Historical Scientific Instruments Research Articles

Identifying and Understanding Historical Scientific Instruments: The Case of the Physics Cabinet of the University of Bologna

AbstractThis paper reconstructs the process of identification and understanding of an ensemble of historic physics instruments carried out between 2021 and 2022 at the Department of Physics and Astronomy “Augusto Righi” of the University of Bologna. The ensemble of 244 instruments is part of the Collection of Physics of the University and corresponds to the main core of the nineteenth-century Cabinet of Physics of the University of Bologna. After a brief recollection of the complex history of the cabinet the paper brings into light the different aspects involved in the identification and understanding of a scientific instrument. The various challenges concern the use of the resources available, the role of the experts, the study in situ and the use of original archive sources. In addition, a contextualization of the present study in the current literature on material culture studies and history of scientific instruments will bring to light the importance of the analysis of historical and trade catalogues, both for retracing the trajectories of a specific artefact and for the study of its relationships with users, donors, collectors, previous owners, and other objects.

Bridging the gap: From the laboratory science education of the 19<sup>th</sup> century in Greece to STEM education

The objectives of the present study are to investigate both the history of the collection of scientific instruments from the Maraslean Teaching Center (MTC) and the potential for the collection’s use in STEM education programs. Although MTC went by a number of different names during its long history, its institutional goal remained the same: training the Greek state’s primary school teachers-to-be. To so do, it was necessary to assemble a collection of scientific instruments. The first objective of the paper is to present in detail the gradual enlargement of the collection from the last quarter of the 19<sup>th</sup> century through to the 1930s, along with the way the instruments were used in science lessons and the central role MTC played in relation to other regional teaching schools in Greece in terms of the distribution, administration, repair and maintenance of the equipment. The second objective is to investigate the role the historical scientific instruments can play not only in the history of science, but also in contemporary science teaching. The findings reveal that the history of laboratory physics education in MTC along with the corresponding collection of the historical scientific instruments can be a fertile ground for implementing STEM education programs. Finally, the findings imply the broader integration of STEM education and history of science in order to promote cultural and procedural aspects of science in student teachers and beyond. Such integration gives rise to broader research on introducing STEM education to cultural embedded environments, such as museums and historically important schools and laboratories, such as MTC.

Historical Scientific Instruments in Contemporary Education , by Elizabeth Cavicchi and Peter Heering, eds.

Historical Scientific Instruments in Contemporary Education , by Elizabeth Cavicchi and Peter Heering, eds.

Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

Exploring Historical Scientific Instruments by Using Mobile Media Devices

We describe an educational activity that can be completed with mobile media devices in order to understand the working principle of a pair of tuning forks, from the Historical Collection of Physics Instruments of the University of Palermo, and how they were used to explain acoustic interference and beats with the Lissajous optical method. This approach can be used with any tuning fork and it is a valuable teaching strategy that does not require specific laboratory equipment.

Editorial

Editorial

The World Inventory of Historical Scientific Instruments – The Polish Contribution

Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki » 2020 » Issue 1 » The World Inventory of Historical Scientific Instruments – The Polish Contribution A A A

Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at World's Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century. Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, vol. 12 ed. by Elena Canadelli

Reviewed by: Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at World's Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century. Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, vol. 12 ed. by Elena Canadelli Morris Low (bio) Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at World's Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century. Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, vol. 12. Edited by Elena Canadelli, Marco Beretta, and Laura Ronzon. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2019. Pp. 263. The papers in this handsomely illustrated book document how nations have looked to science and technology exhibits to celebrate their achievements since the late nineteenth century. While many historians have noted, in passing, how exhibits at world's fairs have often made their way into museums, this book is the first devoted to exploring the links between these settings. In addition, it documents how there has been a growing emphasis on multimedia experiences and hands-on exhibits over static displays of objects since the interwar period. While obvious to many historians of technology, the editors trace this shift's historical roots in Behind the Exhibit through a dozen case studies. The book starts by discussing the display of chemical heritage and the controversy between the French and Germans in the late 1860s over Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's role in the history of chemistry. Next, we see how Germany, Russia, and America attempted to claim electrical telegraphy as their own, despite the technology being the result of cumulative progress (chapter 2). The strength of the volume is the section on the interwar period. The Catalan forge was seen by some engineers as a symbol of the "technological soul" of the Catalan nation dating back to the Middle Ages (chapter 3). Unfortunately for the Catalans, the Spanish government chose to "de-Catalanize" the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition and no traces of Catalonia's metallurgical past appeared. Other European efforts to link science and technology to nations and regions were more successful. The book also discusses the First National Exhibition of the History of Science held in Florence that same year (chapter 4). It led to the establishment of a national Museum of the History of Science, now the Museo Galileo, in 1930. Italians also looked to world's fairs to project their national achievements on an international stage. At the 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago, some of the replicas and scale models exhibited by the Italians would later enter the collections of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as well as the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. [End Page 1269] The Chicago fair emphasized modern science, spectacle, and the importance of experiences. It showcased the first modern planetarium in the United States, which took the form of an astronomical museum, housing a significant collection of historical scientific instruments (chapter 6). This dual approach is what we see in many museums today. The book then discusses the establishment of the Palais de la Découverte against the background of the 1937 Paris International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life (chapter 7). The vision for the Palais was a permanent museum dedicated to modern science, a forerunner of a modern science center. As the Hall of Science at the Chicago fair had influenced the Palais, we can point to a web of influences that this book helps identify. The book also examines the Italian Exhibition of Universal Science set to open in 1942 as part of the Universal Exposition of Rome, which then became part of a permanent science museum (chapter 8). Although the expo was ultimately cancelled, the grand plans nevertheless show the scale of Mussolini's ambitions and what a science museum in Rome would have looked like. The link between science and ideology was further emphasized during the Cold War. The final part of the book is devoted to the post-World War II period. The book covers the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) as an example of the reinvention of the science museum in the 1960s, in contrast with the Exploratorium in San Francisco (chapter 9...

