DOI: 10.22281/2413-9912-2021-05-03-118-128

THE «ALTERNATIVE» MEANS OF USAGE
OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS IN RUSSIA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

The 18th century was marked by the appearance of a great number of unusual objects in Russia. Besides military ships, wardrobes and beds, wigs and Holland-fashioned suites they were all kinds of scientific instruments – compasses, astrolabes, sundials, clocks, bisecting dividers, electrostatic machines etс. They were visible and tangible signs of western culture, processes of Russian modernization and westernization. And besides the obvious for us today means of usage they had some other ones. Many instruments were multi-faceted. As a rule they all were rear and expensive things, hand-made by individual order in just few or even the only exemplar. Not everyone could use them. So the instruments demonstrated the high level of education and the high social status of the possessor. The instruments were used for entertainment both at the court and for general public. This kind of court activities was an important tool of attracting attention and state investments to the scientific researches. Clocks, sundials and telescopes played diplomatic role as gifts both on the level of transnational communication and on the local one (the establishment of good relations between arriving expeditions and local authorities). At last local peasants preserved the strange objects possessed by alien-dressed men as a super-modern weapon of pillage.

Keywords: westernization, clocks, sundials, astrolabes, multi-faceted devices, social status pointer, show-business, enlightenment, diplomacy.

Museum for anthropology and ethnography RAS (Russia)

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