On this day: the role of anniversaries

Newspapers, magazines, blogs and Twitter are awash with anniversaries. Today’s Birthdays, On this Day in History, #OTD and so on greet me every morning. I know a handful of famous people or events that share my birthday, and I am usually aware of forthcoming anniversaries for the people or institutions that I study. It cannot have escaped your attention that this year sees a Dickens anniversary and a royal jubilee. But why should it be in any way meaningful?

There is, of course, a meaningful history attached to the celebration of anniversaries, and one that has been studied by a number of historians. Looking at which, why and how famous individuals have been remembered for centenaries, bicentenaries and tercentenaries can tell us a great deal about how people view their own time, and how they make sense of their heritage, their nation, their discipline or their institutions. It is a product of that age of invented traditions, the 19th century. One of the scene-setters was the Shakespearian tercentenary in 1864, for which an ambitious programme of events was organised. By the early 20th-century such celebrations abounded: Shakespeare again in 1916, James Watt in 1919, Newton in 1927, Faraday in 1931, and many, many more. Many of the themes are touched on in this fascinating article on the Watt and Faraday celebrations, by Christine Macleod and Jennifer Tann (£).

Because of my sense of the fact that such celebrations tend to say more about us than they help develop a real understanding of the past, I’ve been pretty sceptical about anniversaries. This tendency was probably not helped by the fact that for three or four years it was my job to create a list of forthcoming anniversaries for the newsletter of the British Society for the History of Science (back issues here: there’s plenty more interesting stuff in there than these lists!). I was told by my elders and betters that it was a tradition and much appreciated by our members. In an era before Wikipedia, it probably was, but in my innocence I did not understand why.

Since entering the ‘real world’ of grant applications, large organisations and media relations, my eyes have been opened. While I still can’t quite understand why dates separated by a year, a decade, a century or whatever should be so readily accepted as having significance, I now understand why historians go along with it readily enough.

An anniversary seems to be the only way that history can be accepted as news, barring a really dramatic archival or archaeological discovery. Journalists, editors and readers are, it seems, more prepared to accept a story on an event/book/exhibition if it is connected to an anniversary – and, therefore, somehow carrying its own logic and relevance. Thus, publishers, directors and funders are more likely to be convinced that your idea is worth a punt. It also, of course, carries a natural deadline that helps to focus efforts, gain momentum and generate collective endeavour. A general sense that something must be done to celebrate this or draw attention to that can coalesce much more easily around a forthcoming anniversary.

It would seem that I have now become the anniversary’s greatest fan. Today I was delighted to see the marking of the 250th anniversary of Tobias Mayer’s death with a great post over at The Renaissance Mathematicus. I pointed readers of the Longitude Project blog toward it, especially since the bicentenary Nevil Maskelyne’s death last year was an excuse for a number of posts creating a more rounded portrait of the erstwhile ‘longitude villain’. The anniversary made it sensible to have a symposium devoted to the man, and also got him into New Scientist.

Of course, the whole Longitude Project, and the NMM’s forthcoming exhibition on longitude are also knowingly linked to the 2014 tercentenary of the first Longitude Act. I am now beginning to think that it would be worthwhile to start planning for the 350th anniversary of the Royal Observatory (OK, it’s not until 2025, but in the scheme of things, in a busy life, that’s not really so far off, if we’re to pull of a significant redisplay as well as suitable events). These institutional beginnings do, at least, carry a little more weight than birth and death anniversaries, that mark the two events in a life that the hero has least control over, but why should “founded 300 years ago” mean any more than “founded 298 years ago”?

Are we letting the cart lead the horse, in research terms? Should we be working harder to sell what we really think is significant instead of going for the easy option? Are anniversaries a harmless means of raising awareness, or can they obscure the importance of history: accounts, stories and interpretations which are for everyday, or perhaps for some unplanned particular day, and not just once every century. Did the huge Darwin bicentenary of 2010 achieve much, beyond sating everyone’s thirst for talks and TV programmes about the man? Have we, in short, made ourselves slaves to the anniversary?

Mr Punch does transits, constellations and coiffures

Punch, or the London Charivari is a wonderful source for history of science. It is impossible to think of a popular magazine today including jokes that span politics, science, the arts, classical reference and what we might call observational comedy. As with the image posted on the Ptak Science Books blog the other day, the editors of Punch had high expectations of their readers’ ability to recognise not just a handful of scientific celebrities but a while range of figures from the scientific community. Those of us who have commented on John’s post are struggling to be sure of the identities of some of those represented, or to explain just what the mathematician is doing with a fish that has so shocked a zero (have a look – and let me know if you can explain!).

