Event Archive

2022

February

• The Challenge of Everyday Science: Disputes about the Voltaic Battery

  23 February 2022, 11:00 - 13:00

  Volta’s battery (the “Voltaic pile”, announced in 1800) was very easily replicated even by amateurs working at home, but the explanation of its workings remained a matter of great controversy for many years even among the leading experts.  It will come as a surprise to many people that even today the...

January

• Robert Stevenson, Thomas Smith and the Parabolic Reflector - Setting the Story Straight

  26 January 2022, 11:00 - 23:59

  Although Scotland lagged behind Trinity House in the ongoing development of an effective lighthouse illumination system, the Stevenson family, notably Robert Stevenson, consistently down-graded or ignored the achievements of earlier designers. Stevenson sought to establish the primacy in this field of Thomas Smith, both his step-father and his father-in-law, and his...

2021

December

• 'Oh! What a first-rate doctor is Dr Drama': Theatre, Performance and the Asylum Stage

  08 December 2021, 11:00 - 12:55

  The archival remnants of British psychiatric institutions are replete with references to the use of the dramatic arts as a form of recreation, amusement, and cure.

November

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  Moving Across Environmental Borders: Dynamic Portrayals of Ecology in Alexander von Humboldt's and Charles Darwin's Travel Writing

  17 November 2021, 11:00 - 23:55

  In 1749, Carl Linneaus used the term ‘economy of nature’ to describe the interrelatedness of elements within a given natural environment, explaining it to be ‘the all-wise disposition of the creator in relation to natural things, by which they are fitted to produce general ends and reciprocal uses’.1 However, Linneaus’...

October

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  Collected Papers: A Preliminary Account from the Rowett Research Institute

  20 October 2021, 11:00 - 23:55

  In 1912 the North of Scotland College of Agriculture applied to the Development Commission, which was set up to administer funds voted by Parliament to benefit the rural economy, for funding to undertake research into animal nutrition.

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  Filming Fly Eggs: Time-Lapse Cinematography as an Intermedial Practice

  13 October 2021, 11:00 - 23:55

  This talk investigates time-lapse cinematography as a hybrid, intermedial practice.

June

• The Ledgers of Death: Florence Nightingale and the battle to reform army medical practice after the Crimean War

  30 June 2021, 11:00 - 23:59

  Accounting and the concept of accountability have been around as long as human civilization and are intrinsic to it.

• Reclaiming the Unclaimed: The Medical Schools of Aberdeen and the Dissection of the Poor c.1832-1914

  09 June 2021, 11:00 - 23:55

  There has been limited research on the workings of the 1832 Anatomy Act in Scotland which allowed the lawful, but non-consensual, supply of unclaimed corpses to be sent to the medical schools for dissection.

May

• CHPSTM - Colin Maclaurin and the "Good-seeking Forces of Mind

  12 May 2021, 11:00 - 23:55

  Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746) is well known for his A Treatise of Fluxions (Maclaurin, 1742), An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries(MacLaurin, 1748), and the appellation for a type of power series.

March

• "Rethinking Perpetual Motion in the Age of Energy: W. J. M. Rankine, Henry Dircks and Engineering Science"

  24 March 2021, 11:00 - 23:59

  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.