Books!

When I dropped out of academia (for the second time in my life) in the early 1990s, because of serious (mental) health problems, I throttled back my life-long interest in the history of science, giving my energy instead to recovering my mental equilibrium. When, after a break of several years, I returned to an intensive engagement with the history of science, one of the first things I did was to take part in a seminar at the university on Copernicus’ De revolutionibus. This led me to the question, why was De revolutionibus published in Nürnberg? Regular readers will know that I live just down the road from Nürnberg, so this a fairly natural question for me to ask. My attempts to find an answer led to an in depth study of the life and work of Johannes Petreius, the printer publisher who published De revolutionibus and to the early history of the printed book, as Petreius stood in a direct line of descent from Gutenberg through his Basler relatives who had learnt the black art directly from its inventor.

The more general question of the influence of the printed book on the evolution of modern science led quite naturally to a deepened interest in the early history of scientific book publication in which Nürnberg again played a role through Regiomontanus the first printer publisher of scientific books.

Curiously Nürnberg was also the site of the first paper mill north of the Alps, paper being an essentially ingredient in mass production of printed books and this fact led to a strong interest in the history of paper making and to the materials that preceded paper as a medium for transmitting the written word.

Another seminar that I took part in at the university, following my return to the history of science, concerned the history of illustrations in scientific texts, which awakened my interest in the various methods of illustration reproduction and their histories. Another Nürnberger, Albrecht Dürer, played a significant role in that history.

Over the years I acquired a deep interest, and a modicum of knowledge of the histories of all the various aspects of recording knowledge in word and picture, so it was not surprising that my interest was drawn almost magnetically to a fairly recent new publication with the title, The Book: A Cover to Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Times. An interest made even stronger by the fact that the author of this tome is Keith Houston, the author of both the book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks, a serious candidate for ultimate geek bedtime reading, and of the blog of the same name. Unable to resist temptation I acquired a copy of The Book.

Having delved deeply into the subject over a number of years I expected to be entertained, Houston is a witty writer, but not really to learn much that was new. I was mistaken, even though I consider myself well informed on the topic I took away much that was new from Houston’s excellent study of the topic.

The Book is divided into four sections, The Page, The Text, Illustrations and Form. The first deals with the history of writing material from papyrus over parchment to paper and the progress from hand-made paper to modern industrial paper production. The second deals with methods of bringing writing onto that material starting with Babylonian cuneiform symbols impressed into clay tablets, outlining the history of ink and moving on to the history of moveable type printing. Once again covering the arc from the cradle of civilisation to the twentieth century. Part three does the same for pictures on the page. The final part deals with the forms that books have taken over the centuries from the papyrus roles to the codex and the various sizes and forms that the codex has adopted down the years. We also get a detailed history of the evolution of bookbinding.

Houston has researched his topic exceedingly well and delivers his cornucopia of information in a well-digested and easily accessible form for the reader, with a healthy portion of humour. One aspect of the book that appealed to me as a history of science myth buster is Houston’s use of multiple layers of historical story telling. For example, he takes a topic and tells his readers how its history was understood and presented in the nineteenth century. Then he explains how modern research showed this to be wrong and represents the history from this standpoint. Having gone into great detail he then explodes this version by showing why it can’t be true. I’m not going to go here into any great detail, as it would spoil the fun for future readers, and it really is fun, but Houston gives his readers a useful lesson in the evolution of the historiography of his subject.

One thing that has to be said is that The Book is beautifully produced with much obvious loving care for detail. It is printed with a very attractive typeface on lovely paper both of which make it a real pleasure to hold and to read. It comes bound in heavy light-grey carton boards joined together by dark read spinal binding tape. Its gatherings are, as befits a book about the history of the book, stitched and not glued. Throughout the book, starting with the cover, all of the bits and pieces that a book consists of are bracketed and labelled with their corrected technical terms. The book is beautifully illustrated, each illustration possessing an extensive explanatory text of its own. There are a helpful further reading list, extensive endnotes (as always I would have preferred footnotes) and an equally extensive index. Despite being just over 400 pages long, and being a high quality, beautifully produced, bound book it retails at a ridiculously low price. The publishers offer it at $29.95 but it can be had for less than twenty pounds, euro or dollar depending on your location.

If you have any interest in the history of the book as an object or the history of moveable type printing then I can only recommend acquiring a copy of Keith Houston’s wonderful book on the book.

 

How Chemistry came to its first journal – and a small-town professor to lasting prominence

Being fundamentally a lazy sod I am always very pleased to welcome a guest blogger to the Renaissance Mathematicus, because it means I don’t have to write anything to entertain the mob. Another reason why I am pleased to welcome my guest bloggers is because they are all better educated, better read and much more knowledgeable than I, as well as writing much better than I ever could, meaning I get princely entertained and educated by them. Todays new guest blogger, Anna Gielas, maintains the high standards of the Renaissance Mathematicus guests. Anna, who’s a German studying in Scotland whereas I’m an English man living in Germany, helps me to put together Whewell’s Gazette the #histSTM weekly links list. I’ll let her tell you somewhat more about herself.

 I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews (Dr Aileen Fyfe and Prof Frank James from the Royal Institution of Great Britain are my supervisors) and I study the editorship and the establishment of early scientific journals in Britain and the German lands. I focus on the decades between 1760 and 1840 because this was the time when commercial (as opposed to society-based) science periodicals took off and became a central means of scientific communication and knowledge production. 

 As you can see Anna is an expert for the history of scientific journals and her post honours the 200^th anniversary of the death Lorenz Crell, 7 June 1816, who edited and published the world’s first commercial journal devoted exclusively to chemistry. Read and enjoy.

 

---

 

 

In early February 1777, the famous Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller received a letter from an obscure small-town professor named Lorenz Crell. Crell had studied medicine, travelled Europe and returned to his hometown, where he succeeded his former professor of medicine at the local university.

The young professor asked Haller for feedback on a few essays he had submitted anonymously. Haller’s favourable comments encouraged Crell not only to reveal his name but also his risky plan: “I have a chemical journal in the works”, Crell announced to Haller in February 1777.

