How Not to Make a Stradivarius
is only a coincidence or rather, mostly so that Isaac Newton, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Antonio Stradivari reached the pinnacles of their professions at almost exactly the same moment in history. Their lives and work did not touch, though at times they almost intersected. Newton's fascination with the tempered scale overlapped with Bach's. Bach's omnivorous musical interests extended to the labor of instrument design and construction that was Stradivari's lifework. And Stradivari (also known by the Latin form of his name, Stradivarius) in the course of his seventy years as a master luthier and builder of violins, violas, and cellos, applied a craftsman's version of Newton's scientific method, deriving by experiment the skills needed to create the finest stringed instruments ever built. But the three men never met, and if their lives show some common heritage, it is because the ideas that moved them moved their times, forming a common currency of inquiry and change across Europe. The real collision among the three of them came much later. Taken as a drama, it is Stradivari who plays the lead. His is a story of mystery. The core principle of the new experimental science was that what one person can discover any other can find again; yet for three centuries no one has been able to do what Stradivari did build an