ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Reappraising Three Iconic Images in the History of Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session gathers three scholars who are taking similar approaches to reappraising iconic images that now signify not only key episodes, individuals, and/or themes in the history of science but major sociopolitical issues as well. Charles Darwin’s “I think” diagram of 1837 has come to signify evolutionary theory and, for some, secular humanism. Rosalind Franklin’s “Photograph 51” X-ray diffraction pattern of 1952 now symbolizes the historical undervaluing of women’s contributions to science as well as structural studies of DNA. The rising, zigzagging “Keeling Curve” graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over time has been used to symbolize anthropogenic climate change. Each speaker analyzes when, and through whose agency, now-conventional meanings became attached to (often abstracted forms of) these images, revealing in all three cases that visual elements now taken as essential qualities of the images were solidified from among an original multiplicity of candidate versions. We also illustrate how the construction of the three images as icons and symbols perpetuated anachronistic, teleological accounts of why the images were originally created.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Alistair Sponsel, Science History Institute

Individual Presentations

• From private sketch to public icon: the rise of Darwin’s “I think” diagram - Elizabeth Schulz, University of Leeds

• What was “Photograph 51,” and where is it now? - Alistair Sponsel, Science History Institute

• Multiplicity and the making of “simple and unambiguous”: The Keeling curve of rising atmospheric carbon - Madison Renner, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Alistair Sponsel, Science History Institute