Abstract

The apparatus of early modern and modern science, from singular specimens to large artifact classes, beckon archaeological research. We can ask a host of archaeological and historical questions and seek answers with the aid of behavioral concepts, generalizations, and heuristic tools applied to apparatus. The examples in this chapter include (1) life history narratives and Otto von Guericke’s “electrical machine,” (2) assessing the cognitive equivalence between Michael Faraday’s “motor” and Joseph Henry’s “teeter-totter,” (3) studying the design of museum artifacts, with a focus on Thomas Davenport’s electric motor, (4) treating project apparatus as an artifact assemblage (Du Fay and the law of charges; Humphry Davy and the discovery of chemical elements), and (5) functional differentiation in a class of apparatus, the eighteenth-century electrical machine.

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