ABSTRACT

The Challenger Expedition has been identified as perhaps the world’s first example of ‘big science’ (see Chapter 2). Certainly the £200,000 or so that it cost the British Government seems to have so shocked the Treasury that it would be forty years before an even remotely similar British-inspired venture would be undertaken again. Even then, the officials involved at the beginning of what became the Discovery Investigations had no idea that it would develop into one of the largest research programmes of the first half of the twentieth century.