Historic Instruments: The Scientist's Heritage Figure 1 . Science Museum, London
Most of my career has been spent in the practice and development of analytical chemistry. However, I have always had a strong interest in the methods t h a t scientists use and, even more, in the history of scientific instruments. An early association with engineering practices gave me the background needed to appreciate the ingenuity of design and beauty of construction of the output of many of the early instrument makers. Working in their usually small shops in the 18th and 19th centuries, instrument makers in London and elsewhere in Britain provided many of the instruments t h a t mapped much of the earth and t h e heavens. T h e y were active in other directions, especially in the field of metrology and, later, in electrical instrumentation. So, some 15 years ago when I decided to turn my interest into an active one, London was an obvious place in which to make a start. Fortunately, London is the location of the Science Museum, the entrance of which is shown in Figure 1. This museum, devoted entirely to science and technology, receives approximately four million visitors a year. Its vast collections cover every conceivable area from historic chemical and physical laboratory equipment through photography, machine tools, comput-
ers, locomotives and the like, to a massive collection of aircraft. T h e collections are matched by the presence of a staff of highly qualified experts. Adjacent is the Science Museum Library, of a magnitude and scope to match t h a t of the museum itself. With such facilities, it is not surprising t h a t the Science Museum is a first-class center for visiting scientists and technologists who may wish to undertake research in any branch of the history of their particular fields. The chemistry collections fascinated me even in my boyhood. T h e upshot, very much later, was a long spell in 1965 t h a t was spent in the examination of the entire collection of historic balances. Eventually these studies led to the preparation of a paperback on this subject (1 ). This has been followed by other publications (2-7) t h a t extend the work beyond its original scope. A second museum publication t h a t deals with the history of the measurement of electric current is at an advanced stage. An instrument t h a t is in a museum is of course "on record" and safe from destruction. However, as recently pointed out (8), we have a tendency to throw out the old in order to make place for the new. Checking before discarding is not a bad rule. Quite
1518 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1980
often, instruments that are clearly described in the literature, or are otherwise known to have existed, can no longer be found. Unless these "missing" items have at some time been rigorously inventoried, there is not likely to be any evidence of actual destruction. Hence the only recourse t h a t the instrument historian has is to keep on searching! From the historical point of view, the prototype of a "new" instrument, whether built in the household basem e n t or in a manufacturer's R&D facility, is more valuable than all the "latest versions" t h a t can claim the prototype as their ancestor. History is purely relative. Balances have been used for thousands of years, while mechanical timepieces and compound microscopes go back several centuries. We are down to a few decades when we are considering instruments like the gas chromatograph or the electronic X - Y recorder. With rapid developments in the field of electronics, some instruments being produced today may have a half-life of only a few years. Apart from the actual finding of the instrument, the seeker has to face two other problems. The first is to answer the question "Who used the instrum e n t ? " Because the answer is com0003-2700/80/A351-1518$01.00/0 © 1980 American Chemical Society
Report John T. Stock, Department of Chemistry, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn. 06268
monly " a scientist," this problem may not be serious. Scientists have the habit of writing papers t h a t are well indexed. And when they die, their ob ituaries often contain a wealth of in formation. T h e other problem con cerns the maker of the instrument. If we exclude comparatively modern times, this problem can be very real. T h e maker may have published a cat alog, b u t trade material probably be longed to the "junk mail" category even before regular mail came into ex istence. Normally he did not write pa pers b u t confined his literary efforts to the production of bills and trade let ters. These rarely survive long after a particular transaction has been com pleted. T h e r e are some exceptions. Some purchasers are strongly archive mind ed. An excellent example is the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which cele brated its tercentenary a few years ago. Apart from the expected astro nomical and similar records, the ar chives of the Observatory contain a fascinating collection of letters, invoices, and the like. Sir George Airy (180192) was Astronomer Royal for 46 years. Included in the great amount of material sent to him is an announce ment by Henry Barrow (1790-1870) of his taking over of the business of T h o m a s Charles Robinson (17921841). With his announcement, Bar row offered the various Robinson in struments listed in Figure 2. Sometimes the instrument maker will have troubled to have drawn up a will. If this can be located, then some clue as to the final state of his busi ness and of its disposal may come forth. Records of birth, baptism, mar riage, and death may allow the bare outline of a career to be sketched. Post office and trade directories, backed up by census records, may allow this out line to be filled in to some degree. In 1834 the British standards of weights and measures were destroyed in a fire that swept the Houses of Par liament. T h e lengthy work of the rees tablishment of the standards of mass was described by William Miller (1801-80), professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University (.9). Miller's ac count shows t h a t balances made by Robinson and by his successor Barrow were used in this work. T h e ô'/^-in beam Robinson balance, still in excel-
