Abstract
THE Cambridge Philosophical Society has been responsible for the arrangement of a large and interesting exhibition of historic instruments and records which was opened by Lord Rutherford on June 8 and will be on view until June 20. Acting on the suggestion and with the unstinted help of Dr. R. T. Gunther, of Oxford, an attempt has been made to collect together old apparatus illustrating the work of well-known Cambridge men, as well as some of the equipment used by students of natural knowledge in former days. The collection gives an idea of the material instruments by the aid of which scientific progress has been made in the University, and it establishes contact with the present day by the inclusion of series showing the progress in the design of certain important pieces of apparatus like electrometers, electroscopes, galvanometers, air pumps, slide rules, microscopes and microtomes. Among the pieces of special interest are the fourteenth century astrolabe believed to have belonged to Dr. Caius, a circular slide-rule designed by William Oughtred and made about 1640, Pepys' Musarith-mica, the instruments used by W. H. Miller in making the Standard Pound, and the microscopes of Charles Darwin and of his grandfather Erasmus. The remains of the equipment of the observatories of Trinity and St. John's Colleges, and a number of Maxwell's instruments form important features, while the cabinets of materia medica preserved since the early eighteenth century in the libraries of Queens', St. Catherine's and St. John's Colleges are now shown together for the first time. The microscopes used by Francis Maitland Balfour form another exhibit interesting to biologists.
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Exhibition of Historic Scientific Apparatus at Cambridge. Nature 137, 977 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137977b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137977b0