This guest post is by James Poskett, an MPhil student at the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge. The air there is evidently so full of all things longitude, that James found his way, by accident or design, toward a sounding machine in the Whipple Museum made by Edward Massey, a man who had a number of dealings with the Board of Longitude.

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“Could you, as far as your information of the depth of water enabled you to judge, have got near enough to those ships to have destroyed them?” It was on this question that the court martial of Lord Gambier depended. He was accused of failing to follow up an attack on the French fleet at the Battle of the Basque Roads in 1809. A number of French ships had run ashore and Gambier feared for the safety of the British fleet in following them too close to the shoals, HMS Imperieuse having run aground on the night of April 12th.

It’s easy to think of navigation as all about, well, navigation. But my current research picks up on incidents such as Lord Gambier’s court martial and considers other ways of thinking about the history of depth measurement at sea (or sounding, as it is known). My aim is to show how shifting approaches to naval discipline interacted with the introduction of mechanical sounding equipment.

To start with, I’ve been looking at a brass sounding machine patented by a Mr Edward Massey in 1802. It consists of two numbered dials, unmistakably the product of Massey’s watchmaking background, along with a rotor. This machine would have been attached to a line and thrown overboard, the rotor spinning the dials before locking at the seabed. On hauling in, the depth could be read off the dials as one would read a clock.

Massey’s wasn’t the first mechanical sounding design but it was the first to be widely adopted by the Royal Navy. In 1807, following a recommendation from the Board of Longitude, the Navy Board ordered 500 of Massey’s machines followed by another 1250 between 1808 and 1811. That’s at least one machine for every Royal Navy ship in commission during the Napoleonic Wars.

What’s intriguing about the adoption of Massey’s machine is how it both relied upon and reinforced new approaches to discipline developing within the Royal Navy at the time. To take one example, naval authorities felt that negligence was hard to identify given that navigational practices often happened out of sight. Prior to the introduction of Massey’s machine, sounding was a case in point. Groups of sailors arranged themselves on the outside of the ship with a lead and line (a simple coil of rope, knotted at set intervals, with a weight attached). This line would then be thrown overboard, out of sight of the officers on the quarterdeck. As the line was hauled in, one of the sailors would either observe or feel for the number of knots. The depth would then by relayed to an officer on deck in the form of a song, “by the mark ten” for ten fathoms and such.

All this changed with the introduction of Massey’s machine. The average sailor in the Royal Navy did not have experience in reading clock-like dials. For this reason, when Massey’s machine was hauled in, it would be taken to the quarterdeck so that an officer could read and record the depth measured. This simple change in practice made the results of sounding more visible to the officers; they no longer had to rely on a song emanating from out of sight. It also made sure that the officer on the quarterdeck took greater personal responsibility for the depths recorded, something the Admiralty considered crucial if they were to successfully court martial disobedient commanders. (Lord Gambier, incidentally, got off the hook.)

Over the summer, I’m going to be taking up a research internship at the National Maritime Museum, exploring in further detail how other sounding devices slotted in to early-nineteenth century naval discipline. At the time, indiscipline was also considered to be a problem related to travel, court martials citing ease of access to Caribbean rum as a cause of lawlessness in the Lesser Antilles. With this in mind, I’ll also be looking at how attempts to keep order in different regions influenced the adoption and use of different sounding machines. Which device faired best in the hands of a drunken sailor still remains to be seen.

[Images: E. Massey, Sounding Machine, NMM NAV0673; 'Measuring the depth of water from a frigate', Wikimedia Commons.]

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.

While much of this blog has been squarely set in London - in and between the Royal Society, Admiralty, Board of Longitude, Royal Observatory and instrument-makers’ workshops - we have also from time to time strayed out to the Pacific or Arctic, following Captain Cook in 1769 and the move of the 1818 Longitude Act to incorporate previous rewards for locating the North West Passage. What was found in Arctic by John Ross, William Parry and their crews was not, of course, the long-sought route to the Pacific but data, specimens and a testing ground for new techniques and instruments.

