Jon Agar
Biographic Data
| ID | 3768974 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jon Agar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jon |
| FAMILY NAME | Agar |
| SIGNATURE | AGAR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 33 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Swimming with the coelacanth
Export controls, such as through the lists of embargoed goods drawn up by the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) from the 1950s until the 1980s, were a means by which the West sought to put economic and strategic pressures on the communist East. This paper explores a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls provoked by the recent scholarship of Mario Daniels and John Krige, who place knowledge co…
What is science for? The Lighthill report on artificial intelligence reinterpreted
This paper uses a case study of a 1970s controversy in artificial-intelligence (AI) research to explore how scientists understand the relationships between research and practical applications. It is part of a project that seeks to map such relationships in order to enable better policy recommendations to be grounded empirically through historical evidence. In 1972 the mathematician James Lighthill submitted a report, published in 1973, on the sta…
Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technolog…
Political Spectrum
Reviewed by: Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone by Thomas Winslow Hazlett Jon Agar (bio) Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. By Thomas Winslow Hazlett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. Hardcover $35. The radio spectrum is an extraordinarily interesting subject for the historian of scienc…
Rendering satellites more visible
Outward bound
32 years, has written an invaluable, eye-opening account of this premier organization for science, from the Tercentenary of 1960 through to the 350th anniversary of 2010. In doing so he fills a considerable gap in the historical literature. The account is meticulously sourced, drawing on Collins' unparalleled knowledge of the recent archives of the Society, as well as interviews, the memories of colleagues and the material held in external collec…
Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar lecture The curious history of curiosity-driven research
Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a ‘love of truth’, but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first step…
Putting the Spooks Back In? The UK Secret State and the History of Computing
The post–World War II secret state (governmental bodies that handle national security, including signals intelligence, spying, counterintelligence, and some aspects of policing, as well as the central bureaucratic mechanisms of their control) is a lacuna in the history of UK computing. This article assesses the extent to which the UK secret state was a major user of computing technologies and examines the character of its computing tasks, as well…
Information and Intrigue
Reviewed by: Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke Jon Agar (bio) Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. By Colin B. Burke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 382. $45. In a world dominated by Google Inc., with its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” we sometimes forget how difficult it once was to …
Serving the Reich
‘It's springtime for science’
This paper examines how links between the People's Republic of China and the UK were rebuilt in the 1970s. It not only fills a gap in the historiography but also makes three particular arguments. The first is that there were two intersecting institutional paths along which the rebuilding of links were followed: a foreign policy path, in which the most important body was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and an academy-level path in which relat…
Sacrificial Experts? Science, Senescence and Saving the British Nuclear Project
This essay is an enquiry into the roles scientists and engineers might make for themselves in an aging society. At its centre is a case study of an extraordinary response to a devastating event: a British project after Chernobyl to set up a cadre of volunteers, aged 65 or over, willing to act swiftly, expertly and, perhaps, expendably, in the wake of a nuclear emergency. Surprisingly obscure now, the would-be volunteers included many of the elite…
Thatcher, Scientist
This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gat…
Mobile Communications
Reviewed by: Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media Jon Agar (bio) Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media. By Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Pp. iii+190. $29.95. There are now as many cell phones as there are people on the planet. In two decades the device has gone from a luxury, single-purpose technology to an essential multipurpose object engrained in everyday routines of life and work. When examin…
Cell Phone Culture
Reviewed by: Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life Jon Agar (bio) Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. By Gerard Goggin. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xiii+251. $26.95. Gerard Goggin explores the ways in which mobile telecommunications, and the cell phone in particular, are implicated in changing cultural patterns. His book is global in scope—as studies in mobile phone cultures must be—comparative i…
What happened in the sixties
In general history and popular culture, the long 1960s, a period roughly beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the mid-1970s, has been held to be a period of change. This paper offers a model which captures something of the long 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’ resulting from the interference of three waves. Wave One was an institutional dynamic that drew out experts from closed and hidden disagreement into situations where expert disagreemen…
What Difference Did Computers Make
This paper asks the question: what difference did access to computers make to the first generation of scientists to use them? While we do know something about the use of computers in particular scientific specialities, a comparative perspective across disciplines is revealing. So this paper casts the net wider, not only revisiting microphysics and X-ray crystallography, but also examining natural history and the implicit social science of governm…
The science-industry nexus
The Government Machine
An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control o…
Modern Horrors
This book addresses one of the least studied yet most pervasive aspects of modern life--the techniques and mechanisms by which official agencies certify individual identity
Community (Net) Work
BJHS special issue
Time is a fundamental concept that we typically take for granted in our everyday lives. Rarely do we look at our wristwatch and think how seconds, minutes and hours came to take on such importance. Even less do we reflect on all the work that goes into making seconds, minutes and hours appear as something as natural as the world around us. What is time? How is it we have come to order our lives in such regulated and precise ways? How has our conc…
British Society for the History of Science Report of Council for the year 1998
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
SSK in Theory and Practice
This review presented a daunting task. Scientific Knowledge (SK) is the long-awaited textbook introduction to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) written by three authors of the 'Edinburgh school'. Psychologism (P) is a brave and compelling attempt to apply the methodologies of SSK to a different field: philosophical knowledge, in particular the fierce controversy within German academia between the 1880s and World War I over the
Making Space for Science
In recent years there has been a growing recognition that a mature analysis of scientific and technological activity requires an understanding of its spatial contexts. Without these contexts, indeed
What Difference Did Computers Make
This paper asks the question: what difference did access to computers make to the first generation of scientists to use them? While we do know something about the use of computers in particular scientific specialities, a comparative perspective across disciplines is revealing. So this paper casts the net wider, not only revisiting microphysics and X-ray crystallography, but also examining natural history and the implicit social science of governm…
