New models and styles in producing microscopes

If chart 2 represents variation in the production of European microscopical texts during a half century, it also provides subtle clues to the demand for microscopes. For instance in England the increase in the number of texts, from the 1730s to the 1740s, mirrors the London increase in demand for instruments. Nevertheless, these numbers do not signify the same thing in each country, because the production of microscopes throughout Europe was under very different regimes. The demand for microscopes was kept alive differently in each particular country, international exchanges becoming infrequent until 1740. Yet classic and new models of microscopes continued to be produced. In London, microscope makers such as Edward Nairne, Edward Scarlett and George Lindsay were active, the Wilson simple microscope was launched in 1702, and in 1725 the Culpeper compound microscope rose in prominence, though there is seldom evidence that the British microscopes were bought by foreign scholars before the 1740s. In France, the

production of microscopes followed the previous status of lower visibility. Perhaps this is related to the failure of certain attempts to institutionalise the relationships between scholars and craftsmen in an academic framework other than the Académie des

Sciences. Indeed the ephemerous Société des Arts, created around 1728 and torpedoed by the Académie in 1733, gathered scholars and several engineers and microscope makers such as the clockmaker Henry Sully, Gallon, editor of the Machines et

Inventions Approuvées par l’Académie, and Marc Mitouflet Thomin.⁴⁴⁷ Three-lensed microscopes and two improved simple microscopes inspired by Hartsoeker and by Huygens, both called microscope à liqueur^g (microscope for the infusions),⁴⁴⁸ are mentioned especially in the milieu of the Académie Royale des sciences.⁴⁴⁹ These instruments were built by Butterfield from 1678, by Nicolas Bion, Chapotot, Lefebvre and Langlois, and one of these models was the French equivalent to the Wilson type.⁴⁵⁰ However, obstacles to a more precise identification of the manufacturers derive from French scholars who referred only to the types of microscope but never to

manufacturers namely. These craftsmen built compound microscopes as well, but their production seems to have been limited to supplying the French demand. In addition to using a different name for the French equivalent of the British Wilson microscope, one of the best evidences of the French independence from the British culture of using the microscope is provided by a letter of the physicist Abbé Nollet. He had advertised, since 1738, several models of microscopes from his Paris workshop. In the early 1740s, the Geneva physicist Jean Jallabert begged him for a “double microscope”, the current British name designating the compound microscope. Nollet did not understand the request, and asked “what do you mean exactly by double microscope: does this mean that you want two of them, or you want a microscope with several spare lens; My microscopes have three lenses, with five objective lenses that vary the degrees of

447 See Hahn 1971, 109-110.

448 The French name for this microscope derives from its function. This was, since Hartsoeker’s (1694, 175) presentation in Essay de dioptrique that of allowing microscopical observations of infusions, called “liqueur” in the milieu of the Académie des Sciences.

449 A microscope à liqueur was used by La Hire (1730, 425) in 1693.

450 See Ruestow 1996, 26; Fournier 1989, 591-593.

force”.⁴⁵¹ Up to the early 1740s, even a physicist and creator of instruments like Nollet did not know the British terminology. Indeed in France the compound microscope was named “three glasses microscope”.⁴⁵²

Such a half self-sufficient market, centered on Paris, explains why French craftsmen lacked specific advertising strategies. While the British practitioners printed trade-cards, published leaflets in London scientific journals and newspapers, as well as loose sheets, in order to advertise their models, their French colleagues issued big treatises on the making of instruments, thus mixing the educational and advertising functions.

Nicholas Bion’s 1709 Traité de la construction et des principaux usages des

instruments de mathématique became a classic, issuing six editions in forty-three years, five German translations reprinted and an English translation.⁴⁵³ Of course, the

microscopes are lost in the large number of descriptions of other instruments by Bion, as well as in his plate.⁴⁵⁴ (plate 10: Bion) Joblot’s 1718 Descriptions de plusieurs microscopes was perhaps a good advertisement for the King’s engineer, Lefebvre, providing one could read the whole book in order to find Lefebvre’s name quoted only twice. The optician Claude-Simon Passemant gave the formula of his brass alloy in his 1738 book and his colleague Thomin instructed readers on how to grind the lenses in his 1749 Treatise of optical mechanics. When Abbé Nollet set about selling whole chambers of physics, he publicised his business with an entire educational programme, both in his 1738 catalogue of instruments called Programme for a course of

experimental physics, and in the voluminous 1743-1747 Lessons of experimental physics. But no loose sheet or leaflet were used by them. The attitude of the French manufacturers who concealed advertising behind technical education contrasts with the marketing strategy soon adopted by the British. The French advertising style also related to the academic policy of revealing professional secrets. Academies --not only

