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Science and Empire pp 110–139Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘A Science of Our Own’: Nineteenth Century Exhibitions, Australians and the History of Science

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Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

Abstract

Exhibitions, or world’s fairs, were popular events in Europe, Great Britain, the United States, and many European colonies during the second half of the nineteenth century.1 Host cities included Paris, London, Vienna, and Philadelphia, as well as Hobart, Melbourne, and Sydney in Britain’s Australian colonies. Such spectacles appeared to display, in the words of one London weekly in the early 1860s, ‘nearly all possible and impossible things under the sun’, and seemingly did so without any differentiation between the profound and the banal, the permanent and the ephemeral.2 Visitors could observe pigs, as well as steam engines, performing fleas around the corner from paintings. That was ‘nearly’ the case in 1851 at the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace, the first world’s fair, as it was one generation later at a less ambitious colonial show, the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition in 1875. Thousands of visitors to the Australian show, for example, walked amidst and observed, if not in some cases sampled and purchased, Japanese vases, French hats, local wines and gold nuggets, American harvesters, and Australian Aboriginal weapons.3

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Notes

  1. For information about major nineteenth-century exhibitions see, John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle (eds) Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 2nd edition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008); John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Exposition Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Robert Rydell, All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Robert Rydell (ed.) The Books of the Fairs: Materials About World’s Fairs, 1834–1916, in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1992), pp. 1–62.

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  2. French organizers employed a rather straightforward system to sort such exhibits according to basic scientific categories: ‘Chemistry’, ‘Mechanical Engineering’, and ‘Health’. See, John Allwood, ‘General Notes: International Exhibitions and the Classification of their Exhibits’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 128 (1980), 450–1; Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 3–14. The scientific displays at the Great Exhibition are discussed in Jim Bennett, Science at the Exhibition (Cambridge: The Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1983); Richard Bellow, ‘Science at the Crystal Focus of the World’, in Aileen Fyfre and Bernard Lightman (eds) Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 301–35.

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  3. ‘The Museum and Library Report’, The School of Mines, Ballarat, Annual Report Presented at the Meeting of Governors, held January 24, 1882 (Ballarat: Charles Boyd, 1882), pp. 22–7.

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  5. Catalogue of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales Exhibited in the Australian Museum by the Paris Commissioners, Sydney, November 1854 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1854), pp. 41–70.

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  7. Eugene Rimmel, Recollections of the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1867), pp. 331–2.

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  20. Helpful discussions of popular and public science include Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agusti Nieto-Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero (eds) Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); ‘Focus: Historicizing “Popular Science”’, special issue of Isis 100, 2 (2009), 310–68; Peter J. Bowler, ‘Popular Science’, in Bowler and Pickstone (eds) The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 6, pp. 622–33.

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  31. Similar to expositions, mechanics’ institutes also provided practical and general information in various different formats, including lectures, displays, experiments and libraries. For a helpful early document, see ‘Introductory Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, April 23, 1833, by the Rev. Henry Carmichael, A.M. Vice-President of that Institution’, The New South Wales Magazine 1 (1833). The relationship between science and such nineteenth-century Australian mechanics’ institutes, learned societies, and public cultural institutions are discussed in Jan Kociumbas, ‘Science as Cultural Ideology: Museums and Mechanics’ Institutes in Early New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land’, Labour History (Australia) 64 (1993), 17–33; D.I. McDonald, ‘The Diffusion of Scientific and Other Useful Knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 54 (1968), 176–93; George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men, and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1957); Ian Wilkinson, ‘The Battle for the Museum: Frederick McCoy and the Establishment of the National Museum of Victoria at the University of Melbourne’, Historical Records of Australian Science 11 (1996), 1–11; Paul Fox, ‘The State Library of Victoria: Science and Civilisation’, Transition (1988), 14–16; Home, Australian Science in the Making, pp. vii–xxvii.

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Authors
  1. Peter H. Hoffenberg
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Western Sydney, Australia

    Brett M. Bennett (Lecturer in Modern History) (Lecturer in Modern History)

  2. Department of History, West Virginia University, USA

    Joseph M. Hodge (Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies) (Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies)

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© 2011 Peter H. Hoffenberg

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Hoffenberg, P.H. (2011). ‘A Science of Our Own’: Nineteenth Century Exhibitions, Australians and the History of Science. In: Bennett, B.M., Hodge, J.M. (eds) Science and Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_6

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32190-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-32082-6

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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