Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910

Lee T. Macdonald

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780822983491
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew.

Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.

1

A “Physical Observatory”

KEW, THE ROYAL SOCIETY, AND THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1840–1845

The observations most appropriate for the ready and exact determination of physical data are . . . those which it is most necessary to have performed with exactness and perseverance. Hence it is, that their performance, in many cases, becomes a national concern, and observatories are erected and maintained, and expeditions despatched to distant regions, at an expense which, to a superficial view, would appear most disproportioned to their objects. But it may very reasonably be asked why the direct assistance afforded by governments to the execution of continued series of observations adapted to this especial end should continue to be, as it has hitherto almost exclusively been, confined to astronomy.

JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL, 1830

Ld. Dungannon [sic] had examined the house late the Kew Observatory, and finds it in such excellent order that he will not pull it down as intended—he asked Beaufort if he knew any use that could be made of it. . . .

EDWARD SABINE, 1841

WHEN JOHN HERSCHEL WROTE A PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY of Natural Philosophy in 1830, he was very widely respected and arguably Britain’s foremost practitioner of the physical sciences. The first epigraph above is from part 2 of the Preliminary Discourse, in which Herschel made a plea for state-funded observatories that collected not only astronomical data but also “physical data” such as meteorological observations and data for the determination of physical constants such as mean sea levels. In the years after 1830, John Herschel’s call was enthusiastically taken up by his colleagues, and the term “physical observatory” was coined to describe the kind of observatory that Herschel wanted to see established. This chapter describes how in the early 1840s the former King’s Observatory at Kew was transformed into what some claimed to be such a physical observatory. How and why this happened has hitherto not been analyzed in detail. I begin by assessing the state of geomagnetism and meteorology in the early nineteenth century and how the concept of a physical observatory was developed by Herschel and others. I then use a chronological framework to show how the Royal Society, after an abortive attempt to establish a magnetic and meteorological observatory, in the end turned down the government’s offer of the Kew building, which was then taken up enthusiastically by BAAS. Finally, I describe and assess the program of work implemented at Kew up to the mid-1840s. I argue that the institution that emerged was different in many ways to Herschel’s vision of a physical observatory: in particular, none of the work being done at Kew up to 1845 was funded by the government.

Although Preliminary Discourse was clearly an inspiration behind the re-launched Kew Observatory, the story of its transformation is a complex one that owes as much to the personalities and politics of the physical sciences in the 1840s as it does to Herschel. In particular, it will become clear from this chapter that the prime mover behind the Kew project was the Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine, one of the “scientific servicemen” identified as a group by David Philip Miller in his synoptic survey of the physical sciences in the early nineteenth century.¹ Sabine, the chief mastermind of the British geomagnetic program that came to be known as the “Magnetic Crusade,” saw the building’s potential as an observatory very early on—as is suggested by the second epigraph I’ve included. I also argue that although only a limited range of observatory sciences was practiced at Kew before 1845, the very lack of government funding in the age of laissez-faire gave Sabine a free hand to establish his own research program there, independently of his rival at Greenwich, the astronomer royal George Airy.

“PERHAPS ALL THIS IS DREAMING”: MAGNETISM, METEOROLOGY, AND PHYSICAL OBSERVATORIES

Calls for improvements to the still locally organized science of meteorology were beginning to increase from the 1820s onward. However, practitioners of science realized that little progress could be made while meteorological instruments and observations remained in their existing state. In 1823, the battery and hygrometer inventor John Frederic Daniell drew attention to the poor state of the Royal Society’s meteorological instruments at Somerset House and the inaccuracy of the observations made with them. Daniell was a council member of the short-lived Meteorological Society of London, which in 1824 anticipated future events by calling for accurate series of meteorological observations to be made throughout the British Empire and made comparable with each other using standardized instruments. For this to be possible, the society “should set the example of the requisite precision by establishing a Meteorological Observatory in the metropolis, or its vicinity.”² Indeed, Daniell was later a member of the Royal Society Council and the society’s Committee of Physics and Meteorology, both of which deliberated as to whether to take on Kew Observatory in the 1840s. The Meteorological Society proved to be short-lived and its proposals came to nothing, but meteorology was on the agenda of BAAS soon after its formation in 1831. The shambolic state of meteorology was stated more bluntly than Daniell by the Edinburgh natural philosopher James David Forbes in a report read to the 1832 BAAS meeting, in which he lamented that “meteorological instruments have been for the most part treated like toys, and much time and labour have been lost in making and recording observations utterly useless for any scientific purpose.”³ Forbes went further at the 1840 BAAS meeting, calling for the establishment of well-equipped “public observatories” that would “furnish standards of comparison, to establish the laws of phaenomena and to fix secular, or normal data.”⁴

