Nineteenth-century scientific instruments

The first thing to be said about this book is that it is an excellent survey of nineteenth-century scientific instruments. Its excellence lies in its value as a guide to the identification of objects. The volume is extremely well produced; the illustrations, which are mainly photographs of instruments, are first class; and Dr. Turner's detailed text irreproachably sound. The book is a general account, and not a catalogue of a single collection, and it covers the physical sciences and related applied sciences, such as surveying, but not medicine or the life sciences. Aspects of medicine were handled in an earlier, less satisfactory volume, Antique medical instruments, by Elizabeth Bennion. Two disciplines separated by a common language, might be said of the study of scientific instruments and the intellectual and social history of science. The latter, in one form or another, has a body of academic practitioners, who examine scientific ideas and scientific culture, who use a number of identifiable historical theories and write for an audience of historians, philosophers, and, sometimes, scientists. Students of instruments, on the other hand, describe the form and use of apparatus by applying recognized cataloguing procedures. They direct their work largely to an audience of museum curators, casual museum visitors, private collectors, and the shared audience of scientists. The common language between these two bodies of practitioners is science, the rest is silence. The sharing makes for conviviality, a visit to a museum for historians, attendance at a history of science conference by curators and collectors. But, in general, historians of science are to be indicted for their outright failure to take account of instruments when theorizing. Similarly, in the main, curators stand accused of not taking seriously historically sophisticated accounts of science. What makes this situation worse is a tacit agreement on both sides that instruments should be preserved because they do tell us about science past. Apart from a few exemplary studies, however, they have rarely been used to do any such thing. The origin of the different orientations of the two groups possibly lies in the differing audiences they address. Museum guides and catalogues are almost invariably written to fulfil demands that are pedagogical, antiquarian, and economic, and which arise, ultimately, within the scientific community. The corollary of this is that, by and large, curators use current intellectual categories for organizing the past. For example, many science museums have collections entitled chemistry …