Last week I went to visit a very interesting exhibition, unique in many ways. It wasn't about art this time though, as you would expect. The exhibition was called 400 Years of Transylvanian Reformed Colleges and showcased the life of Reformed collages and of the students fortunate to study in these collages. I'm going to write about this in detail at a later date, but today I'd like to show you how a classroom looked like in the 19th - 20th century.
Walking in the museum was like traveling back in time a few centuries, literally. We're in 2024 and we live in a digital era, so seeing a classroom like this really makes you think about how those students spent their school days and makes you appreciate you live now and not back then.
This classroom obviously is new, a reproduction, but the props are real, dating back to ... you'll see when.
School desks did not have glass top back then, the glass top is just to allow you to see what they had there, or where they were storing their things. What so you see there is old books, which is not a surprise, but there's a pencil holder, or should I say a pen holder, as there were no pencils back then. Now imagine yourself carrying your glass of ink to school each day and dipping you pen into it to write a word or two, then repeat. How would you feel?
This is there things get interesting. What do you see here? Most of the kids would say a tablet, which is not wrong, it's just not the tablet you would think of in 2024. That's a blackboard that was used with schist, not chalk as they didn't have chalk at that time. How did it work? You wrote on it, wiped it clean, when it was full, then wrote on it again. You had to carry this board to school every day and if you broke it, your parents most likely made you remember to take better care of your things, using a stick. Those were different times.
The pen you see there is made of plastic, which is a replica or a later edition as back then plastic did not exist. Plastic came with the industrialization. There you can see the ink bottle, without ink, or course and a few pen ends as well, which were easy to break, especially for newbies, till they got used to writing with these pens.
What you see here, on the left is a zoology book, about reptiles and fish, issued in 1846. The other is a chemistry book from 1868. I can assure you, these were not as fun as the school books kids have these days, where there still are books as most school are using digital copies.
A schoolbook of mathematics issued in 1850 in Budapest, a book for grades and another board, on which you can clearly see the lines.
If you thought the board and the pen is interesting, you were not wrong, they are. But check this out. These are prop items from the 19th and 20th century you may have never seen.
Mirror used in wave optics experiments.
This is a tellurion. What's a tellurion? I had to look it up to be honest as I've never heard of it, let alone see one.
A tellurion (also spelled tellurian, tellurium, and yet another name is loxocosm), is a clock, typically of French or Swiss origin, surmounted by a mechanism that depicts how day, night, and the seasons are caused by the rotation and orientation of Earth on its axis and its orbit around the Sun. The clock normally also displays the age of the Moon and the four-year (perpetual) calendar.
It is related to the orrery, which illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System in a heliocentric model.
The word tellurion derives from the Latin tellus, meaning "earth". source
These are all props from a physics lab from the 19th century.
This is the Savart's wheel.
The Savart wheel is an acoustical device named after the French physicist Félix Savart (1791–1841), which was originally conceived and developed by the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703).
A card held to the edge of a spinning toothed wheel will produce a tone whose pitch varies with the speed of the wheel. A mechanism of this sort, made using brass wheels, allowed Hooke to produce sound waves of a known frequency, and to demonstrate to the Royal Society in 1681 how pitch relates to frequency. For practical purposes Hooke's device was soon supplanted by the invention of the tuning fork. source
Trust me, I was looking at these props and reading the label to know what they are and even then I had no clue what they do or what they were used for. Good thing we have search engines today, Wikipedia and a lot of other useful sources to use to educate ourselves. Then I got to this piece, which looked like a human eye. Well, kinda. So I had a look to see what it was and guess what? It is a human eye model :) Or at least how they saw the human eye in the 19th century as today you would get a 100 times detailed prop about the human eye.
Can you guess what this is? It's a spring balance. I've seen quite a few types of balances in my life, but never one like this. It's quite interesting. Too bad there was no information about how much this could weight.
A spring scale, spring balance or newton meter is a type of mechanical force gauge or weighing scale. It consists of a spring fixed at one end with a hook to attach an object at the other. It works in accordance with Hooke's Law, which states that the force needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance scales linearly with respect to that distance. Therefore, the scale markings on the spring balance are equally spaced. source
Looking at these props and tools used by our ancestors, make you think where and how science started and where we are now. It's a true miracle we have these props today and a blessing as well as we can learn about those times and appreciate their effort of experimenting and facing the hardship that came with coming up with new theories. You know that you could face the death penalty for stating something others didn't want to believe, right? Giordano Bruno is one example.
Stay tuned as there is more to come.
Have you ever seen such props, objects? I hope so :)
If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides:
