Microscope T-Shirt

These days, scientific apparatus is either a mass-produced widget you buy out of a catalogue or a piece of gismology you slap together out of whatever is lying around, hoping it offers up data before killing/maiming/sterilising you and your laboratory helpmates. It was not always so. Return with us to a magical time, a time when science turned to local artisans for help. The year is 1650. A bell rings above the door of Christopher Cocke's apothecary as a stranger shoulders his way into the busy shop from the grey London winter. Cocke is a chemist by trade, but also a maker of things optical: spectacles, looking glasses, those things you shake and it snows inside (presumably). The stranger stamps his feet on the worn floorboards, leaving an outline of his galoshes in a parcel of slush and melting snow. He presses a handkerchief to his mouth as he undoes the buttons of his ulster. Cocke emerges from the back room wiping sealing wax from his hands on a greasy rag. 'Alp you, guvnor?. His enquiry is met with silence. The stranger is surveying the wares arrayed upon the shelves like Odysseus squinting at the horizon, the unseen worlds beyond already taking form in his keen mind. He lowers the handkerchief and Cocke immediately recognises him from the portrait hanging in the Royal Society. It is Robert Hooke! Physicist. Engineer. Mathematician. Biologist. Hooke grasps Cocke's lapel between thumb and forefinger and and leads him aside where they can talk in private, away from the prying ears of the other customers. It is then and there he relates his plans for what will become the Micrographia, Hooke's great survey of the microscopic world. He is in need of a ship... Replica drawing of a 17th century microscope, similar to the one used by Robert Hooke in preparing the Micrographia. Image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. Customisable.