SIS Bulletin Issue 77

Scientific Instrument Society Home Contents Index Find Help Bulletin No.77 June 2003 Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society ISSN 0956-8271 ForTable of Contents,see back cover President GerardTurner Vice-President Howard Dawes Honary Committee Gloria Clifton,Chairman Alexander Crum Ewing,Secretary Simon Cheifetz,Treasurer Willem Hackmann,Editor Peter de Clercq,Meetings Secretary Ron Bristow Tom Lamb Tom Newth Alan Stimpson Sylvia Sumira Trevor Waterman Membership and Administrative matters The Executive Officer (Wg Cdr Geoffrey Bennett) 31 High Street Stanford in the Vale Faringdon Tel:01367 710223 Fax:01367 718963 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Oxon SN7 8LH </li><li style="flex:1">e-mail:s<a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">[email protected] </a></li></ul>See outside back cover for information on membership Editorial Matters Dr.Willem Hackmann Sycamore House The PLaying Close Charlbury Tel:01608 811110 Fax:01608 811971 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Oxon OX7 3QP </li><li style="flex:1">e-mail:w<a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">[email protected] </a></li></ul>Society’s Website www.sis.org.uk Advertising See“summary of Advertising Services’panel elsewhere in this Bulletin. Further enquiries to the Executive Officer, Design and printing Jane Bigos Graphic Design 95 Newland Mill Witney Tel:01993 209224 Fax:01993 209255 Oxon OX28 3SZ e-mail:j<a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">[email protected] </a> Printed byThe Flying Press Ltd,Witney <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">The Scientific Instrument Society is Registered Charity No.326733 </li><li style="flex:1">©The Scientific Instrument Society 2003 </li></ul>Editorial September issue.I am still interested to hear from other readers whether they think this project a good idea. which this time will be published electronically on our website.He has been very industrious on our behalf. His ‘List of Members’compilation for 2003 is added to this issue, while the single page of ‘Members’ Interests’ will be in the September Bulletin.There has been a drop in membership since the compilation of the last membership list in 2001. I urge members to renew their membership and to encourage friends and colleagues with instrumental interests to join in order to keep the Society and its Bulletin in a good state of health. Members should also be encouraged to participate in the Society’s activities as much as possible and to attend the AGM this year on Wednesday, 2nd July. There is still the opportunity for members to come forward and describe an unusual or mystery object from their collection. Please contact our Meetings Secretary, Dr Peter de Clercq on [email protected],as soon as possible.There will be a further opportunity for members to come forward with stories and objects at the two-day conference (including the AGM) to be held in Cambridge on 25th and 26th June 2004. Spring Time I am off to the States in early June for three weeks so had to make sure that this issue was ready in plenty of time.There is again a varied menu of papers and as usual, there is much food for thought for those of us instrumentally inclined.There is a snippet in David Bryden’s paper on an advertising war between London opticians in 1707 that especially took my notice – that of the fifteen apprentices booked by the instrument maker George Willdey during his career from 1708 until his death in 1737, eight were girls.This must be the opening for one of our readers of an interesting research project on women in eighteenth-century instrument making. We are at present revamping our website with a new team,and were just about ready when our host website went down thanks to a nasty piece of hacking.We are also considering interesting links to our website,so any ideas you have on that score will be much appreciated. One of the links could be to ongoing bibliography on the SIC website,which this year has reached no.20 (see Peter de Clercq,‘The Scientific Instrument Commission and its Bibliographies’, Bulletin,No.71 (2001),p.39). I look forward to receiving material for future ‘Amateur Pages’, and also for another series of‘Market Places’. More than thirty readers have responded to the flyer in the March Bulletin concerning the digitizing of back numbers on CD-roms. This project is slowly unfolding and I hope to have more positive news by the Our Executive Officer, Geoffrey Bennett, has almost completed the second part of our Bulletin Index for issues 51 to 75, Bulletin’s Cover Scientific models became an important teaching aid in the 18th century,both at university courses and in the private cabinet. Their use was wide-ranging, from teaching the laws of mechanics to demonstrating important technological devices that became increasingly important in the industrialization of Europe’s natural resources. The model of a combustion pump on this issue’s cover fits into the latter category.It is one of the items from the collection of the Stewart Museum in Montreal, Canada, which features in the delightful book and catalogue The Art of Teaching Physics : The Corrections Several errors crept into the previous issue: 1. David Baynes-Cope died on 27th December 2002 and not on 27th February as previously stated. 