TY - JOUR
AU - Higgitt,, Rebekah
AB - Abstract Despite the age and prestige of the Royal Society of London, the history of its collections of scientific instruments and apparatus has largely been one of accidental accumulation and neglect. This article tracks their movements and the processes by which objects came to be recognized as possessing value beyond reuse or sale. From at least the mid-nineteenth century, the few surviving objects with links to the society’s early history and its most illustrious Fellows came to be termed ‘relics’, were treated with suitable reverence, put on display and made part of the society’s public self-presentation. If the more quotidian objects survived into the later 1800s, when their potential as objects for collection, research, display, reproduction and loan began to be appreciated, they are likely to have survived to the present day. Most research on the history of the object collections of the Royal Society (rs) has focused on its early years – when the Repository played a significant part in its activities and reputation – and particularly on natural history.1 Indeed, it is often assumed that the society had no scientific collections after its move from Crane Court to Somerset House in 1780, when its natural history and geology specimens were given to the British Museum. However, as well as keeping and adding to its library and collections of portraits, busts and medals, it retained overlapping and changing holdings referred to as scientific instruments, apparatus and relics. It is perhaps more accurately understood as an assemblage of objects rather than a collection; arriving by different routes, they were things neither deliberately collected nor disposed of.2 As Allen Simpson has shown in his exploration of the collection and its star object, Newton’s reflecting telescope, up to the early nineteenth century, attention was sporadic at best. Indeed, the 1671 telescope was broken, lost and later replaced by another, gifted in 1766 (Fig. 1).3 Despite the significance of the institution, this was a story of inadequate storage, uncatalogued, unnumbered and broken objects, and items borrowed and not returned. Tracking the collection into the mid-nineteenth century and beyond likewise shows a history largely of neglect and accidental accumulation, punctuated by moments of attention. Those moments and their causes are, however, revealing and over time have helped turn the ‘historical accumulation’ into something more obviously resembling a collection.4 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Illustration of ‘Isaac Newton’s Reflecting Telescope’ in the list of ‘Instruments and Historical Relics in the Possession of the Royal Society’ in the 1897 edition of The Record of the Royal Society (1897). The telescope is listed among the ‘Relics of Sir Isaac Newton’. Wellcome cc by. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Illustration of ‘Isaac Newton’s Reflecting Telescope’ in the list of ‘Instruments and Historical Relics in the Possession of the Royal Society’ in the 1897 edition of The Record of the Royal Society (1897). The telescope is listed among the ‘Relics of Sir Isaac Newton’. Wellcome cc by. Attempts within the society to inspect, catalogue and dispose of its accumulation of instruments and apparatus tended to be prompted by issues around storage, although over time they increasingly reflected an interest in their investigation, use and display. This was very significantly prompted by the arrival of public exhibitions and museums that included instruments and apparatus, most pertinently here the South Kensington Museum, created after the 1851 Great Exhibition, and the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus, part of which joined the science collections at South Kensington around which the Science Museum coalesced (the title was used informally from 1885 and officially from 1909).5 Also significant from the end of the nineteenth century was the interest and knowledge of collectors of historic scientific instruments.6 As will be shown, therefore, many of the prompts – important moments whereby value was created and at least some of the objects began to be considered as exceptional – were external.7 However, the mere existence of the objects as rs property has also had its own impact, urging investigations, stimulating opportunities for display and encouraging a particular sense and presentation of the institution’s identity.8 In order to understand the fate of this complex collection, this article will firstly give an overview of its composition and whereabouts over time. It will then look at how understandings of its role and value changed, considering some of those who were responsible for it and some of the ways in which it was put to use. It is worth highlighting that, unlike collections assembled by universities and museums, those of the rs served neither teaching nor public exhibition, although some aspects are similar to university collections arising from research. Unlike the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Astronomical Society, it did not develop a collection that might be put at the service of its members, although a few objects were borrowed and used repeatedly.9 Public presentation of the society, its buildings and their contents were, however, to become important, particularly as a result of its annual conversazione and the illustrated press. The ‘historical accumulation’, its cohesion as a collection and significance, or otherwise, to the institution are, therefore, distinct. As a corporation, gifts and bequests to the rs have been important, deliberately linking individuals and their reputations to that of the institution.10 So, too, are identifications of use, user or maker that cast a favourable light on the institution’s history and generate a sense of connection between past and current fellows.11 Here the distinction between some of the instruments and other objects at the rs – including portraits, medals, manuscripts, relics and institutional regalia – are muddied, each potentially used ‘to keep predecessors alive in the minds and memories of those who feel themselves connected to them’ and ‘further reinforce such affinities’.12 However, while relic instruments might be considered to be distinct from other scientific instruments, the fact that they were instruments was not incidental. They were also to play a role in defining and changing the perceived value of more quotidian objects within the same institution. Object biography has played, and continues to play, an important role in uncovering changing attitudes to science and its material culture over time and in different spatial or geographical contexts.13 It would be possible to discuss the active ‘afterlife’ of several key items from the rs collection – especially Newton’s telescope and the three long-focus objective lenses made by Christian and Constantine Huygens – in order to show the variety and complexity of possible object histories in this context. Such stories demonstrate the importance of illustrious provenance but also that the physical and visual properties of the objects have affected the people encountering them and shaped their respective trajectories. However, it is impossible to do this for every object: considering the collection as a whole brings additional challenges but also a range of benefits. This group of objects has always been in flux and is exceptionally hard to pin down, yet it is as a collection that the majority of its contents has had prolonged life. Gaining value through the prestige of associations – with the rs, its fellows and with other objects (their stable-mates, as it were) – has saved them from resale or the scrap-heap, extracting them from their initial sphere of exchange, as new and second-hand instruments, and placing them next to the ‘priceless’ objects of major national institutions.14 Today what remains of this collection largely sits between the Royal Society and the Science Museum, to which much of the collection has been or is currently on long-term loan (see the supplementary lists in the online Appendix). Tracking the Royal Society’s object collections When a committee was sent to examine and report on the contents of the Royal Society’s Repository, kept in ‘a common passage or thoroughfair’, in the years 1729–34, the members expressed concern about the damage to natural history specimens, the loss and theft of valuable rarities and the fact that ‘The Instruments and Models of Engines are generally so broke to pieces that few of them are worth preserving’.15 Despite some serious efforts to update Nehemiah Grew’s 1681 catalogue, which included instruments and models among the list ‘Of Artificial Matters’, it was found that poor conditions and loss of institutional memory meant that many objects could no longer be identified.16 The physical conditions were improved but other items were missed from the lists because they were kept elsewhere, for example the historic Huygens lenses and microscopes by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, which were intended for use but kept locked in the closet of the Council Room from 1728.17 The latter nevertheless went missing at some point before the 1830s, probably after an unrecorded loan.18 Another inspection, in 1763, produced inventories, the disposal of broken objects and greater care in arrangement, while disposals to the British Museum in 1780 left the society with a collection of instruments and apparatus that was understood to be of continuing use, whether as historic reference or for new investigations.19 This collection included a few items that had been kept since the earliest years, typically gifts intended for use or examination at meetings, as well as instruments acquired in the following centuries. These had