While it would make no sense to suggest that such things would not have been accessed without the availability of chronometers and Nautical Almanacs, these expeditions and their collections are necessarily part of our story. There is the same confluence of people and interests, and the longitude technologies added to the precision of, and confidence in, the data brought home. While botanical specimens seem a long way from testing and using navigational instruments, they represent the way in which expeditions were helping to bring the faraway and unfamiliar near, just as they allowed the possibility of taking well-known things long distances. They each reveal the ambition of knowing, recording, collecting, measuring, cataloguing and, essentially, stating a claim for things in the world.

In thinking about how to represent these things in exhibitions, I have recently had a look at some of the botanical specimens collected in the Arctic on Parry’s expeditions. It was a great treat to see inside the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and to see a range of specimens that, in some cases, closely represented how they were originally arranged by the Arctic voyagers and, in others, demonstrated how working Herbaria incorporate historical specimens into their modern taxonomic arrangements. I have written another post elsewhere which muses on some of what such collections can tell historians, and with another image of a set of specimens from the Parry collection.

The image below represents what happens to specimens when they are incorporated into the Herbarium proper. Two specimens have been cut from their original paper mounts and placed on the same piece of paper of a standard size, used across the Herbarium. They are not type specimens – these are marked out with a red stripe on the paper – but exist as a representation of a species in a particular time and place. The bare historical information remains: the specimen on the left came from the Rocky Mountains (I see the names Drummond and Harkes(?) but am unsure who these people were or when this expedition occurred), the one on the right was collected at Melville Island on Parry’s first voyage – the place that British Arctic explorers first overwintered.

It was clear from the Edinburgh Herbarium alone that a large number of specimens were brought back from the Arctic on these voyages. The British Museum was the primary repository – its plant collections now part of the Natural History Museum – but duplicate, triplicate and more specimens could be sent to other Herbaria and collectors. This was not only because the surgeons, the chief naturalists on such voyages, were assiduous in their work, but because many other officers were collecting too. One of the Parry collections was put together by Lt William Hooper, the Purser, but across the whole Herbarium many other individual collectors can be identified. In some cases brief field notes, recording the scarcity or otherwise of the plant, have also been kept, revealing adherence to Parry’s scientific instructions to write down as much as possible.

Despite this, only one 1820s specimen that I saw (for which, sadly, I have lost the photograph) attempted to record a precise location. Ironically, perhaps, it gives Latitude to the second but the space next to ‘Longitude’ was left blank. TBC, perhaps.

Following a previous guest post, Hannah Salisbury has sent us some further thoughts on Ralph Walker and the compass he submitted to the Board of Longitude:

The invention of his variation compass was just one episode in Walker’s busy and varied life; as well as being an inventor, he was a mariner, a Jamaica planter and in later life an engineer, working principally on the construction of London’s new wet docks. When I first began researching Walker’s life, these career changes all seemed rather sudden and disconnected, yet during my research, it became clear that there were common threads running through each of them.

Designing the West India Docks was Walker’s first engineering job, begun in 1795. They were the biggest project of their kind in the world at the time.

'An elevated view of the West India Docks', by William Daniell, 1802 (NMM PAI7124)

Improving navigation and the accommodation of shipping were by no means isolated pursuits for Walker. He keenly felt that in order to compete with other nations in trade and in war, Britain needed to have a strong navy and merchant fleet. Walker’s career at sea had given him an international scope, and he saw Britain within the context of international networks of war, trade and diplomacy. This understanding of Walker’s political worldview provides a backdrop to his work as an inventor and engineer.

Our best insight into Ralph’s political worldview comes from two letters he wrote to Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, then Secretary of State for War, in 1795 and 1796, the first of which was addressed from the Jamaica Coffee House, a haunt of West India merchants and captains. Walker was clearly a staunch supporter of the British system of monarchical government, which he described as ‘the pride of England, and the admiration of all Europe for Ages’. He had no time for the politics of the French Revolution, referring to them at different times as ‘pernicious principles’ and ‘the French Disorder’.

During the French Revolutionary Wars, Walker was clearly concerned to protect British interests. Walker feared that the French:

will soon become our superior on the Seas, and shut up our fleets in our Ports and sweep the Seas of our Commerce, Deprive us of our Colonies, and put a total stagnation to our Trade, which in a short time would turn the current of commerce into their Ports, and our manufacturers would be obliged to emigrate to a Country, where taxes and the price of living and labour low. Then adieu to the Trade of Great Britain, and the payment of the interest of the National Debt.

