Natalia V. NIKIFOROVA Saint Petersburg Branch of the S.I. Vavilov Institute of the History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences
5B., University Emb., Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
Senior Researcher, Sector of Social and Cognitive Problems of Science
PhD (Cultural Studies)
e-mail: nnv2012@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-8876-1669
Establishment of Electrical Engineering and Academic Everyday Life as Reflected in the Archival Heritage of Moritz JacobiAbstract: The article is dedicated to Moritz Jacobi, a German-born physicist and engineer, academician of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, who lived most of his life in Russia. M. Jacobi made a significant contribution to Russian and world science and technology. His research formed the basis for a number of fields of electrical engineering, including electroplating, electro-mining, electric telegraphy, electrochemistry, and electrical measurement devices. His professional trajectory was both typical for scientists engaged in academic activities in Russia and quite specific. Jacobi's activities took place at the intersection of science and engineering practice, which problematized his identity and position as a theoretical scientist. Documents from his personal archive allow us to see a more complex and multidimensional context in which his studies developed, as well as to reconstruct the content of his work as a scientist, experimenter and expert on a wide range of technical issues, close to the emperor. Jacobi's work came at a kind of intermediate stage in the history of electricity research, when the field had not yet marked its boundaries within physics, and physics itself, with its principles of experimental practice, had not yet been shaped as an independent field. Before the complex institutions of the so-called “big science” were formed, that linked fundamental research and industrial practice, the prestige of pure science prevailed over applied knowledge, with which electrical engineering was largely associated. The materials of M. Jacobi's personal archive indicate the simultaneously innovative and marginal position of electricity research, as well as the scientific theoretical ambitions of the scientist, who was engaged in both the identification of laws and the construction of technologies. The materials for this article involve recently discovered unpublished translations of the diary and correspondence of M. Jacobi with his family and fellow scientists. The translation was made in the 1950s by Tatiana Klado, a researcher of the Leningrad Branch of the Institute for the History of Natural History and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Key words: Moritz Jacobi, electrical engineering, galvanoplasty, electromagnetism, Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, experimental physics, 19th century physics, cultural history of electricity, history of electrical engineering.
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For Citation: Nikiforova, N. (2023) Establishment of Electrical Engineering and Academic Everyday Life as Reflected in the Archival Heritage of Moritz Jacobi. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (53). 57–72. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_4_57
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2023_4_57