Searching for Copley Medals – seen one?

I am currently revising a paper on the early history of the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for publication. I told part of this story in a post one the H Word Guardian Science blog. Although it is tangential to my main story, because I am particularly interested in the materiality of the medal scheme I would like to trace extant Copley Medals and would be grateful for any help readers can give me.

I am looking particularly for copies of the medal that were made from the original die that was engraved by John Sigismund Tanner at the Royal Mint (his signature ‘T’ is visible on Athena/Minerva’s plinth). One of the very earliest is that given to John Belchier (below, now at the British Museum) – it was awarded in 1737 but he only received the medal after copies were first struck in 1742.

Information, images and imagination: Beautiful Science exhibition explores data visualisation

Opening tomorrow [NB this post is cross-posted from The H Word, where it was first published on 20 February – the exhibition remains open until 26 May], the British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibition raises fascinating questions about the power of visualisations and how we might tell their history

 

Florence Nightingale’s “rose diagram”, showing the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East, 1858. Photograph: /British Library

Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, which opens at the British Library tomorrow, is a small but thought-provoking display that looks at how scientific data has and can be visualised. Prompted by today’s interest in big data and infographics, it merges modern digital displays with historic texts and images.

Perpetual Ocean: Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, 2011. Photograph: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, 2011.

According to the exhibition’s curator, Johanna Kieniewicz, it is the British Library’s “first science exhibition”, which seems extraordinary, given the extent to which its collections can reflect the display’s theme.

However, science has often featured in the Library’s larger, more overtly historical exhibitions. Henry VIII: Man and Monarch included a section that – slightly handwavingly – indicated new approaches to knowledge and development of key areas like navigation. The current Georgians Revealed exhibition likewise has a section that notes, particularly, the new technologies, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of the 18th century.

The Out of this World exhibition, while focusing on science fictions, nevertheless revealed a great deal about the excitement, expectations, humour and fears surrounding science and technology in a broad range of periods. Points of View dwelt on the scientific and technical, as well as artistic, development of photography. Magnificent Maps was a perfect demonstration of how travel and precision techniques create new knowledge in ways that suit different audiences

The key display artefacts in Beautiful Science are, like these other exhibitions, historical texts, charts, maps and illustrations, so we might wonder what is new. The answer, it seems, is that it is the first display to have been led by the Library’s Science and Digital teams, rather than that it displays science per se. What difference might this make?

The display items are well-chosen, and include some key examples of innovation in data collection and presentation. However, the science- rather than history-led interpretation of the 17th- to 19th-century texts is clear in the fact that their selection reflects trends and concerns of the present, rather than a concern to reveal those of the past. There is, likewise, an emphasis on progress toward ever better and more accurate approaches to data visualisation (although in a post at PLOS Blogs, Kieniewicz suggests that designers have recently stolen a march over scientists in the display of data).

The three themes of the display are Weather and Climate, Public Health and (rather less obviously) Tree of Life. The first includes Halley’s world map of trade winds, a persuasive form that masked his lack of data, and two 18th-century log books from ships of the of the East India Company. The latter are there less because they have much to say about visualising data in the past (although the recorded observations did feed into charts by Halley and others, and one of the log books includes a charming sketch of a sea bird) and more because of current climate science projects that are attempting to make current use of old data.

Such data, however, also has much to say about how 18th-century mariners saw their world and Empire, what they understood about weather or climate and what was their understanding of important things to record, which maps only poorly onto our own.

“Public Health” naturally includes John Snow’s famous map of cholera cases in London’s east end and Florence Nightingale’s “visually gripping” rose diagrams representing the effects of her sanitary reforms on mortality during the Crimean War (top). Here the power of visual data is made clear, being, above all, an extremely effective tool of persuasion for public opinion and government action.

The “Tree of Life Section” is an excuse to bring out some lovely early modern illustrations and, while it seems a bit too simplistic to connect these theological and metaphysical meditations directly to modern taxonomies and diagrams “based on scientific data and information”, we are prompted to reflect on how older views have left their mark. If a branching tree of evolutionary theory recalls a Great Chain of Being, then it is far too teleological (that is, progressive and purposeful) to represent natural selection.

Ernst Haeckel, The Pedigree of Man, London, 1879. Photograph: /British Library

In comparing earlier and modern taxonomies, it is interesting too to speculate on changing criteria. All systems of categorisation are to some degree unnatural, despite claims to be representing nature. Today, in a way that would have bemused earlier taxonomists, genomic data trumps visual description. Has the (family) tree analogy made this inevitable?

The British Library is the perfect institution for discussions between science, arts and the humanities to take place. While defined as a “science exhibition”, visitors to the display and participants in the accompanying events programme should be encouraged to see the aethestic and the historical in it too – just as the science of the Tudor or Georgian eras should be recognised as part of their history.

Beautiful Science runs from 20 February to 26 May 2014. See the British Library’s website for the full list of list of related events.

 

Picturing science: teaching maths

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

Seeing Alex Bellos’s ‘sconic sections’ in his post on combining baking and geometry, made me think of this lovely early 18th century mezzotint, recently acquired by the National Maritime Museum.

Sadly no foodstuffs are involved, but there is a prominently placed dissected cone, with ready-cut conic sections, in the left foreground. Alongside are some of the other essentials of the mathematical teacher: drawing instruments (today’s ‘geometry set’ known to all kids heading back to school in the autumn), diagram, textbook and writing materials. It is less pencil and squared paper, of course, and more quill and ink.

The portrait is of Thomas Weston, who from 1712 headed Weston’s Academy in Greenwich, which, in taking some pupils who were sons of pensioners at Greenwich Hospital, was one of the forerunners ofGreenwich Hospital School. The portrait was the frontispiece to his book, “A copy-book written for the use of the young-gentlemen at the Academy in Greenwich” (1726).

The text in the picture is a lecture, clearly titled Lectiones Astronomicae Lectio 12. Astronomy and mathematics were Weston’s specialty, especially as the basis to learning navigation. Before setting up his school, Weston had been an assistant to the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. At that time, he lived and worked at the Royal Observatory, an institution founded to help improve astronomical methods for finding longitude at sea.

There is another portrait of Weston, on the ceiling of the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital. Here he looks with admiration at Flamsteed, both in front of the mural arc that was, by the 1690s, the most significant instrument at the Observatory. Placed on a wall aligned north-south, it defined a Greenwich Meridian.

While I love the mathematical details in the foreground of this image, perhaps the most splendid thing about it is Weston, wearing a formal wig and, best of all, a striped dressing gown or banyan.

However, if the combination of food and science is more your thing, have a read of this post by Melanie Keene on the objects used to teach elementary astronomy. There are blueberries and oranges that might stand in for the relative sizes of planets but, even better, in the early 19th-century children’s book, Tom Telescope:

the movement of the earth around the sun was best explained as like that of a rotisserie chicken. This “common occurrence in a kitchen” showed how it was “far better for the bird [the earth] to turn round before the fire [the sun], than the fire to turn round the bird”.

Melanie will be saying more about the use of familiar objects in teaching science in the 18th and 19th centuries in her paper at the International Congress for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (iCHSTM) in Manchester next month.

Picturing science: inside a Georgian observatory

Cross-posted from The H Word blog.

Detail of engraving of the observers at Shirburn Castle Observatory. Source: National Maritime Museum

*

I only recently, and by accident came across this rather delightful 1778 mezzotint by James Watson among the collections of the National Maritime Museum. It was a somewhat hidden gem, having not been fully catalogued, although there are copies to be found elsewhere.

I have now updated the description, having realised that the full imageshows two servants-cum astronomical assistants of George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield (c.1696-1764). They are depicted in his private and exemplary observatory at Shirburn Castle, erected in about 1739.

In the detail at the top of this post is Thomas Phelps, then aged 82, and with him (see below) is John Bartlett, then aged 54. Most of what we know about them is what appears in the text given within this engraving. It is a tale of common men made good, thanks to natural ability, hard work, access to books and recognition by their superiors.

Phelps, “who from being a stable-boy in the year 1718, to the then Lord Chief Justice Parker, afterwards Earl of Macclesfield, rose by his merit to the upper employments in that family, and at last, for his uncommon genius, was promoted to be observer, in their Observatory”. John Bartlett was “originally a shepherd, in which station he by books and observation acquired such a knowledge in computation, and of the heavenly bodies, as induced the late George, Earl of Macclesfield, to appoint him assistant observer in his Observatory”.

Phelps and Bartlett are shown in the observatory’s transit room, with Phelps at the eye-piece of the 5-foot transit telescope, made byJonathan Sisson. This instrument is fixed to supporting pillars and aligned to the meridian in order ensure the accuracy of repeated positional measurements of the heavenly bodies.

Behind Bartlett is an astronomical regulator, an accurate observatory clock, by George Graham. To the left is an equatorially-mounted telescope, probably by John Dollond, These were tip-top London instrument makers. Macclesfield spared no expense to create an observatory that, with a salaried observer and assistant, rivalled or, indeed, trumped the establishment at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

Macclesfield was a remarkable individual. He was instructed in mathematics by Abraham De Moivre and William Jones, and the sciences became his passion. Under Jones’s influence he formed an exceptionallyimportant collection of 17th-century mathematical manuscripts andbooks. He erected his observatory with the assistance of James Bradley, then Savilian Professor of astronomy at Oxford and later Astronomer Royal. He also built a chemical laboratory, in which his observer, Thomas Phelps also assisted.

Macclesfield was, as well as being an MP, President of the Royal Society for 12 years, from 1752 until his death. From both positions he was a principal proponent of the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. His son, Thomas Parker, 3rd Earl of Macclesfield, was also elected FRS, and evidently kept the observatory going, under Phelps and Bartlett, joined in about 1776 by someone called Redding. Regular observations seem to have ceased in the 1790s.

This engraving is a remarkable celebration of two relatively unknown individuals who, otherwise, survive only in the manuscript observations. It is relatively rare, before the advent of photography, that we see images of people engaged in the activity of astronomical observation. It is also rare to see the assistants, rather than the owner of such fine instruments.