Lorenz Crell
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The thirty-three year old professor had hardly any experiences with publishing, let alone with editing a learned journal. Yet his periodical would go on to become the first scientific journal devoted solely to chemical research—and would influence the course of chemical research throughout the German speaking lands.

In February of 1777—roughly one year before the inaugural issue of his Chemisches Journal appeared—things looked rather dire for Crell. At this time, there were essentially two professional groups in the German speaking lands devoted to chemical endeavours: university professors and apothecaries. The core of professorial work—and the task they were paid for—was teaching. And chemistry was taught as part of the medical curriculum. Apothecaries, in turn, focused mainly on producing remedies. Neither profession was based on chemical research. Experimentation would remain secondary until the nineteenth century.

So whom did Crell expect to pick up his periodical? He hoped to garner the attention of the eminent Andreas Sigismund Marggraf and his peers. Marggraf was the first salaried chemist at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Like most of the leading chemical researchers, Marggraf was an apprenticed apothecary. He had audited lectures and seminars at the University of Halle, an epicentre of the Enlightenment, but he never graduated. Before taking on his post at the Academy, Marggraf earned his living through the apothecary shop that he had inherited from his father, the “Apotheke zum Bären” (Bear’s Pharmacy) on Spandauer Straße in Berlin.

Hoping that renowned chemical experimenters like Marggraf would pick up Crell’s journal was one thing—catching their attention and actually persuading them to contribute to the periodical a very different one. But Crell, it appears, had a plan. Later in 1777 he contacted Friedrich Nicolai, a famous publisher and bookseller of the German Enlightenment, and asked for the honour of reviewing a few chemical books for Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (ADB). Crell picked a good moment to do so: in 1777, the ADB experienced record sales. But the editor-to-be approached Nicolai without any letter of introduction, which according to the mores of his times, the Prussian Aufklärer could have easily interpreted as impudence. Nicolai apparently saw moxie where others might have seen brazenness: the publisher commissioned reviews from Crell within days of receiving his letter. Within roughly two months, from November 1777 until mid-January 1778, Crell submitted no less than eleven pieces for Nicolai’s famous periodical. “I still owe you five reviews which shall follow quickly”, he wrote to the Prussian publisher in January. Nicolai received them by February.

Title page from the Chemisches Journal for 1778
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Crell was aware that Nicolai had close ties to leading chemical investigators. The publisher was about to become an extraordinary member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and chemical researchers such as Johann Christian Wiegleb and Johann Friedrich Gmelin contributed to the ADB. Wiegleb was a pharmacist who expanded his laboratory in Langensalza to teach chemistry. Wiegleb’s students lived, learned, and—most importantly—researched at his Privat-Institut. Johann Friedrich Göttling was one of Wiegleb’s pupils—as was the English industrialist Matthew Boulton.

Crell tried to tap into this network when he first contacted Nicolai. Maybe he even hoped to recruit the renowned chemical researchers for the inaugural issue of his Chemisches Journal. But the editor had to pace himself: the first issue of his periodical was almost entirely authored by himself and Johann Christian Dehne, a close friend and physician from a neighbouring village.

Ultimately, Crell’s concerted efforts as a regular contributor to the ADB and the editor of the Chemisches Journal paid off: all three—Wiegleb, Gmelin and Göttling—submitted articles for the second issue of Crell’s novel journal. Throughout the years many other joined them, including the Irish chemist Richard Kirwan, the Scottish researcher Joseph Black and the German Martin Heinrich Klaproth, the first professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, however, never published in Crell’s journal, maybe due to health issues following a stroke.

Crell devoted decades of his life to his journals. Within nearly 27 years he published nine periodicals, the longest-running and most famous of which is the Chemische Annalen (1784-1804). It was here that the German chemists debated (and death-bedded) phlogiston. During a busier year, such as 1785, Crell published over 2,000 pages of chemical facts, findings and flapdoodle.

Today, some scientists and historians belittle his role in chemistry, arguing that Crell did not contribute anything crucial to science. To judge Crell by what he did not achieve in his laboratory is to present science as a solitary undertaking, tucked away in labs. But if we acknowledge that science is a joint endeavour, based on communication, on-going exchange and discussions, Crell’s contribution appears vital.

According to the Berkeley-historian Karl Hufbauer, Crell’s Chemische Annalen was crucial in the formation of the German chemical community. Even more, Crell provided German and European researchers with an instrument for the production of chemical knowledge.

Today is the 200^th anniversary of his death. Let’s use the date to commemorate all the editors throughout the centuries who spent countless hours at their desks—and contributed to the giant’s shoulders on which we stand today.

 

 

How papermaking crossed the Alps

Writing has been an important medium for recording and transmitting scientific results throughout history. In order to write you need two basic things, something to write with and something to write on. Carving words or symbols into wood or stone is one possibility that is both hard work and time consuming but does have the advantage that the finished product is highly durable especially if the material used is stone. You can actually also write with some sort of ink on sheets of wood. In fact the word ‘book’ comes from the German Buch, which in turn comes from Buche, which is the German for beech, both the tree and the wood. The ancient Babylonians wrote their Cuneiform script on clay tablets with a blunt reed stylus the result being wedge shaped symbols, the word cuneiform just coming from the Latin for wedge-shaped. The tablets baked when finished also have a relative high level of durability.

Enuma Anu Enlil text
This tablet talks about how the planet Venus will appear at certain times in the future.

Sometime in the fourth millennium BCE the ancient Egyptians invented a new material to write on, papyrus. These are mats made of the fibres of the papyrus plant. Unfortunately papyrus lacks flexibility and so can only be rolled and not folded making papyrus scrolls somewhat unwieldy in comparison to the later codex (that’s just Latin for book). Papyrus is also very susceptible to environmental influences, such as damp and excessive dryness, and is therefore not very durable.

