Over a year ago I wrote a post ‘Sympathetic vibrations‘ that mentioned a 1688 pamphlet that included (as satire) a means of finding longitude by using a ‘Powder of Sympathy’. The idea was that this could be used to enduce an on-board dog to yelp at a pre-determined time at a known reference point, thus allowing a comparison with local time and, hence, a calculation of longitude. I noted there the fact that this story has often been presented as a genuine longitude scheme, probably because it is useful in getting across the basic point about time difference.

The other day I came across a genuine attempt to locate a longitudinal position that makes this time difference = longitude difference point just as forcefully. While it would today be discounted as pseudo-science, just as the powder of sympathy, it relates to real events and a story that has a number of nice resonances with ours, despite being a few decades later: Arctic exploration, magnetism (or mesmerism), and longitude.

I found this story in the recent edition of Wellcome History (available online PDF) in a ‘work in progress’ piece by Shane McCorristine on ‘The “Bolton Clairvoyante” and Arctic exploration’. This was on the attempt by some individuals, including Capt Alexander Maconochie, to use clairvoyance (what we might now call ESP) to aid the search for John Franklin, missing with his crew in the Arctic from 1845. Franklin had, of course, begun his Arctic career with an 1818 expedition heading for the north pole, at the same time as Ross and Parry were searching for the North West Passage (see Sophie’s post on Thomas Young’s role in the Board and its ‘Arctic turn’).

In September 1849 Maconochie, a naval officer, professor of geography and friend of Franklin’s, contacted a Lancashire surgeon-apothecary called Joseph W. Haddock, who had been carrying out mesmeric experiments on his patients and had discovered an apparent clairvoyante talent in his maid, ‘Emma L’. She was described by Haddock as of a “nervous-bilious temperament”, and by Harriet Martineau as “a vulgar girl, anything but handsome, and extremely ignorant”, but it was claimed that she could travel – virtually – across the globe in search of someone if she had a sample of their handwriting.

Maconochie provided the necessary sample and Emma apparently declared that Franklin was still alive, and “spoke of the snow, ice, &c, of the place where the writer was; said that many with him were dead, but that he was alive, and expected to get away in about nine months, but that she could not say whether he would be able to do so, but that it appeared to her he would get home again”. This was enough to prompt Maconochie to travel to Bolton and undergo several sittings with Haddock and Emma.

While the sittings gave further hope that Franklin was alive, locating him was, of course, the aim, and so Emma was also presented with maps of Northern America. While her ability to deal with maps, especially a detailed Admiralty Chart, was limited – she “appeared to have lost this instinctive sort of power to mark the place, and I found that no reliance could be placed on her in this respect” – Maconochie sensibly asked her to tell him the time of day during her visions. This naval officer knew well, of course, that time difference would provide longitude difference, although he had to assume that Emma’s visions were exactly concurrent with events in Bolton, and that she, or those she was visualising, knew the local time.

Apparently she did, more or less. It was reported to Lady Franklin that Emma suggested a time difference of six hours, placing the expedition somewhere between 85 and 90 degrees west and she had also pointed to Hudson’s Bay on a large-scale map (85 degrees). Perhaps Emma was not as ignorant as Haddock liked to suggest, for this did at least place the expedition somewhere near the relevant region, although it was considered unlikely. It turned out to be a little too far east, and much too late. Traces of the expedition were found on Beechey Island (91 degrees) in August 1850. Much later it was established that Terror and Erebus were trapped in ice off King William Island (97 degrees) in September 1846 and that Franklin had died there on 11 June 1847.

For McCorristine, this episode is useful for revealing the “interrelated histories of affectivity and Artic exploration”, the connections of intimate spaces, imagined regions and the public interest in Franklin’s fate. He writes, therefore, of “an emergent ‘polyvocal’ Arctic” that challenages “the dominance of imperial histories that focus too closely on the naval, scientific and biographical”. But my thanks too for drawing my attention not only to this intruiging episode in the history of Arctic exploration, but to this 19th-century attempt at establishing longitude-at-a-distance.

