It may sound like the beginning of a joke, but  it’s just me getting pedantic.

If you look at the title page of the first Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, you’ll see that it’s dated MDCCLXVI, i.e. 1766. Nothing unusual there and one would normally assume that this was indeed the year of publication of the astronomical tables for the following year (and published only just in time to be of any use, it seems).

Among our manuscripts at the NMM, however, we have a letter from Nevil Maskelyne to John Nourse, one of the London booksellers licensed to sell the new work. The letter is dated 3 January 1767 and this is what Maskelyne has to say:

I send you by the bearer your licence from the Board of Longitude to publish the Nautical Almanack & annexed tables. Mess. Richardson & Clarke in Salisbury Court Fleet Street will send you 100 copies in a day or two for present sale; be pleased to have them stitched up in blue paper; or if you think of any properer covering not expensive let me know, that I may acquaint Mess. Mount & Page to make theirs the same. Advertise the ephemeris for the day you shall be ready to publish, & let Mess. Mount & Page know the day that they may be ready at the same time.

Of course, this only matters because the process of getting the book printed and on public sale took things into the next year, but it does mean that we should really take the publication date of the first Nautical Almanac as 1767. Some people have noticed this in the past, I think, but more often than not 1766 is the given date (as most library catalogues will agree).

Now, of course, I’m wondering how many other books weren’t published when they say they were.

Following Becky’s trip across the pond three months ago, I spent last week on another journey to discuss possible overseas venues for the longitude exhibition we are planning.

My trip included the very splendid Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) in Sydney, where there are great links to our project. This was clear from the moment the plane approached the airport, which is in Botany Bay, where Captain James Cook landed in 1770 during his first circumnavigation on HMS Endeavour. Whether you consider what followed as European settlement or colonisation, it was certainly a significant moment in Australian history, and determined where the First Fleet would land in 1788.

Not surprisingly, Cook and the First Fleet feature in the ANMM’s displays, which include material from the Cook voyage and from HMS Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet, which was then wrecked off Norfolk Island in 1790. For our project, the First Fleet’s voyage is significant because it was one of several supported by the Board of Longitude. On this occasion they employed William Dawes as astronomer and lent many instruments to the expedition, including Larcum Kendall’s marine timekeeper K1, which had previously gone with Cook.

I could go on and on with these links: Matthew Flinders, Captain Bligh and the Bounty, for instance, are all important stories in Sydney and to us. But there are also some other less obvious avenues we are exploring in thinking about the exhibition. One of these concerns VOC voyages to the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century. To get to their destination, the Dutch ships would sail east from the Cape of Good Hope until they reckoned it was time to head north to what is now Indonesia. The problem came in estimating that east-west position, which is where some came to grief, most famously the Batavia, which was wrecked off the coast of Western Australia – the beginning of a long and sorry tale. Its story would make a good introduction to the importance of knowing your longitude and to why people were making long voyages in unfamiliar waters.

You can probably tell I’m brimming with ideas from the trip, so let’s hope an Australian leg of the tour does come about. Much planning to do before then, though!

Image: material from HMS Sirius on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum. By the way, the anchor is huge!

Today’s historians have an embarassment of riches when it comes to easy-access sources, thanks to digitization and the Internet. In earlier decades, if a scholar wanted to find the items relevant to their research in large, scattered and often poorly catalogued archives, then they frequently had to to trawl through them by hand and to travel great distances to access them all.

For example John R. Millburn, the respected biographer of scientific instrument makers such as Benjamin Martin and the George Adamses, dedicated much time and effort to paging through early newspapers in search of references to those individuals and even accumulated a small collection of newspapers himself (now at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford). This makes the scholarly achievements of earlier authors such as Millburn even more impressive but begs the question of how much more they could have discovered and accomplished today!

Some people bemoan the loss of the full experience when one is conducting research through computers rather than handling the original documents, but surely no one can deny that this allows scholars to delve through large and sometimes distant corpora of materials in far more manageable amounts of time than before. This is especially vital for a project such as ours, which in reality references many centuries and nations beyond just eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. For example, digitization and the Internet allow me to identify, view and analyze thousands of London newspapers that mentioned longitude from the mid-seventeenth century onwards through the British Museum’s Burney Collection online.

