Experimental Cultures

This chapter surveys the rise of laboratory science during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how, during the nineteenth century, laboratories became distinct places of experiment and surveys the growth of university laboratories for teaching and for research across Europe and North America in particular during the second half of the century. The chapter investigates the increasing importance of experimental culture in physics in particular and the ways in which other scientific disciplines such as chemistry and physiology adopted and adapted to laboratory life. It looks at the place of laboratories in the growth of Big Science during the second half of the twentieth century and the further transformations in laboratory culture that entailed.