For Walker, the only way of avoiding this dire fate was to enhance Britain’s naval strength. Britain, he suggested, should withdraw land forces from the continent, and instead ‘strain every nerve to enable us to keep our superiority at Sea’.

It is not just Walker’s political views, but also his philosophical standpoint which is relevant to his efforts to improve navigation. His (flawed) theory that magnetism followed regular patterns was part of the Enlightenment attempt to discover ordered, harmonious rules governing the natural world. As he explained in his Treatise on Magnetism, presented to the Board of Longitude along with his compass, he believed that these laws were provided by God in order for man to make sense of the world. Once they had been discovered, they could be used to ‘colonize and carry on commerce for our benefit and happiness’.

Walker was clearly aware of the links between navigation, commerce and conquest, and he seems to have felt no disquiet about the colonisation of foreign lands, or about the use of slave labour. As a Jamaica planter, he seems to have been more concerned about the disruption caused by rebellious slaves rather than their living conditions. In his 1796 letter to Dundas, Walker complained about the problems caused by disruptive slaves, which had cost the white settlers over £300,000.

Although care needs to be taken in extrapolating too much from the fragmentary evidence available, a good deal can be understood about Walker’s political worldview, and he can be placed firmly within literate eighteenth-century coffee-house political culture. For Walker, Britain’s security and prosperity depended upon its navy and upon its commerce, and its commerce depended upon successful maritime navigation, an endeavour which Walker’s compass aimed to improve. The variation compass which Walker submitted to the Board of Longitude is, therefore, symbolic not only of technical advances in navigation, but of the political, economic and cultural forces driving those advances.

It was difficult to know, when starting out on this blog, how much we should attempt to do some scene-setting and how much we should just attempt to reflect the research and activities coming out of the project. By and large, we plumped for the latter, although posts like Alexi’s on Maskelyne were a useful way of laying out some of the basics of our story. There does, however, seem to be a place for a post that lays out the reasons why we, as a group, will always refer to financial rewards from the Board of Longitude and not to the Longitude Prize.

I have felt the need for such a post as a result of recent discussions about challenge prizes in science and technology, which came up in my earlier post and in an interview I did for BBC Radio 4′s World Tonight (to be broadcast on 26 March). In addition, understanding this basic point is a very good way of seeing that the story of longitude in the 18th century is not only about John Harrison, and that timekeepers were not an instantaneously adopted and complete solution.

The immediate cause of this post is a discussion that developed on Twitter surrounding that old question: “Did Harrison win the longitude prize?”. The Museum has previously answered this, although this account, like the actual events, tends less to answer the question and more to raise debates about whether the Commissioners of Longitude were justified in withholding the largest payment until further conditions were fulfilled. This all boils down to interpretation of the original Act – in which the Commissioners were adjudicators of whether any trialled method was “practicable and useful at Sea” – and has been much discussed.

Although there are some fascinating issues to be explored, the question is a red herring: as my title suggests, there was no such thing as the Longitude Prize. From the beginning, as well as using the term “reward” not “prize”, the Longitude Act offered a range of sums depending on the accuracy achieved. Later on, with subsequent acts, the possible rewards proliferated, initially with the realisation that Harrison needed to be supported with ‘grants’ of money while developing his clocks and, by the 1770s, with knowledge that a handful of sea watches was not a complete solution and that benefit would be gained by offering further rewards for improvements to techniques and hardware.

Derek Howse’s article on the Finances of the Board of Longitude reveals what was spent by the Commissioners. Between 1714 and 1828, rewards accounted for only 33% of spending, while overheads (23%), expeditions (15%) and publications (29%) made up the rest. The total spent on rewards was £52,534, of which £22,000 went to Harrison. This sum was made up of a number of payments between 1737 and 1764 to improve and test his timekeepers, £7500 paid in 1765 (a further sum being on offer to take this up to a £20,000 reward if two more sea watches could be made, one by Harrison and one by another maker) and £8750 was awarded by an act of parliament in 1773.

It’s a matter of interpretation as to whether this process constitutes receiving the maximum reward. A number of the payments to Harrison had required additional acts (in 1762, 1754 and 1765) and, ultimately, all the money came from government as a result of the original Act of Parliament. However, the final payment did not appear in the Board’s accounts, which confirms the fact that this final move took place outside the Commissioners’ decision-making process.

