Although officially established as a British colony only in 1841, New Zealand exhibits already appeared in London at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibit. And in 1865, the first New Zealand Exhibition was organized in Dunedin, the colony’s most vibrant city after the Otago Gold Rush of 1864. We might expect such a colonial exhibition to feature agricultural products, mining, and technologies of colonial infrastructure … which it did. But among the 38 classes of exhibits were four devoted to “instruments”: philosophical, musical, horological and surgical. This paper will examine the origins of “instrument making” in NZ as reflected in the exhibits, jurors and awards at the 1865 exhibition. Both practical (light-house lamps) and theoretical (spectroscopes) interests appear, with British exemplars and craft skills always close at hand. But Class 36B, “Maori and other aboriginal manufactures and implements”, featured non-British exemplars, albeit fully framed in colonial terms.

Ideas, masters and objects can travel. Sometimes this is written into their function. The Tartu Repsold-heliometer is the kind of instrument that was made for traveling.
In 1874 astronomers all over the world were preparing for observation of the transit of Venus from the Sun. A conference of top astronomers decided that the best instrument to observe it might be an improved heliometer. The first modern heliometer - with a split achromatic lens - was made by J. Fraunhofer in 1829 for the Königsberg observatory. The new generation heliometers were manufactured in Repsold's workshop, and all the improvements made in the meantime were used, including the first attempt to use electricity to illuminate the field of view.
The Russian state ordered three new heliometers and one of them came to Tartu. The transit of Venus in 1874 was not visible from Tartu, so the astronomer Ludwig Schwarz had to set off to distant Siberia. The observations made in Nertshinsk near the Chinese border seemed successful at first, but later it turned out that an error had occurred in determining the times of contact. In 1882, the Tartu heliometer was lent to a French expedition that travelled to the island of Martinique. No separate publication on this expedition has been found. However, the observations of the transit of Venus in 1874 and 1882 reinforced international cooperation and coordination of scientists using the modern means for travel and communication (railway, telegraph).

This research paper presents the first investigations to trace the routes of the equipment existing in laboratories of the State University of Paraíba and, to some extent, comprehend the role of the institution in the policy of promoting higher education institutions in Brazil. In the physics major, the laboratories are mostly used for teaching activities. However, we found in their collection some equipment that draws attention due to being imported, which is not a standard acquisition for the institution. Through an inventory, we found instruments from German (Phylatex and Leybold Heraeus) and Hungarian (EMG) companies. The instruments from Germany (one unit of each) correspond to educational equipment to introduce the experiment of the electron charge-to-mass ratio. The equipment from Hungary, on the other hand, is mostly used for measuring electricity, from small galvanometers to function generators and potentiometers; we found documents that reveal their arrival in the country during the 1970s and 80s. While the former is small in size and intended for pedagogical use, the latter presents complex measurements associated with specific use in laboratories or industries, aimed at in-depth knowledge of electricity. Thus, by using the descriptive and analytical operations presented by Prown (1982) and studies of scientific material culture, we hope to understand why such pieces of equipment were found in a teaching laboratory of a university focused on teacher training in a university town in Brazil.