Communicating Physics:

The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887

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Josep Simon

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804–87) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot's books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.

Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot's two textbooks: Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée (1851) and Cours de physique purement expérimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson. The study is novel for its international comparison of nineteenth-century physics, its acknowledgement of the role of book-production on the impact of the titles and for its emphasis on the role of communication in the making of science.

Sample pages

• Communicating Physics: Introduction
• Communicating Physics: Index

Readership

History of Science, History of the Book, Social History and Education

Contents

1 Textbooks and the Cultures of Physics
2 Physics in the Marketplace: Textbooks and the Making of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France and England
3 Ganot & Atkinson: A Comparative Biography of the Practice of Physics
4 Ganot's Physique
5 The International Book Trade and the Making of Scientific Knowledge
6 Atkinson's Physics
7 Readers and Readings
Conclusion

Reviews

Winner of the 2010 Marc-Auguste Pictet Prize awarded by the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève

Related titles

• Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science

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