usually been supplied by the society to support scientific surveys and expeditions, such those to observe the eighteenth-century transits of Venus, funded by George III, or government-prompted investigations into weights and measures or geodesy.20 From 1850 the society administered an annual government grant of £1,000, given out in smaller sums to individuals, often for purchase of instruments. Such equipment was, in theory at least, returned to the society after use.21 Objects were also gifted or bequeathed or, occasionally, arrived and remained after having been brought for exhibition or, at least in one case, submitted for a prize.22 It is a difficult collection to pin down fully, not least because there is no complete catalogue of the current object holdings at the rs and no easy means of accessing information about the objects loaned to the Science Museum. What has survived today often appears as the result of an accident of timing or from objects being considered useful or significant. If items entered or survived within) the society’s apartments after the date that museums with a collecting remit that included instruments were established – that is, the late nineteenth century – they are more likely to have found a permanent home.23 The existence of and attention to the instrument and object collections has depended on the physical space in which they have been kept. The change or lack of storage space has, over time, required objects to be inventoried and/or disposed of in a process that was central to understanding the assortment of objects as a collection. From 1782 the society had a warehouse in which to keep books and papers, a space and cost that had been shared with the Board of Longitude for storage of its publications and instruments.24 Not surprisingly, the society also began to store instruments there, for both institutions supplied equipment to the same expeditions.25 When a committee appointed to consider rs property in the warehouse met on 22 March 1821, the members found instruments alongside printed books and manuscripts. It was decided then ‘That all the Instruments now in the Warehouse with the exception of the Magnetic Terrella and Mr Knight’s Magnets be disposed of’, along with additional copies of Philosophical Transactions and a number of picture frames. The instrument makers Edward Troughton and George Dollond were to give their opinion as to the value.26 At the same time, however, additional instruments were being acquired and it was again noted a few years later that they still lacked an accurate catalogue.27 A new committee was appointed, and another inventory made, and this time the instrument maker William Simms commented on the objects' condition and utility.28 However, his was not the only opinion considered, as his list is not identical to the one solidified in a printed list of 1834, by the vice-president, Henry Kater, and treasurer, John Lubbock. This list, containing eighty-two items, has remained a long-term reference point. The objects were marked with these numbers and the accompanying descriptions relied on well into the twentieth century.29 It was made use of as the collection was moved out of Somerset House in 1857, stored at Kew Observatory and then placed in new accommodation at the society’s apartments in 1874, when forty-seven of the eighty-two were marked as arriving at Burlington House and four as remaining at Kew. Fourteen additional items were listed at this date, including instruments, models and a ‘Cocked-hat <in> Case’.30 About thirty of the original eighty-two objects were included in the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus in 1876, plus one of the additional items and two more previously on display in the society’s apartments: Davy’s safety lamp and Priestley’s electrical machine. A handful of other objects clearly remained somewhere in the society’s possession, and others arrived subsequently, for we find them loaned to the South Kensington (later Science) Museum and/or listed in the various editions of the Record of the Royal Society (London, 1897, 1901, 1912, 1940). The 1897 edition listed thirty-three items, ‘And other instruments of less interest’, as well as nine ‘Relics of Sir Isaac Newton’, which included instruments (see Fig. 1).31 By the 1912 edition, following substantial loans in 1900, there were only fourteen items in the main list, including two subsequent additions. By 1940 the number of Newtonian relics had increased to twelve, while the ‘Other Relics and Instruments’ was no longer a numbered list but text that picked out some of the most interesting items, whether on loan or still with the society. Between 1893 and the 1970s over thirty items from the 1834 list, at least twenty-seven items mentioned in subsequent nineteenth-century lists and about thirty additional objects were loaned. A few items were never loaned, some made their way to the museum via other institutions and a few have been loaned to elsewhere. There are about twenty-five objects extant in 1874, the whereabouts of which are unknown to the present author. After 1834, the collection of instruments was sufficiently solidified as part of rs property for its storage to be a consideration as new space was planned for the society in Burlington House in the 1850s. The first concern was nevertheless for an adequate meeting room and library – book collections were clearly the largest and most significant, requiring greater wall space than initial proposals allowed – and the next priority was ‘the Society’s valuable collection of Portraits <which now open to the inspection of the Public>’. Less public, but nevertheless important to the society’s functions were council and committee rooms, ‘Room for the Archives and Manuscripts about 20 feet by 14’ and ‘A Room for Philosophical and Mathematical Instruments about 20 feet square’.32 A description of requirements from 1866 emphasized the need for ‘A Room to hold the Society’s Instruments & apparatus . . . say 30ft × 20ft’. Here, it was suggested, there ‘might also be placed the Safe containing the National Standards of length & weight placed by Parliament in the R. Society’s custody.’33 The creation and fitting up of the rooms was, however, a lengthy process and ‘The Instrument Room’ was still ‘quite empty’ in March 1873 but finally, by the council meeting of 29 October 1874, the instruments had been placed in their new accommodation.34 Nevertheless, a few were always on display elsewhere. In John Timbs’s Curiosities of London (1868), there was an entry for the ‘Royal Society’s Museum’ in Burlington House. It was barely worthy of the name, but included Isaac Newton’s sundial, watch and telescope, and ‘the original model of the Safety-lamp’ by Humphry Davy.35 Twenty years after the instruments arrived at Burlington House, however, the decision had been taken to repurpose the Instrument Room and dispose of most of the contents. From this time, the policy was that the society did not have an instrument collection: offers would be redirected to suitable locations and exiting objects put on loan.36 The first small tranche of loans to South Kensington was made in 1893, with an offer of any other meteorological instruments that they might want.37 Also passed on were instruments acquired by the government grant, fifteen of which were made permanent acquisitions of the museum between 1888 and 1896. Among them was Lord Kelvin’s Harmonic Analyser for tidal observations, now ‘no longer useful for the purposes for which it was originally constructed’.38 The Instruments Committee supposed to oversee this process annotated a copy of the 1834 list to note loans, relocations, missing items and a further and rather eclectic list of the additions, as well querying the identification of their air pump.39 However, a letter from 1900 suggests that Silvanus P. Thompson was the ‘only active member’ of this Committee, which had still not reported to Council.40 This prompt presumably led to the forty-eight loans made that year, while a set of radiometers and otheoscopes presented in 1911 were moved to the Science Museum in 1920.41 Subsequent loans seem to have resulted from accidental finds or enquiries from the museum as it solidified its presence.42 For example, the 1927 loan of spectroscopes ‘recently returned from Dehra Dun by the Survey Department of India’ was made ‘in response to an application to that effect from the Director of the Museum.’43 What remained, in theory, were a few ‘relics of Sir Isaac Newton and other departed worthies’, displayed in a glass case dressed with cloth and surrounded by rope.44 Yet, once again, the collection was added to even as objects were removed and, by making loans rather than donations, the rs retained control and has been able to call back or loan objects elsewhere as policy or need have changed.45 Valuing the collections Anthony Turner has suggested that instruments were not collected ‘for their own sake’ before the late nineteenth century, although they might be valued for their age and provenance.46 Robert Anderson adds that before this date ‘there was no natural audience for scientific instruments per se, unless they be regarded as antiquities or works of art.’47 Some items in the rs collection, like standard weights and measures or instruments used to produce significant published observations, were important for reference and maintenance of national standards. Several were borrowed for comparison by the Treasury or Ordnance Survey and were of interest as Parliament debated new weights and measures in the 1860s, or feared destruction of their own standards in the Second World War.48 High-quality equipment supplied for expeditions had frequent use.49 Fellows of the rs were, however, typical in first valuing unused or unusable instruments if they were considered to be personal relics