58. Joyce E. Chaplin, “The Curious Case of Science and Empire,” Rev. in Amer. History 34:4 (Dec. 2006), 436–37. She frames the general issue thus: “Those busy Europeans of the early modern era. Among the many things they managed to do in the centuries that stretched from 1500 to 1800, they defined modern science and they created modern empires. How did they do it? Did the work depend on an efficient synergy, the two projects somehow supporting each other, science as handmaid to empire? Or did Europeans’ accomplishment depend on a division of labor, in which different people did different things in parallel, nevertheless contributing to a larger program of European definition and control of the globe? Or were the revolutions in science and in global domination merely coincidental, having nothing, really, to do with each other?” (434).
59. State Library of New South Wales, “The Crew on the Endeavour,” Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/banks/series_03/crew_01.cfm (accessed Sept. 26, 2017).
60. See generally Donald H. Menzel, “Venus Past, and the Distance of the Sun,” Proc. Amer. Philosophical Society 113:3 (June 16, 1969), 197–202; Donald A. Teets, “Transits of Venus and the Astronomical Unit,” Mathematics Magazine 76:5 (Dec. 2003), 335–48; “James Cook and the Transit of Venus,” NASA Science, May 27, 2004, science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/28may_cook (accessed Apr. 8, 2017); Neil deGrasse Tyson, “The Long and the Short of It,” Natural History 114:3 (Apr. 2005), 26–27. Early in the third century BC Aristarchus estimated that the Sun was at least nineteen times farther from Earth than was the Moon. In the following century, Hipparchus agreed. So did Ptolemy. That estimate is about twenty times too small. Copernicus didn’t change that estimate, but Kepler did, proposing a distance of 3469 Earth radii, which is about seven times too small. In 1671–73, three French astronomers, based on their observations of Mars from Paris and from French Guiana, calculated the Earth–Sun distance as 87,000,000 miles, which is only about 7 percent too small. In 1771, basing his calculation on the findings of the 1769 Venus transit, a British astronomer named Thomas Hornsby came up with 93,726,900 English miles. Today the average Earth–Sun distance, which constitutes a standard unit called the AU, or astronomical unit—our very own yardstick—is 92,955,807 miles (exactly 149,597,870,700 meters). Reverend Hornsby was off by only eight-tenths of one percent. But because the Sun daily loses mass (which is carried away in the solar wind), the value formally assigned to one AU is, in fact, a quantity that slowly changes with time.
61. E. G. R. Taylor, “Position Fixing in Relation to Early Maps and Charts,” Bull. Brit. Society for the History of Science 1:2 (Aug. 1949), 27; Turnbull, “Cartography and Science,” 6–7, 21 nn. 19, 20; Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 293.
62. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 51–52, 140. For inland waters, Herodotus distinguished a day’s sail from a day’s voyage in an oared boat.
63. Tyson, “Long and the Short,” 24–26; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 49.
64. Museum labels, Royal Observatory Greenwich; Sobel, Longitude, 56; Robert Howard, “Psychiatry in Pictures,” Brit. J. Psychiatry (2002), A10. The final image of degradation and downfall in Hogarth’s 1730s series Rake’s Progress, “The Rake in Bedlam,” includes a “longitude lunatic,” telescope in hand, pursuing to the point of insanity his personal solution to “the lucrative puzzle of the age” (Howard).
65. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 118–22; quote from Williams, Sails to Satellites, 80.
66. For an overview, see, e.g., Cotter, Nautical Astronomy, 180–267 (marred by a few errors in names and dates). For the odder options, see Sobel, Longitude, 41–49.
67. Quoted in Cotter, Nautical Astronomy, 188.
68. Sobel, Longitude, 35. Re Gemma, two dates—1522 and 1530—crop up in different authors. The 1530 reference is specified as “De usu globi” in D. J. Struik, “Mathematics in the Netherlands During the First Half of the XVIth Century,” Isis 25:1 (May 1936), 47, in which Gemma “showed how to determine geographical longitudes with the aid of a watch.”
