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.
When we allowed a Steampunk ‘intervention’ into Flamsteed House and the Time and Longitude Gallery at the Royal Observatory Greenwich last year, in the exhibition Longitude Punk’d, reactions were varied. Many were really positive about bringing some imagination and artistry in to explore the themes, objects and spaces and we undoubtedly attracted at least a few visitors who might not otherwise have gone.
There were, however, more than a few staff and visitors who were annoyed that we were mixing fact and fiction and taking away the authoritative voice of the Museum. How would people learn anything? How would they know what was real history and which were the real objects? Either proving or entirely dismissing their point, most visitors, particularly tourists there for a photograph on the prime meridian, probably didn’t even realise that they were not seeing a straight forward exhibition.
What those who worried about ‘reality’ perhaps don’t fully appreciate is the extent to which fictions and fakes are always a part of museum displays. It is the joy of something like this exhibition – or the really wonderful Stranger than Fiction exhibition at the Science Museum – that they force you to think harder about what we’re presented with and how we too blindly trust the authority and ‘reality’ of certain modes of presentation.
For me, this photograph I took in the Royal Observatory’s Octagon Room during Longitude Punk’d nicely brings out some of what I mean.
The Octagon Room at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with ‘Margaret Maskelyne’s Orrery Gown’ by Jema ‘Emilly Ladybird’ Hewitt. (Photo: Rebekah Higgitt)
While, even for the non-too eagle-eyed, it is clear that the dress in the centre, created for Longitude Punk’d, is not 18th century, for most visitors it might appear that this is a modern piece, with historical nods, simply dropped into a 17th-century space. It is a fiction dropped into history. But things are not what they seem.
Firstly, of course, we can note the museological trappings that make this space very different to the one that John Flamsteed knew. There are barriers, electric lights and museum labels, also a smooth, light wood floor. But what of those paintings? The instruments? The clocks and panelling?
Prospectus intra Cameram Stellatam [View inside the Star Room] (Photo: National Maritime Museum)What we have is a mixture of ‘original’ pieces, later historic objects, 20th-century replicas and 21st-century recreations. The room, much altered over the years, has been completely recreated. The engraving doesn’t give us much information on the nature of the panelling, but restoration work on the rooms downstairs suggested that a fake wood effect had – at least there – been an early wall treatment. Thus an original ‘fake’ effect has been ‘authentically’ recreated, possibly in the wrong space.
The astronomical quadrant, on the left, is a ‘real’ historic object, but some 75 years too late for this set-up. The telescope on the right (out of sight in my picture, but recreating the one in the engraving) is pure prop, without lenses. It used to offer those who bothered to take a look a view of a faded slide of Pluto (the cartoon dog). Now, after much effort of the sort that only those acquainted with the pace of change in large museums will appreciate, it has a picture of Saturn (the planet), fuzzed and chromatically distorted to give some sort of idea of what it was like looking through an early telescope. Obviously Saturn ain’t really visible, through the windows, in the daylight.
What of the paintings? Well, the rather splendid portrait of Charles II (left) is from 1670. I assume (correct me if I’m wrong – annoyingly the catalogue entry doesn’t give the provenance) that this has stayed at Greenwich, if not this room, throughout the centuries – it is certainly similar to the one in the engraving. However, for the purposes of this post we should note that it is nevertheless “thought to be a copy of a Lely”.
The engraving also shows us a painting of the Duke of York, later James II, who had been, perhaps significantly, Lord High Admiral until 1673. However, the one that is currently there is in fact a commissioned replica from 1984. I have no idea what happened to the (copy?) Lely of James that was originally there. Did Charles survive and not James because of an anti-Catholic Astronomer Royal (nearly all of them, I reckon, before the 20th century)? Answers below, please.
The clocks, originally by Thomas Tompion, are perhaps the most complex story of all. Again, what’s in the two images appears to match but that’s about where it stops. Famously, after Flamsteed’s death his wife Margaret sold off the books and instruments at the Observatory, fairly seeing them as private property since they had either been bought by or gifted to Flamsteed. The clocks, therefore, left the observatory.
