Images relating to Gilbert’s Life and work

Title pages of De Magnete. Left is the original edition, printed in London, 1600, by the leading printer Peter Short. Right is the first of at least two “pirate” editions, printed in Stettin (modern Gdansk, Poland) in 1628.

Diagram from De Magnete of Gilbert’s exemplary experiment. He used spherical loadstone and small iron rods to model the behaviour of compass needles on the Earth’s surface, and concluded that the Earth itself was a magnetic sphere with north and south poles.

Pages from the controversial Book VI of De Magnete, where Gilbert argued that his experiments confirmed the daily rotation of the Earth. The top of p.222 asserts that planets revolve around the Sun, and that the Earth also has its circular motion. In some copies Book VI has been censored.

De Magnete, Book 5, on the new phenomenon of magnetic inclination. Both the instrument (an “inclinometer”) and the first chapter shown here were almost certainly not the work of Gilbert but his colleague

Edward Wright.

Magnetic experiments have provided “fascinating and instructive fun” since the late sixteenth century. Alfred Carleton Gilbert, the great U.S. maker of scientific toys, traced his ancestry back to the author of De

Magnete.

Title page of the first printed edition of Gilbert’s De Mundo, printed in Amsterdam in 1651.

The notorious diagram in Gilbert’s De Mundo of an infinite universe. Is there a centre? Is it the Sun or the Earth? Does the Earth orbit the

Sun? Gilbert never gave an explicit answer to the last question.

Gilbert was the first person we know of to make a map of the moon. This image, from the 1651 edition of De Mundo is quite similar to the

manuscript. The reasons why Gilbert made the map have recently been explained. See S.Pumfrey, “The Selenography of William Gilbert.”

Journal for the History of Astronomy, 42 (2011): 193-203

No original portrait of Gilbert has survived. The images we have come from an eighteenth-century copy. Gilbert wears the clothing of a well-

to-do Elizabethan gentleman. The globe upon which his right hand rests signifies his reputation as an investigator of the nature of the

Earth. The colours are speculative.

The cover picture of Latitude is a detail from ‘Dr William Gilbert Showing His Experiment on electricity to Queen Elizabeth I and Her Court’, by

Arthur Ackland Hunt (fl. 1863-1913). It is fanciful and inaccurate!

Tymperley’s, the 15th-century house in Colchester that belonged to Gilbert. He owned several houses and estates, including Wingfield House in the City of London, which was destroyed in the “Great Fire” of 1666. Now a clock museum, Colchester City Council plan to close and sell it.

The End.

Monument to William Gilbert erected in Holy Trinity Church, Colchester by

two of his brothers.