69. Sobel, Longitude, 7, 58–59; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 80.
70. Quoted in Sobel, Longitude, 106.
71. Sobel, Longitude, 128–45, 149.
72. Although Maskelyne and his Board would not permit the real thing to accompany Cook, they hired a clockmaker admired even by Harrison himself to copy H-4 for £500. See Sobel, Longitude, 138–45, 152–53.
73. Sobel, Longitude, 152–64.
74. Williams, Sails to Satellites, 79.
75. Text of full conference proceedings and related documents at “1884 International Meridian Conference,” www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/scans-meridian.html (accessed Apr. 9, 2017). Re inviting astronomers to speak, see Session 2, Oct. 2, 1884, 15–21.
76. “The Meridian Conference,” Science 4:89 (Oct. 17, 1884), 376–77.
77. “The Meridian Conference,” Science 4:91 (Oct. 31, 1884), 421.
78. Stephen Malys, John H. Seago, Nikolaos K. Pavlis, P. Kenneth Seidelmann, and George H. Kaplan, “Prime Meridian on the Move: Pre-GPS Techniques Actually Responsible for the Greenwich Shift,” GPS World, Jan. 13, 2016, gpsworld.com/prime-meridian-on-the-move/ (accessed Sept. 29, 2017); for an in-depth discussion, see Stephen Malys, John H. Seago, Nikolaos K. Pavlis, P. Kenneth Seidelmann, and George H. Kaplan, “Why the Greenwich Meridian Moved,” J. Geodesy 89:12 (Dec. 2015), 1263–72. Universal Time, or UT1, was formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time.
4. ARMING THE EYE
1. Fred Watson, Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 49–50, 296–97; Albert Van Helden, “The Invention of the Telescope,” Transac. Amer. Philosophical Society 67:4 (June 1977), 9, n. 4. The pope referred to was Gerbert d’Aurillac, who reigned as Pope Sylvester II from 999 to 1003.
2. From Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius: “Afterward I made another more perfect one for myself that showed objects more than sixty times larger. Finally, sparing no labor or expense, I progressed so far that I constructed for myself an instrument so excellent that things seen through it appear about a thousand times larger and more than thirty times closer than when observed with the natural faculty only.” In Archives of the Universe: A Treasury of Astronomy’s Historic Works of Discovery, ed. Marcia Bartusiak (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 81. As to the availability of ready-made lenses, Van Helden marshals extensive evidence that by the middle of the sixteenth century, the shops of spectacle sellers across Europe commonly offered a selection of both concave and convex lenses of varying strengths. The explosion of book publication in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, spurred by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable metal type, had led to rapid increases in myopia. The solution—concave spectacle lenses—was for sale in Florence by 1451 (Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 10–11).
3. See Watson, Stargazer, 71–73, re observations prior to Galileo’s. As with the rest of his scientific discoveries, Harriot did not publish his results, note J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson in “Thomas Harriot,” MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Harriot.html (accessed Apr. 13, 2017).
4. Watson, Stargazer, 55–62; Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 25–26, 36–42.
5. Engel Sluiter, “The Telescope Before Galileo,” J. History of Astronomy 28:92 (Aug. 1997), 225–26.
6. The self-characterization of Galileo is from his book Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger (1610), trans. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1. The Venetian connection was the Republic’s chief theologian, Fra Paolo Sarpi, who had been tasked with inspecting and testing the earlier petitioner’s telescope and who might well have provided Galileo with extremely detailed information about it. See Mario Biagioli, “Did Galileo Copy the Telescope? A ‘New’ Letter by Paolo Sarpi,” in The Origins of the Telescope, ed. Albert Van Helden, Sven Dupré, Rob van Gent, and Huib Zuidervaart (Amsterdam: KNAW Press/Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010), 203–30, innovation.ucdavis.edu/people/publications/biagioli-did-galileo-copy-the-telescope (accessed July 26, 2017).
