Milner

Large Air Pump, by Richard Saunders, Salisbury Court, London (c.1790–1800).

In a letter to the Revd Thomas Ludlam (1791) Milner stated: ‘I have been a great dabbler in air pumps, and have spent a great deal of money on them. I have now one by me which cost 60 l. and upwards, exclusive of the apparatus’. (quoted in Mary Milner, Life of Isaac Milner (1842), p.70.)

Whether this is the instrument Milner refers to is not certain, but as a Queens’ artefact dating from around the turn of the nineteenth century, it clearly could have been. When he became Queens’ president in 1788 Milner transformed a section of the president’s lodge into a well-equipped workshop complete with air pumps and other scientific equipment.

Air-pump experiments had played an important part in the experimental science of Isaac Newton and his many subsequent followers, both as a means to enquire into particular topics (production of knowledge), and as a demonstration of known facts. The kinds of areas typically explored included experiments into electricity and light, capillarity, sound, life experiments, experiments on air and fluids, magnetism, optics, and studies of specific weights.