3. Astronomical Instruments at Harvard
3.1 The Current Collection

Harvard College has one of the oldest continuous traditions of astronomy in America. Telescopes survive from the 18th-century , from even before the disastrous fire of 1764. These include the 1740 Short telescope depicted in the large Copley portrait of John Winthrop and currently exhibited below the portrait in the Winthrop House Library, and the Hancock telescope of 1761, now on permanent loan to us from the Kensington Science Museum. In addition, archival records attest to the astronomical computational skills of early Harvard students.

With the founding of Harvard College Observatory in the late 1830s, astronomy moved into the research forefront in the College. The Great 15" Refractor remained a twin of the world's largest refractor for a decade, and today it remains as the only major telescope of the Fraunhofer-Maher-Merz tradition still in situ on its original foundation and relatively unaltered. In recent years the Observatory has invested nearly $100,000 to resheath the dome and to maintain the structure of the Sears Tower, but has been frustrated in its efforts to raise a comparable sum for the restoration of this historic telescope and to build secure exhibit areas in the dome and adjacent spaces. In any event, the preservation steps preserve the possibility that the telescope can actually be used, something of essential importance for historians of instruments.

The ancillary instruments used, for example, in the great photometric and spectrum surveys for which HCO became famous around the turn of the century have for the most part disappeared from Harvard's possession. When there were no longer working instruments at the Observatory (but of potential significance to war-ravaged countries), one was sent to China and two others to Poland in the aftermath of World War II. The principal parts of the great 24-inch Bruce telescope, used in Peru and in South Africa, have been returned to the Observatory and are in storage at the Oak Ridge Station at Harvard, Mass. Most of the smaller instruments (transits, etc.) have been taken over by the Historical Scientific Instruments Collection, but the collection has no space for larger pieces such as the Clark doublet lens of the Bruce telescope, or its tailpiece.

The large pendulum clocks of the Observatory were saved from dispersal by swift action on David Wheatland's part in the mid-1950s, and together with earlier Observatory clocks repurchased by Wheatland now represent an important part of the Collection's array of timepieces. Today the world's most accurate clocks (hydrogen maser clocks) are made at the Center for Astrophysics; these are important objects that should be represented in the collection.

One large Observatory collection of major historical importance is the library of photographic plates. Like taxonomic specimens in the Herbarium or MCZ, they are not only historical but also a live working research resource. These are backed up by an extensive series of observing record books, and well as by the workbooks used by Annie J. Cannon for the monumental Henry Draper Catalogue of Spectral Types.

3.2 Considerations for Future Collecting

In 1956, the arrival of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory brought Cambridge astronomy into the forefront of scientific computing, and for many years the observatories sponsored the largest and fastest computer center in New England. Most of the hardware is no longer here. However, computer programs still survive, and probably samples. We may want to pursue archives relating to the satellite tracking effort, the standard earth, and the theoretical construction of stellar atmospheres, areas in which the observatories excelled in the 1960s. Assuming appropriate storage space, the collection should also consider acquiring one of the Baker-Nunn satellite tracking cameras.

Much observatory effort in the 1970s and 80s went into space programs; the space hardware that stayed at home on earth is probably better collected by the Smithsonian. However, relating to the interpretation of space data has been the "shock tube lab" where a continual set of experiments has supplied atomic and molecular parameters. Probably little of that equipment has been specifically preserved, but now is the time to act to save the historical record of these experiments.

A major new thrust of the Center for Astrophysics developed in the 1980s with the advent of the High Energy Division. We will certainly want to consult the X-ray and Gamma-ray astronomers concerning instrumentation or related computer developments as to hardware and software that should be preserved. At the same time, solid state electronics brought a new efficiency to ground-based observations, so that the 61-inch telescope at Oak Ridge has collected more useful photons in the past decade than in its entire previous existence (since 1930). There is much ancillary electronic material that could be collected in this area. For example, the RCA 1P21 photometer tube recently donated to the collection, for several decades the workhorse of astronomical photometry, is typical of small but highly significant items that should be preserved.


