Large assemblages of Graphical Processors (GPUs) used to train large data models in machine learning and artificial intelligence are among the most expensive and powerful scientific instruments in history. Looking at the making of GPUs into scientific instruments provides an optic useful for thinking about the creation and use of scientific instruments and the historiography of scientific instruments. To understand GPUs we need both the study of supply chains and radically different ways of thinking, of the material and the ideational, indeed, to understand them the study of the how the limits and powers of the material and the ideational are bound and rebound together.
Why do museums exhibit historic scientific instruments? I argue that these instruments, and many other items as well, serve primarily as relics, putting visitors in contact with notable persons, places, or events.
More than other history of science subfields, histories of instrumentation have considered the industrial dimensions of scientific knowledge. A few industries figure repeatedly in such histories: telecommunications; agribusiness; defense. We argue that the oil industry has been remarkably innovative in scientific instrumentation and indeed helped drive instrumentation R&D in other industries. These contributions are examples of "oil spillovers" flows of people, money, ideas, technologies between the oil industry and other industries or scientific fields. Viewing scientific instruments as oil spillovers helps resolve some old historiographic questions and raises new ones. In this article, we show that nuclear instruments were applied, scaled up, and developed during the Manhattan Project in close collaboration with the oil industry. We also briefly show that various nuclear technologies based on oil industry instrumentation continued to be improved postwar by oil companies such as Exxon, sometimes with the help of well-known scientists such as Hans Bethe.
The idea that technical objects result from the projection of organs or, more generally, the extension of the human body, has been central to media theory since Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). From the perspective of recent history of science, this paper argues that this idea cannot exclusively be traced back to Ernst Kapp's (1808-1896) philosophy of technology, as is often assumed in media studies and related fields. Rather, it should be understood as a manifestation of a discourse that goes back much further, which understands scientific instruments prototypically telescopes and microscopes as "external," "artificial" or simply "new organs" with which the "internal" and "natural," i.e. the already existing sensory organs of humans are "supplemented" and/or "enhanced" in order to "extend" human cognition and knowledge. This discourse is traced back via the physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) to Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650). On this basis, the topicality of a historically oriented and theoretically reflected "organology" is discussed, which critically examines the ways in which media and instruments contribute to extending human knowledge.
Instead of thinking about scientific instruments in terms of their functions, makers, sellers, users, and designs overtime, this paper will explore what might be learned from a critical examination of the materials used in an instrument's fabrication and the different artisans who came together in its production. At center stage is a grand orrery (a complex mechanical model of the Solar System) made in Boston during the American Revolution and signed by Joseph Pope, a clockmaker. The orrery is a "world in a box." Close study of it as a material object reveals not only the astronomical theories of the day but also a trans-Atlantic network that provided materials, ideas, and workers who helped to create the scientific instrument. From the orrery, we can build a picture of Boston society, politics, labor, and wartime economy. The orrery is a microcosm of intellectual and social relationships of its time.
