CHSI History

(1898 - 1993)

Scholar, Author,
Avid Collector,
Sine qua non for the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

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David Pingree Wheatland — known affectionately to many as Mr. Wheatland — began amassing the nucleus of objects that were to become the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the 1920s.  After graduating from Harvard College in 1922 with a Bachelor of Science degree, he became involved in his family's lumber business in Maine.  Though successful in business, he remained unfulfilled in this work, and Mr. Wheatland returned to Harvard in 1928 to work in the Physics Department, first as a technical assistant to Professor Leon Chaffee, then as Department Secretary, and in 1940, as the Assistant Director of the Cruft  Research Laboratory of Physics.  

Mr. Wheatland’s duties in the Physics Department led to numerous encounters with obsolete instrumentation often discarded in stairwells and attics of the science buildings on campus.  A zealous collector of rare books on electricity and magnetism, Mr. Wheatland recognized what these castoff instruments were from the marvelous engravings in his old books. He understood that these objects represented an important part of local scientific heritage, but he feared that they were in physical danger due to neglect as well as the propensity of faculty and students to cannibalize them for spare parts.  Since the Physics Department did not then see any value in the instruments, Mr. Wheatland took them into his office for safe-keeping. Larger items, like the Pope orrery, were stored in the basement of the Music Building.  

When his small office became filled to overflowing with "foundlings," Mr. Wheatland sought a new space for the assemblage. He was assisted in this effort by Paul H. Buck, the Provost of Harvard College, I. Bernard Cohen, then an Assistant Professor of the History of Science, and William A. Jackson, the founding curator of Houghton Library, and Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian.  The group gathered together an introductory exhibition of the collection in February 1949, and the following year, the Provost found space in the basement of the Semitic Museum to serve as the home of the now officially-recognized Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.  Mr. Wheatland was appointed curator, and generously agreed to work for $1 per year.  He held this post until 1964, when he became honorary curator.   

Mr. Wheatland was tireless in watching out for wayward parts of Harvard’s scientific heritage.  On a visit to the university’s photographer, he noticed a “nice little brass bubble level” in his photo lab.  The photographer confessed that he had picked it up somewhere in the physics labs, and let Mr. Wheatland have it.  Over time he recognized that this was part of a surveyor’s level by Benjamin Martin of London.  He found the magnetic compass with arms in a case in the Jefferson Laboratory, the telescope that clamped to the arms in a cabinet of teaching apparatus for Physics B, and the tripod of wood and a brass cap with fittings to set and level the compass in a pile of discarded parts in the attic.  This significant brass instrument (Inv. Number: 0068a) had arrived at Harvard in 1765. 

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