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.

Today is the 277^th 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.

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[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

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

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

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

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

I too recently went to Edinburgh and was impressed by the reopened museum. As Katy says, the open vistas and object wall are a great introduction to the Museum’s space and collections. I also enjoyed the range of approaches in the galleries, where chronology was often treated fairly loosely. There were some fairly subtle themes, for example about particular collectors, which might be missed by a large portion of visitors but which gave those with more time another level of interpretation to engage with.

Like Katy, too, I was very happy to see astronomy, timekeeping and navigation represented, with a good dose of longitude. I was so excited, in fact, that I took this rather hazy photograph. It focuses on the labels rather than the objects, but it is always nice to see the Nautical Almanac taking its place in displays!

Richard and I will be back in Edinburgh next week, for a workshop on ‘Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration‘, so perhaps one of us could take a slightly more aesthetically pleasing picture then! In the mean time, here is the NMS’s page on this gallery, called ‘Earth in Space‘.

As you will see from their site, this gallery is part of the general ‘science bit’, set in a room beyond the stuff-animals-and-biology bit, and distinct from the industry-and-technology and the decorative-arts bits. The blurb goes:

What is out there? Where do we fit into the Universe? People have always been fascinated by what lies beyond our planet. Technology helps us investigate these big questions. Scientists use evidence from Earth and space to understand more about the Universe and the origins of life.

And, hence, the gallery includes not only medieval to 19th-century astronomical instruments, clocks and demonstration models, but also fossils, meteorites, films and interactive displays about modern astronomy and a model of DNA.

To me it seems a shame that these objects were thus removed from their historical context. During this project, and in thinking about future longitude-themed displays, we have been considering such instruments in connection with a whole range of themes: changing manufacturing processes, a developing consumer society, maritime trade and empire to name the most obvious. It seems a shame to hide these connections and to depersonalise the objects and the knowledge they helped produce or share. Finding longitude wasn’t (just) a scientific problem about knowing where we are, it was about practice, pragmatics, economics and politics.

Science and its material culture are, in fact, represented elsewhere in the museum. There are, for example, galleries on ‘Art and Industry‘ and ‘Inspired by Nature‘, and the Scottish galleries bring science and technology into a general account of Scotland’s history. Likewise, it is good to see some historical objects brought into the ‘Natural World‘ displays, of which the ‘Earth in Space’ gallery is part. However, a nagging feeling remains that there is an unnecessary divide created between (pure, objective, depersonalised) science and (human, contextualised) art, industry and culture. Or perhaps, for museums which aim to interest a whole range of groups and to create galleries that can link to aspects of the national curriculum, such divisions are unavoidable?

I have been in Edinburgh this weekend for an art history conference, presenting about madness in relationship to longitude in my usual plate from The Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth. The conference was rewarding and stimulating, involving a range of papers that considered madness on the intersection between science and art. I learnt a lot and met some fascinating people.

This also gave me the chance to soak up some culture and atmosphere in the ‘Athens of the North,’ and my first port of call was, of course, the newly re-vamped National Museum of Scotland. It is stunning. From the grand gallery that resembles a Victorian bird-cage, vistas open up into the surrounding galleries on ‘Natural World,’ ‘World Cultures,’ ‘Art and Design’ and ‘Science and Technology.’ One whole wall of the grand gallery is also taken up by a brilliant ‘Window on the World’ which pulls together 800 objects as a snapshot on the collection. I loved the juxtaposition of bicycles with Isnik tiles.

But what was most exciting was to see an entire case devoted to navigation at sea within the ‘Earth in Space’ gallery! It’s good to see the problem of longitude given such prominence in a consideration of the relationship between the earth and the heavens. The case focuses on local hero Alexander Dalrymple and his work on mapping and hydrography for the East India Company, but it also includes all our old favourites in the instrument story. Backstaffs, precision chronometers, and the Nautical Almanac, sit happily in this gallery alongside rocks, minerals and a giant trilobite. Lets hope that interest in longitude lasts as long as the trilobite apparently will!

