ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Physical Geosciences in the 19th Century: Global Sciences and their Contexts

• In Event: Ground Truth: From Local Data to Global Theories of the Earth

English Abstract

Copernicus cautioned that “… we should note carefully what the relation of the Earth to the heavens is, so as not … to attribute to the celestial bodies what belongs to the Earth.”
In the broad emergence of a variety of physical earth sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries, measurements of various terrestrial parameters at particular times and places were mapped and tabulated. Rationales for collecting data varied, from local to regional to global contexts, and during the 19th century, tended ever more toward the global. Several areas of physical earth science – tidal studies, terrestrial magnetism, geodesy, and gravimetry – were also taken to new heights of mathematical modeling and analysis, thanks to the work of Laplace, Lagrange, Fourier, and Gauss and generations to follow. These models effectively, if invisibly, linked these particular earth sciences to advanced celestial mechanics, and thus to astronomers. Their networks, institutions, and practices shaped aspects of these more abstract geophysical realms: geodetic mapping on continental scales, gravity on all scales, geomagnetism, and on. The activities became embedded in military and government survey activity, with clear connections to colonial networks and geophysical observatories/standards centers. Offices of data analysts (computers) calculated means and specific parts of longer calculations, in the movement from local to global. I will highlight the rapid multiplication of international associations of geographers, geodesists, meteorologists, etc., and the international networks of observatories, bureaus, and educational institutions these were built upon. From local observations, through modeling and mapping, to global perspectives, the institutional matrices in which these sciences were embedded were colonial and imperial. This paper ends with the dissolution of the old international academies and the establishment of the International Unions after World War 1. The challenges continued in new contexts.

Author

• Gregory A Good, Retired