The Practice of Science in the Nineteenth Century: Teaching and Research Apparatus in the Teyler Museum (review)

This is the long-awaited second part of a catalog of a collection of scientific instruments and apparatus whose first installment was published in 1973. That first installment formed part of the fourth volume of a larger work (R. J. Forbes, E. Lefebvre, and J. G. de Bruijn, eds., Marinus van Marum: Life and Work, 6 vols. [Haarlem and Leiden, 1969–76]). Fortunately, however, the catalog itself appeared as a handy offprint in its own right as G. L’E. Turner, Van Marum’s Scientific Instruments in Teyler’s Museum (Haarlem and Leiden, 1973). Gerard Turner has been involved in the cataloging of historic scientific instruments for many years. Looking hard at an object under review to make it “speak” is one of the museum curator’s skills, and over the years Turner has had many profitable “conversations” with such material, which he has shared through his publications with a wider audience. His work has proved a boon to curators working in the same field because of the lack, until recently, of good descriptive catalogs that had internal consistency, bibliographic detail, and reliable comparisons with material in other collections.

The Physical Cabinet of the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has been likened to a time machine (p. 11). Martinus van Marum (1750–1837) was appointed its director in 1784, when he established a policy of adult scientific teaching and research. To accomplish this goal, he purchased the highest-quality apparatus by the best makers of the day. The archives of the Teyler Foundation reveal the source, use, cost—indeed the entire working history of the individual items in the cabinet—which adds another dimension to mere cataloging. This part of the catalog reveals aspects of the instrument-making trade: the relationships between scientists and the creators of their apparatus, and the international nature of the trade itself before the twentieth century.

Turner’s first catalog, which covered material acquired between 1784 and 1837 (although van Marum concentrated his activities on geological pursuits after 1810), accounted for some 350 items. This second catalog is numbered from 350 to 804, covering 454 items dating from about 1840 to 1915. As might be expected, the objects reflect the changing nature of science during this period. Telephones, telegraphy, and magic lantern projection are all represented, while the new science of spectroscopy, and those nineteenth-century favorites, electricity and acoustics, make a large showing. Gone are the charming wooden mechanical models and much of the earlier demonstration pieces in which the eighteenth century delighted.

A useful five-page introduction to the catalog outlines the history of the Teyler Museum and gives thumbnail sketches of the careers of each of van Marum’s successors and their contribution to the cabinet. Like the catalog itself, the introduction is well referenced for those who wish to follow up any point in further detail. The most astonishing aspect of the Teyler Museum is its completeness, right across all disciplines to the end of the nineteenth century, when, as Turner rightly observes, “the growth of science after 1900, and the complexity of radio and electron physics, were such as to preclude advances by so modest an institution as the Teyler Foundation” (p. 19). Up to that point, Teyler’s remains a marvelous fly trapped in amber and a standard as further investigation of teaching and research collections is undertaken elsewhere.