“Scientific Instrument Makers and Material Identities in the Metropolis”

Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (University of Cambridge)

This paper explores how scientific instrument makers in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century London fashioned social and professional identities through diverse material cultures. The significance of artisans who designed and crafted scientific instruments, and constructed experimental apparatus, has been acknowledged by instrument specialists (e.g. Taylor, 1954; Turner, 1994), but the wider cultural importance of these craftsmen, and their strategies of self-promotion, have been largely overlooked within histories of culture and science. Studies of artisanal identities and material cultures have also focused upon Italy, Germany and the Netherlands (Pamela Smith, 2006). Taking the commercially and intellectually diverse metropolis of London as its focus, this paper shows how makers of scientific instruments articulated skill and knowledge through the design, materials, and precision of the hand-wrought tools themselves. In addition, the material collections of the city’s livery companies, including paintings, textiles, and the interior decoration of livery halls, reveal how collective professional identities were presented to civic audiences. Drawing on the under-researched collection of scientific instruments held at the Science Museum, London, and the material culture collections of the city livery companies, to which most scientific instrument makers belonged, this paper uncovers the centrality of material things to the commercial and social advantage of city artisans.

“The Spectacle Makers’ Company and London’s Scientific Institutions”

Rebekah Higgitt (University of Kent)

Historians of science are well acquainted with many of the Fellowship and Masters of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers (f. 1629), and with some of the occasions on which they interacted with sites of elite scientific knowledge, including the Royal Society, Royal Observatory and Board of Longitude. In general, however, they have been considered individually, and the extent to which these men used the Company to develop a collective identity and presentation of themselves externally has been overlooked. Historians have also more often noted quarrels among Spectacle Makers’– whether between former masters and apprentices (e.g. Baker, 2017) or the Company as a whole and Peter Dollond (Gee, 2014) – than their more collective, ceremonial or outward-looking roles. In large part this is because the role of London’s Livery Companies in trade regulation was in decline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, the nature of the instrument trade meant that makers found it necessary to work and find credibility well beyond their guild (Stewart, 2005). Yet the guilds persisted and, in the case of the Spectacle Makers’, were represented by many eminent scientific instrument makers. This paper will attempt to resituate some of the well-known names within the craft and civic contexts of the Spectacle Makers’ Company, considering what role it played for them, the extent to which it helped to develop a collective identity for opticians and optical instrument makers, and whether this played a role when artisans cooperated, negotiated and consulted with scientific institutions.

“London Instruments Overseas: the International Use and Reputation of Eighteenth-century London Scientific Instruments”

Noah Moxham (University of St. Andrews)

This paper examines the circulation of scientific instruments from eighteenth-century London, and their role in projecting an idea of London as a scientific metropolis. It explores the various uses for which instruments were circulated – among other things, as showpieces, as a means of standardising observations between localities, or to promote particular scientific ideas. Various types of institutions as well as private individuals were involved in this circulation, including the instrument-makers themselves, official scientific bodies, and the joint-stock trading companies. In many cases the interested parties – the sender, recipient, and user, to say nothing of sponsors and intermediaries – had competing ideas about the purpose of the circulation, especially where instruments circulated across borders: an attempt to gather useable international meteorological data, for instance, could also be read, and resisted, as an effort to impose one nation’s standards upon others. Equally, the high international reputation of the London instrument trade could be exploited by organisations such as the Royal Society to bolster their own reputations by metropolitan association with a profession its members tended to treat as ancillary at best. By exploring the circulation of instruments beyond the city of their making, and by taking a holistic view of that process, this paper hopes to provide an outline for thinking about how a metropolis might signify in early modern and enlightenment science.