More interesting to me is who received the other £30,534. Happily, Howse’s article lists all the reward recipients in an appendix. The bulk of the rewards post-date 1765, when the Board played its hand and divided out rewards between the two successful methods, timekeeping and lunar distances. While Harrison received his £7500 in October 1765, in May:

• Leonhard Euler was paid £300 “for Theorums furnished by him to assist Professor Mayer in the Construction of Lunar tables”
• Maria Mayer was paid £3000 as a posthumous reward to her husband Tobias “for his having constructed a Set of Lunar Tables” and to her for making them property of the Commissioners
• Catherine Price, Edmond Halley‘s daughter, was paid £100 for handing over several of Halley’s manuscripts, which the Commissioners believed “may lead to discoveries useful to navigation”.

While Harrison’s work was the cause of the Commissioners beginning to meet, keep minutes and spend money, there were other pre-1765 pay-outs. Christopher Irwin received £600 in 1762-3 for his marine chair (designed to allow observations of Jupiter’s satellites on board ship) and way back in 1741, William Whiston was paid £500 “For procuring a new Sett of Astronomical Instruments for finding out the Longitude on the Coasts of this Kingdom with the Variations of the Needle and for enabling him to make Observations with them”.

Harrison was certainly the biggest single beneficiary of the Longitude Acts, but balanced against that are the many involved in lunar distances. There are the rewards to Euler and Mayer, but 1765 also saw the beginning of investment in the computing work (£35,559 to 1828) and publication of the Nautical Almanac. There had already been expenditure on lunar-distance-related hardware, salaries for trials and expeditions and later sums were paid out for work on astronomical tables, for example £1537 between 1770-93 for Charles Mason‘s efforts and £1,200 to Josef de Mendoza y Rios for his longitude tables in 1814. 

Post-1765 there were numerous rewards, mostly of tens or hundreds of pounds. The largest, after Harrison’s, was divvied up among the officers and crew of HMS Hecla and Griper in 1820, who received £5000 for reaching 110°W within the Article Circle, after discovery of the North West Passage became one of the Board’s interests in the 1818 Act. The Arctic voyages also led to Edward Sabine being given £1000 in 1826 for his pendulum experiments. Those who helped develop the chronometer as a commercial product, John Arnold, Thomas Earnshaw and Thomas Mudge, were each rewarded with £3000.

Although there was in the 18th-century a sense of competitiveness and occasional reference to a longitude prize (of which more in a later post), suggesting that there was a single pay-out that Harrison did or did not win misses both the richness of the history of the Board of Longitude and obscures the way that longitude solutions were developed and used.

We’ve recently been revisiting the 68 volumes in the RGO 14 collection of papers from the Board of Longitude which are now at the Cambridge University Library, as part of the new project to digitize these and other longitude-related documents. As has been a recurrent theme, these papers are far from complete or representative, being weighted towards the later decades and having been collected, reordered and bound by the Astronomer Royal George Airy thirty years after the abolition of the Board. However, they contain much valuable and interesting material, both from the lifetime of the Commissioners and — as Katy showed in a recent post — from Airy’s later sorting and binding of these records.

One of the interesting aspects of this collection to me is that it encompasses such a variety of types of materials including informal notes and calculations, letters and petitions, meeting minutes (draft as well as finalized) and other official documents, financial accounts, accounts of and records from astronomical events and sea voyages, and so on. I’ve recently been looking at some of the volumes of financial records (in total RGO 14/2 and 14/15-21), which also include some pocket expense books and ‘cheque books’ from key actors in the later history of the Board. These not only add to the information available to us today on the activities and financial dealings of the Board, but also reflect how much of both were tied up in interpersonal ties and communications, and in the actions and decision-making of key Commissioners and employees – especially the Astronomer Royal and the Secretary. Some of the small marbled books of accounts (like that shown above) are not signed but were presumably kept by the Secretary, who was a paid employee first requested by the Commissioners in 1762 and approved of by the King the following year.

