scholarly journals John and Edward Troughton, mathematical instrument makers

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century Edward Troughton (c. 1753-1835, F.R.S. 1810) was the foremost mathematical instrument maker in England, and in the last ten or fifteen years of the eighteenth century he and his older brother John Troughton (c. 1739-1807), then in partnership, ranked second only to the celebrated Jesse Ramsden (c. 1735-1800, F.R.S. 1786). Many examples of their work exist in the collections at Greenwich, South Kensington, Cambridge and Oxford. Edward’s method of ‘original division’, or scale graduation, was a most important contribution, for which he received the Copley Medal, and his major instruments hold an honoured place in the history of astronomy, geodetic surveying and metrology. The modern literature incorporates what seems to have become a traditional version of the Troughton story (Note A), but this is inaccurate in some respects and misleading in others. A more reliable account is therefore desirable and we present here, for the first time, biographical memoirs of John and Edward Troughton based on primary sources and contemporary published information. A brief account of their uncle, John Troughton senior, is also included. Some notes on the dating of Troughton instruments are given in an Appendix.

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-301
Author(s):  
Kanika Singh

This article examines the changing importance, in Sikh history, of Baghel Singh, a Sikh military commander in eighteenth-century Punjab, and the significance of the most recent events commemorating him in Delhi—the Fateh Diwas. The Fateh Diwas was a spectacular event organized for the first time in 2014 at the Red Fort in Delhi, by the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD; Badal)-led Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee. It celebrated the conquest of Delhi by the Sikhs and the unfurling of the Sikh flag on the Red Fort by Baghel Singh. This claim is significant for its timing, symbolism and the historical legacy it seeks to remember. This representation of Baghel Singh also appears in modern paintings on Sikh history which are widely reproduced in popular spheres and also constitute the display in Sikh museums. A comparison of this particular representation of Baghel Singh with that in the nineteenth-century text, Sri Gur Panth Prakash by Ratan Singh Bhangu, is useful in understanding how Baghel Singh’s role has changed in Sikh history and how is it being deployed in contemporary heritage politics.


2015 ◽  
Vol 290 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-604
Author(s):  
Alicja Dobrosielska

This text presents the history of Sundythen from Prussian times to the eighteenth century, indicated the place where probably was a missing village. The name of the village, which is confirmed by sources that Sundythen, Sanditten, Senditten, the other functioning in the literature and folk tales such as Sandyty, Sądy�ty whether Sędyty not exist in written sources or cartographic and should be considered slang. In documents written Sundythen appear for the first time in 1353. in the privilege of the city of Olsztyn. The village functio�ned much earlier, as its name indicates, and the content of Olsztyn location privilege. Sundythen be initially located in the urban forest in the vicinity of settlements and settlement. Not far from the early medieval set�tlement were discovered medieval ceramics, which may indicate existing in this place medieval settlements (XIV–XV.). None, however, by far, of any archaeological evidence the functioning of settlements in modern ti�mes, which can, however, bring on the basis of historical conditions. Written sources are silent about the fate of the village and its inhabitants after 1353. Until the nineteenth century. Only the maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Prove that the village functioned in the modern period. Its destruction caused the death of all residents in the eighteenth century. Plague, as noted in the report Olsztyn magistrate from 1854. In the nineteenth century. Remaining after Sundythen ruins and annotations in municipal documents, the name is confirmed m. In. in the terms of roads (Senditter Wege), which once led to the village. The village is preserved in local memory, her name moved to the forest and settlement, which has been preserved in folk tales, writ�ten mostly in the twentieth century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christopher Page

For Paul SparksFor the most part, the history of the Spanish guitar in eighteenth-century England seems to be no history at all. There appears to be little to place between Samuel Pepys and the beginning of the nineteenth century when the six-string guitar emerged as a favoured instrument of the parlour musician. Thus it is widely supposed that the gut-strung guitar was little used in England until Fernando Sor and other foreign players made it fashionable in the decades after Waterloo (1815). This article proposes to correct that deeply entrenched view with a chronological checklist of material, much of it presented in this connection for the first time, that illuminates the fortunes of the guitar in eighteenth-century England, principally London.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin

Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. This book is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As the book reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. This book is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world's most important minds.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Moutafov

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.


1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
H.O. Danmole

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.


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