There are of course some dangers and drawbacks to using these resources. Their search engines tend not to work perfectly – often failing to recognize faded, blurred or poorly spaced words and in my experience occasionally turning up different numbers and combinations of results at different times for no obvious reason. Some students and scholars may also be tempted to use such search engines as a crutch – presenting scads of archival findings but without a properly rigorous application of analysis and contextual knowledge or consideration of the nature and limitations of the source type. However, there are similar limitations and the possibility of ‘weak’ scholarship with any body of sources.

Newspapers specifically represent a very rich, but in some ways problematic, resource for early modern scholars. The first English newspapers were single pages published during the 1600s, and by the next century some increased in length to four pages and contained perhaps one essay and one to two pages each of advertisements and news. From about the mid-1700s onward, some were printed in eight smaller pages and ran more varied articles. The lapse of the restrictive Printing Act in 1695 allowed for the appearance of many new titles and for their more frequent publication, including daily and in the evenings, with the Daily Courant becoming the first English daily newspaper in 1702. Judging by Stamp Act figures, their circulation numbers grew from at least 2.4 million copies in 1713, to at least 16 million copies by the end of the 1700s.  

These popular publications have proved extremely helpful in constructing a timeline for, and understanding the nature of, longitude-related events and perceptions thereof in England and Europe from at least the 1660s onwards. Some mentions have led us to projectors, publications and even political developments at home and abroad of which we were not yet aware. As is always true in historical research, we must consider these findings alongside those made from other types of documents, however, in order to understand them in context but also to fact-check as much as is possible.

Early modern newspapers were quite different from those which we read today despite some striking superficial similarities, for example with the ideals of accuracy and objectivity not yet being associated with them. Tidbits of news were collected from sources including local hearsay, letters from the provinces and abroad, and other domestic and foreign publications. Sometimes newspapers repeated news items from their sister or competing publications verbatim or with some summarization or elaboration – some of which was clearly innacurate, as if the information had been distorted by playing a game of ‘telephone’.

For example, while the London Evening Post and the London Gazetteer reported in 1749 that a Jewish mathematician of Hanover named ‘Raphael Levi’ or ‘Levy’ was to present his longitude invention to the British Commissioners of Longitude, the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer gave his name as ‘Joseph Pollack’ - apparently in all earnestness rather than as an intended slur on a foreign projector of a different religion. This was presumably the mathematician and astronomer Raphael Levi Hannover, who had been a pupil of Leibniz.

If such news items or the contents of advertisements, letters-to-the-editor and other commentaries were debated or inaccurate, then usually the only recourse was for objectors to run their own responses in the same formats. This could lead to some back-and-forth between the different parties, as when key supporters and opponents of John Harrison‘s claim to the highest reward overseen by the Commissioners of Longitude tried to hash it out in print.

Many letters-to-the-editor and other commentaries such as reviews were published under pseudonyms, which can make it difficult to judge whether they originated from key players themselves (such as Harrison or a Commissioner), their supporters, or the unallied but informed members of the public who the authors often claimed to be (such as a former mariner or a merchant). The different categories of items which appeared in the newspaper also bled into each other during the early modern period, and it seems highly likely that some percentage of the glowing ‘news’ mentions of projectors were actually ‘puffs’ (i.e. advertisements), prompted and perhaps at times even paid for by those individuals.

As is true of slanted or commercially driven ‘news coverage’ today, this may have influenced the perceptions of the unwary general public or even of movers-and-shakers like some of the Commissioners. For example, it is possible that the Commissioners were encouraged to initially offer financial aid and sea trials to Christopher Irwin — the Irish projector whose ‘marine chair’ for astronomical viewing at sea was ultimately slated by Nevil Maskelyne — by the glowing accounts of his invention and prowess that appeared in the news. Essentially, a number of such early modern projectors and other actors used the newspapers and other publications including pamphlets and books to run what would today be called ‘PR campaigns’.

All of this material and similar surveys of large, sometimes digitized collections will help us to better understand what was going on in Britain and Europe with respect to longitude at sea and the Commissioners of Longitude – as well as one of the key ways in which related information (whether accurate, inaccurate or intentionally misleading) spread and interpersonal interactions were facilitated. Such publications provide a dynamic view of the extent to which longitude saturated the consciousness and culture of the British public in different ways at a time when the nation had one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Image credits: Photo of modern newspaper vendor © KF / http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.

