Exploring our archives

Last Sunday marked two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Like many men of their social class at the time, the members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had connections to the slave trade. As Govier has pointed out, the Royal Society invested their first substantial endowment, 1,300 pounds from the sale of Trinity College, in the Royal Africa and East India Companies, both of whom were involved in enslaving Africans for sale or work on their plantations. Several members of the Royal Society were involved with these companies: for example Paul Neile FRS was prominent in the RAC, while Jeremy Sambrooke and Sir John Lawrence are prominent in both the Council meetings of the early Royal Society and the correspondence of the East India Company, of whom both were Commissioners.

References to slavery in the early records of the Royal Society also reveal some degree of practical involvement in the mechanics of the trade. One example that occurs in the Hooke folio appears to refer to the making of ‘trade beads’ or ’slave bead’, glass beads used to trade with Africans in exchange for slaves. For example, at a meeting of April 22 1680 Robert Hooke presented his efforts to replicate a bead made of a blue stone said to be ‘much esteemed by those of Guiny’, which was testing along with some glass beads designed to counterfeit these beads. Apparently the fake bead was unconvincing, being reportly ‘[in] noe wise soe beautyfull & cleer of colour as that of Guiney’. An experiment of heating the bead in the flame also proved the superiority of the real stone, while it ‘could not be melted but it flawed & crackd like a Stone. the counterfeit ones melted very easily.’ Hooke promised to make a more convincing replica of the stone.

Some of the implications of slavery were a cause for concern for the deeply religious mathematician, Robert Boyle, as papers in his collection reveal. A copy in the Boyle Papers (Vol. 4 f. 118) of a draft Act of Parliament proposed in 1670 notes that the principle that a Christian should not be enslaved by another men of the faith has led to planters and owners of slaves actively discouraging the conversion of slaves for fear of losing their property and investment. The proposed solution was not the abolition of slavery, however, but the provision that the baptism of slaves would not affect the ’service’ due from them to their ‘former masters’. Proposals (f. 127-8) that seem to have been drafted by Boyle himself the same year list two proposal, which may have been regarded as alternatives, as their provisions are otherwise contradictory. The first allows for the freeing of a Christian slave but not the offspring of this slave while the second proposes rights for a Christian slave, including the ownership of goods and the right to seek legal redress against mistreatment by a master. The final document (f. 144) refering to slavery in this collection of papers is a copy of a letter of the East India Company to their colony at St Helena dated 9 December 1670. This orders that Christian slave who are able to demonstrate their knowledge of the faith should remain slaves for seven years, after which they should become free planters. There does not seem to be any evidence that this command, remarkably enlightened for its time, was followed and slavery continued to be a mainstay of the income Britain received from its plantations for over a century.

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A quick note to flag up the lastest Royal Society Podcast:

Robert Hooke: the archival tragedy of dying intestate
A fascinating look at the disorganised paper trail left by Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments, and at the efforts of contemporary historians to piece together his paperwork and restore his legacy.

You can access it at www.royalsoc.ac.uk/podcasts - note that the Podcast is an ‘enhanced’ Podcast, with images and audio which will not play on some MP3 players.

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One of the earliest passages in  the Hooke folio records the Society’s receipt of a letter from Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) describing his observation of what he termed ‘animalcules’ in water together with a number of testimonials attesting to the truth of his discovery.

The ‘animalcules’ he describes are in fact the earliest observations of protozoa. Protozoa  are animal-like, single-celled organisms most commonly found in water and very rarely visible without the use of a microscope.

Leeuwenhoek’s observations prompted Hooke to conduct a series of experiments during Royal Society meetings in an attempt to see the ‘exceedingly small animals’ which Leeuwenhoek described. His initial experiment which observed pump water through a single microscope at a meeting on the 1st November 1677, met with little success and he decided to use pepper water in his next experiment. Unfortunately this did not work either. At the meeting of the 15th November 1677, Hooke finally sees ‘exceedingly small animals’ in rain water with a small amount of black pepper added to it and by the 6th December 1677, Hooke had refined the microscope sufficiently that ‘the small insects’ appear ‘much more magnified and clear’.

The Hooke Folio is particularly useful in charting the development of Hooke’s experiments to view protozoa because the records held by the Society (prior to the rediscovery of the Folio) break off abruptly part way through describing Hooke’s experiment on 15th November 1677 and do not recommence until the 6th December 1677. The Folio pages, missing from the official records, describe, amongst a number of other things, how Hooke modified the microscope so that the ‘animals’ could be seen more clearly and a debate amongst the fellows about how the ‘animals’ might be generated in the water and whether pepper somehow influences this generation.