Geomagnetism began to gain prestige and public importance thanks to the well-publicized works of the Prussian explorer and scientific polymath Alexander von Humboldt. Observational work was stimulated by both Humboldt and the mathematical physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss when they began to give the subject a firm theoretical basis and demanded large quantities of accurate data with which to test their theories. They asked that this data be produced by a system of geomagnetic observatories scattered across the globe. Within a few years, such a system of observatories became a reality across the German lands and beyond, including Russia.⁵ Many British practitioners of science were of the opinion that Britain was in danger of being left behind in this promising new field of research. Several prominent figures in this field began calling for a system of magnetic observatories across Britain’s imperial possessions. Arguably the loudest of these voices was Edward Sabine (figure 1.1), who had gained extensive experience of making magnetic observations during the Arctic naval expeditions of the 1810s and 1820s. A Royal Artillery officer who was given generous leave from military service to undertake scientific research, Sabine was based at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich.⁶ In addition to an array of fixed observatories worldwide, Sabine also called for an Antarctic naval expedition that would survey Earth’s magnetic field in the southern hemisphere and find the as-yet-unknown location of the southern magnetic pole (or poles).⁷

John Cawood, and also Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, have claimed that the politically astute Sabine lobbied for this dual project in geomagnetism by putting Humboldt up to writing to the Royal Society, urging Britain to join in the worldwide magnetic campaign and at the same time appealing to British nationalist sentiment by claiming at BAAS meetings that Britain was being left behind in science by its European neighbors.⁸ Sabine moved deftly between the Royal Society and BAAS to achieve his aims: when the Royal Society was not initially interested, he took his campaign to BAAS before going back to the Royal Society to seek its authority when applying to the government for funds. In any event, it was John Herschel who during 1838 and 1839 finally secured funding for the Antarctic expedition and magnetic observatories. Fresh from his successful four-year observing expedition at the Cape of Good Hope, Herschel was lionized as a scientific and national hero. He also had class connections at the highest level, which enabled him to lobby for the magnetic project over dinner with Queen Victoria and the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, as well as to negotiate with the aristocratic presidents of both the Royal Society and BAAS.⁹ The project that the Melbourne government eventually agreed to fund consisted of an Antarctic expedition under James Clark Ross, running from 1839 to 1842; concurrently with this, magnetic and meteorological observations were to be taken from fixed stations at Greenwich (under Astronomer Royal George Airy), Dublin, Toronto, St Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Suitable instruments and observational techniques were developed by Humphrey Lloyd, professor at Trinity College Dublin, and the resulting data were collated by Sabine at Woolwich. This combination of an Antarctic expedition and a system of observatories became known as the “Magnetic Crusade.”¹⁰

Herschel, in his 1830 Preliminary Discourse quoted previously, seems to have been the first to suggest the general concept of a government-funded observatory to provide long-term data for the use of theoreticians, not just in astronomy but in the physical sciences more generally. Yet nobody could agree on an exact plan for what such an observatory should be doing. The earliest known use of the exact phrase “physical observatory” to describe Herschel’s proposal seems to have been made by the Scottish natural philosopher David Brewster, who wrote to William Vernon Harcourt—like Brewster, a leading light in the early years of BAAS—that he had “long thought that one of the greatest scientific desiderata in England is a physical observatory, erected and endowed by the government.” Specifically citing Herschel’s idea as his inspiration, Brewster suggested that in such an establishment his own experiments in optics could be carried out to a much higher standard than was possible in a private laboratory and that “all the phenomena of magnetism, meteorology and electricity” could be observed as they were in the magnetic observatories then being established across Europe. Harcourt agreed, though such a broadly based concept of a physical observatory made no further progress with BAAS at this time.¹¹

Herschel further developed his ideas on physical observatories in October 1835, in a long letter to Francis Beaufort, hydrographer to the Admiralty, written while on his expedition to the Cape of Good Hope. By this time, Herschel had been calling for a more coordinated approach to meteorological observation, both in Preliminary Discourse and in the form of an instruction manual for making and recording meteorological observations, originally published in Cape Town.¹² The views expressed in his letter to Beaufort correspond very well with his remarks in Preliminary Discourse and are important in that they help us to understand his attitude toward Kew Observatory in the 1840s. Herschel advocated to Beaufort a hierarchical system of observatories worldwide in which the great national observatories such as Greenwich formed a “first class” with which those institutions “of an inferior class” could and should not compete. However, there were many important tasks to be done by these lesser observatories. They should, said Herschel, carry out determinations of constants such as local gravity, mean atmospheric pressure, and sea level (the “absolute height above the level of the Sea of some natural unobliterable mark above or below the station of observatory’). Herschel now also proposed that an important part of these institutions’ programs would be to observe, with the most up-to-date instruments and methods available, “magnetic intensity and direction,” “meteorology in all its extent,” and tides. Thus Herschel’s vision of a physical observatory involved routine monitoring of variables such as Earth’s magnetic field, as well as the establishment of constants. Herschel had no plans for how such a system of observatories should be put into effect, and he concluded with the reflection, “Perhaps all this is dreaming.”¹³ We do not know the exact context of this letter to Beaufort, though at the end of the letter he remarks on a ceasefire in the frontier war then taking place in South Africa, suggesting that this vision of a system of observatories was part of Herschel’s view of enlightened imperial administration that he developed during his stay at the Cape of Good Hope in the 1830s.¹⁴

