(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

Some things are hard to find out.

With Google Scholar I can find academic papers on almost any subject I choose. With Google Earth I can zoom in on any part of the planet’s surface. Bibliometrics and physical geography are two fields where it’s easy. But one type of knowledge that is hard, or at least very expensive (which amounts to the same thing) to discover is who owns what, especially who owns what land. There’s no such thing as Google Property.

The question of why we don’t know something often has historical answers: there is past of decisions taken and projects built in certain ways and not others that results in worlds in which some information is available to some people and not to others.

The history of the land, in a country such as Britain, is a case in point. I am deeply impressed by the dedicated historical research that Kevin Cahill began, and Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell-Smith have continued to build in, the latter’s words, ‘the most comprehensive public map of land ownership in England: a modern Domesday, if you like’. Who Owns England? is an activist historical project with substance.

I would approach the topic in a different, but complementary, way.

I have long been interested in the history of information, information technologies, and how they have been built and used. My book, The Government Machine (MIT Press, 2003), traced the history of data collection and processing by the British state, whether the data was paperwork, punched card or computerised. The argument was that government has always been a processor of data, and the capacities to govern shape, and are shaped by, changing technologies of information. It was, I joked, seriously, an attempt to put the bureau back into the history of bureaucracy.

In The Government Machine I showed how the state processed information, and generated knowledge, on topics as diverse as the general population, criminals, vehicles, the location of enemy aircraft, accounts, and the pay of soldiers, sailors and civil servants. But I did not study how information was held, processed and shared, on land.

The route in would be study the available records of the history of the Land Registry. HM Land Registry has been in existence since the 1860s, and holds a record of freehold (and any leasehold of over seven years’ duration) land. The records underpin the operation of the market in property, guaranteeing claims to title. It is therefore the most significant database of who owns what land in England and Wales (there are equivalent bodies for Scotland and Northern Ireland). A search for title (including information on ownership) costs money.

Since the 1860s the Land Registry has passed through different technological forms. At each stage there were different opportunities, and therefore decisions taken, that would affect what information was held and how easily it could be shared.  These decisions would have political consequences, as decisions about how available information is about who owns what must surely have.

It would be also interesting to compare the history of the Land Registry with other cartographic and information-holding institutions, such as the Ordnance Survey and the Hydrographic Office.

I have got as far as browsing some of the records of the Land Registry held at the National Archives (in the TNA/LAR series), but there’s a lot of material and I’m weighing up whether the project justifies the effort spent.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

This one I followed up.

I wanted to find examples of objects that have the highest significance for historical argument.

CHOICE stands for Crucial Historiographical Object in Collections or Exhibitions. I proposed that a CHOICE has two ideal features:

1) a CHOICE object reveals significant, otherwise inaccessible, knowledge about a significant historical narrative.

2) materially, either in total or in part, a CHOICE represents a ‘fork in the road’, a moment of significant historical contingency, revealing how history could have been different.

I described the concept in 2013 and invited suggestions of cases in an earlier blog post here.

It was meant to be provocative, in a productive way, not least to friends and colleagues in the museum world. I wanted examples that could unambiguously justify object-based history, especially in the study of modern periods and subjects for which there are immense documentary archival resources. But it’s fair to say the response was quite chilly. Perhaps the bar was too high. Perhaps CHOICEs don’t exist.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

This idea came from a state of grumpiness. In particular, it was a response to a growing willingness among historians of science to entertain counterfactual – ‘what if?’ – histories. Examples include Peter Bowler’s Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (2013) and Gregory Radick’s BSHS Presidential Address ‘Experimenting with the scientific past’. Both are actually thoughtful and rather good. Hence I think my reaction was due to unfair grumpiness.

Nevertheless, before I was a historian I was trained in mathematics, and there are both simple and complicated ways of thinking critically about counterfactual histories.

The simple point is that any counterfactual sequence of historical reasoning has to be a sequence of probabilities. One way of picturing this is as a decision tree. At each node there’s a probability of taking a new path. Now take even a small sequence, well within the kinds of sequential narratives we find in history of science, say sixteen nodes. Even if the chance of taking a counterfactual path at each node was 4 times out of 5 – pretty good individual odds I think – then the chance of the final outcome would be (4/5) squared four times – less than 3%. Any realistically long counterfactual sequence results in an outcome that is deeply unlikely.

