Social and political cultures of the microscope: Two styles of producing microscopes, in France and Italy

507 Barker 1736b, 434-435; An. 1740, 165.

508 C&C 1932, 189 considered, on the basis of the Dutch translation of Baker’s book, that Farenheit invented the solar microscope without a mirror. In 1736 Lieberkhun saw the solar microscope and built a copy of it before his journey to England, where he showed it in 1738 to the Royal Society and to some instrument-makers of London, among them Cuff. Actually Lieberkhun did not claim to be the inventor of the solar microscope.

When focusing on both microscope making and usage in the main European countries considered here, important differences emerge, mainly indicating that the profession followed the general trend, although with its own particular features. Almost concurrent to the industrial revolution, the take-off in the production of scientific instrument, of which microscopes were a small part, took place in Britain during the 1740s and the whole of Europe followed the trend between one and two decades later, although with very different methods for negotiating the relationship between visibility and

production. In order to capture these differences, I will now present a comparative analysis of the method of marketing used in several European countries, balanced with an examination of the practice of scholars in referring to microscope makers.

It has been said that compared to the English dynamic context, the production of scientific instruments and microscopes was backwards in France, Germany and Italy during the eighteenth-century. To begin with France, this country cultivated, over the eighteenth-century, a half self-sufficient conception of the microscope, very different from the British methods of advertising, and this conception was responsible for the French lack of visibility --but not of production-- of microscopes and their use. French privilèges and the status of the Académie des sciences, who absorbed but also in a way concealed microscopical works from the end of the seventeenth-century, are probably in part responsible of this particular conception of marketing and advertisement. Indeed Maurice Daumas and Paolo Brenni explained eighteenth-century French “technological backwardness” on the basis of the social organisation of work which masters controlled through corporations. Established in 1583, the guilds were specialised in one kind of work, caster, glass maker, mirror-manufacturer, gilder, etc., and had the law on their side in order to block almost anyone doing similar work who did not belong to the community. In the second half of the eighteenth-century obstacles were many to entering the communities that largely only the sons of masters could access such a

privilege.⁵⁰⁹ The building of a microscope, like other scientific instruments --and as well as a lot of manufactured goods-- required the participation of several craftsmen, whose masters could stop work for any reason, in a time when “such division did not any more reflect the needs of a new type of production”.⁵¹⁰ In England, although division of labor and corporation also existed --in London the Spectaclemakers company gathered optical instrument makers-- the absence of the regime of privilege and the declared ideology of the competitive entrepreneur turned out to multiply the possibilities of collaboration between practitioners, and, for instance, subcontracted work was quite common. Several craftsmen could collaborate on finishing a piece, demonstrating a junction of competence, and not hampering the process of producing an instrument in a half industrial way.⁵¹¹ So widespread was the practice of contracted work, that Gerard Turner has demonstrated that decoration tools on British microscopes could not be used as clues to discovering the original maker, because one microscope maker gave pieces to be decorated in many different binding workshops, probably depending on competitive prices.⁵¹² In France, subcontracting could happen providing that corporations accepted it or received taxes, and, because of the absence of

competition, such control over the craftsmen’s work created serious obstacles to the building of scientific instruments, particularly in Paris. In consequence, as shown by Daumas, the conditions of labour did not favour the French, at least for launching a preindustrial production. Indeed, one of the goals of the corporations was to avoid the introduction of competition into a very protectionist organisation of work.

However, instrument makers could employ several ways of escaping the yoke of corporations, either through religious protection, connections with the milieu of the Academy, or obtaining Lettres patentes, a special authorisation delivered ad personam

509 Turgot (1889, 173-174) denounced the established practice according to which some communities denied access to anyone other than masters’ sons. According to Daumas (1956, 131), masters’ sons were exempted from creating the final chef d’oeuvre.

510 Brenni 1991, 450.

511 Nuttall 1979, 9.

512 Turner [1966], 99, 103-106.

to escape corporative rules. For instance, Alexis Magny, a maker who had made microscopes for wealthy people in the 1750s, could freely built his microscopes and lenses because he was working in a Paris abbey, where craftsmen were exempt from corporate rules.⁵¹³ He was also protected by the Duc de Chaulnes, one of the aristocrat inventors who belonged to the Academy. Before the system of licenses, Lettres patentes and privileges existed from the mid sixteenth-century in order to protect the rights of an inventor to diffuse his invention. In the eighteenth-century, they were awarded for a period of twenty years.⁵¹⁴ The “King’s engineer”, the academicians and the instrument makers close to the Academy or to the short-lived Société des Arts could also escape the barriers put up by corporatist unions. For instance, a King’s engineer could freely advertise his microscopes or related instruments, usually within the framework of technical manuals of optics, physics, or in scientific papers, like those of Nollet, Thomin, Passemant, Magny, Chaulnes. Contrary to the unknown masses of craftsmen, close in number and skills to those of London,⁵¹⁵ the King’s engineers could gain a reputation through such advertising, though the French instrument makers did not have, as in England, a culture of advertising that made frequent use of separate leaflets and loose sheets. While there remain extant dozens of separate leaflets and trade cards printed by British microscope makers, in France this practice was rarely employed before the last quarter of the eighteenth-century, with a few exceptions such as Passemant.⁵¹⁶ This is an extremely important factor for the visibility of production of

