Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sara J. Schechner ,  Richard L. Kremer
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   11
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.722kg
ISBN:  

9789004737570

ISBN 10:   900473757
Pages:   360
Publication Date:   04 December 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Figures and Tables XI Notes on Contributors XV Introduction: Forty Years of Scientific Instrument Studies  Sara J. Schechner and Richard L. Kremer Chapters 1 The 1980s  Robert G.W. Anderson 2 The Scientific Instrument Commission in the 1990s  Sara J. Schechner 3 The Scientific Instrument Commission in Its Third Decade, 2000–2009  Richard L. Kremer 4 One Object, Many Worlds: the Scientific Instrument Commission in the 2010s  David Pantalony 5 Transactional Tales: Historiography and Scientific Instrument Studies  Boris Jardine 6 Expansion, “Globalisation,” and National Trends  Sofia Talas 7 Forty Years of Cataloguing Historic Scientific Instruments  A.D. Morrison-Low 8 Forty Years of Permanent and Temporary Exhibitions: a Curator’s Meditation  Giorgio Strano

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Author Information

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.

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