Department
Science before it was called science: what people measured, collected and got gloriously wrong.
For eighty-four years a mechanical Turk in a turban beat the best players in Europe and America, and supposedly Napoleon too. Clever people spent all that time arguing about how the machine worked. The right answer was the boring one, and it's worth asking why it was so hard to say out loud.
Britain's envoy to Naples was meant to be doing diplomacy. Instead Sir William Hamilton climbed Vesuvius dozens of times, wrote it all up for the Royal Society, and hired a painter to record what he saw. The result is one of the most beautiful science books ever printed.