In the comments, I pointed to the existence of the SciPer Index, created at the HPS department in Leeds between 1999 and 2007. This indexed short runs of sixteen 19th-century periodicals, creating a online resource and three important books.[1] While the project suffered from being at the head of the game – being superseded in many ways by mass digitisation projects, which cover much longer runs of periodicals with full images – it remains immensely impressive in terms of the added value created by the project members. This is not just a word-searchable set of texts, but a real index, explication and glossary.

For something as visual and complex as Punch, this is exactly what is required. The image on John Ptak’s site is nothing to a search engine until it is described in words. And the SciPer Index not only describes, but identifies and connects. It is not, of course, infallible: the dedicated scholar-indexers occasionally missed or misidentified references, and had to make complicated choices about just what we, or 19th-century writers, define as ‘science’, but it is the only thing I know that really spells out just how prevalent, and how intricate, such references were at this period.

I often come back to Punch, especially as I was lucky enough to inherit a set of bound 19th-century volumes. Because I have recently been thinking about the historic transits of Venus, I was looking today at the 1874 and 1882 volumes, knowing from Jessica Ratcliffe’s The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain (2008), that there are some great illustrations, revealing popular interest and the imperial and nationalistic agendas bound up with the transit expeditions. More of those another time – one will certainly be making its way into the exhibition at the Royal Observatory this spring. What struck me today, leafing through these volumes, is just how many references to science are there each year. Take a look at the SciPer Index for earlier volumes to see what I mean.

I will share just a couple of 1874 astronomical examples (a year that saw a comet and a transit of Venus), otherwise I could be here all night….

THE ASTRONOMER AT HOME

I hold, whatever PROCTOR writes,
Or LOCKYER, or AIRY,
Out-door observing, these chill nights,
A snare to the unwary

Long though you gaze into the sky
(Not quite, I hope, cigarless),
What chance of seeing meteors fly
Through a heaven that hangs starless?

A blazing fire in bright steel bars
Best observe, after dining;
And study – if you must have stars -
Those ‘neath arched eyebrows shining.

Transit of Venus snugly watch.
With comforts that enhance it:
There is no place like home to catch
Your Venus in her transit.

Let who will, ‘mid Kerguelen’s snows,
Seek freezing-post and thawing-room,
My Venus one short transit knows -
From dining-room to drawing-room.

Let me observe her, by lamp-light,
In chaise longue, soft and lazy,
Her witch-face framed in hair-wreaths bright,
Enough to drive one crazy.

Sweet star of eve, whose beauties blend
With foam of vaporous laces,
That like a cloudy setting lend
A mystery to thy graces,

Heightening the charms they half enwrap -
Sweet star too of the morning,
In muslins fresh, and pretty cap
A prettier head adorning!

Yes, “Vive l’Astronomie,” say I -
But what I add between us is -
While our Home-Heavens can still supply
Observers with their Venuses!

Not the best poetry – though kudos for rhyming “Venuses” with “between us is” – and rather sickly sweet than funny, perhaps. There is little to hint at the strides that women were beginning to make in education and public life at this date. However, this image ‘Constellations and Coiffures’ does something distinctly different:

The joke, of course, is about the fashionable new hairstyle, but it takes its range of astronomical references for granted. A telescopic chignon was, of course, apt for a comet, ‘long-haired’ being the literal meaning, though please note too the telescope earrings. Ether, nebulae and cluster are also thrown into the accompanying poem. At the end, “Berenice’s hair” refers to Coma Berenices, formerly part of Leo and now a constellation in its own right. It was named after Queen Berenice II of Egypt, who swore to sacrifice her long, blond hair to Aphrodite if her husband Ptolemy III Euergetes returned safely from war. He did, and she placed her hair in the temple. It disappeared and, the story goes, the court astronomer, Conon of Samos, appeased the angry king by claiming that the gods were so pleased by the hair that they had taken it and placed it in the heavens.

A source of early feminism Punch is not, but as a source for developing an understanding of the role, meaning and cultural baggage of science among the Victorian middles classes it is, undoubtedly, essential reading.

 

———-

[1] These were Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (CUP, 2004), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004) and Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2004).

