Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887

By Josep Simon

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot's books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.

Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot's two textbooks: Traite elementaire de physique experimentale et appliquee (1851) and Cours de physique purement experimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson. The study is novel for its international comparison of nineteenth-century physics, its acknowledgement of the role of book production on the impact of the titles, and for its emphasis on the role of communication in the making of science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822981688

Book preview

COMMUNICATING PHYSICS:

THE PRODUCTION, CIRCULATION AND

APPROPRIATION OF GANOT’S TEXTBOOKS IN

FRANCE AND ENGLAND, 1851–1887

SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Series Editor: Bernard Lightman

TITLES IN THIS SERIES

1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858

James Elwick

2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science

Rebekah Higgitt

3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain

Jessica Ratcliff

4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences

Victoria Carroll

5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877

Nigel Richardson

6 Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head

L. S. Jacyna

7 Domesticating Electricity: Expertise, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914

Graeme Gooday

8 James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age

David Philip Miller

9 Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland

Diarmid A. Finnegan

10 Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Juliana Adelman

11 Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England

Simon Naylor

12 The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak

Ian Hesketh

FORTHCOMING TITLES

The British Arboretum: Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels

COMMUNICATING PHYSICS:

THE PRODUCTION, CIRCULATION AND

APPROPRIATION OF GANOT’S TEXTBOOKS IN

FRANCE AND ENGLAND, 1851–1887

BY

Josep Simon

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2016, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Cataloging-in-Publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-8168-8   Hardback: 978-1-84893-130-5

ISBN 10: 0-8229-8168-8

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

1 Textbooks and the Cultures Of Physics

2 Physics in the Marketplace: Textbooks and the Making of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France and England

3 Ganot and Atkinson: A Comparative Biography of the Practice of Physics

4 Ganot’s Physique

5 The International Book Trade and the Making of Scientific Knowledge

6 Atkinson’s Physics

7 Readers and Readings

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

To Ramona Rosbif

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Retrospectively, the path to this book started in Valencia around 2001. With no money and a complex personal and professional future, I was fortunate to find a major human and educational support, providing me with a solid postgraduate education in history of science, and a key professional experience in science heritage management which first led me to Ganot’s textbooks. In 2003, I made my way to Oxford, where I started to work on Ganot’s textbooks for a MSc dissertation, and subsequently to Leeds – a great place to be – where I did my PhD. All this was possible thanks to scholarships awarded by La Caixa – The British Council, the University of Leeds and Bancaixa – CSIC and to the support and encouragement of scholars who believed in my potential and, especially, in history of science as a collective human enterprise. I have been able to prepare this book, based on my PhD research, thanks to fellowships at the Dibner Library and the John W. Kluge Center (Washington DC).

At Leeds, Jon Topham and Graeme Gooday had an important role in my maturation as a historian of science. It was a pleasure to work with them and I am grateful for their supervision of my doctoral thesis. There, I also had the privilege of being multinational, for I sometimes was English, other times Catalan, French, Spanish or Scottish, on special days, Pakistani or Neapolitan and, irreversibly, Valencian. At the Leeds HPS Division I had the pleasure of meeting Geoffrey Cantor, Adrian Wilson, Berris Charnley, Greg Radick, Leucha Veneer, Chris Renwick, Claire Jones and Mark Steadman, among others.

During these years I was also encouraged by scholars who displayed a great generosity in their interest for my work and education. I am extremely grateful to José R. Bertomeu, Agusti Nieto-Galan, Robert Fox, Antonio García-Belmar, Pepe Pardo and Alfons Zarzoso.

I am indebted to scholars who kindly replied to my queries. These include Seiji Takata, Françoise Khantine-Langlois, Adrian Desmond, Bill Brock, Colin Russell, Jim Secord, Sam Alberti, Edgar Jenkins, James Sumner, Dawn Digrius, Christelle Rabier, Feza Günergun and Meltem Akbas. I wish to thank for their help Avril Pedley (St. Peter’s School, York), Bridget Morris and David Robinson (Bootham School, York), Christine Leighton (Cheltenham College), Elisabeth Hunerlach (Heidelberg Universitätsarchiv), A. R. Morton (Royal Military College, Sandhurst), Kate Smith (Royal Society of Chemistry), William Spencer (National Archives, Kew), Juan Luis García Hourcade (Segovia), Joan March (Mallorca), and the archivists at the Archives Nationales de France (Paris) and the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe).