of great lives, bolstered by the story of institutional significance and longevity that they implied. Nevertheless, although interest in relics, which might include instruments, developed there was little concern for retaining instruments that might prove to be similarly noteworthy in the future. The value of collecting contemporary portraits and manuscripts, as a record of the society’s activities and fellowship, was readily understood but the same has never been the case for instruments. However, developing external and internal interest helped them to find value in what they did have. The scientific instruments were, however, in many ways the least significant of the society’s collections. Additions to the library, portraits, busts and medals were more proactively collected, more valuable and more frequently discussed. Many more pages of the Record of the Royal Society were devoted to these collections, which were also insured for higher sums. The society’s 1875 insurance policy valued the library at £18,000 and the pictures at £3,000, while the ‘Philosophical Instruments’ were insured for the rather less significant figure of £500.50 Money and use were the obvious approaches to appreciating the value of the society’s instruments. Unsurprisingly, this was the instinct of instrument makers; the fact that Dollond, Troughton and Simms were asked to comment suggests this was also true for the society’s officers. Simms had concluded that ‘the most important & useful instruments are those that I find are in the best condition’, noting too that a repaired and re-divided 12-inch quadrant by Bird ‘would be an acquisition to a young Astronomer’. However, he acknowledged a different kind of significance for the chronometers by Arnold: they were ‘highly curious’ because of ‘having accompanied Capt. Cook’ and because they could illustrate ‘the progress to the Modern compensating balance.’51 Others on the committee may have felt similar kinds of interest even in items Simms judged ‘apparently useless’, for not all were disposed of, although a range of old and foreign equipment was.52 Some objects had long been considered, and referred to, as relics, while others became so due to age and developing interest in the society’s (and science’s) history. It appears that the possession of some acknowledged relics encouraged the reframing of other, hitherto less reified, objects. The arrival of the Newtoniana gifted to the society by Charles Turnor in 1843, which included wood from the famous apple tree and a sundial taken from the wall at Woolsthorpe Manor, undoubtedly helped shift some ‘instruments’ to ‘relics’.53 It was in this year that the society clarified its view that certain objects were too historically important to be taken out of the apartments, including Newton’s telescope, which had also had a glass case made for it in 1827.54 This view was also taken of objects symbolic of the society’s corporate status and history, such as the mace given by Charles II and the inkstand donated by Joseph Banks. As far as insurance values were concerned, the Newton collection was worth £400, and the mace and charter book £190.55 Such objects were, however, increasingly described as ‘irreplaceable’ and ‘invaluable’, possessing instead ‘value as historical records’.56 The relics were in a different category from the objects in the Instrument Room, and were often displayed in the society’s apartments. Typically, they emphasized the personal and the bodily. Newton’s hair, death mask, autograph and portraits were displayed alongside the sundial and telescope, instruments that gained value by having been made as well as used by him. The associations of ‘Cook’s chronometers’ were valued but it was always better to be able to state that, for example, the safety lamp was ‘made by Sir Humphry Davy’s own hands’.57 Likewise, a brass plaque attached to Newton’s telescope records, in suitably if fictionally antiquated language, that it was ‘inuented bi Sr Isaac Newton and made with his own hands’.58 On the few occasions that the society made proactive acquisitions it was always as relics. While gifts of portraits, manuscripts and, less often, objects might be accepted, they rarely bought items offered for sale. The exceptions included a chair marked ‘r.s. 1691’, believed to have belonged to the society’s former president, Robert Southwell, which was purchased from a sale at Christie’s in 1935, and a Darwin-associated item when Down House was being emptied in 1899.59 George Darwin was informed that the rs ‘would much like to take custody of any article which it might be desirable to preserve as a memorial of Mr. Charles Darwin’, and he was persuaded to present the barometer used during the Beagle voyage.60 By the mid-nineteenth century, the most significant of the society’s relics generated reverence, pilgrimage and even ritual. Newton’s death mask was to be ‘hallowed and preserved with religious care’.61 His telescope attracted visitors and was included in the ritual surrounding the inauguration of a statue of Newton in Grantham in 1858.62 The assistant secretary, Walter White, was instructed not to let the relic out of his sight during its travels.63 He, the visiting dignitaries and Grantham crowds watched the ‘telescope carried in the procession by some of the Grammar School boys’ on a red velvet cushion (Fig. 2).64 The telescope was frequently illustrated and readily recognized: much modified, it was a deliberately iconic reconstruction of the Royal Society’s 1672 drawing.65 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Inauguration of the Statue of Sir Isaac Newton’, Illustrated London News 33 (1858), p. 299. The telescope, in its glass case, is displayed in front of the statue alongside a copy of Newton’s Principia and a prism. Wellcome cc by. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Inauguration of the Statue of Sir Isaac Newton’, Illustrated London News 33 (1858), p. 299. The telescope, in its glass case, is displayed in front of the statue alongside a copy of Newton’s Principia and a prism. Wellcome cc by. Far less visually appealing, but continually secured and accounted for, were the Huygens lenses (Fig. 3). Their significance in the history of optical science has prompted a succession of individuals from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries to explore and make use of them.66 While the personal associations are there – the lenses bear original signatures and later inscriptions record that they were ‘made by the celebrated Huygens’ – they required the active and technical engagement of their devotees.67 Attempts were made to explore their optical qualities and, until the late nineteenth century, to use the lenses for new observations. This was also a means of treading in the footsteps of celebrated forebears. It was ‘desirable to form a just estimate of the tools with which our ancestors worked’ or to understand ‘how they contrived to get the eye and object-glasses of these unweildly [sic] machines married, or brought parallel to each other for perfect vision’.68 Among the encounters that were inscribed on the lenses themselves was that of William Derham, who added on the aerial telescope object glass, ‘Vitrum praestantissimum’ (Most excellent glass).69 Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide 122-foot focal length object glass, by Constantine Huygens (Royal Society, mo/2), c.1691, within its nineteenth-century mount. Inscriptions on the glass by Huygens and Derham are faintly visible on the glass at about 110 and 180 degrees respectively. ©The Royal Society. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide 122-foot focal length object glass, by Constantine Huygens (Royal Society, mo/2), c.1691, within its nineteenth-century mount. Inscriptions on the glass by Huygens and Derham are faintly visible on the glass at about 110 and 180 degrees respectively. ©The Royal Society. The various inventories of the rs instrument collections are revealing of changing attitudes. The 1834 catalogue of ‘Instruments and Apparatus Belonging to the Royal Society’ listed the objects with names of makers, owners, occasionally donors and references to Philosophical Transactions. Dates of manufacture were rarely of interest, and chronology was subservient to the original organization of the list by scientific field and instrument type.70 Newton’s telescope appeared at no. 28, among other telescopes, and the supposed Boyle 1662 air pump at no. 49, originally under the heading ‘Philosophical’. By the end of the century there had been a significant shift. In the first edition of the Record of the Royal Society, Newton’s telescope – identified as the most significant item by being illustrated – appeared within the separate list of the ‘Relics of Sir Isaac Newton’, along with items from Woolsthorpe, Newton’s death mask, hair and (purported) chair. In the following list of ‘Other Relics and Instruments’, dates had become more significant, with the air pump coming first, and the model of a ship designed by William Petty, donated in 1685, second.71 Compiling inventories and investigating the collections had usually been a matter for ad hoc committees, aided by instrument makers and the society’s secretaries or librarians, who dug up records of donation and use. These individuals mediated the objects in day-to-day dealings, in person and via correspondence. They were often required to show or talk about the collections with journalists or visitors and, as a result, might explore and research them for their own interest or on behalf of the society. Charles Weld, assistant secretary and then librarian for sixteen years from 1843, did a great deal of work on the historic collections to produce his History of the Royal Society (1848), a catalogue of the portraits (1860) and a number of other works. Walter