Nineteenth-century survey sciences: enterprises, expeditions and exhibitions
2019; Royal Society; Volume: 73; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1098/rsnr.2019.0005
ISSN1743-0178
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Natural History
ResumoYou have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Naylor Simon and Schaffer Simon 2019Nineteenth-century survey sciences: enterprises, expeditions and exhibitionsNotes Rec.73135–147http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0005SectionYou have accessIntroductionNineteenth-century survey sciences: enterprises, expeditions and exhibitions Simon Naylor Simon Naylor School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, Main Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author and Simon Schaffer Simon Schaffer Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Simon Naylor Simon Naylor School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, Main Building, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed and Simon Schaffer Simon Schaffer Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Published:20 March 2019https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0005This special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society addresses important aspects of the new kinds of intensive and ambitious schemes launched by early nineteenth-century British public agencies for worldwide surveys of the phenomena of astronomy and geography, physics and meteorology. Historians and historical geographers of science have already provided separate and increasingly detailed studies of several of these initiatives.1 Such focused scholarship now invites a comparative and synthetic approach to the development and practice of these surveys. In particular, this nineteenth-century work of surveys and observatories, maritime sciences and global physics, has typically been defined through the deployment of collections of ingenious hardware and material instruments. For this reason, many of the essays gathered here examine the apparatus and the equipment involved in the nineteenth-century surveys, and the means through which they can be understood in historical scholarship, in collections and in exhibitions.Their original users hoped that survey instruments could help generate precise data so that information could be juxtaposed and analysed at central sites. Charts and maps would be produced of the global variation and correlation of various physical phenomena. Very large printed data sets in the form of almanacs, catalogues and graphs could, so it was supposed, then be used to aid communication, administration and commerce. The early decades of the nineteenth century provide especially clear cases of the territorial reorganization of scientific enterprises and their long-range connections. Combinations of British colonial, economic and military interests helped establish the Ordnance Survey by 1790–1791. Initially a branch of the Ordnance Survey, the Geological Survey was founded in 1835, while the Great Trigonometric Survey of India was launched from Madras in 1802.This was also the period of the establishment of a network of colonial and company observatories, first at Madras in 1786, then in the 1820s at such sites as the Cape of Good Hope, Parramatta, St Helena and Bombay.2 Many were commissioned to generate huge catalogues of transit times and positions, to monitor meteorological and atmospheric conditions, and to serve as bases for geodetic surveys. From the 1830s, magnetic surveys, backed by a powerful alliance of military and scientific interests, sponsored worldwide maritime and observatory measures of geomagnetic phenomena, and the production and refinement of supposedly robust and precise navigational and field equipment.3 The overhaul of the Admiralty's Hydrographic Office in the 1830s for coastal and tidal surveys, the establishment of Kew as a metropolitan physical observatory in 1842 and the creation of a meteorological department within the Board of Trade in the 1850s all drew on this recent record of institutional investment.4 Expert staff moved between the surveys, as did the hardware and interests of the makers who furnished equipment. These surveys' information order was exploited in ambitious if often compromised attempts to furnish the state with an imperial archive. In many such cases, what began as transient survey projects, involving the despatch of temporarily mobilized manpower and equipment, were often gradually transmuted into more rigidly defined official surveys, with associated bureaucratic regulation and formal institutional resources.5The specific linkage between the work of the surveys and their instrumentation has often been understood by appeal to Alexander von Humboldt's well-publicized schemes for lavishly equipped investigative travel and for big data presented in thematic maps, precision graphs and aesthetically charged graphic print.6 It is timely to subject the Humboldtian model to scrutiny, especially in view of complementary analyses of the significant roles of innovative navigational, astronomical and observatory sciences that were contemporary with the Humboldtian moment and in many ways diverged from or challenged its precedent.7 In her highly influential cultural history of nineteenth-century science, Susan Faye Cannon introduced the term 'Humboldtian science' as a replacement for the category of 'Baconian science', which in turn was taken to denote 'a naïve, encyclopaedic empiricism relying entirely on the collection and collation of facts, a fascination with the particular, and a rejection of theory'.8 Instead, Cannon argued that Humboldtian science was 'the great new thing in professional science in the first half of the 19th century', defined and marked out by a 'new insistence on accuracy … for all instruments and all observations'; a 'new mental sophistication, expressed as contempt for the easy theories