513 Daumas (1953, 351) said that Magny made microscopes for Réaumur, Louis XV and the King of Poland. This is probably an error, of course reproduced in many catalogues of microscopes. Actually Magny’s 1753 text referred to by Daumas cites the microscopes of Réaumur and of the two Kings (ibid.

1753, 74), but he cites them for a comparison of their powers with those of his own microscopes. Hence there is no evidence that Magny made their microscopes, although Magny’s remaining microscopes which belonged to Duc de Chaulnes and Marquise de Pompadour show that he made them for the highest aristocracy.

514 PV AS 1727, f° 221.

515 Other unknown French opticians and microscopes makers whose existence was established by Nachet, Daumas (1953, 352-353) and by other historians were active in Paris from the 1730s, like Jean-Baptiste Noël Chiquet (ca. 1722-1791), Tournant, Marie, Nodos, Choppin, Jacobi, Louvel, Say, Segard, Gilbert François, Lestang, and many others.

516 There remain several advertising texts by Passemant, one of which, put in Needham (1750), was used anew in “Description et usage des télescopes, microscopes, ouvrages et inventions de Passemant”

(Daumas 1953, 218).

microscopes in the eighteenth-century. I believe that the whole “history of microscope-y” is hedged by the fact that this culture of advertising existed in England, and to a lesser extent in Holland during the entire eighteenth-century, while it could not exist in France because of this major obstacle. The corporations combatted every type of non-standard activity and of course, every sign of competition, like advertising. As a consequence, we are much less informed about eighteenth-century microscopes and their management in France --as is the case for Italy, Germany, Russia and probably Spain-- than in England and Holland.

From the last quarter of the eighteenth-century onwards, historians noted a sharp increase in the production of instruments in France due to the new generation of instrument makers born between 1740 and the early 1760s: Lenoir, Mégnié, Fortin, Haupois, and, particularly for optics and microscopes, Rochon, Letellier, Dellebarre, Jecker, Richer, Charles, Rochette, Carochez, Huet, Putois, Lerebours, etc.⁵¹⁷ Daumas related this increase to attempts such as the creation of optical workshops and of the corps of patented engineers.⁵¹⁸ However, this trend must be seen in light of the political endeavour to abolish monopolies and particularly jurandes (corporations) by the French economist and minister Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781). In 1776, he brought about a radical ruling formally dissolving corporations, a law that encountered many obstacles in practice, especially in the provinces. Such a strong political act aimed at an economic target. It was explicitly designed to free labour from all sorts of privileges, and to open the market to competition.⁵¹⁹ Although Turgot was relieved of his duties in 1776 and the Ordonnance sur les jurandes was removed, it stimulated, directly or indirectly, competition, advertisement, visibility and the establishment of workshops.

This year, Dellebarre returned to Paris and established his workshop. In 1777 a Paris Société d’émulation pour l’art, le commerce et l’invention, was founded, and it led to the creation of some important optical workshops. The year later, in 1778,

517 See Daumas 1953, 353-377.

518 Daumas 1953, 354.

519 Turgot 1889, 178-184.

Mammès Pahin de la Blancherie (1751-1811) created the Salon de la correspondance générale, an organisation in which many artists, scholars, manufacturers, engineers, including among them women met during a decade. Needham, d’Alembert, and many other scholars met craftsmen at the Salon and forged together a new style in instrument making, in which the practitioners of science worked closer collaboration with the manufacturers. Needham for instance, tested Dellebarre’s microscope at the Salon, which he declared to be very good. Richer presented his glass micrometers which were tested with Dellebarre’s microscope. An exhibition of machines was mounted in January 1782 during which Dellebarre and Richer presented their devices.⁵²⁰ This new impulse for instrument making was still however encountered obstacles. Indeed, although the power of the corporations was diminished, up until 1786 certain

instrument makers were inconvenienced by procedure, and the corporations seized or even destroyed their tools or their parts.⁵²¹ In March 1791, during the Revolution, the legislative Assembly definitively dissolved the communities and the jurandes,

suppressing the principal political and juridical obstacles to the building and free

marketing of scientific instruments, among other goods, in order to follow the emerging technological transformation later called the Industrial Revolution.