White, sub-librarian and then assistant secretary from 1844 to 1885, was likewise required to take an interest in the society’s history, manuscripts, paintings and artefacts. As well as having maintained custody of Newton’s telescope in Grantham he was, for example, asked to show Thomas Babington Macaulay ‘our relics of Newton’ in 1849 and to ‘plan [the] Newton collection for [the] glass-case’ in 1874.72 Herbert Rix, assistant secretary 1885–96, wrote three articles on the society and its history for the illustrated magazine Leisure Hour, which included a new engraving of Newton’s sundial, as well as of the Royal Society’s mace, charter book and chest.73 Treasurers also had an impact on object collections. Sir John Evans, in that role 1878–98 and previously on council, was an archaeologist and numismatist, as well as a paper manufacturer and president of the Society of Antiquaries (1885–92).74 He displayed objects of historic and archaeological interest at several of the society’s conversaziones and undoubtedly helped develop a sense of antiquarian interest in at least some of the society’s instruments, adding a perspective associated with the slowly developing appreciation of historic instruments at this period that was lacking in the more education-focused context of the South Kensington Museum with which the rs more frequently engaged.75 Evans was the father of Lewis Evans, later famous as owner of the founding collection of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. Probably through his father’s influence he exhibited some ancient astrolabes and other fifteenth- to eighteenth-century instruments at an 1896 Royal Society conversazione and lent others to the 1876 Special Loan Collection Exhibition.76 As discussed in the following section, the rising interest in display of scientific objects and collecting historic instruments was important for the reframing of the rs collections. The most significant individual in this story was Colonel Sir Henry Lyons, who was director of the Science Museum between 1920–33 and, from 1935–40, chairman of its Advisory Council. Lyons was also very closely involved with the society, rising to foreign secretary (1928–9), treasurer (1929–39) and vice-president (1928–1939). He developed a clear view on the function of historic science objects as he expanded the museum’s displays and collections, and played a role in researching the rs collection. In 1933 Lyons wrote that the ‘key-note’ of the technical and scientific museum ‘is development’ and displays should illustrate man’s progress over time, showing ‘the earliest tools and processes which he employed . . . in relation to the later and more advanced types which he produced as his knowledge and skill increased’.77 The museum’s historical collections developed significantly under his watch, including with loans from the rs. A resolution of 1932 stated that the society’s ‘historic scientific instruments . . . [should] be dealt with at the discretion of the Assistant Secretary subject to the approval of the Treasurer’, and correspondence between the two chased up objects and organized the forty-six loans of the 1920-30s.78 It was Lyons, too, who was behind the effort to list, trace and research the society’s collections for the 1940 Record. Here is displayed a real sense of interest in the development of the collection, echoing the Science Museum’s shift towards history under Lyons and discussions of the history and significance of collections in its series of Handbooks.79 Although, by this date, few items beyond the acknowledged relics remained recorded as in the society’s possession, we finally see an interest in the history of the objects as a collection. Displaying the collections The activities of the society’s officers, and their interactions with other institutions and individuals, point to ways in which the collections were put to use, reflecting and influencing the shifting perceptions of their value. These developed over time and out of particular requirements of the society and external developments, as well as in response to the interests of individuals. They included the public presentation of the society, whether to visitors to the apartments – privately arranged or at the annual conversazione – and via the press. A particularly significant event was the 1876 Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus exhibition at South Kensington and the subsequent development of instrument collections in national museums.80 The rs loaned more than thirty items to this enormous exhibition, which drew attention to the existence of other collections, nationally and internationally, and emphasized a story of historical development as well as recent achievement. It also led ultimately to the foundation of the Science Museum and the society’s policy of making loans. These moves, in their different contexts, raised the significance of both the retained objects and the loaned collection. The chief occasion on which the society’s rooms and their content were put on show was during its conversazione (Fig. 4).81 On these occasions an eclectic mix of objects, experiments, specimens and images, brought in by fellows and others for the occasion, were displayed. Most were removed after the event, although a few remained with the society. At least one or two have done so long enough to have been absorbed into the collections. For example, some corn grown under electric light by Charles William Siemens was displayed at a conversazione in the 1880s, was found ‘In the long glass <topped> case’ in the 1890s and was loaned to the Science Museum from 1900.82 A series of x-ray photographs taken at the conversazione held in 1896 have also been kept.83 The radiometers and otheoscopes used by William Crookes to illustrate papers read to the society between 1875 and 1878, and probably featured in at least one conversazione, were given to the rs in 1911.84 While emphasis was typically on the new and recent, as we have seen the exhibits also included antiquities and objects of historic interest. In 1887 the lawyer and microscopist Frank Crisp ‘exhibited a curious collection of early microscopes’ including one said to be by Giuseppe Campani and ‘probably the earliest microscope extant’.85 In the twentieth century, scientific instrument and manuscript collector George H. Gabb was a ubiquitous presence: in 1947 it was reported that he had ‘exhibited at every Royal Society conversazione for the last forty years.’86 Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Conversazione of the Royal Society at Burlington House’, The Graphic 968 (16 June 1888), p. 629. British Library Newspapers. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Conversazione of the Royal Society at Burlington House’, The Graphic 968 (16 June 1888), p. 629. British Library Newspapers. The society’s existing ‘large and interesting collection of portraits’ and, to a lesser extent, its relics, were inevitably part of the display too.87 Newspapers typically described the novel exhibits and listed many of the attendees but might also comment on the surroundings and history of the institution. The society’s own material tended to be treated more as a museum exhibit, placed in showcases, unlike the objects actively shown and demonstrated by exhibitors. In 1934, for example, Lyons was in charge of planning the content of six newly glazed showcases, including one for the charter book, one for the Newton relics, and four for manuscripts.88 The rs collections were also featured in relation to appropriate anniversaries or as recent arrivals. Thus the society could tie its story to that of famous people and events, and to the generosity of donors. A report of the 1842 conversazione noted the recent gift of Charles Blacker Vignoles, a railway engineer and remote descendant of Newton, of ‘one of the finest original portraits known of Sir Isaac Newton, one of the early presidents of the society’.89 Anniversaries linked to Cook brought out the Arnold timekeepers, while bicentenaries of Priestley and Faraday likewise prompted display of appropriate objects.90 Occasionally, the press – especially illustrated periodicals – carried longer articles about the society that featured the objects that were readily on view. In 1843 the Illustrated London News (iln) featured the rs, depicting and describing its rooms and their contents. The portraits and busts in the print were identified in the text, and a (false) story about the mace recounted.91 In similar fashion, a 1863 report took the occasion of the society’s 200th anniversary to describe treasures such as the manuscript of Newton’s Principia, the portrait collection and the room.which, by its size and decorations, may be said to be truly worthy of a society which, for nearly 200 years, had taken the lead in fostering a spirit of investigation into the laws of Nature, and thus promoting the best interests of its country and mankind.It left it to the very end to add ‘a few words on the relics and memorials preserved by the society’, although their age and associations might likewise be interpreted as reflecting its significance. These were firstly, of course, those of Newton (‘autograph, solar dials, watch, first reflecting telescope, lock of his hair, and mask of his face from the cast taken after death’) but also noted was ‘Davy’s safety-lamp, made by Sir Humphry’s own hands’ and ‘the delicate “balance” left by Sir Joseph Banks’.92 As noted by the author of a three-page article in The Graphic in 1893, the Newton collection had become totemic for the society: Once the president, he is now the patron said of the Royal Society, his relics – his death-mask, his dial, his telescope, his watch, a piece of his apple-tree, and a lock of his hair – being religiously preserved, and worship being (scientifically speaking) paid continually at his shrine. The illustrations accompanying this article depicted the Burlington House apartments, the current officers, some of the collection of busts, and key objects: the society’s mace and seal, Newton’s dial and telescope, ‘Captain Cook’s chronometer’, Davy’s Safety Lamp and W. H. Wollaston’s thimble-battery (Fig. 5). These last few were described as ‘sundry other curiosities’, although Wollaston’s battery, which had been presented to the society by his godson in 1879, led to a short discussion of and anecdote about Wollaston and the simplicity of his apparatus.93 These items, along with the account of the society’s history and the historic works noted in the library, were part of the ‘quaint and picturesque’ details that added colour to the periodical’s account of the society in ‘its modern aspect’.94 They attested its age but also how much things had changed – perhaps, it might be asserted, as a result of scientific work such as that promoted by the rs. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail showing some of the illustrations accompanying ‘The Royal Society’, The Graphic 1228 (10 June 1893), p. 25. British Library. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail showing some of the illustrations accompanying ‘The Royal Society’, The Graphic 1228 (10 June 1893), p. 25. British Library. The 1876 Special Loan Collection exhibition, on a much larger scale, linked instruments and their historical development to the success and future of the nation. It was an outcome of concerns that Britain had lost its lead not only in original scientific work but also in the manufacture of instruments.95 As its catalogue suggested, however, it displayed ‘not only apparatus for teaching and for investigation, but also such as possessed historic interest on account of the persons by whom, or the researches in which, it had been employed.’ It was to include ‘objects of historic interest from museums and private cabinets, where they are treasured as sacred relics, as well as apparatus in present use in the laboratories of professors.’96 When the Committee of Council on Education made the official request for loans from the society, they asked for ‘any objects it may possess which are suitable for the Exhibition’, and ‘the original apparatus used by Newton, and Leewenhoek’s microscope, were especially mentioned’.97 The mention of the latter does not suggest good acquaintance with the current state of the society’s collections, despite the fact that more than half of the exhibition committee were Fellows of the Royal Society, including its chief officers.98 However, they were eager to demonstrate support for this assertion of the cultural and economic significance of science and its support by government. The event was, perhaps, more significant for the rs in terms of how it and others might think about the instruments in its collection than the society’s objects were significant for the event’s success. Of the 5,000 exhibits, from 1,400 lenders, just over thirty were directly from the society, although many more were associated with the society’s Kew and Meteorological Committees. A number attracted wider attention, particularly the historic ones. In the opening address at the physics conference accompanying the exhibition, the section president, William Spottiswoode, picked out, among loans ‘especially worth notice’, Newton’s telescope and the Huygens lenses and there was some discussion of the latter by Professor Pieter Rijke, as he introduced the Huygens instruments loaned from Leiden.99 This opportunity to compare objects across collections, including from overseas, was unprecedented and had a significant impact in assessing the worth or authenticity of objects, both to their benefit and detriment. Thus Newton’s telescope was given little attention in the catalogue, placed as it was after older Galileo-linked instruments from Florence. It was, however, among the ‘Historical Treasures’ depicted and discussed by the iln on 16 September 1876.100 To the layman, it seemed, the minority of historic objects, with august associations and quaint looks trumped novelty and complexity.101 These were understood to be the ‘treasures’ among the ‘very bewildering’ mass display.102 Objects with famous associations were, as usual, of the greatest interest. The iln noted that Galileo’s telescopes were, like Newton’s, ‘Constructed by himself’ and ‘made by himself’.103 The opportunity for mass and comparative display gave the society’s relic of Davy’s safety lamp lesser billing compared with the many examples lent by the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. In this case, the oddly-shaped and humble-looking object was not included in the iln illustrated spread of historic objects, which used instead more iconic versions by Stephenson and Davy’s later, improved, lamp. A second illustration of further ‘Historical Treasures’ in the following issue included Otto von Guericke’s air pump and Magdeburg hemispheres, while the rs’s air pump was overlooked.104 This followed the exhibition catalogue, which gave much greater space to these earlier examples. It may have been from this point that suspicions about the attribution and dating of the society’s one were raised. Whilst it was a premier object, and often displayed in the library, we find that at some point its entry in the object list was marked ‘Always a doubt about it’ and ‘Probably by Hauksbee’, although it continued to be listed as Boyle’s in the 1897 and 1912 editions of the Record and a part of it, lent to the Museum of the History of Science in 1932, was and still is identified with Boyle.105 In his investigations into the Loan Collection, Peter de Clerq has found that, despite some dubious dating and attributions, there was ‘a real concern for what was original, a desire to present the genuine objet témoin’.106 John Dalton Hooker, president of the rs, had been chief among those suggesting that the Loan Exhibition should lead to a permanent display. The assumption was that many lenders would be happy to leave their objects in situ to create a science museum.107 However, although over 1,000 items remained, and were added to the South Kensington Museum’s science collections in 1877, the society’s objects were returned.108 Many were subsequently transferred back but control was maintained, particularly of the more historic items. The society decided, for example, not to lend its ‘astronomical relics’ to the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, considering them to be of ‘great historical interest’ and ‘irreplaceable were any accident to befall them’.109 However, loans for display were allowed on occasion, usually to institutions rather than individuals, and were an important signifier of the rs’s cultural significance. Portraits were regularly loaned and in 1896 what was then considered ‘Newton’s chair’, the president’s chair and ‘Boyle’s’ air pump were loaned for an exhibition of furniture organized by the Science and Art Loan Department at the Bethnal Green Museum.110 The society’s officers also agreed to lend the air pump to the Physical and Optical Societies ‘for one day only, provided that great care be taken of it and that it be returned undamaged.’111 However, in 1913, it was, unsurprisingly, thought unlikely that the council would agree to its loan, or that of any other historical relics, ‘to serve as a property in the Masque of Learning’ organized by Patrick Geddes in Chelsea.112 Conclusion Bringing together some of the scattered evidence regarding the nature and movements of the instrument and object collections of the Royal Society has revealed the changing attitudes to these objects, from stored apparatus – that was either considered useful and reusable or obsolete and ready for disposal – to collections of instruments and relics that should be retained for their historic interest. While the care of most of these objects was ultimately delegated to museums, the society has retained ownership of the collection. A relatively few items have, since the early-to-mid nineteenth century, been recognized as scientific relics, of value as talismans and for public representation. Individual items, such as the Huygens lenses, have slid between categories, while others have simply ‘ended up’ in the collection and more have slipped the net when attitudes to loans or grants were lax. The Newton telescope has retained a central function of institutional display. It has never been on loan to the Science Museum (although it may be temporarily loaned to a gallery on science in London, 1550–1800, opening in 2019) and continues to play its traditional role, displayed to dignitaries and visitors to the society’s building. The 350th anniversary of the society, marked in 2010, included the telescope in the Summer Science Exhibition, where it was duly shown to the politely interested monarch.113 This anniversary was the most recent occasion on which the rs made significant use of its object collections, including recalling loan items from the Science Museum. Key corporate signifiers like the mace, ink stand and founders’ portraits were brought on to the stage of the Royal Festival Hall for the anniversary convocation, while a significant number of objects were exhibited in their Carlton House Terrace building and featured by the press.114 In an image gallery accompanying a bbc Radio 4 ‘Today’ feature on the society’s anniversary on 24 June 2010, Newton’s telescope and death mask, wood from the Woolsthorpe tree (part of which was sent to space on a nasa shuttle mission in May that year) and Davy’s safety lamp are all present and correct.115 The opportunities for use and display of instruments as relics within the society’s buildings and in the press helped solidify their role as part of its identity. The shape of the rs