The Oval Room
The Oval Rooms is the oldest part of Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem (Holland), recognized as the oldest museum in the Netherlands and one of the oldest in the world. Funded posthumously by a wealthy Haarlem merchant Pieter Teyler, a Mennonite descended from Scottish immigrants, it houses a variety of artifacts that fascinated people of the 18th and 19th century Europe, such as fossils, minerals and scientific instruments used by many of world’s best know scientists and inventors of the time. Among the latter, it displays the orginal telescope used by William (orig. Wilhelm) Herschel to track a mysterious celestial body that later became known as planet Uranus (the telescope is seen in this photo, way at the back of the room, just to the left of the Teylers logo). My docent told an anecdote (veracity of which I cannot confirm) about Herschel. In order not to lose sight of the new object and to prove that it was not some random comet crossing the planetary plane, Herschel stayed by his telescope for several weeks straight, night and day. During this time his sister Caroline (herself an astronomer) brought him food and, I imagine, carried away the byproducts of William’s digestion (this was not mentioned by the docent). I thought to myself: How ironic that Herschel, in the process of discovering Uranus, became so intimately acquainted with his… I briefly turned away from the docent, cupping a giggle and a grin in the palm of my right hand.
The Oval Room
The Oval Rooms is the oldest part of Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem (Holland), recognized as the oldest museum in the Netherlands and one of the oldest in the world. Funded posthumously by a wealthy Haarlem merchant Pieter Teyler, a Mennonite descended from Scottish immigrants, it houses a variety of artifacts that fascinated people of the 18th and 19th century Europe, such as fossils, minerals and scientific instruments used by many of world’s best know scientists and inventors of the time. Among the latter, it displays the orginal telescope used by William (orig. Wilhelm) Herschel to track a mysterious celestial body that later became known as planet Uranus (the telescope is seen in this photo, way at the back of the room, just to the left of the Teylers logo). My docent told an anecdote (veracity of which I cannot confirm) about Herschel. In order not to lose sight of the new object and to prove that it was not some random comet crossing the planetary plane, Herschel stayed by his telescope for several weeks straight, night and day. During this time his sister Caroline (herself an astronomer) brought him food and, I imagine, carried away the byproducts of William’s digestion (this was not mentioned by the docent). I thought to myself: How ironic that Herschel, in the process of discovering Uranus, became so intimately acquainted with his… I briefly turned away from the docent, cupping a giggle and a grin in the palm of my right hand.