Edward J Gillin
Biographic Data
| ID | 1072741 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward J Gillin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward J |
| FAMILY NAME | Gillin |
| SIGNATURE | GILLIN E J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9449-9292 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences
The Royal Albert Hall
Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)
From fiscal-military state to laissez-faire science
In nineteenth-century Britain, the role of the state in the cultivation of scientific activity was controversial. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, successive governments rolled back the apparatus of the ‘fiscal-military state’, characterized by high taxation and government spending. What followed was a moment of self-avowedly laissez-faire , liberal governance in which contemporaries placed great emphasis on the value of minim…
Mining knowledge
Michael Faraday's laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Ea…
Science in the Church
Until the twentieth century, the interiors of churches and cathedrals constituted the largest enclosed spaces accessible to natural philosophers. Such immense volumes of air provided unique opportunities for the examination of sonorous phenomena and, from the seventeenth century, featured centrally in the production of acoustic knowledge. During the nineteenth century, however, these ecclesiastical buildings took on increasing scientific signific…
The instruments of expeditionary science and the reworking of nineteenth-century magnetic experiment
During the mid-nineteenth century, British naval expeditions navigated the world as part of the most extensive scientific undertaking of the age. Between 1839 and the early 1850s, the British government orchestrated a global surveying of the Earth's magnetic phenomena: this was a philosophical enterprise of unprecedented state support and geographical extent. But to conduct this investigation relied on the use of immensely delicate instruments, k…
Cornish science, mine experiments and Robert Were Fox's Penjerrick letters
In 2019 a collection of letters from the nineteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Were Fox was discovered in his home at Penjerrick in Cornwall. Fox came to the attention of scientific audiences for experimentally establishing that temperature increases with depth beneath the Earth's surface, and later secured fame for his magnetic dipping needle, developed to measure terrestrial magnetic phenomena. The newly uncovered Penjerrick letters con…
The Politics of Musical Standardization in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain
This article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians should tune their instruments. The following year, Bri…
Tremoring transits
Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this…
Mechanics and mathematicians
In mid-Victorian Britain, reconciling elite mathematical expertise with practical mechanical experience presented both engineering and social challenges. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the construction of the Westminster Clock at Britain's Houses of Parliament. Realizing this scheme engendered the collaboration between Cambridge mathematicians George Biddell Airy and Edmund Beckett Denison, and the clockmaker Edward John Dent. Transformin…
Seismology's acoustic debt
In the nineteenth century, Ernst Chladni's acoustic figures provided productive new experimental techniques for investigating natural phenomena. The movement of invisible forces, such as light, electricity, magnetism, and heat, were hard for natural philosophers to examine. But Chladni's use of vibrating glass plates and sand to reveal the wave motions of sound offered an experimental framework through which to make natural phenomena visible. In …
Science on the Niger
In 1841 the British government supported an expedition to the River Niger. This venture aimed to spread Christianity and encourage the abolition of slavery in the region, but the high mortality rates due to tropical disease presented a threat to the undertaking. To resolve this problem, the three expedition steamships were built as giant ventilating systems, under the direction of chemist David Boswell Reid. Grounded on miasmic notions of disease…
Douglas R. Burgess, Engines of Empire
Prophets of Progress
Naval architect John Scott Russell heralded the Great Eastern steamship as a beacon of modern science and used it to promote his own approaches to shipbuilding among Britain's science elites. While Russell defined the project through a rhetoric of science, to popular audiences the ship was analogous to biblical teachings, embodying profound moral lessons. This article places Russell's projections within this wider cultural context of religious in…
Diligent in business, serving the Lord’
Between 1878 and 1901, the Cunard Steamship Company secured a reputation for running high-speed vessels across the Atlantic. This article shows how the evangelical beliefs of the company's chairman, John Burns (the first Lord Inverclyde), shaped this character. Through Burns's friendship with the evangelical Presbyterian minister Norman Macleod, the relationship between theological values and operational practice is explored. Burns and Macleod sh…
The Politics of Musical Standardization in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain
This article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians should tune their instruments. The following year, Bri…
Tremoring transits
Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this…
Seismology's acoustic debt