collection and attitudes toward it have thus been influenced by internal affairs and individual interests. Matters of space and storage prompted attempts to get to grip with an ever-changing set of objects, but interest in the history and contemporary role of the society have also had their impact on decisions about the representation and future of the collection. External events and enquiries, however, often made a more significant impact; the sense that the society had a collection worthy of care and consideration was developed by requests from fellows, journalists, curators and others to see, borrow or illustrate their objects, papers and paintings. Increasingly, as individuals like Lewis Evans and George Gabb developed their instrument collections and expertise, and as the Science Museum took shape, the Royal Society’s collection took on significance within a wider field. The loan of these objects and their display alongside other collections brought them clearly into the sphere of museum objects, while the society developed a role as a cultural institution, lending to others and allowing objects and manuscripts to be copied, drawn or photographed in its apartments. The collections have, therefore, been shaped by their history and location, and by their custodians and users. They have also, by their individual ‘biographies’ and collective physical presence, shaped internal and external understandings of the society’s role, both past and present. Supplementary material An online Appendix at Journal of the History of Collections online provides an overview of the Royal Society’s instrument collections from 1831 to the present day, based on inventories and lists at the Royal Society and Science Museum. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sam Alberti and Carin Berkowitz for their very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper, as well the participants of the 2018 Cain Conference. I am particularly grateful to Alison Boyle and Keith Moore for their generosity in providing access to their collections’ databases and their comments on drafts of the accompanying object list. Footnotes 1 See for example J. Thomas, ‘Compiling “God’s great book [of] universal nature”: The Royal Society’s collecting strategies’, Journal of the History of Collections 23 (2011), pp. 1–13; M. Hunter, ‘The cabinet institutionalized: The Royal Society’s Repository and its background’, in The Origins of Museums. The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, ed. O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford, 1985), pp. 159–68. A. Marples, ‘Scientific administration in the early eighteenth century: reinterpreting the Royal Society’s Repository’, Historical Research (forthcoming 2019) is a recent challenge to the narrative of decline and disorder in the eighteenth-century Repository. 2 R. L. Kremer, ‘A time to keep, and a time to cast away: thoughts on acquisitions for university instrument collections’, Rittenhouse 22 (2008), pp. 188–210 discusses unused objects as in a liminal state, ‘precariously poised between active life in the laboratory and death in landfills or scrap metal recyclers’ (p. 188). As Marples, op. cit. (note 1) shows, however, the early eighteenth-century Repository was, although passively collected, actively used and exchanged. 3 A.D.C. Simpson, ‘Newton’s telescope and the cataloguing of the Royal Society’s Repository’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 38 (1984), pp. 187–214; A. R. Hall and A.D.C. Simpson, ‘An account of the Royal Society’s Newton telescope’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 50 (1996), pp. 1–11. 4 Although focused on universities, Lourenço’s category of ‘second generation collections’, typified by a collecting process of ‘historical accumulation’, is pertinent here: M. C. Lourenço, ‘Between Two Worlds: The Distinct Nature and Contemporary Significance of University Museums and Collections in Europe’, Ph.D. thesis, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (2005), pp. 39–40, see also 76–80. 5 See P.J.T. Morris (ed.), Science for the Nation: Perspectives on the history of the Science Museum (London, 2010) and Alison Boyle’s paper in this issue. 6 See P. de Clercq and A. Turner (eds), ‘Origins and evolution of collecting scientific instruments’, Journal of the History of Collections 7 (1995), pp. 133–268, including Turner’s ‘From mathematical practice to the history of science: the pattern of collecting scientific instruments’, pp. 135–50. 7 On changing value of objects, see I. Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge and New York, 1986), pp. 64–91. 8 Museums are by no means the only location in which instruments are or have been displayed: see S. Ackermann, R.L. Kremer and M. Miniati (eds), Scientific Instruments on Display (Leiden and Boston, 2014). 9 See A. Filippoupoliti, ‘“A small but choice collection of instruments”: the early days of the Royal Astronomical Society of London collection’, Museum History Journal 5 (2012), pp. 105–26 and Jane Wess, ‘The Role of Instruments in Exploration: A Study of the Royal Geographical Society 1830–1930’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh (2018). 10 On the gifting of objects to another kind of corporation, a Livery Company, see J. Kilburn-Toppin, ‘Gifting cultures and artisanal guilds in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London’, Historical Journal 60 (2017), pp. 865–87. The society’s recording of gifts – a habit that, like the use of eponyms for lectures or medals paid for by bequests, might encourage others to follow suit – has always been more thorough than its records of objects. See forthcoming essays by M. Berretta, on eponyms, and R. Higgitt, on the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, in Nuncius (December 2019). 11 See also Karin Tybjerg’s article in this issue. 12 L. Jordanova, ‘Science, memory and relics in Britain’, in Savant Relics: Brains and remains of scientists, ed. M. Beretta, M. Conforti and P. Mazzarello (Sagamore Beach, 2016), pp. 157–81, at p. 160. On Newton’s relics, many of which were held by the rs, see also R. Iliffe, ‘Newtonian hagiography and the creation of genius’ in the same volume, pp. 93–132. 13 See Kopytoff, op. cit. (note 7); S.J.M.M. Alberti, ‘Objects and the museum’, Isis 96 (2005), pp. 559–71; D. Pantalony, ‘Collectors, displays and replicas in context: what we can learn from provenance research in science museums’, in The Romance of Science: Essays in honour of Trevor H. Levere, ed. J. Buchwald and L. Stewart, (Cham, 2017), pp. 255–75. On re-use, repair and the second-hand instrument market see S. Werrett, ‘Recycling in early modern science’, British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013), pp. 627–46. 14 Kopytoff, op. cit. (note 7). 15 ‘Report of the Committee for Examining the State of the Repository of the Royal Society’, 2 November 1731, quoted in Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 195. 16 Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 197; Marples, op. cit. (note 1); N. Grew, Musæum Regalis Societatis. Or a Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham Colledge (London, 1681), pp. 351–86. 17 Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 196, 198. Werrett, op. cit. (note 13), p. 636 notes that when the microscopes were acquired, instructions were published in Philosophical Transactions, to ensure they were ‘of Use’. 18 See B. J. Ford, ‘What were the missing Leeuwenhoek microscopes really like?’, Proceedings of the Royal Microscopical Society 182 (1983), pp. 118–24, p. 123. 19 Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 201–2. 20 Ibid., p. 203. On the relationship between government, science and the rs, see J. Gascoigne, ‘The Royal Society and the emergence of science as an instrument of state policy’, British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999), pp. 171–84. 21 R. M. Macleod, ‘The Royal Society and the Government Grant: notes on the administration of scientific research, 1849–1911’, Historical Journal 14 (1971), pp. 323–58. The return policy was spelled out in 1853 but was clearly not well communicated or policed as it was reiterated in 1869 and 1876: Council Minutes 1863–1874, 18 March 1869, cmo/14; Council Minutes, 1874–1877, 17 February 1876, cmo/15 (Royal Society). 22 A handful of items displayed or created at soirées have been subsumed into the object collection or archive (see below). One object has been identified as probably the winner of an 1843 prize, the entries for which were to be delivered to Somerset House: Powell & Lealand microscope, 1843, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-8460>. 23 See the supplementary online data appended to this article for an overview of the changing collections and relevant inventories, with cross-referred identification numbers indicated where possible. My thanks to Keith Moore, Librarian at the Royal Society, and Alison Boyle, Keeper of Science Collections at the Science Museum, for access to relevant database lists. 24 Meetings of 13 July and 7 December 1782, Confirmed Minutes of the Board of Longitude, 1780–1801, Papers of the Board of Longitude, Cambridge Digital Library <https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-RGO-00014-00006/181> and <https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-RGO-00014-00006/185>. 25 See R. Higgitt, ‘Equipping expeditionary astronomers: Nevil Maskelyne and the development of “precision exploration”’, in Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration, ed. F. MacDonald and C.W.J. Withers (Farnham, 2015), pp. 15–36. 26 Minutes of meeting of the Committee appointed to take into consideration the state of the property belonging to the Society in their Warehouse, 22 March 1821, cmb/1/2, p. 22 (Royal Society). 