Elias Allen

Elias Allen (c.1588 in Tonbridge – March 1653 in London) was an English maker of sundials and scientific instruments.[1]

A 1653 engraving of Elias Allen by Wenceslas Hollar

Allen was apprenticed to a London clockmaker in 1602 and, after his master died, established himself in a workshop beside St Clement Danes Church, the Strand.[1] He made instruments for James I and Charles I, among others, and was associated with the mathematicians Edmund Gunter and William Oughtred.[1] His apprentices included Ralph Greatorex.[1] He served from 19 January 1637 until 29 July 1638 as Master of the London Clockmakers' Company.[1] He died in March 1653 and was buried in St Clement Danes.[1]

In 1638 William Oughtred wrote a letter to Allen asking him to make the earliest known Oughtred slide rule, and indicating that Oughtred himself had never made one. Oughtred writes, "I have here sent you directions (as you requested me being at Twickenham) about the making of the two rulers. [...] I would gladly see one of them when it is finished, which yet I never have done."[2] The instrument does not survive, but there is a reverse print of it.[3]

Notes
  1. Higton 2004b.
  2. Rigaud, Stephen Peter, ed. (1841). "XVII. Oughtred to Elias Allen". Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century. Vol. 1. Oxford. pp. 30–32.
    Hopp, Peter; Otnes, Bob (2008). "A Letter of 1638 from William Oughtred to Elias Allen" (PDF). Journal of the Oughtred Society. 17: 28–32.
    The original letter, dated 20 August 1638, is in the Cambridge University archive, Item Reference Code: GBR/0012/MS Add.9597/13/5/215. "Enclosed is a 2 foot long impression of a copper plate (f.215b.) This has been photographed in two halves."
  3. Jardine, Boris (2016). "Reverse-Printed Paper Instruments (With a Note on the First Slide Rule)". Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society. 128: 36–42.

References
  • Cormack, Lesley B. (2017). "Mathematics for Sale: Mathematical Practitioners, Instrument Makers, and Communities of Scholars in Sixteenth-Century London". In Cormack, Lesley B.; Walton, Steven A.; Schuster, John A. (eds.). Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49430-2_4.
  • Higton, Hester Katharine (1996). Elias Allen and the role of instruments in shaping the mathematical culture of seventeenth-century England (PhD thesis). Cambridge University. doi:10.17863/CAM.16170.
  • Higton, Hester Katharine (2004a). "Portrait of an Instrument-Maker: Wenceslaus Hollar's Engraving of Elias Allen". British Journal for the History of Science. 37 (2): 147–166. doi:10.1017/S0007087404005412. JSTOR 4028328.
  • Higton, Hester Katharine (2004b). "Allen, Elias". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37108.
  • Taylor, Eva Germaine Rimington (1954). The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England. Cambridge University Press.
  • Turner, Gerard L'Estrange (2000). "Elias Allen". Elizabethan Instrument Makers. Oxford University Press. pp. 31–32. ISBN 0198565666.
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