of the past'; a 'new set of conceptual tools: isomaps, graphs, theory of errors'; and the application of these elements to 'the immense variety of real phenomena, so as to produce laws dealing with the very complex interrelationships of the physical, the biological, and even the human' that could work at a global geographical scale.9 Sciences that conformed to this model included astronomy, botany, terrestrial magnetism, hydrology, oceanography, meteorology, geodesy and physical geography. Cannon identified all of these characteristics in the work of Humboldt, especially his promotion of science that studied 'widespread but interconnected real phenomena in order to find a definite law and a dynamical cause'.10Cannon's term gained significant purchase in studies of the history of nineteenth-century science in the years following the publication of her Science in culture. Morrell and Thackray adopted the term to discuss the British Association for the Advancement of Science's involvement in various scientific enterprises, including the study of the tides, meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. Nicolson used it in his analysis of Humboldt's 'morphological' plant geography; Zeller discussed British imperial applications of the Humboldtian sciences to surveys of northwest Canada; and Cushman examined the political motivations and social dimensions of Humboldtian science as it was developed in South American climatological debates.11 Others have been more critical. Dettelbach argued that Cannon's Humboldtianism relied on Humboldt's status to define a 'style' or 'complex' and that it gave the term explanatory force, at the same time as it black-boxed various concerns and practices.12 He noted the lack of unity to the collection of observational and descriptive concerns provided by the term, apart from 'an encyclopedic dedication to the systematic and precise measurement of as many physical parameters as possible'.13 Dettelbach argued that Humboldt needed to be distinguished from the Humboldtians. In doing so, he mapped out the shape of Humboldt's terrestrial physics, which he differentiated from the descriptive sciences through its attention to 'the great and constant laws of nature'. He claimed that his account of Humboldt's science 'illuminates the reorganization of knowledge and disciplines in the early nineteenth century that defined the emergence of natural science out of natural philosophy'.14The sciences that Cannon labelled as components of the Humboldtian sciences have received increasing attention in recent years. For instance, Cawood's work on the magnetic surveys has been built on by scholars including Good and Mawer.15 Mawer noted that Humboldt did much to improve understandings of the relations between declination, inclination and intensity and their connections to other natural forces, notably electricity, and was often credited as the progenitor of the magnetic campaigns.16 Good argued that promoters of these surveys 'elevated Humboldt's vision of observatory-based studies of strange magnetic phenomena and allied their research proposals with the precision instruments and hard-nosed, mathematical methods of [the mathematician Carl Friedrich] Gauss'. Terrestrial magnetism and meteorology became the most data-intensive geo-sciences of the period, with study of the tides and earthquakes lagging behind, while magnetism was the most fully organized in terms of the coordination of empirical research and 'most self-consciously directed toward answering questions of laws and causes'.17Reidy provided a comprehensive study of tidology in Britain, with a focus on the work of the scientific polymath William Whewell, who 'wanted to establish tidology as a viable research frontier based on adequate funding, the necessary equipment, and a worldwide network of observers'. Whewell viewed his project as synoptic, a legacy that Reidy argues found precedents in Edmond Halley's work and its most obvious contemporary resonance in Humboldt's programme.18 Addressing meteorology's emergence as a component of terrestrial physics, Fleming, Jankovic and Coen argued that attempts to standardize and coordinate worldwide weather observations in the nineteenth century created a 'meteorological "synopticon"'. They noted that the astronomer John Herschel saw meteorology as an 'empirical science that required precise measurements and intimate, first-hand knowledge of local airs', while also insisting that 'meteorological phenomena were subject to universal laws, accessible through induction and the testing of hypotheses'.19While much recent work in the history of science has attended to the shape and the meaning of the laboratory sciences and the field sciences one to the other, Aubin drew our attention to an emerging family of nineteenth-century sciences that he described as observatory sciences. He noted that, as a place of knowledge, the observatory has a longer history than either laboratory or field.20 The number of astronomical observatories globally grew from around 30 to between 200 and 300 in the nineteenth century, during which time 'the endowment of expensive observatories became an indispensable requirement for any modern state intent on preserving its political independence and securing its integration into the world-system'.21 Astronomy was the archetypal observatory science but was joined by others in the first half of the nineteenth century: magnetism and meteorology, geodesy and cartography, mathematical statistics and metrology. The editors of Heavens on Earth, Aubin, Bigg and Sibum, asserted that these various traditions were bound together by their commitment to a set of practices—what they called 'observatory techniques'—that placed great store on the use of precision instruments for making observations and taking measurements; that 'embraced methods of data acquisition, reduction, tabulation, and conservation, along with complex mathematical analyses'; that