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Experiment kits and instruction manuals around 1900 - continued...

These kits were to promote interest in the natural sciences by enabling the students to discover the most important phenomena and laws themselves using only the simplest of tests and devices. While it was still common practice at Meiser & Mertig to offer finished instruments such as the polarization device designed by Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg (Meiser & Mertig 1897b, 19), the optics kit and its components, such as lenses etc. enabled students to construct such devices themselves. Although these experiment kits were not cheap – in comparison with other toys, they were sometimes disproportionately expensive – they were hailed as innovative teaching aids. In 1937, the Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung won the gold medal at the World's Fair in Paris for their achievement.

When producing later kits, the Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung made a special effort to indicate that these kits were geared more towards a target audience interested in advancement and technology and that the kits offered learning opportunities which would lead their users to a career in a discipline which promised success. It his literary autobiographical description of the creation of the model steam engine in the Technikus experiment kit, Wilhelm Fröhlich describes two crafty young farm boys ("Once upon a time..."), one of whom reportedly went on to become a successful machine manufacturer and moved to Africa and the other, the real inventor of the two, never forgot "the excitement with which he had tinkered as a boy, how often tests would only succeed after several failures because nobody had given him the instructions" (NL Wilhelm Fröhlich HS 1978-43/10). Now, experiment kits provided these instructions and, as a result, – as I hope to have shown in this essay - specific experimental spaces in which one experimented or could experiment around 1900.

Reference: Beek, Viola van. 2009. Experimental spaces outside the laboratory - Experiment kits and instruction manuals around 1900. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=art73&page=p0009