Alexander Pope


The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

William Wordsworth

Last weekend I had the chance to see Craig Baxter’s play Let Newton Be!, performed in Cambridge during their Science Festival. I wrote a post outlining some of my thoughts on the play and on representations of scientific genius, which you can read here. As the play, and these couplets show, Newton has long been a figure that attracted eulogy and myth-making. He was, of course, a legend in his own lifetime, something that needs to be borne in mind when we consider his role in introducing potential longitude solutions to parliament.

Over at PACHSmörgåsbord, brought to us by the Philadelphia Area Centre for History of Science, Darin Hayton has been catching the longitude vibe while investigating the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. He describes an anonymous 1688 pamphlet that, famously for those who have looked into the history of longitude, suggests an intruiging solution to the problem.

The full title of the pamphlet is Curious Enquiries. Being Six Brief Discourses viz I. Of the Longitude. II. The Tricks of Astrological Quacks. III. Of the Depth of the Sea. IV. Of Tobacco V. Of Europes being Too full of People. VI. The various Opinions concerning the Time of Keeping the Sabbath. As Darin shows, this pamphlet is “an amusing satire of scientific or purportedly scientific practices” and the first section reviews many “whimseys” about finding longitude before suggesting what the author claims is a properly workable idea.

This refers to the idea of a powder of sympathy that, within the framework of natural magic, was a means of healing wounds at a distance, by applying the powder to the weapon that made the wound, or a bandage that had been used to bind it. This, as the pamphlet explains, was something that had been seriously investigated by Sir Kenelm Digby, Fellow of the Royal Society. (By coincidence he also gets a mention today on the Royal Society’s new book reviews feature.) The potential of this salve as a longitude solution was that, according to Digby, when it was applied to the bandage, it instantaneously made the patient start. Why not, the anonymous writer suggested, take a wounded dog to sea and have someone back in London, at an appointed time, dip the bandage in the powder and then the person on board ship, with the yelping dog, would have an accurate knowledge of London time to compare with observations of local time.

This ‘solution’ receives frequent mention in the literature. Owen Gingerich cites it as being “entirely tongue in cheek” in The Quest for Longitude (1996, p. 135). Dava Sobel, whose Longitude was inspired by the conference that led to Quest, also described it, but prefers the reader to take it slightly more seriously (Darin says she “remains agnostic”, but I think this is on the generous side). Recently it made an appearance on James May’s Man Lab and it is, of course on Wikipedia, although it states that ”it is possible that the pamphlet was a form of satire”. It also appears in the Time and Longitude Gallery at the Royal Observatory, where, if you open a door in the panelling, you will catch a figure dipping bandages and hear the dog barking. (It is a strange experience going through Flamsteed House out of hours when all is quiet save ticking clocks, a recording of the BBC pips and the occasional yelp.)

Part of the reason for the popularity of the story, and the fact that often it is taken as a genuine proposal, is undoubtedly its oddness-factor. They did what? They believed that? However, it is also emblematic of some truths, that can be useful in communicating with the public. On the one hand, while sympathetic magic was on its way out in natural philosophy and the world of the Royal Society by 1688, a few decades earlier it had merited serious consideration by Digby and others, including Robert Boyle. Getting people to think about the range of interests of these early ‘scientific heroes’, and how what is considered legitmate science and what is not at any one period, are important steps. Likewise, as Darin points out, the concept is in many ways sound: if the powder worked, then it would indeed be a longitude solution, and it is a nice, engaging way of making the connection between longitudinal position and time clear.

So, although we should encourage taking a pinch of salt with our powder, it’s a story that will continue to run.

As Katy mentioned in her great response to a performance of The Rake’s Progress, ‘curiosities’ were all the rage in Georgian Britain. Although contemporary satirists such as Hogarth poked fun at the more posturing, ill-educated, overzealous or fraudulent of collectors and exhibitors of curiosities, this had far more to do with those individuals’ negative characteristics that with the objects themselves.

Today we tend to refer to something as ‘curious’ or as a ‘curiosity’ when we mean that it is unusual in a circumscribed and potentially unsettling or negative manner – but these terms had other connotations during the eighteenth century. The Georgians associated them more with what we might call intellectual and scientific curiosity, or a general curiosity about the world. They were intended to be interesting and often wondrous reflections of the manifestations and potential of Nature, Man and their Creator. As we shall see, they also encompassed what we would now call scientific instruments, and timekeepers including those of John Harrison!

