Picturing science: sharing knowledge, selling ideas

William Huggins’ depiction of the solar surface (National Maritime Museum)

This image looks like a curving, curling, abstract mosaic. It is, in fact, an attempt to capture what one observer saw when he looked through a filtered telescope lens at the Sun’s surface. Before photography developed, if astronomers wanted to share their visual experience they could only do it by drawing, adding an ability with pencil to the many necessary accomplishments of the observer. Photographing detail on the bright Sun was to prove a particular challenge.

When you know what it is you should be looking for, it is much easier to see. Familiar as we are today with spectacular images of the Sun in all kinds of different wavelengths, we have come to expect pattern, difference, structure, feathery and filament-like shapes and vast bursts of gases. This was unknown before telescopes could supply sufficient magnification and resolution.

Careful drawings were backed by verbal descriptions, but it was only by looking for themselves that other astronomers might come to accept your interpretation. Was the surface pattern “feathered”, “granulated”, “rice-grain”, “slashed straws” or “willow-leaf”? These were all terms used by observers like William Huggins, Samuel Pierpont Langley and James Nasmyth, who revealed that the Sun was not the anticipated smooth, bright disc, punctured only by a few sunspots.

These images tell two stories. One is about the astronomers who looked at, tried to capture and explain the nature of the solar surface. The other is about sharing those images, knowledge and possible explanations with a wider public. These solar close-ups were published in scientific papers, but I have taken them from a set of 38 lantern slides, produced toillustrate lectures on the Sun by a company called York & Son in around 1880.

Drawing of sunspots by James Nasmyth (National Maritime Museum)

The set includes images that show observational instruments, experimental or demonstration equipment and diagrams to explain possible theories of solar activity. The slides allowed the lecturer to, for example, introduce the audience to competing explanations of the appearance of sunspots. William Herschel had suggested that they were openings in the Sun’s luminous atmosphere, revealing a cooler surface beneath; Alexander Wilson considered them depressions in the solar surface.

Experiment using a prism to split sunlight (National Maritime Museum)

I don’t know how many of this set of slides were produced, nor whether any of them were used to enliven one or more actual lectures on the Sun (apart from my own). If they did, the part on sunspots and the solar surface might have run similarly to this 1872 article in the Popular Science Monthly, by the editor Edward Livingston Youmans. While sunspots had, of course, been long known, their complex structure was newly revealed:

But, when a telescope of high magnifying power is directed to the sun, its aspect is greatly changed: the spots lose their simplicity, and the photosphere its uniformity, and in both there are a revelation of structure, a diversity of parts, and a variety of changes, which at once provoke questions in the mind of the observer, as to the causes of this diversified appearance, and the constitution of the body which presents them. The hypotheses put forth are ingenious; but, while the facts of observation are rapidly increasing, and there is a growing agreement on many points, there is still profound uncertainty as to the interpretation to be given to the leading phenomena.

An article or a lecture on the Sun, presented in the last quarter of the 19th century would have introduced its audience to a whole new vocabulary of penumbra, faculae and photosphere. It would also have focused on the use of novel techniques in astronomy, above all the photography and spectroscopy that opened the way to a whole new branch of science. It also introduced the idea that surface irregularities on the Sun might be linked to magnetic activity and terrestrial climate.

It was an exciting topic for a lecture around 1880 – something that a commercial producer of visual aids probably rightly took up as an opportunity.

Messing with time

Cross-posted from The H Word blog, first posted on 31 March 2013, the first day of British Summer Time.

It’s hardly surprising that I’ve become very aware of time and how we measure it since beginning work at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. What has really struck me is how much we, on the one hand, are resentful at any suggestion that we alter the way we measure time and, on the other, have done just that many times over the course of history.