Inscriptions in or on other pocket books and ‘cheque books’ specify that they belonged to key actors including the long-time Astronomer Royal and highly active Commissioner Nevil Maskelyne and the Secretary Thomas Young. Young served as the final Secretary of the Board but also as a Superintendent of the computing and publication of the annual Nautical Almanac, from the passage of the new longitude Act of 1818 until the abolition of the Board ten years later. As Sophie has mentioned, he was a successful ‘civil servant’ as well as being an enthusiast of Egyptology and optics and Foreign Secretary to the Royal Society – of which then-dominant Commissioner Joseph Banks was of course President.

In RGO 14/18 there are two of Maskelyne’s small marbled pocket books, one of which is pictured above. These are interesting because they record expenses which the Astronomer Royal incurred in posting and receiving correspondence relevant to the Board between 1783 and 1806, for which he was eventually reimbursed. (Until 1840, it was typically the recipient who had to pay to claim a letter!) These records reinforce the view provided by many other types of evidence of just how active in, and central to, the Board activities and financial transactions the Astronomer was during this period – and how much of this business was conducted betwixt individuals rather than at the periodic communal meetings.

There are various books related to Thomas Young as well including his small white leather pocket book for 1819 to 1828 in RGO 14/2, and his ‘cheque book’ (i.e. cheque stubs which Airy had mounted – as seen above) for 1819 to 1823 in RGO 14/8. The pocket book contains one other, somewhat poignant piece of evidence – handwritten minutes from the 1829 meeting of the ‘Members of the Committee of accounts of the late Board of Longitude’ to disperse the funds which still remained in the name of the Board after its official abolition.

Photo credits: Alexi Baker / Cambridge University Library.

Hannah Salisbury undertook a research internship at the National Maritime Museum in 2011 and has sent us this post based on her work, which revealed the story behind an unusual-looking compass now in the NMM collections:

By the 1790s, after decades of development, finding longitude at sea by using timekeepers or the lunar distance method was finally beginning to seem a practical reality. Yet these methods still had their problems, and there was scope for alternative suggestions.

Ralph Walker, by Johann Eckstein and William Ridley, 1803 (NMM PAD3061)

In 1793 a man named Ralph Walker (1749-1824) appeared before the Board of Longitude with a compass of his own invention, which he promised would solve all of their longitude-based problems (and others besides). It was a grand claim for his instrument and method.

This was Walker’s first foray into designing navigational instruments. The son of a Scottish farmer, Walker went to sea in 1768 aged 19, and quickly became master of the merchant vessels on which he was sailing, trading to the West Indies, the Baltic and America. In 1783 he settled as a planter in Jamaica with his Irish wife Jane; making use of slave labour, they most probably grew sugar or coffee. It was also in Jamaica that Walker built a prototype of his compass, mostly out of wood.

The Governor of Jamaica was so impressed with the compass that he procured Walker a passage to London on the Providence under Captain William Bligh, to enable Walker to present his invention to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude. Leaving Jane and their seven children behind, Walker arrived in London in August 1793. It would be six or seven years before he saw them again.

Ralph Walker’s meridional compass, about 1793 (NMM NAV0263)

To carry out Walker’s method for finding longitude, a mariner would use the sundial attachment on the compass to align the instrument to the true north-south plane. Comparing this reading with the direction in which the compass needle was pointing gave the magnetic variation. This could, in theory, be used to discover the longitude, by finding where supposed ‘magnetic meridians’ intersected with the observed latitude. Walker believed that his method was simpler than lunar distances, cheaper than chronometers, and deserving of a substantial reward from the Longitude Commisioners.

Initial reactions may well have given Walker cause for hope. The results of trials were generally favourable; Admiral Macbride was so impressed with the compass that he ordered one to be made for his own use. However, the compass did not win glowing reviews all round. Nevil Maskelyne was particularly damning in his judgement, writing that the compass was neither particularly innovative nor useful.

Reporting to the Board on 6 December 1794, Maskelyne criticised both the compass and the theory behind it. The compass relied on the sun to work; on a dull day, it would be useless, and even on too bright a day its functioning would be compromised. Problems were also likely to be caused by the presence of iron on board ships, and Maskelyne thought that Walker’s innovation of placing the compass needle on its side was likely to cause it to warp. Lastly, in the ‘present improved state of navigation’, Maskelyne did not consider that the idea of finding longitude through magnetic variation had anything to offer.

