Readers of this blog may be interested to listen to a talk I gave at the Royal Society last week. Audio and slideshow versions are available here. The talk was entitled “Hero or villain? Nevil Maskelyne’s posthumous reputation” and, while pointing out that ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are hardly historiographically useful categories I discussed how Maskelyne has come to be most commonly known as the villain of the story of longitude.
I began by briefly introducing the man and his life, before discussing the two early and influential accounts of his life, which demonstrate the range of Maskleyne work and his high international reputation. These were a 1812 article in Rees’s Cyclopaedia by Patrick Kelly, who was master of Finsbury Square Academy and an author on nautical astronomy, and the Eloge produced for the French Institute in 1813 by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, permanent secretary for mathematical sciences, director of the Paris Observatory.
Kelly was one of Maskelyne’s close acquaintances and Delambre, according to Lalande in a letter to Maskelyne held in the NMM’s Caird Library, once considered Nevil “le dieu de l’astronomie”. It’s unsurprising that Maskelyne comes out well of these accounts, but it is typical that early 19th-century biography should be sympathetic to its subject and that it should be produced by friends, family or colleagues. They are the sources that were taken up, and thus my talk explored why and at what point the image of this significant figure of British science, who was acclaimed for his dedicated hard work and for making the Royal Observatory useful to the public, became one of elitism and obstructiveness.
As I hope I show, it can’t all be blamed on Sobel’s Longitude but, rather, dates back to earlier rediscoveries of John Harrison, and to horological histories that have tended to ignore significant aspects of the contemporary context.
My talk also dwells a little on my dual response to this. On the one hand there is an academic one that seeks to avoid historical goodies and baddies, to explore fully contexts and motivations and to replace simplistic accounts with more nuanced ones. On the other, there is a sense of injustice which, of course, must mirror that felt by those championing Harrison. There seems to be ample evidence that Maskelyne was a pretty nice, and fair, man but it’s difficult to know what to do with this knowledge! I hope, at least, that future displays at the Royal Observatory – Maskelyne’s home – can take advantage of the objects, manuscripts and accounts that the Museum has to reflect something of Maskelyne’s significance in his own time and his life with friends, colleagues and family as well as antagonists.
While over at the Royal Society’s list of history of science podcasts, do take a look at some of the others on offer. 18th-century enthusiasts will enjoy James Sumner’s ”‘How should a chemist understand brewing?’ Beer and theory around 1800″; material culture/materials folk should listen to Susan Mossman on plastics; more on someone closely connected to the history of the Royal Observatory can be found in Frances Willmoth’s talk on Jonas Moore; early 17th-century instruments and clocks are discussed by Rebecca Pohancenik. And much, much more. Many thanks to Felicity Henderson at the Royal Society for inviting me to join them.
Today is the 277th anniversary of the death of John Arbuthnot, Tory physician and Augustan satirist. He might not seem an obvious subject for a post on this blog, but he is, in fact, a perfect example of the ways in which the longitude problem linked in and out of all different areas of eighteenth-century society.
Arbuthnot was a well-respected mathematician and society physician in the reign of Queen Anne; a member of the Royal Society, an intimate of the Tory ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, and resident at Court until the ministry’s fall and the death of Anne in 1714; the year, of course, that the longitude act was passed. In 1701, he published the influential Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, in which, among many other points, he argued for the importance of mathematics in astronomy and navigation. The former included the use of Jupiter’s satellites to find longitude, and the latter the recent important voyages by Edmund Halley on HMS Paramore to establish magnetic variation as a means of measuring longitude. Arbuthnot commented of Halley’s voyages that ‘those who sent him have, by this Mission secured to themselves more true Honour and lasting Fame, than by Actions, that at first View appear more Magnificent.’[1] This, his respected position in Court and government, and his Fellowship Royal Society, led to Arbuthnot’s appointment in 1705 to the committee set up to oversee the publication of the star charts made by the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, the Historia Coelestis, which eventually appeared in 1712. The arguments between Flamsteed and Newton over this publication are well known, as is the bitter outcome, in much of which Arbuthnot served as the go-between, placating Flamsteed and checking some of the charts and calculations himself.
