There are many obstacles to historians’ reconstructing and understanding the nature of past lives and events as accurately as is possible. While basic human nature has not changed much over the centuries, the socio-economic trappings that outfitted and influenced actors and institutions at any given time could of course be very different from those which exist today – even when they appear quite modern at first glance. This represents a dual threat to historians, of their 1) misinterpreting the past because of the deceptively modern feel of some of the terms and practices that existed then, or conversely 2) allowing the modern labels and definitions that they apply to the past to influence their analyses.
1) As an example of the first threat, key words such as ‘science’ and concepts associated with modern science such as accuracy and replicablility held far different meanings during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they do today. It was not until the second half of the 1800s that ‘science‘ began to specifically indicate branches of the study of the natural world such as biology, chemistry and physics. Before then, the term could refer to any type of knowledge, or to mastery of a certain branch of knowledge or skill set – such as music, politics or defence. The sorts of activities that would later be considered ‘scientific’ fell within the bounds of a number of subjects during the Georgian period including natural and experimental philosophy, astronomy and mathematics, and they were far different in nature than modern science.
Similarly, the modern concepts of scientific and technological accuracy or precision and margin of error simply did not exist during the eighteenth century. This was in part because the instruments of the time did not allow for measurements of enough accuracy for it to be of much relevance. For example, the highest praise that instrument makers tended to bestow upon their wares in advertising was that they had been ‘brought to perfection’ – a vague and unrealistic encomium. The ‘accuracy’ of timekeepers such as the marine chronometers invented by John Harrison lay not in their ticking away the seconds regularly like a modern clock, but in their ‘running down’ at a regular and predictable enough rate as the days and weeks passed that the variations in their running could be compensated for when making observations and calculations. Parliament chose to define the requirements for the granting of its longitude rewards in terms of determination of the longitude at sea to one or fewer degrees away from the true value, or within a certain number of geographical miles.
The recording and reporting of observations and of experiments, including the trials of new methods of discovering the longitude at sea, were handled quite differently during the Georgian period than they would be today as well. Historians must try to decipher how individual observers and experimenters defined their results and chose to present them to the wider world. It was not that unusual for mathematicians and astronomers to cherry-pick the results that they shared or published, for the best didactic effect! The global standardization of mathematical, astronomical and natural philosophical practices and terms began to take shape only gradually during the existence of the Commissioners of Longitude.
2) Historians can thus be misled in their analyses of the past if they do not take into account how the definitions of words and concepts having changed dramatically over the centuries. However, they also face the opposite problem – of misinterpreting the nature of past lives and events by applying modern terminology to them and unknowingly letting this shape their perceptions.
For example, during my recent research on ‘scientific’ instrument makers in eighteenth-century London, it became clear that many historians’ study of the instrument trade had been influenced by their continued use of the term ‘scientific’. That adjective would not actually become applicable to instruments until the later nineteenth century. Its usage is entirely understandable, since the term indicates that authors are not referring to musical instruments instead and is more concise than a litany of early modern descriptors including optical, mathematical and philosophical.
However, it is clear that conceiving of optical, mathematical and philosophical instruments as ‘scientific’ in any way has continued to limit historians’ understanding of the full range of ways in which the British viewed, used and traded in these wares. For one thing, the production and sale of instruments in London encompassed a number of interconnected and yet sometimes quite disparate crafts and retail specialties, rather than representing a single instrument trade as is typically discussed. These activities were also far more interrelated with other types of crafts, services and retail specialties that would not be considered ‘scientific’ today, than has usually been acknowledged.
These dynamics saw trade members forge many important socio-economic relationships outside of ‘the instrument trade’, and instrument production and sale intermingle with trades from ship chandlery to the sale of fashionable luxuries. This mixing of instruments with diverse other stock and trades can be seen in many advertisements including that above for George Willdey, an optician and toyman (a seller of small fashionable trinkets for adults). Willdey ran a successful retail and wholesale business near St. Paul’s Churchyard in London from 1706 until his death in 1737. One of his two known surviving telescopes is now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and is a good example of the type of small, attractive and often technologically basic instruments that were produced in large numbers by instrument makers in Georgian London and exported across the nation and the world.