Nevertheless, the Board did meet with Walker several times between 1793 and 1796, and sent his compass for repeated trials. Unfortunately for Walker, his longitude solution was indeed doomed to failure. He had oversimplified the laws of terrestrial magnetism, and in any case the presence of iron on ships would always be a problem for taking compass readings.

Although the compass was not considered a viable longitude solution, it was seen as an improvement on other compasses then available, and this seems to be the light in which the Board saw it. Eventually, in June 1795, after repeated pleas for justice from Walker, the Board awarded him £200. The compasses proved popular with naval men, and were still in use in the 1850s. Nevertheless, only four are traceable today, one of which is held by the NMM.

Although Walker would remain interested in the fate of his compasses, his main life’s work was actually as an engineer. He began this new career in 1795, his first work being the West India Docks – a quite remarkable achievement given that the docks were the largest construction of their kind in the world, and that Walker apparently had no engineering experience whatsoever. Over the remaining 27 years of his life, Walker worked on several other dock schemes, as well as harbour improvements, canals and the East London Water Works, and launched the career of his nephew James Walker (1781-1862), who went on to become one of the best-known civil engineers of his day.

Walker was a clever and determined man, who took a great risk leaving his family in Jamaica while he took a chance on winning a longitude prize. Although he was not as successful in this as he had hoped, it led him to London and new work furthering Britain’s commercial and maritime interests through dock construction.

Richard is not the only one who has been travelling this week. I attended a colloquium in Paris looking at steps to getting more of Europe’s, and the world’s, observatories recognised as World Heritage sites (currently only a few observatories make the list, usually as part of a larger area: the Royal Observatory in Maritime Greenwich, Pulkovo Observatory in the St Petersburg inscription, Edinburgh’s old Royal Observatory falls within the Edinburgh Old and New Towns inscription, Jantar Mantar in Jaipur and some ancient archaeological sites). One proposal is to suggest a route or intinerary of observatories which, collectively, can be considered outstanding world heritage. Such transboundary, multiple-site inscriptions have already been made by UNESCO, for example in the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route through France and Spain and, intruigingly, the Struve Geodetic Arc.

The meeting was held at the Institut Astrophysique de Paris, which is right next to the Paris Observatory. I stayed in the IAP for one night, and could see the historic observatory, and the sadly delapidated equatorial building, from my window. The main building dates back to 1667 and the institution, of course, has multiple links with Greenwich and the story of longitude on land and at sea. Perhaps most important were the attempts – by astronomical observations, trigonometical survey and rocket signals - to establish the exact difference in longitude between Greenwich and Paris, so allowing accurate comparisons of data from the two observatories and geodetic surveys by both nations.



Many of the characters we’ve met in this blog before were involved in these attempts. The 18th-century projects, led by Cassini de Thury, Joseph Banks, William Roy and the Board of Ordnance, can be read about in this article by Jean-Pierre Martin and Anita McConnell. These surveys were remeasured by François Arago and Henry Kater in the 1820s, and John Herschel and Edward Sabine used a chain of observing stations and visual signals (aka rockets) to establish the distance in 1825, on behalf of the Board of Longitude.



Reminders were thick on the ground around the observatory in Paris. The IAP is on Boulevard Arago, where an empty plinth commemorates the astronomer, and the Observatory’s entrance is accessed via Avenue de l’Observatoire and Rue Cassini (after Cassini I). Although I forgot to look for it, Paris has also marked the Paris Meridian with the Arago Medallions, exactly 9′ 6/10″ away from Greenwich’s meridian – according to Sabine, Herschel and the Board of Longitude.



Just imagine trying to create a Board of Longitude-themed trail! It would be a long trip.

Matthew Paskins of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL came to a project workshop last week and has written this guest post.

Last week’s Board of Longitude project workshop, ‘All a-Board’, raised several significant issues about the relationship between the eighteenth-century British state and expertise. Although it’s an unavoidable term, ‘expertise’ had to be said between gritted teeth: it is not always clear what was meant by this concept in this period. There are significant questions about what exactly is meant by expertise and how to relate it to broader bureaucratic structures. Etymological dictionaries suggest that English did not entertain ‘expertise’ as such, or a group of people called ‘experts’, until the mid 1820s at the earliest. The function may have existed, of course, without the precise modern term, but three questions remain: was the eighteenth-century ‘expert’ an outsider called in by the state for his special knowledge? Was this the only – or even the typical - form of ‘expertise’ in this period? And what, if anything, does this tell us about the relation between knowledge and the state?

