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:Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.114.2.485

1937-5239

N. A. M. RODGER,

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

At the center of this book stands William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a dominant figure in the British scientific establishment of the 1830s and 1840s. Whewell is well known to history, but he is known chiefly as a historian and philosopher of science rather than as a practitioner. Michael S. Reidy is able to show that this misunderstanding springs from overlooking his research into the tides, a great national and international project to which Whewell devoted much of his life, and which occupied the “scientists” (a word coined by Whewell although first adopted in the United States) of his day at least as much as the better-known magnetic and Arctic “crusades.” Tides were both an exceedingly complex problem of theoretical physics and a very urgent problem of practical navigation for the rapidly growing merchant fleets of the age. They could be, and were, studied in different ways. J. W. Lubbock, who had studied mathematics under Whewell at Cambridge, preferred a purely theoretical approach based on what long series of tidal observations he could find. The compilers and publishers of tide tables for particular ports generally worked empirically from local observations (often jealously guarded as commercially valuable). Their tables were in some cases very accurate, but they could not offer any general theory of the behavior of tides beyond their own ports. Whewell for his part chose to collect simultaneous observations taken over as wide an area as possible for a few days or weeks. As a pioneer of graphical methods of displaying large masses of data, he aimed to plot the “cotidal lines” joining places (in the open sea as well as along the coasts) with the same times of high and low water, and the hours in between. All tidal investigators, but Whewell especially, faced a common problem in physical research: the scarcity and high cost of computing power. “Computers,” of course, were people, with the skill, time, and taste for very abstruse and lengthy mathematical calculations. Some were employed by government in the Royal Observatory and the Nautical Almanac Office, but otherwise they were hard to find, and hard to pay for. Researchers had to confront problems that were at once organizational, conceptual, and social. Whewell had to construct and coordinate networks of observers who ranged from university professors to private soldiers, and he had to locate and remunerate computers to reduce their observations to usable data. This raised conceptual questions that Whewell answered with his idea of “inductive science,” based neither on pure theory nor on unenlightened empiricism, but on a dialogue between observational data and theoretical conceptions. The method had social implications, for Whewell was clear that the university-trained “scientist” who was capable of constructing the theory stood at the pinnacle of an intellectual (and by implication a social) hierarchy. Himself of humble birth, Whewell worked cordially with observers and computers of diverse backgrounds, but he never regarded them as being intellectually his equals, and he shared the contemporary assumption that a natural professional and social line divided the gentleman “scientist” from those who were paid for their work.