Although it’s useful publicity for the Observatory, I never cease to be amazed that the change of the clocks, which happens twice a year ever year like … err… clockwork, is always a news story. Suggestions that we might do away with British Summer Time, or shift to what is euphemistically called Double Summer Time (aka Central European Time) are huge debating points. The fact that we do, or the fact that we might cease to, add leap seconds are stories that both receive many column inches.

Although the introduction of BST was a very 1900s notion of making better – that is, more healthful and productive – use of our long summer days*, history suggests that it takes something like a world war to implement such seemingly radical changes. There is often a sense that diverting from whatever it is we are used to is, somehow, unnatural. It certainly seems unnatural when we are ripped untimely from our beds but, even before the arrival of this annual ritual, there was nothing natural about the way we measured time.

Take GMT, which traditionalists are keen to defend by rejecting summer time and by adding leap seconds to ensure that we do not drift too far from having the midday sun above the meridian at Greenwich at noon. In the scheme of things, it is almost as much of a novelty as BST. It only became official standard time in Britain in 1880, even if it had been used in specific contexts, like railway timetables or in navigation, some time before. Its use as a standard to which international time zones are aligned was a matter of slow adoption from the late 19th century onward.

The implementation of a national standard time, which might be some 20 minutes different from your local time, should you live in the west of the country, was seen by some as an unnecessary novelty. There were those who made a stand, and even today the chimes at Christ Church in Oxford still stick to local time. As can be imagined, the idea being floated at the end of the 19th century that there might be a universally-adopted International Time was much mocked, resented or worried about.

But the national or local times that seemed more meaningful to people are, of course, also artificial products. They are expressed as mean time, which is an averaging out of Sun’s the apparent motion that was adopted in deference to the introduction of a new technology – the clock. Clock time is produced by an artificial system that imperfectly mimics “real” time, which is a product of the Earth’s daily rotation and annual orbit.

The difference between mean time and “real” or apparent time is expressed by what’s called the Equation of Time. This was first calculated in the second half of the 17th century, when the introduction of pendulum clocks made the business of artificial timekeeping sufficiently precise. The fact is, the Sun is rarely at its highest point over the Greenwich meridian at the moment our watches show noon.

Things get even more complex when we start looking into how calendars have been calculated and established. These are fascinating histories that are intertwined with everything from the story of astronomy to how we live and order our lives. Our time has been messed with for centuries and it is not, forgive the pun, a clock that can be turned back.

* Personal gripe: many people seem to think that putting the clocks back in Winter is “daylight saving” and is designed, somehow, to give us more daylight. Guys: “daylight saving” is used in Summer and nothing, but nothing, will create more daylight in Winter.

Book review: Venus Seen on the Sun

This review was first published in the British Journal for the History of Science 46 (March 2013)

Jeremiah Horrocks and Wilbur Applebaum (trans.), Venus Seen on the Sun: The First Observation of a Transit of Venus by Jeremiah Horrocks. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xxiv +82. ISBN 978­90­04­22193­2. €99.00 (hardback). 

Jeremiah Horrocks’ observation of the 1639 transit of Venus, from Johannes Hevelius’ version of Venus in sole visa (1662).

The June 2012 transit of Venus was the occasion to turn our attention once again to the observers of the previous transits, in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882. Thus it is that we have the first English translation since the nineteenth century of Jeremiah Horrocks’s account of his 1639 observation. This seems long overdue, especially given the fact that the only other available translation, which is ‘more free in style than necessary’ (p. xxii), was produced by someone who lacked familiarity with the history of astronomy and introduced a number of errors.

The text of Venus in Sole visa, first published by Johannes Hevelius in 1662, is not only an account of the first observation of this rare event but also a fascinating commentary on astronomy at a period of significant change. The transit gave Horrocks the opportunity to judge and correct the work of Copernicus, Lansberge, Longomontanus and Kepler, with the Rudolphine Tables of the last being proved much the superior. It was this, rather than the observation itself, or even its indication of the planets’ great distance and lack of luminosity, that marked the significance of the work. In addition, the text is remarkably readable: as Applebaum writes in the brief introduction, ‘It is filled with an unrestrained enthusiasm and intensity of commitment from which a youthful and refreshing naiveté is never wholly lacking’ (p. xxiii).

