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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Discovering Water - James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century 'Water Controversy' (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,694
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Discovering Water - James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century 'Water Controversy' (Paperback)
Series: Science, Technology and Culture, 1700-1945
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The 'water controversy' concerns one of the central discoveries of
modern science, that water is not an element but rather a compound.
The allocation of priority in this discovery was contentious in the
1780s and has occupied a number of 20th century historians. The
matter is tied up with the larger issues of the so-called chemical
revolution of the late eighteenth century. A case can be made for
James Watt or Henry Cavendish or Antoine Lavoisier as having
priority in the discovery depending upon precisely what the
discovery is taken to consist of, however, neither the protagonists
themselves in the 1780s nor modern historians qualify as those most
fervently interested in the affair. In fact, the controversy
attracted most attention in early Victorian Britain some fifty to
seventy years after the actual work of Watt, Cavendish and
Lavoisier. The central historical question to which the book
addresses itself is why the priority claims of long dead natural
philosophers so preoccupied a wide range of people in the later
period. The answer to the question lies in understanding the
enormous symbolic importance of James Watt and Henry Cavendish in
nineteenth-century science and society. More than credit for a
particular discovery was at stake here. When we examine the various
agenda of the participants in the Victorian phase of the water
controversy we find it driven by filial loyalty and nationalism but
also, most importantly, by ideological struggles about the nature
of science and its relation to technological invention and
innovation in British society. At a more general, theoretical,
level, this study also provides important insights into conceptions
of the nature of discovery as they are debated by modern
historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.
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