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Title: Title page of Newton’s “Opticks”
Format: photograph: print
Date: 1706
Description: Latin editon. Newton published his first edition in 1704 in English, but without his name on the title page, it is thought in order to avoid controversy. Knighted by Queen Anne in the following year, he displayed his name linked to his new title here for the first time in print, “Isaaco Newton, Equite aurato” (golden knight); his new rank entitled him to gild his armor. The Latin edition was intended for distribution outside of England. This copy, in an old and well-preserved binding, bears inside the bookplate of an aristocratic German family, probably dating from the 18th century. Purchased in Rome following World War II by George W. Housner.

Title: Board of Trade
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 86

Title: George Atwood - Atwood’s Machine from A treatise on the Rectilinear Motion and Rotation of Bodies (Cambridge, 1784)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1784
Description: As mathematics tutor at Cambridge University in the 1770s and 80s, George Atwood was responsible for introducing students to Newtonianism. To help with this task -- and to quell lingering debates about inertia and the living force of matter -- Atwood fashioned a machine that soon became known eponymously. The machine employed an ingenious system of weights, pulleys and a pendulum clock which demonstrated Newton’s laws of motion.

Title: Custom House, from the River Thames
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 29a

Title: Royal Exchange
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 67

Title: British Institution, Pall Mall
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 13

Title: Hospital, Middlesex
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 44

Title: A View of London from the Thames, taken opposite the Adelphi
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 89

Title: Thomas Burnet - fig 3 to Sacred Theory of the Earth
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: Burnet’s “general idea” of the primeval Earth: “Because it pleaseth more, and makes a greater impression on us, to see things represented to the Eye, than to read their description in words, we have ventur’d to give a model of the Primaeval Earth, with its Zones or greater Climates, and the general order and tracts of its Rivers ...”

Title: Westminster Hall
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 94

Title: St. Margarets. Westminster
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 78

Title: William Whiston - fig.9 for A New Theory of the Earth (London, 5th edn., 1737)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1737
Description: Whiston’s representation of the solar system, including a prominent 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: New Stock Exchange
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 75

Title: Guild Hall
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 40

Title: Galileo, illustration from Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche (Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations concerning the Two New Sciences of Mechanics and Local Motions), Leiden, 1638
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1638
Description: The illustration is from the second day of Galileo’s Discourses, and shows that the resistance of a solid body to breaking is dependent upon its length and thickness.

Title: Heralds College, The Hall
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 43

Title: Vauxhall Garden
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 88

Title: The Hall, Blue Coat School
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 10