My stay at the Dibner Library in Washington DC had a key role in the transformation of my PhD thesis into a book. At the Smithsonian Institution, I worked in a friendly and interesting atmosphere and I am grateful to Steve Turner and Peggy Kidwell for their help and encouragement. I would also like to thank Kirsten van der Veen, at the Dibner Library, who is an excellent professional in her field. Mary Lou Reker guaranteed a smooth development of my work at the Kluge Center from the first day. With their incisive and constructive comments, two anonymous referees helped me to improve my manuscript and transform it into this book, and I am very grateful to them too. As editor of the series, Bernie Lightman offered invaluable help in the form of comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Commission of the Marc-Auguste Prize of the Société de Physique et Histoire Naturelle de Genève, who awarded an earlier manuscript version of this book with that prize.

Finally, I would like to thank friends and family who have supported me unconditionally throughout these years. My heartfelt thanks to my father, who died some years ago, my mother, Victoria, my sisters Toya and Sabela, and my numerous electric family: Pedro Llovera, Virginia Vinagre, Patrick Ribes, Laurence Leroy, Efrén Calatrava, Jaro Ferrer, Maria Grazia Bellio, Ricard Tomàs, Giulia Zanetti, Miquel Ardid, Alessandro Costa, Cristian and Miha Constantinescu, Jacopo Novelli, Ishita Pande, Lluís Martínez, Luc Deprugney, David Curiel, Mayte Aroca, Álvaro García (‘Varito’), Chimo Martínez, Virginia Tormo, Alícia Verdú, Jaume Valentines, Ino Latorre, Francesc Ferrer, Andy Warren, Christopher Smith (‘Big Chris’), Jimmy Brown, Ximo Guillem, Daria Wingreen-Mason, Michael Mason, Faidra Papanelopoulou, Kirsten van der Veen, Jaume Sastre, Jorge Yeregui and Alicia Pérez García. For their hospitality, I thank Federica Cecchi and Cadu Villela. Patricia Blanco García had to live for too long with my Ganotmania, and she merits all the credit for this epic task. This book is for those who may enjoy reading it.

All images have been taken from the author’s collection except Figure 3.3 which has been reproduced with permission of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1: Title page of a reprint of the first edition of Ganot’s Traité (1852).

Figure 3.1: Ganot’s forgotten tombstone at the cemetery of Montrouge (Paris).

Figure 3.2: Title page of Atkinson-Baillière’s first edition of Ganot’s Treatise (1863).

Figure 3.3: Caricature of Edmund Atkinson performing a classroom illustration of the physiological effects of electricity at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, presumably drawn by one of his students. Crown copyright.

Figure 4.1: Illustration of Stephenson’s British locomotive built by Cail and Derosne, the leading French workshop. Ganot, Traité (1851).

Figure 4.2 a and b: Comparison of illustrations in Ganot’s Traité, Ganot’s Cours and in Pouillet’s Elémens.

Figure 5.1: Size comparison of Ganot’s Traité (1860) and Atkinson’s Treatise (1863).

Figure 7.1: Illustration alluded to by August Strindberg.

Figure 7.2: Illustration of Nollet’s machine in Ganot’s Traité.

Figure 7.3: Comparison of de Ferranti’s drawings (illustrating his early ideas for the development of his electric meter) and Ganot’s diagrams (on the interaction between electrical currents).

INTRODUCTION

This book is another history of the making of physics in the nineteenth century, yet a singular one. Overall, a different focus on events and actors, and a more accurate and well-balanced periodization distinguishes it from previous accounts. My aim is not to offer a complement to previous histories of physics, but to pinpoint problems in its standard historiography, to propose solutions, and to contribute to the writing of a new history of physics in consonance with current historiographical challenges.

