Abstract

Surprisingly little attention has been given hitherto to the definition of the laboratory. A space has to be specially adapted to deserve that title. It would be easy to assume that the two leading experimental sciences, physics and chemistry, have historically depended in a similar way on access to a laboratory. But while chemistry, through its alchemical ancestry with batteries of stills, had many fully fledged laboratories by the seventeenth century, physics was discovering the value of mathematics. Even experimental physics was content to make use of almost any indoor space, if not outdoors, ignoring the possible value of a laboratory. The development of the physics laboratory had to wait until the nineteenth century.