Signedon ivory plate above the crank handle: W & S Jones, No. 30, Holborn London
Inscribedon crankshaft: 17-14
FunctionAn air-pump is an instrument used to produce a vacuum in order to study nature under controlled environmental conditions. It became one of the most important scientific instruments of natural philosophy as early as the late seventeenth century. With the electrostatic machine, the air-pump became in time not only a genuine research tool but an important pedagogical apparatus in the lecturer-demonstrator's arsenal.
A video about air pumps of this period was produced by the Museo Galileo and is available here.
Primary SourcesJohn Prince, "An Account of an Air-Pump of a New Construction..." American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1785), A497.
Published ReferencesDavid P. Wheatland, The Apparatus of Science at Harvard, 1765-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 111.