7. Letter to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, Aug. 24, 1609, in Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, 7–8. Like most creative individuals in need of money, Galileo was thoroughly familiar with having to plead for support. In his discussion of a December 1605 letter from Galileo to Cosimo II, the Medici prince who would soon become Grand Duke of Tuscany, the historian of science Richard S. Westfall writes, “He [Galileo] had prepared his instructions for the use of the geometric and military compass for publication as a pamphlet, and in the spring of 1605 he formally sought permission to dedicate it to the crown prince, Cosimo. Galileo parlayed acceptance of the dedication into an invitation to instruct the prince in mathematics during his summer vacation and did not thereafter relent in his quest. He wrote the prince the flattering letters that an absolute ruler expected of a client, declaring himself ‘one of his most faithful and devoted servants,’ and proclaiming his desire to demonstrate ‘by how much I prefer his yoke to that of any other Master, since it seems to me that the suavity of his manner and the humanity of his nature are able to make anyone desire to be his slave.’ The terms of Galileo’s address . . . would not have seemed sycophantic to Galileo’s contemporaries. Almost no one challenged the legitimacy of a hierarchically ordered society, the precondition of the patronage that supported Galileo in an economically unproductive occupation.” Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope,” Isis 76:1 (Mar. 1985), 14.
8. All quotes from Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 15, 28–30.
9. See, e.g., Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 11, 26; Engel Sluiter, “The First Known Telescopes Carried to America, Asia and the Arctic, 1614–39,” J. History of Astronomy 28:91 (May 1997), 141; Engel Sluiter, “The Telescope Before Galileo,” J. History of Astronomy 28:92 (Aug. 1997), 224–29.
10. Las Lanzas, also known as Surrender at Breda (1634–35), 307 x 367 cm., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
11. Robert K. Merton writes that there were more wars in seventeenth-century Europe than in any preceding century or any succeeding century until the twentieth (“Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris 4 [1938], 564). Geoffrey Parker later writes, “Hardly a decade [in European history] can be found before 1815 in which at least one battle did not take place. . . . In the sixteenth century there were less than ten years of complete peace; in the seventeenth there were only four” (The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 1). On commercialization, see William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chap. 4. On military technology, see Merton, “Science, Technology,” 543–57.
12. William Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova: A treatise of dioptricks in two parts, wherein the various effects and appearances of spherick glasses, both convex and concave, single and combined, in telescopes and microscopes, together with their usefulness in many concerns of humane life, are explained (London: Benj. Tooke, 1692), 243. Quoted in Peter Abrahams, “When an Eye Is Armed with a Telescope: The Dioptrics of William and Samuel Molyneux,” paper, Antique Telescope Society, Sept. 2002, home.europa.com/~telscope/molyneux.txt (accessed Apr. 15, 2017).
13. Merton, “Science, Technology,” 372 n. 8, 373 n. 9, 543–44; Parker, Military Revolution, 177 n. 2, quoting J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620 (1985). Merton quotes John W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (1899): “It is hardly too much to say that for, at any rate, the four years from 1642 to 1646 the English went mad about military matters. Military figures and metaphors abounded in the language and literature of the day.”
14. Samuel Butler, “The Elephant in the Moon” (1676, published posthumously).
15. Re lenses vs. mirrors: Early investigators tried out a wide variety of lens shapes and combinations of lenses. René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher, proposed an especially complicated lens whose shape was a combination of an elliptical solid and a hyperbolic solid, set at right angles to each other—perhaps a fine idea, but the technology to make such a lens didn’t exist in his day. Other investigators tried lengthening the tube that held the lenses; one tube, the creation of a brewer, Johannes Hevelius, was so long that it had to be propped up with ropes and pulleys, and would drift off target with the slightest puff of wind.
For those who chose to work with mirrors rather than lenses, there were other problems: How do you arrange the mirrors so that your head doesn’t get in the way? How do you balance the virtues and drawbacks of reflective metal versus transparent glass? What do you use to polish the mirrors? Can you combine mirrors and lenses in the same telescope? Isaac Newton’s solution was to use a concave primary mirror to collect and reflect the light onto a flat, angled secondary mirror that redirected the now-converging beam of light out the side of the tube, where the viewer looked at the image through an eyepiece. William Herschel, fresh from his discovery of Uranus in 1781, built himself a forty-foot-long telescope—the world’s largest at the time—fitted with a four-foot-wide mirror made mostly of polished copper. The mirror was so large that the viewer, standing on an angled platform above it, would block only a small fraction of the mirror’s total collecting area. From that vista you would observe the direct reflection of light through an eyepiece rather than reflected from a secondary mirror.
