History of science and technology

194-196

Authors: Oleh Pylypchuk, Oleh Strelko, Yulia Berdnychenko

The issue of the journal begins with an article on French sinology. French sinology takes a special place in the history of the sinological studies development. It was France that became the first country where the transformation of missionary sinology, which was common among a limited circle of researchers (mainly in a religious sphere), into the academic scientific discipline, which had already been taught and studied at a professional level in academic institutions, occurred. The Parisian type of sinology used to dominate the entire world for a long time, including such powerful centers of Chinese studies as Germany, Great Britain, the USA, and China itself. In order to form a complete picture of sinology development in France, the authors singled out and analyzed three historical periods covering the entire history of Chinese studies development, starting from its birth and flourishment to the process of stagnation. Modern scientific communication traditionally uses visual narratives, such as comics, for education, presentation of scientific achievements to a mass audience, and as an object of research. In the article by Oksana Hudoshnyk and Oleksandr P. Krupskyi, offers a three-level characterization of the interaction of comic culture and science in a diachronic aspect. Attention is focused not only on the chronological stages of these intersections, the expression of the specifics of the interaction is offered against the background of scientific and public discussions that accompany the comics–science dialogue to this day. Emphasis is placed on the unique phenomenon of the simultaneous concordance of various stages of the dialogue between comics and science, on the prolonged replication of successful inventions into modern experience, and the active testing of known narratives at new levels of a scientific presentation. The next paper assesses the topicality of Vernadsky's concept of the noosphere, coined over almost twenty years starting in the early 20th century. Emphasizing the uniqueness of Vernadsky's concept of the noosphere as the transformation of the biosphere by a man using reason, we concentrate on the assessment of the utopian or realistic nature of his vision of the future of humanity. Based on the philosophical case-studies analysis, it identifies the ideological roots of the noosphere concept, the development of views on the concept in time, the role of reason and scientific thinking, the opinions of its supporters and critics, and Moiseev's related concept of co-evolution. Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva or Of Spring: Explaining the Power of Springing Bodies (1678) is an important book for the history of science. This book is better known for Hooke’s presentation of the law that bears his name. In the article by Isadora Monteiro, seeks to study the Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva once again to better understand Hooke’s thoughts about the rule which bears his name and his conception of gravity, which the author considered a force. Here Hooke’s definitions of body and motion will be presented, as well as his actual objective when he formulated the so-called Hooke’s Law. As we will see, Hooke intended to create a “philosophical scale” to measure the gravitational attraction between bodies. By considering his previous publications, such as An attempt to prove the motion of the Earth from Observations or Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, or even unpublished works such as On the inflection of a direct motion into a curve by supervening Attractive principle, it becomes clear that Hooke was already opening a path toward an understanding of gravity before Newton’s Principia (1687) were published. By taking into account the controversy between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, we also intend to strengthen the idea that Hooke was an indispensable contributor to the elaboration of a law of universal gravitation. In 1915, the first occupational therapy school was founded by Jane Addams at Hull House (Chicago, USA). In that process, Addams inspired the first generation of occupational therapists, especially Eleanor Clarke Slagle. Thus, in the article by Rodolfo Morrisonseeks to highlight the contribution of Jane Addams to the development of Occupational Therapy through an in-depth bibliographic review, from primary sources. The next article presents the results of a study of the features of biographical and prosopographic materials about famous mathematicians and natural scientists, published in one of the most authoritative journals “Bulletin of Experimental Physics and Elementary Mathematics”, which was published in Kyiv and Odesa during 1886–1917. In fact, the journal was an unofficial periodical printed branch of the Mathematical Department of the Novorossiysk Society of Naturalists. The aim of the next research is to study the policy efforts conducted by the Indonesian government since the beginning of independence in 1945 to present, in advancing science and technology and innovation. A content analysis approach is employed to identify each stipulated regulation in Indonesia in the form of Laws, Government Regulations, Presidential Regulations, Presidential Decrees, and Presidential Instructions. There are 78 regulations in the field of science and technology and innovation that are analyzed. The results of the analysis are described based on the emergence of regulations and institutional implications generated as part of the ecosystem. In the article by Ihor Annienkov, based on the problem-chronological, comparative-historical, historiographical, and source-research methods, as well as the method of actualization, identifies the extent of borrowing foreign design and technological solutions in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for projecting electrical machines in the second half of the 1930s, as well as the reasons for the absence of unambiguous information in historiography regarding the existence of this phenomenon in the republic at this chronological stage. The publication provides a general assessment of the quality of scientific support for the processes of creating electrical machines, establishes the ways of fulfilling the scientific-technical borrowings that were studiedand the dynamics of their development, analyzes their role in the growth of the technical level of products of the Ukrainian electrical machine-building branch. In the article by Mykola Ruban and Andrii Fomin, attempts to investigate the historical circumstances of the mastering and development of the industrial production of rolling stock in Ukraine from 1991 to 2021. In the course of the scientific development of the proposed research, materials from mass-circulation newspapers, industry publications of railway transport, as well as technical studies of employees of manufacturing plants were used. The next discusses the conditions and prerequisites for choosing the location of the plant; considers the stage of the establishment (foundation) of the plant; examines the stage of plant construction and equipping it with technological facilities in detail; analyzes the development and establishment of the plant between 1897 and 1914. A brief analysis of locomotive designs produced by the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant from 1897 to 1914 has been made. The article shows the significance of Consultative Congresses of Traction Engineers for the development of railway machinery both at Kharkiv Locomotive Plant and for the entire railway industry. The purpose of next study is to highlight the peculiarities of the development of the Russian aviation industry during the First World War. The focus is on analyzing production programs and matching their quantitative and qualitative parameters to war requirements. Production plans of leading Russian aviation factories as well as qualitative and quantitative parameters of products have been analyzed in the article.

