In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi successfully demonstrated wireless telegraphy across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. Although an important achievement in purely scientific terms, the transmission was also a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity. Carefully inscenated and carried out before a large public audience and assembled journalists as well as the most important denizens of the international scientific community, the transmission was hailed in the press as heralding a new ‘heroic age of science’ and ‘masculine reason.’

When placed in the context of the history of the British Association, this event can be seen as emblematic of an increasingly popular attitude towards science as a peculiarly masculine practice, which had to be repeatedly performed and acknowledged. A range of audiences and performance spaces were key to this process including provincial scientific societies in Britain, the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well as the British government. Most important, however, were transnational spaces – and transnational networks, both within and outside the boundaries of empire. Scientific masculinity was defined, perhaps, above all, by its inter- and trans-national status, its most important audience being the international scientific community.

As this paper will argue, the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth witnessed a parallel development in the history of the British Association. On the one hand, the language of masculinity and gender became ever more important in the self-fashioning of individual scientific members and the Association as an organisation; at the same time, its activities (although cosmopolitan from its beginnings in the early 1830s) became increasingly international and transnational in nature. Meetings were held regularly overseas for the first time (in North America, South Africa and Australia); joint meetings were held with other national scientific associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Indeed, Marconi’s trans-channel transmissions were received on the other side by French scientists at the annual meeting of the Association scientifique française which had been deliberately scheduled to coincide with the British meeting at Dover for the purpose.