Alongside these roles, Arbuthnot was also a popular and accomplished satirist. He met the Tory pamphleteer and novelist Jonathan Swift in 1710-11, commencing a deep and life-long friendship between the two. By 1713 they had formed the famous ‘Scriblerus Club’ with other satirists Alexander Pope and John Gay, along with essayist Thomas Parnell, and the Lord Treasurer Robert Harley, by now elevated to the peerage as Earl of Oxford. This group spawned the formative texts of the age including Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Dunciad and their combined work The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. It is clear that Arbuthnot was the ‘science man’ of the group contributing the natural philosophical jokes and satires. The role of Martin Scriblerus was a perfect foil for these friends, allowing them both to write their own satires on contemporary literature and life, and to claim others’ works which they thought ridiculous as products of Martin’s pen. It was in this context that Arbuthnot first satirised longitude as an impossible scheme, soon after the 1714 Act. He wrote to Swift regarding Whiston and Ditton’s project for using bomb vessels, that ‘Whetstone has at last publish’d his project of the longitude, the most ridiculous thing that ever was thought on; but a pox on him, he has spoild one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposal to this purpose, not very unlike his,’[2] and Swift clearly took great glee in replying that ‘It was a malicious Satyr of yours upon Whiston, that what you intended as a Ridicule, should be any way struck upon him for a Reality.’[3] Accordingly, Whiston and Ditton’s project went on to feature as one of Martin’s absurd projects in the Memoirs.[4]
It seems probable, however, that Arbuthnot also entered the longitude debate more directly. In 2008, Pat Rogers suggested that a pamphlet long thought genuinely to come from the pen of its named author Jeremy Thacker, The Longitudes examin’d, was in fact a satire on the over-inflated longitude projects then proliferating in pamphlet form thanks to the Act, and that it was written, in fact, by Arbuthnot.[5] The pamphlet proposed a scheme for keeping time accurately at sea by placing a clock in a vacuum. Jonathan Betts and Andrew King pointed out in reply to Rogers that the scheme did make some technically complicated and important improvements to contemporary ideas on clock making.[6] Yet, it is also heavily satirical in tone. Thacker opened by addressing his competitors in ‘A Short Epistle to the Longitudinarians’ in which he criticised their schemes and their writing style in exactly the manner which Swift had critiqued hack literature in A Tale of A Tub in 1704, and Pope would later in The Dunciad in 1728. Thacker commented how ‘without Animadversions upon the Attempts of others, I could not swell this to a Six-penny Book, unless I had embellish’d the Recommendation of my new Device with fine Metaphors, and clever Comparisons … I might indeed, with the Printer’s good Management, have made four Pages of the Commissioners Names in Capitals, and then have humbly submitted my Essay.’[7] The whole pamphlet is then made up of digressions and over-inflated statements, taking pages to get to the invention itself. It ends with the comment that ‘I am satisfy’d that my Reader begins to think that the Phonometers, Pyrometers, Selenometers, Heliometers, Barometers, and all the Meters are not worthy to be compar’d with my Chronometer.’[8] Interestingly, he makes one of the first uses of the word chronometer. I think that Arbuthnot probably created ‘Thacker’ in partnership with another author (as the Scriblerians did with other more specialist satires), possibly the clockmaker William Derham who was also an FRS, shared many views with Arbuthnot, and also started to use the term chronometer at this time. But, that is a subject for another blog post.
[1] John Arbuthnot,
An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p.49
[2] The Correspondence of Dr John Arbuthnot (ed.) Angus Ross (Munich, 2006); Arbuthnot to Jonathan Swift, London (17 July 1714) pp.191-2
[3] Ibid., Jonathan Swift to Arbuthnot, Letcombe (25 Jul 1714) pp.195
[4] Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (ed.) Charles Kirby-Miller (Oxford, 1988), p.167
[5] Pat Rogers, ‘Longitude forged: How an eighteenth-century hoax has taken in Dava Sobel and other historians,’ in
Times Literary Supplement (12 November 2008)
[6] Jonathan Betts and Andrew King, ‘Jeremy Thacker: Longitude imposter? in
Times Literary Supplement Letters (18 March 2009)
[7] Jeremy Thacker,
The Longitudes Examin’d (London, 1714), p.11
[8] Ibid., p.23
Because last month’s Maskelyne Symposium, on 14-15 October, has now happened, the details have been taken off the NMM’s website. For posterity, therefore, I thought it would be wise to record details of the programme here. All-in-all, though, I thought the event went very well: many thanks to all the speakers, those who helped me organise things and to everyone who came to hear more.