210-230

Authors: Oksana Hudoshnyk, Oleksandr P. Krupskyi

Modern scientific communication traditionally uses visual narratives, such as comics, for education, presentation of scientific achievements to a mass audience, and as an object of research. The article offers a three-level characterization of the interaction of comic culture and science in a diachronic aspect. Attention is focused not only on the chronological stages of these intersections, the expression of the specifics of the interaction is offered against the background of scientific and public discussions that accompany the comics–science dialogue to this day. Within the framework of the first stage (the appearance and distribution of popular science and educational comics), the characteristics of comics content necessary for the different genesis are highlighted: documentary storytelling, educational practices of learning through drawing, active cooperation with well-known companies and institutions, informativeness and empathic involvement of the young reader in a heroico-romantic narrative of scientific discoveries and mastering nature. With the intensification of interdisciplinary approaches (the second stage), comics are increasingly involved in presenting scientific results within the most diverse fields. Comics-based research is becoming an interdisciplinary method and a widespread practical area with the corresponding formation of scientific tools (applied comics, data comics), forms of interdisciplinary interaction (graphic medicine, ethnography, narrative geography, urban comics, comics journalism, etc.), and scientific publications (“The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship”, “Sequentials”). The national format of comics-based research is presented on the example of Ukrainian comics projects (historical, feminist comics). In the genesis of development, Comics Studies have gone from a field of research to disciplinary definitions. In the creation of the metadiscourse of the scientific direction (the third stage), the authors focused on scientific discussions, the formation of academic directions and approaches, and markers of disciplinary self-identification. Emphasis is placed on the unique phenomenon of the simultaneous concordance of various stages of the dialogue between comics and science, on the prolonged replication of successful inventions into modern experience, and the active testing of known narratives at new levels of a scientific presentation.

249-261

Authors: Isadora Monteiro

Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva or Of Spring: Explaining the Power of Springing Bodies (1678) is an important book for the history of science. This book is better known for Hooke’s presentation of the law that bears his name. This law, or “Rule of Nature” as the author states, is commonly taught within the context of the analysis of elastic bodies and their deformations. However, the framework in which this law was introduced goes beyond the context in which it is currently taught. Alongside the presentation of Hooke’s experiments with springs, the author established his vibratory theory of matter, in which the concepts of congruence and incongruence, initially presented in his Micrographia (1665), would be defined in greater detail. These concepts aimed to theoretically justify the movements of attraction and repulsion in nature. This paper seeks to study the Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva once again to better understand Hooke’s thoughts about the rule which bears his name and his conception of gravity, which the author considered a force. Here Hooke’s definitions of body and motion will be presented, as well as his actual objective when he formulated the so-called Hooke’s Law. As we will see, Hooke intended to create a “philosophical scale” to measure the gravitational attraction between bodies. By considering his previous publications, such as An attempt to prove the motion of the Earth from Observations or Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, or even unpublished works such as On the inflection of a direct motion into a curve by supervening Attractive principle, it becomes clear that Hooke was already opening a path toward an understanding of gravity before Newton’s Principia (1687) were published. By taking into account the controversy between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, we also intend to strengthen the idea that Hooke was an indispensable contributor to the elaboration of a law of universal gravitation. In addition to all this, it will also be argued that the conclusions achieved by Hooke in Of Spring may have also anticipated Newton’s third law of motion.