I’ve mentioned before how everything I do seems to end up relating to our longitude project. Last Wednesday, I went to a ballet at Sadler’s Wells in London, an adaptation by the Pet Shop Boys of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Most Incredible Thing. I did not know of this fairy tale previously, so didn’t know that the story’s hero is a clock maker!

The modern adaptation of the story by Matthew Dunster, turns it into a particularly contemporary mixture of Communist state control and an X-Factor-style talent contest. The ballet starts with the citizens, like automatons, following the dreary round of their daily lives. The king proclaims a contest to find ‘the most incredible thing’ in the state, the reward for which will be half of the kingdom and his daughter’s hand in marriage. After thousands of entries, the prize is won by ‘Leonardo’, a young clock maker who has invented and built an extraordinary tiny clock. This expands to produce 12 visions, which appear for each number of the clock: four seasons, five senses, seven deadly sins and so on. Leo is helped to construct it, alone in his impoverished studio, by the physical embodiments of his three muses: concentration, love and courage. After the clock is destroyed by ‘Karl’, the Orwellian villain of the piece, Leo is helped to reconstruct it by the same muses. The power of this act causes Karl’s death, and overturns his brief victory in the contest, in which his destruction of the wonderful clock becomes itself ‘the most incredible thing.’

The idea of the lone genius, aided by divine inspiration, creating an extraordinary one-off instrument which, once destroyed, can only be saved by further supernatural aid, is of course interesting to us in our ideas on John Harrison. I was especially struck by the idea that destroying such an object becomes itself an incredible act. Leo’s watch here became the ‘object of virtue’ par excellence. But, what particularly interested me was the representation of the incredible clock within the staging of the ballet. The physical object was a small, traditional pocket watch, not dissimilar from H4, which was treated as fragile and jewel-like, crushed simply in Karl’s hands in the destruction scene. Yet, in the invention scene, it expands into a wonderful paper ‘castle in the air’ dreamed up by Leo, and composed of cut-out paper showing parts and diagrams (see the photo gallery of the Sadler’s Wells site), not unlike Harrison’s drawings in The Principles of Mr Harrison’s Time-keeper. Further, when the visions appear from the clock, they do so from a huge dial face-cum-projection screen which dominates the stage, and from which the images and dancers appear and expand. These representations and understandings of the clock were the twins of those I have been finding on the part of longitude pamphleteers in the eighteenth century.

I was intrigued when I recently came across the mention of a letter of 5 June 1763 from the antiquarian and journal editor Richard Gough to one of his authors Edward Haistwell, describing ‘an outrage inflicted at his lodging in Suffolk Street on Sieur de la Condamine who had come for some weeks with colleagues to make researches into longitude’. The aging explorer, mathematician and geographer Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) was one of the French intellectuals who travelled to London that summer with the stated intention of attending the ‘discovery’ (essentially a verbal and hands-on explanation) which the Board of Longitude was requiring John Harrison to make of his longitude timekeeper H4 before a selection of experts. Other such visitors included the mathematician Charles Étienne Louis Camus, the Swiss-born chronometer maker Ferdinand Berthoud, and the astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande (who often collaborated with Nevil Maskelyne).

Although it was highly unlikely for many reasons, not least because Harrison was at one point said to be considering doing business with the French, I could not help imagining the ‘outrage’ inflicted upon La Condamine (shown below in his younger years) as having been a dramatic longitude-related scene like that which played out at a meeting of the Board almost precisely two years later – when Harrison responded to the Commissioners’ repeated request for ‘Experimental Exhibitions’ of his timekeeper technology by abruptly leaving the room and exclaiming ‘That he never would consent to it, so long as he had a drop of English Blood in his Body’!

However, our intrepid leader Simon Schaffer enlightened me that the La Condamine incident mentioned in the letter actually had nothing to do with the longitude but instead became somewhat of a (sex) scandal, as related in Lalande’s travel journal and in many publications. Upon arriving in London on 11 May 1763, La Condamine took a room in Suffolk Street adjoining Pall Mall, a popular neighbourhood on the western side of the metropolis (north of the Thames) which housed many well-heeled visitors and longer term inhabitants – although it was by this time also ‘greatly disfigured by several mean houses of the lowest mechanicks being interspersed in it in many places, and many of them joining to the most sumptuous edifices’ according to the Rev. George Reeves.

Horace Walpole — who did not much care for La Condamine, although he appreciated the man’s support for innoculation — wrote snidely to a friend that: ‘La Condamine, qui se donne pour philosophe. He walks about the streets, with his [hearing] trumpet and a map, his spectacles on, and hat under his arm. But, to give you some idea of his philosophy, he was on the scaffold to see Damien executed. His deafness was very inconvenient to his curiosity ; he pestered the confessor with questions to know what Damien said’. This was Robert-François Damiens, who had been drawn and quartered in Paris in 1757 after stabbing and attempting to kill King Louis XV and with whom Walpole rather sympathized.

La Condamine’s London scandal began on the evening of 27 May 1763. As Lalande (pictured below) succinctly recorded the next day in his journal, ‘constables were sent to Mr Condamine to compel him to leave the same evening. He gave them 2/- and they went away.’ (Two shillings was the same as the cost of a coach trip to Richmond Palace three days later.) La Condamine was able to quickly secure other lodgings in the same street, since by the 29th Lalande was visiting him in ‘Suffolk Street opposite the envoys of Algiers. Those of the Canadian natives lodge very close by in the same street.’

However, the entire episode publicly blew up when the Frenchman published a rather lengthy ‘Address to the English Nation’ in French and English which began appearing in the newspapers and periodicals by at least 30 May, relating that when he returned to his lodgings at 9 o’clock at night, two ‘shabbily drest’ men (one wielding a stick) had entered and threatened to imprison him unless he moved out. La Condamine initially refused and wrote to the French representative, but was encouraged by men of law to move rather than to take legal action. He accused his landlady, Mrs Strafford, of having orchestrated this so that she could let his room to someone else and wondered that he ‘should be exposed in the capital itself to an insult, which he never suffered amongst Barbarians’ during his travels.

The landlady was soon reported to have responded, as the newspapers gleefully recounted alongside the Frenchman’s letter, that in fact two constables had tried to serve a warrant to him because he had threatened a servant maid with his penknife the day before – and ‘he was found amusing himself with the philosophical society of two fair nymphs, who with more propriety might be styled two Graces rather than two Virtues‘, i.e. prostitutes. These conflicting public accounts produced periodic responses in print (often in both French and English) throughout June and until perhaps late July 1763, including both defenses and criticisms of La Condamine, for his perceived slight against the English as well as for the original episode. This was probably not the sort of publicity which the mathematician wanted to accompany the recent publication of his translated Journal of a Tour to Italy!

For example, the pseudonymous commentator Hospitais L’Anglois wrote a week later that surely the ‘Address to the English Nation’ had not actually been written by La Condamine, insulting the people as it did by ranking them lower than Barbarians. The author pointed out that such an episode, if it had in fact occurred, would turn out the same way in Paris as it did in London, since the mathematician could not name or produce the two men who had confronted him. He added that the much disliked French representative or negotiator ‘Monsieur Buffy’ had stayed in the same street and perhaps the very same house without experiencing any trouble.

Others came to the aging explorer’s defense, as when an anonymous commentator produced a note which was purportedly from the French representative to whom La Condamine had unsuccessfully tried to send a letter on the night in question. (The representative was the infamous Chevalier d’Eon, a sometimes cross-dressing diplomat, soldier and spy who convinced many that he was biologically female.) Whether or not he was influenced by this episode and the publicity, an anonymous poet also began publishing a poem in July which ‘imitated’ one that La Condamine had purportedly written to his wife, whom he married in 1756. The explorer had gotten a papal dispensation in order to marry his young niece, Charlotte Bouzia of Estouilly, and this ‘imitiation’ (which was published in books alongside the original for decades) emphasized the great age difference between them – whether more innocently or satirically, it is not entirely clear.

Despite all of this, La Condamine and his French compatriots continued their social rounds in London, often meeting and dining with intellectuals such as Fellows of the Royal Society and central longitude actors including the Astronomer Royal, John Harrison and key scientific instrument makers. (The Frenchmen were never actually able to view Harrison’s H4 or to receive its ‘secrets’, although the clockmaker showed them H1, H2 and H3 without taking them apart.) However, this episode near ritzy Pall Mall was at least an embarrassment to some of his associates and potential associates, if not to La Condamine himself. Walpole resorted to pretending that he was in the country in order to avoid meeting with him, as he wrote on 30 June:

‘MONSIEUR DE LA CONDAMINE will certainly have his letter ; but, my dear Sir, it is equally sure that I shall not deliver it myself. I have given it to my Lord Hertford for him, while I act being in the country. To tell you the truth, La Condamine is absurdity itself. He has had a quarrel with his landlady, whose lodgers being disturbed by La Condamine’s servant being obliged to bawl to him, as he is deaf, wanted to get rid of him. He would not budge : she dressed two chairmen for bailiffs to force him out. The next day he published an address to the people of England, in the newspaper, informing them that they are the most savage nation in or out of Europe. This is pretty near truth ; and yet I would never have abused the Iroquois to their faces in one of their own gazettes. [...] I wish humane men, or men of reflection, [...] would consider that the most desirable kind of understanding is the only kind that never aims at any particularity ; I mean common sense. This is not Monsieur de la Condamine’s kind ; and Count Lorenzi must excuse me if I avoid the acquaintance.’

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons.

In response to my post on The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,  Patrick Wildgust, Curator of Shandy Hall, has alerted me to an interesting film by Thomas Newton.

Shot in and around Coxwold, where Sterne lived while writing Tristram Shandy, it takes its inspiration from a passage from the book to explore the perception of time. Patrick says that it was ‘an attempt to show layers of time using both Sterne’s experimental approach to the subject and the practical task of keeping it accurate in Coxwold’.

Incidentally, the latest exhibition at Shandy Hall, Precious Cargo, has a maritime theme.

See what you think, and thanks for sharing this, Patrick.

Alexi mentioned in a previous post that one of the interesting questions for our project is the survival, or not, of the sources with which we deal. Alongside that comes the question of the history of our main archive at the Cambridge University Library. Alexi mentioned that we know the volumes were arranged and bound as we now have them by George Airy, then Astronomer Royal, in the 1850s, and how he commented on their potential as a resource.

A recent new addition to our project is a digitisation side-project at the UL, funded by JISC. We will be making the entire 68 volumes of the Board of Longitude archives available online with summaries, commentaries and biographical information, in a similar format to the wonderful new Newton Papers resource. Those of us on the project who are charged with writing the summary for each volume therefore have the enjoyable task of going through each volume and making it clear how its contents fit into the history of the Board, and the stories told of it so far.

While writing my summary of Volume 1 last week, I came across this note, which was clearly accidentally bound in with the papers in the 1850s. It’s a letter from Airy to Edward Stone, who was Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory in 1865. It’s interesting that Airy was asking Stone to go through the Board records in the 1860s, and trying to join up the correspondence with the minutes. Exactly what we are now trying to do!

Katy’s recent blog on clocks in novels reminded me of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in several parts between 1759 and 1767. Sterne’s novel also appeared in a recent Guardian list of clocks in books, which succinctly explains the timekeeper’s role in nearly preventing Tristram’s conception.

Referring to Tristram Shandy gives me an excuse to mention a couple of other quotes from this extraordinary work, which manages to refer to a bewildering array of topics, longitude included.

What’s interesting is that the novel’s publication dates span the various developments leading to the 1765 Longitude Act, which arose from the (largely) successful testing of two methods for finding longitude at sea – lunar distances and Harrison’s timekeeper (H4). Sterne’s brief references seem, however, to stem from an earlier period when the quest for longitude was considered one of the great imponderables.

In the first, Tristram’s uncle is in a quandary in his attempts to offer sympathy:

Before an affliction is digested – consolation ever comes too soon; – after it is digested – it comes too late: so that you see, madam, there is but a mark between these two, as fine almost as a a hair, for a comforter to take aim at: my uncle Toby was always either on this side, or on that of it, and would often say, he believed in his heart he could as soon hit the longitude…

The second is from Parson Yorick and needs little in the way of comment:

I think the procreation of children as beneficial to the world… as the finding out the longitude.

