Situating Science and Technology in the Great War,

Woolf College, University of Kent, 23 July 2014

Registration is now open for the ‘Situating Science and Technology in the Great War’ workshop, organised by the Centre for the History of the Science at the University of Kent. Registration is free, but places are limited. To register email D.W.Leggett@Kent.ac.uk. Further details are available on the workshop’s website http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/events/conferences/situating-science.html

The programme is as follows:
9:00     Coffee and registration
9:45     Welcome
10:00   Plenary. Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) & Elizabeth Bruton (University of Leeds), Troublesome Telecommunications in the Great War
11:00   Coffee
11:30   Session I featuring Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College), ‘Another step towards industrial slavery’: scientific management, the Ministry of Munitions, and the gospel of efficiency in British manufacturing, 1915-21; Adrian Smith (University of Southampton), North Kent, the cradle of naval aviation: technological innovation and the Admiralty Air Department before and after August 1914; and Dominic Berry (University of Leeds), Agricultural modernity as a product of the Great War: founding the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, 1917-1921
13:00   Lunch
14:00   Session II featuring Roy MacLeod (University of Sydney), ‘Into hostile camps’: reflections on the Professors’ war; June Barrow-Green (Open University), British mathematicians and the Great War; and Robert Bud (Science Museum), Responding to gas warfare’s emblematic role as science’s contribution to recent civilisation: narrating the conceptual architecture and history of science in the interwar years
15:30   Coffee
16:00   Session III featuring Paul Cornish (Imperial War Museum), ‘The whole machine gun question needs to be closely examined’: placing the machine gun within the history of the Great War; Elizabeth Bruton (University of Leeds), Hydrophones, oscillators and transducers: early sonar and the “Fessenden oscillator” in the Royal Navy during World War One; and Brian Hall (University of Salford), ‘An experiment inside an experiment’: British tank communications on the Western Front, 1916-1918
17:30   Close