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lent condition, is in the University's Whipple Science Museum. On inquiring in the Department of Mineralogy in 1967,1 was shown a badly damaged and incomplete lO'/a-in beam Robinson balance that was almost certainly associated with Miller. His account of the principal instrument, "a balance of extreme delicacy procured from Mr. Barrow," indicates t h a t this balance had a beam length of approximately 15 in and could carry a kilogram in each pan. Despite my own searches and, at my instigation, those by several British instrument historians over the last dozen years, no clues concerning the whereabouts or the fate of this fundamentally important instrument have been found. Although the catalog of Robinson instruments
shows that he made 8-in beam balances, I have yet to find an example of this version. Sometimes the seeker has an agreeable surprise. From an excellent illustration in the literature (10), I had long known of a small balance with a swan-neck beam t h a t was manufactured by Robinson early in his career. After much searching, I had almost given up hope of finding an actual balance of this type. Surprisingly, an example appeared during the interval between two of my trips to the Science Museum. This balance, shown in Figure 3, is part of the Wellcome Collection of medical-pharmaceutical equipment that had been acquired by the museum. From Robinson's will we learn t h a t
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52. NO. 14. DECEMBER 1980 · 1519 A
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John Dover (1824-81) was his appren tice. Dover stuck to instrument mak ing and was awarded a medal for a Robinson-type balance that he showed in the 1851 International Ex hibition in London. Despite much searching, this balance has not been found. The two existing "Robinson & Barrow" balances show that Barrow had made small but useful modifica tions to Robinson's well-tried design. How interesting it would be to be able to see what Dover had done! A master craftsman rarely makes an exact copy, but usually introduces some modifica tion that he sees as an improvement either in design or for easier manufac ture (4). Dover's major business seems to have been in the making of survey ing instruments (11). The only instru ment known to me that appears to be John Dover's work is the dip circle shown in Figure 4. John's son, Alfred Dover, was also an instrument maker. The Science Museum has two Dover dip circles that were almost certainly made by Alfred. Sometimes we have an existing in strument, but a "missing" maker. Here I am excluding items that do not carry the maker's name or other iden tifying mark. Then there are cases where a so-called maker affixes his name in place of that of the real maker. Considerable patience is need ed to sort out problems of this kind. In the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology there is a balance that is signed "Liebricht Giessen" (5). This balance is believed to have been brought to England by Edward Schunk, who studied with Liebig
around 1840. At my request the Ger man balance expert Hans Jenemann has searched extensively for informa tion concerning Liebricht and his workshop. Any records may have van ished as a result of bombing that oc curred during World War II. Oersted's observation that a com pass needle was deflected when a wire carrying an electric current was brought near opened the way to the study of electromagnetism. Oersted's single-wire device needed a strong cur rent to get a sizable deflection of the needle. The idea of a multiple-turn
Figure 4. Dover dip circle
1520 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1980
coil as a way to higher sensitivity dawned almost simultaneously (and apparently quite independently) on three scientists—Schweigger and Poggendorf in Germany and Cumming in England. James Cumming (1777-1861) was professor of chemistry at Cambridge (12). He described both the multiturn coil and another means for increasing the sensitivity. This is the use of an external magnet to nullify much of the effect of the Earth's field. One form of this arrangement is the ancestor of the "control magnet" system used by later workers in their high-sensitivity galva nometers. It appears that Cumming independently discovered the phe nomenon now known as the Seebeck effect. Figure 5, reproduced with Cumming's own caption (13), is a heat-driven device that is really a sim ple electric motor. None of Cumming's apparatus has been found. This is not surprising, because the items were simple and probably homemade for lecture work. Europeans are not alone in "losing" historic instruments. The so-called D'Arsonval moving-coil meter dates from 1881, but the basic principle had been used much earlier (14). It ap pears that the man who "put the coil" in the moving-coil meter was an American, Charles Grafton Page (1812-68), professor of chemistry and pharmacy at Columbian College (later George Washington University). He described a real, if crude, moving-coil device in 1838 (15) and also two me ters of the moving-iron type. Figure 6, reproduced from Page's account (16), shows the later version. As far as I can ascertain, Page's meters disappeared. It appears that the Leeds and Nor-
