'People, Places, Exchanges and Circulation' already indicate what provenance research is about: the reconstruction of object biographies. As a provenance researcher at the German Museum of Technology Berlin, I try to find out who owned our several hundred historical measuring instruments since their production, where they were located, by whom they were traded and sold, and through which collections they passed.

I would like to present the methods, tools, focus and first results of my ongoing research project, focused on context of objects lost due to the persecution in Nazi-Germany. Provenance research has become established in German museums, archives and libraries over the last 20 years. A closely cooperating network of researchers has established strategies, exchanged sources and made their results transparent. However, the focus of this research was mainly on objects of fine art. It is only in recent years that the perspective has expanded to include technical cultural assets. The Museum of Technology is one of the first to employ provenance researchers to investigate the history of its objects. And although the research process of evaluating in-house sources and inventories, object inspections and literature research differs only slightly from the work in art museums, there is one significant difference: historical instruments are difficult to identify in catalogues, photographs and scientific literature.

I would like to present and discuss the methodical steps involved in this task and the networks and collaborations necessary for reliable research. As an opportunity to reconstruct people, places, exchanges and circulations together in the future.

This talk will consider a single hypsometer acquired by the Royal Geographical Society, London for £2 in 1910. The insignificant piece of kit raises questions for the historian concerning ownership, construction, and mathematical relationships even before it was used. The instrument can be seen as a physical and intellectual resource, provided within the framework of ‘modernism’: An underlying assumption of the justice and objectivity of number, rationality, and order. The imperial project, and this imperial object, encompassed a determination to extend these values across the globe.
Following the instrument as it was taken on four expeditions respectively to British East Africa and Abyssinia, South West China, Iraq, and Abyssinia again, reveals the multiple difficulties of practice in the field. The repeated returns to the ‘centre of calculation’, in this case the Society’s map room in London, reveals the negotiations which took place in the establishment of agreed knowledge. In the hands of various travellers, in places occupied by various peoples, in the exchanges between them and between those in the static centre, the circulation of this insignificant object provided information which was significant to the imperialist motivations of the early 20th century. The study of its unexceptional use can provide historians with significant insights into the instrumental practices of imperialist field science.

National Museums Scotland (NMS) recently acquired and put on display the large standing equinoctial ring dial made by the London mathematical instrument maker Richard Glynne (1681-1755) for the Scottish aristocrat Archibald Campbell (1682-1761), Earl of Ilay and later 3rd Duke of Argyll. Drawing on Roger Emerson’s biography of Campbell and work by Alison Morrison-Low on his instrument collection, this paper will focus on this magnificent dial in relation to what we know of both Glynne’s work and milieu and the Earl of Ilay’s scientific interests and connections to the London world of Newtonian experimental philosophy. It will also share some insights from the recent conservation work and metallurgical analysis undertaken at NMS, which speak to the dial’s more recent history.

The National Library of Sweden has an estimated 16 million pieces of ephemera in their collections, largely due to legal deposit requirements dating back to 1661. Part of this collection includes medical ephemera, from patient organisations, producers of medical devices, medical associations, and much more. Despite this vast collection, it remains largely unstudied. This paper will focus on medical devices in the ephemera collection with the aim of illustrating the shifting medical marketplace in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth. From a small, concentrated market where Swedish-speaking physicians, pharmacies and private persons were the primary customers to larger-scale enterprises with glossy, marketing materials and profile products, the collection of ephemera at the National Library helps elucidate the nature of procurement and sale of medical devices in the Swedish context.