184 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE mergers and licensing agreements with independent companies, while they existed, describe a fascinating path toward the realization of the mega-corporation that was the Bell system. There is certainly much to recommend the policy of public service liberalism in addressing our current ills, as our politicians debate the structural components of the common good, and as corporations lose their regional and even national identities in the global economy. Stone hopes this essay will propel the debate to reconsider public service liberalism in many arenas, telling his readers that “past styles of public policy, unlike past events, can be recaptured” (p. 9). All well and good, but the adoption of any public policy must be informed by more than an untempered celebration of a corporation’s glory days. Nelson R. Kellogg Dr. Kellogg is assistant professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University. He is currently writing a history of the National Bureau of Standards, 1901-22. Storia delle scienze. Vol. 1: Gli strumenti. Edited by Gerard L’E. Turner. Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1991. Pp. 593; illustrations, bibliog raphy, index. LI50,000.00. This extraordinarily beautiful book, which belongs on the coffee table of every instrument aficionado, contains hundreds of illustra tions, all in focus and many in full color. There are portraits of scientists, paintings and prints with instruments in the fore- and background, illustrations of trade literature, and pictures of instru ment shops and laboratories. And there are photographs of scientific instruments—some old favorites from public collections which have been published many times before, and numerous unfamiliar views of objects now residing in private collections. Many of these instruments are in Italian collections, but most were produced in the major instrument shops in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Like “science” itself, “scientific instrument” is an ambiguous term. Some historians restrict its meaning to those devices used by scientists to investigate nature qualitatively or quantitatively, while others apply it to a wide assortment of apparatus used for practical as well as investigative purposes. Taking the broad approach, Storia delle scienze includes medical and chemical apparatus, timekeepers from sundials to atomic clocks (but not watches), and the full range of what have long been known as mathematical, optical, and philosophical instru ments. Selection, however, is not based on ideas that engage the attention of historians of science and/or technology but, reflecting the Technology and culture Book Reviews 185 traditional interests of instrument enthusiasts, whether or not such instruments have been or can be collected. Storia dette scienze is a multiauthored book containing a curious mélange of topics that do not add up to a coherent history of science in general or of scientific instruments in particular. Moreover, while it discusses major makers, dealers, and collectors, it all but ignores issues of economics and technology, let alone the complex relationships between instruments and the social and political contexts in which they were made and used. Gerard Turner wrote on specific categories of instruments—navigation, mechanics, and the like. John Millburn contributed the discussion of planetariums, and Helen Turner that of medical and surgical instruments. There are also four area studies: Gloria Clifton on English instrument production, Paolo Brenni on the French instrument industry, Silvio Bedini on the manufacture of instruments in America, and David King on astronomical instruments in medieval Islam. Storia dette scienze also ignores, or at best gives short shrift to, instruments made in the 20th century and most of those made in the second half of the 19th century. The astronomy chapter, for instance, says nothing about astronomical photography, spectros copy, or photometry. That concerning American activities ignores the makers who put America on the scientific map: Alvan Clark & Sons, who made the largest and best refracting telescopes anywhere in the world, and who broke American dependence on European shops; Lewis M. Rutherfurd and Henry Rowland, whose diffraction gratings revolutionized the study of terrestrial and celestial spectra; and Albert A. Michelson, who developed the interferometer and measured the speed of light. Studies of scientific instruments, like most studies of material culture, are still in their infancy, and information about particular instruments and makers is relatively...