Historic Scientific Instruments You Can See in Museums

The real hardware behind famous discoveries: telescopes, clocks, microscopes, tubes and coils that mapped the sky, kept time at sea, weighed gases and tracked particles. Each photo shows a historic instrument, nearly all of them in museum or institutional collections, and each caption says what it did, who made or used it, and where it is kept. The test for a place was that the object itself survives. Instruments that survive only in pieces or as replicas, such as Michelson and Morley's 1887 interferometer, are left out, and captions say so where an attribution or a piece's originality is uncertain. The gallery runs in date order, from an ancient Greek gear train to a 1930s radiation counter.