Scientific Instruments (Pre 1950'ish)

[Ray Petri]

To all forum members who have an interest in scientific instruments of one type or another.
I am hoping you can contribute pictures from your own collections. Either displayed as ornaments that need frequent dusting or are tucked away in lofts or garages. Please give a brief description of any instrument you contribute.
I have suggested pre 1950'ish because that was the era where the old glass'n'brass and wooden cased instruments were being pushed to the back of the laboratory shelf or store cupboard - never to be used again. Many were broken-up or dumped with the rubbish.
Taking 1950 as some sort of datum line, the radio valve (vacuum tube) had been developing over the previous thirty years, and roll forward ten years the transistor or semiconductor and microchip was gathering momentum.
What have you? Just to name a few:- Galvanometers - spectrometers - magnetometers, barometers, calculating machines, crystal sets, telegraph equipment, microscopes, in fact anything of similar interest.

Here is a dip circle by Philip Harris. A well known maker of instrumentation for the laboratory.
Measures the angle between the horizon and the Earth's magnetic field (the dip angle).
Interesting Wiki Link:-

Dip circle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[joayne]

Ray, what an unusual topic, but so interesting and beautiful.
Looking forward to seeing the contributions.. I love your contributions, so sleek and clean
Impressive.

 

[Ray Petri]

Ray, what an unusual topic, but so interesting and beautiful.
Looking forward to seeing the contributions.. I love your contributions, so sleek and clean
Impressive.

Thank you, Joayne. I have quite a collection I will eventually post but it will be nice to see what others can contribute also.
I am trying to go back to the days before everything had semiconductors and microchips and GPS. You might not remember it, but in the 1950s you would have been considered 'posh' to have a telephone connected to your house.

 

[Joeseph]

I do wish as a Telegraph Tech in the late '70's & early '80's that I'd taken more photos of the gear & environment in general. Some of the Telegraph offices were huge - the CPO had easily over 100 machines and operators in the T.O and probably about half that in the I.T.O. (International Telegraph Office) Most of the equipment was barely post-war.

I do recall spending months building a telegraph relay cabinet for the B.C.N.Z. (broadcasting corp) only for the building to be demolished shortly later & the whole lot scrapped!

 

[Ray Petri]

I do wish as a Telegraph Tech in the late '70's & early '80's that I'd taken more photos of the gear & environment in general. Some of the Telegraph offices were huge - the CPO had easily over 100 machines and operators in the T.O and probably about half that in the I.T.O. (International Telegraph Office) Most of the equipment was barely post-war.

I do recall spending months building a telegraph relay cabinet for the B.C.N.Z. (broadcasting corp) only for the building to be demolished shortly later & the whole lot scrapped!

When I started as a trainee technician with the UK GPO - a few years before you describe - I had to spend some time in the small local telegraph office and they were still using 'ticker Tape' machines. I had to maintain the machines. The women in the office would read the code on the punched tape as it was coming in off the machines. There were a few Creed teleprinters slowly clattering away and galvos' deflecting to show the incoming and outgoing lines were in order. Incidentally; all the local bookies were using 'Ticker Tape' machines housed in magnificent glass cases to receive instant race results and we had to keep those in order, It was 'stone age' stuff, 66 words/per min on a good day, compared with the instant transmission of today. The Bookies were also capable of reading the tape.
The telegraph relays were usually the polarised type 299AN or similar. VF signaling came along a bit later. Like you, I took very few pics at the time!

 

[Ray Petri]

A pair of 'Cathedral' type galvanometers from the late 1800s to the 1950s.
Not particularly sensitive by today's standards but mainly used as a detecting instrument in telegraph offices.
Both were used by GPO telegraph offices but very many were used in the countries railway network along with a telegraph sounder.
The top instrument has no engraved scale because it was not used to measure anything - It was simply used to detect the presence of electrical signals.

 

[West Coast Birder]

Great thread. As an engineer, I’ve always had a soft corner for instrumentation as it is the indispensable bread and butter of our profession. I wish I was old enough to actually have had a camera when we transitioned from these works of art to dull and utilitarian electronic plastic boxes.

 

[Ray Petri]

Great thread. As an engineer, I’ve always had a soft corner for instrumentation as it is the indispensable bread and butter of our profession. I wish I was old enough to actually have had a camera when we transitioned from these works of art to dull and utilitarian electronic plastic boxes.

Thanks, Sam. During this period instruments were transitioning and people were just beginning to need to calibrate their instruments in the field - but for most field purposes a calibrated multimeter would suffice. For the laboratory higher standards were necessary and vacuum tubes (wireless valves) were beginning to be employed in equipment - the equipment then needed a power supply and the equipment got bigger and characterless and couldn't be considered 'Glass and Brass' anymore. World War II saw a rapid change in the development of instruments and radio communication. A classic example of the transition was the wavemeter, which started life as a tuned circuit with a diode detector and simple detecting meter to register a peak. Then came the wavemeter which employed a quartz crystal for it's reference frequency and became a standard for many years before the digital frequency meters became available. I still have a BC221 - if it rings a bell with you. I used it for demonstrating the use of harmonics for a radio engineering class.

