The symposium will address the ways in which knowledge was constructed and conveyed in the 19th century by focusing on moments of dispute and contestation. It aims for broad coverage of both period and subject, exploring how the emergence of disciplines, the development of scientific periodicals, the standardizing of materials and measurements, and the increasing significance of priority altered the nature of what constituted knowledge and how that knowledge was rendered certain, trustworthy, and useful. The symposium will be broken into 2 panels that address the theme in interrelated ways, with 8 speakers and Michael Gordin as commentator.

Establishing and Standardizing Knowledge: Catherine Jackson examines the problem caused by the introduction of synthetical experiments into 19th Century chemistry. How could chemists know what they had made? Jackson explains how, by 1870, they resolved this chemical identity crisis. Michael Finn’s paper looks at the development of cerebral localisation in the late 19th century, when an emerging neurological profession in Britain adopted various methods of investigation to study the functions and diseases of the brain. Will Ashworth goes beyond the academy, addressing the role of the excise in standardizing measurement. Taxing the manufacture and movement of goods was a powerful driver of developments in instrumentation. Finally, Michael Kershaw’s paper addresses how the value for Paris-Greenwich longitude – an important astronomical and geodetic standard – was determined with the use of the new electric telegraph. Conflict between determinations was integral to the process of improvement, whilst the eventual establishment of a trusted value involved factors wider than simple numerical consistency.

Communicating Knowledge: Carin Berkowitz will discuss the priority dispute Charles Bell and Francois Magendie over the roots of motor and sensory nerves, focusing on shifting definitions of “the discovery” and international debates about credit. Alex Csiszar will address the role of journals in establishing priority. Print publication had always been on important factor in priority of discovery, but it was only during the mid-19th century that the specialized journal became its principal bearer. Building on the theme, Pedro Ruiz-Castell will examine how speculative articles published in daily newspapers and addressed to a general public became an important tool for some scientists to later use to claim priority in controversial topics in front of the international scientific community. Finally, Gregory Radick’s talk integrates various kinds of scientific claims for credit, attending to interactions among 3 different sorts of knowledge-claims and their disputes: claims to have discovered something first (priority claims); claims to have invented a useful technology first (patent claims); and claims about the power of scientific knowledge to explain and generate useful techniques and technologies (productivity claims).