Rhind Mathematical Papyrus : detail (recto, left part of the first section) Thebes, End of the Second Intermediate Period (c.1550 BC)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The history of parchment and vellum, that is prepared animal skins, which came to replace papyrus in antiquity especially in ancient Greece and Rome is shrouded in legend, myth and confusion but the method probably developed in ancient Egypt in the third millennium BCE. Pergamon in Greece became a major centre for the production of parchment and name of the material derives from the name of the city. Vellum is parchment made from calfskin, which is finer than that of other animals and the name derives from the Latin for calf. Parchment and vellum are difficult and expensive to produce, which amongst other things led to the habit of scraping the writing off of old documents to reuse the material thus producing so-called palimpsests a word derived from the Greek for scraped again, skins being scraped to produce parchment in the first place. If stored properly parchment is considerably less susceptible to environmental influences than papyrus and thus more durable.

A typical page from the Archimedes Palimpsest. The text of the prayer book is seen from top to bottom, the original Archimedes manuscript is seen as fainter text below it running from left to right

In order to mass produce writing on a large scale cheaply it is obvious that a new writing material would have to be invented and that material was paper. Paper, which like papyrus is mats of plant fibre, was invented in China, sometime between the third century BCE and the second century CE, came to Europe like many things via the Islamic Empire. Paper is traditionally made of the fibres of flax or hemp, wood pulp paper is largely a product of the industrial nineteenth century, is lighter and much more flexible than papyrus. Originally it was regarded sceptically in Europe because compared to parchment it lacked durability making it, in the opinion of its critics unsuitable for important documents. However, with the invention of moveable type printing and the possibility of producing multiple copies of documents cheaply and quickly paper came into its own. But I run ahead of myself.

According to legend the Arabs discovered the secret of paper making from Chinese prisoners captured at the Battle of Telas in 751 CE. Although probably not true paper mills began to spread fairly rapidly throughout the Islamic Empire in the eighth century CE. The Arabs developed the techniques of mass paper production and introduced the first paper mills into Europe in Spain in the late eleventh century CE. From here papermaking spread to Southern France and Italy by the thirteenth century. Northern Europe relied on expensive imports to supply their paper needs. The first paper mill north of the Alps was set up by Ulman Stormer on the river Pegnitz just outside of Nürnberg in 1390 CE.

Ulman Stromer was born 6 January 1329 the twelfth of eighteen surviving children of the Nürnberger merchant Heinrich Stromer and his second wife Margarete Geusmid. He was apprenticed as a merchant and learnt his trade in Barcelona, Genoa, Madrid and Kraków. In 1370 he took over, together with two of his brothers, the management of the family’s Europe wide trading company. He also served as a local politician in Nürnberg. Stromer a shrewd trader realising the profits being made by the Northern Italian papermakers decide to set up in competition in his own home territory. According to Stromer’s own written account he set up his paper mill on 24 June (St John’s Day) 1390:

“IN the name of Christ, amen. Anno Domini 1390, I, Ulman Stromer, started at making paper on St. John’s day at the Solstice, and began to set up a wheel in the Gleissmühle, and Clos Obsser was the first who came to work.”

There being no papermakers in Germany Stromer brought in the brothers Marco and Francisco di Marchia and their boy Bartolomeo from Italy to set up and run the mill, which became known as the Hadermühle Hadern being Lumpen or in English rags, paper being made not directly from flax plants but from linen rags.

Ulman Stromer’s Paper-mill. (From Schedel’s Buch der Chroniken of 1493.)

Stromer’s paper mill has been recorded for posterity in one of the most famous early books also printed in Nürnberg, the Die Schedelsche Weltchronik better known in English as the Nuremberg Chronicle.

Stromer’s paper mill in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. The building complex is at the lower right corner, outside the city perimeter.
Source: Wikipedia Commons

The greatest villain in the history of science?

In the popular version of the so-called astronomical revolution Andreas Osiander, who was born on the 19^th December 1496 or 1498, is very often presented as the greatest villain in the history of science because he dared to suggest in the ad lectorum (to the reader) that he added to the front of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus that one could regard the heliocentric hypothesis as a mere mathematical model and not necessarily a true representation of the cosmos. Is the judgement of history just and who was Andreas Osiander anyway?

Andreas Osiander portrait by Georg Pencz
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Andreas Osiander was born in Gunzenhausen, a small town to the south of Nürnberg, the son of Endres Osannder a smith and Anna Herzog. His father was also a local councillor, who later became mayor. He entered the University of Ingolstadt in 1515 where he, amongst other things, studied Hebrew under Johannes Reuchlin one of the greatest humanist scholars in Germany at that time, the great uncle from Philipp Melanchthon and the leading Hebrew scholar of the age. In 1520 Osiander was ordained a priest and called to Nürnberg to teach Hebrew at the Augustinian Cloister. This had been a major centre for reformatory debate for a number of years and it is here that Osiander became a religious reformer. In 1522 he was appointed preacher at the Saint Lorenz church in Nürnberg and became the leading voice for religious reform in the city. In 1525 Nürnberg, a city-state, became the first state to officially adopt the Lutheran Protestant religion, and Osiander became a highly influential and powerful figure. He was largely responsible for converting Albrecht of Prussia to Protestantism and also had a major influence on Thomas Cranmer, later Archbishop of Canterbury and author of the Common Book of Prayer. A trivial pursuits fact is that Cranmer married one of Osiander’s nieces.

Osiander’s first links with the printer/publisher Johannes Petreius was as the author of polemical religious tracts, which Petreius published. How he became an editor for Petreius is not know. It is also not known when and where Osiander developed his interest in and knowledge of the mathematical sciences. What is certain is that it was Osiander who, after Petreius had discovered Cardano’s books at the book fair in Frankfurt, who wrote to the Italian mathematician/physician/philosopher on Petreius’ behalf offering to publish his books in Germany; an offer that Cardano was more than willing to accept. Osiander then became the editor of those books of Cardano’s that Petreius published over the years; a service for which Cardano thanks him very warmly in the preface to one of his books, praising him highly for his abilities as an editor.

When Rheticus published his account of Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy in his Narratio Prima, in the form of an open letter addressed to Johannes Schöner, another of Petreius’ editors, it was Osiander who wrote to Rheticus on behalf of the publishing house showing great interest in the cyclical astrological theory of history outlined by Rheticus in his little book.

