Museo Galilei e Istituto di Storia della Scienza
Room I: The Medici Collections
Room III: The Representation of the World
Room V: The Science of Navigation
Room IX: After Galileo—Exploring the Physical and Biological World
Room X: The Lorraine Collections (Medical Science)
Room XI: The Spectacle of Science
Room XIII: The Archimedes Screw Model
Room XIV: Precision Instruments
Room XVII: Making Science Useful
Enough art, already! Forget the Madonnas and Venuses for a while to ponder weird contraptions from the birth of modern science. The same spirit of discovery that fueled the artistic Renaissance helped free the sciences from medieval mumbo jumbo. This museum offers a historical overview of technical innovations from roughly A.D. 1000 to 1900, featuring early telescopes, clocks, experiments, and Galileo’s fingers in a jar.
English majors will enjoy expanding their knowledge. Art lovers can admire the sheer beauty of functional devices. Engineers will be in hog heaven among endless arrays of gadgets. Everyone will be fully amused by my feeble attempts to explain technical concepts. And admission to the museum gives you access to one of the marvels of modern science: air-conditioning.
(See “Heart of Florence” map, here.)
Cost: €9, €22 family ticket covers two adults and two kids ages 18 and under, cash only, tickets good all day, covered by Firenze Card.
Hours: Wed-Mon 9:30-18:00, Tue 9:30-13:00, last entry 30 minutes before closing.
Getting There: The museum is located one block east of the Uffizi on the north bank of the Arno River at Piazza dei Giudici 1.
Information: Tel. 055-265-311, www.museogalileo.it. Excellent English descriptions are posted throughout. Engaging video screens in many rooms illustrate the inventions and scientific principles (with information in English).
Tours: The €5 audioguide is well-produced and offers both a highlights tour as well as dial-up info (with video) on each exhibit. The 1.5-hour English-language guided tour covers the collection plus behind-the-scenes areas, and includes hands-on demonstrations of some of the devices (€50 flat fee for 2-14 people, cash only, doesn’t include museum entry, book at least a week in advance, great for kids, tel. 055-234-3723, groups@museogalileo.it).
Length of This Tour: Allow one hour (or more, especially for those interested in science).
Photography: Permitted without a flash.
Starring: Galileo’s telescopes, experiment models, and fingers.
Nearby Eateries: For restaurants between Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce Church, see here.
The collection is on the first and second floors. Take advantage of the helpful English-speaking docents. They’re available to answer questions about how these scientific gadgets work. In fact, the staff is happy that you’re there to see this museum, and not just lost on your way to the Uffizi.
• Buy your ticket and head up the stairs to the first floor, Room I.
In this room, you immediately get a sense of the variety of devices to be found in the collection: everything from a big wooden quadrant and maps to optical illusions and old science books. These belonged to that trendsetting family, the Medici, who always seemed at the forefront of Europe’s arts and sciences. Many of the objects we’ll see measured the world around us—the height of distant mountains, the length of a man’s arm, the movement of the sun and stars across the sky. In fact, one of the bold first steps in science was to observe nature and measure it. What scientists found is that nature—seemingly ever-changing and chaotic—actually behaves in an orderly way, following rather simple mathematical formulas.
This room has (triangle-shaped) quadrants and (round) astrolabes. In medieval times, sailors used these to help them find their way at sea. They mapped the constellations as a starting point. Next they had to figure out where they stood in relation to those stars.
Quadrants: A quad-rant is one-fourth of a 360-degree circle, or 90 degrees. You’d grab this wedge-shaped object by its curved edge, point it away from you, and sight along the top edge toward, say, a distant tower or star. Then you’d read the scale etched along the curved edge to find how many degrees above the horizon the object was.
The quadrant (quadrante) measured the triangle formed by you, the horizon, and a distant object. Once you knew at least three of the triangle’s six variables (three angles and three sides), you could calculate the others. (That’s trigonometry.) Armed with this knowledge, you could use the quadrant to measure all kinds of things. On land, you could calculate how high or how far away a building was. At sea, you could figure your position relative to the sun and stars.