In the nineteenth century, Ernst Chladni's acoustic figures provided productive new experimental techniques for investigating natural phenomena. The movement of invisible forces, such as light, electricity, magnetism, and heat, were hard for natural philosophers to examine. But Chladni's use of vibrating glass plates and sand to reveal the wave motions of sound offered an experimental framework through which to make natural phenomena visible. In …
Diligent in business, serving the Lord’
Between 1878 and 1901, the Cunard Steamship Company secured a reputation for running high-speed vessels across the Atlantic. This article shows how the evangelical beliefs of the company's chairman, John Burns (the first Lord Inverclyde), shaped this character. Through Burns's friendship with the evangelical Presbyterian minister Norman Macleod, the relationship between theological values and operational practice is explored. Burns and Macleod sh…
Prophets of Progress
Naval architect John Scott Russell heralded the Great Eastern steamship as a beacon of modern science and used it to promote his own approaches to shipbuilding among Britain's science elites. While Russell defined the project through a rhetoric of science, to popular audiences the ship was analogous to biblical teachings, embodying profound moral lessons. This article places Russell's projections within this wider cultural context of religious in…
Douglas R. Burgess, Engines of Empire
Science on the Niger
In 1841 the British government supported an expedition to the River Niger. This venture aimed to spread Christianity and encourage the abolition of slavery in the region, but the high mortality rates due to tropical disease presented a threat to the undertaking. To resolve this problem, the three expedition steamships were built as giant ventilating systems, under the direction of chemist David Boswell Reid. Grounded on miasmic notions of disease…
Tremoring transits
Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this…
Mechanics and mathematicians
In mid-Victorian Britain, reconciling elite mathematical expertise with practical mechanical experience presented both engineering and social challenges. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the construction of the Westminster Clock at Britain's Houses of Parliament. Realizing this scheme engendered the collaboration between Cambridge mathematicians George Biddell Airy and Edmund Beckett Denison, and the clockmaker Edward John Dent. Transformin…
Seismology's acoustic debt
In the nineteenth century, Ernst Chladni's acoustic figures provided productive new experimental techniques for investigating natural phenomena. The movement of invisible forces, such as light, electricity, magnetism, and heat, were hard for natural philosophers to examine. But Chladni's use of vibrating glass plates and sand to reveal the wave motions of sound offered an experimental framework through which to make natural phenomena visible. In …
The Politics of Musical Standardization in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain
This article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians should tune their instruments. The following year, Bri…
The instruments of expeditionary science and the reworking of nineteenth-century magnetic experiment
During the mid-nineteenth century, British naval expeditions navigated the world as part of the most extensive scientific undertaking of the age. Between 1839 and the early 1850s, the British government orchestrated a global surveying of the Earth's magnetic phenomena: this was a philosophical enterprise of unprecedented state support and geographical extent. But to conduct this investigation relied on the use of immensely delicate instruments, k…
Cornish science, mine experiments and Robert Were Fox's Penjerrick letters
In 2019 a collection of letters from the nineteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Were Fox was discovered in his home at Penjerrick in Cornwall. Fox came to the attention of scientific audiences for experimentally establishing that temperature increases with depth beneath the Earth's surface, and later secured fame for his magnetic dipping needle, developed to measure terrestrial magnetic phenomena. The newly uncovered Penjerrick letters con…
Science in the Church
Until the twentieth century, the interiors of churches and cathedrals constituted the largest enclosed spaces accessible to natural philosophers. Such immense volumes of air provided unique opportunities for the examination of sonorous phenomena and, from the seventeenth century, featured centrally in the production of acoustic knowledge. During the nineteenth century, however, these ecclesiastical buildings took on increasing scientific signific…
Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)
From fiscal-military state to laissez-faire science
In nineteenth-century Britain, the role of the state in the cultivation of scientific activity was controversial. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, successive governments rolled back the apparatus of the ‘fiscal-military state’, characterized by high taxation and government spending. What followed was a moment of self-avowedly laissez-faire , liberal governance in which contemporaries placed great emphasis on the value of minim…
Mining knowledge
Michael Faraday's laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Ea…
Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences
The Royal Albert Hall
History (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · History of Science and Natural History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History of Science and Medicine (8 works) · Archaeology (6 works) · History (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Law (5 works)