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Here we take a brief look at the history of the laboratory to help give perspective about why they're important to modern life.

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Laboratories: A historical perspective

Introduction

Origins of the laboratory

Among the earliest known organized scientific study was that under the rule of the early Ptolomies of Alexandria in the third century B.C. While little to no evidence seems to exist for public or organized laboratories during this time period, researchers and historians widely accept the idea that at least organized and individual research (meaning "direct personal contact with the objects of study, and by the aid of such appliances as were then available"^[1]) into anatomy, physiology, and medicine took place.^[2]^[3]^[1]^[4] Dissections and experiments took place, but certainly not in an organized teaching or research laboratory setting like today. Early twentieth-century philosopher of science Edgar Zilsel suggests that scientific endeavor was non-collaborative in this early era, and the laboratory as a collaborative environment simply didn't exist^[2]:

No publications, no astronomical or geographical investigation which are the work of several collaborating scientists are known. Even the learned compendia of the Roman period (Varro, Pliny, Celsus) and the encyclopedias of late antiquity (Boëthius) were composed by single polyhistors. There is no evidence that the Alexandrian Museum conjointly carried out investigations. Laboratories, the birth places of scientific co-operation in the modern era, existed neither in the Alexandrian Museum, nor in the Academy, nor in the Lyceum. As far as the fellow scholars of the museum did not work each for himself they might have contented themselves with dinners and debates. And of course, there were in antiquity no scientific periodicals in which new findings could have been discussed.

With scientific advancement and discovery still largely a personal (i.e, prestigious) goal, even through the Renaissance humanists of the fourteenth through sixteenth century A.D.^[2], it would take quite some time for both the private and public laboratory to evolve. To be certain, private laboratories surely existed, from Aristotle^[1] (third century B.C.) to the anatomical laboratory — "the first scientific laboratory" — that began to take hold in the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century^[1]^[5], all the way to the "zenith" of the alchemical research laboratory in the second half of the sixteenth century.^[6] But it wouldn't be until the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century that collaboratory science and the first university-affiliated labs would appear.

Zilsel claims that Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, while teaching at the University of Padua from 1592 to 1610, founded the first university-affiliated laboratory in his own home, with help from craftsmen who aided in researching architectural and mechanical concepts.^[7] As Galileo was nearing completion of his professorship at Padua, chemist Johannes Hartmann opened up a university laboratory for students at the University of Marburg in 1609, albeit for "instruction not in [chemical] analysis — still in a very rudimentary state — but in pharmaceutical preparations."^[8] One of the first actual public laboratories dedicated to chemical instruction was founded later that century, in 1683, by the council of Nuremberg, hosted at the University of Altdorf and directed by physician and professor Johan Moritz Hofmann.^[8]^[9] That same year the (Old) Ashmolean played host to Britian's first university laboratory, directed by chemistry chair Robert Plot.^[10]^[11]

By the end of the seventeenth century, textbooks on various subjects such as anatomy and chemistry were becoming more notable,