Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientific Instruments Presented to Gerard L’Estrange Turner ed. by R. G. W. Anderson

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 201 Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientific Instruments Pre­ sented to Gerard LEstrange Turner. Edited by R. G. W. Anderson, J. A. Bennett, and W. F. Ryan. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum (Ashgate), 1993. Pp. xix+492; illustrations, notes, index. $89.95. This book is a festschrift in honor of Gerard L’Estrange Turner, undoubtedly a most influential figure in the history of scientific instru­ ments over the last generation. This influence has been effected through twelve books, more than 100 articles, numerous biographical articles, and, less obviously, his editorship of thejournal Annals ofScience. A useful list of his publications appears in the book’s preface. The thirty-five articles in this volume cover a wide range ofissues and, predictably, vary in depth of analysis. Some provide the merest description of an instrument or a chronology of development. Others suggest entirely new questions about the use of instruments in science and their interpretation by historians or explore the dynamics of the instrument trade. The two opening essays, byJ. L. Heilbron and A. J. Turner, are among the most stimulating on broader historiographic questions. Heilbron assures us that instrument catalogs have functioned to standardize phenomena perhaps even more than the instruments themselves. More generally, he advocates historical study of the “rhetoric of scientific instruments.” Turner points out that it is important for historians to show how instruments were important to the science of their time and not just to assert that they were. At a deeper level, he notes the anachronism of the very term “scientific instrument.” He endorses Derek Price’s point that instruments have been used for measurement and to provide the raw material for theory construction but also for revelation and out of a “sheer love of machinery.” Turner, however, qualifies this endorsement via a long discussion of types of instruments and periods in their development. While these schema are not without objection, this essay should be required reading for anyone writing the history of instruments. Many of the articles concern some particular class of instrument or even an individual instrument: an astrolabe from Picardy, astronomical paper instruments, 18th-century chemical furnaces, or Charles Wheat­ stone’s wave machine. Some of these are most suggestive; some are not. A. D. C. Simpson’s discussion of 19th-century British pendula is a careful and detailed account that transcends the instrument itself to explore its roles in sanctioned metrology and in the study of the earth. Of special interest to historians of technology with no special penchant for scientific instruments is Willem Hackmann’s discussion and catalog of W. G. Armstrong’s hydroelectric machines, which used a steam boiler to generate static electric charges. Hackmann relates the machine to its actual contexts: the popular interest in electricity in early Victorian Britain and the relations of science to light industry. Moreover, he provides period illustrations and photographs of surviving machines. 202 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Instruments in various institutional contexts are also treated. J. A. Bennett examines the interactions of Thomas Hornsby at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, with his instrument makers; Marijn van Hoorn relates the development of the instrumentation at the Teyler’s physical laboratory in Haarlem, Holland; and J. C. Deiman discusses Utrecht University’s microscopes. Several articles provide windows on the instrument-making trade. The instrument makers John Bird, George Graham, and Jesse Ramsden (among others) figure prominently in Bennett’s article. Gloria C. Clifton provides a careful social and institu­ tional analysis of the producers of optical instruments in 17th- and early18th -century London, complete with a list of all the known manufac­ turers for this period. There are also detailed examinations ofindividual instrument makers and their businesses or achievements: Hemming Andersen on the Dane Jeppe Smith, Allan Chapman on Jesse Ramsden as a figure who “scaled up” instrument making to an industrial level, and Anita McConnell on the use of Thomas Cooke’s order book to get at a social analysis of who the buyers were for optical instruments circa 1860. Making instruments count, in the history of technology or in the history of science, is no easy matter. Still needed are more catalogs, more photographs and other illustrations, and more...