This book characterizes the making of physics as a discipline in the nineteenth century as a process driven by practices of school teaching and pedagogical writing, book production and distribution, and studying and reading, shaped by persistent international communication. The originality of this approach lies in its focus on education, book culture, international comparison and cross-national transit.

It is not by chance that the concept of discipline is a cultural product of nineteenth-century society. Historians have characterized disciplines in several ways which are often applied separately: a particular corpus of knowledge, a sequence of questions, problems and methods, an institutional framework, the profile of a community of practitioners, the invention of a genealogy, a tradition and a self-image, the establishment of a common language, a discourse and a distinctively recognizable literature, or the enforcement of power through a normative structure of social authority and control. An efficient way of combining the focus on knowledge and practice with that on institutional, occupational and social roles is to define scientific disciplines as social systems of communication.¹

The configuration of disciplines has commonly been located in certain institutions and their tools of communication: universities, academies, learned societies and schools, and treatises, periodicals and textbooks. It has often been held that disciplines are created in academic institutions, and subsequently adopted elsewhere. In schools, they are adapted to the requirements of beginners.² Here, traditional views on pedagogy are similar to those on popularization: mere tools to simplify (or degrade) complex knowledge into elementary notions, from top (academia or cultural elites) to bottom (school or laity); forms of communication strictly aimed at reproducing knowledge, but unable to create original meaning.

Like the dominant view of popularization, this conception of pedagogy has been criticized in contemporary scholarship: In fact, ‘at the bottom’, the making of school subjects and pedagogy has a creative input in the general process of disciplinary configuration.³ A study of the making of disciplines will thus have to deal with the analysis of interactions between school and university, instead of postulating a simplistic subordination of the former to the latter.⁴ This is particularly relevant in the nineteenth century and in regard to the sciences, since the establishment of scientific disciplines such as physics, chemistry and natural history is inseparable from their development as school subjects in secondary education.

This book intends to prove that the study of the interface between secondary and university education, and the nineteenth-century articulation between these two different but connected spheres can be fruitfully used as a focal point for historical research. Previous work suggests the interest of pursuing this agenda and the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach.⁵

An important contribution of this book is precisely the promotion of interdisciplinary interaction by the combination of approaches from history of science, history of education and book history. Its main objects of research deserved it. At the heart of this book are two physics textbooks by a French teacher and their English translations. Adolphe Ganot published in mid-nineteenth-century Paris two textbooks which rapidly became major best-sellers in the learning of physics across primary, secondary, university and informal education in France. During the second half of the century, they were translated into a large number of languages and became standard introductions to physics worldwide. Ganot’s textbooks were translated in England by Edmund Atkinson, a young chemist who oriented his professional career towards physics teaching. Atkinson’s editions assured an unrivalled status for Ganot’s textbooks in the English market for most of the century. Thus, during the second half of the nineteenth century Ganot’s textbooks represent to a large extent what and how physics was learned by most students in France, England and beyond, in a key moment for the configuration of physics as a discipline.

Paradoxically, Ganot’s textbooks have elicited little interest among historians.⁶ Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics are conspicuous by their absence in the history of physics.⁷ Confronting this problem immediately raises a number of questions: Why did Ganot’s textbooks became so successful? What was their impact on education? What was their contribution to the making of physics as a discipline? How did they reach so many countries? Why were two French textbooks translated into English and why were they so successful in England? Why are Ganot and Atkinson so little known? What are the differences between the French and English editions? What was Atkinson’s contribution to the English editions ? As we shall see, the study of Ganot’s textbooks raises further questions which are of great significance for the historiographies of science, education, and the book.

Overall, this book investigates the tension between ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ present in the aforementioned historiographies, and applies the results of this enquiry to the characterization of nineteenth-century physics as a discipline. To this end, it tackles three areas in which the question of ‘form’ versus ‘meaning’ is particularly significant: the production, circulation and appropriation of scientific knowledge, respectively. The standard historiography of science still holds too often an idealized view of scientific knowledge, conceived as an immaterial canon. The materiality and forms of production and distribution of scientific texts are often deemed irrelevant to understand their scientific meaning. Furthermore, it is still often implicit in the standard view that cultural and national boundaries do not affect the communication of meaning: knowledge is diffused universally by scientific authors, without constraint or change. Thus, teaching and reading are often considered as mere forms of diffusion which do not affect the substance of knowledge.⁸

However, recent work indicates the need of blurring the distinction between form and meaning by taking into account the active role that actions such as book production and distribution, teaching, writing, and reading have in the making of scientific knowledge.⁹ In the following narrative I summarize the main historical questions in this field, which I elaborate further in the first chapter of this book. But first I will set up the problem of defining nineteenth-century physics.