Because of their importance to navigation, geomagnetism and meteorology technically came within the remit of Britain’s “first-class” observatory, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Edmond Halley (Astronomer Royal 1719–1742) had laid many of the foundations for geomagnetic research, and for some years John Pond, George Airy’s predecessor as astronomer royal, had run a magnetic observatory at Greenwich. But the Royal Observatory had never done any magnetic work on a large scale, and by 1835, when Airy succeeded Pond, it had ceased altogether. Airy was a strong supporter of magnetic work, and one of his first priorities on becoming astronomer royal was to set about building a magnetic observatory at Greenwich.¹⁵ Later in the 1830s, he also played a major part in investigating the corrections needed for magnetic compasses on iron ships.¹⁶

It is clear, however, that from very early on in Airy’s time at Greenwich, Airy and Sabine did not get on. This animosity may have arisen because Airy saw Sabine as a rival and a challenge to his authority. It may also stem from the fact that Sabine, unlike Airy and other members of the “Cambridge network” (see the introduction), was no theoretician. Sabine was fundamentally a collector of data who had learned his art through his career in the Royal Artillery and on voyages of exploration. Recruited into the army at the age of fourteen during the Napoleonic Wars, he had not been educated in the regime of reformed Cambridge mathematics in which theory, not empirical data gathering, was seen as the all-important driving force in the physical sciences. Miller has noted the “superior attitude” taken by members of the Cambridge network toward those outside this group. Airy, in particular, was notorious for his insistence on training in higher mathematics as a prerequisite for a leading role in the hierarchy of an observatory.¹⁷ In 1837 Airy refused to support the plan for an Antarctic voyage, apparently out of jealousy toward Sabine’s increasing political power.¹⁸ He did agree to take part in the Magnetic Crusade by contributing the Greenwich magnetic observations to the overall magnetic effort. But he was never an enthusiast for the project as a whole, as is emphasized by the sour tone of his letter to a colleague in early 1840: “I have nothing to do with the new magnetic observatories, and know nothing about them. The supreme president over them is Professor Lloyd (Trinity College Dublin) who is certainly willing and I suppose able to tell what they are to be like.”¹⁹

Sabine, lacking the fashionable mathematical education, must have felt himself an outsider in relation to the likes of Airy, Herschel, and Charles Babbage, who had become such an influential group in the British physical sciences since 1815. Sabine himself made no secret of his preference for a data-driven approach over theory.²⁰ Moreover, Sabine had been sharply criticized by Babbage in his 1830 polemic, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, for the allegedly dubious accuracy of astronomical measurements obtained during expeditions to measure the figure of Earth. Babbage had also pointed out Sabine as an example of someone holding multiple scientific offices: in this case, acting as both an adviser to the Admiralty and as secretary of the Royal Society while on leave of absence from his army regiment. Much of Reflections was an attack on the Royal Society; for Babbage, Sabine’s holding of multiple offices was an example of the abuses that he despised in the society.²¹ The attitude of members of the Cambridge network toward Sabine might go a long way toward explaining why, throughout the rest of his career, he insisted on being in sole charge of his geomagnetic and other scientific enterprises and would not tolerate interference from Greenwich or anywhere else.

Airy had less regard for meteorology than geomagnetism as a science, because he believed that meteorology lacked a firm theoretical basis.²² The only meteorological work in the published Greenwich observations before 1840 was a modest set of observations made on the equinoxes and solstices according to the collaborative program that John Herschel had recommended while he was in South Africa.²³ Yet by the time the Kew Observatory building became available in the early 1840s, a fully-functioning magnetic observatory had been established at Greenwich, at government expense. This would have an important bearing on the history of Kew Observatory in the 1840s and its relationship with government.

“I THINK AT KEW”: THE ROYAL SOCIETY’S PROPOSAL FOR A PHYSICAL OBSERVATORY, 1840

In June 1840, during the same summer as Forbes’s second call for an improved national system of meteorological observations, the Royal Society Council communicated to the government a proposal for something remarkably similar to what was eventually established at Kew: a magnetic and meteorological observatory in the vicinity of London, run by full-time staff and established on a permanent basis. This proposal was in contrast with the system, described earlier, of temporary magnetic observatories set up in various outposts of the British ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Kew Observatory, Victorian Science, and the “Observatory Sciences”
• 1. A “Physical Observatory”: Kew, the Royal Society, and the British Association, 1840–1845
• 2. Survival and Expansion: Kew Observatory, the Government Grant, and Standardization, 1845–1859
• 3. “Solar Spot Mania,” “Cosmical Physics,” and Meteorology, 1852–1870
• 4. Kew Observatory and the Royal Society, 1869–1885
• 5. Kew Observatory and the Origins of the National Physical Laboratory, 1885–1900
• 6. “An Epoch in the History of Kew”: The End of the Victorian Kew Observatory, 1900–1910
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index