The Orrery in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination Jesse Molesworth

1 Time and the Cosmos: The Orrery in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination Jesse Molesworth, Indiana University [email protected] [This is a draft. Please do not cite or recirculate without permission] Abstract: The first modern orrery, a mechanical device presenting the motion of the solar system, was produced in 1704 by the eminent English clockmakers George Graham and Thomas Tompion. Typically driven by a clockwork mechanism and featuring the planets and their moons revolving around the sun, such devices served throughout the eighteenth century as a crucial means of illustrating the new Copernican view of the cosmos. But it is in this capacity that they served the ulterior purpose of demonstrating precisely the smallness of the individual in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. This paper examines the ways in which those living in the eighteenth century—scientists, artists, writers— reckoned with this unwelcome and ultimately terrifying facet of modernity. This paper concerns the invention of what Walter Benjamin described as “empty, homogeneous” time. “Invention” is of course too strong a word, for it seems absurd to suggest that humans might legitimately invent time; perhaps “discovery” would be safer. Still, I use “invention” for its etymological root invenio, “to come upon.” Rather than simply a process of measuring or recording, the description of time during the eighteenth century was a confrontation. As such, it was an unpredictable affair, sometimes congenial, sometimes rude. Benjamin’s theory of course rests on the rude confrontation with time. In describing the node-like “moment of danger,” Benjamin recounts an episode from the July Revolution, in which guns are turned on the tower clocks themselves, thereby suggesting the fullness of present moment (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit), in which time has come to a stand-still.1 For Benjamin time is property made interesting by its absence. The characteristics ascribed to clock-time, “emptiness” and “homogeneity” (leere and homogene) are unequivocally negative; and his focus on the moment outside of time (what the Greeks called kairos) 1 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-64; at 262. 2 rather than the continuum of time (chronos) is a prejudice shared by virtually every theorist of time, from Nietzsche to Derrida to Agamben. But what of the opposite urge, the urge not to shoot out the clock but, rather, to dwell in the fullness of its continuum? It is a topic that has been broached before, in various histories of chronos authored by Benedict Anderson, David Landes, Stuart Sherman, and E. P. Thompson through the substantially different lenses of print media, technological innovation, and industrial capital. The emphasis here will fall on eighteenth-century astronomy, whose popularization fuelled concepts as radically different as Newton’s (Enlightenment) model of the cosmos and Kant’s (Romantic) theory of the mathematical sublime. Chronos was, for those described in this essay, perhaps homogeneous but hardly empty. Rather than diminishing the wonder of the cosmos, it enhanced it—or even vindicated such wonder. The central object in this essay is the orrery, a mechanical device driven by a clockwork mechanism and illustrating the movement of the earth and moon (and sometimes the planets) around the sun. About its early history we know a few sketchy details. The first was apparently devised in 1704 by the English clockmakers George Graham and Thomas Tompion, who lent it to the London instrument maker John Rowley, who eventually presented one to his patron, Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery.2 It therefore borrowed from earlier gear-driven planetary models, such as those devised by Ole Rømer or Christiaan Huygens in the previous century, but radically increased their complexity and capability. For example, Rowley’s original model featured an earth that both orbited the sun and revolved in time while doing so. Orbiting this earth was a revolving moon, appropriately painted half-black and half-white according to its periods of shadow and light [see Figure 1]. 2 This widely accepted account was first given by J. T. Saguliers, who insisted that Graham was “the first person in England, who made a movement to shew the motion of the Moon round the Earth, and the Earth and Moon round the Sun, about 25 or 30 years ago.” See J. T. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, i (London, 1734), 430. For more on the early development of the orrery, see especially Henry C. King, Geared to the Stars: The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries, and Astronomical Clocks (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978), esp. pp. 150-67; see also John R. Millburn, “Benjamin Martin and the Development of the Orrery,” The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 378-99. 