The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century
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In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English The Cultural Impact of culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an Science in the Early interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as ‘Science and culture’. Twentieth Century Robert Bud is Research Keeper at the Science Museum in London. His award-winning publications in the history of science include studies of biotechnology and scientific instruments. Frank James and Morag Shiach James and Morag Frank Robert Greenhalgh, Bud, Paul Edited by Paul Greenhalgh is Director of the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, Edited by and Professor of Art History there. He has published extensively in the history of art, design, and the decorative arts in the early modern period. Robert Bud Paul Greenhalgh Frank James is Professor of History of Science at the Royal Institution and UCL. His research formerly centred on Faraday, but now focuses on Davy. Frank James Morag Shiach Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History at Queen Mary University of London. She has published extensively on the cultural history of modernism and on modernism and labour. Cover image: A. J. Ayres, ‘Prometheus’. Carved brick design for Hornsey electricity department offices, London c. 1936. By permission of James Ayres Free open access versions available from Cover design: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press www.ironicitalics.com Being Modern Being Modern The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century Edited by Robert Bud Paul Greenhalgh Frank James Morag Shiach First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Authors, 2018 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2018 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, redistribute and adapt the work for non-commercial use, provided the original author and source are credited and that modified versions use the same license. Attribution should include the following information: Bud et al. (eds.). 2018. Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353930 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ This license does not cover third-party copyright material. It is the obligation of the user to ensure that any reuse complies with the copyright policies of the owner of that content as listed in the image captions and endnotes to quoted text. ISBN: 978-1-78735-395-4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-394-7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-393-0 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-396-1 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-397-8 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-398-5 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353930 Foreword History of science lacks organising narratives for the twentieth century. This is especially true when we widen the lens to the discipline’s more-inclusive coterie: science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Mostly, we’ve chosen war as a narrative structure. Add imperialism. Add globalisation, though that seems simply to be imperialism by another name. We seek narratives that either describe or explain science’s growing presence, resonance and (dare we suggest) hegemony across a plenitude of landscapes. Try as we might, these continue to prove elusive. One viable choice engages the century’s endlessly nuanced encounter with Modernity. Whatever Modernity is, or was, we seem certain science is somehow intimately associated. At once science seems causal for and caused by this thing, this philosophy, this miasma. Our quest to delineate precisely what and how has led us scholars towards ever more refined species of its genus. We seem to be getting somewhere, though the going is slow and the way is sometimes lost. Being Modern shifts our perspective from observer to participant. The aim is to capture Modernity at work within mentalities, within cultural and biographical aesthetics, within the collisions between scientific and other things occurring in the lived experience of the people we study and from within their perspective. This anthology is a collective study of potency, infection and resistance. The result is a refreshing alternative to scholastic delineations of movements seen from abstracting distances. This collection of original papers delivers richly researched, critical and thought-filled case studies of Modernity as an actor’s category, observed in situ. It ranges across familiar and new settings. It certainly will help us as we build a better conceptualisation of the Modern both as project and product. Joe Cain Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology Head of Department of Science and Technology Studies UCL FOREWORD v Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which made possible the 2015 conference also entitled ‘Being Modern’ which underpins this collection, through Grant no. AH/L014815/1. The authors and editors are grateful to participants at this conference for their comments. We are also most appreciative to the Science and Society Picture Library of the Science Museum Group and to the Sainsbury Gallery for their offer of images without charge. The editors wish to express their gratitude to Dr Ellen Catherine Jones whose invaluable editorial assistance helped convert a group of separate papers into a coherent volume. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii Contents List of illustrations xiii Contributors xvii Being Modern: Introduction 1 Robert Bud and Morag Shiach Section 1: Science, modernity and culture 1 Multiple modernisms in concert: the sciences, technology and culture in Vienna around 1900 23 Mitchell G. Ash 2 The cinematic sound of industrial modernity: first notes 40 Tim Boon 3 Woolf’s atom, Eliot’s catalyst and Richardson’s waves of light: science and modernism in 1919 58 Morag Shiach 4 T.S. Eliot: modernist literature, disciplines and the systematic pursuit of knowledge 77 Kevin Brazil Section 2: Tensions over science 5 Modernity and the ambivalent significance of applied science: motors, wireless, telephones and poison gas 95 Robert Bud 6 ‘The springtime of science’: modernity and the future and past of science 130 Frank A.J.L. James CONTENTS ix 7 ‘Come on you demented modernists, let’s hear from you’: science fans as literary critics in the 1930s 147 Charlotte Sleigh Section 3: Mathematics and physics 8 Modern by numbers: modern mathematics as a model for literary modernism 169 Nina Engelhardt 9 Sculpture in the Belle Epoque: mathematics, art and apparitions in school and gallery 188 Lewis Pyenson 10 Architecture, science and purity 207 Judi Loach 11 A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Ham: wireless, modernity and interwar nuclear physics 245 Jeff Hughes 12 Whose modernism, whose speed? Designing mobility for the future, 1880s–1945 274 Ruth Oldenziel Section 4: Life, biology and the organicist metaphor 13 Ludwig Koch’s birdsong on wartime BBC radio: knowledge, citizenship and solace 293 Michael Guida 14 ‘More Modern than the Moderns’: performing cultural evolution in the Kibbo Kift Kindred 311 Annebella Pollen 15 Organicism and the modern world: from A.N. Whitehead to Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence 337 Craig Gordon 16 Liquid crystal as chemical form and model of thinking in Alfred Döblin’s modernist science 357 Esther Leslie x BEING MODERN 17 ‘I am attracted to the natural order of things’: Le Corbusier’s rejection of the machine 373 Tim Benton Epilogue: Science after modernity 386 Frank A.J.L. James and Robert Bud Select bibliography 394 Index 404 CONTENTS xi List of illustrations Chapter 1 1.1 Gustave Klimt, Danaë (1907/08), oil on canvas, 77 × 83 cm. Privately held. Detail. 25 1.2 Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical and the Psychical, trans. C. M. Williams, rev. and suppl. Sydney Waterlow (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1914 [1886]), Fig. 1, p. 19. 28 1.3 Ernst Mach, Photograph of a blunted projectile, 1887, in: Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), p. 324, fig. 53. 30 1.4 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Figures of numbers’, in: Style and Idea (1984), pp. 224–225. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles. 33 1.5 Ernst Mach, ‘Pure and Tempered Tuning’, in: Einleitung in die Helmholtzsche Musiktheorie (1885), Appendix. 34 1.6a Arnold Schoenberg, Design for Street Car Tickets. Courtesy of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles. 35 1.6b Arnold Schoenberg, Twelve-tone Disk. Courtesy of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles. 35 Chapter 3 3.1 Rutherford’s ‘Gold Foil Experiment’. Universal Images Group Ltd/Science & Society Picture Library. 64 3.2 Recorded usage of the term ‘atom’ 1708–2008. 66 3.3 Masthead of The Egoist, 1919.