I have recently been playing around on Twitter (yes, I’m behind the trends) and generally get generic messages from friends or family about random thoughts or adventures. Today I received something a bit different though, a tweet that read: “Our blog is now active! Check out our first post…” from  @UTSIC or the Twitter account of the University of Toronto Scientific Instrument Collection.

The University of Toronto Scientific Instrument Collection (UTSIC) is a collection of instruments from various scientific fields that have been assembled at the University of Toronto since the late 1970s. The original intention for the collection was to create a museum, a project which has never been realized. Despite this frustration, a dedicated group of volunteers has continued to work towards preserving, growing, and cataloguing the collection. The first post on the group’s new blog provides a history of the collection (the post was also published in Spontaneous Generations, an online peer-reviewed journal for the history and philosophy of science).

I recently had the opportunity to tour the UTSIC and meet one of the group’s members, Erich Weidenhammer (also one of the co-authors of the UTSIC first blog post). The collection is quite diverse ranging from multiple galvonometers to microscopes to scales used to weigh babies to items that have not yet been identified.

AHP readers should note that UTSIC is separately maintained from the Brass Instrument Collection which is also located at the University of Toronto.