It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting at my computer writing a blog post for my Magnetic Variations series on Robert Norman, sixteenth-century instrument maker and discoverer of magnetic dip. As I usually do when I’m writing, I took a short break to survey my social media channels and to check my emails and discovered that the leading historian of scientific instruments, Jim Bennett, has just died. One of the sources that I’m using for my bog post is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Robert Norman, written by one J. A. Bennett.
You can’t really call yourself a historian of early modern science and/or technology without having read, studied, and internalized some of Jim Bennett’s output on the history of scientific instruments. In my case, probably the most important piece of his output that I read was his The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy (Hist. Sci., xxiv (1986), but there is so much more.
I only had one very brief online encounter with Jim Bennet, but it left me glowing like an immature schoolboy. In 2020, good Renaissance Mathematicus friend, Becky Higgitt, organised a conference Science and the City, which was to be held in London and at which I was due to hold a lecture, How Renaissance Nürnberg became the Scientific Instrument Capital of Europe. Unfortunately, a pandemic by the name of Covid got in the way and the conference was transferred online. Speakers were requested to post there lectures online, mine is here, and the participant read them there, after which there was an extended online discussion about the paper with the author. I was both delighted and more than a bit awed when Jim Bennett entered the discussion on my lecture, both asking intelligent questions and offering further information. He was kind and generous with his comments about my humble efforts and left me with a very satisfied glow.
The history of science and technology community yesterday lost another one of its true giants and all over the Internet historians of science and technology are mourning his departure.