The complicated point is that there might be fields of mathematics (Markov Chains being one, although I now have reasons to doubt their applicability) which might help model historical processes, ones pictured as chains of probabilities, in perhaps interesting and useful ways. I am well aware that the very thought would make many historians run for the hills.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

‘Sci20 Rev’ means ‘Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond revise’. Should I update my book?

The idea for the book came from Polity Press. They emailed me in 2006 to say they were commissioning a series of century-by-century histories of science, and did I know anyone who might be interested in the last, twentieth-century volume? I replied that, in fact, I was.

I have been teaching courses on history of modern science since the mid-1990s, at Manchester, Cambridge, Harvard, and, now, UCL. At Cambridge I introduced a whole suite of courses (in Cambridge parlance a ‘Paper’, then ‘Paper 10’), and co-taught the core courses of the paper with good colleagues, first Soraya de Chadarevian and then Jim Endersby. The teaching assistant was one Helen Macdonald, who went on to much greater things. Teaching a subject really hones understanding, so, in my accumulated lectures, I had a good stock of accounts of key developments, theories, and secondary literature. I also had my own research, which has jumped around twentieth-century science and technology. One of the frustrations of teaching the subject was that there was no single textbook you could point students to. That was one reason for agreeing to write Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

A second reason can be found in the causes of the absence of a single textbook. History of science is often, and often usefully so, reliant on the narrow case study. This situation had long been recognised – it was the prompt, for example, of the excellent Big Picture conference organised by the BSHS in 1991, later published in the society’s journal. Remedies for narrowness have been varied, from focussing on cross-cutting themes (gender, material culture, and many others), to a prominent recent turn to global and transnational history. A third, complementary way has been the synthetic account, and that was missing for twentieth-century science.

What made a synthetic account possible at all, and forms a third reason, was the spectacular growth of history of twentieth-century science as a field of study. Older hesitations over studying recent history had well and truly been overcome. New archives were opening everywhere. And the topic was just so important: how can the twentieth century be understood without a historical understanding of science’s place, influence and shaping?

So, while still patchy, there was an immense scholarship on which a synthetic account might find firm foundations. Indeed there was no other path. Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond owes a great debt to others’ work.

Nevertheless, the final reason for writing the book was the hope of novelty and surprise. When the canvas is deliberately big – a timespan of over a hundred years, a determination to cover physical and life sciences, to be global where possible and where justified – and once part of the canvas are filled, drawing on scholarship – what new patterns can be seen, what new insights emerge at scale?

When I finally delivered the manuscript, it was at least three times the size Polity were expecting (sorry! don’t do this to publishers!). I cut it down. Out went 20,000 words on the nineteenth century – ‘Send out the clones’ – that had some ideas but was, umm, on the wrong century and was really an extended throat-clearing. Out went a rather joyful skit imagining a balloon ride around the world in 1900. The remainder was still long, probably too long, but it is the book you can read.

In practice I was quite pleased with the result. ‘Working worlds‘ was an analytical concept and insight that emerged once the the history of twentieth-century science was viewed as a whole.  I was able to cover physical and life sciences, even though my own research had been predominantly on the former. It also fed back into my research. For example, it was clear early on the long 1960s was a pivotal period, but one I knew I couldn’t quite figure out. I decided that it needed the help of a separate test, and wrote a paper ‘What happened in the sixties?’ that benefitted immensely both from writing and from peer review comments and criticisms.

On publication it was, I think, well received by my peers. (Here’s one of the longer reviews.)

So why think about revising the text?

First, it has built-in faults. The coverage of the social sciences is woefully inadequate. I would now write the global connections in different ways, with different emphases and different content. The working worlds concept, which emerged late in the process, can and should be exemplified throughout the text.

Second it was published in 2012, with some parts written in 2007. The field of history of twentieth science does not stand still. There has been much great work published since, and I wonder how, or if, the scholarship might fit the picture.

Finally. the canny ‘and Beyond‘ was deliberate. I’d like to make sense of the twenty-first century and its sciences.

But it may not be the right thing to do. Either of the tasks – fixing the faults, or triangulating with more recent scholarship – may well break the text, while I found writing very recent history (of the past ten or twenty years) very reliant on journalistic sources, good on their own terms, but their use meant the last chapter felt like a second draft of history.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

As well as being a historian of science and technology I am a keen amateur botanist, and the two can overlap.

