Bibliography

C. A. Crommelin. Instrumentmakerskunst en proefondervindelijke Natuurkunde. Leiden: Eduard Ijdo, 1925. 32 pp.

K. A. Crommelin. The Art of Making Scientific Instruments and Experimental Physics.

This exceedingly substantial brochure is the author’s inaugural lecture at Leiden University. In Russian there is no special term for that small but extremely important branch of technology for the development of science which A. Crommelin calls Instrumentmakerskunst; conventionally it is sometimes called “precision mechanics.” The development of this branch of technology was, of course, influenced by physics, astronomy, and biology, but much more often, as the author says, the reverse influence took place. The interrelations between science and “precision mechanics” are therefore of great interest for the history of natural science.

The author naturally confines his task within narrow limits, setting forth chiefly the history of the instrument-making art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular branches. Special attention, and rightly so, is given to Holland. The history of the lathe determined to a considerable degree the course of development of precise observation and experiment. The figure of Samuel van Musschenbroek (Samuel Joosten van Musschenbroek, 1693–1782), “the first master of philosophical instruments in the Netherlands, inventor of air pumps, microscopes, telescopes, anatomical syringes, and many other instruments,” who was the first truly to make use of the lathe, occupies the central place in Crommelin’s account. The author points out, among other things, that the lathes brought by Peter I from Holland and preserved in Peter’s little house in Leningrad must be of exactly the same type as those on which Musschenbroek worked. Such lathes, contemporaries of Musschenbroek, have not survived in Holland itself.

Appended to the brochure are two excellent portraits, reproduced for the first time, of Samuel Musschenbroek and Jan and Pieter Musschenbroek (P. Musschenbroek is the author of a famous eighteenth-century textbook of physics).

The remaining pages are devoted to the history of the manufacture of optical glass, microscopes, telescopes, glassblowing, and thermometry. At the end of this interesting brochure are appended new biographical data (from manuscript sources) on the Musschenbroek family, a bibliography, and a number of separate historical notes.

S. Vavilov.