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Europe in the sixteenth century experienced a period of unprecedented vitality and innovation in the spheres of science and commerce. The Americas had been discovered and the colonizing nations had an urgent need for mathematical instruments for navigation and surveying. The Elizabethan agesaw the establishment of the precision instrument-making trade in London, from 1540, a trade that would become world-famous in the succeeding two centuries.The first of a group of London makers was an immigrant from Flanders, Thomas Gemini, succeeded by the Englishman, Humfrey Cole.It has provedpossible to find over 100 surviving mathematical instruments, signed and unsigned, made by a group of London make...
Examines the variety of instruments and equipment used in scientific research in fields such as chemistry, mechanics, meteorology, and electricity
The impulse to collect is universal. Collections containing natural curiosities date from the 16th century, and it was this type of collection in which scientific instruments found a home. This book traces the historical origins and development of instruments as they spread across the globe, explaining their manufacture, use, and adaptations. 91 color and 20 b&w plates.
Within the history of science, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the instruments themselves - yet they are the very data-creating tools of science and an appreciation of their development is a prerequisite for understanding the evolution of scientific thought. Professor Turner has aimed to rectify this imbalance and here focuses on the instruments and the social and intellectual context in which they were made and used. Particular articles deal with the origins of the microscope, the manufacture of reflecting telescopes - of crucial importance to the development of astronomy - and with the instrument trade in Britain, from its Elizabethan origins to its heydey 200 years later.
This publication lists over 5,000 scientific instrument makers and retailers working in the British Isles, together with a further 10,000 names of apprentices and associates. The directory transforms our understanding of the history of the scientific instrument-making trades in Britain. Each entry includes estimated working dates, specific trades, addresses, training, apprentices, types of instruments made and brief biographical details. As such this volume not only provides essential information for collectors, dealers, museum curators and scholars, but it will also have much to offer economic, social and family historians, with its evidence about master-apprentice links, trade connections and family relationships.
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
The substantial collection of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s apparatus is not the only surviving collection of eighteenth-century chemical apparatus and instrumentation, but it is without question the most important. The present study provides the first scientific catalogue of Lavoisier’s surviving apparatus. This collection of instruments is remarkable not only for the quality of many of them but, above all, for the number of items that have survived (ca. 600 items). Given such a wealth and variety of instruments, this study also offers the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct the cultural and social context of Lavoisier’s experimental activities.