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| Painting of the Royal Observatory circa 1695 by Jan Griffier. The observatory was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and built in Greenwich overlooking the River Thames just downstream from London. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection. |
Last year was the 350th anniversary of the establishment of Britain’s Royal Observatory. To mark the milestone, Rebekah Higgitt, principal curator of science at the National Museums Scotland, published an article in Nature Reviews Physics in December that offers a compact overview of the observatory’s institutional evolution.
This is a history with substantial continuity across its first two centuries, particularly in the observatory’s prioritization of practical applications of astronomy. But the observatory also experienced important changes, notably a slow shift from being essentially the private preserve of Britain’s astronomer royal to being a recognizably modern government institution with a professional staff and a clearly defined public mission.
As time went on, the astronomers royal themselves came to emphasize the value of their institutional history as they oversaw changes in the observatory’s work and governance. In an article published in Isis early last year, historian Yuto Ishibashi explored at length how George Airy, astronomer royal from 1835 to 1881, exerted an especially strong effort in assembling a library and manuscript archive, which informed his labors to modernize the observatory and steer its agenda.
The evolution of a state scientific institution
Higgitt stresses that, when King Charles II issued warrants in 1675 appointing John Flamsteed to the position of “astronomical observator” and ordering the construction of a building in Greenwich to house him, there was not an expectation it would be a permanent institution. While the appointment’s express purpose was to aid efforts to determine longitude while at sea, not only did the observatory not receive financial support from the Admiralty (until 1811), most of its funding had to be covered either by Flamsteed personally or by his patrons.
Initially, the observatory’s main patron was Jonas Moore, who, as the surveyor-general of the ordnance, had been the key figure in advocating for its establishment in the first place. As Higgitt notes, Flamsteed would have preferred to have been the king’s astronomer, which would in principle have given him more freedom to undertake fundamental reforms of positional astronomy. However, Moore, himself a mathematician, exerted influence that kept Flamsteed’s work tied to a larger culture of practical mathematics that spanned areas such as surveying, instrument-making, metrology, architecture, and ballistics. Higgitt has explored these connections at length in an article published in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2019.
Ultimately, Flamsteed ended up in disputes involving his withholding of his observations from publication, leading Queen Anne in 1710 to place the observatory under the oversight of a “board of visitors,” comprising the president of the Royal Society and nominees from its council. At that time, the society’s president was none other than Isaac Newton, who was the main figure seeking access to Flamsteed’s star catalogue. Although Flamsteed chafed under the visitors’ authority, Higgitt points out that they were generally supportive of him and sought additional funds for the observatory. She also argues that the visitors and the networks the observatory was embedded in helped secure its future after Flamsteed’s death in 1719.
During the 18th century, successive astronomers royal continued to exercise control over the release of their observations, even as they took on increasingly prevalent public roles, including as ex officio members of the Board of Longitude, which became an important body in its own right. Higgitt writes in her 2019 article that Nevil Maskelyne, astronomer royal from 1765 to 1811, took his status as a public servant especially seriously and was the first to publish all his observations while still in office. He also began producing the Nautical Almanac, providing tables for finding longitude by the lunar-distance method. Moreover, he instigated King George III’s imposition of more formal requirements on his role, ensuring the observatory’s future observations would be public property.
Following the observatory’s placement under the Admiralty in 1818, its work continued to grow in sophistication and practical importance, particularly after Airy’s arrival in 1835. Airy, Higgitt notes, also became a vocal advocate for maintaining the observatory’s focus on its public purpose, meaning it should not be lured into becoming “an institution for pure science.” To the contrary, he argued, “without foundation on and continued connexion with a utilitarian object it will become disreputable.” Others had differing views, including Airy’s successor William Christie, who served from 1881 to 1910 and argued that the observatory needed more funding to do the kind of research required to live up to its status as a “scientific institution.”
