Summary This essay recounts Hermann von Helmholtz's trip to represent Germany at the International Electrical Congress in Chicago in 1893 as well as his reception by various members of the American scientific, technological, and cultural elite in several other American cities. In doing so, it seeks to portray something of the vitality of the youthful and increasingly important American scientific community; of the strong relationship between American and German scientists, including how Helmholtz used and was used by them and various (...) other members of the American elite to promote science and culture in America as well as to promote his own and German interests; and, finally, of what many considered to be the close interactions between science and technology in the late nineteenth century. In short, the essay seeks to use Helmholtz's trip to capture a sense of the broader relationship among science, the nation-state, and cultural elites in Gilded-Age America and between Germany and America. (shrink)

This essay seeks to illuminate the changing nature of experimental physics in the 1860s and 1870s by analysing the creation of dust tubes and dust figures by the German experimentalist August Kundt, and by showing how Kundt and his associate Emil Warburg used the ‘Kundt tube’ to test the new kinetic theory of gases. In so doing, the essay seeks to show how Kundt came to revise the vision of experimental physics that he had learned from his teacher Heinrich Gustav (...) Magnus, a vision in which the experimentalist's goal was to establish ‘the facts’. Kundt, by contrast, came to envision experimental physics as being in the service of theory: to confirm or disconfirm theory, or to provide theorists with new phenomena to theorize about. Kundt's vision, it is argued, is emblematic of the changing nature of experimental physics and reflective of the rise of the new subdisciplines of theoretical and experimental physics. (shrink)