Abstract
AT a meeting of the Newcomen Society held at the Science Museum on December 11, a paper by Dr. R. S. Clay and Mr. T. H. Court on “English Instrument Making in the 18th Century” was read. As is well known, Mr. Court has contributed largely to the collection of scientific instruments in the Museum. Some of these had been arranged on the lecture table, and during the reading of the paper Dr. Clay used them to illustrate his remarks. In the eighteenth century, he said, England was fortunate in having a number of men who were not merely instrument makers but also men of scientific knowledge. Moxon, Senex, Short, Dollond and Nairne were all fellows of the Royal Society, and they and others such as Benjamin Martin, George Adams and James Ferguson made advances in the construction of scientific instruments which placed English microscopes, telescopes, etc., in the forefront and caused them to be copied abroad. One important invention was that of Marshall, who introduced the method of grinding a large number of lenses together on a block with a spherical tool, another that of the method of drawing brass tubes on a steel mandrel by which tubes capable of sliding smoothly in one another for telescopes could be made. Cuff, it appears, first introduced an all-brass telescope as a commercial instrument. The invention of the achromatic lens by Dollond, the invention of the quadrant by Hadley, the improvement in dividing scales by Bird and Ramsden and the construction of reflecting telescopes by Short all contributed to the supremacy of the English instruments. The biographies of a few of the most famous instrument makers only are known. Short was one of the few who made money by his business; a good many others were at various times made bankrupt. The outstanding men at the end of the century were Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800) and Edward Nairne (1726-1806).
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English Instrument Making. Nature 136, 982 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136982a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136982a0