2. Francis Manasek lets it be known that in his letter on ‘The True Shape of California’, the paragraph:‘It is noteworthy that many prominent post-deHerrera 17th century cartographers, such the Blaeus, and Hondius, never deviated from showing California as a peninsula, either on their World maps or on their American maps’,should read:‘It is noteworthy that many prominent post-deHerrera 17th century cartographers, such the Blaeus, and Hondius, continued to show California as a peninsula in the 17th century, although they did produce a number of maps employing the island concept.A thorough examination of this cartographic phenomenon can be examined in McLaughlin,The Mapping of California as an Island (California Map Society,1995). <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Eighteenth-Century </li><li style="flex:1">Demonstration </li></ul>Apparatus of Jean Antoine Nollet, edited by Lewis Pyenson and Jean-François Gauvin,the subject of a review in this issue by David Bryden.The collection came from two sources.One group originated from the Ecole centrale in Dijon,established in 1795; the central repository in that region for instruments transferred from private institutions and confiscated from private collections during the French Revolution.The second group, including the combustion pump featured on this cover, came from another source. combustion pump was Denis Papin, who published it in 1681. It was developed for commercial use by Thomas Savery. It is, in fact, a water pump in which the action of the piston has been replaced by sprays of alternating expanding and then condensing steam.The water,fed from a rectangular tray in the base, is heated by a spirit lamp.The steam is fed into the cylindrical glass vessel where it expands thereby pushing out the water through a tube that flows into a higher basin.Next the steam in the tube is condensed by a brief controlled flow of cold water,creating a vacuum in the glass vessel, which causes fresh water to enter.The cycle is repeated until the reservoir is empty.Such compression pumps were used in mines and in circulating water from the Thames in cities like London. Savery described his machine for raising water in deep mines in The Miner’s Friend (1702). 3. In Dave Hirsch’s ‘Zig-Zag’ microscope, the illustrations for Figs 1 and 2 were reversed. 4.Finally,Paul Zoller communicates that he has made an error in his paper on the planimeter (Bulletin, No. 75.The hinge in one of the arms of the Lippincott Planimeter (Fig. 12) cannot serve to adjust the planimeter to different scales as was claimed, since the hinge is in the pole arm, and the length of the pole arm has no effect on the reading as long as the pole is outside the figure to be measured. Professor J. Fischer has also noticed this error. It is likely that the hinge is present simply to fold the instrument to a much smaller footprint for storage. French instruments of that period with their delightful ornamentation showed joie de vivre, while contemporary London instruments were often better made, but seemed rather dull and worthy by comparison.The compression pump and the other instruments described in The Art of Physics come straight from the pages of Jean Antoine Nollet’s popular physics textbooks, such as his Leçons de physique expéri- mentale (1754-66) which graced the drawing room of many a savant and physics cabinet.According to Nollet the inventor of this Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society No.77 (2003) 1Report on SIS Visit to the Royal Institution of Great Britain Friday 24th January 2003 Charles Mollan It has been on the same site since its foundation in 1799, on Albemarle Street, in Mayfair in central London.1 The Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) is still a busy centre, with a throughput of 30,000 children each year, and an extensive programme of lectures and discussions for all ages – its spring programme lists 11 events in February and 14 in March,including one on the 25th February on‘RobertWilliam Paul and Scientific Instrument Making’ by our esteemed SIS member from the Science Museum – Neil Brown. The RI is best known for its annual Christmas children’s lectures and its famous Friday Evening Discourses. (1791–1867), the book-binder’s assistant who was recruited to the RI by Davy in 1813, and who became superintendent of the house in 1821,director of the laboratory in 1833,and professor of chemistry from 1833–1867; the marble relief by Thomas Woolner of JohnTyndall (1820–1893), professor of natural philosophy from 1853–1887, and superintendent of the house from 1867–1887; and the bronze relief by Bertram Mackennal of James Dewar (1842–1923),professor of chemistry from 1877–1923. We proceeded to the Library rooms on the first floor. The Main Library room, refurbished in 1935,is particularly attractive and features a Regency gilt wood mirror. Inevitably books have taken over more rooms both on the first floor and the ground floor. In what is called the Long Library,a fireplace from the house of Joseph Banks (1743–1820), complete with a Wedgwood plaque, showing a classical scene,is preserved.Banks was President of the Royal Society from 1778–1820, and it was in his house in Soho Square that the RI was founded on 7th March 1799.The addition of the so-called Red Corridor now allows complete circulation around the inner stairwell core to all of the public spaces within the first floor5. In the Long Library andAnte-room (outside the famous lecture theatre) are more works of art, including one by Alexander Blaikley of Faraday delivering a Christmas lecture in 1855, and one by Henry Jamyn Brooks of James