4. 19th- and 20th-Century Behavioral and Life Sciences

While Harvard currently has a large collection of instruments in experimental psychology and ancillary fields, we believe the time is ripe for a strategic acquisition plan that would allow us to expand our conceptual focus in two critical directions: brain science and physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology .These are both areas that have seen an unprecedented burgeoning of technical developments over the past seventy plus years; both represent fields of current intense activity at Harvard and elsewhere, and open up exciting long-term collaborative research and teaching possibilities between the history of science and faculty across the university. Moreover, the historical prominence of the Harvard faculty in pioneering many of these instruments, as well as the rapid turnover in the technology itself, significantly enhances the likelihood of cost-effective acquisition in these areas.

There is currently no other collection of scientific instruments in the world that has systematically invested in the areas proposed above. The integrated conceptual and pedagogical goal of our proposed acquisition vision will be to illuminate the role of instruments and tools in the quantifying and reductionist thrust of the life and mind sciences in the 20th-century .There is considerable interest among our faculty, not only in the role played by these objects in the intellectual development of experimental practice and discovery, but also in their metaphorical resonances, rhetorical power, and practical extensions into broader social and cultural domains, including industry, education and the clinic.

4.1 Brain science

The thematic emphasis of this proposed expansion into the brain sciences should be on instruments that aim to be revelatory of living brain (or even mind) functioning, rather than on anatomical or neurological diagnostic tools. One can imagine classifying the instruments we have in mind here in two primary ways: "imaging" instruments, and "probing" instruments. Examples of the former include everything from early Victorian phrenology busts to 19th-century functional cartographies of the cerebral cortex, preparatory and staining equipment developed to reveal the functional architecture of the neuron, early electroencephalogram (BEG) equipment and images, simulations and robotic models from the early years of artificial intelligence that aimed to simulate intelligent brain functioning, and more recent imaging instruments driving the current neuroscience "revolution" (not all of which need to be acquired in full force) such as CT, PET, SPENT, and functional MCI. Examples of the latter include microelectrodes developed in the 1950's to measure the activity of single neurons in response to external stimuli (a technological innovation that transformed fundamental aspects of brain research), and instruments for performing brain surgery (including psychosurgery). More indirect "probes" of brain function at the interface of brain and behavioral science, such as the tachistoscopes and experimental setups developed for the Nobel Prize-winning "split-brain" research, would provide some exciting bridges back to the collection of instruments in experimental psychology currently in our possession.

4.2 Molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology

The development of physiology, biochemistry and later molecular biology from the late 19th-century through the 20th-century to the present has witnessed key changes in practice and conception. The overall tendency in the development and use of instruments has been to reduce complex biological/"living" phenomena to fundamentally physical constructs. This has been achieved through increasingly successful moves to measure and quantify biological activities; to use and adapt instruments and practices from physics and chemistry for the examination of the activities of living systems, and identifying the physical components of those systems; and to treat living systems, especially their structure, metabolism and reproduction, in molecular terms. The revolution brought about at mid-century by the rise of molecular biology has been closely tied to important instrumental developments, as well as critical experimental practices. These instruments are not yet represented in any of the Harvard collections. The Physiology Department at Harvard cared enough about instruments used in teaching to establish the Harvard Physiological Apparatus Company in the late 19th-century .

The collecting rationale in the life sciences will be focused on instruments still extant in the laboratory or only recently retired from use. Some of the instruments are actually an ensemble of instruments brought from chemistry or physics and adapted for new tasks.

The collection may serve several functions--as exhibits of the artifacts of historic experiments; as tools for teaching about the instrument/life interface; for reproducing classic experiments; and as artifacts to be reconstructed by scholars and students trying to understand how the instruments worked and what constraints and limits they imposed on understanding and explanation of living systems.

Instruments from experimental physiology and plant physiology quantifying/measuring instruments: (kymographs, calorimeters, galvanometers, auxonometers, manometers)

Advanced microscopy light microscopy-- florescence, phase-contrast, electron microscope ( old RCA)


Biochemical and molecular biological instruments electrophoresis apparatus (pre-W.W.II Tiselius and post-war Klett, etc.) pH meter ion-exchange amino-acid analyzer paper and gas-flow chromatography analytical ultracentrifuge autoradiograph scintillation counter spectrophotometer x-ray diffraction apparatus chromosome map, demonstration models of molecules, e.g., double helix models,early sequencing machine nuclear magnetic resonance instrument