A Sydney physics professor’s 1898 handbook of the hand skills an experimenter once needed before apparatus could be bought ready-made. Threlfall explains how to choose soda, flint and Bohemian glass, work it at the blow-pipe, grind and polish lenses and mirrors, silver glass, and electroplate, all drawn from his own bench experience.
A rich record of how nineteenth-century science was physically built, for historians of the laboratory and anyone who works with their hands. Download the free EPUB.