Organized and revised by Peter Galison based on contributions and assistance of Mario Biagioli, Peter Galison, Owen Gingerich, Anne Harrington, Everett Mendelsohn, Nancy Maull, and Will Andrewes.


1. Introduction

1.1 A Laboratory of Laboratories


From the 17th-century telescope to the high-energy physics detector, from microscopy to electroencephalography, instruments have become a source and reference point for historians of science as much as the always and still-needed archives, books, and journals, Indeed, one of the great shifts in the history of science over the last fifteen years, has been a move away from an orientation exclusively focusing on the development of theory, and toward a history that emphasizes the place of craft and experimental practice in science. Accompanying this sea change has been increased attention toward the specific, local circumstances in which scientific knowledge has been put together. What counts as a demonstration in a particular time and place? How do people replicate results, and what counts as replication? How do the particular practices of science travel--what makes it possible for someone to "borrow" techniques from industry, from the military, from other domains of scientific inquiry? To address such questions, we, as historians, have been driven toward the material means of science, for in the objects of the laboratory we can begin to unpack many of the unspoken, sometimes unrecorded ways in which scientists of a given period produced their results.

Questions such as these have been vigorously pursued in Harvard's History of Science Department. Peter Galison' s Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Microphysics aims to rewrite the history of "fundamental" physics in the 20th-century not as a pure account of new entities, from X rays to quarks so to speak, but rather in terms of quasi-autonomous subcultures of physics, including, importantly, the long traditions of instrumentation. For Anne Harrington, the uses and epistemological assumptions underlying modern imaging and recording instruments in the neurosciences act as a vehicle for understanding ways in theories of mind with older, often socially complex heritages come to be apparently revealed in brain functioning. On still another front, Mario Biagioli, addressing Galileo, his disciples, enemies and patrons, is now turning to examine two issues of immense importance to the broader cosmological views of the early modern period: (1) the great sunspot debate (could superlunary objects have imperfections?), a project that demands a detailed accounting of how the sun was to be viewed in projection, how and by whom could such images be recorded, and how they could be reproduced; and (2) the even more famous telescopic discoveries, that raise for Biagioli questions about how Galileo controlled the distribution and use of his new instruments. Bob Brain has used the self-recording instruments of the 19th century as a way to register the changing aesthetic, philosophical, and historical sensibilities of fin-de-siecle scientific culture. Finally, Owen Gingerich has long made extensive use of instruments for teaching purposes, including seminars with astronomical, navigational, and astrological foci.

All of us in the History of Science Department therefore feel extraordinarily fortunate to have at Harvard one of the great scientific instrument collections in the world. We are concerned here to set the collection in proper space, and to integrate it more fully with our evolving research and teaching commitments. Properly executed, the renovation project we propose should produce for Harvard both a dynamic unit within FAS, and an attractive, publicly-accessible museum of immense appeal. Rich in optical equipment, navigation devices, electrical demonstration equipment, radar, and much else, the collection of historical scientific instruments could become a "laboratory of laboratories" for us, our students and many generations of scholars to come.

As our Department collectively began to imagine this solidification and expansion of our collection into a living teaching, research and public exhibition space, it was exciting to see how many ideas for future work were sparked. In one round of discussions, we found ourselves engaged in a kind of extended imaginative mapping of possible future exhibitions, going so far as to provide titles: "Time, Earth, and Astronomy," "The 'Show' of Experiment," "Teaching Life: The Harvard Physiological Apparatus Company and the Invention of the Teaching Laboratory," and "War, Radar, and Science." We have provided some specifics of our thinking here in the appendix. We imagine that planning and execution of future exhibitions would be carried out through a collaborative effort between the curator and the relevant faculty, with assistance from advisors from other departments. We also suppose that students working toward the Museum Studies Certificate in History of Science would undertake major portions of projects such as these as part of their degree preparation.

To accomplish these ambitious goals, the Department of History of Science (DHS) is now finalizing plans with our architect, Andrea Leers, w[xxx] to build an integrated four-story space in the Harvard Science Center, a centrally located building at the heart of the Harvard Campus. We picture the first two floors as principally used with the Collection, but not exclusively so-teaching will make extensive use of the materials, some offices will be located there-and conversely we are working out ways of bringing the material culture of science into floors three and four.

Indeed, beyond the Collection itself, we have in mind a Center for the Material Culture of Science that would embrace parts of the Collection, parts of the Department, and reach out in ways that push both into new areas such as film, photography, and theater--or artifacts that are not, strictu sensu, instruments. We might want to study the development of laboratory animals-through scientific, legal, and ethical considerations. We might want to look at popularization of science, or scientific toys, or the indistinct boundary between technology and science.

