In 1995 Walker & Company published a small book authored by the professional writer Dava Sobel entitled Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Not only did the book sell exceptionally well; it also spawned a three‐hour film, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, and a new, lavishly illustrated work, The Illustrated Longitude, by Sobel and Harvard's William J. H. Andrewes. It is difficult to think of another book in the (...) history of science that has attained comparable success. Yet it seems that history of science journals have taken scant notice of the book; my efforts to locate reviews of Sobel's volume in history of science journals have turned up only a single review, that being in Italian. This is all the more distressing because the book and film present a very controversial view of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. This is not the place to examine Sobel's recipe for success, but it seems relevant background in reviewing a book also written by a professional journalist, also published by Walker, and fairly comparable in format to Sobel's.The history of science is rich in fascinating stories that could delight a variety of readers. The story of the search for longitude in the eighteenth century is certainly one of these; the dramatic quest to discover Neptune in the mid nineteenth century is another. Put overly briefly, the latter is the story of the frustrated efforts of a young, personally diffident but intellectually bold Cambridge graduate, John Couch Adams, to convince either the director of the Cambridge Observatory or England's Astronomer Royal to look for a planet that Adams's calculations had told him must be located at a specific position. It is also the story of the brilliant and arrogant Urbain J. J. Leverrier, who had independently completed comparable calculations and who beat Adams to the discovery by persuading not one of his French colleagues but an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory to launch a search, which within a few hours had located Neptune. It is also the story of the immense controversy that followed and that has in the last few years been given a new twist with the recovery of key documents carried off to Chile from the Royal Greenwich Observatory.Tom Standage, science correspondent for the Economist and author of The Victorian Internet, has taken up the challenge of retelling the Neptune story, which had previously been treated in dozens of articles and in book‐length studies by John Pringle Nichol, Albert Glodin, Morton Grosser, and Patrick Moore. Moreover, Standage presents the Neptune narrative as the centerpiece in a story that stretches from William Herschel's discovery of Uranus to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and even to the spectroscopic detection in the last few years of dozens of extra–solar system planets. Standage's clear and engaging prose is based on extensive reading in English and French sources, some manuscript work, and interviews with a number of the discoverers of extra–solar system planets. Although the book is bereft of footnotes, an annotated bibliography at its end partially fulfills their function. Numerous illustrations appear, but these tend to be rather dark and small.Although the book is generally reliable, some significant errors appear. For example, whereas Standage reports that William Herschel did not see Uranus alter in size, Herschel observed its diameter nearly double in the two months after his first observation of it. It is John, not William, Herschel who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Benjamin Peirce's last name is misspelled , as is Christiaan Huygens's first name , and it is incorrect to say that Huygens “considered it was unlikely that there was life elsewhere in the solar system” . Also, because Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher played such a major role in the discovery of the planet Pluto by creating and directing the research program that enabled a recent high school graduate, Clyde Tombaugh, to be the first to recognize the planet on a photographic plate, it seems inappropriate that Standage makes no mention of Slipher in recounting the discovery of Pluto.Overall this is a highly engaging story, well told and based on good sources. One would hope that it may follow Longitude into film, at least a documentary, and that other authors and publishers will recognize the market for such exciting stories from the history of science. (shrink)

As Roger Hennessey reminds us, “One of the most famous openings in English literature informs readers that ‘in the last years of the nineteenth century … human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's yet as mortal as his own’” . So began H. G. Wells's famous War of the Worlds , in which Martians invade the Earth.The general public seems scarcely aware that discussions of extraterrestrial intelligent beings began to appear centuries before 1897, not (...) just in fiction but also in serious writings by leading scientists, philosophers, and religious authors. Well before 1970 such scholars as Pierre Duhem, Arthur Lovejoy, and Marjorie Hope Nicolson had shown that mainline intellectuals for centuries have been writing about extraterrestrials. Between 1982 and 1996, three scholars published detailed and fully referenced books documenting in detail the history of ideas of extraterrestrial life from antiquity to the late twentieth century . In the last few years at least a half‐dozen authors have sought to repackage this exciting message for the literate public. The most successful of these popularizations is Worlds without End: The Historic Search for Extraterrestrial Life, the most recent book by Roger Hennessey, a retired British schoolteacher and administrator with strong interests in the history of science and technology.The strengths of Hennessey's volume are numerous. He has read and understood both the most authoritative scholarly work in this area and also a significant portion of the vast primary literature. He has surveyed in an engaging, judicious, and balanced manner materials from antiquity to the present and embellished his narrative with seventy‐two well‐chosen illustrations. He has avoided sensationalism even when writing about sensational controversies and eschewed partisanship even while describing individuals who in many cases were nothing if not passionate in their convictions. He has shown sensitivity to the complexities and to the range of issues that arose in the history of this long and continuing debate, which, although focused on distant locales and on possibly nonexistent beings, is capable of revealing much about the nature of terrestrials. He has traced through more than twenty centuries a debate that involved not just scientific but also key religious and philosophical issues, presenting the debate in its full cultural richness. The level of informational accuracy in his book is high . Although his references are significantly fewer in number and less specific than many scholars might prefer, they are at least adequate to assure specialists that he is not presenting as his own the hard‐won research results of others. The overall format of the book is appealing, its bibliography adequate, its index better than one expects in popularizations.Historians of science wishing to enhance a survey course in the history of science with an attractive text that will reveal to students a history filled with striking controversies and colorful figures as well as little‐known facets of the thought of many scientists of distinction may wish to consider using this book. (shrink)