ABSTRACT
Much of this book has been descriptive, rather than quantitative, because of the dispersed nature of the evidence, and because it is covering new ground. However, some indication of the numbers of businesses outside London which were concerned with the production of scientic instruments, either fully or part time, has been gleaned from the local and national street directories. These numbers rose signicantly between about 1760 and 1851, and are borne out by Census information at an individual level. In contrast, the material evidence that survives – old instrumentation – has indicated very few items with a provincial signature. This has led unwary instrument historians to conclude that almost nothing was produced outside London. As Lorna Weatherill has written:
surviving artefacts are cared for in museums or collected privately, and this inuences the works about them, for their main intention is to provide detailed guides, descriptions, attributions. This fact, together with the nature of surviving objects themselves, gives a quite different view of consumption … [yet] on the other hand, economic and social historians tend to regard the objects as illustrative material for their studies and show a surprising disregard for the physical remains of the past.1
