SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS

SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS. The early modern period saw

the use of devices both to advance scientific research (such
as the telescope and the microscope) and those of a more
practical nature that embodied scientific knowledge (such as
the astrolabe and the thermometer). Because scientific
instruments are typically made by specialized craftsmen who
produce improvements in design and effectiveness through
technical means, their production may also be considered as
a discrete technology.
Although in the Middle Ages there had been specialized
craftsmen who made astrolabes and, later, clocks, the
emergence of a specialized craft for the production of a line of
scientific instruments with distinct functions first emerged
(in England, at least) in the 1540s, in response to the need for
more accurate measurement in navigation, surveying, and
astronomy. In England, the multiple forces of population
growth, agricultural expansion, and, later, the draining of The
Fens, stimulated the development of professional surveying,
which required instruments for making angular
measurements. The age of discovery, moreover, expanded
the market for navigational instruments at a time when the
"lunar distance" method (involving difficult observations of the
distance between the Moon and a designated star, the use of
tables, and calculation) was the predominant method of
navigation. At the same time, in the course of the sixteenth
century, practical mathematics was developed and then
diffused in printed manuals. The primary measurements
involved in describing the use of such instruments
themselves required instrumentation, as did the mathematical
manipulation of observations made by using such manuals.
The emergence of a scientific-instrument craft in the 1540s
was the result of the interaction of all of these factors.
THE TELESCOPE
Once eyeglasses came into common usage toward the end
of the thirteenth century, it was just a matter of time until two
such lenses were combined to produce either a telescope or
a microscope. That insight, however, took quite a long time to
realize. The telescope is first documented in Holland in the
fall of 1608, when at least three different craftsmen, including
a maker of spectacles, were manufacturing them. Because
the principles involved were widely known, the telescope is a
good example of invention appearing simultaneously in
different places. Galileo Galilei heard of the Dutch
instruments by the summer of 1609 and made his own
version, with a diverging eye lens and a converging (convex)
object lens. These early examples had magnifications of two
or three, but within a year Galileo, who ground his own
lenses, achieved magnifications of twenty and thirty and
objectives with increasingly long focal lengths. The
Englishman Thomas Harriot heard of the Dutch instruments
in the same period and was drawing maps of the Moon in
August 1609, before Galileo's most significant research had
begun. Galileo published his first telescopic results in March
1610 in his famous Sidereus nuncius (Starry messenger) and
by the end of the year Johannes Kepler had published two
little books on the results of telescopic research, without
having done any yet himself. (Kepler's contribution was a
telescope with both eyepiece and objective converging, which
made it possible to create a real, though inverted, image and
project it onto a screen beyond the ocular, which became the
normal way of observing the Sun.) As is frequently the case
with recognizably important inventions (the automobile, the
airplane), the invention and innovation of the telescope
caused a quickening of communication among scientists and
stimulated simultaneous excitement in countries widely
removed from one another.

2
Galileo's earliest telescope observations—of the lunar
landscape, the satellites of Jupiter, and the Milky Way—
caused a sensation. The satellites of Jupiter, moreover,
revealed that Earth was not the only planetary center of
rotation, which worked against Aristotelian cosmology and in
favor of that of Nicolaus Copernicus, as did Galileo's
subsequent description of the phases of Venus. The
discovery of sunspots also contradicted the Aristotelian axiom
of the unchangeable nature of celestial bodies. In the hands
of Galileo alone, the telescope changed the nature of
planetary astronomy, both how it was conceptualized and
how it was observed.
One of the problems of early telescopes was that the
objective caused the images to appear with extraneous
colors. The solution was the achromatic lens, developed in
England in the 1730s. To avoid such coloring and other
distortions, seventeenth-century telescopes had very small
apertures and long focal lengths. The eventual solution was a
two-component objective, with two lenses of different density
in contact with one another, worked out by Parisian craftsmen
in 1763, and then by John Dolland in England. This was the
most popular telescope until William Herschel (1738–1822),
toward the end of the century, invented a reflecting telescope
with a large mirror that made possible the gathering of
enough light to be able to examine much fainter celestial
objects.
The telescope's impact was sudden, immense, and rippled
across the length and breadth of cultures, affecting scientific
theory and method, of course, but also theology, philosophy,
literature, and art. In particular, Galileo's depiction of a
jagged, rough, and crater-pocked lunar surface threatened a
whole range of entrenched cultural conventions, including the
Aristotelian perfection of heavenly bodies and the pure,
diaphanous quality of the Moon, which was theologically
associated with the purity of the Immaculate Virgin. Galileo

