Deep underground, in the sub-basement at McLennan Physical Laboratories on the St. George campus, sits a kind of buried treasure: one of Canada’s largest collections of historical scientific instruments.
Carefully catalogued and arranged on shelves, some 2,000 artifacts, collected over four decades and covering a wide range of disciplines, reveal insights about how science has been pursued at U of T over the past century and a half: the projects undertaken – the successes and failures – and scientific trends of the day.
These artifacts – along with thousands more that remain uncatalogued in departments across the university – also tell a larger story about U of T’s role in science and innovation, says assistant curator Victoria Fisher. Some items, such as a camera lens constructed specially to photograph a 1922 solar eclipse that helped prove Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, connect U of T with “important developments in the history of science in Canada and the world.”
Many are intriguing just to look at (see below).
![Fourteen brass spherical resonators of increasing size from top to bottom, attached to the right side of a steel frame, which is attached to a rotating mirror on the left side. Rubber hoses are connected to several of the spheres.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Koenig-analyzer.jpg)
![Hipp chronoscope with two dials inside a glass cover on top of a wooden platform above four columns and pulley with a hook hanging from the bottom. A weight rests on a second platform at the bottom.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Hipp-chronoscope.jpg)
![A calculator constructed from metal, with columns of black keys numbered from 1 to 9 in descending order from top to bottom, interspersed with columns of white keys numbered in the same way](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/MADAS-VII-T-mechanical-calculator.jpg)
![A polished cylindrical case sitting vertically on top of a matte grey base with three adjustable feet. About a third of the length down from the top are two matte grey handles.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Gravity-Meter-Model-CG-2.jpg)
![An instrument consisting of a square surface connected to a circular metal piece on top of thicker, brass-coloured circular pieces. These are mounted on a thick acrylic rectangle, which is then mounted on a dark grey square block, on top of larger acrylic squares. The base is supported by two blocks of wood.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/smectic-electroconvection-experiment.jpg)
![A metal rod-like instrument containing a black coloured eyepiece with a knurled edge on one end. At the opposite end is a cylindrical stem.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Watanabe-arthroscope.jpg)
![A console containing buttons, dials and a small screen embedded on a steel surface](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/multichannel-analyzer-faceplate.jpg)
![A steel suitcase box containing a tape recorder, a keypad on a console and a tangled pile of cables.](https://magazine.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/traffic-data-recorder.jpg)
The materials, which are available online with photographs and details about their purpose and history, provide insights that go far beyond what one can glean from academic articles, says curator Erich Weidenhammer. “An artifact will tell you, not only its particular intellectual and cultural context, but about the materials, design aesthetics and technology of the historical moment from which it emerged,” he observes. “Even mundane objects carry a wealth of information. A single piece of apparatus can serve as a record of an entire research program that would otherwise be forgotten.”
With such a large collection, the curators and their host department, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, are fundraising for a more suitable space on the St. George campus. In the meantime, they remain on the lookout for objects of interest – especially ones that reveal something previously unknown about research at U of T. “We love that kind of thing,” says Fisher.