 

[Ray Petri]

Reflecting Galvanometer by H.Tinsley&Co. c1925-1930.
A small, light, circular mirror, just visible in the top of the circular window is attached to a suspended moving coil of wire, which moves in the field of a permanent magnet when an electric current passes through the coil. A narrow beam of light is projected through the window and reflected back by the moving mirror onto an external calibrated scale. Sometimes the scale might have been drawn on the laboratory wall.
These instruments were used in the late 1800s to the 1950s.

Wiki link for Tinsley history:-

OUR HISTORY – Tinsley Instrumentation Ltd

tinsley.co.uk

 

[Ray Petri]

Gavlanometer Scale by Philip Harris of Birmingham. UK.
Calibrated scale for using with a reflecting galvanometer as shown above.
The lamp is focused onto the galvo's mirror and the reflected beam measured on the scale. A set of scales was supplied with some instruments.

 

[joayne]

I don't know what those instruments do, but I'm amazed how they are able to float in space!

Sorry, They really are lovely images. Very technical looking and the focus is totally on the subject.

 

[Ray Petri]

I don't know what those instruments do, but I'm amazed how they are able to float in space!

Sorry, They really are lovely images. Very technical looking and the focus is totally on the subject.

Thanks, Joayne. Floating in space! Us ancient Brits have our methods - so long as they don’t come down from space with a bang.
Most of my collection is in a similarly nice condition - although it’s sometimes necessary to collect an instrument in not such good condition rather than not have it at all!

Also - I like to match the instruments to the pictures in my old science books.
And just for another spin-off it is satisfying to photograph them.

 

[Ray Petri]

The Campbell-Stokes Sunshine Recorder. Made by Casella of London.
The glass ball focuses the sun's rays onto a chart and burns a line onto the chart which is calibrated with a time scale.
The chart has to be changed daily. Also there is a different set of charts for summer, winter and different latitudes. There are even charts for 'down under' if you can find them.
https://en.wikipedia.org …l%E2%80%93Stokes_recorder

 

[electronpusher]

A pair of 'Cathedral' type galvanometers from the late 1800s to the 1950s.
Not particularly sensitive by today's standards but mainly used as a detecting instrument in telegraph offices.
Both were used by GPO telegraph offices but very many were used in the countries railway network along with a telegraph sounder.
The top instrument has no engraved scale because it was not used to measure anything - It was simply used to detect the presence of electrical signals.

View attachment 3891View attachment 3892

Such beauty in its form and simplicity.

 

[Ray Petri]

E Leitz Wetzlar. Microscope.

The instrument is not dated but I estimate c1865-1870.
It has very smooth rack and pinion focusing.

Canon EOS 7D Mark II • Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @100mm • 1/250 • f/5.6 • ISO 200

 

[PietZA]

I guess this is from after the 50’s, but I have a question I hope the forum readers will be able to answer.
My daughter took this photo at a Tokyo astronomical museum. It looks like it could take rolls of large format film? Can anyone explain what is going on here?

 

[nevermore]

I guess this is from after the 50’s, but I have a question I hope the forum readers will be able to answer. View attachment 34335
My daughter took this photo at a Tokyo astronomical museum. It looks like it could take rolls of large format film? Can anyone explain what is going on here?

I think it's a 35mm SLR from the 1950s/60s with an interchangeable viewfinder system and motor drive. But the contraption does look like a pair of industrial sized spools--I have no idea about that.

 

[simple.joy]

I guess this is from after the 50’s, but I have a question I hope the forum readers will be able to answer. View attachment 34335
My daughter took this photo at a Tokyo astronomical museum. It looks like it could take rolls of large format film? Can anyone explain what is going on here?

I don't know about this specific one, but it looks like what is usually called a "Recording Camera" or "Registrierkamera" (in German). Agfa and Zeiss Ikon have built devices like that and they used an automated mechanism to shoot in regular intervals, either for surveillance or to document certain scientific processes, as far as I know. I've mentioned a similar model from Agfa in one of my articles on the manufacturer here: https://deltalenses.com/agfa-enlarger-lenses/ (under "Color-Solagon"). You can also find some more information here: https://www.udospickmann.de/kopie-von-agfa-colorflex (you'll need to auto-translate it though, if you can't read German).

I've used one of the lenses used on there quite a bit and it's pretty good:


Some more light over there? by simple.joy, on Flickr

They usually didn't cut corners on those things, so I wonder which lens Nikon would have put on there...

 

[Ray Petri]

I guess this is from after the 50’s, but I have a question I hope the forum readers will be able to answer.
My daughter took this photo at a Tokyo astronomical museum. It looks like it could take rolls of large format film? Can anyone explain what is going on here?

Leica made a 250 frame 35mm bulk film back in the 1930s. It took a 10m (33ft) roll of film. Leica made further developments to this during WWII. (These were not SLRs)
Uses would have been for sport and other types of reportage. I used such a camera to photograph oscilloscope traces for laboratory experiments and had to develop the film before we could analyze the traces. Later we had Polaroid film backs and in the 1970/1980s digital oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers etc; were capable of storing multiple images.
I used to drool over owning my very own 250 frame Leica in my school days - But now - any digi camera can rattle off a few thousand frames before you can blink an eyelid.

 

[PietZA]

Thanks @nevermore , @simple.joy and @Ray Petri for uour responses! To me it looked like it could take something larger than 35mm film.
I don't know what lens was used, my daughter could not read the Japanese description. Perhaps it was fitted directly onto the telescope?