279-301

Authors: Natalya Pasichnyk, Renat Rizhniak, Нanna Deforzh

The article presents the results of a study of the features of biographical and prosopographic materials about famous mathematicians and natural scientists, published in one of the most authoritative journals “Bulletin of Experimental Physics and Elementary Mathematics”, which was published in Kyiv and Odesa during 1886–1917. In fact, the journal was an unofficial periodical printed branch of the Mathematical Department of the Novorossiysk Society of Naturalists. The purpose of the study is to conduct a meaningful and content analysis of the texts of the journal articles, which reveal biographies, features of labor activity and participation in scientific research of famous scientists. At the same time, the authors used scientific methods to conduct a meaningful analysis of the subject of research – analysis and synthesis, generalization and systematization. In the process of quantitative content analysis, text quantification, empirical data collection, their generalization, and mathematical and statistical processing were used. As a result of the study of biographical materials of the journal over the period, its authors came to the following conclusions. Firstly, the materials of the journal about famous domestic and foreign mathematicians and natural scientists were both biographical and prosopographic in nature. Moreover, the motives for the appearance of such publications, as a rule, were “round” dates from the moment of birth, from the beginning of creative activity, from the moment an important work was released, or from the moment of death (or the fact of death) of the subject of publication. All such articles in the journal are conditionally classified by the authors into brief biographical and prosopographic notes, detailed biographical and prosopographic articles, and obituaries. Secondly, the total volume of biographical and prosopographic materials for the entire period of publication of the journal was 2.88% of the total volume of the journal. At the same time, the journal contained materials about 84 scientists. The largest journal volume by the editors (more than 5 pages for each) was provided by 27 scientists and this amounted to 72.7% of the total volume of biographical material; this group included 9 domestic scientists and 18 foreigners. In total, the editors allotted an average of 4.89 pages for each domestic scientist, and 5.89 pages for each foreign scientist. The largest volume of materials was about physicists (46.42% of the total volume of biographical materials) and mathematicians (35.44%). Thirdly, the results of a meaningful analysis allow us to conclude that the published biographical and prosopographic materials of the journal are of high quality. This was largely facilitated by the careful selection of the authors of articles (or sources of materials), as well as the special requirements of the editors for documenting sources of materials in paginated links. Fourthly, the “inattention” of the editorial staff of the journal to a number of “round dates” of famous domestic and foreign mathematicians and physicists, as well as the uneven volumes allocated by the journal for biographies, indicate the absence of a clear editorial policy of the journal in the issue of allocating printed volumes for systematic biographical statements and research.

320-339

Authors: Ihor Annienkov

This article, based on the problem-chronological, comparative-historical, historiographical, and source-research methods, as well as the method of actualization, identifies the extent of borrowing foreign design and technological solutions in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for projecting electrical machines in the second half of the 1930s, as well as the reasons for the absence of unambiguous information in historiography regarding the existence of this phenomenon in the republic at this chronological stage. The publication provides a general assessment of the quality of scientific support for the processes of creating electrical machines, establishes the ways of fulfilling the scientific-technical borrowings that were studied and the dynamics of their development, analyzes their role in the growth of the technical level of products of the Ukrainian electrical machine-building branch. It was found that the level of a scientific escort for electrical machine-building production in Ukraine during the considered period was insufficient for arranging a completely independent design of the entire range of sectoral industrial products, therefore, scientific and technical borrowings remained the only way to maintain the necessary rates of development in the design and production of new types of electrical machines across the entire latitude spectrum of their application. According to the archival documents, it was found that because of the rapid growth of the Soviet Union’s needs at the turn of the 1930s–1940s for electric power equipment, on the one hand, and the improvement of the possibility of organizing its mass production in Ukraine, on the other, the scale of such borrowings grew like an avalanche. At the same time, because of the growth of the scientific-technical potential of the republican electrical machine-building, the nature of the procedure for their fulfillment at the end of the 1930s changed and allowed their mimicry as the exclusively independent achievements of domestic designers. This is how the achievements of Ukrainian electric machine builders were presented to the entire Soviet society during the considered period, which subsequently allowed them to gain a foothold in the relevant historiography, however, the facts and arguments in this publication completely refute this established opinion.

367-387

Authors: Oleh Strelko, Yulia Berdnychenko, Olga I. Khromova, Olha Spys

The late XIX century was marked by the rise of industry in the Russian Empire. This period was characterized by shifting the core of industrial development from the Ural region to the south of the country, associated with the development of abundant coal deposits in Ukraine, and accompanied by extensive railroad construction in the central and southern parts of the Russian Empire. This aspect spurred the expansion of machine-building industries under the protectionist economic policy of the Russian Empire's government toward Russian enterprises. It was aimed at shielding them from the influence of foreign competitors. In the early 1870s, Kharkiv started growing rapidly as a major industrial hub in the south of the Russian Empire. The railroad offered an opportunity for the delivery of the most advanced equipment and technology, something that foreign companies never failed to take advantage of. In the 1890s, transport machinery gained significant development. Since 1891, the monopoly on steam locomotive construction in the Russian Empire, which had been concentrated in the 1880s at the Kolomna Locomotive Plant alone, was disrupted. In the mid-1890s, steam locomotive construction was deployed at eight major machine-building enterprises of the Russian Empire. This article is intended to provide a thorough analysis of the background of the creation, further development, and establishment of the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant. It offers an overview of different stages throughout the history of the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant. This article discusses the conditions and prerequisites for choosing the location of the plant; considers the stage of the establishment (foundation) of the plant; examines the stage of plant construction and equipping it with technological facilities in detail; analyzes the development and establishment of the plant between 1897 and 1914. A brief analysis of locomotive designs produced by the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant from 1897 to 1914 has been made. The article shows the significance of Consultative Congresses of Traction Engineers for the development of railway machinery both at Kharkiv Locomotive Plant and for the entire railway industry.