Preparing for the transit

I have recently been working on a small display at the Royal Observatory (opening next month) called Measuring the Universe. Despite being small-scale the topic is – in every sense – vast. We are trying to cover the history of measurements of the scale of the solar system, the distance to the nearest stars, the space between galaxies and to the Cosmic Microwave Background. This takes us from the Earth to the edge of the known universe, and from Greeks to researchers today. [Read more]

A conversation about science and progress

A couple of evenings ago an interesting conversation developed on twitter, between me (@beckyfh), Thomas Soderqvist (@museionist), Thony Christie (@rmathematicus), James Poskett (@jamesposkett) on science and progress. It all started with a query from Danny Birchall:

(@dannybirchall): Choosing images for online galleries. Is it useful to highlight racist elements in the history of science? #histsci

When I asked for more details he told me that the exhibition was “about material culture of the brain; context is faux-measurement of brain capacity/function. shd definitely explain racism (tweet). After another couple of tweets, Danny wrote “I think what I’m trying to ask (in the abstract) is, is it useful in histsci to show … (tweet) … how ideas that we now find repellent are intimately intertwined with the ‘progress’ of science? (tweet). I replied:

(@beckyfh): @dannybirchall I think it’s absolutely essential to show that science has never been one long, straightforward, ‘clean’ story of progress

(@beckyfh): @dannybirchall Racism, imperialism, sexism etc are as implicated in history of science as any other part of history, as it’s a human product

At this point Thomas entered the conversation:

(@museionist): @beckyfh @dannybirchall Equally senseless to deny progress in sci; such denial was a dogma among historians of sci from 1970s to early 2000s

And thus the conversation was kicked off. Apologies if I’ve missed out any important tweets from the conversation below, and for it getting confusing where parallel discussions developed. I’ve had to play with the order a bit to make these make sense.

(@beckyfh): @museionist No, not denying progress, depending on definitions! Bt complexity, dead-end, retrograde, morally dubious etc too @dannybirchall

(@beckyfh): @rmathematicus But also senseless to assume all areas & questions in science have progressed uniformly, inevitably (or at all?) @museionist

(@museionist): @beckyfh @rmathematicus Who’s suggested uniform progress? That’s a strawman’s counterargument against the general progress claim

(@beckyfh): @museionist There ate [are] plenty of people who assume inevitable progress in science. It’s still an attitude worth countering IMO @rmathematicus

(@museionist): @beckyfh @rmathematicus The debate easily falls into extremes: denial of progress vs inevitable progress

(@beckyfh): @museionist Which is the joy, and importance, of complexity! The question, though, is how to sell that. @rmathematicus

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @museionist Tend to agree. History of science needs to escape its negative ‘progress is problematic’ mode.

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett How about my more positive “it’s excitingly, confusingly and unexpectedly complex” approach? @rmathematicus @museionist

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @museionist Sounds better! I guess I’d prefer less focus on progress & more on specific exciting problems.

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @museionist Like “How did science come to make global claims?” (my own interest) rather than “Did science progress?”

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett This is more or less where I came into histsci: “how did science achieve its status & authority?” @rmathematicus @museionist

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @museionist That’s an exciting and complex question! I see much more value in that than the (strawman?) of progress.

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett Well, one thing that gave science authority was its narrative of progress! @rmathematicus @museionist

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @museionist That’s great! Can’t disagree. Harder to ignore the subject than I’d like it seems!

(@rmathematicus): @jamesposkett @beckyfh @museionist Progress exists but it is almost never linear and it can oft only be recognized with hindsight

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett @museionist The question is how to control the complexity so that one can say anything at all

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett I get criticised for arguing that irrational subjects such as astrology have helped science to progress 1/2

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett “It gives people the wrong impression” What is the right impression? 2/2

(@beckyfh): @rmathematicus Anyone who argues that has the wrong impression of how science works & they should be told so! @jamesposkett

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett Going back to complexity. Any presentation of the history of science is a simplification at what level does 1/2

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett the simplification become unacceptable? 2/2

(@beckyfh): @rmathematicus Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. On 1 level there’s merit in just showing science is a human activity @jamesposkett

(@rmathematicus): @beckyfh @jamesposkett @museionist I think authority is assumed to come from science’s claim to provide ‘truth’.

(@beckyfh): @rmathematicus And one piece of evidence for its ‘truthfulness’ is progress… @jamesposkett @museionist

(@dhayton): @rmathematicus @beckyfh @jamesposkett @museionist is it interesting to think about how authority allows science to provide “truth”?