After Rheticus had brought the manuscript of De revolutionibus to Nürnberg, Philipp Melanchthon pressured him to take up the professorship for mathematics in Leipzig and Osiander took over the task of seeing the text through the press. It is here that Osiander added the ad lectorum to the finished book, which has, over the centuries, pulled down so much odium on his head. Is this harsh judgement of his actions justified or have we, as I believe, been blaming the wrong man for the last four and a half centuries.

In the early days of printing there was no such thing as authors rights. The rights to a book lay with the printer/publisher, who was also the first port of call should the authorities decide that a book or pamphlet was seditious, blasphemous or in any other way unacceptable. And please remember our concepts of freedom of speech simply did not exist in sixteenth-century Europe. The ad lectorum was added to De revolutionibus certainly with Petreius’ knowledge and almost certainly at his instigation. This is confirmed by his reaction as Copernicus’ friend Bishop Tiedemann Giese complained to the city council of Nürnberg about the inclusion of the ad lectorum in his dead friend’s magnum opus. Consulted by the council on the subject Petreius basically flew off the handle and told them to get stuffed, it was his book and he’d put what the hell he liked in it.

Osiander continued to edit the books of Cardano for Petreius but in 1548 the city of Nürnberg accepted the Augsburg Interim an edict issued by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who had just won a decisive victory against the Protestant forces, forcing the Protestant states within the Empire to revert to Catholicism. In a moonlight flit Osiander fled the city of Nürnberg and made his way north to Königsberg, where Albrecht appointed him professor of theology at the newly established university. This caused much bad blood, as Osiander was not a qualified theologian. In this position Osiander became embroiled in a major theological dispute with the supporters of Melanchthon in Wittenberg over the doctrine of justification. This dispute is known in German church history as the Osiander Dispute and led to a schism between the two parties, with Osiander basically forming his own branch of Protestantism.

Osiander died in 1552 a controversial figure both in the history of religion and the history of science. However as I have sketched above I think his bad reputation in the history of science is not really justified and the real villain of the piece, if there is one, is Johannes Petreius. I say if there is one, because many historians are of the opinion that the ad lectorum saved the De revolutionibus from being condemned straight away, when it was published, and allowed the heliocentric hypothesis it contained to spread relatively unhindered and become established.

 

The continuing saga of io9’s history of science inanities.

I made a sort of deal with myself to, if possible, avoid io9 and above all the inane utterances of Esther Inglis-Arkell. Unfortunately I fell for a bit of history of science click bait on Twitter and stumbled into her attempt to retell the story of the degenerating relations between Isaac Newton and John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal. I say attempt but that is actual a misuse of the word because it somehow implies making an effort, something that Ms Inglis-Arkell is not willed to do. Her post resembles something half read, half understood and then half forgotten spewed out onto the page in a semblance of English sentences. It in no way approaches being something that one could honestly label history of science story telling even if one were to stretch this concept to its outer most limits.

I have blogged on the relations between Newton and Flamsteed on a number of occasion but let us look at Ms Inglis-Arkell miserable attempt at telling the story and in so doing bring the correct story out into the open. Our storyteller opens her tale thus:

Isaac Newton reached the level of genius in two different disciplines: physics and making people miserable. This is a tale of his accomplishments in the latter discipline. The object of his scorn, this time, is a poor astronomer named John Flamsteed, who made the mistake of not being agreeable enough.

I tend to dislike the term genius but if one is going to apply it to Newton’s various activities then one should acknowledge that as an academic he also reached the level of genius as a mathematician, as a theoretical astronomer and as an instrument maker and not just as a physicist. Credit where credit is due. On the subject of his making people miserable, John Flamsteed was anything but a saint and as I pointed out in an earlier post, Grumpy old astronomers behaving badly or don’t just blame Isaac!, in the dispute in question both of them gave as good as he got.

We now get to the factual part of the story where our storyteller displays her grasp of the facts or rather her lack of one:

Flamsteed and Newton started their acquaintance on good terms. They spent the 1680s happily corresponding about two lights in the sky, seen in 1680, which were either two comets or one comet that made two trips by Earth. This got Flamsteed interested in cataloguing [sic] the heavens. If enough information was compiled about the lay of the night sky, astronomers would be able to understand all kinds of things about the shape of the universe and how its various pieces worked. By the mid-1690s, Flamsteed was the Astronomer Royal and was making a star catalogue which he would publish when it was completed.

Remember that bit about half read and half forgotten? John Flamsteed had been installed by Charles II as Astronomer Royal for the newly commissioned Royal Observatory at Greenwich on 22 June 1675 “forthwith to apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so-much desired longitude of places, for the perfecting the art of navigation.” Not by the mid-1690s as Ms Inglis-Arkell would have us believe. I love the bit about how, “astronomers would be able to understand all kinds of things about the shape of the universe and how its various pieces worked”, Which basically just says that she doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about so she’ll just waffle for a bit and hope nobody notices. The Observatory itself wasn’t finished till 1685 but by the beginning of the 1680 Flamsteed was already busily fulfilling his obligations as official state astronomical observer.

The early 1680s saw a series of spectacular comets observable from Europe, and Flamsteed along with all the other European astronomers devoted himself to observing their trajectories and it was a conjecture based on his observations that led to his correspondence with Newton. He observed two comets in 1680, one in November and the second in mid December. Flamsteed became convinced that they were one and the same comet, which had orbited the sun. He communicated his thoughts by letter to Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in Cambridge, the two hadn’t fallen out with each other yet, and Newton initially rejected Flamsteed’s findings. However on consideration he came to the conclusion that Flamsteed was probably right and drawing also on the observations of Edmund Halley began to calculate possible orbits for the comet. He and Halley began to pay particular attention to observing comets, in particular the comet of 1682. By the time Newton published his Principia, his study of cometary orbits took up one third of the third volume, the volume that actually deals with the cosmos and the laws of motion and the law of gravity. By showing that not only the planets and their satellite systems obeyed the law of gravity but that also comets did so, Newton was able to demonstrate that his laws were truly universal. Note that Flamsteed two-in-one comet was orbiting the sun and not “one comet that made two trips by Earth”; this will come up again in the next paragraph:

Newton, meanwhile, believed that returning comets might be drawn to the Earth by some mysterious force. They might circle the Earth, in fact, the way the Moon circled the Earth. Perhaps, the force that drew the Moon and the comets might be the same. Newton wanted to study his “Moon’s Theory,” and to do so he needed the information in Flamsteed’s catalogue, incomplete though it was. Newton had risen to the rank President of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; the titles might leave one in doubt as to who had the power, but Newton’s fame and connections far outstripped Flamsteed’s. When Isaac Newton wanted information from the catalogue, he wanted it immediately, whether it was published or not.

