How Instruments Extended the Senses

The astrolabe modeled the sky on a rotating brass disk, letting a medieval Islamic or European astronomer read the time, find latitude, and fix the direction of prayer, centuries before any instrument used a lens.

Galileo built an open thermoscope around 1592 with no fixed scale; it took Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit until 1714 to seal a mercury thermometer accurately enough to give temperature a real number.

Evangelista Torricelli inverted a mercury-filled tube into a dish in 1643-44 and realized the column's height was tracking the weight of the air itself.

Galileo turned an improved telescope on the night sky in 1609; Newton's 1668 reflecting design and the 1733 achromatic lens each fixed a different flaw in what came before.

The compound microscope's own origin is genuinely disputed, but Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's single-lens instruments of the 1670s were good enough to see bacteria for the first time in history.

Fraunhofer built a precision spectroscope around 1814 to study dark lines in sunlight; by 1859 Bunsen and Kirchhoff had shown those lines could identify what a distant star is made of.

Geiger and Rutherford worked out the detection principle in 1908; it took Geiger and his student Muller until 1928 to build a sealed tube cheap and rugged enough to leave the research lab.

C.T.R. Wilson's 1911 cloud chamber let physicists photograph a single particle's track for the first time, and led directly to Carl Anderson's 1932 discovery of antimatter.

Ruska and Knoll's 1931 electron microscope beat light microscopy's own resolution limit by 1933, though Ruska did not receive his Nobel Prize for it until 1986.

The line ends at a 27-kilometre ring with no single inventor, built by an entire multinational collaboration: the instrument that produced the collisions in which the Higgs boson was first observed in 2012.