Science educators, historians of science and their students
often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between
past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments
into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of
museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and teachers new to material
culture can readily use artefacts to reveal rich and complex networks of
narratives. We illustrate this point by describing our own lay encounter with an
artefact turned over for our analysis during a week-long workshop at the Canada
Science and Technology Museum. The text explains how elements as disparate as
the military appearance of the instrument, the crest stamped on its body, the
manipulation of its telescopes, or a luggage tag revealed the object’s
scientific and political significance in different national contexts. In this
way, the presence of the instrument in the classroom vividly conveyed the nature
of geophysics as a field practice and an international science, and illuminated
relationships between pure and applied science for early twentieth century
geologists. We conclude that artefact study can be an unexpectedly powerful and
accessible tool in the study of science, making visible the connections between
past and present, laboratory and field, texts and instruments.