The engraving is, of course, also a celebration of those instruments, which were still impressive in the 1770s. In addition to the telescopes and clock, core tools of the well-quipped working observatory, is a celestial globe. This plays a iconographic rather than a practical function, and is unlikely to have been placed in the observatory itself.

However, perhaps my favourite part of the image depicts some rather more humble, but no less essential, aspects of observatory equipment. They are a ratcheted, adjustable observing chair, against which Phelps leans, and the pen and paper with which Bartlett notes the time on the clock at the moment that Phelps calls a star as crossing the meridian of the telescope.

These ordinary things – a chair and writing materials – remind us that the work of these observers was not simple star-gazing but, even in this private observatory, something precise, regular, regulated and tiring. It was the hard work of making and recording observations with an eye to posterity.

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.

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”.

 

Touching and feeling: Henry Moyes redux

Further to my last post, I have had a number of suggestions about what it is that the 18th-century natural philosophy lecturer Henry Moyes is holding in his portrait. In addition to those given in comments there, my thanks go to Rebecca Pohancenik, Tim Skellett, Alan (Gamma Counter), Charlotte Frost, Thony Christie and Ian Hopkinson for further suggestions. Chemical flask or, rather, measuring cylinder is the most popular suggestion. It must be said that it hardly looks as if the object is made of glass, but the shape is absolutely right. But see these 18th- (right) and 19th-century (left) examples from the NMSI Collections website for comparison:

Such an object is apt for a chemist (although perhaps not as iconic as the flask, or, later, test tube) but it begs the question: how would a blind man use a measuring cylinder? I can’t think that Russell, the artist, would have just given Moyes a standard bit of chemical kit as an attribute, since his ability to perform chemical experiments despite his blindness was key to his renown. As I suggested in the comment below, perhaps he had added a modification that allowed him to measure a device pushed up by the height of the liquid or, indeed, a hydrometer? If this is the case, though, the key part appears to be missing.

Going back over my previous post, I also realised that the link I had provided to another portrait, or caricature, of Moyes was not working, so here is the image in question. It is by John Kay, who published it with the biographical sketch I quoted.

We have the darkened glasses, a candle, handkerchief and bottle. I am not sure what the thing on the right might be (suggestions again, please!) and am also intrigued by the fact that Moyes seems to be enumerating something on his fingers as he talks.

Googling my way around some of these issues, I came across some further references to Moyes. Particularly interesting was a paper, read before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1782. This was by George Bew, a physician and, at some time, Vice President of the Society. Entitled ‘Observations on Blindness, and on the Employment of the Other Senses to Supply the Loss of Sight‘, it lauded man’s gift of sight, but also the fact that its loss was compensated to some degree by the heightening of the other senses, particularly hearing and touch. Anecdotal in nature, the paper referred to a number of individual examples, including Moyes, “the elegant reader on philosophical chemistry”.

Bew notes that many members at the Manchester Lit and Phil had attended Moyes’s lectures and were personally acquainted with him. Bew himself says that he enjoyed an “agreeable intimacy, and frequent intercourse” with him, which gave him:

an opportunity of repeatedly observing the peculiar manner, in which he arranged his ideas, and acquired his information. Whenever he was introduced into company, I remarked, that he continued some time silent. The sound directed him to judge of the dimensions of the room, and the different voices, of the number of persons that were present. His distinction, in these respects, was very accuate; and his memory so retentive, that he seldom was mistaken. I have known him instantly recognize a person, on first hearing him speak, though more than two years had elapsed since the time of their last meeting. He dertermined, pretty nearly, the stature of those he was speaking with, by the direction of their voices; and he made tolerable conjectures, respecting their tempers and dispositions, by the manner in which they conducted their conversation.

Bew went on to say, however, that Moyes was not in fact completely blind:

The rays refracted through a prism, when sufficiently vivid, produced certain distinguishable effects on [his eyes]. The red gave him a disagreeable sensation, which he compared to the touch of a saw. As the colours declined in violence, the harshness lessened, until the green afforded a sensation that was highly pleasing to him; and which he described, as conveying an idea similar to what he felt, in running his hand over smooth polished surfaces.

There seems something very theatrical in this claim, and I can certainly imagine it going down well in one of his lectures. I would be interested to know how common this sort colour-specific sensation might be. I think it is clear, though, that Moyes found it important to develop means of communicating with his audiences and acquaintances in a way that made them credit his observations [sic] and judgement. Bew goes on:

Polished surfaces, meandering streams, and the gentle declivities, were the figures, by which he expressed his ideas of beauty. Rugged rocks, irregular points, and boisterous elements, furnished him with expressions for terror and disgust. He excelled in the charms of conversation; was happy in his allusions to visual objects; and discoursed on the nature, composition, and beauty of colours, with pertinence and precision.

Bew concludes that “Doctor Moyes was a striking instance of the power, the human soul possesses, of finding sources of satisfaction, even under the most rigorous calamities” and that, “though destitute of other support than his genius, and under the mercenary protection of a person, whose integrity he suspected [Ed. Could this have been Adam Smith?] – still Dr. Moyes was generally chearful, and apparently happy”.

I hope he was, genuinely as well as generally, happy. He was clearly a remarkable man.