It’s likely that few other people would tag this post as ‘longitude tourism’, but it was a momentous day for me on Sunday when I visited William Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, south London. This re-opened in November 2011 after a £400,000 redevelopment and refurbishment project which restored the structure to it’s former glory and has put in place a number of outreach and learning projects. After a checkered history, including neglect and bomb damage, the house is once again shining.

A statue of Hogarth and pug in Chiswick town centre

Hogarth's house and garden

Anyone to whom I have talked about my PhD over the last year will know that my project is based around the final plate from Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress in which an inmate of Bedlam tries to solve the longitude problem on the madhouse wall. I have therefore spent rather a lot of time on Hogarth recently who is on the way to becoming my hero. It was, consequently, a treat to see ‘my’ print on show at Hogarth’s House, alongside the rest of the Rake’s Progress, a complete set of A Harlot’s Progress, and The Four Stages of Cruelty.

Hogarth’s House suffers from the problem of many house museums in being an interesting historic building linked to an iconic figure, but with little original material from the house to display. The William Hogarth Trust have, however, collected an impressive range of objects to evoke Hogarth. The prints are joined by a copy of his theoretical text The Analysis of Beauty, an original engraving plate and his engraving tools, his official appointment document as Sergeant Painter to the King, and reproduction portraits; but also by careful replica furniture, period china and glassware, and finds from the house itself during the refurbishment. The domestic role of different areas is highlighted by appropriate cut-out figures from his engravings. It’s fun spotting ‘who’s who’! A small cupboard in one room houses child-size replicas of the clothes worn by Hogarth in a self-portrait, just one of the new elements to encourage family engagement.

Garrick's epitaph

Hogarth's grave

Hogarth’s House is a simple but effective treatment of Hogarth as an artist and as an eighteenth-century man. My visit was rounded off by a visit to the nearby St. Nicholas Churchyard where Hogarth is buried, a peaceful English spot in the spring sunshine. He is immortalised by an epitaph from his friend the actor David Garrick as ‘great Painter of mankind … Whose pictur’d morals charm the mind.’ It is a shame that the house and churchyard are now separated by the busy cacophony of the Hogarth roundabout, but I feel this is a metropolitan contrast, and a modern urban tribute, of which Hogarth would have eminently approved.

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.

Today saw the announcement of the Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize, offering £1 million for exceptional advances in engineering. It will be awarded biannually to individuals or teams of up to two people. Unsurprisingly, David Cameron, announcing the prize at the Science Museum today, compared it to the Longitude Prize – hinting at a glorious British past of science and engineering – as well as the Nobel Prize. Nick Clegg name-checked X Factor and the FA Cup.

Lord Rees, formerly President of the Royal Society and (still) Astronomer Royal, mentioned Longitude too today, in a Times article (paywall) headed ‘Isn’t it time to lure innovators with Longitude prizes?’. He opens,

We are repeatedly, and rightly, urged that the UK must channel more brainpower into innovation, jump-start new technologies, and enthuse young people towards careers in these fields. If we don’t get smarter, as a nation, we’ll surely get poorer…

before suggesting that ‘We can learn from a government initiative taken nearly 300 years ago – when Britain “ruled the waves”.’

In the article, Rees briefly reiterates the longitude story, via Sobel, and highlights the Harrison timekeepers as ‘the prime high-tech artifacts of the era’. He then goes on to describe various other ‘challenge prizes’:

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) was set up to generate ideas for the Pentagon, but these often have commercial or social spin-offs. Darpa spends up to $10 million per year on challenges. For instance, there was a competition for driverless vehicles, challenged to navigate a 135-mile course across the Mojave Desert. In 2004, none of the 25 entrants succeeded; a year later, such was the improvement that five entrants completed the course.

Like the Longitude rewards, these are publicly financed, but Rees goes on to mention private initiatives, such as the California-based X Prize Foundation, ‘which oversees privately sponsored grand challenge prizes, with a typical value of $10 million’, ranging from for sub-orbital space flight to cheap but accurate genome sequencing, automated medical diagnosis to improved techniques for dealing with oil slicks. It’s strap-line is ‘Revolution through competition’. Rees notes:

Each prize unleashes investments from many competitors amounting to far more than the prize itself, and helps to focus competitive talent on an important challenge. Well-designed competitions are newsworthy enough to offer a much needed PR boost to the engineering profession. They raise the profile and esteem of innovators, and stimulate young people’s interest. For an individual or small company, the prize money is a significant incentive; if a big company wins, it’s the publicity that’s more important.

