Science Reigns Supreme: Conceptualising Public Science in the Illustrated London News

The Illustrated London News (ILN) published a regular column on science in society from the late 1880s. Titled under various labels, “Science Jottings”, “Science and Natural History”, “The World of Science”, this column sought to provide the British public with a scientific engagement of the world around them. From the late 1880s to 1946 the column was written by five men, curating the scientific knowledge of the ILN’s readership. The first editor, Dr. Andrew Wilson, wrote in April 1906 that “Science reigns supreme” given the “widespread range of interests … with which she is largely concerned”. Wilson’s claim was that science proliferated into every tendril of society and was indispensable to present-day living and it was the column’s mandate to detail how. In order to cover the vast expanse of science, topics jumped from crime one week to morals the next followed by noise and dust. This paper explores the ILN’s science column from the late 1880s to 1946 to understand how five science editors defined and mapped out the contours of the concept of “science” in the British public in a haphazard and undirected manner. The ILN was one of the most read periodicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing a good case study for exploring the spread of scientific knowledge in society. At the core of this paper, I reflect on the role of periodicals in disseminating “soundbites” of science and the “chatter” they created at the beginning of the twentieth century.