451 Letter from Nollet to Jallabert, the 10th of February 1741 (Benguigui 1983, 104).

452 Joblot 1718, 63-64; Bion 1723, 117; Duhamel 1732, 314; Thomin 1749, 132, Magny 1753, 46.

453 Paris 1709, 1716, La Haye 1723, Paris 1725, 1751, 1752, Frankfurt 1712, Leipzig 1713, Nürnberg 1717 and 1727, Nürnberg 1721 and 1728, Nürnberg 1726 and 1741, London 1723.

454 Bion 1723, 114-118; plate 10, fig. I, L, K, M.

the French-- fought to make public the diffusion of certain hidden techniques, to register, evaluate and control people’s inventions, as well as to promote research on trade secrets and lost secrets. Réaumur, for instance, who discovered methods of dying, of making artificial pearls, steel, ceramics and papers, published many of his results in Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences. On microscopes, Joblot’s attitude diverged from that of practitioners who concealed their trade secrets. Joblot, like Bion, gave full instructions for building several types of microscope and not, like the British artisans, simply an advertisement of the product.⁴⁵⁵ Comparison of Joblot’s 1718 plate for the microscope à liqueur, with Wilson’s 1702 design for a simple microscope outlines the difference between the diffusion of secrets and protectionism. (Fig. G)

Joblot made comments about the plate, indicating that the figure replicated the exact size of the microscope, such that anyone, skilled enough in turning, could attempt to build the same instrument. Turning was indeed a very important skill of instrument makers, which allowed them to make almost every component of a microscope. Both

455 See Daumas 1953, 109.

the Wilson and Lefebvre-Joblot models were based on Hartsoeker’s 1694 model;

Hartsoeker had himself given enough information on its pieces and mechanism for anyone to reproduce it.⁴⁵⁶ It would however be misleading to differentiate French from British on this mere point, since the disclosure of practical knowledge and know-how, in contrast to instrument makers, characterised academics. The ideal aim of academic communities was indeed opposed to that of the craftsmen. As a rule, academicians had to describe publicly the means employed in order to repeat experiments, including instruments, while manufacturers, at the opposite, concealed their trade secrets.⁴⁵⁷ Being an academician and a maker and retailer of instruments, abbé Nollet felt himself to be in an in-between position in regards to publicising his methods of manufacturing and thus emphasised the utilisation of his instruments.⁴⁵⁸ In Germany, the

mathematician Christian Gottlieb Hertel (1683-1743) indicated several methods for grinding glasses in his 1716 Comprehensive instructions on grinding glass. A

mathematician such as Robert Smith (1689-1768), in his 1738 comprehensive System of Optics, also made known many recipes for constructing microscopes and grinding lenses, as did the Neapolitan scholar Giovanni-Maria della Torre in 1749, and in 1763.⁴⁵⁹ At the opposite end of the spectrum, a craftsman like Georges Adams, who in Micrographia illustrata of 1746 translated Trembley’s and Joblot’s books, did not mention the first part of Joblot’s book, which revealed precise blueprints for microscopes which could be considered close to trade secrets.

Concerning the use of microscopes, the French and British developments of the Hartsoeker type supply valuable signal of the importance of the instrument in both countries. Before the 1740s, when Cuff designed a new Wilson-type, adjustable to a base, the microscope à liqueur seems to have been used more for scientific work in France than the Wilson was in England. In the forty years before 1740 the Wilson was

456 See Daumas 1953, 63-64.

457 Since the 1660s, systems of licenses and brevet promoted by academies tended to control the know-how of engineers and craftsmen. See for instance the case of France, Hahn 1971, 66-67.

