Session Abstract

Practising with Instruments

Session Organiser: Klaus Staubermann

Over recent years, the interest in the history of scientific instruments has grown significantly. One of the most interesting and decisive questions to emerge is how such a history of scientific instruments can be written. The historian of science, Anthony Turner, who has emphasized this question for many years, calls such a history of scientific instruments one of ‘interaction between needs and expectations’.

A history of scientific instruments can be written as a history of objects and as a history of experience. Any history of experience with scientific instruments, which concerns itself with the development of and interaction with an instrument, needs to focus on practice. It must be flexible in form and character, and take into account both existing instruments and historical records. To present such histories of practice with instruments is the aim of this session. All speakers will give examples of how historic practitioners’ experiences interact with an instrument’s design.

One of the intended results of this session is to show how practising with instruments can become a highly informative source in understanding historic instruments and their uses. In the case of the studies presented here, looking at historic practice led the speakers to a richer and more precise understanding of instrumentation. The historic sources fell into place, and by reinterpreting the historical sources the instruments acquired a more dynamic career.

Practical navigation and the Gunter sector

Dr Hester Higton

In his monumental study of early modern navigation, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, D.W. Waters wrote that through the Gunter sector, Edmund Gunter ‘first made arithmetical navigation a practical proposition at sea’. Since that publication it has been assumed by historians of navigation that such a role could naturally be assigned to the sector. This assumption is not challenged by the writings of either Gunter himself, or by those of other seventeenth-century authors. However, if a careful study of the instruments themselves is conducted, different conclusions begin to emerge.

This paper will consider the questions raised by practical investigation of the sector. Through description of the use of a replica instrument, I will show that the actual position of the sector as a navigational aid is considerably more complicated than might first appear. Certainly the indications are that the instrument was popular. Had this not been the case, we would not be able to explain why writers at the beginning of the eighteenth century were still advocating the sector’s use as an aid to navigation. However, calculations using the sector lead to a marked decrease in accuracy compared to the traditional pen and paper methods, calling into question its contribution to ‘arithmetical navigation’. I hope to suggest some reasons for the sector’s enduring popularity despite these problems, and the important role it may have played in increasing navigators’ use and understanding of mathematics.

The ‘shocking’ bag: medico-electrical practice in 1760s London

Ms Paola Bertucci

In the latter part of the eighteenth century the application of electricity to the human body as a medical therapy attracted the interest of a range of electricians, including natural philosophers, apothecaries and instrument-makers. Far from being a branch of medicine, medical electricity found a niche for itself within the broader context of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, providing instruments and data that proved useful in other areas of electrical research. The paper focuses on the earliest practitioners of medical electricity in London, unfolding the connections between such a practice and other branches of electrical philosophy. Placing medical electricity in the domain of natural philosophy is the target of my paper, and the instruments of medical electricity my starting point.

Practising with reconstructions of Jean Paul Marat’s Perméomètre and Hélioscope

Dr Peter Heering

In the early 1780s the physician and revolutionary-to-be Jean Paul Marat tried to establish himself as a natural philosopher in Paris. In doing so he published not only several monographs on heat, optics and electricity but also claimed to have developed several new scientific instruments, among them the ‘Hélioscope’ and the ‘Perméomètre’. In attempting to learn more about Marat’s experimental practice these instruments were reconstructed and some of the experiments Marat claimed to have performed with these instruments were redone. In my presentation I am going to discuss the difficulties that were to be overcome as well as the experiences gained in working with these devices.