The next level of play

Abstract Although teaching science is considered a serious business, toys and sometimes entertaining spectacles have been at the very heart of such an endeavour over the past 300 years. Using, among other things, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments as a material historical source, this article describes how the ‘magical’ effects of a Cartesian Devil or a solar microscope, the deafening explosion of a volcano, the building (and breaking) of a measuring apparatus, and the playing with mathematical and quantum toys diligently imparted vast areas of scientific knowledge to Harvard University students between 1730 and 1970. Playing with science – and with scientific instruments – is examined here as a valued pedagogical strategy deployed by generations of teachers, who saw in the material culture of science a renewable resource for training the mind and acquiring manual skills. It also allows us to study an important collection of objects from an unusual perspective.

Playing with Quantum Toys: Julian Schwinger’s Measurement Algebra and the Material Culture of Quantum Mechanics Pedagogy at Harvard in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, a PhD student in physics, Costas Papaliolios, designed a simple—and playful—system of Polaroid polarizer filters with a specific goal in mind: explaining the core principles behind Julian Schwinger’s quantum mechanical measurement algebra, developed at Harvard in the late 1940s and based on the Stern-Gerlach experiment confirming the quantization of electron spin. Papaliolios dubbed his invention “quantum toys.” This article looks at the origins and function of this amusing pedagogical device, which landed half a century later in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Rendering the abstract tangible was one of Papaliolios’s demonstration tactics in reforming basic teaching of quantum mechanics. This article contends that Papaliolios’s motivation in creating the quantum toys came from a renowned endeavor aimed, inter alia, at reforming high-school physics training in the United States: Harvard Project Physics. The pedagogical study of these quantum toys, finally, compels us to revisit the central role playful discovery performs in pedagogy, at all levels of training and in all fields of knowledge.

The Elephant and the Sky: Ivory in Astronomical Instruments

AbstractIn this short essay, the author presents studies on ivory in astronomical instruments through examples of ivory instruments from the collections of the Adler Planetarium in order to suggest that the use of such artifacts in museum exhibitions may serve a twofold purpose: to emphasize that historical scientific instruments embody social and cultural meanings that go beyond the pursuits more commonly associated with scientific activity, while fostering the public engagement with the history of ivory trade and the issues surrounding this material.

Successful Chinese German Collaborations in Historical Dresden

Successful Chinese German Collaborations in Historical Dresden

I. Bernard Cohen

1 MARCH 1914 * 20 JUNE 2003 PROUD OF being the first American to receive a doctorate expressly in the history of science (as opposed to writing a thesis for a history department), I Bernard Cohen went on to lead the professionalization of the discipline and to establish a flagship history of science department at Harvard. With a booming voice, a familiar checked sport jacket, and a distinctive articulated fish watch fob, he exuded a memorable presence that inevitably attracted both admirers and detractors. An acknowledged authority on the science of Benjamin Franklin, he was a natural candidate for membership in the American Philosophical Society, yet his election came comparatively late in his career. Born in Far Rockaway, Long Island, Cohen entered New York University at the precocious age of fifteen, only to drop out after a semester; following a brief study of veterinary medicine at the Farmington Agricultural Institute, he attended the Valley Forge Military Academy before entering Harvard as a freshman in 1933 to concentrate in mathematics. Then, continuing as a graduate student in 1937 in the newly founded Program in History of Science and Learning, he became an assistant to George Sarton, the man considered the father of modern history of science and the founding editor of Isis (in 1912), which in the meantime had become the journal of the History of Science Society. Cohen's original dissertation proposal, on Franklin's work on electricity as an example of Newtonian experimental science, grew ever longer, and at the suggestion of Crane Brinton (and with the unenthusiastic approval of Sarton), Cohen's first book, published in 1941, a fully annotated edition of Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, became his thesis for a Ph.D. granted in 1947. Cohen's six-hundred-page Franklin and Newton was published in 1956. During the same period he researched and wrote Some Early Tools of American Science (1950), which documented an exhibition of the university's eighteenth-century instruments and helped to establish Harvard's Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments, in which he continued to maintain a strong interest. From 1946 on (and until his mandatory retirement in 1984) Cohen taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard. Working with president James Bryant Conant on Harvard's newly installed General Education program, he helped introduce the case study method with his popular course, Natural Science 3, The Nature and Growth of the Physical Sciences. A consummate showman in the classroom, he taught an extended series of graduate teaching fellows (including this writer) how to keep undergraduates awake with a host of memorable demonstrations. For two decades he chaired Harvard's program in history of science and guided its transformation into a full-fledged department in the mid-1960s. In 1947 Cohen became managing editor of his, and in 1953 succeeded Sarton in the editorship. As his colleague Erwin Hiebert noted in 1974 when Cohen received the Sarton Medal, the History of Science Society's lifetime achievement award, Cohen shepherded Isis through a gentle metamorphosis that gave it a structure that it still essentially maintains in its current form. Cohen's research in the history of science covered a wide range of topics over the course of his more than six decades of publications. Nevertheless, he was best known for his work on Isaac Newton. In 1957 Cohen joined with Alexandre Koyre, then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, on the monumental project of preparing a variorum edition of Newton's Principia. This endeavor covered not only its three published editions, but also the original manuscript and the voluminous corrections and annotations that Newton had made in his personal copies. …

