This introductory essay frames our special issue by discussing how attention to the history of research integrity and fraud can stimulate new historical and methodological insights of broader import to historians of science.
This introductory article frames our special issue in terms of how historicizing research integrity and fraud can benefit current discussions of scientific conduct and the need to improve public trust in science.
Within the Republic of Letters the art of experiment led to immense reorientation and an extensive redrawing of the enlightened map of natural knowledge. This paper will investigate the formative period of the exact sciences from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century when the persona of the experimentalist as a scientific expert was shaped. The paper focuses on Moritz Hermann Jacobi’s experimental knowledge derived from his modeling of an electro-magnetic self-acting machine and the social and epistemological problems of its integration into traditional academic life. His struggle to achieve academic recognition and credibility for his experimental work reflects not just his individual quandary, but important structural problems of the historical development of experimental knowledge traditions and science in what has been called the “second scientific revolution.”
Within the last decade historians of science have increasingly investigated the the material culture of science. This paper exemplarily introduces into current approaches by means of unfolding hitherto unrecognised layers of cultural meaning embodied in an important experimental apparatus of late 18th century enlightened natural philosophy. It concerns Charles Agustin Coulomb's electrostatic torsion balance. I will show that despite the fact that the experiment could not have worked precisiely the instrument - the balance electrique - became emblematic in French enlightened cultur because it acted like a mediating machine.
At a meeting of the Royal Society in 1925 participants expressed their concerns regarding a recent suggestion by the Australian physicist T. H. Laby of replicating the established value of the mechanical equivalent of heat. This rather controversial discussion about the value of redetermining this numerical fact brings to light different understandings of the moral economy of accuracy in scientific work; it signals a distinctive new stage in the historical understanding of accuracy and precision and the moral integrity in conducting research.