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by Erich Weidenhammer Provenance and Meaning Part 1 of this examination of the Chambers’ Micromanipulator, describes the technology and its various applications. This second part looks at the particular object belonging to the University of Toronto and its possible significance in the absence of detailed information about its history and context (‘provenance’ in museum jargon.) I noticed the U [Read More...]
by Erich Weidenhammer [Update 20/03/2013] Part 2: “The Afterlife of a Scientific Instrument” Part 1: Descripton, Operation, Development At some point in the past several decades, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) inherited a number of items from the dispersed Canadian Museum of Health and Medicine collection. Among these was a lacquered black [Read More...]
by Ari Gross As you may have noticed, the website of the University of Toronto Scientific Instrument Collection has recently gone a major change After years of using our old website, we decided to embrace a new interface, providing users with a fresh look and a significant increase in functionality. Here are some features [Read More...]
by Paul Greenham Recent additions to the catalogue include an entire new category: Astronomy. This addition results from joint plans between UTSIC and the Department of Astronomy for a series of events to celebrate the transit of Venus that will take place this year. The transit of Venus is a reliable phenomenon, but it [Read More...]
by Nicolas Sanchez-Guerrero When researching the history of scientific instruments, scholars hope to complement the physical description of objects with insights on personal, institutional, and experimental histories. These insights result from studying an instrument’s construction and its acquisition, operators, and uses at an institution. Commonly, historical research provides facts and well-founded intuitions, but it [Read More...]
by Erich Weidenhammer Recently, we added a new search option to the instrument database: a quick list of every instrument that we are currently unable to identify. This simple feature reflects our hope that the catalogue will become a focus for collaboration between those directly involved in the project, the community of scientific researchers at [Read More...]
by Jennifer Bazar Over the past year, members of the University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection have been working in collaboration with the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto to establish a partnership. We are pleased to announce that such an agreement has been reached and that we are now working to catalogue a [Read More...]
by Erich Weidenhammer Over the spring and summer of 2011, several generous donations have made it possible for us to take the first steps towards museum-quality storage for the UTSIC collection. This post discusses an instrument that came to our attention as we began to think about quantifying the environmental conditions in our storage [Read More...]