Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot’s Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887 (review)

Decades ago, Thomas S. Kuhn declared that one of the most powerful tools for propagating scientific paradigms was also the most humble: the textbook. This key role of education and textbooks in science has only recently become a subject of interest in the history of science, and Josep Simon’s Communicating Physics takes up this project with great energy. He argues that by focusing on not just the content of textbooks, but also their production and distribution, we can recast the story of the formation of nineteenth-century physics from below. In this way, he says, we see that discipline as being formed not only by famous physicists, but also by teachers, industrial researchers, technicians, publishers, and readers.

Simon pursues this goal by focusing on one of the most successful physics textbooks of the century, Adolphe Ganot’s Traité élémentaire de physique expèrimentale et appliquée (1851), and its English translation by Edmund Atkinson (1863). He notes that textbooks in general only became a standard part of teaching in the nineteenth century, a development that was largely the result of the emergence of national structures of education and examination. This coincided with the rapid expansion of science education, and Simon argues that a major force behind the establishment of physics as a discipline was the design of textbooks to cater to secondary and medical education (and associated examinations).

Communicating Physics makes the case that such textbooks were not simple repositories of theoretical knowledge, but were instead the result of complicated material cultures, business networks, and pedagogical agendas. Ganot made his book successful by drawing on his own teaching experience, local engraving skill, and cutting-edge research—while at the same time including practice exam questions (then a novel idea) and keeping it half the length of competing books. It was marketed by the Baillière bookseller network, whose active involvement in the project is shown to be a major force in the book’s formation and financial success. Simon provides an extraordinarily detailed narrative of the creation of both the Traité and its English translation, always emphasizing the many material and commercial processes at work. He argues that these texts provided distinct kinds of physics: Ganot’s physics was predominantly applied and experimental, with great emphasis on instruments and procedure. Atkinson’s, on the other hand, was more mathematical and tailored for English audiences.

Simon aims to make significant changes to the historiography of physics, particularly to upset the usual nation-oriented periodizations. It is useful to see the ways in which a text becomes influential in different national contexts, but Communicating Physics does not significantly upset the existing historiography. Similarly, it is not the first to investigate the role of education in the development of physics, though it is a useful addition to the work of Andrew Warwick and David Kaiser.

The book falls short of its ambition to show that Ganot’s text was an important part of the formation of nineteenth-century physics. Its widespread use is made clear, and it is very interesting to see the ways in which it was used by researchers in their work. Strangely, however, we see very little about its effects on or appropriations by the students who used it. Ganot may have had a coherent vision of physics, but was it passed on to his readers? How did exposure to that text’s view of physics shape the discipline? Simon’s claim that the text had a widespread impact on the field ends up being underdeveloped. It is left implicit that students took away important ideas or methods from the textbook—a surprisingly passive view of student readership that brings us back to Kuhn’s description of textbooks as tools of indoctrination.

Communicating Physics succeeds in making the case that nineteenth-century physics pedagogy was a “collective enterprise” that involved...