I. Bernard Cohen

Teaching

Cohen began teaching at Harvard in 1942 as a teaching fellow and then an instructor in physics, while still a graduate student.^[25] He received tenure in 1953^[26] and became the first chairman of Harvard's Department of the History of Science when it was established in 1966.^[11] He became Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science at Harvard in 1977^[12] and retired emeritus in 1984.^[27]

Harvard's president James B. Conant initially asked Sarton and Cohen to focus on teaching undergraduates in the history of science rather than graduate students because Conant worried that PhDs in the history of science could not find employment until the history of science was firmly established as a field in courses at the undergraduate level.^[11][28] For a time in the 1940s, Cohen said he was "in charge of all elementary laboratory work at Harvard — civilians, army ASTP, and Navy V-12—1600 students at the peak."^[29] During this time, he prepared a book on the applications of science for laymen titled Science, Servant of Man, published 1948.^[30]

Cohen's early teaching work developed the undergraduate General Education program at Harvard. He served as a research assistant to Conant on Conant's own work on general education, for instance Conant's Terry Lectures at Yale University, which Conant adapted into a General Education course of his own, "On Understanding Science," then into the short book On Understanding Science: an Historical Approach (1947) and then the longer Science and Common Sense (1951).^[31] Cohen also served as a consultant to the faculty committee that established General Education at Harvard^[31] and edited General Education in Science (1952) with Fletcher Watson.^[31] He taught his own original General Education history of science course with an attendance of hundreds titled "The Nature and Growth of the Sciences" for years^[3][31] and published its original textbook, with the same title, in 1954.^[32]

Cohen supervised the doctoral dissertations of Lorraine Daston, Allen G. Debus,^[33] Judith Grabiner, Kenneth Manning, Uta Merzbach, Duane H. D. Roller, Joan L. Richards, and Helen L. Thomas.^[34][35] Among Cohen's other students and protégés were the Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hosein Nasr;^[36] Tufts University professor George E. Smith; Bucknell University professor Martha Verbrugge; and Jeremy Bernstein.

While teaching for Harvard, Cohen adapted his teaching materials for larger audiences. Cohen wrote thirteen general-interest essays published in Scientific American between 1948 and 1992.^[24] Cohen's April 1955 interview with Albert Einstein for the July 1955 Scientific American was the last Einstein gave before his death.^[37] In March 1984, Scientific American published an essay by Cohen on Florence Nightingale and her contributions to social statistics. In the 1970s, Cohen became general editor of a five volume series to provide albums of educational illustrations for classes in the history of science, a project inspired and lead by Charles Scribner, Jr., and contributed his own volume to the series: From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (1980).^[38]

After his retirement from Harvard, Cohen taught at the Harvard Extension School and at many visiting positions until his hospitalization for terminal illness in 2002 interrupted his final classes.^[10]

Isaac Newton

Cohen was an internationally recognized Isaac Newton scholar. He co-authored a 900-page 1972 variorum edition of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica begun with Alexandre Koyré^[24] and a 974-page 1999 English translation of the full Principia, begun in collaboration with the Latinist Anne Whitman.^[2] Many, including Cohen,^[12] considered this translation to be his most important work.

Cohen also published books on Newton such as The Birth of a New Physics (1959), Introduction to Newton's Principia (1971), and The Newtonian Revolution (1980), and he co-edited volumes on Newton such as Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters in Natural Philosophy (1958; 2nd ed. 1978), Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries (1996, with Richard S. Westfall), Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy (2000, with Jed Buchwald), and The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002, with George E. Smith).

Cohen stated his interest in Newton had been inspired by George D. Birkhoff's teaching while he was an undergraduate.^[39] His professional work on Newton began via his dissertation work on Benjamin Franklin, particularly the influence of Newton's Opticks on Franklin.^[32][40] His first published work on Newton was "Newton and the Modern World” in The American Scholar in 1942.^[25] This interest then developed under the mentorship of Alexandre Koyré, who Cohen met via Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian and philosopher Giorgio de Santillana.^[26] Cohen and Koyré's first collaboration was on Koyré's paper “Galileo and Plato” in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1943), but they next moved to a letter from Robert Hooke to Newton and soon Cohen wrote a letter of recommendation for John Farquhar Fulton's effort to recruit Koyré to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, which ensured Koyré a place to work in America 1955–1962.^[26]

Cohen and Koyré decided to begin the project of preparing a variorum edition of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1956 and Cohen took leadership of the project after Koyré's death in 1964.^[41] They had also planned a joint commentary, but it was never begun.^[26] In 1959, Cohen's work on the project brought him into lifelong friendship and collaboration with a graduate student, later an internationally recognized authority on Newton's mathematical work, Derek T. Whiteside.^[32] After Koyré's death, Cohen sought assistance from Harvard (BA 1959) Latinist Anne Whitman on the project.^[42]

During the preparation of this variorum edition, he also produced his Introduction to Newton's Principia (1971) and a substantial biographical entry on Newton for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1974).^[42] He also began a translation project, with Whitman, that they continued together until her death in 1984.^[43] After completing the variorum edition, Cohen's work on Newton focused on an interpretive work, The Newtonian Revolution: With Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas (1980), which he had begun via his Wiles Lectures at the University of Belfast in 1966.^[44]

After Whitman's death, Cohen halted work on the new translation of Newton's Principia out of grief.^[24] However, after a prompt from his former student George E. Smith, he revived the project with the assistance of students and a former friend of Whitman's, classicist Julia Budenz. The work was finally published in 1999, thirty years after it had begun, after review by Richard S. Westfall, Curtis Wilson, and Smith.^[45]

Early American science

Cohen began his professional scholarship with work on the science of Benjamin Franklin and he continued to work on the science of the Founding Fathers of the United States late into his career.