3
himself had had training in art and interacted with artists,
many of whom had observed the Moon telescopically with
reference to specific paintings. Ever since Plutarch wrote his
essay on the face that seemingly appeared on the Moon's
surface, it had been common to refer to the lunar facade as
similar to the surface of a painting, and in the seventeenth
century writers conventionally likened the dark and light sides
of the Moon to painted pigments. The Virgin was, for
theological reasons, conventionally painted in the presence of
a crystalline moon. In his Inmaculada of 1619, Diego
Velázquez depicted the Virgin standing on a textured moon,
the image he had almost certainly seen for himself through a
telescope in Seville.

THE MICROSCOPE
The success of the telescope and consequent diffusion of its
optical principles led quickly to the appearance of the first
compound microscopes between 1612 and 1618. Galileo
himself had one, but until the second half of the seventeenth
century they seem to have been more a curiosity than an
active research tool. The main technical problems of
microscopes were to illuminate the substance under
observation effectively and to produce a small lens that could
provide a sharp image. Large magnifications tended to yield
blurry images. Microscopy really got under way with the
publication of Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) and Jan
Swammerdam's general history of insects in 1669. In the
early 1670s they were joined by contributions from Marcello
Malpighi (1628–1694) and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–
1723).
The earliest microscopes looked like telescopes: the lenses
were set in wooden rings mounted on the ends of cardboard
tubes, the one that held the ocular fitting inside the tube with
the objective. Hooke used a compound microscope with a
double-convex lens objective and a complicated three-lens

4
eyepiece. By this time, however, improvements in grinding
techniques had produced simple microscopes with much
higher powers of magnification, the kind used by
Leeuwenhoek. Sold in large numbers at the end of the
seventeenth century, this was the instrument that popularized
microscopy.

NAVIGATIONAL, SURVEYING, AND

PRACTICAL INSTRUMENTS
In the late Middle Ages and early modern times, the so-called
mariner's astrolabe was used for telling time: by lining up the
site with the Sun the user could read the time of day directly
from a dial on the instrument. But the device had no use in
practical navigation. The most common nautical instruments
were the cross-staff, the back-staff, and the quadrant,
reasonably simple handheld devices for measuring the
altitude of stars but which could not easily be used to
measure the angle between two stars from a moving boat.
These instruments were all abandoned in the 1770s, replaced
by John Hadley's reflecting quadrant, or octant, which
eventually gave rise to the sextant, still in use today. With it,
the navigator could bring the Moon's reflection down to the
horizon, where the image would remain immovable, no matter
how violently the ship was rolling.
Folding rules could be used by surveyors, gunners, or
carpenters for small-scale plotting of terrain, or to estimate
heights and depths, and were engraved with useful
information like timber and board measures. A sector was a
jointed rule with two radial arms engraved with a graduated
scale. With the invention of logarithms (1614), the sector
gave rise to the slide rule. Such ruled instruments were only
as accurate as their graduations. Various methods of
graduation, constantly improved, such as subdividing a scale
by transverse lines that could be read to the one-hundredth
part of quite small units, depending on the quality of the

5
engraving, allowed the direct reading of angles, to an
accuracy of five or ten seconds. Such graduation schemes
became increasingly geometrical in the course of the
eighteenth century and finally machines were devised for
engraving linear scales.
There were also instruments of a practical nature designed to
be carried by ordinary citizens. One such was the
compendium, a pocket-sized brass gadget made for personal
use that typically included an equinoctial sundial, religious
calendars, a table of latitudes, a magnetic compass, a
nocturnal (to determine time at night), a tide computer, and a
table for establishing ports.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Thermometers based on a variety of principles and materials
were built as curiosities in the seventeenth century. It was not
until the German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit began to
use mercury systematically in the 1720s that the thermometer
design stabilized, even though competing models used other
kinds of liquid. Most used alcohol, which was cheaper, but the
reading of the scale varied with the concentration of alcohol.
The Fahrenheit thermometer (with two fixed points, the
freezing [32°] and boiling [212°] points of water, respectively)
was adopted in England, Germany, and
the Netherlands; France used René-Antoine Ferchaulte de
Réaumur's scale, where 0° was the freezing point of water.

