Wednesday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m.

The UNIL and EPFL Scientific Instrument Collection: A History of Physics in Lausanne

By Dr. Yohann Guffroy
University of Geneva and EPFL
Venue: Musée d'histoire des sciences (MHS), Geneva

Dr. Yohann Guffroy’s research focuses on the history of knowledge and technology, particularly on the visual representation of technical objects.
The historical scientific instruments jointly preserved by the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), some dating back to the 18th century, have only recently been brought together as a collection.
Indeed, it is only over the past twenty years, following major institutional changes, that the approximately one thousand objects comprising the collection have been “rediscovered” and gradually inventoried, appearing at first as a heterogeneous assemblage rather than a historically constituted whole.
This lecture will detail the process through which these objects were transformed into a collection by Jean-François Loude beginning in 2003, and will present the findings of a study into the long history of these scientific instruments.
To reconstruct the memory of the collection, numerous documents from the University archives have been examined, including correspondence, reports, invoices, inventories, and other records.
Exploring the history of the collection also makes it possible to trace the development of science in Lausanne—particularly physics—a field whose study has so far focused more on intellectual history than on material history.
Collection d’instruments scientifiques UNIL-EPFL