As an academic research project we are, of course, interested in making an impact – through museum displays and public programmes, through this blog and other forms of media. It was, therefore, particularly heartening to catch, as it were, one moment of impact almost as it took place.

Thony Christie, author of the Renaissance Mathematicus blog and regular commenter here, flagged up a post on the Science Blogs blog Uncertain Principles, by Chad Orzel, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He had put up a post asking how to pronounce ‘Maskelyne’, as he was about to teach a class on the history of timekeeping using Sobel’s Longitude as a text. Thony and I both commented there, highlighting the rather different story we have been touching on in this blog, but thanks for what happened next goes mainly to Thony as my comment got lost in moderation for some time!

A couple of days later, Chad had taken his class and reported back in another post:

This week was all about Dava Sobel’s Longitude, and the making of seaworthy chronometers. I said half-jokingly that the week followed a sort of a course through Union’s curriculum: Monday was on the science of navigation, using the experimental results presented here; Wednesday was about the engineering of clocks, specifically John Harrison’s innovations for his marine clocks; and today was the humanities side of things, presenting the story of Harrison’s attempts to get paid. Those last slides are really sketchy because I spent most of the class having them provide details of the Harrisons’ grievances against the Board of Longitude, as related by Sobel. I then provided a bit of the other side of the story, from the Board of Longitude blog: (Rehabilitating Nevil Maskelyne, Part One: Reassessing the accusations, Part Two: Why lunar distance?, Part Three: Cultural differences, Part Four: The Harrisons’ accusations, and conclusions) and this law review article (PDF) looking at the case in a more balanced way than Sobel’s book.

I’ve been saying repeatedly that this class is about learning how to make arguments, and so introduced the additional material by asking them if they could find holes in Sobel’s argument. They did a pretty good job of picking up on places where she glosses over inconvenient details, so I think it was a useful class.

Good news! And well done to Alexi for her setting-the-record straight series. As Chad commented on the earlier post, “The Board of Longitude blog is a very nice and compact counterpoint” to the suspiciously tidy story told by Sobel.

Since I have started working on longitude, I have noticed increasingly how often discussions of time and time-keepers appear in novels, creating an intrinsic link between narrative, human experience, time, and its mechanical keepers. I thought I would share here two of my favourites, so far, and continue to add examples as I find them.

The first, is set in our time period, from a magical little book by Elizabeth Goudge called The Dean’s Watch, which features a wizened old watchmaker in a fen-bound cathedral city who lives only through his clocks. It brings to life a forgotten tradition of watches, ‘Isaac laid the Dean’s watch down on his work-bench … and opening a drawer took out an envelope of watch papers neatly inscribed in his fine copperplate handwriting. The majority of horologists no longer used these but Isaac was attached to the old customs and liked to preserve them. In the previous century nearly every watch had had its watch pad or paper inserted in the outer case, either a circular piece of velvet or muslin delicately embroidered with the initials of the owner, or else the portrait of the giver, or a piece of paper inscribed with a motto or rhyme. Isaac had collected and written out many of these rhymes, and he would always slip a watch paper into the outer cases of the watches of the humbler folk, for their amusement and delight. He did not dare to do so with his aristocratic customers for he feared they would think him presumptuous.’ It nicely shows us the cultural aspects of owning and carrying a watch, how these could be personalised, and what this meant. It shows the changing traditions surrounding time-keepers and attitudes to ‘personal’ time. Elsewhere, it also discusses George Graham and Thomas Tompion.

The second is totally removed from the first in both time and space, coming from Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence set in twentieth century Turkey (about which I have written more extensively over on my own blog). He discusses the middle-class family clock: ‘It was German-made, cased in wood and glass, with a pendulum and a chime. It hung on the wall right next to the door, and it was there not to measure time, but to be a constant reminder to the whole family of time’s continuity, and to bear witness to the “official” world outside. Because the television had taken over the job of keeping time in recent years, and did so more entertainingly than did the radio, this clock (like hundreds of thousands of other wall clocks in Istanbul) was … there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.’ Yet, this resonates with Goudge’s work set in the eighteenth century, showing the cultural role of the clock, and how it fitted into changing traditions.

The clock seems to represent stability in both of these and, ironically, a sort of timelessness. In other novels it plays different roles, as I’ll discuss in future posts.

As you’ve already seen in Richard’s post, four members of the project – Richard, Alexi, Sophie and I – spent last week at the annual symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission in Kassel, Germany. The theme – Instruments, Images and Texts – seemed particularly pertinent to us, bringing together a wide range of our research and highlighting the work that we do pulling together the archives in Cambridge, the instruments in Greenwich, and a huge diversity of sources from elsewhere.

Alexi opened our panel session by looking at the different technologies encountered and employed by the Board of Longitude, how these were considered by both the Commissioners and the external ‘public,’ and how these became ‘black boxes.’ I then followed looking at the visual discussions of the longitude problem on paper – maps, diagrams, illustrations – and how these posed a visual problem in the early hunt for longitude. Richard brought his research right up to date, from his visit to Göttingen, talking about Tobias Mayer’s work on the lunar distance method, and how his tables and instruments changed and translated in the process of being considered by the Board. Finally, Sophie looked at the end of the Board, and how thinking of the Nautical Almanac as an instrument as well as a standardised text can help us to understand the relationships between the different players in the Board of Longitude’s demise. The panel went well and we were glad to meet some of our advisory board and get their feedback.

Elsewhere in the conference, I was struck by a similar concern with the questions of replication, translation and standardisation which had woven through our panel. Papers considered how historical actors have replicated and changed each other’s collections, the process of replicating and using historic instruments in a museum, and, in a more modern sense of replication, how to give these digital life through online databases and collections online programmes. One long panel considered how eighteenth-century cabinets of experimental philosophy translated and communicated the knowledge they created to a wider public, and other papers looked at how older scientific knowledge can be translated for a modern museum audience. Further speakers considered how texts and instruments changed and were re-interpreted between different users, raising problems of standard in both quality and parity and, coming back to databases, we began to think about how these could be brought back together across European boundaries.

Outside of the presentations, we had ample opportunity to make our own connections between instrument, image and text. The very first evening introduced us to the marvellous collections of the Landgraves of Kassel in both the Cabinet of Astronomy and Physics, and the stunning baroque Marble Bath. We saw planetarium shows, pendulums, mural quadrants and globes. We viewed the beautiful alchemical manuscript collections in the Murhard Library, were initiated into the history of the early university at Göttingen, saw modern astrophysicists at work, and happily investigated the stores of the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. Almost overwhelmed by the wealth of things to see and learn, the breaks provided the perfect chance to pick the brains of the many experts in attendance, and to think as a group about the Board of Longitude in its wider context. I, for one, think this conference will be ‘instrumental’ in taking our research forward. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun.

Several bloggers did, however, rise specifically to the Georgian challenge, and to the themes relevant to us Longitudinarians. To them, then, the first spoils! Top marks must go to Thony Christie, at The Renaissance Mathematicus, for bringing us Upon reflection: the Hadley brothers, which includes an account of John Hadley’s quadrant, a significant (and long-lasting) addition to the navigator’s tool-kit.Georgians, longitude, navigation, mariners and instruments galore!