Gerard L'E. Turner

Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Making

      OUP Oxford - Europe in the sixteenth century experienced a period of unprecedented vitality and innovation in the spheres of science and commerce. The Americas had been discovered and the colonizing nations had an urgent need for mathematical instruments for navigation and surveying. The Elizabethan age saw the establishment of the precision instrument-making trade in London, from 1540, a trade that would become world-famous in the succeeding two centuries.The first of a group of London makers was an immigrant from Flanders, Thomas Gemini, succeeded by the Englishman, Humfrey Cole.It has proved possible to find over 100 surviving mathematical instruments, signed and unsigned, made by a group of London.