In 1714, then, there were several potential solutions to the problem of finding longitude at sea. Most of them were theoretically viable and had already been researched by mathematicians, astronomers, artisans and mariners. In many ways the ground had been prepared: the next, crucial step may not have seemed all that distant. However, all of the methods presented practical problems, most particularly due to the conditions under which observers or instruments had to perform at sea. It was a practical and technical set of problems, and the government hoped that these could be met so that the methods ‘true in theory’ might be made ‘Practicable and Useful at Sea’.
While much previous work had taken place in Spain, Holland, Venice and elsewhere, the momentum had decisively shifted towards Britain. Ideas and skills were available, particularly in London with its flourishing instrument trade, maritime interests, places of open discussion, such as coffee-houses, and widespread access to print. These opportunities were seized by many of those with ideas, mechanisms and projects relating to longitude. The Royal Society, Astronomer Royal and Commissioners of Longitude were marked out as the key figures from whom to seek interest, approval and, perhaps, a route towards one of the 1714 Act’s enormous rewards.
CHAPTER 3
ON TRIAL
I understand not Mathematicks, but have been formerly troubled too much with Projectors of the Longitude to my great Mortification and some Charges by encouraging them ... One of my Projectors cut his Throat, and the other was found an Imposter.
Jonathan Swift, letter to John Wheldon, 27 September 17271
The likely effect of the Longitude Act must have been uncertain as it went through Parliament, but within weeks it was clear that it had caught the public’s attention. Schemes of all sorts came under public scrutiny – a mixed bag of ideas, some more plausible than others and many held up for ridicule. In an age awash with projects of all sorts, getting these ideas taken seriously and gaining support required tenacity and robust strategies.
It would be two decades before a genuinely promising scheme emerged in the work of John Harrison (1693–1776). From the mid-1730s, his sea-clocks began to garner praise and the support of the Commissioners of Longitude. Even so, it took him another twenty years to complete a watch that was ready for a decisive trial. Over the same period, two other contenders emerged in Tobias Mayer’s work on the Moon and Christopher Irwin’s marine chair for viewing Jupiter’s satellites. The three methods would finally go head-to-head in 1763–64 in a sea trial to Barbados, which established marine timekeepers and the measurement of lunar distances (or ‘lunars’) as the methods to back.
* * *
Had we of Archimedes’s Lumber, Enough to make a Chair for Slumber, We’d find by Lines in Cucumber Longitude.
* * *
A Hymn to the Chair (1732)2
Fig. 1 – A summary of the 1714 Longitude Act circulated as a flyer
{Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam}
Projectors in public
Within days of royal assent being granted, details of the Longitude Act appeared in newspapers and periodicals, with abridged versions circulating as flyers (Fig. 1). The public response was just as rapid. Some longitude schemes had been published before, but the number increased dramatically and older proposals were quickly republished. Generally they repeated the known contenders: magnetic variation; marine timekeepers; improved methods of dead reckoning; and astronomy. However, as the newly appointed Commissioners of Longitude knew, the basic theories were largely sound. It was detailed solutions to the practical problems of being on a ship that they were looking for.