Regarding the Italian workshops, extant collections only show a few instruments signed by Italian eighteenth-century instrument makers, and from this poor evidence historians have considered that instrument making was in decline in Italy during the

Enlightenment.⁵²² As in France, as we have already saw, the culture of advertisement was limited in Italy. From the second part of the seventeenth-century Italy began to abandon Latin, and the rise of the culture of national language from the 1750s onwards, strongly diminished its scientific interest in other countries’ eyes. Moreover Italy had a regime very distinct from that of England and France, as regards the marketing

520 See Guénot 1985, Hahn 1971, 106-107 and Duchesne 1800 IV, 269-270. Pahin de la Blancherie published a journal between 1779 and 1788, the Correspondance générale pour les arts et les sciences, which stopped because of Pahin’s debts.

521 Daumas 1953, 134-136.

522 Daumas 1953, 342.

strategies used to advertise and sell instruments. The social network of instrument makers and the wider geographical distribution of instrument making techniques followed rules very different from abroad. The centralisation of instrument making in London increased thanks to competing methods of marketing and advertising

information. Paris also housed the vast majority of French instrument makers.⁵²³ Conversely, and as in Germany, the spreading of Italian instrument makers throughout the country softened market relationships, and makers probably made parts of their instruments under demand. In the second part of the century, better or lesser known lay craftsmen ran workshops making among else, microscopes in Milan, Venice, Rome, Florence, Parma, Brescia, Modena and Vicenza.⁵²⁴ Other cities such as Urbino

continued their former seventeenth-century tradition of instrument making. Some of the opticians, such as Lorenzo Selva in Venice and Antonio Conti in Lucca, were in touch with mathematicians. Like several academies on the continent during the 1760-1780s, Selva, Conti and Boskowich attempted to ascertain the formula for flint-glass,

necessary for making achromatic objectives.⁵²⁵ In Brescia Bernardino Marzoli managed to make achromatic objectives for microscopes by the early nineteenth-century. And, in Venice, Father Bartolomeo Toffoli built a new pocket microscope and a new machine to grind microscopical lenses in the early 1790s, the description of which was translated into German by Huth in 1796. Nevertheless, instrument makers seemed to have

promoted but a poor visibility, and very few leaflets have been recovered. As in France, for other reasons, the culture of advertising was limited in Italy. Although Italian historians of instruments have started to recover this heritage, with promising works that may be able to shed light on many unknown workshops,⁵²⁶ another factor,

neglected by Bedini, Brenni and Lualdi must nevertheless be taken into account in order

523 Brenni 1991, 450.

524 These are Biagio Burlini, Lorenzo Selva and his two sons, Bresavola, Giovanni Battista

Rodella, Pozzo, Isidoro Gaspar Bazzanti, Samuele Fazzi, François de Baillou and his sons, Angelo Gozzi, Giovanni Merlugo, Bartolomeo Toffoli, Bernardino Marzoli. Lualdi (2000) listed more than 30 other eighteenth-century Italian optical makers, who made telescopes, lenses, etc.

525 See Proverbio 1989, 326-327.

526 See the works of Lualdi 2000.

to understand instrument making in the eighteenth-century Italy. In fact, religious craftsmen, isolated in a monastery or working for universities, probably represented a significant part of workshops, and competed de facto with laic men.⁵²⁷ They took some of the work the craftsmen would otherwise have gotten, and made their instruments at very low prices, some friars even worked for free!⁵²⁸ The heritage of the seventeenth-century was responsible for this situation: Zucchi, Kircher, Francesco de Terzi Lana, Manfredi Settala, Matteo Campani, Tortoni, Bonanni, were all scholars who died before 1730, built microscopes or related instruments and were religious men. One can

understand how the division of the craftsman’s work between monks and laymen created serious obstacles to the professionalisation of instrument making, and largely limited the development of the profession. Working in monasteries the monks followed rules of discretion; they did not put their name on their microscopes and other

instruments they built, and furthermore they did not need to advertise their models.

Religious men were even so organised as to be distinguished as inventors and/or craftsmen; some of them built certain particular known types of microscopes and other conceived of new models. The community of Somascan friars from Naples, and the network of Lazzaro Spallanzani reveal the impact of religious men on the practices of the microscope and on microscope making in the second part of eighteenth-century Italy.

Himself a priest, Spallanzani’s interest in microscopical research had first been awakened during his years in the seminar (1745-1750). He was to stay in touch with many religious colleagues with whom he exchanged more scientific and technical

527 There are evidence of this situation for microscope-, optical and other instrument makers. Frà Francesco da Fiorano (Emilia) made a microscope in 1743; Father Francesco Reggio (1743-1804) made optical instruments in Genova. Father Leto Guidi (1711-1777) made at least telescopes in Valleombrosa.

