings of the age. But the real stars are the locomotives themselves. McGowan shows how locomotives work and how they were developed—from the gargantuan beam engines condensing low-pressure steam inside enormous cylinders to the small, high-pressure-driven engines of the maverick miner Trevithick. He adapted the engines to power road carriages, but atrocious roads led him to build an engine that could run on rails. And so was born the world’s first steam locomotive and modern transportation.

Games and other forms of play are used in today’s libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through chess clubs. During the Great Depression, libraries supported patrons with puzzle contests and developed circulating toy and game collections. Academic libraries built game collections for research and classroom needs, while school libraries collected and facilitated educational games to aid teachers. Video games have been used in libraries to help patrons learn to use technology and to bring groups of patrons together to enjoy shared experiences. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the different ways in which libraries have used games, toys, and puzzles over the last 150 years through both collections and services.

Translation has often been characterized as a ‘central act' of European colonialism and imperialism. For example, it has been argued that translation had been utilized to make available legal-cultural information for the administration and rule of the non-West, but perhaps more importantly, translation has been identified as important for the resources it provided in the construction of representations of the colonized as Europe's ‘civilizational other.' In the context of British imperialism in South Asia, Bernard Cohn has persuasively demonstrated the first point, namely, that the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to convert ‘indigenous' forms of textualized knowledge into ‘instruments of colonial rule.' Translational technology, in the form of language grammars and dictionaries, Cohn argues, enabled information gathering and the effective communication of commands, as well as the (at least partial) displacement of European dependence upon interlocutors of perceived dubious reliability. Most recent discussions of translation in this context, however, have focused rather more upon the act of translation as a strategic means for representing ‘otherness' to primarily domestic British reading audiences. In this case, the act of linguistic translation is more clearly being enumerated as a practice of cultural translation. English translations of the ‘ancient' Sanskrit texts of India, for example, have been analyzed for the rhetorical work that the text performs in certain contexts. On the one hand, European-produced translations of these texts might serve to reinforce the dominance of a European aesthetic sensibility through a process of ‘naturalization,' in which the culturally-specific is ‘sanitized,' subordinated to a European norm, thereby inherently limiting the ‘artistic achievement' of the colonized. The orientalist William Jones' erasure of the motif of sweat as an indication of sexual interest and arousal in his translation of Kālidāsa's fourth- or fifth-century Sanskrit play Śakuntala is a case in point. On the other hand, literary translations from Sanskrit might also foreground the ‘otherness' of Indian texts and cultural norms through a strategy of ‘foreignization'; that is, by registering for the European reader differences in language and cultural content. For example, European translations from Sanskrit might include anthropological notations which explain the cultural relevance of the text, or might instead adopt an overly literal rendering of prose, thereby foregrounding differences in syntax, vocabulary, symbol, or motif. Both such rhetorical devices, it can be argued, leave the reader tripping over the text, giving him pause to consider the very strangeness of its appearance and contents.

A medical, as opposed to a surgical, specialty which was to be entrusted with the investigation, care and management of patients with hearing and balance disorders was established in the UK in 1975. This medical specialty was termed ‘audiological medicine’ and its specialists, ‘audiological physicians’. The relationship of the audiological physician to the ear, nose and throat surgeon is analogous to that between the neurologist and the neurosurgeon, or to that between the cardiologist and the cardiac surgeon. The audiological physician’s role needs to be distinguished also from that of the audiologist. An audiologist is a scientist (or technician). (In the UK, science is firmly established as an integral and autonomous discipline within British health-care systems.) The role and scope of the audiological physician is clarified. Audiological physicians are concerned primarily with patients suffering from disorders of auditory communication, equilibrium and spatial disorientation, i.e. ‘deaf and dizzy’ patients.