Inspired by the success of twitter journal clubs in other subjects, and as a way of broadening participation for those who cannot attend our History of Science journal club in person, we are trying out a Twitter-based History of Science journal club.
We'll host this on Friday 1 November 2019, between 1pm and 2pm GMT (see TimeAndDate.com for local times) using the hashtag: #HistSciJC and the Twitter account @HistSciRG. NB: Something is wrong with Wix, which hosts this website, that means it is displaying the text twice. To post you only need one # followed by HistSciJC )
The paper we will be discussing is ‘Eunice Foote, John Tyndall and a Question of Priority’ by Roland Jackson, available online from Notes and Records, published earlier this year ahead of print publication.
The paper is available open access until Sunday 27 October as part of Open Access Week.
How to join in
To participate, just log in to Twitter from 1pm on 1 November, follow the Twitter account @HistSciRG and join in the discussion by including the hashtag #HistSciJC in your tweets about the paper. Selected tweets will be retweeted by the @HistSciRG account.
We will start with a summary of the paper and the context, and go on to discuss the paper's arguments, strengths and weaknesses, and what we could bring from the paper into our own history of science practice.
You can view tweets containing the hashtag #HistSciJC without a Twitter account but if you want to post comments you'll need to sign up for a free Twitter account.
Eunice Foote, John Tyndall and a Question of Priority
The paper is about the work of Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the 19th century relating to climate science and climate change. The abstract highlights some of the issues involved:
In 1856, an American woman, Eunice Foote, discovered the absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide and water vapour. That was three years before John Tyndall, who is generally credited with this important discovery—a cornerstone of our current understanding of the greenhouse effect, climate change, weather and meteorology. Tyndall did not reference Foote's work. From a contemporary perspective, one might expect that Tyndall would have known of her findings. But it appears that he did not, raising deeper historical questions about the connections and relationships between American and European physicists in the mid nineteenth century. The discovery is seen as a significant moment in physics generally and in climate science in particular, and demands a proper analysis. This paper explores the argument about priority, and the issues that the episode highlights in terms of simultaneous discovery, the development of science in America, gender, amateur status, the reputation of American science in Europe and the networks and means of communication between researchers in America and Europe in the 1850s.
Jackson, Roland, ‘Eunice Foote, John Tyndall and a Question of Priority’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, (2019) online ahead of print https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0066