Cohen's debut book was the edited volume Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments (1941), which became his doctoral dissertation in 1947, though he had planned a more extensive dissertation on the influence of Isaac Newton on Franklin, which eventually became the 1956 book Franklin and Newton^[6] (after he had already received tenure in 1953^[26]). Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments was based on the fifth English edition (London, 1774) of Franklin's Experiments and Observations made at Philadelphia together with additional material, coming to roughly 275 pages, plus an original 160-page introduction by Cohen.^[46] Reviewers in Science and The English Historical Review praised both the introduction and the arrangement of material.^[47][48]

Between the publication of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Franklin and Newton, Cohen also contributed to the establishment of Harvard's Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments, focusing on instruments of the 18th century, and prepared the book Some Early Tools of American Science (1950).^[3] He also collaborated with Henry Guerlac on a project titled “American Science and the American Republic,” but this was never finished and instead became material for the later works Science and American Society in the First Century of the Republic (1961) and Science and the Founding Fathers (1995).^[30]

Computing

Cohen began his activity in the history of computing in around 1965^[27] and spent several decades as a special consultant for history of computing with IBM.^[23] As of 1980, he was a member of the Board of Editors of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, a member of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies Committee on the History of Computing, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Processing.^[27] Cohen was exposed to the subject earlier and knew Howard Aiken as a graduate student,^[27] but his first major professional contribution was a 1967 official report for IBM comparing its collection of historic computers with other collections around the world.^[49]

General

• 1948 – Science, Servant of Man: A Layman's Primer for the Age of Science (Little, Brown, LCCN 49-27692)
• 1954 – The Nature and Growth of the Physical Sciences (Wiley, OCLC 7664889)
• 1955 – Cohen, I. Bernard (July 1955). "An Interview with Einstein". Scientific American. 193 (1): 68–73. JSTOR 24944702.
• 1960 – The Birth of a New Physics (Science Study Series S10, Anchor Books, Doubleday, LCCN 84-25582; W. W. Norton 1985 revised ed., ISBN 0-393-01994-2)
• 1984 – Cohen, I. Bernard (March 1984). "Florence Nightingale". Scientific American. 250 (3): 128–37. Bibcode:1984SciAm.250c.128C. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0384-128. JSTOR 24969329. PMID 6367033. (alternative pagination depending on country of sale: 98–107)
• 1985 – Revolution in Science (Belknap Press, ISBN 0-674-76777-2)

• 1985 – Album of Science: From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (Scribner, ISBN 0-684-15377-7)
• 1994 – Interactions: Some Contacts between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03223-6)
• 2005 – The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-05769-0)

Isaac Newton

• 1942 – Cohen, I. Bernard. "Newton and the Modern World". The American Scholar. 11 (3): 328–338. JSTOR 41203606.
• 1958 – edited, Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters in Natural Philosophy (2nd edition Harvard University Press 1978, ISBN 0-674-46853-8)
• 1971 – Introduction to Newton's Principia (Harvard University Press 1st ed., LCCN 78-28770; iUniverse 1999 ed., ISBN 1-58348-601-1)
• 1972 – edited, with Alexandre Koyré and Anne Whitman, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Vol. I & II, Third Edition (1726) with Variant Readings (Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674664753)
• 1980 – The Newtonian Revolution: With Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-22964-2)
• 1996 – edited, with Richard S. Westfall, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries (Norton Critical Editions, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-95902-3)
• 1999 – translated, with Anne Whitman, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-08816-6)
• 2000 – edited, with Jed Z. Buchwald, Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-02477-2)
• 2002 – edited, with George E. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-65177-8)

Early American science

• 1941 – edited, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Edited, with a Critical and Historical Introduction (Harvard University Press)
• 1950 – Some Early Tools of American Science: An Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical And Biological Collections in Harvard University (Harvard University Press; 2014 reprint ed. ISBN 978-0674368446)
• 1953 – Benjamin Franklin: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Makers of the American Tradition series, Bobbs-Merrill, LCCN 53-9874)
• 1956 – Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (American Philosophical Society, LCCN 56-13224)
• 1961 – Science and American Society in the First Century of the Republic (Ohio State University)
• 1976 – Cohen, I. Bernard (1976). "Science and the Growth of the American Republic". The Review of Politics. 38 (3): 359–398. JSTOR 1406619.
• 1990 – Benjamin Franklin's Science (Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-06658-8)
• 1995 – Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison (W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-03501-8)

Computing

• 1990 – Cohen, I. Bernard (1990). "Reviewed Works: A History of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams; Préhistoire et histoire des ordinateurs: Origines du calcul aux premiers calculateurs électroniques by Robert Ligonnière; Histoire de l'informatique by Philippe Breton". Technology and Culture. 31 (4): 907–911. doi:10.2307/3105941. JSTOR 3105941.
• 1999 – Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (History of Computing, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03262-7)
• 1999 – edited, with Gregory W. Welch, Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer (MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-03263-5)