Accession No
4522
Brief Description
compound microscope, formerly owned by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, objectives by Wray, English, 2/2 19th Century
Origin
England; London
Maker
Wray [objectives]
Class
microscopes
Earliest Date
1850
Latest Date
1882
Inscription Date
Material
metal (brass, oxidised brass); glass; wood; paper (cardboard)
Dimensions
overall height 296mm; breadth 115mm; depth 160mm box height 280 mm; breadth 195 mm; depth 154 mm
Special Collection
Provenance
Given to C.T.R. Wilson in 1882, when he was 13-years-old. It is not known whether it were given new or used.
Inscription
‘Wray
London
1/4 in’ (objective case)
‘WRAY, LONDON 1/4 in 100’ (spare objective)
Description Notes
Compound microscope, [by Wray], English, 2/2 C19th, formerly owned by C.T.R. Wilson.
Compound microscope; claw foot; square column with swinging plano-concave mirror; stage in dovetail fitting, with lateral and longitudinal movement (latter controlled by rack and pinion (pinion missing)). Bar limb; long lever fine focus; rack and pinion coarse focus with knurled screws on either side; fine focus by knurled screw on bar limb. Body pivots on column. Screw-fit field lens (lens missing) and push-fit eyepiece. Screw-fit objective. Circular substage with three diaphragms.
Spare 1/4 in objective in brass cylindrical case. The objective has rotating collar with scale divided 0 - [20], numbered by 5, divided to 1.
Rectangular brass support with central lens.
Round cardboard box containing selection of square cover slips.
Fitted wooden box with sliding baseboard; brass handle, hinges and hook fasteners.
Label attached to handle: ‘CTRW’s microscope. Reminiscences of my early years. CTRW.
“A friend of the family, J. B. Pettigrew, had given me when I was thirteen a microscope, suggesting that I might hand it on to someone else when I had finished with it. That time never came and for many years it formed part of my apparatus for recording the electric field of thunderclouds.”
Notes and Records of the Royal Society, vol. 14, no. 2 (June, 1960).’
Condition poor (very tarnished and mechanically unsound); complete.
References
Events
Description
A label attached to the handle of this microscope reads:
“CTRW’s microscope. Reminiscences of my early years. CTRW:
‘A friend of the family, J. B. Pettigrew, had given me when I was thirteen a microscope, suggesting that I might hand it on to someone else when I had finished with it. That time never came and for many years it formed part of my apparatus for recording the electric field of thunderclouds.’
Notes and Records of the Royal Society, vol. 14, no. 2 (June, 1960).”
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson was a Scottish meteorologist and physicist who spent most of his career working in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is most famous for inventing the cloud chamber. Wilson began this research in an attempt to better understand the mechanism of cloud formation through the condensation of water droplets around dust and ionised particles in the air. However, Wilson soon recognised that his device could also be used to trace the path of charged particles and ionising radiation, as water droplets would form along their path of travel around the ions they created as they moved through the chamber. This ability to visually track (and photograph) the path of particles given off during radioactive or collision decay opened up a new field of experimental particle physics research, and in 1927 Wilson was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics “for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour.”
25/06/2015
Created by: Joshua Nall on 25/06/2015
FM:46151
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