Earlier this summer, I was lucky enough to host some of the members of the Ocular Heritage Society and then of the Scientific Instrument Society at our History of Science and Technology [HST] collection at the Yale Peabody Museum! It was a joy to be able to share our wonderful artifacts and also our new work and storage spaces with friends old and new – and I greatly appreciated hearing their insights about specific objects.
My longtime colleague Dr. Neil Handley, Curator of the British Optical Association Museum at the College of Optometrists in London, suggested that the Ocular Heritage Society visit us while meeting in the region. Dr. Audrey Davis founded the Socety at the Smithsonian Institute in 1984, for the appreciation of the history and artifacts of the ophthalmic sciences (or eye care).
I worked with Dr. Charles Letocha, MD to organize a visit not only to our collection but also to other relevant holdings at the Yale Art Gallery’s Wurtele Center, at the Medical Historical Library, and in the exhibition Crafting Worldviews: Art and Science in Europe, 1500–1800 which included many of our early modern artifacts. Kudos to all of the Yale staff who were happy to contribute to such a rich cross-collections experience!
The Ocular Heritage Society members shared further knowledge about our centuries-old vision aids based on clues such as design, materials, and hallmarks. If only they could have stayed even longer!
Next I received a collection visit from members of the international Scientific Instrument Society, of which I have also been a member for many years. In addition to organizing visits and events related to historical instruments, the SIS has published a Bulletin since 1983 which contains masses of wonderful research on instruments. The Society also offers small grants for supporting research related to historical instruments. (I and my predecessor in the HST collection, Shae Trewin, were in fact the first recipients of these grants!)
I worked with longtime colleague Dr. Louise Devoy to organize a visit to our collection and to other Yale sites, as part of an SIS visit to instrument collections in the American Northeast. The SIS members on the tour visited our collection, the Crafting Worldviews exhibition, and relevant objects at the Art Gallery’s Furniture Study Gallery.
Two of our visitors, longtime colleagues Professor Richard Kremer and David Howarth, were intrigued by our unusual hydraulic cube root machine. This led to the three of us studying and conferring about it at length after the visit.
Richard and David were amazingly able to pin down how, and how precisely, this liquid computer operated and to theorize about how it might have been used at Yale – through calculations, model making and experimentation, and their strong grounding in STEM. We plan to report these findings in the Scientific Instrument Society’s Bulletin – stay tuned!
I was also pleased that a number of SIS visitors were interested in our Engle’s Tellurian. I have so far not been able to find another surviving example of this patented astronomical model. (If any readers have seen another Engle’s Tellurian, please drop us a line!)
History of Science & Technology at Peabody Museum 