Today, one of the clocks is back, but on the other side of the room. That is because it was altered and its original 13-foot pendulum changed so that it could be turned into a longcase clock. The clock, with the original dial fitted into an 18th-century wooden case and its mechanism on display in a late 20th-century glass case, is a completely different beast. Next to it is a (wonderful) interloper: a Tompion longcase, which only moved to the Observatory in 2010.
What you can see in the top picture is two replica dials (although the one on the far right is a replica of a sideral clock that, although it was included in the Place drawing, seems never to have actually been installed at the Observatory: a replica of a fiction, therefore) and a reconstruction. The reconstruction, a “tribute” to Tompion by a horology student at West Dean College, has a transparent dial so that the extraordinary pendulum, with a backwards-and-forwards rather than side-to-side motion, can be admired. Excitingly, though, for seekers of ‘reality’, the clock’s positioning was “made possible as many of the original holes for the mount fittings are still visible.”
There we have it. The most original thing in the room are some holes behind the skirting.
Longitude found! The book has been published, the exhibition has opened, and so far all is going pretty well. Although, of course, there are things I would have liked to have changed or tweaked, I am really pleased with how both look and with the message that is, by and large, coming across.
It’s difficult to get an impression of an exhibition through photographs, rather than actually being there. It is a three or even four dimensional experience that involves light, sound, space and (occasionally) touch as well as objects and text. It surrounds you and you move through it and across it over time. Nevertheless, because it was amazing for me to see it after so long existing only in lists of objects, label text and designers’ drawings, I put up a picture gallery over on The H Word, with captions that offer a whistle-stop tour.
The exhibition opens with a large, changing seascape – a scene with no landmarks except the moon and stars – and objects that evoke the risks and rewards of maritime travel. Photograph: National Maritime Museum
The exhibition has been previewed and reviewed positively. Maev Kennedy at the Guardian focused on Hogarth as well as Harrison, noting the rich variety of objects on display. In the Times [£], Libby Purves said that the story “is elegantly and excitingly displayed”.
Richard Dunn, the lead curator (and my co-author), and Katy Barrett did sterling work talking to these and other journalists. They were also interviewed in an excellent slot on Front Row and Richard did a great job on BBC London. I helped out on launch day, and had also written a piece for BBC History Magazine’s July issue. The book has brought in some nice reviews too – there are two on Amazon so far (4 and a very nice 5 star) and this one on Robin’s Reviews, which calls it an “excellent, elegant book”.
All very pleasing, but the work is a long way from over. There are lots of events for Longitude Season at Royal Museums Greenwich. Have a look at the link to see what’s on. I personally (so far…) will be doing the following:
There are all sorts of things going on at the “Dark & Stormy” Late at the National Maritime Museum on 24 July, but Richard and I will be there to give gallery tours and/or Pecha Kucha presentations
25-26 July is the Longitude Project conference at the NMM, Longitudes Examined, in which I’ll be on the final discussion panel
I will be joining David Barrie, author of Sextant, for a book event and signing at Waterstones Trafalgar Square on 27 August (TBC)
I will be one of a team (including Simon Schaffer and Joe Cain) delivering a Science and Empire study day on 18 October
On 30 October I will be giving one of the Maritime Lectures at the NMM (probably on Nevil Maskelyne’s contribution to the longitude story, since I hope the collection of essays on him that I have edited will be out by then).
I’m looking forward to all of this, but seeing it all written out is a little daunting! A lesson to share is not to take on a new lectureship in the same year as you have to deliver books, exhibitions and a large number of events – I also have a significant amount of preparation to do for my new autumn teaching (not to mention some chapters and reviews to deliver over the summer).
I have just returned from a visit to Lisbon, where I had been invited to speak about the Longitude Act and project at the Seminário Nacional de Historia da Matemática. An added bonus of the visit was that an exhibition marking the tercentenary of the first Longitude Act had just opened at the Museu da Marinha.
It was a small display on the first floor that succeeding in getting across many of the key points about the Act, the various contenders for rewards and the Portuguese context. There were three cases of books, tables and charts, two of navigational instruments and a series of wall text and graphic panels.
The first panel was welcome reading, pointing out a long history, several valid areas of research and the development of two of these – the chronometer and lunar distances – as workable solutions in the second half of the 18th century. Although John Harrison was mentioned in the panel dealing with the development of timekeepers, the exhibition did not present either him or chronometers as the most significant part of the story.