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| Astronomer Royal William Christie commissioned the Royal Observatory’s 28-inch telescope, also known as the Great Equatorial Telescope, in 1885, and it was completed in 1893, giving the observatory leading-edge capabilities in the emerging field of physical astronomy. This photograph from the 1890s shows E. Walter Maunder, the observatory’s photography and spectroscopy assistant, and, at left, another assistant, William Bowyer. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. |
By the end of the 19th century, the observatory still had a major practical role in matters such as timekeeping and navigation as well as geomagnetic and meteorological observation, but it was also drawn into the expansion of physical astronomy, which investigated the nature of celestial objects. This made it an increasingly awkward fit for the Admiralty, though it only moved under the UK’s Science Research Council in 1965, by which time it had departed from its Greenwich site. Greenwich reopened as a museum the same year, and the astronomer royal became an honorary position in 1972.
The observatory’s preservation of its history
The astronomers royal had a stake in the history of the Royal Observatory from early on, first and foremost because observations from earlier eras had an enduring value in the analysis and prediction of celestial motions. Yet, until Maskelyne, these observations generally fell into private possession following the deaths of the astronomers royal who made them.
Notably, Flamsteed’s wife Margaret inherited his instruments and papers, selling off the former and working with other members of Flamsteed’s circle to publish his works posthumously. Maskelyne, in addition to publishing his own observations, also leveraged the Board of Longitude’s resources to acquire the observations of both Flamsteed and the second astronomer royal, Edmond Halley. He further labored to expedite publication of the observations of the third astronomer royal, James Bradley.
Higgitt notes that Maskelyne also collected “memorials, instructions, warrants and information on previous funding and management.” However, it was Airy who devoted himself most earnestly to the collection, preservation, and organization of data and records, and Ishibashi details how these efforts were integral to Airy’s broader aims in modernizing the observatory’s work. His initiatives encompassed building up the observatory’s library—including by acquiring Maskelyne’s book collection—which aided his growing staff in keeping up to date with astronomical knowledge. He also treated the observatory’s manuscript collections as an extension of the library, working over decades to amass records related not only to the observatory but also the Board of Longitude, which had been disbanded in 1828.
Airy’s development of these collections benefited from the same energy and attention that he devoted to the observatory’s astronomy. Ishibashi relates how he spent over 20 years searching for a half-century’s worth of minutes from the observatory’s board of visitors. Historians can relate to Airy’s 1861 lament, “These Minutes would be invaluable for the history of the R. Observatory. That without these official records there are not materially enough to give a knowledge how things went on … I have inquired of every person whom I thought likely to know any thing about them, but I can learn nothing.” Two years later, he discovered they did not exist as a standalone collection but were part of the minutes of the council of the Royal Society, which he promptly gained permission to copy.
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| Georgy Airy, painted by John Collier in 1883 or 1884 following his retirement as astronomer royal. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Airy Collection. |
Ishibashi attempts to reconstruct exactly what Airy saw in the manuscript collection. Certainly he was impressed with it as a record of important scientific work. He wrote of the Board of Longitude papers in 1850, “Should no accident occur to destroy or to disperse this collection, I hope that at some future time it may be found valuable, as bearing upon the history of almost every branch of physico-mathematical science pursued in this age.” Ishibashi notes that Airy devoted little of his own time to writing histories of science based on the archive, leaving this task to future scholars.
Beyond the collection’s value to posterity, though, access to archival records does seem to have directly aided Airy in his work. That included his extensive activity as a government adviser on a diverse range of topics, including “the monetary system, shipbuilding technology, port facilities, public health, higher education, the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, railway bridge construction, land surveying, metrology, and the standardisation of railway gauges.” Offering useful advice on such matters necessitated access to relevant documentation, and, accordingly, this work occupies about a quarter of Airy’s own papers.
Ishibashi argues that the observatory’s records also helped Airy and his assistants to fashion authoritative accounts of changes in how the observatory operated, highlighting the importance of their reforms. At the same time, reconstruction of the observatory’s long history, dating back to Flamsteed, provided Airy with a narrative of continuity he could deploy in his efforts to keep its focus on practical astronomy.
Now housed at Cambridge University Library, this same archive has become a crucial resource for Higgitt, Ishibashi, and many others in improving understanding of an essential example of the governance of scientific endeavor.
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