Curiosities and curious things were not just inanimate objects – such as a tropical shell, a mounted pufferfish or a piece of artwork carved by distant natives – which could be admired from a visual standpoint. Many purported to produce mechanical motion or to expose hitherto unseeable aspects of natural phenomena, in which case these sights were of equal or greater importance than the instruments that provided them. Mechanical automata were highly popular with the public, as they had been for centuries and would continue to be into the modern era – for example, the ‘Monster Robot’ below, which was exhibited by Mullard Ltd in 1932!

Instruments for the study of the appearance and behaviour of the natural world were similarly popular, including: models such as planetaria and orreries; instruments that projected images, including magic lanterns and solar microscopes; and optical instruments such as microscopes, telescopes and burning glasses.

Some of the sellers and makers of instruments and timekeepers specifically treated elements of their stock as ‘curiosities’. For example, the respected optician John Yarwell (active 1671 – died 1713) near St Paul’s Churchyard, whose trade card from 1683 you can see below, referred to some of his stock as ‘optical curiosities’ and touted microscopes for observing natural ‘curiosities’ including the circulation of the blood in fish and ‘animalcula’ in pepper water. Similar terminology and advertising strategies were employed by other instrument makers and sellers during the eighteenth century, including Yarwell’s former apprentice George Willdey (freed from apprenticeship in 1702 – died 1737).

Willdey was one of the longest-serving Masters of the Spectaclemakers’ Company, which oversaw the production and sale of optical instruments as well as eyeglasses, and he diversified his retail and wholesale business to include many other fashionable wares as well. In 1720, the optician advertised in the newspapers that his shop near St Paul’s was a ‘Grand Magazine of Curiosities’ and offered to pay sailors for procuring more. His surviving shop accounts, advertisements and trade cards show that he viewed the large numbers of instruments that he sold and bartered at the retail and wholesale levels each year as natural companions to these other fashionable wares.

The concluding passage of Willdey’s lengthy advertisement of 1720 reflects how often instruments, timekeepers and other mechanisms were also included amongst the ‘curiosities’ displayed to a paying audience during the Georgian era – often alongside natural wonders, antiquities, and sensations such as the fabricated remains of mythical beasts. The optician and luxury retailer announced that, ‘I have now finished the best Burning Glass in the World, and plac’d it upon the Top of my House’. He then employed about 150 of the most glowing words to describe the purported abilities of the glass to melt all manner of materials including metals and to heat baths and prepare foods in the home, before offering to show it to anyone who had spent five or more shillings at his shop. He concluded with a swipe at a competing burning glass by noting that, ‘This far exceeds that show’d in the Privy Garden in White Hall, though each Person paid Half a Crown for the Sight of that.’

As with Willdey’s erection of a giant burning glass atop his house, showmanship was often closely allied with the widespread interest in the natural world and mechanical possibilities in Georgian Britain. We can see this in the public lecturing of this time at venues from private homes to coffeehouses and theatres, in the commercial and advertising strategies of craftsmen and retailers such as Willdey and even John Harrison, and in the ways in which the learned and literate went to view curiosities and collections or acquired and shared their own. The mechanisms and natural philosophical exhibitions included in many public showings of curiosities and employed in commercially motivated ‘stunts’, were not as far removed from the experiments exhibited and the technology employed and examined at institutions such as the Royal Society as we might expect.

A colourful satire of instruments-as-curiosities, and one which references the search for the longitude at sea, was the show put on by the popular stage actor Edward Shuter during
the Bartholomew Fair of 1760. (The actor can be seen in the Zoffany portrait below of two years later, in which he is playing Justice Woodcock from the popular ballad opera Love in a Village.) Shuter portrayed a ‘Magical Optician’ with a warehouse in West Smithfield, ‘where will be seen the most uncommon Variety of the greatest Curiosities that were ever exhibited to public View [including] MOMUS, an Astronomer’. Momus would purportedly show the crowd his ‘new reflecting Telescope, improved upon the Newtonian Plan, for the Discovery of lost Maidenheads, and the Longitude ; which will put an End to all the Perplexities of the profoundest Mathematicians ; and this Pro Bono Publico, without any Expectation of a Parliamentary Reward for the Automata and Ephemerides.’

