Joshua Nall is Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. His first book is News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910 (forthcoming). Liba Taub is Curator and Director of the the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She received the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize from the History of Science Society and a Pilkington Teaching Prize from the University of Cambridge. Frances Willmoth (1957–2017) was Archivist at Jesus College, Cambridge. She worked on a three-volume edition of John Flamsteed's correspondence.

• Introduction Liba Taub and Joshua Nall; 1. Sacred astronomy? Beyond the stars on a Whipple astrolabe Seb Falk; 2. What were portable astronomical instruments used for in late-medieval England, and how much were they actually carried around? Catherine Eagleton; 3. 'Sundials and other cosmographical instruments': historical categories and historians' categories in the study of mathematical instruments and disciplines Adam Mosley; 4. 'That incomparable instrument maker': the reputation of Henry Sutton Jim Bennett; 5. Specimens of observation: Edward Hobson's Musci Britannici Anne Secord; 6. Ideas embodied in metal: Babbage's engines dismembered and remembered Simon Schaffer; 7. Galvanometers and the many lives of scientific instruments Charlotte Connelly and Hasok Chang; 8. Buying antique scientific instruments at the turn of the twentieth century: a data-driven analysis of Lewis Evans' and Robert Stewart Whipple's collecting habits Tabitha Thomas; 9. Like a Bos: the discovery of fake antique scientific instruments at the Whipple Museum Boris Jardine; 10. Wanted weeds: environmental history in the Whipple Museum Helen Curry; 11. What 'Consul, the Educated Monkey' can teach us about early twentieth-century mathematics, learning, and vaudeville Caitlin Wylie; 12. Robin Hill's cloud camera: meteorological communication, cloud classification Henry Schmidt; 13. Chicken heads and Punnett squares: Reginald Punnett and the role of visualizations in early genetics research at Cambridge, 1900–1930 Matthew Green; 14. Stacks, 'pacs', and user hacks: a handheld history of personal computing Michael F. Mcgovern.

'The Whipple Museum and its associated scholars continue to illuminate how matter and meaning intersect in fourteen fascinating items from the collection, from mosses to mechanical monkeys, computers to cloud cameras. Taken together, these lively essays are an object lesson in how close attention to the material history of science changes how we think about what science is, who does it, and how it changes.' Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science