Derek John de Solla Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, died unexpectedly from a heart attack in London on September 3, 1983.
An inveterate lecturer, Price traveled all over the world addressing scholarly and government bodies. He was extremely active in the Society for the History of Technology, as well as the History of Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Social Studies of Science, and numerous other councils and scholarly organizations. He participated in the international congresses in the history of science for more than three decades. In 1976 he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology, and shortly before his death he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for distinguished services to scientific research.”
Price was the author of six books and more than 300 articles and papers. The George B. Sarton Lecture that he delivered at the AAAS meeting in Detroit in spring 1983, titled “Of Sealing Wax and String,” was published posthumously in the January 1984 issue of Natural History. Price’s subject was those unsung geniuses “with brains in their fingertips” who often brought about major scientific breakthroughs.
Derek Price was born on January 22, 1922, at Leyton, a London suburb, the son of Fanny de Solla and Philip Price. He was educated in local state schools, during which time he demonstrated an inclination toward mathematics and the sciences. In 1938 he was appointed physics laboratory assistant at the newly established South West Essex Technical College on a work-study program. In 1942 he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics and became assistant to Harry Lowery in wartime research in the experimental optics of hot and molten metals. At the same time he taught evening courses in adult education and armed forces training programs. Meanwhile he was engaged in thesis research leading toward a London external Ph.D. in experimental physics, which he obtained in 1946. He published three papers in physics and one in mathematics during this period and was granted a patent for an emissive-correcting optical pyrometer. Winning one of the first postwar Commonwealth Fund fellowships to the United States, he continued his studies in theoretical physics, first in Pittsburgh and then at Princeton University, and returned to England in 1947.
In the same year Price married Ellen Hjorth in Copenhagen, and for the next three years he taught applied mathematics at Raffles College in Singapore (now the University of Singapore). In 1950 he presented a paper at the Sixth International Congress for the History of Science in Amsterdam on his recent studies on the exponential growth of scientific literature.
Having determined to pursue the history of science as a career, Price was accepted as a graduate student at Cambridge University for a second doctorate. There he became associated with Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was familiar with Price’s earlier work in physics. Under Bragg’s supervision he organized the Archive and the Museum of the Cavendish Laboratory.
Cambridge also provided Price with several unexpected opportunities to develop his earlier interests in historical scientific hardware and in oriental culture, subjects which had first interested him in Singapore. For several years he served as honorary curator of the collection of scientific instruments in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. While preparing a thesis on the history of scientific instruments, he accidentally discovered in the Library of Peterhouse at Cambridge a 14th-century English manuscript which he was able to identify as a companion piece to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. It proved to be a draft in the author’s hand and—when published as The Equatorie of the Planetis in 1955 by Price with others—it was widely acclaimed. Several years later Price was invited to collaborate with Prof. Joseph Needham and Dr. Wang Ling on a book about medieval Chinese horology entitled Heavenly Clockwork, published in 1960.
Having achieved a second doctorate, Price was seeking a teaching position at Cambridge when he met Robert P. Multhauf, then head curator of the Smithsonian’s Department of the History of Science and Technology. Price accepted Multhauf’s invitation to come to Washington, D.C., as consultant on the hall of physical sciences being designed for the new Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) about to be added to the Smithsonian museum complex.
As that assignment was terminating, Price received a one-year appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; this was extended to a second year, during which he studied ancient astronomy with Otto Neugebauer. At the institute he was inspired by Robert Oppenheimer to pursue studies in the historical understanding of science, the history of scientific instrumentation, and the exponential growth of scientific literature. These were to become the main themes of his future work.
It was at this time that Price became preoccupied with the Antikythera Machine, a mechanism recovered in 1900 off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, which remained unrelated to textual or technical evidence. In the course of his research over the next twenty years, he was able to prove it to be a planetary computing device and the earliest known scientific artifact, dating from approximately 80 B.C.