There’s no need to go to the countryside to find nature. Cities are full of wild plants. Each plant species has a history. They can therefore be primary sources for understanding the urban past, so long as the skills are learned to answer the key question: what’s that plant?

In my third-year undergraduate course, Nature, Technology and the Environment, I run an exercise that, I have found, at first bemuses students, then provokes them, and then, when they get it, is often the best teaching experience ever.

I ask them to bring in a weed to class.

I then identify the plant (introducing the basics of classification and taxonomy), and draw out lessons, biological and historical.

For example, Shepherd’s-purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) is an ‘archaeophyte’, probably arrived with Neolithic farming, but also has a very long-lived seed bank, adapted well for cracks in city pavements. Likewise, annual meadow-grass (Poa annua), a native plant, flowers all year round, exploiting urban niches. Oxford ragwort (Senecio squalidus), a native of Mount Etna, escaped from Oxford botanical garden in the 1790s, a voyage that parallels, not coincidentally, the 18th century Grand Tour. Shaggy-soldier (Galinsoga quadriradiata, from Mexico), Buddleja davidii (from China), and Conzya canadensis Canadian (native of North America) tell stories of global trade.

UCL was once one of the world centres of botanical education. The life sciences have long since moved away from natural history. Today science students might intensively study one species, the Thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana, a model organism for plant science, but would be highly unlikely to have been taught field identification of other plants. My minor revival of botanical identification at UCL therefore makes another connection to understanding the past.

But what is this to do with weed theory?

Weeds are good to think with. Weeds are plants in the wrong of place. Just as Mary Douglas showed we could think deeply about ‘dirt’ as matter out of place, so weeds can tell us about how we categorise the spaces and kinds around us. Weeds are category transgressors, and by doing so reveal the categories’ existence. One of our best nature writers, Richard Mabey, argued that ‘how and why and where we classify plants as undesirable is part of our ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication’. There is a philosophy here.

I am also deeply interested in the ways that nature and technology intersect. City weeds are part of, and a response to, an urban environment formed by technological systems of transport and building. They exploit artificial niches. They are also subject to our chemical technologies, and evolve accordingly – one of the plants my class learn to recognise, Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris), became herbicide-resistant, apparently the first of its kind, by 1990. The distribution map (illustrated) of Danish scurvy-grass – originally a seaside plant, which received its name from its antiscorbutic properties – now traces out the UK road system, because of winter salting.

But weeds are not part of the technological system even as they trace it. Other plants (think of arable crops) certainly are – modern agriculture is a machine for moving biological material from seed to plate.

One of the first steps I have taken in thinking about this subject is, very broadly, to classify the ways that nature and technology intersect. I proposed eight types (of which weeds appear in Type 4, ‘Environment as something alongside an artificial world’), in my paper that appeared in an collection, edited by myself and Jacob Ward, Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain, open access from UCL Press, 2018)

I am now thinking about what to do next with this topic.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

Half idea No. 5 I actually finished.

I was kindly invited to provide a paper for a workshop in Japan on the history of British science, so I decided to try out a different empirical approach to working worlds. Here’s the introduction, which explains what I did:

‘Working worlds’ was a concept that I devised and found useful in making sense of
twentieth century science.1 I have taken the opportunity of my invitation to the
‘Institutionalisation of Science and the Public Sphere in the Modern Britain’ seminar to
investigate in more detail the working worlds of British science in the first four decades
of the century. What I do in the following is, first, describe what working worlds are,
identify the five prominent working worlds of twentieth-century science, and discuss the
series of steps whereby working worlds call forth science.
Second, I summarise some research I have undertaken that aimed to identify how, and
how often, ‘problems’ were raised in the public sphere and science was suggested as a
solution, or part solution, to these problems. In this research I took the letters and
editorial pages of The Times as a central forum for the public sphere in Britain between
1900 and 1939.
Third, I review the secondary historical literature on science in Britain in the first half
of the twentieth century in order to understand who (in public, or in the public sector)
was promoting science as a solution to working world problems, the recurrent features
of public debate about science, and which sectors (public and private) were of particular
importance.

A version of the paper can be found here

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

‘Working worlds’ was an analytical insight and framework from my book Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity Books, 2012). Before their science can even start, scientists find themselves immersed in worlds characterised by the incessant presence of problems. ‘Working worlds’ were what I called the arenas of human projects that generate such problems. Working worlds are both a boon for scientists – solving problems gives purpose, and by extension patronage and status – but also a bane: without some institutional or normative insulation scientists cannot have the space, time and quiet to work. Indeed a whole set of social inventions – such as the ‘autonomy’ and ‘independence’ of science, not least of ‘pure’ research – were called forth to make this insulation.

