for my science friends

[swan_tower]

I'm not sure how to phrase this best, but -- at what point in history did we start to develop actual, workable "detection" devices? I'm thinking of things along the lines of a Geiger counter, but it doesn't have to be a radiation detector; just a device to measure anything not visible to the eye. Wikipedia claims Gauss invented an early magnetometer in 1833, but the claim consists of three not terribly informative sentences, and the article on Gauss himself just says he developed a "method" for measuring magnetism, without specifying what it was.

Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I'm trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)

Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?

Comments

[beccastareyes]

I remember William Herschel was the first to discover infrared radiation, by observing that, when splitting sunlight using a prism, the dark area next to the red light would warm a thermometer. Wikipedia suggests that we knew about the photoelectric effect and that methods for turning infrared photons into electricity existed.

You had Maxwell's equations in the 1860s, so you'd have the mathematical abstractions of electric and magnetic fields, and that they work together to make light waves. Before that, scientists knew that an electric current would turn a compass, so you could use a magnetized material as a current detector (and you start to get into the basics of measuring the electronic and magnetic properties of something).

[beccastareyes]

There's also the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which was done right around that time, which was an attempt to measure the properties of the luminiferous ether, the supposed medium in space in which light propagated. The famous experiment itself wasn't done til 1887, but a precursor was done in '81, and the idea shows that 'we can use things we can measure to measure something not visible or tangible, but that we suspect is there' was alive and well.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you for the reminder of that; somebody had mentioned the experiment to me before, and I'd forgotten about it.

[beccastareyes]

No problem.