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National Physical Laboratory: Kew Observatory, Physics and the Victorian World, 1840-1900

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National Physical Laboratory: Kew Observatory, Physics and the Victorian World, 1840-1900 From King’s Instrument Repository to National Physical Laboratory: Kew Observatory, physics and the Victorian world, 1840-1900 Lee Todd Macdonald Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science September 2015 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Lee Todd Macdonald The right of Lee Todd Macdonald to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 3 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Professor Graeme Gooday and the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds, for the three-year studentship that made this PhD possible. I must also thank Graeme Gooday for being such a fine supervisor – patiently reading my work, encouraging me to think critically, and above all for his dedication and professionalism. In particular, my research for this thesis has made use of a very large quantity of unpublished archival material, spread over locations spanning nearly six degrees of latitude across the UK – from Exeter on the south-west coast of England to St Andrews on the North Sea coast of Scotland. Mark Beswick and his colleagues at the National Meteorological Library, managed by the Met Office in Exeter, were ever helpful in granting me access to the unpublished minutes of the Kew Committee and the 1850-1851 ‘Kew Diary’. Similarly, thanks are due to the National Archives for access to the Kew Observatory papers, as well as some invaluable correspondence of John Herschel and Edward Sabine. Keith Moore and colleagues at the Royal Society Library and Archives went above and beyond the call of duty, especially with lugging out volume after volume of Herschel and Sabine correspondence. I must particularly thank the Royal Society for allowing me to use my photographs of the Kew Committee minutes in Figures 6.1 and 6.2 of this thesis. I am grateful to Jon Cable and his colleagues at the Institution of Engineering and Technology for allowing me access to the papers of Francis Ronalds, which helped me to gain new insights into the early years of Kew Observatory under the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The minutes of the British Association Council are housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and I thank the staff at the Bodleian for access to these. At Cambridge University Library, Adam Perkins and his team provided generous help with access to papers in the Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives. The correspondence of James David Forbes at St Andrews University helped shed some important new light on Kew Observatory in the mid- nineteenth century and I must thank Dr Isobel Falconer for pointing me to the location of these papers. Thanks are also due to staff at the Special Collections department of Leeds University Library for access to various items, and the Harry 4 Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas, USA, for arranging to send electronic scans of Herschel correspondence. I thank Sian Prosser, Librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society, for permission to use the images in Figures 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and 4.1 of this thesis. Alexandra Johnson of the Science Museum in London generously gave of her time in showing me around the Museum’s collection of instruments from Kew Observatory. I must thank Alexandra for permission to use the photographs that I took of the thermometers in Figures 3.2 and 5.1. The School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at Leeds has proved to be a stimulating environment in which to work and I have benefited greatly from discussions with colleagues at seminars and lunchtime gatherings, notably Jon Topham, Adrian Wilson, Liz Bruton and Anne Hanley, as well as Graeme Gooday. Interactions with several of these colleagues have encouraged me to think about continuities between different periods of history. I must also thank all the members of the School’s reading group on the History of Technology, who provided much valuable feedback on a paper I circulated to them. This was based on part of Chapter 4 of this thesis and has since been accepted for publication in the Journal for the History of Astronomy (see below). Contact with scholars in the wider world of the history of astronomy, meteorology and geophysics has also sharpened my thinking. Notable among these have been Allan Chapman, Gregory Good, Roger Hutchins, Jack Morrell and Malcolm Walker. Research and writing for this thesis has resulted in two papers being accepted for publication in academic journals. The first, ‘Making Kew Observatory: the Royal Society, the British Association and the politics of early Victorian science’ (based on Chapter 2), appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48, Part 3, September 2015, pages 409-433. The second, ‘“Solar spot mania”: The origins and early years of solar research at Kew Observatory, 1852- 1860’ (based on part of Chapter 4), has been accepted for publication in the Journal for the History of Astronomy at the time of writing. Comments by the anonymous referees of both papers helped to sharpen my thinking when writing the thesis, as well as when resubmitting the papers. The editors of both journals – Charlotte Sleigh for BJHS and James Evans for JHA – also provided helpful comments. I must also thank Dr David Willis of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, for reading through and commenting on the manuscript of the JHA paper. 5 I have presented papers based on parts of this thesis at various conferences and seminars, including: the British Society for the History of Science Postgraduate Conference (held at Leeds, January 2014); the British Society for the History of Science Annual Conference (St Andrews, July 2014 and Swansea, July 2015); the Institute of Physics conference on the History of Physics (Cambridge, September 2014); the Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century seminar series (Oxford, May 2015); and the Twelfth Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA in June 2015. Here I must formally record my thanks to the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at Leeds for the award of a grant that enabled me to attend and present at this latter conference. Working for a PhD at Leeds has enabled me to gain valuable experience in teaching undergraduate students in History and Philosophy of Science. In accordance with the Latin saying, docendo discimus – ‘we learn by teaching’ – running tutorials, giving lectures, interacting with students and marking their work has had the effect of broadening my perspective on the history of science. Here I must thank the module leaders of the following courses and all the students who attended my lectures and tutorials: Introduction to the History of Scientific Thought; Nature, Knowledge and Power in Early Modern Europe; Magic, Science and Religion; and Science, Technology and Culture in the Industrial Age. Grateful thanks are due to Daniel Mitchell of Clare Hall, Cambridge, for proof-reading a draft of this thesis. Last, but by no means least, I must thank my parents, Joyce and Raymond Macdonald, for all their support and encouragement in so many ways throughout my three years of work on this thesis. Lee T Macdonald September 2015 6 Abstract This thesis attempts to fill a notable gap in the literature on nineteenth-century science, by writing the history of Kew Observatory between 1840 and 1900 as an institution. I frame this institutional history within three overall questions:- 1) What can the history of Kew Observatory tell us about how the physical sciences were organised in the Victorian era? 2) How did the ‘observatory sciences’ (defined by historian David Aubin as sciences practised within the observatory, of which astronomy is just one) at Kew develop over the course of the nineteenth century? 3) How did standardisation develop at Kew in the context of the culture of the physical sciences between 1840 and 1900? I demonstrate that throughout the period 1840-1900, the organisation of science at Kew was thoroughly a part of Victorian laissez-faire ideology. Indeed, laissez-faire dictated the emphasis of the work at Kew later in the century, as the observatory was forced to concentrate on lucrative standardisation services. I show that until the 1871 transfer of Kew from the British Association for the Advancement of Science to the Royal Society, the work at Kew expanded to include several observatory sciences, but that after 1871 Kew became a specialist organisation that concentrated principally on just one of these: standardisation. I show that Kew did not simply reflect contemporary trends in the observatory sciences but that it actually helped to set these trends. Finally, I show that as early as the 1850s, the standardisation work at Kew was an essential service to the London instrument trade, private individuals and government departments. I use this, plus archival evidence, to argue that the National Physical Laboratory evolved as an extension of Kew Observatory. I thus argue that the origins of the NPL in Kew Observatory represent one of the last triumphs of laissez-faire . 7 Contents Page List of Tables ................................................................................................... 10 List of Illustrations ........................................................................................... 11 List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................... 12 1 Introduction: Kew Observatory, Victorian science and the ‘observatory sciences’ ...................................................................................
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