FREEMAN EDWARD GILLIN, HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE AND ARCHITECTURE PUBLISHES “AN EMPIRE OF MAGNETISM: GLOBAL SCIENCE AND THE BRITISH MAGNETIC ENTERPRISE IN THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM”
19 AUGUST 2024
Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School for Sustainable Construction, he recently published “An Empire of Magnetism: Global Science and the British Magnetic Enterprise in the Age of Imperialism” with Oxford University Press, which explores the nineteenth-century investigation of terrestrial magnetism.
During the 1830s and 1840s, the Royal Navy launched an industrious series of expeditions, around the world, to record magnetic data which could be returned to London and translated into ordered charts illustrating the Earth’s magnetic phenomena: it was widely believed that such mapping would secure increasingly reliable navigation for the nation’s naval and commercial shipping. Gillin’s work argues that this undertaking marked a hugely significant moment in the relationship between science and the modern state: never before had a government invested so extensively in a scientific investigation of such global ambition. It builds on surviving expeditionary accounts, archival material, and Gillin’s own recreation of a magnetic voyage, completed in 2020, from Bristol to St Helena, Cape Town, and Mumbai, armed with an original magnetic dipping needle built in the 1840s.