M. Norton Wise

Class of Spring 2012

Distinguished Professor of History

University of California, Los Angeles

Gardens of Steam: Projecting Industrial Culture into the Berlin Landscape

During his time in Berlin, Wise will continue working on his book Gardens of Steam: Projecting Industrial Culture into the Berlin Landscape, which will explore how many English gardens around Potsdam and Berlin were built, or rebuilt, around steam power during the nineteenth century. Visitors do not immediately recognize that these large parks contained steam engines that pumped water to the many fountains, streams, lakes, and the multiple forms of Wasserkunst. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these engines is not only that they were quite unusual for landscape gardens, but also that they were housed in elegant buildings designed by the most prominent architects in Berlin. In the end, Wise’s project argues that steam-powered gardens provided a stage onto which steam technology was projected into Prussian culture.

Norton Wise is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. His scholarly areas of expertise are the history of physics and the relationship between science and industrialization from the eighteenth century to the present. With co-author Crosbie Smith, Wise wrote Energy and Empire: A Biographical study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge, 1989), which illustrates how the great transformation of physics in the mid-nineteenth century grew up together with the problems of steam engines, telegraph cables, and vortex turbines. His series “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in 19th Century Britain” developed the point further to show how the steam engine functioned as an active mediator between industrial and scientific interests, with the “work done” by the engine measuring both “labor value” in economics and “energy” in physics. On a broader scale, the edited volume The Values of Precision explored the themes of quantification, trustworthiness of numerical data, role of the professions, and relations between science and technology.