What happened in the sixties
In general history and popular culture, the long 1960s, a period roughly beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the mid-1970s, has been held to be a period of change. This paper offers a model which captures something of the long 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’ resulting from the interference of three waves. Wave One was an institutional dynamic that drew out experts from closed and hidden disagreement into situations where expert disagreemen…
BJHS special issue
Time is a fundamental concept that we typically take for granted in our everyday lives. Rarely do we look at our wristwatch and think how seconds, minutes and hours came to take on such importance. Even less do we reflect on all the work that goes into making seconds, minutes and hours appear as something as natural as the world around us. What is time? How is it we have come to order our lives in such regulated and precise ways? How has our conc…
Making a meal of the big dish
From a distance the Mark 1 radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is an edifying sight. It is a steel structure of over 1000 tons, holding aloft a fully steerable dish of wire mesh which focuses incoming radio waves from astronomical objects. It is set in gently rolling Cheshire countryside. Its striking appearance can easily be recruited as a powerful symbol of progress and of science as the pursuit of pioneering spirits
History of science on the World Wide Web
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The new price and place of university research
During the 1950s the institutional form of academic scientific research in Britain was in flux. This paper analyses the debates on this subject, arguing that the increased expenditure on science strained the relations between universities and government departments. One project, the construction of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope, is examined in detail for two reasons: first, it illustrates the ‘strains’ (partially resolved in this case through …
The History of Radio Astronomy and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
SSK in Theory and Practice
This review presented a daunting task. Scientific Knowledge (SK) is the long-awaited textbook introduction to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) written by three authors of the 'Edinburgh school'. Psychologism (P) is a brave and compelling attempt to apply the methodologies of SSK to a different field: philosophical knowledge, in particular the fierce controversy within German academia between the 1880s and World War I over the
Making Space for Science
In recent years there has been a growing recognition that a mature analysis of scientific and technological activity requires an understanding of its spatial contexts. Without these contexts, indeed
Digital patina
In the late 20th century iconic ‘first computers’ have been rebuilt at several locations across the world. Using the historiographical insights of authors such as Lowenthal, this papers examines what the acts of recreating past machines tell us about relations with the past, history and memory. A distinction is suggested between two modes of history highly relevant to historians of technology: one centred on texts, the other on recapturing spirit
Introduction
(1998). Introduction: History of computing: Approaches, new directions and the possibility of informatic history. History and Technology: Vol. 15, History of Computing Approaches, New Directions, pp. 1-5
The Measurement of Starlight
Reviewed by: The Measurement of Starlight: Two Centuries of Astronomical Photometry * Jon Agar (bio) The Measurement of Starlight: Two Centuries of Astronomical Photometry. By J. B. Hearnshaw. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+511; illustrations, notes, index. $89.95. J. B. Hearnshaw wisely prefaces this book with a warning that neither science historians nor amateur astronomers are its primary audience. The [End Page 764] Measu…
Yerkes Observatory, 1892-1950
The Measurement of Starlight
British Society for the History of Science Report of Council for the year 1998
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
BJHS special issue
Time is a fundamental concept that we typically take for granted in our everyday lives. Rarely do we look at our wristwatch and think how seconds, minutes and hours came to take on such importance. Even less do we reflect on all the work that goes into making seconds, minutes and hours appear as something as natural as the world around us. What is time? How is it we have come to order our lives in such regulated and precise ways? How has our conc…
Community (Net) Work
Modern Horrors
This book addresses one of the least studied yet most pervasive aspects of modern life--the techniques and mechanisms by which official agencies certify individual identity
The Government Machine
An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control o…
What Difference Did Computers Make
This paper asks the question: what difference did access to computers make to the first generation of scientists to use them? While we do know something about the use of computers in particular scientific specialities, a comparative perspective across disciplines is revealing. So this paper casts the net wider, not only revisiting microphysics and X-ray crystallography, but also examining natural history and the implicit social science of governm…
The science-industry nexus
What happened in the sixties
In general history and popular culture, the long 1960s, a period roughly beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the mid-1970s, has been held to be a period of change. This paper offers a model which captures something of the long 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’ resulting from the interference of three waves. Wave One was an institutional dynamic that drew out experts from closed and hidden disagreement into situations where expert disagreemen…
Cell Phone Culture
Reviewed by: Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life Jon Agar (bio) Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. By Gerard Goggin. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xiii+251. $26.95. Gerard Goggin explores the ways in which mobile telecommunications, and the cell phone in particular, are implicated in changing cultural patterns. His book is global in scope—as studies in mobile phone cultures must be—comparative i…
Thatcher, Scientist
This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gat…
Mobile Communications
Reviewed by: Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media Jon Agar (bio) Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media. By Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Pp. iii+190. $29.95. There are now as many cell phones as there are people on the planet. In two decades the device has gone from a luxury, single-purpose technology to an essential multipurpose object engrained in everyday routines of life and work. When examin…
‘It's springtime for science’
This paper examines how links between the People's Republic of China and the UK were rebuilt in the 1970s. It not only fills a gap in the historiography but also makes three particular arguments. The first is that there were two intersecting institutional paths along which the rebuilding of links were followed: a foreign policy path, in which the most important body was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and an academy-level path in which relat…
Sacrificial Experts? Science, Senescence and Saving the British Nuclear Project
This essay is an enquiry into the roles scientists and engineers might make for themselves in an aging society. At its centre is a case study of an extraordinary response to a devastating event: a British project after Chernobyl to set up a cadre of volunteers, aged 65 or over, willing to act swiftly, expertly and, perhaps, expendably, in the wake of a nuclear emergency. Surprisingly obscure now, the would-be volunteers included many of the elite…
Serving the Reich
Computer Science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Library science (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Physics (7 works)