When
John Harrison and the Board of Longitude were wrangling over the disclosure of
H4 in the mid-1760s, one phrase proved particularly tricky. The Harrisons constantly returned to the phrase 'experimental exhibitions' as not clear to them and as possibly requiring actions that they couldn't perform. The phrase has seemed apt to me in a different context in the last two weeks, however.
Sophie and I have been lucky enough to visit LA again, for the second half of a conference on '
Ephemerality and Durability in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture' linked to our '
Things' seminars. We both spoke about these concepts in relation to the longitude problem. Sophie discussed pendulum experiments from
Huygens to
Sabine, and the problematic way in which a pendulum was expected to be simultaneously durable and ephemeral in different scientific experiments. I discussed these ideas in relationship to John Harrison, comparing the 'durable' instruments and stories that usually form the longitude problem, to the 'ephemeral' instruments and knowledge claims that actually formed the story in the eighteenth century, as well as the ephemeral print sources that allow us to see this.
One of the aspects that I discussed was how the Harrison timekeepers are displayed in the
Royal Observatory Time galleries, made to look incredibly durable objects, and one of the inevitable questions asked me was how I would do this differently. The question came back to me two days later on my visit to Washington, where I just managed to squeeze in a visit to the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum before the government shutdown. The museum has recently reopened its
Time and Navigation galleries explaining that 'if you want to know where you are, you need an accurate clock' and how this relationship has developed over 400 years from early pendulum clocks to the GPS on your smartphone.
Overall, it's a successful display. The
long durée story moves from navigation at sea, to air, to space, to satellites and navigation for everyone, linking nicely backwards and forwards with technical innovations and their results. A series of four symbols explain the different methods in play - celestial, mechanical, mathematical and dead reckoning - and how each developed. There's a very effective central display animating five portraits, one from each period of navigation, to explain to the fifth portrait - a girl whose smart phone battery has died - how to find her way around. I thought this would have worked better at the beginning of the gallery than the end.
There were also aspects that I liked about the section on
navigating at sea, which deals almost entirely with our longitude story. Readers who know the focus of my research won't be surprised that I was pleased the display introduced navigation as 'both an art and a science' and opened with a beautifully hand-coloured page from the 1588
Mariner's Mirrour surrounded by four different instruments. There was also a
brilliant interactive to explain finding longitude by celestial observation, combining a touchscreen with using a replica octant aimed at a star map on the wall. Simplified, of course, but the first time that I've ever been able to do it! This comes at the end of a discussion of the development of accurate scale dividing, thanks to
Jesse Ramsden, set against the story of timekeepers. Otherwise, however, the
display tells the same old story of
Sir Cloudesley Shovell's shipwreck off the Scilly Isles in 1707 precipitating the British Longitude Act, and John Harrison eventually winning the great reward against all the odds with the support of George III.
This made me wary of the equally
compelling narrative that followed of how America entered the story in the 1830s when
Lt. Charles Wilkes commanded the US Exploring Expedition to map the Pacific, Antarctica, and northwest coast of the US. He brought back the founding collections of the Smithsonian. This, I thought, was the undersold gem, the '40 tons' of artefacts brought back from these expeditions. I think I would have made these the centre of a story about the relationship of time and place, marking the origins of the museum itself.