James and I had a bit of a side conversation, on the subject of whether there’s a simplistic popular notion of scientific progress, even if the subject is a bit passe in scholarly circles:

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett Thing is, by and large people (as opposed to historians of science) still assume neat progress. They therefore don’t see…1/2

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett …a reason to question/ discuss/take an interest in science & policy for science. I still find it worth arguing 2/2

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh I’m just a bit overeager to push past it! BBC and Guardian don’t push progress much now (tho I agree with you, this leaves a lot.)

(@beckyfh): @jamesposkett Interesting. Sure you’re right, tho doesn’t always feel that way! But any ‘progress’ on this must be result of pushing view?

(@jamesposkett): @beckyfh I concede news is often muddied by popular metaphors which skirt round the issue of progress: approximating the truth etc.

That was more or less it for the night. Thomas had long left us for a book and bed. However, bright and early the next morning:

(@museionist): @beckyfh @rmathematicus @jamesposkett Good morning: I think we need to discuss the meaning of the word ‘progress’ in the history of science

I hazarded the following:

(@beckyfh): @museionist i think most wd see progress in sci as knowing more, knowing better, being able to make better use @rmathematicus @jamesposkett

Thony agreed, but there we left it. So: what do we mean by progress in science? Is there a simplistic view of progress that exists generally, and is it worthwhile trying to point out that the picture is a great deal more complex? Did historians of science in the 1970s-90s really believe that there was no such thing as progress in science? Do some still believe it now? How should we deal with progress in science as opposed to progress in technology?

Answers below, please.

Wanting to believe

Sometimes, the extent to which people see what they wish to see seems truly remarkable. However, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very human affliction affects even those with a training or long practice in observation and logic. An article in the Observer this Sunday discussed one of the more famous cases of a forgery convincing those who wanted to be convinced. This was the 1912 archaeological hoax known as Piltdown Man, which seems to have been accepted as genuine by a number of experts largely because they really wanted to be able to put both British archaeology and early British inhabitants on the map. A remarkable, unique find that suggested that early British man had a larger brain than the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals currently being found to international acclaim on the Continent was, perhaps, too good a story to resist.

Piltdown Man was accepted as a genuine specimen for 40 years, despite the fact that when the finds were first published one individual suggested that it looked rather like a modern human skull with a chimpanzee jawbone. When it was reviewed again in the 1950s it looked like a pretty cheap and obvious forgery. It seems that a lack of relevant expertise in Britain at the time, perhaps together with an unarticulated desire not to ask too many questions and, possibly, even some conspiracy amongst museum curators led to this collective turning of blind eyes. The Natural History Museum and Southampton University will now carrying out research to find out more about the creation of the hoax, just in time for its centenary.

At least the hoaxed were in it together on this occasion. Some time back I wrote about a history of science forgery that fooled only one individual: an eminent man who perhaps should have known better but who wanted to believe, then wanted to believe that he had not been taken advantage of, then finally had to reveal that he had spent large sums of money and staked his reputation on an elaborate, but surely unconvincing series of forged documents. This was Michel Chasles, professor of geometry at the Sorbonne and early expert in the history of mathematics (and, judging by this picture, alarming-looking individual), who collected old mathematical texts and manuscripts but, with one rogue dealer, got out of his depth.

Chasles brought the first of his astonishing finds to the Académie française, and they were published in the institution’s journal, Comptes rendus. They were a number of notes and letters addressed to Robert Boyle and signed ‘Pascal’. They immediately provoked intense criticism but were, for two years, staunchly defended by Chasles, who produced more and more letters to back up an unlikely story. An increasingly complex alternative reality in the history of science was being developed, in which Pascal had discovered gravity, having previously been in communication with Galileo, who had only feigned blindness to get better treatment from the Inquisition. It was a French nationalist illusion then ended up including letters purportedly from a bewildering variety of individuals. At home, it turned out, Chasles had letters from not only the whole history of science, but also French royalty, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc.

It can all be read about in Henri Leonard Bordier and Emile Mabille, Une Fabrique de Faux Autographes, Paris, 1870 (published in English as The Prince of Forgers), who explained that Chasles was “naturally imbued with the desire to prove a thesis, [and] saw only that which agreed with his argument”. The forger, Vrain-Denis Lucas, who was sentenced to two years in prison with the words “You have abused in the most brazen manner the passion of an old man, of a scholar, his passion as a collector and his love for his country, in order to deceive him shamefully”. Lucas should have top marks for effort, a B+ for locating sources, and a C- for palaeography: this image compares a Lucas ‘Pascal’ document with a genuine manuscript.

