In the Air or on the Page? Making Argon Public

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

When Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay announced in early 1895 that an element in the air existed that had escaped anyoneʼs notice, their work was hailed as a triumph not simply by chemists and physicists but also by the wider Victorian press. The discovery of argon was also, however, a locus of controversy over propriety and property in making scientific claims that dragged on for several years, as a host of new gases were put forward as pretenders to elemental status. At issue were not simply matters of scientific priority but rather of the appropriate means by which scientific discoveries were transformed into public knowledge claims, of the nature and the rights of the relevant publics for those claims, and of the rights and responsibilities of researchers and others to follow up on and extend their substantive findings.

Alex Csiszarʼs research interests include the history of 19th-century scientific publishing in France and Britain. His current book project, Broken Pieces of Fact: The Rise of the Scientific Journal, examines the circumstances in which the scientific journal emerged to become the principal institutional site for the representation, certification, and registration of authoritative natural knowledge. He is assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University.