“Certainly Made by Ramsden”: The Long History of the Whipple Museum’s Dividing Engine

Abstract

Sometime in 1954, two young curators climbed into a 1936 Morris 8 and drove the fifty-some miles from Cambridge to Chigwell. The car’s driver, Rupert Hall, later admitted that this journey was a bit of a stretch for the small Morris, but the trip was evidently worth the risk: someone had offered the Whipple Museum of the History of Science a Ramsden dividing engine. Indeed, many decades later both Hall and his passenger, Derek J. de Solla Price, could recollect in some detail the circumstances of the donation, evidently proud of having secured such an important instrument for their new museum.