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:
“Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“If a man is a good lawyer, a good physician, a good engineer ... he may be a fool in every other capacity. But no deficiency or mistake of judgment is forgiven to a woman ... and should she fail anywhere, if she has any scientific attainment, or artistic faculty, instead of standing her interest as an excuse, it is censured as an aggravation and offence.”
—E.P.P., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Una, p. 28 ( February 1855)
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“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)