Search Results | Caltech Archives

Title: William Whiston - fig.1 for A New Theory of the Earth (London, 5th edn., 1737)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1737
Description: This figure traces the path 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 reponsible 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: Kepler - Zodiacal sign, from De stella nova
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1606

Title: Queen’s Palace, St. James’s Park
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. III, London 1809-1810 Plate no. 65

Title: Kings Bench Prison
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 46

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

Title: Dephinus
Format: print: engraving
Date: 1603
Description: From Johann Bayer’s “Uranometria” (1603), the first ‘true’ star-atlas. This and other copper-engraved images from the book demonstrate a notable feature of this atlas: the sheer beauty of the plates. Alexander Mair, the artist, clearly found some inspiration in the De Gheyn engravings in the Aratea published by Hugo Grotius in 1600, but most of Bayer’s constellation figures have no known prototype. Significantly, each plate has a carefully engraved grid, so that star positions can be read off to fractions of a degree. These positions were taken, not from Ptolemy’s catalog, but from the catalog of Tycho Brahe, which had circulated in manuscript in the 1590s, yet not printed until 1602. Another important feature of the atlas was the introduction of a new system of stellar nomenclature, Bayer assigning Greek letters to the brighter stars, generally in the order of magnitude.

Title: India House, The Sale Room
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 45

Title: Covent Garden Market, Westminister Election
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1808
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. I, London 1808 Plate no. 26

Title: Title page of Isaac Newton’s Principia (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica), first edition, published in London, 1687
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1687
Description: This celebrated work set forth the principles of dynamics and expounded Newton’s system of the world, based upon his concept of universal gravitation. The title page names him the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the Royal Society.

Title: Taurus
Format: print: engraving
Date: 1603
Description: From Johann Bayer’s “Uranometria” (1603), the first ‘true’ star-atlas. This and other copper-engraved images from the book demonstrate a notable feature of this atlas: the sheer beauty of the plates. Alexander Mair, the artist, clearly found some inspiration in the De Gheyn engravings in the Aratea published by Hugo Grotius in 1600, but most of Bayer’s constellation figures have no known prototype. Significantly, each plate has a carefully engraved grid, so that star positions can be read off to fractions of a degree. These positions were taken, not from Ptolemy’s catalog, but from the catalog of Tycho Brahe, which had circulated in manuscript in the 1590s, yet not printed until 1602. Another important feature of the atlas was the introduction of a new system of stellar nomenclature, Bayer assigning Greek letters to the brighter stars, generally in the order of magnitude.

Title: Lupus
Format: print: engraving
Date: 1603
Description: From Johann Bayer’s “Uranometria” (1603), the first ‘true’ star-atlas. This and other copper-engraved images from the book demonstrate a notable feature of this atlas: the sheer beauty of the plates. Alexander Mair, the artist, clearly found some inspiration in the De Gheyn engravings in the Aratea published by Hugo Grotius in 1600, but most of Bayer’s constellation figures have no known prototype. Significantly, each plate has a carefully engraved grid, so that star positions can be read off to fractions of a degree. These positions were taken, not from Ptolemy’s catalog, but from the catalog of Tycho Brahe, which had circulated in manuscript in the 1590s, yet not printed until 1602. Another important feature of the atlas was the introduction of a new system of stellar nomenclature, Bayer assigning Greek letters to the brighter stars, generally in the order of magnitude.

Title: Page from the autograph album of Johann Jakob Frisch
Format: photograph: print
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: Newgate Chapel
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 57

Title: Kepler, “Harmonices mundi” (Harmonies of the World)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1619
Description: Illustration from Book III, chapter 10, “concerning the Tetrachords...,” in which attributes of musical scales are discussed. Rocco Collection, History of Science.

Title: Leg of a flea showing musculature and muscle tissue
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1684
Description: From Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s Werken (vol. 4)

Title: Lloyd’s Subscription Room
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1809
Description: Ackermann, R., The Microcosm of London, Vol. II, London 1809 Plate no. 49

Title: William Whiston - fig.2 for A New Theory of the Earth (London, 5th edn., 1737)
Format: photograph: negative
Date: 1737
Description: This figure traces the path of a comet to show how the Earth’s elliptic orbit was caused. 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: Plate from “Nova Reperta” (New Discoveries)
Format: photograph: negative
Description: Shows the use of lenses in the form of eyeglasses.

Title: Canis Major
Format: print: engraving
Date: 1603
Description: From Johann Bayer’s “Uranometria” (1603), the first ‘true’ star-atlas. This and other copper-engraved images from the book demonstrate a notable feature of this atlas: the sheer beauty of the plates. Alexander Mair, the artist, clearly found some inspiration in the De Gheyn engravings in the Aratea published by Hugo Grotius in 1600, but most of Bayer’s constellation figures have no known prototype. Significantly, each plate has a carefully engraved grid, so that star positions can be read off to fractions of a degree. These positions were taken, not from Ptolemy’s catalog, but from the catalog of Tycho Brahe, which had circulated in manuscript in the 1590s, yet not printed until 1602. Another important feature of the atlas was the introduction of a new system of stellar nomenclature, Bayer assigning Greek letters to the brighter stars, generally in the order of magnitude.

Title: J.T Desaguliers - plate 32 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. The 32nd plate shows the use of the planetarium to display the phenomena produced by the Earth’s rotation about its axis.