In 1995, Dava Sobel, a relatively obscure science writer, published her latest book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time[1]. Sobel is a talented writer and she relates with great pathos the tale of the humble, working class carpenter turned clock maker, John Harrison, who struggled for decades against the upper echelons of the establishment and the prejudices of the evil Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, to get recognition and just rewards for his brilliantly conceived and skilfully constructed maritime chronometers, which were the long sort after solution to the problem of determining longitude at sea.
The book caught the popular imagination and became a runaway best seller, spawning a television series and a luxury picture book second edition. There is little doubt that it remains the biggest selling popular history of science book ever published.
There is, however, a major problem with Ms Sobel’s magnum opus, never one to let such a thing as the facts get in the way of a good story her book is for large parts closer to a historical novel than a history of science book. In order to maintain her central narrative of good, John Harrison, versus evil, the Board of Longitude and Nevil Maskelyne, Sobel twists and mutates the actually historical facts beyond legitimate interpretation into a warped parody of the actual historical occurrences.
From 2010 to 2015 the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the Department for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge cooperated on a major research project into the history of the Board of Longitude under the joint direction of Simon Schaffer for Cambridge and Rebekah Higgitt for Greenwich. The other participants were Alexi Baker, Katy Barrett, Eóin Phillips, Nicky Reeves, and Sophie Waring. This project produced a wonderful blog (archived here)[2], workshops, conferences, and public events. As well as creating a digital achieve of the Board of Longitude papers, the project produced a more public finale with the major travelling exhibition in the Maritime Museum, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude, in 2014 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act. After Greenwich the exhibition was also presented in the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, USA from 19 September 2015 to 28 March 2016, and the Australian Maritime Museum from 5 May 2016 to 30 October 2016.
To accompany the exhibition a large format, richly illustrated book was published, not a catalogue, Finding Longitude: How ships, clocks and stars helped solve the longitude problem by Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt.[3] This volume, which I reviewed here, is wider reaching and much better researched than Sobel’s book and does much to correct the one-sided, warped account of the story that she presented. Unfortunately, it won’t be read by anything like the number who read Sobel.
Now, the Board of Longitude research project has birthed a new publication, Katy Barrett’s Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History.[4] This text, originally written as a doctoral thesis during her tenure as a researcher in the Board of Longitude research project has been reworked and published as the volume under review here. However, potential readers need have no fear that this assiduously researched, and exhaustively documented volume is a dry academic tome, only to be taken down from the library shelf for reference purposes. Barrett takes her readers on a vibrant and scintillating journey through the engravings, satires, novels, plays, poems, erotica, religion, politics, and much more of eighteenth-century London.
Satire, plays, poems, erotica…? Isn’t this supposed to be a book about the history of the problem of determining longitude at sea and the solution that were eventually found to this problem? Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the fact that I’m a great supporter of the contextual history of science and technology. Historical developments in science and technology don’t take place in a vacuum but are imbedded in the social, cultural, and political context in which they took place. If you wish to truly understand those historical developments, then you have to understand that context. Katy Barrett has produced a master class in contextual history.
From the very beginning, following the passing of the Longitude Act, the problem of determining longitude and the search for a solution to this problem because a major social theme and eighteenth-century London and the term longitude became, what we would now term, a buzzword and remained so for many decades. It is this historical phenomenon that Barrett’s truly excellent book investigates and illuminates in great detail.
Barrett’s research covers a very wide range of topics with longitude turning up in all sorts of places and contexts. Following an introduction, What Was the Problem with Longitude, which sets out the territory to be explored and the reasons for doing so, the book is divided into three general sections, each divided into two chapters.
The first section deals with visual aspects of the longitude story. Chapter one being centred on cartographical problems and presentations. Chapter two takes us into the world of visual presentations of instruments on paper. A practice with relation to proposed solutions for the longitude problem led eventually to accurate, technical visual presentations becoming standard in patent applications, as Barrett tells us.