The episode is particularly fascinating when we look at how scholars tried to prove Chasles wrong. Like palaeontology in the early 20th century, in the 19th century the serious study of historical documents, especially scientific manuscripts, was still in relative infancy. The scientific minds of the Académie tried ink testing, but the results actually turned out to back Chasles. Others considered handwriting, but this was tricky in a period when access to original material for comparison was difficult, and there were few photographs or facsimiles. This, therefore, left the content, but this required a sophisticated knowledge of the genuine source material. It was a challenge to the relatively few individuals who, at this period, might be considered historians of science.

A pretty unambiguous approach was taken by the Glasgow professor of astronomy, and author of History of the Physical Sciences, Robert Grant, who showed that the dataset in the spurious letter post-dated the real Pascal. David Brewster, biographer of Newton, focused on rescuing his hero’s reputation, working from his detailed knowledge of the archive. Thomas Archer Hirst spotted passages copied directly from later publications. Augustus De Morgan, as was his wont, had fun spotting a range of entertaining and obscure historical errors. These, together with the challenges put forward in Paris from Prosper Faugère and Urbain Le Verrier, and the facsimiles created by Bordier and Mabille, were conclusive, and lessons were learned in the scholarly and bibliographic world – we hope.

The story is not quite complete, though: a final, interesting twist has just come to my notice. Back in 2004, Ken Alder published “History’s Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud along the Seine“ in the journal Critical Inquiry. In this he writes: “Last year, while on academic leave in France, I discovered a letter in a Paris archive…”. This was a letter from the forger Lucas, explaining his motivation, translated by Alder. Today, I noticed that the Wikipedia articles for Lucas and Chasles both refer to this “recently uncovered” letter.

At the time that this article appeared, Alder had begun researching his book The Lie Detectors (2007). Read the Lucas letter, and have a think for yourself, noting that it ends with a quotation from Oscar Wilde:

After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.

The place of science in history and history in science

As an historian of science working between two museum sites and with people researching or communicating both history and science, I often feel I’m a stuck-record, piggy-in-the-middle, harping on to the historians to pay attention to the science and the scientists to remember the history. Irritating, maybe, but it’s a theme that goes beyond my day-to-day work.

It strikes me as particularly odd that history can be taught or presented at school, universities and museums without giving thought to the scientific knowledge and ideas of the period. I managed to get through six years of school history and three years’ undergraduate without touching on science or having any idea that a discipline such as history of science might exist. Some schools include a little history of medicine, but sadly none of this came my way. Technology appeared – as, for example, the seed drill and power-loom, or Dreadnoughts and tanks – but these were simply factors to be taken into consideration in explaining political, social or military developments. So far as I remember, no thought was given to how the political, social or military environment influenced the development or production of such technology.

To be fair, the history curriculum also gave little room for considering the literature, art, music, architecture or philosophy of the period being studied. For me, this is a crying shame. Bringing in such elements is the best way to develop a feel for a temporally or geographically distant culture, and it also allows cross-fertilisation with other subjects being studied. It also makes no sense, as the monarchs, politicians, generals and populations did not act within a vacuum. They created and reacted to the ideas and material reality of their time.

As a history student, I was always most excited by elements in my courses that seemed to reach out into such areas. I remember an element of one course that introduced the cultural flourishing of the Carolingian Renaissance, another where medieval ideas and tales led to a geography and natural history that included one-footed or dog-headed people. Asked to think of dissertation topics, I reached for literature as an historical source or investigated the links between philosophy and politics. My Masters’ course, happily an interdisciplinary one, allowed me to dip into history of architecture, history of the book and, finally, history of science.

I may not have been a typical history student, but I believe strongly that at school and beyond it should be a matter of course that history curricula should find time to consider the culture of the time, and that this should, absolutely, include the science. Martin Robbins’ recent post on the representation of science on the BBC contained one phrase that made me nod. Why, he wonders, is science treated as something to be presented and packaged as a separate strand of programming, rather than as “a natural part of public discourse”. Quite so. And quite so, too, for our discussion of any past culture. [1]

While convinced that history teaching should remember the science, I have usually been less certain about the necessity of including history in science teaching. Science can be taught without knowing the long, complicated history behind any particular technique or idea, and when historical stories are brought into the classroom they are usually more about the folklore of science than its history. I do think that history could really help students understand “how science happens”, but I’m not sure that there are many science teachers with enough historical knowledge and training to do this successfully. Stories of heroes and discoveries are, emphatically, not about how science has actually happened and will not inform a student about how science is experienced by most working scientists today. I would prefer not to have the history there at all than that it should be a triumphalist bit of presentism.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps, also, I am too sanguine about how informed the history of science, art or literature taught by most history schoolteachers would be. Perhaps this would only work with much thought, new curricula, staff training, and if most students took both subjects and were encouraged to make each to reflect on the other. A nice thought!

Since finding my way to history of science, I have wondered whether I would have taken to school science better if it had included some history. Possibly, if it gave context and not just a colourful anecdote. A hint of science policy and ethics would have worked well for me, I think. In fact anything that might have made the stuff I was being taught seem less right/wrong, less finished, less routine and more integral to the business of living and working.

I was, though, recently reminded of one early experience of history of science that led me to a brief moment of genuine excitement and enthusiasm for science. This came about as a result of visiting the Leonardo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. I was in my early teens, but was entirely captured by this rather erudite exhibition. As these images on the website of the exhibition’s designers show, there were some large-scale models, but it was all about the manuscripts. As it was very busy, I had to move slowly along in line before each case and I barely noticed the exhibition design add-ons. I was delighted by the combination of artist, inventor and scientist but it was the science that, on this occasion, most interested me. The studies of fluid dynamics and anatomy, ideas for machines and, above all, exploring the concept of perpetual motion.

My sister (who did become a scientist) and I returned home talking about it. We began sketching ideas, imagined building models and, because our ‘solution’ to perpetual motion involved magnets, went off to buy books on magnetism. I think we knew that it was impossible, but there was something about seeing Leonardo’s notebooks and the sense, there, that this problem was unsolved and worth tinkering with – that the science we were coming across was not neatly packaged and completed before being passed on to us – gave us the licence to think up our own experiments. It was much, much more fun than repeating experiments at school, when you not only knew what the result would be before starting but also that thousands of other children had done exactly the same thing before you.

So, at work and beyond, I guess that I will continue my call for putting the science into history and the history into science.

_________
[1] I don’t quite go along with everything in this post. The under-representation of scientists is not, I think, part of the same battle as dealing with under-representation of women. The BBC is also hardly the worst offender, and I think that one’s sense of the under-representation or trivialization of a particular field is greatly affected by one’s own interest and expertise in said field. At least scientists sometimes get to present science programmes. History of science coverage is, more often than not, presented by a scientist. OK, I know that history of science is a small discipline, and perhaps not many of us are well-known or telegenic, but could we, perhaps, try something radical, like having an historian doing history of science?

The active observatory

The following was written for the new Science Studies section of the website Dissertation Reviews, and can also be read there. The reviewers are encouraged to give a general outline of the content of the thesis under review and to briefly consider it in the context of relevant literature and its possible historiographical impact. Critical analysis is largely left to a separate document, forwarded privately to the author of the thesis. I was very pleased to be asked to do it: a site which lets researchers know what recent PhDs have been up to is a great idea – and it’s always good to have a deadline to ensure that you do read something you should be reading!

Alistair Marcus Kwan, Architectures of astronomical observation: from Sternwarte Kassel (circa 1560) to the Radcliffe Observatory (1772), Yale University, 2010.

Given the scientific and symbolic importance of astronomical observatories, it is surprising that they have received relatively little analysis. There are accounts of individual observatories, the astronomers who worked in them and the instruments they used, but much less has been said about observatories as type of building. Still less has the relationship between buildings, instruments and people been given sustained consideration, which seems the more surprising given the ‘spatial turn’ in history of science over the last decade and more. By doing this, Alistair Kwan adds to such works as Marion Donnelly, Short History of Observatories (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press, 1973) and Agustín Udías Vallina,Searching the Heavens and the Earth (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003). He does this not by challenging them on which observatories are significant or indicating a theory of their development, but by focusing on their physicality and the business of working with instruments within and around them.