Astrolabes: Astrolabes—invented by the ancient Greeks and pioneered by medieval Arab sailors—combined a quadrant with a map of the sky (a star chart), allowing you to calculate your position against the stars without doing all of the math. You’d hang the metal disk from your thumb and sight along the central crossbeam, locate a star, then read its altitude above the horizon on the measuring scale etched around the rim.
Next, you’d enter this information by turning a little handle on the astrolabe’s face. This set the wheels-within-wheels into motion, and the constellations would spin across a backdrop of coordinates. You’d keep turning until the astrolabe mirrored the current heavens. With your known coordinates dialed in, the astrolabe calculated the unknowns, and you could read out your position along the rim.
In the center display case, find the celestial globe, the oldest object in the collection (1085 A.D.). Knowing the position of the stars and sun (using the astrolabe and celestial globe) also revealed the current time of day, which was especially useful for Arab traders (i.e., Muslims) in their daily prayers.
• Continue to Room III, dominated by a big globe.
The big globe is an armillary sphere, a model of the universe as conceived by ancient Greeks and medieval Europeans. You’d turn a crank and watch the stars and planets orbit around the earth in the center. This earth-centered view of the universe—which matches our common-sense observations of the night sky—was codified by Ptolemy, a Greek-speaking Egyptian of the second century A.D.
Ptolemy (silent P) summed up Aristotle’s knowledge of the heavens and worked out the mathematics explaining their movements. His math was complex, especially when trying to explain the planets, which occasionally lag behind the stars in their paths across the night sky. (We now know it’s because fast-orbiting earth passes the outer planets in their longer, more time-consuming orbits around the sun.)
Ptolemy’s system dominated Europe for 1,500 years. It worked most of the time and fit well with medieval Christianity’s human-centered theology. But, finally, Nicolaus Copernicus (and Galileo) made the mental leap to a sun-centered system. This simplified the math, explained the movement of planets, and—most importantly—changed earthlings’ conception of themselves forever.
Thanks to Columbus’ voyages, the Europeans’ world suddenly got bigger and rounder. Increasingly, maps began to portray the spherical world on a flat surface.
• Pass through Room IV (with more globes and a map where south is up) and enter...
This room has more quadrants and maps, plus a new navigational feature: clocks. By measuring time accurately, sailors could not only establish their latitude (north-south on the globe), but also their longitude (east-west).
In the 1700s, with overseas trade booming, there was a crying need for an accurate and durable clock to help in navigation. Sighting by the stars told you your latitude but was less certain on whether you were near Florence, Italy (latitude 44), or Portland, Maine (also latitude 44). You needed a way to time earth’s 24-hour rotation, to know exactly where you were on that daily journey—that is, your longitude. Reward money was offered for a good clock that could be taken to sea, and science sprang into action.
The longitude problem was finally solved—and a £20,000 prize won—by John Harrison of England (1693-1776), who developed the “chronometer” (not in this museum), a spring-driven clock that was set in a suspension device, to keep it horizontal. It was accurate within three seconds a day, far better than any clock displayed here.
• Room VI (The Science of Warfare) displays not weapons but surveyors’ tools, crucial for plotting the trajectory of, say, a cannonball. Next up is one of the museum’s highlights.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is known as the father of modern science. His discoveries pioneered many scientific fields, and he was among the first to blend mathematics with hands-on observation of nature to find practical applications. Raised in Pisa, he achieved fame teaching at the University of Padua before working for the Grand Duke of Florence. The museum displays several of his possessions (lens, two telescopes, compass, and thermometer), models illustrating his early experiments, and his fingers, preserved in a jar.
• Immediately to the right, look for the case containing...
Galileo’s Telescopes: Galileo was the first earthling to see the moons of Jupiter. With a homemade telescope, he looked through the lens and saw three moons lined up next to Jupiter. This discovery also irked the Church, which insisted that all heavenly bodies orbited the earth. You could see Jupiter’s moons with your own eyes if you simply looked through the telescope, but few church scholars bothered to do so, content to believe what they’d read in ancient books.
