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Title: Hevelius with his 140′ telescope
Format: photograph: print
Date: 1673
Description: From Hevelius’ “Machinae Coelestis Pars Prior.” (1673).

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: 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: 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: 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

Title: The Roman Catholic Chapel, Lincolns Inn Fields
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 16

Title: Galileo, title page from Systema Cosmicum, Augustae Treboc. [Strasbourg], 1635
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1635
Description: The first Latin edition of Galileo’s Dialogo (Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems), prepared by the famous Dutch printer Elsevier but printed in Strasbourg. Not mentioned on the title page is the translater, Matthias Bernegger, who appended to the text an extract from Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (published 1609) and a letter by Paolo Antonio Foscarini. The additions presented arguments to demonstrate that the Copernican system did not conflict with the Bible. The Decree of Condemnation under which Galileo stood in Italy had not been published in France, so his work could be printed there. This Latin edition was later brought out in Leiden and London.

Title: Title page: Euclid, “The Elements of Geometrie”, London
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1570
Description: First English edition. Translated into English for the first time by Sir Henry Billingsley, with preface by M. Dee. Based on earlier Latin versions. Watson Collection, History of Science.

Title: Kepler - Table IV, from Mysterium cosmographicum
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1596

Title: Galileo, diagram of the Copernican system from Dialogo...sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo, Tolemaico, e Copernicano (Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican), Florence, 1632
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1632
Description: This is a diagram showing the ordering of the planets, moving out from the Sun. Galileo’s diagram is similar to that of Copernicus, except that Galileo has added the moons of Jupiter, which he discovered.

Title: King’s Mews, Charing Cross
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 47

Title: Botanic Garden at Cambridge University
Format: photograph: print
Date: 1815
Description: Ackermann, R., A history of the University of Cambridge : its colleges, halls, and public buildings.

Title: Christie’s Auction Room
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 6

Title: The College of Physicians
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 20

Title: J.T Desaguliers - plate 30 from A Course of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1734-44)
Format: photograph: negative
Description: Jean Theophilus Desaguliers, a protestant refugee from France, established himself as one of the most prominent advocates of the Newtonian philosophy in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. While trying to clarify some of the theoretical aspects of Newtonianism, he also became deeply concerned with the religious, social and political implications of Newton’s work: for example, at the accession of George II in 1727 Desaguliers published a panegyric entitled The Newtonian System of the World: the best Model of Government. This image is an epitome of William Whiston’s scheme of the solar system. This supposedly conveyed the relative distances, magnitudes, periods, and other quantities involved in the motions of the planets and comets. So detailed was it that Desaguliers expressed concern that viewers might place too much faith in its accuracy.

Title: Diagram of eyes, from Astronomia pars optica
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1604