Microscope Museum

Collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments

 

    

Microscope 88 (C Collins; student microscope; c. 1865)

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Charles Collins produced microscopes and other optical apparatus from 1863 until the early 1900s. The census of spring, 1861, listed the 23-year-old Charles as an optician, living with his parents in Croydon, Surrey. Collins appears to have opened his independent retail shop and factory in 1863 in downtown London, located at 77 Great Titchfield Street, and joined the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, and the Royal Microscopical Society in 1866. Hogg’s sixth edition of The Microscope, in 1867, featured several of Charles Collins’s instruments, including a binocular student’s microscope and the Bockett lamp. Later, monocular versions of the student’s microscope were also manufactured. At the beginning of 1871, Charles moved his retail shop to Great Portland Street, about a two-minute walk from his former store. Charles Collins’s business shows signs of decline by the early 1890s. The 1911 census recorded Charles Collins as being an “optician, sight testing, spectacles”, suggesting that his business at that time had primarily been reduced to fitting eyeglasses. Microscope 88 is an earlier monocular version of the Collins’s student microscope and can be dated to c. 1865. The instrument is signed ‘C. Collins, Optician, 77 Gt Titchfield St, London’. The eyepiece and mirror are both missing from this instrument.

References

Charles Collins, senior, 1837 – ca. 1915 (http://microscopist.net/CollinsCsr.html), last accessed on 14.08.2020

 

LAST EDITED: 15.08.2020