JOHNSTONE, Sarah (fl.1785-1812) — London
Dissected globe maker. As Sarah Cowley, she produced Miss Cowley’s new invented pocket sphere; or the globe dissected 1785 — an educational toy for learning by assembly — published by John Marshall 1 (see BME 2011). The BL has a second example dated 1787. After her marriage, she produced, now as Mrs Johnstone, and as its “first and only inventor”, Mrs. Johnstone’s new invented pocket sphere, a similar but larger and more robust dissected wood, card and paper terrestrial globe in 1812 (Whipple Museum Accession No. 5619), with an explanatory booklet printed for her and sold by ‘Champante & Whitrow’ (William Champante & Benjamin Whitrow), who presumably also sold the globe itself. The stress on her being the “first and only inventor” was evidently in sharp response to Edward Mogg (see BME 2011), who was advertising his own highly similar “Mogg’s dissected globe, for the instruction of youth in the first principles of geography and astronomy … recommended to the attention of tutors, private teachers, schools, and the public in general, as impressing, from its construction, the rudiments of science in a manner infinitely more forcible than any that has hitherto been devised” (Morning Chronicle, 8 Aug 1812).
A daughter of the mathematician John Lodge Cowley F.R.S. (1722?-1797) and his wife Frances Dunkley, who married in 1749. She was conceivably the grand-daughter of John Cowley, Geographer to the King between 1741 and 1746 (BME 2011). She married John Johnstone of Deptford, “purser of his Majesty’s ship the Magician”, at St. Nicholas Deptford, 3 Feb 1793. In the accompanying booklet to her later globe, she noted that she had been “brought up from my infancy to the sciences, under the care and tuition of my father”, and for many years had “the honour of instructing many of the nobility, &c in the use of the globes, orrery, maps, projections, &c”. The earlier paper and card model — many hundreds of which had been sold — had initially been designed “for the use of my pupils”. Her husband may or may not have been the John Johnstone who had a bookshop in Limehouse, just across the river from Deptford, in the early years of the nineteenth century — a shop taken over by 1811 at 93 Fore Street by a Sarah Johnstone. Her father, for many years Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, was the author of several books illustrated with moveable and pop-up parts, demonstrating three-dimensional geometrical models and comparable to his daughter’s globes — ‘Geometry made easy’ 1752, with “schemes cut out of paste-board”; ‘An appendix to Euclid’s Elements’ 1758, with “new-invented schemes cut out of paste-board”, and ‘The theory of perspective demonstrated’ 1766, illustrated with “moveable diagrams cut out of vellum”.
Bennet Street, Westminster — 1779-1784
20 George Street, Tower Hill — 1812
LHD. Webster.