Instruments for Natural Philosophy

Jake von Slatt — Thu, 02/12/2009 - 10:33

Long before I got into Steampunk, in fact long before that name had been coined, I had a love for scientific instruments.

I would rescue the catalogues of instruments and demonstrations from the dumpster behind our school at the end of each year when the science teachers would discard them and take them home to pour over like the Sears xmas Wishbook (or maybe the lingerie supplement ;-) )!

Here's a marvellous resource for the Steampunk fabricator, with hundreds and hundreds of pictures of vintage scientific instruments organized by area of investigation. It's a place I often look to for inspiration.

another large fantastic resource for you

macmangan — Sat, 02/14/2009 - 03:34

http://www.sparkmuseum.com

Great resource you have, and heres another one. You may already now of it. I love the spark museum. The site is set up oddly, but after you figure out the good stuff is on the left hand side, you will love it. Tons of fantastic devices and such. Hope you enjoy it.

These instruments are great.

dsu — Thu, 02/12/2009 - 23:53

These instruments are great. I love the combination of function and beauty.

Over at the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments at Harvard, we've been working on a similar project. We're photographing all 20,000 objects and trying to get them all on line. You can see them at:
http://dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu/emuseumdev/code/emuseum.asp

Check out the sun dials in the Putman Gallery collection, and the animated GIFs in the Waywiser in Motion collection.

dsu

Oh that's a cool collection

Jake von Slatt — Fri, 02/13/2009 - 11:40

Oh that's a cool collection but I hate that the images are locked down behind a flash widget! Why not link the source image and Creative Commons license it?

I wish I had the power to do

dsu — Fri, 02/13/2009 - 14:27

I wish I had the power to do that. I'm just a lowly photographer. (I'll refrain from giving my opinion of the Univerty's intellectual property policies). This seems to be pretty common in the museum world though. For some reason museums own images of things they own. But that's a whole kettle of fish.

I don't know if you posted this before, but Cornell also has a great collection of kinematic teaching models:
http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/index.php
They have lots animated movies and 3d CAD renderings of lots of basic mechanical movements. Plus scans of lots of old kinematics books. Great place to start thinking about steampunk in motion.