458 Salomon-Bayet 1978, 390-398.

459 Smith 1767, 619; Della Torre 1763, 60-71.

only referred to by the anatomist Cowper and by the anonymous C. H., while the French microscope à liqueur continued to be singled out, by Lamy, Poupart, de la Hire, Joblot, Duhamel du Monceau, and probably Réaumur.⁴⁶⁰ These data match what Georges Adams wrote in 1746 about the Wilson microscope which he considered to have been abandoned soon after being invented. According to Adams, it was

Lieberkhun, who, by fitting a Wilson to his solar microscope, rejuvenated this

microscope, “esteemed the best” up until that time.⁴⁶¹ Nevertheless, while the French artisans forsook the simple microscope à liqueur which was not referred to after the 1730s,⁴⁶² the British, German and Dutch manufacturers still built Hartsoeker-Wilson models during the period 1740-1770, but apparently not for a long time afterwards.⁴⁶³ This type, therefore, was dismissed in France before the middle of the century and was replaced by new models made by Passemant, Nollet, Thomin, Magny, Georges, and other unknown instrument manufacturers. However, Henry Baker’s powerful and targeted advertising for the Wilson-Cuff microscope in his internationally published books kept alive the demand for such an instrument, which continued almost up to the time of the French Revolution. But the 1755 Ellis-Cuff model of a simple aquatic microscope lead to the gradual neglect of the Hartsoeker-Wilson type after the 1760s.⁴⁶⁴ Indeed both the Wilson and Ellis microscopes fulfilled a similar function, namely the observation of microscopical water animals seen by reflection, but the aquatic

microscope allowed a much better handling of the material than the Wilson, whose absence of stage still required slides to fix the infusions. (Fig. J: Baker / Ellis). The stake of such competition was also related to the position adopted in order to observe

460 Cowper 1702, 1181; C.H. 1703, 1357; Puget 1704, 66; Poupart 1706, 238; La Hire cadet 1714, 280; Joblot 1718, Duhamel 1732, 303; Duhamel 1733, 180; Duhamel 1735, 73.

461 Adams 1746, 12. Contrary to what was reported by several historians, the Wilson was not the most used microscope in the whole eighteenth-century, but only from 1740 onwards.

462 The agronomist Duhamel du Monceau, who referred to the microscope à liqueur up until 1735, did not mention it any more in his 1758 Physique des arbres, though he made constant reference to various microscopes and lenses being more or less powerful.

463 The Dutch instrument makers Jacob Lommers and Gerrit Cramer made Wilson type in the 1750s-1760s (Daumas 1953, 332).

464 The last references I could find to the Wilson are Ellis 1769, 141; Della Torre 1763, §33; Magni 1776, 30 (an improved Wilson model); Delius & Clemens 1766, 13; Wilke 1768; and Richter 1788, 33 who entered into a dispute with Delius on the crystals of human bile.

through each microscope. The Wilson, as it was called in Britain, and in Germany the Hand microscope, might be handled and directed towards the sky, a position that did not allow lengthy observations for want of stability, which was supplied by the Ellis type. In 1748, Buffon criticised the simple microscope and praised the compound microscope which addressed the need for stability. Before the elimination of both types of microscope à liqueur in the 1740s, certain French and Dutch instrument makers and scholars --Joblot, Musschenbroek, Trembley, and Lyonnet-- had already by this time chosen a solution that gave priority to stability even in simple microscopes, but they designed a much more flexible structure, with sock-and-ball mounted lenses and a fixed foot or rack (Fig. K).

With the problem in the diffusion of creativity throughout their own country, and a language unknown to other European scholars, the Germans actually followed a model of advertising similar to the French one. In Nuremberg, wood microscopes appeared at the end of the seventeenth-century, promoted also in treatises of optics and physics. In the early eighteenth-century, the Germans imported some instruments from France,

Holland and England,⁴⁶⁵ and the design and building of microscopes and optical

465 de Clercq 1991, 83. However, to uphold such opinion, de Clercq refers to only one 1717 letter of a German instrument maker.

machines was progressively developed in Germany between 1710 and the 1730s. While advertisements also appear in educational and technical treatises, there are thus only rare clues pointing to the existence of active workshops. In Augsburg the tradition of optics and microscope manufacturing was transmitted from Johannes Wiesel, who had been a correspondent with Huygens since 1654, to Ieronimus Ambrogius Langenmantel (1641-1718), Cosmus Conrad Cuno (1652-1745) and later to Georg Friedrich Brander.