Just for purposes of imagining how the space might be used, one might (and this has in no way been finally decided) picture the following as a time-slice of what the exhibits might be like:

-on the first floor we imagine a permanent exhibit, one that would choose a particular narrative and use that thread to guide the visitor through some of our most striking objects. That thread might be, for example, one that moved from the optical and mechanical instruments of the scientific revolution through the electrical age that followed it. Precision clocks, huge orreries, telescopes, and electrostatic machines would find permanent (or quasi-permanent) exhibition here. Then the visitor would climb the stairs to the second floor where a much more quickly changing exhibition space would be found. Here someone coming through might see a special exhibit on radar that would probe the objects produced during and after World War II both to exploit the new technology and to outwit it. We would have computer generated simulations of radar images, perhaps a "cell" of the exhibit on the psychological training of radar operators. There might even be a working radar unit from this period. The exhibit would include student-designed "cells" that form part of their research projects. We might have student films -ethnologies of contemporary laboratories--showing on loops about contemporary electronic work. Other stations along the way might push on the political complexities, historical and contemporary, around the relation of pure, applied, industrial, and defense work in science.

These are just a sampling of ideas. In classes recently I (PLG) have been experimenting with student productions of fragments of plays-having some students perform sections of Copenhagen while others enacted bits of the Farm Hall transcripts. Or elsewhere I’ve had some students do "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" while another group read out portions of the Atomic Energy Commission’s transcripts of the security hearings. In a film course ("Filming Science") taught with documentarian Robb Moss, we have our students make and edit 15 minute ethnographic documentaries in specific laboratories-and study classic examples of documentary film on science.

In short: it is my - and our - hope that we can use this restructured space to inaugurate a kind of science studies that makes use of the non-textual domain: instruments, art objects, theater, and film would be the dimensions of that space.


1.2 The Core Collection of Early Instruments

Although the early instruments represent only a part of Harvard's extensive collection, they lie at its heart because they provided the original impetus for preserving historical scientific instruments at the university. The early instruments (that is, those before 1800) can be divided into two parts. On the one hand there is the magnificent "philosophical cabinet," largely demonstration apparatus acquired for Harvard after the great fire of 1764, and one of the great historical treasures of the College. On the other hand, there are the much earlier scientific instruments (largely acquired by David Wheatland) which actually have more classroom and seminar use.

Harvard's "philosophical cabinet" has been chronicled in I. Bernard Cohen's Some Early Tools of American Science (Harvard, 1950) as well as David Wheatland's The Apparatus of Science at Harvard 1765-1800 (Harvard, 1968). The instruments include telescopes, microscopes, orreries, sextants, electrostatic machines, clocks, physical demonstration equipment, and much more. These instruments are the heart of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. As an integrated collection with documentation, this cabinet has perhaps only three other rivals in the world (Oxford, Cambridge, and Haarlem in the Netherlands). These instruments have been frequently and in small part almost continually on exhibition for well over thirty years, and because of their role in Harvard' s historical heritage, they deserve a conspicuous, secure, and permanent display.

The earlier instruments including some stunning pieces such as one of the very rare geometrical compasses from Galileo's workshop (possibly the only one outside Italy), an unusual sundial bowl from the famed sixteenth-century Nuremberg instrument maker Georg Hartmann, a major collection of ivory diptych sundials (for which a handsome illustrated catalog has already been published), the earliest dated navigational octant, glassware from the English chemist Joseph Priestley, and electrical demonstration apparatus from Franklin's French contemporary, Abbe Nollet.

The most important scientific instrument of the middle ages and early Renaissance was the astrolabe. As such it is important for students to be able to examine such an instrument in detail. Houghton Library has one, the Fogg Museum has a fake, but the CHSI has seven, representing both Islamic and Latin instruments. These have been regularly used in history of science classes such as HS 116 ("Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler") and in HS 117 ("Instruments of Space and Time"), and have been shown to visitors, workshops, the introductory history of science methods course for graduate students, the navigation course, and so on. Although one of the better examples, the astrolabes represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of teaching opportunities presented by specific instruments.

1.3 Other Academic Instrument Collections

As we plan for the future of this integrated effort at collection, preservation, scholarship, and teaching, it is helpful to understand the direction and structure of the two most similar enterprises: those in Oxbridge, the Whipple and the Old Ashmolean. The Whipple Museum was created in 1944 to preserve and display several scientific instrument collections at the University, including the teaching collection of the natural sciences tripos. Accessions over the past fifty years have strengthened the Whipple's holdings, especially in early mathematical and astronomical instruments. The collections of 19th- and 20th-century instruments, although substantial and containing many noteworthy examples, are uneven. In addition to the instrument collection, the Whipple Museum has extensive archival holdings concerning scientific instruments and scientific instrument makers, including much published and unpublished material from the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, the foremost British maker of the late 19th and early 2Oth centuries. By way of comparison, the Whipple has roughly 2700 square feet of gallery space and 1800 square feet of storage.

It has been crucial that the Whipple adjoins the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Whipple Library of the History of Science in Free School Lane, the former Physical Chemistry section of the old Cavendish Laboratory (for similar reasons we are designing our space to integrate the collection with the academic department.) This adjacency has allowed easy access to instruments, archives, and library resources, has made Cambridge an especially productive source of the new instrument-sensitive historiography of science. For example, between 1992 and 1995 special funding supported a museum-centered project with two Cambridge faculty members and three postdoctoral fellows. Along with a substantial array of publications, the exhibit "Project on Innovation in Germany and Britain, 1870- 1920" displayed the research in two exhibitions visited by several thousand people from throughout Europe and the United States.

