Itinerant Lecturer Research Articles

(Re‐)Packaging Knowledge and The Business of Format: Benjamin Martin's The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–64)

AbstractBenjamin Martin was an itinerant lecturer, instrument maker, and the author of a substantial number of textbooks mainly in the sciences. His biggest project, however, was The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences (1755–64), dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge to a broad audience. Rather than study Martin's works with regard to the history of science, this article examines his publications in terms of their highly self‐conscious engagement with form and format. While his textbooks are concerned with economic compression, his periodical General Magazine experiments with a special, unwieldy mode of seriality that brings to the fore the role of format as well as the precarious status of seriality for the purposes of knowledge dissemination.

Henry Snowden Ward (1865–1911) Biography with special reference to X-rays in 1896

Henry Snowden Ward was a professional photographer, Editor of The Photogram magazine, itinerant lecturer in England in 1896 on X-rays, and the author of the world’s first textbook on X-rays, Practical Radiography , which was first published in May 1896 and went into three editions with the later editions, 1898 and 1901, expanded and co­-authored with Adolph Isenthal (d~1910), a manufacturer in London of electrical apparatus and X-ray apparatus. Ward was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a founding member of the Rontgen Society. As with most early demonstrators of X-rays imaging, Snowden Ward left the field once qualified physicians, surgeons, physicists and engineers became more involved and took over as the prime leaders in X-ray diagnosis and therapy. Snowden Ward went on to publish and lecture on Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare. He died suddenly in December 1911 in New York whilst on a Dickens & Shakespeare lecture tour of the USA. Some of the illustrations from the three editions of Practical Radiography are included.

The University Archive: Early Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library

The University ArchiveEarly Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library Alexander Kupfer (bio) Well before the National Archives or Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures, a December 1910 article in the Olean [N.Y.] Evening Times proposed that famed itinerant lecturer and exhibitor Lyman H. Howe establish a National Film Library. The author was impressed by the positive press and enthusiastic public reception to Howe’s moving pictures of the funeral of England’s King Edward. The Evening Times’s suggestion to create a film library was also an attempt to legitimate Howe’s pictures as important historical documents worthy of long-term safekeeping. The author proclaimed, “Think of what it would be if we could see the funeral of Julius Caesar, a gladiatorial contest, the maneuvers of the Spanish Armada, the street life of ancient Athens or even a simple Babylonian or Egyptian walking to his business.”1 [End Page 1] Howe never established a motion picture library. However, throughout the 1910s, the idea of forming a collection of significant American films was still frequently raised. Perhaps recognizing the magnitude of this mission, film industry leaders often sought to involve the federal government in the efforts to save early movies. In a widely reprinted interview in 1919, Thomas Edison suggested that the government build a library of educational and industrial motion pictures in Washington, D.C., to provide access to “all institutions in the United States, even to the most rural schoolhouses.”2 Industry support for a film library continued with Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Shortly after he was hired in 1922, Hays began lobbying for a government-funded archive of motion pictures produced by Hollywood studios. Hays discussed with Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover plans to construct a nitrate vault in the basement of the White House to preserve historically important movies of “national cultural value.”3 Will Hays’s lobbying efforts have been singled out by historians of the film preservation movement in the United States as illustrative of the first wave of efforts to create a federal motion picture collection through an appeal to nationalistic discourse. Individuals outside the film industry were likewise interested in forming a national collection of American motion pictures. Scholars interested in the early history of film preservation have particularly focused on the efforts of the federal government. As a result, Janna Jones explains, the history of archiving has been primarily defined by the efforts of the National Archives and the Library of Congress to build a national film library for the purpose of enhancing the reputation of the United States at home and abroad.4 This focus on the federal government’s role in film preservation has meant that the history and importance of university collections of educational, industrial, and sponsored motion pictures have been largely overlooked. Film collections in universities preceded these other archives by decades, as numerous colleges started acquiring motion pictures in the 1910s. The largest collections, both in terms of number of reels of film and audience size, were operated by university extension divisions that established visual instruction programs to distribute educational films and media to schools and off-campus groups. The circulating libraries at institutions including the Universities of Indiana, Wisconsin, California, and Texas were headed by largely unknown administrators who were not archivists or cinephiles but rather valued cinema for its utility as an educational tool. Although contemporary scholars, particularly ones interested in the history of educational and nontheatrical cinema, have explored cinema’s incorporation in university curricula beginning in the mid-1910s, the importance of these early [End Page 2] collections to the history of motion picture preservation in the United States requires further exploration. University film collections offer an alternative site from which to consider the origins of motion picture preservation. In 1920, two years before Hays was hired by the MPPDA, administrators of visual instruction programs proposed the establishment of a National Film Negative Library (NFNL) in Washington, D.C. They sought to connect the goals of long-term film preservation to the more established project of visual education. The library...