The opening sentences of this paragraph are a confession of complete incompetence for somebody, who, if I remember correctly, has a degree in physics. We are of course talking about the force of gravity, so why not call it that? Anyone who has studied physics at school knows that according to the law of gravity any two bodies “attract each other” something that Newton had spelled out very clearly in his Principia, which was published in 1687 before the dispute that Inglis-Arkell is attempting to describe took place. So the comets are not being “drawn to the Earth by some mysterious force”. In fact they are not being drawn to the Earth at all and there are certainly not circling it. Flamsteed’s careful observations and astute deduction had correctly led Newton to the conclusion that the force of gravity causes some comets to orbit the sun. As we shall see shortly when Newton and Flamsteed got in each others hair about Newton’s need for fresh observational date on the moon he was still Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge and still ten years away from becoming President of the Royal Society. However before I go into detail let us look at Inglis-Arkell’s account of the affair.

You can get a lot done when you’re friends with the Queen, but it still took a lot of time for Isaac Newton to get what he wanted from John Flamsteed. First Flamsteed sent assistants’ work instead of his own. Newton was exasperated with the mistakes they had made. Newton wrote nasty letters. Flamsteed wrote nasty diary entries. Newton turned to the royal Prince George, asking him to order Flamsteed to write a book that would include all his current data. Flamsteed just couldn’t get it together to produce the book, much as he must have wished to comply with his Prince’s order.

Newton inspected the Royal Observatory. Flamsteed guarded the equipment so jealously that the two physically fought over it. Flamsteed ended that day with a very smug diary entry declaring that the “instruments… were my own.”

Now the Astronomer Royal was not only disobeying Isaac Newton but the actual Royals, and so it’s impressive that Flamsteed managed to keep his prestigious appointment. He didn’t lose his position or his data for over a decade. It wasn’t until 1712 that Newton was able to influence Queen Anne and Prince George enough to force Flamsteed to publish his data in a small volume. Still, Flamsteed was bitter at the defeat.

Our intrepid wanna-be historian of science has conflated and confused three separate struggles between the two protagonists into one, getting her facts wrong along the way and even making thinks up, not a very good advertisement for a website that wishes to inform its readers or maybe this is one of their sci-fi contributions.

Let us take a look at what really happened. In an incredible tour de force Newton wrote and published his Principia in the three years between 1684 and 1687 and as I noted above Flamsteed’s recognition that some comets orbit the sun went on to play a central role in this ground-breaking work. In his magnum opus Newton was able to demonstrate that the whole of the then known cosmos lay under the rule of the law of gravity. It determined the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun as well as the orbits of the then known satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. It converted the comets from irregular prophets of doom into celestial objects with regular but extremely long orbits. Everything seemed to fit neatly into place in a clockwork cosmos. Well almost everything! The earth’s closest neighbour appeared not to want to obey the dictates of gravity. Although Newton managed to get a fairly good approximation of a gravity-determined orbit for the moon it wasn’t anywhere near as good as he would have liked.

The problem lies on the size of the moon. Having an unusually large mass for a satellite the moon is involved in a gravitational system with both the earth and the sun, the classical three-body problem. As a result its orbit is not a smooth ellipse but being pulled hither and thither by both the earth and the sun its orbit contains many substantial irregularities making it very difficult to calculate. There is in fact no general analytical solution to the three-body problem, as was finally proved in the nineteenth century by Henri Poincaré. The physicist or astronomer is forced to calculate each irregularity step by step, the situation that Newton found himself in whilst writing the Principia.

In 1693 Newton was contemplating a second edition of the Principia and decided to tackle the moon’s orbit anew. This required new observational data and the person who was in procession of that data was Flamsteed. Newton never the most diplomatic of men at the best of times was even more grumpy than usual in the early 1690s. He was recovering from what appears to have been some sort of major mental breakdown, he was tackling one of the few mathematical problem that would always defeat him (the moon’s orbit, which was finally solved by Laplace in his Exposition du système du monde at the end of the eighteenth century), and he was frustrated by his situation in Cambridge and was looking for a suitable position in recognition of his, in the meantime, considerable status in London. The latter would be solved by Charles Montagu appointing him Warden of the Mint in 1696. His approach to Flamsteed to obtain the data that he required was high handed to say the least. Flamsteed, also an irritable man, who was overworked, underpaid and underfinanced in his efforts to map the entire heavens, was less than pleased by Newton’s imperious demands but delivered the requested data none the less. Newton failed to solve his problem and blaming Flamsteed and his data demanded more. Flamsteed feeling put upon grumbled but delivered; and so the pair of grumpy old men continued, each developing an intense dislike of the other. In the end Newton’s demands became so impossible that Flamsteed started sending Newton raw observational data letting him calculate the lunar positions for himself. It is difficult to say where this vicious circle would have led if Newton had not lost interest in the problem and shelved it, and the plans for a second edition of Principia, in 1695. By now the two men were totally at loggerheads but would have nothing more to do with each other for the next nine years.

In 1704 Newton, by now Master of the Mint and resident in London, was elected President of the Royal Society. On 12 April 1704 Newton took a boat down the river from the Tower of London, home of the Mint, to Greenwich, home of the Royal Observatory, to visit Flamsteed. Surprisingly amicable Newton suggested to Flamsteed that he should speak to Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s consort, on Flamsteed’s behalf about obtaining funds to have Flamsteed’s life work published. Flamsteed was agreeable to having his work published especially as his critics, most notably Edmond Halley and David Gregory, were pointing out that he had nothing to show for almost thirty years of endeavour. However he would have preferred to deal with the matter himself rather than have Newton as his broker. Newton spoke to Prince George and obtained the promise of the necessary funds. Meanwhile Flamsteed drew up a publication plan for his work. He wanted three volumes with his star catalogue the high point of his work in the third and final volume. Newton had other plans. He set up an editorial board at the Royal Society consisting of himself, David Gregory, Christopher Wren, Francis Robartes and John Arbuthnot to oversee the publication. Flamsteed, the author and also a member of the Royal Society, was not included. Newton ignored Flamsteed’s wishes and declared that the star catalogue would be printed in volume one. Newton commissioned a printer to print sample sheets, however Flamsteed found them to be of poor quality and wished to find a new printer. Newton ignored him and gave the printer the commission to print the work ordering Flamsteed to supply the introductory material for the first volume.

One major problem was that the star catalogue was at this time not complete. Flamsteed kept stalling declining to supply with Newton with the catalogue until he could complete it. He needed to calculate the stellar positions from the raw observational data. Newton promised him the money to pay the computers and actually obtained the money from Prince George. Flamsteed employed the computers to do the work and paid them out of his own pocket requesting restitution from Newton. Newton refused to pay up. So the whole sorry affair dragged on until Prince George died in 1708 with which the project ground to an end. If Flamsteed had grown to dislike Newton in the 1690s he truly hated him now.

Things remained quiet for two years then at the end of 1710 John Arbuthnot, who was physician to Queen Anne, suddenly announced that Anne had issued a warrant that appointed the president and others as the council of the Royal Society saw fit to be ‘constant Visitors’ of the Royal Society. As used here visitor means supervisor and it effectively meant that Newton was now Flamsteed’s boss. With their newly won authority Newton and his cronies did everything in their power to make life uncomfortable for Flamsteed over the next few years. On 26 October 1711 Newton summoned Flamsteed to a meeting in Crane Court, the home of the Royal Society, to inform him of the state of the observatory instruments. Here we meet a classic of institutional funding. The Crown had paid to have the Royal Observatory built and having appointed Flamsteed to run it the Crown paid his wages, on a very miserly level, however no money was ever supplied for instruments and so Flamsteed had bought his instruments with his own money. When Newton demanded account of the state of the instruments Flamsteed could prove that they were all his own private property and thus no concern of Newton’s. Newton was far from pleased by this defeat. He now ordered the Royal Ordnance to service, repair and upgrade the instruments and thus to win official control over them. Unfortunately the Ordnance, which, like the Mint, occupied the Tower of London didn’t like Newton so taking sides with Flamsteed informed Newton that there were no funds available for this work. A minor victory for Flamsteed but he had already suffered a major defeat. Before discussing this I should point out that contrary to Ms Inglis-Arkell’s claims, at no time did the elderly combatants resort to any form of physical contact.

On 14 March 1711 Arbuthnot had informed Flamsteed that the Queen had commanded the complete publication of his work; the brief reprieve brought about by the death of Prince George was over. Although the star catalogue, which was all that Newton was interested in publishing, was now finished Flamsteed at first prevaricated again. Arbuthnot wrote to Flamsteed requesting him to deliver up the catalogue, Flamsteed declined with further excuses. Newton exploded and shot off a letter ripping a strip of Flamsteed for defying a Royal command and the fight was now effectively over. Flamsteed met with Arbuthnot and handed over the manuscript requesting conditions concerning the printing and editing to which Arbuthnot acquiesced and promptly ignored. Flamsteed went ballistic, as he discovered that printing was going ahead without his knowledge and even worse his manuscript was being edited by Edmond Halley! Flamsteed by now hated Newton but he reserved his greatest loathing for Halley. It has been much speculated why Flamsteed had such an extreme aversion to Halley but it went so far that he refused to use his name and only referred to him as Reimers after Nicolaus Reimers Bär, whom Flamsteed believed had plagiarised his hero Tycho and was thus the most despicable person in the history of astronomy. Flamsteed had lost all down the line and in 1712 his star catalogue appeared in a large folio volume (not the small volume claimed by Inglis-Arkell). Deeply bitter Flamsteed now swore to publish his life’s work in three volumes, as he had originally planned in 1704, at his own expense and began with the preparation. It should be noted that far from ‘Newton being able to influence Queen Anne and Prince George enough to force Flamsteed to publish his data’, Prince George had by now been dead for four years!

However Newton might have won a victory but he hadn’t yet won the war and the tide began finally to turn in Flamsteed’s favour. In 1714 Queen Anne died and was succeeded on the throne by George I, Elector of Hanover. The succession also brought with it a change of government. Now Inglius-Arkell claims that George didn’t like Newton but this is not true. He greatly respected Newton who had long been regarded as the greatest natural philosopher in Europe; he even forced his librarian, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who would have loved to have moved to London to escape his Hanoverian backwater (no offense intended to Hannover or the Hanoverians), to stay at home so as not to offend Newton, who was at war with Leibniz when he wasn’t battling Flamsteed. However the succession and the change of government did mean a loss of influence for Newton. In early 1715 Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax, one of the most powerful politicians in England during the previous twenty years and Newton’s political patron, died. Charles Paulet, 2^nd Duke of Boulton, the Lord Chamberlin, was a friend of Flamsteed’s and on 30 November 1715 he signed a warrant ordering Newton to return the three hundred remaining copies of the printed star catalogue to Flamsteed. He “made a Sacrifice of them to Heavenly Truth”; i.e. he burnt them.

Flamsteed continued with his project to publish his life’s work at his own expense but died in 1719 before he could finish the project. His widow with the willing help of his two assistants Joseph Crosthwait and Abraham Sharp finished the job and his three-volume Historia coelestis britannica was finally published in 1725, followed by his charts of the constellations the Atlas coelestis, edited by his widow and James Hodgson in 1727. Together they form a fitting monument to one of history’s greatest observational astronomers. Flamsteed had written a long preface for the Historia describing, from his standpoint, in great detail his twenty year long war with Newton but this did not make it into the final printed edition, probably because Newton, by now a living legend, was still very much alive. It only resurfaced a hundred years later. Flamsteed got his revenge, from beyond the grave, on Halley, who followed him as Astronomer Royal. As already explained above, Flamsteed’s observational instruments were his own personal property so when he died his widow stripped the observatory bare leaving Halley an empty building in which to pursue his new office.

