The Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers is one of the 108 Livery Companies of the City of London. The Company promotes the craft of scientific instrument-making, the exchange of ideas and information between members and guests, and science generally by offering scholarships to science students.
The organisation was originally formed in 1956 and the City granted it livery status in 1964. It ranks 84th in the order of precedence for the Livery Companies.
Its motto is Sine Nobis Scientia Languet, translated from Latin as Science Languishes Without Us.
The Company's livery hall, the Scientific Instrument Makers' Hall, is located just outside the City, on Montague Close, by the southern end of London Bridge, in the borough of Southwark.
Famous quotes containing the words company, scientific, instrument and/or makers:
“I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock- scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has won for it general assent and admiration.... But the examination can be only carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same as to know it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)