John Banks: an independent and itinerant lecturer of natural and experimental philosophy at the threshold of the English industrial revolution

In eighteenth-century England, courses of natural and experimental philosophy delivered by independent and/or itinerant lecturers, whose textbooks and syllabi were based on Newtonian physics, became the main instruments for spreading and popularizing the idea of applied science. This effectively represented the application of the results of scientific knowledge to the population’s needs and to the production of the material components of life. Thus, the activities of independent and/or itinerant lecturers, with their courses and publications, helped to spread knowledge on the principles of mechanical and experimental science among the men who became protagonists of their country’s transformation into the first industrial power in the world. One among those lecturers was John Banks (1740–1805), who offered courses and specialized knowledge on mechanical physics and machinery to many manufacturers, engineers and mechanics, who stood at the forefront of England’s industrial transformation and was himself one of the main intellectual exponents of this process.

John Theophilus Desaguliers: A Newtonian between patronage and market relations

The dissemination of the mechanical and Newtonian experimental philosophy in 18th-century England arose fascination in relation to the possible application of this new knowledge to the needs of productive life and the general welfare of the population. The activity of many independent and/or itinerant lecturers proved to be fundamental to spread the Newtonian philosophy and allow for the emergence of an ideal of applied science. In the present paper I discuss the intellectual trajectory of John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744), who was the curator, or ‘official experimenter’, of the Royal Society of London and became a pioneer in the spreading of Newtonianism, as well as one of the most important and most respected independent lecturers on mechanical and experimental philosophy in the first half of the 18th century.

Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 by Dana Elizabeth Weiner (review)

Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in Old Northwest, 1830-1870. By Dana Elizabeth Weiner. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. 327. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Kyle G. VolkHistorian Dana Weiner's Race and Rights is a welcome addition to growing body of literature examining abolitionists who battled slavery and racial prejudice in antebellum Midwest. Focusing on struggles of activists-female and male, black and white-in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, Weiner argues that these four states constituted the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America (3). This key claim about significance of Old Northwest over other regions is difficult to gauge, especially given absence of substantial comparative analysis. Nonetheless, Weiner illustrates that this region was an important hotbed of controversy over slavery, race, and freedom of expression. This well-researched study will interest scholars of abolitionism and civil liberties and should be read alongside recent work of Stephen Middleton, H. Robert Baker, and Stacey Robertson, among others.1Weiner's nine chapters are arranged both thematically and chronologically, and within each chapter Weiner uses repeated section breaks to bring order to many controversies occurring in region over space and time. A preliminary chapter sets stage for ascension of abolitionist activism in 1830s by detailing Old Northwest's racial, political, religious, and reform landscape. The second chapter focuses on early battles over fugitive slave laws and region's notorious Black Laws, which restricted black migration into these states and hampered black residents by denying them a range of rights that were enjoyed by whites. From continued black migration and black conventions to court action, petitions, and use of rights arguments, Weiner describes ways that activists contested these hostile measures. In final chapter, Weiner returns to these issues as they persisted in era of sectional crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction. In both chapters, she persuasively makes case that resistance to Black Laws constituted a vital aspect of Midwestern abolitionism and that these efforts at legal reform advanced new egalitarian conceptions of rights. Especially in light of repeated failures of activists to change public policy and only limited signs of local progress (232) that appeared by post-Civil War period, public reception and lasting impact of these rights claims, particularly outside of activist circles, is less clear.The middle four chapters explore perils of publicly advocating abolitionism and racial equality in Old Northwest. At least since Russel Nye's classic Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860, abolitionism's role in provoking controversies over civil liberties has been well known.2 Weiner's study, however, takes readers away from gag rules in Washington, DC, to show how freedoms of speech, assembly, and press were contested on ground in combustible Old Northwest. In describing vitality of public meetings, itinerant lecturers, and press to Midwestern abolitionists' grassroots crusade against slavery and racial prejudice, Weiner provides new readings of such well-known events as murder of abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. …