This interest in protozoa is evident throughout the Folio, in fact some of the last pages of the Folio from 1691 record Mr Henshaw’s observations of ‘animals’ in pepper water.

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Today David Miliband announced the UK’s new climate change bill, getting the message across with this video on YouTube. Climate change has become a matter of increasingly concern, especially after last month’s report that global warming could involve a rise in temperatures of around 4 degrees by the end of the century, with chaotic consequences. The Royal Society has been involved with the investigation into climate change: a study launched in January will focus in particular on the effects of ground-level ozone, one of the greenhouse gasses likely to influence warming.

Although most of the opposition to the view that human activity is responsible for climate change has now dissipated, studying the interaction between the properties of the air and the weather has long been hotly debated. In the seventeenth century the concept of air having a changeable gaseous nature rather than representing a static element was a new and controversial idea. The existence of some exhaustible property of air could be proven by Robert Hooke’s experiments with the now familiar experiment using a candle flame inside a jar. He repeated this using a chick and then himself, who fortunately both remained ‘very lively’. The possibilities afforded by this new understanding of air were also demonstrated in Boyle’s famous airpump, described in his New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects.

Not everyone was convinced immediately: Thomas Hobbes was famously critical of the credibility of Boyle’s experimental proofs. Many also doubted the validity of the experiments that the Royal Society performed to test air pressure using barometers and to compare the weights of various substances in air and water.

A page of the Hooke folio that does not seem to have survived elsewhere, probably dating from 1678, defends the various experiments against an attack on them as ‘triuiall and impertinent tricks’ by those who think themselves ‘masters of all knowledge a priori and by Reuelation and dispise[d] such as is acquired by experimental inquiry’. He goes on to argue that, concerning air:

An exact and thorough knowledge of that is of more concerne
to mankind then all the other physicall knowledg in the world. for
it is by that we continually subsist & wthout it we cannot liue one
tenth part of an hower. tis from that proceeds the causes of Infi=
nite of Diseases, and It affordes as many Remedys for those Distem
pers…that is the cause sine
qua non of all vegetables and animalls vpon the Land and it Influences euen
the fish in the sea. Infinite and vnspeakable are the vses of it to the husband
man the merchant the tradesman the mechanick &c and that age will be
Deseruedly famous that perfects the theory of it.

Hooke’s argument apparently gained acceptance among the Royal Society, who continued to investigate the properties of the air and their effects on the atmosphere. As a recent article in Amix notes, Nehemiah Grew came up with an interesting if incorrect theory that attributed barometric variations to the changing concentrations of saline bodies in the air, that affected atmospheric pressure. By the time of the Great Trigonometrical survey in India, observers were directed to record the chemical composition of the air.

Despite the innovations of John Evelyn in predicting the consequences of man’s interference with the environment in his discourse on forest trees, the impact of man on the composition of the air would only become significant after the industrial revolution and not fully appreciated until long after that. Furthermore, the age which Hooke envisages in which the understanding of the air and our interaction with it is perfected still seems far distant.

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Did you see the lunar eclipse on Saturday night? Lunar eclipses occur when the earth blocks the sun’s light by passing between the sun and the moon and we see the earth’s shadow gradually cast across the moon. Although lunar eclipses are not particularly rare, with a clear sky, as on Saturday night, the sight of the moon with a red or copper hue is an impressive sight.

The Folio records accounts observing both solar and lunar eclipses and, interestingly, these were viewed as sufficiently important to be included in the index to the Folio. Such accounts tended to be in the form of letters, for instance in July 1782, Cassini writes to Flamstead, describing an eclipse of the moon in Dantizick, whilst in December 1685, Hevlius writes to Aston ,again with an account of a lunar eclipse in Dantizick. These descriptions are not confined to the Hooke Folio, however, and form part of a wider pattern of interest in lunar eclipses within the early Royal Society. For example accounts of eclipses are sent from various places including Paris and Moscow, whilst in 1666, Gresham-Professor of Geometry Mr Rook’s methods for observing a lunar eclipse are published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He says that the observer, preferably using a telescope rather than the naked eye, should pick out three of the ‘eminentest spots’ which ‘lie nearest the ecliptick’ and note the time a shadow is first cast on each one and when they are ‘completely entered in’ and out of the shadow. Rook also comments that observing lunar eclipses is important, not only for the astronomical information that could be gleaned, but also for the geographical information, such as comparing how observations made by scientists in various countries both differed and converged.

If you missed Saturday’s eclipse, one should be visible (weather permitting) on July 16th, though only if you live in Asia, the Pacific or the West of the Americas, if you live in Europe then you’ll have to wait until 9th January.

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