The social life of precision instruments: artisans’ trials in early-modern England, 1550–1700 (Q6553079)

Four decades ago, \textit{S. Shapin} and \textit{S. Schaffer} discussed how Robert Boyle undertook to make experiments a criterion of scientific matters of fact. Apart from the technical aspects, they formulated a social criterion for the reliability of witnesses: ``The credibility of witnesses followed the taken-for-granted conventions of that setting for assessing individuals' reliability and trustworthiness: Oxford professors were accounted more reliable witnesses than Oxfordshire peasants'' \N[Leviatham and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1985), p. 58]. \NThat was certainly a sleight of hand, to say it kindly -- the three witnesses justifying the statement were John Wallis, Seth Ward and Christopher Wren, chosen not because they were Oxford professors (Boyle speaks of them as ``Dr.'', ``Dr.'' and ``Mr.'') but because they were mathematicians and astronomers of renown (among Boyle's readers, and even today); similarly today, referees for a astrophysics paper are chosen among the specialists in the field and not from random scholars (e.g., a musicologist and a dermatologist).\N\NThe investigation under review is obliquely presented as a follow-up of Shapin's and Schaffer's work (sotto voce becoming a corrective). It considers how precision instruments were validated in public trials, in which participated gentlemen as well as ``instrument makers, goldsmiths, surveyors and carpenters''. As the author observes on p. 103, these were certainly not peasants, nor however professors. That the English mathematical practitioners were a well-established social category has been recognized at least since Eva G. R. Taylor's work, in which (according to the author, p. 104), the ``evidence used in [his] paper has been hiding in plain sight for many decades''.\N\NThe trials discussed are known from written reports -- how else could they be? One, from 1542, is reported in a letter from John Wallop, Captain of Guînes Castle (an English possession until 1558), to the Treasurer of the Royal Household -- that is, in a correspondence between gentlemen. It speaks about four gentlemen-visitors (one of them being Leonard Digges) engaged in surveying and other kinds of mathematical practice, evidently using mathematical instruments. Trial of the instruments is not yet explicitly involved, and they may well have been quite simple.\N\NChange of participants as well as authorship come with a dialogue written in 1582 as part of a larger treatise about surveying by Edward Worsop, a successful instrument maker. Participants in this (almost certainly fictitious) dialogue are two gentlemen, a clothier and a servant reporting what he has seen a mathematical practitioner called ``Master Morgan'' perform in competitive trial of precision.\N\NWhen Worsop wrote, he was one of only five instrument makers in London. Four decades later there were dozens, and ``instrument makers' shops became lively sites for the exchange of expertise and information on new devices and techniques, and craftsmen could be expected to demonstrate their wares to potential customers'' (p. 110); instrument trials and collective observations also took place in public space and went into print. Of great importance, and discussed in detail, is the work surrounding measurement of the magnetic deviation (the author here uses Stephen Pumfrey's earlier work on the topic). As it was discovered that the value given by Thomas Digges was not true, Digges' measurement was at first believed to have been defective. Then, as the deviation turned out to undergo further variation, measuring it became a kind of research programme, with the compass needle-maker John Marr as the central person. By now (p. 112), ``instrument makers were not the only practitioners whose expertise was valued: artisans and merchants working in architecture, the cloth trade, carpentry, gunnery and allied fields were increasingly expected to have some facility with geometry and arithmetic, and to be able to use, craft and even modify the precision tools of their trade''.\N\NA last trial that is presented involves barrel gauging. In 1633, William Oughtred had collaborated with the instrument maker Elias Allen to develop a scaled ``gauging rod'', improving earlier methods. As taxation needs increased during the Civil Wars, an informal committee formed around the goldsmith John Reynolds. It undertook to control the Oughtred-Allen method, which had been adopted for official use, and showed it to be faulty.\N\NThis points forward to the integration of artisanal culture with that of natural philosophy in the early Royal Society -- a topic analyzed by Rob Iliffe in several publications referred to by the author.