The annotated Emerson

A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism (Our moods do not believe in each other; Money often costs too much), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe's courtly muses and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity. But he remains one of America's least understood writers. And, by his own admission, he spawned neither school nor follower (he valued independent thought too much). Now, in this annotated selection of Emerson's writings, David Mikics instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of Emerson's essential works and the remarkable thinker who produced them. Full of color illustrations and rich in archival photographs, this volume offers much for the specialist and general reader. In his running commentaries on Emerson's essays, addresses, and poems, Mikics illuminates contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. He quotes extensively from Emerson's Journal to shed light on particular passages or lines and examines Emerson the essayist, poet, itinerant lecturer, and political activist. Finally, in his Foreword, Phillip Lopate makes the case for Emerson as a spectacular truth teller--a model of intellectual labor and anti-dogmatic sanity. Anyone who values Emerson will want to own this edition. Those wishing to discover, or to reacquaint themselves with, Emerson's writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than The Annotated Emerson.

Paul A. Elliott, Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. xii + 363, £54.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84885-366-9.

Paul A. Elliott, Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. xii + 363, £54.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84885-366-9. - Volume 56 Issue 1

Eva Gauthier, Java to jazz

Java did not enjoy a significant place in the American imagination during the nineteenth century, and in contrast to India, China, or Japan was rarely an artistic subject. In the early years of the twentieth century, adventurous artist-travellers occasionally gave exhibitions of paintings and sculptures of Indonesian subjects. In the days when illustrated lectures were still a popular entertainment, one might also attend a talk on Java by itinerant lecturers such as Dwight Elmendorf.

The Business of Experimental Physics: Instrument Makers and Itinerant Lecturers in the German Enlightenment

While it is a commonplace in the historiography of electricity that itinerant lecturers and instrument makers were ‘somehow’ part of the ‘electrical flare’ of the 18th century, very little is actually known about them, about their background, their careers and their self-understanding. Yet, research focusing on these practitioners of experimental physics outside the established institutions can contribute immensely to our understanding of the scientific culture of the Enlightenment. The development of electrical machines, the supply for increasing demand for instruments and instruction, the creation of interest in electricity through public demonstrations, relied heavily on these men. Furthermore, these ‘scientific salesmen’ offered a perfect contrast, a foil for the natural philosophers from whom to distinguish themselves. Natural philosophers tried to discredit their extra-academic competitors, thereby forging their own image as serious, honest, truth-seeking, independent researchers. This essay focuses on this situation in the German Empire, tracing the steps of the itinerant lecturer Jakob von Bianchy on his way from court to college, from the workshop to the theatre, from Lake Como, to Vienna and Paris.

Historical and Pedagogical Perspectives on Entertainment, Popularization and Learning in Science

This is an introduction to the following papers of a conference: From Itinerant Lecturers of the 18th Century to Popularizing Science for the 21st Century.

A Role for Historical Experiments: Capturing the Spirit of the Itinerant Lecturers of the 18th Century

Gerald Rutherford (1964), one of the original authors of the Harvard Project Physics course which emphasized the history of science, expressed a view of inquiry which advocated the historical re-constructions of significant experiments. To implement this view we examine two modes of historical re-constructions; Heering’s (Paper presented at the Itinerant Physicists of the 17th century Conference, Pognana, Italy, June 1–6, 2003) replication method for historical experiments and our development of historical representations. Heering describes the replication method in three phases: the construction of the apparatus, the recreation of the experimental procedure, and the contextualisation of the experience. In our adaption of this process for the science classroom we recognize teachers have limited access to methods and resources in historiography. Consequently, the historical re-construction is guided by a historical narrative. As it relates to a historical experiment the narrative has four parts; Introduction, Experimental design, Experimental results, and Analysis.

Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Enda Leaney National University of Ireland, Galway As the discipline of the history of science in Ireland has evolved, scholars have become increasingly concerned with the role science played in civic society. One consequence of this new concern has been an historiographical movement away from histories of elite scientific institutions and the biographies of eminent Irish men and women of science, and toward more thematic discussions of how the Irish public engaged with science on an educational, cultural, and recreational level. 1 The nineteenth century has proven to be an especially attractive ground for such investigations. It was an era when a public culture of science was created in many European countries, as scientists demanded a greater role in educational, economic, and social issues. 2 Ireland was no different; by the mid-nineteenth century, science was fully integrated into the cultural life of Irish polite society. 3 Recently, there has been a greater appreciation of the polymathic tenor of culture in Victorian Ireland, which has recognized the importance [End Page 24] of scientific knowledge—or at least, an affectation toward it—as a cultural signifier of sophistication and modernity. 4 The cult of science was fetishized by such extravagant public celebrations of science as the British Association for the Advancement of Science's (BAAS) visits to Cork, Dublin, and Belfast and the Dublin International Exhibition of 1853. 5 The creation of a public culture of science was predicated on a number of conditions. Two of the most important were the creation of venues for scientific audiences, and the simultaneous creation of a corps of scientific lecturers and demonstrators to entertain them. The rapid expansion of literary and scientific societies throughout rural and urban Ireland in the early decades of the century, which in turn attracted itinerant lecturers from the elite metropolitan scientific societies of Britain and Ireland, helped to fulfil these conditions. 6 Periodicals dedicated to the diffusion of useful knowledge included the Dublin Penny Journal, the Belfast Monthly Magazine, the Dublin Literary Journal and Select Family Advertiser, and the Kilrush Magazine and Monthly Journal of Literature and Useful Information, and expanded the audience for science beyond the restricted constituencies of the specialist societies. 7 By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific lectures, exhibitions, and conversaziones were commonplace throughout rural Ireland. 8 However, most scholarly examinations of the social and cultural role of science in Irish civic society has been restricted to the orthodox sciences. Irish scholars have neglected such marginal sciences as phrenology and mesmerism. Though such pursuits would necessarily be omitted from normative or celebratory [End Page 25] accounts of the history of science or medicine, it remains a fact—well noted by British historians of science—that phrenology was much more than a nineteenth-century parlor entertainment practiced by charlatans and embraced by dilettantes. Phrenology was undoubtedly the most popular science in nineteenth-century Britain. As such, it was a significant medium for popularizing naturalistic accounts of both nature and society. Phrenology had widespread appeal across a road spectrum of British society, from gutter-press radicals to the "chattering classes" of St. John's Wood. 9 As the organization of science in nineteenth-century Ireland largely mirrored British trends, it is unsurprising that phrenology would find advocates in Ireland. Examining the role of phrenology in Irish society is therefore especially useful in helping us delineate the creation of a public culture of science in Irish civic society—for the crucial reason that phrenology was deemed an unorthodox pursuit. The arbiters of scientific orthodoxy in Ireland, such as Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Dublin Society, and, after 1853, the department of science and art, dismissed the legitimacy of phrenology and thereby ensured that it remained a marginal pursuit. Denied a forum in the most powerful and respectable arenas for the public dissemination of scientific culture in Ireland, phrenology was taken up by a private, scientific subculture. Without the patronage of the scientific establishment, phrenology relied upon the public energies of private citizens to expand...

"A WONDERFUL COLLECTION INDEED!": THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF FLORENCE IN THE TESTIMONY OF TWO TRAVELLERS

ABSTRACT The accounts of the visits to the Royal Museum of Florence by two travellers in 1787 and 1790 are analysed in the essay. The first, and littleknown account is by the Englishman Adam Walker (1731?-1821), inventor, builder of machines, and itinerant lecturer of natural and experimental philosophy. The second, and inedited account is by Pietro De Lama (1760-1825), director of the Museum of Antiquities of Parma, who cultivated a great interest for the sciences, natural history in particular, during the first part of his life. Though expressing overall positive opinions, the two scholars did not fail to point out several defects in the museum's outfitting.

Around the World in Eighty Minutes: The Travel Lecture Film

The travel lecture film is the archetypal form of the travelogue in cinema. It formed an important part of early cinema, flourished in later years, and continues today, notwithstanding predictions of its demise in the age of television, virtual reality, and the Internet. This essay examines the world of itinerant film lecturers who present silent travelogues with live narration throughout North America. In the tradition of Burton Holmes, these live travel lectures take place at hundreds of venues across the United States and Canada, including museums, concert halls, universities, and community clubs.