Galileo built these telescopes, based on reports he’d read from Holland. He was the first person to seriously study the heavens with telescopes. Though these only magnified the image about 30 times (“30 power,” which is less than today’s binoculars), he saw Jupiter’s four largest moons, Saturn’s rings, the craters of the moon (which he named “seas”), and blemishes (sunspots) on the supposedly perfect sun.
• In the same case is a...
Pendulum Clock Model: Galileo’s restless mind roamed to other subjects. It’s said that during a church service in Pisa, Galileo looked up to see the cathedral’s chandelier swaying slowly back and forth, like a pendulum. He noticed that a wide-but-fast arc took the same amount of time as a narrow-but-slow arc. “Hmmm. Maybe that regular pendulum motion could be used to time things...”
• The last case on this wall contains a...
Thermoscope: Galileo also invented the thermometer (or thermoscope—similar to the museum’s 19th-century replica), though his glass tube filled with air would later be replaced by thermometers filled with mercury.
• Across the room is a giant model of an...
Inclined Plane: The large wooden ramp figures in one of the most enduring of scientific legends. Legend has it that Galileo dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see whether heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, as the ancient philosopher Aristotle (and most people) believed. In fact, Galileo probably didn’t drop objects from the Leaning Tower, but likely rolled them down a wooden ramp like this reconstructed one.
Rolling balls of different weights down the ramp, he timed them as they rang the bells posted along the way. (The bells are spaced increasingly far apart, but a ball—accelerating as it drops—will ring them at regular intervals.) What Galileo found is that—if you discount air resistance—all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their weight. (It’s the air resistance, not the weight, that makes a feather fall more slowly than a cannonball.)
He also found that falling objects accelerate at a regular rate (9.8 meters per second faster every second), summed up in a mathematical formula (distance is proportional to the time squared).
Galileo pioneered the art of experimentation. He built devices that could simulate nature on a small scale in a controlled laboratory setting, where natural forces could be duplicated and measured. In the following rooms, we’ll see many of the experimental tools and techniques he inspired.
• And last but not least, in the glass case perched on the column at the end of the benches, look for...
Galileo’s Fingers: Galileo is perhaps best known as a martyr for science. He popularized the belief (conceived by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in the early 1500s) that the earth orbits around the sun. At the time, the Catholic Church (and most of Europe) preached an earth-centered universe. At the age of 70, Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition in Rome and forced to kneel and publicly proclaim that the earth did not move around the sun. As he walked away, legend has it, he whispered to his followers, “But it does move!”
A century after his death, Galileo’s followers preserved his finger bone (Dito Medio della Mano Destra di Galileo), displayed on an alabaster pedestal, as a kind of sacred relic in this shrine to science. (This case also holds two other fingers and a tooth that were rediscovered a few years ago.) Galileo’s beliefs eventually triumphed over the Inquisition, and, appropriately, we have his right middle finger raised upward for all those blind to science.
• Room VIII has early glassware and thermometers (which you’ll explore in greater depth in Room XV). Continue on to...
This room has both telescopes (for observing objects far away) and microscopes (to see the world up close).
A telescope is essentially an empty tube with a lens at the far end to gather light, and another lens at the near end to magnify the image. The farther apart the lenses, the greater the magnification, which is why telescopes have increased in size over time. The longest ever built was 160 feet, but the slightest movement would jiggle the image.
Galileo used a “refracting telescope,” made with lenses that bend (refract) light. Later on, scientists started using “reflecting telescopes,” which were often thick-barreled, with the eyepiece sticking out the side. These telescopes use mirrors (not lenses) to bounce light rays back and forth through several lenses, thereby increasing magnification without the long tubes and distortion of refractors.
• Ascend to the second floor and enter Room X.
Look at the big table with all the drawers and jars in the glass case in the center of the room. Back when the same guy who cut your hair removed your appendix, medicine was crude. In the 1700s, there were no anesthetics beyond a bottle of wine, nor was there any knowledge of antiseptics. The best they could do was resort to the healing powers of herbs and plants. Consider what was thought to be therapeutic in the 1700s: cocaine, anise, poisonous plants like belladonna, tea, and ipecac.