Physics

What is this thing called physics? The standard historiography of physics provides a clear answer to this question: the making of physics took place during the nineteenth century through successive developments led in turns by French, British and German practitioners, respectively. The process was complete around 1900 and consisted of the unification of what hitherto were isolated fields of enquiry into nature, through the substitution of the theory of imponderable fluids for the principle of energy conservation, and the development of a compact theoretical, mathematical and experimental approach.¹⁰ In spite of the sophistication of the current historiography of nineteenth-century physics – especially shaped by approaches from cultural history – the general consensus about this general framework is striking.

The simplicity of this narrative is in contrast, for instance, with the substitution, in the neighbouring field of chemistry, of simple narratives of origins and revolutions by a historiography based on a plural set of explanations, factors and approaches, aimed at characterizing discipline building and historical change.¹¹

Historians of physics can learn from the historiography of chemistry not only because of its sophistication, but also because of the blurry boundaries between chemistry and physics in the nineteenth century.¹² The standard historiography of nineteenth-century physics is also at variance with the new historiography of twentieth-century physics. The work of Peter Galison and others has shown the non-existence of a unitary ‘physics’ and the coexistence instead of different cultures of physics subjected to constant interaction and multidirectional exchange.¹³

Historians have historicized ‘physics’ by presenting it as a nineteenth-century ‘invention’, thus making the contingency of its origin a central object of discussion.¹⁴ But this useful strategy has also led to several problems associated with the resulting narrative. In terms of periodization, this narrative is teleological in assuming, more or less explicitly, that nineteenth-century developments are successive steps to form twentieth-century physics. Inevitably most accounts look at nineteenth-century physics from 1900. In terms of geography, it has implicitly assumed a narrow centre-periphery model in which physics is defined by one or two countries being central in a certain period, and diffused elsewhere. In terms of epistemological foundation, it is taken for granted that the process of conceptual unification in physics could be subject to early disagreement and debate, but ended up in generalized consensus and acceptance everywhere.

In this perspective, Ganot’s textbooks would not belong to a hegemonic period of French physics and can thus be ignored. Historians of nineteenth-century physics have thus missed the relevance of the fact that, during the second half of the century, French textbooks had a fundamental role in the education of school and college physics students in Britain and elsewhere.

Moreover, Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbook physics make clear that the conceptual impulse to unify nineteenth-century physics might perhaps be more a desideratum than a reality, and the result of a particular selection of actors and an overemphasis on their claims. Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics offer a big picture of nineteenth-century physics in which mid-century developments are core, and they display the diversity of epistemological frameworks and practices coexisting in physics in different periods and places.

A major challenge for the future history of nineteenth-century physics might be to confront the urge of further comparative and cross-national work analysing the multifarious cultures of nineteenth-century physics across cultural collectives and national boundaries. This problem is connected to standard perceptions of the role of communication in the making of science, which leads us to consider the role that ‘production’, ‘circulation’ and ‘appropriation’ have in this book.

Production

Characterizing the making of a discipline involves establishing who the actors were in this process. Traditionally, this implies asking the question: Who were the producers of physics, that is, who were the physicists? The standard answer is simple: the authors of the most ‘relevant’ scientific papers and treatises in this field. In the standard historiography of physics, this has commonly meant the most ‘relevant’ authors contributing to the unification of physics, whether through theoretical speculation, the development of characteristic mathematical or experimental techniques, or a combination of all of these. Recently, Iwan Morus has expanded this set of actors by emphasizing the importance of popularisers and, in particular, those involved in the making, manipulation and exhibition of scientific instruments.¹⁵ However, this important contribution has not managed to reshape significantly the standard characterization of physics.

