Transport phenomena: Space and visibility in Victorian physics

Abstract

A range of image machines, including projectors, cameras, spark devices and cinematographs, were important resources in later Victorian physics. These devices were not solely used to display the backstage results of physics experiments to a wider public, but were also investigative tools well within the scientific workplace: this science’s scope was widely understood as being defined by the scope of the visible, and changed when new kinds of visibility were introduced. An enterprise defined by such notions of perceptual acquaintance would also therefore depend on the accessibility and restriction of defined spaces. Here, the enterprises of the eminent nineteenth-century experimenters and lecturers John Tyndall and Charles Vernon Boys are used as examples of physics’ visual culture, its urban geography, and its relation with the emergence of cinematography in London in the 1890s in the projects of Robert Paul and his associates.