“The Most Noble Problem in Nature”

The Transit of Venus in the 18th Century


This site provides a web version of the exhibition “The Most Noble Problem in Nature”: the Transit of Venus in the 18th Century. The exhibition ran from 13 April to 12 September 2004 at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford.

The exhibition draws on the historical collections of the museum to present the British response to the 18th-century transits of Venus. It also includes a reconstruction of a large-scale mechanical demonstration of the 1769 transit.

You can explore this web version using the navigation bar at the top of every page. The sections are:
When navigating the site, links may take you from one section to another. For example, clicking a thumbnail in the Gallery will take you to a page with a larger version of the image; this page will in turn have a link to the relevant Catalogue entry. You can always see which section you are in by the highlighted section name in the top navigation bar.

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