3 One of Rowley’s earliest admirers was Sir Richard Steele, who in 1714 wrote glowingly of the instructive potential of the orrery: This one consideration should incite any numerous Family of Distinction to have an Orrery as necessarily as they would have a Clock. This one Engine would open a new Scene to their Imaginations: and a whole Train of useful Inferences concerning the Weather and the Seasons, which are now from Stupidity the Subjects of Discourse, would raise a pleasing, an obvious, an useful, and an elegant Conversation.3 Steele’s prediction—that the orrery would achieve the ubiquity of the clock within the modern home— was bound to fail, for any number of reasons. Expense, utility, and intricacy of design were all against it; the very name “orrery” of course implied a cultural prestige not typical of the clock. What Steele did predict correctly, though, was that the orrery would become more than simply the plaything of princes. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it gained widespread exposure as a prop used in astronomical lectures, particularly those offered by Benjamin Martin (1704/5-1782) and James Ferguson (1710-76), two energetic popularizers of science. It is in this capacity—as lecture aid—that it is probably best known: as the dramatically illuminated object of fascination within Joseph Wright of Derby’s iconic painting, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (ca. 1766) [see Figure 2]. In fact, though Isaac Newton is often claimed as the inspiration for the white-haired lecturer (illuminator) in Wright’s painting, the far likelier model is Ferguson, the similarly white-haired Scotsman who lectured regularly on experimental philosophy from 1748 to his death in 1776. Demand followed exposure, and supply soon rose to meet demand. By the end of the eighteenth century, a fully functioning orrery, featuring representations of the sun, earth, and moon, along with all of the known planets and their moons, might be acquired for 2£. 12s. 6d.—well within the means of any bourgeois home.4 Whereas the earliest orreries tended to be ornate and sometimes quite large—Thomas Wright’s Great Orrery (1730) measured four feet in diameter, as though mimicking the grandiosity of the universe itself—the newer orreries were streamlined, smaller, and even portable. Those marketed in the 1780s and 90s by the ingenious entrepreneur William Jones came in pieces in a mahogany case, to be 3 Steele, The Englishman No. 11 (October 29, 1714). 4 See William Jones, The Description and Use of a New Portable Orrery (London, 1787), 43. 4 assembled by its owner much in the manner of an Ikea bookshelf [see Figure 3]. Others might even be assembled using pasteboard, scissors, and pins—which when properly put together would yield, according to one commentator, “an exceeding good manual Orrery, that will show you as much as those usually sold for 2£. 12s. 6d. or three Guineas.”5 Still, what had changed between the first and last decades of the eighteenth century was more than simply size and price. Orreries had traditionally attempted to strike a balance between the twin aims of Science and Art. But the latter aim faded decidedly in importance, so much so that by 1771 Martin proposed eliminating the bulky hemispherical coverings once popular within orreries, for the simple reason that “there is really no such Thing in Nature.”6 Unlike the earliest orreries, newer models made less of an attempt to hide the wheelwork—the guts of the apparatus—away from view. Textbook illustrations of orreries even began to give prominence to the wheelwork, beginning perhaps with Martin’s Philosophia Brittanica (1747), which offers a diagram of the wheelwork featured in his important double-cone orrery without an accompanying depiction of the actual platform supported by it.7 Ferguson’s texts would follow suit, elaborating the wheelwork within a dazzling technical and visual language in which the face of the orrery is easily lost [see Figure 3]. Such illustrations served most obviously to document the extent of Ferguson’s own achievement; but he also hoped that they might, when rendered in exquisite detail, inspire others to copy the design: “I therefore freely give the following account of it to the Public, in the best Manner that I can; and do wish the description may be generally understood. To any Clock-maker I hope it will be plain, and to every Orrery-maker I believe it will be quite so.”8 5 G. Wright, The Description and Use of Both the Globes, the Armillary Sphere, and Orrery (London, 1783), 97. 6 As Martin continues, “the Orrery I propose is a bare Representation of the Solar System in its native Simplicity, and is, in its self, sufficiently grand, and pompous; it stands in Need of none of the useless, expensive, and cumbersome Embellishments of Art.” See Martin, The Description and Use of an Orrery of a New Construction (London: 1771), 11-12.

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