Abstract
Burgeoning numbers of books and periodicals from earlier centuries are becoming available in online databases such as the British Library Online Newspaper Archive, the Making of America collection, the Million Book Project, the Gallica Project, Google Book Search and the Royal Society's Digital Journal Archive. For those databases that offer it, full-text search capability provides the historian with a novel tool for researching the origin and development of scientific language. A case study is given concerning the adoption of the ‘whirlpool’ epithet for Messier 51 (the astronomical nebula in which the Third Earl of Rosse first discovered spiral structure in 1845). This illustrates the power of the tool but also reveals some limitations. In particular, access to originals is still often necessary. Unexpectedly, the astronomical appropriation of ‘whirlpool’ predates Rosse's discovery.
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