John FitzMaurice Mills (1917–1991)

I would love to know the original working title of this book.

I say that because I really, really would not consider this a book about antique scientific instruments. It's about antique science -- including the gadgets used -- but it also devotes a lot of space the scientific ideas and the inventors.

And this "mission creep" has substantial significance for what the book actually includes. One example that I looked up -- or tried to -- was the Dipping Needle. A dipping needle was a sort of a three-dimensional compass: Instead of just pointing in the surface direction of the north and south poles, it pointed downward toward the pole. If it points straight down, you're at the North Magnetic Pole; if it points straight up, you're at the South Magnetic Pole; if it points at some other angle, you can use it to tell how far you are away from the pole. Polar explorers used them to hunt the magnetic poles -- indeed, when James Clark Ross got to the North Magnetic Pole, the fact that the dipping needle was jiggling as he watched it was the first absolute proof that the magnetic poles moved about. So this is an important instrument that was used in the nineteenth century.

And it's not in here. Neither are alchemical tools like alembics. Thus this is not a really comprehensive reference for ancient scientific instruments.

Nor are the entries long enough to teach you how to use -- let along build -- the instruments. There is an entry on the astrolabe, for instance, but it consists of two photos plus something less than a column of text. You don't get enough information to know how they worked, nor enough history to realize how important they were in astronomy. And it doesn't even mention Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe, considered to be the first scientific textbook in English.

The result, I would submit, is more a "Dictionary of Early Scientists and Their Equipment" than an "Encyclopedia of Antique Scientific Instruments." If you are, like me, fond of actually reading the entries in specialized dictionaries to try to learn something, the entries here are simply too short to give you any real insight. For that purpose, a book with fewer but longer entries would be much better. There are plenty of biographical dictionaries of scientists, and encyclopedias of science, that can supply the other needs.

This is not a defect, exactly. This is a perfectly good book if you know its limitations: It's too short, it's incomplete, and it ranges too far afield. The problem is more one of false advertising: the title will get tinkerers, and historians of tinkering, all excited -- and then disappoint them, as it disappointed me. For those who just want to have a reference available for the history of science, it will usually do fairly well. As long as you don't need to know what a dipping needle is, anyway.… (mais)