Scientific Instruments on Display

During their active lives, scientific instruments generally inhabit the laboratory, observatory, classroom or the field. But instruments have also lived in a wider set of venues, as objects on display. As such, they acquire new levels of meaning; their cultural functions expand.

This book offers selected studies of instruments on display in museums, national fairs, universal exhibitions, patent offices, book frontispieces, theatrical stages, movie sets, and on-line collections. The authors argue that these displays, as they have changed with time, reflect changing social attitudes towards the objects themselves and toward science and its heritage. By bringing display to the center of analysis, the collection offers a new and ambitious framework for the study of scientific instruments and the material culture of science.

Contributors are: Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, Silke Ackermann, Marco Beretta, Laurence Bobis, Alison Boyle, Fausto Casi, Ileana Chinnici, Suzanne Débarbat, Richard Dunn, Inga Elmqvist-Söderlund, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Peggy A. Kidwell, Richard Kremer, Mara Miniati, Richard A. Paselk, Donata Randazzo, Steven Turner.

Silke Ackermann is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and President of the Scientific Instrument Commission of the IUHPS. She is particularly interested in the transfer of knowledge between the Islamic World and Europe.

Richard L. Kremer is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He has published widely on the history of early modern astronomy and on the use, production of and trade in scientific instruments.

Mara Miniati is Emeritus Curator of the Museo Galileo in Florence. She is interested in Renaissance scientific instruments and in the history of the scientific institutions.