Ratcliff, Marc James; (2001) Europe and the microscope in the Enlightenment. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

While historians of the microscope currently consider that no systematic programme of microscopy took place during the Enlightenment, this thesis challenges this view and aims to show when and where microscopes were used as research tools. The focus of the inquiry is the research on microscopic animalcules and the relationship of European microscope making and practices of the microscope with topical trends of the industrial revolution, such as quantification. Three waves of research are characterised for the research on animalcules in the Enlightenment: 1. seventeenth-century observations on animalcules crowned by Louis Joblot's 1718 work in the milieu of the Paris Academic royale des sciences, 2. Mid eighteenth-century observations and experiments on polyps and animalcules (Trembley, Baker and Hill) and, 3. between 1760 and 1790, O.F. Muller's establishment of the systematics of infusoria in Denmark and Germany. Microscope making is characterised by the diversity of cultural styles of production and advertisement, analysed for various European countries. An increased precision in building instruments is nevertheless a practice shared by many European makers, as well as attempts, by scholars, at standardizing microscopical observations and measures by making use of various forms of quantification. This trend shows that microscope makers and scholars applied to the instrument and research the needs of quantification that began to impact on European science from the 1760s onwards. In the course of the thesis, two interpretative schemes propose explanations for the construction of microscopical knowledge of animalcules. The first deals with authority and the reproduction of experiments and observations, and the second emphasises the respective parts of a social versus a heuristic construction of knowledge. The thesis ends with a critical examination of the historical conditions that led early nineteenth-century scientists to assume the role of historians of microscopy, building thus a mythological history which is here deconstructed.

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