14 - Harnessing the Elements: Beeckman and Atmospheric Instruments

Summary

Abstract

Isaac Beeckman's investigations of atmospheric instruments shed new light on his epistemic and natural philosophical ideas and practices. Atmospheric experiences in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century are closely linked to the tradition of natural magic and the critique of Aristotelian meteorology. Beeckman's dealings with the thermoscope and other apparatus fit this picture, too, and add a new dimension to his pioneering in mechanical philosophy. Central to this chapter are his responses and eventual understanding of the perpetuum mobile of Cornelis Drebbel, a figure who appears intellectually more close to Beeckman than is often assumed.

Keywords: Isaac Beeckman, Cornelis Drebbel, atmospheric instruments, natural magic, perpetuum mobile

In September 1618, when he was almost 30 years old, Isaac Beeckman made some biographical entries in his notebook. From the age of 21, he recollected, he had devoted himself ‘more than a little’ to mechanical operations. During the 1610s, having set up shop as a candle maker in Middelburg and Zierikzee, Beeckman was engaged in all kinds of projects involving conduits, pumps, and fountains. First assisting his father, he soon took on work of his own. These activities turn up in his notebook in reflections upon hydrological machines, but also chimneys and stoves. After he moved to Utrecht and Rotterdam and became a schoolmaster, the waterworks did not disappear from the notebook, but the emphasis shifted from technical installations to curious apparatus like thermoscopes and perpetual motion machines.

This chapter focuses on Beeckman's engagement with such atmospheric instruments in his Rotterdam period (1620-1627). Both the contents and the epistemic significance of his notes on these topics have not been studied in much detail. They shed an interesting new light on his learned persona and put him in a new historical context related to late-sixteenth-century meteorology. The notes on atmospheric instruments show a kind of reasoning that I call ‘artefactual’: getting a conceptual grip on matters by tinkering with and reflecting upon artefacts like thermoscopes and stoves. This aspect of Beeckman adds, I maintain, to our understanding of his learning and his place in the early-seventeenth-century history of science.