The production to which this standard picture refers – the most ‘relevant’ physics papers and specialized treatises – is in fact a narrow part of the whole nineteenth-century physics production and one with a narrow and elitist readership. In contrast, textbooks such as those of Ganot and Atkinson had large print runs, they circulated across a wide range of readerships and they were canonical sources for those beginning their training in physics. Furthermore, as we shall see, they provided a genuine picture of physics and were also used by advanced physicists. In his history of literary authorship, historian Nigel Cross showed a few decades ago how misleading it could be to focus exclusively on famous authors, and he argued for a history of ‘the common writer’.¹⁶ Is there any reason to act otherwise in the history of physics?

Textbooks had a major role in the development of physics in secondary and university education, and for this reason they were important agents in the shaping of the subject as a discipline. Teachers and textbook authors like Ganot and Atkinson were important in the quantitative and qualitative development of the discipline through the preparation of students for understanding and, in certain cases, for the future practice of physics. Following the overarching theme of blurring the boundaries between ‘form’ and ‘meaning’, in this book, I consider that the making of pedagogy through textbook physics was also an important part of the making of physics as a discipline. The production of physics also took place in schools and the preparation of textbooks involved the production of original knowledge.

In this book, when I talk about ‘production’ I intend to talk both of the making of ideas (in physics, pedagogy and book design) and of their practical execution, including a major condition for their existence, which is their communication. Thus, I consider that the ‘forms of production’ also contributed to shape the meaning of physical knowledge.¹⁷

This account pays equal attention to the work of research physicists, teachers, textbook authors, print technicians, booksellers, publishers and readers. Instead of assuming that the message put forward by elite physics authors was replicated instantaneously and universally, a different picture emerges when one takes into account this expanded range of actors as active producers of knowledge.

In the nineteenth century, publishers and booksellers had a major role in the production of scientific knowledge: publication and selling strategies contributed to determine what was published and how it was published and communicated. In its turn, this shaped how books were read and therefore the meanings attributed to them by readers. This study also illustrates the importance of production techniques and the impact of the material culture of the book in the making of scientific knowledge. While print technicians are still often considered mere intermediaries in the universal replication of scientific knowledge, here they are given an active role in the making of science, in agreement with an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the role of knowledge circulation in science.

Circulation

Once we have determined what physics is, who produced it, and where and how it was produced, we should get to know how it came to spread across different social, cultural and geographical localities, and how a global consensus might have been reached, providing physics with its disciplinary identity.

Traditionally, a clear separation has been drawn between the production of science and its circulation. The study of the production and circulation of science has commonly been – implicitly or explicitly – tackled through centre-periphery or transmission/reception models.¹⁸ In these models, science is considered to be produced in a locality and subsequently spread elsewhere, reaching intact other localities which are seen as passive receivers.¹⁹ These models fail to take into account several aspects which arise from a more in-depth study of knowledge production and circulation: first, science is rarely produced in isolation; the context of production is also characterized by knowledge circulation. Second, knowledge is shaped in order to be communicated, thus again circulation shapes production. Third, knowledge is rarely received passively; on the contrary, it is usually subjected to creative appropriation.

The traditional view of scientific knowledge circulation is no longer tenable in history of science. However, it is still implicit in many works. The critical analysis of circulation has taken place especially in the field of ‘the Others’, that is, in the study of the making of science and culture beyond Europe and in the European ‘periphery’, giving rise to new approaches such as postcolonial historiography, Atlantic history and STEP (Science and Technology in the European Periphery).²⁰ In contrast, it is still finding its way in the study of what is commonly seen as the canon of contemporary Western science. Further work needs to be done to overcome a picture which overemphasizes national blocks and sees international communication as a mere succession of distinct national periods of scientific and technological hegemony. The study of Franco-British circulation proposed in this book aims to advance in this direction.

