Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Making - Hardcover

Turner, Gerard L'E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198565666 ISBN 13: 9780198565666

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Europe in the sixteenth century experienced a period of unprecedented vitality and innovation in the spheres of science and commerce. The Americas had been discovered and the colonizing nations had an urgent need for mathematical instruments for navigation and surveying. In 1540 the Elizabethan age saw the establishment of the precision instrument-making trade in London, a trade that would become world-famous in the succeeding two centuries. The mathematical instruments needed by astronomers, navigators, and surveyors owe much of their development to the work of the Flemish mathematician and astronomer, Gemma Frisius, and to the map and globe maker, Gerard Mercator, both of whom studied at Louvain. However it was Thomas Gemini who is credited with starting the London trade in 1540: his reputation came from making the plates for his own printing of the Anatomy of Vesalius, and the astrolabs he made and presented to Edward VI and Elizabeth I, which survive today. He was followed by Humphrey Cole, and other makers whose instruments have survived, including Ryther, Knyvyn, and Whitwell. This book first describes the context in which the Elizabethan trade began, and the influence of the instruments taken to Florence by Sir Robert Dudley in 1606. The second part catalogues in detail every surviving instrument from this period, signed and unsigned, that has been traced. The catalogue is accompanied by fine photographs which illustrate both the instruments and the techniques used to identify unsigned instruments.

About this title

About the Author:

Gerard L'E. Turner is Senior Research Associate at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. He is one of the UK's foremost authorities on scientific instruments, and has been the recipient of a number of awards and prizes.

Review:

"Gerard Turner's work on the instrument-makers of Elizabethan England is ... [a] detailed catalogue, treating the work of a group of makers, rather than a particular form of instrument. The catalogue is introduced by a series of short chapters detailing various aspects of the English instrument-making trade during this period. ... The remaining two-thirds of the book are devoted to a catalogue of 103 instruments, and the importance of this contribution to the study of instruments cannot be overstated. For the first time, all known instruments by sixteenth-century maker Elias Allen are also included ... Introductory material to each entry provides information on the date, maker, signature and size of the object ... Tables of latitudes, perpetual calendars and star positions are reproduced carefully to permit comparison of the information provided here with contemporary and modern data."--British Journal for the History of Science

"Elizabethan Instrument Makers is a splendid scholarly work, reinforcing as it does the importance of instruments as fundamental cultural artefacts, and Professor Turner must be applauded for his achievement. And very appropriately, the book is dedicated to the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, which most definitely is, as Gerard Turner describes it, a locus mirabilis."--Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0198565666
• ISBN 13: 9780198565666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 330