Kwan aims to showing how observatories ‘actively contributed to observations’ by either failing or succeeding in ‘accommodating, supporting and sheltering observers and instruments’ (p. i). He includes insights from architectural history, especially the study of spatial functioning, and archaeology. Making careful use of contemporary accounts, engravings and plans, Kwan successfully highlights the physical experience of astronomers using particular instruments, for defined purposes and in often uncomfortable conditions. We gain a lively sense of the astronomer at work: carefully stepping around large instruments in confined spaces, reviving chilled fingers in a warming room, resting in a nearby bed when clouds covered the sky, or taking up undignified postures to access the eyepiece. Observatory buildings might exacerbate or ease physical conditions and contribute to the success or failure of observations. Likewise, observatories can be designed in order to pursue particular objectives, or these might be defined by the difficulties or opportunities presented by the building.

Moving chronologically from the mid-sixteenth century to the later eighteenth, Kwan analyses a small number of well-known institutions. Throughout this period, although astronomers learned by personal experience or written accounts, there was limited precedent or contemporary theory in observatory building. New instruments and objectives, each site and building, presented new challenges. The observatories considered include buildings that were, for a variety of purposes and with vastly differing budgets, built, adapted, or partially adapted, for astronomical work.

Chapter 1 considers what has been described as Europe’s first permanent observatory, that of Wilhelm IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Given that neither the building nor any detailed drawings or descriptions of the observatory survive, Kwan effectively reconstructs it from extant instruments, an inventory, recorded observations and typical practices. While not the easiest example to commence an advocacy for the primacy of studying buildings, this observatory creates a useful contrast to those built by Tycho Brahe, Uraniborg and Stjerneborg. These, considered in the following three chapters, are atypical of Renaissance astronomy, although famous and influential. Wilhelm’s minimal architectural adaptations were far more typical than Tycho’s creation of entirely new, purpose-built structures.

Detailed consideration of the well-documented Uraniborg and Stjerneborg allows Kwan to pursue a number of important themes, for example the relationship between instrument design and space, or the tension between practical function and symbolic meaning in architecture. Uraniborg’s design was, Kwan persuasively argues, dictated not only by its intended uses but also occult Neoplatonism. Here Kwan argues against claims of Palladian or Vitruvian influence, for example from John Robert Christianson (‘Tycho Brahe in Scandinavian Scholarship’, History of Science 36 (1998) pp. 467–484, p. 469) and Victor E. Thoren (Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 106-108). While full of astrological meaning, the design did not turn out to be ideal for astrometry. Tycho was fortunate to have the resources to try again. His Stjerneborg mounted precision instruments below ground-level for maximum stability: they and their use dictated the structure that contained them.

The following three chapters largely consider the adaptation of existing buildings to specific purposes: housing camera obscura for solar observation, long refracting telescopes for qualitative observation and zenith sectors for attempting measurements of stellar parallax. Here we test the meaning of the term ‘observatory’, for Kwan focus largely on the design and housing of particular instruments, some of which were used on a handful of occasions, others not at all. Nevertheless, important ground is covered about their use and the possibilities or constraints of architectural structures. While many of these instances have been described elsewhere, it is useful to compare and contrast such episodes and to highlight the significance of spatial requirements or where available spaces directly affected what observations could be made.

Chapter 8 considers the building, use and adjustment of three major observatories, at Paris, Greenwich and Oxford. The first two, as national institutions, were new ventures and, while funding and requirements differed, in both cases there were trade-offs between functionality and appearance. While they are described as ‘fraught by misjudgement and disagreement from the outset’, the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford is presented as a largely successful building. By this date the key instruments and their requirements were better known, making planning for their accommodation significantly easier. Naturally, however, appearances continued to matter, for observatories must also represent patrons and the worth of astronomy.

Kwan concludes that by the 1770s, ‘decades of trial and error had finally shown what the spatial needs [of astronomy] actually were’ (p. 196). He does not, of course, go on to the following century, when new technologies and techniques required architectural redesign and adaptation. Kwan’s work will, necessarily, inform any historian who goes on to consider these later ventures. Likewise, his demonstration that ‘Observatories stand among astronomy’s most influential protagonists’ (p. 199) must be taken on board by historians of astronomical instruments and observational astronomy. As well as giving us a very clear sense of the bodily work involved in making knowledge, Kwan’s work foregrounds architectural spaces as things to be both overcome and utilised when measuring celestial coordinates, observing heavenly bodies and testing the predictions of astronomical theory.

[Update: There's evidently lots of interest in this dissertation! For those of you with access to ProQuest, you can get more information and purchase a copy online, or download it free if you have a subscription.]