Alexi mentioned in a previous post that one of the interesting questions for our project is the survival, or not, of the sources with which we deal. Alongside that comes the question of the history of our main archive at the Cambridge University Library. Alexi mentioned that we know the volumes were arranged and bound as we now have them by George Airy, then Astronomer Royal, in the 1850s, and how he commented on their potential as a resource.
A recent new addition to our project is a digitisation side-project at the UL, funded by JISC. We will be making the entire 68 volumes of the Board of Longitude archives available online with summaries, commentaries and biographical information, in a similar format to the wonderful new Newton Papers resource. Those of us on the project who are charged with writing the summary for each volume therefore have the enjoyable task of going through each volume and making it clear how its contents fit into the history of the Board, and the stories told of it so far.
While writing my summary of Volume 1 last week, I came across this note, which was clearly accidentally bound in with the papers in the 1850s. It’s a letter from Airy to Edward Stone, who was Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory in 1865. It’s interesting that Airy was asking Stone to go through the Board records in the 1860s, and trying to join up the correspondence with the minutes. Exactly what we are now trying to do!
Because last month’s Maskelyne Symposium, on 14-15 October, has now happened, the details have been taken off the NMM’s website. For posterity, therefore, I thought it would be wise to record details of the programme here. All-in-all, though, I thought the event went very well: many thanks to all the speakers, those who helped me organise things and to everyone who came to hear more.
On the afternoon of Friday 14 October, we began with a brief view of some of the Maskelyne-related objects that came to the National Maritime Museum in 2009. I began with a quick tour of the new instroductory gallery, Voyagers, which includes objects related to James Cook, John Harrison, Larcum Kendall and, of course, Maskelyne. These last included the pastel portrait attributed to John Russell, Maskelyne’s medal from the Institut Français on becoming one of their few Foreign Members and an orrery by William Jones that is said by the Maskelyne family to have belonged to Nevil’s daughter Margaret.
This was followed by two further session, one introducing the Maskelyne manuscript collection, led by Richard in the new Caird Library, and the other showing of Maskelyne’s observing suit (see picture in this post) and his wife’s wedding dress, led by Amy Miller.
The next day was the Symposium proper, with the following talks, after coffee and an introduction by Richard:
- Revisiting and Revising Maskelyne’s Reputation (Dr Rebekah Higgitt, NMM Curator of History of Science and Technology)
- Visualizing the Maskelynes (Dr Jenny Gaschke, NMM Curator of Fine Art)
- ‘The Rev. Mr. Nevil Maskelyne, F.R.S. and Myself’: the Mathematical Career of Maskelyne’s Sometime Assistant, Robert Waddington (Professor Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford)
- Object talks by Rory McEvoy (NMM Curator of Horology) in the Royal Observatory’s Horology Workshop
- Calculating the Nautical Almanac: Maskelyne and his Human Computers (Dr Mary Croarken, independent scholar)
- The Maskelynes at Home (Dr Amy Miller, NMM Curator of Decorative Arts)
It was interesting that our ‘celebration’ of Maskelyne took a somewhat sideways view of the man, seen as much through the lives and work of his collaborators and colleagues or the eyes of biographers and artists as through his own writings. The man of science was discussed as a man at home, which is apt when home and work were so closely entwined at the Royal Observatory, and the physical remains of his life took as much pride of place as his intellectual heritage. Here was a man who was both “le dieu de l’astronomie” (to Delambre, according to Lalande), and who was short and stout with a penchant for dairy products.
As you’ve already seen in Richard’s post, four members of the project – Richard, Alexi, Sophie and I – spent last week at the annual symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission in Kassel, Germany. The theme – Instruments, Images and Texts – seemed particularly pertinent to us, bringing together a wide range of our research and highlighting the work that we do pulling together the archives in Cambridge, the instruments in Greenwich, and a huge diversity of sources from elsewhere.