made use of visualization techniques and other representations of heavens and Earth; and that incorporated the social management of personnel and networks of international collaboration. These techniques defined a common space of knowledge.22In this collection we use the term 'survey science' to group a range of complementary sciences together, all of which mainly conform to aspects of the definition of observatory science put forward by Aubin.23 The term is not therefore intended to supplant or replace other collective nouns for scientific practice. That said, 'survey science', with its emphasis on the conduct of large-scale and yet fine-grained information collection across space, productively incorporates actors otherwise marginal to the operations of the observatory— geographers, explorers, property and revenue surveyors—as much as astronomers and meteorologists. Heroic explorers and East India Company surveyors placed as great an emphasis on precision instrumentation and measurement, statistical methods, data visualization and forms of collaboration as did Cannon's Humboldtian scientists and Aubin's observatory scientists. The survey sciences are also crucially differentiated from the observatory sciences, partly through their emphasis on the importance of the mobility of both instruments and observers. Indeed, the epistemic value of observations collected at rest in the controlled environment of the observatory as against those from beyond its walls was a critical topic of debate in the nineteenth century. During and after his South African residence in the 1830s, John Herschel strongly urged the coordination of travel accounts under the control of fixed survey stations in a general programme to produce what he called 'complete acquaintance with our globe as a whole'. Indeed, his vision was peculiarly oriented towards images of the globe as the object of knowledge and surveillance. In 1839 he told the French administrator and man of science François Arago that magnetic surveys offered 'an opportunity such as may never again occur of fixing for future ages' a vast array of sets of data 'upon a scale which may be said without exaggeration to embrace the whole globe'.24The pursuit of survey sciences at this period therefore raised especially acute problems of infrastructure, recruitment and management on a worldwide scale. Familiar patterns of natural historical accumulation and of individually equipped travellers, characteristic of past inventory programmes, had to be radically transformed. Encounters with indigenous informants and intermediaries were crucial moments in establishing an effective information order. They inevitably involved surveyors in the work of defining the scope and authority of different knowledge traditions. Historians such as Raj have linked some of these transformations, such as the fraught contrast between data accumulation and charismatic travel, and the imposition of disciplinary training on surveyors and delegates on mission and on the workforce charged with data analysis and comparison, with a radical change of the entire global circulation of scientific knowledge and practices during the earlier nineteenth century.25 As Outram has suggested in her studies of debates about Humboldt's repute and the wider authority of travellers' tales, this was what prompted and directed the arguments about the comparative authority of indigenous experts, mobile scientific observers or established survey bases.26Part of the fundamental puzzle of the survey sciences was their apparent dependence on reliable action at a distance, through the despatch of delegates, whether human travellers or material apparatus, who could then be trusted to behave appropriately and accountably elsewhere, whether at sea or on land. Simon Naylor's contribution to this collection addresses this problem directly. He points out how, in a survey science such as nineteenth-century meteorology, its explicitly global orientation forced its dependence on extensive networks of highly variable and often undisciplined observers. It was just for this reason that the provision of standardized equipment might begin to address challenges of data reliability and accumulation. Part of the fascinating history of such sciences lies precisely in how what Fabien Locher, in his study of the European magnetic surveys of the 1840s, calls different 'regimes of observation' were put to work not merely to extract data but to attempt, often vainly, to control the hardware and personnel involved under such regimes.27 In her contribution, Jenny Bulstrode offers evidence from episodes of the 1820s and 1830s in which very different observation regimes, whether based on the practices of the whaling ships in the north Atlantic or the Arctic, or on the systems of Royal Naval discipline shared by scientific servicemen, were in play in the production and discussion of the major magnetic surveys. Using the techniques of historical anthropology, her essay shows how intricate aspects of whalers' lore and custom could affect the production of magnetic data and, indeed, the modelling of magnetic survey equipment and its physical function. These were questions both of legal control and of cosmological significance. In the case of the career of the whaler commander and evangelical preacher William Scoresby, a highly influential protagonist of magnetic instrumentation and magnetic worldviews, Bulstrode demonstrates how his surveys and his models of combinations of force, apparatus and practice could forge very different visions of the physical globe and the moral world.There was thus a set of important connections between specific changes in institutions, hardware and personnel and the very notion, in Herschel's terms, of a 'complete acquaintance' with the globe as a whole. This was the moment of the imperial meridian, when political crises in the Caribbean and Latin America, the Levant and southern Asia