History of nitrous oxide—with special reference to its early use in Germany

The history of nitrous oxide (N2O) begins with its isolation by Joseph Priestly in 1772. Some years later Humphry Davy incidentally noted its analgesic action but this fact was not recognized by surgeons. The gas was used for public entertainment and during one of these demonstrations, Horace Wells realized the therapeutic applicability of the gas. His first public demonstration at the Massachusetts General Hospital was a failure, a story that is too well-known to need re-telling.In the early 1860s the itinerant lecturer Gardner Quincy Colton and the dentist Thomas Evans were among the most fervent advocates of the use of N2O in dentistry. Due to their close contacts with Jean Babtiste Rottenstein – a German dentist living in Paris at the same time, they also popularized its use in Germany. Publications from the Russian surgeon Stanislaw Klikovich stimulated obstetricians to use the anaesthetic in combination with air or oxygen for pain relief during childbirth in the early 1880s. Maximilian Neu was the first to use rotameters for a more accurate dosage of inhaled N2O–oxygen mixtures in 1910. Some years later Wilhelm Knipping suggested the use of an oxygen monitoring device in order to ensure that no hypoxemic N2O gas mixture was administered. The development of his device had been initiated by Helmut Schmidt and Paul Sudeck who, in the meantime, had popularized the use of N2O with air or oxygen among German surgeons. The anaesthetic was administered with a new anaesthetic apparatus, which had a circle system and was equipped with a carbon dioxide absorber. The device became available in the mid-1920s and was produced by the Draeger Company, Luebeck. Thus, this manufacturer became a protagonist of N2O anaesthesia apparatus in the German speaking countries.

Noah Webster and the American dictionary

Noah Webster was described by the publisher of competing dictionary as a vain...plodding Yankee, who aspired to be second Johnson - criticism that rings mostly true. He was certainly vain and, born in Connecticut, undeniably Yankee. Moreover, though he referred to Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language as barren desart of philology, the American lexicographer relied heavily on the book during the creation of his own American Dictionary, going so far as to filch whole sections. And few would seem more plodding than Webster, who was positively obsessed with collecting and preserving bits of information. He kept records of the weather, carefully logged the number of houses in every new town he passed through, filed away every scrap of his writing and everything written about him, and filled the margins of his books with references, dates and corrections. The proud Yankee's sensibilities, however, also made him fine lexicographer. Generally credited with distinguishing American spelling and usage from British, Webster shunned prescriptive mores and was doggedly loyal to his own language habits, as well as to those of the average American speaker.~ The book covers Webster's major publications and the influences and methods that shaped them; recounts his life as schoolteacher, copyright law champion, and itinerant lecturer; and examines the Webster legacy. An appendix containing title page reproductions from Webster's books, as well as some from his predecessors and competitors, is also included.

Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929–1939 ed. by Morine Krissdóttir