Robert Hooke devised a barometer to measure atmospheric

pressure based on the variation of a column of
mercury; Christiaan Huygens made a similar model but,
following an idea of René Descartes, it used two liquids,
mercury and water. The only barometer widely used around
1700 was that of Evangelista Torricelli, a tube plunged into a
container of mercury. At issue was how to achieve consistent
variations in the height of the mercury column, how best to

6
contain the mercury, and what kind of scale could be devised
(in the end, a metal casing placed around the glass tube bore
the graduation marks). The hygrometer, to measure humidity,
presented similar difficulties. The problem was to find an
appropriate substance that was sturdy yet suitably sensitive
to humidity. Finally, around 1783, Horace-Bénédict de
Saussure perfected a model in which a hair held by a clamp
at one end was attached at the other to a silver thread which,
as it wound around a horizontal axis, caused a pointer to
move across a 360° graduated dial. In the case of all three of
these instruments, there was a century-long process whereby
scientists devised workable instruments through the trial-and-
error methods of empirical craftsmen.

ELECTRICAL MACHINES
Benjamin Franklin's discoveries made electrical machines
and demonstrations fashionable after 1750. A variety of
machines featuring the production of electrical current with a
hand crank were made in the first half of the eighteenth
century; but they were not generally produced until the
English instrument maker Jesse Ramsden's plate machine of
1766, which was equipped with an electrometer to measure
the charge produced. Subsequently, all such machines had
electrometers because they were useful in measuring the
shock applied to patients undergoing electric-shock therapy.
Such machines could be connected to Leyden jars serving as
batteries.

SPECIALIZED WORKSHOPS
Specialized workshops making and selling scientific
instruments proliferated in England and in France in the
eighteenth century. Some of the earlier ones specialized
either in navigational or surveying instruments, on the one
hand, or physical instruments, especially barometers, on the
other. The first large instrumentation workshop in England

7
was that of George Adams founded in 1735, identified by a
sign of Tycho Brahe's head in Fleet Street, London. Brahe
(1546–1601), of course, was a pre-telescopic astronomer
famous for his design and use of huge, finely calibrated
observational instruments using the unaided eye alone, and
thus became an apt symbol for the craft of instrumentation.
Microscopes were Adams's specialty, as well as
mathematical instruments of all types. John and Peter
Dolland, father and son, opened an optical shop in London in
1752. The Dollands made quadrants, telescopes, and other
observational instruments in large numbers. Of all the English
instrument makers of the period, Jesse Ramsdem (1735–
1800) was said to be the best mechanician and optician. He
was famous for large-scale astronomical and geodesic
instruments, built telescopes for European observatories, and
was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In Holland, Jan van
Musschenbroek, himself an important popularizer of
Newtonian physics, had a famous workshop (in which he
made instruments for his brother Pieter), as did Fahrenheit, a
German born in Danzig who lived and worked in Amsterdam.
Fahrenheit specialized in glass instruments, particularly the
thermometer whose scale he established, and the barometer.
In France, the great instrument makers of the late eighteenth
century tended to work for institutions. The Mégniés (probably
two brothers) were associated with the Academy of Sciences,
where they built chemical apparatuses for Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier (1743–1794), as well as telescopes and other
optical instruments. Étienne Lenoir (1822–1900) worked
mainly for the Weights and Measures Commission, where he
built the apparatus that French expeditionaries used to
measure the meridian.

8
INSTRUMENTS AND IMPERIAL RIVALRIES
As the expeditions sent out by European powers to the
Pacific came increasingly to focus on scientific matters, they
began to take on the guise of floating laboratories, equipped
with instrument collections that increased in size with each
succeeding expedition. In the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, numerous expeditions tested the marine
chronometer devised by John Harrison (1693–1776) for the
determination of longitude at sea. The instrument was a
matched set of clocks, one set to the prime meridian, the
other to local time. The difference in hours multiplied by
fifteen yields the degree of longitude. On his 1772–1775
voyage, Captain James Cook tested four English
chronometers, one by Harrison and three by John Arnold. He
quickly determined that with accurate chronometers longitude
could be determined within 1.5 degrees of accuracy, and
more importantly, he let it be known publicly that he was
abandoning the complex and tedious "lunar distance" method
for determining longitude in favor of chronometers.
The role that scientific instrumentation played in imperial
rivalries of the late eighteenth century can be appreciated in
the provisioning of the expedition that the Italian captain
Alessandro Malaspina led for the Spanish crown between
1782 and 1794. For the procuring of scientific instruments,
the Spanish navy had an agent in London and another
in Paris. The instrument makers were anxious to place their
wares on spectacular expeditions such as the one being
planned, because the performance of the instruments was
highly publicized after the voyage in the string of memoirs by
officers and naturalists sure to follow. Malaspina carried
seven sets of chronometers, four made by Arnold and three
by Ferdinand Berthoud. Alexander Dalrymple, who supplied
Malaspina with English instruments, had close connections
with Arnold's shop, as a result of which Malaspina offered to
provide Arnold with systematic comparisons of the longitude

