References
The Scientific Instrument Commission web site provides links to reference material and other sources of information related to scientific instruments as a service to its visitors. These links are not intended to endorse a particular source, but only to consolidate selected URL's in a single location as a matter of convenience. The goal of having links to all possible places is better handled by Google than this web page; yet, if you find a web site of broad content useful to historians and others interested in the history of scientific instruments, please pass on your suggestion to the SIC web site editor for consideration.
- Online Scientific Instrument Trade Catalogues
The importance of trade catalogues cannot be underestimated by instrument historians, museum curators and collectors. These catalogues often allow to recognise instruments, to know their original prices their technical characteristics, and to have sometime precious information about their manufacturers. Unfortunately, trade catalogues had been often considered as ephemeral “grey literature” and therefore they had been very often eliminated or forgotten in libraries, observatories, and laboratories, where they can be quite difficult to find. But in the last years a few important scientific institutions, museums as well as private collectors scanned their collections of catalogues to make them available via the web.
- Websters' Instrument Makers Database
This database of instrument makers, or more precisely of their signatures, is a product of many years of research by Roderick and Marjorie Webster, longtime curators of the collection of scientific instruments at Chicago's Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum.
- The Transits of Venus Project
A project initiated by the Scientific Instrument Commission. This website describes historical instruments and offers many Transits images.
- SIC Bibliography
Books, pamphlets, catalogues and articles on or connected with historical studies on scientific instruments.
Home | News | About Us | Conferences | Publications | Bibliography | Contact Us |