Other panels were devoted to the navigational methods used before the Act, magnetic variation, Jupiter’s satellites, lunar distances, chronometers and the Portuguese context. The last of these included the role of Jupiter’s satellites in settling longitudes on land, especially those that had been contested by Spain and Portugal.
Objects included an altaziumth compass (to measure magnetic variation), a telescope (linking to Jupiter’s satellites, but not a type that could have been used for this tricky observation) a box chronometer and several instruments for astronomical observation.
Included among the printed material were books on navigation, ephemerides and almanacs. Among them were an 18th-century edition of the Nautical Almanac, a French account of testing timekeepers at sea, and several Portuguese ephemerides, including those based on the observations of the observatory at Coimbra University.
Two early charts on display also made use of a Portuguese prime meridian, and the 19th-century almanacs clearly played on a sense of history – a reminder of Portugal’s stellar role in maritime navigation in the past – and a claim to a central position in the globe, marking the division of the two hemispheres and the old and new worlds.
I got a good sense of the importance of Portugal’s maritime past to the nation during my visit to Lisbon. The conference was held at the Escola Naval where naval history and, by extension, the histories of navigation, mathematics and astronomy, were very evident. While Greenwich and other maritime location in Britain tend to celebrate the 18th-century Navy above all, many sites in Lisbon have (mostly 20th-century) paintings, mosaics and statues to the heroic navigators of the 15th and 16th centuries.
I was fascinated to learn about the myth-making surrounding the Sagres “School of Navigation“, supposedly founded by Henry the Navigator, and also the extent to which the regime of the 20th-century dictatorship had consciously developed and celebrated this heroic maritime and imperial history – to the benefit of institutions like the Naval School, observatory, museum and planetarium.
Being a guest at the naval base, and visiting the naval museum (still directed by a uniformed naval officer, who was kind enough to guide me around), was a truly memorable experience. I particularly enjoyed being entertained over lunch in the officers’ dining room with stories of the school, and having to teach and learn lunar navigation techniques.
The saying in the Portuguese Navy is that “the moon lies”, emphasising all the many things that can go wrong with instruments, observations and calculations, especially when officers are less and less used to performing them. However, the tables and sextants are still there as back up, not least because of concern about the ease with which GPS signals can be blocked or (more dangerously) tampered with.
Best of all, I was told a story of a ship’s commander, making for a large island but hampered by very poor weather and the loss of one navigation system after another. Left with just radar and dead reckoning, for a moment the moon appeared and he took his chance to take observations. Making his calculations, he couldn’t believe the result: “the moon lies”, he said to himself. But, continuing on his course, the island still didn’t appear and, eventually, he decided to go back to the lunar observation and try his luck – radar soon picked up the target destination.
It sounded like the tale of an old salty sea dog but, later that day, I met the man himself. He was in youthful middle age. The moon sometimes lies but, it turns out, sometimes, even now, she can still be pretty helpful.
For those who are fans of sci-fi, or interested in how sci-fi plays into the history of science, there are some things you might want to take a look at.
Firstly, this Friday there is a free lunchtime lecture at the Royal Society on “The Royal Society and science fiction”, being given by Professor Farah Mendlesohn, who is head of department for English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. The blurb reads:
The lone (mad) scientist is a common trope in science fiction, but hidden away is a fascination with secret and semi-secret societies who work for the future of all mankind. This talk will look at the representation of the Royal Society in science fiction and fantasy as fact, fantasy and metaphor.
For those who can’t make it to London, the talk should be available, like the Society’s other events, as a video afterwards.
