MicroscopyPioneers


Pioneers in Optics: John S. Billings Eric Clark From the website Molecular Expressions created by the late Michael Davidson and now maintained by Eric Clark, National Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306


eclark@magnet.fsu.edu


John S. Billings (1838–1913)


Lieutenant Colonel John


S. Billings served as the cura- tor for the United States Army Medical Museum for a ten- year period from 1883 until 1893. During that time, he initiated the assembly of what has become one of the world’s largest collections of micro- scopes. This


collection was


begun in 1874 by Colonel Bill- ings’s predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Otis, an Army medical officer who acquired several historic microscopes from a Philadelphia instrument maker. In 1864, late in the Civil War, Colonel Bill-


ings was assigned to organize medical records of the Union Army, and he was placed in charge of the Sur- geon General’s Office Library in 1865. His efforts


in


this endeavor eventually led to one of the nation’s finest medical resources, the National Library of Medicine in Washington DC. During the 1880s, as curator of the Medical Museum, Bill-


ings served as vice president of the National Board of Health and acted as an advisor on hospital construction, a job for which he was considered an expert. During one of his many trips to Europe in search of books and historic medical equip- ment, Colonel Billings enlisted the help of John Mayall, Jr., a well-known microscope collector and member of the Royal Microscopical Society, to help procure representative micro- scopes for the Army’s collection. Colonel Billings received the first shipment of


17 microscopes from Mayall in October 1884, followed by eight very rare microscopes in 1886, and three early Italian models in 1887. By 1888, Mayall had purchased over 140 microscopes for Colonel Billings, who was him- self searching throughout Europe for antique instruments.


42 doi:10.1017/S1551929519000658


These efforts inspired many American collectors to con- tribute to the growing museum collection, and Colonel Billings continued to assist in growing the collection until his death in 1913. Today, the collection houses over 600 microscopes, many


of which are very rare and valuable. Army museum curators have now termed these microscopes Te Billings Microscope Collection, and a book has been written that illustrates and describes the microscopes. Visitors to Washington DC can view many of the


microscopes in the Billings Collection at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Hospital.


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