27 The committee for examining into the state of the Meteorological Instruments belonging to the Royal Society ordered a number of meteorological and magnetic instruments, for example 25 April 1822 and 13 May 1824, cmb/1/4, pp. 36, 95–6 (Royal Society). Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 204. 28 ‘Account of Instruments, Apparatus and Coins belonging to the Royal Society’, March 1827, dm/2/124 and ‘List of Instruments belonging to the Royal Society, 1831’, dm/2/127. The list of instruments, dm/2/123, is annotated ‘Simm’s [sic] catalogue’, there are ‘Remarks by Mr Simms’ at dm/2/133, while the 1831 list (dm/2/127), by Henry Kater, includes Simms’s notes (Royal Society). 29 ‘Instruments and Apparatus Belonging to the Royal Society’, November 1834, mm/13/45 (Royal Society). Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 206 suggests that the physical numbering probably took place in early 1832. It was overseen by George Dollond, ibid, p. 217, note 107. 30 ‘List of Instruments and Apparatus belonging to the Royal Society, returned from Kew Observatory’, mm/1351 (Royal Society). 31 The Record of the Royal Society (London, 1897), pp. 171–4. 32 Draft statement about required room for Royal Society, mm/13/65 (Royal Society). 33 Description and plan of rooms required, c.1866, mm/13/68 (Royal Society). 34 ‘Statement of unfinished Joinery and Fittings and Imperfections at the Royal Society, received from Mr Spottiswoode’, mm/13/79; Council Minutes, 29 October 1874, cmo/14; List of Instruments and Apparatus belonging to the Royal Society, returned from Kew Observatory, mm/1351 (Royal Society). This list includes most of the items displayed at South Kensington as well as most of the others cross-referenced to the 1834 list, to be installed in the new Burlington House Instrument Room. 35 J. Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis, new edn (London, 1868), p. 600. 36 For example, B.A. Joule was informed in a letter 13 November 1896 that this policy would not be varied, in spite of his offering J. P. Joule’s apparatus: copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison to B.A. Joule, 13 November 1896, nlb/13/742 (Royal Society). This apparatus eventually came to the Science Museum in 1969, via the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology. 37 Copy letter from Michael Foster to Arthur James Richens Trendell, Science & Art Department, South Kensington Museum, 25 January 1893, nlb/7/338 (Royal Society). 38 Copy letter from Herbert Rix to the Director of the South Kensington Museum (probably Major-General Edward Robert Festing, director of the science collections), 9 December 1895, nlb/12/112 (Royal Society). This is Science Museum inv. no. 1896-60. 39 Copy letter from Rix to Lockyer 20 May 1894, nlb/9/507. The committee were Norman Lockyer, Silvanus Thompson and Lord Rayleigh. List of Instruments &c in Instrument Room, mm/13/56 (Royal Society). This is undated but lists photographic slides, a spectroscope and ‘An umbrella’ and presumably relates to this period of activity. 40 Copy letter from R.W.F. Harrison to S.P. Thompson, 3 October 1900, nlb/21/222 (Royal Society). 41 Science Museum inv. nos 1920-391 to 418. Nineteen of these were returned to the rs around 2010 as they marked the society’s 350th anniversary. See Radiometers and otheoscopes, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-8490>. 42 See Morris, op. cit. (note 5). 43 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 17 February 1927, om/2/1, f. 18 (Royal Society); Science Museum inv. nos 1927-805 to 807. 44 Copy letter from Rix to Dr Ephraim Cutter, 14 March 1894, nlb/9/29, accepting his gift of a case of Rumford ash, in which they would place their Rumford Medal and place amongst said relics; unknown to H. Lindfield, 17 July 1894, nlb/9/828, on display materials ‘wanted for our Newton relics’. On the lack of a museum, see Rix to the Honorary Secretary of the Goldsmiths’ Ramblers’ Club, 11 October 1894, nlb/10/59 and to Senor D. Tomas Llorente, 14 December 1894, nlb/10/543 (Royal Society). 45 For example, the Science Museum applied for permission to loan the Shuckburgh scale (r.s. 43) to the National Physical Laboratory: Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 26 October 1933, om/2/3/14; H. Winter, interested in experimenting on the terella loaned to the Museum, requested permission from the Society: idem, 12 December 1935, om/2/4/6. These had been loaned to the Museum after a request from its director, Henry Lyons: they were recalled from loan to the Admiralty Compass Museum: see correspondence from 1931 in mda/h/9 (Royal Society). 46 Turner, op. cit. (note 6), p. 136 47 R.G.W. Anderson, ‘Connoisseurship, pedagogy or antiquarianism? What were instruments doing in the nineteenth-century national collections in Great Britain?’, Journal of the History of Collections, 7 (1995), pp. 211–25, p. 224. 48 See for example correspondence with James Yates and Treasury on use and loan of standards 1863–5, Council Minutes 1863–74, cmo/14; request for information from the Standards Department of the Board of Trade, 6 May 191; request for loan from the National Physical Laboratory, 4 Oct 1933; R. J. Trump, Standards Department, Board of Trade, to J. D. Griffith Davies, 12 July 1941, Correspondence about instrument on loan, mda/h/9 (Royal Society). 49 Classically, see D. Howse and B. Hutchinson, ‘The saga of the Shelton clocks’, Antiquarian Horology 6 (1969), pp. 281–98. 50 Council Minutes 1874–1877, 18 February 1875, cmo/15 (Royal Society). 51 Report by Mr Simms (May 1831), ‘Instruments belonging to the Royal Society’, 1831, dm/2/127, p. 8 (Royal Society). This page is annotated ‘not to be printed’ and the comment about the young astronomer has been struck through. 52 ‘Instruments belonging to the Royal Society’, 1831, dm/2/127, p. 4 (Royal Society). 53 On Newtoniania, including from Turnor, who was owner of Newton’s childhood home, Woolsthorpe, see P. Fara, ‘Isaac Newton lived here: sites of memory and scientific heritage’, British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), pp. 407–26 and Iliffe, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 125–9. 54 Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 204, 206. 55 Simpson, op. cit. (note 3). Insurance for 1930, reflecting enlarged collections more than increased value of objects, was £22,000 for printed and manuscript material, maps and medals, £7,500 for pictures, £400 for the Newtonian Collection and £190 for the mace, charter book and Banks inkstand: Minutes of Officers’ Committee Meetings, 3 July 1930, om/2/2/14 (Royal Society). 56 Royal Society Council Record, quoted in Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 206. 57 Timbs, op. cit. (note 35), p. 600. 58 Hall and Simpson, op. cit. (note 3), p. 1. 59 Minutes of the Officers’ Meetings, 12 December 1935, om/2/4/6 (Royal Society). See Robert Southwell’s Chair, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-12473>. 60 Council Minutes Printed 8, 1898–1903, p. 33, 16 March 1899 (Royal Society); Barometer, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-12491>. This was loaned to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932, when they had acquired Down House, but has since returned to the society. 61 C.R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society (London, 1848), vol 1, p. 447. 62 Fara, op. cit. (note 53), pp. 416–20. 63 Letter from Lord Wrottesley to Walter White, 19 September 1858, ms/769/117 (Royal Society). 64 W. White, The Journals of Walter White, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society (London, 1898), entry for 21 September 1858, p. 119. 65 See Hall and Simpson, op. cit. (note 3). 66 Probably made by Constantine Huygens, they were given to the society in 1691 (by Christiaan Huygens), 1686 (by Newton) and 1724 (by Gilbert Burnett). They were 22, 23, and 24 in the 1834 list, have (with the exception of some optical parts, Science Museum, inv. no. 1932-461/1–5) remained at the rs and are the only items recorded in the Royal Society online catalogue as Museum Objects. 67 Additional eyepieces and apparatus were made by Robert Hooke, James Pound and Edward Scarlett and Henry Cavendish. Other investigations are: Report of Warren De La Rue FRS on the proposal to remount the Object Glass of Huyghens, 1854, mm/11/27 (Royal Society); by Norman Lockyer, see Council Minutes, 28 October 1875, cmo/15 (Royal Society) and Conferences Held in Connection with the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus (London, 1876), pp. 188–9; R. A. Sampson and A. E. Conrady, ‘On three Huygens lenses in the possession of the Royal Society of London’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 49 (1930), 289–99; A.A. Mills and M.L. Jones, ‘Three lenses by Constantine Huygens in the possession of the Royal Society of London’, Annals of Science 46 (1989), pp. 173–82; A. C. van Helden and R. H. van Gent, ‘The lens production by Christian and Constantijn Huygens’, Annals of Science 56 (1999), pp. 69–79.The most recent inspection was by Marv Bolt for his census of pre-1775 refracting telescopes: ‘Telescope Quest: Days 20 and 21’, Corning Museum of Glass (1 September 2016), <https://blog.cmog.org/2016/09/01/telescope-quest-days-20-and-21/>. 68 C. Blagden to B. Thompson (draft), 7 July 1786, quoted in Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, Cavendish (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 308; W. H. Smyth, in 1835, quoted in Weld, op. cit. (note 61), vol. i, p. 331. 69 Mills and Jones, op. cit. (note 67), p. 176. 70 Instruments belonging to the Royal Society, 1831, dm/2/127 (Royal Society): the headings are scored out and were not used in the 1834 list. 71 Record, op. cit. (note 31) pp. 171–4. 72 White, op. cit. (note 64), p. 91 (7 February 1849) and p. 260 (6 January 1874). 