Unlike the classical microscope, the solar microscope produces its image not in the eye of an individual beholder, but on the wall of a curtained room. Surrounded by darkness, the sun’s light illuminates the greatly magnified image of tiny objects or objects invisible to the naked eye. During the Enlightenment, solar microscopes were enormously popular, and fulfilled the ideal of a useful pastime and a gentlemen’s science. For a long time, the history of science largely disregarded eighteenth-century microscopy, and the solar microscope appeared scientifically marginal—at most a kind of toy. In my paper, I address an aspect of solar microscopy that has attracted virtually no attention in the history of biology: the experience of a world in motion. Scholarship on the image-world of solar microscopy has hitherto focused almost entirely on the copper plates accompanying the microscopy books of the eighteenth century. Instead, I will argue that the experience of motion is the specific sensory experience of the microscopic world that only the solar microscope could offer and that lies at the very heart of the instrument’s performance.

Between 1918 and 1924 French doctor and cinematographer Jean Comandon (1877-1970) collaborated with prominent medical practitioners including Édouard Claparède, Jean-Athanase Sicard, and Édouard Long, to produce over fifty films of patients with neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. Now archived, these films often show graphic images of twitching limbs, motor disorders, and bodies deemed pathological. Most likely they were produced for medical practitioners and students, but how their intended audience was meant to interpret or understand them isn’t immediately obvious. Indeed, all of the films are silent: no sound or text accompanies them. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities provided by silent films as historical sources in the history of science. It aims to contextualize Comandon’s films—many of which were produced by the French production company Pathé—within a wider image economy during the silent motion picture era. Though Comandon’s microcinematographic films of bacteria have been studied in the secondary literature, his neurological and neuropsychiatric films have been largely overlooked. What emerges from an analysis of Comandon’s neuropsychiatric films and their place in the history of medical imaging is his contribution to a larger landscape of measurement and film research on the pathological mind and body in the aftermath of World War I. .

Understanding the sociobiology debate means understanding how its subject matter was presented to the public. The controversy about sociobiology quickly reached the national stage with publications such as the New York Times and the New York Review of Books providing room for debate and partisan coverage. Sociobiology’s fiercest critics Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin presented sociobiology as yet another iteration of biological determinism to support reactionary politics, while E.O. Wilson stressed Sociobiology’s scientific achievements and portrayed himself as the victim of academic vigilantism by political ideologues on the left. This effort by proponents and critics alike to convince the public of their interpretation of sociobiology is exemplified in the history of a 1976 film entitled Sociobiology: Doing what comes naturally. Hoping to promote the explanatory power, disciplinary coherence and social relevance of sociobiology, three leading Harvard sociobiologists, including Wilson himself, gave interviews to the Canadian television network CTV in March 1972. However, the final product was not suitable to promote Wilson’s New Synthesis but instead played into the hands of Wilson’s critics. This film became a crucial weapon in their arsenal to convince the public of the true nature of sociobiology as genetic determinism and naïve reductionism. This paper explores the production, reception, and utilization of this film in one of the most public scientific controversies of the 20th century. It argues that sociobiology’s critics were successful in their mission to create public controversy, but that sociobiology’s actual impact is its immense influence on other disciplines.

Just after the Second World War, a large interdisciplinary group of scientists from all over Europe and some of overseas, joined efforts to found a new science called Filmology. The war had demonstrated the pervasive effects of film as a propaganda tool, on both sides of the conflict. These scientists were convinced that it could no longer suffice to study film as an aesthetic phenomenon: it had to be studied also as a psychological and social phenomenon. Mobilizing all existing human sciences, they tried to develop scientific methods to study the effects of film on man and society. Several of these Filmologists tried to bring the complex problem of cinema to the laboratory. Here, often the use of animation film was promoted, in an attempt to obtain scientific control on the elusive medium of film. Experimental psychologists such as the Belgian Albert Michotte and the British Frederic Bartlett took a leading role. In this paper, I study the history of animation as a shared history of science and media. I explore the use of animation as a scientific experimental tool and examine what its role in these experiments can tell about the changing notion and practice of experiment in the post-war human sciences. The Filmology episode shows how closely media and science have been intertwined: how scientists have investigated media, and how this study of media has challenged their experimental practice. When telling the stories of science, science’s animations, as abstract and short as they are, are worth showing.