Harvard’s Putnam Gallery shows visitors how much science historically depended on good craftsmanship.
Jennifer Cutraro
Scientists many years ago came up with, by today’s standards, fantastical-sounding names for their curious-looking equipment: electrified spangled tubes, dudgeon-type sphygmograph, cometarium. These bygone tools, on permanent display at Harvard University’s Putman Gallery, often look more like works of art than pieces of scientific instrumentation.
The gallery is on the first floor of the Science Center on Harvard’s Cambridge campus and showcases 375 objects from Harvard’s collection of over 20,000 historical scientific instruments. The gallery largely chronicles the tools of science from the colonial era through today, with a smattering of significant European pieces dating back to 1400 A.D.
The gallery shows how science intersected with daily life over time and, conversely, how daily life influenced science, says gallery curator Sara Schechner. Many pieces in the exhibit–surveying tools, timekeeping and navigation devices, for example—reflect aspects of Massachusetts’ early history. “These are the practical tools you would need to establish a colony and travel back and forth to Europe,” she says.
The exhibit also reflects the extent to which science itself is a craft tradition, dependent on the skilled glassblowers, furniture makers, and designers who built the tools that made scientific advances possible, says John Durant, adjunct professor of the history of science at MIT and director of the MIT Museum.
“The way science is taught and portrayed often puts a lot of emphasis on ideas, theories, and experiments, but rarely on the material and machinery on which this all really depends,” he says. “But it’s not quite so obvious that science is about measuring devices, observational equipment, bits and pieces of stuff, many of them ingeniously contrived, which are often the reason why a particular area in science has been able to make progress or break new ground.”
The Putnam Gallery is open to the public from 11 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday.
Exhibit highlights
Galileo’s geometric and military compass
One of only three in existence, Galileo Galilei designed this compass and gave it as a gift to the Duke of Mantua in the early 1600s. Among other things, the compass could be used to calculate how much gunpowder to use in a canon and how to aim it to precisely hit a target.
Control console from Harvard’s cyclotron
It looks like Homer Simpson’s workstation, but this console controlled Harvard’s cyclotron between 1948 and 2001. Harvard’s first cyclotron was sent to Los Alamos National Lab during World War II; its replacement became a pioneer in the development of proton beam radiation therapy for cancer, says Schechner. She preserved the console as it appeared the day it was dismantled, complete with Post-It Notes, cartoons, and letters from patients.
Grand orrery
In possibly the first state-sanctioned lottery to raise funds for education, the General Court of Massachusetts agreed in 1787 to sell tickets with the proceeds going to Harvard College’s purchase of the grand orrery, this brass and mahogany working model of the solar system. Built by Boston clockmaker Joseph Pope, the orrery features the planets (minus Uranus and Pluto) and their satellites, topped by a glass dome depicting the fixed stars. Bronze figures of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin decorate the outer case. Schechner says most scholars attribute these figures to Paul Revere, the activist and silversmith best known for his midnight ride from Boston to Concord alerting the colonial army about the advance of British troops at the start of the Revolutionary War.
Perfusion pump
The aviator Charles Lindbergh designed this suspicious-looking glass device, called a perfusion pump, in 1934. The first tool for keeping organs alive outside of the body, its invention paved the way for the development of the first artificial heart decades later. The perfusion pump circulated sterile fluids through organs so scientists could better understand how those organs function. According to Schechner, Lindbergh and his collaborator tested this device by removing a cat’s pancreas and keeping the cat alive by injecting it with insulin produced by the removed organ.
(All photos courtesy of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments)