Christiaan Huygens and his Inventions
Description
Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) is best known in the Netherlands as the inventor of the pendulum clock. But that is certainly not the whole story. This child prodigy of wealthy parents made it to Europe's greatest scholar in the time period between Galilei and Newton. Even in his own time, his father Constantine was a famous poet and a senior diplomat in the service of the Orange family. He gave his five children, including Christiaan, a thorough education from private tutors in the arts and sciences. Christiaan thus learned Latin, Greek, French and English, became proficient in drawing and music, but above all proved exceptionally gifted in mathematics. His thinking and calculations provided ground-breaking insights that were indispensable for the development of our classical physics.
Huygens was not only a man of theory, however. In his youth, he already tinkered together various devices. In the lecture, Hans Hooijmaijers will paint a picture of Christiaan Huygens and discuss his scientific work and his inventions.
Two points of interest:
- the maximum number of participants is 50 (fifty), due to building-technical considerations.
- the building is difficult to access for people with motor disabilities.
Speaker(s)
Hans Hooijmaijers is deputy director and Head of Collections of the Leiden Museum Boerhaave - the Rijksmuseum for the History of Natural Sciences and Medicine. He studied physics in Nijmegen and completed it in 1990. He then worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institut für Stromungsforschung in Göttingen and at the department of physical chemistry at the University of Groningen.
After teaching physics for several years, he started working as a curator at Museum Boerhaave in 1999. There, he was responsible for the astronomy and physics collections with special interest in Christiaan Huygens, the 18th-century Leiden Physics Cabinet and the history of Dutch astronomy.
He was responsible for exhibitions on sports and science, weather, light, food, clocks, telescopes and a four-site exhibition on Christiaan Huygens in honour of the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.
Hans Hooijmaijers wrote several articles and books on collection items at Museum Boerhaave, including the clocks, planetariums, telescopes and navigation instruments.
Location
Westeinde 2-A,2275 AD Voorburg
Organiser
History of Technology
Histechnica
Name and contact details for information
Further information at dr.ir. Paul van Woerkom (tel. 070 - 3070275 in the evening) or via the e-mail address below