Similar problems of labelling and definition have hindered the study of the British state’s support for the ‘search for the longitude’. As I’ll be discussing in greater detail over the course of 2011, the term ‘the Board of Longitude’ and modern conceptions thereof have obscured the actual nature of the Commissioners of Longitude in the wake of the Act of 1714 and downplayed their activities during the earlier decades of their existence.
Image credits: Richard Rust trade card © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, all other images © National Maritime Museum.
An essential and ongoing function of our research is to try to assess the character of the Board of Longitude, and to put it in context. One important question is how usual was it in Georgian Britain to have a government body both funding scientific research and making rewards for technological innovations?
The Board of Longitude “disposed” of exactly £157,169 during its 114 years of existence. Approximately a third was spent on publications, principally the Nautical Almanac, published annually by the Board from 1767. Another third of the Board’s expenditure went on expeditions, experiments, instruments and overheads, the latter consisting mostly of payments to the Board’s Commissioners for attending meetings. The final third was spent on rewards to individuals for their development of techniques and scientific instruments. Although established in 1714, the Board did not, as far as we know, formally meet until 1737. From that date the Board made regular payments, in effect research grants, to the clockmaker John Harrison, typically of the order of £500 every three or four years.
This funding enabled Harrison to develop a series of marine timekeepers over a period of thirty years, or to “bring his machine to perfection”, as the Board characteristically instructed him to do in June 1746. This was by and large the only expenditure by the Board until 1765, when it made two notably large payments, namely another £7,500 to Harrison upon his successful explanation of the principles of his most recent timekeeper, the large watch now known as “H4″, and £3,000 to the widow of the Göttingen mathematician Tobias Mayer, for his lunar and solar tables to be used in conjunction with an instrument such as an octant to determine the longitude at sea using the lunar distance method.
Hence by the mid-1760s, the Board had given staggered payments to John Harrison amounting in total to £13,500 as encouragement for further research, and as a reward for past endeavour. What other examples of government payments to scientific individuals or institutions were there in the fifty or so years after the establishment of the Board, and what sort of amounts of money were involved? So far in our research it seems there were very few, but we’re still looking! One rare and fascinating example of a large sum being offered by the government as a reward for a medical advance is the case of Joanna Stephens, awarded £5,000 by the government in 1740 for her cure for bladder stones. The sums involved, and the manner in which a proposed technique that was of clear benefit to the nation was investigated through trials and testimonials, all have rather nice similarities to the contemporaneous Harrison case.
Bladder stones or merely “stones” or “the stone” were an extremely common and very painful condition in the 18th century. Various kinds of mineral deposits accreted in the bladder and the general urinary system, possibly exacerbated by diet, and almost certainly made substantially worse by the chronic dehydration that was the norm in this period due to the absence of safe drinking water. Stones and the related “gravel” were sometime passed, with great pain, and often caused blockages, leading to an inability to urinate, secondary infections, and death. Lithotomy, “cutting for the stone”, was one of the very few regularly performed early-modern invasive surgical procedures that wasn’t amputation, but was extremely risky. Lithotrity or lithotripsy, the breaking up of the stones within the bladder, using a catheter-like steel instrument, was only developed later, in the first few decades of the 19th century. An effective lithontriptic, a remedy taken orally to ease the pain and perhaps dissolve the stones, was thus much desired mid-century. In 1738 Joanna Stephens announced a cure, and demanded £5,000 for disclosing it. A private subscription was set up, raising £1,356 by December 1738. Stephens petitioned Parliament, which in April 1739 agreed to pay £5,000 if she revealed her cure in full, and if what amounted to a clinical trial was successful. Stephens agreed to these terms and presented her recipe to the Trustees appointed by Parliament and the editors of the London Gazette, where it was published. Stephens’ medicine consisted of a powder, decoction and pills, containing respectively calcined shells and snails, herbs boiled with soap, and calcined snails, burnt vegetables, honey and more soap.
The Trustees oversaw a series of year-long trials on four men suffering from stones. Detailed examinations were undertaken by both surgeons and physicians, several of whom were Trustees, and all of whom were eminent. The Trustees, amongst them the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and Robert Walpole, Chancellor of the Exchequer and in effect first Prime Minister of Britain, were satisfied that Stephens had both “made a discovery” of the contents of her medicines and the manner in which they should be prepared and administered, and they were convinced of the “utility” and “efficacy” of the cure. The only dissent came from two (out of 28), including, significantly, Thomas Pellet, President of the Royal College of Physicians, who refused to endorse a statement made by the other trustees that the medicine had “dissolving power”. Nevertheless, Stephens received £5,000 from the Exchequer in March 1740, and promptly disappeared from history.
Needless to say this wasn’t the end of the affair. Stephens had as many detractors as supporters, resulting in numerous pamphlets. Dr Stephen Hales, FRS, coincidently (or perhaps not) winner of the Society’s 1739 Copley Medal for his investigation of the stone, and one of the appointed Trustees, undertook lengthy chemical investigations of both stones and Stephens’ medicine, as did S.F. Morand and C.J. Geoffroy of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. Geoffroy analysed the medicine and concluded that the large quantity of soap contained lime, which would dissolve the stones, and oil, which would relax the urinary tract. Morand and Hales both subjected stones to detailed tests in a variety of in vitro conditions, in warmed urine, in varying amounts of Stephens’ medicine, and so on, making precise measurements of the weight of stones before and after these tests. The question of whether a parallel can be drawn between stones and medicine in a glass or earthen vessel, and stones and medicine in the bladder, was of course far from agreed upon.
The case of Joanna Stephens was full of disagreement: some thought her medicine was not novel at all, and hence unworthy of the substantial payment, others thought her medicine was potentially useful but still thought that nothing had been proven or discovered, and others viewed her a charlatan. The comparisons to the assessment by the Commissioners of the Board of Longitude of Harrison’s H4, twenty years later, are interesting. As described above, Harrison was awarded £7,500 in 1765 for his achievements, including an “experimental exhibition” of how the timekeeper worked. None of the Longitude commissioners in 1765 doubted that Harrison’s fine-tuned timekeeper had itself determined longitude at sea to the required accuracy, but ambiguity remained as to what had been discovered, whether a practicable solution had been found, and whether it was possible for any other timekeepers to be constructed that would be able to determine longitude at sea. Even after lengthy trials at sea and inspections in London, the central question of what constituted a discovery remained.
The Board of Longitude became, amongst other things, an arbitrator of discoveries and inventions. It was a jury that assessed instruments and techniques and put them under trial. An obvious comparison is to the burgeoning patent system, and this requires investigation. The comparison to Joanna Stephens, however, shows how in our future work we should think of medicine, and the case-history tradition, as another rich source of comparison as we investigate science and innovation in the Georgian world.
For a facsimilie of Joanna Stephens’ “full discovery” in the London Gazette for June 16th 1739, see these two images:
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/7815/pages/1
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/7815/pages/2
As Alexi has commented in her
last post, longitude crops up frequently in early eighteenth-century press and
pamphlet literature in relationship to madness or ludicrous scientific
inventions. In my search through this literature, I have noticed the unlikely
frequency with which cucumbers crop up as a trope to satirise ridiculous or
convoluted science in the period.
A well-known example is found in Jonathan
Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) where,
in the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver meets a ragged dirty philosopher who ‘had
been eight Years on a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which
were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in
raw inclement Summers.’ This is a suitably silly suggestion for Swift’s aim to
satirise contemporary philosophers who he saw as pursuing useless projects
because they had lost contact with real social needs.
Cucumbers also appear in relation
to longitude in a satirical poem from 1732, the wonderfully named A hymn to the Chair: Or, lucubrations,
serious and comical, on the use of Chairs, Benches, Forms, Joint-Stools,
Three-Legged Stools, and Ducking-Stools. Among the chairs
which the author discusses, he suggests that ‘Had we of Archimedes’s Lumber, / Enough
to make a Chair for Slumber, / We’d find by Lines in a Cucumber / Longitude.’
Again, the cucumber becomes a particularly silly ‘instrument’ with which to
find longitude.
But, why do cucumbers occur to writers as
satirical tropes when commenting on science? Cucumbers certainly had a mixed reputation
as a food in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, when
raw fruit and vegetables were seen as a possible cause of disease. In 1663,
Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of a reported death from eating cucumbers. The
colloquial term ‘cowcumbers’ may come from such an idea that they were only fit
to be eaten by cows. Likewise, cucumbers seem to have been associated with the
tailoring profession, who were jokingly said to exist solely on these in the
summer. Cucumbers certainly seem to offer little as a scientific resource, but
I think merit further attention as a satirical trope.
The issue of finding the longitude at sea was frequently mentioned in print publications during the eighteenth century, especially after the British Parliament established a state-sponsored longitude reward in 1714. These sources included newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, books, fiction, plays and poetry. They make it clear that, as Richard highlighted in his last post, it became increasingly common over the course of the 1700s for the ‘search for the longitude’ to be associated with madness, impossibility or fraud.
This is a vital point in trying to understand attitudes toward, and the funding of, attempts to develop a better method of measuring the longitude at sea. However, it may not have been as dominant a view of the issue as potted histories often suggest. There continued to be many neutral and positive discussions of the problem and of related events at home and abroad as well, even as the decades passed without the appearance of an obvious ‘solution’.
The negativity was partially a response to the overenthusiastic and sometimes poorly informed belief on the part of some members of the general public and indeed some politicians, mathematicians, projectors and the like that the discovery of the longitude could be imminent, in 1713-14 and in the years immediately thereafter. Some periodicals claimed that the issue was fully resolved when they reported on a new proposal or trial thereof at home or abroad. A number of projectors made the same claim for their own proposals, either because they truly believed it or were engaging in the time-honoured tradition of ‘puffing’ their goods and services in the expectation of commercial gain.
For example, the watchmaker Samuel Watson of Long Acre in London — who produced astronomical clocks like this now at the Science Museum — advertised a longitude timekeeper in the newspaper the Post Man and the Historical Account on 5 October 1714 in these words:
‘That great Secret of Longitude both by Sea [and] Land, which hath so much puzled [sic] the World for many Years past, is now perfectly discovered, and made so very easy that the meanest Capacity may be Master of it in half an hour [...] This Machine is not liable to be any way disorder’d, neither is there any attendance required, but is fit for Service at all Times either Night or Day.’
Watson had begun making such claims earlier in the century but seems to have been given a second wind by the establishment of the longitude reward.
When such promised discoveries of the longitude failed to materialise, and no one plucked an impressive personal fortune from the hands of the Commissioners of Longitude, a sort of backlash naturally began to gather steam amongst public commentators and perhaps the general public. However, the inclusion of longitude in pictorial and literary representations of a number of negative qualities was often not about the search for the longitude per se. In many instances, these were reactions against grasping entrepreneurs and especially ‘projectors’ in general and echoed many other commentaries on such individuals. These speculators and inventors, when they were not excused by outright madness, were viewed in a somewhat similar light to ‘stock jobbers’ – as self-interested devils who made their fortunes by beguiling innocent citizens into giving up their own.
The ‘search for the longitude’ became a common literary trope that could be mentioned in a single line in publications on diverse subjects and then never revisited – in the same vein as someone today might refer to a ‘cure for the common cold’ in an off-handed manner when discussing the limits of human knowledge and ability or something long sought-after but perhaps impossible to attain. The longitude became a constant bedfellow to mentions of and discourses upon what many authors considered to be ‘impossible’ or downright mad pursuits, from the search for the Philosopher’s Stone or perpetual motion to humans flying in the air or diving deep into the sea in a manmade ‘bell’. Often publications used litanies of such activities as convenient metaphors for whatever unrelated point they were trying to make.
In the Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post of 25 November, 1721, one pseudonymous commentator compared finding the longitude to understanding the events that had led to the recent financial crisis known as the collapse of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ and knowing how to remedy the situation:
‘Would not any body, that did not know you, conclude from your Behaviour, that you had found out the North-East passage, or the Perpetual Motion, or the Longitude, or the concealed Effects of the late Directors [of the South Sea Company]; [...] at least – a Scheme for retrieving Publick Credit, and paying the Debts of the Nation.’
