From Laboratory to Museum: The Changing Culture of Science and Experiment in India, c. 1830–56

Abstract

The nature of the colonial state and science and technology in India underwent fundamental changes over the first half of the nineteenth century.¹ Though the trends towards particular kinds of changes were present before the uprisings of 1857, the process accelerated sharply after those events. In this chapter, a discussion of the role of the Asiatic Society, the first and foremost scientific and literary association in British India, is used to examine the relationships between the diffusion and generation of knowledge, changes in public subsidy, the changing nature of scientific and technological practice, and the emergence of a ‘colonised’ science and technology. This chapter also analyses William Brooke O’Shaughnessy’s early experiments with telegraphy between 1836 and 1839 and the telegraph system he established in India in 1856. While O’Shaughnessy was experimenting with telegraphy at the same time as Samuel Finley Breese Morse and others, the East India Company’s government did not order O’Shaughnessy to begin construction until 1851, almost ten years after the formation of European telegraph systems. By 1856, a telegraph network of over 4000 miles linked Peshawar, Agra, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta to the military cantonments and important European settlements in the interior. This chapter examines the features of the telegraph system O’Shaughnessy built, and situates both the system and its inventor within the context of the time.