This spring, Cambridge University Press published The Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation and Empire , featuring contributions from Alexi Baker, Richard Dunn, Rebekah Higgitt, Simon Schaffer, and Sophie Waring. The book caps off an ambitious research partnership between Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the UK’s National Maritime Museum that also entailed digitization of the board’s papers and exhibitions of related museum collections. Their project has already catalyzed several earlier books: the exhibition companion Finding Longitude / Ships, Clocks, and Stars (2014) by Dunn and Higgitt, Maskelyne: Astronomer Royal (2014) edited by Higgitt, Navigational Enterprises in Europe and Its Empires, 1730–1850 (2015) edited by Dunn and Higgitt, and the monograph Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History (2022) by project member Katy Barrett.

Solving the longitude problem

The board’s history traces to an “Act for providing a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea,” also known as the Longitude Act of 1714. Whereas the north–south position of a ship at sea can be determined by measuring the position of celestial bodies above the horizon, its east–west position, or longitude, cannot be determined without knowing the precise time at a distant point of reference. In the early 18th century, determining longitude was regarded as a remote but highly attractive goal that promised to greatly ease navigation and avert shipwrecks.

The Longitude Act set out rewards of up to £20,000, which, according to the National Archives of the UK, is equivalent to over £2,000,000 today and would have amounted to more than 600 years of wages for a skilled tradesman. To assess proposals and settle on rewards, the act also provided for the appointment of up to 23 commissioners. The commissioners only began meeting as a group in 1737, and they were first referred to as a “board” in 1756. Between 1714 and the 1760s, the commissioners’ attention focused mainly on timekeepers that could remain accurate at sea and precise methods for measuring the Moon’s distance from certain stars, which is an alternative way of determining the time at a distant location.

Beginning in 1774, new laws broadened the board’s responsibilities to include the assessment of not only new timekeepers, but also other instruments and navigational schemes. It also oversaw production of the Nautical Almanac, which distributed the results of difficult and laborious calculations about the future position of the Moon that were needed to use the lunar-distance method. The board’s activities further expanded in the 19th century as it administered rewards for efforts to find a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean and navigate close to the North Pole. In 1822, it agreed to support the establishment of a new observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. However, the board was dissolved in 1828 with its responsibilities divided between the Admiralty and the Royal Society.

Beyond its role in addressing the longitude problem, the Board of Longitude represents an important institutional development in the history of what we now call science and technology policy. It is far from unprecedented as an example of a government looking to the sciences to solve pressing problems. Notably, the Royal Observatory was founded at Greenwich in 1675 largely to address the longitude problem. Yet, the board evolved into a novel approach to encouraging and assessing invention, and its steadily expanding scope reflected the value seen in using a panel of experts to guide support for useful knowledge. As such, it was an important precedent for many such bodies to follow.

Recovering the board’s significance

In their introduction, the authors note that, while parts of the Board of Longitude’s history are well known, in examining its full history they aim to provide a “more rounded” account. They observe that the historiography of the board has been dominated by its long-running dealings with clockmaker John Harrison, who produced a series of timekeepers culminating in the highly successful H4 marine chronometer in 1759.

Due to the fame H4 accrued in the 20th century, and the fact that Harrison struggled for decades to receive what he felt was a just reward, the board has often been regarded as imperious and a barrier to innovation. This has particularly been the case following Dava Sobel’s breakout 1995 book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time . However, the authors credit Sobel with spurring an enduring public interest in Harrison and the longitude problem, particularly in Britain, where they observe the story has become “something of a staple” in popular programming.

Returning the focus to the board, the authors stress that its challenging role as an arbiter of proposals was at least as important historically as the innovation its rewards encouraged. In the 18th century, “projectors”—people who proposed entrepreneurial projects—were a major part of the economic and intellectual landscape, and the frequency of failure and fraud meant that their credibility was often suspect. In fact, finding longitude itself took on an aura of crankishness akin to the quest for perpetual motion, though it was well recognized that the former feat was possible in principle.

The board’s evolving strategies in driving toward a practical solution to the longitude problem merit close attention as policymaking innovations. The board’s holding of scrupulously minuted meetings; its mediation among projectors, tradesmen, astronomers and mathematicians, and the Royal Navy; its arrangement and assessment of trials at sea; its oversight of the Nautical Almanac; and its use of interim rewards much smaller than the maximum are all examples of ways it helped to structure innovation in Britain over the course of a century.

Origins of the Board of Longitude project

The Board of Longitude history project’s combination of historical research, archives digitization, and museum curation should be recognized as an important model for doing history. To learn more about the project’s origins, we reached out to the authors. The following account was generously provided on short notice by Richard Dunn, currently Keeper of Technologies and Engineering at London’s Science Museum.

“The origins of what were, in fact, several parallel projects, go back to 2007, when I was Curator of the History of Navigation at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, part of what is now Royal Museums Greenwich. At the time, I was beginning discussions with various university academics about possible collaborative projects in the history of science, something the Museum was keen to foster to maintain its status as an Independent Research Organisation. I was also aware that it was ‘only’ seven years (museums move slowly) until the tercentenary of the 1714 Longitude Act. This would be a significant anniversary for the Observatory, which was an important site in the longitude story and had important objects on display, John Harrison’s famous marine timekeepers among them.

One of the academics I chatted with in 2007 was Simon Schaffer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), Cambridge. My initial thinking was that, as the Board of Longitude archives are held by Cambridge University Library, we might think about co-supervising a doctoral project. Simon immediately recognised, however, that we could be far more ambitious, and so over the next two years we put together an application for a major grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with Rebekah Higgitt added as a second co-investigator after she joined the Museum in 2008. What we finally came up with was a proposal for a five-year project led by Simon, Rebekah, and me that would also fund two postdoctoral researchers and two doctoral students, plus an engagement officer in the project’s final year. As ever, we promised an ambitious set of outputs including publications, conferences and workshops, public events, a project blog, and two small exhibitions.

With the application submitted in 2009 and successful, the project itself began in 2010, by which time we had a third doctoral student attached, thanks to AHRC doctoral funding available via HPS. As it happened, the presence of what was now a sizeable research team proved to be a powerful lever for further funding—success does breed success, it turns out. In 2011, for instance, we partnered with Cambridge University Library to secure a large grant from JISC to digitise and put online the Board of Longitude archive and related material in Cambridge and Greenwich, all of which is still available via the Cambridge Digital Library. Around the same time, the Museum secured sponsorship for a major exhibition, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude, which opened in Greenwich in 2014 before touring to the USA and Australia, and which incorporated many of our research findings. The challenge all this created was trying to keep abreast of several different related, nevertheless distinct, projects.

The final bit of the puzzle was the completion of The Board of Longitude: Science, Innovation and Empire, which we had promised as an output of the AHRC project. This has been some time coming but certainly benefited from the frenetic activity in 2010–2015. Digital access to the Board of Longitude archive, for instance, proved crucial when writing through lockdown in 2020–2021.”

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

---

You can sign up to receive the Weekly Edition and other AIP newsletters by email here .

---