Satirical cartoons like that of Hogarth employed similar glancing usages of longitude or more often, its bedfellows. For example, James Gillray’s The Dissolution, or, The Alchymist producing an Aetherial Representation of 1796, is not really a commentary on alchemy but on prime minister William Pitt, who is applying coins from the Treasury and a symbol of royal power to the Parliament in order to transmute himself into a ‘Perpetual Dictator’. As with pictorial and literary mentions of longitude, this reflects a common disregard for the alchemist and what were thought to be his characteristics and beliefs, but the metaphor is employed without any real thought about alchemy itself.
Further proof that many of the negative representations of the search for longitude and the ‘Longitudinarians’ owed more to existing social trends and literary and artistic traditions such as criticism of projectors than to specific reactions to the longitude, is that such ‘attacks’ seem to have begun within a few years of the Act of 1714. For example, a foreign correspondent in the Hague derided a longitude projector there in a letter published in the Post Boy in 1717:
‘To convince you, that we have Lunaticks among us, as well as other Nations, one Mr. John Rascher, who lodges at Leithauseh’s Coffee-House in the Square here, advertises Mathematicians, and Vertuoso’s of whatever Denomination, that he is to make sundry Experiments, upon our Vivier, of his Discovery of the Longitude, and, that in the Presence of some Commissioners of their High-Mightinesses ; for which he will fix the Time in some future Prints ; and invites all the Lovers of Navigation, who fancy they know something in that way, to come and try their Experiments at the same Time and Place, if they please. A fair Challenge!’
Image credits: ‘The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers…’, © http://openlibrary.org;
‘The Dissolution…’, © http://www.wikigallery.org/; Samuel Watson clock, © Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library.
The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that our project logo is a slightly manipulated detail from a print by William Hogarth.
Hogarth’s print was the final image in his series, The Rake’s Progress. Completed as a group of eight paintings in 1734, the first printed versions appeared the following year. The Rake’s Progress tells the story of the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell. In the final scene, Tom has been sent to Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam). For the purposes of our project, what is interesting is that his fellow inmates include a man drawing a scheme to solve the longitude problem on the back wall. By the 1730s, it seems, the many people attempting to solve the problem were being satirised as deluded fools. Here’s a version of the 1735 edition:
Our project logo is taken from a later version, however, made towards the end of Hogarth’s life. In this version, a coin, dated 1763, has been added to the back wall. It seems that Hogarth was inviting a damning comparison between the madhouse and the state of Britain in the 1760s. It’s a nice touch for our project since it adds the important element of finance into the mix, alongside scientific, political and military interests. Thanks to the wonders of digital manipulation, it also allows us to highlight 2014 – the focal year of the research project, when we’ll celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first Longitude Act with a range of events and activities. We’ll keep you posted on that.
The YouTube video in this blog’s first post is by Tom Kirk of the University of Cambridge’s Office of Communications. Featuring the Longitude Project’s Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy, and Richard Dunn, Curator of the History of Navigation at the National Maritime Museum, it’s a brief introduction to the Longitude problem, the research project and some of the themes that we hope to explore over the next few years.
Topically, Simon highlights the important issue of government funding for science: “Essentially the Board represents the germs of our national science policy. The materials and
correspondence it left behind is a window on to the cosmologyof an entire class of people, and also on to the beginnings of
Government-sponsored science in Britain”. The project should both help us recover detailed information about the lives of the many different kinds of people who came in contact with the Board – from Admirals, to astronomers, to artisans – and lead us to discuss very relevant issues of how the state and the scientific community interact.
In the video Richard talks about the most iconic Longitude-related items in the NMM’s collection, John Harrison’s sea clocks, but makes it clear that we have much more to say – and much more yet to find out – about the Board. Let’s remember that Dava Sobel’sbestselling Longitude is a (partial) account of a very small part of the whole story. The NMM, which includes the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (itself founded to solve the Longitude problem), has many other objects in its collection and aspects to its history which relate to that broader story. We have yet to do these full justice.
In the video, Richard and Simon also explain why it made perfect sense for the NMM and Cambridge to come together on this project. We (at the NMM) have the object collections and an intrinsic interest in the navigational story, they (at Cambridge) hold the archives of the Board and of the Observatory. Also, we like to think, the collaboration has brought together a great group of individuals, who you can read more about on the Project Team tab.