Short though the introduction is, it helpfully outlines Horrocks’s life, the history of the four draft manuscripts of the treatise, and the astronomical context in which it was produced and read. Applebaum’s notes in the main text are full and extremely helpful, in technical matters and in relation to the books and manuscripts that Horrocks was referring to, both scientific and literary. I cannot comment on the faithfulness of the translation but it reads well, with the exception, perhaps, of Horrocks’s poetry, which has been translated for meaning rather than scansion.

A sense of Horrocks’s personality arises from the text, in part due to his adhering to ‘a style now completely gone from scientific literature’ (p. xxiv). There is infectious zeal, leading to amusingly damning judgements, as well as the poetry, digressions and classical allusions. (The transit of Venus is a subject for which coy personifications and metaphors of seduction seem not yet to have gone out of style.) It is not hard to see why successive readers of Horrocks have taken him to their hearts. The Victorians, with Arundell B. Whatton’s 1859 Memoir and a series of essentially fictional memorials and portraits, naturally led the way, bequeathing their vision of a pious and persevering young cleric, fighting ill health to perform first his Christian and then his scientific duty.

Jeremiah Horrocks’ observation of the transit of Venus, as imagined in 1891 by Eyre Crowe

We, no less enthused by a local hero with his finger on the pulse of Continental astronomy, will still rejoice in the account of a young astronomer’s greatest moment. Although touched by the thought of his work being cut short by tragically early death, Horrocks nevertheless comes across as wonderfully vital. The modern, positively reclaimed term ‘geek’ comes to mind in reading Horrocks’s description of astronomers who ‘immoderately delight in trifling things, which do not move others in the least’ (p. 16). Something similar arises from his lauding of Kepler, ‘the unparalleled prince of true astronomy’ (p. 51), and his dismissal of the ‘boasts’ and ‘impotent clamour’ (p. 72) of Philippe van Lansberge and those who relied on his tables.

Apart from Kepler, Horrocks’s greatest praise is for ‘the recent and wonderful invention of the telescope’ (p. 8). Despite writing three decades after the instrument was patented, Horrocks clearly felt that ‘the Belgian telescope’ still required a better reputation, and thus he affirmed the increased accuracy it allowed and defended it against those who suggested it could create illusions. It is eulogized in verse, as readers are urged to ‘learn the wonders of such a great tube’ (p. 11) and join him, lying in wait to spy Venus.

Being a review of a book published by Brill, this must end with the inevitable comment about cost. Ninety-nine euros for just over a hundred pages is steep by any measure. Given the accessible style of Horrocks’s writing and Applebaum’s translation, it is a shame that this should simply be a library-based reference work. The author’s preface promises a full-length biography of Horrocks in the near future. It is much to be hoped that this does indeed appear, and that it is available at a price that places it within reach of significantly more pockets.

Picturing science: comet watching

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

‘Looking at the comet till you get a criek in the neck’. Detail of a caricature by

Thomas Rowlandson, 1811. Source: National Maritime Museum

Having begun my series called Picturing Science, I realised that I have stolen the title of another website, which does at least give me an excuse to point those interested in imagery in the history of science to the Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit project. This fascinating academic project is looking in detail at images as an integral part of doing science, while my series is – for now at least – more focused on science in the public sphere.

Thus, while last week’s fanciful image was produced in the sober, educational context of an encyclopedia, this week’s takes us from the heavens right down to earth. It is a caricature by Thomas Rowlandson, published by Thomas Tegg in 1811, and can be viewed in full here.

On one level the print satirises the increasing popular interest in astronomy in the first half of the 19th century. With telescopes increasingly affordable, and comets in the news, there were undoubtedly more individuals than ever who, like this man in his nightcap and nightgown, were straining to view the heavens until they “get a criek [sic] in the neck”.

