A Brill Calendar: July 12

Few facets of scholarship are as intriguing as the history of science.

As a separate discipline it is less than a century old. The one of her half-sister, technology, is even younger. There is a paradox there. While the ‘vox populi’ rests assured that agriculture, technology and engineering have shaped the world as it has become, their histories have become grist to mills of Academia only relatively recently. Examples abound; an explanation of this tardy scholarly activity may be the traditional disdain of learned & literate men & women for menial work and in the fear of dirtying one’s hands, an apprehension going back to ancient Greek thinkers like Thales of Milete.

Until recently it was seldom acknowledged within the realm of Pallas, goddess of knowledge, that contraptions & commodities invented by observant individuals, eager to ease daily chores and to pre-empt day-to-day nuisances are prime agents of social, cultural and economical change. Before universities, innovative harnessing of ploughing horses, stirrups for horsemen and mills thriving on wind & water changed the face of the world. It hardly involved literacy and scholarship; while inventions and crafts of bell-founders and iron-masters were jealously guarded in secrecy.

The second half of the 19th century in the United States of America is a Golden Age in this respect. A manufacturer like George Eastman (Waterville, N.Y. July 12 1854 – Rochester, N.Y. March 14 1932) creating single-handedly large scale amateur photography was innocent of scientific or academic learning. Earlier, barbed wire, assembly-lines (first of slaughter-houses in the Mid-West) and electric light also hardly enjoyed the blessings of Academe. Becoming ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ (Doctor Samuel Johnson) is no bookish job.