Preface 



Within recent years fairly exhaustive studies have been made on 

 many aspects of American science and technology. For example, 

 there have been numerous works relating to clocks and clockmakers, 

 so that the collector and horological student have a number of 

 useful sources on which to rely. More recently there has been a 

 series of publications on the development of American tools and 

 their makers. Until now, however, no systematic study has been 

 attempted of the scientific instruments used in the United States 

 from its colonial beginnings. While several useful regional lists 

 of instrument makers in early America have been compiled from 

 advertisements in contemporary newspapers and published as 

 short articles, these, however, are fragmentary, and are inadequate 

 to the need for documentation in this field. 



With the rapidly growing interest in the history of science, it 

 becomes necessary to have a more complete background for the 

 student and the historian alike. It is desirable to have a more 

 comprehensive picture of the work of the scientific practitioners of 

 the earlier periods of American scientific development, and of their 

 tools. At the same time it is essential to have a history of the 

 development and distribution and use of scientific instruments by 

 others than the practitioners and teachers. The role of the in- 

 strument maker in the American Colonies was an important one — 

 as it was in each epoch of the history of science in Europe — and it 

 deserves to be reported. 



To make a comprehensive study of American scientific instru- 

 ments and instrument makers in the American Colonies is no 

 simple matter, partly because of an indifference to the subject in 

 the past, and partly because of the great volume of sources that 

 must be sifted to accomplish it. Such a project w'ould require 

 an organized search of all published reference works relating to the 

 field and associated topics, of all contemporary newspapers for 

 advertisements and notices, of civil records filed in state and com- 

 munity archives, of business account-books and records that have 

 been preserved, and of business directories of the period under 

 consideration. In addition, such a study would require the com- 

 pilation of an inventory of all surviving instruments in private and 

 public collections, and a correlation of all the data that could be 

 assembled from these sources. 



XI 



