Instruments: preserved in the Museo Galileo

Commentary
Instruments: preserved in the Museo Galileo

Display case with thermometers and other instruments from the Accademia del Cimento, Room VIII, Museo Galileo, Florence. Photo by Sailko, 28 Dec. 2013. Licensc: CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia.

Commentary. How then did the Cimento go about its task of testing the received natural philosophy against the evidence of experience?  To answer this question, the text translated by Waller should be read in light of the huge collection of the academy’s scientific equipment preserved in the Museo Galileo in Florence. 

The Medici’s treasure trove of scientific instruments -- from before, during and after the time of Galileo -- provides the core of the museum’s collection.  The materials relevant to the Accademia del Cimento alone are so voluminous – and so well documented with digital resources – that a brief orientation is needed, facilitated by a series of brief videos (hyperlinked below) available on the museum’s website and by the extensive introduction entitled ‘Court Scientists: The Art of Experimentation in the Galilean Accademia del Cimento (1657-1667)’. 

Room VIII of the Museum is devoted to the Cimento, which can be explored via a brief introductory video and a list of objects displayed in the room.  These are complemented by a second video introducing the Accademia in similar terms, and a second list of items associated with it.

The chief focus of the exhibits is on the studies of thermometry, barometry, and pneumatics central to the Accademia’s experimental programme and to the Saggi themselves.  Particularly impressive is the huge variety of thermometers, filled with ‘acquarzente’ (i.e. alchohol).  Separate videos are devoted to the thermoscope, invented by Galileo, and its evolution via the sealed and calibrated alcohol thermometers of the Cimento into the mercury thermometer as it is known today.  Thanks in part to the ability of the Grand Duke’s craftsmen to blow glassware into an infinite variety of beguiling shapes, even the most utilitarian of these were objects of beauty

Above all, one is impressed with the huge abundance of equipment, the high standards of its manufacture, the constant experimentation with new instruments to serve new experiments, and the consequent stream of experimental results, far more lavishly illustrated in the 1667 Italian original than in the 1684 English translation. As A. Rupert Hall wrote in his introduction to Essays of Natural Experiments (trans. Waller, 1964, p. viii), ‘There had, probably, been no such bountiful furnishing of scientific equipment since the time of Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg’.

Credits: Howard Hotson (November 2016)