The argument of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond was that much of modern science made historical sense when seen in relation to working worlds.

I identified four major ones at the time of the book’s publication: the projects to build and maintain technological systems (there are working worlds of transport, electrical power and light, communication, agriculture, computer systems of various scales and types); the preparation, mobilisation and maintenance of fighting forces;  civil administration; and the maintenance of human (and other) bodies, in sickness and in health. Later I added a fifth: the monitoring and maintenance of global order, especially global environmental stability and economic dynamism.

Working world problems cannot be solved directly (or, if they are, they don’t involve science). There are therefore stages that can be distinguished: how problems are articulated (or aren’t) in ways that invite (or don’t) the attention of scientists; the distinctive way that the sheer complexity of working worlds are reduced in the making of representatives (think of models, data-sets, ‘microworlds’, and so on) which are amenable to science; the science itself, and the processes by which solutions are articulated.

I was surprised about the extent working worlds were necessary for a historical understanding of basic science – think of Max Planck being asked to study the data provided by the German electric light industries prompting his formulation of his quantum equations in 1900, for example – as it was, more expectedly, for science we might class as applied.

So what’s the new idea?

Well, ‘working worlds’ came quite late in the writing of the book. Once emerged it made sense of what I had. But the concept was unrefined, and received some critical (if constructive) probing after publication. So there’s a job to do here: to clarify, extend, and test.

Probably I will proceed by a Socratic dialogue. Or in less fancy terms, I will ask and answer questions. Such as:

1. How many working worlds are there? They can be big and small, and overlapping is fine. But what have I missed?
2. Erasing the traces. One reason why we don’t know this history already as much as we should is because a lot of work is expended erasing the connections. If we have a picture of science as a stock of knowledge awaiting application (rather than a stock of knowledge and practices that are called forth by working worlds) it’s because this linear model insulates science well. I call this erasure ‘anti-working worlds’. It was the accomplishment of scientists and, as Anna-K Mayer reminded us, of historians of science too. I have begun some of the work of identifying how different scientists saw different, or preferred, relationships between their science and problem-solving here, in a paper that looked at the history of the controversy caused by James Lighthill’s critical report on the artificial intelligence research.
3. History of Science’s Entscheidungsproblem. Or the issue of when we stop our accounts. When we offer a historical account we often trace a sequence of causal connections, and the kind of cause we stop at tells us what kind of historian we are. Hessen stopped at problem articulation within capitalism. Hessen only shows us half a picture. The internalists likewise provided a historical account of only part of the picture. With the Cold War over there is no reason why the breach cannot be healed.
4. What about problems but no solutions? Not all working world problems are articulated in ways that attract science. Why?
5. Are there sciences with no connection to working worlds? (Graeme Gooday has suggested to me black hole science as a challenging case)
6. Are there cases of working worlds, perhaps even the building of representatives, but with no science?
7. How far back do working worlds work? Does it make any sense, for example, to talk of a working world of alchemy? Are they a distinctively modern phenomenon?
8. What are the cognate concepts, and how can working worlds be distinguished, usefully?
9. What are the science policy implications? For example do working worlds justify artificially choosing to pursue challenging projects that pose many problems? Or is it far better to find ways of better articulating existing problems in ways that science can engage? The former leads to the currently dominant ‘grand challenges’ approach to policy and industrial strategy, the latter might lead to a better strategy all round. Likewise, having targets of proportion of GDP spent on R&D addresses the wrong end of the issue. A science policy that worked would focus on: (i) better, clearer articulation of problems, (ii) wider participation in problem articulation, (iii) help with representative building (iv) better, clearer, more participative solutionisation.
10. How does science made in response to one working world pass to another? And what happens when it does?

I have notes in response to all these questions. The notes tend to get longer without, it seems, approaching closure. Tame the chaos or move on?

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

A book pitch (can be thought of, literally, as an elevator pitch):

National history privileges human agents, whether they be monarchs and politicians of Traditional History or the poor and marginalised of social history. But agency is distributed, and always has been. What would the history of a nation look like if distributed, mechanical agencies were placed at the centre? Auto UK is a long history of mechanised decision-making and rule-following, of things that move, act, decide and change, and together make a place within which we live and work. It would also explain why some people have power and some do not.

