Historical images of women using scientific instruments

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Biologist Beatrice Mintz (b. 1921), with microscope. Photograph: Smithsonian Institution/flickr

 

There is something about one of my Pinterest boards that seems to have caught the imagination. It is, as the platform allows, simply a way of collecting and displaying images that I have culled from elsewhere across the internet, hitting a particular theme. This one is called Women using scientific instruments.

At present, it is only 42 images, from the 14th century to the 1970s, the majority coming from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. It has largely been created by chance and targeted Googling and offers no narratives and little interpretation. Yet it seems to have provided something that at least some people were looking for.

I started it some time back. Having written a blogpost including an image of putti using scientific instruments, I got into conversation with Danny Birchill on Twitter and mentioned that this had once been a fairly common trope and that, pre-19th century, images of people actually using scientific instruments were relatively rare. Danny was prompted to make his own Pinterest board, Putti of Science (there are many other examples).

This was my introduction to Pinterest, and I set about creating some history of science-themed boards myself. I hadn’t really promoted them but, after happening to mention it on Twitter, Alice Bell tweeted:

Historian of science, @beckyfh has a ‘women using scientific instruments’ board on Pinterest. And it’s a delight.http://www.pinterest.com/beckyfh1/women-using-scientific-instruments/

And it took off from there, with lots of re-tweets and follows on the board. As well as Alice’s “it’s a delight”, comments included “This is so great I may not sleep tonight”, “This gives me goosebumps” and “1st time I understand Pinterest”. I am not sure I have ever put together anything that seems to have had such an overwhelmingly positive response.

It is particularly interesting for me to have been part of this, given that I have sometimes found problems with the way that women in the history of science have been celebrated. Historical facts are rather too often ignored in favour of good stories and the creation of scientific heroes. Yet, the response to this set of images helps remind me how much women in science and science communication need to see themselves reflected in history.

It is also, as someone pointed out on Twitter with a link to this hilarious gallery of stock photography of women, a perfect response to the way women are so often depicted in the media. On my board I have eschewed the modern, posed images of “female scientist” and “woman with test tube”, and instead have largely gathered images of women who actually made use of the instruments they are shown with.

For me, it’s also important than only a few of these women are well known. This is not about creating heroines of science, or making any sort of claim beyond the fact that these particular women were there. It remains obvious that there are far more historical images of men with scientific instruments, and the images also show that women’s experience of science was often mediated by men. But this, and the fact that for much of history they were more likely to be part of the audience or figuring as a muse, should be recalled rather than swept under the carpet.

I, however, will remember the response to this simple collection. It was an excellent reminder that the past does not just belong to historians.

• Rebekah Higgitt will be speaking as part of a panel on Doing Women’s History in a Digital Age at the Women in Science Research Network conference this May. Comment here or tweet her @beckyfh with suggestions for the Pinterest board.

First catch your spider: astronomical arachnids

Cross-posted from The H Word.

Spiders have played a key role in the history of astronomy. This is not simply in being creatures that have kept vigil with the nocturnal astronomer, who is inspired, Robert-the-Bruce-like, by their skill and tenacity, but something far more fundamental.

Spider silk was sufficiently fine, sufficiently uniform and sufficiently strong to be used in the focus of a telescope’s eyepiece for precise measurement. Rather than cross-hairs, astronomers spoke of “wires”, against which the position of a star might be read. Several such spider-silk “wires” or “threads” might help time the transit of a star across the local meridian or, moveable, help measure the distance between binary stars.

Looking the other day for something else, I was pleased to come acrossan 1894 article in the journal of the British Astronomical Association by one of the Royal Observatory’s assistants, E Walter Maunder, that was a how-to guide to “Making a Spider Line Reticule”.

My headline is taken from Maunder, who refers to “Mrs Glasse“, whoseThe Art of Cookery was famously supposed to have instructed readers to “First catch your hare”. In the spirit of the best how-to and make-and-mend housewife, Maunder was sharing his knowledge as money-saving advice for those who could not afford a professionally made filar micrometer. That said, spiders were being caught and used by astronomers at Greenwich for years, and were to be until at least the 1950s.

Unlike Mrs Glasse, Maunder had some hints on animal capture. The spider required was Epeira diadema, “the handsome coronetted spider of our gardens”, although “she has no astronomical monopoly” and an ordinary house spider might do. As he says, “The best time for a raid is the month of October” – until it recently turned cold I spotted many beautiful garden spiders with magnificent webs even in uninspiring urban front gardens.

To catch and keep your spider, she should be “lifted out of her web and placed in a small paper bag, the bag being closed by gently twisting up its mouth. Any number of spiders may be secured and kept ready for use when required if each one is imprisoned in a separate bag.”

Next comes the crucial step, with the acquisition of a “fork”, aka “a piece of wire bent into the shape of a U”, about 12-15 inches long, with the two points about 3 inches apart; “of sufficient width, that is, to well overlap the frame to be webbed, so as to give enough tension to the webs to keep them straight”.

