This is a past event
This paper explores the weird public career of 'perpetual motion' during the decades in which the 'science of energy' was disseminated amongst mid-Victorian scientific and engineering communities.
From c. 1850 the North British advocates of 'energy physics' offered novel explanations for the impossibility of true perpetual motion machines. Yet one of those 'scientists of energy', W. J. M. Rankine, was an enthusiastic supporter of Henry Dircks: entrepreneur, bankrupt, illusionist and celebrated historian of perpetual motion.
As well as placing Dircks centre-stage, this paper suggests that Dircks's literary accounts of impossible machines supported Rankine's project of advancing engineering in the academy or what was beginning to be called 'engineering science'.
Disciplining engineering practice entailed the taming of mechanical monstrosities.
- Speaker
- Ben Marsden, University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- via Teams