MacLeod on Morrison-Low, _Making Scientific Instruments in the Industrial Revolution_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (December 2007)

A. D. Morrison-Low, _Making Scientific Instruments in the Industrial 
Revolution_. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. xvi + 408 pp. $100 
(cloth), ISBN: 978-0-7546-5758-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Christine MacLeod, Department of Historical 
Studies, University of Bristol.


In this erudite yet engaging monograph, Alison Morrison-Low, 
Principal Curator in the Science Section, National Museums of 
Scotland, takes up the challenge issued twenty years ago by John 
Millburn to analyze the structure, profitability and economic 
significance of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British 
instrument-making trade. Himself an eminent instrument historian, 
Millburn recognized the magnitude of this task: connoisseurship was 
rife while documentary evidence was dispersed and sparse, so that, 
with a few famous exceptions, much more was known about the 
instruments than about their makers, let alone the nature of the 
trade as a whole. It is a tribute to the archival and forensic skills 
of Millburn and his colleagues in this field, such as J. A. Bennett, 
David Bryden, Gloria Clifton, Anita McConnell, Richard Sorrenson, 
Anthony Turner, G. L'E. Turner, Deborah Warner and the author 
herself, that Morrison-Low is now in a position to offer that 
"reliable and comprehensive synthesis of the trade." Yet, as she is 
the first to acknowledge, there remain frustratingly large gaps in 
our knowledge, especially in the quantitative aspects that most 
interest economic historians. In this, of course, the 
instrument-making trade is far from unique!

Morrison-Low's work has important implications for all students of 
the industrial revolution but it is more accurately categorized as a 
business history, than an economic history, of the instrument-making 
trade. Her primary concern is to specify its evolving structure and 
geographical distribution, the size and life history of firms, their 
products, markets and methods of working and, in those rare cases 
where archives permit, their prices and profitability. Of particular 
value is her insistence on tracing the expansion of instrument making 
into the English provinces, a development hitherto obscured by the 
fewness of provincial signatures on surviving instruments. 
Consequently, four chapters explore the major and minor provincial 
centers before the ever-dominant metropolis is allowed on stage -- 
only to be succeeded by a further chapter on the provincial trade's 
industrial organization and production.

Unsurprisingly, as the first of these chapters shows, London was not 
the only port to sustain a steady demand for navigational 
instruments. While Bristol supported a small, stable group of 
quayside makers and retailers throughout the period, Liverpool 
overtook its south-western rival in this as in most other ways: by 
1851 it had more than trebled its 1800 tally of ten firms, developing 
strong links to London and drawing both on the watch-making skills of 
nearby Prescot (Lancs.) and the enterprise of Italian and Jewish 
immigrants. In the next chapter, we move to Yorkshire and two 
contrasting centers. Having declined as a port much faster than 
Bristol, York vaulted from eighteenth-century retailing center of 
optical instruments to mid-nineteenth-century pioneer of instrument 
manufacturing on the grand scale. Smilesean hero Thomas Cooke 
(1807-68) installed steam-powered machine tools (many of his own 
design) and lens-grinding equipment to supply leading British 
astronomers with high quality refracting telescopes and an 
international market with much more besides. Neighboring Sheffield 
built its instrument-making trade on the back of its long-established 
cutlery industry, which supplied it both with necessary skills in 
metal-working and lens-grinding and well tried routes to distant 
markets. Initially it also borrowed the cutlers' sub-contracting 
"little mester" system: one enterprise, Proctor & Beilby, anticipated 
Cooke by several decades to found allegedly the "largest optical 
manufactory in the world" but only used the factory to concentrate 
the assembly of outsourced parts. Several other large firms thrived 
in a center remarkable for its diversification and inventiveness.

The third pairing takes us to two industrial heavyweights, Manchester 
and Birmingham. It is curious that Morrison-Low does not discuss 
Manchester in tandem with Liverpool, since the two cities shared the 
influx of Italian and Jewish instrument-makers and several businesses 
moved between them; the inland city's trade remained smaller and, 
starting with customized apparatus for members of Manchester's "Lit 
and Phil," focused increasingly on the educational market. 
Birmingham, with its glassmakers and proliferating small brassware 
enterprises, had more in common with Sheffield; it was long 
characterized by its flexibility of production, as small metal-ware 
firms simply added instruments to their repertoire. They also 
captured a major part of the trade in brass, boxwood and ivory 
measuring rules, mostly marketed in London (often as "London-made"). 
Among its glassmakers, the giant firm of Chance Brothers became 
internationally famous both for its feat of glazing the Crystal 
Palace in 1851 and its optical glass and lighthouse optics.

London's global preeminence in the trade, contends Morrison-Low, 
rested on its capacity to produce "precision" instrumentation, 
unavailable elsewhere. A "handful" of talented men (often of 
provincial or Scottish origin) maintained its reputation for 
technical brilliance and ingenuity through successive generations. 
British government patronage and lucrative commissions to equip 
Europe's observatories and expeditions of discovery sprang from these 
instrument-makers' close cooperation with early fellows of the Royal 
Society (to which they were themselves regularly elected). In 
particular, "it was the provision of large good-quality telescopes to 
wealthy clients that paved the way for English pre-eminence in the 
European market" (p. 139). By 1790, approximately 250 London 
instrument-makers were following in the wake of this prestigious and 
highly specialized minority; by 1840, twice as many. The chapters on 
London and on the organization of the provincial trade are especially 
rich in information for historians of technology: Morrison-Low deftly 
mines a range of sources to illuminate working practices in a trade 
notorious for its devotion to secrecy. While offering no significant 
revision of the picture of incremental, scarcely mechanized, 
technical change, she emphasizes organizational developments that 
allowed both women and provincial manufacturers greater roles than 
have previously been demonstrated.

A long chapter entitled "Supply" is principally concerned with 
marketing and distribution: trade cards and advertisements, much in 
evidence throughout this well illustrated book, come into their own 
here, but there is also a useful examination of nineteenth-century 
exhibitions and premiums. Its partner, "Demand," carefully analyzes 
the market for scientific instruments, trying to assess the relative 
importance of its several segments in the absence of any aggregate 
output figures. While the "dilettante" and "scientific" segments 
provoked new heights of skill and ingenuity, they were tiny and slow 
growing in comparison with the booming market for practical 
instruments, used for navigation, surveying, gauging or teaching 
(which also carried greater implications for the trade's organization 
and techniques of production). It is a sharp reminder, in particular, 
of the industrializing economy's dependence on accurate measurement 
for the construction and operation of its transport infrastructure -- 
and the modernizing state's for its revenue. Morrison-Low is to be 
congratulated for elucidating the broader significance of this small 
but crucial industry.


Christine MacLeod is Professor of History at the University of 
Bristol and author of _Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism 
and British Identity, 1750-1914_ (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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