Tadpoles and Frogs: Some Aspects of the Professionalization of British Physics, 1870-1939

Abstract

Perhaps the most commonly agreed social characteristic of nineteenthcentury science is its emergence as a professional activity. Many explanations have been advanced to account for this phenomenon. Some have identified a powerful economic demand for highly trained scientists;I others have laid emphasis on the importance of the educational system 7 in which, as a consequence of the growth of science teaching, increasing specialization produced a theoretical and technical sophistication that inevitably displaced the amateur from his position in British science. Yet whatever the interpretation, the profession of science has been identified as possessing an ethical basis resting on disinterestedness and dedication to the ideal of pure research. However, professionalization witnessed not only the creation of sufficient openings to enable a handful of men of science to undertake a career in research, but also saw the emergence of a large number of trained scientists who worked at some distance from the boundaries of scientific knowledge, as teachers, government employees or in industry. Employment prospects and economic pressures were, for these practitioners, of considerable importance, yet have been largely ignored in discussions of the social organization of science. For the British physics community such matters were particularly pertinent. While the dedicated pursuit of scientific truth may have been of overriding importance for members of the 'lite, for other physicists more worldly factors carried equal weight. This paper looks at some aspects of the social organization of physics and its emergence as a profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to the importance of the rank and file physicist for whom the idea of pure research had to be reconciled with the economic realities of practising physics. This is done, not in an attempt