Making science cooler: Carré's apparatus

• Autores: M. Carmo Elvas, Isabel Marília Peres, Sarah Carvalho
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 441-449
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The need of refrigeration in the laboratory is not a new idea, and this paper intends to make a tour through its history in the 19th century, where one of the first attempts to make things cooler was created by the Carré brothers. The aim is to explore the types of Carré Apparatus and the techniques used in it, and to study their evolution and improvement. This work will focus mostly in the instrument’s collection of the Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon, which owns several exemplars of the Carré Apparatus as well as improved versions of it. Our approach tries to put these objects back in their real place in the 19th century lab work, corroborating equipment with archival sources by establishing links between equipment and photographs, reports, curricula, chemistry compendia, textbooks written by the professors, where certain experimental settings are described and depicted, invoices and other administration papers, e.g. the 1854 inventory, among other archival and bibliographical sources. The 19th century ‘Laboratorio Chimico’ of the Polytechnic School (1837-1911), integrated in the Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon suffered a restoration and a musealization work (1998-2007) as well as a part of the museum’s heritage, where a Ferdinand Carré’s apparatus is included. This historical space and the pertaining collection allows us to go back to the 19th century scientific practice at the Lisbon Polytechnic School and breathe its atmosphere in a golden period