Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain

This thesis examines the ascendance of Victorian acidnic physics laboratories as institutions primarily devoted the undergraduate

instruction in the techniques of precision measurement. The genesis of these teaching laboratories in established centres of higher education is shown to be specific to the period 1866-1874. This temporal specificityis analysed in terms of the confluence of an industrially-generated "demand" for practical scientific education and an independent research generated "supply" of academic expertise in precision measurement. Case stixiles assess the variation of pedagogical practices according to local institutional factors and the biographical characteristics of incumbent professors of experimental physics in seven English and Scottish laboratories • Three sub-groups of British nRd'ini c physicists are thereby identified: i) non-analytical experimentalists in London and Oxfords who supplied comprehensive and regimented courses of training in the techniques of exact measurement; ii) Scottish natural philosophers in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester who characteristically enlisted undergraduate assistance in professorial measurement researches; and iii) Cambridge analysts who allowed at most only an elite of the indigenous mathematics graduates to pursue independent investigations in their laboratories. The tensions between traditions i) and iii) are illustrated in the divergence of the Cambridge analyst James Clerk Maxwell from the

pedagogical interests and practices of the majority of academic laboratory physicists as represented by the Physical Society founded in 1873-74. Maxwell's dissidence is demonstrated in a brief account of his management of the Cavendish Laboratory as a generically unique centre of postgraduate research from 1874-79. Nevertheless, it is shown that laboratory precision measurement, as the universally recognized vehicle for progress in physics between the 1860's and 1890's, was practised in common by Maxwell and the distinct community of academic experimentalists which existed "before and beyond" the Cavendish Laboratory