Amateur Science and Innovation in Fireworks in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The categories of "amateur" and "professional" remain central in studies on the sociology of nineteenth-century science. This article joins a growing body of literature that points out the complicated and intersecting connections between these two groups and how blurred the boundaries could be. This study focuses on pyrotechny, the art of fireworks, a field of far more obvious importance in the nineteenth century than it is today. Firework displays were mounted by artisan firework makers, who by the end of the century had become industrialists, and by military specialists, usually artillerymen. They had also become a common amateur pursuit. Across the nineteenth century, the art was transformed by the introduction of new materials, and the key discoveries were the work of enthusiasts who did not seek to profit financially from their discoveries. In this sense, they too were amateurs, although some had a scientific education. This article asks how they were able to make such major contributions to the field, and it situates them within networks that often crossed the boundaries between those who made fireworks for a living, or who studied them in military contexts, and those who were simple enthusiasts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".