With the “spatial turn” (Livingstone/Withers), scholars are examining local contexts and the networks linking scientists’ communities. We study the circulation of texts, scientists, scientific knowledge, and specimens or the raw materials used to produce (for example) drugs or armaments. We know less about objects underpinning scientific practice. There are exceptions: Lawrence Dritsas’ “technologies of expedition,” Jennifer Tucker, Marta Braun on photography.
What of the sourcing and circulation of objects used in everyday bench work? Some (notebooks) could be found widely. Others (microscopes) were crafted in metropolitan centers and traveled across the globe.
Canada balsam was a staple of every microscopist’s cabinet, as shown in Wood’s popular Common Objects of the Microscope – yet could be harvested in just one region. A resin from the bark of the balsam fir, Canada balsam acted as pinhole “penny” lens, fixative, or clarifying agent, enabling and enhancing microscopic vision from street to laboratory. It’s discussed by broadsides and by Buckland (writing for Dickens). But it could only be extracted from a remote region in summer, in labor-intensive work usually conducted by indigenous peoples. A unique element of North-woods culture, a product of the extraction economy, Canada balsam was a “common object,” not easy to use, with rare and valuable qualities.
Canada balsam reminds us: microscope stories don't always proceed from metropole outward to province or colony. What story did it offer? The same as the rest of Victorian microscopy: Painstaking labor, the likelihood of error, perhaps a transcendent reward.
