Marconi,masculinity and the heroic age of science: wireless telegraphy at the British Association meeting at Dover in 1899

Abstract

In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system was used to transmit messages across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. This achievement represented a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity and constitutes a key turning point in an important struggle between competing interpretations of invention and innovation as masculine practices within British science. The British Association tended to favor a narrative of scientific research as a collectivist, international, gentlemanly-amateur pursuit, largely confined to the laboratory. Marconi, by contrast, explained the development of wireless telegraphy as the achievement of his own genius. Appealing not only to the established scientific elite but to a range of non-traditional audiences, and stressing the possibilities or ‘imagined uses’ of his technology even more so than his actual results, he succeeded in commanding unprecedented influence.     

A short note on starch and xylem of Ipomoea batatas (sweet potato) in archaeological deposits from northern New Zealand

This study examines preservation of microfossils identified as introduced Ipomoea batatas in soils from northern New Zealand. Starch grains and xylem cells showed highly variable preservation, from good to extremely poor. For starch grains, the latter included brown-staining, expansion and distortion of the grain and vacuole, loss of the Maltese cross, pitting, cracking, fragmentation and disintegration. Degraded xylem showed similar brown-staining, occasional cracking, cross-wise fragmentation, with wall pits becoming progressively less visible or showing distortion, expansion and coalescence.