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Nevil Maskelyne: The Seaman’s Astronomer by Derek Howse (review)

1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1990.a901660

1097-3729

Owen Gingerich,

History and Developments in Astronomy

technology and culture Book Reviews 869 that is currently known and written and providing new insights and answers to long-asked questions. Silvio A. Bedini Mr. Bedim is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. Nevil Maskelyne: The Seaman’s Astronomer. By Derek Howse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 280; illustrations, notes, glossary, appendixes, bibliography, index. $54.50. Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal, seems to have been rather a swot and perhaps a bit of a prig. At Michaelmas in 1755, he was ordained to the curacy of Chipping Barnet, but of his activities there we know very little, although we know what was on the menu when he came to London to dine at the Mitre Club, forerunner of the Royal Society Club. In 1761, he sailed in an East Indiaman to St. Helena, where he waited for six months to observe the transit of Venus, only to have a cloud obscure the sun at the last moment. In 1763, he sailed again, on a fourth-rate of sixty guns that was wearing the flag of Rear Admiral Richard Tyrrell, to test methods for discovering longitude, including John Harrison’s chronometer num­ ber 4. Upon his return there was exciting news: in his absence, Nathaniel Bliss, fourth Astronomer Royal, had died, and Maskelyne was a strong candidate to fill that position. These facts and many more we learn from Commander Derek Howse’s account, truly a seaman’s biography of the “seaman’s astron­ omer.” In 1963, after retiring from the British navy, Howse began an even more distinguished second career at the National Maritime Museum, where he carried out the restoration of the old Greenwich Observatory. Since his second retirement he has undertaken to ferret out every bit of information about the astronomer who presided over the tests of Harrison’s chronometers (which eventually won the principal prize for solving the longitude problem) and who founded the Nautical Almanac and edited the first forty-nine volumes. Maskelyne was involved in so many other projects as well—from attempts to reclaim and publish the observations of James Bradley, the tfiird Astronomer Royal, to the fascinating measurement of Newton’s constant of universal gravitation at Mt. Schiehallion in 1774—that Howse sometimes seems engaged in a juggling act with too many balls in the air at once. However, the biography is short enough that eventually all the themes get sorted out. The result is a fine survey of astronomy in the second half of the 18th century as seen from Greenwich—rich in practical astronomy and navigation, but with the remarkable achievements of French celestial mechanics or William Herschel’s observationally based insights into galactic 870 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE structure clearly out of bounds. By his labor of love, Howse has produced a valuable contribution to the history of astronomy and has closed an outstanding gap in the history of navigation. Owen Gingerich Prof. Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has wide-ranging interests in the history ofastronomy. In 1989, he published Album ofScience: PhysicalSciences in the Twentieth Century. He is chairman of the editorial board of the General History of Astronomy and has written the chapter on Kepler in its recently issued volume 2A. Architectes et Ingemeurs au Siecle des Lumieres. By Antoine Picon. Marseille: Editions Parentheses, 1988. Pp. 317; illustrations, notes, index. F 320.00 (paper). In this magnificent and beautifully printed book, Antoine Picon argues that the French Revolution witnessed the culmination of a transformation in the work, aesthetic theories, and the ideology of architects brought about in large measure by the evolution of civil (as opposed to military) engineering in 18th-century France. To a large degree this was owing to the gradual divergence of architecture and civil engineering during the Enlightenment. In 1716, when the administration of the ponts et chaussees (the government service of roads and bridges, a sort of Department of Public Works) was founded, engineers and architects did very much the same things and approached problems in the same way. By the end of the century, however, engineers had developed a new ideology and technical traditions that were not only independent of architecture but...