1805 had seen what is now known as Encke’s comet and Biela’s comet, two years later there was the much more spectacular Great Comet of 1807. In the year that this print was published, another bright comet, with a remarkable reddish colour and broad tail, was visible to the naked eye for around 260 days. This was the Great Comet of 1811.

As so often, in history and even today, the appearance of a bright comet was connected to particular events on earth. 1811, for example, saw a particularly good wine vintage, and so Comet Wine was marketed. However, it was also interpreted as having portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia the following year – not least by Napoleon himself – and became known as Napoleon’s Comet. However, something else of earthly – or, perhaps, earthy – concern is happening in this caricature.

While the old man’s eye is glued to his telescope, and his mind contemplating the heavens, another man takes advantage of the situation, paying lascivious attention to the astronomer’s young and attractive wife. Just to make the relationship clear, her fur stole appears to add a tail to the older man – a symbol, like horns, of the cuckold.

This joke, about astronomers and enthusiasts being so wrapped up in their ideas, views of nature and gadgets that they fail to see what is going on under their noses, is an old one. It appears in Gulliver’s Travels among the inhabitants of the floating island Laputa, who I mentioned inmy post on Swift and satire. It is, unsurprisingly, a common trope of caricature, something I discussed with some other examples in an old post on caricaturing astronomers.

You can see some other distracted astronomers and some 19th-century comet imagery from the National Maritime Museum’s collections and elsewhere on my Pinterest boards. Also on Pinterest are some morePutti of Science, collected by Danny Birchall after last week’s optical putti.

Picturing science: the eyes have it

Cross-posted from The H-Word blog.

Detail from an engraving depicting ‘Optics’ from the Encyclopaedia Londinensis.

Source: National Maritime Museum

In a series called Picturing Science, that seems appropriate to tired eyes at the end of the week, I am going to explore some images from the history of science. In this I am taking advantage of my role as a curator, and the kind permission of the Picture Library, to draw on the object and art collections of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

The imagery surrounding science has changed hugely over the course of history, and it is undoubtedly the case that the way it is depicted influences our ideas about it. The colouring, the context, the associations all play their part in giving signals about what science is, who does it, who should care about it and why.

The picture heading this post is a striking detail from the centre of a print, one of a number that were my first cataloguing project on joining the Museum back in 2008. You can see the full image here. It is dated 1820 and, although not a particularly fine or rare image, is a long, long a way from how we might choose to depict the subject – Optics – today.

It was published in Encyclopaedia Londinensis, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, published in 24 volumes between 1810 and 1829, complied by the printer John Wilkes.

I am not sure who wrote the long treatise on optics, and would be grateful if anyone can let me know here or @beckyfh. However, we do know one of the readers: George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal from 1835-1881, recalled that he owed much of his early education in optics and the other sciences to the Encyclopaedia, writing in hisAutobiography that it was “a work which without being high in any respect is one of the most generally useful that I have seen”.

The print engraver is J. Chapman, who was responsible for most of the plates in the Encyclopaedia. The artist of many of the more technical illustrations, such as this one, was J. Pass. However, this rather more fanciful image is credited to A.D.M. Whoever this was, they had a splendid way of imagining the science of light: rainbow nymphs surrounding an eye, in the corners putti demonstrate instruments and phenomena.

This putto shows off a camera obscura, a device for projecting an image onto a surface to aid the artist.

This one shows us the phenomena of refraction, with light appearing to bend a stick as it passes through water.

This chap seems to have his telescope trained directly on the charming sight of the red nymph (take a look!).

And, finally, in the bottom left corner, this putto has created the whole scene by holding up his prism - the iconic instrument of of optics – to split light into its seven colours.

It is a science not disembodied but, apparently, teaming with people, even if they are of a distinctly mythical sort.

