Abstract
“The history of scientific instruments can be studied from various perspectives” (p. 240), a statement clearly documented in this seventh volume of the series Scientific Instruments and Collections. Edited by Silke Ackermann, Neil Brown, and Feza Günergun, all renowned historians of science and of scientific instruments, this handy volume presents, like the earlier books in the series, essays based on selected talks given at the annual symposia, this time in Istanbul 2016, of the Scientific Instrument Commission, a member of the Division of History of Science and Technology in the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
These 14 articles, as would seem natural for a venue in Turkey, focus on texts and instruments related to the Ottoman Empire in early modern and modern times. Other contexts, however, such as Iran, Egypt, and Europe, are not neglected, as are not the two to three earlier centuries. Many of the instruments discussed serve astronomical purposes. Others were used for navigation, surveying, mathematics, ballistics, or geology; to perform physical, chemical, and electrical experiments; or to support surgical or architectural practices.
Their authors, as the participants of the symposia, comprise a wide range of younger and more established scholars as well as others interested in the topic. Accordingly, the essays, ranging from 15 to 25 pages in length, cover a broad spectrum. For some, more references and background information would have been welcomed; others are thoroughly researched studies. However, they all “connect East and West in some way” (p. viii). Most present case studies draw on lesser known material found in unpublished Arabic, Greek, Latin, Ottoman, and Persian sources. Others provide concise, up-to-date overviews of specific topics, collections, or instruments.
After the preface, that briefly describes the symposium and the genesis of this volume, essays follow that cover rather unexpected topics:
Gaye Danışan presents a sixteenth-century Ottoman compendium of astronomical and navigational instruments;
Mahdi Abdeljaouad and Pierre Ageron deal with Osman Efendi’s Arabic treatise on surveying, ballistic, and mathematical instruments written in eighteenth-century Belgrade;
Atilla Polat uncovers clues about the sector in Turkish manuscripts;
Feza Günergun, Gaye Danışan, and Atilla Polat introduce a nineteenth-century text on the sextant by Feyzi Bey, an Ottoman engineer;
Richard L. Kremer searches for the origin of the turketum’s (or torquetum’s) name;
Anthony Turner examines sundials in the Ottoman and Safavid empires of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;
Hamid Bohloul reconsiders al-Kāshī’s (al-Kāshānī’s) equatorium on the basis of a newly discovered Arabic manuscript;
Seyyed Hadi Tabatabaei reconstructs the introduction of the telescope into Iran before the nineteenth century;
Janet Laidla examines the construction and trade of seismographs in early twentieth-century Estonia;
Panagiotis Lazos, George N. Vlahakis, and Constantine Skordoulis discuss the instrument collections acquired by schools of the Greek community in Istanbul during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
Hasan Umut and David Pantalony introduce George Petrovic and the metrological instruments he collected in twentieth century;
Patrice Bret considers scientific instruments in use during the French occupation of Egypt at the turn to the nineteenth century;
Bernd Scholze reviews the first dissolving view shows by a laterna magica in mid-nineteenth-century Istanbul;
Meltem Kocaman considers retailers of scientific instruments in nineteenth-century Istanbul.
Numerous diagrams and figures, most in colour, illustrate the essays. Article abstracts would have been useful but an index helps in navigating through the volume. The essays include many Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman technical terms with their English equivalents that will be most useful for further research in the history of scientific instruments; a separate index of technical terms, nevertheless, would have been welcomed.
Notwithstanding the specific topics and individual differences of the essays, readers particularly interested in the history of science, especially of astronomy and of scientific instruments, might profit by considering this volume. Such readers might wish that the notion of “modern sciences” had been more critically investigated. Still, by presenting lesser known case studies of knowledge transfer and of interdependencies between West and East, the volume offers worthwhile reading for those interested in the history of early modern and modern times, especially of the Ottoman empire.