Secondly, yesterday saw the republication of the 1870-71 short story, The Brick Moon, by Edward Everett Hale. It is being published by Jurassic London, along with a new story, Another Brick in the Moon, by Adam Roberts. Details of the publication are available here, and also from this post by Richard Dunn, Senior Curator at Royal Museums Greenwich, who co-wrote the introduction with Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
Cover of the newly published edition of The Brick Moon
The original story is about an artificial satellite, the Royal Observatory, the Greenwich Meridian and possible solutions to the problem of finding longitude at sea. It is a perfect accompaniment to the Longitude Season, just getting underway in Greenwich.Secondly, yesterday saw the republication of the 1870-71 short story, The Brick Moon, by Edward Everett Hale. It is being published by Jurassic London, along with a new story, Another Brick in the Moon, by Adam Roberts. Details of the publication are available here, and also from this post by Richard Dunn, Senior Curator at Royal Museums Greenwich, who co-wrote the introduction with Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
Finally, as well as a major exhibition on the longitude story (opening in July), this season also includes an art and fiction response. Already open at the Royal Observatory is Longitude Punk’d, an intervention in, or takeover of, the pre-existing longitude galleries. Author Robert Rankin and other artists and makers have come up with a whole range of more or less ludicrous or plausible ideas about solving longitude or alternative realities in which clock maker John Arnold made himself clockwork legs and Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne built an airship and hoped to contact parallel universes – just in case they knew his longitude. Read more from the curator here.
There has already been plenty of longitude on this blog, The H Word and the Longitude Project blog, so apologies that there is more to come. This has all been leading up to 2014, the tercentenary of the first Longitude Act, and the start of Longitude Season at Royal Museums Greenwich. It seems like a good idea to put in one place where we’ve been and some of what’s happening this year.
The Board of Longitude Project logo.
First came the Board of Longitude Project. A five year, AHRC-funded research collaboration between the National Maritime Museum and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. The team is/was: Principal Investigator Simon Schaffer, Co-Investigators Richard Dunn (Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology at NMM) and me; two postdocs (Alexi Baker and Nicky Reeves) and three PhD students (Katy Barrett, Eoin Phillps and Sophie Waring). Very shortly joining us as engagement officer is Katherine McAlpine.
Then came the brilliant digitisation project, a JISC-funded digitisation of the Board of Longitude archive, together with related papers from Cambridge University Library and the NMM. Because of its association with the research project and the Museum, this came with lots of add-ons beyond the scanning and listing, and you can read more on the site and at my Guardian post here.
This year is about delivery and public engagement: four exhibitions, two books and a conference (although there’ll be more scholarly books, collections and articles to come out of the project in following years).
Exhibitions
Already open at the Royal Observatory is Longitude Punk’d, which is a steampunk intervention (invasion?) into the courtyard and Flamsteed House that plays with existing spaces and displays, the themes of travel and longitude and with art/science, fact/fiction, real/fabricated. You can read more about it in this post by curator Heloise Finch-Boyer. It is inventive, playful and very funny, but can also confuse and is not necessarily to everyone’s taste. As a response to the problem of denuding the existing galleries in order to put on the main longitude exhibition (see below), it is really brilliant. Once the two exhibitions exist together I hope everyone will be happy! Hashtag is #LongitudePunk’d
Also at the Observatory is a small image and text display, Start to Satellites, about the development of satellite navigation, which takes the story of navigation well beyond the 18th and 19th one about longitude.
Next up will be the main event: Ships, Clocks & Stars: the Quest for Longitude, opening to the public on 11 July. It is an object-rich, historical telling of the story, supported by AV and interactives, with Richard Dunn as the lead curator, me (though my involvement has somewhat diminished since I left the museum) and an NMM team involving Kris Martin, Claire Warrior and Matt Lawrence. I hope it will be fab, and you will hear more anon! Hashtag is #ShipsClocksStars
Last to open will be Art and Science of Exploration, a rehang in The Queen’s House that focuses on the art surrounding the voyages of James Cook. It will be the first opportunity to have Stubbs’s kangaroo and dingo properly on show, alongside paintings by Hodges and Webber. In many ways it will be a natural extension of the main exhibition, which features a section on Cook’s voyages, a key testing ground for new longitude techniques. Hashtag is #ArtSciEx
There will be lots of events on during the run of the exhibitions, so keen an eye on the website. The hashtag for the season as a whole is #WhereOnEarth.
Books
The official book accompanying the exhibition has been written by Richard Dunn and me, and is published by Collins. Called Finding Longitude, it is already available on Amazon for pre-order. It’s available on Kindle and a paperback edition will be sold in the exhibition shop (with luck the hardback trade edition will also make it to paperback?). This follows the same narrative as the exhibition, taking the story well beyond Sobel’s John Harrison focus, and is beautifully illustrated with historical painting and objects. It is out on 19 June.