primacy to existence, to thatness over essence.” To medieval notions of the real, Aristotle is very often an exceedingly unstable guide, his popularity with Aquinas and other medievals notwithstanding. In his fourth chapter, “Medieval and Modern Understandings of Mode of Presentation,” Myles engages the potential contributions from phenomeno­ logical analysis to Chaucer’s “technique of realistic psychological character­ ization” (75) and finds, vis-à-vis the issue of intentionality in particular, that the phenomenologists have much to offer — as long as their insights are formulated in ways that correspond to the dominant medieval seman­ tic theory, which has its roots in Augustine. Chapters Five and Six bring the weight of Myles’s total argument to bear on a discussion of Chaucerian “Entencioun” in the Friar’s Tale, and specifically, the “ententes of rente.” Although this chapter is oddly devoid of reference to earlier scholarship of which it is substantially an elaboration (Jeffrey 1971, 1976; Fleming 1979, 1984; Peck 1967), the Friar’s Tale is unarguably a good text for his purposes. Myles’s conclusion, that intentionality remains a persistent subject in western art substantially because of the residue of ancient no­ tions of the “real,” is certainly sustainable, and his book makes a virtuous contribution toward clarifying the basis upon which that sustentation can become virtuous pedagogy as well. d a v id lyle Je f f r e y / University of Ottawa Morine Krissdottir, ed., Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929-1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). xxvii, 340, illus., $39.95 cloth. As Morine Krissdottir notes in her introduction, “there can be no neutral re­ sponse to [John Cowper] Powys” (xviii). Either he is accepted as a genius — in the recently published The Merry Heart, Robertson Davies describes him as “one of my great men,... as great a writer as Joyce — in my view greater” (14)— or he is dismissed as a ranting charlatan. An eccentric in the age of high modernism, writer of seemingly endless intellectual romances which of­ ten had to be slashed to ribbons before publication (what may well be his masterpiece, Porius, did not appear in an uncut edition until 1994), born either too late or too early (sounding on one page like a provincial Victo­ rian, on the next like a tricky postmodernist), part-clown, part-visionary, part-genius, he could only be seen as absurdly out of step in the world of Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf. But he has always commanded a small band of devoted admirers (I admit to being one of them) who cannot have too much of his refreshing, quirky writings. It is primarily for such readers that this selection of his diaries has been published. 483 Powys began writing a diary at the urging of his longtime companion Phyllis Playter, referred to throughout its pages as the T.T. (short for “Tiny, Thin” ), when he was fifty-six years old and she was thirty-four. He contin­ ued it for the rest of his long life until shortly before his death in 1963 in his ninety-first year. Two volumes — those covering 1930 and 1931 — have recently been published in full, but financial considerations make the appear­ ance of the complete diaries unlikely in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Powys Society and Adjunct Professor at the University of Guelph has compiled the present volume containing selections from the first eleven-and-a-half years, from the end of Powys’s precarious career as itinerant lecturer in North America, through a brief return to the Dorset he knew so well as a child, to his all-but-final settling in a remote corner of North Wales. Professor Krissdottir was required by her publishers to confine her selections to the limits of a single volume (which meant one tenth of the whole) and to forgo annotations. A less than ideal situation, but she provides informative prefaces to each year and occasional bridging summaries to en­ sure continuity. The result is inevitably impressionistic, but an astonishingly vivid portrait of an extraordinary personality manages to emerge. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this book is its presentation of a view of human life...

Editorial: The President's Speaker

The idea for as ingle large plenary session at the beginning of the Ultrasonic Symposium took root about ten years ago. A single session was held in Phoenix in 1977 to enable the Best Paper Award, recognizing meritorious contributions to the TRANSACTIONS, and other business of general nature to take place. The speaker for this session was R.C. Williamson with the topic "Case Studies of Successful Surface-Acoustic-Wave Devices." This format was well received and the ADCOM decided to broaden the areas of interest presented by inviting speakers outside the immediate ultrasonics community. Hence the President's Invited Speaker came into being. The first was E.L. Titlebaum who spoke on "Echolocation Systems in Nature; Bats, Dolphins, and Humans," at the opening of the 1978 Ultrasonics Symposium. We continue this tradition in Williamsburg for the 1986 Symposium with a presentation of The Glorious System of Things-An 18th Century Science Lecture by John L. McKnight and Hans C. von Baeyer who are physics professors at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Together they have re-created a lecture such as might have been given in the second half of the 18th century by an itinerant lecturer in the American colonies. The lecture is built around three principal pieces of apparatus, either antique or reconstructed: an electrical machine, an air pump, and an orrery, now respectively known as electrostatic generator, vacuum pump, and mechanical planetarium. With the help of these instruments, and their ancillary apparatus, a dozen instructive and amusing experiments are performed to illustrate the forefront of 18th century physics and astronomy. Engineers and physicists will recognize the seeds of the modem theories and devices they use in their daily work.

Populäre Naturwissenschaft in Nürnberg am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts: Reisende Experimentatoren, öffentliche Vorlesungen und physikalisches Spielzeug

AbstractPopular science in Nuremberg at the end of the 18th century exemplifies a little known German scientific culture: as in English und French towns, public lectures in natural philosophy and experimental demonstrations were offered to an interested bourgeois audience; the production of scientific toys flourished. The career of Johann Konrad Gütle, private teacher, itinerant lecturer and instrument maker, illustrates the popular scientific scene in Enlightenment Nuremberg.