By W James King 



THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF 



WILLIAM GILBERT 



AND HIS PREDECESSORS 



Until several decades ago, the physical sciences were 

 considered to have had their origins in the 17th century — 

 mechanics beginning with men Like Galileo Galilei and 

 magnetism ivith men like the Elixjihcthan physician and 

 scientist William Gilbert. 



Historians of science, however, have traced many of the 

 17th century's concepts of tncchanics hack into the Middle 

 Ages. Here, Gilbert' s explanation of the loadstone and 

 its powers is compared with explanations to he found in 

 the Middle Ages and earlier. 



From this comparison it appears that Gilbert can best 

 be understood by considering him not so much a herald 

 of the new science as a modifier of the old. 



The Author : W. James King is curator of electricity. 

 Museum of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian 

 Institution' s United States National Musettm. 



THE \K.\R 1600 SAW the puhlkiition Ijy an English 

 physician, William Gilbert, of a book on the 

 loadstone. Entitled De magnele, ' it has traditionally 

 been credited with laying a foundation for the 

 modern science of electricity and magnetism. The 

 following essay is an attempt U) examine the basis 



' William Gilbert, De magnele, magnelicisque corpntihus et de 

 magna magnele telture; physiologia nova, plurimis & argumentis, £? 

 expeiimentis, demonshala, London, 1600, 240 pp., with an intro- 

 duction by Edward Wright. All references to Gilbert in this 

 article, unless otherwise noted, are to the .'\mcrican translation 

 by P. Fleury Mottelay, 368 pp., published in .Xew York in 1893, 

 and are designated by the letter M. However, the Latin text 

 of the 1600 edition has been quoted wherever I have disagreed 

 with the Mottelay translation. 



.\ good source of information on Gilbert is Dr. Duane H. D. 

 Roller's doctoral thesis, written under the direction of Dr. 

 I. B. Cohen of Harvard University. Dr. Roller, at present 

 Curator of the De Golyer Collection at the University of Okla- 

 homa, informed me that an expanded version of his dissertation 

 will shortly appear in book form. Unfortunately his researches 

 were not known to me until after this article was completed. 



for such a tradition by determining what (iilbert's 

 original contributions to these sciences were, and 

 to make explicit the sense in which he may be con- 

 sidered as being dependent upon earlier work. In 

 this manner a more accurate estimate of his position 

 in the history of science may be made. 



One criterion as to the book's significance in the 

 history of science can be applied almost immediately. 

 A number of historians have pointed to the intro- 

 duction of numbers and geometry as marking a 

 watershed between the modern and the medieval 

 understanding of nature. Thus A. Koyrc considers 

 the Archimcdeanization of space as one of the neces- 

 sary features of the development of modern astron- 

 omy and physics." A. N. Whitehead and E. Ca.ssirer 

 have turned to measurement and the quantification 

 of force as marking this transition.' Howc\er, the 



- Alexandre Koyre, fjtuJes galileennes, Paris, 1939 



^ Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and llie modem world, New 



York, 1925, ch. 3; Ernst Cassirer, Das ErkennlnisptobUm, ed. 3, 



Berlin, 1922, vol. 1, pp. 314-318, 352-359. 



122 



BULLETIN 218: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISrOR\- AND TECHNOLOGY 



