Alexi Baker spent years investigating the fascinating story of the British search for longitude at sea, where science and technology intersected with the global interests of empire. Before joining the Yale Peabody Museum to operate its History of Science and Technology collection, Dr. Baker was a post-doctoral researcher on a high-profile five-year project about the Board of Longitude, the first British government body for funding science and technology from 1714 to 1828. The project was based at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Yale recently hosted a launch event for the final output of this project, “The Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation, and Empire”, a book from Cambridge University Press authored by Dr. Baker and her colleagues. “When people are familiar with any part of the longitude story today, it is usually just with the innovative self-taught clock maker John Harrison and his efforts to earn a longitude reward,” Baker says. “However, there are many other important and exciting people and dimensions involved in this story. Our book is the first to tell the full history of the Board of Longitude. It reveals the complex, dynamic, and influential world of longitude which swirled around the British rewards.”
In 1714, the British Parliament established massive rewards of up to £20,000 for improved methods of finding a ship’s longitude coordinate in the open ocean, which would make maritime trade and travel safer. At that time, people were lucky to earn £100 a year, so many people from across Europe, its colonies, and Russia vied for the money. Parliament appointed 24 commissioners as acceptable judges of whether people should receive development funding and ultimately the rewards. They included government and university officials related to trade, defense, mathematics, astronomy, and technology which were all subjects closely tied to navigation.
“It was wonderful to be able to tell an audience at Yale about the new things we discovered about the early modern search for longitude at sea,” says Dr. Baker. “We spent years looking at the archives of the Board of Longitude, Royal Observatory, Royal Society, East India Company, British government, and more. We also looked through other types of sources including newspapers and broadsheets, satirical cartoons and literature, and personal letters.” The resulting book sheds light on not just the history of science and technology but also of government and politics, publishing and the arts, economics and intellectual property, religion and gender, and empire and colonization.
“The longitude story encompasses many innovations including the marine chronometer but also the sextant and the annual ‘Nautical Almanac’ which are still used today, as well as instrumentation and data being made more standardized and precise,” Baker elaborates. “The history of the Board of Longitude intersects with well-known European expeditions to the Pacific Ocean and in search of the Northwest Passage as well, including the multicultural conflicts and collaborations which resulted. It connects to multinational astronomical projects and the establishment of colonial observatories. However, this history is also an intensely human story - involving vast numbers of people with different motivations and backgrounds, all trying to hitch their star to longitude.”
The Yale celebration of this book was organized by the Early Modern Studies Program and co-sponsored by the History of Science and Medicine Program and the Peabody Museum. Dr. Baker, who is an affiliate of both programs, introduced the book to the audience and then discussed it with Professor Paola Bertucci and Professor William Rankin. Professor Bertucci is also the curator-in-charge of the Peabody’s Division of History of Science and Technology. Professor Rankin is an award-winning cartographer who designed an important map for the new History of Science and Technology gallery at the Peabody, which Bertucci and Baker curated.
Baker researched and wrote four chapters for the new book, focusing on the first half of the history of the Board of Longitude, as well as some of the front and end matter. “I showed how the longitude rewards and commissioners of 1714 were shaped by the previous centuries of related developments in Europe,” says Dr. Baker. “I also discovered that the Commissioners’ early history and impacts have been completely misunderstood.” Traditionally historians have assumed that the officials’ failure to hold any communal meetings until at least 1737, and their only sporadically holding meetings before the 1760s, was dereliction of duty.
“In fact, the Commissioners of Longitude were intended to operate as individual longitude authorities, as many of them had already been doing before 1714,” Baker explains. “They did participate in the massive outpouring of longitude proposals and discussions spawned by the establishment of the rewards. When they gradually transitioned to being a standing body, it was because of their interest in repeatedly approving development funding for John Harrison and other innovators, the increasing bureaucratization of the British government at large, and the appointment of the highly organized Nevil Maskelyne as Astronomer Royal and Commissioner.”
Dr. Baker researched a number of eighteenth-century longitude actors who have largely been ignored today as well. One was Christopher Irwin from Ireland, who savvily leveraged press coverage and influential connections to get his “marine chair” trialed at sea alongside one of Harrison’s timekeepers. The chair was a stabilized shipboard platform for astronomical viewing, which was a common approach over the centuries to try to improve the astronomical finding of longitude. Baker looked into the women involved in the search for longitude as well and discovered that one of the anonymous longitude authors who approached the Board of Longitude was Elizabeth Johnson. Johnson was one of the sisters of the famous painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and she began publishing tracts after her husband abandoned her with seven children.
Dr. Baker delved most deeply into the history of Jane Squire, who made a splash in her own time by publishing two detailed and lavishly produced longitude books in 1742 and 1743. Squire was dismissed by later historians, but her books were discussed in polite and learned society, and one of them was even sent to the Pope for consideration.
“Jane Squire was an absolutely fascinating woman.” Baker enthuses. “She invested heavily in a project to recover shipwrecks, brought legal action against the project’s powerful backers for withheld profits, faced attempted prosecution for openly being Catholic likely at their behest, and then endured debtors’ prison for years.” After emerging from prison, Squire dedicated herself to developing an improved method of finding longitude at sea for the benefit of better scientific and Christian understanding. She thought to her dying day that she deserved a reward for her scheme, which was well-informed but too complex to be practical.
“The records of Squire’s discussions with key longitude Commissioners and her attempts to gain attention and approbation are vital pieces of evidence about their early history,” Baker says. “She was also impressively determined to succeed in the longitude sphere, which was very male-coded. She railed in her books against the thought that ‘Mathematicks are not the proper Study of Women’ and refused to be confined to genteel pastimes like ‘Needles, Cards, and Dice’.”
In addition to relating important histories like these, the new book will help to guide readers through other popular and scholarly resources produced by the Board of Longitude project. These include a large digitized archive for which Dr. Baker and other team members wrote the historical explanations, major museum exhibitions at Greenwich such as “Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude” which traveled overseas including to Mystic Seaport Museum, and additional books and articles. The project even inspired television and radio programming and the establishment of a modern British “Longitude Prize”, which offered £8 million for innovations in medicine rather than navigation.
In addition to Dr. Baker, the authors of “The Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation, and Empire” are: Dr. Richard Dunn from the Science Museum of London; Dr. Rebekah Higgitt from National Museums Scotland; Professor Simon Schaffer from the University of Cambridge; and Dr. Sophie Waring from the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret of London. Their contributions to the volume dramatically expand historians’ understanding of the history of the Board of Longitude after the 1760s as well, when it impacted an even wider range of scientific and navigational activities, and when it was ultimately transformed into a different standing body in 1828.