Introduction: Surface Histories.

The first section of this issue brings together four essays on “surfaces” – a subject matter which might seem conspicuous or, indeed, palpable enough. Just think of the sheets of paper, window panes, and haptic interfaces surrounding you: the world, evidently, is diffused with surfaces, membranes, and boundaries of all sorts. Some of these things have been salient, for obvious reasons in fields such as media studies, or implicit in notions such as “boundary object”1: the retina, photographic plates, basilar membranes, the skin, or various forms of “displays” immediately come to mind.2 Not even mentioning their immense metaphoricity, surfaces are the entities that make things visible, inscribable, or knowable. But not all of them have been so salient. In fact, most surface-phenomena arguably – and, typically, for similarly obvious reasons – haven’t received much scholarly notice at all: plastic wraps, lacquers, lubricants, coatings, silicon wavers, cell membranes, glass, plant leaves, the ozone layer. By no means is the subject – surfaces – exhausted by the usual, media-inflected considerations. On second thought, the subject points toward a more heterogeneous, mundane set of materialities, typically less glittering than the sleek interfaces that surround us (First-Worlders) in particular, but no less important. Surfaces, after all, are the entities that connect, separate, and delineate things as well as places and people. It makes them, or so this special issue contends, a worthwhile pursuit for historians of science. What we have in mind here is no metaphysical endeavor (say, a philosophy