«All this is enormous, massive, crushing»: Observatories’ Core Instruments in the Eyes of the French Daily Press, 1803-1875

Abstract

The nineteenth-century press devoted important attention to science, and to astronomy, for many different reasons. This paper surveys public representations of meridian circles and other core instruments such as transit instruments and equatorial refractors as they emerge from the analysis of the French daily news media between the beginning of the nineteenth century and that of the Third Republic. From this survey, we conclude that observatories’ core instruments came to stand for precision in the public sphere as a result of an assemblage of self-reinforcing representations concerning above all: design and construction; environment and setup; expert manipulation of instruments.