Introduction

Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 1-19

  Bourguet, Marie Noëlle ^a   Licoppe, Christian ^b   Sibum, H Otto ^c  

^a UNIVERSITÉ PARIS DESCARTES   (France)

^b TELECOM PARISTECH   (France)

^c MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84905067362     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203219010     Document Type: Editorial

References (34)

1. A.D. Burnett, 'The engraved title-page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna: an icon and paradigm of science and its wider implication', The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar, Occasional Paper no. 27, Durham, 1998.
2. F. Verulam, 'The Great Renewal. Preface on the state of sciences, that is neither prosperous nor far advanced; and that a quite different way must be opened up for the human intellect than men have known in the past, and new aids devised, so that the mind may exercise its right over nature', in L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne (eds) Francis Bacon. The New Organon, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 6-10.
3. For a discussion of the role of the instrument, i.e. the magnetic compass, and its meaning for science, see D. Warner, 'Terrestrial magnetism: for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind', in A. van Helden and T.L. Hankins (eds) 'Instruments', Osiris, vol. 9, 1994, 67-84.
4. On the ship as an instrument, see also Richard Sorrensen, 'The ship as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century', Osiris, vol. 11, 1996, 221-36.
5. L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998;
6. P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums and Collecting in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994;
7. J.V. Field, Renaissance and Revolution:Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge L'Intelligence technique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Albin Michel, 1993;
8. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995;
9. C. Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique. Le discours de l'expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630-1820), Paris: La Découverte, 1996.
10. Ch. C. Baudelot de Dairval, Mémoire de quelques observations générales que l'on peut faire pour ne pas voyager inutilement, Bruxelles: J. Leonard, 1688, p. 6;
11. A. von Humboldt to J. Banks, 15 August 1798, in I. Jahn and F.G. Lange (eds) Die Jugendbriefe Alexander von Humboldts, 1787-1789, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973, p. 637. Within recent scholarship the multiple meanings of the term 'instrument' in the natural philosophy of this period of cultural change have been regarded as an opportunity of investigation. See introductions to A. van Helden and T.L. Hankins, 'Instruments', op. cit., and to T.L. Hankins and R.J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, op. cit. For the most extensive exploration of the status of instruments in the seventeenth century
12. see S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Hankins and Silverman date the introduction of precision measuring instruments in experimental physics in the second half of the eighteenth century.
13. See also M.-N. Bourguet and C. Licoppe, 'Voyages, mesures et instruments: une nouvelle expérience du monde au siècle des lumières', Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52 (5), 1997, pp. 1115-51.
14. The relationship between instruments, precision measurement and the rise of quantifying science has been discussed in several publications with the aim to regard instruments, practices of precision and accuracy as having lives of their own, which are to be looked at from a historical perspective. See especially M.N. Wise (ed.) The Values of Precision, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994;
15. Peter Galison, 'History, philosophy, and the central metaphor', Science in Context, vol. 2 (1988), pp. 197-212
16. idem, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997;
17. T. Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron and R.E. Rider (eds) The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990;
18. Bourguet and Licoppe, 'Voyages, mesures et instruments', op. cit.; H.O. Sibum, 'Les gestes de la mesure. Joule, les pratiques de la brasserie et la science', Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 53 (4 -5), 1998, pp. 745-74.
19. A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986.
20. On the issue of historical embodiment of knowledge, see H.O. Sibum, 'Les gestes de la mesure', op. cit., and idem, 'Experimental history of science', in S. Lindqvist (ed.) Museums of Modern Science, Nobel Symposium 112, Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2000, pp. 77-86
21. On the anthropological tradition: M. Mauss, 'Les techniques du corps', Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, vol. 32, 1935, reprinted in Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 1985.
22. S.F. Cannon, 'Humboldtian science', in Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, New York: Science History Publications, 1978, pp. 73-110;
23. M.-N. Bourguet, 'La république des instruments. Voyage, mesure et science de la nature chez Alexandre de Humboldt', in M.C. Hoock-Demarle, É. François and M. Werner (eds) Marianne-Germania. Deutschfranzösischer Kulturtransfer im europäischen Kontext, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1998, pp. 405-36;
24. M.-N. Bourguet and C. Licoppe, 'Voyages, mesures et instruments', op. cit.
25. L. Daston and P. Galison, 'The image of objectivity', Representations, 40 (1992), 81-128;
26. R.M. Brain, 'The graphic method: inscription, visualization, and measurement in 19th-century science and culture', Phil. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996;
27. S. de Charadevian, 'Graphical method and discipline: self-recording instruments in 19th-century physiology', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24, 1993, 267-91.
28. Following M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (translated from the French by A. Sheridan), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
29. A. von Humboldt, Reise auf dem Rio Magdalena durch die Anden und Mexico (ed. M. Fagt), Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, vol. 1 (1986), p. 183.
30. M.N. Wise (ed.) The Values of Precision, op. cit.
31. As a comparison, see L. Daston, 'Enlightenment calculations', Critical Inquiry, 21 (Autumn 1994), 182-202.
32. See B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 215ff.
33. A. von Humboldt, Reise, op. cit., pp. 186-9.
34. Sir W. Thomson, 'Electrical units of measurement. (A lecture delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers on May 3, 1883 . . . )', in Idem, Popular Lectures and Addresses, London: Macmillan and Co., 1889, pp. 73-136, p. 73.