According to recent work by the eighteenth-century historians Julian Hoppit and Joanna Innes, the answer to the first two questions is no, and the answer to the third is complicated. The main complication is Parliament. Hoppit argues that in attempts to standardise weights and measures - one case where we might expect outside expert knowledge to be brought in, early in the process, given the acknowledged need for an agreed set of standards - a relatively small number of activist Members of Parliament were the drivers behind both data collection and legislative reform. Data collection, he argues, aimed to reveal what practices were in place throughout the kingdom; he equates this with John Howard’s prison reform, the work of the Board of Agriculture, and Thomas Gilbert’s efforts to discover patterns of practice countrywide in pushing for new legislation to provide relief for the poor. In each case regional practice was believed to vary  widely, but to be discoverable. To this we might add the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which from 1754 sought improvements from throughout the country - not in the belief that there was an expert constituency to which the Society had special access, but as a means of coordinating and encouraging regional work. Although by the 1820s Davies Gilbert - a typical committee man - could consider himself instrumental in the reform of weights and measures, and Henry Kater performed a number of important experiments at the behest of the Royal Society, this followed a long period of collecting and coordinating local knowledge, which did not involve anyone who could straightforwardly be defined as an expert.

In other words, there was a complicated relationship between Parliament at the centre and practice in the regions: local and central, and private and public, were not easy to distinguish, as they often mingled with each other in the legislation, lobbying and investigations of Parliament. Joanna Innes summarises the position as follows:

“The eighteenth-century British central executive was scarcely moribund: it demonstrated an impressive capacity to extract tax monies from British subjects, and to sustain global warfare. Ministers also kept an alert eye on home affairs, monitoring the pulse of the national economy, and noting, in order to contain or crush, signs of discontent or disaffection. But they did not pursue a programme of domestic improvement, nor attempt closely to monitor or direct the activities of local government in county or town, except in times of crisis. Local communities were left very much to their own initiative. The opportunity to obtain local legislation, authorizing actions that would not otherwise have been legal, or putting the coercive force of the law behind local projects, represented one of the most powerful resources available to those striving to exercise that initiative.”

That this also makes a significant difference to our picture of the expert can perhaps best be understood in terms of the nature of the expert’s authority. Activist MPs were not tied to particular roles, campaigns or precision practices. Instead, they were ‘charismatics’: campaigns around issues like weights or measures stood or fell with them rather than with the structures to which they belonged. This did change, but it is important not to impose a ‘separate spheres’ argument on eighteenth-century bureaucracy, or to interpret what was actually individual initiative simply in terms of augmenting bureaucracy and stabilised structures.

… ‘The Brick Moon‘, a short story by Edward Everett Hale. I’m telling you this because, although it was published in 1870-71, it contains a nice reference to the Board of Longitude.

Hale’s story is told as if found in the papers of a Captain Frederic Ingham, and describes the construction and accidental launch of an artificial moon – funnily enough, made of bricks. The longitude bit comes right at the start, when he describes why the brick moon was built. It all began, we learn, back at college 30 years earlier:

‘We came across this business of the longitude, and, as we talked, in the gloom and glamour of the old South Middle dining-hall, we had going the usual number of students’ stories about rewards offered by the Board of Longitude for discoveries in that matter, – stories, all of which, so far as I know, are lies. Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough. But as to this business of the longitude it was reserved for Q. [Ingham's brother] to make the happy hit and to explain it to the rest of us.’

The scheme Q. proposes is that they will launch artificial moons into orbits matching the meridians of Greenwich and New Orleans, allowing mariners to determine their longitude by measuring the apparent height of these satellites (and this is said to be the first fictional description of an artificial satellite). It’s sort of similar to finding latitude from the pole star, but a bit full of holes as an idea.

Of course, this is all just an excuse to, launch a group of people into space, in this case by accident. Read the story if you want to know more, though suffice to say it has a heavily moral overtone. But what interested me was finding a specific reference to the Board over 40 years after its demise.

Look forward to more chance finds in future blogs (occasionally).