Some of the German scholars were elected professors providing they could manage a whole cabinet of physics, including microscopes, for their demonstrations. Between 1694 and 1703, the Marburg professor of physics Johann Daniel Dorstenius bought 60 instruments to Musschenbroek, of which four were microscopes.⁴⁶⁶ Theodor von Balthazar’s 1710 work on micrometers, the study by Johann Michael Conradi in 1710 on practical optics, the works by Hertel and Johann Georg Leutmann on grinding and cutting glasses, all reveal a continuous interest in designing microscopes.⁴⁶⁷ The latter’s book, first published in 1719 in Wittemberg, went through at least five editions in 20 years. In Frankfurt am Main, Michael Bernhard Valentin (1657-1729) also dedicated a few chapters of his 1714 General exhibition of arts and naturalia, to the design of optical machines, to microscopes and to the discoveries he made using them.⁴⁶⁸ Besides his work on insects published in 1734, Cuno had been devising and making

microscopes since the end of the seventeenth-century, and in a 1730 book wrote on microscopes and optical machines.⁴⁶⁹ The Nuremberg school of medicine, mathematics and natural history continued to develop practical optics, cultivating successively the heritage of Johan Franz Griendel (1631-1687), Johannes Zahn (1641-1707), Johann Heinrich Müller, Albert Daniel Mercklein, and Johann Gabriel Doppelmayer (1671-1750)who also translated Bion’s treatise on scientific instrument in 1726.⁴⁷⁰ A typical

466 See de Clercq 1991, 90, 107-108. A similar tradition existed in Italy, for instance in Urbino where the professors of physics made themselves a part of their instruments.

467 See C&C 1932, 104.

468 Valentin 1714 I, chapters 15 and 16.

469 C&C 1932, 33; Cuno [1730].

470 Müller 1721, chap. 7 on “microscopiorum phenomena”. Mercklein (1737) tried to improve the grinding of lenses. Doppelmayer 1717, 1730, Bion 1726. On the Nuremberg microscopical tradition, see De Martin 1983 45-47; Geus 1976, 133; De Martin 1973, 11-13.

concern of the German scholars, they translated treatises on optical instruments over the entire century, adding to their own traditions the benefits of other’s work.⁴⁷¹ It is likely that the German countries, who did not actually experience a “golden age of

microscopy” as Bologna, Florence, London and the Dutch Republic in the previous century, also did not face the problem of reducing the visibility of their microscopical works during the eighteenth-century. In this respect, the German situation is close to the French one. But while French practices of the microscope was above all the prerogative of the Académie Royale des Sciences during the first forty years of the century, in Germany, it was taught at the university, at least from the late 1720s in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Halle, Wittemberg, Marburg, Danzig, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Erlangen.

Further archive research would be necessary to clarify the existence of workshops, which, except in Nuremberg, were probably small though active in some of these cities.⁴⁷²

For Italy, the existence of workshops in the eighteenth-century, and more information about certain craftsmen has only recently been established thanks to the works of Alberto Lualdi. During the last decades of the seventeenth-century, important

microscope manufacturers established themselves in Rome, though instrumental and optical workshops existed in cities like Bologna, Brescia, Milano, Naples, Florence, and Venice.⁴⁷³ These cities were to continue the tradition of instrument making. Rome counted six major competing instrument makers --Giuseppe Campani (1636-1715), Eustachio Divini (c.1610-1685), Piccini, Jacob Lusverg (1636-1689), Carlo Antonio

471 The following books were translated into German: Passemant’s 1738 Construction d’un télescope by Hertel (Halle, 1747), Smith’s 1738 System of optick by Kästner (Altenburg, 1755), Baker’s 1743 Microscope made easy (Zurich, 1753); Nollet’s 1770s Art des expériences (Erfurt, 1771-1773);

Priestley’s 1774 History of the present state of discoveries relating to vision, light and colour, by Kluegel (1775-1776); Toffoli’s Descrizione di una nuova macchina per temperare le lenti, by Huth (1796).