all involved intense mobilization of military and economic agents reliant on fragile information networks and long-range systems of commercial exchange.28 Jessica Ratcliff's essay in this collection analyses the very close relationship between the expansive enterprises of the East India Company and the systems of survey and collection that characterized Company agents' work in south and southeast Asia, especially in the period of the Napoleonic wars, when territories in the Indian subcontinent were occupied and charted, and when forces were despatched to the East Indian archipelago, especially to the west coast of Sumatra and to Java. Ratcliff argues that the surveys mounted under the direction of the military officer Colin Mackenzie, and under the aegis of the governor Stamford Raffles by the American medic Thomas Horsfield, could be seen as forms of seizure of rival intellectual capital, with booty then to be accumulated in the new India Museum in London. Mackenzie noted in 1799 that the inhabitants of Mysore 'can scarcely separate the idea of taking possession of a country from that of surveying it'. As several scholars have argued, survey practice and collecting was a crucial feature of the establishment of difficult, tenuous and multilateral relations of circulation and of knowledge production both within the Asian territories and in those institutions of political power and scholarship that emerged in this decisive period of imperial aggression.29 Reidy has argued in the cases of the new tidal and geodetic sciences of the earlier nineteenth century that 'the practice of science helped transform unmapped spaces into imperial places'.30One concern of this scholarship has therefore been to understand how the techniques of survey sciences, not least the hardware and equipment they employed, helped make certain models of the globe an object of both scrutiny and governance. Historians have recently signalled and disputed enthusiasm for global approaches in the studies of past sciences, especially for the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.31 Critics have convincingly pointed to hastily simplistic identification of the global with the imperial; wrong-headed imposition of local (often European) chronologies on systems for which their relevance is dubious; and misrecognition of mixtures of violent exploitation with collaboration in the work of the field sciences.32 Important in these concerns is the awareness that the work of the sciences, especially the surveys, defined phenomena and systems as worldwide in principle, then in an intriguingly circular tactic of self-validation drew their legitimacy and their resources from this very definition of global extension. Examples include the remodelling of geography, meteorology and magnetism as survey sciences in this period. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Humboldt, Arago, Gauss and their interlocutors constructed schemes of magnetic survey which insisted that the patterns of magnetic dip, variation and strength could only be understood on a global scale and would thus somehow reveal the physical system governing the planet. This argument was used to legitimate the magnetic campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s, and especially their recruitment of a workforce among naval personnel and in the nascent observatory systems of North America and Australasia, whose disciplined assemblages of personnel, apparatus and data analysis were then supposed to demonstrate the geographical facts of the worldwide magnetic system.33Several essays in this issue explore the intriguing methods of practical management and ingenious tactics that governed this production of allegedly global sciences. Matthew Goodman's article provides a close study of the methods used by Edward Sabine's bureau at Woolwich arsenal from 1841, by which many millions of distributed observations of magnetic direction and strength were to be processed, stored and juxtaposed. Goodman explains the decisive practices of error management: on the assumption of modes of normal variation, the effects of parasitic disturbances and systematic errors had to be detected and effaced. There was therefore a vital relation between the stability and reach of models of discipline—in the case of the Woolwich system, this discipline was military—and the construction of effective worldwide systems of governance and knowledge. Similar issues were clearly in play in the workings of the new Geographical Society, established in 1830, which would lend equipment to no fewer than 436 expeditions in the following century. In their careful study of the Society's records presented in their contribution to this issue, Jane Wess and Charles Withers demonstrate many ways in which questions of the robustness and reliability of apparatus were apparently to be dealt with through discipline of the delegates. They cite striking claims from a figure such as Francis Galton, the scientific traveller and social statistician, that it was precisely the moral and physical quality of the instruments' users that underwrote their capacity to act worldwide as tools for making reliable scientific knowledge.The relation between quantitative standards and field practice in the use of instruments during the surveys was therefore highly complex. From the later eighteenth century, exact measurement had emerged as a general characteristic of the physical sciences. There was a widespread enthusiasm for precision instruments and the numbers they could generate. Particularly important for the new sciences were instruments that measured quantities of matter and were used for calculation and counting.34 This interest in instruments and the establishment of agreed physical constants and standards of measurement only grew and became an important part of the culture of the sciences in the nineteenth century: MacDonald and Withers remind us that by the 1830s 'method in science