The room also displays models detailing the varieties of complications that could arise during childbirth. Not a pretty sight, but crucial to finding ways to save lives.
This room is filled with odd-looking devices used by scientists to instruct and amaze. Chief among them, in the middle of the room, are the turn-the-crank machines dealing with electricity.
Electromagnetism: Lightning, magnets, and static cling mystified humans for millennia. Little did they know that these quite different phenomena are all generated by the same invisible force—electromagnetism.
In the 1700s, scientists began to study, harness, and play with electricity. As a popular party amusement, they devised big static electricity-generating machines. You turned a crank to spin a glass disk, which rubbed against silk cloth and generated static electricity. The electricity could then be stored in a glass Leyden jar (a jar coated with metal and filled with water). A metal rod sticking out of the top of the jar gave off a small charge when touched, enough to create a spark, shock a party guest, or tenderize a turkey (as Ben Franklin attempted one Thanksgiving). But such static generators could never produce enough electricity for practical use.
• In the corner near where you entered, look for a...
Model for Demonstrating Newton’s Mechanics: Isaac Newton (1642-1727) explained all of the universe’s motion (“mechanics”)—from spinning planets to rolling rocks—in a few simple mathematical formulas.
The museum’s collision balls (the big wooden frame with hanging balls), a popular desktop toy in the 1970s, demonstrate Newton’s three famous laws.
1. Inertia: The balls just sit there unless something moves them, and once they’re set in motion, they’ll keep moving the same way until something stops them.
2. Force = Mass × Acceleration: The harder you strike the balls, the more they accelerate (change speeds). Strike with two balls to pack twice the punch.
3. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction: When one ball swings in and strikes the rest, the ball at the other end swings out, then returns and strikes back.
• Rooms XII and XIII have devices formerly used to teach the “new” physics of Newton. In Room XIII is a famous model.
Back in third-century B.C. Greece, Archimedes—the man who gave us the phrase “Eureka!” (“I’ve found it!”)—invented a way to pump water that’s still occasionally used today. It’s a screw in a cylinder. Simply turn the handle and the screw spins, channeling the water up in a spiral path (as seen in the video in Room XII). Dutch windmills powered big Archimedes screws to push water over dikes, reclaiming land from the sea.
This room shows the development of big reflecting telescopes and finer microscopes.
One day, a Dutchman picked something from his teeth, looked at it under his crude microscope, and discovered a mini-universe, crawling with thousands of “very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving” (i.e., bacteria and protozoa). Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) popularized the microscope, finding that fleas have fleas, semen contains sperm, and one-celled creatures are our fellow animals.
Pop into the museum’s ground-floor bookshop, where some impressive clocks are on display.
In an ever-changing universe, what is constant enough to measure the passage of time? The sun and stars passing over every 24 hours work for calendar time, but not for hours, minutes, or seconds. Since the time of the Greeks, man used sundials, or the steady flow of water or sand through an opening, but these were only approximate.
In medieval times, humans invented mechanical clocks that work similar to the classic grandfather clock. The clock is powered by suspended weights that slowly “fall,” producing enough energy to turn a series of cogwheels that methodically move the clock hands around the dial. The whole thing is regulated by a pendulum rocking back and forth, once a second. A clock has three essential components:
1. Power (falling weights).
2. An “escapement” (the cogs that transform the “falling” power into turning power).
3. A regulator (swinging pendulum) that keeps the gears turning evenly.
Later clocks were powered by a metal spring that slowly uncoiled (also used in most watches). The power was regulated by a pendulum—Galileo’s contribution. Unfortunately, a rocking pendulum on a rocking ship wasn’t going to work.
During the so-called Age of Reason (1600s) and Age of Enlightenment (1700s), the clock was the perfect metaphor for the orderly workings of God’s well-crafted universe. So, wondered the philosophers/scientists, would the universe eventually wind down like an old clock? In fact, in every energy exchange (as stated in the second law of thermodynamics), a certain amount of energy is transformed into nonrecyclable heat, meaning a perpetual motion machine is impossible. This principle of entropy (the trend toward dissipation of energy) has led philosophers to ponder the eventual cold, lifeless fate of the universe itself.
