The emergence of instrument-making trades in early-modern England tested the power of established guilds. From the seventeenth century, instrument makers were able to exploit growing markets for scientific apparatus and attempted to exploit connections with the Royal Society. Given the growth in both local and international demand, and in new methods of manufacture, instrument makers were frequently able to evade the diminishing power of guilds to police the efforts of the makers.

Martin Folkes (1690–1754) was Newton's protégé, an English antiquary, mathematician, numismatist and astronomer who would in the latter part of his career become simultaneously president of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. Folkes took a Grand Tour from March 1733 to September 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. This paper examines Folkes's travel diary to analyse his Freemasonry, his intellectual development as a Newtonian and his scientific peregrination. It (...) shows how, in this latter area, how he used metrology to understand not only the aesthetics but also the engineering principles of antique buildings and artefacts, as well as their context and place in the Italian landscape. Using Folkes's diary, his account book of his journey in the Norwich archives, and his correspondence with other natural philosophers such as Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), Anders Celsius (1701–1744) and Abbé Antonio Schinella Conti (1667–1749), this paper will also demonstrate to what extent Folkes's journey established his reputation as an international broker of Newtonianism, as well as the overall primacy of English scientific instrumentation to Italian virtuosi. (shrink)

In 2017 a clock from the collection of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden was dismantled. This clock had been made around 1767 by Johann Gottfried Köhler (1745–1800), who was then in...