“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech

By Jessica Riskin

Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love. more

Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature

By Richard Fallon

Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life. more

From Snowdrop to Nightjar: Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789)

By Hugh Aldersey-Williams

What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical project of Robert Marsham, the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain's first phenologist. more

Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts

By Steven Connor

Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits The Life Everlasting (1911), where the recent discovery of radium shapes the mechanics of phantasmal machines and psychic forces able to pass through all impediments. more

Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault

By Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world. more

The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

By Mike Jay

Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences. more

Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine

By Katherine Harvey

From cabbage green to coarse meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions. more

Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”

By Peter Sahlins

During the late 1660s in Paris, transfusing the blood of calves and lambs into human veins held the promise of renewed youth and vigour. Peter Sahlins explores Jean Denis’ controversial experiments driven by his belief in the moral superiority of animal blood: a substance that could help redeem the fallen state of humanity. more

Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe

By Rebecca Whiteley

When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings. more

Displaying the Dead: The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue

By Daisy Sainsbury

When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held. more

“Spontaneous Revolutions”: Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement

By Natalie Lawrence

After weeks of watching young tendrils slowly corkscrew their way toward the sun, Charles Darwin set about inventing a system for making botanic motion visible to the naked eye. Natalie Lawrence delves into a lesser-known chapter of the naturalist’s research, discovering revelations about the vegetal world that remain neglected to this day. more

Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

By Juliette Bretan

In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects. more

Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album

By Sasha Archibald

Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including “the most ambitious album of all” by Charles F. Durant. more

“Pajamas from Spirit Land”: Searching for William James

By Alicia Puglionesi

After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor. Channelling these fragmentary voices, Alicia Puglionesi considers the relationship between communication, reputation, and survival after death. more

Marxist Astronomy: The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek

By Lauren Collee

Can a person’s experiences on earth alter how they perceive the stars? Lauren Collee peers through the telescope of Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer whose politics informed his human approach to studying the cosmos. more

The Spiralist

By Dr Kevin Dann

Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl. more

“The Mark of the Beast”: Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement

By Erica X Eisen

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects. more

The Uncertain Heavens: Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life

By Hugh Aldersey-Williams

During the 17th century, as knowledge of the Universe and its contents increased, so did speculation about life on other planets. One such source, as Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, was Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens, whose earlier work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like. more

Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland

By Mike Jay

From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particular became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland. more

“More Lively Counterfaits”: Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science

By Gregorio Astengo

From infographics to digital renders, today’s scientists have ready access to a wide array of techniques to help visually communicate their research. It wasn’t always so. Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first scientific journal — new forms of image making which pushed the boundaries of 17th-century book printing. more

Primary Sources: A Natural History of the Artist’s Palette

By Philip Ball

For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists’ colours. Focusing in on painting’s primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein’s blue. more

Sicko Doctors: Suffering and Sadism in 19th-Century America

By Chelsea Davis

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a ghoulish figure, the cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found both unnerving and entirely plausible. Looking at novels by Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Chelsea Davis dissects this curious character. more

“Invisible Little Worms”: Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague

By John Glassie

Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the great polymath Athanasius Kircher turned his ever-enquiring mind to the then mysterious disease, becoming possibly the first to view infected blood through a microscope. While his subsequent theories of spontaneous generation and “universal sperm” were easily debunked, Kircher’s investigation can be seen as an important early step to understanding contagion, and perhaps even the very first articulation of germ theory. John Glassie explores. more

“Theire Soe Admirable Herbe”: How the English Found Cannabis

By Benjamin Breen

In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London. more