Early modern mathematical instruments (Q2906783)

This seminal article aims to show why and how ``mathematical instruments'' need to be considered a well-defined category in the early modern period in contrast to the later term ``scientific instrument''. The author justifies his idea by analyzing the academic, artisanal and commercial aspects of instrumentation. He begins by focusing his analysis on astronomical instruments such as astrolabes, sundials, horary quadrants and the armillary sphere in the sixteenth century. He emphasizes that the description of the construction and use of mathematical instruments was usual in published treatises, and quotes from books like Giovanni Paolo Gallucci's \textit{Della fabrica et uso di diversi stromenti di astronomia et cosmographia} (1597). According to the author, these kinds of publications show that ``instruments had a life that was not entirely dependent on an academic mathematical discipline''. After underlining the importance for the future of observatory astronomers from the publication of Tycho Brahe's \textit{Astronomiae instauratae mechanica} in 1598, he moves his description to dialing and the division of instruments. He reminds us that mathematicians such as Regiomontanus, Peter Apianus, Gemma Frisius, and Oronce Fine considered ``dialing as an integral part of their disciplinary practice''. The author continues his narrative into the seventeenth century by focusing on Gresham College in London and on Gunter's quadrant and Oughtred's horizontal instrument. He also deals with the compass of proportion and the logarithmic slide rule. The following paragraphs are dedicated to the commercial presence of instruments in English workshops. Bennett gives three reasons for why the trade in mathematical instruments falls within the range of historians of science: the first is explained by ``the entrepreneurial efforts of a number of makers to deal across all classes of instruments''; the second is because the leading mathematical instrument makers were also working in astronomical observatories, while the third one consists in the accuracy of observation and measurement made by these mathematical instrument makers. He concludes by stating that in the history of instruments, optical and experimental instruments are analyzed. However, it should be remembered that some mathematical instruments have a much longer history. In fact, all these instruments deserve the category of mathematical instruments while, because of their trade and commercial use, they become recognized as scientific instruments in the eighteenth century.