“A Co-operation of Observers”: Crafting knowledge infrastructures for microscopy

Abstract

• In 1887, the President of the British Postal Microscopical Society, J. W. Measures, declared that "the beginner is unable to learn from the books on the microscope all the minutiae of so fine an art as mounting (microscope specimens). "1 The preparation of microscope slides, the observation of specimens, as well as the use (and production) of a compound microscope and its many accessories indeed required a high level of practical skill, or craft knowledge, which could only be gained through innumerable hours of training and was often difficult to translate into written instructions. Since skills require some manual dexterity and seem difficult , if not impossible, to codify in text, historians have so far tended to assume that learning skills from other scientific practitioners requires some form of on-site interaction. As the historian Myles Jackson explains in an article reviewing the scholarship on skill in the history of science, skills "are acquired through direct contact and personal observation of experimental technique. "2 Only more recently have historians, mostly early modernists, begun to question the assumption that acquired skills requires historical actors to be co-present, a discussion that this dissertation extends to the history of microscopy in the late nineteenth century.