472 In Leipzig for example Johann Leupold and Christian Schober ran workshops.

473 Following are the names of the main optical instrument makers. In Bologna: Paolo Belletti (17th c.), Carlo Antonio Manzini (d. 1678), Eustachio Manfredi (1674-1739), Vittorio Stancari (1678-1709); in Naples: Francesco Fontana (1580-1656), Giovanni Giustino Ciampini (1639-1698); in Florence: Filizio Pizzichi; In Brescia: Bernardino Bono (around 1710). Other cities had also various workshops: Urbino, Padova, Modena, Mirandola, Livorno, Cremona.

Tortoni (1640-1700) and Marco Antonio Celio--⁴⁷⁴ and many important Italian scholars had a microscope from Rome or long to perform observations with a Roman

microscope. Some of Cestoni, Malpighi, Redi, Marsigli and probably Baglivi’s

microscopes came from Rome, and Bonomo, who described with Cestoni the itch-mite, complained about not having a Roman microscope.⁴⁷⁵ Thanks to the Roman Accademia fisicomatematica, the reputation of these instruments crossed the borders of Italy.

Religious men were also active microscope makers before such dynamic production.

The Jesuit Filippo Buonanni, himself located in Rome, the most known among religious craftsmen, invented a much advanced horizontal microscope in the early 1690s

regarded by his contemporaries as being even better than those of Campani and Tortoni.⁴⁷⁶ Upon entering the eighteenth-century, the Italian market underwent a delocalisation and a relative change in visibility, although the naturalists and certain physicians still continued to apply microscopes to their research.⁴⁷⁷ If Rome had been the example for competing and creative production, after Campani’s death in 1715, the Urbs lost its prominent place. Domenico Lusverg (1669-1744) and Domenico Selva (?-1758) in Rome, Lorenzo Selva (1716-1800) and Biagio Burlini (1709-1771) in Venice, and Pietro Patroni (ca 1676-1744), François de Baillou (ca 1700-1774) and in Milan made microscopes and other instruments.⁴⁷⁸ Certain of these businesses were also handed down from father to son, by the Selva (1700-1810) or the Lusvergh (1660-1830), pursuing thus the same “dynastic regime” of the Adams or the Musschenbroek.

Although these workshops perpetuated microscope making, at least in Rome, Milan, and Venice, during the first half of the century, their spreading and a relative stagnation in demand probably did not stimulate rivalry among them, as existed in a centralised

474 On these instrument makers, see Lualdi 2000, Bedini 1963.

475 Baglivi worked in Rome and said he used a compound three lenses (Baglivi 1704, 551) and a compound four lenses microscopes (Baglivi 1700, 4-5) which were probably made in Rome; Redi 1668, 69; Bonomo 1687, 5; see Bedini 1963, 418. Boyle 1772, II, 25 mentions that microscopes from Rome were used in London to search for the eels of vinegar.

476 Fazzari 1999, 118.

477 Marsigli 1714, Vallisneri 1710, 1713, 1721, Bourguet 1729, Mazzucchelli 1736, 10-11.

478 On Jacob Lusvergh and Domenico Lusverg, see Todesco 1997, 94-95 and Daumas 1953, 91-92.

On Patroni, Baillou and Burlini, see Lualdi 1995, 1996, 1999.

city like London. Between 1700 and 1740, using the microscope was also promoted in certain universities (Padua, Florence, Urbino), journals (in Venice), in many academies such as the Bologna academy from the 1720s, Florence, Siena and Milan academies,⁴⁷⁹ and by numerous scholars who worked individually or under private patronage. For example, Pietrantonio Micheli of Florence discovered the method of reproduction of fungi in 1718 and described, using the microscope, hundreds of cryptogamic species in his 1729 Nova plantarum genera. Antonio Vallisneri, professor of medicine in Padua, promoted microscope for research up until his death in 1731.

During this period, the demand for microscopes probably slowed down with respect to the previous century, but it was also characterised by a lack of advertising strategy.

During this period, the demand for microscopes probably slowed down with respect to the previous century, but it was also characterised by a lack of advertising strategy.