Browse Items (1664 total)

The 18th and 19th century saw an exponential growth in the number of identified stars due to technological improvements. From ancient times until around 1600, the number of identified stars remained at around 1000. But by 1800, scientists had…

Denis Diderot, a key figure in the advancement of Enlightenment philosophy, envisioned the project of the Encyclopedie with his collaborator Jean D’Alembert. The prospectus was accompanied by a diagram of the “Map of Human Knowledge” which Diderot…

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian naturalist and geographer who explored areas of Latin America between 1799 and 1804 under the recommendation of the King of Spain. His research led to his hypothesis that lands…

This 1530 map of Paris depicts key edifices of the French capital and its distinctive topographic features. Printer and cartographer Albert Jouvin Rochefort (c. 1540- c. 1710) included the map in his nine-panel 1672 district map of Paris. Rochefort's…

Buffon's Histoire Naturelle was an undertaking on the scale of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie. In this “Table of the Order of Dogs," Buffon presents his definition of species (against that of Linnaeus!) as beings defined by time, environment,…

The optical microscope first appeared in the 1590s, but the use of microscopes for research did not gain acceptance until the 1660s. It was then that English natural philosopher Robert Hooke began an extended set of experiments with the microscope on…

British photographer Edweard Muybridge pioneered work on animal locomotion using multiple cameras to capture motion in still photographs. After success as a photographer of the American West, Muybridge was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania…