H3 has returned to public display after a thorough cleaning and cataloguing. This video captures Jonathan’s feeling about the project as well as the timekeepers move back into its showcase.

Conserving the H3 Timekeeper part 6 from Royal Observatory Greenwich on Vimeo.

For the past couple of days the project team has been at a conference on Joseph Banks, which was held at the National Maritime Museum.

For various reasons, I ended up giving a paper there on the later life of the Board of Longitude, in which I tried to emphasise the dominance of Banks and Nevil Maskelyne in the affairs of the Board. If you want to hear some more incisive work on the Board’s later history, however, you should go to the BSHS Annual Conference in a few weeks time.

Fortunately, I found one great quote to begin my talk with. It was particularly interesting because it tied in nicely with an earlier blog about the nature and location of Board meetings in which I used an account by William Harrison (John Harrisons‘ son) of a meeting in the 1760s.

Inspired by reading Greg Dening’s wonderful The Death of William Gooch, I had a look at Gooch’s original letters to his parents, which have lots about his appointment as astronomer to George Vancouver’s voyage to the north-coast of America and his voyage to meet that expedition. Sadly, he was killed on Hawaii before meeting up with Vancouver’s ships.

The piece I found was written to his parents on 11 June 1791 as he sat in the Admiralty Office waiting to be called in to a Board meeting to have his appointment confirmed:

The Board of Longitude are now met an[d] I’m now in an antechamber expecting to be call’d in, in a few minutes… Dr. Maskelyne will receive my salary for me (by power of attorney) during my absence, & he tells me he will order & make the best use of it for me; which I thought was a very kind offer. – Just before I began I saw & spoke to Dr. Smith. – Sr. Jos. Banks pass’d me just before that, & gave me a sly look as if he had been inform’d that I was the Person to be appointed. – however they will all be inform’d presently.

Dr Smith, incidentally, was the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford.

There were also lots of interesting papers at the conference, two of which I got particularly excited about.

The first was by Jane Wess of the Science Museum, who showed through very careful research that the lunar distance method seems to have been very little used in the late-18th century. The main reason, she argued, is that it was just so complicated to do – a fair point. The evidence she produced was absolutely convincing, and it’s certainly a really important point to bear in mind. We hope she publishes her work soon.

A second fascinating paper was by Jacob Orrje from Uppsala University and the University of Cambridge. He was talking about a Swedish astronomer, Bengt Ferrner, who came to London in 1759-60 and wrote a diary of the trip. This included meeting many of the leading astronomers, mathematicians and instrument-makers of the day. As well as going to see John Harrison  (although he didn’t say much about that), he paid a visit to the workshop of Jeremiah Sisson, where he saw Christopher Irwin’s marine chair, designed for viewing the satellites of Jupiter on board a ship. Ferrner, however, seems to have been worried about the stability of Irwin’s device – rightly, as it turned out. I hope we’ll have more to say about that in a future blog. More importantly, it would be great to see Jacob do something with this wonderful primary material.

We’ve had a good many blogs about Nevil Maskelyne and John Harrison, who are both important figures in our story, but one thing we are trying to do is tell a more rounded story of the Board of Longitude and the people it dealt with.

One man who has been largely lost in the footnotes is the German astronomer, Tobias Mayer (1723-62) – although there is a museum dedicated to him. His relative anonymity today is a shame, since he was extremely well known, and much sought after, in his own era. Leonhard Euler, for instance, described him as ‘undoubtedly the greatest astronomer in Europe’.

Mayer, it turns out, was central to the longitude story, since it was his work that made the lunar distance method possible. His main interest was actually land mapping, for which the accurate determination of longitudes was crucial, and in the 1750s, while at the University of Göttingen, Mayer created new lunar and solar tables to improve this work. He also came up with a design for a repeating circle, an instrument for making accurate observations, but it was only after much encouragement that he sent his ideas to the Board of Longitude, since he doubted that the Board would reward a foreigner (that said, Britain and Hanover did share a king at the time).

The Astronomer Royal, James Bradley, checked the tables, however, and found them to be very accurate, while sea trials showed that Mayer’s ideas could be used to find longitude at sea (and also led to the development of the sextant). Nevil Maskelyne gets a look in here too, since he also used Mayer’s tables to determine longitudes on voyages to St Helena in 1761 and Barbados in 1763.

As a result, the Board eventually awarded Mayer, or rather his widow, £3,000 in recognition of his work. A surprising footnote to this, according to his biographer, is that Mayer had never even seen the sea.

I’ve begun thinking about Mayer because this year’s Scientific Instrument Symposium includes a visit to Göttingen, so I’m intending to do a paper about Mayer’s role in the development of navigational instruments and techniques. From what I can see, there are still a few gaps in the story. Whether I can fill them is another matter.

For more on Mayer, try one of Eric Forbes’ pieces, in particular:
Eric G. Forbes, Tobias Mayer (1723-1762) Pioneer of Enlightened Science in Germany (Göttingen, 1980)
Eric G. Forbes, The Birth of Navigational Science: The solving in the 18th century of the problem of finding longitude at sea (National Maritime Museum, 1980)

Images:
Portrait of Tobias Mayer, from Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden (1799)
Mayer’s repeating circle, from Tabula motuum solis et lunae (London, 1770)

Conserving the H3 Timekeeper part 5 from Royal Observatory Greenwich on Vimeo.

Maskelyne’s trousers have again inspired a reconsideration of the man, this time in a nice story by Stephanie Pain for the New Scientist. While I am not sure that owning a funny suit necessarily works as proof that Maskelyne was a nice guy, it seems to be the case that the survival of this unique item reminds us that the historical character was once a living, breathing person. Clothing is particularly intimate and, of course, once encased a completely three-dimensional being. That in itself is enough to encourage readers, visitors and writers to look beyond black and white versions of the past and to understand that even the long-dead were once individuals with realistically complex personalities and motivations, which is, surely, a Good Thing. 

Pain did not, of course, leave the work to the trousers alone, and I was particularly glad that she found room to mention the ’mathematicians’ mutiny’, as an occasion that complicates the idea of Maskelyne as a represenative of a unified ”scientific elite”, against which Harrison had to do battle. The mathematicians in question attempted, in 1784, to oust the Royal Society’s president Joseph Banks. They painted themselves as “the scientific part of the society”, countering a snobbish generalist with no understanding of mathematics and the need for practical mathematicians to have representation on the Society’s Council. Maskelyne was identified with those who needed to earn a living through their skills in practical mathematics, and against the coterie surrounding Banks.

(Perhaps it was leaked knowledge of Maskelyne’s funny trousers that lost them the vote….)

I hope that there will be further opportunities to create a good, rounded sense of Maskelyne and his times at the Museum’s symposium on 15 October, marking this year’s Maskelyne bicentenar. The programme and booking details are now available online. Speakers include NMM curators, who will reflect on the surviving manuscripts and objects relating to Maskelyne and his family, as well as members of the Board of Longitude project team and external speakers. Attendees will also have the opportunity to see some of the collections in store and in the Museum’s new library and archive the previous afternoon (Friday 14 October).

I will be starting the day with a brief look at how Maskelyne’s reputation has fared in biographies and histories since his death. While he was certainly painted badly (or moaned about) in his lifetime by some who felt hard done by, such as William Harrison, Thomas Earnshaw and Reuben Burrow, he was generally respected and obituaries naturally sang his praises. I am hoping to pinpoint the moment when it all turned sour, probably as a result of the renewal of interest in Harrison in the early 20th century. I am beginning to see, though, that my talk will also have give some time to reflections on the 2011 Maskelynian rehabilitation!