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thrup Company made the first penrecording polarograph. In 1937 V. W. Meloche and his co-workers at the University of Wisconsin used one of these instruments along with a photo graphically recording polarograph (77). A search made by W. J. Blaedel in 1978 revealed only the latter instru ment (18). Another of these pen-re cording instruments went to the Bell Telephone Laboratories (19). Present ly nothing is known about the usage or fate of this polarograph (20). At least two leading analytical chemists have informed me of having strong memo ries of having used one of these pi oneer American instruments. It is ob vious that an item does not have to be "ancient" to have vanished! The total history of this pen-recording device is not much more than 40 years! We are more fortunate in another connection, in which an American dis covery was commercialized by the Eu ropeans. Figure 7, reproduced from a short paper by John Trowbridge, then assistant professor at Harvard Univer sity, shows a galvanometer in which the sensitivity can be altered by tilting the circular coil (21 ) . Some years later the electrical engineer E. Obach had the same idea, apparently without knowledge of Trowbridge's work (22). The Obach galvanometer, an example of which is shown in Figure 8, became a British instrument of some impor tance in the early days of the commer cial generation and transmission of electricity. On a recent visit to Har vard, D. Vaughan of the London Science Museum noticed the Trow bridge instrument and at once identi-
Figure β. Page's 1846 moving-iron galvanometer
fied it. So we have both the "proto type" and the commercial version! A major problem in the study of the history of laboratory-type instruments is the actual finding of early examples. In the case of industrial equipment, this type of problem appears to be even more acute. Part of the reason may be the speed with which such equipment has developed. Then there is the question of storage. Industrial organizations rarely have much in the way of "junk attics," so equipment is often scrapped (and hence perma nently lost) as it is replaced by later versions. One of the earliest examples of the automatic analyzer is the CO2 indica tor, used to monitor the efficiency of furnace operation (23). Figure 9 shows the Oekonometer, a CO2 monitor of the gas-density type, which is based on a German patent issued in 1893. Numerous other designs followed rap idly. Many of these are based on the measurement and recording of the de crease in volume of the gaseous sam ple when this is treated with a CO2 ab sorbent such as KOH solution. By the outbreak of the first World War, fluegas monitors were in common use. I am presently searching for early ex amples of these industrial devices. In cidentally, the concept of automatic recording is by no means modern. Ac cording to Behar (24), the recording thermometer dates back to about 1663. A reasonable amount of information concerning the ancestry of a typical "laboratory" instrument can usually be gained by thoroughly searching the
1524 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1980
Figure 7. Trowbridge's galvanometer
literature. The unraveling of the histo ry of industrial equipment seems to require rather more than this. Gener alized descriptions of instruments, control systems, and processes can often be found in appropriate periodi cals. However, the real history may be contained in the internal reports of the instrument maker or of the com pany that is operating a particular process. Sometimes, information "es capes" into the patent literature. This field is somewhat difficult for the non-
Figure 8. Obach galvanometer
specialist, b u t can be useful in specific cases where some background history has been uncovered (23). T h e n there is the approach to the practitioner. Ideally, he is a scientist or technologist of long service in the particular field of investigation. He may have retired, b u t will remember (sometimes with documentation!) "how things began." In this connection, it is indeed fortunate t h a t many important industrial instruments have quite short histories. For example, process-type gas chromatographs, infrared analyzers, and paramagnetic oxygen meters did not appear until
Figure 9. Early flue-gas C 0 2 monitor
well after the end of World War II. Figure 10, reproduced from a recent issue of a British local newspaper (25), illustrates this point. T h e occasion depicted is the handing over to Robert Bud (second from left), assistant keeper in the Science Museum's Dep a r t m e n t of Chemistry, of a collection of historic instruments from the Billingham and Heysham establishments of Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd. Jasper Clark (second from right) was Billingham's first instrument manager. He retired in 1960 and was at Billingham when its first ammonia was produced on the old H P plant in 1923.
