Some physics not in The Physical Review

Until the end of the nineteenth century—somewhere in the interval between 1880 and 1915—it was the style of published papers in physics, as in other disciplines, to offer extensive discussions of each stage of an experiment, whether successful or not. In this century the style changed: The discussions became curt, impersonal and matter‐of‐fact, with the result that many significant facts about how discoveries were made, such as mistakes, accidental discoveries, procedural complications, were not mentioned in the published record. This stylistic change may well have improved the clarity of many papers, but at the sacrifice of historically valuable information—at least some of which is also of scientific value. I hope this article can fill a few such lacunae in The Physical Review.

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