The second section views longitude as a mental problem with Chapter three showing how proposed solutions became viewed in the same way as other schemes proposed by the so-called projectors. Schemes designed to produce solutions to a wide range of intractable problems from the realms of finance, politics, religion etc. Here longitude acquired the dubious distinction of becoming compared to such perennial no-hopers as perpetual motion and the philosophers’ stone. Chapter four bears the provocative title Madness or Genius? And looks at the contemporary theories of madness and how they were applied to the proposers of solutions to the longitude problem in particular by the satirists.
The third section introduces the social problem. Chapter five has the intriguing title Polite or Impolite Science? Polite science introduces us, amongst other things, to the fascinating eighteenth century genre in which men explain the new sciences to ladies, a topic that, of course, includes the longitude problem. We also have much on the elegant and informative presentation of instruments and their usage through engravings. Impolite science takes the reader into the fascinating world of scientific erotica, in which both latitude and longitude are frequently used as euphemisms. The sixth and final offering, A Cultural Instrument, continues the metaphorical use of navigation instruments both in erotica and beyond.
It is impossible within the framework of this review to even begin to present or assess the myriad of visual and verbal sources that Barrett examines, analyses, and presents to the reader, woven together in an ever-exhilarating romp through, it seems, all aspects of educated London society in the eighteenth century, illuminating ever more fascinating aspects of the widespread longitude discussion.
Recurring themes that turn up again and again in the different sections of the book are the writings of the satirists, who made the eighteenth century a highpoint in the history of English literary satire, Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, et al, the equally famous engravings of William Hogarth, and of course the struggles of carpenter turned clockmaker John Harrison, although here he is not presented as a lone hero but as just one of many struggling to present his ideas clearly to the Board of Longitude both visually in engravings and verbally in his writings.
The book has eighty-four captivating illustrations in its scant two-hundred and fifty pages. Here I have to say I have my only complaint. The illustrations are grayscale reproductions of engravings and unfortunately quite a few of them are so dark that it is extremely difficult to make out the fine details about which Barrett writes in her astute analysis.
The illustrations are listed and clearly described in an index at the front of the book. The seeming endless list of primary and secondary sources are included in a complete bibliography at the back, and the pages are full of footnote references to those sources. An index completes the academic apparatus.
I could fill another couple of thousand words with wonderful quotes that Barrett delivers up by the barrow load for her readers, but I will restrict myself to just one riddle:
“Why is a Woman like a Mathematician?”
Surely a riddle to rival Lewis Carroll’s immortal “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
I shall not reveal the answer, for that you will have to read Katy Barrett’s wonderful book.
As regular readers will know I do a history of astronomy tour of the Renaissance city of Nürnberg. One of the stations on that tour is Fembo House, now the home of the museum of the city of Nürnberg.
From 1730 to 1852, it was the seat of the cartographical publishing house Homännische Erben, that is “Homann’s Heirs” in English. In its time the biggest cartographical publishing house in Germany and probably the biggest in Europe. For six years from 1745, it was the workplace of Tobias Mayer (1723–1762), who was the astronomer-cartographer, who solved the problem of determining longitude by the Lunar Distance method.
He did the work on this during his time in Nürnberg. I talk on my tour about Sobel’s Longitude, which most of my visitors have heard of and even often read and explain why it’s bad and I recommend that they read Dunn& Higgitt’s Finding Longitude instead. In future I shall add that when they have finished that, they should then read Katy Barrett’s Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History!
[1] Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Walker & Company, 1995
[2] Click on Show Filters then and then find Quest for longitude under the Explore Themes menu – all there, 2010-2015. Thanks to Becky Higgitt for helping me find where Royal Museums Greenwich had hidden them!
[3] Richard Dunn & Rebekah Higgitt, Finding Longitude: How ships, clocks and stars helped solve the longitude problem, Royal Museums Greenwich, Collins, London 2014
[4] Katy Barrett, Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2022