Bibliography

The spreadsheet linked below contains the majority of printed sources (primary and secondary) on which the SIMON (Scientific Instrument Makers: Observations and Notes) Access database, and thus the project’s remodelled database, has drawn. This includes the bibliography for Gloria Clifton’s Directory of British Scientific Instrument Makers, 1550-1851 but also sources published or drawn on since its publication in 1995, supporting research into makers up to 1914.

The following lists includes some of the key texts for project research:

The Scientific Instrument Trade

M. Biagioli, “From Print to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science 44 (2006): 139-186

David Bryden, Scottish Scientific Instrument-Makers 1600–1900 (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1972)

T.N. Clarke,  A.D. Morrison-Low and A.D.C. Simpson, Brass and Glass: Scientific Instrument Making Workshops in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1989)

Gloria Clifton, Directory of British Scientific Instrument Makers, 1550–1851 (London: Zwemmer in association with the National Maritime Museum, 1995)

Charles Mollan, Irish National Inventory of Historic Scientific Instruments (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society: EOLAS The Irish Science and Technology Agency, 1990)

A.D. Morrison-Low, Making Scientific Instruments in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

A.D. Morrison-Low, Sara J. Schechner and Paolo Brenni (eds.), How Scientific Instruments Have Changed Hands (Leiden: Brill, 2017)

E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge: Institute of Navigation at the University Press, 1954)

Object itineraries

S.J.M.M. Alberti, ‘Objects and the Museum’, Isis 96 (2005), 559–571

D. Fontijn, ‘Cultural Biographies and Itineraries of Things – Second Thoughts’, in H. P. Hahn & H. Weiss (eds.), Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture Through Time and Space (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), pp. 183–95

C. Gosden and Y. Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31 (1999), 169–178

I. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91