Making Science History

The history of science from 1945 to 2020, told from the perspective of Arnold Thackray, a pioneering expert in the field

In this fascinating personal account of what he calls the “American century,” Arnold Thackray, noted historian of the development of science, relates his life’s story, beginning in post-war Manchester, England, to his time as an undergraduate at Bristol University, followed by his years at Cambridge University, where he earned a Ph.D. in the newly created field of science history. This subject turned out to be his life’s passion and, lured by the new opportunities in academia in the United States, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Department of the History and Sociology of Science. He went on to found the Chemical Heritage Foundation (later to become the Science History Institute) in Philadelphia.

In this book, Thackray views his long career through the lens of the United States’ rise and fall as a global power, from the testing of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo in 1945, to the ignominious retreat of American forces in Afghanistan in 2020, coinciding with the rise of artificial intelligence—a technology whose benefits, and perils, have yet to be fully realized. An absorbing read for anyone with an interest in the technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Making Science History is at once a memoir as well as a thoughtful examination of the achievements, and limitations, of human scientific thought.

Author Biography

Arnold Thackray’s many roles in the public life of scholarship include founding and building both the Science History Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science. Earlier, he was central to the creation of what would become the Churchill Archives Centre (the largest repository of Winston Churchill’s papers) at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He also served as treasurer of the American Council of Learned Societies for over a decade. Thackray has written, edited, or published some two dozen books on the modern technosciences, from Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter-Theory and the Development of Chemistry (1970) to Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary (2015).