This walk presents a quick general survey of science, technology and medicine on the campus since 1873. We will begin with the oldest buildings, designed by Alfred Waterhouse for Owens College, which had been founded in 1851 but had rapidly outgrown its original premises in a house in the city centre. Around these grew the extensions for Natural History and the Manchester Museum, and the ever grander buildings for a Library and the ceremonial hall, both of which owed much to the fortune of the Manchester engineer Joseph Whitworth, famous for standard screws, very flat planes and best-selling guns.

We will then follow the growth of scientific departments, beginning with chemistry and the Medical School and moving onto engineering (dominated, in the early twentieth century, by Osborne Reynolds) and mathematics  (Horace Lamb developed his work on hydrodynamics here) , and then to physics, including Ernest Rutherford’s stellar group, and ‘electro-technics’, incorporating the Manchester Computer of 1948.

Here is a chance to consider in situ the University community of the time before the First World War, which included not only Rutherford, Lamb and Niels Bohr but Chaim Weizmann (fermentation  chemist and Zionist), Grafton Elliot Smith (anatomist and Egyptologist), and the young Marie Stopes (as a palaeobotanist)  and Ludwig Wittgenstein (as a student of engineering). On the same streets around 1950 you might have met  the computer builders Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, the computer theorist and user Alan Turing, and his mathematical patron, Max Newman. In the physics department was the Dean of Science, Patrick Blackett and the young Bernard Lovell, then building the famous radio-astronomy  ‘Big dish’ at Jodrell Bank. Across Oxford Road, on Dover Street, was a group of noted social scientists and Africanists, including Max Gluckmann; ad there among the economists was Blackett’s good friend and political opponent, the physical chemist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi, whose work in Manchester on ‘tacit knowledge’ was to contribute hugely to the emergence of the field of science studies.

The walk will be led by Professor John Pickstone, emeritus, founding Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and advisor on university heritage; and/or by Dr James Hopkins, the University’s heritage officer.

There is no charge for this walk. Numbers will be limited, so please register in advance. You can do this at any time before the Congress by emailing tours@ichstm2013.com with your details; or you can sign up in person at the Congress Events Desk.