Dewar lecturing on liquid hydrogen in 1904 (Fig.2).TheAnte-room also displays a large Wimshurst machine and Lord Rayleigh’s large glass device for making argon. John Strutt, third Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919), succeeded Tyndall as professor of natural philosophy, and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. The key mover in the foundation of the RI was a remarkable man – Sir Benjamin <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Thompson, </li><li style="flex:1">Count </li><li style="flex:1">von </li><li style="flex:1">Rumford </li></ul>(1753–1814).As a poor but socially ambitious young man in Massachusetts ‘handsome with his bright blue eyes and dark auburn hair’2,he married a wealthy widow fourteen years older than himself in 1773, and jumped in social rank. He soon abandoned his wife and their two-month old baby daughter,and set sail for England.After an eventful and generally successful life in Europe,during which he carried out useful scientific work on such practical subjects as armaments and kitchen stoves – he was knighted by George III and created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire in Bavaria – he drew up proposals for an institution‘for diffusing knowledge…of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching.…the application of science to the common purposes of life’3.Fifty-eight of the great and good were inveigled into putting up the substantial sum of fifty guineas each to be‘Proprietors’,and the RI was founded. Fig. 1 Our host Frank James poses with our Meetings Secretary, Peter de Clercq, under a portrait of Michael Faraday in the Main Entrance. of the history of the building – how the RI in No.21Albemarle Street had expanded to take over neighbouring houses, and when bits had been added and sections refurbished.The entrance hall,where we initially assembled,refurbished in the 1920s/early 1930s, is decorated with a running stuccowork frieze depicting scientific instruments from the Institution’s collection. We proceeded to the ‘Grand Entrance’ (it used to be the main entrance) with its fine 1756 staircase,and were given details of the works of art on display, including particularly the enormous oil painting (tentatively attributed to Archer James Oliver) of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) professor of chemistry at the RI from 1802–1813 (later a rather unsuccessful President of the Royal Society from 1820–1826); the marble statue by (Dubliner!) John Henry Foley and his assistant Thomas Brock of Michael Faraday Rumford later became distracted (to the disadvantage of the RI) since he fell for, and married in 1805, Marie Anne (1758–1836), widow of Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794). Benjamin and Marie Anne separated by mutual consent in 1809. Although the scientific officers of the RI originally spent most of their time doing analyses for the Proprietors and others, in lecture giving and consultancy,in the latter On a Friday afternoon in January 2003 (there was no Discourse that evening), a group of 30 lucky officers and members of the Scientific Instrument Society assembled in Albemarle Street.Those who managed the tour were lucky because the visit was heavily over-subscribed: if you hadn’t applied early you were doomed.We were greeted by our genial host Frank James,the well-known author and editor in the history of science, who has a formidable list of responsibilities within the RI, including, ‘Keeper of Collections’(Fig.1).He was carrying his latest book The Common Purposes of Life4,just published (though it wasn’t available there to potential purchasers – which would have made this article better informed).He gave us an outline Fig. 2 Detail from painting by Henry Jamyn Brooks of James Dewar lecturing on liquid hydrogen. 2Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society No.77 (2003) part of the nineteenth century research (together with continuing lectures) became a key feature of the work of the RI.This role was enormously enhanced by a generous benefaction by the industrial chemist Ludwig Mond (1839–1909),used to endow the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory, which was opened by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1896.We were told about more scientific achievements of the RI, notably the pioneering work on x-ray crystallography by William Henry Bragg (1862–1942) and his sonWilliam Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971),both of whom became Directors of the RI.They jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. Indeed Lawrence was, and is, the youngest recipient, being only 25 years old at the time. Among collaborators with the Braggs at the RI were Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) – one of the two first woman Fellows of the Royal Society (1945) – born in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, and J.D. Bernal (1901–1971), born in Nenagh in Co.Tipperary.The only English woman to have received the Nobel Prize – Dorothy Hodgkin (1910–1994) – was also a collaborator (and a lover of J.D. Bernal6). Another Nobel Prize winning Director was George Porter (1920–2002), famous for his work on photochemistry and high-speed reactions. Porter later became President of the Royal Society, but sadly died on 31st August last year. When he retired as Director of the RI in 1985, the roles of Director of the RI and Director of the Davy-Faraday Laboratory were separated.Susan Greenfield,who had