Scientific Revolution (1600)

The seventeenth century did not invent curiosity. It invented a job around it. Galileo's telescope, Kepler's laws, Harvey's account of the circulation of the blood, and the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660 and the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1666 turned natural philosophy from a private passion of gentlemen into a coordinated, partly paid activity.

The people who made that possible were often not the famous names. They were instrument makers, engravers, demonstrators, and assistants who ground lenses, built air pumps, and drew what the experimenter claimed to have seen. Science became work when someone had to be employed to make the experiment repeatable.

From scholar to investigator

Medieval universities taught natural philosophy as a branch of the curriculum, mostly from Aristotle, and the teacher was a master of arts. The new investigators measured, dissected, and argued from instruments. Francis Bacon's program, published early in the century, was explicit: knowledge should be gathered collectively, by many hands, and put to practical use. That is a description of a workforce, not just a method.

Patronage paid for it. Courts, wealthy amateurs, and new academies supported astronomers, anatomists, and chemists who would otherwise have had to practice medicine or teach to eat. Robert Hooke was employed by the Royal Society as curator of experiments, a salaried post whose duty was to produce a demonstration for the fellows each week. It may be the first job description that simply says: find things out, on a schedule.

The instrument makers

A lens that could resolve the moons of Jupiter was not a philosopher's hobby. It was the product of optical grinders who spent years learning how glass behaves. Clockmakers, whose trade was already exacting, moved into scientific instruments because both crafts demanded the same patience with gear trains and fine metal. By the late century, London and Paris had shops selling microscopes, barometers, and air pumps to people who were not instrument makers themselves.

Print made the observations travel. Engravers translated a specimen or a machine into a plate that a book could carry across Europe. A bad engraving was a bad experiment, because the picture was the evidence. Illustration became part of scientific labor, and the people who drew shells, plants, and moons were collaborators, not decorators.

What this did to older learned work

The university master did not disappear. He lost his monopoly on explaining nature. A physician who had learned medicine from commentary now competed with anatomists who had opened bodies. Astrologers, who had been respectable mathematical practitioners, slowly lost status as astronomy separated prediction of the heavens from prediction of a person's fate.

The longer consequence is the one this museum keeps: a new tool creates a new occupation that looks, at first, like a hobby with a patron. Within a century it has workshops, suppliers, publications, and people who do nothing else. The natural philosopher is the ancestor of the laboratory technician as much as of the professor.

Scientific Revolution

From scholar to investigator

The instrument makers

What this did to older learned work

Work that grew

Work that lost its place

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