On the afternoon of Friday 14 October, we began with a brief view of some of the Maskelyne-related objects that came to the National Maritime Museum in 2009. I began with a quick tour of the new instroductory gallery, Voyagers, which includes objects related to James Cook, John Harrison, Larcum Kendall and, of course, Maskelyne. These last included the pastel portrait attributed to John Russell, Maskelyne’s medal from the Institut Français on becoming one of their few Foreign Members and an orrery by William Jones that is said by the Maskelyne family to have belonged to Nevil’s daughter Margaret.
This was followed by two further session, one introducing the Maskelyne manuscript collection, led by Richard in the new Caird Library, and the other showing of Maskelyne’s observing suit (see picture in this post) and his wife’s wedding dress, led by Amy Miller.
The next day was the Symposium proper, with the following talks, after coffee and an introduction by Richard:
- Revisiting and Revising Maskelyne’s Reputation (Dr Rebekah Higgitt, NMM Curator of History of Science and Technology)
- Visualizing the Maskelynes (Dr Jenny Gaschke, NMM Curator of Fine Art)
- ‘The Rev. Mr. Nevil Maskelyne, F.R.S. and Myself’: the Mathematical Career of Maskelyne’s Sometime Assistant, Robert Waddington (Professor Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford)
- Object talks by Rory McEvoy (NMM Curator of Horology) in the Royal Observatory’s Horology Workshop
- Calculating the Nautical Almanac: Maskelyne and his Human Computers (Dr Mary Croarken, independent scholar)
- The Maskelynes at Home (Dr Amy Miller, NMM Curator of Decorative Arts)
It was interesting that our ‘celebration’ of Maskelyne took a somewhat sideways view of the man, seen as much through the lives and work of his collaborators and colleagues or the eyes of biographers and artists as through his own writings. The man of science was discussed as a man at home, which is apt when home and work were so closely entwined at the Royal Observatory, and the physical remains of his life took as much pride of place as his intellectual heritage. Here was a man who was both “le dieu de l’astronomie” (to Delambre, according to Lalande), and who was short and stout with a penchant for dairy products.
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.
The project team have certainly been making the most of the conference scene recently. Last week saw some of us spending a thought-provoking two days at the National Maritime Museum, at their ‘Peopling the Past‘ conference scheduled to coincide with the opening of the new Sammy Ofer Wing.
Through five panels, and a wide range of papers the conference considered how we can use museum collections to tell engaging stories about the past. Two over-arching questions emerged for me. The first considered which people we should put in the past that we display. Inevitably, we have more objects and archives related to celebrity figures, but we increasingly want to tell the story of the ‘ordinary’ man, the silent voices of the past’s real lived experience. This theme raised further considerations over how we harness and portray community and global narratives from a potentially small object-base; how we balance the authority we want to put behind our displays with the more engaging personality that can emerge from engaging wider communities in the curatorial process. Likewise, how do we portray controversial voices, discussing issues which are now politically incorrect, controversial, or upsetting.
The second, related question, dealt with how museums can use new media to tell such stories. This allows them to engage with wider and different audiences, and to tell stories in potentially more engaging and complex ways, but also runs the risk of detracting from the objects which are the museum’s raison d’être. With increasingly complex technology there is the danger of museums becoming a more elaborate television programme. Papers considered crowd sourcing of information to tell stories for the ‘silent voices’ and engaging community groups to tell stories from personal perspectives. For me, this also raised the interesting idea of sourcing objects and archival material through new media, allowing, in fact, more ‘silent stories’ to be told. Particularly interesting papers, on both themes, considered projects at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Imperial War Museum and Museum of London.
The questions raised also threw light on the NMM’s new ‘Voyagers‘ gallery in the Sammy Ofer wing which now acts as an introduction to the museum. It answers both questions raised by the conference particularly well I thought. Along the back wall of the gallery, a single long case uses key objects and characters to tell a story of maritime experience through seven emotions: joy, pride, sadness etc. It features both celebrities and lesser-known figures. In front of this, a huge wave construction weaves across the gallery, projected with key words in wave patterns, and with images from the archives. It is accompanied by sounds of the sea. I feel this gallery uses new media and ‘silent voices’ to particularly successful effect, and was the perfect complement to such a stimulating conference.
The Longitude Project blog will be hosting the 38th edition of the monthly history of science blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders, on 16 August. In keeping with the project, this edition will be a ‘Georgian Science’ special, focusing on science in the long eighteenth century.
Please write and look out for great history of science posts and submit them at the Blog Carnival site or to the project’s contact email address, shown on the side bar, by 15 August.
Posts on other periods and topics will, of course, also be accepted.
Last Saturday, Alexi, Sophie and I presented some of our research from the project at a session called ‘New Perspectives on the Board of Longitude’ at the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science. Our session and paper abstracts can be found here on my ‘other’ blog, where I also posted some thoughts on the conference as a whole.
I can say that the other two presented great papers, and that we had some good discussion in the session. Because of the interests of some of the audience, this particularly focused on the Board in the 19th century, with questions and comments about the political scene, ideologies of public service and the role of Humphry Davy (President of the Royal Society and, therefore, ex officio member of the Board).
Top marks for a beautiful PowerPoint presentation (plus authoritatively-presented evidence and argument) go to Alexi. Top marks for enthusiasm and first grown-up conference presentation to Sophie! And a special prize to Simon Naylor for chairing the session, having already enthused us with a paper on 19th-century meteorology and the Magnetic Crusade in the previous session.
For the past couple of days the project team has been at a conference on Joseph Banks, which was held at the National Maritime Museum.
For various reasons, I ended up giving a paper there on the later life of the Board of Longitude, in which I tried to emphasise the dominance of Banks and Nevil Maskelyne in the affairs of the Board. If you want to hear some more incisive work on the Board’s later history, however, you should go to the BSHS Annual Conference in a few weeks time.
Fortunately, I found one great quote to begin my talk with. It was particularly interesting because it tied in nicely with an earlier blog about the nature and location of Board meetings in which I used an account by William Harrison (John Harrisons‘ son) of a meeting in the 1760s.
Inspired by reading Greg Dening’s wonderful The Death of William Gooch, I had a look at Gooch’s original letters to his parents, which have lots about his appointment as astronomer to George Vancouver’s voyage to the north-coast of America and his voyage to meet that expedition. Sadly, he was killed on Hawaii before meeting up with Vancouver’s ships.
The piece I found was written to his parents on 11 June 1791 as he sat in the Admiralty Office waiting to be called in to a Board meeting to have his appointment confirmed:
The Board of Longitude are now met an[d] I’m now in an antechamber expecting to be call’d in, in a few minutes… Dr. Maskelyne will receive my salary for me (by power of attorney) during my absence, & he tells me he will order & make the best use of it for me; which I thought was a very kind offer. – Just before I began I saw & spoke to Dr. Smith. – Sr. Jos. Banks pass’d me just before that, & gave me a sly look as if he had been inform’d that I was the Person to be appointed. – however they will all be inform’d presently.
Dr Smith, incidentally, was the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford.
There were also lots of interesting papers at the conference, two of which I got particularly excited about.
The first was by Jane Wess of the Science Museum, who showed through very careful research that the lunar distance method seems to have been very little used in the late-18th century. The main reason, she argued, is that it was just so complicated to do – a fair point. The evidence she produced was absolutely convincing, and it’s certainly a really important point to bear in mind. We hope she publishes her work soon.
A second fascinating paper was by Jacob Orrje from Uppsala University and the University of Cambridge. He was talking about a Swedish astronomer, Bengt Ferrner, who came to London in 1759-60 and wrote a diary of the trip. This included meeting many of the leading astronomers, mathematicians and instrument-makers of the day. As well as going to see John Harrison (although he didn’t say much about that), he paid a visit to the workshop of Jeremiah Sisson, where he saw Christopher Irwin’s marine chair, designed for viewing the satellites of Jupiter on board a ship. Ferrner, however, seems to have been worried about the stability of Irwin’s device – rightly, as it turned out. I hope we’ll have more to say about that in a future blog. More importantly, it would be great to see Jacob do something with this wonderful primary material.
Maskelyne’s trousers have again inspired a reconsideration of the man, this time in a nice story by Stephanie Pain for the New Scientist. While I am not sure that owning a funny suit necessarily works as proof that Maskelyne was a nice guy, it seems to be the case that the survival of this unique item reminds us that the historical character was once a living, breathing person. Clothing is particularly intimate and, of course, once encased a completely three-dimensional being. That in itself is enough to encourage readers, visitors and writers to look beyond black and white versions of the past and to understand that even the long-dead were once individuals with realistically complex personalities and motivations, which is, surely, a Good Thing.
Pain did not, of course, leave the work to the trousers alone, and I was particularly glad that she found room to mention the ’mathematicians’ mutiny’, as an occasion that complicates the idea of Maskelyne as a represenative of a unified ”scientific elite”, against which Harrison had to do battle. The mathematicians in question attempted, in 1784, to oust the Royal Society’s president Joseph Banks. They painted themselves as “the scientific part of the society”, countering a snobbish generalist with no understanding of mathematics and the need for practical mathematicians to have representation on the Society’s Council. Maskelyne was identified with those who needed to earn a living through their skills in practical mathematics, and against the coterie surrounding Banks.
(Perhaps it was leaked knowledge of Maskelyne’s funny trousers that lost them the vote….)
I hope that there will be further opportunities to create a good, rounded sense of Maskelyne and his times at the Museum’s symposium on 15 October, marking this year’s Maskelyne bicentenar. The programme and booking details are now available online. Speakers include NMM curators, who will reflect on the surviving manuscripts and objects relating to Maskelyne and his family, as well as members of the Board of Longitude project team and external speakers. Attendees will also have the opportunity to see some of the collections in store and in the Museum’s new library and archive the previous afternoon (Friday 14 October).
I will be starting the day with a brief look at how Maskelyne’s reputation has fared in biographies and histories since his death. While he was certainly painted badly (or moaned about) in his lifetime by some who felt hard done by, such as William Harrison, Thomas Earnshaw and Reuben Burrow, he was generally respected and obituaries naturally sang his praises. I am hoping to pinpoint the moment when it all turned sour, probably as a result of the renewal of interest in Harrison in the early 20th century. I am beginning to see, though, that my talk will also have give some time to reflections on the 2011 Maskelynian rehabilitation!
With just one week until I go to Purton to take part in their Nevil Maskelyne bicentenary celebrations, I am beginning to gather together everything I’ll need. Fortunately, I can use Maskelyne himself to help me. In September 1794, the Astronomer Royal wrote himself some notes (now preserved in Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre) on what to take on one of his regular trips to Wiltshire. This is what he took:
Hearsley’s abstract Tables of taxes
Paterson’s roads & maps of Counties
Tea; Wine; brandy; Rum; Cork-screw;
Decanters; Buchan’s domestic medicine;
Lewis’s Dispensatory; Prayer books;
Map of Wiltshire; Wood’s Essence for
meat and fish; Worstead boot-stockings;
Flannel waistcoat; Spare suit of cloths;
spare wig; great Coat; Boots, spurs
and whip; gloves; oyl-skin hood; spare
pair of shoes; umbrellas; Paper
pen and ink, wax and wafers, &
pen-knife; knife with instruments;
money-weighing machine. Rasor,
strop, brush, shaving cloth; Books of
amusement; Papers about estates &
leases of the estates; Papers about
the board of Longitude; maps of the
seat of war; Messuage cards; 2 pair
of buckles; 6S stamp & other stamps;
wax-candle; clothes brush; Cheshire
&
parmesan cheese; funnel; ounce
measure; lamp-wicks; quills; pens;
Ivory folder; silver tea spoons & table
spoons; pencils; silver scales;
Sermons; sermon-book & band. Chariot
stool. Pocket-farrier. Small quadt & compass
and measuring wheel.
For our research project, it’s interesting to see him taking his Board of Longitude papers with him – perhaps not surprising, since he and Joseph Banks were very much running the Board by 1794. As for me, I guess it just tells me to remember to take the notes for my talk (it’s a kind of sermon, after all) and a change of clothes. I can probably manage without a money-weighing machine, but he’s right that cheese is always needed.