In front of the 'D'-type flowmeter is Clark's own copy of his group's instrument catalog. Such documents are obviously of great value in the tracing of the development of instruments and their uses. T h e accompanying writeup includes the remark ". . . saved from the scrap heap following a request by American professor J o h n Stock . . . is concerned at the rate at which historic instruments are vanishing.. . ." T h a t I do not appear in the picture enables me to stress another fact. My personal collection of historic instruments is zero, and I intend to keep things this way. My aims are to seek information and to conserve, b u t not to collect. Actual collection is best left to the museum expert. I welcome any information t h a t I can get. Many of the instruments t h a t should have been our scientific heritage have, no doubt, vanished forever. We cannot bring t h e m back. We can, however, try to make sure that, instrumentwise, the heritage of our scientific successors is a secure one. As is obvious, the need to act now is quite critical. Apart from actual loss of equipment, our living sources of information—and maybe the older internal reports of the developer or user—will not be with us forever! This work, carried out under the Research Fellowship Program of the Science Museum, London, was partially supported by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.
Literature Cited
Figure 10. Presentation of historic industrial chemical instruments
(1) Stock, J. T. "Development of the Chemical Balance"; Science Museum: London, 1969. (2) Stock, J. T. J. Chem. Educ. 1968,45, 254.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1980 · 1525 A
(3) Stock, J. T. Chem. Br. 1971, 7, 385. (4) Stock, J. T.; Bryden, D. J. Technol. Culture 1972,13, 44. (5) Stock, J. T. Anal. Chem. 1973, 45, 974 A. (6) Stock, J. T. J. Chem. Educ. 1976,53, 497. (7) Stock, J. T. Chem. Br. 1978,14, 76. (8) Stock, J. T. Chem. Eng. News 1979, .57 (31), 30. (9) Miller, W. H. Philos. Trans. R Soc London 1856,146, 762. (10) Anon., Q. J. Sci. 1822,12, 40. (11) Stock, J. T.; Laurie, P. S. Technol. Culture 1980,27, 51. (12) Stock, J. T. J. Chem. Educ. 1976, 53, 29. (13) Cumming, J. Thomson's Ann. Phil. 1823 22 177 (14) Stock, J. f. Am. Lab., July 1980, 7780. (15) Page, C. G. Am J. Sci. Arts, 1st Series 1838, 33, 376. (16) Page, C. G. Am. J. Sci. Arts, 2nd Se ries 1846,1, 242. (17) Borcherdt, G. T.; Meloche V. W.; Adkins, H. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1937, 59, 2171. (18) Blaedel, W. J. University of Wiscon sin, personal communication, 1978. (19) Kolthoff, I. M.; Lingane, J. J. Chem. Rev. 1939, 24, 9, footnote. (20) Stumm, R. L. Bell Laboratories, per sonal communication, 1980. (21) Trowbridge, J. Am. J. Sci. Arts, 3rd Series 1871, 2, 118. (22) Obach, E. Nature 1878,18, 707. (23) Stock, J. T. J. Chem. Educ., submit ted for publication ("Flue Gas Monitor ing: Early Application of Automatic Analysis"). (24) Behar, M. F. "Handbook of Measure ment and Control"; Instruments Pub lishing Co.: Pittsburgh, 1951; ρ 83. (25) Anon. Billingham Post, May 8, 1980, ρ 2.
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John T. Stock is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Con necticut. He was born in England and received the PhD and DSc degrees from the University of London. After extensive industrial and academic ex perience, he joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1956. His research interests include electroanalytical chemistry, microchemical techniques, the history of chemis try, and the design of apparatus and equipment for the teaching of chem istry.
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