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Recycling in early modern science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2012

SIMON WERRETT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Washington, 315 Smith Hall Box 353560, Seattle, WA98195-3560, USA. Email: werrett@u.washington.edu.

Abstract

This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2012 

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