Visions of an Instrument

If you have ever looked through a microscope, you probably know the excitement of encountering shapes and textures but also the disappointment and vague anxiety when finding out that many of your observations concern, in fact, air bubbles, water drops, impurities, dirt, tricks of light, and perhaps scratches of the glass slide or the lens. Jutta Schickore's book is a historical account of how microscope users and builders from Britain and Germany have dealt with such disappointments and anxieties (as well as others surrounding their research and craft) at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Between Galileo's perfecting of the compound microscope around 1624 and Joseph Lister's assembly of a highly performing version in 1830, the eighteenth century—especially in its second half—seemed to have been a rather stagnant period in the evolution of microscopy, as Schickore points out in the introduction. She argues that even if the instrument as a technology didn't improve significantly during this time, the second-order discourses and practices surrounding microscopy developed and diversified, reaching a maturity that in turn fostered and largely made possible the 1830 landmark leap into official modernity. Furthermore, the ways in which these second-order discourses developed and were negotiated determined in great measure the later success of microscopy as an accepted, respectable, and even categorical technique of science. As such, this book effectively extends debates from fields such as cinema and visual studies, contributing to the historiography of questions surrounding mediated vision and its accuracy—or potential access to an elusive "reality." From the initial anxieties regarding the potential blasphemy of employing an instrument to peer into secrets that God might have wanted to remain unrevealed (briefly surveyed in the first chapter of the book) to its successful career as an instrument of polite science meant to amuse and amaze the society at conferences and in salons, the microscope's identity as a tool of scientific knowledge has been challenged only to emerge more solidly. Perhaps the biggest threat to its legitimacy was, as Schickore points out in chapters 2 to 4, its potential lack of accuracy. Chromatic aberrations, perceptual illusions, and deceptions—what Thomas Young called "misleading phenomena" (87)—as well as the aforementioned impurities and technical imperfections of the instrument were all making the task of microscope enthusiasts extremely difficult, as they had no way of telling whether what they were seeing was the actual object of observation or an observational artifact. In chapter 2, "Encountering Optical Deceptions," Schickore gives a fascinating account of how Alexander Monro, chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth century, made public his discovery of what he named "convoluted fibers," solid structures that appeared to be "a universal elementary structure common to organic as well as inorganic bodies" (42). Alas, he later had to admit he was wrong, but not before he had secured the testimony of eyewitnesses—the method of choice for validating scientific results at the time.

At the same moment, though, the scientific community considered the microscope accurate enough to be used in the calibration and reading of astronomical instruments, measuring rods, and the pyrometer, a tool for evaluating the changes in volume caused by variable temperature. In chapter 3, "Tools of Accuracy," the author offers a valuable analysis of this essential stage in the history of second-order discourses surrounding microscopy. With chapter 5, "Test Objects and the Pretensions, Defects, and Excellencies of Individual Microscopes," we understand even better how the efforts for improving microscopy as a technique and a methodology become intertwined with (and indeed engender) its acceptance as a tool of modern science. The preoccupation with finding the right amount of light intensity, establishing a balance between magnifying and penetrating power, and creating the category of test objects used to evaluate various microscopes is a reflection of foundational axioms in scientific methodology such as reproducibility, independent verification, and the use...