16. Albert Van Helden, “The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century,” Isis 65:1 (Mar. 1974), 42; Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665), preface, quoted in Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 27–28 n. 23; letter from Galileo to Giuliano de Medici, Nov. 13, 1610, quoted in Westfall, “Science and Patronage,” 23.
17. One such was a gentleman acting as Portugal’s official observer during a sea battle between the French and the Portuguese off the coast of Brazil in late 1614. Noticing that the Brazilian-born Creole commander of the Portuguese forces took advantage of a pause in the fighting to pick up his spyglass, the observer told him he was wasting everybody’s time—that looking through a telescope “will neither lessen our task nor make our enemies fewer.” Sluiter, “First Known Telescopes,” 141–45.
18. Sluiter, “First Known Telescopes,” 141–45; Yasuaki Iba, “Fragmentary Notes on Astronomy in Japan (Part III),” Popular Astronomy 46 (1938), 94.
19. Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 10–11, 115; Frederick the Great, “The King of Prussia’s Military Instructions to His Generals,” Articles V, VIII, www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/readings/fred_instructions.htm (accessed Apr. 15, 2017).
20. Silvio A. Bedini, “Of ‘Science and Liberty’: The Scientific Instruments of King’s College and Eighteenth Century Columbia College in New York,” Annals of Science 50:3 (May 1993), 214; Edward Redmond, “George Washington: Surveyor and Mapmaker—Washington as Land Speculator,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/george-washington-survey-and-mapmaker/washington-as-land-speculator/ (accessed Apr. 15, 2017).
21. Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, 1749, 30, facsimile at sceti.library.upenn.edu/pages/index.cfm?so_id=7430&pageposition=30&level=2 (accessed Apr. 15, 2017).
22. Meanwhile, the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge—founded in 1660, a quarter century after the founding of Harvard College—continued to support and recognize the work of colonial scientists. Frederick E. Brasch, “John Winthrop (1714–1799), America’s First Astronomer, and the Science of His Period,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 28:165 (Aug.–Oct. 1916), 156.
23. See Bedini, “ ‘Science and Liberty,’ ” 214–15.
24. Letter from George Washington to William Heath, Sept. 5, 1776, in Henr
y P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn . . . Containing Maps, Portraits, and Original Documents (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), www.gutenberg.org/files/21990/21990.txt (accessed Apr. 16, 2017).
25. The original painting was done in 1850 but was damaged by fire; a full-size copy painted by the artist in 1851 now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
26. Deborah Jean Warner, Alvan Clark & Sons: Artists in Optics (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 33.
27. Letter from George Washington to Brigadier General Anthony Wayne, July 10, 1779, National Digital Library Program, Library of Congress, cdn.loc.gov/service/mss/mgw/mgw3b/009/009.xml (accessed Apr. 16, 2017).
28. Van Creveld, Command in War, 12; in his slightly later work Technology and War, From 2000 B.C. to the Present, rev. and exp. (New York: The Free Press, 1991), van Creveld writes that in the sphere of military intelligence during the period 1500–1830, “technological developments were minimal” (120). Two classics written at about the same time that simply omit mention of the telescope are McNeill, Pursuit of Power, and Parker, Military Revolution.
29. Van Creveld, Command in War, 281 n. 23; van Creveld, Technology and War, 117–20.
30. Frederick the Great, “Military Instructions,” Article I; van Creveld, Technology in War, 107, 123; McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 126–29. Frederick the Great writes of “taking care that the troops be furnished with bread, flesh, beer, brandy, &c.” Van Creveld estimates the daily food requirement for an army besieging a fortress, say 50,000 troops and 33,000 horses, at 1.5 kg per day for each man and 15 kg per day for each horse, or a total of 475 tons of food each day.
Accessory to War Page 50
