Exploring our archives

I’m transcribing the first half of the folio now, which is incredibly densely covered in tiny writing. It is taking a very long time…

Well, thats my moan over, lets move onto Hooke’s. Hooke usually refers to himself in the third person, adopting the formal style of the journal book that he is copying in this part of the folio. However, the section of notes taken in late 1668 and 1669 is annotated with several notes that express Hooke’s growing irritation with the Royal Society and his role within it. For example, on Feb. 11. he notes grumpily that ‘The Curator Absent a Comitte appointed for Expts. [which never did any thing] ‘.

In several places Hooke records what he sees as unreasonable obstructions to his theories. A cause of particular annoyance was the Society’s response to his attempt to prove that ‘a body once put into motion would move perpetually if it met w[th] noe resistance’, and that the decrease of motion was proportional to the resistance it met with. The first part of this argument would later be expressed in Newton’s first law: ‘An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force’. However, the Royal Society were unconvinced by Hooke’s arguments, as he notes, ‘insteed of hearing grounds & reason, experim[t] were always calld for. and all loaded with objections little to purpose]’.

This was particularly frustratring given that the perpetual motion of a body not acted on by force was not something that could be readily proved by experimentation. In his attempt to demonstrate this law, Hooke constructed first a simple experiment with two wooden balls. To demonstrate that resistance decreases motion, at the meeting of 12 November 1668, a trial of three balls, now known as a ‘Newton’s cradle’ was made:

‘either of the two extremes being Lett fall from a certaine height against the intermediat ball y[e] other extreme was impelled vpward to neer the same height that is the middle mouing very little of wch the Presid conceuid this the reason that the intermediat when struck by one of the Laterall found the Resistance of the other Laterall ball but this other Laterall met noe other resistance but that of y[e] air.’

A final complaint allows us to date the copying from the Journal Book to after 1672: next to his own proposition in October 1668 that rebounding did not arise from ’springy particles’ but from the amount of air contained within a body, Hooke notes ‘Wallis prsented this as his own. 1672′. Hooke was apparently particularly concerned with this period of his engagement with the Royal Society. In several places he makes notes to himself to cross-check entries copied from the Journal Book with entries in the Letter Book.

The best explanation for the copy and notes seems to be that the copies were intended to be incorporated in the record of his life’s achievements that Waller reported Hooke began in 1697. In the fragment copied by Waller, Hooke expresses his intention ‘to write the History of my own life, wherein I will comprize as many remarkable Passages, as I can now remember or collect out of suchg Memorials that I have kept in Writing or are in the registers of the ROYAL SOCIETY’.

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Today I’ve escaped from the depth of the Royal Society archive to the lofty heights of the British Library map room to look at a map made by James Rennell entitled ‘A map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire from the latest authorities’. The map was dedicated to Joseph Banks, who was President of the Royal Society at the time of its publication in 1788.

Rennell was first Surveyor-General of India appointed by the East India Company in 1767. Rennell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781, around which time he also published two accounts of his mapping experiences in Bengal and the empire of the ‘great Mogul’. These make it clear that Rennell compiled his map using a wide range of informants, including Indian and British soldiers, missionaries, and local people as well as the tables compiled of districts under the Emperor Akbar, who ruled India for the last half of the sixteenth century and who had used them to levy taxes.

The map itself is a beautiful creation and tells us a lot about European conception of India at the time. Of course this is true for any attempt at cartographical representation; as Siddharth Varadarajan points out in his essay India Tertia and the mapping of the colonial imaginary ‘in the very act of rendering intelligible the world with lines and shapes on stone, parchment or vellum – is always and everywhere an attempt to fashion new social boundaries and domains from the arid reality of geography.’

Rennell’s map is particularly interesting from this perspective as it is positioned on the boundaries of ‘modern’ methods of map-making, including the method of triangulation developed by his contemporary William Topping, and the older reliance on a collation of previous authorities and local informants. The idea of shifting boundaries and regions of influence is also evident in the map: Rennell shows both the subas, the divisions used by the geographical tables of Akbar in 1598 and the new divisions labeled according to their current rulers. These overlapping boundaries are distinguished by different typeface giving the map an almost three-dimensional effect. The scale of the map also speaks of transition and borrowing; adegree is given in reference to ‘Geographic miles’, ‘British miles’, ‘Cosses of Hindoostan’, ‘Carnatic Cosses’ and ‘Pliny’s road map, reduced to horizontal distance’.

The map retains many of the blank spaces that were said to have inspired Conrad’s hero: a large area of the interior is marked ‘unexplored by Europeans’ and the Coast between Bombay (Mumbai) and Goa is dubbed ‘pirate coast’. The blank spaces are also strategic, however, and the exceptions often reveal the commercial interests of Rennell’s employers, the East India Company. For example most of Burma is blank apart from the painstaking depiction of the area of ‘teek (teak) forests’ in the south. Such forests were always of interest to the European merchants given rising concerns about provision of wood for shipping.

