Solar microscopes of this sort were introduced around 1740 and were still popular in the nineteenth century. Wesleyan University may have acquired this example soon after its founding in 1831. The “Benj. Pike & Son, New York” inscription indicates the firm that sold it, but not necessarily the firm that made it.
Ref: Benjamin Pike, Jr., Pike’s Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue of Optical, Mathematical, and Philosophical Instruments (New York, 1856), vol. 2, pp. 239-244.
Deborah Warner, “Projection Apparatus for Science in Antebellum America,” Rittenhouse 6 (1992): 87-94.
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