What would Auto UK include?

It might start with Matthew Boulton’s invitation to study: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER” or with his Albion Mills, the steam-powered flour mill built in Southwark in 1786 and burned to the ground five years later by revolutionary millers; it would take in a long history of automated production, not least the cycles of panics over automated unemployment (1950s, 201os).

It would tell the stories of automated distribution and communication. This 1921 map of telephone repeater stations is an image of one kind of Auto UK coming into being. Each repeater station moves, acts, decides and changes how and where we could talk.

It would discuss automated railway barriers of the 1950s, car license plate recognition systems of the 1970s as well as facial recognition systems of the 2020s.

It would wonder why an automatic door (see picture) installed at the Science Museum in 1933 was opened half a million times.

It would never lose sight of human interests, while not putting them at the centre. Afterall, machines make history but not in circumstances of their own making.

It would channel the spirit of two extraordinary books, Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium and Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, while imitating neither.

It would consider, but reject, the title Autonation.

It would welcome a complementary study of animal agency.

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

The ‘material’ or ‘object’ turn in history of science and technology has been going strong for many years now. There are lots of good reasons for it, and good research that has been done. But I do have a worry about a mismatch between what we say and what we do. Documents ‘speak’ to us much more fluently than objects. It is completely understandable that object histories have a tendency to become histories evidenced by documents concerning objects. And why not? History, after all, should rest on the strongest set of evidential sources, and these will likely be a mixture of types.

But here there is space for historiographical experiment.  What do we learn when we deliberately withhold, as far as possible, documentary evidence, and, under such artificial conditions, ask what we could learn by foregrounding the objects?

(I’m well aware that object-centred research is not new. The experimental subject is really, in this case, myself. I need the artificial constraint of this experiment to help me think through my concerns with object-based history of science!)

Back in 2016 I was lucky enough to be shown round much of the Science Museum Group’s vast collections, not yet properly accessible to the public, part of an advisory role I took on. It was in Blythe House that I saw trays of strange objects that I thought might be the perfect subjects for my experiment.

Here are some of the objects:

These are objects made, for reasons I do not yet know, by the human geneticist Lionel Penrose.

The research question for the experiment would be: what can I say about history of science if these objects were the sources of evidence?

I think I would proceed by stages:

1. I would note down all I already know about Lionel Penrose and the history of the sciences he touched. I am not so naive to think I am starting with these objects as the only sources of historical testimony, but I can at least try and control for the problem by being as explicit as I can about what prior knowledge I bring to the interpretation
2. Proceed with study of the objects. Lots of good strategies to try, such as the John Hennigar Shuh’s 50 Questions.
3. Then proceed with documentary study, there will be clues on Penrose’s papers.
4. Then return to the objects again, and repeat stages 2/3. Notice there is a dialectic here. Memory – objects – documents – objects – documents – objects …
5. Conclusions: I should be able to say what I learned from the first encounter with objects, what I learned when I encountered the objects after documentary research, and so on up the ladder

That’s the idea. I haven’t tried it yet, partly because soon after I saw these strange things the Science Museum Group’s collections at Blythe House were packed up (‘decanted’, like fine wines) for a move to a new collections building, not yet open.

But I think I will.

Does it sound interesting? Can it be improved? Has it been done?

(Just one thing I ask: if you know what these objects are, don’t tell me – yet!)

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

The first on the list of 1/2 ideas from my office whiteboard. This one I have followed up.

It is a commonplace that science starts with curiosity. But the history of curiosity in science turned out to be more complex, and more political, than I first thought.

I gave a public lecture on the topic, which you can watch here.

The full-length paper version was published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society. available here (an early draft can be found here).

Here’s the abstract:

Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a ‘love of truth’, but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question ‘why?’. The aside made by Albert Einstein in private correspondence in 1952—‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’—has now become a meme. Yet in the twentieth century, science was shaped by many forces, and the practical utility of science in the real, messy problematic worlds of its formation seem far removed from the seeming innocence of curiosity-driven research. In my lecture and this paper, I ask why scientists say they ask ‘why?’, and trace the curious history of the idea of curiosity-driven science. In particular, I distinguish between a long and short history of curiosity in science, with the latter associated with the term ‘curiosity-driven science’ and the UK administration of Margaret Thatcher.

Tick! This one has at least been started, but the topic is much deeper than I was able to go.