Rennell produced many other maps, including the one below which shows the currents and patterns of wind as an aid to the circumvention of Africa. Oceanography was another subject on which Rennell corresponded with the Royal Society, writing to Blagden to ask for further information about the gulf stream.

Rennell’s connection with the Royal Society followed from an interest of many of the members in cartography and a concern to produce accurate maps for seafarers. This had been evident since their involvement with incomplete the ‘English Atlas’ project of Moses Pitt between c. 1675 and 1683. As Banks wished when he presented Rennell with the Copley medal, the map of India went on to inspire other large-scale projects of this nature, including the mapping of England.

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Since it’s almost Easter, I thought an egg related post might be in order.

The Hooke Folio details a meeting on 16th January 1679, where Mr Henshaw gives an account of Dr Kuffler’s way of ‘hatching chickens’ using artificial methods rather than leaving the eggs to hatch naturally with the mother hen. Kuffler kept the eggs on a wire over a balneum (similar to a modern day bain marie) with a cover over and placed it close to a furnace. He turned the eggs each day for eighteen days before removing them and putting them ‘on a hair cloth near the ash hole of a stove’. Soon after  Kuffler claims the eggs began to hatch and three days later the chicks were able to feed themselves. Kuffler’s method of artificially incubating the eggs prompted further discussion on 23rd January 1679 concerning whether the chickens produced ’ would be fruitfull & produce eggs and chickens as others that were hatchd the naturall way’. To which Mr Henshaw confirmed that they ‘were euery deale as fruitfull … as the other’.

The Hooke Folio’s account of Kuffler’s work shows how the Fellows of the Society were interested in the way the workings of nature could be ’artificially’ replicated and how the results of such artificial methods compared to those of the natural world.

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Phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical element found in inorganic rocks, is essential to DNA and RNA and is now used for a variety of purposes, from toothpaste to explosives. Its earlier history provides a good example of where alchemy and science overlap. First discovered in the 1660’s, the Royal Society’s early correspondence and experiments regarding it betray a mixture of spiritual and practical interest, as well as some confusion over what should properly be classed as phosphorus. A from Henry Oldenburg to Marcello Malpighi in 1677 describes the German chemist Balduin sending specimens of phosphorus to both the King Charles II and the Royal Society. Oldenburg notes that this stone (shown by later historians to have been calcium nitrate) ‘absorbs the light of the sun or a lamp that afterwards, in the dark, it radiates like incandescent iron or charcoal’. He also observes that this was a different substance from ‘Bologna stone’, a source of baryte, some species of which, like phosphorus, emit a glow on contact with oxygen. This property of the stone made it the focus of attention from alchemists, who identified it as the long sought after ‘philosopher’s stone’, capable of transforming metals into gold.

The interest of fellows such as Isaac Newton in alchemy is well known and references to alchemic myths such as the Table of Hermes litter the early records. The Royal Society also had more a practical aim in mind, however, in making trials on specimens of phosphorescent materials that they acquired: that of providing an alternative light source to candles and oil-lamps. They were encouraged in this effort by the reports of ‘perpetual noctiluca’ coming out of German at the time. Oldenburg’s letters to Adolf Balduin, who was made a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his phosphorus experiments urge him to divulge details of these claims. In February 1682, Hooke reported to the Society that these attempts were still in progress, noting that a Dr Eshalts ‘hoped he should suddainly haue the perpetuall noctiluca as to Enlighten a whole Room being able already to Read a large print by it’. Further correspondence with Eshalts during 1682 discusses the possibility that phosphorus might by made from serum, cows’ milk or human spittle as well as urine.

The Society performed their own experiments with the various phosphorescent materials they were able to obtain. Hooke tried in 1679 to make a type of phosphorus shine after being exposed to the moonlight but failed, even when using a burning glass. On 10 June 1691, the Society witnessed an experiment involving a ‘lapis smargadine’, literally an emerald-coloured stone. This was ground to a powder and placed on a copper plate which was heated, and ‘after the said Powder had been Showed vpon the plate in the shape of R.S. then the Room being Darkened by cloing the Shutters the powder on the plate began to appear white & shining, but [the] All the other parts of the plate did not at all shine for it was not soe great a heat as to make that red hot’. As part of his studies of respiration, Robert Boyle also made experiments with phosphorous wood in an ‘exhausted receiver’, showing that it required a chemical reaction with the air to keep burning (see Fulton’s 1960 article in Notes and Records).
The Philosophical Transactions of 1735 contains some similar experiments using phosphorus synthesized using the ‘acid salt’ (calcium phosphate) of urine as well as an attempt to use it in glass-making. Phosphorescent materials retained their magical allure for some time, and their association with other doctrines of alchemy. For example, a letter to Hans Sloane from a French correspondent dated 1737, stated that phosphorus was a good antidote to the poison of snakes. This idea is one that is constantly associated with bezoar stones, another concept central to alchemy.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the generation of light, with its innately religious implications, continued to inspire mystical explanations. Likewise, the invention of electricity inspired new religious conceptions, even among those who worked most closely with it, as demonstrated by Noakes’ discussion of Varley’s spiritualism in January’s issue of Notes and Records.

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