Out in the autumn is a collection of essays on Nevil Maskelyne, published by Hale Books, called Maskelyne: Astronomer Royal. I have edited it and there are chapters and sections by me, plus chapters by Jim Bennett, Mary Croarken, Nicky Reeves, Rory McEvoy, Alexi Baker, Caitlin Homes and Amy Miller, largely coming out of the symposium we held back in 2011. This should also be well-illustrated with images from the NMM’s collections and, although not in any way replacing Derek’s Howse’s biography of Maskelyne, adds some interesting different angles.
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.
Today [18 July 2013] the complete archive of the Board of Longitude is being launched online, with stories of innovation, exploration and endeavour – and much more than just John Harrison
Design for a marine chair submitted to the Board of Longitude. Source: Cambridge University Library
Today Lord Rees will be launching the digitised archive of the Board of Longitude at Cambridge University Library. Stuffed full of the correspondence and work of those who preceded him as Astronomer Royal, it also contains letters and papers of artisans, inventors, expeditionary astronomers and maritime explorers.
For those not familiar with the story of the 18th-century search for a means to determine longitude at sea, this video, gives an introduction to the project and the story.
This association has meant that as well as digitising 48,596 pages from the archives and libraries at Cambridge and NMM, the content is supported by links to relevant object records at the Museum, summaries of all and transcriptions of some of the files and essays on key figures, places, institutions, objects and events.
Written by the project researchers, there is enough text there for a couple of PhDs (at least) and a really useful resource for users of the site. I was the laggard who has only contributed one essay so far, on Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. He was, though, an extremely significant figure both for the longitude story and in this project, which also includes selections from Maskelyne’s archive from the Royal Observatory and his personal papers held now at the NMM.
While historical researchers will undoubtedly find many ways to start digging into the archive, for those newer to the game there are, on top of the summaries and essays, resources for schools and some selected stories lifted from the archive. The content can take the reader to the observatory at Greenwich, meetings at the Admiralty, artisan workshops of London and the South Seas.
William Wales’ map of Easter Island, from Cook’s Second Voyage. Source: Cambridge University Library
For those who feel they are familiar with the story of longitude, having read about John Harrison and his sea clocks in Dava Sobel’s Longitude, they will find there is much more to explore. As my NMM colleague, Richard Dunn says,
The archive places the familiar story of Harrison in its richer context. He was a crucial figure but the story is much broader. It takes in the development of astronomy, exploration and technological innovation and creativity during the period of the Industrial Revolution, the work of the first government body devoted to scientific matters, and public reactions to a challenge many considered hopeless.
Simon Schaffer, who leads the research project, adds that
The longitude story is a spectacular example of expert disagreement and public participation. As well as attracting the greatest scientific minds of the day, the board enticed people who belong to one of the most important traditions in British society; the extreme eccentric.
Thus while there may be interest in reading the full story of the Board’s dealings with Harrison, eyes are likely to be caught by what were damned by the archive’s 19th-century compilers as “Impractical schemes”. Some of these are real green ink stuff, with perpetual motion and squaring the circle bound into the seemingly intractable problem of finding longitude.
Proposal for finding longitude by determining the ship’s rate of sailing. Source: Cambridge University Library
However, there are many other schemes that, while they did not come to fruition, were based on sound ideas. These included improvements todead reckoning – the educated estimate of position that was not displaced by chronometers until the 20th century – or ways to steady an observer sufficiently to allow them to use Jupiter’s satellites as a celestial timekeeper (the standard means of determining longitude on land).
A reproduction of a lunar map by H. Percy Wilkins, a “proto-Patrick Moore”, is on display at the National Maritime Museum. It makes an interesting side-show to the new major exhibition, Visions of the Universe. [Cross-posted from The H Word blog.]
Sheet from 1951 ed. of Wilkins’ Map of the Moon. Source: National Maritime Museum
Given my recurring Picturing Science posts in this blog, I can’t avoid mentioning the new exhibition that has opened at the National Maritime Museum, Visions of the Universe. (Full disclosure: I have not been involved with this exhibition at all.) It has been getting some really nice reviews and previews, and anyone with an interest in astronomy or photography should make the trip.