Just previous to winding, the fork should be coated with the usual commercial “brown hard varnish.” The operator then mounts on a stool, so as to give his spider a further drop, places his fork ready to his hand, and taking the paper bag in his left hand, and a small straight piece of wood, gently lifts out the spider. The operator then takes the fork, and when the spider has dropped two or three feet, puts in his fork, and gently winds up, pushing forward the fork as it is rotated, so that the thread lies on it in a zig-zag manner. Other forks may be filled if the spider is in the humour for spinning. If Arachne is inclined, however, to be obstinate, gently blow on her with a full steady breath…

The filled forks were to be placed vertically for about an hour, after which time it was possible to pack them away in boxes until required.

Maunder’s article then carefully describes the process of fitting the threads to a frame, and fixing them at a proper tension with some more varnish – applied, he suggests, with another unlikely astronomical instrument: a knitting needle.

Of such things – and sealing wax and string – are the most distinguished careers made.

The tale of a telescope

In this month’s Journal for the History of Astronomy I have a book review of Richard Gillespie’s The Great Melbourne Telescope – a book I enjoyed reading and a review I enjoyed writing.

The Great Melbourne Telescope. Richard Gillespie (Museum Victoria Publishing, Melbourne, 2011). Pp. 188. AUD 29.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-92183-305-2.

This readable and well-illustrated book takes a journey that begins in 1840s Ireland and passes through the astronomical élites of Victorian Britain, colonial Australian society and twentieth-century international collaborative research programmes. The telescope that provides the focus of this story is both a remarkable physical pres- ence and an object of different meanings in the minds of those who dreamed it up, designed it, built it, worked with it or simply visited it. The cast of characters who swiftly cross these pages include British princes, a Fenian agitator, colonial officials and, of course, astronomers major and minor.

Gillespie commendably handles this broad canvas and the specific or more technical details. The content, bibliography and endnotes are proof of knowledge and research that is woven well into an engaging narrative, only occasionally weighted down with the detail necessary to explain the frequent delays and pauses that characterized the history of this telescope. Each chapter opens with a section of semi-dramatized storytelling that, although it felt a little artificial with repetition, works to keep the reader’s interest and, more importantly, to focus attention on telling episodes.

Thus the first chapter opens on a cold night in Ireland, with Lord Rosse, Sir James South and Thomas Romney Robinson observing with Rosse’s ‘Leviathan’. These men, the ambitious telescope and the aim of resolving disputes about the nature of nebulae form the story’s background. The southern hemisphere beckoned as a field that, despite John Herschel’s work, remained relatively unexplored, and with climates more promising than Ireland’s for the use of large mirrored telescopes. Rosse and Robinson, while President of the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science respectively, had their moment in 1852 to create the joint Southern Telescope Committee.

The published correspondence of this committee presents the historian with a wonderful resource to explore the currents of astronomical research, telescope design, politics and personalities. Disagreements caused delay as did, almost fatally to the project, the Crimean War. It took intense lobbying from the colonies to revive the project, and so enters, in the second chapter, the bounding figure of William Wilson, an ambitious, undiplomatic professor of mathematics in Melbourne. Gillespie’s account of society in colonial Victoria is particularly well drawn, with a sense of its burgeoning development until depression hit late in the century. It is a place where names and fortunes could be made, where local, colonial and national identities were consciously developed, and where a large telescope could make a big statement.

The following two chapters open with the drama of casting the telescope’s mirror at Thomas Grubb’s Dublin workshop, and with the Melbourne Observatory’s director, Robert Ellery, writing to explain the difficulties encountered working the telescope at a distance from British and Irish expertise. Not until chap. 5 and the 1870s do we see “The telescope at work” in a regular, satisfying manner, although problems remained in finding observers, keeping the mirrors untarnished and producing results that would justify the costs. As described in the following chapter, however, justification was also found in telescope’s symbolic role within Melbourne and beyond. From the beginning, monthly open evenings were held, and the telescope’s educative, or public relations, role as “the city’s scientific icon” (p. 119) should not be underestimated.

The affection felt for this instrument explains its final chapter. While economic slowdown and changing priorities meant that it was largely unused in the first half of the twentieth century, its symbolic importance, along with claims of economy, let to its post-war “Rebirth”. Twice it was completely remodelled, with increasingly automated operation and a new mirror collecting light for analysis by a host of instru- ments. Where once the observer tackled the telescope manually, trained his eye to see and interpret the faint light of nebulae, and recorded his impressions in drawing and lithograph, now the Great Melbourne Telescope’s light was analysed by computer in the search for evidence of dark matter.

This new life was ended by a bushfire in 2003. This disaster has, however, given Victoria’s Museum and Astronomical Society the opportunity to reunite the original Grubb axes and bearings with parts of the telescope long-since removed. Because of the desire to use the instrument for public observing sessions, it will be fitted with new mirrors and finding system, creating a curious hybrid, like most of our working historical telescopes. While astronomical research continues onward to ever-larger reflectors, this instrument will play its old role of engaging the public with astronomy. And as Richard Gillespie’s enjoyable book makes clear, it should also lead visitors to consider Australia’s astronomical heritage, tied closely as it is to the history of the nation itself. The telescope’s story is one worth telling.