See the following paragraphs for other microscope-makers. Many other religious were instrument maker.

Among the 129 eighteenth-century Italian makers identified by Lualdi 2000, about 12% are religious (Ammatius, Antonio, Cannini, Cassini, Castronio, Francesco, Gasparini, Gian Battista, Grandi, Guidi, Pietro Maria, Re, Reggio, Rosini) and most of them could be identified thanks to a signed instrument. But other examples show that this was not the common rule.

528 See the letter from Spallanzani to Rovatti of the 6th of December 1769 in which Spallanzani is sorry to inform his colleague that the religious men had received orders not to accept any invoice for their work, except for work done within the framework of the university (Di Pietro 1987 VII, 140-141).

information about microscope than religious information --a topic virtually absent from his ten volumes of correspondence. Spallanzani thus belonged to a network of north and central Italian religious scholars who worked with the microscope (Felice Fontana in Florence, Bonaventura Corti in Modena, Roffredi in Turin, Giovanni Battista Beccaria in Turin, Fortis and Michele Colombo in Venice) and he had particularly close ties with almost unknown friars who built microscopes and scientific instruments, such as Frà Fedele (?-1790) and Frà Modesto (?-1778). The two were Capuchin friars from

Modena, and specialised in making every sort of scientific device. After having worked over many years to supply the female physicist Laura Bassi and other scholars with scientific instruments at the University of Pavia, Count Firmian, who patronised Spallanzani, hired both of them as official instrument makers in 1774, for the recently rebuilt University of Modena. Between 1770 and 1774 they built several microscopes after Lyonnet’s model, for Spallanzani, for Count Firmian, for Rovatti, Laura Bassi, perhaps later, one for the Siena anatomist Pietro Moscati, and for the Geneva minister and naturalist Jean Senebier.⁵²⁹ Spallanzani performed his observations on the

circulation of blood in the frog with this microscope. In Turin other priests who

corresponded with Spallanzani, such as the physicist Giovanni Battista Beccaria and the microscopist Maurizio Domenico Roffredi (1711-1805), brought improvements to the solar microscope.⁵³⁰ Spallanzani was also interested in the simple microscope of Frà Giovanni Battista di San Martino, as showed by their correspondence in the 1780s.

In Naples the interest in the microscope dated back at least to the 1740s and was shared especially by the community of Somascan friars. Frà Giovanni Maria Guevara

succeeded in making strong spherular^g lenses by the early 1740s. Later he was to build microscopes, one of which can probably be identified as the one signed Johannes

529 See the letters from Spallanzani to Rovatti, 6th of December 1769, 18th of September 1780 (Di Pietro 1987 VII, 140-141, 248); Spallanzani to Firmian, the 20th of April 1773 (Di Pietro 1985 V, 268);

Spallanzani to Rangone, the 22nd of January 1774 (Di Pietro 1987 VII, 20); on Laura Bassi, see Cavazza 1999, 193.

530 Ciardi 1999, 219.

Guevari 1752 in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers of Paris.⁵³¹ Along with Guevara, with other friars and scholars such as the physician and botanist Domenico Cirillo, Frà della Torre continued to improve the method of working spherules and invented a simple microscope in the early 1750s, similar to a number of unsigned models in various collections. With observations with his microscope showing the blood globule as a ring divided into six little bags, Della Torre launched a important quarrel in the 1760s in which scholars from Italy, France, England, Germany and Switzerland participated.⁵³² During the 1770s, new enthousiasts were gathered and young scholars such as the anatomist Antonio Barba, Saverio Macri and Don Vincenzo Mazzola also made spherules.⁵³³ With these microscopes, Barba was to carry out several observations on the structure of cryptogam, and on the anatomy of the brain, which however, were not conclusive.⁵³⁴ Other naturalists such as Macri and Filippo

Guevari 1752 in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers of Paris.⁵³¹ Along with Guevara, with other friars and scholars such as the physician and botanist Domenico Cirillo, Frà della Torre continued to improve the method of working spherules and invented a simple microscope in the early 1750s, similar to a number of unsigned models in various collections. With observations with his microscope showing the blood globule as a ring divided into six little bags, Della Torre launched a important quarrel in the 1760s in which scholars from Italy, France, England, Germany and Switzerland participated.⁵³² During the 1770s, new enthousiasts were gathered and young scholars such as the anatomist Antonio Barba, Saverio Macri and Don Vincenzo Mazzola also made spherules.⁵³³ With these microscopes, Barba was to carry out several observations on the structure of cryptogam, and on the anatomy of the brain, which however, were not conclusive.⁵³⁴ Other naturalists such as Macri and Filippo