Forty Years of Scientific Instrument Studies

Since 1981, the Scientific Instrument Commission has provided a forum for annual international discussion of topics close to the hearts of those caring for and researching historic scientific instruments. During these years, increasing professionalisation of curatorship and deepened engagement by historians have led to important changes in these roles.
This volume is a cornucopia illustrating how instrument studies have changed and flourished over the past forty years. Four chapters review the work of the Scientific Instrument Commission by decade. The remaining chapters consider the historiography of instrument studies, the cataloguing of collections, historic instruments in exhibitions and educational settings, national trends, and the impact of new media. This book includes twenty smaller, in-depth “Fingerposts”, or colourfully illustrated vignettes, presenting significant artefacts selected to span the spread of historical instrumentation through time and geography. They demonstrate the variety of historical questions and thematic analyses that can be explored through close inspection of particular scientific instruments.

Contributors are R.G.W. Anderson, Sara J. Schechner, Richard L. Kremer, David Pantalony, Boris Jardine, A.D. Morrison-Low, Giorgio Strano, Jean-François Gauvin, Sofia Talas, Pedro Raposo, and Floor Koeleman.

Sara J. Schechner, Ph.D. (1988), Harvard University, is Curator Emerita of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University, retiring in 2024 after twenty-four years of service. She has been Secretary of the Scientific Instrument Commission (2003-2013) and currently serves on the Editorial Board for the Scientific Instrument Commission’s series Scientific Instruments and Collections (SICo). She is the author of Time of Our Lives: Sundials of the Adler Planetarium (2019), co-author of Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (2015), and co-editor of Failed Historical Scientific Instruments (2024).

Richard L. Kremer, Ph.D. (1984), Harvard University, is Professor Emeritus of History at Dartmouth College, where he taught history of science and curated the institution’s collection of historic scientific instruments. He served as President of the Scientific Instrument Commission from 2018-2021, co-edited Instruments on Display (2014), co-authored Study, Measure, Experiment: Stories of Instruments at Dartmouth College (2005), and has published extensively on medieval astronomical instruments and tables.