Microscope

Description:

Compound binocular with interocular adjustment, coarse and fine focus, trunnion, triple nosepiece, circular mechanical stage, sub-stage diaphragm, sub-stage mirror, and wooden box with extra lenses. The inscription on the curved base reads “HENRY CROUCH / LONDON / 1209.”

Henry Crouch and his brother William were in business in London by 1864, offering relatively inexpensive microscopes, and noting that they were “From Smith, Beck & Beck.” Henry Crouch was working on his own by 1869. James W. Queen & Co., of Philadelphia, was selling Crouch microscopes by 1870. Crouch spent several months in the United States in 1876, displaying his wares at the Centennial Exhibition, and meeting American microscopists.

Richard Halsted Ward, physician and professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, showed an instrument of this sort at an American microscope meeting in 1869. James Milton Flint—a surgeon with the U.S. Navy who had been detailed to the United States National Museum in 1881, to take care of its newly established Section of Materia Medica—showed another at an exhibition in 1891.

Ref: “Price List of Microscopes Manufactured by Henry Crouch, of London,” American Journal of Microscopy 2 (1877).

“Report on the Microscopes and Microscopical Apparatus, Exhibited at the Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, At Salem, Mass., August, 1869,” Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 18 (1869): 303-306, on 306.

James M. Flint, “Apparatus for the Exhibition of Microscopic Objects,” Proceedings of the American Society of Microscopists 13 (1891): 54-58.