To put your minds at rest, I have been attempting to do a bit of research on this trip too. This has included going to archives in Göttingen and Hannover to look at letters relating to the years of lobbying and negotiation – between Göttingen and London - that had to happen before Tobias Mayer, or rather his widow, was finally awarded £3,000 for his contribution towards making the lunar distance method possible at sea.

Funnily enough, most of the stuff I looked at was in German and pretty indecipherable (to me) due to the handwriting and my own lack of German skills, although I did come across some letters in English, French and Latin as well. I’ve ordered lots of copies, so we’ll have plenty to work on, but a couple of things caught my attention immediately.

One thing I’m still trying to piece together a bit more, for instance, is Christopher Irwin’s marine chair, and I’m pretty sure I saw it described in one letter as ‘Erwin’s Easy Chair’, which makes it sound even more marvelous. I hope I’m not disappointed when I look at the copy again.

Another letter (in French) was from Mayer’s widow, Marie Victoire, to Lord Grenville. It’s an attempt to persuade Grenville to help her get the reward her late husband’s work merited. The bit that caught my attention was a passage that seems to claim that a repeating circle of Mayer’s design was used for longitude determinations by lunar distance on a voyage to ‘Arabia’ begun in 1761 by Carsten Niebuhr. It is well known that Niebuhr carried out lunar distances, but the other evidence suggests that this was with an octant. It may well be that she was wrong about the instrument used. It is more likely, for instance, that she was thinking of the ‘astrolabium’, a circular surveying instrument based on Mayer’s repeating principle, with which Niebuhr made a few measurements (which was something Ivan Tafteberg Jakobsen talked about at the conference in Kassel). In any case, it’s got me wanting to check things out a bit more.

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.

Following on from my trip to Marbach to see Tobias Mayer’s birthplace, we’ve also just visited the University of Göttingen, where he was a professor from 1751 until his death in 1762. The Institute of Physics there has a good museum, which includes several Mayer-related items.

The largest is a mural quadrant by the London instrument-maker John Bird, which he personally installed at the University’s observatory in 1755-6. This was an instrument that Mayer used for his astronomical work relating to the Moon, which underpinned the tables for which he was posthumously awarded £3,000 by the Commissioners for Longitude.

Although staff at the Institute were quick to point out that the quadrant is now set up incorrectly (facing east-west rather than north-south), the opportunity for a team photo was too good to miss. From left to right, by the way, are: Alexi, Sophie, me and Katy.

If we look relaxed, it’s because we’ve given our papers already!

A few months ago I did a blog on Tobias Mayer, and since I’m in Germany this week for the Scientific Instrument Symposium in Kassel, I’m trying to fit in as much Mayernalia (if that’s the word) as I can.

Yesterday, I took the train down to Marbach. This lovely town is where Mayer was born, in what is now the Tobias Mayer Museum. At the time of his birth in 1723, it was quite a new building, since the centre of Marbach had been destroyed in a fire thirty years earlier. As a result, the town now has lots of beautiful 18th-century architecture, of which the Mayer house is one of the more modest examples. It looks very picturesque today, but must have been rather cosy for a family, with his father’s working area (he was a wheelwright) taking up the ground floor. The museum itself is small, but I had an incredibly warm welcome and was allowed to look around the whole building (since they’re between tenants in the part they rent out) – so thanks and best wishes to all the staff and volunteers there.

With Marbach also being the birthplace of Friedrich Schiller, who dominates the town, it was a bit odd going there in search of someone much less well commemorated, but we history of science tourists must stick to our guns! So if you’re in Marbach (or Stuttgart, which is close by), do try to drop in – particularly next year when they’ll be commemorating the 250th anniversary of his premature death (a few days just after his 39th birthday). We’ll try to keep an eye on that and let you know what’s happening.