Microscope Museum

Collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments

 

    

Microscope 103 (C. Baker; Advanced Student’s microscope; c. 1900)

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The business of Baker was founded in London in about 1765, Charles Baker, who was born in 1820, giving his name to the company from about 1851. When Charles Baker died in 1894 the firm continued under the same name but run by the Curties family until it became, in 1936, Charles Baker & Co. and subsequently, sometime in the 1940s, C. Baker Ltd. The firm’s address mostly given as 244 High Holborn, London (but sometimes 243 and 245, sometimes in combination). The firm produced optical and surgical instruments. In 1963, Vickers acquired the C Baker Ltd microscope factory and a new company called Vickers Instruments was formed. Microscope 103 is signed with ‘Baker, High Holborn, London’, being dated to c. 1900. The instrument is known as the Baker’s Advanced Student’s microscope and includes a Mayall Removable Mechanical Stage (Figure 1). The microscope came with its original wooden box.

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Figure 1. Baker’s Advanced Student’s Microscope (left) and Mayall Removable Mechanical Stage (right) as engraved in the 1898’s book ‘The Microscope. Its History, Construction, and Application’, 15th edition, by Jabez Hogg.

 

References

Charles Baker (https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Charles_Baker), last accessed on 12.08.2020

 

LAST EDITED: 22.08.2020