In addition, emerging approaches in the study of popularization are intending to promote a more symmetrical study of scientific knowledge circulation, with approaches focused on the study of ‘communication’, images such as the ‘marketplace’, and attention to readers’ responses. In parallel, there is a move in the history of technology to conceive ‘consumers’ as agents also intervening in ‘production’. Furthermore concepts such as that of ‘trade zone’ proposed by Galison for the study of twentieth-century physics put an increasing emphasis in the role of collective and multilayered exchange in the making of science.²¹

This general move has been notably grasped by James Secord in a recent historiographical proposal which suggests that blurring the traditional distinction between the making and the communication of knowledge could have the potential to bridge the gap between a wide range of historical areas.²² This is an interesting work plan which could be fruitfully applied to the study of science education and international circulation, provided that an accurate problematization of ‘communication’ is put forward in each case.

In this book, I have made use of this core idea. But my study in communication goes beyond the more standard focuses in history of science – currently geared toward the local and the national – to take into account international communication.²³ The wide circulation of Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks provide an excellent opportunity to produce work on a variety of contexts and across them, and to reflect on the role of communication in the making of scientific knowledge.

If we are going to give an active role to ‘communication’ in the making of scientific knowledge, then we should look to better ways of characterizing how knowledge is provided with meaning by the wide variety of historical actors placed at the other end of the communication line. To this end, in this book I propose the use of the concept of ‘appropriation’ in ways which connect the individual with the collective, and the local with the global.

Appropriation

As we have seen, ‘communication’ is not a newcomer in history of science. What distinguishes new approaches from the old centre-periphery models and transmission/reception studies is that they give important agency to what hitherto were considered passive audiences. An important inspiration here comes from cultural history. In his study of popular culture, Roger Chartier concluded that the ‘popular’ could not be defined as an essential nature found in objects or texts, but by assessing the active ways in which those were ‘appropriated’ by different kinds of readers. Other scholars have used this concept to analyse the production of new knowledge through its circulation across large geographical scales.²⁴

What these approaches are calling for is a more balanced and accurate assessment of the making of science, respectful with cultural and historical difference and exempted from unacknowledged cultural, political and national biases. Hence, able to take into account the voices of a more extended range of historical actors and to consider them for their own sake, in spite of their currently inferior historiographical status. The concept of ‘appropriation’, defined as the active process by which knowledge is provided with meaning, is thus a simple but powerful and inclusive tool. Thus, we can free our historical understanding from the myth of origins (the narrative focus on a unique act of knowledge creation in space and time) and from the viewpoint of elites, to focus instead on how processes of appropriation ranging from the individual to the collective and from the local to the global contributed to shape physical knowledge as a well-defined disciplinary knowledge.

Accordingly, in this book, I will study how physics was conceived in different cultural and social circles beyond the realm of elite practitioners, by analysing what physics was for actors such as teachers, students, booksellers, publishers, printers and a wide range of readers. As we shall see, what provides Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics with the authority of the standard is the wide range of their readerships, the large number of communication processes which they contributed in shaping, and their capacity to promote communication across different cultural and social spheres in local, national and cross-national contexts.

Hence, in this book I characterize the making of physics as a discipline through three major historical themes (production, circulation and appropriation) and the development of a historiographical approach aimed at blurring epistemological boundaries between form and meaning, or, in other words, between production and communication. As I argue in the next chapter, a major strength in this study is its bi-national focus. As we shall see, this book is an exercise in comparative and cross-national history of two countries which are traditionally considered as representing two clearly opposing scientific, educational and political models. If indeed their national cultures and histories have genuine characteristics – as in fact all nations have – then their respective historiographies have often overemphasized national exceptionality – a bias which this work aims to correct.

Chapter 1 presents Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks, and reviews the tensions that the consideration of textbooks and education as sources for historical research have caused in the historiography of science, and in particular of physics. This chapter serves as an introduction to the questions raised in this book and implies a deep revision of Kuhnian perspectives which have long held sway.

Chapter 2 presents the context in which Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks appeared by providing a general overview of the physics textbook market in nineteenth-century France and England. It determines who published physics textbooks, for what reasons, in what moments, and for what readerships, and characterizes the nineteenth-century physics textbook, its functions and its uses. This overview serves as a background to the following chapter.

Chapter 3 narrows its view to focus on a comparison of Adolphe Ganot and Edmund Atkinson as physics practitioners. My aim is to examine why they produced their textbooks, how they produced them and for whom they were intended. This insight into their work is organized in three major themes, namely the study of their teaching, reading and writing practices.