 

Update:

The artist, A.D.M. is identified on the Wellcome website as Ange Denis Macquin, who seems to have written (or illustrated?) a book on animals and a Latin poem on gastronomy… The Hebrew at the top of the picture appeared to be, as might be guessed, “And God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light”.

 

Gulliver’s travels in science and satire

Cross posted from The H Word blog.

For historians of science, Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels is well known both as a work of what we might call proto-science fiction and as a satire on the experimental philosophy that was being promoted by the Royal Society at the time of its publication – two years before the death of Isaac Newton.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a talk at the very same Society that Swift had mocked as wasting time on projects such as the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers. It was given by Dr Greg Lynall, a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, which looks well-worth a read from the review posted on the website of the British Society for Literature and Science.

Swift was a High Church Anglican and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Knowing this, some might leap to the conclusion that here was someone who did not and could not understand the important work being done by Fellows of the Royal Society, that here was a clash of world views and evidence of a natural hostility between science and religion. This, of course, is completely off track. It ignores the complexity of Swift’s views, the validity of some of his targets and the fact that, while sectarianism might be rife, the importance of religion per se was not in question.

In many ways the whole of Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on the scientific approach of the Royal Society. It is presented as a travel narrative, reporting on extraordinary sights and experiences in foreign lands in a calm, detached and, whenever possible, quantitative fashion. The Royal Society had often encouraged travellers to make such records and reported on information collected in circumstances that ranged across formal experiment, mathematical proof, astronomical observation, field work, library work, happenstance and even hearsay. Curiosities and natural monstrosities took their place alongside Newton’s crucial experiment.

The most significant section of the book from the history of science point of view is Gulliver’s visit to the floating island, Laputa, where the inhabitants are enamoured of mathematics, measuring, quantifying, experimenting and astronomical predictions. The island floats by magnetic levitation, in what seems to be one of the only ‘practical’ applications of their knowledge – their obsession with accurate measurement has led them to apply the use of quadrants to the art of tailoring, resulting only in badly-fitting clothes. Their heads literally in the clouds, they have to be woken up from their speculations to communicate with Gulliver.

Swift was satirising the ubiquity of Newtonian philosophy in polite society of 1720s London, but he was not being ‘anti-experimental philosophy’, just as no one today is ‘anti-science’. Yes, there was fun to be poked at some of the extravagances and plain oddness of the new philosophy and some its followers, just as in Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso, which targeted Robert Hooke. However, it works as satire because of genuine concerns lurking beneath – and some of those concerns remain legitimate today.

Most obviously, in Laputa, Swift criticises a world of mathematical and philosophical endeavour that does little or nothing to better people’s lives, especially those of their subjects in the colony Balnibarbi, located beneath the floating Laputa. In fact, satirising the power relations of Britain and Swift’s native Ireland or, more broadly, the rich and poor, we find that Laputa is used to subdue Balnibarbi by threats to block the sun or rain, by throwing down rocks, or even crushing rebel cities by lowering Laputa onto them.

While, in the real world, there was much rhetoric around the beneficial usefulness of new knowledge and, indeed, much focus on practical problems like navigation, mining and agriculture, Swift was surely right that useful applications of the new knowledge either seemed a long time coming, or were clearly in the interests of King, government, military and landowners (who, after all, are much more useful patrons of science than the poor).

Lynall’s talk made it clear how political much of Swift’s satire was, even when the focus might appear to be science. While often associated with the Tories, Swift was suspicious of party politics and the patronage and jobbing that went along with them. Newton became one of the targets of his attacks not because of his science, but because of his influential and very well remunerated position as Master of the Mint, bestowed on him by the Whigs.