It was not only such purportedly ‘new’ optical instruments and automata that were advertised by paying exhibitions of curiosities during the eighteenth century, but also timekeeping mechanisms. This was true in larger public venues but also at the more private showings of ‘curiosities’ that were not uncommon at the homes of collectors and natural philosophers, and at the homes or workshops of some craftsmen including John Harrison. From H1 in the 1730s onwards, Harrison was not averse to having his inventions displayed to the more literate and influential members of the domestic and foreign public and to other craftsmen, first at the shop of George Graham and then at his own home. (Of course, he often denied fellow clockmakers and foreign representatives a view of the timekeepers’ innards, so that they could not steal his innovations!)

We thus have records of the opinions of diverse visitors to Harrison’s chronometers, from intellectuals and politicians to artists. This includes our friend William Hogarth, who described H3 as ‘one of the most exquisite movements ever made’, although not as outwardly beautiful as would be a system created by Nature rather than Man. The clockmaker may have sometimes made financial as well as social and intellectual gains from these visits since it was common for craftsmen, inventors and collectors to charge for the right to view their more interesting wares or acquisitions – and Benjamin Franklin is known to have paid 10 shillings and six pence ‘to see his Longitude Clock’ in 1757.

As we can see with Harrison’s inventions and with Yarwell’s descriptions of microscopic views of blood and microorganisms, the Georgian terms ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’ could be applied to almost anything that exhibited qualities such as newness, innovation, ingenuity or exoticness. In fact, when the first known group meeting of the Commissioners of Longitude took place in 1737, the London Evening Post reported it as a meeting of ‘Persons of Distinction’ who viewed and ‘express’d the greatest Satisfaction’ at ‘a curious Instrument for finding out the Longitude, made by Mr. Harrison of Leather-lane, which he has been six Years in finishing.’

As is true for so many relevant terms that were frequently employed during the eighteenth century — such as curiosity, perfection, discovery and even board — we will have to keep in mind the different shades of meaning that have fallen out of use today. The terms ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’ might lead us to dismiss an object or method and its maker or collector as a lightweight if amusing historical footnote – but Georgian curiosities encompassed far more than just bearded ladies like Baba the Turk and narwhale tusks that were dressed up as unicorn horns.

Picture credits: Yarwell trade card, burning glasses image and Monster Robot photo – Science Museum / Science and Society Picture Library; Zoffany portrait and bearded lady photo – Wikimedia Commons.

As is clear from the banner at the top of the page, this research project focuses on the period during which the Board of Longitude was in existence (or at least, given what Alexi wrote previously, the period during which Commissioners of Longitude could, at least theoretically, meet to discuss potential solutions and rewards). However, the problem of finding longitude – particularly at sea – has a much longer history than this. Fortunately for us, Thony Christie has told some of this story over at his blog, Renaissance Mathematicus. His post is well-worth a perusal, especially in setting out the three main solutions touted during the Renaissance: lunar distances, chronometric and the use of Jupiter’s satellites. This last was to prove, as Thony says, very effective on land but it was too small a measurment to make successfully at sea (although it was tried).

The two astronomical methods both, of course, were used to find longitude from scratch. The chronometrc, or timekeeping, method, on the other hand, could only ever be used to keep longitude. In other words your clock had to be correctly set to your reference position/time and then kept running either keeping perfect time or loosing/gaining at a predicable rate – something unachievable before Harrison’s advances.

There is one more solution that was seriously considered, investigated and invested in over the course of several centuries: terrestrial magnetism. In the 16th century sailors identified the geographical variation in terrestrial magnetism known as declination, and in 1522 the Italian navigator Giovanni Cabato, or John Cabot, suggested that it might be a means of finding longitude. The idea stuck around (a useful summary can be found in this article by Alan Cook), and late in the 17th century, Edmond Halley investigated and mapped magnetic variation on two sea voyages. While it was important to be able to understand and factor variation into compass-navigation, Halley also hoped that the patterns would be predicable enough to use for position-finding.

Halley was not successful, but still the idea did not go away. It didn’t even go away after Maskleyne began publishing the Nautical Almanac and chronometers were being made in greater numbers. In fact, it outlasted the Board of Longitude itself and is, therefore, a tale for another day.