History 181B - Class 11

History 181B: Modern Physics

Class 11 (2/14/03)
The world of a physicist

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Outline

World powers ca. 1900: The grand tour

France: Paris
Concentration of power
Days of glory: The 18th and early 19th centuries

Britain: Cambridge
    Education for the elite: Where does science fit?
    The Mathematical Tripos
    Adding laboratories

Britain: Manchester and Glasgow
    Provincial distance from the elite centers
    Educational alternatives to Oxbridge
    Intersections: National interests, national institutions

Germany: Berlin
    The German university system and the research ideal
    The flourishing of German academic physics
    Ideal values and practical uses
        The polytechnics (THs) and the industrial labs
        The Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology (PTR)
        The Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG)

Other sites
    Secondary European countries
    Marginal places
        The British Empire: Center and periphery
        Japan and Russia modernization
        United States: The peculiar upstart

Names and terms

Primary

Secondary

Académie des Sciences (Paris)
(cf. Royal Society, Prussian Academy)
Ecole Polytechnique
Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge)
Church of England (Anglican)
Tripos, wranglers
Cavendish Laboratory (1871)
nonconformists = Dissenters (Quakers, Methodists, etc.)
Church of Scotland (Presbyterian)
red-brick universities
transatlantic telegraph cable
British Association for the Advancement of Science
German Physical Society
"what holds the world together in its inmost parts"
Technische Hochschulen (THs)
Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR)
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG)
Kaiser Wilhelm II

Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827)
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
James Joule (1818-1889)
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Assignment

Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron, and Spencer Weart, selections from "Physics circa 1900: Personnel, Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishments," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 5 (1975): 1-185, Tables I and A.5.

Imagine preparing a briefing for Althoff in Victor Jakob's story: What countries are the world powers in academic physics ca. 1900? Who is the leader, and who is close behind?
Extra: Of the data provided in these tables, which are most significant?