ABSTRACT
Priority in science points to the acknowledgment that an individual first discovered something—a fact, a law, a theory, an instrument, and so on. Through this process, some scientists come to be represented as the first discoverers of concepts and phenomena. The processes of firsting, seconding, and lasting in priority disputes in the Viceroyalty of New Granada also demonstrate how historians of science have misrepresented priority disputes in this period due to a conflicting use of firsting, and tensions between Latin American and European science and authority come to light. Francisco José de Caldas, customarily seen as the first Colombian scientist, and the dispute over the invention of the hypsometer, example this problem. Previous analyses of Caldas’s invention miss the main forms of political and epistemic power that were at play in those disputes, whereas the conceptual framework related to firsting leads to a better understanding of the role of figures such as Caldas in the development of early-modern transatlantic science.