For the authors of longitude schemes, gaining credibility was the challenge, with ideas of all sorts competing for investors. Every day, Daniel Defoe noted, projectors were coming up with ‘new Contrivances, Engines, and Projects to get Money’.3 Some were honest, he conceded, but potential backers were understandably cautious, particularly after the notorious financial disaster of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, said to have ruined people from all walks of life. Such wariness extended to longitude schemes. Looking back on the first ten years since the Longitude Act, one mathematical author claimed that the rewards
had no other effect than setting all heads and hands at work, and producing, for the sake of interest, abundance of quacks and impossible schemes ... in the year 1722 the discovery of the longitude, was made one of the bubbles in Change-Ally, and put up to be sold to the best bidder. Many brokers, crazy projectors, and poor crafty knaves, cryed it at Garraway’s Coffee-House, along with ... South-sea stock.4
Fig. 2 – ‘Viaticum Nautarum or The Sailor’s Vade Mecum’, by Robert Wright, 1726, a longitude scheme that was sent to Isaac Newton
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
Anyone with pretensions to the rewards needed to impress the Commissioners or some other influential patron. Some projectors took the bull by the horns and approached individual Commissioners directly, sending schemes (Fig. 2) or visiting in person. As Astronomer Royal and an ex officio Commissioner, John Flamsteed received more than his fair share: people knew where to find him and his Greenwich appointment made him a longitude expert. In August 1714, two Derbyshire preachers came to the Observatory in Greenwich Park with a scheme to use the refilling of evacuated vessels to measure time accurately. Flamsteed was polite, but ‘refused to give them my hand to testifie that I had seen their proposealls and advised them not to print them’. Another hopeful inventor, Case Billingsley, outlined a platform for shipboard observations; the astronomer carefully explained its flaws, while Billingsley ‘held his peace which is as much as I can expect from persons that have swelled themselves with the hopes of getting twenty thousand pounds’.5
Publishing was the main way of promoting an idea and, hopefully, making money, with the printed word lending a certain gravitas. Within three months, a ‘Swarme of hopefull Authors’ had proposals rolling off the press, many of them directly addressed to the Commissioners. They included the Venetian mathematician Dorotheo Alimari, whose observing instrument Flamsteed considered ‘one of the worst contrivances for taking the height of the Sun or Stars that ever was thought of’ (Fig. 3).6
Isaac Newton, the country’s leading man of science and a Commissioner by virtue of his presidency of the Royal Society, was another obvious target and was soon weighed down with schemes. He resolutely insisted that astronomy held the solution and that any other method was at best subservient. As he wrote to one thick-skinned enquirer about timekeepers:
I have told you oftner than once that it is not to be found by Clock-work alone ... Nothing but Astronomy is sufficient for this purpose. But if you are unwilling to meddle with Astronomy (the only right method & the method pointed at by Act of Parliament) I am unwilling to meddle with any other methods then the right one.7
Fig. 3 – Dorotheo Alimari’s observing instrument, from The New Method Proposed by Dorotheo Alimari to Discover the Longitude, by Sebastiano Ricci (London, c.1714)
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
Fig. 4 – A satirical print, The Coffee House Politicians, c.1733, poking fun at some of the goings on in London’s coffee-houses
{The Trustees of the British Museum}
Fig. 5 – Jeremy Thacker’s proposed longitude timekeeper, from The Longitudes Examin’d (London, 1714)
{The British Library Board}
While individual Commissioners did receive and respond to proposals, there was general uncertainty about the process and mounting criticism of the lack of conspicuous action. Jane Squire, the only woman known to have proposed a scheme under her own name, complained that:
If this Commission, who in near twenty Years have never thought fit to meet as Commissioners, it would be a charitable piece of Justice to inform the World of it, that this Act of Parliament may no longer remain the Destroyer of the most valuable of all Goods, Time.8
Squire’s ideas were somewhat unusual. Hoping to help humanity reclaim the knowledge lost when the Tower of Babe
l was destroyed, she offered a new language as the basis of a more profound understanding of time and place. It would be taught to children using orange peel, special playing cards and building blocks, she said. Longitude, as a product of time, would be easily found as a result. Family and religious connections gave Squire a way in to the Commissioners, particularly Hans Sloane, by then President of the Royal Society, and Thomas Hanmer, a Commissioner named in the Act. Hanmer suggested she publish her ideas, emphasizing that any proposal should undergo ‘the Scrutiny of all the great Professors of the Sciences of Astronomy and Navigation’, as well as ‘stand the Test of Practice’.9 Squire died without reward, however.
Others explored less direct routes. The mathematician John French already had a scheme in 1706, when he persuaded Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George, to test a compass in which fire deflected the needle. With renewed impetus from the Act of 1714, he wrote to the Royal Society, then solicited public support in print and finally applied to the Prince of Wales (later George II) for a royal patent. The Prince replied that only the Commissioners could help him and there the matter rested. Coming to London with a different magnetic scheme, the Welsh physician Zachariah Williams failed to impress the Commissioners, so he wrote to the Duke of Chandos, who was known for investing in projects of all sorts. Chandos passed him on to the natural philosopher John Desaguliers, who was not impressed either.
Where approaches to specific Commissioners or investors failed, a public appeal was worth trying. Reports and advertisements for supposedly successful longitude methods, and for the books describing them, appeared in all the newspapers. In late July 1714, William Hobbs advertised his ‘Horologe’, a timepiece impervious to heat and cold. All he needed, he told readers of the Daily Courant, Britain’s first daily newspaper, was a backer so that he could make one. By November he was offering to show the finished clock at one of London’s coffee-houses. It was an idea that Flamsteed had dismissed.
William Whiston also made extensive use of newspapers and periodicals, as he had in lobbying with Humphry Ditton for the Longitude Act. In October 1714, the Post Man announced that every Saturday night a ‘Ball of Fire’ would be thrown a mile in the air from Blackheath. Whiston asked readers within sixty miles of London to note its direction and height (see Chapter 2, Fig. 4). The following year he asked them to record the time between seeing the flash and hearing the sound of the mortars. He tried again two years later but had little success in gaining responses.
Whiston had other strategies up his sleeve too. In 1715, he tried raising money by subscription for a coastal survey using his rockets. Two years later, he presented the rocket scheme to the Mayor and Court of Aldermen of the City of London, but when they consulted Edmond Halley he declared it unworkable. Whiston then published a tract on longitude by magnetic inclination in 1719, securing over £470 from subscribers including the royal family, the Duke of Chandos and Martin Folkes, a future President of the Royal Society. By 1724, he was proposing the use of solar eclipses, and, ten years later, a new reflecting telescope for observing Jupiter’s satellites, which he presented at the Royal Society. Finally, when in 1739 he revived his idea for a coastal survey using magnetic variation, the Commissioners offered him £500, and patrons including the First Lord of the Admiralty gave another £175. At the time, Whiston was only the second projector to be rewarded under the Longitude Act.
Whiston was also a doyen of London’s coffee-houses, which had become popular places for relaxation, chat and business. As one regular wrote, they made ‘all sorts of People sociable, they improve Arts, and Merchandize, and all other Knowledge’.10 They were places where projects of all sorts could be read about in books and newspapers (Fig. 4), discussed among the clientele or with the projectors themselves, or presented in lectures. Longitude and navigation had long been topics for coffee-house debate, with James Hodgson, a former assistant at the Royal Observatory, giving talks at Jones’s in Cornhill by 1703, later moving to the Queen’s Head Tavern and the Marine Coffee-house near the Royal Exchange. He even anticipated Whiston in mounting experiments with a ‘large gun’ at Shooter’s Hill and the Royal Observatory, a method by which he believed a ship’s position could be determined.11 By the 1710s, other navigational lecturers included both Ditton and Whiston, the latter still offering talks on latitude and longitude at the Temple Exchange Coffee-house three decades later.
Some intriguing schemes emerged from this melting pot of ideas. In November 1714, advertisements appeared for Jeremy Thacker’s The Longitudes Examin’d, which described a clock sealed in a vacuum to protect it from external influences (Fig. 5). Thacker’s book was horologically knowledgeable and notable for applying the term ‘chronometer’ to a marine timekeeper. But perhaps it was a satire: his ‘pretty machine’ would ‘I am (almost) sure ... do for the Longitude’ and he confessed that, ‘If it be ask’d why I wrote the Book at all, I’ll frankly answer, That I wanted Money’.12 It read like a sly take on projecting and made fun of other published schemes.