Alexi opened our panel session by looking at the different technologies encountered and employed by the Board of Longitude, how these were considered by both the Commissioners and the external ‘public,’ and how these became ‘black boxes.’ I then followed looking at the visual discussions of the longitude problem on paper – maps, diagrams, illustrations – and how these posed a visual problem in the early hunt for longitude. Richard brought his research right up to date, from his visit to Göttingen, talking about Tobias Mayer’s work on the lunar distance method, and how his tables and instruments changed and translated in the process of being considered by the Board. Finally, Sophie looked at the end of the Board, and how thinking of the Nautical Almanac as an instrument as well as a standardised text can help us to understand the relationships between the different players in the Board of Longitude’s demise. The panel went well and we were glad to meet some of our advisory board and get their feedback.
Elsewhere in the conference, I was struck by a similar concern with the questions of replication, translation and standardisation which had woven through our panel. Papers considered how historical actors have replicated and changed each other’s collections, the process of replicating and using historic instruments in a museum, and, in a more modern sense of replication, how to give these digital life through online databases and collections online programmes. One long panel considered how eighteenth-century cabinets of experimental philosophy translated and communicated the knowledge they created to a wider public, and other papers looked at how older scientific knowledge can be translated for a modern museum audience. Further speakers considered how texts and instruments changed and were re-interpreted between different users, raising problems of standard in both quality and parity and, coming back to databases, we began to think about how these could be brought back together across European boundaries.
Outside of the presentations, we had ample opportunity to make our own connections between instrument, image and text. The very first evening introduced us to the marvellous collections of the Landgraves of Kassel in both the Cabinet of Astronomy and Physics, and the stunning baroque Marble Bath. We saw planetarium shows, pendulums, mural quadrants and globes. We viewed the beautiful alchemical manuscript collections in the Murhard Library, were initiated into the history of the early university at Göttingen, saw modern astrophysicists at work, and happily investigated the stores of the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. Almost overwhelmed by the wealth of things to see and learn, the breaks provided the perfect chance to pick the brains of the many experts in attendance, and to think as a group about the Board of Longitude in its wider context. I, for one, think this conference will be ‘instrumental’ in taking our research forward. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun.
Last Saturday, Alexi, Sophie and I presented some of our research from the project at a session called ‘New Perspectives on the Board of Longitude’ at the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science. Our session and paper abstracts can be found here on my ‘other’ blog, where I also posted some thoughts on the conference as a whole.
I can say that the other two presented great papers, and that we had some good discussion in the session. Because of the interests of some of the audience, this particularly focused on the Board in the 19th century, with questions and comments about the political scene, ideologies of public service and the role of Humphry Davy (President of the Royal Society and, therefore, ex officio member of the Board).
Top marks for a beautiful PowerPoint presentation (plus authoritatively-presented evidence and argument) go to Alexi. Top marks for enthusiasm and first grown-up conference presentation to Sophie! And a special prize to Simon Naylor for chairing the session, having already enthused us with a paper on 19th-century meteorology and the Magnetic Crusade in the previous session.
You might not have noticed the subtle appearance of the ‘Resources’ tab on the top bar, but it is worth a click. Thanks to Nicky we now have an excellent ‘Short annotated bibliography on longitude and the Board of Longitude’. Several of the articles can be accessed online including, for the first time, Derek Howse’s article on the Board’s finances (reproduced with the kind permission of the Hon. Editor of The Mariner’s Mirror). While this might not sound like a thrilling read (and it isn’t exactly that) it is an incredibly useful source that does a wonderful job at showing just how much more there is to say about the Board than the well-known story of Harrison. For a start, many of the items listed in the Board’s accounts date to the period after Harrison’s death, including grants, rewards and expenses given to a much wider range of individuals and projects than most readers will suspect. The list is a veritable Who’s Who of European astronomers, mathematicians, instrument makers and explorers.
The online Resources will be developed as the project goes on, leaving, we hope, a useful a legacy that will include, ultimately, a much more complete bibliography. This initial list is, however, an important group of must-reads for anyone interested in knowing more about the Board and its role.
Both Becky and Richard have already discussed Nevil Maskelyne in this blog. Maskelyne features as the ‘baddie’ in Dava Sobel’s story of John Harrison ‘The Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time.’ Along with other commissioners on the Board of Longitude, Sobel accuses Maskelyne of personal animosity towards Harrison and of seeking to win the prize himself for the lunar distance method.
