Instruments and relics

Rebekah Higgitt

doi:10.1093/jhc/fhy038

Abstract

Abstract Despite the age and prestige of the Royal Society of London, the history of its collections of scientific instruments and apparatus has largely been one of accidental accumulation and neglect. This article tracks their movements and the processes by which objects came to be recognized as possessing value beyond reuse or sale. From at least the mid-nineteenth century, the few surviving objects with links to the society’s early history and its most illustrious Fellows came to be termed ‘relics’, were treated with suitable reverence, put on display and made part of the society’s public self-presentation. If the more quotidian objects survived into the later 1800s, when their potential as objects for collection, research, display, reproduction and loan began to be appreciated, they are likely to have survived to the present day.

Highlights

Most research on the history of the object collections of the Royal Society (RS) has focused on its early years – when the Repository played a significant part in its activities and reputation – and on natural history.[1]
A handful of other objects clearly remained somewhere in the Society’s possession, and others arrived subsequently, for we find them loaned to the South Kensington, later Science, Museum and/or listed in the various editions of The Record of the Royal Society (London, 1897, 1901, 1912, 1940)
It was an outcome of concerns that Britain had lost its lead in original scientific work and in the manufacture of instruments.[95]. It displayed ‘ apparatus for teaching and for investigation, and such as possessed historic interest on account of the persons by whom, or the researches in which, it had been employed.’. It was to include ‘objects of historic interest from museums and private cabinets, where they are treasured as sacred relics, as well as apparatus in present use in the laboratories of professors.’[96]. When the Committee of Council on Education made the official request for loans from the Society, they asked for ‘any objects it may possess which are suitable for the Exhibition’, and ‘the original apparatus used by Newton, and Leewenhoek’s microscope, were especially mentioned’

Summary

Introduction

Most research on the history of the object collections of the Royal Society (RS) has focused on its early years – when the Repository played a significant part in its activities and reputation – and on natural history.[1]. Sir John Evans, in that role 1878-98 and previously on Council, was an archaeologist and numismatist, as well as a paper manufacturer and President of the Society of Antiquaries (1885-92).[74] He displayed objects of historic and archaeological interest at several of the Society’s conversazione and undoubtedly helped develop a sense of antiquarian interest in at least some of the Society’s instruments, adding a perspective associated with the slowly developing appreciation of historic instruments at this period that was lacking in the more education-focused context of the South Kensington Museum with which the RS more frequently engaged.[75] Evans was the father of Lewis Evans, later famous as owner of the founding collection of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford Through his father’s influence he exhibited some ancient astrolabes and other fifteenth- to eighteenth-century instruments at an 1896 Royal Society conversazione and lent others to the 1876 Special Loan Collection Exhibition.[76] As discussed, the rising interest in display of scientific objects and collecting historic instruments was important for the reframing of the RS collections. These items, along with the account of the Society’s history and the historic works noted in the Library, were part of the ‘quaint and picturesque’ details that added colour to the periodical’s account of the Society in ‘its modern aspect’.94 They attested its age and how much things had changed – perhaps, it might be asserted, as a result of scientific work such as that promoted by the RS

25. Credit

Conclusion