I. Bernard Cohen

Abstract

1 MARCH 1914 * 20 JUNE 2003 PROUD OF being the first American to receive a doctorate expressly in the history of science (as opposed to writing a thesis for a history department), I Bernard Cohen went on to lead the professionalization of the discipline and to establish a flagship history of science department at Harvard. With a booming voice, a familiar checked sport jacket, and a distinctive articulated fish watch fob, he exuded a memorable presence that inevitably attracted both admirers and detractors. An acknowledged authority on the science of Benjamin Franklin, he was a natural candidate for membership in the American Philosophical Society, yet his election came comparatively late in his career. Born in Far Rockaway, Long Island, Cohen entered New York University at the precocious age of fifteen, only to drop out after a semester; following a brief study of veterinary medicine at the Farmington Agricultural Institute, he attended the Valley Forge Military Academy before entering Harvard as a freshman in 1933 to concentrate in mathematics. Then, continuing as a graduate student in 1937 in the newly founded Program in History of Science and Learning, he became an assistant to George Sarton, the man considered the father of modern history of science and the founding editor of Isis (in 1912), which in the meantime had become the journal of the History of Science Society. Cohen's original dissertation proposal, on Franklin's work on electricity as an example of Newtonian experimental science, grew ever longer, and at the suggestion of Crane Brinton (and with the unenthusiastic approval of Sarton), Cohen's first book, published in 1941, a fully annotated edition of Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, became his thesis for a Ph.D. granted in 1947. Cohen's six-hundred-page Franklin and Newton was published in 1956. During the same period he researched and wrote Some Early Tools of American Science (1950), which documented an exhibition of the university's eighteenth-century instruments and helped to establish Harvard's Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments, in which he continued to maintain a strong interest. From 1946 on (and until his mandatory retirement in 1984) Cohen taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard. Working with president James Bryant Conant on Harvard's newly installed General Education program, he helped introduce the case study method with his popular course, Natural Science 3, The Nature and Growth of the Physical Sciences. A consummate showman in the classroom, he taught an extended series of graduate teaching fellows (including this writer) how to keep undergraduates awake with a host of memorable demonstrations. For two decades he chaired Harvard's program in history of science and guided its transformation into a full-fledged department in the mid-1960s. In 1947 Cohen became managing editor of his, and in 1953 succeeded Sarton in the editorship. As his colleague Erwin Hiebert noted in 1974 when Cohen received the Sarton Medal, the History of Science Society's lifetime achievement award, Cohen shepherded Isis through a gentle metamorphosis that gave it a structure that it still essentially maintains in its current form. Cohen's research in the history of science covered a wide range of topics over the course of his more than six decades of publications. Nevertheless, he was best known for his work on Isaac Newton. In 1957 Cohen joined with Alexandre Koyre, then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, on the monumental project of preparing a variorum edition of Newton's Principia. This endeavor covered not only its three published editions, but also the original manuscript and the voluminous corrections and annotations that Newton had made in his personal copies. …