This view of Maskelyne is challenged by a small archive of documents which the National Maritime Museum purchased in 2003. These thirteen manuscripts and a pamphlet belonged to William Wildman Barrington, Viscount Barrington, who, as Treasurer of the Navy, was a Commissioner of Longitude between 1762 and 1765.
These were key years for the Board and Harrison, when a new Act was passed by parliament that clarified what was necessary to win the ‘great reward’ of £20,000 which had been established by the 1714 Act. It also clarified the Board’s powers over awarding the money. The Barrington Papers revolve around a speech that Barrington gave to the House of Commons in 1765 explaining the Board’s relationship with Harrison and their decisions over awarding him the prize. The papers show how complex this relationship was and how carefully the Commissioners and parliament considered the wording of the Act before it was passed. They also show that the Commissioners were at some pains to convince Parliament of the reasoning behind their decisions.
In relationship to Maskelyne, one document is particularly interesting. This is an unlabelled note stating that no commissioner would be eligible to win the prize money. Given that Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal – and therefore a Commissioner of Longitude – the day before the meeting at which the Board resolved to apply to parliament for the 1765 Act, this shows that Sobel’s narrative of animosity is unfair.
I have considered these papers at length in an article recently published online in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, called ‘‘Explaining’ themselves: the Barrington Papers, the Board of Longitude, and the fate of John Harrison.’ This will be available free online until the next issue of NRRS is posted, and will be published in paper form in July.
I also presented a paper discussing the Barrington Archive at the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) Post-Grad Conference in Manchester in January 2011. This was an invaluable opportunity to meet other graduates in the field, to compare research ideas and skills, and to gain feedback on my work. One question that came up was whether the Commissioners saw themselves as specifically promoting government investment in science, and whether they saw their decisions as affecting the reputation of the scientific community as a whole. These are modern questions to be asking about the relationship between government and science, and particularly pertinent among current debates over government funding. For us, it relates to the problem of how the Board actually existed in its early years. Alexi has noted how ‘the Commissioners’ were not discussed as ‘the Board’ until well into their history, and we have no official record of their meetings for the first 23 years. It is such small treasure troves as the Barrington archive that will allow us to map what happened in these early years.
Image credits: Cropped image of BGN/10 © Jonathan Betts.
There are many obstacles to historians’ reconstructing and understanding the nature of past lives and events as accurately as is possible. While basic human nature has not changed much over the centuries, the socio-economic trappings that outfitted and influenced actors and institutions at any given time could of course be very different from those which exist today – even when they appear quite modern at first glance. This represents a dual threat to historians, of their 1) misinterpreting the past because of the deceptively modern feel of some of the terms and practices that existed then, or conversely 2) allowing the modern labels and definitions that they apply to the past to influence their analyses.
1) As an example of the first threat, key words such as ‘science’ and concepts associated with modern science such as accuracy and replicablility held far different meanings during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they do today. It was not until the second half of the 1800s that ‘science‘ began to specifically indicate branches of the study of the natural world such as biology, chemistry and physics. Before then, the term could refer to any type of knowledge, or to mastery of a certain branch of knowledge or skill set – such as music, politics or defence. The sorts of activities that would later be considered ‘scientific’ fell within the bounds of a number of subjects during the Georgian period including natural and experimental philosophy, astronomy and mathematics, and they were far different in nature than modern science.
Similarly, the modern concepts of scientific and technological accuracy or precision and margin of error simply did not exist during the eighteenth century. This was in part because the instruments of the time did not allow for measurements of enough accuracy for it to be of much relevance. For example, the highest praise that instrument makers tended to bestow upon their wares in advertising was that they had been ‘brought to perfection’ – a vague and unrealistic encomium. The ‘accuracy’ of timekeepers such as the marine chronometers invented by John Harrison lay not in their ticking away the seconds regularly like a modern clock, but in their ‘running down’ at a regular and predictable enough rate as the days and weeks passed that the variations in their running could be compensated for when making observations and calculations. Parliament chose to define the requirements for the granting of its longitude rewards in terms of determination of the longitude at sea to one or fewer degrees away from the true value, or within a certain number of geographical miles.