To be maximally worthwhile, a prize must address a theme that the public regard as important. It’s best if the contest can be followed as a “spectator sport” (robots, for instance). And this type of prize has other advantages over more conventional awards. The winner is decided objectively, as in athletics – and unlike Oscars and literary prizes. And they recognise and boost up-and-coming talent, unlike Nobel and similar prizes where the recognition may come only after decades.

Does this sound like the 18th-century experience of Longitude? More seriously, perhaps, are winners ever – then or now – decided objectively?

The piece ends with a call for such ‘challenge prizes’ in the UK. Rees does not mention the new engineering prize (unless the version of the article that I downloaded from Nexis is incomplete!), and so, obliquely, I presume that his point is that this prize, which doesn’t specify a particular challenge or set of challenges, is perhaps too open to get the kind of competitive spirit, financial investment and public interest he desires.

It is interesting, particularly in terms of the public interest we hope to generate in the theme of longitude with the various events and exhibitions at the NMM, to consider if the Board of Longitude’s rewards really do fit into the scheme that Rees has characterised. It was, of course, in origin a ‘challenge prize’ (and in 1818 it returned to a specific challenge with interest in the North West Passage) but it should be remembered that from the later 18th-century onward rewards were given for ideas, schemes and instrument that were general improvements in navigation and allied areas. Thus, while the X Prize – and, perhaps, Ken Livingstone’s £100,000 challenge to find a way of cooling the London Underground – are analogous to aspects of the Board’s remit, in some ways, the openness of this new QE Engineering Prize sits reasonably well with much of the Board’s history.

It’s always interesting to find longitude cropping up in spheres where you wouldn’t expect it, so I’ve been excited this week to find it mentioned in some unlikely correspondence. Horace Walpole, was one of the most prolific eighteenth-century correspondents. An antiquarian, art historian, man of letters, Whig politician and general bon viveur, he is probably best known for his extraordinary house, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham. The majority of his correspondence is now held in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, which has made the published Yale edition of these available and searchable online.

Looking for other material in the Lewis Walpole catalogue, I idly typed ‘longitude’ into the search field, thinking that it would be interesting to see how a man like Walpole, always discussed by historians of art and literature rather than of science, responded to the longitude problem. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann on 14^th February 1753, he discussed his new role as a trustee of Sir Hans Sloane’s collections which would eventually become the British Museum: ‘We are a charming wise set, all philosophers, botanists, antiquarians and mathematicians; and adjourned our first meeting, because Lord Macclesfield, our chairman, was engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.’[1] Macclesfield was, of course, President of the Royal Society, and therefore an ex officio Commissioner of Longitude. However, the Board minutes only show a meeting on 17^th July 1753. Perhaps it is significant that Walpole describes ‘a party for finding out the longitude’? He may be giving us a glimpse of the un-minuted, more social, discussions that went on outside of the official meetings.

But Walpole doesn’t only give us institutional interest. The following year on 20^th November he wrote to Richard Bentley a ‘scolding letter’ about the fanciful schemes in which Bentley kept trying to get Walpole financially involved, commenting, ‘whenever you send me mighty cheap schemes for finding out longitudes and philosophers’ stones, you will excuse me if I only smile, and don’t order them to be examined by my council.’[2] What strikes me here is that Walpole is using a common throwaway reference to longitude as an impossible scheme, despite clearly being aware of the work of the Board of Longitude through his interactions with Macclesfield. By 1753 the Board had already met four times and had funded John Harrison to the tune of £1,500 to work on his time-keepers. So, we have the institutional considerations of the Board continuing to run alongside wider disparaging attitudes to the problem of longitude.

These are the kind of tantalising tit-bits of information that it’s such a joy to find in the most unlikely sources.

[2] Ibid. Vol.35, pp.190-1