Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton Legacy Library)

In the 16th century, European "natural philosophers" introduced a wide variety of scientific instruments, among them clocks, magnets, and compasses. Braving the risk of being accused of witchcraft, they helped change the face of science.

"Instruments have a life of their own," write historians of science Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman in this engaging study. "They do not merely follow theory; often they determine theory, because instruments determine what is possible, and what is possible determines to a large extent what can be thought." The "natural magic" of inventors such as Father Francis Linus and Athanasius Kircher introduced their contemporaries to the notion that with the proper tools nearly any advance in science was possible. And those who came after them made great advances indeed, from the 18th-century Aeolian harp, from which came the belief that light could be bent to produce sound, to automated weather stations, telestereoscopes, and early phonographs. Many of those inventions, Hankins and Silverman note, anticipated the technological advances that mark our own time, which seems itself to be full of natural magic. --Gregory McNamee