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1 results

  • 9 - Like a Bos: The Discovery of Fake Antique Scientific Instruments at the Whipple Museum

  • Edited by Joshua Nall, University of Cambridge, Liba Taub, University of Cambridge, Frances Willmoth, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Whipple Museum of the History of Science
    Published online:
    19 August 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019, pp 201-222
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  • Summary

    The mid-1950s saw the unmasking of two scientific forgeries: the well-known Piltdown skull was shown to be a fake by J. S. Weiner, and Derek Price, a researcher in the newly opened Whipple Museum, demonstrated that a number of ‘early’ scientific instruments were in fact no more than half a century old. When Price announced his findings, he invoked the Piltdown story, urging historians to be as careful as their scientific colleagues. In this paper I use the Piltdown case and Derek Price’s work identifying five forgeries in the Whipple Museum’s collection to argue that the detection of forgeries was as much a matter of the changing nature of collections as it was a result of new scientific techniques or a more discerning eye. I characterize the change in attitudes towards the Piltdown skull as a move from visibility to legibility, and show that the same holds for Price’s own research into antique scientific instruments, which moved from the collector’s cabinet to the museum card-catalogue and, again, from visibility to legibility.