Magdeburg hemispheres

Beiträge zur Astronomiegeschichte, Band 13, Acta Historica Astronomiae, 2016

The significance of the Nuremberg maps, an extraordinary pair of celestial hemispheres, made in 1503, is shown to exceed the usual aim of celestial cartography to map the stars. The makers of the Nuremberg maps aspired to present the whole universe and expressed this through the decorations surrounding the northern and southern hemispheres. The meaning of the decorations becomes transparent when they are considered in terms of the macrocosm and microcosm.

Lena Holmquist, Sven Kalmring & Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (eds.), New Aspects on Viking-age Urbanism, c. AD 750-1100 (Stockholm 2016), 81-87.

In 1493 Johannes Stoeffler constructed a celestial globe for the suffragan bishop of Constance, Daniel Zehender. Together with the celestial globe owned by Nicolaus Cues and the Cracovian brass globe with astrolabe made by Hans Dorn Stoeffler’s globe is one of the oldest surviving examples of European celestial globes. To commemorate the 500th anniversary of its construction, the globe has been exhibited in Stuttgart (Württembergisches Landesmuseum). On this occasion close examinations concerning the construction and iconographic details could be carried out. A computerized scan of the surface and photogrammetric measurements of star positions have been taken at the Wilhelm-Schickard-Institute (Tübingen).

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2001

The introduction into the laboratory of the magic lantern and the arts of projection marked a change from putatively individual and mechanical to obviously collective and skillful perception in nineteenth-century German sciences. In 1860 Karl Friedrich Zöllner introduced an astro-photometer to astronomers who, by practising with it, became aware of their own tacit and ubiquitous skills. Zöllner was a showman who was aware of the personal skills involved in magic-lantern projection. Like showmen, nineteenth-century astronomers could also control and calibrate their vision with this instrument. Photometrists such as Zöllner were not only aware of subjectivity, but developed techniques to manipulate, control and to employ it in scientific judgements. This view stands in contrast to that of the scientists described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, for whom ‘machines offered freedom from will – from the willful interventions that had come to be seen as the most dangerous aspects of ...

Martino Peña Fernández-Serrano; José Calvo-López. 2017. «Projecting stars, triangles and concrete. The Early History of Geodesic Domes, from Walter Bauersfeld to Richard Buckminster Fuller». Architectura, vol. 47, p. 93-114. ISSN 0044-863X., 2016

Sometimes artefacts that had been designed with a scientific purpose turn into cultural icons that influence art and architecture, mainly because the viewer’s relationship with the work and the very act of receiving it is quite different. In this way, the receiver extracts same of the properties of the original artefact and uses them in other prototype that appears in a completely different way to our eyes. This is the case with the first hemispherical dome using a system of metal bars connected by pin-joints made by the Zeiss Company headquartered in Jena, Germany, designed by its chief engineer Walter Bauersfeld, and its reception some years later by the artistic and architectural avant-garde.

Iau Colloq 116 Comets in the Post Halley Era, 1991

The first widely distributed printed comet images appear in the Nuremberg Chronicle, whose Latin edition appeared in 1493, followed closely by a German edition. In the first section, we begin our consideration with the comet image that has frequently been cited as a representation of the A.D. 684 apparition of Comet P/Halley. To better understand this image, we present a thorough survey of the 13 comet images that appear in the Chronicle, all reproduced from four woodblocks, representing 14 apparitions between A.D. 471 and A.D. 1472. In the second part, we present an analysis of the unpublished preparatory drawings for the comet images in the handwritten Exemplars (manuscript layout dummies) for both the Latin and German editions in the Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg. Finally, in the third part, we demonstrate how the Chronicle presaged the proliferation of broadsides-woodcut prints that functioned like tabloids of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We examine broadsides recording historical comets over such Bavarian cities as Nuremberg and Augsburg. In spite of their superstitious, hysterical journalism, fed by turbulent political and religious upheavals, these broadsides reveal a nascent scientific attitude. 1. The Comet Illustrations of the Nuremberg Chronicle During the recent passage of Halley's Comet (Fig. 1), one often saw reproduced a comet illustration described as the A.D. 684 passage of Halley's Comet and the first known representation of Comet P/Halley (Fig. 10). This woodcut print is from the Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493 in Nuremberg (Fig. 2). The book is a chronicle, a succinct record of noteworthy events and phenomena, both natural and cultural, arranged in a roughly chronological order, which, unlike a history, provides little commentary or interpretation. It covers a period stretching back six millennia and is one of the best known early printed books. Moreover, the Nuremberg Chronicle has a large format and is lavishly illustrated with 1809 illustrations printed from 645 actual woodblocks. Although there had been other printed chronicles, some of which were used for source material by Schedel for the Nuremberg Chronicle, they were not as copiously illustrated. 1 The volume's official name was "The Book of Chronicles, with pictures and portraits from the beginning of the World." 2 The production of the book, commissioned by two wealthy citizens of Nuremberg-Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kamermaister-was really a civic enterprise. 3 The artists Michael Wolgemut (to whom Albrecht Diirer was at one time apprenticed) and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff were responsible for supervising the production of its illustrations. After the signing of the contract, Hartmann Schedel~a Nuremberg humanist, bibliophile, and physician-was selected to write the text, suggesting that the illustrations took precedence over the text. 4

Configurations, 2016

German scholar Georg Christoph Lichtenberg found in the 1770s dust formations on his electrophorus, a new device for electrical experiments. These Lichtenberg Figures became famous as earliest visualizations of electricity. Their beauty captivated popular audiences, but they simultaneously aided the transformation of electricity from a scientific curiosity into a technology that would dominate the nineteenth century. This paper contrasts Lichtenberg's observations of surfaces in arts and sciences with Johann Caspar Lavater's practice of studying profiles in his new physiognomical "science" of which Lichtenberg was very critical. Lichtenberg's discovery became possible by a careful distinction of artistic and scientific observation (one that Lavater fundamentally ignored), and an approach to the latter with a new eye for what would be called "scientific objectivity." As a result, Lichtenberg's practice and findings formed a matrix for emerging sciences and technologies in the early nineteenth century.

This dissertation examines the emergence in the early nineteenth century at the Georg-August Universität of a theory describing the earth’s magnetic field. For its creator, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and his contemporaries, the theory offered an organizational model—a structure for the distribution of magnetic intensity over the earth’s surface. The dissertation argues that the structural quality of the theory was the signal feature of scientific work, or Wissenschaft, at this time. The first chapter places the Georg-August University’s founding in the context of changes in university education, and of developments in philosophical and religious discourses about truth. The second chapter treats the development of a particular institutional identity, the empirical “Göttinger Verstand.” These developments are contrasted with the negative reception of romanticism at Göttingen at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A third chapter explores the ideas of three philosophers—Immanuel Kant, Jakob Fries, and Friedrich Bouterwek—who represent a genealogy of structure as critical to scientific knowledge. Kant provided an articulation of concepts crucial to Fries’s and Bouterwek’s work, which constituted a rejection of Naturphilosophie and argued for structured knowledge as a cure for idealism. In the next chapter, I focus on Gauss’s theory of earth magnetism, compares Gauss’s theory to that produced by the romantic scientist Christopher Hansteen in 1819. Against Hansteen’s definition of magnetic poles, which relied on indeterminate measurements of total intensity, Gauss’s definition involved no such ambiguity, utilizing mathematics which allowed Gauss to avoid considerations about causes and material constitution of the earth’s magnetic field. This formalism allowed Gauss to avoid Hansten’s tabletop-based model, inspired by Naturphilosophie, of the earth’s magnetic field. A subsequent chapter places Gauss’s use of this formalism in the context other contemporary views of structure. Privileging structured knowledge implied that experimental truth was a question of processes used to elicit it. Overall this dissertation aims to show views of the nature of scientific knowledge itself intersected with anxieties over truth and certainty, and with the nature of practices involved in producing not only scientific knowledge, but also scientists themselves.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2009

The Kunstkammer of the Electors of Saxony, founded in Dresden around 1560, housed one of the richest collections of tools and scientific instruments in its day. A close analysis of the optical objects in the collection in the decades around 1600 is undertaken herein particular, their arrangement by a mathematically trained curator, Lucas Brunn, and their use in an 'experiment' by a distinguished visitor, Johannes Kepler. It is argued that the selection, display and use of optical objects within this collection reflect a specific, playful image of optics promoted at the Saxon court.

With the dissemination of globes and the appearance of printed charts suitable for pasting on spheres in the sixteenth century the problem of an adequate construction of globe gores arose, since it is impossible to spread out the surface of a sphere into a plane without distortion and the circumference of a gore is not circular. In 1527 Heinrich Glarean described a rather approximative method of construction using a pair of compasses. At the end of the 17th century Nicolas Bion constructed gores with non-circular circumference. A similar method of delineating the circumference of globe gores has already been used by Philipp Imsser and Andreas Schöner about the middle of the 16th century, however. A hitherto unknown instruction for the preparation of spheres by Bartholomaeus Scultetus is reprinted as an appendix.