Early modern books about mathematical instruments are typically well illustrated and contain detailed instructions on how to make and use the tools they describe. Readers approached these texts with a desire to extract information – and sometimes even to extract illustrations which could be repurposed as working instruments. To focus on practical approaches to these texts is to bring the category of ‘making’ to the fore. But here care needs to be taken about who could make what, about the rhetoric of craft, and about the technique of working with diagrams and images. I argue that we should read claims about making instruments cautiously, but that, conversely, we should be inquisitive and open-minded when it comes to the potential uses of printed diagrams in acquiring skill and knowledge: these could be worked on directly, or cut out or copied and turned into working instruments. Books were sites of mathematical practice, and in certain disciplines this was central to learning through doing.

Collections are made and maintained for pleasure, for status, for nation or empire building, for cultural capital, as a substrate for knowledge production and for everything in between. In asking how collections end, we shift the focus from acquisition and growth to erosion, loss and decay, and expose the intellectual, material and curatorial labour required to maintain collections. In this introductory essay, we draw together insights from the history of science and from science and technology studies to investigate the dispersal, destruction, absorption, repurposing and repatriation of the diverse scientific collections discussed in the papers that make up this issue of BJHS Themes, and many other collections besides. We develop a distinction first suggested by the curator and bibliographer John Willis Clark between ‘working’ collections of objects valued for the information they hold or produce, and ‘unique’ collections of objects valued for their historical singularity. We show that in many cases, the ‘end’ of an object or collection involves a shift in the dominant account of its cultural value from ‘working’ to ‘unique’ or vice versa. Moving between the laboratory, the museum and difficult-to-classify spaces in between, we argue that ‘ending’ is not anathema to ‘collecting’ but is always present as a threat, or as an everyday reality, or even as a necessary part of a collection's continued existence. A focus on ending draws attention not only to the complex internal dynamics and social contexts of collections, but also to their roles in producing scientific knowledge.

This paper explores the hoarding, collecting and occasional display of old apparatus in new laboratories. The first section uses a 1936 exhibition of Cambridge's scientific relics as a jumping-off point to survey the range of historical practices in the various Cambridge laboratories. This panoramic approach is intended to show the variety and complexity of pasts that scientists had used material to conjure in the years prior to the exhibition. Commerce and commemoration emerge as two key themes. The second part turns to the Cavendish Laboratory (experimental physics) to explore the highly specific senses of time and memorialization at play in the early years of the laboratory (c.1874–1910), and the way these were transformed over the subsequent generations leading up to the 1936 moment. The key figure here is James Clerk Maxwell, whose turn to history involved a mix of antiquarianism and modernism. The paper concludes with an attempt to characterize the meanings and significances of ‘the museum in the lab’. This phenomenon ought to be understood in terms of the wide range of ‘collections’ present in laboratory spaces.

When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).