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

Out the Door: A Short History of the University of Toronto Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

Since the late 1970s, various attempts have been made to organize the scientific instruments used in research carried out at the University of Toronto into a catalogued, protected, and accessible collection. Unlike other major research universities with which Toronto compares itself, such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, to name only a few, these efforts have not been successful. The failure to implement even a modest campus-wide program to safeguard the university's material heritage has had unfortunate consequences. Nevertheless, a great deal of material survives. In the following paper, we examine the circumstances of the historical instruments at the University of Toronto. We argue that this university's scientific instruments are an essential piece of its identity and history. Finally, we propose a practical bottom up approach through which the current collection can be stabilized and secured (with new instruments added) so that future students can reflect on today's research with the benefit of a rich and well-documented collection.

Physics thematic paths: laboratorial activities and historical scientific instruments

The Physics Department of Padua University keeps an important collection of historicalphysics instruments which alludes to the fruitful scientific activity of Padua through thecenturies. This heritage led to the suggestion of setting up laboratory activities connectedto the Museum collection for secondary school students. This article shows howdifferent thematic paths have been developed, reflecting on the importance ofhistorical perspectives in science teaching. We also show how a scientific historicalmuseum can play a central role in improving the learning of physics concepts.

History of Psychology: Robert Yerkes’ Multiple-Choice Apparatus, 1913-1939

Robert Yerkes developed a multiple-choice method to study ideational behavior in animals and humans using specially designed multiple-choice apparatuses. One example ofYerkes' apparatus, used for testing human subjects, now resides in the Historical Scientific Instruments Collection at the Peabody Museum of Natural History of Yale University. Yerkes introduced the apparatus in 1913 to show that the multiple-choice method was an effective measure of ideational behavior in normal and abnormal people. An analysis of the machine's construction and history brings to light Yerkes' desire for methodological rigor in experimental design. Yerkes' apparatus became commercially available in 1923 even though other psychological laboratories had been making their own versions of it since 1919. Sixteen years later, Yerkes' apparatus was still on the market despite an apparent lack of demand for it.

Estudos sobre a corrosão do latão em ambiente interno de um museu

Os bens culturais são o produto e o testemunho das tradições e realizações intelectuais do passado e, dentre eles, as coleções de instrumentos científicos históricos constituem- se em testemunhos significativos da história da ciência. Neste trabalho, são apresentados resultados de estudos sobre a corrosão atmosférica do latão, um dos principais constituintes metálicos desses instrumentos, em seu próprio ambiente de guarda, um ambiente interno típico de um museu situado em região de clima tropical. Os estudos, com duração de 300 dias, utilizaram peças de latão, em composição similar àquela encontrada nas peças dos instrumentos, em testes preliminares, de exposição ao ambiente e em teste acelerado (imersão- emersão). Foi possível, em linhas gerais, simular de forma acelerada o processo real de corrosão atmosférica, através de testes de imersão- emersão adaptados, e os resultados obtidos por técnicas instrumentais de microscopia eletrônica de varredura (SEM) e difração de raios- X (DRX) mostraram que o primeiro produto de oxidação formado foi a cuprita, e que o processo mostrou- se muito lento. Não foi possível identificar compostos contendo enxofre, porém as análises por SEM mostraram a presença desse elemento na superfície das placas. Os resultados das análises por espectroscopia de retro- espalhamento Rutherford (RBS) e SEM permitem sugerir, a partir da medida de espessura das camadas de produtos de corrosão formadas, uma relação entre as escalas de tempo dos testes de imersão- emersão e de exposição atmosférica, resultando que cada 30 dias de ensaio acelerado corresponderam a cerca de 300 dias de exposição ao ambiente estudado.