Professor Gerard Turner

Peering through a accumulative bottle or camera viewfinder, he conducted assiduous studies of old instruments , generally managing to authorize the antecedent of a accurate bearding actual section — a exhaustion pump, perhaps, or an astrolabe. He took a accurate contentment in the abstraction of accurate toys.

His access to his accountable was apparent by what one abreast declared as “a admixture of burdensome archaeological analysis accumulated with a Sherlock Holmesian analysis”. Partly because he pooh-poohed careless “connoisseurs” and the bottomless assessment of alleged “experts”, Turner’s access on added advisers in the acreage was unequalled.

Over the years, his acreage of absorption broadcast from the beginning apparatuses of the 18th aeon to instruments of the Renaissance. He was the aboriginal to analyze a amount of assumption astrolabes as basic from the branch of the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator, all of whose instruments had been accepted lost. Indeed, one of Turner’s quirks was to accredit to his namesake Mercator in memos and emails, which he would blithely assurance as Gerardus Secundus or even Gerard der Zweiter.

The son of an auctioneer, Gerard L’Estrange Turner was built-in on January 22 1926 at Rugby. From Churcher’s College, Petersfield, he went to London University, demography a amount in Physics in 1949.

He abutting the analysis class of the General Electric Company , specialising in crystallography, a accountable in which he becoming a Master’s in 1959. A spell as a researcher with Philco in Philadelphia did not endure long, and in 1963 he was arrive to accompany the agents of the Building for the History of Science in Oxford.

His arrangement apparent not alone the alpha of a additional career but aswell a constant affection for celebrated accurate instruments. In 1966 he produced his aboriginal notable publication, a cardboard on the adorning applique on 16th- and 17th-century microscopes, of which the building bedevilled an unrivalled collection.

Turner’s analysis into the museum’s accumulating of optical instruments accustomed him as an ascendancy in a ahead alone field. His investigations were wide-ranging, demography him to collections all over the world. Wherever he went, it was noted, he seemed able to seek out food of his favourite Oxford marmalade and smoked eel.

For the dining club he founded for adolescent instrumentalists in the 1980s, however, Turner advancing an abiding card of amber Windsor soup, and steak and branch pudding or Welsh rarebit. The club met biannually at the bounce and autumn equinoxes.

In 1988, afterwards 25 years at Oxford, Turner was appointed visiting assistant in the History of Accurate Instruments at Imperial College, London, area he aswell formed as chief investigator.

He was awarded doctorates by the University of London (1982) and Oxford University (1996). He was abnormally secretary, admiral and archivist of the Royal Microscopical Society, and wrote the archive of its apparatus accumulating in 1989 as able-bodied as a abbreviate history of the society, both in time for its 150th anniversary.

His added offices included the admiral of the British Association for the History of Science, and he was the founding administrator and admiral of the Accurate Apparatus Society.

The columnist of added than a dozen books, including Collecting Microscopes (1981), and The Great Age of the Microscope (1989), Turner spent 15 years accumulation The Directory of British Accurate Apparatus Makers 1550-1851 (1995). He aswell edited four added books, and appear added than 120 papers.

Turner’s address was sometimes peppery, and he alone abounding avant-garde ethics and fashions. Although aberrant in old age, as a adolescent man he had been a absonant rugby enthusiast, and deployed a acerbic faculty of humour, abnormally in bogus one-liners to call humans who activated his patience.