Fig. 6 – The final plate, set in Bedlam, of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, 1735, showing one inmate drawing longitude schemes on the wall
{The Trustees of the British Museum}
Fig. 7 – Precision long-case regulator, by John Harrison, 1726
{Dr John C. Taylor}
As Thacker suggested, many proposals were not worth the bother. Indeed, to those trying to get their ideas noticed, the plethora of poorly conceived ideas was in itself problematic. Two hopeful authors, William Ward and Caleb Smith, wrote that these ‘Idle Schemes and Chimerical Projects’ had
brought so much Disgrace on the Projectors, that every Attempt to solve this valuable Problem, is now ridiculed as the effect of a weak, or a distempered Brain: The Thing itself has been so long the Reproach of Art ... that the greatest part of Mankind look on it as an Impossibility.13
Critics agreed: finding longitude at sea really was impossible. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver would ‘see the Discovery of the Longitude, the perpetual Motion, the Universal Medicine, and many other great Inventions, brought to the utmost Perfection’, only if he became immortal like the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg; in other words, never.14 Projectors and investors could, therefore, expect only financial, and perhaps mental, ruin. Thus George Lyttelton’s supposed Letters from a Persian in England described a resident of Bedlam lunatic asylum who ‘had quitted Poetry, and taken to the Mathematicks, by the means of which he had found out the Longitude, and expected to obtain a great Reward’.15 Most famously, William Hogarth linked longitude and madness in the final scene of A Rake’s Progress (Fig. 6). His Bedlam inmates included a man sketching Whiston and Ditton’s rocket proposal and other longitude ideas on the hospital wall.
Having gained notoriety for its role in the creation of the 1714 Act, Whiston and Ditton’s proposal attracted particular attention. John Arbuthnot wrote to Swift that it was ‘the most ridiculous thing that ever was thought on’ and had spoiled an idea for their satirical creation, Martinus Scriblerus.16 Nonetheless, Scriblerus was credited with schemes including ‘Perpetuum Mobiles, Flying Engines, and Pacing Saddles; the Method of discovering the Longitude by Bomb-Vessels’,17 while a scatological song credited to the same authors included the lines
The Longitude mist on
By wicked Will Whiston.
And not better be hit on
By good master Ditton.
So Ditton and Whiston
May both be bep–st on;
And Whiston and Ditton
May both be besh–t on.18
While they were neat rhymes, ‘be-pissed on’ and ‘be-shit on’ were hardly sophisticated, yet they suited an age obsessed with bodily parts and functions. It was a mentality for which longitude was a gift. In a poem lampooning longitude projectors, a cuckolded astronomer almost discovers his unfaithful wife with her lover and asks, ‘How far from Mars is Venus off?’
About nine Inches and a half,
(Replies the Dame:) Sleep but one Hour,
> The LONGITUDE I shall secure.19
Yet, amid the satire, plausible longitude schemes did eventually emerge, some promising enough for practical trials. In 1719–20, Admiralty-sponsored tests of a ‘fluid quadrant’ by Jacob Rowe even led to attempts to introduce new legislation. Whiston wrote that the Commissioners met to discuss Rowe’s ideas as well, although no other evidence of this intriguing possibility has come to light. Then, in the 1730s, a scheme emerged with sufficient credibility for the Commissioners to consider a reward. The game changer was a clockmaker from Lincolnshire.
John Harrison and marine timekeeping
Little is known of John Harrison’s early life and education, except that he learned his father’s trade of carpentry. This undoubtedly gave him some of the skills necessary for making clocks, but how and why he became interested in them is still unclear. Possibly he was inspired by contact with the clockmaking trade in Hull, just across the river Humber from his home in Barrow, north Lincolnshire. What is known is that Harrison was making clocks by the time he was twenty, and that they were constructed almost entirely of wood. One of them, built for the stables at the nearby Brocklesby Park estate, was revolutionary. It ran, and still runs, without oil and had a new form of escapement, the part that feeds in the energy to keep the pendulum swinging. Harrison’s design, called a grasshopper escapement – after its distinctive jumping motion – was almost frictionless.
Finding Longitude Page 6
