Auxiliaries of Instrument-making
Across the centuries, instruments have been made by men and women who were not, by trade or avocation, full-time or professional instrument-makers. Carpenters, lock-smiths, armourers, blacksmiths, whitesmiths, pewterers, clock- and watch-makers, to name only a few, have all perpetrated instruments and many of them are listed here. In the later eighteenth to twentieth centuries, definition becomes clearer, but even in the industrialised trades of the nineteenth century, some devices with a scientific application were made by specialists in other fields who never entered the main-stream of instrument-making. A case in point is the manufacturer of vertical steam-engines and apparatus for the production of carbonised liquids (including soda-water fountains), K. Hermann Lachappelle. Because of their skills with liquids, the company became makers of the ‘Filtre Chambelland’, introduced in the circle of Pasteur in the early 1880s. It was however ancillary to their main output and although the company is listed here it has not been thought necessary to attempt a full biographical entry.