73 The Isaac Newton sundial, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-10262>. See also Images rs.10260 and rs.10261. See Herbert Rix, ‘The rise of the Royal Society’, Leisure Hour (June 1896), 489–95; ‘The presidents of the Royal Society’, Leisure Hour (July 1896), pp. 551–63; ‘The Royal Society. Its fellows and its work’, Leisure Hour (August 1896), pp. 657–63. 74 Y. Foote, ‘Evans, Sir John (1823–1908)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33040>; A. MacGregor (ed.), Sir John Evans 1823-1908: Antiquity, Commerce and Natural Science in the Age of Darwin (Oxford, 2008). 75 Evans appears as an exhibitor in several of the rs conversazione programmes. On the educational and military contexts of the South Kensington museums, see Anderson, op. cit. (note 47). 76 Descriptive Catalogue of the Royal Society’s Conversazione, 6 May 1896, p. 11; Catalogue of the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus at the South Kensington Museum, 3rd edn (London, 1877). 77 Henry Lyons, ‘Technical museums: their scope and aim’ (1933), quoted in T. Scheinfeldt, ‘The Science Museum at war and peace’, in Morris, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 41–60, quotations at pp. 51–2. See also E. Baigent, ‘Lyons, Sir Henry George (1864–1944)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34651> and rs Fellowship Directory <https://royalsociety.org/fellows/>. 78 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 7 July 1932, om/2/3/2 (Royal Society). 79 Scheinfeldt, op. cit. (note 77), p. 51. 80 See R. Bud, ‘Responding to stories: the 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus and the Science Museum’, Science Museum Group Journal 1 (2014) <https://doi.org/10.15180/140104> and Anderson, op. cit. (note 47). 81 On conversazione as a ubiquitous and experiential engagement with scientific culture for middle class Victorians, see S.J.M.M. Alberti, ‘Conversaziones and the experience of science in Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 8 (2003), pp. 208–30. On some of the coverage of the Royal Society’s events by newspapers and periodicals, see K. Moore, ‘Plates from Royal Society publications: fin-de-siècle newspaper sketches’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 60 no. 3 (2006), pp. 311–20. 82 Instruments & Apparatus/ Additions, c.1890s, mm/13/46 (Royal Society); Science Museum inv. no. 1900-127. 83 See for example that of William Crookes’s hand: Royal Society Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-9840>. 84 See note 42 above. A report of the 1889 conversazione mentions optical apparatus for showing Crookes’s radiometer: Illustrated London News (iln) 2615 (1 June 1889), p. 686. 85 The Morning Post 35848 (12 May 1887), p. 2. 86 iln 5640 (24 May 1947), p. 548. That year he displayed a seventeenth-century model of a fire-engine, pictured in the paper. In 1939 he had helped the society to celebrate the ‘Centenary of Photography’ by exhibiting a range of Daguerreotypes and Talbotypes from his collection:iln [no issue no.] (27 May 1939), p. 918. 87 iln, 969 (16 April 1859), p. 378. 88 Officers’ Meetings Minutes, 1 November 1934, om/2/3/24 (Royal Society). 89 iln 18 (10 September 1842), p. 278. This was the 1725/6 portrait by John Vanderbank, rs Picture Library <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-9253>. 90 An ‘At Home’ marked the 1933 tercentenary of Pepys and bicentenary of Priestley, when it was ‘agreed that exhibits relating to Pepys, Priestley, Leeuwenhoek, and Malpighi be shown’, Minutes of Officers’ Meetings, 5 January 1933, om/2/3, f. 10 (Royal Society). At other times, if such anniversaries were not being marked by the society itself they might lend objects, paintings or texts to other displays. 91 iln 86 (23 December 1843), p. 412. This story was the tradition that the society’s mace was that used in the pre-Cromwellian House of Commons. Weld had shared this story, which he subsequently debunked in an article of 1846: ‘History of the mace given to the Royal Society by King Charles the Second’, Abstracts of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London 5 (1843–1850), pp. 611–19. He noted that ‘numberless visitors’ came purposely to the building to see it. 92 iln 1235 (12 December 1863), pp. 597–8, at p. 598. The latter object was a hydrostatic balance by Jesse Ramsden, presented to the society by Lady Banks, presumably after her husband’s death in 1820. It had been used in experiments ‘on the best method of proportioning the excise upon spirituous liquors’ ordered by Banks and reported on by Joseph Blagden: Philosophical Transactions 80 (1790), pp. 321–45, at p. 340. It was loaned as Science Museum, inv. no. 1900-166, while all these other relics have remained at the rs. 93 The Graphic 1228 (10 June 1893), p. 24; Record, op. cit. (note 30). This object was offered for loan to the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, in 1932, where it remains today (inv. no. 82044). 94 The Graphic, op. cit. (note 93). 95 See Bud, op. cit. (note 80) and Anderson, op. cit. (note 47). 96 Catalogue, op. cit. (note 76), pp. ix, xiii, quoted in Anderson, op. cit. (note 47) p. 219. 97 Council Minutes 1874–1877, 30 November 1875, cmo/15 (Royal Society). 98 Anderson, op. cit. (note 47), p. 219. 99 Conferences held in Connection with the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus (London, 1876), pp. 2, 185–8. 100 iln 1938 (16 September 1876), p. 269. See P. de Clerq, ‘The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus, South Kensington, 1876: Part 1 The “Historical Treasures” in the Illustrated London News’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 72 (2002), pp. 11–19. Information was drawn from the extensive catalogue and, de Clerq suggests, personal examination. 101 The first iln report of the exhibition also picked out only historical objects: iln 1925 (17 June 1876), p. 599. Peter de Clerq estimates that there were over 400 historic scientific instruments, and many more items of historic technology, among the 5,000 objects: ‘The Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus, South Kensington, 1876: Part 2 The Historical Instruments’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 73 (2002), pp. 8–16. 102 This was the assessment of Queen Victoria, who added ‘one hardly knew how to get away from each’ of the ‘many very curious things’: ra vic/main/qvj (w), 13 May 1876 (Princess Beatrice’s copies) <www.queenvictoriasjournals.org>. She mentioned Newton’s and Galileo’s telescopes and several items of recent invention, concluding ‘It would take days to see the Exhibition thoroughly’ (p. 105). 103 iln 1938 (16 September 1876), p. 270, in de Clerq, op. cit. (note 101), p. 13. 104 iln 1938 (23 September 1876), p. 281. 105 ‘Instruments and Apparatus Belonging to the Royal Society’, November 1834, mm/13/45 (Royal Society). The 1940 edition of the Record lists it as by Haukesbee. The mhs loan, a ‘bomb-shaped’ part marked with the air-pump’s 1834 catalogue number, 49, is inv. no. 28837 (Acc: 1932–69). Its loan and identity was discussed in 1932 with R. T. Gunther in correspondence about instruments on loan, mda/h/9 (Royal Society). The air-pump itself was loaned to the Science Museum as inv. no. 1970-24 but has been returned to the rs. 106 De Clerq, op. cit. (note 101), p. 18. 107 Anderson, op. cit. (note 47), p. 220. 108 The instruments lent to the Loan Collection, and the Huygens object glass borrowed by Lockyer, were reported as returned to the Instrument Room on 15 February 1877, Council Minutes 1874–1877, cmo/51 (Royal Society). The Duke of Richmond, lobbying the Lord Chancellor for the new museum in 1876, said the museum would return objects to exhibitors ‘who expressed a wish to that effect’: Anderson, op. cit. (note 47), p. 220. 109 Copy letter from Harrison to W.J.S. Lockyer, 16 December 1907, nlb/36/784. The rejection was conveyed in Harrison to Sir Alexander Pedler, 29 January 1908, nlb/37/123 (Royal Society). 110 Details of the loan are recorded in Masters Chair, rs Picture Library, <https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-12501>, and see copy letter from Michael Foster to A.J.R. Trendell, Science and Art Department, 12 May 1896, nlb/12/820. This is presumably the chair bequeathed to the society by Thomas Kerslake in 1891: copy letter from Herbert Rix to Messrs Wilton & Sons, Bath, 3 June 1891, nlb/5/407 (Royal Society). 111 Minutes of Officers’ Meetings Committee, 28 October 1926, om/2/1/8 (Royal Society). 112 Copy letter from Harrison to P. Geddes, 6 March 1913, nlb/47/624 (Royal Society). 113 See fig. 5 in ‘Convocation of the Fellowship of the Royal Society at the Royal Festival Hall, 23 June 2010’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64 (2010), pp. 217–27, which shows Prince Philip, Martin Rees (then President of the rs), and Queen Elizabeth II ‘enjoying some of the Society’s treasures’, including the telescope, manuscript of Principia and William Stukeley’s memoir of Newton. 114 ‘Convocation of the Fellowship’ op. cit. (note 113) and, for example, ‘350th Anniversary: Royal Society Goes Back to the Future’, The Guardian (3 Jun 2010). <https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2010/jun/02/350th-anniversary-royal-society>. 115 Accompanying a segment on bbc Radio 4’s Today, ‘A Tour Through 350 Years of The Royal Society’, 24 June 2010 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8758000/8758800.stm>. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Instruments and relicsThe history and use of the Royal Society’s object collections c.1850–1950
JF - Journal of the History of Collections
DO - 10.1093/jhc/fhy038
DA - 2019-11-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/instruments-and-relicsthe-history-and-use-of-the-royal-society-s-QA05BkXAjd
SP - 469
VL - 31
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -