<DIV align=justify>About HoST HOST - Journal of History of Science and Technology is a peer-reviewed open access journal, available online, devoted to the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. It explores the cultural, social and political dimensions of science, technology, and medicine (STM) in history across the world. Since 2019 HoST is published twice a year (June and December). Originated from efforts to develop the Portuguese community of historians of science, technology and medicine, HoST is entirely committed to original research on the cultural and social dimensions of science and technology in history across the globe. In effect, a major goal is to make the global geography of HoST papers a distinctive feature of the journal. The constitution of the advisory board reflects the importance of having an active collaboration from different regions of the planet and distinguishes HoST from most of the journals in the field. Each issue typically includes a thematic dossier, varia and work in progress sections, and three book reviews. Even if based on thematic issues, this journal also accepts and encourages spontaneous submissions, especially from graduate students (work in progress section). In order to promote the exchange between the local research community and noted international scholars, HoST and CIUHCT organize an annual distinguished lecture, which is published each year in the journal. HoST was founded in 2007 and since 2016 is published by De Gruyter/Sciendo. For back issues published until 2014, see <A href="http://johost.eu/">johost.eu</A>. HoST provides immediate open access to its content under the <A href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons BY 4.0 license</A>. Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentoined CC BY 4.0 license. Rejection rate: <UL> <LI>30% </LI></UL> Sponsors: <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 75px; WIDTH: 250px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_CIUHCTlogo.png"></A> <A href="http://www.en.cidehus.uevora.pt/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 74px; WIDTH: 160px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_CIDEHUSlogo.png"></A> <A href="https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 74px; WIDTH: 147px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_ICSlogo.png"></A> <A href="http://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 74px; WIDTH: 240px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_IHClogo.png"></A> HoST is sponsored by four Portuguese research centres, funded by National funds through FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UIDB/00286/2020 (CIUHCT), UIDB/00057/2020 and UIDP/00057/2020 (CIDEHUS), UIDB/50013/2020 and UIDP/50013/2020 (ICS), UIDB/04209/2020 and UIDP/04209/2020 (IHC). <A href="https://www.fct.pt/index.phtml.en"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 70px; WIDTH: 143px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_FCTlogo.png"></A> <A href="http://www.poci-compete2020.pt/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 70px; WIDTH: 183px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_COMPETElogo.png"></A> <A href="https://www.portugal2020.pt/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 70px; WIDTH: 153px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_P2020logo.png"></A> <A href="https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/pt/funding/erdf/"><IMG style="HEIGHT: 70px; WIDTH: 209px" src="https://www.degruyter.com/staticfiles/images/journals/HOST_FEDERlogo.png"></A> </DIV>

HoST - Journal  of History of Science and Technology

<article-title>Introduction: Standards in the History of Contemporary Science</article-title>

Introduction: Standards in the History of Contemporary Science

{"article-title":"Introduction: Standards in the History of Contemporary Science"}

Astrophysics was born in the nineteenth century as a “New Astronomy” (in the words of Samuel Langley, 1884), a knowledge built primarily by amateurs who explored deep space by studying the Sun, stars and nebulae. They were credible enough to interest physicists who did research on the properties of radiation and hence came to constitute a solid and recognised discipline. The aim of this research is to study the contribution of artisanal knowledge in the construction of this new discipline at two distinct moments. The first, when artisans worked to find a standard to normalise the manufacture of the glass with which the lenses of refracting telescopes were manufactured. The most recognised of these artisans was Fraunhöfer. The second moment occurred when the experience of artisan knowledge enabled the manufacture of instruments that improved the traditional classification of the magnitude of the stars. The search for standards led to an alliance between artisans and scientists during the same period in which spectroscopy was carried out. In this case, a unit of luminous intensity was sought that could serve as a standard to classify the stars by their luminosity. Industries, university laboratories and astronomers interested in solar astronomy (such as Karl F. Zöllner), collaborated with the artisan manufacturers of measuring devices, and gave rise to a paradigmatic case of science and industry transfer.

Abstract

Keywords

<article-title>Domesticating Light: Standards and Artisanal Knowledge in Early Astrophysics</article-title>

Domesticating Light: Standards and Artisanal Knowledge in Early Astrophysics

{"article-title":"Domesticating Light: Standards and Artisanal Knowledge in Early Astrophysics"}

Our aim is to explore the links between standardisation, the quantifying spirit, and the discipline mathematics. To do so, we consider the work of Gauss, renowned as a pure mathematician, but professionally an astronomer, and one heavily engaged with all kinds of measuring and precision initiatives. He contributed to the mathematical correction of data with the method of least squares; to observations of high precision in his geodetic work; to the introduction of absolute measures in his collaborations with Weber on terrestrial magnetism; and to the rationalisation of weights and measures in the state of Hannover. Ultimately, the question is to what extent such precision and standardisation activities may have been rooted in the mathematical way of thinking. Mathematics in our tradition has had a strong contemplative bias (theory, <italic>theorein</italic> in Greek means to contemplate), but it’s a fact that mathematics has always had a non-eliminable technical side.

IMUS and Departamento de Filosofía y Lógica

<article-title>Gauss and the Mathematical Background to Standardisation</article-title>

Gauss and the Mathematical Background to Standardisation

{"article-title":"Gauss and the Mathematical Background to Standardisation"}

The first reliable pattern of the human chromosome set was manufactured between the late 1950s and early 1960s. This paper will account for the historical background of such reliability, of the production of a reference, an image, the schematic figure – the ideogram – that represented what would from then on be held in the minds of medical practitioners and laboratory scientists of human cytogenetics as the cytological identity of being human. Human genetics as a history of images and the skills of drawing, making photo(micro) graphs and diagrams, developed through a reference drawn on the basis of the consensus reached by a small group of early human cytogeneticists in Denver in 1960. Schemes and idealizations, as well as the fully realistic transposition of the contours and interiors of each chromosome, participated in the emergence of a particular, specific and enduring way of representing the tiny parts of the cell where division began, and accounting for both the forms and function of chromosomes at the origins of medical genetics.

<article-title>Standard Making in Cytogenetics: the Manufacture, Circulation and Reproduction of Chromosome Images</article-title>

Standard Making in Cytogenetics: the Manufacture, Circulation and Reproduction of Chromosome Images

Standards are linked to specifications about scaling, safety, feasibility and suitability. The threshold setting process defines the environment in which the standards are meaningful to a given community and the conditions of vulnerability implied by their absence. This paper will discuss the role of standards in defining safety conditions for endangered bird species in urban environments and in designing closed environments for polio patients during the 1950s, the infamous iron lungs, which are still rarely used today. The aim is to explore how standards are involved in defining preservation strategies and the shortcomings of their systematic implementation in this regard. The interdependence of technological standards and the increasing amount of information handled are joining cultural assemblages to question the objectives of preservation in artificial environments, urging the question of what we are preserving. This raises the issue of the relationship between stabilisations through epistemic tools and ontological continuity and robustness in dense technological environments.

<article-title>Preserved Worlds: Vulnerability, Ontology, and the Logics of Standards</article-title>

Preserved Worlds: Vulnerability, Ontology, and the Logics of Standards

{"article-title":"Preserved Worlds: Vulnerability, Ontology, and the Logics of Standards"}

This study examines the introduction of prescriptive pesticide technologies into Scandinavian family gardens. It analyses pesticide propaganda and plant protection experts’ advice and instructions on the use of pesticides directed at amateur, home gardeners in Norway, Sweden and Denmark in the years between 1945 and 1952, the period when the new generation of synthetic pesticides was introduced in Scandinavia, and eagerly advocated by the leading experts of plant protection science. The sources investigated are gardening magazines and their special issues on garden instruction and the use of chemicals through the seasons, edited, published and distributed to a wide readership by national gardening associations. The study shows how the gardening associations in Scandinavia and their popular gardening magazines were major pushers of extensive pesticide spraying practices, with supporting epistemic logic, onto the numerous family gardeners of Scandinavia. Through these gardening associations both the state plant protection authorities and their scientific expertise and also the pesticide companies reached wide groups of citizens, across diverse professions, occupations and ways of life. This served to normalise the use of powerful poisons in small gardens and small-scale food production.

<article-title>Syntheticising Scandinavia: The Introduction of Synthetic Pesticides to Scandinavian Gardens, 1945-1952</article-title>

Syntheticising Scandinavia: The Introduction of Synthetic Pesticides to Scandinavian Gardens, 1945-1952

Why do collections continually surprise? The simple answer for students and researchers is that collections of historic objects contain abundant information not well represented in texts or on the internet. Collections in museums, libraries, campuses and private hands offer a unique source of diversity for research, teaching and broader cultural offerings. In this paper, I look at the wealth of findings resulting from the careful study of objects, collections and provenance. I provide examples from our national science museums in Ottawa, as well as collecting activities throughout Canada. I will also describe recent research in German science collections. The close study of objects has a capacity to reveal multiple narratives and unexpected human dimensions of the past, while also connecting us to complex human relations with what remains in the present. I reflect on how collection keepers and museums can better harness the possibilities stemming from these kinds of approaches.

<article-title>What Remains: The Enduring Value of Museum Collections in the Digital Age</article-title>

What Remains: The Enduring Value of Museum Collections in the Digital Age

{"article-title":"What Remains: The Enduring Value of Museum Collections in the Digital Age"}

The wide railway universe, with its particular and peculiar characteristics, requires the implementation of criteria to improve the identification and conservation of cultural goods. Recently concepts of authenticity, integrity and cultural significance have been identified as fundamental in the selection of the cultural heritage of humanity. Although we find these concepts being analyzed in theory as independents, through a theoretical-methodological reflection, this PhD research argues that, in practice, they are interconnected, and therefore should be approached together. Following the contemporary theory of conservation, my doctoral research aims at contributing to the conservation of railways’ heritage using this new approach, by proposing new indicators as assessment tools so that conservation institutions will be able to identify railway goods as cultural heritage. The research uses the Railway Complex of Barreiro, in Portugal, as a case study.

Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT) Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

<article-title>A New Approach to the Concepts of Conservation to Identify and Evaluate Railway Heritage through Indicators</article-title>

A New Approach to the Concepts of Conservation to Identify and Evaluate Railway Heritage through Indicators

Instituto Interuniversitario López Piñero

<article-title>Book-Review: Agustí Nieto-Galan. <italic>The Politics of Chemistry: Science and Power in Twentieth-century Spain</italic></article-title>

<article-title>Book-Review: Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (eds.). <italic>Capital Científica. Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal</italic></article-title>

Book-Review: Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (eds.). 

<article-title>Book-Review: Charles W. J. Withers. <italic>Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian</italic></article-title>

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Chief Editor <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/cristina-luis">Cristina Luís</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal Executive Editors <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/davide-scarso">Davide Scarso</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/luis-tirapicos">Luís Tirapicos</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal Book review Editor <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/members/samuel-gessner">Samuel Gessner</A>, CNRS, Observatoire de Paris-PSL, France Technical Editors <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/members/joao-machado">João Machado</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal　 <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/members/andre-pereira">André Pereira</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal Advisory Board <A href="https://www.en.cidehus.uevora.pt/pessoas/(id)/89656">Ricardo Costa Agarez</A>, CIDEHUS, University of Évora, Portugal <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/members/isabel-amaral">Isabel Amaral</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/MS.html">Elanie Ayers</A>, New York University, USA <A href="http://cchs.csic.es/es/personal/leoncio.lopez-ocon">Leoncio López-Ocón Cabrera</A>, Institute of History, CCHS-CSIC, Spain <A href="https://www.us.es/trabaja-en-la-us/directorio/lino-camprubi-bueno">Lino Camprubi</A>, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain <A href="http://ciuhct.org/en/members/ana-carneiro">Ana Carneiro</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/authors/luis-miguel-nunes-carolino/cv/">Luís Miguel Carolino</A>, CIES, ISCTE – IUL, Portugal <A href="https://www.uevora.pt/pessoas?id=4661">Antónia Fialho Conde</A>, CIDEHUS, University of Évora, Portugal <A href="http://www.ppghcs.coc.fiocruz.br/index.php/br/docentes/103-corpo-docente/171-marcos-cueto">Marcos Cueto</A>, Casa Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Brazil <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/maria-paula-diogo">Maria Paula Diogo</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://www.people.hps.cam.ac.uk/index/fellows-associates/jardine-boris">Boris Jardine</A>, University of Cambridge, UK <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/henrique-leitao">Henrique Leitão</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://www.pagu.unicamp.br/en/maria-margaret-lopes/">Maria Margaret Lopes</A>, University of Campinas, Brazil <A href="https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/quintino-lopes/">Quintino Lopes</A>, IHC-FCSH-UNL, Universidade de Évora, Portugal <A href="https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/pessoa/marta-macedo">Marta Macedo</A>, ICS, University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://www.ua.pt/pt/p/10307156">Isabel Malaquias</A>, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal <A href="https://www.upf.edu/web/shc/entry/-/-/16522/adscripcion/antoni-malet">Antoni Malet</A>, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain <A href="https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/users/mmenon">Minakshi Menon</A>, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany <A href="https://www.people.hps.cam.ac.uk/index/teaching-officers/muellerwille">Staffan Müller-Wille</A>, University of Cambridge, UK <A href="https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/maria-fatima-nunes/">Maria de Fátima Nunes</A>, IHC, CEHFCi, University of Évora, Portugal <A href="https://host.jhu.edu/directory/maria-m-portuondo/">María A. Portuondo</A>, The Johns Hopkins University, USA <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/ana-duarte-rodrigues">Ana Duarte Rodrigues</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/pessoa/ricardo-roque">Ricardo Roque</A>, ICS, University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://drexel.edu/coas/faculty-research/faculty-directory/TiagoSaraiva/">Tiago Saraiva</A>, Drexel University, USA <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/ana-simoes">Ana Simões</A>, CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="https://ciuhct.org/en/members/m-luisa-sousa">M. Luísa Sousa</A>, CIUHCT, NOVA-New University of Lisbon, Portugal <A href="http://iilp.edu.umh.es/2019/09/22/ignacio-suay-matallana/">Ignacio Suay-Matallana</A>, Instituto Interuniversitario López Piñero-Universidad Miguel Hernández, Spain <A href="https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/users/valleriani">Matteo Valleriani</A>, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany; Technische Universität, Berlin; University of Tel Aviv, Israel Former Chief Editors: Tiago Saraiva (2007 -2011) Ana Carneiro (2011-2017) M. Luísa Sousa (2017-2020) Publisher De Gruyter Poland Bogumiła Zuga 32A Str. 01-811 Warsaw, Poland

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Volume 14 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

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Artikel

Special Issue – Standards: Taming Knowledge?

Additional article to Special Issue 13.1 - Before the Silent Spring: Pesticides in Twentieth-Century Europe

Distinguished Lectures

Work in Progress

Book Reviews

Special Issue – Standards: Taming Knowledge?

Additional article to Special Issue 13.1 - Before the Silent Spring: Pesticides in Twentieth-Century Europe

Distinguished Lectures

Work in Progress

Book Reviews

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