On completing his second year at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1959, Price was invited to lecture at Yale University. His five public lectures resulted in the establishment of a new and autonomous department of the history of science combined with the History of Medicine Department, Price’s appointment to a chair, and the publication of his lectures in a work entitled Science since Babylon (1961). Following the death of Prof. John F. Fulton, Price became the chairman of the new department and the first curator of the collection of historic scientific instruments of Yale’s Peabody Museum. In 1962 he was honored with a name professorship in the history of science endowed by the Avalon Foundation.
That same year, his appointment to the Science Information Council of the National Science Foundation led Price deeply into the field of bibliometrics and the role of scientific literature, beginning his lifelong work with the analysis of science policy and what he designated “the science of science.” A series of lectures he presented on the subject at Brookhaven was published in 1963 as Little Science, Big Science. His role as science policy adviser took Price on missions for Unesco and other agencies, and he was invited to consult in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, India, Israel, Pakistan, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and all East European nations. He took the lead in founding the International Council of Science Policy Studies under the International Council of Scientific Unions and its International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science.
At the same time Price continued his studies in historical scientific instrumentation. When the technique of gamma radiography made it possible to photograph the component parts within the corroded mass of the Antikythera mechanism, he discovered that it contained a differential gear—hitherto believed to have been developed centuries later. The product of this research was Gears from the Greeks, published in 1975. Related archaeological activities in the same period included his investigations of the water clocks of Fez and the construction and symbolism of the Tower of the Winds in Athens, on which he worked with Joseph Noble. His research on sundials, astrolabes, and other early instruments, and his exploration of the philosophic significance of automata in mechanistic theory and the computer, led him to consider the instrument tradition as a nexus between science and technology. With Ina Spiegel-Rösing, in 1977 he edited a large collaborative compendium, Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective. His interest in “scientometrics” brought him to a unification between science and technology through quantitative and qualitative historiography.
Price was frequently afflicted with serious illnesses during the last decade of his life. But with indomitable stubbornness and determination, on each recovery he resumed his research activities and world travels. It was during a visit to London to attend the wedding of his niece that he suffered a fatal heart attack. Price is survived by his wife Ellen, three children—-Jeffrey, Linda DeMichele, and Mark—a sister, Joan Cravitz of London, and three grandchildren.
Derek Price has been characterized sometimes as irreverent and driven in the pursuit of his research. His achievements may best be summarized in words from the citation of his award of the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 1976, which noted that the trail of his researches uniting his various interests led from Babylon to the United States, leaving its mark “throughout the broad field of the history of technology from the core to the periphery.”
Silvio A. Bedini
Originally published as Silvio A. Bedini, “Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983),” Technology and Culture 25, no. 3 (1984) 701–5. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1984.a890032.
Hounshell, David. “Review of The Smithsonian Book of Invention.” Technology and Culture 21, no. 3 (1980): 508–09. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890726.
de Solla Price, Derek J. Science since Babylon. Enlarged ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Ina Rösing, Derek J. de Solla Price, and the International Council for Science Policy Studies. Science, technology, and society : a cross-disciplinary perspective. London: SAGE, 1977.
“The Leonardo da Vinci Medal.” Technology and Culture 18, no. 3 (1977): 471-478. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891942.
Drachmann, A. G. “Review of Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism—a Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C., by Derek de Solla Price.” Technology and Culture 17, no. 1 (1976): 112-116. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/891657.
de Solla Price, Derek J. Gears from the Greeks : the Antikythera mechanism : a calendar computer from ca. 80 B.C. New York: Science History Publications, 1975.
de Solla Price, Derek J. “On the Historiographic Revolution in the History of Technology: Commentary on the Papers by Multhauf, Ferguson, and Layton.” Technology and Culture 15, no. 1 (1974): 42–48. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/892823.
de Solla Price, Derek J. “Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 553–68. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894638.
de Solla Price, Derek J. “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 9-23. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894919.
Anderson, David L. Review of Science Since Babylon, by Derek J. de Solla Price. Technology and Culture 3, no. 2 (1962): 175–77. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/895380.
de Solla Price, Derek J. Science since Babylon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.