Rupert Hall was a leading member of the generation of scholars who set standards for the history of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century. He played a crucial role in developing the discipline during its formative period in the UK.

His book The Scientific Revolution (1954) established the use of that term to denote the changes in investigations of the natural world that took place between about 1450 and 1750.

He was also a leading scholar of the life and work of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and co-edited the final three volumes of Newton’s Correspondence (1975-77).

Alfred Rupert Hall (he never used Alfred) was born near Stoke-on-Trent in 1920 and received his secondary education at Alderman Newton’s School, Leicester. In 1938 he went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to read history. He completed Part I of the tripos, but on the outbreak of war joined the Army, and in 1941 was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Signals (in later life he was notably adept at practical tasks) and served with the Eighth Army in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. After the war he returned to Cambridge, obtaining his degree in history in 1946.

In his teens Hall had been fascinated by Albert Neuburger’s Technical Arts of the Ancients (1930) and had read related works such as Beckmann’s History of Inventions (1814). The subject he chose for his doctoral thesis (supervised by F. P. White) was ballistics in 17th-century England (published as a book in 1952).

In 1949 Hall was elected a Fellow of Christ’s College and in 1950 became the first curator of the university’s Whipple Museum for the history of science.

At Christ’s, Hall was one of a quintet of brilliant historians (the others were Jack Plumb, Frank Spooner, John Kenyon and Barry Supple) who helped to transform history teaching at Cambridge. He also found time for research: 1954 was the year of the publication of The Scientific Revolution, a learned and highly readable book which exerted enormous influence on the expanding study of history of science.

At that time the history of science was dominated by scientists, and it was rare for historians to take an interest in it. Indeed Charles Singer, one of the founders of the discipline in Britain, said it was “silly” that Hall, who had no scientific qualifications, should teach history of science. Singer later changed his mind and invited Hall to join him in editing the five-volume History of Technology (1954-58).

In 1959 Hall joined “the brain drain” and went to work at the University of California (Los Angeles). His first marriage, in 1942, had ended in divorce, and in 1959 he married the American historian of science, Marie Boas (who had written an enthusiastic review of The Scientific Revolution), who died a couple of weeks after him. They were a devoted couple, hardly ever apart and highly productive in their historical research.

For more than a decade Hall had been working towards an edition of the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (secretary of the Royal Society from 1663 to 1677), which would illustrate the important part that international communication had played in 17th-century natural philosophy. Rupert and Marie Hall now worked on this project together and volume one (finished in 1962) was published in 1965, with a foreword by the foreign secretary of the Royal Society, Patrick Linstead. The final, 13th, volume appeared in 1986.

Hall spent three years teaching at Indiana University. He was then invited by Linstead, as rector of Imperial College, to take, in 1963, the college’s first chair of history of science. Marie Hall was appointed senior lecturer and later promoted to reader. At about this time, in response to C. P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture of 1959, many universities developed programmes in the history of science, perceiving it as providing bridges between the humanities and the sciences. The Halls remained at Imperial College until their retirement in 1980; Hall then directed the history of medicine programme at the Wellcome Trust for four years.

During their years at Imperial the Halls were diligent, challenging, approachable and kindly teachers, particularly painstaking in their supervision of research students. It is a tribute to the wide compass of their scholarship that their students have made important contributions on topics as diverse as Byzantine gearing, Islamic water clocks, 17th-century telescopes, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin.

After their retirement, the Halls lived in Tackley, a village near Oxford, where both continued their research. Here Rupert Hall wrote a series of important books, including one on the Leibniz-Newton controversy (Philosophers at War, 1980) and biographies of the 17th-century philosopher Henry More (1990) and of Newton (1992).

The style of Hall’s work is not fashionable among historians today, but he never imposed his style on his pupils, and its current standing in no way diminishes his significance. He was elected to the British Academy (1978) and received a LittD from Cambridge University (1975). He was president of the British Society for the History of Science from 1966 to 1968 and was (with Marie Hall) awarded the Sarton medal of the History of Science Society in 1981. Marie Boas Hall died on February 23 (obituary, March 20, 2009), and he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage.

Professor Rupert Hall, historian of science and technology, was born on July 26, 1920. He died on February 5, 2009, aged 88