The whole, more than twenty year long, farce is one of the more unsavoury episodes in the history of science and certainly not how one would expect two senior officers of state to behave. It is clear that Newton caries most of the blame although Flamsteed was not exactly a model of virtue deliberately fanning the flames through renitent and provocative behaviour. In particular his behaviour towards Halley, who was more than qualified and very capable of editing the star catalogue, was extremely childish and inexcusable.

You might think that I am being very unfair to Ms Inglis-Arkell having turned her very brief account into an overlong post but that is actually the point and her central failure, ignoring all of the factual errors in her version of the story. What I have laid out here are only the bare bones of the whole story, if I were to go into real detail this post would be ten times longer than it already is. Ms Inglis-Arkell attempt to reduce a highly complex series of episodes out of the history of science to a couple of hundred words in a throwaway post could only end in a level of distortion that makes the whole exercise a complete waste of time, effort (not that she seems to expended much of that) and cyberspace.

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re going to blog about history of science then at least do the legwork.

In 2012 I found it necessary on two occasions to pour scorn onto the attempts of Esther Inglis-Arkell to blog about the history of science on the io9 website. In the end I gave up having come to the conclusion, not only because of her contributions, that io9 was, despite according to Wikipedia being “named one of the top 30 science blogs by Michael Moran of The Times’ Eureka Zone blog“, definitely not a place to go for anything resembling sensible history of science. However I recently had recourse to visit this quagmire of questionable information to trace the source of a dubious history of science claim. Entering the name Tycho Brahe into the sites search engine the first thing offered was a post about Denmark’s most notorious astronomer written by Esther Inglis-Arkell at the beginning of December. Against my better judgement I decided to read this pre-Christmas offering and very much wished that I hadn’t succumbed to temptation. This post with the title The Bitterest Scientific Duel in History Was Over “Geoheliocentrism” is to put it mildly pretty awful.

Before we examine the post let us consider the title. I have on numerous occasions argued that one should not use superlatives in the history of science, or in history in general come to that, terms such as ‘first’, ‘greatest’, etc., are to be avoided at all cost and the situation here is no different. ‘Bitterest scientific duel”? Really? What about Galileo contra Scheiner on sunspots or Galileo contra Grassi on the nature of comets? Hooke contra Huygens on the watch spring? Hooke contra Newton on everything under the sun or Newton contra Leibniz on the invention of the calculus? That’s just picking some of the cherries off the cake. In the Early Modern period disputes over priority, plagiarism, scientific interpretation and numerous other things were part of the daily bread of scholars. If should think that it was only the mathematical sciences which went in for verbal warfare try the dispute between Leonhart Fuchs and Janus Cornarius, which used language that would make a drunken sailor blush.

EIA’s introduction is also somewhat less than fortunate, she writes, “His bitterest fight involved three famous astronomers of the 16th century, and their battle over the best theory about how Earth was at the center of the universe“. This less than perfect sentence seems to imply that the dispute was about competing cosmological systems, it wasn’t. The dispute was about whether Nicolaus Reimers Bär, generally known as Ursus, had plagiarised the Tychonic system from its Danish creator. Tycho said he had, Ursus denied the charge. EIA’s confusion is not restricted to the introduction as in the following paragraph she writes:

[Tycho] published a geoheliocentric version of the universe, with both the Earth and Sun at the center of the solar system. The “system of the world” was well-received, and an improvement on the existing geocentric model. It was not unique. Nicolaus Reimarus also published a book, titled “Fundamentals of Astronomy,” that replaced the geocentric model.

First off in Tycho’s system “both the Earth and Sun are not at the center of the solar system”! The earth is at the centre and is orbited by the sun, which in turn is orbited by the five planets. Here it is also very clear that EIA is not aware that with slight differences they both published the same system. Tycho claiming that Ursus had plagiarised him and Ursus claiming that he had developed/discovered the system independently. In the interest of fairness it should be pointed out that Paul Wittich, Duncan Liddel, Helisaeus Röslin and Simon Marius all claimed to have independently developed/ discovered a Tychonic system: In fact Gingerich and Westman argue a very good case that Tycho and Ursus both plagiarised Wittich!

I’m not going to discuss the whole story here although I might write a post about it in the future but anybody who wants to read up on it for themselves should, to get a full and balanced picture, read Edward Rosen’s Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler Trapped between Tycho Brahe and Ursus, Nicholas Jardine’s The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s ‘A Defence of Tycho against Ursus’ with Essays on its Provenance and Significance and Owen Gingerich’s and Robert S. Westman’s The Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth Century Cosmology, as well as Victor Thoren’s The Lord of Uraniborg: A biography of Tycho Brahe and Dieter Launert’s Nicolaus Reimers (Raimarus Ursus) (this is in German). If that is not enough volume 36 (2005) of the Journal for the History of Astronomy (which is open access) has nine papers by Jardine et al on the subject and volume 44 (2013, not open access) has an interesting paper Trying Ursus: A Reappraisal of the Tycho-Ursus Priority Dispute by Juan D. Serrano. All of this literature means that there really is no excuse for EIA not to get her story right!

We now get introduced to Tycho:

The dual publication was bound to cause bad feelings. Tycho Brahe was a great drinking buddy, but he did not have an even temper when it came to academic debate. He’d lost part of his nose in a duel with his third cousin over a difference in their appraisal of mathematical formula. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat who avoided marrying a woman because she was a commoner, despite the fact that they lived together for 30 years and had eight children.

That the duel in which Tycho lost part of his nose was over some sort of mathematical dispute (version differ) is apocryphal or put less politely, a myth with no basis in fact, put into the world by Pierre Gassendi. Tycho did not avoid marrying Kirstin Jørgensdatter, because he was a noble and she was a commoner, they couldn’t marry formally, it being illegal at that time in Denmark. However under a Jutish law (accepted at the time), “the woman who for three winters lived openly as wife in a house, eating and drinking and sleeping with the man of the house and possessing the keys to the household, should be his true wife”[1]. Tycho’s and Kirstin’s marriage was thus under Danish law a legitimate one and their children were also legitimate and not bastards but having a commoner as mother they were themselves commoners and could not inherit Tycho’s titles or properties. They could however and did inherit his astronomical observational data, a fact that caused Johannes Kepler much stress.

