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Title: Title page: Benjamin Franklin “Experiments and Observations on Electricity”, 5th ed., London.
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1774
Description: Supervised by Franklin himself, this is the most accurate 18th century edition of his famous work on electricity. Cast in the form of letters to the English Quaker, Peter Collinson, these letters were presented by Collinson to the Royal Society and published in their Philosophical Transactions. History of Science.

Title: Royal Institution, Albemarle Street
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 68

Title: Hand-painted illustration from the autograph album of Johann Jakob Frisch
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1624
Description: Frisch was a nephew of Johannes Kepler. The album was kept by Frisch while a law student at the University of Tubingen (from 1624 to 1631), where Kepler himself also had studied. Autograph entries are typicaly in Latin, and range from a few lines of verse or prose to elaborate miniature illustrations, comic and serious. Kepler’s autograph is included in the book within a Latin inscription dated 1625.

Title: William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” plate 26
Format: photograph: print
Description: Blake’s last great epic poem was engraved by the author on 100 copper plates. In this image, Jerusalem in the form of a woman appears as an emanation from the male figure representing Albion, variously intepreted as Great Britain or all of humankind. The Archives’copy is number 43 of a limited facsimile edition of 516 prints by the Trianon Press, 1950. George W. Housner book collection.

Title: Another azimuth quadrant of brass, from Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1602

Title: View of Westminster Hall and Bridge
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1810
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 104

Title: Stamp Office, Somerset House
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 74

Title: Otto von Guericke, “Experimenta Nova...” (New Magdeburg Experiments)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1672
Description: Illustration showing experiment of the Magdeburg hemispheres in which horses could not pull apart the vacuum created within the hemispheres. Watson Collection, History of Science.

Title: Thomas Burnet - frontispiece to Sacred Theory of the Earth
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: Thomas Burnet was master of Clare Hall, Cambridge, chaplain to King William, and master of Charterhouse. He was also a contemporary of Isaac Newton, who studied Burnet’s works very closely. His Sacred Theory was composed as “an apology for and exposition of the idea of Providence in an age increasingly dominated by mechanism and scepticism.” It proposed that with respect to the most important biblical events - notably Creation, the Flood, and final conflagration - scripture and mechanical philosophy could be reconciled. Burnet also insisted that the colossal scale of Providential superintendence was appropriate to the degradation of mankind’s moral virtue.

Title: Egytpian Hall
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 51

Title: Title page of Federico Commandino’s Italian translation of Euclid’s Elements
Format: photograph: print
Date: 1575
Description: Commandino, described as the most competent mathematician among all Renaissance translators, produced his Italian text from Greek editions. Italian was the first vernacular language into which Euclid was translated.

Title: Kepler - preliminary diagram relating to the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, from Mysterium cosmographicum
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1596
Description: With this first diagram, Kepler thought that he had discovered the key to unlocking a geometrical secret about the creation of the universe. His education at the university of Tubingen with Michael Maestlin had already convinced him of the truth of the Copernican system, and starting in 1595, he was trying to explain the relationship among the distances of the planets from the sun and the length of their revolutionaround the sun. The diagram came to Kepler as a revelation. As he was explaining some astrological matters to his students, he drew triangles inscribed in the same circle - or nearly triangles since the end of one made up the beginning of the next one. The crossing points of these triangles formed another circle, half the size of the first one. That proportion, he realized, was the same as the proportion between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. The importance of the Mysterium Cosmographicum doesn’t lie in its scientific value, but more in Kepler’s processes since he didn’t just present the result of his researches (such as the world system inscribed in the five regular bodies, which he considered at that time as an real achievement in favor of the Copernican system), but he also shows to the reader all his beginnings and errors, as it is the case with that diagram.

Title: Bartholomew Fair
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 8

Title: Old Bailey
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 58

Title: William Whiston - fig.4 for A New Theory of the Earth (London, 5th edn., 1737)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1737
Description: The path of the Earth through the Atmosphere and Tail of a Comet. Newton and Edmond Halley had worked hard to demonstrate that comets were predictable, periodic bodies which therefore could not be used to prognosticate divine interventions in the natural order. Yet they also suggested that comets deposited aethers to revitalize a spiritually depleted Earth. Whiston liked this mixture of close geometrical analysis with divine mechanism, and extended the discussion. He argued that comets had been responsible for key moments in the Earth’s natural and biblical history - for instance, it was a great comet that had caused the Deluge. He even equated comets with Hell: as they moved in their highly eccentric orbits, they alternated between the “Darkness of Torment” and the “ungodly Smoak of Fire.” For Whiston, comets thus became “the place of Punishment for wicked Men after the general Resurrection.”

Title: St. Luke’s Hospital
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 77

Title: Galileo, title page from Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), Venice, 1610
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1610
Description: In the Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo announced to the world the discoveries made with his new telescope or “perspicilli,” especially the “four planets” circling Jupiter--in fact, Jupiter’s moons--which he names the Medicean stars for his patron, Cosimo II de Medici.

Title: Galileo, Pleiades from the Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), Frankfurt, 1610
Format: photograph: print
Date: 1610