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Auction houses regularly make headlines when they sell high art at astronomical
prices. But now, scientific instruments are also jostling for the limelight.
Forget the ugly grey machines and functional glassware found in modern laboratories.
Many of the older pieces are highly aesthetic, harking back to an age when
an understanding of science was essential to every cultured and educated
person. Old surveying instruments, globes and telescopes are beautiful to
look at and handle. Even early typewriters, cameras and telephones have
an appeal beyond the purely technical.

This is a relatively new market. Until a decade or so ago, scientific
instruments were sold alongside clocks. Now they warrant their own department.
The surge in interest owes much to the efforts of Jon Baddeley, director
of collectables at Sotheby’s and Jeremy Collins, head of Christie’s scientific
instruments department which he founded in 1984. With their enthusiasm
and a conviction about the historical importance of many of the scientific
pieces they handle, Baddeley and Collins created a market which boomed in
the mid-1980s. Now, however, things are ‘going through a period of readjustment’
as Collins puts it. Baddeley feels the fledgling market is underappreciated
and worth investing in. ‘Things are very inexpensive for what they are,’
he says. ‘You can get an interesting and important microscope for £5000,
which is relatively low compared to the millions paid for important art.
I think a lot of people don’t understand scientific instruments and so they
do not want to collect them.’

Individual lots usually go for anything between £100 and £50
000. Christie’s is London’s most active auction house for scientific instruments,
holding around half-a-dozen sales each year. Its three ‘secondary’ sales
include tools, technical instruments and items that will fetch lower prices
than the ‘fine instruments’ in its other sales. Christie’s expects to gross
£500 000 this year. Sotheby’s will probably take twice this amount
through its four annual sales. Bonhams, with three scientific instrument
sales this year, should total around £180 000.

‘We sell anything from astrolabes to zoological,’ says George Glastris,
a specialist in Christie’s scientific instruments department. Telescopes,
microscopes and surveying instruments provide the regular income, but the
market, like any other, is subject to the vagaries of fashion. Since Bonhams
sold some dinosaur eggs for £50 600 during the Jurassic Park frenzy
they have been turning up regularly for sale. Unfortunately, many turn out
to be more rock than egg. Stuffed animals and birds, on the other hand,
are definitely out. Strict rules governing their sale makes this a grey
area that the auction houses would rather avoid. Bonhams was stung in 1988
when it was fined for selling a stuffed golden eagle without a certificate
from the Department of the Environment to show it had died lawfully.

Bizarre objects are sold at the discretion of department specialists.
Last year Christie’s got £900 for a 100-year-old ham, and Collins
has a 70-million-year-old fossilised tortoise. ‘It’s a jolly nice thing,’
he says, ‘although there isn’t a huge market for fossilised tortoises.’
Baddeley mentions a 1905 ‘teasmade’ as one of the odder pieces he has handled.
But the Victorian taste for freak shows provides a regular source of unsavoury
objects, he adds. ‘We do get offered horrific things like waxworks and two-headed
lambs. The French like that sort of thing so I tell them to go to Paris
to sell them.’

The medical world produces its fair share of objects for those with
a ghoulish disposition – from mouth clamps to historic instruments used
by gynaecologists and brain surgeons. ‘We also get a few sets of false teeth
made from real teeth set in ivory gums,’ Baddeley adds. ‘In Napoleonic times
they used to go onto battlefields after the battle and remove teeth from
corpses for the purpose.’

Medical instruments of all sorts are the best sellers at the moment.
Glastris describes the market as ‘very, very buoyant’. ‘Professionals such
as physicians and dentists have caught on to it,’ he explains. ‘It’s a sort
of ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have an amputation saw in my room in Harley Street’
thing. And generally pieces are not all that expensive for what they are
. . . and they’re very visual in a gory sort of way.’

This summer Christie’s held its first sale of purely medical instruments
and pharmaceutical objects, which brought in a total of £134 871.
The star lot, which set a new world record for a surgical instrument, was
a 19th-century chain saw used for amputations. Made of steel and ivory by
Heine of Wurzburg, it was never mass-produced. The sale catalogue records
somewhat ominously that it went ‘too far, too fast’. It was bought by the
Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds, and is now on display at St James’s University
Hospital in the city, ready to terrify a new generation of patients.

In the current recession, prices for classic 16th-century scientific
objects have been hardest hit. In the late 1980s these were the pieces that
attracted the big spenders. During the boom period, Christie’s sold a late
16th-century pocket sundial for £105 000 and an 18th-century chest
microscope for more than £13 000. The record for Christie’s scientific
instruments section was set in 1988 at £385 000 by a Flemish gilt
brass planispheric astrolabe – a mechanical computer for astronomy – made
in 1559. ‘The most expensive things tend to be Renaissance,’ notes Baddeley.
‘They have the combination of great craftsmen working in mid-Europe and
scientific and historic value.’ Sotheby’s pride was a compendium of astronomical
instruments by Erasmus Habermel from Prague, dating from 1600. They sold
in 1987 for £200 000.

At Bonhams the record is held by a terrestrial globe, made by John and
William Cary, well known 18th-century globe makers. Worth some £4000,
according to the sale catalogue, the globe sold last June for £13
800. This sort of price hike is not uncommon in auction rooms. It was the
result of competitive bidding between two serious bidders – the winner
already owned a celestial globe matching the terrestrial one on sale. A
similarly fierce battle resulted in a closing bid of £7.7 million
for an early 19th-century German calculator auctioned at Christie’s in May.
Its estimated value in the catalogue was just £20 000.

What price the world?

These examples illustrate how difficult it can be to predict what price
a lot will realise. The skill of an auction house specialist is to maximise
the selling price by creating interest among potential buyers. Sometimes
this means selling an object abroad or through a different department. In
1992, for example, two Murad III globes made during the Renaissance for
a Turkish sultan, were sold for £1 023 000 in a Turkish sale at
Chris-tie’s. It is unlikely that this price would have been realised in
a scientific sale.

Such prices are major league but, as Glastris points out, you needn’t
be a professional dealer or have pots of money to get involved in the scientific
instruments market. ‘Many of our finest pieces have been found in the proverbial
little old lady’s attic,’ says Glastris, recounting a recent example where
a rare microscope was found in a house in North Wales by a colleague visiting
an elderly woman to evaluate her paintings. ‘My best pieces,’ he adds, ‘have
come in over the counter or through a photo in a letter saying ‘Is this
worth anything?’ ‘

Likewise, scientific instrument auctions are attended by a mixture of
people from dealers and museum representatives to private collectors and
enthusiasts. ‘It can be an addiction,’ says one collector of early measuring
instruments, who bought his first piece 25 years ago. Alexander Crum Ewing,
head of the collectors department at Bonhams, describes the collectors as
‘all very nice’ but also distinctly ‘odd’. If this doesn’t put you off,
Glastris recommends new collectors to start with the secondary sales rather
than the fine instrument ones. There buyers can get a taste for what is
on offer without breaking the bank.

Few items are more recent than the turn of the century. The only encroachment
of modernity into the auction rooms are the video screens, telephones and
faxes connecting distant bidders with the sale. But if you are attending
your first sale and want to retain your credibility – and your money –
take heed of a passing auctioneer’s comment: ‘You can always tell the newcomers.
They’re the ones waving their arms at the video screen.’

Jane Seymour is a freelance journalist.