Sectors - Italian Style Galileo became so associated with the
sector that many people incorrectly believed he was the
instrument's only inventor. Even though the collection is small,
the Museum's holdings suggest there was little consensus in
seventeenth-century Italy about which arrangement of scales was
most essential to mathematical practitioners' activities.
Indeed, Galileo himself experimented with several different
scales during the decade he spent working on the instrument
before he formally published Operations of the Geometric and
Military Compass. One reason for the variety is he started out
thinking only about military applications but gradually decided
to develop a general-purpose device. The Italian sectors in the
collection might have been used for tasks ranging from
positioning a cannon and designing fortifications to converting
between systems of currency.