Swift once claimed that he had a “perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression”. Lynall showed that if the knowledge or authority of experimental philosophy were used in backing it, that too should be called out. A key episode was where Newton presented evidence to back William Wood’s application for a valuable contract to make new coinage for Ireland. Corruption and bribery – including involvement ofthe King’s mistress – were widely rumoured, as was the claim that the coins were of inferior quality. Swift took Newton, and what he viewed as his fraudulent use of technical evidence in the assays he carried out in Wood’s favour, as legitimate targets for denunciation in his Drapier’s Letters and vicious satire.

Swifts targets were political and often very personal. But, where he smelt corruption, it would seem that the sins of blinding people with ‘the science’ or impressive credentials only made a bad job worse. Meanwhile, the folly of being satisfied simply with the wonder of astronomical prediction, experimental apparatus and exact measurement, while outside people continue to starve, is one we should always be reminded of by the best critics and satirists.

 

Three centuries of innovation and education at the Museum of Childhood

I recently visited the Museum of Childhood and took a few snaps of things that stood out (with apologies for the poor, beyond-glass images: it turns out that none of these items have been photographed for the V&A collections site yet). There were, of course, plenty of science-related toys on display. Chemistry sets, optical toys and a whole case devoted to lantern slides are just the tip of the iceberg. Children are surrounded by the new and by nostalgia, by pastimes that are meant to inform and which reflect the world around them

As a response to the novelty of hot air balloons, so well described in Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, I enjoyed this sampler. Samplers are designed to keep children still (probably usually girls, although we have an early 20th-century sampler in the family worked by a boy called Percy), are rigorously formal in their reproduction of letters and numbers and yet there was, presumably, some freedom in choice of decoration.

This sampler was sewn by Mary Hall in 1786, just three years after the first flight of the Mongolfier brothers. However, as the catalogue description notes, there is an interesting juxtaposition between the excitement of manned flight and the verse, ‘Fragrant the rose is’, above: “in a melancholy poetic tradition that dwelt on the brevity of mortal life and was particularly popular in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries”.

Although they weren’t on display, the Museum an incomplete astronomy-themed sampler, which is pictured and discussed in this post: Star-gazing girls of Georgian England.

I was also pleased to come across this copy of Lessons on Objects (1840) by Elizabeth Mayo, who ran Cheam School in Surrey with her brother, together with a c.1850 box of specimens designed for educational use. Both were following the pedagogical methods of Yohann Pestalozzi, a Swiss reformer and idealist who advocated child-centred, hands-on, experimental and practical learning. The book encouraged children to use all their senses to explore the world around them, before being led to more systematic understanding. Mayo’s approach influenced the School Board for London, founded in 1870. The pre-prepared specimens includes all kind of materials: wax, gum, spices, fibres, paper, fur, metals (including mercury) and more.

My final object is a bit different. It is a board game from the 1970s that never quite took off, and gloried in the name Vagabondo. In case you want to know, the catalogue description gives the full rules of the game. It was a strategy game, “easy to learn and exciting to play” that could be adapted for 2, 4, or 3, 5 and 6 players. It seems to have been motivated by some high ideals, though what I am not entirely sure. Although it was not a commercial success it won the Queen’s Award for Achievement in 1978. Most fascinatingly of all, the box front includes not only a picture of the proud inventors but also a series of endorsements from a slightly bewildering range of famous individuals, who had clearly been informed of the ideas behind it. My pic wasn’t very legible, so here’s one I found online:

The celebrity endorsements were from Dame Margot Fonteyn De Arias (who “commends your reasons for inventing it”), Roald Dahl (“a splendid game”), Sir John Betjeman, Alan Whicker, Prof Desmond Morris (“certainly better than most other recently invented board games I have come across. I rate it as highly as the very successful Master Mind”), John Pertwee (“a very good game”), Hammond Innes (“a good one”), Poul Hartling (ex-Danish Prime Minister – “most interesting and enjoyable”), and Alfred Hitchcock (“I promise to spread the word, surreptitiously of course, among my friends here in California”).

What an odd collection of people! And what a wonderful collection of objects to explore in east London.