Since completing his DPhil in History at the University of Oxford in 2015, Edward J. Gillin has worked at the universities of Cambridge and Leeds, and is now Lecturer in the History of Building Sciences and Technology at the University College London. A cultural historian of modern science and architecture, he won the 2016 Usher Prize from the Society for the History Technology, the SAHGB's 2015 Hawksmoor Essay Medal, and was named proxime accessit for the Royal Historical Society's 2018 Whitfield Prize. In 2020, he circumnavigated Africa with a genuine 1840s' Fox-type dipping needle.

• Acknowledgements


• Preface


• Introduction: Empires of Magnetism


• 1: Steam-engine Economy and the Heat of the Mine in Early Nineteenth-century Cornwall


• 2: The Earth's Laboratory: Underground Experiments, Philosophical Miners, and Knowledge from the Mine


• 3: Survey and Science: Polar Expeditions, Terrestrial Magnetism, and the Instruments of Empire, 1815-1839


• 4: The Antarctic Foxs: Dipping Needles on James Clark Ross's South Pole Expedition, 1838-1843


• 5: Expedition and Experiment: the British Magnetic Survey, 1841-1843


• 6: Discovery, Disaster, and the Dipping Needle: Britain's Global Magnetic System, 1843-1850


• 7: The Twilight of Cornish Science and the Systematization of Oceanic Navigation, 1850-1907


• 8: Epilogue: Global Science in an Age of Empire


• Bibliography

This book offers an in-depth, global history of the British Magnetic Survey - the nineteenth-century, British-government-funded efforts to measure and understand the earth's magnetic field. These scientific efforts are situated within the context of the development of 'global science' and the ways they intersected with empire and colonialism.