Chapter 4 deals with the production of Ganot’s physique. In the first part of the chapter I analyse the contribution of printers and illustrators to this process. In the second part, I characterize physics as a discipline, according to the structure, order and narrative of Ganot’s textbook physics.

Chapter 5 connects the characterization of Ganot’s physique performed in Chapter 4, with the study of Atkinson’s physics developed in Chapter 6. It does so by vindicating the role of publishers and booksellers in the making of science. In this chapter I consider the agency of these actors in the production of Ganot’s textbook physics in England, and show how their professional practices did not only affect the circulation of physical knowledge but also its constitution.

Chapter 6 is symmetrical to Chapter 4 and eminently comparative. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the production of Atkinson’s physics and the role of teachers, publishers and printing techniques in this process. Subsequently, I characterize the structure, order and narrative of Atkinson’s physics, and I compare it with Ganot’s physique. However, I contend that the analysis of production and its products is not enough to characterize physics, which is also shaped by its readers.

Chapter 7 offers an overview of readers and readings of Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks, classified in three categories which characterize roughly three practices and contexts of reading (formal education; informal education, popularization and general reading; and professional practice). This readers’ overview of Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics allows us to reflect on the nature of physics as a discipline and on the processes by which certain knowledge becomes standard.

1 TEXTBOOKS AND THE CULTURES OF PHYSICS

On 14 January 1895, the British engineer Sebastian de Ferranti (1864–1930) lectured at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on the recent history of his electricity meter – a great commercial success to that date.¹ The Society had been established in the 1820s to promote communication between men of science, engineers, instrument makers and manufacturers.² In his lecture, de Ferranti resorted to ‘Ganot’s physics’ to explain the basic mechanism of his meter. He considered obvious that his audience was familiar with Ganot’s Elementary Treatise on Physics Experimental and Applied, the fourteenth edition of which had been published by the house of Longmans a few years earlier.

De Ferranti’s reference did not merely have an expository function. In fact – he confessed – this had been the source from which he had started to work on the design of his meter.³ His inspiration came from a group of diagrams of Ampere’s laws of the interaction between currents, which Ganot had introduced in the first edition of his Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée (1851) and developed subsequently.⁴ The same diagrams appeared in the first edition of the Treatise, an English translation commissioned by the Franco-British publisher Hippolyte Baillière (1809–67) to Edmund Atkinson (1831–1900), a young chemist just embarked on a career as a college ‘Lecturer on Chemistry and Physics’.⁵

In fin-de-siècle Britain, Atkinson’s translation of Ganot’s textbook marked the standard in school and college physics. A review of its sixteenth edition, which appeared in a major educational journal, stated:

We suppose every teacher of physics knows and respects Ganot’s ‘Physics’. For many years it has been the custom of boys studying this subject to look forward to the time when they will each possess a copy of this attractive and beautifully illustrated volume.⁶

In this period, Ganot’s ‘Physics’ was also considered a genuine product of Victorian culture, in spite of its French origin.⁷ This was due both to the qualities of Ganot’s original and to the work of Atkinson and his publishers.

Ganot published in 1851 his Traité, after working twenty years as a science teacher in France. In 1859, he published a second textbook, the Cours de physique purement expérimentale, which further expanded the readerships of his textbook physics.⁸ Between 1851 and 1884, Ganot produced eighteen editions of his Traité and eight editions of his Cours, selling in France and abroad a total of 204,000 and 64,500 copies, respectively.⁹ During the nineteenth century, the Traité was translated into eleven languages and the Cours had six translations.¹⁰ Although the translation of French physics textbooks into other languages was common in this period,¹¹ Ganot’s textbooks were certainly amongst the most widely translated.