We then get introduced to Ursus:

Reimarus started his life lower, and arguably rose higher. As a child he was a pig herder. (Confusingly, this seemed to earn him the nickname of “Bear” or “Ursus.”) His academic performance helped him rise quickly, and his book on the true shape of the universe earned him a position as the Imperial Astronomer to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II.

Nicolaus Reimers’ nickname Bär (English bear, Latin Ursus) naturally, had nothing to do with his activities as a swineherd, which took place when he was eighteen years old not when he was a child, but was a name he adopted in 1588 because of his relationship to the Baren clan, a notable family in Dithmarschen. He was born in Hennstedt in Dithmarschen, an area in North Germany.

EIA goes on to say that Brahe circulated his accusations against Ursus in a letter “amongst the other imperial scientists”. Whilst it’s true that Brahe originally spread his accusations against Ursus in his correspondence with other scholars, not just one letter, I have no idea who ‘the other imperial scientists’ are supposed to be? However, the dispute first really blew up when he published a volume of his scientific correspondence in 1596 in which he included his correspondence on the topic of Ursus and his intellectual theft with Christian Rothmann, astronomer on the court of Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel. Rothmann, who knew Ursus personally from a period he had spent in Kassel, and didn’t like him, fanned the flames from his side with some choice gratuitous insults. Ursus was not amused.

EIA tells us, “Reimarus replied to the allegations in an astronomy journal“. This is a clear proof that EIA has no idea what she is talking about. Ursus’ reply was actually in the form of a book, De astronomicis hypothesibus, published in 1597. He could not have replied in an astronomical journal because there weren’t any in the sixteenth century. I don’t actually know when or where the first astronomical journal was published but certainly not before the eighteenth century. The first ever academic journal was the Journal des sçavans of which the first edition appeared on Monday 5 January 1665 two months ahead of the first edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which celebrates its 350^th birthday this year. Ursus’ book set new levels for invective in an academic dispute.

The non-existent astronomical journal might seem to be a rather trivial error to non-historians of science but in reality it is anything but trivial. The media with which scholars communicate, disseminating and discussing their results is a very important and very central theme in the history of science. The error that EIA makes is a very high level error. It is as if a military or political historian describing the Battle of Culloden would claim that Bonnie Prince Charlie was driven away from the battlefield in a Rolls Royce.

Not content with all her errors up to now EIA now drops a major clanger:

Then he did something he lived to regret – if only briefly. He mentioned that Johannes Kepler, another famous astronomer, had sided with him in this little dispute. He even included a letter from Kepler, full of extravagant praise, in which Kepler declared that good old Ursus had taught him everything he knew about brilliant mathematics. When one of the most famous astronomers and mathematicians of the age was on his side, how could he be wrong?

Yes, Ursus did include a very obsequious letter from Johannes Kepler in his book, which did acknowledge Ursus as his teacher (not quite as extremely as EIA would have as believe) but Kepler was not “one of the most famous astronomers and mathematicians of the age”. This is common mistake that people make, if XY became famous he must have always been famous. This is of course not true, famous people must of course go through a process of becoming famous, which can often take many years. When Kepler wrote the embarrassing letter to Ursus he was a completely unknown schoolteacher from the Austrian provinces and in fact this was the motivation for his obsequious letter.

Kepler had just written his first book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, and in order to try to interest people for his book and start to build a scholarly reputation he sent off gratis copies of the book accompanied with obsequious letters to well-known and influential astronomers and mathematicians, including sending copies to both Tycho and Ursus, who was after all Imperial Mathematicus in Prague.

EIA now adds fuel to the flames of her own historical funeral pyre she informs us:

Even in his own time he was revered, and so the person who actually did teach him had bragging rights. Those rights belonged to Michael Maestlin, Kepler’s math teacher at his university. When Maestlin heard that Kepler was making the Reimarus claim, he was understandably peeved, and fired off a letter to Kepler.

First off at the time of the publication of Ursus’ book Kepler was, as already said, a nobody and by no means revered. In fact the letter from Maestlin was completely different. Before we look briefly at that, calling another scholar your teacher was a fairly standard Renaissance flowery phrase meaning I have learnt so much from reading your work and didn’t faze Maestlin at all. What did faze Maestlin was the letter he received from Tycho complaining about the appearance of Kepler’s letter in Ursus’ book praising the man who had stolen Tycho’s ideas. Maestlin wrote to Kepler to tell him to apologise to Tycho, which Kepler did very quickly. This would prove to be a highly embarrassing situation for Kepler, who a couple of years later, expelled from Austria by the Counter-Reformation, desperately wanted Tycho to give him a job. In fact the noble Dane did give him employment but as his first assignment ordered him to write a book on the dispute exonerating himself and condemning Ursus. Kepler complied, although the book was originally not published, Tycho having died before it was finished, and it is this document that is the subject of Nicholas Jardine’s book mentioned above.

You may ask why I bother to tear this apology for history of science apart, a question I ask myself. What really angers me is that a website with the reach and influence that io9 has allows somebody like Esther Inglis-Arkell to write articles on the history of science, a discipline about which she very obviously knows next to nothing. There are a lot of good historians of science out in the world couldn’t io9 find somebody who knows what they are talking about to write their history of science articles or at least somebody who is prepared to do the leg work and read up on the topic they are writing about before putting fingers to keyboard?

[1] Thoren, p. 46

Polluting Youtube once again!

Professor Christopher M Graney, Renaissance Mathematicus friend and guest blogger, has posted another of his holiday videos on Youtube, documenting parts of his visit to Nürnberg and Bamberg for the Astronomy in Franconia Conferences. In his new video “Nürnberg and Bamberg” you can see the Behaim Globe (Martin Behaim celebrates his 555^th birthday today!), the Frauenkirche Clock (1509) doing its thing, and yours truly wittering on about Johannes Petreius and Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (4.11–6.56)