ABSTRACT
When George Biddell Airy called for ‘some notion or measure of the degree of darkness’ during the eclipse of 1858, he had a variety of techniques in mind. His immediate contemporaries, though, were little motivated to mathematize light and colour. Not until a quarter-century later did a strong pulse of interest develop for quantitative light measurement1. As previous chapters have shown, the dilatory transition from qualitative ‘notions’ to quantitative ‘measures’ of intensity developed into an ‘undisciplined’ science: a subject without widely recognized professional underpinnings or intellectual coherency. But was it as atypical a science as it seems? This chapter argues that the episodic evolution of the subject illuminates quite common, but under-represented, features of science in the professional period.