been the first woman to give the Christmas Lectures (1994/5), became also the first woman Director of the RI in 1998. She has been very successful in raising its public profile in recent years. SIS meetings book and dispersed. Footnote Count Rumford travelled to Dublin with Lord Pelham, who was Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1795–1798, and who carried out experiments in agriculture and gunpowder at his residence in Ireland‘as relaxation from the more wearisome toils of the desk’.8 Rumford spent a good deal of time in the premises of the Dublin Society (now the Royal Dublin Society – where, incidentally,I worked for 17 years).He directed the setting up of kitchens there, and he also introduced improvements in the kitchens of Irish workhouses and hospitals. He was made an honorary member of the Society for his work and an expenditure of twenty guineas was approved for a medal of Irish gold to be presented to him9.The historian of the Society10 writes: Fig. 3. Original safety lamps made by Humphrey Davy. [Rumford] was so much pleased with the lecture theatre [of the Dublin Society],and the prospect of instruction opened up by it that,on returning to London, he projected the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street. Although Berry, a Barrister-at-Law by profession,is a very reliable chronicler,there is apparently no record in the RI of this claimed influence.Certainly the initial aims of the RI and the contemporary activities of the Dublin Society (which had been founded in 1731) have striking parallels. Can anyone help with any evidence for or against? Fig.4. Voltaic pile given to Faraday b y V olta, and other apparatus. Notes and References motor constructed by Faraday;and the coil used to demonstrate the Faraday Effect (the rotation of polarised light by a magnet). Other instruments on display include electrical machines, an electric egg, Oersted’s apparatus, and many others. Faraday’s medals and decorations are on display, and there is a replica of his laboratory,complete with an air pump and chemical apparatus. As we enjoyed the museum in our own time,groups were taken to see some of the modern labs, rather small and cluttered by comparison with the public rooms, where we viewed state-of-the art apparatus for xray crystallography. 1. Gwendy Caroe, The Royal Institution – An Informal History, with a final chapter by Alban Caroe;reprint with amendments of the 1985 edition (London:John Murray,1988),p.16. 2. Sanborn C. Brown, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (Cambridge,Mass.:The MIT Press,1981),p. 16. In the corridor around the lecture theatre are displays of instruments relating to the main players in the story of the RI – including a replica of Count Rumford’s kitchen range and his coffee pot; eudiometers of Henry Cavendish (1731–1810), one of the original Proprietors of the RI (indeed the only really scientific one); original and derived Davy safety lamps (Fig. 3); vials made by Tyndall in his work on spontaneous generation, and much more. Apparently, the Faradays, although themselves childless,loved young people,and it is recorded that at one of their parties a velocipede was ridden around this corridor!7 3.FrankA.J.L.James,Guides to the Royal Institution of Great Britain: 1 – History (London: Royal Institution,2000),p.3. 4.Frank A.J.L.James,ed.,The Common Purposes of Life ’ – S cience and Society at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (Abingdon:Ashgate, 2002) ISBN 0 75460960 X,W<a href="/goto?url=http://www.ashgate.com" target="_blank">eb www.ashgate.com </a>5. Main Library and Conversation Room – one of the helpful sheets available in the various public rooms of the RI giving details of the history and significant features of each. Finally, we ended up with a very welcome cup of tea in the room where some of the apparatus from the Spottiswood collection was stored in cupboards. This collection was donated by W. Hugh Spottiswood in 1899, in honour of William Spottiswood (1825–1883),President of the Royal Society from 1878–1883. Unfortunately the cupboards were locked, but we could see an array of ‘brass and glass’ optical apparatus, including a Silbermann heliostat and a variety of mounted prisms and lenses,presumably made by Duboscq. I understand that there are plans for this collection to be housed in a new museum.After an appropriate speech of thanks to our host by the SIS Chairman,Gloria Clifton,we signed the 6. Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin - A Life (London:Granta Books,1998),p.101. 7.Caroe (note 1),p.51 8.R.B.McDowell,Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1979),p.458. The key instrument display of the RI is in the Faraday Museum in the basement, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1973 (using a Faraday coil).It is open to the public for a very modest fee. Here, to the enthusiastic commentary of Frank James, we were introduced to an original Voltaic pile given to Faraday by Volta (Fig. 4); the coil with which Faraday first demonstrated electro-magnetic induction (the one used by the Queen);a replica of the first electric 9.Proceedings of the Dublin Society, 32 (1796),pp. 126 & 145,and 33 (1797),pp.22 & 26. 10.Henry F.Berry, London:Longmans,Green & Co., 1915),p 225. Author’s address: Samton Ltd, 17 Pine Lawn Newtownpark Avenue, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland e-mail:[email protected]

SIS Bulletin Issue 77

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