The Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona has a significant collection of scientific instruments for teaching and research accumulated over more than one hundred and fifty years. It is a relatively recent collection, its recovery having been initiated in the Nineties.

In a similar and parallel way the Group of Libraries of the University of Barcelona has build up a huge patrimony of different documentation organised in a Catalogue with access to all the available documents in the libraries (books, magazines, multimedia and electronic resources, sound recordings, videos, etc.) and to an important old and rare books collection (incunabula, manuscripts, parchments, engravings and printed books from the 16th century up to 1900).

By looking at physics books between the years 1825 to 1925, an initial list of 359 books was compiled. After a work of filtering and selecting, a new, more useful list has been reduced to 15 items.

The main idea of this communication is to put the objects for teaching and research into a cultural context, which means examining the interrelations among instruments, images and textbooks of the time for educational purposes. The paper is centred on a selection of a few representative items (about 8 instruments) from different branches of physics (mechanics, acoustics, heat, optics, electricity, magnetism) that are typical in most collections of scientific instruments.

The evolution of the descriptive forms and the concepts on which the instruments have been designed in the different selected text-books is analysed. That is, we study the modulation of the transmission of the basic concepts through formal expressions of text and illustrations. The latter reveal interesting details that show an evolution and feedback to better face the exposure of principle or concept and accuracy of measurements and results. It is also a more concrete analysis between certain devices and the books written by professors of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona in mid-nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The conclusions could be of interest in order to increase our knowledge about the most common objects that were used in Europe for teaching and research in physics, especially in the academic context of our university.