More than transitory interest: an instrument of note

Slightly belatedly, here’s a cross-posting of my last post on the Longitude Project blog, which takes a closer look at a significant astronomical relic:

A lesson quickly learned in the world of museum collections and displays – perhaps especially in history of science and technology collections – is that the appeal and aesthetics of an object only rarely match the interest of their story. It has been rightly stated that in many cases when an instrument has made its way into a museum collection, it is probably because it not much used for its ostensible function: it has been admired and collected rather than used, broken and thrown away. [Read more]

Touching and feeling: Henry Moyes redux

Further to my last post, I have had a number of suggestions about what it is that the 18th-century natural philosophy lecturer Henry Moyes is holding in his portrait. In addition to those given in comments there, my thanks go to Rebecca Pohancenik, Tim Skellett, Alan (Gamma Counter), Charlotte Frost, Thony Christie and Ian Hopkinson for further suggestions. Chemical flask or, rather, measuring cylinder is the most popular suggestion. It must be said that it hardly looks as if the object is made of glass, but the shape is absolutely right. But see these 18th- (right) and 19th-century (left) examples from the NMSI Collections website for comparison:

Such an object is apt for a chemist (although perhaps not as iconic as the flask, or, later, test tube) but it begs the question: how would a blind man use a measuring cylinder? I can’t think that Russell, the artist, would have just given Moyes a standard bit of chemical kit as an attribute, since his ability to perform chemical experiments despite his blindness was key to his renown. As I suggested in the comment below, perhaps he had added a modification that allowed him to measure a device pushed up by the height of the liquid or, indeed, a hydrometer? If this is the case, though, the key part appears to be missing.

Going back over my previous post, I also realised that the link I had provided to another portrait, or caricature, of Moyes was not working, so here is the image in question. It is by John Kay, who published it with the biographical sketch I quoted.

We have the darkened glasses, a candle, handkerchief and bottle. I am not sure what the thing on the right might be (suggestions again, please!) and am also intrigued by the fact that Moyes seems to be enumerating something on his fingers as he talks.

Googling my way around some of these issues, I came across some further references to Moyes. Particularly interesting was a paper, read before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1782. This was by George Bew, a physician and, at some time, Vice President of the Society. Entitled ‘Observations on Blindness, and on the Employment of the Other Senses to Supply the Loss of Sight‘, it lauded man’s gift of sight, but also the fact that its loss was compensated to some degree by the heightening of the other senses, particularly hearing and touch. Anecdotal in nature, the paper referred to a number of individual examples, including Moyes, “the elegant reader on philosophical chemistry”.

Bew notes that many members at the Manchester Lit and Phil had attended Moyes’s lectures and were personally acquainted with him. Bew himself says that he enjoyed an “agreeable intimacy, and frequent intercourse” with him, which gave him:

an opportunity of repeatedly observing the peculiar manner, in which he arranged his ideas, and acquired his information. Whenever he was introduced into company, I remarked, that he continued some time silent. The sound directed him to judge of the dimensions of the room, and the different voices, of the number of persons that were present. His distinction, in these respects, was very accuate; and his memory so retentive, that he seldom was mistaken. I have known him instantly recognize a person, on first hearing him speak, though more than two years had elapsed since the time of their last meeting. He dertermined, pretty nearly, the stature of those he was speaking with, by the direction of their voices; and he made tolerable conjectures, respecting their tempers and dispositions, by the manner in which they conducted their conversation.

Bew went on to say, however, that Moyes was not in fact completely blind:

The rays refracted through a prism, when sufficiently vivid, produced certain distinguishable effects on [his eyes]. The red gave him a disagreeable sensation, which he compared to the touch of a saw. As the colours declined in violence, the harshness lessened, until the green afforded a sensation that was highly pleasing to him; and which he described, as conveying an idea similar to what he felt, in running his hand over smooth polished surfaces.

There seems something very theatrical in this claim, and I can certainly imagine it going down well in one of his lectures. I would be interested to know how common this sort colour-specific sensation might be. I think it is clear, though, that Moyes found it important to develop means of communicating with his audiences and acquaintances in a way that made them credit his observations [sic] and judgement. Bew goes on:

Polished surfaces, meandering streams, and the gentle declivities, were the figures, by which he expressed his ideas of beauty. Rugged rocks, irregular points, and boisterous elements, furnished him with expressions for terror and disgust. He excelled in the charms of conversation; was happy in his allusions to visual objects; and discoursed on the nature, composition, and beauty of colours, with pertinence and precision.

Bew concludes that “Doctor Moyes was a striking instance of the power, the human soul possesses, of finding sources of satisfaction, even under the most rigorous calamities” and that, “though destitute of other support than his genius, and under the mercenary protection of a person, whose integrity he suspected [Ed. Could this have been Adam Smith?] – still Dr. Moyes was generally chearful, and apparently happy”.

I hope he was, genuinely as well as generally, happy. He was clearly a remarkable man.