insisted upon trained observation, improved written recording, repetition of numerical measurement, and a reliance upon precision instrumentation'.35 The observatory was of critical importance in shaping the culture of precision that transformed scientific practices during that century.36 Men of science such as Herschel and the geomagnetic experts Edward Sabine and Humphrey Lloyd cultivated this idea of precise instruments, built to exacting standards in metropolitan workshops, calibrated in metropolitan hubs and put to work in observatories at home and abroad.37The practice of precision measurement using exquisitely crafted instruments did not stop at the boundaries of the observatory. The survey sciences extended observatory techniques into uncertain terrain on land and at sea. The deployment of instruments provided a focus to the work of science in the field and conferred epistemic authority on the user.38 Action at a distance both relied on and urgently challenged the networks binding the producers of survey hardware with exceptionally various users and environments. For instance, Schaffer has shown that East India Company surveyors were very concerned with the reliable status of their hardware and the integrity of their connections with major instrument makers.39 Withers has noted that it became something of a 'scientific and moral necessity' that users continuously wrote down their instrumental observations, maintained accuracy and repeated processes again and again 'so as to be habit forming'.40 Edney observes that the geographer–traveller,when armed with suitable instruments, was able to situate his distanced, privileged, and disciplined observations according to their geographical relationships. … the geographer carried at least a compass for directions, a timepiece for estimating distances, and—if he was wealthy—perhaps also a sextant or octant for astronomical determinations of location. So armed, the geographer could observe and record the abstract quantities of location as he passed through the land. He could survey.41For the property and revenue surveyors of the East India Company, as Mackenzie's remarks about the Mysore identification of survey science with the act of territorial possession implied, scientific instruments cohabited with weapons and themselves functioned as armaments, with military surveyors often contesting the grounds they had to measure.42 The same principles held for the other survey sciences, even if the instruments themselves measured different natural phenomena and features. Instruments were used as weapons in conflicts over epistemology and priority as much as over territory, as is well shown by Bulstrode's analysis in this collection of the controversies over both property and propriety in the fraught exchanges between Scoresby and the Admiralty's magnetic committee during the 1830s.The nineteenth-century physical sciences, with their global data-gathering ambitions, relied heavily on a wide and varied cast of participants to collect observations. While often remembered for his own adventures with instruments in Central and South America, Humboldt's wider scientific project involved a large spectrum of participants and informants from around the world, including naval officers, colonial administrators, physicians, diplomats, gentlemen of science and other travellers. These miscellaneous observers provided 'relatively cheap methods for surveying extensive territories with sufficient accuracy'.43 For Humboldt, precision survey of global terrestrial physics using a diverse body of observers was itself a 'civilizing mission', whereby all participants were improved, while the risks attendant on the use of volunteer or poorly trained observers were offset by the application of new statistical techniques, such as the method of least squares. In the case of military personnel, some training might have been provided in instrument use prior to deployment.44Scientific societies also operated as hubs for advice to volunteers, which was disseminated through dense networks of correspondence, as Naylor shows in his analysis in this issue of the Royal Meteorological Society's group of meteorological observers. His essay concludes with the significant observation that it was precisely by domesticating meteorological equipment that the household garden might somehow come to resemble a scientific site in miniature, while the routine of idealized and aestheticized domestic harmony could be transiently reconciled with the values of exact observation. In their contribution, Wess and Withers similarly explain how carefully circumscribed manuals were produced to be read alongside instruments where epistolary instruction was not available. Manuals like the Royal Geographical Society's Hints to travellers demonstrated and demarcated the methods that scientific travellers ought to follow in order to produce credible science while out and about with their instruments.45 Josefowicz has noted the high degree of faith that British protagonists, particularly Herschel, editor of the Admiralty's 1849 Manual of scientific inquiry, placed on written guidance.46 The use of instruments in survey programmes was deemed to benefit the user. Josefowicz argues that the German magneticiansGauss and Weber located the value of terrestrial magnetic research not only in its contribution to the progressive march of scientific knowledge, but also in the salutary habits of perception that its study promoted—those same habits of obedience, thoroughness, and careful attentiveness that were esteemed by members of a rising, professional middle class.47One of the most important modes in which these forms of bourgeois value were aligned with the survey sciences was the active and expanding complex of museums and exhibitions characteristic of nineteenth-century forms of public knowledge. As Holger Hoock points out in his histor
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