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Navigational Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, 1730–1850 pp 223–247Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Longitude Networks on Land and Sea: The East India Company and Longitude Measurement ‘in the Wild’, 1770–1840

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Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

The story of John Harrison and his marine timekeepers, engagingly told by Dava Sobel, has promulgated the misleading notion that accurate clocks solved the problem of determining longitude at sea.3 Neither Harrison’s timekeepers nor the cheaper, more seaworthy, chronometers of Arnold and Earnshaw immediately transformed the longitude problem, partly because there were alternative, well-supported methods, notably that employing lunar distances, promoted by Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal, the villain of Sobel’s piece.4 However, to advocate either of these ‘solutions’ misses the central point that I want to make — that we need to understand the longitude problem, and its solution, in a broader sense. Neither technological determinism identifying an instrument as the solution, nor singular method determinism, captures how longitude was established in practice.5 Its solution could be universalized in theory but individual determinations of longitude at sea were contingent acts reliant upon hardware (instruments, ships), software (methods, procedures, logs, charts, tables, outputs of land-based observatories), and wetware (the embodied skills, abilities, judgments and goals, of sailors, officers, hydrographers and their masters).

McCluer had a lot of trouble with the box chronometer […] until [he] found that by holding the key still and turning the chronometer around it he could keep it going, and when he adopted this trick it subsequently kept much better time

W. E. May, drawing on John McCluer, 18061

More in fact is to be gained in Hydrography […] by establishing the true place and bearing of a few fixed Observatories on terra firma, simply as starting points, than from a thousand unconnected or disputed points of departure […] they constitute, in fine, a sort of half-way house between the earth and the heavens, to which any phenomena may be referred

Thomas B. Jervis, 18402

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Notes

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Museums Greenwich, UK

    Richard Dunn (Senior Curator for the History of Science) (Senior Curator for the History of Science)

  2. University of Kent, UK

    Rebekah Higgitt (Lecturer in History) (Lecturer in History)

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© 2015 David Philip Miller

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Miller, D.P. (2015). Longitude Networks on Land and Sea: The East India Company and Longitude Measurement ‘in the Wild’, 1770–1840. In: Dunn, R., Higgitt, R. (eds) Navigational Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, 1730–1850. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520647_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520647_12

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56744-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52064-7

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