The recording and reporting of observations and of experiments, including the trials of new methods of discovering the longitude at sea, were handled quite differently during the Georgian period than they would be today as well. Historians must try to decipher how individual observers and experimenters defined their results and chose to present them to the wider world. It was not that unusual for mathematicians and astronomers to cherry-pick the results that they shared or published, for the best didactic effect! The global standardization of mathematical, astronomical and natural philosophical practices and terms began to take shape only gradually during the existence of the Commissioners of Longitude.
2) Historians can thus be misled in their analyses of the past if they do not take into account how the definitions of words and concepts having changed dramatically over the centuries. However, they also face the opposite problem – of misinterpreting the nature of past lives and events by applying modern terminology to them and unknowingly letting this shape their perceptions.
For example, during my recent research on ‘scientific’ instrument makers in eighteenth-century London, it became clear that many historians’ study of the instrument trade had been influenced by their continued use of the term ‘scientific’. That adjective would not actually become applicable to instruments until the later nineteenth century. Its usage is entirely understandable, since the term indicates that authors are not referring to musical instruments instead and is more concise than a litany of early modern descriptors including optical, mathematical and philosophical.
However, it is clear that conceiving of optical, mathematical and philosophical instruments as ‘scientific’ in any way has continued to limit historians’ understanding of the full range of ways in which the British viewed, used and traded in these wares. For one thing, the production and sale of instruments in London encompassed a number of interconnected and yet sometimes quite disparate crafts and retail specialties, rather than representing a single instrument trade as is typically discussed. These activities were also far more interrelated with other types of crafts, services and retail specialties that would not be considered ‘scientific’ today, than has usually been acknowledged.
These dynamics saw trade members forge many important socio-economic relationships outside of ‘the instrument trade’, and instrument production and sale intermingle with trades from ship chandlery to the sale of fashionable luxuries. This mixing of instruments with diverse other stock and trades can be seen in many advertisements including that above for George Willdey, an optician and toyman (a seller of small fashionable trinkets for adults). Willdey ran a successful retail and wholesale business near St. Paul’s Churchyard in London from 1706 until his death in 1737. One of his two known surviving telescopes is now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and is a good example of the type of small, attractive and often technologically basic instruments that were produced in large numbers by instrument makers in Georgian London and exported across the nation and the world.
Similar problems of labelling and definition have hindered the study of the British state’s support for the ‘search for the longitude’. As I’ll be discussing in greater detail over the course of 2011, the term ‘the Board of Longitude’ and modern conceptions thereof have obscured the actual nature of the Commissioners of Longitude in the wake of the Act of 1714 and downplayed their activities during the earlier decades of their existence.
Image credits: Richard Rust trade card © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, all other images © National Maritime Museum.
The YouTube video in this blog’s first post is by Tom Kirk of the University of Cambridge’s Office of Communications. Featuring the Longitude Project’s Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy, and Richard Dunn, Curator of the History of Navigation at the National Maritime Museum, it’s a brief introduction to the Longitude problem, the research project and some of the themes that we hope to explore over the next few years.
Topically, Simon highlights the important issue of government funding for science: “Essentially the Board represents the germs of our national science policy. The materials and
correspondence it left behind is a window on to the cosmologyof an entire class of people, and also on to the beginnings of
Government-sponsored science in Britain”. The project should both help us recover detailed information about the lives of the many different kinds of people who came in contact with the Board – from Admirals, to astronomers, to artisans – and lead us to discuss very relevant issues of how the state and the scientific community interact.
In the video Richard talks about the most iconic Longitude-related items in the NMM’s collection, John Harrison’s sea clocks, but makes it clear that we have much more to say – and much more yet to find out – about the Board. Let’s remember that Dava Sobel’sbestselling Longitude is a (partial) account of a very small part of the whole story. The NMM, which includes the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (itself founded to solve the Longitude problem), has many other objects in its collection and aspects to its history which relate to that broader story. We have yet to do these full justice.
In the video, Richard and Simon also explain why it made perfect sense for the NMM and Cambridge to come together on this project. We (at the NMM) have the object collections and an intrinsic interest in the navigational story, they (at Cambridge) hold the archives of the Board and of the Observatory. Also, we like to think, the collaboration has brought together a great group of individuals, who you can read more about on the Project Team tab.