9
results given by Arnold's instruments and those obtained
simultaneously by astronomical methods. In this way, detailed
field results were fed back to the manufacturer, who could
then make the necessary corrections in future models.
Malaspina's judgment was that an Arnold chronometer was
the best of the six, a Berthoud almost as good; the others ran
too fast. The rest of Malaspina's apparatus was heavily
English: an astronomical pendulum invented by George
Graham, two Dolland achromatic telescopes with triple
objectives, and thermometers from the houses of Nairne and
Blunt, respectively.

INSTRUMENT COLLECTIONS
As a result of the scientific revolution, collections of scientific
instruments emerged in all of the centers of the Western
world. Some collections were formed at universities and other
teaching institutions for didactic purposes; others fulfilled the
whims of wealthy scientific amateurs. Popularizers of Isaac
Newton, who diffused the results of the scientific revolution in
public lectures in the early eighteenth century, required a
large number of instruments with which to conduct
experiments or illustrate scientific principles during their
presentations. The prototypes of much of this Newtonian
demonstration apparatus were built by Pieter van
Musschenbroek at the request of Willem J. s'Gravesande.
The entire collection, including pulleys, weights, pendulums,
pumps, and machines for illustrating specific concepts of
physics is still preserved in Holland. In the second half of the
eighteenth century, electrical apparatus was added to the
repertory of demonstration equipment. The reputation of
lecturers on physics depended in great part on the quality of
their apparatus. Instrumentation became so expensive that
private institutions like the Royal Society were dependent on
patrons to supply them with instruments. The collection of the
German counts of Hesse in the early eighteenth century had
57 telescopes and 32 microscopes. To own such instruments
was a mark of culture. The collection of the kings of France

10
at Versailles contained 245 instruments, including 52 pieces
of electric apparatus, at the time of its confiscation during
the French Revolution. In Madrid, the Spanish crown
established in 1791 a Royal Machine Museum (Real
Gabinete de Máquinas), a collection of 270 models of
different kinds of machines. Private collectors of the same
period, whose collections we know through inventories
included in their wills, inevitably owned electrical machines
and air pumps. Franklin's experiments had made the former a
symbol of scientific progress, and air pumps, as a kind of
prototypical machine, though of a size manageable for
demonstrations, were a convenient symbol of the incipient
industrial revolution and could be used to run a multiplicity of
experiments.
Scientific Information Retrieval
Scientific Illustrator
Scientific Illustration
Scientific Games Corporation
Scientific Fraud
Scientific Exploration
Scientific Explanation
Scientific Ethics
Scientific Empiricism
Scientific Data Management In Earth Sciences
Scientific Committee On Problems Of The Environment
Scientific And Technical Understanding Of Energy
Scientific American (Journal)
Scientific American
ScientialScientia Media And Molinism
Scientia Media
Scienter

11
Scient Corp
Sciences, Classification Of
Science: Overview
Science: East Asia
Science, Technology, War, And The Military
Science, Technology, And The Constitution
Science, Technology, And Society Studies
Scientific Instruments
Scientific Knowledge, Sociology Of
Scientific Materialism
Scientific Method, Measurements And The
Scientific Publishing
Scientific Racism, History Of
Scientific Realism
Scientific Revolutions
Scientific Socialism
Scientific Visualization
Scientist
Scientists Get Closer To Determining The Age Of The Universe
Scientists In Europe And The United States Lay The Foundation
For The Modern Science Of Ecology
Scientists Learn More About The Evolution And Acquisition Of
Human Language

Scientists' Answers To The Hypothetical Question: "What Are The

Pressing Scientific Issues For The Nation And The World, And
What Is Your Advice On How I Can Begin To Deal With Them?"
Twenty-First Century U.S. President (2003)
Scientists' Institute For Public Information
Scientology, Church Of

12
Scieri, Antoinette (Fl. 1920s)
Scieszka, Jon
Scieszka, Jon 1954-
Scifers
Scigaj, Leonard M. (?)–2005
Scil.
Scilla
Scillies

Footer menu
 HOME

 ABOUT US

 HELP

 SITE FEEDBACK

 PRIVACY & COOKIE POLICY

 TERMS AND CONDITIONS

 DAILY

13