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- Charles Whitwell
- Also known as
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Charles Whitwell
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primary name: Whitwell, Charles
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; scientific instrument maker; British; Male
- Life dates
- c.1568-1611
- Biography
- Leading Elizabethan scientific instrument maker, and engraver. Apprenticed to Augustine Ryther (q.v.) 1582 ; became free of the Grocers' Company in 1590. Advertised in surveying manuals and mariners' guides, e.g., W Barlow's 'The Navigators Supply' of 1597, and in 1598 living 'without Temple Barre against St Clement's Church', where births of his children were recorded between 1596 and 1609. In 1606 two of his brothers were also named as City Grocers.
Engraver of maps in early career, later 'probably the most skilled and versatile' (Turner 2000, p. 29) instrument maker of the period, he excelled both at engraving and calligraphy. Some two dozen instruments signed by or attributed to him survive, most in public collections. His lunar computer, a brass disc of 72 cm diameter overall made for Sir Robert Dudley and taken by him to Florence (now, Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, 1116; rule 1127), is considered ‘the most complex instrument made during the sixteenth century’. Inscribed ‘Sir Robert Duddeley was the inuentor of this Instrument’, its purpose was to calculate the place of the moon over a period of thirty years.
Charles Whitwell presumably died in 1611, his widow Elizabeth becoming administrator of his estate in 1612.
- Bibliography
- Simon Adams, ‘Dudley, Sir Robert (1574–1649)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8161]. See also the biographies of Elias Allen, Augustine Ryther and Nathaniel Torporley.