In this post, though, I want to highlight something else that is currently on view, within the main (free) museum. While the exhibition showcases what the space age has brought us, with extraordinary Hubble-type images and – the real hit, I think – a 13-metre long Mars Window, this other display offers the clearest possible reminder of how recently it is that any of this became possible.
In the NMM’s Compass Lounge (at the rear left of the Museum’s new entrance foyer), the several sheets of a 1951 map of the moon have been photographed and reproduced to show the complete 300-inch chart. It shows an extraordinary level of hand-drawn detail, achieved by its maker, H. Percy Wilkins (1896-1960), with the aid of distinctly earth-bound telescopes.
This map, versions of which he had been working on since the 1920s, was the largest-scale and most detailed of its time, combining Wilkins’ personal observations with data from the drawings, photographs and measurements of other astronomers. As his Wikipedia entry says, it was “considered by some as the culmination of the art of selenography prior to the space age”. Wilkins himself described it as “the World’s greatest Moon Map”.
The map was also, perhaps, one of the last productions of its kind. Not only was it published just on the cusp of the space age, but it was also the project of an amateur, working from his home near Bexleyheath with a 12½-inch, and later a 15½-inch, reflector. Wilkins did the work in his spare time, being employed first as a mechanical engineer and then a civil servant at the Ministry of Supply.
The title page of Wilkins’ Map of the Moon. Source: National Maritime Museum
Wilkins nevertheless found time to make telescopes, publish several works on popular astronomy and act as director of the British Astronomical Association’s Lunar Section. As well as founding the Section’s periodical The Moon, he was also, late in life, the first president of the International Lunar Society.
Two of Wilkins’ books were co-authored with another selenographic authority, Patrick Moore, to whom the Visions of the Universe exhibition is dedicated. I found online a reminiscence of Wilkins by an acquaintance describing him as a “proto-Patrick Moore”, but he was perhaps also a direct inspiration. In an obituary of his colleague, Moore wrote of the “prodigious amount of work” that went into the mapping project but, also, that “his personal enthusiasm was inspiring”. Moore felt a “deep sense of personal loss”.
Wilkins did not quite become the media star that Moore did, but he made “numerous broadcasts and television appearances”. You can, for example, see him (his telescope, his map, and his daughter) here in a 1953 Pathé newsreel. Somewhat more infamously, he made the news in 1954 when he announced his observation of “the most extraordinary feature known on the moon today”.
The episode seems to have damaged his credibility considerable and may be one of the reasons that he is less than well-remembered today. Part of the problem was that Wilkins spoke to the press and on the radio before submitting his, rather more cautious, observations to peer scrutiny, His case was not aided by his initially appearing to hint that the structure could be evidence of life on the moon: phrases like “looks artificial” and “almost like an engineering job” led some to leap to such conclusions, even if they were simply descriptive.
The “bridge” was not included in Wilkins’ map, although it did incorporate some other erroneous details. Nevertheless, NASA purchased at least one, and possibly several, copies of the reduced reproduction of his lunar chart when preparing for the Apollo moon landings. His map was also used to help match up the first photographs of the far side of the moon, produced by a Lunar 3 in 1959, with features visible from Earth.
As well as the originals of three editions of the maps themselves, the Museum also received a number of notebooks, all kindly donated by Wilkins’ daughter. The notebooks include formulae, photographs, newspaper cuttings, original drawings and observational notes, from Wilkins’ Kentish observatory and visits to professional observatories in France and the US. They are testament to his years of dedicated work.
When you go (as you must) to see the images, the ingenuity and the leaps that have been made in professional and amateur astronomical imaging on display in the major exhibition, do also remember to pop over to see “the World’s greatest Moon Map”.
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 competingexplanations 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.
![Prospectus intra Cameram Stellatam [View inside the Star Room] (Photo: National Maritime Museum)](https://teleskopos.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/octagon-room.jpg)
Objects included an altaziumth compass (to measure magnetic variation), a telescope (linking to Jupiter’s satellites, but not a type that could have been used for this tricky observation) a box chronometer and several instruments for astronomical observation.
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