Teaching too, is facilitated by the close proximity of the lecture and seminar rooms to the collection. This has made it possible to integrate the demonstration and examination of instruments and materials into lectures and seminar discussions in a relatively easy and uncomplicated manner as particular interests and needs arise. Cambridge offers, for example, a two-term lecture undergraduate survey course in scientific instruments. More recently, a course in "historical replications" of scientific experiments has been added, offered to advanced undergraduates and graduate students--these include Coulomb's torsion balance, Joule's paddle wheel experiment for the mechanical equivalent of heat, etc. using either original or precise replicas. Along with these courses, the British Academy of Sciences has supported the transfer of images and texts to CD-ROM and the Internet. The goal here was to make the collection available for use and consultation outside of Cambridge as a "Virtual Teaching Collection."

The Old Ashmolean Museum at Oxford features a collection significantly larger than the Whipple, including probably the world's premier collection of early scientific instruments, from the medieval period to the early 19th-century .The holdings in the 19th- and 20th-century are relatively weak, with the exception of the microscope collection, possibly the world's finest. Despite its striking architecture and solid endowment, the "Old Ashmo" has remained largely an antiquarian museum used about seventy-percent of the time as a reference collection for connoisseurs, collectors, and about thirty-percent by similarly-minded historians of scientific instruments. A large exhibition space of roughly 4500 square feet (2250 sq. ft storage) makes it possible to keep the whole collection of particular instruments on permanent display, so that a thorough comparative study can be performed.

Since the 1995 arrival of the present keeper, J. A. Bennett, formerly curator of the Whipple Museum, the Old Ashmolean has embarked on several new directions to expand its teaching and its use among a more active and mainstream community of researchers in the history of science. A new M.S. Degree course has been established to train scholars for careers in science museology or for doctoral work in the history of science. Entitled "History of Science: Instruments, Museums, Technology," the program seeks to explore the intersection of those four terms through active work in the collection. Although the museum has for a long time had a loose connection to history of science teaching at Oxford, those ties have been strengthened considerably in recent years, with the museum now beginning to play a central role in both undergraduate and graduate teaching.

1.4 Harvard: New Directions

All three university collections, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, have a wealth of exhibition pieces of great beauty and value-these include the justly-appreciated brass microscopes, telescopes, and navigational devices that adorn so many book jackets. Such objects by no means exhaust the collections. We share with Cambridge, for example, a large teaching and exhibition collection of electrical and electromagnetic devices. These can be used to understand not only the history of science teaching-such studies also help us recover just what skills the generation of Maxwel1 (for example) brought with them to their future work. Where Harvard differs from both the Whipple and Ashmolean is in its extraordinary collection of 20th-century instruments, especially in such areas as radar, radio, and psychology .

Recognizing that Harvard is not, cannot be, and should not be a miniature Smithsonian, taking everything and anything pertaining to instruments, we must be selective in what we collect now. We say this not only because scientific instruments themselves now include accelerators that enclose towns, or detectors that rival many of our buildings for size, but because the very scope of the sciences has made it impossible to harbor the ambition to do everything. Our goal instead is, in the first instance, to maintain our powerful early modern repertoire, while collecting further important 19th and 20th-century instruments and archives that have an intimate relationship with Harvard and its affiliated institutions. Where size forbids preserving something in its entirety, an illustrative component could serve as well. Where the replication and variation of devices make comprehensiveness impossible, we would choose to focus on prototypes or exploratory models. For example, it is unimaginable to collect instances of every electrophoresis device ever produced, but we could think of acquiring the early analytical apparatus with the
laboratory notebooks, proposals, photographs, and correspondence that went with them (perhaps the model used by Harvard professor, Matthew Meselson in his classic experiments with Stahl.)

It is our great good fortune that medical instrumentation, a subject of wide interest and importance, is already being handled at HMS. This makes it possible for us to borrow crucial instrumentation on an as-needed basis, without trying to assemble a large permanent collection of such objects. Given our commitment to maintaining strong links between the history of science and the history of medicine, we should be able, periodically, to mount exhibits of specific medical interest (such as the technologies of birthing). Another example of possible coordination comes in the area of computer hardware and software, both of immense import. It is doubtful that we could ever become competitive with the Babbage museum for the history of computation, IBM’s own internal collection, or the Boston Computer Museum. Where we do have strength--for example in Aiken's apparatus and papers--we should work to enhance what is there, and borrow what is needed for specific purposes as we go.

To maximize our strengths and minimize waste and replication, we thus conclude that where we should invest--and can, for relatively little expenditure-is in the preservation and deepening of our collection of essential experimental scientific instruments and their accompanying archives from the various sciences at or connected to Harvard.