Microscopes can be either simple or compound. A simple one is just a single convex lens—what we’d call a magnifying glass. A compound microscope contains two (or more) lenses in a tube, working like a telescope: One lens magnifies the object, and the eyepiece lens magnifies the magnified image. Van Leeuwenhoek opted for a simple microscope (not in this museum), since early compound ones often blurred and colored objects around the edges. His glass bead-size lens could make a flea look 275 times bigger.
Even nature’s most changeable force—the weather—was analyzed by human reason, using thermometers and barometers.
Thermometers: You’ll see many interesting thermometers—spiral ones, tall ones, and skinny ones on distinctive bases. All operate on the basic principle that heat expands things. So, liquid in a closed glass tube will expand and climb upward as the temperature rises.
Galileo’s early thermoscope was not hermetically sealed, so it was too easily affected by changing air pressure. So scientists experimented with various liquids in a vacuum tube—first water, then alcohol. Finally, Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) tried mercury, the densest liquid, which expands evenly. He set his scale to the freezing point of a water/salt/ice mixture (zero degrees) and his own body temperature (96 degrees). With these parameters, water froze at 32 degrees and boiled at 212 degrees. Anders Celsius (1701-1744) used water as the standard, and called the freezing point 0 and the boiling point 100.
Barometers: To make a barometer, take a long, skinny glass tube (like the ones in the wood frames), fill it with liquid mercury, then turn it upside-down and put the open end into a bowlful of more mercury. The column of mercury does not drain out, because the air in the room “pushes back,” pressing down on the surface of the mercury in the bowl.
Changing air pressure signals a shift in the weather. Hot air expands, pressing down harder on the mercury’s surface, thereby causing the mercury column to rise above 30 inches; this indicates the “pushing away” of clouds and points to good, dry weather. Low pressure lets the mercury drop, warning of rain. If you have a barometer at home, it probably has a round dial with a needle (or a digital readout), but it operates on a similar principle.
• In the next room, you’ll find (among magnets, generators, and small machines), a couple of early batteries.
Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) built the first battery in Europe. (Although the museum does not have one of Volta’s batteries, it does have similar devices.) A battery generates electricity from a chemical reaction. Volta (and others) stacked metal disks of zinc and copper between disks of cardboard soaked with salt water. The zinc slowly dissolves, releasing electrons into the liquid. Hook a wire to each end of the battery, and the current flows. When the zinc is gone, your battery is dead.
England’s Michael Faraday (c. 1831) created the first true electric motor, which could generate electricity by moving a magnet through a coil of copper wire. Faraday shocked the world (and occasionally himself), and his invention soon led to the production of electricity on a large scale.
Chemistry: Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was the Galileo of chemistry, introducing sound methodology and transforming the mumbo jumbo of medieval alchemy into hard science. He created the precursor to our modern periodic table of the elements, and used the standardized terminology of suffixes that describe the different forms a single element can take (sulfur, sulf-ide, sulf-ate, sulf-uric, etc.).
The large object-with-lenses nearby was used, I believe, by 18th-century dukes to burn bugs.
• In the case to the left of this primitive bug zapper, look for the metal rod in a wooden box.
Standard Meter: Much of the purpose of science is to use constants to measure an ever-changing universe. For centuries, one of these constants was the meter-long metal rod, established in 1790 as the fundamental unit by which all distances are measured.
The rod is exactly one meter. Or 39.37 inches. Or 1/1,000th of the distance from the Galileo Science Museum to David. Or 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Or, according to the updated definition from 1960, a meter is the length of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red radiation of krypton 86.
Ain’t science wonderful?
• On the way out, Room XVIII is filled with novelty pieces—a barometer hidden in a walking stick, a portable pharmacy kit, and an early air-conditioner (ventilator/fan). Downstairs, you’ll pass through a fun kids’ zone with hands-on exhibits and touchscreens, and (just before the shop) lots of clocks from various historical periods.