Atkinson prepared the first English translation of Ganot’s Traité between 1861 and 1863.¹² After Baillière’s premature death, he took charge of subsequent editions and negotiated their transfer to the major English publishing house, Longmans. In 1872, he translated for this firm Ganot’s Cours as Natural Philosophy for General Readers and Young Persons.¹³ Between 1861 and 1898, Atkinson prepared fifteen editions of the Treatise and eight of Natural Philosophy. By 1881, the former had sold no less than 52,000 copies and the latter at least 22,000 copies.¹⁴ Most copies were sold in Britain, but a significant number was purchased in other countries, in particular in North America and India. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ganot’s physics had wide readerships, in French or in translation, in the five continents. In this period, Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks became standard as introductions to physics worldwide. They sold an impressive number of copies which seems to be above the average in the physics textbook marketplace. But there were some scientific and educational books which sold more copies in this period. An appropriate quantification of nineteenth-century science in print is still required in order to assess comparatively the success of books such as those of Ganot, but some examples can be illustrative.¹⁵

Ganot and Atkinson increased progressively the print runs of their books. The largest print run attained by Ganot’s textbooks was 20,000 copies for the eighteenth edition of the Traité (1880). The print runs of the Cours were lower, and so were those of the Treatise and Natural Philosophy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of copies of La Fontaine’s Fables – arguably the most printed classic in France – amounted to approximately 750,000 copies. In the 1840s, print runs of 5,000 to 10,000 could be common for successful novels. By the 1870s, some cheap editions of Junes Verne’s novels were printed at 30,000 copies. Camille Flammarion’s best-selling work, the Astronomie populaire (1880), sold 100,000 copies in around a decade. Successful popular science books, such as those by Flammarion, could multiply several times the typical print runs of the previous decades, being printed at 40,000–50,000 copies. In many cases though Ganot’s 20,000 for the eighteenth edition of his Traité was not surpassed or was only matched, and its total 204,000 copies sold was still an exceptional feat.

The print runs and sales of Atkinson’s editions were less than those of Ganot, but still represented a considerably successful publishing enterprise. Atkinson’s textbooks had print runs of around 5,000 copies, and they progressively increased in successive editions to approach 10,000 copies. Two decades after its first edition the Treatise had sold a large number of copies (more than 52,000) and in only one decade Natural Philosophy had sold almost half this number. In Britain, some nineteenth-century best-selling science books had higher sales, which Atkinson’s textbooks might have approached towards the end of the century, but were unlikely to beat. George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), which started with small print runs of around 1,000–2,000, had sold three decades later around 100,000 copies. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar (c. 1841) sold more than 100,000 copies in three decades, and tripled this quantity by the beginning of the twentieth century. Popular books for school learning and domestic education such as Richard Phillips’ Easy Grammar of General Geography, designed during the first half of the century, could have between 10,000 and 20,000 copies printed annually for several decades.

Figure 1.1 Title page of a reprint of the first edition of Ganot’s Traité (1852).

The sales of Atkinson’s textbooks were in certain cases similar to those of some of the Bridgewater Treatises, which had in general enormous sales shortly after their publication, but a major drop in their print runs subsequently. Instead, through their connection to a rapidly expanding educational system, the print runs of Atkinson’s textbooks increased steadily through the years and thus they were likely to surpass the sales of previous educational publishing ventures. In the nineteenth century, both the Treatise and Natural Philosophy sold more copies than well-known classics such as Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species.¹⁶

The combination of longevity, frequent periodicity, large number of translations, and large print runs leaves no doubt about the importance of Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics in the nineteenth-century science book market. Ganot’s textbooks were not only used world-wide and for a long period as standard school and university introductions to physics, but also in other contexts such as popularization and research. Thus, they occupied a central position in French and British culture.

This factual evidence could be interpreted as a clear example of ‘normalization’ and ‘disciplinarization’ in the sense coined by Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, respectively.¹⁷ Indeed, the large number of editions of Ganot’s and Atkinson’s textbooks and their extended use in formal education supports the conception of them as representations of ‘normal science’ or ‘disciplined training’, or – taking a step forward – not merely representations, but agents of the enforcement of scientific norms and discipline which represented the structure of power in physics. However, this approach assumes that there was a pre-established and well-defined disciplinary field (‘physics’), before the appearance of Ganot’s physique and Atkinson’s physics on the scene, that their textbooks contributed to maintain or to consolidate, but never to shape or to change.